g highly unpleasant.

Spiritual means of education, however, are always more effective than
physical, if designed and applied with sufficient wisdom. The
bull-roarer, of which something has been already said, furnishes the
ceremonies with a background of awe. It fills the woods, that surround
the secret spot where the rites are held, with the rise and fall of
its weird music, suggestive of a mighty rushing wind, of spirits in
the air. Not until the boys graduate as men do they learn how the sound
is produced. Even when they do learn this, the mystery of the voice
speaking through the chip of wood merely wings the imagination for
loftier flights. Whatever else the high god of these mysteries,
Daramulun, may be for these people--and undoubtedly all sorts of trains
of confused thinking meet in the notion of him--he is at any rate the
god of the bull-roarer, who has put his voice into the sacred instrument.
But Daramulun is likewise endowed with a human form; for they set up
an image of him rudely shaped in wood, and round about it dance and
shout his name. Daramulun instituted these rites, as well as all the
other immemorial rites of the assembled tribe or tribes. So when over
the heads of the boys, prostrated on the ground, are recited solemnly
what Mr. Lang calls "the ten commandments," that bid them honour the
elders, respect the marriage law, and so on, there looms up before
their minds the figure of the ultimate law-giver; whilst his unearthly
voice becomes for them the voice of the law. Thus is custom exalted,
and its coercive force amplified, by the suggestion of a power--in
this case a definitely personal power--that "makes for righteousness,"
and, whilst beneficent, is full of terror for offenders.

* * * * *

And now it may seem high time to pass on from the sociological and
external view that has hitherto been taken of primitive religion to
a psychological view of it--one that should endeavour to disclose the
hidden motives, the spiritual sources, of the beliefs that underlie
and sustain the customary practices. But precisely at this point the
anthropological treatment of religion is apt to prove unsatisfactory.
History can record that such and such is done with far more certainty
than that such and such a state of mind accompanies and inspires the
doing. Besides, the savage is no authority on the why and wherefore
of his customs. "However else would a reasonable being think of