Lucien Lévy-Bruhl - Primitives and the Supernatural

Routledge Revivals

By
LUCIEN LVY-BRUHL

Author of Primitive Mentality The Soul of the Primitive, etc.

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION

BY
LILIAN A. CLARE

PRIMITIVES
AND THE SUPERNATURAL

By
LUCIEN LVY-BRUHL

Author of Primitive Mentality The Soul of the Primitive, etc.

AUTHORIZED TRANSLATION

BY
LILIAN A. CLARE

LONDON

GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD

All rights reserved. Copyright in the U. S. A .
FIRST PUBLISHED IN GREAT BRITAIN 1936

PRINTED IN THE U. S. A.

ALTHOUGH primitives (to use the commonly accepted term) can clearly differentiate things that appear supernatural from those that occur in the ordinary course of nature, they rarely imagine them as separate, for in them the sense of the impossible is lacking. What we should call miraculous appears to primitives commonplace, and though it may cause them emotion it does not readily surprise them. The events which strike their imagination do not actually proceed from secondary causes, but are due to the functioning of unseen powers. The success or the failure of an enterprise, the well-being or the misfortune of the community, the life and the death of its membersall these depend at all times upon powers, spirits, influences, forces innumerable, which surround the primitive on all sides, and constitute themselves the real masters of his destiny. In short, to judge by what he habitually thinks and fears, it would seem as if the supernatural itself forms part of nature to him.

In my previous works I have more than once had occasion to point out this characteristic attitude and orientation of the primitives mind. For the matters that I was treating, however, it then sufficed to allude to supernatural influences or unseen powers in general terms. In this book these will form the main subject of study, and I shall endeavour to specify more exactly how primitives imagine the supernatural, its constant intervention in all that happens to the individual or to the group of which he forms part, and to show how they behave with regard to the occult powers and influences of all kinds, whose presence and action are to them a source of perpetual dread.

The subject will not be treated in its entirety; far from it, indeed. The whole life of the primitive, from birth to death, and even beyond death, is saturated, as it were, by the supernatural. How can we grasp all its manifestations, or draw up a complete list of the good or bad influences which may at any moment be exerted upon the individual or upon his group ? I have had to confine myself to the study of some important points about which we are fairly well-informedsuch questions, for instance, as the ordinary, almost instinctive reactions of the primitive when faced by supernatural influences and powers which he dreads; how he imagines those which he fears most, especially witchcraft, and how he tries to protect and defend himself against them; the meaning he attaches to purity, defilement, purification, etc. This analysis, although a brief and rapid one, has, I believe, enabled me to account for a certain number of beliefs and institutions which are extremely prevalent among primitives.

Researches such as these inevitably evoke in the mind vast problems, raised long ago and still vehemently discussed, such as: Have primitives a religion? If so, what? Do they entertain the idea of a Supreme God? and so forth. These researches seem indeed to border upon such questions, but they never enter into the discussion. Rightly speaking, they cannot do so, for they are upon another plane altogether.

It may possibly be urged that in refusing to pose such problems and, as a consequence, to discuss their solution, I am thereby implicitly rejecting certain among them rather than others, and that I thus eliminate them by omission. Not at all. How can I take sides in a debate that I know nothing about? It is not this or that answer to the question that I am avoiding; it is the question itself that I have no right to treat. I could not treat it without abandoning the conception of primitive mentality which I believe to be in conformity with the facts, the method I have followed from the very beginning of these studies, and finally, the results which this method has enabled me to obtain.

If these be indeed correct, it at once appears that the terms used in the statement of these problems have nothing even remotely corresponding with them in the minds of the primitives. There is therefore no reason to ask ourselves with regard to them questions which are meaningless except for minds accustomed to our way of thinking, which is not theirs. In The Soul of the Primitive I tried to demonstrate the illusions under which even the most thoughtful and discreet of observers have laboured, for lack of their attention being alive to the differences which distinguish primitive mentality from our own. Their conceptions of the primitives ideas relating to the soul have been found irretrievably warped, and what we have thus ascertained about the soul is no less frequently to the fore when we are dealing with the mystic sphere, the unseen powers in short, the supernatural. In this matter, too, the same causes have produced the same effects. Most of the testimony available also remains unserviceable because the observer, in all good faith and unconsciously, has inserted his own concepts in the primitives ideas, and mingled his personal beliefs with those he thought he had gathered. Not content with thus attributing to primitives ideas alien to them, he nearly always establishes a connection between them to which their minds are indifferent, and he interprets these ideas by the light of our logic, our theology, and our metaphysics. It is better not to make use of such documents, except in the somewhat rare cases in which we can succeed in determining the personal equation of the observer, and getting at what is correct in his testimony.

Even language alone renders it almost impossible for the primitives ideas of the supernatural to be faithfully reproduced. While admitting (and this is true in about one or two cases in a hundred only) that an observer, really gifted from the psychological and linguistic point of view, has a thorough knowledge of the language of the natives among whom he lives, he will be only the more puzzled to find in his own tongue terms which exactly correspond with theirs. For the most part this difficulty is not even perceived by writers. Their interpretation of primitives ideas, generally more or less clumsy approximations, can only lead to error in the matters they aim at explaining. But even if we waive these objections, what can be the value of the testimony if the observer is persuaded beforehand, consciously or unconsciously, that these natives have the same natural metaphysics as himself? Might he not find among them, though no doubt distorted, mutilated, vague, yet nevertheless recognizable, the religious beliefs with which his mind has been permeated since his childhoods days, and which he has been taught to regard as the sacred inheritance of every man born into this world?