HUMANISM AND RELIGIOUS E X P E R I E N C E
and fertility and their use as amulets or fetishes in order to prolong life or to increase the sexual powers. From these beginnings religion was developed as a purely empirical system of ensuring material prosperity by the archaic culture in Egypt and was thence gradually diffused throughout the world by Egyptian treasure-seekers and megalith-builders. The leaders of these expeditions became the first gods, while the Egyptian practices of mum-mification and tomb-building were the source of all those ideas concerning the nature of the soul and the existence of a spiritual world that are found among primitive peoples.
It is needless for us to discuss the archaeological aspects of this pan-Egyptian hypothesis of cultural origins. From our present point of view the main objection to the theory lies in the naive Euhemerism of its attitude to religion.
For even if we grant that the whole development of higher civilisation has proceeded from a single centre, that is a very different thing from admitting that a fundamental type of human experience could ever find its origin in a process of cultural diffusion. It is not as though Professor Perry maintained that primitive man lived a completely animal existence before the coming of the higher culture. On the contrary, the whole tendency of his thought has been to 41
CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
vindicate the essential humanity of the primitive.
It is the claim of ” the new anthropology “
that it rehabilitates human nature itself and disentangles the original nature of man from the systems, tradition, and machinery of civilisation which have modified it.” * If, then, primitive man is non-religious, the conclusion follows that human nature itself is non-religious, and religion, like war, is an artificial product of later development.
But this conclusion has been reached only by the forced construction that has been arbitrarily put upon the evidence. Because the primitive fetish has no more religious value for us than the mascot that we put on our motor-cars, we assume that it can have meant nothing more to primitive man. This, however, is to fall into the same error for which Mr.
Massingham rightly condemns the older anthropology—the neglect of the factor of degeneration.
Our mascot is a kind of fetish, but it is a degenerate fetish, and it is degenerate precisely because it has lost its religious meaning. The religious man no longer uses mascots, though if he is a Catholic he may use the image of a saint.
To the primitive man his fetish is more than the one and less than the other. It has the sanctity of a relic and the irrationality of a mascot.
* H . J . Massingham, The Heritage of Man, p. 142.
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