The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, Vol. 1: Part V. Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from The Golden Bough, a Study in Magic and Religion, Vol. 1: Part V. Spirits of the Corn and of the Wild

Thus on the whole we are concerned in these volumes with the reverence or worship paid by men'to the natural resources from which they draw their nutriment, both vege table and animal. That they should invest these resources with an atmosphere of wonder and awe, often indeed with a halo of divinity, is no matter for surprise. The circle of human knowledge, illuminated by the pale cold light of reason, is so infinitesimally small, the dark regions of human ignorance which lie beyond that luminous ring are so im measurably vast, that imagination is fain to step up to the border line and send the warm, richly coloured beams of her fairy lantern streaming out into the darkness; and so, peering into the gloom, she is apt to mistake the shadowy reflections of her own figure for real beings moving in the abyss. In short, few men are sensible of the sharp line that divides the known from the unknown; to most men it is a hazy borderland where perception and concep tion melt indissolubly into one. Hence to the savage the ghosts of dead animals and men, with which his imagination peoples the void, are hardly less real than the solid shapes which the living animals and men present to his senses; and his thoughts and activities are nearly as much absorbed by the one as by the other. Of him it may be said with perhaps even greater truth than of his civilised brother.

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