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Transactions of the Second International Folk-Congress/The Significance of Folk-Lore

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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FOLK-LORE.

By the HON. LADY WELBY.

It is, of course, a commonplace that as observation of facts becomes more careful and more wary of controversial bias, it is likely to reveal more and more of the unexpected, and to overturn some inferences which had been previously taken for granted. And this must be especially the case where attempts are made to unravel the meaning of folk-lore, which represents a mental condition so far from the modern civilised standpoint.

This must be my excuse for venturing, as an outsider, to bring forward some queries suggested by recent writing on the subject, the first of which could hardly, till now, have been asked with hope of profitable result.

In accounts of savage superstition a traditional bias has for long reigned supreme. Has it not been generally succeeded by an opposite one? Are we not inevitably more or less under the sway of reaction from discredited assumptions? If so, it may well be that the work, of which Dr. Tylor's Primitive Culture was such an epoch-making example, may, itself, prove the introduction to a third way of approaching the subject, in great measure owing to such labours as his, and daily becoming not only more possible but, more frequently adopted. This, of course, would neither be a reversion nor a revulsion, but simply a development.

Of the first method of interpretation (if it merits that name at all) any and every missionary record up to fifteen, or even ten, years ago will furnish endless examples; and, indeed, so would any ordinary traveller's report. Of the second, representing the reaction from this (as its misleading glosses become glaringly evident), there are also on all sides abundant instances. But the point is to ask whether some recent writing on the subject does not give ground for the hope that we may be entering on a virtually fresh phase of inquiry on the earlier stages of the growth of human intelligence, and one likely to yield important results. If so, it is ​needless to urge that social, and especially educational, questions may be vitally affected by researches which now seem remote from practical outcome in that direction.

I venture, therefore, to point first to Dr. Codrington's Melanesians as a striking example of the pregnant change which is passing over the observer of contemporary savage life. We have here a masterly study of the ideas which underlie such life—so far as we can as yet enter into them,—wisely beginning with misgivings, warnings, qualifications too rarely considered necessary either by the orthodox or the heterodox observer. And the following observations have had the great privilege of the author's own invaluable comments and corrections in a private letter.[1]

Dr. Codrington points out that even systematic inquiries are liable to be made too soon, after which all observations are likely to be made to fit into an early scheme of belief And a man may speak a native language every day for years and yet make mistakes. "Pigeon-English" is sure to come in; e.g., a dancing-club is a devil-stick, though the Melanesian mind is innocent of the notion of a devil. He goes on to observe that "the most intelligent travellers and naval officers pass their short period of observation in this atmosphere of confusion".[2] And we are reminded that "besides, everyone, missionary and visitor, carries with him some preconceived ideas; he expects to see idols, and he sees them; images are labelled idols in museums whose makers carved them for amusement. ...... It is extremely difficult for anyone to begin inquiries without some prepossessions, which, even if he can communicate with the natives in their own language, affects his conception of the meaning of the answers he receives. The questions he puts guide the native to the answer he thinks he ought to give. The native, with very vague beliefs and notions floating in cloudy solution in his mind, finds in the questions of the European a thread on which these will precipitate themselves, and, without any intention to deceive, avails himself of the opportunity to clear his own mind while he satisfies the questioner."[3] We are thus introduced to an extremely interesting account of what in Melanesia is called "Mana". And I have Dr. Codrington's own ​approval in deprecating the use of the word "supernatural" with reference to it. He agrees that the uncultured mind has not acquired the idea which the modern civilised man expresses by Nature and the natural, and therefore knows nothing of a supposed world above nature, or superior to it. Thus what is believed in, according to this account (deducting what belongs to our own readings of experience) is simply unseen power which can be turned by man to his own benefit—as in the case of electricity or even wind. True that "Mana" is defined (as we define "will" and "mental energy") as altogether distinct from physical power, and then again Dr. Codrington explains, as "a power or influence not physical and in a way supernatural; but it shows itself in physical force or in any kind of power or excellence which a man possesses. This "Mana" is not fixed in anything, and can be conveyed in almost anything; but spirits, whether disembodied souls or supernatural beings, have it and can impart it; and it essentially belongs to personal beings to originate it, though it may act through the medium of water, or a stone, or a bone."[4] Once more; it "works to effect everything which is beyond the ordinary power of man outside the common process of nature[5]; it is present in the atmosphere of life, attaches itself to persons and to things, and is manifested by results which can only be ascribed to its operation. When one has got it he can use it and direct it, but its force may break forth at some new point; the presence of it is ascertained by proof."[6] How near this definition surely is to what we see at the exceptional crises of life when the ordinary energies are gathered up into a supreme effort! "Thus", we are assured, "all conspicuous success is a proof that a man has 'Mana'; his influence depends on the impression made on the people's mind that he has it; he becomes a chief by virtue of it. Hence a man's power, though political or social in its character, is his 'Mana'; the word is naturally used in accordance with the native conception of the character of all power and influence as supernatural."[7]

Perhaps the word which would best express what is here meant is still to seek. Anyhow man is conceived as akin to all which moves. And this idea develops into that of beings full of this "Mana", but non-fleshly and called spirits; only, as Dr. Codrington, like Major Ellis, urges, "it is most important to distinguish between ​spirits who are beings of an order higher than mankind, and the disembodied spirits of men, which have become, in the vulgar sense of the word, ghosts."[8] He warns us that "from the neglect of this distinction great confusion and misunderstanding arise".[9]

But the anecdote that follows gives us a key which till now has surely been somewhat neglected. A certain chief, we read, "told one of the first missionaries how he proposed to treat him. 'If you die first,' said he, 'I shall make you my god.' And the same Tuikilakila would sometimes say of himself, 'I am a god.' It is added that he believed it too; and his belief was surely correct. For it should be observed that the chief never said he was or should be a god, in English, but that he was or should be a kalou, in Fijian, and a kalou he no doubt became; that is to say, on his decease his departed spirit was invoked and worshipped as he knew it would be."[10] How many current versions of primitive belief may be shattered by this unsuspected difference? How many such declarations have been taken for what we now call objective, when all the time the speaker may have meant what is now defined as the subjective?

Animism in the ordinary sense appears not to exist in Melanesia; no spirit animates any natural object as the soul does a man.[11] A Vui or spirit has no form to be seen, and is apparently an intelligence, but can somehow be connected with a stone or other like object.[12] But in order to communicate with such a spirit there must be two links: the natural object and a human person—nature and man! Suppose we here call the spirit. Mind. Both are alike useful symbols, but have acquired a fictitious isolation and substance. "The native mind", observes Dr. Codrington, "aims high when it conceives a being who lives and thinks and knows and has power in nature without a gross body or even form; but it fails when it comes to deal with an individual being of such a nature."[13] There lies the key, I would suggest. Has not failure followed the attempt to translate the generic into the definite, the individual, the concrete? Yet more, has it not resulted from the desertion of what may perhaps be called the dynamic mode of conception, identifying the meaning of life with its functions and activities, and linking these with all natural forms of energy? This seems, ​by a sort of intellectual degeneration, to have been succeeded by a static type of thought, giving us a world of shadowy replicas of substantial objects. But, surely, as the earliest traceable form of language was mainly an expression of function rather than structure, of activities rather than substances, so the earliest stage of thought would share the same character. A being without substantial body, or even form, would simply be a moving force in nature, or life, or man. And this would be widely different from the complex conceptions of personality, or self-consciousness, which we are apt to credit the early mind with transferring to natural objects or to supposed spectres.

These later conceptions are now undergoing a severe sifting. And the labours of physio-psychologists, alienists, and students of hypnotism threaten, however little they may establish, to undermine much which has appeared till now impregnable. Who knows whether we may not end by finding that here also we have to revert, as well as to advance (as it were on a spiral course), to a dynamic, instead of a static, view of the world, and again enthrone motion as at once the primary and the ultimate fact?

Take "spirit", meaning breath. This needs a book to itself never yet written. But meanwhile even now it may be remarked that we use the words "a spirit" not merely to mean a form, or a being in the sense of shadow, or double, or phantom, but as in some sense a motive force or spring of energy. When we say that the whole spirit of a man's work is right or wholesome, that some example is inspiriting, that the practical spirit which animates a given course of conduct will ensure success, our imagery is at least free from some misleading associations. And, after all, breath is first (like pulse) a rhythm.

But to return to "Mana". It is curiously utilised in what are called "ghost-shooters". A man, so to speak, puts his own hatred and will to injure (which he conveniently shelters under the neutral term "Mana") into a bit of bamboo, waits for his enemy, and lets it out upon him; when, of course, the victim is stricken, probably to death, by the "shock" or "impression" thus made. A graphic story[14] relates how, when the wrong man was thus nearly killed, he revived on being convinced of the mistake.

The author goes on to tell us that, "What that is which in life ​abides with the body, and in death departs from it, and which, speaking of it in English, we call the soul, the natives find it very difficult to explain. Like people very much more advanced than themselves, they have not, in the first place, a perfectly clear conception of what it is; and, in the second place, like other people, they use words to represent these conceptions which they acknowledge to be more or less figurative and inexact when the precise meaning of them is sought for."[15] A tone like this is a positive relief after the cut-and-dry assurance with which we are so familiar. And why is the drift of existence, that which makes its force, its meaning, its value, expressed in terms of visible object? Not always, it may be, because savages are even as much wedded to material analogies as we are, but because "thinking" to such minds "is like seeing", and thus must be expressed in visual terms as in one sense higher than the tactual or muscular dialects. And here Mr. Fison is quoted in the same sense. Strange that we should be so ready to credit the savage with the definite when we are so vague ourselves! Again, take "Nunuai", "the abiding or recurrent impression" which, as we say, haunts us. This is reckoned "not a mere fancy; it is real, but it has no form or substance".[16] Thus the primitive thinker is in full accord with modern results; such persistence is a ringing on the strongly excited nerves; it is "actually" still "active", gradually dying away as the "clang" does. On page 269 a pertinent question is asked: "When an English ghost appears in the dead man's habit as he lived, is it thought to be his soul that appears?"

But enough has been quoted to indicate what is meant. It is well to end such a helpful book with the story of Tagaro, who was tired of being asked pointless questions, and in such wise answered his literalist questioner as at last to bring about his untimely end, and so get rid of him and his inquiries. What a suggestive parable of civilised questioning of the primitive mind!

There remains, however, another recent utterance, not, indeed, on primitive theories in the rude or "savage" sense, but on the sources and character of some of the deepest and most subtle of human thinkings—those which we vaguely call Indian, or, even more broadly. Oriental—worthy of the most respectful attention and admiration.

​Sir Alfred Lyall, in his truly significant study of Natural Religion in India, defines the religion of which he treats as "moulded only by circumstances and feelings, and founded upon analogies drawn sometimes with ignorant simplicity, sometimes with great subtlety, from the operation of natural agencies and phenomena. . . . the religious feeling works by taking impressions or reflections, sometimes rough and grotesque, sometimes refined and artistic, from all that men hear, and feel, and see".[17] He tells us that in Hinduism this "can be seen growing; that one can discern the earliest notions, rude and vague",[18] and "follow them upwards till they merge into allegory, mysticism, or abstract philosophical conceptions".[19] He even thinks that in India we may trace "the development of natural into supernatural beliefs".[20]

This, of course, raises the unsolved question of the line between the two, and where the supernatural is supposed to supersede, to supplement, or simply to intensify, the natural; also how far these terms apply respectively to the objective and the subjective. The bewildering ambiguities caused by the varying mental attitudes of those who use the words, create a real difficulty. Innumerable shades of meaning attach to them, while, unfortunately, there is a widespread tendency to suppose the contrary. We all think our own must be at once the true, the precise, and the most generally held meaning.

Let us, however, seek for the answer in the lecture itself. Taking the current theory of dreams and ghosts as the sources of the earliest superstitions. Sir Alfred Lyall lays stress on fear as "a primordial affection of the human mind",[21] and maintains that much unreasonable terror of the present day is "traceable backward to the times when our ancestors felt themselves to be surrounded by capricious or malignant beings. The fear of ghosts is the faint shadow still left on our imaginations by the universal belief of primitive folk that they were haunted by the spirits of the dead."[22] The value of Dr. Codrington's account of the distinctions made with regard to this even by the rude Melanesian mind[23] is here evident. But next we get a specially valuable ​generalisation; that the underlying idea, the "essential characteristic" of ghosts is that of returning (and therefore of resuscitation), as the French word revenant indicates. And the writer conjecturally connects this with "the endless succession in Nature of Birth, Death, and Revival",[24] by which last he must mean regeneration. Then we come to the early recognition, not merely on a pre-scientific, but, in a sense, a pre-imaginative basis, of that oneness on the one hand of "physical" energies and on the other of the "energies" of what we so little as yet understand, and so vaguely call life, animation, vitality. "To man in his wild state the same life appears to stir in everything, in running water, in a tree, and in a creature; it ends and disappears in everything at times, but it reappears again constantly, in shape, movement, and outward character so similar as to seem identical; conveying the inference that something has gone and come again; there is nothing around a savage to suggest that the animating principle of vitality suffers more than suspension or displacement. The analogy of Nature affords him no presumption that death means extinction, while his imagination supplies him with constant evidence to the contrary."[25] Yes, his "imagination"; not an illusive "fancy", leading him ever further from such facts as the unity of nature, the conservation of energy, the continuity of natural process, the unbroken succession of production and reproduction; but an image-power which, even in its worst failures, is a genuine attempt to render, in pictorial form, impressions stamped upon the very "protist" in which all life alike had started, and constantly reinforced and enriched through the long evolutionary ascent in complexity.

Thus the term "life" itself, it is obvious, cannot indicate in early times so sharp a differentiation as in our highly specialised days, from the stir and movement seen in everything. The presumption is always that which we now call the persistence or conservation of energy; while no bounds are set to its possible transformation. Sir A. Lyall then tells us that his conjecture is "that a great part of what is called animism—the tendency to discover human life and agency in all moving things, whether waving trees or wandering beasts—begins with an ingrained conviction that some new form or habitation must be provided for the ​spirits of dead men"[26]; "that at the bottom of all these imaginary changes lies the belief in survival, the notion that death is transmigration".[27] This needs to be connected with what he describes as "the habit of detecting human spirits everywhere".[28] That "habit" he considers to lead to the deification of humanity," "which is throughout so much the strongest element in the shaping of superstitious imagery that it gradually absorbs all other elements".[29] And is this not originally because man gathers up in the supremacy of his "brain-power" all that he himself observes and experiences? And does he not thus realise on the emotional level the attraction of a human and divine gravitation, and dimly feel, that no more than the earth he lives on is he his own centre or his own pivot; but that his life is orbital and satellitic—though, of course, any such term must needs be taken in a simply symbolical sense? If so, what he is growing towards is the further realisation that such centre itself is but a unit in the vast universe of truth. "The origin of the divine species, the descent of the deities from man",[30] will thus be interpreted as parallel to the idea of projection which underlay so much ancient thinking about the earth and the stars. Therein man thought that he had himself thrown off the "mental" lights which have lightened all mankind; but at last he finds that he and all his doings and thinkings are in a true sense dependent on that very outside world which he had supposed to be dependent upon, and even produced by, the forces of this planet; ex-citation, the call from without, is recognised as the secret of all his activities.

So we return to the conjecture "that the original bent or form of natural religion had been moulded upon the deep impression stamped on primitive minds by the perpetual death and reappearance, or resuscitation, of animate things".[31] And the lecturer traces in the upper grades of Hinduism "the full growth and maturity of these primordial ideas".[32] Here we come to something better than any mere analogy; we get a far-reaching and carefully thought-out application of principles which lie deep in the constitution of nature. Assuming that "Brahma, the creative energy, is too remote and abstract an influence for popular worship",[33] the writer looks upon Siva as representing what ​he has "taken to be the earliest and universal impression of Nature upon men—the impression of endless and pitiless changes".[34] Pitiless? Only to that strange practical fallacy which is one of our most fatal obstacles to a valid optimism, the love of fixity; the love of that Unchanging which is only another name for Death; the cult of the static as the key to life which has to be replaced by the cult of the dynamic, if we would rightly interpret and apply even the facts which we collect or group under either term. Siva thus, according to Sir A. Lyall, "exhibits by images, emblems, and allegorical carvings the whole course and revolution of Nature, the inexorable law of the alternate triumph of life and death—morsjanua vitæ—the unending circle of indestructible animation".[35] But beyond even this vast generalisation, "Vishnu, on the other hand, impersonates the higher evolution; the upward tendency of the human spirit".[36] And these pregnant suggestions are summed up in the contention that "we thus find running through all Hinduism, first the belief in the migration of spirits when divorced from the body, next their deification, and latterly their identification with the supreme abstract divinities reappear again in various earthly forms; so that there is a continual passage to and fro between men and gods, gods and men. And thus we have the electric current of all-pervading divine energy completing its circle through diverse forms, until we reach the conception of all Nature being possessed by the divinity".[37] Here, as the lecturer shows us, we reach the limit of the doctrine of pantheism, which he takes to be the "intellectual climax of the evolution of natural religion".[38] He puts first the adoration of innumerable spirits, and sees these gradually collected into main channels, running into anthropomorphic moulds, and yet further condensing into the Brahmanic Trinity. "And as all rivers end in the sea, so every sign, symbol, figure, or active energy of divinity, is ultimately regarded as the outward expression" of a "single universal divine potency".[39] At this point comes an important reminder: the writer disclaims the theory that "the deification of humanity accounts for all Hinduism; for in India every visible presentation of force, everything that can harm or help mankind is worshipped, at first instinctively and directly, ​latterly as the token of divinity working behind the phenomenal veil".[40] How plain here, how obvious surely, is the connection of this feeling with our own sense of the wonder and the might of those inscrutable forces round us which science is everywhere investigating; finding each, as she advances, the prelude or the indirect witness to another which may or may not as yet come within her experimental ken!

Once more we are pointed to the inherent sense of hereditary unity which Dr. Weissmann's theory has done so much to bring home to us, whatever the ultimate fate of his own view of the matter; it is suggested that "mourning in its original meaning partook largely of the nature of worship".[41] The lecturer thinks that "the prayers were not for the dead man, but addressed to him; that the funeral service was usually an offer or an attempt to do him service".[42] And with reference to the sacrificial aspect of this custom, he insists that, "according to the votary's conception of the god, so is the intention and meaning of the sacrifice".[43] Here we come to a fact which might surely become (after due investigation and analysis on the comparative method) the subject for another of those really deep interpretations of which we have in this lecture such helpful examples. "There is one world-wide and inveterate superstition belonging to the sacrificial class, of which we have many vestiges in India—it is the belief that a building can be made strong, can be prevented from falling, by burying alive some one, usually a child, under its foundations".[44] Is it not worth while to ask—examining the facts by the light of such a question—whether this may not have been a hideously perverted attempt at expressing a primordial impulse, at embodying an organic (that is, a pre-intellectual) conviction, surviving to this day in the purely abstract imagery of the poet? May it not have grown out of a fundamental instinct, that under or at the beginning of all which human intelligence can undertake to construct, life—indeed, growing life—must be found or must be placed; that whatsoever is not founded on life must be founded on death, and must fall thus into irretrievable ruin? Does this sound far-fetched? Perhaps that may be because it is too near us to be rightly focussed yet. Still it may be that as yet such questions can more safely be asked than answered.

​But the main currents of the deep-running stream which is touched in this lecture are on better-explored ground. "The identity of all divine energies underlying this incessant stir and semblance of life in the world is soon recognised by reflective minds; the highest god as well as the lowest creature is a mere vessel of the Invisible Power; the god is only a peculiar and extraordinary manifestation of that power; the mysterious allegorical Trinity, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, at the summit of Hinduism, suggests and personifies its regular unchanging operation."[45] Most truly there is a confession of the unity of "spirit" and "nature" and a reference of both to what lies beyond the planetary scale, which "is ingrained in the minds of all thoughtful persons"[46] in some form perhaps more widely than in India alone, while there "the inner meaning lies everywhere close below the outward worship, and it comes out at the first serious question".[47] May we not here ask whether in this wider sense such a "pantheism" must be exclusively regarded as the absolutely "final stage in the fusion and combination of the multitude of forms and conceptions bred out of vagrant superstitions"?[48] If in one sense it is truly a last stage, may it not well prove, when transfigured in the light of that new world of knowledge now rising upon us in steadily increasing brilliancy, a first stage in the ascent of a reverence for the divinely natural and the naturally divine which is but waiting for a real and living and universal recognition of God as Light; as the very Abolition of Darkness and Unveiling of Truth and Good, which is, as we are, best rendered by a "personal" mode of expression which only fails by reason of lack and limit? And in so far as he is conscious of these ever-brightening rays and beams of living Truth, well may the writer remind us that "every successive death does indeed interrupt consciousness; but so does sleeps;[49] and end by venturing "to suggest that the upward striving of nature through the modifications of forms and species is reflected, as in a glass, darkly, by this vision of spiritual evolution",[50] whatever its concomitant shortcomings. The "discovery that all nature is imbued by one divine energy"[51] may indeed be associated with much that is crude, that is fanciful, that fails to account for nature or life as we find them, or either to satisfy or refute the irrepressible ​cravings of what we agree to call the highest types of mind. "Pantheism" may even represent that most fatal of obstacles, the dead wall of a geocentric levelling down, like the outgrown idea that the suns in the sky were subordinate to this little lightless earth. But that one idea which is here indicated beneath it—the idea of continuity of link between all things at all times and in all places, continuity both simultaneous and successive; the repudiation of all unfathomable gulfs except in the one sense of distinction, not division; the frank acceptance of ties with the most humble or despised of nature's forms and conditions of existence, that may surely prove, when we have learnt to assimilate it, the starting-point of an ascent so worthy and so fruitful of all good, that it is difficult to find a word with pure enough associations to define it with.

This line of thought, however, as no one can feel more strongly than myself, is dangerous if not futile, as at best essentially premature. We have to earn and not to snatch result and reward. And the tangle of dead and decaying growths of theory with fungi of fallacy growing rankly upon them which surrounds us on every side, warns us at least not to add to the number and thus to hinder a healthier future harvest. They must be allowed time to form a fertile soil, and light and air must first be freely admitted. But perhaps it may be wise sometimes to think of modern ethnological labours under the image of working a mine of exceeding and multifarious richness and immense depth and range. The machinery, the "plant" is magnificent and embodies all that science can suggest. But in one part of the mine the floor rings hollow to the footsteps of some less engrossed than others with the task of working it. May it be that this means an insecurity dangerous only if ignored and neglected? May it be that yet below the great depth hollowed out there is a layer of air, or of water or of fire which needs dealing with before the work can safely now be prosecuted? Or, on the other hand, may some yet richer treasure lie beneath? Whatever form in which we put these queries, it is at least a matter of rejoicing, because of hopeful augury for the future, that there should be a manifest increase among our ablest thinkers of the tendency to look deeper than has generally been the case till lately for answers to the most vital of all the appeals and problems of human life.

  1. ↑ I am allowed to quote the following passage:—"With regard to the general danger of the ambiguous use of words it is not possible for me to express too strongly my agreement."
  2. ↑ Pp. 117-8.
  3. ↑ P. 118.
  4. ↑ P. 119.
  5. ↑ Italics my own.
  6. ↑ P. 119.
  7. ↑ P. 120.
  8. ↑ P. 120.
  9. ↑ P. 121.
  10. ↑ P. 122.
  11. ↑ P. 123.
  12. ↑ P, 141.
  13. ↑ P. 152.
  14. ↑ P. 205.
  15. ↑ P. 247.
  16. ↑ P. 151.
  17. ↑ P. 14-5.
  18. ↑ P. 15.
  19. ↑ P. 16.
  20. ↑ Ibid.
  21. ↑ P. 17.
  22. ↑ P. 18.
  23. ↑ As also Major Ellis's report of its existence in West African tribes. (Ewe and Tshi-speaking Peoples.)
  24. ↑ P. 19.
  25. ↑ Ibid.
  26. ↑ P. 24.
  27. ↑ P. 26.
  28. ↑ P. 30.
  29. ↑ Ibid.
  30. ↑ P. 32.
  31. ↑ P. 35.
  32. ↑ Ibid.
  33. ↑ P. 36.
  34. ↑ P. 36.
  35. ↑ P. 36-7.
  36. ↑ P. 37.
  37. ↑ P. 39.
  38. ↑ Ibid.
  39. ↑ P. 40.
  40. ↑ P. 40.
  41. ↑ P. 42.
  42. ↑ Ibid.
  43. ↑ P. 44.
  44. ↑ P. 47.
  45. ↑ P. 57.
  46. ↑ P. 58.
  47. ↑ Ibid.
  48. ↑ Ibid.
  49. ↑ P. 60.
  50. ↑ P. 61.
  51. ↑ P. 62.
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