Introduction
You often look at human customs, myths, and religious rituals as random quirks of history or isolated local inventions. When you try to trace how societies develop, you struggle to find order beneath an overwhelming chaos of bizarre beliefs. Edward Burnett Tylor solves this problem by demonstrating that culture obeys strict, natural laws of evolution that govern human thought from savagery to civilization.
Human culture evolves through fixed natural laws from savagery to civilization, driven by rational invention and the persistent development of animism into higher religion.
The book guides you through a comprehensive science of culture, analyzing survivals, mythology, language, and magic. You discover how the concept of the soul forms the foundation of all religion, evolving from early animism into complex polytheism and monotheism.
- How do obsolete customs persist as survivals of ancient stages of society?
- What mental processes generate mythology, magic, and occult science?
- How does religion develop logically from ghost-souls to supreme monotheism?
1. The Science of Culture
Culture or civilization is a complex whole. It includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and other capabilities acquired in society. You can investigate this subject on general principles to study the laws of human thought and action.
Culture is a complex whole that can be studied through biological species concepts, social statistics, and the doctrine of survivals.
Human thoughts, wills, and actions accord with laws. They are as definite as those governing physical nature. You must study them without invoking causeless spontaneity.
You can classify the details of culture into species. They are studied according to their geographical distribution and transmission, just like plants and animals.
- Items like a bow and arrow
- The habit of flattening skulls
- Counting by tens
The introduction of wheat and horses to America brought the gun and the iron hatchet. The Old World received maize, potatoes, turkeys, the habit of smoking, and the sailor's hammock.
Definition of Culture
Populations exhibit a tacit consensus. This consensus allows researchers to generalize about national culture by ignoring individual differences and studying mass behavior. Statistical generalizations prove that large communities act with regular causation.
You observe annual regularity in numbers of murders, suicides, accidental deaths in London streets, and undirected letters dropped into post-office letter-boxes.
Survivals in Culture
Survivals are processes, customs, and opinions carried by force of habit into a new state of society. They serve as evidence of an older cultural condition. Ancient habits persist when serious business sinks into sport.
An old Somersetshire woman throwing her shuttle from hand to hand in classic fashion illustrates this persistence. Other examples include the ordeal of the Key and Bible, the Midsummer bonfire, and All Souls' supper for the spirits of the dead.
The main tendency of human culture from primordial times has been an evolutionary progression. This progression moves from savagery towards civilization. You trace development from the long-bow to the cross-bow, and from the wheel-lock to flint-lock and percussion-lock firearms.
2. Theories of Culture Development
Culture develops primarily through a progression from savagery to civilization, whereas the degeneration-theory assumes humanity started in a higher state and fell into savagery.
The progression-theory views existing savagery as an early condition of mankind. Higher culture evolved through regular operations from this base. Count Joseph de Maistre and Archbishop Whately argued for the degeneration-theory based on theological views. Early progressionists like Goguet and de Brosses traced human rise from primitive states.
Archaeological Evidence
Prehistoric archaeology proves an original low culture throughout the world. A Stone Age everywhere underlies the Metal Age. This research extends the antiquity of man through Paleolithic drift implements and Neolithic polished stone tools.
M. Boucher de Perthes discovered flint implements in the Drift gravels of the Somme Valley in 1841. John Frere wrote about similar weapons at Hoxne in Suffolk in 1797.
Diffusion and Preservation
The diffusion of culture across wide areas acts as a preservative, protecting human achievements from local degeneration and destruction.
When a progressive movement spreads beyond its origin, it becomes independent of its originators. Useful arts and inventions are diffused across wide regions. The scythe continued to mow the harvests of Italy even after barbarian invaders subverted the laws and palaces of Rome.
3. Survival in Culture
Customs, arts, and opinions often persist long after their original meaning has been forgotten, serving as historic landmarks of earlier states of civilization.
When conditions change, elements from an earlier culture often last on into the new state simply because they already existed. The term superstition originally meant a standing over from old times, but ethnographers use survival to denote this historical fact without the reproachful connotation. The Roman objection to marrying in May, linked to the Lemuralia funeral rites, survived into nineteenth-century England as an unlucky superstition.
Customs and Games
Children's games frequently preserve ancient and obsolete serious practices, acting as sportive imitations of early human culture. Weapons like the bow, the cross-bow, and the sling have disappeared from practical use or warfare but continue to exist in full service as toys and playground games. Esquimaux children practice shooting tiny bows at marks and building miniature snow-huts, while English and New Zealand children imitate animal cries and early numeration.
Games of chance and gambling instruments are historically derived from ancient arts of divination and sacred appeals to supernatural forces. Early civilization viewed lots and dice not as mathematical probability, but as a direct appeal to supernatural beings who intervene in the outcome. In ancient Rome, astragali or hucklebones were used for divination and invoking gods before throws, while Polynesian islanders shifted from spinning a coconut to inquire about sick people to using it purely for a game of forfeits. Thomas Gataker published his treatise Of the Nature and Use of Lots in 1619.
Foundation Sacrifices
The historical practice of laying building foundations over human victims or animals is preserved in widespread European and Asian legends and folklore.
Structures such as bridges, walls, and castles were historically believed to require human blood or immured victims to appease earth-spirits and make the foundations steadfast. Legends and historical accounts record that a child was bought to be walled into the castle of Liebenstein, and a girl was immured in the wall of Copenhagen to keep it from sinking. A similar foundation sacrifice was noted in 1463 when the broken dam of the Nogat was repaired.
4. Mythology and Philosophical Myths
Myths originate as rational yet illusory inferences, pragmatic metaphors, and animistic interpretations of nature.
Edward Burnett Tylor observes that myths are not spontaneous creations of boundless human imagination. They are shaped by inherited materials and an actual experience of nature and life. What seems like lawless fiction by poets is rooted in intelligible sequences from cause to effect.
Savage mythology represents the childhood of the human race and serves as the proper baseline for studying the development of culture.
- Myths of exposed infants saved to become national heroes appear in Rome as Romulus and Remus, in Slavonic lore as Waligora and Wyrwidab, and among Brazilian Yuracarés as Tiri.
Ancient and modern commentators often try to rationalize myths into literal history or moral allegories. Euhemerists explained that Jove's thunderbolts represented a king suppressing a sedition. They argued that Danae's golden shower was simply the money used to bribe her guards.
Philosophical Myths
Philosophical myths often start as pseudo-history born from logical yet illusory inferences. A fossil elephant find in a London brickfield sparked a local story about a dead elephant from Wombwell's menagerie.
Pragmatized metaphors turn descriptive figures of speech into literal historical narratives and material incidents. Moslem legend transformed the metaphorical opening and cleaning of Mohammed's heart into a physical operation where the angel Gabriel opened his chest with a golden basin.
Animism in Nature
The primary cause of nature-myths is the belief in the universal animation of nature. Lower tribes view every physical detail as having personal life and will.
- Kukis of Southern Asia retaliate against a falling tree that kills a relative by cutting it down and scattering it in chips.
- North American tribes personify Nipinūkhe and Pipūnūkhe as the bringers of spring and winter who divide the world between them.
Grammatical gender and proper naming of lifeless objects act in continuum with mythology. Maori traditions preserve the names of ancestral stone axes like Tutauru and Hauhau-te-rangi, alongside canoes like Arawa and Tainui. An ear-ornament named Kaukau-matua was lost in a landslip in the year 1846.
5. Language and Arithmetic
Language and arithmetic emerge from primitive sense experience, imitative sound-roots, gesture systems, and anatomical counting bases.
Educated modern men use substantially the same primary method of speech as savages, relying on articulate sounds allotted to ideas. While structures differ across races, all languages contain directly natural sounds of an interjectional or imitative character.
Tylor contrasts the Tasmanian, Chinese, Greenlander, and Greek languages to show structural differences underpinned by identical expressive methods.
Gesture plays a prominent role in daily communication among rude tribes. Lower races use visible gestures, facial expressions, and body postures to supplement or replace pronouns and grammar.
Mr. Bonwick and Dr. Milligan noted that Tasmanians used signs with monosyllabic words. Rev. J. L. Wilson described how the Grebo language of West Africa omits personal pronouns, using gesture instead to determine whether a verb is first or second person.
In several languages, rises and falls of musical pitch alter the dictionary meaning of a word. Siamese uses pitch accent to differentiate terms:
- há means 'to seek'
- hã means 'pestilence'
- hà means 'five'
Foundations of Arithmetic
The fundamental truths of arithmetic are derived from early and constant experience, resting on the evidence of sense rather than innate abstract certainty. J.S. Mill argued against Dr. Whewell that propositions like two and three make five are inductive truths proved by separating and rearranging objects before your eyes and fingers.
Mr. Mill illustrates this by showing how ten balls can be separated and rearranged to exhibit different sets of numbers whose sum is equal to ten.
Many low savage tribes possess very few specific numeral words, relying instead on gesture-counting using fingers and toes. Spoken numeral words frequently grew out of gesture-language, with tribes naming numbers directly after anatomical features:
- 5 means a whole hand
- 10 means both hands or half a man
- 20 means one Indian or a man ended
The Tamanac language on the Orinoco expresses 5 as amgnaitone, 10 as amgna aceponare, and 20 as tevin itoto. The widespread global use of quinary, decimal, and vigesimal numerical notations confirms that human anatomy formed the basis of counting.
6. Magic and Occult Science
Magic is fundamentally based on an error in the association of ideas, where people mistakenly assume that an ideal connexion in thought involves a similar connexion in reality.
A low intellectual condition leads people to falsely invert real facts. You attempt to cause or foretell events through ideal associations. This includes acting upon a distant person by damaging their hair, nails, or clothing.
In Australia, a native doctor fastens a string to an ailing part and sucks the other end to draw out blood. In Orissa, an Obi-man lets down a thread through an enemy's roof to reach their body and suck their blood.
Association of Ideas
Symbolic magic operates on simple representative principles. Omens rely on direct analogy, such as viewing a howling dog looking downward as a portending death or looking upward as recovery.
Dream interpretation or oneiromancy attributes dreams to spiritual intercourse. The Zulus reason that dreaming of a dead man and a funeral means the sick person will not die. A dream of a wedding-dance portends a funeral.
Witchcraft and Spiritualism
Occult science persisted because it is sustained by professional self-interest and human psychological biases. The European witchcraft delusion was a direct survival from primitive savage culture.
In 1658 at Chard Assizes, Jane Brooks was executed after a twelve-year-old boy named Richard Jones was seen to rise in the air. A witch was reported burnt at Camargo in 1860. Modern spiritualism is a direct revival of savage philosophy and animistic doctrines. In 1847, rapping disturbances began in Arcadia, New York, led by the Fox family.
7. The Doctrine of Souls
The minimum definition of religion is animism, grounded in the universal concept of the apparitional ghost-soul and object-souls.
Narrow definitions requiring a supreme deity, idols, or moral judgments exclude many low races of mankind. Explorers like Dr. Lang, Mr. Moffat, and Don Felix de Azara hastily denied the existence of religion among native tribes like the Australians, Bechuanas, and Guanas, ignoring their deep-seated beliefs in spirits, shades, and deities.
Ancient thinkers observed biological differences between life and death. They inferred that every person possesses a life and a phantom, combining them into a ghost-soul defined as a vapour, film, or shadow.
Definition of Animism
Primitive philosophy conceives the personal soul as a thin, unsubstantial image that can leave the body, travel swiftly, and persist after corporeal death. The Tasmanian word for shadow is also used for spirit. The Algonquin Indians call a man's soul his shadow, and the Abipones use the word lodkal for shadow, soul, echo, and image.
Sickness and trances are explained by the temporary absence of the soul from the body. Buddhist Lamas in Northern Asia perform elaborate soul-restoration ceremonies for patients who have lost their rational soul, while Karen doctors run about to catch a sick man's wandering butterfly-soul.
Souls of Objects and Animals
Primitive animism extends the theory of separable souls to inanimate objects, believing they possess phantasmal spirits that survive when broken. Fijians believe that the souls of broken axes, houses, and canoes swim along a stream in a deep hole in the ground called the Kauvandra well into the regions of immortality.
Animals are credited with having souls and rational faculties similar to humans. Koriaks slay a bear or wolf, dress a person in its skin, dance around him, and chant excuses that a Russian is to blame for the killing.
8. Transmigration and Future Life
Transmigration of souls and the localization of the future life evolve from continuance theories into ethical systems of retribution.
Transmigration
You find that savage and barbaric groups observe family resemblances and interpret them as the return of a deceased relative's soul into an infant. In Vancouver's Island in 1860, a lad was revered because he bore a scar-like mark on his hip matching a chief who died four generations prior.
To identify a returned ancestor, you may follow specific traditional customs:
- Repeat a list of ancestral names to an infant.
- Fix upon the name which the child selects by sneezing or crying when it is uttered.
The Future State
The lower races predominantly hold a continuance-theory of the future life, viewing the afterlife as an idealized continuation of earthly existence. While savage religion links future destiny to courage, skill, or ritual observance, higher cultures develop explicit moral retribution.
The ancient Egyptians required souls to pass before Osiris and forty-two judges in Amenti, making a negative confession denying specific crimes like murder, theft, and calumny.
9. Animism and Spirit Worship
Animism expands from the narrow doctrine of souls into a complete philosophy of natural religion that explains outer world phenomena as the wilful action of pervading personal spirits modelled on the human soul.
Animism expands into ancestor worship, fetishism, and the adoration of nature spirits inhabiting water, trees, and animals.
Ancestor Worship and Fetishism
Manes-worship, or the worship of deified ancestors, is a major branch of human religion where dead relatives and chiefs continue social relations by protecting their kin and punishing wrongs. Abnormal physical and mental conditions are explained in primitive philosophy as the operation of an intruding strange spirit or demon.
In Tinnevelly, native worshippers propitiate the diabolic soul of a wicked British officer by offering brandy and cheroots at his grave.
Fetishism is the subordinate department of animism defined as the doctrine of spirits embodied in, attached to, or conveying influence through certain material objects. The worship of unshaped natural objects like rocks, logs, and stones is a widespread primitive rite rooted in the belief that powerful spirits dwell within them.
To secure luck and comfort in the house, you can:
- preserve round stones in the house;
- wash the stones every Thursday evening;
- smear the stones with butter before the fire;
- place them in the seat of honour on fresh straw;
- steep them in ale at certain times of the year.
Nature Worship
Primitive man views the entire operations of the world as carried on by the influence of personal spiritual beings. Natural bodies of water are animated by personal spirits or deities possessing wills, requiring propitiation and sacrifices for safety and success. Trees and groves are frequently venerated as conscious personal beings either inhabited by an indwelling soul or possessed by a tree-spirit.
Animals are venerated directly as powerful beings, as shrines of incarnate deities, or as clan totems representing ancestral connections.
10. Polytheism, Dualism, and Monotheism
Polytheism develops through specialized nature deities and heaven-gods, culminating in dualistic systems and supreme monotheistic authority.
Polytheism and Nature Deities
You find that polytheistic gods are modeled on human souls, passions, and social structures. Psalmists noted this reflex when writing "Thou thoughtest I was altogether as thyself." The visible sky transitions into anthropomorphic supreme creators like the Aryan Dyaus, Chinese Tien, or African Yankupong. Hurons addressed the sky as Aronhiaté, sacrificing tobacco into the fire.
Agricultural societies facing severe droughts invoke Rain-gods through specific communal rituals. You can observe these practices among indigenous groups:
- Ascend the sacred mountain fasting
- Carry offerings of milk and leaves with drumming
- Kneel with loosened hair and violently shake the head while beseeching the deity for seasonable rain
- Dance upon the rock until distant thunder responds
Dualism and Monotheism
Lower races display rudimentary dualism as a theory of pleasure or pain rather than abstract morality. The Khonds of Orissa provide a barbaric dualism through the opposition of light and earth. The Zarathustrian faith institutionalized this struggle between Ahura-Mazda and Anra-Mainyu. Modern Parsis continue to recite confessions of sin against Ormazd:
- Pardon, O Lord, I repent of sin.
Polytheism frequently culminates in the rule of one supreme divinity. In Peru, a theological rivalry existed between the Supreme Creator Uiracocha and the divine Sun. Chinese state religion centers on the worship of Heaven, maintaining ancient traditions of a supreme celestial ruler.
10 Key Ideas
- Culture is a complex whole that can be studied through biological species concepts, social statistics, and the doctrine of survivals.
- Culture develops primarily through a progression from savagery to civilization, whereas the degeneration-theory assumes humanity started in a higher state and fell into savagery.
- Customs, arts, and opinions often persist long after their original meaning has been forgotten, serving as historic landmarks of earlier states of civilization.
- Myths originate as rational yet illusory inferences, pragmatic metaphors, and animistic interpretations of nature.
- Language and arithmetic emerge from primitive sense experience, imitative sound-roots, gesture systems, and anatomical counting bases.
- Magic is fundamentally based on an error in the association of ideas, where people mistakenly assume that an ideal connexion in thought involves a similar connexion in reality.
- The minimum definition of religion is animism, grounded in the universal concept of the apparitional ghost-soul and object-souls.
- Transmigration of souls and the localization of the future life evolve from continuance theories into ethical systems of retribution.
- Animism expands into ancestor worship, fetishism, and the adoration of nature spirits inhabiting water, trees, and animals.
- Polytheism develops through specialized nature deities and heaven-gods, culminating in dualistic systems and supreme monotheistic authority.