Note 91.1 — RITUAL AND BELIEF

He for whom the world is full of personal beings and hardly anything else—a universe of objects interpreted in the terms of conscious personality and projected on a background of the Unknown with all its possibilities—he for whom each of those objects, human and non-human, living and not-living, is invested in a greater or less degree with orenda, will naturally and instinctively on the one hand avail himself of his own orenda, and on the other hand will dread and endeavour to turn to account the orenda of others. But this very endeavour to turn others’ orenda to account is an exercise by prayer or compulsion of his own. I can see no satisfactory evidence that early man consciously entertained any great faith in the order and uniformity of nature. Automatically, no doubt, he assumed that night would follow day and day night, that the winter would follow the summer or the dry season the wet, that the trees would blossom in the spring or after the rains set in, as he had been accustomed to see them. But that was not the result of reflection; it was not an act of faith. So things had always been, and he could not conceive any different course. It was not part of his mental furniture; it was no acquisition of reasoning. It was the very framework of his mind. When he began to reflect he referred these phenomena to the same cause to which he referred his own acts, and the more uncertain and capricious acts of other living beings—to personal will and orenda. Even if he had risen to the large conception of the Siouan wakonda, that impersonal force must, as we have seen, clothe itself with personality in order to operate. Immediately and for practical purposes the personal will and orenda of himself or some other object were the fount of all causation. They impelled and directed all actions, all means, and were responsible for all effects. If he took aim at his enemy and flung his spear, or whatever primitive weapon served the same purpose; if it hit the man, and he fell; he might witness the result, but the mere mechanical causation, however inevitable in its action, would be the last thing he would think about. Conscious of his own will, of his own effort, of the words, perhaps, with which he had accompanied and directed the spear, he would attribute the result to such causes as these. His own orenda felt in his passion, his will, his effort, and displayed in his acts and words, the orenda of the spear, either inherent in itself, conceived as a personal being, or conferred by its maker, and manifested in the keenness of its point, the precision and the force with which it flies to its work and inflicts the deadly wound—these would be to him the true causes of his enemy’s fall. His orenda is mightier than his enemy’s and overcomes it. So, when the enemy is absent and he cannot visibly reach him, his orenda may yet suffice to accomplish the desired injury. By a psychological process which Dr Marett has subtly analysed,91.1 he is led to perform in pantomime all the acts of a murder in the absence of the victim, either silently, or to the accompaniment of a chant, or of spoken words. His foe, who is as convinced as himself of the power of such a performance, if it come to his knowledge, falls a victim to the terror it inspires, unless he can call in the aid of some other person, objective or imaginary, whose orenda is more powerful still. Nor would the belief lack vindication even in the case of the victim’s ignorance; for any chance misfortune or sickness would be put down to a hostile orenda; and if he did escape, it would be due to his own superior orenda.