Humans hold a unique place in the living universe: they possess a conscience that allows them to think, to understand, to believe, to hope. Combined with the dangerously efficient weapon called language, it gives them the faculty to detach themselves from a situation, from a context that they can then observe, examine, analyze, compare, associate, and eventually use to their profit. They can also apply this faculty to themselves and become the object of their own observation, of their own analysis.
These faculties allow them to exercise a certain control on the world around them, a control supported by the desire to understand, to explain and to integrate events and situations to which they are confronted. In this everlasting quest on which humans have anchored their survival, the spirits will emerge as a leading concept.
The spirits are born of our drive to endow events that escape our understanding with features that make them intelligible to us. By spiritualizing the various manifestations of nature, we have not only found a cause to all its manifestations, but we have also invested them with intentions and goals similar to our own.
A spirit can be roughly defined as an invisible living entity possessing the faculty to inhabit a body or an object, and to leave it at will. An example of this duality body-spirit is found by the Penobscot Indians of North America for whom human beings are characterized by two aspects: the body and the vital me. The vital me depends on the body, but has the faculty to detach itself from it and to spend short periods of time outside the body in which it lives. Once outside its body, the vital me can come into action. It can also meet other wandering vital me. Some of its activities become visible when we dream.
When the body dies, the vital me is liberated and continues to live in an invisible world, except when it appears in dreams. For the Penobscot, these spirits are those of ancestors, and they exert a considerable influence on the living, sometimes in a positive way, but sometimes negatively too. Many (mis)deeds are caused by these roaming spirits.
Spirits are the very essence of the manifestation they represent, and possess its attributes. Humans will use these attributes to explain what they do not understand: with the spirits, all events that until then seemed incomprehensible get now an explanation, in accordance to the logical framework and the knowledge acquired by each community. Besides, conferring “life” to every animated and unanimated object, endowing with a common denominator all natural phenomena that had, so far, no connection with one another whatsoever, the spirits will form a unifying principle on which humans will develop a holistic vision of the universe [16].
The introduction of the spirits marks a point of no-return in our history, deeply transforming the manner we consider life. Let us outline here some of its consequences.
1) Creating a link between the world of the living and the world of the dead, the spirits give a function to death
2) They introduce a principle of cyclicality in the natural world, and with it the (first) notion of immortality
3) They substantialize life
4} They spiritualize nature
The first spirits were those of the deceased, those that everyone knew, those whose exploits, angers, misdemeanors, fears or strengths were still talked about. Their spirits symbolized their presence: their deeds, their mischief, their wrath, their malice, their jealousy, or their non-consummated vengeance remained present in all aspects of daily life, transmitted from generation to generation.
Studying the rituals and beliefs of the Aborigines of Australia, Emile Durkheim described these spirits as follow: “Separated from the body, the spirit [17] doesn't move immediately away; it continues to flutter, so to speak, around the dead body; it haunts the places where the body lived, prowl around the tomb, penetrate the camp at night to look if one is mourning accordingly. This tie is so strong, that time is not sufficient to completely undo it; practices and rituals are necessary; for example, one dries the flesh, one even pulverizes the bones; in other cases, one tries to chase the spirit away from the camp by screaming, by making noises and violent movements, and by putting it in a grave from where it goes to the land of the spirits. This land is sometimes underground, where one believes that the founders of the tribe have disappeared; sometimes, it is an island where all the spirits go; finally, some other times, the land of the spirits is situated in the sky, above the clouds. In these regions, the spirits are organized, as the living, by clans, by totemic groups. The primitives therefore believe in a future life that doesn't end.
[The primitive] doesn't believe that there is creation of a new spirit for every birth. For every clan, a determined amount of spirits exists that cannot increase or decrease. When a man dies, his spirit goes to the land of the spirits; but, after a while, it comes back to be embodied in another body. These spirits are those of the first beings that formed the clan at the origin of times. These first beings came out of the earth and were born of nothing; they lived a mythical life, and then they died, that is they disappeared into the ground; their spirit continued to live, in part under the ground, in part above, around the sacred places where the men finished their terrestrial existence. If a woman passing close to these places seduces one of these spirits, this spirit enters in her: birth is explained this way. The newborn is therefore only a new avatar of ancestral spirits.” [Durkheim, 1907]
For the Aborigine, death is not separated from life, it does not represent the end of life, but it is considered as a transitional stage during which a new life is in the making. The transformations taking place in the body after death confirm that the passage from life to death is a gradual one, the deceased staying in an intermediate zone for a certain amount of time. A parallel has been drawn between the transformations of the body in decomposition and the wanderings of the spirit that in its suffering can inflict all sorts of illnesses and disasters on the living [see Appendix Dobrizhoffer, Of illness].
Mortuary rituals aim at pacifying the spirit during this tormented period and at bringing it to rest. One will provide food and drink for the dead, while a mother will give milk to her deceased infant; and under less lenient skies, an umbrella will be placed beside the departed.
When the process of decomposition is complete and all life has definitely left the body, the spirit can reintegrate the world of spirits. A feast puts an end to this period, since the malevolent conditions that had arisen at the moment of death have now disappeared: “Generally, the spirits leave their parents in peace, once they have fulfilled their last duties towards them.” [Hertz, 1928]
Examples abound that show the interaction between the world of spirits and that of the living. One of them is the custom of closing the eyes of the dead, a custom originally intended to shut an open “window” between the world of the living and that of the dead [see also Appendix Tylor, Of spirits and yawning]. In the same way, covering the face of the dead with a cloth is meant to stop the spirit from returning to the corpse it has just left. Some people will burn the dwelling and things of the deceased in order to destroy everything that could tempt its spirit to come back and haunt the place. Elsewhere, for the same reason, the possessions of the departed are buried with the body. Others still open doors and windows to ensure the spirit’s departure.
To make sure that the spirit leaves the place, some rinsed the body, while others beat the walls (Canada) or the floor of the room (China), especially when bad weather could have incited the spirit not to leave the house (Madagascar). In Scotland and in Germany, chairs on which the coffin had been laid were turned upside down to force the spirit to leave. Some people like the Dakota Indians (United States) and the Karen (Thailand) asked the deceased to behave properly, to go to its grave and to remain there. Others, anxious that the deceased might come back to bother the living, went as far as to divert the bed of a river to bury their dead. Once buried, they would return the river to its original bed [18]. [For more examples see Appendix Spirits and Funeral Practices]
Besides the rituals surrounding the death of an individual, many communities also require an act of purification on behalf of the one who has killed. The Pima Indian (North America) who has taken the life of an enemy must isolate himself in the woods for 16 days. The Bechuana warrior (South Africa) must purify himself as well as his weapons after the fight. These practices also apply to the killing of an animal: the Damara hunter (Namibia) rinses his mouth three times when he comes back triumphant from the hunt. For the Xhosa (South Africa), a man who has been wounded by a lion becomes a hero, but must purify himself, his injury indicating that the lion had to settle the score with him: he will be locked up in a small hut for four days, before receiving the honors of the community. The purification aims at pacifying the spirit of the lion that would otherwise persevere in its vengeance [19] [see also Appendix Lang, Totemism]. In his work on primitive cultures, Edward Tylor wrote that “savages talk quite seriously to beasts alive or dead as they would to men alive or dead, offer them homage, ask pardon when it is their painful duty to hunt and kill them.” [Tylor, 1920]
The close relationship existing between the spirits and the dead reveals the need humans have to give a meaning to death, need that motivates practically all beliefs and that will give rise to the most complex religion.
Another important function attributed to the spirits concerns procreation. With the spirits, pregnancy receives its first satisfactory explanation: “the primitive believed that the spirits continued to live because it was for him the only means to explain new births.” [Durkheim, 1907] Furthermore, they provide men with a role in a process from which they were excluded until then. Essentially, the spirit chooses the woman who is to become a mother, and introduces itself in her womb as a child-spirit, determining the sex of the child to be born. Though men’s physical contribution remains, in most cases, of no relevance, the spirits’ intervention adds, however, a new dimension to the procreative process: the fact that the spirits determine the sex of the newborn child entails that only male spirits can generate boys [20].
As for women who did not become pregnant, it was concluded that they had offended the spirits in one way or another, and had been judged unworthy to carry their child.
The fact that the number of spirits remains permanent and unalterable, each spirit being eternally recycled, ensures continuity between life and death, weaving those two worlds one into the other, each explaining and legitimizing the other while maintaining the universe in balance. It also explains the total absence of scruples regarding infanticide, as the spirit inhabiting the defunct child will eventually return as a child-spirit and reinvest a new body. For this reason, twins in Bellona (Solomon Islands) were seen as a punishment from an ancestor – except, of course, if the mother had contravened a taboo by eating twin fruits. The twins were immediately put to death and buried under a heap of stones.
The influence of the spirits was not limited to the sphere of birth and death. They invested the whole of nature and empowered objects, plants, and more especially animals since men depended so much on them. They also played a primordial role in the development of the totem.
The spirits became the reason for all inexplicable phenomena in nature, for its incomprehensible manifestations as for its unforeseeable changes. They were the source of all pains, all sufferings, but also of all pleasures and all joys. Being spiritualized, natural events were attributed expressions of wrath or of anger, of offense, of violence, even of madness [21]. Consequently, not much was necessary to associate to their manifestations an idea of reward or of punishment.
On these premises, a new personage emerged, the shaman, who had for function to read, interpret, and translate the message from the spirits, and eventually to send them requests, establishing himself [22] as a mediator between them and the community. This mediator’s role was the result of a very long process that profoundly affected the life of these populations. Communicating with the spirits, structuring and interpreting their manifestations, determining which actions had to be taken, and defining the adequate response, endowed the shaman with a particular status and special powers within the community. Using his ascendancy, this influent personage gradually built a monopolistic control on information on which the community became dependent.
In the ignorance of their procreative function, men did not understand what their purpose in the world was, to which function they were destined: they could not create children, they could not bear them, they could not nurse them. As to supplying the camp with meat, it represented a function of mediocre status compared to what nature had granted to women on whom the survival of the group and, ultimately, of the species depended [23]. Women had deeply anchored certainties, acquired first with the physical transformation of puberty and the start of menses, and later with pregnancies and the fact that they could give birth, apparently without any male intervention. But their maternal functions did not stop there, continuing long after having given birth to their children who depended on them during the first years of their lives. That made the situation of men more incomprehensible still, and they left this world without ever knowing why they were brought into it in the first place.
This incomprehensible imbalance haunted them, having, like an unhealed wound, a profound impact on the collective consciousness [24]. It gave rise to a sense of injustice and of humiliation that turned into a deep and lasting feeling of frustration and jealousy. Later, much later, when men will discover that a function of the utmost importance has been assigned to them, they will utter such a cry of victory that its echo still reverberates to the four corners of the earth to this day. But we are not there yet, and for men of those remote times, ignorant of it all, the wound – as symbolic as Bruno Bettelheim might have considered it – was deep and biting: how could they accept such an imbalance, such an inequality, such an injustice?
With the passing of generations, men are going to work out answers to these questions that gnaw at them, trying to re-establish the balance, to rectify the inequalities, to repair the injustices. The spirits will be their first global answer – a primary and necessary element to the forming of the primitive holistic vision of the universe, – opening the way to a masculine representation of the world, in which their sharpened desires, the multiple forces that motivate them, their accumulated frustrations, and even their thirst for vengeance will find their expression. This representation will help them claim monopolies and powers that are still in force today.
The following two examples show us how power has been assigned to the spirits. In the first one, their function is directly connected with the level of knowledge acquired by the community; in the second one, their function is bound to an expression of will.
The fact that the spirits were endowed with the faculty to provoke pregnancies and to determine the sex of children influenced the way most communities conceived the world, as we have seen in the example of the mother of half-caste children who thought that the color of their offspring was due to the white flour introduced by Europeans. “It is clear that the procreative beliefs of the Aborigines constitute the foundation stones of their cosmogony, kinship system, religion, and social organization and possess a significance the ramifications of which far exceed in importance any question of whether or not the Aborigines are in some cases ignorant of the fact of procreation.” [Montagu, 1974]
The spirits will play this role until humans discover the generative function that nature has assigned to men. From that moment, this attribute will be withdrawn from the panoply of powers granted to the spirits: once the mystery revealed, the procreative function of the spirits became redundant [25]. In this example, the powers attributed to the spirits are directly associated with the way humans understand and interpret the world around them: new knowledge that corrects previous “erroneous” interpretations reshapes the beliefs and, as a result, the system that concretizes them. As we will see, the discovery of paternity will cause the demise of the world of spirits.
Carving his shield is one of the most important activities of the Asmat warrior. By doing so, he endows it with a spirit – or a combination of spirits – that renders him invincible: invincible in his own eyes as well as in the eyes of others, whether allies or enemies. His invincibility will remain irrefutable until he is defeated. However, once defeated, his death will not be assigned to the enemy – which would discredit the principle of invincibility of the spirits and, therefore, their very existence – but it will be attributed to the spirit used by the enemy, a spirit powerful enough to annihilate the invincibility of his own spirit [26]. [See also Appendix Dobrizhoffer, Of death and eclipses]
In the first example, the spirits provide a logical explanation to what humans do not understand. As their knowledge of the world around them increases, the functions and powers of the spirits decrease. In our second example on the other hand, knowledge does not alter in any way the powers attributed to the spirits. The fact that the warrior has been defeated does not lessen the belief in the spirits’ capacities. These capacities are determined by humans and remain under their control.
Communicating with the spirits will revolve around one of two approaches, depending on the type of functionality that has been accorded to them. The first approach, found in animism for example, is characterized by a spiritualized nature whose “will” is read and interpreted. Any human request might be formulated, but nothing guarantees that the spirits will take notice. In this “integrative” approach, humans have to share the world with different vital forces, and their influence and power are extremely limited. These limits reveal and mirror the state of human knowledge.
In the second approach that is found in shamanism and in magic, humans take an active part in the world of spirits, and their influence on them is decisive. Our example of the Asmat warrior belongs to this “dominative” approach. Another example refers to hunting, men’s principal activity: “The hunter has to make a pact with the ‘master of animals’ who grants him a beast, asking in return for a sacrifice. The shaman marks the game, because he has been an animal himself, and he negotiates his prey while offering the spirits of those who will die in the year – generally he offers the spirits of an enemy tribe.” [Delumeau, 1999] Shamanism establishes a real exchange between humans and spirits. [See Appendix Dobrizhoffer, The wizard's power]
Both methods will be exploited according to the needs, each system being used to escape the limitations of the other. With the passing of time, rules attached to exchanges with the spirits will get a better definition, will become codified. To secure their grip, to ensure that the reins of power will not slip out of their hands, men will build an almost complete monopoly around the means of communication with the spirits. In most cases, the tools being used to communicate with them and the places where men officiate will be forbidden to women. Access to the world of spirits will be mined with multiple dangers – frightening specters, malevolent powers, deadly perils – that only insiders having acquired a very specific knowledge anchored in a secret tradition will be able to face.
However, there is one approach to the world of spirits that seems to have been under the control of women since the earliest of times.
Magic rituals are one of the most widespread means of communication used with the spirits. Magic stages the balance of power that opposes humans to their environment, allowing them to face the forces of nature with “the attitude of command.” [Hegel, 1963] The hunter who eats the flesh of an animal he has just killed, the warrior who devours the enemy he has defeated, represent as many attempts to get hold of a hostile context. When devouring an animal or an enemy, man kills two birds with one stone: he makes it definitively disappear, and he acquires its spirit, its powers. In the magic world of the Guarani (South America), all misfortune finds its origin in a spell and has to be avenged. Vengeance is ineluctable and can last indefinitely, anchoring this way animosity between neighbors into a timeless tradition. There will be no respite before the process of re-balancing is completed and that the community has regained what had been lost. There is no forgiveness, no possibility of avoidance: the powers in presence are extremely real and no one can escape them. However, it does not mean we have to deal with fatality. Magic gives the necessary weapons to defeat or tame forces that humans do not dominate. Magical powers are controllable with well-defined weapons.
Magic operates in a contextual world. It is the warrior and his shield; it is the hunter and the animal he has killed; it is a special spell that a wizard casts on a tribe: it is a knowledge placed in specific hands for a definite goal. Bronislaw Malinowski explained that “magic constitutes a particular aspect of reality. In all important activities and enterprises in which man has not the issue firmly and safely in hand, magic is deemed indispensable. Thus, appeal is made to it in gardening and fishing, in building a large canoe, and in diving for valuable shell, in the regulation of wind and weather, in war, in matters of love and personal attraction, in securing safety at sea and the success of any great enterprise and last but not least, in health and for the infliction of ailments upon an enemy. Success and safety in all these matters are largely and sometimes entirely dependent upon magic, and can be controlled by its proper application. Fortune or failure, dearth or plenty, health or disease are felt and believed to be mainly due to the right magic rightly applied in the right circumstances.
Magic consists of spells and rites performed by a man who is entitled by the fulfillment of several conditions to perform them. Magical power resides primarily in the words of the formula, and the function of the rite, which is as a rule very simple, is mainly to convey the magician's breath, charged with the power of the words [27], to the object or person to be affected. All magical spells are believed to have descended unchanged from time immemorial, from the beginning of things.” [Malinowski, 1929; see also Appendix Spencer, Of sacred objects]
Extremely ritualized, with its practices anchored in tradition, magic serves precise goals and solves concrete problems: a world of manipulations in which impersonal powers are exhorted with the help of an initiated language.
Magic will frequently be used in conjunction with spirits, as we saw in the example of the Asmat warrior who invokes a spirit for his protection and uses magic rituals to fix the invincibility that this spirit confers on his shield. [See Appendix Spencer, Of magic] [28