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Myth, Ritual, and Religion

出版	CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016-06-30
主題	Religion / General
ISBN	15349842919781534984295
URL	http://books.google.com.hk/books?id=D0pCDQEACAAJ&hl=&source=gbs_api

註釋When this book first appeared (1886), the philological school ofinterpretation of religion and myth, being then still powerful inEngland, was criticised and opposed by the author. In Science, as on theTurkish throne of old, "Amurath to Amurath succeeds"; the philologicaltheories of religion and myth have now yielded to anthropologicalmethods. The centre of the anthropological position was the "ghosttheory" of Mr. Herbert Spencer, the "Animistic" theory of Mr. E. R.Tylor, according to whom the propitiation of ancestral and other spiritsleads to polytheism, and thence to monotheism. In the second edition(1901) of this work the author argued that the belief in a "relativelysupreme being," anthropomorphic was as old as, and might be even older,than animistic religion. This theory he exhibited at greater length, andwith a larger collection of evidence, in his Making of Religion.Since 1901, a great deal of fresh testimony as to what Mr. Howittstyles the "All Father" in savage and barbaric religions has accrued. Asregards this being in Africa, the reader may consult the volumes of theNew Series of the Journal of the Anthropological Institute, which arefull of African evidence, not, as yet, discussed, to my knowledge, byany writer on the History of Religion. As late as Man, for July, 1906,No. 66, Mr. Parkinson published interesting Yoruba legends about Oleron,the maker and father of men, and Oro, the Master of the Bull Roarer.From Australia, we have Mr. Howitt's account of the All Father in hisNative Tribes of South-East Australia, with the account of the AllFather of the Central Australian tribe, the Kaitish, in North CentralTribes of Australia, by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (1904), also TheEuahlayi Tribe, by Mrs. Langley Parker (1906). These masterly books areindispensable to all students of the subject, while, in Messrs. Spencerand Gillen's work cited, and in their earlier Native Tribes of CentralAustralia, we are introduced to savages who offer an elaborate animistictheory, and are said to show no traces of the All Father belief.