There is, perhaps, no subject that has been more extensively
investigated and more prejudicially misunderstood by the modern scientist than
that of folklore. By "folklore" we mean that whole and consistent
body of culture which has been handed down, not in books but by word of mouth
and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form
of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture,
and other rites, and forms of social organization, especially those that we
call "tribal." This is a cultural complex independent of national and
even racial boundaries, and of remarkably similarity through the world; in
other words, a culture of extraordinary vitality. The material of folklore
differs from that of exoteric "religion", to which it may be in a
kind of opposition - as it is in a quite different way to "science" -
by its more intellectual and less moralistic content, and more obviously and
essentially by its adaptation to vernacular transmission: on the one hand, as
cited above, "the myth is not my own, I had it from my mother" (Euripedes), and on the other, "the passage from a
traditional mythology to 'religion' is a humanistic decadence." (Evola)
The content of folklore is metaphysical. Our failure to recognize this
is primarily due to our own abysmal ignorance of metaphysics and of its
technical terms. We observe, for example, that the primitive craftsman leaves
in his work something unfinished, and that the primitive mother dislikes to hear the beauty of her child unduly praised; it is
"tempting
As a matter of fact, the destruction of superstitions invariably
involves, in one sense or another, the premature death of the folk, or in any
case the impoverishment of their lives. To take a typical case, that of the
Australian aborigines, D.F. Thompson, who has recently studied there remarkable
initiatory symbols, observes that their "mythology supports the belief in
a ritual or supernatural visitation that comes upon those who disregard or
disobey the law of the old men. When this belief in the old men and their power
- which, under tribal conditions, I have nnever know to be abused - dies, or
declines, as it does with 'civilization',. chaos and racial death follow immediately". The world's
museums are filled with the traditional arts of innumerable peoples whose
culture has been destroyed by the sinister power of our industrial
civilization: peoples who have been forced to abandon their own highly
developed and beautiful techniques an significant designs in order to preserve
their very lives by working as hired laborers at the production or raw
materials. At the same time, modern scholars, with some honorable exceptions,
have as little understood the content of folklore as did the early missionaries
understand what they thought of only as the "beastly devices of the
heathen"; Sir J.G. Frazer, for example, whose life has been devoted to the
study of all the ramifications of folk belief and popular rites, has only to
say at the end of it all, in a tone of lofty superiority, that he was "led
on, step by step, into surveying, as form some spectacular height, some Pisgah
of the mind, a great part of the human race; I was beguiled, as by some subtle
enchanter, into indicting what I cannot but regard as dark, a tragic chronicle
of human error and folly, of fruitless endeavor, wasted time and blighted
hopes" - words that sound much more like an indictment of modern European
civilization that a criticism of any savage society!
It is often supposed that in a traditional society, or under tribal or
clan conditions, which are those in which a culture of the folk flourished
most, the individual is arbitrarily compelled to conform to the patterns of
life that he actually follows. It would be truer to say that under these
conditions the individual is devoid of social ambition. It is very far from
true that in traditional societies the individual is regimented: it is only in
democracies, soviets, and dictatorships that a way of life is imposed upon the
individual from without. In the unanimous society the way of life is
self-imposed in the sense that "fate lies in the created causes
themselves," and this is one of the many ways in which the order of the
traditional society conforms to the order of nature: it is in the unanimous
societies that the possibility of self-realization - that is, the possibility
of transcending the limitations of individuality - is best provided for. It is,
in fact, for the sake of such a self-realization that the tradition itself is
perpetuated. It is here, as Jules Romains has said,
that we find "the richest possible variety of individual states of
consciousness, in a harmony made valuable by its richness and density",
words that are peculiarly applicable, for example, to Hindu society. In the
various kinds of proletarian government, on the other hand, we meet always with
the intention to achieve a rigid an inflexible uniformity: all the forces of
"education", for example, are directed to this end. It is a national,
rather than a cultural type that is constructed, and to this one type everyone
is expected to conform, at the price of being considered a peculiar person or
even a traitor. It is of
The actual unity of folklore represents on the popular level precisely
what the orthodoxy of an elite represents in a
relatively learned environment. The relation between the popular and the
learned metaphysics is moreover, analogous to and partly identical with that of
the lesser to the greater mysteries. To a very large extent both employ one and
the same symbols, which are taken more literally in the one case, and in the
other understood parabolically; for example, the
"giants" and "heroes" of popular legend are the titans and
gods of the more learned mythology, the seven-league boots of the hero
correspond to the strides of an Agni or a Buddha, and
"Tom Thumb" is no other that the Son whom Eckhart
describes as "small, but so puissant". So long as the material of
folklore is transmitted, so long is the ground available on which the
superstructure of full initiatory understanding can be built.
Let us now consider the "primitive mentality" that so many
anthropologists have studied: the mentality, that is, which manifests itself in
such normal types of society as we have been considering, and to which we have
referred as "traditonal". Two closely
connected questions must first be disposed of. In the first place, is there
such a thing a s a "primitive" or "alogical" mentality distinct from that of civilized
and scientific man? It has been taken for granted by the older
"animists" that human nature is a constant, so that "if we were
in the position of the primitives, our mind being what it is now, we should
think and act as they do." Or on the other hand, for anthropologists and
psychologist of the type of Lévy-Bruhl, there can be
recognized an almost specific distinction between the primitive mentality and
ours. The explanation of the possibility of disagreement in such a matter has
much to do with the belief in progress, by which, in fact, all our conceptions
of the history of civilization are distorted. It is too readily taken for
granted that we have progressed, and that any contemporary savage society in
all respects fairly represents the so-called primitive mentality, and
overlooked that many characteristics of the mentality can be studied at home as
well as or better than in any African jungle: the point of view of the
Christian or Hindu, for example, is in many ways nearer to that of the
"savage" that to that of the modern bourgeoisie. What real
distinction of two mentalities can be made is, in fact, the distinction of a
modern from a mediaeval or oriental mentality; and this is not a specific
distinction, but one of sickness from health. It has been said of Lévy-Bruhl that he is a past master in opening up what is
to us "an almost inconceivable" world: as if there were one amongst
us to whom the mentality reflected in our own immediate environment were not
equally "inconceivable."
We shall consider, then, the "primitive mentality" as
described, very often accurately enough, by Lévi-Bruhl
and other psychologist-anthropolosits. It is
characterized in the first place by a "collective ideation"; ideas
are held in common, whereas in a civilized group, everyone entertains ideas of
his own. Infinitely varied as it may be in detail, the folk literature, for
example, has to do with the lives of heroes, all of whom meet with essentially
the same adventures and exhibit the same qualities. It is not for one moment
realized that a possession of ideas in common does not necessarily imply the
"collective origination" of these ideas. It is argued that what is
true for the primitive mentality is unrelated to experience, i.e., to such
"logical" experience as ours. Yet it is "true" to what the
primitive "experiences". The criticism implied, for such it is, is
exactly parallel to the art historian's who criticizes primitive art as not
being "true to nature"; and the that of the historian of literature
who demands from literature a psychoanalysis of individual character. The
primitive was not interested in such trivialities, but thought in types. This,
moreover, was his means of "education"; for the type can be imitated,
whereas the individual can only be mimicked.
The next and most famous characteristic of the primitive mentality has
been called "participation", or more specifically, "mystical
participation". A thing is not only what it is visibly, but also what it
represents. Natural or artificial objects are not for the primitive, as they
can be for us, arbitrary symbols of some other and higher reality, but actual
manifestations of this reality; the eagle or the lion , for example, is not so
much a symbol or image of the Sun as it is the Sun in a likeness (the form
being more important than the nature in which it may be manifested); and in the
same way every house is the world in a likeness, and every altar situated at
the center of the earth; it is only because we are more interested in what
things are than in what they mean, more interested in particular facts than in
universal ideas, that this is inconceivable to us. Descent from a totem animal
is not, then, what it appears to the anthropologist, a literal absurdity, but a
descent from the Sun, the Progenitor and Pajapati of
all, in that form in which he revealed himself, whether in vision or in dream,
to the founder of the clan. The same reasoning validates the Eucharistic meal;
the Father-Progenitor is sacrificed and partaken of by
his descendants, in the flesh of the sacred animal: "this is my body, take
and eat." So that, as Lévy-Bruhl says of such
symbols, "very often it is not their purpose to 'represent' their
prototype to the eye, but to facilitate a participation," and that
"if it is their essential function to 'represent', in the full sense of
the word, invisible beings or objects, and to make their presence effective, it
follows that they are not necessarily reproductions or likenesses of these
beings or objects." The purpose of primitive art, being entirely different
from the aesthetic or decorative intension of the modern "artist"
(for whom the ancient motifs survive only as meaningless "art
forms"), explains its abstract character. "We civilized men have lost
the
The superior intellectuality of primitive and "folk" art is
often confessed, even by those who regard the "emancipation" of art
from its linguistic and communicative functions as a desirable progress. Thus
W. Deonna writes, "Le primitivism exprime par l'art les idées," but "l'art évolue … vers un naturalisme progressif," no
longer representing things, "telles qu'on les conçoit"; thus
substituting "la réalité" for "l'abstraction"; and that evolution ,
"de l'idéalisme vers
un naturalisme" in which "la forme tend à prédominer
sur l'idée", is what
the Greek genius, "plus artiste que tous les autres," finally
accomplished.
To have lost the art of thinking in images is precisely to have lost the
proper linguistic of metaphysics and to have descended to the verbal logic of
"philosophy". The truth is that the content of such and
"abstract," or rather "principial,"
form as the Neolithic sun-wheel (in which we see only an evidence of the
"worship of natural forces," or at most a "personification"
of these forces), or that of the corresponding circle with center and radii or
rays, is so rich that it could only be fully expounded in many volumes, and
embodies implications which can only with difficulty if a all be expressed in
words; the very nature of primitive and folk art is the immediate proof of its
essentially intellectual content. Nor does this only apply to the diagrammatic
representations: there was actually nothing made for use that had not a meaning
as well as an application: "The needs of the body and the spirit are
satisfied together"; "le physique et le spiritual ne
sont pas encore séparés,"
"meaningful form, in which the physical and metaphysical originally formed
a counterbalancing polarity, is increasingly depleted in its transmission to
us; we say then that it is 'ornament.'" What we call
"inventions" are nothing but the application of known metaphysical
principles to practical ends; and that is why tradition always refers the
fundamental inventions to an ancestral culture hero (always, in the last
analysis, a descent of the Sun), that is to say, to a primordial revelation.
In these applications, however utilitarian their purpose, there was no
need whatever to sacrifice the clarity of the original significance of the
symbolic form: on the contrary, the aptitude and beauty of the artifact at the
same time express and depend upon the form that underlies it. We can see this
very clearly, for example, in the case of such an ancient invention as that of
the "safety pin," which is simply an adaptation of a still older
invention, that of the straight pin or needle having at one end a head, ring or
eye and at the other a point; a form that as a "pin" directly
penetrates and fastens materials together, and as a "needle" fastens
them together by leaving behind it as its "trace" a thread that
originates from its eye. In the safety pin, the originally straight stem of the
pin or needle is bent upon itself so that its point passes back again through
the "eye" and is held there securely, at the same time that is
fastens whatever material is has penetrated.
Whoever is acquainted with the technical language of initiatory
symbolism (in the present case, the language of the "lesser
mysteries" of the crafts) will recognize at once that the straight pin or
needle is a symbol of generation, and the safety pin a symbol or regeneration. The
safety pin is, moreover, the equivalent of the button, which fastens things
together and is attached to them by means of a thread which passes through and
again returns to its perforations, which correspond to the eye of the needle. The
significance of the metal pin, and that of the thread left behind by the needle
(whether or not secured to a button that corresponds to the eye of the needle)
is the same: it is that of the "thread-spirit" by which the Sun
connects all things to himself and fastens them; he is the primordial
embroiderer and tailor, by whom the tissue of the universe, to which our
garments are analogous, is woven on a living thread.
For the metaphysician it is inconceivable that forms such as this, which
express a given doctrine with mathematical precision, could have been
"invented" without a knowledge of their
significance. The anthropologist, it is true, will believe that such meanings
are merely "read into" the forms by the sophisticated symbolist (one
might as well pretend that a mathematical formula could have been discovered by
chance). But that a safety pin or button is meaningless, and merely a
convenience for us, is simply the evidence of our profane ignorance and of the
fact that such forms have been "more and more voided of content on their
way down to us" (Andrae); the scholar of art is
not "reading into" these intelligible forms an arbitrary meaning, but
simply reading their meaning, got this is their "form" or
"life", and present in them regardless of whether of not the
individual artists of a given period, or we, have known it or not. In the
present case the proof that the meaning of the safely pin had been understood
can be pointed to in the fact that the heads or eyes of prehistoric fibulae are
regularly decorated with a repertoire of distinctly solar symbols.
Inasmuch as the symbolic arts of the folk do not propose to tell us what
things are like but, by their allusions, intend to refer to the ideas implied
by these things, we may describe them as having an algebraic (rather than
"abstract") quality, and in this respect as differing essentially
from the veridical and realistic purposes of a profane and arithmetical art, of
which the intentions are to tell us what things are like, to express the
artists' personality, and to evoke an emotional reaction. We do not call folk
art "abstract" because the forms are not arrived at by process of
omission; nor do we call it "conventional", since its forms have not
been arrived at by experiment and agreement; nor do we call it
"decorative" in the modern sense of the word, since it is not meaningless;
it is properly speaking a prinicipial art, and
supernatural rather than naturalistic. The nature of folk art is, then, itself
the sufficient demonstration of its intellectuality: it is, indeed, a
"divine inheritance."
[Omitted: discussion of two illustrations.]
The characteristic pronouncements of anthropologists on the
"primitive mentality", of which a few may be cited, are often very
remarkable, and may be said to represent not what the writers have intended,
the description of an inferior type of consciousness and experience, but one
intrinsically superior to that of "civilized" man, and approximating
to that which we are accustomed to think of as "primordial." For
example, "The primitive mind experienced life as a whole … Art was not for
the delectation of the senses." Dr. Macalister actually compares what he
calls the "Ascent of Man" to Wordsworth's "Ode on the
Intimations of Immortality", not realizing that the poem is the
description of the descent or materialization of consciousness. Schmidt remarks
that "In 'heathenish' popular customs, in the 'superstitions' of our folk,
the spiritual adventures of prehistoric times, the imagery of primitive insight
are living still; a divine inheritance … Originally every type of soul and mind
corresponds to the physiological organism proper to it… The world is conceived
as being partner with the living being, which is unconscious of its
individuality; as being an essential portion of the Ego; and it is represented
as being affected by human exertion and suffering … Nature-man live his life in
images. He grasps it in his conception as a series of realities. His visions
are therefore not only real; they form his objective insight into a higher
world… The talent, in the man of understanding, is only obstructed, more or
less. Artistic natures, poets, painter, sculptors, musicians, seers, who see
God face to face, remain all their lives eidetically
rooted in their creations. In them there lives the folk-soul of dissolving
images in their most perfect creative form … Natural man, to whom vision and
thought are identical … The man of magic … is still standing in a present world
which includes the whole of primeval time .. [On the other hand] the
emancipated man, vehicle of a soul… differentiates the original magical somatopsychic unity … Outward and Inward, World and Ego,
become a duality in the consciousness." Could one say
more in support the the late John Lodge's
proposition, "From the Stone Age until now, quelle
dégringolade"?
If it is difficult for us to understand the primitive belief in the
efficacy of symbolic rites, it is largely because of our limited knowledge of
the prolongations of the personality, which forces us to think in terms of a
purely physical causality. We overlook that while we may believe that the
anticipatory rite has no physical effect in the desired direction, the rite
itself is the formal expression of a will directed to the end, and that this
will, released by the performance of the rite, is also an effective force, by
which the environment in its totality must be to some extent affected. In any
case, the preliminary rite of "mimetic magic" is an enactment of the
"formal cause" of the subsequent operation, whether it be the art of
agriculture of that or war that is in question, and the artist has a right to
expect that the actual operation, if carried out on this plan, will be
successful. What seems strange to us, however, is that for the primitive
mentality the rite is a "prefiguration",
not merely in the sense of a pattern of action to be followed, but in the sense
of an anticipation in which the future becomes a virtually already existent
reality, so that "the primitives feel that the future event is actually
present": the action of the force released is immediate, "and if its
effects appear after some time it is nevertheless imagine - or, rather, in
their case, felt - as immediately produced. Lévy-Bruhl
goes on the point out very justly that all this implies a conception of time
and space that is not in our sense of the word "rational": one in
which both past and future, cause and effect, coincide in a present experience.
If we choose to call this an "unpractical" possibility, we must not
forget that at the same time "the primitives constantly make use of the
real connection between cause and effect… they often
display an ingenuity that implies a very accurate observation of the
"connection."
Now it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that it is precisely a
state of being in which "everywhere and every when is focused"
(Dante), this is for the theologian and the metaphysician "divine":
that at this level of reference "all states of being, seen in principle,
are simultaneous in the eternal now", and that "he who cannot escape
from the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all things in their
simultaneity is incapable of the least conception of the metaphysical
order." We say that what seems to "us" irrational in the life of
"savages," and may be unpractical, since it unfits them to compete
with our material force, represents the vestiges of a primordial state of
metaphysical understanding, and that if the savage himself is, generally
speaking, no longer a comprehensor of his own
"divine inheritance," this ignorance on his part is no more shameful
than ours who do not recognize the intrinsic nature of his "lore,"
and understand it no better that he does. We do not say that the modern savage
exemplifies the "primordial state" itself, but that his beliefs, and
the whole content of folklore, bear witness to such a state. We say that the
truly primitive man - "before the Fall"-was not by any means a
philosopher or scientist but, by all means, a metaphysical being, in full
possession of the 'forma humanitatis' (as we are only
very partially); that, in the excellent phrase of Baldwin Smith, he
"experienced life as a whole."
Nor can it be said that the "primitives" are always
unconscious of the sources of their heritage. For example, "Dr. Malinowski has insisted on the fact that, in the native Trobriand way of thinking, magic, agrarian or otherwise, is
not a human invention. From time immemorial, it forms a part of the inheritance
which is handed down from generation to generation. Like the social
institutions proper, it was created in the age of myth, by the heroes who were
the founders of civilization. Hence its sacred character.
Hence also its efficacy." Far more rarely, an
archeologist such as Andrae has the courage to
express as his own belief that "when we sound the archetype, the ultimate
origin of the form, then we find that it is anchored in the highest, not the
lowest," and to affirm that "the sensible forms [of art], in which
there was at first a polar balance of physical and metaphysical, have been more
and more voided of content on their way down to us."
The mention of the Trobriand Islanders above
leas us to refer toe on more type of what appears at
first sight to imply an almost incredible want of observation. The Trobriand Islanders, and some Australians, are reported to
be unaware of the causal connection between sexual intercourse and procreation;
they are said to believe that spirit-children enter the wombs of women on
appropriate occasions, and that sexual intercourse is not a determinant of
birth. It is, indeed, implausible that the natives, "whose aboriginal
endowment is quite as good as any European's, if not better," are unaware
of any connection whatever between sexual intercourse and procreation. On the
other hand, it is clear that their interest is not in what may be called the
mediate causes of pregnancy, but in its first cause. Their position is
essentially identical with that of the universal tradition for which
reproduction depends on the activating presence of what the mythologist calls a
"fertility spirit" or "progenitive
deity," and is the in fact the Divine Eros, the Indian Kamadeva
and Gandharva, the spiritual Sun of RV 1.115.1 , the
life of all and source of all being; it is upon his "connection with the
field" that life is transmitted, as it is by the human "sower" that the elements of the corporeal vehicle of
life are planted in his "field". So that as the 'Majjhima
Nikaya',1.265-266 expresses it, three things are
required for conception, viz. conjunction of father and mother, the moteher's period, and the presence of the Gandharva: of which the tow first may be called dispostive and third an essential cause. We see now the
meaning of the words of BU 111.9.28.5, "Say not 'from semen', but 'from
what is alive [in the semen]'": "It is the Provident Spirit [prajnatman, i.e., the Sun] that grasps and erects the
flesh" (Kaus. Up. 111.3); "The power of the
soul, which is in the semen through the spirit enclosed therein, fashions the
body" (Sum. Theol. 111.32.11). Thus, in believing with Schiller that "it
is the Spirit that fashions the body for itself" (Wallenstein,
111.13), the "primitive" is in agreement with a unanimous tradition
and with Christian doctrine: … "It is the spirit that quickeneth;
the flesh profiteth nothing", John 6:63.
It will be seen that the Trobriander view that
sexual intercourse alone is not a determinant of conception but only its
occasion, and the "spirit-children" enter the womb, is essentially
identical with the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophers and theologians. The
notion that "old folklore ideas" are taken over into scriptural contexts, which are thus contaminated by the popular superstition,
reverses the order of events; the reality is that the folklore ideas are
the form in which metaphysical doctrines are received by the people and
transmitted by them. In its popular form, a given doctrine may not always have
been understood, but for so long as the formula is faithfully transmitted it
remains understandable; "superstitions", for the most part, are no
mere delusions, but formulae of which the meaning has been forgotten and are
therefore called meaningless-often, indeed, because the doctrine itself has
been forgotten.
Aristotle's doctrine that "Man and the Sun generate man"
(Physics 11.2), that of JUB 111.10.4 and that of the Majjhima
Nikaya, may be said to combine the scientific and the
metaphysical theories of the origin of life: and this very well illustrates the
fact that the scientific and metaphysical points of view are by no means
contradictory, but rather complementary. The weakness of the scientific position
is not that the empirical facts are devoid of interest or utility, but that
those facts are thought of as a refutation of the intellectual doctrine. Actually,
our discovery of chromosomes does not in any way account for
the origin of life, but only tell us more about its mechanism. The
metaphysician may, like the primitive, be incurious about the scientific facts;
he cannot be disconcerted by the, for they can at he most show that God moves
"in an even more mysterious way than we had hitherto supposed."
We have touched upon only a very few of the "motifs" of
folklore. The main point that we have wished to bring out is that the whole
body of the motifs represent a consistent tissue of interrelated intellectual
doctrines belonging to a primordial wisdom rather that to a primitive science;
and that for this wisdom it would be almost impossible to conceive a popular,
or even in any common sense of the term, a human origin. The life of the
popular wisdom extends backward to a point at which it becomes indistinguishable
from the primordial tradition itself, the traces of which we are more familiar
with in the sacerdotal and royal arts; and it is in the sense, and by no means
with "democratic" implications, that the lore of the people,
expressed, in their culture, is really the word of God-Vox
pupuli vox Dei.