The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 Victorian Literature and Culture Series Jerome J

The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 Victorian Literature and Culture Series Jerome J. McGann and Herbert F. Tucker, Editors The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915

Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay

University of Virginia Press | Charlottesville and London University of Virginia Press ∫ 2010 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2010

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wheeler-Barclay, Marjorie, 1952– The science of religion in Britain, 1860–1915 / Marjorie Wheeler-Barclay. p. cm. — (Victorian literature and culture series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. isbn 978-0-8139-3010-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — isbn 978-0-8139-3051-0 (e-book) 1. Religion—Study and teaching—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Religion historians—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Religion—Study and teaching—Great Britain—History—20th century. 4. Religion historians—Great Britain—History—20th century. I. Title. bl41.w467 2010 306.60941%09034—dc22 2010007703 For Daryl and Reese This page intentionally left blank Contents

Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Study of Religion before 1860 17 2. Friedrich Max Müller The Annunciation of a New Science 37 3. Edward B. Tylor The Forging of an Anthropological Orthodoxy 71 4. Andrew Lang The Antipositivist Critique 104 5. William Robertson Smith A New Departure 140 6. James G. Frazer The Orthodoxy Monumentalized 181 7. Jane Ellen Harrison The Redeﬁnition of Religion 215 Conclusion 243 Notes 257 Bibliography 289 Index 305 This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments

In the course of writing this study I have received essential support— intellectual, ﬁnancial, and emotional—from many individuals and institutions. It is a pleasure to attempt here to acknowledge some of these debts. T. W. Heyck guided and advised me through the ﬁrst stages of this project many years ago, and his support and thoughtful criticisms were invaluable. Many friends and colleagues encouraged me to persevere at times when I doubted that this project would ever come to completion. I particularly wish to thank Trent Foley, Carl Hester, Heidi Kunz, Jamie Rohrer, Melinda Wheeler, and Sarah Wheeler. My colleagues in the Department of History at Randolph College—Brad Geisert, Gerry Sherayko, John d’Entremont, and the late Margaret Pertzoff—have extended support, friendship, and encour- agement over more than twenty years. Original research for this study was generously funded by the Alumnae of Northwestern University, and I am grateful to Randolph College for professional development grants and sabbatical leaves that allowed me to continue the research for this book. Thanks also to librarians and archivists at North- western University, Randolph College, the British Library, the Bodleian Li- brary, Trinity College and Newnham College in Cambridge, the Pitt Rivers Museum, the Cambridge University Library, Senate House Library at the University of London, and the University of St. Andrews. I wish to thank the following institutions for permission to quote from material held in their collections: the Principal and Fellows, Newnham Col- lege, Cambridge; the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford; Bodleian Library, University of Oxford; Archives, Imperial College London; and the x | Acknowledgments

Syndics of Cambridge University Library. Portions of chapter 5 were previously published in ‘‘Victorian Evangelicalism and the Sociology of Religion: The Career of William Robertson Smith,’’ which appeared in Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 1 (January 1993), copyright 1993, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc., published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Thanks also go to my editors at the University of Virginia Press, Cathie Brettschneider and Mark Mones, for their support and good advice. My greatest debt is to my husband, Daryl, who has always demonstrated serene faith in my ability to complete this book even when my own con- ﬁdence wavered. The Science of Religion in Britain, 1860–1915 This page intentionally left blank Introduction

Yet how much more safe it is, as well as more fruitful, to look for the main conﬁrmation of a religion in its intrinsic correspondence with urgent wants of human nature, in its profound necessity! Differing religions will then be found to have much in common. Matthew Arnold, ‘‘A Persian Passion Play’’

All the great religions of the world historically considered, are rightly the objects of deep reverence and sympathy. . . . Every community met to worship the highest Good . . . carries me along in its main current, and if there were not reasons against my following such an inclination, I should go to church or chapel constantly for the sake of the delightful emotions of fellowship which come over me in religious assemblies. George Eliot, Letter to John Walter Cross, 1873

Loss of faith in traditional Christian beliefs and the accompanying erosion of the intellectual and cultural authority of the churches have long been central problems in the history of Victorian Britain. Historians have approached the topic from several angles, examining the complex causes and sources of unbelief, pursuing an understanding of its impact through biographical studies of famous ‘‘doubters,’’ and more recently, turning to the investigation of surrogate religions such as spiritualism, eugenics, and the Comtean ‘‘religion of humanity.’’ One problem that has so far attracted little attention, however, is the relationship between this cultural upheaval and the creation of a distinct field of discourse dedicated to the scientific study of religious practices and belief systems as human institutions meeting definite social and psychological needs. This scholarly enterprise, variously known as the ‘‘science of religion,’’ 2 | Introduction

‘‘comparative religions,’’ or the ‘‘history of religions,’’ flourished in Britain from about 1860 up to the early years of World War I. The notion that religion was an appropriate subject for disinterested scholarly investigation was not, of course, original to the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the period after 1860 witnessed an unprecedented burst of activity in this area as the first attempts were made to create a coherent field of study that would treat religion purely as an element in human cultures. This new field was both a response to and a reflection of the sense of religious crisis that troubled so many Victorians. This study seeks to illuminate the connections between Victorian culture and the science of religion through an examination of the lives and work of six individuals—Friedrich Max Müller, Edward B. Tylor, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, James G. Frazer, and Jane Ellen Harrison—all of whom were major contributors to this new field. Other authors who contributed significantly to the field include Herbert Spencer, Edward Clodd, J. F. McLen- nan, John Lubbock, and R. R. Marett. The science of religion did not achieve the status of an autonomous academic discipline during the nineteenth century, and these figures are part of the history of several different fields, including anthropology, sociology, classics, and Oriental studies. Like much of Vic- torian thought, the science of religion drew contributions from outside as well as within the universities. Unlike many of their twentieth- and twenty-first- century successors, these scholars did not confine their investigations to any single cultural tradition, although Max Müller and Robertson Smith specialized in ‘‘Oriental’’ religions while Harrison, Frazer, and Lang began from their interests in classics. But an exclusive focus on one tradition would not have served their purpose, which was to arrive at some understanding of religion as a unitary phenomenon expressing pervasive (though not necessarily permanent) human needs. Theirs was a truly engaged scholarship. Though they concentrated attention on non-Christian religions, especially so-called primitive ones, their work was intended as a vital contribution to the contemporary debate on Chris- tianity.∞ Their scholarly interests reflected the questions and anxieties gener- ated by the intensity of religious debate that surrounded them, and this study argues that their work is best regarded not as a cause of, but as a response to, the sense of cultural disorientation that was engendered by religious turmoil. Furthermore, despite the assumptions of many Victorians, as well as later observers, that any enterprise described as ‘‘scientific’’ must be hostile to religion, the fact is that the science of religion was not purely or even mainly antireligious, though contributors to it were often at odds with what many of their contemporaries would have regarded as Christian orthodoxy. Introduction | 3

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Britain’s educated classes were united in some degree by a religious and moral consensus based on the varieties of British Protestantism. To be sure, religion also provided a fertile source of social and political conflict as a newly self-conscious middle class, many of whose members were Dissenters, launched a series of assaults on the powers and privileges of the established Church while adherents of the Ox- ford Movement sought to counter the influence of the Evangelicals. Broadly speaking, the first half of the Victorian era was marked by sporadic religious conflict that, while often quite intense, was basically sectarian in character. Although it was not unusual to find prominent thinkers and artists who were skeptics or unorthodox believers, most members of the middle and upper classes appeared to share a certain minimum level of religious belief and commitment, and they would have agreed that Britain was and would remain a Christian nation. By the end of the century, however, the situation had altered dramatically as innovations in natural science and the growing visibility in Britain of biblical criticism began to make inroads on the religious consensus of earlier years. Adding to the familiar trio of geology, Darwinism, and biblical criticism, recent analysis has also focused new attention on the efforts of a group variously known as ‘‘agnostics’’ or ‘‘scientific naturalists’’ of whom T. H. Hux- ley was the most prominent, who actively campaigned for a diminution of clerical influence in British culture and who sought to promote the intellectual prestige and academic recognition of the natural sciences at the expense of Christian theology.≤ It might be argued that the science of religion should be regarded as yet one more dissolvent of Christian faith. To the extent that it cast doubt on Christian claims to a unique status by demonstrating parallels between Chris- tian theology and ritual and those of other religions, it had the potential to undermine traditional beliefs. Furthermore, the fundamental claim of the new science—that it was possible to obtain meaningful knowledge of a religion without reference to the truth of its doctrines—might be regarded as in itself subversive of the teaching authority of the Church. Turning to individual case histories, it is clear that cultural comparison did not always work to the advantage of Christian belief; both Charles Darwin and Beatrice Webb suffered some unsettling of faith because of their knowledge of Indian religion.≥ A striking fictional example of this process occurs in Mary Arnold Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888), the most famous and widely read religious novel of the century. It is the story of a young Anglican priest and amateur historian whose studies lead him to reject orthodox Christian doctrine, leave the established 4 | Introduction

Church, and attempt to found a new religion stripped of miraculous elements. Elsmere’s loss of faith begins with him questioning the unique saving power of the Christian Revelation in light of his awareness of ‘‘Buddhist patience and Buddhist charity; of the long centuries during which Chaldean or Persian or Egyptian lived, suffered, and died, trusting the gods they knew.’’ In the end, he finds that ‘‘Christianity seems . . . something small and local. . . . It is not that Christianity is false, but that it is only an imperfect human reflection of a part of the truth.’’∂ But the tendency to look at the science of religion from this narrow perspective—paying attention only to the threat, actual or potential, that it posed to Christian orthodoxy—has led to inadequate recognition and understanding of its importance in late-Victorian culture.∑ For example, Eric Sharpe, whose book Comparative Religion is an otherwise excellent historical survey, has very little to offer on the subject of cultural context, observing only that many Victorians saw the new field as a form of unbelief because it appeared to have ‘‘sided’’ with science over religion.∏ Owen Chadwick, author of a standard work on nineteenth-century British religious history, shows somewhat more interest; The Victorian Church contains a brief but perceptive discussion of the role played by Max Müller in arousing interest in Eastern religions. Turning to the anthropologists, however, the author concludes that they ‘‘did no more to Christian thinking than to stimulate or hasten’’ a task already begun, that ‘‘of turning history into parable.’’π J. W. Burrow acknowl- edges that ‘‘the concept of the social function of religion, irrespective of its truth-claims, was already current in the social sciences as the social and psychological vacuum its disappearance might leave was increasingly contemplated.’’ But his discussion of British contributions suggests that they simply buttressed the notion that the elimination of religion equaled social progress.∫ James C. Livingston offers a perceptive assessment of the science of religion in his recent survey of Victorian religious thought, but again his emphasis is mainly on the impact of the new field on Christian theology.Ω Similarly, some commentators have assumed that the contributors to the new field were mainly agnostics or atheists seeking to ‘‘expose’’ religious belief as a harmful illusion. According to the late E. E. Evans-Pritchard, ‘‘they . . . found in primitive religions a weapon which could, they thought, be used with deadly effect against Christianity.’’∞≠ Just how misleading and inadequate is this generalization will become apparent in the course of this study, but the assumption that lies behind it is widely held. To be sure, these scholars did not hesitate to use their theories as weapons, some to attack and others to defend Introduction | 5

religion, but their aims went far beyond narrow polemic. It is only by altering the perspective—recognizing that the science of religion was a serious response to the cultural anxieties of the time and not just one more contributing factor—that one can rightly judge its contemporary significance and its claims on the historian’s attention. In recent years, scholars have interrogated and complicated the traditional story of secularization in Victorian culture. Social historians argue that ‘‘the image of aloof churches and an alienated people in the cities and towns of Victorian . . . Britain is, in fact, largely false,’’ while others assert that growing religious pluralism and eclecticism, not decline, is the real story of the later Victorian years.∞∞ Even those who focus more narrowly on the Victorian intelligentsia have largely abandoned the once-familiar image of an intellectual scene neatly split between religiously orthodox conservatives and secular scientifically minded progressives. This rethinking can be traced back to F. M. Turner’s study of intellectuals who found themselves, in the title of the book, Between Science and Religion (1974). Bernard Lightman has emphasized the religious context in which agnosticism originated and the ‘‘many vestiges of traditional religious thought embedded’’ in it.∞≤ Similarly, J. W. Burrow illustrates ‘‘the paradox of the mid-nineteenth-century materialist bid to take over the world. . . . The more the scientific view of the world seemed to replace religion, the more of its predecessor’s metaphysical and emotional and even ethical responsibilities it seemed to have to assume.’’∞≥ Individual studies of figures most often identified by Victorians themselves as the prime spokesmen for materialism and positivism complicate the picture further. For example, John Tyndall, often represented as the foremost spokesman for an aggressive materialism, has been persuasively redescribed as a Romantic pantheist.∞∂ More recently, Timothy Larsen has directed attention to the very large number of convinced secularists who were later drawn toward some form of ‘‘spirituality’’ or even reconverted to Christianity.∞∑ While the concept of a crisis of faith remains useful, historians are now more inclined to admit the continued strength of religion in the lives of Victorians readers and audiences and to acknowledge their expectations that public discussion touching directly on religious concerns would be edifying and not simply subversive. Indeed, the ferment of controversy surrounding the cultural triumph of science and the challenges to ecclesiastical authority stemming from social trends, new scholarship, and assertive secularism may have intensified public longing for a cultural reconciliation that would include religion. As John Wolffe observes: ‘‘[R]unning through all [the] varieties of 6 | Introduction

alternative belief, spiritual experimentation, and agonized doubting was an underlying religiosity. Men and women might reject the teaching of a specific Church or even Christianity as a whole, but they remained desperately concerned to find some kind of religion or, at least, ‘ultimate concern’ to give meaning and coherence to their own lives and to the society and culture in which they lived.’’∞∏ Lightman has described ‘‘the continuing importance of religion to the reading public in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the belief that science was still an aid to faith, no matter what the Huxleys, Tyndalls, or Darwins said to the contrary.’’∞π Given these complexities, it would be misguided to expect the story of the science of religion to resolve itself into a simple narrative of subversion or advocacy. The pioneers in the scholarly study of religion, whether as anthropologists, Orientalists, folklorists, or classicists, addressed audiences who respected the authority of science, but many of whom also hoped for the affirmation of religious values and meanings. There is no lack of evidence attesting to public interest in non-Christian faiths and to the felt need for a broadly anthropological understanding of religious history. Basil Willey has noted the existence of ‘‘a powerful stream of tendency’’ that impelled nineteenth-century thinkers to ‘‘discover in their own needs and longings as individuals, but above all as members of human society, the source and indeed the whole reality of the ideal worlds of thought and faith.’’∞∫ One need not look far to discover just such a ‘‘tendency’’ to consider the human and social meaning of belief apart from the truth or falsity of particular beliefs. Some of the most revered of the Victorian ‘‘sages’’ retained a sympathetic interest in religion even after they themselves had thrown over the claims of orthodoxy. In his famous lectures, ‘‘Heroes and Hero Worship,’’ delivered in 1840, Thomas Carlyle offered sympathetic assessments of both Norse paganism and ‘‘Mahometanism,’’ urging his audience to reject the old notions that error and fraud explain the diversity of faiths and to consider non-Christian religions as ‘‘some other side of our common Human Nature that has been developing itself.’’∞Ω George Eliot’s concern for the social and historical meaning of all forms of belief is well attested both in her novels and in her letters. Writing to Barbara Bodichon in 1862, she confessed that she had ‘‘lost all interest in mere antagonism to religious doctrines. I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.’’≤≠ Writing several years before they met, her later partner, George Henry Lewes, went even further, arguing that ‘‘without a common creed, no society can be properly organized, much less fulfill its Introduction | 7

aim.’’≤∞ Even John Stuart Mill, who was distinctly unsympathetic to religious tradition, thought it worthwhile to investigate the possible utility of religion. Even if one rejected, as Mill certainly did, all belief in the supernatural, the question remained: ‘‘What does religion do for society, and what for the individual?’’≤≤ This widespread interest in the ‘‘utility’’ and human ‘‘meaning’’ of all forms of religious belief and practice offered a favorable atmosphere for the creation of a comparative study of religions. It was to be ‘‘scientific,’’ first of all, because it would avoid conventional apologetics; second, because it would substitute ‘‘natural’’ or historical explanations for the traditional Christian solution to the problem of religious diversity. It could draw materials and insights from folklore, ethnology, history, archaeology, sociology, Oriental studies, and classics. As this list demonstrates, it was from the start an interdisciplinary enterprise, and nineteenth-century contributors to the field differed widely in their intellectual backgrounds and commitments. Max Müller was trained in Indo- European philology, and he specialized in the sacred literature of ancient India. Tylor and Frazer identified themselves as anthropologists, although Frazer was also a classicist. Andrew Lang was a late-Victorian man of letters whose prodigious literary output included short stories and verse, essays on Scottish and French history, and numerous book reviews as well as works on folklore and anthropology. William Robertson Smith was a biblical scholar who also served as general editor for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, as a professor of Arabic at Cambridge, and as that university’s chief librarian. Jane Ellen Har- rison was a classicist who proclaimed her debt to anthropology and Durk- heimian sociology while advancing an explicitly feminist approach to the study of religion. This marked diversity should not, however, be allowed to obscure the fact that the field derived a fundamental unity not only from a characteristic approach to its subject matter, but from the perceptions shared by scholars themselves, who referred to, criticized, and built upon each other’s work. Then too, however diverse their methods, each of these scholars shared with the others a set of questions which, though seldom explicitly articulated, nevertheless guided their research. First of all, though they willingly acknowledged the impossibility of isolating absolute origins, they placed the highest importance on identifying primitive forms of religion, a preoccupation that was much criticized by social scientists in the post-Victorian period.≤≥ What critics sometimes fail to address, however, is the extent to which Victorian scholars were convinced that an understanding of the human or ‘‘natural’’ sources of belief was an absolute prerequisite for the establishment of a truly 8 | Introduction

‘‘scientific’’ study of religion as opposed to a primarily apologetic one. It should be pointed out that the obsession with origins did not necessarily entail a denial of the autonomy of religion, though it may seem to imply that, nor was it incompatible with acceptance of a modified conception of revelation. The issue of origins is closely related to two other questions. First, has religion always existed in human societies? Second, is it likely to be a permanent element in human life? Moreover, interest in the ‘‘utility’’ of religion led directly to questions about its social functions and its relations with other institutions. Since Victorians often assumed that the main ‘‘function’’ of the Church was to promote morally correct behavior, scholars were especially curious about the historical relationship between religion and ethics. Finally, investigators grappled with the problem of how to define religion—was there really a fundamental and universal core of ideas, practices, and emotions lying beneath the baffling variety of phenomena that could be described as ‘‘religious’’? The history of the Victorian science of religion could be written within a number of equally appropriate contexts. The most common approach has been to survey the development of the field from the perspective of current scholarly practice, focusing on the methodological and theoretical issues that are of greatest importance for religious studies today. Alternatively, the history of the field has been subsumed within the larger history of British anthropology. Both of these approaches are legitimate, but incomplete. As historians of science have persuasively shown, a line of argument that focuses exclusively on the evolution of ideas, without attention to social, cultural, and political contexts, leaves out too much. The result is an intellectual history weakened by ‘‘too much emphasis on the intellectual’’ and ‘‘inadequate appreciation for the historical,’’ in Frank Turner’s phrase.≤∂ As historians, we wish to know who articulated noteworthy ideas, what were the dimensions and implications of those ideas, and how they evolved in the lifework of authors and scholars. It is equally vital to know how the authors arrived at their ideas: what roots did they have in (to quote Turner once more) ‘‘the intricacies of gender relationships, family concerns, social structure, and political milieu’’?≤∑ Why were such ideas important and influential in their time? Why did they seem helpful, fruitful, or ‘‘true’’ even if they can no longer claim such status? Why were they received enthusiastically (or skeptically) by the Victorian public, and how did they correspond to new trends or settled realities in other areas of society? A history that ignores these questions may still be able to clarify current intradisciplinary debates or bring notice to old Introduction | 9 ideas that may be ripe for revival. It cannot explain why there was such widespread interest in the history, sociology, and psychology of religion in Victorian Britain or why thinkers responded to that interest with such rich and varied offerings of fact, theory, story, observation, speculation, meditation, and even fantasy. A thin, contextless treatment is especially out of place on this subject given the fact that those who contributed to the science of religion consciously and deliberately addressed themselves to a wide public on a topic that they recognized as not just the province of specialists but of consequence to everyone in their society. Similarly, the history of the Victorian science of religion cannot be equated with the history of anthropology during the same period. It is certainly true that the scholars discussed here were interested in and wrote on topics such as kinship, the evolution of law, food practices, and so on, all of which are recognizably part of the subject matter of anthropology. Nevertheless, religion and the related topics of magic and mythology stood at the core of their work. At a time when anthropology, sociology, and the other human sciences were just emerging as professional fields, and when few scholars were prepared to adopt the disciplinary labels that prevail in today’s academy, the topic of inquiry was of as much moment as the disciplinary identity of the inquirer. Indeed, to subsume the history of this discourse within the larger story of anthropology contributes to a crucial misunderstanding. It is true, as George Stocking and others have pointed out, that most, though certainly not all, Victorian anthropologists adhered to a version of sociocultural evolutionism that presumed an equation between progress and the rejection of all traditional religious beliefs and practices.≤∏ The picture looks quite different, however, if the frame is expanded to include authors—such as Friedrich Max Müller, Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, and Jane Ellen Harrison— who are usually regarded as irrelevant or peripheral to the history of anthropology. Thus, a history that merges the study of religion with the more general concerns of Victorian anthropology still leaves much to be explored. These observations raise significant questions: Why, for example, did the new field fail to achieve autonomy as an academic discipline during the nineteenth century? Or, situating the science of religion within the larger context of the rising cultural authority of the natural sciences and of the model that they provided for other forms of intellectual activity, we might ask, What did Victorian scholars mean when they described their investigations of religious phenomena as ‘‘scientific’’? The answers to these questions may be related. Members of professionalizing groups often struggle with each other 10 | Introduction

and with outside ‘‘amateurs’’ over matters such as qualifications, appropriate methodology, and even metaphysical and ideological assumptions; such conflicts define the boundaries of the new field and make it possible to police those boundaries.≤π As part of that process within the natural sciences, ‘‘scientific activity’’ came to be equated with the ‘‘positivistic definition of that activity,’’ a definition that excluded ‘‘the kinds of questions as well as the answers that might arise from theological concerns.’’≤∫ If it is the case that the mid-Victorian conflict of science and religion was thus in part a by-product of boundary conflicts integral to the professionalization of science, it would make sense to regard any attempt to create a science of religion as fraught with obstacles. To be identified as a scientist was beginning to acquire associations that not all scholars were willing to apply to themselves. Furthermore, if the positivistic ideology among those studying religion had been as unrivaled in its dominance as later historians have claimed, it would have provided a powerful bond of unity and a clear dividing line separating ‘‘professionals’’ from amateurs. However, as we will see, the strength of antipositivist currents made that unity impossible to achieve. Also, the sense held by both scholars and their audiences that they were speaking to the public in an open forum on an issue of vital cultural importance to everyone—the essential meaning and purpose of religion—meant that it was more difficult to draw any clear line between professionals and ‘‘outside’’ amateurs or interlopers. Finally, the history of comparative religion is clearly allied to the history of British imperialism during this period, partly because it was the extension of British power that made possible the collection of so much of the ethnographic data upon which scholars relied, and partly because scholarly evaluation of non-European cultures both reflected and helped to create the frame of mind that legitimized exploration and conquest. The appearance in 1978 of Edward Said’s Orientalism opened the way for an immense outpouring of research and writing on the links between imperialism and the human sciences in the nineteenth century. Despite its title, the book raises questions that are applicable to all forms of cross-cultural scholarship. Characterizing Orientalism as ‘‘a Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient,’’ Said focused particular attention on the ways in which nineteenth-century Orientalism worked to create the image of ‘‘the Orient’’ as a static and homogeneous unit, and of the ‘‘Oriental’’ as wholly other, a negative image against which Europeans could define themselves. He goes on to ask whether the notion of ‘‘another culture’’ is ever a useful one, or whether, in contrast, the attempt to represent ‘‘Oriental’’ (or ‘‘Semitic’’ or Introduction | 11

‘‘primitive’’) culture does not always involve either ‘‘self-congratulation’’ or ‘‘hostility and aggression.’’≤Ω The suggestion is that not only Orientalist scholarship, but by extension all sociocultural inquiry applied to ‘‘other cultures,’’ is a tool for domination and imperialist violence and that ‘‘what [appear] . . . to be detached and apolitical cultural disciplines’’ in fact depend upon ‘‘a quite sordid history of imperialist ideology and colonialist practice.’’≥≠ Said’s analysis is at times devastatingly effective, and the flourishing literature on Orientalism that he inspired testifies to the fruitfulness of his insight. Moreover, contemporary scholarship on the history of anthropology expresses similar concerns.≥∞ Certainly the history of the science of religion provides one example after another to support Said’s larger claims. It is also the case, however, that the gaze directed at the other was aimed at the self as well, and anthropologists, Orientalists, and classicists in the nineteenth century used their knowledge as a source of insight into problems within their own cultures. As Said himself has observed (in reference to a quite different set of circumstances), when traditional beliefs are threatened or even discredited—a condition that applies to Christianity in the Victorian period— it becomes easier to ‘‘recognize the relativism of, and possibilities inherent in, all societies, systems of belief, cultural practices.’’≥≤ A number of scholars have recently described how investigation into other cultures was often a simulta- neous interrogation of the Victorians’ own culture. For example, Christopher Herbert contends that ‘‘to represent the theory of culture purely as an adjunct or expression of an impulse of domination would be seriously incomplete . . . it often was employed in precisely the opposite manner,’’ to critique or rebel against aspects of Victorian life.≥≥ Peter van der Veer’s analysis of the inter- action between Victorian Britain and colonized India contains a particularly useful discussion of the long tradition (from deism on) of comparing Chris- tian Europe with other civilizations and other religions to critique Chris- tianity: ‘‘Contrary to what is often surmised, it is not the dichotomy of civilized versus barbaric that is the central feature of much of the ‘othering’ going on in Western thought but rather the critique of specific European— and often Christian—practices.’’≥∂ As we will see, the relation between Euro- pean and non-European was not always posed in strictly oppositional terms. What is more, the process and experience of cultural inquiry did influence the observers and not solely in the direction of confirming previously established notions. Though each of the authors I discuss in this book has been studied before, the new questions and perspectives outlined above justify a fresh attempt to 12 | Introduction

consider them together. These include recent doubts about the usefulness of ‘‘secularization’’ as an organizing concept for Victorian intellectual history; the growing recognition that Orientalism and other forms of cultural inquiry probed and interrogated the West as well as the others; and current trends in the historiography of science (and by extension all forms of scholarship) favoring a contextual approach over the positivistic model of science as ‘‘the steady accumulation of knowledge.’’ In addition, there has recently been renewed interest in analyzing concepts such as ‘‘race’’ or ‘‘culture’’ on which so much of the scholarship in the human sciences has been based.≥∑ For that matter, the concept of ‘‘religion’’ itself has been problematized in much recent scholarship, with some scholars arguing that the concept of religion as a cross- cultural phenomenon was invented by modern European thinkers, a claim that lends added relevance to this episode in Victorian intellectual history.≥∏ In the chapters that follow, I have attempted to recover as far as possible the multiple contexts, both individual and cultural, in which the science of religion was created and had meaning. That has meant paying attention to issues of gender, ‘‘family concerns, social structure, and political milieu’’ as well as to the philosophical and religious commitments of each of these scholars and their own judgments on the contemporary relevance of their work. I have also tried to present some assessment of the reaction to this field by the Victorian audiences to whom it was first presented, though I am aware that much more could be done on this score. I have not received professional training in either anthropology or religious studies and cannot claim to be qualified to pronounce on which of the numerous theories, methodologies, or definitional forays discussed in this work may assist or hamper twenty-first-century workers in the ‘‘science of religion.’’ My aim is not to restore luster to the reputations of those who are today regarded as outgrown, outmoded, or perhaps even embarrassing from the point of view of the present. The cultural arrogance, prejudices, and blind spots about race, ethnicity, class, and gender exhibited by Victorian scholars will be plain to anyone who closely examines their work. But this study is not primarily an exercise in unmasking any more than it is an effort to critique nineteenth-century thought from the point of view of today’s methodological concerns. Recently, Thomas Söderqvist has issued an eloquent defense of science biography (and by extension any intellectual biography?) as ‘‘an edifying genre.’’ Noting that intellectual history has ‘‘demonstrated beyond any doubt the ‘contextual’ nature’’ of its subject, he nevertheless warns against the ‘‘hermeneutics of suspicion’’ that may lie behind an exclusive focus on the Introduction | 13

socially constructed character of knowledge.≥π As a partial antidote, he calls on historians to treat ‘‘passion’’ as an important issue in the lives of all intellectuals as we already do in the study of artists: ‘‘On the view taken here . . . the passions . . . are not social products but integral elements in the realisation of existential projects, defined here as the individual’s view of how to live in a way that gives a measure of sense, unity, and value to his life.’’≥∫ This is an attractive and persuasive argument. To be sure, the authors discussed here were molded by their culture and society, but they were also actors in a cultural drama that was both personal and collective, and were compelled, like many of their fellow Victorians, to construct or discover individual answers for questions, doubts, and anxieties that had troubled earlier generations little if at all. To portray the Victorian study of comparative religion as a historical instance of committed rather than purely disinterested scholarship is by no means to expose it as hollow or worthless. On the contrary, however antiquated and irrelevant it may have appeared to later generations, the science of religion was an authentic and creative response to deeply felt needs. The Victorians felt the foundations of their world shifting around them, a process that only seemed to pick up momentum as the century progressed. An increasingly democratic politics, a succession of ‘‘industrial revolutions,’’ and the seemingly unending series of challenges from workers, Nonconformists, women, and colonial subjects to the Anglican establishment unsettled British society even while it contributed to Britain’s economic and imperial power and opened new opportunities for some of its citizens. These reverberations shook and ultimately fractured the consensus on which the Anglican cultural establishment had rested. A new cultural elite emerged that rejected much of traditional Anglicanism. It is worth noting that each of the thinkers considered here stood to some degree outside of the Anglican Oxbridge establishment. Max Müller was born and educated in Germany; Tylor was a largely self-educated Quaker; Lang, Robertson Smith, and Frazer were all Scots raised in Presbyterian homes, and Jane Ellen Harrison was a member of the first generation of women to pass through the universities. In this, they reflect the pluralism that characterized the cultural scene after midcentury. But the end of Anglican dominance did not mean the rejection of religion. For many Victorians, religion remained the emotional category for tradition, for that which threatened to be lost in the upheavals taking place about them. Others were intent on building a new culture based on ‘‘naturalism, religious experiment, and subjective aesthetic response.’’≥Ω The science of religion should be seen as an effort to explore the pluralism and participate in 14 | Introduction

the religious experiment without allowing scientific naturalism or any other new would-be orthodoxy to shut down investigation before it had even begun. Amidst controversies over evolution, biblical criticism, and the authority of the churches in education, cultural life, and politics, this new scholarly enterprise functioned as an alternative locus of discourse about religious issues. Far from promoting an antireligious or materialistic agenda, the science of religion provided an opportunity for traditional Christians, radical scientists, and everyone in between to talk about religion without becoming immediately bogged down in fractious polemics. Discussion of religion without reference to truth claims did not simply amount to a dismissal of its relevance. More- over, it is wrong to assume that the tenor of this public discussion was predominantly antireligious. Instead, it opened up cultural space for an exploration of religion that was freer, less constricted by the terms of contemporary conflicts than the more familiar debates over Darwin and the Bible. That relative freedom allowed participants in the discussion to negotiate alternative tracks between the peremptory claims of Christian orthodoxy and the anti- supernatural critique inherited from the Enlightenment and revived in the arguments of Victorian scientific naturalists. In some cases, it enabled positive and sympathetic discussion of the spiritual value of non-Christian religions and those with little institutional structure.∂≠ It also made it possible to think in new and more flexible ways about the very definition of religion. Whereas the focus of much mid-Victorian religious debate was on the doctrinal and the intellectual with religion defined primarily in terms of belief and submission to ecclesiastical authority, by late century, religion had come to be understood in a wider sense, one that included emphasis on religious communities and practices and that acknowledged the importance of the emotional, psychological, and aesthetic aspects of religious experience.∂∞ The science of religion amplified this shift. Indeed, one could argue that it enabled readers and audiences to participate more fully in the new culture of ‘‘religious experiment,’’ to encounter and experience, if only vicariously, the distinctive thrill of the numinous without the need to surrender to ecclesiastical authority or even associate with existing institutional Christianity. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and especially from the 1870s on, as momentum built against the orthodoxies and the oppressive moralism of the earlier years of the century, the old verities of liberalism, evangelicalism, utilitarianism, and the gospel of work encountered challenges from a multiplying array of alternative philosophies and systems of values. Well before the turn of the century, it had become more and more difficult to Introduction | 15

identify a stable center of Victorian culture. At the same time, the very pace of change itself had become a topic of anxious national discussion, with prominent thinkers and scientists worrying about the ability of the British population to keep up with the accelerating demands of progressive modern civilization.∂≤ But it is notable how many of the competing cultural fashions of the late century appealed to tradition in one way or another. Pater’s aestheticism rested on the notion of culture as ‘‘a museum of stored experience, continuously available through art for vicarious exploration and recreation,’’ and the eugenic concept of ‘‘race instinct’’ could be viewed as ‘‘a fashionably biologized version of the concept of tradition.’’∂≥ In a culture that was changing at a breathtaking and at times frightening pace, the comparative study of religions fulﬁlled a similar role, offering the promise of reconciliation between the modernism and dynamism of Britain’s urban industrial present and the continuing emotional pull of centuries of tradition. As Hans Kippenberg notes, Victorian scholars of religion ‘‘restored to religions their right to exist in modern culture independent of their claims to faith,’’ while simultaneously they ‘‘restored to modern society its other, ofﬁcially ignored half: the power of life that does not serve progress.’’∂∂ This page intentionally left blank ∞ The Study of Religion before 1860

To characterize the science of religion as a response to secularizing trends within a single national culture may seem myopic from the perspective of a more cosmopolitan history of the human sciences. After all, it was not only in Britain that religion became an object of supposedly scientific scrutiny. To name just a few of the more prominent thinkers—Emile Burnouf and Ernest Renan in France, Cornelius Tiele in the Netherlands, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, and Wilhelm Mannhardt in Germany—these men made distinctive contributions to the field and their influence was strongly felt in Britain.∞ Nevertheless, in terms of methodological and theoretical creativity as well as the sheer quantity of work produced, the British enterprise was exceptional. It is no accident that when, early in the twentieth century, both Durkheim and Freud formulated new approaches to understanding religious phenomena, they shaped their arguments with reference to (and to a great extent in opposition to) the writings of Müller, Tylor, Lang, Robertson Smith, and Frazer.≤ One has only to measure the amount of space devoted to these men in any of the standard surveys of comparative religion to conclude that its modern historiographers, and not only those of Anglo-American background, recognize the singular importance of the British school.≥ Thus, without denying that the science of religion was in many ways an international project, one may suggest that the magnitude of the British contribution justifies more focused treatment than it has yet received. 18 | The Study of Religion before 1860

A Distinctive Field of Discourse Because the science of religion achieved little in the way of institutional autonomy until the twentieth century, the term ‘‘field of discourse’’ is preferable to ‘‘discipline.’’ The new ‘‘science’’ did not begin as an academic specialty, but took shape through the public give-and-take of books, lectures, and articles that appeared in the great Victorian reviews, including Nineteenth Century, the Athenaeum, and the Fortnightly Review. Public lectures were an especially important medium in this case, and the endowment of two series—the Hib- bert Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, established in 1878, and the Gifford Lectures, established in 1887—furthered the new field and attested to the interest that the subject aroused outside the academic world.∂ Of course, comparative religion eventually found its way into the university curriculum, but it was taught in conjunction with other subjects, first as part of Oriental philology and later also in the newly established anthropology departments at Oxford and Cambridge. Where the field did attain more autonomy was in the newer Nonconformist institutions such as Manchester College, where a lectureship in comparative religion was established in 1876, and Mansfield College, established in Oxford in 1886, whose Principal, An- drew Martin Fairbairn, also taught comparative religion.∑ Thus, throughout the late nineteenth century, the science of religion existed on two planes: fragmented and dependent on the academic level, it achieved substantial unity and coherence within the realm of public semi-popular discourse. The relationships between this new field and the other human sciences, especially anthropology, were complicated. Moreover, the historical unity of anthropology is in itself highly problematic.∏ Writing in 1962, Evans-Pritchard distinguished between ‘‘comparative religion,’’ which studies those peoples who have produced sacred texts, and ‘‘anthropology,’’ which, among other things, analyzes the ritual and folklore of nonliterate peoples.π While this categorization may have been perfectly appropriate for the mid-twentieth century, it is far too neat to capture the messy realities of an earlier period. During the nineteenth century, ethnographic data on ‘‘savage’’ cultures were valued mainly as a source of evidence for the prehistory of more ‘‘advanced’’ societies, so that disciplinary specialization along the lines suggested by Evans-Pritchard would have seemed self-defeating. Thus, while the history of anthropology and of the science of religion cannot be conflated, neither should they be segregated into separate compartments. In Britain at least, the two were closely intertwined; both drew on a common matrix of social thought, and both shared a common intellectual history. The Study of Religion before 1860 | 19

Most historians locate the sources of the modern discipline of anthropology within the various projects designed to create a natural science (or a natural history) of humanity and society that arose during the Enlightenment. Of particular importance were the writings of the Scottish ‘‘conjectural historians’’ of the late eighteenth century, who were themselves strongly influenced by the sociology of Montesquieu. This group of moral philosophers, which included Adam Ferguson, Adam Smith, Dugald Stewart, and Francis Hutcheson, sought to establish a new kind of history, one that would reveal the true course of development over time. A genuinely ‘‘philosophic’’ history would draw attention to repetition of pattern, uniform relations of cause and effect, and definite predictable sequences of behavior, as opposed to the merely accidental particulars that held center stage in most works of political and national history.∫ Names, dates, and particular events were of less interest than customs, manners, beliefs, and institutions, and where direct evidence was lacking, ‘‘we are,’’ in the words of Dugald Stewart, ‘‘under a necessity of supplying the place of fact by conjecture; and when we are unable to ascertain how men have actually conducted themselves upon particular occasions, of considering in what manner they are likely to have proceeded from the principles of their nature, and the circumstances of their external situation.’’Ω The rapidly growing travel literature on Africa, America, and Asia provided an important aid to intelligent ‘‘conjecture’’ for, as Adam Ferguson pointed out, it was in the condition of ‘‘barbarous’’ and ‘‘savage’’ nations that ‘‘we are to behold, as in a mirror, the feature of our own progenitors; and from thence we are to draw our conclusions with respect to the influence of situa- tions, in which we have reason to believe that our fathers were placed.’’∞≠ Here Ferguson enunciates the principle of what later came to be called the ‘‘comparative method.’’ This notion, along with the distinction between true history and accidental event, was of crucial importance for British anthropology in the period after 1860.∞∞

The Rise of Social Evolutionism in the Nineteenth Century At one time it was common to identify the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) as the crucial turning point leading to a revival of social evolutionary theory in British anthropology.∞≤ It is true that those who accepted Darwinism had to confront the widely held belief that the human mind itself along with certain moral and intellectual traits, especially language and religion, were evidence of an impassible gulf between humans and the higher animals. This consideration was bound to stimulate the search for natural 20 | The Study of Religion before 1860

origins of all distinctively human phenomena. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the revival of social evolutionary or developmental history in the late 1850s was caused by changes within British philosophy and social thought and cannot be regarded as ‘‘simply a reﬂex of Darwinism.’’∞≥ On the one hand, as Britain extended its colonial regime, the British ‘‘evaluation of the cultural worth of non-European peoples was becoming constantly more negative.’’∞∂ As a result, basic premises of the dominant utilitarian philosophical tradition were called into question; the apparent absur- dity of so many ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’ notions and customs seemed to cast doubt on the proposition that rational self-interest was the fundamental moti- vating principle of human action. For various reasons, most Victorian social theorists rejected the idea supported by a minority of anthropologists that nonwhites were members of separate species, but this left them with the problem of how to account for what seemed to them the obvious cultural inferiority of these peoples. Social evolutionism provided a framework of explanation in which the disturbing elements of non-Western cultures could be ‘‘understood’’ as relics of the primitive human mentality. At one time they had served a rational purpose, which it was the task of the anthropologist to identify. All cultures evolved, but some had advanced at a much more rapid rate than others; the ancestors of modern Europeans had once lived in conditions very much like those of contemporary ‘‘savages.’’ In this way, as J. W. Burrow has shown, Victorian social evolutionists were able to account for the most extreme examples of cultural diversity without threatening certain widely held beliefs. The fundamental postulate of European superiority was upheld, but the possibility that other peoples could advance to the level of Western civilization was held open, so that the equally disturbing alternatives of cultural relativism and a radically deterministic racism were both avoided.∞∑ Even more important, the utilitarian tradition was reinforced since, according to social evolutionary theory, everything created by man had some intelligible origin and the irrationality of a particular institution was simply a function of historical perspective. Those customs and beliefs that outlived their time might hinder further progress, but their existence could not be allowed to undermine faith in a basically rational human nature. There is thus a great deal of merit in Stocking’s description of late- Victorian anthropology as a ‘‘pre-Freudian science of the irrational—the polar complement of political economy.’’∞∏ But not all instances of ‘‘the irrational’’ were of equal interest. The sense of crisis in the larger society, the widespread The Study of Religion before 1860 | 21 feeling that Britain had reached a crucial turning point in its history as a Christian nation: these ensured that religion would receive a disproportionate share of attention in anthropological thought. At the same time, as the existence of the crisis itself demonstrates, religion could not simply be relegated to the same category as magic, folklore, and mythology. The problem of ‘‘the irrational’’ was not limited to other, more primitive nations; it lay at the heart of the world’s most advanced society. In one sense, the science of religion can be seen as an attempt to answer the following question: What, if anything, separated religion from magic and other forms of the mystical and the occult that educated Europeans had long ago repudiated?

The Origins of Religion as a Problem in European Thought Victorian scholars were able to draw on a long history of Western speculation about religious institutions. Traditionally, in fact, the question of the origins and subsequent history of religion presented little problem to Christian orthodoxy. Religion began with God’s revelation of himself to Adam, the memory of which was preserved through Noah and the descendants of his son Shem. But this original monotheism was lost to all but the Hebrews and, later, the Christians. The actual individual systems of paganism had been explained by the early Church as the work of demons and fallen angels; but since these evil spirits were not, like God, genuinely creative beings, the religions established by them could be nothing other than grotesque imitations of the true faith. This neatly explained not only the widespread existence of false religions, but also the numerous parallels between Christianity and the paganism of the Near East. Nevertheless, while the basic outline was clear, the speciﬁc histories of the varieties of heathenism left open a relatively free ﬁeld for speculation.∞π Increasing contact from the sixteenth century on between Europeans and non-Europeans and the growing volume of travel literature describing these contacts stimulated fresh interest in the problem of human cultural diversity, especially in religion.∞∫ At the same time, Europeans were forced to reconcile their indebtedness to and admiration of Greco-Roman culture with the fact that its mythological tradition included obscene and irrational elements that violated all that they most admired. Travelers to Asia, America, and Africa were quick to notice the similarities between ‘‘savage’’ religion and the paganism of the Antique world. Thus, a new view of ancient paganism, as rude, primitive, and brutal, emerged during the eighteenth century.∞Ω But the com- 22 | The Study of Religion before 1860

parison worked both ways; just as it conjured up a new unflattering picture of Greco-Roman worship, so it also provided the beginnings of a framework in which the religion of non-Europeans could be made intelligible in terms of European cultural history. Eighteenth-century speculation on the origins of religion tended to fall into one of two camps. First, the Euhemerist (or historical) school sought to explain the gods and mythical figures as the products of the apotheosis of historical culture heroes or political leaders. This school of interpretation flourished during the first half of the eighteenth century and was to reappear in the nineteenth, in a more sophisticated guise, in the theories of Herbert Spencer. The second approach was that of the ‘‘psychological school,’’ as Frank Manuel has called it, which sought the origins of religion not in the events and personalities of the past, but in the mind of primitive man himself. For these men of the Enlightenment, that mind was like the mind of a child, bedeviled by unreasoning fears or touched by an innocent, wondering gratitude. In these emotions and perceptions one would find the seeds of all religious belief.

The ‘‘Natural History’’ of Religion The eighteenth-century psychological school reached its highest point in David Hume’s ‘‘Natural History of Religion.’’ Published in 1757, this little essay became the classic naturalistic interpretation of religion. According to E. B. Tylor, it had been the major source for ‘‘modern opinions as to the development of religion.’’≤≠ Perhaps in some way the title of Hume’s ‘‘dissertation’’ was the most important thing about it since it signaled his determination to treat the subject in a pointedly ‘‘enlightened’’ manner without even the hint of a concession to orthodoxy. Hume introduces the essay by noting that religion has two foundations, one in reason and one in human nature. He treats of the former in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, a sustained critique of the argument from design that dates from the same period of literary activity as ‘‘Natural History.’’ His task in ‘‘Natural History,’’ then, is to explore the origins of religion in human nature. While acknowledging that ‘‘belief of [sic] invisible, intelligent power has been very generally diffused over the human race,’’ Hume nevertheless contends that such belief is by no means universal. Nor can it be considered an ‘‘original instinct’’ like those which give rise to self- love, sexual love, affection for one’s children, gratitude, or resentment. Com- The Study of Religion before 1860 | 23

pared with these components of human nature, that which gives rise to religion is distinctly secondary, a fact that accounts for the many varieties of ‘‘religious principles’’ as well as the existence of peoples with no religion at all.≤∞ Hume turns next to the question of the original form of religion, firmly rejecting the traditional theory of primitive monotheism. His reasoning on this point anticipates to some degree that of the nineteenth-century social evolutionists. In the first place, Hume argues, there is no positive evidence to support the idea that man began by worshipping a single deity; on the contrary, ‘‘the most ancient records of the human race’’ reveal that everywhere polytheism was ‘‘the popular and established creed.’’≤≤ The important point, however, is that it would be unreasonable to expect any such evidence because monotheism by its nature belongs not to the ‘‘rude beginnings’’ of human society, but to higher civilization. We might as well imagine that ‘‘men inhab- ited palaces before huts and cottages, or studied geometry before agriculture’’ as imagine that the earliest religious conceptions were those of a ‘‘pure . . . theism.’’≤≥ Such a concept is obviously the result of a process of intellectual refinement and therefore should be sought only among those nations in which the arts, letters, and sciences have been cultivated. Hume considers the possibility that primitive man arrived at the idea of a single powerful and intelligent creator through contemplation of ‘‘the order and frame of the universe,’’ but in the end he concludes that such was not the case. The earliest human beings were ‘‘barbarous, necessitous’’ animals, much closer to contemporary ‘‘savages’’ than to the idealized innocents of poetic imagination. They were not likely to regard their physical environment as an object of wondering contemplation or to remark on the perfect regularity of natural phenomena. It was foolish to suppose that primeval man, ‘‘pressed by such numerous wants and passions,’’ would ‘‘so much as start the question, whence the first animal; much less whence the whole system, or united fabric of the universe arose.’’≤∂ In this way, Hume rejects the two most common explanations of religion. By asserting that polytheism, not monotheism, was the earliest form of belief, he tacitly denied the notion of a primitive revelation. At the same time, he discarded the theory held by many eighteenth-century deists (as well as a number of more orthodox theologians) that religion arose from rational man’s philosophic contemplation of nature. Instead, he identified the sources of religious ideas in ‘‘the various and contrary events of human life.’’ Looking upon the world with his own welfare firmly in the foreground, man experiences both natural and historical forces as random, even conflicting. He is 24 | The Study of Religion before 1860

impressed not with the perfect order and regularity of natural law, but with its arbitrariness in relation to his own needs and desires. Crops which have been nourished by the sun are destroyed by storms; a nation’s victory in war may be counterbalanced by loss of population through famine or epidemic. Given the chronic insecurity of human life, the violent swings of fortune, it is not surprising that men relegate each element to its own invisible agent and expect each nation to seek protection and favor from its own gods.≤∑ Thus, the earliest worship of the gods arose not from the peaceful exercise of human reason, but from a ‘‘trembling curiosity’’ aroused by ‘‘hopes and fears’’ (especially the latter) combined with a ‘‘universal human tendency to personification.’’≤∏ Monotheism emerges from polytheism less through any process of theological reasoning than from the desire of a group of worshippers to win extraordinary favor with their god by exalting him above all others. But even among nations which have arrived at monotheism, the attraction of ‘‘idolatry,’’ based on the human inclination to locate supernatural power in concrete objects, continues to influence the ‘‘vulgar.’’ This irreconcilable tension between polytheism and monotheism finds expression in the popular tendency to raise human mediators to divine status. Hume used Catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary to exemplify this point, but clearly his readers might have been tempted to regard the deification of her son as a further illustration of this tendency.≤π Hume’s ‘‘Natural History of Religion’’ was important for two reasons. First, it was a genuine attempt, though a highly speculative one, to employ historical methods to discover the foundations of religious beliefs. While Hume relied mainly on evidence drawn from Greek and Roman literature, he did make use of some material written by European travelers and missionaries who had observed ‘‘barbarous’’ and ‘‘savage’’ societies. Leslie Stephen, while fully acknowledging the distance between Hume’s investigations of primitive men and those of more modern researchers, nevertheless pronounced the philosopher’s view a genuinely ‘‘scientific’’ one.≤∫ The second notable feature of Hume’s treatise was his challenge to the theory of primitive monotheism and his insistence that man’s first religion was polytheistic. T. H. Huxley referred to ‘‘Natural History’’ as that ‘‘remarkable essay’’ which ‘‘anticipated the results of modern investigation in declaring fetishism and polytheism to be the form in which savage and ignorant men naturally clothe their ideas of the unknown influences which govern their destiny.’’≤Ω But while paying tribute to Hume’s essay, both Huxley and Stephen were aware that it was not simply and solely a historical study but was also a The Study of Religion before 1860 | 25 contribution to Hume’s argument against dogmatic theology and popular Christianity. Hume had turned the traditional inquiry as to the natural origins of primitive religions against Christianity itself. In the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, he had gravely undermined the philosophical foundations of the argument from design, the main support of eighteenth-century natural theology. Now he attacked orthodoxy on historical grounds as well. While divines demonstrated the reasonableness of belief in an all-powerful and benevolent Creator whose existence was proclaimed by the workings of nature, the philosopher sought to show that worshipful contemplation of the external world was in no way an original motivation for primitive man’s religious beliefs. Religion could have no foundation in reason (since Hume denied the inferences of the argument from design) so it must have arisen from elements in human nature. But in Hume’s description, these elements were clearly the weaknesses or defects of man, not his moral or intellectual strengths. Nineteenth-century scholars were to challenge a number of Hume’s findings. For example, Tylor reintroduced reason as a factor, indeed the main factor, in the formation of mankind’s earliest religious ideas. Even so, Hume’s use of religious history to buttress a critical stance vis-à-vis the Church and orthodox theology was imitated by some of his Victorian successors. Charles de Brosses (1709–1777), author of the theory of fetishism, was another Enlightenment thinker whose work influenced Victorian perceptions of primitive religion. Unlike his friend Hume, de Brosses was neither a great original thinker nor a polished literary stylist. He possessed, however, an insatiable intellectual curiosity and energy. In the time he could spare from his duties as president of the Dijon Parlement, de Brosses wrote a long treatise on the origins and development of language and edited and published a collection of explorers’ memoirs in addition to producing Du culte des dieux fétiches. The book was printed secretly in Geneva in 1760, as the author was convinced it would never pass the French censor, and de Brosses’s name was not publicly connected with it until after his death. It created little stir at the time it first appeared, however, and would probably have been completely forgotten had Auguste Comte not resurrected the concept of fetishism as the definition of a stage in human consciousness in his Cours de philosophie positive.≥≠ The book’s purpose was to elucidate the nature of early Egyptian religion, specifically the problem of animal worship. Neither ancient nor modern commentators had been able to accept a literal interpretation of the images found on obelisks, mummies, and papyri that showed human beings bowing before beasts and monstrous half-human, half-animal creatures. Instead, they had 26 | The Study of Religion before 1860

relied on allegorical explanations in which the divinized animals were really symbols of the virtues or of the branches of knowledge or else were the emblems of noble families. De Brosses, in contrast, sought to convince his readers that Egyptian religion was, from the beginning, just what it appeared to be—the worship of animals pure and simple. What was most interesting about the author’s conclusion, however, was the way in which he supported it. How could we know that what appeared to be brute worship was not in reality a more elevated tribute to the virtues? De Brosses replied that we had only to examine the parallels between ancient pagan practices and those of modern Africans who, according to European observers, worshipped all manner of objects including plants, animals, bits of stone, and pieces of wood. For de Brosses, there was no question that similarities of behavior represented similarities of thought.≥∞ Looking beyond Africa, he found evidence of fetishism among the uncivilized peoples of Asia and America, and even on the periph- ery of Europe among the Lapps and Samoyeds. This discovery led de Brosses to proclaim the existence of a universal, or nearly universal, stage of fetishism through which the nations had passed on their way to higher forms of belief. Much in the book is not original. The entire third section, which explains the origins of fetishism in the primitive mind, is translated directly from Hume’s ‘‘Natural History’’ with the term ‘‘fetishism’’ substituted for Hume’s ‘‘polytheism.’’≥≤ Nevertheless, de Brosses’s work does differ from that of the Scottish philosopher. For one thing, de Brosses made much more extensive use of the travel literature on contemporary ‘‘savages.’’ Furthermore, the notion of fetishism as a stage of religious development was in itself a new departure. In contrast to Hume, de Brosses set his discussion within an explicitly developmental context. His theory implied the progress of human reason through time; as man learned the laws of cause and effect, he ceased to be the victim of superstitious terror and could develop more rational beliefs and modes of worship. It was this evolutionary cast of de Brosses’s theory that attracted the most attention in the nineteenth century. While a number of scholars quarreled with his rather promiscuous application of the term ‘‘fetishism’’ to cover the divinization of any animate or inanimate object, they nevertheless praised him as ‘‘a most original thinker.’’ Although the French author had not claimed fetishism as the absolute origin of human religion—to do so would have been to break openly with the Church—his nineteenth-century readers usually interpreted him in that way. They believed that de Brosses, by deﬁning fetishism as a stage through which nearly all societies must pass, had prepared the way for the discovery of even earlier stages. At the same time, his contention The Study of Religion before 1860 | 27

that primitives, both ancient and modern, practiced suitably low forms of worship without even a trace of higher beliefs, struck a blow against a theologically dominated history of religions. No wonder, then, that E. B. Tylor paid tribute to the Frenchman by repeating the last words of his book on the title page of Primitive Culture: ‘‘Ce n’est pas dans des possibilités, c’est dans l’homme même qu’il faut étudier l’homme: il ne s’agit pas d’imaginer ce qu’il auroit pû ou dû faire, mais de regarder ce qu’il fait.’’≥≥

The Function of Religion in the Evolution of Society: Comte As we have already noted, Auguste Comte (1798–1857) virtually rescued the concept of fetishism from oblivion by making use of it in his sociological theory. Yet unlike either de Brosses or Hume, Comte was less interested in simply establishing a naturalistic interpretation of religious origins for its own sake than in identifying the proper role of religious development within a vast scheme of human social development. He, too, saw religion as an expression of human nature rather than as a revelation of a transcendent God, but for him this realization led not to a devaluation of religion but to the conviction that an established ‘‘spiritual power’’ is a permanent necessity of social life. Comte’s thought greatly inﬂuenced British philosophers, theologians, and social thinkers. Conveyed to the British public initially in the six volumes of the Cours de philosophie positive (1830–42), and the four-volume Système de politique positive (1851–54), Comte’s philosophy became widely accessible with the publication in 1853 of Harriet Martineau’s translation, The Positive Philosophy of Auguste Comte. Discussions of Comte’s inﬂuence on British social theorists usually focus on his belief that history is the record of the progressive evolution of human society. This emphasis is appropriate, for while it is true that Victorian anthropologists and sociologists had access to other sources of social evolutionary theory, especially the conjectural histories produced by the Scottish Enlightenment, Comte’s work contained an extremely full and systematic application of evolutionary principles to universal history. In any case, as Harriet Martineau remarked in the preface to her translation of Philosophie positive, all those who claimed to be serious thinkers were ‘‘fully acquainted’’ with Comte’s ideas and bound to consider themselves ‘‘under obligations’’ to them.≥∂ In view of Comte’s success in persuading his contemporaries that the ‘‘law of progress is conspicuously at work throughout human history,’’ we need to remind ourselves that his philosophy grew out of anxiety over the condition of Western European civilization in the postrevolu- tionary years.≥∑ His social theory, far from being an expression of compla- 28 | The Study of Religion before 1860

cency, was haunted by a vision of ‘‘the great political and moral crisis that societies are now undergoing.’’ This perilous situation had been brought on by ‘‘intellectual anarchy’’ caused in part by the erosion of the cultural influence of the Church.≥∏ The solution lay in the establishment of a new philosophy that could command universal assent and thus maintain order while it ensured progress. Of course, Comte saw his own ‘‘positive philosophy,’’ based on the extension of scientific principles to social phenomena, as destined to play that role. Comte’s fundamental criterion of progress is intellectual; it is measured by the increasing ability of human reason to manipulate both the natural and social environments. It is not surprising that he used his famous ‘‘Law of the Three States’’ to identify eras not only in the history of thought but in the history of society as well. According to this ‘‘law,’’ mankind has developed three different modes of philosophizing: theological, metaphysical, and positive. In the initial stage, the mind seeks both first and final causes and attributes all phenomena to the action of supernatural beings. The mind which has reached the metaphysical stage continues to search for first and final causes; however, it rests its explanations not on supernatural beings, but on reified abstractions such as ‘‘essences’’ or ‘‘qualities’’ inherent in all things. In the final, or positive, stage, the search for absolute knowledge is at last relinquished, and the thinker confines his efforts to observing and classifying phenomena in the hope of establishing the general laws by which they are governed.≥π The theological stage was the first historical epoch, lasting from humankind’s earliest beginnings until the Middle Ages. The ‘‘theological polity’’ began to disintegrate in the early modern period (for Comte, the only history worth studying was that of Western Europe) and suffered its final decay during the revolutionary years of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Within this first historical age, a secondary process of evolution took place as people moved from fetishism to polytheism to monotheism. Comte defined ‘‘fetishism’’ as the deification of ‘‘every substance or phenomena which attracts the attention of nascent humanity’’; in reality, it is the basis of all ‘‘theological philosophy.’’≥∫ For Comte, the historical significance of fetishism is that it was a philosophy; it satisfied the need for a theory by which men could organize their observations of nature. It made possible all subsequent intellectual advance by ‘‘attacking the original torpor of the human faculties . . . furnishing some aliment to our conceptions, and some bond between them.’’≥Ω In performing this valuable service, however, fetishism created the conditions for its own decline. As primitive humans systematized The Study of Religion before 1860 | 29

their observations of the natural world, they began to group similar phenomena into general categories and to assign to each of these its own deity. So, for example, the spirits of individual rivers merged into a single river god. Monotheism in its turn eclipsed the earlier systems as humans became convinced of the regularity of the external world and could no longer be satisfied with ‘‘the contradictions of a multitude of capricious divinities.’’∂≠ While Comte treated religious evolution as the product of an evolving human consciousness, he was at least as interested in the power of religion to call forth new forms of social organization as in its ability to guide intellectual speculation. It is in his discussion of the social influence of faith that Comte’s historical relativism is most apparent. His admiration for medieval Catholi- cism, a taste that struck his English readers as especially eccentric, could be justified on the principle that ‘‘the social state, regarded as a whole’’ was ‘‘as perfect, in each period, as the co-existing condition of humanity and of its environment would allow.’’∂∞ At its height, the Church had performed invaluable services for mankind. It had maintained a class of men whose only duties were to advance knowledge and to provide education and moral guidance for the people. Furthermore, this class represented a progressive ideal since it was open to talent, not based on heredity. The philosopher was especially struck by the power of the ecclesiastical organization; as the one truly international body, it was ideally suited to mitigate national rivalries and to enforce unity of belief through all of Europe. Finally, the sacraments and other forms of worship instituted by the Church served to bind each individual to the universal system and to remind him at the most important periods of his life that he was part of a larger whole.∂≤ Comte’s admiration for the medieval Church and his conviction that modern society was doomed to moral and political anarchy unless a similar unifying system could be found led him to create the Religion of Humanity. His plans are set forth in numbing detail in Système de politique positive (1851– 54). This new Church would perform all the necessary functions of the old: offering moral guidance and education, counteracting excessive individualism, and coordinating all efforts to promote social welfare. At the same time, unlike the old system, it would be able to claim the allegiance of the finest, most progressive intellects of the day by resting its doctrine on the positive rather than the theological philosophy. The new object of worship was ever- evolving humanity itself, not a supernatural, transcendent creator. Although Comte claimed, with justice, that his philosophy was all of a piece, the Reli- gion of Humanity aroused consternation among most of his English admirers.∂≥ The herald of the dawning positive age seemed to have betrayed his 30 | The Study of Religion before 1860

commitment to science, smuggling theology back into a culture that was just beginning to break free of its dominance. In England, Comte’s writings had appealed mainly to Utilitarians and other liberals. The hierarchical organization of the new religion smacked of authoritarianism to them, and the elaborate ritual and commemorations of positivist ‘‘saints’’ were too reminiscent of popular Catholicism. Huxley’s famous description of the new faith as ‘‘Cathol- icism minus Christianity’’ captures a sense of distaste that many Victorians shared. But if few British thinkers were prepared to embrace the full liturgical panoply of Comte’s Religion of Humanity, his historical sociology of religion established a number of concepts that were deeply influential. The notion of religious development as the expression of an evolving human consciousness, starting from theological explanations and moving toward scientific or positive ones, appears in the work of Tylor, Frazer, and, to a lesser extent, Lang. Indeed, the basic premise of Comte’s interpretation—that religion is essentially a philosophic system—was accepted almost without question until challenged by William Robertson Smith in his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites (1889). Scholars also imitated Comte’s historical relativism to some extent. A good example is Tylor’s insistence that even the crudest and most bizarre of early religious ideas must be judged rational within their primitive cultural context. Comte’s endorsement of the historical method, though not original, acted as a powerful reinforcement for general trends in Victorian social science. Convinced that the study of history uncovers the ‘‘laws’’ of social behavior, he claimed that only those who could ‘‘predict’’ the past would be able scientifically to predict the future. In this way, historical study became a tool for diagnosing the present condition of society and pointing out the path forward.∂∂ Finally, the failure of a strictly Comtist Religion of Human- ity to catch on did not mean that Comte’s endorsement of religion fell on stony ground. His call for a religion of human solidarity was welcomed by many liberal theologians and added more force to the arguments of those who looked to the creation of a science of religion to advance the health of British culture.∂∑

The Function of Religion in the Evolution of Society: Spencer When one looks to nineteenth-century England for examples of Comtean inﬂuence, it is tempting to focus especially upon Herbert Spencer. In many ways, the two men were intellectual cousins. Most obviously, both thinkers The Study of Religion before 1860 | 31

devoted their lives to ambitious projects to synthesize the results of modern science and thereby to create a new philosophic basis for society. Both men relied heavily on the concept of progressive social evolution, and both helped to popularize the idea, indeed to make it part of the common currency of nineteenth-century thought. Nevertheless, Spencer always vehemently denied any debt to Comte. He had abandoned Politique positive in disgust and had picked up the outlines of the system from G. H. Lewes’s popular summary.∂∏ In truth, the differences between the two men were substantial, and not least in their differing versions of the history of social development and of the role played by religion in that process. Although Spencer wrote a great deal on the origins of religion and on its evolutionary significance, his work is discussed here only briefly. On the one hand, the ideas on which Spencer himself laid most stress were neither especially original nor greatly influential contributions to the study of religion. His account of the origins of belief in the supernatural—the ‘‘ghost theory,’’ as he termed it—differs only slightly from Tylor’s concept of animism.∂π A second, and more important, reason for setting Spencer apart is that his ideas about religion depend heavily on a theory he developed elsewhere and then simply applied to religion as well as to a host of other things including political and economic institutions and kinship organization. Much of his discussion lacks any specificity of explanation; the history of religion is merely one example among many of the ‘‘law of evolution’’ in action. Finally—and this is admittedly a matter of perception and subtle impressions —Spencer stands apart from the group of scholars whose work is at the center of this study. It has already been noted how these individuals built upon one another’s work, criticized each other, and reacted to that criticism. This is not to say that they were all personally acquainted, although a number of them were; Robertson Smith and Frazer were close friends; Müller corresponded with Tylor and Lang. The two latter were on friendly terms, and Frazer’s wife once complained facetiously that she took in a letter from Lang every day along with the morning paper. Jane Harrison knew Frazer, and she referred frequently to his work as well as that of Robertson Smith. Spencer had no real part in these exchanges over methods and conclusions, perhaps because of his Comtean attachment to ‘‘mental hygiene,’’ or because other scholars found it difficult to modify his ideas on the evolution of religion or put them to use outside the all-embracing system in which they were embedded.∂∫ Reviews and assessments of Spencer’s work by his contemporaries seldom discuss his theories about the origins and social development of 32 | The Study of Religion before 1860

religion, although they often address his promotion of agnosticism (his famous theory of the unknowable) as a positive religious philosophy. Spencer’s critics also took pains to point out that, unlike Tylor or John Lubbock, Spencer was not a ‘‘real ethnologist’’ but rather someone who sought to ransack the evidence from ethnology in support of his religious and ethical philosophy.∂Ω None of this is to suggest that Spencer’s treatment of religion is without interest. Indeed, a later generation of social scientists could reasonably claim that the Victorian science of religion would have benefited if more sympathetic attention had been paid to some of his work, especially his essay ‘‘Ecclesiastical Institutions’’ in The Principles of Sociology. In any case, whatever the value of his speculations for sociology and anthropology, Spencer’s views are interesting as an example of a peculiarly Victorian cast of mind—liberal, agnostic, steeped in scientific naturalism—applied to the analysis of primitive religion. His earliest statement on the subject appears in ‘‘Manners and Fashion,’’ an article published in 1854 in the Westminster Gazette. It contains the seed of all his later speculations on the sociology of religion. Unlike much of his later work, however, this essay displays a fresh and engaging inventiveness. Spencer suggests that custom (including etiquette and fashion), religion, and politics ‘‘have all grown from the same root’’ and remain of the same nature. Each is an institutional embodiment of authority which limits human freedom in order to mold men to the social state. As the author puts it, ‘‘originally Deity, Chief, and Master of the Ceremonies were identical.’’∑≠ How, then, do the three offices become separate? According to Spencer, the split between political and religious authority originated in the death of the chief. Since the primitive mind did not regard death as necessarily permanent, and since the ‘‘other world’’ was assumed to be a more or less remote part of this world, it was easy for his subjects to believe that their leader was temporarily absent; they still owed him a loyal obedience. Meanwhile, new chiefs arose, but they were obliged to share their power with an emerging priestly caste whose function was to ensure continued remembrance of the old leader, supplication of his ghost, and submission to his wishes.∑∞ Spencer’s argument is intriguing, though he never makes it clear whether he is adopting a traditional Euhemer- ist approach, claiming that the gods were once specific historical individuals, or whether he intends a more subtle version of the argument in which reverence for the office or role of the political leader is the source of theism. In this early article, Spencer accepted the theory that fetishism was the The Study of Religion before 1860 | 33

first stage of religious thought. Yet, as he later remarked, it was a ‘‘passive’’ acceptance.∑≤ Fetishism played no positive role in his interpretation, and, indeed, the theory is quite out of step with the major conclusions of the essay. Instead, Spencer came to see belief in ghosts as the most primitive form of belief in the supernatural and as the germ which produced all subsequent religious concepts. The ‘‘ghost theory’’ was not presented in its fullest form until 1876, though early hints of it appear in ‘‘Manners and Fashion.’’ Spencer chose to develop the concept as part of a general picture of primitive morality—the starting point, so to speak, of social evolution. The author acknowledged the difficulty of acquiring reliable knowledge of the earliest human beings, but he assured his reader that the problem was not insurmountable. First of all, studies of contemporary ‘‘savages’’ provided evidence about the primitive mental state. Yet Spencer admitted candidly that such evidence was often misleading; it could suggest the character of primitive ideas but not establish which ones were the earliest. The investigator had also to rely on deductions drawn from the doctrine of evolution.∑≥ Using these two methods, Spencer went on to describe the early human mind as one remarkable chiefly for its deficiencies. Primitive man lacked ‘‘conceptions of general facts,’’ ‘‘prevision of distant results,’’ ‘‘abstract ideas,’’ ‘‘definiteness of thought,’’ or any clear notion of truth.∑∂ The author was forced to conclude that, ‘‘lacking ability to think, and the accompanying desire to know, the savage is without tendency to speculate.’’∑∑ This was an absurdly harsh judgment, of course, even by nineteenth- century standards. But Spencer, like Hume, saw himself pitted against a harmful illusion—the notion that religious ideas grew out of man’s rational contemplation of the world around him. Yet, unlike Hume, Spencer did not attribute supernaturalism to fear and confusion alone. Belief in ghosts is based on observation, but observation which is barely reflected upon and which takes place at the very lowest level of mental activity. The belief in two complementary modes of existence, ‘‘per- ceptible’’ and ‘‘imperceptible,’’ is suggested initially by the duality of nature itself, by all those phenomena that involve appearance and disappearance, for example, sunrise and sunset, the phases of the moon, or a sudden tempest.∑∏ This original perception establishes a basic mental disposition that favors belief in ghosts, but the firm conviction that man, too, has an invisible double arises from certain psychological experiences. These include dreams, visions, swoons, apoplexy, catalepsy, and ecstasy.∑π Here the theory most resembles Tylor’s description of animism. 34 | The Study of Religion before 1860

According to Spencer, the simplest nomadic societies never got much further than belief in ghosts. On the other hand, those groups which gave up wandering and established permanent settlements (and permanent burial sites) developed after a time a complex ancestor worship. The more highly evolved societies venerate not only local recent ancestors but also more remote and powerful ones whom they call gods.∑∫ Spencer was quite ingenious when it came to explaining how speciﬁc doctrines and rituals evolved from worship of the dead. For example, he claimed that those tribes who buried their dead in caves developed conceptions of a subterranean home of the spirits while those who carried them to the tops of the hills believed in a sky heaven. All religious sacriﬁces, he asserted, were originally funeral gifts.∑Ω He even went so far as to argue that the only way to make sense of Old Testament religion was to see it as the story of a covenant between a powerful chieftain and a suppliant wanderer, Abraham, whose grateful descendants conferred divinity on his patron.∏≠ Spencer’s insistence that all religion is rooted in ancestor worship supports his argument that politics and religion share a common source. ‘‘While the fear of the living becomes the root of the political control, the fear of the dead becomes the root of the religious control.’’∏∞ This is the subject of his discussion entitled ‘‘Ecclesiastical Institutions’’ in part 6 of The Principles of Sociology. Most of the volume is devoted to description of the emergence and growth of the priestly caste in accordance with Spencer’s ‘‘Law of Evolution,’’ but it contains one very interesting chapter entitled ‘‘An Ecclesiastical System as a Social Bond.’’ Here the author actually looks at how religious institutions function in the interests of the larger society. J. D. Y. Peel describes his argument here as ‘‘quite simply functionalist in the modern sense.’’∏≤ Ecclesiastical systems help to ‘‘conserve the social aggregate.’’ Just as the observances performed by a family after the death of one of its members help to unify the kin group, so religious observances help to unify the whole society. The members are brought together to perform a common action; differences among them are put to rest; and they formally acknowledge the authority of a common law—the wishes of the dead or the god’s commands. Second, religious institutions, much more so than political ones, retain the customs, ceremonies, sentiments, and beliefs which evolved in an earlier time. Thus, the church fosters cohesion among all living members and continuity among past and present generations.∏≥ We might think that a sociologist would be likely to approve of such an effective unifying force, but for Spencer, the positive value of ecclesiastical institutions lay all in the past. Primitive man had need of the controlling authority of organized religion, for he was not only intellectually weak but The Study of Religion before 1860 | 35

also lacked the social virtues. Selfish, imprudent, aggressive, his character had to be forcibly molded to fit him for a peaceful life of cooperation with his fellows. Looking around him, however, Spencer concluded that the task had been successfully completed at least with regard to his own social milieu, the Victorian middle class.∏∂ Institutional religion, therefore, was no longer necessary; in fact, it had become an obstacle to progress and a source of social antagonism. Unlike Comte, Spencer was basically satisfied with his own society. As Peel has argued, Spencer’s sociology was at bottom a kind of ‘‘the- odicy’’ intended less to diagnose social ills and prescribe their cure than to explain why social change had taken the direction that it has and to reassure his readers that, all in all, it has been change for the better.∏∑ Spencer’s biography casts some light on his judgments in this matter. He was a product of provincial radicalism and Dissent whose personal and political orientation was individualistic and profoundly antiauthoritarian. As Peel points out, in Derby, Spencer’s hometown, ‘‘the parties were distinguished not so much by class as by religion and the cultural assumptions linked with it.’’ One such assumption, shared by the tight-knit Methodist social circle to which Spencer’s family belonged, was that the state as a coercive force—aided by an established Church—was a necessary but temporary evil; as humanity progressed, the need for external restraints, political or ecclesiastical, on selfish human nature would continually diminish, perhaps eventually to disappear altogether.∏∏ The younger Spencer’s journey from Methodism to rational deism to agnosticism was apparently a painless one, differing in that way from the experiences of many of his contemporaries.∏π Nevertheless, he retained many of the cultural traits and mental habits of the Dissenting circles in which he had been raised. He disliked the restraint imposed by ceremony and distrusted any form of organization that went beyond the individual voluntary association. It is natural, then, that Spencer, who felt no attachment to the faith of his fathers, should have regarded all religious institutions, even the Dissenting churches, negatively, as illegitimate and unnecessary systems of authority. Spencer was uncompromisingly rigid in his rejection of anything with an ecclesiastical tinge to it—refusing, for example, to attend the wedding of his friend John Tyndall because it was to be held in a church, and meticulously planning the details of his own funeral to eliminate the possibility of anything that might smack of traditional religion.∏∫ Perhaps there were personal sources for this intense dislike of ecclesiastical authority. Although Spencer speaks of his father affectionately, he also comments on his father’s bullying behavior toward his mother, Harriet. Surpris- ingly though, he ascribes most of the fault to his mother, a woman who was 36 | The Study of Religion before 1860

very attentive to religious observances and whose subservience to her husband seemed to invite aggression.∏Ω Spencer seems to have associated his mother’s piety with her subservience and victimization. In any case, what might strike others as harmless accommodation to the social conventions of a still nominally Christian society seemed to him intolerable compromises with a tyrannical authority that must be opposed at all times. Looking into the future, he conﬁdently predicted the dissolution of the national Church, decline of a separate priesthood, and the continued multi- plication of sects that, while differing over practice, would cheerfully tolerate each other’s doctrinal idiosyncrasies. The idea of God would continue to evolve, shedding all anthropomorphic qualities in favor of the conception of ‘‘an Inﬁnite and Eternal Energy.’’π≠ Spencer clearly regarded such a future as the fruit of progress. Whether all his fellow Victorians could be expected to share that judgment is another matter.

The Stage Is Set By 1860, a number of trends had converged to stimulate the creation of a new field of religious studies. The growing influence of positivism, in both its Comtean and not-so-Comtean forms, was one factor.π∞ Equally important was the flood of ethnographic information that poured in from travelers, missionaries, and government officials as Britain’s imperial reach continued to ex- pand, much of which seemed only to deepen the mystery of human diversity and to challenge traditional explanations of it. The economic and imperial might that made it possible to regard the entire world as a field for British scholarship supported an apparently secure national identity and confident assertions of superiority. Beneath the self-assurance, however, was a growing anxiety about the future of one of the traditional props of national identity— collective commitment to a firm Protestant Christianity. The ground was prepared for the advent of a new science. Like Comte, many of the British contributors could be located somewhere on the broad spectrum of social evolutionary thought. Yet the field was not to be quite so predictable and homogeneous as that statement might imply. Friedrich Max Müller, the first to proclaim the birth of the science of religion to the British public, was the product of a very different anthropological tradition and one quite at variance with the dominant British empirical tradition—the text-oriented Psychologie of the German philological schools. The triumph of a thoroughgoing social evolutionism would come later, and even then, its dominance would not long remain unchallenged. ≤ Friedrich Max Müller The Annunciation of a New Science

In 1845 and 1846, F. D. Maurice preached a series of sermons entitled ‘‘The Religions of the World and Their Relations to Christianity,’’ the aim of which, as he said, was not to ‘‘search’’ for the ‘‘absurdities’’ of non-Christian faiths but to discover the ‘‘living wants’’ and the permanent ‘‘necessities of man’s being’’ that all religions were called upon to satisfy.∞ The project had been an extremely difﬁcult one, he admitted, because the availability of information, even on the great historical religions of Asia and the Middle East, was very limited for anyone unfamiliar with Oriental languages. For ‘‘Mahometanism’’ there was, of course, Carlyle’s essay on the Prophet, as well as some passages from Gibbon and Ranke. Turning to Indian religion, Maurice found the ‘‘chief helps’’ to be Cole- brooke’s essay on the Vedas and Rosen’s Latin translation of the Rig Veda. But Maurice had reason to hope that this dire situation was about to be remedied: ‘‘I understand that a young German, now in London, whose knowledge of Sanscrit is profound, and his industry plus quam Germanicum, has it in contemplation to publish and translate all the Vedas. English money it is to be hoped will not be wanting, when the other and more indispensable requisite is supplied by a foreigner.’’≤ The ‘‘young German’’ of whom Maurice spoke was Friedrich Max Müller. He had arrived in London in 1846, not with the intention of publishing ‘‘all the Vedas,’’ but with the more modest goal of compiling a complete edition of the text and commentaries of the oldest of them, the Rig Veda. Intending to remain in England only a few weeks, Müller ended by making his home ﬁrst in London and later in Oxford, remaining there, except for brief trips abroad, 38 | Friedrich Max Müller

until his death in 1900. His ambitions too soon outran his original intentions, and the edition of the Rig Veda became a platform from which he sought to launch a new branch of the human sciences—the ‘‘science of religion.’’

An Apprenticeship in Comparative Philology Müller was born in Dessau, the capital of a minor German principality, on December 6, 1823. The son of the poet Wilhelm Müller, he claimed to have inherited from his father a streak of ‘‘suppressed poetry’’ which surfaced in his scholarly writings and earned warm praise from his English critics.≥ But the father died when his son was only four, and the boy’s childhood was shadowed by his mother’s inability to shake off her grief. Mother and son were deeply attached to each other, and it was she who formed the boy’s religious sensibilities in the mold of a simple pietistic Lutheranism. The emotional tone of his early religious training, one which emphasized, above all, personal devotion to and trust in God, was to remain the dominant one even after his theology had broken through the boundaries of the most liberal forms of Victorian Protestantism. Educated at home as a child, Müller later attended the Universities of Leipzig and Berlin, where he at ﬁrst chose to pursue the most traditional route to scholarly success—Greek and Latin philology. He soon tired of this, however, and convinced that he was merely ‘‘chewing the cud’’ in his classical studies, Müller plunged into systematic philosophy, catching along with many of his fellow students the ‘‘Hegelian fever’’ which was ‘‘still very high at that time’’ (1841).∂ Yet, his initial reaction to these new interests was a feeling of helpless confusion: ‘‘I confess I . . . felt quite bewildered for a time, and began to despair altogether of my reasoning powers. Why should I not be able to understand . . . what other people seemed to understand without any effort?’’∑ Only when he began to take courses in the history of philosophy did Müller regain his bearings and come to feel that his understanding of the subject was ‘‘strong and healthy.’’∏ This preference for a historical approach to philosophy combined with a growing interest in the problems of language led Müller to concentrate on the question of how meanings change. He was convinced that the investigation of concepts must begin as a historical, even an etymological enterprise, and he was later to assert that the problems of philosophy would someday be seen as problems of language. A deep historicist bias colored all of Müller’s work. Again and again he would describe the controversies between himself and his critics as conﬂicts Friedrich Max Müller | 39

between a ‘‘historical school’’ (his own) and a ‘‘theoretical school’’ (that of his opponents).π The precise accuracy of this division is questionable, but it does point to an important difference between Müller and the younger generation of linguists who vigorously criticized his work in the last decades of the century.∫ For the older man, the study of language was ultimately of interest less for its own sake than as a tool for reconstructing the history of human consciousness, especially religious consciousness. Müller summed up his life’s work in the Autobiography written two years before his death. ‘‘The thread that connects all my labours,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is very visible, namely, the thread that connects the origin of thought and languages with the origin of mythology and religion.’’Ω Müller’s decision to study Sanskrit followed soon after his discovery of the history of philosophy. The language itself was chosen because it was exotic, and because there was ‘‘a charm . . . in studying something which my friends and fellow students did not know.’’∞≠ His introduction to Indo-European studies, like that of many other young men at the time, came from reading Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (1808). This book contained both a technical discussion of Sanskrit and its relationship to other languages and a disquisition on Indian philosophy that emphasized its significance for modern Europe. Schlegel’s work was, as Müller knew, out of date and filled with errors; for example, the philosopher had believed that Sanskrit was the ‘‘Ursprache,’’ or mother tongue, of the Indo-European languages, an opinion that had been firmly rejected by the time Müller took up his studies. But the book exercised a powerful influence on the young student, drawing him not only to the languages of India, but also to its religion and philosophy. Müller began his language studies under Brockhaus at Leipzig in 1841, moving on to Berlin in 1844 to study Sanskrit with Bopp and philosophy with Schel- ling. He was especially attracted to the ‘‘Oriental’’ flavor of the latter’s philosophy, and, flattered by the older man’s eagerness to discuss Vedanta with him, Müller worked away at a translation of the Kathaka Upanishad, which Schel- ling had asked him to prepare.∞∞ The training he received in these years, more than simply professional preparation in the techniques of a discipline, was an initiation into a tradition heavily influenced by the historical and philosophical concerns of German Romanticism. As late as 1860, when Max Müller delivered his first series of lectures on the ‘‘science of language’’ at the Royal Institution, comparative philology was regarded by the English as the preserve of Continental scholars, especially the Germans. There was an irony in this, one that did not go unnoticed by 40 | Friedrich Max Müller

contemporaries, because, as Edward Tylor pointed out, ‘‘towards the end of the last century we [the English] had actually grasped the clue which was to lead to the great philological discoveries of the present.’’∞≤ The ‘‘clue’’ to which Tylor referred was the discovery of the relationship between Sanskrit and the classical languages, and the man usually credited with bringing this discovery to the attention of European scholars is Sir William Jones (1746–1794). His statement on the subject is well known but worth quoting again: ‘‘The San- scrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong, indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.’’∞≥ This insight helped to lay the foundation for the new philology of the nineteenth century. As it became clear that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the modern European languages were all descendants of a single proto–Indo- European tongue, scholars were able to establish a genealogical system of classification and to identify regular patterns of phonetic change through the comparison of related languages. A number of English scholars took up Jones’s perceptive observation; most importantly, Thomas Colebrooke and H. H. Wilson in the years before 1820, and Benjamin Thorpe and J. M. Kemble in the 1830s. Yet it was the Germans who dominated the field: Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, August and Friedrich Schlegel, and Franz Bopp were widely regarded as the founders of the new linguistic science.∞∂ The attitudes toward the past that characterized German Romanticism provided a rich soil for the growth of comparative language study. For one thing, the new approach was fundamentally relativistic. According to Hum- boldt, ‘‘no language should be condemned or depreciated, not even that of the most savage tribes.’’∞∑ Language was conceived of as ceaselessly dynamic; it had a life of its own and developed according to its own laws. Once discover those laws and the philologist would acquire a powerful tool for reconstructing not only the words but the spirit and mentality of peoples who had vanished long ago, leaving no literary monuments behind them.∞∏ The ‘‘discovery’’ of Sanskrit by the German Romantics fostered a new conception of language, but equally important, it brought them into contact with a civilization that seemed to embody, much more so than modern Europe, the cultural values most highly prized by them. Friedrich Schlegel, Friedrich Max Müller | 41

elaborating on a theme introduced by Herder, glorified ancient India as the cradle of all human knowledge and wisdom. Its mythology spoke of unity, not conflict, between faith and knowledge: philosophy was at one with religion, science merged with poetry, and the supernatural revealed itself ceaselessly in the midst of the everyday. Believing that the Germans, of all the European peoples, were most spiritually akin to Asia, Schlegel argued for their unique responsibility to seek an understanding of the Orient and to spread that understanding throughout the West. This was necessary knowledge if Europe was to reverse the process of disintegration that threatened her existence as a civilization. Traced back to its source in the individual, this decay proceeded from spiritual poverty, or ‘‘an incapacity for religion, the complete numbness of the higher organs.’’∞π Müller sometimes criticized the exaggerated and quasi-mystical enthusiasm for the East that he found in the works of Schlegel and others, but his own mid-Victorian version of comparative philology owed a great deal to the Romantic tradition, as he freely acknowledged.∞∫ He, too, believed that Europe must search for its complement in India with the goal of opening itself to the religious and philosophical insights it would find there. Müller’s decision to devote his energies to Sanskrit studies led to some hardship at first. In 1845, a little less than a year after his arrival in Berlin, he accepted a friend’s invitation to move to Paris, a tempting prospect since the city had long been a magnet to Orientalists by reason of the magnificent manuscript collections housed there. Once settled, he became friends with the French Sanskritist Eugène Burnouf, who encouraged the younger man to apply himself to the study of the Rig Veda. But these promising developments were overshadowed by loneliness and poverty, and his life took on the outlines of a classic tale—the student-martyr sacrificing health and happiness in the pursuit of pure knowledge. Resolving not to abandon his research in order to make a living, Müller took to copying manuscripts to earn money, sleeping only one night in three so as to spare some time for his own work.∞Ω The pattern established during this period persisted throughout his life. In later years, Müller developed a reputation for unabashed ambition and social climbing. Once established as an Oxford professor, he enjoyed the life of an academic superstar; hobnobbing with the cream of Victorian literary society, corresponding with Gladstone and assorted members of the royal family, he developed an instantly recognizable image as a Great Man of Learning.≤≠ Neverthe- less, during all his years of fame and success, Müller continued to work at a prodigious pace and level of intensity, churning out lectures, translations, essays, books, and scholarly correspondence while supervising one of the 42 | Friedrich Max Müller

supreme achievements of Victorian academic enterprise—the publication of the fifty-volume series Sacred Books of the East.≤∞ Despite his poverty while living in Paris, Müller found it necessary to plan a trip to London to consult some manuscripts in the Library of the East India Company, and by late May 1846, he had scraped enough money for a passage and a few weeks living expenses. The young man’s fortunes started to improve soon after his arrival. He began by winning the friendship and support of Baron Bunsen, a man who combined the duties of the Prussian minister in London with the zealous pursuit of a single intellectual object: to discover ‘‘the consciousness of God in the mind of man, and that which in and through that consciousness, He has accomplished, especially in language and religion.’’≤≤ As this quotation makes clear, the intellectual concerns of the two men were quite similar, and it would be difficult to calculate precisely the extent of Müller’s debt to his patron. The central theme of Bunsen’s numerous writings was the history of divine revelation, conceived not as an event but as an ongoing universal process; and the gradual unfolding of ‘‘God-consciousness’’ was most clearly disclosed in the development of language. This vision was also central to Müller’s work, but, as J. W. Burrow points out, this may be less a case of direct influence than of the common sources of their ideas in the philosophy and theology of early nineteenth-century Germany.≤≥

Müller at Oxford: Triumph and Alienation In any case, the connection proved extremely valuable to Müller, for Bunsen not only provided temporary ﬁnancial support, but also smoothed the way for his young friend’s entry into English academic and literary circles. Müller was introduced to prominent liberal churchmen, including J. C. Hare, F. D. Maurice, and Connop Thirlwall, and at Bunsen’s urging, made his scholarly debut at the British Association meeting at Oxford in 1847, where he delivered a paper on Indian languages. The young philologist moved to Oxford permanently in 1848, in part because his edition of the Rig Veda was being printed there, and found that the memory of his paper along with Bunsen’s ‘‘kind words’’ opened many doors for him. Although as a German and a friend of Bunsen’s he ‘‘was looked upon as a kind of heretic,’’ he formed lasting friendships with many leaders of the High Church party, including E. B. Pusey, H. P Liddon, and R. W. Church.≤∂ But he clearly felt most at home with friends of more liberal opinions, men such as A. P. Stanley, J. A. Froude, Benjamin Jowett, A. H. Clough, and Matthew Arnold. Friedrich Max Müller | 43

Though warmly received at Oxford, Müller was perplexed and alienated by the atmosphere of tension that theological differences seemed to engender there. As far as he could see, the disputes that aroused such passion had nothing to do with ‘‘true religion.’’≤∑ Müller certainly regarded himself as a sincere believer, yet even at this early period, his theological commitments were minimal; ‘‘true religion’’ was simply the ‘‘rediscovery of the eternal union between God’’ and ourselves.≤∏ He felt sure that the discoveries of the higher criticism ‘‘could never deprive me of the little I really wanted,’’ for ‘‘that little could never be little enough; it was like a stronghold with no fortifications, no trenches, and no walls around it.’’≤π Understanding little of the serious issues which lay behind apparently trivial disputes, and not wishing to be taken for a meddling foreigner, Müller for the most part avoided direct involvement in the religious controversies at Oxford.≤∫ As it turned out, however, the adoption of a low profile did not protect him from suspicions that his religious views were ‘‘most indefinite’’ and probably marked by ‘‘excessive broadness.’’≤Ω These suspicions were partly responsible for the first major setback in Müller’s academic career. His formal connection with the university began in 1850, when he was appointed to lecture on modern languages and literature for the Taylorian Institute. One year later, he became a member of Christ Church and in 1858 was elected to a fellowship at All Souls. But Müller set his sights even higher, on the Boden Sanskrit Chair, which fell vacant on the death of H. H. Wilson in May 1860. The canvassing for the election was prolonged and created something of a stir—when the day finally came, special trains had to be added to the schedule to accommodate all those who wished to return to Oxford for the vote. Though Müller’s rival, Monier Monier-Williams, was generally acknowledged as the less distinguished scholar of the two, the German philologist suffered from prejudice against him both as a foreigner and as a holder of suspect religious views. In the end, Müller was badly defeated, 610 for him and 833 for Monier-Williams. Those who voted against him were said to have been motivated not only by distrust of his orthodoxy and prejudice against any non- English candidate, but also by the desire to strike a symbolic blow against the ‘‘Germanising’’ tendencies of reform-minded academics. For Pusey, who had supported Müller’s candidacy, the vote was important mainly as showing the strength of ‘‘religious feeling’’ at Oxford, while other observers laid greater stress on the anti-German motive.≥≠ In reality, the three motives were so closely bound up that there was little point in trying to fix on one as the most important; at any rate, that seems to have been Müller’s perception. Müller 44 | Friedrich Max Müller

was not the sort to resign himself easily to disappointed ambition, and there is no doubt that the loss of the election was a severe blow to him. Though it might be an exaggeration to say that he was embittered, it sharpened his sense of exile along with the conviction that he would never be fully accepted in his adopted home. The defeat was only temporary; Müller continued on at Oxford, and in 1868 he became the first professor of comparative philology there. In any case, had he won the Sanskrit chair, it is unlikely that he would have had the freedom to pursue the studies that were responsible for his reputation and influence during the 1860s and 1870s. Müller became known especially for the popular lectures in which he introduced the English cultural elite to comparative philology and the history of religions. His ‘‘Lectures on the Science of Language,’’ delivered in two series during 1861 and 1863, were major cultural events, and his listeners included not only Maurice, Stanley, and Thirlwall but J. S. Mill, Tennyson, and Michael Faraday. Similarly, his 1878 Hibbert Lectures (‘‘On the Origin and Growth of Religion’’) aroused so much interest that he was obliged to deliver each one twice, once in the morning and once in the afternoon, so as not to disappoint the crowds.≥∞ His triumph was by no means total; during the 1870s, his linguistic scholarship came under fierce criticism from the American Sanskritist W. D. Whitney, and his work on comparative mythology and religion was assailed by Andrew Lang.≥≤ Though these attacks dented his professional reputation, governments and learned societies continued to shower him with honors, and by the end of his life, his career was judged to have been one of the most extraordinary in the history of nineteenth-century scholarship.≥≥ As Müller moved away from almost exclusive concentration on Sanskrit studies (he continued to work on the Rig Veda until 1874) and began to devote time to comparative religion and mythology, his own religious stance was gradually transformed. Though he continued to describe himself, no doubt sincerely, as an ordinary Christian believer, he was increasingly drawn toward the Eastern spiritual traditions with which he tried to acquaint his audiences. At the same time, he became more willing to depart openly from orthodox doctrine.≥∂ One measure of this development is the change in his attitude toward missionary efforts in Asia. Where in his early writings, Müller had been enthusiastic about prospects for the Christianization of India, by the 1870s he was looking forward instead to a reformation of Hinduism and Buddhism which would sweep away ‘‘medieval’’ encrustations and restore them to their original purity.≥∑ Finally, he began to incorporate elements of Friedrich Max Müller | 45

Indian spiritual practice into his own religious life. Impelled partly by a prolonged depression that followed the death of his eldest daughter, Ada, in 1876, Müller took up serious study of the Upanishads. He found there a recognition of the unreality of the world that answered to his own sense of loss, the feeling that he was getting old, and his recurring homesickness for Germany.≥∏ From the mid-1870s on, he began ‘‘more and more’’ to ‘‘spin’’ himself ‘‘into the chrysalis of the Vedaânta,’’ until he could say with Schopen- hauer: ‘‘In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads. It has been the solace of my life—it will be the solace of my death.’’≥π Indeed, only three months before his death, Müller received an unexpected testimonial to his progress as a Vedantist. One morning in August 1900, two Indian men, one much younger than the other, appeared at his home in Oxford. The older man was Agamya Yogindra, a prominent yogin. He and his disciple had come to England ‘‘impelled by the pure desire to impart . . . the highest knowledge,’’ only to find themselves in a land un- prepared to learn from them. Müller and the yogin discussed Vedanta— somewhat haltingly since they had difficulty with each other’s pronunciations. Turning then to another guest, an Englishman, the yogin told how he ‘‘had come . . . to teach men the subtle enigmas of existence, but England was like a poisonous fruit, fair and attractive to view, but full of deadly juice; there were no good men, no one who wanted to understand knowledge; only in this house have I found a good man and one who knows.’’≥∫ At times Müller, too, had felt that ‘‘England was like a poisonous fruit,’’ but unlike the yogin, his status as an outsider was part of the strength of his influence. On the one hand, he was hailed as a sort of Prometheus bringing Continental learning to an England badly in need of its light. And on the other, the peculiar combination of intense spirituality and what one critic called ‘‘Invertebrate Theology’’ which ran through his writings and which many Victorians regarded as characteristically German, caused surprisingly little distress. More than that, it even brought a large measure of reassurance, for Müller had put himself in a position to say what many of his contemporaries apparently wanted to hear: that one need not submit to the dictates of a ‘‘hardened and formularized’’ Christianity in order to affirm the irreducible reality and permanent relevance of religious aspirations.≥Ω As Müller’s success would show, the science of religion, even when it encroached on the most vulnerable theological territory, would not necessarily be looked on as an enemy of faith. 46 | Friedrich Max Müller

Comparative Mythology and the ‘‘Disease of Language’’ Theory Müller’s first important theoretical contribution was a lengthy essay entitled ‘‘Comparative Mythology,’’ which appeared in 1856. In this early piece, he sketched out the theory (later called the ‘‘disease of language’’ theory) that firmly established his reputation as a mythographer. Here, too, he introduced the central theme of all his later writings on the history of mythology and religious thought—the way in which language generates both myths and theogonies. He began with a consideration of the myths of ancient Greece, pointing out clearly what was at stake for his Victorian readers. Were they to believe that a culture so highly admired by them, one that in its golden age had produced the noblest art, the most elevated and searching philosophy, had also produced, only a few centuries earlier, the wild and grotesque legends we meet with in Homer and Hesiod? Given that the bulk of the mythic tales, however embellished by later poets, were, ‘‘taken in themselves and in their literal meaning[,] . . . absurd and irrational,’’ it was impossible to reconcile them with ‘‘the principles of thought, religion and morality which guided the Greeks as soon as they appear to us in the twilight of traditional history.’’∂≠ Müller’s thesis, an unfamiliar one for most of his readers, was that the origins of the myths were not Greek at all, but were to be found in the culture of the ancient ‘‘Aryans’’ whose language had been the ancestor of Greek, Sanskrit, Latin, and the Germanic languages. This argument met the need to reconcile Greek civilization with the primitive character of some of the myths, but it did not explain how the stories had come into being in the first place. Müller maintained that the key to that explanation lay in the etymology of the names of mythological beings. Most of these originally referred to natural objects and phenomena such as the sun, dawn, night, thunder, and so on. Employing the ‘‘laws’’ discovered by comparative philologists, it was possible to unravel the history of proper names, disclosing the original predicates from which they were derived, but in most cases the correct etymology was available only to those who knew Sanskrit and the related tongues. One of Müller’s favorite examples was the story of Daphne and Apollo, which he classified as a solar myth. The name ‘‘Daphne,’’ he explained, was derived from the same root as ‘‘Ahaòa,’’ a Sanskrit word for dawn. Thus, the tale of Daphne pursued and ultimately destroyed by Apollo becomes meaningful and intelligible: it is simply one way of describing the daily drama of the rising sun.∂∞ In this, as in every other ‘‘true myth,’’ the original significance of the Friedrich Max Müller | 47 characters’ names was no longer apparent; they had dwindled down into ‘‘mere sounds’’ which designated imaginary beings. Müller argued that such transformations occurred naturally as the result of linguistic evolution, and he described two complementary processes: homonymy (where different objects are called by the same name because they share a particular attribute), and polynymy (where a single object acquires multiple names, each designat- ing a different attribute). Even more important was the role of metaphor. Müller followed Locke in maintaining that words for ‘‘immaterial conceptions’’ were derived by metaphorical extension from those expressive of sense experience. The combined action of these linguistic processes produced long- range shifts of meaning that could not even be perceived, let alone consciously directed, by successive generations of speakers.∂≤ In this context, mythology can be defined simply as the misinterpretation of metaphor: ‘‘Whenever any word, that was at first used metaphorically, is used without a clear conception of the steps that led from its original to its metaphorical meaning, there is danger of mythology; whenever those steps are forgotten and artificial steps put in their places, we have mythology, or, if I may say so, we have diseased language, whether that language refers to religious or secular interests.’’∂≥ Not all of Müller’s readers were convinced that mythology could be explained as the result of linguistic corruption. Even if the earlier meaning of a word had been obscured, that still did not explain why sun, dawn, and so forth should come to be thought of as living beings. E. B. Tylor, for example, while acknowledging that some myths resulted from etymological forgetfulness, nevertheless maintained that this was a secondary process. A deeper understanding would reveal them as the products of a general primitive tendency to personify natural phenomena and inanimate objects. Andrew Lang ridiculed the suggestion that ‘‘men were driven . . . to the most disgusting superstitions’’ solely by ‘‘the iron necessity of decaying language and forgotten symbols.’’∂∂ In fact, the ‘‘disease of language’’ theory is a great deal more subtle and interesting than such remarks would suggest. According to the anthropologist Mal- colm Crick, ‘‘of the Victorians, only Müller had a remotely modern approach to myth.’’ Yet his theories were ultimately ‘‘defeated by the literalism’’ of his critics, especially those like Tylor and Lang, who identified themselves as ethnologists.∂∑ Perhaps the persistent criticism of Müller’s ‘‘disease of language’’ theory should be attributed less to the intellectual insensitivity of his critics than to deep and persistent ambiguities contained within the theory itself. This is not primarily a question of Müller’s faults as a scholar, the 48 | Friedrich Max Müller

stylistic extravagancies and the lack both of caution and of due regard for logical consistency for which he has often been scolded. Rather, it seems that the ambiguities in the theory reflect Müller’s own divided mind. On the one hand, he was fascinated by the persistent influence of language over thought: hence he stressed the inevitability of mythology and its creative role in the history of consciousness. Yet when Müller turned his attention to the relationship between religion and mythology, he described the latter as corrupt and pathological. The tension between these positions is reflected in the way Müller used the word ‘‘mythology.’’ Of course, he employed it to refer to the whole body of narratives conventionally called myths; but for Müller, ‘‘mythology’’ meant also the power of language to shape and direct human thinking. In this latter sense, it was ‘‘something formal, not something substantial.’’ And further: ‘‘Mythology is only a dialect, an ancient form of language. Mythology, though chiefly concerned with nature . . . was applicable to all things. Nothing is excluded from mythological expression; neither morals nor philosophy, neither history nor religion, have escaped the spell of that ancient sibyl.’’∂∏ Müller could have added natural science to the list, for he argued that ‘‘ether’’ and ‘‘atoms,’’ though undoubtedly useful terms for the scientist, were also ‘‘mythological,’’ an assertion that bewildered and irritated some critics.∂π The very act of naming is, from this point of view, the creation of myth. As Müller explained, to name an object is simply to choose one of its many attributes as a designation for the whole, while ‘‘the selection of these attributes and their expression in language, represents a kind of unconscious poetry.’’∂∫ Every noun is therefore the product of an act not merely of perception but of conceptualization. This is especially obvious in the case of what Müller calls ‘‘collective words, such as sky’’ or ‘‘earth.’’ ‘‘For if we say, ‘the earth nourishes man,’ we do not mean any tangible portion of soil, but the earth, conceived as a whole; nor do we mean by the sky the small horizon which our eyes can scan. We imagine something which does not fall under our senses, but whether we call it a whole, a power, or an idea, in speaking of it we change it unawares into something individual.’’∂Ω This is what Müller meant when he spoke of mythology as ‘‘formal, not substantial’’—the power of language to make us ‘‘change’’ things ‘‘unawares’’ from collective to individual, inert to active, or impersonal to personal. This part of Müller’s thought was based on the theory of roots elaborated by the older generation of German philologists. Müller characterized roots as ‘‘whatever, in the words of any language or family of languages, cannot be Friedrich Max Müller | 49

reduced to a simpler or more original form,’’ and he followed Bopp and Grimm in holding that they had originally possessed an active significance.∑≠ The earliest are those that signify human activities; therefore, the earliest names also possess an active quality. As Müller explained: ‘‘The river is not called at first the plough, but the plougher; nay even the plough itself is for a long time conceived and called an agent, not a mere instrument.’’∑∞ The nature of the linguistic resources available to early man thus has momentous consequences for primitive thought. ‘‘At a time when even the stone which he had himself sharpened was still looked upon by man as his deputy, and called a cutter, not a something to cut with; when his measuring rod was a measurer, his plough a tearer . . . how could it be otherwise than that the river should be a shouter, the mountain a defender?’’∑≤ It follows that the problem raised by Tylor and Lang—the apparent need to explain why primitive man conceived and spoke of objects and phenomena as if they were active beings—was for Müller not a problem at all. There was no difficulty in explaining the primitive tendency to personification—the very nature of language demanded that it be so—and such terms as ‘‘anthropomorphism’’ and ‘‘animism’’ were profoundly misleading. The peculiar psychological tendencies that these words seemed to isolate must be recognized as ‘‘necessities of language and thought, and not as what they appear to be afterwards, free poetical conceptions.’’∑≥

Mythology and Religion The double meaning contained in Müller’s use of the word ‘‘mythology’’ stands as one source of ambiguity in his theory. In one sense, the myths of the ancient Aryan world represented the regrettable symptoms of a ‘‘disease of language.’’ Irrational, often violent and obscene, they were grotesque distortions of an originally pure and rational response of the spirit to the power and beauty of nature. Yet surely Müller was guilty of some inconsistency when he described as ‘‘diseased’’ that which from another vantage point was an inevitable product of language, and had played an essential role in human efforts to create a coherent view of the world. What accounts for the tensions and ambiguities in this theory of mythology? We should note, ﬁrst of all, that Müller was especially apt to regard mythology as ‘‘diseased, corrupt,’’ or ‘‘parasitical’’ whenever he turned his attention to the relationship between it and religion. That it was ‘‘possible to separate the truly religious elements . . . from the mythological crust by which 50 | Friedrich Max Müller

they are surrounded,’’ he had no doubt.∑∂ Furthermore, the modern tendency to ‘‘confound the religion and the mythology of the ancient nations’’ was gravely mistaken.∑∑ It was easy to see how the notion that ancient religions were ‘‘inevitably and altogether mythological’’ could have arisen, for ‘‘mythology has encroached on ancient religion, it has at times wellnigh choked its very life.’’ Yet, ‘‘through the rank and poisonous vegetation of mythic phraseology we may always catch a glimpse of that original stem round which it creeps and winds itself, and without which it could not enjoy even that parasitical existence which has been mistaken for independent vitality.’’∑∏ Müller has been sharply criticized for his description of mythology as a corruption of ancient religion and for his insistence that the historian must try to separate the two. He is accused of domesticating the myths, depriving them of imaginative and psychological interest to bring them into harmony with the ‘‘excessively genteel set of mind’’ appropriate to a ‘‘Victorian sensibility.’’∑π These charges are not unfounded, but by portraying Müller as little more than an academic Bowdler, they fail to explain the connections between his theory of mythology and the philosophy of religion that he tried to make acceptable to Victorian audiences. The cornerstone of that philosophy was the belief in a universal and progressive revelation, a single historical process from which no nation had been excluded. A commonplace in the German intellectual milieu of Müller’s youth, the idea was by no means so familiar in his adopted country. He recalled later that by the time he went to Oxford in 1848, ‘‘anything like revelation in the old sense of the word . . . was to me a standpoint long left behind.’’∑∫ In his naiveté, Müller assumed that ‘‘these things were familiar to all’’ so that he ‘‘did not feel called upon to preach what, as I thought, every serious student knew quite as well and probably much better than myself.’’∑Ω It came to the young scholar as something of a shock, then, to learn that his views on the true meaning of revelation were not only not universally accepted, but were liable to be considered dangerously loose in his new environment. He recalled how in conversation with Bunsen he had used the expression ‘‘the great revelations of the world,’’ only to be interrupted by the older man with the warning, ‘‘Don’t say that at Oxford.’’∏≠ This lesson, painfully reinforced by the loss of the Boden Sanskrit Chair, convinced Müller that his syncretic reading of the history of religions was not likely to win easy acceptance from an English audience. The full signiﬁcance of his views on the relationship between religion and mythology emerges only when they are placed against this background. Interestingly, Müller virtually ignored the question in his earlier work; in the 1856 essay, religion is not Friedrich Max Müller | 51

singled out as especially vulnerable, nor does the phrase ‘‘disease of language’’ appear there. As Müller’s interest in establishing a science of religion grew, however, so too did his emphasis on the corrupt and pathological status of mythology. He began to use it as a residual category, a sort of holding pen, to isolate those elements of actual historical religions that discredited them in the eyes of his audience, thus drawing attention away from the conclusion he wished them to draw: that all religions are in some sense true because each one has played a necessary role in the divine education of the world. It was reserved for the science of religion, the ‘‘last born child of the nineteenth century,’’ to chronicle the history of revelation and to suggest the direction of future development.

The Science of Language and the Science of Religion Müller first sketched his vision of what a science of religion should be in 1867, in the preface to a volume of collected essays (Chips from a German Work- shop), developing these principles in greater detail in his Introduction to the Science of Religion (1873). Not surprisingly, his version of the new science was to stand on the shoulders of comparative philology. Knowledge of Sanskrit and other Oriental languages had made it possible for the first time to produce full and accurate translations of the sacred texts of Asia, but in Müller’s eyes, the importance of language study went far beyond this.∏∞ For one thing, the same techniques that the philologist used to reveal the true significance of mythological names could also be used to recover the earliest religious concepts in ‘‘their sharp original outline.’’∏≤ In other ways, too, the new field would resemble the science of language. It would have a predominantly historical and comparative orientation; for just as the side-by-side study of many languages disclosed the true nature of language, comparison of the historical religions would uncover the enduring essence behind them all. It was crucial, however, that comparisons be truly ‘‘scientific,’’ based not on chance resemblances or the accidents of history, but on ‘‘real relationships,’’ that is, genealogical ones.∏≥ Thus, Müller rejected all attempts to classify religions geographically, by age, or according to such artificial categories as ‘‘natural’’ and ‘‘revealed.’’ Instead, they should be grouped into families, the most important being the Aryan or Indo-European and the Semitic. Müller’s position on this subject should not be misunderstood. He sometimes spoke of an ‘‘Aryan race,’’ and he has been held responsible for popularizing the term.∏∂ Nevertheless, he insisted on numerous occasions that 52 | Friedrich Max Müller

‘‘Aryan’’ and ‘‘Semitic’’ should be culturally, not biologically, defined. It made as little sense to refer to Aryan skulls as it would to speak of a dolichocephalic language.∏∑ Müller agreed with Schelling and other Romantic philosophers that shared language and religion, not ‘‘community of blood,’’ made a people into a true nation or ‘‘ethnos.’’∏∏ These opinions are clearly consistent with his emphasis on the power of language to shape thought; all those who spoke an Indo-European tongue were descendants of the Aryans, no matter what their race. In any case, Müller was much more interested in celebrating the kinship between India and England than in drawing invidious distinctions between Aryan and non-Aryan.∏π Having described the methods appropriate to a scientific investigation of religion, Müller went on to stress the importance of the investigator’s own attitude toward his subject. The integrity of the new science was threatened from two opposite directions: on the one side was the quasi-mystical enthusiasm for ‘‘the wisdom of the East,’’ which had appeared as part of the Romantic response to Orientalism, and on the other, the narrow bias which condemned all unfamiliar beliefs as savage, immoral, and idolatrous. Müller deplored the vogue for Madame Blavatsky’s ‘‘Esoteric Buddhism,’’ fearing that comparative religion would be tainted if the public associated it with a growing interest in the occult.∏∫ Yet it was clear to him that in England, at least, the dangers of uncritical enthusiasm were as nothing compared to the obstacles that arose from prejudice and lack of sympathy with all non-Christian traditions. He complained that ‘‘no judge, if he had before him the worst of criminals, would treat him as most historians and theologians have treated the religions of the world. Every act in the lives of their founders which shows that they were but men, is eagerly seized and judged without mercy; every doctrine that is not carefully guarded is interpreted in the worst sense that it will bear; every act of worship that differs from our own way of serving God is held up to ridicule and contempt.’’∏Ω It was time for students of religion to adopt the stance of the secular historian, to ‘‘enter into the . . . moral and political atmosphere of the ancient world,’’ to ‘‘become ancients ourselves.’’π≠ Müller asked his readers to remember that religious beliefs are seldom ‘‘convictions arrived at by the individual.’’ Instead, ‘‘they are national peculiarities, and they exercise an irresistible sway over all who belong to the same nation.’’ For example, in the case of ‘‘nations’’ such as the Hindus, to whom ‘‘life is but a prison,’’ such ‘‘cruel rites’’ as ‘‘the custom of human sacrifices and religious suicides . . . will have a very different meaning from what they would have to us.’’ We are bound to acknowledge Friedrich Max Müller | 53 that such practices ‘‘are not mere cruelty and brutality. They contain a religious element.’’π∞ We may recognize here the accents of a tentative relativism, but the predominant tone of Müller’s work owes more to a liberal Christian humanitar- ianism than to any strictly intellectual decision to avoid cultural bias. His attitudes were exceptionally humane and open, even when compared with those of contemporary anthropologists, but he was by no means free from ethnocentric assumptions. He saw no reason to avoid pronouncing moral judgments on the customs of other peoples, nor did he hesitate to declare Christianity superior to all other existing religions. Müller shared the tendency of many Romantic Orientalists to idealize the wisdom and virtue of the ‘‘primitive’’ peoples of the ancient East at the expense of their modern descendants; though even here he showed a sympathy toward modern Hindus that struck some British readers as naive or disingenuous.π≤ Müller regarded it as part of his task to enlarge the sympathetic moral grasp of his audience. It may be that, like other prominent Victorian thinkers, he simply enjoyed playing the role of the ‘‘sage.’’π≥ But it would be a mistake to dismiss his appeals on behalf of non-Christian traditions as no more than pious lay sermons; they are clearly related to the overriding purposes, as he saw them, of comparative religious studies. The assumption that the history of religions was a single, universal process, not a group of separate histories, led Müller to emphasize the similarities between Christianity and all other faiths. Of course, it was the responsibility of the new science to describe, and as far as possible to explain, the actual historical varieties of belief and worship, and Müller prided himself on his ‘‘historical conscience.’’π∂ Yet what lay at the heart of his appeals was an invitation to his audience to find themselves, their own spiritual longings and values, reflected in the minds of Buddhists, Hindus, and even the ‘‘poor helpless’’ fetish-worshipping Papuans.π∑ Like Hume, Comte, and Spencer, Müller assumed that a scientific exploration of religion must begin with a naturalistic account of its origins. Unlike these philosophers, however, his aim was not so much to undermine the status of revelation as to dissolve the traditional opposition between natural and revealed. In 1870, Müller declared that ‘‘the theory . . . that there was a primeaval preternatural revelation granted to the fathers of the human race . . . would find but few supporters at present.’’π∏ On the other hand, this did not mean that religion was a purely human invention or that its origins could be explained solely with reference to a materialistic psychology. Müller rebuked Renan for writing of the ‘‘monotheistic instinct’’ of the ancient Hebrews: 54 | Friedrich Max Müller

It is always dangerous to transfer expressions from one branch of knowledge to another. The word ‘‘instinct’’ has its legitimate application in natural history, where it is used of the unconscious acts of unconscious beings. . . . If, however, we transfer the word to the conscious thoughts of conscious beings . . . we use it in order to avoid other terms which would commit us to the admission either of innate ideas or inspired truths. . . . It may sound more scien- tiﬁc to speak of a monotheistic instinct . . . but is instinct less mysterious than revelation? . . . We begin by playing with words, but in the end the words will play with us.ππ

Müller himself did not advocate a return to the notions of ‘‘innate ideas or inspired truths.’’ Instead, he argued for the existence of a ‘‘faculty of faith’’ to be placed alongside those of sense and reason. This new ‘‘faculty’’ was not a collection of ideas or even ‘‘intuitions’’; rather, it was a ‘‘power’’ or potential, like the ‘‘faculty of speech,’’ which existed prior to its historical manifestations.π∫ Through it, the human mind was able to ‘‘apprehend the Infinite under . . . varying disguises,’’ and to do this ‘‘independent of, nay in spite of sense and reason.’’πΩ By itself the faculty of faith could not account for the origins of religion since it was only a passive disposition or ‘‘power’’ without any content of its own. Faith itself or the ‘‘sensus numinis’’ had to be awakened.∫≠ Here Müller’s controversial ‘‘solarism’’ becomes important because he believed that faith was first aroused when primitive humans began to contemplate the operations of nature, especially the rising and setting of the sun. For us, Müller wrote, the dawn was ‘‘merely a beautiful sight,’’ but to ‘‘the early gazer and thinker,’’ it was ‘‘the problem of all problems.’’∫∞ Contained in the sunrise, Müller saw the seeds of the most elemental and fertile religious concepts. The contrast between dark night and the breaking of day suggests the idea of conflict between the forces of light and darkness, good and evil. The daily-renewed triumph of the sun’s ascent prompted thoughts of the renewal of life, the conviction that death was but a temporary state, immortality a permanent truth. Finally, the regularity both of the daily cycle and of the seasonal one spoke of the regularity of all natural phenomena and of human dependence upon the wisdom of a powerful but benevolent creator.∫≤ This last point is particularly important because even those who agreed with Müller that natural phenomena were the most potent sources for mythological and theistic conceptions sometimes objected to his almost exclusive concentration on the solar cycle. But while Müller was prepared to admit that a small fraction of myths could be explained without reference to the dawn, he Friedrich Max Müller | 55

insisted that the influence of irregular and evanescent phenomena such as thunderstorms and floods was extremely restricted. Sporadic violent events could inspire fear and awe, but they could never arouse the profound sense of dependence that Müller, following Schleiermacher, looked upon as the primary religious emotion. It would be fair to ask whether the ‘‘faculty of faith’’ was really an improvement over Renan’s religious ‘‘instincts.’’ Was not Müller also ‘‘playing with words’’? What he most objected to was Renan’s blurring of the distinction between human and animal, his attempt to explain the spiritual in terms that could be equally applied to all the higher organisms. But with his talk of the ‘‘faculty of faith,’’ the ‘‘dowry of the soul,’’ and the ‘‘intuition of the divine,’’ Müller appeared to be smuggling theological concepts into a supposedly scientific account. From his point of view, however, it was not less legitimate to speak of the ‘‘faculty of faith’’ than of the faculty of speech. Both were exclusively human, but that did not rule out a scientific treatment of religion any more than of language. The plausibility of the theory depended, however, on maintaining a rigid divide between humans and the other animals. In 1856, he had confidently proclaimed the invulnerability of this separation: ‘‘More and more the image of man, in whatever clime we meet him, rises before us, noble and pure from the very beginning. . . . As far as we can trace back the footsteps of man, even on the lowest strata of history, we see that the divine gift of a sound and sober intellect belonged to him from the very first; and the idea of a humanity emerging slowly from the depths of an animal brutality can never be maintained again.’’∫≥ Darwin’s Origin of Species, published only three years later, delivered a sharp challenge to these views and one that Müller promptly set out to meet. First in his Lectures on the Science of Language and then in a series of articles in Fraser’s Magazine on ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language,’’ he defended the idea that an unbridgeable gulf separated the mental world of animals from that of human beings.∫∂ Not surprisingly, Müller identified the crux of the debate as the question of the origins of language. Darwin supported the views of those philologists, prominent among them his brother-in-law, Hensleigh Wedgewood, who relied on the onomatopoeic and interjectional theories. Indeed, in his opinion there was ‘‘no doubt that language owes its origin to the imitation and modification of various natural sounds, the voices of other animals, and man’s own instinctive cries, aided by signs and gestures.’’∫∑ 56 | Friedrich Max Müller

Müller revised his own theories on the origin of language several times over a twenty-year span, but he consistently opposed the onomatopoeic and interjectional explanations, sarcastically referred to by him as the ‘‘bow-wow’’ and the ‘‘pooh-pooh’’ theories. Though he took much pleasure in exploding the faulty etymologies with which these theories were supported, his objections were fundamentally philosophical. Both theories were, in his view, na- ively materialistic; they represented the earliest speech as the product of external stimuli acting upon an essentially passive human mind. Müller argued that ‘‘real language’’ begins with conceptual roots, the ‘‘very opposite’’ of mimicked cries and involuntary exclamations.∫∏ Language was rational in origin, the product of creative acts of conceptualization rather than reflex responses to emotion or sense perception; its existence attested to the unique power of the human mind to form abstractions and general ideas. Because of this power, ‘‘we not only stand a step above the brute creation: we belong to a different world.’’∫π The character of the debate between Müller and Darwin is in many ways as interesting as its content. Personal relations between the two men were generally cordial; Darwin acknowledged with his characteristic modesty that Müller had ‘‘often spoken highly of me, perhaps more highly than I deserve.’’∫∫ Müller was also on friendly terms with Darwin’s supporters, Huxley in particular, and he agreed with most of their goals, especially the drive to eliminate the privileged status of theological studies at the universities and to promote more original scientific research at those institutions.∫Ω Regarding himself as a liberal, especially on questions of theology and academic politics, Müller clearly had no desire to be identified with the conservative opposition to Darwinism. In 1889, he recalled how ‘‘disheartening’’ it had been ‘‘to hear the followers of Darwin stigmatised as atheists.’’ But, he went on, ‘‘it was equally painful to see the opponents of Darwin’s theories treated as mere bigots, because, if they did not accept the theory of evolution, they must believe in the account of creation as given in Genesis.’’Ω≠ Müller never dropped his opposition to the theory of human descent from lower animals, but in an 1873 letter to Gladstone, he admitted that he had ‘‘no reply’’ to some of ‘‘the problems started by Darwin, H. Spencer, Haeckel, etc.,’’ and that ‘‘many positions which have become untenable’’ would have to be ‘‘freely surrendered.’’Ω∞ He did not specify precisely which ‘‘positions’’ would have to be ‘‘surrendered,’’ but by 1878, the year in which he delivered his Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, Müller had virtually given up the notion of a separate ‘‘faculty of faith.’’ This modification of his ideas was intended as a concession to the ‘‘Positivist philosophy’’ (which Müller associated with Darwinism), but, Friedrich Max Müller | 57

in fact, the new theory reads more like an attempt to satisfy the traditional empiricism of British psychology. Müller declared himself willing to accept the proposition that ‘‘nothing exists in the intellect except what existed before in the senses.’’Ω≤ He was prepared to ﬁght the ‘‘positivists’’ on their own ground and with their own weapons. ‘‘We are asked,’’ he wrote, ‘‘to confess that all that goes by the name of religion from the lowest fetishism to the most spiritual and exalted faith, is a delusion, and that to have recognized this delusion is the greatest triumph of our age.’’Ω≥ Müller intended to show that, on the contrary, religion was no ‘‘delusion’’ but, rather, was ‘‘inevitable.’’ Yet, he boasted, ‘‘we claim no special faculty, no special revelation. The only faculty we claim is perception, the only revelation we claim is history, or, as it is now called, historical evolution.’’Ω∂

The Perception of the Infinite In this modified version of his theory, the original impulse to religious thought was traced not to a hypothetical ‘‘faculty of faith,’’ but to primitive man’s ‘‘perception of the infinite.’’ But while Müller claimed that his new starting point corresponded with that of his ‘‘positivist’’ opponents, he was forced early on to admit some key distinctions. First of all, his use of ‘‘perception’’ differed from the ‘‘ordinary sense of the word.’’ For ‘‘in perceiving the infinite, we neither count, nor measure, nor compare, nor name. We know not what it is, but we know that it is, and we know it, because we actually feel and are brought in contact with it.’’Ω∑ To clarify the point, Müller asked his audience to consider how our eyesight ‘‘breaks down’’ at the horizon; we cannot ‘‘perceive’’ what lies beyond, yet in some way we sense its existence, we ‘‘suffer’’ from it.Ω∏ This poetic reference to primitive humanity’s metaphysical ‘‘suffering,’’ though in some ways apt, tends to obscure an important feature of Müller’s theory. For while the ‘‘materialist’’ or ‘‘positivist’’ theories relied on a passive model of the mind, he subscribed to a Kantian view in which creative mental activity plays an essential role in the constitution of objective knowledge. Confronted with ‘‘the unlimited wealth of the universe,’’ the human mind is ‘‘constantly brought in contact with what is not finite, or, at least, not finite yet.’’ Thus, its ‘‘chief object’’ is ‘‘to elaborate the finite out of the infinite, the seen out of the unseen, the natural out the supernatural, the phaenomenal world out of the universe which is not yet phaenomenal.’’Ωπ The ‘‘perception of the infinite,’’ then, is the inevitable accompaniment to all our attempts to create a fixed and ordered world of concepts out of the chaos of sense experience. Here, Müller believed, in the ‘‘first suspicion of something existing beyond 58 | Friedrich Max Müller

what our senses could apprehend,’’ he had discovered the seed of all theologies.Ω∫ But this was only the ‘‘first impulse’’ to religious speculation. On the one hand, Müller’s belief in universal revelation forced him to identify a single source for all faiths. On the other hand, revelation was not an event fixed in time but an ongoing process. This meant that Müller faced two problems: one, to explain how the initial impulse had given rise to so many different beliefs and ritual forms; and two, to persuade his audience that a single course of development could be discerned beneath the appearance of endless variety. His solution was to construct a dialectical model of religious history in which conflict produced greater and greater differentiation, at the same time prepar- ing the foundations for a future synthesis. He identified three areas of conflict as especially significant: (1) the constant pressure of thought to break through the limitations imposed by language; (2) the struggle between the material and the spiritual; and (3) the action of criticism on faith. It should come as no surprise to learn that Müller regarded the character of religious phraseology as the crucial determinant of the character of religious ideas. The etymologies of the names of the gods were nothing less than condensed versions of the history of theology. Man’s first religious act had been to transform his vague intuition of the divine (or, in later versions, perception of the infinite) into a concrete conception by choosing a name for the object of it. But primitive language, not yet ‘‘reduced by the wear and tear of thought,’’ was so ‘‘unwieldy,’’ so weighted down with ‘‘material’’ associations, that it was hardly a fit vehicle for the ‘‘abstract idea of an immaterial and supernatural being.’’ΩΩ The extent to which words could warp theistic conceptions depended in part on the structure of the language in question. In one of his earliest pieces on the subject, a review of Renan’s Histoire générale et systeme comparé des langues sémitiques, Müller had tried to show that the differences between Aryan and Semitic theology were attributable to differences of language rather than to a special Semitic instinct for monotheism. In the Aryan languages, the ‘‘significative element’’ or root of any word was apt to be submerged in ‘‘derivative elements’’ so that the descriptive quality of each word used to designate the divine was soon lost and the appellation became a proper noun, a ‘‘mere name.’’ In contrast, in the Semitic languages the root remained distinct so that ‘‘the Semitic man would call on God in adjectives only, or in words which always conveyed a predicative meaning.’’∞≠≠ Whereas the Aryans came to regard Dyaus (the bright one), Ushas (dawn), and Agni (fire) as separate beings, the Semites were protected from this mythological trap. The structure of their language was not the cause of Aryan polytheism, but it made it more difficult for them to arrive at a clear monotheistic ideal. Friedrich Max Müller | 59

Of course, the question of whether religion was originally polytheistic or monotheistic had long been regarded as crucial, in part because it was one of the most clear-cut tests of orthodoxy. For Müller, however, this problem was an illusory one, much like the problem of the origins of personification; both resulted from the failure of moderns to take account of the character and limitations of ancient speech. In the case of Aryan religion, at least, the first stage was neither monotheism nor polytheism but what Müller called ‘‘henotheism.’’ He explained the meaning of the term with reference to a peculiar characteristic of the Vedic hymns: ‘‘In the Veda one god after another is invoked. For the time being, all that can be said of a divine being is ascribed to him. The poet, while addressing him, seems hardly to know of any other gods. But in the same collection of hymns, sometimes even in the same hymn, other gods are mentioned, and they also are truly divine, truly independent, or, it may be, supreme.’’∞≠∞ Though Müller insisted that the primitive intuition of the divine ‘‘is by its very nature one,’’ he stressed that a fully conscious and mature monotheism is only slowly conquered.∞≠≤ The struggle to arrive at a pure conception of one God was really part of a larger conflict between the material and the spiritual, between the selfless longing to know the divine and to enter into communion with it, and the egoistic surrender to the claims of the world and to the human taste for the morbid and the irrational. Looking closely at those elements of religious culture which Müller classified as ‘‘materialistic,’’ we can detect a distinctive bias—a pietistic sensibility very close to that of nineteenth-century evangelicalism allied with a liberal emphasis on free inquiry in theological matters. Of course, the most potent enemy of genuine spiritual religion was that ‘‘disease of language’’ which led not only to the proliferation of gods and the false worship of physical objects, but also to ‘‘material and deceptive’’ interpretations of sacred literature. Thus, the modern Christian who insisted on a strict literal belief in everything contained in the Bible was not only a victim of mythology, but an unwitting materialist as well.∞≠≥ Mythology was not the only threat, however; religion was also apt to be corrupted in the early stages of civilization by its contact with developing political institutions. ‘‘As soon as a religion is established,’’ Müller wrote, ‘‘and more particularly when it has become the religion of a powerful state, the foreign and worldly elements encroach more and more.’’∞≠∂ For Müller, it should be stressed, the danger was not merely that religious authority could be exploited by the politically ambitious; the organizational structures of religious institutions were in themselves inimical to authentic spirituality. Although he makes no explicit statement to this effect, the assumption that 60 | Friedrich Max Müller

personal and institutional religion are opposed emerges clearly in the way Müller used a whole series of related contrasts. Spontaneous expression was set against formal ritual, prayer contrasted with sacrifice, and the image of a patriarchal community in which the heads of families were also spiritual leaders was opposed to that of a society divided into priests and laymen.∞≠∑ In each case, the second alternative represented movement away from the spiritual pole and toward the material, a process of degradation to which all religions were subject. These themes find illustration in Müller’s reading of Indian religious history. The story was essentially one of decline from an originally simple and noble faith to the rigid, mechanical, and irrational system of worship contained in modern Hinduism. Whereas the hymns of the Rig Veda breathed a spirit of ‘‘free and unconscious’’ creativity, later writings (such as those contained in the Brâhmanas) were marked by ‘‘shallow and insipid grandiloquence, . . . priestly conceit, and antiquarian pedantry.’’∞≠∏ Müller preferred to describe the ancient poets, or Rishis, as ‘‘elders,’’ but he cautioned that if moderns chose to think of them as priests, ‘‘do not let us imagine that’’ they were ‘‘therefore very like Cardinal Manning.’’∞≠π The Cardinal Mannings of Indian religion had come later, with the elaboration of caste and the Brahmans’ use of the sacred writings to bolster their authority. This shift was paralleled by an increasing emphasis on elaborate ceremonial. It was axiomatic for Müller that the first germs of Aryan religion could be found not in ‘‘sacrifice and sacrificial formulas’’ but in ‘‘praise, and thanksgiving, and the unfettered expression of devotion and wonderment.’’∞≠∫ In his vision it was the individual—pictured most often in solitary prayer or meditation—rather than the congregation who embodied the spiritual desires common to all humanity. Müller’s treatment of Indian religious history lends support to those who have described his theory as a version of degenerationism.∞≠Ω Indeed, he extended the results drawn from his study of the Vedas to a principle operat- ing in all religions. One of the conclusions to which a comparative study was ‘‘sure to lead’’ was that ‘‘religions in their most ancient form . . . are generally free from many of the blemishes that attach to them in later times.’’∞∞≠ This was a theme he returned to many times.∞∞∞ Yet, equally important, his theory also depended on the admission that genuine, and presumably lasting, progress had occurred; the conscious monotheism of the modern Christian is an enduring advance over the nebulous henotheism of the primitive Aryan. If we recall that Müller adhered to a dialectical model of religious development, his ‘‘degenerationism’’ need not be equated with a pessimistic view of history. What for a time might appear as Friedrich Max Müller | 61

decay or retrogression was in reality the necessary stimulus to continued advance: ‘‘It seems at first a fatal element in religion that it cannot escape [the] flux and reflux of human thought . . . but if we watch it more closely we shall find, I think, that this flux and reflux constitutes the very life of religion.’’∞∞≤

The ‘‘New Reformation’’ We have discussed two aspects of Müller’s model of religious history—the conflict between thought and language, and that between the material and the spiritual—but a third pair remains, the opposition between criticism and faith. Here, in his discussion of how skepticism is actually a force for progress, Müller drew a direct connection between the theological controversies that troubled so many Victorians and the patterns of historical change disclosed by comparison of the great religions. First of all, a distinction had to be drawn between ‘‘vulgar atheism’’ and agnosticism, or ‘‘honest atheism.’’ The former was nothing other than pure nihilism, it was like ‘‘unto death,’’ but the latter was ‘‘the very life-blood of all true faith.’’ It was ‘‘the power of giving up what, in our best, our most honest moments, we know to be no longer true.’’∞∞≥ Almost all religions had, at one time or another, been tested by the corrosive influence of doubt. The ancient Indians, too, had suffered a loss of faith in their gods or devas; they questioned the existence of Indra, Agni, and Varuna. Some of those who listened to Müller’s lectures could empathize with a passage he read from the Rig Veda in which the poet surrenders to despair: ‘‘My eyes vanish, and the light also which dwells in my heart; my mind with its far-off longing leaves me; what shall I say, and what shall I think?’’∞∞∂ Yet eventually this paralysis gave way not to ‘‘the coils of atheism,’’ but to a ‘‘new spring,’’ a new blossoming of religious thought contained in the Upanishads, the doctrines of Vedanta to which Müller was becoming more and more deeply attached. Perhaps modern Christian Europe, too, stood on the verge of a new spring or a ‘‘New Reformation.’’ Writing to Ernst Renan in November 1861, Müller confided his belief that an era was approaching in which the aims of the sixteenth-century reformers would at last be fulfilled. A month later, he returned to this theme: ‘‘I cannot help believing that we are on the eve of great religious and philosophic struggles. There is a longing after true and primitive Christianity in the best spirits of England, France and Germany.’’∞∞∑ The science of religion would prepare the way for this ‘‘New Reformation’’; it would ‘‘give a new life to Christianity itself.’’∞∞∏ In Müller’s hands, the study of Eastern religions became an ally of European theological liberalism. I have already suggested one way in which Müller’s work reinforced the 62 | Friedrich Max Müller

arguments of liberal reformers. According to his interpretation of religious history, periods in which doubt or ‘‘honest atheism’’ seemed to flourish were but preludes to eras of renewed spiritual vitality. As Müller explained in a letter to A. P. Stanley written shortly after finishing the series of Hibbert Lectures in 1878: ‘‘I could not but grapple with the question of Atheism, or at all events try to show how every nation has had to grapple with it. . . . I have a few signs that my lectures have set some . . . thinking that their atheism is not so hopeless as they imagined.’’∞∞π It followed that free inquiry and speculation could never permanently undermine ‘‘true religion,’’ for even ‘‘unpalatable truths . . . will reinvigorate the system into which they enter.’’∞∞∫ The insistence on uniformity of belief was a source of weakness for Christianity, and Müller contrasted it unfavor- ably with the Hindus’ doctrinal relativism. Real danger came not from the ‘‘honest doubters’’ but from those who wanted to strengthen ecclesiastical authority and restrict theological speculation, historical criticism of the scriptures, and a flexible approach to ritual. For Müller, this meant the English heirs of Newman and, more distantly, the Roman Catholic Church. The notion that High Church ecclesiasticism was bound to produce results directly opposed to those it sought was of course a well-worn theme by the time Müller’s work first began to reach a large English audience, but he added a new twist to the familiar argument. History showed that anti-ritual and anti-ecclesiastical re- volts were recurrent features of all major religious groups, not just the Semitic ‘‘family.’’ Müller held that Buddhism, for example, could not be properly understood except as a reaction against the excessive formalism and ‘‘priestly tyranny’’ that marked the Brahmanism of the time. Buddha was portrayed as a sort of Martin Luther, condemning the privileges of a sacerdotal caste and opening up the treasures of true inward religion to the masses.∞∞Ω One might reasonably ask whether this version of the science of religion was not ultimately subservient to a liberal and up-to-date Christian apologetic. At times, Müller himself seemed to suggest that this was the case. In 1874, he predicted that the day would come ‘‘when those who at present profess to be most disquieted by our studies, will be the most grateful for our support.’’∞≤≠ To be sure, the Christianity that he sought to defend was conceived by him along the broadest lines. Belief in miracles, including the Virgin birth and the bodily resurrection of Christ, he considered superfluous, and his views on the Incarnation were far from orthodox.∞≤∞ Nevertheless, Müller frequently spoke of Christianity as the culmination and fulfillment of mankind’s spiritual evolution. The science of religion would show ‘‘for the first Friedrich Max Müller | 63 time fully what was meant by the fullness of time’’; it would ‘‘restore to the whole history of the world, in its unconscious progress towards Christianity, its true and sacred character.’’∞≤≤ Müller never repudiated this judgment, but one must place side by side with it an increasing number of statements in his later works that look forward to a fresh synthesis arising from the world’s great religions. His quickening interest in Vedanta partly explains this new eclecticism, but the friendships he formed with leaders of the Brahma-Samâj movement in India also contributed something. This group, heavily influenced by both Islam and Chris- tianity, held that social progress in India depended on a sweeping reform of Hinduism that would eliminate its ‘‘medieval’’ features and establish a monotheistic system based on the Upanishads. Müller fully approved of their aims and urged them to learn from ‘‘the religion of Christ’’ while holding fast to their Indian identity and keeping their distance from the Christianity of English missionaries.∞≤≥ The new message was not only for Indian consumption, however. Müller urged Christian audiences to look to the religions of the East as an antidote for their own spiritual enervation. In India, What Can It Teach Us? (1883), he argued that the sacred literature of India was the ‘‘corrective which is most wanted in order to make our inner life more perfect, more comprehensive, more universal, in fact more truly human, a life. . . . transfigured and eternal.’’∞≤∂ This is cautious enough, but elsewhere Müller adopted a bolder stance, praising the Brahma-Samâj for the ‘‘unmixed good’’ they had done, ‘‘in helping to realise the dream of a new religion for India, it may be for the whole world, a religion free from many corruptions of the past . . . and firmly founded on a belief in the One God, the same in the Vedas, the same in the old, the same in the New Testament, the same in the Koran’’ (emphasis added).∞≤∑ This is not to suggest that Müller foresaw the immediate advent of an ecumenical golden age. His ambitions for the science of religion may have been inflated, but there is no reason to think that he planned to set himself up as the prophet of a new dispensation. Nowhere does he give a detailed description of what a universal religion would look like or how it would come into being. Yet he recognized that many of those who crowded into lecture halls to hear him speak had come because they were tired of the theological squabbling that surrounded them and resentful of demands to bow before the claims of dogma and ecclesiastical authority or resign themselves to ‘‘hopeless atheism.’’ To these people, Müller held out a means of escape. ‘‘The Science of Religion,’’ he assured them, 64 | Friedrich Max Müller

which at present is but a desire and a seed, will in time become a fulfillment and a . . . harvest. When that time . . . has come, when the deepest foundations of all the religions of the world have been laid free and restored, who knows but that those very foundations may serve once more, like the catacombs, or like the crypts beneath our old cathedrals, as a place of refuge for those who, to whatever creed they may belong, long for something better, purer, older, and truer than the stat- utable sacrifices, services, and sermons of the days in which their lot . . . has been cast. . . . That crypt though as yet but small and dark, is visited even now by those few who shun the noise of many voices, the glare of many lights, the conflict of many opinions. Who knows but that in time . . . the Crypt of the Past may become the Church of the Future.∞≤∏

That many of Müller’s listeners were enthralled and inspired by his message there can be no doubt. But others cautioned that warm, generous feeling and elevated rhetoric were not enough to create a genuine alternative to the painful confusion that beset many British men and women. As some of Müller’s conservative critics sought to remind him, a vital religion was one that not only offered comfort and moral stimulation to its adherents, but one that also made demands, intellectual as well as emotional, upon them.

The Contemporary Impact of Müller’s Work Müller had begun by arguing that necessities of language accounted not only for the creation of myths, but also for the apparently intractable human tendency to personify natural forces and phenomena. This thesis came to be known as the ‘‘disease of language’’ theory, not an altogether happy phrase because mythology conceived of in this sense, as the shadow cast by language over thought, was both inevitable and an essential part of the process by which humankind had created an ordered world of concepts. Müller’s description of mythology as diseased, pathological, and parasitic was not simply an arbitrary surrender to the charms of metaphor, however, for by providing a category to contain the less acceptable elements of non-Christian religions, it facilitated his argument that no religion is false because each is an event in God’s continuing revelation of himself through history. Müller proposed the creation of a comparative and historical science of religion in order to study this process. As he conceived of it, the new field was to be closely allied to Friedrich Max Müller | 65 comparative philology. It would stand resolutely apart from traditional apologetics and cultivate a sympathetic respect for non-Christian faiths. Like those who had tackled the subject before him, Müller regarded the problem of the origins of religion as crucial. Though he modified his ideas in response to a perceived challenge from ‘‘positivism,’’ his goals remained constant. First, he sought to create an acceptable modern alternative to the traditional explanation of a primitive and ‘‘preternatural’’ revelation. Simultaneously, however, he hoped to demonstrate that the human capacity for belief was original, not evolved, and that religion was neither an accident of social development nor a harmful delusion but like language, part of the very definition of the human. The influence of Müller’s work as a whole went far beyond the importance ascribed to any one of his theories. Many critics, in England at least, regarded him as the founder of the comparative study of religion. Even those who had some acquaintance with the important contributions of Continental scholars paid tribute to Müller as ‘‘the man who has done the most to bring the Science of Religion before the notice of cultivated Englishmen.’’∞≤π Indeed, the term ‘‘science of religion,’’ though never universally adopted, enjoyed wide currency in England because of his influence. The reception of his writings and lectures tells much, therefore, about the extent to which the Victorian public considered such an intellectual approach to religion to be desirable or practicable. Müller’s notion of an ‘‘undogmatic’’ comparative theology gained wide acceptance between 1868, the year in which he first sketched out the principles of the new science, and 1878, when he delivered the Hibbert Lectures to overflow crowds in Westminster Abbey. A. P. Stanley’s controversial invitation to Müller to preach on Christian missions at Westminster Abbey in December 1873 and Müller’s announcement the following year of the plan to publish The Sacred Books of the East are two landmarks in the growing public recognition of this new science. Müller’s version of comparative religion was not the only one available to the Victorian public; during these same ten years, E. B. Tylor, Herbert Spencer, and others had produced major works on the subject. Nev- ertheless, many commentators pointed to the interest aroused by the Hibbert Lectures as marking a new departure. The Athenaeum pronounced them ‘‘a remarkable sign of the times,’’ while a fellow Orientalist, A. H. Sayce, observed that ‘‘the crowded audiences which attended Professor Max Müller’s lectures showed plainly that the days are past when a scientific treatment of religion could be regarded as either irreverent or heterodox.’’∞≤∫ Most of Müller’s critics were quick to point out the possible contemporary relevance of his conclusions. As one might expect, the religious journals 66 | Friedrich Max Müller

focused closely on the potential importance of his work for foreign missionary efforts. In fact, while missionaries formed part of Müller’s audience, the value of his scholarship for the missionary enterprise was a matter of hot debate. Müller’s failure to attain the Boden Sanskrit Chair had resulted partly from distrust of him and his work among missionaries and their supporters. Monier Monier-Williams, the successful candidate, was an Evangelical clergyman who campaigned for the post by claiming that he would better represent the wishes of the chair’s founder by offering practical aid to mission efforts.∞≤Ω Never- theless, Müller continued to insist, as in his lay sermon ‘‘Christian Missions’’ at Westminster Abbey in 1873, that the science of religion was an ally of the missionary if only rightly understood. It does seem to be the case that comparative religion figured among the ‘‘rhetorical traditions’’ available to nineteenth-century missionaries in India and elsewhere.∞≥≠ Over the years, Müller established close and friendly working relationships with a number of missionary-scholars including James Legge, who contributed translations from the Chinese for the Sacred Books series, and R. H. Codrington, who corresponded with Müller from his mission post in Melanesia. Both men were influenced by or least sympathetic to Müller’s call for more respectful and broad-minded attention to the religions of non-Europeans.∞≥∞ Even so, while some missionaries seem to have been swayed by Müller’s liberal comparativist approach, others sternly rejected any alternative to the image of an utterly depraved and worthless heathenism.∞≥≤ Although the missionary angle figured prominently in the public response to Müller’s work, a number of critics also voiced the hope that comparative religious studies would throw light on theological terrain closer to home. As early as 1860, the author of a review article entitled ‘‘Vedic Religion’’ appearing in the Westminster Review observed that ‘‘we cannot consider the phenomena presented by the religious traditions of people distant from ourselves in time and region without deriving from them illustration of other religious traditions, in which we are more nearly concerned.’’∞≥≥ Another critic writing eight years later in the same journal was hopeful that Müller’s work might help cool the temper of current disputes. By observing that ‘‘very similar debates . . . have agitated the sincerest believers in non-Christian communions as they disturb our own contemporaries,’’ English men and women might learn to face theological controversy with ‘‘patience, confidence, and above all charity.’’∞≥∂ A contributor to the Theological Review remarked apropos the Hibbert Lectures that ‘‘it is inevitable that in a work of this kind . . . readers should eagerly catch, as the hearers in the Westminster Chapter-House must have Friedrich Max Müller | 67

caught, at . . . any stray hint of how they are to keep nearer the higher life in these days of doubt and division.’’∞≥∑ A number of Müller’s readers regarded his work as reinforcement for the lessons taught by the higher criticism. In 1860, H. B. Wilson, later a contributor to Essays and Reviews and one of the two tried for heresy, warned that ‘‘it will not be possible much longer, when the natural and spontaneous growth of legend has become better understood from such examples as are presented to us in the religious traditions of the Hindus, to ignore a legendary element in the Jewish and Christian Scriptures.’’∞≥∏ Müller’s philological-literary approach could easily be seen as an extension of modern critical techniques and principles to the sacred writings of those outside the Semitic tradition. In the mid-1870s, he began to come under attack for his single-minded use of this approach. It was claimed that his literary methods were too narrow, and critics charged that by ignoring or belittling the possible contributions of archaeology, folklore, and the study of ‘‘savage’’ customs, Müller was trying to force the science of religion into a restrictive and antiquated mold.∞≥π Even so, the familiarity of his approach probably accounts for some of Müller’s popularity and inﬂuence; his writings were accessible and congenial to classically educated Victorians with no special expertise in Oriental studies or, for that matter, in the ethnology of exotic tribes. For Matthew Arnold, whose own religious writings described the interplay between the ‘‘natural and spontaneous growth of legend’’ and what he regarded as the abiding spiritual truth of Christianity, Müller’s work was valuable precisely because of its literary orientation. It promised to enlarge the intellectual horizons of his English readers and to stimulate their imaginative sympathies; and this in turn was the only way to remedy the bitter divisiveness of religious debate. Arnold discussed this point in a letter to Müller written in January 1871: ‘‘ ‘The incurable ambiguity in the use of the word God makes at present the discussion of these matters almost impossible.’ And only the growing study of languages and literatures—that is, the growing acquaintance with the human spirit—can do away with this ambiguity.’’∞≥∫ Some years later, Arnold remarked upon the similarity between his argument in Literature and Dogma and an important theme of Müller’s writings on Eastern religions: ‘‘The line was, I knew in some sort the same as your own— the pursuit of the thread of natural history in all those religions and theologies.’’∞≥Ω Some readers regarded Müller’s explicit advocacy of the idea that religions evolve, that their history is indeed a ‘‘natural history,’’ as the most valuable part of his work. His authority was invoked to support theories of 68 | Friedrich Max Müller

social evolutionism, although a few of the more alert critics complained of the ‘‘corruptionist’’ streak in his theories.∞∂≠ But those who held to a very conservative theological position tended to reject even the mild evolutionism of Müller’s theories. As it turned out, Müller’s assertion that traditional degenerationism was an error not likely to be repeated in the enlightened intellectual atmosphere of the nineteenth century was in fact a serious misreading of the situation. Contributors to the Catholic Dublin Review and to the British and Foreign Evangelical Review may have had little in common, but they were at one in pronouncing Müller’s account of the development of religion a ‘‘formidable’’ threat to revelation. His theory that the origins of faith could be located in the primitive ‘‘perception of the infinite’’ found little acceptance anywhere; but while many critics approved the intent—to provide a natural psychological explanation for the beginnings of theism—and were content to address the philosophical weaknesses of the theory itself, conservative theologians rejected any explanation which ignored God’s explicit revelation of himself to humankind. The Church Quarterly Review expressed mild ‘‘regret’’ that Müller could find no trace of a primordial revelation in the Vedas, but the British and Foreign Evangelical Review took a much more severe line. Müller’s ‘‘teaching’’ on this subject stood ‘‘in irreconcilable contradiction to the teaching of our Lord and his apostles.’’∞∂∞ The aspect of Müller’s work that provoked the most controversy, however, was the relativism that became increasingly conspicuous in his later writings. While a number of critics praised his ‘‘tender charity’’ and agreed that the time had come for a more sympathetic study of non-Christian religions, very few were prepared to agree that Western culture could find a ‘‘corrective’’ for its spiritual condition by learning from the ‘‘inner life’’ of the East. Reviewers frequently accused Müller of ‘‘laying on’’ too much ‘‘rose-colour’’ in his descriptions of Vedic religion, and his praise of Vedanta called forth some especially sharp rebukes.∞∂≤ In its review of India, What Can It Teach Us? (originally a series of lectures delivered at Cambridge), the Church Quarterly Review found it ‘‘saddening to think that, while tens of thousands of intelligent Hindus are shaking off the tremendous errors of the Vedânta, an Oxford professor should be thus holding them up as objects of admiration to the students of Cambridge.’’∞∂≥ But the likelihood of Müller or anyone else turning Cambridge undergraduates into Vedantists was, after all, not great, and his tendency to downplay the differences between Christianity and other religions met with some more subtle objections. Probably the most thoughtful criticisms on this point came not from a reviewer but from a friend and Friedrich Max Müller | 69

colleague of Müller’s, H. P. Liddon, a leader of the High Church party at Oxford and Pusey’s biographer. In a correspondence covering the years from 1875 to 1879, Liddon several times sought to convince his friend that the distinction that Christianity claimed for itself as ‘‘the Absolute Religion . . . ‘truth,’ as opposed to ‘error,’ ‘grace,’ as opposed to ‘nature,’’’ was not simply an unfortunate legacy from the early Church, but ‘‘one of the most powerful forces which Christianity commands in its efforts for the illumination and improvement of mankind.’’∞∂∂ Attempts to reduce Christianity to ‘‘some ethical extracts from the New Testament, after all its distinctive features have been abandoned—do more credit to the heart than to the head of those who make them.’’∞∂∑ But Liddon tempered his critical remarks with a measure of praise, not only because the two men were on friendly terms, but also because, by calling attention to the ‘‘struggle after light among the heathen,’’ Müller’s work supported the belief that religion and the desires on which it was based were permanent and universal elements of human nature. In 1874, Müller had predicted that the orthodox would one day ‘‘be thankful for our support.’’ The prediction was abundantly fulﬁlled; conservative churchmen like Liddon and E. B. Pusey were less outraged by Müller’s clear departures from accepted doctrine than they were grateful for his reassurance. In 1880, Pusey, then an old man, wrote to the younger scholar on the subject of their theological differences:’’We have, I fear been educated in very different faiths, but in these days, I am but too thankful for anything which is in the direction of faith.’’∞∂∏ This was the reassurance that Müller offered: that the new sciences of humanity, of language and history, would show man to be by nature a religious being, destined ultimately to move ‘‘in the direction of faith.’’ This was the message that most often impressed his readers.∞∂π A passage from the British Quarterly Review may be taken to stand for many similar judgments: ‘‘Researches in the sphere of history, with the help of comparative mythology, prove that there are elements in human nature which must have been primal and original, which could never have been developed, which must have been implanted from the beginning. . . . That man, as a religious being, possesses such an element or disposition, we conceive Mr. Müller . . . has gone far to prove.’’∞∂∫ No doubt Müller’s reputation as an ally of embattled belief was partly a matter of style since he was a master of the kind of ‘‘reverent’’ and elevated language that some readers might be tempted to dismiss as religiosity. One reviewer observed caustically that ‘‘the indications are that a profession of 70 | Friedrich Max Müller

religion is about to become quite fashionable among a class of thinkers who would formerly have thought it a reproach to have religion imputed to them. Now they have a weakness for the designation.’’∞∂Ω But most critics were more perceptive, if less amusing, in regarding Müller as an opponent of ‘‘that class of thinkers’’ variously described as rationalists, positivists, and materialists. Because the general tenor of his conclusions was optimistic, at least from the point of view of those who resisted the alternative of agnosticism, only the most conservative were inclined to pronounce harsh judgments on his theology. His position in this regard was in marked contrast to that of E. B. Tylor. Where Müller, despite his tact, was quite explicit as to the bearing of his theories on contemporary theological debate, Tylor was more reticent. Yet the implications of Tylor’s history of primitive religion were as clear as any to be found in Müller’s work, and the conclusions to which they pointed lay in precisely the opposite direction. ≥ Edward B. Tylor The Forging of an Anthropological Orthodoxy

Among the many observers who hailed Max Müller’s ‘‘science of religion’’ as a welcome sign of the times, few displayed greater enthusiasm than Edward Burnett Tylor, the man who was to become the founding father and first academic representative of British social anthropology. Tylor, writing in 1868, saw in the public response to Müller’s work an unmistakable indication that ‘‘there is in England at this moment an intellectual interest in religion, a craving for real theological knowledge, such as seldom has been known before.’’ What was more, this desire for knowledge had never until the present ‘‘had such opportunity of being satisfied.’’∞ Thus Tylor, who like Müller was to devote years of painstaking research and writing to the study of religion, also echoed the Oxford philologist’s emphasis on the contemporary relevance of that scholarship. Yet despite the similarity of their interests, and despite also the mutual respect and deference that marked their public exchanges, the differences between them were vastly greater than any apparent resemblances. Most obviously, they disagreed on questions of method; Tylor, who was ‘‘not really happy with foreign tongues,’’ argued that philological evidence must be supplemented by the contributions of archaeology and folklore, while Müller challenged the validity of the analogy between modern ‘‘savages’’ and prehistoric men upon which Tylor and other anthropologists constructed their evolutionary models.≤ At an even deeper level, the two men were separated by epistemological assumptions that were ultimately incompatible; a clash aptly characterized as ‘‘one version of the opposition between empiricism and idealism that seems to be always with us.’’≥ Yet the most significant difference between them, at least as regards their work on religion, had less to do with philosophical perspectives or the tech- 72 | Edward B. Tylor

niques of scholarship than with an underlying opposition in the realm of sentiment and ethical values. Müller had found enduring spiritual truths in what he took to be the most ancient of all sacred texts, and he had tried to convince his audiences that those truths could dwell in perfect harmony with the latest discoveries of the new human sciences. A future in which humankind gave no expression, however partial and imperfect, to the permanent spiritual endowment of the race was to him, unimaginable. For Tylor, in contrast, religious thought was by its very nature primitive and could not forever coexist with modern science. His hopes for continued moral and intellectual progress lay in the liberation of human rationality from the religious and mythological baggage that had encumbered it in the past. Müller always regarded his own work as a contribution to the ‘‘science of man,’’ and he often spoke of himself and the ethnologists as laborers in the same vine- yard.∂ But in the years after 1870, it was Tylor’s methods and theories, rather than those of the German philologist, that seemed to dominate anthropological studies of religious belief and practice. The belief that hostility to religion motivated those Victorians who sought to make it the object of scientific study is due above all to Tylor’s work and reputation. His fame as a founding figure of British anthropology and specifically his prominence as the author of animism—a simple, flexible, and emi- nently useful theory of religious origins—meant that later contributors la- bored partly in his shadow. Tylor was a fellow fighter with Huxley, Tyndall, and other scientific naturalists, but his work was less aggressively polemical than theirs, and his ideas could be incorporated into interpretations far less unfriendly to religion. In fact, some who considered themselves intellectually indebted to Tylor—including Andrew Lang, William Robertson Smith, Jane Ellen Harrison, and R. R. Marett—took a markedly more sympathetic stance toward religion in their own writings. Furthermore, Tylor’s own views are somewhat more ambivalent than they may seem at first reading. His work, like that of Comte and Spencer, rested on the notion that the social and psychological functions of religion were problems to be taken seriously and that the role of religion in human development was a question of first importance. What is more, his signature theory of animism strongly affirmed the positive evolutionary value of religion in the past, if not for the future.

The Education of an Anthropologist Born in Camberwell in 1832, Tylor was the third son of a prosperous London brassfounder. His parents belonged to the Society of Friends, and he attended Edward B. Tylor | 73 a Quaker school, Grove House in Tottenham, until at the age of sixteen he left to join the family firm. Poor health forced him to resign from the business in 1855, but secure in the possession of an independent income, he undertook a two-year journey to the American continent, a trip that was to set in motion his career as an anthropologist. Returning to England in 1858, he married Anna Fox, the daughter of a prominent Quaker family. During the next few years, he traveled a great deal in Europe, mostly to recover his health but also to engage in what might, somewhat anachronistically, be called ‘‘fieldwork.’’ In Berlin, for example, he spent time as an observer at a famous school for the deaf and dumb in order to gain a greater insight into the principles of gesture language.∑ The 1860s were years of intense scholarly activity for Tylor. His first book, Anahuac, a travel narrative based on his experience in Mexico, was published in 1861. In the next year, he began to attend meetings of the newly revived Ethnological Society, and after 1866 he became an intimate of the ‘‘Darwinian’’ members of the organization, T. H. Huxley, Alfred Wallace, John Lubbock, and George Rolleston among them.∏ During the following years, he produced a stream of articles on ethnological and archaeological topics with titles ranging from ‘‘Wild Men and Beast Children,’’ to the ‘‘Discovery of a Celtic Kitchen Refuse Heap.’’π His two major books were also researched and written during this period, Researches into the Early History of Mankind between 1862 and 1864 (published in 1865), and Primitive Culture between 1864 and 1869 (published in 1871). On the strength of the latter work, Tylor came to be regarded as the foremost anthropologist in Britain, and in 1884 he won academic recognition for the discipline with his appointment as Reader in anthropology at Oxford. Only one further book was produced after 1871, Anthropology (1881), a handbook-style introduction, and Tylor began to devote much of his time to professionalizing the discipline, strengthening its institutional underpinnings, and fighting to improve its academic status. Dur- ing the final years of his life, Tylor suffered some mental decline, and he lived on in quiet retirement in Somerset until his death in 1917. Though he was by no means the first British anthropologist, the impact of both his scholarly work and his organizational efforts render Max Müller’s description of the subject as ‘‘Mr. Tylor’s science’’ an exaggeration rather than a serious distor- tion of the truth. Tylor’s Quaker background is important for an understanding of his contribution to the scientific study of religion even though there is little direct evidence about his relations with the sect in later years. He was brought up during a period of profound transformation for English Friends. The sect had shrunk alarmingly from the time of its greatest strength in the seventeenth 74 | Edward B. Tylor

century; there were fewer than 16,500 English Quakers in 1840.∫ Yet their social influence and economic weight were out of all proportion to their numbers, so that many Friends treasured the image of themselves as a spiritual elite and remained unconcerned about declining membership. Others, however, were deeply disturbed by the trend. Furthermore, their business activities brought them into contact with like-minded Dissenters, and many Friends began to realize how much they had in common with others who stood opposed to the established Church and the political order that guaranteed its privileges. This new recognition of common interests began to break down the Quakers’ customary insularity. Many Friends came to look with disfavor on the ‘‘peculiarities’’ of speech and dress and the prohibition against ‘‘out marriage,’’ which now seemed like unnecessary barriers separating them from others of their social class. At the same time, the influence of the evangelical revival, though scarcely compatible with many of the distinctive tenets of Quaker theology, proved irresistible. By the 1830s, it had become the dominant tendency, edging out the traditional quietism, which was now supported only by a handful of aging conservatives. But while the triumph of evangelicalism brought Quakers into closer contact with other middle-class Dissenters, older tendencies persisted in muffled form. Distrust of formal theology and doctrinal statement, rejection of ‘‘bibliolatry,’’ and reliance on the ‘‘Inner Light’’ revealed to the individual as the basic source of spiritual guidance, the habit of religious tolerance, all these prepared the way for a further momentous shift in the last decades of the century. Evangelicalism was supplanted by liberal theology as Quakers embraced the findings of modern biblical criticism, rejected the latent Calvinism of the evangelicals, and began to show a sympathetic interest in non-Christian religions, especially the Eastern faiths, which possessed mystical traditions similar to those of the early Friends.Ω The traditions and religious principles of the Quakers throw light on certain characteristic attitudes that mark Tylor’s work. He made little effort to disguise his dislike of systematic theology for the restraints it imposed upon intellectual freedom, or the distrust of theologians, which went along with it. His reflexive anticlericalism was, if anything, even stronger than Max Müller’s, and his cynicism about ecclesiastical institutions at least as acute. But while both men displayed an intense antiformalism, ultimately rooted in traditional Protestant theology, only Müller sought to balance this with an equally intense Romantic theism. In contrast, as Tylor moved away from the religious faith in which he had been brought up, he cultivated an increasing attachment Edward B. Tylor | 75

to rationalism and to the belief that science alone held the key to progress. Science had long been viewed by Quakers as a worthy intellectual activity, and their schools celebrated the study of nature as well as other ‘‘useful’’ and ‘‘practical’’ pursuits in contrast to the ‘‘frivolous’’ and ‘‘pagan’’ learning that prevailed in Anglican institutions.∞≠ Tylor never formally identified himself as an agnostic, but the conclusions that must logically be drawn from his theories, and indeed the whole tenor of his thought, make it extremely difficult to place him in any other camp. This is not to say that his evolution toward agnosticism was purely painless. Beneath the calm, dry rationalism of his prose, a reader can sometimes detect a note of anxious fascination in descriptions of occult or mystical experiences. It may be that Tylor had paid a psychic price for his loss of religious faith and that his identification with scientific naturalism therefore became all the more precious to him.∞∞ Tylor’s occasional references to his own religious background reveal curiously mixed feelings. Certainly he was conscious of his heritage as a member of the middle-class Nonconformist elite and proud of the independent liberal traditions of the Friends.∞≤ Describing with approval the new spirit of tolerance toward non-Christians that the writings of Max Müller and others were likely to bring about, he pointed to the fact that the ‘‘Quakers of the old days’’ had preached that ‘‘the goodness of the Almighty was never narrowed to a race or a sect.’’∞≥ Even so, he looked upon the Quakers’ history of self-imposed isolation with an odd mixture of affection and contempt. The distinguishing ‘‘peculiarities’’ of customs, language, and dress that prevented them from ‘‘melting into the general population’’ made them objects of curiosity to the scientific mind. Such groups offered the ‘‘spectacle of a phase of religious life, which, though dwindling away,’’ seemed to have been preserved at least temporarily ‘‘for the edification of students of culture.’’∞∂ These remarks suggest one very personal source for Tylor’s celebrated concept of ‘‘survivals,’’ defined as ‘‘processes, customs, opinions, and so forth, which have been carried on by force of habit into a new state of society different from that in which they had their original home, and . . . thus remain as proofs and examples of an older condition of culture out of which a newer has been evolved.’’∞∑ As a Dissenter, Tylor was virtually barred from attending university; thus he was free to pursue his own interests rather than concentrating on the requirements of a classical education. Like many other scholars who came from Nonconformist backgrounds, he developed a rigorous program of self- education; his reading lists focused on geology, archaeology, travels, linguistics, history, folklore, and philosophy. Many years later at Oxford, he would 76 | Edward B. Tylor

‘‘boast that he had never sat for an examination in his life, and had arrived at a professorship notwithstanding.’’∞∏ The trip to the Americas, where Tylor first came in contact with an exotic culture, was an extension of the process of self-education. In the spring of 1856, having traveled for the better part of a year in the United States, Tylor ended up in Havana, where he met Henry Christy, fellow Englishman, fellow Quaker, and amateur archaeologist.∞π His new friend’s enthusiasm stimulated Tylor’s own interest in ‘‘antiquities’’ and ethnological research, and the two men decided to travel to Mexico together. The fruit of that excursion, Anahuac, is primarily a travel narrative with no claims to be a systematic ethnographic study. It is, nevertheless, a very revealing document for the insights it affords into Tylor’s attitudes toward the non- European cultures that he was to spend the rest of his life studying. The overriding tone is one of an easygoing, almost unconscious, sense of superiority. Although he judged the Mexicans to be generally dishonest and lazy, he was clearly fascinated by their ways and extremely sensitive to the cultural differences between Indians, Europeans settlers, and ‘‘half-castes’’ and to the tensions that resulted from them. It is curious, given his position in the history of social evolutionary thought, that Tylor seems to have been more pre- occupied with the stagnant or declining aspects of Mexican culture than with those which might have suggested the possibility of improvement. His criteria for a progressive society were basically utilitarian, and Mexico conspicuously failed the test. Remarking on the contrast between the splendid churches in the rural villages and the miserable huts that surrounded them, Tylor could not restrain his sarcasm: ‘‘We thought of Mr. Ruskin, who has somewhere expressed an earnest desire that all the money and energy that England has wasted in making railroads, had been spent in building churches; and we wished he had been here to see his principles carried out.’’∞∫ But the social commentary was incidental to Tylor’s real interests—the monuments and artifacts left by the ancient Mexicans. Given the nature of his early training and associations, it is understandable that at first he should have been primarily concerned with material culture and the influence of physical environment on the development of a civilization. The years when Tylor was working up his notes on the Mexican excursion were ones in which research in many different fields seemed to be converging on the problem of the antiquity of the human race and the course of its development. In addition to the contributions of Darwin and the geologists, 1858 and 1859 witnessed dramatic archaeological finds; at Brixham Cave in Devon, flint tools were found along- Edward B. Tylor | 77

side the bones of extinct animals; the discoveries of Boucher de Perthes, which pointed to the same conclusions but had earlier been derided, were confirmed by a group of British scientists. Europeans were intrigued with the image of their prehistoric ancestors, which now as never before took on definite features and a distinct outline.∞Ω Through Christy, Tylor was kept abreast of archaeological developments while also learning from his brother Alfred’s geological expertise, but the reading he undertook after returning from Mexico was not confined to these subjects. Indeed, he was influenced by a wide range of traditions, and not always obviously compatible ones. He read and admired the advocates of positivist sociology—Comte, Buckle, J. S. Mill, G. H. Lewes—and agreed with them that a science of society should aim at ‘‘the induction of general laws.’’≤≠ But during the early 1860s, Tylor also became deeply interested in the German historical and philological traditions.≤∞ He wrote an enthusiastic review of Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language, prefacing his critical remarks with a detailed summary of the history of the subject designed to introduce it to a Victorian audience. He also began to read the works of German ethnologists and culture historians, such as Adolf Bastian, Theodor Waitz, Moritz Lazarus, and Hermann Steinthal. Probably many of Tylor’s key concepts could be traced to his German reading. The evidence of comparative philology seems to have reinforced his leanings toward progressive evolutionism, and the concepts of ‘‘psychic unity’’ and ‘‘elementary ideas’’ which figured prominently in his thought are associated with Volkerpsychologie, the study of cultures as expressions of collective psychology. But Tylor’s ability to blend and harmonize not only the theories and conclusions but also the underlying spirit of inquiry in each of these fields was a major source of his strength. Primitive Culture, his most ambitious book, was in many ways similar to the type of history practiced by Buckle, universal in scope and laying special emphasis on the law-bound character of social development. Yet reviewers were gratified to note that Tylor wrote ‘‘more like a historian’’ than a scientist.≤≤ His attentiveness to the particular and the concrete contrasted sharply with the excessively abstract quality, not to mention the dogmatic tone, which marred Buckle’s work in the eyes of many readers. Tylor’s treatise was a powerfully persuasive synthesis in which the hallmarks of science—systematic treatment, a high level of generalization, and clear nomothetic purpose—were accompanied by masses of detailed evidence and enriched by the workings of a sensitive historical consciousness. Tylor’s development as a theorist of social evolutionism followed a dis- 78 | Edward B. Tylor

cernible pattern. Initially, he was most impressed with the evidence for progressive evolution of technology and material culture. During the early 1860s, when he was immersed in German scholarship, he became convinced that language also offered support for the ‘‘progression theory.’’ This was an important breakthrough for Tylor because it meant that the ideal realms of thought and symbolic communication were as law-bound, and therefore as subject to scientiﬁc understanding, as the material realm of technology.≤≥ Finally, in the period after 1866, he turned to the problem of an evolutionary treatment of religion and morals; indeed, this area now became his central concern. After the publication of Early History of Mankind in 1865, Tylor began to work out his ideas on the development of religious concepts in a series of articles which appeared both in popular journals such as the Fortnightly Review and in specialized publications such as the Journal of the Ethnological Society. The separate threads were drawn together and the ﬁnal version of his theory was presented in its entirety in Primitive Culture. Although it contained discussions on such topics as children’s games and counting methods, the development of religious ideas, or the ‘‘primitive spiritualistic philosophy,’’ dominated the book. Seven of the nineteen chapters were devoted to the theory of ‘‘animism,’’ and most of the remainder dealt with related subjects.

Science and Academic Reform Tylor’s preoccupation with religion, somewhat remarkable in a work osten- sibly devoted to the history of all aspects of culture, may have stemmed less from a purely internal growth of ideas than from shifting currents in the surrounding intellectual atmosphere. Though the religious crisis was a many- layered problem that affected the cultural life of the entire Victorian period, the decade after 1860 was especially critical for the relationship between theological traditionalists on the one hand, and on the other, those who sought to undermine or at least severely restrict the intellectual status and authority of theology, and consequently the institutional support and cultural authority of the Church. Darwin’s theory of evolution cast doubt not only on the accuracy of Genesis, but also on the ultimate compatibility of theology and natural science. As George Stocking has observed, ‘‘what was at first simply a fault line between different religious points of view within science widened into what seemed to many a chasm between science and religion.’’≤∂ The polemical exchanges that followed the publication of Origin of Species in 1859 soon came to embrace a number of issues that had more to do with Edward B. Tylor | 79 cultural politics than with any strictly scientific question. The defenders of Darwin were able to capture the moral high ground by presenting their case as the defense not only of a particular scientific theory but also of freedom of intellectual inquiry per se.≤∑ This feature of the controversy was further highlighted by the furor over the publication of Essays and Reviews in 1860. To the conservatives who wished to see the contributors punished, the issue may have appeared to be one primarily of ecclesiastical discipline; the expression of certain views was held to be incompatible with the calling of an Anglican clergyman. But for many, like Tylor, who stood outside the Church, the case was one in which those who advocated ‘‘free inquiry’’ and ‘‘the acquisition of new knowledge, even at the expense of the old,’’ were victimized by ‘‘theological fury.’’≤∏ Primitive Culture appeared at the end of a decade of open conflict, but the book could hardly be described as a manifesto of militant agnosticism. In- stead, Tylor sought to show how in most cases religious beliefs had given way gradually, almost imperceptibly, in the face of increasing scientific knowledge. It was perhaps natural that the representatives of the old order should for a time resist the inevitable, but the entire course of mankind’s cultural history told against them; in the magisterial sweep of Tylor’s narrative, the futility of resistance stood revealed for what it was.≤π But while Tylor adopted a reasoned and moderate tone, his polemical purposes could scarcely be doubted, for, as he later declared: ‘‘Theologians all to expose,—’Tis the mission of Primitive Man.’’≤∫ Primitive Culture was thus a contribution to the conflict between science and religion. The opponents, however, were not two abstract forces, but two different groups within the educated elite of Victorian society—those who argued for movement toward a more scientific culture, with all the institutional reforms such a change would involve, and those who sought to defend the status quo. This debate and its consequences were in turn part of a broader reordering of British culture, the history of which has been recounted in a number of important studies.≤Ω One crucial aspect of this transformation was the rising influence of natural science, entailing, first, efforts to ‘‘improve the professional status of scientists,’’ and second, the proliferation of professional disciplines that adopted the intellectual model of the sciences as their guide. The drive for professionalization meant that scientists began to close ranks, to promote the image of themselves as an elite based on ability and specialized knowledge. Consequently, scientific societies that awarded membership on scholarly achievement rather than social status were founded, 80 | Edward B. Tylor

while the demand to have one’s work judged by qualified peers rather than the general public led to the establishment of professional journals. Meanwhile, new fields such as sociology, psychology, and, of course, anthropology sought the status of independent disciplines, while older ones such as history were recast in a more scientific mold. All of these tendencies found expression in the university reform movement that swept over Oxford and Cambridge in the second half of the century. The reform campaigns drew on many sources, not all of them directly connected with the rise of the sciences, but the scientists and their allies played a crucial role. Their aim was to harness the wealth of the universities, not only endowments, but also the less tangible resources of influence and prestige, to support the acquisition and dissemi- nation of new, specialized knowledge. The movement produced enormous changes. An academic career structure came into existence, one that emphasized original research over the teaching of undergraduates. The ranks of the professoriate were greatly expanded as new disciplines sought and won academic recognition. Finally, the universities ceased to be the cornerstones of the ecclesiastical culture system as religious tests were abolished and theology became a separate discipline rather than an umbrella under which all branches of learning were grouped.≥≠ The reception of Primitive Culture—Tylor was made a Fellow of the Royal Society on the strength of it—put its author in an advantageous position to advance the fortunes of his chosen discipline. This aspect of his career can be read as a case study in the professionalization of Victorian science. Even more important, however, it further clarifies his role as an ally of those who wanted to enhance the authority of science and scientists in modern British society. Tylor actively promoted the welfare of the various learned associations to which he belonged. As early as 1862, he began to attend meetings of the Ethnological Society. Founded in 1843, it was an offshoot of the Aborigines’ Protection Society (APS), which in turn was an instrument of the antislavery movement and in which Quaker influence was particularly strong. The parent organization had long supported efforts to obtain information about native peoples in areas coming under European domination, but the founders of the Ethnological Society hoped to separate themselves from the self-consciously humanitarian aims of the APS and to project instead an image of pure science unmixed with ideological or philanthropic motive.≥∞ The Ethnological Society was succeeded by the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1873, and Tylor twice served as president of this new society, first in 1879 and again in 1891. During his term of office, he not only sought to raise funds for scientific expeditions, Edward B. Tylor | 81 but also campaigned vigorously for a measure of government support for the organization. Casting envious eyes on the Berlin Anthropological Association, Tylor noted that it was subsidized and ‘‘provided with rooms by the state,’’ while its English counterpart, whose ‘‘practical value’’ for colonial administra- tion was almost limitless, could not even count on being ‘‘properly housed.’’≥≤ Tylor worked equally hard to obtain independence and academic recognition for his field. For example, he was a leader of the movement to establish a separate section for anthropology at the British Association for the Advance- ment of Science. His efforts on behalf of anthropology at Oxford began in 1883 when he was appointed Keeper of the University Museum. It appears that Max Müller used his influence to bring Tylor to Oxford, an ironic circumstance in view of the philologist’s reputed hostility to anthropology.≥≥ In any case, Tylor began to offer lectures soon after his arrival, and one year later he became a Reader in anthropology, finally arriving at a professorship in 1896. In this way, anthropology benefited from the expansion of faculty positions at the university level that took place at Oxford after 1882. Yet, as R. R. Marett, Tylor’s successor at the university, pointed out, it was not until the older man was about to retire that ‘‘the teaching of Anthropology was organized on more than a nominal basis.’’≥∂ Not only was it impossible to earn a diploma in the subject, but it was not even offered as a separate examination field; students could take it only in conjunction with another branch of science such as morphology or geology. Tylor launched a number of campaigns to improve the status of his subject, but on each occasion the opposition proved too strong. A number of different reasons were given—one opponent objected that ‘‘there was no ‘central idea’ in anthropology.’’≥∑ But Tylor himself was convinced that the resistance came from an unholy alliance between ‘‘classical men’’ and ‘‘theologians.’’≥∏ His supporters both inside and outside the university were equally convinced that the ‘‘old theological intolerance’’ lay behind the check suffered by his plans.≥π Tylor’s perception of the situation may have been colored by his own image of theology as the eternal enemy, but assuming that at least some reality lay behind his charges, an interesting irony presents itself. He had argued in Primitive Culture, if only in a rather oblique fashion, that the advance of positive knowledge must automatically produce a diminution of the intellectual terrain available to religion. Furthermore, he had maintained a lofty, above-the-battle tone that acted to forestall any suspicion that science had been lowered to the service of polemic. But as his experiences at Oxford seemed to demonstrate, it was one thing to herald the demise of theology and 82 | Edward B. Tylor

quite another to tangle with its human representatives. In the overall scheme of the history of culture, religion might be giving ground continuously and more or less painlessly to science, but in the world of academic politics, changes seldom came without a ﬁght, and the outcome of each new battle was far from predetermined.

The Comparative Study of Progress The portions of Tylor’s writings which treat the history of mythology and religious thought have received less intense scrutiny from modern scholars than his theoretical and methodological contributions, which are thought to have broader or more general significance for the social sciences. These include his authoritative defense of social evolutionism, his definition of culture, his use of the so-called ‘‘comparative method,’’ and the concept of ‘‘survivals’’ formulated by him in order to explain certain apparent anomalies which threatened to undermine the progressionist view of history. Each of these points has received detailed examination elsewhere; they are considered here only briefly as the essential background to an understanding of Tylor’s theory of primitive religion.≥∫ Social evolutionism of the Victorian type fell before a barrage of criticism during the post–World War I years. The accusations brought against it were many, but the most significant included the ethnocentrism inherent in nineteenth-century notions of progress, the purely conjectural character of historical reconstructions based on the ‘‘comparative method,’’ and finally, the distortions that resulted from overconfident reliance on supposed ‘‘laws’’ of society and human psychology.≥Ω Tylor’s brand of developmentalism did not escape these defects, but it is generally conceded to have been less rigid and more cautiously articulated than many others.∂≠ Unlike either Comte or Spencer, for example, Tylor chose not to dogmatize on the necessity or inevitability of progress. He acknowledged the limitations of the ‘‘comparative method’’; the conditions of contemporary ‘‘savagery’’ revealed nothing about the very first human societies.∂∞ And despite his confidence in the ultimate unity of both the natural and the social sciences, Tylor made no attempt to reinforce his theory by linking it to any particular biological or physical laws. Yet the caveats and disclaimers served not to undermine but to strengthen Tylor’s profession of faith in progress. The ‘‘main tendency of culture from primaeval up to modern times’’ had been sure but gradual advance in all areas, not simply in the practical arts of everyday life.∂≤ ‘‘On the whole,’’ Tylor Edward B. Tylor | 83

believed, ‘‘the civilised man is not only wiser and more capable than the savage, but also better and happier, and . . . the barbarian stands between.’’∂≥ His serene confidence in the superiority of European culture must strike most modern readers as either naive or arrogant: but it is important to understand that his Eurocentrism was more than simply a bias for it played a crucial methodological role in his theory. Tylor used the standards of taste, morality, and education which prevailed among the Victorian middle classes as a principle of organization and a means by which to measure varying ‘‘grades of civilization’’; the ‘‘wildly heterogeneous’’ materials with which the ethnologist had to deal could be sorted and labeled as ‘‘high’’ or ‘‘low,’’ ‘‘crude’’ or ‘‘refined,’’ ‘‘advanced’’ or ‘‘degraded,’’ according to how closely they corresponded to contemporary Western models.∂∂ Of course, most of the claims advanced in the name of the ‘‘progression theory’’ were recognized as no more than mere truisms. Few would quarrel with the argument that European society, for example, had evolved from relatively simple conditions but a few steps removed from those typical of ‘‘savage’’ life. The question, rather, was whether ‘‘savages’’ themselves had evolved, or could evolve, without the assistance or example offered by higher civilizations. One school of thought, the most influential representative of which was Richard Whately, archbishop of Dublin, responded to the question with an emphatic negative; there was no known instance, he claimed, in which a genuinely ‘‘savage’’ tribe had raised itself to a civilized condition solely by its own efforts.∂∑ Whately is usually taken as the most typical if not the best representative of the ‘‘degeneration theory,’’ but in fact there were many varieties of degenerationism. It could be argued that the earliest men had lived at a level of material comfort and intellectual and artistic attainment roughly equivalent to those of barbarous peoples. Modern societies could then be divided into those that had advanced from these original conditions and those that had instead suffered a grievous decline.∂∏ Since the argument ultimately relied on scripture, it was a relatively simple matter for Tylor and other social evolutionists to pose the dispute as one between the upholders of a critical and secular history on the one hand and the forces of theological obscurantism on the other. ‘‘It would be inexcusable,’’ Tylor warned, ‘‘if students who have seen in Astronomy and Geology the unhappy results of attempting to base science on religion, should countenance a similar attempt in Ethnol- ogy.’’∂π Nevertheless, it was possible to hold the position, assumed by some to be the orthodox one, that non-Christian religions were the decayed and mutilated remnants of the true revelation, without denying the possibility that 84 | Edward B. Tylor

in all other areas—language, arts, philosophy—independent progress was the rule. Degenerationism stood as one example of skeptical protest to the dominant Victorian belief in automatic progress, and the fact that it was so closely associated with conservative theology may partly explain why the possible objections to evolutionism as a theory of cultural or social change were not more aggressively advanced. For as Max Müller and, later, Andrew Lang discovered, to offer a critique of developmentalist assumptions was to risk being cast into the outer darkness normally reserved for the defenders of Genesis. It was within this context—for degenerationism experienced something of a vogue during the first half of the century—that the status of the ‘‘comparative method’’ appeared for the first time seriously threatened. The equation between the primitive in form and the chronologically primitive, which had been an essential tool of historical sociology since the eighteenth century, required buttressing against the doubts raised by antiprogressionist arguments. Tylor’s theory of survivals addressed this need. The proper interpretation of elements of folk culture—customs, games, proverbs, and so on—which appeared merely quaint and curious in a modern setting had long been a recognized problem among antiquarians. By comparing these anomalous beliefs and practices with the material remains unearthed by archaeologists, Tylor was able to treat them as the decayed remnants of an earlier stratum of thought. Furthermore, by identifying corresponding elements in ‘‘savage’’ cultures where, however, their meaning was clear and they continued to serve a rational function, he strengthened the presumption of a close resemblance between ‘‘savage’’ societies and those of prehistoric Europe. In this way, the ‘‘comparative method’’ was vindicated, and the anthropologist acquired a new tool by which the beliefs of the primitive and the civilized were made to explain each other.∂∫ The outlines of Tylorian anthropology, barely suggested in Anahuac, were developed and refined in the Early History of Mankind, and finally received their full definitive expression in Primitive Culture. Neither of the first two books can be said to contribute significantly to the anthropological study of religion; nevertheless, they both contain hints of what was to come. Anahuac is especially interesting in that, since the book was a travelogue rather than a scientific treatise, the author dispensed judgment with uninhibited firmness and made little attempt to rein in his prejudices. Tylor attributed the ‘‘backwardness’’ of Mexican society largely to the influence of the Catholic Church. He took a kind of grim satisfaction in relaying tales of rascally priests who Edward B. Tylor | 85

fomented civil disorder and encouraged their parishioners to cheat foreign businessmen, especially British ones. Even worse than the dishonesty and ambition of the clergy, however, was the fact that ‘‘their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico.’’∂Ω The ‘‘monastic’’ system of education, stressing theology, casuistry, and metaphysics and spurning all ‘‘positive knowledge’’ other than mathematics, was a formidable barrier to efforts at progressive reform.∑≠ De- spite these thoughts on the influence of the Church on social development, however, it is clear that at this point Tylor was neither probing deeply nor asking critical questions about the origins and meaning of religion as an institution. There is even less direct comment on religion in Tylor’s Early History of Mankind, his first truly scholarly work. Modestly characterized by its author as a ‘‘miscellaneous’’ collection of essays, the book displays greater thematic unity than such a description suggests, but it is more of an exploration of selected themes in anthropology than a single sustained argument.∑∞ It contains discussions on the origins of language, on the various methods for interpreting myths, and on the problem of distinguishing between those cases in which similar customs and artifacts are derived from a common source and those in which they have been independently invented. But while disclaiming any intention of providing a systematic treatment of the development of morals and religion, Tylor did address the subject indirectly in his discussion of the customs and superstitions surrounding ‘‘Images and Names.’’∑≤ His thesis is that primitive man suffers from a confusion between objective and subjective, one that explains not only the majority of practices categorized as magic or sorcery but also the earlier stages of religious development, especially fetishism and idolatry: ‘‘Man, in a low stage of culture, very commonly believes that between the object and the image of it there is a real connexion, which does not arise from a mere subjective process in the mind of the observer, and that it is accordingly possible to communi- cate an impression to the original through the copy.’’∑≥ This primal confusion between subjective and objective was an abundantly fertile source of error; magical techniques drew their justification from it, but it was also the bedrock underlying a great many irrational beliefs, mythological and religious, as well as the more obviously superstitious. There are certain passages where Tylor seems to suggest the existence of a significant disparity between the ‘‘mental processes’’ of the primitive or ‘‘savage’’ and those of the modern European. But while his language on this point is not 86 | Edward B. Tylor

absolutely clear, the tendency of his argument was to attribute the difference not to an inherent defect in the reasoning powers of the ‘‘savage’’ but rather to differences of education. Despite an isolated reference to ‘‘races at a low mental level,’’ his overall conclusion was that ‘‘the accumulated experience and the long course of education of the civilized races, have brought them . . . to reverse the opinion of the savage.’’∑∂ No aspect of Tylor’s work has been more vigorously criticized than his ‘‘intellectualist’’ explanation of magical and ‘‘superstitious’’ practices. Accord- ing to Paul Bohannan, ‘‘Tylor’s basic mistake,’’ was that he ‘‘sought to discover what was ‘in the mind’ of another man rather than the substantive statements and the social and psychic background of communications.’’ The reason for this, Bohannan believes, was that ‘‘Tylor wrote before psychoanalysis and philosophy taught us that mere discovery of error was not enough, but that we must learn what it is that error portends.’’∑∑ The point is well taken, but the problem with such criticism lies in the assumption that Tylor’s single overriding aim was to provide a scientific description of other cultures more primitive than his own. Certainly, that was part of his intention, but it must be recognized that Tylor meant to impress upon his Victorian readers some fairly specific and pointed lessons about their own culture and inherited beliefs. It follows, then, that he was less interested in the ‘‘social and psychic background of communications’’ than in tracing the continuities between primitive beliefs and those of his own contemporaries. From this point of view, the ‘‘mere discovery of error’’ represented more than a first step; it was a significant achievement in its own right.

Social Evolutionism and the Mission of Anthropology In 1865, Tylor had predicted that ‘‘nothing short of a history of Philosophy and Religion would be required to follow . . . out’’ the results of the primitive ‘‘inability to separate . . . the external object from the mere thought or idea of it in the mind.’’∑∏ His masterwork, Primitive Culture, went a long way toward accomplishing this end. The title, however, is in one respect somewhat misleading since the book is a history, not just of ‘‘primitive culture,’’ but of human culture viewed as a single whole. True, most of the examples and illustrations are drawn from societies that, if not strictly ‘‘primitive,’’ were at least considered less advanced than nineteenth-century England. These include contemporary ‘‘savage’’ tribes, the ancient civilizations of both the Old World and the New, and the European peasantry. Nevertheless, the problem Edward B. Tylor | 87

upon which Tylor sought to fix the attention of his readers was ‘‘that of determining the relation of the mental condition of savages to that of civilized men.’’∑π Tylor’s emphasis on the continuity between ‘‘savage’’ and ‘‘civilized’’ was much more than a necessary corollary to his commitment to progressionism and desire to defeat the degenerationists. As J. W Burrow has pointed out: ‘‘Evolutionary social theory was an attempt to answer not merely the question ‘how does it work?’, or . . . ‘how does it happen?’, but also ‘what shall we do?’ ’’∑∫ In the case of Primitive Culture, this concern is especially prominent. The author was at pains both to defend a progressive evolutionary interpretation of the human past, and to draw out the practical implications of such a reading. Though Tylor’s famous description of anthropology as a ‘‘reformer’s science’’ is often quoted with evident approval, its significance is seldom explored in any depth. ‘‘Not merely as a matter of curious research,’’ he insisted, ‘‘but as an important practical guide to the understanding of the present, and the shaping of the future, the investigation into the origin and early development of civilization must be pushed on zealously.’’∑Ω Of course, the picture of prehistoric man constructed by himself and others would take its ‘‘proper place in the general scheme of knowledge.’’ But that was not the end of it, for ‘‘to establish a connexion between what uncultured ancient men thought and did, and what cultured modern men think and do, is not a matter of inapplica- ble theoretic knowledge.’’ Armed with the insights derived from ethnological investigations, the educated reformer would be able to test the elements of his own culture by asking, ‘‘how far are modern opinion and conduct based on the strong ground of soundest modern knowledge, or how far only on such knowledge as was available in the earlier and ruder stages of culture where their types were shaped.’’∏≠ At times it would be the ‘‘painful’’ duty of anthropology ‘‘to expose the remains of crude old culture which have passed into harmful superstition, and to mark these out for destruction.’’∏∞ This last quotation should not be misunderstood. Certainly Tylor was eager to ‘‘expose’’ those ‘‘superstitions’’ and occult beliefs that lingered on the margins of Victorian society. He denounced spiritualism and astrology and used his ethnological expertise to attack what he considered to be the crackpot utopianism of the advocates of socialism and communism.∏≤ But the reformer’s searchlight was by no means fixed solely on such obvious targets; it was directed at some of the ‘‘deepest and most vital points of our intellectual . . . state’’ and, above all, at the religious condition of Tylor’s own society.∏≥ 88 | Edward B. Tylor

But Tylor’s approach to this sensitive terrain was characteristically circum- spect. While owning to a ‘‘sense of attempting an investigation which bears very closely on the current theology of our own day,’’ he assured his readers that ‘‘direct controversial argument’’ had been avoided ‘‘as far as possible.’’∏∂ Presumably, they could be trusted to draw their own conclusions for, ‘‘while dwelling at some length on doctrines and ceremonies of the lower races . . . it has not seemed my proper task to work out in detail the problems thus suggested among the . . . creeds of Christendom. . . . Educated readers possess the information required to work out their general bearing on theology while more technical discussion is left to professional theologians.’’∏∑ This last remark is surely tongue-in-cheek; though Tylor referred on more than one occasion to the advantages that theologians would derive from studying the beliefs of ‘‘the lower races,’’ his argument, taken in its entirety, pointed to the day when theologians would find themselves altogether without employment. Tylor’s strictures on contemporary religion should not be interpreted simply as a protest against the bigotry of the anti-Darwinians or as a plea for more liberal interpretation of doctrine, or as an attack on the formalism of High Church Anglicanism. The message of Primitive Culture is not just that theological conservatives are on the wrong side of history, but that all of theology is an outmoded form of philosophy, part of the ‘‘crude old culture’’ which is destined to disappear. It may be that Tylor’s reluctance to engage directly in antireligious polemics helped to obscure the sweeping nature of his argument. His reticence can be attributed in part to his notion of the behavior appropriate to a scientist. Looking back from the vantage point of the 1890s, Tylor deplored the fact that, in the decade after 1859, some anthropologists had been eager to use their science as a ‘‘battering-ram against theological strongholds.’’ Science ‘‘should be a dispassionate means of investigating truth,’’ and it must inevitably be harmed by any attempt to ‘‘capture’’ it ‘‘for polemical purposes’’ and use it as ‘‘a mere arsenal of anti-religious weapons.’’∏∏ But perhaps such statements should not be taken at face value. The real target of these remarks was the Anthropological Society, the president of which, James Hunt, was a radical racist who accused his opponents (of whom Tylor was one) of holding to a belief in the common origin of mankind out of a lingering deference to theological orthodoxy. The society itself had an ‘‘unsavoury reputation for godlessness,’’ and its leaders were suspected of courting public outrage for its own sake.∏π In any case, the context of these and similar remarks makes it clear that Tylor was thinking primarily of the bearing of anthropology on the question of ‘‘man’s place in the universe’’ and the controversies on that subject Edward B. Tylor | 89 aroused by Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Indeed, Tylor went out of his way in Primitive Culture to avoid making a direct connection between his material and Darwin’s theory, though his sympathies for it are evident. When the issue was no longer, however, ‘‘man’s place in the universe,’’ but the place of religion in history, Tylor showed no hesitation to use his science as a ‘‘battering-ram.’’ Before going on to examine the specific content of Tylor’s theories on the development of religion, it might be helpful to consider the broader impact of his methodology. Beyond the initial assertion that it was possible to pursue systematic study of religious doctrines and ceremonies without ‘‘entering into questions of their authority and value,’’ there were other features of his method that might be expected to disconcert the orthodox.∏∫ Tylor’s definition of culture, much celebrated by later anthropologists, also held implications for the study of religion. Taken ‘‘in its wide ethnographic sense,’’ culture could be described as ‘‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’’∏Ω Such a definition might seem to call for a static holistic investigation of the cultural institutions within a particular social system as the most appropriate methodology. Tylor, of course, did not take his work in that direction since he was concerned with what Herbert Spencer called ‘‘Social Dynamics’’ rather than with ‘‘Social Statics.’’ But the implication that religions could be treated as collections of beliefs, customs, and ‘‘other capabilities and habits’’ ran counter to the usual tendency to treat them as integrated systems or ‘‘complex wholes’’ in their own right. It followed that when Tylor employed his rather diffuse notion of what constituted a religion, not within a single society, but over the entire course of human history, he arrived at comparisons and juxtapositions which, when not positively subversive, were certainly unconventional. This point can be clarified by comparing Tylor’s methods with those of Max Müller. While the latter allowed himself to make broad generalizations on the characteristics of all religions, he preferred to restrict detailed comparisons to those faiths that had emerged within the same linguistic family—such as Hinduism and Buddhism—and thus could be assumed to share a historical connection, however remote. Tylor, in contrast, while acknowledging that language played a role in shaping beliefs, was convinced that Müller had exaggerated its importance. Moreover, the anthropologist was deeply impressed by evidence for the independent invention of similar customs, myths, and artifacts in cases where there was little likelihood of past contact between the societies in question. Without ignoring the possibility that some cultural parallels were the result of diffusion through temporary contact or migration, 90 | Edward B. Tylor

Tylor nevertheless argued that, in many cases, ‘‘this similarity and consistency’’ could be traced ‘‘to general likeness in human nature . . . and to general likeness in the circumstances of life.’’ According to this principle of ‘‘psychic unity,’’ ideas and practices that appeared to correspond could legitimately be compared even when no direct historical link between them could be assumed: ‘‘Little respect need be had in such comparisons for date in history or for place on the map; the ancient Swiss lake-dweller may be set beside the mediaeval Aztec, and the Ojibwa of North America beside the Zulu of South Africa.’’π≠ The dissimilarity of method between the two investigators was bound to produce strikingly different results. Müller tended to look at the development of Christian doctrine within the traditional framework of the Semitic religions. Such an approach was not likely to startle even the most conservative theologians, although Müller’s specific conclusions sometimes did so. Tylor, on the other hand, never hesitated to place Christian beliefs in company with those of the ‘‘lowest savages.’’ To take one of many instances, he analyzed the tradition of Christ’s descent into Hell in connection with stories of similar journeys by mythological heroes of the Zulus, Maoris, and Algonquins.π∞ In case after case, Tylor seemed positively to avoid the common procedure of tracing concepts through ancient Judaism into Christianity. One obvious consequence was that the allegedly ‘‘savage’’ origins of Christian ideas were highlighted, and Tylor reminded his readers that ‘‘whatever bears on the origin of philosophic opinion, bears also on its validity.’’π≤ A further result, less apparent but perhaps ultimately more significant, was that by following Tylor’s evolutionary model, the ‘‘culture scientist’’ could now impose his own definition on the object of his investigations. Christianity, or any other religion, need no longer be regarded as a single complex system, but could be treated instead as a bundle of concepts, myths, and ceremonial activities, each of which could be abstracted from the whole and studied without reference to it. The meaning of these elements was thus no longer dependent on their relation to each other, but could more accurately be determined by comparison with similar ideas and practices drawn from apparently unrelated religious systems.

The Evolution of God Tylor approached the problem of deﬁnition indirectly, turning ﬁrst to the perennial question of the universality of religion. ‘‘Are there, or have there been,’’ he asked, ‘‘tribes of men so low in culture as to have no religious Edward B. Tylor | 91

conceptions whatever?’’ The possibility could not be denied, and any theory which sought to explain modern civilization as the product of evolution through a series of stages provided a ‘‘theoretical niche’’ at the lowest stage ready and waiting for ‘‘prae-religious’’ tribes to occupy it. It was all the more striking, then, that ‘‘as a matter of fact the tribes are not found,’’ yet Tylor firmly insisted that such was the case.π≥ His conclusion here differed sharply from that of John Lubbock, a friend and fellow proponent of social evolutionism with whose views Tylor was generally in enthusiastic agreement. In his Origin of Civilization, which appeared about the same time as Primitive Cul- ture, Lubbock had argued that the evolution of religion could be traced through no fewer than six well-marked phases. At the lowest level, one would find atheism, defined not as ‘‘a denial of the existence of a Deity, but an absence of any definite ideas on the subject.’’π∂ Tylor could not agree with Lubbock’s contention that there were ‘‘races of men altogether devoid of religion,’’π∑ maintaining that the relevant ethnographic evidence was, without exception, defective, and that the conclusion was based on an excessively narrow definition of religion. These were his chief objections. And yet, despite his reference to the ‘‘theoretical niche’’ waiting for irreligious societies, Tylor may have been uncomfortable with the idea of an absolutely primitive condition of atheism, for according to his narrative scheme, civilization seemed to be evolving toward atheism, not away from it. To say that primitive societies were universally religious was not to say that all future societies would be, and Tylor pointedly reminded his readers that the mere fact that an idea had been universally accepted in the past was no reason why it should continue to command assent.π∏ In any case, Tylor proposed to clear the ground by offering as a ‘‘minimum definition of Religion,’’ the ‘‘belief in Spiritual Beings,’’ which he called ‘‘Ani- mism.’’ Tylor’s discovery could be said to represent a ‘‘minimum definition’’ in two different senses. On the one hand, it was the form of religion that characterized the lowest known human societies, so that even if it was not the very first, one could at least assume that it had appeared at a very early stage of mankind’s development. On the other hand, it was also the ‘‘minimum’’ which had to be present in order for any system of ideas to be characterized as a religion: it was, in fact, the substratum or ‘‘groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion.’’ππ The distinction between these two meanings is important because it is sometimes claimed that Tylor’s theory described the evolution from animism through polytheism to monotheism.π∫ This is misleading, for according to Tylor’s definition, animism and monotheism (or polytheism) are by no means mutually exclusive terms. To be sure, the ‘‘savage’’ could be called an 92 | Edward B. Tylor

animist, but so too could the Christian, or Moslem or Buddhist, even though their creeds went beyond animism to add other beliefs. Though animism was ‘‘one consistent doctrine,’’ it could be further divided into ‘‘two great dogmas’’: first, ‘‘concerning souls of individual creatures, capable of continued existence after the death or destruction of the body’’; second, ‘‘concerning other spirits, upward to the rank of powerful deities.’’πΩ The idea of individual souls had emerged first, Tylor argued, and in time had given rise to ‘‘the wider doctrine of spirits,’’ but the ideas of ‘‘souls, demons, deities and any other classes of spiritual beings,’’ were ‘‘conceptions of similar nature throughout.’’∫≠ Before going on to trace the elaborate permutations and transformations undergone by this ‘‘primitive doctrine,’’ Tylor paused to consider its origins, to offer an account of how men first came to believe in ‘‘apparitional souls.’’ This discussion could be considered the centerpiece of Tylor’s theory; certainly, a close reading of it provides a key to his polemical strategy. Tylor’s initial premise is that animism is a product of ‘‘human reason,’’ a ‘‘theory devised by ‘‘ancient savage philosophers’’ to account for certain rudimentary observations. ‘‘It seems as though thinking men,’’ while as yet at a very primitive level of culture, were, nevertheless, ‘‘deeply impressed by two groups of biological problems.’’ First of all, what was responsible for the difference between a living body and one that was dead or that mimicked death in a state of sleep or trance? Second, what was the true nature of the human images seen in dreams and hallucinations? With marvelous economy, primitive thinkers made each of these ‘‘two groups of phenomena’’ help to explain the other ‘‘by combining both in a conception . . . of a personal soul or spirit.’’ The soul was usually thought of as a ‘‘thin unsubstantial human image,’’ responsible for ‘‘life and thought’’ in its owner and ‘‘independently possessing’’ his or her ‘‘personal consciousness and volition.’’ It could appear ‘‘to men waking or asleep as a phantasm separate from the body of which it bears the likeness,’’ and could even ‘‘enter into, possess, and act in the bodies of other men . . . animals and . . . things.’’ Though Tylor admitted that his description represented an ideal type or ‘‘standard’’ rather than a definition ‘‘of universal application,’’ yet these ‘‘opinions’’ would be found to prevail ‘‘world-wide.’’∫∞ The investigator must recognize, however, that it was ‘‘seldom . . . justifiable to consider’’ the ‘‘uniformity’’ of these beliefs ‘‘among distant races as proving communication of any sort.’’ They were not ‘‘arbitrary and conventional products,’’ but ‘‘doctrines answering in the most forcible way to the plain evidence of men’s senses,’’ and thus would rise up again and again, wherever ‘‘savage philosophers’’ pondered the mysteries of animation and consciousness.∫≤ Edward B. Tylor | 93

The doctrine of the soul was then a ‘‘theory,’’ and even though it stemmed from what Tylor perceived as an error in primitive reasoning, it was a theory that so admirably accounted for the facts that it became the nucleus of a ‘‘consistent and rational primitive philosophy.’’∫≥ Belief in a future life, for example, followed ‘‘almost necessarily’’ from the notion that the soul need not remain trapped in its owner’s body. In time, the simple idea of the personal soul grew into a complex and comprehensive explanatory system; any phenomenon which caught the attention of the primitive thinker and which seemed to require an assignable cause could be regarded as the work of spiritual beings. These, though no longer thought of as the apparitions of men and women, were nevertheless modeled on that original conception: ‘‘It seems as though the conception of a human soul, when once attained to by man, served as a type . . . on which he framed . . . his ideas of spiritual beings in general, from the tiniest elf that sports in the long grass up to the heavenly Creator and Ruler of the world, the Great Spirit.’’∫∂ As Tylor turned to each new branch of animistic philosophy, one theme was sounded over and over again. However ‘‘far-fetched’’ and ‘‘absurd’’ savage beliefs might seem to us, we must accept them as ‘‘rational speculations,’’ comprehensible and even admirable products of the human intellect when judged within their own cultural setting.∫∑ The surprising ‘‘regularity with which such conceptions repeat themselves over the world’’ must leave little doubt that they proceeded from the most fundamental processes of the mind and were called forth by imperative intellectual needs. One instance he developed in elaborate detail was the ‘‘possession theory of disease,’’ the belief that sickness, either mental or physical, resulted from an invasion of the body by an alien spirit. T. H. Huxley would later use this same example in his attack on the evil social effects of traditional Christian belief, an indictment that went beyond the ever-vulnerable target of popular Roman Catholic superstition into the very heart of Christian theology, the Gospels themselves.∫∏ Tylor’s rationalistic scorn was as easily roused as Huxley’s, but by employing the concept of ‘‘survivals’’ he was able to explain how beliefs which seemed out of place in the modern world were actually the hollow remnants of theories that at one time had served a genuine purpose. This was true of the possession theory in the ages prior to the development of modern medicine, when men and women were relatively helpless, after all, in the face of suffering that could be neither prevented nor cured. It not only allowed them to make sense of disease, but it provided a rationale for action that, if therapeutically inadequate in other ways, was at least emotionally satisfying.∫π 94 | Edward B. Tylor

It is fully consistent with his notion of animism as a rudimentary natural philosophy that Tylor should have declined to ‘‘touch on the purely moral aspects of the religion of the lower races.’’ But he went even further, maintaining that the most primitive forms of religion possessed little or no moral content: ‘‘The conjunction of ethics and Animistic philosophy, so intimate and powerful in the higher culture, seems scarcely yet to have begun in the lower.’’∫∫ This conclusion suggested in its turn that the authority of moral standards was no more irrevocably tied to theology now than it had been in the past. As Tylor observed, here taking a rare departure from the assumption of unilinear progress that guided his argument: ‘‘[T]he philosophic schools which from classic times onward have rejected the belief in a future existence, appear to have come back by a new road to the very starting point which perhaps the rudest races of man never quitted. At least this seems true as regards the doctrine of future retribution, which is alike absent from the belief of classes of men at the two extremes of culture.’’∫Ω Admittedly, it was difficult to predict the full social consequences of lapsed credence in the ‘‘life hereafter’’ since even ‘‘unbelievers in this second life share ethical principles which have been more or less shaped under its influence.’’ Even so, Tylor speculated that, ultimately, a ‘‘positive morality’’ could ‘‘of its own force control the acts of men.’’Ω≠ If Tylor could detect signs that the connection between morality and belief in spirits, a relatively late development in history, was beginning to unravel, he maintained that in other equally important ways the present was a crucial time for the fortunes of animism. As the ancillary doctrines that posited the existence of plant and animal souls began to lose their force, ‘‘Animism . . . seems to be drawing in its outposts, and concentrating itself on its first and main position, the doctrine of the human soul.’’ Tylor’s use of the military metaphor was not merely ornamental, for according to the narrative pattern underlying his history of culture, the most advanced civilizations had already entered the initial phases of a climactic struggle between ancient beliefs and modern positive science. Thus, in the concluding words of volume 1, the lines of battle were drawn: ‘‘The theory of the soul is one principal part of a system of religious philosophy, which unites, in an unbroken line of mental connexion, the savage fetish-worshipper and the civilized Christian. The divisions which have separated the great religions of the world into intolerant and hostile sects are for the most part superficial, in comparison with the deepest of all religious schisms, that which divides Animism from Materialism.’’Ω∞ One after another, those areas of thought that had once lain within the realm of animistic beliefs had come under the purview of modern science. A Edward B. Tylor | 95

most instructive example was the ‘‘ancient doctrine of the eclipse,’’ which one could trace ‘‘upward from its early savage stages,’’ when it was thought that the sun was being devoured by celestial monsters, on ‘‘to the period when astronomy claimed it.’’ Moreover, ‘‘to follow the course of the ensuing conflict over it between theology and science—ended among ourselves but still being slug- gishly fought out among less cultured nations,’’ was to ‘‘lay open a chapter of the history of opinion, from which the student who looks forward as well as back may learn grave lessons.’’ A more recent instance, and one of ‘‘the deepest significance,’’ was the development of a psychology ‘‘which has no longer anything to do with ‘soul’ ’’ but which treats ‘‘the phenomena of life and thought, the senses and the intellect, the emotions and the will, on a groundwork of pure experience.’’Ω≤ Thus, the ‘‘first and main position’’ of animism was itself finally coming under attack. Yet, in one sense, the language of struggle and conflict was misplaced, for according to the logic of Tylor’s argument, modern science was not so much the conqueror of animism as its legitimate heir. Given that the doctrine of the soul and its numerous offshoots had been formulated by ancient ‘‘savage philosophers’’ to account for observations of natural phenomena, it followed that the needs which this primitive theory had once addressed could now more adequately be met by positive science.Ω≥ Nor should it be assumed that the secularization of thought among the educated proceeded from ‘‘wanton incre- dulity or the decay of the religious temperament.’’ Rather, the doctrines of animism had been ‘‘gradually superseded by views more in accordance with modern science, to the great gain of our health and happiness.’’Ω∂ Tylor employed his concept of survivals to reinforce the claim that the true historical relationship between theology and science could best be described as the gradual replacement of the former by the latter. In one instance, he compared animistic beliefs as they were found among ‘‘races within the limits of savagery,’’ with their counterparts among ‘‘barbaric and cultured nations.’’ In the most primitive societies, the doctrine of spirits was ‘‘worked out with remarkable breadth and consistency.’’ At a higher level of culture, however, one could observe scientific theory and the more or less hollow remnants of spiritualistic beliefs coexisting in a system that offered superior explanations of natural processes but that was at the same time less consistent and coherent than pure animistic philosophy.Ω∑ It was as if positive science, growing up within the confines of animistic thought, had at a certain point begun to exert intolerable strains on the older system, distorting a key term here and dislodging a concept there until a once symmetrical and harmonious structure 96 | Edward B. Tylor

had fallen into a state of near collapse. The solution—one implied by Tylor’s notion of anthropology as a ‘‘reformer’s science’’—was not to attempt a reno- vation of the old structure but to identify those survivals, the debris of animism, which threatened to impede the progress of scientific thought and ‘‘mark them out for destruction.’’ At this point, the significance of Tylor’s repeated assertions that primitive theology is rational becomes evident. Working from the assumptions of progressive evolutionism, Tylor, like Comte before him, was able to pay a relativistic tribute to the positive role that theology had played in mankind’s intellectual development. The primitive philosophical speculations that had given rise to animism were neither accidental nor without positive purpose. The consequences of this were twofold. On the one hand, in an age that was notably unsympathetic to the eighteenth-century variety of free thought, Tylor’s affirmation that early religion was indeed the product of noble and admirable human traits seemed preferable to theories, like that of Hume, that identified base emotions such as fear and greed as the original sources of theism. At the same time, however, his argument left no doubt that the future lay not with the survivals of animism nor with its modern adherents, but with those who now had the power to satisfy the elementary human need for a rational philosophy of nature. In this way, Tylor’s vindication of the intellectual virtues of early theology became a sort of guarantee for the legitimacy of its successor.

The Critical Reception The public response to Primitive Culture was on the whole extremely favorable. The sheer magnitude of Tylor’s project, his evident industry and erudition, and the vast weight of evidence that he brought to bear on the problem at hand were acknowledged to be deeply impressive. Not surprisingly, many readers interpreted the work as a triumphant extension of Darwinian theories to the realm of human culture; this despite the fact that Tylor’s evolutionism owed a great deal more to the sociology of Comte than to any biological models. A critic for the Examiner claimed that ‘‘he has done for the spirit world what Mr. Darwin has done for the animal.’’Ω∏ Though this assessment was superﬁcial at best, there can be no doubt that Tylor’s work and that of other social evolutionists derived much of their impact from the sense that developmental theories were at last closing in on a true understanding of the history of life. As a contribution to the study of religion, Primitive Culture almost immediately established a new model—setting aside much previous debate on the Edward B. Tylor | 97

objects and character of primitive beliefs; answering, at least tentatively, the question of the universality of religion; and relegating to a secondary position Max Müller’s philologically based method in favor of a more eclectic approach drawing on archaeology, folklore, and traditional history. Several of the younger generation of anthropologists who dominated the scene in the last quarter of the century, including Andrew Lang and J. G. Frazer, came to the subject through Primitive Culture. A factor often cited by them as one of Tylor’s major contributions was that he had ‘‘liberated’’ the study of religion and mythology from ‘‘the despotic control of Comparative Philology,’’ which had ‘‘threatened to leave any student of the subject not specially trained in the niceties of linguistic science on the wrong side of the pale.’’Ωπ In fact, Tylor’s work hardly amounted to a campaign against Müller. It was left to Andrew Lang to assume that challenge. Nevertheless, Tylor provided an alternative by directing attention away from the supposed ‘‘supremacy’’ of language ‘‘over primitive thought or imagination’’ and back toward associa- tionist psychology. The force of his example ensured that the study of religion would take place, at least for a time, within the framework of positivist assumptions, that the role of language would be played down, and that ‘‘savage’’ cults would be treated as mines from which supposedly primitive concepts could be abstracted, collected, and compared. What was not altered, but instead was reinforced by Tylor’s success, was the conviction that if one could only isolate the first stirrings of religion in the primitive human mind, one would have discovered the secret of its essential meaning and purpose. It was to be expected that Max Müller would reply to the criticisms, in some instances overt but more often only implied, that were contained in Tylor’s work. Thus, while his specific references to Tylor were almost always favorable, Müller became a persistent critic of the methods and assumptions of the ‘‘anthropological school’’ of which Tylor was the most distinguished and influential leader. In some of his earlier writings, Müller had spoken favorably of ethnological researches and stressed the complementarities between his own work and that of those who studied ‘‘savages.’’ In the Introduc- tion to the Science of Religion (1873), for example, he acknowledged the value of anthropology for the ‘‘student of religion.’’ He even made a tentative attempt to employ primitive folktales as illustrations alongside the more familiar classical myths.Ω∫ In time, however, he adopted a far less accommodating stance. To some extent, he was merely reacting to the attacks on his own theories launched in 1873 by Andrew Lang, at that time an ardent disciple of Tylorian methods. There is no doubt that Lang’s onslaughts seriously diminished 98 | Edward B. Tylor

Müller’s influence, a fact that partly explains the querulous tone of the latter’s replies. But Müller’s supposed hostility to anthropology should not be exaggerated. If one recalls his role in bringing Tylor to Oxford, as well as his interest in the works of such early ‘‘fieldworkers’’ as Codrington, Calloway, and Gill, there is less temptation to regard his critique of anthropology as a purely defensive reaction. In any case, modern anthropologists would later echo many of Müller’s criticisms of the Tylorian approach. He complained about cavalier attitudes toward native languages and tried to convince the anthropologists that much of the material on which they relied was at best unreliable and perhaps even useless because the observers had seldom mastered the idiom of those whose customs and ideas they tried to relate. ‘‘If a man shrinks from writing on the Veda because he does not know Sanskrit,’’ Müller warned, ‘‘he should tremble whenever he writes the names of Zulus, unless he has some idea of what Bântu grammar means.’’ΩΩ Even more potentially damaging, however, was Müller’s attack on the anthropologists’ conception of the ‘‘savage’’ and their assumption that he could be made to stand in for primitive man in the attempt to reconstruct the history of the earliest human societies. He drew attention to fact that the only real point of unity for the many vague definitions of ‘‘savagery’’ was the ethnocentric bias or outright racism implicit in all of them: ‘‘Of course the Spaniards called the inhabitants of America savages, though it is now quite generally conceded that the Spanish conquerors supplanted a higher civilization than they established. The first discoverers of India called the naked Brahmans savages, though they could hardly have followed them in their subtle arguments on every possible philosophical topic. Even by us New Zealanders and Zulus are classed as savages. And yet a Zulu proved a match for an English bishop.’’∞≠≠ Müller’s examples also exposed one of the weakest points in the ‘‘comparative method’’—the presupposition that technologically inferior societies were bound to be less advanced at every level of culture. What the notion of the ‘‘savage’’ lacked in definitional precision, however, was of less concern than the sweeping use to which it was put in the construction of social evolutionary theories. Müller sought to demonstrate ‘‘how untenable is the theory which would boldly identify the modern savage with primitive man, and how cautious we ought to be whenever we take even a few hints here and there from degraded tribes of the present day in order to fill out our imaginary picture of the earliest civilization of our race.’’ Even for a cautious investigator, it was all too easy to fall into the habit of regarding the Edward B. Tylor | 99

‘‘savage’’ as one who had been ‘‘salted and preserved for us during many thousands of years, so that we might study in him the original type of man.’’∞≠∞ The absence of written records could not be taken as evidence of a slower rate of change over time; indeed, the languages of primitive peoples contained evidence of rich and complex histories. ‘‘Nothing can be more interesting,’’ Müller acknowledged, ‘‘than the study of races who have no literature . . . only let us remember that these races and their languages are as old as the most civilized races and their languages. . . . If we in England are old, the Fuegians are not a day younger.’’∞≠≤ But most critics who reviewed Tylor’s works were not troubled by the analogy between the earliest men and modern ‘‘savages.’’ Those who rejected this parallel most often based their opposition on some version of degenerationism, usually linked explicitly to theology.∞≠≥ In contrast, those journals known for a liberal scientiﬁc outlook either accepted the analogy without question or praised Tylor for ﬁrmly establishing its legitimacy. The review in Nature, for example, hailed Primitive Culture as marking ‘‘an epoch in the annals of the philosophy of history,’’ for its decisive argument in favor of the ‘‘comparative method.’’∞≠∂ This in turn was recognized as the linchpin for a progressive evolutionary account of the history of civilization. Even so, most reviewers of Primitive Culture were less interested in social evolutionism per se than in Tylor’s treatment of the development of religion and morals. And, as had been the case earlier with Max Müller’s work, they dwelt especially on those sections of the book in which the contemporary relevance was apparent or in which Tylor acted as prophet on the future course of cultural change. The fundamental premise of his interpretation—that apparently similar beliefs could be arranged typologically without regard for their original historical context—met with little opposition. There was, however, some confusion over how far Tylor had intended to go in integrating Christian doctrine into an evolutionary account. The Examiner saw the work as an attempt to ‘‘trace philosophically the history of spiritual beings from the soul of man upward to the Great Deity,’’ and recommended it to any theologian wishing to surpass his colleagues ‘‘in comprehension and grasp of doctrine.’’∞≠∑ On the other hand, the reviewer for the Spectator seemed to feel that Tylor had not been explicit enough and expressed disappointment over his failure to ‘‘grapple’’ with the question of whether Christianity itself was ‘‘a development,’’ that is, ‘‘a natural shoot from the original stock of human nature.’’∞≠∏ Tylor’s insistence that religion and morality had no original connection 100 | Edward B. Tylor

seems to have been particularly disturbing, for it was both widely noted and sharply criticized. In the eyes of the unambiguously orthodox, the observation that Tylor treated religion purely as an ‘‘intellectual development’’ made further refutation almost superfluous.∞≠π Others were not so dismissive. The Contemporary Review, for example, devoted its entire notice of Primitive Cul- ture to the work’s bearing on moral philosophy. The author, Henry Calder- wood, pointed out the inherent conflict between Tylor’s recognition of the consistent and compelling nature of primitive ethical standards and the commitment to progressionism that inclined him to doubt the possibility of a high morality coexisting with a low level of civilization. Because of this progressionist bias, Calderwood argued, Tylor was unable to recognize that animistic beliefs contained ethical elements, especially the notion of a future life, from their very inception.∞≠∫ Only a handful of the more discerning critics took note of what was potentially most explosive in Primitive Culture—the author’s evident conviction that all forms of animistic belief from the lowest to the highest were nothing more than pure illusion. The implications of Tylor’s position were clearly spelled out in a review of the third edition that appeared in the Critical Review of Theological and Philosophical Literature, a specialized journal devoted to ‘‘scientific theology.’’ ‘‘That the forms into which all religious beliefs gravitate in the lower grades of culture are gross and corrupt is a matter of experience,’’ the author acknowledged, ‘‘but the hypothesis that there is no objective reality behind any of them is one of the gravest moment.’’ For, if Tylor was correct in his description of animism as a continuous development ‘‘from the philosophy of the savage thinker to that of the modern professor of theology,’’ the only logical conclusion was that ‘‘the Christian idea of the soul’’ was itself no more than ‘‘a sublimated survival.’’∞≠Ω Earlier critics had made similar observations. In a review that was on balance quite favorable, the critic for the Edinburgh Review pronounced Tylor’s discussion of primitive religion as ‘‘the least satisfactory’’ section of the book. ‘‘Mr. Tylor’s argument . . . appears to be that, inasmuch as the belief in spiritual existences prevails universally amongst savage and barbarous tribes, such beings do not exist.’’ This was ‘‘no doubt a very summary turning of the tables on the old position, that the universal and irresistible character of this belief . . . is an evidence of its objective validity,’’ but, after all, there seemed to be ‘‘more reason in the old position than in the new.’’ It could not be assumed that ‘‘savage’’ beliefs lacked ‘‘essential rationality and objective worth’’ simply because those who held them were men of ‘‘low civilization.’’ Transfer Tylor’s Edward B. Tylor | 101

argument to ‘‘the region of science,’’ and one would have to reason that ‘‘because particular effects have been referred by the rude and ignorant to false and preposterous causes, therefore no such thing as real power or effective causation exists in nature.’’∞∞≠ The suggestion that Tylor’s most far-reaching conclusions owed more to unexamined bias than to a strict line of reasoning was echoed in a review written by Alfred R. Wallace which appeared in the Academy. But where the Edinburgh Review had adopted a tone of dry mockery and indulgent reproof, Wallace mounted a harsh and bitter attack. The source of his anger was almost certainly Tylor’s campaign against Victorian spiritualism, a phenomenon that Tylor regarded as a prime example—isolated, it is true, but nonetheless deplorable—of the revival of savage beliefs in the midst of the most advanced modern culture. Wallace, who was coauthor of the theory of evolution by natural selection, had by the mid-1860s abandoned his earlier agnosticism in favor of an idiosyncratic theism linked to the spiritualist movement and the growing interest in psychical research. Tylor and Wallace had in fact corresponded on the subject in 1866–67, and Tylor had even attended a séance sponsored by Wallace.∞∞∞ Though he maintained friendly relations with some of the most eminent figures of the Victorian scientific establishment and was greatly respected by them, Wallace baffled and at times irritated these same men by his refusal to conform to the cultural values of scientific naturalism. This rebellion was exemplified not only by his faith in spiritualism, but also by his increasingly vocal doubts as to whether the scientific and technological triumphs of his century had led to genuine moral and intellectual improvement for society as a whole.∞∞≤ Both themes were prominent in his critique of Primitive Culture. Wallace attacked the complacency, as it seemed to him, of Tylor’s assumption that the material superiority of contemporary Western civilization indicated a corresponding superiority in all other realms. His central complaint, however, was that Tylor had refused even to entertain the possibility that the instances of supernatural or psychic phenomena that crowded the pages of the chapters on animism might have some basis in fact. Only when ‘‘the so-called superstitions of mankind . . . are recognised as possible realities, and studied with thoroughness and devotion and a complete freedom from foregone conclusions,’’ would it be possible ‘‘to expect a sound philosophy of religion or any true insight into the mysterious depths of our spiritual nature.’’∞∞≥ The most interesting feature of Wallace’s review, however, was his claim that the defects of Primitive Culture were symptomatic of the ‘‘one-sidedness,’’ not only of an 102 | Edward B. Tylor

individual mind, but of the entire mentality characteristic of the scientiﬁc elite to which Tylor belonged. Where ‘‘modern science’’ could offer ‘‘no intelligible account’’ of inconvenient facts, Wallace charged, it ‘‘ignored’’ them ‘‘as much as possible,’’ and he compared the response to spiritualism to the ridicule heaped on the proponents of mesmerism. The suggestion, of course, was that Tylor, like others with whom Wallace had constantly to debate, had allowed his implicit materialism to obstruct the disinterestedness vital to any truly scientiﬁc inquiry. Wallace was not the only one to draw attention to the cluster of values that underlay Tylor’s argument and colored his vision of the future course of intellectual change. Max Müller noted that the evolutionary model of ‘‘the anthropological school’’ implied a ‘‘natural and necessary progress to polytheism, monotheism and atheism,’’ and he, of course, vigorously opposed the linkage made between progress and atheism.∞∞∂ But it was possible to interpret Tylor’s prophecies in terms not restricted to religion. As one critic remarked:

In his casual references to such subjects as poetry, philosophy, and theology, he can hardly conceal his belief that they have had their day, and must be effaced or absorbed by the advancing tide against which they are for the time struggling, as he evidently thinks, in a confused and helpless manner. With all his habitual caution and reserve of statement, he almost unconsciously suggests that these subjects have now very much lost any claim they may once have possessed on the serious attention of enlightened and cultivated minds.∞∞∑

Although the author of this passage was guilty of exaggeration, he did capture the ﬂavor of some of Tylor’s less guarded pronouncements. The world to which Primitive Culture pointed was one disenchanted and demythologized by the combined triumphs of modern science and commonsense rationalism. If the precise outlines of Tylor’s vision were only vaguely discernible, it was in any case a world likely to provide a less than congenial atmosphere for those who had not, like Tylor, ‘‘been completely swept into the strong modern current of scientiﬁc research.’’ But some readers applauded Tylor’s broader cultural message. The reviewer for the journal Nature, for example, expressed the conviction that anthropology would help ‘‘to ascertain what ought to be introduced and what banished’’ from Victorian intellectual life. This critic summarized the history of thought as revealed in Primitive Culture with the help of a rather homely metaphor: ‘‘Civilised knowledge, as a whole, may be likened to an old canoe, Edward B. Tylor | 103

of which no plank nor nail is the same as when she started on her first voyage, and myth to the old timbers and metal which once formed a part of her, but have now been some lost, some metamorphosed into wholly different shapes, some utilised again in the construction of other vessels.’’∞∞∏ Perhaps the most remarkable feature of this passage is the way in which it echoes Tylor’s own gradualism, his stress on the continuity between old and new. In his description of the rise of modern science, growing up within the framework of primitive animistic ‘‘philosophy,’’ Tylor portrayed cultural evolution as a process of step-by-step replacement and, moreover, one that was essentially painless because nothing of value to mankind was ever really lost but only ‘‘metamorphosed into . . . different shapes.’’ This was no doubt an extremely comforting message for Tylor’s allies in the drive to empower scientists and the philosophy of scientific naturalism at the expense of Church and theology. Though the explanation of religion as an erroneous natural philosophy was hardly an original thesis, Tylor developed it with such skill and persuasiveness that it became more or less a commonplace for scientific publicists such as Tyndall, Huxley, and Spencer. The ultimate triumph of true natural philosophy was thus guaranteed, of course, along with its validity as the answer to a universal human need. But the implications went even further: Tylor’s argument suggested that the loss of faith that troubled contemporaries was, when viewed in the proper historical light, not a genuine loss at all. The battle was almost over, and the vanquished were about to discover that their sense of defeat was only a self-imposed illusion. ∂ Andrew Lang The Antipositivist Critique

In the end, the most searching critique of Tylor’s message came not from Christian thinkers or their allies, but from one of his own earliest and most ardent disciples, Andrew Lang. But then Lang was always somewhat out of place in the role of ‘‘jackal’’ to Tylor’s ‘‘lion.’’∞ Tylor had journeyed from liberal Dissent via an intentionally modern, science-oriented program of self- education and had arrived finally at an alliance with cultural reformers of agnostic and positivist inclinations. Lang pursued a more traditional literary and humanistic course. Starting with a conventional liberal education, he had followed through with a stint as a classical scholar at Oxford, first as an undergraduate and then as a Merton College Fellow, eventually settling in London to become one of the last of the Victorian men of letters, a literary gadfly with something amusing to say on almost any topic, from modern novels and poetry to Scottish history, the ‘‘Homeric question,’’ ghost stories, Joan of Arc, cricket, golf, and fishing. Unlike his mentor’s, Lang’s interest in anthropology was focused almost exclusively on folklore, mythology, and primitive religion; his concern with physical anthropology or the history of material culture was only incidental. Nevertheless, beginning in 1872, when he first read Primitive Culture and met its author at Oxford, Lang considered himself a devoted student of Tylorian anthropology. His first contribution to the field was an attempt to construct an alternative to Max Müller’s theory of mythology with Tylor’s concept of survivals as its methodological centerpiece. But in 1898, after more than twenty years of labor in the cause of a science of cultural evolution, Lang startled his fellow anthropologists and folklorists with an explicit renunciation of Tylor’s theory of the evolution of modern Andrew Lang | 105

religion from primitive animism. Though he continued to portray himself as a respectful if somewhat wayward disciple, Lang’s apostasy went far beyond the scope of minor disagreement on technical or methodological issues. His attack on Tylor’s theory, which by that time had acquired the status of an orthodoxy among anthropologists, was simultaneously an attack on its underlying ideological commitments—above all, the conviction that religion was but a stage in the history of human consciousness, one that the most advanced civilizations were rapidly outgrowing. Lang was and is sometimes dismissed as a dilettante, and he did dabble in an odd assortment of topics—folklore, fairy tales, psychic phenomena, Scot- tish history, and general literary criticism, as well as anthropology. In fact, though, there are unifying themes to be found in much of Lang’s work. Although he embraced the new discipline of anthropology and rejected traditional Christian theology (at least for a time), Lang was a late-century Ro- mantic and cultural conservative who rejected the Victorian worship of progress in favor of a sympathetic celebration of the forces that resisted change and maintained cultural traditions. Though he may rightly be classed as a maver- ick or peripheral figure in the history of anthropology, Lang is a key figure in the history of the science of religion because the Romanticism and distrust of positivism and materialism inherent in his outlook were much more widely shared among his fellow workers in the field than is usually recognized.

From Scotland to Oxford Lang’s passionate interest in folktales and customs grew out of seeds planted in early childhood.≤ He was born in Selkirk, in the heart of the Scottish border country in 1844, the eldest son of John Lang, a solicitor and sheriff-clerk of the town. Lang’s grandfather had been a close friend of Sir Walter Scott during the latter’s term as sheriff of the county, and the two families were in fact distantly related, a great source of pride to the young Andrew. Scott’s medievalism and his example as one of the ﬁrst major novelists to demonstrate the potential literary uses of Scottish folklore had a lasting impact on Lang, despite his later tendency to deplore literary ‘‘contamination’’ of oral traditions.≥ But earlier yet he had come under the spell of the generations of unknown poets who had created the fairy tales told by his nurse and the chapbooks that ‘‘could be bought for a penny apiece,’’ and that recounted the legends of Robert the Bruce, William Wallace, and Rob Roy. These latter did not, however, ‘‘awaken a precocious patriotism,’’ but only strengthened the child’s inclination to feel 106 | Andrew Lang

‘‘more at home in Fairyland than in his own country.’’ It is no accident that the only thing close to an autobiographical statement that Lang ever produced was entitled Adventures among Books, for his most vivid memories were of the stories he had read or heard; they seemed more real to him than everyday events. He believed himself ‘‘born to be, from the ﬁrst, a dweller in the cloister of a library.’’∂ Though Lang was prone to idealize childhood and could write quite sentimentally about childish virtues, his account of his own boyhood is far from sunny; instead, it is haunted by a sense of dark fears that welled up spontaneously within him and a melancholy that seemed to have no deﬁnite cause. He tells how as a young boy he adopted, ‘‘as a sort of motto in life,’’ the following verses from ‘‘The Bride of Lammermoor’’:

Look not thou on beauty’s charming, Sit thou still when kings are arming, Taste not when the wine-cup glistens, Speak not when the people listens, Stop thine ear against the singer, From the red gold keep thy ﬁnger, Vacant heart, and hand, and eye, Easy live and quiet die.

It ‘‘seems a queer idea for a small boy,’’ Lang admitted, but ‘‘the rhymes, unlearned, clung to my memory; they would sing themselves to me on the way to school.’’∑ This rather chilling reminiscence reveals a salient feature of Lang’s personality and one that had a noticeable effect on his work: a sense of interior vacancy and desolation was in him quite close to the edge of consciousness and could surface at any time with paralyzing force. But this memory of self- revelation also has a more positive signiﬁcance, for it may have contributed to his notion of genius, which in turn played an important role in his ideas about the relationship between folklore and high culture. For Lang, ‘‘genius’’ was a natural property of childhood, in effect a childlike form of consciousness. But it was not so much supposed childish innocence or even the sheer vivid strength of childhood imagination that appealed to him. Rather it was the unself-conscious unity of the child’s mind, the ability to make penetrating intuitive judgments and to perceive the kinship between the self and other orders of being; children live in a world where imagination has not yet been separated from everyday experience and conﬁned to the task of artistic pro- Andrew Lang | 107

duction. They can actually ‘‘see’’ the supernatural beings that people their thoughts and have not yet come to regard intuition as synonymous with whim or fancy.∏ Lang’s collections of fairy tales (The Blue Fairy Book, The Red Fairy Book, etc.) are the only publications by him still widely available to modern readers. They could be seen as contributions to a new movement in children’s literature associated with Charles Kingsley and George MacDonald which emerged after 1860 and created an ‘‘alternative world of faerie’’ in service of an incarnational theology opposed to evangelical and Calvinist emphasis on the natural depravity of even the youngest children.π Lang’s own religious training was fairly typical for the time and place— nothing but the Bible or theological literature was to be read on Sundays— but it does not appear to have been pursued with much zeal or intensity. As an adult he regarded Scottish Calvinism with a mixture of incomprehension and exasperation, but he could not recall that it had made much impression on him as a child: ‘‘Unlike other Scots of the pen, I got no harm from ‘The Shorter Catechism,’ of which I remember little, and neither then nor now was or am able to understand a single sentence. . . . From most children, one trusts, Calvinism ran like water off a duck’s back.’’∫ Unlike some of his contemporaries, Lang did not take part in the revolt of conscience against the doctrines of predestination, election, and so on, nor did rejection of (or, more accurately, indifference to) orthodox dogma have any quality of personal rebellion against an overly strict upbringing. In 1861, Lang entered St. Andrews University, where he was to remain until 1863, years later remembered as ‘‘the happiest of my life.’’ Though he attained honors in every subject except mathematics, here as in his earlier schooling, Lang pursued an independent course whenever he could, devoting most of his spare time to poetry, folklore, and books on alchemy and magic. He also tried his hand at the occult arts under the guidance of such authors as Cornelius Agrippa, Trithemius, Petrus de Abano, and Michael Scott, but the results were ‘‘disappointing,’’ for ‘‘it soon became evident enough that the devil was not to be raised by their prescriptions.’’Ω After a brief stint at Glasgow, Lang won the Snell Exhibition, a prestigious scholarship to Balliol College, and he took residence in Oxford in 1864. A hardworking undergraduate in a college renowned for the serious intellectual purpose of its students, Lang soon gained a reputation for his ‘‘extraordinary power of disquisition.’’ But though he praised the Balliol tutors as ‘‘far the best in Oxford,’’ Lang sought no mentor and prided himself on being a ‘‘masterless man.’’∞≠ His own tutor was T. H. Green, who had won a following of devoted undergraduates with a system that combined German idealism and a rever- 108 | Andrew Lang

ence for the Christian ethical example (though not for Christian doctrine) into an antimaterialistic and anti-utilitarian philosophy of social progress. Lang admired his tutor’s ‘‘noble simplicity and rare elevation of character,’’ but he could not accept Green in the role of a ‘‘sultan of thought,’’ and could ‘‘never believe that ‘the Absolute,’ as the Oxford Spectator said, had really been ‘got into a corner.’ The Absolute has too often been apparently cornered, too often has escaped from that situation.’’ To a ‘‘mind already sceptical about masters,’’ Green was but ‘‘the last of that remarkable series of men . . . among whom Newman’s is a famous name, that were successively accepted at Oxford as knowing something esoteric, as possessing a shrewd guess at the secret,’’ but Lang came away convinced of the futility of the search for ‘‘some piece of knowledge, some method of thinking,’’ that would lead ‘‘to certainty and to peace.’’∞∞ These recollections were penned in 1891, and the dominant tone is one of cheerful resignation, but earlier reflections on a kindred subject speak of a sharper sense of regret. ‘‘No man can think of his own University days,’’ Lang wrote in 1879, ‘‘and not remember, with a twinge of the old pain, how religious doubt insists on thrusting itself into the colleges.’’ This was not the fault of any set of teachers or tutors; nothing less than ‘‘the modern historical spirit’’ was to blame. Oxford itself was ‘‘a lumber room of ruinous philosophies, decrepit religions, forlorn beliefs,’’ and the student was compelled to look back on ‘‘all the philosophic and many of the religious systems of belief which, in the distant and the nearer past, have been fashioned by men and have sheltered men for a day.’’ He was ‘‘taught to mark each system crumbling, to watch the rise of the new temple of thought on its ruins, and to see that also perish, breached by assaults from without or sapped by the slow approaches of Time.’’ And in the ‘‘long vista of failure thus revealed,’’ he came ‘‘to see that their systems were only plausible, that their truths were but half-truths.’’∞≤ These remarks are not explicitly autobiographical, and it is therefore difficult to determine how far they reflect Lang’s own experience, but when he speaks of ‘‘these doubts that weary, and torture, and embitter the naturally happy life of discussion, amusement . . . and study,’’ one catches a note of authentic individual feeling.∞≥ There is no evidence that Lang was a pious or devout Christian before coming up to Oxford, however, and it may be that if he did suffer a religious crisis of some kind while at the university, it was less a case of an abrupt break with doctrinal orthodoxy than of a gathering doubt that any center of meaning, any ‘‘royal road’’ to ‘‘peace and certainty,’’ could ever be found. Andrew Lang | 109

The ‘‘Divine Amateur’’? For a time it appeared that Lang might pursue an academic career at Oxford. He was elected to a fellowship at Merton in 1868 and entered into residence there soon afterward. It was during this period that anthropology, first encountered in the writings of Tylor and J. F. McLennan, began to attract him. Though the study of folklore and of the development of customs and myths was considered ‘‘generally unattractive’’ by his colleagues, these writings on ‘‘early marriage and early religion’’ came to Lang as a ‘‘revelation.’’∞∂ The groundwork for this discovery was Lang’s interest in European folk tales; now he began to pay attention to the similarities between this familiar material and the folktales of ‘‘savage’’ peoples, convinced that the study of folklore held ‘‘scientific’’ value as well as Romantic interest. The first yield of this new pursuit was the article ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ which appeared in the Fortnightly Review in 1873 and constituted the opening salvo in Lang’s attack on Max Müller’s theory of mythology. With this contribution, Lang appeared to be carving out a niche for himself as the man who would bring the insights of the latest scholarship in anthropology to bear on the traditional subject matter of classical studies. Lang left Merton in 1874, however, giving up his chances for an academic career. He had become engaged that year and was married in 1875, but it is unlikely that he left Oxford solely on that account for the college had recently liberalized its regulations on this point, and a limited number of married Fellows were now allowed to retain their positions. His facility with the pen made it possible for him to contemplate a career as an independent author, and he had begun writing regularly for the Academy before his departure from Merton. According to his biographer, Lang ‘‘never considered himself to be a scholar of the strictest academic type,’’ and the wide range of his interests— modern literature, classics, and history as well as the newer subjects of folklore and anthropology—would have made it hard for him to fall in with the growing trend toward scholarly specialization.∞∑ Still, in later years, Lang looked back with regret on his decision to leave Oxford; R. R. Marett recalled a conversation in which Lang protested: ‘‘If I could have made a living out of it, I might have been a great anthropologist!’’∞∏ Once established in London, Lang carved out a successful career as a ‘‘man of letters’’ in a cultural environment that was becoming increasingly uncon- genial to that calling as scholars and artists sought to establish their independence from the market of middle-class readers. Though his earliest journalis- 110 | Andrew Lang

tic pieces concerned literary subjects and European folklore, he eventually extended his range to include art criticism, sport, Scottish history, ‘‘savage’’ anthropology, and ‘‘psycho-folklore,’’ or the traditions surrounding ghost stories and other phenomena associated with ‘‘spiritualism.’’ His ability to dash off a piece on almost any subject in record time made him a highly sought- after contributor to both popular and specialized journals; he could write an article while attending a newspaper staff meeting or while waiting for his turn to bat at cricket and send it off to the printer ‘‘without a glance of revision.’’∞π The combination of incalculable wit and playful erudition that marked Lang’s essays won him something of a cult following in the early 1880s, and his style was so individual that even his unsigned articles were easily recognizable to devotees. Given the variety of his interests and the almost superhuman dimensions of his literary output—he was the author of more than one hundred books and thousands of articles—it is inevitable that much of his work, even at its most entertaining, was both trivial and superﬁcial. W. E. Henley’s description of Lang as ‘‘the divine amateur,’’ no doubt intended as a compliment at the time, has proved an effective weapon in the hands of unfriendly modern critics. Lang’s hostility, especially marked in his later years, to the naturalism and psychological realism of such novelists as Zola, Hardy, Henry James, and George Moore has hardly endeared him to literary critics, while those historians of anthropology whose primary aim is to celebrate the professionalization of their discipline are tempted to dismiss him as a popularizer.∞∫ Contemporaries too were apt to scold Lang for frittering away his considerable talents on a multitude of subjects, not all of them worthy of the attention he devoted to them. Several different diagnoses were offered. Rich- ard Whiteing, who had been his colleague on the Daily News, attributed Lang’s apparent dilettantism to the ‘‘melancholy cast’’ of his personality and claimed that ‘‘his boundless activities were but restless attempts to make the best of a bad job—existence.’’∞Ω And Richard Le Gallienne reported that ‘‘above all things Lang hated to seem to take himself or his work seriously.’’≤≠ Lang himself more than half-suspected that the same reasons which had led to him to choose his childhood ‘‘motto’’ were those that stood in the way of his ever becoming a successful novelist, despite several attempts. With all his talent, he could never be rid of ‘‘the irresistible desire to mock at himself, his work, his puppets and their fortunes.’’≤∞ Yet the view of Lang as ‘‘at . . . best . . . a gifted amateur and at . . . worst a polemical bore’’ is hardly an adequate assessment of his place in late Victorian Andrew Lang | 111 culture, at least as regards his work in anthropology and folklore.≤≤ For one thing, as Lang himself observed, it was not at that time possible to devote oneself full-time to anthropology unless, like Tylor, one had a source of independent income. Nevertheless, Lang’s work was taken seriously by Tylor, R. R. Marett, and other full-time anthropologists, and he devoted much of his spare time to his chosen subjects.≤≥ He was, for example, one of the founders and early presidents of the Folklore Society. Nor is it accurate to regard Lang solely as a popularizer. Certainly he did play that role, introducing the theories of Tylor, McLennan, and others to a much larger reading public than these men themselves would have been able to reach. One of his enterprises, a column for Longman’s Magazine entitled ‘‘At the Sign of the Ship,’’ served as a kind of folklore forum; more than half of the columns contained folklore entries, and Lang encouraged his readers to collect regional variants and send them on to him. But Lang’s more original work was also important; his theory of primitive ‘‘high gods,’’ for instance, continued to inspire research and debate well into the twentieth century.

Antipositivism as the Unifying Thread Beyond that, Lang’s work is interesting not only for the positive contributions that he made to anthropological thought, but because the concerns underlying his multifarious activities were symptomatic of doubts and anxieties that disturbed many late-Victorian thinkers as they contemplated the effects of secularizing trends on their own culture. Indeed, Lang’s scattered interests are not really as disparate as they appear at ﬁrst; there are unifying threads running through many of his essays on different topics. As one perceptive critic observed, ‘‘it is Mr. Lang’s way to devote himself to one subject almost exclusively, and bring that into connexion with all the many other subjects upon which he writes.’’≤∂ Most importantly, his thoughts on literature, mythology, religion, psychic phenomena, and the role of folklore in culture all found a common meeting ground in a fundamentally antimodernist perspective that began as little more than temperamental conservatism and nostalgia but, from the 1890s on, became an increasingly sharp protest against the optimistic creed of progress and the tyranny of scientiﬁc positivism. Lang was hardly a predictable conservative, but his tastes and distastes were colored by a longing for the past and a sense of being out of place in the modern world. He himself found it particularly telling that as a child his appetite for Romantic escapist literature was matched only by an equally 112 | Andrew Lang

intense hatred for ‘‘machinery of every description.’’≤∑ A fondness for lost causes revealed itself in a partiality for the Jacobites and a seemingly irrepress- ible urge to defend the honor of Mary Stuart.≤∏ But Lang’s conservatism was not consciously political; he had no taste for practical politics, and it was one of the few subjects that did not find its way into his writings. Instead, the past was for him a repository of superior moral and aesthetic values, an idealized realm of intensely felt experience and heroic virtue rooted in the secure permanence of an organic social order. While at Oxford, where he was good friends with Walter Pater, he had become an enthusiastic disciple of aestheticism. Though this was in part just ‘‘playing’’ the game of ‘‘keeping up with Culture,’’ Lang never dropped his attachments to his early heroes, Swinburne, Rossetti, and Morris.≤π The last, in particular, he regarded as ‘‘a benefactor almost without example,’’ to ‘‘all who desire the restoration of beauty in modern life,’’ and redemption from ‘‘the hideousness of modern industrial- ism.’’≤∫ Morris’s medievalism he rated superior to the ‘‘more genial, if more superficial, restoration by Scott’’ because the former had managed to recap- ture the dark violent intensity of the Middle Ages in a way that was ‘‘more intimate, more ‘earnest.’’’≤Ω In Lang’s ideal of the past, violence, the power of the irrational, and the dread of the supernatural were all emphasized, not toned down into a vision of a golden age of passive contentment, serene faith, and universal virtue. Lang was certainly capable of indulging in cultural nostalgia, but in his later years especially he became less inclined to look back on a dreamed-of past and more apt to use his conservative bent as a base from which to protest against the direction of late-Victorian culture, identifying ‘‘positivism’’ and the ‘‘new popular tradition’’ of ‘‘dogmatic materialism’’ as the gravest threats.≥≠ Without explaining precisely what he understood by either of these terms, Lang made it clear that he feared that the new urban democracy was giving birth to a culture that glorified a meager commonsense rationality as its highest intellectual value. Though this new ideology lacked any but the most superficial historical perspective, it was winning a spurious prestige through its association with the triumphs of natural science. Most of all, Lang feared that the dawning ‘‘positive’’ age must bring with it a final repudiation of the traditional sources of European cultural vitality, the heritage of myths and symbols, fundamentally religious in character, which had been preserved by the folk from earliest times and from which men of genius had drawn the raw materials to create high art and philosophy. ‘‘We owe all things,’’ he wrote, ‘‘to the people and to genius. The natural people, the Andrew Lang | 113

folk, has supplied us, in its unconscious way, with the stuff of all our poetry, law, ritual: and genius has selected from the mass, has turned customs into codes, nursery tales into romance, myth into science, ballad into epic, magic mummery into gorgeous ritual.’’≥∞ Lang’s concept of folk culture found an analogue on the level of individual psychology in his idea of the ‘‘X region’’ of human personality. Though he admitted some resemblance between this notion and the ideas of the ‘‘unconscious’’ and the ‘‘subliminal self’’ that were beginning to gain currency among psychologists at the end of the century, he preferred to conceive of the ‘‘X region’’ in anthropological terms. It was the source of ‘‘miracle, prophecy, and vision’’ from which ‘‘the great religious innovators and teachers’’ had drawn their power, but it was also part of our common human nature, a collection of little explored ‘‘faculties’’ that came into play in any experience of ‘‘the marvel- lous’’ whether one labeled that experience religious or ‘‘psychical.’’ The threat, then, was that the growing influence and militancy of scientistic ideologies, propelled by their eagerness to break away from the unenlightened superstitious past, would lead to the impoverishment of European culture and the neglect of ancient sources of meaning that could no longer fit within the rigid boundaries of the possible as defined by ‘‘current systems of materialism.’’≥≤ These concerns are hinted at in Lang’s numerous writings rather than drawn together in a fully developed argument. Nevertheless, they are central to reconstructing the context of his writings on religion and mythology, and help to account for some of the dramatic departures that occasionally baffled his friends, such as his venture into psychical research in the 1890s. These same concerns also influenced his thinking on literature. Lang’s notorious preference for escapist adventure stories (such as the novels of H. Rider Haggard) over the efforts of serious modern novelists has made him an object of scorn among students of literature in our own day, in part because he was a very influential critic whose review of a work could decisively affect its commercial fortunes.≥≥ But while it is true that Lang’s dislike of ‘‘realistic’’ fiction was motivated to some extent by revulsion against the unpleasant, the morbid, the (relatively) sexually explicit, that was not the whole story. Even those few modern scholars who have tried to assess Lang’s literary criticism with some sympathy have failed to notice his repeated complaints that naturalistic and realistic novelists were trying to introduce ‘‘a conception of modern literature as science in disguise.’’≥∂ Lang recoiled from ‘‘microscopic’’ prob- ings of the psyche, of human guilt, frailty and pain; ‘‘such analysis’’ made him feel ‘‘intrusive and unmanly.’’ But his grievance was not merely a matter of 114 | Andrew Lang

personal revulsion; by criticizing, systematizing, analyzing, the modern novelist abetted the encroachment of the positivist spirit into the domain of literature. In opposition to realism, Lang posed a counter-ideal of ‘‘romance,’’ or ‘‘that element which gives a sudden sense of the strangeness and beauty of life; that power which has the gift of dreams.’’≥∑ This notion, derived from Lang’s study of folklore, represented for him the true and enduring function of literature. By turning their backs on this conception of their art, he charged, modern authors were simultaneously cutting themselves off from their audiences. Their works might appeal to ‘‘intellectual peers and dames,’’ but ‘‘the delight of the people has ever been romance, the marvelous in event, the true in passion and conduct.’’≥∏ Lurking behind this judgment was the fear that ‘‘the people’’ might come to reject both realism and romance in favor of a crude materialism. Despite the persistence with which Lang returned to the antimodernist theme, however, his protest was ultimately much less forceful than it might have been. Two circumstances combined to blunt the effectiveness of his polemics. On the one hand, Lang’s instinct for self-deprecation, his fear of being taken too seriously, would not allow him to play the part of a sage or moral prophet; instead, he described himself as ‘‘a punctual, domesticated barn-door fowl, laying its daily ‘article’ for the breakfast table of the citizens.’’≥π Given this estimate of the importance of his own work, it is not surprising that he never developed a unified argument to support his critical perspective, and his occasional fragmentary pronouncements came to seem like nothing more than the crotchets of an old man who had continued writing long after his powers had failed.≥∫ A second and more important point is that Lang stopped short of con- fronting the full implications of his own position; in one sense, his conservatism was not conservative enough. This is evident, for example, in his ambivalent response to the question of what kind of intellectual authority science could legitimately claim. Like many late-Victorian thinkers who shared his views, Lang was opposed not to science per se but to ‘‘science falsely so- called,’’ or to ‘‘popular science.’’≥Ω He was drawn to the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) (serving as president in 1911) because he hoped that the group’s activities would help promote scientific recognition of the existence of an ‘‘X region’’ and scientific investigation of its ultimate nature. Yet by accepting the premises of the SPR—that science could prove (or disprove) the existence of a spirit realm—Lang ceded with the one hand the authority that he sought to take away with the other. Similarly, while speaking out against the Andrew Lang | 115

widening gulf between artists and intellectuals on the one side, and the public on the other, a development that threatened his ideal of culture as an exchange between ‘‘genius’’ and ‘‘the people,’’ Lang accepted the structure of values that contributed to its momentum. Even in anthropology, where his commitment was greatest, he denigrated himself as ‘‘only an amateur . . . one of the outer circle,’’ and repeatedly lamented his lack of professional status.∂≠ Lang never slackened the feverish pace of his literary activity; in the last years of his life, new books and articles, revised editions and translations continued to pour out as they always had. But at the same time, he became noticeably reclusive and was haunted by obsessive fears of a cataclysm about to overtake Europe. Some two years before his death in 1912, his wife conﬁded to an acquaintance that ‘‘Mr. Lang, as she always called him, had suddenly expressed, some time before, a strong desire that they should part with their London house, and their adored home at St. Andrews, and settle in South America. He declared that awful calamities were about to befall Europe, and that almost everything for which he cared would be destroyed.’’∂∞ The sources of this intense anxiety were no doubt complex; the constitutional crises and industrial unrest of the prewar years convinced many that a period of inten- sifying domestic anarchy was just beginning and Lang was certainly not alone in his fears. But it is tempting to speculate that his prophecy was not inspired solely by the events that began in 1910. For Lang, the truly momentous historical transformations were those which took place at the level of culture; politics was a mere surface distraction. This suggests that one element in his gloomy vision of the future awaiting Europe may have been a sense that the gradual dissolution of its traditional folk culture—the supernatural beliefs that had bound it together melting away as in an acid bath—forecasted a more general destruction.

Lang vs. Müller Lang made his anthropological debut with a critique of Max Müller’s theory of mythology, writing from the standpoint of a convert to Tylorian methods. Beginning modestly enough as a brief article on the relation between folktales and the higher myths of antiquity, Lang’s initial foray into comparative mythology expanded eventually into a full-blown controversy that extended beyond the statements and counterstatements of the two main disputants and attracted contributions from a host of concerned observers. From 1873, when Lang opened his campaign with ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ until 1897 116 | Andrew Lang

(when, after a cordial meeting with the aging philologist, the younger man ‘‘vowed . . . never to criticise his ideas again’’),∂≤ the two men carried on a running battle through numerous articles, addresses, and full-length treatises. It makes sense to begin a study of Lang’s contributions to anthropology with his attack on solar mythology, for as his biographer has pointed out, he seemed to need the stimulus of debate as a spur to original thought.∂≥ The emphasis on the dispute between Lang and Müller can also be misleading, however, especially if the main focus is to be on religion rather than mythology. For while the two men differed absolutely on the proper method for interpreting myths, not all of their ideas were so incompatible. Both, for example, thought it possible to distinguish between the pure religious sentiment in primitive culture and the mythological contamination that it strives to transcend.∂∂ It could also be argued that Müller’s ‘‘faculty of faith’’ found an echo in what Lang came to identify as the ‘‘X region’’ of human nature. Even in the ﬁrst contributions to the debate there is a real, though quite limited, area of agreement, and by the time of Müller’s death in 1900, it had grown to the point where Lang’s position was much closer to that of his old adversary than to that of Tylor, his one-time mentor.∂∑ Lang’s assault on Müller’s theory of mythology sometimes appeared to be directed at the entire enterprise of comparative philology. He never tired of taunting philologists with their manifest lack of agreement, or of asking, in mock-plaintive tones, how a simple folklorist was to proceed when distinguished specialists could not convince each other? But Lang’s attempt to puncture the claims of a highly specialized and technical discipline by posing as a hard-headed layman was in this case little more than a polemical strategy; his chief objections to the philological approach to myth were of a much more serious and fundamental character. Lang’s more substantive objections to Müller’s theory can be reduced to three general points. First, Lang pointed out that stories strikingly similar to the myths of Greeks, Scandinavians, and ancient Indians were also told among Australians, South Sea Islanders, Eskimos, Zulus, Solomon Islanders, Iroquois, and so forth. Employing a comparison that immediately signaled his allegiance to the new anthropology, Lang observed that ‘‘the remains of the stone age’’ were ‘‘scarcely more broadcast, and more identical in form, than these legends. Tertullian knew the story of Rapünzel,’’ and a form of Grimm’s ‘‘Goose Girl’’ had been found among the Zulus.∂∏ Thus the names of mythical characters, which in Müller’s system were regarded as the germ of the narrative, were in fact just as likely to be later additions to a preexisting plotline. It Andrew Lang | 117

was obvious, then, that an interpretation based solely on the historical development of the Indo-European languages was bound to prove too narrow; if myths were to be explained as the products of a ‘‘disease of language,’’ how were scholars to account for the fact that unrelated languages produced such similar results? Furthermore, Lang charged, the philological method ‘‘does not explain, but usually keeps clear of,’’ the very elements in myth ‘‘that need explanation.’’ The two opponents agreed that the aim of interpretation should be to account for the ‘‘irrational and unnatural’’ in these narratives about the gods, the ‘‘horrors’’ that made mythology ‘‘the puzzle which men have so long found it.’’∂π But while Müller’s system could show how the broad outlines of a tale might have originated, it could hardly explain the ‘‘disgusting details.’’ As a folklorist, Lang felt obliged to protest the assumption that the detailed content of a story could be sloughed away without distorting its essential and natural meaning. Often it was the most apparently absurd and trivial features of a tale that endured the least alteration as it traveled through time and space; these details could hardly be dismissed as meaningless. Finally, Lang argued that Müller’s theory of myth formation was ﬂawed because its chief source of evidence, the Indian Vedas, were the products of a semi-civilized society, and were therefore of only limited application to the problem of primitive thought and belief.∂∫ In one sense, this was simply a technical question of methodology, though one with far-reaching implications. Neither Lang nor Müller was under any illusions that either the Vedas or the folklore of modern ‘‘savages’’ offered direct evidence about the primitive human condition, but each insisted that his sources were nevertheless the most trustworthy available.∂Ω Beyond this, however, lay a disjunction between two fundamentally incompatible versions of the ‘‘primitive.’’ Where ‘‘Max’s proud Aryans’’ conjured up images of simple patriarchal dignity, Lang’s ‘‘savages’’ carried associations of cruelty, ignorance, obscenity, and dirt. If the former version can be described as ‘‘the projection of European nostalgia on European history,’’∑≠ the latter can perhaps be seen as an expression of Euro- pean culture shock in a period of colonial expansion. It is revealing that as the gap between Lang and Müller began to narrow and as Lang himself became more critical of anthropological orthodoxy, his vision of the primitive became noticeably less harsh. What, then, was Lang’s alternative to the philological method? First of all, he insisted that the myths must be studied in relation to the humbler folktales that every people had produced. Müller had argued that fairy tales and nurs- 118 | Andrew Lang

ery tales were merely corruptions, the ‘‘detritus’’ of the great cosmogonic and theological myths. Now Lang came forward to argue that ‘‘the very opposite of Mr. Müller’s view is the true one.’’ The folktales, far from being the secondary and degraded offshoots of a higher mythology ‘‘are the remains of an earlier formation, and . . . in most cases in which they tally with the higher epic, they preserve an older and more savage form of the same myth.’’∑∞ Once it was recognized that folktales were the primary products of early imagination and that myth more properly belonged to a later age, it would become apparent that the ‘‘irrational and unnatural’’ features of the myths were not the symptoms of a disease of language but ‘‘survivals’’ from the stage of ‘‘savage’’ culture. The allusions to cannibalism, shamanism, metamorphosis, and kinship with beasts, which were ‘‘unintelligible’’ when encountered in the mythology of a civilized people such as the Greeks, were ‘‘intelligible enough when . . . found among savages.’’∑≤ A truly ‘‘scientific mythology,’’ then, must be based on ‘‘a study of the mental condition of savages.’’∑≥ Müller more than stood his ground against Lang’s offensive. He launched a series of vigorous counterattacks. His critique of that convenient stereotype of the anthropologists—the savage—was especially telling. At the same time, he protested against the hinted accusations that he was hostile to the efforts of the ethnologists or indifferent to the value of their collections and those of the European folklorists.∑∂ But, however just Müller’s self-defense and however sincere his protestations of goodwill for the ‘‘ethno-folklorists,’’ the fact remained that Lang had put his finger on the weakest point in the philological system: its reductionism, its failure to pay close attention to the narrative details of the myths or to extract any significant meaning from them. Lang was to some extent guilty of constructing a caricature of solar mythology, but, with all his exaggerations and distortions, there was surely some justice in his objection to the ‘‘improbable monotony in the theory which resolves most of old romance into a series of remarks about the weather.’’∑∑ Yet Lang’s own interpretations were also liable to appear curiously flat. Taking up Müller’s favorite example of the myth of Daphne and Apollo, Lang had decried as cumbersome and overly ingenious the etymological reduction of the story to a statement about the rising sun when the evidence of savage belief in metamorphosis seemed to offer a much more likely interpretation. But, as Müller pointed out: ‘‘[T]o say that ‘a legend of a woman being changed into a tree is explained when we have shown that it is natural to a race which believes in women being changed into trees’ is surely not saying very much.’’∑∏ The real problem, Müller insisted, was why anyone, even a ‘‘savage,’’ would believe such a thing. Andrew Lang | 119

The Challenge to Orthodox Evolutionism These remarks on the circularity of his antagonist’s argument are perhaps even more revealing than Müller knew. It does not seem to have occurred to him that Lang was far less interested in explaining the psychological origins of this or that curious primitive belief than he was fascinated and to some extent baffled by the fact of cultural survival itself. It was the sheer tenacity with which popular notions and customs could hold their own beneath the shifting currents of ‘‘cultivated,’’ ‘‘educated,’’ or ‘‘civilised’’ opinion that captured the attention of the folklorist and drew from him a mixed reaction of admiration and repugnance. This points to a subtle difference between Lang and Tylor. Where the latter had used the concept of ‘‘survivals’’ primarily as a methodological tool (and to some extent as a polemical one) preferring to stress the dynamism of the evolutionary process, Lang placed much greater weight on the static elements of culture, on the power of the old to resist the new. Nor was this the only point on which Lang differed from his mentor, even in the early stages when he was still regarded as an orthodox Tylorian. It may be that Lang was first attracted to the ‘‘anthropological method’’ because, unlike the philological, it offered to rescue the study of folklore from mere antiquarianism and to provide it with a significant function in a truly scientific discipline.∑π Nevertheless, even in his early work Lang held aloof from certain aspects of Tylor’s theory, especially those that applied directly to the study of religion. For example, he never relied heavily on animism, resisting Tylor’s identification of it as the earliest form of belief. Nor did he lay as much emphasis as Tylor on the intellectual needs of the individual primitive thinker. While Lang’s approach could hardly be called sociological, he did express somewhat greater interest than Tylor in the social needs which early religion addressed; it is not surprising to find Lang exchanging ideas with William Robertson Smith and quoting approvingly from him in Magic and Religion or, years later, seeking out the latest volumes of L’année sociologique.∑∫ Finally, where Tylor regarded early religion and mythology as all of a piece—both stemmed from the fundamental primitive error of equating subjective connections in the mind with objective relations in the external world—Lang resembled Müller in identifying a specifically religious impulse standing in opposition to the ‘‘myth-making habit.’’ These differences coalesced ultimately in an open challenge to Tylor’s theory of animism, which Lang initiated in 1898 in The Making of Religion. Though he claimed that the prospect of departing from ‘‘Mr. Tylor’s ideas’’ filled him with ‘‘fear and trembling,’’∑Ω Lang’s critique of animism amounted to nothing less than an attempt to reverse the direction 120 | Andrew Lang

that Tylor had given to the study of primitive theology and to overturn the entire doctrine of progressive evolutionism in its application to the history of religions. Even in his early writings, Lang had worn his evolutionism with a difference. To be sure, he explicitly affirmed the standard developmental theory of religion. Modern faith was the product of ‘‘a continual and rational progress, from the worship of the objects nearest sense, to the adoration of the bodiless forces that strike the loftiest imagination.’’ Yet this was only half the story, for the progress of religious thought made but little impact on the great mass of society; the ‘‘folk,’’ the ‘‘peasantry,’’ the ‘‘people’’—however one identified them, they constituted a powerful conservative element resistant to any modification of ‘‘old cults and old rites.’’ Lang urged his readers to remember ‘‘what we are so prone to forget, the quite unbroken nature of peasant life, and of peasant faith.’’ Nor was it a matter of simply a few centuries difference between popular culture and that of the educated strata, for Lang observed that, ‘‘the Nereids in modern Greece still receive offerings of milk and honey, from peasants whose forefathers may have scarcely known the name of Zeus and of the high gods, and whom even the penetrating force of Christianity has hardly won from the practices of the lower culture.’’∏≠ Of course, Tylor had also recognized that peasant culture was rich in ‘‘survivals,’’ but he was interested in these mainly for their usefulness in reconstructing the sequence of evolutionary stages. In contrast, Lang focused much more attention on popular culture itself. The conservatism of the folk became a major theme for him; consequently, the theory of survivals took on a whole new significance. In Lang’s work, survivals began to look much more like counterweights to a rather superficial progress than like convenient indicators of how far civilized humanity had come. Of course, the elements of culture preserved in popular customs and superstitions were not absolutely primitive. Like both Tylor and Müller, Lang found it necessary to offer his own conjectural account of the primitive mental state. Viewed from the standpoint of a modern educated European, this ‘‘condition of mind’’ resembled nothing so much as ‘‘temporary insanity,’’ for early humans had lived in a world in which ‘‘our own ordinary ideas about . . . the limits of possibility did not yet exist.’’ The main distinction between our ‘‘mode of conceiving the world’’ and theirs was that they regarded ‘‘all nature as a congeries of animated personalities.’’ Lang’s vision of primitive mentality was hardly a novel one, but the details of his description reveal an underlying attitude that is extremely interesting in light of his later attacks on modern Andrew Lang | 121

scientific naturalism. Above all, his account conveys a sense of horrified fascination with the lawlessness, the undifferentiated chaos of the earliest human consciousness. It is a state of ‘‘inextricable confusion’’ and ‘‘a world where everything may be anything, where nature has no laws and imagination no limits.’’∏∞ In even more revealing language, he speaks of ‘‘savage’’ myth as a ‘‘coroboree dance of confusion’’ and as ‘‘a jungle of foolish fancies, a walpurgis nacht of gods, and beasts, and men, and stars, and ghosts, all moving madly . . . and all changing shapes at random, as partners are changed in some fantastic witches’ revel.’’∏≤ This is a vision that emphasizes the dark, grotesque, anarchic character of primal irrationality, and Lang did not trouble to conceal the anxiety it aroused in him. But in his later critique of the mentality created by modern science, Lang expressed an almost equal anxiety that his own culture had traveled too far in the opposite direction and had lost touch with the sources of mystery, imagination, and intuitive knowledge. The ‘‘positivist’’ obsession with arranging and classifying, weighing and measuring had created a world in which the limits of the possible were laid down with dogmatic assurance, and uncontrolled primitive fancy had given way to the mind inhibited and oppressed in its confrontation with an inexorably law-bound reality. It was the function of the earliest religious ideas to bring order to this chaos of primitive thought. Though Lang firmly resisted the urge to assign primacy to any one concept or cluster of concepts, he laid particular emphasis on three things: fetishism, ghost worship, and totemism. Relying heavily on de Brosses (he does not cite Comte), Lang insisted that fetishism, or the adoration of particular stones, feathers, shells, and ‘‘other odds and ends of rubbish,’’ was not, as Müller would have it, a parasitical growth on the pure stock of early religion. Instead, it was a primitive form of religious belief, though not necessarily the most primitive.∏≥ It was a necessary part of the process by which humans first began to emerge from the condition ‘‘in which there was no God, but all things were adorable,’’ by distinguishing certain objects as the possessors of peculiar supernatural power. The function of ‘‘ghost-worship’’ was similar: ‘‘Man, through reflection, attained to the idea of spirit, and gradually invested with spirits his chief, himself,’’ and his fellows, thus partially liberating himself from ‘‘the servile attitude towards nature,’’ which had made him ‘‘worship anything or everything.’’∏∂ These examples deal specifically with what Lang called ‘‘savage metaphysics,’’ and they recall Tylor’s emphasis on the problems of primitive philosophy. But Lang could also write in a more sociological mood, though he never offered any formal analysis of the differences between these two possible 122 | Andrew Lang

approaches, or any justification for preferring one over the other. The absence of a sociological perspective was one item in his catalog of complaints against Müller, for the latter’s ‘‘theory of the growth of Aryan religion seems to leave society without cement, and without the most necessary sanctions.’’ To some extent, Lang merely echoed the insights, commonplace since at least the eighteenth century, on the role of religion in establishing a stratified social order and maintaining the political authority of the elite. ‘‘Is it not obvious,’’ he asked, ‘‘that . . . religious elements . . . are most powerful in developing rank?’’∏∑ Similar observations had been made by Hume, Comte, Spencer, and Fustel de Coulanges, to name just a few. But Lang also made use of more recent work on the subject of ‘‘totemism,’’ a term and concept popularized by J. F. McLennan in his series of articles entitled ‘‘The Worship of Animals and Plants’’ for the Fortnightly Review (1869– 70). Lang defined it as ‘‘the custom by which a stock (scattered through many local tribes) claims descent from and kindred with some plant, animal or other natural object.’’ It had arisen at a stage where the patriarchal family was as yet unknown, where ‘‘unions of the sexes’’ were as yet ‘‘shifting and pre- carious, so that the wisest child was not expected to know his own father.’’∏∏ (The frightening chaos of the primitive mentality thus found its counterpart in an early state of lawless promiscuity.) Modern ‘‘savage’’ totemism was therefore the relic of a once widespread, perhaps universal, stage of social development. Lang considered it important for two reasons. First, it helped explain the frequent mythological references to kinship between humans and beasts. Second, it demonstrated that religion had played an essential role at the very beginning of social life—the organization of the family: ‘‘The worship of sacred animals is found, in every part of the globe, to be part of the sanction of the most stringent and important of all laws, the laws of marriage.’’ Indeed, certain societies, such as the Ashantees, Choctaws, and the various Australian tribes were ‘‘actually constructed by the operation of laws which are under the sanction of . . . sacred plants and animals.’’∏π But though Lang wrote a great deal on totemism, it remained essentially a side issue for him; he never, for example, was able to integrate it with his theory of primitive high gods. The heyday of totemistic hypotheses was yet to come, in the works of William Robertson Smith and J. G. Frazer. For Lang, totemism was significant primarily as one instance, along with fetishism and ghost worship, of ‘‘that appropriation, and ‘winning from the vast and formless infinite’ ’’ which followed as ‘‘the notion of the intercommunity and equality of all nature was losing its hold on men.’’∏∫ Andrew Lang | 123

Throughout the centuries, it had been the special task (perhaps the privi- lege) of the folk to preserve these ‘‘appropriations’’ in something like their original form. Living out their lives in ‘‘solitude and close communion with nature,’’ generation after generation they handed down ‘‘the earliest beliefs of grey antiquity,’’ and especially those having to do with the sacred, for the ‘‘religious instinct’’ was the most conservative.∏Ω Indeed, so conservative that ‘‘elemental beliefs of the people’’ survived ‘‘beneath a thin covering of Chris- tian conformity.’’ The coming of Christianity had contributed decisively to the opening of a rift between the culture of the people and that of the educated elite, and Lang insisted that ‘‘in religion, as in society,’’ there were ‘‘two worlds, of which the one does not know how the other lives.’’π≠ The relation between the two was one of latent conflict as from time to time the elite would attempt to eradicate ancient beliefs. As Lang observed, ‘‘the progressive classes had advanced comparatively but a little way in the evolution of creeds and customs when they left the rural people behind. They have turned back on these again and again, in moments of spiritual excitement, have compelled them to put on a semblance of new beliefs, and to call on gods not of their making.’’π∞ But the possibility also existed for a more fruitful collaboration between the two classes. The highest achievements of literature and religion were the products of the selection and refinement, by individual poetic or philosophic genius, from the treasure house of ancient symbols kept safe by the folk.π≤ In a later formulation of a similar idea, Lang compared the two cultures to a single mind, describing the ‘‘people’’ as ‘‘the unconscious self, as it were, of the educated and literary classes.’’π≥ Lang was not a nineteenth-century precursor of modern cultural historians. His concept of a virtually unchanging folk is clearly ahistorical and his notion of a rift between popular and elite culture was not based on a serious analysis of social structure. His ideas were derived in part from his own childhood experiences, and in part from the British antiquarian tradition. Ever since the Reformation, British folklorists had been obsessed with ferreting out popular survivals of ‘‘Popish’’ practices.π∂ Though Lang did not share this particular obsession, he certainly drew on a familiar trope of the people retaining in stubborn secrecy their allegiance to the old ways. Yet in the context of late-Victorian culture, Lang’s emphasis on the enduring primitiveness of European folklore took on new significance, for it provided a vantage point from which to challenge the dominance of evolutionary optimism. Even while he explicitly endorsed orthodox developmentalism, his theory carried a potential counter to it, and in the period after 1890 he came to 124 | Andrew Lang

pursue the logic of his earlier work into an open rejection of progressivist assumptions. Lang’s growing disenchantment with social evolutionism took the form of a two-pronged attack. On the one hand, he denied the common conviction that the advance of science and modern rationalism had expelled the supernatural from the realm of human desire or the facts of human experience. At the same time, he developed a theory of primitive religion that came very close to the ‘‘old degeneration theory’’ which Tylor had so con- ﬁdently disposed of more than twenty years earlier. It was no longer certain, Lang now maintained, that the highest religious ideas had developed in a regular fashion out of the lowly soil of animism, or that primitive theology was without ethical content.

The Comparative Study of Ghost Stories As early as 1875, in an article entitled ‘‘Apparitions’’ for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, Lang had rejected the idea that the final disenchantment of the world was simply a matter of time. Pointing to the ‘‘millions’’ of adherents of spiritualism in both Britain and America, he noted that ‘‘it would no longer be true to say, as Scott did forty years ago, that ‘the increasing civilisation of all well-constituted countries has blotted out the belief in apparitions.’’’π∑ Almost twenty years later, in Cock Lane and Common Sense, he even more boldly confronted Rationalist hubris. Contrary to the beliefs of the ‘‘guides of public opinion’’ such as Spencer and W. H. Lecky, Lang contended that the volume of reports of ‘‘abnormal,’’ presumably supernatural, events was about the same for all eras of European history. Periods of ‘‘spiritual excitement’’ such as the Middle Ages produced no sudden upsurge in such claims.π∏ Indeed, modern English men and women seemed at least as fascinated with magic, ghost stories, and the occult as any medieval peasant was supposed to be. ‘‘Today, at any dinner party, you may hear of bogles and wraiths at first or at second hand,’’ Lang exclaimed; ‘‘however we are to explain it, the ghosts have come forth again.’’ππ Lang’s evidence for a rising curve of interest in the supernatural was not derived solely from casual dinner party conversation. He could point to his own correspondence, especially after 1885, when he began the regular columns (‘‘At the Sign of the Ship’’) for Longman’s Magazine in which he often passed on examples of the numerous reports of ‘‘psychic phenomena’’ sent to him. Even more striking were the strenuous efforts of the members of the Society for Psychical Research, many of whom were leading figures of late-Victorian Andrew Lang | 125

intellectual life, and whose indefatigable pursuit of hard evidence about the alleged phenomena was eloquent testimony to Lang’s argument. Despite his fascination with the traditional lore of apparitions, ‘‘second sight,’’ crystal visions, and so on, Lang was initially skeptical about the value of the society’s work. ‘‘As a mythologist,’’ he wrote, ‘‘I frankly acknowledge that . . . tales of phantasms are interesting; as a superstitious person I tremble (though I don’t believe); and yet I cannot take Psychical Research seriously.’’π∫ He found the society’s members uninformed about the history of the subject and apparently unwilling to make use of the data collected by folklorists and ethnologists. But at the same time, Lang realized, though anthropologists assiduously collected any scraps of evidence as to ‘‘savage’’ supernaturalism, most of them followed Tylor in regarding modern reports of ‘‘psychic’’ occurrences as unworthy of serious investigation. Thus, the ‘‘whole topic’’ had ‘‘only been touched at either end, so to speak.’’ As a remedy, Lang half-jokingly suggested the establishment of ‘‘a new branch of the science of Man, the Comparative Study of Ghost Stories.’’πΩ The language was facetious, but the basic proposal was not. As early as 1875, Lang had been struck by the ‘‘identity of ghost stories in all lands and times.’’∫≠ The ‘‘facts’’ about apparitions, their characteristic modes of appearance, the prophetic signiﬁcance of their choices of timing, these things were ‘‘as well known to contemporary savages as they were to the classical people of Lucian’s day, or as they are . . . to the secretaries of the Society for Psychical Research.’’ How were these very close resemblances to be explained? ‘‘Appar- ently there is either some internal groundwork of fact at the bottom of a belief which savages share with Fellows of the Royal Society, or liability to certain recurring hallucinations must be inherited by civilised man from his un- tutored ancestors, or the mythopoeic faculty, to use no harder term, is common to all stages of culture.’’∫∞ Unlike a number of contemporaries with similar interests, such as Alfred Wallace and Frederick Myers, Lang was not convinced that psychic phenomena were examples of genuine ‘‘spirit manifestations.’’∫≤ Most often he described himself as suspended between belief and disbelief: ‘‘On the question of the real existence of the reported phenomena . . . the writer has been unable to reach any conclusion, negative or afﬁrmative. . . . On the other hand, the writer feels unable to set wholly aside the concurrent testimony of the most diverse people, in times, lands, and conditions of opinion the most various.’’∫≥ Lang’s reports on the ‘‘abnormal’’ or ‘‘uncanny’’ experiences of others, almost always presented with scrupulous (not to say tedious) atten- 126 | Andrew Lang

tion to detail, seem designed not so much to compel belief as to force the reader to acknowledge that no satisfactory explanation has yet been provided. All he could say with assurance was that such phenomena pointed to a range of human faculties as yet unexplained, which he termed the ‘‘X region of our nature.’’∫∂ On one level, Lang’s venture into ‘‘psycho-folklore’’ was an earnest plea for serious scientific consideration of a particular realm of human experience. ‘‘To compare the data of savage and civilised psychology, or even of savage and civilised illusions and fables,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is decidedly part, though a neglected part, of anthropological science.’’ But at another level, his argument can be read as a critique of the mentality of Victorian scientific naturalism. He was particularly hard on practitioners of the newer human sciences, especially anthropology and psychology, for pretensions to speak with the certainty of the ‘‘exact sciences.’’ Above all, he condemned those ‘‘men of science’’ who ‘‘constitute themselves judges of what is possible.’’∫∑ The spirit of scientific inquiry was supposed to be one of intellectual openness, but too many of its disciples had instead become ‘‘friend[s] to systematic negation.’’ The problem, he suggested, was that scientists were too concerned with maintaining their own cultural authority. Thus, the acceptability of different kinds of evidence was dependent on whether or not an explanation in appropriate scientific language could be devised to fit them. And those investigators who might be tempted to explore anything beyond the ‘‘sacred circle of permitted knowledge’’ risked their reputations as ‘‘great scientific sceptics,’’ and were liable to be ‘‘subjected to such persecutions as official science could inflict.’’∫∏ The heart of Lang’s complaint, then, was that positivist social science was threatening to become an oppressive ideology that refused to admit the existence of any realm of human nature that could not be explained on the basis of its own ‘‘dogmatic materialism and unbelief.’’ Lang recognized that his sense of being stifled by ‘‘negative certainty’’ was far from unique. In 1875, he had detected signs of ‘‘an impatient revolt against the supposed tendencies and conclusions of modern science,’’ led by those ‘‘who live in constant fear that science is trying to demonstrate the truth of materialism.’’∫π By the 1890s, the revolt had, if anything, gathered strength, and Lang himself had joined it. In his earlier remarks, Lang had identified the materialist threat to hopes that the soul might survive death as the source of this discontent. Now he broadened his view; the reaction originated in the ‘‘imaginative longings’’ of men and women that could find no satisfaction in ‘‘an age of fatigued scepticism and rigid physical science.’’∫∫ Perhaps the tri- Andrew Lang | 127

umph of a new ‘‘positive age’’ was inevitable, and one day men and women would all be ‘‘perfect positivist philosophers,’’ but why was it, Lang asked, that ‘‘as science becomes more cock-sure,’’ and ‘‘as the visible world is measured, mapped, tested, weighed, we seem to hope more and more that a world of invisible romance may not be far from us’’?∫Ω Yet while taking comfort in the revival of supernaturalism, Lang seemed dimly aware that by itself it was only a cultural fad that might signify nothing more than a desire for escape and emotional titillation, the pleasure aroused by ‘‘the stirring of ancient dread within [the] veins.’’Ω≠ In earlier ages of religious crisis, as the hold of familiar creeds was waning, the ‘‘literary classes’’ were prone to fall back on ‘‘the old ancestral superstitions,’’ the long-forgotten ‘‘savage and peasant necromancy.’’Ω∞ Lang recognized this as a debasement of thought and culture, though he also saw it as a natural response. The fact that a similar reaction was taking place in late-Victorian society revealed a sense of deprivation but not necessarily a genuine capacity for belief. Moreover, Lang began to fear that the folk culture that had for centuries maintained old beliefs—whether as a resource for genius in periods of cultural vitality, or as a last refuge in periods of crisis—was itself ﬁnally giving way to a new ‘‘popular tradition.’’ Though stemming ultimately from Enlightenment philosophy and the intellectual revolution created by the rise of the sciences, the ‘‘new popular tradition’’ did not mean the triumph of reason and critical thought but the tyranny of ‘‘common sense.’’ It was true that belief in miracles—though not the longing for the miraculous—was vanishing. But, Lang insisted: ‘‘It is not . . . before reason that they vanish, not before learned argument and examination, but just before a kind of sentiment, or instinct, or feeling, that events contradictory of normal experience seem ridiculous, and incredible.’’Ω≤ Thus the replacement of the old folk culture of supernaturalism and superstition by a modern culture of ‘‘popular materialism’’ represented no real progress, no real gain. Instead, it threatened to alienate European culture from its past and individuals from the irrational and mysterious depths of their own natures. Given his distrust of the positivistic bias of so many scientists, it is odd, to say the least, that Lang should have pleaded so insistently for serious scientiﬁc examination of psychic events, or ‘‘X phenomena.’’ On the one hand, he seemed to be asking that science account for such occurrences, while at the same time he implied that any explanation it was likely to give would be fu- tile, no more than an explaining away. A favorite tactic of his was to drag the reader through a ruthlessly thorough dissection of some hapless investigator’s 128 | Andrew Lang

attempt to provide a rational solution for some mysterious fact—Polynesian fire walking, for example. Lang delighted in exposing each violation of logic, each ‘‘discovery’’ of ‘‘a new psychological law,’’ each attempt to cover ignorance with words such as ‘‘hysteria,’’ ‘‘suggestion,’’ or ‘‘subliminal mind.’’Ω≥ Ironically, his sarcasms began to echo those of Max Müller, as in this remark: ‘‘Now this is a queer result of science, common-sense, cheap newspapers, popular education, and progress in general. We may all confess to a belief in ghosts, because we call them ‘phantasmo-genetic agencies,’ and in as much of witchcraft as we style ‘hypnotic suggestion.’ So great, it seems, is the power of language!’’Ω∂ After reading a great deal in this vein, one is drawn to conclude that there was a point to Lang’s seemingly pointless debunking exercises, but one of which he was perhaps not fully conscious. Despite his pleas for scientific attention to the ‘‘X region,’’ he in some way preferred it to remain what it had always been, a ‘‘region of which we know nothing,’’ a ‘‘margin undiscovered.’’Ω∑ Lang’s eagerness for scientific recognition of the ‘‘X region’’ was connected with his challenge to Tylor’s animistic theory, first presented in fully developed form in The Making of Religion (1898). At the time, the book aroused comment not only for its contents, but also because of its unusual form: the first eight chapters being devoted primarily to ‘‘X phenomena’’ and the remaining nine to a discussion of the ‘‘savage high gods.’’ The unifying thread to this apparently fragmented work was the author’s avowed intention to force a reconsideration of ‘‘the current anthropological theory’’ of the origin of religion, that is, the theory of animism. Tylor had argued that belief in spirits first arose from faulty inferences that primitive men had drawn on the basis of common experiences, particularly dreams. The concept of spirit or soul had then been expanded and generalized into that of gods and demi-gods. Lang reasoned that if it could be demonstrated that the ‘‘supernormal experiences’’ of ‘‘savages’’ were of the same kind as those reported by numerous ‘‘civilised’’ people, he could begin to cast doubt on this theory. However such ‘‘experiences’’ were ultimately explained, the fact remained that at present the ‘‘materialists’’ had no satisfactory solution to the problem. Lang admitted that even ‘‘if the supernormal phenomena . . . be real matters of experience, the inferences drawn from them by early savage philosophy may be, in some degree, erroneous,’’ but, he went on, ‘‘the inferences drawn by materialists . . . will also, perhaps, be, let us say, incomplete.’’Ω∏ This argument was not likely to convince anyone who excluded, a priori, the possibility of clairvoyance, thought transference, and so on, but by linking Andrew Lang | 129

‘‘savage’’ experiences with those of ‘‘civilised’’ Englishmen, Lang was at least able to cast doubt on the assumption that belief in mind or spirit separable from matter could only have arisen in conditions of primitive ignorance.

‘‘Savage’’ High Gods vs. Animism The more important and ultimately more influential branch of Lang’s argument, however, was that devoted to ‘‘savage Supreme Beings.’’ In one of his earlier works, Myth, Ritual and Religion (1887), Lang had noted that several of the ‘‘lowest’’ tribes of Australians, Bushmen, and Andamanese were said to believe in moral, anthropomorphic creator gods who were older and in some instances more powerful than the mass of spirits and lesser gods who figured most prominently in the ritual observances of these peoples.Ωπ At the time, however, he had not regarded these beings as central to any ‘‘savage’’ religion. Only later, Lang recalled, did he begin ‘‘to notice the coincidence of testimony from many quarters, in many ages,’’ evidence which had previously received little attention.Ω∫ Much of this testimony was derived from old accounts by travelers and missionaries, many of which Tylor had used to support his theories. A significant portion of Lang’s source material had been published after 1870, however. He relied most heavily on Kamilaroi and Kurnai (1880) by L. Fison and A. W. Howitt and on a series of articles by the latter for the Journal of the Anthropological Institute that appeared from 1882 through 1889. Howitt, who had lived among Australian aborigines for thirty years, not only spoke native languages but also had been initiated into their religious mysteries, so his reports carried special weight. Sifting through a huge quantity of ethnological data, not only from Aus- tralia but from Africa, Polynesia, and the Americas, Lang believed that he had discovered a widespread recurring pattern of belief in deities who generally shared certain attributes: they were moral, eternal, benevolent ‘‘Creators’’ who enforced standards of moral conduct and were ‘‘relatively supreme.’’ΩΩ One reason that this evidence had been ignored, he argued, was that anthropologists were so wedded to the notion that gods must have evolved from spirits that they were unable to recognize that the ‘‘Supreme Beings’’ of ‘‘savages’’ were not logically dependent on animistic conceptions. Borrowing a phrase from Matthew Arnold, Lang described these deities as ‘‘magnified non-natural men,’’ thereby indicating that they had not been developed from ghosts (as Herbert Spencer had urged) and that their worshippers did not conceive of them as disembodied souls.∞≠≠ Lang was not simply 130 | Andrew Lang

quibbling over a definition of ‘‘spirit’’ here: his point went deeper. In Literature and Dogma (1873), Arnold had argued for the necessity of a rethinking of the anthropomorphic conception of God, suggesting as one alternative ‘‘the force that makes for righteousness.’’ Yet he recognized in the ‘‘magnified non-natural Man’’ of popular Christianity, ‘‘the travail of the human mind to adapt to its grasp . . . great ideas of which it feels the attraction,’’ but for which it was still ‘‘immature.’’∞≠∞ Lang’s use of Arnold’s phrases was very much in keeping with the spirit of the original. By shifting attention away from the anthropologists’ idea of ‘‘spirit,’’ he sought to undermine the assumption that ‘‘gods’’ were derived from a primitive philosophical ‘‘theory’’ as Tylor had believed. Instead, he emphasized that even at a very early stage, ‘‘god’’ was something felt, something experienced as a ‘‘force making for righteousness,’’ not merely something reasoned out as an explanation for various psychological phenomena. Here Lang raised yet another challenge to the settled wisdom of evolutionary anthropology. Flatly contradicting Tylor, and setting his sights also on T. H. Huxley, he rejected the view that ‘‘savage’’ theology was utterly divorced from ‘‘savage’’ ethics. He was able to show that certain Australian gods—Darumulun, Bunjil, and Mungan-ngaur—were thought to have instituted moral laws and were able to observe men’s conduct and to punish transgressors.∞≠≤ ‘‘The inquirer must be careful,’’ he warned, ‘‘not to adopt the common opinion that Gods improve, morally and otherwise, in direct ratio to the rising grades in the evolution of culture and civilisation.’’∞≠≥ The theological implications of Lang’s thesis were so obvious that it was a relatively easy matter to predict reactions to it; as he wryly confessed in a letter to Tylor, ‘‘I receive the compliments of the clergy of all denominations.’’∞≠∂ Many readers confidently assumed that Lang was defending a theory of primitive monotheism and divine revelation. In the preface to his second edition, therefore, he explicitly disclaimed any reliance on the doctrine of revelation. The point of the book had been to insist on the evidence for belief in these ‘‘high gods,’’ not to try to account for its origins. As a sop to the critics, Lang diffidently offered his own speculations—a version of the argument from design—but he seemed to have little desire to argue the point. On the question of original monotheism he was similarly reticent. Though clearly inclined to the view that in at least some instances the worshippers of the ‘‘high god’’ had at one time recognized him alone, Lang admitted that ‘‘ ‘monotheism’ is a large order.’’∞≠∑ But while Lang professed annoyance at the chorus of praise with which the orthodox greeted his work, and was anxious that the theory should appear ‘‘in Andrew Lang | 131

no way mystical,’’∞≠∏ his book was not simply a survey of the evidence; it did have an apologetic purpose, albeit an idiosyncratic one. He recognized the implications of the ‘‘anthropological theory’’ and stated them in the bluntest terms: ‘‘If religion, as now understood among men, be the latest evolutionary form of a series of mistakes, fallacies, and illusions, if its germ be a blunder, and its present form only the result of progressive but unessential reﬁnements on that blunder, the inference that religion is untrue—that nothing actual corresponds to its hypothesis—is very easily drawn.’’∞≠π Lang sought to counter that conclusion, not by insisting on a particular version of religious origins, but by arguing that the history of religion did not reveal a pattern of continuous advance. In the process, he found himself offering a positive revaluation of the ‘‘old degeneration theory’’ on new grounds. To hold such a position demanded a certain amount of courage, though Lang’s engagement with ‘‘psycho-folklore’’ showed that he was not afraid to travel on the boundary between the crackpot and the intellectually respectable. But while this defense of an ‘‘obsolete theory’’ might at ﬁrst have appeared as nothing more than an extravagant gesture, it was in the end much more than that. In Lang’s hands, the degenerationist position was opened up and transformed from an obscu- rantist defense of a narrow and literal-minded theology into a thoughtful and provocative critique of his contemporaries’ faith in progress. Lang was quick to point out that his own version of degenerationism was a revisionist one; the theories of Whatley and others of his school were no longer tenable. He had already disclaimed any allegiance to the traditional notion of revelation on which orthodox degenerationists had relied, and he remained a perfectly orthodox evolutionist as far as material culture and social and political organization were concerned. Indeed, he saw ‘‘advancing social conditions’’ as a central cause of religious decline.∞≠∫ His argument hinged on the distance between the ‘‘Supreme Beings’’ of ‘‘lower savages’’ such as the Australians, and the gods of ‘‘higher savages’’ and even of civilized nations such as the Greeks and the Aztecs. In the case of the ‘‘higher savages,’’ for example, the high god was more or less neglected; he was thought to have little interest in human affairs, and though his existence was acknowledged, he was not feared. Among yet richer and more complex societies, the investigator found only the faintest traces of a supreme being, or none at all. Instead, a ‘‘crowd of hungry and cruel gods’’ dominated the foreground and received virtually all the ceremonial attention. Thus, the ‘‘lowest known savages’’ worshipped a god ‘‘who created or constructed the world; who was from time beyond memory or conjecture; who is primal, who makes for 132 | Andrew Lang

righteousness, and who loves mankind,’’ a being ‘‘from which the ordinary polytheistic gods of infinitely more polite people are frankly degenerate.’’∞≠Ω The processes of social evolution had created the conditions for this fall from religious purity. The high gods of the most primitive peoples received little in the way of formal worship. Their concern was with conduct, and they could neither be bribed with sacrifices nor manipulated with elaborate rituals. But as humans gave up a nomadic existence for life in settled agricultural communities, their societies became more complex: arts and crafts were developed; division of labor and disparities of wealth became the norm; aristocratic military states arose and competed with each other for territory. The high god came to be localized in a fixed temple or other sacred place and was expected to advance the fortunes of his people at the expense of others. Finally, gods who could be bought with sacrifices of food, or even human sacrifices, ‘‘serviceable family spirits, who continually provided an excuse for a dinner of roast beef,’’ were evolved to meet the needs, and the temptations, of an advancing civilization.∞∞≠ In this way, Lang called into question some of the most basic presuppositions not only of anthropological theory but of the liberal optimistic creed of progress to which so many of his contemporaries subscribed. The belief that the level of technological, artistic, or intellectual achievement of any society could be used as an accurate predictor of its moral and spiritual condition was explicitly rejected. In Lang’s own case, this necessitated a drastic revision of his earlier judgments. As his respect for ‘‘savage’’ theology and ethics grew, his assessment of ancient civilized peoples, even his beloved Greeks, became noticeably more critical.∞∞∞ Yet this new position hardly amounted to an idealization of the conditions of primitive life; Lang did not portray the Australians as blissful children of nature. Indeed, he insisted on the disjunction between the ugly features of ‘‘savage’’ culture and the loftiness of their religious ideas. What of the specific applications of the theory for the European religious tradition? In the penultimate chapter of The Making of Religion, Lang attempted to use his thesis against the anthropological debunking of the Old Testament exemplified in Spencer’s Principles of Sociology and Huxley’s Science and Hebrew Tradition. Efforts to identify Jehovah as an ancestral ghost-god foundered on the lack of any positive evidence that the Hebrews had ever practiced ancestor worship. Was it not more reasonable to regard Him as a version of the primitive high god? As their society evolved and they came in contact with yet more advanced nations, Israel’s theistic ideal had become Andrew Lang | 133 tainted with animistic and fetishistic conceptions, so that at times it had fallen below the religious level of Australian tribes. Yet owing to ‘‘the historically unique genius of the prophets,’’ Israel had recaptured ‘‘a lofty conception of universal Deity.’’ Finally, with the coming of Christianity, the pure theistic ideal was reconciled with ‘‘Animism in its pure and priceless form—the reward of faith, hope, and charity in eternal life.’’∞∞≤ Here Lang’s interpretation comes closest to the old version of degenerationism; by identifying Christianity as the climax and fulfillment of humanity’s spiritual strivings, he echoed the orthodox claim that Christ had reversed the long decline from the original revelation. Yet the implications of his argument did not really accord easily with the comfortable certainties of the traditional belief in Christianity as eternal and absolute. According to Lang’s account, in many cases the primitive high god had become a deus otiosus; thrust aside in favor of more manipulable deities, he was believed to have retired to the farthest reaches of heaven, where he dwelt ‘‘in epicurian repose,’’ no longer troubling himself with the doings of humanity. Mircea Eliade points out that ‘‘this oblivion of the High God means also his death,’’ and he regards Lang’s discovery as an unintended echo of Nietzsche’s proclamation some twenty years earlier of the death of the Christian God. Though the idea ‘‘was new for the Western, Judeo-Christian world, . . . the death of God is an extremely old phenomenon in the history of religions.’’∞∞≥ Eliade observes that Lang was not aware of the significance of this aspect of his discovery, and certainly it is true that he made no explicit comparison between the rejection of the high god and decline of Christian belief in his own time. But taken in the whole context of his later work, the diatribes against ‘‘positivism’’ and ‘‘popular materialism,’’ and the laments for a vanishing folk culture, it is difficult to regard his preoccupation with the dei otiosi as purely coincidental. Carrying his sketch of religious history up to his own period, Lang observed: ‘‘[M]odern thought has deanthropomorphised what was left of the anthropomorphic in religion, and, in the end, has left us for God, at most, ‘a stream of tendency making for righteousness,’ or an energy unknown and unknowable—the ghost of a ghost. For the soul . . . is left to us a negation or a wistful doubt.’’∞∞∂ Tylor would not have disagreed. But what was suggested by the example of the rejected high gods was that this state of things was not the result of a benign, impersonal, and inevitable modernizing process, nor of a struggle between two abstractions—‘‘animism’’ and ‘‘materialism.’’ Rather, the people of a particular culture at a particular historical moment had ‘‘deprive[d] the universe of a god.’’∞∞∑ 134 | Andrew Lang

Lang and His Critics At the time of Lang’s death in 1912, the standard judgment of his importance to anthropology, at least among the authors of obituaries, was that he had shone as a critic of the synthetic systems of others but had left little in the way of fully developed original theory of his own.∞∞∏ This assessment is not wholly inaccurate, but it fails to recognize the coherent (if never coherently articulated) critical perspective underlying what appeared as a series of isolated offensives against one theory after another. What the eulogists had most in mind was the generally successful attempt to undermine Müller’s study of mythology as a ‘‘disease of language.’’ Though Lang had initiated the attack in 1873, it was not until 1884, when his scattered essays were finally collected into one volume, Custom and Myth, that the full force of his argument was brought to bear on the philological school. His campaign was soon pronounced victorious; as one reader put it, ‘‘his attack on the Linguistic School is vigorous and irresistible.’’∞∞π While a few critics went out of their way to praise his portrait of the primitive mind, many more emphasized the destructive impact of Lang’s critique, portraying him as a sort of Davidic liberator pitted against philological ‘‘tyranny.’’∞∞∫ Lang’s early work also attracted praise for its contribution to Tylorian social evolutionism. Tylor himself gave his stamp of approval in a review of Lang’s Myth, Ritual and Religion. Warning the reader not to ‘‘expect an impar- tial notice of this treatise from a reviewer long prejudiced in favour of its purpose,’’ he welcomed Lang’s demonstration that ‘‘a main origin of myth . . . is to be sought in early stages of human knowledge, going back to rude and ancient savagery.’’ The subtle distinction between Lang’s use of survivals and his own did not escape Tylor’s notice: ‘‘[W]ith him [Lang] the actual interpretation of a myth is secondary, and the proof that it has come on from lower culture is primary.’’∞∞Ω But he ignored the anti-evolutionary implications of Lang’s concentration on a folk culture which barely evolves, and then only superficially. The reaction to Lang’s later work, above all to his advocacy of ‘‘psycho- folklore’’ and his theory of primitive high gods, was in marked contrast to the nearly unanimous praise that greeted his earlier efforts. The reaction of other anthropologists was particularly disappointing to him. Though R. R. Marett, who had begun to challenge the animistic theory from another angle by 1899, corresponded with Lang on the subject, The Making of Religion was at first virtually ignored among anthropological circles. It was not until the Austrian Andrew Lang | 135

anthropologist Father Wilhelm Schmidt took up Lang’s theory in 1912 that it began to receive serious positive consideration. Later students of the history and sociology of religions, including Mircea Eliade and E. E. Evans-Pritchard, praised Lang for highlighting facts that were in danger of being ignored without necessarily accepting his argument in full.∞≤≠ At the time of its first appearance, however, and right up until Lang’s death, most of his fellow anthropologists and folklorists judged the new theory a conspicuous failure. Lang apparently realized that he could expect no public response from Tylor, who was by that time in declining health. Six years before The Making of Religion appeared, Tylor had addressed the issue of high gods in an article for the Journal of the Anthropological Society. He argued that the evidence on savage gods was not good enough in any individual case to rule out the possibility that the ‘‘higher’’ ethical attributes of these beings were the consequence of Christian or Islamic influence.∞≤∞ This was a direct turnabout from his earlier position in the first edition of Primitive Culture, where he had pronounced the theory of borrowing from more civilized religions untenable, at least in a few cases. Yet sometime between 1871 and 1891, Tylor had altered his opinion without explanation. In the 1891 edition of Primitive Culture, previous statements which admitted that certain creator gods were purely native were altered to reflect Tylor’s new opinion: all instances of an apparently anomalous ethical deity in a ‘‘savage’’ culture could be explained as loan gods. Lang attempted to respond point by point, and Tylor’s rather extreme position did not receive unanimous support, despite his great influence.∞≤≤ Critics generally admitted that at least some of Lang’s high gods appeared to be of native origin. The most noteworthy professional response to Lang’s new theory came from his colleagues at the Folklore Society, Edwin Sidney Hartland and Edward Clodd. Together with G. L Gomme, Alfred Nutt, W. A. Clouston, and Lang himself, these six men constituted the nucleus of the society; Richard Dorson has dubbed them the ‘‘great team’’ of British folklorists. United in their commitment to a study of folklore based on anthropological methods, the members of the group worked in close partnership, cooperating in the running of the society and sprinkling their publications with praise and acknowledgments of each other’s work.∞≤≥ The members of the ‘‘great team’’ were used to skirmishing with each other over relatively minor points, but Lang had already put himself ‘‘in disgrace’’ with the society by his campaign for psycho-folklore, and the position he took up in The Making of Religion struck some of his colleagues, Hartland and 136 | Andrew Lang

Clodd especially, as nothing less than a defection from their ranks. Their reaction was the more understandable in that only two years earlier, in 1896, the society had undergone a crisis from which it was just beginning to recover. The crisis originated in an address delivered by Clodd, at that time president of the society, in which he undertook a painstaking scrutiny of the ‘‘savage’’ origins of certain Christian sacraments and points of doctrine according to Tylorian methods. Acting upon Tylor’s injunction to practice anthropology as a ‘‘reformer’s science,’’ Clodd sought to demonstrate how folklore, as a branch of the science of man, could be used ‘‘to contribute to the freedom of the spirit, to deliver those who, being children of superstition, are therefore the prisoners of fear.’’∞≤∂ The result, according to one of the president’s more enthusiastic supporters, was ‘‘a landmark in the intellectual emancipation of our times,’’ comparable in effect to ‘‘Tyndall’s Belfast address and one or two of Huxley’s more pregnant pronouncements.’’∞≤∑ But as Grant Allen, also a supporter, recognized, it practically committed the society ‘‘to an anti- Christian attitude.’’∞≤∏ A rash of resignations from offended subscribers (including William Gladstone, who had been one of the original members) followed the publication of the address in the group’s journal. Throughout the storm raised by his outspokenness, Clodd had assumed that his friends Hartland and Lang were in full accord with his bold confronta- tional stance. The latter’s attack on the basis of that stance, the evolution of modern religion from primitive animism, thus appeared to the two others as a surrender to conservative forces. The two men corresponded about the need to marshal evidence for a counterattack, and in the end both found opportunity to strike a blow against Lang’s theory. Clodd wrote a brief review of The Making of Religion for the Academy, admitting the evidence for the existence of at least some of Lang’s high gods but arguing that Lang had vastly exaggerated the significance of this material. He ignored Lang’s attempt to bracket, at least temporarily, the question of how these beliefs originated, insisting that the high gods were simply nature deities ‘‘with tribal ethics superadded,’’ and that the codes of morality that they were said to enforce, were of social, not divine origin.∞≤π Clodd’s review was a mere squib compared to the forty-page article in Folk-Lore in which Hartland dissected Lang’s argument, sifted his evidence, and disputed his interpretations with calm perseverance. Like Clodd, Hart- land saw The Making of Religion as an apologetic exercise, ‘‘an impassioned appeal on behalf of the rudiments of theological orthodoxy,’’ and therefore a betrayal of scientific folklore.∞≤∫ His criticisms can be resolved into two main Andrew Lang | 137 contentions: first, that Lang had greatly exaggerated the purer or more elevated features of Australian religious beliefs; second, that his rhetoric, which emphasized the parallels between Christian theology and that of ‘‘savages,’’ was not only out of place in a purportedly scientific account, but was calculated to produce a wholly unwarrantable impression. Casting back over much of the same testimony that Lang had employed, Hartland was able to show that Australian folklore contained tales of the gods as ugly and grotesque as those found in any ancient mythology. Furthermore, he argued that the real character of Australian religion had been obscured and distorted by Lang’s use of certain terms—Father, Creator, Omnipotent, Eternal—which suggested comparison with his readers’ own religious notions and by his habit of equating the ethical the exhortations of Australian elders with the most familiar biblical injunctions. The net result was to impose ‘‘a civilised gloss’’ on ‘‘savage’’ ideas and to suggest the existence of a mysterious disjunction between their religious ideas and their level of technological development and social organization, where in fact no so such disjunction had been shown to exist.∞≤Ω In this way, both Clodd and Hartland joined in condemning Lang’s attempt to ‘‘whitewash’’ the ‘‘savage.’’∞≥≠ For them, as for Tylor, the tendency to look at primitive societies as negative images of their own was more than personal bias; it was a fundamental tool of their science and to be defended as such. This attitude is clearly exemplified in their insistence that Lang had misunderstood or misrepresented the source and character of the ethical ideals held by Australian tribesmen. Here Clodd and Hartland echoed the sociologism which marked Spencer’s thought and, to a lesser extent, Tylor’s as well: the belief that where ‘‘savage’’ standards of value were determined by the need to maintain social order and cohesion, the distinguishing feature of civilized life was that the ethical choices of the individual were freely and rationally made. Hartland’s final position—that inquiry into the religious beliefs of Austra- lians and other primitive peoples must be undertaken for its own sake—was surely incontestable. What was far from clear, however, was how such an investigation was to produce worthwhile results as long as researchers were wedded to a set of assumptions which dictated in advance what the theological conceptions of ‘‘savages’’ were allowed to mean. These assumptions, fully endorsed by Hartland, Clodd, and most of their fellow workers in folklore and anthropology, constituted the progressive evolutionary model that Lang had set out to criticize, at least in its application to religion. But the attempt soon entangled him in a double bind. On the one hand, because the model placed 138 | Andrew Lang

modern European culture at one end of the developmental series, Lang was obliged to compare ‘‘savage’’ teachings with Christian doctrine, especially in its liberal Protestant versions, in order to convince his readers that the former were really higher than knowledge of ‘‘savage’’ social conditions would suggest. On the other hand, this strategy laid him open to the accusation (or commendation) of serving theological orthodoxy. To be sure, a few critics were keenly aware of the significance of Lang’s thesis for anthropological theory. The Critical Review for example, pointed out that ‘‘it raises the whole question of evolution in that sense of the word which identifies evolution with progress.’’ The reviewer went on: ‘‘Mr. Lang is not afraid to mention the word degeneration. . . . He has the courage of his convictions, and when we look at the trend of current speculation on these matters, he has need of courage.’’∞≥∞ The Times welcomed The Making of Religion as a contribution to the growing body of works which looked at religion from an overtly antipositivist standpoint, and compared Lang’s views with those of William James. ‘‘Nowhere have we seen a more ingenious and strenuous attempt to destroy the notion that a great gulf severs primitive and civilised man,’’ the reviewer observed, and he praised the book as a ‘‘powerful criticism’’ of widely accepted theories that had acted ‘‘as a veil between observers and facts lying before them.’’∞≥≤ But other critics, while recognizing the seriousness of Lang’s challenge, were not willing to fall in with his anti-evolutionary conclusions. Many seemed to feel that offering even a qualified assent to the ‘‘high gods’’ theory was tantamount to a surrender to orthodoxy and would cast a shadow on the very possibility of regarding religion from an objective scientific standpoint. At the same time, those who criticized the theory on an explicitly Christian basis lent color to these suspicions by their tendency to seize on those points in Lang’s work which seemed to support a belief in primitive monotheism, rather than approaching the theory on its own terms.∞≥≥ Thus, even after forty years of public discussion on the subject, it was not easy for thinkers such as Lang, who sought both to understand religion as an element in human culture and to affirm its ultimate autonomy, to convince their readers that these were compatible goals. Critics such as Clodd and Hartland tended to dismiss or ignore his disavowal of belief in primitive revelation or in the ‘‘spiritualistic’’ explanation of ‘‘psychic phenomena.’’ But those disclaimers should be taken seriously. Lang was not trying to discover the ‘‘royal road to peace and certainty’’ that he had relinquished as an Oxford undergraduate, but rather to fight the ‘‘negative certainty’’ and reductionism Andrew Lang | 139

of positivist sociology and anthropology on the one hand, and the cramped defensiveness of Christian orthodoxy on the other. No serious student of the science of religion could disagree with Lang’s contention that theistic beliefs, mythical or not, were ‘‘undeniably of human importance.’’∞≥∂ The question was whether their significance had been exhausted, whether they represented at most a stage in the evolution of human consciousness. For Tylor, Clodd, Hartland, and Frazer, this was clearly the case. Lang acknowledged that he had been charged with ‘‘desert[ing] the camp’’ and ‘‘taking service under the colours of Mr. Max Müller,’’ reporting the accusation in a bantering tone which was intended to convey his repudiation of it.∞≥∑ Certainly the areas of disagreement between the two antagonists remained extensive, but in one sense the observation was a shrewd one. Both men attempted to use the science of religion not only to explore the historical forms and psychological content of humankind’s religious experiences, but to oppose those who denied their continuing relevance and validity. More- over, while pursuing this project both men sought to distance themselves, not always successfully, from a specifically Christian interpretation of religious history. But Lang’s pessimism, in part a matter of personal temperament, led him to take a much bleaker view than Müller of the possibilities which remained open to the European religious tradition. Where Müller looked forward to a triumphant synthesis of the great historical faiths, Lang seemed to believe that the best that could be hoped for was that an undefined ‘‘X region,’’ an area of spontaneity, mystery, and infinite possibility, could be defended against the tyrannical knowingness of the scientific impulse. Somewhat inconsistently perhaps, he never regarded such a defense as incompatible with a rational understanding of the spiritual realm, but he saw that it necessarily entailed the willingness to give up all pretensions to certainty. Such a sacrifice—of the certainty of Christian belief in a preternatural revelation, or of reliance on the redemptive power of inevitably advancing human knowledge—was one that many of Lang’s readers were not prepared to make. But in his turn away from the positivist tradition in evolutionary thought Lang was not alone; his work shared common ground with that of younger contemporaries such as William Robertson Smith, Jane Ellen Harrison, and R. R. Marett who reshaped the field of comparative religion in the years between the late 1880s and the First World War. ∑ William Robertson Smith A New Departure

In his attempt to defend the autonomy of religion from an all-embracing evolutionism, Andrew Lang had lashed out against the anthropological establishment that had grown up in Britain during the 1870s and 1880s. Of course, his attitude was an ambivalent one, for while attacking the positivistic tendencies which seemed to him to be gaining ground in the new ﬁeld, he also treasured his personal ties with men such as J. F. McLennan, E. B. Tylor, and R. R. Marett and often regretted his own failure to dedicate himself full-time to anthropology. Similarly, ambivalence marks the career of Lang’s fellow Scot, William Robertson Smith, biblical scholar, editor of the famous ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Cambridge Orientalist.∞ But while Lang had staked out a position midway between agnosticism and Christian orthodoxy, Robertson Smith approached anthropology from the standpoint of commitment to traditional Christian beliefs. His most distinctive and original contribution to the science of religion—the formulation of a genuinely sociological method—owes much to his religious commitments and experiences. Indeed, it could be said that he was attracted to the Victorian science of anthropology because of his prior concern with anthropology in the theological sense, as the study of humankind’s relationship to God. Robertson Smith, too, sought to inscribe the history of religion, or at least that of the ‘‘revealed’’ faith of the Bible, within a separate space, protected from the grasp of developmentalist theorizing. But unlike Lang, whose campaign was openly and gleefully polemical, Robertson Smith adopted a ﬂanking maneuver. Rather than attacking head-on the conclusions of the evolutionary school, he contested the initiating premise of previous studies of religion—that the investiga- William Robertson Smith | 141

tor should begin with the psychological conditions that gave rise to the earliest theistic ideas. Robertson Smith is commonly regarded as the founder (or one of the founders, if the claims of the French historian Numa Fustel de Coulanges are taken into account) of modern sociology of religion.≤ While it is true that previous authors hardly ignored the fact that religions are social institutions (whatever else they might be), it has been argued that Robertson Smith was the ﬁrst to articulate a distinctively sociological method, and moreover, one that explicitly opposed the psychological or intellectualist approach exempli- ﬁed in Tylor’s Primitive Culture.≥ Nevertheless, while Robertson Smith has been praised for his originality, the sources of that originality and the full dimensions of the contrast between his work and that of his predecessors have not received adequate attention or exploration. As Robert Ackerman has pointed out, ‘‘the question of how and why Smith came to reject the dominant rationalist assumptions of British historiography of religion’’ remains to be answered.∂

William Robertson Smith and the Free Church Robertson Smith’s academic career began in 1870, when he won his ﬁrst post, a chair at the Free Church College of Aberdeen. Eventually he went on to Cambridge, where he served as professor of Arabic and later as university librarian. In the meantime, he served as general editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a post for which he was peculiarly well suited by the great variety of his intellectual pursuits and attainments. During his life and for several years after his death at the age of forty-seven, Robertson Smith was best known as a champion of the so-called higher criticism, the historical exegesis of the Scriptures which was pioneered by Continental scholars in the late eighteenth century and consolidated, especially in the German universities, during the ﬁrst decades of the nineteenth century. The Free Church of Scotland, to which Robertson Smith belonged both as a member and as a clergyman, was a stronghold of theological conservatism whose leaders jealously guarded its reputation for strict Evangelical orthodoxy. Robertson Smith regarded his biblical scholarship as a religious duty, but in the eyes of his fellow churchmen it was a reckless and destructive activity, and he paid an extremely heavy price for advocating the new criticism when in 1881, following one of the most celebrated ecclesiastical trials of the century, he was expelled from the Aberdeen chair. It was only after this that he 142 | William Robertson Smith

turned his attention to comparative religion. Given his notoriety as an accused heretic, it is not surprising that the earlier phase of Robertson Smith’s career should, for a time, have overshadowed the later one in the public mind. In reality, Robertson Smith’s contributions to anthropology carried on and in certain important ways extended the projects that he first undertook as an Old Testament critic. The ordeal of Robertson Smith’s trial was not his alone: it was also a crisis for the church of which he was a member and officeholder. No clear understanding of the history of Robertson Smith’s career or of the character of his thought is possible without some knowledge of the history of the church in whose principles he had been educated. Of particular importance are the conflicts that led to the creation of the Free Church in the Great Disruption of 1843.∑ Throughout the latter half of the eighteenth century, the Scottish Church, like the Church of England, had been dominated by a group of latitudinarian clerics who opposed all forms of religious ‘‘enthusiasm’’ as dangers to social order and civic peace. These ‘‘Moderates’’ were closely allied with the leading thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment and deeply imbued with its ethos. From about 1800, however, Moderate influence in the Church entered a period of gradual but steady decline in the face of a gathering Evangelical reaction. In the eyes of their opponents, the Moderates were lukewarm believers at best, and it was even charged that under their sway deistical philosophy had found its way into the pulpit. In contrast to what they deemed the ‘‘rationalism’’ of eighteenth-century theology, Evangelical preachers called for a renewed acknowledgment of humanity’s absolute dependence upon divine grace as the only means of salvation, an acknowledgment that must come from the heart of the repentant sinner. Those who left the establishment to form the Free Church were among the most committed followers of the Evangelical party, while many of those who remained were the intellectual heirs of the eighteenth-century Moderates.∏ These differences were not alone responsible for the Disruption, however. The immediate cause was a clash between the British state and a large faction within the Church known as the ‘‘popular party’’ and led by the Evangelical minister Thomas Chalmers. A powerful and magnetic orator and a man of stubborn conviction, Chalmers used his gifts to advance both the Evangelical cause and his own peculiar vision of a society regenerated by the Church, a nineteenth-century version of Calvin’s godly commonwealth. Two features of Chalmers’s program are of special interest. First, he sought to preserve the William Robertson Smith | 143

traditional parish system, and in particular the responsibility of the Church to provide education and poor relief in the face of trends toward voluntarism in the Church and increasing state control over social policy. For Chalmers, this was the only answer to the growth of disruptive individualism and class conflict in an industrializing society; by assuming the traditional duties of the Church, the government added to social fragmentation, depriving people of any sense of responsibility toward their neighbors. The second notable feature of Chalmers’s program was his determination to see the influence of the ‘‘people’’ prevail over that of the wealthy and powerful few in matters of ecclesiastical policy. Specifically, he and his party sought to strengthen the hands of the local presbyteries against the lay patrons of parish livings. The richly complicated series of events leading up to the Disruption practically defies adequate summary, but it was this last issue—the right of the people to choose their own ministers—that occasioned the final break. In the so-called Auchterarder affair of 1839, the Scottish courts, backed up by the central government in London, upheld the power of a patron to force the acceptance of a minister, even though a majority in the parish had formally rejected him. There followed a series of skirmishes with the state in which the Church was forced to acknowledge not only the unrestricted rights of patrons but, in effect, the authority of the secular government to interfere in matters of internal spiritual discipline.π The actual split came in 1843 at a meeting of the General Assembly (the highest governing body of the Church), when Chal- mers and the majority of the Evangelicals, announcing their unwillingness to accept government encroachment on the ‘‘spiritual independence’’ of the Church, seceded to form a new body. It must be emphasized that their action in no way implied a repudiation of the principle of establishment. According to the ‘‘Disruption Fathers,’’ the Free Church was the true Church of Scotland, forced to suffer a period of exile in a desperate act of self-defense; those who remained behind constituted nothing more than a rump that had forfeited its legitimacy in bowing to state tyranny. This was a dubious claim in light of the fact that a majority of churchmen had not joined the secessionists, but the pretensions of the Free Church were not wholly without foundation. A very large minority of both laymen and ministers (more than 450, or approximately 38 percent of the clergy) had gone out, and they could claim, with some show of reason, that their numbers included many of the most active and committed members.∫ During the following decades, the more conservative members of the Free Church, among them the Smith family, continued to reject the principle of 144 | William Robertson Smith

voluntarism and to shun closer contacts with those independent Presbyterian churches that favored disestablishment. Robertson Smith’s father, William Pirie Smith, had been the headmaster of a successful Aberdeen school, but in 1845 he had given up this comfortable position to serve as minister of the newly formed Free Church congregation in the rural parish of Keig. He was to remain there until his retirement some thirty-five years later. The local landlord, a member of the establishment, refused to provide a site for the new congregation, and for the first year they met in a hastily constructed wooden shed. But he gave in eventually, and William Robertson Smith, who was born in November 1846, was the first child to be baptized in the new church at Keig. The family seems to have been exceptionally close-knit. Throughout the entire course of his trial, Robertson Smith was always able to depend on their unwavering support, and his father especially followed each step of the case with protective anxiety, although it is questionable whether he fully shared his son’s theological opinions. This deep sense of family loyalty was fostered by the circumstance that the Smith children, eventually seven in all, remained at home together and received lessons from their parents. Though William was frail and often very ill, he was possessed of an extraordinary nervous energy and intellectual curiosity; his father was able to report with some complacency that he had learned to read not only English but also Hebrew by the age of six. The parents expected an unusual measure of self-reliance from their children; lessons were prescribed and then the students were left to their own resources, a system which ‘‘drew out their latent powers, accustomed them to think for themselves, and gave them the pleasure that springs from the overcoming of difficulties.’’Ω Evangelical distaste for ‘‘rationalism’’ and latitudinarianism could and often did create an atmosphere hostile to critical discussion of theological issues, but this was not the case in the Smith home. Despite the fact that the family held ‘‘exceedingly precise’’ views on ‘‘all matters of conduct,’’ the children were not discouraged from expressing their views; visitors to the manse were sometimes shocked by the uninhibited discussion of ‘‘sacred topics.’’ William especially was known for the eagerness with which he sought to draw visitors into theological debate and for the confidence, the ‘‘almost reckless intellectual honesty,’’ with which he stated his own opinions. As one boyhood friend later reported: ‘‘When Willie began to talk in his fluent way on ‘the universality of sin and grace,’ it gave us boys a queer turn. He rather alarmed us by his criticism of some of the inspired writings, and we though him somewhat irreverent, as did his mother.’’∞≠ William Robertson Smith | 145

This intellectual self-confidence, considered arrogance by some, was a quality noted by all who knew Robertson Smith well or who clashed with him in scholarly controversy. Not that he was guilty of an exaggerated estimate of his own abilities. In 1889, for example, when he was considered the leading candidate for the Adams Chair in Arabic at Cambridge, he wrote to one of his own supporters that he considered a rival more highly qualified for the position.∞∞ Yet he was seldom troubled with genuine self-doubt, and even when he was under ferocious attack at the time of his heresy trial, he maintained an optimistic belief that the validity of his position must in time be apparent to all. This essentially open, even naive outlook made it easier for his friends to tolerate the tendency to embark on tyrannical monologues on any and every subject.∞≤ Robertson Smith won many friends, and they apparently regarded this tendency as an endearing foible rather than a serious defect, but it also made enemies for him, and they were less likely to forgive what looked to them like a species of intellectual bullying.∞≥ There can be little doubt that Robertson Smith’s reputation for arrogance had a significant impact on the outcome of his battle with the authorities of the Free Church, and not simply because his barely concealed contempt wounded the amour-propre of his opponents. Critics argued that in his zeal to uphold the results of modern Continental biblical criticism, he showed a callow insensitivity to needs of the unscholarly mass of believers. Yet despite his role as a symbol of the clash between modern critical scholarship and the traditions of popular Protestantism, Robertson Smith remained throughout his career deeply influenced by his earliest emotional attachments, and his most advanced and original work was shaped by the Evangelical theology that had been impressed upon him as a child. The judgment of one modern historian, that he ‘‘was a man in service of the Church whose first loyalty was not to her but to scholarship’’ is far too one- sided.∞∂ Certainly his commitment to critical investigation and discourse was unshakable, but what has been less obvious to both his admirers and his critics is the extent to which the almost aggressive intellectualism which this entailed was tempered by an equally profound attachment to Evangelical principles, and especially the Evangelical emphasis on personal religion. According to his biographer and longtime friend, John Sutherland Black, while still a child, Robertson Smith had shown ‘‘signs of a purely intellectual attitude towards spiritual things.’’∞∑ He once complained of ‘‘a temptation to look at truth on the intellectual side, and less than I should wish on the spiritual side.’’∞∏ And during the summer of 1869, while on a trip to Germany, 146 | William Robertson Smith

he again raised the issue; while he deeply admired the intellectual rigor of the German theologians, he was disturbed to find that they regarded their subject as nothing ‘‘but an abstract science.’’∞π Robertson Smith’s distaste for an excessively abstract or rational approach to faith should be placed in the context of the long struggle between Evan- gelicals and Moderates within the Scottish Church. He steadfastly resisted the anti-intellectualism that figured so prominently in the reaction against eighteenth-century theology, but he rejected with equal firmness the notion of faith as intellectual assent to a body of received doctrine. For him, as for other Evangelicals, the core of the Christian life lay in personal experience of divine redeeming love. To have faith was less a matter of believing in a system of propositions supposed to contain ‘‘saving truth’’ than an acceptance of one’s participation in a relationship with God through Christ. The uneasiness that Robertson Smith felt about his own approach to ‘‘religious truth’’ seems to have come to a head in 1869 during and after his trip to Germany. The following year he accepted the Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at the Free Church College of Aberdeen, and the hints of anxiety and self-doubt disappear from his correspondence. He found that it was possible to embrace the critical methods of his German mentors and still remain loyal to Evangelical tradition. By elevating the relationship with God above concern for specifics of doctrine, the pietistic emphasis on ‘‘personal religion’’ could lessen the fear that departures from theological tradition were necessarily subversive of ‘‘true faith.’’ Robertson Smith’s theological writings from this period reveal an intense preoccupation with the conception of faith as personal and spiritual rather than doctrinal and ‘‘ratiocinative.’’∞∫ He was to return to this theme again and again; and increasingly, he sought to integrate it into his practice of Old Testament criticism. Moreover, it was to play a critical role in shaping his theories on the sociology of religion. The history of Robertson Smith’s career can be interpreted as an object lesson on the difficulties of trying to serve two masters, but he himself did not see it that way. By the time he had accepted the Aberdeen chair he had already come to a personal resolution of the discord between the claims of intellect and those of faith, and in his mature work the two were not only compatible, but mutually fruitful and supporting. Before 1870, however, it was by no means certain that he would use his talents in the fields of theology and biblical studies, though there was little doubt that he would be a scholar. He entered the University of Aberdeen in 1861 at the age of fifteen, along with his younger brother George. Though the William Robertson Smith | 147

two were the youngest undergraduates of their year, William had already distinguished himself by taking first place in competition for a Bursary award the aim of which was to ensure that ‘‘a young man with 5£ a year and an adequate supply of oatmeal could scale the heights of knowledge.’’∞Ω Robert- son Smith’s resources were not quite so meager, but his undergraduate existence looks grim enough to a modern observer. Constant work and austere living probably contributed to the early deaths of George and a sister, Mary Jane, who accompanied them to Aberdeen, and William himself was prevented by illness from taking his final honors examinations. Nevertheless, his achievements were nothing short of spectacular. His name appeared first on the class lists with monotonous regularity, and a fellow student later recalled that on prize day Robertson Smith would be forced to hire a cab to carry home all the books he had won.≤≠ His professors competed with one another in their attempts to steer his talents toward appropriate goals. Alexander Bain, the famous champion of empirical psychology, regarded Robertson Smith as the most brilliant pupil he had ever had, this despite the fact that the two were often at odds, the student regarding his professor as little better than an infidel.≤∞ These successes were the product of unrelenting effort, a passionate and sincere love of learning spiced with a sharp competitive streak, and an extraordinarily powerful intellect. Throughout his student days, Robertson Smith pursued a double track; though he never lost interest in theology, he threw himself with equal enthusiasm into the study of mathematics and natural philosophy, especially physics. The autumn after his graduation from Aberdeen, he won the Ferguson Schol- arship in Mathematics, one of the highest honors open to a Scottish student, and a year later, in 1866, he entered the New College in Edinburgh, where he planned to continue his mathematical studies. One result of the move to Edinburgh was that he began to be drawn into a new more cosmopolitan circle of acquaintances, men of literary and scientific interests whose intellectual horizons were considerably wider than those of the provincial ministers and theology students who had been his earliest friends. In 1868, he accepted the position of assistant to P. G. Tait, an eminent professor of physics at the New College.≤≤ With Tait’s sponsorship, he began to associate with some of the leading figures in the intellectual life of the capital. Among his new friends were Sir William Thomson (afterwards Lord Kelvin) and J. F. McLennan, a member of the Scottish bar whose research into primitive marriage customs and social organization culminated in two very influential works, Primitive Marriage (1865), and Studies in Ancient Society (1876). McLennan’s pioneering 148 | William Robertson Smith

articles on totemism (‘‘The Worship of Plants and Animals’’) were just beginning to appear in the Fortnightly Review in October 1869, when Robertson Smith first made his acquaintance, but it was not until 1880 that his influence on the work of the young biblical scholar was to become apparent. In the meantime, Robertson Smith had already undertaken the studies that foreshadowed his future role as mediator between the Scottish Calvinist tradition and German Protestant theology and biblical scholarship. His first trip to Germany, in the summer of 1867, fulfilled a plan of long standing, and he decided to repeat the experience two years later. These two journeys saw him making rapid strides in his Hebrew studies, winning the friendship and support of some of the leading lights of German scholarship, and moving very gradually away from the extreme theological conservatism that dominated the Free Church. At first he was somewhat bewildered and taken aback, not so much by the intellectual speculations to which he was exposed as by the strange new customs and usages, particularly those associated with religion. The lax observance of the ‘‘Continental Sunday,’’ typical even among Protes- tants, was especially disturbing. Noting with disapproval that not even the delivery of mail was suspended, he begged his father to time the letters from home so that they would not arrive on a Sunday.≤≥ This severity on matters of custom was balanced by a tendency to excuse the heterodox leanings (as he conceived them) of the professors with whom he came in contact. In a letter to his parents written during his first trip to Germany, for example, Robertson Smith described Professor Kamphausen of Bonn as ‘‘a very sincere and I believe pious man,’’ and he went on, ‘‘in fact, it is quite absurd to regard the heterodox Germans as infidels.’’≤∂ This gradual evolution of personal feeling was reflected in a greater openness to new ideas. Robertson Smith’s advisers had urged him to go to Heidel- berg to study under Richard Rothe, at that time considered ‘‘the most notable man on the Rational side’’ in German theology, but the young student had felt ‘‘some hesitation in exposing himself’’ to such ‘‘rationalistic teaching’’ and had decided to go to Bonn instead. Upon his return to Scotland, however, he began an intensive study of Rothe’s work, and he was later to acknowledge the Heidelberg theologian and his younger disciple, Albrecht Ritschl, as ‘‘leading influences’’ in the formation of his own thought.≤∑ In Rothe’s work, Robertson Smith came face to face for the first time with the problem of the relationship between scripture and revelation. More precisely, he was now forced to confront the possibility that there was a problem, for among Scottish Evangeli- cals, as among those Germans of pietistic bent from whom Rothe himself had William Robertson Smith | 149

come, the tendency had always been to treat the two as identical. Little by little, Robertson Smith was moving toward the characteristic stance of Rothe, Ritschl, and other students of ‘‘believing criticism’’: an absolute affirmation of the fact of a supernatural divine revelation combined with ‘‘a refusal to assign a special supernatural character to the records in which the fact of that revelation is conveyed.’’≤∏ Yet perhaps because his own transition was so gradual, he seems not to have realized at first how far he strayed from a position acceptable to others in the Free Church. Shortly after returning from his second trip to Germany, Robertson Smith found himself forced to choose finally between a scientific career and one devoted to religious scholarship. The Chair of Hebrew and Old Testament Exegesis at the Free Church College of Aberdeen had fallen vacant, and after some initial hesitation, Robertson Smith was at last persuaded to offer himself as a candidate. His extraordinary accomplishments and brilliant potential were generally acknowledged, but some observers questioned whether his intellectual maturity could wholly make up for his lack of actual experience either as a religious teacher or as a pastor. But these doubts were overborne by the flood of glowing testimonials which poured in not only from distinguished members of the Free Church but from prominent scholars in Germany and the Netherlands, and Robertson Smith was elected to the post with a large majority. In November 1870, at the age of twenty-four, he was ordained as a Free Church minister, and one day later he took up his professorial duties. As part of his campaign for the post at Aberdeen, Robertson Smith had written an article for the British Quarterly Review entitled ‘‘The Question of Prophecy in the Critical Schools of the Continent.’’ It was an essay on the critical positions of Ewald, Kuenen, and Baur, and while Robertson Smith did not fail to point out where he differed from these men, he also made it plain that he regarded himself as a member of the same camp. This was Robertson Smith’s first important statement of his views on the subject, and the extent to which the article prefigures his later work is striking. Right from the beginning, he sought to hold in combination, and allow his work to be guided by, two seemingly discordant principles: (1) a belief in ‘‘the organic unity of all history,’’ and (2) the conviction that a consistent and coherent view of Old Testament history was possible only to those who turned away from rationalism and accepted the reality of a supernatural revelation. Robertson Smith also made it plain that his own interest lay not so much with the details of source criticism as with the broader reconstruction of Israelite religious his- 150 | William Robertson Smith

tory, especially the role of the prophets. On this latter point, he praised the Continental critics for demonstrating so convincingly that the prophets must not be looked upon primarily as seers, but as religious reformers whose messages were intended for their contemporaries. The new critical schools had ‘‘done no greater service than to point out how small a fraction of the prophetic writings is strictly predictive.’’≤π

The Robertson Smith Trial Soon after taking up his position at the Free Church College, Robertson Smith began to churn out a steady stream of articles and reviews on Old Testament subjects. His growing scholarly reputation was sealed in 1875 by an invitation to join the committee entrusted with revision of the English Bible. A year earlier he had been asked by Spencer Baynes, editor of the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, to write some important religious articles which were to appear in volumes 2 and 3. Baynes was searching for someone who could combine liberal ‘‘progressive’’ scholarship with ‘‘a sufficient measure of orthodoxy’’ in the handling of sensitive religious questions.≤∫ Robertson Smith seemed to match the requirements perfectly. The articles ‘‘Angel,’’ ‘‘Apostle,’’ ‘‘Ark,’’ ‘‘Assideans,’’ and ‘‘Baal,’’ each meticulously researched and painstakingly written, testified to Robertson Smith’s scholarly excellence, but the one of greatest importance for him, the contribution that was to allow the fullest display of his mastery of his field, was the article ‘‘Bible,’’ which appeared in volume 3 in 1875. This article was the main source of evidence for the heresy charges that were to embroil Robertson Smith in a five-year battle with Free Church officials. In the opening statement, Robertson Smith characterized the Bible as a collection drawing together ‘‘a number of independent records, which set before us the gradual development of the religion of revelation.’’≤Ω These two themes—the varied and composite character of the sacred books, each of which posed ‘‘a distinct critical problem,’’ and the contention that they recorded a progressive rather than a static revelation—guided the discussion that followed. In the case of the Old Testament, the records spoke of a period of conflict during which polytheistic nature-worship and an ‘‘unspiritual’’ conception of Jehovah as a purely national deity whose interest in his people had nothing to do with moral considerations were pitted against a third conception, the one moral and spiritual God preached by the ‘‘prophetic party.’’ This image of the prophets as religious reformers speaking first of all to William Robertson Smith | 151

their own age was, as Robertson Smith acknowledged, a dramatic departure from older views, and one whose acceptance had long been stymied by ‘‘traditional prejudices.’’ On the one hand, the predictive element in prophecy had received ‘‘undue prominence’’; and on the other, it had been assumed that all the ordinances and most of the doctrines of later Judaism had been laid down as a finished system at the time of Moses. In other words, according to the traditional belief, Moses himself had written the books composing the Pentateuch. Robertson Smith, in contrast, endorsed the modern critical theory that the Pentateuch is composed of materials dating from different periods. Nevertheless, the dominant impression is of an author more interested in presenting a revised overview of Israelite history, one that was common property for all but the most conservative critics, than in a subversive attention to contradictions and inaccuracies. The tone was authoritative, dispassionate, even a little dry, as befits an encyclopedia article. Robertson Smith’s article attracted little attention in the initial reviews of the new volume. It was singularly unfortunate for him that the first extended discussion of his contribution came from the pen of A. H. Charteris, a professor of biblical criticism and popular preacher who, though a minister of the established Church, was widely respected in Free Church circles as ‘‘a sincere and fervent Evangelical.’’≥≠ Dismissing the article as ‘‘an attempt to pass off rationalistic speculations as ascertained facts,’’ he expressed regret ‘‘that a publication which will be admitted without suspicion into many a religious household . . . should, upon so all-important a matter as the records of our faith, take a stand—a decided stand—on the wrong side.’’≥∞ In May 1876, one month after the review had appeared, Free Church officials informed Robert- son Smith that his views were to be made the subject of a formal inquiry. In the weeks that followed, the case ceased to be solely a matter of official discussion and investigation and became the center of a heated public agita- tion, complete with a ferocious pamphlet war and urgent calls for action from anxious presbyteries. In January 1877, the case was handed over to the Aber- deen Presbytery (which had direct jurisdiction over Robertson Smith), which in turn referred it to the General Assembly, where the charges against him were finally reduced to order in a formal indictment, or ‘‘libel,’’ as it was known in Scottish church courts, which appeared in its final form in May 1878. Robertson Smith faced two major accusations. The first was that he had ‘‘published’’ and ‘‘promulgated’’ opinions ‘‘which are . . . of a dangerous and unsettling tendency in their bearing on the doctrine of the immediate inspiration, infallible truth, and divine authority of the Holy Scriptures.’’ The more 152 | William Robertson Smith

specific charge dealt with his contention that Deuteronomy had not been written by Moses but by a later author who had represented his words as ‘‘proceeding from the mouth of Moses.’’≥≤ The case thus recalled the controversies over Pentateuchal criticism that had agitated the English public in the early 1860s at the time of the Colenso affair. It is easy to portray the issue as a frivolous one. One historian declares that few outside of the Free Church ‘‘would have troubled to argue that a book had been written by a man whose death and burial it recounted.’’≥≥ In fact, as both Robertson Smith and his opponents realized, the implication of the advanced critical position were very far-reaching, for if it could be shown that portions of the Pentateuch had been written long after the time of Moses, a radical revision of Israelite history would become absolutely necessary.≥∂ The belief that God had revealed to Moses a complete religious system from which the Hebrews of succeeding generations had repeatedly deviated would no longer be tenable. Moreover, if the biblical records were really in such disarray, if the books were so arranged as to mislead the reader concerning their actual historical character, what was to forestall the conclusion that one could never arrive at an accurate reading of them without expert critical assistance? Again and again, critics attacked Robertson Smith as representative of an arrogant and presumptuous elite who pursued their researches in defiance of the plain common sense of the mass of believers and for no other purpose than to satisfy their own intellectual curiosity.≥∑ Of course, these issues did not originate with the Robertson Smith case, and he was not the first or the only Free Church scholar to practice the new higher criticism. In truth, if Robertson Smith had really been as aloof and insulated from public opinion as his opponents charged (and as some recent historians have argued), he could never have won the kind of widespread support that gathered around him during the following years. The case attracted a measure of international attention, but in Scotland itself, according to James Bryce, it was for four years ‘‘the chief topic of discussion outside as well as inside the Free Church.’’≥∏ The General Assembly meetings of 1878, 1879, and 1880 attracted huge crowds who packed the Visitors’ Gallery, sometimes waiting in line for hours for the chance of a seat and transforming the Assembly into a public theater of ecclesiastical politics. Rising to speak, Rob- ertson Smith was usually greeted with prolonged applause, and on several occasions the proceedings were delayed by spontaneous demonstrations in his favor.≥π Most of the Scottish press was on his side, and he also attracted a substantial body of dedicated defenders—students, colleagues, younger min- William Robertson Smith | 153

isters, and prominent laymen—who busied themselves organizing committees and writing letters and pamphlets on his behalf. Robertson Smith met the charges against him with a number of defensive strategies. In the first place, he pointed out, the higher criticism was firmly established and widely accepted as ‘‘a field of legitimate scientific activity,’’ so that the Church could not forbid its practice to her members and officehold- ers ‘‘without surrendering it to unbelievers.’’≥∫ But his aims were not primarily defensive; he hoped to convince not only his church but also the wider audience of British Protestants that the new critical schools were uniquely situated to promote the advance of Christian theology in an age of rampant infidelity. With eyes fixed solely on the ‘‘danger from without,’’ conservatives had begun to neglect ‘‘the internal growth and activity of the Church.’’≥Ω It was the task of the higher criticism, Robertson Smith maintained, to rouse the Churches from this defensive, purely reactive posture and to indicate a fresh path of theological advance. Historical study of the Scriptures could break the impasse and mediate between modern thought and traditional Christian teaching. The key to Robertson Smith’s modernizing project lies in this insistence on a historically minded reading of the Bible. All of the sciences had made great strides over the preceding century, but none had come further than the critical and scientific study of history. Thoughtful and active minds everywhere were coming to recognize ancient literature as ‘‘a fragment of ancient life’’ which must be treated as ‘‘a living thing . . . which we shall not fully understand without putting ourselves back into the age in which it was written.’’∂≠ The task of the biblical critic was in every way parallel to that of the secular historian—to enable his readers to enter as fully as possible into a past reality. But his responsibility was even greater ‘‘because the supreme religious significance of the history gives it an interest to which no other part of ancient history can pretend.’’∂∞ If the Church were to accept the higher criticism, Robertson Smith believed, it would not be surrendering to modern thought but going out to meet it and to claim it as its own. The culmination of Robertson Smith’s first trial came at the General Assembly meeting of 1880 when, as a result of his own skill and the strategic blunders committed by the prosecution, the charges against him were found not proven. The reprieve was only temporary, however. During the years in which his case was before Church officials, Robertson Smith, who had been suspended from his teaching duties, had continued to write articles for the Encyclopaedia. Three weeks after the conclusion of his first trial, volume 11 154 | William Robertson Smith

appeared containing his contribution ‘‘Hebrew Language and Literature,’’ which reiterated many of the conclusions found in the article ‘‘Bible.’’ The new article had actually been completed the previous autumn, but the entire volume was delayed because of the failure of another contributor (William Thomson [Lord Kelvin], author of the article ‘‘Heat’’) to meet the deadline. The timing was disastrous. Robertson Smith’s opponents were unmoved by the fact that following the Assembly’s decision he had made it clear to the editors of the Encyclopaedia that he would have to refuse further requests for contributions on biblical topics. They saw this new development as a golden opportunity to reverse the previous decision; one of Robertson Smith’s enemies declared it ‘‘a marvelous interposition of providence.’’∂≤ By June 15, 1880, the second Robertson Smith case had begun. The second trial differed from the first most notably in the increased ruthlessness of Robertson Smith’s enemies. Having failed once, they were determined that no legal niceties should prevent them from obtaining their object this time. A new Commission of Inquiry was packed so as to include none of Robertson Smith’s supporters, and he was not provided with a copy of the charges until the very day on which he was to appear to defend himself. In the end, Rainy persuaded the two sides to accept a compromise on the grounds of expediency; Robertson Smith was to be deprived of his chair, but his opinions would not be formally condemned. In this way, it was hoped, the conservatives could be placated while the liberty of other, less outspoken, Free Church scholars would not have to be given up. The brazen opportunism that led to this result was not soon forgotten.∂≥ Soon after the termination of the second case in June 1881, it was an- nounced that Robertson Smith would be joining Spencer Baynes as coeditor of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and following Baynes’s death he became chief editor. The ninth edition had already become famous as the ‘‘scholar’s edition,’’ and it was the first one to receive international circulation on a mass basis. With his continental contacts, Robertson Smith was able to further broaden the Encyclopaedia’s international base and to raise the quality of the contributions even higher, especially in the fields of biblical criticism and Semitic archaeology.∂∂ Though he devoted careful attention to each article (earning a reputation among his staff for obsessive perfectionism), he showed special concern for those relating to anthropology and comparative religion where he saw opportunities for pioneering work. In one instance, he fought with the publishers for the inclusion of an article on totemism: ‘‘I hope that Messrs. Black clearly understand that Totemism is a subject of growing importance, daily mentioned in magazines and papers, but of which there is no good William Robertson Smith | 155

account anywhere—precisely one of those cases where we have an opportunity of being ahead of everyone and getting some reputation. There is no article in the volume for which I am more solicitous. I have taken much personal pains with it, guiding Frazer carefully in his treatment. . . . We must make room for it, whatever else goes.’’∂∑ The author of the article was a young classical scholar, James George Frazer, with whom Robertson Smith had become friends in 1883. Robertson Smith adopted his fellow Scotsman as a protégé, and it was at his urging that Frazer began to devote more and more effort to anthropology and the study of primitive religion. By this time, Robertson Smith had already left Scotland for Cambridge. Though the catholicity of his intellectual interests made the Encyclopaedia job congenial in some ways, he had come to look on editing as ‘‘a dreadful trade’’ and longed to return to academic life and the opportunity to pursue sustained original research. In 1882, Edwin Palmer, Lord Almoner’s Professor of Arabic, had been assassinated while traveling in the Sinai peninsula on diplomatic business for the British government. Robertson Smith’s friends at Cambridge urged him to stand for the now vacant post. In addition to his linguistic abilities, Robertson Smith had the advantage of having traveled in Arabia in 1878 and 1879; his account of his adventures, published in the Scotsman as ‘‘Journey in the Hejaz,’’ had appeared in 1880.∂∏ His candidacy was successful, and he moved to Cambridge in 1883. He was to spend the rest of his life there, serving as university librarian from 1886 to 1889 and again as professor of Arabic from that year until his death at the age of forty-seven in 1894. Robertson Smith was buried in the churchyard at Keig, and the procession that accompanied the hearse from the railway station included some of the leading scholars of Scotland and England as well as the farmers and crofters who had been the family’s neighbors for so many years. But the gathering of such a diverse company of mourners was not really as incongruous as it might at ﬁrst have appeared. In some ways, it was wholly appropriate. It was one of the great mysteries of the Robertson Smith case that the accused had fought so hard to retain the right to serve the Free Church when other institutions were eager to offer him employment; Harvard, for example, made him two offers.∂π Even after his expulsion, he sought to maintain his ties with the Free Church, regularly attending meetings of his local presbytery and serving as delegate in the General Assembly of 1882, though on this latter occasion his presence provoked some acrimonious exchanges. Robertson Smith had been partly cut off from the community in which he was raised by the results of his heresy trial, and he never overcame the sense of loss associated with that experience.∂∫ 156 | William Robertson Smith

Evangelicalism and the Sociology of Religion Of course, it is one thing to try to maintain personal ties and connections with one’s past and another to cling ‘‘with an almost obstinate conservatism,’’ as Robertson Smith is said to have done ‘‘to the forms of thought familiar to him in his youth.’’∂Ω To judge by the observations made after his death, nothing could have been more chivalrous and touching than his personal loyalty to the church in which he had received such unbrotherly treatment. But at the same time, nothing could have been more perplexing or more difficult to reconcile with his status as a martyr to intellectual freedom and a pioneer in religious scholarship than his tenacious theological conservatism. Robertson Smith’s contemporaries often assumed that any investigation of religion along self- consciously ‘‘scientific’’ lines must be inherently antagonistic to traditional beliefs. It is significant that two of his closest friends, J. G. Frazer and J. S. Black, at times misinterpreted or sought to minimize the influence of Robert- son Smith’s religious convictions on his anthropological work.∑≠ Moreover, most sociocultural evolutionists took it for granted that continued adherence to inherited Christian beliefs unfitted a scholar to pursue detached and objective research into religious phenomena. Few modern historians would see the question in precisely those terms; nevertheless, the suggestion of something anomalous or even self-contradictory in Robertson Smith’s position has continued to shape analysis of his work down to the present. Some have claimed that his theories and methods were logically inconsistent with his professedly traditional theology and that he was able to retain both sides only by segregating them in separate mental compartments.∑∞ Others acknowledge the bearing of his religious convictions on his scholarship, but they regard the former mainly as a distorting bias, a source of weakness.∑≤ The following argument identifies the ways in which Robertson Smith’s theology was reflected in his sociological theories of religion. His definition of religious faith centered on the relationship between the individual believer and God rather than intellectual acceptance of a creed. At the same time, Robertson Smith’s own religious experience led him away from an exclusive emphasis on the individual to insist on the importance of the Church as a religious community. These concerns reappear in his sociological writings as an assertion of the primacy of ritual over myth in the interpretation of ancient religion. According to Robertson Smith, ritual—the process by which worshippers reinforced the bonds between themselves and their gods—was central to religion from the beginning; dogma and mythology came later. This William Robertson Smith | 157

assertion presented a challenge to the intellectualist assumptions of Tylor and other British contributors to the scientific study of religion, assumptions that had hitherto dominated inquiry. It appears, then, that both Robertson Smith’s biblical criticism and his articulation of a sociological method for the study of religion (and precisely those aspects of the latter which are most strikingly modern) are not only consistent with his ‘‘old-fashioned evangelicalism’’ but are very intimately related to it. One of the hazards of intellectual biography lies in the temptation to stitch together isolated passages drawn from quite distinct periods of a thinker’s work, thereby creating a deceptively smooth and static whole. In the case of Robertson Smith, however, one must also guard against the opposing tendency. At first sight, his writings appear easily divisible into Old Testament criticism on the one hand, and studies in comparative religion on the other. In fact, the significance of his later work is apt to be misjudged unless his earlier exercises in the higher criticism are first taken into account, and on their own terms, not merely as a prelude to things to come. In part this is because his goals remained relatively constant. Robertson Smith’s venture into comparative religion was an attempt to further his project of harmonizing Christian thought with what he saw as the distinctive historical-mindedness of the nineteenth century. At the same time, he continued to insist that Old Testa- ment religion was unique, shaped as it was by ‘‘the supernatural hand of a revealing God.’’ Furthermore, Robertson Smith’s own religious commitments, not only his theological principles, but at a more intimate level the quality of his personal faith, created a kind of deep structure to his thought which remained when he turned to a new subject matter and methodology. Two points deserve special emphasis in this regard: first, and most important, is Robertson Smith’s claim that faith is preeminently personal and experiential rather than doctrinal and cognitive; second is his view of the proper relation between the Church and the individual believer. Robertson Smith attached himself firmly to Evangelical tradition in holding that faith means trust in a personal God rather than intellectual assent to a series of propositions about God. This emphasis comes through in a most striking fashion in the sermons that he preached between his ordination, in 1870, and 1881, when he left the official service of the Free Church. These public appearances naturally drew especially large crowds during the years of the trial, but those who came expecting to be treated to daring speculative flights or startling departures from traditional teaching came away ‘‘almost disappointed with the old-fashioned evangelicalism’’ of his remarks.∑≥ The most noticeable feature of these sermons, as one scholar has recently ob- 158 | William Robertson Smith

served, ‘‘is their patently unacademic quality.’’∑∂ They contain very little either of scriptural exegesis or analysis of doctrine, but are mainly devotional in character. The theme most often repeated and most fully developed is ‘‘the supremacy of an utter commitment and devotion to Christ,’’ as in this admo- nition: ‘‘It is not knowing about Christ not believing truths about Christ that is the mark of grace in the heart [sic]. We must know the Lord himself, know him as his disciples knew him.’’∑∑ To be sure, the homely pietism that ﬂavors this passage is peculiarly appropriate for a sermon, but the same conviction expressed in more sophisticated language appears frequently in Robertson Smith’s formal scholarly works. ‘‘Saving faith,’’ he wrote, ‘‘is not an intellectual assent to a system of doctrine superior to reason, but a personal trust on God in Christ.’’∑∏ This is, in certain ways, a very individualistic conception of faith; at one point, Robertson Smith refers to the Bible as ‘‘the personal message of [God’s] love to me.’’∑π But the inﬂuence of his own Presbyterian heritage, reinforced by the teachings of the German theologian Albrecht Ritschl, directed him to the problem of unresolved tensions between personal and institutional religion within the Protestant tradition and convinced him of the need for a clearer conception of the proper role of the Church. It is one of the ironies of the Robertson Smith case that he should have been portrayed by his opponents as pursuing a disruptively individualistic course, for like many of them he feared the trend toward sectarianism that he saw growing in the Free Church. In- deed, like Thomas Chalmers, Robertson Smith had a highly developed appreciation of the social role of the Church within the life of a community of believers. According to his biographers, he held ‘‘somewhat high doctrine on the position and privileges of the Visible Church,’’ and he had opposed the movement for unity with other Presbyterian denominations that favored disestablishment.∑∫ ‘‘The sects,’’ he pointed out, saw no difference between the Church and ‘‘the sum of saved individuals.’’ In contrast to this ideal, Robertson Smith urged recognition of the fact that ‘‘the Church is before the individual, that it is in the Church that God’s grace works and that the development of the individual Christian takes place in the Church and is conditioned by the Church.’’∑Ω Because Robertson Smith held such a complex understanding of the connections between the Church and the individual, he was unlikely to fall in with the assumption that appeared so often in the work of Müller, Tylor, and Lang—that institutional religion is by its nature corrupt and inimical to personal religion. The biblical criticism that so shocked Robertson Smith’s fellow church- William Robertson Smith | 159

men was a synthesis of his ‘‘old-fashioned evangelicalism’’ and his modern historical sense. This combination is apparent not so much in his Encyclo- paedia articles, as in the public lectures he delivered during the final months of his second trial in an attempt both to clarify his own position and to convince his audience that the higher criticism was not the ‘‘alien and repulsive thing’’ his opponents supposed. The first course of lectures was published in 1881 as The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, and the second in 1882 as The Prophets of Israel and Their Place in History to the Close of the Eighth Century B.C. The fundamental premise of both works is articulated in the opening words of Prophets: ‘‘The revelation recorded in the Bible is a jewel which God has given to us in a setting of human history.’’∏≠ But what was it that the record revealed? In full accordance with his understanding of what faith is, Robertson Smith argued that what must be sought in the Bible is not doctrine, not a description of the divine attributes, but God himself as he discloses his love and ‘‘redeeming purpose’’ through his activity in history. This point is central to an understanding of Robertson Smith’s work; its significance can hardly be exaggerated. ‘‘The supreme value of the Bible,’’ he wrote, ‘‘does not lie in the fact that it is the ultimate source of theology, but in the fact that it contains the whole message of God’s love . . . not doctrine but promise, not the display of God’s metaphysical essence but of His redeeming purpose, in a word, of Himself as my God.’’ The Bible was neither a collection of philosophical speculations, nor a handbook of practical morality cast in poetic form, but the record of a relationship, ‘‘the inner history of the converse of God with man.’’∏∞ It followed then that the revelation contained in the Old Testament was a dynamic process, not a closed system of truths handed down to Moses on Mt. Sinai. The ‘‘method of revelation’’ was really a ‘‘method of education,’’ and like a human teacher, God spoke to his children in language suited to their limited understanding. The aim of scholarly exegesis must be to put the reader of Scripture into ‘‘the position of the man to whose heart God first spoke’’ or, in other words, to allow him or her to enter empathetically into the historical reality of the ancient Hebrews.∏≤ Furthermore, if one took seriously the proposition that the Old Testament is above all a history, and not a book of oracles, then even those passages that seemed ‘‘quite deficient in spiritual instruction’’ must not be cast aside as ‘‘mere lumber.’’∏≥ Geographical and architectural descriptions, even the notorious genealogies of Genesis and Numbers, were precious because they made the ‘‘ordinary history’’ and the ‘‘everyday life’’ of the Hebrews come alive in concrete detail. 160 | William Robertson Smith

Robertson Smith followed the majority of Continental critics in locating the dynamic of Israelite history in the reformist impulse represented by ‘‘the prophetic party.’’∏∂ ‘‘Intimates of Jehovah,’’ their task was not simply to remind the nation of its obligations to him, but to advance a new and deeper understanding of him as Israel’s God. They did this not by propounding a system of propositions concerning his metaphysical essence, but by interpreting the events of the nation’s history as revelations of his character and will.∏∑ A just appreciation of the prophets’ reforming activity depended upon an accurate view of the gulf which separated their understanding of Jehovah from that found in the popular religion of the Hebrews. Robertson Smith once recalled that as a child the ‘‘great puzzle’’ of the Old Testament had been why the Israelites were ‘‘so ready to go aside and worship other gods.’’∏∏ Through his studies in the higher criticism, he began to realize that the ‘‘mystery’’ was really the product of an anachronistic interpretation of Old Testament history. If many of the Pentateuchal ordinances were not in force during Moses’s time (or for centuries thereafter), then the defects of the popular worship during the intervening period could hardly be put down to mere willful backsliding. In contrast to the traditional view, Robertson Smith laid great emphasis on the original similarities between Hebrew religion and that of other Semitic tribes: ‘‘The possession of a national God, to whom the nation owed homage, and in whose name kings reigned and judges administered justice, was not in itself a thing peculiar to Israel . . . and among the nations most nearly akin to the Hebrews these ideas took a shape which, so far as mere externals were concerned, bore a close family likeness to the religion of Jehovah.’’∏π The real weakness of the popular religion lay not so much in a tendency to forsake Jehovah for other gods or to indulge in all sorts of obscene ‘‘abominations,’’ but rather in a narrow and ‘‘unspiritual’’ conception of Him. Research into the history of the conflict between prophets and people drew Robertson Smith naturally into comparative study of the cultic practices of other ancient Semitic nations. He was not the first among the higher critics to use this method to reconstruct the historical context of the Old Testament. But his work in comparative religion went far beyond that of previous biblical scholars and constitutes an original and lasting contribution in a way that his more strictly critical work does not. Robertson Smith’s article entitled ‘‘Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among the Arabs and in the Old Testament,’’ published in the Journal of Philology for 1880, was his first attempt to marry anthropological theory and methods to the study of the Old Testament. Inspired by J. F. McLennan’s work on the worship of plants and animals William Robertson Smith | 161 among primitive people, Robertson Smith noted traces of totemism or something resembling totemism in the data on early Hebrew religion and invited other biblical scholars to direct their attentions ‘‘to the questions suggested by Mr. McLennan’s speculations.’’∏∫ The essay had aroused some comment at the time of Robertson Smith’s second trial, but while it marked an important departure for him and was recognized by some of his fellow critics as a pioneering effort, his opponents in the Free Church were for the most part inclined to treat it as all of a piece with his previous work.∏Ω After his move to Cambridge, Robertson Smith began to concentrate more and more on the ethnology of the primitive Semites. In 1885, for example, he published a monumental work entitled Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia. To some extent, no doubt, this can be explained by the fact that he held a chair in Arabic, not in Hebrew. At the same time, some of his Cam- bridge sponsors warned him to tread delicately in questions of biblical and theological study so as not to arouse the protective instincts of the local divinity professors.π≠ Nevertheless, the explanation for Robertson Smith’s growing interest in comparative religion involves more than just an awakened anthropological curiosity or a natural reluctance to pursue his accustomed studies in changed circumstances. In the first place, he recognized the growing power and persuasiveness of this new field, and recognized too that it posed a serious challenge to conservative religious convictions such as his own. As early as 1876, he had warned that ‘‘the influence of the new science of comparative religion has laid upon biblical scholars the duty of examining more precisely the relation of the Hebrew faith to Semitic polytheism, and, in particular, of testing the theory . . . that there is no specific difference between the development of the Old Testament religion and that of other faiths.’’π∞ Robertson Smith’s ambivalence toward ‘‘the new science of comparative religion’’ deserves special attention. On the one hand, he expected ‘‘important results’’ from the new school. It was, after all, the natural outgrowth of the historical spirit that he saw as so characteristic of his own age; and like the higher criticism, it offered the hope of a fresh alternative to the endless debates between conservative apologists and proponents of various liberal theologies. At the same time, he was profoundly dissatisfied with the results that had actually been achieved by the 1870s and 1880s. Above all, he opposed the standard evolutionary interpretation in which Christianity was regarded solely as the product of a natural process of development. According to Robertson Smith, the conclusions advanced by the new school were these: 162 | William Robertson Smith

‘‘Religion has been genetically explained from its beginnings down to the present time. Its ideas are most valuable, for they are part of the organic development of human thought. They are the inalienable property of the human race, just like the Pyramids or any other great work of men’s hands. And there is no more to be said about it, except that these ideas are sure to go on developing in future as they have done in the past.’’π≤ It was evident, Robertson Smith argued, that these conclusions were not pure inferences from empirical evidence, but the results of a prior commitment to an ‘‘absolute philosophy . . . according to which everything in human history is the mechanical evolution of a hidden principle working by equally inﬂexible laws in the moral and physical spheres. . . . The fundamental order of things is gradually clarifying itself as it is worked out in history. But the only thing that is real is this progress.’’π≥ He made these remarks in a critique of the liberal Dutch theologian Abraham Kuenen, but it is obvious that the historicist ‘‘philosophy’’ that Robertson Smith opposed was, mutatis mutandis, also held by Max Müller, Comte, Spencer, and Tylor; in short, by most of the thinkers whose works had shaped the British version of the science of religion. It is not too fanciful to regard Robertson Smith’s own venture into the ﬁeld as the acceptance of a challenge—and in the process of testing his own orthodoxy against that of the evolutionary school, he would devise a radically innovative method for the study of religion.π∂

Ritual before Theology: Lectures on the Religion of the Semites In 1887, Robertson Smith was invited by the trustees of the Burnett Fund to deliver a series of lectures at Aberdeen on ‘‘the primitive religions of the Semitic peoples viewed in relation to other ancient religions and to the spiritual religion of the Old Testament and of Christianity.’’ These were his most substantial contributions to comparative religion, and the published version of the first series (1889) is his most famous and influential book. Unfortunately, by 1889, Robertson Smith was beginning to suffer much pain and weakness from the tuberculosis that would kill him five years later, so that the second and third series of his lectures were not prepared for publication, but for many years existed only as fragmentary notes.π∑ The first series was to treat the religious institutions of the ancient Semites, and the second was to deal with the Semitic myths and dogmas. In the third series, Robertson Smith planned to undertake ‘‘an examination of the part which Semitic religion has played in universal history, and its influence on the general progress of humanity.’’π∏ William Robertson Smith | 163

There was nothing arbitrary in the decision to open with a discussion of institutions, for the originality of Robertson Smith’s method lay partly in his insistence that the analysis of ancient religions must begin there, with ritual and practice, and not with myths or theologies as previous investigators had so readily assumed. The ‘‘modern habit’’ was ‘‘to look at religion from the side of belief,’’ taking it for granted ‘‘that what is the most important and prominent side of religion to us was equally important in . . . ancient society.’’ Thus, ‘‘when we approach some strange or antique religion, we naturally assume that . . . our first business is to search for a creed, and find in it the key to ritual and practice.’’ππ But this was a very grave error. ‘‘It is of the first importance,’’ Robertson Smith claimed, ‘‘to realise clearly from the outset that ritual and practical usage were, strictly speaking, the sum total of ancient religions. Religion in primitive times was not a system of belief with practical applications; it was a body of fixed traditional practices, to which every member of society conformed as a matter of course.’’π∫ Of course, this was not to suggest that no beliefs were associated with ritual practice; ‘‘men would not be men if they agreed to do certain things without having a reason for their action.’’ But the reasons were not formulated as doctrines to which all were obliged to adhere, and in no case was ancient ritual to be regarded as a direct symbolic expression of clearly articulated ideas. As long as an individual conscientiously observed the prescribed forms, he was considered ‘‘truly pious, and no one asked how his religion was rooted in his heart or affected his reason.’’πΩ The second novel element in Robertson Smith’s method is a corollary to the first—the proper unit of study was not the individual, certainly not the individual as philosopher or theologian, but the society of which he or she was a member. Strictly speaking, ancient religion was an affair of the community as a whole, the idea of a personal spiritual life was virtually absent, and participation in ritual was simply the fulfillment of a social obligation. ‘‘Reli- gion did not exist for the saving of souls,’’ Robertson Smith argued, ‘‘but for the preservation and welfare of society.’’∫≠ This being so, the investigator could not hope to understand the religion of a given people without first forming a very clear picture of their social and economic arrangements and political organization. Religion of the Semites includes very detailed accounts of the social conditions prevailing among the various Semitic peoples at different periods of their history; kinship systems, methods of agriculture and hus- bandry, diet, the laws and customs which regulated the use of land and other natural resources, judicial systems and methods of taxation, even local 164 | William Robertson Smith

geography—knowledge of these was relevant, or rather indispensable, to an understanding of religious institutions. The obvious question is how religion was supposed to accomplish the ‘‘preservation of society.’’ Did it serve merely to inculcate and to reinforce habits of conformity? Again, Robertson Smith’s answer was startlingly original. The key to the problem lay in the fact that the gods of the ancient world were members of the societies that worshipped them. This point was essential to his argument, and he developed it at some length:

The tribal or national societies of the ancient world were not strictly natural in the modern sense of the word, for the gods had their part and place in them equally with men. The circle into which a man was born was not simply a group of kinsfolk and fellow-citizens, but embraced also certain divine beings, the gods of the family and of the state, which to the ancient mind were as much a part of the particular community with which they stood connected as the human members of the social circle. . . . Thus a man was born into a ﬁxed relation to certain gods as surely as he was born into relation to his fellow-men.∫∞

It should be emphasized that Robertson Smith is not speaking of formal theology here. The god might be conceived of as a father or a great ancestor or a king, but these ideas were later elaborations on the central fact of the ‘‘solidarity’’ between gods and their worshippers ‘‘as part of one organic society.’’ Robertson Smith sought to clarify this point by comparison of the gods with other types of supernatural beings such as demi-gods or jinn: ‘‘The gods proper were not sharply marked off, as regards their nature, from the lower orders of demoniac beings. . . . Their distinctive mark lay in their relations with man, or, more exactly, with a definite circle of men, their habitual worshippers.’’∫≤ Robertson Smith made no attempt to explain how belief in supernatural beings might have originated; indeed, any such attempt would have been inconsistent with his method. But he was convinced that his account of religion as part of the primitive Semitic social system would also hold good (‘‘with very trifling modifications’’) for ‘‘all parts and races of the ancient world in the earlier stages of their history,’’ and he could not resist the temptation to speculate on the ‘‘causes of so remarkable a uniformity.’’ In the first place, he noted, it was plain that the earliest human societies were clans united not by formal political arrangements, but by ties of blood. It followed from William Robertson Smith | 165

this that the relationship between a god and his people was originally one of kinship: ‘‘[H]e and they made up one natural family with reciprocal family duties to one another.’’∫≥ Robertson Smith sought to reinforce this point with evidence drawn from his own work on totemism and that of his friends McLennan and Frazer, evidence which led him to postulate that humanity had passed through a ‘‘totem stage of society’’ in which each clan believed itself to be related to some natural entity, usually an animal. The totem was part of the kindred, and yet it was separate in that it possessed distinct superhuman or even supernatural powers, and it was therefore sacred and surrounded by taboos. The importance of totemism was that it created a ‘‘permanent alliance, based on the indissoluble bond of kinship,’’ between human groups and a whole class of ‘‘natural beings lying outside the sphere of humanity.’’∫∂ Modern anthropologists regard the notion of a ‘‘totem stage of society’’ as one of the most pernicious of all the fantasies embraced by their nineteenth- century predecessors, and this aspect of Robertson Smith’s work has accordingly come under vigorous attack.∫∑ In truth, it is very difficult to pin down the precise function of totemism in Robertson Smith’s thought. He did not argue, for example, that the earliest clan-gods had evolved directly from totems, and he stressed that ‘‘it is one thing to say that the phenomena of Semitic religion carry us back to totemism, and another thing to say that they are all to be explained from totemism.’’∫∏ It is possible that totemism appealed to Robert- son Smith as a concrete example of how human societies could incorporate nonhuman members and as an indication of the types of relationships that were likely to result. As he had argued in his earlier work on Arab kinship customs, the merit of the totem hypothesis was that ‘‘it does justice to the intimate relation between religion and the fundamental structure of society which is so characteristic of the ancient world.’’∫π But it would be a mistake to regard totemism as the source of Robertson Smith’s methodological principles or as the keystone of his general interpretation of Semitic religion; certainly he himself did not see it in that light. Having established the nature of the relationship between gods and their worshippers, Robertson Smith was ready to tackle the question of how religious ritual contributes to the maintenance or preservation of society. His theory went far beyond the commonsense response that concerted public action creates a feeling of communal solidarity or that the need to conform combats selfishness and excessive individualism. In his eyes, the social efficacy of ritual lay in something much more precise and concrete. He noted, first of 166 | William Robertson Smith

all, that the fundamental type of all religious rites was sacrifice. Previous scholars had agreed that the nature and meaning of sacrifice were problems of great significance. The dominant theory, however, best exemplified by Tylor’s discussion in Primitive Culture, was that sacrifices were gifts or tributes from the worshippers to their god.∫∫ They could be seen as bribes to ensure the deity’s continued favor or as offerings meant to appease his anger, but in either case it was obvious that the essence of the act was the worshipper’s alienation of his property in favor of the god. In Robertson Smith’s eyes, this interpretation was faulty, based on an inadequate understanding of the relationship between the god and his people. For one thing, it rested on the assumption that ancient religious practice was primarily a question of individual access to the god rather than that of the community as a whole. Second, it posited a state of affairs in which the god stood wholly outside the society of his worshippers and had therefore no natural interest in their welfare but required payment for his services. In opposition to the gift theory, Robertson Smith argued that sacrifice was, first of all, ‘‘an act of communion in which the god and his worshippers unite by partaking together of the flesh and blood of a sacred victim.’’∫Ω It was in effect a communal feast, and its significance lay in the fact that the deity and his people were commensals. Among those groups with the simplest forms of social organization, every feast shared by the entire community had not only a festal but also a sacred character. Robertson Smith reminded his audience that ‘‘according to antique ideas, those who eat and drink together are by this very act tied to one another by a bond of friendship and mutual obligation.’’ Hence, ‘‘by admitting man to his table the god admits him to his friendship; but this favor is extended to no man in his mere private capacity; he is received as one of a community, to eat and drink along with his fellows, and in the same measure as the act of worship cements the bond between him and his god, it cements also the bond between him and his brethren in the common faith.’’Ω≠ The identity of the sacred victim is plainly a question of some importance, but Robertson Smith’s ideas on this point were frankly speculative and not developed with the clarity that is otherwise so characteristic of his thought. He evidently believed that the communion feast had originated in the ‘‘totem stage’’ of social life but lacked the evidence for a firm unequivocal statement to this effect. In Australia, for example, the members of a given clan were or- dinarily forbidden to eat the flesh of their totem, for the animal was both sacred and kin to them. But on certain extraordinary occasions, the rule was reversed, and all were required to participate in a totem feast. The parallels William Robertson Smith | 167

with Robertson Smith’s description of Semitic religious feasts are obvious, but there are also important differences. Unlike the totems, the victims of early Semitic sacrifices were likely to be the most common domestic animals, not inherently sacred but sacred only by virtue of their role in the sacrifice. To get around this difficulty, Robertson Smith drew a distinction between ordinary sacrifice (among the ancient Hebrews every slaughter was a sacrifice) and an extraordinary sacramental rite, in which the victim was inherently sacred and therefore, he implied, probably originally a totem. But he admitted that this last conclusion was only a ‘‘surmise’’ and pointed out that the totem hypothesis and the theory of sacrifice as communion rather than gift had been arrived at by two independent chains of reasoning.Ω∞ In time, of course, the original communion sacrifice evolved into several other distinct types. It was one of the advantages of Robertson Smith’s method that he could show how the continuity of religious forms over long ages was compatible with profound changes in intellectual life and dramatic shifts of national mood. Ritual was such an effective conservative force in part because its relationship to theology and mythology was so ambiguous; never reducible to any single meaning, but rich in interpretive possibilities, it remained stable because it could so easily accommodate change. Ironically, by placing so much emphasis on communion as the original function of sacrifice, Robertson Smith to some extent undercut the effectiveness of his own method. His picture of the most primitive Semitic societies, those in which sacrifice was still primarily an act of communion, bears all the marks of Edenic fantasy: ‘‘The habitual temper of the worshippers’’ was one of ‘‘joyous confidence in their god, untroubled by any . . . sense of human guilt, and resting on the firm conviction that they and the deity they adore are good friends.’’ Their ordinary acts of worship were ‘‘all brightness and hilarity, expressing no other idea than that the worshippers are well content with themselves and with their divine sovereign.’’Ω≤ Probably Robertson Smith intended these passages to counteract the familiar caricature of primitive religion as gloomy and fear-ridden, but by substituting an equally exaggerated and one- sided picture, he made it difficult to see how the actual history of ancient religion, which in time came to include notions of guilt and sin, could be seen as anything other than a mysterious fall from innocence. Indeed, he ascribes the ‘‘insouciance’’ of primitive religion to ‘‘a childish unconsciousness of the inexorable laws that connect the present and the future with the past.’’ Accord- ingly, ‘‘the more developed nations of antiquity, in proportion as they emerged from national childhood, began to find the old religious forms inadequate.’’Ω≥ 168 | William Robertson Smith

Nevertheless, Robertson Smith’s account of the rise of piacular rites contains a number of penetrating observations. The notion of sacrifice as a meal shared by the god and his people harmonized naturally with the way of life of primitive nomadic tribes in which authority was more or less equally divided among heads of households and the idea of private property was barely recognized. But as settled agricultural communities developed and became complex and highly stratified, the original ritual was subtly modified. For one thing, the sacred meal began to mirror existing class distinctions, becoming ‘‘banquets of the upper classes in which the poor had a very subordinate share.’’Ω∂ At the same time, as the ‘‘comparatively modern idea of property’’ began to emerge, it, too, transformed the understanding of sacrifice. Accord- ing to older usage, the sacrificial victim was a ‘‘useful friend’’ over which ‘‘man had very limited rights,’’ but ‘‘as soon as the notion of property, and of transfers of property from one person to another, gets firm footing, it begins to swallow up all earlier formulas for the relations of person and things.’’ Robertson Smith regarded this development as ‘‘one of the most fatal aberra- tions’’ in the history of ancient religion, ‘‘for the notion of property mate- rialises everything that it touches,’’ and it encouraged very crass conceptions of the relationship between the deity and his worshippers.Ω∑ This concern with the dangers to which spiritual religion is exposed as societies become more complex and highly stratified also finds a place in Robertson Smith’s earlier Old Testament criticism. It could well be an echo of the social Cal- vinism preached by the older generation of Free Church leaders, but unlike them, Robertson Smith confined his observations to the past. He drew no comparisons, or at least none that were explicit, with his own society. One question that would have occurred to most of Robertson Smith’s readers concerns the possible bearing of his theory on the traditional Chris- tian doctrine of the atonement, while beyond that lies the larger issue of the relation between the religion of the Hebrews and that of their Semitic neighbors. There is no simple answer to the first question, for Robertson Smith nowhere clearly spells out his position on how Christ’s sacrifice relates to the history of Semitic religious institutions.Ω∏ In the introduction, he merely contents himself with the observation that ‘‘when we wish thoroughly to study the New Testament doctrine of sacrifice, we are carried back step by step till we reach a point where we have to ask what sacrifice meant, not to the old Hebrews alone, but to the whole circle of nations of which they formed a part.’’Ωπ It may be that like many other Victorians, Robertson Smith was troubled by the moral implications of the legalistic or penal-substitutionary William Robertson Smith | 169 view of the atonement which found a home in the sterner versions of British Calvinism, preferring to view it as an act of reconciliation between the people and a deity alienated from them by their sin.Ω∫ In the first edition of the Religion of the Semites, Robertson Smith had argued that the Christian doctrine that ‘‘the God-man dies for His people, and that His death is their life’’ is ‘‘foreshadowed’’ in the ancient heathen sacrifices.ΩΩ This passage was excised from subsequent edition, presumably on the author’s authority, but he gave no explanation for the change. It could be, as J. G. Frazer seemed to imply, that Robertson Smith removed this section because it might seem to cast doubt on New Testament doctrine, but if so, it is unlikely that he saw the danger in quite the same light that his protégé did.∞≠≠ In Frazer’s view, the conclusion that Christianity had drawn on the forms of ancient heathenism more or less automatically discredited its claim to have been divinely revealed. Robertson Smith’s position was exactly the reverse of this. A comparison of Bible religion with those to which it was historically related would show that the most important differences between them were ‘‘spiritual,’’ not theological or ritual, and that this ‘‘mystic differentia’’ could be explained only by the fact of revelation. Robertson Smith repeatedly made this point in his higher critical exercises, but it is also a theme in his later anthropological work: the spiritual religion of the Old Testament (which flowered in the New) was not simply the highest point of natural development of tendencies already inherent in Semitic religion as a whole. To be sure, the language of historical analysis forced him to describe the development of Jehovah worship in naturalistic terms. The Bible was both human and divine, but the task of the historian lay wholly with the human side.∞≠∞ Nevertheless, Robertson Smith consistently opposed attempts to substitute evolution for revelation. Shortly before his death, he confided to his friend T. M. Lindsay that he hoped to live a while longer that ‘‘I may finish my book [the final series of Burnett Lectures] in which I intend to show to the world the divine Revelation of God in the Old Testament.’’∞≠≤ It was because he was so convinced of the reality of revelation that Robertson Smith so vehemently criticized Renan and others who spoke of ethical monotheism as a natural or ‘‘instinctive’’ feature of Semitic religion.∞≠≥ Solely by virtue of ‘‘its own wisdom,’’ Israel was no ‘‘more fit than any other nation to rise above the lowest level of heathenism,’’ nor was Hebrew theology superior to that of neighboring peoples.∞≠∂ It was Jehovah himself who was superior to Melkarth, Chemosh, and the other Semitic Baalim.∞≠∑ Robertson Smith no more than hints at this conclusion in Religion of the 170 | William Robertson Smith

Semites, pointing out that ‘‘on the whole it is manifest that none of the ritual systems of antiquity was able by mere natural development to shake itself free from the congenital defect inherent in every attempt to embody spiritual truth in material forms.’’∞≠∏ But the conclusion of one of his Burnett Lectures (which remained unpublished until 1995) contains a much more explicit declaration on the differences between the religion of the Hebrews and those of their heathen neighbors:

The burden of explaining this contrast does not lie with me. It falls on those who are compelled by a false Philosophy of Revelation to see in the Old Testament nothing more than the highest point of the general tendencies of Semitic religion. This is not the view which that study commends to me. It is a view that is not commended, but condemned by the many parallelisms in detail between Hebrew and heathen story and ritual; for all these material points of resemblance only make the contrast in spirit the more remarkable.∞≠π

It cannot be said that the importance of this statement and others like it has received sufficient attention in discussions of Robertson Smith’s work. His biographers, for example, look upon it frankly as a contradiction, though perhaps an excusable one. If Lectures on the Religion of the Semites ‘‘means anything,’’ they aver, ‘‘it means that the process of religious evolution has been continuous.’’ Yet, ‘‘when the final stage is reached, the author invites us to believe that there is a great gulf fixed; that the religion of the chosen people differed not only in degree, but in kind from that of their near kindred.’’∞≠∫ More often, this aspect of Robertson Smith’s work has simply been ignored, and his account of Semitic religious development is placed squarely within the tradition of Victorian social evolutionism.∞≠Ω This misinterpretation, serious though it is, is quite understandable. There is no question that Robertson Smith employed most of the standard methodological and theoretical tools of the evolutionary anthropologist in his attempt to reconstruct the history of archaic societies. He relied on the comparative method, using ethnological data on modern Bedouins as evidence about primitive Arabian nomads, and sought to identify cultural ‘‘survivals’’ in a thoroughly Tylorian way. And, of course, his hypothesis of a ‘‘totem stage’’ of social development was borrowed from the same storehouse of evolutionary theorizing. Perhaps a further source of confusion is Robertson Smith’s commitment to the principle of progressive revelation, an idea he first encountered in the works of his German mentors. The notion that God always shapes William Robertson Smith | 171

his message to the understanding of those who are to receive it bears clear points of contact with a secularized cultural evolutionism. The superficial resemblances between Robertson Smith’s theory and a thoroughgoing developmentalism render all the more significant his protests against the inclusion of Bible religion within any process of ‘‘mere natural development.’’ But perhaps such statements are really no more than formal disclaimers: having assured his audience (and himself) that the history of Jehovah worship could not ultimately be explained on purely naturalistic principles, Robertson Smith was free to offer a history that was indistinguishable in detail from evolutionary accounts but for which he claimed only a proximate validity. This is a plausible judgment, but one that does not stand up to close examination. In the first place, Robertson Smith never assumed (as Tylor and most other evolutionists did) that later religious forms were, in general, superior to earlier ones.∞∞≠ For example, tributary and propitiatory sacrifices were in some sense more advanced than the earlier communion type because they were the product of a more advanced complex society, yet Robertson Smith plainly regarded the later types as inferior both ethically and theologically to the earlier. His claim that it was ‘‘fatal’’ to ancient religion that it became bound up with developing notions of property hardly accords easily with the evolutionists’ assumption that developed notions of property were the unmistakable hallmark of a progressive society.∞∞∞ To situate Robertson Smith firmly within the evolutionary tradition is to underestimate the complexity not only of his ideas, but also of the value judgments that, in some cases, lay behind them. One might suppose, for example, that he would expect the highest type of religion to lie at the opposite end of the spectrum from the primitive; to be individualistic where the latter was preeminently social and to consist of private devotion rather than public ceremonial.∞∞≤ It may be recalled that Herbert Spencer, the only other British theorist who could be said to have promoted a genuinely sociological method, maintained that in the future, religion would mean only individual contemplation of the ‘‘Unknowable.’’ It is difficult to imagine a vision that Robertson Smith would have found more repellent than this. Certainly, he thought that modern Christianity, which required ‘‘individual conviction,’’ was superior to ancient heathenism, which in his view did not. But unlike Max Müller, for example, he did not subscribe to the view that religion was genuine and ‘‘spiritual’’ only to the extent that it cast off all such ‘‘material’’ externals as rituals, temples, and organized priesthoods. The ancient worship was purely ceremonial, and therefore incomplete, but that did 172 | William Robertson Smith

not mean it was empty or lacking positive moral effect; on the whole, Robert- son Smith’s image of the sacred feasts of antiquity is an attractive one.∞∞≥ The superiority of Bible religion to all others was not measured by how many heathen ritual forms it rejected, but by the fact that those it retained were filled with spiritual truth and in that way utterly transformed.∞∞∂ Robertson Smith himself was aware that his approach to comparative religion differed dramatically from that of his predecessors. Writing to T. H. Huxley shortly after the publication of his Burnett Lectures, he claimed that the main worth of the book was not in its factual content but in the attempt to employ a ‘‘more strictly scientific method’’ than earlier investigators had used.∞∞∑ The phrase ‘‘more strictly scientific’’ may not have quite the same resonance today as it did when Robertson Smith penned it, but the essence of his observation is just. Most obviously, his method was a challenge to the intellectualist approach that expected to find the key to primitive religion in the metaphysical speculations of archaic humans. This had been the general procedure adopted by Müller, Lang, and Tylor, though of course they differed sharply in other ways. All three of these scholars had expressed some interest in the problems presented by ancient ritual and in the question of the relationship between primitive religion and primitive social organization, but unlike Robertson Smith, they tended to treat these as interesting side issues, where he saw them as the necessary starting point for inquiry. What led Robertson Smith to adopt such a radically new perspective? The answer does not lie with any single factor in his personal history or in the course of his intellectual development. Quite early on in his Old Testament studies, for example, he had become convinced that the prophets saw Jehovah as the God of the nation, not of individual Israelites. It is easy enough to see how this insight might apply to other religions. But it seems more than likely that his conservative Evangelical beliefs and his Free Church upbringing also played a crucial role. The conviction that faith concerns one’s relationship with God rather than one’s ideas about him could hardly have dictated Rob- ertson Smith’s methodological innovations, but on the other hand, the conventional Tylorian equation of religion with theology simply did not mesh with his own religious experience. As Émile Durkheim later pointed out, ‘‘the theorists who have undertaken to explain religion in rational terms have generally seen in it before all else a system of ideas. . . . But the believers, the men who lead the religious life and have a direct sensation of what it really is, object to this way of regarding it, saying that it does not correspond to their daily experience.’’∞∞∏ This observation aptly describes Robertson Smith’s own William Robertson Smith | 173 case. At the same time, his ‘‘High Church,’’ pro-establishment leanings made it impossible for him to accept any general theory of religion that ignored ecclesiastical institutions or deemed them purely inimical to authentic spiritual impulses. Like many earlier Christian scholars, Robertson Smith faced the task of reconciling his conviction that his own faith was revealed truth in a way that no other faith could claim to be with the fact that it bore so many points of resemblance to other Near Eastern cults. Far from trying to mute these similarities, he insisted upon them, and the tension in his position was resolved with a theory that emphasized the protean nature of symbolic action, the loose fit between ritual and meaning. Finally, the significance of Robertson Smith’s personal ordeal, the expulsion from his professorial chair (and in practical terms from the Free Church and from Scotland), should not be ignored. Throughout his five-year-long battle, the accused heretic had made it plain that he wished to stay within the fold, though there were attractive alternatives open to him. There can be no question that Robertson Smith’s commitment to the Free Church was tied up with his emotional needs for friendship and a sense of belonging, but the connection was not able to withstand a conflict whose origins were theological and intellectual. Viewed against this background, there is something peculiarly poignant in Robertson Smith’s imagined spectacle of the primitive communion feast as a warm and joyful sanctification of fellowship where all individual conflicts are transcended in a moment of mystical reconciliation.

Ritualism’s Reception Robertson Smith’s reputation has never endured the sort of buffeting which lay in store for Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and even to some extent Edward Tylor. Nevertheless, the public evaluation of his scholarship falls into two sharply distinct stages. During his life and for a decade or more after his death, he was known chieﬂy as one of the more spectacular examples of the suffering champion of modern biblical criticism, a characteristically Victorian culture hero. His contributions to comparative religion, though hardly ignored, were greatly overshadowed by the dramatic events that had attended the earlier phase of his career. There is no question that the Robertson Smith case marked a decisive turning point in the history of the higher criticism in Britain. The shameless manipulations which led to his expulsion from the Aberdeen chair and the loyalty which he continued to demonstrate toward the Free Church won him 174 | William Robertson Smith

an almost universally acknowledged moral victory which redounded to the benefit of fellow scholars. According to S. D. F. Salmond, ‘‘his defeat, painful as it was . . . was a real and permanent gain’’ because ‘‘the liberty for which he had contended was won.’’ This was a result not only of Robertson Smith’s conduct during the trial, his ‘‘numerous speeches’’ and ‘‘masterly answers’’ to the libel, but also of the courses of lectures which were later published as The Old Testament in the Jewish Church and The Prophets of Israel.∞∞π Later historians have echoed this judgment with added emphasis on Robertson Smith’s success in undermining popular assumptions about the inevitable connection between the higher criticism and ‘‘German rationalism’’ or heterodoxy.∞∞∫ Though Robertson Smith continues to attract attention as one of the key figures in the history of the higher criticism, he is now remembered principally for his part in establishing a distinctly sociological approach to the study of religion, and his Lectures on the Religion of the Semites are much more widely read than his earlier works. His modern admirers have included such prominent anthropologists as Bronislaw Malinowski, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and more recently, E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Edmund R. Leach, Mary Douglas, and T. O. Beidelman. Robertson Smith’s insights on the relationships between religious ideas and practices on the one hand and ‘‘economic ethics’’ on the other seem to foreshadow the later and more fully elaborated analysis of these themes in the works of Max Weber.∞∞Ω Not that the Religion of the Semites has escaped criticism; on the contrary, many of Robertson Smith’s main contentions have been vigorously challenged. Above all, the evidence which he adduced for primitive Semitic totemism is regarded as far too thin and un- stable to support the weight of his conclusions, and the hypothesis of a universal totemic stage of religion, never widely accepted, has been discarded altogether. Moreover, while Robertson Smith’s explicit rejection of a relativistic stance toward religious history undergirded his challenge to a totalizing social evolutionism (and in that sense could be seen as a source of critical insight), it is also true that his scholarship was disfigured by the same crude ethnocentrism which appeared in so much nineteenth-century social science. This is evident in his treatment of Islam, and indeed, in the very constitution of a distinctive ‘‘Semitic’’ cultural category.∞≤≠ But despite these damaging criticisms, Robertson Smith’s fundamental innovations—his insistence that ancient religion must be regarded as a social rather than an individual phenomenon and the related claim that ritual rather than theology or mythology is the key to its interpretation—have been celebrated as decisive breaks with the Victorian tradition and important first steps in the development of modern anthropological thought. William Robertson Smith | 175

Yet the initial reviews of Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites, though generally favorable, offer only the barest hint that here was a work that would initiate far-reaching changes in sociological and anthropological theory. The most perceptive of the early evaluations of Robertson Smith’s anthropological work came not in a review but in an obituary notice in the English Historical Review written by one of his former Cambridge students, F. C. Burkitt. Noting that Robertson Smith’s claim to originality lay not ‘‘in the direct line of Old Testament criticism,’’ where his role had been that of ‘‘an interpreter of the last results’’ of Continental scholarship, Burkitt located his teacher’s contribution in the pioneering methodology of Religion of the Semites and especially its demonstration that ‘‘religious observances’’ rather than ‘‘any abstract theory about the nature of the deity’’ must form the starting point of investigation.∞≤∞ The value of the book did ‘‘not depend upon the absolute accuracy of all the conclusions reached, but rather upon the fact that it forms the starting point for further investigation.’’∞≤≤ Burkitt’s remarks were unusually insightful. Many of the reviewers, however, treated the work as the latest contribution to Old Testament criticism without paying much attention to its implications for the wider study of comparative religion. The publication in 1889 of Lux Mundi, an attempt by some of the younger High Church theologians to demonstrate the compatibility of Catholic doctrine with the results of critical history, had revived the debate on biblical criticism within the Church of England. Ac- cording to Owen Chadwick, the years from 1889 to 1892 marked a decisive turning point in official Anglican attitudes toward the historical criticism of the Scriptures.∞≤≥ The fact that in Robertson Smith’s book, ‘‘the views of Wellhausen are not treated as hypothetical, and still under the discussion of scholars,’’ but, on the contrary, ‘‘as recognized truths which can be brought before the public without any reserve,’’ was therefore seen as a landmark of some importance.∞≤∂ Not that all the more original features of the work were ignored. The element which attracted the most attention was Robertson Smith’s theory of sacrifice, in particular his contention that the functions of tribute and expiation came later than that of communion. More than one reviewer sensed an ulterior motive lying behind this theory and claimed that the notion of communion was too ‘‘abstract’’ and refined to lie as the basis of a primitive rite.∞≤∑ But the wider significance of Robertson Smith’s assertion that, at least as regards ‘‘ancient religion,’’ public ceremony rather than private belief must be the focus of investigation received very little consideration. Even those who admitted the novelty of Robertson Smith’s approach found it difficult to 176 | William Robertson Smith

discuss his work in any but intellectualist terms. According to the Spectator, for example, he had ‘‘trace[d] the early development of the religious idea’’ among the Semites, and other notices were filled with references to the ‘‘beliefs,’’ ‘‘conceptions,’’ ‘‘ideas,’’ and ‘‘notions’’ discussed in the book.∞≤∏ Of course, Robertson Smith had also used these terms, but only as a kind of shorthand to refer to ‘‘the impressions produced on the mind of the worshipper by features of the ritual,’’ not as ‘‘formulated ethico-dogmatical ideas.’’∞≤π Few were able to appreciate this distinction, and hence that portion of the work which Robertson Smith himself considered most important, his defense of a new method for the study of religion, was for the time being, virtually ignored. If reviewers of The Religion of the Semites failed to appreciate Robertson Smith’s innovations in method, the same was true of many of his fellow students of the science of religion. Frazer’s misunderstanding of Robertson Smith’s approach has already been discussed. Indeed, with the partial exception of Andrew Lang, none of the other anthropologists or scholars of comparative religion who wrote during the years before or shortly after Robertson Smith’s death seem to have understood the larger significance of his work.∞≤∫ Those British scholars who seem to have been among the first to recognize the relative novelty of Robertson Smith’s approach were generally not anthropologists but classicists, notably the so-called Cambridge Ritualists, a group that included Jane Ellen Harrison, Francis Cornford, A. B. Cook, and, at Oxford, Gilbert Murray. In her Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion (1903) and later in Themis (1912), Harrison used Robertson Smith’s concept of the social function of ancient religion and his emphasis on the primacy of cult as a heuristic model for the reorientation of classical scholarship. The Religion of the Semites did have a very dramatic impact, however, on a number of Continental thinkers. Most notably, writing in 1907, Émile Durk- heim acknowledged the crucial importance of Robertson Smith’s work for his own intellectual development:

It was not until 1895 that I achieved a clear view of the essential role played by religion in social life. It was in that year that, for the ﬁrst time, I found the means of tackling the study of religion sociologically. This was a revelation to me . . . all my previous researches had to be taken up afresh in order to be made to harmonize with these new insights. . . . [This reorientation] was entirely due to the studies of religious history which I had just undertaken, and notably to the reading of the works of Robertson Smith and his school.∞≤Ω William Robertson Smith | 177

In addition to this testimony, Durkheim cites Robertson Smith with evident approval at several points in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life. This classic treatise, one of the foundation documents of modern sociology, appeared in 1912, coincidentally the same year in which the biography of Robertson Smith and a companion volume of his previously uncollected theological and scientiﬁc essays were published. The second and third chapters of The Elementary Forms contain lucid and extremely perceptive analyses of Tylor’s theory of animism and Max Müller’s ‘‘naturism’’; in a sense, the entire work can be seen as a dialogue between Durkheim and the British advocates of a science of religion, including Lang, Spencer, and Frazer. Though readily confessing his debt to these earlier thinkers, Durkheim sharply dif- ferentiated his own approach from their basically intellectualist or psychological methods; the reason that he offers is illuminating:

It is an essential postulate of sociology that a human institution cannot rest upon an error and a lie. . . . If it were not founded in the nature of things, it would have encountered in the facts a resistance over which it could never have triumphed. So when we commence the study of primitive religions, it is with the assurance that they hold to reality and express it; this principle will be seen to re-enter again and again in the course of the analyses and discussions which follow, and the reproach which we make against the schools from which we have separated ourselves is that they have ignored it.∞≥≠

To be sure, when Durkheim, ‘‘a professed, virtually devout, agnostic,’’ spoke of religion as ‘‘true,’’ his meaning was quite different from what Robertson Smith would have intended by the same word.∞≥∞ Nevertheless, it is of some importance that the one member of the ‘‘British school’’ from whom Durkheim did not separate himself was the one who refused to look to the history of human consciousness to explain God, the one for whom God’s absolute and transcendent reality was never in question. It was also in 1912 that Sigmund Freud was ﬁrst perusing the pages of The Religion of the Semites, declaring to friends that ‘‘he had hardly ever been so pleased with any book’’ and that ‘‘to read it was like gliding in a gondola.’’∞≥≤ What interested him, however, was not so much Robertson Smith’s articulation of a sociological method for studying religion but the description of totemic sacriﬁce. Durkheim had also focused on this ritual but his interpretation of it was much closer to Robertson Smith’s own, for while Robertson Smith looked on the communion feast as a joyful expression of solidarity, a 178 | William Robertson Smith

reaffirmation of the social bonds between gods and their worshippers, Freud seized on it as a highly condensed but also quite transparent example of the emotional ambivalence characterizing the Oedipus complex represented in ritual action. In his view, elaborated at length in Totem and Taboo, the totem was a psychic substitute for the primal father slain by his rebellious sons, and the sacrificial feast was both an act of expiation (since the participants mourned the death of the victim) and a triumphant assertion of power over the dead patriarch. Freud intended Totem and Taboo as a contribution to ‘‘social psychology,’’ and while he was pleased to see how Robertson Smith’s work seemed to support the theory of psychoanalysis, it was even more gratifying to learn that this theory need not be restricted to individual psychology but that ‘‘the beginnings of religion, ethics, society, and art meet in the Oedipus complex.’’∞≥≥ The object of this comparison between the reactions of Robertson Smith’s British contemporaries on the one hand, and those of Durkheim and Freud on the other is not simply to vindicate the superior wisdom and judgment of the latter thinkers. It is by no means self-evident that a sociological approach to the study of religion is inherently superior to one that is based on philology or the kind of commonsense psychology that underlay Tylor’s theory. Of course, the guiding principles of The Religion of the Semites eventually forced some reassessment of many previously unquestioned assumptions which had dominated British cultural anthropology, and not only in relation to the study of religion. In that sense alone, the book represents a genuine advance. But apart from that, it is worth asking why Robertson Smith’s methodological innovations received so little recognition at first. The answers can only be speculative. No doubt part of the explanation lies in the continued authority of Tylor’s very different account of primitive religion; Primitive Culture was so influential not only because of its admitted scholarly virtues, but also because it was a particularly cogent defense of the social and scientific ideologies shared by many of Tylor’s contemporaries in the educated elite. But it is not enough to point to the dominance of the Tylorian model as the sole explanation. After all, though Tylor’s approach was predominantly individualistic and intellectualist, neither he nor his followers were unwilling to admit the possible legitimacy of alternative methods. Robertson Smith was not the first to call for an investigation of the connections between primitive religion and primitive social organization, but the distinctiveness of his approach becomes apparent when one compares it, for example, with Herbert Spencer’s sociological account of ‘‘Ecclesiastical In- William Robertson Smith | 179 stitutions.’’ The author of the ‘‘Synthetic Philosophy’’ harked back to the deistic tradition in emphasizing the regulative or controlling functions of organized religion. Robertson Smith also acknowledged that the assertion of group authority over the individual accounted in part for the social efficacy of religion. But only in part: even more important was what he termed the ‘‘stimulative’’ effect of ritual, that is, its power to strengthen group solidarity and to reaffirm corporate identity. According to Spencer’s model, one of the features of industrial society that distinguished it from the primitive was that in the former the source of moral control has become internalized within individual citizens, so that ecclesiastical authority had become redundant. Though Robertson Smith was also concerned with the moral function of religion, his theory implied that the problem could not be disposed of quite so neatly as Spencer believed. Even if modern societies had outgrown the need for religion as an instrument of restraint, that would not eliminate the need for it as an integrative force. Robertson Smith’s focus on the significance of communal worship and of the sacraments further implied that the attempts of certain reformers (for example, Matthew Arnold and T. H. Green) to save what was valuable in Christianity by stripping it down to a core of pure ethics were ultimately doomed to failure. In other ways, too, the deeper implications of The Religion of the Semites clashed with the terms and conventions of the late-Victorian debate on Chris- tianity. For one thing, by dislodging theology from the center of inquiry, Robertson Smith’s theory cast doubt on the proposition that unbelief could be warded off by a judicious pruning away of those doctrines that the modern mind found most embarrassing. His contemporaries often described him as a champion of liberal theology, but this designation is hardly apt. It is not really surprising to find that F. C. Burkitt, one of Robertson Smith’s most perceptive admirers, was also among the foremost critics of much Victorian liberal Prot- estant theology, which was vitiated in his eyes by its present-mindedness, its refusal to recognize the gap between nineteenth-century England and first- century Palestine, and its tendency to assimilate Christian doctrine to its own rational moral idealism.∞≥∂ Robertson Smith himself may have been disappointed with the inability of the critics to come to terms with his sociological theory of religion, but one of his earlier writings contains the clue to a possible explanation for this failure. Discussing Isaiah’s message in The Prophets of Israel, Robertson Smith contrasted the prophet’s religious ideal with that ‘‘which leavens almost the whole life of modern times’’ and which has ‘‘accustomed us to regard religion as a 180 | William Robertson Smith

thing by itself,’’ belonging ‘‘to a different region from the avocations of daily life.’’ He went on, ‘‘to such a habit of thought the ideal of Isaiah is necessarily disappointing . . . on account of the realism which represents the state of perfected religion as consistent with the continuance of earthly conditions and the common order of actual life. But in reality it is just this realism which is the greatest triumph of Isaiah’s faith.’’∞≥∑ One of his admirers has suggested that ‘‘the aim that, consciously or not, lay behind Smith’s life,’’ was to ‘‘re- establish the ancient harmony of religious and daily experience.’’∞≥∏ It is difﬁ- cult to see how Robertson Smith could have hoped to approach this goal, since the implication of his own theory was that even if a revolution in ways of thinking about religion was to occur it could have only limited effect. And of course, in the eyes of some, the main result of Robertson Smith’s activity as a biblical critic had been to widen the gap between faith and daily experience, not to close it. But if his work did not offer any solutions to those whose faith was not as securely grounded as his own, it did cast a new more penetrating light on the dimensions of the Victorian cultural crisis. The fact that Robert- son Smith offered neither remedies nor prophecies of his own is not after all so surprising if it is recalled that he had taken up the study of comparative religion in part from a desire to lay bare its limitations. ∏ James G. Frazer The Orthodoxy Monumentalized

In a memorial tribute to William Robertson Smith written in 1911, the French scholar Salomon Reinach concluded a recital of his subject’s virtues and accomplishments by pointing to the greatest achievement of all—‘‘Genuit Frazerum!’’∞ Forty years later, it would have been difficult to find many anthropologists or sociologists who would agree with the implied judgment on the relative merits of Robertson Smith and his protégé, but at the time, even Robertson Smith’s own biographers did not dispute the claim. Reinach certainly intended no insult to the memory of the departed scholar, and his remarks do no more than echo the contemporary consensus. Frazer’s scholarly reputation suffered a precipitous decline after his death in 1941, but he remains one of the most important figures in the intellectual history of the twentieth century.≤ The source of his fame is, of course, The Golden Bough, still the most widely read of any work on anthropology or comparative religion. While many important works of Müller, Tylor, Lang, and Robertson Smith have long been out of print, one could walk into almost any bookstore today and find the one-volume paperback edition of The Golden Bough sitting on the shelves. Though the names of his predecessors are little known outside academic circles, it is rare to find a liberally educated Westerner who has never heard of Frazer, and his work has been the subject of numerous books and articles. Many scholars have argued that The Golden Bough occupies a distinct category somewhere in the unclaimed territory between imaginative literature and empirical social science, and that this hybrid character accounts for much of the book’s cultural impact.≥ It is not merely that the book is well written, 182 | James G. Frazer

readable, and accessible to a nonspecialist audience, though it is all these things, but rather that Frazer’s magnum opus is at once a vast panorama of the world of Homo religiosus and a stirring meditation on the ‘‘long tragedy of . . . folly and suffering’’ which is human history.∂ But while The Golden Bough may defy conventional classification, it was not utterly unique. It was, instead, the product of a long-established tradition of scientific inquiry into the origins and development of religious institutions. Despite his close friendship with Robertson Smith, Frazer preferred the intellectualist approach of Tylor to the more sociological one advocated by his friend. Where Robertson Smith had tried to direct attention to the relationship between a human society and its god, Frazer turned inquiry back to the question that Tylor had posed: by what train of reasoning had primitive man come to believe in the existence of the spirits to whom his rituals appealed? In The Golden Bough, Frazer adopted a procedure much like that employed by Tylor in Primitive Culture. Drawing on the ethnology of non-European ‘‘savages’’ as well as European folklore, and reasoning by analogy, Frazer attempted to decode the legend of the priest, or King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, not far from Rome. He concluded, among other things, that the Priest of Nemi was believed to be a god, and that his ritual murder was best understood as a survival of ancient fertility rites. This reading of the legend took pride of place in the first edition of the book, but by the third edition, it had become a purely structural device, a ‘‘convenient peg’’ on which to hang a variety of more or less independent disquisitions on such topics as the evolution of kingship, the ritual killing of men and animals regarded as divine, the fire festivals of Europe, and rites and superstitions associated with agriculture. Superficially at least, Frazer’s outline of history bears a strong resemblance to that enunciated by Tylor in Primitive Culture. Both men identify critical shifts in human consciousness as the determining forces in history and use them to demarcate successive epochs, and both defined religion primarily as an erroneous natural philosophy (with practical applications) which was destined to disappear as science assumed more and more of its functions.∑ Nevertheless, the pattern actually disclosed in Frazer’s work is not one of linear advance, but a repetitive cycle of conflict, ‘‘a long tragedy of human folly and suffering,’’ as the author himself put it. The dominant mood is pessimistic, and Frazer’s faith in rationalism and science is eventually overshadowed by his preoccupation with their limitations and with the precariousness of their hold on the human mind. Writing in the 1860s and 1870s, it had been possible for James G. Frazer | 183

Tylor to point conﬁdently toward a future in which men of science would direct the forces of social progress, not through violent revolution or radical reform, but through the peaceful advance of knowledge. Yet by the ﬁrst decade of the new century, it was no longer so easy to believe that progress was inevitable or that the advance of science was rapidly eradicating error and illusion. For Frazer, as for other late-Victorian thinkers, it appeared that the seductive forces of myth, irrationality, and superstition had lost little if any of their appeal to the masses.

An Anthropologist’s Beginnings Born on New Year’s Day, 1854, Frazer was the son of a successful Glasgow pharmacist. His written memoir of his parents fails to convey any very vivid impression of them, but the son paid full tribute to the ‘‘wise and tender’’ methods employed in his upbringing, observing that none of the children was ever punished and adding: ‘‘Indeed they had no occasion to punish us, for we were dutiful and obedient children who never dreamed of questioning their authority or thwarting their wishes.’’∏ This solemn declaration of innocence may or may not be an accurate reﬂection of his childhood, but it is perfectly in keeping with his later reputation as a man of painfully sensitive conscience. A famous anecdote told by Frazer’s ﬁrst biographer tells of how he tried to resign his fellowship at Trinity College after learning that he had been guilty of mistranslating a passage in one of his books (fortunately, the Master dis- suaded him from taking this drastic step).π Like Robertson Smith, Frazer was brought up in the Free Church, of which his parents were devout and active members. The elder Frazer was described by his son as a man of ‘‘unquestioning orthodoxy, who accepted the Bible in its literal sense as the inspired and infallible Word of God.’’ Unlike the Smith family, however, the parents never talked of religion or theology, nor did they encourage such talk among the children. Family worship formed part of the daily routine of the household, and ‘‘the Sabbath was observed . . . with the usual restrictions traditional in Scottish households.’’ But Frazer did not remember this strict regime as ‘‘irksome or wearisome’’ in the least. ‘‘On the contrary,’’ he averred, ‘‘I look back to those peaceful Sabbath days with something like fond regret, and the sound of Sabbath bells, even in a foreign land, still touches a deep chord in my heart.’’∫ Frazer showed a scholarly bent early on, and though his parents had originally planned for him to follow his father into the family business, they 184 | James G. Frazer

willingly agreed to his plan to attend Glasgow University instead, and he entered in November 1869. He claimed to have been most deeply influenced by two professors: John Veitch, who held the Chair of Logic and Metaphysics, and the great physicist William Thomson, afterward Lord Kelvin. Though many of his contemporaries regarded Veitch as an eccentric anachronism, Frazer remembered him as ‘‘the last representative of the line of purely Scot- tish philosophers,’’ which included Hume, Dugald Stewart, and William Ham- ilton, scholars who ‘‘wrote like gentlemen in the language of polished society, and not like pedants in the uncouth jargon of the schools.’’ Thomson, in contrast, was closer to the type of the modern scientific specialist. His teaching was almost too advanced and technical for the beginning student, but Frazer at least ‘‘carried away from his class a conception of the physical universe as regulated by exact and absolutely unvarying laws of nature expres- sible in mathematical formulas,’’ one which ever after formed a ‘‘settled principle’’ of his thought.Ω In autumn of 1873, having won an entrance scholarship to Trinity College, Frazer went south to Cambridge. After this he made only brief trips to Scotland, and Cambridge remained his center of gravity for most of his working life. He devoted his early years at Trinity to the study of classics, and in 1879 his thesis, published in 1930 as The Growth of Plato’s Ideal Theory, won him a permanent fellowship. Even after becoming caught up in anthropological research, Frazer gave much of his time and energy to more strictly classical scholarship, including an edition of Pausanias’s Description of Greece and one of Ovid’s Fasti. Frazer’s ideal of the scholarly life was essentially a reclusive one, for his extreme personal shyness led him to avoid active participation in conferences or learned societies. Though he sometimes gave public lectures, he did so only with great reluctance. It was his custom to be at work in his study by 8:00 a.m., and he often remained there until late at night.∞≠ The routine seldom varied; even when he went on holiday, packing cases full of notes and books accompanied him. Frazer would probably have preferred to remain hidden from the public eye, but his wife (he had married in 1896 at the age of forty-two, much to the astonishment of his friends) was determined to win the widest possible recognition for his achievements. She managed his correspondence, screened his visitors, and had his books translated. As his eyesight began to fail in the final years of his life, she tried to keep him active by arranging for the publication of his old writings in a variety of new forms so that he could dictate all the necessary revisions.∞∞ It was at her urging, presumably, that Frazer accepted a James G. Frazer | 185

professorship of social anthropology at the University of Liverpool in 1907. This abrupt alteration of circumstances proved disastrous, and Frazer soon ﬂed back to the safe haven of his rooms at Trinity. Used to the quiet life of a research scholar and to the ‘‘pensive beauty and historical memories of Cam- bridge,’’ he was repelled by the ‘‘bustle and tumult and squalor’’ of a large commercial city and was unable to shake off his dread of speaking in public.∞≤ The experiment was not repeated. Henceforth Frazer’s inﬂuence as an anthropologist depended solely on his books and on his correspondence with other scholars; he resolutely avoided active teaching and organizational work.

William Robertson Smith, Cambridge, and Anthropology Frazer’s interest in anthropology was first aroused by reading ‘‘Tylor’s great book,’’ Primitive Culture. One of his novice efforts in the field was ‘‘Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul,’’ a decidedly Tylorian treatment which he read before a meeting of the Anthropological Institute in August 1885. During the question-and-answer session that closed the meeting, Tylor warmly praised the paper, to Frazer’s ‘‘deep gratification.’’∞≥ Yet despite the very close methodological affinities apparent in their work, some personal friction developed between the two men, and the relationship was at times a frosty one.∞∂ Primitive Culture may have introduced Frazer to anthropology, but his interest might have remained ‘‘purely passive and inert’’ had it not been for the influence of Robertson Smith.∞∑ The two met shortly after Robertson Smith’s arrival in Cambridge in 1883 and quickly became friends; shared afternoon walks became part of their routine, and in September 1884 they toured the Highlands along with J. S. Black. When, in 1890, Robertson Smith became too ill and weak to remain in his college rooms, Frazer accompanied the invalid to Edinburgh, where he was to receive treatment.∞∏ In Frazer’s eyes, Robertson Smith was ‘‘the most delightful of friends and companions,’’ a ‘‘wonderfully gifted and altogether admirable scholar and thinker.’’∞π Robertson Smith jumped at the chance to win a bright young recruit for comparative religion, and it was because of his influence that Frazer passed from ‘‘a lively interest’’ in the subject to ‘‘a systematic study of it,’’ as the younger man was drawn into research and writing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica.∞∫ In addition to the article ‘‘Totemism’’ mentioned earlier, Robert- son Smith also convinced Frazer to write ‘‘Taboo,’’ portions of which deeply influenced the treatment of the subject in Religion of the Semites. Frazer later 186 | James G. Frazer

recalled his discussions with Robertson Smith as some of ‘‘the keenest moments of intellectual enjoyment’’ he had ever experienced: ‘‘[A] sort of electri- cal discharge of thought seemed to take place between us, while we turned up one passage after another in book after book . . . till at last he went away, leaving my study table buried under a pile of books . . . and my head throbbing with the new ideas he had sent through it.’’∞Ω It may be that Frazer and Robertson Smith, along with their mutual friend James Ward, the psychologist, and the classicists Henry Jackson and W. H. D. Rouse, constituted a sort of ‘‘Cambridge anthropological circle’’ in the later 1880s.≤≠ The impact of Frazer’s friendship with Robertson Smith was profound; all three editions of The Golden Bough were dedicated to his friend, ‘‘in gratitude and admiration.’’ It is clear that Robertson Smith’s death in 1894 was a painful blow from which the younger man was slow to recover. But in spite of the close friendship and collaboration between the two men, there is some justice in J. W. Burrow’s contention that ‘‘Frazer wrote anthropology like Tylor, not like Robertson Smith.’’≤∞ For one thing, he either misunderstood or repudiated his mentor’s theory of the primacy of formal ceremony over theological doctrine. The uncertainty arises because, even though he followed Robertson Smith’s lead by appealing to ritual as the most valuable form of evidence for the student of ancient religion, Frazer seems to have had little appreciation for the theoretical justiﬁcation of such a method. His confusion on this point is revealed in an exchange of letters with R. R. Marett, written in 1911, the contents of which have been carefully analyzed by Robert Ackerman. The correspondence began when Frazer rebuked Marett for circulating a ‘‘mistaken’’ interpretation of Robertson Smith’s principle that ritual practice precedes doctrinal teaching in primitive religion. It ended with Frazer himself reluctantly giving ground, admitting that ‘‘the passages of Robertson Smith to which you call my attention certainly support your interpretation of his view more fully than I had supposed.’’≤≤ During the course of this exchange, it became apparent that Frazer preferred an intellectualist approach to the more sociological one advocated by his friend. Where Robertson Smith had concentrated on the social nexus from which early religion arose, Frazer re- focused attention on the problem that Tylor had placed at the center of inquiry—how had ancient thinkers come to believe in the existence of the spirits to whom their rituals appealed? Ten years after this correspondence, the ‘‘Ritualist’’ position now a ﬁrmly established alternative in both anthropology and mythography, Frazer went out of his way to attack the modern James G. Frazer | 187

practitioners of the method to which he himself had given at least tacit support in his early writings.≤≥ It may be that this ‘‘repudiation’’ of Robertson Smith was the end product of a gradual process. It is true, for example, that the first edition of The Golden Bough (1890) bears a stronger Ritualist emphasis than subsequent versions.≤∂ On the other hand, it may be that with all his personal devotion to Robertson Smith, Frazer was never a fully committed disciple. His earliest published remarks on his friend, the obituary notice that he wrote for the Fortnightly Review in 1894, display an almost equal measure of warm admiration and failure to comprehend, let alone to illuminate, the real thrust of Robertson Smith’s work or the true sources of his claims to originality. This essay is at least as interesting for what it omits as for what it contains. No clear statement of Robertson Smith’s sociological principles is included, for example, although Frazer does point out that ‘‘no one was more keenly alive’’ to the ‘‘inter- penetration of religion and other elements of primitive society.’’≤∑ Frazer not only fails to indicate the connection between sociological method and theological purpose in Robertson Smith’s work; he writes as if the latter did not exist. Indeed, he highlights the subversive or iconoclastic potential of Robert- son Smith’s work, arguing that the comparative study of religion ‘‘proves that many religious doctrines and practices are based on primitive conceptions which most civilized and educated men have long agreed in abandoning as mistaken. From this it is natural and often a probable inference that doctrines so based are false, and that practices so based are foolish.’’≤∏ Frazer’s initial reaction to The Religion of the Semites shows how far he was from being an uncritical admirer of Robertson Smith’s work. Writing to J. S. Black, he praised the work as ‘‘striking and powerful,’’ but then went on to complain that ‘‘the elements out of which the history of religion is recon- structed are . . . too few in number, and too simple and obvious,’’ and admitted that these defects filled him with ‘‘a vague and perhaps unjustified distrust.’’≤π This was Frazer’s chief criticism of his predecessors in the science of religion, and he regarded it as a sign of the increasing maturity of the field that investigators were beginning to show more caution about identifying any single origin for the object of their studies.≤∫ This was not the only issue that divided the two men, however. In spite of the similarities of their backgrounds, Frazer did not share Robertson Smith’s religious convictions, and like a number of later critics, he was inclined to think that his friend’s ‘‘deeply religious nature’’ had been a source of scholarly weakness.≤Ω 188 | James G. Frazer

Pessimism and Nostalgia: Frazer on Religion The evidence as to Frazer’s own theological position is conflicting and fragmentary, precluding the possibility of any neat categorization. On the one hand, according to the testimony of his secretary, Angus Downie, he frequently attended church both in Cambridge and during the years when he resided in London, and his remarks about his own religious upbringing are full of nostalgic sentiment.≥≠ On the other hand, he made it quite it plain that he did not believe in such central Christian doctrines as the immortality of the soul or the divinity of Christ.≥∞ Apart from any question of his personal beliefs, the fact remains that his works were famous (or notorious) for the anticlerical and even explicitly anti- Christian messages contained in them. The most spectacular example of this occurs in the second edition of The Golden Bough (1900), in which Frazer outlined a theory of the Crucifixion casting Jesus as the more or less random victim of an archaic Babylonian rite that had found its way into the practice of postexilic Judaism.≥≤ The Golden Bough is liberally peppered with gibes at the Church and at traditional belief, and its fundamental premises are as agnostic as those of Primitive Culture. But while Frazer at times fancied himself a hammer of orthodoxy, he was anxious to prevent the association of his name or his works with any cause that smacked of militant agnosticism or rationalism. In 1906, for example, he refused to allow publication of a special edition of The Golden Bough for the Rationalist Press Association, though its president, Edward Clodd, was one of his close friends.≥≥ And again, in 1928, he begged Macmillan, his publisher for many years, to ‘‘protect’’ him from a similar request by an unnamed ‘‘Bolshevik’’ organization. His dismay on this last occasion was in part the result of his deep horror of communism, and there was nothing unusual about the milder distaste that he felt for the Rationalists. But Frazer was not motivated solely by a desire to distance himself from cranks and crackpots; in his letter to Macmillan, he made it quite clear that the ‘‘propagation of atheism’’ was a cause with which he had no sympathy.≥∂ In none of his autobiographical statements does Frazer provide any clue to the emotional sources of his hostility toward traditional Christianity, but the internal conflict hinted at in this fragmentary evidence emerges in other areas of his thought, as well as in his explicit references to religion. Very few of the labels that have been applied to his work—rationalistic, scientistic, belletristic, nostalgic, conservative, progressive—are in any simple sense appropriate. Fra- James G. Frazer | 189

zer’s tendency to self-contradiction has often been remarked upon, as has the fact that this defect seemed to trouble him little if at all. This can be attributed to his lack of ‘‘analytic rigor.’’ Despite his great erudition, few would have classed him among the most powerful thinkers of his period.≥∑ But the tangles and contradictions in Frazer’s thought are often more positive, more fruitful, and evocative than any mere errors of logic could be. According to Downie, ‘‘the facts of Frazer’s life consist essentially of a list of his works,’’ a statement that contains an insight never fully explored by its author.≥∏ More so than any of the other figures in this study, Frazer re- sists the efforts of the biographer to locate and identify a stable set of personal and philosophical motives, concerns, or tendencies finding more or less direct expression in his scholarly writings. At least part of the explanation for this lies in his authorial practice; from book to book, and sometimes within the same work, he adopts first one and then another of various narrative personae, so that rather than grappling with a single authorial voice, the reader is confronted with a number of different ‘‘Frazers,’’ each of whom carries a different message. It is no accident that literary scholars have written some of the most interesting commentary on his work, an unusual distinction for an anthropologist.≥π Indeed, Frazer invited this literary analysis by his own attitude toward his writings. His thoughts regarding the professionalization of his discipline are especially interesting in this connection. On the one hand, he approved of the notion of anthropology as a cooperative enterprise advancing through division of labor, and he was very conscientious about keeping up with the latest research in his field.≥∫ At the same time, however, his work ran counter to the dominant trend in that he consciously sought to appeal to a general audience rather than directing his works to an exclusively professional audience, and he was not inhibited about employing literary devices to this end. In 1889, while completing the first edition of The Golden Bough, he wrote to Macmillan detailing his aims: since he wished ‘‘to attract not only students but the general reader,’’ he planned to give the book ‘‘a certain dramatic effect,’’ particularly in the opening and closing sections.≥Ω Though Frazer’s hopes to capture a wide audience were abundantly fulfilled, his penchant for blurring the distinction between science and imaginative literature aroused some distrust among his professional peers and contributed heavily to the eventual decline of his reputation among fellow anthropologists.∂≠ According to Downie, Frazer modeled his literary style partly on the writings of Gibbon.∂∞ In the essay ‘‘Gibbon at Lausanne’’ (1931), Frazer offers, 190 | James G. Frazer

perhaps inadvertently, some suggestions on the nature of the parallels between his own work and that of the great historian. He observed that The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire must be recognized as an achievement all the more impressive in light of ‘‘the wretched nature of the materials’’ with which its author constructed his masterpiece.∂≤ Although Frazer does not refer to it here, he often commented on the wretchedness of the materials that he himself employed.∂≥ By sheer force of genius, Gibbon had turned the ‘‘dross of the . . . Byzantine annals’’ into gold, imparting a stately dignity and high signiﬁcance to one of the darkest ages of Western history.∂∂ In the same way, Frazer sought to bring life and meaning to the mountains of data thrown up by ethnographers and folklorists, evidence which spoke mostly of human folly and the long melancholy reign of superstition. Most of the authors he admired were, like Gibbon, men of the previous century, and Frazer himself is often spoken of as essentially a man of the eighteenth century.∂∑ Certainly, he admired not only the literature of that period, but also its ethical and intellectual values. In an essay on Condorcet, another of his heroes, Frazer writes glowingly of that philosopher’s faith in progress, his vision of an almost unlimited human perfectibility, his commitment to immediate social improvement through the overthrow of superstition and ignorance and through the establishment of new economic and political arrangements more in harmony with the dictates of natural law.∂∏ In his own works, Frazer also paused at times to rhapsodize on the powers of human reason, especially as it had been mobilized by the triumphant forces of modern science. It was probably not too much to say that ‘‘the hope of progress— moral and intellectual as well material—in the future is bound up with the fortunes of science.’’∂π Unlike Condorcet, however, Frazer was less interested in creating positive schemes for the amelioration of social ills than in exposing the enemies of progress both past and present, and in pouring ridicule on the irrational customs and beliefs that they upheld. His remarks on this point recall Tylor’s manifesto for anthropology as a ‘‘reformer’s science’’: ‘‘The comparative study of the beliefs and institutions of mankind is ﬁtted to be much more than a means of satisfying an enlightened curiosity and of furnishing materials for the researches of the learned. Well handled, it may become a powerful instrument to expedite progress if it lays bare certain weak spots in the foundations on which modern society is built. . . . At present we are only dragging the guns into position: they have hardly yet begun to speak.’’∂∫ Like Tylor, he trusted that much of the demolition work could be left to the comparative method itself, but more so than his predecessor, Frazer loved to James G. Frazer | 191

engage in sly mockery or outright lampooning of the objects of his disapproval. Here again, the influence of eighteenth-century models is apparent. But the eighteenth-century Rationalist was only one of Frazer’s literary personae, though perhaps the most easily recognizable. If Gibbon and Con- dorcet provided models for his work, so too did Ernest Renan, a writer for whom Frazer expressed both intellectual admiration and a deep temperamental affinity. In an address to the Ernest Renan Society delivered in Paris in 1920, he compared Renan and Voltaire as the two great French critics of the European religious heritage. Voltaire exemplified the highest virtues of the Rationalist—an intelligence of almost crystalline clarity and an unshakable commitment to truth and justice—but, like most pure Rationalists, his understanding of human nature was too one-sided. He lacked the emotional sensitivity, the tenderness, and the sense of poetry that allowed Renan to contemplate religion from the inside, and not solely from the outside as a hostile critic.∂Ω In a later preface to this address, Frazer dilated further on Renan’s appeal to him, attributing part of it to the fact that they were both of Celtic blood. The Celt could never be a pure Rationalist, he argued, but was ‘‘tou- jours au fond rêveur, romantique, religieux.’’∑≠ In rejecting the title of ‘‘Ra- tionalist’’ for Renan, Frazer simultaneously rejected it for himself. But Renan’s influence on Frazer goes beyond reinforcing the latter’s distrust of an unalloyed or too one-sided rationalism. It was from Renan’s Études d’histoire religieuse that he drew the concluding image of The Golden Bough— the church bells of Rome tolling both for the close of day and for a dying god.∑∞ Though the immediate reference is to the ‘‘protagonist’’ of the book, the Priest of Nemi, many readers also took it as a haunting epitaph for the pagan god’s Christian successor. It is in this role, not solely as historian, but as elegist for a dying religion, that Frazer admired and sought to emulate his predecessor. When Frazer adopts his Renan-inspired voice, the tone is at once nostalgic, melancholy, pitying, and self-consciously poetic: ‘‘It is indeed a melancholy and in some respects thankless task to strike at the foundations of beliefs in which, as in a strong tower, the hopes and aspirations of humanity through long ages have sought a refuge from the storm and stress of life. Yet sooner or later it is inevitable that the battery of the comparative method should breach these venerable walls, mantled over with the ivy and mosses and wild flowers of a thousand tender and sacred associations.’’∑≤ Despite the ominous reference here to the ‘‘battery of the comparative method,’’ the voice of Frazer as enlightened iconoclast seldom combines with that of Frazer as nostalgic Romantic; more often the two simply co-exist or 192 | James G. Frazer

actually compete with each other. Similarly, the author as optimist, confident that civilization will continue to progress in the future as it has done in the past was opposed by a pessimistic strain in Frazer’s thought that sometimes emerged in true misanthropy. In recent attempts to account for the great impact of Frazer’s work on modern thought, a number of commentators have pointed to his emphasis on the continuity and essential similarity between primitive customs and ‘‘superstitions’’ and much of traditional European culture.∑≥ This was not, of course, a novel insight on Frazer’s part, but one that he shared with other anthropologists including Tylor and Lang. Like them, he regarded much of peasant culture as a congeries of barely modified ‘‘survivals,’’ and like Lang in particular, he laid great emphasis on the continued endurance of this primitive heritage. According to Frazer, ‘‘our peasants are, intellectually regarded, simply savages.’’∑∂ But where Lang regarded the continuity of popular culture as a mixed blessing, Frazer was inclined to view it as wholly negative, and his references to the ‘‘uneducated many’’ are almost uniformly contemptuous and harsh. Thus, ‘‘the dull, the weak, the ignorant . . . constitute . . . the vast majority’’ even in Europe.∑∑ The ‘‘mob’’ he calls them, and ‘‘the swine of modern society.’’∑∏ No doubt there is some rhetorical exaggeration at work here, but the shrillness of tone also derives from Frazer’s often expressed fears that ‘‘the permanent existence of . . . a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society’’ constituted ‘‘a standing menace to civilisation.’’∑π This theme will be explored in greater detail at a later point, but here it is enough to say that Frazer’s frequent and bitter attacks on the ‘‘common herd’’ were not simply occasions for him to vent his spleen, for he was known to acquaintances as an essentially mild-mannered personality. Rather, his fierce remarks must be traced to an anxious sense of urgency about the future of the liberal bourgeois culture to which he owed allegiance. Where, in Frazer’s opinion, lay the source of this danger to ‘‘civilisation’’? At times, he seemed to think that ‘‘the extraordinary persistence—we may almost say indestructibility—of superstition’’ was in itself a threat; any chance wind might cause the sleeping embers to burst into flame.∑∫ But while Frazer led a rather sheltered and reclusive academic existence, he was not unaware of the fact that whatever the situation elsewhere, in Britain at least, the old peasant superstitions were dying out along with the social class that had maintained them.∑Ω It was one thing to recount tales of witchcraft and other forms of occult mischief in remote Highland communities and quite another James G. Frazer | 193 to believe that such quaint and picturesque happenings were in any sense ‘‘a standing menace’’ to a predominantly urban and industrial society. In fact, the continued existence of a few remnants of a vanishing popular culture is a less relevant context for Frazer’s anxieties than certain more recent changes in British (and European) public life. Many historians have called attention to the pessimistic mood that seemed to infect much of European culture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Britain particularly, the sources of this gloom may be attributed variously to relative economic stagnation; disappointment of the educated elite over the realities of mass politics and the increasing influence and visibility of a ‘‘debased’’ mass culture; the first rebellious stirrings of such previously quiescent groups as women and unskilled workers; and a ‘‘clerical resurgence’’ that threatened to arouse the Catholic masses in Ireland and on the Continent.∏≠ Any one of these factors could be thought potentially subversive of the values of tolerance, rationality, intellectual freedom, and gradual reform that were shared by most of the liberal leaders of opinion in British society, while a combination of these trends might spell disaster. In his study of such important figures as Leslie Stephen, John Morley, and W. H. Lecky, Jeffrey Paul Von Arx has described how these men had looked forward to the creation of a democratic society, believing they and others like them could, on the basis of talent and knowledge, assume positions of political and cultural leadership. But while the franchise was extended and a system of public elementary education was established, these men found that the new ‘‘democratic’’ Britain failed to live up to their expectations, in large part because the newly enfranchised masses proved distressingly receptive to the politics of emotional manipulation and irrational appeal. Frazer belongs to a later generation, and there is no evidence that he ever harbored practical political ambitions, but in some ways his position is quite closely akin to that of Stephen, Lecky, and Morley. Like them, he adhered to the values of Victorian liberalism, and like them, he grew increasingly discouraged by the apparently illiberal, irrational, and unprogressive character of the mass of his fellow citizens. Though Frazer did not write extensively about politics, his anthropological writings are peppered with references to issues of contemporary concern, and like Tylor, he believed that the anthropologist could serve as a valuable resource in public policy debates. Above all, the student of primitive society would use his knowledge to combat utopian schemes of social reform or revolution. For ‘‘visions of a Golden Age of universal equality and universal 194 | James G. Frazer

wealth in the future, modeled on the baseless fancy of a like Golden Age in the past, have too often lured the ignorant multitude to the edge of the precipice and pushed them over the brink.’’∏∞ By ‘‘paint[ing] savagery in its true colours,’’ the anthropologist would ‘‘break that dream’’ and ‘‘dispel that mirage.’’∏≤ In the years after the Russian Revolution, Frazer returned repeatedly to the theme that communism was a dangerous reversion to primitivism, but even before 1917 he had been sensitive to the bearing of his work on such ‘‘burn- ing practical questions of the day’’ as ‘‘private property and the relations of the sexes.’’∏≥ Frazer was particularly obsessed with the bête noire of socialism, and he may also have been haunted by the growing influence of mass anti-Semitism in European politics, but it would be a mistake to tie his pessimism too closely to any single perceived threat to the liberal order.∏∂ A more inclusive interpretation would point to the conflict between his commitment to a progressionist view of history and his fear (or recognition) that the rationalistic assumptions on which that view was based were fatally flawed. A generation earlier, Tylor and his supporters had envisioned a future in which anthropology, leading the way as a ‘‘reformer’s science,’’ would smooth the path of progressive social change through the triumph of reason and scientific knowledge. Part of Tylor’s own contribution to that end had been to show that the intellectual authority held by theology and theologians more properly belonged to modern science. He and others like him had been at least partially successful in diminishing the role of the Church in British culture. But by the last years of the nineteenth century, it was no longer so obvious that progress was inevitable or that the advance of science was rapidly eradicating error and illusion. Indeed, far more obvious to Frazer, as to many of his contemporaries, was ‘‘the permanent existence of . . . a solid layer of savagery beneath the surface of society’’ that constituted ‘‘a standing menace to civilisation.’’ It is this conflict between belief in progress and disillusioned pessimism that imparts such dramatic power to Frazer’s anthropological writings, and especially to The Golden Bough. If there is one dominant persona that emerges from his work, it is not so much that of the ‘‘Rationalist’’ as that of a ‘‘man of the eighteenth century’’ stranded in a hostile and alien present. This image of Frazer helps to explain the curious Janus-faced role that religion plays in his thought. On the one hand, he was antagonistic to religion, Christianity in particular, because it was both the sign and the institutional embodiment of the seductive power of the irrational, persisting even in the midst of the James G. Frazer | 195

world’s most advanced civilization. Yet, to the extent that Christianity represented a stable, known past in contrast to the threateningly unpredictable future, it became the focus of a network of backward-looking emotions, and Frazer could write of it as of a phantom memory that retained an astonishing capacity to haunt the imagination and to awaken ancient longings.

The Golden Bough: ‘‘A Long Tragedy of Folly and Suffering’’ Frazer’s first important contributions to comparative religion were the En- cyclopaedia Britannica articles ‘‘Taboo’’ and ‘‘Totemism,’’ written under Rob- ertson Smith’s direction. While completing research on the latter topic, Frazer found that he had amassed far too much evidence to fit within the prescribed format, so that his article ‘‘Totemism’’ was in fact a condensed version of a larger treatise published separately in 1887. This pattern was to be repeated over and over again in the course of his career, but nowhere more dramatically than in the case of The Golden Bough, which began as two volumes for its first edition (1890), grew to three volumes by 1900 when the second edition appeared, and finally swelled to twelve volumes for the third edition, which was published between 1911 and 1915. In the intervening years, Frazer issued full-length works on the evolution of kingship, the belief in immortality, totemism again, and the part played by ‘‘superstition’’ in the genesis of such institutions as marriage, private property, and criminal law.∏∑ He also penned a number of shorter essays on such topics as Hebrew folklore, primitive creation myths, and methodological questions, including the proper scope of social anthropology and the best interview techniques for ethnologists in the field. The following discussion focuses on the third edition of The Golden Bough with no more than incidental reference to Frazer’s other writings. The third edition was the most widely read version of Frazer’s most important book, and it serves, in effect, as an epitome of his anthropological work in the period before the First World War. Much of the material in the third edition had been published previously, if not as part of The Golden Bough then in some other form; sooner or later Frazer would find an opportunity to insert nearly all of his leading ideas into the elastic framework of his magnum opus. Frazer’s method of composition, his habit of ‘‘piecing the new cloth into the old garment,’’ was not without its disadvantages.∏∏ Critics were bemused by the insouciance with which he could oscillate from one interpretation to another, sometimes even combining two or more apparently contradictory theories within a single work. The transformation of his ideas on totemism 196 | James G. Frazer

presents one of the most striking examples of this habit. His initial views on the subject were quite close to Robertson Smith’s interpretation: totemism was a socioreligious system in which the members of a society were divided into clans, each worshipping an animal (or plant) which the clansmen regarded as their divine ancestor. After 1899, however, Frazer came to regard totemism as having little if any religious significance. Basing his theory on the description of Australian Intichiuma ceremonies contained in the recently published Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899) by Baldwin Spencer and Frank Gillen, he now saw totemism as a kind of magical consumer cooperative in which each clan performed rites intended to increase the supply of their totem object in order to benefit the tribe as a whole. But this was by no means Frazer’s final word on the subject; in 1905, he changed his mind yet again, attributing the origins of the system to the fantasies which pregnant women might be expected to entertain given widespread primitive ignorance about the facts of conception.∏π Disturbing as these shifts and turns may have been to some readers, to Frazer himself they were never a cause of embarrassment. On the contrary, he wore his flexibility (if that is the right word) proudly as a mark of his allegiance to an empiricist epistemology which held theories as no more than ‘‘light bridges’’ built to connect isolated islands of fact.∏∫ ‘‘I have changed my views repeatedly,’’ he confessed, ‘‘and I am resolved to change them again with every change of the evidence.’’∏Ω Moreover, Frazer was not always careful to effect a complete demolition of his outworn theoretical ‘‘bridges,’’ and the result, as Robert Ackerman points out, is a ‘‘curious layered effect . . . something like [a] medieval palimpsest,’’ in which the traces of old conclusions and speculations can be discerned beneath later additions.π≠ This quality is particularly evident in the third edition of The Golden Bough, so much so that any attempt to analyze the work as a single sustained argument is inevitably doomed to failure. Moreover, it is questionable whether such an analysis would have much relevance or value. Better to approach the work, as Frazer himself suggested in his prefatory remarks, as a dramatic cycle containing many subplots, some of them but loosely related to the central action.π∞ The inspiration for The Golden Bough came from a legend given by Servius in his Commentary on Virgil concerning the priest, or King of the Wood, who guarded the sacred grove of Diana at Nemi, not far from Rome. According to the legend, the succession to the priesthood was governed by a ritual trial of strength in which the new claimant must succeed in entering the sacred grove, James G. Frazer | 197 breaking off the golden bough which grew there, and then killing the reigning priest in single combat. Frazer intended, by the application of the ‘‘comparative method,’’ to clear up some of the mysteries surrounding this tale, and above all to explain why it was that the aspirant to the priesthood was required to slay his predecessor. His procedure differed little from that employed by Tylor in Primitive Culture. Drawing on the ethnology of non-European ‘‘savages’’ as well as European folklore and reasoning by analogy, he concluded, among other things, that the golden bough was the mistletoe (revered also by the ancient Druids); that the Priest of Nemi was believed to be a god; and that his ritual murder was best understood as a survival of ancient fertility rites. While this legend had a central place in the first edition of the book, by the third edition it had become no more than a framework around which to gather an encyclopedic collection of curious facts and customs bearing on the origin and history of ‘‘Aryan’’ paganism.π≤ If the book can be said to have a single dominant theme, it is that the crucial function of ancient ritual is to promote fertility, but Frazer often loses sight of this topic as he meanders from one diversion to another. The differences among the various editions were not simply a matter of added bulk, however. In the ten years that elapsed between the publication of the first edition and the appearance of the second, Frazer had significantly revised his argument on the relation between magic and religion. Where earlier he had conceived of magic as a ‘‘lower form’’ of religion, he now insisted that there was ‘‘a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle’’ between the two.π≥ More than that, he had devised an evolutionary schema in which an ‘‘Age of Magic’’ had preceded an ‘‘Age of Religion,’’ while religion in its turn was being displaced by science.π∂ Critics often identified this as the central thesis of The Golden Bough, and certainly Frazer defended it with more than his customary vigor. He even changed the subtitle of the work from ‘‘A Study in Comparative Religion’’ to ‘‘A Study in Magic and Religion’’ in order to harmonize more fully with his revised opinion. Nevertheless, a critic trying to demonstrate that the various chapters and volumes were systematically arranged to support this theory or explore its ramifications would face an impossible task. It cannot be said that Frazer’s views on the historical relations between magic, religion, and science function as the controlling thesis of The Golden Bough; nevertheless, they are extremely important as the most condensed and coherent expression of his intellectual commitment to the progressionist tradition in social evolutionary thought, in effect an emblem or badge of his identity.π∑ Though Frazer claimed to have formed his theory ‘‘directly from the facts,’’ 198 | James G. Frazer

and apparently believed that it was subject to empirical tests, he conceded that its acceptance depended to a great extent on the acceptance of his definitions.π∏ He defined religion as ‘‘a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life,’’ laying equal stress on the ‘‘theoretical’’ side (belief in higher powers) and on the ‘‘practical’’ (attempts to conciliate them). Magic, however, at least in its ‘‘pure unadulterated form,’’ entails no belief in spiritual agencies, but is essentially a practical art which assumes the uniformity of nature and the absolute sovereignty of natural laws: ‘‘The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by the desired results. . . . He supplicates no higher power: . . . he abases himself before no awful deity.’’ππ In this way, as Frazer points out, the primitive magician bears more than a passing resemblance to the modern scientist. The difference between them lies not in their fundamental assumptions—both agree that ‘‘the succession of events is perfectly regular and certain, being determined by immutable laws’’ —but in the fact that the magician’s understanding of these laws is erroneous while the scientist’s is correct. But what of the chronological relation among these three different forms of thought, the postulated sequence of historical epochs dominated by magic first, then religion, and finally science? While acknowledging that magic and religion were usually found to exist in the same culture and that ethnic religious systems often contained an amalgam of the two elements, Frazer maintained that this fusion was not primitive; at one time, humans had trusted to magic alone.π∫ With this claim, Frazer placed himself in direct opposition to Andrew Lang by arguing that among the ‘‘rudest savages’’ of all, the indigenous tribes of Australia, magic was universally practiced while religion was practically unknown.πΩ Not surprisingly, Frazer encountered difficulties when it came to explaining the transition from one age to another, but what the account lacks in persuasiveness is more than made up for in dramatic force. Observing that ‘‘a full and satisfactory solution of so profound a problem is hardly to be hoped for,’’ he could only suggest that ‘‘a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account.’’ But this new awakening brought not only a change of mind but also a change of heart. The primitive philosopher had grossly James G. Frazer | 199 overestimated the power of his own will; he had ‘‘taken for causes what were no causes,’’ and had now to confront the fact that ‘‘he had been pulling at strings to which nothing was attached.’’ The bitter realization of failure, of the depth of his own self-deception, and of the reality of his own powerlessness left him ‘‘sadly perplexed and agitated,’’ until finally, ‘‘he came to rest . . . in a new system of faith and practice.’’ Now came the realization that if neither he nor any other man could control the forces of nature, there must be ‘‘other beings, like himself, but far stronger,’’ who wielded that power.∫≠ This striking account of the conversion from a magical world view to a religious one appears in volume 1, and it is not until the concluding volume (11) of The Golden Bough that Frazer completes his theory with a parallel description of the triumph of modern science. Nevertheless, the notion of religion as a transition stage in the history of civilization is clearly posited from the beginning. Since religion necessarily entails belief in the ‘‘elasticity or variability of nature,’’ its fundamental principles are as incompatible with those of science as with the premises which underlie the magician’s art. Thus the ‘‘slow and toilsome ascent’’ from savagery to civilization assumes a cyclical pattern rather than a strictly linear one. The rise of science represents a return, through struggle, to the faith in order and law that guided the earliest seekers after knowledge.∫∞ Thus far, Frazer’s interpretation of the history of culture falls neatly into the by now well-established progressionist tradition. To the extent that The Golden Bough is intended as an overview of primitive religion and society, the reader could expect to see unveiled the gradual evolution of higher, more refined, more accurate and fruitful modes of thought and belief than those that prevail at the less advanced stages of social development. On the surface, at least, Frazer’s outline of history seems to follow the broad narrative pattern of Tylor’s Primitive Culture. But there are also major differences between the two anthropologists, particularly when it comes to their speculations on the psychology of archaic humans. Tylor’s ‘‘primitive philosopher’’ was motivated first of all by the desire for a rational explanation of those phenomena that could not fail to arrest his attention once he had attained to a recognizably human level of consciousness. Frazer, on the other hand, laid much more stress on utilitarian motives, basic biological needs at the most primitive level of development, and beyond that the more complex calculations of self- interest outlined in classical economic theory. ‘‘To live and to cause to live,’’ he wrote, ‘‘to eat food and to beget children, these were the primary wants of man in the past, and they will be the primary wants of man in the future.’’∫≤ 200 | James G. Frazer

This was not to say that the primitive was incapable of curiosity and reasoned speculation. But this curiosity had ‘‘not been purely disinterested; for even the savage cannot fail to perceive how intimately his own life is bound up with the life of nature, and how the same processes which freeze the stream and strip the earth of vegetation menace him with extinction.’’∫≥ Historians have had a difficult time deciding whether Frazer promoted or hindered greater sensitivity toward sociological issues in British anthropology. On the one hand, unlike Robertson Smith, he never enunciated a set of guiding principles for the sociological study of religion. Nevertheless, it has been argued that by emphasizing the significance of pervasive anxiety about the food supply, Frazer drew attention away from the intellectual origins of myth and ritual and toward their social context.∫∂ Bronislaw Malinowski, for example, contended that the ‘‘naive theoretical arguments’’ of The Golden Bough clashed with the implied sociology embedded in the author’s selection and presentation of evidence.∫∑ In this sense perhaps, Frazer could be said to have transcended the intellectualist tradition more or less in spite of himself. Frazer also differs from Tylor in his attitude toward progress. Though Ty- lor described cultural evolution as a painfully slow process, he never doubted that scientific thought was successfully leavening the whole of society. It was the duty of the anthropologist to identify irrational survivals and to expose them as anomalies, but the laws of history were on his side, and continued advance was ultimately assured. As he wrote in Primitive Culture: ‘‘[W]hile civilization has to contend not only with survivals from lower levels, but also with degeneration within its own borders, it yet proves capable of overcoming both and taking its own course. History within its proper field, and ethnogra- phy over a wider range, combine to show that the institutions which can best hold their own in the world gradually supersede the less fit ones.’’∫∏ While Frazer’s commitment to scientific naturalism was equally firm, his appraisal of human nature would not allow him to echo Tylor’s confident predictions. Turning to the prophetic mode in the final chapter of The Golden Bough, he asked, would ‘‘the great movement which for centuries has been slowly altering the complexion of thought be continued in the near future?’’ Or would there be a reaction that might ‘‘arrest progress’’ and possibly undo much that had already been accomplished?∫π One could not say for sure, but the great achievement of the nineteenth century—the discovery of the folk— meant also the discovery that there existed a ‘‘solid stratum of intellectual agreement among the dull, the weak, the ignorant, and the superstitious.’’ This must give pause to the enlightened optimist, for he could not fail to be James G. Frazer | 201

impressed, and horrified, by the realization of how novel and how fragile were the achievements of civilization. ‘‘We seem to move on a thin crust which may at any moment be rent by the subterranean forces slumbering below. From time to time a hollow murmur underground or a sudden spirt of flame into the air tells of what is going on beneath our feet.’’∫∫ The apprehensive tone of this and many similar passages bears little resemblance to Tylor’s robust faith in the future. The characteristic rhythm of Frazer’s thought, ceaselessly moving back and forth between two poles—confidence in the shaping power of reason and science on one side and gnawing dread of the irrational on the other— establishes a related pattern of conflict in The Golden Bough. The drama played out in the sacred grove at Nemi, the priest slain by a successor who will himself be slain, is repeated, with variations, in case after case as kings, magicians, and incarnate gods are murdered for the sake of their subjects and worshippers. And it soon becomes apparent that in each of these analogous tragedies there are two forces pitted against one another: a powerful quasi- divine individual on the one hand, and on the other, the people who both revere him and require his violent death. The real foe of the priest/king/ god is not his would-be heir, but the conditions and expectations that have brought him to power in the first place. Though Frazer was careful to point out that the specific features of divine kingship differed widely from one society to another, it is possible for the sake of convenience to identify two archetypal figures that reappear from time to time in different guises: the Magician King and the Incarnate God. The first of these appears, naturally enough, in the Age of Magic, when men still believe that by correctly performing certain acts, they can more or less automatically produce the effects they desire. At this ‘‘rude’’ stage of society, it is normal for every individual to dabble in the practice of magic, but it is not uncommon to find that one man ‘‘possesses in an unusually high degree powers which most of his fellows arrogate to themselves on a smaller scale.’’ Sometimes this individual is charged with the responsibility of employing his talents for public benefit; he seeks to assert magical control over the forces of nature in order to secure an abundant supply of food for the whole group.∫Ω In time a professional class of magicians may emerge—a fact of momentous importance for the future of society: ‘‘Here is a body of men relieved . . . from the need of earning their livelihood by hard manual toil, and allowed, nay, expected and encouraged, to prosecute researches into the secret ways of nature.’’ Frazer is quite explicit in describing these early magicians as the 202 | James G. Frazer

ancient counterparts of modern men of science. From this class of public magicians the institution of kingship had evolved in many, though not in all, primitive societies.Ω≠ But while among some nations it is assumed that the king’s supernatural power is ‘‘exerted through definite acts of will,’’ others hold that the course of nature, though dependent on the king, is not wholly under his conscious control. In that case, ‘‘his person is considered . . . as the dynamical centre of the universe. . . . He is the point of support on which hangs the balance of the world, and the slightest irregularity on his part may overthrow the delicate equipoise.’’Ω∞ Where such beliefs prevail, it is not unusual to find the royal existence hedged about with an elaborate system of ceremonial observances and prohibitions designed not only to maintain the king’s life and health, but also to preserve him in an ideal state of harmony with the cosmos. In some instances, court etiquette becomes so intrusive and punctilious—the sovereign may neither eat, groom himself, nor sleep with his wife free from outside interference—that the life which his subjects seek to protect becomes nothing more than a burden to him. But in reality, this system of taboos is designed to safeguard not only the king, but his people as well, for the magical or quasi-divine sovereign is a potential threat to his subjects. The ultimate danger is that as he grows old and feeble the natural forces that he controls may suffer a similar degeneration. Since ‘‘no amount of care and precaution’’ can stave off forever the ravages of age or the approach of death, it is best that the king be killed, and his spirit transferred to a younger, more vigorous successor at the first sign of decay.Ω≤ On the one hand, then, the Magician King is vulnerable and in a sense impotent, liable to victimization by his people and denied independent control over the most petty and mundane of his own activities. Yet in emphasizing the paradox of the ruler’s weakness, Frazer does not ignore the attractions of power for men of superior talent or the services which have been rendered to the cause of social progress when powerful individuals have been able to impose their wills on ‘‘savage’’ or ‘‘barbarous’’ masses. In discussing the evolution of kings from magicians, Frazer introduces one of his favorite themes— progress through ‘‘knavery’’ and the manipulation of superstition.Ω≥ Wherever the belief in magic prevails and the welfare of society is held to depend on the correct performance of magical rites, it is only natural that the most ambitious and intelligent individuals will be drawn to a career in sorcery for ‘‘acuter minds perceive how easy it is to dupe their weaker brother and to James G. Frazer | 203 play on his superstition for their own advantage.’’ As a result, ‘‘at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character.’’Ω∂ But it would be wrong to condemn this development as an unmitigated evil, for it is ‘‘the essential condition of the emergence of mankind from savagery.’’ Frazer condemned the ‘‘old notion’’ that the ‘‘democratic savage’’ is ‘‘the freest of mankind.’’ In fact, the ‘‘savage’’ is enslaved to the past. Conse- quently, in no other state of society ‘‘is progress so slow and difficult. . . . The ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest. . . . The surface of such a society presents a uniform dead level, so far as it is humanly possible to reduce the natural inequalities, the immeasurable real differences of inborn capacity and temper, to a false superficial appearance of equality.’’ It is difficult not to see in this gloomy description a reflection of Frazer’s uneasy vision of his own society. In any case, anything which can ‘‘raise society by opening a career to talent and proportioning the degrees of authority to men’s natural abilities’’ must be seen as a step in the right direction and a service to future generations.Ω∑ Two points stand out in Frazer’s treatment of the emergence of primitive monarchy from ‘‘savage democracy,’’ an account far from novel in its general outlines. One is his focus on knowledge as the source of power. Not that he denied the relevance of military skill or practical political capacities; decisive- ness, self-confidence, the will to power—these had all played a part in the evolution of kingship.Ω∏ But Frazer was not much interested in these factors. More compelling by far was the story of how wizards and wise men, ‘‘the direct predecessors . . . of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science,’’ had risen to the ranks of authority. They ‘‘began the work which has since been carried to such glorious and beneficent issues by their successors in after ages.’’Ωπ Standing in contrast to this celebration of enlightenment and progress, however, is Frazer’s narrative of tragic martyrdom for the superior individual who is sacrificed to the fears and ignorance of the mob. Here he seems to echo the anxieties of other late-Victorians thinkers who perceived themselves as members of an embattled elite threatened by the inroads of mass culture and politics. In time, of course, ‘‘the slow advance of knowledge, which has dispelled so many cherished illusions,’’ forced ‘‘the more thoughtful portion of mankind’’ to confront the realization that their magical practices were useless, and men now began to speculate that the changing seasons and the accompanying cycle of birth and death were caused by divine beings whose favor must be 204 | James G. Frazer

courted like that of a chief or king and upon whose whims and caprices human life depended.Ω∫ At first, the lives of the gods were believed to follow the pattern of human life. While these beings were held to possess supernatural powers far tran- scending those of men, they were neither infinitely powerful nor, strictly speaking, immortal. Furthermore, no impassable gulf separated human existence from that of the gods; a man or a woman could acquire divine status and a deity might choose to assume human form. According to Frazer, the belief in incarnate human gods had appeared at an early stage in the history of thought and was found among many nations scattered all over the world.ΩΩ This last contention was of crucial importance for Frazer’s investigation of the myths and rituals associated with the Dying God, a discussion that occupies seven volumes of the third edition of The Golden Bough. Although he devoted some attention to religious festivals that merely commemorate the legend of a divine death, such as that of the Babylonian god Tammuz, Frazer’s primary interest was in those rites in which a human being was actually slain as a representative or incarnation of the deity. The motive for this act was the same as that which dictated the violent death of the magical or priestly king before illness or old age could weaken him, to ensure the continued vitality and fertility of vegetation, animals, and even people.∞≠≠ With the introduction of theistic ideas, however, certain modifications of older practices and beliefs gradually developed. On the one hand, the representative of the god need not be the actual ruler; in some places, it was customary to appoint a temporary or nominal king, often a slave or a condemned criminal, who enjoyed the privileges of office (though without genuine authority) for a brief period after which he was ritually executed. Frazer viewed the Roman Saturnalia and the European Carnival as relics of this custom. At the same time, the doctrine of incarnation entails the notion that the divine spirit or essence may survive the ‘‘death’’ of the human vessel in which it is contained. It follows that ‘‘the killing of the god, that is, of his human incarnation, is . . . merely a necessary step to his revival or resurrection in a better form.’’∞≠∞ In time, these periodic sacrifices were modified into the mock executions of ‘‘Death,’’ ‘‘Carnival,’’ or the ‘‘Corn Spirit’’ familiar to students of European folklore, but Frazer made it clear that in his opinion the harmless playacting of modern rustics was a survival of rites which had once been performed in grim earnest all over Europe and western Asia.∞≠≤ Though the original motive of these human sacrifices had been to ensure the continued fruitfulness of the earth, eventually they were assimilated to James G. Frazer | 205

another, independently evolved, tradition—the custom of transferring evils to an innocent person, an animal, or an inanimate object—in short, the use of a scapegoat.∞≠≥ In its origins, the idea is a crudely materialistic product of magical thinking; a classic example of the process is the custom found among certain tribes in Malaya and India of building small rafts or boats on which disease and misfortune are literally carried away downstream.∞≠∂ But, in time, this elementary error gives rise to a sophisticated and ‘‘sublime’’ theological conception of ‘‘a God who dies to take away the sins of the world.’’∞≠∑ In his double role as god and scapegoat, the sacrificial victim now performs a twofold act of redemption, vanquishing the physical corruption and decay of death and obliterating the moral corruption of sin or evil. Frazer’s discussion of ‘‘the theory and practice of the Dying God’’ quite obviously invites comparison with the Gospel accounts of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection and with the central tenets of Christian doctrine. The elements for such a comparison were not all firmly in place until the ninth volume (subtitled ‘‘The Scapegoat,’’ though Frazer had originally planned to call it ‘‘The Man of Sorrows’’).∞≠∏ But the author makes his intentions clear long before that, as he circles about his target, pauses as if to strike, lands a glancing blow, and then retreats to begin circling once again. No brief syn- opsis can adequately convey the impact of Frazer’s technique, especially his use of irony; juxtaposing (without comment) similar pagan and Christian rites, employing the language of the Bible or the Book of Common Prayer to describe ‘‘savage’’ ceremonies, inviting his readers to laugh at the absurdities of primitive customs and then turning the laughter against ‘‘Christian Europe’’ itself—these are some of his favorite devices. Frazer’s chief method, however, is simply to show how many of the central points of orthodox Christian belief—the virgin birth, the incarnate god who is also the son of god, the resurrection, the sacramental eating of the god, and of course, the soterio- logical meaning of the death of the god—were anticipated in the pre-Christian cults of Asia and the Mediterranean lands, and not only as vague precursors but as crucial themes in pagan theology.∞≠π For the most part, Frazer’s approach is an indirect one, casually dropping a hint, sometimes with little apparent relevance to the topic under discussion, then returning to the main line of his argument. Finally, however, he does draw an explicit connection between the Dying God and the crucified Christ, in the notorious ‘‘Note’’ at the end of volume 9 of The Golden Bough. Origi- nally incorporated into the text of the second edition (1900), this section was turned into an appendix in the third edition because, as Frazer admitted, the 206 | James G. Frazer

hypothesis outlined in it had met with little acceptance.∞≠∫ His theory was based on the resemblance both in general outline and in detail between the treatment accorded Jesus before his crucifixion and the ritual of the Babylo- nian Sacea, a version of the Saturnalia in which a human victim was first invested with kingly regalia, then mocked, stripped, scourged, and finally hanged or crucified as the representative of a god. According to Frazer, the Jewish feast of Purim was based on this Babylonian ceremony, and every year at Jerusalem a condemned criminal was chosen to play the role of Haman (a version of the mock king) and then executed after the usual festivities. The conclusion hardly needs spelling out: Jesus died in the role of Haman, one of ‘‘the great army of martyrs who in many ages and in many lands . . . have died a cruel death in the character of gods.’’∞≠Ω The advantage of this theory was that it seemed to throw ‘‘fresh light’’ not only on the Gospel narratives but also on the earliest moments of a nascent religion, explaining the prompt deification of Jesus by his bereaved followers and the extraordinary speed with which his worship spread through Asia Minor. The new faith incorporated elements that ‘‘appealed powerfully to the Asiatic mind,’’ and ‘‘the blow struck on Golgotha set a thousand expectant strings vibrating in unison wherever men had heard the old, old story of the dying and risen god.’’∞∞≠ Not content with simply emphasizing the broad similarities between Christianity and paganism, Frazer believed that he had isolated the syncretic moment itself. Though Frazer put forward his theory ‘‘with great diffidence,’’∞∞∞ it is plain that he hoped to create a sensation and to shock orthodox opinion. In a letter to his publishers written shortly before the second edition came out, he speaks with almost childlike glee of his hopes that ‘‘the Saturnalia business’’ will ‘‘attract . . . attention’’ and ‘‘make some impression.’’∞∞≤ But while Frazer’s intentions were clearly subversive, it would be a mistake to conclude, as some critics have done, that The Golden Bough is nothing more than an elaborate attempt to undermine Christianity by tracking down its sources in pagan fertility cults and, more remotely, ‘‘savage’’ religion as a whole. Andrew Lang, for example, concluded a devastatingly thorough critique of the book by suggesting that Frazer was too ‘‘fascinated by the Cross at the end of the long vista of argument’’ to notice the numerous contradictions, gaps, and inconsis- tencies which marred his work.∞∞≥ There is more than a grain of truth in this judgment, but however strong Frazer’s ulterior motives may have been, the full implications of his treatment of the Dying God are not realized if it is taken solely as an attempt to expose Christianity as a ‘‘survival.’’ James G. Frazer | 207

First of all, it is obvious that Frazer’s vision of Christ crucified falls squarely into the pattern described earlier—the dramatic conflict between an enlightened or superior individual on the one hand, and on the other, superstitious masses who alternately revere and persecute him. In the case of Jesus, the process of victimization is twofold. Not only is he tormented and killed for spreading ‘‘revolutionary doctrines,’’ but the consequence of his death is a kind of second martyrdom. By impressing ‘‘upon what had been hitherto mainly an ethical mission the character of a divine revelation,’’ his followers could be said to have betrayed him in the very act of deifying him.∞∞∂ By linking the Crucifixion with the Saturnalia, Frazer adds a further di- mension to the tragedy, for one of the distinctive features of the festival is that it includes a period of officially sanctioned license during which the normal social roles are reversed. Servants lord it over their masters, acting out the fantasy of a primitive Golden Age in which neither private property nor distinctions of rank had yet arisen.∞∞∑ With the natural balance of power thus dangerously inverted, the superior man is more vulnerable than ever to the ferocity of the deluded mob. Though Frazer remains vague as to the precise connection between the Saturnalia and the Crucifixion, the way in which he juxtaposes the origins of Christianity with images of the anarchic violence of the masses indicates the presence of a psychic association between religion and his fear of the irrational mob. Hence, despite Frazer’s claim that the history of thought reveals the gradual displacement of error by truth, the pattern actually disclosed in The Golden Bough is not one of linear advance, but a repetitive cycle of conflict, ‘‘a long tragedy of human folly and suffering.’’∞∞∏ The dominant mood is pessimistic, and the author’s faith in rationalism and ‘‘science’’ is overshadowed by his preoccupation with their limitations and with the precariousness of their hold on the human mind. Beneath this lies a related ambivalence about the value of religion. On the one hand, Frazer tended to identify religion with his great enemy, ‘‘superstition,’’ often using the two as interchangeable terms. Even when distinguishing between them, however, he insisted that the cultural authority of religious institutions was confined within narrow limits; they could never rise far above the lowest level of irrationalism without leaving the mass of believers behind: ‘‘For the great faiths of the world, just in so far as they are the outcome of superior intelligence, of purer morality, of extraordinary fervour of aspiration after the ideal, fail to touch and move the common man. They make claims upon his intellect and his heart to which neither the one nor the other is 208 | James G. Frazer

capable of responding.’’∞∞π Any attempt that religious reformers might make to remedy the ignorance or to restrain the brutish cruelty of the multitude is automatically checked by a corresponding loss of inﬂuence over public opinion. Thus, religion could never really promote social progress; its only real effect as a cultural force was to maintain the masses in their irrational habits of mind, endangering those few who conducted their lives according to the dictates of reason. Yet Frazer himself made use of the ‘‘irrational’’ mythic associations embedded in his data. In the preface to the second edition, written in 1900, Frazer had described himself ‘‘dragging the guns into position’’ and directing ‘‘the battery of the comparative method’’ against the outworn structures of Chris- tian belief. Despite this statement of intent, his own aesthetic choices bear witness to the continuing signiﬁcance and vitality of religion, or at least of religious symbols. As John Vickery has pointed out, much of Frazer’s artistic power lies in the way that he simultaneously opposes and ‘‘conspires with’’ the ‘‘spiritual, irrational, myth-making impulses’’ of the human mind.∞∞∫ Nowhere is this better illustrated than in the concluding passage of The Golden Bough, where the author imagines himself, in company with the reader, returning to the grove of Diana where ‘‘the long voyage of discovery’’ began:

Once more we take the road to Nemi. It is evening, and as we climb the long slope of the Appian Way up to the Alban Hills, we look back and see the sky aﬂame with sunset, its golden glory resting like the aureole of a dying saint over Rome and touching with a crest of ﬁre the dome of St. Peter’s. . . . The temple of the sylvan goddess . . . has vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Ariccia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. Le roi est mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!∞∞Ω

Though no other passage in the The Golden Bough can quite compete with this peroration, elsewhere too the aesthetic cogency of the book derives from the religious associations of the author’s imagery.∞≤≠ It may be recalled that Frazer later used the same image—a traveler far from home, his attention arrested by the music of Sabbath bells—to evoke childhood memories. The appeal of the device rests on a kind of sentimental nostalgic religiosity that was not unusual among Victorian agnostics. But the emotional sources that James G. Frazer | 209

gave rise to the image are less interesting than the fact that he chose to employ it. With the church bells of Rome ringing out the death of God, Frazer ends by testifying to the enduring power of those symbols that the comparative method was supposed to have exorcised.

The Meanings of The Golden Bough The importance of The Golden Bough does not depend primarily upon the novelty of its controlling ideas or methodology. The one area where Frazer could claim to have broken new ground (at least within the context of British anthropology) was his attempt to focus on the religious significance of primitive anxieties about food supply. But his use of the comparative method, his treatment of religion as a fallacious natural philosophy in competition with modern science, and his preference for an intellectualist explanation of the origins of institutions all recall Tylor’s approach to the phenomena of primitive culture. At the same time, Frazer agreed with students of Euro- pean folklore in emphasizing the continuing vitality of superstitious survivals among the lower classes, the ‘‘savages’’ of contemporary Western society. Here his work had much in common with that of Andrew Lang, though Frazer owed more to the writings of the German folklorist Wilhelm Mannhardt. Finally, the influence of Robertson Smith can be traced in Frazer’s fascination with the figure of the slain god and his interest in ritual as a source of evidence, although he rejected, or perhaps misunderstood, Robertson Smith’s theoretical justification for stressing the primacy of ceremonial act over theological belief. Though members of a later generation of readers sometimes exaggerated Frazer’s originality, contemporary critics, even those most enthusiastic about The Golden Bough, recognized it as the product of an already well-established tradition rather than the manifesto of a new movement. The Edinburgh Re- view complained that Frazer had hardly gone beyond ‘‘the solid landmarks already set up by the leading pioneers in this field of exploration.’’∞≤∞ Accord- ing to the author of a notice in Folk-Lore, Frazer’s book was a ‘‘triumph’’ for the comparative method, but its value lay not so much in its theories as in the selection and presentation of facts and in the considerable literary skill displayed; the reviewer considered Robertson Smith’s Religion of the Semites a more important contribution to science.∞≤≤ On the other hand, many critics of The Golden Bough found its intricate narrative structure attractive, even if Frazer’s arguments were sometimes derivative or unconvincing. Right from 210 | James G. Frazer

the first edition in 1890, readers responded to the work as an aesthetic object rather than a product of pure scholarship. The reviewer for Folk-Lore praised Frazer’s craftsmanship in creating a ‘‘cunningly woven weft’’ from ‘‘chaotic materials.’’∞≤≥ Virtually every critic, even those who most vigorously disputed Frazer’s theories and conclusions, commented favorably on the stylistic qualities of the book. By 1914, when the last substantive volume of the third edition had finally appeared, critical consensus placed The Golden Bough high on the list of works which appealed equally to those of scientific or of literary bent, to ‘‘minds that desire to imagine as well as know.’’∞≤∂ Frazer’s influence on modern literature is well attested and has been analyzed skillfully and in depth by literary scholars. According to John Vickery, for example, The Golden Bough became ‘‘central to twentieth-century literature’’ both directly, through such authors as T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and D. H. Lawrence, all of whom possessed some familiarity with the book, and indirectly, through ‘‘a diffused influence which operated . . . independently’’ of the text.∞≤∑ But why was it that The Golden Bough, by no means the only work of its kind, should have ‘‘spearheaded the drive of comparative religion’’ into modern literature? Vickery locates the source of its impact in the book’s aesthetic qualities; the author’s use of irony and his ability to create concrete, almost pictorial, representations of scenes and actions. Above all, Vickery points to the structure of the work, which he describes as ‘‘a quest romance.’’ While Frazer explicitly endorsed a linear progressivism, his work possessed hidden affinities with the ‘‘cyclical theories of life, history, and culture’’ so attractive to modernist authors.∞≤∏ Any assessment of the public impact of Frazer’s work must take note of one of its most striking features—the existence, much commented upon, of a sizeable gap between the seeming intentions of the author and the conclusions that readers sometimes drew from his work. There seemed to be no consensus among Frazer’s readers about what The Golden Bough meant. On the one hand, Jane Harrison told of meeting a self-educated policeman who had become a convinced freethinker after reading the book.∞≤π On the other hand, Tennyson read the first edition in 1890, and, far from damaging his faith, Frazer’s ‘‘demonstration that primitive mythologies prefigured Christian ritual’’ seemed to ‘‘to generalize—and in a sense certify’’ it.∞≤∫ A particularly telling instance of ‘‘misreading’’ can be found in T. S. Eliot’s use of the Adonis myth, in The Waste Land, to explore ‘‘the recovery of religious consciousness.’’∞≤Ω Frazer had seen himself exposing the true character of the gospel story as a ‘‘savage’’ survival by linking its central events with those of older James G. Frazer | 211

Near Eastern cults, but in the eyes of some readers, Eliot among them, the effect of this device was to deepen, rather than to diminish, the power and significance of Christ’s death and resurrection. Quite a few of the reviewers of the Golden Bough also suggested that the message of book was something quite different from what its author seemed to intend. Frazer as storyteller was apt to subvert the authority of Frazer as philosopher. One critic pointed out that while it may be true that ‘‘the progress of man has been . . . through religion to science,’’ as Frazer contended, anyone reading The Golden Bough would be led to doubt whether science alone could ‘‘fulfill the wants of man.’’∞≥≠ As these remarks suggest, the rationalistic and utilitarian strain in Frazer’s thought did not sit well with many critics. This is especially noticeable in reviews of the third edition of The Golden Bough, the first volumes of which began to appear in 1911. The Athe- naeum, for example, complained that Frazer was too concerned to ‘‘lay his finger on what is confused and wrong according to the standards of civilized logic,’’ and too apt to reach for literal interpretations of symbolic acts.∞≥∞ A number of readers found fault with Frazer’s tendency to explain customs and institutions as consciously designed and calculated to meet basic physical needs, ignoring the role of irrational fears and desires, and of ‘‘spiritual, moral or speculative needs.’’∞≥≤ Sidney Hartland argued that ‘‘mankind did not begin as eighteenth-century philosophers. . . . Wonder, awe, fear, an indefinable sense of enveloping powers with which he must make friends . . . were among man’s primal experiences.’’∞≥≥ Several critics singled out Frazer’s theory of the relation (or more precisely the opposition) between magic and religion as an especially unfortunate product of his philosophical predilections.∞≥∂ The most incisive criticism of the theory came from R. R. Marett, Tylor’s successor at Oxford, who was both a persistent critic and a generous admirer of Frazer’s work. In a lengthy essay written for the Edinburgh Review in 1914, he attacked Frazer’s ‘‘intellectualistic method’’ and his ‘‘specious but superficial analogy’’ between magic and natural science. Marett pointed out that Frazer’s whole approach had led him to disregard the significance of religious or magical acts for those who actually participated in them. The important question was not ‘‘whether a given body of associated beliefs and practices’’ could be shown to contain ‘‘a certain concept,’’ but ‘‘whether it fulfills a certain social and moral function.’’ In Marett’s view, the distinction between magic and religion was moral, not metaphysical; magic should be understood as ‘‘all maleficent and anti-social ways of exploiting the unseen and the occult,’’ while religion includes only 212 | James G. Frazer

such dealings ‘‘as are supposed to further the common welfare.’’∞≥∑ In effect, Marett was defending the religion of ‘‘savage’’ man on the grounds of a pragmatic functionalism that owed much to the sociology of Émile Durkheim and something also to the psychology of William James and his American disciples. His impatience with Frazer’s dogged rationalism is nowhere better illustrated than in his rejection of Frazer’s assessment of Australian totemism:

It is shallow to regard the totemic ritual of Australia as a sort of science of stock- raising gone wrong. What you have ﬁrst to learn in the deserts of Australia is how to go without your dinner on occasions, and nevertheless to fare on bravely until you ﬁnd one. Having by the aid of your rites made yourself ‘‘strong’’ and ‘‘glad’’ and ‘‘good,’’ then you get good hunting as a matter of course; and even then you have the decency and the sound sense to ascribe your good fortune, not to yourself, but to the higher powers that are with you and in you yet are never merely you.∞≥∏

These remarks anticipate the criticisms that a later generation of anthropologists, calling themselves ‘‘functionalists,’’ would direct against Frazer’s work. But Marett spoke for quite a few of his contemporaries in voicing his dissatisfaction with a theory that seemed to reduce both magic and religion to folly and futility. Oddly enough, on the one point where Frazer expected to arouse considerable controversy—his treatment of the Cruciﬁxion in the second edition—the response was generally quite mild.∞≥π The one critic who seemed most in- censed by the theory was Andrew Lang; he attacked it ﬁrst in an article for the Fortnightly Review in 1901, and then enlarged on these criticisms in his book Magic and Religion which appeared the same year.∞≥∫ It was in Magic and Reli- gion that Lang made his infamous characterization of Frazer as leader of ‘‘the Covent Garden School of mythologists’’ (referring to the latter’s preoccupation with gods and spirits of vegetation), a piece of cruelty said to have plunged its victim into a depression lasting several weeks.∞≥Ω In some ways, it was strange that Lang, whose theories on European folk culture closely resembled those of Frazer, should have felt so little sympathy for the efforts of the younger man. But by 1900, if not earlier, Lang had become so intolerant of anything that smacked of ‘‘positivism’’ that he was incapable of seeing past his antagonism to the possible points of contact between Frazer’s interests and his own. It was not only Frazer’s rationalism that was perceived as faintly old- fashioned; similar complaints were voiced about his scholarly methods, espe- James G. Frazer | 213

cially by those critics who took a professional interest in the development of anthropological theory. Marett, for example, took exception to what he evidently regarded as Frazer’s naive empiricism.∞∂≠ Even more significant, perhaps, are the criticisms advanced by the Oxford scholar L. R. Farnell, one of the new generation of classicists influenced by anthropology, for they indicate a growing dissatisfaction with the traditions of nineteenth-century social evolutionism. Writing in 1906, he argued that Frazer’s work raised doubts about the adequacy of the comparative encyclopedic method which it exemplified, and gave urgency to ‘‘the question which some anthropologists are now putting to themselves, whether the time has not come to study more deeply special ethnic areas, rather than to make continual free excursions round the globe.’’∞∂∞ As early as 1896, in his article ‘‘The Limitations of the Comparative Method of Anthropology,’’ Franz Boas had launched a thoroughgoing critique of Victorian social evolutionism, and in the following decade, the forces that were to overturn the dominant paradigm were slowly gathering strength.∞∂≤ If critics considered Frazer’s methods unoriginal and possibly outmoded, if his philosophy struck many as too narrow and superficial, if his most prominent theories were often rejected as untenable, how does one account for the virtually unanimous agreement by these same critics that The Golden Bough was one of the greatest books of the age and one that had profoundly influenced their generation? Of course, admiration for Frazer’s skill as a prose stylist accounts for much of the enthusiasm, but it was not the sole factor. The vast scope of the book was awe-inspiring, as was the seemingly boundless erudition and industry of its author; readers described it as ‘‘a lordly treasure house,’’ and ‘‘a panorama of the primitive life and mind.’’∞∂≥ It was also called a ‘‘monument,’’ a common enough term of praise, but in this case perhaps, the word is more than usually appropriate. It might be asked to what The Golden Bough was a monument? Certainly, it was a standing tribute to the heroic scholarship of its author, but interestingly, a number of reviewers also saw the book as a memorial to its subject matter— the archaic religious consciousness that was rapidly passing into oblivion. As a critic for the Bookman observed: ‘‘[W]hatever the ultimate effect may be of the despiritualization of the universe which science is everywhere producing, it . . . is of the highest importance to possess a faithful record, such as Dr. Frazer presents, of phenomena which are now rapidly disappearing.’’∞∂∂ Sidney Hart- land pronounced The Golden Bough ‘‘a talisman of power’’ which would guide the student ‘‘into dark and subterranean regions of the past . . . along the devious tracks haunted by dead and dying religions.’’∞∂∑ 214 | James G. Frazer

These two authors shared Frazer’s historicist assumptions. But it should be emphasized that whether readers did or did not accept Frazer’s developmentalism, they agreed that the greatness of The Golden Bough lay chiefly in his ability to reveal the richness of his material. As Marett put it, ‘‘by the magic of his pen he has made the myriad facts live, so that they tell their own tale, and we are left free to read their meaning as our several tastes and temperaments dictate.’’∞∂∏ In effect, then, the book was a kind of museum of the spiritual realm with its artifacts arranged, displayed, and appropriately labeled for the edification and aesthetic appreciation of visitors. From a later perspective, The Golden Bough can be seen as a monument in yet another sense—as the culmination of a project of inquiry launched more than fifty years earlier. In praising his achievement, Frazer’s critics simultaneously paid tribute to those scholars who had previously traversed the same ground, but even at the moment of greatest enthusiasm, hints of exhaustion and disappointment crept into the chorus of acclaim. And as Frazer’s colleagues in anthropology and folklore picked away at his scholarly methods and philosophical assumptions, they were beginning to formulate a judgment (though as yet it was but a vague feeling of dissatisfaction) repudiating the tradition of which he was the standard-bearer. If Frazer’s masterpiece was a memorial to a whole world of ancient religious belief that was receding into the past, it also marked the point where the older positivist version of the science of religion had come to a dead end. π Jane Ellen Harrison The Redefinition of Religion

The work of Jane Ellen Harrison, pioneering female classicist and contemporary of Frazer, regularly met with caustic criticism from well-established male colleagues. For example, in a letter to her friend and intellectual ally Gilbert Murray, Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, the famed philologist, dismissed Harrison’s Themis thus: ‘‘In matters of religion I remain old- fashioned. . . . It does not interest me much how Hecuba’s grandmother felt; not Plato’s for that matter. She was only an old woman and her faith a hag’s. . . . I can’t get along with historians of religion; not with those who really dispose of everything with magic and superstition and in the end have a more intimate relation with old women of both sexes than to Plato, Spinoza and Goethe.’’∞ What at first sight seems no more than gratuitous insult is in fact an insightful observation, for Wilamowitz here puts his finger on something that lay at the heart of Harrison’s distinguishing contributions to the science of religion; her scholarly project could indeed be described, though loosely, as an effort to unearth ‘‘the religion of Plato’s grandmother.’’ Furthermore, even though she did not ‘‘dispose of everything with magic and superstition,’’ she, like Lang and Frazer, sought to dig beneath the familiar surface of classical civilization into the primeval strata of superstition and magic below. Like Lang, she found much there to attract and fascinate her, much to which she was sympathetic. But Harrison went where neither Lang, Frazer, nor any of her fellow contributors to the field had gone in her search for evidence of an ancient woman- centered religion, a discovery that she believed had dramatic implications for her own culture. Recent discussion of Harrison is apt to place her within the context of the 216 | Jane Ellen Harrison

Cambridge Ritualists, the scholarly circle that included Murray, Francis Corn- ford, and possibly A. B. Cook, as well as Harrison herself, so named because of their shared eagerness to use the findings of anthropology to illuminate the study of ancient Greece. Numerous controversies surround the history of the Ritualists, however. The term itself is misleading, since Murray was an Oxford don and Harrison had adopted a Ritualist position similar to that of William Robertson Smith some years before she began to teach at Cambridge. The very existence of the group has been challenged, with Mary Beard, for example, pointing out that the supposed participants never referred to themselves as ‘‘Ritualists.’’≤ In her recent biography of Harrison, Annabel Robinson suggests that ‘‘the label ‘Cambridge ritualists’ reifies a non-existent group’’ and that in reality, Harrison’s personality and intellectual interests were so powerful that she temporarily seemed to impose a unified agenda on Murray and Cornford, while they eventually came to believe that ‘‘their more important work lay elsewhere.’’≥ Disputes about ritualism appear to be caught in the same muddle over disciplinary categories that attends the history of the science of religion in the nineteenth century. There seems to be little doubt that, beginning in the late 1880s, interest in matters anthropological had become widespread among ‘‘various sectors of the Cambridge faculty’’ including scholars in archaeology, history, zoology, psychology, and Arabic as well as classicists such as Frazer and Harrison.∂ Naturally enough, they were not all focused on the same questions and problems. This applies equally to Murray, Cornford, and Har- rison, regardless of whether or not one calls them ‘‘Cambridge Ritualists.’’ Murray focused attention on the putative ritual origins of Greek drama, and Cornford on the mythic and religious concepts underlying the work of supposedly rationalist ancient historians and philosophers. An extraordinarily prolific writer, Murray devoted most of his attention to verse translations of Greek drama, literary studies, and the various liberal political causes that increasingly absorbed him in the period after the First World War. His most important book on religion, Four Stages of Greek Religion (later revised as Five Stages . . .) was and is generally thought of as a popularization of Harrison’s views, though it was also written partly to counter Harrison’s glorification of the primitive and archaic forms of religion over the classical and Olympian. Among the so-called Ritualists, only Harrison shared with Lang, Robert- son Smith, Frazer, and other subjects of this study a pressing sense of the relevance of comparative religion for the understanding of their own society’s dilemmas and discontents. In that sense, she, more so than Murray or Corn- Jane Ellen Harrison | 217 ford, was clearly part of the Victorian project of religious study even though she continued to live and write long past the end of the Victorian age. Harrison was a member of the first generation of women undergraduates at Cambridge and the first female scholar to make a widely acknowledged impact on the new field of comparative religion. Her work could be compared to that of both Robertson Smith and Frazer: like Robertson Smith, her approach to the study of religion is resolutely sociological, although unlike him she was a fairly orthodox social evolutionist; like Frazer, she ranged widely about the field of ethnographic evidence while always returning to classical subjects, and like him but with even greater boldness, she displayed herself as a freethinker and iconoclast, publicly proclaiming her atheism.∑ In the end, however, it makes little sense to position Harrison as simply another link between Robertson Smith and Frazer; her scholarship mapped out an im- pressively broad sweep of new territory, drawing on insights from Nietzsche, Durkheim, Bergson, Freud, and William James as well as her own feminist perspective. Moreover, she wore her atheism with a difference, rejecting ‘‘Old Rationalism’’ in favor of a search for ‘‘true religion,’’ an alternative both to dogmatic Christianity and to the spiritually barren agnosticism that was rooted in empiricist individualism. In the end, Harrison’s most distinctive contribution to the study of religion was her open and conscious commitment to the task of redefining or reconceptualizing religion itself. Perhaps more than any of the other figures considered here, Harrison’s work reveals the Victorian science of religion as an engine of reform rather than demolition.

The Making of a Radical/Conservative Harrison was born in 1850 into the family of a successful Yorkshire timber merchant. Her mother died within a month after the birth, leaving her daughter to be cared for by a maiden aunt to whom she grew much attached. Though her earliest years appear to have been happy ones, a series of disruptive events put an end to the young girl’s sense of emotional security. When Jane was about ﬁve, her aunt left the family circle to marry, installing as her successor a young Welsh governess of strict Evangelical convictions and narrow provincial outlook. Within six months, this woman had become the child’s stepmother, an event that brought conﬂict to the Harrison household and damaged the hitherto affectionate relationship between father and daughter.∏ Writers on Harrison have traditionally emphasized the many links between her emotional life and her ideas. Her friend Gilbert Murray admired the 218 | Jane Ellen Harrison

way her personality illuminated her writings, while hostile critics blamed her for allowing personal feelings and prejudices to infiltrate her scholarship.π Mary Beard rightly points out that this biographical emphasis on Harrison’s emotions is a rather suspicious pattern given her fame as a pioneering female scholar.∫ Nevertheless, Harrison readily acknowledged the emotional and psychic bases of her work, claiming, ‘‘we know nothing we haven’t felt.’’Ω Mischievously inverting the scholarly common sense of her day, she proclaimed her regard for ‘‘honest prejudice’’ because ‘‘prejudice, rising as it does in emotion, has its roots in life and reality.’’∞≠ Harrison made no effort to hide the connections between her youthful experiences and her ‘‘prejudices’’ (as well as some of her most striking insights). Although there is no full autobiography, these connections are not difficult to trace; Harrison’s writings contain scattered but revealing references to her childhood and youth.∞∞ These, along with her unpublished correspondence and the testimony of those who knew her, disclose recurring themes: repeated conflicts between conservative and progressive leanings; her search for a life in which the intellectual, spiritual, and emotional were fully integrated; her unwillingness to be restricted by Victorian conventions; her rejection of religious orthodoxy; and her search for ‘‘true religion.’’ Harrison’s references to her religious upbringing all tell much the same story—her strained relationship with her stepmother fostered the deep ambivalence toward Christianity and all religion that infused and stimulated her scholarship. Harrison describes herself as having been ‘‘reared . . . in a narrow school of Evangelicalism—reared with sin always present, with death and judgment always before [me], Heaven and Hell to either side.’’∞≤ Her family was ‘‘ ‘Low Church’ . . . thoroughly Church . . . but rather violently Protes- tant.’’∞≥ While Harrison’s father seems to have regarded religious observance mainly as a matter of social propriety, her stepmother’s faith ‘‘was of the fervent, semi-revivalist type,’’ and it appears that after the marriage, her religious views dominated the household and the education of the children.∞∂ Harrison recalled that as a child she had ‘‘agonized’’ over ‘‘the question of Eternal Punishment.’’∞∑ She also spoke of the mental ‘‘scars’’ that her religious upbringing had inflicted on her.∞∏ These are later reflections, and the reader may be struck by the feelings of oppression and victimization that gave rise to a natural resentment. Recent scholarship on Harrison has been generally one- sided in its emphasis on her hostility toward Christianity and the bitter youthful experiences that engendered it. Also present in her reminiscences, if less obvious, however, is the fact that Harrison, far from being a passive victim, seems to have entered into her religious education with passionate intensity. Jane Ellen Harrison | 219

Many of the crucial events of her youth were suffused with elements of theological drama. Certainly her stepmother’s teachings made an ineradicable impression on her. Her friend Hope Mirrlees reported that ‘‘up to the very end she was conscious of a sense of sin if she spent the morning in reading.’’∞π Other friends also commented upon the lasting effects of Harrison’s strict Victorian upbringing. According to Gilbert Murray, she always retained the ‘‘ineradicable habits left by an old-fashioned and somewhat severe education, with its good manners, its fastidious taste . . . its power of self control.’’ Yet he also recognized that she was ‘‘always in spirit . . . against orthodoxy.’’∞∫ In- deed, Harrison adopted the role of the rebel early in life; according to her friend Hope Mirrlees, ‘‘Jane grew up with a hostile attitude towards the powers that be.’’∞Ω The friction between Harrison and her stepmother came to a head in 1867 when the young girl’s ﬂirtation with High Church ritualism and other forbidden religious tendencies grew into a real-life ﬂirtation with a recently installed curate and she was ‘‘despatched in dire disgrace’’ to Cheltenham Ladies Col- lege.≤≠ Fortunately for Harrison, the college was at that time one of the few academically serious schools for English girls. There, despite the spotty and defective education that she had received at home, Harrison soon distinguished herself academically to such an extent that Cheltenham’s famous headmistress Dorothea Beale regarded her as the intellectual ornament of the school. For a time, Harrison seems to have accepted Beale as her mentor, expressing special interest in the headmistress’s Scripture lessons, which opened up ‘‘a new exciting vision of Christianity full of ‘intellectual possibilities.’’’ A schoolfellow remembered that during her time at Cheltenham, Har- rison’s ‘‘interest in religion was predominant.’’ Fragments of her youthful poetry tell the same story; one example describes the spiritual odyssey of a young woman, concluding that her life was ‘‘one long God-ward emotion.’’≤∞ Though the diction is overblown, the substance would have struck many of Harrison’s friends as an apt self-description. By the end of her time at Chelten- ham, however, her rebellious side had begun to assert itself. In growing disgust at the atmosphere of ‘‘fatuous prudery’’ which reigned at the school, Harrison deliberately and, according to Mirrlees, ‘‘rather brutally’’ destroyed her relationship with Beale. Once again, Harrison’s penchant for theological controversy also played a critical role. At some point after leaving Cheltenham in 1870, Harrison read Strauss’s Life of Jesus and began to have ‘‘religious doubts,’’ news of which reached Miss Beale, who wrote to Jane, attempting to bring her back to a more orthodox position. To no avail. Nevertheless, her experience at Cheltenham had determined her choice of 220 | Jane Ellen Harrison

career. A few years after leaving Cheltenham, Harrison decided to take the Cambridge University (known as the Higher Local) examination, scoring well enough to win a scholarship from Newnham, where she enrolled in 1874, three years after the founding of the college, and finished her studies in 1879. The next year she moved to Oxford to teach Latin at the girl’s high school there, but finding the work unsatisfying, she moved to London later in the year to study Greek art and archaeology with Sir Charles Newton at the British Museum. Soon she began to lecture and lead tours at the museum, and within two years she had produced her first book, Myths of the Odyssey in Art and Literature. She remained in London for eighteen years in all, supporting herself by giving public lectures. Harrison’s way of life at this time reflects her early rebellion against Vic- torian restrictions on women. She shared flats with other professional women, maintained a very active social life with both men and women friends, and traveled extensively in England and on the Continent, where she pursued her studies in archeology and antiquities. As her biographer, Sandra Peacock, points out, Harrison’s existence during these years ‘‘presents an interestingly modern picture.’’≤≤ Still, she longed for the financial security and professional recognition that an academic post would bring; twice, first in 1888, and again in 1896, she applied, unsuccessfully, to hold the Yates Professorship in Archaeology at University College, London. Finally, in 1898 she returned to Cambridge as holder of Newnham’s first research fellowship; the college served as her base for the most of the rest of her life. Given the realities of the Victorian feminine ideal, any woman who chose to become a professional scholar had to have a very thick skin or be able to derive some emotional satisfaction from defying convention. Harrison enjoyed thumbing her nose at authority, and that side of her personality certainly was expressed in her choice of career. Yet clearly her motivation went deeper. Harrison’s commitment to the scholar’s life sprang partly from psychological needs and anxieties of which she herself was well aware. In 1902 she confessed to Gilbert Murray, ‘‘everything is a danger to me that cannot be instantly translated into hard thinking.’’≤≥ On the surface an enigmatic statement, this claim resonates throughout Harrison’s life and work. By 1902, she had long ceased to regard herself as a Christian or even a theist, nor did she attempt to hide her opinions. Yet in the same letter quoted above, she goes on to say, ‘‘Mr. Verral [a close friend and fellow Cambridge classicist] always says, and he is right, that I am by nature rotten with superstition and mysticism.’’≤∂ On another occasion, she referred to herself as a Jane Ellen Harrison | 221

‘‘mystic by birth.’’ Some of her students were surprised to discover that she was not the ‘‘old rationalist’’ they had expected to ﬁnd her, and she once conﬁded to a friend that she could not feel really close to a person who had ‘‘no religion.’’≤∑ Harrison’s relationship with her stepmother may well have played a role in shaping this aspect of her personality. There is no question that her conscious feelings toward her stepmother were mainly anger and dislike—her few recorded references to her are far from affectionate in tone. She remembered her primarily as a woman capable of bitter harangues and unreasoning prejudice. When Harrison asserts that ‘‘a religious woman without knowledge is like a lunatic armed with an explosive,’’≤∏ the reference could easily have applied to her stepmother. Yet while far from fond of her stepmother, Harrison seems to have resembled her in some respects. To be sure, she rebelled against and rejected her early religious training, renouncing her Low Church upbringing in favor of the High Church and then agnosticism. But this religious indifference did not last. At a certain point, Harrison came to recognize herself as possessing a ‘‘deeply . . . almost insanely’’ religious ‘‘temperament.’’≤π Her use of the latter adjective is revealing. She was throughout her adulthood given to uncanny, mystical, and visionary experiences. On one occasion, her friend Francis Cornford found her ‘‘lying exhausted in a long chair, looking out at the sea. She told me she had become totally blind for, perhaps, an hour, and she was wrought up by a visionary experience which she described.’’≤∫ Perhaps the most important and certainly the most dramatic of these experiences occurred in 1912, when Harrison was still nursing the emotional wounds caused by the marriage of Cornford to Frances Darwin. As she described it to Gilbert Murray:

Last night I was awake all night with misery and utter loneliness . . . and I was full of hate against Frances, unjustly of course, as the cause of my loneliness. I fell asleep at last and woke . . . in a most amazing bliss and feeling that all the world was new and in perfect peace. I can’t describe it—the ‘‘New Birth’’ is the best . . . it is what they mean by communion with God. . . . All the hate against Frances was gone. . . . What I feel most is a . . . whole crust of egotism gone, melted away, and that I have got hold of something bigger than me that I am part of.≤Ω

It seems wrong to dismiss these experiences, as Cornford was tempted to do, as simply ‘‘neurotic symptoms.’’ She herself described the vision of 1912 as a ‘‘conversion’’ and explained to Murray, ‘‘I think I know now at ﬁrst hand’’ that 222 | Jane Ellen Harrison

there is ‘‘more in religion than the collective conscience.’’≥≠ As she matured, Harrison seems to have recognized the importance for her own identity of accepting the mystical and religious side of her personality, afﬁrming the value of religious emotion without descending into the obscurantism which she associated with her stepmother. The challenge was to be a ‘‘religious woman’’ with knowledge and with a vigilant rational intellect. Harrison was a feminist, though not a political activist. But like many feminists then and now, she accepted the notion that there were fundamental and possibly permanent psychological differences between men and women. Certainly she valued her male friends partly because they offered intellectual traits which complemented her own:

I never looked to a man to supply me with new ideas. . . . Your thoughts are—for what they are worth—self-begotten. . . . But there comes often . . . a moment when alone I cannot bring them to birth, when, if companionship is denied, they die unborn. . . . The moment, so far as I can formulate the need, is when you want to disentangle them from yourself and your emotions. . . . Then you want the mind of a man with its great power of insulation. To talk a thing over with a competent man friend is to me like coming out a seething cauldron of suggestion into a spacious well-ordered room.≥∞

Men were more individualistic in their thinking, more inclined to abstraction, she claimed, while women could be described as ‘‘resonant,’’ more in touch with and responsive to the needs and pressures of other minds, other sets of feelings. Above all, Harrison claimed that women and men differed in their religious sensibilities, and her description makes it clear which version of religion she regarded as more authentic and valuable: ‘‘What has the intellect and individualism of man made of God—that God who ‘is not far from any one of us,’ in whom we live and move and have our being? It has made of Him—the Deity . . . Man, in a word, has made of religion, theology, an intellectual abstraction, divorced ever more and more from life.’’ On the other hand, Harrison claimed, ‘‘I have never met with a woman who was interested in theology.’’≥≤ Much of her career was devoted to identifying the special religious concerns and insights of women, unearthing their expression in the ancient world and tracing the processes by which they were overshadowed by the imperative demands of patriarchal society. Harrison’s notions about friendship and other relationships also throw light on her attempt to redeﬁne religion. Harrison was a woman to whom Jane Ellen Harrison | 223

relationships mattered deeply—she seems to have been incapable of work or any satisfying activity unless buoyed by the companionship of someone, usually more than one person, to whom she felt deeply attached. Her closest friends were often collaborators in work as well. In addition to her well-known partnerships with Francis Cornford and Gilbert Murray, her collaborative relationships with Margaret Verrall, D. S. MacColl, and Hope Mirrlees deserve mention. She was more or less equally drawn to friendships with men and women. Nor were these relationships purely business entailing no emotional involvement. Her jealousy of Frances Darwin Cornford has already been mentioned, and her friendship with Hope Mirrlees, the most important relationship in the final years of her life, was one of profound emotional attachment and even dependence on both sides.≥≥ At the same time, she was distrustful, at times disdainful of conventional Victorian and Edwardian families, and her writings are freely sprinkled with acid asides on the faults and follies of bourgeois patriarchy. ‘‘The arrangements of the ordinary middle class home,’’ she found ‘‘deeply depressing.’’ ‘‘Family life has never attracted me,’’ she confessed. ‘‘At its best it seems to me rather narrow and selfish; at its worst, a private hell.’’≥∂ According to Mirrlees, Harrison had decided quite early in life never to marry. In fact, she may have become engaged soon after her return to Newnham to a fellow classicist, R. A. Neil, but unfortunately he died in 1901.≥∑ Even so, it is difficult to imagine her partaking of anything resembling the conventional family life of her day, and she often spoke of her own preference for the life of the small, close-knit community. Despite her occasional impatience with Cambridge and her anger at the second-class treatment accorded women scholars there, college life ultimately suited her. As she explained in her Reminiscences: ‘‘If I had been rich I should have founded a learned community for women . . . as it is, I am content to have lived many years of my life in a college. I think, as civilization advances, family life will become, if not extinct, at least much modified and curtailed.’’≥∏ Harrison’s circle of friends extended to the world of animals, both real and imaginary. She once eulogized a friend’s dog in a tone only partly facetious as ‘‘the only Christian I have ever met.’’≥π Animals haunted her imagination; she often gave her friends animal names, and she kept a stuffed bear about which she wove an elaborate private mythology.≥∫ Harrison’s animal obsessions may seem sentimental, precious, or simply silly traits that sit oddly with other aspects of her character. In reality, she never outgrew a strong sense of kinship with the natural, and especially the animal, world. What is more, this turn of 224 | Jane Ellen Harrison

mind and personality played an essential role in her work. One of her most persistent criticisms of Christianity was that it was too focused on the human world and not sufficiently alive to the significance of the whole of nature: ‘‘Christianity, though not ego-centric, is certainly anthropocentric; our religion, and I think our ethics, have suffered through over focus on the human will.’’≥Ω ‘‘Our god . . . [has] through sheer humanity become profoundly non- religious.’’∂≠ In her view, Christianity had impoverished Western religious sensibilities by rejecting the primitive ‘‘totemistic’’ reverence for plants and animals.∂∞ This points finally to an overarching theme in Harrison’s life and work— her radicalism was in many respects the product of very conservative impulses. Harrison liked to regard herself as intellectually daring, on the cutting edge; her friends were sometimes amused by the ‘‘eager welcome’’ which she would predictably extend to the new theories of the ‘‘latest’’ philosopher or psychologist.∂≤ Yet she once described herself as a real-life version of George Eliot’s Aunt Glegg: ‘‘I wear before the world a mask of bland cosmopolitan courtesy and culture; I am advanced in my views, eager to be in touch with all modern movements, but beneath all that lies Aunt Glegg, rigidly, irrationally conservative, fibrous with prejudice, deep-rooted in her native soil.’’∂≥ This self-description was little if at all a facetious one. The need to value tradition and to reverence human connections is a recurring theme in Harrison’s writings. ‘‘A thing has little charm for me unless it has on it the patina of age,’’ she wrote.∂∂ It may be that for Jane Harrison as for many other Victorian and Edwardian thinkers, religion came to be a symbol of the traditions, the old things that needed to be preserved. Yet she could not rest content with the Christian Church and its traditions. Although Harrison sometimes attended church and was sometimes moved by its rituals, she did not identify herself as a Christian, and her characteristic attitude toward the Church was one of criticism. She once refused to participate in the baptism of a friend’s child, explaining, ‘‘alas, while magic still darkens men’s hearts . . . I daren’t say ‘sanctify this water to the mystical washing away of sin’ or even be there when it is said.’’∂∑ For the intellectual in her, the only way to save religion was to radically redefine it. Her project, then, was to identify the elements of true religion, to reconceptualize religion for the modern world so that it could be saved from the shipwreck of Victorian Christianity. To accomplish this, she sought to unearth aspects of ancient religion which modern civilization, and the Christian churches in particular, had smothered or tried to obscure. Jane Ellen Harrison | 225

Conversion and Deconversion In the first decade of her scholarly career, Harrison focused primarily on Greek art rather than religion. On this subject, as she later acknowledged, her views were derivative and her judgments conventional. What is more, Har- rison’s tastes at this period contrast sharply with the preferences exemplified in her later work; her praise for the ‘‘ideality’’ of Greek art, for example, was something she would later vigorously renounce. Nevertheless, even in her early works there are clear signs of what was to come. Right from the first Harrison showed an interest in the contribution that modern anthropology could make to the study of classics; her first book, Myths of the Odyssey (1882), uses knowledge of ‘‘savage’’ folklore to throw light on her subject, and the list of authorities contains a citation for Tylor’s Primitive Culture. Her second book, Introductory Studies in Greek Art (1885), contains even more evidence of her burgeoning interest in religion, albeit the opinions she expressed at this time are the exact opposite of those she would later hold. In particular, this book is steeped in the conventional ‘‘Protestant’’ view of ritual; for example, where Harrison chides the Assyrians for their ‘‘addict[ion] to . . . elaborate and significant gesture and posture, . . . to mechanical formularies rather than vital expression.’’∂∏ She also praises the harmonious and beautiful representations of Greek art in contrast to the ‘‘grotesque’’ and ‘‘monstrous’’ images that arose from Egyptian religion, although in later years her favorite images were often the more bizarre and rough ones. This contrast even led her to postulate that the aesthetic superiority of Greece was perhaps tied up with the super- ficiality, as she thought at that time, of Greek religion: ‘‘It was to a certain extent the limitation of the Greek spirit, its frank rejection of such imaginations as were vague and shapeless that led to the perfection of his art . . . but perhaps at some loss as regards the mystical side of religion.’’∂π In later work, Harrison would drastically revise this judgment, arguing that Greek religion and Greek art contained depths not imagined by most Victorian classicists. Thus Harrison’s interest in Greek art was from the first mixed with an interest in mythology and religion.∂∫ But a personal crisis in 1887 intervened to push her toward a more conscious focus on the study of mythology. As so often in Harrison’s life, the crisis arose from a combination of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual issues. In 1886, she met the art historian and critic Dugald Sutherland MacColl, and the two soon became close friends. But within a few months of their meeting, MacColl, who had attended at least one of her public lectures, wrote a letter criticizing her style and methods. Al- 226 | Jane Ellen Harrison

though Harrison immediately destroyed the letter, her later references to the incident make it clear that MacColl had reproached her for an overly sensa- tionalistic presentation of her material and for ‘‘dishonoring’’ her subject by ‘‘forcing upon it meretricious effects.’’∂Ω Although his disapproval must have been genuine, it is doubtful whether he expected his criticism to produce the effect that it did. In fact, Harrison seems to have suffered an emotional collapse. In a first reaction of mingled humiliation and rage, Harrison tore up the offending letter, so that it is no longer possible to identify the exact nature of MacColl’s strictures. But far from defending herself against his criticism, Harrison went into a paroxysm of self-blame: ‘‘I knew from the first that my rage against you was caused by the simple fact that you were right and I was wrong. . . . The worst is that all the success I have had has been based on wrongness.’’∑≠ She resolved at that point to discontinue her lectures, even though they were her main source of financial support and had brought her recognition as an authority. In fact, she did not give up lecturing, but over the next few months she continued to refer to the incident, and her letters convey the impression of a slow emotional convalescence. This incident was well known to Harrison’s friends and later biographers as a crucial turning point in her career, and it has even been referred to as a ‘‘conversion’’ experience, but opinions differ as to its precise significance.∑∞ According to Jessie Stewart, MacColl’s criticism was responsible for Harri- son’s turn to ‘‘solid research work.’’∑≤ MacColl himself claimed to have pointed her toward folklore and mythology, while according to Mirrlees, it was Mac- Coll who introduced Harrison to Mannhardt and made her a mythologist.∑≥ Sandra Peacock interprets this episode as an intellectual revulsion against aestheticism undergirded by a crisis of romantic/sexual identity.∑∂ Robert Ackerman claims that it prompted Harrison’s repudiation of the classical in favor of an interest in archaic or ‘‘primitive’’ Greek culture.∑∑ No doubt there is much truth in all these explanations, although there was much that did not change—in fact, Harrison was already interested in folklore and had certainly read Tylor if not Mannhardt.∑∏ Her earliest work (Myths of the Odyssey) contains more than a few hints of that affection for the primitive that was so marked in her later works, and while she may have adopted a somewhat less flamboyant style in her public lectures, her teaching at Newnham continued to exhibit a flair for the dramatic.∑π Perhaps the experience should be seen as a religious conversion (whatever else it might have been), not just figuratively but in a very real and straight- forward sense. In fact, Harrison’s own words call attention to the religious content of this experience, as in this frankly confessional passage: Jane Ellen Harrison | 227

I had grown into a sort of Salvationist for Greek art—probably a sort of educated decency withheld me from the constant obtrusion of my gospel or someone would before now have told me . . . that I was a fool, but none the less the faith in my gospel was the secret of my strength. . . . It will seem to you . . . absurd that the shattering of a theory should depress . . . & indeed it is not the shattering of any particular theory but the giving up of the habit of mind that demands a creed. I know by experience that one gets on much better in practice without a religious creed than with one, but it was none the less desolate at ﬁrst to live without God in the world—art has to me taken and more taken the place of religion & my work for it was I see only another form of an old & I thought long dead personal fanaticism.∑∫

Indeed, it might be more accurate to speak here of a deconversion experience. MacColl’s criticism of her lecturing style apparently forced Harrison to confront the deep motivations of her work and to recognize that aestheticism could not satisfy her as a surrogate for religion. And despite her claim that ‘‘one gets on better without a creed,’’ she was unable to be satisfied with a pure agnosticism. Like many of her contemporaries, she arrived at the study of religion as part of a personal search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment. As Gilbert Murray observed, ‘‘She is always looking for the new gospel, and triumphantly finding at least little fragments of it.’’∑Ω

Redefining Religion As Harrison began to focus more attention on the study of ancient religion, she entered more deeply into an already established anthropological tradition, but her relations with that tradition were always ambiguous and at times conflicted. To be sure, Harrison was in many ways a clear debtor to Tylor’s vision of anthropology. She fully accepted the importance of studying origins as a way to explain the meaning of any cultural phenomenon: ‘‘[T]he only light I, personally, can ever get on anything is by tracing it back to its first known beginnings.’’∏≠ She was clearly in many respects a Rationalist; unlike Lang, for example, she expressed no interest in psychic phenomena, which she regarded as nothing but illusion. Nevertheless, Harrison distinguished her own position from that of the ‘‘Old Rats’’ (Rationalists), as she called them, and in many ways her work turned the Victorian science of religion on its head. The difference comes through most sharply in her disposition toward the primitive.∏∞ Friends testified to her ‘‘affection for the old-fashioned’’ and her ‘‘love of the primitive.’’∏≤ 228 | Jane Ellen Harrison

According to Gilbert Murray: ‘‘[S]he did not really like the ‘beastly devices of the heathen,’ but she loved to work among them and understand them and eventually to discover the spiritual beauty latent beneath their uncouth help- lessness.’’∏≥ Her tone contains little trace of Frazer’s mocking condescension or Tylor’s grave assurance of superiority, as in her well-known description of the evolution away from primitive totemism: ‘‘It is in many ways pure loss. The totemistic attitude towards animals may, as based on ignorance, beget superstition, but it is full of beautiful courtesies. There are few things uglier than a lack of reverence for animals. . . . In art this exclusion of animal and plant life from the cycle of the divine is sometimes claimed as a gain. Rather it leaves a sense of chill and loneliness.’’∏∂ She delighted in celebrating those aspects of ancient religion—such as the intoxication and loss of control associated with Dionysus—which her contemporaries were likely to find most repugnant. Similarly, she baffled and irritated her fellow classicists by her bitter attacks on the Olympians and, by extension, the calm rational harmony associated in many Victorian minds with the classical model. Harrison clearly took pleasure in flouting contemporary tastes and standards of judgment: ‘‘My friends . . . tax me with some lack of reverence for the Olympian gods . . . my heart, it would seem, is not in the right place.’’∏∑ These preferences were not merely capricious; though Harrison sometimes seemed to glory in her own irreverence, her love of the primitive and of the ecstatic are connected in a serious way with her most substantial contributions to the study of religion. The similarities between Harrison’s work and that of William Robertson Smith are striking; she extended many of his ideas and rendered explicit some of what was implied in his theory. Still, she did not share his religious convictions or motivation, and though they began with similar principles, her final conclusions were dramatically different from his. It is not even clear that she owed him a direct debt for her commitment to ritualism. Robert Alan Acker- man has argued persuasively that Harrison arrived at the Ritualist position on her own, citing her statement in Mythology and Monuments (1890): ‘‘My belief is that in many, even in the large majority of cases, ritual practice misunderstood explains the elaboration of myth.’’∏∏ It is not clear when Harrison first read Robertson Smith, although she was assigning Lectures on the Religion of the Semites to her students by 1900, if not earlier. In any case, as Ackerman points out, Harrison seems to have been most influenced by her archaeological studies in Greece in 1888–89. What is more, even as a child growing up in a staunchly Low Church household, Harrison was fascinated with ritual or, as she later put it, the ‘‘apparatus’’ of religion.∏π Even if this early ‘‘ritualism’’ was Jane Ellen Harrison | 229

adopted in part to annoy her stepmother, there seems little doubt that Har- rison’s interest was not purely intellectual—her descriptions of ceremonies are often lovingly detailed, enlivened at times by the sense of thrill she felt at moments when the drama and mystery of a ritual touched her closely. More importantly, Harrison disagreed with Robertson Smith on the fundamental significance of primitive rituals. For Robertson Smith, the rite which set the pattern for all others was the act of communion between a god and his people in which the community is bound together through the sharing of food. Harrison, however, did not regard any single type of ritual as the starting point for all others, focusing in turn on processions, initiation rites, sacrifices, and rites of purification. In Prolegomena, she first indicated her dissatisfaction with the idea of mystical communion between god and worshippers as the primary ritual act. Later, in Themis, she challenged Robertson Smith more explicitly: ‘‘Robertson Smith, great genius though he was, could not rid himself wholly of animism and anthropomorphism. To him primitive sacrifice was a commensal meal . . . by . . . [which] the common life of god and group was alike renewed. . . . He could not quite see that in sacrifice the factors were only two, the eater and the eaten, the ‘worshipper’ . . . and the sacred animal consumed. . . . There is no third factor, no god mysteriously present at the banquet and conferring his sanctity on the sacred animal.’’∏∫ Instead, she argued, the idea of the god arises from the sacrifice itself. As this passage indicates, Harrison’s dispute with Robertson Smith amounted to more than a scholarly disagreement over details; it went to the core of her definition of religion: ‘‘Necessarily at the time when Robertson Smith wrote he conceived of a god as something existing independently of the community. . . . The error arose partly from . . . the mistake of starting with a general term religion of which the enquirers had a preconceived idea, and then trying to fit into it any facts that came to hand.’’∏Ω For Harrison, theism was a late and far from essential development in religion, a product of the mythologizing and concretizing tendencies of the human mind. As early as 1900, she had argued that even the pre-Olympian divinities (such as the earth goddess Ge) were relatively late developments in primitive Greece.π≠ Later, in Prolegomena and again in Themis, she theorized that rituals themselves give rise to gods as worshippers seek to personify the ‘‘sanctities’’ which are the real objects of their actions:

It has of late been frequently pointed out that the god in some sense always ‘‘re- ﬂects’’ the worshipper, takes on the colour of his habits and his thoughts. . . . The social structure is also, it is allowed, in some sense reﬂected in the god: a ma- 230 | Jane Ellen Harrison

triarchal society will worship the Mother and a Son, a patriarchal society will tend to have a cult of the Father. All this is true, but the truth lies much deeper. Not only does the god reﬂect the thoughts, social conditions, morality and the like, but in its origin his substance when analysed turns out to be just nothing but the representation, the utterance, the emphasis of these imaginations, these emotions, arising out of particular social conditions.π∞

A crucial part of Harrison’s definition of religion is her insistence that religion is social, not individual, in origin. It is collective worship of the powers and realities that shape, support, and control human life—not the result of individual speculation, wonder, or awe. Hence the fundamental expression of religion is ritual, which is of the group, and not theology, which is of the individual. Furthermore, ritual itself begins not as an attempt to symbolize anything but as an action intended to influence other beings or objects; Harrison agreed with Frazer that many religious rituals originated in magic, but she rejected his attempt to draw a sharp distinction between the two. She differed from him further in her belief that primitive rituals, though practical, were not simply deluded attempts to control the natural world. In her definition, ‘‘A rite is . . . a sort of stereotyped action, not really practical, but yet not wholly cut loose from practice, a reminiscence or an anticipation of actual practical doing.’’π≤ Ritual celebrated and spiritualized human needs, natural and social, food and fertility among them. Unlike Frazer, however, Harrison defined ‘‘practical’’ in ways that went far beyond the basic material requirements of human life. According to Harrison, the most important rituals have psychosocial purposes; they cement the group, integrate the human with the nonhuman, and even bind together the individual human personality, the conscious and the unconscious.π≥ In Prolegomena, Harrison claimed that the most powerful rituals are sacraments which celebrate and help to maintain the connections between humans and the rest of nature.π∂ She also concentrated attention on rituals of purification, those designed to expel disease, impurity, or evil. Later, in Themis, Harrison no longer highlighted purification rituals, but her new focus of attention—initiation—is a logical next step; these rituals, designed to bind together the group, require the expulsion of the evil or impure. Her description of the purposes of initiation is, in fact, an excellent illustration of Harrison’s views on the purposes of ritual generally: ‘‘At and through his initiation the boy is brought into close communion with his tribal ancestors: he becomes socialized, part of the body politic. Henceforth he belongs to something bigger, more potent, more lasting, than his own individ- Jane Ellen Harrison | 231

ual existence: he is part of the stream of the totemic life, one with the generations before and yet to come.’’π∑ Harrison championed the Ritualist position at an important moment in the history of the science of religion, but it was her interest in matriarchal religion and her insistence on its importance that most distinctly set her apart from other British scholars. Predictably, this is also an aspect of her work that has been of particular interest to recent commentators. As early as 1900, she made note of the evidence of an older stratum of religion—the worship of earth goddesses—lying beneath Olympianism and supplanted by it.π∏ Her first extended discussion of this old religion did not appear until 1903 in Prole- gomena, in which she described how the Olympian pantheon had challenged and replaced the older earth goddesses who had once been supreme, not the subordinate figures that they later became. When Greek matriarchy was over- thrown by a patriarchal kinship system, the goddesses were reimagined as rebellious but ultimately subordinate wives (Hera) or as dutiful daughters of the Father (Athena).ππ It was on this subject, above all, that Harrison gave full rein to her tendencies toward passionately partisan scholarship.π∫ Baffling and irritating her (male) critics, Harrison lauded the primitive matriarchal worship and excori- ated the triumphant Olympians with an intensity that surprises even now. In her interpretation of the Pandora myth, for example, Harrison observes: ‘‘Zeus the Father will have no great Earth-goddess . . . in his man fashioned Olympus, but her figure is from the beginning, so he re-makes it; woman, who was the inspirer, becomes the temptress; she who made all things, gods and mortals alike, is become their plaything, their slave . . . and with a slave’s tricks and blandishments. To Zeus, the archpatriarchal bourgeois, the birth of the first woman is but a huge Olympian jest.’’πΩ Not surprisingly, her views as well as her way of expressing them attracted hostile criticism from antifeminist contemporaries. Lewis Farnell, for example, complained that Harrison’s theory was inspired by partisan ‘‘passion,’’ and that ‘‘in reading her pages one misses the quiet, unprejudiced temper of science.’’∫≠ On the other hand, her advocacy of matriarchal religion has attracted much positive interest from modern feminist scholars.∫∞ While Harrison was certainly sympathetic to the primitive goddess worship that she had discovered in her sources, however, and though she would not apologize for her ‘‘matriarchal soul,’’ her theories about women’s role in religious history are not simply an ideologically inspired inversion of the accepted patriarchal narrative. In the first place, she often used the word ‘‘matriarchal’’ as a synonym for ‘‘matrilinear,’’ and her 232 | Jane Ellen Harrison

meaning is not always clear from the context. Furthermore, she was well aware, at least at times, that the matriarchal society of the primitive Greeks and their neighbors was hardly a prelapsarian feminist paradise and that a woman-centered religion could flourish in a society where the actual social status and power of women were very restricted.∫≤ She acknowledged that in the ‘‘primitive stage of society,’’ the ‘‘main . . . function of woman was mother- hood and the more civilized, less elemental, function of wedded wife was scarcely adventured.’’∫≥ Finally, according to her, the end of ‘‘matriarchy’’ was not an unmixed tragedy: ‘‘[T]he shift from matriarchy to patriarchy, . . . spite of a seeming retrogression, is a necessary stage in a real advance. Matriarchy gave to women a false because a magical prestige.’’∫∂ Harrison was a bold, self-consciously feminist scholar, but her emphasis on the importance of matriarchal religion was not motivated by illusions about a primitive situation that could be recovered, but rather by a conviction that any woman-centered religion was true and whole in way that the patriarchal religions of ancient Greece and modern Europe could never be. Like many of her feminist contemporaries, Harrison subscribed, if only implicitly, to a view that certain gender differences were durably imprinted on human reality, and perhaps ineradicable.∫∑ Noting the age-old associations of women with agriculture, nutrition, fertility, and cyclicity, she identified the ancient goddesses as symbols of ‘‘the mystery and the godhead of things natural.’’∫∏ This archaic matriarchal worship was an affair of real ‘‘flesh and blood’’ beings, ‘‘gods who had only half emerged from the natural things they are,’’ and in poignant contrast to the ‘‘splendid phantoms’’ of the Olympian Pantheon.∫π Zeus and his children triumphed over the old earth goddesses, but for Harrison it was an almost meaningless victory: ‘‘How thin and chill for all their painted splen- dour, are these gods who live at ease in the upper air, how much they lose when they shake off mortality and their feet leave the earth who was their mother.’’∫∫ It is tempting, but mistaken, to isolate Harrison’s attention to matriarchal cults from the larger effort to redefine religion within her culture. Beyond her championship of controversial and novel theories about ancient Greece, Har- rison, like other figures in this study, sought to promote a new understanding of religion among her readers and audiences. Like many thoughtful Vic- torians, she embraced science and materialism, while claiming that science alone was not enough: ‘‘By neither individual sense-perception nor ratiocination alone do we live.’’ Scientific individualism alone leaves a ‘‘strange chill.’’∫Ω Moreover, the demotion of humanity implicit in the Darwinian schema left her anxious to include humanity as part of the whole worthy of worship.Ω≠ Jane Ellen Harrison | 233

As Gilbert Murray perceived, she studied Greek myths and rituals, ‘‘not . . . to analyse these worships exactly, but to wrest from them a kind of real religion for mankind.’’Ω∞ It was in searching for the distinctive spiritual sensibilities of women that Harrison believed she had found the elements of a wider, more inclusive, and truer definition of religion. Her aim, then, was to redefine religious action to include elements such as mysticism, ecstasy, and celebration of the natural world, which had been ignored by Christianity, at least in its nineteenth-century Protestant form. At the same time, she directed attention away from theism and theology, elements that for many of her contemporaries were still synonymous with religion itself.Ω≤ She found motivation and inspiration for this project in studying the works of Émile Durkheim, William James, and Henri Bergson. Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907), in particular, influenced her strongly. In Bergson she found a thinker who combined respect for science and commitment to evolutionism with a penetrating critique of nineteenth-century materialism and the worship of science. His philosophy emphasized dynamism, intuition, creativity, and the experiential rather than the analytical—all qualities that appealed strongly to Harrison. Bergson wished to defend the authenticity of freedom and creativity against the idea of humanity caught in the iron fixities and necessities of natural ‘‘law.’’ The key to this defense was the concept of durée, which might be understood as time experienced in consciousness, rather than time marked out on the face of the clock, or time ‘‘spatialized,’’ as Bergson says. ‘‘The more we study the nature of time,’’ he claimed, ‘‘the more we shall comprehend that duration means invention, the creation of forms, the continual elaboration of the absolutely new.’’Ω≥ Modern science, on the other hand, in order to perform its proper function, must deny the special reality of time and foster the illusion that things are predictable: ‘‘Science can work only on what is supposed to repeat itself—that is to say, on what is withdrawn, by hypothesis, from the action of real time.’’Ω∂ In this, it serves the human need to act upon and control the material world. But this science cannot legitimately claim to apprehend or represent to us the whole of reality. How then, Bergson asked, could it become a substitute for a philosophy (or religion?), which seeks to remind us of the nature of the vital whole of which we are a transitory part. ‘‘A beneficent fluid bathes us, whence we draw the very force to labour and to live. From this ocean of life, in which we are immersed, we are continually drawing something, and we feel that our being . . . has been formed therein be a kind of local concentration. Philosophy can only be an effort to dissolve again into the Whole.’’Ω∑ 234 | Jane Ellen Harrison

Bergson’s philosophy, as well as his poetic style, resonated deeply with Harrison’s own long-standing beliefs and values. While still a student at Chel- tenham, she had been struck by the revelation (in chemistry class) that things ‘‘are not what they seem; you picture hidden terrific forces, you can even imagine that the whole solid earth is only such forces held in momentous balance.’’Ω∏ This notion of fundamental reality, life itself, as ‘‘terrific forces held in momentous balance’’ is at the center of Harrison’s religious aesthetic. These insights were sharpened by her encounter with the holistic and dynamic qualities of Bergson’s thought. The concept of durée, which she understood as ‘‘that life which is one, indivisible, and yet ceaselessly changing,’’ was especially instrumental for her.Ωπ It is no accident that the aspects of religion to which Harrison was most attracted—rituals, especially ceremonial drama and dance—are precisely the most dynamic, rhythmic, fluid expressions of a collective spirituality. Like Bergson, Harrison was temperamentally opposed to the static, the closed, the unchanging. Harrison’s attachment to the notion of durée sheds light on her contention that theism is alien to ‘‘true religion.’’ Describing herself as a ‘‘religious atheist,’’ Harrison argued that true religion and the desirable religion of the future must be atheistic. ‘‘If we are to keep our hold on religion, theology must go,’’ she proclaimed in 1913.Ω∫ To some extent, this was simply the logical conclusion of her theory. As we have already seen, Harrison regarded gods as a later development in religious history, and that alone made them suspect. For her, that which is oldest and most primitive is also that which lasts longest because it appeals to ‘‘something very deep-down and real . . . something in the secret bidding of nature.’’ΩΩ Theism, the product of ‘‘myth-making’’ and ‘‘anthropomorphism,’’ was the opposite of real ‘‘worship.’’∞≠≠ Theism is limiting and commits worshippers to intellectual absurdities—it leads to theology, which in Harrison’s view is absurd tout court: ‘‘The idea of theology—i.e., a science of the unknowable—is, if not dead, at least . . . dying. God and reason are contradictory terms.’’∞≠∞ Beyond that, however, Harrison viewed all gods (even her beloved earth goddesses) as static and therefore lifeless by definition. She could not see the Olympian gods as genuinely religious figures because unlike the multitude of year spirits who preceded them, they renounce ‘‘all life and that which is life and reality—Change and Movement. . . . Instead [the god] chooses Deathless- ness and Immutability—a seeming Immortality which is really the denial of life.’’∞≠≤ In this as in a number of passages, Harrison gives the impression that she refers not only to the Olympians but to the Immortal Father of Chris- Jane Ellen Harrison | 235

tianity. That God, ‘‘the same yesterday, to-day, and forever,’’ was a god who appealed neither to her intellect nor to her emotions. What’s more, she claimed, His image was a stumbling block to the acceptance of religions for many of her contemporaries.∞≠≥ What, then, if not a god, was the proper object of religious devotion? In Prolegomena, Harrison had spoken of the ‘‘the ties that link [us] with animals and plants’’ and of the ‘‘life that is in beasts and streams and woods as well as in man.’’∞≠∂ No humanly created god was worthy of worship, but there was a ‘‘real mystery of the universe, the force behind things, before which we all bow.’’∞≠∑ Religion could be distinguished from morality in that ‘‘morality is social . . . it is human. But religion is our reaction to the whole, the unbounded whole.’’∞≠∏ She also emphasized these points in Themis, insisting that the purpose of ritual is ‘‘is the keeping open of the individual soul—that bit of the general life which life itself has fenced in by a separate organism—to other souls, other separate lives, and . . . other forms of life.’’∞≠π More concisely, ‘‘sacraments are for union.’’∞≠∫ True religion, then, is reverence for the oneness of all life in nature, the human joined with the nonhuman; it is a ‘‘grasping by faith after the unity of things.’’∞≠Ω

Harrison and Her Critics Assessments of Harrison’s career tend to focus on the harsh treatment she received at the hands of critics; snubbed as a woman academic and condemned as irresponsibly radical, she emerges in some accounts as a margin- alized ﬁgure in late-Victorian intellectual life. According to Sandra Peacock, ‘‘as a woman scholar and . . . [an] enthusiastic explorer of the dangerous, chaotic archaic age, Harrison served as a target for many traditionally minded male scholars who resented her treatment of the past . . . and her thinly disguised attack on Victorian society.’’∞∞≠ Evidence for this interpretation can be found in the reviews penned by one of her most persistent detractors, Lewis Farnell, Oxford classicist and author of Cults of the Greek States. Farnell welcomed the use of anthropology to illuminate ancient history, and he paid tribute to Harrison’s ‘‘learning’’ and ‘‘brilliance.’’ But the overall tone of his reviews was witheringly negative. He attacked Harrison’s deﬁciencies as a philologist and accused her of dogmatism. He claimed that her work ‘‘lacks balance, proportion, self-criticism . . . and a saving sense of humor.’’∞∞∞ Issues of contemporary gender politics linger just below the surface of Farnell’s hostility. He was an outspoken opponent of equal treatment for women at the 236 | Jane Ellen Harrison

universities, and his reviews of Harrison’s work fairly seethe with animosity and bitterness. He found her ‘‘matriarchal prejudice’’—not only her remarks about matrilineal social organization, but also her theories on female divinities and the centrality of women in ancient cults—profoundly irritating. Detecting beneath such ideas an unhealthy obsession with the grievances of contemporary women, Farnell deplored the passion with which Harrison praised the ancient goddesses and scorned the Olympians who replaced and suppressed them, complaining that ‘‘Miss Harrison’s dogma concerning a ‘matriarchal’ religion . . . sometimes inspires such passion in her as usually ﬁnds vent at meetings on women’s rights.’’∞∞≤ What’s more, he detected another ‘‘prejudice’’ behind her attacks on the Olympians, ‘‘the prejudice against the personal individual God,’’ and declared that ‘‘her invective against the ‘Olympian’ will apply, and was perhaps intended to apply, equally to Jahwe and Allah.’’∞∞≥ But Farnell’s views and his harsh tone, though not unique, are not broadly representative of the contemporary critical reception of Harrison’s work. On the contrary, she was generally treated respectfully and frequently praised for her originality, brilliant powers of synthesis, and willingness to grapple with fundamental philosophical and theological questions. Her work was often characterized as pioneering, pathbreaking, brilliantly original. Reviewers of Prolegomena praised the book for its ‘‘ambition’’ and ‘‘prophetic vitality.’’∞∞∂ Her other major book, Themis, received in some cases even more enthusiastic praise. ‘‘Every page bears witness to . . . learning and acumen, and . . . it will not easily be superseded,’’ claimed W. Crooke, writing in Folk-Lore.∞∞∑ The anonymous reviewers for the Spectator and the Athenaeum describe it as ‘‘a great book . . . full of living interest,’’ and ‘‘not only learned, but also instinct with a soul.’’∞∞∏ Much of the critical reaction to Harrison’s work emphasized the contemporary relevance of her ideas. A reviewer of Ancient Art and Ritual, for example, observed that the book’s ‘‘most marked feature is its modernity,’’ while admitting that ‘‘some readers will think she is wrong in giving undue prominence to what is ephemeral in modern thought or art.’’∞∞π Harrison’s partiality for the ‘‘latest thing’’ in art and philosophy was much remarked upon and sometimes mocked,∞∞∫ but many critics seem to have recognized that the modernity of her thought went deeper than a ﬂair for reproducing the latest intellectual fads. Novel, ‘‘revolutionary,’’ ‘‘pioneering,’’ her books might be, but her scholarly sensibilities—her tenderness toward the primitive, disdain for rationalism, and embrace of a sociological approach to religion—were judged thoroughly in tune with the spirit of the times. Jane Ellen Harrison | 237

These themes surfaced early in the critical reactions to Prolegomena (1904), greeted by many as a milestone in the evolution of the relationship between classical scholarship and anthropology. The ‘‘world has grown millenniums older,’’ exclaimed one critic as he described how awareness of and even appreciation for the primitive element in Greek religion had become commonplace in recent years.∞∞Ω Harrison’s ‘‘sympathetic delight in savages’’ became even more noticeable in her later work, and even Farnell pronounced it ‘‘an excellent trait.’’∞≤≠ The New Statesman, reviewing Harrison’s collected essays (Alpha and Omega, 1915), observed that ‘‘every age has its peculiar way of thirsting after the waters of life; that in our age, and in the case of a learned and piercing mind, what slakes the thirst should be . . . primitive magic—this is undoubtedly a notable sign of the times.’’∞≤∞ These reactions indicate that Harrison’s belief in the ongoing relevance of the primitive, her claim that it corresponds to ‘‘something very deep down and real . . . something in the secret bidding of nature,’’∞≤≤ found at least a partial echo in the responses of her readers. An unexpected exception to this critical trend appears in the review of Prolegomena written by Harrison’s collaborator and close friend Gilbert Mur- ray. While acknowledging his own contributions to the book, Murray praised it for originality and for the ‘‘imaginative force’’ that gave it a distinctive style and tone.∞≤≥ Yet his summary of the book’s main themes differs markedly in spirit from Harrison. Where she delights in the chthonic, the archaic, and the grotesque, Murray is most impressed with evidence of progress and reﬁne- ment. Speaking of the religion of Dionysus, for example, he celebrates the process by which a ‘‘rite of drunken Thracians, involving, as usual, the most revolting cruelty, passes by stage after stage of perilous progress, shedding its failures as it goes, up into a high mysticism . . . nothing left of the primitive drunkenness but its spirit of ecstasy, nothing of the primitive savagery but a beautiful brotherhood with the wild beasts of the forest.’’∞≤∂ Harrison, in contrast, had argued that ‘‘there is a degree of even physical intoxication that is part of ‘the return to nature’ and is right and from the gods, and the Greeks understood it.’’∞≤∑ While she loved the unruly messiness and rawness of the primitive, liberal idealism and belief in progress were Murray’s guiding lights. His review of Prolegomena provides further evidence that as close as they may have been in some of their ideas, the intellectual sensibilities of these two scholars were dissimilar and even in some respects incompatible. With all his reservations, however, Murray found the ‘‘supreme merit’’ of Prolegomena in Harrison’s ‘‘strikingly successful effort . . . to enter into the emotion of each cult and each expression of worship.’’ In this way, she revealed how ‘‘in the earliest religious emotions, amid much degrading superstition, 238 | Jane Ellen Harrison

there may be present and vividly working the very highest aspirations that man can reach.’’∞≤∏ Other critics also found in Harrison’s work an affirmation of the emotions that gave rise to religion and continued at its core. According to the Spectator, the aim of the ‘‘student of religion’’ is to understand the ‘‘emotional realities’’ at the base of all worship: ‘‘Beneath all the Protean shapes in which they find outward expressions his aim is to penetrate to those deep human impulses and feelings in which they have their common and living source.’’∞≤π Andrew Lang, whose own work had much in common with Harrison’s, recognized that her version of ritualism heightened the importance of religious emotion, though he rejected the ‘‘nihilistic’’ implication of her theory: god or any spiritual being does not exist but is simply an external- ization of the emotions experienced in ritual—or collective ‘‘mana.’’∞≤∫ Some reviewers went further, identifying the links between Harrison’s emphasis on the emotional grounding of religious rituals and the modern sociological and psychological theories that so interested and influenced her. While opinions differed concerning the permanent value of the works of Bergson, Durkheim, or Freud, critics endorsed the result of Harrison’s encounter with their ideas.∞≤Ω Her central claims—that religion develops from shared emotions, especially those arising from the struggle for group survival in primitive conditions—found widespread agreement. One critic, for example, referred to Harrison’s reliance on ‘‘the now generally accepted view, that in analyzing culture we must begin with the social structure.’’∞≥≠ As notable as this general acceptance of a sociological theory of religious origins is the fact that several critics found such theories quite compatible with traditional religious beliefs. For example, R. de Bary, writing in the Church Quarterly Review, found what he called the ‘‘group theory of religious origins’’ very compatible with a defense of liberal Christianity: ‘‘[T]he laws of group- consciousness seem to indicate that we require a community or Church . . . as the ground of the preservation of human individual self-identity.’’∞≥∞ This misreading of Harrison is perhaps not surprising. After all, the consensus on the social origins of religion rested on the work of a host of thinkers with dramatically differing theological positions, among them Robertson Smith, Lang, and Frazer as well as Harrison herself. On the other hand, even friendly critics were sometimes troubled by the strongly subjective and impassioned approach that she took toward her subjects. Nowhere was this unease with Harrison’s subjectivity more evident than in critical response to her long-running vendetta against the Olympians. Many reviewers expressed their bafflement and exasperation with what they regarded as intemperate and ‘‘contemptuous’’ treatment of the Homeric gods Jane Ellen Harrison | 239

on whom she ‘‘lavishes unmitigated scorn.’’∞≥≤ Harrison’s invective against the Olympians and especially Zeus was calculated to offend on many grounds—it demanded a drastic revision of traditional judgments, and the feminist and antitheistic grounds of her complaints were barely if at all concealed. In any case, her depiction of the Olympian cults as lacking in true religion found little support even among her most enthusiastic admirers.∞≥≥ Similarly, much of her argument about matriarchy was rejected or treated with great skepticism. Farnell was certainly her fiercest critic, but others expressed similar disapproval with less heat. The Spectator, for example, observed: ‘‘[T]hat the ancestors of the people whom we call Greeks passed through a matriarchal stage is possible enough; but the existence of goddesses, called simply Mother and Maid . . . is hardly a proof.’’∞≥∂ Other reviewers complained that she was too quick to take evidence of matrilineal methods of reckoning descent as proof for a full-blown matriarchal social stage in the distant Greek past.∞≥∑ Again, there was no single focus for the criticisms of Harrison’s matriarchal theories; instead, reviewers reflected a generalized skepticism and discomfort with ideas that seemed so radical. The most striking thing about the critical response to Harrison’s work, however, is that it reveals just how broadly public thought had been pene- trated by the ideas, questions, and problems of comparative religion. More- over, by the time that Harrison’s most important works appeared, the intellectualist approach associated with Tylor and Spencer had been partly dislodged by a multivalenced understanding of religion that focused attention on experiential, social, emotional, and aesthetic elements in the religious life and that embraced the notion of ‘‘varieties of religious experience.’’∞≥∏ Definitions of religion, previously focused on doctrines and ecclesiastical institutions, had been stretched, deepened, and complicated far beyond anything that most British audiences would have expected in 1867 when Max Müller had an- nounced the coming of a new science.∞≥π Even so, the largely uncomprehend- ing or negative reactions to some aspects of Harrison’s thought demonstrated the limits of the public discussion on the nature of religion; in particular, her advocacy of a nontheistic and woman-centered religion was still too extreme, too fundamentally alien from the Christian tradition of centuries of European civilization.

Conclusion: A Religion for the Future? Harrison’s vision of ‘‘true religion’’ offered a radical alternative to Victorian Christianity. How, then, was this religion to be practiced or pursued? When it 240 | Jane Ellen Harrison

came to the ancient Greeks, the objects of her study, Harrison was outspoken in her preferences. All of the aspects of Greek religion that most offended Evangelical sensibilities—mysticism, sacramentalism, ecstatic ritual—were ‘‘truly religious’’ in contrast to the placid formalities of Olympian worship. In a famous passage, she teasingly calls attention to the indecorous nature of her tastes in primitive worship: ‘‘[I]n matters of ritual I prefer savage disorders, Dionysiac orgies, the tearing of wild bulls to the . . . stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions.’’∞≥∫ In a more serious tone, she once defended herself from criticism by Gilbert Murray: ‘‘I believe I hate the ugliness of excess as much as you, but there is a degree of even physical intoxication that . . . is right and from the gods.’’∞≥Ω Harrison was even bold enough to challenge the Victorian preoccupation with bodily self-control, speaking sympathetically of the religious uses of alcohol and other drugs. Writing to Murray, she praised William James’s Gifford Lectures: ‘‘[T]he mysticism and drunkenness parts delight me and the ‘revelation under anaesthetics’ experiences are my very own—morphia cured me far more of materialism, and laughing gas convinced me of the existence of god—I am quite serious.’’∞∂≠ Yet turning to her own era, Harrison’s vision was less assured. At times she seemed to advocate a religion primarily concerned with moral improvement. On occasion she would slip into a strictly functionalist view of religion, promoting it as a counterweight to the extreme individualism of modern capitalist societies; writing in 1912, she asserted that ‘‘one function of . . . all religion is to distract attention from that divinity which is ourselves.’’∞∂∞ In this mode, her pronouncements resemble nothing so much as pale echoes of Frederick Harrison’s English positivism. Perhaps realizing that a religion of self-discipline and moral and intellectual improvement would leave many unsatisﬁed, she acknowledged the continuing relevance, even necessity, of ritual: ‘‘We would not be taken to imply that ritual is obsolete and must drop out of life.’’∞∂≤ But it was not easy to imagine what the content of authentic modern ritual would be. She rejected Christian ceremonies as magical and overly anthropomorphic, ‘‘confus[ing] our intellect and fail[ing] to stir our emotion.’’∞∂≥ Similarly, while describing herself as ‘‘really a Maenad, tho’ alas phenomenally a respectable British spinster,’’ there were strict limits to her willingness to champion the more earthy forms of worship even for ancient Greeks.∞∂∂ On those occasions when she sought to ‘‘preach’’ on contemporary spiritual concerns, she expounded a fundamentally humanistic, intellectual creed that would not have been out of place in the ‘‘chapel’’ of one of the London Ethical Societies.∞∂∑ The religion of the future (which she sometimes Jane Ellen Harrison | 241

referred to as ‘‘Unanimism’’) would be a modern ascetic discipline calling on its followers to focus on the spiritual power of the group. The enlightened individual would understand her- or himself in relation to the group and to the whole order of nature and be willing to submit selfish instincts to the needs of the community. It is difficult to find a place for mysticism in such a vision, and ritual in this context would be so dutiful and self-conscious as to lose any possibility of ecstasy. On the eve of World War I, Harrison voiced the characteristic nineteenth- century faith in European progress—at last, social evolution, science, and the division of labor were creating human societies in which individualism, tolerance, and freedom of thought could flourish side by side with cooperation, altruism, and humane values. But her experience during the war was especially disillusioning, leading her to denounce the ‘‘awful herd’’ that she had once seen as the source of individual spirituality. Having championed a return to the spirit of ‘‘collectivism’’ and to ‘‘primal emotions,’’ she was at first wary and eventually horrified to see how these social forces erupted into irrational hatreds in the superheated atmosphere of total war.∞∂∏ In Epilegomena (1921), written in the aftermath of the war, Harrison summed up her life’s work in Greek religion and applied her learning to ‘‘the religious questions of the day.’’ While she continued to stress ‘‘the practice of asceticism’’ as the ‘‘core and essence’’ of religion,’’ her emphasis now was not on the needs of the community, but on the individual’s capacity for transcendence.∞∂π Henceforth religion would mean the practice of spiritual/intellectual/aesthetic self-cultivation by the individual in contrast to, and in conflict with, self-indulgent absorption in material abundance. Harrison’s career inspired dozens of younger scholars, especially young women, during a period of dramatic cultural flux. She succeeded in her quest to integrate emotions, intellect, and spirit within a life dedicated to the pursuit of truth, and her celebration of the unity of things—nature, human social necessities, and the individual search for transcendence—still resonates. But in her attempt to find a new religion to replace Victorian Christianity, she failed in much the same way that contemporary positivists did—she identified ritual as the key to the power and appeal of religion, yet she rejected rituals based on magic, and her own credo was primarily ethical and detached from collective action. She valued tradition and cultural continuity and spoke of her desire to maintain long-established ideas such as sacrament, conversion, baptism, and even church, yet her vision of a religion for the modern world offered no structure to support the continuation of these traditions. She 242 | Jane Ellen Harrison

characterized religion as essentially social and of the group but identiﬁed the genius of the modern age as recognition of the value and dignity of the individual, and came to fear ‘‘the herd’’ as ugly, destructive, and irrational. She rejected the intellectualist characterization of religion as an erroneous system of thought, insisting that it was about ‘‘real things,’’ yet she found no way to reconcile the emotions at the heart of religion with the demands of modern thought and the critical intellect. In short, Harrison’s work exhibited and highlighted to a degree unequalled among her contemporaries the modern dilemma as regards religion. Conclusion

In 1962, the distinguished anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard delivered a series of lectures entitled ‘‘Theories of Primitive Religion’’ which included a historical survey and critical analysis of the contributions of British scholars during the period from about 1850 to the First World War. His concluding judgment was harsh: the theories themselves were as ‘‘dead as mutton,’’ and it was difficult to believe that such ‘‘inadequate, even ludicrous’’ ideas had ever commanded the attention that at one time they did. Perhaps they still retained some interest as ‘‘specimens of the thought of their time,’’ but for the contemporary working anthropologist, ‘‘it must suffice to say that there is little or nothing one can do with such theories.’’∞ The chasm that separated Evans-Pritchard from his Victorian predecessors is almost as immense as that which stood between those earlier scholars and the ‘‘quaint’’ and ‘‘exotic’’ people whose beliefs and rituals they studied. But the rupture was not new in 1962; the first fissures and breaks had begun to appear as early as the 1890s, and by 1915, they had multiplied and were spreading in every direction. On the one hand, social evolutionary doctrine and the method of survivals were coming under intolerable strain as students questioned both the explanatory adequacy of the Tylorian model and the philosophical assumptions embedded in it. At the same time, the work of Continental sociologists such Émile Durkheim, Marcel Mauss, and Max We- ber presented British scholars with concrete alternatives to the beleaguered intellectualist tradition with its reliance on an increasingly outmoded associa- tionist psychology. Finally, Evans-Pritchard himself suggested a reason why the theories he discussed no longer carried conviction: ‘‘Religion has ceased 244 | Conclusion

to occupy men’s minds in the way it did at the end of the last, and at the beginning of this century. Anthropological writers then felt that they were living at a momentous crisis in the history of thought, and that they had their part to play in it.’’≤ After World War I, those who had been troubled by a sense of religious crisis were more likely to feel themselves caught up in a general crisis of European civilization. Together, these trends radically altered what had been the Victorian science of religion, rendering it incoherent and almost unintelligible to the anthropological mind in the later twentieth century. The career of the Oxford anthropologist Robert Ranulph Marett (1866–1943) spans the period of transition and aptly illustrates a number of these transforming developments. Marett, who once described himself as ‘‘a flying buttress rather than a pillar of the Anglican Establishment,’’ was, nevertheless, much closer to that establishment than any of the other major figures in this study.≥ Born and brought up on the Island of Jersey, Marett studied philosophy at Balliol and the University of Berlin and served at Oxford, first as a philosophy tutor, later as a Reader in anthropology, and finally as rector of Exeter College. Marett, like Tylor, devoted much of his time and energy to strengthening the academic position of his discipline; he played a key role in the creation of the special diploma course in anthropology at Oxford in 1905 and also in the establishment of the Oxford Anthropological Society. He also participated enthusiastically in learned associations including the Folklore Society, which he headed as president from 1914 to 1918. Marett’s interest in anthropology was first aroused when he read works by Tylor and Lang as research for a prize essay entitled ‘‘The Ethics of Savage Races,’’ written in 1893. As early as 1897 he was reviewing books on sociology and anthropology for the Oxford Magazine, but his first original contribution to the field was the address ‘‘Pre-Animistic Religion,’’ delivered at the British Association meeting in Dover in 1899. This paper, printed in Folk-Lore in 1900 and republished in The Threshold of Religion in 1909, attracted the attention of anthropologists not only in Britain, but on the Continent as well, and the obscure young philosopher was catapulted to instant renown as the leader of a ‘‘pre-animistic school’’ bent on discrediting Tylor’s theory of animism. Marett later recalled having been more startled than anyone by this turn of events: ‘‘I scarcely recognize myself in the rôle imputed to me,’’ he confessed.∂ Indeed, while his essay contains a very incisive and telling critique of the theory of animism, it was hardly a bolt from the blue, since Lang and Robert- son Smith had already undermined some key elements of the model. Marett Conclusion | 245

contributed to the eclipse of the Tylorian tradition in the study of religion, but he did not initiate it. His principal argument was that animism was inadequate as a ‘‘minimum definition of religion’’ because it was too intellectualistic, relying too heavily on formulated ideas and neglecting the importance of feeling and of the human will. The identification of spirits and the elaboration of a religious system out of random spirit phenomena were not pure acts of ratiocination, but acknowledgments of supernatural power accompanied by the emotions of awe, wonder, admiration, or fear. The religious sense was awakened when primitive humans came in contact with something—inanimate object, animate being, or natural event—which was perceived to contain such supernatural power, or, in the term Marett borrowed from the Melanesians, mana.∑ He developed these points further in a series of follow-up essays written between 1904 and 1909 and collected in The Threshold of Religion.∏ As Marett himself acknowledged, the claim that religion involved emotion as well as ‘‘ideation’’ was so obvious that it might seem hardly worthwhile to insist upon it. But that was precisely his point; the gap between informal commonplace knowledge and formal explanatory model could no longer be ignored, and Marett urged those who might accuse him of retailing empty truisms to examine their own practice.π Tylor’s theory, which had once served a necessary purpose by helping scholars to organize their data, had now outlived its usefulness and threatened to ‘‘crib, cabin and confine’’ research by rendering theoretically insignificant whole categories of evidence.∫ In reality, Marett’s intention was not so much to create a new rival synthesis as to press against the weak points of current anthropological practice, to initiate a reevaluation of methods, and to draw attention to neglected problems. His writings represent the first sustained effort to take stock of the results of comparative religion—both methods and conclusions—as these had emerged over the previous third of a century. He was, in effect, the first historiographer of the field, or at least of British contributions to it; the concise surveys of previous scholarship with which he often began his essays are models of their kind. It was Marett who first attempted to alert his colleagues to aspects of Robertson Smith’s work that had been overlooked.Ω In the 1930s, he contributed important biographical articles to The Encyclopaedia of the Social Sciences and his study of E. B. Tylor, published in 1935, was until 1980 the only full-length work on the great anthropologist. Writing to Marcel Mauss in 1912, Radcliffe-Brown claimed to have been the first English anthropologist to appreciate the importance of the French socio- 246 | Conclusion

logical school, but it appears that that distinction more properly belongs to Marett.∞≠ Although Durkheim’s writings had received favorable notice in the pages of Folk-Lore as early as 1903, they were discussed there chiefly as contributions to the debate on totemism. It was Marett who first launched a comprehensive theoretical comparison of the French and British schools in ‘‘A Sociological View of Comparative Religion,’’ (in the Sociological Review for January 1908).∞∞ During the planning stages for the special diploma course at Oxford, he had suggested L’annee sociologique as essential reading for pro- spective anthropologists, and a year later, in a 1906 lecture entitled ‘‘Magic and Religion,’’ he commended the new sociology to his students.∞≤ His aim was not to prompt wholesale conversion to Durkheimian principles; indeed, he was quite critical of the radical determinism espoused by the French school. Instead, he hoped that the new sociology would undermine the dominance of individual psychology as the method of choice for British students of anthropology. Marett’s contributions to comparative religion and to anthropology as a whole deserve more attention than they have received, for his comments are penetratingly insightful, combining ‘‘a pleasant ruthlessness’’ (as T. K. Penni- man put it) with an unusually generous appreciation for points of view that differed from his own.∞≥ But the role he chose was that of critic and mediator, not that of the constructive theorist. Without exaggerating his importance as an agent of professionalization, it can be said that Marett’s career exemplifies a crucial moment in the history of comparative religion: the point at which scholars began to turn inward toward an audience of fellow experts and away from the larger educated public. It should be reemphasized, in this connection, that Marett objected to Tylor’s theory mainly because it had begun to hamper research. His essays were almost always addressed, quite explicitly, to fellow anthropologists and students of religious history, and they contain frequent references to the distinction between the ‘‘popular’’ and the professional views on any given topic.∞∂ In some respects, Marett’s work bears comparison with that of Andrew Lang, for one could argue that the role of the latter was also mainly that of critic. But where Lang attacked the evolutionary theory of religion as part of an impassioned protest against what he saw as the banality and materialism of modern culture, Marett conducted his battle within the strictly circumscribed limits of professional disinterested scholarship. Without implying that Marett (or for that matter, later anthropologists) were genuinely clear-sighted and free of bias where their predecessors were not, one must still emphasize the Conclusion | 247

importance of this shift toward a more self-consciously professional perspective. Marett’s writings lack the feeling of urgency, the sense that momentous issues hang on his conclusions or that he has a message of crucial importance to bring to the larger public. What is missing, finally, is the impulse to use the science of religion as an instrument of cultural criticism and prophecy. Although the science of religion had never achieved the unity of an academic discipline, those who contributed to it had understood themselves to be participants in a common undertaking of signal importance, and they had addressed their works to a wide public. But by 1914 the situation was fundamentally changed, and the former coherence of this particular field of discourse was lost among proliferating disciplines and subdisciplines. Between 1910 and 1920, the focus of ethnological inquiry shifted from primitive religion to kinship systems as British social anthropology entered its ‘‘modern’’ period under the leadership of W. H. R. Rivers, A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, and Bronislaw Malinowski. After World War I, anthropologists were more likely to ‘‘achieve renown within their own specialized circles—and less as members of a national intelligentsia.’’∞∑ In the meantime, a kind of identity crisis overtook those students of religious phenomena who did not regard themselves primarily as anthropologists. This is reflected in the controversy that arose over an appropriate name for the field. Some felt that ‘‘comparative religion’’ was irredeemably tainted by evolutionist associations and preferred ‘‘history of religions’’ or Religionswissenschaft.∞∏ Finally, it became apparent that the Brit- ish school no longer stood on the frontiers of research and theory as Conti- nental thinkers increasingly dominated the scholarly debate on religion.∞π It would be a mistake to describe these changes as nothing more than the inevitable consequences of professionalization and specialization, nor are they explicable solely in terms of the great mass of relevant ethnological and historical data that had accumulated over the previous half century. As the cultural conditions that had engendered it receded into the past, the science of religion became fragmented, analytical rather than synthetic, and progres- sively more inward-looking. The works of the great nineteenth-century theorists came to appear irrelevant, sterile, and impenetrable.

The Victorian ‘‘science of religion’’ was a reaction to and a reﬂection of the sense of crisis that had troubled the educated classes of British society as the traditional Anglican cultural elite came under increasingly successful attack, a process that had reached its most intense phase in the years between 1850 and 1890. The debate on Christianity that had featured as the centerpiece of this 248 | Conclusion

crisis was extremely divisive, arousing intense antagonisms and anxieties that needed to be allayed. By subjecting the phenomena of non-Christian religions to ‘‘scientific’’ methods of inquiry, scholars believed that they could create a stable body of knowledge from which to formulate generalizations as to the social and psychological functions of all religions. This in turn would allow them to guide the way toward a durable consensus on the appropriate role for the Church and for Christian belief in their own culture. The two foremost contributors to the science of religion in the years before 1880 were Friedrich Max Müller and Edward B. Tylor. Working in the tradition of Orientalist philology, Müller attempted to construct a grandiose trinity of human sciences linking the study of language, mythology, and religion and drawing its evidence from the sacred texts of Asia. Tylor’s achievement was to spearhead the drive of British social evolutionism into the scientific investigation of religion by the application of the method of ‘‘survivals.’’ While Müller and Tylor differed fundamentally on questions of methodology, both took very seriously the responsibility that came with their expertise: to help shape the public debate on religious issues. Furthermore, both Müller and Tylor tried to offer reassurance, to assuage anxiety, and to defuse the sense of crisis rather than exacerbate it. Their special insights allowed them to indicate the general course of development which religion might be expected to follow in the years ahead, and they accepted the prophetic role, not out of hubris, but out of a sense of scholarly responsibility. Müller claimed that religion was, like language, a universal and eternal element in human life. He argued that theistic notions proceeded inevitably from the mental processes by which human beings create an ordered world of concepts out of the chaotic flux of sense experience. Religious emotion, as distinct from belief, was an equally inevitable product of primitive man’s contemplation of nature, especially the movements of the sun. Müller sought to console his audience by showing them that a wave of skepticism and unbelief often preceded an age of spiritual renewal, and he encouraged those who found themselves crushed between dogmatic orthodoxy on one side and agnosticism on the other to turn for solace, as he had, to the sacred philosophies of Asia. Müller believed that each religion had in its own way contributed to the divine education of the world, and that hence each was in some sense true. Part of the task of the new science of religion, as he conceived of it, was to promote this syncretistic view, and Müller came to look forward to a synthesis of the world’s great faiths that would deliver Europe from spiritual despair and anomie. Conclusion | 249

Tylor, on the other hand, predicted continued erosion of the cultural presence and authority of religion as men of science began to assume the leadership role that had once belonged to the clergy. His work was in fact a major contribution to what Jeffrey Cox has identified as the ‘‘master narrative’’ of secularization.∞∫ The underlying message of Primitive Culture, his most important work, was that the same evolutionary processes that had created the successive phases of religion were slowly sapping the foundations of all theistic beliefs. Locating the sources of theology in the earliest speculative gropings of the primitive mind, Tylor sought to account for the origins of this grand illusion without undermining the optimistic evaluation of human nature which was so essential to the belief in progress. For the animistic philosophy, though mistaken, was in its own way perfectly rational, and in its time it had served society well. That time was now passed, and the modern remnants or ‘‘survivals’’ of old beliefs were so many obstacles that threatened to impede the advance and wider diffusion of scientific modes of thought. It was the task of anthropologists, allying themselves with other progressive thinkers and cultural reformers, to expose these outworn ideas and customs and thereby assist in their destruction. Tylor acknowledged, however, that religion had been an absolutely necessary element in the evolution of human culture. His message was thus ultimately a reassuring one: the new secular man was not cut off from his history but remained true to his ancestors. His paths had been made straight by the successive phases through which animism had evolved, and Christianity could claim, as a sort of epitaph, to have been the highest and most refined of these historical forms. Though Müller and Tylor foresaw very different futures and appealed to different audiences, both sought to convey affirming, more or less optimistic visions, and both proceeded with confidence to the task of theory building. In this way, they differed considerably from the next stage of British inquiry into religion, which began about 1875 with Andrew Lang’s first salvos against Müllerian mythography, and ended with similar assaults on Tylor’s system. During this second phase, it became clear that the ambitious syntheses and the confident claims to have discovered the essence and origin of religion had been somewhat premature. As Lang, Robertson Smith, Frazer, and Harrison began to probe the weaknesses and expose the contradictions in their predecessor’s theories, the expectation that ‘‘scientific’’ inquiry could lead the way to a solution of contemporary religious dilemmas began to fade. Andrew Lang initiated the new, consciously critical phase of inquiry with his attacks on Müller’s theory of mythology as a ‘‘disease of language.’’ Portray- 250 | Conclusion

ing himself as a loyal disciple of Tylor’s anthropological method, Lang argued that the grotesque and fantastic elements of Indo-European mythology were not late products of decaying symbols, but relics of primitive stages of thought that provided invaluable clues to the earliest religious and metaphysical speculations of the prehistoric ancestors of modern civilized Europeans. But where Tylor had espoused a dynamic social evolutionism, focusing on the forces of progress, what most deeply impressed Lang was the static, the enduring, the immutable. Tylor had formulated the concept of cultural ‘‘survivals’’ as a convenient methodological device, but for Lang the interest lay not so much in the new as in that which survived, and especially the magico-religious culture of the folk. In his later works, Lang further distanced himself from Tylor’s vision, as he developed a penetrating critique of the Victorian faith in progress. Resting his argument on the beliefs held by some indigenous Austra- lian peoples (commonly regarded at the time as the ‘‘lowest’’ of all ‘‘savages’’) in ethical creator gods, Lang sought to demonstrate that progress, in the sense of growing technological sophistication and complexity of social organization, did not entail parallel improvements in the realms of religion and morality. Although Lang challenged the conclusions of Tylor and other social evolutionists with regard to religion, he remained wedded to the intellectualist presuppositions that had guided much previous inquiry. The first thinker to cast serious doubt on the adequacy of Tylor’s method was Lang’s fellow Scot, William Robertson Smith. His investigation of comparative religion grew naturally out of his activity as a believing practitioner of the higher criticism, determined to demonstrate that the religions of the Old and New Testaments were historically unintelligible to those who refused to accept them as the fruit of divine revelation. As a devout evangelical, Robertson Smith understood Christian faith as a relationship with God rather than as intellectual knowledge about him, and this basic religious orientation profoundly influenced his scholarship. From his point of view, the unspoken equation between religion and theology that had dominated previous studies was simply wrong. Robertson Smith’s alternative was a sociological method for the science of religion, one concerned less with doctrine than with sacramental practice, and one that focused not on the individual’s beliefs about the divine but on the ‘‘converse’’ between a community and its god. Robertson Smith thus rejected Tylor’s view of religion as flawed natural philosophy and brought into question the latter’s claim that science would provide a satisfactory replacement for lost faith and a socially impotent Church. At first sight, the work of James G. Frazer appears as a triumphant reasser- Conclusion | 251 tion of Tylor’s methods and intellectual style, despite the lack of personal sympathy between the two men. On closer inspection, however, Frazer’s writings begin to resemble the crumbling but still picturesque ruins (one of his favorite metaphors for Christianity) of Victorian social evolutionism. Judged purely as a work of historical and ethnological scholarship, The Golden Bough emerges as an unintended demonstration of the bankruptcy of the Tylorian approach to religion, since it clearly exemplifies the weaknesses of the comparative method and the intellectualist framework of interpretation. But to leave it at that fails to account for the great cultural influence that Fra- zer undoubtedly achieved. Contemporaries responded to The Golden Bough as a work of the imagination; and part of the book’s dramatic impact derived from the tension between the author’s conscious commitment to a progressivist evolutionary reading of history and the pessimistic or even tragic vision of the human past that forced itself upon him. Caught between his faith in science and reason and his fear that they were only fragile bulwarks against the irrational impulses which seemed to govern the mass of humankind, Frazer was unable to echo Tylor’s prediction of a transition, gradual and nearly painless but nonetheless certain, from ‘‘Animism’’ to enlightenment. The work of Jane Ellen Harrison, the first female scholar to make a widely acknowledged impact on the science of religion, marks a decisive moment in the erosion of the intellectualist tradition. Like other Victorian religionists, Harrison began the study of ancient myths and cults as part of a personal search for meaning and spiritual fulfillment, one that led her to a commitment to redefine religion itself. She took up the banner of ritualism soon after Robertson Smith had delivered the first series of his ‘‘Lectures on the Religion of the Semites,’’ but it was her interest in matriarchal religion and her insistence on its importance that most clearly set her apart from other British scholars. Harrison devoted much of her career to the study of the stories, beliefs, and ritual practices associated with an ancient woman-centered religion in Greece, one that had deeper and older roots than the worship of the Olympian gods and goddesses. She sought to redefine religion to include elements of this woman’s religion, such as mysticism and ecstatic communion with the natural world, that were alien to Victorian Christianity. At the same time, she downplayed the importance of theism and theology, elements that for most Victorians had been synonymous with religion itself. Yet Harri- son, like other late-Victorian participants in the ‘‘revolt against positivism,’’ was caught within the contradictions of her own desires—for the emotional satisfaction associated with collective recognition and veneration of the sa- 252 | Conclusion

cred on the one hand, and on the other, for the freedom of individual thought that had been central to liberal values since the time of the Enlightenment; and her attempt to envision a compelling new faith for her own society ultimately failed. By the turn of the century, it was clear that the new science, however fruitful in other ways, had failed to bring forth the longed-for consensus on the appropriate role or future prospects for religion in British culture. As one observer put it: ‘‘The hope that the study of comparative religion would throw some light on religion itself seems to be fading away.’’∞Ω In the meantime, the sense of religious crisis that had troubled the mid-Victorians had lost some of its sense of urgency. By the early twentieth century, the churches had been deprived of much of their influence over British cultural institutions, especially at the universities, where the principle that scholarship must never be trammeled by theological considerations was now firmly established. Reli- gious indifference or even open agnosticism no longer led to social ostracism, and there was little need to suppress expressions of doubt or heterodox beliefs. But while the science of religion was not able to create a new cultural consensus, it had contributed in ways not always easy to trace to a new and more wide-ranging conception of religion. By the turn of the century, British audiences had become familiar with the concepts, theories, and terminology of anthropology and comparative religion, to the point where a popular novel such as Dracula could assume readers’ acquaintance with ideas such as taboo and mana.≤≠ Along with that familiarity had come a greater recognition that religion could not be reduced to theology. Frederic Harrison’s 1884 article entitled ‘‘The Ghost of Religion,’’ in which he rejected ‘‘metaphysics’’ and called for a ‘‘living’’ or ‘‘working’’ religion, was not just a repetition of well- worn Comtist themes but also an appeal for more awareness of the social meaning of religion at a moment when anthropologists had already begun to focus public attention in that direction.≤∞ As the near exclusive focus on theology began to wane, the spotlight fell on the aesthetic and emotional components of individual and collective religious experience. It may be, as John Wolffe argues, that throughout the nineteenth century, popular piety ‘‘was still more a matter of communally significant shared ritual than of theological creeds and internalized spirituality.’’≤≤ Per- haps scholars of comparative religion simply reflected a reality that was all around them. In any case, by the late century, artists and intellectuals quite self-consciously gloried in the aesthetic and expressive side of Christianity without professing any need to proclaim adherence to an orthodox creed. Conclusion | 253

Some found that religious aestheticism could offer a satisfying surrogate for more traditional forms of belief and commitment. Like many members of the late-Victorian cultural elite, Edward Burne-Jones rejected the Church of En- gland as an institution; nevertheless, he declared: ‘‘I love Christmas Carol Christianity . . . Medieval Christianity. . . . The enthusiasm and devotion and the art, the humanity and Romance.’’≤≥ Religious symbols and mythologies, not only of Western nations but of peoples from all parts of the globe, became valued objects of intellectual and artistic consumption. In the late 1880s, the interior décor of the fashionable young bachelor might include ‘‘an altar, a Buddhist temple, a statue of the Apollo . . . censers [and] great church candlesticks.’’≤∂ Here, of course, scholars of comparative religion played a direct and crucial role. The aesthetic impulse was clearly an element in the public enthusiasm for The Golden Bough, which, as we saw, won praise as a beautifully constructed treasure house of religious lore even while many ad- miring readers rejected Frazer’s theories and arguments. Aestheticism was also an element, though not the only one, in the new openness to non-European religions. During the 1860s and 1870s, missionaries had studied comparative religion in order to sharpen their arguments and anticipate challenges to standard Christian apologetic.≤∑ By the 1880s, the officers of mission boards and associations had begun to detect the growing impact of the science of religion on missionary activity from China to Africa. Welcomed by some and condemned by others, it was nevertheless agreed that comparative religion was helping to create what the actual field experience of missionary activity had not, an ‘‘eclectic view of religion.’’≤∏ As the editor of one missionary journal observed, ‘‘The spirit of the age is . . . a spirit of enquiry into other men’s beliefs, with the inevitable result that the enquirer finds there is much commendable, where he would once have been taught to believe all was beyond question condemnable.’’≤π During the 1880s, Max Müller was reproached for recommending Indian theosophy as a ‘‘corrective’’ for Western spiritual aridity, but his message of ‘‘Unity in Diversity’’ found a receptive audience among his contemporaries.≤∫ Müller’s writings inspired Tennyson, whose late poem ‘‘Akbar’s Dream’’ (from The Death of Oenone, Akbar’s Dream and Other Poems, 1892) was intended to support the theme that ‘‘all religions are one.’’≤Ω Tennyson’s friend Benjamin Jowett, who had encouraged him to write ‘‘Akbar’s Dream,’’ had come to believe that the ‘‘New Theology’’ would be based on the ‘‘moral and rational parts’’ of Christian tradition combined with ‘‘the best elements of other religions especially Buddhism & Mohometanism.’’≥≠ ‘‘Akbar’s Dream,’’ in its turn, 254 | Conclusion

served as inspiration for the organizers of the Chicago World Parliament of Religions held in 1893, an event hailed by Müller as ‘‘unprecedented in the whole history of the world.’’≥∞ In his Gifford Lectures for 1890–1892, Edward Caird asked: ‘‘What is it, then, which has awakened the new modern interest in the science of religion? . . . What is that . . . has set to our scholars the task of analyzing the Sacred Books of all nations and seeking for the ‘keys of all mythologies’?’’ It was ‘‘the idea of a unity in men deeper than all racial and social distinctions, deeper than all distinctions of culture or even of religion.’’ The modern spirit wants ‘‘not only to believe in . . . the identity of the spirit of humanity in all times and places, but to see it,’’ and comparative religion satisfied the need.≥≤ To be sure, the increasing acceptability of this eclectic approach—to each his or her own religious synthesis—measures the extent to which traditional dogma had already lost much of its hold. On the other hand, it is plain that for some individuals, comparative religion did serve one of the functions that Max Müller had claimed for it—offering a range of alternatives between agnosticism and orthodoxy. The issues and problems raised by Victorian students of comparative religion seem more pertinent and more compelling now than at any other time since the First World War. Amidst talk of a ‘‘clash of civilizations,’’ in an era when many feel threatened by waves of religious resurgence and decline, when the power of religious passion seems promising to some, threatening to others, when religious differences stir strong feelings of alienation and antipa- thy as well as the desire for understanding, it can be instructive, to say the least, to observe the attempts of earlier generations to arrive at a dispassionate understanding of the psychological and social meanings of religious beliefs and practices. For one thing, as contemporary humanists have questioned the epistemological status of the human sciences that arose during the nineteenth century, including anthropology and the critical study of history, they have also asked whether the ‘‘knowledges’’ produced by these disciplines can claim an absolute universal validity or whether, on the contrary, they are not in some sense mythologies of the modern West. From a postmodern perspective, it is plain that questions about the origins and the future of religious consciousness could never have been settled on the grounds of strict sober empiricism or appeals to a ‘‘scientific method.’’ In their attempts to answer these questions apart from the traditional explanations offered by Christian mythology, Vic- torian scholars created their own countermythologies. Tylor and other de- velopmentalists used the special authority derived from their identity as men Conclusion | 255 of science to portray the decline of Christianity as a predetermined moment in the progressive evolution of Western civilization. They depicted Britain’s rupture with its Christian past as pure emancipation without genuine loss—a narrative that distorted contemporary reality and forestalled serious examination of the breach even while they tried to explain it away. What is more, insofar as they denied the autonomy of religion, scholars declared their intellectual dominance over believers within their own societies and over non- Western societies that had not yet experienced the blessings of progress in the form of secularization. They alone were free; they possessed the truth while others were trapped in the prison of their illusions. This study has focused on the ways in which Victorian thinkers used their knowledge of non-Christian faiths to explore contemporary concerns; but seeing that, in our own day, the ideological bases of all studies of cultural ‘‘others’’ are under scrutiny, we might pause to consider how perceptions of non-European peoples were influenced by this scholarship. Much has been made, justifiably, of the role that Christian identity played in European expan- sionism and in the development of a Eurocentric narrative of modern history. Much less has been said about the similar role played by materialistic and naturalistic ideologies since the later nineteenth century. And yet it is evident that where the whole thrust of world history is identified with the values and needs of a Western scientific elite, competing values and needs will be dismissed or ‘‘explained’’ as evidence of backwardness or, more politely, under- development. To argue that this is precisely what occurred in the case of Victorian social evolutionary theory is hardly novel; but it is somewhat more novel to insist on the pivotal position held by religion within this scheme of thought. To be sure, developmental theorists found many ways to measure progress, but for Tylor, Frazer, and other prominent social thinkers in the latter third of the century, the single most important correlation was that between primitiveness and attachment to animistic and magical beliefs. It is worth recalling here that those thinkers—notably Max Müller, Andrew Lang, and Jane Harrison—who sought a middle ground between positivism and secularism on the one hand and Christian pretensions to exclusive truth on the other were also the most willing to challenge the model of social evolutionism that placed nineteenth-century Europe at the pinnacle of history. Certainly it was no accident that these thinkers, all of whom challenged the equation of progress with secularization, should have experienced and articulated profound misgivings as to the absolute superiority of their own society to all others. 256 | Conclusion

In the postcolonial era, the assumption that all true history belongs to Western elites and that all opposing beliefs, behaviors, and institutions are mere accidental survivals no longer goes unchallenged. As regards religion, members of secularized modern cultures ﬁnd themselves forced to accede respect, however grudging, to the continued power and vitality of traditional faiths, of which the Islamic resurgence is but one example. Reductive explanations of religious phenomena continue to be offered, but no longer with complacency, and the conviction that happiness, not just for some but for all, lies in the absolute victory of the disenchanted vision, has eroded.≥≥ Though the Victorian science of religion was declared defunct long ago, many of the questions posed by its founders and contributors are once again high on the agenda of modern thought and cultural analysis. That is no guarantee that they will be answered. Notes

Introduction 1. Several scholars have noted the fact that the human or social sciences in the nineteenth century were much more permeable by popular and moral concerns than they are usually thought to be today (see Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 253; and Stocking, After Tylor, xv). 2. Turner, Between Science and Religion; Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority; Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 28–30; Martin Fichman, ‘‘Biology and Politics: Defining the Boundaries,’’ in Light- man, ed., Victorian Science in Context, 100–105. 3. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 2:35. 4. Ward, Robert Elsmere, 266, 365. 5. A significant exception is The Victorian Translation of China: James Legge’s Oriental Pilgrimage (2002), Norman J. Girardot’s biography of the great Victorian sinologist James Legge. Girardot places his career within the larger context of the growing Victorian fascination with the science of religion. 6. Sharpe, Comparative Religion, 28. 7. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 2:33. 8. Burrow, Crisis of Reason, 62, 78–79. For a similar judgment (applying only to anthropologists, however), see Kuklick, Savage Within, 79. 9. Unlike many earlier works, however, Livingston’s book gives a thorough and useful account of the positive uses made by theologians of research in comparative religion (Livingston, Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, 256–78). 10. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 15. 11. S. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, 22; see also C. Brown, ‘‘The Secularisation Decade,’’ 35; and McLeod, Secularisation in Western Europe, 164. 12. Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 3. 13. Burrow, Crisis of Reason, 52; see also George Levine, ‘‘Defining Knowledge: An Introduc- tion,’’ in Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context, 19. 14. Barton, ‘‘John Tyndall, Pantheist’’; see also Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 17, 130–31, 135, 148–49. Geoffrey Cantor cites John Tyndall’s ‘‘romantic’’ biography of Faraday as an instance of antipositivist and anti-utilitarian discourse (‘‘Public Images of Michael Faraday,’’ in Shortland and Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science, 174–76). 258 | Notes to Pages 5–14

15. Larsen, Crisis of Doubt; see also van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 60–63. 16. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 173; see also Burrow, Crisis of Reason, 19, xii; and Cashdollar, Transformation of Theology, 220. 17. Bernard Lightman, ‘‘ ‘The Voices of Nature’: Popularizing Victorian Science,’’ in Lightman, ed., Victorian Science in Context, 207; see also Wolffe, ed., Culture and Empire, 5–10. The existence of the Metaphysical Society is also testimony to the strength of the impulse to reconcile faith and science (see Alan Willard Brown, The Metaphysical Society: Victorian Minds in Crisis [New York: Columbia University Press, 1947]). 18. Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies, 231. 19. Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, 2, 41. Carlyle’s interests were also shared by many prominent thinkers who identiﬁed themselves as Christians (for example, Tennyson, Jowett, and Maurice) (see Livingston, ‘‘Tennyson, Jowett, and the Chinese Buddhist Pilgrims’’). 20. Eliot, George Eliot Letters, 4:65; Cashdollar, Transformation of Theology, 225–32. 21. From a review of Comte’s work in the British and Foreign Review in 1843, quoted in Cashdollar, Transformation of Theology, 31 (emphasis in original). 22. Mill, Three Essays on Religion, 77; Cashdollar, Transformation of Theology, 223–25. For a discussion of similar concerns among prominent agnostics, including Huxley, Tyndall, and Stephen, see Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 125–31; see also the discussion of Mark Pattison in Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 127. 23. See, for example, Maleﬁjt, Religion and Culture, 48. 24. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 10 (emphasis in original). 25. Ibid., 16. 26. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 188–97; Kuklick, Savage Within, 79; Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 27. 27. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 176; Stocking, After Tylor, xv; see also Selander, ‘‘Associative Strategies in the Process of Professionalization.’’ 28. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 17, 182. 29. Said, Orientalism, 3, 325. 30. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 41. 31. Peter Forster, ‘‘Empiricism and Imperialism: A Review of the New Left Critique of Social Anthropology,’’ in Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 23–38; Kuklick, Savage Within, 26, 182–93, 280–93; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 233–37; Stocking, After Tylor, 369–91; Cohen, Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge, 11–15. For a particularly interesting critique of the anthropological understanding of ‘‘religion,’’ see Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 27–79. 32. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 325. 33. Herbert, Culture and Anomie, 44. 34. van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 60, 107; see also Kuklick, Savage Within, 25–26, 294–95. 35. See Stocking, Victorian Anthropology; Stocking, After Tylor; and Herbert, Culture and Anomie. 36. See Fitzgerald, Ideology of Religious Studies; J. Smith, ‘‘Religion, Religions, Religious’’; and P. Harrison, ‘‘Religion’’ and the Religions in the English Enlightenment. 37. Söderqvist here borrows the phrase from Paul Ricoeur (see Söderqvist, ‘‘Existential Projects and Existential Choice in Science: Science Biography as an Edifying Genre,’’ in Shortland and Yeo, eds., Telling Lives in Science, 74–75). 38. Ibid., 66. 39. Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, 72. 40. Phillip Almond explores the popularity of Buddhism in Victorian Britain; he attributes its appeal partly to widespread anxiety about the pace of change that surfaced especially in the late nineteenth century (Almond, British Discovery of Buddhism, 83). 41. See John Wolffe, ‘‘ ‘Praise to the Holiest in the Height’: Hymns and Church Music,’’ in Notes to Pages 15–21 | 259

Wolffe, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, 5:59–99; Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism, 125–31; and S. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline, 296–324. 42. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration, 2–3, 22. 43. Burrow, Crisis of Reason, 166–67, 176. 44. Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age, 193.

1. The Study of Religion before 1860 1. Max Weber’s name should certainly appear in any list of prominent European contributors to the scientific study of religion. He began his work on the sociology of religion near the end of the period treated in this book, however, and his writings on religion appear to have had little or no impact on British scholars up to 1915. Unlike Durkheim, Weber seems to have had little knowledge of, or perhaps interest in, the work of the British scholars who are the focus of this study. 2. See Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; and Freud, Totem and Taboo. In 1913, Durkheim countered the ‘‘charge’’ that his own thought was heavily dependent on German influences by remarking: ‘‘[I]t is known what a preponderant place the study of religion has taken in our researches. Now the science of religion is essentially English and American: not at all German’’ (quoted in Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 238). 3. See Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age; Sharpe, Comparative Reli- gion; Eliade, Quest, 57–62; Eliade, Sacred and the Profane, 216–32; and Waardenburg, Classical Approaches to the Study of Religion, 1:7–52. 4. Lord Gifford may have intended the lecturers to speak on problems of natural theology, somewhat along the lines of the Bridgewater Treatises, but, in fact, many of them chose topics more closely related to comparative religion or the history of religions. Müller, Lang, Tylor, and Frazer all gave Gifford Lectures. Writing to his friend John Sutherland Black in 1887, Robertson Smith remarked: ‘‘What a queer bequest that is of Lord Gifford’s. If the professors chosen are worth their salt they will make the subject Comparative History of Religion wh[ich] is important and could be made attractive’’ (W. Robertson Smith to J. S. Black, 14 February 1887, Robertson Smith Papers). 5. Jordan, Comparative Religion, 381, 586. On Fairbairn, see Johnson, Changing Shape of English Nonconformity, 145–46. 6. George W. Stocking Jr., ‘‘Functionalism Historicized,’’ in Stocking, ed., Functionalism His- toricized, 3–4; see also Stocking, After Tylor, xv. 7. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 119. 8. Bryson, Man and Society, 78–79. 9. D. Stewart, Collected Works, 10:33–34. 10. Ferguson, Essay on the History of Civil Society, 146–47. 11. See Bryson, Man and Society, 78–113. 12. Darwin’s influence is seen as crucial in Penniman, A Hundred Years of Anthropology, 18–20; see also Opler, ‘‘Cause, Process and Dynamics in the Evolutionism of E. B. Tylor,’’ 132; and Sharpe, Comparative Religion (in which chapter 3 is entitled ‘‘Darwinism Makes It Possible’’). 13. Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 69–70; see also Bock, Human Nature and History, 38; and Burrow, Evolution and Society, 97–99. 14. Stocking, ‘‘From Chronology to Ethnology,’’ lxx. (Stocking is speaking of the European reaction, not just that of the British.) 15. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 35, 62. 16. George W. Stocking Jr., ‘‘Radcliffe-Brown and British Social Anthropology,’’ in Stocking, ed., Functionalism Historicized, 183. 17. Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 113. 260 | Notes to Pages 21–32

18. See Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 218. 19. Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 19. 20. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:477. 21. Hume, Hume on Religion, 31–32. 22. Ibid., 33. 23. Ibid., 34. 24. Ibid., 34–35. 25. Ibid., 37–38. 26. Ibid., 39–44. 27. Ibid., 58, 62–63. 28. Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2:334–35. 29. Huxley, Hume, 155. 30. For background on de Brosses, see Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 184–209. 31. De Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 98–99. 32. De Brosses frankly admitted his debt to Hume in letters and conversations, but omitted the philosopher’s name from the book out of caution. Relations between the two men were always friendly (Manuel, Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods, 187). 33. ‘‘It is not in his possibilities, it is in man himself that one must study man; it is not a matter of imagining what he could have or should have done, but of looking at what he does’’ (de Brosses, Du culte des dieux fétiches, 285). 34. Comte, Positive Philosophy, 1:v. 35. Ibid., 1:xv; see also Pickering, Auguste Comte, 3–6. 36. Comte, Positive Philosophy, 1:14–15. 37. Ibid., 1:2–6. 38. Ibid., 2:189. 39. Ibid., 2:194. 40. Ibid., 2:250. 41. Ibid., 2:89; see also ibid., 2:93. 42. Ibid., 2:266–78. 43. Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies, 187–88, 194. 44. Comte, Positive Philosophy, 2:108–9. 45. On those theologians who welcomed aspects of Comte’s thought, see Cashdollar, Transfor- mation of Theology, 12, 339–40, 445. 46. Peel, Herbert Spencer, 14, 28. 47. While Spencer claimed to have arrived at the idea independently, the full exposition of it did not appear until 1876 in the first volume of the Principles of Sociology. In contrast, Tylor’s animistic theory had been fully developed in his Primitive Culture (1871) and had appeared in a more rudimentary form earlier than that. The two men engaged in a rather heated controversy about who had first come up with the idea (see the exchange of letters published in Academy 11 [April– May 1877]: 367, 392, 416, 462). The Croom Robertson Papers (Add. Ms. 88) contain ten letters (May 1876–June 1877) related to the dispute; see also Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 196. 48. ‘‘Mental hygiene’’ refers to Comte’s refusal, shared by Spencer, to read the works of those whose theories might clash with their own (see Spencer, Autobiography, 1:277, 350; and Burrow, Evolution and Society, 181–82). Spencer’s contributions to the sociology of religion seem to have had little if any significance in the minds of his admirers at the time of his death (see Gay, ‘‘No ‘Heathen’s Corner’ Here’’). 49. Fairbairn, ‘‘Mr. Spencer’s Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion,’’ 83; pt. 2, 218; review of First Principles, by Spencer, British Quarterly Review 37 (January 1863): 110–11; review of Eccle- Notes to Pages 32–39 | 261 siastical Institutions, by Spencer, Church Quarterly 21 (January 1886): 450; review of Political Institutions, by Spencer, Athenaeum (22 April 1882): 501–2. The critical consensus on the ‘‘ghost theory’’ was that it was an interesting idea, but that Spencer pushed it too hard and too exclusively (see ‘‘Recent Speculations on Primitive Religion’’; review of Political Institutions, by Spencer, Athenaeum [22 April 1882]: 501; review of Ecclesiastical Institutions, by Spencer, Athenaeum [6 March 1886]: 322; ‘‘Mr. Spencer’s Sociology,’’ Theological Review 14 [July 1877]: 349–56; review of Essays: Scientific, Political and Speculative, vol. 3, by Spencer, Saturday Review 38 [4 July 1874]: 21; and review of Ceremonial Institutions, by Spencer, Saturday Review 49 [3 January 1880]: 21). 50. Spencer, ‘‘Manners and Fashions,’’ 3–5. 51. Ibid., 7. 52. Note added to 1892 reprint of Spencer’s ‘‘Manners and Fashions,’’ 5. 53. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 1:56, 66–67, 98–99 (hereafter cited as PS). 54. Ibid., 75–77. 55. Ibid., 89. 56. Ibid., 107–10. 57. Ibid., 142–44, 145–52. 58. Ibid., 286–87, 291. 59. Ibid., 208, 213, 261–65. 60. Ibid., 417–19. 61. Ibid., 437 (emphasis in original). 62. Peel, Spencer, 184. 63. Spencer, PS, 3: 95–97, 102–4. 64. Ibid., 1:61–62, 71–74; 3:132–39. 65. Peel, Herbert Spencer, 244–45. 66. Ibid., 36, 72. 67. Grant Allen claimed that Spencer had once told him, ‘‘I was never a Christian’’ (‘‘Personal Reminiscences of Herbert Spencer,’’ Spencer Papers). See also Duncan, Life and Letters of Spen- cer, 491. 68. Herbert Spencer to John Tyndall, 24 February 1876, Ms. 791/18, Spencer Papers; Duncan, Life and Letters of Spencer, 486–87. 69. Spencer, Autobiography, 54–58. 70. Spencer, PS, 3:156, 165–69, 175. 71. On the differences among various versions of positivism see Pickering, Auguste Comte, 693–94.

2. Friedrich Max Müller 1. Maurice, Religions of the World, ix, 34, 261. 2. Ibid., x. 3. Müller, Auld Lang Syne, 1:40. 4. Müller, My Autobiography, 130–31. 5. Ibid., 137. 6. Ibid., 140. 7. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:ix; 2:247; see also Müller, Natural Religion, 275–76. 8. According to Sheldon Pollock, Müller’s work is characterized by excessive focus on religion and disdain for vernacular Indian languages. A ‘‘more complex’’ understanding of Indian literature and culture emerged, however, in the early twentieth century (Pollock, introduction to Literary Cultures in History, 4–5). 262 | Notes to Pages 39–45

9. Müller, My Autobiography, 3. 10. Ibid., 147. 11. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:23–25. 12. [Tylor], review of Lectures on the Science of Language, by Müller, 394. 13. Quoted in Aarsleff, Study of Language in England, 133 (emphasis in original). 14. On the history of philology in the nineteenth century, see Jespersen, Language; and Aarsleff, Study of Language in England. Van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, contains an interesting account of the ‘‘marginalization’’ of comparative philology in Britain in the decades after Jones’s death and of how the discipline developed in Germany (114). 15. Quoted in Jespersen, Language, 57. 16. For the reaction against these views by linguists in the later decades of the nineteenth century, see Sampson, Schools of Linguistics, 13–33. 17. Quoted in Ronald Taylor, ‘‘The East and German Romanticism,’’ in Iyer, ed., Glass Curtain between Asia and Europe, 196; see also Pollack, introduction to Literary Cultures in History, 4. 18. For Müller’s views on Schlegel, see Lectures on the Science of Language, 1:164–66; and Autobiography, 146. 19. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:33–37. 20. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, contains samples of correspondence with Gladstone, Darwin, Matthew Arnold, and the Duke of Albany, among others. For an account of his meeting with the queen, see 1:303–4. Müller’s star status at Oxford seems to have aroused some jealousy among his colleagues (see ibid., 1:311–12, 497–505). 21. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 254–59; Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 259. 22. Bunsen, Memoir of Baron Bunsen, 1:137 (emphasis in original). 23. Burrow, ‘‘The Uses of Philology in Victorian England,’’ 198. 24. Müller, Autobiography, 281, 286–87. 25. Ibid., 291; see also G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:195–96. 26. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:96, from a letter written to his mother in 1849. 27. Müller, Autobiography, 305. 28. Though he did support both Froude and Jowett when the reaction to their liberal opinions threatened both their careers (see G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:77, 90). 29. From a reminiscence by F. W. Farrar quoted in G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:177–78. 30. Pusey to Gladstone, 10 December 1860, Add. MSS 44281, Gladstone Papers; G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:241–45; Oxford University, Papers Relating to the Proceedings of the University, 1860; see also Chaudhuri, Scholar Extraordinary, 220–29; and van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 108–9. 31. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:46. 32. See esp. Whitney, Max Müller and the Science of Language; see also Dowling, ‘‘Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language,’’ 160–61, 175. The Lang–Müller controversy is discussed in chapter 4. 33. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:415–16. 34. For example: ‘‘I often regret that the Jews buried, and did not burn their dead, for in that case the Christian idea of the resurrection would have remained . . . spiritual’’ (Müller, Biographical Essays, 140). 35. For example, in a lecture given in 1873 in Westminster Abbey, Müller praised the Hindu reformers of the Brahma-Samâj, calling their movement one of the ‘‘most momentous in this momentous century’’ (Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 4:257–61; see also G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:362; 2:253, 333). 36. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:35, 38, 51. Notes to Pages 45–52 | 263

37. Ibid., 2:322. Schopenhauer quoted in Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us? 254; see also Müller, Autobiography, 42. 38. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:436 (emphasis in original). 39. The words are from an 1867 letter from Müller to the dean of St. Paul’s (G. Müller, Life and Letters of Muller, 1:331). 40. F. Max Müller, ‘‘Comparative Mythology,’’ in Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:11. For a discussion of Victorian interpretations of Greek mythology, see Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, chap. 3. 41. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:91–93. 42. Ibid., 90, 53–54, 73–74, 93; Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2:356, 373–74. 43. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2:375–76. 44. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 628. 45. Crick, Explorations in Language and Meaning, 34–35, 16. 46. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:143. 47. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2:599–600. One critic protested that ‘‘the hypothesis of an undulating ether is framed according to the strictest analogies of experience, while Agni [a Vedic god] was fabled in direst defiance of them’’ (Benn, review of Natural Religion, by Müller, 492). 48. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:52. 49. Ibid., 2:55. 50. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 1:252. On Grimm, see Jespersen, Language, 61; and on Bopp, see Foucault, Order of Things, 289. 51. Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 180. 52. Ibid., 180–81. 53. Ibid., 180. Müller’s remark hardly does justice to Tylor’s concept. 54. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:xii. 55. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2:432. 56. Ibid., 2:432–33. 57. Feldman and Richardson, eds., Rise of Modern Mythology, 481–82. See also Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, 110–11. 58. Müller, Autobiography, 288. 59. Ibid., 290. 60. Ibid., 288. 61. On the other hand, Müller devoted much time and effort to the task of translation, serving as general editor for The Sacred Books of the East. The series filled fifty volumes by the time it was completed in 1910. 62. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:ix. 63. Ibid., 1:21; see also Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 154. 64. Poliakov, Aryan Myth, 199, 206. On the ambiguities in Müller’s use of the term, see also Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 59. 65. For example: ‘‘There are Aryan and Semitic languages, but it is against all rules of logic to speak without an expressed or implied qualification of an Aryan race, of Aryan blood, of Aryan skulls’’ (Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 4:211). 66. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 143–47. 67. Van der Veer argues that the emphasis on Anglo-Indian kinship is more generally associated with comparative philology and is not found only in Müller (Imperial Encounters, 137). 68. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:297. On the other hand, the general popularity of collections of ‘‘Eastern Wisdom,’’ especially the 1873 publication of Moncure Conway’s Sacred 264 | Notes to Pages 52–60

Anthology, seems to have stimulated Müller’s interest in the Sacred Books project (Girardot, Vic- torian Translation of China, 256). 69. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 221. 70. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:57. 71. Ibid., 1:58–59. 72. For example, the reviewer of Introduction to the Science of Religion in the Edinburgh Review 139 (April 1874): 226. 73. Hans Aarsleff makes a persuasive case for this characterization in From Locke to Saussure, 37– 38 (notwithstanding his hostility toward both Müller and the ﬁgure of the ‘‘sage’’). The notion of the ‘‘sage’’ as a characteristic Victorian culture hero is argued in Holloway, Victorian Sage. 74. Müller, Autobiography, 141–42. 75. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:52. 76. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 40–41. 77. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:350–51. 78. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 17–20. 79. Ibid., 17. 80. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 2:455. 81. Ibid., 2:517. 82. Ibid., 2:517–18; see also Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:56, 95–96. 83. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:8. 84. On the complex relationship between linguistic theory and the discourse surrounding Darwin’s work, see Alter, Darwinism and the Linguistic Image, and especially Alter’s discussion of Müller, 79–84. Alter does not, however, make the connection between Müller’s theories of language origins and his ambitions for a science of religion. 85. Darwin, Descent of Man, 87. 86. Müller, ‘‘Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language,’’ 17. 87. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 1:379. 88. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:452. 89. For example, in a letter to Gladstone dated 21 February 1871, Müller argued that ‘‘the sooner the last trace of protection is removed from the study of theology at Oxford, the better’’ (Gladstone Papers). 90. Müller, Natural Religion, 257. 91. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:442. 92. Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 30. 93. Ibid., 30. 94. Ibid. 95. Ibid., 36. 96. Ibid. 97. Ibid., 40, 360. 98. Ibid., 360. 99. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:354. 100. Ibid., 1:357. 101. Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 261. 102. Ibid., 262–63. 103. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 47. 104. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:xxiii–xxiv. 105. See esp. Müller, History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, 1:111. 106. Ibid., 389, 496. Notes to Pages 60–68 | 265

107. Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us? 122. 108. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:113. 109. Feldman and Richardson, eds., Rise of Modern Mythology, 482; Crick, Explorations in Language and Meaning, 26. 110. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:48. 111. See also Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 64, 113; and Müller, Introduc- tion to the Science of Religion, 268. Müller’s corruptionism was not confined to his work on religion. He recognized the possibility that certain societies had suffered cultural retrogression on a comprehensive scale. It was on this basis that he challenged the contemporary assumption that modern ‘‘savages’’ represented survivals of the earliest human societies. This aspect of his work is discussed in detail in chapter 3. 112. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 268–69. 113. Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 292–93. 114. Ibid., 304. 115. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:254, 256; see also ibid., 1:372. 116. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:xix. 117. Müller to Stanley, Oxford, 2 June 1878, Ms. Eng. d. 2346, fols. 302–3, Müller Papers. 118. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:xxvi. 119. Müller, History of Sanskrit Literature, 77–82. 120. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 4:328. 121. See Müller, Biographical Essays, 118–25, 137–40. 122. Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 1:xx. 123. See G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:61–62, 411–16; see also ibid., 1:350. 124. Müller, India, What Can It Teach Us? 6. The book contains a series of lectures first delivered at Cambridge in 1882. 125. Müller, Biographical Essays, 83. 126. Müller, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, 363–64. 127. Review of Lectures on the Science of Language, by Müller, Athenaeum (14 December 1878): 753–54. 128. Ibid., 754; Academy 14 (14 December 1878): 555. 129. Statements on this theme by Monier-Williams and his supporters are found in Oxford University, Papers Relating to the Proceedings of the University, 1860; see also G. Beckerlegge, ‘‘Pro- fessor F. Max Müller and the Missionary Cause,’’ in J. Moore, ed., Religion in Victorian Britain, 5:177–220. 130. Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 25. 131. Stocking, After Tylor, 42–46; Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 120–21. 132. On the controversy over comparative religion among missionaries to China, see Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 205, 228–32, 328–31. 133. [Wilson], ‘‘Vedic Religion,’’ 199. 134. Review of Chips from a German Workshop, by Müller, Westminster Review, 105–6. 135. Macan, ‘‘Max Müller’s Hibbert Lectures,’’ 243. 136. [Wilson], ‘‘Vedic Religion,’’ 199. 137. This particular aspect of the reaction to Müller’s work is discussed more fully in chapter 4. 138. Arnold to Friedrich Max Müller, 20 January 1871, in Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold, 4:5. Arnold is quoting the first sentence from a letter written by him to an unnamed third person (emphasis in original). 139. Arnold to Müller, 17 September 1878, in Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold, 4:421–22. 140. See, for example, H. B. Wilson, who regarded Müller’s insistence on the monotheistic 266 | Notes to Pages 68–75

tendency of primitive religious ideas as pure prejudice. There was no reason to assume that ‘‘the truth or value’’ of the monotheistic concept was at all ‘‘destroyed by its late development and growth’’ (‘‘Vedic Religion,’’ 200). For an interpretation of Müller’s work as support for social evolutionism, see ‘‘The Early History of Mankind,’’ in North British Review. 141. ‘‘How Is It That We Have a Religion?’’ 346; Kellog, review of Lectures on the Science of Language, by Müller, 342; see also Dublin Review 16 (October 1886): 452–53. 142. Review of History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature, by Müller, Dublin University Magazine 55 (April 1860): 406. On Müller’s supposed idealization of Indian religion, see also Athenaeum (27 November 1869): 695; and British and Foreign Evangelical Review 29 (January 1880): 36. 143. Church Quarterly Review 16 (July 1883): 485–86; see also British and Foreign Evangelical Review 33(April 1884): 341–43. 144. Liddon to Müller, 12 December 1875, Ms. Eng. c. 2806, fols. 92–93, Müller Papers. 145. Liddon to Müller, 8 April 1878, Ms. Eng. c. 2806, fols. 70–73, Müller Papers. 146. Pusey to Müller, [?] 1880, Müller Papers, Ms. Eng. c. 2807, fols. 242–43. Peter van der Veer notes that there is something ‘‘truly radical’’ in Müller’s vision of a science of religion that includes Christianity. The fact that his work was supported both by the state and by a clerical institution, Oxford, should be regarded as ‘‘an important sign of the shifting location of religion in nineteenth- century Britain’’ (van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 111–12). Pusey’s comments are striking conﬁr- mation of this point. 147. For example, Thomas Cooper, a well-known freethinker who later became a Christian, turned away from Darwin and toward Müller because of the ‘‘the more noble views of humanity articulated’’ in the writings of the latter (Larsen, Contested Christianity, 121). 148. Review of Introduction to the Science of Religion, by Müller, British Quarterly Review 58 (1 July 1873): 292–93. 149. D. Moore, review of Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, by Müller, 22.

3. Edward B. Tylor 1. Tylor, review of Chips from a German Workshop, by Müller, 227. 2. This estimate of Tylor’s linguistic abilities is given by Marett (Tylor, 28 n. 1), but Marett also notes that ‘‘he could ﬁnd his way through a book in French or Spanish, German or Dutch.’’ 3. Schrempp, ‘‘The Re-Education of Friedrich Max Müller,’’ 91. 4. G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 1:315, 361; Müller, Chips from a German Workshop, 2:250, 4:354–61; see also Crick, Explorations in Language and Meaning, 15–16. 5. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 16, 20–21. 6. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 54; Stocking, ‘‘What’s in a Name? 377, 381. 7. See Barbara W. Freire-Marreco, ‘‘A Bibliography of Edward Burnett Tylor from 1861 to 1907,’’ in Anthropological Essays Presented to Edward Burnett Tylor, 375. 8. For the history of English Friends during the nineteenth century, see Isichei, Victorian Quakers. 9. Ibid., 2–14. 10. Cantor, Quakers, Jews, and Science, 25, 46–49. 11. Stocking, Victorian Anthropology, 191. 12. J. L. Myres, ‘‘Memories of Sir Edward Tylor,’’ in Anthropology at Oxford, 6. 13. Tylor, review of Chips from a German Workshop, by Müller, 228. 14. Tylor, ‘‘How the Problems of American Anthropology Present Themselves to the English Mind,’’ 82–84. Notes to Pages 75–83 | 267

15. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:15. 16. Marett, Tylor, 11. 17. Tylor, Anahuac, 1. 18. Ibid., 36–37. 19. Daniel, Idea of Prehistory, 36–38. 20. Tylor, ‘‘On Traces of the Early Mental Condition of Man,’’ 93. 21. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 9. 22. Rolleston, review of Early History of Mankind, by Tylor, 11. 23. Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective, 28–34. 24. Stocking, ‘‘Tylor, Edward Burnett,’’ 171 (emphasis in original). 25. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 87. 26. Tylor, review of Memoir of Baron Bunsen, by Baroness Bunsen, 716. 27. Primitive Culture is arranged topically, not chronologically; nevertheless, a distinct, and somewhat schematic, narrative pattern underlies Tylor’s discussion of selected themes. 28. Andrew Lang and Edward B. Tylor, ‘‘Double Ballade of Primitive Man,’’ in Lang, XXXII Ballades in Blue China, 46 (emphasis in original); see Andrew Lang, ‘‘Edward Burnett Tylor,’’ in Anthropological Essays, 15. 29. See Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life; Turner, Between Science and Religion; Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority; and Lightman, Origins of Agnosticism. 30. Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life, 87–89, 97–98, 104–15, 120–22, 175–82, 221–23; see also Engel, From Clergyman to Don. 31. Stocking, ‘‘What’s in a Name?’’ 371–72. 32. Tylor, ‘‘President’s Anniversary Address,’’ 448–49. 33. The British Library’s collection of letters received by Tylor, Add. MSS 50254, contains two items that bear on Müller’s role in bringing Tylor to Oxford. One is an envelope dated 9 November 1881, addressed to Tylor in Müller’s handwriting. There is a note on it in the hand of a third person that reads, ‘‘Max Müller who was largely instrumental in E. B. T. coming to Oxford.’’ The second is a draft of a letter from Tylor to Müller, dated 11 November 1881, that reads in part: ‘‘Your kindness in trying to find me a niche at Oxford is quite understood and valued here, and if anything should come to pass about the readership in ‘Culture’ I really believe I could do some good with it.’’ 34. Marett, Tylor, 16. 35. Jackson’s Oxford Journal (8 June 1895): 5 (from a report on a discussion among Oxford dons as to the merits of a proposed new examination in anthropology). 36. E. B. Tylor to Francis Galton, 18 June 1895, Galton Papers. 37. G. Griffith to E. B. Tylor, 19 June 1895; see also Franz Boas to E. B. Tylor, 27 June 1895 and 29 July 1895, Box 12, [letter ref.], Tylor Papers. 38. Hodgen, Doctrine of Survivals; Burrow, Evolution and Society, 228–59; Leopold, Culture in Comparative and Evolutionary Perspective; Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 69–90; Malefijt, Images of Man, 138–46. 39. Hodgen, Doctrine of Survivals, 175–88; Burrow, Evolution and Society, xi–xii, 260–64; Bock, Acceptance of Histories, 16–17, 85–86; Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 100–121. 40. Bock, Acceptance of Histories, 20; Stocking, ‘‘Tylor, Edward Burnett,’’ 172–77. 41. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:33. 42. Ibid., 19. 43. Ibid., 28. 44. Ibid., 5, 13–14, 23–24, 28. 45. Hodgen, Doctrine of Survivals, 9–35. 46. Whatley’s theologically based ‘‘degenerationism’’ should not be confused with the ideas of 268 | Notes to Pages 83–94

late-century Continental thinkers such as Max Nordau and Cesare Lombroso that were rooted in theories of biological evolution. 47. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:33. 48. Hodgen, Doctrine of Survivals, 51–54. 49. Tylor, Anahuac, 126. 50. Ibid., 127–28. 51. Tylor, Early History of Mankind, 2. 52. Ibid., 2–3. 53. Ibid., 119–20. 54. Ibid., 119. 55. Bohannan, introduction to Researches into the Early History of Mankind, by Tylor, xi–xii. 56. Tylor, Researches into the Early History of Mankind, 150. 57. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:61. 58. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 101. 59. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:22. 60. Ibid., 2:401–2. 61. Ibid., 2:410. 62. Ibid., 1:116–21, 130–31, 138–11; Opler, ‘‘Tylor’s Application of Evolutionary Theory to Public Issues.’’ 63. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:402. 64. Ibid., 1:21. 65. Ibid., 386–87. 66. Tylor, ‘‘T. H. Huxley as Anthropologist,’’ 311. 67. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 131; Stocking, ‘‘What’s in a Name?’’ 376–81. 68. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:21 69. Ibid., 1:1 70. Ibid., 5–6. 71. Ibid., 2:45–49. 72. Ibid., 100. 73. Ibid., 1:377–78. 74. Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, 207. 75. Ibid., 186. 76. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:12–13. 77. Ibid., 383–85. 78. Maleﬁjt, Images of Man, 141–42. 79. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:385. 80. Ibid., 2:99–100. 81. Ibid., 1:386–87. 82. Ibid., 387. 83. Ibid. 84. Ibid., 2:100–101. 85. Ibid., 1–2. 86. Ibid., 54; T. H. Huxley, ‘‘Agnosticism’’ (1889), in Huxley, Collected Essays, 5:215–22. 87. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:113–31 88. Ibid., 1:386. 89. Ibid., 2:97 (emphasis added). 90. Ibid., 97, 407. 91. Ibid., 1:452–53. Notes to Pages 95–105 | 269

92. Ibid., 298–99, 453. 93. Tylor’s claim that primitive religion is essentially an erroneous natural philosophy echoed Comte, and it had also been suggested more recently by T. H. Huxley in ‘‘On the Advisableness of Improving Natural Knowledge’’ (1866; in Huxley, Collected Essays, 1:33–40). 94. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:167, 130. 95. Ibid., 1:452. 96. Review of Primitive Culture, by Tylor, Examiner (27 May 1871): 536; see also ‘‘Tylor on Primitive Culture,’’ Edinburgh Review 135 (January 1872): 45–46; review of Primitive Culture, by Tylor, Nature (15 June 1871): 117. On the other hand, St. George Mivart used Tylor’s work as a source of evidence to counter the application of Darwinian evolution to mankind, arguing that the universality of religion, language, and so forth left no positive evidence for a transition stage between brutes and human beings (‘‘Primitive Man: Tylor and Lubbock’’). 97. Marett, Tylor, 79, 84; see also Lang, ‘‘Edward Burnett Tylor,’’ 9–10. 98. Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion, 25, 384–90. 99. Müller, ‘‘Savage,’’ 131. 100. Ibid., 111. 101. Ibid., 130–31. 102. Ibid., 117. 103. Review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, Literary Churchman (10 June 1871): 248; Macalister, review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, 228–29, 234–35. See also review of Early History of Mankind, by Müller, British Quarterly Review 52 (October 1870): 520–21. 104. Review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, Nature (15 June 1871): 117; review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, Westminster Review 96 (July 1871): 128. See also reviews of Tylor’s Early History of Mankind in Examiner (18 March 1865): 164; and London Review 10 (15 April 1865): 411–12. 105. Review of Primitive Culture, Examiner (18 March 1865): 536. 106. Review of Primitive Culture, Spectator (22 July 1871): 892. 107. [Mivart], ‘‘Primitive Man,’’ 248. 108. Calderwood, ‘‘Moral Philosophy and Savage Life,’’ Contemporary Review 19 (January 1872): 212; see also review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, Spectator (29 July 1871): 920–91. 109. Macalister, review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, 233. 110. ‘‘Tylor on Primitive Culture,’’ 61–62. 111. Stocking, ‘‘Animism in Theory and Practice.’’ 112. Turner, Between Science and Religion, 84–93. 113. Wallace, review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, 71. 114. Müller, Natural Religion, 212–13. Although Müller does not refer speciﬁcally to Primitive Culture here, the context of the discussion and his references to ‘‘animism’’ indicate that Tylor’s theory is his target. 115. ‘‘Tylor on Primitive Culture,’’ 47–48. 116. Review of Primitive Culture, by Müller, Nature (22 June 1871): 117, 138.

4. Andrew Lang 1. The relationship between the two was thus described in a hostile review of Lang’s Making of Religion, which appeared in the Catholic Month (September 1898). 2. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 1–12. The only full biography of Lang, this work has much to say on the literary aspects of his career but very little on his work in anthropology. 3. Lang, Adventures among Books, 9. On Lang’s defense of Scott’s ‘‘loose editorial methods,’’ see Dorson, British Folklorists, 219. 270 | Notes to Pages 106–114

4. Lang, Adventures among Books, 4–5. 5. Ibid., 4. 6. Ibid., 53, 305–6. Lang claimed to have modeled his notion of genius on R. L. Stevenson. The two were close friends, and Lang was a passionate admirer of Stevenson’s work (Lang, Essays in Little, 24). 7. Hilton, Age of Atonement, 314–15. 8. Lang, Adventures among Books, 23. 9. Ibid., 25; Green, Andrew Lang, 21. 10. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 30–31; Lang, Adventures among Books, 28. 11. Lang, Adventures among Books, 28–30. 12. Lang, Oxford, 268–71. 13. Ibid., 271. 14. Lang, Adventures among Books, 36. 15. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 40. 16. Marett, Jerseyman at Oxford, 169; see also George Gordon, ‘‘Andrew Lang,’’ in Concerning Andrew Lang, 10. 17. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 56–57; Whiteing, My Harvest, 272–75. Whiteing was a colleague of Lang’s at the Daily News. 18. On Lang’s literary criticism, see Weintraub, ‘‘Andrew Lang,’’ 5, 13–14; Maurer, ‘‘Andrew Lang and Longman’s Magazine; Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters, 133–39. On Lang’s role in anthropology, see Langham, Building of British Social Anthropology, 251. George Stocking offers an open-minded and balanced discussion of Lang’s work in After Tylor, 50–63. 19. Whiteing, My Harvest, 275. 20. Le Gallienne, Romantic Nineties, 72. 21. Lang, Adventures among Books, 270. 22. Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, 119. 23. The author of Lang’s obituary in the Athenaeum claimed that Lang would be remembered as a popularizer of ‘‘the ideas of more serious scholars.’’ This elicited a sharp protest from Marett, who wrote: ‘‘I cannot conceive what a serious scholar of anthropology may be if Andrew Lang was not amongst the most serious scholars of his generation. . . . At any rate a good many of his fellow workers in this ﬁeld take his contributions very seriously’’ (letter to Athenaeum [3 August 1912]: 119). 24. Review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Athenaeum (18 June 1898): 783. 25. Quoted in R. Green, Andrew Lang, 9. 26. See Robert S. Rait, ‘‘Andrew Lang as Historian,’’ in Concerning Andrew Lang, 4–5, 15–17. 27. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 32–37, 58; Crawford, ‘‘Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism.’’ 28. Lang, Adventures among Books, 107, 117. 29. Ibid., 101; see also Lang, ‘‘Poetry of William Morris,’’ 202. 30. Lang, Making of Religion, 23–25, 37–39, 44; see also Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, xiii, 23, 303, 357; Lang, Adventures among Books, 279–80. 31. Lang, Adventures among Books, 37. 32. Lang, Making of Religion, 2–3, 23, 297–304. 33. Maurer, ‘‘Andrew Lang and Longman’s Magazine,’’ 168. 34. Lang, ‘‘Emile Zola,’’ 165. 35. Lang quoted in Weintraub, ‘‘Andrew Lang,’’ 9. 36. Lang, ‘‘A Fallacy of Mr. Howells,’’ 143. 37. Lang, Adventures among Books, 50. Notes to Pages 114–124 | 271

38. See, for example, Beerbohm, ‘‘Two Glimpses of Andrew Lang,’’ 10–11. 39. Lang, Making of Religion, 23–25, 58. 40. Lang, ‘‘Edward Burnett Tylor,’’ 1. 41. Lowndes, Merry Wives of Westminster, 20–22. 42. Lang, ‘‘Max Mueller,’’ 785; G. Müller, Life and Letters of Müller, 2:381 43. R. Green, Andrew Lang, 70, 73. 44. See Lang, ‘‘Mythology.’’ 45. Bramlett, Language and Imagination, 190, 197, 206–9. Richard Dorson also offers a very detailed discussion of the controversy in ‘‘The Eclipse of Solar Mythology,’’ in Sebeok, ed., Myth: A Symposium, 15–38. 46. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 618, 621. 47. Lang, ‘‘Mythology,’’ 136–39. 48. Ibid., 141; see also Lang, Custom and Myth, 234–35; and Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 219– 20. 49. Lang, ‘‘Anthropology and the Vedas,’’ 108; Müller, ‘‘Savage,’’ 124. 50. Bramlett, Language and Imagination, 126. 51. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 620. 52. Lang, Custom and Myth, 25. 53. Ibid., 9. 54. See Müller, ‘‘Solar Myths,’’ in which Müller relies on ethnological data from the Polynesians, Hottentots, and Algonquians to support his solar hypothesis. 55. Lang, introduction to Household Tales, by the Brothers Grimm, 1:xxxiv. 56. Müller, Natural Religion, 442. 57. See Lang, Adventures among Books, 37–38. 58. See Lang, Custom and Myth, 235–36, 238–39. On Lang’s collaboration with Robertson Smith, see Duff-Cooper, ‘‘Andrew Lang.’’ Lang’s interest in L’anné sociologique is the subject of a letter from July 1907 in Lang Letters (ms. 615). 59. Lang, ‘‘Edward Burnett Tylor,’’ 6. 60. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 618–20. 61. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:10; Lang, ‘‘Mythology,’’ 142–46. 62. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:50, 66. 63. Lang, Custom and Myth, 212–15. 64. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 630–31; Lang, Custom and Myth, 213–14. While explicitly rejecting Herbert Spencer’s claim that ancestor worship was ‘‘the ﬁrst germ of religion,’’ Lang failed to point out that his argument against Spencer applied also to Tylor’s theory. 65. Lang, Custom and Myth, 236–38. 66. Ibid., 260, 245. 67. Ibid., 226. 68. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 631. 69. Lang, Custom and Myth, 161, 63. 70. Ibid., 177. 71. Lang, ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales,’’ 618–19. 72. Lang, Custom and Myth, 179; Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:339–40; Lang, Adventures among Books, 37. 73. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 63. 74. Dorson, British Folklorists, 5–6, 11–15. 75. Lang, ‘‘Apparitions,’’ 202. 76. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 27–28. 272 | Notes to Pages 124–133

77. Ibid., 302–3. 78. Lang, ‘‘At the Sign of the Ship,’’ 330. 79. Lang, ‘‘Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,’’ 623–25. 80. Lang, ‘‘Apparitions,’’ 203. 81. Lang, ‘‘Comparative Study of Ghost Stories,’’ 624. 82. Lang reported seeing two wraiths himself, but he was less sure about ghosts. ‘‘I do ﬁrmly believe,’’ he wrote, ‘‘that there are human faculties, as yet unexplained, as yet inconsistent with popular scientiﬁc ‘materialism.’ But when Mr. Myers goes further, and expresses belief that messages from the dead are uttered by Mrs. Piper, or given by table-tilting, or automatic writing, I cannot march with him’’ (quoted in R. Green, Andrew Lang, 72). 83. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 22–23. 84. Lang, Making of Religion, 3. 85. Ibid., 3, 13. 86. Ibid., 22–24, 40; Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 57. 87. Lang, ‘‘Apparitions,’’ 202. 88. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 6–7. 89. Lang, Adventures among Books, 279. The original essay is entitled ‘‘The Supernatural in Fiction.’’ 90. Ibid. 91. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 6–7, 63. 92. Ibid., 23. 93. See, for example, Making of Religion, 309–43. 94. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 303. 95. Lang, Making of Religion, 339; ‘‘Notes on Ghosts,’’ 452. 96. Lang, Making of Religion, 44. 97. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, 1:239, 2:1–64. The second edition of this work (1899) was extensively revised by Lang to conform to his new ‘‘high gods’’ thesis. 98. Lang, Magic and Religion, 13. 99. Ibid., 184. 100. Lang was a great admirer of Arnold and claimed to know his work well (Matthew Arnold to Lucy Charlotte Arnold Whitridge, 16 October 1886, in Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold, 6:210–11). 101. Arnold, Literature and Dogma, 131. 102. Lang, Making of Religion, 167–84. 103. Ibid., 163. 104. Lang to Tylor, 15 June [?], Add. MSS 50254, Tylor, Correspondence Received. 105. Lang to Tylor, 25 November 1898, Box 12, [letter ref.], Manuscript Collections, Tylor Papers. 106. Quoted in R. R. Marett, ‘‘The Raw Material of Religion,’’ in Concerning Andrew Lang, 11. 107. Lang, Making of Religion, 46. Although he went on in the same passage to attack the logical fallacy of this position, he recognized its persuasive force. 108. Ibid., 254–67. 109. Ibid., 255, 264–66. 110. Ibid., 208–10. 111. Ibid., 196, 256. 112. Ibid., 258–60, 287. 113. Eliade, Quest, 47–48. 114. Lang, Making of Religion, 303–4. 115. Lang, Cock Lane and Common Sense, 336–37. Notes to Pages 134–142 | 273

116. See Clodd, ‘‘In Memoriam: Andrew Lang.’’ 117. Gill, ‘‘Origin and Interpretation of Myths,’’ 122. 118. Grant Allen, review of Custom and Myth, by Lang, Academy (20 December 1884): 404–5. 119. Tylor, review of Myth, Ritual and Religion, by Lang, 277. 120. Eliade, Quest, 25, 47–48; Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 50. 121. Tylor, ‘‘The Limits of Savage Religion.’’ 122. See Lang, ‘‘Are Savage Gods Borrowed from Missionaries?’’ 123. See Dorson, British Folklorists, 202–65. 124. Clodd, ‘‘Presidential Address to the Folk-Lore Society,’’ 59. 125. T. Fairman Ondish to E. Clodd, quoted in Dorson, British Folklorists, 253. 126. Dorson, British Folklorists, 255. 127. Clodd, review of The Making of Religion, by Lang. 128. Hartland, ‘‘ ‘High Gods’ of Australia,’’ 290. 129. Ibid., 312, 329. 130. The words are those of a third critic (review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Athenaeum [18 June 1898]: 782). 131. Review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Critical Review 8 (1898): 393–94. 132. Review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Times (London), 4 July 1898, 15. 133. See review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Critical Review 8 (1898): 390–96; see also Church Quarterly Review 47 (October 1898): 244–46; and review of Magic and Religion, by Lang, Church Quarterly Review 53 (October 1898): 198. 134. Lang, ‘‘Australian Gods,’’ 14, 18. 135. Ibid., 1. But later Lang acknowledged that while he and Müller still differed on questions of mythology, as regarded primitive religion, they ‘‘were in agreement,’’ (‘‘Max Mueller,’’ 790).

5. William Robertson Smith 1. This chapter is based on my article ‘‘Victorian Evangelicalism and the Sociology of Religion: The Career of William Robertson Smith,’’ which appeared in Journal of the History of Ideas 54, no. 1 (January 1993), copyright 1993, the Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc., published by The Johns Hopkins University Press. The standard biography is Black and Chrystal, The Life of William Robertson Smith (1912). It should be noted, however, that Black, a close friend of Robertson Smith’s from their undergraduate days and a fellow Free Churchman, arrived eventually at a theological position considerably less traditional than Robertson Smith’s own, a fact that affects Black’s judgments on his subject in numerous subtle ways. 2. Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith and the Sociological Study of Religion; see also Stocking, After Tylor, 63–81. 3. See, however, recent criticism by Morton Smith (‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 251–61), in which he argues that Robertson Smith’s anthropological works were no more than ‘‘enlargements and extended defenses of theses developed’’ by J. F. McLennan. It is certainly true that McLennan had a crucial inﬂuence on Robertson Smith’s work, but while McLennan focused on ritual, he was not a ‘‘ritualist’’ in the sense that Robertson Smith was; he shared the rationalist and intellectualist assumptions dominant among British anthropologists at the time. 4. Robert Ackerman, ‘‘The Cambridge Group: Origins and Composition,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 5. 5. This discussion of the Great Disruption is based on S. Brown, Thomas Chalmers; see also Bulloch and Drummond, The Scottish Church. 274 | Notes to Pages 142–152

6. See S. Brown, Thomas Chalmers, 44–49. 7. Because in the Church of Scotland induction and ordination normally took place at the same time, by forcing a parish to accept a candidate, the state was, in effect, forcing the Church to ordain him (see S. Brown, Thomas Chalmers, 300–301). 8. Ibid., 334–36. 9. William Pirie Smith quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 11, 26. 10. Ibid., 22–23. 11. Ibid., 508. 12. According to James Bryce, ‘‘he was combative . . . and a discussion with him taxed the defensive acumen of his companions’’ (‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ in Bryce, Studies in Contempo- rary Biography, 323). 13. See the remarks of Robert Rainey, one of Robertson Smith’s principal antagonists at the trial, in Bulloch and Drummond, Church in Late-Victorian Scotland, 76. 14. Ibid., 76. 15. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 13. 16. William Robertson Smith to W. A. Gray [August or September] 1869, classmark M9, Robertson Smith Papers. 17. Black and Chrystal, Life of William Robertson Smith, 84. 18. See esp. ‘‘Christianity and the Supernatural’’ (January 1869) and ‘‘The Work of a Theologi- cal Society’’ (November 1869) in Robertson Smith, Lectures and Essays, 109–36, 137–62 (hereafter cited as L&E). 19. Wallace, ‘‘Religious Upheaval in Scotland,’’ 262. 20. Lilley, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 62. 21. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 34–35, 50. 22. Tait was coauthor with Balfour Stewart of a much-celebrated eirenicon, The Unseen Universe (1875). Written as a reply to Tyndall’s ‘‘Belfast Address,’’ the book was intended to demonstrate the harmony between ‘‘the received postulates of religious teaching’’ and the ‘‘current hypotheses of contemporary science.’’ Apparently Robertson Smith also took part in its composition (Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 162–65). 23. Ibid., 85. 24. Ibid., 88. 25. Ibid., 85, 534. 26. Ibid., 103 n. 1. 27. William Robertson Smith, ‘‘On the Question of Prophecy in the Critical Schools of the Continent,’’ British Quarterly Review (April 1870), reprinted in L&E, 164, 176. 28. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 158. 29. Robertson Smith, ‘‘Bible,’’ 634. 30. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 188–90. 31. A. H. Charteris, ‘‘The New Encyclopaedia Britannica on Theology,’’ Edinburgh Courant (16 April 1875), quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 189. 32. For the draft form of the original libel and the various amended forms, see Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 582–607. 33. Bulloch and Drummond, Church in Late-Victorian Scotland, 76. 34. For a discussion of this point by a Robertson Smith supporter, see Lindsay, ‘‘Critical Movement in the Free Church of Scotland,’’ 32. 35. See the following anti–Robertson Smith pamphlets: [Montgomery], Examination of Arti- cles, 46; Fallibility of Inspired Scripture, 49–51; J. Smith, Professor Smith on the Bible, 10–12; Innes, Commission of Assembly, 44–45. Notes to Pages 152–160 | 275

36. Bryce, Studies in Contemporary Biography, 316. 37. According to the ofﬁcial account, ‘‘the ladies seemed the most incorrigible’’ (quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 359; see also ibid., 349–50). 38. Robertson Smith, Answer to the Form of Libel, 16. 39. Robertson Smith, L&E, 313–15; see also ibid., 109–36. 40. Robertson Smith, The Old Testament in the Jewish Church, 23–24 (hereafter cited as OTJC). 41. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, li. 42. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 377. 43. Ibid., 424–51; Bulloch and Drummond, Church in Late-Victorian Scotland, 77–78; Carswell, Fellow Scots, 55–56. 44. Kogan, The Great E.B., 55–62. 45. Quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 494–95. 46. Reprinted in Robertson Smith, L&E, 484–97. 47. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 235, 340–41, 452. 48. Cook, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 11. 49. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 571. 50. According to Robert Ackerman: ‘‘From the start Frazer and Smith found themselves at odds regarding the meaning, value, and future of religion. . . . [A]nd it must have taken them only a little while to resolve . . . that their disagreement should never be allowed to undermine their friendship’’ (Ackerman, Frazer, 70). Nevertheless, after his friend’s death, Frazer tended to stress the iconoclastic implications (as he saw them) of Robertson Smith’s work (see Frazer, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 800–804). Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 537, 571–73. Black’s own religious position seems to have been closer to Frazer’s than to that of Robertson Smith (see two letters from J. S. Black to J. G. Frazer, 14 April 1904 and 22 September 1913, Frazer Correspondence). 51. See Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late-Victorian Scotland, 215–21; Bulloch and Drummond, Church in Victorian Scotland, 75–77; Douglas, Purity and Danger, 15–18; and Morton Smith, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 251–61. 52. T. O. Beidelman contends that ‘‘some of Smith’s weaknesses in analysis and perception (as well as his strengths) derive from his particular religious convictions,’’ but he fails to specify what the ‘‘strengths’’ might be (Beidelman, Robertson Smith, 35 n. 48; see also ibid., 57–58). 53. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 124. 54. Riesen, Criticism and Faith in Late-Victorian Scotland, 211. 55. Quoted ibid., 212 (Riesen has transcribed the text directly from Robertson Smith’s manuscript notes). 56. Robertson Smith, OTJC, 12. 57. Ibid., 13 (emphasis in original). 58. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 70, 112, 159–60. 59. William Robertson Smith to William Pirie Smith, 7 July 1869, classmark C118, Robertson Smith Papers; see also Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 112. 60. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 1. 61. Robertson Smith, OTJC, 13, 15. 62. Ibid., 18–22. 63. Ibid., 17. 64. T. O. Beidelman observes that for Robertson Smith, the prophets ‘‘were the convenient diachronic link between different synchronic stages of society’’ (W. Robertson Smith, 40–41). 65. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 70–71, 81–82. 66. MS notes on Lectures I and II, Burnett Lectures, 3rd Series, Robertson Smith Papers. 67. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 49–50. 276 | Notes to Pages 161–169

68. The article is reprinted in Robertson Smith, L&E, 456. 69. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 382. 70. This is the message of a letter (undated) to Robertson Smith from one of his supporters at Cambridge, William Wright, in the Robertson Smith Papers at Cambridge. 71. Robertson Smith, L&E, 391 (emphasis added). 72. Ibid., 363–64. 73. Ibid. 74. For Robertson Smith’s comments on Bunsen, see L&E, 116, 126–28. On the relation between Kuenen’s views and those of the ‘‘thoroughgoing evolutionists,’’ see Robertson Smith, ‘‘Old Testa- ment Exegesis,’’ British and Foreign Evangelical Review 20 (1871): 596–99. 75. A version of these edited by John Day appeared in 1995 (see Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: Second and Third Series). 76. Quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 535. 77. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the Semites: The Fundamental Institutions, 16 (hereafter cited as LRS). 78. Ibid., 20. 79. Ibid., 20–21. 80. Ibid., 29. 81. Ibid., 29–30. 82. Ibid., 32, 90 (emphasis in original). 83. Ibid., 30–32. 84. Ibid., 124. 85. For a discussion of the debate on totemism, see Stocking, After Tylor, esp. 176–78. 86. Robertson Smith, LRS, 139; see also ibid., 129. 87. Robertson Smith, Kinship and Marriage in Early Arabia, 223. 88. See Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2:375. 89. Robertson Smith, LRS, 226–27; Robertson Smith’s article ‘‘Sacriﬁce’’ for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica contains an earlier version of this theory. 90. Robertson Smith, LRS, 265. 91. Ibid., 295–96. Robertson Smith’s reliance on the Narratio of Pseudo-Nilus as a main source of evidence for his account of ancient Semitic animal sacriﬁce has been much criticized (see Morton Smith, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 255 n. 11); but some modern scholarship has defended the authenticity of the Narratio (see Christides, ‘‘Once Again the ‘Narrations’ of Nilus Sinaiticus’’). 92. Robertson Smith, LRS, 255–57. 93. Ibid., 257. 94. Ibid., 252–53. 95. Ibid., 390–96. 96. Richard Riesen argues that Robertson Smith’s views on the atonement were almost certainly unorthodox (Criticism and Faith in Late-Victorian Scotland, 174–86). 97. Robertson Smith, LRS, 3. 98. Ibid., 424–25. 99. Robertson Smith, LRS, 1st ed. (1889), 393. 100. Frazer, Gorgon’s Head, 288–89. 101. Robertson Smith, OTJC, 19–20. 102. Quoted in Cook, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 16. 103. Robertson Smith, L&E, 612–13. 104. Ibid., 483. Notes to Pages 169–178 | 277

105. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 57–58. 106. Robertson Smith, LRS, 439–440. 107. Quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 536–37. 108. Ibid., 537. 109. For example, in Beidelman, W. Robertson Smith. In contrast, Carol Smith recognizes that Robertson Smith’s Burnett Lectures emphasized the unique status of Hebrew religion (and by extension, Christianity) (‘‘William Robertson Smith as Christian and Scholar,’’ in Johnstone, ed., William Robertson Smith: Essays in Reassessment, 206). 110. Compare, for example, their observations on the relative merits of fetishism and idolatry. Tylor assumes that the worship of a carved image is somehow higher or more advanced than worship of naturally occurring objects (Primitive Culture, 2:167). In contrast, Robertson Smith observes that ‘‘no doubt the worship of unshapen blocks is from the artistic point of view a very poor thing, but from a purely religious point of view its inferiority to image worship is not so evident’’ (LRS, 209). 111. On the use of conceptions of property as the test of a progressive society, see Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, 27. 112. E. E. Evans-Pritchard assumes that this is Robertson Smith’s position (Theories of Primitive Religion, 53). 113. Robertson Smith, LRS, 257–63. 114. Ibid., 439–40; see also OTJC, 288–90. 115. W. R. Smith to T. H. Huxley, 6 December 1889, Huxley Papers. 116. Emile Durkheim, Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 416. 117. Salmond, ‘‘Professor William Robertson Smith.’’ 118. Glover, Evangelical Nonconformists, 125, 127; Cheyne, Transforming of the Kirk, 51. 119. The phrase is Weber’s (‘‘The Social Psychology of the World Religions,’’ in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 267). I have seen no evidence that Weber was familiar with Robertson Smith’s work. 120. See Edward Said’s critique of Robertson Smith in Orientalism, 235–37. Said’s discussion is one-sided, however, in that he does not recognize how Robertson Smith’s religious concerns led him to depart from classic Victorian social evolutionism. 121. Burkitt, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 684–85. 122. Ibid., 687–88. 123. Chadwick, Victorian Church 2:101–6. 124. Lloyd, review of Religion of the Semites, by Robertson Smith, 375; see also review of Religion of the Semites in Nature 41 (13 February 1890): 337–38. 125. Jacobs, ‘‘Recent Research in Comparative Religion,’’ 388; see also Lloyd, review of Religion of the Semites, by Robertson Smith, 379. 126. Review of Religion of the Semites, by Robertson Smith, Spectator 65 (11 October 1890): 500. 127. Robertson Smith, LRS, 439. 128. On Lang and Robertson Smith, see Duff-Cooper, ‘‘Andrew Lang.’’ 129. Quoted in Lukes, Emile Durkheim, 237. It is not clear which authors Durkheim included within Robertson Smith’s ‘‘school.’’ 130. Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, 2. 131. Nisbet, introduction to Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, v. 132. Jones, Life and Work of Sigmund Freud, 2:353. 133. Freud, Totem and Taboo, 202. Freud used the work of Tylor, Lang, Lubbock, and Frazer, among others, but he reserves his highest praise for Robertson Smith, whom he describes as ‘‘a many-sided . . . keen and free-thinking man’’ (171–72). 278 | Notes to Pages 179–187

134. Dictionary of National Biography (Supplement 1931–40), s.v. ‘‘Burkitt, Francis Crawford.’’ 135. Robertson Smith, Prophets of Israel, 310–11. 136. Cook, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ 16.

6. James G. Frazer 1. Reinach, ‘‘Growth of Mythological Study,’’ 438. 2. See Douglas, ‘‘Judgments on James Frazer’’; see also Ackerman, Frazer, 1–4. 3. Vickery, Literary Impact of ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 68. 4. Frazer, The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., 10:vi (hereafter cited as GB; all references are to the third edition unless otherwise noted). 5. Robert Fraser characterizes Frazer’s project as a study of ‘‘the epistemology of misconcep- tion’’(Making of ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 38). 6. Frazer, ‘‘Memories of My Parents,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, 131. 7. This incident is recorded in the rather gossipy biography written by Frazer’s former secretary, R. Angus Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 22. This is a revised version of Downie’s James George Frazer: The Portrait of a Scholar. Downie’s books have been superseded by Robert Acker- man’s excellent critical biography; for Ackerman’s account of this incident, see Frazer, 115–16. 8. Frazer, ‘‘Memories of My Parents,’’ 132–33. 9. Frazer, ‘‘Speech on Receiving the Freedom of the City of Glasgow,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, 122–24. 10. Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 24. 11. Ibid., 23–25; see also Bronislaw Malinowski, ‘‘Sir James George Frazer: A Biographical Appreciation,’’ in Malinowski, Scientific Theory of Culture, 181–82. 12. Quoted in Robert Ackerman, ‘‘Sir James G. Frazer and A. E. Houseman,’’ 346. 13. Frazer, ‘‘On Certain Burial Customs,’’ 102–3. 14. Frazer to Tylor, 16 October 1898, Tylor Papers; Frazer to Macmillan, 13 May 1900, Add. MSS 55135, Macmillan Archives. 15. Frazer, ‘‘Speech,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmogonies, 126. 16. Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 524. 17. Frazer, ‘‘William Robertson Smith,’’ in Frazer, Gorgon’s Head, 278 (first published in Fort- nightly Review, June 1894); Frazer, ‘‘Speech,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution of Primitive Cos- mogonies, 126. 18. Frazer, GB, 1:xiv. 19. Frazer to John F. White, 15 December 1897, in Frazer, Selected Letters of Frazer, 107. 20. Ackerman, Frazer, 89. 21. Burrow, Evolution and Society, 241 n. 2; see also Jones, ‘‘Robertson Smith and James Frazer,’’ 31–56. 22. The letters are reproduced in Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual,’’ 126–29. Marett pointed out that while Frazer argued that ‘‘savage ritual . . . seems to . . . bear the imprint of reflexion and purpose stamped on it just as plainly as any actions of civilised men,’’ Robertson Smith had spoken of the ancient religions as the products of ‘‘unconscious’’ forces. Marett went on, ‘‘all that some of us . . . have been trying to do is to emphasize the mobbish character of primitive religion,’’ an enterprise which Robertson Smith would have endorsed but one far removed from Frazer’s implicitly intellectualist assumptions (Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual, 126–18; emphasis in original). 23. Apollodorus, The Library, trans. J. G. Frazer (London: Heinnemann, 1921) 1:xxvii–xxviii. Notes to Pages 187–192 | 279

24. Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual,’’ 129–30. 25. Frazer, Gorgon’s Head, 287. 26. Ibid., 283. 27. Frazer to John Sutherland Black, 27 November 1889, in Frazer, Selected Letters, 64–65. 28. Frazer, GB, 1:332–34. 29. Quoted in Black and Chrystal, Life of Robertson Smith, 518. 30. Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 21. 31. According to A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Frazer ‘‘did not share that belief in immortality that he so diligently investigated’’ (‘‘Sir James George Frazer,’’ 2). On this, as on so many other topics, Frazer’s published remarks are quite ambiguous (see Frazer, Man, God and Immortality, 345–421; this volume is a collection of passages from Frazer’s books conveniently arranged to reveal his thoughts on selected subjects). 32. Reprinted as an appendix in the third edition; see Frazer, GB 9:412–23. 33. Frazer to Macmillan, 17 May 1906, BL Add. MSS 55136, Macmillan Archives. 34. Frazer to Macmillan, 15 February 1928, BL Add. MSS 55143, Macmillan Archives. 35. Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual,’’ 130; see also Malinowski, Scientific Theory of Culture, 183. 36. Downie, Frazer: Portrait of a Scholar, 11. 37. For example, Vickery, Literary Impact of ‘‘The Golden Bough’’; Herbert, Victorian Relativity; and Hyman, Tangled Bank. 38. See Frazer, Questions on the Customs, Beliefs and Languages of Savages, 5–10; Frazer, ‘‘The Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology,’’ in Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 246 (first published in Science Progress, no. 64 [April 1922]). For Frazer’s importance to ethnographic fieldworkers, see Malinowski, Scientific Theory of Culture, 183. 39. Frazer to Macmillan, 25 December 1889, BL Add. MSS 55134, Macmillan Archives. 40. In fact, it took a while for the book to reach a wide audience; according to Charles Morgan, Frazer and his publishers ‘‘had no great reward’’ until the publication of the abridged edition in 1922 (Morgan, House of Macmillan, 172). 41. Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 20. 42. Frazer, ‘‘Gibbon at Lausanne,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmologies, 49. 43. See, for example, Frazer, GB 1:xx. 44. Frazer, ‘‘Gibbon,’’ in Frazer, Creation and Evolution in Primitive Cosmologies, 50. 45. Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 20; Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual,’’ 133–34. 46. Frazer, Gorgon’s Head, 379–83. 47. Frazer, GB, 11:306. 48. Ibid., 1:xxv–xxvi. 49. Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 267. 50. Ibid., 265. 51. Ackerman suggests that Frazer may have been inspired to take up the story of the priest of Nemi after reading a play on the subject written by Renan (Frazer, 93–94). 52. Frazer, ‘‘Preface to the 1900 edition,’’ reprinted in GB 1:xxvi. 53. Herbert, ‘‘Vampire Religion,’’ 105; Ackerman, Frazer, 95–102, 121; Hyman, Tangled Bank, 439–40. 54. Frazer, ‘‘Some Popular Superstitions of the Ancients,’’ Folk-Lore (1890), in Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 129. 55. Frazer, GB, 1:235. 56. Frazer, ‘‘Taboo,’’ 17; Frazer, ‘‘Scope and Method of Mental Anthropology,’’ in Frazer, Gar- nered Sheaves, 87, 251. 280 | Notes to Pages 192–202

57. Frazer, GB, 1: 236. As early as 1890, Frazer had warned of the ‘‘mass of savagery lying at our doors’’ (Garnered Sheaves, 130). 58. Frazer, ‘‘The Cursing of Venizelos,’’ Folk-Lore (30 June 1917), in Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 208. 59. Frazer, GB, 10:viii–ix. The first edition (1890) and other pieces written about the same time do seem to focus only on peasants as the modern carriers of superstition; in later writings, however, Frazer speaks more generally of the ‘‘uneducated’’ or the ‘‘mob.’’ 60. von Arx, Progress and Pessimism, esp. 6–10. 61. Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 249–51. 62. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, 1:xv–xvi. 63. Frazer to Macmillan, 20 January 1909, BL Add. MSS 55137, Macmillan Archives; see also Frazer, Psyche’s Task, 17; Frazer, Garnered Sheaves, 250–51. 64. On the threat of anti-Semitism, see Herbert, Victorian Relativity, 206–8. 65. See Besterman, Bibliography of Frazer. 66. The phrase is used by an anonymous critic in ‘‘Anthropology—A Science?’’ 198. 67. In Totemism and Exogamy, Frazer obligingly reprints, in chronological order and without revision, the articles in which he developed these theories (1:1–172). 68. Frazer, GB, 1:xix. 69. Frazer, Totemism and Exogamy, 1:xiii. 70. Ackerman, ‘‘Frazer on Myth and Ritual,’’ 123. 71. Frazer, GB, 1:viii–ix. 72. Ibid., 10:xi. 73. Ibid., 1:xx. 74. Ibid., 237, 11:305. 75. It is interesting to note the resemblance between this theory and Comte’s tripartite division of history, though Frazer does not mention Comte (see ibid., xx). 76. Ibid., xx–xxi. 77. Ibid., 220–22. 78. Ibid., 233. 79. Frazer based his claim on Native Tribes of Central Australia by Spencer and Gillen; he had read the manuscript and assisted in its publication. It may be that he had Lang in mind when he included ‘‘propitiation’’ in his definition of religion, since it was Lang’s contention that the Austra- lians did not sacrifice to their high gods. According to Frazer’s definition, then, they had no religion. Part of the appeal of the new Australian evidence was that it seemed to offer ammunition against the ‘‘high gods’’ thesis, but while Frazer interpreted the new material as support for his claim that magic had preceded religion, he claimed to have arrived at the theory deductively (see Frazer, GB, 1:234). 80. Ibid., 1:237–39. 81. Ibid., 220–24; see also ibid., 11:305–8. 82. Ibid., 5:5. 83. Ibid., 3. 84. Turner, Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, 120. 85. Malinowski, Scientific Theory of Culture, 184, 190–91. 86. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1:62. 87. Frazer, GB, 11:308. 88. Ibid., 1:235–36. 89. Ibid., 244–45. 90. Ibid., 246, 332. 91. Ibid., 3:1. 92. Ibid., 4:9–10. Notes to Pages 202–211 | 281

93. This is the theme of Psyche’s Task (1909) in which Frazer shows how ‘‘superstition’’ has at times strengthened such ‘‘pillars’’ of civilized society as marriage, private property, and criminal law. 94. Frazer, GB, 1:215–16. 95. Ibid., 217. 96. Ibid., 332. 97. Ibid., 247. 98. Ibid., 5:3–4. 99. Ibid., 1:373–77. 100. Ibid., 4:211–12. 101. Ibid., 212. 102. Ibid., 9:407–9. 103. Ibid., 227. 104. Ibid., 198–99. 105. Ibid., v. 106. Frazer to Macmillan, 23 February 1912, BL Add. MSS 55138, Macmillan Archives. 107. See Frazer, GB, 2:194–95, 5:264, on the virgin birth; 4:160, on the divine son as an acceptable victim; 5:272, 304–10 on resurrection of the god; and 5:189 on sacramental eating of the god. 108. See ibid., 9:412 n. 1. 109. Ibid., 422. 110. Ibid., 421–22. 111. Ibid., 419. 112. Frazer to Macmillan, 1 April 1900, BL Add. MSS 55135, Macmillan Archives. 113. Lang, Magic and Religion, 107. 114. Frazer, GB, 9:422–23. 115. Ibid., 306–8. 116. Ibid., 10:vi. 117. Ibid., 9:89. 118. Vickery, Literary Impact of ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 5. 119. Frazer, GB, 11:308–9. 120. For an early instance of Frazer’s aesthetic approach to religious ceremonial, see the 1883 diary entry in which he refers to a Catholic service as presenting an effect at once ‘‘harsh,’’ ‘‘theatrical,’’ and ‘‘touching’’ (quoted in Ackerman, Frazer, 31). 121. Review of The Golden Bough, 1st ed., by Frazer, Edinburgh Review 172 (1890): 572. 122. Jacobs, ‘‘Recent Research in Comparative Religion,’’ 385, 393. 123. Ibid., 391, 394; see also review of The Making of Religion, by Lang, Edinburgh Review 188 (1898): 312. 124. J. E. H. [Jane Ellen Harrison], review of Balder the Beautiful, by Frazer, 996. 125. Vickery, Literary Impact of ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 138, 81. 126. Ibid., 122–28. 127. Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 66. 128. Jerome Buckley quoted in Livingston, ‘‘Tennyson, Jowett, and the Chinese Buddhist Pilgrims,’’164; see also Stocking, After Tylor, 148. 129. Vickery, Literary Impact of ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 244. 130. Review of The Golden Bough, 2nd ed., by Frazer, Blackwoods 169 (February 1901): 270. 131. Review of The Scapegoat, pt. 6 of The Golden Bough, 3rd ed., by Frazer, Athenaeum (11 October 1913): 383. The reviewer pointed out that ‘‘perhaps . . . we do not allow sufﬁciently for the fact that the savage no less than ourselves can deal consciously in symbols.’’ 132. Lang, review of The Golden Bough, 2nd ed., by Frazer, 244; see also review of The Scapegoat, 282 | Notes to Pages 211–218

by Frazer, Athenaeum (11 October 1913): 383. A related objection was that Frazer had ‘‘overworked’’ the ‘‘vegetable factor’’ in primitive religion (see ‘‘Anthropology—A Science?’’ 195; and Hartland, review of Spirits of the Corn and the Wild, by Frazer, 28. On the other hand, Alfred Nutt, a prominent member of the Folklore Society, complained that critics had not given Frazer enough credit for pointing to the religious significance attaching to ‘‘the overpowering interest felt by mankind in the germination and growth of the food crop’’ (Nutt, review of The Golden Bough, by Frazer, 238–39). 133. Hartland, review of The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, by Frazer, 14. 134. See, for example, ibid. 135. Marett, ‘‘Magic or Religion?’’ 402–4. 136. Ibid., 407. 137. Marett suggested that the theory was so unconvincing that it could safely be allowed to ‘‘explode itself’’ (ibid., 394). Point-by-point refutations of Frazer’s theory can be found in review of The Golden Bough, 2nd ed., by Frazer, Church Quarterly Review 194 (1901): 181–88; and Gaster, review of The Golden Bough, by Frazer. 138. See Lang, ‘‘Mr. Frazer’s Theory of the Crucifixion.’’ 139. Lang, Magic and Religion, 206. On Frazer’s reaction, see Downie, Frazer and ‘‘The Golden Bough,’’ 54. Ackerman disputes Downie’s interpretation (Frazer, 172–74). 140. Marett, ‘‘Magic or Religion?’’ 396–97. 141. Farnell, review of Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, by Frazer, 932 (the material under review was later incorporated into the third edition of The Golden Bough); see also Gomme, review of The Golden Bough, 2nd ed., by Frazer, 225. 142. See Boas, ‘‘On the Limitations of the Comparative Method in Anthropology.’’ On the significance of this article, see Stocking, Race, Culture and Evolution, 195–233. 143. ‘‘Anthropology—A Science?’’ 197; Marett, ‘‘Magic or Religion?’’ 395. 144. T. E. Page, review of The Golden Bough, 2nd ed., by Frazer, Bookman (London) 19 (April 1901): 21. 145. Hartland, review of The Magic Art and the Evolution of Kings, by Frazer, 16. It was Hartland who called The Golden Bough a ‘‘monument’’ in his review of Balder the Beautiful in Man 14 (1914): 192. 146. Marett, ‘‘Magic or Religion?’’ 408.

7. Jane Ellen Harrison 1. Bierl, Calder, and Fowler, eds., Prussian and the Poet, 4–5. 2. Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 118–24. However, Beard uses ‘‘ritualism’’ in a rather narrow sense to refer only to classicists, virtually ignoring the anthropological interest in the study of ritual that Harrison was well aware of by the time she began to publish her full-length works (ibid., 112–15). 3. Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 185, 185 n. 7. 4. Stocking, After Tylor, 116; Ackerman, Frazer, 89. 5. Jane Ellen Harrison, Alpha and Omega, 205 (hereafter cited as A&O). 6. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 12–15. Peacock’s work is explicitly Freudian in interpretation; it is not necessary to accept all of her interpretations to agree that Jane disliked her stepmother, was unhappy at home, and at some point came to feel guilt over her mother’s death. 7. For Murray’s view, see Gilbert Murray, ‘‘Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928,’’ 566, reprinted in Harrison, ‘‘Epilogomena’’ and ‘‘Themis.’’ Citations of Themis or Epilogomena refer to this combined edition unless otherwise noted. Notes to Pages 218–224 | 283

8. Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 159. 9. Harrison to Gilbert Murray, 21 March 1913, Box 4, Harrison Papers. 10. Harrison, A&O, 3. 11. Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (hereafter cited as RSL) is a collection of anec- dotes, many of them humorous. It contains quite a number of revealing passages, but it also omits any mention of most of Harrison’s closest friends and contains little information on her most important life’s work—the study of Greek religion. Other autobiographical references appear in the collection of essays written between 1909 and 1914 published as Alpha and Omega. 12. Harrison, RSL, 80. 13. Harrison, A&O, 184. Several authorities refer to Harrison as coming from a Dissenting or Nonconformist background (Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 14; Robert Ackerman, ‘‘The Cambridge Group: Origins and Composition,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 5, n. 10). That was not the case, as her own words attest. 14. Harrison, RSL, 19; see also ibid., 17–18. 15. Harrison, A&O, 22. 16. Ibid., 59. 17. Typescript of biography by Hope Mirrlees, Box 15, Harrison Papers (hereafter cited as Mirrlees, Harrison Papers). 18. Murray, ‘‘Jane Ellen Harrison,’’ 577. 19. Mirrlees, Harrison Papers. 20. Harrison, RSL, 27. 21. Mirrlees, Harrison Papers. 22. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 65. 23. Quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 38. 24. Ibid. 25. Victoria de Bunsen, Newnham College Roll Letter (1929), 69–70. 26. Harrison, A&O, 123. 27. Ibid., 206. 28. Cornford, Newnham College Roll Letter, 76. 29. Quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 113. 30. Cornford, Newnham College Roll Letter, 76; Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 113. 31. Harrison, A&O, 130–31. 32. Ibid., 135. 33. See Martha Vicinus’s discussion of Harrison’s friendships in Independent Women, 152–57. 34. Harrison, A&O, 128; RSL, 88. 35. Peacock, Harrison, 107–8; Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 141–42. 36. Harrison, RSL, 89. 37. Harrison to Lady Mary Murray, 3 September 1904, quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Let- ters, 69. 38. See also the anecdote by Helen Salter (H. de G. S.), Newnham College Roll Letter, 71. 39. Harrison, Rationalism and Religious Reaction, 31, 37. 40. Harrison, A&O, 199 (emphasis in original). Similar criticism appears in Rationalism and Religious Reaction, 19; Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, 650; and Themis, 446. 41. Harrison, Themis, 449–50. 42. Murray, ‘‘Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928,’’ 576–77. 43. Harrison, RSL, 11–12. 44. Ibid., 86. 45. Harrison to Jessie Stewart, 1908, Box 10, Harrison Papers. 284 | Notes to Pages 225–231

46. Harrison, Introductory Studies in Greek Art, 63–64. 47. Ibid., 29–30. 48. Also, as Mary Beard has pointed out, Harrison continued to rely very heavily on analyses of Greek art to support her theories on religion and mythology (Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 106). 49. Quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 122; see also Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 74; Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 85–89. 50. Quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 121 51. See Ackerman, ‘‘Harrison: The Early Work,’’ 223–25. 52. Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 11, 115. 53. Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 89; Mirrlees, Harrison Papers. 54. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 71–75. 55. Ackerman, ‘‘Harrison: The Early Work,’’ 224. More recently, Mary Beard asserts that the significance of the episode has been exaggerated (Beard, Invention of Jane Harrison, 120–21). It is true, as Beard points out, that the incident did not lead to a wholesale repudiation by Harrison of her previous work or the adoption of a completely new academic direction. Nevertheless, it is clear that the episode rankled and was seen by her as a landmark in her career. 56. Harrison cites Tylor in her list of authorities in Myths of the Odyssey; the first mention of Mannhardt, as far as I know, is in Harrison’s introductory comments to Margaret Verrall’s translation of Pausanius in Mythology and Monuments of Ancient Athens, iii. 57. F. M. Cornford recalled that ‘‘every lecture [by Harrison] was a drama in which the spectators were to share the emotions of ‘Recognition’ ’’ (Newnham College Roll Letter, 74). 58. Quoted in Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 87–88. 59. Quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, xiii; see also Harrison, A&O, 184–86. 60. Harrison, A&O, 64,149–53; see also Harrison, review of Greece and Babylon, by Farnell. 61. On ‘‘Old Rats,’’ see Cornford, Newnham College Roll Letter, 76. 62. Frances Darwin quoted in Stewart, Portrait from Letters, 107. 63. Murray, ‘‘Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928,’’ 564. 64. Harrison, Themis, 449–50. 65. Harrison, ‘‘Pillar and the Maiden,’’ 65; see also Harrison, A&O, 200–201. 66. Harrison, introduction to Mythology and Monuments, by Verrall, iii (emphasis in original); see Ackerman, ‘‘Harrison: The Early Work,’’ 225–26. 67. Harrison, RSL, 19. 68. Harrison, Themis, 136. 69. Ibid., 29 (emphasis in original). 70. Harrison, ‘‘Pandora’s Box,’’ 108. 71. Harrison, Themis, 28. Perhaps the most extreme statement of this idea appears in Ancient Art and Ritual, 54. 72. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, 26. 73. Harrison, A&O, 204–5. 74. Harrison, Prolegomena, 452–53. 75. Harrison, Themis, 19. 76. Harrison, ‘‘Pandora’s Box,’’ 106–14. 77. Harrison, Prolegomena, 95, 31–321. 78. Harrison’s work was part of a wave of feminist writing on matriarchy and the origins of the family that gathered strength between 1890 and 1914 (see Allen, ‘‘Feminism, Social Science, and the Meanings of Modernity,’’ 1084–113). 79. Harrison, Prolegomena, 285 (emphasis in original). 80. Farnell, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, 825; see also Arlen, ‘‘For Love of an Idea.’’ 81. See, for example, Martha Celeste Carpentier, who refers to Harrison’s ‘‘imaginative recre- Notes to Pages 232–237 | 285 ation of a female-dominated past, almost a feminist utopia’’ (Ritual, Myth, and the Modernist Text, 175); see also Passman, ‘‘Out of the Closet and into the Field.’’ 82. Harrison, Prolegomena, 143–44. 83. Ibid., 402. 84. Ibid., 285. 85. Harrison, A&O, 99–101. 86. Harrison, Prolegomena, 314, 262–72. 87. Ibid., 565. 88. Harrison, Themis, 384. 89. Harrison, A&O, 35. 90. In Ancient Art and Ritual, Harrison argued that modern art reflects a science ‘‘which has dwarfed actual human life almost to imaginative extinction’’ (200). 91. Murray, ‘‘Jane Ellen Harrison, 1850–1928,’’ 568. 92. See esp. Harrison, A&O, 183–84, 195–208. 93. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 14, 213. 94. Ibid., 35. 95. Ibid., 210. 96. Harrison, RSL, 37 (emphasis in original). 97. Harrison, Themis, 542. 98. Harrison, A&O, 179. 99. Harrison, Prolegomena, 343. 100. Ibid., 80. 101. Harrison, A&O, 206. 102. Harrison, Themis, 468; A&O, 205. 103. Harrison, A&O, 206–8. 104. Harrison, Prolegomena, 452–53; 649–50. 105. Harrison, A&O, 200. 106. Ibid., 199. 107. Harrison, Themis, 553. 108. Harrison, A&O, 195. 109. Harrison, review of From Religion to Philosophy, by Cornford, 133. 110. Peacock, Jane Ellen Harrison, 212; see also Mary Beard, ‘‘Frazer, Leach and Virgil,’’ 205 n. 11; Thomas Africa, ‘‘Aunt Glegg among the Dons or Taking Jane Harrison at Her Word,’’ in Calder, ed., Cambridge Ritualists Reconsidered, 23. Annabel Robinson notes that reviewers admired parts of Harrison’s work, but her own analysis focuses mainly on negative assessments (Life and Work of Harrison 142–43, 169–70, 230–32). 111. Farnell, review of Themis, by Harrison, 454. 112. Farnell, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, 825. 113. Farnell, review of Themis, by Harrison, 11, 455. 114. W. H. D. Rouse, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Classical Review 18, no. 9 (December 1904): 465–70; review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Expository Times 15 (1903–4): 347; see also review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Times Literary Supplement (26 February 1904): 59. 115. Crooke, review of Themis, by Harrison, 394. 116. Review of Themis, by Harrison, Spectator (27 April 1912): 678; review of Themis, by Harrison, Athenaeum, no. 4403 (16 March 1912): 317–18. 117. Review of Ancient Art and Ritual, by Harrison, Athenaeum (2 August 1913): 116. 118. Review of Ancient Art and Ritual, by Harrison, New Statesman (30 August 1913): 667. 119. Review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Expository Times, 15, 347; see also review of Prole- gomenon, by Harrison, Spectator (9 April 1904): 570–71. 286 | Notes to Pages 237–244

120. Farnell, review of Themis, by Harrison, 458. 121. Review of Alpha and Omega, by Harrison, New Statesman (1 May 1915): 92. 122. Harrison, Prolegomena, 343. 123. Murray, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison. 124. Ibid., 519. 125. Harrison to Gilbert Murray, 27 April 1902, Harrison Papers. 126. Murray, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, 519. 127. Review of Themis, Spectator (27 April 1912): 678. 128. [Lang], review of Themis, by Harrison. 129. For doubts about the theories of Bergson, in particular, and ‘‘modern sociology,’’ in general, see review of Themis, by Harrison, Oxford and Cambridge Review 19 (1912): 188–89; Joyce, review of Themis, by Harrison. 130. Crooke, review of Themis, by Harrison, 395. 131. R. de Bary ‘‘The Natural Fruitfulness of Religion,’’ Church Quarterly Review (January 1914): 375; see also review of Themis, by Harrison, Spectator (27 April 1912): 678. 132. Review of Prolegomenon, by Harrison, Spectator (9 April 1904): 570–71; Crooke, review of Themis, 395; see also Murray, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, 519. 133. Reviewers also rejected the claim, presented in Prolegomena but dropped in Themis, that the Olympians were a foreign import (see review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Athenaeum [27 Febru- ary 1904]: 278; review of Prolegomenon, by Harrison, Journal of Hellenic Studies 24 [1904]: 174). 134. Review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, Spectator (9 April 1904): 571. 135. Murray, review of Prolegomena, by Harrison, 519; review of Themis, by Harrison, Athenaeum (16 March 1912): 317–18; Joyce, review of Themis, by Harrison, 397. 136. ‘‘She brings out by a most penetrating analysis . . . the fundamental nature of this ‘variety of religious experience,’ as William James would have called it’’ (review of Themis, by Harrison, Athenaeum [16 March 1912]: 318). 137. See the following reviews of Harrison’s Alpha and Omega: Athenaeum (5 June 1915): 500; New Statesman (1 May 1915); Saturday Review (15 May 1915). Reactions to this work, one that is not solely scholarly but contains more personal reﬂections, demonstrate the appeal of Harrison’s position—antitheological but deeply religious. 138. Harrison, ‘‘Pillar and the Maiden,’’ 65. 139. Jane Ellen Harrison to Gilbert Murray, 27 April 1902, Harrison Papers. 140. Jane Ellen Harrison to Gilbert Murray, 14 August 1902, Harrison Papers. 141. Harrison, A&O, 68. 142. Harrison, Ancient Art and Ritual, 206. 143. Harrison, A&O, 178. 144. Jane Ellen Harrison to Gilbert Murray, July 1902, Harrison Papers; see also Harrison, Themis, 460. 145. In fact, Rationalism and Religious Reaction, one of her later writings on religion, was ﬁrst delivered before the South Place Ethical Society in 1919 as the Conway Memorial Lecture. On the special appeal to women of the Ethical movement, see Royle, Radicals, Secularists, and Republi- cans, 130. 146. Harrison, A&O, 236. 147. Harrison, Epilegomena, lii.

Conclusion 1. Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion, 4, 100–102. 2. Ibid., 100. Notes to Pages 244–256 | 287

3. See Marett’s autobiography, Jerseyman at Oxford, 328. 4. Marett, Threshold of Religion, 2nd ed., viii. 5. Ibid., 1–2, 10–13, 24. 6. Ibid., vii. 7. Ibid., 26–27. 8. Ibid., 3–4. 9. See Marett’s inaugural lecture as Reader in social anthropology at Oxford, ‘‘The Birth of Humility,’’ ibid., 181. Delivered in 1910, this lecture sparked the disagreement with Frazer that is recounted in chapter 6. 10. See George W. Stocking Jr., ‘‘Dr. Durkheim and Mr. Brown; Comparative Sociology at Cambridge in 1910,’’ in Stocking, ed., Functionalism Historicized, 107–9. Jane Harrison also has a claim; she seems to have been reading Durkheim in 1907 or 1908 as she began planning Themis (Robinson, Life and Work of Harrison, 220–23). 11. Reprinted in Marett, Threshold of Religion, 2nd ed., 122–44. 12. A sheet labeled ‘‘Books Recommended for Study’’ is included in Folder 1, Records of the Committee for Anthropology, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Marett’s lecture, dated 30 January 1906, is in Section B, Marett Papers. 13. Penniman, ‘‘Robert Ranulph Marett,’’ 34. 14. See Marett, Threshold of Religion, xxix, 37; Marett, ‘‘Magic or Religion?’’ 389–93, 404. 15. Kuklick, Savage Within, 65 16. See Sharpe, Comparative Religion, xiii. 17. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 513. 18. Jeffrey Cox, ‘‘Master Narratives of Long-Term Religious Change,’’ in McLeod and Ustorf, eds., Decline of Christendom, 201–15. 19. Jacobs, ‘‘Recent Research in Comparative Religion,’’ 397. 20. Herbert, ‘‘Vampire Religion,’’ 107–9; see also James Livingston on the proliferation of works on world religions directed at general audiences (Religious Thought in the Victorian Age, 256–57). 21. F. Harrison, ‘‘The Ghost of Religion’’; see also Cheyne, Transforming of the Kirk, 55. 22. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain, 91. 23. Quoted ibid., 181. 24. G. Moore, Confessions of a Young Man, 57–58. 25. See Hilton, Age of Atonement, 282 26. Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 331, 397–98. 27. G. M. H. Playfair, ‘‘An Expounder of Dark Sayings,’’ Journal of the North China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (1889–90), quoted in Girardot, Victorian Translation of China, 399. On the other hand, Jeffrey Cox notes that although comparative religion was among the ‘‘rhetorical traditions’’ available to nineteenth-century missionaries to India, their attitudes toward Hinduism at least remained very negative even in the early twentieth century (Cox, Imperial Fault Lines, 25, 62–63). See also Thompson, ‘‘Nonconformists at Cambridge before the First World War,’’ 193. 28. van der Veer, Imperial Encounters, 111. 29. Livingston, ‘‘Tennyson, Jowett, and the Chinese Buddhist Pilgrims,’’ 164. 30. From Jowett’s ‘‘Personal Notebook,’’ quoted in Cashdollar, Transformation of Theology, 386; see also Livingston, ‘‘Tennyson, Jowett, and the Chinese Buddhist Pilgrims,’’ 164. 31. Ziolkowski, ‘‘Waking up from Akbar’s Dream,’’ 42. 32. Caird, ‘‘Modern Conception of the Science of Religion,’’ 391–96. 33. See Saler, ‘‘Modernity and Enchantment,’’ 692–716. This page intentionally left blank Bibliography

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Aborigines’ Protection Society, 80 Beard, Mary, 216, 218, 284n55 academic reform movement, 78–82 Beidelman, T. O., 174 Ackerman, Robert, 141, 186, 196, 226, 228 Bergson, Henri, 233–34, 238 aestheticism, 13–15, 112, 226–27, 252–53 biblical criticism, 3, 141, 175; revelation and, agnosticism, 3, 5, 61 148–51, 159–60, 169–70 Allen, Grant, 136 Black, John Sutherland, 145, 156, 185, 273n1 Anahuac (Tylor), 76, 84–85 Blavatsky, Madame, 52 ancestor worship, 34 Boas, Franz, 213 Ancient Art and Ritual (Harrison), 236 Bohannan, Paul, 86 ‘‘Animal Worship and Animal Tribes among Bookman, 213 the Arabs . . .’’ (Robertson Smith), 160–61 Bopp, Franz, 40, 49 animism, 31, 33, 72, 78, 91–92, 94–96, 119, 128, Brahma-Samâj movement, 63 244–45 British and Foreign Evangelical Review, 68 Anthropological Society, 88 British Quarterly Review, 69 anthropology: comparative method and, 19, 82, Bryce, James, 152 84, 98, 213; critics of, 97–99; as discipline, Buckle, Thomas Henry, 77 9, 11, 18–19, 73, 81, 189, 247 Buddhism, 44, 53, 62, 258n40 anticlericalism, 74, 188 Bunsen, Baron Christian Karl Josias, 42, 50 antipositivism, 10, 111–15 Burkitt, F. C., 175, 179 Arnold, Matthew, 1, 42, 67, 129–30 Burne-Jones, Edward, 253 atheism, 61–62, 91, 102 Burnouf, Emile, 17 Athenaeum, The, 211, 236 Burnouf, Eugène, 41 atonement, 168–69 Burrow, J. W., 4–5, 20, 42, 87, 186 Auchterarder affair (1839), 143 Australian (aboriginal) culture, 116, 122, 130, Caird, Edward, 254 137, 166, 198, 212 Calderwood, Henry, 100 Calvinism, 74, 107, 142, 168–69 Bain, Alexander, 147 Cambridge Ritualists, 176, 216 Baynes, Spencer, 150, 154 Carlyle, Thomas, 6 Beale, Dorothea, 219 Catholicism, 29, 84–85, 93, 175 306 | Index

Chadwick, Owen, 4, 175 Dublin Review, 68 Chalmers, Thomas, 142–43 Du culte des dieux fétiches (de Brosses), 25–27 Charteris, A. H., 151 Durkheim, Émile, 17, 212, 233, 238, 243; critical Chips from a German Workshop (Müller), 51 reception of, 246; Elementary Forms of the Christy, Henry, 76 Religious Life, 177; on sociology of religion, Church, R. W., 42 172, 176–77 Church Quarterly Review, 68, 238 Clodd, Edward, 2, 135–37, 188 Early History of Mankind (Tylor), 85 Clough, A. H., 42 ‘‘Ecclesiastical Institutions’’ (Spencer), 32, 34, Clouston, W. A., 135 178–79 Cock Lane and Common Sense (Lang), 124 Edinburgh Review, 100, 209 Codrington, R. H., 66 Egyptian religion, 25–26 Colebrooke, Thomas, 40 Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, The communion (feast), 166–68, 175, 177–78, 229 (Durkheim), 177 comparative method, 19, 82, 84, 98, 213 Eliade, Mircea, 133, 135 Comparative Mythology (Müller), 46 Eliot, George, 1, 6 Comte, Auguste, 25, 27–30, 96, 280n75 Eliot, T. S., 210 Condorcet, Marquis de, 190 Encyclopedia Britannica, 140–41, 150–51, 153– conjectural history, as discipline, 19 55, 185, 195 Contemporary Review, 100 Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, 245 Conway, Moncure, 263n68 Epilegomena (Harrison), 241 Cook, A. B., 216 Essays and Reviews, 79 Cooper, Thomas, 266n147 ethnographic information, 10, 18, 36 Cornford, Francis, 216, 221 Ethnological Society, 80 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte), 25, 27 evangelicalism, 59, 74, 107, 142–44, 146, 156– Cox, Jeffrey, 249 62 Crick, Malcolm, 47 Evans-Pritchard, E. E., 4, 18, 135, 174, 243–44 Critical Review of Theological and Philosophical Examiner, 99 Literature, 100, 138 Crooke, W., 236 Fairbairn, Andrew Martin, 18 Crucifixion, 188, 207, 212 faith, crises in: as context, 3–5, 244, 247–48, culture, definitions of, 82, 89 252; Great Disruption, 142–44; Müller on, Custom and Myth (Lang), 134 61–64; Tylor on, 79 Farnell, L. R., 213, 231, 235–37 Daphne and Apollo (mythical story), 46, 118 Ferguson, Adam, 19 Darwin, Charles, 55–56 fetishism, 25–26, 28, 32–33, 121 Darwinism, 3, 18–19, 78–79, 232 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 17 de Bary, R., 238 Fison, L., 129 de Brosses, Charles, 25–27, 121 folklore, 21, 97, 109, 123. See also mythology degenerationism, 60–61, 68, 83–84, 99, 131, 133 Folk-Lore, 209–10, 236 Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (Hume), Folklore Society, 111, 135–36 22, 25 Four Stages of Greek Religion (Murray), 216 Diana (mythical story), 182, 196–97 Frazer, James G.: academic/friendship con- Dionysus, 228, 237 nections of, 31, 97, 155–56, 181–82, 185–87, ‘‘disease of language’’ theory, 46–49, 58–59, 64 188; on communism, 194; Comte’s influ- Dorson, Richard, 135 ence on, 30; critical reception of, 189, 206, Douglas, Mary, 174 209–14; education/academic interests of, Downie, Angus, 188–89 2, 7, 13, 181–87; on gods, 182, 191, 201, 203– Index | 307

7; The Golden Bough, 181–82, 186, 188–89, 240–41; on sacrifices, 229; on theism, 234; 195–214, 251, 253; Lang as critic of, 206, 212; on totemism, 224, 228; writings of, 220, on magic, 197–98, 201–2, 211–12; personal 225–26. Works: Ancient Art and Ritual, 236; religious views of, 188; on popular culture/ Epilegomena, 241; Prolegomena, 176, 229–31, the ‘‘mob,’’ 192–93, 203, 207; on progress, 235–37; Themis, 176, 215, 229–30, 235–36 190, 194, 197–201, 207; on reason/rational- Hartland, Edwin Sidney, 135–37, 211, 213 ity, 182, 190–91, 207, 211; on religion, 169, Hebrew traditions, 132–33, 151–52, 160. See also 182, 188–209, 250–51; on ritual, 186; on sac- Semitic traditions rifices, 204–7; on totemism, 195–96, 212; Henley, W. E., 110 writings of, 155, 184, 195 Herbert, Christopher, 11 Free Church, 142–44 Hibbert Lectures, 18, 44, 56, 65 Freud, Sigmund, 17, 177–78, 238 higher criticism. See biblical criticism Froude, J. A., 42 ‘‘high gods’’ theory, 129–33, 135 functionalism, 212, 240 Hinduism, 44, 52–53, 60 history: conjectural, 19; contextual, 1–2, 8–9, genius, 106–7, 113 12–15; study of, 30, 153 ghost stories, 124–29 Howitt, A. W., 129 ghost theory, 31, 33–34, 129 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 40 ghost-worship, 121 Hume, David, 22–26 Gibbon, Edward, 189–90 Hunt, James, 88 Gifford Lectures, 18, 259n4 Hutcheson, Francis, 19 Gillen, Frank, 196, 280n79 Huxley, T. H., 3, 24, 30, 73, 93 Gladstone, William, 136 gods: Frazer on, 182, 191, 201, 203–7; Harrison imperialism, 10–11, 36, 255–56 on, 234, 238–39; Lang on, 129–33, 135; India, What Can It Teach Us? (Müller), 63 Müller on, 58–59; origin of, 24, 29, 229; Indian religions, 60. See also Buddhism; Hin- Robertson Smith on, 164–66; H. Spencer duism on, 32. See also specific cultures by name initiation, 230–31 Golden Bough, The (Frazer), 181–82, 186, 188– institutions, religious, 29, 34–35, 59–60, 74, 89, 195–214, 251, 253 158, 162–63 Gomme, G. L., 135 intellectual freedom, 79 Great Disruption (1843), 142–44 Introduction to the Science of Religion (Müller), Greco-Roman culture, 21, 216, 225, 228, 231–32, 51, 97 238–39. See also individual myths by name Green, T. H., 107–8 Jackson, Henry, 186 Grimm, Jacob, 40, 49 James, William, 212, 233, 240 Jones, Sir William, 40 Harrison, Frederic, 252 Jowett, Benjamin, 42, 253 Harrison, Jane Ellen, 210; academic/friendship connections of, 31, 72, 223, 228; aestheti- Kant, Immanuel, 57 cism and, 226–27; critical reception of, 215, Kelvin, William Thomson, 1st Baron, 147, 154, 235–39; education/academic interests of, 2, 184 7, 13, 215–25, 227; as feminist, 217, 222, 231– Kemble, J. M., 40 32; on gods, 234, 238–39; on magic, 230; Kippenberg, Hans, 15 personal religious views of, 217–22, 224; on progress, 241; on reason/rationality, 217, Lang, Andrew: academic/friendship connec- 227; on religion, 176, 224, 227–35, 238–42, tions of, 31, 72, 97, 112, 135, 140, 270n6; on 251–52; on ritual, 216, 228–31, 234–35, 238, animism, 119, 128; antipositivism and, 111– 308 | Index

Lang, Andrew (cont.) Magic and Religion (Lang), 212 15; Comte’s influence on, 30; critical recep- Making of Religion, The (Lang), 119, 128, 132, tion of, 130, 134–39; on ‘‘disease of lan- 134–37 guage’’ theory, 47; education/academic Malinowski, Bronislaw, 174, 200, 247 interests of, 2, 7, 13, 104–11; on Frazer, 206, Manchester College, 18 212; on genius, 106–7, 113; ghost-worship ‘‘Manners and Fashion’’ (Spencer), 32–33 and, 121; on gods, 129–33, 135; on Harrison, Mannhardt, Wilhelm, 17, 209, 226 238; ‘‘high gods’’ and, 129–33, 135; on Mansfield College, 18 Müller, 44, 97–98, 109, 115–18, 134; on my- Manuel, Frank, 22 thology, 109, 115–18; personal religious Marett, Robert R., 2, 72, 81, 109, 134, 186, 211– views of, 107–8; on progress, 132; on reli- 14, 244–47 gion, 119–24, 129–33, 245, 249–50; on rit- Martineau, Harriet, 27 ual, 113; on sacrifices, 132; on social materialism, 5, 57, 59–60, 112, 126, 232–33 evolutionism, 119–24, 132; supernaturalism matriarchal traditions, 231–32, 236, 239 and, 124–29; on totemism, 122. Works: Maurice, F. D., 37 Cock Lane and Common Sense, 124; Custom Mauss, Marcel, 243 and Myth, 134; Magic and Religion, 212; The McLennan, J. F., 2, 122, 147–48, 160–61, 273n3 Making of Religion, 119, 128, 132, 134–37; Metaphysical Society, 258n17 Myth, Ritual and Religion, 129; ‘‘Mythology Mexican society, 76, 84–85 and Fairy Tales,’’ 109 Mill, John Stuart, 7 language: beliefs and, 89; ‘‘disease of language’’ Mirrlees, Hope, 219, 223, 226 theory and, 46–49, 58–59, 64; origins of, missionaries/mission work, 24, 36, 44, 66, 253 55–56, 85; progress and, 78; revelation and, Mivart, St. George, 269n96 42. See also philology, as discipline Monier-Williams, Monier, 43, 66 Larsen, Timothy, 5 monotheism, 23–24, 29, 58–59, 91, 130 Leach, Edmund R., 174 Montesquieu, Charles de Secondat, baron de, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion 19 (Müller), 44, 56 Morris, William, 112 Lectures on the Religion of the Semites ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language’’ (Robertson Smith), 30, 174–77, 185, 187, (Müller), 55 209 Müller, Friedrich Max, 4; academic/friendship Lectures on the Science of Language (Müller), connections of, 31, 41–42, 56, 63, 66, 81; 44, 55, 77 critical reception of, 44, 64–70, 97–98, Le Gallienne, Richard, 110 109, 115–18, 134, 249, 253; as critic of anthro- Legge, James, 66 pology, 97–99; on ‘‘disease of language’’ Lewes, George Henry, 6, 31 theory, 46–49, 58–59, 64; education/ Liddon, H. P., 42, 69 academic interests of, 2, 7, 13, 37–45; on Lightman, Bernard, 5–6 gods, 58–59; on mythology, 46–51, 64; per- Literature and Dogma (Arnold), 130 sonal religious views of, 43–45, 62; on Livingston, James C., 4 progress, 102; on reason/rationality, 54; on Locke, John, 47 religion, 51–64, 89–90, 248–49, 253–54; on Lubbock, John, 2, 73, 91 ritual, 62; on sacrifices, 52–53; on social Lux Mundi, 175 evolutionism, 68. Works: Chips from a Ger- man Workshop, 51; Comparative Mythology, MacColl, D. S., 223, 225–26 46; India, What Can It Teach Us?, 63; Intro- magic, 9, 21; Frazer on, 197–98, 201–2, 211–12; duction to the Science of Religion, 51, 97; Lec- Harrison on, 230; Tylor on, 85–86. See also tures on the Origin and Growth of Religion, supernaturalism 44, 56; Lectures on the Science of Language, Index | 309

44, 55, 77; ‘‘Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Purim, 206 Language,’’ 55 Pusey, E. B., 42–43, 69 Müller, Wilhelm, 38 Murray, Gilbert, 216–17, 219, 227–28, 233, 237 Quakerism, 73–75 Myth, Ritual and Religion (Lang), 129 ‘‘Question of Prophecy in the Critical Schools mythology, 9, 21; Lang on, 109, 115–18; Müller of the Continent, The’’ (Robertson Smith), on, 46–51, 64; Robertson Smith on, 156, 149–50 163; Tylor on, 47, 85 ‘‘Mythology and Fairy Tales’’ (Lang), 109 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 174, 245–46, 247 Mythology and Monuments (Harrison), reason and rationality, 23–25, 33, 182; Frazer 228 on, 182, 190–91, 207, 211; Harrison on, 217, 227; Müller on, 54; progress and, 28, 72, 75; ‘‘Natural History of Religion’’ (Hume), 22–26 Robertson Smith on, 146; Tylor on, 72, 75, natural sciences, 3, 79 92–93, 96 Nature, 99, 102 Reinach, Salomon, 181 nature, contemplation of, 23–25, 29, 54–55 religion: evolution of, 90–96; gods and, 58–59, Nemian priests (mythical story), 182, 196–97 129–33, 135, 164–66, 182, 191, 201, 203–7, New Statesman, 237 229, 234, 238–39; origins of, 7–8, 21–27, 24, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 133 29, 32, 53–55, 57–61, 92, 182, 238; utility of, Nutt, Alfred, 135, 282n132 6–8, 27–36, 176 Renan, Ernest, 17, 53, 55, 191 Oedipus complex, 178 revelation: biblical criticism and, 148–51, 159– Orientalism, 10–11, 52 60, 169–70; as historical process, 42, 50–51, Origin of Civilization (Lubbock), 91 53, 58, 68; origin of religion and, 23, 53, 130 Origin of Species (Darwin), 19, 55–56 Ritschl, Albrecht, 148–49, 158 ritual: Frazer on, 186; Harrison on, 216, 228–31, Pater, Walter, 15, 112 234–35, 238, 240–41; Lang on, 113; Müller Peacock, Sandra, 220, 226, 235 on, 62; Robertson Smith on, 156, 162–74, Peel, J. D. Y., 34–35 179, 229 Penniman, T. K., 246 Rivers, W. H. R., 247 philology, as discipline, 39–40, 97. See also lan- Robert Elsmere (Ward), 3–4 guage Robertson Smith, William. See Smith, William polytheism, 23–24, 29, 58–59, 91 Robertson positivism, 5, 29–30, 36, 57, 112, 121, 126–27 Robinson, Annabel, 216 possession theory of disease, 93 Rolleston, George, 73 Primitive Culture (Tylor), 73, 77–81, 86–89, Rothe, Richard, 148–49 96–97, 99–100, 135, 166, 178, 249 Rouse, W. H. D., 186 professionalization of sciences, 9–10, 79–80, Royal Anthropological Institute, 80–81 246–47 progress, 60, 183; Frazer on, 190, 194, 197–201, sacriﬁces: Frazer on, 204–7; Harrison on, 207; Harrison on, 241; Lang on, 132; Müller 229; Lang on, 132; Müller on, 52–53; on, 102; reason/rationality and, 28, 72, 75; Robertson Smith on, 166–69, 171, 175, as revelation, 42, 50–51, 53, 58, 68, 169–70; 177–78; H. Spencer on, 34; Tylor on, 166 skepticism and, 61; Tylor on, 78, 82–86, Said, Edward, 10–11, 277n120 194, 199–200 Salmond, S. D. F., 174 Prolegomena (Harrison), 176, 229–31, 235–37 Saturnalia, 204, 206–7 Prophets of Israel, The (Robertson Smith), 179– Sayce, A. H., 65 80 scapegoats, 205 310 | Index

Schlegel, August, 40 tions,’’ 32, 34, 178–79; ‘‘Manners and Fash- Schlegel, Friedrich, 39–41 ion,’’ 32–33 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 55 spiritualism, 101, 124 Schmidt, Wilhelm, 135 Stanley, A. P., 42, 65 science of religion: contextual analysis and, 1– Stephen, Leslie, 24 2, 8–9, 12–15; crises of faith and, 3–5, 61– Stevenson, Robert Louis, 270n6 64, 79, 244, 247–48, 252; as field of dis- Stewart, Dugald, 19 course, 2, 7, 18–19, 247; postmodernism Stewart, Jessie, 226 and, 254; post–World War I views of, 244; Stocking, George, 9, 20, 78 research paths in, 6–8, 243 Strauss, David Friedrich, 17 scientific naturalism, 3, 5, 126. See also individ- supernaturalism, 31, 33–34, 124–29, 227, 245 ual disciplines by name superstitions, 192, 202–3 Semitic traditions, 162–73, 174. See also He- ‘‘survivals’’: Frazer on, 192; Lang on, 119–20, brew traditions 134; as method, 243; Tylor on, 75, 82, 84, 93, Sharpe, Eric, 4 95, 119–20, 134, 243, 265n111 Smith, Adam, 19 Système de politique positive (Comte), 27, 29 Smith, William Pirie, 144 Smith, William Robertson, 30; academic/ Tait, P. G., 147 friendship connections of, 31, 72, 147–48, Tennyson, Alfred, 1st Baron, 210, 253 155, 185–87; critical reception of, 165, 173– theism, 32, 96, 229, 234 80, 187, 245; education/academic interests Themis (Harrison), 176, 215, 229–30, 235–36 of, 2, 7, 13, 140–50; on Gifford Lectures, Theological Review, 66 259n4; on gods, 164–66; on mythology, Thomson, William. See Kelvin, William Thom- 156, 163; personal religious views of, 140, son, 1st Baron 145–46, 157, 172–73, 187; on reason and ra- Thorpe, Benjamin, 40 tionality, 146; on religion, 156–73, 250; on Tiele, Cornelius, 17 ritual, 156, 162–74, 179, 229; on sacrifices, Times (newspaper), 138 166–69, 171, 175, 177–78; on social evolu- Totem and Taboo (Freud), 178 tionism, 170–71; on totemism, 165, 167, 174, totemism: Frazer on, 195–96, 212; Harrison on, 178; trial of, 141–42, 150–55. Works: ‘‘Ani- 224, 228; Lang on, 122; Robertson Smith mal Worship and Animal Tribes among the on, 165, 167, 174, 178 Arabs . . . ,’’ 160–61; Lectures on the Religion travel literature, 19, 21, 36 of the Semites, 30, 174–77, 185, 187, 209; The Turner, Frank M., 5, 8 Prophets of Israel, 179–80; ‘‘The Question Tylor, Edward B.: academic/friendship con- of Prophecy in the Critical Schools of the nections of, 31, 72–73, 76, 81, 97, 185; ani- Continent,’’ 149–50 mism and, 31, 33, 72, 78, 91–92, 94–96, 119, social evolutionism, 19–21, 213, 243; Lang on, 128, 244–45; Comte’s influence on, 30; crit- 119–24, 132; Müller on, 68; Robertson ical reception of, 80, 96–103, 244, 249–51; Smith and, 170–71; Tylor on, 82, 86–90, 96 on de Brosses, 27; education/academic in- Society for Psychical Research, 114, 124–25 terests of, 2, 7, 13, 71–78; on Hume’s ‘‘Natu- sociology of religion, 141, 156–62, 200, 238, ral History,’’ 22; on magic, 85–86; Müller as 245–46 critic of, 97; on mythology, 47, 85; personal Söderqvist, Thomas, 12–13 religious views of, 75; on philology/lan- soul, the, 92–95, 100 guage, 40, 71, 89; on reason/progress, 25, Spectator, 99, 176, 236, 238, 239 72, 78, 82–86, 92–93, 96, 194, 199–200; on Spencer, Baldwin, 196, 280n79 religion, 87–96, 99–100, 135, 248–49; on Spencer, Herbert, 2, 22, 30–36, 65, 129, 171, sacrifices, 166; on social evolutionism, 82, 178–79, 271n64; ‘‘Ecclesiastical Institu- 86–90, 96; ‘‘survivals’’ theory of, 75, 82, 84, Index | 311

93, 95, 119–20, 134, 243, 265n111. writings of, Ward, Mary Arnold, 3–4 65, 73. Works: Anahuac, 76, 84–85; Early Webb, Beatrice, 3 History of Mankind, 85; Primitive Culture, Weber, Max, 174, 243, 259n1 73, 77–81, 86–89, 96–97, 99–100, 135, 166, Wedgewood, Hensleigh, 55 178, 249 Westminster Review, 66 Tyndall, John, 5 Whately, Richard, 83 Whiteing, Richard, 110 Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier Whitney, W. D., 44 (Schlegel), 39 Wilamowitz-Moellendorff, Ulrich von, 215 utilitarianism, 6–7, 20, 30, 199 Willey, Basil, 6 Wilson, H. B., 67 van der Veer, Peter, 11 Wilson, H. H., 40, 43 Veitch, John, 184 Wolffe, John, 5–6, 252 Verrall, Margaret, 223 World Parliament of Religions (1893), 254 Vickery, John, 208, 210 Voltaire, 191 ‘‘X region,’’ 126, 128 Von Arx, Jeffrey Paul, 193 Yogindra, Agamya, 45 Wallace, Alfred, 73, 101–2 Ward, James, 186 This page intentionally left blank Recent Books in the Victorian Literature and Culture Series

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