Note 12 — Chapter II · PRIMITIVE FREETHINKING

Anthropological evidence suggests that, while religion clearly begins in primordial fear and fancy, wilful fraud must to some extent have entered into all religious systems alike, even in the period of primeval credulity, were it only because the credulity was so great. One of the most judicial and sympathetic of the Christian scholars who have written the history of Greece treats as unquestionable the view that alike in pagan and Christian cults “priestcraft” has been “fertile in profitable devices, in the invention of legends, the fabrication of relics, and other modes of imposture”;12 and the leading hierologist of the last generation pronounces decisively as to an element of intentional deceit in the Koran-making of Mohammed13—a judgment which, if upheld, can hardly fail to be extended to some portions of all other sacred books. However that may be, we have positive evidence that wilful and systematic fraud enters into the doctrine of contemporary savages, and that among some “primitives” known myths are deliberately propounded to the boys and women by the male adults.14 Indeed, the majority of modern travellers among primitives seem to have regarded their priests and sorcerers in the mass as conscious deceivers.15 If, then, we can point to deliberate imposture alike in the charm-mongering and myth-mongering of contemporary savages and in the sacred-book-making of the higher historical systems, it seems reasonable to hold that conscious deceit, as distinguished from childlike fabrication, would chronically enter into the tale-making of primitive men, as into their simpler relations with each other. It is indeed impossible to conceive how a copious mythology could ever arise without the play of a kind of imaginativeness that is hardly compatible with veracity; and it is probably only the exigencies of ecclesiastical life that cause modern critics still to treat the most deliberate fabrications and forgeries in the Hebrew sacred books as somehow produced in a spirit of the deepest concern for truth. An all-round concern for truth is, in fact, a late intellectual development, the product of much criticism and much doubt; hence, perhaps, the lenity of the verdicts under notice. Certain wild tribes here and there, living in a state of great simplicity, are in our own day described as remarkably truthful;16 but they are not remarkable for range of supernatural belief; and their truthfulness is to be regarded as a product of their special stability and simplicity of life. The trickery of a primitive medicine-man, of course, is a much more childlike thing than the frauds of educated priesthoods; and it is compatible with so much of spontaneous pietism as is implied in the common passing of the operator into the state of convulsion and trance—a transition which comes easily to many savages.17 But even at that stage of psychosis, and in a community where simple secular lying is very rare, the professional wizard-priest becomes an adept in playing upon credulity.18