Chapter 55 Public Exorcism: Demons Are Everywhere

The original principle of transferring disasters to others, to animals and objects, was explained and proved in the previous chapter.The savages also use similar means to relieve the various disasters that the whole society suffers from.It is by no means an uncommon or exceptional practice to sweep away the accumulated sorrows of a whole people all at once; on the contrary, it is done in many places, at first occasionally, then periodically, annually. We have some work to do to understand what is the thinking that drives people to do this.Our philosophic upbringing has stripped nature of its personality and reduced it to the unknown cause of a well-ordered series of phenomena acting on our senses, and we find it difficult to consider ourselves in the place of primitive beings.The same natural phenomena that we see, in the eyes of primitive people, are the gestures of the gods or the craftsmanship of the gods.For so many generations, multitudes of gods have been very close to us, and many, many gods have gradually receded from us, farther and farther away, driven by the wand of science from the hearth and the home, from the ruins of huts and overgrown trees. From the castle of ivy, from the glades and lonely ponds where gods come and go, from the shattered clouds that spit lightning, from the silver-gray moonlight and the flaming Driven away in a pale cloud rimmed with golden twilight.Drive them all even from the last stronghold of the sky, and none but children see the firmament as a veil that hides the splendor of the celestial world from mortal eyes.Only in the poet's dreams, only in the passionate speech of the orator, can one occasionally see the final fluttering of the banners of the far-retired gods, hear the beating of their invisible wings and the mocking laughter, Or the music of angelic circumflexes dies in the distance.All this is completely different for primitive people.In his imagination, the world was still full of those strangely dressed fetishes long since abandoned by waking philosophy, and fairies and spirits, ghosts and demons were always dancing around him whether he was awake or asleep.They watched his tracks, disturbed his senses, entered his body, haunted him, deceived him, tortured him in a thousand whimsical ways of doing evil.Generally speaking, he regards the disasters, losses, and pains he encounters, either as enemies performing magic, or as elves venting hatred, anger, or mischief.They haunted him all the time, they made him drowsy, they bothered him day and night, they made him angry, his indescribable longing to get rid of them sometimes made him helpless, intolerable, turning his face fiercely, His persecutors endeavored to drive this whole lot from his land, to clear away their swarming swarms, and enable him, for a time at least, to breathe more freely and go about his business. , undisturbed.Primitive man, therefore, strives to rid himself of all his troubles in the form of exorcising or driving away demons and ghosts on a large scale.They think that if only they can get rid of these hideous tormentors, they can live happily and innocent again, and the story of Eden and the ancient poetic golden age will become a real reality again.