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Updated: June 3, 2025
There is a belief in Thuringia that the possession of fern seed causes the bearer to be pursued by serpents till thrown away; and, according to a curious Eussian proverb, "from all old trees proceeds either an owl or a devil," in reference, no doubt, to their often bare and sterile appearance. See Tylor's "Primitive Culture," ii. 316. Thorpe's "Northern Mythology," iii. 193.
Such works as Maine's Ancient Law, Tylor's Primitive Culture, Lubbock's Origin of Civilisation, show how fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the history of society. Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of religion, which is one of its principal elements.
In place of 'facts of civilisation' read 'psychical phenomena, and Mr. Tylor's argument applies to the evidence for these rejected and scouted beliefs.
It is not surprising too that plants of this stamp should have been extensively used as charms against the influences of occult powers, their symbolical nature investing them with a potency such as was possessed by no ordinary plant. See an article on "Myths of the Fire Stealer," Saturday Review, June 2, 1883, p. 689; Tylor's "Primitive Culture." "Myths and Myth Makers," p. 55.
Tylor's Primitive Culture is itself a store-house of other examples, to which more may easily be added. For example, there is the old and savage belief in a 'sending'. The medicine-man, or medium, or witch, can despatch a conscious, visible, and intelligent agent, non-normal, to do his bidding at a distance. This belief is often illustrated in the Scandinavian sagas.
The theory of the origin of religion that may be said to hold the field, because it is the view of the greatest of living anthropologists, is Dr. Tylor's theory of animism. The term animism is derived from the Latin anima, which like the corresponding word spiritus, whence our "spirit" signifies the breath, and hence the soul, which primitive folk tend to identify with the breath. Dr.
Sproat took among the Ahts, and when his account of Melanesian myths reads like a close copy of Mr. I also cited at length Dr. Tylor's masterly argument to the same effect, an argument offered by him to 'a great historian, apparently. Mr. Max Muller's Method of Controversy Now no member of the reading public, perusing Mr. He could not guess that Dr.
Tylor's wider range of observation, conspicuously supplemented by other work of Lubbock, embraced all human activities in one formula of comparison, which is indeed as old as Thucydides. We can infer, that is, something about early stages of an advanced culture from the present-day practices of savagery.
Tylor's theory needs modifications; while the character of the savage's reasoning becomes more creditable to the savage, and appears as better bottomed than we had been asked to suppose. But Mr. Tylor does not examine this large body of evidence at all, or, at least, does not offer us the details of his examination.
He disproves, out of their own mouths, the allegations of several writers who have made this exploded assertion about 'godless tribes. He says: 'The thoughts and principles of modern Christianity are attached to intellectual clues which run back through far pre-Christian ages to the very origin of human civilisation, perhaps even of human existence. So far we abound in Mr. Tylor's sense.
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