Lang, Andrew

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Andrew Lang Summary

Lang, Andrew

LANG, ANDREW (1844–1912), was a Scottish anthropologist and folklorist. Born in Selkirk, Scotland, Lang received his education at Saint Andrews, Glasgow, and Oxford universities. For seven years he was a fellow of Merton College, where he was regarded as a brilliant and promising classicist. After his marriage, he left Oxford, embarked upon a career as a literary journalist, and became widely known for his editions of fairy tales, his contributions to folklore and anthropology of religion, and his literary essays and reviews. Although Lang's range of interests and learning was considerable, his scholarly work was devoted to topical intellectual issues, and he made no major contribution to the development of knowledge. He was an astute critic of the theories of others rather than an original thinker. He was among the founders of the British Folklore Society and near the end of his life was president of the Society for Psychical Research.

As a professional man of letters, Lang wrote prodigiously. He was the author of 120 books (including pamphlets) and was involved in more than 150 others either as editor or as contributor, and his periodical articles number in the thousands. At a time when the growing British and American intelligentsia were intensely interested in issues of science and scholarship, Lang's penetrating intellect and skillful writing made him a leading figure, especially in the newly developing fields of anthropology, folklore, and history of religions.

Lang is credited with demolishing the great Max Müller's philological approach to the study of myth and his popular theory that all myth was the result of a "disease of language." In Modern Mythology (1897) Lang used his extensive knowledge of comparative mythology to show that the themes in Indo-European mythology that Müller explained in terms of Indo-European philology, many of them concerning solar phenomena, were also present in myths from other parts of the world and could be accounted for by the more universal tendency to personify nature. Although Lang did not himself offer a new theory of myth, he regarded mythology as the key to the "actual condition of the human intellect" (Myth, Ritual, and Religion, 1887, vol. 1, p. 29), and he thought that myth had to be understood according to its own form of rationality. In this respect, Lang anticipated major developments in the contemporary study of myth in anthropology and history of religions.

In Magic and Religion (1901) Lang wrote a detailed criticism of the illustrious James G. Frazer's theory of magic and religion. He exposed the flaws in Frazer's evolutionary theory that magic preceded religion and that religion arose from the perceived failures of magic. Lang also took Frazer to task for explaining the divinity of Christ in terms of ritual king-killing and myths of dying-rising gods, and he produced a devastating criticism of Frazer's theory of ritual regicide and his comparative method in The Golden Bough, questions on which later scholarly opinion agreed.

Although Lang was a proponent of E. B. Tylor's evolutionary theory of animism, he rejected Tylor's view that the idea of God arose as a late development from the animistic notions of souls, ghosts, and spirits. He pointed out in Myth, Ritual, and Religion that the concept of a creator god who is moral, fatherly, omnipotent, and omniscient is found among the most culturally primitive peoples of the world. Hence, on the evolutionists' own grounds, the idea of God, having been found among the culturally simplest peoples, could not have arisen from ideas of ghosts and souls as a later development. Lang's criticism on this point was among the first of many that eventually led to the downfall of evolutionism in anthropology. Lang's own view was that the idea of the soul-ghost and the idea of God had totally different sources and that the idea of God may have preceded animism, though he recognized that the issue of priority could never be historically settled. Lang thought, however, that the idea of God may have been prior and that it may have been corrupted and degraded by later animistic ideas and pushed out of its originally central position. Although Lang's emphasis upon the presence of "high gods" among culturally primitive peoples was largely ignored in England, it was taken up by other scholars and made the subject of major investigation in anthropology (Wilhelm Schmidt, E. E. Evans-Pritchard) and history of religions (Nathan Söderblom, Raffaele Pettazzoni, Mircea Eliade).

In later life, Lang developed an interest in psychic phenomena—ghosts, telepathy, crystal gazing, fire walking, apparitions, spiritualism—and he wrote two books on the subject. Although he treated ghost stories as a form of folklore, he thought that the psychological experience that gave rise to them might have some foundation in reality and that it might have been the original source of religious belief. In this matter, however, Lang stood alone and somewhat in disgrace among his folklore colleagues. What Lang seems to have been groping for was a way of documenting and exploring the experience of what Rudolf Otto was later to call "the numinous," which Otto and subsequent phenomenologists of religion held to be both the ancient source and the continuing foundation of religious belief.