Professor Lowie has described how an Indian offered to show him ” the greatest thing in the world ” ; how he reverently uncovered one cloth wrapper after another ; and how at length there lay exposed a simple bunch of feathers—a mere nothing to the alien onlooker, but to the owner a badge of his covenant with the supernatural world. ” It is easy,” he says, ” to speak of the veneration extended to such badges … as fetishism, but that label with its popular meaning is monstrously inadequate to express the psychology of the situation. For to the Indian the material object is nothing apart from its sacred associations.” *
So, too, when Mr. Massingham speaks of primitive religion as “a purely supernatural machinery, controlled by man, for insuring the material welfare of the community,” he is right in his description of facts, but wrong in his appreciation of values. To us, agriculture is merely a depressed industry which provides the raw material of our dinners, and so we assume that a religion that is largely concerned with agriculture must have been a sordid materialistic business. But this is entirely to misconceive primitive man’s attitude to nature. To him, agriculture was not a sordid occupation ; it was one of the supreme mysteries of life, and he * R. H. Lowie, Primitive Religion, p. 19.
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CHRISTIANITY AND THE NEW AGE
surrounded it with religious rites because he believed that the fertility of the soil and the mystery of generation could only be ensured through the co-operation of higher powers.
Primitive agriculture was in fact a kind of liturgy.
For us nature has lost this religious atmosphere because the latter has been transferred elsewhere. Civilisation did not create the religious attitude or the essential nature of the religious experience, but it gave them new modes of expression and a new intellectual interpretation. This was the achievement of the great religions or religious philosophies that arose in all the main centres of ancient civilisation about the middle of the first millen-nium B.C.* They attained to the two fundamental concepts of metaphysical being and ethical order, which have been the foundation of religious thought and the framework of religious experience ever since. Some of these movements of thought, such as Brahmanism, Taoism, and the Eleatic philosophy, concentrated their attention on the idea of Being, while others, such as Buddhism, Confucianism, Zoroastrianism, and the philosophy of Heraclitus, emphasised the idea of moral order; but all of them agreed in * I h a v e discussed this m o v e m e n t at g r e a t e r l e n g t h in Progress and Religion, ch. vi.
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