Kitabı oku: «The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India, Volume 1», sayfa 13

62. The recurrence of events

A brief digression may be made here in order to suggest an explanation of another important class of primitive ideas. These arise from the belief that when something has happened, that same event, or some other resembling it, will again occur, or, more briefly, the belief in the recurrence of events. This view is the origin of a large class of omens, and appears to have been originally evolved simply from the recurring phenomena of day and night and of the months and climatic seasons. For suppose that one was in the position of primitive man, knowing absolutely nothing of the nature and constitution of the earth and the heavenly bodies, or of the most elementary facts of astronomy; then, if the question were asked why one expected the sun to rise to-morrow, the only possible answer, and the answer which one would give, would be because it had risen to-day and every day as long as one could remember. The reason so stated might have no scientific value, but would at any rate establish a strong general probability. But primitive man could not have given it in this form, because he had no memory and could not count. Even now comparatively advanced tribes like the Gonds have a hopelessly inaccurate memory for ordinary incidents; and, as suggested subsequently, the faculty of memory was probably acquired very slowly with the development of language. And since he could not count, the continuous recurrence of natural phenomena had no cumulative force with him, so that he might distinguish them from other events. His argument was thus simply “the sun will rise again because it rose before; the moon will wax and wane again because she waxed and waned before”; grass and leaves and fruit would grow again because they did so before; the animals which gave him food would come again as before; and so on. But these were the only events which his brain retained at all, and that only because his existence depended upon them and they continually recurred. The ordinary incidents of life which presented some variation passed without record in his mind, as they still do very largely in those of primitive savages. And since he made no distinction between the different classes of events, holding them all to be the acts of volitional beings, he applied this law of the recurrence of events to every incident of life, and thought that whenever anything happened, reason existed for supposing that the same thing or something like it would happen again. It was sufficient that the second event should be like the first, since, as already seen, he did not distinguish between similarity and identity. Thus, to give instances, the Hindus think that if a man lies full length inside a bed, he is lying as if on a bier and will consequently soon be dead on a real bier; hence beds should be made so that one’s feet project uncomfortably over the end. By a similar reasoning he must not lie with his feet to the south because corpses are laid in this direction. A Hindu married woman always wears glass bangles as a sign of her state, and a widow may not wear them. A married woman must therefore never let her arms be without bangles or it is an omen that she will become a widow. She must not wear wholly white clothes, because a widow wears these. If a man places one of his shoes over the other in the house, it is an omen that he will go on a journey when the shoes will be in a similar position as he walks along. A Kolta woman who desires to ascertain whether she will have a son, puts a fish into a pot full of water and spreads her cloth by it. If the fish jumps into her lap, it is thought that her lap will shortly hold another living being, that is a son. At a wedding, in many Hindu castes, the bride and bridegroom perform the business of their caste or an imitation of it. Among the Kuramwār shepherds the bride and bridegroom are seated with the shuttle which is used for weaving blankets between them. A miniature swing is put up and a doll is placed in it in imitation of a child and swung to and fro. The bride then takes the doll out and gives it to the bridegroom, saying:—“Here, take care of it, I am now going to cook food”; while, after a time, the boy returns the doll to the girl saying, “I must now weave the blanket and go to tend the flock.” Thus, having performed their life’s business at their wedding, it is thought that they will continue to do so happily as long as they live. Many castes, before sowing the real crop, make a pretence of sowing seed before the shrine of the god, and hope thus to ensure that the subsequent sowing will be auspicious. The common stories of the appearance of a ghost, or other variety of apparition, before the deaths of members of a particular family, are based partly on the belief in the recurrence of associated events. The well-known superstition about sitting down thirteen to dinner, on the ground that one of the party may die shortly afterwards, is an instance of the same belief, being of course based on the Last Supper. But the number thirteen is generally unlucky, being held to be so by the Hindus, Muhammadans and Persians, as well as Europeans, and the superstition perhaps arose from its being the number of the intercalary month in the soli-lunar calendar, which is present one year and absent the next year. Thirteen is one more than twelve, the auspicious number of the months of the year. Similarly seven was perhaps lucky or sacred as being the number of the planets which gave their names to the days of the week, and three because it represented the sun, moon and earth. When a gambler stakes his money on a number such as the date of his birth or marriage, he acts on the supposition that a number which has been propitious to him once will be so again, and this appears to be a survival of the belief in the recurrence of events.

63. Controlling the future

But primitive man was not actuated by any abstract love of knowledge, and when he had observed what appeared to him to be a law of nature, he proceeded to turn it to advantage in his efforts for the preservation of his life. Since events had the characteristic of recurrence, all he had to do in order to produce the recurrence of any particular event which he desired, was to cause it to happen in the first instance; and since he did not distinguish between imitation and reality, he thought that if he simply enacted the event he would thus ensure its being brought to pass. And so he assiduously set himself to influence the course of nature to his own advantage. When the Australian aborigines are performing ceremonies for the increase of witchetty grubs, a long narrow structure of boughs is made which represents the chrysalis of the grub. The men of the witchetty grub totem enter the structure and sing songs about the production and growth of the witchetty grub. Then one after another they shuffle out of the chrysalis, and glide slowly along for a distance of some yards, imitating the emergence and movements of the witchetty grubs. By thus enacting the production of the grubs they think to cause and multiply the real production.¹³⁵ When the men of the emu totem wish to multiply the number of emus, they allow blood from their arms, that is emu blood, to fall on the ground until a certain space is covered. Then on this space a picture is drawn representing the emu; two large patches of yellow indicate lumps of its fat, of which the natives are very fond, but the greater part shows, by means of circles and circular patches, the eggs in various stages of development, some before and some after laying. Then the men of the totem, placing on their heads a stick with a tuft of feathers to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, stand gazing about aimlessly after the manner of the emu. Here the picture itself is held to be a living emu, perhaps the source or centre from which all emus will originate, and the men, pretending to be emus, will cause numbers of actual emus to be produced.¹³⁶ Before sowing the crops, a common practice is to sow small quantities of grain in baskets or pots in rich soil, so that it will sprout and grow up quickly, the idea being to ensure that the real crop will have a similarly successful growth. These baskets are the well-known Gardens of Adonis fully described in The Golden Bough. They are grown for nine days, and on the tenth day are taken in procession by the women and deposited in a river. The women may be seen carrying the baskets of wheat to the river after the nine days’ fasts of Chait and Kunwār (March and September) in many towns of the Central Provinces, as the Athenian women carried the Gardens of Adonis to the sea on the day that the expedition under Nicias set sail for Syracuse.¹³⁷ The fire kindled at the Holi festival in spring is meant, as explained by Sir J.G. Frazer, to increase the power of the sun for the growth of vegetation. By the production of fire the quantity and strength of the heavenly fire is increased. He remarks:¹³⁸—“The custom of throwing blazing discs, shaped like suns, into the air, is probably also a piece of imitative magic. In these, as in so many cases, the magic force is supposed to take effect through mimicry or sympathy; by imitating the desired result you actually produce it; by counterfeiting the sun’s progress through the heavens you really help the luminary to pursue his celestial journey with punctuality and despatch. The name ‘fire of heaven,’ by which the midsummer fire is sometimes popularly known, clearly indicates a consciousness of the connection between the earthly and the heavenly flame.” The obscene songs of the Holi appear to be the relic of a former period of promiscuous sexual debauchery, which, through the multiplied act of reproduction, was intended to ensure that nature should also reproduce on a generous scale. The red powder thrown over everybody at the Holi is said to represent the seed of life. The gifts of Easter eggs seem to be the vestige of a rite having the same object. At a wedding in the Lodhi caste the bride is seated before the family god while an old woman brings a stone rolling-pin wrapped up in a piece of cloth, which is supposed to be a baby, and the old woman imitates a baby crying. She puts the roller in the bride’s lap, saying, “Take this and give it milk.” The bride is abashed and throws it aside. The old woman picks it up and shows it to the assembled women, saying, “The bride has just had a baby,” amid loud laughter. Then she gives the stone to the bridegroom, who also throws it aside. This ceremony is meant to induce fertility, and it is supposed that by making believe that the bride has had a baby she will quickly have one. Similar rites are performed in several other castes, and when a girl becomes adult her lap is filled with fruits with the idea that this will cause it subsequently to be filled with the fruit of her womb. The whole custom of giving dolls to girls to play with, perhaps originated in the belief that by doing so they would afterwards come to play with children.

The dances of the Kol tribe consist partly of symbolical enactments of events which they desired to be successfully accomplished. Some variations of the dance, Colonel Dalton states, represent the different seasons and the necessary acts of cultivation that each brings with it. In one the dancers, bending down, make a motion with their hands, as though they were sowing the grain, keeping step with their feet all the time. Then comes the reaping of the crop and the binding of the sheaves, all done in perfect time and rhythm, and making, with the continuous droning of the voices, a quaint and picturesque performance.¹³⁹ The Karma dance of the Gonds and Oraons is also connected with the crops, and probably was once an enactment of the work of cultivation.¹⁴⁰ The Bhīls danced at their festivals and before battles. The men danced in a ring, holding sticks and striking them against one another. Before a battle they had a war-dance in which the performers were armed and imitated a combat. To be carried on the shoulders of one of the combatants was a great honour, perhaps because it symbolised being on horseback. The object was to obtain success in battle by going through an imitation of a successful battle beforehand. This was also the common custom of the Red Indians, whose war-dances are well known; they brandished their weapons and killed their foe in mimicry in order that they might soon do so in reality. The Sela dance of the Gonds and Baigas, in which they perform the figure of the grand chain of the lancers, only that they strike their sticks together instead of clasping hands as they pass, was probably once an imitation of a combat. It is still sometimes danced before their communal hunting and fishing parties. In these mimetic rehearsals of events with the object of causing them to occur we may perhaps discern the origin of the arts both of acting and dancing. Another, and perhaps later form, was the reproduction of important events, or those which had influenced history. For to the primitive mind, as already seen, the results were not conceived of as instrumentally caused by the event, but as part of the event itself and of its life and personality. Hence by the re-enactment of the event the beneficial results would be again obtained or at least preserved in undiminished potency and vigour. This was perhaps the root idea of the drama and the representation of sacred or heroic episodes on the stage.

64. The common life

Thus, resuming from paragraph 61, primitive man had no difficulty in conceiving of a life as shared between two or more persons or objects, and it does not seem impossible that he should have at first conceived it to extend through a whole species.¹⁴¹ A good instance of the common life is afforded by the gods of the Hindu and other pantheons. Each god was conceived of as performing some divine function, guiding the chariot of the sun, manipulating the thunder and so on; but at the same time thousands of temples existed throughout the country, and in each of these the god was alive and present in his image or idol, able to act independently, receive and consume sacrifices and offerings, protect suppliants and punish transgressors. No doubt at all can be entertained that each idol was in itself held to be a living god. In India food is offered to the idol, it goes through its ablutions, is fanned, and so on, exactly like a human king. The ideas of sanctuary and sacrilege appear to depend primarily on the belief in the actual presence of the god in his shrine. And in India no sanctity at all attaches to a temple from which the idol has been removed. Thus we see the life of the god distributed over a multitude of personalities. Again, the same god, as Vishnu or the sun, is held to have had a number of incarnations, as the boar, the tortoise, a man-lion, a dwarf, Rāma and Krishna, and these are venerated simultaneously as distinct deities. The whole Brāhman caste considered itself divine or as partaking in the life of the god, the original reason for this perhaps being that the Brāhmans obtained the exclusive right to perform sacrifices, and hence the life of the sacrificial animal or food passed to them, as in other societies it passed to the king who performed the sacrifice. A Brāhman further holds that the five gods, Indra, Brahma, Siva, Vishnu and Ganesh, are present in different parts of his body,¹⁴² and here again the life of the god is seen to be divided into innumerable fragments. The priests of the Vallabhachārya sect, the Gokulastha Gosains, were all held to be possessed by the god Krishna, so that it was esteemed a high privilege to perform the most menial offices for them, because to touch them was equivalent to touching the god, and perhaps assimilating by contact a fragment of his divine life and nature.¹⁴³ The belief in a common life would also explain the veneration of domestic animals and the prohibition against killing them, because to kill one would injure the whole life of the species, from which the tribe drew its subsistence. Similarly in a number of cases the first idea of seasonal fasts is that the people abstain from the grain or fruit which is growing or sown in the ground. Thus in India during the rains the vegetables growing at this period are not eaten, and are again partaken of for the first time after the sacrificial offering of the new crop. This rule could not possibly be observed in the case of grain, but instead certain single fast-days are prescribed, and on these days no cultivated grain or fruit, but only those growing wild, should be eaten. These rules seem to indicate that the original motive of the fast was to avoid injuring the common life of the grain or fruit, which injury would be caused by a consumption of any part of it, at a time when the whole of the common life and vigour was required for its reproduction and multiplication. This idea may have operated to enable the savage to restrain himself from digging up and eating the grain sown in the ground, or slaughtering his domestic animals for food, and a taboo on the consumption of grain and fruits during their period of ripening may have first begun in their wild state. The Intichiuma ceremonies of the Australian natives are carried out with the object of increasing the supply of the totem for food purposes. In the Ilpirla or Manna totem the members of the clan go to a large boulder surrounded by stones, which are held to represent masses of Ilpirla or the manna of the mulga tree. A Churinga stone is dug up, which is supposed to represent another mass of manna, and this is rubbed over the boulder, and the smaller stones are also rubbed over it. While the leader does this, the others sing a song which is an invitation to the dust produced by the rubbing of the stones to go out and produce a plentiful supply of Ilpirla on the mulga trees.¹⁴⁴ Then the dust is swept off the surface of the stones with twigs of the mulga tree. Here apparently the large boulder and other stones are held to be the centre or focus of the common life of the manna, and from them the seed issues forth which will produce a crop of manna on all the mulga trees. The deduction seems clear that the trees are not conceived of individually, but are held to have a common life. In the case of the hakea flower totem they go to a stone lying beneath an old tree, and one of the members lets his blood flow on to the stone until it is covered, while the others sing a song inciting the hakea tree to flower much and to the blossoms to be full of honey.¹⁴⁵ The blood is said to represent a drink prepared from the hakea flowers, but probably it was originally meant to quicken the stone with the blood of a member of the totem, that is its own blood or life, in order that it might produce abundance of flowers. Here again the stone seems to be the centre of the common life of the hakea flower. The songs are sung with the idea that the repetition of words connoting a state of facts will have the effect of causing that state of facts to exist, in accordance with the belief already explained in the concrete virtue of words.

Sir E. B. Tylor states: “In Polynesia, if a village god were accustomed to appear as an owl, and one of his votaries found a dead owl by the roadside, he would mourn over the sacred bird and bury it with much ceremony, but the god himself would not be thought to be dead, for he remains incarnate in all existing owls. According to Father Geronimo Boscana, the Acagchemen tribe of Upper California furnish a curious parallel to this notion. They worshipped the panes bird, which seems to have been an eagle or vulture, and each year, in the temple of each village, one of them was solemnly killed without shedding blood, and the body buried. Yet the natives maintained and believed that it was the same individual bird they sacrificed each year, and more than this, that the same bird was slain by each of the villages.”¹⁴⁶ An account of the North American Indians quoted by the same author states that they believe all the animals of each species to have an elder brother, who is as it were the principle and origin of all the individuals, and this elder brother is marvellously great and powerful. According to another view each species has its archetype in the land of souls; there exists, for example, a manitu or archetype of all oxen, which animates all oxen.¹⁴⁷

Generally in the relations between the totem-clan and its totem-animal, and in all the fables about animals, one animal is taken as representing the species, and it is tacitly assumed that all the animals of the species have the same knowledge and qualities and would behave in the same manner as the typical one. Thus when the Majhwār says that the tiger would run away if he met a member of the tiger-clan who was free from sin, but would devour any member who had been put out of caste for an offence, he assumes that every tiger would know a member of the clan on meeting him, and also whether that member was in or out of caste. He therefore apparently supposes a common knowledge and intelligence to exist in all tigers as regards the clan, as if they were parts of one mind or intelligence. And since the tigers know instinctively when a member of the clan is out of caste, the mind and intelligence of the tigers must be the same as that of the clan. The Kols of the tiger clan think that if they were to sit up for a tiger over a kill the tiger would not come and would be deprived of his food, and that they themselves would fall ill. Here the evil effects of the want of food on one tiger are apparently held to extend to all tigers and also to all members of the tiger clan.