Ritual and Regalia
I
THE anthropologists have said, of late years, a great many fascinating things about ritual and belief, custom and myth, magic and religion. They have invited us to observe, within ourselves, vestiges of the prehistoric soul; and far from endeavoring to free us of senseless superstitions, they positively encourage us to foster those gestures and reactions which mean that, a few thousand years ago, our ancestors were, in certain circumstances, happy or afraid. If we indulge in sympathetic or symbolic magic, the anthropologists are not shocked; they are genuinely pleased.
The physicist or the geologist may think you a fool for knocking wood, or refusing to destroy an old photograph of a friend, or looking at the moon over your right shoulder; he may even try to argue you out of it. But the anthropologist loves you just in proportion as you seem to him to be folklore. You do not have to be ashamed, before him, of these little habits; he finds them engaging.
So we love the anthropologists better than other gentlemen with card-catalogues. They cocker our weaknesses; they love our instinctive and unconsidered gestures. They do not even want us to be reasonable beings. When a farmer refuses to set cedar posts except with the moon in a certain quarter, the biologist or the chemist is annoyed; but the anthropologist would rather go without his garden gate forever than appeal to the farmer on the score of reason. He feels a positive affection for any man who sees an occult relation between the setting of cedar posts and the phases of the moon. That is the sort of person that, to suit his book, we ought all to be. Very comfortable people, the anthropologists: easy to get on with. No hypocrisy needed. They love to look at you over the pages of The Golden Bough and put you, mentally, into a footnote.
Ritual is only one of the things with which anthropology concerns itself; and ritual, of course, is usually tied up either with magic or with religion. (No two anthropologists, I believe, ever quite agree as to the relation between the two.) It is, naturally, not my object to consider the love of ritual scient ifically, or yet exhaustively. I am not equipped for dealing with folklore. I have referred to the anthropologists only because I think, being passionately preoccupied with our more picturesque weaknesses, that they ought to answer a few questions.
What is it, for example, that makes men, quite apart from magical or religious purposes, love to invent absurd rituals of their own, and love to ornament themselves with queer costumes and queerer insignia — not on Mardi Gras or Hallowe’en, or for theatrical purposes, but regularly, and merely for the sake of doing it? Why do they do it even more in America than in the older and presumably more conservative nations?
The peasantry in any land are the guardians of ancient customs and the preservers of old superstitions. But in America we have no peasantry; and it is not, in any case, our colorless equivalent for the peasant who so indulges himself: it is the business man, the dweller in towns, the hard-headed trader. We have more secret societies than any other country; and the man who is willing to make a guy of himself in the public streets is the very man who, in the other relations of life, is from Missouri and wants to be shown. A great many citizens who would feel the assumption of evening clothes an affectation not to be borne are quite willing to be seen on Main Street with turbans on their heads and cabalistic signs all over them. They are not praying for rain, or attempting to terrify their enemies: most of them are nominally Christians, and they all employ physicians when they are ill. They are doing it for the fun of it; and the fun of it is so real that they do not mind looking absurd to the uninitiated.
It must be a very strong urge. The average American citizen has less use for symbolism than any other civilized being; but is there any other civilized being who indulges in such vast and varied orgies of it? Citizens who resent an American ambassador’s wearing knee breeches at court are perfectly willing, themselves, to parade, in the most astonishing clothes, behind a camel or a bear. We who censure the diplomacies of the Old World and must have open covenants openly arrived at, are more addicted to secret societies than the Chinaman himself.
Is all this initiating, and swearing of oaths, and reverencing of insignia, mere protest against the drabness of life? If so, why is it that the women do not indulge? Women are supposed to be fonder, both of secrets and of ornaments, than men are; yet you will notice that it is not the women of the country who create lodges and invent rituals and fashion symbolic costumes for themselves. Women do not wear aprons in the street if they can help it; but men do.
The last thing that I intend or desire is to ridicule this almost universal pastime of the opposite sex. There must be some good and dignified reason for it, humanly speaking, or it would not be so widespread. There must also be something in the male heart that is left out of the female heart. It would be exceedingly interesting to know what these facts and reasons are. I wonder if the anthropologists can tell. Women are quite willing to band themselves together in societies: witness the prevalence of women’s clubs all over the country. But it does not seem to occur to them to make their societies secret, and their ritual is open to all, being merely Cushing’s Manual. Nor do they sport insignia.
That women have lodges as well as men, I am quite aware. But their lodges are, for the most part, mere parasites of the masculine orders, consisting of the ‘wives, sisters, daughters, and widows’ of the fraternal band. Women never started out, by themselves, to be Masons or Odd Fellows or Red Men or Elks. In order to have a ‘Society of the Brides of the Odd Fellows,’ you have first to have Odd Fellows, well established. Sororities did not exist until the spread of fraternities in coeducational institutions practically challenged the girls to create them. True, women seem to be Past Grands and Exalted Rulers, but there seems to be less solemnity about it; and certainly they do not parade in public.
Having occasion, once, in the interest of a public petition, to look through a list of the orders and societies which our very small town supports, I was confronted by many congeries of initials whose purport I could not even guess. O.F.’s and R.M.’s were simple; but what was the true meaning of F. and A.M., P.O.S. of A., O.U.A.M., and such? I came to have a real affection for people who wrote themselves out boldly as Knights of the Golden Eagle and Foresters of America.
I regretted the absence of the Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise, immortalized by Mr. Octavus Roy Cohen; and had to put up with the Ancient United Order, Sons and Daughters, brothers and Sisters of Moses.
I gathered incidentally that the colored race was more sociable and coöperative in these matters; less solemn and secret than the whites. Practically all my colored acquaintance belongs to lodges, and practically none of my white acquaintance does; but I think I am right in saying that the colored lodge-member is both franker and more practical about his secret society. Sick benefits and burial expenses are no side issue with him, but the main thing; and he does not conceal himself behind initials. He seems to reserve his theatricality for his churches. He shows more of his famous histrionicism in the technique of building a parsonage or getting converted from one Baptist sect to another, than in public display of fraternal organizations. Naturally, my experience is limited; but I have never happened to see a railway station filled with colored men in turbans and caftans and sashes. You might expect, indeed, to see the race that invented leopard societies do something more picturesque than white inhibitions can quite permit. On the contrary, in America it is the white man who takes the lead, and his colored brother seems content with mild imitation.
II
Here is the question I should like to put to the anthropologist: —
What is that impulse resident in the heart of the adult male of the white race, who is also a responsible citizen of a civilized country, which makes him desire to belong to a secret society and makes him, so far from being ashamed of it or apologetic for it, willing and glad to parade his mystic signs and fantastic clothes in the broad light of day? What is this instinct, so strong that it conquers his general horror of being conspicuous or absurd? Why is a man of the ‘Babbitt’ type, who objects to being called a real-estate man instead of a realtor, happy to be known as a tree in the Smithville Forest of Tall Cedars of Lebanon?
It is not religion, for the Trees go to different churches. It is not — essentially at least — politics; for none of the great secret societies in the United States has ever been publicly associated with political manœuvring, like the G.A.R. and the American Legion, or the labor organizations — which are not secret. I speak under correction; but these organizations do not seem to be out for ‘power.’
It is an historic fact, I believe, that French Free-Masonry, which is both atheistic in nature and political in purpose, has been repudiated by British Free Masons, if not by American. It cannot be that lodge members find any magical value in their rituals and oaths; would not most of them, indeed, be shocked at the very notion of magic? The benefit-association side of it is easy to understand; but that does not explain the initiations and the clothes and the symbolism.
I have heard it said that it is ‘good’ for a man, in the business sense, to belong to some large secret society. But if that is all, why the paraphernalia? Why, too, are these initiatives confined to the male? In Dahomey the women had — perhaps still have, though I gather that Dahomey has been a good deal expurgated — a very powerful secret organization, strong as a leopard society. I once heard Professor Gilbert Murray make a suffrage speech in which he used the Dahoman Mumbo Jumbo as a symbol of male devices for denying the vote to women. Professor Murray did not mention on that occasion the Dahoman Amazons, who could accuse a man of anything, and sell him into slavery for punishment, if he showed his nose while they were parading.
There have always been female ‘lodges’ in the jungle. So you cannot be sure that it is mere atavism: the civilized male unconsciously regretting the good old days when he made himself beautiful and terrible with bones and bladders and feathers, and drank human blood, with incantations, to the salvation of his friends and the destruction of his enemies.
For that matter, if it is a mere harking-back to the joys of prehistoric importance, why are not the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association secret societies? Surely it is the physicians and the lawyers who — leaving religion aside — inherit from the medicine man.
Most of the men of my acquaintance have not belonged to any of these organizations, though I have once or twice in my life heard a man express regret that he had never joined one. Yet, like everyone else, I have known men who were members of some order; I have even known Masons who affected to believe in the antiquity of their ritual, though all encyclopædias explode that theory. Certainly I have usually heard the Masonic order, for example, mentioned with respect by men who did not belong to it.
But I have never heard any of these orders mentioned with what you could honestly call respect by women. To the female mind, the mysterious side of it, at least, does not appeal.
In country districts, where the ‘Grange’ is a social nucleus, it is another matter. Women will come in on the social side of anything that is going in the community; and they will affiliate themselves, for social reasons, with anything that their husbands belong to. Every woman knows that all women consider their own sex an open book, while men seem to them incalculable and unpredicable from start to finish.
I have never known a woman who understood what men meant when they talked of women’s being mysterious or incomprehensible. Whereas the woman who boasts that she understands men is not only rare but usually a singular fool.
Most women, I think, take this secretsociety business as merely another instance of the incomprehensibility of the male. They can understand the peacock’s tail, and the biologic urge for the male to make himself beautiful in order to attract a mate. But what they see is men making themselves, not physically beautiful, but physically ridiculous: a phenomenon which can have nothing to do with biologic urges. If men were unconsciously attempting to be attractive, they would abolish the hideous uniform of the ‘business suit,’ to which they have condemned themselves; and they would never, never wear aprons over cashmere trousers.
III
Is it mere human love of ritual and mystery? If it is, why do not women indulge as well? For women are even more susceptible than men to ritual and to the mysterious. The ritualistic churches keep a firmer and more enduring hold over women than over men, apparently; and in our own day women go in much more than the other sex for the occult and mystical. Or is it some faint memory of magic itself — a denatured magic, without results, without even purpose?
Do Elks and Red Men remember, without remembering, that signs and symbols were once legal tender in the realm of fate, and that a formula was stronger than a sword — as a dog, turning round three times, is said to be remembering, yet not remembering, the days of his wolfhood? Surely the anthropologists might tell us this.
The folk-lorist is happy if he can hear an old woman muttering something to herself before she gives herb tea to a patient; but does he ever look up when a thousand ‘Shriners’ pass before him in full regalia? If it is the old impulse to magical activities, why are the members of orders the last people to rely on the legitimately inherited magic which is popular superstition?
Women would seem to have preserved, more consistently than men, the old folk-habits, now impossible of explanation. Carrying the newborn child up instead of down, not destroying clothing that has belonged to a near and dear person, folk-remedies for trifling ills — women are much harder to cure of these habits than men. But they have not preserved the psychology of the ‘long house’ or the medicine lodge.
Nor can it be mere gregariousness, though men are perhaps more truly gregarious than women. Gregariousness, in men, is ministered to by the club or the corner grocery (the saloon having perished), rather than by the lodge. Gregariousness demands, not stated meetings or formal procedure, but a place where, at any hour of any day, you can find a comfortable chair and a group of human beings.
Sometimes one is tempted to consider these fraternal orders a mere hangover from the mysterious ‘bunches’ and ‘gangs’ of boyhood, as if men remained forever Tom Sawyers and Penrods at heart. But the essential requirement of the small boy’s secret organization is that it should be small, exclusive, and flauntable in the face of unpopular playmates; the keynote is intimacy.
The two impulses are not quite the same. There are too many Elks; essential Elkhood must be a fairly indefinable thing, and any national convention of Elks must posit a likemindedness that the Elk from Chattanooga and the Elk from Portland will not always recognize the instant they meet.
As well — almost — ask all Republicans, or all Democrats, to be congenial, as all Masons.
Besides, it must be remembered that many men belong to more than one of these organizations. Apparently being a Tall Cedar of Lebanon does not interfere with being a Knight of Pythias.
If it is not a hankering after magic, or a delight in self-adornment, or the satisfaction of the gregarious impulse, or the reaching out for secret power, what, then, is it that makes these orders so numerous and so popular? Here we have an instinct stronger than the instinct of protective coloring, which in our day translates itself into the objection to being conspicuous or absurd.
But just what is that instinct? That is what we should like the anthropologists to tell us.
Goats, and rituals, and cabalistic signs, all point back to a savage inheritance, to be sure; but if it is mere atavism, why are women exempt? Since the first thing savage women do when they become sufficiently powerful in any community is to create their own societies and make their own ‘medicine, ‘ why does not my completely emancipated sex rush into competition, instead of weakly allying itself with male organizations?
Why, that is, should one sex ‘throw back,’ and not the other? If the Elks are only feebly remembering and imitating ancestral totemism, why are not the directer heirs of the jungle — our colored citizens — foremost in both ritual and regalia?
There is something still left, it seems to me, for the folk-lorist to explain. Let him stop gathering charms from the Kentucky mountaineers and the New Jersey ‘pinies,’ and watch his hard-headed fellow citizens the next time they parade in full regalia. What goes on in the tangle of the male mind, no ratiocinating female would presume to guess; and women pass this over like so many other manifestations of the mystery which is Man. But the anthropologist — who is usually a man himself — has no right to give up the riddle. Here are fascinating indications, clues of the showiest, parti-colored hints that should take him far. Will he not explain?