which the life of the women falls in these same lines of fecundity, nurture and growth, so that their association and attendance on the flocks and crops should further the propitious course of things also by the subtler means of sympathetic suggestion. There is a magical congruity of great force as between womankind and the propagation of growing things. And these subtler ways of influencing events are especially to the point in all contact with these non-human sentient beings, since they are speechless and must therefore in the main be led by living example rather than by precept and expostulation. And, again, being sentient, somewhat after the fashion of mankind, it is not to be believed that they have not the gift visibly common to mankind and many animals, of following their leader by force of sympathetic imitation. It may not be easy to say how far this instinctive impulse of imitation, necessarily credited to all phenomena to which anthropomorphic traits are imputed, is to be accounted the ground of all sympathetic magic; but it is at least to be accepted as sufficient to account for much of what is done to induce fertility in flocks and crops.
So that on many accounts it is evident that in the nature of things, the care of flocks and crops is the women’s affair, and it follows that all intercourse with the flocks and crops in the early days had best be conducted by the women, who alone may be presumed intuitively to apprehend what is timely, due and permissible in these premises. It is all the more evident that communion with these wordless others should fall to the women, since the like wordless communion with their own young is perhaps the most notable and engaging trait of their own motherhood. The parental bent also throws a stress of sentiment on this simple and obvious phase of motherhood, such as has made it in all men’s apprehension the type of all kindly and unselfish tendance; at the same time this ubiquitous parental instinct tends constantly to place motherhood in the foreground in all that concerns the common good, in as much as all that is worth while, humanly speaking, has its beginning here. In that early phase of culture in which the beginnings of tillage and cattle-breeding were made and in which the common good of the group was still the chief daily interest about which men’s solicitude and forethought are habitually engaged, motherhood will always have been the central fact in the scheme of human things. So that in this cultural phase the parental bent and the sense of workmanship will have worked together to bring the women into the chief place in the technological scheme; and the sense of imitative propriety, as well as the recognised constraining force exercised by example and mimetic representation through the impulse of imitation, will have guided workmanship shrewdly to play up womankind and motherhood in an ever-growing scheme of magical observances designed to further the natural increase of flocks and crops. Where anthropo-morphic imputation runs free and with conviction, such observances, designed to act sympathetically on the natural course of phenomena, unavoidably become an integral feature of the technological scheme, no less indispensable and putatively no less efficacious to this end than the mechanical operations with which these observances are associated. There is no practicable line of division to be drawn between sympathetic magic and anthropomorphic technology; and in the known cultures of this early type it is for the most part an open question whether the magical observances are to be accounted an adjunct to what we would recognise as the technological routine of the art, or conversely. The two are not commonly held apart as distinct categories, and both are efficacious and indispensable; and in both the felt efficacy runs on much the same grounds of imputed anthropomorphic traits.57 On grounds of magical-technological expediency, then, as well as by force of the sense of intrinsic propriety, women come to take the leading rôle in the industrial community of the early time, and the community’s material interests come to centre about them and their relation to the natural products of the fields; and since this interest bears immediately on the fecundity of the flocks and crops, it is particularly in their character of motherhood that the women come most vitally into the case. The natural produce on which the life of the group depends, therefore, will appertain to the women, in some intimate sense of congruity, so that in the fitness of things this produce will properly come to the good of the community through their hands and will logically be dispensed somewhat at their discretion. So great is the reach of this logic of congruity that in the known cultures which show much reminiscence of this early technological phase it is commonly possible to detect some remnant of such discretionary control of the natural produce by the women. And modern students, imbued with modern preconceptions of ownership and predaceous mastery, have even found themselves constrained by this evidence to discover a system of matriarchy and maternal ownership in these usages that antedate the institution of ownership. Conceivably, the usages growing out of this preferential position of women in the technology and ritual of early husbandry will, now and again, by the uniform drift of habituation have attained such a degree of consistency, been wrought into so rigid a form of institutions, as to have been carried over into a later phase of culture in which the ownership of goods is of the essence of the scheme; and in such case these usages may then have come to be reconstrued in terms of ownership, to the effect that the ownership of agricultural products vests of right in the woman, the mother of the household.
But if the magical-technological fitness and efficacy of women has led to the growth of institutions vesting the disposal of the produce in the women, in a more or less discretionary way, the like effect has been even more pronounced, comprehensive and lasting as regards the immaterial developments of the case. With great uniformity the evidence from the earlier peaceable agri-cultural civilisations runs to the effect that the primitive ritual of husbandry, chiefly of a magical character, is in the hands of the women and is made up of observances presumed to be particularly consonant with the phenomena of motherhood.58 And presently, when the more elaborate phases of these magical rites of husbandry come, by further superinduction of anthropomorphism, to grow into religious observances and mythological tenets, the greater daimones and divinities that emerge in the shuffle are women, and again it is the motherhood of women that is in evidence. The deities, great and small, are prevailingly females; and the great ones among them seem invariably to have set out with being mothers.
In the creation of female and maternal divinities the parental instinct has doubtless greatly re-enforced the drift of the instinct of workmanship in the same direction. The female deities have two main attributes or characteristics because of which they came to hold their high place; they are goddesses of fertility in one way or another, and they are mothers of the people. It is perhaps unnecessary to hold these two concomitant attributions apart, as many if not most of the great deities claim precedence on both grounds. But the lower orders of female divinities in the matriarchal scheme of things divine will much more commonly specialise in fertility of crops than in maternity of the people.
The number of divinities that have mainly or solely to do with fertility is greater than that of those which figure as mothers of the people, either locally or generally. And perhaps in the majority of cases there is some suggestive evidence that the great female deities have primarily been goddesses of fertility having to do with the growth of crops - and, usually in the second place, of animals - rather than primarily mothers of the tribe;59 which would suggest that their genesis and character is due to the canons of the sense of workmanship more than to the parental bent, although the latter seems to have had its part in shaping many of them if not all.
The female divinities belong characteristically to the early or simpler agricultural civilisation, and what has been said goes to argue that they stand on technological grounds in the main; indeed, in their genesis and early growth, they are in good part of the nature of technological expedients. They are at home with the female technology of early tillage especially, and perhaps only in the second place do they serve the magical and religious needs of peoples given mainly to breeding flocks and herds; although it is to be noted that most of the greater known goddesses of the ancient Western world, as well as many of the minor ones, are also found to be closely related to various of the domestic animals. In America and the Far East, of course, any connection with the domestication of animals would appear improbable.
With a change of base, from this early husbandry to a civilisation in which the main habitual interest is of another kind, and in which the habitual outlook of men is less closely limited by the same anthropomorphic conceptions, of nurture and growth, the goddesses begin to lose their preferential claim on men’s regard and fall into
