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Updated: June 26, 2025
Interesting as a proof of Inca crystal-gazing, this legend of Christoval's cannot compete as evidence with Acosta and Garcilasso. The reader, however, must decide as to whether he prefers Garcilasso's unpropitiated Pachacamac, or Christoval's Uiracocha, human sacrifices, and all. Mr. Tylor prefers the version of Christoval, making Pachacamac a title of Uiracocha.
Tylor is nevertheless quite right in arguing that unless the horrible custom had received the sanction of a public opinion bequeathed from pre-Vedic times, the Brahmans would have had no motive for fraudulently reviving it; and this opinion is virtually established by the fact of the prevalence of widow sacrifice among Gauls, Scandinavians, Slaves, and other European Aryans.
Tylor goes too far when he says 'where the savage could see phantasms, the civilised man has come to amuse himself with fancies. The civilised man, beyond all doubt, is capable of being enfantosmé. In all that he says on this point, the point of psychical condition, Mr. Tylor is writing about known savages as they differ from ourselves.
The real object is to show that facts may be regarded in this light, as well as in the light thrown by the anthropological theory, in the hands whether of Mr. Tylor, Mr. Spencer, M. Réville, or Mr. Jevons, whose interesting work comes nearest to our provisional hypothesis. We only ask for suspense of judgment, and for hesitation in accepting the dogmas of modern manual makers.
It is not the good but the powerful spirits that are invoked; an appeal to them is not made by showing them examples of kindness, justice, or noble deeds, but by bribes, flatteries, and threats. So we have Tylor also endorsing this opinion by remarking that, "The popular idea that the moral government of the universe is an essential tenet of natural religion simply falls to the ground.
Tylor illustrates this theory of early man by the little child's idea that 'chairs, sticks, and wooden horses are actuated by the same sort of personal will as nurses and children and kittens.... In such matters the savage mind well represents the childish stage.
I shall therefore allude to a few points which appear to me to show that the origin of the belief in fairies cannot be settled in so simple a manner as has been suggested, but is a question of much greater complexity one in which, as Mr. Tylor says, more than one mythic element combines to make up the whole. Roy. Soc. Antiq.
An inquiry into this subject, in the ethnographic and modern fields, may be new but involves no 'superstition. We now return to Mr. Tylor, who treats of hallucinations among other experiences which led early savage thinkers to believe in ghosts or separable souls, the origin of religion. As to the causes of hallucinations in general, Mr. Tylor has something to say, but it is nothing systematic.
Tylor, the alleged physical phenomena of spiritualism, the flights and movements of inanimate objects apparently untouched. The question thus arises, Is there any truth whatever in these world-wide and world-old stories of inanimate objects acting like animated things? Has fetishism one of its origins in the actual field of supernormal experience in the X region?
Tylor himself says that it has been 'reinstated in a far larger range of society, and under far better circumstances of learning and prosperity. This fact he ascribes generally to 'a direct revival from the regions of savage philosophy and peasant folklore, a revival brought about in great part by the writings of Swedenborg. To-day things have altered.
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