e are dealing with the origins of Religion; and what I want
the reader to see is that it was just this breaking up of the old
psychologic unity and continuity of man with his surroundings which led
to the whole panorama of the rituals and creeds. Man, centering round
himself, necessarily became an exile from the great Whole. He committed
the sin (if it was a sin) of Separation. Anyhow Nemesis was swift. The
sense of loneliness and the sense of guilt came on him. The realization
of himself as a separate conscious being necessarily led to his
attributing a similar consciousness of some kind to the great Life
around him. Action and reaction are equal and opposite. Whatever he may
have felt before, it became clear to him now that beings more or less
like himself--though doubtless vaster and more powerful--moved behind
the veil of the visible world. From that moment the belief in Magic and
Demons and Gods arose or slowly developed itself; and in the midst of
this turmoil of perilous and conflicting powers, he perceived himself an
alien and an exile, stricken with Fear, stricken with the sense of Sin.
If before, he had experienced fear--in the kind of automatic way of
self-preservation in which the animals feel it--he now, with fevered
self-regard and excited imagination, experienced it in double or treble
degree. And if, before, he had been aware that fortune and chance were
not always friendly and propitious to his designs, he now perceived
or thought he perceived in every adverse happening the deliberate
persecution of the powers, and an accusation of guilt directed against
him for some neglect or deficiency in his relation to them. Hence by
a perfectly logical and natural sequence there arose the belief in
other-world or supernatural powers, whether purely fortuitous and
magical or more distinctly rational and personal; there arose the sense
of Sin, or of offence against these powers; there arose a complex ritual
of Expiation--whether by personal sacrifice and suffering or by
the sacrifice of victims. There arose too a whole catalogue of
ceremonies--ceremonies of Initiation, by which the novice should learn
to keep within the good grace of the Powers, and under the blessing of
his Tribe and the protection of its Totem; ceremonies of Eucharistic
meals which should restore the lost sanctity of the common life and
remove the sense of guilt and isolation; ceremonies of Marriage and
rules and rites of sex-connection, fitted to c