Over the chancel-arch of the church at
South Leigh, a few miles west of Oxford, is
a fresco of the Last Judgment and the
Resurrection, of the type well known in
mediæval art. On the adjoining south wall
stands the stately figure of the archangel
Michael. In his right hand he holds a pair
of scales. In one scale is the figure of a soul
in the attitude of prayer; beside it is Our
Lady carrying a rosary. The other contains
an ox-headed demon blowing a horn. This
scale rises steadily, though another demon
has climbed to the beam above to weigh it
down, and a third from hell's mouth below
endeavours to drag it towards the abyss. The
same theme recurs in several other English
churches; and it is carved over the portals
of many French cathedrals, as at Notre Dame
in Paris.
Unroll a papyrus from an Egyptian tomb
of the Eighteenth Dynasty before the days
of Moses, and you will see a somewhat similar
scene. The just and merciful judge Osiris,
"lord of life and king of eternity," sits in the
Hall of the two goddesses of Truth. Hither
the soul is brought for the ordeal which will
determine his future bliss or woe. Before
forty-two assessors he declares his innocence
of various offences: "I am not a doer of what
is wrong; I am not a robber; I am not a slayer
of men; I am not a niggard; I am not a teller
of lies; I am not a monopoliser of food; I am
no extortioner; I am not unchaste; I am not
the causer of others' tears...." Then he is
led, sometimes supported by the two goddesses
of Truth, to the actual trial. Resting on an
upright post is the beam of a balance. It is
guarded by a dog-headed ape, symbol of
Thoth, "lord of the scales." Thoth has
various functions in the ancient texts, and
even rises into a kind of impersonation of the
principle of intelligence in the whole universe.
Here as the computer of time and the inventor
of numbers he plays the part of secretary to
Osiris. In one scale is placed the heart of the
deceased, the organ of conscience. In the
other is sometimes a square weight, sometimes
an ostrich plume, symbol of truth or righteousness.
Thoth stands beside the scales, tablet
in hand, to record the issue as the soul passes
to the great award.
The scenes and the persons differ; but the
fundamental conception of judgment is the
same, and it is carried out by the same method.
Is this an accidental coincidence of metaphor?
The figure of the balance was naturally
suggestive for the estimate of worth, and
the Psalmist cried in bitterness of heart—
Surely men of low degree are vanity,
And men of high degree are a lie,
In the balances they will go up;
They are altogether lighter than vanity.
The mysterious hand wrote upon the wall
of Belshazzar's palace the strange word Tekel,
which contained the dreadful sentence, "Thou
art weighed in the balances and art found
wanting." To early Indian imagination,
before the days of the Buddha (500 B.C.), the
ordeal of the balance was part of the outlook
into the world beyond. In the ancient Persian
teaching, Rashnu, the angel of justice, before
the shining "Friend," the mediator Mithra,
presided over the weighing of the spirits at
the bridge of destiny, over which they would
pass to heaven or hell.
Is Michael the heir of Thoth or Rashnu?
He passed into the Christian Church from the
Jewish Synagogue, where he was specially
connected with the destinies of the dead.
He guided the souls of the just to the heavenly
world, where he led them into the mystic city,
the counterpart of Jerusalem below; or he
stood at the gate as the angel of righteousness
to decide who should be admitted. So for
the Greeks Hermes was the guardian of the
spirits of the departed, whom he conducted
to the judgment in the under-world. In this
respect, then, Hermes and Michael were akin.
But Hermes also played many other parts,
and the Greeks identified him with the
Egyptian Thoth. When the destinies of Hector
and Achilles were weighed against each other,
ere the last mortal combat, the vase-painter
could represent Hermes as holding the
balance in the presence of Zeus, much as
Thoth had presided over it before Osiris.
The Etruscan artists depicted Mercury, the
Italian equivalent of Hermes, fulfilling the
same function. True, the purport of the test
was different. But the symbol was the same;
and when Hermes gave place to Michael, as
Christianity was carried to the West, the scales
passed from the Hellenic to the Jewish
Christian figure, though they had in the one case
been used to decide the allotment of fate, and
in the other were employed for judgment.
Why they remained so long unused in Christian
symbolism is obscure. The revival of
intercourse with the East through the Crusades
may have given new force to the idea as part
of the great judgment-process; and the figure
to which it was most natural to assign it
was that of Thoth-Hermes-Michael.
The religion of the ancient Hindus was
founded, as every one knows, upon the
venerable hymns collected into one sacred
book under the name of the Rig Veda. These
hymns, 1017 in number, containing over
10,000 verses, are now arranged in ten books,
twice the number of the divisions of the
Hebrew Psalter. Like most of the Psalms
they are traditionally ascribed to different
poets, in whose families they were sung; and
their authors were regarded as Rishis, bards,
or sages. Of their real origin nothing is
definitely known; their composition probably
extends over many generations, perhaps over
several centuries; and dim suggestions of their
super-earthly origin already appear in some
of the latest poems. They became the peculiar
treasure of the priestly order; the most
laborious efforts were devised for the study
and preservation of the sacred text; the
methods of pronunciation, the rules of
grammar, the principles of metre, the derivations
of words, were all elaborated with the utmost
minuteness into different branches of Vedic
lore. Two other smaller Vedas, collections
of sacrificial formulæ and hymns, were very
early placed beside the main work, and a
fourth collection gained similar rank much
later. With the development of the great
schools of Hindu philosophy, especially after
the decline of Buddhism, the whole question
of authority as the foundation of belief and
reasoning was forced to the front, and this
in due time was applied to the Veda.
Brahmanical speculation had been long concerned
with its divine origin. It sprang from one of
the mysterious figures in which the ancient
theologians expressed their sense of the real
unity of the heavenly powers, Prajāpati, the
"lord of creatures," through the medium of
Vach, or sacred Speech. As such it was "the
firstborn in the universe." But as proceeding
from Prajāpati it issued from the world of
the an-anta, the "un-ending" or "infinite,"
which was likewise the sphere of the a-mrita,
the "im-mortal" or "deathless." So it
belonged to the realm of the eternal, where it
could be beheld, not indeed with the eye of
sense, but with the higher discernment of the
holy Seer. The philosophical schools occupied
themselves accordingly with the defence of the
eternity and consequent infallibility of the
Veda. Elaborate arguments were devised to
explain the relation of words to things, and
of sound in the abstract to uttered speech or
again to show how behind individuals which
had their origin in time there existed species
(even of the gods) which belonged to the
timeless order transcending our experience. So
the conclusion was reached, in the words of
the great philosopher Çankara (A.D. 788-820),
that "the authority of the Veda with regard
to the matters stated by it is independent and
direct; just as the light of the sun is the
direct means of our knowledge of form and
colour."
Just at this era, by a singular coincidence,
a remarkable controversy was raging in the
schools of Mohammedan theology. Mohammed
died in A.D. 632. He had himself recorded
nothing; the traditions about him are not even
agreed whether he could read or write. His
oracles were taught to his disciples, who began
to note down some of them during the prophet's
life; soon after his death the formal collection
of them was undertaken; and under Caliph
Othman (651) four copies were deposited in
the cities of Mecca, Cufa, Basra, and Damascus.
We know the work under the name of the
Koran (Qurān = reading), one of the
numerous expressions which Mohammed was said
to have coined for the revelation imparted
to him from on high. Later generations
attached the title exclusively to the utterances
fixed in literary form, and discerned in them
a unity designed by the prophet; but it seems
more consonant with his view to regard each
of the 114 discourses (suras) as a unit in itself,
and the whole as only a fragment of his
teaching. Many passages raise a claim to
specific divine origin; others allude to the
uncreated Scripture, umm-al-kitab, "the
mother of the book."
On such hints was founded the remarkable
doctrine that the Koran was eternal in its
essence as the word of God, a necessary
attribute of the Most High. First formulated
in the middle of the eighth century (A.D. 747-748),
it roused extraordinary interest outside
the theological schools. It was fostered by
the early Caliphs, for it supported their
political authority, and the emphasis which it
placed on the doctrine of predestination
supplied them with a potent weapon. Opposition
arose on the ground of free will; the passages
enforcing the principle of predestination were
evaded by the handy method of allegorical
interpretation, and the revolt of the moral
consciousness led, as it has done elsewhere,
to rationalism. Public debates were held
amid general excitement, when the Caliph
Ma'mun (813-833) unexpectedly espoused the
rationalist cause, and issued a decree forbidding
the discussion. The popular forces, however,
were in the long run triumphant. In 847 a
new Caliph came into power, inclined for
political reasons to the higher doctrine.
Lectures were instituted in the mosques on
the attributes of God, and vast audiences—the
historians report twenty and even thirty
thousand hearers—listened eagerly while the
theologians disputed whether God's word
could be conceived distinct from his absolute
being. Faith in the prophet triumphed; the
exaltation of the product reacted on that of
the person; and the Arabian shepherd could
be regarded as the inerrant, sinless, uncreated
light, sent forth from Deity himself, who for
his sake spread out the earth and arched the
heavens, and proclaimed the great confession
"There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed
is his prophet."
Every great historical religion passes through
numerous phases, as it is brought into contact
with different cultures, and evokes various
forms of speculative thought and inward
experience. Buddhism has been no exception
to this rule. It sprang up in a moral revolt
against the claims of the Brahmanical teachers,
and in the midst of the discussions of the
sophists turned its back on metaphysics and
sought to concentrate attention on the Noble
Path of the good life. It offered a way of
deliverance from the weary round of births
and deaths by the victory over ignorance and
sin, and sought to overcome selfishness by
eliminating the idea that man has, or is, a
Self. Accordingly it presented its founder
Gotama (500 B.C.), as the man who had
attained the Truth, who had by a long series
of lives devoted to the higher righteousness
acquired the insight into the causes and
meaning of existence, and imparted it to his
followers with instructions to carry it forth for
the welfare of their fellow-men. For this end
he founded a union or order; he instituted a
discipline, and committed his teaching to a
body of disciples whose successors gradually
bore it into distant lands. He himself passed
away, leaving no trace behind. His memory
was cherished with dutiful devotion.
Pilgrimages to the scenes of his birth and
Buddhahood, commemorative festivals and pious
rites, kept the image of the Teacher before the
mind of the believer. But no prayer was
offered to him; no worship created any bond
of fellowship between the departed Gotama
and the community which he had left on earth.
But in the course of several generations
remarkable changes took place. Environed
by philosophical speculations, Buddhism could
not remain wholly unaffected by the great
ideas of metaphysics. While one branch, now
surviving in Ceylon, Burma and Siam, remained
faithful to the Founder's exclusion of all such
conceptions as being, substance, and the like,
others began to interpret the person of the
Buddha in terms of the Absolute, and identified
him with the Eternal and the Self-Existent,
who from time to time for the welfare
of the world took on himself the semblance
of humanity, and appeared to be born, to
attain Enlightenment, and die. The great
aim of the deliverance of all sentient beings
from error, suffering, and guilt, expressed itself
further in the association with him of numerous
other holy forms sharing the same purpose of
the world's salvation.
Among these was the Buddha Amitâbha,
the Buddha of Boundless Light,[1] who had
made a wondrous vow in virtue of which a
blessed future of righteousness and joy in the
Western Paradise was secured for all who put
their trust in him. Carried into China, this
devotion acquired great popularity, and
centuries later it passed into Japan. There, while
Europe was sending its warriors to win back
from the Crescent the city of the Cross, while
Bernard and Francis and Dominic were
awakening new enthusiasm for the monastic
life, two famous teachers, Honen (1133-1212)
and Shin-ran (1173-1262), developed the
doctrine of "salvation by faith." Honen was
the only son of a military chief who died of
a wound inflicted by an enemy. On his deathbed
he enjoined the boy never to seek revenge,
and bade him become a monk for the spiritual
enlightenment both of his father and his
father's foe. So the lad passed in due time
into one of the great Buddhist monasteries on
mount Hiei. Long years of laborious study
followed, till in 1175 he reached the conviction
that faith in Amida[2] was the true way of
salvation. A deep sense of human sinfulness
and the belief in an All-Merciful Deliverer were
the essential elements of his religion. Three
emperors became his pupils, and his life,
compiled by imperial order after his death,
resembles that of a mediæval Christian saint.
Visions of Amida and of the holy teachers of
the past were vouchsafed to him. He preached—like
another St. Francis—to the serpents
and the birds. His person was mysteriously
transfigured, and a wondrous light filled his
dwelling.
His disciple Shin-ran carried the doctrine
of his master yet a little farther. Filled with
adoring gratitude to the Buddha of Boundless
Light, who, as the deliverer, was also the
Buddha of Boundless Life, he argued that
infinite mercy and infinite wisdom must belong
to him; and these in their turn implied the
power to give effect to his great purpose. He
passed from village to village through the
Eastern provinces, rousing enthusiasm by the
hymns into which he wrought his new faith.
They are still sung in the temples at the
present day. But whereas Honen had
recognised a value in good works, and had enjoined
the duty of constant repetition of the sacred
name of Amida, Shin-ran insisted that all
element of "self-exertion" must be purged
away, and faith in the merits of Amida—"the
exertion of another"—should alone remain.
Some of the conceptions of Western teaching
thus present themselves in Japan in the midst
of modes of life and thought of purely Indian
origin. Christian theologians had debated
whether faith was to be regarded as an opus
or a donum, a "work" or a "gift," was it
something to be attained by man or was it
bestowed by God? The Japanese answer
was unhesitating. Faith was not earned by
effort, or achieved by merit, it was granted
out of immeasurable love. "The Buddha,"
we read, "confers this heart. The heart
which takes refuge in his heart is not produced
by oneself. It is produced by the command
of Buddha. Hence it is called the believing
heart by the Power of Another." The natural
corollary was that in due course this grace
would be bestowed on all. The Buddha of
Boundless Light and Life would overcome the
darkness of ignorance and death; and this
type of Buddhism, now the most active and
influential in Japan, preaches the doctrine of
universal salvation. The student finds here
a whole series of parallels to the Evangelical
interpretation of Christianity. Both schemes
are founded on the same essential ideas, man's
need of a deliverer, and the attainment of
salvation by no human conduct but by faith
in a divine person.
The foregoing sketches raise many problems.
What are the actual features in different
religions which are susceptible of comparison?
How can we distinguish between resemblances
which are deep-seated and spring from the
fundamental principles of two given faiths,
and those which are only on the surface, and
probably accidental? How far can such
parallels be ascribed to suggestion through
historical contact, and, if they lie too far
apart for possibilities of any form of mutual
dependence, out of what common types of
experience are they derived, what forces of
thought have shaped them, what feelings do
they express?
The student of Comparative Religion seeks
answers to these and similar questions. A
vast field of inquiry is at once opened before
him. It embraces practically every continent,
people, and tribe on the face of the globe.
It begins in the last period of the great ice
age, when men lived in this country in the
company of the elephant, the rhinoceros, and
the mammoth, and hunted their game through
Germany, Belgium, and France. In dim
recesses of the caves they painted the deer,
the bison, the antelope and the wild boar,
under conditions which imply some kind of
mysterious or holy place. They buried their
dead with care, and though we can ask them
no questions we may infer with much probability
that they celebrated some kind of funeral
meal, and deposited implements and ornaments
in the grave for the use of the departed in the
world beyond. In one case hundreds of shells
were found buried with the skull of a little
child. Similar usages may be traced through
the slow advances of culture to the present
day. Death is an element of universal experience;
and it is not unreasonable to suppose that
if the negroid peoples of Western Europe had
worked out some view of its meaning and
consequences, there were other things to be
done or avoided out of fear or reverence for
the Unseen.
The first objects of comparison are thus
found in the outward acts which fall more or
less clearly within the sphere of religion, the
places where these are performed, the persons
who do them, the means required for them,
the occasions to which they are attached.
These all belong to the external world; they
can be observed and recorded, even though
we may not be sure what they mean. When
they are brought together, a series of
gradations of complexity can be established, while
a common purpose may be traced through all.
From the negro who lays his offering of grain
or fruit at the foot of a tree with the simple
utterance, "Thank you, gods," to a great
Eucharistic celebration at St. Peter's, a
continuous line of ritual may be followed, in
which the action becomes more elaborate, the
functions and character of the officiating
ministers more strictly defined, the accessories
of worship more complicated. This corresponds
to the enrichment and elevation of the
ideas and emotions that animate the act, as
that which is at first performed as part of
tribal usage and ancestral custom acquires
the force of divine institution and personal
duty.
Behind the external act lies the internal
world of thought and feeling. The social
sanction may invest the ceremony itself with
so much force that the worshipper's interest
may lie rather in the due performance of the
rite than in the deity to whom it is addressed.
The element of belief may be relatively vague
and indefinite. But in the more highly organised
religions belief also may externalise itself
through hymn and prayer, through myth and
history and prophecy. When a religion is
strong enough to create a literature, a fresh
object of comparison is presented. The
utterances of poet and sage, of lawgiver and seer,
can be set side by side. Their conceptions of
the Powers towards which worship is directed
can be studied; the characters and functions
of the several deities can be determined. This
is the intellectual element in religion. It has
often been regarded as the element of most
importance, because it seemed most readily
to admit of the test of truth. It finds its
most formal expression in the articles of a
creed, and has sometimes been erected into
the chief ground of the supreme arbitrament
of heaven and hell.
There remains the element of feeling. This
also may be so entangled in tradition, so
enveloped in the pressure of surrounding
influences, that it is at first obscure and
indistinct. But its importance was early recognised
when the origin of religion was ascribed to fear,
in the oft-quoted line of the Roman Satirist
Petronius Arbiter at the court of Nero (who
committed suicide A.D. 66)—
"Primus in orbe deos fecit timor.
In the eighteenth century the genius of
Lessing (1729-1781) fastened on the feeling of
the heart as the essential foundation of religion.
No written record, no historical event, could
guarantee its truth; that lay in the constitution
of the human spirit in its interpretation
of its experience. In his famous drama of
"Nathan the Sage" he applied this to the
representatives of three great historical
religions which were thus brought together for
comparison: the Christian Templar, the
Mohammedan Saladin, and the Jew Nathan.
Herder (1744-1803) endeavoured with the
materials then at command to trace the origin
and development of religion, starting from
the primitive impressions made upon the
mind by the world without, and sought to
interpret mythology as the imaginative
utterance of man's consciousness of the power,
light, and life in Nature. In the next
generation Schleiermacher (1767-1834) placed the
essence of religion in the feeling of absolute
dependence, without attempting to define the
object towards which it was directed. The
study of origins has passed out of the hands
of the philosophers and the theologians. But
it cannot dispense with psychology; and
among the factors of early religious life will
be found the beginnings of wonder, reverence
and awe. And this element, often cruelly
twisted into false and degraded forms, and
sometimes refined in the higher types of
mysticism into the loftiest spirituality, inheres
in all practice and belief.
What, then, is the basis of comparison
among different faiths? The student who
is engaged in tracing the life-history of any
one religion will naturally start from the field
of investigation thus selected. As he widens
his outlook he will find that a number of
illustrative instances force themselves upon
his view. The people whose institutions and
ideas he is examining are members of a given
ethnic group. The ancient Hebrews, for
instance, belong on the one side to the life of
the desert, and are kin with the nomad Arabs,
on the other they are related to the authors
of Babylonian culture. Or in the course of
events a new religion is brought by missionary
impulse into a less-developed civilisation, as
when Buddhism passed from China through
Corea into Japan, and was planted in the
midst of a cruder faith. Widely different
modes of thought are thus brought into close
juxtaposition, their relation and interaction
can be examined, and the inner forces of each
compared.
That such inquiries must be
conducted without prejudice need not now
be enforced. An eighteenth-century writer
might lay it down that "the first general
division of Religion is into True and False,"
and might draw the conclusion that "the
chapter of False Religions is by much the
longest in the History of the religious opinions
and practices of mankind."[3] Dr. Johnson
could sententiously declare that "there are
two objects of curiosity, the Christian world
and the Mohammedan world—all the rest
may be considered as barbarous." A learned
Oxford scholar of the last generation could
speak of the "three chief false religions,"
Brahmanism, Buddhism, and Mohammedanism.
Missionaries and travellers of an elder
day, who took some form of Christianity as
their foundation, sometimes found the savages
among whom they laboured destitute of
religion because they had no Father in heaven
and no everlasting hell. These attitudes, it
is now freely recognised, are not scientific.
For purposes of comparison no single religion
can be selected as a standard for the whole
human race. Particular products may be set
side by side. The asceticism of India may
be compared with that of early Christianity.
The ritual of sacrifice may be studied in the
book of Leviticus or the Hindu Brāhmanas.
What are sometimes called "Ethnic Trinities"
may be examined in the light of Alexandrian
theology. The suras of the Koran may be
read after the prophecies of Isaiah. The
various phases of the Buddhist Order, with
its missionary zeal, its power of adaptability
to different cultures, its readiness to accept
new teaching, may be contrasted with the
wonderful cohesiveness and expansion of the
Roman Catholic Church. The ideas of the
Hellenic mystery-religions may be found to
throw light on the language of St. Paul. Out
of the multitudinous phases of human
experience all the world over innumerable
resemblances will be discovered. Each is a fact
for the student, and must be treated on equal
terms in the field of science. But they will
have more or less intrinsic significance in the
scale of values. Philosophy may attempt to
range them in gradations of worth, in nobility
of form, in dignity of expression, in moral
purity, in social effectiveness. Beneath
infinite diversity the mystic will affirm the
unity of the whole, with the poet of the
Masnavi, Jalálu-'d-Dïn of Balkh (A.D. 1207-1273)—
"Because He that is praised is, in fact, only One,
In this respect all religions are only one religion."
The materials of comparison are, of course,
of the most varied kind. The interest of the
ancient Greeks was early roused in the diverse
practices which they saw around them, and
the observations of Herodotus concerning the
Egyptians, the Persians, the Scythians, and
many another tribe upon the fringe of
barbarism, have earned for him the modern title
of the "Father of Anthropology." Travellers,
missionaries, government officers, men of
trade and men of learning, have recorded the
usages of the lower culture all over the world,
naturally with varying accuracy and
penetration, and a vast range of facts has been
registered through successive stages of
complexity in social and religious development.
Many of these have their parallel in the
folklore of countries where the uniformity of
modern civilisation has not crushed out all
traditional beliefs, while annual customs or
even village games may contain survivals of
what were once important ceremonial rites.
The irruption of the Arab conquerors into
Europe brought Christianity face to face with
Mohammedanism and its sacred book. In the
seventeenth century the Jesuit Fathers in
China first made known the teachings of
Kong-fu-tse ("Philosopher Kong") 500 B.C. whose
name they Latinised into Confucius. Towards
the end of the eighteenth century a brilliant
little band of English scholars in Calcutta
began to reveal the astounding copiousness
of the sacred literature of India. During the
expedition of Napoleon to Egypt in 1799 the
Rosetta Stone (now in the British Museum)
yielded the clue to the hieroglyphics which cover
the walls of temple and tomb. A generation
later a young British officer, Lieutenant
Henry Rawlinson, began in 1835 to copy a
triple inscription on a cliff of Mount Behistun,
near Kermanshah in Persia. The work was
dangerous and difficult, but he was enabled
to complete it ten years later. It contained
an identical record in three languages, Persian,
Median, and Babylonio-Assyrian, and provided
the means for deciphering the cuneiform script
of the tablets and cylinders soon recovered
from the mounds of Mesopotamia.
Meanwhile the lovers of the past were at
work in many other directions. The Swedish
Lonrott collected the ancient songs of the
Finnic people, under the name of the Kalevala.
Other scholars brought to light the treasures
of Scandinavian mythology in the Icelandic
Edda with its two collections of poetry and
prose. In Wales and Ireland the texts which
enshrined the Celtic faith awoke new interest.
The students of classical antiquity began to
collect inscriptions, and it was soon realised
that the spade might be no less useful in
Greece or Asia Minor than beside the Nile or
the Euphrates.
The last century has thus accumulated an
immense mass of material in literature and
art. There are codes of law regulating in the
name of deity the practice of family and social
life. There are hymns of praise or of
penitence, sometimes in strange association with
the spells of magic. There are books of ritual
and sacrifice, of ceremonial order, of
philosophical speculation and moral precept. There
are rules of discipline for religious communities;
and there are pictures of judgment and
delineations of the heavenly life. Sculpture
and painting have been employed to give
external form to the objects of pious reverence;
and the architecture of the sanctuary has
wrought into stone the fundamental
conceptions of majesty, proportion, and grace.
All this, it is plain, rests upon history.
When Confucius visited the seat of the
imperial dynasty at the court of Chow, he
studied with deep interest the arrangements
for the great sacrifices to Heaven and Earth;
he surveyed the ancestral temples in which
the emperor offered his worship; he inspected
the Hall of Light whose walls bore paintings
of the sovereigns from the remotest times;
and then he turned to his disciples with the
remark: "As we use a glass to examine the
forms of things, so must we study the past to
understand the present." Comparison that
confines itself solely to counting up
resemblances here and there will be of small value.
We cannot comprehend the real meaning of
a single religious rite, a single sentence of any
scripture, apart from the context to which it
belongs. Acts and words alike issue out of
experiences that may be hundreds of years
old, and sum up generations, it may be whole
ages, of a continuous process. To trace the
successive forms of these changes, to describe
the steps through which they have passed, is
like making a chart of a voyage, and laying
down the lines of continent and ocean, island
and cape. Or just as the races of man are
sorted, and their characteristics are
enumerated without reference to the various causes
which have produced their modifications, so
geography and ethnography might companion
hierography, the delineation of "the Sacred"
in its concrete manifestations.
But behind the external evolution of a given
religion, its modes of worship, its ministers,
its doctrines, lie more complicated questions.
What causes shaped these acts and moulded
these beliefs? What elements of race are to
be discerned in them? How can we account
for the diversities between the religions of
peoples belonging to a common stock, like
those of India and those of ancient Italy?
What have been the effects of climate, of the
struggle with alien peoples and new
environment? How does the food-supply influence
the formation of religious ideas? What
contacts have been felt with other races, and
what positive loans or more impalpable
influences have passed from one side to the other?
We, find here in hierology, the science of "the
Sacred," an analogue to the reasoning which
accounts for the distribution of land and
water, the rise of mountain ranges and the
sculpture of valleys and river-beds out of the
stratification of the earth's crust, and builds
up a science of geology; or which traces the
results of migration upon peoples, the
consequences of inter-marriage with other tribes,
the disastrous issues of war, surveys the
immense variety of causes which have
contributed to new developments of racial energy,
and arranges this knowledge in the science of
ethnology.
And, lastly, the values of these facts must
be estimated. How far can they be accepted
as expressing the reality of the Unseen Power,
and man's relation to it? Hierology may
explain how men have developed certain
practices or framed certain beliefs; to
determine their reasonableness is the task of the
philosophy of religion or hierosophy.[4]
The study of "Comparative Religion"
assumes that religion is already in existence.
It deals with actual usages, which it places
side by side to see what light they can throw
upon each other. It leaves the task of
formulating definitions to philosophy. It is not
concerned with origins, and does not project
itself into the prehistoric past where conjecture
takes the place of evidence. An old miracle-play
directed Adam to pass across the stage
"going to be created." Whether religion first
appeared in the cultus of the dead, or only
entered the field after the collapse of a reign
of magic which had ceased to satisfy man's
demands for help, or was born of dread and
desired to keep its gods at a distance, only
remotely affects the process of discovering and
examining the resemblances of its forms, and
interpreting the forces without and within
which have produced them. The sphere of
speculation has its own attractions, but in this
little book an attempt will be made to keep to
facts.
Three hundred years ago Edward Herbert,[5]
an Oxford scholar who played many parts and
played them well, in deep revolt against the
ecclesiastical doctrine that all the world outside
the pale of the Church was doomed to eternal
damnation, devoted himself to the study of
comparative religion. With the materials
which the classics afforded him, he examined
the recorded facts among the Greeks and
Romans, the Carthaginians and Arabs, the
Phrygians, the Persians, the Assyrians. The
whole fabric of human experience was built
up, he argued, on certain common knowledges
or notions, which could be distinguished by
specific marks, such as priority, independence,
universality, certainty, necessity for man's
well-being, and immediacy. Here were the
bases of law in relation to social order, and of
religion in relation to the Powers above man.
These principles in religion were five: (1) that
there is one supreme God; (2) that he ought
to be worshipped; (3) that virtue and piety
are the chief parts of divine worship; (4) that
we ought to be sorry for our sins and repent
of them; (5) that divine goodness doth dispense
rewards and punishments both in this life and
after it. These truths had been implanted by
the Creator in the mind of man, and their
subsequent corruption produced the idolatries
of antiquity.
The theory held its ground in various forms
till its last echoes appeared in highly theologic
guise in the writings of Mr. Gladstone. He
pleaded that there must have been a true
religion in the world before an untrue one
began to gather and incrust upon it, and this
religion included three great doctrines—the
existence of the Triune Deity, the advent of a
Redeemer, and the power of the Evil One and
the defeat of the rebel angels. These had
formed part of a primeval revelation. In the
Homeric theology he traced the first in the
three sons of Kronos—Zeus, Hades, and
Poseidon. The second he found in Apollo, whose
mother Leto represented the Woman from
whom the Redeemer should descend. The
rebel angels were equated with the Titans;
the power of temptation was personified in
Ate; the rainbow of the covenant was
identified with Iris. The student of to-day can
hardly believe that this volume could have
been published in the same year in which
Darwin and Wallace formulated the new
scientific principle of "natural selection" as
the great agent in the formation of species,
and thus laid the foundation of the modern
conception of evolution (1858).
It is on this great idea that the whole study
of the history of religion is now firmly
established. At the foundation of all endeavours
to classify the multitudinous facts which it
embraces, lies the conviction that whatever
may be the occasional instances of degeneration
or decline, the general movement of
human things advances from the cruder and
less complex to the more refined and developed.
In the range of knowledge, in the sphere of
the arts, in the command over nature, in the
stability and expansion of the social order,
there are everywhere signs of growth, even if
isolated groups, such as the Australians, the
Todas of India, or the Veddas of Ceylon, seem
to be in the last stages of stagnation or decay.
Religion is one phase of human culture, it
expresses man's attitude to the powers around
him and the events of life. Its various forms
repose upon the unity of the race. The
anthropologist is convinced that if a new tribe
is discovered in some forest in central Africa,
whether its stature be large or small, its
persons will contain the same limbs as other
men, and will live by the same physical
processes. The sociologist expects that their
social groups will approximate to other known
types of human relations. The philologist
anticipates that behind the obscurities of their
speech he will find modes of thought which he
can match elsewhere. The student of religions
will in the same way be on the look-out for
customs and usages akin to those which he
already knows; he will assume that under
similar conditions experience will be moulded
on similar lines, and the streams of thought
and feeling—though small causes may easily
deflect their course—will tend to flow in
parallel channels as they issue from minds
of the same order, and traverse corresponding
scenes.
And just as the general theory of evolution
includes the unity of bodily structure and
mental faculty, so it will vindicate what may
be called the unity of the religious consciousness.
The old classifications based on the
idea that religions consisted of a body of
doctrines which must be true or false, reached
by natural reflection or imparted by
supernatural revelation, disappear before a wider
view. Theologies may be many, but religion
is one. It was after this truth that the Vedic
seers were groping when they cried, "Men call
him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; sages name
variously him who is but one"; or again, "the
sages in their hymns give many forms to him
who is but one." When the Roman Empire
had brought under one rule the multitudinous
peoples of Western Asia, North Africa, and
Southern and Middle Europe, and new worships
were carried hither and thither by priest and
missionary, soldier and merchant and slave,
the titles and attributes of the gods were freely
blended and exchanged. Thinkers of different
schools invented various modes of harmonising
rival cults. When "Jupiter best and greatest"
was surrounded by a vast crowd of lesser
deities, the philosophic mind discerned a
common element running through all their
worship. "There is one Supreme God," wrote
Maximus of Madaura to Augustine, about
A.D. 390, "without natural offspring, who is, as it
were, the God and Mighty Father of all. The
powers of this Deity, diffused through the
universe which he has made, we worship
under many names, as we are all ignorant
of his true name. Thus it happens that while
in diverse supplications we approach separated,
as it were, certain parts of the Divine Being,
we are seen in reality to be the worshippers
of him in whom all these parts are one." Here
is the prayer of a Blackfoot chief of our
generation in the great ceremonial of the Sun-Dance,
reported by Mr. McClintock,[6] which blends the
implications of theology with the impulses and
emotions of religion—
"Great Sun Power! I am praying for my
people that they may be happy in the summer
and that they may live through the cold of
winter. Many are sick and in want. Pity
them and let them survive. Grant that they
may live long and have abundance. May we
go through these ceremonies correctly, as you
taught our forefathers to do in the days that
are past. If we make mistakes, pity us!
"Help us, Mother Earth! for we depend
upon your goodness. Let there be rain to
water the prairies, that the grass may grow
long and the berries be abundant.
"O Morning Star! when you look down
upon us, give us peace and refreshing sleep.
"Great Spirit! bless our children, friends,
and visitors through a happy life. May our
trails lie straight and level before us. Let us
live to be old. We are all your children, and
ask these things with good hearts."
Twice in the history of the world has it
been possible to survey a wide panorama of
religions, and twice has the interest of
travellers, men of science, and students of
philosophy, been attracted by the immense variety
of worships and beliefs. In the second
century of our era the Roman Empire embraced
an extraordinary range of nationalities within
its sway. In the twentieth the whole history
of the human race has been thrown open to
the explorer, and an overwhelming mass of
materials from every land confronts him. It
may be worth while to take a hasty glance at
the chief groups of facts that are thus
disclosed, and make a sort of map of their
relations.
I
The scientific curiosity of the ancient
Greeks was early awakened, and Thales of
Miletus (624-546 B.C.), chief of the seven
"wise men," and founder of Greek geometry
and philosophy, was believed to have studied
under the priests of Egypt, as well as to have
visited Asia and become acquainted with the
Chaldean astronomy. Still more extensive
travel was attributed to his younger
contemporary Pythagoras, whose varied learning
was explained in late traditions by his sojourn
east and west, among the Persian Magi, the
Indian Brahmans, and the Druids of Gaul.
The first great record of observations is
contained in the History of Herodotus of
Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor. Born
in 484 B.C., six years after Marathon, and
four years old when the Greeks put Xerxes
to flight at Salamis, he devoted his maturity
to the record of the great international
struggle. Hither and thither he passed,
collecting information, an eager student of
human things. In Egypt he compared the
gods with those of Greece, and attempted
to distinguish two sets of elements in Hellenic
religion, Egyptian and Pelasgic. He left
notes on the Babylonians and the Persians,
on the Scythians in the vast tracts east of
northern Europe, on the Getæ south of the
Danube.
When the conquests of Alexander the
Great (356-323 B.C.) threw open the gates of
Asia, a stream of travellers passed into Persia
and India, whose reports were utilised by the
geographers of later days. The religion of
Zoroaster, whose name was already known
to Plato, attracted great attention. At the
court of Chandragupta on the Ganges, at the
opening of the third century B.C., Megasthenes,
the ambassador of Seleucus (who had
succeeded to the dominions of Alexander in
Asia), set down brief memoranda on the usages
and belief of the Hindus among whom he
resided. Nearer home the representatives
of Mesopotamian and Egyptian learning
commended their national cultures to their
conquerors. Berosus, priest of Bel in Babylon,
translated into Greek a Babylonian work on
astronomy and astrology, and compiled a
history of his country from ancient documents;
while his contemporary, Manetho, of
Sebennytus in the Nile Delta, undertook a similar
service for his native land.
Meanwhile the great library and schools at
Alexandria had been founded. Hither came
students from many lands; and the Christian
fathers Eusebius and Epiphanius in the fourth
century attributed to the librarian of the royal
patron of literature, Ptolemy Philadelphus
(285-247 B.C.), the design of collecting the
sacred books of the Ethiopians, Indians,
Persians, Elamites, Babylonians, Assyrians,
Romans, Phœnicians, Syrians, and Greeks.
The Jews had settled in Alexandria in
considerable numbers; they began to translate
their Hebrew Scriptures into Greek, and
little by little they planted their synagogues
all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and
finally established their worship in Rome.
The Egyptian deities in their turn went
abroad. The worship of Serapis was
introduced at Athens. Isis, the sister-wife of
Osiris and mother of Horus, goddess of many
functions—among others of protecting
sailors—was carried round the Levant to Syria,
Asia Minor, Greece, and as far north as the
Hellespont and Thrace. Westwards she was
borne to Sicily and South Italy. In due time
she entered Rome, and in spite of senatorial
orders five times repeated (in the first century
B.C.), to tear down her altars and statues, she
secured her place, and received homage all
through the West from the outskirts of the
Sahara to the Roman wall north of our own Tyne.
The introduction of Greek gods had begun
centuries before. As early as 493 B.C., at a
time of serious famine, a temple had been
built to Demeter, Dionysus, and Persephonê;
many others followed; resemblances among
the native gods quickly led to identifications;
and new forms of worship tended to displace
the old. After another crisis (206 B.C.) the
"Great Mother," Cybelê, the Phrygian
goddess of Mount Ida, was imported. The
black aerolite which was supposed to be her
abode, was presented by King Attalus to the
ambassadors of the Roman senate. The
goddess was solemnly welcomed at the Port
of Ostia, and was ultimately carried by noble
Roman ladies on to the Palatine hill.
The history of later days was full of notes
upon religion. Cæsar interspersed them
among the narratives of his campaigns in
Gaul; Tacitus drew on his recollections as
an officer in active service for his description
of the Germans. There was as yet no literature
in Wales or Ireland to embody the Celtic
traditions; and the Scandinavian Saga was
unborn. But the geographers, like Strabo
(first century A.D.), collected a great deal of
material that must have been gathered
ultimately from travellers, soldiers, traders,
and slaves. A wise and gentle philosophic
Greek, Plutarch of Chæronea in Bœotia
(A.D. 46-120), student at the university of Athens,
lecturer on philosophy at Rome, and finally
priest of Pythian Apollo in his native city, is
at home in many religions. Beside altars to
the Greek gods Dionysus, Herakles, and
Artemis, in his own streets, were those of the
Egyptian Isis and Anubis. The treatise on
Isis and Osiris (commonly ascribed to him)
is an early essay in comparative religion. In
the latter half of the second century the
traveller Pausanias passes through Greece,
describing its sacred sites, noting its
monuments, recording mythological traditions, and
observing archaic rites. In this fascinating
guide-book to religious practice are survivals
of ancient savagery, still lingering at country
shrines, set down with curious unconsciousness
of their significance. The historical method
is as yet only in its infancy. But Pausanias
rightly discerned that its first business is to
know the facts.
In Rome, where ritual tradition held its
ground with extraordinary tenacity amid the
decay of belief, Marcus Terentius Varro,
renowned for his wide learning (116-28 B.C.),
devoted sixteen books of his great treatise
on Antiquities to "Divine Things." Like so
many other precious works of ancient
literature it has disappeared, but its contents are
partly known through its use by St. Augustine
in his famous work on "The City of God." Following
a division of the gods by the chief
pontiff Mucius Scævola, he treated religion
under three heads. In the form presented
by the poets' tales of the gods it was mythical.
Founded by the philosophers upon nature
(physis) it was physical. As administered
by priests and practised in cities it was civil.
It was an old notion that religion was a legal
convention imposed by authority for purposes
of popular control; and Varro does not
disdain to declare it expedient that States should
be deceived in such matters. This police-notion
long regulated public custom, and
tended to render the identification of deities
presenting superficial resemblances all the
more easy.
By this time the origin of the term
"religion" had begun to excite interest, as its
meaning began slowly to change. Varro's
contemporaries, Cicero (106-43 B.C.) and
Lucretius (about 97-53), discussed its
derivation. Cicero connected it with the root
legere, to "string together," to "arrange";
while Lucretius found its origin in ligare, to
"bind." Philology gives little help when it
speaks with uncertain voice. More important
is the primitive meaning which Mr. Warde
Fowler defines as "the feeling of awe, anxiety,
doubt, or fear, which is aroused in the mind
by something that cannot be explained by a
man's experience or by the natural course of
cause and effect, and which is therefore
referred to the supernatural." It has nothing
to do at the outset with any special rites or
doctrines. It is not concerned with state-usage
or with priestly law. In its adjectival
form "religious days" or "religious places"
are not days or places consecrated by official
practice; they are days and places which have
gathered round them man's sentiments of awe
and scruple. The word thus came to be
applied to anything that was in some way a
source or embodiment of mysterious forces.
The naturalist Pliny can even say that no
animal is "more full of religion than the mole,"
because strange medicinal powers were
supposed to reside in its heart and teeth.
But, on the other hand, a new use of it
passes into Roman literature in the writings
of Cicero. The feeling of awe still lies in the
background, but the word takes on a reference
to the acts which it prompts, and thus comes
to denote the whole group of rites performed
in honour of some divine being. These make
up a particular cult or worship, ordained and
sanctioned by authority or tradition. "Religion"
thus comes to mean a body of religious
duties, the entire series of sacred acts in which
the primitive feeling is expressed. Roman
antiquity conceived these as under the care
of priesthoods, legitimated by the State.
Around them lay a fringe of superstitions,
which a hostile critic like Lucretius could also
sum up under the same term. And thus in
an age when philosophy was addressing itself
to the whole question of man's relation to the
world and its unseen Rulers, and a single
word was wanted to describe his attitude to
the varied spectacle, "religion" was at hand
to fill the place. It covered the whole field
of human experience, and as different nations
presented it in different forms, it became
possible to speak of "religions" in the sense
of separate systems of worship and belief.
The champion of Christianity naturally
distinguished his religion as the true from the
false; and over against the multiformity of
polytheism he set the unity of the faith of the
Church.
Of these "religions" history and philosophy
sought to give some account. As will be seen
hereafter (Chap. VI), Babylon and Egypt
both claimed a divine origin for their rites,
their arts, and laws. Plutarch expressly
defends the idea of revelation in the cases of
Minos of Crete, the Persian Zoroaster, Zaleucus
the shepherd legislator of the Locrians, Numa
of Rome, and others. Pan was in love with
Pindar, and Æsculapius conversed with
Sophocles: if such divine diversions were
allowed, how much more should these greater
attempts for human welfare be prompted from
heaven! Numa had been enabled through
Camena Egeria to regulate the ceremonial law
as priest-king, and pontiffs, augurs, flamens,
virgins, received their duties from him with
supernatural sanctions.
Philosophers, on the other hand, discussed
the meaning of religion upon different lines.
A wide-spread view already noted presented
it as a mere instrument of policy, devised to
overawe the intractable. The diversity of
religions seemed to support this view. Plato's
Athenian, in one of his latest works, the Laws,
mentions the teaching of sophists who averred
that the gods existed not by nature but by
art, and by the laws of States which are
different in different places, according to the
agreement of those who make them. In a
fragment of a drama on Sisyphus ascribed to
Critias, the friend of Alcibiades, it was alleged
that in the primeval age of disorder and
violence laws might strike crimes committed
in open day, but could not touch secret sins,
hidden in the gloomy depths of conscience.
A sage advised that to moralise men they
must be made afraid. Let them invent gods
who could see and hear all things, cognisant
not only of all human actions but also of men's
inmost thoughts and purposes. They were
accordingly connected with the source of
the most terrifying and the most beneficent
phenomena, the sky, home alike of thunder
and lightning, of the shining sun and fertilising
rain, seat of divine powers helpful and hurtful
to mankind. In the discussion on "the
Nature of the Gods" (by Cicero), Cotta, of
the Academic school, inquires of his Epicurean
opponent Velleius, "What think you of those
who have asserted that the whole doctrine
concerning the immortal gods was the
invention of politicians, whose notion was to
govern that part of the community which
reason could not influence, by religion?"
From another point of view, however,
the practical universality of religion was
again and again cited in proof of its truth.
Antiquity was not scientific in its method of
treatment, and though it did not accept all
religions as altogether equal, it had no
difficulty in regarding them as substantially
homogeneous. The Egyptian worship of
animals might be lashed with satiric scorn,
but the mysteries of its religion, venerable
from an immemorial past, deserved the
highest respect. The process of identification
of the gods of different religions was always
going on as they were carried from land to
land. The Apologist, therefore, like the Cretan
Cleinias in Plato's Laws when the Athenian
stranger asked him to prove the existence of
the gods, could always appeal to two main
arguments—first, the fair order of the universe
and the regularity of the seasons, and secondly,
the common belief of all men, both Hellenes
and barbarians. This common belief, however,
itself required explanation. Its value
really depended on its origin. If that ranked
no higher than the crouching impulses of
fear, it had little worth. Even if it was sought
in the sense of dependence, in quiet trust in a
sheltering order, or in intelligent inference
based on the demand for a cause, the question
still pressed for an answer, "What made this
possible?" The answer was given by the
doctrine of the Logos.
The term logos has played a famous part
in philosophical theology. It appears in our
New Testament at the opening of the fourth
Gospel, "In the beginning was the Logos." Our
translators render the Greek term by
the English "Word." It is derived from the
verb legein, to "speak" or "say." Logos is
primarily "what is said," utterance, or speech.
Speech, however, must mean something.
When we look out upon the objects of the
world around us—rock, river, tree, horse,
star—we learn to separate them into groups,
because while some say quite different things
to us, others speak to us, as it were, with
nearly the same meaning. We recognise a
common meaning in various sorts of dogs, or
in still larger classes such as the whole family
of birds. But in human intercourse what is
said has first been thought. Logos thus takes
on another meaning; it is what thinking says
to itself, or what we call "reason." The
processes of science consist in finding out
these meanings or reasons, and getting them
into intelligible relations with each other.
And when the early Greek thinkers had reached
the conception of the unity of the world, here
was a term which could be called in to express
it. The world must have a meaning; it must
express some thought. And did not thought
imply thinking?
The philosophy of Heracleitus "the
Obscure" (at Ephesus, 500 B.C.) has
received in modern times widely different
interpretations; but whether or not the Stoics
were right in understanding his doctrine of
the Logos to imply the existence of a cosmic
reason universally diffused, present both in
nature and man, it is certain that such ideas
appear soon afterwards in Greek literature.
Pindar affirms the derivation of the soul from
the gods. Plato and Euripides declare the
intelligence of man both in nature and origin
to be divine; and Pseudo-Epicharmus lays
it down (in the second half of the fifth century)
that "there is in man understanding, and there
is also a divine Logos; but the understanding
of man is born from the divine Logos." On
this basis the Stoics worked out the
conception of a fellowship between man and God
which explained the universality of religion.
Its seat was in human nature. Every one
shared in the Generative Reason, the Seminal
Word (the Logos spermatikos). In the long
course of ages, says Cicero, when the time
arrived for the sowing of the human race,
God quickened it with the gift of souls. So
we possess a certain kinship with the heavenly
Powers; and while among all the kinds of
animals Man alone retains any idea of Deity,
among men themselves there is no nation so
savage as not to admit the necessity of believing
in a God, however ignorant they may be what
sort of God they ought to believe in.
The part played by this doctrine in the early
Church is well known. When the new faith
began to attract the attention of the educated,
it was impossible that the resemblances
between Christian and Hellenic monotheism
should be ignored. Philosophy had reached
many of the same truths, and poets and sages
bore the same witness to the unity and
spirituality of God as the prophets and
psalmists of Israel. It was easy to suggest
that the Hebrew seers had been the teachers
of the Greek; might not Plato, for instance,
have learned of Jeremiah in Egypt? On
the other hand, the pleas of chronological
and literary dependence might be insufficient;
there were radical differences as well as
resemblances; the Apologist might deride the
diversities of opinion and make merry over
the contradictions of the schools. Nevertheless
Christianity was often presented by its
defenders as "our philosophy." The Latin
writer Minucius Felix (in the second century)
is so much struck by the parallels in the
higher thought that he boldly declares, "One
might think either that Christians are now
philosophers, or that philosophers were then
already Christian." The martyr Justin (about
A.D. 150) incorporates such teachings into the
scheme of Providence by the aid of the Logos.
For Justin, as for his co-believers, the popular
religion was the work of demons. But
philosophy had combated them in the past like
the new faith. If Socrates had striven to
deliver men from them, and they had
compassed his death through evil men, it was
because the Logos condemned their doings
among the Greeks through him, just as among
the barbarians they were condemned by the
Logos in the person of Christ. The great
truths of God and Providence, of the unity
of the moral government of the world, of the
nature and destiny of man, of freedom, virtue,
and retribution, which were to be found in
the writings of the wisest of the past, were
the product of "the seed of the Logos
implanted in every race of men." Those who
had lived with the Logos were Christians
before Christ, though men might have called
them atheists, like Heracleitus and Socrates.
All noble utterances in theology or legislation
arose through partial discovery or contemplation
of the Logos, and consequently Justin
could boldly claim "whatever things have
been rightly said among all men" as "the
property of us Christians."
The cultivated and mystical Clement, who
became head of the catechetical school of
Alexandria towards the close of the second
century, enforced the same theme. An
enormous reader, he loved to compare the
truths enunciated by Greek poets and
philosophers with the wisdom of the barbarians.
Philosophy, indeed, was a special historical
manifestation of thought along a peculiar
line of development. It affected a particular
race, it spread over a distinct area, and
appeared in a definite time. In these respects
it resembled the preparatory work of Israel
itself. It was a discipline of Providence, so
that beside the generalisation of St. Paul
that the Law had been a tutor to bring the
Jews to Christ, Clement could set another,
that philosophy had played the same part
for the Greeks. On the field of common
speech Clement's contemporary, the fiery
Tertullian of Carthage, appealed to the
worshipper who bore the garland of Ceres on
his brow, or walked in the purple cloak of
Saturn, or wore the white robe of Egyptian
Isis—what did he mean by exclaiming "May
God repay!" or "God shall judge between
us?" Here was a recognition of a supreme
authority and power, the "testimony of a
soul naturally Christian."
Such comparisons, however, had a very
different side. Greece had long had its secret
mysteries, with their sacred initiations, their
rites of purity and enlightenment, their
promises of welfare beyond the grave. When
the new deities from Asia Minor, from Egypt,
Syria, and the further East, were brought to
Italy, the resemblances of their practice to
that of the Christian Church excited the
believer's alarm, and roused at once the
charge of plagiarism. There was a congregation
of Mithra at Rome as early as 67 B.C.,
and towards the end of the first century of
our era his mysteries began to be widely
spread. Here was a baptism; here was a
"sacrament" as the neophyte took the oath
on entering the warfare with evil; here were
grades of soldiership and service; here were
oblations of bread and water mingled with
wine which were naturally compared with
the Lord's supper; here were doctrines of
deliverance from sin, of judgment after death
and ascent to heaven, which brought the
theology and practice of Mithraism very close
to that of the Church. So Mithra bore the
august titles of the holy and righteous God;
or he was the Mediator, author of order in
nature and of victory in life between the
ultimate powers of good and evil.
For a time the rivalry was acute, as his
worship was carried through the West as far
as York and Chester and the Tyne. But
with the triumph of Christianity in the fourth
century the sounds of conflict die away. The
men of learning, Eusebius of Cæsarea (about
A.D. 260-340), Augustine (A.D. 354-430)
bishop of Hippo, surveyed the religions and
philosophies of antiquity as conquerors. The
faiths of Egypt, Phœnicia, Greece, and Rome,
are passed in review. With a broad sweep
of learning Eusebius comments on the ancient
mythologies, the oracles, the theory of demons,
the practice of human sacrifice, the history of
Mosaism. His treatise on the "Preparation
for the Gospel" is the first great work on
comparative religion which issued out of Christian
theology. With generous recognition of what
lay beyond the Church he taught (in the
Theophania) that all higher culture was due
to participation in the Logos. Idolatry might
be the work of demons; the world might be
filled with the babblings of philosophers and
the follies of poets; but the Logos had been
continuously present, sowing in the hearts
of men the rudiments of the divine laws, of
various orders of teaching, of doctrines of
every kind. Thus ethics, art, science, and
the fairest products of human thought, were
genially brought within the scope of
Revelation.
II
The panorama of religions unrolled before
the student of the present day is far vaster
than that which offered itself to the thinkers
of Greece and Rome, and its meaning is
far better understood. When Pausanias
describes the daily sacrifice to a hero at Tronis
in Phocis, where the blood of the victim was
poured down through a hole in the grave to
the dead man within, while the flesh was eaten
on the spot, he notes, like the careful author
of a guide-book, a curious local usage, but he
does not know that it belongs to a group of
savage practices that may be traced all round
the globe. On Mount Lycæus in Arcadia, he
tells us, was a spring which flowed with equal
quantity in summer as in winter. In time of
drought the priest of Lycæan Zeus, after due
prayer and sacrifice, would dip an oak-branch
into the surface of the spring, and a mist-like
vapour would rise and become a cloud. In
the midst of Hellenic culture it was still
possible, as among the negroes of West Africa
or the Indians of North America, to make rain.
From continent to continent a multitude
of observers have gathered an immense range
of facts, which show that amid numerous
differences in detail the religions of the lower
culture may all be ranked together on the
basis of a common interpretation of the
surrounding world. Philosophy suggests that
man can only explain nature in terms of his
own experience. He is encompassed by
powers that are continually acting on him,
as he to a much smaller extent can in his turn
act on them. By various processes of
observation and reflection (p. 85), he comes to
the conclusion that within his body lives
something which enables it to move and feel
and think and will, until at death it goes
away. To this mysterious something many
names are given, and for purposes of modern
study they are all ranked under the term
"spirits." This explanation is then applied
to the behaviour of all kinds of objects within
his view; though it does not at all follow that
this was actually the first explanation. The
animals that are stronger and more cunning
than himself, the trees that move in the
wind, the corn that grows so mysteriously,
the bubbling spring, even the things that he
himself has made, his weapons, tools, and
jars, all have their "spirits," so that the entire
scene of his existence is pervaded by them.
To this doctrine, with its many branches of
belief and practice, Sir E. B. Tylor, in his
classical work on Primitive Culture (1871),
gave the name of "Animism," and the
religions founded upon it are called
"animistic," or sometimes, from the multitude of
unorganised spirits which they recognise,
"polydæmonistic" religions.
Such religions belong to no specific ethnic
group. They appear either in existing
practice or in the shape of occasional survivals
in all of the three great racial divisions of
mankind—the white or Caucasic, the yellow
or Mongolian, and the black or Negroid.
They are to be found under the Equator and
among the Arctic snows. They are
sometimes associated with a peculiar form of
social structure regulating inter-tribal
relations known as totemism. It was at one
time supposed that this designated a stage of
evolution through which all peoples had passed.
The totem or clan-sign, whether animal or
plant, or more rarely an inanimate object like
wind, sun, or star, was supposed to have
become an object of worship, and various
theories were invented to explain the divisions
and subdivisions of the clans, and the selection
of their special signs. Hence, it was argued,
came the cultus of beast and bird and tree;
hence the altar and the idol; hence the animal
sacrifice and the sacramental meal. In clever
hands it supplied a universal key. The
extraordinary intricacy of the subject, and
the widely scattered character of the evidence,
prevent any discussion here. But the most
recent researches have not sustained these
attempts. Among the Central Australian
tribes the totems are not worshipped, they
are in no sense deities, no prayers or sacrifices
are offered to them. They may be brought
into the sphere of religion in some tribes as
part of a social order to which a superhuman
origin is ascribed (p. 171). But totemism
cannot be established as the typical form of
"primitive religion" any more than any other
complicated system. Its general diffusion is
questionable. At the present day there are
large areas over which no signs of totemic
organisation are found; and many phenomena
which were formerly assumed to be proofs of
totemism in the higher religions of antiquity,
in Egypt, Greece, and Italy, now receive other
explanations.
The higher forms of animistic religion pass
out into polytheisms of more or less dignity.
They do not succeed in embodying themselves
in permanent literary product, they create no
scriptures or sacred books. They have their
rude chants, their songs for weddings and
funerals, their genealogies and tales of ancient
heroes. Strange cosmogonies float from
island to island in Polynesia. The Finnic
peoples enshrined their faith in the ballads
collected under the name of the Kalevala.
Among the Indians of North America
speculation is sometimes highly elaborated in
mythologic tradition; and out of the fusion of
nationalities in Mexico rose a developed
polytheism in which lofty religious sentiment
seems strangely blended with a hideous and
sanguinary ritual. Peru, no less, presented
to the Spanish conquerors bewildering and
incongruous aspects. In these two cultures
native American civilisation reached its
highest forms. In Mexico the apparatus of
religion was very minutely organised. There
were immense temples, which required large
numbers of priests and servitors. The capital
alone is said to have contained 2000 sacred
buildings, and the great temple had a staff
of 5000 priests. There were religious orders
and temple-schools; rites of baptism and
circumcision; feasts and sacrifices and
sacraments, in which the monkish chroniclers
found strange parallels to their own practice.
The issues of victory were disastrous. With
the death of the last Aztec emperor (1520)
the doom of the old gods was assured, and the
Inquisition (1571) completed what the sword
of Cortes had begun.
In the old world Asia has been the mother
of religions, but various fates have befallen
her offspring. The ancient cults of Babylonia,
after an existence longer than the period from
Moses to the present day, vanished from the
scene. The teachings of Zoroaster were
planted in China in A.D. 621, and a temple
was erected at the capital, Changan; but the
Persian faith could not maintain itself in such
a different culture. After the Mohammedan
conquest in the eighth century it was finally
carried by a little band of exiles into India,
and is still cherished by their descendants
who bear the name of Parsees. The Jew and
the Christian have only a precarious
toleration in the land which was once their home.
In India and in China alone is the religion of
to-day linked in unbroken continuity with
the distant past. Islam may set itself in
lineal succession to the teachers of old, and
claim a place for Mohammed in the sequence
of Abraham, Moses, and Christ. But it is
the youngest, and in some respects the least
original, of the world's great faiths.
India has its own panorama of religions,
from the animistic practice of the tribes
of the jungle and the hills, up to the refined
pantheism of the philosophical school.
Diversities of race have been strangely
intermingled, and fifty languages make it
impossible to secure any uniformity of culture.
There are the descendants of the ancient
inhabitants who occupied the country before
the Aryan ancestors of the Hindus settled
themselves upon the fertile lands. They
are represented to-day by the wild tribes of
Central India such as the Bhils and Gonds.
Some ten million probably profess a religion
of a well-marked animistic type. But this
also lies at the base of wide-spread popular
belief and custom, where the propitiation of
spirits, the cultus of Mother Earth, and the
veneration of village deities, engage much
more attention than the higher gods of
Hinduism.
The literary foundation of the religions of
India lies in the ancient hymns of the Rig
Veda, sung by the immigrant Aryans as they
entered from the North-west and gradually
established themselves in the Ganges valley.
These hymns were addressed to gods of earth
and air and sky; they celebrated the glories
of dawn and day; they told of the conflict
between sunshine and storm; they praised
Agni, the god of fire, messenger between
heaven and earth, himself as agent of the
sacrifice a kind of priest among the gods;
they commemorated the dead who passed
into the upper world and adorned the sky
with stars. Already in some of the later
hymns the poet's thought endeavoured to
find some principle or power that should
unite these different agencies as manifestations
of one ultimate reality; and philosophic
imagination at length fixed on the conception
of Brahman, a term whose original meaning
seems to hover between that of sacred spell
and prayer. Viewed in a personal aspect
(Brahma) as a god of popular worship, he
could be described as "Lord of all, the Maker,
the Creator, Father of all that are and are to
be."[1] But behind this sovereign ruler
metaphysical abstraction placed a neuter Brahma,
all-embracing, the ground of all existence,
summed up in three terms—Being, Thought,
and Bliss. Here was the ultimate Self of the
whole universe; and to know the identity
of the human self with the Absolute, to be
able to repeat the mysterious words tat
tvam asi, "that art thou," was the aim of
the forest-sages and the highest attainment of
holy insight.
Meantime the social order was acquiring
the first forms of caste. The priests and the
fighting men, the people who settled on the
lands for pasture and tillage, and the tribes
of aborigines whom they dispossessed and
subdued, formed the basis of divisions which
were gradually multiplied with extraordinary
complexity. A religious authority was found
for the whole system in the teachings of the
Veda, and to contest its claims was to defy
the power which slowly spread with subtle
hold through the whole peninsula. By its
side arose the doctrine of the Deed (karma,
p. 217), which explained the varied
conditions of human life by the principle that
"a man is born into the world that he has
made." The lot of each individual had a
moral meaning: it was the result of previous
conduct, good or ill. This is the conception
embodied in the word "transmigration." It
pictures man as involved in a continuous series
of births and deaths, and religion and
philosophy undertook in their several ways to
secure him a favourable destiny hereafter, or
by various means of divine grace, or strenuous
self-discipline, or pious contemplation, to
extricate him altogether from the weary round
of ignorance and pain.
Out of these elements, a crude and
ever-varying animism at the bottom, a highly
refined metaphysical pantheism at the top,
figures of incarnation and deliverance, the
cultus of the dead, caste, and transmigration,
the complex strands of modern Hinduism
have been woven. Many have been the
growths upon the way. The early Buddhist
texts, representing the society of the "Middle
Country," show already in the fifth century
B.C. a surprising activity of speculation, busily
engaged in questioning every received doctrine
of religion and morals. Some forms held
their ground for a few centuries and then
disappeared. One religious community of
that date alone survives, viz. the Jains, who
still number about a million and a third.
Buddhism, after sending out its missionaries
into Ceylon in the south and China in the
north, was driven from its ancient seats, and
only some 300,000 hold its creed in India
itself. In Burma, however, it numbers between
ten and eleven million lay adherents, and in
the adjacent kingdom of Siam it has 13,000
temples, and more than 93,000 mendicants
have taken its vows.
But Hinduism still lives on with a
marvellous and self-renewing power. Two great
divine figures have been set beside the original
creative Brahma, representatives of the forces
that preserve and destroy, Vishnu and Çiva
(p. 128). Vishnu succeeded to the place
of the Buddha; and Hindu religion gave
prominence in him to the conception of a
Divine Person who out of love for man
assumed human shape to conquer evil and
establish truth. The worship of Çiva has
been carried everywhere by the Brahmans;
if he destroys, he also reproduces; he, too,
appears to bless and help, and the Tamil
poets of South India in the early Middle Ages
sang his praises in hymns that still feed the
piety of the people. Again and again
reforming teachers have initiated movements
on behalf of spiritual religion. Their followers
have multiplied and broken up into sects,
but still remain within the general area of
the ancestral faith, which now embraces
considerably more than 200 million souls. The
disciples of Nānak (1469-1538), however,
known as Sīkhs, formed into a semi-military
organisation by the Guru Gobind "the Lion"
(1675-1708), retain their religious independence,
touching Hinduism on one side and
Mohammedanism on the other. They number
at the present day more than two millions, and
are found almost exclusively in the Punjab.
China, like India, illustrates the principle
of religious continuity. Its earliest historic
date is fixed by an eclipse in 776 B.C.; and the
traditions of its dynasties stretch more than
a thousand years beyond. The ancient
religion depicted in the books known as the
Shu and the Shî Kings, which Confucius
(550-478 B.C.) was supposed to have edited out
of much older documents, rested upon the
solemn order of the living Heaven and Earth,
with multitudinous ranks of associated spirits,
and the generations of the dead. This has
remained the formal basis of the national
religion (p. 97). Meanwhile the ethical
sayings of Confucius acquired extraordinary
ascendency. They formed the chief element
in the national education, and supplied the
ideals of popular culture. Carried into Japan
in the sixth century of our era, they filled a
gap in the old Japanese teaching, which we
know by the name of Shin-To or "Spirits'
way." Confucius himself became the object
of general commemorative homage; and
annual ceremonies are still celebrated in his
honour with great splendour in the Confucian
temples which adorn every city within the
empire above a certain rank.[2]
In the popular religion demonology and
magic play a constant part, and numerous
growths out of the worship of ancestors
provide ever fresh additions to the higher ranks
of spirits. These are regulated by decrees
of the Board of Rites, one of the most ancient
religious institutions in China. The spirit
of a departed governor, perhaps two centuries
ago, is believed to have appeared in time of
flood, and by his beneficent influence dangers
have been averted. Memorials are sent up
to Peking by the local authorities, and after
repeated manifestations divine honours are
awarded. Beneath these august personages
are the spirits which preside over the trades
and professions, over the parts of a house—the
door, the bed, or the kitchen range—over
the breeding of domestic animals, and a large
variety of occupations, to say nothing of
medicine and disease, the limbs of the body,
and the stars. They are analogous to the
Kami, the equivalent powers in Japan (p. 91);
and they are not without parallel in religions
further west.
Half a century before Confucius, in 604,
was born another sage, known in history as
Lao Tsze. Fragments of his teaching are
embodied in a small book of aphorisms,
concerned with the doctrine of the Tao, the way,
the path, or course. In nature this
corresponded to the ordered round of the seasons,
and the regularities which we call laws. In
man it might be seen in the line of right
conduct, and the inner principles which
pointed to it. On this conception, which was
much older than Lao Tsze himself, a kind of
metaphysical mysticism was reared by later
disciples, not without affinities with some
aspects of the Brahmanical philosophy. They
have been explained by suggestions of travel
and contact which more careful study cannot
justify. The religion of the Tao (whence the
name Taoism) could never have been popular
had it not become strangely entangled with
alchemy and transformed under the influence
of its later rival, Buddhism, from which it
derived much both in ritual, in ethics, and in
doctrine.
The statements about the appearance of
Buddhist teachers and Buddhist books in
China before our era have been much
disputed: the first trustworthy record relates
that in the year A.D. 65, a deputation of
eighteen persons was sent to Khotan to make
inquiries, and they returned two years later
with books and images and a teacher. A
second teacher arrived shortly after, a temple
was built at the imperial capital, Lo-Yang, and
the laborious work of translation was begun.
A stream of missionaries, Hindus, Parthians,
Huns, slowly flowed into the Flowery Land,
"moved," says the chronicler, "by the desire
to convert the world." After a while the
Chinese students sought the holy places in
India, and learned Sanskrit at the great
Buddhist university at Nalanda, near Buddha
Gaya. Vast collections of sacred literature
were gathered. The first Chinese catalogue,
dated A.D. 520, enumerates 2,213 distinct
works. Twelve successive revisions were
made under imperial order, and to the last,
in 1737, the Emperor himself, following the
example of some of his predecessors,
contributed a preface.
Opposed again and again by the Confucian
literati, its temples destroyed, its religious
houses suppressed, its monks and nuns driven
back into the world, Buddhism has still lived
on. It has created impressive devotions, and
generated numerous sects. It has spread
through Corea, Mongolia, and Japan; on
the west it is planted in Tibet. It has
exercised immense influence on Chinese culture;
architecture, art and letters being all deeply
indebted to it. In numerical estimates of
different religions common in the last century
Buddhism always headed the list, for the
whole population of China—vaguely reckoned
at 400,000,000—was included in its fold.
Such estimates are no longer trustworthy.[3] The
ancestral cultus of the dead under the
shelter of Confucianism, the rites of Taoist
and of Buddhist priests, are strangely blended.
The incidents of life from birth to death are
never completed without help from one or
other of the two faiths once rivals, and now
so curiously intertwined. As early as the
sixth century a famous Buddhist scholar
Fu Hhi was asked by the Emperor Wu-ti if
he was a Buddhist, and he pointed to his Taoist
cap. "Are you a Taoist?" he showed his
Confucian shoes. "Are you a Confucian?" he
wore a Buddhist scarf. When the Abbé
Hue made his famous journey two generations
ago, he observed that when strangers
met, politeness required that each should ask
his neighbour, "To what sublime religion do
you belong?" The first might be a
Confucian, the second a Taoist, the third a disciple
of the Buddha. Each would then begin to
commend the religion not his own, and they
would conclude by saying, "Religions are
many, reason is one, we are all brothers." It
was the maxim of Lu Shun Yang (a
distinguished Buddhist) centuries ago that "the
teaching of the sects is not different. The
large-hearted man regards them as embodying
the same truths. The narrow-minded man
observes only their differences."
Yet another great religion, the latest born
among the higher faiths of the world, has
established itself in both India and China.
The first Mohammedan invasion of India took
place in A.D. 664. The followers of the
prophet are now reckoned at more than
66 millions. In 628 Mohammed himself sent
his uncle to China with presents to the
Emperor. He travelled by sea to Canton,
where the first mosque was afterwards built.
Good observers number the Mohammedans in
China to-day at 30 millions, mostly in the
north and west; and it is supposed that there
are about as many more in the Malay
Archipelago. In Africa, especially among the
negroes of the west, their numbers have
increased enormously in the last century, and
some two-fifths of the multitudinous peoples
of the Dark Continent, 80 millions out of
200, are believed to live in the obedience of
Islam.
Islam, resignation or submission to the will
of God, was the name given to his religion by
the prophet himself, who died in A.D. 632.
But in the hands of his first followers
submission was no passive virtue. Tradition
ascribed to him the idea of addressing all
known sovereigns, and promising them safety
if they accepted the faith. His successors,
therefore, conceived that the fulfilment of
Allah's will demanded a resolute effort to
make known the new revelation. A fierce
burst of missionary effort carried the Moslem
armies far and wide. In the year of
Mohammed's death they attacked Persia and Syria;
a few years later they invaded Egypt. Within
the first century they had entered India, and
had swept through north Africa into Spain.
But they had twice been obliged to retreat
from Constantinople, and in 732 they were
defeated on the Loire by Charles Martel near
Tours, and forced to retire behind the Pyrenees.
With the same astonishing energy they
created centres of culture from Baghdad to
Cordova. Through Syriac versions of
Aristotle's works Arabian teachers carried Greek
philosophy into Western Europe when the
light of ancient learning had grown dim. The
contact with new thought stimulated theological
discussion, and the Moslem had to justify
himself against the Christian, the Zoroastrian,
the Manichæan and the Buddhist. Above
the simple ritual demands of the prophet,
the recital of the creed—"There is no god but
God (Allah), Mohammed is the apostle of
God"—the observance of prayer five times
daily, the annual fast in the month of
Ramadhān, the bestowal of alms, and the pilgrimage
to Mecca, arose the debates of the schools and
the divisions of sects. The nature of the
divine attributes, and their relation to the
being or essence of the Deity, the problems of
predestination and free will, of reason and
revelation, excited eager interest. Beside the
Koran vast numbers of traditions concerning
religious life and practice were gradually put
in circulation, and in the third century after
Mohammed's death they were reduced to
writing in six great collections. To these
sources of truth and rules of conduct the
jurists and theologians added two others:
agreement or universal consent, where beliefs
and practices are generally received though
not specially sanctioned by the Koran or
tradition; and analogy, by which a doctrine
or usage may be accepted as valid because
of its resemblance to something legitimated
by revelation.
Like the higher religions of India, like
Judaism in its long and chequered career
whether in Palestine or in the Dispersion, like
the "universal religions" of Buddhism and
Christianity, Mohammedanism has known
how to accommodate itself to very different
levels of culture. In the Arabian deserts
much of the earlier animism still remains.
It is not rudely expelled either at the present
day as Islam advances through Africa. Other
impulses have worked in different directions.
There are religious orders and mendicant
ascetics. There are mystical schools of refined
spirituality, to which the influences of
Neo-platonism, of Christianity, and Buddhism,
have all contributed. Sūfiism (as this type
of thought is called) was fed from various
sources, and has assumed different forms in
different countries, but its best-known literary
products came from the great poets of Persia.
From that subtle race issues the most
remarkable movement which modern
Mohammedanism has produced. In 1844 a young
man not twenty-five years of age, named Ali
Mohammed, of Shiraz, appeared under the
title of the "Bab" or Gate. Disciples gathered
round him, and the movement was not checked
by his arrest, his imprisonment for nearly six
years, and his final execution in 1850.
Thirteen years later one of his disciples named
Bahá-ullah, "Splendour of God," announced
himself as "He whom God shall manifest,"
whose advent the Bab had foretold. Exiled
to Acre, he died in 1892, and was succeeded
in the leadership by his son Abbas Efendi.
The new faith declared that there was no
finality in revelation, and while recognising
the Koran as a product of past revelation,
claimed to embody a new manifestation of
the divine Unity. Carried to Chicago in
1893 by a Bâbî merchant, it succeeded in
establishing itself in the United States; and
its missionaries are winning new adherents
in India. It, too, claims to be a universal
teaching; it has already its noble army of
martyrs and its holy books; has Persia, in
the midst of her miseries, given birth to a
religion which will go round the world?
Religion presents itself in its most obvious
form as a mode of activity. It is seen in
some kind of behaviour; it prompts a
particular sort of conduct. Behind the customs
and rites which are its visible sign lie certain
thoughts and feelings, often dim, indistinct,
obscure. In the totality of its beliefs, emotions,
and institutions, it is as much the product
of the human spirit as poetry, or art, science,
morals, and law. It will therefore always
bear some kind of relation to the general
circumstances of the social development to
which it belongs. The interpretation of the
surrounding scene which is implied in its
intellectual outlook will vary with the
elements of the scene itself. But the limits
of variation are much smaller than might be
expected. The questions "why" and "how"
may be answered very differently under the
Equator and within the Arctic zone, but they
are the same questions, and spring from
common impulses of thought. Moreover,
while race, climate, and economic conditions
may all vary, it happens to all men to be born
and to die. The family must be maintained,
children must be reared, food must be
procured, the tribal group must preserve its
stability and, if possible, increase. There are
universal elements in human life all over the
globe; and the manifestations of religion
founded upon them exhibit in consequence
marked resemblances from land to land.
Religion always implies some kind of want.
The young husband wants male children, the
hunter game, the warrior victory, the diviner
the knowledge of secrets, the saint holiness.
The wants may be crude or refined, the
satisfaction of a physical appetite, protection
against some anticipated danger, the realisation
of an exalted spiritual fellowship. But
religion suggests that there is some Power
capable of satisfying these wants, and
undertakes to provide the means for setting man
in proper relations with it. All round him are
the objects and forces of the visible world.
He learns by degrees that some help him to
gratify his desires, and others hinder them.
There are many things that he cannot
understand, and some of which he dimly feels that
he must not presume to try: he is only
conscious towards them of a strange wonder and
awe; they are uncanny; he cannot bring
them into his experience; he must not meddle
with them, he must keep away. But other
things are more kindly, and fulfil his hopes.
Out of such vague consciousness he
gradually frames a working method. Some sort
of theory is at length established after many
trials, concerning what must be done to
obtain what he seeks. The line of his action
is determined in part by the ideas and
expectations which have slowly emerged out
of his endeavours to get into fruitful
connection with the powers by which he is
encompassed. This is the element of belief,
which lies behind religion proper, and supplies
the soil in which religious feeling and action
germinate and grow. What, then, is the kind
of belief which, in the sphere of the lower
culture, makes religion possible?
It is plain at once that no records remain of
what is still sometimes called "primitive
religion." Even tribes that seem to be living
in the Stone Age have as long a past behind
them as any European of light and leading.
Whatever the beliefs may be that belong to
any given stage of social culture, they are
not new inventions, they depend on
immemorial tradition. And they are not, as
now cherished, the results of individual
research or reflection. They are held in
common by all the members of the tribe, so
that they have a kind of collective force.
No doubt in the long process of their
formation and transmission modifications may have
been introduced, as some elder, shrewder
than his fellows, gave new emphasis to some
leading idea, or suggested the adoption of
some fresh action. Trace them back into
the dim realm of conjecture, and some mind
a little more observant or ready than his
comrades must have started the first explanation,
some will a little more adventurous must
have made the first experiments in conduct.
Thoughts do not issue from a "collective
consciousness"; they bear the stamp of
personality, they are not begotten by
abstractions, and every fresh development starts
from a single brain. But the uniformity of
experience within the group gives enormous
weight to the wisdom of the past; and
constitutes a sanction which only some grave
shock can change or overthrow.
With religion is constantly associated, both
in historical record and in the lower forms of
present-day practice, another kind of activity
known as Magic. The relation between them
has been variously interpreted. The modern
anthropologist, Dr. Frazer, finds himself in
unexpected agreement with the philosopher
Hegel in supposing that magic was the first
to appear upon the scene. It is represented
as a kind of primitive science, founded on
certain elementary axioms, such as that "like
produces like," or that things once in contact
with each other will continue to act upon
each other when the contact is broken. The
Central Australian performs elaborate
ceremonies to stimulate the multiplication of
the totem which provides the supply of food
for his tribe. Suppose it is the witchetty
grub. A kind of pantomime is performed
representing the emergence of the
fully-developed insect out of the chrysalis, typified
by a long, narrow structure made of boughs.
The totem men sit inside and chant rude
songs, and then crawl out singing of the
insect coming forth.
One of the commonest illustrations is the
attempt to compass the death of an enemy
by injuring or destroying an image or figure
supposed to correspond to him. Such images
were made in ancient Babylonia, Egypt,
Greece, and Rome. One North American
Indian will draw a figure of his adversary in
the sand, or in ashes, and prick it with a sharp
stick. Another will make a wooden image,
and insert a needle into the head or the heart.
Clay is used for the purpose by the African
Matabele, wax in Arabia, the guelder rose in
Japan, materials of all kinds in India. In
Scotland the corp chre, as it was called, was
a clay body, which was stuck full of pins,
nails, and broken bits of glass, and set in a
running stream with its head to the current;
a modern specimen from Inverness-shire may
be seen in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Is all this really as Dr. Frazer supposes, prior
to the birth of religion, and does man only
turn to the propitiation of superior powers
when he cannot get what he wants through
magic? Of that process no evidence can
be offered.
The essence of magic lies in some kind of
compulsion or constraint. Through the proper
spell, or through the will of the magician,
a control is exerted which produces the
desired result. The power which is thus claimed
implies an attitude wholly unlike that of
religion. Into that attitude there enter
elements of wonder and submission in the
presence of energies which man cannot
master, though he desires to get them on his
side. But no observer was at hand to watch
the first processes of feeling and thought
which the interaction of man and his environment
produced. The crudest forms of religion
which we actually know, meet us in tribes
which have possessed them from an unknown
past. Here religion has a social character
binding the members of a group together,
and tending to maintain certain uniformities
of conduct and character. Over against it
stands the antisocial character of magic, at
any rate when directed against individuals.
Along this line it is urged that magic and
religion have both issued out of common
conditions. In the world around all sorts
of events are continually happening. Man,
in the midst of them, moves to and fro
impulsively among various objects and agencies.
Out of these arise various reactions for
self-maintenance, for protection and defence.
Certain acts tend to establish themselves as
successful; they make for security and welfare.
At first man's efforts have no definite
direction; but some are found effective, others
are futile, and attention is concentrated on
those that produce satisfactory results. After
many trials certain beliefs, certain processes,
certain persons, gradually stand out above the
rest, and through them relations of advantage
are established with the environing powers.
In such experiences lie the roots of both
religion and magic. In their earliest forms
they may be as difficult to discriminate as
the simplest types of animal and vegetable
life. If it be asked what distinguishes them
outwardly, when both are transmitted by
tradition, both rest upon custom, it may be
answered that religion is concerned with
what tends to the stability of the community.
Its interests are those of the group. It
supplies the bond of united action for clan
or tribe or people. It is pre-eminently
social; it expresses itself in ceremonies,
feasts, and rites in which all can join, or in
commands which all can obey. Even the
Australians, so poor in elements of worship,
have tribal laws which have been imparted
to them from on high (Chap. VII).
Over against the community stands the
individual, object of all kinds of jealousies
and enmities. All sorts of antisocial arts may
be practised for his destruction. The pointing-stick
of Australia provides a common magical
weapon. It is carried away into a lonely spot
in the bush, and the intending user plants it
in the ground, crouches down over it, and
mutters a curse against the object of his
hatred: "May your heart be rent asunder,
may your backbone be split open!" Then
one evening, as the men sit round the
campfire in the dark, he creeps up stealthily
behind his enemy, stoops down with his back
to the camp, points the stick over his shoulder,
and mutters the curse again. A little while
after, unless saved by a more powerful magic,
the victim sickens and dies.
Of course magic may also be used for the
benefit of the individual, and the practice
of exorcism for the cure of diseases caused
through possession by evil spirits long found
shelter in some branches of the Christian
Church. The kinship between Magic and
Religion is clearly marked when the priest
takes the place of the devil-dancer or the
medicine man. Yet they are on different
planes; religion is prescribed and official, and
demands specific services; magic falls into
the background, it becomes a secret, perhaps
a forbidden, art. Nevertheless, between
religion and antisocial magic lies a large
group of rites, essentially magical in character,
like the North American Indian rain-dances
or the totem-ceremonies of the Arunta in
Central Australia, designed for the general
welfare. Even in much higher cultures the
spell frequently mingles with the prayer, and
ceremonies of sacrifice carry with them
elements of compulsion or constraint.
What traces, then, do the phases of religion
in the lower culture exhibit of a view of the
world and its powers out of which these
diverging lines of practice might emerge?
In widely different regions of the globe the
forces that operate in unexpected ways, or
play through things beyond man's reach, or
appear in natural objects of striking
character—an animal, a tree—are summed up in some
general term of mystery and awe. Such is
the Melanesian term mana, first noted by
Bishop Codrington, common to a large group
of languages. It implies some supersensual
power or influence; it is not itself personal,
though it may dwell in persons as in things.
It is known by the results which reveal its
working. You find a stone of an unusual
shape; it may resemble some familiar object
like a fruit; you lay it at the root of the
corresponding tree, or you bury it in a
yam-patch; an abundant crop follows; clearly,
the stone has mana. It lives in the song-words
of a spell; it secures success in fighting,
perhaps through the tooth of some fierce and
powerful animal; it imparts speed to the
canoe, brings fish into the net, enables the
arrow to inflict a mortal wound. But the
word has a yet wider range, in the sense of
power, might, influence. By it a parent
can bring a curse on a disobedient child, a
man who possesses it can work miracles; it
even denotes the divinity of the gods. And
so mysterious is the whole range of the inner
life, that mana covers thought, desire, feeling,
and affection; and in Hawaian it reaches out
to spirit, energy of character, majesty. Here
is an immense reserve of potency pervading
the world, on which man may draw for good
or ill.
Among the North American Indians similar
conceptions may be traced. The Algonquin
manitou represents a subtle property believed
to exist everywhere in nature, though some
persons and objects possess more of it than
others. Among the Sioux the sun, the moon,
the stars, thunder, wind, are all wakanda.
So are certain trees and animals, the cedar,
the snake, the grey elephant; and mystery-places
like a particular lake in North Dakota,
or some peculiar rocks on the Yellowstone
River. The term carries with it power and
sacredness; it belongs to what is ancient,
grand, and animate. The Iroquoian tribes
designate this mysterious force orenda. It
expresses an incalculable energy, manifested in
rocks and streams and tides; in plants and
trees, in animals and man; it belongs to the
earth and its mountains; it breathes in the
winds and is heard in the thunder; the clouds
move by it, day and night follow each other
through it; it dwells in sun, moon, and stars.
The shy bird or quadruped which it is difficult
to snare or kill, possesses it; so does the skilful
hunter; it gives victory in intertribal games
of skill, and is the secret force of endurance or
speed of foot. The prophet or the soothsayer
discloses the future by its aid; and whatever is
believed to have been instrumental in
accomplishing some purpose or obtaining some good,
finds in orenda the source of its effectiveness.
Not dissimilar is the conception of mulungu
among the Yaos, east of Lake Nyassa. The
term is wide-spread through the eastern
group of Bantu tongues, and is said to have
the meaning of "Old One" or "Great One";
and in this sense it has been employed as
equivalent to God. But we are expressly
told that in its native use and form it does
not imply personality. Etymologically it
ranks with the leg, arm, heart, head, of the
human frame. Yet it denotes rather a state
or property inhering in something, like life
or health in the body, than any single object.
It indicates a kind of supernormal energy,
displayed in actual experience, but not to be
detected by any physical sense. It is the
agent of wonder and mystery; the rainbow
is mulungu; and it sums up at once the
creative energy which made the earth and
animals and man, and the powers which
operate in human life. At the foot of a tree
in the village courtyard, where men sit and
talk, a small offering of flour or beer is placed
on any distinctive occasion in the communal
life; at a meal, or on a journey at cross roads,
a little flour is set aside. It is "for Mulungu";
sometimes dimly conceived as a spirit within;
sometimes regarded as a universal agency in
nature and affairs, impalpable, impersonal;
sometimes rising into distinctness as God.
Such terms are, of course, generalisations
from many separate experiences. Out of this
sense of mystery grow more definite ideas.
The dark and solemn forest, the rushing
river, the precipitous rock, the lofty
cloud-crowned mountain, the winds and storms, all
manifest a common power;[1] it lives in the
snake or the bull, in the tiger or the bear.
This may be conceived in a highly complex
and abstract form. Thus the Zuñis of
Mexico, we are told, suppose the sun and
moon, the stars, the sky, the earth and sea,
with all their various changes, and all
inanimate objects, as well as plants, animals,
and men, to belong to one great system of
all-conscious and interrelated life. One term
includes them all: hâi, "being" or "life." With
the prefix â, "all," the whole field of
nature is summed up as âhâi, "life" or
"the Beings." This comprehensive term
includes the objects of sensible experience
regarded as personal existences, and
supersensual beings who are known as "Finishers
or Makers of the paths of life," the most
exalted of all being designated "the Holder
of the paths of our lives." So in Annam life
is regarded as a universal phenomenon. It
belongs not only to men and animals and
plants, but to stones and stars, to earth,
fire, and wind. But it is seen in groups
and kinds rather than individuals, and the
limits of its forms are not sharply drawn;
it can pass through many transformations,
and possesses indefinite possibilities of change.
Such conceptions have a long history behind
them.
The poets of the ancient Vedic hymns
beheld everything around them full of energy.
The names by which they designated what
they saw all denoted action or agency. The
swift flow of the stream gained it the title of
the "runner"; as it cut away the banks or
furrowed its course deep between the rocks,
it was the "plougher"; when it nourished
the fields it was the "mother"; when it
marked off one territory from another it was
the "defender" or "protector." So the
seers addressed their invocations to the dawn
or the sun, to the winds and the fire, to the
river or the mountain, to the earth-mother
or the sky-father, as living powers, capable of
responding to the prayers of their worshippers.
Similar energy dwelt in the horse or the cow,
the bird of omen and the guardian dog. It
was even shared by ritual implements such
as the stones by which the sacred soma-juice
was squeezed out, or by the products of
human handiwork, the war-car, the weapon,
the drum, and the peaceful plough.
At the present day the Batak in the
north-west of Sumatra interpret the world about
them in terms of a soul-stuff or life-power
called tondi. A vast reservoir of this exists
in the world above, and flows down upon men
and animals and plants. The biggest animal,
like the tiger, the most important of plants,
like rice (chief source of food), have most
tondi, but it is not confined to living things;
the smith attributes it to his iron, the
fisherman to his boat, the tiller of the ground to
his hoe, the householder to his hearth and
home. But a further analysis is beginning.
What is the relation of a man's tondi to
himself? When he dies, it passes into some
fresh organism. But the rest of him, his
shadow, his double, or his self, becomes a
begu. In life, it is the body that thinks and
feels, that fears and hopes and wills, though
the presence of the tondi supplies the needful
energy. But the tondi also has the functions
of consciousness, for it can go away in dreams
and meet the begus of parents and ancestors.
And the apprehension that it may depart
begets reverence and even offerings to the
tondi, rather than to distant gods for whom
man can feel neither fear nor love.
We touch here another root of religious
belief, which produces growths so
wide-spreading that some interpreters bring the
whole range of objects of worship within their
shade. How, after all, does man explain
himself to himself? At first he does not
think about thinking. Such words as he uses
are vague and elastic, like the Polynesian
mana, which covers a multitude of facts
without and within. Only through long
dim processes does any idea corresponding
to our conception of personality come into
his consciousness. He is as confused about
the objects round him as he is about himself.
Yet he has some sort of initiative. Whence
comes it? Little by little a variety of
experiences force on him the belief that beside
the body and its limbs he possesses something
which he cannot ordinarily see, but which is
essential to his activity. He falls asleep, and
lies still upon the ground; he wakes, full of
remembrance of adventure, the localities
which he has visited, the animals that he has
hunted, the dead kinsmen whom he has met.
The Australians explain their dreams by the
supposition that the yambo, the mūrup, or
the boolabong, can quit the body and return.
"I asked one of the Kurnai" (of Gippsland),
relates Mr. Howitt, "whether he really
thought his yambo could go out during sleep." "It
must be so," was the answer, "for when
I sleep, I go to distant places, I see distant
people, I even see and speak with those that
are dead." The great apostle of the East in
the sixteenth century, the devoted Francis
Xavier, wrote home from India to the Society
of Jesus in Europe—
"I find that the arguments which are to
convince these ignorant people must be by
no means subtle, such as those which are
found in the books of learned schoolmen, but
such as their minds can understand. They
asked me again and again how the soul of
a dying person goes out of the body, how it
was, whether it was as happens to us in dreams,
when we seem to be conversing with our
friends and acquaintances. Ah, how often
this happens to me, dearest brethren, when
I dream of you! Was this because the soul
then leaves the body?"
This explanation is found all round the globe.
Many other experiences confirm the
impression of some kind of dual existence.
The shadow or shade which follows a man
repeats his movements, and appears as a sort
of double. It is even widely believed in the
face of the simplest evidence that a dead
body casts no shadow (of course, as it lies
upon the ground the shadow may almost
disappear). Your reflection in river, pool,
or lake, actually reproduces your colour as
well as your form: beware lest a crocodile
seizes it and drags you in. From ancient
times down to Shelley and Walt Whitman,
poetry has designated Sleep and Death as
"brothers"; in death that which was
temporarily absent in sleep has gone away for good.
It may have rushed out with the blood from
a gaping wound; it may have quietly departed
with the last faint breath. So it may be
summoned back, as in Chinese custom, on
the housetop, in the garden or the field.
Ghostly sounds may be heard in the forest,
among the rocks, borne along the wind; the
clairvoyant may discern dimly strange faces,
vanished forms; the dead can sometimes
make themselves seen in their old haunts;
the world is full of unexpected indications
of presences beyond our sense.
Such presences are grouped, for the modern
student, under the general title "spirits." But
the explanations which lead to these
beliefs are not concerned with human beings
only. Animals share in the incidents of life
and death; plants, even, grow and blossom
and decay; and animals, plants, and
inanimate objects of all sorts may be seen in
dreams. Hence the analysis which is applied
to man can be readily extended; and another
world is called into existence, strangely
blended with this, a realm of immaterial
counterparts and impalpable forces. A Fiji
native, placed before a mirror, recognising
himself and object after object, whispered
softly, "Now I can see into the world of
spirits."
With the help of this elementary philosophy
a vast machinery of causation is always at
hand for explaining untoward events. The
Tshi-speaking negro on the West Coast of
Africa has inside him a kind of life-power
named kra. It existed long before his birth,
for it served in the same capacity a whole
series of predecessors; and it will continue
its career after his death, when the man
himself becomes a srahman or ghost. The
adjoining Ga-speaking tribes modify the kra into
two kla, one male and one female, the first
of a bad disposition, the second good, who
give advice and prompt to actions according
to their respective characters. Yet a third
inmate dwells in the neighbouring Yoruba-speaking
folk, one in the head, one in the
stomach, and one in the great toe. Offerings
are made to the first by rubbing fowl's blood
and palm oil on the forehead. The second
needs none, for it shares whatever the stomach
receives. The third is propitiated as an
agent of locomotion before starting on a
journey. But the curious theme of the
plurality of souls must not beguile us.
Meantime the original kra is set behind all
the activities of nature, and extended to the
whole sphere of material objects. Each town
or village or district has its own local spirits,
rulers of river and valley, rock and forest and
hill. Sometimes they take human shape, and
colour, white or black, for transformations
of all kinds are always possible. They are
not all of equal rank; the broad lake, the
mountain, the sea where the surf breaks
heavily and the frail craft are upset—the
lightning, the storm, and the earthquake—the
leopard, the crocodile, the shark, and the
devastating smallpox—such are among the
dreaded manifestations of these dangerous
and mysterious powers. But the actual dead
must not be forgotten; they must be provided
with ghostly counterparts of food and weapons
and utensils, with cloth and gold-dust, just
as a departed chief must be accompanied into
the next life by the wives and slaves who
adorned his household state in this.
The ritual of the dead belongs, as we have
seen (p. 20), to the earliest-known activities
of European man. It is found in some form
or other in every country under the sun.
Sometimes it is prompted by fear, and has
for its object to keep the dead imprisoned
in the grave, or to prevent their spirits
from returning to their old haunts (p. 228).
Sometimes it is warmed by affection, as the
departed are recalled to the homes where
they were loved. In ancient Egypt it was
developed with the utmost elaboration, and
created a literature describing a kind of
"pilgrim's progress" through the scenes of
the next world (p. 237); while in Greece
and Rome the cultus of the dead acquired,
as in India and China, immense social
significance. The question that arises in the study
of religion in the lower culture is concerned
with the probable connection between the
two groups of spirits, which may be broadly
distinguished as spirits of nature and spirits
of the dead. That the latter are constantly
propitiated in various forms is well known.
They are to be found everywhere, lurking in
the trees, flying through the air, sojourning
in caves, haunting the promontories on the
rivers or hidden in the forest-depths. With
them lie the causes of disease and madness;
they are malevolent and hurtful, as well as
kindly and good. What differences are to
be discerned between them and the powers
of nature? Are we to suppose, with some
students, that all the higher forms of religion
have been developed out of the worship
of the dead, and that for gods we must
everywhere read originally ghosts?
Consider, for example, the ancient religion
of Japan, which we know by an adaptation
of two Chinese words as Shin-To, the "spirits'
way," or in its native form kami-no-michi.[2] Who
are the kami, or "spirits"? The title
of "religion" has sometimes been denied to
their cultus on the ground that it contains
"no set of dogmas, no sacred book, and no
moral code." Greece and Rome might, on
the same plea, be described as having no
religion. The term kami has for its root-idea
the significance of "that which is above." It
may be applied in the widest range of relations
from the hair which is on the top of the head
to the government which rules the people.
The kami are, as it were, the "highnesses";
the word is used of big things by land and sea,
great rivers, mighty mountains, roaring winds
and rolling thunder; then of rocks and trees,
of animals like the tiger and the wolf, of
metals, and so of innumerable objects in
earth and sky. It is not always clear whether
these were originally conceived as themselves
living, or whether they had been resolved into
material body and controlling spirit. The
functions of the kami, however, are extended
and distributed by a kind of fission; the kami
of food split into the produce of trees and the
parent of grasses; they preside over guilds
and crafts, the weavers, the potters, the
carpenters, the swordsmen, the boatbuilders;
they guide the operations of agriculture;
they superintend the household, and watch
over the kitchen range, the saucepan, the
ricepot, the well, the pond, the garden, and
the scarecrow.
But in this vast assembly are included also
the spirits of the dead. They likewise become
kami of varying rank and power. Some dwell
in temples built in their honour; some hover
near their tombs; some are kindly, and some
malevolent. They mingle in the immense
multiplicity of agencies which makes every
event in the universe, in the language of the
Shinto writer Motowori (1730-1801), "the
act of the Kami." They direct the changing
seasons, the wind and the rain; and the good
and bad fortunes of individuals, families, and
States, are due to them. From birth to
death the entire life of man is encompassed
and guided by the Kami.
Hence came the duty of worship on which
Hirata (1776-1843) lays great stress. The
heaven-descended Ninigi, progenitor of the
imperial line, was taught by his divine
forefathers that "everything in the world depends
on the spirits of the kami of heaven and earth,
and therefore the worship of the kami is a
matter of primary importance. The kami
who do harm are to be appeased, so that they
may not punish those who have offended
them; and all the kami are to be worshipped
so that they may be induced to increase
their favours." Accordingly Hirata's morning
prayer before the kami-dana, the wooden shelf
fixed against the wall in a Shinto home about
six feet from the floor, bearing a small model of
a temple or "august spirit-house," ran thus—
"Reverently adoring the great God of the
two palaces of Isé (the Sun-goddess) in the
first place, the 800 myriads of celestial kami,
the 800 myriads of ancestral kami, all the
1500 myriads to whom are consecrated the
great and small temples in all provinces, all
islands and all places in the great land of
8 islands, the 1500 myriads of kami whom
they cause to serve them.... I pray with
awe that they will deign to correct the
unwitting faults which, heard and seen by them,
I have committed, and, blessing and favouring
me according to the powers which they
severally wield, cause me to follow the divine
example, and to perform good works in the way."
Here, the spirits of the dead are blended with
those of nature, without any definite attempt
to assign them to different ranks or functions.
Among the dead themselves there are such
distinctions, which do not, however, concern
us here; there are "spirits of crookedness,"
and there are spirits of the clans and of the
imperial line. But above the multitudinous
groups of nameless kami, whether once human
or attached to the physical scene, rise certain
great powers which it seems very difficult
to identify with departed ghosts. The earliest
traditions of the divine evolution in the
ancient chronicles contain no hint pointing in
that direction; and the comparison of the
Japanese deities of earth, fire, wind, sea, and
similar great elemental forces elsewhere, is
not favourable to their derivation from the
hosts of the dead.
The student of the hymns to Fire in the
Rig-Veda (Agni = Latin ignis) cannot fail
to notice the emphasis laid upon the birth
of the god out of the wood, as the fire-drill
kindles the first sparks, and the flame leaps
forth. Here is something quick-moving,
vital; the fire is the god; he may rise into
cosmic significance as a pervading energy
sustaining the whole world; but he never loses
his physical character, any more than the
solid earth or the encompassing sky. These
are again and again the chief co-ordinating
powers of the higher animism. Their
separation out of the primeval mass of obscure and
indiscriminate chaos has been the theme of
myth from Egypt to New Zealand; just as
their "bridal" has served to express the
union and co-operation of the forces of nature
all around the world.
Of this the ancient Chinese religion, still the
formal basis of the national worship as
performed by the Emperor, supplies perhaps
the best example. The cultus of the dead
is practised in every home, and around the
incidents of life and death have gathered
various Buddhist and Taoist rites. Moreover,
a rampant demonology environs the entire
field of existence; but this disordered
multitude of noxious spirits has no recognition
in the imperial homage. From immemorial
generations the Chinese practice made religion
a department of the State, and the venerable
book of the Rites of the great dynasty of
Chow requires the Grand Superior of Sacrifices
to superintend the worship due to three
orders of Shin or spirits, celestial, terrestrial,
and human. Under the sovereignty of the
sky the first includes the spirits of the sun,
moon, stars, clouds, wind, rain, thunder, and
the changes of the atmosphere. In the sphere
of earth are reckoned the spirits of the
mountains, rivers, plains, seas, lakes, woods,
fields, and grains.
Taken together Heaven and Earth thus
include all the energies of the universe. The
world, as we see it, is, indeed, full of opposing
powers, one group (yang) representing light
and warmth and life, the contrary (yin)
manifesting themselves in cold and darkness and
death.[3] But these are both encompassed by
the "Path" or Tao, the daily course of the
universe, the abiding guarantee of justice
in the distribution of good and evil in the
human lot. Heaven and earth are thus
regarded as themselves active or living; they
constantly maintain the order of nature for
the welfare of man. In the ancient Odes
(which Confucius was supposed to have
edited) "heaven" is called great and wide
and blue. This is plainly the visible
firmament; it is addressed as parent, and sky and
earth together are father and mother of the
world. They are not spirits, but are
themselves animate. "Why," laments Dr. Edkins
of his Chinese hearers, "they have been often
asked, should you speak of these things which
are dead matter, fashioned from nothing
by the hand of God, as living beings?" "And
why not?" they have replied. "The
sky pours down rain and sunshine, the earth
produces corn and grass, we see them in
perpetual movement, and we therefore say
they are living."
The Chinese genius was ethical rather than
metaphysical. It was not concerned with
the Infinite, the Eternal, and the Absolute.
But it was deeply impressed with the moral
aspects of the sky, its universality, its
comprehensive embrace of all objects and powers
beneath its far-stretching dome, its all-seeing
view, its inflexible impartiality. Its decrees
are steadfast, and proceeded from its sovereign
sway; and in this capacity it bore the
august title of Shang Tî, "Supreme Ruler." The
scholastic philosophers of a later day
analysed "Heaven" in this capacity into the
actual sky and its controlling personality,
and Shang Tî became the Moral Governor of
the Universe, the equivalent of the western God.
Beneath the sky lay the earth, receptive of
the energies descending upon it from on high;
"Heaven and Earth, Father and Mother,"
are conjoined in common speech. Together
they guided the changes of the year, in
steadfast tread along the annual round.
Folded in their wide compass were the Shin,
charged with the regulation of the elemental
powers. Under Heaven's control were the
Shin of sun and moon, planets, stars, meteors,
comets; of clouds and winds, thunder and
rain; of the seasons, months, and days.
Those of the earth were organised in territorial
divisions, representing the dominions of the
vassal princes down to the district areas.
The higher were graded according to the
political rank of the several provinces;
beneath them were reckoned the spirits of the
mountains, forests, seas, rivers, and grains.
The privileges of worship granted to the
various officials were part of the State order,
and helped to maintain political and civic
stability.
The imperial sacrifices to Heaven and
Earth were performed at the winter and the
summer solstices. The great altar to Heaven
stands in a large park in the southern division
of Peking, a vast marble structure in three
stages, the lowest being 210 feet across. It
is the largest altar in the world. Its white
colour symbolises the light principle of the
Yang. The upper stage, ninety feet in
diameter, has for its centre a round blue jade
stone, the symbol of the vault above. Here is
placed the tablet to Heaven, inscribed "Throne
of Sovereign Heaven," and associated with
it are tablets to deceased emperors as well as
to the Sun and Moon, the seven stars of the
Great Bear, the five Planets, the twenty-eight
Constellations, and the Stars. On the second
stage, beneath the richly carved balustrade
above, are the tablets to the Clouds and Rain,
to Wind and Thunder. At the corresponding
altar to the Earth on the north side of the
city, square in shape, and dark-yellow in hue,
the imperial worship at the summer solstice
embraces also the five lofty Mountains, the
three Hills of Perpetual Peace, the four Seas,
the five celebrated Mountains, and the four
great Rivers.[4]
Splendid processions of princes and dignitaries,
musicians and singers, accompany the
Emperor to the great ceremonial. The recent
Manchu sovereigns employed the prayers of
the Ming dynasty which preceded them: here
are one or two stanzas of a psalm in which
the Emperor Kia-tsing in the sixteenth century
announced to Shang Tî that he would be
addressed as "dwelling in the sovereign
heavens":—
"O Tî, when thou hadst separated the Yin
and the Yang (i.e. the earth and the sky),
thy creative work proceeded.
"Thou didst produce the sun and moon
and the five planets, and pure and beautiful
was their light.
"The vault of heaven was spread out like
a curtain, and the square earth supported
all upon it, and all things were happy.
"I thy servant venture reverently to thank
thee, and while I worship, present the notice
to thee, calling thee Sovereign.
*****
"All the numerous tribes of animated
beings are indebted to thy favour for their
beginning.
"Men and things are all emparadised in
thy love, O Tî.
"All living things are indebted to thy
goodness, but who knows from whom his
blessings come to him.
"It is thou alone, O Lord, who art the
true parent of all things."
Here the ancient view of the living sky
has given place under the influences of
philosophy to a creative monotheism. No
image is made of Shang Tî. As he stands
at the head of the manifold ranks of the
Shin, he represents the last word of animism
in providing an intellectual form for religion.
Religion in the lower culture takes many
forms, but, speaking broadly, they rest upon
a common interpretation of the world. Man
sees around him all kinds of motion and
change. He finds in everything that happens
some energy or power; and the only kind of
power which he knows is that which he
himself exerts. As long as he is alive he can run
and fight, he can throw the spear or guide the
canoe; death comes to the comrade by his
side, and all is still. So in wind and stream,
in beast and tree, in the stones that fall upon
the mountain side, in the stars that march
across the nightly sky, he sees a like power;
they, too, have some sort of life.
Life as an abstract idea, a potency or
principle, is but rarely grasped. But its
manifestations early attract notice, and can
be roughly explained. They are due to
something inside the living body, which can pass
in and out, and can finally leave it altogether.
Here is an immense store of causality
provided, to account for all the incidents of
each day's experience. Modern language calls
such agents spirits, and recognises in their
multitude two mingled groups, both active:
the spirits of the dead on the one hand, and
those of natural objects, the bubbling well,
the gloomy forest, the raging storm, upon the
other.
Sometimes these are merged under a
common term, like the Japanese kami,
sometimes they are separately named. They bear
different characters of good and evil, as they
are ready to help or hurt; and the same spirit
may be now kindly and now hostile, without
fixity of disposition or purpose. To such
spirits the ancient Babylonians gave the name
of zi. Literally, we are told, the word
signified "life"; it was indicated in their
picture-writing by a flowering plant; the
great gods, and even heaven and earth
themselves, all had their zi. The Egyptians, in
like manner, ascribed to every object, to
human beings, and to gods, a double or ka.
The word seems to be identical with that for
"food"; it was another way of indicating
that all visible things, the peoples of the
earth, the dwellers in the realms above and
below, shared a common life.
The history of religion is concerned with
the process by which the great gods rise into
clear view above the host of spirits filling the
common scene; with the modes in which
the forces of the world may be grouped under
their control; with the manifold combinations
which finally enable one supreme power to
absorb all the rest, so that a god of the sky,
like the Greek Zeus, may become a god of
rain and sunshine and atmospheric change,
of earth and sea, and of the nether world; and
may thus be presented as the sole and universal
energy, not only of all outward things but also
of the inner world of thought. Of this
immense development language, archæology,
literature, the dedications of worship, the
testimonies of the ancient students of their
still more ancient past in ritual and belief,
contain the scattered witness, which the
student of to-day laboriously gathers and
interprets. It is the humbler object of a little
manual of Comparative Religion to set some
of the principal issues of such historic evolution
side by side, and show how similar reactions
of the mind of man upon the field of his
experience have wrought like results.
As the inquirer casts his eye over the manifold
varieties of the world's faiths, he sees that
they are always conditioned by the stage of
social culture out of which they emerge. The
hunter who lives by the chase, and must range
over large areas for means of support; the
pastoral herdsman who has acquired the art
of breeding cattle and sheep, and slowly
moves from one set of feeding-grounds to
another; the agriculturist who has learned
to rely on the co-operation of earth and sky
in the annual round,—have each their own
way of expressing their view of the Powers
on which they depend.
Little by little they are arranged in groups.
The Celts, for instance, coming to river after
river in their onward march, employed the
same name again and again, "Deuona,"
divine (still surviving in this country in
different forms, Devon, Dee, etc.), as though
all rivers belonged to one power. They were
the givers of life and health and plenty, to
whom costly sacrifices must be made. So they
might bear the title "Mother," and were akin
to the powers of fertility living in the soil, the
"Mothers" (Matres or Matronæ), cognate
with the "Mothers" who fulfil similar
functions in modern India. The adjacent
Teutonic peoples filled forest and field with
wood-sprites and elves, dwellers in the air
and the sunlight. The springs, the streams,
and the lakes, were the home of the water-sprites
or nixes; in the fall of the mighty
torrent, among the rocks on the mountain
heights, in the fury of the storm or the
severity of the frost, was the strength of the
giants.
Yet further east and north the Finnic races
looked out on a land of forest and waters, of
mists and winds. The spirits were ranged
beneath rulers who were figured in human
form. The huntsman prayed with vow and
sacrifice to the aged Tapio, god of the woods
and the wild animals. Kekri watched over
the increase of the herd, while Hillervo
protected them on the summer pastures. The
grains and herbs—of less importance to tribes
only imperfectly agricultural—were ascribed
to the care of Pellervoinen, who falls into the
background and receives but little veneration.
Water, once worshipped as a living element
(vesi), is gradually supplanted by a water-god
(Ahto) who rules over the spirits of lakes and
rivers, wells and springs. "Mother-earth"
still designates in the oldest poetry the living
energy of the ground, though she afterwards
becomes the "lady of the earth" and consort
of the lord of the sky. The sky, Jumala, was
first of all conceived as itself living;
"Jumala's weather" was like "Zeus's shower"
to an ancient Greek. And then, under the
name Ukko, the sky becomes a personal ruler,
with clouds and rain, thunder and hail,
beneath his sway; who can be addressed as—
Ukko, thou of gods the highest,
Ukko, thou our Heavenly Father.
Many causes contribute to the enlargement
and stability of such conceptions. Tribes
of limited local range and a meagre past
without traditions may conceive the world around
them on a feeble scale. But migration helps
to enlarge the outlook. Local powers cannot
accompany tribes upon the march. Either
they must be left behind and drop out of
remembrance, or they must be identified with
new scenes and adapted to fresh environments.
When the horizon moves ever further forwards
with each advance, earth and sky loom vaster
before the imagination, and sun and moon,
the companion of each day or the protector
of each night, gain a more stately predominance.
The ancestors of the Hindus, the
Greeks, the Romans, the Teutons, carried
with them the worship of the sky-god under a
common name, derived from the root div, to
"shine" (Dyaus = Zeus = Jovis = old High
German Tiu, as in Tuesday). Other names
gathered around the person in the actual
firmament, such as the Sanskrit Varuna (still
recognised by some scholars as identical with
the Greek Ouranos, heaven), loftiest of all
the Vedic gods. The Aryan immigrants are
already organised under kings, and Varuna
sits enthroned in sovereignty. His palace is
supported by a thousand pillars, and a
thousand doors provide open access for his
worshippers. But he is in some sense
omnipresent, and one of the ancient poets sang—
"If a man stands or walks or hides, if he
goes to lie down or to get up, what two people
sitting together whisper, King Varuna knows
it, he is there as the third.
"This earth, too, belongs to Varuna, the
king, and this wide sky with its ends far apart.
The two seas (sky and ocean) are Varuna's
loins; he is also contained in this small drop
of water.
"He who should flee far beyond the sky,
even he would not be rid of Varuna, the
king."
The supreme power of the universe is here
conceived under a political image. Conceptions
of government and social order supply
another line of advance, parallel with the
forces of nature. On the African Gold Coast,
after eighteen years' observation, Cruickshank
ranged the objects of worship in three ranks:
(1) the stone, the tree, the river, the snake,
the alligator, the bundle of rags, which
constituted the private fetish of the individual;
(2) the greater family deity whose aid was
sought by all alike, sometimes in a singular
act of communion which involved the swallowing
of the god (p. 144); and (3) the deity of
the whole town, to whom the entire people
had recourse in times of calamity and suffering.
The conception of the deity of a tribe or
nation may be greatly developed under the
influence of victory. War becomes a struggle
between rival gods. Jephthah the Gileadite,
after recounting the triumphs of Israel to
the hostile Ammonite king, states the case
with the most naked simplicity: "Yahweh,
Israel's god, hath dispossessed the Amorites
from before his people Israel, and shouldest
thou possess them? Wilt thou not possess
that which Chemosh thy god giveth thee to
possess? So whomsoever Yahweh our god
hath dispossessed from before us, them will
we possess" (Judges xi. 23, 24). The land
of Canaan was the gift of Israel's God, but at
first his power was limited by its boundaries:
to be driven from the country was to be
alienated from the right to offer him worship
or receive from him protection. In the
famous battle with the Hittites, celebrated by
the court-poet of Rameses the Great (1300-1234
B.C.), the king, endangered by the flight
of his troops, appeals to the great god Amen,
a form of the solar deity Rê, with confidence
of help, "Amen shall bring to nought the
ignorers of God": and the answer comes,
"I am with thee, I am thy father, my
hand is with thee, I am more excellent for
thee than hundreds of thousands united in
one." Success thus enhanced the glory of
the victor's gods. Like the Incas of Peru in
later days, the Assyrian sovereigns confirmed
their power by bringing the deities of tributary
peoples in a captive train to their own capital:
and the Hebrew prophet opens his description
of the fall of Babylon by depicting the images
of the great gods Bel and Nebo as packed for
deportation on the transport-animals of the
conqueror.
Other causes further tended to give
distinction to the personality of deities, and
define their spheres. A promiscuous horde
of spirits has no family relationships. A god
may have a pedigree; a consort is at his side;
and the mysterious divine power reappears
in a son. Instead of the political analogy of
a sovereign and his attendants, the family
conception expresses itself in a divine father,
mother and child. Thus the Ibani of Southern
Nigeria recognised Adum as the father of all
gods except Tamuno the creator, espoused
to Okoba the principal goddess, and mother
of Eberebo, represented as a boy, to whom
children were dedicated. The Egyptian triad,
Osiris, Isis and Horus, is well known; and the
divine mother with the babe upon her lap
passed into the Christian Church in the form
of the Virgin Mary and her infant son.
The divisions of the universe suggested
another grouping. The Vedic poets arranged
their deities in three zones: the sky above, the
intervening atmosphere, and the earth
beneath. Babylonian cosmology placed Anu
in the heaven, Bel on the earth, and Ea in the
great deep, and these three became the
symbols of the order of nature, and the divine
embodiments of physical law. Homer already
divides the world between the sky-god Zeus,
Poseidon of earth and sea, and Hades of the
nether realm: and Rome has its triads, like
Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, or again Jupiter,
Juno, and Minerva. Whatever be the origin
of the number three in this connection, it
reproduces itself with strange reiteration in
both hemispheres. Other groups are
suggested by the sun and moon and the five
planets, and appear in sets of seven. Egyptian
summaries recognised gods in the sky, on
earth, and in the water; and the theologians
of different sanctuaries loved to arrange them
in systems of nine, or three times three.
Out of this vast and motley multitude
emerge certain leading types in correspondence
with certain modes of human thought, with
certain hopes and fears arising out of the
changes of the human lot. Curiosity begins
to ask questions about the scene around.
The child, when it has grasped some simple
view of the world, will inquire who made it;
and to the usual answer will by and by rejoin
"And who made God?" Elementary speculation
does not advance so far: it is content
to rest if necessary in darkness and the void,
provided there is a power which can light
the sun, and set man on his feet. But the
intellectual range of thought even in the lower
culture is much wider than might have been
anticipated; while the higher religions contain
abundant survivals of the cruder imagination
which simply loves a tale.
Sometimes the creative power (especially
on the American continent) is figured as a
marvellous animal, a wondrous raven, a
bird-serpent, a great hare, a mighty beaver. Or
the dome of sky suggests an original world-egg,
which has been divided to make heaven
and earth. Even the Australians, whose
characteristics are variously interpreted as
indications of extreme backwardness or of
long decline, show figures which belong to
what Mr. Andrew Lang designated the "High
Gods of Low Races." Among the Narrinyeri
in the west Nurrundere was said to have made
all things on the earth; the Wiimbaio told
how Nurelli had made the whole country with
the rivers, trees, and animals. Among the
Western Bantu on the African continent
Nzambi (a name with many variants over a
large area) is described as "Maker and
Father." "Our forefathers told us that name.
Njambi is the One-who-made-us. He is our
Father, he made these trees, that mountain,
this river, these goats and chickens, and us
people." That is the simple African version
of the "ever-and-beyond." But as with so
many of the chief gods, not only on the dark
continent, but elsewhere, he is regarded
as a non-interfering and therefore negligible
deity.
Sometimes speculation takes a higher flight.
The Zuñis of Mexico have remained in
possession of ancient traditions, uninfluenced
by any imported Christianity. After many
years' residence among them Mr. Cushing
was able to gather their ideas of the origin
of the world. Awona-wilona was the Maker
and Container of all, the All-Father-Father.
Through the great space of the ages there
was nothing else whatever, only black
darkness everywhere. Then "in the beginning
of the new-made" Awona-wilona conceived
within himself, and "thought outward in
space," whereby mists of increase, steams
potent of growth, were evolved and uplifted.
Thus by means of his innate knowledge the
All-Container made himself in the person and
form of the sun. With his appearance came
the brightening of the spaces with light, and
with the brightening of the spaces the great
mist-clouds were thickened together and fell.
Thereby was evolved water in water, yea and
the world-holding sea. And then came the
production of the Fourfold-Containing
Mother-Earth and the All-Covering Father-Sky.
With a yet bolder leap of imagination did
a Polynesian poet picture the great process.
From island to island between Hawaii and
New Zealand is a "high god" known as
Taaroa, Tangaloa, Tangaroa, and Kanaroa.
The Samoans said that he existed in space and
wished for some place to dwell in, so he made
the heavens; and then wished to have a place
under the heavens, so he made the earth.
Tahitian mythology declared (the versions of
priests and wise men differed) that he was
born of night or darkness. Then he
embraced a rock, the imagined foundation of all
things, which brought forth earth and sea;
the heavens were created with sun, moon,
and stars, clouds, wind, and rain, and the dry
land appeared below. The whole process
was summed up in a hymn—
"He was: Taaroa was his name.
He abode in the void; no earth, no sea, no sky.
Taaroa calls, but nought answers,
Then, alone existing, he became the universe."
The relations of these creative Powers to
man are conceived very differently. The
Maker of the world may be continually
interested in it, and may continue to
administer the processes which he has begun.
The Akkra negro looks up to the living sky,
Nyongmo, as the author of all things, who is
benevolently active day by day: "We see
every day," said a fetish-man, "how the grass,
the corn, and the trees, spring forth through
the rain and sunshine sent by Nyongmo
[Nyongmo ne = 'Nyongmo rains'], how
should he not be the creator?" So he is
invoked with prayer and rite. The great
Babylonian god, Marduk, son of Ea (god of
wisdom and spells), alone succeeds in
overcoming the might of Tiamat (the Hebrew
tehôm or "deep"), the primeval chaos with
her hideous brood of monsters, and out of
her carcass makes the firmament of heaven.
He arranges the stations of the stars, he founds
the earth, and places man upon it. "His
word is established," cries the poet, "his
command is unchangeable: wide is his heart,
broad is his compassion." A conqueror so
splendid could not relinquish his energy, or
rest on his achievements: he must remain on
the throne of the world to direct and support
its ways. Here is a prayer of Nebuchadrezzar
to this lofty deity—
"O eternal ruler, lord of all being, grant
that the name of the king thou lovest, whose
name thou hast proclaimed, may flourish as
seems pleasing to thee. Lead him in the right
way. I am the prince that obeys thee, the
creature of thy hand. Thou hast created me,
and hast entrusted to me dominion over
mankind. According to thy mercy, O lord, which
thou bestowest upon all, may thy supreme
rule be merciful! The worship of thy divinity
implant within my heart. Grant me what
seems good to thee, for thou art he that hast
fashioned my life."
On the other hand, the "High Gods of Low
Races" often seem to fade away and become
inactive, or at least are out of relations to
man. Olorun, lord of the sky among the
African Egbas, also bore the title of Eleda,
"the Creator." But he was too remote and
exalted to be the object of human worship,
and no prayer was offered to him. Among
the southern Arunta of central Australia,
reports Mr. Strehlow, Altjira is believed to
live in the sky. He is like a strong man save
that he has emu feet. He created the
heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars.
When rain-clouds come up, it is Altjira
walking through the sky. Altjira shows
himself to man in the lightning, the thunder
is his voice. But though thus animate, he
is no object of worship. "Altjira is a good
god; he never punishes man; therefore the
blacks do not fear him, and render him neither
prayer nor sacrifice." In Indian theology
the reason for the discontinuance of homage
was thus frankly stated by one of the poets
of the great epic, the Mahābhārata; "Men
worship Çiva the destroyer because they fear
him; Vishnu the preserver, because they
hope from him; but who worships Brahman
the creator? His work is done."[1]
If the deity who has provided the scene of
existence thus recedes into the background,
it is otherwise with the powers which maintain
and foster life. Among the impulses which
drive man to action is the need of food; and
the sources of its supply are among the earliest
objects of his regard. A large group of
agencies thus gradually wins recognition, out of
which emerge lofty forms endowed with
functions far transcending the simple energies
at first ascribed to them. Even the rude
tribes of Australia, possessing no definite
worship, perform pantomimic ceremonies of
a magical kind, designed to stimulate the food
supply. The men of the plum-tree totem
will pretend to knock down plums and eat
them; in the initiation ceremony of the
eagle-hawks two representatives will imitate the
flapping of wings and the movements of attack,
and one will finally wrench a piece of meat out
of the other's mouth. At a higher stage of
animism the Indians of British North America
pray to the spirit of the wild raspberry.
When the young shoots are six or eight inches
high above the ground, a small bundle is
picked by the wife or daughters of the chief
and cooked in a new pot. The settlement
assembles in a great circle, with the presiding
chief and the medicine-man in the midst.
All close their eyes, except certain assisting
elders, while the chief offers a silent prayer
that the spirit of the plants will be propitious
to them, and grant them a good supply of suckers.
Here the whole class of plants is already
conceived as under the control of a single
power. In ruder stages the hunter will
address his petitions to the individual bear,
before whose massive stature he feels a certain
awe, entreating him not to be angry or fight,
but to take pity on him. Pastoral peoples
will employ domesticated animals in sacrifice,
while the products of the field occupy a second
place; the cow may become sacred, and the
daily work of the dairy may rise, as among the
Todas, to the rank of religious ritual. Some
element of mysterious energy will even lie in
the weapons of the chase, in the net or the
canoe, and may be found still lingering in the
implements of agriculture, such as the plough.
Among settled communities which live by
tillage the succession of the crops from year
to year acquires immense importance. Earth
and sky, the sun, the rain, and time itself in
the background, are all contributory powers,
but attention is fastened upon the spirit of
the grains. The Iroquois look on the spirits
of corn, of squashes, and of beans, as three
sisters, who are known collectively as "Our
Life" or "Our Supporters." In central
America each class of food-plants had its
corresponding spirit, which presided over its
germination, nourishment, and growth. This
was called the mama or "mother" of the
plant: in Peru there was a cocoa-mother, a
potato-mother, a maize-mother; just as in
India the cotton-spirit is worshipped as
"cotton-mother." A "maize-mother," made
of the finest stalks, was renewed at each
harvest, that the seed might preserve its
vitality. The figure, richly clothed, was
ceremoniously installed, and watched for
three nights. Sacrifice was solemnly offered,
and the interpreter inquired, "Maize-mother,
canst thou live till next year?" If the spirit
answered affirmatively, the figure remained
for a twelvemonth; if no reply was
vouchsafed, it was taken away and burnt, and a
fresh one was consecrated. In Mexico maize
was a much more important food than in
Peru, and the maize-deity acquired in
consequence a much higher rank. She became a
great harvest goddess. Temple and altar
were dedicated to her; spring and summer
festivals were celebrated in her honour; and
a youthful victim was slain, whose vitality
might enter the soil, and recruit her exhausted
energies.
The ceremonies connected with the cultus
of the rice-spirit in the East Indies still
perpetuate in living faith beliefs once vital
in the peasantry of Europe, and surviving to
this day (as Mannhardt and Frazer have
shown) in many a usage of the harvest-field.
Out of this group of ideas arise divine forms
which express mysteries of life and time.
What is it that guides the circle of the year?
What power brings forth the blade out of the
ground, and clothes the woods with verdure?
As the months follow their constant course, are
not the seasons the organs of some sacred
force, lovely figures as Greek poets taught,
born of Zeus and Themis (holy law); or angels
of the Most High, ruling over heat and cold,
summer and winter, spring and autumn, as
the later Israel conceived the continuance of
God's creative work? And when the fields
are bare and the leaves fall, have not the
energies of vegetation suffered an arrest, to
come to life again when the great quickening
of the spring returns? So while here and
there dim speculations (as in India or Persia
or the Orphic hymns of Greece) hover round
Time, the generator of all things, and the
recurring periodicity of the Year, more
concrete imagination conceives the processes of
the growth, decay, and revival of vegetation
under the symbols of the life, the death, and
resurrection of the deities of corn and tree.
To such a group belong different forms in
Egypt, Syria and Greece, whose precise origin
cannot always be traced amid the bewildering
variety of functions which they came to fulfil.
But they all illustrate the same general theme.
In the ritual of their worship similar motives
and symbols may be traced; and the incidents
of their life-course were presented in a sort
of sacred drama which reproduced the central
mystery. Such were Osiris in Egypt, Adonis
(as the Greeks called the Syrian form of
the ancient Babylonian Tammuz), Attis of
Phrygia in Asia Minor, and in Greece the
Thracian Dionysus, and the divine pair
Demeter and her daughter Persephonê blended
with the figure of Korê "the Maid."
The worship of Osiris early spread throughout
Egypt, and its various phases have given
rise to many interpretations of his origin and
nature. Recent studies have converged upon
the view that he was primarily a vegetation
deity. In the festival of sowing, small
images of the god formed out of sand or
vegetable earth and corn, with yellow faces
and green cheek-bones, were solemnly buried,
those of the preceding year being removed.
On the temple wall of his chamber at Philæ
stalks of corn were depicted springing from
his dead body, while a priest poured water on
them from a pitcher. This was the mystery
of him "who springs from the returning
waters." The annual inundation brought
quickening to the seed, and in the silence and
darkness of the earth it died to live.
Of this process Osiris became the type for
thousands of years. Already in the earliest
days of the Egyptian monarchy he is presented
as the divine-human king, benevolent, wise,
just. To him in later times the arts and laws
of civilised life could be traced back; he was
the founder of the social order and the worship
of the gods. But the jealousy of his brother
Set brought about his death. The ancient
texts do not explicitly state what followed.
But his body was cut to pieces and his limbs
were scattered, until his son Horus effected
their reunion. Restored to life, he ascended
to the skies, and became "Chief of the
Powers," so that he could be addressed as
the "Great God." There by his resurrection
he became the pledge of immortality. Each
man who died looked to him for the gift of
life. Mystically identified with him, the
deceased bore the god's name and was thus
admitted into fellowship with him. Over his
body the ceremonies once performed upon
Osiris were repeated, the same formulæ were
recited, with the conviction that "as surely
as Osiris lives, so shall he live also." But
magic was early checked by morals, and by
the sixth dynasty Osiris had also become the
august and impartial judge (p. 8).
Such might be the splendid evolution of a
deity of the grains. But food was not, of
course, the only need. The family as well as
each individual must be maintained. Mysterious
powers wrought through sex. Strange
energies pulsed in processes of quickening,
and these, too, were interpreted in terms of
divine agency. They found their parallels
in the operations of nature (like the Yang and
Yin of ancient China), and begot new series
of heavenly forms. The greater gods all had
their consorts. Birth must be placed under
divine protection, just as the organ of
generation might itself be sacred. The Babylonian
looked to the spouse of Marduk, "creator of
all things," to whom as Zēr-panîtum,
"seed-creatress," the processes of generation were
especially referred. Or with ceremony and
incantation the child was set beneath the care
of Ishtar, queen of Nineveh, and goddess of
the planet Venus. The Greek prayed to
Hera, Artemis, or Eileithyia; and all round
the world superhuman powers, for good or
ill, gathered round the infant life, whose aid
must be sought, or whose hurt averted.
Dread agencies of disease, like fever,
smallpox, or cholera, were in like manner
personalised. Demonic forces cut short the tale of
years. From the equator to the arctic zone
Death is ascribed in the lowest culture to
witchcraft. Strange stories were told of his
intrusion into the world, commonly through man's
transgression of some divine command. And
gradually the other world must be ruled like
this; the multitudes of the dead need a
sovereign like the living; and after the fashion
of Osiris the Indian Yama, "first to spy out the
path" to the unseen realm, becomes the "King
of Righteousness" before whom all must in
due time give their account (p. 244).
Such deities, however, represent much more
than the physical life. They have a social
character, and have become the expression of
organised morality. On this field another
group of divine powers comes into view,
symbols of order in the home or the city,
charged with the maintenance of the family
or the State. Round the hearth-fire gathers
a peculiar sanctity. There is the common
centre of domestic interests; there, too, the
agent by which gifts are conveyed to the
spirits of the dead. There, then, was a sacred
force, dwelling in the hearth itself, and
animating the fire that burned upon it. The
Greek Hestia seems originally to have been
not the goddess who made the hearth holy, nor
the sacrificial fire which it sustained, but the
mysterious energy in the actual stones
upholding the consecrated flame. All kinds of
associations were attached to it; and though
her personality remained somewhat dim and
indistinct, and carven forms of her were rare,
and her worship was never sacerdotalised like
that of the Latin Vesta, she nevertheless had
the first place in sacrifice and prayer. She
was worshipped in the city council-hall.
Athenian colonists carried her sacred fire
across the seas. The poets provided her with
a pedigree, and made her "sister of God most
high, and of Hera the partner of his throne." The
sculptor placed her statue at Athens
beside that of Peace. The family deity
expanded into an emblem of the unity of
government and race. But the primitive character
of the ancient hearth-power still clung to her.
She never rose into the lofty functions of
guide and protector of moral order like the
great city-gods Zeus, Athena, or Apollo.
In Rome numerous powers were recognised
in early days as guardians of the home and
the farm-lands. Vesta had her seat upon the
hearth, which was the centre of the family
worship, and afterwards became the object
of an important city-cult. The store-chamber
behind was the dwelling-place of the Penates,
and with its contents no impure person might
meddle. Where farm met farm stood the
chapel of the local Lares, and there whole
households assembled, masters and slaves
together, in annual rejoicings and good
fellowship. Brought into the home, the Lar
became the symbol of the family life, and the
ancestral pieties gathered round him. More
vague and elastic was the conception of the
Genius, a kind of spiritual double who watched
over the fortunes of the head of the home, and
through the marriage-bed provided for the
continuity of descent. This protecting power
could take many forms with continually
expanding jurisdiction. The city, the colony,
the province, the "land of Britain," Rome,
the Emperor himself, were thus placed under
divine care, or rather were viewed as in some
way the organs of superhuman power. In
the energy which built up states and brought
peoples into order lived something that was
creative and divine.
From distant times in many forms of society
it was felt that there was something mysterious
in sovereignty. The king (once connected
with the priest) was hedged round with some
sort of divinity which expressed itself in
language amazing to the modern mind. In
the ancient monarchies of Egypt and Babylon
the royal deity was the fundamental
assumption of government, and it was represented
upon the monuments beside the Nile with
startling realism. In later days the Greek
title Theos (god) was boldly assumed by the
sovereigns of Egypt and Syria. It was
conferred, with the associated epithet Sotér
(Saviour or Preserver), as early as 307 B.C., on
Demetrius and his father Antigonus, who
liberated Athens from the tyranny of
Cassander. On the Rosetta stone (in the British
Museum) Ptolemy V, 205 B.C., claims the same
dignity, and is described as "eternal-lived,"
and "the living image of Zeus." Ephesus
designated Julius Cæsar as "God manifest
and the common Saviour of human life."
This is something more than the extravagance
of court-scribes, or the fawning adulation
of oriental dependents. In the worship paid
to the Roman Emperor many feelings and
associations were involved. The power which
had brought peace, law, order, into the midst
of a multitude of nations and languages, and
subdued to itself the jarring wills of men,
seemed something more than human. When
Tertullian of Carthage coined the strange
word "Romanity," he summed up the infinite
variety of energies which spread one culture
from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic, from
the cataracts of the Nile to the sources of the
Tyne. Of this mysterious force the Emperor
was the symbol. So Augustus was saluted
throughout the East as "Son of God," and
in inscriptions recently discovered in Asia
Minor, and referred by the historian Mommsen
to the year 11 or 9 B.C., we read the startling
words: "the birthday of the God is become
the beginning of glad tidings (evangelia[2])
through him to the world." He is described
as "the Saviour of the whole human race";
he is the beginning of life and the end of sorrow
that ever man was born. An inscription at
Philæ on the Nile equated him with the
greatest of Greek deities, for he is "star of all
Greece who has arisen as great Saviour Zeus."
This is the most highly developed form of
the doctrine of the divine king, which the
Far East has retained for the sovereigns of
China and Japan to our own day. The
language and practice of Roman imperialism
called forth the impassioned resistance of the
early Christians, and the clash of opposing
religions is nowhere portrayed with more
desperate intensity than in the Book of
Revelation at the close of our New Testament,
where Rome and her false worship are
identified with the power of the "Opposer" or
Sâtân, and are hurled with all their trappings
of wealth and luxury into the abyss.
The conception of a god as "saviour" or
deliverer is founded on incidents in personal
or national experience, when some unexpected
event opens a way of escape from pressing
danger. When the Gauls were advancing
against Rome in 388 B.C., a strange voice of
warning was heard in the street. It was
neglected, but when they had been repelled,
Camillus erected an altar and temple to the
mysterious "Speaker," Aius Locutius, whose
prophetic energy was thus manifested. In
the second Punic war, when the Carthaginian
general, Hannibal, was marching against the
city in 211 B.C., he suddenly changed his course
near the Capena gate. Again the might of
an unknown deity was displayed, and the
grateful Romans raised a shrine to him under
the name of Tutanus Rediculus, the god who
"protects and turns back." It might be the
attack of an enemy, it might be the imminence
of shipwreck, it might be a desolating plague,
or any one of the vicissitudes of fortune, the
distresses and anxieties of the soul or of the
State, in the power which brought rescue or
health or peace to body or mind, or life
hereafter in a better world, the grateful believer
recognised the energy of some superhuman
being. Just as the making of the world
required a creative hand, just as the arts and
laws of social life were the product of some
divine initiative (p. 171), just as the higher
virtues belonged to a band of spiritual forces
which had a kind of individuality of their own,
so the shaping of affairs bore witness to the
interest and intervention of wills above those
of man. All through the countries of the
Eastern Mediterranean the greater deities,
such as Apollo, Artemis, Athena, Æsculapius,
Dionysus, Isis, Zeus, bore the title of
"Deliverer." And in the mysteries which drew
so many worshippers to their rites in the first
centuries of our era, this deliverance took the
form of salvation from sin, and carried with
it the promise of re-birth into eternal life.
Similar conceptions are seen in India. The
founder of Buddhism, Gotama of the Sākyan
clan, was believed to have attained the
Enlightenment which enabled him to discern the
whole secret of existence. After a long series
of preparatory labours in previous lives he
had appeared as a man in his last birth, to
"lift off from the world the veils of ignorance
and sin." He had himself repudiated all
ontological conceptions; he had explained
the human being without the hypothesis of
a soul or self, and the world without the ideas
of substance or God. But in due time the
rejected metaphysics insisted on recognition;
and some three hundred years or more after
his death a new interpretation of his person
arose. Under the stress of pious affection,
the influence of philosophical Brahmanism,
and the need of permanent spiritual help, he
was conceived as a manifestation of the
Infinite and Eternal, who for the sake of
suffering humanity from time to time
condescended to seem to be born and die, that in
the likeness of a man he might impart the
saving truth. So he was presented as
the Self-Existent, the Father of the world, the
Protector of all creatures, the Healer of men's
sicknesses and sins.
Over against this great figure Brahmanism
placed another, that of Vishnu, with his series
of "descents," in which the Buddha was
formally incorporated as the ninth. The most
famous of these were the heroes Rama and
Krishna; and Krishna became the subject of
the best-known book of Indian devotion, the
Bhagavad-Gita or the "Divine Lay," which
has been sometimes supposed to show traces
of the influence of the Gospel of St. John.
Here was a religion founded on the idea of
divine grace or favour on the one part, and
adoring love and devotion on the other.
Krishna, also, taught a way of deliverance
from the evils of human passion and attachment
to the world; and Vishnu came to be
the embodiment of divine beneficence, at once
the power which maintained the universe and
revealed himself from time to time to man.
Vishnu was an ancient Vedic deity
connected with the sun; and by his side
Hindu theology set another god of venerable
antiquity, once fierce and destructive, but
now known under the name of Çiva, the
"auspicious." The great epic entitled the
Mahābhārata does not conceal their rivalry;
but with the facility of identification
characteristic of Indian thought, either deity could
be interpreted as a form of the other. Çiva
became the representative of the energies of
dissolution and reproduction; and his worship
begot in the hearts of the mediæval poets an
ardent piety, while in other aspects it
degenerated into physical passion on the one side
and extreme asceticism on the other. But in
association with Brahma, Vishnu and Çiva
constituted the Trimurti, or "triple form,"
embracing the principles of the creation,
preservation, destruction, and renewal of
the world. Symbolised, like the Christian
Trinity, by three heads growing on one stem,[3]
these lofty figures were the personal manifestations
of the Universal Spirit, the Sole Existence,
the ultimate Being, Intelligence, and Bliss.
By various paths was the goal of
monotheism approached, but popular practice
perpetually clung to lower worships, and
philosophy could often accommodate them
with ingenious justifications. A bold and
decisive judgment like that of the Egyptian
Akhnaton might fix on one of the great powers
of nature—the sun—as the most suitable
emblem of Deity to be adored, and forbid
all other cults. Or the various groups and
ranks of divine beings might be addressed in
a kind of collective totality, like the
"all-gods" of the Vedic hymns. At Olympia
there was a common altar for all the gods;
and a frequent dedication of Roman altars
in later days consecrated them "to Jupiter
Greatest and Best, and the Other Immortal
Gods." If reflection was sufficiently advanced
to coin abstract terms for deity, like the
Babylonian 'ilûth, or the Vedic asuratva or
devatva, some poet might apprehend the
ultimate unity, and lay it down that "the
great asuratva of the devas is one." Both
India and Greece reached the conception of
a unity of energy in diversity of operation;
"the One with many names" was the theme
of the ancient Hindu seers long before Æschylus
in almost identical words proclaimed
"One form with many names." The great
sky-god Zeus, whose personality could be
almost completely detached from the visible
firmament, brought the whole world under
his sway, and from the fifth century before
Christ Greek poetry abounded in lofty
monotheistic language which the early Christian
apologists freely quoted in their own defence.
A philosophic sovereign like Nezahuatl,
lord of Tezcuco, might build a temple to "the
Unknown God, the Cause of Causes," where
no idol should be reared for worship, nor
any sacrifice of blood be offered. But other
motives were more often at work. Conquest
led to the identification of the deities of the
victor and the vanquished; and the importance
of military triumph enhanced the majesty
of the successful god. In his great inscription
on Mount Behistun Darius celebrated the
grandeur of Ahura Mazda, "Lord All-Wise,"
in language resembling that of a Hebrew
psalm, "A great God is Ahura Mazda, the
greatest of the gods." Under the Roman
Empire the principle of delegated authority
could be invoked to explain the unity of the
Godhead above inferior agencies; in the
heavenly order there was but one sovereign,
though there were many functionaries. Even
Israel had its hierarchy of ministering spirits,
and the Synagogue found it necessary to forbid
pious Jews to pray to Michael or to Gabriel.
When the unity of the moral order was
combined with the unity of creative might, the
transition to monotheism was even more
complete. It could, indeed, be deferred. In the
ancient poems of the great religious reformer
whom the Greeks called Zoroaster, Ahura
Mazda is the supremely Good. Beside him
are the Immortal Holy Ones, Holy Spirit,
Good Mind, Righteous Order, and the rest.
True, in the oppositions of light and darkness,
heat and cold, health and sickness, plenty and
want, life and death, he is for a time hampered
by the enmity of "the Lie"; but the power
of evil would be finally destroyed, and the
sovereignty of Ahura established for ever
(p. 247).
From another point of view the divine
purpose of deliverance must be conceived
upon an equally world-wide scale. One type
of Indian Buddhism looked to Avalokiteçvara
(Chinese Kwanyin, Japanese Kwannon), who
made the famous vow not to enter into final
peace until all beings—even the worst of
demons in the lowest hell—should know the
saving truth and be converted. And in the
Far East rises the figure of the Buddha of
Infinite Light, who is also the Buddha of
Infinite Life, whose grace will avail for
universal redemption (p. 18). The motive of
creation falls away. The world is the scene
of the moral forces set in motion under the
mysterious power of the Deed. No praise
rises to Amida for the wonders of the universe
or the blessings of life. But to no other may
worship be offered. Here is a monotheism
where love reigns supreme, and it is content
to trust that Infinite Mercy will achieve its end.
One morning, Plato tells us, as Socrates
was in the Porch of the King Archon, he met
Euthyphro, a learned Athenian soothsayer,
on his way to accuse his father of impiety
for having caused the death of a slave.
Socrates, who was also expecting an
accusation against himself, engaged him in a
conversation, as his manner was, on the nature
of impiety, and its opposite, piety. The talk
leads Euthyphro to maintain that piety or
holiness consists in learning how to please
the gods in word and deed, by prayers
and sacrifices. "Then," inquires Socrates,
"sacrifice is giving to the gods, and prayer
is asking of the gods?" and Euthyphro is
driven to assent to the conclusion that piety
is an art which gods and men have of doing
business with one another. It was a satirical
description of the popular Greek view.
But the argument of Socrates really
corresponds to world-wide practice. However
dim and confused the elements of belief may
be, every tribe has some rites and ceremonies
which express the desire to get the Powers
which encompass it upon its side. And when
this desire, after many ineffectual trials, has
succeeded in establishing suitable methods
of approach, the endeavours which produce
the result tend to become fixed; they are
cherished from generation to generation;
they form solemn customs which must be
maintained with strict inviolate order, even
though their original meaning may have been
long forgotten. Belief may fluctuate in a
kind of fluid medium of imagination, but
action cannot have this indeterminate and
elastic character. Action is the mode through
which feeling obtains expression, while it
helps at the same time to intensify the emotion
which calls it forth. The rite must be done
or omitted; it cannot trail off into shadow
and vagueness. And it gathers the whole
weight of tribal sanction around it; so that
even the simplest elements of common usage
are moulded under the powerful pressure of
the "weight of ages."
The active side of religion may be
considered under two aspects. There is, on the
one hand, the effort to enter into helpful
relations with the energies which pervade
nature and operate on man. Such efforts spring
from manifold emotions of hope and fear, of
affection and reverence. They seek to
inaugurate such relations; to maintain them
through the vicissitudes of experience, the
phases of life, the sequences of time; and to
renew them when they have suffered sudden
shock or gradual decay. By such action
the original emotion is reawakened when it
has declined, and is raised to greater vividness
and higher tension. It may be summed up
in the term worship, including sacrifice and
prayer, often associated with a wide range
of acts cognate in purpose, as well as with
manifold varieties of sacred persons and
sacred products (Chap. VI).
And, secondly, apart from public or private
acts of homage, thanksgiving, submission,
propitiation, addressed specifically to the
higher Powers, there are modes of behaviour
which are believed to be pleasing or displeasing
to them. Some things may be done, and
others may not. Certain acts, or words, or
even thoughts, are forbidden; others are
enjoined. The sphere of daily conduct is
thus brought into connection with what is
"above." "Act," said the Japanese teacher
of Shinto, Hirata, in the last century, "so
that you shall not be ashamed before the
Kami" (p. 93). It was a universal rule.
Morality is thus placed under the
guardianship of religion (Chap. VII).
At the funeral of Lord Palmerston (1865),
the chief mourner was observed to drop
several diamond and gold rings upon the
coffin as it was lowered into the grave. A
little child, seeing a steam-tram advance with
irresistible might along the road, offered it her
bun. It may be surprising to meet with a piece
of the primitive ritual of the dead in the midst
of a sophisticated and conventional society;
but when strong feeling is excited something
must be done to give it relief, and in parting
with his rings the donor found the outlet for his
emotion as irrationally as the child before the
monster which excited at once her wonder
and her impulse of goodwill. Out of such
impulses of self-expression, it may be
suggested, arises the largest class of sacrifices,
when gifts are made in doing various kinds
of "business with the gods."
In its widest use the word covers an
extensive range of purposes, and begets a large
variety of questions. On whose behalf is
the offering made, a single individual, or some
social group, his family or clan, a secret society,
a tribe, a nation? What persons are required
for the due performance of the rite, the head
of the family, the village magistrate, the
fetish man, the priest? A complicated Vedic
sacrifice needed the co-operation of various
orders of priests. What objects are effected
by it, a house or city-gate to be protected,
a river to be crossed, a battle to be won, a
covenant or contract to be sealed? To
what powers does the worshipper address
himself, in gratitude, homage, or submission,
seeking renewal of favour, or purging himself
of some sin, or desiring actual fellowship with
his god? Behind these external features
lie more difficult problems in connection
especially with animal sacrifices, concerned
with the victim's qualities, and the
appropriation of them by the deity or the
worshipper; with the peculiar sanctity of blood, and
the mysterious properties which it can impart;
with the notion of the transmission of the life
of which it was the vehicle; and the whole
set of indefinite influences capable of
propagation by contact, like the clean and the
unclean, the common and the holy. And why,
when the victim was offered, was the god
supposed to be satisfied with bones and
entrails and a modest piece of meat, all wrapped
in fat? Greek wonder at so strange a practice
could find no better answer than the tale of
how Prometheus once cheated the gods of
their share, and men had ever since followed
his example. These questions belong to the
obscure realm of beginnings, in which various
answers are possible. All that can be
attempted here is to offer a few illustrations of
the different motives that seem to lie behind
different forms of rite.
Offerings to the dead pass through a long
series of stages, from the simple provision for
the wants of the dead man in the grave up
to his proper equipment with all that is due
to his rank and state in the next life, or the
maintenance of the ties of guardianship and
protection over unborn generations. The
earliest human remains imply some dim belief
that the grave was the dead man's dwelling
(p. 20), and there he must be supplied with
the requisites for some kind of continued
existence. All over the world, food, weapons,
ornaments, utensils, are found deposited in
barrow and tomb; and this practice
culminates in the complicated arrangements of
an Egyptian sepulchre, where the wealthy
landowner constructed an enduring home
for his double, and filled it with representations
and objects which could be magically
converted to his entertainment after death.
When the dead man passes into another
world, and enters a land resembling that which
he has left (Chap. VIII), he may need wives
and slaves appropriate to his rank. From
ancient Japan and still more ancient China
all round the globe to Mexico are traces of
such ritual murder. The widow's self-devotion
was exalted in India to religious duty,
and cases still occasionally occur when (in
spite of the British Government) she seeks
to mount the pyre and immolate herself beside
her husband's corpse. In West Africa the
ghastly tale of the Grand Customs of Dahomey
in the last century is well known; and it is
supposed that thousands of lives are still
annually sacrificed in the Dark Continent to
this belief. Other personal needs must be
supplied, and on the Gold Coast in the last
century an observer saw fine clothes and gold
buried with the chief; and a flask of rum,
his pipe and tobacco, were laid ready to his
hand. Moreover, goods of all kinds can be
made over by fire; and in the funeral rites
of a Chinese family a paper house with paper
furniture and large quantities of paper money
may be burned for the endowment of a
departed member in his next life.
Or the offering may be made for the cherishing
of the dead in their former home. The
simplest and the most common sacrificial
act in Melanesia, Bishop Codrington tells us,
is that of throwing a small portion of food
to the dead. It may be nothing more than a
bit of yam or a morsel of betel-nut; it is not
for food, but for remembrance and affection.
But sometimes it is for actual nourishment.
The dead in ancient India who had none to
render to them the needful sustenance,
wandered as dismal ghosts round their former
dwellings, or haunted the cross roads,
compelled to feed themselves on the garbage of
the streets. The funeral meals, continued
at intervals, were celebrated for the purpose
of providing the departed with new forms,
and converting them into the higher rank of
"Fathers." In many lands, from Europe to
Japan and Central America, an annual feast
for the dead has been maintained in various
modes both in classic antiquity and in modern
usage; and the ancient practice still survives
in strangely altered fashion in the cakes and
confectionery carried on All Souls' Day to
the graves in the great Parisian cemetery of
Père Lachaise.
Such acts of recognition and fellowship pass
through very different stages. They begin
with a desire for self-identification with the
mysterious power which helps or hurts; as
the power is conceived on a greater and more
personal scale they turn into tribute and
homage. The West African negro passing a
big rock or an unusually large tree will add
a stone or bit of wood or tuft of grass to the
little heap of such trifles at its foot; it is for
the Ombwiri, or spirit of the place. After the
harvest on the plateau of Lake Tanganyika,
pilgrimages are made to the mountain of
Fwambo-Liamba; at the top is a sort of altar
of small stones, and there scraps of calico,
bits of wood, flowers, beads, are laid in honour
of a vague "High God" called Lesa. The
nature of such gifts may be traced through
all gradations of economic advance, just as the
mode of conveying it passes through various
phases from the coarse to the refined. The
pastoral nomad brings the firstling of his
flocks; the more advanced agriculturist adds
the produce of the ground. The immigrant
Hebrew under Canaanite tuition adopted the
festivals of harvest and vintage, and with
firstlings and tithes wrought his husbandry
into his religion when he went to the sanctuary
"to see Yahweh's face." The daily sacrifice
in the great temple of Marduk at Babylon
under Nebuchadrezzar was an epitome of
the whole tillage of the land; the choicest
fruits, the finest produce of the meadow, honey,
cream, oil, wine of different vintages, must
be served. In the early ritual of an Egyptian
temple, when the daily toilet of the god had
been performed and he had been duly robed,
painted, and oiled, his table was spread with
bread, goose, beef, wine, and water, and
decorated with the flowers needed to adorn a
meal.
In many cases such offerings carried with
them the additional purpose of actually
increasing the vigour of the god. Dim
notions of promoting the divine vitality hovered
in the background. The physical effect might
be reached by divers modes. Food was at
first conveyed by actual contact; it might
be smeared upon the idol's mouth. Offerings
to earth spirits were buried in the ground.
Water deities received them when they were
thrown into the well, the river, or the lake.
Even in Greece Poseidon's horses were driven
into the sea, just as the horses of the defeated
Mallius were offered by the Gallic victors
to the Rhine. Indian realism provided the
Fathers who assembled for the rice-ball
sacrifice with water and tufts of wool to cleanse
themselves after the meal. In more refined
usage fire conveyed the essence of the food
to the upper airs. At Noah's sacrifice on the
subsidence of the flood Yahweh smelt the
sweet savour, and in the corresponding
Babylonian narrative the gods, drawn by the scent,
gathered together around the offerer "like
flies." The American Osages invited the
Great Spirit, Fire, and Earth, to smoke with
them at the beginning of a new enterprise. The
Sioux lighted the pipe of peace and offered it
to the sun, with the invocation, "Smoke, O Sun."
Many and various are the ideals which
have gathered round the offering, as magic
and religion have strangely blended. The
sacred tree, whether among the Celts of the
West or the Syrians of the East, is hung with
rags of clothing, sometimes doubtless with
the same motive which prompts similar gifts
at the tomb of a Mohammedan saint, for the
transference of diseases from the sick. The
highest value was reached among the ancient
Irish, as among the Semites, in the sacrifice
of the first-born; and the long tale of human
victims indicates man's passionate desire
to secure in divers forms supernatural aid.
They have been slain in crises of national
danger by plague or war, in atonement for sin,[1]
or in thanksgiving for victory. They have
been immured in the foundations of houses
or cities that their spirits might remain as
guardians of the gates. They have been done
to death in the seasons of the agricultural
year that their lives might fertilise the soil
and quicken the grain. They have been
forced to yield their entrails to the diviner
that the secrets of the future might be unveiled.
Brahmanical speculation carried the ideas
of sympathetic magic in association with
sacrifice to their highest pitch. The Vedic
hymns early formulated the idea of reciprocal
obligation in the crudest terms: Dehi me,
dadāmi te—"Give to me, I give to thee." But
this simple relation was superseded in
the priestly ceremonial by elaborate parallels
between the daily order of the ritual and the
daily order of the skies. The earthly
sacrifices were the counterparts of those offered
by celestial priests. The "Fathers"
accomplished the rising of the sun; and when the
heavenly process was imitated in the world
below, the kindling of the sacred fire came
to be regarded as the actual instrument for
stimulating and maintaining the activities
above. From a yet higher point of view the
whole world had issued from the mysterious
sacrifice of a cosmic Man (described in one
of the latest hymns of the Rig-Veda), out of
whose person the visible universe, the Veda, and
the human race in four castes, had been created.
In the Brahmanical theology his place was
taken by Prajāpati, the "Lord of Creatures,"
who underwent repeated offering in every
sacrifice. And just as the primeval sacrifice
effected the generation of the world, so every
fresh oblation was a miniature reproduction
of the cosmic event. The Lord who had been
dismembered must be reconstituted that he
might offer himself anew; and thus sacrifice
was blended with the course of Time and the
period of the Year, and the perpetual
dissolution and renewal of the life that animated
the mighty frame of earth and heaven. In
that upper world, moreover, the sacrificer,
through mystical identification with Prajāpati,
was enabled to prepare a new body for the
celestial abode, and out of the altar-ground
below to generate his future divine self in the
world above.
Along other lines the conception of
fellowship with Deity may be realised through a
common act. Above the personal fetish of
a Gold Coast negro to which he made offerings
of rum and palm-wine, oil, corn, sheep, goats,
stood the patron god of the family. Before
a separation which would prevent them from
ever again worshipping together, they engaged
in a strange kind of communion. The
fetish-priest pounded up some sacred substance
and mixed it with water, which was then
drunk by the whole family in turn. During
the rite the priest enjoined all present in the
name of the deity to abstain from some
particular kind of food, fish, beef, fowl, milk,
or other article of diet. None of the
company tasted it again. They were united by
the deity within them; and obedience to his
command bound them, however far apart, in
common worship.
Sometimes the worshipper sat at the table
of the god, who was in some sense present at
the meal celebrated in his honour. In the
usage of ancient Israel the householder shared
with his family, kinsmen, neighbours, and
guests, in the sacred feast "before Yahweh." How
far the belief in Yahweh's presence was
actually cherished by the participants cannot
be definitely affirmed; it does not appear, for
instance, in the Babylonian ritual. But a
corresponding idea may certainly be traced
in Greece and Rome. From the early cult
of the sacred stone or pillar as the abode of
deity, some kind of divine power inhered in
the altar and the image; and when the
members of the clan feasted together on solemn
occasions, the clan-god was present with his
worshippers. The Greek ritual sometimes
provided a place for the table-companions or
"parasites," at sacred banquets, such as were
held in the temples of Apollo at Acharnæ or
Delos.
An inscription at Magnesia describes a
festival of twelve gods, whose images, adorned
with festal array, were carried into the
marketplace, and arranged on three cushions under
a canopy. When sacrifices had been offered,
the priests and people partook of a common
meal with the gods. The old Latins and other
Italians believed the deities of the house to
be present at their meals. The Penates,
Mr. Warde Fowler tells us, were the spirits of the
foods. Rome celebrated its solemn feast of
Jove in the Capitoline temple every
September on full-moon day, when Jupiter, with
his face painted red, Juno, and Minerva,
were present in their statues to share the meal
with the magistrates and Senate of the city.
To "lay a couch for the god" (as we might
say "to lay a table") was a common phrase.
Recently discovered papyri, illustrating so
many aspects of daily life in the Eastern
Mediterranean, show that such hospitalities
were of frequent occurrence, alike in temples
and in private houses. Among the precious
remains from Oxyrhynchus are such notes
as this: "Antonius son of Ptolemæus invites
you to dine with him at the table of our Lord
Sarapis in the house of Claudius Sarapion on
the 16th at 9 o'clock."
But the worshipper might not only eat
with the god, he might more rarely, and under
special circumstances, even eat him. A more
intimate union was thus effected. When
the altar imparted its sanctity to the victim
laid upon it, the holy food distributed to the
worshipper had some kind of divine presence
in it, and virtue passed through the meat
into the eater. The late Prof. Robertson
Smith, in his famous lectures on "the Religion
of the Semites," endeavoured to show that
sacrifice originally consisted in slaying the
animal of the totem-group, of which members
of the totem-kin partook so that they received
into their own persons the divine power
incarnated in the totem animal. Further research
has failed to confirm this view; but a similar
conception has been illustrated from another
side. The agricultural usages of which
Dr. Frazer has collected so many examples, show
how out of the last sheaf, which had become the
home of the corn-spirit, the grain was baked in
human form as its embodiment, and solemnly
eaten. In the East Indian archipelago, on
the island of Buro, the approaching
rice-harvest was welcomed by a tribal meeting
when each man brought some first-fruits from
the fields, and the meal of inauguration was
known as "eating the soul of the rice."
Twice a year was the great Mexican deity
Huitzilopochtli presented in the form of dough
images to his worshippers, and with elaborate
ceremonies was consumed. Tezcatlipoca, in
like manner, chief god of the Aztecs,
represented by a handsome and noble captive
wearing the divine emblems, was slain on the
great altar; the body of the victim was
respectfully carried down into the court below,
divided into small pieces, and distributed
among priests and nobles as blessed food.
It is strange to find such savagery associated
with prayers of exalted fervour and devotion.
But ecstasy is roused by various means, and
is not affronted at the most brutal rites.
There were incidents in the Orphic cult of the
Thracian Dionysus grouped under the name
of the "Omophagy" (literally "raw-eating")
of like character. In frenzied excitement the
devotees flung themselves on bull or goat,
rent it asunder, and devoured the bleeding
flesh. Such was the condition of securing
the actual entry of the god into the believer's
person, so that he became entheos, "with the
god inside him." Words have strange
histories, and few now remember, when they
describe the welcome of a monarch by acclaiming
crowds, or the excitement roused by a
great orator, what was the earlier meaning
of "enthusiasm."
In the "art which gods and men have of doing
business with each other," Socrates associated
sacrifice with prayer (p. 133). The association
is world-wide, and here religion reaches its
utmost inwardness. The feeling which
expresses itself in action will also prompt gesture
and speech; rude rhythms mould words into
chant and song; and even without a definite
object of address some utterance breathes a
desire. "May it be well with the buffaloes,
may they not suffer from disease and die
... may there be water and grass in plenty." So
runs the dairy-ritual of the Indian Todas,
without the direct invocation of any gods.
But there is no element here of compulsion
or constraint. The distinction between
prayer and spell is clear; the attitude is
religious, not magical. On the other hand,
sacrifices are sometimes offered to a "High
God," as by the Dinkas of the Bahr-el-Ghazal
in Central Africa to Deng-deet, who is
described as "Ruler of the universe, Creator
of mankind, the actual Father of human
beings"; but, adds Captain Cummins,
imagine it does not occur to them to pray.
Others, by contrast, make morning and evening
prayer part of their daily practice; the Nandi
of East Africa concludes his devotions
(addressed to Asista, the ordinary word for
the sun): "I have prayed to thee, thou
sleepest and thou goest, I have prayed to thee,
do not say 'I am tired.'" Sometimes prayer
is offered only to the powers of mischief.
The Lepchas of the Himalayas told Dr. Hooker
that they did not pray to the good spirits.
"Why should we? They do us no harm;
the evil spirits that dwell in every grove and
rock and mountain, to them we must pray,
for they hurt us." To the Australian it may
seem foolishness to address Baiame from day
to day: he knows, why weary him by repetitions,
disturbing his rest after his earthly
labours? But the impulse of prayer does not
always take articulate form, any more than
it always seeks a personal object; and after
long residence among the Euahlayi in South
East Australia Mrs. Langloh Parker pleaded
that the man who invoked aid in his hour of
danger, or the woman who crooned over her
babe an incantation to keep him honest and
true, shared, however dimly, the same spirit
of devotion which elsewhere prompts elaborate
litanies. It is with a pious reserve that
the Khonds of Orissa pray: "We are ignorant
of what it is good for us to ask for. You
know what is good for us; give it to us."
Prayer in the lower culture is rarely
individualised. It is almost always a social
act. Common prayers for food or rain, for
protection against danger, the removal of
pestilence, victory over enemies, represent
the wants of all. The group may be the
family, as in the evening worship of the
Samoan householder, who pours a little of his
cup of ava on the ground, and prays for
health, productive plantations, and plenty of
fruit. On the Lower Niger Major Leonard
found worship offered daily before an image
or emblem believed to contain the spirits
of more immediate ancestors: "Preserve
our lives, O Spirit Father, who hast gone
before, and make thy house fruitful, so that
we thy children shall increase and multiply
and so grow rich and powerful."
Such prayers may be traced through many
expanding phases up to the higher petitions
which seek to place the civic and moral life
under the guidance of the heroic dead. The
element of bargain or contract which Socrates
so sarcastically emphasised, here drops away.
"To what god or what hero shall we pray,"
inquired the people of Corcyra, weary of
internal strife, at the oracle of Dodona, "in
order to obtain concord, and to govern our
city fairly and well?" Chinese statecraft
well understood the significance of such
worship as a social bond. The ancient author of
the Lî Chî, or "Book of Rites," laid it down
that "the prayers of the principal in the
sacrifice to the spirits, and the benedictions
of the representatives of the departed, are
carefully framed. The object of all
ceremonies is to bring down the spirits from above,
even their ancestors; serving also to rectify
the relations between ruler and minister, to
maintain the generous feeling between father
and son, and the harmony between elder and
younger brother, to adjust the relations
between high and low, and to give their proper
places to husband and wife. The whole may
be said to secure the blessing of Heaven."
Attention is thus concentrated upon
common sentiments and universal relationships,
and prayer acquires a deeper ethical meaning.
It then comes to rest upon devout experience,
which seeks to interpret life in relation to
the permanent forces of justice which are
believed to rule the world. The hymns of
Egypt celebrate in lofty terms the majesty
and beneficence of the gods, and the psalmists
of the Nile sang of the divine love
encompassing all lands, setting every man in his
place, and amid diversities of colour and
speech supplying all human needs. The
Babylonian poets addressed Shamash or Sin,
sun or moon, as the symbols of the universal
order of nature, the witnesses of thought
and deed over the wide earth, the rulers on
whom man could place unchanging reliance.
The Vedic singer found a similar figure of
moral sovereignty in Varuna (p. 106). Out
of the depths of her distress Hecuba (in the
"Trojan Women") appeals to the mysterious
Power whom she can still glorify in her
anguish: "Thou deep base of the world, and
thou high throne above the world, whoe'er
thou art, unknown and hard of surmise, chain
of things to be, or reason of our reason, God,
to thee I lift my praise, seeing the silent road
that bringeth justice ere the end be trod to
all that breathes and dies." With a yet
firmer confidence could the Peruvian in the
sixteenth century record this prayer to the
"World-animating Spirit": "O Pāchacāmac,
thou who hast existed from the beginning,
and shalt exist unto the end, who createst
man by saying "Let man be," who defendest
us from evil, and preservest our life and health,
art thou in the sky or in the earth, in the
clouds or in the depths? Hear the voice of
him who implores thee, and grant him his
petitions. Give us life everlasting; preserve
us, and accept this our sacrifice."
Two or three thousand years before, the
pious Egyptian had been bidden to enter
quietly into the sanctuary of God, to whom
clamour is abhorrent. "Pray to him with a
longing heart in which all thy words are hidden,
so will he grant thy request, and hear that
which thou sayest and accept thy offering." Dear
was this silent worship to the higher
teachers. A hymn to Thoth (p. 8) addresses
him as "Thou sweet spring for the thirsty in
the desert," adding, "It is closed for those who
speak there, it is open for those who keep
silence there. When the silent man cometh,
he findeth the spring."
Petitions such as these, rooted in ethical
sentiment, demand as their moral condition purity
of heart and concentration of thought. The
prophets of all ages have protested against
formalism and insincerity. The Japanese
god of learning, Temmangu, was once a
distinguished statesman. But he fell into
unmerited disgrace (A.D. 901), and was
banished. Posthumously vindicated, he was
promoted to the rank of deity, and declared
through his oracle, "All ye who come before
me hoping to attain the accomplishment of
your desires, pray with hearts pure from
falsehood, clean within and without, reflecting
the truth like a mirror." The disposition of
prayer must be that of life also. It was with
reference to similar slander to that from
which Temmangu had suffered, that Pindar
cried, "Never be this mind in me, O Father
Zeus, but to the paths of simplicity let me
cleave throughout my life, that when dead
I may set upon my children a name that
shall be of no ill repute." And Socrates prays,
as he and Phædrus rise from the shade of the
plane-tree where they have been talking,
"Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods that
haunt this place, give me beauty in the
inward soul, and may the outward and the
inward man be at one": to which Phædrus
adds, "Ask the same for me, for friends
should have all things in common."
The need of righteousness begets penitence
and confession. A Buddhist liturgy issued
in China in 1412 with a preface by the Emperor
Yung Loh of the Ming dynasty, after the
opening invocations, proceeded thus: "We
and all men from the very first, by reason of
the grievous sins we have committed in
thought, word, and deed, have lived in
ignorance of all the Buddhas, and of any
way of escape from the consequences of our
conduct. We have followed only the course
of this evil world, nor have we known aught
of Supreme Wisdom, and even now, though
enlightened as to our duty, yet with others
we still commit heavy sins, which prevent us
from advancing in true knowledge. Therefore
in the presence of Kwan Yin [the Chinese form
of Avalokiteçvara, p. 131], and the Buddhas
of the ten regions, we would humble
ourselves, and repent of our sins.... For the
sake of all sentient creatures in whatever
capacity they be, would that all obstacles
may be removed, we confess our sins and
repent."
A higher note is sounded here than in the
famous penitential psalms of ancient Babylon,
where the poet, smitten with various
distresses, laments the unknown sins which have
roused the anger of his god, and passes into
fierce incantations against the demonic powers
which are the instruments of the divine
wrath. Here prayer makes a close alliance
with magic: and its formulæ are always in
danger of this degeneration. In the old
Italian ritual of a guild at Iguvium the exact
titles of the deity must be rehearsed, and
the proper words recited. The slightest slip
invalidated the entire rite, and the officiating
priest was required to repeat the whole over
again. To this rigid adhesion to consecrated
forms we owe the preservation of antique
liturgical expressions left stranded in priestly
usage. Such phrases acquired a semi-magical
power. The Honover (Ahuna Vairya), or
most sacred verse of the ancient Persian
scriptures, became a charm against evil in
the fight with Ahriman and his hosts.
Passages from the Koran are used by
Mohammedans as amulets against danger. The
Buddhist formula Om mani padme hum is a
protection from mischievous influences, like
the Lord's Prayer in the Middle Ages; and the
prayer-wheels and prayer-mills of Mongolia,
in endeavouring to enlist the aid of Nature,
and harness wind and water in the service
of religion, have only turned devotion into
a mechanical device.
In the long story of Indian religion many
notes are struck in the wide range of human
want, of divine grace, and adoring faith.
The Vedic poets speak with full hearts of
the simple joys of earth; the happiness of
home with its passionate desires for children
and long life; the pleasures of wealth in horses
and chariots and cows. Rescue from poverty
or danger, victory over the godless enemy,
influence in the assembly and superiority
in debate, these are the gifts which are sought
with the utmost directness of speech: "If
I, O Indra, were like thee, the single sovereign
of all wealth, my worshipper should be rich
in kine." But other tones are not wanting:
"Aditi, Mitra, Varuna, forgive us, however
we have sinned against you": "Before this
Varuna (p. 106) may we be sinless, him who
shows mercy even to the sinner."
With the development of Brahmanical
speculation prayer rises to more abstract
ideas: "Lead me from darkness to light,
from falsehood to truth, from death to the
deathless." The association of prayer and
magic is seen in the fact that the very term
brahma has the double meaning of prayer
and spell, something like the Greek euchê or
the Hebrew "bless," which could imply a
curse as well as a prayer. But in its higher
sense it gave birth to the "Lord of Prayer,"
Brahmanaspati, a kind of house-priest of the
gods, a heavenly personification of the
priesthood on earth, in whom resided the power of
influencing events by prayer and incantation.
Nay, just as the hymns came to be regarded
as originally existing in the realm of the
infinite and the undying (p. 12), so prayer
was said to have been born of yore in heaven.
And thus the Lord of Prayer acquires a
more lofty character as its generator and
inspirer; he is even called the "Father of the
gods"; and the very universe depends upon
him, for he holds asunder the ends of the
earth. In the shining company of deities,
moreover, stand Sacred Speech, and Devotion,
and Lovely Praise, and Holy Thought, with
others of the goodly fellowship of Prayer, to
attest its power, and approve its worth.
The subsequent devotion of India aspires
by different paths to reach communion with
the Infinite Spirit or Universal Self. The
supreme reality is presented in the triple
aspects of Being, Thought, and Bliss
(saccidānanda). To know him alone as the Self
of all selves, is the goal rather of meditation
than of prayer. Existence, understanding,
and joy, these are the ultimates of all
experience, and he who has attained them prays
no more: "Seeking for emancipation I go
for refuge to that God who is the guiding
light to the understanding of all souls." This
is the note of much of the later mystical piety
of Hinduism. It speaks in the language
both of religion and of philosophy.
In the first, the believer looks to his
heavenly Lord with adoring faith (p. 128)
and lowly love (bhakti), and feels the inflowing
of divine favour or grace (prasāda). The
long line of mediæval poets transmitted from
generation to generation passionate impulses
of devotion which expressed themselves again
and again in legend and song. "Search in thy
heart," pleaded the weaver Kabir in the
fifteenth century, "search in thy heart of
hearts, there is God's place of abode." Not,
however, without conditions: "Unless you
have a forgiving spirit, you will not see
God." He might describe himself in his humility as
"the worst of men"; that only made the
marvel of divine grace more wonderful: "I
am thy son; Thou art my Father; we both
live in the same place."
On the philosophical side a modern manual
of Hindu practice endeavours to combine
religion and metaphysics. Ere the believer
rises from bed in the morning he should
confess his unworthiness: "O Lord of the
universe, O All-Consciousness, presiding Deity
of all, Vishnu, at thy bidding, and to please
thee alone, I rise this morning, and enter on
the discharge of my daily duties. I know
what is righteous, yet I feel no attraction for
it; I know what is not righteous, yet I have
no repulsion from it. O Lord of the senses,
O Thou seated in the heart, may I do thy
commands as ordered by thee in my
conscience." But in order to remind him of his
divine origin, in this age of sordid interests
and low ideals, he is enjoined also to look upon
himself as the reflected image of God, the
Eternal, the All-Knowing, the All-Glad, and
to recite the ancient verse, "I am divine and
not anything else, I am indeed Brahma above
all sorrows, my form is Being, Intelligence,
and Bliss, and eternally free is my nature."
The duties of offering and prayer may be
performed from day to day, or they may be
reserved for special occasions of enterprise,
danger, and thanksgiving. They mark the
incidents of the week, the month, the year;
there are sabbaths, new moons, seed-time and
harvest, and new year festivals. This
periodicity affects the whole community together.
But there are also personal events, marking
successive stages in each individual career,
which must be placed under the shelter of
religion, and do not all occur at the same
time. From his entry into the world to his
departure from it each person passes at certain
crises out of one condition into another, and
the transition requires the protection of the
powers above. Birth, the attainment of
adolescence, marriage, death, are the chief
occasions marked by what M. van Gennep
has called "rites of passage." They are all
connected with mysteries of life.
For life, in the lower culture, is exposed
perpetually to dangers of all kinds. Demonic
influences continually threaten it; strange
pollutions beset it; the blood in which it is
often located has about it something weird,
uncanny, sometimes unclean. So there are
preliminary rites for bringing in the soul of
the child as yet unborn from its home in
the ground, among the flowers and trees, or
in wells and lakes and running streams.
Among tribes which regard the mother as
unclean before birth, the uncleanness is
transmitted to the child, and ceremonies of
purification must be performed for both.
The child must be guarded against the evil
eye, perils of infection of various kinds, or
the attacks of hostile demons. The ritual
of cleansing must be scrupulously performed.
When Apollo and the future Buddha were
born, divine beings received them; Apollo
was washed in fair water, and wondrous
streams, warm and cold, descended from the
sky for the Indian babe. Sometimes there
is such haste to place the infant under divine
care that it is borne away at once to the
temple, as Turner noticed among the
Nanumangans of Hudson's island, that its first
breathings, when only a few seconds old,
may take place in the presence of the god,
and his blessing be invoked on the essentials
of its life.
Around the cradle friendly influences must
be secured, the child must be duly incorporated
into the circle of the cosmic powers and of
human life. He is laid upon the ground
for contact with the supporting earth, and
presented to the great vivifier, the sun, or
held over the fire. Out of the bath grew a
rite of immersion designed to solemnise his
admission into the guild of mankind, and
wash away the strange element of evil which
seemed to inhere in human nature. In Peru
this was exorcised by the priest, who bade it
enter the water, which was then buried in
the ground. The Aztec ritual of baptism,
according to the native writer Sahagun,
began: "O child, receive the water of the
lord of the world which is our life. It is
to wash and purify. May these drops remove
the sin which was given to thee before the
creation of the world, since all of us are under
its power." This was a real act of
regeneration, for the priest concluded: "Now he
liveth anew, and is born anew, now he is
purified and cleansed, now our Mother the
water again bringeth him into the world."
After purification comes the ceremony of
giving the name, fittingly performed in the
temple, as in Greece, Rome, or Mexico.
Elements of personality inhere so strangely
in names, that this rite also acquires great
significance. Perhaps the name of some
ancestor is chosen, who may thus endow the
child with some of his qualities, or at least
be invoked for protection and aid. Divine
powers have watched over his birth (p. 121);
others may decide his destiny, like the three
Greek fateful goddesses Klotho, Lachesis, and
Atropos, or the venerable Scandinavian Norns.
Or the aid of the stars must be invoked, and
a horoscope must be prepared by the astrologer.
Sometimes a special guardian power may be
chosen for the infant, sometimes the choice
is reserved for him at a later stage. Or he
may be dedicated from the outset to some
hallowed service, as the child Samuel was
given to Yahweh.
More important even than the rites of birth
and infancy are those of the attainment of
adolescence, when the youth is admitted to
the privileges of manhood and instructed in
the secrets of the tribe. All round the world
the lower culture has its ceremonies of
initiation, which have sometimes survived in more
refined forms in more highly organised
societies. They involve seclusion from the
common life, for no woman must be cognisant
of what takes place, severe bodily trials to
test the youth's power of endurance—fasts,
scourging, loss of front teeth, tattooing (so
that his status may be recognisable at once)
and other forms of personal scarification and
pain, under which the feeble sink, and the
happiest are those who die, escaping the
humiliations of the weakling's lot. Long
abstinence in lonely places begets strange
dreams and visions, and raises nervous
excitability to its highest pitch. Strange forms
appear with hideous faces and mysterious
trappings; appalling sounds are heard; and
it is only when the hours of terror are past
that the initiated learns that the awful figures
were his own kinsmen in masks and disguises,
and the Australian is told that what he took
to be the signal of Daramulun's advent was
produced by the whirling of the bull-roarer.
In the midst of these pantomimic incidents
the novice dies to rise again. Perhaps he
is buried in the fetish-house; or he passes
through the bath into his new condition; or
he is vivified by the sprinkling of blood. But
he awakes to a fresh life. He must be utterly
forgetful of the old; he must even sometimes
feign ignorance of his parents' home and
names. The elders then impart to him the
customs and traditions of the tribe. He
learns the rules of conduct, and duties of
reverence and obedience to the aged, who
are thus, in tribes without formal government,
placed under the protection of religion. The
strain of prolonged excitement and attention
fixes precept and counsel indelibly upon his
memory, and he knows that the penalty of
betrayal will be death.
The ancient Indian ritual was more refined.
The three upper castes, the Brahman, the
noble, and the cultivator of the land,
belonged to the "twice-born." Only to these
was the study of the Veda permitted. When
the youth was led to his teacher to be invested
with the sacred thread, the symbol of his
dignity, blessings were uttered and holy
water was sprinkled on him. Then for the
first time was he permitted to repeat the
sacred verse (known as the Gāyatrī, Rig Veda,
iii. 62, 10), "Let us meditate on that excellent
glory of the divine Vivifier, may he enlighten
our understandings," which is still recited
daily by millions of devout Hindus. One
of the later books of the Zoroastrian faith
lays down that "it is necessary for all those
of the good religion to celebrate the ritual
and become navazûd, newly born," or born
again. The ceremony began with a purification
which lasted nine nights, and included
sprinkling with water; the candidate for the
priesthood must be of the age of fifteen; he
must confess his sins, endure the scourge;
and might then be regarded as regenerate.
Within the whole group of initiates secret
societies were often formed, bound together
by special vows, and using the instrumentality
of religion. Observers in West Africa and
elsewhere (they are also common in
Polynesia and Melanesia) have differed widely as
to their value, some denouncing them for
their intolerable tyranny, others finding them
useful agents of police. They are the
forerunners of more purely religious associations
such as may be seen in the mysteries of
Greece. Here, too, were ceremonies of
initiation, here were pantomimic representations
of divine events, secrets of communion with
deity, and promises of life beyond the grave.
Most famous, of course, were the mysteries
of Eleusis, in charge of the great family of
the Eumolpids. Already in the Homeric
hymn to Demeter, before the days of
Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all Greece had been bidden
to come to Eleusis, and receive initiation
into the rites of the Lady Mother and the
Maid. There were preliminaries of purification,
which a Christian apologist like Clement
of Alexandria could compare with the baptism
of the Church. Cleansed from the stain of
sin, the candidate was required to be devout
and holy. What was the precise nature of
the revelation which he was permitted to see
is uncertain. The passion-drama of the
mother's loss of her daughter, her search
and recovery, may have grown out of some
seasonal vegetation ceremonies. But they
had taken on higher meanings. The secret
might not be divulged in detail; there is,
however, a large amount of testimony that
ideas of death and re-birth or resurrection
played a great part in this, as in other
mystery-religions; the Homeric hymn to Demeter holds
out intimations of immortality; and by
some kind of communion with the deity the
salvation of the believer was assured.
The rites of the Phrygian Sabazius touch
the processes of the lower culture at more
than one point. In his great oration "on
the Crown" (315 B.C.) Demosthenes twits his
opponent Æschines in such terms as these:
"You assisted your mother in the initiations,
you read aloud the books (the ritual prayers),
and took part in the rest of the plot. You
put on (or, you robed the candidates in)
fawn-skins; you sprinkled them with water
from the bowl; you purified and rubbed
them with clay and bran, then you raised
them from their purification, and bade them
say, 'I have fled the bad, and found the
better.'" On the gold Orphic tablets
discovered in South Italy and Crete occur strange
phrases: "I, a kid, fell into the milk," "O
blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy
mortality and hast become divine," which
are interpreted with great probability as
references to a ritual of milk-baptism in
which the initiate was born again.
That idea was certain expressed in the
mysteries of Isis, which were widely spread
in the Eastern Mediterranean (p. 40). Here,
too, was a solemn kind of death and re-birth;
here, too, lustrations of the purest water,
the priestly declaration of the pardon of the
gods, the mystic revelation of the Goddess,
herself identified with all deities in turn;
and here, after the vision, the assurance of
a blessed life to come. The candidate for
initiation into the rites of Mithra must mount
slowly through seven stages. The details
of the ritual of the successive grades are
unknown; but in accordance with ancient
Iranian practice repeated ablutions were
imposed till the cleansing waters had washed
away all stains of guilt. The Mithraic
sacraments so closely resembled Christian usage
that they were vehemently denounced by
Church writers as a Satanic parody. They
were certainly supposed to secure happiness
in the world to come. The believer who
had passed through the blood-bath of the
slaughtered bull was said to be "re-born for ever."
Associated with sacrifice and prayer, and
partaking at once of the characters of magic
and mystery, is the sacred dance. Rhythmic
movement of body and limbs readily becomes
the expression of strong feeling; and the
feeling in its turn may be reawakened by
the solemn renewal of the action. When it
imitates the motions of the warrior or the
huntsman it comes to possess a magical
value, and the women who remain at home
will dance all day while their husbands are
engaged in battle or the chase. Does it not
quicken their courage or enhance their skill?
The child in an elementary school now learns
his action-songs, and sows the grain and reaps
the harvest. He does not, however, suppose
that he is promoting nature's work. But the
women whose social progress has advanced to
agriculture, instead of imitating the gambols of
the wolf or bear, will celebrate the operations
of the fields to stimulate their effectiveness,
and at a later stage still will go forth into the
vineyards with timbrel and song. There are
dances for courtship and marriage, dances in
initiations and mysteries, dances even for the
funeral. There are solemn preparations, as
in the snake-dance of the secret order of the
Snakes among the Moquis of Arizona, when
the members must not only wash the snakes,
but themselves as well and everything about
them (in the same water), and fast for one
day. Then any one who has been bitten
will be healed, and when the pipe is lit, the
clouds from it will rise and form rain-clouds,
and the rain will fall upon the altar and the
sacred things. Or the dance will serve for
the reunion of the tribe, and becomes a great
social as well as a religious institution. The
Sun-dance of the Blackfoot Indians (p. 35) is
the supreme expression of their religion, and
their great annual religious gathering. It must
originate in a woman's vow for the recovery
of the sick, and the ceremonies are spread over
a considerable time. Some come for
enjoyment, some to fast and pray. Some must
discharge their vows for the healing of sick
kinsfolk; others pay the price of deliverance
from peril by the infliction of self-torture in
the sun-lodge.
The vow, the fast, and all the varied forms
of asceticism which Eastern religions have
so abundantly produced, all involve common
elements of sacrifice and self-subjection. The
vow, indeed, has in part the nature of a
contract. It is not magic, it is a bargain.
There is no constraint, the deity may avail
himself of what is offered, or may not. If
Yahweh will go with me, says Jacob, and
provide me food to eat and clothes to wear,
he shall be my god and get his tithe. But
the vow involves the surrender of something
otherwise desirable. It is the same with the
ascetic, who gives up food, or clothing, or sleep,
or the bath, or speech, or a fixed home; who
sits between four fires under a blazing sun;
who lacerates his back with the scourge or his
flesh with knives; who holds a flower-pot in
his hand till the fingers grow round it
immovably; who hangs himself up by hooks in his
bare back, or loads himself from neck to feet
with chains. Men may fast religiously to
overcome bodily desire; or to prepare the higher
insight for strange openings of vision. "The
continually stuffed body," say the Amazulu,
"cannot see secret things." Lacordaire bade
the brethren of his Order scourge him that
he might humble himself, and taste the pain
of his Redeemer. But the extremer forms
of asceticism (especially as a life-long practice)
are always based on the idea that they are in
themselves meritorious; they produce desert
and desert leads to reward. They are a mode
of establishing a claim on the future bounty
of heaven; they are, after all, only another
form of "doing business with the gods."
In the intimate connection of religion with
life all primitive interests are placed under
its sanction. A large portion of time is
occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes
of the tribe are bound up with it. To the
bounty of its powers they owe abundant food
and safety or success in war. Beneath its
protection the newly born enter the world,
and to its care the elders are committed when
they die. Its holy persons rule in their
midst; its holy places are all round about
them; its sacred objects are in their homes.
It is not surprising, therefore, that all the
higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and
crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws,
its stories of the gods and their dealings with
each other or with man, should be ascribed
to the same origin. Where individuality is
hampered at every turn by time-honoured
conventions, and personal initiative is
imperfectly developed and timidly confined
within the narrowest limits, all higher
intellectual products, command over nature,
inventions, poetry and song, the usages of
the social order, and the rituals for serving
the gods, carry with them a secret force, a
mysterious authority, which passes the bounds
of human wisdom, and has been imparted
from some higher source. Each man is
dimly conscious that his single wit could not
have compassed these things; he does not
observe the long processes and imperceptible
stages of advance; he accepts the theory
offered to him by those who should know best,
and looks back to the days when kindly powers
took in hand the instruction of men.
Thus at the present day many of the
Australian tribes whose condition has probably
changed little since the date of the oldest
civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty
institutions as ordained by beings above.
Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any
custom, the answer is that Nurrundere
commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the
marriage laws for their respective tribes;
Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts
of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws
which the old people handed down from
generation to generation.
The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and
Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast
prehistoric period before the Flood the people
round the lower Euphrates had lived without
rule or order, like the beasts of the field,
till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek
historian called Cannes, appeared out of the
Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. He
taught them arts and laws, and wrote
concerning the generation of mankind, their
different ways of life, and their civil polity.
It was no other than Ea, god of the encircling
Deep, the source of all. Historic inscriptions
told of his "books," which may have included
ancient oracles, and which certainly laid down
the duties of a king. So the famous code of
Hammurabi (about 1950 B.C.), recently
discovered at Susa (1901), was handed to him,
as the tablet shows, by the great Sun-god,
Shamash.
The Egyptian priests, perhaps as late as
the great Nineteenth Dynasty, before the
days of Moses, threw into definite shape the
vague traditions of immemorial antiquity,
when men had lived devouring one another,
ignorant how to till the ground. Osiris
(p. 119) taught the art of tillage, the use of
the plough and hoe, how to grow wheat and
barley, and the culture of the vine; and Isis
added the domestic arts of making bread and
weaving linen. Osiris, moreover, appointed
the offerings to the gods, regulated the
ceremonies, composed the texts and
melodies of the hymns. And among his
successors was Thoth of Hermopolis (p. 8), who
introduced astronomy and divination,
medicine, arithmetic, and geometry, and whose
"books," embracing a kind of religious
encyclopædia, were known to the Christian
teacher, Clement of Alexandria, in the second
century of our era.
So Zeus gave laws to Minos in Crete, and
Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to
Lycurgus; Numa, the traditional founder of
the Roman ceremonial law, received instruction
from the nymph Egeria. The shepherd
slave, Zaleucus (whom Eusebius placed about
660 B.C.), taught the Locrians what Athena
had first taught him, and prefaced his laws
by enjoining them to revere the gods as the
real causes of all things fair and good in life,
and keep their hearts pure from all evil,
inasmuch as the gods do not take pleasure in
the sacrifices of the wicked, but in the righteous
and fair conduct of the good.
From the New World come a series of
similar figures. Mr. Curtin claims to show
that the vast area of the American continent
is pervaded by one system of thought
incalculably old. In the central group of the
most sacred personages is the Earth with
Sky and Sun conceived sometimes as identical
sometimes as distinct. The Earth-maiden on
whom the Sun has gazed, becomes a mother,
and gives birth to a great hero. He bestows
on men all gifts that support existence, and
it is through him that the race lives and
prospers. To the Algonkins he was Michabo
or Manibozho, the "Great Light," who
imparted vision, author of wisdom, arts, and
institutions. Among the Toltecs at Tulla
he was Quetzalcoatl, virgin-born, founder of
civilisation, who organised worship without
human or animal sacrifices, and endured no
war. The Miztecs called him Votan, prince
and legislator of his people, representative
of a higher wisdom, so that he rose to be the
mediator between earth and heaven. In the
plains of Begota the white-bearded Bohica
appeared to the Mozca Indians, taught them
how to sow and build, formed them into
communities, contrived an outlet for the
waters of their great lake, and, having settled
the government and the ritual, retired into
ascetic penance for two thousand years.
Out of the depths of Lake Titicaca in Peru
there rose one day the son and daughter of
the sun and moon, Manco Capac and Mama
Ogllo, sent by their father in compassion
for men's wretched plight. They taught the
ignorant folk agriculture, the chief trades, the
art of building cities, aqueducts, and roads,
and Mama Ogllo showed the women how to
spin and weave. Then when all was in
order, and overseers were appointed to see
that each one did his duty, they went back
to the skies.
These stories all belong to the class known
as myths. They are not accounts of what
actually happened, they are the work of
religious imagination operating on a particular
group of facts, and endeavouring to explain
them. The scope of mythology, whatever
may be its particular origins, is of the widest
compass. It embraces the whole field of
nature and life. It first came into modern
view through the study of classical antiquity
in Greece and Rome. The discovery of
Sanskrit and the investigation of its literature,
especially of the Vedic hymns, concentrated
the attention of scholars for a time,
pre-eminently under the genius of Max Müller,
on the relations of myth to language, and the
resolution of various deities of India and
Greece into the phenomena of dawn and
sunshine, of the thunderstorm or the moon.
But it was gradually found necessary to
abandon one after another of the philological
identifications which had at one time been
proposed with confidence. New aspects of
mythology demanded consideration. It was
not only concerned with the incidents and
powers of nature, or with the various relations
of the gods. It appeared also in the field
of ritual. It often contained antique secrets
of the meaning of religious performance. It
was the key to the dramatised representations
of the sacred dance, the ceremonials on which
depended the welfare of the tribe. And in
proportion as action acquired a larger
psychological recognition in shaping the character
of religion, and belief receded into the
background, the significance of the development
of myths was changed.
As religion, however, became more self-conscious,
the intellectual element in it gained
more force and energy, and the thinkers of
the priestly schools endeavoured to bring
the claims of different deities into some sort
of order, and regulate the hierarchy of heaven.
But they were often confronted with ancient
elements of savagery which could be
imperfectly harmonised with the more refined
ideas of a progressive culture. Thus already
in Homer, Zeus, as supreme God, bears one
significant epithet; he is mêtieta, full of mêtis
or counsel. The word is of doubtful derivation,
but with the strong tendency of Greek
imagination to turn abstract ideas into
persons, Mêtis is presented by Hesiod (next
in literary succession to Homer) as the
daughter of Ocean, the Hellenic equivalent
of the Babylonian Deep, source of all being
even for the gods. Greek thought was not
yet ripe for the ontological conception of
wisdom or intelligence as inherent in the
divine nature, so the union of Thought with
Zeus is represented mythologically as a
marriage, and Mêtis becomes the bride of
the great "king of gods and men." The
result is conceived in truly savage fashion.
In order to possess her in the most intimate
manner, and embody her in his own person,
Zeus suddenly swallows her. Mythology, of
course, has to provide a reason; she would bear
a son who would overthrow him. The poet
(or perhaps his editor), desirous of correcting
this brutal selfishness, suggests a further
plea; the goddess should be his perpetual
monitor, and warn him inwardly of good and
evil. The myth is being directly moralised.
Whatever, therefore, may be the origins
of myth, whether in connection with tribal
tradition, in the interpretation of the incidents
of nature—as when a Siberian described to
Baron von Wrangell the occultation of one
of Jupiter's moons by saying that the blue
star had swallowed another very small star
and soon after vomited it up again—or in
endeavours to picture the characters and
relations of the gods, the beginnings of the
world, the birth of man, the entry of evil,
sin, and death, or the condition of those
who have already passed away, the myth
becomes the reflex of the culture in the midst
of which it rises. It is the depository of
human experience, of man's criticism of his
own life. And in its representations of a
distant age when gods visibly consorted with
men, and deigned to instruct them in the
conditions of social welfare, mythology is the
direct product of religion.
When the gods have withdrawn from human
fellowship, and no longer choose their brides
from the dwellers upon earth, or even
vouchsafe to appear among them in various forms
for temporary help or promise of blessing,
the communications from heaven do not cease
altogether. The Vedic poet might challenge
the existence of Indra, the fool might say in
his heart, "There is no God"; but the Powers
above never left themselves without a witness.
The negro going out of his hut one morning
strikes his foot against a peculiarly shaped
stone. "Art thou there?" he inquires, and
recognises the presence of a guardian and
helper. The Samoan watches the behaviour
of a spinning cocoa-nut, or the flight of a bird
to right or left. The Central Asiatic notes
the cracks on a tortoise's shell, much as a
modern palmist traces the lines in a human
hand. The liver is selected as the special
seat of the prophetic faculty, and Babylonian
and Etruscan developed a common diagnosis
of its marks. The Celt divined by the water
of wells, or the smoke and flames of ascending
fires, and slew his prisoners that the secrets
of destiny might be discovered in their entrails.
China and Rome made divination the basis
of elaborate state systems. Rome produced
a literature of Augury, with books of
regulations and minutes of procedure, while Plato
commended it as "the art of fellowship
between gods and men," and the philosophy
of the Stoics justified it on the ground of a
providential harmony between nature and
man, so that divine guidance was vouchsafed
to human need. Did not clouds and stars
move by Heaven's great ordinance?
The lot took the responsibility of decision
out of the hands of man, and vested it in the
presiding deity. There is always a mystery
in chance, which could be interpreted as the
will of God. The oath implied that the
heavenly Powers could be at any moment
summoned to attest man's veracity; and the
vow must be fulfilled, though it might cost
Jephthah the sacrifice of his daughter.
Perjury and broken vows were early recognised
among the gravest of crimes. The ordeal
was in like manner the inquisition of a divine
judge. When the Adum draught was
administered to an accused Ashanti upon the
Gold Coast, the god condescended to enter
with it; he looked around for the signs of
guilt, and if he found none he returned with
the nauseous mixture to the light of day.
It was a procedure analogous to the ancient
rite embedded in the Levitical Law as the
test of a wife's faithlessness (cp. Num. v. 11 sqq.).
Another mystery lay in dreams, which
have been connected with supersensual
powers all the world over. To the savage
who cannot analyse his experience the
dream-world is as real as that of his waking hours.
The dreams that follow fasts, whether
compulsory through deficient food, or voluntary
through preparation for some solemn event,
possess peculiar vividness; and, when attention
has been fixed upon some expected crisis,
readily acquire a prophetic significance.
Divine forms are seen, and strange intimations
are conveyed from another world. The dream
verses of the Icelander brought tidings from
those who had been lost at sea. To sleep
upon the grave of a dead kinsman, still more
of a hero or a seer, was the means of receiving
communications from the wisdom of the dead.
Did not philosophy teach that in sleep the
mind is less hampered by its physical
environment, and attains truth more nearly;
and what condition was so suitable, therefore,
for the beneficent revelation of a god?
In Greece, accordingly, the practice of
sleeping at the tombs of heroes or in the
temples of gods was regularly organised.
The sanctuaries of Æsculapius, of which more
than two hundred can be traced round the
Eastern Mediterranean and in Italy, were
specially frequented by patients who resorted
thither for medical treatment and the advice
of the god. The sufferer must pass through
the preliminary discipline of the bath, and
to his purifications must add the due offering
of a sheep. The victim's fleece was carried
into the holy precincts, and on it the sick
man lay down for the night. In the visions
of the dark hours the god appeared, and
prescribed the mode of cure, or even
condescended to operate himself. An inscription
at Epidaurus records that the stiffened
fingers of a patient were straightened out
and restored for use by the god's own grasp.
Was it surprising that Æsculapius should
become the object of increasing reverence,
and in the second century of our era should
be enthroned in the highest as "Saviour (or
Preserver) of the universe"?
Under other conditions the visitation of
the god expresses itself in poetic form. Among
the ruder peoples whose songs are of the
simplest—perhaps the most childish—kind,
the faculty of rhythmic utterance seems
superhuman. Words, lines, stanzas, follow
each other with a spontaneity which seems
out of the reach of ordinary effort. The
chants of worship have been again and again
carried back to divine authorship in a distant
past. The marriage of speech with music
is no art of man. So the Finnic hero,
Wäinamöinen, conceived by the wind, and born
(after seven hundred years in the womb)
by the maiden Dmatar, added to his gifts
of fertility and fire the invention of the harp,
and the teaching of wisdom, poetry, and music
to man. Odin was the god of wisdom and
poetry for Scandinavia, god also of the holy
draught, which, like the Indian Soma, gave
inspiration. The poet brewed Odin's mead,
bore Odin's cup; and in old Teutonic speech
was godh-mālugr, "god-inspired." Hermes
passed in Greece as the inventor of the lyre,
which he gave to Apollo, chief among the
deities who declared to man the unerring
counsel of Zeus; and Homer already counts
singer and song as alike divine.
The lovely forms of the Muses, daughters
of Zeus and Memory, or with an alternative
mother in Harmony, were endowed with
functions of song and prophecy, and between
them and the historic poets stood a group, half
mythical, half human, whose names were
attached to actual hymns and poems. Such
were Orpheus, Musseus, Eumolpus, Thamyris,
and Linos. The verses ascribed to them
tended to acquire an authoritative character;
they were cited as a rule or norm for conduct;
they were on the way to become a Scripture.
Homer and Hesiod were employed in the same
way; and Plato denounces the mendicant
prophets who went to rich men's doors
offering to make atonements, and quoting
Homer and Hesiod as religious guides.
Nevertheless, though he proposed to banish
from his ideal State the poets who said
unworthy things of the gods, he elsewhere
formulates the highest claim for poetry as
a supernatural product. The poets are only
the interpreters of the gods by whom they
are severally possessed; "God takes away the
minds of the poets;" "God himself is the
speaker, through them he is conversing with
us." It is the lament of the Bantus of South
Africa that since the white man came the
springs of music and song have ceased to
flow: "The spirits are angry with their
children, and do not teach them any more."
Another mode of converse between deity
and man was found in the oracle. Widespread
was the belief that through certain
chosen persons or in certain peculiar spots
the gods deigned to communicate with those
who sought their aid. Such agencies were
peculiarly numerous in the Hellenic world, and
the oracle at Delphi acquired supreme
importance. As early as the eighth century B.C.,
in the days of Amos and Isaiah, it is rising into
prominence as an authority that may take
the leading place in Greek religion. At one
time it almost seemed as if it might succeed
in co-ordinating the separate and often
opposing forces of the City States, and blend
them into national unity. If that hope was
ever cherished by its guardians, they failed
to realise it. The higher minds discerned
in it capacities which were never fulfilled.
They saw it give counsel to rival powers,
promote enterprise, and support plans of
colonisation. They knew that it exercised
a far-reaching moral authority; it compelled
reverence for oaths, and secured respect for
the lives of women, suppliants, and slaves;
and again and again in true prophetic spirit
it subordinated ritual to ethical demands.
With the widest outlook over human affairs,
Plato proposes to establish the midpoint
of religious legislation in Delphi at Apollo's
shrine: "He is the god who sits in the centre,
on the navel of the earth, and he is the
interpreter of religion to all mankind." It is the
note of universalism: had not Jeremiah
proclaimed two centuries before on behalf of
Yahweh at Jerusalem: "My house shall be
called a house of prayer for all nations"?
When the Israelites had renewed their
temple in the days of Darius, and the scribes
were beginning to busy themselves with the
remains of their national literature, Greek
writers also interested themselves in the
collection of the utterances of the past.
About 500 B.C. Onomacritus gathered together
the oracles of Musæus. It was the first
instance of what became a frequent practice
in later days; one of Plato's disciples,
Heracleides of Pontus, undertook a similar task;
so did Chrysippus the Stoic. A special
literature was thus begotten. The circumstances
which called for the successive oracles were
duly narrated; and had Delphi maintained
its early position, here would have lain
the nucleus of a Scripture, which might
have developed into a permanent record of
revelation.
Italy, in like manner, had its libri fatales,
its sacred books of destiny. There were
Etruscan oracles under the name of the nymph
Begoe or Vegone; there were the Marcian
Songs, said to have been adopted as genuine
by the Roman Senate in 213 B.C. The
ancient city of Veii had its books; Tibur
(Tivoli) the "lots" of the nymph Albunea.
Most famous of all were the Sibylline books,
brought (according to later tradition) from
Cumæ to Rome, perhaps in the last days of
the monarchy, or a little later (about 500 B.C.),
and placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the
Capitol under the charge of two special
guardians. These were afterwards increased
to ten, and in the year 51 B.C. to fifteen. The
office remained till the books were destroyed
in A.D. 400, when Christianity had been finally
established as the imperial religion. What
they contained is doubtful; how they were
consulted is not known. Their aid was sought
after prodigies, pestilence, or disaster had
awakened general alarm; but their actual
words were not made public. Nevertheless
they supplied the basis for important religious
innovations. The introduction of Greek
deities by their sanction profoundly affected
Roman religious ideas, and left deep marks on
literature and art.
In the year 83 B.C. the temple which
contained the books was burned. The greatest
anxiety was displayed for their restoration.
Envoys were sent to Sicily, Greece, and Asia
Minor to collect fresh verses; they were
deposited in a new temple, and prophecies
were founded on them in the last days of the
Republic. But it was believed that spurious
verses had got into circulation, and Augustus
ordered a rigid examination. Some two
thousand volumes, it is alleged, were destroyed;
those which were admitted as genuine were
removed to a temple of Apollo which Augustus
had himself dedicated on the Palatine hill.
Here are the characteristics of a Canon. The
books are kept under special charge in a temple.
Their authority suffices to modify old cults
and introduce new. When they perish, they
must be restored. The false must be separated
from the true, the genuine eliminated from the
spurious. The Amoral element in them seems
to have been entirely subordinated to the
ritual; but they were believed to express in
seasons of difficulty and danger the demands
of the gods.
The transition to what are formally called
"Sacred Books" leaves a considerable
literature upon the boundary. The collection of
the ancient national Finnic songs, made with
so much patience by the Swedish Lonrott,
under the name of the Kalevala, presents no
claim to inspiration, but it is the poetical
expression of the national religion. In the
literature of the Eddas, the Volospa (p. 248)
is a product of the prophetic spirit. After
Herodotus remarked that Homer and Hesiod
made the gods of the Greeks, the Homeric
poems acquired more and more authority,
until by the usage of centuries they gained
a semi-canonical position. Lectures were
given upon their sacred text, and the most
extravagant methods of interpretation were
employed to reconcile them with the
world-view of philosophy. The ancient Egyptian
accepted the "Book of the Dead" as his
guide to the next world. Chapters of it were
inscribed on the walls of his tomb, engraved
on his coffin, or laid inside it with his mummy.
It contained the charms needful for the
preservation of his soul on its journey to the
land of the West. Its authors were unknown,
but it contained the secrets of the life to come.
The "Bibles of Humanity," as the
foundation-books of the great religions have been
called, belong to one continent. Asia has
been the mother of them all. The oldest takes
shape in India in the Vedic hymns; and the
immense literatures of Brahmanism, early and
later Buddhism, and the Hinduism which
finally drove Buddhism off the field, follow in
due course. Cognate in language with the
immigrant Aryans, the ancient Persians
preserved, amid many losses, some of the
compositions of their prophet Zarathustra, mingled
with religious documents of later date, known
to modern students by the name Zend Avesta.
Palestine produces Judaism, with its collection
of national literature embracing law, history,
prophecy, poetry, and wisdom. Judaism gives
birth to Christianity, which sets its New
Testament beside the Old; and Judaism and
Christianity lie behind Mohammed and the
Koran, where the person and the book blend
in the closest union.
In the Far East Chinese culture reposes on
the so-called Classics, the five King and the
four Shu, which had a chequered history till
they finally acquired their position as
fountains of knowledge and models of composition.
The ancient odes of the Shî King, the traditions
of rulers and the counsels of statesmen in the
Shu King, the collections of the teaching of
Confucius and Mencius, and the remaining
works which need not be mentioned here,
raise none of the claims which have been
preferred for the Indian Veda, or the Christian
Bible. Nor does the singular little book of
aphorisms ascribed to Lao-Tsze, which serves
as the starting-point for Taoism (p. 67). The
Shintoist of Japan finds the earliest records
of his religion in the national chronicles known
as the Kojiki and the Nihongi; and the
modern believer, who has been offered an
infallible Bible, responds with a profession
of faith in the practical inerrancy of his own
traditional books.
Some smaller communities claim a passing
word. The Jains (p. 61), once the rivals of
the Buddhists, possess a sacred literature only
less copious. Group after group appears in
mediæval India singing the hymns of its
founder, such as the Kabir-panthis, till the
poet Tulsi-Das (born 1532) embodies in his
version of the ancient Rāmāyana the essence
of Hindu religion for some ninety millions
from Bengal to the Punjab. The Sikhs (p. 62)
stay themselves upon the words of their holy
teachers in the Ādi-Granth. The followers
of Mani in the third century of our era, who
threatened the progress of the Christian
Church, and spread all the way from Carthage
to Middle Asia, possessed a gospel and epistles
of their Prophet, portions of which were
brought to Berlin a few years ago from Chinese
Turkestan. The Druzes of the Lebanon,
whose origin goes back to the Caliph Hakim
at Cairo in the eleventh century A.D., treasure
the documents of the faith in 111 treatises
and epistles, starting from Hakim's vizier,
Hamza. And the hapless prophet of Persia,
who designated himself the Bab (p. 70),
composed in the Beyyan (among numerous
other works) an exposition of the Truth for
his disciples. For such small communities
a sacred literature is in fact a necessity.
Without it they have no adequate cohesion.
It is at least one of the conditions of permanent
resistance to the forces of decay.
Around the Scriptures of the greater religions
devout reverence has gathered with ardent
faith. The Hindu term Veda (meaning
literally "knowledge") has a narrower and
a wider sense. In its limited application it
denotes the four collections of hymns, of
ritual formulæ, and sacrificial songs, of which
the Rig-Veda is the most important (p. 10).
Their history must be inferred from their
contents; of the circumstances of their
formation there is no external evidence, save
that the early Buddhist texts show that the
fourth or Atharva-Veda had not acquired
canonical value in the days of the Teacher
Gotama. But the term Veda is also extended
to include a mass of ceremonial compositions
known as Brāhmanas, attached to one or
other of the ancient collections, and handed
down in different religious schools. These are
all included more or less definitely in what a
Western theologian might term "Revelation." They
are technically designated as çruti or
"hearing"; they form the matter of the
sacred teaching transmitted orally, which
must be reserved for a special order and not
imparted to the world outside.
The books of household law, on the other
hand, prescribing the domestic ceremonies
for birth, marriage, and death, regulating
caste-privileges, and laying down rules for
the conduct of life, were open to all. But
just as the Rig-Veda was exalted into a
reproduction on earth of what existed eternally
in heaven, so endeavours were made to
convert the legal works current in particular
schools into sacred codes of divine origin.
One was boldly ascribed to Vishnu, who
communicated it to the goddess of the earth.
Another, most famous of all, was attached to
Manu, the eponymous hero of the human race.
"Father Manu" he is called in the Rig-Veda,
and as the sire of mankind he was the founder
of social and moral order. First king, and
Rishi (or seer) privileged to behold the sacred
texts, he was the inventor of rites and author
of the maxims of law. And yet higher dignity
belonged to him, for he sprang from the
Self-Existent and could thus be identified with
Brahma himself; and as Prajāpati (p. 143)
he took part in the creation of the world. In
due course poetry and philosophy had their
turn. The immense epic known as the
Mahābhārata, where tradition and myth and
imaginative speculation are blended in rich
confusion, was put in the scales by the
gods against the four Vedas, and its sanctity
outweighed them all.
The Buddhist Scriptures were early grouped
in three divisions under the title of the Three
Baskets. The teachings of the Supremely
Enlightened were of course absolutely true,
and his rules for the members of his Order
were of compelling authority. It was assumed
that they were recited correctly at an assembly
held immediately after his decease. The
"Buddha-Word" thus became the infallible
standard of faith and practice. There are
traces of provision to meet difficulties in case
different elders should believe themselves to
possess varying traditions of the Buddha's
commands: but not even the enormous
expansion of the Scriptures of the Great
Vehicle, as preserved in China and Japan, shook
the faith of the disciple in the authentic
character of their doctrine. The higher
teaching belonged to the later years of the
Buddha's life, and was transmitted by special
channels. It is much as if Gnosticism had
established itself in the Christian Church of
the second century, and had formed its
literature into a Canon beside our New Testament.
Nepal, according to the testimony of Bryan
Hodgson, raised its sacred books into objects
of worship. Chinese respect was satisfied
when they were issued from time to time (p. 66)
with a preface by the imperial Son of Heaven.
The oldest portion of the sacred literature
collected under the name of the Zend Avesta
consists of five hymns (called Gathas), ascribed
to Zarathustra himself. They bear many
marks of high antiquity, and they acquired
a peculiar sanctity, so that the later sacrificial
hymns already regard them as objects of
homage to which worship should be offered.
Above the actual Scriptures rose a radiant
figure, in which the conception of revelation
was impersonated. Iranian thought was
markedly idealist; each earthly object had its
spiritual type, its antecedent or counterpart
in the heavenly realm. The religion and law
of Zarathustra had their representative in
Daena, who is already celebrated with pious
praise in the Avesta. Sacrifice is offered to
her as she dwells in the Heavenly House, the
Abode of Song. Thence Zarathustra summons
her, beseeching her fellowship—she is
associated with Cista, "religious knowledge"—and
he asks of her mystic powers and righteousness
in thought and speech and deed. Later
teaching declared her to be produced by Vohu
Mano, the "Good Mind" of Ahura Mazda
himself (p. 131). As the actual utterance of
the Lord Omniscient, the sacred Law might also
be called his mãthra çpenta or "Holy Word."
Jewish theology was not altogether deficient
in similar conceptions. Corresponding to the
Torah or Law imparted to Moses, was a
heavenly Torah, infinitely richer in content.
It formed one of a mysterious group of seven
Realities which existed, like the Throne of
Glory, Eden, and Gehenna, before the making
of the earth and sky. It was a kind of epitome
of all possible cosmic relations, so that as an
architect frames his plan for a city, God looked
into the Torah when he would create the world.
Christian theology has never employed this
imagery to express its conception of
Revelation. But it lies at the back of the curious
language of the Koran concerning the "Mother
of the Book" (p. 13). Mohammedan theologians
reckoned no less than ten ways in
which the Prophet received his revelations.
Sometimes the divine inspiration came in a
dream, sometimes like the noise of a bell
through which he recognised the words which
Gabriel wished him to understand. Other
books had been given previously to Moses,
to David, to Jesus, and each nation would be
summoned to its own book at the judgment.
The believer in Islam recognised in the
"Mother of the Book" the pre-existent or
Eternal Word, which God from time to time
"sent down" to his Prophet. It had definite
size and aspect for Arab imagination. The
commentator Jalâlain described it as existing
in the air above the seventh heaven. There
angel guardians defended it from theft by
Satan or the change of any of its contents.
It was as long as from heaven to earth, and
as broad as from east to west; and its
consistency was of one white pearl. Was it
surprising that Mohammedan faith should
support the utterance of the pious Câdi
Iyâd (who died in Morocco, A.D. 1149): "The
Koran, as it lies between the two covers is
God's own word, which he imparted by way
of inspiration to the Prophet. Therefore is
it in every way inimitable, and no man can
produce anything like it"?
Christian theology has refrained from these
physical emblems. But it was possible for a
scholar of unquestioned learning to declare
in the pulpit of the University of Oxford barely
half a century ago (1861) that "the Bible is
none other than the voice of him that sitteth
upon the throne. Every book of it, every
chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of it,
every syllable of it (where are we to stop?),
every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the
Most High ... faultless, unerring, supreme."
The expression of religion in action produces
the offering and the prayer: by sacrifice and
devotion, with thanksgiving and requests,
do men approach their gods. But there is
another way of entering into fruitful obedience
to them. Certain kinds of conduct may be
acceptable to them, and others not. Are
these concerned only with ceremonial acts,
or do they include the behaviour of men to
each other? How far does religion promote
or regulate what we call morality? What
are their relations, and how do they affect one
another? This question has been discussed
in innumerable treatises; attention can only
be invited to it here from the point of view
of the historical comparison of religions,
without reference to philosophical definitions.
Every one admits a connection of some sort,
for good or for evil, at some period in their
respective development. They may not have
started hand in hand. Their alliance may be
disbanded, and morality may claim total
independence. But at some time on the
journey they have marched together.
The difficulty of the inquiry arises in part
from the variety of views as to the scope and
essence of both morality and religion. Where
do they begin, and in what do they consist?
The philosopher may demand a complete
recognition of the freedom of the will, and
the independent activity of the conscience,
and savages who have no such words are set
down as destitute of morality, just as those
who have no Heavenly Father and no devil,
no heaven and no hell, are described as without
religion. It is obviously impossible to expect
to find everywhere our categories of right and
wrong; yet even Lord Avebury lent his high
authority to the statement that there are
many savages almost entirely without moral
feeling largely on the ground of the absence
of ideas of sin, remorse, and repentance.
Mr. Huxley in the same way declared it obvious
that the lower religions are entirely unethical.
On the other hand, the idealist strenuously
affirms the intimacy of the connection. We
are assured that the historical beginning of
all morality is to be found in religion; or that
in the earliest period of human history, religion
and morality were necessary correlates of each
other; or that all moral commandments have
originally the character of religious
commandments. And the student of comparative
religion like the late Prof. Robertson Smith
cautiously affirms that "in ancient society
all morality, as morality was then understood,
was consecrated and enforced by religious
motives and sanctions." The words which
we have italicised contain exactly the
limitation which is ignored by the philosopher who
requires that the gods shall be patterns of
conduct, and administrators of an ethical
world-order. Plainly the question is settled
in different ways according to different
standards of what religion and morality
mean. If we are content to begin low enough
down, we may see reason to believe that in
that stage of thought in which religion, magic,
and custom are so strangely intertwined,
morality is also not wanting. Even the
Fijian, who called some of his gods by hideous
names, such as "the Rioter," "the Brain-eater,"
"the Murderer," regarded theft,
adultery, and such offences, as serious.
The difficulty of broad general statements
lies in the imperfection of our knowledge.
Again and again closer observation has revealed
quite unexpected secrets. Whole ranges of
belief, feeling, action, formerly concealed from
observation, have been brought to light. Thus
about twenty years ago Major Ellis, writing
of the Ewe, Tshi, and Yoruba peoples on the
Gold Coast, laid it down that "religion at the
stage of growth at which we find it among
these three groups of tribes, has no connection
with morals, or the relations of men to one
another." But the German missionary, Jakob
Spieth, now tells us (1911) that among the
Ewe-speaking folk not only does Mother Earth
punish with death those who have sworn
falsely, but Mawu, God, who knows the
thoughts and hearts of men, who is the giver
of everything good upon the earth—very
patient and never angry—will not allow one
brother to deceive another, or suffer the king
to judge unrighteously, or permit one to burn
another's house down. Morality here is more
than rudimentary; the justice of man is put
under the guardianship of God, who requires
"truth in the inward parts." Another West
African observer, Major Leonard, on the Lower
Niger, describes religion as intermingled with
the whole social system of the tribes under
his view. It supplies the principle on which
their law is dispensed and morality adjudicated.
The entire organisation of their common life
is so interwoven with it that they cannot get
away from it. Like the Hindus, "they eat
religiously, drink religiously, bathe religiously,
dress religiously, and sin religiously."
The beginnings of morality can no more be
discovered historically than the beginnings of
religion. Language, in various nations, implies
that it springs out of custom. The foundation
of practical ethics, whatever may be the
ultimate interpretation of such terms as duty
and conscience in more advanced cultures, lies
in social usage. When any custom is
established with sufficient strength to serve as a
rule demanding observance, so that its breach
evokes some feeling, the seed of morals is
already germinating. No group however
small, no society however crude, can cohere
without some such customs. They may be
formed in various ways; they are strengthened
by habitual repetition; they acquire the
sanction of the past, they are usually referred,
when men have begun to ask how they came
into being—just as they ask about their own
origin—to some great First Man, or some
superhuman personality in the realm above
(p. 171). But always there are some things
allowable, and others forbidden: some things
may (or even must) be done, others may not.
When custom has gained this power, it
carries with it an element of control. Impulse
must not be inconsiderately indulged, it must
be governed. Private interests must be
subordinated to a rule, and conduct conformed
to a standard of behaviour. In the ruder
culture, where the supply of food is of urgent
importance, such rules gather around the
produce of the chase or of the ground. Among
the Australian Kurnai, for example, all game
caught by the men, all roots or fruits collected
by the women, must be shared with others
according to definite arrangements. Methodic
distribution is obligatory, and self-denial in
sharing and eating is thus impressed upon the
young. Moreover certain varieties of food
are strictly forbidden to women, children, and
boys before initiation.
Prohibitions of this kind, extending over
many branches of conduct, are found all over
the world. They are often designated by a
term in use in Polynesia, taboo (tabu or tapu).
Their origin has been much disputed, owing
to the extraordinary complexity of the
circumstances with which they are concerned. Taboo
contains emphatically an element of mystery.
It comes out of a vague dim background, and
implies that some strange power will be set
in perilous operation if a certain thing is done.
Such a power, obscure, indefinite, not personalised,
but mightier than men, has been recognised
at the base of religion under another
term, the Melanesian mana (p. 80). Taboo
has been accordingly described as a negative
mana. It is a prohibition against calling the
weird uncanny force into the open, where it
may do unexpected hurt.
The objects and actions placed under such
taboos are various; and it is for the
anthropologist and the psychologist, if they can, to
discover their origin and application in each
particular case. They involve ideas of purity
and defilement, the holy and the common,
the clean and the unclean. They gather in
particular round blood, which rouses in some
animals as in many human beings an instinctive
aversion and disgust, and yet is at the
same time sacred as a seat of life. They enter
at the great crises of existence, birth and
death; the mother, and perhaps also the
new-born child, are unclean, and must be
purified; the corpse defiles whoever touches
it. They attend the sexual processes, which
are the occasion of releasing dangerous
energies. So they affect people as well as
things. The king is charged with this
mysterious force, and is hedged round with
taboos lest it should suddenly burst forth
against the intruder on his sanctity. The
chief, the priest, possess it in less degree.
And it is transmitted to what belongs to
them. Their weapons, their food and, above
all, their persons, are sacred. The oft-quoted
story of the Maori may still be repeated here:
it is not the only case of the kind. Strong
and stalwart, he found some food beside the
path, and ate it. He learned shortly
afterwards that it was the remains of the king's
meal. He had violated a royal taboo. The
secret power had him in its grasp: he was
speedily seized with cramp in the stomach,
and in a few hours died.
Ritual religions are full of survivals of such
taboos. "O Maker of the material world,"
inquires Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, "can
he be clean again who has eaten of the carcass
of a dog, or the corpse of a man?" In ancient
Israel various foods were forbidden by
religious law; the priest might not touch a dead
body; when a murder had been committed
and the murderer could not be found, the
elders of the city must solemnly purify the
ground which unpunished bloodshed had
defiled. Early Roman religion contained many
such prohibitions; from certain sacrifices
women and strangers and fettered criminals
must withdraw; there are traces of taboo on
iron and shoe-leather, on burial grounds and
spots where thunder-bolts were supposed to
have fallen, and on certain days, especially
those connected with the cult of the dead.
Such taboos still play a great part in savage
society, and exert no little moral force in
preserving honesty and order. In Samoa,
observed Turner, objects placed under taboo
are perfectly safe; they are in no danger of
theft. Primitive morality is thus brought
under the sanction of religion.
All over the world, as we have seen (p. 161),
the young receive a very severe training in
preparation for their entry into the full
privileges and duties of the tribe. They are
then instructed in the traditional rules of
conduct, the proper abstinences, the right
behaviour of the sexes. Such ceremonies are
recognised as of great importance in
communities of the simplest form without political
control, for it is through them that the social
ties of tribal kinship gain coherence and
strength. Various observers have testified
to the consideration displayed in Australia,
for instance, towards the aged, the sick, and
the infirm. The blind are often carefully
tended, and the best fed. "As a matter of
fact," says Mr. Marett, "the earlier and more
democratic types of primitive society,
uncontaminated by our civilisation, do not
present many features to which the modern
conscience can take exception; but display
rather the edifying spectacle of religious
brotherhoods encouraging themselves by
mystical communion to common effort."
In West Africa Miss Kingsley noted the
close connection in negro communities between
religion and life. To get through day or night
a man must be right in the religious point of
view; he must be on working terms with the
great world of spirits round him. In spite of
much make-believe the secret societies in
which the men are enlisted under solemn
oaths, are recognised as important moral
agencies. The Ukuku, recently described by
Dr. Nassau, could settle tribal quarrels, and
proclaim or enforce peace, when no individual
chief or king could end the strife. Such
organisations regulate marriage laws, the
duties of parents and children, the privileges
of eldership, the recognition of age and worth.
The entry into them lies through the rites of
religion.
"I have studied these societies," wrote Miss
Kingsley; "I am in possession of fairly
complete knowledge of three of them. I know
men acquainted with ten other societies, and
their information is practically the same as
my own, viz. that those rites consist in a series
of oath-takings as you pass from grade to
grade ... Each grade gives him a certain
amount of instruction in the native law.
Each grade gives him a certain function in
carrying out the law. And finally, when he
has passed through all the grades, which few
men do, when he has sworn the greatest oath
of all, when he knows all the society's heart's
secret, that secret is 'I am I,' the one Word.
The teaching of that Word is law, order,
justice, morality. Why the one Word teaches
it, the man does not know. But he knows two
things: one that there is a law-god, and the
other that, so says the wisdom of our ancestors,
his will must be worked or evil will come. So
in his generation he works to keep the young
people straight."
Taboos may be violated unconsciously, and
tribal laws may be transgressed sometimes
intentionally, sometimes by accident. The
resulting guilt must be removed, if the offender
or the community is not to incur the wrath of
the affronted Powers. Sin, like holiness, has
this peculiar property that it can be
communicated by contact. Savage morality does not
always rise above the confusion between the
physical and the mental. Evil qualities such
as uncleanness can be transferred from persons
to things, just as from things to persons.
Pains and diseases can be extracted from the
sufferer, and magically sent into animals or
objects which can be driven away or destroyed;
and moral evil can be similarly removed.
When an Atkhan of the Aleutian Islands had
committed a serious offence and desired to
unburden himself, he chose a time when the
sun was clear, picked up certain weeds, and
carried them about his person. After they
were thus sufficiently impregnated by contact
with him, he laid them down, called the sun
to witness, cast his sins upon them, and threw
them into the fire. The consuming flame
burned away his guilt.
The Peruvian made his confession to the
sun, and then bathed in an adjoining river.
There he rid himself of his iniquity, saying
"O thou river, receive the sins I have this
day confessed to the sun, carry them down to
the sea, and let them never more appear." The
oldest and the most recent rituals repeat
the same idea in various forms. In one of
the Vedic ceremonials of sacrifice, the sacrificer
and his wife towards the close bathed and
washed each other's backs. Then having
wrapped themselves in fresh garments, they
stepped forth, and we read: "Even as a
snake casts its skin, so does he cast away all
his sin. There is in him not so much sin as
there is in a toothless child." Water was
likewise employed in Babylonia, where the
incantation ran, "I have washed my hands,
I have cleansed my body with pure spring
water which is in the town of Eridu. All evil,
all that is not good, in my body, my flesh, my
limbs, begone!" Or, "By the wisdom of
thy holy name let the sin and the ban which
were created for man's misery be removed,
destroyed, and driven away."
Like physical evil such as disease, so moral
evil might be attributed to the action of spirits,
and periodic ceremonies might be performed
for purging the community by driving them
out. Sometimes the sins were buried in the
ground; sometimes they were thrown into the
river; sometimes they were concentrated on
a person or an animal; or were magically
expelled under the sanction of religion into
some object which could be destroyed. In
the annual celebration of the Thargelia at
Athens, in the month of May, under the
solemn sanction of Apollo, two "purifying
men" were led through the streets to be
whipped with rods, and then driven over the
border of the state, bearing the people's sins.
The Levitical ritual (Lev. xvi) incorporated
at a late date a solemn ceremony on the tenth
day of the first month of the ancient religious
year (in September), when an act of atonement
was performed for the whole nation. Two
goats were brought into the sanctuary, and
lots were cast upon them. One was dedicated
to Yahweh, over the other the high priest
confessed the iniquities of the children of
Israel; and by the laying on of hands he
transferred them to the head of the doomed
animal, which was then led forth into the
wilderness for a mysterious power of evil,
Azazel. As the temporary adjuncts of so
much guilt, the high priest and the goat-leader
were required to purify themselves afterwards
by bathing; the high priest must change his
robes, and the goat-leader wash his clothes.
So in modern times in Nigeria the town sins
are annually laid on some unhappy slave-girl,
perhaps selected some time before. As she
is led through the street the householders
come forth and discharge the year's accumulated
evil on her; then she is dragged to the
river, bound, and left to drown. Japan is
satisfied without a life. The ancient ritual
of purification shows that in the early
centuries of the national history a public
ceremony was occasionally performed. In
the revival of Shinto usage which marked the
late reign, it was re-enacted by imperial
decree in 1872 for half-yearly celebration on
June 30 and December 31, at all Shinto
shrines. Four or five days before these dates
the believer was enjoined to procure from his
priest a piece of white paper cut in the shape
of a garment. On this he was to write his
name and sex, with the year and month of
his birth; then he must rub it over his body,
and finally breathe on it. His sins would
thus be transferred to the paper robe, which
was to be taken back to the priest. Offerings
of food and purifying ceremonies would
complete the believer's release. The paper
garments with their load of guilt were then to
be packed in cases which were to be put in
boats, rowed out to sea, and committed to the
deep. There they would be carried to the
great Sea Plain by the Maiden of
Descent-into-the-Current, who would convey them to the
Maiden of the Swift Opening, dwelling in the
Eight Hundred Meetings of the Brine of
the Eight Brine Currents. She would swallow
them down with a gurgling sound, and the
Lord of the Breath-blowing Place would
finally blow them away into the Root-Country,
the bottom apparently of the under-world!
The relation of morality to religion tends
to become more definite along different lines
of thought, which are constantly intertwined,
and of which three are only isolated here for
the purpose of the briefest possible illustration
of the forms in which they have appeared
historically. In the first place, the world
may be regarded as a scene in which rival
powers of help and hurt are engaged in
constant conflict; and the physical dualism thus
exhibited may be reproduced in the sphere
of morals as a contest between powers of
good and evil. Secondly, the course of
nature may be viewed as a world-order,
where seasonal uniformities are the
manifestation of a permanent principle of harmony
which is the guide of human conduct, and the
vicissitudes of daily or annual experience are
interpreted as the judgments of heaven on
man's doings, national or personal. And
thirdly, the development of the individual
conscience may surmount the confusion
which ranks ritual offences along with moral
transgressions, and the ethical life may be
set wholly free from ceremonial bondage, and
carried up into the realm of spirit.
The lower culture all over the world ascribes
disease or accident, madness, calamity, and
death, to the agency of hostile powers lying
in wait for man, and breaking in on his
security. The violences of the elements, the
hurricane, the flood, the earthquake, the
volcanic eruption, are in the same way the
work of giants towering in might above the
common herd of the demons of air, water, or
earth. The spirits of the evil dead, especially
of powerful magic-men, Shamans, and the
like, of malicious character, are potent for
sickness and disaster. But in their
unorganised ranks there is no controlling or
directing force. Here and there some figure
or group emerges into prominence. At the
head of the demonic hosts of Babylonian
mythology is a band of seven ruling spirits,
perhaps the windy counterparts of the
sun and moon and the five planets. In
Egyptian story Set (or by his Greek name
Typhon) is the evil opposite of the good Osiris
whom he does to death; or it is the sun
himself who is attacked in his nightly journey
by the serpent Apap with his monstrous crew.
Scandinavian mythology was full of these
conflicts. The oppositions of light and
darkness, storm and calm, warmth and cold, were
felt with unusual vehemence. Over the motley
multitude of powers infesting forest and field,
the wind and the water, rose the giants of
mountain and cataract, the furious blast, the
curdling frost. The giants of the frost were
evil powers, like the wolf Fenris, and the
serpent Nidhogg, who lay beneath one of the
roots of the mighty cosmic tree (in Niflheim,
a second being among the frost-giants, and
a third among the gods), for ever gnawing
till the great world's end. Above them rose
the dread goddess Hel, the "hollow," once,
apparently, the name of the grave, and then
of the power that ruled the gloomy
underworld, the abode of those who had not fallen
upon the battle-field. She, in her turn, was
subordinated to Loki, once reckoned among
the gods, capricious and tricky, who becomes
the father of Hel, the wolf Fenris, and the
Midgard snake, and leads the forces of evil
for the destruction of the world. He
compasses the death of Balder the fair, Odin
perishes by the wolf, and Thor by the serpent;
though god and wolf and serpent in their turn
sink in common ruin. But the powers
engaged in the strife are all superhuman;
man has no share in the warfare, save when
the warriors pass at death into the abode of
the gods, and take their place beside them
in the final conflict. Loki is no Devil, he does
not tempt, or interfere with the children of
earth; he does not affect their present conduct
or future destiny.
The oppositions of light and darkness
belong to every zone all round the world, and
were perhaps most strongly felt among the
Indo-Iranian branches of the great Aryan
family. The name deva in ancient Indian
mythology denotes the shining powers of
the upper world, the radiant dwellers in the
sky. In contrast with it stands another, the
asura, once a title of high honour, for it clung
even to Varuna, but later degraded to the
designation of demonic beings, who appear
again and again in contest with the devas for
the precious drink of immortality. So the
realm of darkness is the realm of evil. Into
the pit of darkness are the wicked thrust: and
when right and wrong are presented under
the forms of truth and falsehood, and untruth
is identified with gloom, the poet reached the
natural symbolism—"Light is heaven, they
say, and darkness hell."
It was, however, among the cognate Iranian
people that this antithesis acquired the
greatest force, under the influence of the
prophet Zarathustra. By a curious historic-religious
process which cannot here be traced,
the terms of the opposing forces were reversed.
Ahura (= asura) remained the name of the
Supreme Power, with the addition of the term
Mazda, "all-knowing," and the daevas (= devas)
became the evil multitude. In the oldest
part of the Zend Avesta Ahura appears as the
sole Creator, the God of light and purity and
truth, who dwells on high in the Abode of
Song. Beside him is his Good Mind, and the
Holy (or beneficent, gracious) Spirit. But
opposed to him in the realm of darkness
beneath is "the Lie" (drug), with its correlates
the Bad Mind and the Evil Spirit (Añra
Mainyu, not yet a proper name). The world
between is the scene of continuous struggle,
and in this conflict man is called to take his
part. Ritual purity, appropriate sacrifice,
and personal righteousness in thought, word,
and deed, are his weapons in the fight. By
these he helps to establish the sovereignty of
Ahura, and to curtail the power of "the Lie." The
earliest representations offer no account
of the origin of the Drug any more than of
Ahura himself. But later speculation,
impressed with the contrasting elements of
human life, began to ascribe to him, too,
under the name of Ahriman (Añra Mainyu),
creative power; all noxious animals and
plants were due to him; plague and disease
came from his hands; all agencies of cold,
darkness, and destruction were his work; he
was the daeva of daevas, Lord of death, and
author of temptation. And finally, in the
long process of thought the two powers of good
and evil had both issued from a still higher
unity, Zervan Akarana, Time without bound.
But long ere this the Persian character had
responded to Zarathustra's teaching of
warfare against "the Lie"; and Herodotus bears
testimony to their repute for loyalty to truth.
For from the earliest days the dualism of
Zarathustra bound together morality and
religion in the closest alliance. How the
great demand for the ultimate victory of good
was to be justified will be seen hereafter
(p. 247).
A second group of figures embodying the
same idea of the connection of morality with
religion is found in the various impersonations
of the Order of Nature and its correlate in Law
in the world without and the heart within.
The speculations of the early Greek
philosophers in their attempts to reach an
ultimate Unity behind all the diversities of
appearance familiarised the higher minds
with the idea of the harmony of the cosmos.
"Law," sang Pindar, "is king of all, both
mortals and immortals." And this sovereign
order is represented mythologically by Themis,
whom Hesiod exalts to be the daughter of
Heaven and Earth, and bride of Zeus. Pindar
pictured her as borne in a golden car from the
primeval Ocean, the source of all, up to the
sacred height of Olympus, to be the consort
of Zeus the Preserver. But though she is
thus the spouse of the sovereign of the sky,
she is in another aspect identified with Earth,
scene of fixed rules both in nature and social
life, for with the cultus of the earth were
associated not only the operations of agriculture,
but the rites and duties of marriage, and
the maintenance of the family. So Themis
is the mother of the seasons in the annual
round, and the sequences of blossom and fruit
are her work; but among her daughters are
also Fair Order, Justice, and Peace, and the
world and the State thus reflect obedience to a
universal Law.
Behind Greece lay Egypt, where tradition
said that Thales, first of Greeks to philosophise,
had studied. When the soul of the dead man
was brought to the test of the balance (p. 8),
he was supported by the goddesses of Maāt
or Truth. Derived from the root mā, "to
stretch out," this name covered the ideas of
rectitude or right, and Maāt was the splendid
impersonation of order, law, justice, truth, in
both the physical and moral spheres. She
is the daughter—or even the eye—of the
Sun-god Rê. But she is conceived in still more
exalted fashion as the sovereign of all realms,
and is elevated above all relationships. She
is Lady of heaven, and Queen of earth, and
even Lady of the Land of the West, the
mysterious dwellings of the dead. In one
aspect she serves each of the great gods as her
lord and master; in another she knows no
lord or master. So it is by her that the gods
live; she is, as it were, the law of their being;
alike for sun and moon, for days and hours,
in the visible world, and for the divine king
at the head of his people. She is solemnly
offered by the sovereign to his god, and the
deity responds by laying her in the heart of
his worshipper, to manifest her everlastingly
before the gods. Through the court-phrases
gleams the solemn idea that sovereignty on
earth is no law to itself; it must follow the
ordinances of heaven.
Chinese insight early reached a similar
thought. Before the days of Confucius or his
elder contemporary Lao-Tsze, the wiser
observers had noted the uniformity of Nature's
ways. Were not Heaven and Earth the
nourishers of all things? Did not Heaven pour
down all kinds of influences upon the docile and
receptive Earth? Heaven was all-observing,
steadfast, impartial; and its "sincerity,"
seen in the regular movements of the sun and
moon, or the succession of the seasons,
becomes for the moralist the groundwork of
the social order. This daily course is called
Heaven's way or path, the Tao (the highway
as distinguished from by-tracks), which with
unvarying energy maintains the scene of our
existence, and provides the norm or pattern
for our conduct. In the hands of Lao-Tsze
this became the symbol of a great philosophical
conception. Behind the visible path
which all could see lay the hidden Tao,
untrodden and enduring. Here was the
eternal source of all things, for ever streaming
forth in orderly succession, but never vaunting
itself or inviting attention by outbursts of
display. It was the type for man to follow;
the sage, like Heaven, must have no personal
ends; he must act, like the great exemplar,
without meddling interference, leaving his
nature to fulfil itself; let him renounce
ambition and cultivate humility; only one
who has "forgotten himself" can become
identified with Heaven. "Can you"—so
Lao-Tsze was said to have asked an inquirer
six hundred years before Jesus taught in
Galilee—"Can you become a little child?"
The Vedic seers were hardly less impressed
with the sense of an orderly control in
contemplating the energies around them. Four
words are used to denote the institutes or
ordinances, the fixed norms or standards, the
solemn laws, and the steadfast path, according
to which the rivers flow, the dawn comes forth
after the night, the sun traverses the sky, and
even the storm winds begin to blow. Of
these the last named, the Rita (with its Zend
equivalent Asha), the ordered course along
which all things move, presents the least
abstract, the most mythical form. For here
is that which exists before heaven and earth;
they are born of it, or even in it, and its
domain is the wide space. From it, likewise,
the gods proceed, and the lofty pair, Mitra
and Varuna, with Aditi and her train, are
its protectors. But through the mystical
identity of the order of nature and the order
of sacrifice (p. 143), the cultus—whether on
earth or in heaven—is also its sphere. Agni,
the sacrificial fire, the dear house-priest, is
Rita-born, and by its aid carries the offerings
to heaven. Such, also, is the sacred drink, the
Soma, which is borne in the Rita's car, and
follows its ways. And the heavenly sacrificers,
the Fathers in the radiant world above, have
grown according to the Rita, for they know
and faithfully obey the law. Thus it becomes
the supreme expression of morality, and is
practically equivalent with satya, true
(literally, that which is), or good. Heaven
and Earth are satya, veracious, they can be
trusted; they are ritāvan, faithful to the Path,
steadfast in the Order. Not less so is the
godly man; he, too, is ritāvan (Zend ashavan),
the same word being used to denote divine
holiness and human piety. And thus the
life of gods and men, the order of nature, the
ritual of worship, and daily duty, were all
bound together in one principle.
Rita, however, did not establish itself as a
permanent conception in Indian theology.
Its place was taken by another idea, which
still sways the thought and rules the lives of
hundreds of millions of believers in India and
the Far East, Karma, or the doctrine of the
Deed. It is well known that this doctrine
does not appear in the Vedic hymns. It is
first discussed as a great mystery in the
forest-sessions where teachers and students met
together, where kings could still instruct
Brahmans, and women might speak in debate.
In the Brahmana of a Hundred Paths it is
summed up in a maxim which was first
formulated in connection with ceremonial
obligation, but came to have a much wider
application: "A man is born into the world
that he has made"; to which the Law-books
added the warning: "The Deed does not perish."
Man is for ever making his own world.
Each act, each word, even each thought, adds
something to the spiritual fabric which he
is perpetually producing. He cannot escape
the results of his own conduct. The values
for good or evil mount up from hour to hour,
and their issues must be fulfilled. When this
conception was carried through the universe,
the whole sphere of animated existence was
placed under its sway. The life of any single
person upon earth was only an incident in a
chain of lives, stretching into the distant past
as well as into the immeasurable future. His
condition hereafter would be determined by
what he had done before he entered the state
that would match his deed. Then his
condition here was also determined by what he
had wrought in a previous lot. His personal
qualities, his health and sickness, his caste
and rank, his wealth or poverty, all precisely
matched some elements in the moral product
of his past. These were, of course, never all
precisely of one kind. They were of mingled
good and evil, and each of these would in
course of time have its appropriate consequence
of joy and pain. For every shade of guilt
there was a fitting punishment, exactly
adjusted in severity and duration, either in
degradation and suffering upon earth, or in
some one of numerous hells below. And
similarly all good was sure of its reward, as
happiness and prosperity awaited it here, or
were allotted in still richer measure for their
due periods in the heavens that rose tier above
tier beyond the sky.
The doctrine of Transmigration has
appeared in various forms, in very different
cultures. But nowhere has it swayed whole
civilisations as it has done in the East. It
has expressed for innumerable multitudes the
essential bond of morals and religion. There
were not wanting, indeed, teachers who
criticised and rejected it when Gotama the
Buddha passed to and fro five hundred years
before our era. But while he repudiated the
authority of the Vedas, the ceremonies of
sacrifice, the claims of the Brahmans, and the
immortality of the gods, he retained the
doctrine of Karma at the very core of the
system of ethical culture which he offered as
the way out of the weary circle of re-birth.
The whole meaning of the universe, its cosmic
periods of dissolution and evolution, was
still moral; and the scene of our existence
came once more into being that the
unexhausted potencies of countless products of
the Deed from the lowest hell to the topmost
heaven might realise their suspended energy.
And when Buddhism became a religion
through the interpretation of the person of
its founder in terms of the Absolute and
Eternal, this law of the phenomenal world
of space and time remained beyond even his
power to set aside or change.
The ethical element necessarily varies in
richness of content and intensity of feeling
in different religions. In the classifications
which have been from time to time proposed,
attention has often been fixed upon its presence
as the marked characteristic of a group. Thus
Prof. Tiele, of Leiden, proposed to treat the
higher religions of Revelation under two
heads: (1) religions embodying a sacred
law, and forming national communities,
including Taoism, Confucianism, Brahmanism,
Jainism, Mazdaism, Mosaism, Judaism, and
(2) universalistic communions, Buddhism,
Christianity, and to some extent Islam.
Another writer forms a class of Morality-Religions
above the savage Nature-Religions,
and reckons in it the religions of Mexico and
Peru, the earliest Babylonian (often called
Akkadian), Egyptian, Chinese, Hindu, Persian,
German, Roman, Greek. All such classifications
are exposed to many difficulties, but
they at least bear witness to the significance
of the place which is occupied by morality
in modern estimates of the worth of great
historic faiths. The aspects of any particular
development are so manifold, that any
attempt to establish a scale of rank at once lays
itself open to criticism. Where, for example,
is Greece in Prof. Tiele's scheme? It is
thrown back into the group of "half-ethical
anthropomorphic polytheisms." But in the
hands of poets and philosophers, the really
shaping powers of Hellenic culture, polytheism
was left far behind, and on the third
of the questions suggested above in
considering the relations of morality and religion
(p. 208)—their attitude to ritual obligation—Greek
official teaching sometimes reached the
loftiest heights.
For not only did philosophical and religious
communities like the Pythagoreans enunciate
such maxims as these: "Purity of soul is the
only divine service," or "God has no place on
earth more akin to his nature than the pure
soul," but the oracle of Delphi itself was
supposed to have affirmed the worthlessness
of ceremonial cleansing without corresponding
holiness of heart. Dr. Farnell translates two
utterances ascribed to the Pythia as follows:
"O stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine
of the holy God, having but touched the
lustral water: lustration is an easy matter
for the good; but all ocean with its streams
cannot cleanse the evil man"; and again:
"The temples of the gods are open to all good
men, nor is there any need of purification;
no stain can ever cleave to virtue. But
depart, whosoever is baneful at heart; for thy
soul will never be washed by the cleansing of
the body." Over the sanctuary of Æsculapius
at Epidaurus, where so many sufferers thronged
for cure (p. 180), ran the inscription quoted
by Porphyry—
"Into an odorous temple he who goes
Should pure and holy be; but to be wise
In what makes holiness is to be pure."
The religion of Zarathustra, on the other
hand, did not maintain its primitive elevation.
The prophet's Gāthās (p. 191) summoned the
believer to live in the fellowship of the Good
Mind and in obedience to the Most Excellent
Order (Asha vahista), and the later Avesta
seems sometimes to repeat their high demand:
"Purity is for man, next to life, the greatest
good; that purity that is procured by the
law of Mazda to him who cleanses his own self
with good thoughts, words, and deeds." It
is the utterance of Ahura himself. But purity
may be interpreted in very different ways:
the lad who walks about over fifteen years of
age without the sacred girdle and sacred shirt,
has no forgiveness, for he has "power to
destroy the world of the holy spirit"; while,
on the other hand, to pull down the scaffold
on which corpses had been deposited (the
Persians employed neither burial nor
cremation) was to destroy a centre of impure
contagion, and secure pardon for all sins.
When Moses established the administration
of justice at the sanctuary of Yahweh, he
planted a powerful ethical influence in the
heart of the religion of Israel. No reader of
the Old Testament needs to be reminded of
the prophetic rebukes of a monarch's crimes.
Nathan and David, Elijah and Ahab, have
become universal types. The history of
Hebrew ethics shows how the conception of
morality gradually passed from the regulation
of external conduct into the inner sphere of
thought; and the offender was no longer
regarded merely as a member of a tribe or
nation on which punishment might alight
collectively; he stood in an immediate
relation to his God. Primitive imagination
could rest content with supposing that sin
had first entered the world through the
subtlety of a talking snake. Later thought
found such a solution inadequate to enlarged
moral experience. In the figure of the
Adversary or the Opposer, the Sâtân, first
traceable in Israel's literature after the
Captivity, Judaism admitted a moral dualism
analogous to the opposition between Ahura
Mazda and Añra Mainyu. The Sâtân had,
indeed, no creative power, though hordes of
demons were under his sway in the abyss, and
were sent forth to do the desolating work of
madness and disease. But he was the head
of a realm of evil over against the sovereignty
of God; and the intensity of the moral
consciousness of sin was reflected in the
mythologic form of his warfare against the hosts of
heaven.
Along a quite different line of thought,
which may possibly have been stimulated from
the Greek side, the humanists of later Israel
endeavoured to bring nature and social life
under one common conception of divine
Wisdom. The earlier prophecy had regarded
the physical world as plastic in Yahweh's
hands, so that its events—such as drought
or flood, the locust and the blight, could be
made the immediate instruments of Israel's
discipline. A wider culture brought new
ideas. There were statutes and ordinances
for the cosmic powers just as there were for
communities of man. The universe was the
product of the divine thought, and the same
agency was seen in the structure and
organisation of human societies. The order of the
visible scene was due to the presence and
control of Wisdom, which from the first had
sat as a kind of assessor by Yahweh's side.
The moral order was no less her work; she
gave the sanction to all authority and rule;
"By me kings reign," cries the poet in her
name, "and princes decree justice"; and the
men of humble heart know that their piety,
"the fear of the Lord," is her gift, and links
them in joyous fellowship with the stars on
high.
That Mosaism started with a vigorous moral
conception of the divine demands, however
limited might be its early scope, is generally
recognised. The gradual settlement of the
immigrant tribes in the land of Canaan, the
appropriation of Canaanite sanctuaries, and
the adoption of their festivals and ritual,
brought new influences which threatened the
ancient simplicity. The voices of Hebrew
prophecy rang out at Jerusalem ere Greek
thought had begun to move. It was a singular
result in Israel's history that the great truths
of the unity and spirituality and holiness of
God, which prophecy had won out of
impassioned experience, were confided for their
preservation to a code of Priestly Law which
raised the elements of ritual and sacerdotal
caste to their highest significance in the nation's
life. But the law which declared sacrifice to be
legitimate only on one altar, made room for
a new development of Israel's religion. If
the ancient faith was to be maintained by a
race that spread from Babylon to Rome, it
must adapt its worship to new conditions.
There could be but one temple; but a
meeting-house could be built anywhere; and the
Synagogue thus became the birthplace of the
congregations of the Christian Church.
"If a man die, shall he live again?" The
question is as old as the Book of Job, but
the affirmative answer is much older. The
earliest human remains in Europe imply some
provision for the dead, and it did not occur
to the peoples of the lower culture all over
the world to doubt the reality of some kind
of continued existence. Did not the living
still see them in their dreams (p. 86)?
But this life might be conceived in an
infinite variety ol forms. Where was it
passed? under what conditions? what would be its
privileges and its requirements? how long
would it last? To these and a hundred other
questions no uniform answers have been
returned; and numerous as are the stories
of visits to the other world, there is little
agreement as to its place, its scenery, its
occupations, its society, its government, its duties,
its punishments, or its rewards. Yet no field
of human imagination reflects more clearly
the stage of social and moral development
which creates it. Into his pictures of the
future man has persistently woven his
criticism of the present. But the tenacity of
usage and convention in everything affecting
the dead has sometimes detained belief at
a much lower level than the general progress
of ethical feeling might otherwise have
suggested. Religious thought does not always
move forwards with equal speed over all the
relations and possibilities of life.
The logic of the treatment of the dead is
full of gaps and inconsistencies. The same
people will perform rites which rest upon
quite different theories; customs have run
together in strange incoherence. This may
be sometimes due to the necessity for making
provision for different elements in the person
which were united while on earth. The
wealthy Egyptian required an elaborate home
in the tomb for his double or ka, while his ba
started on its perilous journey through the
mysterious regions of the world of the dead.
From the ethical point of view, however, which
chiefly concerns the student of comparative
religion, the doctrine of the next life falls into
two main divisions, as Burton and Tylor
pointed out more than a generation ago—theories
of continuance, and theories of retribution.
They are connected by many intermediate
stages of transition, and they range
all the way from the crudest conceptions of
prolonged existence in the grave, up to
exalted solemnities of judgment, of doom,
and of the fellowship of heaven.
When a man dies, where will his spirit dwell?
Perhaps it will pass into some animal, a bear,
a walrus, or a beautiful bird. Perhaps it
will haunt his old home. In that case it were
well that he should not die where he has lived;
let him be carried into the open air as death
approaches, or laid in the loneliness of the woods.
The Eskimo of Greenland build a small snow
hut, the entrance of which is closed as death
approaches that the inmate may pass away
alone. Dr. Franz Boas relates that a young
girl once sent for him from such a lodging
a few hours before her end, to ask for some
tobacco and bread, that she might take them
to her mother who had died only a few weeks
before. Or the connection between the dead
man and his former dwelling may be severed
by burning down the hut and forsaking the
locality, even though (as among the Sakais
of the Malay peninsula) the coming crop of
tapioca or sugar-cane should be lost by
departure. Or strong measures may be taken
with the corpse by thrashing it to hasten the
ejection of the soul; the walls of the
death-chamber may be beaten with sticks to drive
it away; or a professional functionary may
be invoked with his broom to sweep it out.
And when the body has been carried forth,
precautions must be taken to prevent the
spirit from finding its way back, and barriers
erected against its return. Only occasionally,
as in ancient Athens, was burial permitted
in the house, where the venerated dead could
still protect and bless those whom they loved.
The tomb was sometimes constructed to
resemble the home and admit the members
of the family together. Under the cliffs of
Orvieto is an Etruscan city of the dead, where
the stone houses (usually with two rooms)
stand side by side in streets. The prehistoric
gravemounds of Scandinavia have disclosed
sepulchral burial chambers, entered by a
gallery or passage, divided by large slabs
of granite into alcoves or stalls, round which
the dead were seated. Just so does the
Eskimo of the present day arrange his dwelling.
Those who had lived in caves and left their
dead there, retained the usage long after they
had learned to construct tents or build houses
for themselves. The chief was carried to
the hills, as the barrows on our own moors
show, or to the mountain top, where his spirit
blended perhaps with the spirit of the place
and lent an additional awe to the heights; or
to secure him from disturbance, as the Spanish
observers noted in Columbia (S. America),
a river was diverted from its course, his grave
was made in its bed, and the waters, restored
to their former channel, kept the secret safe.
The dream experience only provides the
world of the dead with scenery and occupations
resembling those of common life, with
more rapidity of change and mysterious ease
of transformation. But when tribes have
migrated from one locality to another,—and
in the vast reaches of prehistoric time
such movements were incessant though
slow—the various forces of association in memory,
dreaming, and tradition, would connect the
dead with the places of the past. Sometimes
the course of travel might have lain through
mountain passes, or across a river, or from
beyond the sea. A journey, or a voyage
was thus suggested—Samoans said of a chief
that he had "sailed"; to reach the abode of
the dead might need days of travel; so shoes
as well as food (p. 138) must be provided, and
the fires, first kindled for the warmth of the
dweller in the grave below, were continued
to light him on his way. On solar analogies,
such as may be found in both hemispheres,
the homes of the departed were often assigned
to the East or West.
The brotherhood of sleep and death has
always been recognised, and we still call our
graveyards "cemeteries," or sleeping-places.
The ancient Israelite said of his dead that
he "slept with his fathers." Earth burial
suggested a locality beneath the ground,
vast and gloomy like some huge cave. The
Mesopotamian thought of it as a city, ringed
with seven walls; and even the Hebrew who
pictured the underworld, Sheol, as a gigantic
pit, sometimes imagined it to be approached
through gates. There lay the nerveless feeble
forms of the mighty ones of earth. The
separate nations had their several stations
allotted to them, where ghostly warriors lay
dark and silent with their ghostly swords
around the ghostly thrones of ghostly kings.
The entry of a new comer from Babylon awoke
a ghostly wonder, and ghostly voices greeted
him from the dead. It is a strange contrast
with the pageantry of the skies, where various
races, from the Australians to the Hindus
and the Greeks have seen their forefathers
looking down on them as stars. So inveterate
is this belief that it was found necessary to
obtain a certificate from the Astronomer
Royal to refute the rumour that on the night
on which Browning died a new star appeared
in the constellation of Orion. The Milky
Way could thus be interpreted as the path
of Souls, and the Aurora Borealis resolved
into the Dance of the Dead.
The transfer of souls through death from
one kind of life to another does not necessarily
involve any moral change. The relations
of earth are resumed in the new scene. The
ancient Celts who placed letters to their
friends on the pyre of a dead relative, or even
expected to receive in the next world the
repayment of loans in this, conceived existence
hereafter on the same plane as the present,
like the modern Chinaman who celebrates the
wedding of his spirit-son with the spirit-daughter
of a suitable friend, and thus brings
peace to a tormented house. The spirit-land
of Ibo on the lower Niger had its rivers and
forests, its hills, and towns, and roads, below
the ground like those above, only more gloomy.
In Tuonela, the land of the dead, Finnic
imagination pictured rivers of black water,
with boisterous waterfalls and dangerous
whirlpools, forests full of wild beasts, and fields
of grain which provided the death-worm with
his teeth; but it is still homely enough for
Wainamoinen to find the daughter of its ruler,
Tuoni, god of death, busy with her washing.
The dead of the Mordvinians, a group of Ural-Altaic
origin in the heart of Russia, are believed
to marry and beget children as on earth.
Such conceptions naturally resulted in a
continuity of occupation, rank, and service.
The Spanish historian, Herrera, relates that
in Mexico "every great man had a priest or
chaplain to perform the ceremonies of his
house, and when he died the chaplain was
called to serve him in the same manner, and
so were his master of the household, his
cup-bearer, his dwarf, the deformed people he
kept, and the brothers that had served him,
for they looked upon it as a piece of grandeur
to be served by them, and said they were
going to keep house in the other world." Yet
in Mexico, as will be seen immediately,
the differentiation of the future lot had already
begun.
The chief is usually sure of admission into
high society in the next world. The Maori
paradise was a paradise of the aristocracy;
heroes and men of lofty lineage went to the
skies. But common souls, in passing from one
division to another of the New Zealand Hades,
lost a little of their vitality each time, until
at last they died outright. Polynesian fancy
sometimes mingled the seen and the unseen
in strange juxtaposition. The Fijian route
to the world beyond, Mbulu, lay through a
real town with ordinary inhabitants. But
it had also an invisible portion, where dwelt
the family of Samuyalo who held inquest on
departed spirits. If this trial was surmounted,
a second judgment awaited them at the hands
of Ndengei, by which they were assigned to
one or other of the divisions of the underworld.
A great chief who had destroyed many
towns and slain many in war, passed to
Mburotu, where amid pleasant glades the
occupants lived in families and planted and
fought. But bachelors, those who had killed
no enemy, or would not have their ears bored,
women who refused to be tatooed, and generally
those who had not lived so as to please
the gods, were doomed to various forms of
penal suffering and degradation.
Courage and daring are of immense social
importance, and are among the most important
elements in primitive virtue. Strength, valour,
skill in war and hunting, lift men into leadership,
and the pre-eminence won here is retained
hereafter. But these qualities are not limited
to chiefs. The happy land of the Greenlanders,
Torngarsuk, received the valiant workers,
men who had taken many whales and seals,
borne much hardship, and been drowned
at sea, and women who had died in
childbirth. A mild and unwarlike tribe in
Guatemala might be persuaded that to die by any
other than a natural death was to forfeit
all hope of life hereafter, the bodies of the
slain being left to the vultures and wild
beasts. On the other hand, the Nicaraguan
Aztecs declared that the shades of those who
died in their beds went downwards till they
came to nought; while those who fell in battle
for their country passed to the East, to the
rising of the sun.
Such was the destiny, also, of the Mexican
warriors, who daily climbed to the zenith by
the sun's side with shouts of joy, and there
resigned their charge to the celestial women,
who had given their lives in childbed.
Merchants, too, were in the procession, who had
faced risk and peril and died upon their
journeys. But this privilege tasted only
four years, when they became birds of beautiful
plumage in the celestial gardens. In the
far East, in the abode of Tlaloc, god of waters,
were those who had died by lightning or
at sea, sufferers from various diseases, and
children who had been sacrificed to the
water-deities. These last, after a happy time, were
born again; the rest passed in due course
to the underworld of Mictlan in the far north,
"a most obscure land, where light cometh not,
and whence none can ever return." There
the rich were still rich, and the slaves still
slaves. But their term was short. Mictlan
had nine divisions, and at the end of the fourth
year the spirit reached the ninth and ceased
to be.
This curious distribution has little moral
significance, save for its recognition of valour,
as in the Teutonic welcome of the warrior
into Valhalla, or of social service, as in the
case of those who give their lives for the
community, the merchant like the Greenland
whaler, or the mothers who did not survive
their labour. But the beginnings of ethical
discrimination sometimes present themselves
in very much more simply organised
communities. A rude social justice expresses
itself in the belief of the Kaupuis of Assam
that a murdered man shall have his murderer
for his slave in the next life. The Chippeways
predict that the souls of the wicked will be
pursued by phantoms of the persons they
have injured; and horses and dogs which have
been ill-treated will torment their tormentors.
Murder, theft, lying, adultery, draw down a
singular chastisement in the Banks Islands.
The spirits of the dead assemble on the road
to Panoi, when each fresh comer is torn to
pieces and put together again. Then the
injured man has his chance. He seizes a
part of the dismembered soul, so that it
cannot be reconstructed, or at least suffers
permanent mutilation. No judge presides
over the process, no law regulates it; punishment
is still a private affair. But the entry
into the new life is not unconditional. The
American Choctaws conceived their dead to
journey to the east, till they reached the
summit of a hill. There a long pine-trunk,
smooth and slippery, stretched over the
river of death below to the next hill-top.
The just passed over safely and entered
paradise, the wicked fell off into the stream
beneath. It was a self-acting test, which
needed not the prior ordeal of the Avestan
balance under Mithra and Rashnu at the
Chinvat bridge (p. 9).
Sometimes a new religious motive is more or
less plainly apparent. Even the rude Fijian
award depended in some way on the
satisfaction of the gods. The Tonga Islanders
were more explicit; neglect of the gods and
failure to present due offerings would involve
penalties hereafter. The sun-worshipping
people of Achalaque in Florida placed men
of good life and pious service and charity to
the poor in the sky as stars, while the wicked
languished in misery among mountain
precipices and wild beasts. Two centuries ago
Bosnian heard some of the negroes on the
Guinea coast tell of a river in the heart of
the land where they would be asked by the
divine judge if they had duly kept the holy
days, abstained from forbidden meats, and
maintained their oaths inviolate, and those
who could not answer rightly would be
drowned. Such anticipations really introduce
a fresh principle. Above the tribal morality,
the custom of the clan, rises an obligation
of no obvious and immediate use; even ritual
practice, the observance of special seasons,
or of proper taboos, the offering of prescribed
sacrifice, may create new standards of order
in conformity with a higher will. They supply
the groundwork on which the prophet may
build the temple of the ideal.
The ancient Semitic cultures formulated no
general doctrine of immortality in the higher
sense of the word. Faint traces of a hope
of resurrection appear here and there in
Babylonian texts; but there is no judgment
beyond the grave; the chastisements of the
gods arrive in this life; and it is only
occasionally that the fellowship of heaven becomes
the privilege of the great. In Israel the higher
prophecy from Amos onward interprets
"Yahweh's day" as a day of doom instead
of victory; but the divine judgment would
alight on the whole people, and would be
realised in no future life but in some
overwhelming national catastrophe. In Egypt the
destiny of the dead was already individualised.
Around it gathered the solemnities of the
Osirian judgment-seat (p. 8); the ritual and
the ethical demands of the forty-two assessors
show the moral tests advancing through the
ceremonial. The believer who passed safely
through the ordeal of the balance and was
duly fortified with the proper spells, was
mystically identified with Osiris as the
"justified," and different texts present
different types of future bliss. He might find a
home in the fields of Ialu, where numerous
servants answered to his call, and he feasted
on the magic corn. Or a fresh form might be
provided for him, when he was washed with
pure water at the meshken or place of new
birth. Mysterious transformations
assimilated him with various gods; or he was
admitted on to the sun-bark among the
worshippers of Rê, and fed on his words.
But the guilty souls were subjected to
unspeakable torments; there were magistrates
to measure the duration of those appointed
for extinction, and at the allotted time they
were destroyed.
Egypt, thought Herodotus, had been the
teacher of immortality to Greece. The
statement is at least interesting as a sign that
in the traveller's view the Hellenic faith of
his day possessed some analogies with the
Egyptian. The ethical element in it, at any
rate, was gaining more and more force. In
Homer Hades, who is after all another form
of Zeus in the underworld, is sovereign, but
not judge, of the nether realm. The Erinnyes,
who are originally ghosts of the dead,
inflict their punishments mostly in the life
of earth; only for broken oaths is penalty
imposed below; and Tartarus, in the lowest
deep, is reserved for the giant Titans who had
challenged the majesty of heaven. In the
stony asphodel meadow Achilles is but a
shade among the rest; if Menelaus is
admitted to the Elysian plain, it is no superior
valour but aristocratic connection which
wins him his place. Rare is the allusion to
a judgment; the tribunal of Minos, son of
Zeus, may be the moralising addition of some
later bard.
But in the fifth century B.C. fresh influences
are at work. Pythagoras has founded his
communities, half philosophical, half religious.
The higher thought has become markedly
monotheistic, and Orphism with its rude
sacrament (p. 147) has helped to develop
conceptions of fellowship with deity which
made new hopes for the future possible.
So Pindar, nearest of kin among Greek poets
to the prophetio voices of Israel, emphasises
the retributive government of God. Man may
be nothing more than "a dream of a shadow,"
nevertheless he is not too insignificant to
escape the dooms of heaven upon his guilt,
and if there is requital for evil there are also
happy islands for the blest. The ethical
leaven is already powerfully at work. The
language of Cebes and Simmias in Plato's
dialogue of the Phædo shows, however, that
the belief was by no means universal; and
the beautiful sepulchral reliefs at Athens
give no hint of that august tribunal of Minos,
Rhadamanthus and Æacus, which Plato
pictures as engaged in judging souls.
But the great mysteries of Eleusis certainly
fostered the hope of immortality. The
conviction grew stronger that the initiated would
have a happier lot in the life to come, so that
Diogenes sarcastically inquired whether an
initiated robber would be better off than an
uninitiated honest man. The inscriptions of
the last centuries before our era show nothing
like the consensus of feeling in an Egyptian
cemetery or a modern English graveyard.
The soul is piously committed to the ether,
or, if there be rewards in the realm below,
is confided to Persephonê; or it is reverently
placed among the stars, in the councils of the
immortals, or in the home of the gods. Such
were the popular conventions. Philosophical
speculation gathered round the idea of
transmigration, or pleaded for at least a continuance
of consciousness till the great conflagration
which should end the world; while Orphic
religion held out the hope that the soul,
entangled in this earthly scene, might after
long discipline rise once more to its home with God.
The theories of continuance all assume that
the world will go upon its usual way. Generation
will follow generation in this life, but
the lower culture does not ask what will
happen in the next. It cannot take big
time-surveys, like the Egyptian "millions
of years" or the Hebrew "ages of ages." The
future will be like the present, as the
present has been like the past. Imagination
can conceive a beginning, it does not at first
advance to an end. But the development of
astronomy in Babylonia, with the discovery of
regular periodicities in Nature, seems to have
suggested the idea of a great World-Year,
an immense period beginning with creation,
which would be brought to an end by some
great catastrophe such as flood or fire. The
flood had already taken place. Traditions
of it floated to India and Greece; they were
incorporated in ancient Hebrew story. After
another immense revolution of time would
there be a similar close? There is some
evidence that this was part of Babylonian
teaching in the days of Berosus, in the middle
of the third century B.C. (p. 39), but it has
not yet been discovered in the ancient
cuneiform texts. The next agency of dissolution
would be heat. It was part of early Buddhist
speculation, and lodged itself in Indian
thought; and from the days of Pythagoras,
in the sixth century B.C., it formed part of
the Greek philosophical outlook in different
schools towards the "last things." When the
next periodic destruction took place, what
would happen? According to one answer
the restoration of all things would set in,
and the entire cycle would be repeated over
again. Eudemus, a pupil of Aristotle, is
said to have observed in one of his lectures
that if the Pythagoreans were to be trusted,
his audience would have the privilege of
hearing him again: "You will be sitting
there in the same way, and I shall be telling
you my story, holding my little stick, and
everything else will go on the same."
This mechanical reproduction of a whole
previous age down to its minutest details did
not, however, really engage the higher Greek
thought. That was chiefly occupied with the
abiding contrast between that which is and
that which appears; how could the ultimate
Unity present itself in such infinite
diversity? what was the relation of the world of change
and succession to the enduring substance that
lay behind? In such questions man and his
destiny had but a small share. Pindar might
sing how "God accomplisheth all ends
according to his wish; God who overtaketh the
winged eagle and outstrippeth the dolphin
of the sea, and layeth low many a mortal in
his haughtiness, while to others he giveth
glory unspeakable: if any man expect that
in doing ought he shall be unseen of God, he
erreth." The tragedians might wrestle with
dark problems of crime and fate; and poetry
and philosophy might agree in presenting the
world as the scene of a divine thought, the
manifestation of a divine energy. Regularities,
fixities, invariable successions, pointed
to a definite order, divinely maintained. But
to what did it lead? What place was there
in it for man? His future might be
moralised; the unethical Hades of Homer might be
replaced by the judgment-scenes of Plato;
but no world-process is suggested for the
elimination of evil or the fulfilment of any
divine end. Plato might throw out the hint
that Delphi should become the interpreter of
religion to all mankind; the mysteries might
be opened to slave as well as freeman, and
might even admit those who were not of
Hellenic race; but there were no prophet's
glimpses of a purpose leading to some
all-embracing goal. Zeus orders all as he wills.
Individuals are punished, but the misdeeds,
like the sufferings or sorrows of man, are lost
in the harmonious majesty of the Whole.
Indian thought, as has been already
indicated, worked out a complete identification
of life with the moral order by means of the
doctrine of the Deed (p. 217). The scheme
of transmigration took up the earlier ideas
of the elder thinkers. The Vedic poets had
told of the land of Yama, who was sometimes
presented as the first man to die and enter the
heavenly world. In one hymn he is associated
with Varuna in the highest heaven, where the
pious live from age to age, and are sometimes
identified with the sun's rays or the stars.
There kindred were gathered, and warriors
and poets received their reward, and the
devout realised the object of their prayers;
and Yama sat under a tree of goodly leaves,
drinking with the gods the life-giving
soma-juice, father and master of the house, tending
the heavenly sires. Deep below was the dark
pit for those who would not sacrifice to Indra,
or persecuted his worshippers. There were
fiends of various kinds to torment the wicked,
the untruthful, or the seducer. But there are
no traces of any specific judgment, with
definite awards of heaven and hell. In the
later scheme of life founded on the conception
of Karma such a tribunal might seem
unnecessary: the product of the past works
out its own result. But as Buddhist
folklore shows, popular theology required the
pronouncement of a judge, and Yama
took his place as Lord of hell and King of
Righteousness.
By what channels the doctrine of successive
world-ages entered Hindu religion cannot be
definitely determined. Early Buddhist
teaching assumes it as familiar, though it is not
included in the prior Brahmanical literature;
and minutely describes the great conflagration
which will consume the universe through the
heat engendered by the appearance of seven
suns. Karma, however, could not be
destroyed. No fire could burn it, nor could the
other agencies of dissolution, like water or
wind, drown or disperse it. It must proceed
unerringly to its results. These might be
for a time suspended, they could not be
frustrated for ever. Their energies lay latent,
waiting their opportunity. So a new world
would arise to provide the means and the field
for their operation, and from age to age,
through seasons of dissolution and restoration,
with intervals of incalculable time, the endless
process would fulfil its round. This would
be no literal repetition. The history of a
new world-age would be quite fresh, for the
potencies of Karma were of infinite variety,
and were for ever being re-shaped, cancelled,
or extended by the action of the new
personalities—divine, human, demonic—(reincarnation
might also take place in animal or plant)—in
which they were embodied. But the
immense series led to nothing. Buddhist
imagination filled the universe with worlds,
each with its own systems of heaven and hell,
and projected æons upon æons into
immeasurable time, but the sequence pointed
to no goal, for what could arrest the inexorable
succession? Was there any escape from its law?
To that question different answers were
returned by different teachers. The forest-sages
had already pleaded for the recognition
of the identity of the self within the heart
with the Universal Self (p. 60). There was
the path by which the phenomenal scene
could be transcended, and the soul brought
into its true fellowship with the Infinite
Being, Intelligence, and Joy. But inasmuch
as this deliverance was only realised by a
few, and could not be self-wrought, it must
be the result of a divine election; they only
could attain it whom the Self chose as his
own. With its repudiation of all ontological
ideas of soul, or substance, or universal Self,
early Buddhism threw the whole task of
achieving emancipation on the individual,
who must himself win the higher insight and
discipline his character with no aid but that
of the Teacher and his example. The passion
for the salvation of the world might generate
an unexampled missionary activity, transcending
all bounds of caste and race. It
might express itself in singularly
comprehensive vows such as these, which were
carried from China to Japan in the seventh
century A.D., and are still part of Buddhist
devotion: "There are beings without limit,
let me take the vow to take them all unto
the further shore: there are depravities
without number, let me take the vow to
extinguish them all: there are truths without
end, let me take the vow to know them all:
there is the way of Buddha without
comparison, let me make the vow to accomplish
it." But only the wisdom of Amida,
All-Merciful and All-Potent (p. 17), could avail
to harmonise the issues of Karma with the
operations of grace, and carry the world-process
to the goal of universal salvation.
The theologians and philosophers of India
might devise various methods for the
believer's escape from the round of re-births;
but on the ecclesiastical side they never
surmounted the practical limitation of
nationality, or sought to address themselves to the
world at large; while the mystics who more
easily passed the bounds of race usually
lacked the aggressive energy which demanded
the conquest and suppression of evil and the
assurance of the victory of good. It was
reserved for the Persian thinkers, led by
Zarathustra, to work out a scheme for the
ultimate overthrow of the power of "the
Lie" (p. 211). Egyptian theology had
impersonated the forces of evil in Set. There
were the constant oppositions of darkness
and light, of sickness and health, of the
desert against fertility, of drought against
the Nile, of foreign lands against Egypt.
Mythically, the antagonism between Set and
his brother Osiris was continued by Isis' son
Horus. It was renewed again and again,
and Set was for ever defeated, yet always
returned afresh to the strife. But no demand
was raised for his elimination. Osiris had
passed into the land of Amenti, where Set
could trouble him no more. And apparently
the later identification of the deceased with
Osiris meant that for him, too, the powers
of death and evil were overcome. But this
did not affect Set's activity in the existing
scene, where the strife continued over the
survivors day by day. The insight of the
Iranian prophet could not admit this division
of spheres, and demanded not only new
heavens, but also a new earth, where evil
should have no more power, and the Righteous
Order, the Good Mind, the Bounteous Spirit,
and the rest of the Immortals, should be the
unchallenged ministers of Ahura's rule.
The history of the world, accordingly, was
ultimately arranged in four periods of three
thousand years each. The life of Zarathustra
closed the third. At the end of the fourth
the great era of the Frasho-kereti, the entry
into a new age and a new scene, would arrive.
It would be preceded at the close of each
millennial series by the advent of a deliverer,
wondrously born of Zarathustra's seed. During
the third of these, the last of the whole twelve,
the ancient serpent would be loosed to ravage
Ahura Mazda's good creation. But the
Saoshyant or "Saviour," the greatest of the
three successors of the prophet, would bring
about the general resurrection. From the
Home of Song and from the hells of evil
thought and word and deed the spirits of the
dead would resume their bodies. Families
would be reunited in preparation for the last
purifying pain. For a mighty conflagration
would take place; the mountains would be
dissolved with fervent heat, and the whole
multitude of the human race would be
overflowed by the molten metal for three days.
The righteous would pass through it like a
bath of milk; the evil would be purged of the
last impulses to sin. Saoshyant and his
helpers would dispense the drink of immortality,
and the final conflict with the powers
of evil would begin. Añra Mainyu, the great
Serpent, with all their satellites and the
multitude of the demonic hosts, should be
finally driven into hell and consumed in the
cleansing flame; and hell itself should be
"brought back for the enlargement of the
world."
The Iranian Apocalypse is not the only
presentation of conflict and victory in the
widespread Indo-Germanic group. The Old
Teutonic religion produced its Volospa, the
seer's high song of creation and the overthrow
of evil. Here is in brief the story of the
great world-drama, the degeneracy of man,
the conflicts of the gods. The universe slowly
surges to its end; there are portents in the
sky, disorders on the earth, till the whole
frame of things dissolves and all goes up in
flame. But a new vision dawns: "I behold
earth rise again with its evergreen forests
out of the deep; the fields shall yield unsown;
all evil shall be amended; Balder shall come
back. I see a hall, brighter than the sun,
shingled with gold, standing on Gem-lea.
The righteous shall dwell therein and live in
bliss for ever. The Powerful One comes to
hold high judgment, the Mighty One from
above who rules over all, and the dark dragon
who flies over the earth with corpses on
his wings is driven from the scene and
slinks away." There are possibly Christian
touches here and there, but the substantial
independence of the poet seems assured.
Above the theories of world-continuance
and world-cycles must be ranked those of a
world-goal, which imply more or less clearly
the conception of a world-purpose. The
supreme expression of this in religious
literature is found in the Christian Bible. The
prophecy of Zarathustra belonged to the same
high ethical order as that of Israel. How
much the Apocalyptic hopes of the later
Judaism were stimulated by contact with
Persian thought cannot be precisely defined:
the estimates of careful scholars differ. But
there is no doubt whatever of the dependence
of Christianity upon Jewish Messianic
expectation. The title of its founder, Christ,
is the Greek equivalent of the Jewish term
Messiah, or "Anointed." Its pictures of
human destiny, of resurrection, of judgment,
of one world where the righteous shine like
the sun, and another full of fire that is not
quenched, are pictures drawn by Jewish
hands. Its promises of the Advent of the
Son of Man in clouds of glory from the sky,
who shall summon the nations to his great
assize, are couched in the language of earlier
Jewish books. For one religion builds upon
another, and must use the speech of its
country and its time. Its forms must,
therefore, necessarily change from age to age, as
the advance of knowledge and the widening
of experience suggest new problems and call
for fresh solutions. But it will always embody
man's highest thought concerning the
mysteries that surround him, and will express
his finest attitude to life. Its beliefs may be
gradually modified; its specific institutions
may lose their power; but history shows it to
be among the most permanent of social forces,
and the most effective agent for the slow
elevation of the race.
Out of the immense literature produced since Max Müller's
Essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) only a small number
of the most important books can be here named, and the list
is limited to works in English. Superior figures attached to
titles indicate the edition. [Transcriber's note: the
superscripted edition numbers have been replaced with
the edition in brackets.]
GENERAL INTRODUCTION.—Tylor, Primitive Culture (4th ed.) (2
vols. 1903); Max Müller, Introd. to the Science of Religion
(1873), Hibbert Lectures (1878), Gifford Lectures (4 vols. 1889-93);
W. Robertson Smith, Lectures on the Religion of the
Semites (2nd ed.) (1902); J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bough
(3rd editioin) (now in
course of publication); A. Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion (2nd ed.)
(2 vols. 1899), The Making of Religion (2nd ed.) (1900), Magic and
Religion (1901); Goblet d'Alviella, Origin and Growth of the
Conception of God (Hibbert Lectures, 1892); Tiele, Elements
of the Science of Religion (2 vols. 1897); F. B. Jevons,
Introduction to the History of Religion (2nd ed.) (1902); Crawley, The
Mystic Rose (1902), The Tree of Life (1905); Farnell, The
Evolution of Religion (1905); Westermaarck, The Origin and
Development of the Moral Ideas (1906), 2 vols.; Hobhouse,
Morals in Evolution (1906), 2 vols.; Marett, The Threshold of
Religion (1909).
RELIGION IN THE LOWER CULTURE.—Ratzel, The History
of Mankind, tr. Butler (1896), 3 vols.; Turner, Samoa (1884);
Codrington, Melanesians (1891); A. B. Ellis, Ewe-speaking
Peoples (1890); Yoruba-speaking Peoples (1894); Tshi-speaking
Peoples (1897); Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-lore of
Northern India (2 vols. 1896); Miss M. H. Kingsley, Travels
in West Africa (1898), West African Studies (1899); Spencer
and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), Northern
Tribes of Central Australia (1904); Howitt, Native Tribes of
South-eastern Australia (1904); Dennett, At the Back of the
Black Man's Mind (1906); Roscoe, The Baganda, their
Customs and Beliefs (1911); Brinton, Myths of the New World (2nd ed.)
(1878); McClintock, The Old North Trail (1910); Reports of the
Bureau of Ethnology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.
For the higher religions a few of the best English introductions
are here named, in addition to the copious collection of
materials in the Sacred Books of the East (50 vols.).
BABYLONIA: Sayce, Hibbert Lectures (1887), Religions of
Ancient Egypt and Babylonia (1902); Jastrow, Religion of
Babylonia and Assyria (1898), American Lectures.
CELTS: Rhys, Hibbert Lectures (1886); Macculloch, The
Religion of the Ancient Celts (1911).
CHINA: Legge, Chinese Classics (2nd ed.) (1893), 5 vols. (in 8 parts);
de Groot, The Religious System of China (1892-1910), 6 vols.:
already published, The Religion of the Chinese (1910).
CHRISTIANITY (primitive): Wernle, Beginnings of Christianity
(1903), 2 vols.; Pfleiderer, Primitive Christianity (1906), 4
vols. Fuller bibliography in Encycl. Brit., (11th ed.) by G. W. Knox.
EGYPT: Renouf, Hibbert Lectures (1879); Maspero, The Dawn
of Civilisation (1894); Sayce, Religions of Ancient Egypt and
Babylonia (1902); Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Religion
(1907); Budge, Osiris and the Egyptian Resurrection (1911),
2 vols.
GREECE: Farnell, Cults of the Greek States (1896-1909), 5
vols., Greece and Babylon (1911), Higher Aspects of Greek
Religion (1912); Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of
Greek Religion (1903), Themis (1912); Sir W. M. Ramsay, in
Hastings' Dict. of the Bible, extra vol. (1904), "Religion of
Greece and Asia Minor."
INDIA: Barth, Religions of India (1882); Hopkins, Religions
of India (1895). VEDIC: Macdonell, Vedic Mythology (1897)
in Bühler's Grundriss; Bloomfield, Religion of the Veda (1909).
For BUDDHISM, see Mrs. Rhys Davids' vol. in this series.
HINDUISM: Monieu Williams, Religious Thought and Life in
India (1883).
ISRAEL: Kuenen, Religion of Israel (1874), 3 vols.; Montefiore,
Hibbert Lectures (1892); Kautzsch, in Hastings' Dict. of
the Bible, extra vol. (1904), "Religion of Israel." Kent,
Hist. of the Hebrew People, 2 vols. (1890-7); Hist. of the Jewish
People (1899); Addis, Hebrew Religion (1906); Marti,
Religion of the Old Testament (1907).
JAINS: Jacobi in Sacred Books of the East, vols. xxii (1884)
and xlv (1895); Bühler, On the Indian Sect of the Jainas (1904).
JAPAN: The Nihongi, tr. Aston (1896), 2 vols.; Aston,
Shinto (1905); papers in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society
of Japan; Griffis, The Religions of Japan (4th ed.) (1904, New York);
Knox, Development of Religion in Japan (1907); Tada Kanai,
The Praises of Amida, tr. Lloyd (1907, Tokyo).
MEXICO AND PERU: Reville, Hibbert Lectures (1884); Payne,
History of the New World called America (1892), 2 vols.
MOHAMMEDANISM: see Prof. Margoliouth's vol. in this series.
PERSIA: Jackson, Zoroaster, the Prophet of ancient Iran
(1899); Sanjana, Zarathushtra and Zarathushtrianism in the
Avesta (1906, Leipzig); Moulton, Early Religious Poetry of
Persia (1911).
ROME: W. Warde Fowler, The Roman Festivals, 1899, The
Religious Experience of the Roman People (1911); Glover,
Studies in Virgil, 1904; Dill, Roman Society from Nero to
Marcus Aurelius (1904); Carter, The Religion of Numa (1906),
The Religious Life of Ancient Rome (1912); Cumont, Oriental
Religions in Roman Paganism (1911), Astrology and Religion
among the Greeks and Romans (1912).
SIKHS: Macauliffe, The Sikh Religion (1909), 6 vols.
TEUTONS: Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale
(1883), 2 vols.; Grimm, tr. Stallybrass, Teutonic Mythology
(1900), 4 vols.; Chantepie de la Saussaye, Religion of the
Teutons (1902).
Small popular volumes in the series on "Non-Christian
Religious Systems" (Soc. for Promoting Christian Knowledge),
and more recently in Constable's series, "Religions Ancient
and Modern." Valuable articles in Hastings' Encyclopædia
of Religion and Ethics, and in Encyclopædia Britannica.
Ādi-Granth, the, 188
Aditi, 155
Adonis, 119
Æschylus, 130
Æsculapius, 44, 127, 180, 221
Africa, 111, 113 f., 140, 148, 163, 182, 203
Agni, 34, 94
Ahriman (Añra Mainyu), 155, 212, 248
Ahura Mazda, 131, 211 f., 248
Aius Locutius, 126
Akhnaton, 129
"All-gods," the, 129
American Indians, North, 57, 81, 110, 173, 235
Amida (Amitâbha), 16 ff., 132, 246
Animism, 55, 59
Annam, 83
Apollo, 123, 127, 145, 159, 173, 181, 183
Artemis, 127
Asceticism, 168
Asha, 216, 221
Asista, 148
Athena, 123, 127, 173
Athens, 228
Attis, 119
Augury, 178
Augustine, St., 35, 42, 52
Augustus, 125
Australia, 33, 75, 78 f., 86, 110, 114 f., 149, 162, 171, 199, 202
Avalokiteçvara, 131, 154
Awona-wilona, 111
Bab, the, 70, 188
Babylonia, 39, 58, 102, 109, 145, 151, 171, 178, 205, 209, 237, 240
Baiame, 149, 171
Balder, 210, 249
Baptism, rites of, 160
Berosus, 39, 241
Bhagavad-Gītā, the, 128
Bhakti, 157
Bible, the, 194
Birth, deities and rites of, 121, 159
Blackfoot Indians, the, 35, 167
Book of the Dead, the, 186
Brahma, 60, 156
Brahmā, 60, 62, 129, 158
Brāhmanas, the, 189, 217
Brahmanaspati, 156
Brahmanical sacrifice, 143
Brahmanism, 24, 128
Buddha, the future, 159. Cp. Gotama
Buddhism, 15, 24, 61, 65, 131, 153, 155, 219, 241, 244 f.
Buddhist Scriptures, 190
Bjunjil, 171
Celts, the, 27, 41, 104, 142, 231
Chemosh, 107
China, 58, 63, 65, 68, 87, 90, 95, 125, 150, 178, 214, 231
Chinese Classics, 187
Christianity, 187, 225, 250
Chrysippus, 184
Cicero, 42, 46
Çiva, 62, 128 f.
Classification of religions, 220
Clement of Alexandria, 50 f.
Confucius, 27 f., 63, 96
Corea, 66
Creation-myths, 110
Cybelê, 40
Dahomey, 138
Dance, the sacred, 166
Daramulun, 162, 171
Dead, cultus of the, 20, 90, 137 ff.
Death, 121
Delphi, 182, 221, 242
Demeter, 40, 119, 164
Deng-deet, 148
Dionysos, 40, 119, 127, 147
Divination, 178
Dreams, 86, 179, 229
Druzes, the, 188
Ea, 113, 172
Earth, mother, 59, 95, 97, 173
Eating the god, 146
Edda, the, 27, 186
Egypt, 7, 39, 46, 102, 109, 113, 124, 129, 151 f., 171 f., 209,
213, 227, 237 f., 246
Eleusinian Mysteries, 164, 239
Entheos, 147
Erinnyes, the, 238
Eskimo, the, 228 f., 233
Etruscans, the, 178, 229
Euahlayi, the, 149
Euripides, 48, 151
Eusebius, 39, 52
Fijians, the, 197, 233
Finnic peoples, the, 104, 231
First-borns sacrificed, 142
Florida, 236
Food-deities, 115 ff.
Gabriel, 131
Gāthās, the, 191, 221
Genius, the, 123
Gold Coast negroes, 107, 138, 144, 197
Gotama, 15, 127, 219
Greece, 37, 90, 121 f., 145, 161
Hades, 238
Hammurabi, 172
Heaven and Earth, 63, 94 ff., 213 ff.
Hebrews, the, 140. See Israel.
Heracleides, 184
Heracleitus, 48, 50
Herbert, Lord, 31
Hermes, 9 f., 181
Herodotus, 26, 38, 238
Hesiod, 182, 186, 213
Hestia, 122
Hierography, Hierology, Hierosophy, 29 f.
Hinduism, 62
Hirata, 92 f., 135
Homer, 181 f., 186, 238, 242
Homeric Hymn, 164
Huitzilopochtli, 147
Incubation, 180
India, 58, 90, 127, 139, 141
Indra, 34, 155, 177
Initiation ceremonies, 161 ff.
Irish sacrificed first-borns, 142
Isis, 39 ff., 51, 109, 127, 165
Islam. See Mohammedanism.
Israel, 201, 222, 230, 237, 249
Jacob, 168
Jains, the, 61, 188
Japan, 63, 66, 91, 125, 135, 138 f., 152, 246
Jephthah, 107
Jeremiah, 182
Jews, the, 39, 58. See Israel.
Judaism, 187, 223, 249
Judgment after death, 7 ff., 233 ff.
Jumala, 105
Juno, 145
Jupiter, 35, 109, 130, 145
Justin the Martyr, 49
Kabir, 157, 188
Kalevala, the, 27, 57, 186
Kami, the, 64, 91 ff., 135
Karma, 60, 217, 219, 243 ff.
Kings, as divine, 124
Koran, the, 13, 69, 155, 187, 192 f.
Krishna, 128
Kwan-yin, 132, 154
Lao-Tsze, 64, 214 f.
Lares, the, 123
Lesa, 140
Lessing, 22
Lî Chî, the, 150
Life after Death, 226 ff.
Life, in the universe, 83
Logos, the, 47 f., 50, 53
Loki, 210
Lot, the, 178
Lucretius, 42, 44
Lycurgus, 173
Maāt, 214
Magic, 75 ff., 120, 142, 148, 154
Mahābhārata, the, 190
Mama Ogllo, 174
Mana, 80, 85, 200
Manco Capac, 174
Manetho, 39
Manitou, 81
Manu, 190
Marcian Songs, 184
Marduk, 113, 140
Mawu, 198
Melanesia, 139, 164
Messiah, the, 250
Mêtis, 176
Mexico, 57, 117, 147, 161, 232, 234
Michabo, 173
Michael, 7, 9 f., 131
Migration, 229
Minerva, 109, 145
Minos, 44, 173
Minucius Felix, 49
Mithra, 9, 52, 166, 236
Mitra, 34, 155
Mohammed, 12 f., 67 f., 187, 193
Mohammedanism, 24, 26, 58, 63, 67, 155
Morality, 135, 195 ff.
Moses, 222
"Mothers," 104
Motowori, 92
Mulungu, 82
Musæus, 181, 183
Muses, the, 181
Mysteries, 51, 164 ff., 239
Mythology, 174 ff.
Nānak, 62
New Zealand, 232
Nezahuatl, 130
Niger, tribes of Lower, 150, 198, 231
Noah's sacrifice, 141
Norns, the, 161
Numa, 44 f., 173
Nurrundere, 171
Nyongmo, 113
Oannes, 171
Odin, 181, 210
Omophagy, 147
Onomacritus, 183
Oracles, 182 ff.
Ordeals, 179
Orenda, 81
Orpheus, 181
Orphism, 147, 165, 239 f.
Osiris, 8, 109, 119, 172, 209, 237, 247
Pāchacāmac, 152
Pan, 44, 153
"Parasites," 145
Parsees, the, 58
Pausanias, 41, 53
Penates, 123, 145
Persephonê, 40, 119, 240
Peru, 57, 108, 117, 174
Petronius Arbiter, 22
Pindar, 44, 48, 153, 213, 239, 242
Plato, 38, 45 f., 48 f., 133, 178, 182, 239, 242
Plutarch, 41, 44
Polydæmonistic religions, 55
Polynesia, 112, 164
Prajāpati, 12, 143 f.
Prayer, 35, 133, 148 ff.
Prometheus, 137
Pythagoras, 38
Pythagoreans, 220, 239 f.
Quetzalcoatl, 173
Rain-making, 54
Rameses, 108
Rashnu, 9, 236
Religio, 42
Rig Veda, 10 f., 59. See Veda.
Rita, 216
Rites of passage, 159
Roman emperor, 124
Rome, 41, 52, 90, 109, 123, 131, 145, 161, 178, 201
Sabazius, 165
Sacred Books, 185 ff.
Sacrifice, 133, 136 ff.
Samuel, 161
Saoshyant, 248
Sarapis, 39, 146
Sâtân, the, 223
Scandinavia, 209, 229
Scape-goat, in Israel, 206
Schleiermacher, 23
Scriptures, 189 ff.
Self, doctrine of the, 85 ff.
Self, the Universal, 60, 245
Semites, the, 142
Set, 209
Shamash, 151, 172
Shang Tî, 97, 100
Sheol, 230
Shin, the, 95, 100
Shinto, 63, 91, 135, 187, 207
Sibylline books, 184
Sīkhs, the, 62, 188
Sin, communicable and removable, 204 ff.
Sin (moon-god), 151
Snake-dance, 167
Socrates, 50, 133, 153
Sophocles, 44
Sotêr (saviour, etc.), 124 f., 127
Spirits, 54, 102
Stars, the dead as, 231, 240, 243
Stoics, the, 178
Sūfiism, 70
Sun-dance, 34, 167
Syrians, the, 142
Taaroa, 112
Taboo, 200 ff.
Tammuz, 119
Tao, the, 215
Taoism, 65, 67, 187
Tertullian, 51, 124
Tezcatlipoca, 147
Thales, 37, 213
Thargelia, the, 206
Themis, 118, 213
Thor, 210
Thoth, 8, 152
Tibet, 66
Time, 143
Todas, the, 33, 148
Totemism, 55
Transmigration, 61, 218
Triads, 109
Trimurti, 129
Truth, goddesses of, 8
Tutanus Rediculus, 126
Ukko, 105
Universal Religions, 70
Valhalla, 235
Varro, 42
Varuna, 34, 106, 151, 155 f., 211, 243
Veda, the, 136, 142, 151, 155, 163, 177, 189, 205, 215, 243
Vegetation-gods, 118 ff.
Vesta, 122 f.
Vishnu, 62, 128 f., 158, 190
Volospa, the, 186, 248
Votan, 174
Vows, 168
Wäinamöinen, 181, 232
Wakanda, 81
World-year, 240
Xavier, Francis, 86
Yahweh, 107, 144, 161, 168, 222
Yama, 121, 243 f.
Yang and Yin, 95, 120 f.
Zaleucus, 44, 173
Zarathustra (Zoroaster), 38, 44, 58, 131, 163, 187, 201, 221, 246 f.
Zend Avesta, the, 187, 191 f., 211
Zeus, 103, 106, 109, 127, 153, 173, 176, 181, 213, 238, 243
Zi (Babylonian), 102
Zuñis, the, 83, 111
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