Health and Education

But has the savage no other faculties, save his five senses and five passions?  I do not say that.  I should be most unphilosophical if I said it; for the history of mankind proves that he has infinitely more in him than that.  Yes: but in him that infinite more, which is not only the noblest part of humanity; but, it may be, humanity itself, is not to be counted as one of the roots of superstition.  For in the savage man, in whom superstition certainly originates, that infinite more is still merely in him; inside him; a faculty: but not yet a fact.  It has not come out of him into consciousness, purpose, and act; and is to be treated as non-existent: while what has come out, his passions and senses, is enough to explain all the vagaries of superstition; a vera causa for all its phenomena.  And if we seem to have found a sufficient explanation already, it is unphilosophical to look further, at least till we have tried whether our explanation fits the facts.

Nevertheless, there is another faculty in the savage, to which I have already alluded, common to him and to at least the higher vertebrates—fancy; the power of reproducing internal images of external objects, whether in its waking form of physical memory—if, indeed, all memory be not physical—or in its sleeping form of dreaming.  Upon this last, which has played so very important a part in superstition in all ages, I beg you to think a moment.  Recollect your own dreams during childhood; and recollect again that the savage is always a child.  Recollect how difficult it was for you in childhood, how difficult it must be always for the savage, to decide whether dreams are phantasms or realities.  To the savage, I doubt not, the food he eats, the foes he grapples with, in dreams, are as real as any waking impressions.  But, moreover, these dreams will be very often, as children’s dreams are wont to be, of a painful and terrible kind.  Perhaps they will be always painful; perhaps his dull brain will never dream, save under the influence of indigestion, or hunger, or an uncomfortable attitude.  And so, in addition to his waking experience of the terrors of nature, he will have a whole dream-experience besides, of a still more terrific kind.  He walks by day past a black cavern mouth, and thinks, with a shudder—Something ugly may live in that ugly hole: what if it jumped out upon me?  He broods over the thought with the intensity of a narrow and unoccupied mind; and a few nights after, he has eaten—but let us draw a veil before the larder of a savage—his chin is pinned down on his chest, a slight congestion of the brain comes on; and behold he finds himself again at that cavern’s mouth, and something ugly does jump out upon him: and the cavern is a haunted spot henceforth to him and to all his tribe.  It is in vain that his family tell him that he has been lying asleep at home all the while.  He has the evidence of his senses to prove the contrary.  He must have got out of himself, and gone into the woods.  When we remember that certain wise Greek philosophers could find no better explanation of dreaming than that the soul left the body, and wandered free, we cannot condemn the savage for his theory.  Now, I submit that in these simple facts we have a group of “true causes” which are the roots of all the superstitions of the world.

And if any one shall complain that I am talking materialism: I shall answer, that I am doing exactly the opposite.  I am trying to eliminate and get rid of that which is material, animal, and base; in order that that which is truly spiritual may stand out, distinct and clear, in its divine and eternal beauty.

To explain, and at the same time, as I think, to verify my hypothesis, let me give you an example—fictitious, it is true, but probable fact nevertheless; because it is patched up of many fragments of actual fact: and let us see how, in following it out, we shall pass through almost every possible form of superstition.

Suppose a great hollow tree, in which the formidable wasps of the tropics have built for ages.  The average savage hurries past the spot in mere bodily fear; for if they come out against him, they will sting him to death; till at last there comes by a savage wiser than the rest, with more observation, reflection, imagination, independence of will—the genius of his tribe.

The awful shade of the great tree, added to his terror of the wasps, weighs on him, and excites his brain.  Perhaps, too, he has had a wife or a child stung to death by these same wasps.  These wasps, so small, yet so wise, far wiser than he: they fly, and they sting.  Ah, if he could fly and sting; how he would kill and eat, and live right merrily.  They build great towns; they rob far and wide; they never quarrel with each other: they must have some one to teach them, to lead them—they must have a king.  And so he gets the fancy of a Wasp-King; as the western Irish still believe in the Master Otter; as the Red Men believe in the King of the Buffalos, and find the bones of his ancestors in the Mammoth remains of Big-bone Lick; as the Philistines of Ekron—to quote a notorious instance—actually worshipped Baal-zebub, lord of the flies.

If they have a king, he must be inside that tree, of course.  If he, the savage, were a king, he would not work for his bread, but sit at home and make others feed him; and so, no doubt, does the wasp-king.

And when he goes home he will brood over this wonderful discovery of the wasp-king; till, like a child, he can think of nothing else.  He will go to the tree, and watch for him to come out.  The wasps will get accustomed to his motionless figure, and leave him unhurt; till the new fancy will rise in his mind that he is a favourite of this wasp-king: and at last he will find himself grovelling before the tree, saying—“Oh great wasp-king, pity me, and tell your children not to sting me, and I will bring you honey, and fruit, and flowers to eat, and I will flatter you, and worship you, and you shall be my king.”

And then he would gradually boast of his discovery; of the new mysterious bond between him and the wasp-king; and his tribe would believe him, and fear him; and fear him still more when he began to say, as he surely would, not merely—“I can ask the wasp-king, and he will tell his children not to sting you:” but—“I can ask the wasp-king, and he will send his children, and sting you all to death.”  Vanity and ambition will have prompted the threat: but it will not be altogether a lie.  The man will more than half believe his own words; he will quite believe them when he has repeated them a dozen times.

And so he will become a great man, and a king, under the protection of the king of the wasps; and he will become, and it may be his children after him, priest of the wasp-king, who will be their fetish, and the fetish of their tribe.

And they will prosper, under the protection of the wasp-king.  The wasp will become their moral ideal, whose virtues they must copy.  The new chief will preach to them wild eloquent words.  They must sting like wasps, revenge like wasps, hold all together like wasps, build like wasps, work hard like wasps, rob like wasps; then, like the wasps, they will be the terror of all around, and kill and eat all their enemies.  Soon they will call themselves The Wasps.  They will boast that their king’s father or grandfather, and soon that the ancestor of the whole tribe, was an actual wasp; and the wasp will become at once their eponym hero, their deity, their ideal, their civiliser; who has taught them to build a kraal of huts, as he taught his children to build a hive.

Now, if there should come to any thinking man of this tribe, at this epoch, the new thought—Who made the world? he will be sorely puzzled.  The conception of a world has never crossed his mind before.  He never pictured to himself anything beyond the nearest ridge of mountains; and as for a Maker, that will be a greater puzzle still.  What makers or builders more cunning than those wasps of whom his foolish head is full?  Of course, he sees it now.  A Wasp made the world; which to him entirely new guess might become an integral part of his tribe’s creed.  That would be their cosmogony.  And if, a generation or two after, another savage genius should guess that the world was a globe hanging in the heavens, he would, if he had imagination enough to take the thought in at all, put it to himself in a form suited to his previous knowledge and conceptions.  It would seem to him that The Wasp flew about the skies with the world in his mouth, as he carries a bluebottle fly; and that would be the astronomy of his tribe henceforth.  Absurd enough; but—as every man who is acquainted with old mythical cosmogonies must know—no more absurd than twenty similar guesses on record.  Try to imagine the gradual genesis of such myths as the Egyptian scarabæus and egg, or the Hindoo theory that the world stood on an elephant, the elephant on a tortoise, the tortoise on that infinite note of interrogation which, as some one expresses it, underlies all physical speculations, and judge: must they not have arisen in some such fashion as that which I have pointed out?

This, I say, would be the culminating point of the wasp-worship, which had sprung up out of bodily fear of being stung.

But times might come for it in which it would go through various changes, through which every superstition in the world, I suppose, has passed or is doomed to pass.

The wasp-men might be conquered, and possibly eaten, by a stronger tribe than themselves.  What would be the result?  They would fight valiantly at first, like wasps.  But what if they began to fail?  Was not the wasp-king angry with them?  Had not he deserted them?  He must be appeased; he must have his revenge.  They would take a captive, and offer him to the wasps.  So did a North American tribe, in their need, some forty years ago; when, because their maize-crops failed, they roasted alive a captive girl, cut her to pieces, and sowed her with their corn.  I would not tell the story, for the horror of it, did it not bear with such fearful force on my argument.  What were those Red Men thinking of?  What chain of misreasoning had they in their heads when they hit on that as a device for making the crops grow?  Who can tell?  Who can make the crooked straight, or number that which is wanting?  As said Solomon of old, so must we—“The foolishness of fools is folly.”  One thing only we can say of them, that they were horribly afraid of famine, and took that means of ridding themselves of their fear.

But what if the wasp-tribe had no captives?  They would offer slaves.  What if the agony and death of slaves did not appease the wasps?  They would offer their fairest, their dearest, their sons and their daughters, to the wasps; as the Carthaginians, in like strait, offered in one day 200 noble boys to Moloch, the volcano-god, whose worship they had brought out of Syria; whose original meaning they had probably forgotten; of whom they only knew that he was a dark and devouring being, who must be appeased with the burning bodies of their sons and daughters.  And so the veil of fancy would be lifted again, and the whole superstition stand forth revealed as the mere offspring of bodily fear.

But more; the survivors of the conquest might, perhaps, escape, and carry their wasp-fetish into a new land.  But if they became poor and weakly, their brains and imagination, degenerating with their bodies, would degrade their wasp-worship till they knew not what it meant.  Away from the sacred tree, in a country the wasps of which were not so large or formidable, they would require a remembrancer of the wasp-king; and they would make one—a wasp of wood, or what not.  After a while, according to that strange law of fancy, the root of all idolatry, which you may see at work in every child who plays with a doll, the symbol would become identified with the thing symbolised; they would invest the wooden wasp with all the terrible attributes which had belonged to the live wasps of the tree; and after a few centuries, when all remembrance of the tree, the wasp-prophet and chieftain, and his descent from the divine wasp—aye, even of their defeat and flight—had vanished from their songs and legends, they would be found bowing down in fear and trembling to a little ancient wooden wasp, which came from they knew not whence, and meant they knew not what, save that it was a very “old fetish,” a “great medicine,” or some such other formula for expressing their own ignorance and dread.  Just so do the half-savage natives of Thibet, and the Irishwomen of Kerry, by a strange coincidence—unless the ancient Irish were Buddhists, like the Himalayans—tie just the same scraps of rag on arise, and show men that they are not the puppets of Nature, but her lords; and that they are to fear God, and fear naught else.

And so ends my true myth of the wasp-tree.  No, it need not end there; it may develop into a yet darker and more hideous form of superstition, which Europe has often seen; which is common now among the Negros;5 which, we may hope, will soon be exterminated.

This might happen.  For it, or something like it, has happened too many times already.

That to the ancient women who still kept up the irrational remnant of the wasp-worship, beneath the sacred tree, other women might resort; not merely from curiosity, or an excited imagination, but from jealousy and revenge.  Oppressed, as woman has always been under the reign of brute force; beaten, outraged, deserted, at best married against her will, she has too often gone for comfort and help—and those of the very darkest kind—to the works of darkness; and there never were wanting—there are not wanting, even now, in remote parts of these isles—wicked old women who would, by help of the old superstitions, do for her what she wished.  Soon would follow mysterious deaths of rivals, of husbands, of babes; then rumours of dark rites connected with the sacred tree, with poison, with the wasp and his sting, with human sacrifices; lies mingled with truth, more and more confused and frantic, the more they were misinvestigated by men mad with fear: till there would arise one of those witch-manias, which are too common still among the African Negros, which were too common of old among the men of our race.

I say, among the men.  To comprehend a witch-mania, you must look at it as—what the witch-literature confesses it unblushingly to be—man’s dread of Nature excited to its highest form, as dread of woman.

She is to the barbarous man—she should be more and more to the civilised man—not only the most beautiful and precious, but the most wonderful and mysterious of all natural objects, if it be only as the author of his physical being.  She is to the savage a miracle to be alternately adored and dreaded.  He dreads her more delicate nervous organisation, which often takes shapes to him demoniacal and miraculous; her quicker instincts, her readier wit, which seem to him to have in them somewhat prophetic and superhuman, which entangle him as in an invisible net, and rule him against his will.  He dreads her very tongue, more crushing than his heaviest club, more keen than his poisoned arrows.  He dreads those habits of secresy and falsehood, the weapons of the weak, to which savage and degraded woman always has recourse.  He dreads the very medicinal skill which she has learnt to exercise, as nurse, comforter, and slave.  He dreads those secret ceremonies, those mysterious initiations which no man may witness, which he has permitted to her in all ages, in so many—if not all—barbarous and semi-barbarous races, whether Negro, American, Syrian, Greek, or Roman, as a homage to the mysterious importance of her who brings him into the world.  If she turn against him—she, with all her unknown powers, she who is the sharer of his deepest secrets, who prepares his very food day by day—what harm can she not, may she not do?  And that she has good reason to turn against him, he knows too well.  What deliverance is there from this mysterious house-fiend, save brute force?  Terror, torture, murder, must be the order of the day.  Woman must be crushed, at all price, by the blind fear of the man.

I shall say no more.  I shall draw a veil, for very pity and shame, over the most important and most significant facts of this, the most hideous of all human follies.  I have, I think, given you hints enough to show that it, like all other superstitions, is the child—the last born and the ugliest child—of blind dread of the unknown.