Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites: Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society (Yale Cultural Sociology) [1 ed.] 1594517746, 9781594517747

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Editors' Introduction
Chapter 1 Myths
Chapter 2 Art and Myth according to Wilhelm Wundt
Chapter 3 Preface to Saint Patrick and the Cult of the Hero
Chapter 4 The Preeminence of the Right Hand: A Study of Religious Polarity
Chapter 5 A Contribution to a Study of the Collective Representation of Death
Chapter 6 Saint Besse: Study of an Alpine Cult
About the Editors

Citation preview

SAINTS, HEROES, MYTHS, AND RITES

THE YALE CULTURALL SOCIOLOGYY SERIES Jeffrey C. Alexander and Ron Eyerman, Series Editors Triumph and Trauma, by Bernhard Giesen (2004) Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, edited by Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (2006) American Society: Toward A Theory of Societal Community, by Talcott Parsons, edited and introduced by Giuseppe Sciortino (2007) The Easternization of the West, by Colin Campbell (2007) Culture, Society, and Democracy: The Interpretive Approach, edited by Isaac Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander (2007) Changing Men, Transforming Culture: Inside the Men’s Movement, by Eric Magnuson (2007) Do We Need Religion? On the Experience of Self-Transcendence, by Hans Joas (2007) A Contemporary Introduction to Sociology: Culture and Society in Transition, by Jeffrey C. Alexander and Kenneth Thompson (2008) Staging Solidarity: Truth and Reconciliation in a New South Africa, by Tanya Goodman (2008) Inside Jihadism: Understanding Jihadi Movements Worldwide, by Farhad Khosrokhavar (2008) Meaning and Method: The Cultural Approach to Sociology, edited by Isaac Reed and Jeffrey C. Alexander (2009) Performative Democracy, by Elzbieta Matynia (2009) Injustice at Work, by François Dubet (2009) Saints, Heroes, Myths, and Rites: Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society, by Marcel Mauss, Henri Hubert, and Robert Hertz, edited and translated by Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnar (2009)

SAINTS, HEROES, MYTHS, AND RITES Classical Durkheimian Studies of Religion and Society Marcel Mauss Henri Hubert Robert Hertz

Edited and Translated by

Alexander Riley Sarah Daynes Cyril Isnart

Routledge

Taylor & Francis Group LONDON AND NEW YORK

First published 2009 by Paradigm Publishers Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © 2009, Taylor & Francis. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file. Designed by Straight Creek Bookmakers. ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-775-4 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-1-59451-774-7 (hbk)

Contents Editors’ Introduction Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnart

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Chapter 1 Myths Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert

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Chapter 2 Art and Myth according to Wilhelm Wundt Marcel Mauss

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Chapter 3 Preface to Saint Patrick and the Cult of the Hero Henri Hubert

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Chapter 4 The Preeminence of the Right Hand: A Study of Religious Polarity Robert Hertz

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Chapter 5 A Contribution to a Study of the Collective Representation of Death Robert Hertz

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Chapter 6 Saint Besse: Study of an Alpine Cult Robert Hertz

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About the Editors

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Editors’ Introduction Alexander Riley, Sarah Daynes, and Cyril Isnart

For the past several decades, a significant effort in the reinterpretation of the work of Émile Durkheim and his colleagues on the research team affiliated with the journal l’Année sociologique has been underway (see e.g., Besnard 1983; Alexander 1988; Gane 1992; Martins and Pickering 1994; Pickering 1999; Allen, Pickering, and Miller 1998; Cladis 2001; Turner 2003; Alexander and Smith 2005; Strenski 2006; Riley 2009). It would be a worthwhile project to publish this volume if our interests were only related to the history of the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, since the selections are important classic contributions by central members of the most important early school of social science, but our ambitions in presenting them are considerably broader. We believe these early Durkheimian works on religion and culture, which are relatively little known in the English-speaking social scientific world, make an important contribution to this reinterpretive effort. Some readers will immediately note that Durkheim is not the author of any of these pieces and will perhaps therefore inquire as to their “Durkheimianness,” so some small bit of relevant intellectual historical context might be merited. All six of these studies are by students and colleagues of Durkheim who not only produced their own seminal works in the sociology of religion, many of them first published in the Année, but who in fact significantly contributed to the direction that Durkheim’s own work on religion and culture took. Like Durkheim, Marcel Mauss (1872-1950), Henri Hubert (1872-1927), and Robert Hertz (1881-1915) devoted considerable energy to the analysis and description of the sacred, the key concept in the Durkheimian theory of religion. All three authored many pages devoted to the examination of particular elements of the sociology of religious knowledge and experience: sacrifice, magic, sin and expiation, myth, ritual, taboo. And, like Durkheim, they were quite interested in speculating about how these concepts would change as the social world evolved. Durkheim indicated in The Elementary Forms that the sacred would certainly transform itself in modernity, although he limited his conjecture as to precisely how it would do so to some brief remarks on popular political manifestations of collective effervescence and sacred symbolic production. In their introduction to the Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, Jeffrey Alexander and Philip Smith speak of “the new Durkheim,” by which they mean Durkheimian theory after the cultural turn and in a social world where religion, while it has not disappeared, has lost much of its ability to provide the central site for the meaning production that remains at the core of human activity (Alexander and Smith

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2005:12). Durkheim had already pointed to the nascent rise of what Robert Bellah and his colleagues (1985) called, in the American context, “Sheilaism” or religion become individualist and anti-ritualistic, but he did not see this as a reason to believe the symbolic practices centered around varieties of sacredness would disappear. As Bellah put it elsewhere, echoing Durkheim’s sentiments precisely, he had “optimism that, as has happened before, new resources for ritual meaning and moral solidarity could emerge once again” (Bellah 2005:195). Much contemporary work in cultural sociology has invoked Durkheim to postulate new manifestations of the sacred in seemingly secular cultural spaces and forms. These six classic texts show how thoroughly such contemporary efforts to analyze those new forms of symbolic and ritual life to which Bellah alluded can be rooted in the work emerging in the original Durkheimian school during its heyday in the first two decades of the 20th century. So, Mauss, Hubert, and Hertz were indeed Durkheimians. In some ways, in fact, the three writers whose works we translate here can be thought of as intellectually one, and as one united with the towering figure in French social science who was mentor to all of them. Too much has been written on the cohesiveness and unified intellectual direction of the Année sociologique team over the past several decades for us to need to prove that case again (see especially Besnard 1983). But though they were Durkheimian, they were not Durkheim, and numerous accounts have contributed to an understanding of the frequently overlooked intellectual differences the three younger Durkheimians had with Durkheim and how their own work subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, diverged from and added to Durkheim’s (Isambert 1983; Karsenti 1997; Riley 2002, 2005, 2009). A brief summary of some of the contents of the essays in this volume will reveal both some of the continuity and the difference, while also pointing to their contemporary relevance in sociological research. Marcel Mauss and and the Sociology of Myth Mauss, who was a monumental figure in French intellectual circles for the first half of the 20th century, is certainly the most widely known of our trio, but it is perhaps less well-known that much of his work on religious topics was produced in various forms of collaboration with his close friend Hubert, to whom he referred as his “Siamese twin” (Fournier 1994:104). A good deal of their most important writing was explicitly co-authored (e.g., the long essays on sacrifice and magic that were first published in the Année), and what they wrote was often deeply collective even when only one name appeared in the author line. The brief piece “Myth” originally appeared in the Année, and it is typical of this collaboration; Fournier attributes it to Mauss, though it bears only the initials “H. H.” at its conclusion, and the safest bet is that the piece was worked over by both. More evidence, of a purely quantitative kind, of the collaborative nature of their work can be seen in the number of times each cites their collaborative work and the sole-authored work of the other in the notes of their respective individual essays here. Hubert refers to co-authored work with Mauss four times

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in footnotes and extensively cites from Mauss’s essay on Wundt which appears here. Mauss’s notes include three references to the work of Hubert or to their coauthored work. Additionally, Mauss and Hubert each cite Hertz once, and the latter cites Mauss, Hubert, or both numerous times in the essays on death and the right hand. Individual bibliographies, that most conventional of conventions in the scholarly world, become something far more obviously and intimately collective in the work of Mauss and Hubert. As Hubert purportedly put it to a negligent student who had not been sufficiently solicitous of their knowledge: “Everything I don’t know, Mauss knows, and everything Mauss doesn’t know, I do!” (Dumézil 1981:18). Whether we agree with the hyperbole of such a statement or not, it is apparent that they indeed knew a significant amount about the study of myth. The two pieces on that subject we present here together constitute a kind of statement of the basic elements of a Durkheimian theory of the topic. From this perspective, myth is a social fact, fundamentally a product of human beings in society, that cannot be reduced to the imagination, for this would fail to properly acknowledge the essentially collective character of the symbolic order. Myth is an “almost subconscious state of mind,” a narrative that, however “multiform [and] confused,” is the object of collective belief (p. 16). It is not chosen or developed at the individual level, but rather imposed on the individual from elsewhere. It is a narrative that precedes the individual, yet it encompasses his or her experience in a symbolic structure given shape and force by its social nature. What is outlined in the brief “Myths” is expounded in detail in the magisterial review of the work of Wilhelm Wundt, the venerated elder statesman of German psychology with whom Durkheim had briefly studied in the mid-1880s. It was typical of Mauss to produce book reviews in the Année that became elaborate, masterful statements on the topic themselves, and this piece is vivid evidence of that. Here, the great psychologist is subjected to a strict and thoroughly Durkheimian sociological criticism. Wundt’s grand effort to link myth and art as dual manifestations of the human imagination ultimately relies, charges Mauss, on a wholly individualist theory of their production. Art is for Wundt but “a generalized form of fantasy,” explained finally and completely by the universal cognitive apparatus of the human being (p. 22). But how and whence can art emerge, full-blown and creative, with no debts to previous efforts to use aesthetics for human purposes? Even the most “ideal” and “free” art must have originated in collective life and obligation, in the sphere of architecture, and in the site of the temple of worship (p. 19). Art is, in Maussian terminology to be most famously applied later in the monumental essay on the gift, a total social fact; it cannot be reduced to one causal factor, but instead emanates from the combined realms of morality, religion, and myth and is tied intimately to every other structural element of a given society, including law, politics, economy, and demography. Important recent work in the sociology of the arts has pointed back to the description of myth’s social force and the connection between art and myth that is outlined in these two pieces. Ron Eyerman and Lisa McCormick (2006), in

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seeking to develop a new sociology of the arts centrally focused on the making of meaning, recognize what might be of use in the Durkheimian school in such an effort. They and the other contributors to their volume explore the myth of the artist in the contemporary Western world: i.e., the narrative modes used to understand the artist in society, which are in intimate contact with essentially mythical and religious tropes and themes. The young artist is inspired (touched), perceives a calling (is reborn), struggles in obscurity (suffers), achieves success (sainthood), falls from grace (sins); in each incarnation, the artist is “a story told by society” (Sherwood 2006:94-5, 99). Mythical narratives concerning musical performance, e.g., the inexplicable and ultimately “spiritual” sources of the creativity of Paganini or Hendrix, and sacred sites, e.g., Carnegie Hall or the Fillmore, are omnipresent (McCormick 2006:124-5), and these narratives can be more fully understood with the Durkheimian tools for the study of myth that Mauss and Hubert set forth here. How is it that such narratives and symbols continue to be influential in our secular, zweckrational-dominated world? Is this evidence of reenchantment, or of the fact that enchantment in fact never died, but just changed residences? A close consideration of the theory of myth developed by Mauss and Hubert sheds light on these issues. Henri Hubert and the Hero While Mauss’s reputation and place in the Durkheimian tradition are secure, Hubert’s position in the Durkheimian pantheon is quite simply insufficiently understood and appreciated. Besnard (1987), almost certainly the greatest historian of the Durkheimian school, has thoroughly described the central place he occupied in the working team of the Année sociologique, a role in some ways greater than that of Mauss during his lifetime. Some recent steps have been made in the English-speaking academic world to bring more of his thought to our attention, most notably the translation of his brilliant essay on religious time (1999). Hubert’s introduction to Stefan Czarnowski’s book on Saint Patrick is a great untranslated and, outside the circles of scholars of the history of French sociology, almost wholly forgotten gem of the Durkheimian corpus. Czarnowski, himself a compelling, enigmatic, and largely unknown figure from the early days of the Durkheimian school, was closely associated with Hubert and Mauss while a student at the École Pratique des Hautes Études and worked on the manuscript that became the book on Saint Patrick in Hubert’s seminar (Isambert 1983:161). Hubert seized the opportunity of the preface to his student’s book and moved well beyond simply describing the argument of the book to a significant extension of Czarnowski’s theoretical contribution to the study of the hero. Hubert begins where he knows he must: what is a hero? Arriving at a workable definition of this concept is anything but a straightforward and obvious process. At its most basic, the hero is an individual, real or fictional, whose life and death are recalled and celebrated by some social group. But is the hero a human who has actually lived? A god? An ancestor? A demon? Potentially any

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of these? The rule at first glance seems to be the indiscriminate mixing of the categories. Yet the social nature of the hero is a constant. The hero is the symbol of a given society, the society’s progenitor in many cases and a sort of ideal summing up in one mythic individual of the chief characteristics of the various empirical members of the group. He is the “secular form of the god” and “a species of the divine” (pp. 42, 64). Legend and myth arise around the hero after his death, and, as is argued by Hubert here and by he and Mauss in “Myths,” these are fundamentally social narratives. Heroes such as Ireland’s Patrick or France’s Jeanne d’Arc, neither gods nor mere humans, are “the living symbol and emblem of a definite society” (p. 52). Culturally, they act as national totems, in ways quite similar to the ways actual totems act in totemistic societies. But while the hero is sacred, he is also something of a bridge between the sacred and the secular, as “his very legend brings him back to the earth and close to his people.” Indeed, the secular thing in him is “precisely the character of the social groups in general from which he emanates” (p. 53). Heroes bridge another gap: that between the religious and the aesthetic. The myths at the core of heroic cults form the basis of tragedy and drama insofar as they are key theatrical elements of the primitive festivals which engender more advanced aesthetic structures. The performances at the hero festivals effectively give birth to drama, initially largely in the form of tragedy, then later in other dramatic representative forms. As does Mauss in the review of Wundt, Hubert carefully sketches in the evolutionary process that led a religious representation to become the tool of artistic expression and secular drama and, in doing so, gives the reader much to work with in the way of the basic material for a Durkheimian theory of the sacred as it operates outside the purely religious realm. The hero retains a strong connection to the form and aesthetic of tragedy. He must suffer because societies desire to concretize their own sufferings in the adventures of the dramatic über-character that is the hero. Here, on the topic of the aesthetic taste for suffering, we find some of Hubert’s most powerful insights. We “take pleasure in commemorating [our] defeats” and “the retrospective suffering that [we] experience here is a source of intimate satisfaction” (p. 75). There is an important place for the tragic, then, and even evil in the Durkheimian cultural framework, though Durkheim himself said relatively little about this. Hertz would go even further in this direction, as we describe below. More recent work on the hero continues to tap into the Durkheimian tradition set forth in the work of Hubert. In French, an extensive recent volume looks at the construction of nationalist identities in the 19th and 20th centuries, communist and capitalist worldviews and identities in the 20th, and post-communist nationalist identities in the 21st as genres of hero formation and cult (Centlivres, Fabre, and Zonabend 1998). In English, recent work by Jeffrey Alexander seeks to expand on Durkheimian theory in order to integrate it with performance studies and thereby intersects with aspects of Hubert’s argument here in a significant way. Alexander’s argument is that ritual is an adequate tool for understanding archaic societies, where simple social organization permits all the elements involved in ritual performance to be tightly fused, but more complex contempo-

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rary societal forms require an innovative set of concepts. In these latter societies, dramatic performances, with actors and audiences, take the place of rituals. They are “ritual-like” in that they are symbolic and potentially integrative, but they rely much more on the success or failure of particular performances of social scripts and texts (Alexander 2006:54-76). Hubert’s discussion of the hero foregrounds this character as an important one for understanding the shift Alexander describes and the operation of the new social paradigm. Heroes, in Hubert’s analysis, are frequently presented to us in narratives drawn from sacrifice, yet sacrifice as ritual has no real part in the heroic myth or cult. There is a sacrificial myth attached to many heroes without any proper accompanying sacrificial rite; as Hubert puts it, “heroicization is a mythological process where mythology seems to do without the ritual canvas” (p. 58). Heroes, then, we might suspect, should be particularly enabled and present in the social context Alexander describes, more so even than gods, who are tied to the archaic form of sacrificial ritual. Indeed, this is what his analysis reveals. Politics becomes a de-ritualized but still mythological realm in which heroes emerge and disappear according to a logic of performative power; convincing dramatic enactment of heroic myths empowers particular narratives and heroes. Alexander describes the ways in which heroes were constructed in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack as part of a process with many connections to Hubert’s discussion. The actions and persons of certain actors were idealized and, at the same time, made familiar and close to others according to specific mythic narratives of national unity and familial love; social class differences and antagonisms between Wall Street traders and janitors in the World Trade Center were dissipated, all the victims became idealized members of perfect, loving families, and the professional actions of emergency workers were transformed into the superhuman efforts of culture heroes (Alexander 2006a:106-7). This is the hero in our world, far from the one Hubert describes and yet very near it. Robert Hertz: Death, the Right Hand, and the Cult of Saint Besse Hertz is one of the most intriguing figures in the history of French sociology (Parkin 1996; Riley 1999; Isnart 2006). His early death in World War I at the age of 33 prevented him from producing a vast body of work like that of Durkheim or Mauss, but what he did produce is profound and still resonant nearly a hundred years after his death. The entire output of his scholarly career, spanning the decade from the publication of the essay on death in 1907 to the collection of French rural folklore he began while actually at the front in 1914-15, is now being reedited for presentation to the French reading public in one volume by one of the editors of the present volume (Isnart). Here, we present the core of the large proportion of that work that dealt with themes in religious sociology. The three works found here make a powerful contribution to a Durkheimian theory of myth, folklore, and the sacred. Two of them, the texts on death and the right hand, are already known among English-speaking anthropologists because of the deservedly lauded 1960 translation by Rodney and Claudia Needham. Those

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two essays are rightly seen as a precursor of some of what became structuralism in mid-20th century Europe, but they are more than this. Along with the third piece by Hertz presented here, an essay on a rural Christian cult in Alpine Italy, these studies make a major contribution to contemporary cultural sociology. Mauss famously commented on the work of his student Hertz that much of its focus had to do with “a total study of impurity in general.” His unfinished thesis on sin and expiation was part of this project, and we cannot know what else he might have contributed in this vein had he survived the war. The essays on death, the right hand, and Saint Besse revolve around this theme; they provide a powerful set of empirically based Durkheimian tools for investigating the sacred as not only one pole in a binary relationship with the profane, but as also itself consisting of a binary opposition with profound importance for the functioning of symbolic systems. For sacredness is indeed dual, as Durkheim noted but discussed only to a limited degree, and this duality is explored in detail here. Hertz shows that we are in fact dealing with three, and not simply two, terms when we consider the symbolism of the sacred. He deserves to be quoted at length: Supernatural powers are not all of the same order: some are exercised in harmony with the order of things and have a regular and august character that inspires veneration and confidence; others, contrarily, violate and trouble universal order and the respect they impose is constructed above all from aversion and fear. All these energies present the common trait of opposition to the profane; for the latter, they are all equally dangerous and forbidden. Contact with a corpse produces in profane being the same effects as sacrilege. In this sense, Robertson Smith was correct to say that the notion of taboo envelops at once the sacred and the impure, the divine and the demonic. But the perspective of the religious world changes if one sees it no longer from the point of view of the profane but from that of the sacred. Consequently, the confusion signaled by Smith no longer exists: the Polynesian chief, for example, knows well that the religiosity imbued in the corpse is radically contrary to that he carries in himself. The impure separates itself from the sacred to come to place itself at the pole opposed to the religious world. Moreover, the profane no longer defines itself, from this point of view, by purely negative characteristics: it appears as an antagonistic element which, by its mere contact, degrades, diminishes, and alters the essence of sacred things. It is a nothingness, if one likes, but an active and contagious nothingness; the evil influence that it exercises over beings gifted with holiness differs only in intensity from that which comes from harmful powers. From the privation of sacred powers to the possession of sinister ones the transition is imperceptible. Thus, in the classification that, from the beginning and more and more, has dominated religious consciousness, there is a natural affinity and nearly an equivalence between the profane and the impure; the two notions combine and form, in opposition to the sacred, the negative pole of the spiritual world (this volume pp 91-92).

The fundamental difference between the profane and the impure, or the transgressive sacred, has to do with the very characteristics of sacredness. The impure is powerful precisely because it bears social energy derived from intense,

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focused attention, whereas the profane is merely mundane, ordinary, and without any such power. More, the impure is a necessary part of the religious and social world insofar as it provides a balance to the pure sacred. Roger Caillois (2001[1939]), who studied with Mauss’s student Georges Dumézil, would later sketch out an image of the role of the impure sacred in festival and transgression that was consistent with the contours visible in Hertz’s work. All the taboos that ensured the purity of the pure sacred were to be explicitly broken during festival times that represented the formative moment of the world in which order emerged from chaos. When the king dies, as Hertz shows in the essay on death, transgression becomes the rule, until a new king is enthroned. The left hand is not simply viewed as unimportant; it is imbued with sinister power to corrupt and defile, and this power is at least sometimes something to be courted and utilized for its efficacy. Spells and magic, desired powers for many, are frequently wielded with the left hand. Again, transgression and evil have their place. There are powerful insights in this framework for better understanding a whole range of contemporary transgressive Carnivalesque cultural practices ranging from popular musics such as gangsta rap (Riley 2005) and extreme metal (Kahn-Harris 2007) to sport violence and riots (Collins 2008). In the essay on death, the very body of the deceased becomes a site for the playing out of central cultural concepts and categories. A newly deceased person becomes the subject of taboos and ritual requirements stemming from the social group’s sense of weakness in the face of the death of a member. The fresh corpse inspires terror and is an impure sacred object meriting complex ritual responses. Time is needed to transform its status, as the soul of the deceased undergoes the preparatory period necessary for its final accession to the society of the dead. The body will signal that moment in transforming itself from the rotting, impure flesh of the cadaver into the dry, clean, pure skeletal remains that will, in some tribes, actually be ingested by remaining tribal members so that in some sense the deceased remains a part of the living society his soul has left. Death is, in Hertz’s analysis, the disappearance of a social being, which potentially entails grave consequences for the social group he has left, unless powerful forces and rites are mobilized to contain and reduce the evil effects. It is, for the deceased, an experience of initiation from one realm into another; such initiations are, as Hertz notes in comparing death to marriage, painful and difficult not only for the participants but for those socially connected to them as well. Like Mauss and Hubert, Hertz opposes theories of religion fundamentally based in the idea of the soul as the central object of belief and cult. The body itself is also a key player in the social and cultural web surrounding the phenomenon of death and must be explicitly recognized as such and theorized. Here, we see an anticipation of the turn, nearly a century later, to today’s vibrant interest in a sociology of the body. How can we understand the working of cultural symbolism if we discount that first symbolic object that each of us inhabits? The study of the Besse cult, which emerged from one of the few ethnographic studies done by the Durkheimians, can be read simply in appreciation and enjoyment of the cultural and historical detail Hertz mobilizes, but several

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central theoretical contributions to Durkheimian thought on culture and religion also emerge. Hertz aptly shows how, in actual empirical sites, definitions of sacrality and myth are not simple objects of solidarity, but products of conflict, narrative and counter-narrative. The cult of Saint Besse is in fact plural, and the specific contours of local versions of the cultic legend and the rites that follow from it are strongly rooted in the specific social structures and cultural histories of those places. Besse in the plain and Besse in the mountains are not the same Besse, and struggle over which is the authentic one make up a central part of the history of the cult. It is simultaneously a charming and alarming passage in the text when Hertz describes an elderly native of Cogne’s account of being stabbed by a native of Campiglia in the struggle to decide who would have the privilege of carrying the statue of the saint during the procession. Here is an element of religious practice that we do not find in orthodox, functionalist readings of Durkheimianism. We can note one final point of theoretical interest in Hertz’s Alpine study. It makes explicit the Durkheimian school’s conviction that the ethnographic perspective has to be engaged not only in the study of exotic and faraway societies but also in the study of the very societies inhabited by the sociologist. In the debate that was in their day already emerging concerning the primitive and the stance of the Western intellectual toward the study of non-Western cultures and peoples, the Durkheimians neither defended any moral superiority of contemporary European culture nor romanticized the primitive in the sometimes facile way that characterized the response of some later French intellectuals in the 1920s and beyond. They understood sociology as an intellectual framework in such a way that would surely have found suspicious the disciplinary separation and distinction of sociology and anthropology that would later emerge and become institutionally dominant. Hertz’s ethnographic work in the Alps, and the abridged study of French folklore he did while at the front in interviewing his comrades, showed vividly that one did not have to leave Europe to find evidence of the concepts in religious sociology that the Durkheimians explored (Isnart 2006). So the fact that Hertz was studying “savages who speak French,” in his words, made even more apparent the necessity for a consideration of the relationship of the ethnographer and his ethnographic object, and this was made still more cogent when it was a matter of an agnostic sociologist studying the practices of religious believers (Isnart 2006). Hertz explicitly reflected on this matter in his intellectual correspondence (Hertz 2002; Riley 1999), and here, too, one sees this aspect of the research problem of the sociologist/anthropologist of religion. Hertz is eloquent in his admiration for these “worshippers so ferociously envious to serve” their saint and their “sharp tenacity” in “defend[ing] ‘the honor of their commune’ and the moral patrimony received from their fathers” (p. 190). It is in this kind of situation that Hertz most fully perceived the fuzziness of the line between scientific knowledge and the personal experience of the sacred. He was powerfully moved by the prospect of the disappearance of the cult and of other such representatives of folk religious tradition: “For centuries, Saint Besse has taught his followers to…joyfully place on their shoulders the heavy burden of the ideal…. When the holy rock becomes a profane

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rock, completely naked and material, who will be there to remind the people of the valley of these truths?” (p. 208). A colleague writing in the wake of Hertz‘s death put it admirably well: Rarely has it been given us to read pages written with such a discrete and full art. Under the rigor of critical investigation, one senses that the author was happy to live in the same atmosphere that he was studying, and that a sympathy that went as far as emotion united him with the simple folk whose ritual gestures he was describing (Alphandéry 1919:336).

A NOTE ON THE TRANSLATIONS AND REFERENCES IN THE TEXTS Some of the Durkheimians had a reputation for a certain carelessness in documentation of sources. This is certainly in evidence in several of these essays. Some of the work of tracking down partial or incorrectly recorded sources was fortuitously already done by one of us (Isnart) for the new French edition of the collected works of Hertz that he is preparing. We have endeavored to find dates and to do some rudimentary checking of titles, author names, and page citations in the remaining pieces, but we have not been able to fully clarify all of the murkiness in their footnotes. We trust this will not diminish the volume’s utility for the contemporary sociologist or anthropologist of religion and culture, who can be expected to be somewhat less concerned with the historical sources from which our trio is drawing than with the crux of their arguments and the theoretical tools they wield. We have endeavored to be as functional as possible in our translations without sacrificing fidelity. In a number of situations, we were presented with choices between very English approximations of phrases and slightly more awkward, though still tolerable English translations that were closer to the actual meaning and rhythm of the French. In almost all those situations, we have chosen the latter route. We used Anglicized versions of the French and German terms for the various indigenous peoples described in a number of the texts. As the Année was a collective research workshop of sorts, it is perhaps appropriate that the works presented here are of various genres—a preface to a book, several journal articles, a book review, a summary note framing a collection of reviews. The writerly styles are also varied and we have tried not to impose too much of a generic unified style on them. Hubert, Mauss, and Hertz each wrote differently, with different gifts and different liabilities, and we hope some of each is still evident in the translations.

REFERENCES Alexander, Jeffrey, ed. (1988). Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Alexander, Jeffrey, and Philip Smith, eds. (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey. (2006). “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance between Ritual and strategy.” In Alexander, Jeffrey, Berhard Giesen, and Jason Mast, eds. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, pp. 29-90. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Alexander, Jeffrey. (2006a). “From the Depths of Despair: Performance, Counterperformance, and ‘September 11.’” In Alexander, Jeffrey, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast, eds. Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual, pp. 91-114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Allen, N. J., W. S. F. Pickering, and W. Watts Miller, eds. (1998). On Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life. London: Routledge . Alphandéry, Paul. (1919). In Memoriam, 1914-18. Revue d’Histoire des Religions, 79, p. 336. Bellah, Robert, et al. (1985). Habits of the Heart. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellah, Robert. (2005). “Durkheim and Ritual.” In Alexander, Jeffrey, and Philip Smith, eds. The Cambridge Companion to Durkheim, pp. 183-210. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Besnard, Philippe, ed. (1983). The Sociological Domain: The Durkheimians and the Founding of French Sociology. London and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maision des Sciences de l’Homme. Besnard, Philippe, ed., (1987). “Lettres de Émile Durkheim à Henri Hubert. Revue française de sociologie,” 38, pp. 483-534. Caillois, Roger. (2001 [1939]). Man and the Sacred. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Centlivres Pierre, Daniel Fabre, and Françoise Zonabend, eds. (1998). La fabrique des héros. Paris: Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme. Cladis, Mark, ed. (2001). Durkheim and Foucault: Perspectives on Education and Punishment. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Collins, Randall. (2008). Violence: A Micro-Sociological Theory. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Books. Dumézil, Georges. (1981). Georges Dumézil. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou/Pandora Éditions. Eyerman, Ron, and Lisa McCormick, eds. (2006). Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts. Boulder, CO: Paradigm. Fournier, Marcel. (1994). Marcel Mauss. Paris: Fayard. Gane, Mike, ed. (1992). The Radical Sociology of Durkheim and Mauss. London: Routledge. Hertz, Robert. (1994). Sin and Expiation in Primitive Societies. Translated and edited by Robert Parkin. Oxford: British Centre for Durkheimian Studies. Hertz, Robert. (2002). Un ethnologue dans les tranchées (août 1914-avril 1915). Lettres de Robert Hertz à sa femme Alice. Edited by Alexander Riley and Philippe Besnard. Paris: CNRS Éditions. Hubert, Henri. (1999). Essay on Time: A Brief Study of the Representation of Time in Religion and Magic. Edited by Robert Parkin. London: Berghahn Books. Isambert, François-André. (1983). “At the Frontier of folklore and Sociology: Hubert, Hertz and Czarnowski, Founders of a Sociology of Folk Religion.” In Besnard, Philippe, ed. The Sociological Domain, pp. 152-176. London and Paris: Cambridge University Press/Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.

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Isnart, Cyril. (2006). ‘Savages Who Speak French’: Folklore, Primitivism, and Morals in Robert Hertz. History and Anthropology, Vol. 17, No. 2, June 2006, pp. 135–152. Kahn-Harris, Keith. (2007). Extreme Metal: Music and Culture on the Edge. Oxford: Berg. Karsenti, Bruno. (1997). L’Homme total. Sociologie, anthropologie et philosophie chez Marcel Mauss. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Martins, H., and W. S. F. Pickering, eds. (1994). Debating Durkheim. New York, NY: Routledge. McCormick, Lisa. (2006). “Music as Social Performance.” In Eyerman, Ron, and Lisa McCormick, eds. Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, pp. 121-144. Boulder: Paradigm. Parkin, Robert. (1996). The Dark Side of Humanity: The Work of Robert Hertz and Its Legacy. Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers. Pickering, W. S. F., ed. (1999). Durkheim and Representations. London: Routledge. Riley, Alexander. (1999). “The Intellectual and Political Project of Robert Hertz: The Making of a Peculiar Durkheimian Intellectual, As Seen through Selected Correspondance with Pierre Roussel.” In Durkheimian Studies/Etudes durkheimiennes, 5, pp. 29-59. Riley, Alexander. (2002). “The Sacred Calling of Intellectual Labor in Mystic and Ascetic Durkheimianism.” Ins Archives européenes de sociologie/European Journal of Sociology, 42:2, pp. 354-385. Riley, Alexander. (2005). The Rebirth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Hip Hop: Some Suggestions for a Cultural Sociology of Gangsta Rap Music. Journal of Youth Studies 8:3, pp. 297-311. Riley, Alexander. (2009). Godless Intellectuals?: How Durkheimian Sociology and Poststructuralism Reinvented the Intellectual Pursuit of the Sacred. New York, NY: Berghahn Books. Sherwood, Steve. (2006). “Seeker of the Sacred: A Late Durkheimian Theory of the Artist.” In Eyerman, Ron, and Lisa McCormick, eds. Myth, Meaning, and Performance: Toward a New Cultural Sociology of the Arts, pp. 81-101. Boulder: Paradigm. Strenski, Ivan. (2006). The New Durkheim. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Turner, Stephen, ed. (2003). Émile Durkheim: Sociologist and Moralist. New York, NY: Routledge.

1 Myths Marcel Mauss and Henri Hubert1

INTRODUCTION In the five preceding volumes of the Année, a large amount of space has been devoted to the study of mythology, but we never had the opportunity to say what the sociological interest of this study was. We successively examined some questions that mythologists discuss without trying to coordinate them. It goes without saying that we consider myth to be a social fact, that is, a product or normal manifestation of collective activity. This implies that we do not consider myths, in a given society, as contingent and supererogatory; even when borrowed, they are not exotic trinkets; when thinking about myths, we cannot ignore the collaboration of the people who adopted them, who think and repeat them, and who, in sum, believe in their truth. Myths are social institutions. This clarified, we can now study them by using two angles of approach: first, by trying to determine the mechanism of the formation of myths, and the usual processes of their creative imagination, which presupposes enquiring about some of the laws of human mental activity in society; second, by then focusing on the sociological function, and in particular on the religious function, of the myth; by asking what is religious in myth, what place it occupies in the system of religious things, what objects it represents, to what needs it corresponds, and how it satisfies them; by doing, in short, everything entailed by a study of function. The first angle of research is naturally divided into two tasks: a study of collective psychology and logic. We have already talked about the latter2 as a sort of mythological analysis or as a rhetoric of mythology, of which the object would be to show how the fundamental, psychological or logical, laws of the mind are conditioned in the fabrication of myths. The myth applies to its objects its own processes of analysis; it has particular modes of image association, in sum, a whole specific logical apparatus. Unfortunately, it is not yet possible to pursue these various studies by themselves and in a completely theoretical way. We are still at the stage of preparing the materials of a mythology, and often of simply demonstrating that myths are social phenomena. For now, mythology must above all be historical. But first we must put aside the question of knowing whether myths come from one or several

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centers of dispersion, and what the latter are. This does not directly interest us: the answer would mostly have an ethnographic interest, the attribution of myths or series of myths to specific human groups serving first of all to characterize them. For us, the critical sorting of collections of facts is simply a good preparation to the study of myths; moreover, it is always good to know with precision that myths can be passed on while remaining or becoming myths again. One fundamental question concerns the relation between rites and myths. It is frequently stated that a myth corresponds to a regularly practiced rite; the myth provides the reason for carrying out the rite by telling the story of the fact or event that the rite commemorates or simply imitates. One can wonder whether this coincidence is universal or only very general, and to what extent. The definition of the myth, considered as a religious phenomenon, depends in part on the answer to this question, which cannot yet be formulated. It is still more frequently asked which, of the myth and the rite, is anterior and gave birth to the other. We have seen3 that some mythologists still consider the rite as the dramatic representation of a preexisting myth. Others argue the opposite. As for us, we believe that the question is not well posed, and we have argued our point elsewhere.4 “The myth and the rite,” we said, “can be dissociated only on the abstract level.” The myth attached to the rite is nothing but the representation of the act that accompanies the act; depending on the case, one or the other member of the pair can be prominent; there exist rites that are very strongly inspired by the processes of representation specific to the myth, as well as myths that are overwhelmed by incoherent details borrowed to the adventitious effects of the rite (supplementary sympathetic actions) and not to its principal action; moreover, we note moreover that each term follows its own evolution. There exist rites that are almost empty of mystical meaning. There exist myths that are no longer the direct representation of the corresponding rite. Finally, there exist rites that are accompanied by myths of diverse age. Additionally, it is obvious that, while the rite is usually doubled by a myth, independent myths, unattached to any rite, must in turn create rites by analogy. In sum, this question cannot be answered in a general way. The observation and analysis of facts will touch on the mechanism of myths. Supposing that the myth is not empty, the sort of deformation that it imposes on reality can be assessed by the differences that separate the ritual act from the corresponding mythical act. We are therefore led to approach the study of the function of myths by its most accessible side; not only is their religious nature clarified by that of the acts they explain and of the things they concern, their place is generally determined by their liturgical role since, in a great number of cases, the recitation of the myth is part of the ritual ceremony. Another question that deserves to be studied is the composition of myths. The lack of variety of episodes and combinations is striking; there are a small number of types of myths, and in the multiples versions of each type, parts are presented in an almost constant order. This order is far from always being the one that appears natural. This apparent illogicality of the myth reveals its par-

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ticular logic, and the persistence of its obscure forms is an index of its function.

CONCLUSION The preceding studies of myths5 do not solve the question of their origins. The only progress comes from the ones that concern the material of myths, the way in which it accrued by the doubling up of characters and episodes and by the intervention of various particular features. From a collection of studies, we have seen specific types of myths appear, although their formation cannot yet be explained. The way in which these cycles were formed, and how these frames of collective thought persisted to the point that they imposed themselves upon the novel during the emergence of legend in literature, is all the more unexplained. Thus, while progress is being made concerning a certain number of phenomena, how many, hence, are still unknown! But our work during this year at least provides us with a definition, or rather with a description, of what we mean by myth. Unlike the tale, the myth is not a play of images; it is the object of belief. But this is not enough to characterize it. When the object of belief is a concept, when it can be formulated as a proposition and take its place in a credo, then it is called dogma. Moreover, a narrative of personal experience can also be an object of belief. But the myth is anterior to any possible experience; it is a thing of the collectivity, which imposes itself on the individual as a category of his thought. Hence the narratives relative to heroes, that is to characters that have lived or are supposed to have lived, can up to a point be considered as myths, since they act as such when the event that they tell of is commemorated in festivals; however, they differ from myths in the sense that their action occurs in time, is more or less dated, and is not susceptible to being reproduced; on the contrary, mythical actions are continuous, and either are indefinitely reproduced6 or are perpetuated by their effects. Placed in a generally undefined past, they are in reality placed out of time. Myths, for instance those concerning cosmology, have as a goal the explanation of eternal facts. It follows, and that is one of its main characteristics, that the myth commands action as sciences does; the representation of the sun riding a boat or as a wheel is a myth because it suggests that by moving a boat or a wheel under special circumstances, one will act upon the movements of the sun; the myth is repeated by virtue of the rite, the gesture, the spell; it can be said to be a prayer. This fully realized fact is observed among the Huichol of Mexico. Thought even replaces action, as Mr. Powell notes in his analysis of the psychology of the savage thinker of myths;7 that is how the associated rite and myth form an inseparable whole; let us add to this that the idea of power is not implicated only in simple myths, the ones attached to rites, but in the whole effort of the creative imagination of myths that tends to frame the myths of ritual and to form a systematic representation of the universal and sacred forces manifest in the world.

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The belief attached to the myth implies that it is representative or expressive, as already noted. It is a system of signs; with its own means it reproduces, as language does, a constructed or perceived reality. But it possesses its own force and autonomy. It often presents itself as a continuous image. The statue of Henri IV, in the memory of a child who often looked at it, advances at a regular pace; the distinction between the immobile original and the mobile image is confused, but it exists; this child’s impression is a rudiment of the myth; a perfect myth would transport the cavalcade of Henri IV to the origin, or to a divine world; it would be both temporary and continuous; hence the myth attempts to fix things that are continuous; it frames its objects within time and space. Moreover, the myth uses a special form of the idea of causation. Powell8 argues that the special characteristic of myth is that it creates imaginary bodies to which is attributed the production of phenomena. He says elsewhere that causality, in the myth, is magical causality, two propositions that are equally correct so long as their consequences are not exaggerated. Myth is essentially vague and multiform. When it is ancient, liturgical redactions are elementary, incoherent, and can be developed and commented on in many ways. Moreover, as soon as a place of worship is well known, there are always several different versions of particular myths. It does not follow that their variability is indefinite; there are a few fixed points; the variation is found in the connections and the filling. Myth appears as a confused and nearly subconscious state of mind, yet common to all members of a group. Moreover, the union of the parts of a myth is not logical, and it cannot be adequately expressed in rational terms; it is given by the material of the myth, or it is emotional. It results that what could be called the meaning of the myth is as wavering as its form. By specializing it, we run the risk of damaging it. In reality, it suggests rather than designates things. As soon as we want to explain it rationally, it dies, or rather it mutates. We will not follow it in these transformations. NOTES 1

Editors’ note: This chapter was first published as “Introduction aux mythes” and “Conclusion” in Année sociologique, 6, 1903, pp. 243-246, 268-271 and reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, volume 2 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968-69), pp. 269-272. Translated and used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Les Editions de Minuit. 2 Année sociologique, 1898-99, 3, p. 270. 3 Ibid., p. 272. 4 Année sociologique, 1897-98, 2, pp. 243 and 245. 5 Editors’ note: A number of reviews of books on specific myths intervened between these two remarks on myth that Mauss and Hubert prepared for this issue of the Année. 6 Cf. the Ascension, book review of G. Pitré, in Année sociologique, 6. 7 American Anthropology, 1901, 3, p. 57. 8 Ibid, p. 55.

2 Art and Myth according to Wilhelm Wundt Marcel Mauss1

Mr. Wundt is one of the last encyclopedic minds in Germany. After physiology, physics, and psychology, he is now tackling sociology. His Ethik already had a sociological character, which was noticed. The seeds contained in the Ethik are now being developed in a monumental Völkerpsychologie. The first part of this work, Die Sprache, which was soon revised, has already been reviewed here,2 and we know that linguists agree in recognizing the remarkable intelligence with which Wundt assimilated their methods and the results of their science. Now the two first volumes of the second part, Myth and Religion, have been published,3 and the specialists of the science of religion will bow to the divination shown by the old master in selecting his sources, the range of his information, and the marvelous sense he has of the things he discusses. If we find again in his work the usual flaws of the philosopher—excessive systematization, hasty generalization, multiplied and complicated divisions— philologists themselves will have to take into account this book that shows a great effort to clarify the facts and define concepts too often overlooked by the specialists even though they frequently use them.

I. ART On opening the first volume, the reader has the pleasant surprise of finding a complete theory of the forms of art, from the most primitive to the most recent ones. There are even ingenious remarks on Romanticism and modern drama.4 According to Wundt, there exists a close relationship between poetry and myth: it is difficult for him even to distinguish one from the other.5 According to him, in fact, there is no other difference between the mythical image and the artistic image than the collective and involuntary character of the former, and the individual and voluntary character of the latter. The primitive forms of the myth

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belong, like art, to the domain of “fantasy.” The two are different manifestations of one and the same activity: imaginative activity.6 Art emerges from play and constantly returns to it. But it is distinguished from play, first, by its creative character; it does not borrow its objects, but creates them. Second, it has a collective character. Even when confined to play, art supposes a common life shared by the people who practice or enjoy it, and a continuous evolution of thought impossible outside of society.7 This definition of art might seem insufficient and, in fact, it does not permit a distinction of art from other products of the collective imagination: science also creates, and in the same conditions. However, underneath this notion of art are hidden a definition and a theory of play among children and adults, which are not immune to objection. First of all, Wundt does not give enough space to the games of adults and adolescents, which possess an undeniable social character. Second, he seems to forget that children games, at least after the early years of childhood, are practiced in society, and that early on playing is usually taught by the mother, the nanny, and parents, rather than created by the child who, at most, modifies them. Finally, this theory, because it exclusively ties play to the phenomena of imagination, does not satisfactorily take into account the role played by surprise, expectation, relaxation, emotion in general. In reality, both art and play, in society as much as in the individual, are imaginative means to create emotions.8 But if his general definition of art is quite indecisive, his genetic classification of various arts probably is one of the best ever offered. It is based on the classical division of arts between plastics on one hand and “musics” on the other.9 The former act through a sort of shock provoked by the created object (painting, statue, etc), while the latter act through the simple expression of sentiments, through the immediate means “of speech, chant, poetry, music.”10 Plastic arts, in turn, divide into the arts of ornamentation and ideal arts: in the former, the aesthetic motif is added to an object that, in itself, is not artistic but destined to utilitarian ends; in the latter, the created object is entirely a work of art. This division, we believe, has not been proposed before, and it seems fecund. It is logical, and shows the mental elements from which our fine arts emerged with their mix of idealism and naturalism. This division is also historical, since the artistic forms rooted in matter, and subjected to the thing to which they are grafted,11 have preceded the ideal forms in which the matter itself entirely obeys the artist. The division of ornamental arts into a multiple of others, “art of the moment” (sign, mark),12 art of the fixation of remembrance (trophies, wooden or stone monuments, etc.), art of ornament (Zierkunst) and art of imitation, will appear, on the contrary, much riskier and excessively refined. But the genealogy that Wundt establishes among plastic arts appears to be much more important. He proceeds according to the healthiest methods of sociology and science in general; he constructs types, links them to one another according to their degree of kinship, and thereby draws a genealogical tree of

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modern arts,13 in the same way biologists trace the phylogenesis of living species. It is generally agreed today that ornamental art has preceded all other forms of art. It is also agreed that primitive ornamentation was neither symbolic nor of a geometric origin; for each time the origin of such a drawing could be traced back, it was found to be essentially a reproduction.14 The scholarship on Dayak art by Foy15 and Hein,16 the work of Haddon17 on the art of Papua New Guinea and of Holmes18 on the pottery of native Americans, etc.,19 all reduce the most stylistic forms to drawings dominated by the intention, more or less realized, to directly evoke the image of the object represented. But if there is reproduction, it is not a servile copy. A simple choice between the elements of the object, through apperception, is enough to create not a symbol but a sign, and this sign, once created, can evolve on its own towards geometrical forms or towards the symbol, towards style. But this does not tell us what those first represented objects were, and why they were represented. Wundt superbly shows the importance of religious, magical and totemic motifs in both primitive and already evolved forms of art;20 hence, the animal or human nature of the first representations.21 It is only through evolution that plastic arts did not simply reproduce anymore, but tended to imitate; first, a general type is constituted, for each animal species as well as for the human species; then this type becomes specialized, and each moment in this evolution has a social cause, which the author attempts to isolate.22 In primitive ornamental arts, it is crucial to consider not only what they represent, but also what they ornament. The most immediate ornamental object is the human body;23 temporary paintings and permanent tattoos are the main types of this mode of ornamentation. Furniture objects then became the primary material of ornamentation. Wundt rightly points to the decisive role played by ceramic arts. Nowhere else, indeed, are the influences of industrial techniques (pottery, weaving)24 more marked. Moreover, the evolution of the motifs is especially easy to follow because the decorated objects have multiple chances to survive, but also because close bonds unite the motif and the material it ornaments, as well as the the most evolved and the most primitive motifs. Finally, the laws of ceramic decoration can be applied to other modes of ornamentation; for it is by following the same laws that clothing, arms, and other instruments have been successively decorated by complex and differentiated ornaments. As to ideal art, free art, which creates its object completely for itself25 and has strictly aesthetic goals, it could have been made possible by architecture alone. The idea of decoration for its own sake could emerge only in the temple or the palace – in the temple, above all.26 And without any doubts, the ideal plastic arts, sculpture and painting, are originally essentially architectonics.27 In Europe, at least, the laws of perspective used by both sculpture and painting were discovered by architecture.28 But it should not be forgotten that, even today, pure art is still a decorative art; moreover, the arts of ornamentation have reacted to architecture, sculpture and painting much more than Wundt thinks. Indeed glazing and smelting, which both originate in the fabrication of either

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weapons and instruments or jewelry,29 have played a considerable role in the discovery of the techniques and matters used by the ideal arts. The evolution of art is still much more complex than the historian of art thinks, and aesthetic and religious phenomena are not enough to explain its conditions. All sorts of factors participate in it: science, technique, economy. The theory of musical arts does not show the same simplicity. Wundt shows there an acute sense of complexity. First he does not attempt, unlike Grosse,30 a monogenetic deduction that starts with a sole art, that of dance. But, while he sees the unity and solidarity that unites all those forms of arts31 (ordinarily but mistakenly called mimicry), he recognizes their plurality and divides them into four groups: chant, narrative poetry, dance and music, mime and drama. This division allows no objection of principle, except concerning the space given to narrative poetry. It is located between chant on one hand, music and dance on the other, and therefore considered as something very primitive, as a sort of foundational art. We believe that narrative poetry does not go that far back in time. It is found, it is true, in the form of legend or tale, associated with chant and lyricism. But the fact, in itself, does not prove anything; for this sort of combination can be a product of evolution. Because the Australians have this kind of tale does not necessarily mean that it is primitive.32 Considering contemporary Naturvölker as the strict representatives of past Naturvölker ignores the often considerable historical developments they have faced.33 In our view, narration derives from primitive religious lyrical poetry. Gummere,34 who Wundt apparently has not read, thought that, even in our European civilization, the evolved forms of poetry could be attached to ballads and round singing. We consider the folklore of tales as the product either of an evolution of pure prose towards art, or as a regression of myth. We will not demonstrate this thesis in opposition to Wundt’s; it is enough to indicate that another legitimate way of ordering the facts is possible. But if reservations are found, it is fruitful to read all that Wundt says concerning the forms of narration,35 the motifs of its evolution,36 the manner in which themes are associated in the tale. He shows that this arrangement of themes is not yet the cycle, which appears only with legend, the notion of hero, the cult of ancestors—who came from the religious sphere—in order to culminate in epic. The epic becomes the novel and, by addressing nature in general and human nature in particular, then forms our contemporary prose and poetry. We will only mention, omitting necessary critiques, the chapter devoted to chant (Lied),37 which is very short. Moreover, it must be admitted that the Lied as such, that is, outside its connections with drama or lyrical comedy on one hand and polyphonic music on the other, has unpolished forms and a poor evolution. The study of dance,38 on the contrary, is suggestive and contains views that are destined to become classic. All dances are organized into two fundamental categories: ecstatic and mimetic dances. The notion of ecstatic dance, with the goal not of imitating this or that movement but of provoking a state of sensorial, fantastic, hallucinatory excitement, did not exist before this book, and we think

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it is of great interest; for the considerable role played by this technique in art and religion, and in particular in religions where the disciplined and monotonous movements of ecstatic dance lead to possession or ecstasy,39 is well known. Mimetic dances are different, not only because they imitate determined movements, but also because they are practiced in society, whereas ecstatic dance is rather individual. But their origin is also religious: they are linked to the cults of vegetation and nature, to hunting rites, to totemic practices, etc.40 We lack the competency to adequately analyze the chapter on music.41 Here though is what seems to us to deserve retention. With Wundt, we agree that the primitive instrument was an instrument of noise rather than of sound,42 and that music started with pure, monophonic melody and detached itself with difficulty from the scale of sounds. As to the question whether, as the author attempts to show, the recognition by the Greeks of musical intervals, the establishment of the arithmetic rules of sound, and the Pythagorian theory of music had an influence on the development of musical art, we leave it to historians. However, it would be particularly interesting to know if the idea of seven tones in the octave comes from the arithmetic mythology of the number seven, as well as if, more generally, the magical value of numbers played a role in the knowledge and practice of harmonic intonation and chords.43 It would be a crucial fact for those who admit the social origin of the categories of understanding, if such an eminently collective idea was the basis for the most physiological of the arts we practice. This leaves the theory of mime and drama.44 Here, Wundt uses the results of Reich’s book,45 which is not well-known in France. He shows the origins of mimodrama and its mythological nature, and how mime and its derived forms, farce and comedy, have resulted from it; how religious mime gave birth to tragedy, or the story of gods and heroes, and then, through a return to the direct painting of life under the influence of comedy, to modern drama. In this chapter, one of the most accomplished of the book, Wundt’s method is rigorously historical and sociological. Indeed, he does not limit himself to tracing a schema of the forms of dramatic art, but rather attempts to find their causes. What would have determined the main transformations of this art are, first, the religious emancipation of Greek tragedy after Sophocles, later the absence of a division of genres in Shakespearian drama, then still later the shift from heroic to bourgeois tragedy, and finally to modern drama, under the influence of the bourgeoisie and democracy. The social character of the causes invoked is clear. Moreover, for the first time in this long theory of art, Wundt gives a place to feeling.46 Simple intellectual states, pure “associative motifs” are not alone in his argument; expectation and laughter, fear and moral sentiment, the exaltation or relaxation of the will finally take a preponderant place. Had Wundt added that theater does not arouse these sentiments in an isolated spectator but in a group of spectators, and that its function is to set a rhythm not in the individual but in all those affected by a shared emotion; had he, in brief, not lost the collective character of drama, then he would have grasped much more tightly the reality he was trying to express.

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This criticism, unfortunately, cannot be extended to the whole theory of art. Wundt attempts to directly explain history by individual psychology, by the general faculties of human consciousness. He sees in art only a generalized form of fantasy, that is, in the social he only sees the human. Yet the social is not what is permanent and universal, but, on the contrary, what has varied from one society to another and, in the same society, throughout time. As a result, Wundt cannot account for those differences and changes. He offers genealogical tables; he shows that some art forms are derived from others in a determined order; but he does not seek the causes of this derivation. And yet, this development cannot have occurred alone, under the influence of some sort of unexplainable vis a tergo. But in order to see the determining reasons, one has to leave pure psychology and relate art to its social conditions. It is probably from this that another lacuna emerges. Never in his study does Wundt care to offer a notion of art, of its nature, of its function. To be sure, this philosophical question requires precaution before being raised; but it should not be indefinitely postponed. The point of departure is the study of particular arts, but only in order to gradually arrive at an idea of what art is, of its essential characteristics, of the general needs it answers, of the general conditions on which it depends. The problem that Ribot had the courage to attack in the field of psychology47 does not receive any solution from Wundt. In physiological psychology, he only studies “aesthetic impression.”48 In sociology, he only studies the genesis of the means for producing this impression. Nowhere does he study the relationship between the two, which is the whole of art, or when he does, it is as metaphysics.49 Perhaps he would have more strongly felt the possibility and necessity of resolving this problem if he had approached it not only from the angle of a rational chronology, but also in a rigorously sociological manner. Art has not only a social nature, but also social effects. It is the product of collective fantasy, but it is also what we agree upon, whose sentimental effects are relatively the same for all at a given time in a given society. This nature and function probably explain both the persistence and variation, the universality and instability, of the sentiment of the beautiful. Wundt indeed succeeds in not even mentioning this sentiment. He is not unaware that it has no other characteristic than its communicability in a given group, and that the apperception by which the artist chooses a “motif of association” of images is commanded by the sentiment he has of beauty and by the judgment of the audience. But these two essential moments—the creation and the enjoyment of the work of art—sare not even considered. That is why this whole “natural history of art” has no psychological life and no philosophical interest, precisely because it is without any sociological reality.

II. MYTH Myth in general--Wundt’s whole theory is dominated by a principle that cannot be clearly set out nor discussed here; he himself postpones its exposition and

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demonstration to his third volume.50 He merely announces that, according to him, the compared science of religion is spoiled at birth by its failure to radically distinguish myth and religion. But of this distinction, he explains nothing. All that can be glimpsed is that, according to him, myth is a “spontaneous” conception of the world, while religion is an “ideal” conception formed by man according to the “ideal,” the degree of intellectual and moral “culture” he has reached.51 Without waiting for the promised developments, we want to immediately express the highest reservation concerning a distinction that seems impossible to defend. The myth invented by an Australian in order to justify, for instance, the formation of a new clan separated by segmentation from an older clan is neither more spontaneous nor less ideal than the institution of the cult of a saint. But what is myth? In order to talk about it, it should first be defined. Here as with art, Wundt does not feel the need to define his object. He only gives a simple philosophical description. Myth is opposed to language,52 as less objective, “less linked to the normal conditions of communal life.” It is more subjected to sentimental fluctuations and popular passions than language, and therefore, the “motifs” that form its material are perpetually transforming. While these remarks are fair, they leave myth indistinct from art and, particularly, from poetry. Wundt recognized this lacuna; hence he attempted to mark the boundary between these two domains.53 He shows that myth, which lies mid-way between language and poetry, is more objective than the latter and more subjective than the former. Further, poetry, even when in its popular forms,54 always retains an individual character, while myth has a collective character; consequently, the beings created by poetry are also individual, yet unreal,55 whereas those created by myth have a reality comparable to that of general ideals (such as the spirit of a deceased person, with a composite personality formed, as we shall see later, on the basis of a multitude of general elements assembled together). But these distinctions leave the object of research singularly undetermined. Between myth, here approximately described, and other collective representations that form the basis of law, science and even technique, which are real at the level of general ideas, the resemblances are too great. Moreover, Wundt himself notes,56 with reason, that the theory of taboo, which he derives from myth, should play a primordial role in the theory of morals which he will develop in the third part of Völkerpsychologie; nothing shows better the instability of his notion of myth, since it should make him consider as imaginary a notion that he places at the basis of morals itself. At other times, Wundt seems to find the differential characteristic of myth in the personification of mythic images; but then the ensemble of mythic representations is radically separated from other collective representations, without any links between them, which goes against Wundt’s own facts and ideas. We can add that, in primitive formations of mythology, personification is lacking. Myths refer to animal species, which are thought as such and not individualized.

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But let us get to the theory of myth offered by Wundt. It is not set out directly and in itself, but with a long and penetrating discussion of existing theories,57 and can be condensed into a few propositions. According to him, myth is the work of collective fantasy (allgemeine Phantasiethätigkeit); but this fantasy does not function here as it does elsewhere. The images it produces have three main characteristics: 1) They are perceptive; they possess an objectivity absent from the images produced by art; they make a strong impression that consequently gives the representation reality. Between the notion of a ghost, on one hand, and the impressions and memories of the dream that created it, on the other hand, there is not any relation of theory to fact; but the subject really has the feeling (Eindruck) that the soul that appears to her, or the one that left her body during sleep, fully exists. 2) These images are associative,58 that is, they show considerable powers of aggregation, fructification, ramification, entanglement, and confusion. This power is practically undefined. Hence the notion of soul is constituted by the normal and indissoluble association of the idea of breath and the idea of vital principle. Then, once these two ideas are associated, still others are aggregated with them: hence the myth of a bird-soul, of a boat-soul, etc. 3) Finally,59 these images are governed by the faculty of consciousness, which chooses and enlivens impressions and images, aggregates them, and transforms them into a whole with will and soul: it is the faculty of apperception. This faculty, in conjunction with the mythical image’s powerful ability to evoke and associate, produces the personification of the objects of mythology. For instance, once the generic image of the soul is built, apperception transforms it into a person. Such a general theory, which Wundt, indeed, presents only as a clue to orient the reader, does not call on a consequent discussion in the realm of facts. As a psychological analysis of a social fact, it is not without truth. Mythologists would benefit from knowing that, psychologically, the mythical image has a perceptive content (Wahrnehmungsinhalt), that it has “an immediate reality”; that apperception, more exactly Einfühlung, the attention directed by emotion, plays a central role in the choice of elements made by each mythical representation, as is also the case in art and play.60 But, even on the merely psychological level, not all the essential elements have been discovered by this analysis. The mythical image does not possess only the power of association; there is, in myth, more than compositions of themes and images; there are transformations, segmentations, splits, oppositions, contrasts, displacements in space and in time (passage from the eternal to the transitory), disappearances, etc. The hero of a myth is successively a thing, a class of beings, an ancestor, his own son, he dies, is born again, fights against himself and then against his enemies, he multiplies, travels, disappears.61 Moreover, the analysis of mythological apperception does not seem to give enough importance to what Ribot has justly called the logic of sentiments, nor to the collective character of apperception. For the Einfühlung that chooses the elements of the myth is not exclusively that of the poet, but that of the mass of believers. Wundt knows this, but he does not explain how this communal apperception happens, nor where this agreement of free consciences

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comes from. Is it the product of a simple encounter? Would it not rather be due to the fact that myth is the product of organized groups that have invented it and imposed it on generations? The reason why Wundt does not pose these questions is that he has missed one of the essential elements of any myth: belief. To characterize myth by saying that it has a “perceptive content” leads, in fact, to making of it nothing but an illusion, as Stendhal argued, although Wundt rejects his theory. But in reality, myth is not only a system of representation to which objective value is mistakenly attributed. It is also the object of a simultaneously voluntary, spontaneous and obligatory adhesion, the object of the faith of an organized group. The myth exists only if there is a sort of necessity to agree both on the themes that form its material and on the way these themes are arranged together. Yet this necessity can only be explained as coming from the group, if it is society that pushes its members to believe. Society imposes the myth because it is expressed in it, because it is the symbol by means of which it thinks itself. From this angle, myth does not appear as a simple daydream (Wachvision), which comes from anywhere and corresponds to anything. It translates an existing reality, and then it becomes possible to explain how myth dominates experience itself, how it informs it, and how morals, rites, and economy itself are produced from it. Myth and Primitive Rite—But let us leave the general notion of myth developed by Wundt, and see what he says about the different sorts of myths. Because of the distinction that he makes between myth and religion, he is led to singularly narrow the domain of mythology. He does not consider mythical the conceptions that refer to gods, nature, its origins and end. The philosophical and moral breath that animates them, the idealist inspiration that he always seems to find within, force him to consider them as strictly religious representations rather than as mythological constructions, in the restricted sense he gives to the term. In the end, according to him, myths are systems of representation exclusively relative to beings that, although they are unreal and imaginary, are not those to which a cult of adoration is addressed: there are myths only for souls, spirits, and demons. There are moments when the reader wonders whether, for our author, mythology is not simply the intellectual aspect of magic. In order to better study some of these myths, Wundt sometimes substitutes for them their corresponding rites. It is a legitimate, and sometimes necessary, substitution, for some of these representations do not have any distinct existence outside of the practices that realize them. It is the case, in particular, of the beliefs relative to the soul, which usually do not translate into definite and observable formulas, and which are difficult to reach other than through the funeral rites in which they express themselves. But Wundt justifies this substitution not only as an often necessary methodological tool, but as a principle. According to him, the reason why rite might replace myth in our study of them is that myth dominates rite; the latter is never anything more than the former put into practice. To be sure, it is correct that there is no rite that is not accompanied by some

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mythical representation.62 But while this regular coexistence proves that both necessarily imply one other, it does not necessarily follow that one has primacy over the other. Wundt thinks this primacy may be established by remarking that, while there is no rite without myth, there are on the contrary myths without rites.63 It is true that myth can live an autonomous life, fructify, ramify, be anastomosed to other myths, evolve, change their milieu, whereas rite, frozen within the cult to which it belongs, is often immobilized within the group of believers who practice it. But, while myth is susceptible to dissociating itself from rite and evolve with independence, it does not follow at all that, within the normal complexus formed by the association of myth and rite, the former is the essential and prominent element. Wundt himself admits that, when the myth transforms itself and detaches from its ritual extensions, it then tends towards the tale, the epic, the legend;64 that is, in some measure, it ceases to be itself and degenerates. Normally myth implies belief in the real existence of a special force, with which we are always potentially in contact; and since any contact with a force of that kind necessarily takes on a ritual form, there is no myth in the strict sense of the term without rite. In any case, Wundt’s goal is to seriate the different mythical forms in genealogical order, starting, following the laws of general psychology, with those that can be immediately explained by the impressions directly produced upon primitives and by the sentiments and associations of ideas that give rise to these impressions, without the need for any other explanation.65 From these, Wundt goes on to those immediately derived from the first, and so forth and so on until he reaches the most complex, the farthest away from the initial representation. This fundamental idea, from which all others have come by means of a gradual complication, is that of the soul. Hence the analysis of the representation of the soul constitutes the central part of this book. The Notion of Soul—Two types of elements have served to form this representation. On one hand, there is the idea of the “corporeal soul,” and, on the other, the idea of the independent soul, of the psyche, two contradictory ideas that nonetheless coexist and perfectly harmonize in primitive mentality. The notion of the corporeal soul inherently contains analogous contradiction and indecision. The corporeal soul is first and foremost a principle of life, spread throughout the whole body, which very slowly abandons it during death and lengthy funerals.66 But the corporeal soul is also the organs that are the special location of this soul: the kidneys, blood, excrement and excrescences (nails, hair, etc.), the gaze. Hence, by evolving, this idea gives birth to the idea67 of the souls of organs: it is in this state that we find the psychology of Homer.68 The second form of the idea of the soul, equally primitive and distinct from the first form, is the psyche.69 It is the soul independent from the body, the principle of moral personality. But the psyche itself is not conceived as simple: the notion has to be decomposed in two contradictory elements. On one hand, it is \XFKthe breath-soul, and on the other hand it is the shadow, HLGZORQ, the VFLD The breath-soul is closest to the corporeal soul, it is what is exhaled after

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death, what can escape while sneezing, what slips away while kissing or in the voice of the magician. It is also what the descendants take from the mouth of the dying, what is immediately incarnated in the worm or the snake that appear at the side of the deceased. The breath-soul becomes the Seelentier, the animalsoul. And it is what a portion of the funeral rites aims to conciliate. The shadowsoul is the wandering psyche, whose roamings in space cause or rather constitute the dream. The shadow-soul is what dreams. It is also the deceased person who appears to the sleeper;70 it is therefore the double of the living and the dead. It tends towards the malevolent demon. The function of a part of the funeral rites is to push it away, to keep it at distance. Diverse elements participate in the formation of this idea of the double. The contrast of death and life gives rise to the idea of something that has left. The appearance of the deceased person in dreams and the travels in space that the subject sees himself undertaking while asleep confirm the idea of a double, which leaves the body and survives the earthly soul. But those are only the first faltering steps of collective thought. Two groups of facts come to add to the vivacity of this first representation, unstable and bland outside of funeral rites. First, there are the phenomena of vision during both waking and sleeping states. The violent reality of some dreams, of the Albdruck and particularly of nightmares, gives them an extraordinary weight.71 Second, the phenomena of voluntary or spontaneous ecstasy,72 of possession and of shamanism confer a special prestige on certain individuals and some souls. They come to reinforce, unify and prove the idea of the soul, which becomes spirit and is very close to being (incubus, vampire, werewolf) a demon. Cults Derived from Animism (Magic, Fetishism, Totemism)—Once forged, these representations of the soul give birth to laws of common action and to a cult. This cult takes two forms: one is primitive, the other evolved. The primitive form presupposes the notion of the soul only; it can be best observed in magic and fetishism, and yet it is not found today in its pure form; it subsists only as a vast uniform strata, which, analysis shows, lies underneath the rites and folklore of nearly all of humankind.73 To be sure, it is everywhere mixed with elements that originated with primitive animism. But according to Wundt, it would express an ensemble of ideas shared by all independently of their culture, social organization, and differentiation of minds.74 Here is how Wundt is led to see in magic and fetishism the purest expression of the notions relative to the soul. In magic, he distinguishes three strata. The first, which he calls “the magic of breaths,” is purely animist.75 It is the case of the doctor, who inhales or sucks disease in: the voice is itself only breath and consequently any magical action practiced through the voice belongs to this form of magic. Preuss was the first to mention the importance of these facts.76 However, while he linked the magic of breaths to the more abstract and general notion of mana or magical efficacy, Wundt directly deduces it from the notion of the soul, from animist beliefs. The second stratum77 is magical action from a distance, which is scarcely defined by

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more than the mysterious, unintelligible manner in which it produces its effect. These are the analogical rites, which were insufficiently analyzed by Frazer: he sees in them only erroneous applications of principles of causality.78 Finally, the third sort of magical rite includes all those that imply the notion of demons and independent spirits; it is witchcraft per se, as well as healing medical magic in the cases where the idea of the good demon, under religious influences, becomes distinct from the general notion of demon.79 We will not insist on the arbitrariness in these divisions; with them, one separates what is inseparable. There is no abyss between direct and indirect magic. Any magical rite presupposes both the personal action of the soul of the magician and the impersonal action of the rite and of all the things that participate in the rite. Indeed, in no way does magic happen between individual souls. Powers, natures, virtues, the properties of things, act at the same time as do the souls of men, spirits, and gods. Even if it could be established that the notion of the soul forms the exclusive material of magic, we would still need to seek the causes of the formation of magic per se, that is, why men did not limit themselves to funeral rites and the precautions concerning the souls of the deceased. Ultimately, Wundt’s notion of magic seems unsettled. Here is, in fact, how he defines it: “Any action mysteriously exercised by a man or a god is magical.”80 Yet such a definition might indistinctly apply to any rite, religious as well as magical,81 to the sui generis efficacy of all sacred beings or objects, and even to miracles.82 Fetishism is the other group of facts in which primitive animism is best expressed. Fetishism is distinct from magic in the sense that the latter is made of isolated, temporary rites, without regularity nor periodicity, employed for specific (and non-lasting) circumstances, whereas fetishism is a cult properly speaking.83 It is a system of rites practiced in conformity with collective traditions and addressed to a determined thing, which always remains the same, and in which a soul or spirit resides. The fetish keeps its distinctive characteristics outside of the rites of which it is the object. Moreover, while magic is practiced by isolated agents and private individuals, fetishism has its societies of practitioners, which are real social institutions. But it is also distinct from religious or mythical cults in the absolute arbitrariness of its choices.84 The two main forms it might take are the talisman, which has a positive action, and the amulet, which is rather used for passive protection. These two notions are derived from the general principle. But beyond a few clever remarks, it is difficult to see in these distinctions more than arbitrary refinements. Both the amulet and the talisman are the concern of magic, which produces them. Moreover, both magic and fetishism have respective traditional practitioners and corporations of professional agents. The situation of Wundt is so unstable that at some points85 he considers fetishism as absolutely primitive, and at others86 as the result of an evolution. As a matter of fact, it could hardly be otherwise, since Wundt wished to remain faithful to classical theories and therefore to use a notion of fetishism that remains undefined. Even in African countries, supposed to be the territory of choice for fetishism, this notion has no foundation, as we have shown elsewhere.87 The

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object used as a fetish is never an arbitrarily chosen, common object: it is always defined by the code of magic and religion. But magic and fetishism have produced two more groups of facts: Manism, the cult of ancestors, and animalism, the cult of animals. Of the former, we will say little. For if the cult of the soul leads to the cult of ancestors, it does so, as Wundt admits, following a long evolution that can fully develop only within a highly developed social organization.88 If in China it dominates the whole of mythology and rituals, it is precisely because culture has there attained a very high development. Although branching quite early, this evolution of myth only bears fruit very late, and for this reason Manism cannot be extensively treated in a book that is mostly occupied with primitive forms. However, this is not the case of animalism, of which the most widespread type is totemism. According to Wundt, totemism is derived from animism,89 which preceded it: the reason he invokes to establish anteriority deserves to be noted, because it is linked to one of his doctrine’s guiding ideas, to which we will return later. Totemism presupposes individuals forming defined societies called classes; it is linked with a specific social organization.90 However, for Wundt, any social organization is a derived fact, more or less late, which implies something beyond itself. What is really primitive is what is anterior to any organization, which emerges from the unorganized mass of individuals. The notion of the soul, which fulfills this condition since it is the spontaneous product of human reflection, must therefore have preceded totemic beliefs and practices. Here is how they emerged. What would have been the intermediary between the idea of the soul and that of the totem is the notion of soul-animal or animal-soul (Seelentier). At the moment of death, it is believed that the soul escapes in the form of animals that are seen in the vicinity of the dying person, mostly in the form of a worm or a snake, “those universal totems,” says Wundt, without providing any ground for his argument. Therefore, a cult to these animals emerged, and then a cult to others; finally, man came to think that a magical action, similar to the one that forms the basis of the Australian intichiuma,91 could be exercised upon the totems thereby constituted, in order to ensure the multiplication of the totemic species, and the totemic cult therefore emerged. One sees that this deduction of totemism does not add anything important to the theories of Tylor92 and Wilken,93 who see in the totem, above all, the soul of an ancestor incarnated in the body of an animal. Without insisting on the several difficulties raised by this theory, let us merely note that nothing justifies this supposed anteriority of the notion of soul. Isolated, pure animism will never be observed, and it is only arbitrarily that an epoch during which the cult of the soul existed on its own can be imagined. If we remain in the realm of facts, all that can be said is that the idea of soul and totemism are solidary facts, which belong to the same system. Actually, from a dialectical point of view, we might wonder if this explanation does not rest on a petitio principii. For, indeed, if the souls of clan members are incarnated in a given animal species, is it not because living people had kinship relations with this species? If these animals were strangers, why would the souls inhabit them? If this is the case, the real question is to

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know where these kinship relations come from. And to this question, the animist theory does not give any answer. From totemism, Wundt deduces the institution of taboo. The totem is the object of respect, which produces prohibitions, and it is on the model of these prohibitions that other taboos would have been formed.94 The idea is not unfounded, although the way in which it is presented makes it appear a bit tenuous. With Robertson Smith, he admits that, in its primitive form, the notion of taboo is ambiguous, that the ideas of pure and impure are mingled within it, and that the distinction between them is made only later, when demons and gods appear. Very justly, he emphasizes the relations that this notion, thereby formed, entertains with morals and the law.95 Finally, intrepidly, he attempts to derive a table of processes of lustration, first by fire and then by water; for Wundt thinks, we do not know why, that the former were anterior to the latter. Notwithstanding the interest of his remarks, their reach is weakened by his unfortunate distinction between myth and religion; for this reason, in fact, he cannot link the notion of taboo to the notion of sacred, of which it is, in reality, only one aspect. Finally, from these notions and cults, Wundt deduces the idea of demon, that is, of a spirit which is not a disembodied human soul. We will say nothing of this genesis, which already presupposes elements borrowed from religion: for the notion of demon is not constituted independently from the idea of gods.96 We will only note the difference that Wundt subtly indicates between individual souls, which are scattered and independent from one another, and the demons which, on the contrary, are gregarious and only exist in gangs and groups.97 Wundt also correctly shows how demons correspond to natural things and the events of life. We also note the description he makes of demonic possession and of the elements that formed protective demons. Concerning demons of vegetation and their cult, Wundt follows the proper authors, Mannhardt98 and Preuss.99 Finally, he gives a fine analysis of the dramatic representations of myths of vegetation, sun and rain, which form the origins of mimodrama.100 However, following Frazer, Wundt considers as magic the rites of water and fire which are a part of these myths, we believe without justification. One finds the elements of a theory of sacrifice in two parts of this book. Originally purely expiatory, it was a means of lustration from the consequences of the taboo;101 then, when addressed to demons and especially to agrarian demons, it became a sacrifice for requests and thanks.102 We restrain ourselves to these indications, since the question will naturally return in his coming volume on religion.

CONCLUSION This book is significant in the mass of observations and ideas, the theories discussed, and the theses proposed. We have to salute this imposing effort to introduce rational order in the world of mythology, a world in which anthropologists have usually only seen long series of linked empirical facts, philologists lan-

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guage disorders, and historians chronologies or chains that were, at the most, used to take the place of absent chronologies.103 However, it seems that very serious reservations have to be made concerning the author’s conceptions, including the most fundamental ones. First of all, nothing is more contestable than the dominant idea that art and myth belong to the domain of imagination and fantasy, and therefore are nothing more than simple combinations of images. A multitude of sentiments and a creative will are at play in art, and there is no reason why the study of these factors should be reserved to physiological psychology or philosophy, as Wundt argues. Similarly (and without mentioning that there should be no distinction between myth and religion, as we argued earlier), the Gefühlsreaktionen, the actions of collective sentiment, of which Wundt shows the importance concerning ritual prohibitions related to animals,104 also govern the way in which mythological images and concepts are grouped, dissociated, classified, hierarchized, and bear fruit; for there are, in mythology, not only images, but also concepts or, at least, composite images. It is the logic of collective sentiments105 that presides over the formation of both. Additionally, the function of myth is to direct practice, i.e., ritual; the myth is to the efficient gesture what the idea is to the word, what the moral rule is to the act that applies or violates it, and consequently it cannot be separated from active faculties. In sum, we fear that Wundt is prisoner to the old divisions of Völkerspsychologie: language is attached to the intellect, myth and art to fantasy, law and morals to will.106 This clear-cut and arbitrary partition results in the elimination of sentiment and image from language, of morality from primitive religion, of will, the sense of force, from production (while the idea of causation and creation actually dominate it), and finally, of imagination and understanding from morality. This a priori division of facts is, moreover, the cause of a great gap. We are indeed surprised to see that, in that monumental Völkerpsychologie, no place is left for those collective representations that are not essentially mythic, religious, aesthetic, moral or judicial: the representations of time,107 space, class,108 force, cause, number, etc. Of all these, Wundt studied only one; it is the category of personality, which he only touched on within his analysis of the notion of the soul. And yet, there is no reason why the others should be left out from history and comparison. But, notwithstanding these omissions, what is the value of this book? It is, in a way, a sociology. For Wundt studies phenomena of collective life and, a priori, he studies them as such. Albeit vague, the notion of Kultur, of civilization, to which our author attaches so many evolutions and changes in form,109 is in our eyes an essentially sociological notion. This work even constitutes, because of the method it employs, progress in comparison to Wundt’s previous works. It is a generous and courageous effort to systematize into a genealogy the principal forms of the principal institutions of art and of what is commonly called religion. But if it is a sociology, it is singularly incomplete, even altered by Wundt’s conception of Völkerpsychologie. Indeed he distinguishes the discipline indi-

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cated by this term from sociology.110 He restrains the latter to what is external and material in collective life, to political economy, the science of law, the study of social structure, general movements of population and criminality. Conversely, collective psychology does not have to understand these phenomena. Consequently, the latter studies facts in ignorance of everything that concerns the judicial, political, economic, technical and material organization of society, and independently from any adaptation to the environment or demographic phenomenon. It is easy to see the arbitrariness of such an abstraction. Are not language, myths, the different art forms, and morals not linked to all social institutions, to all social structures? Is it possible to understand them when they are artificially detached from their natural ambiance? So, what does Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie or collective psychology study? What is common (gemeinsam) to men; the ensemble of ideas and beliefs that human beings formed because they are human beings, and because they in relations with one another;111 the shared basis for human mentality, as it results both from the nature of mankind in general and from the exchanges of ideas between individuals. If one subtracts from civilization everything that might be due to the influence of the different forms of social organization, of various institutions, etc., the residue then obtained is the object of Völkerpsychologie. Hence Wundt carefully asserts that he studies the mental life of the people112 (das Volk), not of society (die Gesellschaft); indeed society is a defined, individualized and organized human grouping, whereas the people is simply the crowd, the multitude, the confused and undifferentiated mass of individual consciousnesses. However, it is difficult not to perceive how blurry and vague the object of collective psychology, so conceived, is. Where can this shared basis of human mentality be found, where can it be reached in order to be observed? How can it be dissociated from what it is not? Is it preferable to observe primitive societies? No matter how simple, how little advanced they are, they nonetheless already possess a social organization that contributed to shape their mentality. In the complexus of effects given to observation, how is it possible to distinguish the different factors? Wundt himself is obliged to recognize that the animist cult is nowhere found in its pure state, that everywhere it is mixed with many other elements. But then how can we make it a sort of separate entity, that could form the object of a distinct science? Wundt would say that the notion of the soul can be explained by the data common to human mentality, without any considerations relative to social organization, and that therefore it is of the domain of Völkerpsychologie. But it is contrary to any method to define the object of science on the basis of the explanatory hypotheses made by the scientist. The group of facts that is the object of research must be delimited before the scientist is led to explain it. Finally, are there any representations that really are produced by the unorganized mass of consciousnesses? In fact, men have always entertained relationships only within defined and organized groups and, consequently, it is completely arbitrary to imagine mental life independently from any organization. At the least, the groups men form always have a sentiment of themselves, of their unity, and this sentiment, which varies according to the nature, form and

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composition of groups, necessarily affects all the representations that emerge within them. We are therefore extremely worried that there is, in this very notion of Völkerpsychologie, a large amount of vagueness, which is detrimental to the theories of the author. In particular, it is difficult to imagine how there could be any evolution in this order of representations studied by collective psychology. The shared basis of human mentality should always remain the same, since it does not depend, according to Wundt, on changing conditions. Indeed for him, the same ideas branch, proliferate, are segmented or agglomerated, without us really knowing why. It is always the notion of the soul that, without apparent causes, gives birth, by a sort of internal dialectic, to diverse forms of the soul, to magic, to fetishism, and to demons. We are merely marking time. Or, when some real novelty appears, it is not prepared nor engendered by what precedes it, but arises in a revolutionary way; such is, according to our philosopher, the case of religion and pure art, which emerged more or less at the same time and in the same mysterious way. But on the contrary, if these facts are considered as the products of well and truly social life, if they are put in relationship with the social factors that Wundt takes pains to avoid, then changes are effortlessly explained. For everything that is social, in the sense that we give to the term, is specific and variable according to countries and times. Meillet had already rightly criticized Wundt’s Sprache for this very same reason.113 Finally, we wonder if this conception of Völkerpsychologie does not, in the end, compromise psychology itself. Indeed, Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie is not simply the richer reservoir of facts in general psychology;114 it threatens to absorb the latter. Since the phenomena it studies are those that are common to all human beings and are not specific to determined social groups, there is no reason to believe that there would be any other in individual consciousness. There only remain the mental states that are tightly related to organisms, which are the objects of physiological psychology, the only part of psychology on which Wundt has written. In fact, for instance concerning language, the philosopher sees only two problems: one psycho-physiological, and the other sociopsychological.115 The analogy between this position and the one generally attributed to Comte is noticeable. It is true that, according to Wundt, there is, in consciousness, the notion of apperception, which would be the proper object of psychology.116 But in the way Wundt conceives of it, as attached to primitive will, apperception is metaphysical. It is not consciousness, but the substantial foundation of consciousness. The cycle of psychological phenomena ranges from Trieb, from conatus, to voluntary and free will, without consciousness being anything more than an intermittent glint.117 Everything comes out of the noumenon and returns to it. But this way of conceiving of psychology as a sort of voluntarist substantialism compromises the very theory of apperception, which is so useful both in sociology and in psychology.118 Without sufficiently clear-cut criteria, which would allow for the distinction between the physiological and the psychic on one hand, and on the other hand between the purely psychic (that is, everything that is common

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to all individual consciousnesses) and the social (that is, what is common only to men who live in one specific, defined and organized, society), does not psychology vanish, or can it be anything more than a metaphysics?

NOTES 1

Editors’ note: This chapter was first published as “L’art et le mythe d’après M. Wundt,” Revue philosophique de la France et l’étranger, 66, 1908, pp. 48-78 and reprinted in Marcel Mauss, Oeuvres, volume 2 (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1968-69), pp. 195-227. Translated and used by permission of Georges Borchardt, Inc., for Les Editions de Minuit. 2 Editors’ note: I.e., in the Revue philosophique de la France et l’étranger. 3 Editors’ note: Mauss’s language of “parts” and “volumes” is potentially confusing here. In fact, Mythus und Religion was the title Wundt gave to the second volume of his multivolume Völkerpsychologie (VP hereafter), and at the time of Mauss’s writing, he had published two parts in this second volume, in 1905 and 1906 respectively. The first part (617 pages in length) contained three lengthy chapters on “Die Phantasie,” “Die Phantasie in der Kunst,” and “Die mythenbildende Phantasie,” while the second consisted of a 481 page fourth chapter on “Die Seelenvorstellungen.” Mauss refers to those two parts with the simple designation “1” and “2” throughout the review. We have filled out these reference to include the full title, the volume number (2), the part number (1 or 2), and any chapter or indication of subdivision within a chapter Mauss gives. 4 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 510. 5 Ibid., p. 590. 6 The excellent essay by M.S. Culin, “The Games of the North American Indians,” in the 24th Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1907, demonstrates that all the games of North American Indians were or are religious. 7 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 87 sq. 8 See, however, VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 56, 71. 9 Ibid., pp. 92, 93. 10 Ibid., p. 94. Wundt omits dance in this list, but this must be mere carelessness. 11 In his list of materials (VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 101) that were used in primitive craft, and which limited the latter to its fixation in memory (Erinnerungkunst), Wundt omits one: bone sculpture played such a role in prehistoric art in Europe, and in the art of arctic America and Asia that its omission by the author, who knows the facts well, is surprising. The role given to dyeing in the origins of painting, and that given to painting in comparison with drawing (ibid., pp. 157, 269) also seems inequitable. 12 In reality, these are rather forms of writing, to which Wundt loosely links them (cf. VP, volume 1 (Die Sprache), part 2, 2nd edition, p. 240). But he admits that the symbolic forms of writing (VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 99, n. 1) are a manifestation of art. The truth rather lies, in our opinion, in the opposite direction. Writing has a serious origin. Rites constitute the first ideograms (the term is significant); here are the first graphic materializations of religious ideas: marks of property (cf. Van Gennep, and the different works cited in Revue des traditions populaires, 1906, p. 73 sq.), totemic coats of arms (cf. VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 99, 244; cf. VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 242), ritual drawings (see Année Sociologique, 1899, 2, pp. 207-212, cf. S. Reinach, “L’art et la magie,” Anthropologie,

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1903, p. 257, sq.). All this is at the origin of art itself, which only later constituted itself independently. 13 The schema of the genealogical tree is expressly employed; see VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 511, about modern drama. 14 Ibid., p. 121 sq.. 15 Foy, Der Kunst der See Dayaks (Museum Völkerkunde, Dresden, 1901). 16 Die bildenden Künste bein den Dayaks auf Borneo, 1890. 17 “Evolution in Art,” etc. Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy, 1884. 18 Holmes, “The Aboriginal Pottery of the Eastern United States,” in 20th Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology, 1903, as well as other works in the publications of the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. 19 Garrick Mallery, “Picture Writing of the American Indians,” in 20th Report Bur. of Amer. Ethnology, 1893. On South Americans, see Von den Steinen, Unter den Naturvölkern Zentralbräsiliens, 1897. Koch-Grünberg, Anfänge der Kunst im Urwald, Berlin, 1895. 20 VP, volume 2, part 1, p.130, for instance, for semi-animal, semi-human types. 21 Wundt believes in the secondary character of ornaments borrowed from vegetation (ibid., p.186). We are in agreement, but he should have added that this secondary phenomenon appears very early in history, as early as in Australian and New-Guinean arts. 22 Ex. ibid., p. 147: importance of the mask in this evolution towards human figuration; p. 152: necessity in multi-racial societies (Egypt) of marking the characteristics of each; p. 154: influence of funeral portrait (Egypt) on the search for individual resemblance. 23 Ibid., chapter 2, p. 3. 24 Ibid., pp. 225, 285. 25 Ibid., pp. 113, 220. 26 The exclusively technological chapter that Wundt devotes to the house (VP, volume 2, part 2, section 3b) is skipped in our argument; it is simplistic and often inaccurate. The passages on the temple, imitation of the world and place of sanctuary are quite literary (VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 234). 27 VP, volume 2, part 2, chapter 2, sections 3 and 4. 28 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 294 sq. 29 It is even permissible to consider jewelry as having been one of the principles of ideal art. Very early, at least as soon as the great civilization of Asia and the Mediterranean emerged, the jewel is an object of art, made for the exclusive joy of touching and seeing. Moreover, the way in which jewelry is set aside in this book, in which tattooing (to which it is linked) take so much space, is the cause of the most serious gaps. 30 Les débuts de l’art, translation Alcan, 1902. 31 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 303, 394. Cf. VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, p. 269. 32 Cf. Année Sociologique, 1907, 10, p. 227. 33 Cf. Mauss, “Leçon d’ouverture,” in Revue d’histoire des religions, 1902. 34 The Beginnings of Poetry, New York, 1900. 35 VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 326-348. 36 Ibid., p. 348 sq. 37 VP, volume 2, part 1, chapter 3, section 2. 38 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 394 sq. 39 Cf. below, on ecstasy, VP, volume 2, part 2, chapter 4, sections 1 and 4. 40 VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 427-31. 41 Ibid., chapter 2, section 3, sub-section 4.

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We can however point out to Wundt, who does not know it, Balfour’s book, History of the Musical Bow, Oxford, 1901. He will easily deduce from it that Frobenius’s hypothesis, according to which wind instruments necessarily preceded string instruments, has to be abandoned (1, p.435, cf. Frobenius, Ursprung der Kultur, 1898, 1, p.143). 43 VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 446-457. 44 Ibid., chapter 2, section 3, sub-section 5. 45 Der Mimus, 1903; cf. Hubert in Année sociologique, 8. 46 See his Psychologie du tragique, p. 517 sq., and du comique, p. 511 sq. 47 Psychologie des sentiments, chapter 9 ; Imagination créatrice, chapter 4 (F. Alcan). 48 Grundzüge der phys. Psy., 5th edition, 3, p. 128 sq. 49 System der Philosophie, 2nd edition, 2, p. 674 sq. 50 In the Année sociologique, 10, p. 211, can be found a brief exposition of what we believe to be Wundt’s theory. For cited references, cf. Ethik, 2nd edition, 1, p. 50 sq. 51 Cf. Ethik, loc. cit., Grundriss des Psychologie, 5th edition, 3, 21. 52 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 598. 53 Ibid., pp. 94, 475, 581, etc. 54 Ibid., p. 594. 55 Ibid., p. 603 sq. 56 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 305. 57 This discussion contains very clever remarks (VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 580) on the relationship between symbolist theory and romantic literature, on the revival of symbolism in the etymological methods of Usener (ibid., pp. 552, 393), and on “analogical” theories (ibid., p. 385; cf. VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 195). 58 VP, volume 2, part 1, chapter 3, section 2, sub-section c. 59 VP, volume 2, part 1, chapter 1, sections 3 and section 2, sub-section 1. 60 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 570, p. 61 sq.; cf. System der Philosophie, 2nd edition, p. 64 sq. Grund. phys. Psy., 3rd edition, 3, p. 186. 61 This is the faithful analysis of a specific totemic myth. 62 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 228; cf. p. 453. 63 Ibid., pp. 228 and 399. 64 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 235 sq. 65 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 766. 66 VP, volume 2, part 2, pp. 8 and 9. Wundt arrives at a theory of death in two stages, which has been indicated and demonstrated, along with all other developments, by Hertz in l'Année sociologique, 1907, 10. 67 Here we use the term “idea” or “notion” because Wundt does not always use the term “representation” (Vorstellung, Anschauung) and sometimes uses the word “concept” (Begriff). 68 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 37 sq. 69 Ibid., sections 3a and 3b. 70 Ibid., p. 93. 71 To the list of works provided by Wundt we advise the addition of the several essays of Höfler and Roscher (see index of the Année sociologique). 72 VP, volume 2, part 2, pp. 101-103. Cf. VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 403-410. The analysis of ecstasy by German authors since Wundt and Kraepelin, Psychiatrie, 7th edition, 1, 258; cf. Achelis, Die Extase, 1902, is quite different from what is classical in France. These authors attribute less importance to the states of catalepsy and hypnosis, and more importance to the states of sentimental excitement and to the free play of images. They are of course right concerning the degree normally reached by cults, magic, or religion. Cf. Mauss, “Origine des pouvoirs magiques,” p. 44.

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VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 147. Ibid., pp. 152-3. 75 Ibid., p. 46 sq. 76 Der Urprung der Religion und der Kunst. Globus, 1904. 2; 1905, 1. cf. Année sociologique, 1906, 9, p. 293 sq. 77 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 176 sq. 78 Cf. ibid., p. 180; p. 190 note 2, a good discussion of the division into sympathic and mimetic rites. 79 Ibid., p. 395 sq. 80 Ibid., p. 154. 81 See Hubert and Mauss, “Esquisse d'une théorie générale de la magie,” Année sociologique, 1904, 7. 82 Cf. VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 178. 83 Ibid., p. 229. 84 Ibid., p. 207. 85 Ibid., p. 232. 86 Ibid., p. 231. 87 Année sociologique, 1907, 10, p. 308. 88 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 350. 89 Ibid., pp. 150-152, p. 146; cf. pp. 242 sq., 274, 349. 90 Ibid., p. 272; cf. VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 560. 91 Wundt nicely notes its importance (VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 261, p. 410), but it is impossible to find the intichiuma of the lizard that he describes in the books that he habitually cites. 92 “Totem Post from the Haida Village,” etc., Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, 1898. 93 Het Animisme bij den Volken van den Indischen Archipel, Indische Gids, 1884. 94 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 299. 95 Ibid., p. 304. 96 We pass over a discussion of this origin. We note only that Wundt claims, without any evidence, that the notion of demon is a late one. It is certainly found beginning in Australian societies, and simultaneously with the idea of the soul. 97 VP, volume 2, part 2, pp. 128 and 200. 98 Baum, Wald, und Feld-Kulte, 2nd edition, 1904. 99 See the references to this name in the Année sociologique, 1905-07, 8-10. 100 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 431 sq.; VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 463 sq. 101 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 330 sq. 102 Ibid., p. 446. 103 Wundt agrees that his research might have the latter utility (VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 616 sq., 538 sq.). We do not wish to list all the mistakes of detail that are unavoidable in such a large work. But, keeping in mind a future edition, here are some of the most serious: VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 474, the hako is not an Omaha Dakota, but a Skidi Pawnee ceremony; ibid., p. 522, the link between vedánta (Hindu substantialist pantheism) and stoicism, both seen as negating the will, is too bold; the painting reproduced as Australian, from the cave of Grey, ibid., p. 123, is definitvely identified as Malay and has a Battak inscription; VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 30, it is incorrect that the “savage” usually dies alone; ibid., p. 152, it is incorrect that Queensland tribes have no organization, and that they assert that the sun is made by other magicians: Lumholtz, who is cited here, is untrustworthy; ibid., p. 256, it is untrue that totemism would have disappeared in Pre74

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Colombian Peru; ibid., p. 352, the Areoi of Tahiti did not form a caste; ibid., p. 338, the identification, in Vedic soma, of wine as a substitute for blood is completely gratuitous. However numerous other small errors may be, we admit to admiration for the philosopher who avoided committing more. 104 Ribot, Logique des sentiments, 1907, p. 98 sq. (F. Alcan). 105 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 298. 106 Grundriss der Psychologie, 3rd edition, section 21 ; VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, chapter 1, pp. 2, 32. 107 See Hubert, La Représentation du temps dans la religion et dans la magie. École des hautes études, 1906. 108 See Durkheim and Mauss, “Classifications primitives,” Année sociologique, 1903, 6. 109 VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 150 sq. Cf. ibid., p. 327, 386; VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 615; cf. VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, p.360. 110 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 575. 111 Cf. VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, p. 32; Grundriss der Psychologie, section 21; System der Philosophie, 2nd edition, p. 626; the opposition is between Naturgemeinschaft and Kulturgemeinschaft. VP, volume 2, part 2, p. 240; VP, volume 2, part 1, pp. 4, 611. 112 VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, p. 27. 113 Meillet, in Année sociologique, 1899, 2, p. 598 sq. ; “Comment les mots changent de sens,” Année sociologique, 1906, 9, p. 5. 114 VP, volume 2, part 1, p. 611. 115 Grundriss der Psychologie, 3rd edition, p. 601; VP, volume 1, part 1, 2nd edition, chapter 1, p. 38. 116 Grundriss der Psychologie, section 2; System der Philosophie, p. 201. 117 See “Grundzüge der Philosophie des Geistes,” in System der Philosophie, 2nd edition, especially p. 590. 118 See the objections of Münsterberg, Beiträge zur experimentellen Psychologie, 1912, 1, 1, and the responses of Wundt, Grundzüge der phys. Psych., 5th edition, 3, pp. 350, 351.

3 Preface to Saint Patrick and the Cult of the Hero Henri Hubert1

One might ask oneself how a study of narrowly circumscribed facts, such as this, which is limited to the life of a single saint, could have sociological significance and if one could pass in a single bound from Saint Patrick, national hero of Ireland, to the social conditions of the cult of heroes. Czarnowski recounts for us, with supporting documents, the factual history of Saint Patrick, which is brief. He analyzes Patrick’s legendary history, which is lengthy. Saint Patrick resembles Irish gods and heroes whose myths are presented to us in their characteristic episodes. Hagiography, philological study of Irish mythology, history, ultimately, such is the heart of the book. Yet sociology is still the affair of philosophers. In a sociological work, specific facts are more mentioned than recounted. They appear there by way of evidence and examples. Sociology appears still to be mere theory. It is true that in order to theorize social facts the sociologist must often himself do the historical and philological study that has not already been done. But perhaps he will in such a case take care not to bluntly present his dual labor. Here, the discussion of the general sociological problem expressed by the title is, on the contrary, wrapped up in the meticulous account of a specific fact, the actual and legendary story of Saint Patrick. In asking ourselves in what manner and in what measure the thesis breaks off from the example, we have in view the definition of the characteristics of a kind of sociological study, useful and commendable. But, a preliminary question, is it in fact a matter of a sociological problem? Not every problem in the history of religion is necessarily such. Not every phenomenon which takes place in society is necessarily social. Czarnowski takes pains to give us, from the first pages, a general idea of heroes in which the sociological interest is evident. Not everyone who would like to or who one would like to becomes a hero, he tells us. A kind of collective consent, which takes on ritual forms carefully noted, is necessary; only those with a quite obvious representative character can be the object of such consent. They virtually represent the ideal qualities of a group of men, to whom they are

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attached by special, and often imaginary, ties; they are the ones who link parents to one another, leaders to their subordinate, bosses to the community, to the city, to the institution they founded. The alliance between the representative and the represented is perpetuated by spiritual, temporal, and effective services that the latter expect and believe that they receive from the former. Thus, the notion of hero implies social relationships between a legendary or mythical character and a group of men. It therefore contains a social element. And consequently, it lends itself to sociological study. The usual research and demonstration method of sociology is the comparative method. Its definitions and conclusions are based on comparisons in which the terms are usually not taken from a single society. In the work of Czarnowski, Saint Patrick is compared only with the saints, gods, and heroes of Ireland; and moreover this comparison is actually intended to show that he resembles them and therefore is a hero; we leave Saint Patrick only to know him better. The comparative method is therefore used with reduced benefits. To be sure, the study is based on a broader substratum of comparisons. They provide the basis for an introduction. But they are not used in the demonstration. Already then, we see that the author was less preoccupied by generalization than by analysis and perhaps less by theory than by research. He wanted to extract from a particular case, that of Saint Patrick, the sociological teachings that this case carries.

** The analysis of isolated cases already has its place in sociological methods, whether as a monograph, which adds up to other monographs to form cumulative syntheses, or as crucial and typical facts, from which are extracted the essential elements of a phenomenon. Czarnowski shows that the story of Saint Patrick provides sociology with such a crucial fact; but it does not do so at first glance. Indeed the crucial elements of historical or ethnographical facts appear only with analysis and after a sociological processing. But in fact there are two sorts of sociological works. In the first, theses are offered and questions are posed; facts are called on, one after the other, in order to provide answers. In the second, it is the facts that precede and therefore pose the questions; but they are chosen precisely for the questions they pose. This method has its advantages. Here, the facts keep their details, their color, and their guarantees of authenticity, which are precious in the face of the darkness of the past. This is the case with Czarnowski’s book. The minutia of history and philology serve sociology by providing it not only with assurances but also with reasons.

** We will better understand the sociological character of works like Czarknowski’s if we first see how they can differ from historical studies. It is

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easy to figure out how a historian would approach the subject chosen by Czarnowski. We will certainly be surprised to see that, having begun in wondering, texts in hand, if Saint Patrick was really a historical character, Czarnowski has not written the history of his popularity in the same manner. We will certainly reproach him for having been brief concerning the past and present manifestations of this popularity. Does not the study of Saint Patrick as the national hero of Ireland imply counting the occasions when this character was professed, determining, within the relevant period of time, a series of its variations in number as well as in intensity, and fixing dates and circumstances? The diffusion of the name, the churches placed under the invocation of the saint, the popular and other songs, the emblems and their uses, all are as many facts and documents that would seem suited to appear in the work of a historian. Czarnowski treats them as unquestionable data. On the other hand, he emphasizes the reasons and conditions of the principal fact; these are institutions, durable and general things. While for the historian, the series of effects and causes happens in a sequence of particular facts, the sociologists goes back from a social fact to an antecedent social fact. This is moreover not without historical benefit: through the Saint Patrick of legend, Czarnowski lets us see quite clearly a few important traits of the Saint Patrick of history. We do not believe that, for instance, the method of assimilation practiced by Saint Patrick has been better explained.2 Moreover, on this side, we win the game, because no one can ignore the clarity that the sociological spirit brings to history. But what matters to us is not the profit of history, but of sociology. It is a work of sociology based on history that we present to the readers of the Travaux de l’Année Sociologique, not a work of history based on sociology.

II When we talk of heroes, we understand one another, and without any doubt the common use of this word is made with discernment; but the difficulties start with reflection.3 Already, the German language makes a distinction between two words, Held and Héros, the hero of the epic and the hero of the religious cult. Distinction sometimes brings confusion. The languages that do not come from the sources of classical antiquity present a variety of synonyms of which the correspondence is imperfect; the marabouts,4 the Arabic velis5 have something in common with the heroes that we imagine, without completely resembling them. Above all we must account for the languages whose religious vocabulary lacks a topical and precise term to designate the hero, although the latter exist in the traditions of peoples who have spoken these languages; this is the case of Hebrew,6 Latin,7 Irish, as well as Welsh.8 In these cases, adjectives are used to qualify characters that are strong, violent, warlike, illustrious, to describe their magnificent, memorable and beneficent brutalities, but without separating them, by using a specific term, from men and gods. Certainly, we have reasons to believe that the notion expressed by the term hero has been widespread, but it has

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not been distinct, homogeneous and compact everywhere. It is not one of those notions that do not need definition, and neither is it one of those that risk becoming more obscure by being defined. Without exception, heroes are characters that, at least in the opinion of men, have lived and died, men from a near or distant and legendary past; demons or gods who have undergone the risks of a temporal life. They are men and yet superhuman; they died and are yet distinguished from the crowd of the dead by the memory that is attached to them and the strength that they are still given; demons or gods, they are quasi-demons or semi-gods, with a lesser power, limited or temporary, but serviceable to men, to whom they are close, adjoined to them in their recognizable images and certain deaths, in a word, they are divine intercessors. Superhumans or semi-gods, heroes are, in any case, divine; the hero is a divus, a species of the divine.9 But these characteristics, as limiting as they might seem to be, still leave an almost undefined latitude to the use of the term in question. Between ancestral spirits and heroes, no demarcation appears at first. There is also none between epic heroes and heroes of tales or novels. All agrarian demons, all totemic spirits, all the gods that come down on earth to engender men, found races, teach them, catch the moon or the sun for them and finally die in sacrifice or elsewhere, and finally all the creator-gods, in a word, all the gods, are susceptible to being placed in turn into the too broad and open category of the hero, following the civilizing heroes, American or other,10 of whom the abilities and attributions are indefinitely stretched. In speaking of the hero, one has spoken of the Christ and the Buddha, of the prophets, and above all of the saints. It is even the first title of Saint Patrick that presents itself as candidate here. Such a distended notion can lead to a misunderstanding, and its limits therefore have to be tightened. It is on the side of the gods that they are most difficult to fix, so numerous are the degrees and imperceptible the progression in the spiritual and divine world humanity has superimposed on itself. In the middle of the temple of Hierapolis in Syria there were three divine images: one represented a goddess; the other, the quite dim face of a very great god; and of the third, the author of the De Dea Syria, whose language is nuanced, does not explicitly tell us that it represents a god.11 The first two were properly speaking the objects of a cult; the third appeared in the cult and was used in rites. With more myths and legends than the other two, this character resembled Attis or Adonis; the visitors of the temple, curious to know his name, were told of Dionysus, of Semiramis; even his divine personality was identified with the founder of a cult, Combabos, general of Seleucus, of whom a curious legend was told. We would therefore freely recognize a hero here. The third character of these Semitic trinities, of which the trinity of Hierapolis is one example, is preeminently a “living god,”12 full of life similar to human life; he gives evidence of it through his suffering, death, and resurrection followed by new death; his humanity makes his worth; he is a mediator; he is almost already a messiah. If the Greeks adopt him, he is Hercules,13 he is Melicerte,14 Iolaos15 or Deucalion,16 that is, heroes who they recognize in him. Nevertheless, the

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opinion of the Greeks did not seem decisive to Von Baudissin, who dedicated clear and profound studies to these Syrian gods. According to him, Adonis and his equals, being gods only incompletely, are demons. There is a great difficulty in classifying in clearly defined and hierarchical categories the religious beings whose place is not at the forefront of the cult. We have the feeling that there exist categories, but how are their differences articulated? Fixing, as we have done,17 the limit between gods and heroes at the point where the cult starts, excludes all the Greek heroes, the most typical of all, because they are the object of a cult. Taking as a criterion the historical character of the acts—the temporary character of interventions, bounded by competency, limited by power—necessarily leaves aside the civilizers of American mythologies, because they do not only help men and establish their races, they also create them and are able to give mankind the sun as well as fire. Taking personality, nothing more, as the definite criterion implies the rejection of all the anonymous heroes of Greece, the heroes of functions and numerous spirits who are the inventors of rites or techniques who are classified under the rubric of civilizing heroes;18 the human nature of the characters implies refusing to add to the family of heroes its ancestors in animal form, such as the crow of British Columbia. Heroes, gods and demons are of parent species. But their similarities and differences are difficult to reduce to systems. Certainly there have been passages or exchanges between the two; some heroes became gods, some gods became heroes. Even some entire groups have changed character or switched levels. The Goths, says their historian Jordanes, called heroes the Anses, who were chiefs; these are the Ases of the Northern Germans, who considered them as gods.19 A limit so often crossed thus is at risk of being erased entirely. In the case just cited, heroes have been promoted. But is the progression from heroes to gods constant, regular and natural? Certainly not. The kinship that links the species of spirits does not imply an obvious genealogical order. Did heroes precede or follow gods? Are they descended from demons? These are the questions that are posed, but the responses do not satisfy us.20 Confusion is the rule. It results in large part from the abusive extension, depending on time and place, of familiar notions, sometimes to the profit of gods, sometimes to the profit of some sorts of demons, such as fairies. It is also due to the complex character of the divine characters, like Hercules or Dionysus,21 who are between god and hero. There are several aspects of divinity. Sometimes a single figure unites them, sometimes they are divided into more than one figure, associated by a single cult. The qualities of heroes undoubtedly correspond to one of these aspects, and inversely it seems that some roles of heroes exist for divinity.

** Czarnowski’s book gives ample space to the definition of the hero. It ends with a definition. It opens with a preliminary definition. The latter is not a review of

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synonyms; it enumerates and summarizes the traits of a type, of which Greece provides the principle examples. Czarnowski finds this type in Ireland and, while drawing the portrait of Saint Patrick, explains its different characters. His provisional definition is comprehensive, because it contains both the heroes whose epic resuscitates tumultuous adventures and those who are heroes by virtue of their grave and relics, both the ideal types and the real objects of the cult, both those whose life is commented on and those whose remains are venerated, both those who have really lived and whose memory is authentic and those whose mortal life is a myth, both those who are men and those who approach the gods. They do not entirely realize the plenitude of the type, but they all show some recognizable aspect of it. The explanation for hypothetically attributing a heroic character to Saint Patrick is methodically based on this definition. Saint Patrick was, it seems, a very strong personality. Active, energetic and with the sense of organization, he had the qualities of a leader and thereby deserved to become one of those superhuman chiefs and champions who are the heroes. His legend gave him virtues and powers, in which were evident both the Christian ideal and the national ideal of the Irish people. He became similar to their ancient gods. But the latter are heroes, or assimilated to heroes. They all lived on earth. Fights and disasters give them a wondrous prestige, an exemplary virtue to imitate or fear, an aura of useful and present power. Saint Patrick penetrated, for example, the system of feasts in which the Irish heroes are represented as triumphing and dying in turn; his legend is mixed with some sorts of sacrifices that strikingly resembles theirs, and like them he fights, though he does not die like them. There is a parallelism between Saint Patrick and the Irish heroes; there is also a parallelism between the characteristics of the Irish heroes and the elements of the preliminary definition; but is it not a constant tautology? Undoubtedly. And this was inevitable. For Saint Patrick is not a hero de plano, but a saint, and it must be demonstrated that the preliminary definition of the hero can be applied to him despite appearances. The clarity and precision the definition gains from this work is supplementary value, a net profit. The goal was not to deepen it, nor to justify it, but to extend its application; the result is the sociological definition of a historical fact. This is a result, in itself, not without interest, but which matters above all because it is able to bring a new contingent of precise, evident and authentic data to the general problems with which this work is concerned.

** But although this book is about the hero in general, it is in fact on a specific category of hero that attention is focused, starting with the title. By defining Saint Patrick as a national hero, Czarnowski is already accounting in his definition for the type of society of which his hero will incarnate, to borrow his expression, “the fundamental social value.” Now he is in a position to inform us,

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fairly completely, about the sociological relationships between the Irish national hero and the Irish nation. Here is how, according to Czarnowski, the heroic legend of Saint Patrick was constituted: by borrowing from Irish tradition. Characteristic episodes of heroic myths have been incorporated into it, especially those which relate to festivals.22 The Irish year contains four major festivals, on the first day of February, May, August, and November. In between these major festivals that inaugurate seasons fall the mid-season festivals. The festival of Saint Patrick, on March 17th, coincides with one of the latter. But all the others have something of Saint Patrick. His legendary life is accomplished within the cycle of the year. Its episodes all coincide with the dates of festivals, whether with the old Irish festivals or with Easter; but Easter is equivalent to both Beltene, the festival of the first of May, and Samhain, that of the first of November. The life of Saint Patrick is strictly regulated by the calendar and by the order of festivals, as is the social life of the Irish people who, since they lived dispersed and without cities, gathered on a regular basis only during festivals, during which collective actions were decided and accomplished. The life of Saint Patrick and the life of the Irish both follow the same calendar. There is therefore an obvious harmony between the legendary life of the saint and the social milieu within which it is placed, a harmony that results from the way in which his life has been composed. This heroic tradition, tribal or national, had its entitled depositaries. They were the filid.23 In Ireland and in Gaul, the filid formed a class comparable to that of the druids: judges, priests, scholars, and above all poets, they were the ones who sang the stories of the heroes during festivals. They formed a national institution. Their organization was independent from that of the tribes and clans. Now, Saint Patrick was adopted by the filid. The Saint Patrick of history put into service of his propaganda the jealousy of the two rival corporations formed by the druids and the filid. He utilized the organization of the latter. Unwelcomed by the druids, he was nonetheless able to enter, with his followers, into the ranks of the leadership of Irish society under the aegis of the filid. The latter provided him with his clergy and with methods of action. One sees him for example surrounded by young people to whom he assumes some sort of adoptive parenthood. It is then as a filé master that he acts. Irish society, in a sense, abandoned its children to the spiritual corporations that were in charge of their education. The filid, allies and disciples of Saint Patrick, took care of his legend. They shaped it to the taste of their own tradition. They filled it with their indigenous legends. But, as a national Irish body, they made their patron saint a hero of all of Ireland. On the other hand, inspired by the vigorous political sense that seems to have been one of his characteristics, Saint Patrick made the organization of his Church conform as much as possible to the structure of the society into which he implanted it. Although the Irish considered themselves a nation and one could, with some good will, perceive in Irish society the rudiments of a State, in reality

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they formed only a large confederation of clans (tuatha), divided into great agnatic families (fine), which were intermediaries between the actual family and the clan, and grouped in tribes, which were larger clans (mortuatha) that, united in fixed numbers, formed kingdoms, which in turn were confederated like tribes within a nation under the aegis of the great king of Tara.24 The kingdom of Ireland was mid-way between tribal gregariousness and monarchic organization. Men were grouped in a patriarchal feudalism, united by personal ties of consanguinity and by both real and personal ties of property and social hierarchy. It has been noted that the framework of the Irish Church reproduced that of society; dioceses correspond to clans; monastic communities to the large agnatic groups (fine), whose character they shared. They do more than correspond: they coincide, and both systems are intertwined in a complex network of familial and feudal ties.25 In this politico-domestically structured society, the relationships between gods and men were conceived on the model of the relationships between men. To some degree the gods are parents. The gods are ancestors. On the other hand, the ancestors are divinities, or more precisely, heroes or gods playing the role of heroes. In the religion of such a society, the cult of the heroes had to be the characteristic element and play the principle role. We say heroes and not simply ancestors because the fundamental units of society did not simply have the moral and legal role of a family; they were political units, which counted above all through their leaders. Groups of this type are usually idealized in their ancestor-chiefs, and the latter are usually heroes. Vanity attributes them enviously with all the merits; it likes to represent them as taller, more valorous and handsome than the best and most honorable of their offspring; they have, in any case, the merit of having been the first, and of having beyond them only the unknown or the gods. The fundamental units of the Irish society, the fine and tuatha, therefore entertained a cult of heroes, who were their legitimate ancestors. Above those narrow kinships spread broader kinships. Other heroes, who were raised above the first group, corresponded with them; it is as a matter of fact remarkable that the heroes corresponding to the fine and tuatha have almost always, in the myth of their origin, had an element of illegitimacy or foreignness; this is the case of Cuchulainn,26 the most popular hero of Ulster. In this heroic and divine world, the adventures of which are told in Irish mythology, some characters more especially play the role of gods; they are collectively called Tuatha dé Danann, the clans of the goddess Danu. They had mythical enemies, the Fomore, among which some can be classified as gods. But both are supposed to have developed multiple and diverse relationships with men. All of them have resided on earth and have been united, directly or indirectly, to a group of men through alliance or kinship, whether natural or adoptive. The Olympus of Ireland is subterranean. Gods live in the sidhe, that is, the burial mound; for they are dead or have withdrawn to the realm of the dead.27 The entire spiritual world of Ireland is gathered in the graves and cemeteries, around which the religious life of the kingdoms, tribes, clans, and fine is concen-

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trated.28 Heroes and gods are mixed together in the notion of “people of the sidhe,”29 which also contains the demons and fairies. The proof of kinship given by the family name is abundantly found in Ireland in the case of the clans and their founders; it is also not lacking in the case of more widely extended groups. The clans have collective names or gentilices, which include the patronymic name, or they are referred to as the race, the sons, the posterity of the ancestor: Corcu Ochland, cenél Conaill, Hui Degaidh, Mac Eachach. But there are also Hui Amalgada, and they are a tribe;30 Mac Nechta, who undoubtedly descend from a great god, Nuadu Necht;31 Fir Domnann, men of Domnu, a very important and vague goddess, who are probably the Dumnonii who originated in Great Britain and have been transposed in mythology and transformed into demonic tribes by the national poets.32 Hence the fine, tuatha, the tribes and kingdoms of Ireland were defined in relationship to characters who were their ideal types, their personal emblems, their gods, and their ancestors. These characters were heroes. In the same way that the Church of Saint Patrick modeled its organization on the framework of Irish society, it imitated, in the cult of its saints, the cult of the heroes found in this society. The Irish saints replace the ancestors and heroes in the monasteries and the dioceses they founded, but also in the large and small clans to which they correspond. Among them, Saint Patrick, founder of the Irish Church, holds the place of a national hero because he has been adopted by the national institution of the filid, thanks to whom he was able to accomplish his task as national apostle. He has the traits of a hero because of the assimilation that took place between his Church and the society whose gods it replaced; the saints of the church were heroes because of the form taken by the gods of the society. These conclusions imply the existence of rational ties not only between two social phenomena (the legendary model of Saint Patrick and the society in which he founded his Church) but also between the notion of hero and certain structures of society, of which the hero would be the function. They therefore mark a considerable logical progress towards the solution of the problem at stake. This gain is of real importance.

** A study limited to a single case and a single type of society could not prove that the phenomenon it observes is lacking in other societies, nor could it prove that this phenomenon is present without exception in this single type of society. Czarnowski does not therefore claim that all the kinship-based, clan-formed societies, and only these, produce heroes; he claims that a specific form of these societies, and a specific phase in their evolution, is particularly favorable to the production of heroes. But we can here advance with caution along the path he opens for us in order to see where it leads.

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Heroic societies are among those which no longer define themselves strictly through kinship, but which also do not completely define themselves through their territory (although there exist some territorial heroes)33 or through an impersonal status comparable to that of the citizens of a republic or the subjects of a monarchy; they define themselves through their leaders, their kings, warriors, magistrates, founders, initiators.34 The notion of hero makes a pair with the notion of chief. Heroic societies are chief societies. Any society that has chiefs, if it does not define itself usually through them, can go through crises during which it recognizes itself in them and makes them into heroes. This formula has a limit, for we have the feeling that a double delimitation imposes itself, touching on the nature of the social bond that unifies the subordinates and the very quality of the chiefs. The patron of a brotherhood is, strictly speaking, a hero. The ancient city had its heroes, as does the fatherland. But can the same be said of the state,35 a départment, a monarchy, a republic, a democracy? These institutions are to fatherlands and nations what anonymous societies or syndicates are to brotherhoods. But when one calls a troop or a party by the name of its leader, one gives them, through thought, a unity that is more intimate than that provided by military or political discipline. Between the members of these groups, the willed community has built a real communion; a shared life and soul emanating from the chief animates them; the dependency between him and them resembles kinship; they are truly brothers in him and the name that is given to them symbolizes this chance kinship. When a society gains consciousness of itself through its heroes, it feels that it takes its origin, its blood, its name from the prestige of their authority, their strength and their worth. Saint Louis, Joan of Arc, Napoleon have been, or are, heroes for France, but also heroes of the French fatherland, of the French name that we all bear, of the French blood in our veins. The words fatherland and nation, like the word brotherhood, imply kinship. The notion of companionship implies communion. The Greek city was a circle of kinship, like the phratry and the . One might think of tyrannicidal heroes as examples of heroes that heroicize political abstractions and, for the heroicization of the state, the cult of the Roman emperors. But, in the case of tyrannicides, the political order is perhaps not well distinguished from the  .36 As to the cult of the emperors in Rome, it developed on the basis of the familiar, quasi-domestic cult of the Lares;37 in the provinces, the regular extension of the Roman citizenship, the introduction of new citizens into the tribes of Rome and the imperial gentes, which indefinitely broadened in order to adopt all,38 contributed to effectively found the cult on the basis of a kinship system; in general, it was a family, or at least a clientele, that practiced the imperial cult. To be sure, we willingly give the name of hero to characters whose nature seems to imply not the ideal command of a society but the eminent realization of some episode or quality of the human condition; heroes are emblems of virtue or of faults, of success, of the necessity of good and bad luck, but they are also the emblems of the men who identify with them; the latter form, in the eyes of the

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others, a society; our familiar language, which here is not mistaken, calls them brothers and talks of their brotherhoods;39 our popular fantasy has realized the latter. But moreover heroicization hardly fails to make them enter into some category of hero that is the object of an ordered cult on the part of a group of men. In sum, there are no heroes that do not have a society behind them, however diffuse. The society of men who agree in electing a hero, the social sentiments that unite it, even be they reduced to the most indifferent sympathy, are of the nature of kinship. It could not be otherwise, for while the institutions that unite men express the principle of their union through emblems, such as coats of arms, flags, stones of coronation, or heroes, the emblem creates the kinship among the united men.40 The possession of a common emblem is the proof of kinship because it constitutes it. But, moreover, there are chiefs and chiefs, kings and kings. In Irish epic, where nearly all the characters are heroes, it is not the greatest kings who are the greatest heroes. There are Irish kings who are great heroes, such as Conn Cétcathach,41 he of a hundred battles; but not all are, and most are of a very retiring heroism. In Ulster, the king of the heroic cycle is Conchobar, but the hero is Cuchulainn; the epic role of the king is secondary, when it is not odious or ridiculous.42 We can say the same for Finn, who is a king for the Fianna. It is not to him that the strongest blows in their adventures are attributed, but to Diarmaid, Caoilte, and Conan; he does not enter the scene until the battle is won; he manages only with the aid of his allies and never takes the good role when disagreement arises between them.43 The fact is not peculiar to Ireland. Arthur, who is in many ways the perfect hero, seems less so when he is compared to his entourage. It is the same with Charlemagne or Agamemnon. The true hero, in sum, is not the king, but the champion of the king.44 In this sense, the epic is, we believe, a faithful mirror of ancient institutions. The epic kings, who are subordinated to their auxiliaries in the scale of heroic values, likely had real kings as models, and these latter were something more or less and in any case other than the chiefs who became the heroes. The Irish tradition conserved some traits of the primitive character of the king. Czarnowski tells us that “he is responsible for the harvest, for the growth of the herd, and in general for the prosperity of his subjects. When cows have no milk, fruit falls before ripening, and wheat is scarce, it is because the king is not legitimate.”45 King of the weather, the fields, and the herd more than king of men, the Irish king belongs to the family of kings-priests-gods.46 But are the latter not eminently apt to become heroes? Are they not already during their lifetimes heroes? It seems paradoxical to doubt this. The notion of hero was explained, in the case of Celtic heroes specifically, by that of the king-god, which was better studied and seemed clearer.47 Is not the hero a divine man or a terrestrial god? The king-priest-god, who all at once serves and incarnates the god of agricultural fertility, is truly a god on earth. It was thus that Conchobar appeared to the Ulates; he was a dia talmaide,48 terrestrial god. For that reason he received quite specific tributes, but he was less taken to heart by his people than Cuchulainn. He was less of a hero, because he was more of a god.

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The characteristics of the king-priest-god have equally been recognized in the druids, who perhaps have preserved the primitive traits of the institution better than the Irish kings.49 However, among the epic heroes of Ireland, only one was a druid. This is Cathbu, the druid of Conchobar.50 There are many who are filid.51 Is this an accident? One might think that the filid had arranged the epic tradition in their favor, as they controlled that tradition; it is possible. But, in our view, the retiring role of kings and near total absence of druids in the heroic tradition, and the character of the king-god, who is tied to both, are facts which call out and deserve to be connected. We do not claim that the qualities of the kings-priests-gods and those of the heroes are incompatible. Conchobar and several others unite them. In real life, the functions of the king-priest-god and those of the politico-domestic chief have certainly been assumed on some occasions by the same individual. But the personages of tradition who possess these characteristics at the same time are not heroes by that fact, though they are kinggods. We stress these considerations because they add to our presumptions concerning the rapport between heroes and politico-domestic institutions. The institution of the king-god is not of this latter class; it is political and religious. It evolved into monarchy of divine right and into priesthood. The hero is not of divine but of human law; he emanates from the society that claims him. The king by divine right, who comes from elsewhere and represents something else, becomes a god rather than a hero. Romulus had in his history everything necessary to become a hero; yet, he is the object of a cult like Quirinus52 and the latter is truly a god. Adonis is a questionable hero.53 The Pharaohs of Egypt are gods.54 We therefore distinguish theoretically between king-gods and kingheroes. Excuse us for passing the limits Czarnowski appropriately set, for rising to a viewpoint that is more extended but less certain than that to which he has restricted himself. But we have tried to show at once the value and the generality of inductions to which the analysis of even a very specific fact can lead. The analysis of specific facts distinguishes in their elements general facts. Czarnowski has carried out his own analysis in such a way that the history of Saint Patrick, Christian and national hero of Ireland, gives the idea of the general relationship existing between heroes and the hierarchy of these structures. These are not merely important facts but also new ones. This is the limit of the analysis and Czarnowski stops here, for his study is purely analytical, at the threshold of the comparative study to which one must necessarily resort in order to generalize the conclusions and furnish the proof. We have just shown of what that study would consist.

** But why this great analytical detour? Was it necessary to take a saint as typical of the national hero in order to reach conclusions whose principle interest is that

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they are valid for all heroes? But the normal case is not always the most instructive. Here, the detour was useful, if not necessary. If we wish to choose only one field of observation, and Greece, India, and China aside, Celtic society perhaps offers the best one.55 In Ireland, heroes prevail over the somewhat crepuscular gods. Among the Gauls, heroes have completely absorbed the gods. Yet to choose among all the heroes of Ireland this doubtful hero who is a saint, is this not a wager? Two heroes in Irish tradition hold a place comparable to that of Saint Patrick: Cuchulainn and Finn mac Cumail. In fact, we are uninformed about the cult of each one. It is likely that such a cult did exist, but there remain only minute and hypothetical traces of it. Now, even if a hero can do without a cult, the cult completes the hero. Cuchulainn and Finn mac Cumail are heroes in the theater of the imagination, the one in epic, the other in legend. Cuchulainn belongs to Ulster, Finn to Leinster. Moreover, their social ties, in their provinces, are less well defined and less solid that those of Saint Patrick with Ireland as a whole. The case of Saint Patrick was in sum the best one. Besides, perhaps he is a saint only because he was first a hero. Let us not however take advantage of the irregularities of ecclesiastical canonization.56 Saint of possession, it is still necessary to demonstrate that he was a hero. But this is worth doing; crucial facts are rare enough that one should not neglect to accommodate them when it is possible. It is not even a matter here of a stopgap measure. In these repetitions of social phenomena, where their primordial characteristics disappear at first view through reduction or by confusion, we are lucky enough to find them at a critical date in their evolution, or at least in relation to other phenomena with which they have natural ties. Finn mac Cumail, whose face is blurred, trails after him a long string of truncated myths, but he has hoarded an entire treasure of fables. The cycle of Finn would be an excellent case for the comparative study of tale and myth and their proximity. Finn is a mythical hero who has something about him of the hero of fables. Equally Saint Patrick, because he is a saint and founder of churches, offers a favorable case for another part of the study of heroes. Either we must condemn ourselves to excessively restrain sociological investigation, or sociologists must apply themselves to the unraveling of facts that are difficult to define and classify. The effort applied toward this latter goal is salutary and some advance for sociology will always result of it.

III We have just noted one of these advances and it is equally one to find fixed in good light a portrait of a single hero that evokes many. But more, in systematically setting out the facts that give Saint Patrick the character of a hero, Czarnowski has contributed to a theory of heroicization, which he did not directly intend to do; we will see in what measure and, at the same time, in what manner we should proceed to add to his work in taking it as a point of departure.

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In this respect, our studies introduced a lacuna. We have excellent collections of facts and very strong works on Greek57 and Chinese58 heroes and the Arab marabouts;59 we have dealt with the cult of saints and the characteristics it shares with that of heroes;60 we have theorized the king-priest-god, which is at risk of being confused with the heroes, and attempted to theorize the civilizing spirits,61 but the general study and theorization of the hero has not to this point been attempted by historians of religion, anthropologists, or sociologists. Wundt traced out the broad features of a sketch of such a study in his Elemente der Völkerpsychologie; there, he reviews the epochs of ethnic psychology, the third of which is that of the hero. He also poses in principle the correlation of social forms and certain ideal types, but as he gives no analytical proof, its priority does not take away any of the interest and the novelty of the conclusions presented above. As for the problems we will take on now, his book does not address them. Czarnowski leads us to consider the hero as the living symbol and emblem of a definite society. Durkheim expressed in that form the sociological relationship of the totems to their clans.62 The relationship of the Irish tuatha to their heroes is similar and should express itself in the same way. We have touched here, we believe, on that which unifies the species constituted by the hero. It is their character as social symbols that draws together saints, the dead, chiefs, sacrificed gods, civilizers, divine intermediaries, and other individuals to whom one is tempted to give the name hero. Even separated, heroes retain these characteristics, as long as there remains a small bit of their physiognomy. Heroes in short lend a real personality to the moral persons who make up the clans, tribes, nations, classes, and brotherhoods. But this function, which consists in representing the diffuse and multiple being of human collectivities through the unity of an individual, has not necessarily devolved solely to the hero, even in the case of politico-domestic societies. In many peoples, it normally devolved on a category of beings whose civil state is uniquely constituted by their relationship with the fortunes, spirits, special gods, whose spiritual essence they integrate.63 If this function is indeed that of the hero, it is thus insufficient to define it. Heroes, who are as rich in characteristics as the spirit is impoverished, fulfills it splendidly, but they surpass it. We compared above the hero and the chief; we showed that their persons can be distinguished by their importance and their autonomy. They are quite real persons, but of a peculiar reality, part individual, part typical, but always concrete and close. Close and, moreover, familiar people, heroes are distinguished in this from gods, who are equally real, important, and autonomous people. Heroes are people with whom one sometimes deals familiarly. Hercules the good child, joyful fellow, and great drinker, who settles in with Admete, while Alcestis leaves, claimed by death, is in conformity with his heroic character. The most ancient of novels dominated by the personality of Arthur, the story of Culhwch and Olwen, included in the Mabinogion, is a kind of parody.64 Familiarity and parody are possible because of the very excess of the valor of the heroes, the excessive en-

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ergy with which they affirm their virtue and deploy their force, the excessive movement to which they give themselves in defeating the wicked and rescuing their own. Strained in violent but expressive behavior, which are the typical gestures of the simplified activity commanded by their role, their relaxation can be a fall, comical when not tragic. Indeed, heroes show humor, whether good or bad. Those of Ireland are among the least ceremonious. With the Tuatha dé Danann, who are, as we have said, heroicized gods, they are perpetuated in the features of fairies, mysterious and fragile, benevolent and capricious, aggressive and sparing, who are at once the most marvelous, the most obliging, the most down-to-earth, and the most familiar of spirits.65 The counterpart of a familiarity that is not always respectful is affection. The love of God is addressed to the gods who are rather close to the human condition and take part in its vicissitudes. The love addressed to the hero completes the sentiment of kinship, whatever its nature, that unites the hero to his own. Doubtless the hero is connected to the sacred. He holds to it always through his legend, which makes for him an imaginary life in a world that is not completely the same as the one in which men of the present day move. But his very legend brings him back to the earth and close to his people. Doubtless, the feelings attached to the hero have something of the religious. But they do not resemble those of which the gods are the object. The hero has something not of the laic, for there have been heroicized priests,66 but of the secular; this is precisely the character of the social groups in general from which he emanates. Societies specialized in the exercise of religion, or with a predominant religious function, have prophets and saints,67 in the guise of heroes, who can borrow much from heroes, but from which they are always distinguished by some typical characteristic. It is the societies in which the religious life is not detached from the whole of social life which give themselves heroes and institute heroic cults. Such were the Greek cities and the Irish tuatha. A temporal form of god and a secular and political form of saint, the hero is surrounded by less religiosity than either. Farther from the world, closer to men and to the age, such is the place occupied by the hero in relation to that of the demons, gods, and saints. But how and for what reasons was an alliance established between men and these personages who spoke so intimately to their imagination and their hearts? Not all heroes are qualified to furnish us with a response. There are many inappropriate heroes; there are doubtless many more that are not well known. We must consider only successful heroes. Only these present the right mixture of diverse qualities and unite all the religious, moral, and aesthetic proprieties that make up, according to us, the heroic ideal. The cult of the hero has been considered as a case of the cult of the dead. Many heroes are indeed among the dead and are properly the object of a funerary cult. It is good that a hero actually lived in order to succeed; it is even good that he distinguished himself by an expressive personality and true heroic facts. A bit of truth, historical truth, is perhaps always hidden in a heroic legend.68 Nevertheless life and history provide only candidates for heroism. A hero becomes such only with legend; it is legend that

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composes his life69 and orders the spectacle of his death. The dead, who await in their tomb a parsimonious cult, do not become true heroes, whatever their merits, other than by the grace of mythology. Therefore, we will concern ourselves thus first with the heroes that mythology has fabricated. Thus posed, the question is nearly a general question of mythology. Sociological mythology, of course, because it follows from what has been said to this point that the correlation of myths and social, religious, or political organisms should appear quite clearly in the case of the hero. These demi-gods, who lived among men, selected from their peers, whose dignity, unlike that of the gods, has no metaphysical foundation, and whose prestige comes from tradition and collective expectations, have a predisposition to being considered as social beings that others lack. Halfway between the worshippers and the gods, they naturally provide us with a middle term to help explain the social characteristics of the latter. To this point, we have used the expressions myth and legend interchangeably to describe the stories of heroes. But, legend or myth, we cannot doubt that heroic legend belongs to mythology. Moreover, mythology is a part of religion. From the perspective of sociology, it cannot be otherwise. This is not the view of Wilhelm Wundt. He denies, perhaps with the appearance of being right, that sociologists can be interested in mythology,70 and moreover he separates the latter from religion.71 Mythology, as he conceives it, includes the stories of heroes, but he nearly writes that the former boils down entirely to the latter.72 He judges all this as a psychologist and considers foremost the mental functions from which they result; he reduces them to a play of images, wherein the psychological phenomenon of apperception introduces the seed of the personality. For us, myth is something else. A belief is attached to it; it is imposed categorically as a dogma; it makes up part of the Law, as ritual rules do. Prayer is nourished by it; sacrifice is enveloped in it; it is believed that it makes up the substance of revelations.73 It must be authentic. It has a value. Its authenticity is guaranteed by a society, and its value is exercised in social life. Its characteristics are in large measure common to heroic legend and the myths of gods. If they differ in this perspective, they do so within the same genre. But religion is practice. Heroic legend must be practical as divine myth is. If religion gives birth to beings of a reality that is closer, more powerful, familiar, and alive than that of the gods, it is from religious practice, the very exercise of religious life that this reality, which is its reflection, was able to break loose. We will endeavor therefore to find heroic myths and heroes, in their formation and function, in religious practices, in rites, at the very points where representation and action meet. This is not to pose the question of the precedence of rituals over myths or vice versa. Czarnowski does not pose it either. However, profoundly preoccupied as he was by the intersections of rituals and myths, their reciprocal influences and countershocks, he sought his first facts of heroic representations in their comparative study.74 He shows that at least several of them are born at the unclear frontier between myth and ritual. If he followed this path, it is because he primarily considered heroes and their myths as religious things.

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It is also because he studies them as social things. As myths are social products, it is in rituals that society is visible, present, or necessarily implicated. The mythological imagination dances to the beat of rituals and it is there that one can grasp it.

** Sacrifice presents itself first and foremost to thought and one would like to imagine the hero born in sacrifice, the typical, essential rite. If it is true, as Czarnowski indicates several times, that heroes must pass through a kind of bloody initiation, that they are crowned solely by trial and that a religious death must consecrate their works, might their deaths be a sacrifice, and the final and essential theme of their legends a sacrificial myth? There are in fact sacrificial myths. These are myths that refer to or can refer precisely to sacrifices. Of these, there are different types. The subject of the myth is the celebration by a hero or a god of a sacrifice which is the first of an entire series; this is the divine institution of a sacrifice and its particularities, the choice of the victim, for example; it is the fact that gave rise to the institution, or any other mythical fact of which the sacrifice would be the ritual transposition. Normally the sacrificial myth is part of the liturgy of the sacrifice. But, among sacrifices are found some where the rite and the myth are still more tightly linked because the divine world here finds itself immediately implicated: these are the ones that appear as sacrifices of gods. In sacrifices of gods, the victims are gods, who come to die at the altar in order, it is true, to be resurrected. In the corresponding myths, the sacrificed gods die, as all heroes die. One is tempted to compare these divine deaths to heroic passions and to consider them as myths of sacrifice, corresponding by hypothesis to ritual sacrifices.75 There is thus an appearance of affinity between the sacrifice and the legendary life of the hero. The bloody episodes of the latter find nowhere in ritual a more exact correspondence. Likewise, it is not only the death of the hero but also his triumphs that are easily transposed into sacrificial episodes. Conqueror or conquered, sacrificer or sacrificed, the hero is thus blended into a kind of sacrificial myth, from which it seems to follow that, in one of the stages of his formation, his legendary personality was effectively implicated in a sacrifice of the ritual. Sacrifice would therefore have been for some heroes a source of merit, but perhaps also more. His actors—priests and victims—were suitable, it seems, to become props for heroic personalities. The victim is already an individuality; sacrifice distinguishes, sanctifies, divinifies,76 and personalizes him; it exalts equally the person of the priest and that of the sacrificer. Its solemn unfolding, slow preparations, ordered action, and theatrical apparatus make it a drama wherein the character of a hero may develop. Thus the suffering and dying hero would have been first victim; the triumphant hero, sacrificer or sacrified, and the sacrifice, from which the hero derived origin or quality but which in every case

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made heroes, would be the principle or one of the principles sought by heroicization. But do the facts correspond to appearances? If one puts aside the cases in which a hero of well-defined character is explicitly represented as celebrating or instigating sacrifice, do heroes actually appear in sacrificial myths? Are there sacrifices of heroes? We have not distinguished sacrifices of heroes and sacrifices of gods. Surely sacrificed gods are precisely the kinds of gods who are hard to distinguish from heroes. Son-gods, savior-gods, impassioned gods, these are not impassive gods.77 Perhaps there are some true heroes among them? But have we not for that matter misused the sacrifice of the god? The fish god Hiérapolis in Syria78 and the sacred fish, ceremonially eaten by the priests of the temple described by Pseudo-Lucian, are surely, to speak as theologians, of one and the same nature; the sacrifice of fish to Hierapolis was apparently a sacrifice of a god.79 We do not know the myth of this fish god; assimilated by temple tradition to Attis and Adonis, it was like them to die a divine death. Whether the myth of its death followed the schema of sacrifice closely or not, it died in sacrifice; the proof is furnished by the longevity of the ritual in which the god effectively died. When this proof is lacking, the hypothesis of the divine sacrifice is always ineffectual, for, supposing the need to find a ritual substratum for all myth ineluctable, sacrifice is not, after all, the only ritual to which myths of suffering, dying gods or heroes have been able to attach themselves. But for how many gods who die do we know the ritual sacrifice wherein the myth of his death would be periodically realized? We know well that of Osiris;80 we do not know those of Orpheus,81 Hippolytus, Marsyas, and Acteon; we know poorly those of Adonis, Phaethon, and Diomedes. Yet these individuals whose sacrifices are conjectural are all precisely heroes. In Ireland, mythology joins all heroic deaths to feasts, which include sacrifices. We do not have any direct evidence for the concordance of sacrifices with the myths of these feasts. However, Czarnowski assumes it, and we are tempted to trust him. We would even add to the resemblances from which he takes his argument. He reports myths that in fact present quite significant characteristics. King Muicertach Mac Erca died in a ship of mead.82 It was one of the days of Samhain, the great Irish autumn feast. One of Lucan’s notes, still poorly utilized, tells us that the sacrifices to Teutates were achieved by submersion in plenum semicupium.83 This concerns, in tradition, cauldrons into which one submerges the dead who revive and the living who become holy.84 The famous silver vase, decorated with religious scenes of Celtic subjects, which was found at Gundestrup in Denmark,85 shows us on one of its interior plaques an immersion scene and perhaps it was itself a sacrificial cauldron comparable to those demanded by the cult of Teutatès; though it was not large enough to contain a human victim, it could have served for other sacrifices. Argument by analogy is valid, and it is probable that the fantastic death of Muicertach Mac Erca was myth of some actually celebrated sacrifice. A similar occurrence was recounted of an individual named Flann;86 besieged by King Diarmaid mac Cerbhail, his house was burned down; fleeing the fire, he threw himself into a tank, drowned inside it, and his

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body burned up with the house; the feast of Beltene, to Uisnech on the first of May, which was instituted in his honor, commemorates and expiates his death. But these are, we believe, the sole cases where Irish mythology has surrounded the death of a hero in circumstances that recall with precision the ritual of a sacrifice. Battles, murders, accidents, everywhere else myth recalls sacrifice with the theme of death; it is too little. But, on the other hand, it is not certain that Muicertach and Flann, whose exceptional fates are moreover attached to two of the principal Irish feasts (at the beginning of spring and the end of summer), are properly speaking heroes. One of them is a king; he could be a king-god. Gaulish mythology also knows of a cauldron, or basin, where one submerges humans;87 it belongs to individuals who, one fine day, were shut up in their own cauldron in a house of iron heated white hot. Found on a burial mound, strangers to the people with whom they lived, gigantic, hairy and savage, these individuals, who had no other history, were rather more demonic than heroic. From Germanic mythology, a divinity whose passion presents with a perfect clarity the traits of a mythic sacrifice broke away; this is Baldr.88 He is a hero and a god; he is an Ase; in any case, he is counted among the great gods. But Baldr, who can be killed only with a branch of mistletoe and whose life, consequently, is associated with that of a sacred plant, presents to a completely eminent degree the characteristics of those spirits of vegetation who are incarnated in king-gods.89 We must nevertheless observe that the sacrifice of Baldr is a mythic sacrifice, to which we do not know if an actual sacrifice ever corresponded. It is normally thus for all heroic sacrifices. But, if such is the case, we mean quite a different thing when we speak of a divine sacrifice. The hero dies one time and one time only. The sacrificed god suffers death every time the sacrifice is accomplished. The passion of Jesus is daily. The sacrificial death of Osiris is reiterated on every day in every feast.90 But these are unquestionably gods. The belief in the divinity of Christ weakens when the belief in his real presence disappears. The eternity of the sacrifice mirrors the divine eternity. In sum, the sacrifice of a god is a rite; its myth penetrates it, but a distinct myth does not always correspond to it. When we speak of sacrifice in relation to the hero, we can think only of myth or of legend. It may be that the myth of a sacrificed god contributed some element to it. Thus the hero Combabos, who was called at Hierapolis the voluntary martyr, is an avatar of the sacrificed fish god. But, though his martyrdom, according to Pseudo-Lucian, served as an example to the Gauls, who dedicated themselves each year to the service of the goddess,91 he does not have that essential relationship and perfect union with the ritual that the performance and action presented in a sacrifice of a god; as for the sacrifice from which that story proceeds, it is no longer more than a narrative theme for it. But it has been and still is possible to compare figuratively the death of the hero to sacrifice. This is a type that well expresses the religious value of their legends, whether it concerns the merit acquired by the heroes and the example they furnish, or the social benefits that emanate from them. The blood shed by

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martyrs has been compared to sacrificial blood92 and yet their death, in which the sacramental weight of baptism and ordination has been recognized, has not been given that of sacrifice. Czarnowski, in representing the acquisition of heroic merits as a kind of initiation, gives himself the right to compare the death that ends it to a sacrifice, doubtless one that would exhaust all its useful effects to the benefit of the sacrificant. Moreover self-sacrifice for the good of all is an exercise of virtue, where the heroic ideal finds the most perfect expression of its energy. But it is still a unique sacrifice and the one who sacrifices himself does not succumb as a victim; he sacrifices himself as a hero. The sacrifice of the hero, in sum, is accomplished only figuratively and in representation; it perpetuates his merit in legend; it does without its ritual counterpart. We are led to extend that conclusion. If there are heroic legends which have such a counterpart, it is distant, indirect, and perhaps inoperative. Heroicization is a mythological process where mythology seems to do without the ritual canvas. This is not to say that religious practice has not brought it something.

** The sacrifices considered by Czarnowski have a particular character; they are accomplished in feasts. He has not detached them from the feasts of which they are a part. He relates heroic passions to feasts before relating them to sacrifice and at the exclusion of all other ritual circumstance. He gives the biggest part to the feasts. In truth, the very choice of his subject leads him to this. Of the Irish Celtic religion we scarcely know of any rites that have not been reserved for feasts. This is because the Ireland where Saint Patrick preached, scattered and without towns, had no truly public cult other than the feasts, where men found themselves together, national panegyrics, royal feasts, clan feasts; all of them moreover seemed to fall on the same dates, which were seasonal dates on the Celtic calendar. In this public cult, the tribal and national heroes are perfectly implicated. In what way? Here again we will note that the discussion of a specific question is going to instruct us regarding general phenomena. The study of feasts is especially fruitful as a preparation to the study of myth, because it is in feasts that religious thought and action are the most intimately connected. The intervention of representations which the exercise of all ritual brings is acknowledged in feasts by signs more apparent than elsewhere. All that is necessarily present in spirit in a ritual here preferably appears figuratively. Among all rites, feasts are the best supplied with myths. But it happens besides that performance translates itself here completely into action; it mixes intimately with the ritual and notably amplifies it. Gesture and thought are less distinct in feasts than in the rest of the cult.93 On the other hand, when men assemble in feasts, myth is presented in a fully social environment, that is, in the most propitious conditions for sociological study of its genesis or function.

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Now feasts constitute a setting favorable to the evocation of divine individuals, spirits who circulate, gods who appear.94 Czarnowski frequently uses the expressions “spirits of feasts,” “heroes of feasts,” “gods of feasts.” The first of these expressions indicates spirits spoken of only in connection to feasts, either because they make their appearance there or because they are born and come into view at the start of a feast to die at the end or at another feast, limiting to the feasts the duration of the ephemeral or intermittent life granted them. This expression means that they exist only in relation to feasts, that they are their spirit, moreover multiple, and nothing else, an animist representation of festival religiosity. By “heroes of feasts” is meant an analogous but personal representation. Czarnowski perhaps extends this expression to less ephemeral figures, but with the sentiment that these heroes were able to survive the occasion that gave birth to them. In sum, feasts are propitious to the elaboration of the divine; they seem to be so quite particularly for that of the heroic divine.

** Irish heroes act, so to speak, only in feasts. This constant relation is doubtless necessary. It is not specific to Ireland. It is a general matter that dates of feasts are those of heroic episodes, which are commemorated by feasts. The forms of heroic legend which tend toward literature demonstrate this relationship particularly well. Epic literature attests to it first of all. This is a preeminently heroic literature.95 There is no epic that is not the legend of a hero, nor any heroic legend that is not a possible epic. So recitations of the Mahabarata and the Ramayana96 were and still are done in India at the feast of Holi, at the first spring moon. The recitation of Homeric poems at the Panathenaea97 was likely neither a tribute to their beauty nor a festival diversion dreamed up by a man of taste; it had a religious and political meaning. It was thought that this concerned the symbolization of the unanimity of Athens and Ionia by the evocation of national heroes; this would be a typical case of the cult of the hero. We have recently learned that our French chansons de gestes owe their origins to pilgrimsages;98 Roland and the archbishop Turpin were sung on the road to Santiago de Compostela; pilgrimages lead to feasts or prolong a state of feasting throughout the year. Finally, the filid performed in the feasts their function of reciters; they brought to the task heroic accounts of tribal, local, and national events.99 It could be thus that the epic accounts were created to be recited at feasts. But we cannot prove this. On the other hand, we do not find them present at festival concerts except with already fully defined heroes, and we do not know if it was ever otherwise. In order to analyze the epic in such a way as to explain what it owes and what it adds to feasts, especially regarding its heroic actors, we must turn to an intermediary, which is drama. Usener has successfully done this.100 But drama is itself one of the forms of heroic literature whose relationship to feasts is at once more general, more obvious, and more intimate than that of the epic. We know

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that the dramatic performances of Athens were performed at the Great Dionysia and the Lenaia. Dramatic performances have everywhere and always been a part of festival rites. They have remained tied to the dates of feasts long after drama became a literary genre and was separated from religion. It must be shown that the hero belongs to drama as drama belongs to the feast and why.101 But in this respect the Irish tradition provides no instructive data. Considering the place held there by feasts, what went on in them is not well known. The effort made by Czarnowski to catch a glimpse of this through the myths cannot, from where we are, substitute for the absence of direct information. Beyond poetic recitations, the commemoration of heroes required games; to our knowledge, the dramatic element of Irish feasts is reducible to games. It is not enough to study the parallel development of heroic cults and festive drama among the Celts. We must look to Greece. Ridgeway102 argued a short while ago, in a book on the origins of Greek drama, that tragedy was subordinate to the cult of heroes. Greek drama is a good subject for study, since we can follow its evolution from the most primitive dramatic forms up to the most complex. When it produces its most perfect works, it is still involved in the cult, and nevertheless its aesthetic flight seems as free as it could possibly be. It was believed that it was connected at its origins to the cult of Dionysus. When inspected closely, those connections are loose. Well before the tragic events of the Great Dionysia were instituted at Athens, there were in other towns tragic choruses who sang and danced tragedies that represented the history and suffering of certain individuals. These individuals were heroes. Herodotus gives us an example of this.103 At Sicyon, tragic choruses celebrated the passion of the hero Adrastus at his gravesite. These performances in honor of Adrastus were suppressed, says Herodotus, by the tyrant Cleisthenes (495-560) and transferred to the cult of Dionysus. Dionysus received the tragic choruses, at Sicyon and perhaps also at Attica, by substitution.104 The performances at Sicyon are the oldest example of dramatic representations that history has brought to our knowledge. It is very probable that they resembled the old tragedies; it is also possible, and Herodotus tells us so, that they were tragedies in the proper sense of the term, chants de bouc, independent of the cult of Dionysus; for, if it is true that tragedy by definition is a song that accompanies the sacrifice of a goat, as the dithyramb accompanies that of a cow, we absolutely do not know if the goat was a victim reserved for Dionysus or especially demanded by him.105 But, on the other hand, it is in heroic legend and not in mythology that Greek tragedy, faithful to its origins according to Ridgeway, has always found its subjects. It has even chosen them in such a way that scenes of the funeral cult interspersed themselves naturally there. The individuals gather around a tomb; it is that of Darius, or of Agamemnon; it is the grave mound of the Suppliants. There are funeral offerings, songs of grieving,   and μμ. Death plays its role among the living. It is consulted, avenged, appeased, evoked. The very layout of the theater is meaningful. There is an altar on which the sacrifice to

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Dionysus is made; it is μ ; but there is on the stage another altar, the one used by the poet for his production; it is the altar of the tomb (μ). Thus the theater is the temple of two juxtaposed cults, that of a hero and that of Dionysus; the latter is a gatecrasher. What is more, Greek tragedy dramatizes not divine but human actions, acts of heroes. As its performances have to do with the death of heroes, it is reasonable to link them to the funeral cult. The cult of heroes in Greece was a cult of the dead, but it also had other aspects. The thesis of Ridgeway was avidly fought by Farnell. But, if the latter gave drama to Dionysus, he did not take it away from the heroes.106 It is not the god of wine who remains the god of tragedy, it is a more vague and powerful god, the god of fecundity, the god of nature who awakens, grows, fights, and dies to be reborn. The Dionysus of the Athenian Dionysia was in reality the Dionysus of the small town of Eleutherae,107 Dionysus Melanaigis, of the black goat, the only one moreover who had anything to do with the female goats, if not with the males. Yet, the latter appears in a heroic adventure where his divine nature appears in the same good light as his relationship with the origins of drama and with the heroes. He intervenes in a legendary battle which delivered the Boetian Xanthus (the blond) and the Messenian Melanthus (the dark) to the border of Attica; the latter, with the help of the god, killed the former and the event was commemorated by the feast of the Apaturies. In several editions of the myth of Dionysus is reproduced a battle or a passion that resembles this combat of the dark one and the blond,108 the various aspects and great popularity of which are made known to us by the skolia of classical mythology. Such were, we are told, the subjects of the most ancient tragedies. It is troublesome for the proof of this thesis that the feast of the Apaturies was not a feast of dramatic performances. But, if direct evidence here is lacking, we have the near equivalent. It is Games of the popular feasts that give us this evidence. Macedonian peasants formerly still performed farces at Carnaval that recalled the ups and downs of the Dionysian myth.109 Our folkloric tradition teaches us that a similar configuration of agrarian spirits, the accidents and antitheses of vegetation and time furnished the feasts of Western Europe equally with the very simple themes of dramas.110 It is a classical theory that the mummeries, the battles of masks and other short Carnavalesque pieces represent the competition of the seasons symbolically and in dramatic action. Seasonal mummeries and drama, such is the succession of facts that we enjoy reconstituting.111 But what must the individuals of seasonal pieces be? In villages without history, they remained spirits and models and yet they rather easily take the form of historical individuals.112 In the Greek cities, Usener has informed us, they moved up in degree and became heroes.113 Rudimentary heroic dramas, still quite close to the mimetic ritual of the feast, whose existence they presuppose, have not been preserved for us; but something of them has come down to us, in the form of epic scenes and episodes, in the Homeric epics which they have furnished with materials. They are canvases of heroic drama. But, then, the relationship between drama and the hero, as it is no longer the same, should be still tighter than it was at first. Ridgeway endeavors to make us

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believe that drama was formed around the hero. The other party would have us think that the hero is, so to speak, formed in drama, which precedes him. It is a representation, implicated by a feast, of natural and supernatural facts, the elements, moments, and antithetical images of which take on a living and personal expression in the species of the hero. A good number of these heroes seem to owe everything, their name, civil state, attitude and character, to festival drama. All heroes would owe to it at least something of their nature and heroic vitality; for, even in primitive drama, the dramatic action, the play of the characters, the incarnation of the type by the actor have contributed in giving something to the individual or developing in him that moral personality which some have wanted to make the distinctive characteristic of the hero.114 It is a theatrical personality. The succession of observations that have just been presented calls for reservation. The facts we have just recalled to explain (with Farnell) the origin of Dionysiac tragedy, and (with Usener) the origin of the pieces of epics that recount heroic conflicts, are seasonal mimetic rites. Have we then shown in mimetic rites the origin of drama and the hero at once? Of course, the theory is plausible and the arguments that commend it persuasive, but not enough to entail the conviction that there were no dramas of different origins and no heroes save those of these dramas. We take care then not to construct a general theory from specific connections. As for the heroicization of its actors, mimetic rites which furnish the theme of seasonal sketches do not carry in themselves their logic. Between the masks of foliage, paraded, beaten, sprinkled, pursued in the village feasts, and the most impersonal of the heroes, the distance is already great; the structure of mimetic rites provides nothing to bridge it. Once the rite has given it a role, an attitude, and even a name, all that makes for the interest of the drama and the valor of the hero was still to be added, that is, all that caused it to pass gradually from the summary conflict of Xanthus and Melanthus to the sublime disputes and complaints of Oedipus; but this is also for us the essential. The principle of heroicization is thus no more found in mimetic rite than in sacrifice or in any other specific ritual complexus. It remains to look for it in the feast itself, since it is on this occasion that qualified individuals rise from mimetic rite and perhaps from sacrifice. For that matter, the supposed heroes of primitive tragedy, which were just discussed, were spirits of feasts at the same time as seasonal spirits. The Irish heroes, Czarnowski proves to us, are close relatives of spirits of feasts.

** When one speaks of a feast, one speaks at once of time and of ritual; time is consecrated; ritual is public and positive. The ritual of a feast is more complex, more solemn, more important or more particular than an everyday ritual, it interests and unites more followers, occupies more actors. The executors of religious acts in the feast are indeed actors and equally so are their associates, and even the audience. Doubtless as much can be said of

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any religious ceremony; but a process of daily familiarization brings private rites, those that are not performed often, closer to normal gestures, to normal, secular consciousness. They take place on the stage where life takes place; in the consciousness, in so far as they affect it, the feelings that they stimulate became familiar. The feast loses its virtue as soon as it becomes banal. As long as it is not half-obsolete, the exceptional character of acts and performances is vividly felt here. These are acts, performances, and feelings of the feast, which are not at all free, spontaneous, or personal, despite appearances, but are moved by a kind of collective automatism. Gestures link up in roles. There are those of the protagonists and those of the entire chorus of the festival crowd. These roles are not simply the exaltation of the everyday person, rising up one or a few degrees in the hierarchy of religious values. They are representation and symbol.115 They represent everything the feast concerns or suggests. In totemic societies, the case is clear, it is the totem that is represented. At a few degrees further along in social evolution, representation is less direct; it is refracted in diverse atmospheres; several layers of institutions and myths rise up between society at the time of feast, the religious powers it wants to evoke and the ends it has in view. But in the feast, there is always a need to represent, to appear, which ends by finding satisfaction. One must always invoke and express oneself, indicate the interested powers and their mode of action,116 signify the circumstances, the meaning and the object of the feast, translate the needs, desires, passions, and fears of the society, or simply its well being or malaise, the pleasure or irritation of being together. All this is expressed not so much in words but in gestures, in the gestures of the characters, by the characters, and in the form of characters making gestures.117 We have already described the opening out of social sentiments and collective representations which, in a meeting of men, gives objectivity, body, to feelings and notions that everyday life disperses or diffuses and which produces experiences that, in other conditions, would scarcely hold our attention.118 All that is common and exceeds self-consciousness becomes exterior, takes on substance, life, soul, spirit, person. These souls and people represent what they find; at least, they represent their officiators. Thus the argument of a feast implies characters, superhuman ones. But, moreover, the plurality of officiants is already, for the ritual of the feast, a principle of dramatic organization.119 Whether they express themselves in words or prayers, there are one or more people who say the prayers or direct them; social division and hierarchy separate and differentiate parts in the chorus; but though the whole mass is one thing, it is not everywhere the same; discipline is never perfect; there is always someone who is not on tempo, a chorister who improvises; in the emancipated individual there already appears the soloist accompanied by the others and to whom they respond. In sum, several distinct individuals and several distinct groups are there, among which will be divided the confused mass of evocations. In space and plurality the images of the feast are analyzed and fixed. This repartition of roles and symbolic values contains drama in its essence.

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People at a feast need much restraint, much or too little imagination in order to keep to the discourse and the prayer. When gesture completes thought, figurative anticipations produce anticipation in advance, and masks render the gods present for the faithful, then ritual becomes performance and myth is at play.120 So it is for the action; there is no feast that does not, to some degree, call for it. As for the actors, they are always ready. From the officiants to the simplest laymen, each becomes a character. One wears badges and rags, puts on one’s Sunday best and disguises oneself;121 from one to the other the distance is not great. One becomes someone else and feels exceedingly bold, for one is possessed by the spirit of the feast. A feast easily becomes a masquerade, scattered and disorderly, arranged and regulated. All coordination of the masquerade makes of it a dramatic performance. The heroic drama is a superior degree of this. The characters of the festival drama, when they exceed the rudimentary state of anonymous spirits, are heroes rather than gods. The divine has several levels. To become present in ritual, to undergo the risks of sacrifice, to rub elbows with men in feasts, it has if not to secularize at least to humanize. The god of the feast is not God the Father, but God the Son. He descends to the level of human life and becomes man to meet men. Now it is there precisely that heroes act. The hero, as a secular form of the god, is a kind of divine person who fits both religious dramas and feasts. The feasts qualify the divine persons who are implicated in them as heroes. The gods of the cults that are limited to feasts tend toward the type of the hero. This is the case of the Irish gods; but outside of Ireland heroes have been substituted for gods in the cult of feasts, or the gods present themselves here in the form of heroes.122 We must also observe that the divine in a feast is often specific to it; it is the very spirit of the feast, which bears its name or some other proper name;123 these spirits are diverse or contrary to the parties, moments, antitheses, so to speak, and opposed roles of the feast. Born in the frame of human life, among men, from whom they emanate, they have no reason to raise themselves much above men; if they take their figure and rank in the hierarchy of divine figures, the state which fits them is that of the hero, who is at once man and god or demon. Besides, something of the actors, in whom they are incarnated and with whom they identify in a sense, always remains with them. Suitability on the one hand, origins of representation on the other, these are the reasons for the connection we suppose between heroes and feasts. There is another which is entirely logical. A feast has a date. The date of a feast is an element of time, distinguished from others by particular qualities of such a nature that the sacred can here appear in the midst of the profane.124 The eternal here touches the temporal. That which it does not lose of its eternity from this contact is maintained by endless repetitions. The critical points of time that are the dates of feasts form, each in relation to the other feasts and to other markers of time, systems of homologous elements, which are taken as equivalents and which repeat one another as much

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as possible. Each feast reproduces thus an earlier feast and the entire series of the same feast reproduces a unique, mythic event. This repetition can take two aspects, depending on the relative importance (which is variable) of the contradictory ideas it reconciles, that of real presence and that of commemoration. In the latter, the event reproduced by the feast is itself situated in time; it is a very distant time, but one which, all told, is still part of history; it does not cast off its chronological elements; its reproduction is above all remembrance and recalling. The characters whose acts are commemorated, or supposedly such, having existed in time and taken a place in the flow of history, supposedly at least, have precisely the essential characteristics that, among divine persons, distinguish heroes. Of course, there are feasts that evoke heroes, as they do all other dead, so that they will come take their part of the offerings reserved for them by the cult; but if they spiritually attend the recitation or the reproduction of their heroic acts, it is as auditors or spectators; they do not themselves repeat their memorable acts and they do not undergo their tragic destiny a second time. Real presence is the deed of the gods. Commemoration is the indication of feasts of heroes. Thus is established, in comparison with the feasts, between gods and heroes a distinction comparable to that we determined in comparison with sacrifices. The gods, who assert themselves in devotion elsewhere, descend into full reality in the feast.125 Heroes, whose cult is more rare and more concentrated in the feast, are here celebrated figuratively. The story of a god is a description; it is a myth, properly speaking. That of a hero is a tradition, a rumor of the past; it is a legend. The permanence and infinity of the divine belongs only to gods.126 Heroes are divine by circumstance, discontinuous and finite. The god is a beam of virtual energies. The hero is a gesture made once and fixed as a symbol. The dividing line between the two species is thus theoretically very clear. Practically it is less so. Feasts present subtle combinations of real representations and commemoration. Christian feasts, for example, commemorate the events of the life of Christ and realize his presence in a sacrifice that indefinitely renews his passion, or else they unite the celebration of the mass and the commemoration of saints. There is always a portion of commemoration in feasts and consequently a place for heroes. But pure commemoration does not satisfy the followers of heroes. They feel the need to bring them closer in order to give them reality and refresh, so to speak, their heroic ideal; in general, they rejuvenate the ideal by changing it.127 By this process that is completely analogous to that which replaced ancient heroes with more recent ones, the gods were transformed into heroes; in order to invigorate the notion of their presence and reality, they were humanized and rejuvenated. Gods of feasts tend toward the heroic type; but heroes never completely separate themselves from gods. It can be said that the model of the hero is preeminently fitted to gods of feasts. The plane of human life and that of divine activity meet in feasts; heroes are found at the intersection, representatives of the former, instruments of the latter, divine symbols of societies. Thus feasts are the occasion for the formation of characters who, uniting the divine and the human, are heroes. Additionally, once the notion

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of hero, as well as that of god, were constituted, they were a favorable terrain for the crossbreeding of divine myth and heroic legend on which attention has often focused.128

** There are feasts that actually commemorate historical events. Between this actual commemoration and the conventional commemoration of mythic events the original difference fades away on its own. Mythic heroes, gratuitously commemorated, join historic heroes. The difference of their origins does not bring any difference of function between the one and the other. Enough legend, myth, and religiosity accumulate quickly around historic events and characters that are the object of feasts that they have no reason to be envious of one another. On the other hand, historic heroes have lent to mythic heroes a little of their objectivity. Moreover, rites of positive and, so to speak, physical effectiveness, which one can imagine were the primitive core of feasts that were not principally intended to celebrate real exploits, were overrun by myth when they became feasts of heroes; the positive end was surpassed by the representation.129 This latter became its own end. This is precisely what happened in commemorative feasts. In them, one represents to represent. But, if the part of the feast that dramatizes the hero succeeds in being nothing more than performance and play, the hero himself is reduced to pure performance; he is, in and for all, dramatis persona. From this comes the fact that many heroes are theater characters, whose stories are broken down into situations, whose being is broken down into attitudes and gestures, and whose character, which nothing else was to determine, consists, by contrast, of dramatic character. The moral types the drama staged were able to house themselves under the empty masks of the heroes. It is not even sufficient to say that dramatic performance of heroic events goes beyond the positive ritual of the feast. It constitutes itself a distinct rite. In any case, it is a surplus element, added to the other parts of the feast. It is independent of them and ends up being independent of the feast itself. However necessary one imagines it might have been at its origin, the relation between the hero and the drama, the myth and the feast, seems, in considering the facts in their entirety, rather slack. Feasts change their myths.130 Myths change their feasts, and we know that feasts with dramatic performances have allowed dramas other than those of which their own heroes were the subjects. They demanded performances, but they were indifferent to which piece was performed. This relative autonomy of the drama with respect to the feast was certainly the condition of its definitive growth in Greece. Heroes gained from it. They benefited from human experience and the reflection humankind brought to bear on itself in its literary work. Heroicization is produced during a process that reaches its conclusion with the development of the drama. It begins as religion and ends as aesthetics. In this evolution of dramatic performance and feast, the hero, a religious being, draws

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nearer to (to the point of becoming one with) the literary hero. This is not to say that they were originally identical, or that the first was not solidly implanted in religious practice, or even that it completely or rapidly leaves the realm of religion. As practical as religion is, pure representation has a large place there. To leave myth outside of religion when it is not uniquely used to nourish piety and give meaning to the ritual seems to us not only to shrink but to impoverish religion. It is led by an insatiable need for reality, but also by an irrepressible need for fantasy. Both are moreover cheaply satisfied; but, with religion as in the whole of human life, imagination arrives before positive activity and ends by giving the latter its objects. Religion does not do without imagination, but the imagination which serves it is religious. The example of heroes is precisely made to show that, when representation is freed, myth retains enough practical value to make up for what the support of the ritual does not provide. In detaching itself from any direct and special link to certain rites, feasts, notions, and religious needs, the representation of the hero does not lose at a stroke all genre of meaning or sentimental and moral compensation. It is never a simple game of imagination, without interest and reach for those who surrender to it. A luminous image that bursts forth from obscure reflections, it is a pole of attraction for floating thoughts and confused feelings; it is also a principle of action.131 One can say of heroes, as of saints, that their lives are edifying, producing values that are not the same but which religions have not disdained. The spectacle of their deeds and gestures provide effective examples of energy, courage, good will, even of good humor and cheerfulness. The feast in which the faithful take part is a source of moral benefits, among which one must count at a minimum consolation and diversion.132 Divine symbols of societies, ideal actors of their history, models of merit, examples of virtue, moral types and characters, heroes have passed by degrees from heroes of religion to heroes of literature, in the evolution of drama and epic that originates in the feasts. All heroes, in whatever degree, as symbols and types, help individuals and groups to become conscious of themselves. At each level, their representation always preserves a kind of practical value whose religiosity fluctuates and diminishes only imperceptibly. We would not know where to indicate the point at which it is entirely abolished. In the study of heroes, as in the study of feasts, the part played by religion and that played by aesthetics cannot at any moment be exactly measured. But, to the extent that he tends toward the historical hero and above all toward the romanesque hero, the hero distances himself from the god. Each specializes in its meaning and each has its own domain. To the god go the cosmic forces; to the hero, ingenuity, valor and human misery. They differ as myth and legend do. The one moves toward metaphysics; the other leans toward history and the story. We are inclined to believe that these are natural tendencies. Indeed, we know the story of heroes only through drama, epic, and narratives that are summaries of epics or potential dramas. This affinity heroes have for literature is explained, if it is true that feasts, which have appealed to its unformed trials, bring together the conditions in which the notion of the hero developed

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and its characteristics were determined, if indeed this development is closely connected to the feasts. But we cannot say that all heroes originate in feasts. We believe only that the heroes of feasts are the most vivid, colorful, popular and typical, that feasts constitute circumstances eminently favorable to their representation, and that the example provided by feasts is the one that best explains how societies are provided with heroes. It is in feasts, where societies are concentrated, that they are able to produce the most complete representation of themselves in the species of their emblems.133 For example, the role played by totems in the feasts of Australian aboriginal societies devolved naturally on heroes in societies that can recognize themselves in them.

IV We have indicated the place Greek tragedy devoted to funeral scenes. Moreover, why has the imagination of humankind pleased itself in representing the death of heroes? It is always the main episode of their dramatic existence. This fact would be explained if, by a necessity of nature, the hero had to figure as a victim in a real or ideal sacrifice. Heroes of seasonal dramas, who we supposed were at the origins of tragedy, die because what they symbolize suffers or disappears; their triumphs are temporary and, in fact, they triumph less than they suffer.134 But, if heroicization is independent of all ritual in which an incident can be represented by the death of the hero, why then does the hero die? Heroes who have not lived die in the image of those who have died, because they assume their human condition. This is without doubt. But they could die noiselessly and pass on. And yet, no, their deaths, even if tranquil, are never banal. They always have something singular, surprising, tragic, or edifying about them that attracts attention. Often they have the character of a test. We have been told that heroes must pass through a test. But why must they succumb to it? The death of the hero is an element of his definition. In Greece, his sanctuary is a tomb; his cult, a funeral cult, where he receives the services due to the dead. In Ireland, feasts of heroes had cemeteries as their theaters; they were celebrated among burial mounds, among which was found the tomb of the hero or heroine whose death was being commemorated. One runs no risk in generalizing. It is true that a great number of heroic tombs have been usurped or emptied. There are some that are only supposed. In Ireland, every hillock, every natural or artificial mound is a sidh, that is, ultimately, a tomb, and the individuals whose names are attached to it are heroes. We agree that there were imaginary or mythic heroes. But it is an uncontested fact that in general heroes have been represented as dead people. And it is the representation that is important. Heroes and the dead are notions that call one another; cults of heroes and cults of the dead are connected things that vary together.135 There is yet more evidence of this. In Greece, for example, one notes that all gods who evoke in some way the idea of the dead, by the position of their sanctuary, by their habitat, attributions, adventures or mode of action, approxi-

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mate or are counted among the heroes; such are the chthonian gods and the warrior gods who reveal their secrets in dreams, like the dead, and the gods of possession.136 As for the individuals, likely exceptional, whose heroicization seems to have preceded death, either death passed so close to them that they remain touched by it, as is the case for spared martyrs,137 or they died figuratively, to the world. Czarnowski is inclined to consider heroicization as a kind of initiation,138 of which death was the ordinary agent but which could be lacking; we believe in fact, to take an example, that the complicated initiation of the companions of Finn was of such a nature as to heroicize them before the term was coined;139 yet, when it was desired to represent the initiation or explain it in the terms of everyday language, one generally resorted to the figure of death and resurrection. After all, their character as dead persons suits the intimate relationship of heroes and feasts, for feasts are dates of funeral cult and, if there are spirits whose part in feasts is explicitly mentioned, they are spirits of the dead.140 But is it, ultimately, death that heroicizes and have we not taken a false route in looking elsewhere? A tomb, a name, a date, a mythical gesture, here is the substance of a legend and of a heroic cult. Does this merging of elements proceed from death? Is the hero properly speaking a powerful dead person, one with mana? Does the notion of the powerful dead person contain in substance all that is developed by that of the hero,141 and that of the dead person all that is supposed by that of the powerful dead person? At first examination, the dead person appears to be the original hero, the dead person or the ancestor. Such is, it seems, the response of the facts to the question we posed.

** Not all the dead are the same. Heroes are deceased persons of a particular nature that saves them from the oblivion into which the rest of the dead fall. They are the dead who do not die. Everywhere the dead distance themselves from the living in groups of pale and anonymous shadows.142 Even there where belief in the life to come is the most assured, the memory of past generations is quickly erased. The rough personality of epic heroes stands out in violent features against this drab background. It is not the memory of an extinguished energy that attaches itself to their names, but an image that is forever present and renovated. When the hero is represented in the sphere of the rest of the dead, the contrast of the collision of his weakness as a dead person and his eminent dignity as a hero is shocking and moving. “How much I would prefer,” says Achilles, “to work the soil in the employ of another, and live with a poor peasant, with a poorly-stocked breadbox than to reign here, like Hades, among the dead.”143 Achilles knows nothing of his people and can do nothing for them. In truth, people have asked the same services of heroes that they have asked of the other dead, when these latter were not yet forgotten. The dead, who hold to both worlds, the sacred and profane, are in the position to provide them; it is the

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compensation of the religious care of which they are the object.144 They have a view of the beyond; they are consulted. These are disintegrated, available but not independent forces, the application of which can be controlled by the living if they have the means to seize them. But it has been remarked that heroes, from this point of view, do not excel among the dead and do not justify the exceptional cult that is rendered them.145 If they are superior to the others, it is not by their power, but by the more frequent calls made to their power; it is by the memory attached to them, which indicates them to their solicitors. The very memory of their earthly life is the clearest of their virtues. It is because they served their people during their lives that they do not cease to provide them the most effective aid. The beneficent power that remains to them is that of their myth. They have a force of example and consolation, and one thinks less of the condition and superhuman gifts of their immortal soul than of their gestures while alive. When the shadows of his Achaean companions had exhausted the little bit of life they had found in sacrificial blood, Ulysses saw other shadows march past,146 those of older heroes; Minos, a scepter in hand, judged the dead; Orion still hunted in the daffodil plain the beasts he had killed; Tityos, Tantalus, and Sisyphus, in their consecrated bearing, stand out against the background of oblivion in bas-reliefs; the shadow of Hercules pulls the bow;147 but Hercules himself is not there, living joyously with the immortal gods, protected from death or actually made divine. But there are other heroes, from whom was expected positive help without having been for that assimilated to the gods. Arthur is one such hero; but he was not dead and could return.148 From Castor and Pollux, who got a break from death, Greeks and Latins had their share, on several occasions, of timely returns and effective aid.149 The case of Arthur is not more exceptional among the Celts than that of Hercules among the Greeks.150 Numerous are the heroes, and particularly in Ireland, who escaped the downfall of death; their death is a transgression of forbidden doors; this transgression gives them the brilliance deserving remembrance, they enter living into the world of the dead; but they live there; there are even those who know how to return from that realm.151 In sum, if the posthumous activity of heroes distinguishes itself from that of the rest of the dead, it is by their acts in life, of which they are believed capable because of their vanquishing of death. If they have, as dead persons, special merits, it is by virtue of what their remains, when they exist, still preserve of their virtues and their power, that is, of their life.152 The cult of heroes requires a cult of relics and the cult of relics is a cult of present powers. But heroes always live on in some sense through memory and myth. Honored as deceased persons, the fact of death adds nothing to the essential reasons that a cult is dedicated to them. Their prestige would owe nothing to death if the latter did not complete the trials that consecrate them; their supernatural power loses here, while that of the other dead gains. They are obviously powerful dead persons, but by virtue of the tenacity of their lives,153 and not because they possess eminent qualities of the dead. It is quite correct that heroes are among the dead, but it is that which differentiates them from the dead that makes them heroes. It is not death that

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heroicizes them. The attention attached to heroes does not originate in that which was able to surround the immortal souls of men, whoever they might be, with fear, respect, and care. We read in the Ynglinga Saga that the god Frey, who reigned over Sweden, having died, his family hid him in a burial mound built in the manner of a dwelling and concealed his death to the Swedes until they were reassured about the consequences of his death by a continuation of good harvests.154 This account gives the exact measure of the value of a dead hero. Heroes are individuals whose death cannot be believed or whose death, never anticipated, is an eternal surprise, eternally lamented. The happy, the powerful, and the strong are naturally the object of similar sentiments. Belief in the immortality of the soul cheats with death, by which lives that should continue are unexpectedly shattered. The immortality of the leaders preceded that of the common people.155 This is why living or immortal heroes stand out among the dead.

** But the idea of death is neither clear nor simple, and it is not everywhere the same. To generally discuss the representation of death and of the dead without defining them is scarcely legitimate. They present variations, whose affinities with the representation of the hero deserve to be taken into consideration. Czarnowski fixed his attention here. The Ynglinga Saga adds that, when the Swedes learned of the death of Frey, they took care not to burn his body, as was customary, but instead preserved it in a burial mound to have it near them.156 If the idea of death is hesitant and uncertain, it is constant on one point. Nowhere is death represented as a sudden and definitive departure.157 At its first strike, life still lingers around the cadaver. Everywhere it is believed that there is a temporary state of half-death, which lasts and is able to last as long as the decomposition of the cadaver is incomplete. To this first stage of death corresponds an initial series of funeral rites, a death vigil, a provisional tomb, etc. We will see that Czarnowski compares the condition of Irish heroes to that intermediary state between life and death through which all of the dead must pass, but it is prolonged indefinitely for the Irish heroes. He provides meaningful examples.158 On the other hand, Greece, a land of heroes, is a land of vampires.159 Vampires, sometimes dangerous and wicked, sometimes beneficent and unhappy, are the dead who are not completely dead; their bodies have not been able to decompose as they should have, either because funeral rites were not completely carried out with respect to them, or because the rites failed in their effect; their souls have not left their bodies. Several examples, often cited, demonstrate that the belief of the Greeks incorporated the posthumous energy of the hero into his mortal remains. When Cleisthenes, the tyrant of Sicyon, who we discussed above,160 wanted to defeat the power the Argive hero Adrastus was still capable of exerting over his city, he sent for the remains of his characteristic

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enemy, Melanippus, son of Astacus. Greek tradition relative to heroes preserves the memory of a time when the predecessors of the historical Greeks did not burn their dead, but interred them in tombs that were funeral chambers.161 The heroic tombs, in Greece, were   , that is, arched chambers, Mycenaean tombs, dwellings of the dead, like the great megalithic tombs of Ireland, which were the palaces of Tuatha dé Danann. In sum, while every effort was made, for the great masses of the dead, to facilitate and hasten the disappropriation of the body and the departure of the soul, it seems it was believed this was prevented for heroes. This bringing together of facts, if it is legitimate, furnishes a solution to the difficulty noted above. We would explain in this way that heroes preserved after death all their qualities in life, while gaining some freedom of action and a bit of mystery and the supernatural. They would moreover logically and regularly enter the class of the dead. They are dead who, for a certain reason, have not cast off their souls. Is the reason worth more than the effect? Perhaps. In any case, it is toward the tomb and the remains, which suggest the idea that a latent life is closed inside, able to awaken with its power, that reverence and the cult are directed. The maintenance, service and use of that dormant power are the object and the reason for the latter. Nevertheless, we have not unscrupulously compared the body of the vampire to the remains of the hero. When Cimon brought the remains of Theseus to Athens, they were quite dry bones. The dead of funeral houses, like Egyptian mummies, had passed through all the degrees of purifying ritual that complete the passage to the stage of the dead. The proposed comparison between the posthumous condition of the hero and the first state of the dead is certainly valid as an illustration, but we are less certain that it is valid as a reason, at least as a general reason, for heroicization. But, in such a complex case, only one factor does not validate or invalidate the whole argument. Czarnowski in fact explains quite ingeniously in another way, with the idea that the Celts made of the final death, not only the hopes of salvation they attached to the heroes, but the latter’s general aptitude at filling an indefinite number of divine functions. Heroes, according to the Irish, are able to return to earth through reincarnation. But all souls equally can reincarnate. Death makes them available for this. It is in this form that the Irish conceived of life beyond the grave. It fills a reservoir of life that is ceaselessly emptied by births. The land of the dead is the cradle of life. Souls left it, by groups at first, then one at a time, in order to populate the land of the living. This representation of an immortality that unfolds by reincarnations is apparently in contradiction with that of survival and an incomplete death which we just examined, for transmigration can begin only at the moment when death has produced all its consequences and the body is completely disused. But we must not stop at this contradiction; all religious ideas admit of it and reconcile with it. The idea of the hero seems to make the best of a similar representation of death and its consequences. The common immortality of the dead is thus the reason and the condition of their own immortality. Death, which consecrates them in the trial to

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which they succumb, even puts them in the position to more effectively exercise their virtues after another birth. Moreover, souls are not distinguishable in any way, neither in the other world to which they must flow nor in this world where they bustle about, from other spirits and, in particular, from those that circulate in invisible groups during feasts. The reservoir of the one and the other is the same and provides to all equally; the same spirits become, according to the chance of their appointment, gods, heroes, or simple mortals. Thus the Irish king Mongan passed as the reincarnation of the hero Finn and that of the god Manannan at the same time.162 The synthesis of contradictory principles that covers the heroic nature finds itself realized in similar conditions. This passage of the same spirit through a plurality of functions, which lead it from the government of nature to that of a tribe by giving it the means to indefinitely ramify its kinship, explains in a concrete manner the position of the hero in connection to a society.163 Through him, it has a hold over the world in which it exists, on him is based the authority which governs it, and from him emanates the force that it counts on, for, if society presents to itself the soul of a hero who is reincarnated in it, it is in the leader that society recognizes it; in a word, society is able to summarize itself in its hero as it does in its leader and its representative to the gods and to humans. Death does not contravene here; it merely diversifies the ties that bind what is symbolized to the symbol. We have just argued as if reincarnations had been supposed to appear in a tightly plotted circle of kinship.164 If some spirit of imagination governed the representation of reincarnations, the circle was not found to be indefinitely enlarged by this, for we were still discussing only Ireland. But at least heroes and the other dead are no longer separated, in this conception, by irreducible differences; the former are distinguished only by an indicator of excellence. The moving dissonance against which sometimes the representations of the dead and of the hero have collided seems to be smoothed out. The difficulty has disappeared, but by omission; the dead no longer count; there are now only spirits among whom those who are the objects of a cult are heroes, unless they are gods. Unfortunately, this means of reducing heroes to the dead is not provided to us everywhere. The belief in the reincarnation of souls is not common to all the societies that have had heroes. Greece did without it. But moreover the same difficulty reappears on another side; for no theory of the beyond more completely deprives the dead of their humanity and their individuality than the one we have just discussed; none serves to better demonstrate that the dead, as for the Greeks, normally become μ, genii, anonymous forces deprived of permanent attributes.165 Yet, for the Irish, heroes and gods as well (we have seen that they resemble one another) preserve across their reincarnations the memory of their names and their characters. It is in our view a specific and irreducible feature. μ and  are two names and two species. Both are fed by death. The pure and simple fact of death does not determine heroes. On the contrary, one must look to their character as heroes to find the reason for the tenacity with which their souls must remain attached to their mortal remains and their

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names to their souls. It goes without saying that we speak here of typical heroes, in relation to whom is defined by reflection the valor of others, and of whom remain something more than a cult and a monument. For, there where the heroic cults developed, there is a host of them that nothing distinguishes, not even a name, from the rest of the obscure and forgotten dead.

** Was it not by way of ancestors that heroes were provided by the imagination of their followers with these gifts that distinguish them from the rest of the dead?166 We have in fact acknowledged that kinship-based societies are favorable to the development of heroic cults. Ancestors easily provide the figures for heroes. But reciprocally some families have freely chosen their ancestors from among the available heroes. It is thus that a great number of Greek families pushed their origins back to Hercules,167 doubtless through desire to distinguish themselves; undoubtedly also because they had forgotten their true ancestors, for, even there where the cult of ancestors is practiced, it is unsuccessful at saving the memory of any but the most recent generations. We indicated above that the principal members of the hero class had only a kinship relation of mediocre quality with their human associates. These are moreover those of the largest groups, where the paternity of ancestors can only be a symbolic paternity. Placed at the head of genealogies whose middle branches have disappeared, heroes rise up here as emblematic figures. It is less by blood than by arms that they are the leaders of their kin.168 The hero who is the ancestor of a family or clan is that one whose coat of arms they hold. Such is the case for Magennis, ancestor of Conall Cernach, one of the companions of Cuchulainn. It was from him that the insignia of the red hand, which survived, came. In a race, the prize of which was the allocation of a territory disputed by two rival tribes, Magennis, at the point of being beaten, cut off a hand and threw it over the finish line with the other.169 The quality of hero dominates that of ancestor, among individuals who possess both, as their condition of hero dominates their condition as a member of the dead. Moreover, they were perfectly distinct.170 One can say that the one proceeds from the other, but which from which? Far from it being evident that the cult of heroes derives from the funeral or ancestral cult, it is likely that the one and the other are extensions of the cult of heroes.171

** The nature of heroes is expressed in the entirety of their legend. If death adds something important to this, it is through its circumstances. Every time the hero’s death is reported, it is in fact such as to enhance the legend. Czarnowski puts it quite exactly: the death of heroes has a social significance.172 It appears as a sacrifice, sanction, or example; it is violent, ritual, exceptional, magnificent. If

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death has its share in the representation of heroes, it contributes to qualifying them only on the condition of being the death of a hero. To conclude this debate, we do not believe the idea of the hero results from the adding of a determinative to the idea of the dead, but that death is an adjective to the other elements of this idea. This appears rather clearly in the case of heroes, quite numerous, who perform the function of local spirits.173 An epic poem could not evoke two young people who meet at the shore of a lake without concluding that they drowned there. It is a logical necessity. Death fixes the spirit, it stops the hero or the god in his path, at the point to which his image must remain attached. But more it seems there is so to speak an aesthetic suitability between the quality of heroes and the final fate that is imagined to befall them. A hero is complete only if he meets a tragic end and, more still, it seems, if the society that sees itself in him has suffered over his disaster. It is astonishing that people take pleasure in commemorating their defeats. The retrospective suffering that they experience here is a source of intimate satisfactions. The aesthetic taste for suffering is not a sentimental depravity of an aged humanity, nor is it a sophistication of its maturity. Its origins are very deep and very early. It found satisfaction in numerous feasts. The Anthesteries of Athens and the Adonies, with their display of mourning followed by joyous relaxation, are examples. The game of suffering, the recalling or the anticipation of grief, which does not harm because it is anticipated or past, is a contrast to joy or laughter, but it is also their equivalent and perhaps their stimulant. If it concerns an individual, an uninterrupted succession of successful results only half-pleases and ends by displeasing. In the domain of the imagination, it engenders anxiety; disfavor, in reality. It is necessary that the labors of Hercules be limited to twelve and that he die. We cannot count the number of heroic catastrophes. Roland succumbs, Siegfried is betrayed, Joan of Arc is condemned, the gods of Ireland, who are heroes, are crushed and flee under the earth to the peace of their twilight. The pathetic increases the interest of heroic myths. But above all, it is necessary that the hero have the compassion, sympathy, and self-reflection that makes the public experience the retrospective emotion of the suffering that affected him. When the story turns too well, its hero remains a stranger to us, he does not touch us; he is not near or real enough to us. The continuity of success is a supernatural element, not of the heroic supernatural, but, for example, that of tales. The tale must end well. The heroic myth ends badly. Wundt has written with much truth that the hero of the tale is an infant, to whom the world and adventures limitlessly open.174 The true hero is a human being, who collides with the limits of his own and human power. The continuity of moral triumphs, which are achieved by saints, constitutes one of the differences that separates them from heroes. Czarnowski rightly notes this.175 They are the heroes of religion, but they are not, save for exceptions like Saint Patrick, exemplary heroes. Too perfect or too fortunate, they do not pass through enough dangerous trials and their impassiveness is too unshakeable for

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them to be as close to the hearts of men as heroes. The weaknesses and failures of the latter give them humanity. Their catastrophe completes their type and ends by accommodating them to their symbolic function. It terminates the dreamed ideal by the surprise of death. It adds, so to speak, the myth of death to the myths of life. It is in fact by a veritable myth of death that the legend of the great Polynesian hero Maui, who is a hero among heroes, concludes. He perfected the hook and line, invented fire, fished the islands, and chained up the sun; but he died, and it is because he died that death holds sway in the world.176 Myths of life, myths of death, in the one and the other the hero creates his character and it is the central character. But it is myth, and not death, that makes the hero. We do not believe that, once the dead are provided with immortal souls, some of them had only to raise themselves to the level of the hero.177 There are heroes who actually are among the dead, others who are only myth and legend. We believe that we cannot separate the ones from the others. We have been above all concerned with the second group, believing that they owe less to the first group than they are owed by them. The normal development of their legend leads them to the type of the powerful dead. The conditions in which the legend develops are moreover favorable here. The death of the hero indeed suits these sad feasts where troubled societies, or those anticipating their troubles, gather in contemplation of their sufferings.178 Exchanges between the cult of suffering and the funeral cult took place. Initially distinct, they connected, intersected, even identified.179 The dead became heroes, and heroes the dead. It is in this state of entanglement that Ireland presents its cults. Does not taking account of their confusion require the renunciation of distinguishing them at their origins? Important accounts of their specific differences have been left us. What is left of the hero, in cases of extreme reduction, is an indication of function: physician hero, hero of the feast of the new moon, among the Greeks.180 We conclude from this that the hero is essentially and at bottom a symbol of social fact. The tomb is a support for the symbol. Heroes resemble less the dead than gods of functions, special gods, Sondergötter, defined by Usener. A good number of these special gods are heroes. Such are, among others, those of feasts we have just encountered in our discussion of the relation between the festival drama and the heroic cults. Heroes are symbols of functions and social characteristics, which bear witness until death, like Hippolytus, hero of purity.181 Less limited in their attributions or in the circle of their followers, they were to become gods, despite death; but, in fact, it is known that they have become gods.

V We are not attempting, at the conclusion of this examination, to reduce the notion of hero to the rather dry features of the genius after making every effort up to this point to avoid stripping it of its legendary and literary coverings in analyzing it. The idea of the hero is not defined by symbolization pure and simple,

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without meaning of signs. The hero is a person, or perhaps rather a character. His personality is sometimes quite faint, but it tends toward colorful and defined forms. The personality of the hero is defined by acts, which they accomplished once; they have their story; this story is a legend; this legend matters in their role. The hero is a mythological formation. The imagination that makes heroes works with limited facts. When men feel the need to transpose into an elevated mode what they do or suffer, or believe they do or suffer in the plural and collective, the same verbs, in the singular, have the hero as their subject. The social and human ties of heroes restrict their competence and horizon and fix them at a subordinate rank in the order of mythological structures. Heroes are divinities sized for societies that are not very large. In the point of view of the latter, they do not symbolize anything that is shrunken. They are level with social tiers from which the gaze does not reach very high. Popular mythology cultivates heroes.182 The type of the hero develops in mythology when it turns to legend. But hierarchical order is not genealogical order. We are completely in the dark concerning the succession and the train of mythological formations. They respond to diverse needs of the religious spirit, among which we have no reason to imagine a chronological order. Gods, heroes, demons of diverse sorts are indeed interchangeable. The mythological formation that is constituted by heroes is complex; it is variable; it floats at the boundary of other formations. But it is nevertheless marked by rather definite and recognizable features. It includes essential elements. Our investigation, like that of Czarnowski, has retained two of these, the funereal element and the epico-dramatic element of the cults and legends of heroes. The dead and the tomb on the one hand, feasts on the other, are for heroes constitutive facts, whose relative importance is variable. There is on both sides the possibility of heroes. But the resources provided to the figuration by the feasts, the impetus they give to the imagination, and the freedom they leave the hero are for the epic and dramatic element of heroic legends the principle and condition of a supernatural development. This is the positive element of these performances. The other is in part negative. The set of sacred masks possessed by the Hopi Indians provides a complete, clear and concrete example of what the heroic pantheon of a society is and comprises. They are called kachinas. We have a complete, descriptive and illustrated enumeration of them.183 “The kachinas are doll-masks of various gods of various ceremonies of the Hopi religion; the puppet has in fact many times replaced the masked individual representing the god in the ritual.”184 Each one of them appears in one or several feasts. “The kachinas are the ‘Elders of the clan’; they are ancestors at the same time as they are gods, and are actually reincarnated in their descendants. Even those who were certainly invented, even those who came to the Hopi through borrowing from other pueblos, or those who were acquired by inheritance from extinct clans, are represented in this form.”185 There are among them the figures of beings of all sorts and ranks, but who, in their species of kachinas, fulfill the function of the hero. They are introduced in the feasts to take up, like the heroes, their representative and supplementary part there. They

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constitute a set of symbols that the feasts put into movement. But these heroes are masks and heroes generally are individuals whose figuration is a game. In sum language, which designates heroes of the cult and heroes of literature with the same word, speaks justly. The former are complete only when they already have something of the latter.

** The kachinas are the symbols of the Hopi clans, and those that are available are equally understood as symbols of clans. In the same manner all heroes, whatever might be their special assignment, are ancestors, founders, symbols of societies. For some, this is a convention. For most, it is an authentic testimony to their nature and origin. They indeed emanate from certain societies. Those societies that derive from the clan are favorable to heroes. The clans of the Pueblo Indians are totemic clans, in a society where totemism has greatly evolved. Other totemic societies, in Australia, for example, have conceived of spirits186 who, in some features, resemble heroes; these are the dead from the distant past, able to return and reincarnate themselves, like the Irish heroes and the Hopi kachinas, with no immediate kinship with men, but situated at the summit of the genealogy of clans. These are totemic spirits. Do heroes then derive from totems? Does totemism provide a point of view from which one can see the entire system of heroic cults unfold starting at the very origins of religion? It is tempting to go this far back and Czarnowski thought about it. He enumerated, in an appendix, several facts that can seem to be survivals of totemism,187 but it is difficult to conclude that the Celtic hero cult rose from a base of totemic cults. Heroes and totems derive from societies in which the clan is the basis, and they are united with humans by the ties of loose kinship that make up clans and tribes. Between their human dependents and the world, they are on the side of humans. Resemblances and differences of social types; differences and resemblances of social symbols; relationship between imaginary beings and social forms; the linking together of totems and heroes at the end of the book recalls, in a concrete and pressing form, its central problem. If it can nearly be posed in this form, the facts are still lacking that would enable us to formulate it in a more precise statement. We will perhaps one day speak of the heroic clan as we speak of the totemic clan. I hope others will inform us of the ties between the two. But it is not the Celtic tradition that will enable them to sufficiently inform us on this point.

NOTES 1

This chapter was originally published as the preface to Stefan Czarnowski, Le culte des héros et ses conditions socials (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1919). Pp. i-xciv.

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D’Arbois de Jubainville, Cours de littérature celtique, 1, Introduction à l’étude de la literature celtique, 1882, p. 158. 3 Since these lines were written, an article titled “Heroes and hero-gods” has appeared in volume 6 of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics (1908-27, edited by J. Hastings); it is the work of several collaborators. It is a good example of the diversity of opinions that men who are in agreement about the use of a word can express concerning the definition of the corresponding idea. There are heroes who are famous deceased persons, powerful and the objects of a cult; others are mythic actors of the spectacle of nature; still others are heroes in epics. These three sorts of heroes are taken each in their turn by the various contributors to the article to be the original types of the species. We will show the three types here fall into the same scheme. With respect to common names, this universal review of heroes leaves us more or less to our own resources. 4 E. Doutté, Magie et Religion dans l’Afrique du Nord, 1909, pp. 52, 433, 590, etc. 5 S. I. Curtiss, Ursemitsche Religion im Volksleben des heutigen Orients, 1903, passim. 6 Gibbor, strong, violent, describes the warrior, the soldier as well as the hero and the divine force; ‘azzouz, strong, is used as a collective noun to describe heroes (Isiaiah 43:17); shalish could in a pinch pass as a specific expression, but it is especially applied to the chosen men who surround the king (Second Kings 7:2); in the use of the expression ’abir Israel, which is only said of Yahweh (Genesis 49:24), appears something of the meaning we will define. 7 The Roman heroes are the viri illustres of ancient history; the Empire, with the imperial religion provided them with a new acclamation. The imperial cult is associated with that of the Lares. It is a matter of knowing whether the cult of the Lares originates in the cult of the dead and the ancestors (Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 1902, pp. 148, 159); this does not appear to be a solvable problem. There is therefore nothing to research if the Lares are comparable to heroes; nevertheless, they have functions that, elsewhere, devolved on heroes. The use of divus in the religious protocol of the emperors is a nuance that perhaps corresponds to a distinction, by language, between gods and heroes. 8 In Gaelic, one of the most used words is laech (from laïcus), laech gaile, valiant hero; cur, caur, is an old word (cf.  ); gaiscedach, gaisceach come from gaisced, warriorly valor; greit, champion, referred to the saint or divine champion, cf. Félire oengusso, ed. Stokes, passim; err, applies especially to the warrior who fights on a chariot next to the coachman. We might ask whether nia, gen. niad, hero, and nia, nephew are the same word. In Gallic, dewr is borrowed from the Anglo-Saxon deor, cf. J. Loth, “Questions de grammaire et de linguistique brittonique,” in Revue celtique, 1910, 31, pp. 28-9; J. Vendryes, “Trois historiettes irlandaises du manuscrit de Paris,” ibid., p. 476; arwr, gwron, gwrolddyd indicate pre-eminence, valor. 9 In Greek, the expression   which translates Dei Manes, in Hellenistic inscriptions does not say more (Corpus Inscriptionum Graecarum, 3232). On the coins that bear his effigy, Antinoos is called sometimes  and sometimes  (G. Blum,  , Mélanges d’Hist. et d’Arch., 1913, École française de Rome, p. 65 sqq.). 10 The notion of hero was enlarged to the extreme by Breysig and Wundt. See K. Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer, Berlin, 1905; W. Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, Leipzig, 1909, ch. 3, “Das Zietalter der Helden und Götter”; Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 1904, 2 “Mythus und Religion,” “Tier-Ahnen-und Dämonenkult,” ch. 5, “der Naturmythus.” For Breysig, it is a matter not of heroes but of saviors and civilizers. No matter! He gives ample reign to his imagination in passing from the civilizations of the New World to the ancient civilizations of Asia and Europe. Yahweh, for example, is connected (p. 65 sqq.) to the family of Heilbringer by character-

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istics of a half-animal, half-heroic nature. Mauss, in his review in the Année sociologique, 1907, 10, p. 317 sqq., indicated the point of view from which we judge this work, which we cannot utilize or discuss at length. We attach a completely different interest to the opinions of the philosopher Wundt; I will return to this later. But as respectable as his work seems to us, we find in it more opinion than fact. See M. Mauss, Année sociologique, 1910, 11, p. 52 sqq. 11 Lucian of Samosata, De Dea Syria, 32. 12 W. W. von Baudissin, Adonis und Eshmun, 1911, Introduction, 6, p. 56, “Die Idee des Lebens,” 4th part, 3, p. 450 sqq., “Jahwe der lebende Gott.” 13 Ibid., pp. 230, 255. 14 H. Schmidt, Iona, p. 113 sqq. 15 W. W. von Baudrissin, op. cit., 1, p. 286 sqq. 16 Lucian of Samosata, op. cit., 12. 17 K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 7 sq.; A. C. Haddon, in Hastings Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 6, p. 635 sq. 18 E. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse, 1912, p. 405. 19 Jordanes, De origine actibusque Getarum, 13; “proceres suos, quasi qui fortuna vincebant, non puros homines, sed semideos, id est anses, vocavere.” O. Schrader, “Aryan religion,” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 2, p. 15; O. Schrader, Reallexidon der indogermanischen Altertumskunde, 1901, p. 30: the Ases, like the Asuras, were conceived as souls of the dead; this meaning is carried by the root from which their names derive. 20 Wundt, Elemente…, pp. 281, 366, 372; Völkerpsychologie, 4, 1, 2nd edition, p. 455. H. Usener, Götternamen, 1896, p. 257 sqq. J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion, 1908, p. 323 sqq. 21   , Poetae Lyrici Graeci, 3, 656. 22 Czarnowski, p. 139 sqq. 23 Ibid., p. 271 sqq. 24 Ibid., p. 231 sqq. 25 Ibid., p. 265 sqq. 26 Ibid., p. 262. Cuchulainn is the son of Conchobar and his sister Dechtire (d’Arbois de Jubainville, l’Épopée celtique en Irelande, 1892, p. 38). According to two other traditions, he is the son of Lug or the product of parthogenesis (d’Arbois de Jubainville, op. cit., p. 26 sqq.; E. Hall, The Cuchullin saga, 1898, p. 15 sqq.). 27 The individual to whom the Boyne river owes its name, according to a legend of which we have several versions, is called by the Airne Fíngein (Fingen’s Nightwatch), 2, banghalghaidhe, a female hero (O. J. Bergin et al, Anecdota from Irish manuscripts, 1908, 2, p. 1 sq.). The fountain from which the river emerged belongs to the sidh of Nechtan and Buan is the wife of Nechtan. Nechtan is also called Nuadu, doubtless Nuadu Necht. The river is in fact called Rig mna Nuadat, arm of the wife of Nuadu (Ed. Gwynn, The metrical Dindsenchas, 1903-06, 3, p. 27). On Nuadu Necht, cf. Sir John Rhys, Celtic heathendom, 1886, pp. 119-33, and in Transactions of the Third International Congress for the history of religions, 2, p. 217 sq. I see no reason to place in doubt the hypotheses of Sir John Rhys on the equivalence of Necht-Nechtan and Neptunus; I attribute it not to a borrowing but to an Italo-Celtic concordance. As for Nuadu=Nudd=Nodens, he is one of the protagonists of panceltic mythology. Buan was assimilated by the Dindsenchas to Buan, wife of Dagda, one of the principals of Tuatha de Danann (Wh. Stokes, “The Prose Tales in the Rennes Dindsenchas,” in Revue celtique, 1894, 15, pp. 315, 19; Ed. Gwynn, op. cit., around 73 sqq.). The Sidh of Dagda was precisely the Brugh na Boinne, on the left

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bank of the Boyne (cf. G. Coffey, New Grange (Brugh na Boinne) and other incised tumuli in Ireland, 1912, p. 20 sqq.). Buan or Buanann are part of a group of mythical personalities, which includes two other very vague and important figures, Anu and Danu. She is associated by the dictionary of Cormac with Anu, mother of the gods, as mother of heroes (Sir John Rhys, in Transactions…, loc cit., p. 213; Rhys, Celtic heathendom, p. 430; O’Curry, On the manners and customs of the ancient Irish, 1873, 3, p. 454 sq.). Like Nuadu Necht, she is absolutely on the first level of mythology. Following the Airne Fíngein, loc. cit., the formation of the Boyne is contemporaneous with the birth of Conn Celcathach, whose reign began in 123 A. D. This is a complete example of heroicized divinity. 28 Czarnowski, p. 165 29 The use of the word dia, god, and its feminine form, of which we have two genitives, dee (dé) and déa or dia, is in sum limited. The word is preserved in fully made expressions: Tuatha Dé Danann, Fir Dea (men of the goddess), Tuatha Déa (tribes of the goddess); Fir trin Dea, man of three gods, Tri dee Donann, the three gods of Donu, or Tri dee Dana, the three gods of science; dée ocus an dée, a formula that has become unintelligible, cf. Lebar na h-Uidhre, 16, 2; Coir Anmann, in E. Windische, Irische Texte, 1880, 3, p. 355; MacCulloch, The religion of the ancient Celts, 1911, p. 67. 30 Czarnowski, p. 259, 263. 31 Táin bó Cúailnge, ed. E. Windisch, chapter 4 sqq. On Nuadu Necht, see note 26 above. 32 Rhys, op. cit., p. 216. Cf. Brigantes and Brigid; the Tricases, Baiocasses, Veliocasses and the dii Casses. On the character of social symbols heroes have, see Airne Fíngein, loc. cit.: at the hour of the birth of the hero Conn Cétcathach, Conn of the 100 battles, which coincides with a night of Samhain, a notable fact, the principal marvels of Ireland were produced. Airne Fíngein, 7: the tombs of Eber and Erimon, the two rival sons of Mile, ancestor of the Irish, were separated at the two extremities of the mountain called Sliab Mis (Slieve Mish, County Cork); they must remain separated until the day when one of them will reunite Ireland (nocco comraicfedh engreim flatha for Erinn); they reunite at the birth of Conn Cétcathach; his power has its seat at Tara. 33 E. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 333, Ed. Chavannes, Le dieu du sol dans la Chine antique, 1910, Annales du Musée Guimet, 31, p. 438 sq. 34 Czarnowski, p. 326; cf. pp. 212, 226. 35 Czarnowski believes this (p. 326), but the examples he cites are taken from the feudal states. 36 On the cults of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, cf. Aristotle, Athenaiôn politeia, 58, 17; Demosthenes, 19, 200; Skolia, in T. Bergk, Poetae Lyrici Graeci, 1882, 3, pp. 646, 912. 37 G. Boissier, La religion romaine, 1874, 1, p. 137 sqq. 38 R. Cagnat, Cours d’epigraphie latine, 1890, p. 75 sq. 39 Cf. E. K. Chambers, The medieval stage, 1903, 1, p. 372 sqq. There is no contradiction between the hero as chief or emblem of the group and the hero as emblem of qualities: in Australia, among the Warramunga and the Tjingilli, a clan bears the name of an ancestor Thaballa, the boy who laughs, who seems to incarnate gaiety (Spencer and Gillen, The northern tribes of Central Australia, 1904, p. 207 sq.; E. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 147). 40 E. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 142 sqq. 41 D’Arbois de Jubainville, Cours de littérature celtique, 1883-1902, 5, “l’Épopée celtique en Irlande,” p. 375 sqq. 42 Ibid.; see particularly the piece entitled “Exil des fils d’Usnech,” p. 517 sqq. 43 MacCulloch, op.cit., p. 142 sqq. On the rivalry between Finn and Diarmaid, ibid., p. 140.

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44 “Greit rig, Fled Bricrend” (Banquet of Bricriu), 46, in Windisch, Irische Texte, 1, p. 276. 45 Czarnowski, p. 261; MacCulloch, op. cit., p. 160 sq.; J. O’Donovan, The Book of Rights, 1847, p. 8, note; O’Grady, Silva Gadelica, 1892, 2, p. 416; J. G. Frazer, Golden Bough, 1890, 1, p. 157. 46 J. G. Frazer, Lectures on the early history of kingship, 1905; A. B. Cook, “The European sky-god” in Folk-Lore, 1905 and 1906. 47 MacCulloch, op. cit., p. 159 sqq.; MacCulloch, “Celts” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics, 3, p. 294. Czarnowski seems to want to explain the king-god by means of the hero, p. 261; in any case, he thinks there exists a tight relation between the two notions. 48 Fled Bricrend, 15 (I. T. I. p. 259); Rhys, in Transactions…, 2, p. 202; Dechtire, sister of Conchobar and mother of Chchulainn, is equally called goddess; Cuchulainn is called méic dia Dechtiri = filii deae Dechtire, Book of Leinster, p. 123. 49 J. A. MacCulloch, “Celts,” p. 294; MacCulloch, Religion…, p. 293 sqq. 50 D’Arbois, L’Épopée celtique…, 37-40, 14-21, etc. See however the piece entitled “Cause de la Bataille de Cuncha,” p. 378 sqq.; Nuadu, great-grandfather of Finn, is a druid, but Cumall, father of Finn is a royal champion, that is, a pre-eminent hero; Finn is a filé, cf. O’Grady, op. cit., 1, p. 90. On Nuadu, who is doubtless a heroicized form of god, see note 26 above. 51 Czarnowski, p. 282 sqq. 52 Cicero, De republica, 2, 10, 20; Plutarch, Romulus, 29; etc. 53 Cf. p. 43. 54 Herodotus, 2, 50, writes, in my view justly: μ  "   

#. Cf. F. Sethe, “Heroes and hero-gods” in Hastings’s Encyclopedia…, 6, p. 647 sqq.; A. Moret, Du caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique, 1902. 55 The importance of the cult of heroes among the Celts had been observed by the ancients; this seems to be indicated in this passage of Tertullian, de Anima, 57: “Nasamonas propria oracula apud parentum sepulcra…captare…Celtas apud virorum fortium busta eadem de causa obnoctare ut Nicander affirmat.” 56 Saint Patrick was not canonized validly, but in fact his canonization was recognized by Rome. The right of the archbishop of Armagh under the title of primate of Ireland, founded on the patrician tradition, was recognized at the synod of Kells in 1152, in the presence of a papal legate; Baronius, XIX, s. a. The transferral of the ashes of Saints Patrick, Colomba, and Brigid was carried out in 1183, auctoritate apostolica: Annales d’Ulster, s. a. Cf. Chastelain, Martyrologe Universel traduit du Martyrologe romain, 1823, p. 128; Acta Sanctorum, Martii, 2, p. 524. 57 F. Deneken, “Heros” in W. H. Roscher, Lexikon der griechischen und römischen Mythologie, 1886, 1, p. 2441 sqq.; S. Eitrem, “Heros” in Pauly-Wissowa, RealEncyclopädie, 8, p. 1111 sqq.; H. Usener, Götternamen, 1896; J. E. Rohde, Psyche, 4th edition, 1907; J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the study of Greek religion, 1903. 58 J.-J.-M. de Groot, The religious system of China, 1910, 6. 59 See note 3 above. 60 E. Lucius, Die Anfänge des Heiligenkults in der christlichen Kirche, 1904. 61 K. Breysig, Die Entstehung des Gottesgedankens und der Heilbringer, 1906. 62 E. Durkheim, op. cit., pp. 158 sqq., 331 sqq. 63 R. Dussaud, Introduction à l’Histoire des Religions, 1914: dieux de groupe, p. 71 sqq. A. Negrioli, Dei Genii presso I Romani, 1900, p. 20; Cf. Année sociologique, 5, p. 269.

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Les Mabinogion, translation by J. Loth, 1889, 2nd edition, 1, p. 115 sqq. On the antiquity of this novel, cf., ibid., introduction, pp. 13, 27, 35, 41, 65. On the comic character which the history of heroes can have, cf. K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 13. 65 W.-Y. Evans Wentz, The fairy faith in Celtic countries, 1911, p. 283 sqq. 66 For example, an Athenian school of Dionysiasts raised their priest to the level of hero: Athenische Mittheilungen, 9, p. 291; Usener, Götternamen, p. 250. 67 On the transformation of the cult of heroes into a sort of cult of saints under the Roman empire, cf. Lucius, op. cit., p. 25. 68 Cf. K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 488. 69 Cf. Czarnowski, p. 89, on the mythical character of the legend of Saint Patrick. 70 W. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 1910, 4, p. 155. The phenomena that constitute the principal problems of ethnic psychology (language, myth, morality) are relatively distant from the interest of sociologists. 71 Wundt, Elemente der Völkerpsychologie, 1913, pp. 348, 369; Völkerpsychologie, p. 410 sqq. 72 Ibid., p. 381. 73 On the mythical character of mysteries, cf. L. R. Farnell, Cults of the Greek states, 1907, 3, p. 131. 74 Czarnowski, p. 91. 75 See the examples given in Hubert-Mauss, Mélanges d’histoire des religions (Travaux de l’Année sociologique, 1909), and Essai sur la nature et la fonction du sacrifice, 1898, p. 103 sqq.: the sacrifice of the god. 76 Seler, Darstellungen der mexikanischen Jahresfeste: die achtzehn Jahresfeste der Mexikaner, 1899; human sacrifices with dessication of the victim, feasts 1 and 2. 77 J. M. Robertson, Pagan Christs, studies in comparative hierology, 1903. 78 Lucian of Samosata, De Dea Syria, 55; Mnaseas, fragment 32, in K. Mueller et al., Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum, 1841, 3, p. 155; W. Dittenberger, Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum, 2nd edition, p. 584; Diogenes Laërtius, Book 8, 34. 79 A. Moret, Le rituel du culte divin journalier en Egypte, 1902. 80 See note above. 81 S. Reinach, Cultes, mythes et religions, 1906, 2, p. 85 sqq. (Orpheus); 3, p. 24 (Acteon), p. 54 sqq. (Hippolytus); p. 60 sqq. (Diomede); 4, p. 29 sqq. (Marsyas), p. 45 sqq. (Phaethon). 82 Czarnowski, p. 116. 83 Annaei Lucani Commenta Bernensia, ed. Usener, 1869, p. 32. 84 Cauldron of resurrection: “Branwen, fille de Llyr,” in Les Mabinogion, translated by J. Loth, 1, 2nd edition, p. 129 sqq. Giraldus Cambrensis, Topographia Hiberniae, 3, 25: consecration of the king of Tirconnell. Cf. Czarnowski, p. 186. 85 Sophus Muller, “Det store solvkar fra Gundestrup i Jylland” in Nordiske Fortidsminder, 1, p. 2. C. Jullian, “Le vase de Gundestrup (Notes Gallo-Romaines)” in Revue des études anciennes, 1908, p. 73 sqq. H. Hubert, “Notes d’archéologie et de philologie celtique, 1., Gweilgi, l’océan et le carnassier androphage” in Revue celtique, 1913, 34, p. 1 sqq. 86 Czarnowski, p. 119. 87 “Branwen, fille de Llyr,” in Les Mabinogion, op. cit., p. 76 sqq. 88 Fr. Kaufmann, Balder, Mythus und Sage, 1902. Cf. Année sociologique, 1904, 7, p. 32 sqq.

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89 H. Munro Chadwick, “The ancient Teutonic priesthood” in Folk-Lore, 1900, p. 268 sqq. Cf. Année sociologique, 1902, 5, p. 305. J.-G. Frazer, Golden Bough, 3rd edition, 1906-15, 6 and 7. 90 A. Moret, Caractère religieux de la royauté pharaonique, 1902; cf. Année sociologique, 1904, 7, p. 446 (the daily death of the king identified with Osiris). 91 Lucian of Samosata, De Dea Syria, 50 sqq. 92 E. Lucius, op. cit., pp. 53-4, 64. 93 A few examples: L. R. Farnell, op. cit., 3, pp. 90-1, 93 (Thesmophories); 2, p. 274 (Stepteria, mimetic performance of the adventures of Apollo after his victory over Python). 94 Visit of the god: L. R. Farnell, op. cit., 4, p. 288 (Delia). 95 W. Wundt, Elemente…, p. 452. 96 E. Lehmann, in P. D. Chantepie de la Saussaie, Manuel d’histoire des religions, 1904, French translation, pp. 410 sq., 425. 97 G. Murray, The rise of the Greek epic, 1907, p. 171 sqq. 98 J. Bédier, Les légendes épiques, 1908-1913, 3, p. 39 sqq. 99 Czarnowski, p. 282 sqq. 100 H. Usener, “Der Stoff des griechischen Epos” in Sitzungsberichte d. k. Akad. D. Wiss. In Wien, ph. H. Klasse, CXXXVII, 1897. 101 Cf. W. Wundt, Elemente…, p. 456 sqq. 102 W. Ridgeway, The origin of tragedy, with special references to the Greek tragedians, 1910. 103 W. Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 26 sqq. Herodotus, V, p. 67. 104 In the same way, the dithyramb had passed from the cult of heroes to the cult of Dionysus. W. Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 4. 105 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, 1909, p. 283. 106 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., pp. 204, 231 sqq. A. Dieterich has provided the sketch of a more comprehensive theory in his posthumous work, “Die Entstehung der Tragödie” in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1908, p. 162. He gives a share of it to heroes, to liturgy in general, and particularly to that of the Eleusyian mysteries. 107 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., p. 224 sqq. 108 Ibid., 5, pp. 88 sqq., 124, 169, 172, etc. In Welsh mythology, the rivalry of Gwynn (the blond) and Gwythur, condemend by the judgment of Arthur to do battle every first day of May for the beautiful eyes of Creiddylad is a comparable fact: Kwlhwch et Olwen, Les Mabinogion, op. cit., 1, p. 331. 109 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 107, feast of Carnival at Viza. Cf. J.-C. Lawson, Modern folklore and ancient Greek religion, 1910, pp. 222, 224 sq., 228 (Dramatic feasts of January 1st). 110 E.-K. Chambers, op. cit., 1, pp. 116, 274. R. Eisler, “Der Chiemgauer Schiffsamzug vom 28 Februar 1811” in Zeitschrift des Veriens für Volkskunde, 1911, p. 352 sqq. R. Lobmeyer, “Der Pfingstquack in der Saargegend” in ibid., 1910, p. 399. 111 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 295. Farnell traces the theory of the $   back to the sacramental and cathartic character of ancient feasts of dramatic performances; ibid., p. 237. Cf. H. Reich, Der Mimus, ein litterar-entwickelungsgeschichtlicher Versuch, 1903: cf. Année sociologique, 1905, 8, p. 630. K. Th. Preuss, “Phallische FruchtbarkeitsDämonen als Träger des alt-mexikanischen Dramas” in Archiv für Anthropologie, 1904, N. F., 1, p. 129 sqq. 112 For example, Guy Fawkes: Guy Fawkes Day, November 4th, cf. Folk-Lore, 1907, p. 449.

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H. Usener, Götternamen, p. 247 sqq.; Usener, Der Stoff des griechischen Epos, 1897, passim; Usener, “Heilige Handlung” in Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, 1904, 7, p. 281 sqq; cf. Usener, “Göttliche Synonyme” in Rheinisches Museum für Philologie, 1898, 3, p. 329 sqq. 114 W. Wundt, Elemente…, p. 200 sqq. K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 178. 115 A. Oelrich, “Wettermachen und Neufjahrsmond im Norden” in Zeitschrift des Vereins für Volkskunde, 1910, p. 57 sqq. (responsible and representative individual). 116 Representation of the god: Pausanias, 9, 22, 2 (Tanagra, Hermes criophore). 117 I. A. Dickson, “The burry-man” in Folk-Lore, 1908, p. 379 sqq. (second Friday of August); cf. ibid., 1909, p. 227: the object of the procession is to obtain luck for fisherman; there will be as many fish as there are hairs on the burry-man. 118 Hubert-Mauss, “Esquisse d’une théorie générale de la magie” in Année sociologique, 1904, 7. E. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 529 sqq. Cf E. Rohde, op. cit., 2, pp. 1 sqq., 48 sqq. (the products of the Dionysiac religion). On the orgiastic ceremonies of the cult of Dionysus and the psychic facts that were produced by them, cf. L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, pp. 152 sqq., 157, 161 sq., 186, 193. On possession and feasts, cf. J.-C. Lawson, op. cit., pp. 208, 288, 416: the description of the feasts of the death and resurrection of the Christ in Thessalie, ibid., p. 573 sqq., furnishes an example of the typical and complete feast. 119 F. B. Gummere, The beginnings of poetry, 1901, pp. 441, 471. Cf. Année sociologique, 1903, 6, p. 564. 120 Dramatic performance of the abduction of Proserpina at the Thesmophoria: L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., III, pp. 87, 327; Clement of Alexandria, Prolrept., p. 14; P.-M. Moszkowski, “Die Völkerstämme am Mamberano in Holländ, Neu-Guinea” in Zeitschrift für Ethnologie, 1911, pp. 191, 315 sq.: feast of the July full moon, wedding party of the goddess Bimbajo and the god Mangossi, dramatic dance. Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 95: shamanism and theater in central Asia, p. 100, etc. 121 L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., V, p. 172: bacchants with plastered faces ( = Titans (myth of the murder of the infant-god by the Titans), cf. Nonnus, 47, 733. On the disguising of men as women, cf. L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., pp. 160, 273 (Dionysus), p. 167 (legend of Pentheus). 122 See the equivalences described by H. Usener, “Göttliche Synonyme” in Rheinisches Museum, 1898, 53, p. 329. Heroic associates of Dionysus: L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 100 (Rhesos); p. 168 (Pentheus), Dionysus himself is a hero, ibid., p. 130; see above, note 20. 123 Divinity bearing an epithet furnished by the name of a feast, L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 120: Dionysus %  (%), *    (*   ); p. 405, Ares   (Tegee, sacrificial feast of women); cf. p. 129, +. Personifications of the procession: J.-C. Lawson, op. cit., p. 23, *  , name of the individual represented in a procession whose goal is to obtain rain. Cf. E. Fischer, “Paparuda und Scaloian” in Globus, 1908, 1, p. 13 (Rumania). Personifications of dates: the arrival of Mars, Revue des traditions populaires, 1907, p. 181. Personifications of sacred things, objects of feast: Revue des traditions populaires, 1907, p. 34. 124 Hubert-Mauss, “Mélanges…,” p. 189 sqq., Étude sommaire de la représentation du temps dans la religion et la magie. 125 J.-C. Lawson, op. cit., p. 573: “Happening to be in some village of Euboea during Holy Week, he had been struck by the emotion which the Good Friday service evoked; and observing the next day the same general air of gloom and despondency, he questioned an old woman about it; whereupon she replied: ‘Of course I am anxious; for if Christ does not rise tomorrow, we shall have no corn this year.’” 126 K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 7.

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Hubert-Mauss, “Mélanges…, “ p. 193. E.-B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 1891, 1, 3rd edition, p. 343 sqq. 129 Plutarch, Solon, 29: Solon protests when Thespis confesses to him that his plays have a purely representative character. Cf. Ridgeway, op. cit., p. 58. 130 Example: L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., V, p. 191. 131 H. Jacobi, in Hastings, op. cit., p. 659, of the sentiment of bhakti applied to heroes, W. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 1904, 4, p. 65 sqq. 132 E. Durkheim, op. cit., p. 537 sqq. 133 For example, feasts of trades:  , L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 378. On the concentration of Irish social life during feasts, cf. O’Curry, op. cit., 2, p. 44; 3, p. 542 sq. 134 The comparison of the setting of the sun with death led to treating the solar god as a hero: J. Rhys, Celtic heathendom, p. 383 sqq., “The sun hero.” Cf. W. Wundt, Völkerpsychologie, 4, p. 51. 135 A.-C. Haddon, “Heroes and hero-gods” in Hastings, op. cit., 6, p. 636. 136 J. Harrison, op. cit., p. 323 sqq. 137 E. Lucius, op. cit., p. 61 sqq. 138 Czarnowski, pp. 183, 197. 139 Cf. Ch. Squire, The mythology of the British Islands, 1910, p. 207. 140 O. Schrader, “Aryan religion” in Hastings, op. cit., 2, p. 25. P. Haupt, Purim, p. 19. Hans Schmidt, Jona, 1907, p. 111. Cf. W. Wundt, Elemente…, p. 140: “Und unter den Götterkulten sind es vornchmlich jene, in denem Seelenkult und Jenseitsvorstellungen zusammengeflossen sind, in denen sich die Motive zu dieser dramatischen Weiterbildung der liturgischen Handlungen zusammenfinden.” 141 Cf. E. Rohde, op. cit., p. 146 sqq.; Lucius, op. cit., p. 20. 142 K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 177. 143 Homer, Odyssey, 11, p. 490 sqq. 144 Oracle of heroes: E. Rohde, op. cit., 1, p. 189 sqq. 145 K. Breysig, op. cit., pp. 6, 177. 146 Homer, op. cit., 11, p. 568 sqq. 147 Ibid., p. 601 sqq. 148 J. Rhys, Celtic folk-lore, 1901, p. 493 sqq. 149 On the legend of the battle of Lake Régille, cf. G. Wissowa, Religion und Kultus der Römer, 1902, p. 216. 150 Rhesos: Euripedes, Rhesos, 970 sqq. L.-R. Farnell, op. cit., 5, p. 100. 151 A. Nutt and K. Meyer, The voyage of Bran, 1895, 2 volumes. 152 Fr. Pfister, Der Reliquienkult im Altertum, I, 1909, cf. Année sociologique, 1913, 12, p. 247. 153 K. Breysig, op. cit., p. 177. 154 “Ynglinga Saga,” 12, in W. Morris and E. Magnússon, eds., The Saga Library, 3, p. 22. Cf. M.-E. Seaton, in Hastings, op. cit., 6, p. 667. Frey appears in this passage as a sort of god-king. 155 W. Wundt, Elemente…, p. 392. 156 “Ynglinga Saga,” 13, loc. cit., p. 29. 157 R. Hertz, “Contribution à une étude sur la représentations collective de la mort” in Année sociologique, 1907, 10, p. 48 sqq. 158 Czarnowski, p. 139. O’Curry, op. cit., 1, p. ccxxi. 159 J.-C. Lawson, op. cit., p. 991 sq., 412 sqq. 160 See above, note 102. 161 W. Ridgeway, Early age of Greece, 1901, p. 508 sqq. 128

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Czarnowski, p. 166 sqq. A. Nutt and K. Meyer, Voyages of Bran, 1895, 1, p. 199 sqq. Nutt and Meyer, op. cit., 1, p. 42 sqq; 1897, 2, p. 1 sqq. 164 Example of Hui Amalgada, cf. Czarnowski, p. 159. 165 H. Usener, Götternamen, p. 253 sqq. 166 H. Usener, Stoff des griechischen Epos, loc. cit., p. 19. 167 P. Friedländer, Herakles, 1907, p. 139. 168 J.-F.-M. French, Prehistoric faiths and worship: XI, Irish tribal badges, 1912, p. 165. P.-W. Joyce, A social history of ancient Ireland, 1903, 2, p. 190 sqq. 169 O’Curry, op. cit., 3, p. 265. 170 Plato, Laws, 717 a, distinguishes five categories of beings, to whom divine honors are rendered, in the following order: Olympian gods, chtonian gods, demons, heroes, ancestral gods (