The Trobriand Islanders, and some Australians, are reported to be unaware of the causal connection between sexual intercourse and procreation; they are said to believe that spirit-children enter the wombs of women on appropriate occasions, and that sexual intercourse is not a determinant of birth. The next and most famous characteristic of the primitive mentality has been called "participation", or more specifically, "mystical participation". By “folklore” we mean that whole and consistent body of culture which has been handed down, not in books but by word of mouth and in practice, from time beyond the reach of historical research, in the form of legends, fairy tales, ballads, games, toys, crafts, medicine, agriculture, and other rites, and forms of social organization, especially those that we call “tribal.” This is a cultural complex independent of national and even racial boundaries, and of remarkably similarity through the world; in other words, a culture of extraordinary vitality. It has been taken for granted by the older “animists” that human nature is a constant, so that “if we were in the position of the primitives, our mind being what it is now, we should think and act as they do.” Or on the other hand, for anthropologists and psychologist of the type of Lévy-Bruhl, there can be recognized an almost specific distinction between the primitive mentality and ours. Mode of Thinking. This, moreover, was his means of “education”; for the type can be imitated, whereas the individual can only be mimicked. So long as the material of folklore is transmitted, so long is the ground available on which the superstructure of full initiatory understanding can be built. Primitive Mentality ... Invisible Forces “…to the primitive, the surrounding world is the language of spirits speaking to a spirit. It is a national, rather than a cultural type that is constructed, and to this one type everyone is expected to conform, at the price of being considered a peculiar person or even a traitor. It is argued that what is true for the primitive mentality is unrelated to experience, i.e., to such “logical” experience as ours. Thus, in believing with Schiller that “it is the Spirit that fashions the body for itself” (Wallenstein, 111.13), the “primitive” is in agreement with a unanimous tradition and with Christian doctrine: … “It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing”, John 6:63. ", Now it is impossible not to be struck by the fact that it is precisely a state of being in which "everywhere and every when is focused" (Dante), this is for the theologian and the metaphysician "divine": that at this level of reference "all states of being, seen in principle, are simultaneous in the eternal now", and that "he who cannot escape from the standpoint of temporal succession so as to see all things in their simultaneity is incapable of the least conception of the metaphysical order." We no longer live among the shapes which we had fashioned within: we have become mere spectators, reflecting them from without.”. If it is difficult for us to understand the primitive belief in the efficacy of symbolic rites, it is largely because of our limited knowledge of the prolongations of the personality, which forces us to think in terms of a purely physical causality. It is characterized in the first place by a “collective ideation”; ideas are held in common, whereas in a civilized group, everyone entertains ideas of his own. The next and most famous characteristic of the primitive mentality has been called “participation”, or more specifically, “mystical participation”. It is, in fact, for the sake of such a self-realization that the tradition itself is perpetuated. In the present case the proof that the meaning of the safely pin had been understood can be pointed to in the fact that the heads or eyes of prehistoric fibulae are regularly decorated with a repertoire of distinctly solar symbols. The life of the popular wisdom extends backward to a point at which it becomes indistinguishable from the primordial tradition itself, the traces of which we are more familiar with in the sacerdotal and royal arts; and it is in the sense, and by no means with "democratic" implications, that the lore of the people, expressed, in their culture, is really the word of God—Vox populi vox Dei. Whoever is acquainted with the technical language of initiatory symbolism (in the present case, the language of the "lesser mysteries" of the crafts) will recognize at once that the straight pin or needle is a symbol of generation, and the safety pin a symbol or regeneration. It will be seen that the Trobriander view that sexual intercourse alone is not a determinant of conception but only its occasion, and the “spirit-children” enter the womb, is essentially identical with the metaphysical doctrine of the philosophers and theologians. In the safety pin, the originally straight stem of the pin or needle is bent upon itself so that its point passes back again through the "eye" and is held there securely, at the same time that is fastens whatever material is has penetrated. Natural or artificial objects are not for the primitive, as they can be for us, arbitrary symbols of some other and higher reality, but actual manifestations of this reality; the eagle or the lion , for example, is not so much a symbol or image of the Sun as it is the Sun in a likeness (the form being more important than the nature in which it may be manifested); and in the same way every house is the world in a likeness, and every altar situated at the center of the earth; it is only because we are more interested in what things are than in what they mean, more interested in particular facts than in universal ideas, that this is inconceivable to us. That seems like nonsense to us. Actually, our discovery of chromosomes does not in any way account for the origin of life, but only tell us more about its mechanism. When this belief in the old men and their power – which, under tribal conditions, I have nnever know to be abused – dies, or declines, as it does with ‘civilization’,. LBvy-Bruhl's theory of-primitive mentality is complete in his first volume on the subject. In any case, the preliminary rite of “mimetic magic” is an enactment of the “formal cause” of the subsequent operation, whether it be the art of agriculture of that or war that is in question, and the artist has a right to expect that the actual operation, if carried out on this plan, will be successful. 32He further specifies that it is a “mentality in which the logical and the prelogical can be coexistent and make themselves equally perceptible in mental processes.” Similarly, he emphasizes that “primitive mentality” is far from “appear[ing] to us unbridled and unregulated, and just as purely arbitrary” (Lévy-Bruhl 1926, 106, 108). conjunction of father and mother, the mother's period, and the presence of the Gandharva: of which the two first may be called dispositive and third an essential cause. What real distinction of two mentalities can be made is, in fact, the distinction of a modern from a mediaeval or oriental mentality; and this is not a specific distinction, but one of sickness from health. 111.3); "The power of the soul, which is in the semen through the spirit enclosed therein, fashions the body" (Sum. We shall consider, then, the "primitive mentality" as described, very often accurately enough, by Lévi-Bruhl and other psychologist-anthropologists. In the various kinds of proletarian government, on the other hand, we meet always with the intention to achieve a rigid an inflexible uniformity: all the forces of “education”, for example, are directed to this end. We shall consider, then, the “primitive mentality” as described, very often accurately enough, by Lévi-Bruhl and other psychologist-anthropolosits. Hence also its efficacy.” Far more rarely, an archeologist such as Andrae has the courage to express as his own belief that “when we sound the archetype, the ultimate origin of the form, then we find that it is anchored in the highest, not the lowest,” and to affirm that “the sensible forms [of art], in which there was at first a polar balance of physical and metaphysical, have been more and more voided of content on their way down to us.”. It would be truer to say that under these conditions the individual is devoid of social ambition. The main point that we have wished to bring out is that the whole body of the motifs represent a consistent tissue of interrelated intellectual doctrines belonging to a primordial wisdom rather that to a primitive science; and that for this wisdom it would be almost impossible to conceive a popular, or even in any common sense of the term, a human origin. It is not for one moment realized that a possession of ideas in common does not necessarily imply the “collective origination” of these ideas. In the present case the proof that the meaning of the safely pin had been understood can be pointed to in the fact that the heads or eyes of prehistoric fibulae are regularly decorated with a repertoire of distinctly solar symbols. If we choose to call this an "unpractical" possibility, we must not forget that at the same time "the primitives constantly make use of the real connection between cause and effect
they often display an ingenuity that implies a very accurate observation of the "connection. '” What we call “inventions” are nothing but the application of known metaphysical principles to practical ends; and that is why tradition always refers the fundamental inventions to an ancestral culture hero (always, in the last analysis, a descent of the Sun), that is to say, to a primordial revelation. The world’s museums are filled with the traditional arts of innumerable peoples whose culture has been destroyed by the sinister power of our industrial civilization: peoples who have been forced to abandon their own highly developed and beautiful techniques an significant designs in order to preserve their very lives by working as hired laborers at the production or raw materials. Two closely connected questions must first be disposed of. Hence also its efficacy. The safety pin is, moreover, the equivalent of the button, which fastens things together and is attached to them by means of a thread which passes through and again returns to its perforations, which correspond to the eye of the needle. It is here, as Jules Romains has said, that we find “the richest possible variety of individual states of consciousness, in a harmony made valuable by its richness and density”, words that are peculiarly applicable, for example, to Hindu society. SUPPLEMENT I THE PROBLEM OF MEANING IN PRIMITIVE LANGUAGES By BR0NIsLAw Maw4owsKI, Ph.D., D.Sc. What we call "inventions" are nothing but the application of known metaphysical principles to practical ends; and that is why tradition always refers the fundamental inventions to an ancestral culture hero (always, in the last analysis, a descent of the Sun), that is to say, to a primordial revelation. The significance of the metal pin, and that of the thread left behind by the needle (whether or not secured to a button that corresponds to the eye of the needle) is the same: it is that of the “thread-spirit” by which the Sun connects all things to himself and fastens them; he is the primordial embroiderer and tailor, by whom the tissue of the universe, to which our garments are analogous, is woven on a living thread. We, on the other hand, trace it in reverse. The next and most famous characteristic of the primitive mentality has been called "participation", or more specifically, "mystical participation". From time immemorial, it forms a part of the inheritance which is handed down from generation to generation. The relation between the popular and the learned metaphysics is moreover, analogous to and partly identical with that of the lesser to the greater mysteries. 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