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Title: The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

Author: Grant Allen

Release date: July 25, 2018 [eBook #57581]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by David Widger from page images generously
        provided by the Internet Archive


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD: AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF RELIGIONS ***




Produced by David Widger from page images generously
provided by the Internet Archive








THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD

AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF RELIGIONS

BY GRANT ALLEN

AUTHOR OF “PHYSIOLOGICAL ÆSTHETICS” “THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS”
“FORCE AND ENERGY” ETC

LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS 1897




PREFACE

|TWO main schools of religious thinking exist in our midst at the
present day: the school of humanists and the school of animists. This
work is to some extent an attempt to reconcile them. It contains, I
believe, the first extended effort that has yet been made to trace the
genesis of the belief in a God from its earliest origin in the mind of
primitive man up to its fullest development in advanced and etherealised
Christian theology. My method is therefore constructive, not
destructive. Instead of setting out to argue away or demolish a
deep-seated and ancestral element in our complex nature, this book
merely posits for itself the psychological question, “By what
successive steps did men come to frame for themselves the conception of
a deity?”--or, if the reader so prefers it, “How did we arrive at
our knowledge of God?” It seeks provisionally to answer these profound
and important questions by reference to the earliest beliefs of savages,
past or present, and to the testimony of historical documents and
ancient monuments. It does not concern itself at all with the validity
or invalidity of the ideas in themselves; it does but endeavour to show
how inevitable they were, and how man’s relation with the external
universe was certain _a priori_ to beget them as of necessity.

In so vast a synthesis, it would be absurd to pretend at the present day
that one approached one’s subject entirely _de novo_. Every enquirer
must needs depend much upon the various researches of his predecessors
in various parts of his field of enquiry. The problem before us divides
itself into three main portions: _first_, how did men come to believe
in many gods--the origin of polytheism; _second_, how, by elimination
of most of these gods, did certain races of men come to believe in one
single supreme and omnipotent God--the origin of monotheism; _third_
how, having arrived at that concept, did the most advanced races and
civilisations come to conceive of that God as Triune, and to identify
one of his Persons with a particular divine and human incarnation--the
origin of Christianity. In considering each of these three main problems
I have been greatly guided and assisted by three previous enquirers or
sets of enquirers.

As to the _origin of polytheism_, I have adopted in the main Mr. Herbert
Spencer’s remarkable ghost theory, though with certain important
modifications and additions. In this part of my work I have also been
largely aided by materials derived from Mr. Duff Macdonald, the able
author of _Africana_, from Mr. Turner, the well-known Samoan missionary,
and from several other writers, supplemented as they are by my own
researches among the works of explorers and ethnologists in general. On
the whole, I have here accepted the theory which traces the origin
of the belief in gods to primeval ancestor-worship, or rather
corpse-worship, as against the rival theory which traces its origin to a
supposed primitive animism.

As to the _rise of monotheism_, I have been influenced in no small
degree by Kuenen and the Teutonic school of Old Testament criticism,
whose ideas have been supplemented by later concepts derived from
Professor Robertson Smith’s admirable work, _The Religion of the
Semites_. But here, on the whole, the central explanation I have to
offer is, I venture to think, new and original: the theory, good or bad,
of the circumstances which led to the elevation of the ethnical Hebrew
God, Jahweh, above all his rivals, and his final recognition as the only
true and living god, is my own and no one else’s.

As to the _origin of Christianity_, and its relations to the preceding
cults of corn and wine gods, I have been guided to a great extent by
Mr. J. G. Frazer and Mannhardt, though I do not suppose that either the
living or the dead anthropologist would wholly acquiesce in the use I
have made of their splendid materials. Mr. Frazer, the author of that
learned work, _The Golden Bough_, has profoundly influenced the opinions
of all serious workers at anthropology and the science of religion, and
I cannot too often acknowledge the deep obligations under which I lie to
his profound and able treatises. At the same time, I have so transformed
the material derived from him and from Dr. Robertson Smith as to have
made it in many ways practically my own; and I have supplemented it
by several new examples and ideas, suggested in the course of my own
tolerably wide reading.

Throughout the book as a whole, I also owe a considerable debt to Dr. E.
B. Tylor, from whom I have borrowed much valuable matter; to Mr. Sidney
Hartland’s _Legend of Perseus_; to Mr. Lawrence Gomme, who has come
nearer at times than anyone else to the special views and theories
here promulgated; and to Mr. William Simpson of the _Illustrated London
News_, an unobtrusive scholar whose excellent monographs on _The Worship
of Death_ and kindred subjects have never yet received the attention
They deserve, at the hands of unprejudiced students of religion. My
other obligations, to Dr. Mommsen, to my friends Mr. Edward Clodd,
Professor John Rhys, and Professor York Powell, as well as to numerous
travellers, missionaries, historians, and classicists, are too frequent
to specify.

Looking at the subject broadly, I would presume to say once more that
my general conclusions may be regarded as representing to some extent
a reconciliation between the conflicting schools of humanists and
animists, headed respectively by Mr. Spencer and Mr. Frazer, though with
a leaning rather to the former than the latter.

At the same time it would be a great mistake to look upon my book as
in any sense a mere eirenicon or compromise. On the contrary, it is in
every part a new and personal work, containing, whatever its value, a
fresh and original synthesis of the subject. I would venture to
point out as especially novel the two following points: the complete
demarcation of religion from mythology, as practice from mere
explanatory gloss or guesswork; and the important share assigned in the
genesis of most existing religious systems to the deliberate manufacture
of gods by killing. This doctrine of the manufactured god, to which
nearly half my book is devoted, seems to me to be a notion of cardinal
value. Among other new ideas of secondary rank, I would be bold enough
to enumerate the following: the establishment of three successive stages
in the conception of the Life of the Dead, which might be summed up as
Corpse-worship, Ghost-worship, and Shade-worship, and which answer
to the three stages of preservation or mummification, burial, and
cremation; the recognition of the high place to be assigned to the
safe-keeping of the oracular head in the growth of idol-worship; the
importance attached to the sacred stone, the sacred stake, and the
sacred tree, and the provisional proof of their close connection with
the graves of the dead; the entirely new conception of the development
of monotheism among the Jews from the exclusive cult of the jealous god;
the hypothesis of the origin of cultivation from tumulus-offerings,
and its connection with the growth of gods of cultivation; the wide
expansion given to the ancient notion of the divine-human victim; the
recognition of the world-wide prevalence of the five-day festival of
the corn or wine god, and of the close similarity which marks its
rites throughout all the continents, including America; the suggested
evolution of the god-eating sacraments of lower religions from the
cannibal practice of honorifically eating one’s dead relations; * and
the evidence of the wide survival of primitive corpse-worship down to
our own times in civilised Europe. I could largely increase this rapid
list of what I believe to be the new contributions here made to the
philosophy of religious evolution; but I purposely refrain. I think
it will be allowed that if even a few of these ideas turn out on
examination to be both new and true, my book will have succeeded in
justifying its existence.

     * While this work was passing through the press a similar
     theory has been propounded by Mr. Flinders Petrie in an
     article on “Eaten with Honour,” in which he reviews briefly
     the evidence for the custom in Egypt and elsewhere.

I put forth this work with the utmost diffidence. The harvest is vast
and the labourers are few. I have been engaged upon collecting and
comparing materials for more than twenty years. I have been engaged in
writing my book for more than ten. As I explain in the last chapter, the
present first sketch of the conclusions at which I have at last arrived
is little more than provisional. I desire in my present essay merely to
lay down the lines of the general theory which after so many years of
study I incline to accept. If my attempt succeeds in attracting public
attention, I hope to follow it up by several other volumes in which
the main opinions or suggestions here set forth may be reinforced and
expanded by copious collections of evidence and illustrations. If it
fails to arouse public attention, however, I must perforce be satisfied
with this very inadequate preliminary statement. I should also like to
add here, what I point out at greater length in the body of the work,
that I do not hold dogmatically to all or to a single one of the ideas
I have now expressed. They are merely conceptions forced upon my mind by
the present state of the evidence; and I recognise the fact that in so
vast and varied a province, where almost encyclopaedic knowledge would
be necessary in order to enable one to reach a decided conclusion, every
single one or all together of these conceptions are liable to be upset
by further research. I merely say, “This is how the matter figures
itself to me at present, on the strength of the facts now and here known
to us.”

A few chapters of the book were separately published in various reviews
at the time they were first written. They were composed, however, from
the outset, as parts of this book, which does not therefore consist
of disconnected essays thrown into line in an artificial unity. Each
occupies the precise place in the argument for which it was first
intended. The chapters in question are those on “Religion and
Mythology,” and “The Life of the Dead,” contributed under
the titles of “Practical Religion” and “Immortality and
Resurrection” to the _Fortnightly Re-view_; that on “Sacred
Stones,” contributed under the same name to the same periodical;
and that on “The Gods of Egypt,” which originally appeared in the
_Universal Review_. I have to thank the proprietors and editors of those
magazines for permission to print them in their proper place here. They
have all been altered and brought up as far as I could bring them to
the existing state of our knowledge with regard to the subjects of which
they treat.

In dealing with so large a variety of materials, drawn from all times
and places, races and languages, it would be well-nigh impossible
to avoid errors. Such as my own care could discover I have of course
corrected: for the rest, I must ask on this ground the indulgence of
those who may happen to note them.

I have endeavoured to write without favour or prejudice, animated by a
single desire to discover the truth. Whether I have succeeded in that
attempt or not, I trust my book may be received in the same spirit in
which it has been written,--a spirit of earnest anxiety to learn all
that can be learnt by enquiry and investigation of man’s connection
with his God, in the past and the present. In this hope I commit it to
the kindly consideration of that small section of the reading public
which takes a living interest in religious questions.




THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD.




CHAPTER I.--CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD.

|I propose in this work to trace out in rough outline the evolution of
the idea of God from its earliest and crudest beginnings in the savage
mind of primitive man to that highly evolved and abstract form which it
finally assumes in contemporary philosophical and theological thinking.

In the eyes of the modern evolutionary enquirer the interest of the
origin and history of this widespread idea is mainly psychological. We
have before us a vast and pervasive group of human opinions, true or
false, which have exercised and still exercise an immense influence upon
the development of mankind and of civilisation: the question arises, Why
did human beings ever come to hold these opinions at all, and how did
they arrive at them? What was there in the conditions of early man which
led him to frame to himself such abstract notions of one or more great
supernatural agents, of whose objective existence he had certainly
in nature no clear or obvious evidence? Regarding the problem in this
light, as essentially a problem of the processes of the human mind, I
set aside from the outset, as foreign to my purpose, any kind of enquiry
into the objective validity of any one among the religious beliefs thus
set {002}before us as subject-matter. The question whether there may
be a God or gods, and, if so, what may be his or their substance and
attributes, do not here concern us. All we have to do in our present
capacity is to ask ourselves strictly, What first suggested to the mind
of man the notion of deity in the abstract at all? And how, from the
early multiplicity of deities which we find to have prevailed in all
primitive times among all human races, did the conception of a single
great and unlimited deity first take its rise? In other words, why did
men ever believe there were gods at all, and why from many gods did
they arrive at one? Why from polytheism have the most advanced nations
proceeded to monotheism?

To put the question in this form is to leave entirely out of
consideration the objective reality or otherwise of the idea itself.
To analyse the origin of a concept is not to attack the validity of the
belief it encloses. The idea of gravitation, for example, arose by slow
degrees in human minds, and reached at last its final expression in
Newton’s law. But to trace the steps by which that idea was gradually
reached is not in any way to disprove or to discredit it. The Christian
believer may similarly hold that men arrived by natural stages at the
knowledge of the one true God; he is not bound to reject the final
conception as false merely because of the steps by which it was slowly
evolved. A creative God, it is true, might prefer to make a sudden
revelation of himself to some chosen body of men; but an evolutionary
God, we may well believe, might prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to
reveal his own existence and qualities to his creatures by means of
the same slow and tentative intellectual gropings as those by which
he revealed to them the physical truths of nature. I wish my enquiry,
therefore, to be regarded, not as destructive, but as reconstructive.
It only attempts to recover and follow out the various planes in the
evolution of the idea of God, rather than to cast doubt upon the truth
of the evolved concept.

In{003} investigating any abstruse and difficult subject, it is often
best to proceed from the known to the unknown, even although the unknown
itself may happen to come first in the order of nature and of logical
development. For this reason, it may be advisable to begin here with
a brief preliminary examination of Christianity, which is not only the
most familiar of all religions to us Christian nations, but also the
best known in its origins: and then to show how far we may safely use
it as a Standard of Reference in explaining the less obvious and certain
features of earlier or collateral cults.

Christianity, then, viewed as a religious standard, has this clear and
undeniable advantage over almost every other known form of faith--that
it quite frankly and confessedly sets out in its development with the
worship of a particular Deified Man.

This point in its history cannot, I think, be overrated in importance,
because in that single indubitable central fact it gives us the key to
much that is cardinal in all other religions; every one of which, as I
hope hereafter to show, equally springs, directly or indirectly, from
the worship of a single Deified Man, or of many Deified Men, more or
less etherealised.

Whatever else may be said about the origin of Christianity, it is at
least fairly agreed on either side, both by friends and foes, that
this great religion took its rise around the personality of a certain
particular Galilean teacher, by name Jesus, concerning whom, if we know
anything at all with any approach to certainty, we know at least that
he was a man of the people, hung on a cross in Jerusalem under the
procuratorship of Caius Pontius Pilatus. That kernel of fact--a man, and
his death--Jesus Christ and him crucified--is the one almost undoubted
historical nucleus round which all the rest of a vast European and
Asiatic system of thought and belief has slowly crystallised.

Let us figure clearly to ourselves the full import of these truths.
{004}A Deified Man is the central figure in the faith of Christendom.

From the very beginning, however, a legend, true or false (but whose
truth or falsity has no relation whatever to our present subject),
gathered about the personality of this particular Galilean peasant
reformer. Reverenced at first by a small body of disciples of his
own race and caste, he grew gradually in their minds into a divine
personage, of whom strange stories were told, and a strange history
believed by a group of ever-increasing adherents in all parts of the
Græco-Roman Mediterranean civilisation. The earliest of these stories,
in all probability--certainly the one to which most importance was
attached by the pioneers of the faith--clustered about his death and its
immediate sequence. Jesus, we are told, was crucified, dead, and buried.
But at the end of three days, if we may credit the early documents of
our Christian faith, his body was no longer to be found in the sepulchre
where it had been laid by friendly hands: and the report spread abroad
that he had risen again from the dead, and lived once more a somewhat
phantasmal life among the living in his province. Supernatural
messengers announced his resurrection to the women who had loved him: he
was seen in the flesh from time to time for very short periods by one
or other among the faithful who still revered his memory. At last,
after many such appearances, more or less fully described in the crude
existing narratives, he was suddenly carried up to the sky before the
eyes of his followers, where, as one of the versions authoritatively
remarks, he was “received into heaven, and sat on the right hand of
God”--that is to say, of Jahweh, the ethnical deity of the Hebrew
people.

Such in its kernel was the original Christian doctrine as handed down to
us amid a mist of miracle, in four or five documents of doubtful age and
uncertain authenticity. Even this central idea does not fully appear
in the Pauline epistles, believed to be the oldest in date of all our
Christian {005}writings: it first takes full shape in the somewhat
later Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. In the simplest and perhaps the
earliest of these definite accounts we are merely told the story of the
death and resurrection, the latter fact being vouched for on the
dubious testimony of “a young man clothed in a long white
garment,” supplemented (apparently at a later period) by subsequent
“appearances” to various believers. With the controversies
which have raged about these different stories, however, the broad
anthropological enquiry into the evolution of God has no concern. It is
enough for us here to admit, what the evidence probably warrants us in
concluding, that a real historical man of the name of Jesus did once
exist in Lower Syria, and that his disciples at a period very shortly
after his execution believed him to have actually risen from the dead,
and in due time to have ascended into heaven.

At a very early date, too, it was further asserted that Jesus was in
some unnatural or supernatural sense “the son of God”--that is to
say, once more, the son of Jahweh, the local and national deity of
the Jewish people. In other words, his worship was affiliated upon the
earlier historical worship of the people in whose midst he lived, and
from whom his first disciples were exclusively gathered. It was not, as
we shall more fully see hereafter, a revolutionary or purely destructive
system. It based itself upon the common conceptions of the Semitic
community. The handful of Jews and Galileans who accepted Jesus as a
divine figure did not think it necessary, in adopting him as a god,
to get rid of their own preconceived religious opinions. They believed
rather in his prior existence, as a part of Jahweh, and in his
incarnation in a human body for the purpose of redemption. And when his
cult spread around into neighboring countries (chiefly, it would seem,
through the instrumentality of one Paul of Tarsus, who had never seen
him, or had beheld him only in what is vaguely called “a vision”)
the cult {006}of Jahweh went hand in hand with it, so that a sort of
modified mystic monotheism, based on Judaism, became the early creed of
the new cosmopolitan Christian church.

Other legends, of a sort familiar in the lives of the founders of creeds
and churches elsewhere, grew up about the life of the Christian leader;
or at any rate, incidents of a typical kind were narrated by his
disciples as part of his history. That a god or a godlike person should
be born of a woman by the ordinary physiological processes of humanity
seems derogatory to his dignity--perhaps fatal to his godhead: *
therefore it was asserted--we know not whether truly or otherwise--that
the founder of Christianity, by some mysterious afflatus, was born of a
virgin. Though described at times as the son of one Joseph, a carpenter,
of Nazareth, and of Mary, his betrothed wife, he was also regarded in an
alternative way as the son of the Hebrew god Jahweh, just as Alexander,
though known to be the son of Philip, was also considered to be the
offspring of Amon-Ra or Zeus Ammon. We are told, in order to lessen
this discrepancy (on the slender authority of a dream of Joseph’s),
how Jesus was miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit of Jahweh in
Mary’s womb. He was further provided with a royal pedigree from the
house of David, a real or mythical early Hebrew king; and prophecies
from the Hebrew sacred books were found to be fulfilled in his most
childish adventures. In one of the existing biographies, commonly
ascribed to Luke, the companion of Paul, but supposed to bear traces of
much later authorship, many such marvellous stories are recounted of
his infantile adventures: and in all our documents, miracles attest his
supernatural powers, while appeal is constantly made to the fulfilment
of supposed predictions (all of old Hebrew origin) as a test and
credential of the reality of his divine mission.

     * On this subject, see Mr. Sidney Hartland’s Legend of
     Perseus, vol. i.

We {007}shall see hereafter that these two points--the gradual growth
of a myth or legend, and affiliation upon earlier local religious
ideas--are common features in the evolution of gods in general, and of
the God of monotheism in particular. In almost every case where we can
definitely track him to his rise, the deity thus begins with a Deified
Man, elevated by his worshippers to divine rank, and provided with a
history of miraculous incident, often connected with the personality of
preexistent deities.

In the earlier stages, it seems pretty clear that the relations of
nascent Christianity to Judaism were vague and undefined: the Christians
regarded themselves as a mere sect of the Jews, who paid special
reverence to a particular dead teacher, now raised to heaven by a
special apotheosis of a kind with which everyone was then familiar. But
as the Christian church spread to other lands, by the great seaports, it
became on the one hand more distinct and exclusive, while on the other
hand it became more definitely dogmatic and theological. It was in
Egypt, it would seem, that the Christian Pantheon (if I may be allowed
the expression in the case of a religion nominally monotheistic) first
took its definite Trinitarian shape. Under the influence of the old
Egyptian love for Triads or Trinities of gods, a sort of mystical triune
deity was at last erected out of the Hebrew Jahweh and the man Jesus,
with the aid of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom of Jahweh, which had come
to be regarded by early Christian minds (under the influence of direct
divine inspiration or otherwise) as a separate and coordinate person of
this composite godhead. How far the familiar Egyptian Trinity of Osiris,
Isis, and Horus may have influenced the conception of the Christian
Trinity, thus finally made up of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we shall
discuss at a later stage of our enquiry; for the present, it may suffice
to point out that the Græco-Egyptian Athanasius was the great upholder
of the definite dogma of the Trinity against opposing (heretical)
Christian thinkers; and {008}that the hymn or so-called creed known by
his name (though not in all probability of his own composition) bears
the impress of the mystical Egyptian spirit, tempered by the Alexandrian
Greek delight in definiteness and minuteness of philosophical
distinction.

In this respect, too, we shall observe in the sequel that the history of
Christianity, the most known among the religions, was exactly parallel
to that of earlier and obscurer creeds. At first, the relations of the
gods to one another are vague and undetermined; their pedigree is often
confused and even contradictory; and the pantheon lacks anything like
due hierarchical system or subordination of persons. But as time goes
on, and questions of theology or mythology are debated among the priests
and other interested parties, details of this sort get settled in the
form of rigid dogmas, while subtle distinctions of a philosophical or
metaphysical sort tend to be imported by more civilised men into the
crude primitive faith. The belief that began with frank acceptance of
Judaism, plus a personal worship of the Deified Man, Jesus, crystallised
at last into the Catholic Faith in one God, of three persons, the
Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Quibbles are even made, and discussions raised at last as to the
question whether Father and Son are “of one substance” or only “of
like substance”; whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and
the Son, or from the Father only; and so on _ad infinitum_.

It was largely in other countries than Judæa, and especially in Gaul,
Rome, and Egypt, too, as I believe, that symbolism came to the aid of
mysticism: that the cross, the tau, the labarum, the fish, the Alpha
and Omega, and all the other early Christian emblems were evolved and
perfected; and that the beginnings of Christian art took their first
definite forms. Such forms were especially to a great extent evolved
in the Roman catacombs. Christianity, being a universal, not a local or
national, religion, has {009}adopted in its course many diverse elements
from most varied sources.

Originally, it would seem, the Christian pantheon was almost exclusively
filled by the triune God, in his three developments or “persons,”
as thus rigorously conceived by the Alexandrian intelligence. But from
a very early time, if not from the first dawn of the Christian cult, it
was customary to reverence the remains of those who had suffered for the
faith, and perhaps even to invoke their aid with Christ and the Father.
The Roman branch of the church, especially, accustomed to the Roman
ancestor-worship and the Roman reverence for the Du Manes, had its
chief places of prayer in the catacombs, where its dead were laid.
Thus arose the practice of the invocation of saints, at whose graves
or relics prayers were offered, both to the supreme deity and to the
faithful dead themselves as intercessors with Christ and the Father. The
early Christians, accustomed in their heathen stage to pay respect
and even worship to the spirits of their deceased friends, could not
immediately give up this pious custom after their conversion to the
new creed, and so grafted it on to their adopted religion. Thus the
subsidiary founders of Christianity, Paul, Peter, the Apostles, the
Evangelists, the martyrs, the confessors, came to form, as it were, a
subsidiary pantheon, and to rank to some extent almost as an inferior
order of deities.

Among the persons who thus shared in the honours of the new faith,
the mother of Jesus early assumed a peculiar prominence. Goddesses
had filled a very large part in the devotional spirit of the older
religions: it was but natural that the devotees of Isis and Pasht, of
Artemis and Aphrodite, should look for some corresponding object of
feminine worship in the younger faith. The Theotokos, the mother of
God, the blessed Madonna, soon came to possess a practical importance
in Christian worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by the persons of
the Trinity themselves--in certain southern countries, indeed, actually
superior {010}to it. The Virgin and Child, in pictorial representation,
grew to be the favourite subject of Christian art. How far this
particular development of the Christian spirit had its origin in Egypt,
and was related to the well-known Egyptian figures of the goddess
Isis with the child Horus in her lap, is a question which may demand
consideration in some future treatise. For the present, it will be
enough to call attention in passing to the fact that in this secondary
rank of deities or semi-divine persons, the saints and martyrs, all
alike, from the Blessed Virgin Mary down to the newest canonised among
Roman Catholic prelates, were at one time or another Living Men and
Women. In other words, besides the one Deified Man, Jesus, round whom
the entire system of Christianity centres, the Church now worships also
in the second degree a whole host of minor Dead Men and Women, bishops,
priests, virgins, and confessors.

From the earliest to the latest ages of the Church, the complexity thus
long ago introduced into her practice has gone on increasing with every
generation. Nominally from the very outset a monotheistic religion,
Christianity gave up its strict monotheism almost at the first start by
admitting the existence of three persons in the godhead, whom it vainly
endeavoured to unify by its mystic but confessedly incomprehensible
Athanasian dogma. The Madonna (with the Child) rose in time practically
to the rank of an independent goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic
theory): while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John Baptist, St.
Catherine, and even St. Thomas of Canterbury himself, became as
important objects of worship in certain places as the deity in person.
At Milan, for example, San Carlo Borromeo, at Compostella, Santiago, at
Venice, St. Mark, usurped to a great extent the place of the original
God. As more and more saints died in each generation, while the cult of
the older saints still lingered on everywhere more or less locally,
the secondary pantheon grew ever fuller and fuller. Obscure personages,
{011}like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas, St. Chad and St. Cuthbert rose
to the rank of departmental or local patrons, like the departmental and
local gods of earlier religions. Every trade, every guild, every nation,
every province, had its peculiar saint. And at the same time, the
theory of the Church underwent a constant evolution. Creed was added
to creed--Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth, each embodying
some new and often subtle increment to the whole mass of accepted dogma.
Council after council made fresh additions of articles of faith--the
Unity of Substance, the Doctrine of the Atonement, the Immaculate
Conception, the Authority of the Church, the Infallibility of the Pope
in his spiritual capacity. And all these also are well-known incidents
of every evolving cult: constant increase in the number of divine
beings; constant refinements in the articles of religion, under the
influence of priestly or scholastic metaphysics.

Two or three other points must still be noted in this hasty review of
the evolution of Christianity, regarded as a standard of religion; and
these I will now proceed to consider with all possible brevity.

In the matter of ceremonial and certain other important accessories of
religion it must frankly be admitted that Christianity rather borrowed
from the older cults than underwent a natural and original development
on its own account. A priesthood, as such, does not seem to have formed
any integral or necessary part of the earliest Christendom: and when
the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons were introduced into the
new creed, the idea seems to have been derived rather from the existing
priesthoods of anterior religions than from any organic connexion
with the central facts of the new worship. From the very nature of the
circumstances this would inevitably result. For the primitive temple
(as we shall see hereafter) was the Dead Man’s tomb; the altar was
his gravestone; and the priest was the relative or representative who
continued for him the customary gifts to the ghost {012}at the grave.
But the case of Jesus differs from almost every other case on record of
a Deified Man in this--that his body seems to have disappeared at an
early date; and that, inasmuch as his resurrection and ascension into
heaven were made the corner-stone of the new faith, it was impossible
for worship of his remains to take the same form as had been taken in
the instances of almost all previously deified Dead Persons. Thus, the
materials out of which the Temple, the Altar, Sacrifices, Priesthood,
are usually evolved (as we shall hereafter see) were here to a very
large extent necessarily wanting.

Nevertheless, so essential to religion in the minds of its followers
are all these imposing and wonted accessories that our cult did actually
manage to borrow them readymade from the great religions that went
before it, and to bring them into some sort of artificial relation with
its own system. You cannot revolutionize the human mind at one blow.
The pagans had been accustomed to all these ideas as integral parts
of religion as they understood it: and they proceeded as Christians
to accommodate them by side-issues to the new faith, in which these
elements had no such natural place as in the older creeds. Not only did
sacred places arise at the graves or places of martyrdom of the saints;
not only was worship performed beside the bones of the holy dead, in the
catacombs and elsewhere; but even a mode of sacrifice and of sacrificial
communion was invented in the mass,--a somewhat artificial development
from the possibly unsacerdotal Agape-feasts of the primitive Christians.
Gradually, churches gathered around the relics of the martyr saints: and
in time it became a principle of usage that every church must contain
an altar--made of stones on the analogy of the old sacred stones;
containing the bones or other relics of a saint, like all earlier
shrines; consecrated by the pouring on of oil after the antique fashion;
and devoted to the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass,
which became by degrees more and more expiatory and sacerdotal in
{013}character. As the saints increased in importance, new holy places
sprang up around their bodies; and some of these holy places, containing
their tombs, became centres of pilgrimage for the most distant parts of
Christendom; as did also in particular the empty tomb of Christ himself,
the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.

The growth of the priesthood kept pace with the growth of ceremonial in
general, till at last it culminated in the mediaeval papacy, with its
hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and other
endless functionaries. Vestments, incense, and like accompaniments of
sacerdotalism also rapidly gained ground. All this, too, is a common
trait of higher religious evolution everywhere. So likewise are fasting,
vigils, and the ecstatic condition. But asceticism, monasticism,
celibacy, and other forms of morbid abstinence are peculiarly rife in
the east, and found their highest expression in the life of the Syrian
and Egyptian hermits.

Lastly, a few words must be devoted in passing to the rise and
development of the Sacred Books, now excessively venerated in
North-western Christendom. These consisted in the first instance
of genuine or spurious letters of the apostles to the various local
churches (the so-called Epistles), some of which would no doubt be
preserved with considerable reverence; and later of lives or legends of
Jesus and his immediate successors (the so-called Gospels and the Acts
of the Apostles). Furthermore, as Christianity adopted from Judaism
the cult of its one supreme divine figure, now no longer envisaged
as Jahweh, the national deity of the Hebrews, but as a universal
cosmopolitan God and Father, it followed naturally that the sacred books
of the Jewish people, the literature of Jahweh-worship, should also
receive considerable attention at the hands of the new priesthood. By a
gradual process of selection and elimination, the canon of scripture
was evolved from these heterogeneous materials: the historical or
quasi-historical and prophetic Hebrew {014}tracts were adopted by the
Church, with a few additions of later date, such as the Book of Daniel,
under the style and title of the Old Testament. The more generally
accepted lives of Christ, again, known as Evangels or Gospels; the Acts
of the Apostles; the epistles to the churches; and that curious mystical
allegory of the Neronian persecution known as the Apocalypse, were
chosen out of the mass of early Christian literature to form the
authoritative collection of inspired writing which we call the New
Testament. The importance of this heterogeneous anthology of works
belonging to all ages and systems, but confounded together in popular
fancy under the name of the Books, or more recently still as a singular
noun, the Bible, grew apace with the growth of the Church: though the
extreme and superstitions adoration of their mere verbal contents has
only been reached in the debased and reactionary forms of Christianity
followed at the present day by our half-educated English and American
Protestant dissenters.

From this very brief review of the most essential factors in the
development of the Christian religion as a system, strung loosely
together with a single eye to the requirements of our present
investigation, it will be obvious at once to every intelligent reader
that Christianity cannot possibly throw for us any direct or immediate
light on the problem of the evolution of the idea of God. Not only
did the concept of a god and gods exist full-fledged long before
Christianity took its rise at all, but also the purely monotheistic
conception of a single supreme God, the creator and upholder of all
things, had been reached in all its sublime simplicity by the Jewish
teachers centuries before the birth of the man Jesus. Christianity
borrowed from Judaism this magnificent concept, and, humanly speaking,
proceeded to spoil it by its addition of the Son and the Holy Ghost, who
mar the complete unity of the grand Hebrew ideal. Even outside Judaism,
the selfsame notion had already been arrived at in a certain mystical
{015}form as the “esoteric doctrine” of the Egyptian priesthood;
from whom, with their peculiar views as to emanations and Triads, the
Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the Logos, the Incarnation, and the
Holy Ghost were in large part borrowed. The Jews of Alexandria, that
eastern London, formed the connecting link between Egyptian
heathenism, Hellenic philosophy, and early Christianity; and their
half-philosophical, half-religious ideas may be found permeating the
first writings and the first systematic thought of the nascent church.
In none of these ways, therefore, can we regard Christianity as
affording us any direct or immediate guidance in our search for the
origin and evolution of the concepts of many gods, and of one God the
creator.

Still, in a certain secondary and illustrative sense, I think we are
fully justified in saying that the history of Christianity, the religion
whose beginnings are most surely known to us, forms a standard of
reference for all the other religions of the world, and helps us
indirectly to understand and explain the origin and evolution of these
deepest among our fundamental spiritual conceptions.

Its value in this respect may best be understood if I point out briefly
in two contrasted statements the points in which it may and the points
in which it may not be fairly accepted as a typical religion.

Let us begin first with the points in which it may.

In the first place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in the fact that
beyond all doubt its most central divine figure was at first, by common
consent of orthodox and heterodox alike, nothing other than a particular
Deified Man. All else that has been asserted about this particular
Man--that he was the Son of God, that he was the incarnation of the
Logos, that he existed previously from all eternity, that he sits now on
the right hand of the Father--all the rest of these theological stories
do nothing in any way to obscure the plain and universally admitted
historical fact that this Divine Person, the Very God of Very God, being
of one {016}substance with the Father, begotten of the Father before all
worlds, was yet, at the moment when we first catch a glimpse of him
in the writings of his followers, a Man recently deceased, respected,
reverenced, and perhaps worshipped by a little group of fellow-peasants
who had once known him as Jesus, the son of the carpenter. On that
unassailable Rock of solid historical fact we may well be content to
found our argument in this volume. Here at least nobody can accuse us
of “crude and gross Euhemerism.” Or rather the crude and gross
Euhemerism is here known to represent the solid truth. Jesus and his
saints--Dominic, Francis, Catherine of Siena--are no mere verbal myths,
no allegorical concepts, no personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the
Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present from our purview of the Faith
that one element of the older supreme God--the Hebrew Jahweh,--whom
Christianity borrowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we can say at
least with perfect certainty that every single member of the Christian
pantheon--Jesus, the Madonna, St. John Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles,
the Evangelists--were, just as much as San Carlo Borromeo or St. Thomas
of Canterbury or St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, worshipped after their
death with divine or quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known of
all human religions, the one that has grown up under the full eye of
history, the one whose gods and saints are most distinctly traceable,
every object of worship, save only the single early and as yet
unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose origin is lost for us in the
mist of ages, turns out on enquiry to be indeed a purely Euhemeristic
god or saint,--in ultimate analysis, a Real Man or Woman.

That point alone I hold to be of cardinal importance, and of immense or
almost inestimable illustrative value, in seeking for the origin of the
idea of a god in earlier epochs.

In the second place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in all that
concerns its subsequent course of evolution; the gradual {017}elevation
of its central Venerated Man into a God of the highest might and
power; the multiplication of secondary deities or saints by worship or
adoration of other Dead Men and Women; the growth of a graduated and
duly subordinated hierarchy of divine personages; the rise of a legend,
with its miracles and other supernatural adjuncts; the formation of a
definite theology, philosophy, and systematic dogmatism; the development
of special artistic forms, and the growth or adoption of appropriate
symbolism; the production of sacred books, rituals, and formularies;
the rise of ceremonies, mysteries, initiations, and sacraments; the
reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs, and dead bodies; and the
close connexion of the religion as a whole with the ideas of death,
the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the resurrection of the body, the last
judgment, hell, heaven, the life everlasting, and all the other vast
group of concepts which surround the simple fact of death in the
primitive human mind generally.

Now, in the second place, let us look wherein Christianity to a certain
small extent fails to be typical, or at least to solve our fundamental
problems.

It fails to be typical because it borrows largely a whole ready-made
theology, and above all a single supreme God, from a pre-existent
religion. In so far as it takes certain minor features from other cults,
we can hardly say with truth that it does not represent the average run
of religious systems; for almost every particular new creed so bases
itself upon elements of still earlier faiths; and it is perhaps
impossible for us at the present day to get back to anything like a
really primitive or original form of cult. But Christianity is very far
removed indeed from all primitive cults in that it accepts ready-made
the monotheistic conception, the high-water-mark, so to speak, of
religious philosophising. While in the frankness with which it exhibits
to us what is practically one half of its supreme deity as a Galilean
peasant of undoubted humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised,
it allows us to get down at a single {018}step to the very origin of
godhead; yet in the strength with which it asserts for the other half
of its supreme deity (the Father, with his shadowy satellite the Holy
Ghost) an immemorial antiquity and a complete severance from human life,
it is the least anthropomorphic and the most abstract of creeds. In
order to track the idea of God to its very source, then, we must apply
in the last resort to this unresolved element of Christianity--the
Hebrew Jahweh--the same sort of treatment which we apply to the
conception of Jesus or Buddha;--we must show it to be also the
immensely transfigured and magnified ghost of a Human Being; in the
simple and forcible language of Swinburne, “The shade cast by the soul
of man.”

Furthermore, Christianity fails to be typical in that it borrows also
from pre-existing religions to a great extent the ideas of priesthood,
sacrifice, the temple, the altar, which, owing to the curious
disappearance or at least un-recognisability of the body of its founder
(or, rather, its central object of worship), have a less natural place
in our Christian system than in any other known form of religious
practice. It is quite true that magnificent churches, a highly-evolved
sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the mass, the altar, and the
relics, have all been imported in their fullest shape into developed
Christianity, especially in its central or Roman form. But every one
of these things is partly borrowed, almost as a survival or even as
an alien feature, from earlier religions, and partly grew up about the
secondary worship of saints and martyrs, their bones, their tombs, their
catacombs, and their reliquaries. Christianity itself, particularly when
viewed as the worship of Christ (to which it has been largely reduced in
Teutonic Europe), does not so naturally lend itself to these secondary
ceremonies; and in those debased schismatic forms of the Church which
confine themselves most strictly to the worship of Jesus and of the
supreme God, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism have been brought down to
a minimum, {019}so that the temple and the altar have lost the greater
part of their sacrificial importance.

I propose, then, in subsequent chapters, to trace the growth of the
idea of a God from the most primitive origins to the most highly evolved
forms; beginning with the ghost, and the early undeveloped deity:
continuing through polytheism to the rise of monotheism; and then
returning at last once more to the full Christian conception, which we
shall understand far better in detail after we have explained the nature
of the yet unresolved or but provisionally resolved Jehovistic element.
I shall try to show, in short, the evolution of God, by starting with
the evolution of gods in general, and coming down by gradual stages
through various races to the evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and
Moslem God in particular. ‘And the goal towards which I shall move will
be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter,--the proof
that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of
a Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed
with increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.




CHAPTER II.--RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.

|At {020}the very outset of the profound enquiry on which we are now
about to embark, we are met by a difficulty of considerable magnitude.
In the opinion of most modern mythologists mythology is the result of
“a disease of language.” We are assured by many eminent men that the
origin of religion is to be sought, not in savage ideas about ghosts
and spirits, the Dead Man and his body or his surviving double, but in
primitive misconceptions of the meaning of words which had reference
to the appearance of the Sun and the Clouds, the Wind and the Rain, the
Dawn and the Dusk, the various phenomena of meteorology in general. If
this be so, then our attempt to derive the evolution of gods from the
crude ideas of early men about their dead is clearly incorrect; the
analogy of Christianity which we have already alleged is a mere will
o’ the wisp; and the historical Jesus himself may prove in the
last resort to be an alias of the sun-god or an embodiment of the
vine-spirit.

I do not believe these suggestions are correct. It seems to me that
the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of being an element in
primitive religion, is really a late and derivative type of adoration;
and that mythology is mistaken in the claims it makes for its own
importance in the genesis of the idea of a God or gods. In order,
however, to clear the ground for a fair start in this direction, we
ought, I think, to begin by enquiring into the relative positions of
mythology and religion. I shall therefore {021}devote a preliminary
chapter to the consideration of this important subject.

Religion, says another group of modern thinkers, of whom Mr. Edward
Clodd is perhaps the most able English exponent, “grew out of fear.”
It is born of man’s terror of the great and mysterious natural agencies
by which he is surrounded. Now I am not concerned to deny that many
mythological beings of various terrible forms do really so originate. I
would readily accept some such vague genesis for many of the dragons and
monsters which abound in all savage or barbaric imaginings--for
Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire, and other manifold shapes of the
superstitiously appalling. I would give up to Mr. Clodd the Etruscan
devils and the Hebrew Satan, the Grendels and the Fire-drakes, the
whole brood of Cerberus, Briareus, the Cyclops, the Centaurs. None of
these, however, is a god or anything like one. They have no more to do
with religion, properly so called, than the unicorn of the royal arms
has to do with British Christianity. A god, as I understand the
word, and as the vast mass of mankind has always understood it, is
a supernatural being to be revered and worshipped. He stands to his
votaries, on the whole, as Dr. Robertson Smith has well pointed out, in
a kindly and protecting relation. He may be angry with them at times, to
be sure; but his anger is temporary and paternal alone: his permanent
attitude towards his people is one of friendly concern; he is worshipped
as a beneficent and generous Father. It is the origin of gods in this
strictest sense that concerns us here, not the origin of those vague
and formless creatures which are dreaded, not worshipped, by primitive
humanity.

Bearing this distinction carefully in mind, let us proceed to consider
the essentials of religion. If you were to ask almost any intelligent
and unsophisticated child, “What is religion?” he would answer
offhand, with the clear vision of youth, “Oh, it’s saying your
prayers, and heading your Bible, and singing hymns, and going to church
{022}or to chapel on Sundays.” If you were to ask any intelligent
and unsophisticated Hindu peasant the same question, he would answer in
almost the self-same spirit, “Oh, it is doing poojah regularly,
and paying your dues every day to Mahadeo.” If you were to ask any
simple-minded African savage, he would similarly reply, “It is giving
the gods flour, and oil, and native beer, and goat-mutton,” And
finally if you were to ask a devout Italian contadino, he would
instantly say, “It is offering up candles and prayers to the Madonna,
attending mass, and remembering the saints on every festa.”

And they would all be quite right. This, in its essence, is precisely
what we call religion. Apart from the special refinements of the
higher minds in particular creeds, which strive to import into it all,
according to their special tastes or fancies, a larger or smaller dose
of philosophy, or of metaphysics, or of ethics, or of mysticism, this
is just what religion means and has always meant to the vast majority
of the human species. What is common to it throughout is Custom
or Practice: a certain set of more or less similar Observances:
propitiation, prayer, praise, offerings: the request for divine favours,
the deprecation of divine anger or other misfortunes: and as the outward
and visible adjuncts of all these, the altar, the sacrifice, the temple,
the church; priesthood, services, vestments, ceremonial.

What is not at all essential to religion in its wider aspect--taking
the world round, both past and present, Pagan, Buddhist, Mohammadan,
Christian, savage, and civilised--is the ethical element, properly so
called. And what is very little essential indeed is the philosophical
element, theology or mythology, the abstract theory of spiritual
existences. This theory, to be sure, is in each country or race closely
related with religion under certain aspects; and the stories told about
the gods or God are much mixed up with the cult itself in the minds
of worshippers; but they are no proper part of religion, strictly
so called. In a single word, I contend that religion, as such,
is essentially {023}practical: theology or mythology, as such, is
essentially theoretical.

Moreover, I also believe, and shall attempt to show, that the two have
to a large extent distinct origins and roots: that the union between
them is in great part adventitious: and that, therefore, to account
for or explain the one is by no means equivalent to accounting for and
explaining the other.

Frank recognition of this difference of origin between religion and
mythology would, I imagine, largely reconcile the two conflicting
schools of thought which at present divide opinion between them on this
interesting problem in the evolution of human ideas. On the one side,
we have the mythological school of interpreters, whether narrowly
linguistic, like Professor Max Müller, or broadly anthropological, like
Mr. Andrew Lang, attacking the problem from the point of view of myth or
theory alone. On the other side, we have the truly religious school of
interpreters, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, and to some extent Mr. Tylor,
attacking the problem from the point of view of practice or real
religion. The former school, it seems to me, has failed to perceive
that what it is accounting for is not the origin of religion at all--of
worship, which is the central-root idea of all religious observance, or
of the temple, the altar, the priest, and the offering, which are its
outer expression--but merely the origin of myth or fable, the mass
of story and legend about various beings, real or imaginary, human
or divine, which naturally grows up in every primitive community. The
latter school, on the other hand, while correctly interpreting the
origin of all that is essential and central in religion, have perhaps
underestimated the value of their opponents’ work through regarding it
as really opposed to their own, instead of accepting what part of it
may be true in the light of a contribution to an independent but allied
branch of the same enquiry.

In short, if the view here suggested be correct, Spencer and {024}Tylor
have paved the way to a true theory of the Origin of Religion; Max
Müller, Lang, and the other mythologists have thrown out hints of
varying value towards a true theory of the Origin of Mythology, or of
its more modern equivalent and successor, Theology.

A brief outline of facts will serve to bring into clearer relief
this view of religion as essentially practical--a set of observances,
rendered inevitable by the primitive data of human psychology. It will
then be seen that what is fundamental and essential in religion is the
body of practices, remaining throughout all stages of human development
the same, or nearly the same, in spite of changes of mythological or
theological theory; and that what is accidental and variable is the
particular verbal explanation or philosophical reason assigned for the
diverse rites and ceremonies.

In its simplest surviving savage type, religion consists wholly and
solely in certain acts of deference paid by the living to the persons of
the dead. I shall try to show in the sequel that down to its most highly
evolved modern type in the most cultivated societies, precisely similar
acts of deference, either directly to corpses or ghosts as such, or
indirectly to gods who were once ghosts, or were developed from ghosts,
form its essence still. But to begin with I will try to bring a few
simple instances of the precise nature of religion in its lowest
existing savage mode.

I might if I chose take my little collection of illustrative facts from
some theoretical writer, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has collected
enough instances in all conscience to prove this point; but I prefer
to go straight to an original observer of savage life and habit, a
Presbyterian missionary in Central Africa--the Rev. Duff Macdonald,
author of _Africana_--who had abundant opportunities at the Blantyre
Mission for learning the ideas and practice of the Soudanese natives,
and who certainly had no theoretic predisposition towards resolving all
religious notions into {025}the primitive respect and reverence for the
dead or the worship of ancestors.

Here, in outline, but in Mr. Macdonald’s own words, are the ideas and
observances which this careful and accurate investigator found current
among the tribes of the heart of Africa. “I do not think,” he says,
“I have admitted any point of importance without having heard at least
four natives on the subject. The statements are translations, as far as
possible, from the _ipsissima verba_ of the negroes.”

The tribes he lived among “are unanimous in saying that there is
something beyond the body which they call spirit. Every human body at
death is forsaken by this spirit.” That is the almost universal though
not quite primitive belief, whose necessary genesis has been well traced
out by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and more recently in America with great
vigour and clearness by Mr. Lester Ward.

“Do these spirits ever die?” Mr. Macdonald asks. “Some,” he
answers, “I have heard affirm that it is possible for a troublesome
spirit to be killed. Others give this a direct denial. Many, like
Kumpama, or Cherasulo, say, ‘You ask me whether a man’s spirit ever
dies. I cannot tell. I have never been in the spirit-world, but this I
am certain of, that spirits live for a very long time.’”

On the question, “Who the gods are?” Mr. Macdonald says: “In
all our translations of Scripture where we found the word God we used
_Mulungu_; but this word is chiefly used by the natives as a general
name for spirit. The spirit of a deceased man is called his Mulungu,
and all the prayers and offerings of the living are presented to such
spirits of the dead. It is here that we find the great centre of the
native religion. The spirits of the dead are the gods of the living.

“Where are these gods found? At the grave? No. The villagers shrink
from yonder gloomy place that lies far beyond their fields on the bleak
mountain side. It is only {026}when they have to lay another sleeper
beside his forefathers that they will go there. Their god is not the
body in the grave, but the spirit, and they seek this spirit at the
place where their departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the
great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s house that is their
temple; and if no tree grow here they erect a little shade, and
there perform their simple rites. If this spot become too public,
the offerings may be defiled, and the sanctuary will be removed to a
carefully-selected spot under some beautiful tree. Very frequently a
man presents an offering at the top of his own bed beside his head. He
wishes his god to come to him and whisper in his ear as he sleeps.”

And here, again, we get the origin of nature-worship:

“The spirit of an old chief may have a whole mountain for his
residence, but he dwells chiefly on the cloudy summit. There he sits
to receive the worship of his votaries, and to send down the refreshing
showers in answer to their prayers.”

Almost as essential to religion as these prime factors in its
evolution--the god, worship, offerings, presents, holy places,
temples--is the existence of a priesthood. Here is how the Central
Africans arrive at that special function:

“A certain amount of etiquette is observed in approaching the gods.
In no case can a little boy or girl approach these deities, neither can
anyone that has not been at the mysteries. The common qualification
is that a person has attained a certain age, about twelve or fourteen
years, and has a house of his own. Slaves seldom pray, except when they
have had a dream. Children that have had a dream tell their mother,
who approaches the deity on their behalf. (A present for the god is
necessary, and the slave or child may not have it.)

“Apart from the case of dreams and a few such private matters, it
is not usual for anyone to approach the gods except the chief, of the
village. He is the recognised high priest {027}who presents prayers and
offerings on behalf of all that live in his village. If the chief
is from home his wife will act, and if both are absent, his younger
brother. The natives worship not so much individually as in villages or
communities. Their religion is more a public than a private matter.”

But there are also further reasons why priests are necessary.
Relationship forms always a good ground for intercession. A mediator is
needed.

“The chief of a village,” says Mr. Macdonald, “has another title
to the priesthood. It is his relatives that are the village gods.
Everyone that lives in the village recognises these gods; but if anyone
remove to another village he changes his gods. He recognises now the
gods of his new chief. One wishing to pray to the god (or gods) of any
village naturally desires to have his prayers presented through the
village chief, because the latter is nearly related to the village god,
and may be expected to be better listened to than a stranger.”

A little further on Mr. Macdonald says: “On the subject of the village
gods opinions differ. Some say that every one in the village, whether a
relative of the chief or not, must worship the forefathers of the chief.
Others say that a person not related to the chief must worship his own
forefathers, otherwise their spirits will bring trouble upon him. To
reconcile these authorities we may mention that nearly everyone in the
village is related to its chief, or if not related is, in courtesy,
considered so. Any person not related to the village chief would be
polite enough on all public occasions to recognise the village god:
on occasions of private prayer (which are not so numerous as in
Christendom) he would approach the spirits of his own forefathers.
Besides, there might be a god of the land. The chief Kapeni prays to his
own relatives, and also to the old gods of the place. His own relatives
he approaches himself; the other deities he may also approach himself,
but he often {028}finds people more closely related and consequently
more acceptable to the old gods of the land.”

The African pantheon is thus widely peopled. Elimination and natural
selection next give one the transition from the ghost to the god,
properly so called.

“The gods of the natives then are nearly as numerous as their dead. It
is impossible to worship all; a selection must be made, and, as we have
indicated, each worshipper turns most naturally to the spirits of his
own departed relatives; but his gods are too many still, and in farther
selecting he turns to those that have lived nearest his own time.
Thus the chief of a village will not trouble himself about his
great-great-grandfather: he will present his offering to his own
immediate predecessor, and say, ‘O father, I do not know all your
relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.’ The
offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his
relatives.”

Ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with the generation that knew them.
Not so a few select spirits, the Cæsars and Napoleons, the Charlemagnes
and Timurs of savage empires.

“A great chief that has been successful in his wars does not pass out
of memory so soon. He may become the god of a mountain or a lake, and
may receive homage as a local deity long after his own descendants have
been driven from the spot. When there is a supplication for rain the
inhabitants of the country pray not so much to their own forefathers as
to the god of yonder mountain on whose shoulders the great rain-clouds
repose. (Smaller hills are seldom honoured with a deity.)”

Well, in all this we get, it seems to me, the very essentials and
universals of religion generally,--the things without which no religion
could exist--the vital part, without the ever-varying and changeable
additions of mere gossiping mythology. In the presents brought to the
dead man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the central element of
all worship, the practical key of all cults, past or present.

On {029}the other hand, mythologists tell us nothing about the origin of
prayer and sacrifice: they put us off with stories of particular gods,
without explaining to us how those gods ever came to be worshipped. Now,
mythology is a very interesting study in its own way: but to treat as
religion a mass of stories and legends about gods or saints, with hardly
a single living element of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply to
confuse two totally distinct branches of human enquiry. The Origin of
Tales has nothing at all to do with the Origin of Worship.

When we come to read Mr. Macdonald’s account of a native funeral,
on the other hand, we are at once on a totally different tack; we can
understand, as by an electric flash, the genesis of the primitive acts
of sacrifice and religion.

“Along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his
property. We have already seen that his bed is buried with him; so also
are all his clothes. If he possesses several tusks of ivory, one tusk or
more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. Beads
are also ground down in the same way. These precautions are taken to
prevent the witch (who is supposed to be answerable for his death) from
making any use of the ivory or beads.

“If the deceased owned several slaves, an enormous hole is dug for a
grave. The slaves are now brought forward. They may be either cast into
the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. The body of
their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs,
and the grave is covered in.

“After this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and
place them at the head of the grave. The dishes in which the food was
brought are left behind. The pot that held the drinking-water of the
deceased and his drinking-cup are also left with him. These, too, might
be coveted by the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot, and the
drinking calabash is broken.

“The {030}man has now gone from the society of the living, and he is
expected to share the meal thus left at his grave with those that have
gone before him. The funeral party breaks up; they do not want to visit
the grave of their friend again without a very good reason. Anyone found
among the graves may be taken for a cannibal. Their friend has become
a citizen of a different village. He is with all his relatives of the
past. He is entitled to offerings or presents which may come to him
individually or through his chief. These offerings in most cases he will
share with others, just as he used to do when alive,” Sometimes the
man may be buried in his own hut.

“In this case the house is not taken down, but is generally covered
with cloth, and the verandah becomes the place for presenting offerings.
His old house thus becomes a kind of temple.... The deceased is now in
the spirit-world, and receives offerings and adoration. He is addressed
as ‘Our great spirit that has gone before.’ If anyone dream of him. it
is at once concluded that the spirit is ‘up to something.’ Very likely
he wants to have some of the survivors for his companions. The dreamer
hastens to appease the spirit by an offering.”

So real is this society of the dead that Mr. Macdonald says: “The
practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the grave is found on
the West Coast. A chief summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and
then cuts off his head. If the chief forget anything that he wanted to
say, he sends another slave as a postscript.”

I have quoted at such length from this recent and extremely able work
because I want to bring into strong relief the fact that we have here
going on under our very eyes, from day to day, _de novo_, the entire
genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of all that is most central
and essential to religion--worship, prayer, the temple, the altar,
priesthood, sacrifice. Nothing that the mythologists can tell us about
the Sun or the Moon, the Dawn or the Stormcloud, {031}Little Red Riding
Hood or Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, comes anywhere near the Origin
of Religion in these its central and universal elements. Those stories
or guesses may be of immense interest and importance as contributions
to the history of ideas in our race; but nothing we can learn about the
savage survival in the myth of Cupid or Psyche, or about the primitive
cosmology in the myth of the children of Kronos, helps us to get one
inch nearer the origin of God or of prayer, of worship, of religious
ceremonial, of the temple, the church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any
other component part of what we really know as Religion in the concrete.
These myths may be sometimes philosophic guesses, sometimes primitive
folk-tales, but they certainly are not the truths of Religion. On the
other hand, the living facts, here so simply detailed by a careful,
accurate, and unassuming observer, strengthened by the hundreds of
similar facts collected by Tylor, Spencer, and others, do help us at
once to understand the origin of the central core and kernel of religion
as universally practised all the world over.

For, omitting for the present the mythological and cosmological
factor, which so often comes in to obscure the plain religious facts
in missionary narrative or highly-coloured European accounts of
native beliefs, what do we really find as the underlying truths of all
religion? That all the world over practices essentially similar to those
of these savage Central Africans prevail among mankind; practices whose
affiliation upon the same primitive ideas has been abundantly proved
by Mr. Herbert Spencer; practices which have for their essence the
propitiation or adulation of a spiritual being or beings, derived from
ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all except the greatness of
the connoted attributes, to the souls of men. “Whenever the [Indian]
villagers are questioned about their creed,” says Sir William Hunter,
“the same answer is invariably given: ‘The common people have no
idea of religion, {032}but to do right [ceremonially] and to worship the
village god.”

In short, I maintain that religion is not mainly, as the mistaken
analogy of Christian usage makes us erroneously call it, Faith or Creed,
but simply and solely Ceremony, Custom, or Practice. And I am glad to
say that, for early Semitic times at least, Professor Robertson Smith is
of the same opinion.

If one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it
is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of
observances essentially similar to those just described among the
Central African tribes. Its core is worship. Its centre is the God--that
is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative. The religion of China is
to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. The making of
offerings and burning of joss-paper before the Family Dead form its
principal ceremonies. In India, while the three great gods of the
mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice
at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and
its own special cult of its little domestic altar.

“The first Englishman,” says Sir William Hunter, “who tried
to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans
described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship
quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has
usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude
unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes
a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the
attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the
half-Hinduised low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan
fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief
that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.”

Omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous
supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max-Müllerism,
that ancestor-worship must necessarily {033}be a “non-Aryan” feature
(though it exists or existed in all so-called Aryan races), this simple
description shows us the prevalence over the whole of India of customs
essentially similar to those which obtain in Central Africa and in the
Chinese provinces.

The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once
into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the
great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as
the Central African tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were
the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and
whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral
spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly
of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family
deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so,
too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice
done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, _farre pio et
saliente mica_.

I will not go on to point out in detail at the present stage of our
argument how Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and
Shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion
of the ancient Ac-cadians; how other observers have performed the same
task for the Egyptians and Japanese; and how like customs have been
traced among Greeks and Amazulu, among Hebrews and Nicaraguans, among
early English and Digger Indians, among our Aryan ancestors themselves
and Andaman Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel abounds with
examples. Of Netherland Island I read, “The skulls of their ancestors
were treasured for gods of the New Hebrides, “The people worshipped
the spirits of their ancestors. They prayed to them, over the kava-bowl,
for health and prosperity.” In New Caledonia, “Their gods were their
ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised.” At Tana, “The
general name for gods seemed to be _aremha_; that means a _dead man_,
and hints,” {034}says the Rev. George Turner, with pleasing frankness,
“alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship.” When
the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, “Compassionate
father, here is some food for you; eat it. Be kind to us on account of
it.” Those who wish to see the whole of the evidence on this matter
marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of
Mr. Herbert Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_, where they will find
abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast
and overwhelming phalanx.

What concerns us in this chapter a little more is to call attention
by anticipation to the fact that even in Christianity itself the
same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most
distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the Christian
religion. And I make these remarks provisionally here in order that the
reader may the better understand to what ultimate goal our investigation
will lead him.

It is the universal Catholic custom to place the relics of saints or
martyrs under the altars in churches. Thus the body of St. Mark the
Evangelist lies under the high altar of St. Mark’s, at Venice; and
in every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited
within the altar itself. So well understood is this principle in the
Latin Church, that it has hardened into the saying, “No relic, no
altar.” The sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and
is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. The entire Roman Catholic
ritual is a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry
at an altar, and its connection with the primitive form is still kept up
by the necessary presence of human remains in its holy places.

Furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended from the
early Christian meeting-places in the catacombs or at the tombs of
the martyrs, which are universally allowed to have been the primitive
Christian altars. {035}We know now that the cruciform dome-covered plan
of Christian churches is derived from these early meeting-places at the
junction of lanes or alleys in the catacombs; that the nave, chancel,
and transepts indicate the crossing of the alleys, while the dome
represents the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular vault where the
two lines of archway intersect. The earliest dome-covered churches
were attempts, as it were, to construct a catacomb above ground for the
reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or martyr. Similarly with
the chapels that open out at the side from the aisles or transepts.
Etymologically, the word chapel is the modernised form of _capella_,
the arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of the catacombs, before the
tomb at which it was usual to offer up prayer and praise. The chapels
built out from the aisles in Roman churches, each with its own altar and
its own saintly relics, are attempts to reproduce above ground in the
same way the original sacred places in the early Christian excavated
cemeteries. We will recur to this subject at much greater length in
subsequent chapters.

Thus Christianity itself is linked on to the very antique custom of
worship at tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship by altars, relics,
and invocation of saints, even revolutionary Protestantism still
retaining some last faint marks of its origin in the dedication of
churches to particular evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or less
disguised survival of altar, priesthood, sacrifice, and vestments.

Now, I do not say ancestor-worship gives us the whole origin of
everything that is included in Christian English minds in the idea
of religion. I do not say it accounts for all the cosmologies and
cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilised tribes. Those, for the
most part, are pure mythological products, explicable mainly, I believe,
by means of the key with which mythology supplies us; and one of them,
adopted into Genesis from an alien source, has come to be accepted by
modern Christendom as part of {036}that organised body of belief which
forms the Christian creed, though not in any true sense the Christian
religion. Nor do I say that ancestor-worship gives us the origin of
those ontological, metaphysical, or mystical conceptions which form
part of the philosophy or theology of many priesthoods. Religions, as
we generally get them envisaged for us nowadays, are held to include the
mythology, the cosmogony, the ontology, and even the ethics of the race
that practises them. These extraneous developments, however, I hold to
spring from different roots and to have nothing necessarily in common
with religion proper. The god is the true crux. If we have once
accounted for the origin of ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples,
churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods, and ceremonies, then we have
accounted for all that is essential and central in religion, and may
hand over the rest--the tales, stories, and pious legends--to the
account of comparative mythology or of the yet unfounded science of
comparative idealogy.

Once more, I do not wish to insist, either, that every particular and
individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent
a particular ghost--the dead spirit of a single definite once-living
person. It is enough to show, as Mr. Spencer has shown, that the idea
of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from
the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without
necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer seems to hold, that every god is and
must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. Once
the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become
a common part of every man’s imagined universe--of the world as it
presented itself to the mind of the percipient--then it was natural
enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of
abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same
worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as
had previously been paid to the whole host of gods {037}evolved from
personal and tribal ancestors. It is the first step that costs: once you
have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may
be invented or introduced from all quarters. A great pantheon readily
admits new members to its ranks from, many strange sources. Familiar
instances in one of the best-known pantheons are those of Concordia,
Pecunia, Aius Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus. The Romans, indeed, deified
every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or
goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations,
of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements
generally. Many of their deities, as we shall see hereafter, were
obviously manufactured to meet a special demand on special occasions.
But at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can judge, could
ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and ancestor-worship
had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and
practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god could not
otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of
new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.

Still, to admit that other elements have afterwards come in to confuse
religion is quite a different thing from admitting that religion itself
has more than one origin. Whatever gives us the key to the practice of
worship gives us the key to all real religion. Now, one may read through
almost any books of the mythological school without ever coming upon
a single word that throws one ray of light upon the origin of religion
itself thus properly called. To trace the development of this, that,
or the other story or episode in a religious myth is in itself a very
valuable study in human evolution: but no amount of tracing such stories
ever gives us the faintest clue to the question why men worshipped
Osiris, Zeus, Siva, or Venus; why they offered up prayer and praise to
Isis, or to Artemis; why they made sacrifices of oxen to Capitolian
Jove {038}at Rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar of Jahweh, god
of Israel, at Jerusalem. The ghost-theory and the practice of
ancestor-worship show us a natural basis and genesis for all these
customs, and explain them in a way to which no mythological enquiry can
add a single item of fundamental interest.

It may be well at this point to attempt beforehand some slight
provisional disentanglement of the various extraneous elements which
interweave themselves at last with the simple primitive fabric of
practical religion.

In the first place, there is the mythological element. The mythopoeic
faculty is a reality in mankind. Stories arise, grow, gather episodes
with movement, transform and transmute themselves, wander far in
space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand ways suffer change and
modification. Now, such stories sometimes connect themselves with living
men and women. Everybody knows how many myths exist even in our own
day about every prominent or peculiar person. They also gather more
particularly round the memory of the dead, and especially of any very
distinguished dead man or woman. Sometimes they take their rise in
genuine tradition, sometimes they are pure fetches of fancy or of the
romancing faculty. The ghosts or the gods are no less exempt from
these mythopœic freaks than other people; and as gods go on living
indefinitely, they have plenty of time for myths to gather about them.
Most often, a myth is invented to account for some particular religious
ceremony. Again, myths demonstrably older than a particular human
being--say Cæsar, Virgil, Arthur, Charlemagne--may get fitted by later
ages to those special personalities. The same thing often happens also
with gods. Myth comes at last, in short, to be the history of the gods;
and a personage about whom many myths exist, whether real or imaginary,
a personification of nature or an abstract quality, may grow in time to
be practically a divine being, and even perhaps to receive worship, the
final test of divinity.

Again, {039}myths about the gods come in the long run, in many cases,
to be written down, especially by the priests, and themselves acquire a
considerable degree of adventitious holiness. Thus we get Sacred Books;
and in most advanced races, the sacred books tend to become an important
integral part of religion, and a test of the purity of tenets or
ceremonial. But sacred books almost always contain rude cosmological
guesses and a supernatural cosmogony, as well as tales about the doings,
relationships, and prerogatives of the gods. Such early philosophical
conjectures come then to be intimately bound up with the idea of
religion, and in many cases even to supersede in certain minds its
true, practical, central kernel. The extreme of this tendency is seen in
English Protestant Dissenting Bibliolatry.

Rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses tend to arise with advancing
culture. Attempts are made to trace the pedigree and mutual relations
of the gods, and to get rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. The
Theogony of Hesiod is a definite effort undertaken in this direction for
the Greek pantheon. Often the attempt is made by the most learned
and philosophically-minded among the priests, and results in a
quasi-philosophical mythology like that of the Brahmans. In the
monotheistic or half-monotheistic religions, this becomes theology. In
proportion as it grows more and more laboured and definite the attention
of the learned and the priestly class is more and more directed to
dogma, creed, faith, abstract formulae of philosophical or intellectual
belief, while insisting also upon ritual or practice. But the popular
religion remains usually, as in India, a religion of practical custom
and observances alone, having very little relation to the highly
abstract theological ideas of the learned or the priestly.

Lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of
sentiment, of broad humanitarianism of adventitious emotion, is allowed
to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of
practice and observance.

We are {040}constantly taught that “real religion” means many things
which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense,
but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion towards a
spiritual being or set of beings.

Owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the
origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with
savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony,
philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. They do not sufficiently
see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime
factors--worship and sacrifice. In all early religions, the practice is
at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. We, nowadays, look back upon
these early cults, which were cults and little else, with minds warped
by modern theological prejudices--by constant wrangling over dogmas,
clauses, definitions, and formularies. We talk glibly of the Hindu
faith or the Chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the Hindu
practice or the Chinese observances. By thus wrongly conceiving the
nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. We shall only get
right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion,
and when we recognise that the growth and development of the myth have
nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. The science of
comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing
study in its own way: but it has no more to do with the origin of
religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. There are
ethical rules in most advanced cults: there are geological surmises
in most sacred books: but neither one nor the other is on that account
religion, any more than the history of Jehoshaphat or the legend of
Samson.

What I want to suggest in the present chapter sums itself up in a few
sentences thus: Religion is practice, mythology is story-telling. Every
religion has myths that accompany it: but the myths do not give rise
to the religion: {041}on the contrary, the religion gives rise to the
myths. And I shall attempt in this book to account for the origin of
religion alone, omitting altogether both mythology as a whole, and
all mythical persons or beings other than gods in the sense here
illustrated.




CHAPTER III.--THE LIFE OF THE DEAD.

|The {042}object of this book, we saw at the beginning, is to trace the
evolution of the idea of God. But the solution of that problem implies
two separate questions--first, how did men begin to frame the idea of
a god at all; and second, how did they progress from the conception of
many distinct gods to the conception of a single supreme God, like the
central deity of Christianity and of Islam. In other words, we have
first to enquire into the origin of polytheism, and next into its
gradual supersession by monotheism. Those are the main lines of enquiry
I propose to follow out in the present volume.

Religion, however, has one element within it still older, more
fundamental, and more persistent than any mere belief in a god or
gods--nay, even than the custom or practice of supplicating and
appeasing ghosts or gods by gifts and observances. That element is the
conception of the Life of the Dead. On the primitive belief in such
life, all religion ultimately bases itself. The belief is in fact the
earliest thing to appear in religion, for there are savage tribes who
have nothing worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult
of their dead relatives. It is also the latest thing to survive in
religion; for many modern spiritualists, who have ceased to be theists,
or to accept any other form of the supernatural, nevertheless go on
believing in the continued existence of the dead, and in the possibility
of intercommunication between them and the living. This, therefore,
which is the earliest manifestation of religious thought, {043}and
which persists throughout as one of its most salient and irrepressible
features, must engage our attention for a little time before we pass on
to the genesis of polytheism.

But the belief in continued life itself, like all other human ideas,
has naturally undergone various stages of evolution. The stages glide
imperceptibly into one another, of course; but I think we can on the
whole distinguish with tolerable accuracy between three main layers or
strata of opinion with regard to the continued existence of the dead.
In the first or lowest stratum, the difference between life and death
themselves is but ill or inadequately perceived; the dead are thought
of as yet bodily living. In the second stratum, death is recognised as
a physical fact, but is regarded as only temporary; at this stage, men
look forward to the Resurrection of the Body, and expect the Life of the
World to Come. In the third stratum, the soul is regarded as a distinct
entity from the body; it survives it in a separate and somewhat shadowy
form: so that the opinion as to the future proper to this stage is not a
belief in the Resurrection of the Body, but a belief in the Immortality
of the Soul. These two concepts have often been confounded together by
loose and semi-philosophical Christian thinkers; but in their essence
they are wholly distinct and irreconcilable.

I shall examine each of these three strata separately.

And first as to that early savage level of thought where the ideas of
life and death are very ill demarcated. To us at the present day it
seems a curious notion that people should not possess the conception of
death as a necessary event in every individual human history. But that
is because we cannot easily unread all our previous thinking, cannot
throw ourselves frankly back into the state of the savage. We are
accustomed to living in large and populous communities, where deaths
are frequent, and where natural death in particular is an every-day
occurrence. We have behind us a vast and long history of previous ages;
and {044}we know that historical time was occupied by the lives of many
successive generations, all of which are now dead, and none of which
on the average exceeded a certain fixed limit of seventy or eighty odd
years. To us, the conception of human life as a relatively short period,
bounded by a known duration, and naturally terminating at a relatively
fixed end, is a common and familiar one.

We forget, however, that to the savage all this is quite otherwise. He
lives in a small and scattered community, where deaths are rare, and
where natural death in particular is comparatively infrequent. Most of
his people are killed in war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed
by accidents in the chase, or by thirst or starvation. Some are drowned
in rapid rivers; some crushed by falling trees or stones; some poisoned
by deadly fruits, or bitten by venomous snakes; some massacred by
chiefs, or murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen. In a large
majority of instances, there is some open and obvious cause of death;
and this cause is generally due either to the hand of man or to some
other animal; or failing that, to some apparently active effort of
external nature, such as flood, or lightning, or forest fires, or
landslip and earthquake. Death by disease is comparatively rare; death
by natural decay almost unknown or unrecognised.

Nor has the savage a great historic past behind him. He knows few but
his tribesmen, and little of their ancestors save those whom his parents
can remember before them. His perspective of the past is extremely
limited. Nothing enables him to form that wide idea of the necessity and
invariability of death which to us is so familiar. That “all men are
mortal” is to civilised man a truism; to very early savages it would
necessarily have seemed a startling paradox. No man ever dies within his
own experience; ever since he can remember, he has continued to exist
as a permanent part of all his adventures. Most of the savage’s family
have gone on continuously living with him. A death has been a rare and
startling occurrence. {045}Thus the notion of death as an inevitable end
never arises at all; the notion of death as due to natural causes seems
quite untenable. When a savage dies, the first question that arises is
“Who has killed him?” If he is slain in war, or devoured by a
tiger, or ripped up by an elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate, or
murdered by a tribesman, the cause is obvious. If none of these, then
the death is usually set down to witchcraft.

Furthermore, the mere fact of death is much less certain among primitive
or savage men than in civilised communities. We know as a rule with
almost absolute certainty whether at a given moment a sick or wounded
man is dead or living. Nevertheless, even among ourselves, cases of
doubt not infrequently occur. At times we hesitate whether a man
or woman is dead or has fainted. If the heart continues to beat, we
consider them still living; if not the slightest flutter of the pulse
can be perceived, we consider them dead. Even our advanced medical
science, however, is often perplexed in very obscure cases of catalepsy;
and mistakes have occurred from time to time, resulting in occasional
premature burials. The discrimination of true from apparent death is not
always easy. Vesalius, the eminent anatomist, opened a supposed corpse
in which the heart was seen to be still beating; and the Abbé Prévost,
who had been struck by apoplexy, was regarded as dead, but recovered
consciousness once more under the surgeon’s scalpel. Naturally, among
savages, such cases of doubt are far more likely to occur than among
civilised people; or rather, to put it as the savage would think of it,
there is often no knowing when a person who is lying stiff and lifeless
may happen to get up again and resume his usual activity. The savage
is accustomed to seeing his fellows stunned or rendered unconscious by
blows, wounds, and other accidents, inflicted either by the enemy, by
wild beasts, by natural agencies, or by the wrath of his tribesmen; and
he never knows how soon the effect of such accidents may pass away, and
the man may recover his {046}ordinary vitality. As a rule, he keeps and
tends the bodies of his friends as long as any chance remains of their
ultimate recovery, and often (as we shall see in the sequel) much
longer.

Again, in order to understand this attitude of early man towards his
wounded, his stricken, and his dead, we must glance aside for a moment
at the primitive psychology. Very early indeed in the history of the
human mind, I believe, some vague adumbration of the notion of a soul
began to pervade humanity. We now know that consciousness is a function
of the brain; that it is intermitted during sleep, when the brain rests,
and also during times of grave derangement of the nervous or circulatory
systems, as when we faint or assume the comatose condition, or are
stunned by a blow, or fall into catalepsy or epilepsy. We also know
that consciousness ceases altogether at death, when the brain no longer
functions; and that the possibility of its further continuance is
absolutely cut off by the fact of decomposition. But these truths, still
imperfectly understood or rashly rejected by many among ourselves, were
wholly unknown to early men. They had to frame for themselves as best
they could some vague working hypothesis of the human mind, from data
which suggested themselves in the ordinary course of life; and the
hypothesis which they framed was more or less roughly that of the soul
or spirit, still implicitly accepted by a large majority of the human
species.

According to this hypothesis every man consists of two halves or parts,
one material or bodily, the other immaterial or spiritual. The first
half, called the body, is visible and tangible; the second half, called
the soul, dwells within it, and is more or less invisible or shadowy. It
is to a large extent identified with the breath; and like the breath
it is often believed to quit the body at death, and even to go off in a
free form and live its own life elsewhere. As this supposed independence
of the soul from the body lies at the very basis of all ghosts and gods,
and therefore of {047}religion itself, I may be excused for going at
some length into the question of its origin.

Actually, so far as we know by direct and trustworthy evidence, the
existence of a mind, consciousness, or “soul,” apart from a body,
has never yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. But the savage derived
the belief, apparently, from a large number of concurrent hints and
suggestions, of which such a hypothesis seemed to him the inevitable
result. During the daytime he was awake; at night he slept; yet even in
his sleep, while his body lay curled on the ground beside the camp-fire,
he seemed to hunt or to fight, to make love or to feast, in some
other region. What was this part of him that wandered from the body in
dreams?--what, if not the soul or breath which he naturally regarded as
something distinct and separate? And when a man died, did not the soul
or breath go from him? When he was badly wounded, did it not disappear
for a time, and then return again? In fainting fits, in catalepsy,
and in other abnormal states, did it not leave the body, or even play
strange tricks with it? I need not pursue this line of thought, already
fully worked out by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. It is enough to
say that from a very early date, primitive man began to regard the soul
or life as something bound up with the breath, something which could go
away from the body at will and return to it again, something separable
and distinct, yet essential to the person, very vaguely conceived as
immaterial or shadowy, but more so at a later than at an earlier
period. *

     * The question of the Separate Soul has recently received
     very full treatment from Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and
     Mr. Sidney Hartland in The Legend of Perseus.

Moreover, these souls or spirits (which quitted the body in sleep or
trance) outlived death, and appeared again to survivors. In dreams,
we often see the shapes of living men; but we also see with peculiar
vividness the images of the departed. Everybody is familiar with the
frequent reappearance {048}in sleep of intimate friends or relations
lately deceased. These appearances, I fancy, are especially frequent
during the first few months of bereavement, and gradually weaken in
frequency and vividness as time goes on. The reason for both sets of
phenomena I take to be this: the nervous structures, accustomed to be
stimulated in particular combinations by intercourse with the dead
friend, miss automatically their wonted stimulation; and being therefore
in a highly nourished and unstable state, are peculiarly ready to
undergo ideal stimulation in sleep, as we know to be the case with other
well-nurtured and underworked nerve-centres. Or, to put it less
materially, the brain falls readily into a familiar rhythm. But in
course of time the channels atrophy by disuse; the habit is lost; and
the dream-appearances of the dead friend grow more and more infrequent.
The savage, however, accepts the dream-world as almost equally real with
the world of sense-presentation. As he envisages the matter to himself,
his soul has been away on its travels without its body, and there has
met and conversed with the souls of dead friends or relations.

We must remember also that in savage life occasions for trance, for
fainting, and for other abnormal or comatose nervous conditions occur
far more frequently than in civilised life. The savage is often wounded
and fails from loss of blood; he cuts his foot against a stone, or is
half killed by a wild beast; he fasts long and often, perforce, or is
reduced to the very verge of starvation; and he is therefore familiar,
both in his own case and in the case of others, with every variety of
unconsciousness and of delirium or delusion. All these facts figure
themselves to his mind as absences of the soul from the body, which is
thus to him a familiar and almost every-day experience.

Moreover, it will hence result that the savage can hardly gain any clear
conception of Death, and especially of death from natural causes. When
a tribesman is brought home severely wounded and unconscious, the
spectator’s immediate {049}idea must necessarily be that the soul has
gone away and deserted the body. For how long it has gone, he cannot
tell; but his first attempts are directed towards inducing or compelling
it to return again. For this purpose, he often addresses it with
prayers and adjurations, or begs it to come back with loud cries and
persuasions. And he cannot possibly discriminate between its temporary
absence and its final departure. As Mr. Herbert Spencer well says,
the consequences of blows or wounds merge into death by imperceptible
stages. “Now the injured man shortly ‘returned to himself,’ and
did not go away again; and now, returning to himself only after a long
absence, he presently deserted his body for an indefinite time. Lastly,
instead of these temporary returns, followed by final absence, there
sometimes occurred cases in which a violent blow caused continuous
absence from the very first; the other self never came back at all.”

In point of fact, during these earlier stages, the idea of Death as we
know it did not and does not occur in any form. There are still
savages who do not seem to recognise the universality and necessity of
death--who regard it on the contrary as something strange and unatural,
something due to the machination of enemies or of witchcraft. With the
earliest men, it is a foregone conclusion, psychologically speaking,
that they should so regard it; they could not form any other concept
without far more extended knowledge than they have the means of
possessing. To them, a Dead Man must always have seemed a man whose soul
or breath or other self had left him, but might possibly return again to
the body at any time.

Each of the three stages of thought above discriminated has its
appropriate mode of disposing of its dead. The appropriate mode for this
earliest stage is Preservation of the Corpse, which eventuates at last
in Mummification.

The simplest form of this mode of disposal of the corpse consists in
keeping it in the hut or cave where the family dwell, together with the
living. A New Guinea woman thus {050}kept her husband’s body in her
hut till it dried up of itself, and she kissed it and offered it food
every day, as though it were living. Many similar cases are reported
from elsewhere. Hut preservation is common in the very lowest races.
More frequently, however, owing to the obvious discomfort of living in
too close proximity to a dead body, the corpse at this stage of thought
is exposed openly in a tree or on a platform or under some other
circumstances where no harm can come to it. Among the Australians and
Andaman Islanders, who, like the Negritoes of New Guinea, preserve for
us a very early type of human customs, the corpse is often exposed on
a rough raised scaffold. Some of the Polynesian and Melanesian peoples
follow the same practice. The Dyaks and Kyans expose their dead in
trees. “But it is in America,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “that
exposure on raised stages is commonest. The Dakotahs adopt this method;
at one time it was the practice of the Iroquois; Catlin, describing the
Mandans as having scaffolds on which ‘their _dead live_ as they term
it,’ remarks that they are thus kept out of the way of wolves and
dogs; and Schoolcraft says the same of the Chippewas.” Generally
speaking, at the lowest grades of culture, savages preserve the actual
bodies of their dead above ground, either in the home itself, or
in close proximity to it. We shall recur later on to this singular
practice.

A slight variant on this method, peculiar to a very maritime race, is
that described by Mr. H. O. Forbes among the natives of Timurlaut:

“The dead body is placed in a portion of a _prau_ fitted to the length
of the individual, or within strips of _gaba-gaba_, or stems of the
sago-palm pinned together. If it is a person of some consequence, such
as an _Orang Kaya_, an ornate and decorated _prau_-shaped coffin is
specially made. This is then enveloped in calico, and placed either on
the top of a rock by the margin of the sea at a short distance from
the village, or on a high pile-platform erected on the shore {051}about
low-tide mark. On the top of the coffin-lid are erected tall flags,
and the figures of men playing gongs, shooting guns, and gesticulating
wildly to frighten away evil influences from the sleeper. Sometimes the
platform is erected on the shore above high-water mark, and near it is
stuck in the ground a tall bamboo full of palm-wine; and suspended over
a bamboo rail are bunches of sweet potatoes for the use of the dead
man’s _Nitu_. When the body is quite decomposed, his son or one of the
family disinters the skull and deposits it on a little platform in his
house, in the gable opposite the fireplace, while to ward off evil from
himself he carries about with him the atlas and axis bones of its neck
in his _luon_, or _siri_-holder.”

This interesting account is full of implications whose fuller meaning we
will perceive hereafter. The use of the skull and of the talisman bone
should especially be noted for their later importance. For skulls are
fundamental in the history of religion.

Cases like these readily pass into the practice of Mummifying, more
especially in dry or desert climates. Even in so damp a tropical country
as New Guinea, however, D’Albertis found in a shed on the banks of the
Fly River two mummies, artificially prepared, as he thought, by removal
of the flesh, the bones alone being preserved with the skin to cover
them. Here we have evidently a clear conception of death as a serious
change, of a different character from a mere temporary absence. So, too,
Mr. Chalmers says of the Koiari people in the same island, “They treat
their dead after this fashion. A fire is kept burning day and night at
the head and feet for months. The entire skin is removed by means of
the thumb and forefinger, and the juices plastered all over the face
and body of the operator (parent, husband, or wife of the deceased).
The fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so that little more than the
skeleton is left.” But mummification for the most part is confined to
drier climates, where it is artificially performed {052}down to a very
evolved stage of civilisation, as we know well in Peru and Egypt.

One word must be said in passing as to the frequent habit of specially
preserving, and even carrying about the person, the head or hand of
a deceased relative. This has been already mentioned in the case of
Timurlaut; and it occurs frequently elsewhere. Thus Mr. Chalmers says
of a New Guinea baby: “It will be covered with two inches of soil, the
friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller
bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” Similarly, in the
Andaman Islands, where we touch perhaps the lowest existing stratum of
savage feeling, “widows may be seen with the skulls of their deceased
partners suspended round their necks.” The special preservation of the
head, even when the rest of the body is eaten or buried, will engage our
attention at a later period: heads so preserved are usually resorted to
as oracles, and are often treated as the home of the spirit. Mr. Herbert
Spencer has collected many similar instances, such as that of the
Tasmanians who wore a bone from the skull or arm of a dead relation.
He rightly notes, too, that throughout the New World “the primitive
conception of death as a long-suspended animation seems to have been
especially vivid;” and we find accordingly that customs of this
character are particularly frequent among American savages. Thus, to
draw once more from his great storehouse, the Créés carried bones
and hair of dead relations about for three years; while the Caribs and
several Guiana tribes distributed the clean bones among the kinsmen of
the deceased. In the Sandwich Islands, also, bones of kings and chiefs
were carried about by their descendants, under the impression that the
dead exercised guardianship over them.

At this stage of thought, it seems to me, it is the actual corpse that
is still thought to be alive; the actual corpse that appears in dreams;
and the actual corpse that is fed and worshipped and propitiated with
presents.

Ceremonial {053}cannibalism, which will be more fully considered
hereafter, appears in this stratum, and survives from it into higher
levels. The body is eaten entire, and the bones preserved; or the
flesh and fat are removed, and the skin left; or a portion only is
sacramentally and reverently eaten by the surviving relations. These
processes also will be more minutely described in the sequel.

The first stage merges by gradual degrees into the second, which is that
of Burial or its equivalent. Cave-burial of mummies or of corpses forms
the transitional link. Indeed, inasmuch as many races of primitive men
lived habitually in caves, the placing or leaving the corpse in a cave
seems much the same thing as the placing or leaving it in a shed, hut,
or shelter. The cave-dwelling Veddahs simply left the dead man in the
cave where he died, and themselves migrated to some other cavern. Still,
cave-burial lingered on late with many tribes or nations which had
for ages outlived the habit of cave-dwelling. Among the South
American Indians, cave-burial was common; and in Peru it assumed high
developments of mummification. The making of an artificial cave or vault
for the dead is but a slight variant on this custom; it was frequent in
Egypt, the other dry country where the making of mummies was carried
to a high pitch of perfection. The Tombs of the Kings at Thebes are
splendid instances of such artificial caves, elaborated into stately
palaces with painted walls, where the dead monarchs might pass
their underground life in state and dignity. Cave-tombs, natural or
artificial, are also common in Asia Minor, Italy, and elsewhere.

During the first stage, it may be noted, the attitude of man towards his
dead is chiefly one of affectionate regard. The corpse is kept at home,
and fed or tended; the skull is carried about as a beloved object. But
in the second stage, which induces the practice of burial, a certain
Fear of the Dead becomes more obviously apparent. Men dread the return
of the corpse or the ghost, and strive to keep {054}it within prescribed
limits. In this stage, the belief in the Resurrection of the Body is the
appropriate creed; and though at first the actual corpse is regarded
as likely to return to plague survivors, that idea gives place a little
later, I believe, to the conception of a less material double or spirit.

And here let us begin by discriminating carefully between the
Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul.

The idea of Resurrection arose from and is closely bound up with the
practice of burial, the second and simpler mode of disposing of the
remains of the dead. The idea of Immortality arose from and is closely
bound up with the practice of burning, a later and better innovation,
invented at the third stage of human culture. During the early
historical period all the most advanced and cultivated nations burnt
their dead, and, in consequence, accepted the more ideal and refined
notion of Immortality. But modern European nations bury their dead,
and, in consequence, accept, nominally at least, the cruder and grosser
notion of Resurrection. Nominally, I say, because, in spite of creeds
and formularies, the influence of Plato and other ancient thinkers, as
well as of surviving ancestral ideas, has made most educated Europeans
really believe in Immortality, even when they imagine themselves to be
believing in Resurrection. Nevertheless, the belief in Resurrection is
the avowed and authoritative belief of the Christian world, which thus
proclaims itself as on a lower level in this respect than the civilised
peoples of antiquity.

The earliest of these two ways of disposing of the bodies of the dead is
certainly by burial. As this fact has recently been called in question,
I will venture to enlarge a little upon the evidence in its favour. In
point of time, burial goes back with certainty to the neolithic age, and
with some probability to the palaeolithic. Several true interments in
caves have been attributed by competent geologists to the earlier of
these two periods, the first for which we {055}have any sure warranty
of man’s existence on earth. But, as I do not desire to introduce
controversial matter of any sort into this exposition, I will waive the
evidence for burial in the palaeolithic age as doubtful, and will merely
mention that in the Mentone caves, according to Mr. Arthur Evans, a
most competent authority, we have a case of true burial accompanied by
neolithic remains of a grade of culture earlier and simpler than any
known to us elsewhere. In other words, from the very earliest beginning
of the neolithic age men buried their dead; and they continued to bury
them, in caves or tumuli, down to the end of neolithic culture. They
buried them in the Long Barrows in England; they buried them in the Ohio
mounds; they buried them in the shadowy forests of New Zealand; they
buried them in the heart of darkest Africa. I know of no case of burning
or any means of disposal of the dead, otherwise than by burial or its
earlier equivalent, mummification, among people in the stone age
of culture in Europe. It is only when bronze and other metals are
introduced that races advance to the third stage, the stage of
cremation. In America, however, the Mexicans we*re cremationists.

The wide diffusal of burial over the globe is also a strong argument for
its relatively primitive origin. In all parts of the world men now bury
their dead, or did once bury them. From the Tombs of the Kings at Pekin
to the Pyramids of Memphis; from the Peruvian caves to the Samoyed
graveyards, we find most early peoples, most savage peoples, most
primitive peoples, once or still engaged in one or other form of
burying. Burial is the common and universal mode; burning, exposure,
throwing into a sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and
exceptional, and in many cases, as among the Hindus, are demonstrably of
late origin, and connected with certain relatively modern refinements of
religion.

Once more, in many or most cases, we have positive evidence that where a
race now burns its dead, it used once {056}to bury them. Burial preceded
burning in preheroic Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in early
Latium. The people of the Long Barrows, in Western Europe generally,
buried their dead; the people of the Round Barrows who succeeded them,
and who possessed a far higher grade of culture, almost always cremated.
It has been assumed that burning is primordial in India; but Mr. William
Simpson, the well-known artist of the _Illustrated London News_, calls
my attention to the fact that the Vedas speak with great clearness of
burial as the usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and even allude to
the tumulus, the circle of stones around it, and the sacred _temenos_
which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high
authority on the subject is universally acknowledged, burial was the
rule in India till about the thirteenth or fourteenth century before
the Christian era; then came in cremation, with burial of the ashes, and
this continued till about the time of Christ, when burial was dispensed
with, and the ashes were thrown into some sacred river. I think,
therefore, until some more positive evidence is adduced on the other
side, we may rest content with our general conclusion that burial is the
oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains
of the dead among humanity after the general recognition of death as a
positive condition. It probably took its rise in an early period, while
mankind was still one homogeneous species; and it has been dispersed,
accordingly, over the whole world, even to the most remote oceanic
islands.

What is the origin of this barbaric and disgusting custom, so repugnant
to all the more delicate sentiments of human nature? I think Mr. Frazer
is right in attributing it to the terror felt by the living for the
ghosts (or, rather, at first the corpses) of the dead, and the fear that
they may return to plague or alarm their surviving fellow tribesmen.

In his admirable paper on “Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of
the Primitive Theory of the Soul,” Mr. Frazer points out that certain
tribes of early men paid great {057}attention to the dead, not so much
from affection as from selfish terror. Ghosts or bodies of the dead
haunt the earth everywhere, unless artificially confined to bounds, and
make themselves exceedingly disagreeable to their surviving relatives.
To prevent this, simple primitive philosophy in its second stage has hit
upon many devices. The most universal is to bury the dead--that is to
say, to put them in a deep-dug hole, and to cover them with a mighty
mound of earth, which has now sadly degenerated in civilised countries
into a mere formal heap, but which had originally the size and dignity
of a tumulus. The object of piling up this great heap of earth was to
confine the ghost (or corpse), who could not easily move so large a
superincumbent mass of matter. In point of fact, men buried their dead
in order to get well rid of them, and to effectually prevent their
return to light to disturb the survivors.

For the same reason heavy stones were often piled on the top of the
dead. In one form, these became at last the cairn; and, as the ghosts
of murderers and their victims tend to be especially restless, everybody
who passes their graves in Arabia, Germany, and Spain is bound to add
a stone to the growing pile in order to confine them. In another form,
that of the single big stone rolled just on top of the body to keep
it down by its mass, the makeweight has developed into the modern
tombstone. In our own times, indeed, the tombstone has grown into a mere
posthumous politeness, and is generally made to do duty as a record of
the name and incomparable virtues of the deceased (concerning whom,
_nil nisi bonum_); but in origin it was nothing more than the big, heavy
boulder, meant to confine the ghost, and was anything but honorific in
intention and function.

Again, certain nations go further still in their endeavours to keep the
ghost (or corpse) from roaming. The corpse of a Damara, says Galton,
having been sewn up in an old ox-hide is buried in a hole, and the
spectators jump backwards {058}and forwards over the grave to keep the
deceased from rising out of it. In America, the Tupis tied fast all the
limbs of the corpse, “that the dead man might not be able to get up,
and infest his friends with his visits.” You may even divert a river
from its course, as Mr. Frazer notes, bury your dead man securely in
its bed, and then allow the stream to return to its channel. It was thus
that Alaric was kept in his grave from further plaguing humanity; and
thus Captain Cameron found a tribe of Central Africans compelled their
deceased chiefs to “cease from troubling.” Sometimes, again, the
grave is enclosed by a fence too high for the dead man to clear even
with a running jump; and sometimes the survivors take the prudent
precaution of nailing the body securely to the coffin, or of breaking
their friend’s spine, or even--but this is an extreme case--of hacking
him to pieces. In Christian England the poor wretch whom misery had
driven to suicide was prevented from roaming about to the discomfort of
the lieges by being buried with a stake driven barbarously through him.
The Australians, in like manner, used to cut off the thumb of a slain
enemy that he might be unable to draw the bow; and the Greeks were wont
to hack off the extremities of their victims in order to incapacitate
them for further fighting. These cases will be seen to be very
luminiferous when we come to examine the origin and meaning of
cremation.

Burial, then, I take it, is simply by origin a means adopted by the
living to protect themselves against the vagrant tendencies of the
actual dead. For some occult reason, the vast majority of men in all
ages have been foolishly afraid of meeting with the spirits of the
departed. Their great desire has been, not to see, but to avoid seeing
these singular visitants; and for that purpose they invented, first of
all, burial, and afterwards cremation.

The common modern conception of the ghost is certainly that of an
immaterial or shadowy form, which can be seen but not touched, and which
preserves an outer semblance {059}of the human figure. But that idea
itself, which has been imported into all our descriptions and reasonings
about the ghost-beliefs of primitive man, is, I incline to think,
very far from primitive, and has been largely influenced by quite late
conceptions derived from the cremational rather than the burial level
of religious philosophy. In other words, though, in accordance with
universal usage and Mr. Frazer’s precedent, I have used the word
“ghost” above in referring to these superstitious terrors of early
man, I believe it is far less the spirit than the actual corpse itself
that early men even in this second stage were really afraid of. It is
the corpse that may come back and do harm to survivors. It is the corpse
that must be kept down by physical means, that must be covered with
earth, pressed flat beneath a big and ponderous stone, deprived of its
thumbs, its hands, its eyes, its members. True, I believe the savage
also thinks of the ghost or double as returning to earth; but his
psychology, I fancy, is not so definite as to distinguish very
accurately between corpse and spirit. The accurate differentiation of
the two belongs rather, it seems to me, to the post-cremational and more
spiritual philosophy than to the primary or preservative, and the
secondary or inhumational.

Anybody who looks at the evidence collected by Mr. Frazer will see for
himself that precautions are taken rather against the return of the
actual physical body than against the return of the ghost or spirit. Or
perhaps, to be more precise, the two are hardly thought of at this early
stage in separation or antithesis.

If we look at the means taken to preserve the body after death among the
majority of primitive peoples, above the Tasmanian level, this truth
of the corpse being itself immortal becomes clearer and clearer. We are
still, in fact, at a level where ghost and dead man are insufficiently
differentiated. In all these cases it is believed that the dead body
continues to live in the grave the same sort of life that it led
above ground; and for this purpose it is provided {060}with weapons,
implements, utensils, food, vessels, and all the necessaries of life for
its new mansion. Continued sentient existence of the body after death
is the keynote of the earliest level of psychical philosophy. First, the
corpse lives in the hut with its family: later, it lives in the grave
with its forefathers.

But side by side with this naïve belief in the continued existence
of the body after death, which survives into the inhumational stage of
evolution, goes another and apparently irreconcilable belief in a future
resurrection. Strictly speaking, of course, if the body is still alive,
there is no need for any such special revivification. But religious
thought, as we all know, does not always pride itself upon the temporal
virtues of logic or consistency; and the savage in particular is not
in the least staggered at being asked to conceive of one and the same
subject in two opposite and contradictory manners. He does not bring
the two incongruities into thought together; he thinks them alternately,
sometimes one, sometimes the other. Even Christian systematists
are quite accustomed to combine the incongruous beliefs in a future
resurrection and in the continued existence of the soul after death,
by supposing that the soul remains meanwhile in some nondescript limbo,
apart from its body--some uncertain Sheol, some dim hades or purgatory
or “place of departed spirits.” The savage is scarcely likely to be
more exacting in this matter than our doctors of divinity.

It is the common belief of the second or inhumational stage, then, that
there will be at some time or other a “General Resurrection.” No
doubt this General Resurrection has been slowly developed out of
the belief in and expectation of many partial resurrections. It is
understood that each individual corpse will, or may, resurge at some
time: therefore it is believed that all corpses together will resurge
at a single particular moment. So long as burial persists, the belief
in the Resurrection persists beside it, {061}and forms a main feature in
the current conception of the future life among the people who practise
it.

How, then, do we progress from this second or inhumational stage to the
third stage with its practice of burning, and its correlated dogma of
the Immortality of the Soul?

In this way, as it seems to me. Besides keeping down the ghost (or
corpse) with clods and stones, it was usual in many cases to adopt
other still stronger persuasives and dissuasives in the same direction.
Sometimes the persuasives were of the gentlest type; for example, the
dead man was often politely requested and adjured to remain quiet in the
grave and to give no trouble. But sometimes they were less bland; the
corpse was often pelted with sticks, stones, and hot coals, in order to
show him that his visits at home would not in future be appreciated. The
ordinary stake and mutilation treatment goes, it is clear, upon the same
principle; if the man has no feet or legs of his own, he cannot very
well walk back again. But further developments of the like crude idea
are to cut off the head, to tear out the heart, to hack the body in
pieces, to pour boiling water and vinegar over the dangerous place where
the corpse lies buried. Now burning, I take it, belonged originally
to the same category of strong measures against refractory ghosts or
corpses; and this is the more probable owing to the fact that it is
mentioned by Mr. Frazer among the remedies recommended for use in the
extreme case of vampires. Its original object was, no doubt, to prevent
the corpse from returning in any way to the homes of the living.

Once any people adopted burning as a regular custom, however, the
chances are that, _cœteris paribus_, it would continue and spread. For
the practice of cremation is so much more wholesome and sanitary than
the practice of burial that it would give a double advantage in the
struggle for existence to any race that adopted it, in peace and in
war. Hence it is quite natural that when at a certain grade of culture
certain races happened to light upon it {062}in this superstitious way,
those races would be likely to thrive and to take the lead in culture as
long as no adverse circumstances counteracted the advantage.

But the superstitions and the false psychology which gave rise at first
to the notion of a continued life after death would not, of course,
disappear with the introduction of burning. The primitive cremationists
may have hoped, by reducing to ashes the bodies of their dead, to
prevent the recurrence of the corpse to the presence of the living; but
they could not prevent the recurrence of the ghost in the dreams of the
survivors; they could not prevent the wind that sighed about the dead
man’s grave, the bats that flitted, the vague noises that terrified,
the abiding sense of the corpse’s presence. All the factors that go
to make up the ghost or the revenant (to use a safe word less liable to
misinterpretation) still remained as active as ever. Hence, I believe,
with the introduction of cremation the conception of the ghost merely
suffered an airy change. He grew more shadowy, more immaterial, more
light, more spiritual. In one word, he became, strictly speaking, a
ghost as we now understand the word, not a returning dead man. This
conception of the ghost as essentially a shade or shadow belongs
peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating peoples. I can answer for
it that among negroes, for example, the “duppy” is conceived as
quite a material object. It is classical literature, the literature of
the cremating Greeks and Romans, that has familiarised us most with the
idea of the ghost as shadowy and intangible. Burying races have
more solid doubles. When Peter escaped from prison in Jerusalem, the
assembled brethren were of opinion that it must be “his angel.” The
white woman who lived for years in a native Australian tribe was always
spoken of by her hosts as a ghost. In one word, at a low stage of
culture the _revenant_ is conceived of as material and earthly; at a
higher stage, he is conceived of as immaterial and shadowy.

Now {063}when people take to burning their dead, it is clear they will
no longer be able to believe in the Resurrection of the Body. Indeed, if
I am right in the theory here set forth, it is just in order to prevent
the Resurrection of the Body at inconvenient moments that they take to
burning. To be sure, civilised nations, with their developed power of
believing in miracles, are capable of supposing, not only that the
sea will yield up its dead, but also that burnt, mangled, or dispersed
bodies will be collected from all parts to be put together again at
the Resurrection. This, however, is not the naïve belief of simple
and natural men. To them, when you have burnt a body you have utterly
destroyed it, here and hereafter; and we know that mutilation and
burning were employed for this very purpose in the case of vampires and
other corpses whose total suppression was desirable. Sepoys were
blown from the guns in the Indian mutiny for the express reason
that, according to the Hindu belief, that method of disposing of them
destroyed not only the body but the soul as well--got rid of them
entirely. The ordinary human idea is that when you burn a body you
simply annihilate it; and on that very account early Christians
preferred burial to cremation, because they thought they stood thereby
a better chance at the Resurrection. It is true they allowed that the
divine omnipotence could make new bodies for the martyrs who were burnt;
but for themselves, they seem to have preferred on the average to go on
afresh with their old familiar ones.

Naturally, therefore, among cremating peoples, the doctrine of the
Resurrection of the Body tended to go out, and what replaced it was the
doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. You may burn the body, but the
spirit still survives; and the survival gives origin to a new philosophy
of ghosts and _revenants_, a new idea of the inner nature of ghosthood.
Gradually the spirit gets to be conceived as diviner essence, entangled
and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes of the flesh, and only to be
set free by means {064}of fire, which thus becomes envisaged at last as
friendly rather than destructive in its action on the dead body. What
was at first a precaution against the return of the corpse becomes
in the end a pious duty; just as burial itself, originally a selfish
precaution against the pranks and tricks of returning corpses, becomes
in the end so sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts are conceived
as wandering about, Archytas-wise, begging for the favour of a handful
of sand to prevent them from homeless vagabondage for ever. Nations
who burn come to regard the act of burning as the appointed means for
freeing the ghost from the confining meshes of the body, and regard it
rather as a solemn duty to the dead than as a personal precaution.

Not only so, but there arises among them a vague and fanciful conception
of the world of shades very different indeed from the definite and
material conception of the two earlier stages. The mummy was looked
upon as inhabiting the tomb, which was furnished and decorated for its
reception like a house; and it was provided with every needful article
for use and comfort. Even the buried body was supplied with tools
and implements for the ghost. The necessities of the shade are
quite different and more shadowy. He has no need of earthly tools or
implements. The objects found in the Long Barrows of the burying
folk and the Round Barrows of the cremationists well illustrate this
primordial and far-reaching difference. The Long Barrows of the Stone
Age people are piled above an interment; they contain a chambered tomb,
which is really the subterranean home or palace of the body buried in
it. The wives and slaves of the deceased were killed and interred with
him to keep him company in his new life in the grave; and implements,
weapons, drinking-cups, games, trinkets, and ornaments were buried with
their owners. The life in the grave was all as material and real as
this one; the same objects that served the warrior in this world
would equally serve him in the same form in the next. {065}It is quite
different with the Round Barrows of the Bronze Age cremationists. These
barrows are piled round an urn., which determines the shape of the
tumulus, as the chambered tomb and the corpse determine the shape of
the earlier Stone Age interments. They contain ashes alone; and the
implements and weapons placed in them are all broken or charred with
fire. Why? Because the ghost, immaterial as he has now become, can no
longer make use of solid earthly weapons or utensils. It is only their
ghosts or shadows that can be of any use to the ghostly possessor in the
land of shades. Hence everything he needs is burnt or broken, in order
that its ghost may be released and liberated; and all material objects
are now conceived as possessing such ghosts, which can be utilised
accordingly in the world of spirits.

Note also that with this advance from the surviving or revivable
Corpse to the immortal Soul or Spirit, there goes almost naturally and
necessarily a correlative advance from continued but solitary life in
the tomb to a freer and wider life in an underground world of shades and
spirits. The ghost gets greatly liberated and emancipated. He has more
freedom of movement, and becomes a citizen of an organised community,
often envisaged as ruled over by a King of the Dead, and as divided into
places of reward and punishment. But while we modern Europeans pretend
to be resurrectionists, it is a fact that our current ghostly and
eschatological conceptions (I speak of the world at large, not of mere
scholastic theologians) have been largely influenced by ideas derived
from this opposite doctrine--a doctrine once held by many or most of
our own ancestors, and familiarised to us from childhood in classical
literature. In fact, while most Englishmen of the present day believe
they believe in the Resurrection of the Body, what they really believe
in is the Immortality of the Soul..

It might seem at first sight as though a grave discrepancy existed
between the two incongruous ideas, first of burying {066}or burning your
dead so that they may not be able to return or to molest you, and second
of worshipping at their graves or making offerings to their disembodied
spirits. But to the savage mind these two conceptions are by no means
irreconcilable. While he jumps upon the corpse of his friend or his
father to keep it in the narrow pit he has digged for it, he yet brings
it presents of food and drink, or slays animals at the tomb, that the
ghost may be refreshed by the blood that trickles down to it. Indeed,
several intermediate customs occur, which help us to bridge over the
apparent gulf between reverential preservation of the mummified body,
and the coarse precautions of burial or burning. Thus, in many cases,
some of which we shall examine in the next chapter, after the body has
been for some time buried, the head is disinterred, and treasured with
care in the family oratory, where it is worshipped and tended, and where
it often gives oracles to the members of the household. A ceremonial
washing is almost always a feature in this reception of the head; it
recurs again and again in various cases, down to the enshrinement of the
head of Hoseyn at Cairo, and that of St. Denis at the abbey of the same
name, to both of which we shall allude once more at a far later stage of
our enquiry. For the present, it must suffice to say that the ceremonial
and oracular preservation of the head--the part which sees, and speaks,
and eats, and drinks, and listens--is a common feature in all religious
usages; that it gives rise apparently to the collections of family
skulls which adorn so many savage huts and oratories; that it may be
answerable ultimately for the Roman busts and many other imitative
images of the dead, in which the head alone is represented; and that
when transferred to the sacred human or animal victim (himself, as we
shall hereafter see, a slain god), it seems to account for the human
heads hung up by the Dyaks and other savages about their houses, as also
for the skulls of oxen and other sacred animals habitually displayed on
the front of places of {067}worship, whose last relic is the sculptured
oxen’s heads which fill the metopes in some Greek and most Roman
temples. Much of this, I admit, will be little comprehensible to the
reader at the present stage of our argument: but I beg him to bear in
mind provisionally this oracular and representative value of the head or
skull from this point forth; he will find, as he proceeds, its meaning
will become clearer and ever clearer at each successive stage of our
exposition.

I ought also to add that between complete preservation of the corpse
and the practice of burial there seems to have gone another intermediate
stage, now comparatively rare, but once very general, if we may judge
from the traces it has left behind it--a stage when all the body or part
of it was sacramentally eaten by the survivors as an act of devotion.
We will consider this curious and revolting practice more fully when we
reach the abstruse problem of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present
it will suffice to say that in many instances, in Australia, South
America, and elsewhere, the body is eaten, while only the bones are
burned or buried. Among these savages, again, it usually happens
that the head is cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the skull is
ceremonially washed, and preserved as an object of household veneration
and an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted in succeeding chapters.

Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the
worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense
of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised
people.

The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be
shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship.




CHAPTER IV.--THE ORIGIN OF GODS.

|MR. {068}Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his _Principles of
Sociology_ the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that
I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief
recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall
supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the
conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of
the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty _resume_
which I shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a
later point by consideration of several national religions.

In the earliest stage of all--the stage where the actual bodies of the
dead are preserved,--Gods as such are for the most part unknown: it is
the corpses of friends and ancestors that are worshipped and reverenced.
For example, Ellis says of the corpse of a Tahitian chief that it was
placed in a sitting posture under a protecting shed; “a small altar
was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were
daily presented by the relatives, or the priest appointed to attend the
body.” (This point about the priest is of essential importance.) The
Central Americans, again, as Mr. Spencer notes, performed similar
rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. The New Guinea people,
as D’Albertis found, worship the dried mummies of their fathers
and husbands. A little higher in the scale, we get the developed
mummy-worship of Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution
{069}of greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. Other evidence
in abundance has been adduced from Polynesia and from Africa. Wherever
the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship and
offerings are paid to them.

Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body but the head
alone that is specially kept and worshipped. Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says
of the people of Buru: “The dead are buried in the forest in some
secluded spot, marked often by a _merang_ or grave-pole; over which at
certain intervals the relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various
offerings. When the body is decomposed, the son or nearest relative
disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places it in the
Matakau at the back of his house, or in a little hut erected for it near
the grave. It is the representative of his forefathers, whose behests he
holds in the greatest respect.”

Two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account, as giving
us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories whose evolution
we must trace hereafter; first the grave-stake, which is probably the
origin of the wooden idol; and second, the little hut erected over the
head by the side of the grave, which is undoubtedly one of the origins
of the temple or praying-house. Observe also the ceremonial wrapping of
the skull in cloth, and its oracular functions.

Similarly, Mr. Wyatt Gill, the well-known missionary, writes of a dead
baby at Boera, in New Guinea: “It will be covered with two inches of
soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull
and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” And of
the Suau people he says: “Enquiring the use of several small houses,
I learned that it is to cover grave-pits. All the members of a family
at death occupy the same grave, the earth that thinly covered the last
occupant being scooped out to admit the newcomer. These graves are
shallow; the dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands folded.
{070}The earth is thrown in up to the mouth only. An earthen pot covers
the head. After a time the pot is taken off, the perfect skull removed
and cleansed--eventually to be hung up in a basket or net inside the
dwelling of the deceased over the fire, to blacken in the smoke.”
In Africa, again, the skull is frequently preserved in such a pot and
prayed to. In America, earthenware pots have been found moulded round
human skulls in mounds at New Madrid and elsewhere; the skull cannot
be removed without breaking the vessel. Indeed, this curious method of
preservation in pots seems to be very widespread; we get perhaps a vague
hint or reminiscence of its former prevalence in Europe in the story of
Isabella and the pot of basil.

The special selection and preservation of the head as an object of
worship thus noted in New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago is also still
found among many other primitive peoples. For instance, the Andamanese
widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession:
and the New Caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present
offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” Mr. Spencer quotes
several similar examples, a few of which alone I extract from his pages.

“‘In the private fetish-hut of King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull
of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the
earth.’ He ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to
answer his expectations.’ Similarly among the Mandans, who place
the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her
former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does
not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... There is scarcely
an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen
sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband--talking to it
in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as
they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer
back.’”

This {071}affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from
fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving
stage of human death-conceptions. It seldom survives where burial has
made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is
then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it
encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.

A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu notes that some of his West
African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls
of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off
small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank;
giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and
that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless
like their ancestors. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit
of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance Mr. Frazer
has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a
subsequent chapter.

Throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution, this
primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the chief known
objects of worship survives undiluted: and ancestor-worship remains to
this day the principal religion of the Chinese, and of several
other peoples. Gods, as such, are practically unknown in China.
Ancestor-worship also survives in many other races as one of the
main cults, even after other elements of later religion have been
superimposed upon it. In Greece and Rome, it remained to the last
an important part of domestic ritual. But in most cases, a gradual
differentiation is set up in time between various classes of ghosts or
dead persons, some ghosts being considered of more importance and power
than others; and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally
developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an exceptionally
powerful and friendly ghost--a ghost able to help, and from whose help
great things may reasonably be expected.

Again, {072}the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with
the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any
great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god
of considerable importance. We shall trace out this idea more fully
hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the present it must suffice to
say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly
increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.

When we pass from the first plane of corpse-preservation and
mummification to the second plane where burial is habitual, it might
seem at a hasty glance as though continued worship of the dead, and
their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. For we saw
that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should
return to plague the living. Nevertheless, natural affection for parents
or friends, and the desire to ensure their good will and aid, make these
seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that
even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them:
while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they
roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become in
time altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.

In these two later stages of thought with regard to the dead which
accompany burial and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow more and more
distinct from minor ghosts with an accelerated rapidity of evolution.
They grow greater in proportion to the rise of temples and hierarchies.
Furthermore, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless ghost tells in
favour of an enlarged godship. The gods are thought of as more and more
aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they
are clothed with mighty attributes; they assume colossal size; they are
even identified with the sun, the moon, the great powers of nature. But
they are never quite omnipotent during the polytheistic stage, because
in a pantheon they are {073}necessarily mutually limiting. Even in
the Greek and Roman civilisation, it is clear that the gods were not
commonly envisaged by ordinary minds as much more than human; for
Pisistratus dressed up a courtesan at Athens to represent Pallas Athene,
and imposed by this cheap theatrical trick upon the vulgar Athenians;
while Paul and Barnabas were taken at Lystra for Zeus and Hermes. Many
similar instances will occur at once to the classical scholar. It is
only quite late, under the influence of monotheism, that the exalted
conceptions of deity now prevalent began to form themselves in Judaism
and Christianity.

Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the
origin of anything more than domestic religion--the cult of the manes,
the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national
deities. But kingship supplies us with the missing link. We have seen in
Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African god-making how the
worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods;
and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods
of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs.
Especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that
the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men,
and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. Thus kingship rapidly
reacts upon godship. If the living king himself is great, how much
greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and
worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god,
the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and
propitiated! In some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of
gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually
in the end the greatest of any.

The consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts,
tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the
invention of written language sets {074}a final seal on the godhead and
might of great early ancestors. Among very primitive tribes, indeed,
we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship.
The chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate
predecessors. The more ancient ancestors, as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so
well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with more advanced
races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead;
and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch
of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively
unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped
ones. More than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, _vires
acquirit eundo_. Thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods
of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the
highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity,
whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.

Three such agencies of prime importance in the transition from the mere
ghost to the fully developed god must here be mentioned. They are the
rise of temples, of idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. Each of these
we must now consider briefly but separately.

The origin of the Temple is various; but all temples may nevertheless
be reduced in the last resort either into graves of the dead, or into
places where worship is specially offered up to them. This truth,
which Mr. Herbert Spencer arrived at by examination of the reports
of travellers or historians, and worked up in connection with his
_Principles of Sociology_, was independently arrived at through quite a
different line of observation and reasoning by Mr. William Simpson,
the well-known artist of the _Illustrated London News_. Mr. Simpson has
probably visited a larger number of places of worship all over the world
than any other traveller of any generation: and he was early impressed
by the fact which forced itself upon his eyes, that almost every one of
them, where its origin could be {075}traced, turned out to be a tomb in
one form or another. He has set forth the results of his researches in
this direction in several admirable papers, all of which, but especially
the one entitled _The Worship of Death_, I can confidently recommend to
the serious attention of students of religion. They contain the largest
collection of instances in this matter ever yet made; and they show
beyond a doubt the affiliation of the very idea of a temple on the tomb
or grave of some distinguished dead person, famous for his power, his
courage, or his saintliness.

The cave is probably the first form of the Temple. Sometimes the dead
man is left in the cave which he inhabited when living; an instance
of which we have already noticed among the Veddahs of Ceylon. In other
cases, where races have outgrown the custom of cave-dwelling, the habit
of cave-burial, or rather of laying the dead in caves or in artificial
grottoes, still continues through the usual conservatism of religious
feeling. Offerings are made to the dead in all these various caves: and
here we get the beginnings of cave-temples. Such temples are at first
of course either natural or extremely rude; but they soon begin to be
decorated with rough frescoes, as is done, for example, by the South
African Bushmen. These frescoes again give rise in time by slow degrees
to such gorgeous works as those of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes;
each of which has attached to it a magnificent temple as its
mortuary chapel. Sculpture is similarly employed on the decoration of
cave-temples; and we get the final result of such artistic ornament
in splendid cave-temples like those of Ellora. Both arts were employed
together in the beautiful and interesting Etruscan tomb-temples.

In another class of cases, the hut where the dead man lived is abandoned
at his death by his living relations, and thus becomes a rudimentary
Temple where offerings are made to him. This is the case with the
Hottentots, to take an instance at a very low grade of culture. Of a New
Guinea {076}hut-burial, Mr. Chalmers says: “The chief is buried in
the centre; a mat was spread over the grave, on which I was asked to
sit until they had a weeping.” This weeping is generally performed by
women--a touch which leads us on to Adonis and Osiris rites, and to
the Christian Pietà. Mr. Spencer has collected several other excellent
examples. Thus, the Arawaks place the corpse in a small boat and bury
it in the hut; among the Creeks, the habitation of the dead becomes his
place of interment; the Fantees likewise bury the dead person in his own
house; and the Yucatanese “as a rule abandoned the house, and left it
uninhabited after the burial.” I will not multiply quotations; it
will be better to refer the reader to Mr. Spencer’s own pages, where a
sufficient number of confirmatory examples are collected to satisfy
any but the most prejudiced critic. “As repeated supplies of food are
taken to the abandoned house,” says Mr. Spencer, “and as along with
making offerings there go other propitiatory acts, the deserted dwelling
house, turned into a mortuary house, acquires the attributes of a
temple.”

A third origin for Temples is found in the shed, hut, or shelter,
erected over the grave, either for the protection of the dead or for the
convenience of the living who bring their offerings. Thus, in parts of
New Guinea, according to Mr. Chalmers, “The natives bury their dead in
the front of their dwellings, and cover the grave with a small house, in
which the near relatives sleep for several months.”

“Where house-burial is not practised,” says Mr. Spencer, once more,
“the sheltering structure raised above the grave, or above the stage
bearing the corpse, becomes the germ of the sacred building. By some
of the New Guinea people there is a ‘roof of atap erected over’ the
burial-place. In Cook’s time the Tahitians placed the body of a dead
person upon a kind of bier supported by sticks and under a roof. So,
too, in Sumatra, where ‘a shed is built over’ the grave; and so,
too, in Tonga. Of course {077}this shed admits of enlargement and
finish. The Dyaks in some places build mausoleums like houses, 18 feet
high, ornamentally carved, containing the goods of the departed--sword,
shield, paddle, etc. When we read that the Fijians deposit the bodies of
their chiefs in small _enbures_ or temples, we may fairly conclude that
these so-called temples are simply more-developed sheltering structures.
Still more clearly did the customs of the Peruvians show that the
structure erected over the dead body develops into a temple. Acosta
tells us that ‘every one of these kings Yncas left all his treasure and
revenues to entertaine the place of worshippe where his body was layed,
and there were many ministers with all their familie dedicated to his
service.’”

Note in the last touch, by anticipation, one origin of priesthood. On
the other hand, we saw in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central
African natives that those savages do not worship at the actual grave
itself. In this case, terror of the _revenant_ seems to prevent the
usual forms of homage at the tomb of the deceased. Moreover, the ghost
being now conceived as more or less freely separable from the corpse,
it will be possible to worship it in some place remote from the dreaded
cemetery. Hence these Africans “seek the spirit at the place where their
departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the great tree at the
verandah of the dead man’s house that is their temple: and if no tree
grow here, they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple
rites.” We have in this case yet another possible origin for certain
temples, and also, I will add by anticipation of a future chapter, for
the sacred tree, which is so common an object of pious adoration in many
countries.

Beginning with such natural caves or such humble huts, the Temple
assumes larger proportions and more beautiful decorations with the
increase of art and the growth of kingdoms. Especially, as we see in the
tomb-temples and pyramids {078}of Egypt and Peru, does it assume great
size and acquire costly ornaments when it is built by a powerful king
for himself during his own lifetime. Temple-tombs of this description
reach a high point of artistic development in such a building as the
so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenæ, which is really the sepulchre
of some nameless prehistoric monarch. It is admirably reconstructed in
Perrot and Chipiez.

Obviously, the importance and magnificence of the temple will react upon
the popular conception of the importance and magnificence of the god who
inhabits it. And conversely, as the gods grow greater and greater,
more art and more constructive skill will constantly be devoted to the
building and decoration of their permanent homes. Thus in Egypt the tomb
was often more carefully built and splendidly decorated than the house;
because the house was inhabited for a short time only, but the tomb for
eternity. Moreover, as kings grew more powerful, they often adorned
the temples of their ancestors with emulous pride, to show their own
greatness. In Egypt, once more, the original part of all the more
important temples is but a small dark cell, of early origin, to which
one successive king after another in later dynasties added statelier
and ever statelier antechambers or porches, so that at last the building
assumed the gigantic size and noble proportions of Karnak and Luxor.
This access of importance to the temple cannot have failed to add
correspondingly to the dignity of the god; so that, as time went on,
instead of the early kings being forgotten and no longer worshipped,
they assumed ever greater and greater importance from the magnificence
of the works in which their memory was enshrined. To the very end, the
god depends largely on his house for impressiveness. How much did not
Hellenic religion itself owe to the Parthenon and the temple of Olympian
Zeus! How much does not Christianity itself owe to Lincoln and Durham,
to Amiens and Chartres, to Milan and Pisa, to St. Mark’s and {070}St.
Peter’s! Men cannot believe that the deities worshipped in such noble
and dimly religious shrines were once human like themselves, compact of
the same bodies, parts, and passions. Yet in the last instance at least
we know the great works to be raised in honour of a single Lower Syrian
peasant.

With this brief and imperfect notice of the origin of temples, which
will indirectly be expanded in later portions of my work, I pass on from
the consideration of the sacred building itself to that of the Idol who
usually dwells within it.

Where burial prevails, and where arts are at a low stage of development,
the memory of the dead is not likely to survive beyond two or three
generations. But where mummification is the rule, there is no reason
why deceased persons should not be preserved and worshipped for an
indefinite period; and we know that in Egypt at least the cult of kings
who died in the most remote times of the Early Empire was carried on
regularly down to the days of the Ptolemies. In such a case as this,
there is absolutely no need for idols to arise; the corpse itself is the
chief object of worship. We do find accordingly that both in Egypt
and in Peru the worship of the mummy played a large part in the local
religions; though sometimes it alternated with the worship of other
holy objects, such as the image or the sacred stone, which we shall see
hereafter to have had a like origin. But in many other countries, where
bodies were less visibly and obviously preserved, the worship due to
the ghost or god was often paid to a simulacrum or idol; so much so that
“idolatry” has become in Christian parlance the common term for most
forms of worship other than monotheistic.

Now what is the origin and meaning of Idols, and how can they be
affiliated upon primitive corpse or ghost worship?

Like the temple, the Idol, I believe, has many separate origins, several
of which have been noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer, {080}while others, it
seems to me, have escaped the notice even of that profound and acute
observer.

The earliest Idols, if I may be allowed the contradictory expression,
are not idols at all--not images or representations of the dead person,
but actual bodies, preserved and mummified. These pass readily, however,
into various types of representative figures. For in the first place the
mummy itself is usually wrapped round in swathing-cloths which obscure
its features; and in the second place it is frequently enclosed in a
wooden mummy-case, which is itself most often rudely human in form, and
which has undoubtedly given rise to certain forms of idols. Thus,
the images of Amun, Khem, Osiris, and Ptah among Egyptian gods
are frequently or habitually those of a mummy in a mummy-case. But
furthermore, the mummy itself is seldom or never the entire man; the
intestines at least have been removed, or even, as in New Guinea, the
entire mass of flesh, leaving only the skin and the skeleton. The eyes,
again, are often replaced, as in Peru, by some other imitative object,
so as to keep up the lifelike appearance. Cases like these lead on to
others, where the image or idol gradually supersedes altogether the
corpse or mummy.

Mr. H. O. Forbes gives an interesting instance of such a transitional
stage in Timorlaut. “The bodies of those who die in war or by a
violent death are buried,” he says; “and if the head has been captured
[by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the grave to represent the
missing member, and to deceive and satisfy his spirit.” There is
abundant evidence that such makeshift limbs or bodies amply suffice
for the use of the soul, when the actual corpse has been destroyed or
mutilated. Sometimes, indeed, the substitution of parts is deliberate
and intentional. Landa says of the Yucatanese that they cut oft the
heads of the ancient lords of Cocom when they died, and cleared them
from flesh by cooking them (very probably to eat at a sacrificial feast,
of which more hereafter); then they sawed {081}off the top of the skull,
filled in the rest of the head with cement, and, making the face as like
as possible to the original possessor, kept these images along with the
statues and the ashes. Note here the usual preservation of the head as
exceptionally sacred. In other cases, they made for their fathers wooden
statues, put in the ashes of the burnt body, and attached the skin of
the occiput taken off the corpse. These images, half mummy, half idol,
were kept in the oratories of their houses, and were greatly reverenced
and assiduously cared for. On all the festivals, food and drink were
offered to them.

Mr. Spencer has collected other interesting instances of this
transitional stage between the corpse or mummy and the mere idol. The
Mexicans, who were cremationists, used to burn a dead lord, and collect
the ashes; “and after kneading them with human blood, they made of
them an image of the deceased, which was kept in memory of him.”
Sometimes, as in Yucatan, the ashes were placed in a man-shaped
receptacle of clay, and temples or oratories were erected over them.
“In yet other cases,” says Mr. Spencer, “there is worship of the
relics, joined with the representative figure, not by inclusion, but
only by proximity.” Thus Gomara tells us that the Mexicans having
burnt the body of their deceased king, gathered up the ashes, bones,
jewels, and gold in cloths, and made a figure dressed as a man, before
which, as well as before the relics, offerings were placed. It is clear
that cremation specially lends itself to such substitution of an image
for the actual dead body. Among burying races it is the severed skull,
on the contrary, that is oftenest preserved and worshipped.

The transition from such images to small stone sarcophagi, like those
of the Etruscan tombs, is by no means a great one. These sarcophagi
contained the burnt ashes of the dead, but were covered by a lid which
usually represented the deceased, reclining, as if at a banquet, with a
beaker in his hands. The tombs in which the sarcophagi were placed were
of two types; one, the stone pyramid or {082}cone, which, says Dr. Isaac
Taylor, “is manifestly a survival of the tumulus”; the other, the
rock-cut chamber, “which is a survival of the cave.” These lordly
graves are no mere cheerless sepulchres; they are abodes for the dead,
constructed on the model of the homes of the living. They contain
furniture and pottery; and their walls are decorated with costly mural
paintings. They are also usually provided with an antechamber, where the
family could assemble at the annual feast to do homage to the spirits
of departed ancestors, who shared in the meal from their sculptured
sarcophagus lids.

At a further stage of distance from the primitive mummy-idol we come
upon the image pure and simple. The Mexicans, for example, as we have
seen, were cremationists; and when men killed in battle were missing,
they made wooden figures of them, which they honoured, and then burnt
them in place of the bodies. In somewhat the same spirit the Egyptians
used to place beside the mummy itself an image of the dead, to act as
a refuge or receptacle for the soul, “in case of the accidental
destruction of the actual body.” So the Mexicans once more, if one of
their merchants died on a journey, were accustomed to make a statue of
wood in the shape of the deceased, to which they paid all the honours
they would have done to his actual corpse before burning it. In Africa,
while a king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the
palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Mr.
Spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for
the bodies of the dead. The Roman _imagines_ wore masks of wax, which
preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. Perhaps the most
curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is
to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in
Westminster Abbey.

There are two other sources of idol-worship, however, which, as it seems
to me, have hardly received sufficient attention at Mr. Spencer’s
hands. Those two are the stake which {083}marks the grave, and the
standing stone or tombstone. By far the larger number of idols, I
venture to believe, are descended from one or other of these two
originals, both of which I shall examine hereafter in far greater
detail. There is indeed no greater lacuna, I fancy, in Mr. Spencer’s
monumental work than that produced by the insufficient consideration
of these two fruitful sources of worshipful objects. I shall therefore
devote a considerable space to their consideration in subsequent
chapters; for the present it will suffice to remark that the wooden
stake seems often to form the origin or point of departure for the
carved wooden image, as well as for such ruder objects of reverence
as the cones and wooden pillars so widely reverenced among the Semitic
tribes; while the rough boulder, standing stone, or tombstone seems to
form the origin or point of departure for the stone or marble statue,
the commonest type of idol the whole world over in all advanced and
cultivated communities. Such stones were at first mere rude blocks or
unhewn masses, the descendants of those which were rolled over the grave
in primitive times in order to keep down the corpse of the dead man, and
prevent him from returning to disturb the living. But in time they grew
to be roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and finally to be decorated
with a rude representation of a human head and shoulders. From this
stage they readily progressed to that of the Greek Hermæ. We now know
that this was the early shape of most Hellenic gods and goddesses;
and we can trace their evolution onward from this point to the wholly
anthropomorphic Aphrodite or Here. The well-known figure of the Ephesian
Artemis is an intermediate case which will occur at once to every
classical reader. Starting from such shapeless beginnings, we progress
at last to the artistic and splendid bronze and marble statues of
Hellas, Etruria, and Rome, to the many-handed deities of modern India,
and to the sculptured Madonnas and Pietàs of Renaissance Italy.

Naturally, {084}as the gods grow more beautiful and more artistically
finished in workmanship, the popular idea of their power and dignity
must increase _pari passu_. In Egypt, this increase took chiefly the
form of colossal size and fine manipulation of hard granitic materials.
The so-called Memnon and the Sphinx are familiar instances of the first;
the Pashts of Syenite, the black basalt gods, so well known at the
Louvre and the British Museum, are examples of the second. In Greece,
effect was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in the Aphrodites and
Apollos, or by costliness of material, as in the chryselephantine Zeus
and the Athene of the Parthenon. But we must always remember that in
Hellas itself these glorious gods were developed in a comparatively
short space of time from the shapeless blocks or standing stones of the
ruder religion; indeed, we have still many curious intermediate forms
between the extremely grotesque and hardly human Mycenæan types, and
the exquisite imaginings of Myron or Phidias. The earliest Hellenic
idols engraved by Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez in their great work on
_Art in Primitive Greece_ do not rise in any respect superior to
the Polynesian level; while the so-called Apollos of later archaic
workmanship, rigidly erect with their arms at their sides, recall in
many respects the straight up-and-down outline of the standing stone
from which they are developed.

I should add that in an immense number of instances the rude stone image
or idol, and at a still lower grade the unwrought sacred stone, stands
as the central object under a shed or shelter, which develops by degrees
into the stately temple. The advance in both is generally more or less
parallel; though sometimes, as in historical Greece, a temple of the
noblest architecture encloses as its central and principal object of
veneration the rough unhewn stone of early barbaric worship. So even
in Christendom, great churches and cathedrals often hold as their most
precious possession some rude and antique image like {085}the sacred
Bambino of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli at Rome, or the “Black Madonnas”
which are revered by the people at so many famous Italian places of
pilgrimage.

Nor do I mean to say that every Idol is necessarily itself a funereal
relic. When once the idea of godship has been thoroughly developed,
and when men have grown accustomed to regard an image or idol as the
representative or dwelling-place of their god, it is easy to multiply
such images indefinitely. Hundreds of representations may exist of the
self-same Apollo or Aphrodite or Madonna or St. Sebastian. At the same
time, it is quite clear that for most worshippers, the divine being is
more or less actually confused with the image; a particular Artemis or
a particular Notre Dame is thought of as more powerful or more friendly
than another. I have known women in Southern Europe go to pray at the
shrine of a distant Madonna, “because she is greater than our own
Madonna.” Moreover, it is probable that in many cases images or sacred
stones once funereal in origin, and representing particular gods or
ghosts, have been swallowed up at last by other and more powerful
deities, so as to lose in the end their primitive distinctness. Thus,
there were many Baals and many Ashteroths; probably there were many
Apollos, many Artemises, many Aphrodites. It is almost certain that
there were many distinct Hermæ. The progress of research tends to
make us realise that numberless deities, once considered unique and
individual, may be resolved into a whole host of local gods, afterwards
identified with some powerful deity on the merest external resemblances
of image, name, or attribute. In Egypt at least this process of
identification and centralisation was common. Furthermore, we know
that each new religion tends to swallow up and assimilate to itself
all possible elements of older cults; just as Hebrew Jahwehism tried to
adopt the sacred stones of early Semitic heathenism by associating them
with episodes in the history of the patriarchs; and just as Christianity
has sanctified {086}such stones in its own area by using them sometimes
as the base of a cross, or by consecrating them at others with the name
of some saint or martyr.

But even more than the evolution of the Temple and the Idol, the
evolution of the Priesthood has given dignity, importance, and power
to the gods. For the priests are a class whose direct interest it is to
make the most of the greatness and majesty of the deities they tend or
worship.

Priesthood, again, has probably at least two distinct origins. The one
is quasi-royal; the other is quasiservile.

I begin with the first. We saw that the chief of an African village, as
the son and representative of the chief ghosts, who are the tribal
gods, has alone the right to approach them directly with offerings. The
inferior villager, who desires to ask anything of the gods, asks through
the chief, who is a kinsman and friend of the divine spirits, and who
therefore naturally understands their ideas and habits. Such chiefs are
thus also naturally priests. They are sacred by family; they and their
children stand in a special relation to the gods of the tribe, quite
different from the relation in which the common people stand; they are
of the blood of the deities. This type of relation is common in many
countries; the chiefs in such instances are “kings and priests, after
the order of Melchizedek.”

To put it briefly, in the earliest or domestic form of religion, the
gods of each little group or family are its own dead ancestors, and
especially (while the historic memory is still but weak) its immediate
predecessors. In this stage, the head of the household naturally
discharges the functions of priest; it is he who approaches the family
ghosts or gods on behalf of his wives, his sons, his dependants. To the
last, indeed, the father of each family retains this priestly function
as regards the more restricted family rites; he is priest of the worship
of the _lares_ and _penates_; he offers the family sacrifice to the
family gods; he reads family prayers in the Christian household. But as
{087}the tribe or nation arises, and chieftainship grows greater, it is
the ghosts or ancestors of the chiefly or kingly family who develop
most into gods; and the living chief and his kin are their natural
representatives. Thus, in most cases, the priestly office comes to be
associated with that of king or chief. Indeed, we shall see hereafter in
a subsequent chapter that many kings, being the descendants of gods, are
gods themselves; and that this union of the kingly and divine characters
has much to do with the growth of the dignity of godhead. Here, however,
I waive this point for the present; it will suffice for us to note at
the present stage of our argument that in a large number of instances
the priesthood and the kingship were inherent and hereditary in the
self-same families.

“The union of a royal title with priestly duties,” says Mr. Frazer
in _The Golden Bough_, “was common in ancient Italy and Greece.
At Rome and in other Italian cities there was a priest called the
Sacrificial King or King of the sacred rites (_Rex Sacrificulus or Rex
Sacrorum_), and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.
In republican Athens, the second magistrate of the state was called the
King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. Many
other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they
are known, seem to have been priestly. At Rome the tradition was that
the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the expulsion of the kings
in order to offer the sacrifices which had been previously offered by
the kings. In Greece a similar view appears to have prevailed as to the
origin of the priestly kings. In itself the view is not improbable, and
it is borne out by the example of Sparta, the only purely Greek state
which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in
Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of
the god. This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is
familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of
various great religious capitals, peopled by thousands of ‘Sacred
{087}slaves,’ and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal
and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such
priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pes-sinus. Teutonic Kings, again, in
the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position and exercised
the powers of high priests. The Emperors of China offer public
sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books. It
is needless, however, to multiply examples of what is the rule rather
than the exception in the early history of the kingship.”

We will return hereafter in another connexion to this ancient relation
of kingship with priesthood, which arises naturally from the still more
ancient relation of the king to the god.

Where priesthood originates in this particular way, little
differentiation is likely to occur between the temporal and the
ecclesiastical power. But there is a second and far more potent origin
of priesthood, less distinguished in its beginnings, yet more really
pregnant of great results in the end. For where the king is a priest,
and the descendant of the gods, as in Peru and Egypt, his immediate and
human power seems to overshadow and as it were to belittle the power of
his divine ancestors. No statue of Osiris, for example, is half so big
in size as the colossal figure of Rameses II. which lies broken in huge
pieces outside the mortuary temple of the king it commemorates, among
the ruins of Thebes. But where a separate and distinct priesthood gets
the management of sacred rites entirely into its own hands, we find the
authority of the gods often rising superior to that of the kings, who
are only their vicegerents: till at last we get Popes dictating to
emperors, and powerful monarchs doing humble penance before the costly
shrines of murdered archbishops.

The origin of independent or quasi-servile priesthood is to be found in
the institution of “temple slaves,”--the attendants told off as we
have already seen to do duty at the grave of the chief or dead warrior.
Egypt, again affords {089}us, on the domestic side, an admirable example
of the origin of such priesthoods. Over the lintel of each of the
cave-like tombs at Beni Hassan and Sakkarah is usually placed an
inscription setting forth the name and titles of its expected occupant
(for each was built during the life-time of its owner), with an
invocation praying for him propitious funeral rites, and a good
burial-place after a long and happy life. Then follows a pious hope that
the spirit may enjoy for all eternity the proper payment of funereal
offerings, a list of which is ordinarily appended, together with a
statement of the various anniversaries on which they were due. But the
point which specially concerns us here is this: Priests or servants were
appointed to see that these offerings were duly made; and the tomb was
endowed with property for the purpose both of keeping up the offerings
in question, and of providing a stipend or living-wage for the priest.
As we shall see hereafter, such priesthoods were generally made
hereditary, so as to ensure their continuance throughout all time:
and so successful were they that in many cases worship continued to be
performed for several hundred years at the tomb; so that a person
who died under the Early Empire was still being made the recipient of
funeral dues under kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.

I give this interesting historical instance at some length because it
is one of the best known, and also one of the most persistent. But
everywhere, all the world over, similar evolutions have occurred on
a shorter scale. The temple attendants, endowed for the purpose of
performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into priests,
who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. Bit by bit,
prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the
priests have become the depositaries of the divine traditions. They
alone know how to approach the god; they alone can read the hidden signs
of his pleasure or displeasure. As intermediaries between worshipper and
deity, they are themselves half sacred. {090}Without them, no votary
can rightly approach the shrine of his patron. Thus at last they rise
into-importance far above their origin; priestcraft comes into being;
and by magnifying their god, the members of the hierarchy magnify at the
same time their own office and function.

Yet another contributing cause must be briefly noted. Picture-writing
and hieroglyphics take their rise more especially in connexion with
tombs and temples. The priests in particular hold as a rule the key to
this knowledge. In ancient Egypt, to take a well-known instance, they
were the learned class; they became the learned class again under
other circumstances in mediaeval Europe. Everywhere we come upon sacred
mysteries that the priests alone know; and where hieroglyphics exist,
these mysteries, committed to writing, become the peculiar property
of the priests in a more special sense. Where writing is further
differentiated into hieratic and demotic, the gulf between laity and
priesthood grows still wider; the priests possess a special key to
knowledge, denied to the commonalty. The recognition of Sacred Books has
often the same result; of these, the priests are naturally the guardians
and exponents. I need hardly add that side by side with the increase
of architectural grandeur in the temple, and the increase of artistic
beauty and costliness in the idols or statues and pictures of the gods,
goes increase in the stateliness of the priestly robes, the priestly
surroundings, the priestly ritual. Finally, we get ceremonies of the
most dignified character, adorned with all the accessories of painting
and sculpture, of candles and flowers, of incense and music, of rich
mitres and jewelled palls,--ceremonies performed in the dim shade of
lofty temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour of god or gods of
infinite might, power, and majesty, who must yet in the last resort be
traced back to some historic or prehistoric Dead Man, or at least to
some sacred stone or stake or image, his relic and representative.

Thus, {091}by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or
ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and
greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from necessary
limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever
more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely
forgotten. But to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods
or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of
demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from known
sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he
turns out to be--a human being. Whenever we go back to very primitive
religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their
ancestors. It is only when we take relatively advanced races with
unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number
of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men
or spirits. Unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the
closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away
from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before
us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed.
Hence they are too much inclined, like Professor Robertson Smith, and
even sometimes Mr. Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot mention in
passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a
godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious
derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the
deified ancestor. Yet the moment we get away from these advanced and
too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple
savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral
corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites
and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or
departmental deities are wholly wanting. Even in the great historical
religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we
{092}probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or
ancestor-gods. And where, as in Egypt, the evidence is oldest and most
complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods
of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age
in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the
earliest documents.

It will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even
more than this--to show that the apparently unresolvable element
in later religions, including the Hebrew god Jahweh himself, can
be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive
conception of a ghost or ancestor.




CHAPTER V.--SACRED STONES.

|I {093}mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as
I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr.
Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which
mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of
worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but
which is of very high importance in early religion--the sacred tree,
with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus
enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their
general significance in the history of religion, and also from their
special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel,
who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as
the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism.

I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only
because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because,
as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of
the God of Israel.

All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the
most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either
rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone
on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of
England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other
antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of
Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), {094}long described
by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by
the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect
and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and
Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local
peasants as _sepolture dei giganti_--the tombs of the giants. In Syria,
Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa
and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a
field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas.
Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious
man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners;
and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn
how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and
“poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in
our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air
court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle
of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns
of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under
its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish
predecessors.

Now, what is the share of such sacred stones in the rise and growth of
the religious habit?

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to give formal proof of the familiar
fact that an upright slab is one of the commonest modes of marking the
place where a person is buried. From the ancient pillar that prehistoric
savages set up over the tumulus of their dead chief, to the headstone
that marks the dwarfed and stunted barrow in our own English cemeteries,
the practice of mankind has been one and continuous. Sometimes the stone
is a rough boulder from the fields; a representative of the big block
which savages place on the grave to keep the corpse from rising:
sometimes it is an oblong slab of slate or marble; sometimes, and
especially among the more advanced races, it is {095}a shapely cross or
sculptured monument. But whenever on earth interment is practised, there
stones of some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost invariably mark the
place of burial.

Again, as presents and sacrifices are offered at graves to the spirits
of the dead, it is at the stone which records the last resting-place of
the deceased that they will oftenest be presented. As a matter of fact
we know that, all the world over, offerings of wine, oil, rice,
ghee, corn, and meat are continually made at the graves of chiefs or
relations. Victims, both human and otherwise, are sacrificed at the
tomb, and their blood is constantly smeared on the headstone or boulder
that marks the spot. Indeed, after a time, the grave and the stone get
to be confounded together, and the place itself comes to have a certain
sacredness, derived from the ghost which haunts and inhabits it.

Four well-marked varieties of early tombstone are recognised in the
eastern continent at least, and their distribution and nature is thus
described by Major Conder: “Rude stone monuments, bearing a strong
family resemblance in their mode of construction and dimensions, have
been found distributed over all parts of Europe and Western Asia, and
occur also in India. In some cases they are attributable to early
Aryan tribes; in others they seem to be of Semitic origin. They include
_menhirs_, or standing stones, which were erected as memorials, and
worshipped as deities, with libations of blood, milk, honey, or water
poured upon the stones: _dolmens_, or stone tables, free standing--that
is, not covered by any mound or superstructure, which may be considered
without doubt to have been used as altars on which victims (often human)
were immolated: _cairns_, also memorial, and sometimes surrounding
menhirs; these were made by the contributions of numerous visitors
or pilgrims, each adding a stone as witness of his presence: finally
_cromlechs_, or stone circles, used as sacred enclosures or early
hypæthral temples, often {096}with a central menhir or dolmen as statue
or altar.”

There can be very little doubt that every one of these monuments is
essentially sepulchral in character. The menhir or standing stone is
the ordinary gravestone still in use among us: the dolmen is a chambered
tomb, once covered by a tumulus, but now bare and open: the cairn is a
heap of stones piled above the dead body: the stone circle is apparently
a later temple built around a tomb, whose position is marked by the
menhir or altar-stone in its centre. And each has been the parent of
a numerous offspring. The menhir gives rise to the obelisk, the stone
cross, and the statue or idol; the dolmen, to the sarcophagus, the
altar-tomb, and the high altar; the cairn, to the tope and also to the
pyramid; the cromlech, or stone circle, to the temple or church in one
at least of its many developments.

Each of these classes of monuments, Major Conder observes, has its
distinctive name in the Semitic languages, and is frequently mentioned
in the early Hebrew literature. The _menhir_ is the “pillar” of
our Authorised Version of the Old Testament; the _dolmen_ is the
“altar”; the _cairn_ is the “heap”; and the stone circle appears
under the names Gilgal and Hazor. The significance of these facts will
appear a little later on when I reach a more advanced stage in the
evolution of stone-worship.

In the simplest and most primitive stage of religion, such as that pure
ancestor-cult still surviving unmixed among the people of New Guinea or
the African tribes whose practice Mr. Duff Macdonald has so admirably
described for us, it is the corpse or ghost itself, not the stone to
mark its dwelling, which comes in for all the veneration and all
the gifts of the reverent survivors. But we must remember that every
existing religion, however primitive in type, is now very ancient; and
it is quite natural that in many cases the stone should thus come itself
to be regarded as the ghost or god, the object to which veneration is
{097}paid by the tribesmen. In fact, just in proportion as the ghost
evolves into the god, so does the tombstone begin to evolve into the
fetish or idol.

At first, however, it is merely as the rude unshapen stone that the idol
in this shape receives the worship of its votaries. This is the stage
that has been christened by that very misleading name fetishism, and
erroneously supposed to lie at the very basis of all religion. Here are
a few interesting samples of this stage of stone-worship, taken from the
very careful Samoan collection of Mr. Turner, of the London Missionary
Society:

“Fonge and Toafa were the names of the two oblong smooth stones
which stood on a raised platform of loose stones inland of one of the
villages. They were supposed to be the parents of Saato, a god who
controlled the rain. When the chiefs and people were ready to go off for
weeks to certain places in the bush for the sport of pigeon-catching,
offerings of cooked taro and fish were laid on the stones, accompanied
by prayers for fine weather and no rain. Any one who refused an offering
to the stones was frowned upon; and in the event of rain was blamed
and punished for bringing down the wrath of the fine-weather god, and
spoiling the sports of the season.”

Here, even if one doubts that Saato was a deceased Weather-doctor, and
that Fonge and Toafa were his father and mother (which I do not care to
insist upon), it is at least clear that we have to deal essentially with
two standing stones of precisely the same sort as those which habitually
mark sepulture.

Of the gods of Hudson’s Island, Mr. Turner gives this very interesting
and suggestive account:

“Foelangi and Maumau were the principal gods. They had each a temple;
and under the altars, on which were laid out in rows the skulls of
departed chiefs and people, were suspended offerings of pearl-shell and
other valuables. Foelangi had an unchiselled block of stone to represent
him--something like a six feet high gravestone.... {098}Offerings of
food were taken to the temples, that the gods might first partake before
anyone else ate anything.... Husked cocoanuts were laid down, one before
each skull.”

And of St. Augustine Island he writes: “At the Temple of Maumau there
stood a nine feet high coral sandstone slab from the beach.... Meat
offerings were laid on the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in
honour of the god.”

Similarly, about one of the Gilbert Group, Mr. Turner says:

“They had other gods and goddesses, and, as was common in this group,
had sandstone slabs or pillars set up here and there among the houses.
Before these shrines offerings of food were laid during the day, which
the priests took away stealthily by night and made the credulous believe
that gods and not mortals had done it. If the stone slab represented a
_goddess_ it was not placed erect, but laid down on the ground. Being a
_lady_ they thought it would be cruel to make her stand so long.”

In these cases, and in many others, it seems to me clear that the
original gravestone or menhir itself is the object of worship, viewed as
the residence of the ghost or god in whose honour it was erected. For in
Samoa we know that the grave “was marked by a little heap of stones, a
foot or two high,” and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was raised
at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it”--a first
step, as we have already seen, towards the evolution of one form of
idol.

Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every
village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the
big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full
importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree
will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship
was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the
penates of households {099}and the patron-deities of villages”--in
other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near
Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under
megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe.
One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some
squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed
round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had
their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones,
and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number
of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other
anthropologists.

But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly
fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones,
resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to
be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost
or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some
curious instances.

“Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were
regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was,
there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed
to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam
god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god--and so on.”

Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in
this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a
stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore
possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of
sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the
idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as
animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. *

     * The whole subject is admirably worked out in The
     Principles of Sociology, § 159.

Hence I incline {100}to believe Mr. Turner is right, and that these
stones may really have been picked out and worshipped, merely for their
oddity, but always, as he correctly infers, from the belief in their
connexion with some god or spirit.

Here is another case, also from Polynesia, where no immediate connexion
with any particular grave seems definitely implied:

“Two unchiselled ‘smooth stones of the stream’ were kept in a
temple at one of the villages, and guarded with great care. No stranger
or over-curious person was allowed to go near the place, under penalty
of a beating from the custodians of these gods. They represented good
and not malicious death-causing gods. The one made the yams, breadfruit,
and cocoanuts, and the other sent fish to the nets.

“Another stone was carefully housed in another village as the
representative of a rain-making god. When there was overmuch rain, the
stone was laid by the fire and kept heated till fine weather set in.”

Further instances (if fairly reported) occur elsewhere. “Among the
lower races of America,” says Dr. Tylor, summarising Schoolcraft,
“the Dakotahs would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then,
addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it, and pray it to
deliver them from danger.” But here the very fact that the stone
is worshipped and treated as an ancestor shows how derivative is the
deification--how dependent upon the prior association of such stones
with the tomb of a forefather and its indwelling spirit. Just in the
same way we know there are countries where a grave is more generally
marked, not by a stone, but by a wooden stake; and in these countries,
as for instance among the Samoyedes of Siberia, sticks, not stones, are
the most common objects of reverence. (Thus, again, stick-worship
is found “among the Damaras of South Africa, whose ancestors are
represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes
consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first {101}offered.”)
But here, too, we see the clear affiliation upon ancestor-worship; and
indeed, wherever we find the common worship of “stocks and stones,”
all the analogies lead us to believe the stocks and stones either
actually mark the graves of ancestors or else are accepted as their
representatives and embodiments.

The vast majority, however, of sacred stones with whose history we are
well acquainted are indubitably connected with interments, ancient
or modern. All the European sacred stones are cromlechs, dolmens,
trilithons, or menhirs, of which Mr. Angus Smith, a most cautious
authority, observes categorically, “We know for a certainty that
memorials of burials are the chief object of the first one, and of
nearly all, the only object apparently.” So many other examples will
come out incidentally in the course of the sequel that I will not labour
the point any further at present. Among the most remarkable instances,
however, I cannot refrain from mentioning the great Sardinian sacred
stones, which so often occur in the neighbourhood of the _nuraghi_, or
ancient forts. These consist of tall conical monoliths, rough and unhewn
in the oldest examples, rudely hewn in the later ones, and occasionally
presenting some distant resemblance to a human face--the first rough
draft of the future idol. “Behind the monolith lies the burial-place,
ten to fourteen yards long by one or two in width.” These
burial-places have been examined by the Abbate Spano.

“He was satisfied that several bodies had been buried together in the
same tomb, and that these were therefore family burial-places. When
the death of one of the members of the tribe occurred, one of the great
transverse stones which covered the long alley built behind the monolith
was removed, and then replaced until the time came for another body
to claim its place in the tomb. The monolith, called by the Sardinian
peasants _pietra dell’ altare_, or altar-stone, because they believe
it to have been used for human sacrifice, always faces the south or
east.”

Such {102}a surviving tradition as to the human sacrifices, in an island
so little sophisticated as Sardinia, has almost certainly come down to
us unbroken from a very early age.

I have already stated that the idol is probably in many cases derived
from the gravestone or other sacred stone. I believe that in an immense
number of cases it is simply the original pillar, more or less rudely
carved into the semblance of a human figure.

How this comes about we can readily understand if we recollect that by a
gradual transference of sentiment the stone itself is at last identified
with the associated spirit. Here, once more, is a transitional instance
from our Polynesian storehouse.

The great god of Bowditch Island “was supposed to be embodied in a
stone, which was carefully wrapped up with fine mats, and never seen
by any one but the king” (note this characteristic touch of kingly
priesthood), “and that only once a year, when the decayed mats were
stripped off and thrown away. In sickness, offerings of fine mats were
taken and rolled round the sacred stone, and thus it got busked up to
a prodigious size; but as the idol was exposed to the weather out of
doors, night and day, the mats soon rotted. No one dared to appropriate
what had been offered to the god, and hence the old mats, as they were
taken off, were heaped in a place by themselves and allowed to rot.”

Now the reasonableness of all this is immediately apparent if
we remember that the stones which stand on graves are habitually
worshipped, and anointed with oil, milk, and blood. It is but a slight
further step to regard the stone, not only as eating and drinking, but
also as needing warmth and clothing. As an admirable example of the same
train of thought, working out the same result elsewhere, compare this
curious account of a stone idol at Inniskea (a rocky islet off the Mayo
coast), given by the Earl of Roden, as late as 1851, in his _Progress of
the Reformation in Ireland_: “In {103}the south island, in the house
of a man named Monigan, a stone idol, called in the Irish ‘Neevougi,’
has been from time immemorial religiously preserved and worshipped. This
god resembles in appearance a thick roll of home-spun flannel, which
arises from the custom of dedicating a dress of that material to
it whenever its aid is sought; this is sewn on by an old woman, its
priestess, whose peculiar care it is. Of the early history of this idol
no authentic information can be procured, but its power is believed to
be immense; they pray to it in time of sickness; it is invoked when a
storm is desired to dash some hapless ship upon their coast; and, again,
the exercise of its power is solicited in calming the angry waves, to
admit of fishing or visiting the mainland.”

Nor is this a solitary instance in modern Europe. “In certain mountain
districts of Norway,” says Dr. Tylor, “up to the end of the last
century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every
Thursday evening,.... smeared them with butter before the fire, laid
them in the seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the
year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the
house.”

The first transitional step towards the idol proper is given in some
rude attempt to make the standing stone at the grave roughly resemble
a human figure. In the later Sardinian examples, two conical lumps,
representing the breasts, seem to mark that the figure is intended to
be female--either because a woman is buried there, or to place the spot
under the protection of a goddess. From this rude beginning we get every
transitional form, like the Hermæ and the archaic Apollos, till we
arrive at the perfect freedom and beauty of Hellenic sculpture. Says
Grote, in speaking of Greek worship, “their primitive memorial erected
to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often nothing
more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone, or a post [notice the
resemblance to ordinary grave-marks] receiving care and decoration from
the {104}neighbourhood as well as worship.” Dr. Tylor, to whose great
collection of instances I owe many acknowledgments, says in comment on
this passage, “Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Euboea;
the stake that represented Pallas Athene ‘sine effigie rudis palus,
et informe lignum;’ the unwrought stone at Hyethos, which ‘after the
ancient manner’ represented Heracles; the thirty such stones which the
Pharæans in like fashion worshipped for the gods; and that one which
received such honour in Boeotian festivals as representing the Thespian
Eros.” Such also was the conical pillar of Asiatic type which stood
instead of an image of the Paphian Aphrodite, and the conical stone
worshipped in Attica under the name of Apollo. A sacred boulder lay in
front of the temple of the Trœzenians, while another in Argos bore
the significant name of Zeus Kappotas. “Among all the Greeks,”
says Pausanias, “rude stones were worshipped before the images of the
gods.” Among the Semites, in like manner, Melcarth was reverenced at
Tyre under the form of two stone pillars.

Intermediate forms, in which the stone takes successively a face, a
head, arms, legs, a shapely and well-moulded body, are familiar to all
of us in existing remains. The well-known figures of Priapus form a
good transitional example. “At Tâbala, in Arabia,” says Professor
Robertson Smith, “a sort of crown was sculptured on the stone
of al-Lat to mark her head.” Indeed, to the last, the pillar or
monolithic type is constantly suggested in the erect attitude and
the proportions of the statue among all except the highest Hellenic
examples. I may add, that even in Islam itself, which so sternly forbids
images of any sort, some traces of such anthropomorphic gravestones may
still be found. I noticed in the mosque of Mehemet Ali at Cairo that
the headstones of the Vice-regal family were each adorned with a fez and
tassel.

It is worth noting that the obelisk, also, doubtless owes its origin to
the monolith or standing stone. Whatever fresh {105}sacredness it may
later have obtained from the associations of sun-worship, as a solar
ray, cannot mask for any wide anthropological enquirer the fact that it
is by descent a mere shapeless head-stone, with a new symbolic meaning
given to it (as so often happens) in a new religion. The two obelisks’
which stand so often before Egyptian temples are clearly the analogues
of the two pillars of Melcarth at Tyre, and the sacred pair at Paphos,
Hera-polis, and Solomon’s temple. In the same way, the Indian tope and
the pyramid are descendants of the cairn, as the great stone-built tombs
of the Numidian kings in Algeria seem to be more advanced equivalents of
the tumulus or round barrow. And let me clear the ground here for
what is to follow by adding most emphatically that the genesis of
stone-worship here sketched out precludes the possibility of phallic
worship being in any sense a primitive form of it. The standing stone
may have been, and doubtless often was, in later stages; identified with
a phallus; but if the theory here advocated is true, the lingam, instead
of lying at the root of the monolith, must necessarily be a later and
derivative form of it. At the same time, the stone being regarded as
the ancestor of the family, it is not unnatural that early men should
sometimes carve it into a phallic shape. Having said this, I will say
no more on the subject, which has really extremely little to do with the
essentials of stone worship, save that on many gravestones of early
date a phallus marked the male sex of the occupant, while breasts, or a
symbolical triangle, or a mandorla, marked the grave of a woman.

Sometimes, both forms of god, the most primitive and the most finished,
the rude stone and the perfect statue, exist side by side in the same
community.

“In the legendary origin of Jagannath,” says Sir William Hunter,
“we find the aboriginal people worshipping a blue stone in the depths
of the forest. But the deity at length wearies of primitive jungle
offerings, and longs for the cooked food of the more civilised Aryans,
upon {106}whose arrival on the scene the rude blue stone gives place
to a carved image. At the present hour, in every hamlet of Orissa, this
twofold worship coexists. The common people have their shapeless stone
or block, which they adore with simple rites in the open air; while
side by side with it stands a temple to one of the Aryan gods, with its
carved idol and elaborate rites.”

Where many sacred stones exist all round, marking the graves of the
dead, or inhabited by their spirits, it is not surprising, once more,
that a general feeling of reverence towards all stones should begin to
arise--that the stone per se, especially if large, odd, or conspicuous,
should be credited to some extent with indwelling divinity. Nor is it
astonishing that the idea of men being descended from stones should
be rife among people who must often, when young, have been shown
headstones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs, and been told that the
offerings made upon them were gifts to their ancestors. They would
accept the idea as readily as our own children accept the Hebrew myth
of the creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from “the dust of the
ground”--a far less promising material than a block of marble or
sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we can most readily understand
the numerous stories of men becoming stones, and stones becoming men,
which are rife among the myths of savage or barbarous peoples.

Fernandez de Piedrahita says that the Laches “worshipped every stone
as a god, as they said they had all been men.” Arriaga tells us the
Peruvians paid honour to “very large stones, saying that they were
once men.” In the American _Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for
1880_, several stories are told of metamorphosis of men into stones
from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the Oneidas and
Dakotahs claim descent from stones, to which they ascribe animation. An
interesting intermediate form, which shows the growth of this idea, is
given in Arriaga’s statement that the Marcayoc, or idol worshipped
in {107}Peru as the patron of the village, “is sometimes a stone and
sometimes a mummy”: in other words, it depended upon circumstances
whether they reverenced the body itself or the gravestone that covered
it. Among the Coast Negroes, when a person dies, a stone is taken to a
certain house--the village valhalla--to represent his ghost; and among
the Bulloms, women “make occasional sacrifices and offerings of rice
to the stones which are preserved in memory of the dead.” At Tanna,
in the New Hebrides, Mr. Gray, a missionary, found “a piece of sacred
ground, on which were deposited the stones in which they supposed
the spirits of their departed relatives to reside”; and Commander
Henderson, commenting upon a similar case from Vati Island, says these
“were the only form of gods the natives possessed, and into them they
supposed the souls of their departed friends and relatives to enter.”
Some of them “had a small piece chipped out on one side, by means of
which the indwelling ghost or spirit was supposed to have ingress or
egress.” Of a third sort, rudely fashioned by hand, Captain Henderson
says acutely, “these, it seemed to me, were the beginnings of a graven
image--a common stone, sacred as the dwelling-place of an ancestral
ghost.” *

     * I owe this and several other references to Mr. Spencer’s
     Appendix, as I do some of my previously cited cases to Mr.
     Lang or Dr. Tylor.

Classical and Hebrew literature are full of examples of such stones,
believed to have been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife are instances
that will at once occur to every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells
us, people believed Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, was changed into a
stone. Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another example, paralleled by
the Breton idea that their great stone circles were people, who, in the
modern Christianised version of the story, were turned into stone for
dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word
to say further on; meanwhile, observe the similar name of the Giant’s
Dance given to the great Stonehenge {108}of Ireland.) In the same way
there is a Standing Rock on the upper Missouri which parallels the story
of Niobe--it was once a woman, who became petrified with grief when
her husband took a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or ancestral ghosts)
“were changed into stones,” says Mr. Turner, “and now stand up in
a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.”

On the other hand, if men become stones, stones also become men, or at
least give birth to men. We get a good instance of this in the legend of
Deucalion. Again, by the roadside, near the city of the Panopoeans, lay
the stones out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man
in Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. The inhabitants of the New
Hebrides say that “the human race sprang from stones and the earth.”
On Francis Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the temple there was
a seven-feet-long beach sandstone slab erected, before which offerings
were laid as the people united for prayer”; and the natives here
told him that one of their gods had made stones become men. “In
Melanesia,” says Mr. Lang, “matters are so mixed that it is not easy
to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s
soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the
spirit’s outward part or organ.” And, indeed, a sort of general
confusion between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor, and the god,
at last pervades the mind of the stone-worshipper everywhere. “The
curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and
even having children,” as Dr. Tylor calls it--an idea familiar to the
Fijians as to the Peruvians and Lapps--is surely explicable at once by
the existence of headstones either to men or women, and the confusion
between the mark and the ghost it commemorates.

An interesting side-point in this gradual mixing up of the ghost and the
stone, the god and the image, is shown in a gradual change of detail
as to the mode of making offerings at the tomb or shrine. On the great
trilithon in Tonga, {109}Miss Gordon-Cumming tells us, a bowl of kava
was placed on a horizontal stone. Here it must have been supposed that
the ghost itself issued forth (perhaps by night) to drink it, as the
serpent which represented the spirit of Anchises glided from the tomb
to lick up the offerings presented by Æneas. Gradually, however, as the
stone and the ghost get more closely connected in idea the offering
is made to the monument itself; though in the earlier stages the
convenience of using the flat altar-stone (wherever such exists) as a
place of sacrifice for victims probably masks the transition even to the
worshippers themselves. Dr. Wise saw in the Himalayas a group of stones
“erected to the memory of the petty Rajahs of Kolam,” where “some
fifty or sixty unfortunate women sacrificed themselves.” The blood,
in particular, is offered up to the ghost; and “the cup-hollows which
have been found in menhirs and dolmens,” says Captain Conder, “are
the indications of the libations, often of human blood, once poured on
these stones by heathen worshippers.” “Cups are often found,” says
a good Scotch observer, “on stones connected with the monuments of the
dead, such as on the covering stones of kistvaens, particularly those of
the short or rarest form; on the flat stones of cromlechs; and on stones
of chambered graves.” On the top of the cairn at Glen Urquhart, on
Loch Ness, is an oblong mass of slate-stone, obviously sepulchral, and
marked with very numerous cups. When the stones are upright the notion
of offering the blood to the upper part, which represents the face or
mouth, becomes very natural, and forms a distinct step in the process of
anthropomorphisation of the headstone into the idol.

We get two stages of this evolution side by side in the two deities of
the Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, “one with a stone head, the other a
mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and
both smeared with sacrificial blood.” In the Indian groups of standing
stones, representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a usual practice,”
{110}says Dr. Tylor, “to daub each stone with red paint, forming, as
it were, a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped
idol.” Mr. Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this practice in an
instructive passage. “A Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a
stone for succour paints it with some red pigment, such as red ochre.
Now, when we read that along with offerings of milk, honey, fruit,
flour, etc., the Bodo and Dhimals offer ‘red lead or cochineal,’ we
may suspect that these three colouring matters, having red as their
common character, are substitutes for blood. The supposed resident ghost
was at first propitiated by anointing the stone with human blood; and
then, in default of this, red pigment was used, ghosts and gods being
supposed by primitive men to be easily deceived by shams.” It
is possible, too, that with the process of idealisation and
spiritualisation it might be supposed a substitute would please the gods
equally well, or that redness generally was the equivalent of blood, in
the same way as the Chinese burn paper money and utensils to set free
their ghosts for the use of ancestral spirits.

In any case, it is interesting to note that the faces of many Hindu gods
are habitually painted red. And that this is the survival of the same
ancient custom we see in the case of Shashti, protectress of children,
whose proper representative is “a rough stone as big as a man’s
head, smeared with red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred
vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece down to the classical
period. “The faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,” says
Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were smudged all over with cinnabar,
like fetish-stones in India or Africa.” In early South Italy, too,
the Priapus-Hermes, who protected the fields, had his face similarly
“daubed with minium.” Is it possible to dissever these facts from
the cannibal banquets of the Aztec gods, where the images had lumps of
palpitating human flesh thrust into their lips, {111}and where their
faces were smeared with the warm blood of the helpless victims?

Only in one instance, however, have I been able to trace the custom of
painting with red directly back to cannibalism, and that is among the
man-eaters of the New Hebrides, where, when a man died, and his body was
laid out in a piece of thick native cloth, “the face was kept exposed
and painted red.” I believe with this practice must ultimately be
correlated the red-painted faces of the Corinthian Dionysi.

Another point of considerable interest and importance in the evolution
of stone worship is connected with the migration of sacred stones. When
the Israelites left Egypt, according to the narrative in Exodus, they
carried the bones of Joseph with them. When Rachel left her father’s
tent she stole the family teraphim to accompany her on her wanderings.
When Æneas flew from burning Troy, he bore away to his ships his
country’s gods, his Lares and Penates. All of these tales, no doubt,
are equally unhistorical, but they represent what, to the people who
framed the legends, seemed perfectly natural and probable conduct. Just
in the same way, when stone-worshippers migrate from one country to
another, they are likely to carry with them their sacred stones, or at
least the most portable or holiest of the number.

Here is a very good illustrative case, once more from that most valuable
storehouse, Turner’s _Samoa_. The Fijian gods and goddesses we saw,
according to Tylor, “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like
smooth round millstones, and there received their offerings of food.”
But on a certain Samoan island, says Mr. Turner, “In a district said
to have been early populated by settlers from Fiji, a number of fancy
Fijian stones were kept in a temple, and worshipped in time of war. The
priest, in consulting them, built them up in the form of a wall, and
then watched to see how they fell. If they fell to the westward, it was
a sign that the enemy there was to be {112}driven; but if they fell to
eastward, that was a warning of defeat, and delay in making an attack
was ordered accordingly.”

I cannot find room here for many detailed instances of similar
migrations; but there are two examples in Britain so exceedingly
interesting that even in so hasty a notice I cannot pass them by without
a brief mention. The inner or smaller stones at Stonehenge are known to
be of remote origin, belonging to rocks not found nearer Salisbury
Plain than Cumberland in one direction or Belgium in the other. They are
surrounded by a group of much larger stones, arranged as trilithons, but
carved out of the common sarsen blocks distributed over the neighbouring
country. I have tried to show elsewhere that these smaller igneous
rocks, untouched by the tool, * were the ancient sacred stones of an
immigrant tribe that came into Britain from the Continent, probably
over a broad land-belt which then existed where the Straits of Dover now
flow; and that the strangers on their arrival in Britain erected these
their ancestral gods on the Plain of Amesbury, and further contributed
to their importance and appearance by surrounding them with a circle of
the biggest and most imposing grey-wethers that the new country in which
they had settled could easily afford.

     * So Moses in the legend commanded the children of Israel to
     build “an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift
     up any iron”; and so of the boulders composing the altar on
     Mount Ebal it was said, “Thou shah not lift up any iron tool
     upon them.” The conservatism of religion kept up the archaic
     fashion for sacred purposes.

The other case is that of the Scone stone. This sacred block, according
to the accredited legend, was originally the ancestral god of the Irish
Scots, on whose royal tumulus at Tara it once stood. It was carried by
them to Argyllshire on their first invasion, and placed in a cranny of
the wall (say modern versions) at Dunstaffnage Castle. When the Scotch
kings removed to Scone, Kenneth II. took the stone to his new lowland
residence. Thence Edward I. {113}carried it off to England, where it has
ever since remained in Westminster Abbey, as part of the chair in
which the sovereigns of Britain sit at their coronation. The immense
significance of these facts or tales will be seen more clearly when we
come to consider the analogies of the Hebrew ark. Meanwhile, it may help
to explain the coronation usage, and the legend that wherever the Stone
of Destiny is found “the Scots in place must reign,” if I add a
couple of analogous cases from the history of the same mixed Celtic
race. According to Dr. O’Donovan, the inauguration stone of the
O’Donnells stood on a tumulus in the midst of a large plain; and on
this sacred stone, called the Flagstone of the Kings, the elected chief
stood to receive the white wand or sceptre of kingship. A cylindrical
obelisk, used for the same purpose, stands to this day, according to Dr.
Petrie, in the Rath-na-Riogh. So, too, M’Donald was crowned King of
the Isles, standing on a sacred stone, with an impression on top to
receive his feet. He based himself, as it were, upon the gods his
ancestors. The Tara stone even cried aloud, Professor Rhys tells us,
when the true king placed his feet above it. The coronation stone exists
in other countries; for example, in Hebrew history, or half-history, we
learn that when Abimelech was mads king it was “by the plain of
the pillar that was in Shechem”; and when Jehoash was anointed by
Jehoiada, “the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was.” In front
of the church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan stands the stone pillar at
which the Lombard kings and German emperors took the coronation oath,
under the ancient lime-trees which overshadow the piazza.

Now, it is quite true that Mr. Skene, the best authority on Celtic
Scotland, rejects this story of the Stone of Destiny in most parts as
legendary: he believes the Scone stone to have been merely the sacred
coronation-block of the Pictish Kings at Scone, and never to have
come from Ireland at all. Professor Ramsay thinks it is a piece of red
{114}sandstone broken off the rock of that district of Scotland. Even
Professor Rhys (who gives a most interesting account of the Tara Stone)
seems to have doubts as to the migration. But, true or not, the story
will amply serve my purpose here; for I use it only to illustrate the
equally dubious wanderings of a Hebrew sacred stone, at which we will
arrive in due time; and one legend is surely always the best possible
parallel of another.

In the course of ages, as religions develop, and especially as a few
great gods grow to overshadow the minor ancestral Lares and spirits,
it often comes about that sacred stones of the older faith have a new
religious significance given them in the later system. Thus we have seen
the Argives worshipped their old sacred stone under the name of Zeus
Kappotas; the Thespians identified theirs with the later Hellenic Eros;
and the Megarians considered a third as the representative of Phoebus.
The original local sacred stone of Delos has been found on the spot
where it originally stood, beneath the feet of the statue of the Delian
Apollo. And this, I am glad to see, is Mr. Andrew Lang’s view also;
for he remarks of the Greek unwrought stones, “They were blocks which
bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De
Brosses says, to the old fetishistic objects of worship, _after_
the anthropomorphic gods entered [I should say, were developed in]
Hellas.” So, too, in India, the local sacred stones have been
identified with the deities of the Hindu pantheon; Mr. Hislop remarks
that in every part of the Deccan (where Hinduism is of comparatively
late introduction) four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot’s
field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which the peasants
call the Five Pandavas; but, says Dr. Tylor, “he reasonably takes
these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient appellations.”
Islam, in like manner, has adopted the Kaaba, the great black stone
of the Holy Place at Mecca; and the Egyptian religion gave {115}a
new meaning to the pillar or monolith, by shaping it as an obelisk to
represent a ray of the rising sun-god.

Sometimes the sanctity of the antique stones was secured in the later
faith by connecting them with some legend or episode of the orthodox
religion. Thus the ancient sacred stone kept at Delphi--no doubt the
original oracle of that great shrine, as the rude Delian block was the
precursor of the Delian Apollo--was explained with reference to the
later Hellenic belief by the myth that it was the stone which Kronos
swallowed in mistake for Zeus: an explanation doubtless due to the fact
that this boulder was kept, like Monigan’s Irish idol and the Samoan
god, wrapped up in flannel; and in the myth, Rhea deceived Kronos by
offering him, instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling-bands.
There is here indeed food for much reflection. The sacred stone of the
Trœzenians, in like manner, lay in front of the temple; but it was
Hellenised, so to speak, by the story that on it the Trœzenian elders
sat when they purified Orestes from the murder of his mother.

In modern Europe, as everybody knows, a similar Christianisation of holy
wells, holy stones, and holy places has been managed by connecting them
with legends of saints, or by the still simpler device of marking a
cross upon them. The cross has a threefold value: in the first place,
it drives away from their accustomed haunts the ancient gods or spirits,
always envisaged in early Christian and mediæval thought as devils or
demons; in the second place, it asserts the supremacy of the new faith;
and in the third place, by conferring a fresh sanctity upon the old holy
place or object, it induces the people to worship the cross by the
mere habit of resorting to the shrine at which their ancestors so long
worshipped. Gregory’s well-known advice to St. Augustine on this
matter is but a single example of what went on over all Christendom.
In many cases, crosses in Britain are still found firmly fixed in old
sacred stones, usually recognisable by their unwrought condition. The
finest {116}example in Europe is probably the gigantic monolith of
Plumen in Brittany, topped by an insignificant little cross, and still
resorted to by the peasants (especially the childless) as a great place
of worship. The prehistoric monuments of Narvia in the Isle of Man have
been Christianised by having crosses deeply incised upon them. Other
cases, like the Black Stones of Iona, which gave sanctity to that Holy
Isle long before the time of Columba, will doubtless occur at once to
every reader. With many of the Scotch sculptured stones, it is difficult
to decide whether they were originally erected as crosses, or are
prehistoric monuments externally Christianised.

I have thus endeavoured briefly to suggest the ultimate derivation of
all sacred stones from sepulchral monuments, and to point out the very
large part which they bear in the essential of religion--that is to say,
worship--everywhere. There is, however, one particular application to
which I wish to call special attention, because of its peculiar
interest as regards the origin of the monotheistic god of Judaism and
Christianity. Hitherto in this chapter, I have intentionally made but
very few allusions to the faith and the sacred stones of the Hebrews,
because I wished first to give a general view of the whole ramifications
and modifications of stone-worship before coming down to the particular
instance in which we modern Europeans are most deeply interested. I will
now, however, give a brief summary of what seems to me most suggestive
and important in the early Semitic stone-cult. These results are no
doubt already familiar in outline to most cultivated readers, but it
is possible they may appear in a somewhat new light when regarded in
connexion with the general history of stone-worship as here elucidated.

That the Semites, as well as other early nations, were stone-worshippers
we know from a great number of positive instances. The stone pillars of
Baal and the wooden Ashera cones were the chief objects of adoration in
the Phoenician religion. The Stone of Bethel was apparently a menhir:
{117}the cairn of Mizpeh was doubtless a sepulchral monument. The
Israelites under Joshua, we are told, built a Gilgal of twelve standing
stones; and other instances in the early traditions of the Hebrews will
be noticed in their proper place later on. Similarly, among the Arabs of
the time of Mohammed, two of the chief deities were Manah and Lât,
the one a rock, the other a sacred stone or stone idol: and the Kaaba
itself, the great black stone of local worship, even the Prophet was
compelled to recognise and Islamise by adopting it bodily into his
monotheistic religion.

The stone worship of the Semites at large, though comparatively
neglected by Professor Robertson Smith, must have played a large part
in the religion of that race, from which the Hebrews were a special
offshoot. “In Arabia,” says Professor Smith, “where sacrifice by
fire was almost unknown, we find no proper altar, but in its place a
rude pillar or heap of stones, beside which the victim is slain, the
blood being poured out over the stone or at its base.” To the great
orientalist, it is true, the sacred stone or altar, like the sacred
tree and the sacred fountain, are nothing more than “common symbols
at sanctuaries”; he thinks of them not as gods but merely as
representatives of the god, arbitrarily chosen. After the evidence
I have already adduced, however, I think it will be seen that this
position is altogether untenable; indeed, Dr. Smith himself uses many
phrases in this connexion which enables us to see the true state of the
case far more clearly than he himself did. “The sacred stones [of the
Arabs], which are already mentioned by Herodotus, are called _ansab_,
i.e., stones set up, pillars. We also find the name _ghariy_,
‘blood-bedaubed,’ with reference to the ritual just described [of
sacrifice at the _nosb_ or sacred pillar]. The meaning of this ritual
will occupy us later: meantime the thing to be noted is that the altar
is only a modification of the _nosb_, and that the rude Arabian usage
is the primitive type out of which all the elaborate altar ceremonies
of the {118}more cultivated Semites grew. Whatever else was done in
connexion with a sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling or dashing
the blood against the altar, or allowing it to flow down on the ground
at its base, was hardly ever omitted; and this practice was not peculiar
to the Semites, but was equally the rule with the Greeks and Romans, and
indeed with the ancient nations generally.”

“It is certain,” says Professor Smith again, “that the original
altar among the Northern Semites, as well as among the Arabs, was a
great stone or cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed.”
There is no difference, he declares, between the Hebrew altar and the
Arabian standing stone. “Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are
frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as
standing at Sanctuaries, generally in connexion with a sacred legend
about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch
or hero. In the biblical story, they usually appear as mere memorial
structures without any definite ritual significance; but the
pentateuchal law looks on the use of sacred pillars as idolatrous. This
is the best evidence that such pillars held an important place among the
appurtenances of Canaanite temples; and as Hosea speaks of the pillar
as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of Northern Israel in
his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the Hebrews the pillars of
Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal, and other shrines were looked upon, not as mere
memorials of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual
apparatus of a place of worship.... From these evidences, and especially
from the fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both, it
seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the primitive
rude stone pillar. But the sacred stone is more than an altar, for in
Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a
table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar; the two are found side
by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a piece of sacrificial
apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the
{119}presence of the deity, which in process of time comes to be
fashioned and carved in various ways, till ultimately it becomes a
statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post
was ultimately developed into an image of wood.”

In spite of much obvious groping in the dark in this and other passages
of the _Religion of the Semites_, it is clear that the learned professor
recognised at least one central fact--“the sacred stone at Semitic
sanctuaries was from the first an object of worship, a sort of rude idol
in which the divinity was somehow supposed to be present.” Again, he
notes that “Jacob’s pillar is more than a mere landmark, for it is
anointed, just as idols were in antiquity, and the pillar itself, not
the spot on which it stood, is called ‘the house of God,’ as if the
deity were conceived actually to dwell in the stone, or manifest himself
therein to his worshippers. And this is the conception which appears to
have been associated with sacred stones everywhere. When the Arab daubed
blood on the _nosh_, his object was to bring the offering into direct
contact with the deity; and in like manner the practice of stroking the
sacred stone with the hand is identical with the practice of touching or
stroking the garments or beard of a man in acts of supplication before
him.” Elsewhere he says: “So far as evidence from tradition and
ritual goes, we can only think of the sacred stone as consecrated by the
actual presence of the godhead, so that whatever touched it was brought
into immediate contact with the deity.” And he quotes a line from an
Arab poet in which the Arabian gods are expressly described as “gods
of stone.”

It is thus clear that sacred stones were common objects of worship with
the Semites in general, and also with the Hebrew people in particular.
But after the exclusive worship of Jahweh, the local Jewish god,
had grown obligatory among the Jews, it became the policy of the
“Jehovist” priests to Jehovise and to consecrate the sacred stones
of Palestine by bringing them into connexion {120}with the Jehovistic
legend and the tales of the Patriarchs. Thus Professor Cheyne comments
as follows upon the passage in Isaiah where the prophet mocks the
partizan of the old polytheistic creed as a stone-worshipper--“Among
the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion: They, they are thy lot:
Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering: Thou hast offered a meat
offering: “The large smooth stones referred to above were the fetishes
of the primitive Semitic races, and anointed with oil, according to a
widely spread custom. It was such a stone which Jacob took for a pillow,
and afterwards consecrated by pouring oil upon it. The early Semites and
reactionary idolatrous Israelites called such stones Bethels.... i.e.,
houses of _El_ (the early Semitic word for God) *.... In spite of the
efforts of the ‘Jehovist’ who desired to convert these ancient
fetishes into memorials of patriarchal history, the old heathenish use
of them seems to have continued especially in secluded places.”

     * Say rather, “for a god.”

Besides the case of the stone at Bethel, there is the later one (in our
narrative) when Jacob and Laban made a covenant, “and Jacob took a
stone, and set it up for a pillar. And Jacob said unto his brethren,
Gather stones; and they took stones and made an heap: and they did eat
there upon the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he erects an altar
called El-Elohe-Israel; he sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and
another at the place at Luz where God appeared to him. Of like import is
the story of the twelve stones which the twelve men take out of Jordan
to commemorate the passage of the tribes. All are clearly attempts to
Jehovise these early sacred stones or local gods by connecting them with
incidents in the Jehovistic version of the ancient Hebrew legends.

That such stones, however, were worshipped as deities in early times,
before the cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive one among his
devotees, is evident from the Jehovistic {121}narrative itself, which
has not wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces of earlier religion.
Samuel judged Israel every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s sacred
pillar: at Gilgal, the place where Joshua’s twelve stones were set
up; and at Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted by the pillar of
Laban’s covenant. In other words, these were the sanctuaries of the
chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel himself “took a stone and set it
between Mizpeh and Shem and its very name, Eben-ezer, “the stone of
help,” shows that it was originally worshipped before proceeding on
warlike expeditions, though the Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto
the Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of course, to obscure the
real meaning. So at Peran, in New Guinea, Mr. Chalmers saw “a large
peculiarly-shaped stone,” by name Ravai, considered very sacred.
Sacrifices are made to it, and it is more particularly addressed in
times of fighting. “Before setting forth, offerings are presented,
with food,” and the stone is entreated to precede the warriors into
battle. Wherever a stone has a name, it is almost certainly of mortuary
origin. It was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more, that Samuel
directed Saul to go, saying, “I will come down unto thee, to offer
burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings.”
It was at the cairn of Mizpeh that Saul was chosen king; and after the
victory over the Ammonites, Saul went once more to the great Stonehenge
at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom,” and “there they made Saul
king before Jahweh in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of
peace-offerings before Jahweh.” This passage is a very instructive and
important one, because here we see that in the opinion of the writer at
least Jahweh was then domiciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred stones
of that holy circle.

Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his
father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and
then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up
to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” {122}evidently to sacrifice, “one
carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread,
and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like
memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books
of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked
under a thin veil of Jehovism.

On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has
shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though
east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How,
then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that
when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the
Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the
Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of
Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh,
the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no
alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction.

And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of
the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live
near him?

I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying,
according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by
an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all
the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford
us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we
first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we
find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been,
located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear
that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed,
Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt,
remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end
of the conquest, the {123}tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh;
and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast
lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still
when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh;
and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That
Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a
true old tradition--a tradition of the age just before the historical
beginnings of the Hebrew annals.

But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present
the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late
date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic
editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the
great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were
afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the
Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke
in pieces--so Hebrew legend declared--before the face of Jahweh. After
the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time
at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the
Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of
the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh
on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before
Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David
had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house
of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of
the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.”
Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea,
the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe
and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the
moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary
for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are
completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of
civilisation, as Mr. {124}Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece
were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient
temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to
which men were hardly admitted.”

That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient traditions of the race, was
similarly concealed within his chest or ark in the holy of holies,
is evident, I think, to any attentive reader. It is true, the later
Jehovistic glosses of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed after the
Jehovistic worship had become purified and spiritualised, do their best
to darken the comprehension of this matter by making the presence of
Jahweh seem always incorporeal; and even in the earlier traditions, the
phrase “the ark of the covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted for
the simpler and older one, “the ark of Jahweh.” But through all the
disfigurements with which the priestly scribes of the age of Josiah and
the sacerdotalists of the return from the captivity have overlaid the
primitive story, we can still see clearly in many places that Jahweh
himself was at first personally present in the ark that covered him.
And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship they
had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was
nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there
at Horeb, when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when
they came out of the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they
admit--that the object or objects concealed in the ark consisted of a
sculptured stone or stones; and that to dance or sing before this stone
or these stones was equivalent to dancing or singing before the face of
Jahweh.

The question whether the mysterious body concealed in the ark was or was
not a lingam or other phallic object I purposely omit to discuss here,
as not cognate to our present enquiry. It is sufficient to insist that
from the evidence before us, first, it _was_ Jahweh himself, and second,
it was an object made of stone. Further than that ’twere {125}curious
to enquire, and I for one do not desire to pry into the mysteries.

Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly
certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them
a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately
connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or
objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the
front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in
the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh
their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its
true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the
most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him
in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times
constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the
embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the
Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night.
According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone,
“for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is
as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using
the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own
sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel--the
sacred stone of the tribe--that they look for succour. Nay, even when
Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by
it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before
Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original
nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break
in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain
undemolished within his tribal boundaries.

I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference
that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and
etherealised into the God {126}of Christianity, was in his origin
nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of
Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all,
the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.




CHAPTER VI.--SACRED STAKES.

|MILTON {127}speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our
fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly
contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast
majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in
all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for
their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite
so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less
important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks
into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have
already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or
megalithic monument.

Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of
an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the
honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as
elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct
reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the
interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great
men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty
have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day
at Père Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second
place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than
the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is
{128}chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and
it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are
always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less
critical than the stone in the history of religion.

Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred stone
derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the grave to keep
down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from the sharp-pointed
stick driven through the body to pin it down as we saw in the third
chapter, and still so employed in Christian England to prevent suicides
from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to protrude from
the ground, so as to warn living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit.

At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere
grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative inconspicuousness, it
obtains relatively little notice, it is now and always has been by far
the most common mode of preserving the memory of the spot where a person
lies buried. A good example, which will throw light upon many subsequent
modifications, is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New
Guinea. “The body,” he says, “was buried. At the side was set up
a stake, to which were tied the spear, club, bow and arrow of the
deceased, but broken, to prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave
of a woman: her cooking utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the
stake.” Similar customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.

Though worship of stakes or wooden posts is common all over the world, I
can give but few quite unequivocal instances of such worship being paid
to a post actually known to surmount an undoubted grave. Almost the
best direct evidence I can obtain is the case of the grave-pole in Buru,
already quoted from Mr. H. O. Forbes. But the following account of
a Samoyed place of sacrifice, extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s
_Voyage of the Vega_, is certainly suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats
Island {129}the Swedish explorer found a number of reindeer skulls, so
arranged that they formed a close thicket of antlers. Around lay other
bones, both of bears and reindeer; and in the midst of all “the
mighty beings to whom all this splendour was offered. They consisted’ of
hundreds of small wooden sticks, the upper portions of which were carved
very clumsily in the form of the human countenance, most of them
from fifteen to twenty, but some of them three hundred and seventy
centimetres in length. They were all stuck in the ground on the
southeast part of the eminence. Near the place of sacrifice there were
to be seen pieces of driftwood and remains of the fireplace at which the
sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide told us that at these meals the
mouths of the idols were besmeared with blood and wetted with brandy;
and the former statement was confirmed by the large spots of blood
which were found on most of the large idols below the holes intended to
represent the mouth.” At a far earlier date, Stephen Burrough in 1556
writes as follows to much the same effect in his interesting narrative
printed in Hakluyt: “There I met againe with Loshak, and went on shore
with him, and he brought me to a heap of Samoeds idols, which were in
number about 300, the worst and the most unartificiall worke that ever I
saw: the eyes and mouthes of sundrie of them were bloodie, they had the
shape of men, women, and children, very grossly wrought, and that which
they had made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood. Some of
their idols were an olde sticke with two or three notches, made with a
knife in it. There was one of their sleds broken and lay by the heape of
idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which the foules had spoyled:
and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as high as their
mouthes; being all bloody, I thought that to be the table wheron they
offered their sacrifice.”

In neither of these accounts, it is true, is it distinctly mentioned
that the place of sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: {130}but I
believe this to be the case, partly from analogy, and partly because
Nordenskiôld mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled is a frequent
sign of a Samoyed grave. Compare also the following account of a
graveyard among nominally Christian Ostyak Siberians, also from
Nordenskiôld: “The corpses were placed in large coffins above ground,
at which almost always a cross was erected.” [The accompanying
woodcut shews that these crosses were rude wooden stakes with one or two
crossbars.] “In one of the crosses a sacred picture was inserted
which must be considered a further proof that a Christian rested in the
coffin. Notwithstanding this, we found some clothes, which had belonged
to the departed, hanging on a bush beside the grave, together with a
bundle containing food, principally dried fish. At the graves of the
richer natives the survivors are even said to place along with food some
rouble notes, in order that the departed may not be altogether without
ready money on his entrance into the other world.”

To complete the parallel, I ought to add that money was also deposited
on the sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of another such sacrificial
place on Yalmal, Nordenskiôld says, after describing a pile of bones,
reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws: “In the middle of the heap of bones
stood four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted of sticks a metre in
length, with notches cut in them.... The two others, which clearly were
the proper idols of this place of sacrifice, consisted of driftwood
roots, on which some carvings had been made to distinguish the eyes,
mouth, and nose. The parts of the pieces of wood, intended to represent
the eyes and mouth, had recently been besmeared with blood, and
there still lay at the heap of bones the entrails of a newly killed
reindeer.”

Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the
wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps further
to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute writer, among
the Ostyaks {131}of Eastern Siberia there is found a most interesting
custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition from the
image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man dies, they set
up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which receives offerings
at every meal and has honours paid to it, while the widow continually
embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried
at the end of three years or so: but sometimes “the image of a shaman
(native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is set up permanently, and remains
as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say “god”; and we
see the transformation at once completed. Indeed, Erman adds acutely
about the greater gods of the Ostyaks: “That these latter also have a
historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished
men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by
degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to
doubt.”

With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden idols, it
must be remembered that bowls of blood are common offerings to the dead;
and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly witness in this matter,
has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts with those to deities. In the
eleventh book of the Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink greedily of
the sacrificial blood; and libations of gore form a special feature in
Greek offerings to heroes. That blood was offered to the sacred stones
we have already seen; and we noticed that there as here it was specially
smeared upon the parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to
gods, or pouring of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular
notice; and we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come
to consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will
only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on blood
as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh asks indignantly
in the fiftieth {132}Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink
the blood of goats?”

To pass on to more unequivocal cases of stake-worship, where we can
hardly doubt that the stake represents a dead man, Captain Cook noticed
that in the Society Islands “the carved wooden images at burial-places
were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which the souls of
the departed retired.” So Ellis observes of Polynesians generally that
the sacred objects might be either mere stocks and stones, or carved
wooden images, from six to eight feet long down to as many inches. Some
of these were to represent “tu,” divine manes or spirits of the
dead; while others were to represent “tu,” or deities of higher
rank and power. To my mind, this is almost a distinction without a
difference; the first being ghosts of recently deceased ancestors, the
second ghosts of remoter progenitors. The ancient Araucanians again
fixed over a tomb an upright log, “rudely carved to represent the
human frame.” After the death of New Zealand chiefs, wooden images,
20 to 40 feet high, were erected as monuments. I might easily multiply
instances; but I refrain lest the list grow tedious.

Dr. Codrington notes that the large mouths and lolling tongues of many
New Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to the habit of smearing the
mouth with blood and other offerings.

Where men preserve the corpses of their dead, images are not so likely
to grow up; but where fear of the dead has brought about the practice of
burial or burning, it is reasonable that the feelings of affection
which prompted gifts and endearments to the mummy in the first stage
of thought should seek some similar material outlet under the altered
circumstances. Among ourselves, a photograph, a portrait, the toys of
a dead child, are preserved and cherished. Among savages, ruder
representations become necessary. They bury the actual corpse safely
out of sight, but make some rough wooden imitation to represent {133}it.
Thus it does not surprise us to find that while the Marianne Islanders
keep the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household
gods, and expect them to give oracles out of their skulls, the New
Zealanders, on the other hand, “set up memorial idols of deceased
persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them as if
still alive, and casting garments to them when they pass by,” while
they also “preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each
dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor.” The Coast Negroes “place
several earthen images on the graves.” Some Papuans, “after a grave
is filled up, collect round an idol, and offer provisions to it.” The
Javans dress up an image in the clothes of the deceased. So, too, of the
Caribs of the West Indies, we learn that they “carved little images in
the shape in which they believed spirits to have appeared to them; and
some human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them.”
From such little images, obviously substituted for the dead body which
used once to be preserved and affectionately tended, are derived, I
believe, most of the household gods of the world--the Lares and Penates
of the Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.

How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see among the
Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the _matmate_ are the spirits of their
ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or household gods.
They are supposed to enter the house through an opening in the roof, and
to take up their abode temporarily in the skulls, or in images of wood
or ivory, in order to partake of the offerings.”

A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in still
stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the image. A
New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child, and carries it
about with her; whereas a West African mother, living in a tribe where
terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial, makes {134}a
little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash, wraps it in
skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby. Bastian saw
Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their
backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat higher level, “the
spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe
not a few of these instances, “were represented by, and in language
completely identified with, the carved wooden heads” (note this
point) “or more complete images, to which worship and sacrifice were
offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I think, the course
of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the ashes of the dead are
similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which are afterwards worshipped
as household gods.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples some of
which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the growth of the
idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the real body for burial
or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, a
figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished
with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of France was buried, “over the
coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and
diamonds, and holding two shields.... This image was dressed with cloth
of gold.... In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre
Dame.” Madame de Motteville says of the father of the great Condé,
“The effigy of this prince was waited upon for three days, as was
customary”--forty days having been the original time during which food
was supplied to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes
a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the
Westminster Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.

As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit
that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be
generally recognised, it {135}would be a simple transference of feeling
to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine
or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian
tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them
to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among
the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman
in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff
planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there
necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up
was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even
probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote
one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent
connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth
(like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and
sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to
that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave,
wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles.

Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work _The Hairy Ainu_, figures and
describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The
stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance;
those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This
fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and
elsewhere.

Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their
genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes
usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood
described as an _ashera_. What kind of object an _ashera_ was we learn
from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an _ashera_
of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is
clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.”
But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar,
{136}beside which stood an _ashera_, under a green tree,--all three
of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together.
A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and
wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree.
“The _ashera_,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred
symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G.
Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the
divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present
work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally
the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,”
says Professor Smith, again, “had its _ashera_, even such altars as in
the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to
Jehovah.”

The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other
grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian
monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental
pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act
of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says
Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the
_ashera_ was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or
Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings
(xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove _hangings_ for
the _ashera_.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the
parallel of the sacred _erica_ at Byblus, which was “a mere dead
stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped
in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore
represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis).
“But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew _ashera_.” So
near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may
he miss its actual import.

I will dwell no longer upon these more or less remote derivatives of the
grave-stake. I will only say briefly that in {137}my opinion all wooden
idols or images are directly or indirectly descended from the wooden
headpost or still more primitive sepulchral pole. Not of course that
I suppose every wooden image to have been necessarily once itself a
funereal monument. Donatello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at Florence,
the blue-robed and star-spangled Madonna of the wayside shrine, have
certainly no such immediate origin. But I do believe that the habit of
making and worshipping wooden images arose in the way I have pointed
out; and to those who would accuse me of “gross Euhemerism,” I would
once more remark that even in these highest Christian instances the
objects of veneration are themselves in the last resort admitted to have
been at one time Galilean women. Nay, is not even the wayside shrine
itself in most Catholic countries more often than not the mortuary
chapel erected where some wayfarer has died a violent death, by murder,
lightning, accident, or avalanche?




CHAPTER VIL--SACRED TREES.

|The {138}sacred tree stands less obviously in the direct line of
ancestry of gods and of God than the sacred stone and the sacred
stake which we have just considered. I would willingly pass it over,
therefore, in this long preliminary inquisition, could I safely do so,
in order to progress at once to the specific consideration of the God
of Israel and the rise of Monotheism. But the tree is nevertheless so
closely linked with the two other main objects of human worship that I
hardly see how I can avoid considering it here in the same connexion:
especially as in the end it has important implications with regard
to the tree of the cross, as well as to the True Vine, and many other
elements of Christian faith and Christian symbolism. I shall therefore
give it a short chapter as I pass, premising that I have already entered
into the subject at greater length in my excursus On the Origin of
Tree-Worship, appended to my verse translation of the _Attis_ of
Catullus.

The worship of sacred trees is almost as widely diffused over the whole
world as the worship of dead bodies, mummies, relics, graves, sacred
stones, sacred stakes, and stone or wooden idols. The great authorities
on the subject of Tree-Worship are Mannhardt’s _Baumkultus_ and Mr.
J. G. Frazer’s _The Golden Bough_. Neither of those learned and acute
writers, however, has fully seen the true origin of worship from funeral
practices: and therefore it becomes necessary to go over the same
ground again briefly here from the point of view afforded us by the
corpse-theory and {139}ghost-theory of the basis of religion. I shall
hope to add something to their valuable results, and also incidentally
to show that all the main objects of worship together leads us back
unanimously to the Cult of the Dead as their common starting-point.

Let us begin in this instance (contrary to our previous practice) by
examining and endeavouring to understand a few cases of the behaviour of
tree-spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third Æneid
how, on a certain occasion, Æneas was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus
crowned with dogwood and myrtle bushes. He endeavoured to pluck up some
of these by the roots, in order to cover the altar, as was customary,
with leaf-clad branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up
astonished him by exuding drops of liquid blood, which trickled and fell
upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled human
gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding from the tumulus,
and a voice assured Æneas that the barrow on which he stood covered the
murdered remains of his friend Polydorus.

Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth--no doubt an ancient
and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his great poem--we
see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as the
representative and embodiment of the dead man’s soul, just as elsewhere
the snake which glides from the tomb of Anchises is regarded as the
embodied spirit of the hero, and just as the owls and bats which haunt
sepulchral caves are often identified in all parts of the world with the
souls of the departed.

Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur abundantly
elsewhere. “When the oak is being felled,” says Aubrey, in his
_Remains of Gentilisme_, “it gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that
may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting.
E. Wyld, Esq., hath heared it severall times.” Certain Indians, says
Bastian, dare not cut a particular plant, because there comes out of
it a red juice which they take for its blood. {140}I myself remember
hearing as a boy in Canada that wherever _Sanguinaria Canadensis_, the
common American bloodroot, grew in the woods, an Indian had once been
buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the stem when
one picked the flowers were the dead man’s blood. In Samoa, says Mr.
Turner, the special abode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a grove of large
and durable afzelia trees. “No one dared cut that timber. A story is
told of a party from Upolu who once attempted it, and the consequence
was that blood flowed from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers
all took ill and died.” Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred
larch-tree at Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever
it was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not actually know
that the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed about
Polydorus’s dogwood, and is probably implied in the Samoan case, as I
gather from the title given to the spirit as king of Fiji.

In other instances, however, such a doubt does not exist. We are
expressly told that it is the souls of the dead which are believed to
animate the speaking or bleeding trees. “The Dieyerie tribe of South
Australia,” says Mr. Frazer, “regard as very sacred certain trees
which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they will not
cut the trees down, and protest against settlers doing so.” Some of
the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers
inhabit certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell
one of these sacred trunks, they excuse themselves by saying that it was
the priests who made them fell it.

Now, how did this connexion between the tree and the ghost or ancestor
grow up? In much the same way, I imagine, as the connexion between the
sacred stone or the sacred stake and the dead chief who lies buried
beneath it. Whatever grows or stands upon the grave is sure to share the
honours paid to the spirit that dwells within it. Thus a snake or other
animal seen to glide out of a tomb is {141}instantly taken by savages
and even by half-civilised men as the genius or representative of the
dead inhabitant. But do trees grow out of graves? Undoubtedly, yes.
In the first place, they may grow by mere accident, as they might grow
anywhere else; the more so as the soil in such a case has been turned
and laboured. But beyond this, in the second place, it is common all
over the world to plant trees or shrubs over the graves of relatives or
tribesmen. Though direct evidence on this point is difficult to obtain,
a little is forthcoming. In Algeria, I observed, the Arab women went
on Fridays to plant flowers and shrubs on the graves of their immediate
dead. I learned from Mr. R. L. Stevenson that similar plantings take
place in Samoa and Fiji. The Tahitians put young casuarinas on graves.
In Roman Catholic countries the planting of shrubs in cemeteries takes
place usually on the _jour des morts_, a custom which would argue for it
an immense antiquity; for though it is a point of honour among Catholics
to explain this _fete_ as of comparatively recent origin, definitely
introduced by a particular saint at a particular period, its analogy to
similar celebrations elsewhere shows us that it is really a surviving
relic of a very ancient form of Manesworship.

In Græco-Roman antiquity it is certain that trees were frequently
planted around the barrows of the dead; and that leafy branches formed
part of the established ceremonial of funerals. I cannot do better than
quote in this respect once more the case of Polydorus:=

```Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens

```Aggeritur tumulo tellus; stant Manibus aræ,

```Cæruleis mœstæ vittis atraque cupresso.=

Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was
carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me
to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The
acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments,
with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus {142}from which an
acacia emerges, with the naïve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”,

An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how
easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal
descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of
the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the
simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement
that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which
accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a
little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus.

I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin
are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees.

Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli
because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and
thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of
the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in _The Golden Bough_
that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it
visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the
surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are
very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in
southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs;
and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed,
it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of
ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over
the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short,
the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule,
however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted
in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and
Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very
ancient yews in {143}Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’
Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In
southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most
closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy,
however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional
denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay _Sur le
Culte du Cypres_ has brought together much evidence of this worship of
evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs,
Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.

Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many
respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies,
mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or
statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made
to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the
recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the _Voyage
of the Beagle_ describes how the Indians of South America would greet
with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part
of the Pampas; libations of brandy and maté were poured into a hole at
its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these
tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes
of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other
cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr.
Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the
“prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield
saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as
offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a
year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who
dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food
at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by
spirits. I need not multiply {144}instances; they may be found by the
hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections.

Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection
with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the
idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually
its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn
stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being
probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with
which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a
tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is
one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude
stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its
sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts
or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship
in its undisguised early native development.

I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this
triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or
invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.

The association of the sacred tree with actual idols or images of
deceased ancestors is well seen in the following passage which I quote
from Dr. Tylor: “A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove
in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe.
Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur coats, each set up beneath its
great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and
peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns
and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods--such is the
description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of
foreign civilisation has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial
it must end by abolishing. A race ethnologically allied to these
tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of
tree-worship in Northern Europe. In {145}Esthonian districts, within the
present century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree,
generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a
sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; and the old memories are handed
down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was
sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an
offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the
worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back,
which stone he kissed when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an
offering.‘” After the evidence already given, I do not think there can
be a reasonable doubt, in such a combination of tree and stone, that we
have here a sacrifice to an ancestral spirit.

Similarly, in the courtyard of a Bodo house is planted the sacred
euphorbia of Batho, the national god, to which a priest offers prayer
and kills a pig. In the island of Tjumba, in the East Indies, a
festival is held after harvest, and vessels are filled with rice as a
thank-offering to the gods. Then the sacred stone at the foot of a palm
tree is sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed animal, and rice is
laid on the stone for the gods. When the Khonds settle a new village, a
sacred cotton tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is
placed the sacrificial stone which embodies or represents the village
deity. Among the Semites, says Professor Robertson Smith, “no
Canaanite high place was complete without its sacred tree standing
beside the altar.” We shall only fully understand the importance of
these facts, however, when we come later to consider the subject of the
manufacture of gods by deliberate process, and the nature of the bloody
ceremonial which always accompanies it.

In some of the above instances it is incidentally mentioned that the
trunks of sacred trees are occasionally draped, as we saw to be also
the case with sacred stones, sacred stakes, idols, and relics. Another
example of this practice is given in the account of the holy oak of
Romowe, venerated {146}by the ancient Prussians, which was hung with
drapery like the _ashera_, and decked with little hanging images of the
gods. The holy trees of Ireland are still covered with rag offerings.
Other cases will be noticed in other connexions hereafter.

Once more, just as stones come to be regarded as ancestors, so by a like
process do sacred trees. Thus Galton says in South Africa, “We passed
a magnificent tree. It was the parent of all the Damaras.... The savages
danced round it in great delight.” Several Indian tribes believe
themselves to be the sons of trees. Many other cases are noted by Mr.
Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. I do not think it is necessary for our
argument to repeat them here. Sometimes, however, especially in later
rationalising times, the sacred tree is merely said to have been planted
by the god or hero whom it commemorates. Thus the cypresses of Herakles
at Daphne were believed to have been set on the spot by that deity,
while the tamarisk at Beersheba was supposed to have been placed there
by Abraham.

I hope it is clear from this rapid _resume_ that all the facts about the
worship of sacred trees stand exactly parallel to those with regard to
the worship of graves, mummies, idols, sacred stones, sacred stakes,
and other signs of departed spirits. Indeed, we have sometimes direct
evidence of such affiliation. Thus Mr. Turner says of a sacred tree on a
certain spot in the island of Savaii, which enjoyed rights of sanctuary
like the cities of refuge or a mediæval cathedral: “It is said that
the king of a division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived at that spot.
After he died, the house fell into decay; but the tree was fixed on as
representing the departed king, and out of respect for his memory it was
made the substitute of a living and royal protector.” By the light
of this remark we may surely interpret in a similar sense such other
statements of Mr. Turner’s as that a sweet-scented tree in another
place “was held to be the habitat of a household god, and anything
aromatic {147}which the family happened to get was presented to it as
an offering;” or again, “a family god was supposed to live” in
another tree; “and hence no one dared to pluck a leaf or break a
branch.” For family gods, as we saw in a previous chapter, are really
family ghosts, promoted to be deities.

In modern accounts of sacred trees much stress is usually laid upon the
fact that they are large and well-grown, often very conspicuous,
and occupying a height, where they serve as landmarks. Hence it has
frequently been taken for granted that they have been selected for
worship on account of their size and commanding position. This, however,
I think, is a case of putting the cart before the horse, as though one
were to say that St. Peter’s and Westminster Abbey, the Temple of Karnak
or the Mosque of Omar, owed their sanctity to their imposing dimensions.
There is every reason why a sacred tree should grow to be exceptionally
large and conspicuous. Barrows are usually built on more or less
commanding heights, where they may attract general attention. The ground
is laboured, piled high, freed from weeds, and enriched by blood and
other offerings. The tree, being sacred, is tended and cared for. It is
never cut down, and so naturally on the average of instances grows to be
a big and well-developed specimen. Hence I hold the tree is usually big
because it is sacred, not sacred because it is big. On the other hand,
where a tree already full-grown is chosen for a place of burial, it
would no doubt be natural to choose a large and conspicuous one. Thus I
read of the tree under which Dr. Livingstone’s heart was buried by his
native servant, “It is the largest in the neighbourhood.”

Looking at the question broadly, the case stands thus. We know that in
many instances savages inter their dead under the shade of big trees.
We know that such trees are thereafter considered sacred, and worshipped
with blood, clothes, drapery, offerings. We know that young shrubs
{148}or trees are frequently planted on graves in all countries. We know
that whatever comes up on or out of a grave is counted as representative
of the ghost within it. The presumption is therefore in favour of any
particular sacred tree being of funereal origin; and the onus of proving
the opposite lies with the person who asserts some more occult and less
obvious explanation.

At the same time I am quite ready to allow here, as in previous
instances, when once the idea of certain trees being sacred has grown
common among men, many trees may come to possess by pure association
a sanctity of their own. This is doubtless the case in India with the
peepul, and in various other countries with various other trees. Exactly
the same thing has happened to stones. And so, again, though I believe
the temple to have been developed out of the tomb or its covering, I
do not deny that churches are now built apart from tombs, though always
dedicated to the worship of a God who is demonstrably a particular
deified personage.

Another point on which I must touch briefly is that of the sacred grove
or cluster of trees. These often represent, I take it, the trees planted
in the _temenos_ or sacred tabooed space which surrounds the primitive
tomb or temple. The _koubbas_ or little dome-shaped tombs of Mahommedan
saints so common in North Africa are all surrounded by such a walled
enclosure, within which ornamental or other trees are habitually
planted. In many cases these are palms--the familiar sacred tree of
Mesopotamia, about which more must be said hereafter in a later chapter.
The well-known _bois sacré_ at Blidah is a considerable grove, with
a _koubba_ in its midst. A similar _temenos_ frequently surrounded the
Egyptian and the Greek temple. I do not assert that these were always of
necessity actual tombs; but they were at any rate cenotaphs. When once
people had got accustomed to the idea that certain trees were sacred to
the memory of their ancestors or their gods, it would be but a slight
step to plant such trees {149}round an empty temple. When Xenophon, for
example, built a shrine to Artemis, and planted around it a grove of
many kinds of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an image of the
goddess, nobody would for a moment suppose he erected it over the body
of an actual dead Artemis. But men would never have begun building
temples and consecrating groves at all if they had not first built
houses for the dead god-chief, and planted shrubs and trees upon his
venerated tumulus. Nay, even the naïve inscription upon Xenophon’s
shrine--“He who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the ground must
every year offer the tenth part of the produce to the goddess, and out
of the residue keep the temple in repair”--does it not carry us back
implicitly to the origin of priesthood, and of the desire for perpetuity
in the due maintenance of the religious offices?

I shall say nothing here about the evolution of the great civilised
tree-gods like Attis and Adonis, so common in the region of the eastern
Mediterranean, partly because I have already treated them at some length
in the essay on Tree-Worship to which I have alluded above, and partly
because they would lead us too far afield from our present subject. But
a few words must be devoted in passing to the prevalence of tree-worship
among the Semitic peoples, intimately connected as it is with the rise
of certain important elements in the Christian cult.

“In all parts of the Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson Smith,
“trees were adored as divine.” Among the species thus honoured he
enumerates especially the pines and cedars of Lebanon, the evergreen
oaks of the Palestinian hills, the tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, and
the acacias of the Arabian wadies. Most of these, it will be noted, are
evergreens. In Arabia, the most striking case on record is that of the
sacred date-palm at Nejran. This was adored at an annual feast, when it
was “all hung with fine clothes and women’s ornaments.” A similar
tree existed at Mecca, to which the people resorted annually, {150}and
hung upon it weapons, garments, ostrich eggs, and other offerings. In a
sacred acacia at Nakla a goddess was supposed to live. The modern
Arabs still hang pieces of flesh on such sacred trees, honour them with
sacrifices, and present them with rags of calico and coloured beads.

As regards the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Philo Byblius says that
plants were in ancient times revered as gods, and honoured with
libations and sacrifices. Dr. Robertson Smith gives several instances.
Christianity has not extinguished the veneration for sacred trees in
Syria, where they are still prayed to in sickness and hung with rags.
The Moslems of Palestine also venerate the sacred trees of immemorial
antiquity.

In the Hebrew scriptures tree-worship constantly appears, and is frankly
dwelt with by Professor Robertson Smith, who does not refuse to connect
with this set of beliefs the legend of Jahweh in the burning bush. The
local altars of early Hebrew cult were habitually set up “under green
trees.” On this subject I would refer the reader to Dr. Smith’s own
interesting disquisition on p. 193 of The Religion of the Semites.

With regard to the general sacredness of vegetation, and especially of
food-plants, such as corn, the vine, and the date-palm, I postpone that
important subject for the present, till we come to consider the gods
of cultivation, and the curious set of ideas which gradually led up to
sacramental god-eating. In a theme so vast and so involved as that of
human religion, it becomes necessary to take one point at a time, and to
deal with the various parts in analytic isolation.

We have now examined briefly almost all the principal sacred objects of
the world, according to classes--the corpse, the mummy, the idol, the
sacred stone, the sacred stake, the sacred tree or grove; there remains
but one other group of holy things, very generally recognised, which I
do not propose to examine separately, but to which {151}a few words may
yet be devoted at the end of a chapter. I mean, the sacred wells. It
might seem at first sight as if these could have no possible connection
with death or burial; but that expectation is, strange to say, delusive.
There appears to be some reason for bringing wells, too, into the
widening category of funereal objects. The oxen’s well at Acre, for
example, was visited by Christian, Jewish, and Moslem pilgrims; it was
therefore an object of great ancient sanctity; but observe this point:
there is a _mashhed_ or sacred tomb beside it, “perhaps the modern
representative of the ancient Memnonium.” Every Egyptian temple had
in like manner its sacred lake. In modern Syria, “cisterns are always
found beside the grave of saints, and are believed to be inhabited by a
sort of fairy. A pining child is thought to be a fairy changeling, and
must be lowered into the cistern.” The similarity of the belief about
holy wells in England and Ireland, and their frequent association with
the name of a saint, would seem to suggest for them a like origin.
Sacred rivers usually rise from sacred springs, near which stands a
temple. The river Adonis took its origin at the shrine of Aphaca: and
the grave of Adonis, about whom much more must be said hereafter, stood
near the mouth of the holy stream that was reddened by his blood. The
sacred river Belus had also its peculiar Memnonium or Adonis tomb. But I
must add that sacred rivers had likewise their annual god-victims, about
whom we shall have a great deal to say at a later stage of our enquiry,
and from whom in part they probably derived their sanctity. Still, that
their holiness was also due in part, and originally, to tombs at their
sources, I think admits of no reasonable doubt.

The equivalence of the holy well and the holy stone is shown by the fact
that while a woman whose chastity was suspected had to drink water of a
sacred spring to prove her innocence, at Mecca she had to swear seventy
oaths by the Kaaba.

Again, {152}sacred wells and fountains were and are worshipped with just
the same acts of sacrifice as ghosts and images. At Aphaca, the pilgrims
cast into the holy pool, jewels of gold and silver, with webs of linen
and other precious stuffs. A holy grove was an adjunct of the holy
spring: in Greece, according to Botticher, they were seldom separated.
At the annual fair of the Sacred Terebinth, or tree and well of Abraham
at Mamre, the heathen visitors offered sacrifices beside the tree, and
cast into the well libations of wine, with cakes, coins, myrrh, and
incense: all of which we may compare with the Ostyak offerings to
ancestral grave-stakes. At the holy waters of Karwa, bread, fruit, and
other foods were laid beside the fountain. At Mecca, and at the Stygian
Waters in the Syrian desert, similar gifts were cast into the holy
source. In one of these instances at least we know that the holy well
was associated with an actual burial; for at Aphaca, the holiest shrine
of Syria, the tomb of the local Baal or god was shown beside the sacred
fountain. “A buried god,” says Dr. Robertson Smith quaintly, in
commenting on this fact, “is a god that dwells under ground.” It
would be far truer and more philosophical to say that a god who dwells
underground is a buried man.

I need not recall the offerings to Cornish and Irish well-spirits, which
have now degenerated for the most part into pins and needles.

On the whole, though it is impossible to understand the entire genesis
of sacred founts and rivers without previous consideration of deliberate
god-making, a subject which I reserve for a later portion of our
exposition, I do not think we shall go far wrong in supposing that
the sacred well most often occurs in company with the sacred tree,
the sacred stone or altar, and the sacred tomb; and that it owes its
sanctity in the last resort, originally at least, to a burial by its
side; though I do not doubt that this sanctity was in many cases kept up
by the annual immolation of a fresh victim-god, of a type whose genesis
will hereafter {153}detain us. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of the
Semitic worship in general, “The usual natural symbols are a fountain
or a tree, while the ordinary artificial symbol is a pillar or pile of
stones: but very often all three are found together, and this was the
rule in the more developed sanctuaries.” I cannot agree with him on
the point of “symbolism”: but the collocation of objects is at least
significant.

Thus, in ultimate analysis, we see that all the sacred objects of the
world are either dead men themselves, as corpse, mummy, ghost, or god;
or else the tomb where such men are buried; or else the temple, shrine,
or hut which covers the tomb; or else the tombstone, altar, image, or
statue, standing over it and representing the ghost; or else the stake,
idol, or household god which is fashioned as their deputy; or else the
tree which grows above the barrow; or else the well, or tank, or spring,
natural or artificial, by whose side the dead man has been laid to rest.
In one form or another, from beginning to end, we find only, in Mr.
William Simpson’s graphic phrase, “the Worship of Death,” as the
basis and root of all human religion.




CHAPTER VIII.--THE GODS OF EGYPT.

|WE {154}have now completed our preliminary survey of the nature and
origin of Gods in general. We have seen how men first came to believe in
the objective existence of these powerful and invisible beings, how they
learnt to invest them with majestic attributes, and how they grew to
worship them under the various forms of mummies or boulders, stone or
wooden idols, trees or stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. In short,
we have briefly arrived at the origin of Polytheism. We have now to
go on to our second question--How from the belief in many gods did men
progress to the belief in one single God, the creator and upholder of
all things? Our task is now to reconstruct the origin of Monotheism.

But Monotheism bases itself entirely upon the great God of the Hebrews.
To him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. Is he too resoluble,
as I hinted before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument and representative
of some prehistoric chieftain? Can we trace the origin of the Deity of
Christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the
earliest period?

The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of
his primitive worship by his own people, was but one among a number of
competing deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied by their votaries
in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small
group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the
southwest of Syria. The confederacy among {155}whom he dwelt knew
themselves as the Sons of Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their
principal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or the early Teutons their
national hero Woden. But a universal tradition among them bore witness
to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in Egypt,
the house of bondage, and that their god Jahweh had been instrumental in
leading them thence into the rugged land they inhabited throughout
the whole historical period, between the valley of Jordan and the
Mediterranean coast. So consistent and so definite was this traditional
belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel
of truth; and not only do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of the
present day admit it as genuine, but the Egyptologists also seem
generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with
hieroglyphic literature. This sojourn in Egypt cannot have failed to
influence to some extent the Semitic strangers: therefore I shall begin
my quest of the Hebrew god among the Egyptian monuments. Admitting that
he was essentially in all respects a deity of the true Semitic pattern,
I think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people
among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the
Egyptian cults affords us perhaps the best historical example of the
growth and development of a great national religion.

A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind
to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can
we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest
beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism
and philosophic theology. There are savage cults, it is true, which show
us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple
ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a
supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show
us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single
supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But there is no other {156}religious system
known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break,
the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually
expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great
historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in
Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to
the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common
savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point
where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate
goal of pure monotheism.

I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history
by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions to special
Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent on general
anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page
Renouf in his _Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt_. That learned
writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century
behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine of evolution had
never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions
of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf
still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of
an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of
adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer
portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result
of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” Such
theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the
fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings
forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey
of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts
about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from
the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide
anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable
conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind {157}that on
these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be
implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the
religion of Judæa or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not
in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the
attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been
found so disastrous in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must
be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless
error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found,
not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by M. de Rougé and his
English disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of
existing African savages.

Looked at from this point of view, then--the evolutionary point of
view--nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early
Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations,
ancestor-worship and totemism.

I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to
consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. And I
may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both
the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the Nile
valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall
see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon,
including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of
their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical
religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal
importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient
cult of Pharaohnic Egypt.

The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for
a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the
desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent
the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship
on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the
private mummy of an ancestor {158}or kinsman, sometimes the greater
deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later
syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities,
but represented to the very last in all ages of art--on the shattered
Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken
Denderah--as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was
a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that
country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.

“The oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of
sacrifice,” says Mr. Loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine
of a deceased ancestor or relative.” This is fully in keeping with
what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense
importance always attached to the preservation of the mummy intact
throughout the whole long course of Egyptian history. The Egyptian,
in spite of his high civilisation, remained always at the first
or corpse-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. To him,
therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on
earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it
during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion.
The grave was a place of abode, where the mummy was to pass the greater
part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like
that famous Tih whose painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every tourist to
Cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously decorated with
painting and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers or chapels attached to
the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery
celebrated on certain fixed dates various ceremonies in honour of the
dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “The tables of
offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers,
are depicted on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits,
bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” These _parentalia_
undoubtedly formed the main feature of the practical religion {159}of
early Egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late
tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted to the worship of the equally
mummified great gods.

The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially
imitated. The outer chamber, in which the ceremonies of the offertory
took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been
completed, to the feet of survivors. The mummy itself, concealed in its
sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a
corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. These idols,
says M. Maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself
should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the _Ka_ (the ghost or
double) might find a safe dwelling-place. Compare the numerous little
images placed upon the grave by the Coast Negroes. It was the outer
chamber, however, that sheltered the _stele_ or pillar which bore the
epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from
which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small
aperture in the wall of partition. Down the well beyond, the mummy in
person reposed, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of
violation or outrage. “The greatest importance,” says Mr. Renouf,
“was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of
the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” Again,
“there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised
the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether
world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found
out of repair.’” In the inscription on one of the great tombs at
Beni-Hâssan the founder says: “I made to flourish the name of my
father, and I built chapels for his _ka_ [or ghost]. I caused statues
to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their
offerings in pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest, to whom I
gave donations in land and presents. I ordered funeral offerings for
all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated {160}at
considerable length]. If it happen that the priest or any other cease to
do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.”
All this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of
priesthood.

How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is
shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who
built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the
purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts
or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who
lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of
the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before
his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who
filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in
this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued
for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case
of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of
so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the
ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children
or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few
generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of
the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out
altogether.”

For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense
importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting of a son who
should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed
by others after him. The duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly
insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand,
the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the
most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries
after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a
record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, {161}of the
abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment
of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the
funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the
ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass
of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of
the _ka_--the _genii, manes, or lares_ of the departed.

If even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed--if even the
lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs,
daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured--it might readily be
believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties
themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special
splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt,
their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial
caves. The dreary desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo
consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of
Memphis--a vast and mouldering city of the dead--whose chief memorials
are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for
the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There,
under stone tumuli of enormous size,--barrows or cairns more carefully
constructed,--the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in
sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts
of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more
beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging
to the great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth
Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development.
Those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal
sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to
inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion
of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers
{162}of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the
nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest
that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord
in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal
palaces of Medinet-Hâbu or the corridors of Luxor.

M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt
in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really
cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and
worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the _mastabah_ or mortuary chapel for
the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-Hâbu fulfilled
the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.;
and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins,
with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.

At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine
the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile
without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central
object of worship--that the entire practical religion of the people was
based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond
the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal
offerings to the _manes_ of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to
this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the
Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described
means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that
they were really enjoying everlasting life. _Mors janua vitae_ is the
short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great
beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real
objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.

Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of
the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship {163}to God-Worship. Thus,
in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty),
all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb
which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The
quotations from (or anticipations of) the Book of the Dead are few and
short. The great gods are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos of
Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent
scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities
are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as
yet comparatively in abeyance. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at
Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of
the Dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a
whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.”

“But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods,
distinct from their ancestors--national, or local, or common gods--whose
names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the
monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not
immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors--gods
whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became
transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But
it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater
gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various
ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most
important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.

I will take, to begin with, one typical example. There is no single god
in the Egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused
than Osiris. In later forms of the national religion, he is elevated
into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be
“justified by Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified
Osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral
{164}inscription; and identification with Osiris is looked upon as the
reward of all the happy and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every one of
his representations and modes, is simply--a Mummy. His myth, to be sure,
assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with Isis and
Horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable tales,
repeated over and over again in art and literature. If we took mythology
as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted to give him
far other origins. He is identified often with other gods, especially
with Amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments
of the newer empire, when Ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably
with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. But if we neglect
these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the
simplest origin of Egyptian history and religion, we shall, I think,
see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism
into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings
nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to
be--a revered and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the
town or little district of This by Abydos.

I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor
do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and
pious dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was
identified in the end with an annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow
that there may have been more than one original Osiris--that the word
may even at first have been generic, not specific. But I still maintain
that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a
Dead Chief of Abydos.

We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense
antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced
civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest
known state of Egypt {165}necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era
of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower
Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless
mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the
bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and
each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. The sheikh of
the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless
Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses.
Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little
more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost
as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry
and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore
marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of
Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after
the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local
gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped
in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially
worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency
upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at
Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris
himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.

Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a
state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first
king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united
Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it
was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines
which reigned in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the
unification.

In the case of Osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction
are almost irresistible. It is all but certain that Osiris was
originally a local god of This or Thinis, a {166}village near Abydos,
where a huge mound of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s
resting-place. The latter town is described in the Harris papyrus as
Abud, the hand of Osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at
that site, Osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom
kings and priests present appropriate offerings. But it is a significant
fact that Menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was born at the
same place; and this suggests the probability that Osiris may have
been the most sacred and most venerated of Menes’s ancestors.
The suggestion derives further weight from the fact that Osiris
is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar
head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in
historical times as the crown of Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands
the crook and scourge which are the marks of kingly office--the crook
to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers
and to ward off enemies. His image is therefore nothing more nor less
than the image of a Mummied King. Sometimes, too, he wears in addition
the regal ostrich plumes. Surely, naught save the blind infatuation of
mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that Osiris
was a mummified chief of Abydos in the days before the unification of
Egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors
in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were
worshipped by their family elsewhere--exactly, for example, as on the
famous Tablet of Ancestors found at Abydos itself, Sethi I. and Rameses
II. are seen offering homage to seventy-six historical kings, their
predecessors on the throne of United Egypt.

Not only, however, is Osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we
are expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract
_De Osiride_ which bears his name) that the tomb of Osiris existed at
Abydos, and that the richest and most powerful of the Egyptians were
desirous of being buried in the adjacent cemetery, in order that
{167}they might lie, as it were, in the same grave with the great god
of their country. All this is perfectly comprehensible and natural if we
suppose that a Thinite dynasty first conquered the whole of Egypt; that
it extended the worship of its own local ancestor-god over the entire
country; and that in time, when this worship had assumed national
importance, the local god became the chief figure in the common
pantheon.

I had arrived at this opinion independently before I was aware that Mr.
Loftie had anticipated me in it. But in his rare and interesting _Essay
on Scarabs_ I find he has reached the same conclusions.

“The divinity of Pharaoh,” says Mr. Loftie, “was the first article
in the creed of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know
anything. As time went on, though the king was still called divine, we
see him engaged in the worship of other gods. At last he appears as
a priest himself; and when Herodotus and the later Greek historians
visited Egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left
that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” This
is quite natural, I may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity
and grandeur of the great gods increased, the gulf between them and mere
men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have
grown ever wider and wider. “I have myself no doubt whatever,” Mr.
Loftie goes on, “that the names of Osiris and of Horus are those of
ancient rulers. I think that, long before authentic history begins, Asar
and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the
Upper Nile which is now the site of Girgeh and Berbé” (exactly where
I place the principality of Osiris). “Their son was Hor, or Horus,
the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt; and the ‘Hor seshoo.’ the
successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers.
I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject,
and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to prove that Asar,
and Aset, and Hor, and {168}Ptah, and Anep, are representations of the
powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to
ancient principles; and that Horus and his successors are gods and were
never men. But in the oldest inscriptions we find none of that mysticism
which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty
down to the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.” In short, Mr.
Loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods
essentially similar to the one I am here defending.

Though a little out of place, I cannot help noting here the curious
confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at
Abvdos in close proximity to the mound where M. Mariette confidently
expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of Osiris himself.
Hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of
Abydos or This, as the bull was of Memphis, the crocodile of the Fayoum,
the cat of Bubastis, and the baboon of Thebes. Now, the ibis-god of
Abydos is Thoth; and it is noteworthy that Thoth, as recorder, always
accompanies Osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local
mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and
both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of Abydos, in company with
Horus, Anubis, Isis, and other (probably) local divinities.

It is quite easy to see how, with this origin, Osiris would almost
inevitably grow with time to be the King of the Dead, and supreme judge
of the nether regions. For, as the most sacred of the ancestors of the
regal line, he would naturally be the one whom the kings, in their
turn, would most seek to propitiate, and whom they would look forward
to joining in their eternal home. As the myth extended, and as mystical
interpretations began to creep in, identifications being made of the
gods with the sun or other natural energies, the original meaning of
Osiris-worship would grow gradually obscured. But to the last, Osiris
himself, in spite of all corruptions, is represented {169}as a mummy:
and even when identified with Amen, the later intrusive god, he still
wears his mummy-bandages, and still bears the crook and scourge and
sceptre of his primitive kingship.

It may be objected, however, that there were many forms of Orisis, and
many local gods who bore the same name. He was buried at Abydos, but was
also equally buried at Memphis, and at Philæ as well. The pretty little
“Temple on the Roof” at Denderah is an exquisitely elaborate chapel
to the local Osiris of that town, with chambers dedicated to the various
other Osiris-gods of the forty-two nomes of ancient Egypt. Well, that
fact runs exactly parallel with the local Madonnas and the local Apollos
of other religions: and nobody has suggested doubts as to the human
reality of the Blessed Virgin Mary because so many different Maries
exist in different sacred sites or in different cathedrals. Our Lady
of Loretto is the same as Our Lady of Lourdes. Jesus of Nazareth was
nevertheless born at Bethlehem: he was the son of Joseph, but he was
also the son of David, and the son of God. Perhaps Osiris was a common
noun: perhaps a slightly different Osiris was worshipped in various
towns of later Egypt; perhaps a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some
extinct native line, often wrongly usurped the name and prerogatives of
the great mummy-god of Abydos, especially under the influence of late
priestly mysticism. Moreover, when we come to consider the subject
of the manufacture of gods, we shall see that the body of an annual
incarnation of Osiris may have been divided and distributed among all
the nomes of Egypt. It is enough for my present purpose if I point out
in brief that ancestor-worship amply explains the rise and prevalence
of the cult of Osiris, the kingly mummy, with the associated cults of
Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the other deities of the Osirian cycle.

I may add that a gradual growth of Osiris-worship is clearly marked on
the monuments themselves. The simpler {170}stelæ and memorials of the
earliest age seldom contain the names of any god, but display votaries
making offerings at the shrine of ancestors. Similarly, the scenes
represented on the walls of tombs of early date bear no reference to the
great gods of later ages, but are merely domestic and agricultural in
character, as may be observed at Sakkarah and even to some extent also
at Beni-Hassan. Under the Sixth Dynasty, the monuments begin to make
more and more frequent mention of Osiris, who now comes to be regarded
as Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Lower World; and on a tablet of
this age in the Boulak Museum occurs for the first time the expression
afterwards so common, “justified by Osiris.” Under the Twelfth
Dynasty, legend becomes more prominent; a solar and lunar character
seems to be given by reflex to Osiris and Isis: and the name of Ra,
the sun, is added to that of many previously distinct and independent
deities. Khem, the ithyphallic god of the Thebaid, now also assumes
greater importance, as is quite natural under a line of Theban
princes: and Khem, a local mummy-god, is always represented in his
swathing-clothes, and afterwards confounded, certainly with Amen, and
probably also with the mummy-god of Abydos. But Osiris from this time
forward rises distinctly into the front rank as a deity. “To him,
rather than to the dead, the friends and family offer their sacrifices.
A court is formed for him. Thoth, the recorder [totem-god of Abydos],
Anubis the watcher, Ra the impersonation of truth, and others, assist
in judgment on the soul.” The name of the deceased is henceforth
constantly accompanied by the formula “justified by Osiris.” About
the same time the Book of the Dead in its full form came into existence,
with its developed conception of the lower world, and its complicated
arrangement of planes of purgatorial progress.

Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications
of the gods become more and more intricate; Amen and Ra are sought and
found under innumerable {171}forms of other deities; and a foundation
is laid for the esoteric Monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of
the later philosophising priesthood. It was under the Nineteenth Dynasty
that the cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest shape, and that
the mystical interpretation of the religion of Egypt came well into the
foreground. The great Osirian myth was then more and more minutely and
mystically elaborated; and even the bull Apis, the totem-god of Memphis,
was recognised as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus becomes,
with Amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national
pantheon. At last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, Osiris
being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also
the son of his own child Horus. * Sentences with an almost Athanasian
mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds
from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is
the soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra and how Horus his child,
awakened by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious over Set,
the prince of darkness, and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the father
whom he has revived and avenged. Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of
being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.”

     * “Stories like the Osiris myth,” says Mr. Lang, “spring
     from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and
     fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human
     fancy and human speculation.” This sentence enforces
     precisely the same idea that I have previously expressed in
     chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and
     mythology. The myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no
     light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only
     obscures and overshadows the underlying kernel of genuine
     fact.

In like manner, I believe, Ptah was originally a local mummy-god of
Memphis, and Khem of Ap, afterwards known as Chemmis.

This gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however,
into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more
remarkable than the gradual growth {172}of a Galilean peasant into the
second person of an eternal and omnipotent Godhead. Nor does the myth
of the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be considered hereafter in
a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence
any more than the history of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ
militates against the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth. “Gross and
crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic Max-mullerism
appears to me just as unphilosophical.

The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we
consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had
been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the
gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing
from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of
which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious
expressions to their favoured scion. “The ruling sovereign of
Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “was the living image of and
vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of
divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental
evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled
in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were
significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the
times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other
Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title
of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from
Chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the
Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like
Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.” And on all the
monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the
gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by
the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols
of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.

The {173}former guerdon bestows upon him the same rank they themselves
had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the
glories of the other existence. In the temple of Kurneh, Rameses I.
(then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies of his royal grandson.
Hard by, Rameses II. offers to Amen-ra, Khonso, and Rameses I., without
distinction of divinity. On the side wall, Sethi I. receives similar
divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber Sethi
himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine.
The King is thus but the Living God: the God is thus but the Dead King.

I conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater Egyptian
gods--the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each
family in its own necropolis--were early kings, whose myths were later
expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned by
priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. But down to
the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god Euergetes,
and the goddess Berenice, or representations like that at Philæ, of
the god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show that to the Egyptian mind
the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the
original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to
priests and people.

There was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat
less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which
developed out of the totems of the various villages. Such bestial types,
Professor Sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age,
when the religious creed of Egypt,” say rather, the custom of Egypt,
“was still totemism.” But in what precise relation totemism stood to
the main line of the evolution of gods I do not feel quite so sure in my
own mind as does Mr. Herbert Spencer. It seems to me possible that the
totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a
particular tribe (like the regimental {174}goat or deer); and that from
being at first petted, domesticated, and to some extent respected on
this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas,
to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the
ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer has
suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the Separable
Soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this
obscure subject. Be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually
elevated into divinities, we can easily understand Mr. Renouf’s remark
that the long series of tombs of the Apis bulls at Sakkarah shows “how
immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later
times than in the former.”

May I add that the _worship_ of totems, as distinct from the mere _care_
implied by Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the
custom of carving the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or
grave-board? This custom is still universal among the Indian tribes of
Northwestern America.

Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, I do not
think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of
the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the
deified ancestor. For only after the concept of a god had been formed
from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the
customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other
object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. Nor, on the other
hand, as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined wholly to agree with
Mr. Spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular
Dead Man. It seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had
become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be
recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions,
from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty.
I do not think, therefore, that the existence {175}of a certain
(relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in Egypt or elsewhere is
necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin
of godhead.

Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was
a very ancient and widespread institution in early Egypt. Totems are
defined by Mr. Frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage
regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between
him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special
relation.” “Observation of existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia,
and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway, “shows us that one or more
representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in
captivity by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells us that “amongst the
Nar-rinyeri in South Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch
snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as
pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed.
Amongst the Kalong in Java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a
rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to
be struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same way, no doubt, certain
Egyptian clans kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals,
cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles. Mummies of most of
these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the
neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped.

Whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same
totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods
belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its
totem, is not a question easily settled. But at any rate it is clear
that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case
with the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the cow-headed
Athor, the ram-headed Knum, the cat-headed Pasht, the lion-headed
Sekhet, the ibis-headed {176}Thoth, and the kestrel-headed Khons. These
gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human
forms with bestial heads. Till the Twelfth Dynasty, when a totem-god
is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says Mr.
Flinders Petrie, “by his animal.” Anubis, for example, at this
stage, is merely a jackal; and as M. Maspero puts it, “Whatever may
have been the object of worship in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, not a
hieroglyph, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” There were
other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which
entered largely in artistic forms into the later religious symbolism.
Such were especially the asp and the sacred scarabæus, which almost
rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed
religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. I may
add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical
picture-writing are the Tau or _crux ansata_, by origin apparently a
combined _linga_ and _yoni_; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek, and the
crescent.

There is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings
in the newer Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew Lang, in his able
introduction to the _Euterpe_ of Herodotus, still allows that great
importance may be attached. These are the elemental or seemingly
elemental deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large a part in all
rationalistic or mystical mythologies. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb,
the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the
coffin of Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the British Museum: such
perhaps (though far less certainly) are Khons, identified with the
rising sun, and Tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly
setting. But none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except Ra, play
any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people:
to adopt the broad distinction I have ventured to draw in our second
chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore--mythological
conceptions rather than religious beings. Their names occur {177}much in
the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown.
It is not Nut or Seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on
the grey sandstone pillars of Karnak and Luxor, painted in endless file
on the gesso-covered walls of the Tombs of the Kings, or represented by
dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many
cabinets at the Boulak Museum. The actual objects of the highest worship
are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are
Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The quaint or
grotesque incised figures of Nut, represented as a female form with arms
and legs extended like a living canopy over the earth, as at Denderah,
belong, I believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the Ptolemaic
period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely
borrowed by the Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut and Seb, as gods,
not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun-disk Ra,
himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly
so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity
united syncretically with the various other deities. To call a king
the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as
Osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. His name is joined
to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a
symbol as the Tau or the Asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his
simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with
some more practical deity of strictly human origin. Even at the great
“Temple of the Sun” at Heliopolis, it was as the bull Men or Mnevis
that the luminary was adored: and that cult, according to Manetho, went
back as far as the totemistic times of the Second Dynasty.

To put it briefly, then, I hold that the element of nature-worship is
a late gloss or superadded factor in the Egyptian religion; that it is
always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict
sense; and that it does {178}not in the least interfere with our general
inference that the real Egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral
or totemistic in origin.

From the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly
conclude, then, that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of pure
ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of
totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself
closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. The later gods
were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes
directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by
their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads.
Almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular
place--“Lord of Abydos,” “Mistress of Senem,” “President of
Thebes,” “Dweller at Hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case
if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national
pantheon. In the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us,
the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or
from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. With the gradual
evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths
increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere,
identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife, and an esoteric faith,
with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to
rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of
the original belief. It is the refinements and glosses of this final
philosophical stage that pass current for the most part in systematic
works as the true doctrines of Egyptian religion, and that so many
modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest
product of native thought. The ideas as to the unity of God, and the
sun-myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly late developments or
excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric
spirit of priestly interpretation. To the very last, the Worship of
the Dead, and the {179} crude polytheism based upon it, were the true
religion of the ancient Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the
monuments.

Such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest
Semitic traditions, the Sons of Israel brought their God Jahweh and
their other deities from beyond the Euphrates at a very remote period of
their national history. And such, in its fuller and more mystical form,
was the religion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, at
the moment when the Christian faith was just beginning to evolve itself
round the historical nucleus of the man Christ Jesus, and him crucified.




CHAPTER IX.--THE GODS OF ISRAEL.

|THE {180}only people who ever invented or evolved a pure monotheism at
first hand were the Jews. Individual thinkers elsewhere approached
or aimed at that ideal goal, like the Egyptian priests and the Greek
philosophers: entire races elsewhere borrowed monotheism from the
Hebrews, like the Arabs under Mohammad, or, to a less extent, the Romans
and the modern European nations, when they adopted Christianity in
its trinitarian form: but no other race ever succeeded as a whole in
attaining by their own exertions the pure monotheistic platform, however
near certain persons among them might have arrived to such attainment in
esoteric or mystical philosophising. It is the peculiar glory of Israel
to have _evolved God_. And the evolution of God from the diffuse gods
of the earlier Semitic religion is Israel’s great contribution to the
world’s thought.

The sacred books of the Jews, as we possess them in garbled forms
to-day, assign this peculiar belief to the very earliest ages of their
race: they assume that Abraham, the mythical common father of all the
Semitic tribes, was already a monotheist; and they even treat monotheism
as at a still remoter date the universal religion of the entire world,
from which all polytheistic cults were but a corruption and a falling
away. Such a belief is nowadays, of course, wholly untenable. So also is
the crude notion that monotheism was smitten out at a single blow by the
genius of one individual man, Moses, at the moment {181}of the Hebrew
exodus from Egypt. The bare idea that one particular thinker, just
escaped from the midst of ardent polytheists, whose religion embraced an
endless pantheon and a low form of animal-worship, could possibly have
invented a pure monotheistic cult, is totally opposed to every known
psychological law of human nature. The real stages by which monotheism
was evolved out of a preceding polytheism in a single small group of
Semitic tribes have already been well investigated by Dutch and
German scholars: all that I propose to do in the present volume is to
reconsider the subject from our broader anthropological standpoint, and
show how in the great Jewish god himself we may still discern, as in
a glass, darkly, the vague but constant lineaments of an ancestral
ghost-deity.

Down to a comparatively late period of Jewish history, as we now
know, Jahweh was but one and the highest among a considerable group of
Israelitish divinities; the first among his peers, like Zeus among the
gods of Hellas, Osiris or Amen among the gods of Egypt, and Woden or
Thunor among the gods of the old Teutonic pantheon. As late as the
century of Hezekiah, the religion of the great mass of the Israelites
and Jews was still a broad though vague polytheism. The gods seem to
have been as numerous and as localised as in Egypt: “According to the
number of thy cities are thy gods, O Judah,” says the prophet Jeremiah
in the sixth century. It was only by a slow process of syncretism, by
the absorption into Jahweh-worship of all other conflicting creeds, that
Israel at last attained its full ideal of pure monotheism. That ideal
was never finally reached by the people at large till the return from
the captivity: it had only even been aimed at by a few ardent and
exclusive Jahweh-worshippers in the last dangerous and doubtful years of
national independence which immediately preceded the Babylonish exile.

In order to understand the inner nature of this curious gradual
revolution we must look briefly, first, at the general character {182}of
the old Hebrew polytheism; and secondly, at the original cult of the
great ethnical god Jahweh himself.

In spite of their long sojourn in Egypt, the national religion of the
Hebrews, when we first begin dimly to descry its features through the
veil of later glosses, is regarded by almost all modern investigators as
truly Semitic and local in origin. It is usually described as embracing
three principal forms of cult: the worship of the _teraphim_ or family
gods; the worship of sacred stones; and the worship of certain great
gods, partly native, partly perhaps borrowed; some of them adored in
the form of animals, and some apparently elemental or solar in their
acquired attributes. Although for us these three are one, I shall
examine them here in that wonted order.

The cult of the _teraphim_, I think, we cannot consider, on a broad
anthropological view, otherwise than as the equivalent of all the
other family cults known to us; that is to say, in other words, as
pure unadulterated domestic ancestor-worship. “By that name,”
says Kuenen, “were indicated larger or smaller images, which were
worshipped as household gods, and upon which the happiness of the family
was supposed to depend.” In the legend of Jacob’s flight from Laban,
we are told how Rachel stole her father’s teraphim: and when the angry
chieftain overtakes the fugitives, he enquires of them why they have
robbed him of his domestic gods. Of Micah, we learn that he made images
of his teraphim, and consecrated one of his own sons to be his family
priest: such a domestic and private priesthood being exactly what we are
accustomed to find in the worship of ancestral _manes_ everywhere. Even
through the mist of the later Jehovistic recension we catch, in passing,
frequent glimpses of the early worship of these family gods, one of
which is described as belonging to Michal, the daughter of Saul and wife
of David; while Hosea alludes to them as stocks of wood, and Zechariah
as idols that speak lies to the people. It is clear {183}that the
teraphim were preserved in each household with reverential care, that
they were sacrificed to by the family at stated intervals, and that they
were consulted on all occasions of doubt or difficulty by a domestic
priest clad in an ephod. I think, then, if we put these indications side
by side with those of family cults elsewhere, we may conclude that the
Jewish religion, like all others, was based upon an ultimate foundation
of general ancestor-worship.

It has been denied, indeed, that ancestor-worship pure and simple ever
existed among the Semitic races. A clear contradiction of this denial
is furnished by M. Lenormant, who comments thus on sepulchral monuments
from Yemen: “Here, then, we have twice repeated a whole series of
human persons, decidedly deceased ancestors or relations of the authors
of the dedications. Their names are accompanied with the titles they
bore during life. They are invoked by their descendants in the same way
as the gods. They are incontestably deified persons, objects of a family
worship, and gods or genii in the belief of the people of their race.”
After this, we need not doubt that the teraphim were the images of such
family gods or ancestral spirits.

It is not surprising, however, that these domestic gods play but a small
part in the history of the people as it has come down to us in the late
Jehovistic version of the Hebrew traditions. Nowhere in literature, even
under the most favourable circumstances, do we hear much of the _manes_
and _lares_, compared with the great gods of national worship. Nor
were such minor divinities likely to provoke the wrath even of that
“jealous god” who later usurped all the adoration of Israel: so that
denunciations of their votaries are comparatively rare in the rhapsodies
of the prophets. “Their use,” says Kuenen, speaking of the teraphim,
“was very general, and was by no means considered incompatible with
the worship of Jahweh.” They were regarded merely as family affairs,
poor foemen for {184}the great and awesome tribal god who bore no rival
near his throne, and would not suffer the pretensions of Molech or
of the Baalim. To use a modern analogy, their cult was as little
inconsistent with Jahweh-worship as a belief in fairies, banshees, or
family ghosts was formerly inconsistent with a belief in Christianity.

This conclusion will doubtless strike the reader at once as directly
opposed to the oft-repeated assertion that the early Hebrews had little
or no conception of the life beyond the grave and of the doctrine of
future rewards and punishments. I am afraid it cannot be denied that
such is the case. Hard as it is to run counter to so much specialist
opinion, I can scarcely see how any broad anthropological enquirer may
deny to the Semites of the tenth and twelfth centuries before Christ
participation in an almost (or quite) universal human belief, common to
the lowest savages and the highest civilisations, and particularly
well developed in that Egyptian society with which the ancestors of the
Hebrews had so long rubbed shoulders. The subject, however, is far too
large a one for full debate here. I must content myself with pointing
out that, apart from the _a priori_ improbability of such a conclusion,
the Hebrew documents themselves contain numerous allusions, even in
their earliest traditional fragments, to the belief in ghosts and in the
world of shades, as well as to the probability of future resurrection.
The habit of cave-burial and of excavated grotto-burial; the importance
attached to the story of the purchase of Machpelah; the common phrase
that such-and-such a patriarch “was gathered to his people,” or
“slept with his fathers”; the embalming of Joseph, and the carrying
up of his bones from Egypt to Palestine; the episode of Saul and the
ghost of Samuel; and indeed the entire conception of Sheol, the place of
the departed--all alike show that the Hebrew belief in this respect did
not largely differ in essentials from the general belief of surrounding
peoples. The very frequency of allusions to witchcraft and necromancy
{185}point in the same direction; while the common habit of assuming a
priestly or sacrificial garment, the _ephod_, and then consulting the
family teraphim as a domestic oracle, is strictly in accordance with all
that we know of the minor ancestor-worship as it occurs elsewhere.

Closely connected with the teraphim is the specific worship at tombs
or graves. “The whole north Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson
Smith, “was dotted over with sacred tombs, Memnonia, Semiramis
mounds, and the like; and at every such spot a god or demigod had his
subterranean abode.” This, of course, is pure ancestor-worship. Traces
of still older cave-burial are also common in the Hebrew Scriptures.
“At the present day,” says Professor Smith, “almost every sacred
site in Palestine has its grotto, and that this is no new thing is plain
from the numerous symbols of Astarte-worship found on the walls of
caves in Phoenicia. There can be little doubt that the oldest Phoenician
temples were natural or artificial grottoes.”

We are fairly entitled to conclude, then, I believe, that a domestic
cult of the _manes_ or _lares_, the family dead, formed the general
substratum of early Hebrew religion, though as in all other cases, owing
to its purely personal nature, this universal cult makes but a small
figure in the literature of the race, compared with the worship of the
greater national gods and goddesses.

Second in the list of worshipful objects in early Israel come the sacred
stones, about which I have already said a good deal in the chapter
devoted to that interesting subject, but concerning whose special nature
in the Semitic field a few more words may here be fitly added.

It is now very generally admitted that stone-worship played an
exceedingly large and important part in the primitive Semitic religion.
How important a part we may readily gather from many evidences, but from
none more than from the fact that even Mohammad himself was unable to
exclude from Islam, the most monotheistic of all {186}known religious
systems, the holy black stone of the Kaaba at Mecca. In Arabia, says
Professor Robertson Smith, the altar or hewn stone is unknown, and
in its place we find the rude pillar or the cairn, beside which the
sacrificial victim is slain, the blood being poured out over the stone
or at its base. But in Israel, the shaped stone seems the more usual
mark of the ghost or god. Such a sacred stone, we have already seen, was
known to the early Hebrews as a Beth-el, that is to say an “abode of
deity,” from the common belief that it was inhabited by a god, ghost,
or spirit. The great prevalence of the cult of stones among the Semites,
however, is further indicated by the curious circumstance that this word
was borrowed by the Greeks and Romans (in a slightly altered form) to
denote the stones so supposed to be inhabited by deities. References to
such gods abound throughout the Hebrew books, though they are sometimes
denounced as idolatrous images, and sometimes covered with a thin veneer
of Jehovism by being connected with the national heroes and with the
later Jahweh-worship.

In the legend of Jacob’s dream we get a case where the sacred stone
is anointed and a promise is made to it of a tenth of the speaker’s
substance as an offering. And again, on a later occasion, we learn
that Jacob “set up a pillar of stone, and he poured a drink-offering
thereon, and he poured oil thereon;” just as, in the great phallic
worship of the linga in India (commonly called the _linga puja_), a
cylindrical pillar, rounded at the top, and universally considered as
a phallus in its nature, is worshipped by pouring upon it one of five
sacred anointing liquids, water, milk, ghee, oil, and wine. Similar
rites are offered in many other places to other sacred stones; and in
many cases the phallic value assigned to them is clearly shown by the
fact that it is usual for sterile women to pray to them for the blessing
of children, as Hindu wives pray to Mahadeo, and as so many Hebrew women
(to be noted hereafter) {187}are mentioned in our texts as praying to
Jahweh.

A brief catalogue of the chief stone-deities alluded to in Hebrew
literature may help to enforce the importance of the subject: and it
may be noted in passing that the stones are often mentioned in connexion
with sacred trees--an association with which we are already familiar.
In the neighbourhood of Sichem was an oak--the “oak of the prophets”
or “oak of the soothsayers”--by which lay a stone, whose holiness is
variously accounted for by describing it as, in one place, an altar
of Abraham, in another an altar of Jacob, and in a third a memorial of
Joshua. But the fact shows that it was resorted to for sacrifice, and
that oracles or responses were sought from it by its votaries. That is
to say, it was a sepulchral monument. Near Hebron stood “the oak of
Mamre,” and under it a sacred stone, accounted for as an altar of
Abraham, to which in David’s time sacrifices were offered. Near
Beersheba we find yet a third tree, the tamarisk, said to have been
planted by Abraham, and an altar or stone pillar ascribed to Isaac. In
the camp at Gilgal were “the twelve stones,” sometimes, apparently,
spoken of as “the graven images,” but sometimes explained away
as memorials of Jahweh’s help at the passing of the Jordan. Other
examples are Ebenezer, “the helpful stone,” and Tobeleth, the
“serpent-stone,” as well as the “great stone” to which sacrifices were
offered at Bethshemesh, and the other great stone at Gibeon, which was
also, no doubt, an early Hebrew deity.

So often is the name of Abraham connected with these stones, indeed,
that, as some German scholars have suggested, Abraham himself may
perhaps be regarded as a sacred boulder, the rock from which Israel
originally; sprang.

In any case, I need hardly say, we must look upon such sacred stones as
themselves a further evidence of ancestor-worship in Palestine, on the
analogy of all similar stones elsewhere. {188}We may conclude that,
as in previously noted instances, they were erected on the graves of
deceased chieftains.

And now we come to the third and most difficult division of early Hebrew
religion, the cult of the great gods whom the jealous Jahweh himself
finally superseded. The personality of these gods is very obscure,
partly because of the nature of our materials, which, being derived
entirely from Jehovistic sources, have done their best to overshadow the
“false gods”; but partly also, I believe, because, in the process of
evolving monotheism, a syncretic movement merged almost all their
united attributes into Jahweh himself, who thus becomes at last the
all-absorbing synthesis of an entire pantheon. Nevertheless, we can
point out one or two shadowy references to such greater gods, either by
name alone, or by the form under which they were usually worshipped.

The scholarship of the elder generation would no doubt have enumerated
first among these gods the familiar names of Baal and Molech. At
present, such an enumeration is scarcely possible. We can no longer see
in the Baal of the existing Hebrew scriptures a single great god. We
must regard the word rather as a common substantive,--“the lord” or
“the master,”--descriptive of the relation of each distinct god to
the place he inhabited. The Baalim, in other words, seem to have been
the local deities or deified chiefs of the Semitic region; doubtless
the dead kings or founders of families, as opposed to the lesser gods
of each particular household. It is not improbable, therefore, that
they were really identified with the sacred stones we have just been
considering, and with the wooden _ashera_. The Baal is usually spoken
of indefinitely, without a proper name, much as at Delos men spoke of
“the God,” at Athens of “the Goddess,” and now at Padua of “il
Santo,”--meaning respectively Apollo, Athene, St. Antony. Melcarth is
thus the Baal of Tyre, Astarte the Baalath of Byblos; there was a Baal
of Lebanon, of Mount {189}Hermon, of Mount Peor, and so forth. A few
specific Baalim have their names preserved for us in the nomenclature
of towns; such are Baal-tamar, the lord of the palm-tree; with Baal-gad,
Baal-Berith, Baal-meon, and Baal-zephon. But in the Hebrew scriptures,
as a rule, every effort has been made to blot out the very memory
of these “false gods,” and to represent Jahweh alone as from the
earliest period the one true prince and ruler in Israel.

As for Molech, that title merely means “the king”; and it may have
been applied to more than one distinct deity. Dr. Robertson Smith does
not hesitate to hold that the particular Molech to whom human sacrifices
of children were offered by the Jews before the captivity was Jahweh
himself; it was to the national god, he believes, that these fiery
rites were performed at the Tophet or pyre in the ravine just below the
temple.

We are thus reduced to the most nebulous details about these great
gods of the Hebrews, other than Jahweh, in the period preceding
the Babylonian captivity. All that is certain appears to be that a
considerable number of local gods were worshipped here and there at
special sanctuaries, each of which seems to have consisted of an altar
or stone image, standing under a sacred tree or sacred grove, and
combined with an _ashera_. While the names of Chemosh, the god of Moab,
and of Dagon, the god of the Philistines, have come down to us with
perfect frankness and clearness, no local Hebrew god save Jahweh has
left a name that can now be discerned with any approach to certainty.
It should be added that the worship of many of the gods of surrounding
Semitic tribes undoubtedly extended from the earliest times into Israel
also.

I must likewise premise that the worship of the Baalim, within and
without Israel, was specially directed to upright conical stones, the
most sacred objects at all the sanctuaries; and that these stones
are generally admitted to have {190}possessed for their worshippers a
phallic significance.

Certain writers have further endeavoured to show that a few animal-gods
entered into the early worship of the Hebrews. I do not feel sure that
their arguments are convincing; but for the sake of completeness I
include the two most probable cases in this brief review of the vague
and elusive deities of early Israel.

One of these is the god in the form of a young bull, specially
worshipped at Dan and Bethel, as the bull Apis was worshipped at
Memphis, and the bull Mnevis at On or Heliopolis. This cult of the bull
is pushed back in the later traditions to the period of the exodus, when
the Israelites made themselves a “golden calf” in the wilderness.
Kuenen, indeed, lays stress upon the point that this Semitic
bull-worship differed essentially from the cult of Apis in the fact that
it was directed to an image or idol, not to a living animal. This is
true, and I certainly do not wish to press any particular connexion
between Egypt and the golden bulls of Jeroboam in the cities of Ephraim:
though I think too much may perhaps be made of superficial differences
and too little of deep-seated resemblances in these matters, seeing that
bull-worship is a common accompaniment of a phallic cult in the whole
wide district between Egypt and India. It is the tendency of the
scholastic mind, indeed, to over-elaborate trifles, and to multiply to
excess minute distinctions. But in any case, we are on comparatively
safe ground in saying that a bull-god was an object of worship in Israel
down to a very late period; that his cult descended from an early age of
the national existence; and that the chief seats of his images were at
Dan and Bethel in Ephraim, and at Beersheba in Judah.

Was this bull-shaped deity Jahweh’ himself, or one of the polymorphic
forms of Jahweh? Such is the opinion of Kuenen, who says explicitly,
“Jahweh was worshipped in the shape of a young bull. It cannot be
doubted that the {191}cult of the bull-calf was really the cult of
Jahweh in person.” And certainly in the prophetic writings of the
eighth century, we can clearly descry that the worshippers of the bull
regarded themselves as worshipping the god Jahweh, who brought up his
people from the land of Egypt. Nevertheless, dangerous as it may seem
for an outsider to differ on such a subject from great Semitic scholars,
I venture to think we may see reason hereafter to conclude that this was
not originally the case: that the god worshipped under the form of the
bull-calf was some other deity, like the Molech whom we know to
have been represented with a bull’s head; and that only by the later
syncretic process did this bull-god come to be identified in the end
with Jahweh, a deity (as seems likely) of quite different origin, much
as Mnevis came to be regarded at Heliopolis as an incarnation of Ra, and
as Apis came to be regarded at Memphis as an avatar of Ptah and still
later of Osiris. On the other hand, we must remember that, as Mr. Frazer
has shown, a sacred animal is often held to be the representative and
embodiment of the very god to whom it is habitually sacrificed. Here
again we trench on ground which can only satisfactorily be occupied at a
later stage of our polymorphic argument.

A second animal-god, apparently, also adored in the form of a metal
image, was the asp or snake, known in our version as “the brazen
serpent,” and connected by the Jehovistic editors of the earlier
traditions with Moses in the wilderness. The name of this deity is given
us in the Book of Kings as Nehushtan, “the brass god”; but
whether this was really its proper designation or a mere contemptuous
descriptive title we can hardly be certain. The worship of the serpent
is said to have gone on uninterruptedly till the days of Hezekiah, when,
under the influence of the exclusive devotion to Jahweh which was
then becoming popular, the image was broken in pieces as an idolatrous
object. It is scarcely necessary to point out in passing that the asp
was one of the most sacred animals {192}in Egypt: but, as in the case of
the bull, the snake was also a widespread object of worship throughout
all the surrounding countries; and it is therefore probable that the
Hebrew snake-worship may have been parallel to, rather than derived
from, Egyptian ophiolatry.

Such, then, seen through the dim veil of Jehovism, are the misty
features of that uncertain pantheon in which, about the eighth century
at least, Jahweh found himself the most important deity. The most
important, I say, because it is clear from our records that for many
ages the worship of Jahweh and the worship of the Baalim went on side by
side without conscious rivalry.

And what sort of god was this holy Jahweh himself, whom the Hebrews
recognised from a very early time as emphatically and above all others
“the God of Israel”?

If ever he was envisaged as a golden bull, if ever he was regarded as
the god of light, fire, or the sun, those concepts, I believe, must have
been the result of a late transference of attributes and confusion of
persons, such as we may see so rife in the more recent mystical religion
of Egypt. What in his own nature Jahweh must have been in the earliest
days of his nascent godhead I believe we can best judge by putting
together some of the passages in old traditionary legend which bear most
plainly upon his character and functions.

In the legendary account of the earliest dealings of Jahweh with the
Hebrew race, we are told that the ethnical god appeared to Abraham
in Haran, and promised to make of him “a great nation.” Later on,
Abraham complains of the want of an heir, saying to Jahweh, “Thou hast
given me no seed.” Then Jahweh “brought him forth abroad, and said,
Look now toward heaven and tell the stars: so shall thy seed be.” Over
and over again we get similar promises of fruitfulness made to Abraham:
“I will multiply thee exceedingly”; “thou shalt be a father of
many nations”; “I will make thee exceeding fruitful”; “kings
shall come out of thee”; “for a father of many nations {193}have I
made thee.” So, too, of Sarah: “she shall be a mother of nations;
kings of people shall be of her.” And of Ishmael: “I have blessed
him and will make him fruitful, and will multiply him exceedingly:
twelve princes shall he beget, and I will make him a great nation.”
Time after time these blessings recur for Abraham, Isaac, and all his
family: “I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as
the sand which is upon the seashore, and thy seed shall possess the gate
of his enemies.”

In every one of these passages, and in many more which need not
be quoted, but which will readily occur to every reader, Jahweh
is represented especially as a god of increase, of generation, of
populousness, of fertility. As such, too, we find him frequently and
markedly worshipped on special occasions. He was the god to whom sterile
women prayed, and from whom they expected the special blessing of a son,
to keep up the cult of the family ancestors. This trait survived even
into the poetry of the latest period. “He maketh the barren woman
to keep house,” says a psalmist about Jahweh, “and to be a joyful
mother of children.” And from the beginning to the end of Hebrew
legend we find a similar characteristic of the ethnical god amply
vindicated. When Sarah is old and well stricken in years, Jahweh visits
her and she conceives Isaac. Then Isaac in turn “intreated Jahweh for
his wife, because she was barren; and Jahweh was intreated of him, and
Rebekah his wife conceived.” Again, “when Jahweh saw that Leah was
hated, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren.” Once more, of the
birth of Samson we are told that Manoah’s wife “was barren and bare
not”: but “the angel of Jahweh appeared unto the woman and said
unto her, Behold, now thou art barren and bearest not; but thou shalt
conceive and bear a son.” And of Hannah we are told, even more
significantly, that Jahweh had “shut up her womb.” At the shrine
of Jahweh at Shiloh, therefore, she prayed to Jahweh that this disgrace
might be removed from her and that a child might {194}be born to her. If
she bore “a man child,” she would offer him up all his life long as
an anchorite to Jahweh, to be a Nazarite of the Lord, an ascetic and
a fanatic. “Jahweh remembered her,” and she bore Samuel. And after
that again, “Jahweh visited Hannah, so that she conceived and bare
three sons and two daughters.” In many other passages we get the
self-same trait: Jahweh is regarded above everything as a god of
increase and a giver of offspring. “Children are a heritage from
Jahweh,” says the much later author of a familiar ode: “the fruit of
the womb are a reward from him.”

It is clear, too, that this desire for children, for a powerful clan,
for the increase of the people, was a dominant one everywhere in Ephraim
and in Judah. “Thy wife shall be as a fruitful vine,” says Jahweh to
his votary by the mouth of the poet; “thy children like olive plants
round about thy table.” “Happy is the man that hath his quiver full
of them,” says another psalmist; “they shall speak with the enemies
in the gate.” Again and again the promise is repeated that the seed
of Abraham or of Joseph or of Ishmael shall be numerous as the stars
of heaven or the sands of the sea: Jahweh’s chief prerogative is
evidently the gift of increase, extended often to cattle and asses, but
always including at least sons and daughters. If Israel obeys Jahweh,
says the Deuteronomist, “Jahweh will make thee plenteous for good in the
fruit of thy belly, and in the fruit of thy cattle, and in the fruit of
thy ground”: but if otherwise, then “cursed shall be the fruit of thy
body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine, and the
flocks of thy sheep.”

Now, elsewhere throughout the world we find in like manner a certain
class of phallic gods who are specially conceived as givers of
fertility, and to whom prayers and offerings are made by barren women
who desire children. And the point to observe is that these gods are
usually (perhaps one might even say always) embodied in stone pillars
{195}or upright monoliths. The practical great god of India--the god
whom the people really worship--is Mahadeo; and Mahadeo is, as we know,
a cylinder of stone, to whom the _linga puja_ is performed, and to whom
barren women pray for offspring. There are sacred stones in western
Europe, now crowned by a cross, at which barren women still pray to God
and the Madonna, or to some local saint, for the blessing of children.
It is allowed that while the obelisk is from one point of view (in later
theory) a ray of the sun, it is from another point of view (in earlier
origin) a “symbol of the generative power of nature,"--which is only
another way of saying that it is an ancestral stone of phallic virtue.
In short, without laying too much stress upon the connexion, we may
conclude generally that the upright pillar came early to be regarded,
not merely as a memento of the dead and an abode of the ghost or
indwelling god, but also in some mysterious and esoteric way as a
representative of the male and generative principle.

If we recollect that the stone pillar was often identified with the
ancestor or father, the reason for this idea will not perhaps be quite
so hard to understand. “From these stones we are all descended,”
thinks the primitive worshipper: “these are our fathers; therefore,
they are the givers of children, the producers and begetters of all our
generations, the principle of fertility, the proper gods to whom to pray
for offspring.” Add that many of them, being represented as human, or
human in their upper part at least, grow in time to be ithyphallic, like
Priapus, party by mere grotesque barbarism, but partly also as a sign
of the sex of the deceased: and we can see the naturalness of this easy
transition. From the Hermæ of the Greeks to the rude phallic deities of
so many existing savage races, we get everywhere signs of this constant
connexion between the sacred stone and the idea of paternity. Where the
stone represents the grave of a woman, the deity of course is conceived
as a goddess, but with {196}the same implications. Herodotus saw in
Syria stelæ engraved with the female pudenda. The upright stone god
is thus everywhere and always liable to be regarded as a god of
fruitfulness.

But did this idea of the stone pillar extend to Palestine and to
the Semitic nations? There is evidence that it did, besides that
of Herodotus. Major Conder, whose opinion on all questions of pure
archaeology (as opposed to philology) deserves the highest respect, says
of Canaanitish times, “The menhir, or conical stone, was the emblem
throughout Syria of the gods presiding over fertility, and the
cup hollows which have been formed in menhirs and dolmens are the
indications of libations, often of human blood, once poured on these
stones by early worshippers.” He connects these monuments with the
linga cult of India, and adds that Dr. Chaplin has found such a cult
still surviving near the Sea of Galilee. Lucian speaks of the two great
pillars at the temple of Hierapolis as _phalli_. Of the Phoenicians
Major Conder writes: “The chief emblem worshipped in the temples was
a pillar or cone, derived no doubt from the rude menhirs which were
worshipped by early savage tribes, such as Dravidians, Arabs, Celts, and
Hottentots.” That they were originally sepulchral in character we
can gather from the fact that “they often stood beneath trilithons or
dolmens, or were placed before an altar made by a stone laid flat on an
upright base.” “The representations on early Babylonian cylinders
of tables whereon a small fire might be kindled, or an offering of
some small object laid, seem to indicate a derivation from similar
structures. The original temple in which the cone and its shrine, or its
altar, were placed, was but a cromlech or enclosure, square or round,
made by setting up stones.” Remains of such enclosures, with dolmens
on one side, are found at various spots in Moab and Phoenicia. Nothing
could be more obviously sepulchral in character than these rude shrines
or Gilgals, with the pillar or gravestone, from which, as Major Conder
suggests, {197}the hypæthral temples of Byblos and Baalbek are finally
developed.

That Jahweh himself in his earliest form was such a stone god, the
evidence, I think, though not perhaps exactly conclusive, is to say the
least extremely suggestive. I have already called attention to it in a
previous chapter, and need not here recapitulate it in full; but a
few stray additions may not be without value. Besides the general
probability, among a race whose gods were so almost universally
represented by sacred stones, that any particular god, unless the
contrary be proved, was so represented, there is the evidence of all
the later language, and of the poems written after the actual stone god
himself had perished, that Jahweh was still popularly regarded as, at
least in a metaphorical sense, a stone or rock. “He is the Rock,”
says the Deuteronomist, in the song put into the mouth of Moses; “I
will publish the name of Jahweh; ascribe greatness unto our god.”
“Jahweh liveth, and blessed be my rock,” says the hymn which a later
writer composes for David in the Second Book of Samuel: “exalted be
the god of the rock of my salvation.” And in the psalms the image
recurs again and again: “Jahweh is my rock and my fortress”; “Who
is a god save Jahweh, and who is a rock save our god?”; “He set my
feet upon a rock, and established my goings”; “Lead me to the rock
that is greater than I”; “Jahweh is my defence, and my god is the
rock of my refuge”; “O come, let us sing to Jahweh; let us make a
joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.” And that the shape of this
stone was probably that of a rounded pillar, bevelled at the top, we see
in the fact that later ages pictured to themselves their transfigured
Jahweh as leading the Sons of Israel in the wilderness as a pillar of
fire by night and a pillar of cloud by daytime.

The earlier Israelites, however, had no such poetical illusions.
To them, their god Jahweh was simply the object--stone pillar or
otherwise--preserved in the ark or chest {198}which long rested at
Shiloh, and which was afterwards enshrined, “between the thighs of the
building” (as a later gloss has it), in the Temple at Jerusalem. The
whole of the early traditions embedded in the books of Judges, Samuel,
and Kings show us quite clearly that Jahweh himself was then regarded as
inhabiting the ark, and as carried about with it from place to place
in all its wanderings. The story of the battle with the Philistines at
Eben-ezer, the fall of Dagon before the rival god, the fortunes of the
ark after its return to the Israelitish people, the removal to Jerusalem
by David, the final enthronement by Solomon, all distinctly show that
Jahweh in person dwelt within the ark, between the guardian cherubim.
“Who is able to stand before the face of Jahweh, this very sacred
god?” ask the men of Bethshemesh, when they ventured to look inside
that hallowed abode, and were smitten down by the “jealous god” who
loved to live in the darkness of the inmost sanctuary. *

     * Mr. William Simpson has some excellent remarks on the
     analogies of the Egyptian and Hebrew arks and sanctuaries in
     his pamphlet on The Worship of Death.

It may be well to note in this connexion two significant facts: Just
such an ark was used in Egypt to contain the sacred objects or images
of the gods. And further, at the period when the Sons of Israel were
tributaries in Egypt, a Theban dynasty ruled the country, and the
worship of the great Theban phallic deity, Khem, was widely spread
throughout every part of the Egyptian dominions.

Is there, however, any evidence of a linga or other stone pillar being
ever thus enshrined and entempled as the great god of a sanctuary?
Clearly, Major Conder has already supplied some, and more is forthcoming
from various other sources. The cone which represented Aphrodite in
Cyprus was similarly enshrined as the chief object of a temple, as were
the stelæ of all Egyptian mummies. “The trilithon,” says Major
Conder, “becomes later a shrine, in which the cone or a statue
stands.” The significance {199}of this correlation will at once be
seen if the reader remembers how, in the chapter on Sacred Stones,
I showed the origin of the idol from the primitive menhir or upright
pillar. “The Khonds and other non-Aryan tribes in India,” says
Conder once more, “build such temples of rude stones, daubed with
red,--a survival of the old practice of anointing the menhirs and the
sacred cone or pillar with blood of victims, sometimes apparently human.
Among the Indians, the pillar is a lingam, and such apparently was its
meaning among the Phoenicians.” And in the Greek cities we know from
Pausanias that an unhewn stone was similarly enshrined in the most
magnificent adytum of the noblest Hellenic temples. In fact, it was
rather the rule than otherwise that a stone was the chief object of
worship in the noblest fanes.

One more curious trait must be noted in the worship of Jahweh. Not only
did he rejoice in human sacrifices, but he also demanded especially an
offering of the firstborn, and he required a singular and significant
ransom from every man-child whom he permitted to live among his peculiar
votaries. On the fact of human sacrifices I need hardly insist: they
were an integral part of all Semitic worship, and their occurrence in
the cult of Jahweh has been universally allowed by all unprejudiced
scholars. The cases of Agag, whom Samuel hewed to pieces before the face
of Jahweh, and of Jephthah’s daughter, whom her father offered up as a
thank-offering for his victory, though not of course strictly historical
from a critical point of view, are quite sufficient evidence to show the
temper and the habit of the Jahweh-worshippers who described them. So
with the legend of the offering of Isaac, who is merely rescued at the
last moment in order that the god of generation may make him the father
of many thousands. Again, David seeks to pacify the anger of Jahweh by
a sacrifice of seven of the sons of Saul. And the prophet Micah asks,
“Shall I give my first-born for my transgression, the fruit of my body
for the sin of my soul?”--a passage {200}which undoubtedly implies
that in Micah’s time such a sacrifice of the eldest child was a common
incident of current Jahweh-worship.

From human sacrifice to circumcision the transition is less violent
than would at first sight appear. An intermediate type is found in the
dedication of the first-born, where Jahweh seems to claim for himself,
not as a victim, but as a slave and devotee, the first fruits of that
increase which it is his peculiar function to ensure. In various laws,
Jahweh lays claim to the first-born of man and beast,--sometimes to
all, sometimes only to the male first-born. The animals were sacrificed;
the sons, in later ages at least, were either made over as Nazarites or
redeemed with an offering or a money-ransom. But we cannot doubt that in
the earliest times the first-born child was slain before Jahweh. In
the curious legend of Moses and Zipporah we get a strange folk-tale
connecting this custom indirectly with the practice of circumcision.
Jahweh seeks to kill Moses, apparently because he has not offered up his
child: but Zipporah his wife takes a stone knife, circumcises her son,
and flings the bloody offering at Jahweh’s feet, who thereupon lets
her husband go. This, rather than the later account of its institution
by Abraham, seems the true old explanatory legend of the origin of
circumcision--a legend analogous to those which we find in Roman and
other early history as embodying or explaining certain ancient customs
or legal formulae. Circumcision, in fact, appears to be a bloody
sacrifice to Jahweh, as the god of generation: a sacrifice essentially
of the nature of a ransom, and therefore comparable to all those other
bodily mutilations whose origin Mr. Herbert Spencer has so well shown in
the _Ceremonial Institutions_.

At the same time, the nature of the offering helps to cast light
upon the character of Jahweh as a god of increase; exactly as the
“emerods” with which the Philistines were afflicted for the capture
of Jahweh and his ark show {201}the nature of the vengeance which might
naturally be expected from a deity of generation.

Last of all, how is it that later Hebrew writers believed the object
concealed in the ark to have been, not a phallic stone, but a copy of
the “Ten Words” which Jahweh was fabled to have delivered to Moses?
That would be difficult to decide: but here at least is an aperçu
upon the subject which I throw out for what it may be worth. The later
Hebrews, when their views of Jahweh had grown expanded and etherealised,
were obviously ashamed of their old stone-worship, if indeed they were
archaeologists enough after the captivity to know that it had ever
really existed. What more natural, then, than for them to suppose that
the stone which they heard of as having been enclosed in the ark was a
copy of the “Ten Words,”--the covenant of Jahweh? Hence, perhaps,
the later substitution of the term, “Ark of the Covenant,” for the
older and correcter phrase, “Ark of Jahweh.” One more suggestion,
still more purely hypothetical. Cones with pyramidal heads, bearing
inscriptions to the deceased, were used by the Phoenicians for
interments. It is just possible that the original Jahweh may have been
such an ancient pillar, covered with writings of some earlier character,
which were interpreted later as the equivalents or symbols of the “Ten
Words.”

Putting all the evidence together, then, as far as we can now recover
it, and interpreting it on broad anthropological lines by analogy from
elsewhere, I should say the following propositions seem fairly probable:

The original religion of Israel was a mixed polytheism, containing many
various types of gods, and based like all other religions upon domestic
and tribal ancestor-worship. Some of the gods were of animal shapes:
others were more or less vaguely anthropomorphic. But the majority were
worshipped under the form of sacred stones, trees, or wooden cones. The
greater part of these gods were Semitic in type, and common to the Sons
of Israel with their neighbours {202}and kinsmen. The character of the
Hebrew worship, however, apparently underwent some slight modification
in Egypt; or at any rate, Egyptian influences led to the preference
of certain gods over others at the period of the Exodus. One god, in
particular, Jahweh by name, seems to have been almost peculiar to the
Sons of Israel,--their ethnical deity, and therefore in all probability
an early tribal ancestor or the stone representative of such an
ancestor. The legends are probably right in their implication that this
god was already worshipped (not of course exclusively) by the Sons of
Israel before their stay in Egypt; they are almost certainly correct in
ascribing the great growth and extension of his cult to the period of
the Exodus. The Sons of Israel, at least from the date of the Exodus
onward, carried this god or his rude image with them in an ark or box
through all their wanderings. The object so carried was probably
a conical stone pillar, which we may conjecture to have been the
grave-stone of some deified ancestor: and of this ancestor “Jahweh”
was perhaps either the proper name or a descriptive epithet. Even if, as
Colenso suggests, the name itself was Canaanitish, and belonged already
to a local god, its application to the sacred stone of the ark would be
merely another instance of the common tendency to identify the gods of
one race or country with those of another. The stone itself was always
enshrouded in Egyptian mystery, and no private person was permitted to
behold it. Sacrifices, both human and otherwise, were offered up to it,
as to the other gods, its fellow’s and afterwards its hated rivals.
The stone, like other sacred stones of pillar shape, was regarded as
emblematic of the generative power. Circumcision was a mark of devotion
to Jahweh, at first, no doubt, either voluntary, or performed by way
of a ransom, but becoming with the growth and exclusiveness of
Jahweh-worship a distinctive rite of Jahweh’s chosen people. (But
other Semites also circumcised {203}themselves as a blood-offering to
their own more or less phallic deities.)

More briefly still, among many Hebrew gods, Jahweh was originally but
a single one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a
cylindrical stone, perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as
essentially a god of increase, a special object of veneration by
childless women.

From this rude ethnical divinity, the mere sacred pillar of a barbarous
tribe, was gradually developed the Lord God of later Judaism and of
Christianity--a power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most
ethereal, the most sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of
man has ever conceived. By what slow evolutionary process of syncretism
and elimination, of spiritual mysticism and national enthusiasm, of
ethical effort and imaginative impulse that mighty God was at last
projected out of so unpromising an original it will be the task of our
succeeding chapters to investigate and to describe.




CHAPTER X.--THE RISE OF MONOTHEISM.

|WE {204}have seen that the Hebrews were originally polytheists, and
that their ethnical god Jahweh seems to have been worshipped by them in
early times under the material form of a cylindrical stone pillar. Or
rather, to speak more naturally, the object they so worshipped they
regarded as a god, and called Jahweh. The question next confronts us,
how from this humble beginning did Israel attain to the pure monotheism
of its later age? What was there in the position or conditions of the
Hebrew race which made the later Jews reject all their other gods, and
fabricate out of their early national Sacred Stone the most sublime,
austere, and omnipotent deity that humanity has known?

The answer, I believe, to this pregnant question is partly to be
found in a certain general tendency of the Semitic mind; partly in the
peculiar political and social state of the Israelitish tribes during the
ninth, eighth, seventh, sixth, and fifth centuries before the Christian
era. Or, to put the proposed solution of the problem, beforehand, in a
still simpler form, Hebrew monotheism was to some extent the result of
a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in the course of which the
attributes and characters of each became merged in the other, only the
names (if anything) remaining distinct; and to some extent the result of
the intense national patriotism, of which the ethnical god Jahweh was at
once the outcome, the expression, and the fondest hope. The belief that
Jahweh fought for Israel, {205}and that by trust in Jahweh alone could
Israel hold her own against Egypt and Assyria, wildly fanatical as it
appears to us to-day, and utterly disproved by all the facts of the case
as it ultimately was, nevertheless formed a central idea of the Hebrew
patriots, and resulted by slow degrees in the firm establishment first
of an exclusive, and afterwards of a truly monotheistic Jahweh-cult.

It is one of Ernest Renan’s brilliant paradoxes that the Semitic mind
is naturally monotheistic. As a matter of fact, the Semitic mind has
shown this native tendency in its first stages by everywhere evolving
pretty much the same polytheistic pantheon as that evolved by every
other group of human beings everywhere. Nevertheless, there is perhaps
this kernel of truth in Renan’s paradoxical contention; the Semites,
more readily than most other people, merge the features of their deities
one in the other. That is not, indeed, by any means an exclusive Semitic
trait. We saw already, in dealing with the Egyptian religion, how all
the forms and functions of the gods faded at last into an inextricable
mixture, an olla podrida of divinity, from which it was practically
impossible to disentangle with certainty the original personalities of
Ra and Turn, of Amen and Osiris, of Neith and Isis, of Ptah and Apis.
Even in the relatively fixed and individualised pantheon of Hellas,
it occurs often enough that confusions both of person and prerogative
obscure the distinctness of the various gods. Aphrodite and Herakles are
polymorphic in their embodiments. But in the Semitic religions, at least
in that later stage where we first come across them, the lineaments of
the different deities are so blurred and indefinite that hardly anything
more than mere names can with certainty be recognised. No other gods are
so shadowy and so vague. The type of this pantheon is that dim figure
of El-Shaddai, the early and terrible object of Hebrew worship, of whose
attributes and nature we know positively nothing, but who stands in
the background of all Hebrew thought as the embodiment of the nameless
{206}and trembling dread begotten on man’s soul by the irresistible
and ruthless forces of nature.

This vagueness and shadowiness of the Semitic religious conceptions
seems to depend to some extent upon the inartistic nature of the Semitic
culture. The Semite seldom carved the image of his god. Roman observers
noted with surprise that the shrine of Carmel contained no idol. But
it depended also upon deep-seated characteristics of the Semitic race.
Melancholy, contemplative, proud, reserved, but strangely fanciful, the
Arab of to-day perhaps gives us the clue to the indefinite nature of
early Semitic religious thinking. There never was anether world more
ghostly than Sheol; there never were gods more dimly awful than the
Elohim who float through the early stories of the Hebrew mystical cycle.
Their very names are hardly known to us: they come to us through the
veil of later Jehovistic editing with such merely descriptive titles as
the God of Abraham, the Terror of Isaac, the Mighty Power, the Most High
Deity. Indeed, the true Hebrew, like many other barbarians, seems to
have shrunk either from looking upon the actual form of his god itself,
or from pronouncing aloud his proper name. His deity was shrouded in the
darkness of an ark or the deep gloom of an inner tent or sanctuary; the
syllables that designated the object of his worship were never uttered
in full, save on the most solemn occasions, but were shirked or slurred
over by some descriptive epithet. Even the unpronounceable title of
Jahweh itself appears from our documents to have been a later name
bestowed during the Exodus on an antique god: while the rival titles
of the Baal and the Molech mean nothing more than the Lord and the King
respectively. An excessive reverence forbade the Semite to know anything
of his god’s personal appearance or true name, and so left the
features of almost all the gods equally uncertain and equally formless.

But besides the difficulty of accurately distinguishing between the
forms and functions of the different Semitic deities {207}which even
their votaries must have felt from the beginning, there was a superadded
difficulty in the developed creed, due to the superposition of elemental
mysticism and nature-worship upon the primitive cult of ancestral ghosts
as gods and goddesses. Just as Ra, the sun, was identified in the latest
ages with almost every Egyptian god, so solar ideas and solar myths
affected at last the distinct personality of almost every Semitic deity.
The consequence is that all the gods become in the end practically
indistinguishable: one is so like the other that different interpreters
make the most diverse identifications, and are apparently justified
in so doing (from the mythological standpoint) by the strong solar or
elemental family likeness which runs through the whole pantheon in its
later stages. It has even been doubted by scholars of the older school
whether Jahweh is not himself a form of his great rival Baal: whether
both were not at bottom identical--mere divergent shapes of one
polyonymous sun-god. To us, who recognise in every Baal the separate
ghost-god of a distinct tomb, such identification is clearly impossible.

To the worshippers of the Baalim or of Jahweh themselves, however,
these abstruser mythological problems never presented themselves. The
difference of name and of holy place was quite enough for them, in
spite of essential identity of attribute or nature. They would kill
one another for the sake of a descriptive epithet, or risk death itself
rather than offer up sacrifices at a hostile altar.

Nevertheless, various influences conspired, here as elsewhere, to
bring about a gradual movement of syncretism--that is to say, of the
absorption of many distinct gods into one; the final identification of
several deities originally separate. What those influences were we must
now briefly consider.

In the first place, we must recollect that while in Egypt, with its dry
and peculiarly preservative climate, mummies, idols, tombs, and temples
might be kept unchanged and undestroyed {208}for ages, in almost all
other countries rain, wind, and time are mighty levellers of human
handicraft. Thus, while in Egypt the cult of the Dead Ancestor survives
as such quite confessedly and openly for many centuries, in most other
countries the tendency is for the actual personal objects of worship to
be more and more forgotten; vague gods and spirits usurp by degrees the
place of the historic man; rites at last cling rather to sites than to
particular persons. The tomb may disappear; and yet the sacred stone may
be reverenced still with the accustomed veneration. The sacred stone
may go; and yet the sacred tree may be watered yearly with the blood of
victims. The tree itself may die; and yet the stump may continue to be
draped on its anniversary with festal apparel. The very stump may decay;
and yet gifts of food or offerings of rags may be cast as of old into
the sacred spring that once welled beside it. The locality thus grows
to be holy in itself, and gives us one clear and obvious source of later
nature-worship.

The gods or spirits who haunt such shrines come naturally to be thought
of with the lapse of ages as much like one another. Godship is all that
can long remain of their individual attributes. Their very names are
often unknown; they are remembered merely as the lord of Lebanon,
the Baal of Mount Peor. No wonder that after a time they get to be
practically identified with one another, while similar myths are often
fastened by posterity to many of them together. Indeed, we know that new
names, and even foreign intrusive names, frequently take the place
of the original titles, while the god himself still continues to be
worshipped as the same shapeless stone, with the same prescribed rites,
in the same squalid or splendid temples. Thus, Melcarth, the Baal of
Tyre, was adored in later days under the Greek name of Herakles; and
thus at Bablos two local deities, after being identified first with the
Syrian divinities, Adonis and Astarte, were identified later with the
Egyptian divinities, Osiris and Isis. {209}Yet the myths of the place
show us that through all that time the true worship was paid to the dead
stump of a sacred tree, which was said to have grown from the grave of a
god--in other words, from the tumulus of an ancient chieftain. No matter
how greatly mythologies change, these local cults remain ever constant;
the sacred stones are here described as haunted by djinns, and there
as memorials of Christian martyrs; the holy wells are dedicated here
to nymph or hero, and receive offerings there to saint or fairy. So the
holy oaks of immemorial worship in England become “Thor’s
oaks” under Saxon heathendom, and “Gospel oaks” under mediaeval
Christianity.

Finally, in the latest stages of worship, an attempt is always made to
work in the heavenly bodies and the great energies of nature into
the mythological groundwork or theory of religion. Every king is the
descendant of the sun, and every great god is therefore necessarily
the sun in person. Endless myths arise from these phrases, which are
mistaken by mythologists for the central facts and sources of religion.
But they are nothing of the kind. Mysticism and symbolism can never be
primitive; they are well-meant attempts by cultivated religious thinkers
of later days to read deep-seated meaning into the crude ideas and still
cruder practices of traditional religion. I may add that Dr. Robertson
Smith’s learned and able works are constantly spoiled in this way by
his dogged determination to see nature-worship as primitive, where it
is really derivative, as the earliest starting-point, where it is really
the highest and latest development.

Clearly, when all gods have come to be more or less solar in their
external and acquired features, the process of identification and
internationalisation is proportionately easy.

The syncretism thus brought about in the Hebrew religion by the
superposition of nature-worship on the primitive cult must have paved
the way for the later recognition of {210}monotheism, exactly as we know
it did in the esoteric creed of Egypt, by making all the gods so much
alike that worshippers had only to change the name of their deity, not
the attributes of the essential conception. Let us look first how far
this syncretism affected the later idea of Jahweh, the phallic stone-god
preserved in the ark; and then let us enquire afterward how the
patriotic reaction against Assyrian aggression put the final
coping-stone on the rising fabric of monotheistic Jahweh-worship.

It is often asserted that Jahweh was worshipped in many places in Israel
under the form of a golden calf. That is to say, Hebrews who set
up images of a metal bull believed themselves nevertheless to be
worshipping Jahweh. Even the prophets of the eighth century regard the
cult of the bull as a form of Jahweh-worship, though not a form to which
they can personally give their approbation. But the bull is probably in
its origin a distinct god from the stone in the ark; and if its worship
was identified with that of the Rock of Israel, it could be only by a
late piece of syncretic mysticism. Perhaps the link here, as in the
case of Apis, was a priestly recognition of the bull as symbolising
the generative power of nature; an idea which would be peculiarly
appropriate to the god whose great function it was to encourage
fruitfulness. But in any case, we cannot but see in this later
calf-worship a superadded element wholly distinct from the older cult
of the sacred stone, just as the worship of Ra was wholly distinct in
origin from the totem-cult of Mnevis, or as the worship of Amen was
wholly distinct from that of Khem and Osiris. The stone-god and the
bull-god merge at last into one, much as at a far later date the man
Jesus merges into the Hebrew god, and receives more reverence in modern
faiths than the older deity whom he practically replaces.

Even in the Temple at Jerusalem itself, symbols of bull-worship were
apparently admitted. The altar upon which the daily sacrifice was burnt
had four horns; and the laver {211}in the court, the “brazen sea,”
was supported upon the figures of twelve oxen. When we remember that
the Molech had the head of a bull, we can hardly fail to see in these
symbols a token of that gradual syncretism which invariably affects all
developed pantheons in all civilised countries.

Much more important are the supposed signs of the later identification
of Jahweh with the sun, and his emergence as a modified and transfigured
sun-god. It may seem odd at first that such a character could ever be
acquired by a sacred stone, did we not recollect the exactly similar
history of the Egyptian obelisk, which in like manner represents,
first and foremost, the upright pillar or monolith--that is to say, the
primitive gravestone--but secondarily and derivatively, at once the
generative principle and a ray of the sun. With this luminous analogy to
guide us in our search, we shall have little difficulty in recognising
how a solar character may have been given to the later attributes and
descriptions of Jahweh.

I do not myself attach undue importance to these solar characteristics
of the fully evolved Jahweh; but so much has been made of them by a
certain school of modern thinkers that I must not pass them over in
complete silence.

To his early worshippers, then, as we saw, Jahweh was merely the stone
in the ark. He dwelt there visibly, and where the ark went, there Jahweh
went with it. But the later Hebrews--say in the eighth century--had
acquired a very different idea of Jahweh’s dwelling-place.
Astrological and solar ideas (doubtless Akkadian in origin) had
profoundly modified their rude primitive conceptions. To Amos and to
the true Isaiah, Jahweh dwells in the open sky above and is “Jahweh of
hosts,” the leader among the shining army of heaven, the king of the
star-world. “Over those celestial bodies and celestial inhabitants
Jahweh rules”; they surround him and execute his commands: {212}the
host of heaven are his messengers--in the more familiar language of our
modern religion, “the angels of the Lord,” the servants of Jahweh.
To Micah, heaven is “the temple of Jahweh’s holiness”: “God on
high,” is the descriptive phrase by which the prophet alludes to him.
In all this we have reached a very different conception indeed from that
of the early and simple-minded Israelites who carried their god with
them on an ox-cart from station to station.

Furthermore, light and fire are constantly regarded by these later
thinkers as manifestations of Jahweh; and even in editing the earlier
legends they introduce such newer ideas, making “the glory of
Jahweh” light up the ark, or appear in the burning bush, or combining
both views, the elder and the younger, in the pillar of fire that
preceded the nomad horde of Israel in the wilderness. Jahweh is said to
“send” or to “cast fire” from heaven, in which expressions we
see once more the advanced concept of an elemental god, whose voice
is the thunder, and whose weapon the lightning. All these are familiar
developments of the chief god in a pantheon. Says Zechariah in his
poem, “Ask ye of Jahweh rain in the time of the latter showers: Jahweh
will make the lightnings.” Says Isaiah, “The light of Israel shall
be for a fire, And his holy one for a flame”; “Behold, the name
of Jahweh cometh from afar, His anger burneth, and violently the smoke
riseth on high: His lips are full of indignation, And his tongue is as
a devouring fire.” In these and a hundred other passages that might be
quoted, we seem to see Jahweh envisaged to a great extent as a sun-god,
and clothed in almost all the attributes of a fiery Molech.

Sometimes these Molech-traits come very close indeed to those of the
more generally acknowledged fire-gods. “Thus we read,” says Kuenen,
“that ‘the glory of Jahweh was like devouring fire on the top of Mount
Sinai’; and that ‘his angel appeared in a flame of fire out of the
midst of a bush: the bush burned with fire but was not consumed.’”
{213}So Jahweh himself is called “a consuming fire, a jealous god”:
and a poet thus describes his appearance, “Smoke goeth up out of his
nostrils, And fire out of his mouth devoureth; coals of fire are kindled
by him.” These are obviously very derivative and borrowed prerogatives
with which to deck out the primitive stone pillar that led the people of
Israel up out of Egypt. Yet we know that precisely analogous evolutions
have been undergone by other stone-gods elsewhere.

Once more, though this is to anticipate a little, the later
Jahweh-worship seems to have absorbed into itself certain astrological
elements which were originally quite alien to it, belonging to the cult
of other gods. Such for example is the institution of the Sabbath,
the unlucky day of the malign god Kewân or Saturn, on which it was
undesirable to do any kind of work, and on which accordingly the
superstitious Semite rested altogether from his weekly labours. The
division of the lunar month (the sacred period of Astarte, the queen
of heaven) into four weeks of seven days each, dedicated in turn to the
gods of the seven planets, belongs obviously to the same late cult of
the elemental and astrological gods, or, rather, of the gods with whom
these heavenly bodies were at last identified under Akkadian influence.
The earlier prophets of the exclusive Jahweh-worship denounce as
idolatrous such observation of the Sabbath and the astrological
feasts--“Your Sabbaths and your new moons are an abomination to me”;
and according to Amos, Kewân himself had been the chief idolatrous
object of worship by his countrymen in the wilderness. Later on,
however, the Jehovistic party found itself powerless to break the
current of superstition on the Sabbath question, and a new _modus
vivendi_ was therefore necessary. They arranged a prudent compromise.
The Sabbath was adopted bodily into the monotheistic Jahweh-worship, and
a mythical reason was given for its institution and its sacred character
which nominally linked it on to the cult of the ethnical god. On that
day, said {214}the priestly cosmogonists, Jahweh rested from his labour
of creation. In the same way, many other fragments of external cults
were loosely attached to the worship of Jahweh by a verbal connection
with some part of the revised Jehovistic legend, or else were accredited
to national Jehovistic or Jehovised heroes.

Having thus briefly sketched out the gradual changes which the
conception of Jahweh himself underwent during the ages when his
supremacy was being slowly established in the confederacy of Israel,
let us now hark back once more and attack the final problem, Why did the
particular cult of Jahweh become at last exclusive and monotheistic?

To begin with, we must remember that from the very outset of the
national existence, Jahweh was clearly regarded on all hands as the
_ethnical_ god, the special god of Israel. The relation of such ethnical
gods to their people has been admirably worked out by Dr. Robertson
Smith in _The Religion of the Semites_. Even though we cannot, however,
accept as historical the view given us of the exodus in the Pentateuch,
nor admit that Jahweh played anything like so large a part in the great
national migration as is there indicated, it is yet obvious that
from the moment when Israel felt itself a nation at all, Jahweh was
recognised as its chief deity. He was the “god of Israel,” just
as Milcom was the god of the Ammonites, Chemosh the god of Moab, and
Ashtaroth the goddess of Sidon. As distinctly as every Athenian, while
worshipping Zeus and Hera and Apollo, held Athene to be the special
patron of Athens, so did every Israelite, while worshipping the Baalim
and the Molech and the local deities generally, hold Jahweh to be the
special patron of Israel.

Moreover, from the very beginning, there is reason to suppose that the
Israelites regarded Jahweh as their supreme god. Most pantheons finally
settle down into a recognised hierarchy, in which one deity or another
gradually assumes the first place. So, in Hellas, the supremacy of
Zeus was undoubted; so, in Rome, was the supremacy {215}of Jupiter.
Sometimes, to be sure, as among our Teutonic ancestors, we see room for
doubt between two rival gods: it would be difficult to assign the exact
priority to either of the two leading deities: among the English, Woden
rather bore it over Thunor; among the Scandinavians, Thor rather bore it
over Odin. In Israel, in like manner, there was apparently a time when
the Presidency of the Immortals hovered between Jahweh and one or other
of the local Baalim. But in the end, and perhaps even from the very
beginning, the suffrages of the people were mainly with the sacred stone
of the ark. He was the God of Israel, and they were the chosen people of
Jahweh.

The custom of circumcision must have proved at once the symbol and in
part the cause, in part the effect, of this general devotion of the
people to a single supreme god. At first, no doubt, only the first-born
or other persons specially dedicated to Jahweh, would undergo the
rite which marked them out so clearly as the devotees of the god of
fertility. But as time went on, long before the triumph of the exclusive
Jahweh-worship, it would seem that the practice of offering up every
male child to the national god had become universal. As early as the
shadowy reign of David, the Philistines are reproachfully alluded to in
our legends as “the uncircumcised”; whence we may perhaps conclude
(though the authority is doubtful) that even then circumcision had
become coextensive with Israelitish citizenship. Such universal
dedication of the whole males of the race to the national god must have
done much to ensure his ultimate triumph.

If we look at the circumstances of the Israelites in Palestine, we shall
easily see how both religious unity and intense national patriotism were
fostered by the very nature of their tenure of the soil; and also why
a deity mainly envisaged as a god of generation should have become the
most important member of their national pantheon. Their position
during the first few centuries of their {216}life in Lower Syria may be
compared to that of the Dorians in Peloponnesus: they were but a little
garrison in a hostile land fighting incessantly with half-conqùered
tributaries and encircling foes; now hard-pressed by rebellions of
their internal enemies; and now again rendered subject themselves to
the hostile Philistines on their maritime border. The handful of rude
warriors who burst upon the land under such bloodthirsty leaders as
the mystical Joshua could only hope for success by rapid and constant
increase of their numbers, and by avoiding as far as possible those
internal quarrels which were always the prelude to national disgrace.
To be “a mother in Israel” is the highest hope of every Hebrew woman.
Hence it was natural that a god of generation should become the chief
among the local deities, and that the promise held out by his priests of
indefinite multiplication should make him the most popular and powerful
member of the Israelitish pantheon. And though all the stone gods were
probably phallic, yet Jahweh, as the ethnical patron, seems most of all
to have been regarded as the giver of increase to Israel.

It seems clear, too, that the common worship of Jahweh was at first the
only solid bond of union between the scattered and discordant tribes who
were afterwards to grow into the Israelitish people. This solidarity of
god and tribe has well been insisted on by Professor Robertson Smith as
a common feature of all Semitic worship. The ark of Jahweh in its house
at Shiloh appears to have formed the general meeting-place for Hebrew
patriotism, as the sanctuary of Olympia formed a focus later for the
dawning sense of Hellenic unity. The ark was taken out to carry before
the Hebrew army, that the god of Israel might fight for his worshippers.
Evidently, therefore, from a very early date, Jahweh was regarded in a
literal sense as the god of battles, the power upon whom Israel might
specially rely to guard it against its enemies. When, as the legends
tell us, the national unity was realised under {217}David; when the
subject peoples were finally merged into a homogeneous whole; when the
last relics of Canaanitish nationality were stamped out by the final
conquest of the Jebusites; and when Jerusalem was made the capital of
a united Israel, this feeling must have increased both in extent
and intensity. The bringing of Jahweh to Jerusalem by David, and the
building of his temple by Solomon (if these facts be historical),
must have helped to stamp him as the great god of the race: and though
Solomon also erected temples to other Hebrew gods, which remained in
existence for some centuries, we may be sure that from the date of the
opening of the great central shrine, Jahweh remained the principal deity
of the southern kingdom at least, after the separation.

There was one characteristic of Jahweh-worship, however, which
especially helped to make it at last an _exclusive_ cult, and thus paved
the way for its final development into a pure monotheism. Jahweh was
specially known to be a “jealous god”: this is a trait in his
temperament early and often insisted on. We do not know when or where
the famous “Ten Words” were first promulgated; but we have every
reason to believe that in essence at least they date from a very antique
period. Now, at the head of these immemorial precepts of Jahweh stands
the prohibition of placing any other gods before his face. Originally,
no doubt, the prohibition meant exactly what it states; that Jahweh
would endure no companion gods to share his temple; that wherever he
dwelt, he would dwell alone without what the Greeks would have called
fellow shrine-sharers. Thus we know that no ashera was to be driven into
the ground near Jahweh’s ark; and that when Dagon found himself face
to face with the Rock of Israel, he broke in pieces, and could not stand
before the awful presence of the great Hebrew Pillar. No more than this,
then, was at first demanded by “the jealous god”: he asked of his
worshippers that they should keep him apart from the society of all
inferior gods, {218}should allow no minor or rival deity to enter his
precincts.

Gradually, however, as Jahweh-worship grew deeper, and the conception
of godhead became wider and more sublime, the Jahweh-worshipper began
to put a stricter interpretation upon the antique command of the jealous
god. It was supposed that every circumcised person, every man visibly
devoted to Jahweh, owed to Jahweh alone his whole religious service.
Nobody doubted as yet, indeed, that other gods existed: but the extreme
Jehovists in the later days of national independence held as an article
of faith that no true Israelite ought in any way to honour them. An
internal religious conflict thus arose between the worshippers of Jahweh
and the worshippers of the Baalim, in which, as might be expected, the
devotees of the national god had very much the best of it. Exclusive
Jahweh-worship became thenceforth the ideal of the extreme Jehovists:
they began to regard all other gods as “idols,” to be identified
with their images; they began to look upon Jahweh alone as a living god,
at least within the bounds of the Israelitish nation.

To this result, another ancient prohibition of the priests of Jahweh no
doubt largely contributed. The priesthood held it unlawful to make or
multiply images of Jahweh. The one sacred stone enclosed in the ark
was alone to be worshipped: and by thus concentrating on Shiloh, or
afterwards on Jerusalem, the whole religious spirit of the ethnical
cult, they must largely have succeeded in cementing the national unity.
Strict Jehovists looked with dislike upon the adoration paid to the
bull-images in the northern kingdom, though those, too, were regarded
(at least in later days) as representatives of Jahweh. They held that
the true god of Abraham was to be found only in the ark at Jerusalem,
and that to give to the Rock of Israel human form or bestial figure was
in itself a high crime against the majesty of their deity. Hence
arose the peculiar Hebrew dislike to “idolatry”; a dislike never
{219}equally shared by any but Semitic peoples, and having deep roots,
apparently, at once in the inartistic genius of the people and in the
profound metaphysical and dreamy character of Semitic thinking.
The comparative emptiness of Semitic shrines, indeed, was always a
stumbling-block to the Greek, with his numerous and exquisite images of
anthropomorphic deities.

All that was now wanted to drive the increasingly exclusive and
immaterial Jahweh-worship into pure monotheism for the whole people
was the spur of a great national enthusiasm, in answer to some dangerous
external attack upon the existence of Israel and of Israel’s god.
This final touch was given by the aggression of Assyria, and later of
Babylon. For years the two tiny Israelitish kingdoms had maintained
a precarious independence between the mighty empires of Egypt and
Mesopotamia. In the eighth century, it became certain that they could
no longer play their accustomed game of clever diplomacy and polite
subjection. The very existence of Israel was at stake; and the fanatical
worshippers of Jahweh, now pushed to an extreme of frenzy by the
desperate straits to which they were reduced, broke out in that
memorable ecstasy of enthusiasm which we may fairly call the Age of
the Prophets, and which produced the earliest masterpieces of Hebrew
literature in the wild effort to oppose to the arms of the invaders the
passive resistance of a supreme Jahweh. In times of old, the prophets
say, when Jahweh led the forces of Israel, the horses and the chariots
of their enemies counted for naught: if in this crisis Israel would
cease to think of aid from Egypt or alliance with Assyria--if Israel
would get rid of all her other gods and trust only to Jahweh,--then
Jahweh would break asunder the strength of Assyria and would reduce
Babylon to nothing before his chosen people.

Such is the language that Isaiah ventured to use in the very crisis of a
grave national danger.

Now, strange as it seems to us that any people should have {220}thrown
themselves into such a general state of fanatical folly, it is
nevertheless true that these extraordinary counsels prevailed in both
the Israelitish kingdoms, and that the very moment when the national
existence was most seriously imperilled was the moment chosen by the
Jehovistic party for vigorously attempting a religious reformation. The
downfall of Ephraim only quickened the bigoted belief of the fanatics
in Judah that pure Jahweh-worship was the one possible panacea for the
difficulties of Israel. Taking advantage of a minority and of a plastic
young king, they succeeded in imposing exclusive Jehovism upon
the half-unwilling people. The timely forgery of the Book of
Deuteromony--the first germ of the Pentateuch--by the priests of the
temple at Jerusalem was quickly followed by the momentary triumph of
pure Jahweh-worship. In this memorable document, the exclusive cult of
Jahweh was falsely said to have descended from the earliest periods
of the national existence. Josiah, we are told, alarmed at the
denunciations in the forged roll of the law, set himself to work at once
to root out by violent means every form of “idolatry.” He brought
forth from the house of Jahweh “the vessels that were made for the
Baal, and for the Ashera, and for all the Host of Heaven, and he burned
them without Jerusalem in the fields of Kidron.” He abolished all the
shrines and priesthoods of other gods in the cities of Judah, and put
down “them that burned incense to the Baal, to the sun, and to the
moon, and to the planets, and all the Host of Heaven.” He also brought
out the Ashera from the temple of Jahweh, and burnt it to ashes; and
“took away the horses that the kings of Judah had given to the sun,
and burned the chariots of the sun with fire.” And by destroying the
temples said to have been built by Solomon for Chemosh, Milcom, and
Ashtoreth, he left exclusive and triumphant Jahweh-worship the sole
accredited religion of Israel.

All, however, was of no avail. Religious fanaticism could {221}not
save the little principality from the aggressive arms of its powerful
neighbours. Within twenty or thirty years of Josiah’s reformation,
the Babylonians ceased to toy with their petty tributaries, and thrice
captured and sacked Jerusalem. The temple of Jahweh was burnt, the
chief ornaments were removed, and the desolate site itself lay empty and
deserted. The principal inhabitants were transported to Babylonia, and
the kingdom of Judah ceased for a time to have any independent existence
of any sort.

But what, in this disaster, became of Jahweh himself? How fared or
fell the Sacred Stone in the ark, the Rock of Israel, in this general
destruction of all his holiest belongings? Strange to say, the Hebrew
annalist never stops to tell us. In the plaintive catalogue of the
wrongs wrought by the Babylonians at Jerusalem, every pot and shovel and
vessel is enumerated, but “the ark of God” is not so much as
once mentioned. Perhaps the historian shrank from relating that
final disgrace of his country’s deity; perhaps a sense of reverence
prevented him from chronicling it; perhaps he knew nothing of what had
finally been done with the cherished and time-honoured stone pillar
of his ancestors. It is possible, too, that with his later and more
etherealised conceptions of the cult of his god, he had ceased to regard
the ark itself as the abode of Jahweh, and was unaware that his tribal
deity had been represented in the innermost shrine of the temple by a
rough-hewn pillar. Be that as it may, the actual fate of Jahweh himself
is involved for us now in impenetrable obscurity. Probably the invaders
who took away “the treasures of the house of Jahweh, and cut in pieces
all the vessels of gold which Solomon, King of Israel, had made,”
would care but little for the rude sacred stone of a conquered people.
We may conjecture that they broke Jahweh into a thousand fragments and
ground him to powder, as Josiah had done with the Baalim and the Ashera,
so that his very relics could no longer be recognised or worshipped by
{222}his followers. At any rate, we hear no more, from that time forth,
of Jahweh himself, as a material existence, or of the ark he dwelt
in. His spirit alone survived unseen, to guard and protect his chosen
people.

Yet, strange to say, this final disappearance of Jahweh himself, as a
visible and tangible god, from the page of history, instead of proving
the signal for the utter downfall of his cult and his sanctity, was
the very making of Jahweh-worship as a spiritual, a monotheistic, and a
cosmopolitan religion. At the exact moment when Jahweh ceased to
exist, the religion of Jahweh began to reach its highest and fullest
development. Even before the captivity, as we have seen, the prophets
and their party had begun to form a most exalted and spiritualised
conception of Jahweh’s greatness, Jahweh’s holiness, Jahweh’s
unapproachable nature, Jahweh’s superhuman sublimity and omnipotence.
But now that the material Jahweh itself, which clogged and cramped their
ideas, had disappeared for ever, this spiritual conception of a great
Unseen God widened and deepened amazingly. Forbidden by their creed
and by Jahweh’s own express command to make any image of their chosen
deity, the Hebrews in Babylonia gradually evolved for themselves the
notion of a Supreme Ruler wholly freed from material bonds, to be
worshipped without image, representative, or symbol; a dweller in the
heavens, invisible to men, too high and pure for human eyes to look
upon. The conical stone in the ark gave place almost at once to an
incorporeal, inscrutable, and almighty Being.

It was during the captivity, too, that pure monotheism became for the
first time the faith of Israel. Convinced that desertion of Jahweh was
the cause of all their previous misfortunes, the Jews during their exile
grew more deeply attached than ever to the deity who represented their
national unity and their national existence. They made their way back
in time to Judæa, after two generations had passed away, with a firm
conviction that all their happiness {223}depended on restoring in ideal
purity a cult that had never been the cult of their fathers. A new form
of Jahweh-worship had become a passion among those who sat disconsolate
by the waters of Babylon. Few if any of the zealots who returned at last
to Jerusalem had ever themselves known the stone god who lay shrouded in
the ark: it was the etherealised Jahweh who ruled in heaven above among
the starry hosts to whom they offered up aspirations in a strange land
for the restoration of Israel. In the temple that they built on the
sacred site to the new figment of their imaginations, Jahweh was no
longer personally present: it was not so much his “house,” like
the old one demolished by the Babylonian invaders, as the place where
sacrifice was offered and worship paid to the great god in heaven. The
new religion was purely spiritual; Jahweh had triumphed, but only by
losing his distinctive personal characteristics, and coming out of the
crisis, as it were, the blank form or generic conception of pure deity
in general.

It is this that gives monotheism its peculiar power, and enables it so
readily to make its way everywhere. For monotheism is religion reduced
to its single central element; it contains nothing save what every
votary of all gods already implicitly believes, with every unnecessary
complexity or individuality smoothed away and simplified. Its simplicity
recommends it to all intelligent minds; its uniformity renders it the
easiest and most economical form of pantheon that man can frame for
himself.

Under the influence of these new ideas, before long, the whole annals of
Israel were edited and written down in Jehovistic form; the Pentateuch
and the older historical books assumed the dress in which we now
know them. From the moment of the return from the captivity, too, the
monotheistic conception kept ever widening. At first, no doubt, even
with the Jews of the Sixth Century, Jahweh was commonly looked upon
merely as the ethnical god of Israel. But, in time, the sublimer and
broader conception {224}of some few among the earlier poetical prophets
began to gain general acceptance, and Jahweh was regarded as in very
deed the one true God of all the world--somewhat such a God as Islam
and Christendom to-day acknowledge. Still, even so, he was as yet
most closely connected with the Jewish people, through whom alone the
gentiles were expected in the fulness of time to learn his greatness.
It was reserved for a Græco-Jewish Cilician, five centuries later, to
fulfil the final ideal of pure cosmopolitan monotheism, and to proclaim
abroad the unity of god to all nations, with the Catholic Church as its
earthly witness before the eyes of universal humanity. To Paul of Tarsus
we owe above all men that great and on the whole cosmopolitanising
conception.




CHAPTER XI.--HUMAN GODS.

|WE {225}have now in a certain sense accomplished our intention of
tracing the evolution of gods and of God. We have shown how polytheism
came to be, and how from it a certain particular group of men, the
early Israelites, rose by slow degrees, through natural stages, to the
monotheistic conception. It might seem, therefore, as though the task
we set before ourselves was now quite completed. Nevertheless, many
abstruse and difficult questions still lie before us. Our problem as
yet is hardly half solved. We have still to ask, I think, How did this
purely local and national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the
civilised world? How from an obscure corner of Lower Syria did the god
of a small tribe of despised and barbaric tributaries slowly live down
the great conquering deities of Babylon and Susa, of Hellas and Italy?
And again, we have further to enquire, Why do most of the modern nations
which have nominally adopted monotheism yet conceive of their god as
compounded in some mystically incomprehensible fashion of Three Persons,
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In short, I am not satisfied
with tracing the idea of a god from the primitive mummy or the secondary
ghost to the one supreme God of the ancient Hebrews; I desire also to
follow on that developed concept till it merges at last in the triune
God of modern Christendom. For, naturally, it is the god in whom men
believe here and now that most of all concerns and interests us.

I {226}may also add that, incidentally to this supplementary enquiry,
we shall come upon several additional traits in the idea of deity and
several important sources of earlier godhead, the consideration of which
we had to postpone before till a more convenient season. We shall find
that the process of tracking down Christianity to its hidden springs
suggests to us many aspects of primitive religion which we were
compelled to neglect in our first hasty synthesis.

The reader must remember that in dealing with so complex a subject as
that of human beliefs and human cults, it is impossible ever to condense
the whole of the facts at once into a single conspectus. We cannot grasp
at a time the entire mass of evidence. While we are following out one
clue, we must neglect another. It is only by examining each main set of
components in analytical distinctness that we can proceed by degrees to
a full and complete synthetic reconstruction of the whole vast fabric.
We must therefore correct and supplement in the sequel much that may
have seemed vague, inaccurate, or insufficient in our preliminary
survey.

The Christian religion with which we have next to deal bases itself
fundamentally upon the personality of a man, by name Jesus, commonly
described as the Christ, that is to say “the anointed.” Of this most
sacred and deified person it is affirmed by modern Christianity, and has
been affirmed by orthodox Christians from a very early period, that he
was not originally a mere man, afterwards taken into the godhead, but
that he was born from the first the son of God, that is to say, of the
Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed previously from all time; that he was
miraculously conceived of a virgin mother; that he was crucified and
buried; that on the third day he arose from the dead; and that he is now
a living and distinct person in a divine and mystically-united
Trinity. I propose to show in the subsequent chapters how far all
these conceptions were already familiar throughout the world in which
Christianity {227}was promulgated, and to how large an extent the new
religion owed its rapid success to the fact that it was but a _résumé_
or idealised embodiment of all the chief conceptions already common to
the main cults of Mediterranean civilisation. At the moment when
the empire was cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to
cosmopolitanise religion, by taking into itself whatever was central,
common, and universal in the worship of the peoples among whom it
originated.

We will begin with the question of the incarnation, which lies at the
very root of the Christian concept.

I have said already that in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, “The God was
the Dead King, the King was the Living God.” This is true, literally
and absolutely. Since the early kings are gods, the present kings, their
descendants, are naturally also gods by descent; their blood is divine;
they differ in nature as well as in position from mere common mortals.
While they live, they are gods on earth; when they die, they pass over
to the community of the gods their ancestors, and share with them a
happy and regal immortality. We have seen how this essential divinity
of the Pharaoh is a prime article in the religious faith of the Egyptian
Pyramid-builders. And though in later days, when a Greek dynasty, not
of the old divine native blood, bore sway in Egypt, this belief in the
divinity of the king grew fainter, yet to the very last the Ptolemies
and the Cleopatras bear the title of god or goddess, and carry in
their hands the sacred _tau_ or _crux ansata_, the symbol and mark of
essential divinity.

The inference made in Egypt that the children of gods must be themselves
divine was also made in most other countries, especially in those where
similar great despotisms established themselves at an early grade of
culture. Thus in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were the children of
the Sun; and when they died, it was said that their father, the Sun,
had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings were likewise gods, with full
control of the course of nature; {228}they swore at their accession to
make the sun shine, the rain fall, the rivers flow, and the earth bring
forth her fruit in due season. How they could promise all this seems
at first a little difficult for us to conceive; but it will become more
comprehensible at a later stage of our investigation, when we come to
consider the gods of cultivation: even at present, if we remember that
kings are children of the Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves, and
sacred wells are closely connected with the tombs of their ancestors, we
can guess at the beginning of such a mental connexion. Thus the Chinese
emperor is the Son of Heaven; he is held responsible to his people for
the occurrence of drought or other serious derangements of nature.
The Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says Mr. Frazer, to whom I am
greatly indebted for most of the succeeding facts, styled themselves
brothers of the sun and moon, and were worshipped as deities. Numberless
other cases are cited by Mr. Frazer, who was the first to point out the
full importance of this widespread belief in man-gods. I shall follow
him largely in the subsequent discussion of this cardinal subject,
though I shall often give to the facts an interpretation slightly
different from that which he would allow to be the correct one. For to
me, godhead springs always from the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr.
Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.

Besides these human gods who are gods by descent from deified ancestors,
there is another class of gods who are gods by inspiration or
indwelling of the divine spirit, that is to say of some ghost or god
who temporarily or permanently inhabits the body of a living man. The
germ-idea of such divine possession we may see in the facts of epilepsy,
catalepsy, dream, and madness. In all such cases of abnormal nervous
condition it seems to primitive man, as it still seemed to the Jews of
the age of the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or seized upon by
some spirit, who bodily inhabits him. The spirit may throw {229}the man
down, or may speak through his mouth in strange unknown tongues; it may
exalt him so that he can perform strange feats of marvellous strength,
or may debase him to a position of grovelling abjectness. By fasting
and religious asceticism men and women can even artificially attain this
state, when the god speaks through them, as he spoke through the mouth
of the Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always one of the religious
exercises of god-possessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and ascetics
in general. Where races have learnt how to manufacture intoxicating
drinks, or to express narcotic juices from plants, they also universally
attribute the effects of such plants to the personal action of an
inspiring spirit--an idea so persistent even into civilised ages that
we habitually speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both these ways of
attaining the presence of an indwelling god are commonly practised among
savages and half-civilised people.

When we recollect how we saw already that ancestral spirits may descend
from time to time into the skulls that once were theirs, or into the
clay or wooden images that represent them, and there give oracles, we
shall not be surprised to find that they can thus enter at times into a
human body, and speak through its lips, for good or for evil. Indeed,
I have dwelt but little in this book on this migratory power and this
ubiquitousness of the spirits, because I have desired to fix attention
chiefly on that primary aspect of religion which is immediately and
directly concerned with Worship; but readers familiar with such works as
Dr. Tylor’s and Mr. Frazer’s will be well aware of the common power
which spirits possess of projecting themselves readily into every
part of nature. The faculty of possession or of divination is but one
particular example of this well-known attribute. The mysteries and
oracles of all creeds are full of such phenomena.

Certain persons, again, are born from the womb as incarnations of a
god or an ancestral spirit. “Incarnate gods,” {230}says Mr. Frazer,
“are common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary or
permanent.... When the divine spirit has taken up its abode in a human
body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate his character by
working miracles.” Mr. Frazer gives several excellent examples of both
these classes. I extract a few almost verbatim.

Certain persons are possessed from time to time by a spirit or deity;
while possession lasts, their own personality lies in abeyance, and the
presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shakings and quiverings
of the body. In this abnormal state, the man’s utterances are accepted
as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through
him. In Mangaia, for instance, the priests in whom the gods took up
their abode were called god-boxes or gods. Before giving oracles, they
drank an intoxicating liquor, and the words they spoke in their frenzy
were then regarded as divine. In other cases, the inspired person
produces the desired condition of intoxication by drinking the fresh
blood of a victim, human or animal, which, as we shall see hereafter, is
probably itself an avatar of the inspiring god. In the temple of Apollo
Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a
woman, who had to observe the rule of chastity, tasted its blood, and
then gave oracles. At Ægira in Achæa the priestess of the Earth
drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into her cave to
prophesy. (Note in passing that caves, the places of antique burial, are
also the usual places for prophetic inspiration.) In southern India,
the so-called devil-dancer drinks the blood of a goat, and then becomes
seized with the divine afflatus. He is worshipped as a deity, and
bystanders ask him questions requiring superhuman knowledge to answer.
Mr. Frazer extends this list of oracular practices by many other
striking instances, for which I would refer the reader to the original
volume.

Of permanent living human gods, inspired by the constant {231}indwelling
of a deity, Mr. Frazer also gives several apt examples. In the Marquesas
Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime.
They were supposed to wield supernatural control over the elements. They
could give or withhold rain and good harvests. Human sacrifices were
offered them to appease their wrath. “A missionary has described one
of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a very old
man who lived in a large house within an enclosure.” (A temple in its
_temenos_.) “In the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the
house and on the trees around it were hung human skeletons, head down.
No one entered the enclosure, except the persons dedicated to the
service of the god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed
might ordinary people penetrate into the precinct. This human god
received more sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on
a sort of scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human
victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he inspired
was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offerings were sent
to him from every side.” Indeed, throughout the South Sea Islands,
each island had usually a man who embodied its deity. Such men were
called gods, and were regarded as of divine substance. The man-god was
sometimes a king; oftener he was a priest or a subordinate chief. The
gods of Samoa were sometimes permanently incarnate in men, who gave
oracles, received offerings (occasionally of human flesh), healed the
sick, answered prayer, and generally performed all divine functions.
Of the Fijians it is said: “There appears to be no certain line of
demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor between gods and
living men, for many of the priests and old chiefs are considered as
sacred persons, and not a few of them will also claim to themselves
the right of divinity. ‘I am a god,’ Tuikilakila would say; and he
believed it too.” There is said to be a sect in Orissa who worship the
Queen of England as their chief divinity; {232}and another sect in the
Punjab worshipped during his lifetime the great General Nicholson.

Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine by birth, as descendants of gods;
but sometimes divinity is conferred upon them with the kingship, as
indeed was the case even in the typical instance of Egypt. Tanatoa, king
of Raiatea, was deified by a certain ceremony performed at the chief
temple. He was made a god before the gods his ancestors, as Celtic
chiefs received the chieftainship standing on the sacred stone of their
fathers. As one of the deities of his subjects, therefore, the king was
worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and honoured with sacrifices. The
king of Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred girdle of red
and yellow feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly
station, but also identified him with the heavenly gods. Compare the
way in which the gods of Egypt make the king one of themselves, as
represented in the bas-reliefs, by the presentation of the divine _tau_.
In the Pelew Islands, a god may incarnate himself in a common person;
this lucky man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank, and rules as god
and king over the community. Not unsimilar is the mode of selection of
a Grand Lama. In later stages, the king ceases to be quite a god, but
retains the anointment, the consecration on a holy stone, and the claim
to “divine right”; he also shows some last traces of deity in
his divine power to heal diseases, which fades away at last into the
practice of “touching for king’s evil.” On all these questions,
again, Mr. Frazer’s great work is a perfect thesaurus of apposite
instances. I abstain from quoting his whole two volumes.

But did ideas of this character still survive in the Mediterranean world
of the first and second centuries, where Christianity was evolved? Most
undoubtedly they did. In Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had
only just become extinct. In Rome itself, the divine Cæsar had recently
undergone official apotheosis; the divine Augustus had ruled over the
empire as the adopted son of the new-made {233}god; and altars rose
in provincial cities to the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or
Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity were claimed indirectly for the
god Julius; he was divine by apotheosis, but he was also descended
from the goddess Venus. So the double claim was made for the central
personage of the Christian faith: he was the son of God--that is to
say of Jahweh; but he was also of kingly Jewish origin, a descendant of
David, and in the genealogies fabricated for him in the Gospels extreme
importance is attached to this pretended royal ancestry. Furthermore,
how readily men of the Mediterranean civilisation could then identify
living persons with gods we see in the familiar episode of Paul and
Barnabas at Lystra. Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordinary
feature of religion and daily life as then understood. And to oriental
ideas in particular, the conception was certainly no novelty. “Even
an infant king,” say the laws of Manu, which go to the root of so much
eastern thinking, “must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere
mortal: for he is a great deity in human form.”

To most modern thinkers, however, it would seem at first sight like a
grave difficulty in the way of accepting the deity of an ordinary
man that he should have suffered a violent death at the hands of his
enemies. Yet this fact, instead of standing in the way of acceptance of
Christ’s divinity, is really almost a guarantee and proof of it. For,
strange as it sounds to us, the human gods were frequently or almost
habitually put to death by their votaries. The secret of this curious
ritual and persistent custom has been ingeniously deciphered for us
by Mr. Frazer, whose book is almost entirely devoted to these two main
questions, “_Why do men kill their gods?_” and “_Why do they eat
and drink their flesh and blood under the form of bread and wine?_”
We must go over some of the same ground here in rapid summary, with
additional corollaries; and we must also bring Mr. Frazer’s curious
facts into line with our general principles of the origin of godhead.

Meanwhile, {234}it may be well to add here two similar instances of
almost contemporary apotheoses. The dictator Julius was killed by a band
of reactionary conspirators, and yet was immediately raised to divine
honours. A little later, Antinous, the favourite of the emperor Hadrian,
devoted himself to death in order to avert misfortune from his master;
he was at once honoured with temples and worship. The belief that it
is expedient that “one man should die for the people,” and that the
person who so dies is a god in human shape, formed, as we shall see,
a common component of many faiths, and especially of the faiths of the
eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, a little later, each Christian martyrdom
is followed as a matter of course by canonisation--that is to say, by
minor apotheosis. Mr. Frazer has traced the genesis of this group of
allied beliefs in the slaughter of the man-god in the most masterly
manner. They spring from a large number of converging ideas, some of
which can only come out in full as we proceed in later chapters to other
branches of our subject.

In all parts of the world, one of the commonest prerogatives and
functions of the human god is the care of the weather. As representative
of heaven, it is his business to see that rain falls in proper
quantities, and that the earth brings forth her increase in due season.
But, god though he is, he must needs be coerced if he does not attend to
this business properly. Thus, in West Africa, when prayers and offerings
presented to the king have failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him
with ropes, and take him to the grave of his deified forefathers, that
he may obtain from them the needful change in the weather. Here we see
in the fullest form the nature of the relation between dead gods and
living ones. The Son is the natural mediator between men and the Father.
Among the Antaymours of Madagascar, the king is responsible for bad
crops and all other misfortunes. The ancient Scythians, when food
was scarce, put their kings in bonds. {235}The Banjars in West Africa
ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. As long
as the climate is satisfactory, they load him with presents of grain and
cattle. But if long drought or rain does serious harm, they insult and
beat him till the weather changes. The Burgundians deposed their king if
he failed to make their crops grow to their satisfaction.

Further than that, certain tribes have even killed their kings in times
of scarcity. In the days of the Swedish king Domalde, a mighty famine
broke out, which lasted several years, and could not be stayed by human
or animal sacrifices. So, in a great popular assembly held at Upsala,
the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the
scarcity, and must be sacrificed for good seasons. Then they slew
him, and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Here we must
recollect that the divine king is himself a god, the descendant of gods,
and he is sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own forefathers.
We shall see hereafter how often similar episodes occur--how the god is
sacrificed, himself to himself; how the Son is sacrificed to the Father,
both being gods; and how the Father sacrifices his Son, to make a god
of him. To take another Scandinavian example from Mr. Frazer’s
collection: in the reign of King Olaf, there came a great dearth, and
the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was
sparing in sacrifices. So they mustered an army and marched against
him; then they surrounded his palace and burnt it, with him within it,
“giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.” Many points must
here be noted. Olaf himself was of divine stock, a descendant of Odin.
He is burnt as an offering to his father, much as the Carthaginians
burnt their sons, or the king of Moab his first-born, as sacrifices to
Melcarth and to Chemosh. The royal and divine person is here offered up
to his own fathers, just as on the cross of the founder of Christendom
the inscription ran, “Jesus of Nazareth, king of the Jews,” and just
as in Christian {236}theology God offers his Son as a sacrifice to his
own offended justice.

Other instances elsewhere point to the same analogies. In 1814, a
pestilence broke out among the reindeer of the Chukches (a Siberian
tribe); and the shamans declared that the beloved chief Koch must be
sacrificed to the angry gods (probably his ancestors); so the chief’s
own son stabbed him with a dagger. On the coral island of Niue in the
South Pacific there once reigned a line of kings; but they were also
“high-priests” (that is to say, divine representatives of divine
ancestors); and they were supposed to make the crops grow, for a reason
which will come out more fully in the sequel. In times of scarcity, the
people “grew angry with them and killed them,” or more probably,
as I would interpret the facts, sacrificed them for crops to their own
deified ancestors. So in time there were no kings left, and the monarchy
ceased altogether on the island.

The divine kings being thus responsible for rain and wind, and for
the growth of crops, whose close dependence upon them we shall further
understand hereafter, it is clear that they are persons of the greatest
importance and value to the community. Moreover, in the ideas of early
men, their spirit is almost one with that of external nature, over which
they exert such extraordinary powers. A subtle sympathy seems to exist
between the king and the world outside. The sacred trees which embody
his ancestors; the crops, which, as we shall see hereafter, equally
embody them; the rain-clouds in which they dwell; the heaven they
inhabit;--all these, as it were, are parts of the divine body, and
therefore by implication part of the god-king’s, who is but the avatar
of his deified fathers. Hence, whatever affects the king, affects the
sky, the crops, the rain, the people. There is even reason to believe
that the man-god, representative of the ancestral spirit and tribal god,
is therefore the representative and embodiment of the tribe itself--the
soul of the nation.

_L’état, c’est moi_ {237}is no mere personal boast of Louis
Quatorze; it is the belated survival of an old and once very powerful
belief, shared in old times by kings and peoples. Whatever hurts the
king, hurts the people, and hurts by implication external nature.
Whatever preserves the king from danger, preserves and saves the world
and the nation.

Mr. Frazer has shown many strange results of these early beliefs--which
he traces, however, to the supposed primitive animism, and not (as
I have done) to the influence of the ghost-theory. Whichever
interpretation we accept, however, his facts at least are equally
valuable. He calls attention to the number of kingly taboos which are
all intended to prevent the human god from endangering or imperilling
his divine life, or from doing anything which might react hurtfully
upon nature and the welfare of his people. The man-god is guarded by the
strictest rules, and surrounded by precautions of the utmost complexity.
He may not set his sacred foot on the ground, because he is a son of
heaven; he may not eat or drink with his sacred mouth certain dangerous,
impure, or unholy foods; he may not have his sacred hair cut, or his
sacred nails pared; he must preserve intact his divine body, and every
part of it--the incarnation of the community,--lest evil come of his
imprudence or his folly.

The Mikado, for example, was and still is regarded as an incarnation of
the sun, the deity who rules the entire universe, gods and men included.
The greatest care must therefore be taken both _by_ him and _of_ him.
His whole life, down to its minutest details, must be so regulated that
no act of his may upset the established order of nature. Lest he should
touch the earth, he used to be carried wherever he went on men’s
shoulders. He could not expose his sacred person to the open air, nor
eat out of any but a perfectly new vessel. In every way his sanctity
and his health were jealously guarded, and he was treated like a person
{238}whose security was important to the whole course of nature.

Mr. Frazer quotes several similar examples, of which the most striking
is that of the high pontiff of the Zapotecs, an ancient people of
Southern Mexico. This spiritual lord, a true Pope or Lama, governed
Yopaa, one of the chief cities of the kingdom, with absolute dominion.
He was looked upon as a god “whom earth was not worthy to hold or the
sun to shine upon.” He profaned his sanctity if he touched the common
ground with his holy foot. The officers who bore his palanquin on their
shoulders were chosen from the members of the highest families; he
hardly deigned to look on anything around him; those who met him
prostrated themselves humbly on the ground, lest death should overtake
them if they even saw his divine shadow. (Compare the apparition of
Jahweh to Moses.) A rule of continence was ordinarily imposed upon him;
but on certain days in the year which were high festivals, it was usual
for him to get ceremonially and sacramentally drunk. On such days,
we may be sure, the high gods peculiarly entered into him with the
intoxicating pulque, and the ancestral spirits reinforced his godhead.
While in this exalted state (“full of the god,” as a Greek or Roman
would have said) the divine pontiff received a visit from one of the
most beautiful of the virgins consecrated to the service of the gods. If
the child she bore him was a son, it succeeded in due time to the
throne of the Zapotecs. We have here again an instructive mixture of
the various ideas out of which such divine kingship and godship is
constructed.

It might seem at first sight a paradoxical corollary that people who
thus safeguard and protect their divine king, the embodiment of nature,
should also habitually and ceremonially kill him. Yet the apparent
paradox is, from the point of view of the early worshipper, both natural
and reasonable. We read of the Congo negroes that they have a supreme
pontiff whom they regard as a god upon earth, and {239}all-powerful
in heaven. But, “if he were to die a natural death, they thought the
world would perish, and the earth, which he alone sustained by his power
and merit, would immediately be annihilated.” This idea of a god as
the creator and supporter of all things, without whom nothing would be,
is of course a familiar component element of the most advanced theology.
But many nations which worship human gods carry out the notion to its
logical conclusion in the most rigorous manner. Since the god is a man,
it would obviously be quite wrong to let him grow old and weak; since
thereby the whole course of nature might be permanently enfeebled; rain
would but dribble; crops would grow thin; rivers would trickle away; and
the race he ruled would dwindle to nothing. Hence senility must never
overcome the sacred man-god; he must be killed in the fulness of
his strength and health (say, about his thirtieth year), so that the
indwelling spirit, yet young and fresh, may migrate unimpaired into the
body of some newer and abler representative. Mr. Frazer was the first, I
believe, to point out this curious result of primitive human reasoning,
and to illustrate it by numerous and conclusive instances.

I cannot transcribe here in full Mr. Frazer’s admirable argument, with
the examples which enforce it; but I must at least give so much of it
in brief as will suffice for comprehension of our succeeding exposition.
“No amount of care and precaution,” he says, “will prevent the
man-god from growing old and feeble, and at last dying. His worshippers
have to lay their account with this sad necessity and to meet it as best
they can. The danger is a formidable one; for if the course of nature is
dependent on the man-god’s life, what catastrophes may not be expected
from the gradual enfeeblement of his powers and their final extinction
in death? There is only one way of averting these dangers. The man-god
must be killed as soon as he shows symptoms that his powers are
beginning to fail, and his soul must be transferred to a {240}vigorous
successor before it has been seriously impaired by the threatened decay.
The advantages of thus putting the man-god to death instead of allowing
him to die of old age and disease are, to the savage, obvious enough.
For if the man-god dies what we call a natural death, it means,
according to the savage, that his soul has either voluntarily departed
from his body and refuses to return, or more commonly that it has been
extracted or at least detained in its wanderings by a demon or
sorcerer. In any of these cases the soul of the man-god is lost to
his worshippers; and with it their prosperity is gone and their very
existence endangered. Even if they could arrange to catch the soul of
the dying god as it left his lips or his nostrils and so transfer it
to a successor, this would not effect their purpose; for, thus dying of
disease, his soul would necessarily leave his body in the last stage
of weakness and exhaustion, and as such it would continue to drag out a
feeble existence in the body to which it might be transferred. Whereas
by killing him his worshippers could, in the first place, make sure
of catching his soul as it escaped and transferring it to a suitable
successor; and, in the second place, by killing him before his natural
force was abated, they would secure that the world should not fall
into decay with the decay of the man-god. Every purpose, therefore,
was answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god
and transferring his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous
successor.”

For this reason, when the pontiff of Congo grew old, and seemed likely
to die, the man who was destined to succeed him in the pontificate
entered his house with a rope or club, and strangled or felled him. The
Ethiopian kings of Meroe were worshipped as gods; but when the priests
thought fit, they sent a messenger to the king, ordering him to die,
and alleging an oracle of the gods (or earlier kings) as the reason of
their command. This command the kings always obeyed down to the reign
of Ergamenes, a contemporary of Ptolemy II. of Egypt. So, when {241}the
king of Unyoro in Central Africa falls ill, or begins to show signs of
approaching age, one of his own wives is compelled by custom to kill
him. The kings of Sofala were regarded by their people as gods who could
give rain or sunshine; but the slightest bodily blemish, such as the
loss of a tooth, was considered a sufficient reason for putting one of
these powerful man-gods to death; he must be whole and sound, lest all
nature pay for it. Many kings, human gods, divine priests, or sultans
are enumerated by Mr. Frazer, each of whom must be similarly perfect in
every limb and member. The same perfect manhood is still exacted of the
Christian Pope, who, however, is not put to death in case of extreme age
or feebleness. But there is reason to believe that the Grand Lama, the
divine Pope of the Tibetan Buddhists, is killed from time to time, so as
to keep him “ever fresh and ever young,” and to allow the inherent
deity within him to escape full-blooded into another embodiment.

In all these cases the divine king or priest is suffered by his people
to retain office, or rather to house the godhead, till by some outward
defect, or some visible warning of age or illness, he shows them that
he is no longer equal to the proper performance of his divine functions.
Until such symptoms appear, he is not put to death. Some peoples,
however, as Mr. Frazer shows, have not thought it safe to wait for even
the slightest symptom of decay before killing the human god or king;
they have destroyed him in the plenitude of his life and vigour. In such
cases, the people fix a term beyond which the king may not reign, and at
the close of which he must die, the term being short enough to prevent
the probability of degeneration meanwhile. In some parts of Southern
India, for example, the term was fixed at twelve years; at the
expiration of that time, the king had to cut himself to pieces visibly,
before the great local idol, of which he was in all probability the
human equivalent. “Whoever desires to reign other twelve years,”
says an early observer, “and to undertake {242}this martyrdom for the
sake of the idol, has to be present looking on at this; and from that
place they raise him up as king.”

The king of Calicut, on the Malabar coast, had also to cut his throat
in public after a twelve years’ reign. But towards the end of the
seventeenth century, the rule was so far relaxed that the king was
allowed to retain the throne, and probably the godship, if he could
protect himself against all comers. As long as he was strong enough to
guard his position, it was held that he was strong enough to retain
the divine power unharmed. The King of the Wood at Aricia held his
priesthood and ghostly kingship on the same condition; as long as he
could hold his own against all comers, he might continue to be priest;
but any runaway slave had the right of attacking the king; and if he
could kill him, he became the King of the Wood till some other in turn
slew him. This curious instance has been amply and learnedly discussed
by Mr. Frazer, and forms the central subject of his admirable treatise.

More often still, however, the divine priesthood, kingship, or godhead
was held for one year alone, for a reason which we shall more fully
comprehend after we have considered the annual gods of cultivation. The
most interesting example, and the most cognate to our present enquiry,
is that of the Babylonian custom cited by Berosus. During the five days
of the festival called the Sacæa, a prisoner condemned to death was
dressed in the king’s robes, seated on the king’s throne, allowed
to eat, drink, and order whatever he chose, and even permitted to
sleep with the king’s concubines. But at the end of five days, he was
stripped of his royal insignia, scourged, and crucified. I need hardly
point out the crucial importance of this singular instance, occurring in
a country within the Semitic circle. Mr. Frazer rightly concludes that
the condemned man was meant to die in the king’s stead; was himself,
in point of fact, a king substitute; and was therefore invested for the
time being with the fullest {243}prerogatives of royalty. Doubtless
we have here to deal with a modification of an older and sterner rule,
which compelled the king himself to be slain annually. “When the time
drew near for the king to be put to death,” says Mr. Frazer, “he
abdicated for a few days, during which a temporary king reigned and
suffered in his stead. At first the temporary king may have been an
innocent person, possibly a member of the king’s own family; but with
the growth of civilisation, the sacrifice of an innocent person would be
revolting to the public sentiment, and accordingly a condemned criminal
would be invested with the brief and fatal sovereignty.... We shall find
other examples of a criminal representing a dying god. For we must not
forget that the king is slain in his character of a god, his death
and resurrection, as the only means of perpetuating the divine life
unimpaired, being deemed necessary for the salvation of his people
and the world.” I need not point out the importance of such ideas
as assisting in the formation of a groundwork for the doctrines of
Christianity.

Other evidence on this point, of a more indirect nature, has been
collected by Mr. Frazer; and still more will come out in subsequent
chapters. For the present I will only add that the annual character
of some such sacrifices seems to be derived from the analogy of the
annually-slain gods of cultivation, whose origin and meaning we have yet
to examine. These gods, being intimately connected with each year’s
crop, especially with crops of cereals, pulses, and other annual grains,
were naturally put to death at the beginning of each agricultural year,
and as a rule about the period of the spring equinox,--say, at Easter.
Starting from that analogy, as I believe, many races thought it fit that
the other divine person, the man-god king, should also be put to death
annually, often about the same period. And I will even venture to
suggest the possibility that the institution of annual consuls,
archons, etc., may have something to do with such annual sacrifices.
{244}Certainly the legend of Codrus at Athens and of the Regifugium at
Rome seem to point to an ancient king-slaying custom.

At any rate, it is now certain that the putting to death of a public
man-god was a common incident of many religions. And it is also clear
that in many cases travellers and other observers have made serious
mistakes by not understanding the inner nature of such god-slaying
practices. For instance it is now pretty certain that Captain Cook was
killed by the people of Tahiti just _because_ he was a god, perhaps
in order to keep his spirit among them. It is likewise clear that many
rites, commonly interpreted as human sacrifices to a god, are really
god-slayings; often the god in one of his human avatars seems to be
offered to himself, in his more permanent embodiment as an idol or stone
image. This idea of sacrificing a god, himself to himself, is one which
will frequently meet us hereafter; and I need hardly point out that, as
“_the sacrifice of the mass_,” it has even enshrined itself in the
central sanctuary of the Christian religion.

Christianity apparently took its rise among a group of irregular
northern Israelites, the Galilæans, separated from the mass of their
coreligionists, the Jews, by the intervention of a heretical and
doubtfully Israelitish wedge, the Samaritans. The earliest believers
in Jesus were thus intermediate between Jews and Syrians. According to
their own tradition, they were first described by the name of Christians
at Antioch; and they appear on many grounds to have attracted attention
first in Syria in general, and particularly at Damascus. We may be sure,
therefore, that their tenets from the first would contain many elements
more or less distinctly Syrian, and especially such elements as formed
ideas held in common by almost all the surrounding peoples. As a matter
of fact. Christianity, as we shall see hereafter, may be regarded
historically as a magma of the most fundamental religious ideas of the
Mediterranean basin, and especially of the eastern {245}Mediterranean,
grafted on to the Jewish cult and the Jewish scriptures, and clustering
round the personality of the man-god, Jesus. It is interesting therefore
to note that in Syria and the north Semitic area the principal cult
was the cult of just such a slain man-god, Adonis,--originally, as Mr.
Frazer shows, an annually slain man-god, afterwards put to death and
bewailed in effigy, after a fashion of which we shall see not a
few examples in the sequel, and of which the Mass itself is but an
etherealised survival. Similarly in Phrygia, where Christianity early
made a considerable impression, the most devoutly worshipped among the
gods was Attis, who, as Professor Ramsay suggests, was almost certainly
embodied in early times as an annually slain man-god, and whose cult was
always carried on by means of a divine king-priest, bearing himself the
name of Attis. Though in later days the priest did not actually immolate
himself every year, yet on the yearly feast of the god, at the spring
equinox (corresponding to the Christian Easter) he drew blood from
his own arms, as a substitute no doubt for the earlier practice of
self-slaughter. And I may add in this connexion (to anticipate once
more) that in all such godslaughtering rites, immense importance was
always attached to the blood of the man-god; just as in Christianity
“_the blood of Christ_” remains to the end of most saving efficacy.
Both Adonis and Attis were conceived as young men in the prime of life,
like the victims chosen for other god-slaying rites.

I have dealt in this chapter only in very brief summary with this vast
and interesting question of human deities. Mr. Frazer has devoted to it
two large and fascinating volumes. His work is filled with endless facts
as to such man-gods themselves, the mode of their vicarious or expiatory
slaughter on behalf of the community, the gentler substitution of
condemned criminals for the divine kings in more civilised countries,
the occasional mitigation whereby the divine king merely draws his own
blood instead {246}of killing himself, or where an effigy is made to
take the place of the actual victim, and so forth _ad infinitum_. All
these valuable suggestions and ideas I could not reproduce here without
transcribing in full many pages of _The Golden Bough_, where Mr.
Frazer has marshalled the entire evidence on the point with surprising
effectiveness. I will content myself therefore by merely referring
readers to that most learned yet interesting and amusing book. I will
only say in conclusion that what most concerns us here is Mr. Frazer’s
ample and convincing proof of the large part played by such slain (and
rerisen) man-gods in the religion of those self-same east-Mediterranean
countries where Christianity was first evolved as a natural product
of the popular imagination. The death and resurrection of the
humanly-embodied god form indeed the keynote of the greatest and most
sacred religions of western Asia and northeastern Africa.




CHAPTER XII.--THE MANUFACTURE OF GODS.

|Normally {247}and originally, I believe, all gods grow spontaneously.
They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified ancestors or chieftains.
The household gods are the dead of the family; the greater gods are the
dead chiefs of the state or town or village. But upon this earlier and
spontaneous crop of gods there supervenes later an artificial crop,
deliberately manufactured. The importance of this later artificial class
is so great, especially in connexion with the gods of agriculture, and
with the habit of eating the god’s body as corn and drinking his blood
as wine, that it becomes necessary for us here to examine their nature
in due order. We shall find that some knowledge of them is needed
preliminary to the comprehension of the Christian system.

We saw that in West Africa the belief in another world is so
matter-of-fact and material that a chief who wishes to communicate with
his dead father kills a slave as a messenger, after first impressing
upon him the nature of the message he will have to deliver. If he
forgets anything, says Mr. Duff Macdonald, he kills a second and sends
him after “as a postscript.” A Khond desired to be avenged upon an
enemy; so he cut off the head of his mother, who cheerfully suggested
this domestic arrangement, in order that her ghost might haunt and
terrify the offender. Similar plenitude of belief in the actuality and
nearness of the Other World makes attendants, wives, and even friends of
a dead man, in many countries, volunteer to kill themselves {248}at his
funeral, in order that they may accompany their lord and master to the
nether realms. All these examples combine to show us two things: first,
that the other life is very real and close to the people who behave so;
and second, that no great unwillingness habitually exists to migration
from this life to the next, if occasion demands it.

Starting with such ideas, it is not surprising that many races should
have deliberately made for themselves gods by killing a man, and
especially a man of divine or kingly blood, the embodiment of a god, in
order that his spirit might perform some specific divine function. Nor
is it even remarkable that the victim selected for such a purpose should
voluntarily submit to death, often preceded by violent torture, so as
to attain in the end to a position of trust and importance as a tutelary
deity. We have only to remember the ease with which Mahommedan fanatics
will face death, expecting to enjoy the pleasures of Paradise, or the
fervour with which Christian believers used to embrace the crown of
martyrdom, in order to convince ourselves of the reality and profundity
of such a sentiment. The further back we go in time or culture,
the stronger does the sentiment in question become; _it is only the
civilised and sceptical thinker who hesitates to exchange the solid
comforts of this world for the shadowy and uncertain delights of the
next_.

The existence of such artificially-manufactured gods has been more or
less recognised for some time past, and attention has been called to one
or other class of them by Mr. Baring Gould and Mr. J. G. Frazer; but
I believe the present work will be the first in which their profound
importance and their place in the genesis of the higher religions has
been fully pointed out in systematic detail.

The best known instances of such deliberate godmaking are those which
refer to the foundation of cities, city walls, and houses. In such
cases, a human victim is often sacrificed in order that his blood may be
used as cement, {249}and his soul be built in to the very stones of the
fabric. Thereafter he becomes the tutelary deity or “fortune” of the
house or city. In many cases, the victim offers himself voluntarily for
the purpose; frequently he is of kingly or divine ancestry. As a sheep
before her shearers is dumb, so he opens not his mouth. In Polynesia,
where we usually stand nearest to the very core of religion, Ellis heard
that the central pillar of the temple at Mæva was planted upon the body
of a human victim. Among the Dyaks of Borneo, a slave girl was crushed
to death under the first post of a house. In October 1881, the king of
Ashanti put fifty girls to death that their blood might be mixed with
the “swish” or mud used in the repair of the royal buildings. Even
in Japan, a couple of centuries since, when a great wall was to be
built, “some wretched slave would offer himself as a foundation.”
Observe in this instance the important fact that the immolation was
purely voluntary. Mr. Tylor, it is true, treats most of these cases as
though the victim were intended to appease the earth-demons, which is
the natural interpretation for the elder school of thinkers to put upon
such ceremonies; but those who have read Mr. Frazer and Mr. Baring Gould
will know that the offering is really a piece of deliberate god-making.
Many of the original witnesses, indeed, correctly report this intention
on the part of the perpetrators; thus Mason was told by an eyewitness
that at the building of the new city of Tavoy in Tennasserim “a
criminal was put in each post-hole to become a protecting demon” or
rather deity. So in Siam, when a new city gate was being erected, says
Mr. Speth, officers seized the first four or eight people who passed,
and buried them under it “as guardian angels.” And in Roumania a
_stahic_ is defined as “the ghost of a person who has been immured
in the walls of a building in order to make it more solid.” The Irish
Banshee is doubtless of similar origin.

Other curious examples are reported from Africa. In Galam, {250}a boy
and girl used to be buried alive before the great gate of a city,
to make it impregnable; and I gather here that the sacrifice was
periodically renewed, as we shall see it to have been in many other
cases. In Great Bassam and Yarriba, similar sacrifices were usual at the
foundation of a house or village. Clearly the idea in these cases was to
supply the site with a tutelary deity, a god whose existence was bound
up with the place thus consecrated to him. He and the town henceforth
were one; he was its soul, and it was his body. Human victims are
said to have been buried “for spirit-watchers” under the gates of
Mandelay. So too, according to legend, here a tolerably safe guide, a
queen was drowned in a Burmese reservoir, to make the dyke safe; while
the choice for such a purpose of a royal victim shows clearly the
desirability of divine blood being present in the body of the future
deity. When Rajah Sala Byne was building the fort of Sialkot in
the Punjaub, the foundation gave way so often that he consulted a
soothsayer. The soothsayer advised that the blood of an only son should
be shed on the spot; and the only son of a widow was accordingly killed
there. I may add that the blood of “_an only-begotten son_” has
always been held to possess peculiar efficacy.

In Europe itself, not a few traces survive of such foundation-gods, or
spirits of towns, town-walls, and houses. The Piets are said to have
bathed their foundation-stones in human blood, especially in building
their forts and castles. St. Columba himself, though nominally a
Christian, did not scruple thus to secure the safety of his monastery.
Columbkille said to his people, “‘It would be well for us that our
roots should pass into the earth here.’ And he said to them, ‘It is
permitted to you that some one of you go under the earth to consecrate
it.’” St. Oran volunteered to accept the task, and was ever after
honoured as the patron saint of the monastery. Here again it may be
noted that the offering was voluntary. As late as 1463, when the broken
dam of the Nogat had to be repaired, {251}the peasants, being advised
to throw in a living man, are said to have made a beggar drunk (in which
state he would of course be “full of the god”) and utilised him for
the purpose. In 1885, on the restoration of Hols-worthy church in Devon,
a skeleton with a mass of mortar plastered over the mouth was found
embedded in an angle of the building. To make the castle of Liebenstein
fast and impregnable, a child was bought for hard money of its mother,
and walled into the building. Again, when the church at Blex in
Oldenburg was being built, the authorities of the village crossed the
Weser, “bought a child from a poor mother at Bremerleke, and built
it alive into the foundations.” We shall see hereafter that “to
be brought with a price” is a variant, as it were, on the voluntary
offering; great stress is often laid when a victim is offered on this
particular fact, which is held to absolve the perpetrators from
the crime of god-murder. So, we shall see in the sequel, the divine
animal-victim, which is the god offered to himself, his animal
embodiment to his image or altar, must always consent to its own
sacrifice; if it refuse or show the slightest disinclination, it is no
good victim. Legend says that the child in the case of the Liebenstein
offering was beguiled with a cake, probably so as to make it a
consenting party, and was slowly walled up before the eyes of the
mother. All these details are full of incidental instructiveness and
importance. As late as 1865, according to Mr. Speth, some Christian
labourers, working at a-block-house at Duga, near Scutari, found two
young Christian children in the hands of Mahommedan Arnauts, who were
trying to bury them alive under the block-house.

It is about city walls, however, that we oftenest read such legendary
stories. Thus the wall of Copenhagen sank as fast as it was built; so
they took an innocent little girl, and set her at a table with toys and
eatables. Then, while she played and eat, twelve master masons closed
a vault over her. With clanging music, to drown the child’s cries,
{252}the wall was raised, and stood fast ever after. In Italy, once
more, the bridge of Arta fell in, time after time, till they walled in
the master builder’s wife; the last point being a significant detail,
whose meaning will come out still more clearly in the sequel. At Scutari
in Servia, once more, the fortress could only be satisfactorily built
after a human victim was walled into it; so the three brothers who
wrought at it decided to offer up the first of their wives who came to
the place to bring them food. (Compare the case of Jephtha’s daughter,
where the first living thing met by chance is to be sacrificed to
Jahweh.) So, too, in Welsh legend, Vortigern could not finish his tower
till the foundation-stone was wetted with “_the blood of a child born
of a mother without a father”--this episode of the virgin-born infant
being a common element in the generation of man-gods_, as Mr. Sidney
Hartland has abundantly proved for us.

In one case cited above, we saw a mitigation of the primitive custom,
in that a criminal was substituted for a person of royal blood or divine
origin--a form of substitution of which Mr. Frazer has supplied abundant
examples in other connexions. Still further mitigations are those
of building-in a person who has committed sacrilege or broken some
religious vow of chastity. In the museum at Algiers is a plaster cast
of the mould left by the body of one Geronimo, a Moorish Christian (and
therefore a recusant of Islam), who was built into a block of concrete
in the angle of the fort in the sixteenth century. Faithless nuns were
so immured in Europe during the middle ages; and Mr. Rider Haggard’s
statement that he saw in the museum at Mexico bodies similarly immured
by the Inquisition has roused so much Catholic wrath and denial that one
can hardly have any hesitation in accepting its substantial accuracy.
But in other cases, the substitution has gone further still; instead of
criminals, recusants, or heretics, we get an animal victim in place of
the human one. Mr. St. John saw a chicken sacrificed for a slave girl
{253}at a building among the Dyaks of Borneo. A lamb was walled-in
under the altar of a church in Denmark, to make it stand fast; or the
churchyard was hanselled by burying first a live horse, an obvious
parallel to the case of St Oran. When the parish church of Chumleigh in
Devonshire was taken down a few years ago, in a wall of the fifteenth
century was found a carved figure of Christ, crucified to a vine--a form
of substitution to which we shall find several equivalents later. In
modern Greece, says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe many of these instances, a
relic of the idea survives in the belief that the first passer-by after
a foundation-stone is laid will die within the year; so the masons
compromise the matter by killing a cock or a black lamb on the
foundation-stone. This animal then becomes the spirit of the building.

We shall see reason to suspect, as we proceed, that every slaughtered
victim in every rite was at first a divine-human being; and that animal
victims are always substitutes, though supposed to be equally divine
with the man-god they personate. I will ask the reader to look out for
such cases as we proceed, and also to notice, even when I do not
call attention to them, the destination of the oracular head, and the
frequent accompaniment of “clanging music.”

Elsewhere we find other customs which help to explain these curious
survivals. The shadow is often identified with the soul; and in
Roumania, when a new building is to be erected, the masons endeavour
to catch the shadow of a passing stranger, and then lay the
foundation-stone upon it. Or the stranger is enticed by stealth to the
stone, when the mason secretly measures his body or his shadow, and
buries the measure thus taken under the foundation. Here we have a
survival of the idea that the victim must at least be not unwilling. It
is believed that the person thus measured will languish and die within
forty days; and we may be sure that originally the belief ran that
his soul became the god or guardian spirit of the edifice. {254}If the
Bulgarians cannot get a human shadow to wall in, they content themselves
with the shadow of the first animal that passes by. Here again we get
that form of divine chance in the pointing out of a victim which is seen
in the case of Jephtha’s daughter. Still milder substitutions occur in
the empty coffin walled into a church in Germany, or the rude images of
babies in swaddling-clothes similarly immured in Holland. The last trace
of the custom is found in England in the modern practice of putting
coins and newspapers under the foundation-stone. Here it would seem
as if the victim were regarded as a sacrifice to the Earth (a late and
derivative idea), and the coins were a money payment in lieu of the
human or animal offering. I owe many of the cases here instanced to
the careful research of my friend Mr. Clodd. But since this chapter was
written, all other treatises on the subject have been superseded by Mr.
Speth’s exhaustive and scholarly pamphlet on “Builder’s Rites
and Ceremonies,” a few examples from which I have intercalated in my
argument.

Other implications must be briefly treated. The best ghost or god for
this purpose seems to be a divine or kingly person; and in stages when
the meaning of the practice is still quite clear to the builders, the
dearly-be-loved son or wife of the king is often selected for the honour
of tutelary godship. Later this notion passes into the sacrifice of the
child or wife of the master mason; many legends or traditions contain
this more recent element. In Vortigern’s case, however, the child is
clearly a divine being, as we shall see to be true a little later on in
certain Semitic instances. To the last, the connexion of children with
such sacrifices is most marked; thus when in 1813 the ice on the Elbe
broke down one of the dams, an old peasant sneered at the efforts of the
Government engineer, saying to him, “You will never get the dyke to
hold unless you first sink an innocent child under the foundations.”
Here the very epithet “innocent” in itself reveals some last
{255}echo of godship. So too, in 1843, when a new bridge was to be built
at Halle in Germany, the people told the architects that the pier would
not stand unless a living child was immured under the foundations.
Schrader says that when the great railway bridge over the Ganges was
begun, every mother in Bengal trembled for her infant. The Slavonic
chiefs who founded Detinez sent out men to catch the first boy
they met and bury him in the foundation. Here once more we have the
sacred-chance victim. Briefly I would say there seems to be a preference
in all such cases for children, and especially for girls; of kingly
stock, if possible, but at least a near relation of the master builder.

Mr. Speth points out that horses’ heads were frequently fastened on
churches or other buildings, and suggests that they belong to animal
foundation-victims. This use of the skull is in strict accordance with
its usual oracular destination.

Some notable historical or mythical tales of town and village gods,
deliberately manufactured, may now be considered. We read in First Kings
that when Hiel the Bethelite built Jericho, “he laid the foundation
thereof in Abiram his first-born, and set up the gates thereof in his
youngest Segub.” Here we see evidently a princely master builder,
sacrificing his own two sons as guardian gods of his new city. Abundant
traces exist of such deliberate production of a Fortune for a town. And
it is also probable that the original sacrifice was repeated annually,
as if to keep up the constant stream of divine life, somewhat after the
fashion of the human gods we had to consider in the last chapter. Dido
appears to have been the Fortune or foundation-goddess of Carthage; she
is represented in the legend as the foundress-queen, and is said to have
lept into her divine pyre from the walls of her palace. But the annual
human sacrifice appears to have been performed at the same place; for
“It can hardly be doubted,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that
{256}the spot at which legend placed the self-sacrifice of Dido to
her husband Sicharbas was that at which the later Carthaginian human
sacrifices were performed.” At Laodicea, again, an annual sacrifice
took place of a deer, in lieu of a maiden; and this sacrifice, we are
expressly told, was offered to the goddess of the city. Legend said
that the goddess was a maiden, who had been similarly sacrificed to
consecrate the foundation of the town, and was thenceforth worshipped as
its Fortune, like Dido at Carthage; “it was therefore the death of the
goddess herself,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “that was annually
renewed in the piacular rite.” (I do not admit the justice of the
epithet “piacular.”) Again, Malalas tells us that the 22d of May
was kept at Antioch as the anniversary of a maiden sacrificed at the
foundation of the city, and worshipped thereafter as the Tyche, or luck,
of the town. At Durna in Arabia an annual victim was similarly buried
under the stone which formed the altar.

In most of the legends, as they come down to us from civilised and
lettered antiquity, the true nature of this sanguinary foundation-rite
is overlaid and disguised by later rationalising guesses and I may
mention that Dr. Robertson Smith in particular habitually treats the
rationalising guesses as primitive, and the real old tradition of the
slaughtered virgin as a myth of explanation of “the later
Euhemeristic Syrians.” But after the examples we have already seen of
foundation-gods, I think I can hardly be doubted that this is to reverse
the true order; that a girl was really sacrificed for a tutelary deity
when a town was founded, and that the substitution of an animal victim
at the annual renewal was a later refinement. Mr. Speth quotes a case in
point of a popular tradition that a young girl had been built into the
castle of Nieder-Manderschied; and when the wall was opened in 1844, the
Euhemeristic workmen found a cavity enclosing a human skeleton. I would
suggest, again, that in the original legend of the foundation of Rome,
Romulus was represented as having built-in {257}his brother Remus as a
Fortune, or god, of the city, and that to this identification of Remus
with the city we ought to trace such phrases as _turba Remi_ for the
Roman people. The word _forum_ in its primitive signification means the
empty space left before a tomb--the _llan_ or _temenos_. Hence I would
suggest that the Roman Forum and other Latin _fora_ were really the
tomb-enclosures of the original foundation-victims. * So, too, the
English village green and “play-field” are probably the space
dedicated to the tribal or village god--a slain man-god; and they are
usually connected with the sacred stone and sacred tree. I trust this
point will become clearer as we proceed, and develop the whole theory of
the foundation god or goddess, the allied sacred stone and the tree or
trunk memorial.

     * In the case of Rome, the Forum would represent the grave
     of the later foundation-god of the compound Latin and Sabine
     city.

For, if I am right, the entire primitive ritual of the foundation of a
village consisted in killing or burying alive or building into the wall
a human victim, as town or village god, and raising a stone and planting
a tree close by to commemorate him. At these two monuments the village
rites were thereafter performed. The stone and tree are thus found
in their usual conjunction; both coexist in the Indian village to the
present day, as in the Siberian woodland or the Slavonic forest. Thus,
at Rome, we have not only the legend of the death of Remus, a prince of
the blood-royal of Alba Longa, intimately connected with the building
of the wall of Roma Quadrata, but we have also the sacred fig-tree of
Romulus in the Forum, which was regarded as the embodiment of the city
life of the combined Rome, so that when it showed signs of withering,
consternation spread through the city; and hard by we have the sacred
stone or Palladium, guarded by the sacred Vestal Virgins who kept the
city hearth-fire, and still more closely bound up with the fortune of
that secondary Rome which had its home in the Forum. Are not these three
the {258}triple form of the foundation-god of that united Capitoline
and Palatine Rome? And may not the sacred cornel on the Palatine, again,
have been similarly the holy foundation-tree of that older Roma Ouadrata
which is more particularly associated with the name of Romulus? Of
this tree Plutarch tells us that when it appeared to a passer-by to be
drooping, he set up a hue and cry, which was soon responded to by people
on all sides rushing up with buckets of water to pour upon it, as if
they were hastening to put out a fire. Clearly, here again we have to
deal with an embodied Fortune.

We do not often get all three of these Fortunes combined--the human
victim, the stone, and the tree, with the annual offering which renews
its sanctity. But we find traces so often of one or other of the trio
that we are justified, I think, in connecting them together as parts of
a whole, whereof here one element survives, and there another. “Among
all primitive communities,” says Mr. Gomme, “when a village was
first established, a stone was set up. To this stone, the headman of
the village made an offering once a year.” To the present day, London
preserves her foundation-god in the shape of London Stone, now enclosed
in a railing or iron grill just opposite Cannon Street Station.
Now, London Stone was for ages considered as the representative and
embodiment of the entire community. Proclamations and other important
state businesses were announced from its top; and the defendant in
trials in the Lord Mayor’s court was summoned to attend from London
Stone, as though the stone itself spoke to the wrong-doer with the
united voice of the assembled citizens. The first Lord Mayor, indeed,
was Henry de Lundonstone, no doubt, as Mr. Loftie suggests, the
hereditary keeper of this urban fetish,--in short, the representative
of the village headman. I have written at greater length on the
implications of this interesting relic in an article on London Stone
in _Longman’s Magazine_, to which I would refer the reader for further
information. {259}I will only add here the curious episode of Jack Cade,
who, when he forced his way, under his assumed name of Mortimer, into
the city in 1450, first of all proceeded to this sacred relic, the
embodiment of palladium of ancient London, and having struck it with his
sword exclaimed, “Now is Mortimer lord of this city.”

A similar sacred stone exists to this day at Bovey Tracey in Devon, of
which Ormerod tells us that the mayor of Bovey used to ride round it
on the first day of his tenure of office, and strike it with a
stick,--which further explains Jack Cade’s proceeding. According
to the Totnes Times of May 13, 1882, the young men of the town were
compelled on the same day to kiss the magic stone and pledge allegiance
in upholding the ancient rights and privileges of Bovey. (I owe these
details to Mr. Lawrence Gomme’s Village Community.) I do not think we
can dissociate from these two cases the other sacred stones of Britain,
such as the King’s Stone at Kingston in Surrey, where several of
the West Saxon kings were crowned; nor the Scone Stone in the
coronation-chair at Westminster Abbey; nor the Stone of Clackmannan, and
the sacred stones already mentioned in a previous chapter on which the
heads of clans or of Irish septs succeeded to the chieftainship of
their respective families. These may in part have been ancestral and
sepulchral monuments: but it is probable that they also partook in part
of this artificial and factitious sanctity. Certainly in some cases that
sanctity was renewed by an animal sacrifice.

With these fairly obvious instances I would also connect certain other
statements which seem to me to have been hitherto misinterpreted. Thus
Mesha, king of Moab, when he is close beleaguered, burns his son as a
holocaust on the wall of the city. Is not this an offering to protect
the wall by the deliberate manufacture of an additional deity? For
straightway the besiegers seem to feel they are overpowered, and the
siege is raised. Observe {260}here once more that it is the king’s own
dearly-be-loved son who is chosen as victim. Again, at Amathus, human
sacrifices were offered to Jupiter Hospes “before the gates”; and
this Jupiter Hospes, as Ovid calls him, is the Amathusian Herakles or
Malika, whose name, preserved for us by Hesychius, identifies him at
once as a local deity similar to the Tyrian Melcarth. Was not this
again, therefore, the Fortune of the city? At Tyre itself, the sepulchre
of Herakles Melcarth was shown, where he was said to have been cremated.
For among cremating peoples it was natural to burn, not slaughter, the
yearly god-victim. At Tarsus, once more, there was an annual feast, at
which a very fair pyre was erected, and the local Herakles or Baal
was burned on it in effigy. We cannot doubt, I think, that this was a
mitigation of an earlier human holocaust. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith
says of this instance: “This annual commemoration of the death of the
god in fire must have its origin in an older rite, in which the victim
was not a mere effigy, but a theanthropic sacrifice, i.e., an actual man
or sacred animal, whose life, according to the antique conception now
familiar to us, was an embodiment of the divine-human life.” This is
very near my own view on the subject.

From these instances we may proceed, I think, to a more curious set,
whose implications seem to me to have been even more grievously mistaken
by later interpreters. I mean the case of children of kings or of ruling
families, sacrificed in time of war or peril as additional or auxiliary
deities. Thus Philo of Byblos says: “It was an ancient custom in a
crisis of great danger that the ruler of a city or nation should give
his beloved son to die for the whole people, as a ransom offered to the
avenging demons; and the children thus offered were slain with mystic
rites. So Cronus, whom the Phoenicians call Israel, being king of
the land, and having an only-begotten son called Jeoud (for in the
Phoenicians tongue Jeoud signifies only-begotten), dressed him in royal
robes and sacrificed him upon an altar {261}in a time of war, when the
country was in great danger from the enemy.” I do not think Philo is
right in his gloss or guess about “the avenging demons,” but otherwise
his story is interesting evidence. It helps us more or less directly
to connect the common Phoenician and Hebrew child-sacrifices with this
deliberate manufacture of artificial gods. I do not doubt, indeed, that
the children were partly sacrificed to pre-existent and well-defined
great gods; but I believe also that the practice first arose as one of
deliberate manufacture of gods, and retained to the end many traces of
its origin.

We know that in times of national calamity the Phoenicians used thus
to sacrifice their dearest to Baal. Phoenician history, we know from
Porphyry, is full of such sacrifices. When the Carthaginians were
defeated and besieged by Agathocles, they ascribed their disasters to
the anger of the god; for whereas in former times they used to sacrifice
to him their own children, they had latterly fallen (as we shall see
hereafter the Khonds did) into the habit of buying children and rearing
them as victims. So two hundred young people of the noblest families
were picked out for sacrifice; and these were accompanied by no less
than three hundred more, who volunteered to die for the fatherland. They
were sacrificed by being placed, one by one, on the sloping hands of
the brazen image, from which they rolled into a pit of fire. So too at
Jerusalem, in moments of great danger, children were sacrificed to some
Molech, whether Jahweh or another, by being placed in the fiery arms
of the image at the Tophet. I will admit that in these last cases we
approach very near to the mere piacular human sacrifice; but we shall
see, when we come to deal with gods of cultivation, and the doctrine
of the atonement, that it is difficult to draw a line between the
two; while the fact that a dearly-beloved or only-begotten son is the
victim--especially the son of a king of divine blood--links such cases
on directly to the more obvious instances of deliberate god-making.
Some such voluntary sacrifice {262}seems to me to be commemorated in
the beautiful imagery of the 53d of Isaiah. But there the language is
distinctly piacular.

That annual human sacrifices originated in deliberate god-making of this
sort is an inference which has already been almost arrived at by more
orthodox thinkers. “Among the Semites,” says Dr. Robertson Smith,
“the most current view of annual piacula seems to have been that they
commemorate a divine tragedy--the death of some god or goddess. The
origin of such myths is easily explained from the nature of the ritual.
Originally, the death of the god was nothing else than the death of
the theanthropic victim; but when this ceased to be understood, it was
thought that the piacular sacrifice represented an historical tragedy in
which the god was killed.” But we shall see hereafter that the idea of
expiation in sacrifice is quite a late and derivative one; it seems more
probable that the victim was at first a human god, for whom later an
animal victim was substituted. In the Athenian Thar-gelia, the victims
were human to the very end, though undoubtedly they were thought of as
bearing vicariously the sins of the people. We shall come across similar
intrusions of the idea of expiation in later chapters; that idea belongs
to a stage of thought when men considered it necessary to explain away
by some ethical reference the sanguinary element of primitive ritual.
Thus in two Greek towns, as we learn from Pausanias--at Potniæ and
Patræ,--an annual sacrifice existed which had once been the sacrifice
of a human victim; but this was later explained as an expiation of an
ancient crime for which satisfaction had to be made from generation to
generation. Indeed, as a rule, later ages looked upon the murder of a
god as obviously criminal, and therefore regarded the slaughter of
the victim, who replaced the god, as being an atonement for his death,
instead of regarding it as a deliberate release of his divine spirit.

I have dwelt here mainly on that particular form of artificial
{263}god-making which is concerned with the foundation of houses,
villages, cities, walls, and fortresses, because this is the commonest
and most striking case, outside agriculture, and because it is specially
connected with the world-wide institution of the village or city god.
But other types occur in abundance; and to them a few lines must now be
devoted.

When a ship was launched, it was a common practice to provide her with
a guardian spirit or god by making her roll over the body of a human
victim. The Norwegian vikings used to “redden their rollers” with
human blood. That is to say, when a warship was launched, human victims
were lashed to the round logs over which the galley was run down to the
sea, so that the stem was sprinkled with their spurting blood. Thus the
victim was incorporated, as it were, in the very planks of the vessel.
Captain Cook found the South Sea Islanders similarly christening
their war-canoes with blood. In 1784, says Mr. William Simpson, at the
launching of one of the Bey of Tripoli’s cruisers, “a black slave
was led forward and fastened at the prow of the vessel to influence
a happy reception in the ocean.” And Mr. Speth quotes a newspaper
account of the sacrifice of a sheep when the first caique for
“Constantinople at Olympia” was launched in the Bosphorus. In many
other cases, it is noted that a victim, human or animal, is slaughtered
at the launching of a ship. Our own ceremony of breaking a bottle of
wine over the bows is the last relic of this barbarous practice. Here
as elsewhere red wine does duty for blood, in virtue of its colour. I do
not doubt that the images of gods in the bow of a ship were originally
idols in which the spirits thus liberated might dwell, and that it was
to them the sailors prayed for assistance in storm or peril. The god was
bound up in the very fabric of the vessel. The modern figure-head still
represents these gods; figure-heads essentially similar to the domestic
idols occur on New Zealand and Polynesian war-canoes.

The {264}canoes of the Solomon Islanders, for example, “often have
as figure-head a carved representation of the upper half of a man,
who holds in his hands a human head.” This head, known as the
“canoe-god” or “charm,” “represents the life taken when the
canoe was first used.” A canoe of importance “required a life for
its inauguration,” says Dr. Codrington.

Another curious instance is to be found in the customs and beliefs
regarding river gods. Rivers, I have suggested, are often divine because
they spring near or are connected with the grave of a hero. But often
their divinity has been deliberately given them, and is annually renewed
by a god-making sacrifice: just as at the Jewish Passover an annual
animal-victim was slain, and his blood smeared on the lintels, as a
renewal of the foundation sacrifice. The best instance I have found of
this curious custom is one cited by Mr. Gomme from Major Ellis. Along
the banks of the Prah in West Africa there are many deities, all bearing
the common name of Prah, and all regarded as spirits of the river. At
each town or considerable village along the stream, a sacrifice is held
on a day about the middle of October. The usual sacrifice was two human
adults, one male and one female. The inhabitants of each village believe
in a separate spirit of the Prah, who resides in some part of the river
close to their own hamlet. Everywhere along the river the priests of
these gods officiate in groups of three, two male and one female, an
arrangement which is peculiar to the river gods. Here, unless I mistake,
we have an obvious case of deliberate god-making.

This savage instance, and others like it, which space precludes me from
detailing, suggest the conclusion that many river gods are of artificial
origin. The Wohhanda in Esthonia received offerings of little children,
whom we may fairly compare with the children immured in buildings or
offered to the Molech. Many other rivers spontaneously {265}take their
victim annually; thus the Devonshire rhyme goes,=

````River of Dart, river of Dart,

````Every year thou claimest a heart.=

The Spey also takes one life each year, and so do several British rivers
elsewhere. Originally, no doubt, the victim was deliberately chosen and
slain annually; but later on, as a mitigation of the custom, the river
itself seems to have selected its own spirit by divine chance, such as
we have already seen in action more than once in the earlier cases. In
other words, if a passer-by happened to be accidentally drowned, he was
accepted in place of a deliberate victim. * Hence the danger of rescuing
a man from drowning; you interfere with the course of divine selection,
and you will pay for it yourself by being the next victim. “When, in
the Solomon Islands, a man accidentally falls into a river, and a shark
attacks him, he is not allowed to escape. If he succeeds in eluding the
shark, his fellow-tribesmen throw him back to his doom, believing him
to be marked out for sacrifice to the god of the river.” Similarly, in
Britain itself, the Lancashire Ribble has a water-spirit called Peg o’
Nell, represented by a stone image, now headless, which stands at the
spring where the river rises in the grounds of Waddon. (Compare the
Adonis tomb and grove by the spring at Aphaca.) This Peg o’ Nell was
originally, according to tradition, a girl of the neighbourhood; but
she was done to death by incantations, and now demands every seven
years that a life should be quenched in the waters of the Ribble. When
“Peg’s night” came round at the close of the septennate, unless a
bird, a cat, or a dog was drowned in the river, it was sure to claim
its human victim. This name of Peg is evidently a corruption of some old
local Celtic or pre-Celtic word {266}for a nymph or water-spirit; for
there is another Peg in the Tees, known as Peg Powler; and children used
there to be warned against playing on the banks of the stream, for fear
Peg should drag them into the water. Such traces of a child-sacrifice
are extremely significant.

     * Here is an analogue in foundation sacrifices. A house was
     being built at Hind Head while this book was in progress. A
     workman fell from a beam and was killed. The other workmen
     declared this was luck for the house and would ensure its
     stability.

I cannot do more than suggest here in passing that we have in these
stories and practices the most probable origin of the common myth which
accounts for the existence of river gods or river nymphs by some episode
of a youth or maiden drowned there. Arethusa is the example that occurs
to everyone. Grossly Euhemeristic as it may sound to say so, I yet
believe that such myths of metamorphosis have their origin in the
deliberate manufacture of a water-deity by immolation in the stream;
and that the annual renewal of such a sacrifice was due in part to the
desire to keep alive the memory of the gods--to be sure they were there,
to make them “fresh and fresh,” if one may venture to say so--and
in part to the analogy of those very important artificial gods of
agriculture whose origin and meaning we have still to consider. I would
add that the commonness of sea-horses and river-horses in the mythology
of the world doubtless owes its origin partly to the natural idea of
“white horses” on the waves, but partly also to the deliberate
sacrifice of horses to the sea or rivers, which this notion suggested,
and which tended to intensify it. It is as though the worshipper wished
to keep up a continuous supply of such divine and ghostly steeds. At
Rhodes, for example, four horses were annually cast into the sea; and
I need hardly refer to the conventional horses of Poseidon and Neptune.
The Ugly Burn in Ross-shire is the abode of a water-horse; in the
remains of the Roman temple at Lydney, the god Nodens, who represents
the Severn, is shown in the mosaic pavement as drawn in a chariot
by four horses; and the Yore, near Middleham, is still infested by a
water-horse who annually claims at least one human victim. Elsewhere
other animals take the place of the horse. The Ostyaks {267}sacrifice to
the river Ob by casting in a live reindeer when fish are scanty.

I do not deny that in many of these cases two distinct ideas--the
earlier idea of the victim as future god, and the later idea of the
victim as prey or sacrifice--have got inextricably mixed up; but I
do think enough’ has been said to suggest the probability that many
river-gods are artificially produced, and that this is in large part the
origin of nymphs and kelpies. Legend, indeed, almost always represents
them so; it is only our mythologists, with their blind hatred of
Euhemerism, who fail to perceive the obvious implication. And that even
the accidental victim was often envisaged as a river-god, after his
death, we see clearly from the Bohemian custom of going to pray on the
river bank where a man has been drowned, and casting into the river a
loaf of new bread and a pair of wax candles, obvious offerings to his
spirit.

Many other classes of manufactured gods seem to me to exist, whose
existence I must here pass over almost in silence. Such are the gods
produced at the beginning of a war, by human or other sacrifice; gods
intended to aid the warriors in their coming enterprise by being set
free from fleshly bonds for that very purpose. Thus, according to
Phylarchus, a human sacrifice was at one time customary in Greece at
the beginning of hostilities; and we know that as late as the age of
Themistocles three captives were thus offered up before the battle of
Salamis. The sacrifice of Iphigenia is a good legendary case in point,
because it is one of a virgin, a princess, the daughter of the leader,
and therefore a typical release of a divine or royal spirit. Here,
as usual, later philosophising represents the act as an expiation for
mortal guilt; but we may be sure the original story contained no such
ethical or piacular element. Among the early Hebrews, the summons to
a war seems similarly to have been made by sending round pieces of
the human victim; in later Hebrew usage, this rite declines into the
sacrifice of a burnt {268}offering; though we get an intermediate stage
when Saul sends round portions of a slaughtered ox, as the Levite in
Judges had sent round the severed limbs of his concubine to rouse the
Israelites. In Africa, a war is still opened with a solemn sacrifice,
human or otherwise; and Mr. H. O. Forbes gives a graphic account of the
similar ceremony which precedes an expedition in the island of Timor.

In conclusion, I will only say that a great many other obscure rites or
doubtful legends seem to me explicable by similar deliberate exercises
of god-making. How common such sacrifice was in agricultural relations
we shall see in the sequel; but I believe that even in other fields
of life future research will so explain many other customs. The
self-immolation of Codrus, of Sardanapa-lus, of P. Decius Mus, as of so
many other kings or heroes or gods or goddesses; the divine beings who
fling themselves from cliffs into the sea; M. Curtius devoting himself
in the gulf in the Forum; the tombs of the lovers whom Semiramis buried
alive; all these, I take it, have more or less similar implications.
Even such tales as that of T. Manlius Torquatus and his son must be
assimilated, I think, to the story of the king of Moab killing his son
on the wall, or to that of the Carthaginians offering up their children
to the offended deity; only, in later times, the tale was misinterpreted
and used to point the supposed moral of the stern and inflexible old
Roman discipline.

Frequent reiteration of sacrifices seems necessary, also, in order to
keep up the sanctity of images and sacred rites--to put, as it were,
a new soul into them. Thus, rivers needed a fresh river-god every year;
and recently in Ashantee it was discovered that a fetish would no longer
“work” unless human victims were abundantly immolated for it.

This is also perhaps the proper place to observe that just as the great
god Baal has been resolved by modern scholarship {269}into many local
Baalim, and just as the great god Adonis has been reduced by recent
research in each case to some particular Adon or lord out of many, so
each such separate deity, artificially manufactured, though called by
the common name of the Prah or the Tiber,’ yet retains to the last some
distinct identity. In fact, the great gods appear to be rather classes
than individuals. That there were many Nymphs and many Fauni, many
Silvani and many Martes, has long been known; it is beginning to be
clear that there were also many Saturns, many Jupiters, many Junones,
many Vestæ. Even in Greece it is more than probable that the
generalised names of the great gods were given in later ages to various
old sacred stones and holy sites of diverse origin: the real object of
worship was in each case the spontaneous or artificial god; the name was
but a general title applied in common, perhaps adjectivally, to several
such separate deities. In the Roman pantheon, this principle is now,
quite well established; in the Semitic it is probable; in most others,
the progress of modern research is gradually leading up to it. Even the
elemental gods themselves do not seem in their first origin to be really
singular; they grow, apparently, from generalised phrases, like our
“Heaven” and “Providence,” applied at first to the particular
deity of whom at the moment the speaker is thinking. The Zeus or Jupiter
varies with the locality. Thus, when the Latin prætor, at the outbreak
of the Latin war, defied the Roman Jupiter, we may be sure it was the
actual god there visible before him at whom he hurled his sacrilegious
challenge, not the ideal deity in the sky above his head. Indeed, we now
know that each village and each farm had a Jovis of its own, regarded as
essentially a god of wine, and specially worshipped at the wine-feast in
April, when the first cask was broached. This individuality of the gods
is an important point to bear in mind; for the tendency of language
is always to treat many similar deities as practically identical,
especially in late {270}and etherealised forms of religion. And
mythologists have made the most of this syncretic tendency.

A single concrete instance will help to make this general principle yet
clearer. Boundaries, I believe, were originally put under the charge
of local and artificial deities, by slaughtering a human victim at each
turning-point in the limits, and erecting a sacred stone on the spot
where he died to preserve his memory. Often, too, in accordance with the
common rule, a sacred tree seems to have been planted beside the sacred
stone monument. Each such victim became forthwith a boundary god, a
protecting and watching spirit, and was known thenceforth as a Hermes or
a Terminus. But there were many Hermæ and many Termini, not in Greece
and Italy alone, but throughout the world. Only much later did a
generalised god, Hermes or Terminus, arise from the union into a single
abstract concept of all these separate and individual deities. Once
more, the boundary god was renewed each year by a fresh victim. Our own
practice of “beating the bounds” appears to be the last expiring
relic of such annual sacrifices. The bounds are beaten, apparently, in
order to expel all foreign gods or hostile spirits; the boys who play a
large part in the ceremony are the representatives of the human victims.
They are whipped at each terminus stone, partly in order to make them
shed tears as a rain-charm (after the fashion with which Mr. Frazer has
made us familiar), but partly also because all artificially-made gods
are scourged or tortured before being put to death, for some reason
which I do not think we yet fully understand. The rationalising
gloss that the boys are whipped “in order to make them remember the
boundaries” is one of the usual shallow explanations so glibly offered
by the eighteenth century. The fact that the ceremony takes place at
sacred stones or “Gospel oaks” sufficiently proclaims its original
meaning.

The idea underlying Christian martyrdom, where the martyr
{271}voluntarily devotes himself or herself to death in order to
gain the crown and palm in heaven, is essentially similar to the
self-immolation of the artificial gods, and helps to explain the
nature of such self-sacrifice. For Christianity is only nominally a
monotheistic religion, and the saints and martyrs form in it practically
a secondary or minor rank of deities.

On the other hand, the point of view of the god-slayers cannot be more
graphically put than in the story which Mr. William Simpson relates of
Sir Richard Burton. Burton, it seems, was exploring a remote Mahommedan
region on the Indian frontier, and in order to do so with greater
freedom and ease had disguised himself as a fakir of Islam. So great
was his knowledge of Muslim devotions that the people soon began
to entertain a great respect for him as a most holy person. He was
congratulating himself upon the success of his disguise, and looking
forward to a considerable stay in the valley, when one night one of
the elders of the village came to him stealthily, and begged him, if he
valued his own safety, to go away. Burton asked whether the people did
not like him. The elder answered, yes; that was the root of the trouble.
They had conceived, in fact, the highest possible opinion of his
exceptional sanctity, and they thought it would be an excellent thing
for the village to possess the tomb of so holy a man. So they were
casting about now how they could best kill him. Whether this particular
story is true or not, it at least exhibits in very vivid colours the
state of mind of the ordinary god-slayer.

Dr. Tylor, Mr. Speth, and other writers on foundation sacrifices treat
them as springing from primitive animism. To me, they seem rather
to imply the exact opposite. For if everything has already a soul by
nature, why kill a man or criminal to supply it with one?




CHAPTER XIII.--GODS OF CULTIVATION.

|BY {272}far the most interesting in the curious group of
artifically-made gods are those which are sacrificed in connexion with
agriculture. These deities appeal to us from several points of view.
In the first place, they form, among agricultural races as a whole, the
most important and venerated objects of worship. In the second place,
it is largely through their influence or on their analogy, as I believe,
that so many other artificial gods came to be renewed or sacrificed
annually. In the third place, it is the gods of agriculture who are most
of all slain sacramentally, whose bodies are eaten by their votaries
in the shape of cakes of bread or other foodstuffs, and whose blood is
drunk in the form of wine. _The immediate connexion of these sacramental
ceremonies with the sacrifice of the mass, and the identification of
the Christ with bread and wine, give to this branch of our enquiry
a peculiar importance from the point of view of the evolution of
Christianity_. We must therefore enter at some little length into the
genesis of these peculiar and departmental gods, who stand so directly
in the main line of evolution of the central divine figure in the
Christian religion.

All over the world, wherever cultivation exists, a special class of
corn-gods or grain-gods is found, deities of the chief foodstuff,--be
it maize, or dates, or plantain, or rice--and it is a common feature
of all these gods that they are represented by human or quasi-human
victims, who are annually slain at the time of sowing. These human gods
{273}are believed to reappear once more in the form of the crop that
rises from their sacred bodies; their death and resurrection are
celebrated in festivals; and they are eaten and drunk sacramentally by
their votaries, in the shape of first-fruits, or of cakes and wine,
or of some other embodiment of the divine being. We have therefore to
enquire into the origin of this curious superstition, which involves, as
it seems to me, the very origin of cultivation itself as a human custom.
And I must accordingly bespeak my readers’ indulgence if I diverge for
a while into what may seem at first a purely botanical digression.

Most people must have been struck by the paradox of cultivation. A
particular plant in a state of nature, let us say, grows and thrives
only in water, or in some exceedingly moist and damp situation. You
take up this waterside plant with a trowel one day, and transfer
it incontinently to a dry bed in a sun-baked garden; when lo! the
moisture-loving creature, instead of withering and dying, as one might
naturally expect of it, begins to grow apace, and to thrive to all
appearance even better and more lustily than in its native habitat. Or
you remove some parched desert weed from its arid rock to a moist and
rainy climate; and instead of dwindling, as one imagines it ought to do
under the altered conditions, it spreads abroad in the deep rich mould
of a shrubbery bed, and attains a stature impossible to its kind in its
original surroundings. Our gardens, in fact, show us side by side
plants which, in the wild state, demand the most varied and dissimilar
habitats. Siberian squills blossom amicably in the same bed with Italian
tulips; the alpine saxifrage spreads its purple rosettes in friendly
rivalry with the bog-loving marsh-marigold or the dry Spanish iris. The
question, therefore, sooner or later occurs to the enquiring mind: How
can they all live together so well here in man’s domain, when in
the outside world each demands and exacts so extremely different and
specialised a situation?

Of {274}course it is only an inexperienced biologist who could long be
puzzled by this apparent paradox. He must soon see the true solution of
the riddle, if he has read and digested the teachings of Darwin. For the
real fact is, in a garden or out of it, most of these plants could get
on very well in a great variety of climates or situations--if only they
were protected against outside competition. There we have the actual
crux of the problem. It is not that the moisture-loving plants cannot
live in dry situations, but that the dry-loving plants, specialised
and adapted for the post, can compete with them there at an immense
advantage, and so, in a very short time, live them down altogether.
Every species in a state of nature is continually exposed to the
ceaseless competition of every other; and each on its own ground can
beat its competitors. But in a garden, the very thing we aim at is just
to restrict and prevent competition; to give each species a fair chance
for life, even in conditions where other and better-adapted species can
usually outlive it. This, in fact, is really at bottom all that we ever
mean by a garden--a space of ground cleared, and kept clear, of its
natural vegetation (commonly called in this connexion weeds), and
deliberately stocked with other plants, most or all of which the weeds
would live down if not artificially prevented.

We see the truth of this point of view the moment the garden is, as
we say, abandoned--that is to say, left once more to the operation of
unaided nature. The plants with which we have stocked it loiter on for
a while in a feeble and uncertain fashion, but are ultimately choked
out by the stronger and better-adapted weeds which compose the natural
vegetation of the locality. The dock and nettle live down in time the
larkspur and the peony. The essential thing in the garden is, in short,
the clearing of the ground from the weeds--that is, in other words, from
the native vegetation. A few minor things may or may not be added, such
as manuring, turning the soil, protecting with {275}shelter, and so
forth; but the clearing is itself the one thing needful.

Slight as this point seems at first sight, I believe it includes the
whole secret of the origin of tillage, and therefore, by implication,
of the gods of agriculture. For, looked at in essence, cultivation is
weeding, and weeding is cultivation. When we say that a certain race
cultivates a certain plant-staple, we mean no more in the last resort
than that it sows or sets it in soil artificially cleared of competing
species. Sowing without clearing is absolutely useless. So the question
of the origin of cultivation resolves itself at last simply into
this--how did certain men come first to know that by clearing ground
of weeds and keeping it clear of them they could promote the growth of
certain desirable human foodstuffs?

To begin with, it may be as well to premise that the problem of the
origin of cultivation is a far more complex one than appears at first
sight. For we have not only to ask, as might seem to the enquirer
unaccustomed to such investigations, “How did the early savage first
find out that seeds would grow better when planted in open soil, already
freed from weeds or natural competitors?” but also the other and far
more difficult question, “How did the early savage ever find out that
plants would grow from seeds at all?” That, I take it, is the real
riddle of the situation, and it is one which, so far as I know, has
hitherto escaped all enquirers into the history and origin of human
progress.

Fully to grasp the profound nature of this difficulty we must throw
ourselves back mentally into the condition and position of primitive
man. We ourselves have known so long and so familiarly the fact that
plants grow from seeds--that the seed is the essential reproductive part
of the vegetable organism--that we find it hard to unthink that piece
of commonplace knowledge, and to realise that what to us is an almost
self-evident truth is to the primitive savage a long and difficult
inference. Our own common and {276}certain acquaintance with the fact,
indeed, is entirely-derived from the practice of agriculture. We have
seen seeds sown from our earliest childhood. But before agriculture grew
up, the connexion between seed and seedling could not possibly be known
or even suspected by primitive man, who was by no means prone to make
abstract investigations into the botanical nature or physiological
object of the various organs in the herbs about him. That the seed is
the reproductive part of the plant was a fact as little likely in itself
to strike him as that the stamens were the male organs, or that the
leaves were the assimilative and digestive surfaces. He could only have
found out that plants grew from seeds by the experimental process of
sowing and growing them. Such an experiment he was far from likely ever
to try for its own sake. He must have been led to it by some other and
accidental coincidence.

Now what was primitive man likely to know and observe about the plants
around him? Primarily one thing only: that some of them were edible, and
some were not. There you have a distinction of immediate interest to all
humanity. And what parts of plants were most likely to be useful to him
in this respect as foodstuffs? Those parts which the plant had
specially filled up with rich material for its own use or the use of its
offspring. The first are the roots, stocks, bulbs, corms, or tubers in
which it lays by foodstuffs for its future growth; the second are the
seeds which it produces and enriches in order to continue its kind to
succeeding generations.

Primitive man, then, knows the fruits, seeds, and tubers, just as
the squirrel, the monkey, and the parrot know them, as so much good
foodstuff, suitable to his purpose. But why should he ever dream of
saving or preserving some of these fruits or seeds, when he has found
them, and of burying them in the soil, on the bare off-chance that by
pure magic, as it were, they might give rise to others? No idea could
be more foreign to the nature and {277}habits of early man. In the first
place, he is far from provident; his way is to eat up at once what he
has killed or picked; and in the second place, how could he ever come
to conceive that seeds buried in the ground could possibly produce
more seeds in future? Nay, even if he did know it--which is well-nigh
impossible--would he be likely, feckless creature that he is, to save or
spare a handful of seeds to-day in order that other seeds might spring
from their burial-place in another twelvemonth? The difficulty is so
enormous when one fairly faces it that it positively staggers one;
we begin to wonder whether really, after all, the first steps in
cultivation’ could ever have been taken.

The savage, when he has killed a deer or a game-bird, does not bury a
part of it or an egg of it in the ground, in the expectation that it
will grow into more deer or more bird hereafter. Why, then, should he,
when he has picked a peck of fruits or wild cereals, bury some of
them in the ground, and expect a harvest? The savage is a simple and
superstitious person; but I do not think he is quite such a fool as
this proceeding would make him out to be. He is not likely ever to have
noticed that plants in the wild state grow from seeds--at least prior to
the rise of agriculture, from which, as I believe, he first and slowly
gained that useful knowledge. And he certainly is not likely ever to
have tried deliberate experiments upon the properties of plants, as
if he were a Fellow of the Royal Society. These two roads being thus
effectually blocked to us, we have to enquire, “Was there ever any way
in which primitive man could have blundered blindfold upon a knowledge
of the truth, and could have discovered incidentally to some other
function of his life the two essential facts that plants grow from
seeds, and that the growth and supply of useful food-plants can be
artificially increased by burying or sowing such seeds in ground cleared
of weeds, that is to say of the natural competing vegetation?”

I {278}believe there is one way, and one way only, in which primitive
man was at all likely to become familiar with these facts. I shall try
to show that all the operations of primitive agriculture very forcibly
point to this strange and almost magical origin of cultivation; that all
savage agriculture retains to the last many traces of its origin; and
that the sowing of the seed itself is hardly considered so important and
essential a part of the complex process as certain purely superstitious
and bloodthirsty practices that long accompany it. In one word, not
to keep the reader in doubt any longer, I am inclined to believe that
cultivation and the sowing of seeds for crops had their beginning as an
adjunct of the primitive burial system.

Up to the present time, so far as I know, only one origin for
cultivation has ever been even conjecturally suggested; and that is a
hard one. It has been said that the first hint of cultivation may
have come from the observation that seeds accidentally cast out on the
kitchen-middens, or on the cleared space about huts, caves, or other
human dwelling-places, germinated and produced more seeds in succeeding
seasons. Very probably many savages have observed the fact that
food-plants frequently grow on such heaps of refuse. But that
observation alone does not bring us much nearer to the origin of
cultivation. For why should early man connect such a fact with the seeds
more than with the bones, the shells, or the mere accident of proximity?
We must rid our minds of all the preconceptions of inductive and
experimental science, and throw ourselves mentally back into the
position of the savage to whom nature is one vast field of unrelated
events, without fixed sequence or physical causation. Moreover, a
kitchen-midden is not a cleared space: on the contrary, it is a weed-bed
of extraordinary luxuriance. It brings us no nearer the origin of
clearing.

There is, however, one set of functions in which primitive men do
actually perform all the essential acts of agriculture, without in the
least intending it; and that is the almost {279}universal act of the
burial of the dead. Burial is, so far as I can see, the only object for
which early races, or, what comes to the same thing, very low savages,
ever turn or dig the ground. We have seen already that the original idea
of burial was to confine the ghost or corpse of the dead man by putting
a weight of earth on top of him; and lest this should be insufficient
to keep him from troublesome reappearances, a big stone was frequently
rolled above his mound or tumulus, which is the origin of all our
monuments, now diverted to the honour and commemoration of the deceased.
But the point to which I wish just now to direct attention is this--that
in the act of burial, and in that act alone, we get a first beginning of
turning the soil, exposing fresh earth, and so incidentally eradicating
the weeds. We have here, in short, the first necessary prelude to the
evolution of agriculture.

The next step, of course, must be the sowing of the seed. And here, I
venture to think, funeral customs supply us with the only conceivable
way in which such sowing could ever have begun. For early men would
certainly not waste the precious seeds which it took them so much time
and trouble to collect from the wild plants around them, in mere otiose
scientific experiments on vegetable development. But we have seen that
it is the custom of all savages to offer at the tombs of their ancestors
food and drink of the same kind as they themselves are in the habit of
using. Now, with people in the hunting stage, such offerings would no
doubt most frequently consist of meat, the flesh of the hunted beasts or
game-birds; but they would also include fish, fruits, seeds, tubers,
and berries, and in particular such rich grains as those of the native
pulses and cereals. Evidence of such things being offered at the graves
of the dead has been collected in such abundance by Dr. Tylor, Mr.
Frazer, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, that I need not here adduce any further
examples of so familiar a practice.

What must be the obvious result? Here, and here alone, {280}the savage
quite unconsciously sows seeds upon newly-turned ground, deprived of
its weeds, and further manured by the blood and meat of the frequent
sacrificial offerings. These seeds must often spring up and grow
apace, with a rapidity and luxuriance which cannot fail to strike the
imagination of the primitive hunter. Especially will this be the case
with that class of plants which ultimately develop into the food-crops
of civilised society. For the peculiarity of these plants is that they
are one and all--maize, corn, or rice, pease, beans, or millet--annuals
of rapid growth and portentous stature; plants which have thriven in the
struggle for existence by laying up large stores of utilisable material
in their seeds for the use of the seedling; and this peculiarity enables
them to start in life in each generation exceptionally well endowed, and
so to compete at an advantage with all their fellows. Seeds of such a
sort would thrive exceedingly in the newly-turned and well-manured soil
of a grave or barrow; and producing there a quantity of rich and edible
grain, would certainly attract the attention of that practical and
observant man, the savage. For though he is so incurious about what are
non-essentials, your savage is a peculiarly longheaded person about all
that concerns his own immediate advantage.

What conclusion would at once be forced upon him? That seeds planted in
freshly-turned and richly-manured soil produce threefold and fourfold?
Nothing of the sort. He knows naught of seeds and manures and soils; he
would at once conclude, after his kind, that the dreaded and powerful
ghost in the barrow, pleased with the gifts of meat and seeds offered
to him, had repaid those gifts in kind by returning grain for grain a
hundredfold out of his own body. This original connexion of ideas seems
to me fully to explain that curious identification of the ghost
or spirit with the corn or other foodstuff which Mr. Frazer has so
wonderfully and conclusively elaborated in _The Golden Bough_.

Some {281}little evidence is even forthcoming that vegetation actually
_does_ show exceptional luxuriance on graves and barrows. The Rev.
Alexander Stewart of Ballachulish mentions that the milkmaids in
Lochaber and elsewhere in the Scotch highlands used to pour a little
milk daily from the pail on the “fairy knowes,” or prehistoric
barrows; and the consequence was that “these fairy knolls were clothed
with a more beautiful verdure than any other spot in the country.”
In Fiji, Mr. Fison remarks that yam-plants spring luxuriantly from
the heaps of yam presented to ancestral spirits in the sacred stone
enclosure or _temenos_; and two or three recent correspondents (since
this chapter was first printed in a monthly review) have obligingly
communicated to me analogous facts from Madagascar, Central Africa, and
the Malay Archipelago. It is clear from their accounts that graves do
often give rise to crops of foodstuffs, accidentally springing from the
food laid upon them.

Just at first, under such circumstances, the savage would no doubt be
content merely to pick and eat the seeds that thus grew casually, as it
were, on the graves or barrows of his kings and kinsfolk. But in
process of time it would almost certainly come about that the area
of cultivation would be widened somewhat. The first step toward such
widening, I take it, would arise from the observation that cereals and
other seeds only throve exceptionally upon newly-made graves, not on
graves in general. For as soon as the natural vegetation reasserted
itself, the quickening power of the ghost would seem to be used up.
Thus it might be found well to keep fresh ghosts always going for
agricultural purposes. Hence might gradually arise a habit of making a
new grave annually, at the most favourable sowing-time, which last would
come to be recognised by half-unconscious experiment and observation.
And this new grave, as I shall show reason for believing a little later,
would be the grave, not of a person who happened to die then and there
accidentally, but {282}of a deliberate victim, slain in order to provide
a spirit of vegetation,--an artificial god,--and to make the corn grow
with vigour and luxuriance. Step by step, I believe, it would at length
be discovered that if only you dug wide enough, the corn would grow well
_around_ as well as _upon_ the actual grave of the divine victim. Thus
slowly there would develop the cultivated field, the wider clearing,
dug up or laboured by hand, and finally the ploughed field, which yet
remains a grave in theory and in all essentials.

I have ventured to give this long and apparently unessential preamble,
because I wish to make it clear that the manufactured or artificial god
of the corn-field or other cultivated plot really dates back to the very
origin of cultivation. Without a god, there would be no corn-field at
all; and the corn-field, I believe, is long conceived merely as the
embodiment of his vegetative spirit. Nay, the tilled field is often at
our own day, and even in our own country, a grave in theory.

It is a mere commonplace at the present time to say that among early men
and savages every act of life has a sacred significance; and agriculture
especially is everywhere and always invested with a special sanctity. To
us, it would seem natural that the act of sowing seed should be regarded
as purely practical and physiological; that the seed should be looked
upon merely as the part of the plant intended for reproduction, and
that its germination should be accepted as a natural and normal process.
Savages and early men, however, have no such conceptions. To them the
whole thing is a piece of natural magic; you sow seeds, or, to be more
accurate, you bury certain grains of foodstuff in the freshly-turned
soil, with certain magical rites and ceremonies; and then, after the
lapse of a certain time, plants begin to grow upon this soil, from which
you finally obtain a crop of maize or wheat or barley. The burial of
the seeds or grains is only one part of the {283}magical cycle, no more
necessarily important for the realisation of the desired end than many
others.

And what are the other magical acts necessary in order that
grain-bearing plants may grow upon the soil prepared for their
reception? Mr. Frazer has collected abundant evidence for answering
that question, a small part of which I shall recapitulate here for
the benefit of those who have not read his remarkable work, referring
students to The Golden Bough itself for fuller details and collateral
developments. At the same time I should like to make it clearly
understood that Mr. Frazer is personally in no way responsible for the
use I here make of his admirable materials.

All the world over, savages and semi-civilised people are in the habit
of sacrificing human victims, whose bodies are buried in the field with
the seed of corn or other bread-stuffs. Often enough the victim’s
blood is mixed with the grain in order to fertilise it. The most famous
instance is that of the Khonds of Orissa, who chose special victims,
known as Meriahs, and offered them up to ensure good harvests. The
Meriah was often kept for years before being sacrificed. He was regarded
as a consecrated being, and treated with extreme affection, mingled with
deference. A Meriah youth, on reaching manhood, was given a wife who was
herself a Meriah; their offspring were all brought up as victims. “The
periodical sacrifices,” says Mr. Frazer, “were generally so arranged
by tribes and divisions of tribes that each head of a family was
enabled, at least once a year, to procure a shred of flesh for his
fields, generally about the time when his chief crop was laid down.”
On the day of the sacrifice, which was horrible beyond description in
its details, the body was cut to pieces, and the flesh hacked from it
was instantly taken home by the persons whom each village had deputed to
bring it. On arriving at its destination, it was divided by the priest
into two portions, one of which he buried in a hole in the ground, with
his back turned and without looking {284}at it. Then each man in the
village added a little earth to cover it, and the priest poured water
over the mimic tumulus. The other portion of the flesh the priest
divided into as many shares as there were heads of houses present. Each
head of a house buried his shred in his own field, placing it in the
earth behind his back without looking. The other remains of the human
victim--the head, the bones, and the intestines--were burned on a
funeral-pile, and the ashes were scattered over the fields, or mixed
with the new corn to preserve it from injury. Every one of these details
should be carefully noted.

Now, in this case, it is quite clear to me that every field is regarded
as essentially a grave; portions of the divine victim are buried in it;
his ashes are mixed with the seed; and from the ground thus treated he
springs again in the form of corn, or rice, or turmeric. These customs,
as Mr. Frazer rightly notes, “imply that to the body of the Meriah
there was ascribed a direct or intrinsic power of making the crops to
grow. In other words, the flesh and ashes of the victim were believed to
be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the land.”
More than that, it seems to me that the seed itself is not regarded as
sufficient to produce a crop: it is the seed buried in the sacred
grave with the divine flesh which germinates at last into next year’s
foodstuffs.

A few other points must be noticed about this essential case, which is
one of the most typical instances of manufactured godhead. The Meriah
was only satisfactory if he had been purchased--“bought with a
price,” like the children who were built as foundation-gods into
walls; or else was the child of a previous Meriah--in other words, was
of divine stock by descent and inheritance. Khonds in distress often
sold their children as Meriahs, “considering the beatification”
(apotheosis, I would rather say) “of their souls certain, and _their
death, for the benefit of mankind, the most honourable possible_.”
This sense of the sacrifice as a case of “one man dying for the
people” is most {285}marked in our accounts, and is especially
interesting from its analogy to Christian reasoning. A man of the Panua
tribe was once known to upbraid a Khond because he had sold for a Meriah
his daughter whom the Panuâ wished to marry; the Khonds around at once
comforted the insulted father, exclaiming, “Your child died that all
the world may live.” Here and elsewhere we have the additional idea
of a piacular value attached to the sacrifice, about which more must be
said in a subsequent chapter. The death of the Meriah was supposed to
ensure not only good crops, but also “immunity from all disease and
accident.” The Khonds shouted in his dying ear, “We bought you with
a price; no sin rests with us.” It is also worthy of notice that the
victim was anointed with oil, a point which recalls the very name of
Christus. Once more, the victim might not be bound or make any show of
resistance; but the bones of his arms and his legs were often broken to
render struggling impossible. Sometimes, however, he was stupefied with
opium, one of the ordinary features in the manufacture of gods, as
we have already seen, being such preliminary stupefaction. Among the
various ways in which the Meriah was slain I would particularly specify
the mode of execution by squeezing him to death in the cleft of a tree.
I mention these points here, though they somewhat interrupt the general
course of our argument, because of their great importance as antecedents
of the Christian theory. In fact, _I believe the Christian legend to
have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making
sacrifices; I hold that Christ is essentially one such artificial god;
and I trust the reader will carefully observe for himself as we proceed
how many small details (such as the breaking of the bones) recall in
many ways the incidents of the passion and the crucifixion_.

The Khonds, however, have somewhat etherealised the conception of
artificial god-making by allowing one victim to do for many fields
together. Other savages are more prodigal {286}of divine crop-raisers.
To draw once more from Mr. Frazer’s storehouse--the Indians of
Guayaquil, in South America, used to sacrifice human blood and the
hearts of men when they sowed their fields. The ancient Mexicans,
conceiving the maize as a personal being who went through the whole
course of life between seed-time and harvest, sacrificed new-born babes
when the maize was sown, older children when it had sprouted, and so
on till it was fully ripe, when they sacrificed old men. May we not
parallel with this instance the singular fact that the Romans had as
their chief agricultural deity Saturnus, the god of sowing, but had also
several other subsidiary crop-deities, such as Seia, who has to do
with the corn when it sprouts, Segetia, with the corn when shot up, and
Tutilina with the corn stored in the granary? (An obvious objection
based on the numerous gods of childhood and practical arts at Rome will
be answered in a later chapter.) The Pawnees, again, annually sacrificed
a human victim in spring, when they sowed their fields. They thought
that an omission of this sacrifice would be followed by the total
failure of the crops of maize, beans, and pumpkins. In the account of
one such sacrifice of a girl in 1837 or 1838, we are told: “While her
flesh was still warm, it was cut in small pieces from the bones, put in
little baskets, and taken to a neighbouring corn-field. Here the head
chief took a piece of the flesh from a basket, and squeezed a drop of
blood upon the newly-deposited grains of corn. His example was followed
by the rest, till all the seed had been sprinkled with the blood; it
was then covered up with earth.” Many other cases might be quoted from
America.

In West Africa, once more, a tribal queen used to sacrifice a man and
woman in the month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and
their bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled.
At Lagos, in Guinea, it was the custom annually to impale a young girl
alive soon after the spring equinox in order to {287}secure good crops.
A similar sacrifice is still annually offered at Benin. The Marimos, a
Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen
is generally a short stout man. He is seized by violence or intoxicated
(note that detail) and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst
the wheat “to serve as seed.” After his blood has coagulated in the
sun, it is burned, along with that peculiarly sacred part, the frontal
bone, the flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then
scattered over the ground to fertilise it. Such scattering of the ashes
occurs in many instances, and will meet us again in the case of Osiris.

In India, once more, the Gonds, like the Khonds, kidnapped Brahman
boys, and kept them as victims to be sacrificed on various occasions.
At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal procession, one of the lads
was killed by being punctured with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then
sprinkled over the ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was
sacramentally devoured. The last point again will call at a later stage
for further examination.

I will detail no more such instances (out of the thousands that exist)
for fear of seeming tedious. But the interpretation I put upon the facts
is this. Originally, men noticed that food-plants grew abundantly from
the laboured and well-manured soil of graves. They observed that this
richness sprang from a coincidence of three factors--digging, a sacred
dead body, and seeds of foodstuffs. In time, they noted that if you dug
wide enough and scattered seed far enough, a single corpse was capable
of fertilising a considerable area. The grave grew into the field or
garden. But they still thought it necessary to bury some one in the
field; and most of the evidence shows that they regarded this victim as
a divine personage; that they considered him the main source of growth
or fertility; and that they endeavoured to deserve his favour by
treating him well during the greater part of his lifetime. For in many
of the accounts it is expressly stated {288}that the intended victim was
treated as a god or as a divine king, and was supplied with every sort
of luxury up to the moment of his immolation. In process of time, the
conception of the field as differing from the grave grew more defined,
and the large part borne by seed in the procedure was more fully
recognised. Even so, however, nobody dreamed of sowing the seed alone
without the body of a victim. Both grain and flesh or blood came to be
regarded alike as “seed”: that is to say, the concurrence of the two
was considered necessary to produce the desired effect of germination
and fertility. Till a very late period, either the actual sacrifice or
some vague remnant of it remained as an essential part of cultivation.
Mr. Frazer’s pages teem with such survivals in modern folk-custom.
From his work and from other sources, I will give a few instances of
these last dying relics of the primitive superstition.

Mr. Gomme, in his _Ethnology in Folklore_, supplies an account of a
singular village festival in Southern India. In this feast, a priest,
known as the Potraj, and specially armed with a divine whip, like the
scourge of Osiris, sacrifices a sacred buffalo, which is turned loose
when a calf, and allowed to feed and roam about the village. In that
case, we have the common substitution of an animal for a human victim,
which almost always accompanies advancing civilisation. At the high
festival, the head of the buffalo was struck off at a single blow, and
placed in front of the shrine of the village goddess. Around were placed
vessels containing the different cereals, and hard by a heap of mixed
grains with a drill-plough in the centre. The carcase was then cut up
into small pieces, and each cultivator received a portion to bury in his
field. The heap of grain was finally divided among all the cultivators,
to be buried by each one in his field with the bit of flesh. At last,
the head, that very sacred part, was buried before a little temple,
sacred to the goddess of boundaries. The goddess is represented by a
shapeless stone--no doubt a Terminus, {289}or rather the tombstone of an
artificial goddess, a girl buried under an ancient boundary-mark. Here
we have evidently a last stage of the same ritual which in the case of
the Khonds was performed with a human victim. It is worth while noting
that, as part of this ceremony, a struggle took place for portions of
the victim.

A still more attenuated form of the same ceremony is mentioned by
Captain Harkness and others, as occurring among the Badagas of the
Nilgiri Hills. I condense their accounts, taking out of each such
elements as are most cognate to our purpose. Among these barbarians,
the first furrow is ploughed by a low-caste Kurrumbar, who gives his
benediction to the field, without which there would be no harvest. Here,
the member of the aboriginal race is clearly looked upon as a priest or
kinsman of the local gods, whose cooperation must be obtained by later
intrusive races. But the Kurrumbar does not merely bless the field; he
also sets up a stone in its midst; and then, prostrating himself before
the stone, he sacrifices a goat, the head of which he keeps as his
perquisite. This peculiar value of the oracular head retained by the
priest is also significant. When harvest-time comes, the same Kurrumbar
is summoned once more, in order that he may reap the first handful of
corn, an episode the full importance of which will only be apparent to
those who have read Mr. Frazer’s analysis of harvest customs. But
in this case also, the appearance of the sacred stone is pregnant with
meaning. We can hardly resist the inference that we have here to do with
the animal substitute for a human sacrifice of the god-making order, in
which the victim was slaughtered, a stone set up to mark the site of
the sacrifice, and the head preserved as a god to give oracles, in the
fashion with which we are already familiar. Comparing this instance with
the previous one of the sacred buffalo and the still earlier cases of
ancestral heads preserved as gods for oracular purposes, I think the
affiliation is too clear to be disregarded.

Evidence {290}of similar customs elsewhere exists in such abundance that
I can only give a very small part of it at present, lest I should assign
too much space to a subordinate question; I hope to detail the whole of
it hereafter in a subsequent volume. Here is a striking example from Mr.
Gomme’s _Ethnology in Folklore_, the analogy of which with preceding
instances will at once be apparent.

“At the village of Holne, situated on one of the spurs of Dartmoor, is
a field of about two acres, the property of the parish, and called the
Ploy Field. In the centre of this field stands a granite pillar (Menhir)
six or seven feet high. On May-morning, before daybreak, the young men
of the village used to assemble there, and then proceed to the moor,
where they selected a ram lamb, and, after running it down, brought it
in triumph to the Ploy Field, fastened it to the pillar, cut its throat,
and then roasted it whole, skin, wool, etc. At midday a struggle took
place, at the risk of cut hands, for a slice, it being supposed to
confer luck for the ensuing year on the fortunate devourer. As an act of
gallantry the young men sometimes fought their way through the crowd
to get a slice for the chosen amongst the young women, all of whom, in
their best dresses, attended the Ram Feast, as it was called. Dancing,
wrestling, and other games, assisted by copious libations of cider
during the afternoon, prolonged the festivity till midnight.”

Here again we get several interesting features of the primitive ritual
preserved for us. The connexion with the stone which enshrines
the original village deity is perfectly clear. This stone no doubt
represents the place where the local foundation-god was slain in very
remote ages; and it is therefore the proper place for the annual renewal
sacrifices to be offered. The selection of Maymorning for the rite;
the slaughter at the stone pillar; the roasting of the beast whole; the
struggle for the pieces; and the idea that they would confer luck,
all show survival of primitive feeling. So does the cider, sacramental
{291}intoxication being an integral part of all these proceedings.
Every detail, indeed, has its meaning for those who look close; for the
struggle at midday is itself significant, as is also the prolongation
of the feast till midnight. But we miss the burial of the pieces in the
fields; in so far, the primitive object of the rite seems to have been
forgotten or overlooked in Devonshire.

A still more attenuated survival is quoted by Mr. Gomme from another
English village. “A Whitsuntide custom in the parish of King’s
Teignton, Devonshire, is thus described: A lamb is drawn about the
parish on Whitsun Monday in a cart covered with garlands of lilac,
laburnum, and other flowers, when persons are requested to give
something towards the animal and attendant expenses; on Tuesday it is
killed and roasted whole in the middle of the village. The lamb is then
sold in slices to the poor at a cheap rate. The origin of the custom is
forgotten, but a tradition, supposed to trace back to heathen days, is
to this effect: The village suffered from a dearth of water, when the
inhabitants were advised by their priests to pray to the gods for water;
whereupon the water sprang up spontaneously in a meadow about a third of
a mile above the river, in an estate now called Rydon, amply sufficient
to supply the wants of the place, and at present adequate, even in a
dry summer, to work three mills. A lamb, it is said, has ever since that
time been sacrificed as a votive thank-offering at Whitsuntide in the
manner before mentioned. The said water appears like a large pond, from
which in rainy weather may be seen jets springing up some inches
above the surface in many parts. It has ever had the name of ‘Fair
Water.’”

I mention this curious instance here, because it well illustrates the
elusive way in which such divine customs of various origins merge into
one another; and also the manner in which different ideas are attached
in different places to very similar ceremonies. For Mr. Frazer has shown
that the notion of a rain-charm is also closely bound up with {292}the
gods of agriculture; the Khond Meriah must weep, or there will be
no rain that year; his red blood must flow, or the turmeric will not
produce its proper red colour. (Compare the red blood that flowed from
Poly-dorus’s cornel, and the Indian’s blood that drops from the
Canadian bloodroot.) In this last instance of the King’s Teignton
ceremony, it is the rain-charm that has most clearly survived to our
days: and there are obvious references to a human sacrifice offered up
to make a river-god in times long gone, and now replaced by an animal
victim. The garlands of lilac, laburnum, and other flowers are, however,
common adornments of the artificial god of cultivation; they occurred in
the Dionvsiac rites and the Attis festival, and are still preserved in
many European customs.

Very closely bound up with the artificial gods of cultivation are the
terminal gods with whom I dealt in the last chapter; so closely that
it is sometimes impossible to separate them. We have already seen some
instances of this connexion; the procession of the sacred victim usually
ends with a perlustration of the boundaries. This perlustration is
often preceded by the head of the thean-thropic victim. Such a ceremony
extends all over India; in France and other European countries it
survives in the shape of the rite known as Blessing the Fields, where
the priest plays the same part as is played among the Nilgiri hillsmen
by the low-caste Kurrumbar. In this rite, the Host is carried round the
bounds of the parish, as the head of the sacred buffalo is carried round
at the Indian festival. In some cases every field is separately visited.
I was told as a boy in Normandy that a portion of the Host (stolen or
concealed, I imagine) was sometimes buried in each field, but of this
curious detail I can now obtain no confirmatory evidence, and I do not
insist upon it. _We must remember, however, that the Host is the body of
Christ, and that its presence in such cases is the exact analogue of the
carrying round the pieces of the Meriah_.

In {293}England, the ceremony merges into that of Beating the Bounds,
already described; though I believe the significance of the boy-victims,
and the necessity for whipping them as a rain-charm, will now be more
apparent than when we last met with it.

In many cases, all the world over, various animals come to replace the
human victim-god. Thus we learn from Festus that the Romans sacrificed
red-haired puppies in spring, in the belief that the crops would thus
grow ripe and ruddy; and there can be little doubt that these puppies,
like the lamb sacrifice at Holne and King’s Teignton, were a
substitute for an original human victim. Even so, the Egyptians, as we
shall see, sacrificed red-haired men as the representatives of Osiris,
envisaged as a corn-god. In some cases, indeed, we have historical
evidence of the human god being replaced at recent dates by a divine
animal-victim; for example, in Chinna Kimedy, after the British had
suppressed human sacrifices, a goat took the place of the sacred Meriah.

Mannhardt has collected much evidence of the curious customs still (or
lately) existing in modern Europe, which look like survivals in a very
mitigated form of the same superstition. These are generally known by
the name of “Carrying out Death,” or “Burying the Carnival.”
They are practised in almost every country of Europe, and relics of them
survive even in England. The essence of these ceremonies consists in an
effigy being substituted for the human victim. This effigy is treated
much as the victim used to be. Sometimes it is burned, sometimes thrown
into a river, and sometimes buried piecemeal. In Austrian Silesia,
for example, the effigy is burned, and while it is burning a general
struggle takes place for the pieces, which are pulled out of the flames
with bare hands. (Compare the struggle among the Khonds, and also at
the Potraj festival and the Holne sacrifice.) Each person who secures
a fragment of the figure ties it to a branch of the largest tree in his
garden, or buries it in his field, in the {294}belief that this causes
the crops to grow better. Sometimes a sheaf of corn does duty for the
victim, and portions of it are buried in each field as fertilisers. In
the Hartz Mountains, at similar ceremonies, a living man is laid on a
baking-trough and carried with dirges to a grave; but a glass of brandy
is substituted for him at the last moment. Here the spirit is the
equivalent of a god. In other cases the man is actually covered with
straw, and so lightly buried. In Italy and Spain, a similar custom bore
the name of “Sawing the Old Woman.” In Palermo, a real old woman was
drawn through the streets on a cart, and made to mount a scaffold, where
two mock executioners proceeded to saw through a bladder of blood which
had been fitted to her neck. The blood gushed out, and the old woman
pretended to swoon and die. This is obviously a mitigation of a human
sacrifice. At Florence, an effigy stuffed with walnuts and dried figs
represented the Old Woman. At mid-Lent, this figure was sawn through the
middle in the Mercato Nuovo, and when the dried fruits tumbled out they
were scrambled for by the crowd, as savages scrambled for fragments of
the human victim or his animal representative. Upon all this subject a
mass of material has been collected by Mannhardt and Mr. Frazer. Perhaps
the most interesting case of all is the Russian ceremony of the Funeral
of Yarilo. In this instance, the people chose an old man and gave him
a small coffin containing a figure representing Yarilo. This he carried
out of the town, followed by women chanting dirges, as the Syrian women
mourned for Adonis, and the Egyptians for Osiris. In the open fields
a grave was dug, and into it the figure was lowered amid weeping and
wailing.

Myth and folk-lore also retain many traces of the primitive connexion.
Thus, in the genuine American legend of Hiawatha, the hero wrestles with
and vanquishes Mon-damin, and where he buries him springs up for the
first time the maize, or Indian-corn plant. Similar episodes occur
{295}in the Finnish Kalevala and other barbaric epics. According to Mr.
Chalmers, the Motu tribe in New Guinea say that yams sprang first from
the bones of a murdered man, which were buried in a grave. After some
time, the grave was opened, and the bones were found to be no longer
bones, but large and small yams of different colours.

In order to complete our preliminary survey of these artificial gods
of cultivation, before we proceed to the consideration of the great
corn-gods and wine-gods, it may be well to premise that in theory at
least the original victim seems to have been a king or chief, himself
divine, or else at least a king’s son or daughter, one of the divine
stock, in whose veins flowed the blood of the earlier deities. Later on,
it would seem, the temporary king was often allowed to do duty for the
real king; and for this purpose he seems frequently to have been clad in
royal robes, and treated with divine and royal honours. Examples of this
complication will crop up in the sequel. For the present I will only
refer to the interesting set of survivals, collected by Mr. Gomme, where
temporary kings or mayors in England are annually elected, apparently
for the sake of being sacrificed only. In many of these cases we get
mere fragmentary portions of the original rite; but by piecing them all
together, we obtain on the whole a tolerably complete picture of the
original ceremonial observance. At St. Germans in Cornwall, the mock
mayor was chosen under the large walnut-tree at the May-fair; he was
made drunk overnight, in order to fit him for office, and was in that
state drawn round the nut-tree, much as we saw the mayor of Bovey rode
round the Bovey stone on his accession to the mayoralty. The mayor of
St. Germans also displayed his royal character by being mounted on the
wain or cart of old Teutonic and Celtic sovereignty. At Lostwithiel, the
mock mayor was dressed with a crown on his head, and a sceptre in
his hand, and had a sword borne before him. At Penrhyn, the mayor was
preceded by torch-bearers and town sergeants, and though he was not
{296}actually burnt, either in play or in effigy, bonfires were
lighted, and fireworks discharged, which connect the ceremony with such
pyre-sacrifices of cremationists as the festival of the Tyrian Melcarth
and the Baal of Tarsus. On Halgaver Moor, near Bodmin, a stranger was
arrested, solemnly tried in sport, and then trained in the mire or
otherwise ill-treated. At Polperro, the mayor was gen-rally “some
half-witted or drunken fellow,” in either case, according to early
ideas, divine; he was treated with ale, and, “having completed the
perambulation of the town,” was wheeled by his attendants into the
sea. There, he was allowed to scramble out again, as the mock victim
does in many European ceremonies; but originally, I do not doubt, he was
drowned as a rain-charm.

These ceremonies, at the time when our authorities learnt of them, had
all degenerated to the level of mere childish pastimes; but they contain
in them, none the less, persistent elements of most tragic significance,
and they point back to hideous and sanguinary god-making festivals.
In most of them we see still preserved the choice of the willing or
unconscious victim; the preference for a stranger, a fool, or an idiot;
the habit of intoxicating the chosen person; the treatment of the victim
as king, mayor, or governor; his scourging or mocking; his final death;
and his burning on a pyre, or his drowning as a rain-charm. All these
points are still more clearly noticeable in the other form of survival
where the king or divine victim is represented, not by a mock or
temporary king, but by an image or effigy. Such is the common case of
King Carnival, who is at last burnt in all his regalia, or thrown into
a river. Our own Guy Fawkes, though fastened upon the personality of a
particular unpopular historical character, seems to be the last feeble
English representative of such a human victim. I will not elaborate this
point any further (considerations of space forbid), but will refer
the reader for additional examples to Mr. Gomme’s {297}_Village
Community_, and Mr. Frazer’s wonderful collection of examples in _The
Golden Bough_.

The general conclusion I would incline to draw from all these instances
is briefly this. Cultivation probably began with the accidental sowing
of grains upon the tumuli of the dead. Gradually it was found that by
extending the dug or tilled area and sowing it all over, a crop would
grow upon it, provided always a corpse was buried in the centre. In
process of time divine corpses were annually provided for the purpose,
and buried with great ceremony in each field. By-and-bye it was found
sufficient to offer up a single victim for a whole tribe or village, and
to divide his body piecemeal among the fields of the community. But the
crops that grew in such fields were still regarded as the direct gifts
of the dead and deified victims, whose soul was supposed to animate and
fertilize them. As cultivation spread, men became familiarised at
last with the conception of the seed and the ploughing as the really
essential elements in the process; but they still continued to attach
to the victim a religious importance, and to believe in the necessity of
his presence for good luck in the harvest. With the gradual mitigation
of savagery an animal sacrifice was often substituted for a human one;
but the fragments of the animal were still distributed through the
fields with a mimic or symbolical burial, just as the fragments of the
man-god had formerly been distributed. Finally, under the influence of
Christianity and other civilised religions, an effigy was substituted
for a human victim, though an animal sacrifice was often retained
side by side with it, and a real human being was playfully killed in
pantomime.

In early stages, however, I note that the field or garden sometimes
retains the form of a tumulus. Thus Mr. Turner, the Samoan missionary,
writes of the people of Tana, in the New Hebrides:

“They bestow a great deal of labour on their yam plantations, and keep
them in fine order. You look over a reed {298}fence, and there you see
ten or twenty mounds of earth, some of them seven feet high and sixty
in circumference. These are heaps of loose earth without a single stone,
all thrown up by the hand. In the centre they plant one of the largest
yams whole, and round the sides some smaller ones.”

This looks very much like a tumulus in its _temenos_. I should greatly
like to know whether a victim is buried in it.

I may add that the idea of the crop being a gift from the deified
ancestor or the divine-human victim is kept up in the common habit of
offering the first-fruits to the dead, or to the gods, or to the living
chief, their representative and descendant. Of the equivalence of these
three ceremonies, I have given some evidence in my essay on Tree-Worship
appended to my translation of the _Attis_ of Catullus. For example, Mr.
Turner says of these same Tanese in the New Hebrides:

“The spirits of their departed ancestors were among their gods. Chiefs
who reached an advanced age were, after death, deified, addressed by
name, and prayed to on various occasions. They were supposed especially
to preside over the growth of the yams and the different fruit-trees.
The first-fruits were presented to them, and in doing this they laid
a little of the fruit on some stone or shelving branch of the tree, or
some more temporary altar.., in the form of a table.... All being quiet,
the chief acted as high priest and prayed aloud thus: ‘Compassionate
father, here is some food for you; eat it; be kind to us on account of
it.’ And instead of an Amen, all united in a loud shout.”

Similar evidence is abundant elsewhere. I summarise a little of it.
Every year the Kochs of Assam, when they gather their first-fruits,
offer some to their ancestors, calling them even by name, and clapping
their hands to summon them. The people of Kobi and Sariputi, two
villages in Ceram, “offer the first-fruits of the paddy in the form
of cooked rice to their ancestors as a token of gratitude.” {299}The
ceremony is called “Feeding the Dead.” In the Tenimber and Timorlaut
Islands, the first-fruits of the paddy are offered to the spirits of the
ancestors, who are worshipped as guardian gods or household lares. The
people of Luzon worship chiefly the souls of their ancestors, and offer
to them the first-fruits of the harvest. In Fiji the earliest of
the yams are presented to the ancestral ghosts in the sacred stone
enclosure; and no man may taste of the new crop till after this
presentation.

In other cases it is gods rather than ghosts to whom the offering is
made, though among savages the distinction is for the most part an
elusive one. But in not a few instances the first-fruits are offered,
not to spirits or gods at all, but to the divine king himself, who
is the living representative and earthly counterpart of his deified
ancestors. Thus in Ashantee a harvest festival is held in September,
when the yams are ripe. During the festival the king eats the new yams,
but none of the people may eat them till the close of the festival,
which lasts a fortnight. The Hovas, of Madagascar, present the first
sheaves of the new grain to the sovereign. The sheaves are carried in
procession to the palace from time to time as the grain ripens. So, in
Burmah, when the pangati fruits ripen, some of them used to be taken to
the king’s palace that he might eat of them; no one might partake
of them before the king. In short, what is offered in one place to the
living chief is offered in another place to his dead predecessor, and is
offered in a third place to the great deity who has grown slowly out of
them. The god is the dead king; the king, as in ancient Egypt, is the
living god, and the descendant of gods, his deified ancestors. Indeed,
the first-fruits seem sometimes to be offered to the human victim
himself, in his deified capacity, and sometimes to the Adonis, or
Osiris, who is his crystallised embodiment. Our own harvest festival
seems to preserve the offering in a Christianised form.

Finally, I will add that in many cases it looks as though the
{300}divine agriculture-victim were regarded as the king in person, the
embodiment of the village or tribal god, and were offered up, himself
to himself, at the stone which forms the monument and altar of the
primitive deity. Of this idea we shall see examples when we go on to
examine the great corn-gods and wine-gods of the Mediterranean region.




CHAPTER XIV.--CORN- AND WINE-GODS.

|IN {301}advanced communities, the agricultural gods with whom we dealt
in the last chapter come to acquire specific class-names, such as
Attis and Adonis; are specialised as corn-gods, wine-gods, gods of the
date-palm, or gods of the harvest; and rise to great distinction in the
various religions.

I propose to examine at some length the more important of these in the
Mediterranean civilisations, where Christianity was first evolved. And I
begin with Dionysus.

One of the notable features of the Potraj festival of southern India,
which Sir Walter Elliot has minutely described for us, and of which
I gave a brief abstract in the previous chapter, is its orgiastic
character. As type of the orgiastic god-making ceremonies, with their
five-day festival, it well deserves some fuller description. The feast
takes place near the temple of the village goddess, who is worshipped
in the form of an unshapely stone, stained red with vermillion, the
probable representative of the first human foundation-victim. An altar
was erected behind this temple to the god who bears the name of Potraj.
He is a deity of cultivation. The festival itself was under the charge
of the Pariahs, or aboriginal outcasts; it was attended by all the
lowest classes, including the dancing girls of the temple and the
shepherds or other “non-Aryan” castes. During the festival, these
people took temporarily the first place in the village; they appeared
to {302}form the court of the temporary king, and to represent the early
local worship, whose gods the conquering races are afraid of offending.
For since the dead of the conquered race are in possession of the soil,
immigrant conquerors everywhere have a superstitious dread of incurring
their displeasure. On the first day of the orgy, the low-caste people
chose one of themselves as priest or Potraj.

On the second day of the feast, the sacred buffalo, already described
as having the character of a theanthropic victim, was thrown down before
the goddess; its head was struck off at a single blow, and was placed in
front of the shrine, with one leg in its mouth. The carcase, as we saw
already, was then cut up, and delivered to the cultivators to bury in
their fields. The blood and offal were afterwards collected into a large
basket; and the officiating priest, a low-caste man, who bore (like the
god) the name of Potraj, taking a live kid, hewed it in pieces over
the mess. The basket was then placed on the head of a naked man, of the
leather-dresser class, who ran with it round the circuit of the village
boundaries, scattering the fragments right and left as he went. The
Potraj was armed with a sacred whip, like Osiris; and this whip was
itself the object of profound veneration.

On the third and fourth days, many buffaloes and sheep were slaughtered;
and on the fourth day, women walked naked to the temple, clad in boughs
of trees alone; a common religious exercise of which I have only space
here to suggest that St. Elizabeth of Hungary and the Godiva procession
at Coventry are surviving relics. (These relations have well been
elucidated by Mr. Sidney Hartland.)

On the fifth and last day, the whole community marched with music to the
village temple, and offered a concluding sacrifice at the Potraj altar.
A lamb was concealed close by. The Potraj, having found it after a
pretended search, rendered it insensible by a blow of his whip, or by
mesmeric passes--a survival of the idea of the voluntary victim. Then
the assistants tied the Potraj’s hands behind his {303}back, and the
whole party began to dance round him with orgiastic joy. Potraj joined
in the excitement, and soon came under the present influence of the
deity. He was led up, bound, to the place where the lamb lay motionless.
Carried away with divine frenzy, he rushed at it, seized it with his
teeth, tore through the skin, and eat into its throat. When it was quite
dead, he was lifted up; a dishful of the meat-offering was presented to
him; he thrust his blood-stained face into it, and it was then buried
with the remains of the lamb beside the altar. After that, his arms were
untied, and he fled the place. I may add that as a rule the slaughterer
of the god everywhere has to fly from the vengeance of his worshippers,
who, after participating in the attack, pretend indignation as soon as
the sacrifice is completed.

The rest of the party now adjourned to the front of the temple, where
a heap of grain deposited on the first day was divided among all the
cultivators, to be sown by each one in the field with his piece of
flesh. After this, a distribution was made of the piled-up heads of the
buffaloes and sheep slaughtered on the third and fourth days. These
were evidently considered as sacred as divine heads generally in all
countries and ages. About forty of the sheeps’ heads were divided
among certain privileged persons; for the remainder, a general scramble
took place, men of all castes soon rolling together on the ground in
a mess of putrid gore. For the buffaloes’ heads, only the Pariahs
contended. Whoever was fortunate enough to secure one of either kind
carried it off and buried it in his field. Of the special importance of
the head in all such sacrifices, Mr. Gomme has collected many apposite
examples.

The proceedings were terminated by a procession round the boundaries;
the burial of the head of the sacred buffalo close to the shrine of
the village goddess; and the outbreak of a perfect orgy, a “rule of
misrule,” during which the chief musician indulged in unbridled abuse
of all the authorities, native or British.

I {304}have given at such length an account of this singular festival,
partly because it sheds light upon much that has gone before, but partly
also because it helps to explain many elements in the worship of the
great corn- and wine-gods. One point of cardinal importance to be
noticed here is that the officiating priest, who was at one time also
both god and victim, is called Potraj like the deity whom he represents.
So, too, in Phrygia the combined Attis-victim and Attis-priest bore the
name of Attis; and so in Egypt the annual Osiris-offering bore the name
of Osiris, whom he represented.

If I am right, therefore, in the analogy of the two feasts Dionysus
was in his origin a corn-god, and later a vine-god, annually slain
and buried in order that his blood might fertilise the field or
the vineyard. In the Homeric period, he was still a general god of
cultivation: only later did he become distinctively the grape-god
and wine-deity. There was originally, I believe, a Dionysus in every
village; and this divine victim was annually offered, himself to
himself, with orgiastic rites like those of Potraj. Mr. Laurence Gomme
has already in part pointed out this equation of the Hellenic and
the Indian custom. The earliest form of Dionysus-worship, on this
hypothesis, would be the one which survived in Chios and Tenedos, where
a living human being was orgiastically torn to pieces at the feast of
Dionysus. At Orchomenus, the human victim was by custom a woman of the
family of the Oleiæ (so that there were women Dionysi): at the annual
festival, the priest of Dionysus pursued these women with a drawn
sword, and if he caught one, he had the right to slay her. (This is the
sacred-chance victim.) In other places, the ceremony had been altered in
historical times; thus at Potnice, in Boeotia, it was once the custom
to slay a child as Dionysus; but later on, a goat, which was identified
with the god, was substituted for the original human victim. The
equivalence of the animal victim with the human god is shown by the fact
that at Tenedos the newborn {305}calf sacrificed to Dionysus--or _as_
Dionysus--was shod in buskins, while the mother cow was tended like a
woman in childbed.

Elsewhere we find other orgiastic rites still more closely resembling
the Indian pattern. Among the Cretans, a Dionysus was sacrificed
biennially under the form of a bull; and the worshippers tore the living
animal to pieces wildly with their teeth. Indeed, says Mr. Frazer, the
rending and devouring of live bulls and calves seems to have been a
regular feature of the Dionysiac rites. In some cities, again, the
animal that took the place of the human victim was a kid. When the
followers of Dionysus tore in pieces a live goat and drank its blood,
they believed they were devouring the actual body and blood of the god.
_This eating and drinking the god is an important point_, which will
detain us again at a later stage of our enquiry.

I do not desire to dwell too long upon any one deity, or rather class of
deities; therefore I will say briefly here that when Dionysus became
the annual or biennial vine-god victim, it was inevitable that his
worshippers should have seen his resurrection and embodiment in the
vine, and should have regarded the wine it yielded as the blood of the
god. In this case, the identification was particularly natural, for
could not every worshipper feel the god in the wine? and did not the
divine spirit within it inspire and intoxicate him? To be “full of the
god” was the natural expression for the resulting exhilaration; the
cult of the wine-spirit is thus one of those which stands on the surest
and most intimate personal basis.

The death and resurrection of Dionysus are accordingly a physical
reality. The god is annually killed in the flesh, as man, bull, or goat;
and he rises again in the vine, to give his blood once more for the good
of his votaries. Moreover, he may be used as a fertiliser for many
other trees; and so we find Dionysus has many functions. He is variously
adored as Dionysus of the tree, and more particularly {306}of the
fruit-bearing fig and apple. His image, like those of other tree-gods
already encountered, was often an upright post, without arms, but draped
(like the _ashera_) in a mantle, and with a bearded mask to represent
the head, while green boughs projecting from it marked his vegetable
character. He was the patron of cultivated trees; prayers were offered
to him to make trees grow; he was honoured by fruit-growers, who set up
an image of him, in the shape of a natural tree-stump, in the midst of
their orchards. (Compare that last degraded and utilitarian relic, the
modern scarecrow.) For other equally interesting facts, I would refer
the reader once more to Mr. Frazer, whose rich store I must not further
rifle. It seems to me obvious from his collection of facts that there
was originally everywhere a separate local Dionysus, an annual man-god
or woman-god victim (for which a beast was later substituted), and that
only slowly did the worship of the individual Dionysi pass into the
general worship of one great idealised god Dionysus. The great gods are
at first classes, not individuals.

Mr. Gomme has further pointed out three interesting points of
resemblance between the Dionysiac rites and the Indian Potraj festival.
In the first place, Dionysus is sometimes represented to his worshippers
by his head only--no doubt a preserved oracular head; and in any case
a parallel to the importance of the head in the Indian ceremony. In the
second place, the sacrificer of the calf at Tenedos was driven out and
stoned after the fulfilment of the rite--a counterpart of the Potraj
fleeing from the place after the slaughter of the lamb. And in the
third place, the women worshippers of Dionysus attended the rites nude,
crowned with garlands, and daubed over with dirt--a counterpart of the
naked female votaries surrounded with branches of trees in the Indian
festival. All three of these points recur abundantly in similar
ceremonies elsewhere.

As a rule, I severely disregard mere myths, as darkeners of
{307}counsel, confining my attention to the purely religious and
practical elements of custom and worship. But it is worth while noting
here for its illustrative value the Cretan Dionysus-myth, preserved
for us in a Romanised form by Firmicus Maternus. Dionysus is there
represented as the son of Zeus, a Cretan king; and this legend,
dismissed cavalierly by Mr. Frazer as “Euhemeristic,” at least
encloses the old idea that the Dionysus-victim was at first himself a
divine god-king, connected by blood with the supreme god or founder of
the community. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was jealous of the child, and
lured him into an ambush, where he was set upon by her satellites the
Titans, who cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs,
and ate it. Other forms of the myth tell us how his mother Demeter
pieced together his mangled remains, and made him young again. More
often, however, Dionysus is the son of Semele, and various other
versions are given of the mode of his resurrection. It is enough for our
purpose that in all of them _the wine-god, after having been slain and
torn limb from limb, rises again from the dead, and often ascends to
his father Zeus in heaven_. The resurrection, visibly enacted, formed
in many places a part of the rite; though I cannot agree with Mr.
Frazer’s apparent and (for him) unusual suggestion that the rite grew
out of the myth; I hold the exact opposite to have been the order of
evolution.

On the whole, then, though I do not deny that the later Greeks envisaged
Dionysus as a single supreme god of vegetation, nor that many abstract
ideas were finally fathered upon the worship--especially those which
identified the death and resurrection of the god with the annual winter
sleep and spring revival--I maintain that in his origin the Dionysus was
nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into the
tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that
blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving
wine. At first a yearly human victim, he was afterwards personated
{308}by a goat or a bull; and was therefore represented in art as a
bull, or a bull-horned man. Gradually identified with vegetation in
general, he was regarded at last as the Flowery Dionysus, the Fig
Dionysus, or even, like Attis, the god of the pine-tree. But all these,
I believe, were later syncretic additions; and I consider that in such
primitive forms as the orgiastic crop-god of the Indian corn-festival we
get the prime original of the Hellenic vine-deity.

I pass on to Osiris, in his secondary or acquired character as corn-god.

I have already expressed the belief, in which I am backed up by Mr.
Loftie, that the original Osiris was a real historical early king of
This by Abydos. But in the later Egyptian religion, after mystic ideas
had begun to be evolved, he came to be regarded as the god of the dead,
and every mummy or every justified soul was looked upon as an Osiris.
Moreover, it seems probable that in Egypt the name of Osiris was also
fitted to the annual slain corn-victim or corn-god. Thus all over Egypt
there were many duplicates of Osiris; notably at Busiris, where the
name was attached to an early tomb like the one at Abydos. This
identification of the new-made god with the historic ancestor, the
dead king, or the tribal deity is quite habitual; it is parallel to the
identification of the officiating Potraj with the Potraj god, of the
Attis-priest with Attis, of the Dionysus-victim with the son of Zeus:
and it will meet us hereafter in savage parallels. Let us look at the
evidence.

As in India, the Osiris festival lasted for five days. (The period is
worth noting.) The ceremonies began with ploughing the earth. We do
not know for certain that a human victim was immolated; but many
side-analogies would lead us to that conclusion, and suggest that as
elsewhere the sacred victim was torn to pieces in the eagerness of the
cultivators and worshippers to obtain a fragment of his fertilising
body. For in the myth, Typhon cuts up the corpse of the god into
fourteen pieces, which he {309}scatters abroad (as the naked
leather-dresser scatters the sacred buffalo): and we know that in the
Egyptian ceremonies one chief element was the search for the mangled
portions of Osiris, the rejoicings at their discovery, and their solemn
burial. On one of the days of the feast, a procession of priests went
the round of the temples--or beat the bounds: and the festival closed
with the erection of a pillar or stone monument to the Osiris, which, in
a bas-relief, the king himself is represented as assisting in raising.
I think it is impossible to overlook the general resemblance of these
rites to the rites of Potraj.

I ought to add, though I cannot go into that matter fully here, that the
many allusions to the flinging of the coffer containing the Osiris into
the Nile are clear indications of the rain-charm obtained by throwing
the human victim into a spring or river. In this case, however, it must
of course be regarded locally as a charm to make the Nile rise in due
season.

The character of the later Osiris, or the god-victim identified with
him, as a corn and vegetable god, is amply borne out by several other
pieces of evidence. Osiris, it is said, was the first to teach men the
use of corn. He also introduced the cultivation of the vine. Mr. Frazer
notes that in one of the chambers dedicated to Osiris in the great
temple of Isis at Philæ, the dead body of Osiris is represented with
stalks of corn springing from it, and a priest is watering the stalks
from a pitcher which he holds in his hand. That human corn-victims
were at least not unknown in Egypt we have on the direct authority of
Manetho, who tells us that red-haired men used to be burned, and their
ashes scattered with winnowing fans. (Similar cases elsewhere have been
previously mentioned.) So, too, the legend tells us that Isis placed
the severed limbs of Osiris on a corn-sieve. Red-haired oxen were also
sacrificed in Egypt, apparently in order to produce red wheat. This is
the analogue of the bull sacrificed as Dionysus.

Again, {310}in the legend of Busiris, and the glosses or comments upon
it, we get important evidence, the value of which has not fully been
noted, I believe, by Mr. Frazer. The story comes to us in a Greek form;
but we can see through it that it represents the myth which accounted
for the Osiris sacrifice. The name Busiris means the city of Osiris,
which was so called because the grave of an ancient Osiris (either a
mummy, or a local chief identified with the great god of Abydos) was
situated there. Human sacrifices were said to have been offered at
his tomb; just as the Potraj sacrifice is offered at the shrine of the
village goddess, and just as the annual victim elsewhere was sacrificed
at the Terminus stone or the sacred stone of the foundation-god or
goddess. The victims were redhaired men, and strangers. Their ashes
were scattered abroad with winnowing fans. They were slain on the
harvest-field, and mourned by the reapers (like Adonis and Attis) in the
song which through a Greek mistake is known to us as the Maneros. The
reapers prayed at the same time that Osiris might revive and return with
renewed vigour in the following year. The most interesting point in this
account, pieced together from Apollodorus, Diodorus, and Plutarch, is
the fact that it shows us how the annual Osiris was identified with the
old divine king who lay in his grave hard by; and so brings the
case into line with others we have already considered and must still
consider. As for the hunting after the pieces of Osiris’s body,
that is just like the hunting after the mangled pieces of Dionysus by
Demeter. I interpret both the resurrection of Osiris, and the story of
the fragments being pieced together and growing young again, told of
Dionysus, as meaning that the scattered pieces, buried like those of
the Khond Meriah, grow up again next year into the living corn for the
harvest.

Furthermore, there exists to this day in Egypt an apparent survival of
the ancient Osiris rite, in an attenuated form (like the mock mayors in
England), which distinctly suggests {311}the identification I am here
attempting. In Upper Egypt, Klunzinger tells us, on the first day of
the (Egyptian) solar year, when the Nile has usually reached its highest
point, the regular government is suspended for three days in each
district, and every town chooses its own temporary ruler. This temporary
king (a local Osiris, as I believe) wears a conical cap, and a
long flaxen beard, and is enveloped in a strange mantle. I say
unhesitatingly, the dress of an Osiris, wearing the old royal cap of
Upper Egypt. With a wand of office in his hands--like the crook which
Osiris carries on the monuments--and attended by men disguised as
scribes, executioners, and so forth, he proceeds to the governor’s
house. The governor allows himself to be deposed; the mock king,
mounting the throne, holds a tribunal, to whose decisions even the
governor himself must bow. In short, like other temporary kings, he
really enjoys royal authority for the moment. After three days, however,
the mock king is condemned to death; the envelope or shell in which he
is encased is committed to the flames; and from its ashes creeps forth
the Fellah who impersonated him. I do not doubt that the case here
represents the antique coffer or mummy-case of Osiris.

In this graphic ceremonial, then, I see a survival, with the customary
mitigations, of the annual Osiris sacrifice, once actually performed on
a human victim. I do not doubt that in Egypt as elsewhere a mock
king was formerly chosen in place of the real king to personate the
descendant of Osiris, an Osiris himself; and that this substitute was
put to death, and torn to pieces or burnt, while his ashes were winnowed
and scattered over the land. It may also be worth while to enquire
whether the scourge which Osiris holds in the bas-reliefs is not the
equivalent of the divine whip of the Potraj, and the other whips which
Mr. Gomme has so ingeniously correlated with that very venerable and
mystic attribute.

I would suggest, then, that Osiris in his later embodiment {312}was
annually renewed as a corn and vine victim. Originally a king of Upper
Egypt, or part of it, he was envisaged in later myth as a general
culture-god. Isis, his sister and wife, discovered wheat and barley
growing wild; and Osiris introduced these grains among his people, who
thereupon abandoned cannibalism, and took to grain-growing. An annual
victim, most often a stranger, identified with the racial god, was torn
to pieces in his place; and Osiris himself was finally merged with the
abstract spirit of vegetation, and supposed to be the parent of all
trees. Just as the Corinthians, when ordered by an oracle to worship a
certain pine tree “equally with the god,” cut it down and made two
images of Dionysus out of it, with gilt bodies and red-stained faces; so
the Egyptians cut down a pine-tree, took out the heart, made an image of
Osiris, and then buried it in the hollow of the tree from which it had
been taken. Similar rites obtained in Attis-worship and all alike bear
witness to that late and abstract stage of thought where the primitive
cultivation-victim has been sublimated and elevated into a generalised
god of vegetation in the abstract. But this, which for Mr. Frazer is the
starting-point, is for me the goal of the evolution of Osiris.

Let us next look very briefly at the case of Adonis.

The Adon or Lord commonly known as Thammuz was one of the chief elements
in Syrian religion. He was closely connected with the namesake river
Adonis, which rose by his grave at the sacred spring of Aphaca. We do
not actually know, I believe, of a human Adonis-victim; but his death
was annually lamented with a bitter wailing, chiefly by women. Images
of him were dressed like corpses, and carried out as if for burial,
and then thrown into the sea or into springs. This was evidently a rain
charm, such as is particularly natural in a dry country like Syria. And
I will add incidentally that I attribute to similar circumstances also
some portion at least of the sanctity of rivers. In certain places, the
resurrection of the Adonis was {313}celebrated on the succeeding day.
At Byblos, he also ascended into heaven before the eyes of his
worshippers--a point worth notice from its Christian analogies.
The blood-red hue of the river Adonis in spring--really due to
the discoloration of the tributary torrents by red earth from the
mountains--was set down to the blood of the god Adonis; the scarlet
anemone sprang from his wounds. But the scholiast on Theocritus
expressly explains the Adonis as “the sown corn;” and that he was
“seed,” like the common corn-victims in India and elsewhere, we can
hardly doubt from the repeated stories of his death and resurrection.
The so-called “gardens of Adonis,” which were mimic representations
of a tumulus planted with corn, formed a most noticeable part of the
god’s ritual. They consisted of baskets or pots, filled with earth,
in which wheat, barley, flowers, and so forth were sown and tended
by women; and at the end of eight days they were carried out with the
images of the dead Adonis, and flung into the sea or into springs. This
was no doubt another case of a rain-charm. Mr. Frazer has collected
several interesting examples of similar rites the whole world over.

A few other embodiments of the corn-god may be more hastily treated.

What Adonis was to Syria, Attis was to Phrygia. Originally he seems,
according to Professor Ramsay, to have been represented by an annual
priest-victim, who slew himself for the people to ensure fertility. This
priest-victim himself bore the name of Attis, and was identified with
the god whose worship he performed. In later days, instead of killing
himself, he merely drew his own blood; and there is reason to think that
a pig was also substituted as duplicate victim, and that this pig was
itself regarded as an Attis. Analogies exist with the Paschal lamb;
while the self-mutilation of Attis-worship has also features in
common with Jewish circumcision. Moreover, the ceremonies were closely
connected, at Pessinus at least, with the ancient sacred stone which
bore the name of Cybele, and which was {314}described as the Mother of
the Gods; this connexion exactly recalls that of the Potraj-god in India
with the cult of the local village goddess. As I believe the village
goddess to be the permanent form of the foundation human sacrifice, I
also believe Cybele (gross Euhemerism as it may seem) to be the sacred
stone of the original virgin who was sacrificed at the first foundation
of Pessinus.

When the sacred stone of Cybele and the cult of Attis were removed to
Rome (under circumstances to which I shall refer in a later chapter) the
festival consisted of a five days’ rite, like that of the Potraj. It
took place at the spring equinox, as does our own equivalent festival of
Easter. On the first day, a pine-tree was cut down in the woods, and the
effigy of a young man was tied to it. This effigy no doubt represented
the primitive human sacrifice, and its crucifixion answers exactly to
the slaughter of the sacred buffalo in India. The second day yields
nothing of importance; on the third day, the Attis-priest drew blood
from his own arms and presented it as an offering; I would conjecture
that this was a substitute for self-immolation, and that the
self-immolation was originally performed by mutilation of the genitals.
It was perhaps on this night that a mourning took place over the body of
Attis, represented by an effigy, which was afterwards solemnly buried.
On the fourth day came the Festival of Joy, on which, as Mr. Frazer
believes, the resurrection of the god was celebrated. The fifth day
closed with a procession to the brook Almo, in which the sacred stone
of the goddess and her bullock-cart were bathed as a rain-charm. On the
return, the cart was strewn with flowers. I think the close parallelism
to the Indian usage is here fairly evident. Indeed, out of consideration
for brevity, I have suppressed several other most curious resemblances.

Attis was thus essentially a corn-god. His death and resurrection were
annually celebrated at Rome and at Pessinus. An Attis of some sort died
yearly. The Attis of Pessinus was both priest and king; it was perhaps
at one time {315}his duty to die at the end of his yearly reign as a
corn-god for his people. One epithet of Attis was “very fruitful”;
he was addressed as “the reaped yellow ear of corn”; and when an
effigy took the place of the annual slain priest-king, this effigy
itself was kept for a year, and then burnt as the priest-king himself
would have been at an earlier period. It seems to me impossible to
resist the cumulative weight of this singular evidence.

For the very curious customs and myths regarding Demeter, Persephone,
and other female corn-victims, I must refer the reader once more to Mr.
Frazer. It is true, the enquirer will there find the subject treated
from the opposite standpoint; he will see the goddesses regarded as
first corn-spirits, then animal, finally human: but after the examples
I have here given of my own mode of envisaging the facts, I think the
reader will see for himself what corrections to make for Mr. Frazer’s
animism and personal equation. I will only say here that in many
countries, from Peru to Africa, a girl or woman seems to have been
offered up as a corn-goddess; that this corn-goddess seems to have been
sown with the seed, and believed to come to life again with the corn;
and that several European harvest customs appear to be mitigations
of the old ceremonial, with the usual substitution of an animal or an
effigy for the human victim. Regarded in this light, Mr. Frazer’s
collection of facts about the Corn Baby affords an excellent groundwork
for research; but though I could say much on the subject, I will refrain
from it here, as I desire only at present to give such an outline as
will enable the reader to understand my general principles. The half is
often more than the whole; and I fear if I flesh out the framework too
much, it may be difficult to follow the main line of my argument.

I cannot, however, refrain from mentioning that the ceremonies of
“Carrying out Death” and “Burying the Carnival,” which prevail
all over Europe, retain many interesting features of the Potraj,
Dionysus, and Attis-Adonis {316}festivals. The figure of Death--that is
to say, as I understand it, the image of the dead human god--is often
torn to pieces, and the fragments are then buried in the fields to make
the crops grow well. But the Death is also drowned or burned; in the
first case, like Adonis, in the second, like the Osiris in the modern
Egyptian custom. And the analogies of the festivals to those of India
and Western Asia must strike every attentive reader of Mr. Frazer’s
masterwork.

Two or three typical instances must suffice as examples. In Bohemia,
the children carry a straw man out of the village, calling it Death, and
then burn it, singing,=

```Now carry we Death out of the village,

```The new summer into the village;

```Welcome, dear summer,

```Green little corn.=

Here the relation of the ceremony to the primitive corn-sacrifice
is immediately evident. And the making of the effigy out of straw is
significant. At Tabor in Bohemia the image of Death is flung from a high
rock into the water, evidently as a rain-charm, with a similar song,
praying for “good wheat and rye.” (Compare the ceremony of the
Tarpeian rock, where the victim was at last a condemned criminal: as
also the myths of immolation by jumping into the sea.) In Lower Bavaria
the pantomime was more realistic; the _Pfingstl_, as the victim was
called, was clad in leaves and flowers, and drenched with water. He
waded into a brook up to his middle, while a boy pretended to cut off
his head. In Saxony and Thüringen, the Wild Man, who represents the
god, is killed in dumb show at Whitsuntide. His captors pretend to
shoot him, and he falls as if dead, but is afterwards revived, as in the
resurrection of Adonis and Dionysus. Such resurrections form a common
episode in the popular corn-drama. I have found a case in Sussex. At
Semic in Bohemia we have the further graphic point that the victim is
actually described as the King, wears a crown of bark, and carries a
wand as a {317}sceptre, like the mock Osiris. Other kings are frequent
elsewhere. In the Koniggratz district, the King is tried, and, if
condemned, is beheaded in pantomime. Near Schomberg, the mock victim
used to be known as the Fool, another significant name, and was finally
buried under straw and dung, a conjunction of obvious agricultural
import. In Rottweil, the Fool is made drunk, and interred in straw amid
Adonis-like lamentations. Elsewhere, the Fool, either in person or by a
straw effigy, is flung into water. At Schluckenau, realism goes a stage
further: the Wild Man wears a bladder filled with blood round his neck;
this the executioner stabs, and the blood gushes forth on the ground.
Next day, a straw man, made to look as like him as possible, is laid on
a bier, and taken to a pool into which it is flung. In all these antique
ceremonies it is impossible not to see a now playful survival of the
primitive corn-sacrifice. Our own April Fool shows the last stage of
degradation in such world-wide customs. Originally sent on a fool’s
errand to the place of sacrifice, so that he might go voluntarily, he is
now merely sent in meaningless derision.

I will only add here that while corn-gods and wine-gods are the most
notable members of this strange group of artificial deities, the sacred
date-palm has its importance as well in the religions of Mesopotamia;
and elsewhere the gods of the maize, the plantain, and the cocoanut rise
into special or local prominence.’ So do the Rice-Spirit, the Oats-Wife,
the Mother of the Rye, and the Mother of the Barley (or Demeter). All
seem to be modifications of the primitive victim, sacrificed to make
a spirit for the crop, or to act as “seed” for the date or the
plantain.




CHAPTER XV.--SACRIFICE AND SACRAMENT.

|WE {318}have now arrived at a point where we can more fully understand
_those curious ideas of sacrifice and sacrament which lie at the root of
so much that is essential in the Jewish, the Christian, and most other
religions_.

Mr. Galton tells us that to the Damaras, when he travelled among them,
all meat was common property. No one killed an ox except as a sacrifice
and on a festal occasion; and when the ox was killed, the whole
community feasted upon it indiscriminately. This is but a single
instance of a feeling almost universal among primitive pastoral people.
Cattle and other domestic animals, being regarded as sacred, are rarely
killed; and when they are killed, they are eaten at a feast as a social
and practically religious rite--in short, sacramentally. I need not
give instances of so well-known a principle; I will content myself with
quoting what Dr. Robertson Smith says of a particular race: “Among
the early Semites generally, no slaughter was legitimate except for
sacrifice.”

Barbaric herdsmen, indeed, can hardly conceive of men to whom flesh meat
is a daily article of diet. Mr. Galton found the idea very strange to
his Damaras. Primitive pastoral races keep their domestic animals mainly
for the sake of the milk, or as beasts of burden, or for the wool and
hair; they seldom kill one except for a feast, at which the gods are
fellow-partakers. Indeed, it is probable, as the sequel will suggest,
that domestic animals were originally kept as totems or ancestor-gods,
and that the habit of eating {319}the meat of sheep, goats, and oxen has
arisen mainly out of the substitution of such a divine animal-victim
for the divine human-victim of earlier usage. Our butchers’ shops have
their origin in mitigated sacrificial cannibalism.

Sacrifice, regarded merely as offering to the gods, has thus, I believe,
two distinct origins. Its earliest, simplest, and most natural form is
that whose development we have already traced,--the placing of small
articles of food and drink at the graves of ancestors or kings or
revered fellow-tribesmen. That from a very early period men have
believed the dead to eat and drink, whether as corpse, as mummy, as
ghost of buried friend, or as ethereal spirit of cremated chieftain, we
have already seen with sufficient frequency. About the origin of these
simplest and most primitive sacrifices, I think, there can be little
doubt. Savages offer at the graves of their dead precisely those
ordinary articles of food which they consumed while living, without any
distinction of kind; and they continue to offer them in the same naïve
way when the ghost has progressed to the status of one of the great gods
of the community.

But there is another mode of sacrifice, superposed upon this, and
gradually tending to be more or less identified with it, which yet, if
I am right, had a quite different origin in the artificial production of
gods about which I have written at considerable length in the last three
chapters. The human or animal victim, thus slaughtered in order to
make a new god or protecting spirit, came in time to be assimilated in
thought to the older type of mere honorific offerings to the dead gods;
and so _gave rise to those mystic ideas of the god who is sacrificed,
himself to himself, of which the sacrament of the Mass is the final and
most mysterious outcome_. Thus, the foundation-gods, originally killed
in order to make a protecting spirit for a house or a tribal god for a
city or village, came at last to be regarded as victims sacrificed to
the Earth Goddess or to the Earth Demons; and thus, too, the Meriahs and
other agricultural {320}victims, originally killed in order to make a
corn-god or a corn-spirit, came at last to be regarded as sacrifices to
the Earth, or to some abstract Dionysus or Attis or Adonis. And since in
the last case at least the god and the victim were still called by the
same name and recognised as one, there grew up at last in many lands,
and in both hemispheres, but especially in the Eastern Mediterranean
basin, the mystic theory of the sacrifice of a god, himself to himself,
in atonement or expiation, which forms the basis of the Christian Plan
of Salvation. It is this secondary and derivative form of sacrifice,
I believe, which is mainly considered in Professor Robertson Smith’s
elaborate and extremely valuable analysis.

I have said that the secondary form of sacrifice, which for brevity’s
sake I shall henceforth designate as the mystic, is found in most parts
of the world and in both hemispheres. This naturally raises the question
whether it has a single common origin, and antedates the dispersal of
mankind through the hemispheres; or whether it has been independently
evolved several times over in many lands by many races. For myself, I
have no cut-and-dried answer to this abstruse question, nor do I regard
it, indeed, as a really important one. On the one hand, there are many
reasons for supposing that certain relatively high traits of thought or
art were common property among mankind before the dispersion from the
primitive centre, if a primitive centre ever existed. On the other hand,
psychologists know well that the human mind acts with extraordinary
similarity in given circumstances all the world over, and that identical
stages of evolution seem to have been passed through independently by
many races, in Egypt and Mexico, in China and Peru; so that we can
find nothing inherently improbable in the idea that even these complex
conceptions of mystic sacrifice have distinct origins in remote
countries. What is certain is the fact that among the Aztecs, as among
the Phrygians, the priest who sacrificed, the victim he slew, and the
image or great god to {321}whom he slew him, were all identified; the
killer, the killed, and the being in whose honor the killing took place
were all one single indivisible deity. Even such details as that the
priest clothed himself in the skin of the victim are common to many
lands; they may very well be either a heritage from remote ancestral
humanity, or the separate product of the human mind, working along like
grooves under identical conditions. In one word they may perhaps be
necessary and inevitable corollaries from antecedent conceptions.

I must further premise that no religion as we now know it is by any
means primitive. The most savage creeds we find among us have still
hundreds of thousands of years behind them. The oldest religions whose
records have descended to us, like those of Egypt and of Assyria, are
still remote by hundreds of thousands of years from the prime original.
Cultivation itself is a very ancient and immemorial art. Few savages,
even among those who are commonly described as in the hunting stage, are
wholly ignorant of some simple form of seed-sowing and tillage. The few
who are now ignorant of those arts show some apparent signs of being
rather degenerate than primitive peoples. My own belief or suspicion
is that ideas derived from the set of practices in connexion with
agriculture detailed in the last two chapters have deeply coloured the
life and thought of almost the whole human race, including even those
rudest tribes which now know little or nothing of agriculture. But I do
not lay stress upon this half-formed conviction, to justify which would
lead me too far afield. I shall be content with endeavouring to suggest
how far they have coloured the ideas of the greater number of existing
nations.

Early pastoral races seldom kill a beast except on great occasions. When
they kill it, they devour it in common, all the tribe being invited to
the festival. But they also eat it in fellowship with their gods; every
great feast is essentially a Theoxenion, a Lectisternium, a banquet in
which the {322}deities participate with mortals. It is this sense of
a common feast of gods and men which gave, no doubt, the first step
towards the complex idea of the sacramental meal--an idea still further
developed at a later stage by the addition of the concept that the
worshipper eats and drinks the actual divinity.

My own belief is that all sacrificial feasts of this godeating character
most probably originated in actual cannibalism; and that later an animal
victim was substituted for the human meat; but I do not insist on this
point, nor attempt, strictly speaking, to prove it. It is hardly
more than a deeply grounded suspicion. Nevertheless, I will begin for
convenience’ sake with the cannibal class of sacrifice, and will come
round in time to the familiar slaughter of sheep and oxen, which in many
cases is known to have supplanted a human offering.

Acosta’s account of the Mexican custom is perhaps the best instance
we now possess of the ritual of cannibal mystic sacrifice in its fullest
barbarity. “They took a captive,” says that racy old author, “at
random; and before sacrificing him to their idols, they gave him the
name of the idol to whom he should be sacrificed, and dressed him in the
same ornaments, identifying him with the god. During the time that the
identification lasted, which was for a year in some feasts, six months
or less in others, they reverenced and worshipped him in the same manner
as the idol itself. Meanwhile, he was allowed to eat, drink, and make
merry. When he went through the streets, the people came forth to
worship him; and every one brought alms, with children and sick
people that he might cure them and bless them. He did as he pleased in
everything except that he had ten or twelve men about him, to prevent
him from escaping. In order that he might be reverenced as he passed, he
sometimes sounded upon a small flute, to tell the people to worship him.
When the feast arrived, and he had grown fat, they killed him, opened
him, and making a solemn sacrifice, eat him.” There, in the words
{323}of a competent authority, we have the simple cannibal feast in its
fullest nakedness.

I need hardly point out how much this account recalls the Khond custom
of the Meriah. The victim, though not really of royal blood, is made
artificially into a divine king; he is treated with all the honours
of royalty and godhead, is dressed like the deity with whom he is
identified, and is finally killed and eaten. The last point alone
differs in any large degree from the case of the Meriah. We have still
to enquire, “Why did they eat him?”

The answer to this enquiry takes us into the very heart and core of the
sacramental concept.

_It is a common early belief that to eat of any particular animal gives
you the qualities of that animal_. The Miris of Northern India prize
tiger’s flesh for men; it gives them strength and courage; but women
must not eat it; ’twould make them “too strong-minded.” The
Namaquas abstain from eating hare; they would become faint-hearted if
they swallowed it; but they eat the meat of the lion or drink the blood
of the leopard, in order to gain their strength and courage. Among the
Dyaks, young men and warriors must not eat deer; it would render them
cowardly; but women and very old men are allowed to eat it. Men of the
Buro and Aru Islands feed on the flesh of dogs in order to be bold and
nimble. Mr. Frazer has collected an immense number of similar instances,
which show both how widespread and how deep-seated are such beliefs.
Even scrapings of the bones are sufficient to produce the desired
result; in Corea, the bones of tigers fetch a higher price than those
of leopards as inspirers of courage. The heart of a lion is also
particularly good for this purpose; and the tongues of birds are
recommended for eloquence.

Again, on the same analogy, the flesh and blood of brave men are eaten
in order to inspire bravery. The Australian Kamilaroi eat the heart
and liver of a valiant warrior in order to acquire his courage. The
Philippine Islanders drink the blood of their bravest enemies. In the
Shire Highlands {324}of Africa, those who kill a distinguished fighter
eat his heart to get his courage. Du Chaillu’s negro, attendants, we
saw, scraped their ancestors’ skulls, and drank the powder in water.
“Our ancestors were brave,” said they; “and by drinking their
skulls, we shall be brave as they were.” Here again I can only
refer the reader for numerous examples to Mr. Frazer’s inexhaustible
storehouse.

The case of Du Chaillu’s warriors, however, takes us with one bound
into the heart of the subject. Many savages for similar reasons actually
eat their own dead fathers. * We learn from Strabo that the ancient
Irish “deemed it honourable to devour the bodies of their parents.”
So, Herodotus tells us, did the Issedones of Central Asia. The
Massagetæ used “from compassion” to club and eat their aged people.
The custom was quite recently common among the Battas of Sumatra, who
used “religiously and ceremonially to eat their old relations.” In
Australia, it was usual to eat relatives who died by mischance. Of
the Cucumas we read that “as soon as a relation died, these people
assembled and eat him roasted or boiled, according as he was thin
or fat.” The Tarianas and Tucanas, who drink the ashes of their
relatives, “believe that thus the virtues of the deceased will be
transmitted to the drinkers.” The Arawaks think it the highest mark of
honour they could pay to the dead to drink their powdered bones mixed
in water. Generally speaking, in a large number of cases, the parents
or relatives were eaten in order “not to let the life go out of the
family” or to preserve the bodies and souls in a kindred body; or to gain
the courage and other qualities of the dead relation. _In short,
the dead were eaten sacramentally or, as one writer even phrases it,
“eucharistically.”_ Mr. Hartland has collected many striking
instances.

     * Since this chapter was written, the subject of honorific
     cannibalism has been far more fully treated by Mr. Sidney
     Hartland in the chapter on Funeral Rites, in the second
     volume of The Legend of Perseus.

How this strange custom originates we may guess from Mr. {325}Wyatt
Gill’s description of a New Guinea funeral. “The women lacerated
their faces and beat their breasts most affectingly,” he says; “and
then, in the madness of their grief, pressed the matter out of the
wounded thigh, and smeared it over their faces and persons, and even
licked it up.” Of the Koiari corpses he says: “A fire is kept
burning day and night at the head and feet for months. The entire
skin is removed by means of the thumb and forefinger, and the juices
plastered all over the face and body of the operator,--parent, husband,
or wife of the deceased. The fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so
that little more than the skeleton is left.” This naturally leads on
to eating the dead, which indeed is practised elsewhere in New Guinea.

But if men eat the bodies of their fathers, who are their family
and household gods, they will also naturally eat the bodies of the
artificial gods of cultivation, or of the temporary kings who die for
the people. _By eating the body of a god, you absorb his divinity; he
and you become one; he is in you and inspires you. This is the root-idea
of sacramental practice; you eat your god by way of complete union; you
subsume him in yourself; you and he are one being_.

Still, how can you eat your god if you also bury him as a corn-spirit
to use him as seed? The Gonds supply us with the answer to that obvious
difficulty. For, as we saw, they sprinkle the blood of the victim over
the ploughed field or ripe crop, and then they sacramentally devour
his body. Such a double use of the artificial god is frequently to be
detected, indeed, through the vague words of our authorities. We see
it in the Potraj ceremony, where the blood of the lamb is drunk by the
officiating priest, while the remainder of the animal is buried beside
the altar; we see it in the numerous cases where a portion of the victim
is eaten sacramentally, and the rest burned and scattered over the
fields, which it is supposed to fertilise. You eat your god in part,
so as to imbibe his divinity; but you bury {326}him in part, so as to
secure at the same time his fertilising qualities for your corn or your
vineyard.

I admit that all this is distinctly mystic; but mystery-mongering and
strange reduplication of persons, with marvellous identifications and
minute distinctions, have always formed much of the stock-in-trade of
religion. If cults were all plain sailing throughout, what room for
faith?--there would be less to engage the imagination of the votary.

And now let us return awhile to our Mexican instances.

At the annual feast of the great god Tezcatlipoca, which, like most
similar festivals, fell about the same time as the Christian Easter,
a young man was chosen to be the representative of the god for a
twelvemonth. As in the case of almost all chosen victims, he had to be a
person of unblemished body, and he was trained to behave like a god-king
with becoming dignity. During his year of godship, he was lapped in
luxury; and the actual reigning emperor took care that he should be
splendidly attired, regarding him already as a present deity. He was
attended by eight pages clad in the royal livery--which shows him to
have been a king as well as a god; and wherever he went the people
bowed down to him. Twenty days before the festival at which he was to
be sacrificed, four noble maidens, bearing the names of four goddesses,
were given him to be his brides. The final feast itself, like those of
Dionysus, of Attis, and of Potraj, occupied five days--a coincidence
between the two hemispheres which almost points to original identity of
custom before the dispersion of the races. During these five days the
real king remained in his palace--and this circumstance plainly
shows that the victim belonged to the common class of substituted and
temporary divine king-gods. The whole court, on the other hand, attended
the victim. On the last day of the feast, the victim was ferried across
the lake in a covered barge to a small temple in the form of a pyramid.
On reaching the summit, he was seized and held down on a block of
stone,--no doubt {327}an altar of funereal origin,--while the priest cut
open his breast with a stone knife, and plucked his heart out. This he
offered to the god of the sun. The head was hung up among the skulls
of previous victims, no doubt for oracular purposes, and as a permanent
god; but the legs and arms were cooked and prepared for the table of
the lords, who thus partook of the god sacramentally. His place was
immediately filled by another young man, who for a year was treated with
the same respect, and at the end of that time was similarly slaughtered.

I do not think I need point out the close resemblance of this ritual
to that of the Khond Meriah, of the Potraj, and of the festivals of
Dionysus, Osiris, Attis, and Adonis. But I would also call particular
attention to the final destination of the skull, and its exact
equivalence to the skull of the animal-god in India and elsewhere.

“The idea that the god thus slain in the person of his representative
comes to life again immediately,” says Mr. Frazer, “was graphically
represented in the Mexican ritual by skinning the slain man-god,
and clothing in his skin a living man, who thus became the new
representative of the godhead.” For example, at an annual festival in
Mexico, a woman was sacrificed who represented Toci, the Mother of the
Gods--a sort of yearly Mexican Cybele. She was dressed in the ornaments
and bore the name of the goddess of whom she was believed to be an
incarnation. After being feasted for several days, she was taken at
midnight to the summit of a temple, and there beheaded. Her body was
flayed, and one of the priests, clothing himself in the skin, became
the representative of the goddess Toci. The skin of the woman’s thigh,
however, was separately removed, and a young man who represented the god
Cinteotl, the son of Toci, wrapt it round him like a mask. Ceremonies
then followed, in which the two men, clad in the woman’s skin, enacted
the parts of the god and goddess. In all this, there is much that seems
to me reminiscent {328}of Isis and Horus, of Cybele and Attis, of Semele
and Dionysus, and of several other eastern rituals.

Still more significant is the yearly festival of the god Totec, who
was represented in like manner by a priest, clad in the skin of a human
victim, and who received offerings of first-fruits and first-flowers,
together with bunches of maize which had been kept for seed. Here
we have the closest possible analogy to the case of the Meriah. The
offering of first-fruits, made sometimes to the king, sometimes to the
ancestral spirits, is here made to the human god of cultivation, who
represents both in his own person.

Many other cannibal sacrifices are recorded in Mexico: in more than one
of them it was customary for the priest to tear out the warm throbbing
heart of the victim, and present it to the idol. Whether these
sacrifices in each particular case were of the ordinary or of the mystic
type it is not always quite easy to decide; probably the worshippers
themselves did not accurately discriminate in every instance. But
however that may be, we know at least this much: when human sacrifices
had been rare, the priests reminded the kings that the gods “were
starving with hunger”; war was then made on purpose to take prisoners,
“because the gods had asked for something to eat,” and thousands of
victims were thus slaughtered annually. The blood of the victims was
separately offered; and I may add in this connexion that as a rule both
ghosts and gods are rather thirsty than hungry. I take the explanation
of this peculiar taste to be that blood and other liquids poured upon
the ground of graves or at altar-stones soon sink in, and so seem to
have been drunk or sucked up by the ghost or god; whereas meat and
solid offerings are seen to be untouched by the deity to whom they are
presented. A minor trait in this blood-loving habit of the gods is seen
in the fact that the Mexicans also gave the god to drink fresh blood
drawn from their own ears, and that the priests likewise drew blood
from their legs, and daubed it on the temples. Similar mitigations of
self-immolation {329}are seen elsewhere in the Attis-priest drawing
blood from his arms for Attis, in the Hebrew Baal-priests “cutting
themselves for Baal,” and in the familiar Hebrew rite of circumcision.
Blood is constantly drawn by survivors or worshippers as an act of
homage to the dead or to deities.

I might multiply instances of human sacrifices of the mystic order
elsewhere, but I prefer to pass on to the various mitigations which they
tend to undergo in various communities. In its fullest form, I take
it, the mystic sacrifice ought to be the self-immolation of a divine
priest-king, a god and descendant of gods, himself to himself, on the
altar of his own divine foundation-ancestor. But in most cases which we
can trace, the sacrifice has already assumed the form of an immolation
of a willing victim, a temporary king, of the divine stock only by
adoption, though sometimes a son or brother of the actual monarch.
Further modifications are that the victim becomes a captive taken in
war (which indeed is implied in the very etymology of the Latin word
victima), or a condemned criminal, or an imbecile, who can be more
readily induced to undertake the fatal office. Of all of these we have
seen hints at least in previous cases. Still more mitigated are the
forms in which the victim is allowed to escape actual death by a
subterfuge, and those in which an image or effigy is allowed to do duty
for the living person. Of these intermediates we get a good instance in
the case of the Bhagats, mentioned by Col. Dalton, who “annually make
an image of a man in wood, put clothes and ornaments on it, and present
it before the altar of a Mahadeo” (or rude stone phallic idol). “The
person who officiates as priest on the occasion says, ‘O, Mahadeo, we
sacrifice this man to you according to ancient customs. Give us rain
in due season, and a plentiful harvest.’ Then, with one stroke of the
axe, the head of the image is struck off, and the body is removed
and buried.” This strange rite shows us a surviving {330}but much
mitigated form of the Khond Meriah practice.

As a rule, however, such bloodless representations do not please the
gods; nor do they succeed in really liberating a ghost or corn-god. They
are after all but feeble phantom sacrifices. Blood the gods want, and
blood is given them. The most common substitute for the human victim-god
is therefore the animal victim-god, of which we have already seen
copious examples in the ox and kid of Dionysus, the pig of Attis, and
many others. It seems probable that a large number of sacrifices, if not
the majority of those in which domestic animals are slain, belong in
the last resort to the same category. Thus, indeed, we can most easily
explain the theory of the so-called “thean-thropic” victim,--the
animal which stands for a man and a god,--as well as the point of view
of sacrifice so ably elaborated by Dr. Robertson Smith.

According to this theory, the domestic animals were early regarded as of
the same kin or blood as the tribe; and the slaughter of an ox, a goat,
or a sheep could only be permitted if it were done, like the slaughter
of a king’s son, sacrificially and sacramentally. In my own opinion,
this scarcely means more than that the sacred domestic animals were
early accepted as substitutes for the human victim, and that they were
eaten sacrificially and sacramentally as the human victim was also
eaten. But I will waive this somewhat controversial point, and content
myself with suggesting that the animal victim was habitually treated as
in itself divine, and that its blood was treated in the same way as the
blood of the original cannibal offering. At the same time, the sacrifice
was usually offered at the altar of some older and, so to speak, more
constant deity, while the blood of the victim was allowed to flow over
the sacred stone. Certainly, both among the Arabs and the Hebrews,
all slaughter of domestic animals appears to have been at one time
sacrificial; and even when the slaughter ceased necessarily to involve a
formal sacrifice, it was still thought {331}necessary to slay the victim
in the name of a god, and to pour out the blood in his honour on the
ground. Even in the Græco-Roman world, the mass of butcher’s meat was
“meat offered to idols.” We shall see hereafter that among existing
savages the slaughter of domestic animals is still regarded as a sacred
rite.

I believe also that as a rule the blood-offering is the earliest and
commonest form of slaughter to the gods; and that the victim in the
earlier stages was generally consumed by the communicants, as we know
the cannibal victim to have been consumed among the Mexicans, and as
we saw the theanthropic goat or kid was orgiastically devoured by
the worshippers of Dionysus. It is a detail whether the sacred victim
happened to be eaten raw or cooked; the one usage prevailed in the
earlier and more orgiastic rites, the other in the milder and more
civilised ceremonies. But in either case, the animal-god, like the human
god, was eaten sacramentally by all his worshippers, who thus took into
themselves his divine qualities. The practice of burning the victim, on
the other hand, prevailed mainly, I think, among cremationists, like
the Tyrians and Hellenes, though it undoubtedly extended also to many
burying peoples, like the Hebrews and Egyptians. In most cases even of
cremated victims, it would appear, a portion at least of the animal was
saved from the fire and sacramentally eaten by the worshippers.

Once more, the victim itself was usually a particular kind of sacred
animal. This sacredness of the chosen beast has some more important
bearings than we have yet considered. For among various pastoral races,
various domesticated animals possess in themselves positive sanctity. We
know, for example, that cows are very holy in the greater part of India,
and buffaloes in the Deccan. Among the African peoples of the pastoral
tribes, the common food is milk and game; cattle are seldom slaughtered
merely to eat, and always on exceptional or sacred occasions--the
very occasions which elsewhere demand a human {332}victim--such as the
proclamation of a war, a religious festival, a wedding, or the
funeral of a great chieftain. In such cases, the feast is public, all
blood-relations having a natural right to attend. The cattle-kraal
itself is extremely sacred. The herd and its members are treated by
their masters with affectionate and almost brotherly regard.

A few further points must also be added. Among early races, to kill and
eat wild animals, or to kill and eat enemies, who are not members of the
tribe, is not accounted in any way wrong. But to kill a tribesman--to
shed kindred blood--is deeply sinful; and so it is sinful to kill and
eat the domestic herds. In old age, indeed, or when sick and feeble, you
may kill and eat your blood-relation blamelessly; and so you may also
kill and eat old or sickly cattle. But as a rule, you only eat them
sacramentally and sacrificially, under the same circumstances where
you would be justified in killing and eating a human victim. Thus, as
a rule, each tribe has its own sacred beast, which is employed as a
regular substitute for a man-god. Among the Arabs, this beast was a
camel; among the Indian peoples, the bull or the buffalo; among shepherd
races, it is the sheep or goat; among the Teutons, the horse; among
many settled urban peoples, the pig; and with the Samoyeds and Os-tiaks,
their one chattel, the reindeer.

Also, as a rule, the cow or other female animal was not usually
sacrificed; she was kept for milk-yielding. It was the bull, the ram,
the ox, the he-goat that was oftenest offered and eaten sacramentally.
Mere utilitarian considerations would soon lead to this use, just as our
own butchers kill ram lambs by choice, and spare the ewes for breeding.
The custom, once introduced, would tend to become sacred; for whatever
our divine ancestors did is itself divine, and should not be lightly or
carelessly altered. Hence we can understand that supreme sanctity of
the cow, which has made so many races refuse to sacrifice it, while they
sacrifice and eat the bull or ox without let or scruple. {333}Thus the
Todas have never eaten the flesh of the female buffalo; but the male
they eat once a year, sacramentally, all the adult men in the village
joining in the ceremony of killing and roasting it.

A remarkable instance of the theanthropic sacrifice of such a sacred
animal is given us in Nilus’s account of the ceremony performed by the
Arabs of his time. A holy camel, chosen as a victim, was bound upon a
rude cairn of piled-up stones. In this primitive altar we can hardly
fail to recognise the grave of an early tribal chieftain. The leader
of the band then led the worshippers thrice round the cairn in a solemn
procession, chanting a solemn hymn as they went. As the last words of
the hymn were sung, he fell upon the camel (like Potraj on the lamb),
wounded it, and hastily drank of the blood that gushed out from it.
Forthwith the whole company fell on the victim with their swords, hacked
off pieces of the quivering flesh, and devoured them raw with such wild
haste that between the rise of the day-star and that of the sun, the
entire camel, body and bones, skin, blood, and entrails, was absolutely
eaten. I need not point out the close resemblance of this savage rite to
those of Potraj and of Dionysus. It is a point, however, to observe that
here also the blood falls on the cairn or grave or altar. I may note
that the annual sacrifice of the paschal lamb among the shepherd Hebrews
is obviously a mere mitigation of this barbarous rite. In that case, as
might be expected in a more civilised race, the victim is roasted whole:
but it is similarly necessary that every part of it should be hastily
eaten. Legend further informs us, in the instance of the Passover, that
the lamb was a substitute for a human victim, and that the first-born
were sanctified to Jahweh, instead of being sacrificed. Note also that
the feast of the paschal lamb occupied the now familiar space of five
days: the sacred animal was chosen on the tenth day of the month, and
sacrificed on the fourteenth. The whole ceremonial is most illustrative
and full of survivals.

Though {334}it breaks for a moment the thread of my argument, I find it
impossible not to mention here the curious parallel case of the judicial
sacrifice among the Battas of Sumatra, which is the human analogue
of the Arabian camel-sacrament. Only in this instance, as in so many
others, sacrifice and punishment merge into one another. “With them
the adulterer, the night-thief, and those who had treacherously attacked
a town, a village, or a particular person, were condemned to be eaten
by the people. They were tied to three posts; their legs and their arms
were stretched out in the shape of a St. Andrew’s cross;and then, when
a signal was given, the populace rushed upon the body and cut it into
fragments with hatchets or with knives, or perhaps more simply with
their nails and their teeth. The strips so torn off were devoured
instantly, all raw and bloody; they were merely dipped into a cocoanut
bowl containing a sauce prepared beforehand of lemon-juice and salt.
In the case of adultery, the outraged husband had the right of choosing
first what piece he liked best. The guests invited to the feast
performed this work with so much ardour that they often tore and hurt
each other.” I do not think we can read this account without being
struck by its close analogy to many of our previous sacrifices, both of
human corn-gods and of sacred animals. The criminal is here nothing more
than the substitute for a holy human victim.

And now we must also remember that in most countries the gods were
housemates of their worshippers, present at all times in every home, and
partakers of every meal, side by side with the living. They lived in the
house, as still in New Guinea. Libations to them were poured from every
cup; food was offered to their ghosts or skulls or wooden images at
every family gathering. The ordinary feasts were thus mere enlarged
festal gatherings, at which a victim was sacrificially slain and
sacramentally eaten; and _the visitors believed they were eating the
body and blood of the god to their own salvation_. Greater sacrifices,
like the {335}hecatombs, or the heroic Indian horse-sacrifice, must have
been relatively rare; but in all of them we see clear proof that the
victim was regarded as a sacred animal, that is to say a god, in one of
his embodiments.

Clear evidence of this equivalence is seen in the fact that the
worshippers often clad themselves in the skin of the victim, as the
Mexicans did in the skin of the annual god. Sometimes the hide is
even used to deck the idol. In the Cyprian sacrifice of a sheep to the
sheep-goddess Aphrodite, the celebrants wore the skin of the sheep;
while the Assyrian Dagon-worshipper offered the fish-sacrifice to the
fish-god, clad in a fish-skin. Of similar import is doubtless the ægis
or goat-skin of Athena, envisaged as a goat-goddess, and the skins used
in the Dionysiac mysteries. I do not hesitate to affiliate all these on
a primitive usage like that of the Mexican cannibal sacrifice.

Having reached this point, we can see further that the case where a
sacred animal, the representative of a human victim, is slaughtered
before the altar of an older god is exactly equivalent to the
other known case where a human victim is slaughtered before the
foundation-stone of a town or village. In either case, there is a
distinct renewal of the divine life; fresh blood, as it were, is
instilled by the act into the ancient deity. All the other concomitants
are precisely the same. Thus at the Theban sacrifice of a ram to the
ram-god Amen, the worshippers bewailed the victim, as the women bewailed
Adonis and Attis; and the image of Amen was finally draped in the skin
of the victim, while its body was buried in a sacred coffin. At the
Buphonia or sacramental ox-slaying in Athens, there was a regular trial
after the victim was slain, everybody throwing the blame on one another,
till at last the knife that inflicted the wound was found guilty
of murder and cast into the sea. (This casting into the sea of a
guilt-bearer for the community will meet us again when we come to
consider the doctrine of the atonement.) So we saw that the Potraj fled
after the performance of his sanguinary sacrifice; and {336}so too
the slayer of the Dionysus-calf at Tenedos fled for his life when the
ceremony was completed. Indeed, we get many intermediate cases, like
that of the goat dressed up as a girl which was offered theanthropically
to Artemis Munychia, or that of the Dionysus-calf clad in buskins,
whose mother-cow was treated as a woman in child-birth. To me, all these
instances are obvious attempts to palm off, as it were, on the gods a
sacred animal in place of a genuine human victim. They are little
more than divine legal fictions, eked out, no doubt, by the fiction of
kinship between the herd and its masters.

As a whole, then, we may venture to say not perhaps that all, but that a
great number of sacrifices, and certainly the best-known among historic
nations, are slaughters of animal substitutes for human victims; and
that the flesh is sacramentally consumed by the worshippers.

There is one special form of this animal sacrifice, however, which I
cannot here pass over in complete silence. It is the one of which the
harvest-feast is the final relic. Mr. Frazer has fully worked out this
theme in his fascinating essay: to detail it here at length would occupy
too much space; I can only give the barest outline of his instances.
Originally, it would seem, the corn-god or corn-spirit was conceived
during the reaping as taking refuge in the last sheaf left standing.
Whoever cut that wisp of corn slew the corn-spirit, and was therefore,
on the analogy of the slayer of the divine king, himself the
corn-spirit. Mr. Frazer does not absolutely assert that this human
representative was originally killed and eaten, though all analogy
would seem to suggest it; but that he was at least killed is abundantly
certain; and killed he still is, in dumb show at any rate, on many
modern European corn-fields. More often, however, the corn-spirit is
supposed to be embodied in any animal which happens to be found in the
last sheaf, where even now small creatures like mice and hedgehogs often
take refuge. In earlier times, however, wolves, wild boars, and other
large animals {337}seem to have been frequently met with under similar
circumstances. However that may be, a great many beasts--generally
sacred beasts--are or have been sacramentally eaten as representatives
of the corn-god; while, conversely, the last sheaf is often made up
into the image of a man or still more often of a woman, and preserved
religiously for a year, like the annual king, till the next harvest.
Sometimes a cock is beheaded and eaten at the harvest feast, special
importance being here attached to its head, as to the head of the human
victim in so many other cases. Sometimes, as with the ancient Prussians,
it was the corn-goat whose body was sacramentally eaten. Sometimes, as
at Chambéry, an ox is slaughtered, and eaten with special rites by the
reapers at supper. Sometimes, it is the old sacred Teutonic animal, the
horse, that is believed to inhabit the last wisp of corn. I will add
parenthetically here (what I trust in some future work to show) that
we have probably in this and kindred ideas the origin of the sacred
and oracular heads of horses and oxen attached to temples or built into
churches. Sometimes, again, it is a pig that represents the god, and is
ceremonially eaten at the harvest festival.

I need hardly mention that all these sacred animals, substitutes for the
original human god, find their parallels in the festivals of Dionysus,
Attis, Osiris, Demeter, Adonis, Lityerses, and the other great corn and
wine gods of the historic civilisations.

But there is yet another and more sublimated form of sacramental feast.
Since the corn-god and the wine-god, when slain, undergo resurrection
in the corn and the vine, may we not also eat their bodies as bread, and
drink their blood as wine or soma?

To people already familiar, first with the honorific cannibal form
of god-eating, and then with its gentler animal-victim modification,
nothing could be more natural than this slight transference of feeling.
Nay, more: _whoever eat bread and drank wine from the beginning must
have known {338}it was the body and blood of a god he was eating and
drinking_. Still, there is a certain difference between mere ordinary
every-day food and the sacramental feast, to which sacred cannibalism
and animal-sacrifice had now familiarised men’s minds. Accordingly, we
find in many cases that there exists a special _sacramental_ eating and
drinking of bread and wine, which is more especially regarded as _eating
the body and drinking the blood of the deity_.

Some curious illustrative facts may here be cited. Since straw and corn
grow from the slaughtered corn-god, they may be regarded as one of his
natural embodiments. Hence, when human sacrifices are prohibited, people
sometimes make a straw god do duty for a human one. The Gonds, we saw,
used once to kidnap sacred Brahman boys--gods by race, as it were, yet
strangers and children--scatter their blood over the fields, and
eat their bodies sacramentally. But when the unsympathetic British
government interfered with the god-making habits of the Gond people,
they took, says Col. Dalton, to making an image of straw instead,
which they now similarly sacrifice. So it may be noted in many of the
ceremonies of “Burying the Carnival” and the like, which I have
already cited, that a straw man is substituted symbolically for the
human victim. Indeed, in that singular set of survivals we have every
possible substitute--the mock king, the imbecile, the pretended killing,
the ceremonial shedding of blood, the animal victim, and the straw man
or effigy. I may add that even the making of our modern Guy Fawkes as
“a man of straw” is thus no mere accident. But we get a very similar
use of corn in the curious practice of fashioning the corn-wife and the
corn-baby, so fully detailed by Mr. Frazer. In this attenuated survival
of human sacrifice, a sheaf of corn does duty for a human victim, and
represents the life of the corn-god or corn-spirit from one year to
another. All the existing evidence goes to suggest the idea that at
harvest a corn-maiden or corn-wife, after a year {339}of deification,
was slain in former times, and that the human victim is now represented
by her vegetable analogue or equivalent, the corn in the ear, a sheaf
of which does duty in her place, and reigns as corn-queen till the next
year’s harvest. The corn-baby is thus a temporary queen, made of corn,
not of human flesh and blood. We may compare with this case the account
of the Sioux girl who was sacrificed by the Pawnees, by being burned
over a slow fire, and then shot (like St. Sebastian) with arrows. The
chief sacrificer tore out her heart and devoured it, thus eating the
goddess in true cannibal fashion. While her flesh was still warm, it
was cut up into small pieces and taken to the corn-field. Drops of blood
were squeezed from it upon the grains of seed-corn; after which it was
all covered up in the ground to form a crop-raiser. Of such a ghastly
goddess-making ceremony, our seemingly innocent harvest comedy of the
corn-baby is probably the last surviving relic. Mr. Frazer rightly
connects it with the cult of the Athenian Korê, Persephone. I think,
indeed, the double form of the name, “the Old Woman” and “the
Corn-baby,” makes it probable that the pair are the vegetable
equivalents of both Demeter and her ravished daughter.

In other cases, however, it is the actual bread and wine themselves,
not the straw or the corn in the ear, that represent the god and are
sacramentally eaten. We owe to Mr. Frazer most of our existing knowledge
of the wide prevalence and religious importance of this singular ritual.

We have seen already that in many countries the first-fruits of the
crops are presented either to ancestral ghosts, or to the great gods,
or else to the king, who is the living god and present representative
of the divine ancestors. Till this is done, it would be unsafe to eat
of the new harvest. The god within it would kill you. But in addition to
the ceremonial offering of first-fruits to the spirits, many races also
“eat the god” in the new corn or rice sacramentally. In Wermland,
in Sweden, the farmer’s wife uses {340}the grain of the last sheaf (in
which, as we saw, the corn-god or corn-spirit is supposed specially to
reside), in order to bake a loaf in the shape of a little girl. Here
we have the maiden, who was previously sacrificed as a corn-goddess or
Persephone, reappearing once more in a bread image. This loaf is divided
among all the household and eaten by them. So at La Palisse in France, a
man made of dough is hung upon the fir-tree which is carried home to the
granary on the last harvest-waggon. The dough man and the tree are taken
to the mayor’s house till the vintage is over; then a feast takes
place, at which the mayor breaks the dough man in pieces, and gives the
fragments to the people to eat. Here, the mayor clearly represents
the king or chief, while the feast of first-fruits and the sacramental
eating are combined, as was perhaps originally the case, in one and the
same sacrificial ceremony. No particular mention is made of wine; but
as the feast is deferred so as to take place after the vintage, it
is probable that the blood of the wine-god as well as the body of the
corn-god entered once at least into the primitive ritual.

Many similar feasts survive in Europe; but for the rite of eating the
corn-god in its fullest form we must go once more to Mexico, which also
supplied us with the best and most thoroughly characteristic examples of
the cannibal god-eating. Twice a year, in May and December, an image of
the great Mexican god Huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in
pieces, and solemnly eaten by his assembled worshippers. Two days before
the May feast, says Acosta, the virgins of the temple kneaded beet-seeds
with roasted maize, and moulded them with honey into a paste idol, as
big as the permanent wooden idol which represented the god, putting in
glass beads for eyes, and grains of Indian corn in the place of teeth.
The nobles then brought the vegetable god an exquisite and rich garment,
like that worn by the wooden idol, and dressed the image up in it. This
done, the carried the effigy on a litter {341}on their shoulders, no
doubt to mark its royal authority. On the morning of the feast, the
virgins of the god dressed themselves in garlands of maize and other
festal attire. Young men, similarly caparisoned, carried the image in
its ark or litter to the foot of the great pyramid temple. It was
_drawn up the steps with clanging music of flutes and trumpets--a common
accompaniment of god-slaying ceremonies_. Flowers were strewed on it, as
was usual with all the gods of vegetation, and it was lodged in a little
chapel of roses. Certain ceremonies of singing and dancing then took
place, by means of which the paste was consecrated into the actual body
and bones of the god. Finally, the image was broken up and distributed
to the people, first the nobles, and then the commonalty, who received
it, men, women, and children, “with such tears, fear, and reverence
as if it were sacred, saying they did eat the flesh and bones of
God, wherewith they were grieved.” I need not point out the close
resemblance here to the mourning over the bodies of Attis and Adonis,
nor to the rites of Dionysus.

Still more closely does the December feast (which took place, like
Christmas, at the winter solstice) recall the cannibal practice; for
here an image of the god was made of seeds, kneaded into dough with
the blood of children. Such a Massacre of the Innocents occurs often
elsewhere in similar connexions: we shall meet with it again on a
subsequent occasion. The image was placed on the chief altar of the
temple, and on the day of its Epiphany, the king of Mexico offered
incense to it. Bambino gods like this are well known in other countries.
Next day it was taken down, and a priest flung at it a flint-tipped
arrow. This was called “killing the god so that his body might be
eaten.” One of the priests then cut out the heart of the image and
gave it to the actual king to eat, just as in other sacrifices the
priest cut out the throbbing heart of the human victim and placed it in
the mouth of the cannibal god. The rest of the image was divided into
small pieces, {342}which were distributed to all the males of the
community, adults or children. The ceremony was called “_God is
Eaten_.”

I will not multiply examples of the main principle of eating the
corn-god in the shape of little cakes or human images, which have been
collected in abundance all the world over. Mr. Frazer’s work is a
perfect thesaurus of analogous customs. I will rather call attention to
one or two special parallels with similar god-eating rites, cannibal
or animal, which occur elsewhere. At the close of the rice harvest in
Boeroe, in the East Indies, each clan meets at a common sacrificial
meal, to which every member of the clan is bound to contribute a little
of his new rice from the current season. This is called “eating the
soul of the rice.” But some of the rice is also set apart and offered
to the spirits--that is, I take it, to the ghosts of ancestors. This
combination is like the common case of the human victim being offered
on the altar-stone of earlier ancestral deities. Amongst the Alfoers
of Celebes, again, it is the priest who sows the first rice-seeds, and
plucks the first ripe rice in each field. This he roasts and grinds into
meal, giving some of it to each member of the family. Here the priest no
doubt represents the old tribal priest-king. Several similar practices
are reported from India, only one of which need at present detain us.
Among the Hindoos of the Deccan there is a magical and sacramental
eating of the new rice; but the special point of interest to be noted
here is the fact that some of it is offered to the god Ganesa, after
which the whole family partake of the produce. Among the Kafirs of
Natal and Zululand, however, it is at the king’s kraal that the people
assemble for their sacramental feast of new fruits, where they dance and
perform certain sacred ceremonies. In this case, the king, the living
god, seems to take the place of the god, the dead king, in the Indian
festival. Various grains are mixed with the flesh of a sacrificed
animal, in whom we shall now have perhaps little difficulty in
recognising the representative {343}of a human corn-god victim; and
_a portion of this mess is placed in the mouth of each man by the king
himself, here officiating in his capacity of ancestral priest_. By
the light of such analogies, I think we need have no hesitation
in reconstructing the primitive sacramental feast, where a man was
sacrificed as an annual manufactured corn-god; seeds were mixed with his
blood; his flesh was eaten sacramentally by the people, fed by the king;
a part of his body was also eaten by the king himself, and a part was
offered to the great gods, or to the tribal god, or the foundation god
or goddess of the village or city. After putting together the various
survivals already cited, I do not think this is too large an exercise of
the constructive faculty.

An interesting mixed case of god-eating, in which the cake was baked,
not in the form of a man, but of a divine animal, I have seen myself in
the house of Irish emigrants in Canada. The new corn was there made into
loaves or buns in the shape of little pigs, with currants for eyes; and
one of these was given to each of the children. Though merely regarded
as a playful custom, this instance, I venture to think, has still its
own illustrative value.

The practice of kneading sacramental cakes from the blood of infants,
which we saw to prevail in the case of a Mexican god, is parallelled
in the practice of mixing them with shreds of the flesh from an animal
victim in the Zulu ceremony. The cannibal form of the rite must,
however, have been very widespread; as we gather from the fact that a
Christian sect, the Paulicians, were accused of it as late as the eighth
century. John of Osun, Patriarch of Armenia, wrote a diatribe against
these sectaries, in which he mentions the fact that they moulded an
image of wheaten flower with the blood of children, and eat therewith
their unholy communion. Of course, there could have been no direct
intercourse in the ninth century between Armenia and Mexico; but
the accusation shows at least that similar ceremonies were known or
remembered in {344}Asia as actual practices. Indeed, the Harranians
in the middle ages annually sacrificed an infant, and boiling down
its flesh, baked it into cakes, of which every freeman was allowed to
partake. In both these cases, we have the two extremes of eating the
god combined in one practice--the cannibal rite and the sacramental
corn-cake.

Mr. Frazer calls attention to another interesting transitional instance.
Loaves made in the shape of men were called at Rome Maniæ; and it
appears that such loaves were specially made at Aricia. Now Aricia
was also the one place in Italy where a divine priest-king, the Rex
Nemoralis, lived on well recognised into the full blaze of the historic
period, on the old savage tenure of killing his predecessor. Again,
Mania was the name of the Mother or Grandmother of Ghosts. Woollen
images, dedicated to this Latin Cybele, were hung out in Rome at the
feast of the Compitalia, and were said to be substitutes for human
victims. Mr. Frazer suggests that the loaves in human form which were
baked at Aricia were sacramental bread; and that in old days, when the
Rex Nemoralis was annually slain, loaves were also made in his image
as in Mexico, and were eaten sacramentally by his worshippers. I do not
hesitate myself to suggest still further that the _gingerbread cakes,
shaped like a man_, and still richly gilt, which are sold at so many
fairs in France and Italy, and also sometimes in England, are last dying
relics of similar early sacramental images. For fairs are for the most
part diminished survivals of religious festivals.

As the theanthropic animal victim represents a man and a god, it is
reasonable that a cake shaped as an animal and baked of flour should
sometimes do as well as the animal victim. For the corn is after all the
embodiment of the corn-god. Hence bakers in the antique world used
to keep in stock representations in dough of the various sacrificial
animals, for people who were too poor to afford the originals. Oxen and
sheep were regularly so represented. When Mithridates besieged
Cyzicus, and the people {345}could not get a black cow to sacrifice to
Persephone, they made a dough cow and placed it at the altar. At
the Athenian festival of the Diasia, cakes shaped like animals were
similarly sacrificed; and at the Osiris festival in Egypt, when the
rich offered a real pig, the poor used to present a dough pig as a
substitute, like the dough pig of the Irish Canadians.

But in many other rites, the sacramental and sacrificial cake has
entirely lost all semblance of a man or animal. The god is then eaten
either in the shapeless form of a boiled mess of rice or porridge, or in
a round cake or loaf, without image of any sort, or in a wafer stamped
with the solar or Christian cross. Instances of this type are familiar
to everyone.

More closely related still to primitive cannibalism is the curious
ritual of the Sin-Eater, so well elaborated by Mr. Sidney Hartland. In
Upper Bavaria, what is called a corpse-cake is kneaded from flour, and
placed on the breast of a dead person, in order to absorb the virtues
of the departed. This cake is then eaten by the nearest relation. In the
Balkan peninsula, a small image of the dead person was made in bread
and eaten by the survivors of the family. These are intermediate stages
between cannibalism and the well-known practice of sin-eating.

I hope I have now made clear the general affiliation which I am seeking
to suggest, if not to establish. My idea is that in the beginning
certain races devoured their own parents, or parts of them, so as to
absorb the divine souls of their forebears into their own bodies.
Later, when artificial god-making became a frequent usage, especially
in connexion with agriculture, men eat the god, or part of him, for a
similar reason. But they likewise eat him as the corn or yam or rice,
sacramentally. When thean-thropic victims were substituted for the
man-god, they eat the theanthropic victim in like manner. Also they made
images in paste of both man and beast, and, treating these as compounded
of the god, similarly sacrificed and eat them. {346}And they drank his
blood, in the south as wine, in the north as beer, in India as soma. If
this line of reconstruction be approximately correct, then sacraments
as a whole are in the last resort based upon survival from the cannibal
god-feast.

_It is a significant fact that in many cases, as at the Potraj festival,
the officiating priest drinks the blood of the divine victim, while the
laity are only permitted to eat of its body_.




CHAPTER XVI.--THE DOCTRINE OF THE ATONEMENT.

|ONE {347}more element of some importance yet remains in the complex
conception of the human or animal victim, or slain god, which we must
briefly examine before we can proceed with advantage to the evolution
of Christianity; I mean the doctrine of piacular sacrifice--or, in other
words, of the atonement.

“_Without shedding of blood,” says the author of one of the earliest
Christian tractates, “there is no remission of sin_.” This is a
common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is regarded, not
merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or incarnate
god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed. “_Behold the Lamb
of God,” says the Baptist in the legend, “which taketh away the sins
of the world_.”

This idea, I take it, is not primitive. Sin must be regarded as a late
ethical intruder into the domain of religion. Early man for the most
part takes his gods joyously. He is on the best of terms with them. He
eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. They join in his phallic
and bacchanalian orgies. They are not great moral censors, like the
noble creation of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold
iniquity.” They are creatures of like passions and failings with
himself,--dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human
frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the
most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen.
Angry they may be at times, {348}no doubt; but their anger as a rule
can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered
goats and bulls. Under normal circumstances, they are familiar
housemates. Their skulls or images adorn the hearth. They assist at the
family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or
wine made to them with a smiling countenance. In short, they are average
members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they
continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and
merry-makings of their relatives.

Thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a
temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most
primitive religions. It is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude
themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is
primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the
gods, makes itself slowly visible. In many cases, later glosses seem to
put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy
a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. But in more
consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains
ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of
communion or feasting together. Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of
as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this
is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the
hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in many works of Hellenic and Semitic
literature.

In particular, the piacular sacrifice seems to have crystallised and
solidified round the sacred person of the artificial deity. “The
accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people,” says Mr.
Frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to
bear them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.”
“Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” says one
of the Hebrew poets, whose verses are conjecturally attributed {349}to
Isaiah, about one such divine scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him
stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our
transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of
our peace was upon him, and with his stripes are we healed. Jahweh hath
laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”

The ideas here expressed in such noble language were common to all the
later man-gods of the more advanced and ethical religions.

Mr. Frazer is probably right in connecting the notion of the scapegoat,
human or animal, with _the popular barbaric idea of the transference of
evils_. Thus, in popular magic of all nations, diseases of every sort,
from serious fevers and plagues, down to headache, toothache, warts, and
sores, are transferred by some simple ceremony of witchcraft to animals,
rags, or other people. I will quote examples but briefly. Epilepsy is
made over to leaves and thrown away in the Malay Archipelago. Toothache
is put into a stone in Australia. A Bechuana king gave his illness to
an ox, which was drowned in his stead, to secure his recovery. Mr. Gomme
quotes a terrible story of a Scotch nobleman who transferred his mortal
disease to his brother by a magical ceremony. “Charms” for fever or
for warts generally contain some such amiable element of transferring
the trouble to a string, a rag, or a piece of paper, which is flung away
to carry the evil with it to the person who next touches it. Numerous
cases of like implication may be found in the works of Mr. Gomme and Mr.
Hartland, to which I would refer enquirers after further evidence.

Closely connected with these notions of transference are also the
occasional or periodical ceremonies undertaken for the expulsion of
evils from a village or a community. Devils, demons, hostile spirits,
diseases, and other misfortunes of every sort are frequently thus
expelled with gongs, drums, and other magical instruments. Often the
boundaries of the tribe or parish are gone over, a {350}perlustration
is performed, and the evil influences are washed out of the territory or
forcibly ejected. Our own rite of Beating the Bounds represents on one
of its many sides this primitive ceremony. Washings and dippings are
frequent accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in Peru, it was also
bound up with that common feature of the corn-god sacrament--a cake
kneaded with the blood of living children. The periodical exorcism
generally takes place once a year, but is sometimes biennial: it has
obvious relations with the sacrifice of the human or animal victim.
In Europe, it still survives in many places as the yearly expulsion of
witches. The whole subject has been so admirably treated by Mr. Frazer
that I have nothing to add to his excellent exposition.

Putting these two cardinal ideas together, we arrive at the compound
conception of the _scapegoat_. A scapegoat is a human or animal victim,
chosen to carry off, at first the misfortunes or diseases, later the
sin and guilt of the community. The name by which we designate it
in English, being taken from the derivative Hebrew usage, has animal
implications; but, as in all analogous cases, I do not doubt that the
human evil-bearer precedes the animal one.

A good example of this incipient stage in the evolution of the scapegoat
occurs at Onitsha, on the Quorra River. Two human beings are there
annually sacrificed, “to take away the sins of the land”--though
I suspect it would be more true to native ideas to say, “the
misfortunes.” The number two, as applied to the victims, crops
up frequently in this special connexion. The victims here again are
“bought with a price”--purchased by public subscription. All persons
who during the previous year have committed gross offences against
native ethics are expected to contribute to the cost of the victims. Two
sickly people are bought with the money, “one for the land and one for
the river.” The victims are dragged along the ground to the place
of execution, face downward. The crowd who accompany {351}them cry,
“Wickedness! wickedness!” So in Siam it was customary to choose
a broken-down woman of evil life, carry her on a litter through the
streets (which is usually a symbol of kingship or godhead) and throw her
on a dunghill or hedge of thorns outside the wall, forbidding her ever
again to enter the city. In this eastern case, there is mere expulsion,
not actual killing.

In other instances, however, the divine character attributed to the
human scapegoat is quite unmistakable. Among the Gonds of India, at the
festival of the god of the crops, the deity descends on the head of
one of the worshippers, who is seized with a fit, and rushes off to the
jungle. There, it is believed he would die of himself, if he were not
brought back and tenderly treated: but the Gonds, more merciful here
than in many other cases, take him back and restore him. The idea is
that he is thus singled out to bear the sins of the rest of the village.
At Halberstadt in Thuringia an exactly similar custom survived till
late in the middle ages. A man was chosen, stained with deadly sin,
as the public scapegoat. On the first day of Lent he was dressed in
mourning, and expelled from church. For forty days, he wandered about,
fed only by the priests, and no one would speak to him. He slept in the
street. On the day before Good Friday, however, he was absolved of
his sins, and being called Adam, was believed to be now in a state
of innocence. This is a mitigated and Christianised form of the human
sin-offering.

Again, the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of sacred
slaves in the temple of the moon, many of whom were inspired and
prophesied. When one of these men exhibited unusual symptoms of
inspiration, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain, and
maintained for a year in luxury, like the Mexican corn-god. This fact
immediately brings the human scapegoat into line with the annual human
gods we have already considered. At the end of a year, he was anointed
with unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and led forth to be
sacrificed. {352}The sacrifice was accomplished as a purificatory
ceremony.

Mr. Frazer, to whom I owe all these examples, connects with such rites
the curious ceremony of the expulsion of the Old Mars, the Mamurius
Veturius, at Rome. Every year on the 14th of March (near the spring
equinox), a man, called by the name of a god, was clad in skins--the
significance of which rite we now know--and after being beaten with
long white rods, was expelled the city. From one point of view, this
personage no doubt represented the god of vegetation of the previous
year (for the Mars was originally an annual corn-god). But from another
point of view, being now of no further use to the community, he was
utilised with true old Roman parsimony as a scapegoat, and sent to carry
away the offences of the people. Indeed, there seems to be some reason
for believing that he was driven into the territory of the hostile
Oscans. In this case we perceive that an annual god is made the
sin-offering for the crimes of a nation.

In Greece, we get similar traces of the human scapegoat. At Chæronea in
Boeotia, the chief magistrate at the town-hall, and every householder in
his own house, as we learn from Plutarch (who was himself a magistrate
there) had on a certain day to beat a slave with rods of _agnus castus_,
and turn him out of doors, with the formula, “Out, hunger! in, health
and wealth!” Elsewhere the custom retained more unpleasant features.
At Marseilles, when the colony was ravaged by plague, a man of the
poorer classes used voluntarily to offer himself as a sin-offering or
scapegoat. Here we have once more the common episode of the willing
victim. For a whole year, like other annual gods, he was fed at the
public expense, and treated as a gentleman--that is to say, a kingly
man-god. At the end of that time, he was dressed in sacred garments
--another mark of godship--decked with holy branches, the common
insignia of gods of vegetation, and led through the city, while prayers
were offered up that the sins of {353}the people might fall on his
head. He was then cast out of the colony. The Athenians kept a number of
outcasts as public victims at the expense of the town; and when plague,
drought, or famine befell, sacrificed two of them (note the number) as
human scapegoats. One was said to be a substitute for the men, and one
for the women. They were led about the city (like Beating the Bounds
again) and then apparently stoned to death without it. Moreover,
periodically every year, at the festival of the Thargelia, two victims
were stoned to death as scapegoats at Athens, one for the men, and one
for the women. I would conjecturally venture to connect this sacred
number, not merely with the African practice already noted, but also
with the dual kings at Sparta, the two consuls at Rome, and the two
suffetes at Carthage and in other Semitic cities. The duality of kings,
indeed, is a frequent phenomenon.

I can only add here that the many other ceremonies connected with these
human scapegoats have been well expounded and explained by Mannhardt,
who shows that they were all of a purificatory character, and that the
scourging of the god before putting him to death was a necessary point
of divine procedure. Hence the significance of the _agnus castus_.

Briefly, then, the evidence collected by Mannhardt and Frazer suffices
to suggest that the human scapegoat was the last term of a god,
condemned to death, upon whose head the transgression or misfortunes of
the community were laid as substitute. He was the vicarious offering who
died for the people.

It is only here and there, however, that the scapegoat retains to
historical times his first early form as a human victim. Much more
often, in civilised lands at least, we get the usual successive
mitigations of the custom. Sometimes, as we have seen already in these
cases, the victim is not actually killed, but merely expelled, or
even only playfully and ceremonially driven out of the city. In other
instances, {354}we get the familiar substitution of the condemned
criminal, or the imbecile, as in the Attic Thargelia.’ The Greeks of
Asia Minor used actually to burn their atonement-victim, and cast his
ashes into the sea; but the Leucadians merely threw down a condemned
prisoner from a cliff, and lightened his fall by fastening live birds
to him, while they kept boats below to save him from drowning, and carry
him well beyond the frontier. In the vast majority of cases, however, we
have the still more common substitution of a sacred animal for a human
victim; and this appears to be in large part the origin of that common
religious feature, the piacular sacrifice.

Occasionally we get historical or half-historical evidence of the
transition from a human victim to a divine or quasidivine animal. Thus,
the people of Nias offer either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the
land; but formerly, a man was bound to the same stake with the buffalo,
and when the buffalo was killed, the man was driven away, no native
daring to receive him or feed him. The sacrificial camel of the ancient
Arabs, presumably piacular, is expressly stated to be a substitute for
a human victim. The favourite victims of the Saracens were young and
beautiful captives: but if such were not to be procured, they contented
themselves with a white and faultless camel. The step hence to the
habitual immolation or driving forth of a divine animal in place of a
divine or quasi-divine man is a very small one. In Malabar, the cow is
a sacred beast, and to kill or eat a cow is a crime like murder.
Nevertheless, the Brahmans transfer the sins of the people to a cow
or cows, which are then driven out wherever the Brahmans appoint. The
ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice a bull, and lay upon its head all
the evils which might otherwise happen to themselves and their country;
then they sold the bull’s head to the Greeks, or flung it into the
river. (Contrast this effort to get rid of the accursed head with the
careful preservation and worship of the sacred one.) The best-known case
of all, of course, is the Hebrew scapegoat, which was {355}the sacred
animal of a shepherd people, turned out to die of hunger or thirst in
the desert, and bearing on its head the sins of the people. (Contrast
the scapegoat with the paschal lamb, and compare with the goats and
sheep of the last judgment.) When cholera rages among the aboriginal
tribes of India, they take a goat or a buffalo--in either case a female,
the most sacred sex in Indian sacrifice, and black all over, like Apis
and Mnevis; they turn it out of the village, with magical ceremonies,
and do not allow it to return within their precincts. In many other
similar poojahs, the victim is a goat. Mr. Frazer has collected, here as
elsewhere, a vast number of valuable and illustrative instances.

As a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not
actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven
away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst.
Sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned,
and sometimes slaughtered. And in later and less perfect forms of
piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning
had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the
various elements of the complex problem. People had got accustomed to
certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that
one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial,
and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr. Robertson Smith writes of ancient
Egypt: “Bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten
in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a
piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public
lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” Compare the annual
mourning for Adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament,
and atonement in the Mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of
the Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the
solemn mourning of Good Friday.

Now, I do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these {356}very
mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. Often
enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of
public expiation are evidently present. Usually, too, the victim is
slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god,
and its blood poured forth for him. Thus, in the Hebrew ritual both of
the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar,
“before Jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has
a special significance. In the Semitic held, as Dr. Robertson Smith
observes (and I would add, in most others), “_the fundamental idea
of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion
between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the
living flesh and blood of a sacred victim_.” But the identity of
god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the
sheep-Aphrodite was worshipped in Cyprus with an annual mystic and
piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad
in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to
us.

On the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, I will not
attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed
ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. Most sacrifices seem in the last
resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. Most seem to be
sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. I do not
even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of
rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by
consideration of numerous mixed examples, I have always placed
each particular fact in its best and most effective position for
illustration. The elements of the problem are so involved and so closely
interosculating. For instance, I do not doubt that the great Phoenician
and Carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which I was compelled at
first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor
do I doubt that the Greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was
a mitigation or attenuation {357}of such gigantic human holocausts as
these, or as those attributed to the British Druids. Asclepiades states
expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for
human sacrifice; and so, in the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt
sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of Isaac, the
dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, Abraham, intends to offer as
a royal victim to his tribal god. Abraham says that the god himself
will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers
itself. So at the great temple of Astarte at Eryx, where the victims
were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the
chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the
altar. At the Dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven
together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which
voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only
showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first
because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he
swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity.
(Compare, of course, the Hebrew shewbread.) I need not pursue this line
of thought any further. _It must be obvious that many sacrifices at
least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in
most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal
form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I
point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline
theology_.

I would like to add, however, that the ideas here formulated must give
a new meaning to many points we could not at first understand in
ceremonies mentioned in our earlier chapters. I will take only
one example--that of the place of Samoyed sacrifice which Baron
Nordenskiôld saw on Vaygats Island. We can now divine the meaning of
the heap of reindeer skulls piled around the rude open-air shrine; for
reindeer are the sacred and the-anthropic animals of the northern races;
while the preservation {358}of their heads at the hypœthral altar of
the elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and oracular meaning. We
can also guess why remains of a fireplace could be seen by the side, at
which the sacrificial and sacramental meal was habitually prepared; and
why the mouths of the idols were smeared with blood, in order to make
the older gods or ghosts participators in the festival. Indeed, any
reader who has followed me thus far, and who now turns back to the
earlier chapters of this book, will find that many details appear to him
in quite a different light, and will see why I have insisted beforehand
on some minor points which must have seemed to him at the time wholly
irrelevant.

Many other curious ceremonies that seem equally meaningless at first in
narratives of travel will also come to have a significant meaning when
thus regarded. For instance. Mr. Chalmers tells us that among the New
Guinea natives of particular districts, “pigs are never killed but
in the one place, and then they are offered to the spirit. The blood is
poured out there, and the carcase is then carried back to the village,
to be divided, cooked, and eaten. Pigs’ skulls are kept and hung up
in the house. Food for a feast, such as at house-building”--a most
pregnant hint--“is placed near the post where the skulls hang, and
a prayer is said. When the centre-post is set up, the spirits have
wallaby, fish, and bananas presented to them, and they are besought to
keep that house always full of food, and that it may not fall when the
wind is strong.” If we recall other cases elsewhere, we can hardly
doubt that the pigs in these instances are killed as sacred victims at
the grave of the chief family ancestor; especially when Mr. Chalmers
also tells us that “each family has a sacred place where they
carry offerings to the spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they greatly
fear.” When sickness, famine, or scarcity of fish occur, it is these
spirits that have to be appeased. And if we recollect once more that in
so many cases the central post of the hut is based on a human or animal
victim, both {359}in New Guinea and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that
to this household god or foundation-ghost the offerings at the central
post are presented. Finally, the skulls of the pigs which are kept in
the house and hung on the post remind us on the one hand of the skulls
of ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on the other hand of the
skulls of theanthropic victims kept by the people of India at their
festivals, or fastened by early Greeks and Romans on their temples.
“They cook the heads of their slain enemies,” says Mr. Chalmers
again, “to secure clean skulls to put on sacred places.” Adequately
to develop the hints thus suggested, however, would require another book
as long as the present one.

Yet here is just one more such hint, from the same author, too pregnant
to be omitted.

“When the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas
and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation, and call over
the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding: ‘There is
your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let
it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentiful, you all will be
full of shame, and so shall we.’

“When they go on trading expeditions, they present their food to
the spirits at the centre-post of the house, and ask the spirits to
go before them and prepare the people, so that the trading may be
prosperous.

“When sickness is in the family, a pig is brought to the sacred place
of the great spirit” (probably the chief ancestral ghost), “and
killed. The carcase is then taken to the sacred place of the family, and
the spirits are asked to accept it. Sins are confessed, such as bananas
that are taken, or cocoanuts, and none have been presented, and leave
not given to eat them. ‘There is a pig; accept, and remove the
sickness.’ Death follows, and the day of burial arrives. The friends
all stand round the open grave, and the chief’s sister or cousin”
(the primitive priestess) “calls out in a loud voice, ‘You have been
angry with us for {360}the bananas we have taken (or cocoanuts, as the
case may be), and you have, in your anger, taken this child. Now let it
suffice, and bury your anger.’ The body is then placed in the grave,
and covered over with earth.”

Here we have in brief a perfect epitome of savage theology, savage
ceremonial, and savage atonement. I could enlarge not a little on its
numerous implications.

A single quotation from Mr. Savage Landor’s work on The Hairy Ainu
of Japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic
barbaric theology. “If they have any belief at all,” he says, “it
is an imperfect kind of Totemism, and the central point of that belief
is their own descent from the bear. This does not include the smallest
reverence for their ancestor. They capture their Totem and keep it in
captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to
it. When the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated
and baited by all the men present.” Like the Khond Meriah and the
tortures of martyrs. “It is tied to a stake” or _stauros_ or
accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor
beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks,
shot at with blunted arrows,” like St. Sebastian, “bruised with
stones,” like St. Stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is
killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish
and _raison d’etre_ of a festival, where all the members of the tribe
partake of its flesh. The owner of the hut in which the feast takes
place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside
with the others at the east end of his hut. The skin is made into
garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” Here, I need hardly
say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use
of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of
theanthropic substitution.

It is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal
points: _first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected
as a convenient vehicle for the {361}sins of the people; and second,
that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.”_
These two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but
especially in that Eastern Mediterranean world where Christianity was
first evolved. Indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the
writers of the earliest Christian tractates, the Apostolic Epistles,
take them for granted as self-evident--as principles of which every
intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency.




CHAPTER XVII.--THE WORLD BEFORE CHRIST.

|Christianity {362}grew. It was a natural product. It did not spring,
full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang from the head
of Zeus. It was not even invented by any little group or school of men,
Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church
of Jerusalem, Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew--slowly. It
developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual
stages in all the teeming centres of the Roman world; and even after it
had assumed a consistent form as the Holy Catholic Church, it still
went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends,
but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican
Council to the last new departure of the last new group of American
sectaries.

Christianity grew--in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities
of the Roman empire--in Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Cyrene,
Byzantium, Rome. Its highway was the sea. Though partly Jewish in
origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal
and international religion. Therefore we may gain some approximate
knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious
condition of these various great towns at the time when Christianity
began to spring spontaneous in their midst. We can arrive at some idea
of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was
evolved.

Once more, Christianity grew--for the most part among {363}the lower
orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself among the
slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish, Syrian, and African immigrants,
the Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the petty shopkeepers, the
pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres.
Hence, while based upon Judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all
those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were
common to the whole world, and especially to the Eastern Mediterranean
basin. Furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular
those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the
popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised,
Hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. It
was a democratic rather than an official product. We have to look,
therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious
thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould
Christianity. I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched
and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from
Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic
systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the
root-stratum of religious practice and belief in Antioch and Alexandria,
in Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and Rome. _It based itself above
all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection_. Yet again,
Christianity originated first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or
Semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very
moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no
doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors,
slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest
adherents. Hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of Judaism
with the central ideas of the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of
the Mediterranean basin. We must expect in it much that was common
in Syria, Asia Minor, Hellas, and Egypt,--something even from Gaul,
Hispania, Carthage. Its first o w great {364}apostle, if we may believe
our authorities, was one Saul or Paul, a half-Hellenised Jew of Semitic
and commercial Tarsus in Cilicia, and a Roman citizen. Its first great
churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the Levant. _Its very
name of Christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan
city of Antioch_.

It is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of Hellenised
and Romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of
Christianity.

Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle
of the new religion. _I do not mean that Jerusalem was not very probably
the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric
Christ-worshippers, or that Galilee was not the region where the Christ
himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever
really existed_. In those matters the traditions handed down to us in
the relatively late Gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they
may not. But Christianity as we know it, the Christianity of the Pauline
epistles and the later writings, such as the Gospels and the works
of the Fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider Syrian and
Gentile growth. It embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered
on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in
Judæa itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly
and official Jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the
popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of
northern Syria.

Antioch, where Christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a
handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the Greek Seleucid
kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the Syrian area. _At the time
of Paul (if there was a Paul)_, it probably contained half a million
people; it was certainly the largest town in Asia, and worthy to be
compared with Rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. Many things
about its position are deserving of notice. It stood upon the banks
of the Orontes, a {365}sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural
plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at
Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of Syria and
the east towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterranean in front connected
it with Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the caravan routes across
the Syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of
Mesopotamia and the remoter east. It was thus the main entrepôt of the
through trade between two important worlds. The Venice of its time,
it lay at the focal point where the highroads of Europe and of Asia
converged.

Scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the
days of Paul, Buddhist ideas from India seem to have dribbled through
and affected the Syrian world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later
dribbled through and affected the thought of Alexandria: and some
importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the
mystical east. Now, I do not care to deny that budding Christianity may
have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical
side by floating elements of Buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the
Christ may have been nursed by the Magi. But on the whole I think the
facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial
human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will
suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth.
The native soil contained already every essential element that was
needed to feed it--the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the
Man-God, the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension.
So that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international
position of Antioch, as the double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and Asia,
I am not inclined to think that points peculiar to Buddhism need
have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new
religion. For we must remember that Buddhism itself did but subsume
into its own fabric ideas {366}which were common to Peru and Mexico, to
Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt, and which came out in fresh forms,
surging up from below, in the creed of Christendom. _If anything is
clear from our previous researches it is this--that the world has never
really had more than one religion--“of many names, a single central
shape,”_ as the poet phrases it.

The Syrian people, Semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the
rest of the eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion of the successors
of Alexander. A quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they
underwent rapid and facile Hellenisation. It was an easy task for them
to accept Greek culture and Greek religion. The worshipper of Adonis had
little difficulty in renaming his chief god as Dionysus and continuing
to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after
the ancestral pattern. The Astarte whom the east had given to
Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite, came back again as Aphrodite to
Astarte’s old sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and cults were but
simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in
origin and function. Thus the easy-going Syrian had few scruples about
practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting
to the hospitality of his Semitic temples the Hellenic deities of the
reigning Antiochi.

The Seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to
impose the alien gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the southern
mountains. Antiochus IV. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of
intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom of Palestine. He reckoned
without his hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would not away with his
“idolatrous” rites--would not permit the worship of Zeus and Pallas,
of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of
Jahweh. The rebellion of the Maccabees secured at least the religious
independence of Judæa from the early Seleucid period down to the days
of Vespasian and Titus. Lower Syria remained true in her arid hills
{367}to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the God of Israel. And at
the same time the Jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries,
carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his
ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.

In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorption of Syria, a most
cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled
Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a
way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. And among the
popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of
Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte, and of the local gods or
goddesses, the Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we
learnt from Malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the
city, and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or Fortune. _In other
words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the
death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all
been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of Antioch and of Syria in
general_.

Let us note here, too, that the particular group of Jah-weh-worshippers
among whom the Christ is said to have found his personal followers, were
not people of the priestly type of Jerusalem, but Galilæan peasants of
the northern mountains, separated from the most orthodox set of Jews by
the intrusive wedge of heretical Samaritans, and closely bordering on
the heathen Phoenician seaboard--“the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.”
Here Judaism and heathenism marched together; here Jahweh had his
worshippers among the fishers of the lake, while Hellenism had fixed
itself in the statelier villas of Tiberias and Ptole-mais.

Alexandria was another of the great cosmopolitan seaport towns where
Christianity made its earliest converts, and assumed not a few of its
distinctive tenets. Now, in Alexandria, Hellenism and the immemorially
ancient Egyptian religion found themselves face to face at very close
{368}quarters. It is true, the town in its historical aspect was mainly
Greek, founded by the great Macedonian himself, and priding itself on
its pure Hellenic culture. But the mass of the lower orders who thronged
its alleys must surely have consisted of more or less mongrel Egyptians,
still clinging with all the old Egyptian conservatism to the ideas and
practices and rites of their fathers. Besides these, we get hints of a
large cosmopolitan seafaring population, among whom strange faiths and
exotic gods found ready acceptance. Beside the stately forms of the
Greek pantheon, and the mummified or animal-headed Egyptian deities,
the imported Syrian worship of Adonis had acquired a firm footing;
_the annual festival of the slaughtered god was one of the principal
holidays_; and other Syrian or remoter faiths had managed to secure
their special following. The hybrid Serapis occupied the stateliest fane
of the hybrid city. In that huge and busy hive, indeed, every form of
cult found a recognised place, and every creed was tolerated which did
not inculcate interference with the equal religious freedom of others.

The Ptolemaic family represents in itself this curious adaptability of
the Græco-Egyptian Alexandrian mind. At Alexandria and in the Delta,
the kings appear before us as good Hellenes, worshipping their ancestral
deities in splendid temples; but in the Thebaid, the god Ptolemy or
the goddess Cleopatra erected buildings in honor of Ptah or Khem in
precisely the old Egyptian style, and appeared on their propyla in the
guise of Pharaohs engaged in worshipping Amen-Ra or Osiris. The great
Alexander himself had inaugurated this system when he gave himself out
as the son of “Zeus Ammon”; and his indirect representatives carried
it on throughout with a curious dualism which excused itself under the
veil of arbitrary identifications. Thus Serapis himself was the dead
Apis bull, invested with the attributes of an Osiris and of the Hellenic
Hades; while Amen-Ra was Zeus in an Egyptian avatar.

The large Jewish colony at Alexandria also prepared the way {369}for the
ultimate admixture of Neo-Platonism in the Christian faith; while _the
Egyptian belief in Triads of gods formed the groundwork for the future
doctrine of the Trinity_, so doggedly battled for by the Alexandrian
Athanasius. It is true that Ampère and Preller have strenuously denied
any Egyptian admixture in the philosophy of Alexandria; and their
reasoning may be conclusive enough as to the upper stratum of thought:
but it must at least be admitted that popular belief in the city of the
Ptolemies must have been deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of
its Egyptian substratum. Now, in the growth of Christianity, it was
the people who counted, not the official classes, the learned, or the
philosophic. We must not attribute to the population of the East End of
London the theology of Pusey or the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.

Christianity would seem also to have taken part at least of its form in
Rome. And as Roman influence extended likewise over every portion of
the vast empire, I must say a very few words here about the origin and
growth of the Roman religion.

That religion, as it comes upon us in the few glimpses we get of its
early Italic and pre-Hellenised form, was one of the rudest and most
primitive type, almost savage in its extreme simplicity. It knew hardly
any great gods by name: the few deities it possessed, it expressed only
for the most part by adjectival names. Few, I say, as to type, for as to
number of individuals, their name indeed was legion; they pervaded
the whole, world in that reckless multiplicity which distinguishes the
simple ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral peoples. With
the Romans, this multiplicity, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into a
relatively settled and civilised agricultural condition. A vast number
of small departmental gods, with few or no great ones--that is the first
state of the Roman pantheon.

The central point of old Roman religion was clearly the household;
the family ghosts or _lares_ were the most honoured {370}gods. We may
instructively compare Mr. Chalmers’s account of the theology of New
Guinea. Beside these ancestral shades, or almost identical with them,
came the _pénates_ or practical deities of the store-room, perhaps the
representatives of the victims slain as foundation-ghosts at the first
erection of the building. Of these two, the Lares were undoubtedly the
departed ancestors of the family; they lived near the spot where they
were first buried (for the old Romans were buriers), and they still
presided over the household as in life, like its fathers and senators.
They were worshipped daily with prayers and simple offerings of food
and drink; their masks or busts which hung on the wall were perhaps the
representatives, or in ancient days the coverings, of the old oracular
heads or skulls; for the skulls themselves may have been preserved in
wax, as so often elsewhere at an earlier period. * The Penates, which
were worshipped with the Lares, seem to have stood for the family spirit
in a more generalised way; they represent the continuity and persistence
of its Fortune; and therefore, if we may trust the analogy of the
Fortune of a town, they are probably the ghosts of the foundation or
renewal victims. In judging of all this, we cannot attach too great
importance to the analogy of Negritto and Polynesian customs.

     * To this use of the oracular head I would venture also to
     refer the common employment of small masks as amulets: an
     employment which, as Bottiger rightly remarks, explains “the
     vast number of such subjects met with in antique gems.”

Other deities are more public. But most of them seem to belong to the
simplest and most immediately ghost-like stratum. They had to do with
sowing, reaping, and vintage--in other words, were corn or wine gods. Or
else they had to do with the navigable river, the Tiber, and the port
of Ostia, which lay at its mouth--in other words, were spring and river
gods. Or else they had to do with war and expeditions--in other words
were slaughtered campaign gods of the Iphigenia pattern, Bellonas and
battle-victims.

Among {371}this dim crowd of elder manufactured deities, Saturnus, the
sowing god, was most likely an annual corn-victim; his adjectival name
by itself suggests that conclusion. Terminus, the boundary god, is
already familiar to us. About these two at least we can hardly be
mistaken. A red-haired man (as in Egypt) no doubt preceded as yearly
corn-victim the red-haired puppies still slaughtered for the crops
within the ken of Festus. Seia, Segetia, Tutilina, the successive
corn-deities, we have already considered. They seem to equate with the
successive maidens slain for the corn in other communities, and still
commemorated in our midst by the corn-baby and the corn-wife. At each
stage of age in the corn, a corresponding stage in the age of the human
victim was considered desirable. But how reconcile this idea with the
existence of numerous petty functional deities--gods of the door and
the hinge?--with the Cunina who guards the child in the cradle, and the
Statina who takes care of him when he begins to stand? I answer, all
these are but adjectival gods, mere ghosts or spirits, unknown in
themselves, but conceived as exercising this particular function. “The
god that does so-and-so” is just a convenient expression, no more;
it serves its purpose, and that was enough for the practical Roman. How
readily they could put up with these rough-and-ready identifications we
know in the case of Aius Locutius and of the Deus Rediculus.

Each Terminus and each Silvanus is thus the god or protecting ghost
of each boundary stone or each sacred grove--not a proper name, but a
class--not a particular god, but a _kind_ of spirit. The generalised and
abstract gods are later unifications of all the individuals included
in each genus. The Janus, I take it, was at first the victim once
sacrificed annually before each gate of the city, as he is sacrificed
still on the west coast of Africa: as the god of opening, he was
slaughtered at the opening of every new year; and the year conversely
opened its course with the month sacred to the god of opening. Perhaps
he was also slain {372}as fortune at the beginning of each war. The
Vesta is the hearth-goddess; and every house had its Vesta; perhaps
originally a slaughtered hearth-victim. Every man had in like manner his
Genius, an ancestral protecting spirit; the corresponding guardian of
the woman was her Juno; they descend to Christianity, especially in
its most distinctive Roman form, as the guardian angels. Mars was a
corn-spirit; only later was he identified with the expeditionary god.
His annual expulsion as the human scapegoat has already been considered.
The Jupiter or Jovis was a multiple wine-god, doubtless in every case
the annual victim slain, Dionysus-wise, for the benefit of the vineyard.
Each village and each farm had once its Jovis, specially worshipped,
and, I doubt not, originally slaughtered, at the broaching of the
year’s first wine-cask in April. But his name shows that, as usual, he
was also identified with that very ancient Sky-god who is common to all
the Aryan race; the particular Jovis being probably sacrificed,
himself to himself, before the old Sky-god’s altar, as elsewhere the
Dionysus-victim at the shrine of Dionysus.

These identifications, I know, may sound fanciful to mere classical
scholars, unacquainted with the recent advances in anthropology, and
I would not have ventured to propound them at an earlier stage of our
involved argument; but now that we have seen and learned to recognise
the extraordinary similarity of all pantheons the whole world over, I
think the exact way these deities fall into line with the wall-gods,
gate-gods, corn-gods, wine-gods, boundary-gods, forest-gods,
fountain-gods, and river-gods everywhere else must surely be allowed
some little weight in analogically placing them.

The later Roman religion only widens, if at all, from within its own
range, by the inclusion of larger and larger tribal elements. Thus the
Deus Fidius, who presided over each separate alliance, I take to be the
ghost of the victim slain to form a covenant; just as in Africa to
this day, _when {373}two tribes have concluded a treaty of peace,
they crucify a slave “to ratify the bargain.”_ The nature of such
covenant victims has been well illustrated by Professor Robertson Smith,
but the growth of the covenant-gods, who finally assumed very wide
importance, is a subject which considerations of space prevent me from
including in our present purview. The victim, at first no doubt human,
became later a theanthropic animal; as did also the Jo vis-victim and
the representatives of the other adjectival or departmental deities.
The Roman Mars and the Sabine Ouirinus may readily have been amalgamated
into a Mars Ouirinus, if we remember that Mars is probably a general
name, and that any number of Martes may at any time have been
sacrificed. The Jovis of the city of Rome thus comes at last to be the
greatest and most powerful Jupiter of them all, and the representative
of the Roman union. Under Hellenising influences, however, all these
minor gods get elevated at last into generalised deities; and the animal
victims offered to them become mere honorific or piacular sacrifices,
hardly identified at all with the great images who receive them.

The Hellenising process went so far, indeed, at Rome that the old Roman
religion grew completely obscured, and almost disappeared, save in its
domestic character. In the home, the Lares still held the first rank.
Elsewhere, Bacchus took the place of Liber, while the traits of Hermes
were fastened on the adjectival Roman bargain-spirit Mercurius. Yet even
so, the Roman retained his primitive belief in corn and wine gods, under
the newer guises; his Ceres he saw as one with the Attic Demeter; his
rural ceremonies still continued unchanged by the change of attributes
that infected and transfigured the city temples. Moreover, the Romans,
and later the cosmopolitan population of Rome, borrowed gods and
goddesses freely from without in ever increasing numbers. In very early
days, they borrowed from Etruria; later, they borrowed Apollo from
Greece, and (by an etymological blunder) {374}fixed upon their own
Hercules the traits of Heracles. On the occasion of a plague, they
publicly summoned Asclepios, the Greek leech-god, from Epidaurus; and
at the very crisis of the life-and-death conflict with Hannibal, they
fetched the sacred field-stone known as Cybele, the Mother of the Gods,
from Pessinus in Phrygia. The people of Pessinus with strange compliance
let their goddess go; and the whole orgiastic cult of Attis was thus
transported entire to Italian soil. The rites of the great festival were
carried on at Rome almost as they had been carried on before in Phrygia;
so that an Asiatic worship of the most riotous type found a firm
official footing in the centre of the empire. The priest, indeed, was
still an Asiatic, or at least not a Roman; but the expulsion of Hannibal
from Italy which followed on this adoption of a foreign god, must have
greatly increased the prestige and reputation of the alien and orgiastic
deity.

The luxurious Aphrodite of Eryx in Sicily arrived in Rome about the
same time with Cybele. Originally a Semitic goddess, she combined the
Hellenic and oriental ideas, and was identified in Italy with the old
Latin Venus.

Later still, yet other gods were imported from without. New deities
flowed in from Asia and Africa. The population of the city under the
early empire had almost ceased to be Roman, save in the upper strata;
a vast number of slaves from all parts of the world formed the lowest
layer in the crowded vaults: the middle rank was filled by Syrians,
Africans, Greeks, Sicilians, Moors, and freedmen--men of all places and
races from Spain or Britain to the Euphrates and the Nile, the steppes
and the desert. The Orontes, said Juvenal, had flooded the Tiber. Among
this mixed mass of all creeds and colours, subfusk or golden-haired, a
curious mixture of religions grew up. Some of these were mere ready-made
foreign importations--Isis-worship from Egypt; Jahweh-worship from
Judæa; strange eastern or northern or African cults from the remotest
parts of Pontus or Mauritania. Others were intermixtures {375}or
rationalisations of older religions, such as Christianity, which mingled
together Judaism and Adonis or Osiris elements; such as Gnosticism,
which, starting from Zoroastrian infiltrations, kneaded all the gods of
the world at last into its own supreme mystic and magic-god Abraxas.

Looking a little deeper through the empire in general, we see that from
the time of Augustus onward, the need for a new cosmopolitan religion,
to fit the new cosmopolitan state, was beginning to be dimly felt and
acknowledged. Soldiers, enlisted in one country, took the cult and
images of their gods to another. The bull-slaying Mithra (in whom we can
hardly fail to see a solar form of the bull-god, who sacrifices a bull,
himself to himself, before his own altar) was worshipped here and
there, as numerous bas-reliefs show, from Persia to Britain. The Gaul
endeavoured to identify his own local war-gods with the Roman Mars, who
had been Hellenised in turn into the duplicate presentment of the Greek
Ares. The Briton saw his river-gods remodelled in mosaic into images
like those of Roman Tiber, or provided with the four horses who drag the
Roman Neptune, as Neptune had borrowed the representation at least from
the Greek Poseidon. And this was all the easier because everywhere alike
horses were sacrificed to sea or river, in lieu of human victims; just
as everywhere corn-gods were dressed in green, and everywhere wine-gods
wore coronals of vine-leaves on their holy foreheads. Men felt the truth
I have tried to impress, that _everywhere and always there is but one
religion_. Attributes and origin were so much alike that worship
was rapidly undergoing a cosmopolitanisation of name, as it already
possessed a similarity of rites and underlying features. Language itself
assisted this unifying process. In the west, as Latin spread, Latin
names of gods superseded local ones; in the east, as Greek spread,
Hellenic deities gave their titles and their beautiful forms to
native images. An artificial unity was introduced {376}and fixed by a
conventional list of Greek and Roman equivalents; and in the west, as
Greek art gained ground and spread, noble Greek representations of the
higher gods in ideal human form became everywhere common.

But that was not enough. As the government was one, under a strong
centralised despotism, it was but natural that the religion should be
one also, under the rule of a. similar omnipotent deity. _Man makes his
heaven in the image of earth_; his pantheon answers to his political
constitution. The mediaeval hall of heaven had an imperial God, like the
Othos or the Fredericks, on his regal throne, surrounded by a court of
great barons and abbots in the angels and archangels, the saints and
martyrs: the new religions, like spiritualism and Theosophy, which
spring up in the modern democratic world, are religions of free and
independent spirits, hardly even theistic. The Roman empire thus
demanded a single religion under a single strong god. It tended to
find it, if not in the Genius of Trajan or Antonine, then in some
bull-slaying Mithra or some universal Abraxas. Materialists were
satisfied with the worship of the Emperor or of the city of Rome:
idealists turned rather to Isis or to Christ.

One religion there was which might have answered the turn of the empire:
the pure and ideal monotheism of Judæa. But the cult of Jahweh was too
local and too national; it never extended beyond the real or adopted
sons of Israel. Even so, it gained proselytes of high rank at Rome,
especially among women; as regards men, the painful and degrading
initiatory ceremony of Judaism must always have stood seriously in the
way of converts. Yet in spite of this drawback, there were proselytes in
all the cosmopolitan cities where the Jews were settled; men who loved
their nation and had built them a synagogue. If Judaism could but get
rid of its national exclusiveness, and could incorporate into its god
some more of those genial and universal traits which he had too early
shuffled off--if {377}it could make itself less austere, less abstract,
and at the same time less local--there was a chance that it might rise
to be the religion of humanity. The dream of the prophets might still
come true and all the world might draw nigh to Zion.

At this critical juncture, an obscure little sect began to appear among
the Jews and Galilæans, in Jerusalem and Antioch, which happened
to combine in a remarkable degree all the main requirements of a new
world-religion. And whatever the cult of Jesus lacked in this respect
in its first beginnings, it made up for as it went by absorption and
permeation.

It was a Catholic Church: it stood for the world, not for a tribe or
a nation. It was a Holy Church: it laid great stress upon the ethical
element. It was a Roman Church: it grew and prospered throughout the
Roman empire. It made a city what was once a world. Whence it came and
how it grew must be our next and final questions.




CHAPTER XVIII.--THE GROWTH OF CHRISTIANITY.

|WHILE {378}the world was thus seething and fermenting with new faiths
the creed of the Christ made its first appearance on the seaboard of
Asia. In spite of certain remarks in my first chapter, _I am not such
a “gross and crass Euhemerist” as to insist dogmatically on the
historical existence of a personal Jesus. Of the Christ himself, if a
Christ there were, we know little or nothing. The account of his life
which has come down to us in the Gospels is so devoid of authority, and
so entirely built up of miraculous fragments, derived from elsewhere,
that we may well be excused for gravely doubting whether he is not
rather to be numbered with St. George and St. Catherine, with Perseus
and Arthur, among the wholly mythical and imaginary figures of legend
and religion._

On the other hand, it is quite possible, or even probable, that there
really did live in Galilee, at some time about the beginning of our
accepted era, a teacher and reformer bearing the Semitic name which is
finally Hellenised and Latinised for us as Jesus. If so, it seems not
unlikely that this unknown person was crucified (or rather hung on
a post) by the Romans at Jerusalem under the Procurator C. Pontius
Pilatus; and that after his death he was worshipped more or less as a
god by his immediate followers. Such kernel of truth may very well exist
in the late and derivative Gospel story; a kernel of truth, but imbedded
in a mass of unhistorical myth, which implicitly identifies him with all
the familiar corn-gods and wine-gods of the Eastern Mediterranean.

Furthermore, {379}it is even possible that the Christ may have been
deliberately put to death, at the instigation of the Jewish rabble, as
one of those temporary divine kings whose nature and meaning we have
already discussed. If this suggestion seem improbable from the lack of
any similar recorded case in the scanty Jewish annals, I would answer
that formal histories seldom give us any hint of the similar customs
still surviving in civilised European countries; that many popular rites
exist unheard of everywhere; and that the Jews were commonly believed
through the Middle Ages to crucify Christian boys, like St. Hugh of
Lincoln, in certain irregular and unrecognised ethnical ceremonies.
Furthermore, lest I should be thought to adduce this instance through an
anti-Semite tendency (which I do not in the slightest degree possess), I
may add that even among Christians similar customs are believed to exist
in rural parts of Italy at the present day,--there are villages where a
man dies yearly as the representative of Christ; and that in my
opinion the Oberammergau and other Passion Plays are survivals of like
representations in which a condemned criminal, the usual substitute, did
once actually enact the part of Christ. In short, I do not hesitate to
say that _god-slaying ceremonies, more or less attenuated, have lingered
on everywhere in obscure forms among the folk-rites and folk-customs of
the most civilised peoples_.

Without doing more than briefly indicate this possibility, however, I
pass on to say that _if ever there was really a personal Christ, and
if his followers began by vaguely believing in his resurrection, the
legend, as we get it, is obviously made up of collected fragments from
all the godslaying customs and beliefs we have been considering in
detail through the last six or seven chapters_. In the Gospel of his
later believers, after the sect had spread widely among the Gentiles of
the towns, _Jesus is conceived of as a corn and wine god, a temporary
king, slain on a cross as a piacular atonement, and raised again from
the dead after {380}three days, in the manner common to all corn and
wine gods._ It is possible, of course, that the first believers may have
fastened all these ideas on to an accidental condemnation and execution,
so to speak; but it is possible too that the _Christ may actually
have been put to death at the great spring feast of the Passover, in
accordance with some obscure and unrecognised folk-rite of the rabble of
Jerusalem_. I do not even pretend to have an opinion on this subject;
I do not assert or deny any historical nucleus of fact: I am satisfied
with saying that _the story on the whole exhibits the Christ to us
entirely in the character of a temporary king, slain with piacular
rites as a corn and wine god_. In this case at least, I am no dogmatic
Euhemerist.

I think it was Professor Freeman who once quaintly described Buddhism
as “a blasphemous anticipatory parody of Christianity.” _The learned
historian’s idea apparently was that the author of all evil, being
aware beforehand of the divine intentions, had invented Buddhism before
the advent of Christ, so as to discount the Christian Plan of Salvation
by anticipation_. If so, we must regard all other religions as similar
blasphemous attempts at forestalling God: for we shall see as we
proceed that every one of them contains innumerable anticipations of
Christianity--or, to put it conversely, that Christianity subsumes them
all into itself, in a highly concentrated and etherealised solution.

In the earliest Christian documents, the Pauline and other Apostolic
Epistles, we get little information about the history of the real or
mythical Christ. Shadowy allusions alone to the crucifixion and the
resurrection repay our scrutiny. But through the mist of words we see
two or three things clearly. The Christ is described as the son of
God--that is to say of the Jewish deity; and he is spoken of continually
as slain on a post or tree, the sacred symbol of so many old religions.
He dies to save mankind; and salvation is offered in his name to all
men. A careful reading {381}of the epistles from this point of view will
give in brief an epitome of the earliest and least dogmatic yet
very _doctrinal Christian theology. Its cardinal points are four
--incarnation, death, resurrection, atonement_.

The later accounts which we get in the Gospels are far more explicit.
The legend by that time had taken form: it had grown clear and
consistent. _All the elements of the slain and risen corn and wine god
are there in perfection._ For brevity’s sake, I will run all these
accounts together, adding to them certain traits of still later origin.

_The aspect of Christ as a survival of the corn-god is already clear in
Paul’s argument in First Corinthians on the resurrection of the
body. This argument would strike home at once to every Greek and every
Asiatic. “That which you sow is not quickened unless it die. And when
you sow, you sow not the body that is to be, but bare grain; it may be
wheat or any other grain. But God gives it a shape as pleases him; to
every seed its own body.”_ _The whole of this fifteenth chapter, the
earliest statement of the Christian belief, should be read through in
this connexion by any one who wishes to understand the close relation
of the idea of sowing to the resurrection. It might have been written by
any worshipper of Adonis or Osiris who wished to recommend his special
doctrine of a bodily resurrection to a doubtful cremationist, familiar
with the cult of Dionysus and of Attis._

The earliest known rite of the Christian church was the sacramental
eating and drinking of bread and wine together; which rite was said to
commemorate the death of the Lord, and his last supper, when he eat
and drank bread and wine with his disciples. _The language put into
his mouth on this occasion in the Gospels, especially the Fourth, is
distinctly that of the corn and wine god. “I am the true vine; ye are
the branches.” “I am the bread of life.” “Take, eat, this is my
body.” “This is my blood of the new testament.”_ Numberless other
touches of like kind are scattered through the speeches. In the parable
{382}of the vineyard, God the Father is described as the owner of a
vineyard, who sends his only begotten son to receive the fruit of it:
and the workers slay him. The first miracle at Cana of Galilee is one
where water is turned into wine by the hand of Jesus: and so on through
a long series of curious instances, which readers can discover for
themselves by inspection.

In early Christian art, as exhibited in the catacombs at Rome, the true
vine is most frequently figured; as are also baskets of loaves, with the
corresponding miracle of the loaves and fishes. _Multiplication of bread
and wine are the natural credentials of the corn and wine god_. The
earliest description we possess of Christ, that of John of Damascus,
states that his complexion was “of the colour of wheat”; while in
the apocryphal letter of Lentulus to the Roman Senate we read in the
same spirit that his hair was “wine-coloured.” The Greek description
by Epiphanius Monachus says that Christ was six feet high; his hair
long and golden-coloured; and in countenance he was ruddy like his
father David. All these descriptions are obviously influenced by the
identification of the bread and wine of the eucharist with the personal
Jesus.

_In the usage of the church from very early days, it has been customary
to eat the body of Christ in the form of bread, and to drink his blood
as wine in the sacrament. In the Catholic church, this continuous
ceremony takes place at an altar, containing sacred bones, and is
represented as being the offering of God, himself to himself, in the
form of a mystic and piacular sacrifice. The priest drinks the wine or
blood; the laity eat only the bread or body_.

A curious custom which occurs in many churches of Sicily at Easter still
further enforces this unity of Christ with the cult of earlier corn and
wine gods, like Adonis and Osiris. The women sow wheat, lentils, and
canary-seed in plates, which are kept in the dark and watered every
second day. The plants soon shoot up; they are then tied together
{383}with red ribbons, and the plates containing them are placed on the
sepulchres which, with effigies of the dead Christ, are made up in Roman
Catholic and Greek churches on Good Friday, “just as the gardens of
Adonis,” says Mr. Frazer, “were placed on the grave of the dead
Adonis.” In this curious ceremony we get a survival from the very
lowest stratum of corn-god worship; the stratum where an actual human
victim is killed, and corn and other crops are sown above his body. Even
where the sowing itself no longer survives, the sepulchre remains as a
relic of the same antique ritual. Such sepulchres are everywhere common
at Easter, as are the cradles of the child-god at the feast of the
winter solstice. The Pietà is the final form of this mourning of the
corn-god by the holy women.

Passing on to the other aspects of Christ as corn-god and divine-human
victim, we see that he is doubly recognised as god and man, like all the
similar gods of early races. In the speeches put into his mouth by
his biographers, he constantly claims the Jewish god as his father.
Moreover, he is a king; and his kingly descent from his ancestor David
is insisted upon in the genealogies with some little persistence. He
is God incarnate; but also he is the King of the Jews, and the King of
Glory. Wise men come from the east to worship him, and bring gifts of
gold and myrrh and frankincense to the infant God in his manger cradle.
But he is further the Christ, the anointed of God; and, as we saw,
anointment is a common element with numerous other divine-human victims.

Once more, he is the King’s son; and he is the only begotten son, _the
dearly beloved son, who is slain as an expiation for the sins of the
people_. The heavens open, and a voice from them declares, “This is
my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.” He is affiliated, like all
other such victims, on the older and earlier ethnical god, Jah-weh; and
though he is himself God, and one with the Father, _he is offered
up, himself to himself, in expiation of {384}the sin committed by men
against divine justice. All this would be familiar theology indeed to
the worshipper of Osiris, Adonis, and Attis._

_The common Hebrew offering was the paschal lamb; therefore Christ is
envisaged as the Lamb of God, that taketh away the sins of the world. In
the paintings of the catacombs, it is as a lamb that the Saviour of
the world is oftenest represented._ As a lamb he raises another lamb,
Lazarus; as a lamb he turns the water into wine; as a lamb he strikes
the living springs from the rock on the spandrils of the sarcophagus of
Junius Bassus. But his birth in a manger is also significant: and his
vine and his dove are almost as frequent as his lamb in the catacombs.

The Gospel history represents the passion of Christ essentially as the
sacrifice of a temporary king, invested with all the familiar elements
of that early ritual. Christ enters Jerusalem in royal state, among
popular plaudits, like those which always accompany the temporary king,
and the Attis or Adonis. He is mounted on an ass, the royal beast of the
Semites. The people fling down branches of trees in his path, as they
always fling down parts of green trees before the gods of vegetation.
On Palm Sunday his churches are still decked with palm-branches or with
sprays of willow-catkin. Such rites with green things form an integral
part of all the old rituals of the tree-god or the corn-god, and of all
the modern European survivals in folk-lore--they are equally found in
the Dionysiac festival, and in the Jack-in-the-Green revels on English
fair-days. The connexion with trees is also well marked throughout the
Gospels; and the miracle of the barren fig-tree is specially mentioned
in close connexion with the entry into Jerusalem. The people as he
entered cried “Hosanna” to the son of David and the prophetic words
were supposed to be fulfilled, “Behold, thy king cometh unto thee,
meek, sitting upon an ass, and a colt, the foal of an ass.”

The Christ goes as a willing victim to the cross; he does not
{385}seriously ask that the cup should pass from him. He foretells his
own death, and voluntarily submits to it But he is also bought with a
price--the thirty pieces of silver paid to Judas. Of all this, we had
forecasts in the Khond, the Mexican, and various other rituals.

Furthermore, there is a trial--a double trial, before the high priest,
and before Pilate. Such trials, we have seen, are common elements of the
mock-king’s degradation. Like all other similar victims, the Christ,
after being treated like a monarch, is reviled and spat upon, buffeted
and insulted. He is bound with cords, and carried before Pilate. The
procurator asks him, “Art thou the King of the Jews?” and the Christ
by implication admits the justice of the title. All the subsequent
episodes of the painful drama are already familiar to us. The sacred
victim is cruelly scourged that his tears may flow. As in other cases he
is crowned with flowers or with bark, in order to mark his position as
king of vegetation, so here he is crowned with a chaplet of thorns that
adds to his ignominy. The sacred blood must flow from the sacred
head. But still, he is clothed with purple and saluted with the words,
“Hail, King of the Jews!” in solemn irony. He is struck on the head
with a reed by the soldiers: yet even as they strike, they bow their
knees and worship him. They give him to drink wine, mingled with myrrh;
“but he received it not.” Then he is crucified at Golgotha, the
place of a skull, * on a cross, the old sacred emblem of so many
religions; it bears the inscription, “The King of the Jews,” by
order of the Procurator. After the death of the Christ he is mourned
over, like Adonis and Osiris, by the holy women, including his mother.
_I do not think I need point out in detail the many close resemblances
which exist between the Mother of the Gods and the Mother of God--the
Theotokos_.

     * According to mediaeval legend, the skull was Adam’s, and
     the sacred blood which fell upon it revived it. In
     crucifixions, a skull is generally represented at the foot
     of the cross.

The {386}thieves crucified with the Saviour have their legs broken, like
many other sacred victims; but the Christ himself has not a bone broken,
like the paschal lamb which was the Jewish substitute for the primitive
human victim. Thus both ideas on this subject, the earlier and the
later, seem to find an appropriate place in the history. Instead of
having his legs broken, however, the Christ has his side pierced; and
from it flows the mystic blood of the atonement, in which all Christians
are theoretically washed; this baptism of blood (a literal reality
in older cults) being already a familiar image at the date of the
Apocalypse, where the robes of the elect are washed white in the blood
of the lamb that was slain.

After the crucifixion, the Christ is taken down and buried. But, like
all other corn and wine gods, he _rises again from the dead on the third
day--this very period of three days being already a conventional one in
similar cases_. Every one of the surroundings recalls Osiris and Attis.
It is the women once more who see him first; and afterwards the men.
Finally, he ascends into heaven, to his Father, before the wondering
eyes of his disciples and his mother. In each item of this, there is
nothing with which we are not already familiar elsewhere.

I will not pursue the analogy further. To do so would be endless.
Indeed, I do not think there is an element in the Gospel story which
does not bear out the parallel here suggested. The slight incident of
the visit to Herod, for example, is exactly analogous to the visit of
the false Osiris in modern Egypt to the governor’s house, and the
visit of the temporary or mock king in so many other cases to the real
king’s palace. The episode where Herod and his men of war array
the Christ in a gorgeous robe is the equivalent of the episode of
the Mexican king arraying the god-victim in royal dress, and is also
paralleled in numerous other like dramas elsewhere. The women who
prepare spices and ointments for the body recall the Adonis rites;
Pilate washing his hands of the guilt of condemnation {387}recalls the
frequent episode of the slaughterers of the god laying the blame upon
others, or casting it on the knife, or crying out, “We bought you with
a price; we are guiltless.” Whoever will read carefully through the >
Gospel accounts, side by side with Mr. Frazer’s well-chosen collection
of mock-king narratives, will see for himself that endless other minor
traits crop up in the story which may be equated with numerous similar
incidents in the death and resurrection of the man-god elsewhere.

The very subjects of the parables are in themselves significant: the
lord of the vineyard who sends his son, whom the hirers slay; the
labourers who come at the eleventh hour: the sower and the good and bad
ground: the grain of mustard-seed: the leaven of the Pharisees: the seed
growing secretly: the sons in the vineyard. It will be found that almost
all of them turn on the key-note subjects of bread and wine, or at least
of seed-sowing.

By what precise stages the story of the Galilæan man-god arose and
fixed itself around the person of the real or mythical Jesus it would be
hard to say. Already in the epistles we may catch stray glimpses, in the
germ, of most of it. Already we notice strange hints and foreshadowings.
Probably the first Jewish disciples had arrived at the outline of the
existing story even before the Gentiles began to add their quotum. And
when we look at documents so overloaded with miracle and legend as the
Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, we find it hard indeed to separate
any element of historical truth from the enormous accretion of myth and
legend. Still, I see no grave reason to doubt the general truth of the
idea that the Christian belief and practice arose first among Galilæan
Jews, and that from them it spread with comparative rapidity to the
people of Syria and Asia Minor. It even seems probable that one Saul or
Paul was really the person who first conceived the idea of preaching the
new religion throughout the empire, and especially in the great cities,
as a faith which might be embraced by both Jew and Gentile.

Certainly, {388}while the young cult contained most of the best features
of Judaism, viewed as a possible universal religion,--its monotheism,
its purity, its comparative freedom from vile and absurd legends of the
gods and their amours--it surpassed the elder faith in acceptability to
the world at large, and especially to the people of Syria and western
Asia. Every one of them could have said with perfect truth, “Nothing
is changed; there is but one god more to worship.”

As the church spread, the legend grew apace. To the early account of the
death and resurrection of the King of the Jews, later narrators added
the story of his miraculous birth from a virgin mother, who conceived
directly from the spirit of God wafted down upon her. The wide extent
and the origin of this belief about the conception of gods and heroes
has been fully examined by Mr. Sidney Hartland in his admirable study of
the Legend of Perseus. The new believers further provided their divine
leader with a royal genealogy from David downward, and made him by a
tolerably circuitous argument be born at Bethlehem, according to the
supposed prophecy--though if there ever was really a Jesus at all, it
would seem that the one fact of which we could feel tolerably sure about
him, was the fact of his being a man of Nazareth. Later writers put into
his mouth a high moral teaching for its time, somewhat anticipated by
Hillel and other rabbis, and perhaps in part of Buddhist origin; they
also made him announce for himself that divine _rôle_ of mediator and
atoner which they themselves claimed for the Saviour of Mankind. He
calls himself the vine, the bread of life, the good shepherd; he is
called “_the lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world_,”
by John the Baptist, an enthusiast whose fame has attracted him at last
into the Christian legend. Very early, the old rite of water-lustration
or baptism, adopted by John, was employed as one of the chief Christian
ceremonies, the ceremony of initiation, which replaced with advantage
the bloody and dangerous Jewish circumcision.

This {389}allowed for far freer proselytism than Judaism could ever
expect; and though no doubt at first the Christians regarded themselves
as a sect of the Jews, and though they always adopted entire the Jewish
sacred books and the Jewish God, with all the Jewish history,
cosmogony, and mythology, yet the new religion was from the beginning a
cosmopolitan one, and preached the word unto all nations. Such a faith,
coming at such a moment, and telling men precisely what they were ready
to believe, was certain beforehand of pretty general acceptance. When
Constantine made Christianity the official creed of the empire, it is
clear that he did but put an official stamp of approval on a revolution
that had long been growing more and more inevitable.

In one word, Christianity triumphed, because it united in itself all the
most vital elements of all the religions then current in the world, with
little that was local, national, or distasteful; and it added to them
all a high ethical note and a social doctrine of human brotherhood
especially suited to an age of unification and systematic government.

Occasionally, even in the Gospels themselves, we get strange passing
echoes of a mysterious identification of the Christ with the ancient
Hebrew ethnical god, not as the Lord of the Universe alone, but vaguely
remembered as the sacred stone of the ark, the Rock of Israel. “The
stone which the builders rejected, that one has become the head of the
corner.” “Whosoever shall fall on this stone shall be broken; but
on whomsoever it shall fall, it will grind him to powder.” And in a
speech put into the mouth of Christ, he says to Peter, “Rock thou art,
and on this Rock will I build my assembly.” *

     * I can honestly assure the polemical Protestant divine
     that I am well aware of the difference in gender in this
     passage--and of its utter unimportance. The name Peter could
     not well be made feminine to suit a particular play upon
     words or to anticipate the objections of a particular set of
     trivial word-twisters.

Sometimes, too, in the epistles the two ideas of the corn-god and
the foundation stone-god are worked upon alternately. {390}“I have
planted; Apollos watered.” “Ye are God’s husbandry; ye are God’s
building.” “I have laid the foundation, and another builds thereon.
Let every man take care how he builds upon it. For other foundation can
no man lay than that which is laid, which is the Christ, Jesus.”
Or again, “You are built upon the foundation of the apostles and
prophets, Jesus, the Christ, being himself the chief corner stone.”
Whoever rereads the epistles by the light of the analogies suggested in
this book will find that they positively teem with similar references
to the familiar theology of the various slain man-gods, which must have
been known to every one along the shores of the Mediterranean.

The church which was built upon this rock--and that Rock was Christ--has
shown its continuity with earlier religions in a thousand ways and by
a thousand analogies. Solar and astrological elements have been freely
admitted, side by side with those which recall the corn and wine gods.
The chief festivals still cling to the solar feasts of the equinoxes
and the solstices. Thus every year the church celebrates in mimicry
the death and resurrection of the Christ, as the Mediterranean peoples
celebrated the death and resurrection of the Attis, the Adonis, the
Dionysus, the Osiris. It celebrates the feast at the usual time for most
such festivals, the spring equinox. More than that, it chooses for the
actual day of the resurrection, commonly called in English Easter,
and in the Latin dialects the Paschal feast (or Pâques), a trebly
astrological date. The festival must be as near as possible to the
spring equinox; but it must be after a full moon, and it must be on the
day sacred to the sun. Before the feast, a long fast takes place, at
the close of which the Christ is slain in effigy, and solemnly laid in
a mimic sepulchre. Good Friday is the anniversary of his piacular death,
and the special day of the annual mourning, as for Adonis and Attis. _On
Easter Sunday, he rises again from the dead, and every good Catholic is
bound to communicate--to eat the body of his slaughtered {391}god on the
annual spring festival of reviving vegetation._ Comparison of the
Holy Week ceremonies at Rome with the other annual festivals, from the
Mexican corn-feast and the Potraj rite of India to Attis and Adonis,
will be found extremely enlightening--I mean, of course, the ceremonies
as they were when the Pope, the Priest-King, the representative of the
annual Attis at Pessinus, officiated publicly in the Sistine Chapel,
with paschal music known as Lamentations, and elevation of the Host amid
the blare of trumpets. On this subject, I limit myself to the barest
hint. Whoever chooses to follow out so pregnant a clue will find it lead
him into curious analogies and almost incredible survivals.

Similarly, the birth of Christ is celebrated at the winter solstice,
the well-known date for so many earlier ceremonies of the gods of
vegetation. Then the infant god lies unconscious in his cradle. Whoever
has read Mr. Frazer’s great work will understand the connexion of the
holly and the mistletoe, and the Christmas tree, with this second great
festival of Christendom, very important in the Teutonic north, though
far inferior in the south to the spring-tide feast, when the god
is slain and eaten of necessity. I limit myself to saying that the
Christmas rites are all of them rites of the birth of the corn-god.

Even the Christian cross, it is now known, was not employed as a symbol
of the faith before the days of Constantine, and was borrowed from the
solar wheel of the Gaulish sun-god-worshippers who formed the mass of
the successful emperor’s legionaries.

We are now, therefore, in a very different position for understanding
the causes which led to the rise and development of the Christian
religion from that which we occupied at the outset of our enquiry. We
had then to accept crudely the bare fact that about the first century of
our era a certain cult of a Divine Man, Jesus, arose among a fraction of
the maritime people of Lower Syria. That fact as we at first received it
stood isolated and unrelated {392}in its naked singularity. We can now
see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency
in human nature, high or low; and in our last chapter we shall find that
this universal tendency to worship the dead has ever since persisted
as fully as ever, and is in fact the central element in the entire
religious instinct of humanity.

The main emotional chord upon which Christianity played in its early
days--and indeed the main chord upon which it still plays--is just,
I believe, the universal feeling in favour of the deification or
beatification of the dead, with the desire for immortality on the part
of the individual believer himself in person. Like all other
religions, but even more than any other religion at that time in vogue,
Christianity appealed to these two allied and deep-seated longings of
human nature. It appealed on the one hand to the unselfish emotions and
affections of mankind by promising a close, bodily, personal, and
speedy reassociation of the living believer with his dead relatives and
friends. It appealed on the other hand to the selfish wishes and desires
of each, by holding forth to every man the sure and certain hope of
a glorious resurrection. Like all other creeds, but beyond all other
creeds, it was the religion of immortality, of the dead revived, of the
new world: in an age of doubt, of scepticism, of the decay of faith, it
gave fresh life and a totally new basis to the old beliefs--perhaps the
old delusions--of the religious nature.

A necessary consequence of the universal ferment and intermixture of
pantheons everywhere during the early days of the Roman empire was a
certain amount of floating scepticism about the gods as a whole, which
reaches its highest point in the mocking humour of Lucian, or still
earlier in the Epicurean atheism of Lucretius and of Roman philosophy
in general. But while this nascent scepticism was very real and very
widespread, it affected rather current beliefs as to the personality
and history of the various gods than the {393}underlying conception
of godhead in the abstract. Even those who laughed and those who
disbelieved, retained at bottom many superstitions and supernatural
ideas. Their scepticism was due, not like that of our own time to
fundamental criticism of the very notion of the supernatural, but to
the obvious inadequacy of existing gods to satisfy the requirements of
educated cosmopolitans. The deities of the time were too coarse, too
childish, too gross for their worshippers. The common philosophic
attitude of cultivated Rome and cultivated Alexandria might be compared
to some extent to that of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed hostile
to the conception of theology in its own nature, but who demur to the
most miraculous and supernatural part of the popular doctrine.

With the mass, however, the religious unrest showed itself mainly, as
it always shows itself at such critical moments, in a general habit of
running after new and strange religions, from some one or other of which
the anxious enquirer hopes to obtain some divine answer to his doubts
and difficulties. When old faiths decay, there is room for new ones. As
might have been expected, this tendency was most clearly shown in the
great cosmopolitan trading towns, where men of many nations rubbed
shoulders together, and where outlandish cults of various sorts had
their temples and their adherents. Especially was this the case at Rome,
Alexandria, and Antioch, the capitals respectively of the Roman, the
Hellenic, and the Semitic worlds. In the Græco-Egyptian metropolis, the
worship of Serapis, a composite deity of hybrid origin, grew gradually
into the principal cult of the teeming city. At Antioch, Hellenic
deities were ousting the Baalim. At Rome, the worship of Isis, of
Jahweh, of Syrian and other remoter Eastern gods was carried on by an
ever-increasing body of the foreign, native, and servile population.
These were the places where Christianity spread. The men of the villages
were long, as the world still quaintly phrases it, “pagans.”

The {394}strange cults which united in thus gradually crushing out the
old local and national pantheons throughout the Roman world, had for
the most part two marked attributes in common: they were more or less
mystical; and they tended more or less in the direction of monotheism.
Solar myth, syncretism, the esoteric priestly interpretations, and
the general diffusion of Greek philosophic notions, mixed with subtler
oriental and Zoroastrian ideas, had all promoted the rise and growth of
the mystic element: while a vague monotheistic movement had long been
apparent in the higher thought of Egypt, Greece, Italy, and the East. In
the resulting conflict and intermixture of ideas, Judaism, as one of
the most mystical and monotheistic of religions, would have stood a good
chance of becoming the faith of the world, had it not been for the fatal
weight of its strict and obstinate national character. Even as it was,
Jewish communities were scattered through all the commercial towns of
the Græco-Roman world; a Jewish colony strongly influenced Alexandria;
and Jewish teachers made proselytes in Rome in the very bosom of the
imperial household.

The ferment which thus existed by the Orontes, the Nile, and the
Tiber must also have extended in a somewhat less degree to all the
cosmopolitan seaports and trading towns of the great and heterogeneous
military empire. What was true of Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch,
was true in part, we have every reason to believe, of Damascus, of
Byzantium, of Sinope, of Ephesus: of Rhodes, of Cyrene, of Athens, of
Carthage; perhaps even of Massilia, of Gades, of Burdigala, of Lugdunum.
All around the eastern Mediterranean at least, new faiths were
seething, new ideas were brewing, new mysticisms were being evolved,
new superstitions were arising, Phoenix-like, out of the dying embers
of decaying creeds. Setting aside mere exotic or hybrid cults, like the
worship of Serapis at Alexandria and of Isis at Rome, or mere abortive
attempts like the short-lived worship of Antinous in Egypt, {395}we may
say that three of these new religions appealed strongly to the wants
and desires of the time: and those three were Mithraism, Gnosticism, and
Christianity.

All were alike somewhat eclectic in character; and all could lay claim
to a certain cosmopolitan and catholic spirit unknown to the cults of
the old national pantheons. All came to the Greek and Roman world from
the mystic east, the land of the rising sun, whose magic is felt even at
the present day by the votaries of Theosophy and of Esoteric Buddhism.
Which of the three was to conquer in the end might have seemed at one
time extremely doubtful: nor indeed do I believe that the ultimate
triumph of Christianity, the least imposing of the three, inevitable as
it at last became, was by any means at first a foregone conclusion.
The religion of Jesus probably owed quite as much to what we call
chance--that is to say, to the play of purely personal and casual
circumstances--as to its own essential internal characteristics. If
Constantine or any other shrewd military chief had happened to adopt the
symbols of Mithra or Abraxas instead of the name of Christ, it is quite
conceivable that all the civilised world might now be adoring the mystic
divinity of the three hundred and sixty-five emanations, as sedulously
as it actually adores the final theological outcome of the old Hebrew
Jahweh. But there were certain real advantages as well, which told,
I believe, in the very nature of things, in favour of the Christ
as against the coinage of Basilides or the far-eastern sun-god.
Constantine, in other words, chose his religion wisely. It was the cult
exactly adapted to the times: above all others, during the two centuries
or so that had passed since its first beginning (for we must place the
real evolution of the Christian system considerably later than the life
or death of Jesus himself) it had shown itself capable of thoroughly
engaging on its own side the profoundest interests and emotions of the
religious nature.

We must remember, too, that in all religious crises, while {396}faith in
the actual gods and creeds declines rapidly, no corresponding weakening
occurs in the underlying sentiments on which all religions ultimately
base themselves. Hence the apparent paradox that periods of doubt are
also almost always periods of intense credulity as well. The human mind,
cast free from the moorings which have long sufficed for it, drifts
about restlessly in search of some new haven in which it may take refuge
from the terrors of uncertainty and infidelity. And its new faith is
always but a fresh form of the old one. A god or gods, prayer, praise,
and sacraments, are essential elements. More especially is it the case
that when trust in the great gods begins to fail, a blind groping after
necromancy, spiritualism, and ghost-lore in general takes its place for
the moment. We have seen this tendency fully exemplified in our own time
by the spiritualists and others: nor was it less marked in the tempest
of conflicting ideas which broke over the Roman world from the age of
the Antonines to the fall of the empire. The fact is, the average man
cares but little, after all, for his gods and his goddesses, viewed as
individuals. They are but an outlet for his own emotions. He appeals
to them for help, as long as he continues to believe in their effective
helpfulness: he is ready to cajole them with offerings of blood or to
flatter them with homage of praise and prayer, as long as he expects to
gain some present or future benefit, bodily or spiritual, in return for
his assiduous adulation. But as soon as his faith in their existence and
power begins to break down, he puts up with the loss of their
godhead, so far as they themselves are concerned, without one qualm of
disappointment or inconvenience. It is something far other than that
that touches him in religion: it is his hopes for his own eternal
welfare, and the welfare after death of those that love him.

Hence, a decline of faith in the great gods is immediately followed by a
recrudescence of the most barbaric and original element in religion--the
cult of the ghost or spirit, {397}necromancy, the direct worship of the
dead or intercourse with the dead: a habit of enquiry into the positive
chances of human immortality. This necromantic spirit is well marked
in Gnostic remains, and in the fragmentary magical literature of the
decadent Græco-Roman world. It is precisely the same tendency which
produces spiritualism in our own time: and it is due to the desire to
find some new and experimental basis for the common human belief in the
immortality of the soul or the resurrection of the body.

And here we get the clue to the serious change which Christianity
wrought in the religious feeling of the western world: a change whose
importance and whose retrograde nature has never yet, I believe, been
fully recognised. For Christianity, while from one point of view, as a
monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic religion, an immense advance upon the
aesthetic paganism of Greece and Italy, was from another point of view,
as a religion of resurrection rather than a religion of immortality, a
step backward for all Western Europe.

Even among the Jews themselves, however, the new cult must have come
with all the force of an “aid to faith” in a sceptical generation.
Abroad, among the Jewish Hellenists, Greek philosophy must have
undermined much of the fanatical and patriotic enthusiasm for Jahweh
which had grown stronger and ever stronger in Judæa itself through
the days of the Maccabees and the Asmonæan princes. Scraps of vague
Platonic theorising on the nature of the Divine were taking among these
exiles the place of the firm old dogmatic belief in the Rock of Israel.
At home, the Hellenising tendencies of the house of Herod, and the
importance in Jerusalem of the Sadducees “who say there is no
resurrection,” were striking at the very roots of the hope and faith
that pious Jews most tenderly cherished. Instead of Israel converting
the world, the world seemed likely to convert Israel. Swamped in the
great absorbing and assimilating empire, Judah {398}might follow in the
way of Ephraim. And Israel’s work in the world might thus be undone,
or rather stultified for ever.

Just at this very moment, when all faiths were tottering visibly to
their fall, a tiny band of obscure Galilæan peasants, who perhaps had
followed a wild local enthusiast from their native hills up to turbulent
Jerusalem, may have been seized with a delusion neither unnatural nor
unaccustomed under their peculiar circumstances; but which nevertheless
has sufficed to turn or at least to modify profoundly the entire
subsequent course of the world’s history. Their leader, if we may
trust the universal tradition of the sect, as laid down long after in
their legendary Gospels, was crucified at Jerusalem under C. Pontius
Pilatus. If any fact upon earth about Jesus is true, besides the fact
of his residence at Nazareth, it is this fact of the crucifixion, which
derives verisimilitude from being always closely connected with the
name of that particular Roman official. But three days after, says the
legend, the body of Jesus could not be found in the sepulchre where his
friends had laid him: and a rumour gradually’ gained ground that he had
risen from the dead, and had been seen abroad by the women who mourned
him and by various of his disciples. In short, what was universally
believed about all other and elder human gods, was specifically asserted
afresh in a newer case about the man Christ Jesus. The idea fitted in
with the needs of the time, and the doctrine of the Resurrection of
Jesus the Christ became the corner-stone of the new-born Christian
religion.

Nothing can be clearer than the fact admitted on all hands, that this
event formed the central point of the Apostles’ preaching. It was the
Resurrection of Jesus, regarded as an earnest of general resurrection
for all his followers, that they most insisted upon in their words and
writings. It was the resurrection that converted the world of western
Europe. “Your faith is flagging,” said the early Christians in
effect to their pagan fellows: “your gods are {399}half-dead; your
ideas about your own future, and the present state of your departed
friends, are most vague and shadowy. In opposition to all this, we
offer you a sure and certain hope; we tell you a tale of real life, and
recent; we preach a god of the familiar pattern, yet very close to you;
we present you with a specimen of actual resurrection. We bring you
good tidings of Jesus as the Messiah, and him crucified: to the Jews, a
stumbling-block; to the Greeks, foolishness; but to such as are saved,
a plain evidence of the power of the God of Israel. Accept our word: let
your dead sleep in Christ in our catacombs, as once they slept in Osiris
at Abydos, or rested upon him that rests at Philæ.” “If Christ be
not risen,” says one of the earliest Christian writers in a passionate
peroration, “then is our preaching vain, and your faith is vain also:
but as it is, Christ is risen from the dead, and has become the first
fruits of them that slept.” “Else what shall they do,” he goes on,
touching to the quick that ingrained human desire for communion with the
departed, “what shall they do which are baptised for the dead, if the
dead rise not at all? Why are they then baptised for the dead?” These,
in short, apart from the elements common to all creeds, are the three
great motors of primitive Christianity: one dogmatic, the resurrection
of Jesus: one selfish, the salvation of the individual soul: one
altruistic, the desire for reunion with the dead among one’s beloved.

Syria and Egypt could easily accept the new doctrine. It involved for
them no serious change of front, no wide departure from the ideas and
ceremonies which always formed their rounded concept of human existence.
There is a representation of the resurrection of Osiris in the little
temple on the roof at Denderah which might almost pass for a Christian
illustration of the resurrection of Jesus. To Syrian and Egyptian, the
resurrection indeed was but a special modern instance of a well-known
fact; a fresh basis of evidence upon which to plant firmly the tottering
edifice {400}of their old convictions.’ In its beginnings, in short,
Christianity was essentially an oriental religion; it spread fastest
in the eastern Mediterranean basin, where Judaism was already well
established: at Rome, it seems to have attracted chiefly the oriental
population. And it is a significant fact that its official adoption as
the public religion of the Roman state was the act of the same prince
who deliberately shifted the seat of his government from the Tiber to
the Bosphorus, and largely transformed the character of the empire from
a Latin to a Græco-Asiatic type. All the new religions which struggled
together for the mastery of the world were oriental in origin: the
triumph of Christianity was but a single episode in the general triumph
of aggressive orientalism over the occidental element in the Roman
system.

Egypt in particular, I believe, had far more to do with the dogmatic
shaping of early Christianity, and the settlement of Christian symbolism
and Christian mysticism, than is generally admitted by the official
historians of the primitive church. There, where the idea of
resurrection was already so universal, and where every man desired to be
“justified by Osiris,” Christianity soon made an easy conquest of a
people on whose faith it exerted so little change. And Egypt easily made
its influence felt on the plastic young creed. It is allowed that the
doctrine of the Trinity took shape among the Triad-worshippers on the
banks of the Nile, and that the scarcely less important doctrine of the
Logos was borrowed from the philosophy of Alexandrian Jews. Nobody can
look at the figures of Isis and the infant Horus in any Egyptian museum
without being at once struck by the obvious foreshadowing of the Coptic
and Byzantine Madonna and Child. The mystery that sprang up about the
new doctrines; the strange syncretic union of Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost into a single Trinity; the miraculous conception by the Theotokos
or mother of God--a clear variant in one aspect on the older idea of
Hathor; and the antenatal existence of Christ {401}in heaven before
his incarnation; all are thoroughly Egyptian in character, with a faint
superadded dash of Alexandrian Jewish Hellenism. The love of symbols
which the young church so early exhibits in the catacombs and elsewhere
smacks equally of Ptolemaic reminiscences of Thebes and Memphis. The
mummy-form of Lazarus; the fish that makes such a clever alphabetic
ideogram for the name and titles of Jesus; the dove that symbolises the
Holy Ghost; the animal types of the four evangelists--all these are in
large part Egyptian echoes, resonant of the same spirit which produced
the hieroglyphics and the symbolism of the great Nilotic temples. At the
same time it must be remembered that sacred fish were common in Syria,
and that similar identifications of gods with animals have met us at
every turn, in our earlier investigation.

Nay, more, the very details themselves of Christian symbolism often go
back to early Egyptian models. The central Christian emblem of all, the
cross, is holy all the world over: it is the sacred tree: and each race
has adapted it to its own preconceived ideas and symbols. But in Coptic
Christianity it has obvious affinities with the _crux ansata_. In the
Coptic room of the New Museum at Ghizeh is an early Christian monument
with a Greek uncial inscription, on which is represented a cross of four
equal limbs with expanded flanges, having a crux ansata inserted in all
its four interstices. At the Coptic church of Abu Sirgeh at Old Cairo
occurs a similar cross, also with suggestions of Tau-like origin, but
with other equal-limbed crosses substituted for the _cruces ansatae_ in
the corners. * How far the Egyptian Christians thus merely transferred
their old ideas to the new faith may be gathered from a single curious
example. In Mr. Loftie’s collection of sacred beetles is a scarabæus
{402}containing a representation of the crucifixion, with two palm
branches: and other scarabs have Christian crosses, “some of them,”
says Mr. Loftie, “very unmistakable.” If we remember how extremely
sacred the scarab was held in the Egyptian religion, and also that it
was regarded as the symbol of the resurrection, we cannot possibly miss
the importance of this implication. Indeed, the Alexandrian Father,
Epiphanius, speaks of Christ as “the scarabæus of God,” a phrase
which may be still better understood if I add that in the treatise on
hieroglyphs known under the name of Horapollo a scarabæus is said to
denote “an only-begotten.” Thus “the lamb of God” in the
tongue of Israel becomes “the scarabæus of God” in the mouth of an
Egyptian speaker. To put it shortly, I believe we may say with truth,
in a sense far other than that intended by either prophet or evangelist,
“Out of Egypt have I called my son.”

     * Count Goblet d’Alviella’s interesting work on The
     Migration of Symbols well illustrates this common syncretism
     and interchangeability of symbolic signs, which runs
     parallel with the syncretism of gods and religions.

In the west, however, the results of the spread of Christianity were far
more revolutionary. Indeed, I do not think the cult of Jesus could ever
have spread at all in Rome had it not been for the large extent to which
the city was peopled in later times by Syrians and Africans. And if
Christianity had not spread in Rome, it could never have gained a
foothold at all in the Aryan world: for it is not at bottom an Aryan
religion in tone and feeling: it has only become possible among Aryan
peoples by undergoing at last a considerable change of spirit, though
not largely of form, in its westward progress. This change is indicated
by the first great schism, which severed the Latin from the Greek
communion.

Foremost among the changes which Christianity involved in Italy and
the rest of western Europe was the retrograde change from the belief
in immortality and the immateriality of the soul, with cremation as its
practical outcome, to the belief in the resurrection of the body, with
a return to the disused and discredited practice of burial as its
normal correlative. The catacombs were the necessary {403}result of this
backward movement; and with the catacombs came in the possibility of
relic-worship, martyr-worship, and the adoration of saints and their
corpses. I shall trace out in my next chapter the remoter effects of
this curious revival of the prime element in religion--the cult of the
dead--in greater detail: it must suffice here to point out briefly that
it resulted as a logical effect from the belief in the resurrection
of Christ, and the consequent restoration of the practice of burial.
Moreover, to polytheists, this habit gave a practical opening for the
cult of many deities in the midst of nominal monotheism, which the
Italians and sundry other essentially polytheistic peoples were not slow
to seize upon. Here again the difference between the more monotheistic
and syncretic east, which puts a ban upon graven images, and the more
polytheistic and separating west, which freely admits the employment of
sculpture, is not a little significant. It is true that theoretically
the adoration paid to saints and martyrs is never regarded as real
worship: but I need hardly say that technical distinctions like
these are always a mere part of the artificial theology of
scholastic priesthoods, and may be as safely disregarded by the broad
anthropological enquirer as may all the other fanciful lumber of
metaphysical Brahmans and theologians everywhere. The genuine facts of
religion are the facts and rites of the popular cult, which remain in
each race for long periods together essentially uniform.

Thus we early get two main forms of Christianity, both official and
popular: one eastern--Greek, Coptic, Syrian; more mystical in type, more
symbolic, more philosophic, more monotheistic: the other western--Latin,
Celtic, Spanish; more Aryan in type, more practical, more material, more
polytheistic. _And these at a later time are reinforced by a third or
northern form,--the Teutonic and Protestant; in which ethical ideas
preponderate over religious, and the worship of the Book in its most
literal and often foolish interpretation supersedes the earlier worship
of Madonna, saints, pictures, statues, and emblems._

At {404}the period when Christianity first begins to emerge from
the primitive obscurity of its formative nisus, however, we find it
practically compounded of the following elements--which represent _the
common union of a younger god offered up to an older one with whom he is
identified_.

First of all, as the implied basis, taken for granted in all the early
Hebrew scriptures, there is current Judaism, in the form that Judaism
had gradually assumed in the fourth, third, and second centuries before
the Christian era. This includes as its main principle the cult of the
one god Jahweh, now no longer largely thought of under that personal
name, or as a strictly ethnic deity, but rather envisaged as the Lord
God who dwells in heaven, very much as Christians of to-day still
envisage him. It includes also an undercurrent of belief in a heavenly
hierarchy of angels and archangels, the court of the Lord (modifications
of an earlier astrological conception, the Host of Heaven), and in a
principle of evil, Satan or the devil, dwelling in hell, and similarly
surrounded by a crowd of minor or assistant demons. Further, it accepts
implicitly from earlier Judaism the resurrection of the dead, the
judgment of the good and the wicked, the doctrine of future rewards and
punishments (perhaps in its fullest shape a Hellenistic importation from
Egypt, though also commonly found in most spontaneous religions), and
many other tenets of the current Jewish belief. In short, the very
earliest Christians, being probably for the most part Jews, Galilæans,
and proselytes, or else Syrians and Africans of Judaising tendencies,
did not attempt to get rid of all their preconceived religious opinions
when they became Christians, but merely superadded to these as a new
item the special cult of the deified Jesus.

On the other hand, as the Gospel spread to the Gentiles, it was not
thought necessary to burden the fresh converts with the whole minute
ceremonial of Judaism, and especially with the difficult and unpleasant
initiatory rite of circumcision. {405}A mere symbolical lustration,
known as baptism, was all that was demanded of new adherents to the
faith, with abstinence from any participation in “heathen” sacrifices
or functions. To this extent the old exclusiveness of Jahweh-worship,
the cult of the jealous God, was still allowed to assert itself. And the
general authority of the Hebrew scriptures, especially as a historical
account of the development of Judaism, from which Christianity sprang,
was more or less fully admitted, at first by implication or quotation
alone, but afterwards by the deliberate and avowed voice of the whole
Christian assembly. The translation of this mixed mass of historical
documents, early cosmogonies, ill-reported and Jeho-vised Jewish
traditions, misinterpreted poems, and conscious forgeries, in the Latin
version known as the Vulgate, had the effect of endowing Europe for many
centuries with a false body of ancient history, which must have largely
retarded the development of the race up to our own time, and whose
evil effects have hardly yet passed away among the more ignorant and
conservative Bibliolatrous classes of modern society.

Superimposed upon this substratum of current Judaism with its worship
of Jahweh came the distinctive Jesus-cult, the worship of the particular
dead Galilæan peasant. This element was superadded to the cult of the
Father, the great god who had slowly and imperceptibly developed out of
the sacred stone that the sons of Israel were believed to have brought
up with them from the land of Egypt. But how, in a religion pretending
to be monotheistic, were these two distinct cults of two such diverse
gods to be reconciled or to be explained away? By the familiar doctrine
of the incarnation, and the belief in the human god who is sacrificed,
himself to himself, as a piacular offering. Jewish tradition and subtler
Egyptian mysticism sufficed to smooth over the apparent anomaly. The
Jews looked forward to a mysterious deliverer, a new Moses, the Messiah,
who was to fulfil the destiny of Israel by uniting all nations under the
sceptre of David, and by {406}bringing the Gentiles to the feet of the
God of Israel. Jesus, said the Christians, had proclaimed himself that
very Messiah, the Christ of God; he had often alluded to the great
Hebrew deity as his father; he had laid claim to the worship of the Lord
of heaven. Further than this, perhaps, the unaided Jewish intelligence
would hardly have gone: it would have been satisfied with assigning to
the slain man-god Jesus a secondary place, as the only begotten Son
of God, who gave himself up as a willing victim--a position perhaps
scarcely more important than that which Mohammad holds in the system
of Islam. Such, it seems to me, is on the whole the conception which
permeates the synoptic Gospels, representing the ideas of Syrian
Christendom. But here the acute Græco-Egyptian mind came in with its
nice distinctions and its mystical identifications. There was but one
god, indeed; yet that god was at least twofold (to go no further for
the present). He had two persons, the Father and the Son: and the Second
Person, identified with the Alexandrian conception of the Logos, though
inferior to the Father as touching his manhood, was equal to the Father
as touching his godhead--after the precise fashion we saw so common in
describing the relations of Osiris and Horus, and the identification
of the Attis or Adonis victim with the earlier and older god he
represented. “I and my Father are one,” says the Christ of the
Fourth Gospel, the embodiment and incarnation of the Alexandrian Logos.
And in the very forefront of that manifesto of Neo-Platonic Christianity
comes the dogmatic assertion, “In the beginning was the Logos: and the
Logos dwelt with God: and the Logos _was_ God.”

Even so the basis of the new creed is still incomplete. The Father and
Son give the whole of the compound deity as the popular mind, everywhere
and always, has commonly apprehended it. But the scholastic and
theological intelligence needed a Third Person to complete the Trinity
which to all mankind, as especially to orientals, is the {407}only
perfect and thoroughly rounded figure. In later days, no doubt, the
Madonna would have been chosen to fill up the blank, and, on the analogy
of Isis, would have filled it most efficiently. As a matter of fact, in
the creed of Christendom as the Catholic people know it, the Madonna
is really one of the most important personages. But in those early
formative times, the cult of the Theotokos had hardly yet assumed its
full importance: perhaps, indeed, the Jewish believers would have been
shocked at the bare notion of the worship of a woman, the readmission of
an Astarte, a Queen of Heaven, into the faith of Israel. Another object
of adoration had therefore to be found. It was discovered in that vague
essence, the _Holy Ghost, or Divine Wisdom, whose gradual development
and dissociation from God himself is one of the most curious chapters
in all the history of artificial god-making_. The “spirit of Jahweh”
had frequently been mentioned in Hebrew writings; and with so invisible
and unapproachable a deity as the Jewish God, was often made to do duty
as a messenger or intermediary where the personal presence of Jahweh
himself would have been felt to contravene the first necessities of
incorporeal divinity. It was the “spirit of Jahweh” that came
upon the prophets: it was the “wisdom of Jahweh” that the poets
described, and that grew at last to be detached from the personality of
God, and alluded to almost as a living individual. In the early church,
this “spirit of God,” this “holy spirit,” was supposed to
be poured forth upon the heads of believers: it descended upon Jesus
himself in the visible form of a dove from heaven, and upon the
disciples at Pentecost as tongues of fire. _Gradually, the conception
of a personal Holy Ghost took form and definiteness: an Alexandrian monk
insisted on the necessity for a Triad of gods who were yet one God: and
by the time the first creeds of the nascent church were committed to
writing, the Spirit had come to rank with the Father and the Son as the
Third Person in the ever-blessed Trinity._

By {408}this time, too, it is pretty clear that the original manhood of
Jesus had got merged in the idea of his eternal godhead; he was regarded
as the Logos, come down from heaven, where he had existed before all
worlds, and incarnate by the Holy Ghost in the Virgin Mary. The other
articles of the Christian faith clustered gradually round these
prime elements: the myth gathered force; the mysticism increased;
the secondary divine beings or saints grew vastly in numbers; and the
element of Judaism disappeared piecemeal, while a new polytheism and a
new sacerdotalism took root apace in the Aryan world. I shall strive to
show, however, in my concluding chapters, how even to the very end the
worship of the dead is still the central force in modern Christianity:
how religion, whatever its form, can never wander far from that
fundamental reality: and how, whenever by force of circumstances
the gods become too remote from human life, so that the doctrine of
resurrection or personal immortality is endangered for a time, and
reunion with relations in the other world becomes doubtful or insecure,
a reaction is sure to set in which takes things back once more to these
fundamental concepts, the most persistent and perpetually recurrent
element in all religious thinking.




CHAPTER XIX.--SURVIVALS IN CHRISTENDOM.

|WE {409}have now travelled far, apparently, from that primitive stage
of god-making where the only known gods are the corpses, mummies,
skulls, ghosts, or spirits of dead chieftains or dead friends and
relations. The God of Christianity, in his fully-evolved form,
especially as known to thinkers and theologians, is a being so vast, so
abstract, so ubiquitous, so eternal, that he seems to have hardly and
points of contact at all with the simple ancestral spirit or sacred
stone from which in the last resort he appears to be descended. Yet even
here, we must beware of being misled by too personal an outlook. While
the higher minds in Christendom undoubtedly conceive of the Christian
God in terms of Mansel and Martineau, the lower minds even among
ourselves conceive of him in far simpler and more material fashions. A
good deal of enquiry among ordinary English people of various classes,
not always the poorest, convinces me that to large numbers of them God
is envisaged as possessing a material human form, more or less gaseous
in composition; that, in spite of the Thirty-nine Articles, he has body,
parts, and passions; that he is usually pictured to the mind’s eye as
about ten or twelve feet high, with head, hands, eyes and mouth, used to
see with and speak with in human fashion; and that he sits on a throne,
like a king that he is, surrounded by a visible court of angels and
archangels. Italian art so invariably represents him, with a frankness
unknown to Protestant Christendom. Instead of {410}being in all places
at once, pervading and underlying nature, the Deity is conceived of
by most of his worshippers as having merely the power of annihilating
space, and finding himself wherever he likes at a given moment. His
omniscience and omnipotence are readily granted; but his abstractness
and immateriality are not really grasped by one out of a thousand of his
believers in Britain.

The fact is, so abstract a conception as the highest theological
conception of God cannot be realised except symbolically, and then for
a few moments only, in complete isolation. The moment God is definitely
thought of in connexion with any cosmic activity, still more in
connexion with any human need, he is inevitably thought of on human
analogies, and more or less completely anthropomorphised in the brain
of the believer. Being by origin an offshoot of the mind of man, a great
deified human being, he retains necessarily still, for all save a few
very mystical or ontological souls, the obvious marks of his ultimate
descent from a ghost or spirit. Indeed, on the mental as opposed to
the bodily side, he does so for us all; since even theologians freely
ascribe to him such human feelings as love, affection, a sense of
justice, a spirit of mercy, of truth, of wisdom: knowledge, will, the
powers of intellect, all the essential and fundamental human faculties
and emotions.

Thus, far as we seem to have travelled from our base in the most exalted
concepts of God, we are nearer to it still than most of us imagine.
Moreover, in spite of this height to which the highest minds have raised
their idea of the Deity, as the creator, sustainer, and mover of the
universe, every religion, however monotheistic, still continues to make
new minor gods for itself out of the dead as they die, and to worship
these gods with even more assiduous worship than it bestows upon the
great God of Christendom or the great gods of the central pantheon.
And the Christian religion makes such minor deities no less than all
{411}others. _The fact is, the religious emotion takes its origin from
the affection and regard felt for the dead by survivors, mingled with
the hope and belief that they may be of some use or advantage, temporal
or spiritual, to those who call upon them_; and these primitive faiths
and feelings remain so ingrained in the very core of humanity that even
the most abstract of all religions, like the Protestant schism, cannot
wholly choke them, while recrudescences of the original creed and custom
spring up from time to time in the form of spiritualism, theosophy, and
other vague types of simple ghost-worship.

Most advanced religions, however, and especially Christianity in its
central, true, and main form of Catholicism, have found it _necessary
to keep renewing from time to time the stock of minor gods--here
arbitrarily known as saints_--much as the older religions found it
always necessary from year to year to renew the foundation-gods, the
corn and wine gods, and the other special deities of the manufactured
order, by a constant supply of theanthropic victims. What I wish more
particularly to point out here, however, is that _the vast majority of
places of worship all the world over are still erected, as at the
very beginning, above the body of a dead man or woman_; that the chief
objects of worship in every shrine are still, as always, such cherished
bodies of dead men and women; and that the primitive connexion of
Religion with Death has never for a moment been practically severed
in the greater part of the world,--not even in Protestant England and
America.

Mr. William Simpson was one of the first persons to point out this
curious underlying connexion between churches, temples, mosques, or
topes, and a tomb or monument. He has proved his point in a very full
manner, and I would refer the reader who wishes to pursue this branch
of the subject at length to his interesting monographs. In this work,
I will confine my attention mainly to _the continued presence of this
death-element in Christianity_; but by way of illustration, I will
preface my remarks {412}by a few stray instances picked up at random
from the neighbouring and interesting field of Islam.

There is no religion in all the world which professes to be more purely
monotheistic in character than Mohammedanism. The unity of God, in the
very strictest sense, is the one dogma round which the entire creed
of Islam centres. More than any other cult, it represents itself as a
distinct reaction against the polytheism and superstition of surrounding
faiths. The isolation of Allah is its one great dogma. If, therefore,
we find even in this most monotheistic of existing religious systems a
large element of practically polytheistic survival--if we find that even
here the Worship of the Dead remains, as a chief component in religious
practice, if not in religious theory, we shall be fairly entitled to
conclude, I think, that such constituents are indeed of the very essence
of religious thinking, and we shall be greatly strengthened in
the conclusions at which we previously arrived as to a _belief in
immortality or continued life of the dead being in fact the core and
basis of worship and of deity._

Some eight or ten years since, when I first came practically into
connexion with Islam in Algeria and Egypt, I was immediately struck by
the wide prevalence among the Mahommedan population of forms of worship
for which I was little prepared by anything I had previously read or
heard as to the nature and practice of that exclusive and ostentatiously
monotheistic faith. Two points, indeed, forcibly strike any visitor
who for the first time has the opportunity of observing a Mahommedan
community in its native surroundings. The first is the universal habit
on the part of the women of visiting the cemeteries and mourning or
praying over the graves of their relations on Friday, the sacred day
of Islam. The second is the frequency of Koubbas, or little whitewashed
mosque-tombs erected over the remains of Marabouts, fakeers, or local
saints, which form the real centres for the religion and worship of
every village. Islam, in practice, is a religion {413}of pilgrimages to
the tombs of the dead. In Algeria, every hillside is dotted over with
these picturesque little whitewashed domes, each overshadowed by its
sacred date-palm, each surrounded by its small walled enclosure or
_temenos_ of prickly pear or agave, and each attended by its local
ministrant, who takes charge of the tomb and of the alms of the
faithful. Holy body, sacred stone, tree, well, and priest--not
an element of the original cult of the dead is lacking. Numerous
pilgrimages are made to these koubbas by the devout: and on Friday
evenings the little courtyards are almost invariably thronged by a crowd
of eager and devoted worshippers. Within, the bones of the holy man
lie preserved in a frame hung about with rosaries, pictures, and other
oblations of his ardent disciples, exactly as in the case of Roman
Catholic chapels. The saint, in fact, is quite as much an institution of
monotheistic Islam as of any other religion with which I am practically
acquainted.

These two peculiarities of the cult of Islam strike a stranger
immediately on the most casual visit. When he comes to look at the
matter more closely, however, he finds also that most of the larger
mosques in the principal towns are themselves similarly built to contain
and enshrine the bones of saintly personages, more or less revered in
their immediate neighbourhood. Some of these are indeed so holy that
their bones have been duplicated exactly like the wood of the true
cross, and two tombs have been built in separate places where the whole
or a portion of the supposed remains are said to be buried. I will only
specify as instances of such holy tombs the sacred city of Kerouan in
Tunisia, which ranks second to Mecca and Medina alone in the opinion of
all devout western Mohammedans. Here, the most revered building is
the shrine of “The Companion of the Prophet,” who lies within a
catafalque covered with palls of black velvet and silver--as funereal a
monument as is known to me anywhere. Close by stands the catafalque of
an Indian saint while {414}other holy tomb-mosques abound in the city.
In Algiers town, the holiest place is similarly the mosque-tomb of Sidi
Abd-er-Rahman, which contains the shrine and body of that saint, who
died in 1471. Around him, so as to share his sacred burial-place (like
the Egyptians who wished to be interred with Osiris), lie the bodies
of several Deys and Pashas. Lights are kept constantly burning at the
saint’s tomb, which is hung with variously-coloured drapery, after the
old Semitic fashion, while banners and ostrich-eggs, the gifts of the
faithful, dangle ostentatiously round it from the decorated ceiling.
Still more sacred in its way is the venerable shrine of Sidi Okba near
Biskra, one of the most ancient places of worship in the Mahommedan
world. The tomb of the great saint stands in a chantry, screened off
from the noble mosque which forms the ante-chamber, and is hung round
with silk and other dainty offerings. On the front an inscription in
very early Cufic characters informs us that “This is the tomb of Okba,
son of Nafa: May Allah have mercy upon him.” The mosque is a famous
place of pilgrimage, and a belief obtains that when the Sidi is rightly
invoked, a certain minaret in its front will nod in acceptance of the
chosen worshipper. I could multiply instances indefinitely, but refrain
on purpose. All the chief mosques at Tlemçen, Constantine, and the
other leading North African towns similarly gather over the bodies of
saints or _marabouts_, who are invoked in prayer, and to whom every act
of worship is offered.

All over Islam we get such holy grave-mosques. The tomb of the Prophet
at Medina heads the list: with the equally holy tomb of his daughter
Fatima. Among the Shiahs, Ali’s grave at Nejef and Hoseyn’s grave at
Kerbela are as sacred as that of the Prophet at Medina. The shrines of
the Imams are much adored in Persia. The graves of the peers in India,
the Ziarets of the fakeers in Afghanistan, show the same tendency. In
Palestine, says Major {415}Conder, worship at the tombs of local saints
“represents the real religion of the peasant.”

I had originally intended, indeed, to include in this work a special
chapter on these survivals in Islam, a vast number of which I have
collected in various places; but my book has already swelled to so much
larger dimensions than I had originally contemplated that I am compelled
reluctantly to forego this disquisition.

One word, however, must be given to Egypt, where the cult of the dead
was always so marked a feature in the developed religion, and where
neither Christianity nor Islam has been able to obscure this primitive
tendency. Nothing is more noticeable in the Nile Valley than the
extraordinary way in which the habits and ideas as to burial and the
preservation of the dead have survived in spite of the double and rapid
alteration in religious theory. At Sak-karah and Thebes, one is familiar
with the streets and houses of tombs, regularly laid out so as to form
in the strictest sense a true Necropolis, or city of the dead. Just
outside Cairo, on the edge of the desert, a precisely similar modern
Necropolis exists to this day, regularly planned in streets and
quarters, with the tomb of each family standing in its own courtyard or
enclosure, and often very closely resembling the common round-roofed or
domed Egyptian houses. In this town of dead bodies, every distinction of
rank and wealth may now be observed. The rich are buried under splendid
mausolea of great architectural pretensions; the poor occupy humble
tombs just raised above the surface of the desert, and marked at head
and foot with rough and simple Egyptian tombstones. Still, the entire
aspect of such a cemetery is the aspect of a town. In northern climates,
the dead sleep their last sleep under grassy little tumuli, wholly
unlike the streets of a city: in Egypt, to this day, the dead occupy, as
in life, whole lanes and alleys of eternal houses. Even the spirit
which produced the Pyramids and the Tombs of the Kings is conspicuous in
modern or mediaeval Cairo in {416}the taste which begot those vast
domed mosques known as the Tombs of the Khalifs and the Tombs of the
Mamelooks. Whatever is biggest in the neighbourhood of ancient Memphis
turns out on examination to be the last resting-place of a Dead Man, and
a place of worship.

Almost every one of the great mosques of Cairo is either a tomb built
for himself by a ruler--and this is the more frequent case--or else
the holy shrine of some saint of Islam. It is characteristic of Egypt,
however, where king and god have always been so closely combined, that
while elsewhere the mosque is usually the prayer-tomb of a holy man,
in Cairo it is usually the memorial-temple of a Sultan, an Emeer, a
viceroy, or a Khedive. It is interesting to find, too, after all we have
seen as to the special sanctity of the oracular head, that perhaps the
holiest of all these mosques contains the head of Hoseyn, the grandson
of the Prophet. A ceremonial washing is particularly mentioned in the
story of its translation. The mosque of Sultan Hassan, with its splendid
mausolem, is a peculiarly fine example of the temple-tombs of Cairo.

I will not linger any longer, however, in the precincts of Islam,
further than to mention the significant fact that the great central
object of worship for the Mahommedan world is the Kaaba at Mecca, which
itself, as Mr. William Simpson long ago pointed out, bears obvious
traces of being at once a tomb and a sacred altar-stone. Sir Richard
Burton’s original sketch of this mystic object shows it as a square
and undecorated temple-tomb, covered throughout with a tasselled black
pall--a most funereal object--the so-called “sacred carpet.” It is,
in point of fact, a simple catafalque. As the Kaaba was adopted direct
by Mohammad from the early Semitic heathenism of Arabia, and as it must
always have been treated with the same respect, I do not think we
can avoid the obvious conclusion that this very ancient tomb has
been funereally draped in the self-same manner, like those of Biskra,
Algiers, and Kerouan, from the time of its first erection. {417}This
case thus throws light on the draping of the _ashera_, as do also the
many-coloured draperies and hangings of saints’ catafalques in Algeria
and Tunis.

Nor can I resist a passing mention of the Moharram festival, which is
said to be the commemoration of the death of Hoseyn, the son of Ali
(whose holy head is preserved at Cairo). This is a rude piece of acting,
in which the events supposed to be connected with the death of Hoseyn
are graphically represented; and it ends with a sacred Adonis-like or
Osiris-like procession, in which the body of the saint is carried
and mourned over. The funeral is the grand part of the performance;
catafalques are constructed for the holy corpse, covered with green and
gold tinsel--the green being obviously a last reminiscence of the god of
vegetation. In Bombay, after the dead body and shrine have been carried
through the streets amid weeping and wailing, they are finally thrown
into the sea, like King Carnival. I think we need hardly doubt that here
we have an evanescent relic of the rites of the corn-god, ending in a
rain-charm, and very closely resembling those of Adonis and Osiris.

But if in Islam the great objects of worship are the Kaaba tomb at Mecca
and the Tomb of the Prophet at Medina, so the most holy spot in the
world for Christendom is--the Holy Sepulchre. It was for possession
of that most sacred place of pilgrimage that Christians fought Moslems
through the middle ages; and it is there that while faith in the human
Christ was strong and vigorous the vast majority of the most meritorious
pilgrimages continued to be directed. To worship at the tomb of the
risen Redeemer was the highest hope of the devout mediæval Christian.
Imitations of the Holy Sepulchre occur in abundance all over Europe: one
exists at S. Stefano in Bologna; another, due to the genius of Alberti,
is well known in the Ruccellai chapel at Florence. I need hardly recall
the Sacro Monte at Varallo.

For the most part, however, in Christendom, and especially {418}in those
parts of Christendom remote from Palestine, men contented themselves
with nearer and more domestic saints. From a very early date we see in
the catacombs the growth of this practice of offering up prayer by (or
to) the bodies of the Dead who slept in Christ. A chapel or _capella_,
as Dean Burgon has pointed out, meant originally an arched sepulchre in
the walls of the catacombs, at which prayer was afterwards habitually
made: and above-ground chapels were modelled, later on, upon the pattern
of these ancient underground shrines. I have alluded briefly in my
second chapter to the probable origin of the cruciform church from two
galleries of the catacombs crossing one another at right angles; the
High Altar stands there over the body or relics of a Dead Saint; and the
chapels represent other minor tombs grouped like niches in the catacombs
around it. A chapel is thus, as Mr. Herbert Spencer phrases it, “a
tomb within a tomb”; and a great cathedral is a serried set of such
cumulative tombs, one built beside the other. Sometimes the chapels
are actual graves, sometimes they are cenotaphs; but the connexion with
death is always equally evident. On this subject, I would refer the
reader again to Mr. Spencer’s pages.

So long as Christianity was proscribed at Rome and throughout the
empire, the worship of the dead must have gone on only silently, and
must have centred in the catacombs or by the graves of saints and
martyrs--the last-named being practically mere Christian successors of
the willing victims of earlier religions. “To be counted worthy to
suffer” was the heart’s desire of every earnest Christian--as it
still is among fresh and living sects like the Salvation Army; and
the creed of self-sacrifice, whose very name betrays its human-victim
origin, was all but universal. When Christianity had triumphed, however,
and gained not only official recognition but official honour, the cult
of the martyrs and the other faithful dead became with Christian Rome a
perfect passion. The Holy Innocents, {419}St. Stephen Protomartyr, the
nameless martyrs of the Ten Persecutions, together with Poly carp, Vivia
Perpétua, Félicitas, Ignatius and all the rest, came to receive from
the church a form of veneration which only the nice distinctions of the
theological mind could enable us to discriminate from actual worship.
The great procession of the slain for Christ in the mosaics of Sant’
Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna gives a good comprehensive list of the more
important of these earliest saints (at least for Aryan worshippers)
headed by St. Martin, St. Clement, St. Justin, St. Lawrence, and St.
Hippolytus. Later on came the more mythical and poetic figures, derived
apparently from heathen gods--St. Catharine, St. Barbara, St. George,
St. Christopher. These form as they go a perfect new pantheon, circling
round the figures of Christ himself, and his mother the Madonna, who
grows quickly in turn, by absorption of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, into
the Queen of Heaven.

The love-feasts or _agapœ_ of the early Christians were usually
held, in the catacombs or elsewhere, above the bodies of the martyrs.
Subsequently, the remains of the sainted dead were transferred to lordly
churches without, like Sant’ Agnese and San Paolo, where they were
deposited under the altar or sacred stone thus consecrated, from whose
top the body and blood of Christ was distributed in the Eucharist. As
early as the fourth century, we know that no church was complete without
some such relic; and the passion for martyrs spread so greatly from that
period onward that at one time no less than 2300 corpses of holy men
together were buried at S. Prassede. It is only in Rome itself that
the full importance of this martyr-worship can now be sufficiently
understood, or the large part which it played in the development of
Christianity adequately recognised. Perhaps the easiest way for the
Protestant reader to put himself in touch with this side of the subject
is to peruse the very interesting and graphic {420}account given in the
second volume of Mrs. Jameson’s _Sacred and Legendary Art_.

I have room for a few illustrative examples only.

When St. Ambrose founded his new church at Milan, he wished to
consecrate it with some holy relics. In a vision, he beheld two young
men in shining clothes, and it was revealed to him that these were holy
martyrs whose bodies lay near the spot where he lived in the city. He
dug for them, accordingly, and found two bodies, which proved to be
those of two saints, Gervasius and Protasius, who had suffered for the
faith in the reign of Nero. They were installed in the new basilica
Ambrose had built at Milan. Churches in their honour now exist all over
Christendom, the best known being those at Venice and Paris.

The body of St. Agnes, saint and martyr, who is always represented
with that familiar emblem, the lamb which she duplicates, lies in a
sarcophagus under the High Altar of Sant’ Agnese beyond the Porta Pia,
where a basilica was erected over the remains by Constantine the Great,
only a few years after the martyrdom of the saint. The body of St.
Cecilia lies similarly in the church of Santa Cecilia in Trastevere. In
this last-named case, the original house where Cecilia was put to death
is said to have been consecrated as a place of worship, after the very
early savage fashion, the room where she suffered possessing especial
sanctity. Pope Symmachus held a council there in the year 500. This
earliest church having fallen into ruins during the troubles of the
barbarians, Pope Paschal I., the great patron of relic-hunting, built
a new one in honour of the saint in the ninth century. While engaged in
the work, he had a dream (of a common pattern), when Cecilia appeared to
him and showed him the place in which she lay buried. Search was made,
and the body was found in the catacombs of St. Calixtus, wrapped in a
shroud of gold tissue, while at her feet lay a linen cloth dipped in the
sacred blood of her martyrdom. Near her were deposited the remains of
Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus, {421}all of whom are more or less
mixed up in her legend. The body was removed to the existing church,
the little room where the saint died being preserved as a chapel. In the
sixteenth century, the sacred building was again repaired and restored
in the atrocious taste of the time; and the sarcophagus was opened
before the eyes of several prelates, including Cardinal Baronius. The
body was found entire, and was then replaced in the silver shrine in
which it still reposes. Almost every church in Rome has thus its entire
body of a patron saint, oftenest a martyr of the early persecutions.

In many similar cases, immense importance is attached to the fact that
the body remains, as the phrase goes, “uncorrupted”; and I may
mention in this connexion that in the frequent representations of the
Raising of Lazarus, which occur as “emblems of the resurrection”
in the catacombs, the body of Lazarus is represented as a mummy,
often enclosed in what seems to be a mummy-case. Indeed, it is most
reminiscent of the Egyptian Osiris images.

I pass on to other and more interesting instances of survival in
corpse-worship.

The great central temple of the Catholic Church is St. Peter’s at
Rome. The very body of the crucified saint lies enshrined under the high
altar, in a sarcophagus brought from the catacomb near S. Sebastiano.
Upon this Rock, St. Peter’s and the Catholic Church are founded.
Ana-cletus, the successor of Clement, built a monument over the bones of
the blessed Peter; and if Peter be a historical person at all, I see no
reason to doubt that his veritable body actually lies there. St. Paul
shares with him in the same shrine; but only half the two corpses
now repose within the stately Confessio in the Sacristy of the papal
basilica: the other portion of St. Peter consecrates the Lateran; the
other portion of St. Paul gives sanctity to San Paolo fuori le Mura.

Other much venerated bodies at Rome are those of the Quattro Coronati,
in the church of that name; S. Praxedis {422}and St. Pudentiana in
their respective churches; St. Cosmo and St. Damian; and many more too
numerous to mention. Several of the Roman churches, like San Clemente,
stand upon the site of the house of the saint to whom they are
dedicated, or whose body they preserve, thus recalling the early New
Guinea practice. Others occupy the site of his alleged martyrdom, or
enclose the pillar to which he was fastened. The legends of all these
Roman saints are full of significant echoes of paganism. The visitor
to Rome who goes the round of the churches and catacombs with an
unprejudiced mind must be astonished to find how sites, myths, and
ceremonies recall at every step familiar heathen holy places or stories.
In the single church of San Zaccaria at Venice, again, I found the
bodies of St. Zacharias (father of John the Baptist), St. Sabina, St.
Tarasius, Sts. Nereus and Achilles, and many other saints too numerous
to mention.

How great importance was attached to the possession of the actual corpse
or mummy of a saint we see exceptionally well indeed in this case of
Venice. The bringing of the corpse or mummy of St. Mark from Alexandria
to the lagoons was long considered the most important event in the
history of the Republic; the church in which it was housed is the
noblest in Christendom, and contains an endless series of records of the
connexion of St. Mark with the city and people that so royally received
him. The soul, as one may see in Tintoret’s famous picture, flitted
over sea with the body to Venice, warned the sailors of danger by
the way, and ever after protected the hospitable Republic in all its
enterprises. One must have lived long in the city of the Lagoons and
drunk in its very spirit in order to know how absolutely it identified
itself with the Evangelist its patron. “Pax tibi, Marce, evangelista
metis,” is the motto on its buildings. The lion of St. Mark stood
high in the Piazzetta to be seen of all; he recurs in every detail of
sculpture or painting in the Doges’ Palace and the public edifices
of the city. The body that lay {423}under the pall of gold in the great
church of the Piazza was a veritable Palladium, a very present help in
time of trouble. It was no mere sentiment or fancy to the Venetians;
they knew that they possessed in their own soil, and under their own
church domes, the body and soul of the second of the evangelists.

Nor was that the only important helper that Venice could boast. She
contained also the body of St. George at San Giorgio Maggiore, and the
body of St. Nicholas at San Niccolo di Lido. The beautiful legend of
the Doge and the Fisherman (immortalised for us by the pencil of Paris
Bordone in one of the noblest pictures the world has ever seen) tells
us how the three great guardian saints, St. Mark, St. George, and St.
Nicholas, took a gondola one day from their respective churches, and
rowed out to sea amid a raging storm to circumvent the demons who were
coming in a tempest to overwhelm Venice. A fourth saint, of far later
date, whom the Venetians also carried off by guile, was St. Roch of
Montpelier. This holy man was a very great sanitary precaution against
the plague, to which the city was much exposed through its eastern
commerce. So the men of Venice simply stole the body by fraud from
Montpelier, and built in its honour the exquisite church and Scuola di
San Rocco, the great museum of the art of Tintoret. The fact that mere
possession of the holy body counts in itself for much could not be
better shown than by these forcible abductions.

The corpse of St. Nicholas, who was a highly revered bishop of Myra in
Lycia, lies, as I said, under the high altar of San Niccolo di Lido at
Venice. But another and more authentic body of the same great saint, the
patron of sailors and likewise of schoolboys, lies also under the high
altar of the magnificent basilica of San Nicola at Bari, from which
circumstance the holy bishop is generally known as St. Nicolas of Bari.
A miraculous fluid, the Manna di Bari, highly prized by the pious,
exudes from the remains. A gorgeous cathedral rises over the sepulchre.
{424}Such emulous duplication of bodies and relics is extremely common,
both in Christendom and in Islam.

I have made a point of visiting the shrines of a vast number of leading
saints in various parts of Italy; and could devote a volume to their
points of interest. The corpse of St. Augustine, for example, lies
at Pavia in a glorious ark, one of the most sumptuous monuments ever
erected by the skill of man, as well as one of the loveliest. Padua
similarly boasts the body of St. Antony of Padua, locally known as “il
Santo,” and far more important in his own town than all the rest of
the Christian pantheon put together. The many-domed church erected over
his remains is considerably larger than St. Mark’s at Venice; and
the actual body of the saint itself is enclosed in an exquisite marble
chapel, designed by Sansovino, and enriched with all the noblest art of
the Renaissance. Dominican monks and nuns make pilgrimages to Bologna,
in order to venerate the body of St. Dominic, who died in that city,
and whose corpse is enclosed in a magnificent sarcophagus in the church
dedicated to him, and adorned with exquisite sculpture by various hands
from the time of Niccolo Pisano to that of Michael Angelo. Siena has for
its special glory St. Catherine the second--the first was the mythical
princess of Alexandria; and the house of that ecstatic nun is still
preserved intact as an oratory for the prayers of the pious. Her head,
laid by in a silver shrine or casket, decorates the altar of her chapel
in San Domenico, where the famous frescoes of Sodoma too often usurp the
entire attention of northern visitors. Compare the holy head of Hoseyn
at Cairo. The great Franciscan church at Assisi, once more, enshrines
the remains of the founder of the Franciscans, which formerly reposed
under the high altar; the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli below it
encloses the little hut which was the first narrow home of the nascent
order. I could go on multiplying such instances without number; I hope
these few will suffice to make the Protestant reader feel how real is
the reverence {425}still paid to the very corpses and houses of the
saints in Italy. If ever he was present at Milan on the festa of San
Carlo Borromeo, and saw the peasants from neighbouring villages flock
in hundreds to kiss the relics of the holy man, as I have seen them, he
would not hesitate to connect much current Christianity with the most
primitive forms of corpse-worship and mummy-worship.

North of the Alps, again, I cannot refrain from mentioning a few salient
instances, which help to enforce principles already enunciated. At
Paris, the two great local saints are St. Denis and Ste. Geneviève. St.
Denis was the first bishop of Lutetia and of the Parish: he is said
to have been beheaded with his two companions at Montmartre,--Mons
Martyrum. He afterwards walked with his head in his hands from that
point (now covered by the little church of St. Pierre, next door to the
new basilica of the Sacre Cœur), to the spot where he piously desired
to be buried. A holy woman named Catulla (note that last echo) performed
the final rites for him at the place where the stately abbey-church of
St. Denis now preserves his memory. The first cathedral on the spot was
erected before the Frankish invasion; the second, built by Dagobert, was
consecrated (as a vision showed) by Christ himself, who descended for
the purpose from heaven, surrounded by apostles, angels, and St. Denis.
The actual head or skull of the saint was long preserved in the basilica
in a splendid reliquary of solid silver, the gift of Marguérite de
France, just as Hoseyn’s head is still preserved at Cairo, and as
so many other miraculous or oracular heads are kept by savages or
barbarians elsewhere. Indeed, the anthropological enquirer may be
inclined to suppose that the severance of thé head from the body and
its preservation above ground, after the common fashion, gave rise later
to the peculiar but by no means unique legend. Compare the bear’s
head in the Aino superstition, as well as the oracular German and
Scandinavian Nithstangs.

As for {426}Ste. Geneviève, she rested first in the church dedicated
to her on the site now occupied by the Pantheon, which still in part,
though secularised, preserves her memory. Her body (or what remains of
it) lies at present in the neighbouring church of St. Etienne du Mont,
where every lover of Paris surely pays his devotion to the shrine in the
most picturesque and original building which the city holds, whenever he
passes through the domain of Ste. Geneviève. How real the devotion of
the people still is may be seen on any morning of the working week, and
still more during the octave of the saint’s fete-day.

As in many other cases, however, the remains of the virgin patroness
of Paris have been more than once removed from place to place for safe
custody. The body was originally buried in the crypt of the old abbey
church of the Holy Apostles on the Ile de la Cité. When the Normans
overran the country, the monks carried it away with them in a wooden
box to a place of safety. As soon as peace was once more restored, the
corpse was enshrined in a splendid _châsse_; while the empty tomb was
still treated with the utmost reverence. At the Revolution, the actual
bones, it is said, were destroyed; but the sarcophagus or cenotaph
survived the storm, and was transferred to St. Etienne. Throughout
the Neuvaine, thousands of the faithful still flock to worship it. The
sarcophagus is believed even now to contain some holy portions of the
saint’s body, saved from the wreck by pious adherents.

Other familiar examples will occur to every one, such as the bones of
the Magi or Three Kings, preserved in a reliquary in the Cathedral
at Cologne; those of St. Ursula and the 11,000 virgins; those of St.
Stephen and St. Lawrence at Rome; those of St. Hubert, disinterred and
found uncorrupted, at the town of the same name in the Ardennes; and
those of St. Longinus in his chapel at Mantua. All these relics and
bodies perform astounding miracles, and {427}all have been the centres
of important cults for a considerable period.

In Britain, from the first stages of Christianity, the reverence paid to
the bodies of saints was most marked, and the story of their wanderings
forms an important part of our early annals. Indeed, I dwell so long
upon this point because few northerners of the present day can fully
appreciate the large part which the Dead Body plays and has played for
many centuries in Christian worship. Only those who, like me, have lived
long in thoroughly Catholic countries, have made pilgrimages to numerous
famous shrines, and have waded through reams of Anglo-Saxon and other
early mediaeval documents, can really understand this phase of Christian
hagiology. To such people it is abundantly clear that the actual Dead
Body of some sainted man or woman has been in many places the
chief object of reverence for millions of Christians in successive
generations. A good British instance is found in the case of St.
Cuthbert’s corpse. The tale of its wanderings is too long to be
given here in full; it should be read in any good history of Durham. I
epitomize briefly. The body of the devoted missionary of the north was
first kept for some time at Lindisfarne. When, at the end of eleven
years, the saint’s tomb was opened, his outer form was found still
incorrupt; and so for more than 800 years it was believed to remain.
It rested at Lindisfarne till 875, when the piratical Danes invaded
Northumbria. The monks, regarding St. Cuthbert as their greatest
treasure, fled inland, carrying the holy body with them on their own
shoulders. Such translations of sacred corpses are common in Christian
and heathen history. After many wanderings, during which it was treated
with the utmost care and devotion, the hallowed body found an asylum
for a while at Chester-le-Street in 883. In 995, it was transferred to
Ripon, where it sanctified the minster by even so short a sojourn; but
in the same year it went forth again, on its way north to Lindisfarne.
On the way, however, it miraculously {428}signified (by stubborn refusal
to move) its desire to rest for ever at Durham--a town whose strong
natural position and capacity for defence does honour to the saint’s
military judgment. Here, enclosed in a costly shrine, it remained
working daily miracles till the Reformation. The later grave was opened
in 1826, when the coffin was found to enclose another, made in 1104:
and this again contained a third, which answered the description of the
sarcophagus made in 698, when the saint was raised from his first
grave. The innermost case contained, not indeed the uncorrupted body
of Cuthbert, but a skeleton, still entire, and wrapped in fine robes
of embroidered silk. No story known to me casts more light on
corpse-worship than does this one when read with all the graphic details
of the original authorities.

But everywhere in Britain we get similar local saints, whose bodies or
bones performed marvellous miracles and were zealously guarded against
sacrilegious intruders. Bede himself is already full of such holy
corpses: and in later days they increased by the hundred. St. Alban at
St. Alban’s, the protomartyr of Britain; the “white hand” of
St. Oswald, that when all else perished remained white and uncorrupted
because blessed by Aidan; St. Etheldreda at Ely, another remarkable
and illustrative instance; Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey;
these are but a few out of hundreds of examples which will at once occur
to students of our history. And I will add that sometimes the legends
of these saints link us on unexpectedly to far earlier types of heathen
worship; as when we read concerning St. Edmund of East Anglia, the
patron of Bury St. Edmund’s, that Ingvar the viking took him by force,
bound him to a tree, scourged him cruelly, made him a target for the
arrows of the pagan Danes, and finally beheaded him. Either, I say,
a god-making sacrifice of the northern heathens; or, failing that, a
reminiscence, like St. Sebastian, of such god-making rites as preserved
{429}in the legends of ancient martyrs. Compare here, once more, the
Aino bear-sacrifice.

But during the later middle ages, the sacred Body of Britain, above all
others, was undoubtedly that of Thomas A’Becket at Canterbury. Hither,
as we know, all England went on pilgrimage; and nothing could more fully
show the rapidity of canonisation in such cases than the fact that even
the mighty Henry II. had to prostrate himself before his old enemy’s
body and submit to a public scourging at the shrine of the new-made
martyr. For several hundred years after his death there can be no doubt
at all that the cult of St. Thomas of Canterbury was much the most real
and living worship throughout the whole of England; its only serious
rivals in popular favour being the cult of St. Cuthbert to the north of
Humber, and that of St. Etheldreda in the Eastern Counties.

Holy heads in particular were common in Britain before the Reformation.
A familiar Scottish case is that of the head of St. Fergus, the apostle
of Banff and the Pictish Highlands, transferred to and preserved at
the royal seat of Scone. “By Sanct Fergus heid at Scone” was the
favourite oath of the Scotch monarchs, as “Par Sainct Denys” was
that of their French contemporaries.

In almost all these cases, again, and down to the present day, popular
appreciation goes long before official Roman canonisation. Miracles are
first performed at the tomb, and prayers are answered; an irregular cult
precedes the formal one. Even in our own day, only a few weeks after
Cardinal Manning’s death, advertisements appeared in Catholic papers
in London, giving thanks for spiritual and temporal blessings received
through the intervention of Our Lady, the saints, “and our beloved
Cardinal.”

This popular canonisation has often far outrun the regular official
acceptance, as in the case of Joan of Arc in France at the present day,
or of “Maister John Schorn, that blessed man born,” in the Kent
of the middle ages. Thus countries like Wales and Cornwall are full of
local and {430}patriotic saints, often of doubtful Catholicity, like St.
Cadoc, St. Padern, St. Petrock, St. Piran, St. Ruan, and St. Illtyd, not
to mention more accepted cases, like St. Asaph and St. David. The fact
is, men have everywhere felt the natural desire for a near, a familiar,
a recent, and a present god or saint; they have worshipped rather the
dead whom they loved and revered themselves than the elder gods and
the remoter martyrs who have no body among them, no personal shrine, no
local associations, no living memories. “I have seen in Brittany,”
says a French correspondent of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s, “the tomb of a
pious and charitable priest covered with garlands: people flocked to
it by hundreds to pray of him that he would procure them restoration
to health, and guard over their children.” There, with the Christian
addition of the supreme God, we get once more the root-idea of religion.

I should like to add that beyond such actual veneration of the bodies
of saints and martyrs, there has always existed a definite theory in the
Roman church that no altar can exist without a relic. The altar, being
itself a monumental stone, needs a body or part of a body to justify
and consecrate it. Dr. Rock, a high authority, says in his _Hierurgia_,
“By the regulations of the Church it is ordained that the Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass be offered upon an altar which contains a stone
consecrated by a Bishop, enclosing the relics of some saint or martyr;
and be covered with three linen cloths that have been blessed for that
purpose with an appropriate form of benediction.” The consecration of
the altar, indeed, is considered even more serious than the consecration
of the church itself; for without the stone and its relic, the ceremony
of the Mass cannot be performed at all. Even when Mass has to be said
in a private house, the priest brings a consecrated stone and its relic
along with him; and other such stones were carried in the _retables_ or
portable altars so common in military expeditions of the middle ages.
The church is thus {431}a tomb, with chapel tombs around it; it contains
a stone monument covering a dead body or part of a body; and in it is
made and exhibited the Body of Christ, in the form of the consecrated
and transmuted wafer.

Not only, however, is the altar in this manner a reduced or symbolical
tomb, and not only is it often placed above the body of a saint, as at
St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s, but it also sometimes consists itself of
a stone sarcophagus. One such sarcophagus exists in the Cathedral at
St. Malo; I have seen other coffin-shaped altars in the monastery of La
Trappe near Algiers and elsewhere. When, however, the altar stands, like
that at St. Peter’s, above the actual body of a saint, it does not
require to contain a relic; otherwise it does. That is to say, it must
be either a real or else an attenuated and symbolical sarcophagus.

In the eastern church, a sort of relic-bag, called an Antimins, is
necessary for the proper performance of the Holy Eucharist. It consists
of a square cloth, laid on the altar or wrapped up in its coverings, and
figured with a picture representing the burial of Christ by Joseph of
Arimathea and the Holy Women. This brings it very near to the Adonis and
Hoseyn ceremonies. But it must necessarily contain some saintly relic.

Apart from corpse-worship and relic-worship in the case of saints,
Catholic Christendom has long possessed an annual Commemoration of the
Dead, the _Jour des Morts_, which links itself on directly to earlier
ancestor-worship. It is true, this commemoration is stated officially,
and no doubt correctly, to owe its origin (in its recognised form) to a
particular historical person, Adam de Saint Victor: but when we consider
how universal such commemorations and annual dead-feasts have been in
all times and places, we can hardly doubt that the church did but adopt
and sanctify a practice which, though perhaps accounted heathenish, had
never died out at all among the mass of believers. The very desire to
be buried in a church or churchyard, and all that it implies, link on
Christian usage here {432}once more to primitive corpse-worship. Compare
with the dead who sleep with Osiris. In the middle ages, many people
were buried in chapels containing the body (or a relic) of their patron
saint.

_In short, from first to last, religion never gets far away from
these its earliest and profoundest associations. “God and
immortality,”--those two are its key-notes. And those two are one;
for the god in the last resort is nothing more than the immortal ghost,
etherealised and extended._

On the other hand, whenever religion travels too far afield from its
emotional and primal base in the cult of the nearer dead, it must either
be constantly renewed by fresh and familiar objects of worship, or it
tends to dissipate itself into mere vague pantheism. A new god, a new
saint, a “revival of religion,” is continually necessary. _The
Sacrifice of the Mass is wisely repeated at frequent intervals; but
that alone does not suffice; men want the assurance of a nearer, a
more familiar deity._ In our own time, and especially in Protestant and
sceptical England and America, this need has made itself felt in the
rise of spiritualism and kindred beliefs, which are but the doctrine
of the ghost or shade in its purified form, apart, as a rule, from the
higher conception of a supreme ruler. ~And what is Positivism itself
save the veneration of the mighty dead, just tinged with vague ethical
yearnings after the abstract service of living humanity? I have known
many men of intellect, suffering under a severe bereavement--the loss
of a wife or a dearly-loved child--take refuge for a time either in
spiritualism or Catholicism. The former seems to give them the practical
assurance of actual bodily intercourse with the dead, through mediums
or table-turning; the latter supplies them with a theory of death
which makes reunion a probable future for them. This desire for direct
converse with the dead we saw exemplified in a very early or primitive
stage in the case of the Mandan wives who talk lovingly to their
husbands’ skulls; it probably forms the basis for the common habit of
keeping the head {433}while burying the body, whose widespread results
we have so frequently noticed. I have known two instances of modern
spiritualists who similarly had their wives’ bodies embalmed, in order
that the spirit might return and inhabit them.

_Thus the Cult of the Dead, which is the earliest origin of all
religion, in the sense of worship, is also the last relic of the
religious spirit which survives the gradual decay of faith due to
modern scepticism. To this cause I refer on the whole the spiritualistic
utterances of so many among our leaders of modern science. They have
rejected religion, but they cannot reject the inherited and ingrained
religious emotions._




CHAPTER XX.--CONCLUSION.

|AND {434}now we have reached at last the end of our long and toilsome
disquisition. I need hardly say, to those who have persisted with me so
far, that I do not regard a single part of it all as by any means final.
There is not a chapter in this book, indeed, which I could not have
expanded to double or treble its present length, had I chosen to include
in it a tithe of the evidence I have gathered on the subject with which
it deals. But for many adequate reasons, compression was imperative.
Some of the greatest treatises ever written on this profoundly important
and interesting question have met with far less than the attention they
deserved because they were so bulky and so overloaded with evidence that
the reader could hardly see the wood for the trees; he lost the thread
of the argument in the mazes of example. In my own case, I had or
believed I had a central idea; and I desired to set that idea forth with
such simple brevity as would enable the reader to grasp it and to follow
it. I go, as it were, before a Grand Jury only. I do not pretend in any
one instance to have proved my points; I am satisfied if I have made out
a _prima facie_ case for further enquiry.

My object in the present reconstructive treatise has therefore been
merely to set forth in as short a form as was consistent with clearness
my conception of the steps by which mankind arrived at its idea of its
God. I have not tried to produce evidence on each step in full; I
have only tried to lay before the general public a rough sketch of
a psychological {435}rebuilding, and to suggest at the same time to
scholars and anthropologists some inkling of the lines along which
evidence in favour of my proposed reconstruction is likeliest to be
found. This book is thus no more than a summary of probabilities. Should
it succeed in attracting attention and arousing interest in so vast and
fundamental a subject, I shall hope to follow it up by others in future,
in which the various component elements of my theory will be treated
in detail, and original authorities will be copiously quoted with the
fullest references. As, however, in this preliminary outline of my views
I have dealt with few save well-known facts, and relied for the most
part upon familiar collocations of evidence, I have not thought it
necessary to encumber my pages with frequent and pedantic footnotes,
referring to the passages or persons quoted. The scholar will know well
enough where to look for the proofs he needs, while the general reader
can only judge my rough foreshadowing of a hypothesis according as he is
impressed by its verisimilitude or the contrary.

If, on the other hand, this _avant-courier_ of a reasoned system fails
to interest the public, I must perforce be content to refrain from going
any deeper in print into this fascinating theme, on which I have still
an immense number of ideas and facts which I desire the opportunity of
publicly ventilating.

I wish also to remark before I close that I do not hold dogmatically
to the whole or any part of the elaborate doctrine here tentatively
suggested. I have changed my own mind far too often, with regard to
these matters, in the course of my personal evolution, ever to think I
have reached complete finality. Fifteen or twenty years ago, indeed,
I was rash enough to think I had come to anchor, when I first read Mr.
Herbert Spencer’s sketch of the origin of religion in the opening
volume of the _Principles of Sociology_. Ten or twelve years since,
doubts and difficulties again obtruded themselves. Six years ago, once
more, {436}when _The Golden Bough_ appeared, after this book had been
planned and in part executed, I was forced to go back entirely upon many
cherished former opinions, and to reconsider many questions which I
had fondly imagined were long since closed for me. Since that time, new
lights have been constantly shed upon me from without, or have occurred
to me from within: and I humbly put this sketch forward now for what it
may be worth, not with the idea that I have by any means fathomed the
whole vast truth, but in the faint hope that I may perhaps have looked
down here and there a little deeper into the profound abysses beneath us
than has been the lot of most previous investigators. At the same time,
I need hardly reiterate my sense of the immense obligations under which
I lie to not a few among them, and preeminently to Mr. Spencer, Mr.
Frazer, Mr. Hartland, and Dr. Tylor. My only claim is that I may perhaps
have set forth a scheme of reconstruction which further evidence will
possibly show to be true in parts, and mistaken in others..

On the other hand, by strictly confining my attention to religious
features, properly so called, to the exclusion of mythology, ethics, and
all other external accretions or accidents, I trust I have been able
to demonstrate more clearly than has hitherto been done the intimate
connexion which always exists between cults in general and the worship
of the Dead God, natural or artificial. Even if I have not quite
succeeded in inducing the believer in primitive animism to reconsider
his prime dogma of the origin of gods from all-pervading spirits (of
which affiliation I can see no proof in the evidence before us),
I venture to think I shall at any rate have made him feel that
Ancestor-Worship and the Cult of the Dead God have played a far larger
and deeper part than he has hitherto been willing to admit in the
genesis of the religious emotions. Though I may not have raised the
worship of the Dead Man to a supreme and unique place in the god-making
process, I have at least, I trust, raised it to a position of higher
importance than {437}it has hitherto held, even since the publication of
Mr. Herbert Spencer’s epoch-making researches. I believe I have
made it tolerably clear that the vast mass of existing gods or divine
persons, when we come to analyse them, do actually turn out to be
dead and deified human beings. In short, it is my hope that I have
rehabilitated Euhemerism.

This is not the place, at the very end of so long a disquisition, to
examine the theory of primitive animism. I would therefore only say
briefly here that I do not deny the actual existence of that profoundly
animistic frame of mind which Mr. Im Thurn has so well depicted among
the Indians of Guiana; nor that which exists among the Sa-moyeds of
Siberia; nor that which meets us at every turn in historical accounts
of the old Roman religion. I am quite ready to admit that, to people at
that stage of religious evolution, the world seems simply thronged with
spirits on every side, each of whom has often his own special functions
and peculiar prerogatives. But I fail to see that any one of these ideas
is demonstrably primitive. Most often, we can trace ghosts, spirits, and
gods to particular human origins: where spirits exist in abundance
and pervade all nature, I still fail to understand why they may not be
referred to the one known source and spring of all ghostly beings. It
is abundantly clear that no distinction of name or rite habitually
demarcates these ubiquitous and uncertain spirits at large from those
domestic gods whose origin is perfectly well remembered in the family
circle. I make bold to believe, therefore, that in every such case we
have to deal with unknown and generalised ghosts,--with ghosts of
most varying degrees of antiquity. If any one can show me a race of
spirit-believers who do not worship their own ancestral spirits, or can
adduce any effective prime differentia between the spirit that was once
a living man, and the spirit that never was human at all, I will gladly
hear him. Up to date, however, no such race has been pointed out, and no
such differentia ever posited.

The {438}truth is, we have now no primitive men at all. Existing men are
the descendants of people who have had religions, in all probability,
for over a million years. The best we can do, therefore, is to trace
what gods we can to their original source, and believe that the rest are
of similar development. And whither do we track them?

“So far as I have been able to trace back the origin of the best-known
minor provincial deities,” says Sir Alfred Lyall, speaking of India
in general, “they are usually men of past generations who have earned
special promotion and brevet rank among disembodied ghosts.... Of the
numerous local gods known to have been living men, by far the greater
proportion derive from the ordinary canonisation of holy personages....
The number of shrines thus raised in Berar alone to these anchorites and
persons deceased in the odour of sanctity is large, and it is constantly
increasing. Some of them have already attained the rank of temples.”
We have seen that an acute observer, Erman, came to a similar conclusion
about the gods of those very Ostyaks who are often quoted as typical
examples of primitive animists. Of late years, all the world over,
numerous unprejudiced investigators, like Mr. Duff Macdonald and Captain
Henderson, have similarly come to the conclusion that the gods of the
natives among whom they worked were all of human origin; while we
know that some whole great national creeds, like the Shinto of Japan,
recognise no deities at all save living kings and dead ancestral
spirits. Under these circumstances, judging the unknown by the known,
I hesitate to take the very bold step of positing any new and fanciful
source for the small residuum of unresolved gods whose human origin is
less certainly known to us.

In one word, _I believe that corpse-worship is the protoplasm of
religion, while admitting that folk-lore is the protoplasm of mythology,
and of its more modern and philosophical offshoot, theology_.










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