Balder the Beautiful, Volume I A Study in Magic and Religion: the Golden Bough, Part VII | Page 2

due to
simple diffusion, since nothing is more certain than that the various
races of men have borrowed from each other many of their arts and
crafts, their ideas, customs, and institutions. To sift out the elements of
culture which a race has independently evolved and to distinguish them
accurately from those which it has derived from other races is a task of
extreme difficulty and delicacy, which promises to occupy students of
man for a long time to come; indeed so complex are the facts and so
imperfect in most cases is the historical record that it may be doubted
whether in regard to many of the lower races we shall ever arrive at
more than probable conjectures.
Since the last edition of The Golden Bough was published some
thirteen years ago, I have seen reason to change my views on several
matters discussed in this concluding part of the work, and though I
have called attention to these changes in the text, it may be well for the
sake of clearness to recapitulate them here.
In the first place, the arguments of Dr. Edward Westermarck have
satisfied me that the solar theory of the European fire-festivals, which I
accepted from W. Mannhardt, is very slightly, if at all, supported by the
evidence and is probably erroneous. The true explanation of the
festivals I now believe to be the one advocated by Dr. Westermarck
himself, namely that they are purificatory in intention, the fire being
designed not, as I formerly held, to reinforce the sun's light and heat by
sympathetic magic, but merely to burn or repel the noxious things,
whether conceived as material or spiritual, which threaten the life of

man, of animals, and of plants. This aspect of the fire-festivals had not
wholly escaped me in former editions; I pointed it out explicitly, but,
biassed perhaps by the great authority of Mannhardt, I treated it as
secondary and subordinate instead of primary and dominant. Out of
deference to Mannhardt, for whose work I entertain the highest respect,
and because the evidence for the purificatory theory of the fires is
perhaps not quite conclusive, I have in this edition repeated and even
reinforced the arguments for the solar theory of the festivals, so that the
reader may see for himself what can be said on both sides of the
question and may draw his own conclusion; but for my part I cannot
but think that the arguments for the purificatory theory far outweigh the
arguments for the solar theory. Dr. Westermarck based his criticisms
largely on his own observations of the Mohammedan fire-festivals of
Morocco, which present a remarkable resemblance to those of Christian
Europe, though there seems no reason to assume that herein Africa has
borrowed from Europe or Europe from Africa. So far as Europe is
concerned, the evidence tends strongly to shew that the grand evil
which the festivals aimed at combating was witchcraft, and that they
were conceived to attain their end by actually burning the witches,
whether visible or invisible, in the flames. If that was so, the wide
prevalence and the immense popularity of the fire-festivals provides us
with a measure for estimating the extent of the hold which the belief in
witchcraft had on the European mind before the rise of Christianity or
rather of rationalism; for Christianity, both Catholic and Protestant,
accepted the old belief and enforced it in the old way by the faggot and
the stake. It was not until human reason at last awoke after the long
slumber of the Middle Ages that this dreadful obsession gradually
passed away like a dark cloud from the intellectual horizon of Europe.
Yet we should deceive ourselves if we imagined that the belief in
witchcraft is even now dead in the mass of the people; on the contrary
there is ample evidence to show that it only hibernates under the
chilling influence of rationalism, and that it would start into active life
if that influence were ever seriously relaxed. The truth seems to be that
to this day the peasant remains a pagan and savage at heart; his
civilization is merely a thin veneer which the hard knocks of life soon
abrade, exposing the solid core of paganism and savagery below. The

danger created by a bottomless layer of ignorance and superstition
under the crust of civilized society is lessened, not only by the natural
torpidity and inertia of the bucolic mind, but also by the progressive
decrease of the rural as compared with the urban population in modern
states; for I believe it will be found that the artisans who congregate in
towns are far less retentive of primitive modes of thought than their
rustic brethren. In every age cities have been the centres and as it were
the lighthouses from