Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

512 Themis [ch.
making of a medicine man, death itself, were only rites de passage,
the transit from one state to another. Change which is life itself
is emphasized, represented. To consult an oracle you need a rite
de passage just as much as to be made a member of a tribe. To
know is to be in touch with mana, not to be entheos, for the theos
is not yet formulated and projected, but to be sanctified, to pass
inside the region of tabu ; hence the preliminary purification.
Lethe is but an attenuated Death ;
Mnemosyne,
renewed con-
sciousness, is a new Life.
We distinguish between the objective and the subjective. So
did primitive man ; indeed a creature who did not for practical
purposes make some such distinction would not long survive.
But we know definitely that the subjective world, though it can
influence our actions as strongly as the objective, has its only
reality within us. The savage gives to the world of his imagina-
tion, of his feelings, emotions, dreams, a certain outside reality.
He cannot quite distinguish between a conception and a perception.
He makes another world with a sort of secondary reality, super-
V sensuous but quite real. To this supersensuous world go all his
remembrances of the past, all his hopes and imaginings for the
future.
And so the supersensuous world grows big with the invisible present and
big also with the past and the future, crowded with the ghosts of the dead
and shadowed with oracles and portents of the future. It is this supersensuous,
supernatural world which is the eternity, the other world, of
primitive religion ; not an endlessness of time but a state removed from
full sensuous reality, a world in which anything and everything may happen,
a fairyland of heaven and hell, a world too peopled with demonic ancestors
--
and liable to a 'once upon a time-ness
denied to the present 1 .
Thus, to consult an oracle, a veritable, almost physical, rite de
passage is indispensable. The suppliant must pass out of the
actual, sensible, ' objective ' world, into that other world of dream,
of ecstasy, of trance, with its secondary reality, the world in which
emotions, hope and fear, and imaginations, are blended with what
we should call subjective hallucinations. He needs a rite d'agre-
gation to assimilate him, and when he would return to the normal
1 See my paper on The Influence of Duricinism on the Study of Religions,
pp. 499—501 in the Darwin Memorial Volume, 1909. The view there expressed
as to the content of the primitive supersensuous world is entirely based on
Dr P. Beck's Erkenntnisstheorie des primitiven Denkens in Zeitschrift f. Philosophie
und philos. Kritik, 1903, p. 172, and 1904, p. 9.