Revival: Studies of Savages and Sex (1929) by Alfred Ernest Crawley Theodore Besterman

Author:Alfred Ernest Crawley, Theodore Besterman [Alfred Ernest Crawley, Theodore Besterman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781138568785
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2019-01-31T00:00:00+00:00

VII. LIFE AND DEATH

IN primitive thought, so far as we can analyse it, life and death are not the balanced opposites which civilized contemplation has made them. To early man life is the normal condition, death an abnormal catastrophe, unnatural, miraculous, and terrible. An exception is to be made when a man kills his quarry or his foe; here the satisfaction of an end achieved inhibits the feelings aroused by the non-violent death of a tribesman. According to Australian philosophy, men would live on indefinitely, except for the result of actual physical violence or of sorcery, a refined form of it.1 This is the usual view of the savage; though it is hardly a reasoned opinion. The savage, like the majority of civilized men, lives in the present; this fact involves a certain inertia of thought as to the contrast between life and death, and it is true of both stages of culture that “the fear of death is as nothing.”2 The primitive mind, when it exercised itself on the subject of life, was concerned with the acquisition of physical strength and moral influence rather than with the problem of the nature of vitality; but the constant rage and terror which characterized its attitude towards death involved a permanent concern with the supposed causes of an event which, though inevitable, remained a mystery and a violation of natural law.

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