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Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

by Edward Carpenter · English · Gutenberg #1561 · 592,873 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Pagan and Christian Creeds: Their Origin and Meaning

Author: Edward Carpenter


        
Release date: December 1, 1998 [eBook #1561]
                Most recently updated: November 26, 2022

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING ***




PAGAN & CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING

By Edward Carpenter




"The different religions being lame attempts to represent under various
guises this one root-fact of the central universal life, men have at
all times clung to the religious creeds and rituals and ceremonials as
symbolising in some rude way the redemption and fulfilment of their own
most intimate natures--and this whether consciously understanding
the interpretations, or whether (as most often) only doing so in an
unconscious or quite subconscious way."

The Drama of Love and Death, p. 96.



CONTENTS

     I.    INTRODUCTORY
     II.   SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS
     III.  THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC
     IV.   TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS
     V.    FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC
     VI.   MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS
     VII.  RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION
     VIII. PAGAN INITIATIONS AND THE SECOND BIRTH
     IX.   MYTH OF THE GOLDEN AGE
     X.    THE SAVIOUR-GOD AND THE VIRGIN-MOTHER
     XI.   RITUAL DANCING
     XII.  THE SEX-TABOO
     XIII. THE GENESIS OF CHRISTIANITY
     XV.   THE MEANING OF IT ALL
     XV.   THE ANCIENT MYSTERIES
     XVI.  THE EXODUS OF CHRISTIANITY
     XVII. CONCLUSION

     APPENDIX ON THE TEACHINGS OF THE UPANISHADS:
     I.    REST
     II.   THE NATURE OF THE SELF




PAGAN AND CHRISTIAN CREEDS: THEIR ORIGIN AND MEANING




I. INTRODUCTORY

The subject of Religious Origins is a fascinating one, as the great
multitude of books upon it, published in late years, tends to show.
Indeed the great difficulty to-day in dealing with the subject, lies in
the very mass of the material to hand--and that not only on account of
the labor involved in sorting the material, but because the abundance
itself of facts opens up temptation to a student in this department of
Anthropology (as happens also in other branches of general Science) to
rush in too hastily with what seems a plausible theory. The more facts,
statistics, and so forth, there are available in any investigation, the
easier it is to pick out a considerable number which will fit a given
theory. The other facts being neglected or ignored, the views put
forward enjoy for a time a great vogue. Then inevitably, and at a later
time, new or neglected facts alter the outlook, and a new perspective is
established.

There is also in these matters of Science (though many scientific men
would doubtless deny this) a great deal of "Fashion". Such has been
notoriously the case in Political Economy, Medicine, Geology, and even
in such definite studies as Physics and Chemistry. In a comparatively
recent science, like that with which we are now concerned, one would
naturally expect variations. A hundred and fifty years ago, and since
the time of Rousseau, the "Noble Savage" was extremely popular; and he
lingers still in the story books of our children. Then the reaction from
this extreme view set in, and of late years it has been the popular cue
(largely, it must be said, among "armchair" travelers and explorers)
to represent the religious rites and customs of primitive folk as a
senseless mass of superstitions, and the early man as quite devoid of
decent feeling and intelligence. Again, when the study of religious
origins first began in modern times to be seriously taken up--say in the
earlier part of last century--there was a great boom in Sungods. Every
divinity in the Pantheon was an impersonation of the Sun--unless indeed
(if feminine) of the Moon. Apollo was a sungod, of course; Hercules was
a sungod; Samson was a sungod; Indra and Krishna, and even Christ, the
same. C. F. Dupuis in France (Origine de tous les Cultes, 1795), F. Nork
in Germany (Biblische Mythologie, 1842), Richard Taylor in England (The
Devil's Pulpit, (1) 1830), were among the first in modern times to put
forward this view. A little later the PHALLIC explanation of everything
came into fashion. The deities were all polite names for the organs and
powers of procreation. R. P. Knight (Ancient Art and Mythology,
1818) and Dr. Thomas Inman (Ancient Faiths and Ancient Names, 1868)
popularized this idea in England; so did Nork in Germany. Then again
there was a period of what is sometimes called Euhemerism--the theory
that the gods and goddesses had actually once been men and women,
historical characters round whom a halo of romance and remoteness
had gathered. Later still, a school has arisen which thinks little of
sungods, and pays more attention to Earth and Nature spirits, to gnomes
and demons and vegetation-sprites, and to the processes of Magic by
which these (so it was supposed) could be enlisted in man's service if
friendly, or exorcised if hostile.


 (1) This extraordinary book, though carelessly composed and
containing many unproven statements, was on the whole on the right
lines. But it raised a storm of opposition--the more so because its
author was a clergyman! He was ejected from the ministry, of course, and
was sent to prison twice.


It is easy to see of course that there is some truth in ALL these
explanations; but naturally each school for the time being makes the
most of its own contention. Mr. J. M. Robertson (Pagan Christs and
Christianity and Mythology), who has done such fine work in this field,
(1) relies chiefly on the solar and astronomical origins, though he does
not altogether deny the others; Dr. Frazer, on the other hand--whose
great work, The Golden Bough, is a monumental collection of primitive
customs, and will be an inexhaustible quarry for all future students--is
apparently very little concerned with theories about the Sun and the
stars, but concentrates his attention on the collection of innumerable
details (2) of rites, chiefly magical, connected with food and
vegetation. Still later writers, like S. Reinach, Jane Harrison and
E. A. Crowley, being mainly occupied with customs of very primitive
peoples, like the Pelasgian Greeks or the Australian aborigines, have
confined themselves (necessarily) even more to Magic and Witchcraft.

 (1) If only he did not waste so much time, and so needlessly, in
slaughtering opponents!

 (2) To such a degree, indeed, that sometimes the connecting clue
of the argument seems to be lost.


Meanwhile the Christian Church from these speculations has kept itself
severely apart--as of course representing a unique and divine revelation
little concerned or interested in such heathenisms; and moreover (in
this country at any rate) has managed to persuade the general public
of its own divine uniqueness to such a degree that few people, even
nowadays, realize that it has sprung from just the same root as
Paganism, and that it shares by far the most part of its doctrines and
rites with the latter. Till quite lately it was thought (in Britain)
that only secularists and unfashionable people took any interest in
sungods; and while it was true that learned professors might point to a
belief in Magic as one of the first sources of Religion, it was easy in
reply to say that this obviously had nothing to do with Christianity!
The Secularists, too, rather spoilt their case by assuming, in their
wrath against the Church, that all priests since the beginning of
the world have been frauds and charlatans, and that all the rites of
religion were merely devil's devices invented by them for the purpose of
preying upon the superstitions of the ignorant, to their own enrichment.
They (the Secularists) overleaped themselves by grossly exaggerating a
thing that no doubt is partially true.

Thus the subject of religious origins is somewhat complex, and yields
many aspects for consideration. It is only, I think, by keeping a broad
course and admitting contributions to the truth from various sides, that
valuable results can be obtained. It is absurd to suppose that in this
or any other science neat systems can be found which will cover all the
facts. Nature and History do not deal in such things, or supply them for
a sop to Man's vanity.

It is clear that there have been three main lines, so far, along which
human speculation and study have run. One connecting religious rites and
observations with the movements of the Sun and the planets in the sky,
and leading to the invention of and belief in Olympian and remote gods
dwelling in heaven and ruling the Earth from a distance; the second
connecting religion with the changes of the season, on the Earth and
with such practical things as the growth of vegetation and food, and
leading to or mingled with a vague belief in earth-spirits and magical
methods of influencing such spirits; and the third connecting religion
with man's own body and the tremendous force of sex residing in
it--emblem of undying life and all fertility and power. It is clear
also--and all investigation confirms it--that the second-mentioned phase
of religion arose on the whole BEFORE the first-mentioned--that is, that
men naturally thought about the very practical questions of food and
vegetation, and the magical or other methods of encouraging the same,
before they worried themselves about the heavenly bodies and the laws of
THEIR movements, or about the sinister or favorable influences the stars
might exert. And again it is extremely probable that the third-mentioned
aspect--that which connected religion with the procreative desires and
phenomena of human physiology--really came FIRST. These desires and
physiological phenomena must have loomed large on the primitive mind
long before the changes of the seasons or of the sky had been at all
definitely observed or considered. Thus we find it probable that, in
order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of
religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given
in which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the
Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of
earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief
in definite God-figures residing in heaven.

At the base of the whole process by which divinities and demons were
created, and rites for their propitiation and placation established, lay
Fear--fear stimulating the imagination to fantastic activity. Primus in
orbe deos fecit Timor. And fear, as we shall see, only became a mental
stimulus at the time of, or after, the evolution of self-consciousness.
Before that time, in the period of SIMPLE consciousness, when the human
mind resembled that of the animals, fear indeed existed, but its nature
was more that of a mechanical protective instinct. There being no figure
or image of SELF in the animal mind, there were correspondingly no
figures or images of beings who might threaten or destroy that self. So
it was that the imaginative power of fear began with Self-consciousness,
and from that imaginative power was unrolled the whole panorama of the
gods and rites and creeds of Religion down the centuries.

The immense force and domination of Fear in the first self-conscious
stages of the human mind is a thing which can hardly be exaggerated, and
which is even difficult for some of us moderns to realize. But naturally
as soon as Man began to think about himself--a frail phantom and waif in
the midst of tremendous forces of whose nature and mode of operation he
was entirely ignorant--he was BESET with terrors; dangers loomed upon
him on all sides. Even to-day it is noticed by doctors that one of the
chief obstacles to the cure of illness among some black or native races
is sheer superstitious terror; and Thanatomania is the recognized word
for a state of mind ("obsession of death") which will often cause a
savage to perish from a mere scratch hardly to be called a wound.
The natural defence against this state of mind was the creation of an
enormous number of taboos--such as we find among all races and on every
conceivable subject--and these taboos constituted practically a
great body of warnings which regulated the lives and thoughts of the
community, and ultimately, after they had been weeded out and to some
degree simplified, hardened down into very stringent Customs and Laws.
Such taboos naturally in the beginning tended to include the avoidance
not only of acts which might reasonably be considered dangerous, like
touching a corpse, but also things much more remote and fanciful in
their relation to danger, like merely looking at a mother-in-law, or
passing a lightning-struck tree; and (what is especially to be noticed)
they tended to include acts which offered any special PLEASURE or
temptation--like sex or marriage or the enjoyment of a meal. Taboos
surrounded these things too, and the psychological connection is easy to
divine: but I shall deal with this general subject later.

It may be guessed that so complex a system of regulations made life
anything but easy to early peoples; but, preposterous and unreasonable
as some of the taboos were, they undoubtedly had the effect of
compelling the growth of self-control. Fear does not seem a very worthy
motive, but in the beginning it curbed the violence of the purely animal
passions, and introduced order and restraint among them. Simultaneously
it became itself, through the gradual increase of knowledge and
observation, transmuted and etherealized into something more like wonder
and awe and (when the gods rose above the horizon) into reverence.
Anyhow we seem to perceive that from the early beginnings (in the
Stone Age) of self-consciousness in Man there has been a gradual
development--from crass superstition, senseless and accidental, to
rudimentary observation, and so to belief in Magic; thence to Animism
and personification of nature-powers in more or less human form,
as earth-divinities or sky-gods or embodiments of the tribe; and to
placation of these powers by rites like Sacrifice and the Eucharist,
which in their turn became the foundation of Morality. Graphic
representations made for the encouragement of fertility--as on the
walls of Bushmen's rock-dwellings or the ceilings of the caverns of
Altamira--became the nurse of pictorial Art; observations of plants
or of the weather or the stars, carried on by tribal medicine-men for
purposes of witchcraft or prophecy, supplied some of the material of
Science; and humanity emerged by faltering and hesitating steps on the
borderland of those finer perceptions and reasonings which are supposed
to be characteristic of Civilization.

The process of the evolution of religious rites and ceremonies has in
its main outlines been the same all over the world, as the reader will
presently see--and this whether in connection with the numerous creeds
of Paganism or the supposedly unique case of Christianity; and now the
continuity and close intermixture of these great streams can no longer
be denied--nor IS it indeed denied by those who have really studied the
subject. It is seen that religious evolution through the ages has been
practically One thing--that there has been in fact a World-religion,
though with various phases and branches.

And so in the present day a new problem arises, namely how to account
for the appearance of this great Phenomenon, with its orderly phases
of evolution, and its own spontaneous (1) growths in all corners of the
globe--this phenomenon which has had such a strange sway over the hearts
of men, which has attracted them with so weird a charm, which has drawn
out their devotion, love and tenderness, which has consoled them in
sorrow and affliction, and yet which has stained their history with such
horrible sacrifices and persecutions and cruelties. What has been the
instigating cause of it?

 (1) For the question of spontaneity see chap. x and elsewhere.


The answer which I propose to this question, and which is developed to
some extent in the following chapters, is a psychological one. It is
that the phenomenon proceeds from, and is a necessary accompaniment of,
the growth of human Consciousness itself--its growth, namely, through
the three great stages of its unfoldment. These stages are (1) that of
the simple or animal consciousness, (2) that of SELF-consciousness, and
(3) that of a third stage of consciousness which has not as yet been
effectively named, but whose indications and precursive signs we here
and there perceive in the rites and prophecies and mysteries of the
early religions, and in the poetry and art and literature generally of
the later civilizations. Though I do not expect or wish to catch Nature
and History in the careful net of a phrase, yet I think that in the
sequence from the above-mentioned first stage to the second, and then
again in the sequence from the second to the third, there will be found
a helpful explanation of the rites and aspirations of human religion. It
is this idea, illustrated by details of ceremonial and so forth, which
forms the main thesis of the present book. In this sequence of growth,
Christianity enters as an episode, but no more than an episode. It does
not amount to a disruption or dislocation of evolution. If it did, or
if it stood as an unique or unclassifiable phenomenon (as some of its
votaries contend), this would seem to be a misfortune--as it would
obviously rob us of at any rate one promise of progress in the future.
And the promise of something better than Paganism and better than
Christianity is very precious. It is surely time that it should be
fulfilled.

The tracing, therefore, of the part that human self-consciousness has
played, psychologically, in the evolution of religion, runs like a
thread through the following chapters, and seeks illustration in a
variety of details. The idea has been repeated under different aspects;
sometimes, possibly, it has been repeated too often; but different
aspects in such a case do help, as in a stereoscope, to give solidity to
the thing seen. Though the worship of Sun-gods and divine figures in
the sky came comparatively late in religious evolution, 1 have put this
subject early in the book (chapters ii and iii), partly because (as I
have already explained) it was the phase first studied in modern times,
and therefore is the one most familiar to present-day readers, and
partly because its astronomical data give great definiteness and
"proveability" to it, in rebuttal to the common accusation that the
whole study of religious origins is too vague and uncertain to have much
value. Going backwards in Time, the two next chapters (iv and v) deal
with Totem-sacraments and Magic, perhaps the earliest forms of religion.
And these four lead on (in chapters vi to xi) to the consideration of
rites and creeds common to Paganism and Christianity. XII and xiii deal
especially with the evolution of Christianity itself; xiv and xv explain
the inner Meaning of the whole process from the beginning; and xvi and
xvii look to the Future.

The appendix on the doctrines of the Upanishads may, I hope, serve to
give an idea, intimate even though inadequate, of the third Stage--that
which follows on the stage of self-consciousness; and to portray the
mental attitudes which are characteristic of that stage. Here in this
third stage, it would seem, one comes upon the real FACTS of the inner
life--in contradistinction to the fancies and figments of the second
stage; and so one reaches the final point of conjunction between Science
and Religion.




II. SOLAR MYTHS AND CHRISTIAN FESTIVALS

To the ordinary public--notwithstanding the immense amount of work which
has of late been done on this subject--the connection between Paganism
and Christianity still seems rather remote. Indeed the common notion
is that Christianity was really a miraculous interposition into and
dislocation of the old order of the world; and that the pagan gods (as
in Milton's Hymn on the Nativity) fled away in dismay before the sign of
the Cross, and at the sound of the name of Jesus. Doubtless this was a
view much encouraged by the early Church itself--if only to enhance its
own authority and importance; yet, as is well known to every student, it
is quite misleading and contrary to fact. The main Christian doctrines
and festivals, besides a great mass of affiliated legend and ceremonial,
are really quite directly derived from, and related to, preceding
Nature worships; and it has only been by a good deal of deliberate
mystification and falsification that this derivation has been kept out
of sight.

In these Nature-worships there may be discerned three fairly independent
streams of religious or quasi-religious enthusiasm: (1) that connected
with the phenomena of the heavens, the movements of the Sun, planets and
stars, and the awe and wonderment they excited; (2) that connected with
the seasons and the very important matter of the growth of vegetation
and food on the Earth; and (3) that connected with the mysteries of Sex
and reproduction. It is obvious that these three streams would mingle
and interfuse with each other a good deal; but as far as they were
separable the first would tend to create Solar heroes and Sun-myths;
the second Vegetation-gods and personifications of Nature and the
earth-life; while the third would throw its glamour over the other two
and contribute to the projection of deities or demons worshipped with
all sorts of sexual and phallic rites. All three systems of course have
their special rites and times and ceremonies; but, as, I say, the rites
and ceremonies of one system would rarely be found pure and unmixed with
those belonging to the two others. The whole subject is a very large
one; but for reasons given in the Introduction I shall in this and
the following chapter--while not ignoring phases (2) and (3)--lay most
stress on phase (1) of the question before us.

At the time of the life or recorded appearance of Jesus of Nazareth, and
for some centuries before, the Mediterranean and neighboring world had
been the scene of a vast number of pagan creeds and rituals. There were
Temples without end dedicated to gods like Apollo or Dionysus among the
Greeks, Hercules among the Romans, Mithra among the Persians, Adonis and
Attis in Syria and Phrygia, Osiris and Isis and Horus in Egypt, Baal
and Astarte among the Babylonians and Carthaginians, and so forth.
Societies, large or small, united believers and the devout in the
service or ceremonials connected with their respective deities, and
in the creeds which they confessed concerning these deities. And an
extraordinarily interesting fact, for us, is that notwithstanding great
geographical distances and racial differences between the adherents
of these various cults, as well as differences in the details of their
services, the general outlines of their creeds and ceremonials were--if
not identical--so markedly similar as we find them.

I cannot of course go at length into these different cults, but I may
say roughly that of all or nearly all the deities above-mentioned it was
said and believed that:


(1) They were born on or very near our Christmas Day.

(2) They were born of a Virgin-Mother.

(3) And in a Cave or Underground Chamber.

(4) They led a life of toil for Mankind.

(5) And were called by the names of Light-bringer, Healer, Mediator,
Savior, Deliverer.

(6) They were however vanquished by the Powers of Darkness.

(7) And descended into Hell or the Underworld.

(8) They rose again from the dead, and became the pioneers of mankind to
the Heavenly world.

(9) They founded Communions of Saints, and Churches into which disciples
were received by Baptism.

(10) And they were commemorated by Eucharistic meals.


Let me give a few brief examples.

Mithra was born in a cave, and on the 25th December. (1) He was born of
a Virgin. (2) He traveled far and wide as a teacher and illuminator
of men. He slew the Bull (symbol of the gross Earth which the sunlight
fructifies). His great festivals were the winter solstice and the Spring
equinox (Christmas and Easter). He had twelve companions or disciples
(the twelve months). He was buried in a tomb, from which however he rose
again; and his resurrection was celebrated yearly with great rejoicings.
He was called Savior and Mediator, and sometimes figured as a Lamb; and
sacramental feasts in remembrance of him were held by his followers.
This legend is apparently partly astronomical and partly vegetational;
and the same may be said of the following about Osiris.

 (1) The birthfeast of Mithra was held in Rome on the 8th day
before the Kalends of January, being also the day of the Circassian
games, which were sacred to the Sun. (See F. Nork, Der Mystagog,
Leipzig.)

 (2) This at any rate was reported by his later disciples (see
Robertson's Pagan Christs, p. 338).


Osiris was born (Plutarch tells us) on the 361st day of the year,
say the 27th December. He too, like Mithra and Dionysus, was a great
traveler. As King of Egypt he taught men civil arts, and "tamed them by
music and gentleness, not by force of arms"; (1) he was the discoverer
of corn and wine. But he was betrayed by Typhon, the power of darkness,
and slain and dismembered. "This happened," says Plutarch, "on the 17th
of the month Athyr, when the sun enters into the Scorpion" (the sign of
the Zodiac which indicates the oncoming of Winter). His body was placed
in a box, but afterwards, on the 19th, came again to life, and, as in
the cults of Mithra, Dionysus, Adonis and others, so in the cult
of Osiris, an image placed in a coffin was brought out before the
worshipers and saluted with glad cries of "Osiris is risen." (1) "His
sufferings, his death and his resurrection were enacted year by year in
a great mystery-play at Abydos." (2)

 (1) See Plutarch on Isis and Osiris.

 (2) Ancient Art and Ritual, by Jane E. Harrison, chap. i.


The two following legends have more distinctly the character of
Vegetation myths.

Adonis or Tammuz, the Syrian god of vegetation, was a very beautiful
youth, born of a Virgin (Nature), and so beautiful that Venus and
Proserpine (the goddesses of the Upper and Underworlds) both fell in
love with him. To reconcile their claims it was agreed that he should
spend half the year (summer) in the upper world, and the winter half
with Proserpine below. He was killed by a boar (Typhon) in the autumn.
And every year the maidens "wept for Adonis" (see Ezekiel viii. 14). In
the spring a festival of his resurrection was held--the women set out
to seek him, and having found the supposed corpse placed it (a wooden
image) in a coffin or hollow tree, and performed wild rites and
lamentations, followed by even wilder rejoicings over his supposed
resurrection. At Aphaca in the North of Syria, and halfway between
Byblus and Baalbec, there was a famous grove and temple of Astarte,
near which was a wild romantic gorge full of trees, the birthplace of
a certain river Adonis--the water rushing from a Cavern, under lofty
cliffs. Here (it was said) every year the youth Adonis was again wounded
to death, and the river ran red with his blood, (1) while the scarlet
anemone bloomed among the cedars and walnuts.

 (1) A discoloration caused by red earth washed by rain from the
mountains, and which has been observed by modern travelers. For the
whole story of Adonis and of Attis see Frazer's Golden Bough, part iv.


The story of Attis is very similar. He was a fair young shepherd or
herdsman of Phrygia, beloved by Cybele (or Demeter), the Mother of the
gods. He was born of a Virgin--Nana--who conceived by putting a ripe
almond or pomegranate in her bosom. He died, either killed by a boar,
the symbol of winter, like Adonis, or self-castrated (like his own
priests); and he bled to death at the foot of a pine tree (the pine
and pine-cone being symbols of fertility). The sacrifice of his blood
renewed the fertility of the earth, and in the ritual celebration of
his death and resurrection his image was fastened to the trunk of a
pine-tree (compare the Crucifixion). But I shall return to this legend
presently. The worship of Attis became very widespread and much honored,
and was ultimately incorporated with the established religion at Rome
somewhere about the commencement of our Era.

The following two legends (dealing with Hercules and with Krishna) have
rather more of the character of the solar, and less of the vegetational
myth about them. Both heroes were regarded as great benefactors of
humanity; but the former more on the material plane, and the latter on
the spiritual.

Hercules or Heracles was, like other Sun-gods and benefactors of
mankind, a great Traveler. He was known in many lands, and everywhere
he was invoked as Saviour. He was miraculously conceived from a divine
Father; even in the cradle he strangled two serpents sent to destroy
him. His many labors for the good of the world were ultimately
epitomized into twelve, symbolized by the signs of the Zodiac. He slew
the Nemxan Lion and the Hydra (offspring of Typhon) and the Boar. He
overcame the Cretan Bull, and cleaned out the Stables of Augeas; he
conquered Death and, descending into Hades, brought Cerberus thence and
ascended into Heaven. On all sides he was followed by the gratitude and
the prayers of mortals.

As to Krishna, the Indian god, the points of agreement with the general
divine career indicated above are too salient to be overlooked, and too
numerous to be fully recorded. He also was born of a Virgin (Devaki)
and in a Cave, (1) and his birth announced by a Star. It was sought to
destroy him, and for that purpose a massacre of infants was ordered.
Everywhere he performed miracles, raising the dead, healing lepers, and
the deaf and the blind, and championing the poor and oppressed. He had
a beloved disciple, Arjuna, (cf. John) before whom he was transfigured.
(2) His death is differently related--as being shot by an arrow, or
crucified on a tree. He descended into hell; and rose again from the
dead, ascending into heaven in the sight of many people. He will return
at the last day to be the judge of the quick and the dead.

 (1) Cox's Myths of the Aryan Nations, p. 107.

 (2) Bhagavat Gita, ch. xi.


Such are some of the legends concerning the pagan and pre-Christian
deities--only briefly sketched now, in order that we may get something
like a true perspective of the whole subject; but to most of them, and
more in detail, I shall return as the argument proceeds.

What we chiefly notice so far are two points; on the one hand the
general similarity of these stories with that of Jesus Christ; on the
other their analogy with the yearly phenomena of Nature as illustrated
by the course of the Sun in heaven and the changes of Vegetation on the
earth.


(1) The similarity of these ancient pagan legends and beliefs with
Christian traditions was indeed so great that it excited the attention
and the undisguised wrath of the early Christian fathers. They felt no
doubt about the similarity, but not knowing how to explain it fell
back upon the innocent theory that the Devil--in order to confound the
Christians--had, CENTURIES BEFORE, caused the pagans to adopt certain
beliefs and practices! (Very crafty, we may say, of the Devil, but also
very innocent of the Fathers to believe it!) Justin Martyr for instance
describes (1) the institution of the Lord's Supper as narrated in the
Gospels, and then goes on to say: "Which the wicked devils have IMITATED
in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For,
that bread and a cup of water are placed with certain incantations in
the mystic rites of one who is being initiated you either know or can
learn." Tertullian also says (2) that "the devil by the mysteries of
his idols imitates even the main part of the divine mysteries."...
"He baptizes his worshippers in water and makes them believe that
this purifies them from their crimes."... "Mithra sets his mark on the
forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers
an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the
sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage; he even has his
virgins and ascetics." (3) Cortez, too, it will be remembered complained
that the Devil had positively taught to the Mexicans the same things
which God had taught to Christendom.

 (1) I Apol. c. 66.

 (2) De Praescriptione Hereticorum, c. 40; De Bapt. c. 3; De
Corona, c. 15.

 (3) For reference to both these examples see J. M. Robertson's
Pagan Christs, pp. 321, 322.


Justin Martyr again, in the Dialogue with Trypho says that the Birth in
the Stable was the prototype (!) of the birth of Mithra in the Cave of
Zoroastrianism; and boasts that Christ was born when the Sun takes its
birth in the Augean Stable, (1) coming as a second Hercules to cleanse
a foul world; and St. Augustine says "we hold this (Christmas) day holy,
not like the pagans because of the birth of the Sun, but because of the
birth of him who made it." There are plenty of other instances in the
Early Fathers of their indignant ascription of these similarities to the
work of devils; but we need not dwell over them. There is no need for
US to be indignant. On the contrary we can now see that these
animadversions of the Christian writers are the evidence of how and to
what extent in the spread of Christianity over the world it had become
fused with the Pagan cults previously existing.

 (1) The Zodiacal sign of Capricornus, iii.


It was not till the year A.D. 530 or so--five centuries after the
supposed birth of Christ--that a Scythian Monk, Dionysius Exiguus, an
abbot and astronomer of Rome, was commissioned to fix the day and the
year of that birth. A nice problem, considering the historical science
of the period! For year he assigned the date which we now adopt, (2) and
for day and month he adopted the 25th December--a date which had been
in popular use since about 350 B.C., and the very date, within a day or
two, of the supposed birth of the previous Sungods. (3) From that
fact alone we may fairly conclude that by the year 530 or earlier the
existing Nature-worships had become largely fused into Christianity. In
fact the dates of the main pagan religious festivals had by that time
become so popular that Christianity was OBLIGED to accommodate itself to
them. (1)

 (1) As, for instance, the festival of John the Baptist in June
took the place of the pagan midsummer festival of water and bathing;
the Assumption of the Virgin in August the place of that of Diana in the
same month; and the festival of All Souls early in November, that of the
world-wide pagan feasts of the dead and their ghosts at the same season.

 (2) See Encycl. Brit. art. "Chronology."

 (3) "There is however a difficulty in accepting the 25th December
as the real date of the Nativity, December being the height of the rainy
season in Judaea, when neither flocks nor shepherds could have been at
night in the fields of Bethlehem" (!). Encycl. Brit. art. "Christmas
Day." According to Hastings's Encyclopaedia, art. "Christmas," "Usener
says that the Feast of the Nativity was held originally on the 6th
January (the Epiphany), but in 353-4 the Pope Liberius displaced it to
the 25th December... but there is no evidence of a Feast of the Nativity
taking place at all, before the fourth century A.D." It was not till 534
A.D. that Christmas Day and Epiphany were reckoned by the law-courts as
dies non.


This brings us to the second point mentioned a few pages back--the
analogy between the Christian festivals and the yearly phenomena of
Nature in the Sun and the Vegetation.

Let us take Christmas Day first. Mithra, as we have seen, was reported
to have been born on the 25th December (which in the Julian Calendar was
reckoned as the day of the Winter Solstice AND of the Nativity of the
Sun); Plutarch says (Isis and Osiris, c. 12) that Osiris was born on
the 361st day of the year, when a Voice rang out proclaiming the Lord of
All. Horus, he says, was born on the 362nd day. Apollo on the same.

Why was all this? Why did the Druids at Yule Tide light roaring fires?
Why was the cock supposed to crow all Christmas Eve ("The bird of
dawning singeth all night long")? Why was Apollo born with only one hair
(the young Sun with only one feeble ray)? Why did Samson (name derived
from Shemesh, the sun) lose all his strength when he lost his hair? Why
were so many of these gods--Mithra, Apollo, Krishna, Jesus, and others,
born in caves or underground chambers? (1) Why, at the Easter Eve
festival of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem is a light brought from the
grave and communicated to the candles of thousands who wait outside, and
who rush forth rejoicing to carry the new glory over the world? (2) Why
indeed? except that older than all history and all written records has
been the fear and wonderment of the children of men over the failure of
the Sun's strength in Autumn--the decay of their God; and the anxiety
lest by any means he should not revive or reappear?


 (1) This same legend of gods (or idols) being born in caves has,
curiously enough, been reported from Mexico, Guatemala, the Antilles,
and other places in Central America. See C. F. P. von Martius,
Etknographie Amerika, etc. (Leipzig, 1867), vol. i, p. 758.

 (2) Compare the Aztec ceremonial of lighting a holy fire and
communicating it to the multitude from the wounded breast of a human
victim, celebrated every 52 years at the end of one cycle and the
beginning of another--the constellation of the Pleiades being in the
Zenith (Prescott's Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 4).


Think for a moment of a time far back when there were absolutely NO
Almanacs or Calendars, either nicely printed or otherwise, when all that
timid mortals could see was that their great source of Light and Warmth
was daily failing, daily sinking lower in the sky. As everyone now knows
there are about three weeks at the fag end of the year when the days are
at their shortest and there is very little change. What was happening?
Evidently the god had fallen upon evil times. Typhon, the prince of
darkness, had betrayed him; Delilah, the queen of Night, had shorn his
hair; the dreadful Boar had wounded him; Hercules was struggling
with Death itself; he had fallen under the influence of those malign
constellations--the Serpent and the Scorpion. Would the god grow weaker
and weaker, and finally succumb, or would he conquer after all? We can
imagine the anxiety with which those early men and women watched for the
first indication of a lengthening day; and the universal joy when the
Priest (the representative of primitive science) having made some
simple observations, announced from the Temple steps that the day WAS
lengthening--that the Sun was really born again to a new and glorious
career. (1)

 (1) It was such things as these which doubtless gave the
Priesthood its power.


Let us look at the elementary science of those days a little closer.
How without Almanacs or Calendars could the day, or probable day, of the
Sun's rebirth be fixed? Go out next Christmas Evening, and at midnight
you will see the brightest of the fixed stars, Sirius, blazing in the
southern sky--not however due south from you, but somewhat to the
left of the Meridian line. Some three thousand years ago (owing to the
Precession of the Equinoxes) that star at the winter solstice did
not stand at midnight where you now see it, but almost exactly ON
the meridian line. The coming of Sirius therefore to the meridian at
midnight became the sign and assurance of the Sun having reached the
very lowest point of his course, and therefore of having arrived at the
moment of his re-birth. Where then was the Sun at that moment? Obviously
in the underworld beneath our feet. Whatever views the ancients may have
had about the shape of the earth, it was evident to the mass of people
that the Sungod, after illuminating the world during the day, plunged
down in the West, and remained there during the hours of darkness in
some cavern under the earth. Here he rested and after bathing in the
great ocean renewed his garments before reappearing in the East next
morning.

But in this long night of his greatest winter weakness, when all the
world was hoping and praying for the renewal of his strength, it is
evident that the new birth would come--if it came at all--at midnight.
This then was the sacred hour when in the underworld (the Stable or the
Cave or whatever it might be called) the child was born who was destined
to be the Savior of men. At that moment Sirius stood on the southern
meridian (and in more southern lands than ours this would be more nearly
overhead); and that star--there is little doubt--is the Star in the East
mentioned in the Gospels.

To the right, as the supposed observer looks at Sirius on the midnight
of Christmas Eve, stands the magnificent Orion, the mighty hunter. There
are three stars in his belt which, as is well known, lie in a straight
line pointing to Sirius. They are not so bright as Sirius, but they are
sufficiently bright to attract attention. A long tradition gives them
the name of the Three Kings. Dupuis (1) says: "Orion a trois belles
etoiles vers le milieu, qui sont de seconde grandeur et posees en ligne
droite, l'une pres de l'autre, le peuple les appelle les trois rois.
On donne aux trois rois Magis les noms de Magalat, Galgalat, Saraim;
et Athos, Satos, Paratoras. Les Catholiques les appellent Gaspard,
Melchior, et Balthasar." The last-mentioned group of names comes in
the Catholic Calendar in connection with the feast of the Epiphany (6th
January); and the name "Trois Rois" is commonly to-day given to these
stars by the French and Swiss peasants.

 (1) Charles F. Dupuis (Origine de Tous les Cultes, Paris, 1822)
was one of the earliest modern writers on these subjects.


Immediately after Midnight then, on the 25th December, the Beloved Son
(or Sun-god) is born. If we go back in thought to the period, some three
thousand years ago, when at that moment of the heavenly birth Sirius,
coming from the East, did actually stand on the Meridian, we shall come
into touch with another curious astronomical coincidence. For at the
same moment we shall see the Zodiacal constellation of the Virgin in
the act of rising, and becoming visible in the East divided through the
middle by the line of the horizon.

The constellation Virgo is a Y-shaped group, of which [gr a], the star
at the foot, is the well-known Spica, a star of the first magnitude. The
other principal stars, [gr g] at the centre, and [gr b] and [gr e] at
the extremities, are of the second magnitude. The whole resembles more a
cup than the human figure; but when we remember the symbolic meaning
of the cup, that seems to be an obvious explanation of the name Virgo,
which the constellation has borne since the earliest times. (The three
stars [gr b], [gr g] and [gr a], lie very nearly on the Ecliptic, that
is, the Sun's path--a fact to which we shall return presently.)

At the moment then when Sirius, the star from the East, by coming to the
Meridian at midnight signalled the Sun's new birth, the Virgin was seen
just rising on the Eastern sky--the horizon line passing through
her centre. And many people think that this astronomical fact is the
explanation of the very widespread legend of the Virgin-birth. I do not
think that it is the sole explanation--for indeed in all or nearly all
these cases the acceptance of a myth seems to depend not upon a single
argument but upon the convergence of a number of meanings and reasons in
the same symbol. But certainly the fact mentioned above is curious, and
its importance is accentuated by the following considerations.

In the Temple of Denderah in Egypt, and on the inside of the dome,
there is or WAS an elaborate circular representation of the Northern
hemisphere of the sky and the Zodiac. (1) Here Virgo the constellation
is represented, as in our star-maps, by a woman with a spike of corn in
her hand (Spica). But on the margin close by there is an annotating and
explicatory figure--a figure of Isis with the infant Horus in her arms,
and quite resembling in style the Christian Madonna and Child, except
that she is sitting and the child is on her knee. This seems to show
that--whatever other nations may have done in associating Virgo with
Demeter, Ceres, Diana (2) etc.--the Egyptians made no doubt of the
constellation's connection with Isis and Horus. But it is well known as
a matter of history that the worship of Isis and Horus descended in the
early Christian centuries to Alexandria, where it took the form of the
worship of the Virgin Mary and the infant Savior, and so passed into
the European ceremonial. We have therefore the Virgin Mary connected by
linear succession and descent with that remote Zodiacal cluster in the
sky! Also it may be mentioned that on the Arabian and Persian globes of
Abenezra and Abuazar a Virgin and Child are figured in connection with
the same constellation. (3)

 (1) Carefully described and mapped by Dupuis, see op. cit.

 (2) For the harvest-festival of Diana, the Virgin, and her
parallelism with the Virgin Mary, see The Golden Bough, vol. i, 14 and
ii, 121.

 (3) See F. Nork, Der Mystagog (Leipzig, 1838).


A curious confirmation of the same astronomical connection is afforded
by the Roman Catholic Calendar. For if this be consulted it will be
found that the festival of the Assumption of the Virgin is placed on the
15th August, while the festival of the Birth of the Virgin is dated the
8th September. I have already pointed out that the stars, [gr a], [gr
b] and [gr g] of Virgo are almost exactly on the Ecliptic, or Sun's path
through the sky; and a brief reference to the Zodiacal signs and the
star-maps will show that the Sun each year enters the sign of Virgo
about the first-mentioned date, and leaves it about the second date. At
the present day the Zodiacal signs (owing to precession) have shifted
some distance from the constellations of the same name. But at the time
when the Zodiac was constituted and these names were given, the first
date obviously would signalize the actual disappearance of the cluster
Virgo in the Sun's rays--i. e. the Assumption of the Virgin into the
glory of the God--while the second date would signalize the reappearance
of the constellation or the Birth of the Virgin. The Church of Notre
Dame at Paris is supposed to be on the original site of a Temple of
Isis; and it is said (but I have not been able to verify this myself)
that one of the side entrances--that, namely, on the left in entering
from the North (cloister) side--is figured with the signs of the Zodiac
EXCEPT that the sign Virgo is replaced by the figure of the Madonna and
Child.

So strange is the scripture of the sky! Innumerable legends and customs
connect the rebirth of the Sun with a Virgin parturition. Dr. J. G.
Frazer in his Part IV of The Golden Bough (1) says: "If we may trust the
evidence of an obscure scholiast the Greeks (in the worship of Mithras
at Rome) used to celebrate the birth of the luminary by a midnight
service, coming out of the inner shrines and crying, 'The Virgin has
brought forth! The light is waxing!' ([gr 'H parhenos tetoken, auzei
pws].)" In Elie Reclus' little book Primitive Folk (2) it is said of the
Esquimaux that "On the longest night of the year two angakout (priests),
of whom one is disguised as a WOMAN, go from hut to hut extinguishing
all the lights, rekindling them from a vestal flame, and crying out,
'From the new sun cometh a new light!'"

 (1) Book II, ch. vi.

 (2) In the Contemporary Science Series, I. 92.


All this above-written on the Solar or Astronomical origins of the myths
does not of course imply that the Vegetational origins must be denied
or ignored. These latter were doubtless the earliest, but there is no
reason--as said in the Introduction (ch. i)--why the two elements should
not to some extent have run side by side, or been fused with each other.
In fact it is quite clear that they must have done so; and to separate
them out too rigidly, or treat them as antagonistic, is a mistake. The
Cave or Underworld in which the New Year is born is not only the place
of the Sun's winter retirement, but also the hidden chamber beneath the
Earth to which the dying Vegetation goes, and from which it re-arises
in Spring. The amours of Adonis with Venus and Proserpine, the lovely
goddesses of the upper and under worlds, or of Attis with Cybele, the
blooming Earth-mother, are obvious vegetation-symbols; but they do not
exclude the interpretation that Adonis (Adonai) may also figure as a
Sun-god. The Zodiacal constellations of Aries and Taurus (to which I
shall return presently) rule in heaven just when the Lamb and the Bull
are in evidence on the earth; and the yearly sacrifice of those two
animals and of the growing Corn for the good of mankind runs
parallel with the drama of the sky, as it affects not only the said
constellations but also Virgo (the Earth-mother who bears the sheaf of
corn in her hand).

I shall therefore continue (in the next chapter) to point out these
astronomical references--which are full of significance and poetry; but
with a recommendation at the same time to the reader not to forget the
poetry and significance of the terrestrial interpretations.

Between Christmas Day and Easter there are several minor festivals or
holy days--such as the 28th December (the Massacre of the Innocents),
the 6th January (the Epiphany), the 2nd February (Candlemas (1) Day),
the period of Lent (German Lenz, the Spring), the Annunciation of the
Blessed Virgin, and so forth--which have been commonly celebrated in
the pagan cults before Christianity, and in which elements of Star and
Nature worship can be traced; but to dwell on all these would take too
long; so let us pass at once to the period of Easter itself.

 (1) This festival of the Purification of the Virgin corresponds
with the old Roman festival of Juno Februata (i. e. purified) which was
held in the last month (February) of the Roman year, and which included
a candle procession of Ceres, searching for Proserpine. (F. Nork, Der
Mystagog.)




III. THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ZODIAC

The Vernal Equinox has all over the ancient world, and from the earliest
times, been a period of rejoicing and of festivals in honor of the
Sungod. It is needless to labor a point which is so well known. Everyone
understands and appreciates the joy of finding that the long darkness is
giving way, that the Sun is growing in strength, and that the days are
winning a victory over the nights. The birds and flowers reappear, and
the promise of Spring is in the air. But it may be worth while to give
an elementary explanation of the ASTRONOMICAL meaning of this period,
because this is not always understood, and yet it is very important in
its bearing on the rites and creeds of the early religions. The priests
who were, as I have said, the early students and inquirers, had worked
out this astronomical side, and in that way were able to fix dates and
to frame for the benefit of the populace myths and legends, which were
in a certain sense explanations of the order of Nature, and a kind of
"popular science."

The Equator, as everyone knows, is an imaginary line or circle girdling
the Earth half-way between the North and South poles. If you imagine a
transparent Earth with a light at its very centre, and also imagine the
SHADOW of this equatorial line to be thrown on the vast concave of
the Sky, this shadow would in astronomical parlance coincide with the
Equator of the Sky--forming an imaginary circle half-way between the
North and South celestial poles.

The Equator, then, may be pictured as cutting across the sky either by
day or by night, and always at the same elevation--that is, as seen from
any one place. But the Ecliptic (the other important great circle of the
heavens) can only be thought of as a line traversing the constellations
as they are seen at NIGHT. It is in fact the Sun's path among the fixed
stars. For (really owing to the Earth's motion in its orbit) the Sun
appears to move round the heavens once a year--travelling, always to the
left, from constellation to constellation. The exact path of the sun is
called the Ecliptic; and the band of sky on either side of the Ecliptic
which may be supposed to include the said constellations is called the
Zodiac. How then--it will of course be asked--seeing that the Sun and
the Stars can never be seen together--were the Priests ABLE to map out
the path of the former among the latter? Into that question we need not
go. Sufficient to say that they succeeded; and their success--even with
the very primitive instruments they had--shows that their astronomical
knowledge and acuteness of reasoning were of no mean order.

To return to our Vernal Equinox. Let us suppose that the Equator and
Ecliptic of the sky, at the Spring season, are represented by two lines
Eq. and Ecl. crossing each other at the point P. The Sun, represented
by the small circle, is moving slowly and in its annual course along the
Ecliptic to the left. When it reaches the point P (the dotted circle)
it stands on the Equator of the sky, and then for a day or two, being
neither North nor South, it shines on the two terrestrial hemispheres
alike, and day and night are equal. BEFORE that time, when the sun
is low down in the heavens, night has the advantage, and the days are
short; AFTERWARDS, when the Sun has travelled more to the left, the days
triumph over the nights. It will be seen then that this point P where
the Sun's path crosses the Equator is a very critical point. It is the
astronomical location of the triumph of the Sungod and of the arrival of
Spring.

How was this location defined? Among what stars was the Sun moving at
that critical moment? (For of course it was understood, or supposed,
that the Sun was deeply influenced by the constellation through which it
was, or appeared to be, moving.) It seems then that at the period when
these questions were occupying men's minds--say about three thousand
years ago--the point where the Ecliptic crossed the Equator was, as a
matter of fact, in the region of the constellation Aries or the he-Lamb.
The triumph of the Sungod was therefore, and quite naturally, ascribed
to the influence of Aries. THE LAMB BECAME THE SYMBOL OF THE RISEN
SAVIOR, AND OF HIS PASSAGE FROM THE UNDERWORLD INTO THE HEIGHT OF
HEAVEN. At first such an explanation sounds hazardous; but a thousand
texts and references confirm it; and it is only by the accumulation of
evidence in these cases that the student becomes convinced of a theory's
correctness. It must also be remembered (what I have mentioned before)
that these myths and legends were commonly adopted not only for
one strict reason but because they represented in a general way the
convergence of various symbols and inferences.

Let me enumerate a few points with regard to the Vernal Equinox. In the
Bible the festival is called the Passover, and its supposed institution
by Moses is related in Exodus, ch. xii. In every house a he-lamb was to
be slain, and its blood to be sprinkled on the doorposts of the house.
Then the Lord would pass over and not smite that house. The Hebrew word
is pasach, to pass. (1) The lamb slain was called the Paschal Lamb. But
what was that lamb? Evidently not an earthly lamb--(though certainly
the earthly lambs on the hillsides WERE just then ready to be killed and
eaten)--but the heavenly Lamb, which was slain or sacrificed when the
Lord "passed over" the equator and obliterated the constellation Aries.
This was the Lamb of God which was slain each year, and "Slain since the
foundation of the world." This period of the Passover (about the 25th
March) was to be (2) the beginning of a new year. The sacrifice of
the Lamb, and its blood, were to be the promise of redemption. The
door-frames of the houses--symbols of the entrance into a new life--were
to be sprinkled with blood. (3) Later, the imagery of the saving power
of the blood of the Lamb became more popular, more highly colored. (See
St. Paul's epistles, and the early Fathers.) And we have the expression
"washed in the blood of the Lamb" adopted into the Christian Church.

 (1) It is said that pasach sometimes means not so much to pass
over, as to hover over and so protect. Possibly both meanings enter in
here. See Isaiah xxxi. 5.

 (2) See Exodus xii. i.

 (3) It is even said (see The Golden Bough, vol. iii, 185) that
the doorways of houses and temples in Peru were at the Spring festival
daubed with blood of the first-born children--commuted afterwards to the
blood of the sacred animal, the Llama. And as to Mexico, Sahagun, the
great Spanish missionary, tells us that it was a custom of the people
there to "smear the outside of their houses and doors with blood drawn
from their own ears and ankles, in order to propitiate the god of
Harvest" (Kingsborough's Mexican Antiquities, vol. vi, p. 235).


In order fully to understand this extraordinary expression and its
origin we must turn for a moment to the worship both of Mithra, the
Persian Sungod, and of Attis the Syrian god, as throwing great light
on the Christian cult and ceremonies. It must be remembered that in the
early centuries of our era the Mithra-cult was spread over the whole
Western world. It has left many monuments of itself here in Britain.
At Rome the worship was extremely popular, and it may almost be said
to have been a matter of chance whether Mithraism should overwhelm
Christianity, or whether the younger religion by adopting many of the
rites of the older one should establish itself (as it did) in the face
of the latter.

Now we have already mentioned that in the Mithra cult the slaying of a
Bull by the Sungod occupies the same sort of place as the slaving of the
Lamb in the Christian cult. It took place at the Vernal Equinox and the
blood of the Bull acquired in men's minds a magic virtue. Mithraism was
a greatly older religion than Christianity; but its genesis was similar.
In fact, owing to the Precession of the Equinoxes, the crossing-place of
the Ecliptic and Equator was different at the time of the establishment
of Mithra-worship from what it was in the Christian period; and the
Sun instead of standing in the He-lamb, or Aries, at the Vernal Equinox
stood, about two thousand years earlier (as indicated by the dotted line
in the diagram), in this very constellation of the Bull. (1) The bull
therefore became the symbol of the triumphant God, and the sacrifice
of the bull a holy mystery. (Nor must we overlook here the agricultural
appropriateness of the bull as the emblem of Spring-plowings and of
service to man.)

 (1) With regard to this point, see an article in the Nineteenth
Century for September 1900, by E. W. Maunder of the Greenwich
Observatory on "The Oldest Picture Book" (the Zodiac). Mr. Maunder
calculates that the Vernal Equinox was in the centre of the Sign of
the Bull 5,000 years ago. (It would therefore be in the centre of Aries
2,845 years ago--allowing 2,155 years for the time occupied in passing
from one Sign to another.) At the earlier period the Summer solstice was
in the centre of Leo, the Autumnal equinox in the centre of Scorpio, and
the Winter solstice in the centre of Aquarius--corresponding roughly,
Mr. Maunder points out, to the positions of the four "Royal Stars,"
Aldebaran, Regulus, Antares and Fomalhaut.


The sacrifice of the Bull became the image of redemption. In a certain
well-known Mithra-sculpture or group, the Sungod is represented as
plunging his dagger into a bull, while a scorpion, a serpent, and other
animals are sucking the latter's blood. From one point of view this may
be taken as symbolic of the Sun fertilizing the gross Earth by plunging
his rays into it and so drawing forth its blood for the sustenance of
all creatures; while from another more astronomical aspect it symbolizes
the conquest of the Sun over winter in the moment of "passing over" the
sign of the Bull, and the depletion of the generative power of the Bull
by the Scorpion--which of course is the autumnal sign of the Zodiac
and herald of winter. One such Mithraic group was found at Ostia, where
there was a large subterranean Temple "to the invincible god Mithras."

In the worship of Attis there were (as I have already indicated) many
points of resemblance to the Christian cult. On the 22nd March (the
Vernal Equinox) a pinetree was cut in the woods and brought into the
Temple of Cybele. It was treated almost as a divinity, was decked
with violets, and the effigy of a young man tied to the stem (cf. the
Crucifixion). The 24th was called the "Day of Blood"; the High Priest
first drew blood from his own arms; and then the others gashed and
slashed themselves, and spattered the altar and the sacred tree with
blood; while novices made themselves eunuchs "for the kingdom of
heaven's sake." The effigy was afterwards laid in a tomb. But when
night fell, says Dr. Frazer, (1) sorrow was turned to joy. A light was
brought, and the tomb was found to be empty. The next day, the 25th, was
the festival of the Resurrection; and ended in carnival and license
(the Hilaria). Further, says Dr. Frazer, these mysteries "seem to have
included a sacramental meal and a baptism of blood."

 (1) See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, Part IV of The Golden Bough, by
J. G. Frazer, p. 229.


"In the baptism the devotee, crowned with gold and wreathed with
fillets, descended into a pit, the mouth of which was covered with a
wooden grating. A bull, adorned with garlands of flowers, its forehead
glittering with gold leaf, was then driven on to the grating and there
stabbed to death with a consecrated spear. Its hot reeking blood
poured in torrents through the apertures, and was received with devout
eagerness by the worshiper on every part of his person and garments,
till he emerged from the pit, drenched, dripping, and scarlet from head
to foot, to receive the homage, nay the adoration, of his fellows--as
one who had been born again to eternal life and had washed away his sins
in the blood of the bull." (1) And Frazer continuing says: "That the
bath of blood derived from slaughter of the bull (tauro-bolium)
was believed to regenerate the devotee for eternity is proved by an
inscription found at Rome, which records that a certain Sextilius
Agesilaus Aedesius, who dedicated an altar to Attis and the mother of
the gods (Cybele) was taurobolio criobolio que in aeternum renatus."
(2) "In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia," says Mr. J. M.
Robertson, (3) "which grew very popular in the Roman world, we have the
literal and original meaning of the phrase 'washed in the blood of the
lamb' (4); the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life
were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a
sacrificial bull or ram." (5) For the POPULARITY of the rite we may
quote Franz Cumont, who says:--"Cette douche sacree (taurobolium) pareit
avoir ete administree en Cappadoce dans un grand nombre de sanctuaires,
et en particulier dans ceux de Ma la grande divinite indigene, et dans
ceux: de Anahita."

 (1) See vol. i, pp. 334 ff.

 (2) Adonis, Attis and Osiris, p. 229. References to Prudentius,
and to Firmicus Maternus, De errore 28. 8.

 (3) That is, "By the slaughter of the bull and the slaughter of
the ram born again into eternity."

 (4) Pagan Christs, p. 315.

 (5) Mysteres de Mithra, Bruxelles, 1902, p. 153.


Whether Mr. Robertson is right in ascribing to the priests (as he
appears to do) so materialistic a view of the potency of the actual
blood is, I should say, doubtful. I do not myself see that there is
any reason for supposing that the priests of Mithra or Attis regarded
baptism by blood very differently from the way in which the Christian
Church has generally regarded baptism by water--namely, as a SYMBOL of
some inner regeneration. There may certainly have been a little more
of the MAGICAL view and a little less of the symbolic, in the older
religions; but the difference was probably on the whole more one of
degree than of essential disparity. But however that may be, we cannot
but be struck by the extraordinary analogy between the tombstone
inscriptions of that period "born again into eternity by the blood of
the Bull or the Ram," and the corresponding texts in our graveyards
to-day. F. Cumont in his elaborate work, Textes et Monuments relatifs
aux Mysteres de Mithra (2 vols., Brussels, 1899) gives a great number of
texts and epitaphs of the same character as that above-quoted, and they
are well worth studying by those interested in the subject. Cumont, it
may be noted (vol. i, p. 305), thinks that the story of Mithra and the
slaying of the Bull must have originated among some pastoral people to
whom the bull was the source of all life. The Bull in heaven--the symbol
of the triumphant Sungod--and the earthly bull, sacrificed for the good
of humanity were one and the same; the god, in fact, SACRIFICED HIMSELF
OR HIS REPRESENTATIVE. And Mithra was the hero who first won this
conception of divinity for mankind--though of course it is in essence
quite similar to the conception put forward by the Christian Church.

As illustrating the belief that the Baptism by Blood was accompanied by
a real regeneration of the devotee, Frazer quotes an ancient writer
(1) who says that for some time after the ceremony the fiction of a new
birth was kept up by dieting the devotee on MILK, like a new-born
babe. And it is interesting in that connection to find that even in the
present day a diet of ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BUT MILK for six or eight
weeks is by many doctors recommended as the only means of getting rid
of deep-seated illnesses and enabling a patient's organism to make a
completely new start in life.

 (1) Sallustius philosophus. See Adonis, Attis and Osiris, note,
p. 229.


"At Rome," he further says (p. 230), "the new birth and the remission
of sins by the shedding of bull's blood appear to have been carried
out above all at the sanctuary of the Phrygian Goddess (Cybele) on
the Vatican Hill, at or near the spot where the great basilica of St.
Peter's now stands; for many inscriptions relating to the rites were
found when the church was being enlarged in 1608 or 1609. From
the Vatican as a centre," he continues, "this barbarous system of
superstition seems to have spread to other parts of the Roman empire.
Inscriptions found in Gaul and Germany prove that provincial sanctuaries
modelled their ritual on that of the Vatican."

It would appear then that at Rome in the quiet early days of the
Christian Church, the rites and ceremonials of Mithra and Cybele,
probably much intermingled and blended, were exceedingly popular. Both
religions had been recognized by the Roman State, and the Christians,
persecuted and despised as they were, found it hard to make any headway
against them--the more so perhaps because the Christian doctrines
appeared in many respects to be merely faint replicas and copies of the
older creeds. Robertson maintains (1) that a he-lamb was sacrificed in
the Mithraic mysteries, and he quotes Porphyry as saying (2) that
"a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to Mithra as an
appropriate seat; and on this account he bears the sword of the Ram
(Aries) which is a sign of Mars (Ares)." Similarly among the early
Christians, it is said, a ram or lamb was sacrificed in the Paschal
mystery.

 (1) Pagan Christs, p. 336.

 (2) De Antro, xxiv.


Many people think that the association of the Lamb-god with the Cross
arose from the fact that the constellation Aries at that time WAS on the
heavenly cross (the crossways of the Ecliptic and Equator-see diagram,
ch. iii), and in the very place through which the Sungod had to pass
just before his final triumph. And it is curious to find that Justin
Martyr in his Dialogue with Trypho (1) (a Jew) alludes to an old Jewish
practice of roasting a Lamb on spits arranged in the form of a Cross.
"The lamb," he says, meaning apparently the Paschal lamb, "is roasted
and dressed up in the form of a cross. For one spit is transfixed right
through the lower parts up to the head, and one across the back, to
which are attached the legs (forelegs) of the lamb."

 (1) Ch. xl.


To-day in Morocco at the festival of Eid-el-Kebir, corresponding to the
Christian Easter, the Mohammedans sacrifice a young ram and hurry it
still bleeding to the precincts of the Mosque, while at the same time
every household slays a lamb, as in the Biblical institution, for its
family feast.

But it will perhaps be said, "You are going too fast and proving too
much. In the anxiety to show that the Lamb-god and the sacrifice of the
Lamb were honored by the devotees of Mithra and Cybele in the Rome of
the Christian era, you are forgetting that the sacrifice of the Bull and
the baptism in bull's blood were the salient features of the Persian and
Phrygian ceremonials, some centuries earlier. How can you reconcile
the existence side by side of divinities belonging to such different
periods, or ascribe them both to an astronomical origin?" The answer
is simple enough. As I have explained before, the Precession of the
Equinoxes caused the Sun, at its moment of triumph over the powers of
darkness, to stand at one period in the constellation of the Bull, and
at a period some two thousand years later in the constellation of the
Ram. It was perfectly natural therefore that a change in the sacred
symbols should, in the course of time, take place; yet perfectly natural
also that these symbols, having once been consecrated and adopted,
should continue to be honored and clung to long after the time of their
astronomical appropriateness had passed, and so to be found side by side
in later centuries. The devotee of Mithra or Attis on the Vatican
Hill at Rome in the year 200 A.D. probably had as little notion or
comprehension of the real origin of the sacred Bull or Ram which he
adored, as the Christian in St. Peter's to-day has of the origin of the
Lamb-god whose vicegerent on earth is the Pope.

It is indeed easy to imagine that the change from the worship of the
Bull to the worship of the Lamb which undoubtedly took place among
various peoples as time went on, was only a ritual change initiated
by the priests in order to put on record and harmonize with the
astronomical alteration. Anyhow it is curious that while Mithra in the
early times was specially associated with the bull, his association with
the lamb belonged more to the Roman period. Somewhat the same happened
in the case of Attis. In the Bible we read of the indignation of
Moses at the setting up by the Israelites of a Golden Calf, AFTER
the sacrifice of the ram-lamb had been instituted--as if indeed the
rebellious people were returning to the earlier cult of Apis which they
ought to have left behind them in Egypt. In Egypt itself, too, we find
the worship of Apis, as time went on, yielding place to that of the
Ram-headed god Amun, or Jupiter Ammon. (1) So that both from the Bible
and from Egyptian history we may conclude that the worship of the Lamb
or Ram succeeded to the worship of the Bull.

 (1) Tacitus (Hist. v. 4) speaks of ram-sacrifice by the Jews in
honor of Jupiter Ammon. See also Herodotus (ii. 42) on the same in
Egypt.


Finally it has been pointed out, and there may be some real connection
in the coincidence, that in the quite early years of Christianity the
FISH came in as an accepted symbol of Jesus Christ. Considering that
after the domination of Taurus and Aries, the Fish (Pisces) comes next
in succession as the Zodiacal sign for the Vernal Equinox, and is now
the constellation in which the Sun stands at that period, it seems
not impossible that the astronomical change has been the cause of the
adoption of this new symbol.

Anyhow, and allowing for possible errors or exaggerations, it becomes
clear that the travels of the Sun through the belt of constellations
which forms the Zodiac must have had, from earliest times, a profound
influence on the generation of religious myths and legends. To say that
it was the only influence would certainly be a mistake. Other causes
undoubtedly contributed. But it was a main and important influence. The
origins of the Zodiac are obscure; we do not know with any certainty the
reasons why the various names were given to its component sections, nor
can we measure the exact antiquity of these names; but--pre-supposing
the names of the signs as once given--it is not difficult to imagine the
growth of legends connected with the Sun's course among them.

Of all the ancient divinities perhaps Hercules is the one whose role
as a Sungod is most generally admitted. The helper of gods and men, a
mighty Traveller, and invoked everywhere as the Saviour, his labors
for the good of the world became ultimately defined and systematized
as twelve and corresponding in number to the signs of the Zodiac. It
is true that this systematization only took place at a late period,
probably in Alexandria; also that the identification of some of the
Labors with the actual signs as we have them at present is not always
clear. But considering the wide prevalence of the Hercules myth over
the ancient world and the very various astronomical systems it must have
been connected with in its origin, this lack of exact correspondence is
hardly to be wondered at.

The Labors of Hercules which chiefly interest us are: (1) The capture
of the Bull, (2) the slaughter of the Lion, (3) the destruction of the
Hydra, (4) of the Boar, (5) the cleansing of the stables of Augeas, (6)
the descent into Hades and the taming of Cerberus. The first of these
is in line with the Mithraic conquest of the Bull; the Lion is of course
one of the most prominent constellations of the Zodiac, and its conquest
is obviously the work of a Saviour of mankind; while the last four
labors connect themselves very naturally with the Solar conflict in
winter against the powers of darkness. The Boar (4) we have seen already
as the image of Typhon, the prince of darkness; the Hydra (3) was said
to be the offspring of Typhon; the descent into Hades (6)--generally
associated with Hercules' struggle with and victory over Death--links on
to the descent of the Sun into the underworld, and its long and doubtful
strife with the forces of winter; and the cleansing of the stables
of Augeas (5) has the same signification. It appears in fact that the
stables of Augeas was another name for the sign of Capricorn through
which the Sun passes at the Winter solstice (1)--the stable of course
being an underground chamber--and the myth was that there, in this
lowest tract and backwater of the Ecliptic all the malarious and evil
influences of the sky were collected, and the Sungod came to wash them
away (December was the height of the rainy season in Judaea) and cleanse
the year towards its rebirth.

 (1) See diagram of Zodiac.


It should not be forgotten too that even as a child in the cradle
Hercules slew two serpents sent for his destruction--the serpent and the
scorpion as autumnal constellations figuring always as enemies of the
Sungod--to which may be compared the power given to his disciples by
Jesus (1) "to tread on serpents and scorpions." Hercules also as a
Sungod compares curiously with Samson (mentioned above, ii), but we
need not dwell on all the elaborate analogies that have been traced (2)
between these two heroes.

 (1) Luke x. 19.

 (2) See Doane's Bible Myths, ch. viii, (New York, 1882.)


The Jesus-story, it will now be seen, has a great number of
correspondences with the stories of former Sungods and with the actual
career of the Sun through the heavens--so many indeed that they cannot
well be attributed to mere coincidence or even to the blasphemous wiles
of the Devil! Let us enumerate some of these. There are (1) the birth
from a Virgin mother; (2) the birth in a stable (cave or underground
chamber); and (3) on the 25th December (just after the winter solstice).
There is (4) the Star in the East (Sirius) and (5) the arrival of the
Magi (the "Three Kings"); there is (6) the threatened Massacre of the
Innocents, and the consequent flight into a distant country (told also
of Krishna and other Sungods). There are the Church festivals of (7)
Candlemas (2nd February), with processions of candles to symbolize the
growing light; of (8) Lent, or the arrival of Spring; of (9) Easter Day
(normally on the 25th March) to celebrate the crossing of the Equator
by the Sun; and (10) simultaneously the outburst of lights at the Holy
Sepulchre at Jerusalem. There is (11) the Crucifixion and death of the
Lamb-God, on Good Friday, three days before Easter; there are (12) the
nailing to a tree, (13) the empty grave, (14) the glad Resurrection (as
in the cases of Osiris, Attis and others); there are (15) the twelve
disciples (the Zodiacal signs); and (16) the betrayal by one of the
twelve. Then later there is (17) Midsummer Day, the 24th June, dedicated
to the Nativity of John the Baptist, and corresponding to Christmas
Day; there are the festivals of (18) the Assumption of the Virgin
(15th August) and of (19) the Nativity of the Virgin (8th September),
corresponding to the movement of the god through Virgo; there is the
conflict of Christ and his disciples with the autumnal asterisms, (20)
the Serpent and the Scorpion; and finally there is the curious fact that
the Church (21) dedicates the very day of the winter solstice (when any
one may very naturally doubt the rebirth of the Sun) to St. Thomas, who
doubted the truth of the Resurrection!

These are some of, and by no means all, the coincidences in question.
But they are sufficient, I think, to prove--even allowing for possible
margins of error--the truth of our general contention. To go into the
parallelism of the careers of Krishna, the Indian Sungod, and
Jesus would take too long; because indeed the correspondence is so
extraordinarily close and elaborate. (1) I propose, however, at the
close of this chapter, to dwell now for a moment on the Christian
festival of the Eucharist, partly on account of its connection with the
derivation from the astronomical rites and Nature-celebrations already
alluded to, and partly on account of the light which the festival
generally, whether Christian or Pagan, throws on the origins of
Religious Magic--a subject I shall have to deal with in the next
chapter.

 (1) See Robertson's Christianity and Mythology, Part II, pp.
129-302; also Doane's Bible Myths, ch. xxviii, p. 278.


I have already (Ch. II) mentioned the Eucharistic rite held in
commemoration of Mithra, and the indignant ascription of this by Justin
Martyr to the wiles of the Devil. Justin Martyr clearly had no doubt
about the resemblance of the Mithraic to the Christian ceremony. A
Sacramental meal, as mentioned a few pages back, seems to have been held
by the worshipers of Attis (1) in commemoration of their god; and
the 'mysteries' of the Pagan cults generally appear to have included
rites--sometimes half-savage, sometimes more aesthetic--in which a
dismembered animal was eaten, or bread and wine (the spirits of the Corn
and the Vine) were consumed, as representing the body of the god whom
his devotees desired to honor. But the best example of this practice is
afforded by the rites of Dionysus, to which I will devote a few lines.
Dionysus, like other Sun or Nature deities, was born of a Virgin (Semele
or Demeter) untainted by any earthly husband; and born on the 25th.
December. He was nurtured in a Cave, and even at that early age was
identified with the Ram or Lamb, into whose form he was for the time
being changed. At times also he was worshiped in the form of a Bull.
(2) He travelled far and wide; and brought the great gift of wine to
mankind. (3) He was called Liberator, and Saviour. His grave "was shown
at Delphi in the inmost shrine of the temple of Apollo. Secret offerings
were brought thither, while the women who were celebrating the feast
woke up the new-born god.... Festivals of this kind in celebration of
the extinction and resurrection of the deity were held (by women and
girls only) amid the mountains at night, every third year, about the
time of the shortest day. The rites, intended to express the excess of
grief and joy at the death and reappearance of the god, were wild even
to savagery, and the women who performed them were hence known by
the expressive names of Bacchae, Maenads, and Thyiades. They wandered
through woods and mountains, their flying locks crowned with ivy or
snakes, brandishing wands and torches, to the hollow sounds of the drum,
or the shrill notes of the flute, with wild dances and insane cries and
jubilation."

 (1) See Frazer's Golden Bough, Part IV, p. 229.

 (2) The Golden Bough, Part II, Book II, p. 164.

 (3) "I am the TRUE Vine," says the Jesus of the fourth gospel,
perhaps with an implicit and hostile reference to the cult of
Dionysus--in which Robertson suggests (Christianity and Mythology, p.
357) there was a ritual miracle of turning water into wine.


Oxen, goats, even fawns and roes from the forest were killed, torn to
pieces, and eaten raw. This in imitation of the treatment of Dionysus by
the Titans, (1)--who it was supposed had torn the god in pieces when a
child.

 (1) See art. Dionysus. Dictionary of Classical Antiquities,
Nettleship and Sandys 3rd edn., London, 1898).


Dupuis, one of the earliest writers (at the beginning of last century)
on this subject, says, describing the mystic rites of Dionysus (1):
"The sacred doors of the Temple in which the initiation took place were
opened only once a year, and no stranger might ever enter. Night lent to
these august mysteries a veil which was forbidden to be drawn aside--for
whoever it might be. (2) It was the sole occasion for the representation
of the passion of Bacchus (Dionysus) dead, descended into hell, and
rearisen--in imitation of the representation of the sufferings of Osiris
which, according to Herodotus, were commemorated at Sais in Egypt. It
was in that place that the partition took place of the body of the god,
(3) which was then eaten--the ceremony, in fact, of which our Eucharist
is only a reflection; whereas in the mysteries of Bacchus actual raw
flesh was distributed, which each of those present had to consume in
commemoration of the death of Bacchus dismembered by the Titans, and
whose passion, in Chios and Tenedos, was renewed each year by the
sacrifice of a man who represented the god. (4) Possibly it is this last
fact which made people believe that the Christians (whose hoc est corpus
meum and sharing of an Eucharistic meal were no more than a shadow of a
more ancient rite) did really sacrifice a child and devour its limbs."

 (1) See Charles F. Dupuis, "Traite des Mysteres," ch. i.

 (2) Pausan, Corinth, ch. 37.

 (3) Clem, Prot. Eur. Bacch.

 (4) See Porphyry, De Abstinentia, lii, Section 56.


That Eucharistic rites were very very ancient is plain from the
Totem-sacraments of savages; and to this subject we shall now turn.




IV. TOTEM-SACRAMENTS AND EUCHARISTS

Much has been written on the origin of the Totem-system--the system,
that is, of naming a tribe or a portion of a tribe (say a CLAN)
after some ANIMAL--or sometimes--also after some plant or tree or
Nature-element, like fire or rain or thunder; but at best the subject is
a difficult one for us moderns to understand. A careful study has been
made of it by Salamon Reinach in his Cultes, Mythes et Religions, (1)
where he formulates his conclusions in twelve statements or definitions;
but even so--though his suggestions are helpful--he throws very little
light on the real origin of the system. (2)

 (1) See English translation of certain chapters (published by
David Nutt in 1912) entitled Cults, Myths and Religions, pp. 1-25. The
French original is in three large volumes.

 (2) The same may be said of the formulated statement of the
subject in Morris Jastrow's Handbooks of the History of Religion, vol.
iv.

There are three main difficulties. The first is to understand why
primitive Man should name his Tribe after an animal or object of nature
at all; the second, to understand on what principle he selected the
particular name (a lion, a crocodile, a lady bird, a certain tree); the
third, why he should make of the said totem a divinity, and pay honor
and worship to it. It may be worth while to pause for a moment over
these.

(1) The fact that the Tribe was one of the early things for which Man
found it necessary to have a name is interesting, because it shows
how early the solidarity and psychological actuality of the tribe
was recognized; and as to the selection of a name from some animal or
concrete object of Nature, that was inevitable, for the simple reason
that there was nothing else for the savage to choose from. Plainly to
call his tribe "The Wayfarers" or "The Pioneers" or the "Pacifists" or
the "Invincibles," or by any of the thousand and one names which modern
associations adopt, would have been impossible, since such abstract
terms had little or no existence in his mind. And again to name it after
an animal was the most obvious thing to do, simply because the animals
were by far the most important features or accompaniments of his own
life. As I am dealing in this book largely with certain psychological
conditions of human evolution, it has to be pointed out that to
primitive man the animal was the nearest and most closely related of all
objects. Being of the same order of consciousness as himself, the animal
appealed to him very closely as his mate and equal. He made with regard
to it little or no distinction from himself. We see this very clearly in
the case of children, who of course represent the savage mind, and who
regard animals simply as their mates and equals, and come quickly into
rapport with them, not differentiating themselves from them.

(2) As to the particular animal or other object selected in order to
give a name to the Tribe, this would no doubt be largely accidental. Any
unusual incident might superstitiously precipitate a name. We can hardly
imagine the Tribe scratching its congregated head in the deliberate
effort to think out a suitable emblem for itself. That is not the way in
which nicknames are invented in a school or anywhere else to-day. At the
same time the heraldic appeal of a certain object of nature, animate or
inanimate, would be deeply and widely felt. The strength of the lion,
the fleetness of the deer, the food-value of a bear, the flight of a
bird, the awful jaws of a crocodile, might easily mesmerize a whole
tribe. Reinach points out, with great justice, that many tribes placed
themselves under the protection of animals which were supposed (rightly
or wrongly) to act as guides and augurs, foretelling the future.
"Diodorus," he says, "distinctly states that the hawk, in Egypt, was
venerated because it foretold the future." (Birds generally act as
 and Samoa the kangaroo, the crow and the owl premonish their fellow
clansmen of events to come. At one time the Samoan warriors went so far
as to rear owls for their prophetic qualities in war. (The jackal,
or 'pathfinder'--whose tracks sometimes lead to the remains of a
food-animal slain by a lion, and many birds and insects, have a value of
this kind.) "The use of animal totems for purposes of augury is, in all
likelihood, of great antiquity. Men must soon have realized that the
senses of animals were acuter than their own; nor is it surprising that
they should have expected their totems--that is to say, their natural
allies--to forewarn them both of unsuspected dangers and of those
provisions of nature, WELLS especially, which animals seem to scent
by instinct." (1) And again, beyond all this, I have little doubt that
there are subconscious affinities which unite certain tribes to certain
animals or plants, affinities whose origin we cannot now trace, though
they are very real--the same affinities that we recognize as existing
between individual PERSONS and certain objects of nature. W. H.
Hudson--himself in many respects having this deep and primitive relation
to nature--speaks in a very interesting and autobiographical volume (2)
of the extraordinary fascination exercised upon him as a boy, not
only by a snake, but by certain trees, and especially by a particular
flowering-plant "not more than a foot in height, with downy soft
pale green leaves, and clusters of reddish blossoms, something like
valerian." ... "One of my sacred flowers," he calls it, and insists on
the "inexplicable attraction" which it had for him. In various ways of
this kind one can perceive how particular totems came to be selected by
particular peoples.


 (1) See Reinach, Eng. trans., op. cit., pp. 20, 21.

 (2) Far away and Long ago (1918) chs. xvi and xvii.


(3) As to the tendency to divinize these totems, this arises no doubt
partly out of question (2). The animal or other object admired on
account of its strength or swiftness, or adopted as guardian of the
tribe because of its keen sight or prophetic quality, or infinitely
prized on account of its food-value, or felt for any other reason to
have a peculiar relation and affinity to the tribe, is by that fact SET
APART. It becomes taboo. It must not be killed--except under necessity
and by sanction of the whole tribe--nor injured; and all dealings with
it must be fenced round with regulations. It is out of this taboo or
system of taboos that, according to Reinach, religion arose. "I propose
(he says) to define religion as: A SUM OF SCRUPLES (TABOOS) WHICH IMPEDE
THE FREE EXERCISE OF OUR FACULTIES." (1) Obviously this definition is
gravely deficient, simply because it is purely negative, and leaves
out of account the positive aspect of the subject. In Man, the positive
content of religion is the instinctive sense--whether conscious or
subconscious--of an inner unity and continuity with the world around.
This is the stuff out of which religion is made. The scruples or taboos
which "impede the freedom" of this relation are the negative forces
which give outline and form to the relation. These are the things which
generate the RITES AND CEREMONIALS of religion; and as far as Reinach
means by religion MERELY rites and ceremonies he is correct; but clearly
he only covers half the subject. The tendency to divinize the totem is
at least as much dependent on the positive sense of unity with it, as on
the negative scruples which limit the relation in each particular case.
But I shall return to this subject presently, and more than once, with
the view of clarifying it. Just now it will be best to illustrate the
nature of Totems generally, and in some detail.


 (1) See Orpheus by S. Reinach, p. 3.


As would be gathered from what I have just said, there is found among
all the more primitive peoples, and in all parts of the world, an
immense variety of totem-names. The Dinkas, for instance, are a rather
intelligent well-grown people inhabiting the upper reaches of the Nile
in the vicinity of the great swamps. According to Dr. Seligman their
clans have for totems the lion, the elephant, the crocodile, the
hippopotamus, the fox, and the hyena, as well as certain birds which
infest and damage the corn, some plants and trees, and such things as
rain, fire, etc. "Each clan speaks of its totem as its ancestor, and
refrains (as a rule) from injuring or eating it." (1) The members of the
Crocodile clan call themselves "brothers of the crocodile." The tribes
of Bechuana-land have a very similar list of totem-names--the buffalo,
the fish, the porcupine, the wild vine, etc. They too have a Crocodile
clan, but they call the crocodile their FATHER! The tribes of Australia
much the same again, with the differences suitable to their country; and
the Red Indians of North America the same. Garcilasso, della Vega,
the Spanish historian, son of an Inca princess by one of the Spanish
conquerors of Peru and author of the well-known book Commentarias
Reales, says in that book (i, 57), speaking of the pre-Inca period, "An
Indian (of Peru) was not considered honorable unless he was descended
from a fountain, river or lake, or even from the sea, or from a wild
animal, as a bear, lion, tiger, eagle, or the bird they call cuntur
(condor), or some other bird of prey." (2) According to Lewis Morgan,
the North American Indians of various tribes had for totems the wolf,
bear, beaver, turtle, deer, snipe, heron, hawk, crane, loon, turkey,
muskrat; pike, catfish, carp; buffalo, elk, reindeer, eagle, hare,
rabbit, snake; reed-grass, sand, rock, and tobacco-plant.

 (1) See The Golden Bough, vol. iv, p. 31.

 (2) See Andrew Lang, Custom and Myth, p. 104, also Myth, Ritual
and Religion, vol. i, pp. 71, 76, etc.


So we might go on rather indefinitely. I need hardly say that in more
modern and civilized life, relics of the totem system are still to be
found in the forms of the heraldic creatures adopted for their crests by
different families, and in the bears, lions, eagles, the sun, moon and
stars and so forth, which still adorn the flags and are flaunted as the
insignia of the various nations. The names may not have been ORIGINALLY
adopted from any definite belief in blood-relationship with the animal
or other object in question; but when, as Robertson says (Pagan Christs,
p. 104), a "savage learned that he was 'a Bear' and that his father
and grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really
impossible, after ages in which totem-names thus passed current, that he
should fail to assume that his folk were DESCENDED from a bear."

As a rule, as may be imagined, the savage tribesman will on no account
EAT his tribal totem-animal. Such would naturally be deemed a kind of
sacrilege. Also it must be remarked that some totems are hardly suitable
for eating. Yet it is important to observe that occasionally, and
guarding the ceremony with great precautions, it has been an almost
universal custom for the tribal elders to call a feast at which
an animal (either the totem or some other) IS killed and commonly
eaten--and this in order that the tribesmen may absorb some virtue
belonging to it, and may confirm their identity with the tribe and with
each other. The eating of the bear or other animal, the sprinkling with
its blood, and the general ritual in which the participants shared its
flesh, or dressed and disguised themselves in its skin, or otherwise
identified themselves with it, was to them a symbol of their community
of life with each other, and a means of their renewal and salvation in
the holy emblem. And this custom, as the reader will perceive, became
the origin of the Eucharists and Holy Communions of the later religions.

Professor Robertson-Smith's celebrated Camel affords an instance of
this. (1) It appears that St. Nilus (fifth century) has left a detailed
account of the occasional sacrifice in his time of a spotless white
camel among the Arabs of the Sinai region, which closely resembles a
totemic communion-feast. The uncooked blood and flesh of the animal had
to be entirely consumed by the faithful before daybreak. "The slaughter
of the victim, the sacramental drinking of the blood, and devouring in
wild haste of the pieces of still quivering flesh, recall the details
of the Dionysiac and other festivals." (2) Robertson-Smith himself
says:--"The plain meaning is that the victim was devoured before its
life had left the still warm blood and flesh... and that thus in the
most literal way, all those who shared in the ceremony absorbed part of
the victim's life into themselves. One sees how much more forcibly
than any ordinary meal such a rite expresses the establishment or
confirmation of a bond of common life between the worshipers, and also,
since the blood is shed upon the altar itself, between the worshipers
and their god. In this sacrifice, then, the significant factors are two:
the conveyance of the living blood to the godhead, and the absorption of
the living flesh and blood into the flesh and blood of the worshippers.
Each of these is effected in the simplest and most direct manner, so
that the meaning of the ritual is perfectly transparent."

 (1) See his Religion of the Semites, p. 320.

 (2) They also recall the rites of the Passover--though in this
latter the blood was no longer drunk, nor the flesh eaten raw.


It seems strange, of course, that men should eat their totems; and
it must not by any means be supposed that this practice is (or was)
universal; but it undoubtedly obtains in some cases. As Miss Harrison
says (Themis, p. 123); "you do not as a rule eat your relations," and as
a rule the eating of a totem is tabu and forbidden, but (Miss Harrison
continues) "at certain times and under certain restrictions a man not
only may, but MUST, eat of his totem, though only sparingly, as of a
thing sacrosanct." The ceremonial carried out in a communal way by the
tribe not only identifies the tribe with the totem (animal), but is
held, according to early magical ideas, and when the animal is desired
for food, to favor its manipulation. The human tribe partakes of the
mana or life-force of the animal, and is strengthened; the animal tribe
is sympathetically renewed by the ceremonial and multiplies exceedingly.
The slaughter of the sacred animal and (often) the simultaneous
outpouring of human blood seals the compact and confirms the magic. This
is well illustrated by a ceremony of the 'Emu' tribe referred to by Dr.
Frazer:--

"In order to multiply Emus which are an important article of food, the
men of the Emu totem in the Arunta tribe proceed as follows: They clear
a small spot of level ground, and opening veins in their arms they let
the blood stream out until the surface of the ground for a space of
about three square yards is soaked with it. When the blood has dried
and caked, it forms a hard and fairly impermeable surface, on which they
paint the sacred design of the emu totem, especially the parts of the
bird which they like best to eat, namely, the fat and the eggs. Round
this painting the men sit and sing. Afterwards performers wearing long
head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the emu, mimic
the appearance of the bird as it stands aimlessly peering about in all
directions." (1)

 (1) The Golden Bough i, 85--with reference to Spencer and
Gillen's Native Tribes of Central Australia, pp. 179, 189.


Thus blood sacrifice comes in; and--(whether this has ever actually
happened in the case of the Central Australians I know not)--we can
easily imagine a member of the Emu tribe, and disguised as an actual
emu, having been ceremonially slaughtered as a firstfruits and promise
of the expected and prayed-for emu-crop; just as the same certainly
HAS happened in the case of men wearing beast-masks of Bulls or Rams
or Bears being sacrificed in propitiation of Bull-gods, Ram-gods or
Bear-gods or simply in pursuance of some kind of magic to favor the
multiplication of these food-animals.

"In the light of totemistic ways of thinking we see plainly enough the
relation of man to food-animals. You need or at least desire flesh food,
yet you shrink from slaughtering 'your brother the ox'; you desire his
mana, yet you respect his tabu, for in you and him alike runs the common
life-blood. On your own individual responsibility you would never kill
him; but for the common weal, on great occasions, and in a fashion
conducted with scrupulous care, it is expedient that he die for his
people, and that they feast upon his flesh." (1)

 (1) Themis, p. 140.


In her little book Ancient Art and Ritual (1) Jane Harrison describes
the dedication of a holy Bull, as conducted in Greece at Elis, and at
Magnesia and other cities. "There at the annual fair year by year the
stewards of the city bought a Bull 'the finest that could be got,' and
at the new moon of the month at the beginning of seed-time (? April)
 Bull was led in procession at the head of which went the chief priest
and priestess of the city. With them went a herald and sacrificer,
and two bands of youths and maidens. So holy was the Bull that nothing
unlucky might come near him. The herald pronounced aloud a prayer for
'the safety of the city and the land, and the citizens, and the women
and children, for peace and wealth, and for the bringing forth of grain
and all other fruits, and of cattle.' All this longing for fertility,
for food and children, focuses round the holy Bull, whose holiness is
his strength and fruitfulness." The Bull is sacrificed. The flesh is
divided in solemn feast among those who take part in the procession.
"The holy flesh is not offered to a god, it is eaten--to every man his
portion--by each and every citizen, that he may get his share of the
strength of the Bull, of the luck of the State." But at Athens the
Bouphonia, as it was called, was followed by a curious ceremony. "The
hide was stuffed with straw and sewed up, and next the stuffed animal
was set on its feet and yoked to a plough as though it were ploughing.
The Death is followed by a Resurrection. Now this is all important. We
are accustomed to think of sacrifice as the death, the giving up, the
renouncing of something. But SACRIFICE does not mean 'death' at all. It
means MAKING HOLY, sanctifying; and holiness was to primitive man just
special strength and life. What they wanted from the Bull was just that
special life and strength which all the year long they had put into him,
and nourished and fostered. That life was in his blood. They could not
eat that flesh nor drink that blood unless they killed him. So he must
die. But it was not to give him up to the gods that they killed him,
not to 'sacrifice' him in our sense, but to have him, keep him, eat him,
live BY him and through him, by his grace."

 (1) Home University Library, p. 87.


We have already had to deal with instances of the ceremonial eating of
the sacred he-Lamb or Ram, immolated in the Spring season of the year,
and partaken of in a kind of communal feast--not without reference (at
any rate in later times) to a supposed Lamb-god. Among the Ainos in the
North of Japan, as also among the Gilyaks in Eastern Siberia, the Bear
is the great food-animal, and is worshipped as the supreme giver of
health and strength. There also a similar ritual of sacrifice occurs. A
perfect Bear is caught and caged. He is fed up and even pampered to the
day of his death. "Fish, brandy and other delicacies are offered to him.
Some of the people prostrate themselves before him; his coming into
a house brings a blessing, and if he sniffs at the food that brings a
blessing too." Then he is led out and slain. A great feast takes place,
the flesh is divided, cupfuls of the blood are drunk by the men;
the tribe is united and strengthened, and the Bear-god blesses the
ceremony--the ideal Bear that has given its life for the people. (1)


 (1) See Art and Ritual, pp. 92-98; The Golden Bough, ii, 375
seq.; Themis, pp. 140, 141; etc.


That the eating of the flesh of an animal or a man conveys to you some
of the qualities, the life-force, the mana, of that animal or man, is an
idea which one often meets with among primitive folk. Hence the common
tendency to eat enemy warriors slain in battle against your tribe. By
doing so you absorb some of their valor and strength. Even the enemy
scalps which an Apache Indian might hang from his belt were something
magical to add to the Apache's power. As Gilbert Murray says, (1) "you
devoured the holy animal to get its mana, its swiftness, its strength,
its great endurance, just as the savage now will eat his enemy's brain
or heart or hands to get some particular quality residing there."
Even--as he explains on the earlier page--mere CONTACT was often
considered sufficient--"we have holy pillars whose holiness consists
in the fact that they have been touched by the blood of a bull." And in
this connection we may note that nearly all the Christian Churches have
a great belief in the virtue imparted by the mere 'laying on of hands.'

 (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 36.


In quite a different connection--we read (1) that among the Spartans a
warrior-boy would often beg for the love of the elder warrior whom he
admired (i. e. the contact with his body) in order to obtain in that
way a portion of the latter's courage and prowess. That through the
mediation of the lips one's spirit may be united to the spirit of
another person is an idea not unfamiliar to the modern mind; while the
exchange of blood, clothes, locks of hair, etc., by lovers is a custom
known all over the world. (2)

 (1) Aelian VII, iii, 12: [gr autoi goun (oi paides) deontai twn
erastwn] [gr eispnein autois]. See also E. Bethe on "Die Dorische
Knabenliebe" in the Rheinisches Museum, vol. 26, iii, 461.

 (2) See Crawley's Mystic Rose, pp. 238, 242.


To suppose that by eating another you absorb his or her soul is somewhat
naive certainly. Perhaps it IS more native, more primitive. Yet there
may be SOME truth even in that idea. Certainly the food that one eats
has a psychological effect, and the flesh-eaters among the human race
have a different temperament as a rule from the fruit and vegetable
eaters, while among the animals (though other causes may come in
here) the Carnivora are decidedly more cruel and less gentle than the
Herbivora.

To return to the rites of Dionysus, Gilbert Murray, speaking of
Orphism--a great wave of religious reform which swept over Greece and
South Italy in the sixth century B.C.--says: (1) "A curious relic of
primitive superstition and cruelty remained firmly imbedded in Orphism,
a doctrine irrational and unintelligible, and for that very reason
wrapped in the deepest and most sacred mystery: a belief in the
SACRIFICE OF DIONYSUS HIMSELF, AND THE PURIFICATION OF MAN BY HIS
BLOOD. It seems possible that the savage Thracians, in the fury of their
worship on the mountains, when they were possessed by the god and became
'wild beasts,' actually tore with their teeth and hands any hares,
goats, fawns or the like that they came across.... The Orphic
congregations of later times, in their most holy gatherings, solemnly
partook of the blood of a bull, which was by a mystery the blood of
Dionysus-Zagreus himself, the Bull of God, slain in sacrifice for the
purification of man." (2)

 (1) See Notes to his translation of the Bacch[ae] of Euripides.

 (2) For a description of this orgy see Theocritus, Idyll xxvi;
also for explanations of it, Lang's Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii,
pp, 241-260, on Dionysus. The Encyclop[ae]dia Brit., article "Orpheus,"
says:--"Orpheus, in the manner of his death, was considered to personate
the god Dionysus, and was thus representative of the god torn to pieces
every year--a ceremony enacted by the Bacchae in the earliest times with
a human victim, and afterwards with a bull, to represent the bull-formed
god. A distinct feature of this ritual was [gr wmofagia] (eating the
flesh of the victim raw), whereby the communicants imagined that they
consumed and assimilated the god represented by the victim, and thus
became filled with the divine ecstasy." Compare also the Hindu doctrine
of Praj[pati, the dismembered Lord of Creation.


Such instances of early communal feasts, which fulfilled the double part
of confirming on the one hand the solidarity of the tribe, and on the
other of bringing the tribe, by the shedding of the blood of a divine
Victim into close relationship with the very source of its life,
are plentiful to find. "The sacramental rite," says Professor
Robertson-Smith, (1) "is also an atoning rite, which brings the
community again into harmony with its alienated god--atonement being
simply an act of communion designed to wipe out all memory of previous
estrangement." With this subject I shall deal more specially in chapter
vii below. Meanwhile as instances of early Eucharists we may mention the
following cases, remembering always that as the blood is regarded as the
Life, the drinking or partaking of, or sprinkling with, blood is always
an acknowledgment of the common life; and that the juice of the grape
being regarded as the blood of the Vine, wine in the later ceremonials
quite easily and naturally takes the place of the blood in the early
sacrifices.

 (1) Religion of the Semites, p. 302.


Thus P. Andrada La Crozius, a French missionary, and one of the first
Christians who went to Nepaul and Thibet, says in his History of India:
"Their Grand Lama celebrates a species of sacrifice with BREAD and WINE,
in which, after taking a small quantity himself, he distributes the
rest among the Lamas present at this ceremony." (1) "The old Egyptians
celebrated the resurrection of Osiris by a sacrament, eating the sacred
cake or wafer after it had been consecrated by the priest, and thereby
becoming veritable flesh of his flesh." (2) As is well known, the eating
of bread or dough sacramentally (sometimes mixed with blood or seed)
as an emblem of community of life with the divinity, is an extremely
ancient practice or ritual. Dr. Frazer (3) says of the Aztecs,
that "twice a year, in May and December, an image of the great god
Huitzilopochtli was made of dough, then broken in pieces and solemnly
eaten by his worshipers." And Lord Kingsborough in his Mexican
Antiquities (vol. vi, p. 220) gives a record of a "most Holy Supper"
in which these people ate the flesh of their god. It was a cake made of
certain seeds, "and having made it, they blessed it in their manner, and
broke it into pieces, which the high priest put into certain very clean
vessels, and took a thorn of maguey which resembles a very thick needle,
with which he took up with the utmost reverence single morsels, which
he put into the mouth of each individual in the manner of a communion."
Acostas (4) confirms this and similar accounts. The Peruvians partook of
a sacrament consisting of a pudding of coarsely ground maize, of which
a portion had been smeared on the idol. The priest sprinkled it with the
blood of the victim before distributing it to the people. Priest and
people then all took their shares in turn, "with great care that no
particle should be allowed to fall to the ground--this being looked upon
as a great sin." (5)


 (1) See Doane's Bible Myths, p. 306.

 (2) From The Great Law, of religious origins: by W. Williamson
(1899), p. 177.

 (3) The Golden Bough, vol. ii, p. 79.

 (4) Natural and Moral History of the Indies. London (1604).

 (5) See Markham's Rites and laws of the Incas, p. 27.


Moving from Peru to China (instead of 'from China to Peru') we find that
"the Chinese pour wine (a very general substitute for blood) on a straw
image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it, and taste the
sacrificial victim, in order to participate in the grace of Confucius."
(Here again the Corn and Wine are blended in one rite.) And of Tartary
Father Grueber thus testifies: "This only I do affirm, that the devil so
mimics the Catholic Church there, that although no European or Christian
has ever been there, still in all essential things they agree so
completely with the Roman Church, as even to celebrate the Host with
bread and wine: with my own eyes I have seen it." (1) These few
instances are sufficient to show the extraordinarily wide diffusion of
Totem-sacraments and Eucharistic rites all over the world.

 (1) For these two quotations see Jevons' Introduction to the
History of Religion, pp. 148 and 219.




V. FOOD AND VEGETATION MAGIC

I have wandered, in pursuit of Totems and the Eucharist, some way from
the astronomical thread of Chapters II and III, and now it would appear
that in order to understand religious origins we must wander still
farther. The chapters mentioned were largely occupied with Sungods and
astronomical phenomena, but now we have to consider an earlier period
when there were no definite forms of gods, and when none but the vaguest
astronomical knowledge existed. Sometimes in historical matters it is
best and safest to move thus backwards in Time, from the things recent
and fairly well known to things more ancient and less known. In this way
we approach more securely to some understanding of the dim and remote
past.

It is clear that before any definite speculations on heaven-dwelling
gods or divine beings had arisen in the human mind--or any clear
theories of how the sun and moon and stars might be connected with the
changes of the seasons on the earth--there were still certain obvious
things which appealed to everybody, learned or unlearned alike. One of
these was the return of Vegetation, bringing with it the fruits or the
promise of the fruits of the earth, for human food, and also bringing
with it increase of animal life, for food in another form; and the other
was the return of Light and Warmth, making life easier in all ways. Food
delivering from the fear of starvation; Light and Warmth delivering from
the fear of danger and of cold. These were three glorious things which
returned together and brought salvation and renewed life to man. The
period of their return was 'Spring,' and though Spring and its benefits
might fade away in time, still there was always the HOPE of its
return--though even so it may have been a long time in human evolution
before man discovered that it really did always return, and (with
certain allowances) at equal intervals of time.

Long then before any Sun or Star gods could be called in, the return of
the Vegetation must have enthralled man's attention, and filled him with
hope and joy. Yet since its return was somewhat variable and uncertain
the question, What could man do to assist that return? naturally
became a pressing one. It is now generally held that the use of
Magic--sympathetic magic--arose in this way. Sympathetic magic seems to
have been generated by a belief that your own actions cause a similar
response in things and persons around you. Yet this belief did not rest
on any philosophy or argument, but was purely instinctive and sometimes
of the nature of a mere corporeal reaction. Every schoolboy knows how
in watching a comrade's high jump at the Sports he often finds himself
lifting a knee at the moment 'to help him over'; at football matches
quarrels sometimes arise among the spectators by reason of an
ill-placed kick coming from a too enthusiastic on-looker, behind one;
undergraduates running on the tow-path beside their College boat in
the races will hurry even faster than the boat in order to increase its
speed; there is in each case an automatic bodily response increased
by one's own desire. A person ACTS the part which he desires to be
successful. He thinks to transfer his energy in that way. Again, if by
chance one witnesses a painful accident, a crushed foot or what-not,
it commonly happens that one feels a pain in the same part oneself--a
sympathetic pain. What more natural than to suppose that the pain
really is transferred from the one person to the other? and how easy the
inference that by tormenting a wretched scape-goat or crucifying a human
victim in some cases the sufferings of people may be relieved or their
sins atoned for?

Simaetha, it will be remembered, in the second Idyll of Theocritus,
curses her faithless lover Delphis, and as she melts his waxen image she
prays that HE TOO MAY MELT. All this is of the nature of Magic, and is
independent of and generally more primitive than Theology or Philosophy.
Yet it interests us because it points to a firm instinct in early
man--to which I have already alluded--the instinct of his unity and
continuity with the rest of creation, and of a common life so close
that his lightest actions may cause a far-reaching reaction in the world
outside.

Man, then, independently of any belief in gods, may assist the arrival
of Spring by magic ceremonies. If you want the Vegetation to appear you
must have rain; and the rain-maker in almost all primitive tribes has
been a MOST important personage. Generally he based his rites on quite
fanciful associations, as when the rain-maker among the Mandans wore a
raven's skin on his head (bird of the storm) or painted his shield with
red zigzags of lightning (1); but partly, no doubt, he had observed
actual facts, or had had the knowledge of them transmitted to him--as,
for instance that when rain is impending loud noises will bring about
its speedy downfall, a fact we moderns have had occasion to notice on
battlefields. He had observed perhaps that in a storm a specially loud
clap of thunder is generally followed by a greatly increased downpour
of rain. He had even noticed (a thing which I have often verified in
the vicinity of Sheffield) that the copious smoke of fires will generate
rain-clouds--and so quite naturally he concluded that it was his smoking
SACRIFICES which had that desirable effect. So far he was on the track
of elementary Science. And so he made "bull-roarers" to imitate the
sound of wind and the blessed rain-bringing thunder, or clashed
great bronze cymbals together with the same object. Bull-voices and
thunder-drums and the clashing of cymbals were used in this connection
by the Greeks, and are mentioned by Aeschylus (2); but the bull-roarer,
in the form of a rhombus of wood whirled at the end of a string, seems
to be known, or to have been known, all over the world. It is described
with some care by Mr. Andrew Lang in his Custom and Myth (pp. 29-44),
where he says "it is found always as a sacred instrument employed in
religious mysteries, in New Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, ancient
Greece, and Africa."

 (1) See Catlin's North American Indians, Letter 19.

 (2) Themis, p. 61.


Sometimes, of course, the rain-maker was successful; but of the inner
causes of rain he knew next to nothing; he was more ignorant even than
we are! His main idea was a more specially 'magical' one--namely, that
the sound itself would appeal to the SPIRITS of rain and thunder and
cause them to give a response. For of course the thunder (in Hebrew
Bath-Kol, "the daughter of the Voice") was everywhere regarded as
the manifestation of a spirit. (1) To make sounds like thunder would
therefore naturally call the attention of such a spirit; or he, the
rain-maker, might make sounds like rain. He made gourd-rattles (known
in ever so many parts of the world) in which he rattled dried seeds
or small pebbles with a most beguiling and rain-like insistence; or
sometimes, like the priests of Baal in the Bible, (2) he would cut
himself with knives till the blood fell upon the ground in great drops
suggestive of an oncoming thunder-shower. "In Mexico the rain god was
propitiated with sacrifices of children. If the children wept and shed
abundant tears, they who carried them rejoiced, being convinced that
rain would also be abundant." (3) Sometimes he, the rain-maker, would
WHISTLE for the wind, or, like the Omaha Indians, flap his blankets for
the same purpose.

 (1) See A. Lang, op. cit.: "The muttering of the thunder is said
to be his voice calling to the rain to fall and make the grass grow up
green." Such are the very words of Umbara, the minstrel of the Tribe
(Australian).

 (2) I Kings xviii.

 (3) Quoted from Sahagun II, 2, 3 by A. Lang in Myth, Ritual and
Religion, vol. ii, p. 102.


In the ancient myth of Demeter and Persephone--which has been adopted by
so many peoples under so many forms--Demeter the Earth-mother loses her
daughter Persephone (who represents of course the Vegetation), carried
down into the underworld by the evil powers of Darkness and Winter.
And in Greece there was a yearly ceremonial and ritual of magic for the
purpose of restoring the lost one and bringing her back to the world
again. Women carried certain charms, "fir-cones and snakes and unnamable
objects made of paste, to ensure fertility; there was a sacrifice of
pigs, who were thrown into a deep cleft of the earth, and their remains
afterwards collected and scattered as a charm over the fields."
(1) Fir-cones and snakes from their very forms were emblems of male
fertility; snakes, too, from their habit of gliding out of their own
skins with renewed brightness and color were suggestive of resurrection
and re-vivification; pigs and sows by their exceeding fruitfulness would
in their hour of sacrifice remind old mother Earth of what was expected
from her! Moreover, no doubt it had been observed that the scattering of
dead flesh over the ground or mixed with the seed, did bless the
ground to a greater fertility; and so by a strange mixture of primitive
observation with a certain child-like belief that by means of symbols
and suggestions Nature could be appealed to and induced to answer to the
desires and needs for her children this sort of ceremonial Magic arose.
It was not exactly Science, and it was not exactly Religion; but it was
a naive, and perhaps not altogether mistaken, sense of the bond between
Nature and Man.

 (1) See Gilbert Murray's Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.


For we can perceive that earliest man was not yet consciously
differentiated from Nature. Not only do we see that the tribal life was
so strong that the individual seldom regarded himself as different or
separate or opposed to the rest of the tribe; but that something of the
same kind was true with regard to his relation to the Animals and to
Nature at large. This outer world was part of himself, was also himself.
His sub-conscious sense of unity was so great that it largely dominated
his life. That brain-cleverness and brain-activity which causes modern
man to perceive such a gulf between him and the animals, or between
himself and Nature, did not exist in the early man. Hence it was
no difficulty to him to believe that he was a Bear or an Emu.
Sub-consciously he was wiser than we are. He knew that he was a bear or
an emu, or any other such animal as his totem-creed led him to fix his
mind upon. Hence we find that a familiarity and common consent existed
between primitive man and many of his companion animals such as has
been lost or much attenuated in modern times. Elisee Reclus in his very
interesting paper La Grande Famille (1) gives support to the idea that
the so-called domestication of animals did not originally arise from any
forcible subjugation of them by man, but from a natural amity with
them which grew up in the beginning from common interests, pursuits and
affections. Thus the chetah of India (and probably the puma of Brazil)
from far-back times took to hunting in the company of his two-legged and
bow-and-arrow-armed friend, with whom he divided the spoil. W. H. Hudson
(2) declares that the Puma, wild and fierce though it is, and capable
of killing the largest game, will never even to-day attack man, but
when maltreated by the latter submits to the outrage, unresisting, with
mournful cries and every sign of grief. The Llama, though domesticated
in a sense, has never allowed the domination of the whip or the bit,
but may still be seen walking by the side of the Brazilian peasant
and carrying his burdens in a kind of proud companionship. The mutual
relations of Women and the Cow, or of Man and the Horse (3) (also the
Elephant) reach so far into the past that their origin cannot be traced.
The Swallow still loves to make its home under the cottage eaves and
still is welcomed by the inmates as the bringer of good fortune. Elisee
Reclus assures us that the Dinka man on the Nile calls to certain snakes
by name and shares with them the milk of his cows.


 (1) Published originally in Le Magazine International, January
1896.

 (2) See The Naturalist in La Plata, ch. ii.

 (3) "It is certain that the primitive Indo-European reared droves
of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if not centuries, before
it ever occurred to him to ride or drive them" (F. B. Jevons, Introd. to
Hist. Religion, p. 119).


And so with Nature. The communal sense, or subconscious perception,
which made primitive men feel their unity with other members of their
tribe, and their obvious kinship with the animals around them, brought
them also so close to general Nature that they looked upon the trees,
the vegetation, the rain, the warmth of the sun, as part of their
bodies, part of themselves. Conscious differentiation had not yet set
in. To cause rain or thunder you had to make rain- or thunder-like
noises; to encourage Vegetation and the crops to leap out of the ground,
you had to leap and dance. "In Swabia and among the Transylvanian Saxons
it is a common custom (says Dr. Frazer) for a man who has some hemp to
leap high in the field in the belief that this will make the hemp grow
tall." (1) Native May-pole dances and Jacks in the Green have hardly
yet died out--even in this most civilized England. The bower of green
boughs, the music of pipes, the leaping and the twirling, were all an
encouragement to the arrival of Spring, and an expression of Sympathetic
Magic. When you felt full of life and energy and virility in yourself
you naturally leapt and danced, so why should you not sympathetically do
this for the energizing of the crops? In every country of the world
the vernal season and the resurrection of the Sun has been greeted with
dances and the sound of music. But if you wanted success in hunting
or in warfare then you danced before-hand mimic dances suggesting the
successful hunt or battle. It was no more than our children do to-day,
and it all was, and is, part of a natural-magic tendency in human
thought.

 (1) See The Golden Bough, i, 139 seq. Also Art and Ritual, p. 31.


Let me pause here for a moment. It is difficult for us with our
academical and somewhat school-boardy minds to enter into all this, and
to understand the sense of (unconscious or sub-conscious) identification
with the world around which characterized the primitive man--or to look
upon Nature with his eyes. A Tree, a Snake, a Bull, an Ear of Corn. WE
know so well from our botany and natural history books what these things
are. Why should our minds dwell on them any longer or harbor a doubt as
to our perfect comprehension of them?

And yet (one cannot help asking the question): Has any one of us really
ever SEEN a Tree? I certainly do not think that I have--except most
superficially. That very penetrating observer and naturalist, Henry D.
Thoreau, tells us that he would often make an appointment to visit a
certain tree, miles away--but what or whom he saw when he got there, he
does not say. Walt Whitman, also a keen observer, speaks of a tulip-tree
near which he sometimes sat--"the Apollo of the woods--tall and
graceful, yet robust and sinewy, inimitable in hang of foliage and
throwing-out of limb; as if the beauteous, vital, leafy creature could
walk, if it only would"; and mentions that in a dream-trance he actually
once saw his "favorite trees step out and promenade up, down and around
VERY CURIOUSLY." (1) Once the present writer seemed to have a partial
vision of a tree. It was a beech, standing somewhat isolated, and
still leafless in quite early Spring. Suddenly I was aware of its
skyward-reaching arms and up-turned finger-tips, as if some vivid life
(or electricity) was streaming through them far into the spaces of
heaven, and of its roots plunged in the earth and drawing the same
energies from below. The day was quite still and there was no movement
in the branches, but in that moment the tree was no longer a separate or
separable organism, but a vast being ramifying far into space, sharing
and uniting the life of Earth and Sky, and full of a most amazing
activity.

 (1) Specimen Days, 1882-3 Edition, p. iii.


The reader of this will probably have had some similar experiences.
Perhaps he will have seen a full-foliaged Lombardy poplar swaying in
half a gale in June--the wind and the sun streaming over every little
twig and leaf, the tree throwing out its branches in a kind of ecstasy
and bathing them in the passionately boisterous caresses of its two
visitants; or he will have heard the deep glad murmur of some huge
sycamore with ripening seed clusters when after weeks of drought the
steady warm rain brings relief to its thirst; and he will have known
that these creatures are but likenesses of himself, intimately and
deeply-related to him in their love and hunger longing, and, like
himself too, unfathomed and unfathomable.

It would be absurd to credit early man with conscious speculations
like these, belonging more properly to the twentieth century; yet it is
incontrovertible, I think, that in SOME ways the primitive peoples, with
their swift subconscious intuitions and their minds unclouded by mere
book knowledge, perceived truths to which we moderns are blind. Like
the animals they arrived at their perceptions without (individual) brain
effort; they knew things without thinking. When they did THINK of course
they went wrong. Their budding science easily went astray. Religion
with them had as yet taken no definite shape; science was equally
protoplasmic; and all they had was a queer jumble of the two in the form
of Magic. When at a later time Science gradually defined its outlook and
its observations, and Religion, from being a vague subconscious feeling,
took clear shape in the form of gods and creeds, then mankind gradually
emerged into the stage of evolution IN WHICH WE NOW ARE. OUR scientific
laws and doctrines are of course only temporary formulae, and so also
are the gods and the creeds of our own and other religions; but these
things, with their set and angular outlines, have served in the past
and will serve in the future as stepping-stones towards another kind of
knowledge of which at present we only dream, and will lead us on to
a renewed power of perception which again will not be the laborious
product of thought but a direct and instantaneous intuition like that of
the animals--and the angels.


To return to our Tree. Though primitive man did not speculate in modern
style on these things, I yet have no reasonable doubt that he felt (and
FEELS, in those cases where we can still trace the workings of his
mind) his essential relationship to the creatures of the forest more
intimately, if less analytically, than we do to-day. If the animals with
all their wonderful gifts are (as we readily admit) a veritable part
of Nature--so that they live and move and have their being more or less
submerged in the spirit of the great world around them--then Man, when
he first began to differentiate himself from them, must for a long
time have remained in this SUBconscious unity, becoming only distinctly
CONSCIOUS of it when he was already beginning to lose it. That early
dawn of distinct consciousness corresponded to the period of belief
in Magic. In that first mystic illumination almost every object was
invested with a halo of mystery or terror or adoration. Things were
either tabu, in which case they were dangerous, and often not to be
touched or even looked upon--or they were overflowing with magic grace
and influence, in which case they were holy, and any rite which released
their influence was also holy. William Blake, that modern prophetic
child, beheld a Tree full of angels; the Central Australian native
believes bushes to be the abode of spirits which leap into the bodies of
passing women and are the cause of the conception of children; Moses
saw in the desert a bush (perhaps the mimosa) like a flame of fire, with
Jehovah dwelling in the midst of it, and he put off his shoes for
he felt that the place was holy; Osiris was at times regarded as a
Tree-spirit (1); and in inscriptions is referred to as "the solitary one
in the acacia"--which reminds us curiously of the "burning bush." The
same is true of others of the gods; in the old Norse mythology Ygdrasil
was the great branching World-Ash, abode of the soul of the universe;
the Peepul or Bo-tree in India is very sacred and must on no account be
cut down, seeing that gods and spirits dwell among its branches. It is
of the nature of an Aspen, and of little or no practical use, (2) but so
holy that the poorest peasant will not disturb it. The Burmese believe
the things of nature, but especially the trees, to be the abode of
spirits. "To the Burman of to-day, not less than to the Greek of long
ago, all nature is alive. The forest and the river and the mountains
are full of spirits, whom the Burmans call Nats. There are all kinds of
Nats, good and bad, great and little, male and female, now living round
about us. Some of them live in the trees, especially in the huge figtree
that shades half-an-acre without the village; or among the fern-like
fronds of the tamarind." (3)


 (1) The Golden Bough, iv, 339.

 (2) Though the sap is said to contain caoutchouc.

 (3) The Soul of a People, by H. Fielding (1902), p. 250.


There are also in India and elsewhere popular rites of MARRIAGE of women
(and men) to Trees; which suggest that trees were regarded as very
near akin to human beings! The Golden Bough (1) mentions many of these,
including the idea that some trees are male and others female. The
well-known Assyrian emblem of a Pine cone being presented by a priest to
a Palm-tree is supposed by E. B. Tylor to symbolize fertilization--the
Pine cone being masculine and the Palm feminine. The ceremony of the god
Krishna's marriage to a Basil plant is still celebrated in India down
to the present day; and certain trees are clasped and hugged by pregnant
women--the idea no doubt being that they bestow fertility on those
who embrace them. In other cases apparently it is the trees which are
benefited, since it is said that men sometimes go naked into the
Clove plantations at night in order by a sort of sexual intercourse to
fertilize them. (2)

 (1) Vol. i, p. 40, Vol. iii, pp. 24 sq.

 (2) Ibid., vol. ii, p. 98.


One might go on multiplying examples in this direction quite
indefinitely. There is no end to them. They all indicate--what was
instinctively felt by early man, and is perfectly obvious to all to-day
who are not blinded by "civilization" (and Herbert Spencer!) that the
world outside us is really most deeply akin to ourselves, that it is
not dead and senseless but intensely alive and instinct with feeling and
intelligence resembling our own. It is this perception, this conviction
of our essential unity with the whole of creation, which lay from the
first at the base of all Religion; yet at first, as I have said, was
hardly a conscious perception. Only later, when it gradually became more
conscious, did it evolve itself into the definite forms of the gods and
the creeds--but of that process I will speak more in detail presently.

The Tree therefore was a most intimate presence to the Man. It grew in
the very midst of his Garden of Eden. It had a magical virtue, which
his tentative science could only explain by chance analogies and
assimilations. Attractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the
natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever
drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful
of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and
Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so
potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual
most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds
(or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent
combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it
reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance
we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen
Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the
fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found
in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient
temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden
apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans,
the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man
through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And
De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories,
says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which
yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the
fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their
beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India,
Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."

 (1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.

 (2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.


Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting
itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case
of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away
and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in
the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a
primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or
semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of the Snake--the fascination
of its mysteriously gliding movement, of its vivid energy, its
glittering eye, its intensity of life, combined with its fatal dart of
Death--is a thing felt even more by women than by men--and for a reason
(from what we have already said) not far to seek. It was the Woman who
in the story of the Fall was the first to listen to its suggestions.
No wonder that, as Professor Murray says, (1) the Greeks worshiped a
gigantic snake (Meilichios) the lord of Death and Life, with ceremonies
of appeasement, and sacrifices, long before they arrived at the worship
of Zeus and the Olympian gods.

 (1) Four Stages of Greek Religion, p. 29.


Or let us take the example of an Ear of Corn. Some people
wonder--hearing nowadays that the folk of old used to worship a
Corn-spirit or Corn-god--wonder that any human beings could have been so
foolish. But probably the good people who wonder thus have never REALLY
LOOKED (with their town-dazed eyes) at a growing spike of wheat. (1) Of
all the wonderful things in Nature I hardly know any that thrills one
more with a sense of wizardry than just this very thing--to observe,
each year, this disclosure of the Ear within the Blade--first a swelling
of the sheath, then a transparency and a whitey-green face within a
hooded shroud, and then the perfect spike of grain disengaging itself
and spiring upward towards the sky--"the resurrection of the wheat with
pale visage appearing out of the ground."

 (1) Even the thrice-learned Dr. Famell quotes apparently with
approval the scornful words of Hippolytus, who (he says) "speaks of the
Athenians imitating people at the Eleusinian mysteries and showing to
the epoptae (initiates) that great and marvelous mystery of perfect
revelation--in solemn silence--a CUT CORNSTALK ([gr teqerismenon] [gr
stacon])."--Cults of the Greek States, vol. iii, p. 182.


If this spectacle amazes one to-day, what emotions must it not have
aroused in the breasts of the earlier folk, whose outlook on the world
was so much more direct than ours--more 'animistic' if you like! What
wonderment, what gratitude, what deliverance from fear (of starvation),
what certainty that this being who had been ruthlessly cut down and
sacrificed last year for human food had indeed arisen again as a savior
of men, what readiness to make some human sacrifice in return, both as
an acknowledgment of the debt, and as a gift of something which would
no doubt be graciously accepted!--(for was it not well known that where
blood had been spilt on the ground the future crop was so much more
generous?)--what readiness to adopt some magic ritual likely to
propitiate the unseen power--even though the outline and form of the
latter were vague and uncertain in the extreme! Dr. Frazer, speaking of
the Egyptian Osiris as one out of many corn-gods of the above character,
says (1): "The primitive conception of him as the corn-god comes clearly
out in the festival of his death and resurrection, which was celebrated
the month of Athyr. That festival appears to have been essentially a
festival of sowing, which properly fell at the time when the husbandman
actually committed the seed to the earth. On that occasion an effigy of
the corn-god, moulded of earth and corn, was buried with funeral rites
in the ground in order that, dying there, he might come to life again
with the new crops. The ceremony was in fact a charm to ensure the
growth of the corn by sympathetic magic, and we may conjecture that as
such it was practised in a simple form by every Egyptian farmer on his
fields long before it was adopted and transfigured by the priests in the
stately ritual of the temple." (2)

 (1) The Golden Bough, iv, p. 330.

 (2) See ch. xv.


The magic in this case was of a gentle description; the clay image of
Osiris sprouting all over with the young green blade was pathetically
poetic; but, as has been suggested, bloodthirsty ceremonies were also
common enough. Human sacrifices, it is said, had at one time been
offered at the grave of Osiris. We hear that the Indians in Ecuador used
to sacrifice men's hearts and pour out human blood on their fields
when they sowed them; the Pawnee Indians used a human victim the same,
allowing his blood to drop on the seed-corn. It is said that in Mexico
girls were sacrificed, and that the Mexicans would sometimes GRIND their
(male) victim, like corn, between two stones. ("I'll grind his bones to
make me bread.") Among the Khonds of East India--who were particularly
given to this kind of ritual--the very TEARS of the sufferer were an
incitement to more cruelties, for tears of course were magic for Rain.
(1)

 (1) The Golden Bough, vol. vii, "The Corn-Spirit," pp. 236 sq.


And so on. We have referred to the Bull many times, both in his
astronomical aspect as pioneer of the Spring-Sun, and in his more direct
role as plougher of the fields, and provider of food from his own body.
"The tremendous mana of the wild bull," says Gilbert Murray, "occupies
almost half the stage of pre-Olympic ritual." (1) Even to us there is
something mesmeric and overwhelming in the sense of this animal's
glory of strength and fury and sexual power. No wonder the primitives
worshiped him, or that they devised rituals which should convey his
power and vitality by mere contact, or that in sacramental feasts
they ate his flesh and drank his blood as a magic symbol and means of
salvation.

 (1) Four Stages, p. 34.




VI. MAGICIANS, KINGS AND GODS

It is perhaps necessary, at the commencement of this chapter, to say a
few more words about the nature and origin of the belief in Magic.
Magic represented on one side, and clearly enough, the beginnings of
Religion--i.e. the instinctive sense of Man's inner continuity with the
world around him, TAKING SHAPE: a fanciful shape it is true, but with
very real reaction on his practical life and feelings. (1) On the other
side it represented the beginnings of Science. It was his first attempt
not merely to FEEL but to UNDERSTAND the mystery of things.

 (1) For an excellent account of the relation of Magic to Religion
see W. McDougall, Social Psychology (1908), pp. 317-320.


Inevitably these first efforts to understand were very puerile, very
superficial. As E. B. Tylor says (1) of primitive folk in general, "they
mistook an imaginary for a real connection." And he instances the case
of the inhabitants of the City of Ephesus, who laid down a rope, seven
furlongs in length, from the City to the temple of Artemis, in order to
place the former under the protection of the latter! WE should lay down
a telephone wire, and consider that we established a much more efficient
connection; but in the beginning, and quite naturally, men, like
children, rely on surface associations. Among the Dyaks of Borneo (2)
when the men are away fighting, the WOMEN must use a sort of telepathic
magic in order to safeguard them--that is, they must themselves rise
early and keep awake all day (lest darkness and sleep should give
advantage to the enemy); they must not OIL their hair (lest their
husbands should make any SLIPS); they must eat sparingly and put aside
rice at every meal (so that the men may not want for food). And so on.
Similar superstitions are common. But they gradually lead to a little
thought, and then to a little more, and so to the discovery of actual
and provable influences. Perhaps one day the cord connecting the temple
with Ephesus was drawn TIGHT and it was found that messages could be, by
tapping, transmitted along it. That way lay the discovery of a fact. In
an age which worshiped fertility, whether in mankind or animals, TWINS
were ever counted especially blest, and were credited with a magic
power. (The Constellation of the Twins was thought peculiarly lucky.)
Perhaps after a time it was discovered that twins sometimes run in
families, and in such cases really do bring fertility with them. In
cattle it is known nowadays that there are more twins of the female sex
than of the male sex. (3)

 (1) Primitive Culture, vol. i, p. 106.

 (2) See The Golden Bough, i, 127.

 (3) See Evolution of Sex, by Geddes and Thomson (1901), p. 41,
note.


Observations of this kind were naturally made by the ablest members of
the tribe--who were in all probability the medicine-men and wizards--and
brought in consequence power into their hands. The road to power in
fact--and especially was this the case in societies which had not
yet developed wealth and property--lay through Magic. As far as magic
represented early superstition and religion it laid hold of the _hearts_
of men--their hopes and fears; as far as it represented science and the
beginnings of actual knowledge, it inspired their minds with a sense of
power, and gave form to their lives and customs. We have no reason to
suppose that the early magicians and medicine-men were peculiarly wicked
or bent on mere self-aggrandizement--any more than we have to think the
same of the average country vicar or country doctor of to-day. They
were merely men a trifle wiser or more instructed than their flocks.
But though probably in most cases their original intentions were decent
enough, they were not proof against the temptations which the possession
of power always brings, and as time went on they became liable to trade
more and more upon this power for their own advancement. In the
matter of Religion the history of the Christian priesthood through the
centuries shows sufficiently to what misuse such power can be put; and
in the matter of Science it is a warning to us of the dangers attending
the formation of a scientific priesthood, such as we see growing up
around us to-day. In both cases--whether Science or Religion--vanity,
personal ambition, lust of domination and a hundred other vices, unless
corrected by a real devotion to the public good, may easily bring as
many evils in their train as those they profess to cure.

The Medicine-man, or Wizard, or Magician, or Priest, slowly but
necessarily gathered power into his hands, and there is much evidence to
show that in the case of many tribes at any rate, it was HE who became
ultimate chief and leader and laid the foundations of Kingship. The
Basileus was always a sacred personality, and often united in himself as
head of the clan the offices of chief in warfare and leader in priestly
rites--like Agamemnon in Homer, or Saul or David in the Bible. As a
magician he had influence over the fertility of the earth and, like the
blameless king in the Odyssey, under his sway

                         "the dark earth beareth in season
     Barley and wheat, and the trees are laden with fruitage, and
     alway
      Yean unfailing the flocks, and the sea gives fish in
     abundance." (1)

 (1) Odyssey xix, 109 sq. Translation by H. B. Cotterill.


As a magician too he was trusted for success in warfare; and
Schoolcraft, in a passage quoted by Andrew Lang, (1) says of the Dacotah
Indians "the war-chief who leads the party to war is always one of
these medicine-men." This connection, however, by which the magician is
transformed into the king has been abundantly studied, and need not be
further dwelt upon here.

And what of the transformation of the king into a god--or of the
Magician or Priest directly into the same? Perhaps in order to
appreciate this, one must make a further digression.

For the early peoples there were, as it would appear, two main objects
in life: (1) to promote fertility in cattle and crops, for food; and (2)
to placate or ward off Death; and it seemed very obvious--even before
any distinct figures of gods, or any idea of prayer, had arisen--to
attain these objects by magic ritual. The rites of Baptism, of
Initiation (or Confirmation) and the many ceremonies of a Second Birth,
which we associate with fully-formed religions, did belong also to
the age of Magic; and they all implied a belief in some kind of
re-incarnation--in a life going forward continually and being renewed
in birth again and again. It is curious that we find such a belief among
the lowest savages even to-day. Dr. Frazer, speaking of the Central
Australian tribes, says the belief is firmly rooted among them "that the
human soul undergoes an endless series of re-incarnations--the living
men and women of one generation being nothing but the spirits of their
ancestors come to life again, and destined themselves to be reborn
in the persons of their descendants. During the interval between
two re-incarnations the souls live in their nanja spots, or local
totem-centres, which are always natural objects such as trees or rocks.
Each totem-clan has a number of such totem-centres scattered over the
country. There the souls of the dead men and women of the totem, but no
others, congregate, and are born again in human form when a favorable
opportunity presents itself." (2)

 (1) Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. i, p. 113.

 (2) The Golden Bough, vol. i, p. 96.


And what the early people believed of the human spirit, they believed of
the corn-spirits and the tree and vegetation spirits also. At the great
Spring-ritual among the primitive Greeks "the tribe and the growing
earth were renovated together: the earth arises afresh from her dead
seeds, the tribe from its dead ancestors." And the whole process
projects itself in the idea of a spirit of the year, who "in the first
stage is living, then dies with each year, and thirdly rises again from
the dead, raising the whole dead world with him. The Greeks called him
in this stage 'The Third One' (Tritos Soter) or 'the Saviour'; and the
renovation ceremonies were accompanied by a casting-off of the old year,
the old garments, and everything that is polluted by the infection of
death." (1) Thus the multiplication of the crops and the renovation of
the tribe, and at the same time the evasion and placation of death, were
all assured by similar rites and befitting ceremonial magic. (2)

 (1) Gilbert Murray, Four Stages, p. 46.

 (2) It is interesting to find, with regard to the renovation of
the tribe, that among the Central Australians the foreskins or male
members of those who died were deposited in the above-mentioned nanja
spots--the idea evidently being that like the seeds of the corn the
seeds of the human crop must be carefully and ceremonially preserved for
their re-incarnation.


In all these cases, and many others that I have not mentioned--of
the magical worship of Bulls and Bears and Rams and Cats and Emus and
Kangaroos, of Trees and Snakes, of Sun and Moon and Stars, and the
spirit of the Corn in its yearly and miraculous resurrection out of the
ground--there is still the same idea or moving inspiration, the sense
mentioned in the foregoing chapter, the feeling (hardly yet conscious of
its own meaning) of intimate relationship and unity with all this outer
world, the instinctive conviction that the world can be swayed by the
spirit of Man, if the man can only find the right ritual, the right
word, the right spell, wherewith to move it. An aura of emotion
surrounded everything--of terror, of tabu, of fascination, of desire.
The world, to these people, was transparent with presences related to
themselves; and though hunger and sex may have been the dominant and
overwhelmingly practical needs of their life, yet their outlook on the
world was essentially poetic and imaginative.

Moreover it will be seen that in this age of magic and the belief in
spirits, though there was an intense sense of every thing being
alive, the gods, in the more modern sense of the world, hardly existed
(1)--that is, there was no very clear vision, to these people, of
supra-mundane beings, sitting apart and ordaining the affairs of
earth, as it were from a distance. Doubtless this conception was slowly
evolving, but it was only incipient. For the time being--though there
might be orders and degrees of spirits (and of gods)--every such being
was only conceived of, and could only be conceived of, as actually a
part of Nature, dwelling in and interlaced with some phenomenon of Earth
and Sky, and having no separate existence.

 (1) For a discussion of the evolution of RELIGION out of MAGIC,
see Westermarck's Origin of Moral Ideas, ch. 47.


How was it then, it will be asked, that the belief in separate and
separable gods and goddesses--each with his or her well-marked outline
and character and function, like the divinities of Greece, or of India,
or of the Egyptian or Christian religions, ultimately arose? To
this question Jane Harrison (in her Themis and other books) gives an
ingenious answer, which as it chimes in with my own speculations (in the
Art of Creation and elsewhere) I am inclined to adopt. It is that the
figures of the supranatural gods arose from a process in the human mind
similar to that which the photographer adopts when by photographing a
number of faces on the same plate, and so superposing their images on
one another, he produces a so-called "composite" photograph or image.
Thus, in the photographic sphere, the portraits of a lot of members
of the same family superposed upon one another may produce a composite
image or ideal of that family type, or the portraits of a number of
Aztecs or of a number of Apache Indians the ideals respectively of the
Aztec or of the Apache types. And so in the mental sphere of each member
of a tribe the many images of the well-known Warriors or Priests or
wise and gracious Women of that tribe did inevitably combine at last
to composite figures of gods and goddesses--on whom the enthusiasm
and adoration of the tribe was concentrated. (1) Miss Harrison has
ingeniously suggested how the leading figures in the magic rituals of
the past--being the figures on which all eyes would be concentrated; and
whose importance would be imprinted on every mind--lent themselves to
this process. The suffering Victim, bound and scourged and crucified,
recurring year after year as the centre-figure of a thousand ritual
processions, would at last be dramatized and idealized in the great
race-consciousness into the form of a Suffering God--a Jesus Christ or
a Dionysus or Osiris--dismembered or crucified for the salvation of
mankind. The Priest or Medicine-Man--or rather the succession of Priests
or Medicine-Men--whose figures would recur again and again as leaders
and ordainers of the ceremonies, would be glorified at last into the
composite-image of a God in whom were concentrated all magic powers.
"Recent researches," says Gilbert Murray, "have shown us in abundance
the early Greek medicine-chiefs making thunder and lightning and rain."
Here is the germ of a Zeus or a Jupiter. The particular medicine-man
may fail; that does not so much matter; he is only the individual
representative of the glorified and composite being who exists in the
mind of the tribe (just as a present-day King may be unworthy, but is
surrounded all the same by the agelong glamour of Royalty). "The real
[gr qeos], tremendous, infallible, is somewhere far away, hidden in
clouds perhaps, on the summit of some inaccessible mountain. If the
mountain is once climbed the god will move to the upper sky. The
medicine-chief meanwhile stays on earth, still influential. He has some
connection with the great god more intimate than that of other men... he
knows the rules for approaching him and making prayers to him." (2) Thus
did the Medicine-man, or Priest, or Magician (for these are but three
names for one figure) represent one step in the evolution of the god.

 (1) See The Art of Creation, ch. viii, "The Gods as Apparitions
of the Race-Life."

 (2) The Four Stages, p. 140.


And farther back still in the evolutionary process we may trace (as in
chapter iv above) the divinization or deification of four-footed animals
and birds and snakes and trees and the like, from the personification of
the collective emotion of the tribe towards these creatures. For people
whose chief food was bear-meat, for instance, whose totem was a bear,
and who believed themselves descended from an ursine ancestor, there
would grow up in the tribal mind an image surrounded by a halo of
emotions--emotions of hungry desire, of reverence, fear, gratitude and
so forth--an image of a _divine Bear_ in whom they lived and moved and had
their being. For another tribe or group in whose yearly ritual a Bull or
a Lamb or a Kangaroo played a leading part there would in the same
way spring up the image of a holy bull, a divine lamb, or a sacred
kangaroo. Another group again might come to worship a Serpent as its
presiding genius, or a particular kind of Tree, simply because these
objects were and had been for centuries prominent factors in its yearly
and seasonal Magic. As Reinach and others suggest, it was the Taboo
(bred by Fear) which by first forbidding contact with the totem-animal
or priest or magician-chief gradually invested him with Awe and
Divinity.

According to this theory the god--the full-grown god in human shape,
dwelling apart and beyond the earth--did not come first, but was a late
and more finished product of evolution. He grew up by degrees and out of
the preceding animal-worships and totem-systems. And this theory is much
supported and corroborated by the fact that in a vast number of early
cults the gods are represented by human figures with animal heads. The
Egyptian religion was full of such divinities--the jackal-headed
Anubis, the ram-headed Ammon, the bull-fronted Osiris, or Muth, queen of
darkness, clad in a vulture's skin; Minos and the Minotaur in Crete; in
Greece, Athena with an owl's head, or Herakles masked in the hide
and jaws of a monstrous lion. What could be more obvious than that,
following on the tribal worship of any totem-animal, the priest or
medicine-man or actual king in leading the magic ritual should don the
skin and head of that animal, and wear the same as a kind of mask--this
partly in order to appear to the people as the true representative of
the totem, and partly also in order to obtain from the skin the magic
virtues and mana of the beast, which he could then duly impart to the
crowd? Zeus, it must be remembered, wears the aegis, or goat-skin--said
to be the hide of the goat Amaltheia who suckled him in his infancy;
there are a number of legends which connected the Arcadian Artemis with
the worship of the bear, Apollo with the wolf, and so forth. And, most
curious as showing similarity of rites between the Old and New Worlds,
there are found plenty of examples of the wearing of beast-masks in
religious processions among the native tribes of both North and South
America. In the Atlas of Spix and Martius (who travelled together in
the Amazonian forests about 1820) there is an understanding and
characteristic picture of the men (and some women) of the tribe of the
Tecunas moving in procession through the woods mostly naked, except for
wearing animal heads and masks--the masks representing Cranes of various
kinds, Ducks, the Opossum, the Jaguar, the Parrot, etc., probably
symbolic of their respective clans.

By some such process as this, it may fairly be supposed, the forms of
the Gods were slowly exhaled from the actual figures of men and women,
of youths and girls, who year after year took part in the ancient
rituals. Just as the Queen of the May or Father Christmas with us are
idealized forms derived from the many happy maidens or white-bearded
old men who took leading parts in the May or December mummings and thus
gained their apotheosis in our literature and tradition--so doubtless
Zeus with his thunderbolts and arrows of lightning is the idealization
into Heaven of the Priestly rain-maker and storm-controller; Ares the
god of War, the similar idealization of the leading warrior in the
ritual war-dance preceding an attack on a neighboring tribe; and Mercury
of the foot-running Messenger whose swiftness in those days (devoid of
steam or electricity) was so precious a tribal possession.

And here it must be remembered that this explanation of the genesis of
the gods only applies to the SHAPES and FIGURES of the various deities.
It does not apply to the genesis of the widespread belief in spirits or
a Great Spirit generally; that, as I think will become clear, has
quite another source. Some people have jeered at the 'animistic' or
'anthropomorphic' tendency of primitive man in his contemplation of the
forces of Nature or his imaginations of religion and the gods. With a
kind of superior pity they speak of "the poor Indian whose untutored
mind sees God in clouds and hears him in the wind." But I must confess
that to me the "poor Indian" seems on the whole to show more good sense
than his critics, and to have aimed his rude arrows at the philosophic
mark more successfully than a vast number of his learned and scientific
successors. A consideration of what we have said above would show that
early people felt their unity with Nature so deeply and intimately
that--like the animals themselves--they did not think consciously or
theorize about it. It was just their life to be--like the beasts of the
field and the trees of the forest--a part of the whole flux of things,
non-differentiated so to speak. What more natural or indeed more
logically correct than for them to assume (when they first began to
think or differentiate themselves) that these other creatures, these
birds, beasts and plants, and even the sun and moon, were of the same
blood as themselves, their first cousins, so to speak, and having the
same interior nature? What more reasonable (if indeed they credited
THEMSELVES with having some kind of soul or spirit) than to credit these
other creatures with a similar soul or spirit? Im Thurn, speaking of the
Guiana Indians, says that for them "the whole world swarms with beings."
Surely this could not be taken to indicate an untutored mind--unless
indeed a mind untutored in the nonsense of the Schools--but rather a
very directly perceptive mind. And again what more reasonable (seeing
that these people themselves were in the animal stage of evolution) than
that they should pay great reverence to some ideal animal--first cousin
or ancestor--who played an important part in their tribal existence, and
make of this animal a totem emblem and a symbol of their common life?

And, further still, what more natural than that when the tribe passed
to some degree beyond the animal stage and began to realize a life more
intelligent and emotional--more specially human in fact--than that
of the beasts of the field, that it should then in its rituals and
ceremonies throw off the beast-mask and pay reverence to the interior
and more human spirit. Rising to a more enlightened consciousness of its
own intimate quality, and still deeply penetrated with the sense of its
kinship to external nature, it would inevitably and perfectly logically
credit the latter with an inner life and intelligence, more
distinctly human than before. Its religion in fact would become MORE
'anthropomorphic' instead of less so; and one sees that this is a
process that is inevitable; and inevitable notwithstanding a
certain parenthesis in the process, due to obvious elements in our
'Civilization' and to the temporary and fallacious domination of
a leaden-eyed so-called 'Science.' According to this view the true
evolution of Religion and Man's outlook on the world has proceeded not
by the denial by man of his unity with the world, but by his seeing and
understanding that unity more deeply. And the more deeply he understands
himself the more certainly he will recognize in the external world a
Being or beings resembling himself.

W. H. Hudson--whose mind is certainly not of a quality to be jeered
at--speaks of Animism as "the projection of ourselves into nature:
the sense and apprehension of an intelligence like our own, but more
powerful, in all visible things"; and continues, "old as I am this same
primitive faculty which manifested itself in my early boyhood, still
persists, and in those early years was so powerful that I am almost
afraid to say how deeply I was moved by it." (1) Nor will it be quite
forgotten that Shelley once said:--

     The moveless pillar of a mountain's weight
     Is active living spirit. Every grain
     Is sentient both in unity and part,
     And the minutest atom comprehends
     A world of loves and hatreds.

 (1) Far Away and Long Ago, ch. xiii, p. 225.


The tendency to animism and later to anthropomorphism is I say
inevitable, and perfectly logical. But the great value of the work done
by some of those investigators whom I have quoted has been to show that
among quite primitive people (whose interior life and 'soul-sense' was
only very feeble) their projections of intelligence into Nature were
correspondingly feeble. The reflections of themselves projected into
the world beyond could not reach the stature of eternal 'gods,' but
were rather of the quality of ephemeral phantoms and ghosts; and the
ceremonials and creeds of that period are consequently more properly
described as Magic than as Religion. There have indeed been great
controversies as to whether there has or has not been, in the course
of religious evolution, a _pre_-animistic stage. Probably of course human
evolution in this matter must have been perfectly continuous from stages
presenting the very feeblest or an absolutely deficient animistic sense
to the very highest manifestations of anthropomorphism; but as there is
a good deal of evidence to show that _animals_ (notably dogs and horses)
see ghosts, the inquiry ought certainly to be enlarged so far as to
include the pre-human species. Anyhow it must be remembered that the
question is one of _consciousness_--that is, of how far and to what degree
consciousness of self has been developed in the animal or the primitive
man or the civilized man, and therefore how far and to what degree the
animal or human creature has credited the outside world with a similar
consciousness. It is not a question of whether there _is_ an inner life
and _sub_-consciousness common to all these creatures of the earth and
sky, because that, I take it, is a fact beyond question; they all emerge
or have emerged from the same matrix, and are rooted in identity; but
it is a question of how far they are _aware_ of this, and how far by
separation (which is the genius of evolution) each individual creature
has become conscious of the interior nature both of itself and of the
other creatures _and_ of the great whole which includes them all.

Finally, and to avoid misunderstanding, let me say that
Anthropomorphism, in man's conception of the gods, is itself of course
only a stage and destined to pass away. In so far, that is, as the
term indicates a belief in divine beings corresponding to our PRESENT
conception of ourselves--that is as separate personalities having each
a separate and limited character and function, and animated by
the separatist motives of ambition, possession, power, vainglory,
superiority, patronage, self-greed, self-satisfaction, etc.--in so far
as anthropomorphism is the expression of that kind of belief it is of
course destined, with the illusion from which it springs, to pass away.
When man arrives at the final consciousness in which the idea of such a
self, superior or inferior or in any way antagonistic to others, ceases
to operate, then he will return to his first and primal condition, and
will cease to need ANY special religion or gods, knowing himself and all
his fellows to be divine and the origin and perfect fruition of all.




VII. RITES OF EXPIATION AND REDEMPTION

There is a passage in Richard Jefferies' imperishably beautiful book
The Story of my Heart--a passage well known to all lovers of that
prose-poet--in which he figures himself standing "in front of the Royal
Exchange where the wide pavement reaches out like a promontory," and
pondering on the vast crowd and the mystery of life. "Is there any
theory, philosophy, or creed," he says, "is there any system of culture,
any formulated method, able to meet and satisfy each separate item of
this agitated pool of human life? By which they may be guided, by which
they may hope, by which look forward? Not a mere illusion of the craving
heart--something real, as real as the solid walls of fact against
which, like seaweed, they are dashed; something to give each separate
personality sunshine and a flower in its own existence now; something
to shape this million-handed labor to an end and outcome that will leave
more sunshine and more flowers to those who must succeed? Something real
now, and not in the spirit-land; in this hour now, as I stand and the
sun burns.... Full well aware that all has failed, yet, side by side
with the sadness of that knowledge, there lives on in me an unquenchable
belief, thought burning like the sun, that there is yet something to
be found.... It must be dragged forth by the might of thought from the
immense forces of the universe."

In answer to this passage we may say "No,--a thousand times No! there
is no theory, philosophy, creed, system or formulated method which
will meet or ever satisfy the demand of each separate item of the
human whirlpool." And happy are we to know there is no such thing! How
terrible if one of these bloodless 'systems' which strew the history
of religion and philosophy and the political and social paths of
human endeavor HAD been found absolutely correct and universally
applicable--so that every human being would be compelled to pass
through its machine-like maw, every personality to be crushed under
its Juggernath wheels! No, thank Heaven! there is no theory or creed or
system; and yet there is something--as Jefferies prophetically felt and
with a great longing desired--that CAN satisfy; and that, the root
of all religion, has been hinted at in the last chapter. It is the
CONSCIOUSNESS of the world-life burning, blazing, deep down within us:
it is the Soul's intuition of its roots in Omnipresence and Eternity.

The gods and the creeds of the past, as shown in the last
chapter--whatever they may have been, animistic or anthropomorphic
or transcendental, whether grossly brutish or serenely ideal and
abstract--are essentially projections of the human mind; and no doubt
those who are anxious to discredit the religious impulse generally will
catch at this, saying "Yes, they are mere forms and phantoms of the
mind, ephemeral dreams, projected on the background of Nature, and
having no real substance or solid value. The history of Religion (they
will say) is a history of delusion and illusion; why waste time over
it? These divine grizzly Bears or Aesculapian Snakes, these cat-faced
Pashts, this Isis, queen of heaven, and Astarte and Baal and Indra
and Agni and Kali and Demeter and the Virgin Mary and Apollo and Jesus
Christ and Satan and the Holy Ghost, are only shadows cast outwards onto
a screen; the constitution of the human mind makes them all tend to
be anthropomorphic; but that is all; they each and all inevitably pass
away. Why waste time over them?"

And this is in a sense a perfectly fair way of looking at the matter.
These gods and creeds ARE only projections of the human mind. But all
the same it misses, does this view, the essential fact. It misses the
fact that there is no shadow without a fire, that the very existence of
a shadow argues a light somewhere (though we may not directly see it) as
well as the existence of a solid form which intercepts that light.
Deep, deep in the human mind there is that burning blazing light of
the world-consciousness--so deep indeed that the vast majority of
individuals are hardly aware of its existence. Their gaze turned
outwards is held and riveted by the gigantic figures and processions
passing across their sky; they are unaware that the latter are only
shadows--silhouettes of the forms inhabiting their own minds. (1) The
vast majority of people have never observed their own minds; their own
mental forms. They have only observed the reflections cast by these.
Thus it may be said, in this matter, that there are three degrees of
reality. There are the mere shadows--the least real and most
evanescent; there are the actual mental outlines of humanity (and of
the individual), much more real, but themselves also of course slowly
changing; and most real of all, and permanent, there is the light "which
lighteth every man that cometh into the world"--the glorious light
of the world-consciousness. Of this last it may be said that it never
changes. Every thing is known to it--even the very IMPEDIMENTS to its
shining. But as it is from the impediments to the shining of a light
that shadows are cast, so we now may understand that the things of this
world and of humanity, though real in their degree, have chiefly a
kind of negative value; they are opaquenesses, clouds, materialisms,
ignorances, and the inner light falling upon them gradually reveals
their negative character and gradually dissolves them away till they
are lost in the extreme and eternal Splendor. I think Jefferies, when
he asked that question with which I have begun this chapter, was in some
sense subconsciously, if not quite consciously, aware of the answer. His
frequent references to the burning blazing sun throughout The Story of
the Heart seem to be an indication of his real deep-down attitude of
mind.

 (1) See, in the same connection, Plato's allegory of the Cave,
Republic, Book vii.


The shadow-figures of the creeds and theogonies pass away truly like
ephemeral dreams; but to say that time spent in their study is wasted,
is a mistake, for they have value as being indications of things much
more real than themselves, namely, of the stages of evolution of the
human mind. The fact that a certain god-figure, however grotesque and
queer, or a certain creed, however childish, cruel, and illogical, held
sway for a considerable time over the hearts of men in any corner or
continent of the world is good evidence that it represented a real
formative urge at the time in the hearts of those good people, and
a definite stage in their evolution and the evolution of humanity.
Certainly it was destined to pass away, but it was a step, and a
necessary step in the great process; and certainly it was opaque and
brutish, but it is through the opaque things of the world, and not
through the transparent, that we become aware of the light.

It may be worth while to give instances of how some early rituals and
creeds, in themselves apparently barbarous or preposterous, were really
the indications of important moral and social conceptions evolving in
the heart of man. Let us take, first, the religious customs connected
with the ideas of Sacrifice and of Sin, of which such innumerable
examples are now to be found in the modern books on Anthropology. If we
assume, as I have done more than once, that the earliest state of Man
was one in which he did not consciously separate himself from the world,
animate and inanimate, which surrounded him, then (as I have also said)
it was perfectly natural for him to take some animal which bulked large
on his horizon--some food-animal for instance--and to pay respect to it
as the benefactor of his tribe, its far-back ancestor and totem-symbol;
or, seeing the boundless blessing of the cornfields, to believe in
some kind of spirit of the corn (not exactly a god but rather a magical
ghost) which, reincarnated every year, sprang up to save mankind
from famine. But then no sooner had he done this than he was bound to
perceive that in cutting down the corn or in eating his totem-bear
or kangaroo he was slaying his own best self and benefactor. In
that instant the consciousness of DISUNITY, the sense of sin in some
undefined yet no less disturbing and alarming form would come in. If,
before, his ritual magic had been concentrated on the simple purpose of
multiplying the animal or, vegetable forms of his food, now in addition
his magical endeavor would be turned to averting the just wrath of the
spirits who animated these forms--just indeed, for the rudest savage
would perceive the wrong done and the probability of its retribution.
Clearly the wrong done could only be expiated by an equivalent sacrifice
of some kind on the part of the man, or the tribe--that is by the
offering to the totem-animal or to the corn-spirit of some victim whom
these nature powers in their turn could feed upon and assimilate. In
this way the nature-powers would be appeased, the sense of unity would
be restored, and the first At-one-ment effected.

It is hardly necessary to recite in any detail the cruel and hideous
sacrifices which have been perpetrated in this sense all over the world,
sometimes in appeasement of a wrong committed or supposed to have been
committed by the tribe or some member of it, sometimes in placation or
for the averting of death, or defeat, or plague, sometimes merely
in fulfilment of some long-standing custom of forgotten origin--the
flayings and floggings and burnings and crucifixions of victims without
end, carried out in all deliberation and solemnity of established
ritual. I have mentioned some cases connected with the sowing of the
corn. The Bible is full of such things, from the intended sacrifice of
Isaac by his father Abraham, to the actual crucifixion of Jesus by
the Jews. The first-born sons were claimed by a god who called himself
"jealous" and were only to be redeemed by a substitute. (1) Of the
Canaanites it was said that "even their daughters they have BURNT in the
fire to their gods"; (2) and of the King of Moab, that when he saw
his army in danger of defeat, "he took his eldest son that should have
reigned in his stead and offered him for a burnt-offering on the wall!"
(3) Dr. Frazer (4) mentions the similar case of the Carthaginians
(about B.C. 300) sacrificing two hundred children of good family as a
propitiation to Baal and to save their beloved city from the assaults
of the Sicilian tyrant Agathocles. And even so we hear that on that
occasion three hundred more young folk VOLUNTEERED to die for the
fatherland.

 (1) Exodus xxxiv. 20.

 (2) Deut. xii. 31.

 (3) 2 Kings iii. 27.

 (4) The Golden Bough, vol. "The Dying God," p. 167.


The awful sacrifices made by the Aztecs in Mexico to their gods
Huitzilopochtli, Texcatlipoca, and others are described in much detail
by Sahagun, the Spanish missionary of the sixteenth century. The victims
were mostly prisoners of war or young children; they were numbered by
thousands. In one case Sahagun describes the huge Idol or figure of the
god as largely plated with gold and holding his hands palm upward and in
a downward sloping position over a cauldron or furnace placed below. The
children, who had previously been borne in triumphal state on litters
over the crowd and decorated with every ornamental device of feathers
and flowers and wings, were placed one by one on the vast hands and
ROLLED DOWN into the flames--as if the god were himself offering them.
(1) As the procession approached the temple, the members of it wept and
danced and sang, and here again the abundance of tears was taken for a
good augury of rain. (2)

 (1) It is curious to find that exactly the same story (of the
sloping hands and the children rolled down into the flames) is related
concerning the above-mentioned Baal image at Carthage (see Diodorus
Siculus, xx. 14; also Baring Gould's Religious Belief, vol. i, p. 375).

 (2) "A los ninos que mataban, componianlos en muchos atavios para
llevarlos al sacrificio, y llevabos en unas literas sobre los hombros,
estas literas iban adornadas con plumages y con flores: iban tanendo,
cantando y bailando delante de ellos... Cuando Ileviban los ninos a
matar, si llevaban y echaban muchos lagrimas, alegrabansi los que los
llevaban porque tomaban pronostico de que habian de tener muchas aguas
en aquel ano." Sahagun, Historia Nueva Espana, Bk. II, ch. i.


Bernal Diaz describes how he saw one of these monstrous figures--that
of Huitzilopochtli, the god of war, all inlaid with gold and precious
stones; and beside it were "braziers, wherein burned the hearts of three
Indians, torn from their bodies that very day, and the smoke of them and
the savor of incense were the sacrifice."

Sahagun again (in Book II, ch. 5) gives a long account of the sacrifice
of a perfect youth at Easter-time--which date Sahagun connects with the
Christian festival of the Resurrection. For a whole year the youth had
been held in honor and adored by the people as the very image of the
god (Tetzcatlipoca) to whom he was to be sacrificed. Every luxury
and fulfilment of his last wish (including such four courtesans as he
desired) had been granted him. At the last and on the fatal day, leaving
his companions and his worshipers behind, be slowly ascended the Temple
staircase; stripping on each step the ornaments from his body; and
breaking and casting away his flutes and other musical instruments;
till, reaching the summit, he was stretched, curved on his back, and
belly upwards, over the altar stone, while the priest with obsidian
knife cut his breast open and, snatching the heart out, held it up, yet
beating, as an offering to the Sun. In the meantime, and while the heart
still lived, his successor for the next year was chosen.

In Book II, ch. 7 of the same work Sahagun describes the similar
offering of a woman to a goddess. In both cases (he explains) of young
man or young woman, the victims were richly adorned in the guise of the
god or goddess to whom they were offered, and at the same time great
largesse of food was distributed to all who needed. (Here we see the
connection in the general mind between the gift of food (by the gods)
and the sacrifice of precious blood (by the people).) More than once
Sahagun mentions that the victims in these Mexican ceremonials not
infrequently offered THEMSELVES as a voluntary sacrifice; and Prescott
says (1) that the offering of one's life to the gods was "sometimes
voluntarily embraced, as a most glorious death opening a sure passage
into Paradise."

 (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.


Dr. Frazer describes (1) the far-back Babylonian festival of the Sacaea
in which "a prisoner, condemned to death, was dressed in the king's
robes, seated on the king's throne, allowed to issue whatever commands
he pleased, to eat, drink and enjoy himself, and even to lie with the
king's concubines." But at the end of the five days he was stripped
of his royal robes, scourged, and hanged or impaled. It is certainly
astonishing to find customs so similar prevailing among peoples so far
removed in space and time as the Aztecs of the sixteenth century A.D.
and the Babylonians perhaps of the sixteenth century B.C. But we know
that this subject of the yearly sacrifice of a victim attired as a
king or god is one that Dr. Frazer has especially made his own, and for
further information on it his classic work should be consulted.

 (1) Golden Bough, "The Dying God," p. 114. (See also S. Reinach,
Cults, Myths and Religion, p. 94) on the martyrdom of St. Dasius.


Andrew Lang also, with regard to the Aztecs, quotes largely from
Sahagun, and summarizes his conclusions in the following passage:
"The general theory of worship was the adoration of a deity, first by
innumerable human sacrifices, next by the special sacrifice of a MAN for
the male gods, of a WOMAN for each goddess. (1) The latter victims were
regarded as the living images or incarnations of the divinities in, each
case; for no system of worship carried farther the identification of the
god with the sacrifice (? victim), and of both with the officiating priest.
The connection was emphasized by the priests wearing the newly-flayed skins
of the victims--just as in Greece, Egypt and Assyria, the fawn-skin
or bull-hide or goat-skin or fish-skin of the victims is worn by the
celebrants. Finally, an image of the god was made out of paste, and this
was divided into morsels and eaten in a hideous sacrament by those who
communicated." (2)

 (1) Compare the festival of Thargelia at Athens, originally
connected with the ripening of the crops. A procession was formed and
the first fruits of the year offered to Apollo, Artemis and the Horae.
It was an expiatory feast, to purify the State from all guilt and avert
the wrath of the god (the Sun). A man and a woman, as representing
the male and female population, were led about with a garland of figs
(fertility) round their necks, to the sound of flutes and singing. They
were then scourged, sacrificed, and their bodies burned by the seashore.
(Nettleship and Sandys.)

 (2) A Lang, Myth, Ritual and Religion, vol. ii, p. 97.


Revolting as this whole picture is, it represents as we know a mere
thumbnail sketch of the awful practices of human sacrifice all over the
world. We hold up our hands in horror at the thought of Huitzilopochtli
dropping children from his fingers into the flames, but we have to
remember that our own most Christian Saint Augustine was content to
describe unbaptized infants as crawling for ever about the floor of
Hell! What sort of god, we may ask, did Augustine worship? The Being who
could condemn children to such a fate was certainly no better than the
Mexican Idol.

And yet Augustine was a great and noble man, with some by no means
unworthy conceptions of the greatness of his God. In the same way the
Aztecs were in many respects a refined and artistic people, and their
religion was not all superstition and bloodshed. Prescott says of them
(1) that they believed in a supreme Creator and Lord "omnipresent,
knowing all thoughts, giving all gifts, without whom Man is as
nothing--invisible, incorporeal, one God, of perfect perfection and
purity, under whose wings we find repose and a sure defence." How can
we reconcile St. Augustine with his own devilish creed, or the religious
belief of the Aztecs with their unspeakable cruelties? Perhaps we can
only reconcile them by remembering out of what deeps of barbarism and
what nightmares of haunting Fear, man has slowly emerged--and is
even now only slowly emerging; by remembering also that the ancient
ceremonies and rituals of Magic and Fear remained on and were cultivated
by the multitude in each nation long after the bolder and nobler spirits
had attained to breathe a purer air; by remembering that even to the
present day in each individual the Old and the New are for a long period
thus intricately intertangled. It is hard to believe that the practice
of human and animal sacrifice (with whatever revolting details) should
have been cultivated by nine-tenths of the human race over the globe
out of sheer perversity and without some reason which at any rate to
the perpetrators themselves appeared commanding and convincing. To-day
(1918) we are witnessing in the Great European War a carnival of human
slaughter which in magnitude and barbarity eclipses in one stroke all
the accumulated ceremonial sacrifices of historical ages; and when
we ask the why and wherefore of this horrid spectacle we are told,
apparently in all sincerity, and by both the parties engaged, of the
noble objects and commanding moralities which inspire and compel it. We
can hardly, in this last case, disbelieve altogether in the genuineness
of the plea, so why should we do so in the former case? In both cases we
perceive that underneath the surface pretexts and moralities Fear is and
was the great urging and commanding force.

 (1) Conquest of Mexico, Bk. I, ch. 3.


The truth is that Sin and Sacrifice represent--if you once allow for the
overwhelming sway of fear--perfectly reasonable views of human conduct,
adopted instinctively by mankind since the earliest times. If in a
moment of danger or an access of selfish greed you deserted your brother
tribesman or took a mean advantage of him, you 'sinned' against him; and
naturally you expiated the sin by an equivalent sacrifice of some kind
made to the one you had wronged. Such an idea and such a practice were
the very foundation of social life and human morality, and must have
sprung up as soon as ever, in the course of evolution, man became
CAPABLE of differentiating himself from his fellows and regarding his
own conduct as that of a 'separate self.' It was in the very conception
of a separate self that 'sin' and disunity first began; and it was
by 'sacrifice' that unity and harmony were restored, appeasement and
atonement effected.

But in those earliest times, as I have already indicated more than once,
man felt himself intimately related not only to his brother tribesman,
but to the animals and to general Nature. It was not so much that he
THOUGHT thus as that he never thought OTHERWISE! He FELT subconsciously
that he was a part of all this outer world. And so he adopted for his
totems or presiding spirits every possible animal, as we have seen,
and all sorts of nature-phenomena, such as rain and fire and water and
clouds, and sun, moon and stars--which WE consider quite senseless and
inanimate. Towards these apparently senseless things therefore he felt
the same compunction as I have described him feeling towards his brother
tribesmen. He could sin against them too. He could sin against his
totem-animal by eating it; he could sin against his 'brother the ox' by
consuming its strength in the labor of the plough; he could sin against
the corn by cutting it down and grinding it into flour, or against the
precious and beautiful pine-tree by laying his axe to its roots and
converting it into mere timber for his house. Further still, no doubt he
could sin against elemental nature. This might be more difficult to be
certain of, but when the signs of elemental displeasure were not to be
mistaken--when the rain withheld itself for months, or the storms and
lightning dealt death and destruction, when the crops failed or evil
plagues afflicted mankind--then there could be little uncertainty that
he had sinned; and Fear, which had haunted him like a demon from the
first day when he became conscious of his separation from his fellows
and from Nature, stood over him and urged to dreadful propitiations.

In all these cases some sacrifice in reparation was the obvious thing.
We have seen that to atone for the cutting-down of the corn a human
victim would often be slaughtered. The corn-spirit clearly approved of
this, for wherever the blood and remains of the victim were strewn the
corn always sprang up more plentifully. The tribe or human group made
reparation thus to the corn; the corn-spirit signified approval. The
'sin' was expiated and harmony restored. Sometimes the sacrifice was
voluntarily offered by a tribesman; sometimes it was enforced, by lot
or otherwise; sometimes the victim was a slave, or a captive enemy;
sometimes even an animal. All that did not so much matter. The main
thing was that the formal expiation had been carried out, and the wrath
of the spirits averted.

It is known that tribes whose chief food-animal was the bear felt it
necessary to kill and eat a bear occasionally; but they could not do
this without a sense of guilt, and some fear of vengeance from the great
Bear-spirit. So they ate the slain bear at a communal feast in which
the tribesmen shared the guilt and celebrated their community with their
totem and with each other. And since they could not make any reparation
directly to the slain animal itself AFTER its death, they made their
reparation BEFORE, bringing all sorts of presents and food to it for a
long anterior period, and paying every kind of worship and respect to
it. The same with the bull and the ox. At the festival of the Bouphonia,
in some of the cities of Greece as I have already mentioned, the actual
bull sacrificed was the handsomest and most carefully nurtured that
could be obtained; it was crowned with flowers and led in procession
with every mark of reverence and worship. And when--as I have already
pointed out--at the great Spring festival, instead of a bull or a goat
or a ram, a HUMAN victim was immolated, it was a custom (which can be
traced very widely over the world) to feed and indulge and honor the
victim to the last degree for a WHOLE YEAR before the final ceremony,
arraying him often as a king and placing a crown upon his head, by way
of acknowledgment of the noble and necessary work he was doing for the
general good.

What a touching and beautiful ceremony was that--belonging especially
to the North of Syria, and lands where the pine is so beneficent and
beloved a tree--the mourning ceremony of the death and burial of Attis!
when a pine-tree, felled by the axe, was hollowed out, and in the hollow
an image (often itself carved out of pinewood) of the young Attis was
placed. Could any symbolism express more tenderly the idea that the
glorious youth--who represented Spring, too soon slain by the rude tusk
of Winter--was himself the very human soul of the pine-tree? (1) At some
earlier period, no doubt, a real youth had been sacrificed and his body
bound within the pine; but now it was deemed sufficient for the maidens
to sing their wild songs of lamentation; and for the priests and male
enthusiasts to cut and gash themselves with knives, or to sacrifice
(as they did) to the Earth-mother the precious blood offering of their
virile organs--symbols of fertility in return for the promised and
expected renewal of Nature and the crops in the coming Spring. For
the ceremony, as we have already seen, did not end with death and
lamentation, but led on, perfectly naturally, after a day or two to a
festival of resurrection, when it was discovered--just as in the case of
Osiris--that the pine-tree coffin was empty, and the immortal life had
flown. How strange the similarity and parallelism of all these things to
the story of Jesus in the Gospels--the sacrifice of a life made in order
to bring salvation to men and expiation of sins, the crowning of the
victim, and arraying in royal attire, the scourging and the mockery, the
binding or nailing to a tree, the tears of Mary, and the resurrection
and the empty coffin!--or how not at all strange when we consider in
what numerous forms and among how many peoples, this same parable
and ritual had as a matter of fact been celebrated, and how it had
ultimately come down to bring its message of redemption into a somewhat
obscure Syrian city, in the special shape with which we are familiar.

 (1) See Julius Firmicus, who says (De Errore, c. 28): "in sacris
Phrygiis, quae Matris deum dicunt, per annos singulos arbor pinea
caeditur, et in media arbore simulacrum uvenis subligatur. In Isiacis
sacris de pinea arbore caeditur truncus; hujus trunci media pars
subtiliter excavatur, illis de segminibus factum idolum Osiridis
sepelitur. In Prosperpinae sacris caesa arbor in effigiem virginis
formaraque componitur, et cum intra civitatem fuerit illata, quadraginta
noctibus piangitur, quadragesima vero nocte comburitur."


Though the parable or legend in its special Christian form bears with it
the consciousness of the presence of beings whom we may call gods, it is
important to remember that in many or most of its earlier forms, though
it dealt in 'spirits'--the spirit of the corn, or the spirit of the
Spring, or the spirits of the rain and the thunder, or the spirits of
totem-animals--it had not yet quite risen to the idea of gods. It
had not risen to the conception of eternal deities sitting apart and
governing the world in solemn conclave--as from the slopes of Olympus
or the recesses of the Christian Heaven. It belonged, in fact, in its
inception, to the age of Magic. The creed of Sin and Sacrifice, or of
Guilt and Expiation--whatever we like to call it--was evolved perfectly
naturally out of the human mind when brought face to face with Life
and Nature) at some early stage of its self-consciousness. It was
essentially the result of man's deep, original and instinctive sense of
solidarity with Nature, now denied and belied and to some degree
broken up by the growth and conscious insistence of the self-regarding
impulses. It was the consciousness of disharmony and disunity,
causing men to feel all the more poignantly the desire and the need of
reconciliation. It was a realization of union made clear by its very
loss. It assumed of course, in a subconscious way as I have already
indicated, that the external world was the HABITAT of a mind or minds
similar to man's own; but THAT being granted, it is evident that the
particular theories current in this or that place about the nature of
the world--the theories, as we should say, of science or theology--did
not alter the general outlines of the creed; they only colored its
details and gave its ritual different dramatic settings. The mental
attitudes, for instance, of Abraham sacrificing the ram, or of the
Siberian angakout slaughtering a totem-bear, or of a modern and pious
Christian contemplating the Saviour on the Cross are really almost
exactly the same. I mention this because in tracing the origins or the
evolution of religions it is important to distinguish clearly what is
essential and universal from that which is merely local and temporary.
Some people, no doubt, would be shocked at the comparisons just made;
but surely it is much more inspiriting and encouraging to think that
whatever progress HAS been made in the religious outlook of the world
has come about through the gradual mental growth and consent of the
peoples, rather than through some unique and miraculous event of a
rather arbitrary and unexplained character--which indeed might never be
repeated, and concerning which it would perhaps be impious to suggest
that it SHOULD be repeated.

The consciousness then of Sin (or of alienation from the life of the
whole), and of restoration or redemption through Sacrifice, seems to
have disclosed itself in the human race in very far-back times, and
to have symbolized itself in some most ancient rituals; and if we are
shocked sometimes at the barbarities which accompanied those rituals,
yet we must allow that these barbarities show how intensely the early
people felt the solemnity and importance of the whole matter; and we
must allow too that the barbarities did sear and burn themselves into
rude and ignorant minds with the sense of the NEED of Sacrifi

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