Forgotten forerunners: Harrison's evolutionary psychology
An evolutionary perspective of this kind represented the most epistemically warranted way to demolish fideistic and theological approaches while relocating the research focus from emically religious understanding to natural processes.
In June 1909, the same year in which Baldwin's Darwin and the Humanities was published, Cambridge classicist Jane E. Harrison participated in the commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Charles Darwin and the 50th anniversary of the publication of the Origin of Species. Although held in a period of anti-Darwinian reaction, it was a spectacle to behold, for this 3-day interdisciplinary celebration was unprecedented in the annals of science in both scope and grandiosity; ‘235 scientists from 167 different countries and 68 British institutions' (Richmond 2006: 447).4 In her contribution, Harrison recognized Darwin as the true founder of the ‘scientific study of Religions', thanks to which the predominance of revealed theology, as ‘a doctrine, a body of supposed truths', and the existence of a ‘teleological scheme complete and unadulterated, which had been revealed to man once and for all by a highly anthropomorphic God', were finally challenged (Harrison 1909: 494-5). According to Harrison,psychology was henceforth to be based on ‘the necessary acquirement of each mental capacity by gradation'. With these memorable words [by Darwin] the door closes on the old and opens on the new horizon. The mental focus henceforth is not on the maintaining or refuting of an orthodoxy but on the genesis and evolution of a capacity, not on perfection but on process. Continuous evolution leaves no gap for revelation sudden and complete. We have henceforth to ask, not when was religion revealed or what was the revelation, but how did religious phenomena arise and develop.
Harrison 1909: 497-8; Harrison refers here to the 6th edition of the Origin of Species; Darwin 1872b: 428
Harrison's evolutionary psychology encapsulated nothing less than a powerful attack against degenerationism, i.e.
the idea of the degenerescence and decadence from a primordial and divinely pure monotheism into polytheism. As we have already seen, this idea, originally advanced in its Victorian form by Lang, came to dominate the HoR until the 1950s (Harrison 1909: 498; Wheeler-Barclay 2010: 104-39). Harrison’s goal was to dethrone anthropomorphism, with gods in the image of men, as the ‘final achievement in religious thought’, and make religious scholars recognize that, instead, ‘anthropomorphism lies at the very beginning of our consciousness’ (Harrison 1909: 508). As she writes, ‘the “decadence” theory is dead and should be buried’ (Harrison 1909: 498).After a biographical sketch of Darwin’s gradual abandonment of religious faith, Harrison focused on the ‘religion of the primitive peoples’, in which she included GraecoRoman religions as well, to highlight that ‘vague beliefs necessarily abound’ while ‘ritual is dominant and imperative’ (Harrison 1909: 498). The ‘primitive mind’, as well as that of a child,5 is compelled to understand the world not just by empirical, present observation, but also by imaginatively resorting to anthropomorphic thinking, to ‘dreams, visions, hallucinations, nightmares’, to emotional memories of the past, to problem-solving about the future. The understanding of such a ‘supersensuous world’ is further elaborated into a properly spiritual mind-body dualism, which brings about ‘ghosts and sprites, ancestor worship, the soul, oracles, prophecy’ (Harrison 1909: 499-502; a hint of obsessivecompulsive disorder in religious thinking and acting is also available on p. 502). Then, Harrison recognized that such a folk-theory of religious development would have soon fallen into oblivion through scientific trial and error, had it not been for ritual: ‘but man has ritual as well as mythology; that is, he feels and acts as well as thinks; nay, he probably feels and acts long before he definitely thinks. This contradicts all our preconceived notions of theology’, for worship precedes belief in gods (Harrison 1909: 503). Dance, ecstatic rapture, ritual imitation (‘imitation begets custom, custom begets sanctity’; Harrison 1909: 509), emotion, magical ‘pan-vitalism’ (Harrison 1909: 506), the emotional experience of agency, power and will; all concur to substantiate religion more than any belief. Summarizing the psychosocial features of ritual, Harrison stressed that ‘imitation, repetition, uniformity and social collectivity have been found by the experience of all time to have a twofold influence - they inhibit the intellect, they stimulate and suggest emotion, ecstasy, trance’ (Harrison 1909: 510, based on Beck 1904).