Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind · Wilhelm Max Wundt
2. THE EXTERNAL CULTURE OF THE HEROIC AGE.
The heroic era is so comprehensive and comprises so large a part of human history that any attempt to arrive at even the barest outlines of its external culture makes it clear that this culture is even less unitary than is that of the preceding period. The differentiation of phenomena naturally increases with advancing development. Even the various forms of totemic culture manifest wide differences in detail; indeed, when taken as a whole, they represent distinct stages. When we come to the heroic age, however, whose beginning is practically coincident with the beginnings of history in the usual sense of the term, and which includes within itself a large part of the succeeding course of events, the multiplicity and diversity of the forms of culture are incomparably greater. Every nation has its particular heroes, even though there are also certain general hero-types which everywhere recur. Even more does each nation have its gods. Heroes and gods are ideals created in the image of men, and therefore they always reflect--if possible, in a heightened degree--the characteristic differences of peoples. Nevertheless, amid all these differences of times and peoples, there are certain constant features that distinguish the heroic period both from the preceding age and from the era that follows. Most important of all these features is the establishment of the _State_.
It was a long step from totemic tribal organization to political institutions. In the surge and press of the folk migrations which occurred at the beginning of the heroic period, traces of the preceding tribal organization were still everywhere present. Tribes did not change suddenly into States. Nevertheless, along with the emergence of the heroic age and its concomitant phenomena, there was a noticeable tendency towards the formation of a political order. This development pursued different courses, depending on the character of the nations or of their heroes and gods. It is primarily the resultant differences in political organization which, when considered in connection with the parallel changes in mythological and religious development, clearly show that in this period, just as in the totemic age, all other aspects of culture were closely dependent upon mythological and religious ideas. 'Totemism' connotes not merely a complex of mythological beliefs in which a certain stage of culture had its setting, but also a unique form of tribal organization, which, in spite of many differences of detail, remained constant in its general features.
Similarly, political society, in the original form in which it long survived, was closely bound up with the heroic age, even though the increasing differences between national cultures led, from the very outset, to a greater diversity of forms than were to be found in the case of totemism. In spite of these differences, however, the factor fundamental to political society remained the same. The formation of States was always conditioned by individual _rulership_. This itself is indicative of the character of the age as a whole: its typical expression is to be found in the personalities of heroes and of gods. Again it was the migrations and wars of peoples that brought about the dissolution of the old tribal organization and the creation of political society. But these migrations and wars were on an incomparably broader scale and had more intimate interconnections than had previously been the case. This gave them a correspondingly greater significance, both intensively and extensively. As a matter of comparison, we may refer to the migrations of the Malayan race during the totemic age. It would be difficult to conceive of more extensive migrations. But they took place gradually, in separate waves, and left no traces, for the most part, beyond changes in the physical characteristics and in the languages of peoples.
These migrations, which frequently involved long voyages across the sea, were carried on by but small numbers of people, who set out from restricted groups. It cannot be doubted that these migrations exercised an influence on the character and the culture of the resulting mixed races. They were never able, however, completely to transform the culture as a whole. Even when these tribal migrations occurred in oft-repeated waves, they never resulted in more than such imperfect beginnings of a political organization as we find among the Polynesians or, in other parts of the earth, among many of the semi-cultural peoples of America and Africa. Quite different are the _folk migrations_ that occur at the very dawn of the history of the great cultural peoples. The difference between tribal and racial migrations is an important one. When a race migrates, it retains its peculiar characteristics, its traditions, its heroes, and its gods, and transplants these into the new territory. True, these various elements do not remain unchanged. They inevitably become fused with the culture of the original inhabitants, and it is from these fusions, when they are at all deep-going, that new peoples arise. None of the great cultural nations that mark the beginning of this age of heroes and gods, from the Babylonians down to the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans, is homogeneous. Indeed, recent Babylonian investigations have shown that the Semitic immigration into Babylon was preceded by that of other peoples who were probably of different origin--namely, the Sumerians. We know of the latter only through linguistic traces in Babylonian inscriptions, of which, however, the religious parts, especially, show that the Sumerians exercised a great influence upon later civilization. Similarly, the settlement of the Greeks, Romans, and Germans in the territory which they eventually occupied, followed upon great earlier migrations to these regions. The people that finally formed the Greek race left the mountain country of Thrace and Thessaly in prehistoric times; wandering towards the sea, they fused with the original inhabitants of the regions into which they entered. In view of these migrations of early history, the theory of the desirability of racial purity, which has recently been so ardently championed in many quarters, is scarcely tenable. Political organization, on the one hand, and mythology and religion, on the other, represent important creations which for the most part sprang into existence only in the wake of migration and of the resultant fusion of peoples of different races.
Though political organization has been mentioned as the first important feature distinguishing the heroic age from the preceding era, there is a second and not less significant differentia. This relates to the material conditions of life. Two things are of outstanding importance for the new culture. The first of these consists in what we ordinarily call agriculture--that is, the tilling of the soil by the aid of the _plough_, or, as it is therefore more properly called in contrast to the earlier hoe-culture, plough-culture. In addition, there is the _breeding of domestic animals_, particularly of food-supplying cattle, and, later, of sheep and goats. It is even to-day widely believed that, of the various modes of procuring food, hunting came first. The hunter is thought to have been seized, one fine day, with an impulse to domesticate animals instead of hunting them. He tamed the wild creatures, and thus turned from a hunter into a nomad. In the course of time, the nomad is then supposed to have tired of his wandering life and to have settled down in permanent habitations. Instead of obtaining milk by herding his cattle, he hitched the ox to the plough, after having (with that wisdom and foresight which such theories always attribute to primitive man) invented the plough. This theory is an impossible fiction from beginning to end. It is just as intrinsically improbable as is the above-mentioned hypothesis that in prehistoric times the Australians invented totemic tribal organization and exogamy for the purpose of preventing the marriage of relatives. We have seen, on the contrary, that the prohibition of such marriages was a consequence of exogamy, and that the latter, in turn, was not a deliberate invention but the natural result of certain conditions inherent in the culture of the age. All these institutions were originally due to influences whose outcome could not possibly have been foreseen. The same is true of the subject under discussion.
In the first place, the assumed order of succession of the three stages of life is contradicted by facts. It is hardly correct to speak of a hunting life which is not supplemented by a certain amount of agriculture in the form of hoe-culture--an industry which, as a rule, is carried on by the woman in the immediate vicinity of the hut. This primitive agriculture existed even at a very early age. We find it widely prevalent among the American aborigines, who possessed no domesticated animal whatever except the dog, and the dog, as was above observed, was never tamed at all, but domesticated itself at the very dawn of prehistoric times. The supposition that the nomadic life followed upon that of the hunter is impossible, in the second place, because the animals that are hunted are not identical with those that form the care of the nomad. Cattle were never objects of the chase; the closely related buffalo, on the other hand, was never domesticated, but has remained exclusively a game animal down to the present day. Game animals have never been domesticated and utilized for the purpose of supplying milk and drawing the plough. No doubt the domestic animals of the nomad at one time existed in a wild state. Wild cattle, of course, preceded tame cattle.
But the latter did not develop from the former by the indirect way of the hunted animal. Nor does agriculture at all presuppose a nomadic life. There are vast stretches of the Old World, as, for instance, all of China, Indo-China, and Indonesia, where the production of milk was never engaged in but where agriculture in the form of plough-culture has existed, in part, since early times. Agriculture, however, involves the raising of cattle, particularly of oxen. These male cattle are castrated, usually when very young. They are thus made tractable, so that they may be hitched to the plough and used for agricultural purposes more easily than is possible in the case of bulls, which are never completely manageable. What, then, were the motives which led to the raising of cattle, an occupation which, in many places at least, is carried on solely in the interests of agriculture? What motives led to the castration of male cattle, a practice which everywhere obviously serves agricultural purposes?
The traditional mode of explanation would lead us to suppose that man foresaw the effects of castration, that he knew beforehand that if the bull were subjected to this operation he would become an animal fitted to draw the plough. The impossibility of this supposition is evident. Such an effect could be learned only from experience, prior to which, therefore, it could not have been known. The problem relating to the cultivation of the soil by means of the plough, therefore, divides into two questions: How may we account for the ox? How for the plough? These questions are closely related, and yet they lead us back to divergent explanations. For in all probability the plough was originally drawn by man. Moreover, the plough was not the first implement to be thus drawn; it was anteceded by the _wagon_. Even on the early Babylonian and Assyrian monuments there were figures of a wagon bearing either an image of a god or else the king or chief priest, both of whom were probably regarded as uniting in _one person_ the function of their offices with that of representative of the deity. Thus, the question as to the origin of the plough carries us back directly to that of the origin of the wagon.
Now, the earliest wagon had but two wheels; the four-wheeled wagon came as a later discovery or as an improvement. The two-wheeled wagon, however, presupposes the wheel. But how did the wheel come to be recognized as a useful object of locomotion? The first traces of a wheel or of wheel-like objects are to be found in the latter part of the stone age. A number of such objects have been discovered in Europe; in their centre is a hole, and there are spokes that radiate to the circumference. The fact that these wheels are of small size indicates that they may have been worn about the neck as amulets. But even in early culture the wheel was also put to an entirely different use. Widely prevalent over the earth and probably connected with ancient sun worship, is the custom of kindling a fire to celebrate the festival of the summer solstice. In ancient Mexico, tradition tells us, this fire was started by turning a notched disk of wood about a stake until the heat thus generated gave rise to fire--the same method of producing fire by friction that is still in use among primitive peoples.
This fiery wheel was then rolled down a hill as an image of the sun, and later, when the custom had lost its original magical significance, as a symbol of the sun moving in the heavens. According to the report of W. Mannhardt, a remarkably similar custom existed in East Prussia not so very long ago. Perhaps the wheel that was worn about the neck as an amulet or article of adornment likewise had some connection with the idea that the sun was a celestial wheel rolling across the heavens. After the early sun cults had once created the rolling wheel in imitation of the sun and its movements, it was but a short step to the idea of securing regular, continuous movements by means of which some sort of work might be performed. An early application of this idea is to be found in the practice of spinning with distaff and whorl. This invention was credited even by the ancients to prehistoric times. Doubtless its origin belongs to the beginnings of the heroic age. This same early period, however, probably also used the wheel for transporting heavy articles. This was the original purpose of the one-wheeled barrow.
It alone enabled the ancient Babylonians and Egyptians to overcome the difficulties of transporting by human agencies the mighty blocks of stone required for their temples and pyramids. From this it was not a far advance to the two-wheeled wagon. The barrow was pulled or pushed by men. The wagon, in contrast to the barrow, was apparently from the beginning an aristocratic mode of transit, never used by the common people. The two-wheeled wagon was in the first instance a vehicle of the gods. Later it served as the vehicle of the ruler, the terrestrial counterpart of the deity. Finally, the nobleman employed it in war, in going forth to battle. A vivid portrayal of battles in which such two-wheeled wagons played a part is presented in the Iliad. True, the wagon is here also, as a rule, only a means for carrying the hero to the scene of combat. The fighting itself is seldom done from it. Upon its arrival at the appointed place, the warrior dismounts, to try his strength, shield against shield, with his opponent. The general populace, however, always goes on foot.
This sketch gives us the main outlines of the history of the wagon. But how did the animal, first the ox and later the horse, come to be hitched to the wagon? Originally, the wagon bearing the image of the god was very probably drawn by men, as was likewise, in imitation of this, the chariot of the king. But the breeding of animals soon changed matters. Oxen were used for the purpose of drawing wagons much earlier than were horses. The horse did not appear until late in the history of civilization. There are no Egyptian pictures of horses that date back farther than the fifteenth dynasty, whereas those of cattle occur considerably earlier. In Oriental civilization, furthermore, the ass antedates the horse. In harmony with ancient custom, the ass even to-day continues, in the Orient, to be a favourite beast of burden as well as a riding animal. The horse seems to make its first appearance in history along with the Indo-Germanic tribes, who were probably indebted for it to the Turanian peoples of the Asiatic steppes. As a result of its superior speed, it then superseded its rivals in all the civilized countries of the ancient world. The Assyrian king went forth to the chase and the Homeric hero proceeded to battle in a chariot drawn by steeds. It was only later that the Greeks used the horse for saddle purposes, and not merely to draw the chariot. When this took place, equestrian combat came into favour among the aristocracy.
This development, however, was preceded not only by the taming of cattle but probably also by the use of the ox for drawing the wagon. How the latter came about may, of course, only be conjectured. The bull has remained unmanageable even to the present day; the attempt to hitch him to a wagon, therefore, must always have failed. The cow was not forced into this service--at least, not in those places where milk was valued. On the other hand, the castrated male animal is thoroughly suited to the task of drawing the wagon. It is stronger than the cow, and also more tractable. It is inconceivable, however, that castration was originally performed with the purpose of engendering these characteristics. Before there could be such a purpose, the results must already have been known--that is, the operation must already have been performed for other purposes. Eduard Hahn has offered a suggestion with reference to our problem. He has called attention to the ancient Asiatic cults of the Phrygian Cybele and the Syrio-Phœnician Astarte. These cults are similar to the vegetation festivals which, as was mentioned in the preceding chapter, may be found among the Pueblo peoples of America. Similar orgiastic phenomena recur wherever peoples are primarily concerned with agriculture and are anxious for the welfare of the grain.
The beginnings of vegetation cults, found in the earlier period of hoe-culture, were succeeded by more developed deity cults, connected with plough-culture. The ecstatic motives associated with the tilling of the soil then extended their influence beyond the limits of vegetation cults proper and became universal elements of the deity cults. The powers shared by the numerous demoniacal beings of the more primitive cults were now centralized in a _single_ goddess mother. The life-giving activity of the deity in connection with human procreation came to be of focal interest. The exaggerated development of cult ecstasy caused the orgy to become a form of self-mortification. The cult associates, especially the priests, lacerated and emasculated themselves in the fury of religious excitement. By becoming a permanent custom, this gave rise to a group of eunuchs consecrated to the service of the deity. These were doubtless the earliest eunuchs of history. In the guardians of Turkish harems and in the singers of the Sistine Chapel, survivals of these unrestrained cults of the past still exist. Now, when the group of emasculated priests paced beside the chariot of the goddess, they might easily have hit upon the idea of hitching a castrated animal to the wagon.
But, however plausible this hypothesis may appear, in that it avoids the impossible assumption of an invention, it nevertheless leaves one question unanswered. Even though the castration of the priest may be understood as the result of the well-known effects of extreme religious excitement, the castration of the bull is not yet accounted for. Are we to suppose that the priest merely aimed to render the animal similar to himself? Neither ecstasy nor reflection could account for such a purpose. But there is another factor which has always been significant for cult, and which attained to increased importance precisely in the worship of the deity. I refer to _sacrifice_. In its highest stages, sacrifice assumes new forms, in that man offers either himself or parts of his own body, his blood, his hair, or a finger. A late survival of such sacrifices is to be found in a custom that is still prevalent in Catholic countries. Here it frequently occurs that a sick man lays a wax replica of the diseased part of his body upon the altar of the saint. This idea of sacrificing parts of one's own body is also exemplified in the self-emasculation practised by the Russian sect of Skopzi even in our own Christian age.
Such sacrifice, moreover, may receive a wider application, so as to include, among the sacrificial objects, parts of the animal. Now at one time the kidneys with their connected organs were regarded as vehicles of the soul, and, as such, were sacrificed to the gods. The castration of the bull, therefore, may originally well have been regarded as the sacrifice of the most readily accessible of the favourite vehicles of the soul. Thus, it may have been in the case of the animal whose generative organs had been sacrificed to the deity that man first observed the change of characteristics which fitted the animal to be hitched to the chariot of the deity, and finally, through an extension of its sphere of usefulness, to draw the plough across the fields. This hypothesis, which presupposes the joint influence of orgiastic vegetation cults and ancient sacrificial usages, is, of course, not susceptible of positive demonstration. Nevertheless, to one concerned with the transition from ancient field cults to the agriculture of later times, the combination of conditions just indicated may reasonably be regarded as affording the basis of an hypothesis that is psychologically not improbable.
Whether the raising of the milch cow was coincident with the taming of the ox for the purposes of agriculture, and whether it came about as the result of a similar transformation of motives, it is hardly possible to determine. Though such changes are of more importance for the development of culture than are many of the campaigns and ancient folk wars of which history has preserved a record, no positive clue as to their origin has anywhere survived. All that we know with certainty is that the taming of the ox to draw the plough and the raising of the milch cow are not necessarily bound up with one another. For plough-culture and the milk industry are by no means always to be found together. In spite of his highly developed agriculture, the Chinaman loathes milk, whereas the Hindoo regards it as a valuable gift of civilization, prizing it not only because of the butter which he secures from it but especially as a food and as a sacrifice to the gods. The Israelites received the promise that Canaan was to be a land "that floweth with milk and honey." The latter expression suggests the cultural conditions of two widely different periods. Milk represents the most valuable product of later culture, while even primitive man regarded the honey which he gathered from the hives of wild bees as his most precious article of food.
Whatever may be the relation of the two factors in the domestication of cattle, whether the taming of the ox preceded the raising of cows or vice versa, the production of milk, at any rate, represents the more difficult and slower task. The taming of the ox is essentially an act that affects only the particular animal in question; even to-day it must be repeated in the case of every male calf; the inheritance of acquired characteristics is here not operative. The cow, just as all female mammals in their natural condition, produces very little milk except during the period of suckling, and then only so much as is necessary for the support of her young. Only through efforts continued throughout generations and as a result of the inheritance of acquired characteristics could she be brought to that tremendous over-production of her secretion of which she has become capable. In this case, therefore, there must from the very outset have been a systematic striving toward the desired goal. It is not absolutely essential to assume a change of motives such as occurred in the taming of the ox; from the very beginning there may have been an attempt to make personal use of the milk which Nature intended for the calf.
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.