22
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the world that used
the dimension of the invisible. Man used his ingenuity to Ell his
stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of his organism;
this is only logical and natural. But this stomach-centered character-
istic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. One reason
is that man was never content to just stop at food: he wanted more
life in the widest sense of the term — exactly what we would expect
an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-
conscious about life and death and the need to continue experienc-
ing . 22 Food is only one part of that quest; man quickly saw beyond
mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify
for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted
into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All
of man’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original
quest for energy-power. Nietzsche was one of the first to state this
blatantly, and he shocked the world with it: that all morality is
fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to
continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all
right for man to talk about spiritual aims; what he really means is
aims for merits that qualify him for eternity. This too, of course, is
the logical development of organismic ambitions.
Hocart ends his noted work Kingship with just such a com-
mentary on the evolution of spirituality out of the simple quest for
physical life:
Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered
at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote
the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing ... a sum of innocence,
purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity. . . . Doubtless
many will be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls
from the cravings of the stomach. . . . Even so the rising generation may
find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which Man,
so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of
matter to that of the spirit . 23
No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual
emotions that man is capable of. As a creature he is most attuned to
the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 23
a fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous; the whole
thing is surely part of a divine mystery. But the step from the
stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as
Hocart would seem to make out. The earning of spiritual points is
the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some
few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For
most men faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life,
the exact extension of the organismic stomach project.
There is a small debate being aired in certain circles of anthro-
pology today about the many ways in which primitive life was
superior to our own. Levi-Strauss himself has taken a stand in favor
of the primitive. 24 I don’t want to go into the pros and cons of it
and the many subtle and valid arguments produced on both sides.
But it does help us to understand the primitive world if we agree
to the old anthropological tenet about “the psychic unity of man-
kind” — that is, that man everywhere, no matter how exotic a
particular culture, is basically standard vintage Homo sapiens,
interchangeable in his nature and motives with any other human
being. This is what the whole movement to rehabilitate the primi-
tive — from Hocart to Levi-Strauss — has been about; to show that
he is basically no different from ourselves and certainly not inferior
mentally or emotionally. Well, having agreed that the primitive
is no worse than we are, it might be in order to add that he is no
better. Otherwise, as we shall see, we cannot really understand
what happened in history, unless we try to make out that a different
animal developed, nor can we understand the problems of modern
society, unless we pretend that modern man is a wholly degenerate
type of Homo sapiens.
What I am saying is that if modern man seems mad in his ob-
session to control nature by technology, primitive man was no less
obsessed by his own mystical technics of sacrifice. After all, one
of the things we have learned from the modem study of mental
illness is that to make the body the referent of the whole cosmos
is a technique of madness. 23 It is true that by institutionalizing
macrocosmization, primitive man made it a normal way of referring
oneself to transcendent events. But this kind of “normality” is itself
unreal, it blows man up to an abnormal size, and so we are right
to consider it self-defeating, a departure from the truth of the
24
ESCAPE FROM EVIL
human condition. If the primitive was not less intelligent, he was
equally not less intent on self-perpetuation. When we “step off’
into history, we seem to see a type of man who is more driven —
but this is only because he started off already obsessed with control
and with a hunger for immortality. It is true that primitive man
was kinder to nature, that he did not cause the kind of destructive-
ness we are causing and, in fact, did not seem capable of our kind
of casual disregard for the bounty of the natural world. It would
take a lot of study and compilation of comparative data to bear
these impressions out, but I think that if primitive man was kinder
to nature, it was not because he was innately different in his
emotional sensitivity nor more altruistic toward other living forms
than we are. I think, rather, that it was because his technics of
manipulation was less destructive. He needed a tree, the spirit of an
animal or plant, the sacrifice of one animal of a species. As we shall
see, we grind up astronomically larger quantities of life, but it is
in the same spirit and for the same basic reasons. If we talk about
a certain primitive quality of “reverence” for life, we must be very
careful. The primitives’ attitude toward animals considered sacred
was sometimes more cruel than our own is. They did not hesitate
to sacrifice those whom they considered their benefactors or their
gods, or even hesitate to kill their chiefs and kings. The main value
was whether this brought life to the community and whether the
ritual demanded it . 20 Man has always casually sacrificed life for
more life.
Probably more to the point, man has always treated with con-
sideration and respect those parts of the natural world over which
he has had no control. As soon as he was sure of his powers, his
respect for the mystery of what he faced diminished. Hocart makes
a telling point about the evolution of man’s attitude toward animals:
As his superiority and mastery over the rest of the living world became
more and more apparent he seems to have become more and more
anxious to disclaim relationship with animals, especially when worship
became associated with respect. There is no objection to an animal’s
being the object of a cult when this does not imply respect but is merely
a procedure for causing the animal to multiply. It is a very different
thing when ritual becomes worship; man is loath to abase himself be-
fore an animal . 27
The Primitive World: Ritual as Practical Technics 25
Hocart attributes this to "the growing conceit of man.” But we
could just as well see it as a result of natural narcissism. Each
organism preens itself on the specialness of the life that throbs
within it, and is ready to subordinate all others to its own continua-
tion. Man was always conceited; he only began to show his destruc-
tive side to the rest of nature when the ritual technology of the
spiritual production of animals was superseded by other technol-
ogies. The unfolding of history is precisely the saga of the succession
of new and different ideologies of organismic self-perpetuation —
and the new injustices and heightened destructiveness of historical
man. Let us turn to this.
CHAPTER TWO
The Primitive World:
Economics as Expiation and Power
Now that we have talked about how primitive man created or
helped create natural bounty, we have to look at what he did with
this bounty, how he applied his concept of the natural order of
things in daily life in addition to performing it in ritual. When we
put these two aspects together, they give us a fairly complete
picture of primitive society, of how man lived through long periods
of prehistory.
It often happens that we get our most important insights from
people outside a field, and anthropology is no exception. Huizinga,
as mentioned, is one such outsider who has helped us understand
primitive society. Norman O. Brown is another; his analysis of
primitive economics literally brims with insights . 1 What makes his
discussion so seminal is that he has combined essential, often
overlooked work from classical anthropology and psychoanalysis in
his analysis of economic motives. But his psychoanalysis, unlike
Roheim’s, is not the dogmatic Freudian kind, and it has not been
brought to bear on primitive society in order to prove Freud right . 2
The whole burden of Brown’s argument is to show that economic
activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time,
is sacred to the core . 3 It is not a rational, secular activity designed
simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only
that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain man’s
drive to create a surplus, from the very beginning of society to the
present? How explain man’s willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny
himself, in order to produce beyond his capacity to consume?
Why do people work so hard to create useless goods when they
already have enough to eat? We know that primitives amassed
huge piles of food and other goods often only to ceremoniously
destroy them, just as we continue to do. We know that many of
26
The Primitive World: Economics as Expiation and Power
