Organ of The American Anthropological Association, the Anthropological Society of Washington, and the American Ethnological Society of New York Anthropology, Race, Psychology, and Culture.....J. R. KANTOR 267 Songs of the Menomini Medicine Ceremony.. ALANSON SKINNER 290 Unique Prehistoric Carvings from near Vancouver, B. C. HARLAN I. Supplied to members of the American Anthropological Association, the Anthro- pological Society of Washington, and the American Ethnological Society. Address all business communications to the Sec'y-Treas., DR. A. V. KIDDER, AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION VOLUME I PART 1.-Materials for the Physical Anthropology of the Eastern European Jews. By MAURICE FISHBERG. (Pages 1-146.) Price $1.20. PART 2.-Tribes of the Columbia Valley and the Coast of Washington and Oregon. By ALBERT BUELL LEWIS. (Pages 147-209.) Price 50 cents. PART 3.-Historical Jottings on Amber in Asia. By BERTHOLD LAUFER. (Pages 211-244.) Price 30 cents. 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PART 6.-Pottery of the Pajarito Plateau and of some Adjacent Regions in New Mexico. By A. V. KIDDER. (Pages 407-462. cents. Plates XIV-XXVIII.) Price 85 American Anthropologist NEW SERIES VOL. 27 APRIL, 1925 No. 2 IDEAS OF SPACE AND TIME IN THE CONCEPTION OF PRIMITIVE RELIGION S BY WALDEMAR BOGORAS INTRODUCTION HAMANISM along with animism represents not only a special part of the religious conceptions of humanity. It represents a system of primitive mentality, a complex of ideas and perceptions of external things, material and psychical. One may therefore analyze shamanism from the point of view of its prevailing ideas and fundamental perceptions. One may discuss the mathematics, physics, art, and philosophy of shamanism. I want to examine in this sketch the ideas of space and time, as represented in shamanism and generally connected with the primitive conception of the world. I came to my plan when following the ideas of the newest physics as to space and time in their mutual relation. While perusing some works of Einstein, Minkowski, Mach, the Russian professor Umov and others, I came to notice certain coincidences, more or less unexpected. Namely, when these scientists tried to transform their abstract formulae into more concrete combinations of psychical facts the material preferred by them closely resembled some shamanistic stories and descriptions, that are spread among primitive peoples in Asia and America. In a way one could possibly say that the ideas of modern physics about space and time, when clothed with concrete psychical form, appeared as shamanistic. Let us take some well-known combinations mentioned in several works of modern physics. Case 1. Let us assume [says Prof. Umov in one of his lectures] that all of us assembled here, including even myself, tired with the exposition of this matter, went to sleep and in our sleep did not notice that this room began to move in space with equable rectilineal motion, having the velocity of light. What would be the effect of this motion, when we awake again? After the room has moved on with the velocity of light, I could not awake at all or rather by awaking would last the whole of eternity; within my mind will freeze the same dream which occupied it in the first moment of the motion. I have lost the faculty of judging and of spontaneous movement. I remain in the same unchanging posture. The forces sustaining life came to inertness, as well as similar forces destroying life. The same thing happened with all of you, and with all other forces which formerly were active in this room. Your watches came to a standstill. Time does not exist any more for us. We with our frozen minds and perceptions have no more part either in life or in death. Our fate is immortality. What is the inference we must deduce from this ever-frozen state? For whom are our ever-moving doubles immortal? They are not immortal for themselves. They simply dream on and have the same kind of a dream and feel themselves exactly as well or as ill as we feel ourselves when dreaming in the usual manner. They are immortal not for themselves, but for us who stay in this room in the usual condition and meditate on their manner of being. It is for us, as outside onlookers, that all watches and clocks in this moving room came to a standstill, and all processes going on within its space appear as infinitely slow. We shall turn old, shall come to our death, but for our doubles the same moment will continue as before. Then what has become of the usual human idea of time? Whither is gone the absolute sense which we attribute to this idea? This remarkable description by Professor Umov fully coincides with the well-known legend of the Sleeping Beauty. In the enchanted castle in a very similar manner time came to a standstill and a moment of the life of the sleeping people turned to an eternity to the outside observers. Case 2. The phenomena of life are simply the pictures of a cinematograph. Each separate world, each plane has a cinematograph of its own. The film-line on the apparatus moves on with a certain speed and pictures change with the same speed and the onlooker gets a sensation of life action. Men move, suffer, the drama develops itself, hours pass. The time of this action, the passing of hours, the velocity of men's actions, and therefore the velocity of their mind and judging, for the perception of the outside onlooker depends wholly on the velocity of the motion of the film-line of the cinema apparatus. But the men in the pictures can not perceive any change whatever in the time of their acting. They are unable to discern whether the time moves on more slowly or more swiftly. A figure on the cinematograph of some other planet observes the pictures of the cinematograph of our world. He will most certainly perceive the passing of pictures quite differently from our usual earthly perception. One must understand how to transform the perception of pictures from one world to another, from the onlooker inside of the picture to that of the outside of it. . . . |