History of Religion
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Title: History of Religion
Author: Allan Menzies
Release date: September 2, 2009 [eBook #29893]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK HISTORY OF RELIGION ***
E-text prepared by Ron Swanson
HISTORY OF RELIGION
A Sketch of Primitive Religious Beliefs and Practices, and of the
Origin and Character of the Great Systems
by
ALLAN MENZIES, D.D.
Professor of Biblical Criticism in the University of St. Andrews
Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the
world.--ACTS xv. 18.
New York
Charles Scribner's Sons
597-599 Fifth Avenue
1917
FIRST EDITION . . . _April_ 1895
SECOND EDITION . . _September_ 1895
_Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1897
_Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1900
_Reprinted_ . . . . _January_ 1902
_Reprinted_ . . . . _March_ 1903
_Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1905
THIRD EDITION . . . _January_ 1908
FOURTH EDITION . . _September_ 1911
_Reprinted_ . . . . _June_ 1914
_Reprinted_ . . . . _October_ 1918
PREFACE
This book makes no pretence to be a guide to all the mythologies, or
to all the religious practices which have prevailed in the world. It
is intended to aid the student who desires to obtain a general idea
of comparative religion, by exhibiting the subject as a connected and
organic whole, and by indicating the leading points of view from
which each of the great systems may best be understood. A certain
amount of discussion is employed in order to bring clearly before the
reader the great motives and ideas by which the various religions are
inspired, and the movements of thought which they present. And the
attempt is made to exhibit the great manifestations of human piety in
their genealogical connection. The writer has ventured to deal with
the religions of the Bible, each in its proper historical place, and
trusts that he has not by doing so rendered any disservice either to
Christian faith or to the science of religion. It is obvious that in
a work claiming to be scientific, and appealing to men of every
faith, all religions must be treated impartially, and that the same
method must be applied to each of them.
In a field of study, every part of which is being illuminated almost
every year by fresh discoveries, such a sketch as the present can be
merely tentative, and must soon, in many of its parts, grow
antiquated and be superseded. And where so much depends on the
selection of some facts out of many which might have been employed,
it will no doubt appear to readers who have some acquaintance with
the subject, that here and there a better choice might have been
made. The writer hopes that the great difficulty will not be
overlooked with which he has had to contend, of compressing a vast
subject into a compendious statement without allowing its life and
interest to evaporate in the process.
For a fuller bibliography than is given in this volume the reader may
consult the works of Dr. C. P. Tiele, and of Dr. Chantepie de la
Saussaye. It will readily be believed that the writer of this volume
has been indebted to many an author whom he has not named.
ST. ANDREWS, 1895.
PREFACE TO THE THIRD (REVISED) EDITION
Since this book first appeared twelve years ago it has been several
times reprinted without change. Advantage has now been taken,
however, of a call for a fresh issue, to introduce into it some
alterations and additions, such as its stereotyped form allows. Some
mistakes have been corrected, the names of recent books have been
added to the bibliographies, and in some chapters, especially those
dealing with the Semitic religions, considerable changes have been
made. In going over the book for this purpose, I have seen very
clearly that if it had been called for and written at this time
instead of twelve years ago, some things which are in it need not
have appeared, and additions might have been made which are not now
possible. The last twelve years have made a great change in the study
of religions; the prejudices with which it was regarded have almost
passed away, powerful forces have been enlisted in its service, and
admirable works have appeared dealing with various parts of the vast
field. Yet I am glad to think that the attempt made in this book to
furnish a simple introduction to a deeply important study, and
especially to promote the understanding of the religions of the Bible
by placing them in their connection with the religion of mankind at
large, may still prove useful.
ST. ANDREWS, _June_ 1907.
PREFACE TO THE FOURTH EDITION
This book is now being reprinted in a somewhat larger type, and an
opportunity is given, less restricted than the last, for making
changes in it. It is impossible for me at present to re-write it; it
appears substantially as it was. Some alterations and additions have
been made in the earlier chapters, and the bibliographies have been
brought more nearly up to date. I would take this opportunity of
directing the attention of readers of this book to the published
Proceedings of the Oxford Congress of the History of Religion, held
in September 1908. They will there see how large this field of study
has now grown, and what varied life and movement every part of it
contains. I have given references only to the addresses of the
Presidents of the Sections of the Congress, in which a fresh review
will be found of recent progress in the study of each of the great
religions.
ST. ANDREWS, _July_ 1910.
CONTENTS
PART I
THE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
PAGE
Position of the science--Unity of all religion--The growth of
religion continuous--Preliminary definition of religion--
Criticism of other definitions--Fuller definition--Religion
and civilisation advance together . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1-18
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF RELIGION
Origin of civilisation--It was from the savage state that
civilisation was by degrees produced--The religion of
savages--All savages have religion--It is a psychological
necessity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19-28
CHAPTER III
THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
Nature-worship--Ancestor-worship--Fetish-worship--A supreme
being--Which gods were first worshipped?--Fetish-gods came
first--Spirits, human or quasi-human, came first--Theories
of Mr. Spencer and Mr. Tylor--Animism--The minor
nature-worship came first--Theories of Mr. M. Müller and of
Ed. von Hartmann--The great nature-powers came first--Both
nature-worship and the worship of spirits are sources of
early religion--Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29-50
CHAPTER IV
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF
Growth of the great gods--Polytheism--Kathenotheism--The
minor nature-worship--The worship of animals--Trees, wells,
stones--The state after death--Growth of the great religions
out of these beliefs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51-65
CHAPTER V
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES
Sacrifice--Prayer--Sacred places, objects, persons--Magic--
Character of early religion--Early religion and morality . . 66-78
CHAPTER VI
NATIONAL RELIGION
Classifications of religions--Rise of national religion--It
affords a new social bond--And a better God--Example--The
Inca religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79-90
PART II
ISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS
CHAPTER VII
BABYLON AND ASSYRIA
People and literature--Worship of spirits--Worship of
animals--The great Gods--Mythology--The state religion . . . 91-105
CHAPTER VIII
CHINA
History of China--The literature of the religion--The state
religion of ancient China--Heaven--The spirits--Ancestors--
Confucius--His life--His doctrine--Taoism--Buddhism in China 106-125
CHAPTER IX
THE RELIGION OF ANCIENT EGYPT
History and literature--1. Animal worship--Theories
accounting for it--2. The great Gods--They also are local--
Mythology--Dynasties of gods--Ra--Osiris--Ptah--Was the
earliest religion monotheistic?--Syncretism--Pantheism--
Worship--3. The doctrine of the other life--Treatment of the
dead--The spirit in the under-world--_The Book of the Dead_--
Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126-157
PART III
THE SEMITIC GROUP
CHAPTER X
THE SEMITIC RELIGION
Home of the Semites--Character of the race--Their early
religious ideas--Difference between Semitic and Aryan
religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159-169
CHAPTER XI
CANAANITES AND PHENICIANS
The Religion of the Canaanites--The Phenicians--Their gods--
Astral deities of Phenicia--Influence of Phenician art . . . 170-178
CHAPTER XII
ISRAEL
The sacred literature--The people--Jehovah--The early ritual
was simple--Contact with Canaanite religion--Danger of
fusion--Religious conflict--The monarchy--Religion not
centralised--The Prophets--The old religion national--
Criticism of the old religion by the prophets--Appearance of
Universalism--Ethical monotheism--Individualism of the
prophetic teaching--The reforms--Deuteronomy--Earlier codes--
The exile--The return; the reform of Ezra--Character of the
later religion--Heathenish elements of Judaism--Spiritual
elements--The Psalms--The Synagogue--The national hopes--The
state after death . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 179-216
CHAPTER XIII
ISLAM
Arabia before Mahomet--The old religion--Confusion of
worship--Allah--Judaism and Christianity in Arabia--Mahomet,
early life--His religious impressions--The revelations--His
preaching--Persecution--Trials; decides to leave Mecca--
Mahomet at Medina--New religious union--Breach with Judaism
and Christianity--Domestic--Conquest of Mecca--Mecca made the
capital of Islam--Spread of Islam--The duties of the Moslem--
The Koran--Islam a universal religion . . . . . . . . . . . . 217-242
PART IV
THE ARYAN GROUP
CHAPTER XIV
THE ARYAN RELIGION
The Aryans, their early home--Their civilisation described--
Little known of their gods--Their worship was domestic . . . 243-255
CHAPTER XV
THE TEUTONS
The Aryans in Europe--The ancient Germans--The early German
gods--The working religion--Later German religion--Iceland--
The Eddas--The gods of the Eddas--The twilight of the gods . 256-273
CHAPTER XVI
GREECE
People and land--Earliest religion; functional deities--
Growth of Greek gods--Stones, animals, trees--Greek religion
is local--Artistic tendency--Early Eastern influences--
Homer--The Homeric gods--Worship in Homer--Omens--The state
after death--Hesiod--The poets and the working religion--Rise
of religious art--Festivals and games--Zeus and Apollo--
Change of the Greek spirit in sixth century B.C.--New
religious feeling; the mysteries--Religion and philosophy . . 274-304
CHAPTER XVII
THE RELIGION OF ROME
Roman religion was different from Greek--The earliest gods of
Rome are functional beings--The worship of these beings--The
great gods--Sacred persons--Roman religion legal rather than
priestly--Changes introduced from without--Etruria--Greek
gods in Rome--The Graeco-Roman religion--Decay and confusion 305-323
CHAPTER XVIII
THE RELIGIONS OF INDIA
I. _The Vedic Religion_
Relation of Indian to Aryan religion--The Rigveda--The Vedic
gods--Hymns to the gods--To what stage does this religion
belong?--It is primitive--It is advanced--In spite of many
gods, a tendency to Monotheism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 324-337
CHAPTER XIX
INDIA
II. _Brahmanism_
The caste system: the Brahmans--The growth of the sacred
literature--Sacrifice--Practical life--Philosophy--
Transmigration--Later developments . . . . . . . . . . . . . 338-352
CHAPTER XX
INDIA
III. _Buddhism_
The literature--Was there a personal founder?--The story of
the founder--Is Buddhism a revolt against Brahmanism?--The
Buddha--The doctrine--Buddhist morality--Nirvana--No gods--
The order--Buddhism made popular--Conclusion--Buddhism is not
a complete religion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 353-380
CHAPTER XXI
PERSIA
Sources--The contents of the Zend-Avesta are composite--
Zoroaster--Primitive religion of Iran--The call of
Zarathustra--The doctrine--Its inconsistencies--Man is called
to judge between the gods--This religion is essentially
intolerant--Growth of Mazdeism--Organisation of the heavenly
beings--The attributes of Ahura--Ancient testimonies to the
Persian religion--The Vendidad: laws of purity--How this
doctrine entered Mazdeism--Influence of Mazdeism on Judaism
and in other directions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 381-408
PART V
UNIVERSAL RELIGION
CHAPTER XXII
CHRISTIANITY
State of Jewish religion at the Christian era--The teaching
of Jesus--His person and work--Universalism of Christianity--
The Apostle Paul--What Christianity received from Judaism--
And from the Greek world--The different religions of
Christian nations and the common Christianity . . . . . . . . 409-425
CHAPTER XXIII
CONCLUSION
Tribal, national, and individual religion--This the central
development--Has to be studied in nations--Periods of general
advance in religion--Conditions of religious progress . . . . 426-434
INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 435-440
PART I
THE RELIGION OF THE EARLY WORLD
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTION
The science to which this little volume is devoted is a comparatively
new one. It is scarcely half a century since the attention of Western
Europe began to fix itself seriously on the great religions of the
East, and the study of these ancient systems aroused reflection on
the great facts that the world possesses not one religion only, but
several, nay, many religions, and that these exhibit both great
differences and great resemblances. The agitation of mind then
awakened by the thought that other faiths might be compared with
Christianity, has to a large extent passed away; and on the other
hand fresh fields of knowledge have been opened to the student of the
worships of mankind. By new methods of research the religions of
Greece and Rome have come to be known as they never were before; and
all the other religions of which we formerly knew anything have been
led to tell their stories in a new way. A new study--that of the
earliest human life on the earth--has brought to light many primitive
beliefs and practices, which seem to explain early religious ideas;
and the accounts of missionaries and others about savage tribes now
existing in different parts of the world, are seen to be full of a
significance which was not noticed formerly. We are thus in a very
different position from our fathers for studying the religion of the
world as a whole. To them their own religion was the true one and all
the others were false. Calvin speaks of the "immense welter of
errors" in which the whole world outside of Christianity is immersed;
it is unnecessary for him to deal with these errors, he can at once
proceed to set forth the true doctrine. The belief of the early
fathers of the Church, that all worships but those of Judaism and
Christianity were directed to demons, and that the demons bore sway
in them, practically prevailed till our own day; and it could not but
do so, since no other religions than these were really known. That
ignorance has ceased, and we are responsible for forming a view of
the subject according to the light that has been given us.
The science of religion, though of such recent origin, has already
passed beyond its earliest stage, as a reference even to its earlier
and its later names will show. "Comparative Religion" was the title
given at first to the combined study of various religions. What had
to be done, it was thought, was to compare them. The facts about them
had to be collected, the systems arranged according to the best
information procurable, and then laid side by side, that it might be
seen what features they had in common and what each had to
distinguish it from the others. Work of this kind is still abundantly
necessary. The collection of materials and the specifying of the
similarities and dissimilarities of the various faiths will long
occupy many workers.
Unity of all Religion.--But recent works on the religions of the
world regarded as a whole have been called "histories." We have the
well-known _History of Religion_ of M. Chantepie de la Saussaye, now
in its third edition, and the _Comparative History of the Religions
of Antiquity_ of M. Tiele. A history of religion may be either of two
things. The word history may be used as in the term Natural History,
to denote a reasoned account of this department of human life,
without attempting any chronological sequence; or it may be used as
when we speak of the History of the Romans, an attempt being made to
tell the story of religion in the world in the order of time. In
either case the use of the term "history" indicates that the study
now aims at something more than the accumulation of materials and the
pointing out of resemblances and analogies, namely, at arranging the
materials at its command so as to show them in an organic connection.
This, it cannot be doubted, is the task which the science of religion
is now called to attempt. What every one with any interest in the
subject is striving after, is a knowledge of the religions of the
world not as isolated systems which, though having many points of
resemblance, may yet, for all we know, be of separate and independent
growth, but as connected with each other and as forming parts of one
whole. Our science, in fact, is seeking to grasp the religions of the
world as manifestations of the religion of the world.[1]
[Footnote 1: The above statement is criticised by Mr. L. H. Jordan in
his excellent work, _Comparative Religion_, p. 485, but is in the
main a true account of what has taken place. Mr. Jordan strongly
holds that Comparative Religion is a science by itself, and ought to
be distinguished from the History of Religion, though the latter is,
of course, its necessary foundation.]
In rising to this conception of its task, the science of religion is
only obeying the impulse which dominates every department of study in
modern times. What every science is doing is to seek to show the
unity of law amid the multiplicity of the phenomena with which it has
to deal, to gather up the many into one, or rather to show how the
one has given rise to the many. In the study of religion, if it be
really a science, this impulse of all science must surely be felt.
Here also we must cherish the conviction that an order does exist
amid the apparent disorder, if we could but find it. We must believe
that the religious beliefs and practices of mankind are not a mere
chaos, not a mere incessant outburst of unreason, consistent only in
that it has appeared in every age and every country of the world, but
that they form a cosmos, and may be known, if we take the right way,
as a part of human life from which reason has never been absent, and
in which a growing purpose has fulfilled and still fulfils itself.
Some theories, it is true, from which the world formerly hoped much,
are not now relied on, and the present tendency is to abstain from
any general doctrine of the subject, and to be content with careful
collection and arrangement of the facts in special parts of the
field. Caution is no doubt most needful in the attempt to form a view
of this great study as a whole. Yet something of this kind is
possible, and is beyond all doubt much called for. It is the aim of
this little work not only to describe the leading features of the
great religions, but also to set forth some of the results which
appear to have been reached regarding the relation in which these
systems stand to each other.
The Growth of Religion Continuous.--We shall not pretend to set out
on this enterprise without any assumptions. The first and principal
assumption we make is that in religion as in other departments of
human life there has been a development from the beginning, even till
now, and that the growth of religion has gone on according to the
ordinary laws of human progress. This is a position which, begin the
study at whatever point he may, the student of this subject will find
himself compelled to take up, if he is not to renounce altogether the
idea of understanding it as a whole. To understand anything means, to
the thought of the present day, to know how it has come to be what it
is; of any historical phenomenon at least it is certain that it
cannot be understood except by tracing its history up to the root. We
assume, therefore, until it be disproved, that in this as in other
departments of human activity, growth has been continuous from the
first. In every other branch of historical study, this assumption is
made. The history of institutions is traced back in a continuous line
to an age before there was any family or any such thing as property.
The methods by which men have earned their subsistence on the earth
are known equally far back; and there is no break in the development
from the hooked stick to the steam plough. And should it not be the
same in religion? Here also shall we not assume, until we find it
proved to be incorrect, that there has been no break in the growth of
ideas and practices from the earliest days till now, and that the
highest religion of the present day is organically connected with
that religion which man had at first? It is, indeed, in many ways far
removed from the earliest religion, but what was most essential in
the earliest belief still lives in it, and what was fittest to
survive of its earliest motives, still prompts its worship. Should we
adopt this view, we shall find many of the difficulties disappear
which have frequently stood in the way of this study. When, according
to the new tendency that seems to govern all modern thought,
institutions and beliefs are regarded not as fixed things, but as
things growing from something that was there before, and tending
towards something that is coming, they cease to arouse contempt, or
jealousy, or hatred. If we can regard religions as stages in the
evolution of religion, then we have no motive either to depreciate or
unduly to extol any of them. The earlier stages of the development
will have a peculiar interest for us, just as we look with affection
on the home of our ancestors even though we should not choose to
dwell there. We shall not divide religions into the true one,
Christianity, and the false ones, all the rest; no religion will be
to us a mere superstition, nor shall we regard any as unguided by
God. Feeling that we cannot understand our own religion aright
without understanding those out of which it has been built up, we
shall value these others for the part they have played in the great
movement, and our own most of all, without which they could not be
made perfect. In the light of this principle of growth we shall find
good in the lowest, and shall see that the good and true rather than
the evil and false, furnish the ultimate meaning of even the poorest
systems.
We start then with the assumption that religion is a thing which has
developed from the first, as law has, or as art has; and the best
method we can follow, if it should prove practicable, will be to
follow its movement from the beginning. We must not presume to hope
that everything will be made clear, or that we shall meet with no
religious phenomena to which we cannot assign their place in the
development. We must remember that ground is often lost as well as
won in human history, and that in religions as in nations
degeneration frequently occurs as well as progress. We must not be
too sure that we shall be able to find any plain path leading through
the immeasurable forests of man's religious sentiments and practices.
Yet we may at least expect to find evidence of the direction which on
the whole the growth of religion has followed.
Preliminary Definition of Religion.--But, before we can set out on
this inquiry, we are met by the question, What is it that we suppose
to have been thus developed? In order to trace any process of
evolution it is necessary to define that which is evolved; for it
belongs to the very idea of evolution that the identity of the
subject of it is not changed on the way up, but that the germ and the
finished product are the same entity, only differing from each other
in that the one has still to grow while the other is grown. Futile
were it indeed to sketch a history of religion with the savage at one
end of it and the Christian thinker at the other, if it could be said
that in no point did the religion of the savage and that of the
Christian coincide, but that the product was a thing of entirely
different nature from the germ. It seems necessary, therefore, in the
first place, to say what that is, of which we are to attempt the
history; or in other words, to say what we mean by religion.
It must not be forgotten that an adequate definition of a thing which
is growing can only be reached when the growth is complete. During
its growth it is showing what it is, and its higher as well as its
lower manifestations are part of its nature. The world has not yet
found out completely, but is still in the course of finding out, what
religion is. Any definition propounded at this stage must, therefore,
be of an elementary and provisional character. I propose then as a
working definition of religion in the meantime, that it is "The
worship of higher powers." This appears at first sight a very meagre
account of the matter; but if we consider what it implies, we shall
find it is not so meagre. In the first place it involves an element
of belief. No one will worship higher powers unless he believes that
such powers exist. This is the intellectual factor. Not that the
intellectual is distinguished in early forms of religion from the
other factors, any more than grammar is distinguished by early man as
an element of language. But something intellectual, some creed, is
present implicitly even in the earliest worships. Should there be no
belief in higher powers, true worship cannot continue. If it be
continued in outward act, it has lost reality to the mind of the
worshipper, and the result is an apparent or a sham religion, a
worship devoid of one of the essential conditions of religion. This
is true at every stage. But in the second place, these powers which
are worshipped are "higher." Religion has respect, not to beings men
regard as on a level with themselves or even beneath themselves, but
to beings in some way above and beyond themselves, and whom they are
disposed to approach with reverence. When objects appear to be
worshipped for which the worshipper feels contempt, and which a
moment afterwards he will maltreat or throw away, there also one of
the essential conditions is absent, and such worship must be judged
to fall short of religion. There may no doubt be some religion in it;
the object he worships may appear to the savage, in whose mind there
is little continuity, at one moment to be higher than himself and the
next moment to be lower; but the result of the whole is something
less than religion. And in the third place these higher powers are
worshipped. That is to say, religion is not only belief in the higher
powers but it is a cultivating of relations with them, it is a
practical activity continuously directed to these beings. It is not
only a thinking but also a doing; this also is essential to it. When
worship is discontinued, religion ceases; a principle indeed not to
be applied too narrowly, since the apparent cessation of worship may
be merely its transition to another, possibly a higher form; but
religion is not present unless there be not only a belief in higher
powers but an effort of one kind or another to keep on good terms
with them.
Criticism of other Definitions.--What has now been said will enable
us to judge of several of the definitions of religion which have been
put before the world in recent years. Without going back to the
definitions offered by philosophers who wrote before the scientific
study of our subject had begun, and limiting ourselves to those which
have been propounded in the interests of our science, we notice that
several make religion consist in an intellectual activity.[2] Thus
Mr. Max Müller[3] says that "Religion is a mental faculty or
disposition which independent of, nay, in spite of, sense and reason,
enables man to apprehend the Infinite under different names, and
under varying disguises. Without that faculty ... no religion would
be possible." To this definition there are various strong objections.
It implies that there is only one way in which men come to believe in
higher beings; they arrive at that belief by finding something which
transcends them and which they cannot understand; _i.e._ by an
intellectual process. It may be doubted whether the sense of
disappointment with the finite is the only road, or even a common
road, to belief in gods. Mr. Müller's omission, moreover, from his
definition, of the practical side of religion, of the element of
worship, is a fatal objection to it. Belief and worship are
inseparable sides of religion, which does not come fully into
existence till both are present. In a later work[4] Mr. Müller admits
the force of this objection, urged by several scholars, to his
definition, and modifies it as follows: "Religion consists in the
perception of the infinite under such manifestations as are able to
influence the moral character of man." In this form the definition
recognises that worship, the practical activity in which man's moral
character shows itself in fear, gratitude, love, contrition, is an
essential part of religion, and that perceptions of the infinite
apart from this are only one side of it. His original definition,
however, has played too large a part in the history of our subject to
be left without careful notice. The same objection applies to Mr.
Herbert Spencer's account of the matter. Mr. Spencer finds the basis
of all religion in the inscrutableness of the Power which the
universe manifests to us. The belief common to all religions, he
holds, is the presence of something which passes comprehension. The
idea of the absolute and unconditioned he regards as accompanying all
our consciousness of things conditioned and limited, and as being not
a negative notion, not merely the denial of limits, but a positive
one. The unconditioned is that of which all our thoughts and ideas
are manifestations, but which we never can know, with regard to which
we cannot affirm anything but that it exists. This definition like
that last noticed traces religion to the defects in man's knowledge,
and rather to a negative than a positive element in his experience.
It also comes under the objection that it traces religion rather to
an intellectual than a practical motive, and omits the element of
worship.
[Footnote 2: Though Mr. Tylor defines religion as the "belief in
spiritual beings," he is not to be charged with making it too much a
matter of the intellect. He uses the word belief in a wide sense as
including the practices it involves. In the word "spiritual,"
however, Mr. Tylor brings into the definition his theory of Animism,
and thus makes it unserviceable for those who do not adopt that
theory.]
[Footnote 3: _Introduction to the Science of Religion_, 1882, p. 13.
The definition was put forward in the year 1873, and in his lectures
on the Origin of Religion, 1882, Mr. Müller adhered to it as being in
the main sound (p. 23).]
[Footnote 4: _Natural Religion_, 1888, pp. 188, 193.]
Other scholars have explained religion as the action of the curiosity
of the human mind, of that impulse which prompts man to investigate
the causes of things, and specially to seek for the first cause of
all things. Here we touch what is certainly to be recognised as an
invariable feature of religion; it always professes to explain the
world, and to bring unity to man's mind by clearing up the problems
which perplex him, and affording him a commanding point of view, from
which he may see all the parts of the world and of life fall into
their places. This, however, does not tell us what religion itself
is. This curiosity, this impulse to know, are not specifically
religious; they belong rather to philosophy. Other motives than those
connected with knowledge entered from the first into man's worship.
Curiosity impelled him to seek the first cause of things; in religion
he saw something that promised to explain the world to him, and to
explain him to himself. But it was something more than curiosity that
made him regard that cause, when found, as a god, and pay it
reverence and sacrifice. What is the motive of worship? Wonder, no
doubt, is always present in it, but what is there in it beyond
wonder? No definition of religion can be regarded as complete in
which the motive of worship is left undetermined. That is of the
essence of the matter. There must be a moral as well as an
intellectual quality which is characteristic of religion. What is
religion morally? Acts of worship may be specified in which every
conceivable moral quality seeks to express itself. The most
contradictory motives, pride and anger and revenge, as well as fear
or hunger or contrition, enter into such acts. But if religion is a
matter of sentiment as well as of outward posture, these acts of
worship cannot all be equally entitled to the name, and something is
wanted to complete our definition.
Fuller Definition.--Let us add what seems to be wanting; and say that
religion is the "worship of higher powers from a sense of need"! This
will remind the reader of Schleiermacher's definition--"a sense of
infinite dependence." It was always objected to that definition, that
it made religion no more than a sentiment, a mood, but that besides
this, it is both belief and action. But the truth Schleiermacher
urged was one of essential importance to the matter. Belief in gods
and acts of worship paid to them do not constitute religion unless
the sentiment, the sense of need, be also there. These three
together, feeling, belief, and will expressing itself in action,
constitute religion both in the lowest and in the highest levels of
civilisation.
A belief must exist, to take a step farther, that the being
worshipped is capable of supplying what the worshipper requires. Men
do not pray nor bring offerings to beings they suppose to be
incapable of attending to them, or powerless to do them any good or
evil. It is implied in every act of worship that the being addressed
is a power who is able to do for the worshipper what he cannot do for
himself. It is his inability to help himself or to supply his own
needs that sends the worshipper to his god, who has a power he
himself has not. If he could help himself he would not need religion,
if his life were either perfectly prosperous and even, so that there
was nothing left to wish for, or perfectly miserable and
unsuccessful, so that there was no room for hope, he would not resort
to higher powers; but neither of these two being the case, his life
on the contrary being a mixed lot of good and evil, in which there
are blessings his own forces cannot secure, and dangers from which no
efforts of his own can save him, and the belief having arisen within
him, in what way we need not now inquire, that higher powers exist
who can, if they will, defend and prosper him, in this way he has
religion, he keeps up intercourse with higher powers. And thus
religion is not necessarily, even in its most primitive form, a
manifestation of mere selfishness. Though gifts are offered which are
expected to please the higher beings, and though benefits are asked
of which the worshipper is urgently in need, such transactions are
not necessarily sordid any more than similar applications between
human beings, between two friends, or between a parent and a child.
Even the savage living in entire isolation, at war with every one and
conscious of no needs but those of food and shelter, will not seek
benefits from his god without some feeling of attachment, nor without
some sense of strengthened friendship should the benefit be granted
him. When once this sense of friendship has arisen, religion is
present, the man has come to be in living relation with a higher
power, whom he conceives, no doubt, after his own likeness, but
nevertheless as greater than he is.
This then is what we conceive to be the essence of religion--the
worship of higher powers, from a sense of need; and it is of this
that we are to trace the history though only in the barest outlines.
The definition itself suggests in what way the development may be
expected to work itself out. According as the needs change their
character, of which men are conscious, so will their religion also
change. The gradual elevation and refinement of human needs, in the
growth of civilisation, is the motive force of the development of
religion. The deities themselves, their past history and their
present character, the sacrifices offered to them, and the benefits
aimed at in intercourse with them, all must grow up as man himself
grows, from rudeness to refinement and from caprice to order. At its
lowest, religion is perhaps an individual affair between the savage
and his god, and has to do with material individual needs. At a
higher stage (not always nor even commonly later in time) it is the
affair of a family, of a tribe, or of a combination of tribes, and
with each of these extensions the requests grow broader and less
personal which have to be presented to the deity; the religion
becomes a common worship for public ends. The needs of the nomad are
other than those of the settled agriculturist, and those of the
countryman differ from those of the citizen, and those of the
Laplander from those of the Negro, and these differences will be
reflected in the aspect of the deities and in the observances
celebrated in their honour. When art begins to stir within a nation,
the gods have to adapt themselves to the new taste. As society grows
more humane, cruel and sanguinary religious observances, though they
may long keep a hold of the ignorant and excitable, lose their
support in the public conscience and are sentenced to change or to
extinction. And when a new consciousness of personal human dignity
springs up, and men come to feel the infinite value and the infinite
responsibility of personal life, the old public religion is felt to
be cold and distant, and religious services of a more personal and
more intimate kind are sought for.
Thus religion and civilisation advance together; according as the
civilisation is in any people, so is its religion. It is vain,
broadly speaking, to look for the combination of primitive manners
and customs with a lofty spiritual faith. The converse it is true may
often seem to take place. Religion, or rather religious creeds and
practices, often seem to lag behind civilisation and to maintain
themselves long after the reason and the conscience of a people has
condemned them. That is because religion is what man values most in
his life, and he is loath to change observances in which his
affections are powerfully engaged. But religion must reflect the
ideals of the society in which it exists; the needs which the society
feels at the time must be the burden of its prayers; its sacrifices
must be such as the general sentiment allows; its gods, to retain the
allegiance of the community, must alter with time and prove
themselves alive and in touch with their people. And if it be the
case that civilisation has on the whole advanced upwards from the
first; if, as Mr. Tylor assures us,[5] man began with his lowest and
has, in spite of occasional declines, on the whole been improving
ever since, then of religion also the same will be true. It also will
be found to begin with its rudest forms and gradually to grow better.
Religion in fact is the inner side of civilisation, and expresses the
essential spirit of human life in various ages and nations. The
religion of a race is the truest expression of its character, and
reflects most faithfully its attitude and aims and policy. The
religion of an age shows what at that time constituted the object of
man's aspiration and endeavour, as older hopes grew pale and new
hopes rose on his sight. Thus the study of the religions of the world
is the study of the very soul of its history; it is the study of the
desires and aspirations which throughout the course of history men
have not been ashamed, nay, which they have been proud and determined
to confess. No more fascinating study could possibly engage us. It is
true that the requirements for the adequate treatment of the subject
are such as few indeed can hope to possess. He who would treat the
history of religion aright ought to know thoroughly the whole of the
history of civilisation; he should have explored the vast domain of
savage life and thought that has recently been opened up to us, and
he should be at home in every century of every nation from the
beginning of history. At a time like this, when new light is being
poured every year on every part of our subject, no statement of it
can be more than tentative and partial. The student will be directed
at each step to sources of fuller information.
[Footnote 5: _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii.]
BOOKS RECOMMENDED (GENERAL)
_Outlines of the History of Religion to the Spread of the Universal
Religions_. By Dr. C. P. Tiele. Translation. In Trübner's Oriental
Series. Very condensed and in somewhat technical language; but the
work of one of the greatest masters of the subject. A full
Bibliography is appended to the various chapters.
_Lehrbuch der Religionsgeschichte_, von P. D. Chantepie de la
Saussaye. Freiburg, 1887. The English translation has an altered
title, viz. _Manual of the Science of Religion_, Longmans, 1891. The
Third Edition (1905) is practically a different book, and consists of
studies, each by an expert, of the various religions.
_Religious Systems of the World_ (Sonnenschein, 1892) is a full
collection of descriptions of the various religions, by persons
specially acquainted with them; of very unequal merit.
Mr. Max Müller's works cited above, also his more recent volumes of
Gifford Lectures, contain a number of general discussions.
See also the Gifford Lectures of the late Mr. Ed. Caird, and the late
Prof. Tiele.
Pfleiderer's _Philosophy of Religion_, 4 vols.
Pünjer, _Geschichte der christl. Religionsphilosophie_, 2 vols.
1880-83.
Rauwenhoff, _Wijsbegeerde van den Godsdienst_, 2 vols. 1887 (also in
German).
M. Jastrow, _The Study of Religion_, 1901.
L. H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion, its Origin and Growth_, 1905.
_Revue de l'histoire des religions_, edited by M. J. Réville.
_Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, edited by Alb. Dieterich.
Reinach, Orpheus, _Histoire Générale des Religions_, 1909.
Hastings, _Encyclopedia of Religion and Ethics_, vol. i. A-Art, 1908.
_The New Schaff-Heizog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge_ has
excellent articles on the various religions.
Louis H. Jordan, _Comparative Religion_, 1905. An account of the
progress of our study, with extensive bibliography.
Galloway, _The Principles of Religious Development_, a psychological
and philosophical study, 1909.
_Proceedings of the Oxford International Congress of the History of
Religions_, 1908. 2 vols. The addresses of the Presidents of the
Sections give a record of the most recent progress in every part of
our study. Of these see, for this chapter, Count Goblet d'Alviella,
vol. ii. pp. 365 _sqq_. on the Method and Scope of the History of
Religion.
CHAPTER II
THE BEGINNING OF RELIGION
Origin of Civilisation.--Every inhabited country, we are assured by
ethnologists, was once peopled by savages; the stone age everywhere
came before the age of metals. Antecedent to every civilisation that
has sprung up on the earth is this dim period, the period of the cave
dwellers and afterwards of the lake dwellers. There can be no
chronology nor any exact knowledge of these early men who lived by
hunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How from
his earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to help
himself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons and
invented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals on
which he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about the
world came to settle in one place and till the soil, and how family
life came to be instituted, and the father as well as the mother to
act as guardian to the children; all that is a vast history, which
must be read in its own place. Immense, indeed, were the labours
early man had to undergo, in wrestling his way up from a life like
that of the brutes to a life in which his own distinctive nature
could begin to display itself.
It was from the savage state that civilisation was by degrees
produced. The theory that man was originally civilised and humane,
and that it was by a fall, by a degeneration from that earliest
condition, that the state of savagery made its appearance, is now
generally abandoned. There may be instances of such degeneration
having taken place; but on the whole, the conviction now obtains that
civilisation is the result of progressive development, and was the
result man conquered for himself by his age-long struggles with his
environment. That development did not take place in all lands alike.
In some it proceeded faster than in others, and its advances were due
oftener to propagation from without, than to unaided growth from
within; as one race came in contact with another new ideas were
aroused of the possibilities of life in various directions. In some
lands the development has scarcely taken place at all. There remain
to this day races who are judged to be still in the primitive
condition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition.
The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others,[1] are
found to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements that
they must be considered as races which have fallen from a higher
position, and present instances of degeneration. But a multitude of
savage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appear
to have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in that
state in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were before
what we now call civilisation began. They are races among whom
civilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. From
these races we may learn in a general way, though in this great
caution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nations
were. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilised
nation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which the
mental condition of the nation as we know it does not account for,
which manifestly are not outgrowths of the civilisation, but relics
of an older state of life, which civilisation has not entirely
obliterated; and that these practices, beliefs, and stories can be
exactly matched by those of the savage races. The inference is drawn
that civilisation has sprung from savage life, that, as Mr. Tylor
says, "the savage state represents the early condition of mankind,
out of which the higher culture has gradually been developed by
causes still in operation." To trace the history of civilisation,
therefore, it is necessary to go back to the earliest knowledge we
have of human life upon the earth, and to ask what germs and
rudiments can be discovered among savages of law, of institutions, of
arts and sciences. Such works as Maine's _Ancient Law_, Tylor's
_Primitive Culture_, Lubbock's _Origin of Civilisation_, show how
fruitful this method is, and what floods of light it pours on the
history of society.
[Footnote 1: Instances in Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, chap. ii.,
where the theory of degeneration is fully discussed.]
Now what is true of civilisation generally will be true also of
religion, which is one of its principal elements. If every country
was once inhabited by savages, then the original religion of every
country must have been a religion of savages; and in the later
religion there will be features which have been carried on from the
earlier one. This, indeed, we must in any case expect to find. No new
religion can enter on its career on a soil quite unprepared, on which
no gods have been worshipped before. (That would imply that there had
been races in the world without religion, on which we shall speak
presently.) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself to
that which it found in possession of the soil, and it always adopts
what it can of the old system. We should expect then that the great
religions of the world should exhibit features which do not belong to
their own structure, but which they inherited, with or against their
will, from their uncivilised predecessors. And that is the case, as
we shall see afterwards, with all the great religions. They are all
full of survivals of the savage state. The old religious associations
cling to the face of a land and refuse to be uprooted, whatever
changes take place among the gods above. Superstitious practices
continue among a race long after a truth has been preached there with
which they are entirely inconsistent. Stories are long told about the
gods, quite out of keeping with their character in the theology of
the new faith, pointing to a time when not so much was expected of a
god. In Mr. Lang's _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, the reader will find
an admirable collection of material showing how the popular elements
of an old religion survive in a new one in which they are quite out
of place. There is none of the great religions to which this does not
apply.
Now, if it be the case that each of the great religions has been
built upon a primitive religion formerly occupying the same ground,
it might appear that we must, in order to understand any of the great
religions, study first, in each case, the savage system which it
superseded. It would be a serious prospect for the student if he had
to make a separate study of a set of savage beliefs as an approach to
each of the ten or twelve great religions. But this, as we shall see
afterwards, is not the case. There is a great family likeness in the
religions of savages, and we may even allow ourselves to speak not of
the religions but of the religion of early races. In the next chapter
an attempt will be made to describe that religion; but we may say
here that there are some features which are generally, though by no
means always found in it, and that these features may be regarded for
practical purposes as the religion of the primitive world, which
everywhere was the forerunner of the great systems. This is the
jungle, as it were, overspreading all the early world, out of which
like giant trees the great religions arose, and from which they
derived and still derive a nourishment they cannot disown. Indeed, we
may go much farther. In some of their leading doctrines, the great
religions show the most striking affinity with one another. China and
Egypt have some doctrines in common which are also found in the
religion of the Incas; the Aryan and the Semitic religions know them
too. Should these doctrines be found in the religion of savages, it
will at least be a question whether the great religions all alike
borrowed and developed them from that source, or whether any other
explanation of the case can be found. Evidently we cannot make any
progress with our subject till we have taken a general view of this
religion of savages and come to some conclusions regarding it.
A few words must be said, by way of preface to this subject, on the
mental habits of early races. We cannot hope to understand the
thoughts of those people without knowing how they came to have such
thoughts, how they were accustomed to think. Now of the savage we may
say that he is just like a child who has not yet learned to think
correctly, or to know things truly. He is making all kinds of
experiments in thought, and being led into all sorts of errors and
confusion; and if the child takes years, the savage may take
millenniums, to get free from these. He does not know the difference
between one thing and another, between himself and the lower animals,
or between an animal and a water-spout. He does not know how far
things are away from him, nor what makes them move and act as they
do; why, for example, the sun and moon go round the sky, or why the
wind blows. He cannot tell why things have this or that peculiar
appearance; why, for example, the rabbit has no tail, why the sky is
red in the morning, why some stones are like men. And he wants to
know all these things, and is for ever asking questions. But almost
any answer will do for him, the first explanation that turns up is
accepted; and while a child finds out pretty soon if he has been told
wrong, the savage is so ignorant that he cannot see the absurdest
explanation to be false, but sticks to it seriously and goes on using
it. There is no consistency in the contents of his mind, and
inconsistency does not distress him. He has no classes and orders of
things, but considers each thing by itself as it occurs, without
putting it in its place with reference to other things. He has no
idea of what is possible and what is impossible; these words in fact
would have no meaning for him, since he is not aware of any laws by
which events are governed. His imagination, accordingly, is not under
any restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and,
having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them and
seriously believes them. The stories of the nursery, in which there
are no impossibilities, in which a man may visit the sun and the
winds in their homes and find them at their broth, in which the
beasts can speak, in which the witch or the fairy knows at any
distance what is going on and can turn up just at the nick of time,
in which ghosts walk, in which anything can be changed into anything,
a hero going through half a dozen transformations to escape from so
many dangers,--these are to the savage not incredible nor foolish
tales, to him they are very real, and very serious matters. He lives,
in fact, we are told by the authorities on the subject, in the
myth-making period of the world; in the period when such incidents as
occur in the tales of fairyland and in the stories of mythology are
matter of common belief, and even, it is thought, of common
experience, so that when the story is put in a good form, it lives
and is believed as a true record of what has actually taken place.
On one feature of the savage imagination in particular we must fix
our attention. The savage regards all things as animated,--as
animated with a life like his own. Of his own life he has no very
exalted idea; he has no notion how different he really is from
anything around him; as he is himself, so he supposes other beings to
be also, not only the animals but the trees and all that moves and
even what does not move, even rocks and stones. He is living himself;
he regards all these as living too. He imagines them like himself,
and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, to
reason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, that
is not incredible to him. Thus he lives in a world of infinite
confusion, in which there are no laws, no classes of beings, no means
of knowing what may happen, or of verifying any statement, where
every effort of fancy may be believed. The mental world of savages
has been compared to the ravings of a whole world turned lunatic. We
survey it, however, without horror, because we know that reason is
not unseated there, but striving towards her kingdom. That is the
experience that had to be gone through, these are part of the
experiments, such as every child has still to make, by which the
knowledge of the world is gradually arrived at.
Amid this apparent universal confusion a certain consistency of view
is to be observed. It might be expected that the savage habit of
thought, acting independently in different parts of the world, would
lead to an infinite number of divergent and inconsistent views of the
nature of things and of man's place in the world. But this is not
found to be the case. Mr. Lang accounts as follows for the diffusion
of the same stories all over the world: "An ancient identity of
mental status, and the working of similar mental forces at the
attempt to explain the same phenomena, will account without any
theory of borrowing, or of transmission of myth, or of original unity
of race, for the world-wide diffusion of many mythical conceptions."
Mr. Tylor says that the same imaginative processes regularly recur,
that world-wide myths show the regularity and the consistency of the
human imagination. M. Réville, in his _Religions des peuples
non-civilisés_, remarks that the character of savage religions is
everywhere the same; that only the forms vary.
Now of the things that all savages possess, certainly religion is
one. It is practically agreed that religion, the belief in and
worship of gods, is universal at the savage stage; and the accounts
which some travellers have given of tribes without religion are
either set down to misunderstanding, or are thought to be
insufficient to invalidate the assertion that religion is a universal
feature of savage life.
How did it get there? How comes it that men so near the lowest human
state, so devoid of all that has been since acquired, should yet be
found to have this mode of thought universally diffused among them?
It has been ascribed to a primitive revelation. At the beginning, it
is said, God, with the other gifts He gave to man, gave him religion;
that is to say, gave him not only a disposition for reverence and
piety, but a certain amount of religious knowledge, so that he set
out with a stock of religious ideas which were not elaborated by his
own efforts, but bestowed on him ready made. It is impossible,
however, to conceive how this could be done. If the religion given at
first was a lofty and pure one,--and no other need be thought of in
such a connection,--then it implies a condition of human life far
above the struggles and uncertainties of savage existence; and both
the civilisation and the religion must have been lost afterwards. But
how could all mankind forget a pure religion? Mankind in that case
cannot have been fit for the possession of it; it was given
prematurely. No. The history of early civilisation is the history of
a struggle in which man has everything to conquer, and in which he is
not remembering something he had lost, but advancing by new routes to
a land he never reached before. And if civilisation was won for the
first time, so was religion.
We may also put aside the theory that man had religion from the first
as an innate idea, that he found information all ready and prepared
in his mind of what it was proper to do in this direction, and how it
was to be done. There was indeed a suggestion from within; but it was
due not to any special faculty lying outside the essential structure
of human nature, but to the constitution of the human mind itself. We
cannot go into the philosophical question of the basis of religion in
the human mind.[2] It would seem to be a psychological necessity. At
all stages of his existence the world of which man is aware outside
him, and the world of feelings and desires within him are in
conflict. But the conviction lives within him that in some way they
can be brought into harmony, and that a power exists which rules in
both of these discordant realms and in which, if he can identify
himself with it, he also will escape from their discord. If this be
so, then this necessity to seek after a higher power must have begun
to operate as soon as human consciousness appeared. The savage
certainly was never unacquainted with the discrepancy between what he
wanted and what the world would give him, between the inner man so
full of desires and plans, and that outward nature which denied him
his desires and thwarted his plans, and before which he felt so
feeble and insecure. He also could not but be driven, if his life was
to go on at all on any tolerable basis, to believe in something that
had to do both with the world outside him and with the world of his
heart, in a being which both had sympathy with his desires and power
to give effect to them outwardly.
[Footnote 2: See on this subject Prof. Edward Caird's Gifford
Lectures, _The Evolution of Religion_, 1893. Galloway, _The
Principles of Religious Development_.]
The whole of the early world did entertain such a belief. This is the
first and the most important instance of uniformity of thought at a
stage through which every nation once passed; all men at that stage
believe in gods. We will not refuse the name of religion to this side
of savage life, even should the needs be low and material which send
the savage to his god, though his god be a being who in us would
excite the very opposite of reverence, and though his treatment of
his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove
to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting
about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence
with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need
has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there
we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this is universally
the case among men at the savage stage, then religion is universal
among the ancestors of all nations; it did not need to be invented
when kings and priests appeared and wanted it as an instrument for
their own purposes; it was there before there were any kings or
priests, and is an inheritance which has come down to all mankind
from the time when human intelligence first turned to the effort to
understand the world.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
_For this and the three following chapters_
J. B. Tylor, _Anthropology_, Third Edition, 1891.
J. B. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, Fourth Edition, 1903.
Frazer, _The Golden Bough_, Third Edition, 1900. A new edition is now
appearing in parts.
A. Lang, _Myth, Ritual, and Religion_, new edition, 1899.
Th. Achelis, in De la Saussaye.
Waitz und Gerland, _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, 1859-72.
Brinton, _Religions of Primitive Peoples_, 1897.
The reports of travellers and missionaries are, of course, important.
CHAPTER III
THE EARLIEST OBJECTS OF WORSHIP
We must now make some attempt to set forth the principal features of
the religion of savages. It is an attempt of some difficulty; for
savage religion is an immense and bewildering jungle of all manner of
extraordinary growths. It is described in detail in large books and
if we try to sum it up in a short statement, we may be told that
essential features have been omitted. No one set of savages has
anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages
are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include
under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of
human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions,
in hot climates and in cold, both rude savages and those who are
nobler; and these will, of course, have a variety of ideas and needs,
and in so far, different religions. After reading such a book as Mr.
Frazer's _Golden Bough_, or turning over the pages of Waitz and
Gerland's _Anthropologie der Naturvölker_, one is inclined to regard
it as a hopeless task to reduce savage religion to any compact
statement.
Mr. Tylor's orderly collections, in his great book _Primitive
Culture_, of materials bearing on different features of early
religion are a help for which the student cannot be sufficiently
thankful. After all, it is not the whole of savage religion that we
are responsible for here, but only those parts of it that grew and
survived in higher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the
uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and
looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them,
rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture
on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire
what beings savages worship as gods. Of these we shall find that
there are several classes; and it will be necessary to notice the
great discussions which have arisen on the question which of these
classes of deities was first worshipped by man. The objects
worshipped by men in low stages of civilisation may be arranged in
four classes, viz.--
1. Parts of nature (_a_) great, (_b_) small.
2. Spirits of ancestors and other spirits.
3. Objects supposed to be haunted by spirits (fetish-worship).
4. A Supreme Being.
1. Nature-worship.--It is not difficult to realise why early man
turned to the great elements of nature as beings who could help him,
and whom he ought, therefore, to cultivate. The farther we go back in
civilisation, the less protection has man against the weather, the
more do his subsistence and his comfort depend on the action of the
sun, the winds, the rain. If, according to the habits of early
thought, he conceived these beings as living like himself and as
guided by feelings and motives similar to his own, he could not fail
to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that
they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go
upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think
of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with
these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make
food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a
being who had power to put an end to a long drought; the winds could
break the trees, could dry up the wet earth, or could bring rain.
Heaven was over all, and the Earth was the supporter and fertile
producer of all; from her all life came. The moon as well as the sun
was a friendly power, nay, in some climates, more friendly. Fire was
a living being certainly, on whom much depended; and so was the great
lake or the ocean. This is what M. Réville calls the great
Nature-worship, in comparison with the minor Nature-worship to be
noticed presently.
We do not now enter on the subject of mythology; that is to say, of
the names men very early began to give to the great natural objects
of worship, the characters they ascribed to them, the stories they
told about them. That process of myth-making began very early, and is
to be found at work in every part of the world. But at first it was
simply the natural being itself, conceived as living, that was
worshipped, not a spirit or a person thought to dwell in it. Of this,
abundant evidence has survived in the great religions. Jupiter is
just the sky, the Greek god Helios is just the sun, and the goddess
Selene the moon. In China heaven itself is worshipped to this day.
The Babylonians worshipped the stars. The Vedic gods are primarily
the elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state of
matters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywhere
greatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficent
deity, the moon as an inferior god. To the Natchez the sun is the
supreme god; with some tribes of North America the chief god is
heaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the
"Great Spirit" or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator and
the Sun and Thunder. Thunder was one of the great gods of the
Germans. The Samoyede bows to the Sun every morning and every evening
and says. "When thou arisest I also arise; when thou settest I also
betake myself to rest." To the Ojibways Fire is a divine being, to be
well entertained, with whom no liberties must be taken. In every land
men are to be found who worship the Earth as a great deity, calling
her by her own name and serving her with suitable rites. In the
_Prometheus_ of Æschylus the hero addresses his appeal as follows to
the beings he regards as gods of old race who will sympathise with
him against the upstart Zeus:--
Ether of Heaven and Winds untired of wing,
Rivers whose fountains fail not, and thou Sea,
Laughing in waves innumerable! O Earth,
All-mother!--Yea and on the Sun I call,
Whose orb scans all things; look on me and see
How I, a god, am wronged by gods.
_Lewis Campbell_, line 85 _sq_.
The minor Nature-worship has to do with rivers and springs, with
trees and groves, with crops and fruits, with rocks and stones, and
with the lower animals. Here also we must bear in mind the habit of
mind of early man, who regarded all things as animated and as like
himself. It was not necessary for one who thought in this way to
suppose that the spring was haunted by a nymph or the oak inhabited
by a dryad, before he felt that the spring or the oak had a claim on
him, and brought offerings to secure their friendship. The Nile and
the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to
them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every
country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the
primeval sanctity of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the
grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the grassy
knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of
sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no
animal that has not once been worshipped. A marked feature of
primitive life also is the worship of nature not in its particular
objects but in its living processes. In a multitude of curious rites,
some of which still survive in local usages, and have only recently
been explained, primitive man brought himself into relations with
nature in its growth, decay, and resurrection. He sympathised with it
and imitated it, and he thus sought to make himself sure of the
benefits which he saw bestowed by some power which he apprehended in
its processes and believed able to further him.
2. Ancestor-worship.--A set of beings of a very different kind comes
next. If man found in the world which he beheld outside him a number
of objects he could make gods, his domestic experience forced him to
consider certain beings of a different kind, of whom the outward
world could tell him nothing. The worship of the dead, of ancestors,
is diffused throughout nearly the whole of antiquity, it is practised
by most savages. Man at an early stage does not fully realise the
meaning of death. He interprets death after the analogy of dreams, in
which he judges that the spirit leaves the body and traverses distant
regions, coming back to the body again when the journey is ended. A
vision is to him an instance of the same thing. He sees a friend,
who, he afterwards learns, was far from him at the time, and he
judges that it was the spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus
there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is
able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called
by various names,--the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when
Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman
the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or
spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it
back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and
is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape,
but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about
and to pass through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises,
and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the
very earliest times, the savage regards the spirit which has left the
house as an enemy, and uses a variety of precautions to keep it from
coming back to trouble him (vampires, ghosts, _lemures_). Whether
from such fear or from more liberal motives, much is done to please
the spirits of the departed and to increase their comfort in the
abodes to which they have gone. At their burial or cremation all they
may be supposed to want where they are going, _i.e._ the things they
used on earth, are made to accompany them; food and weapons are
placed beside them; servants are killed whose spirits are to wait on
them, even a wife, voluntarily or without being asked, gives up her
earthly life to accompany her husband. Offerings of food and drink
are made to them afterwards, prayers are addressed to them, memorials
of them, of various kinds, are preserved in the houses they occupied.
It was the universal belief of the early world that the person
continued to exist after the death of the body; and this furnished
the materials for a religion which was more widely prevalent in
antiquity than the worship of any god. In some forms of it, indeed,
the spirit appears to have been treated as an enemy, and this worship
might be judged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation,
not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has
no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in
most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, other
sentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lost
relative; the ancestor represents the family, to which the individual
is called to subordinate and to some extent even to sacrifice
himself; the spirit of the dead is the upholder of a family tradition
which the living must hold sacred. Even in those cases in which
nothing but fear is apparent, these latter sentiments may also be to
some extent operative.
3. Fetish-worship.--The early world has still another kind of deity.
In the case of all those we have considered, the god stands in some
respect above the worshipper; man reverences the sun, spirit, or
animal, for some quality in them that is admirable or that gives them
a hold over him; they are in some ways beyond him. Among certain sets
of savages, however, notably in South Africa, this feature of
religion partially disappears, and objects are reverenced not for any
intrinsic quality in them that makes them worthy of regard, but
because of a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them.
Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds,
teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivable
object, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded as
embodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out of
the common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each of
which has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is not
connected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to a
spirit which has come to reside in it, and which may very possibly
leave it again. Having chosen this deity and set it up for worship,
the man can use it as he thinks fit. He addresses prayers to it and
extols its virtues; but should his enterprise not prosper, he will
cast his deity aside as useless, and cease to worship it; he will
address it with torrents of abuse, and will even beat it, to make it
serve him better. It is a deity at his disposal, to serve in the
accomplishment of his desires; the individual keeps gods of his own
to help him in his undertakings.
The name "fetishism," by which this kind of worship is known, is of
Portuguese origin; it is derived from _feitiço_, "made," "artificial"
(compare the old English _fetys_, used by Chaucer); and this term,
used of the charms and amulets worn in the Roman Catholic religion of
the period, was applied by the Portuguese sailors of the eighteenth
century to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the West
Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought
the word fetishism into use as a term for the type of religion of the
lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been
applied by Comte and other writers to the worship of the heavenly
bodies and of the great features of nature. It is best to limit it,
as has been done above, to the worship of such natural objects as are
reverenced not for their own power or excellence but because they are
supposed to be occupied each by a spirit.
Can this be called religion? In the full sense of the term it cannot.
We should remember that it is not the casual object, but the spirit
connected with it that the savage worships; but even then we shall be
obliged to hold that the fetish worshipper is rather seeking after
religion than actually in possession of it.
4. A Supreme Being.--Is it necessary to add another class of deity to
these three, and to say that besides nature-gods and spirits early
man also worshipped a Supreme Being above all these? In most savage
religions there is a principal deity to whom the others are
subordinate. But if we carefully examine one by one the supreme gods
of these religions, we shall find reason to doubt whether they really
have a common character so as to form a class by themselves. Many of
them are nature gods who have outgrown the other deities of that
class and come to occupy an isolated position. The North American
Indians, as we saw, worship the Great Spirit, the heaven with its
breath, to whom sun and moon and other ordinances of nature act as
ministers. In many cases heaven is the highest god. In others again
the sun is supreme. Ukko the great god of the Finns is a heaven- and
rain-god. Perkunas the god of the Lithuanians is connected with
thunder. On the other hand there are instances in which the supreme
god appears to be a different being from the nature-god. The
Samoyedes worship the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts of
nature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. The
Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the
name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the
uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian
influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be
supposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we find
he is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyond
which idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North American
tribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or the
musk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs a
vague far-off god who is at the back of all the others, takes little
part in the management of things, and receives little worship. But it
is impossible to judge what that being was at an earlier time; he may
have been a nature-god or a spirit who has by degrees grown faint and
come to occupy this position. We cannot judge from the supreme beings
of savages, such as they are, that the belief in a supreme being was
generally diffused in the world[1] in the earliest times, and is not
to be derived from any of the processes from which the other gods
arose. We shall see afterwards how natural the tendency is which,
where there are several gods, brings one of them to the front while
the others lose importance. For a theory of primitive monotheism the
supreme gods of savages certainly do not furnish sufficient evidence;
they do not appear to have sprung all from the same source, but to
have advanced from very different quarters to the supreme position,
in obedience to that native instinct of man's mind which causes him,
even when he believes in many gods, to make one of them supreme.
[Footnote 1: _Cf._ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_ (1898);
Galloway, _Studies in the Philosophy of Religion_ (1904), p. 123,
_sqq._]
Which Gods were First Worshipped?--If then early man formed his gods
from parts of nature and from spirits of departed ancestors or
heroes, and even, should the more backward races now existing
represent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, from
spirits residing in outward objects, which of these is the original
root of all the religions of the world? The claim has been made for
each of these kinds of religion, that it came first.
1. Fetish-gods came First.--Till recently the view prevailed that all
the religion of the world has sprung out of fetishism. First the
savage took for his god some casual object, as we have described,
then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes,
and even the sun and stars. The heavens at last became his supreme
fetish, and at a higher level, when he had learned about spirits, he
would make a spirit his fetish, and so at last come to Monotheism.
This view is attractive because it places the beginning of religion
in the lowest known form of it and thus makes for the belief that the
course of the world's faith has been upward from the first. But it
presents the gravest difficulties; for why should the savage make a
god of a stick or a stone, and attribute to it supernatural powers?
Who told him about a god, that he should call a stick god, or about
supernatural powers, that he should suppose a stick to work wonders?
There is nothing in the stick to suggest such notions; that he should
make gods in this way, that the belief in wonderful powers should
originate in this way, is surely quite incredible. Much more likely
is it, surely, that he got the notion of God from some other quarter
and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the
notion of God was taken first from such poor forms and applied
afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation
go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading
anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West
Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then
religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from
a higher and adapt them to their own position, _i.e._ degrade them.
And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the
whole, although retrograde movements have taken place in certain
races. On these and other grounds it is now held with growing
certainty that fetishism cannot be the original form of religion, and
that the higher stages of it are not to be derived from that one. The
races among whom fetishism is found exhibit a well-known feature of
the decadence of religion, namely that the great god or gods have
grown weak and faint, and smaller gods and spirits have crowded in to
fill up the blank thus caused. Worship is transferred from the great
beings who are the original gods of the tribe and whom it still
professes in a vague way to believe, to numerous smaller beings, and
from the good gods to the bad.
2. Spirits, Human or Quasi-human, came First.--Is the worship of
spirits then the original form of religions. This has been powerfully
maintained in this country by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Mr. Tylor.
According to Mr. Spencer "the rudimentary form of all religion is the
propitiation of dead ancestors." Men concluded, as soon as they were
capable of such reasoning, that the life they witnessed in plants and
animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their
being inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for
the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer[2] of the early beliefs
of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has
made out his case when he treats the gods of early India and of
Greece as deified ancestors. If the natural incredulity we feel at
being told that Jupiter, Indra, the sun, the sacred mountain, and the
stars all alike came to be worshipped because each of them
represented some departed human hero, is not at once decisive, we
have only to wait a little to see whether some other theory cannot
account for these gods in a simpler way.
[Footnote 2: _Sociology_, vol. i. Also _Ecclesiastical Institutions_,
p. 675; "ghost-propitiation is the origin of all religions."]
Mr. Tylor also derives all religion from the worship of spirits, but
in a different way. His is the most comprehensive system of Animism,
using that term in the narrower sense of soul-worship. Starting from
the doctrine of souls, reached by early man in the way described
above (p. 33, _sqq._), he argues that when once this notion was
reached it would be applied to other beings as well as man. Not
having learned to distinguish himself clearly from other beings, man
would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of
nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the
universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this
way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation
of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the
human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting
spirit-soul, so the operations of the world seemed to be carried on
by other spirits." At this point the soul is an unsubstantial essence
inhabiting a body, it has its life and activity only in connection
with the body; but the step was easily taken to the further belief in
spirits like the souls, but not attached to any body. The spirits
moved about freely, like the genii, demons, fairies, and beings of
all kinds, with whom to the mind of antiquity the world was so
crowded.
Three classes of spirits we have up to this point: those of
ancestors, those attached to the various parts of the life of nature,
and those existing independently. Can the higher nature-deities be
accounted for by this theory as well as the minor spirits of the
parts of nature? Mr. Tylor considers that they can; he declares that
the "higher deities of polytheism have their place in the general
animistic system of mankind." He acknowledges that, with few
exceptions, great gods have a place as well as smaller gods in every
non-civilised system of religion. But in origin and essence he holds
they are the same. "The difference is rather of rank than of nature."
As chiefs and kings are among men so are the great gods among the
lesser spirits. The sun, the heavens, the stars, are living beings,
because they have spirits as man has a soul, or as a spring has a
spirit that haunts it. Thus in the doctrine of souls is found the
origin of the whole of early religion. Mr. Tylor confesses, however,
that it is impossible to trace the process by which the doctrine of
souls gave rise to the belief in the great gods.
The weakness of this view is that it involves a denial that the great
powers of nature could be worshipped before the process of reasoning
had been completed which led to the belief that they had souls or
spirits. But how did early man regard these great powers before this?
Did they not appear to him adorable by the very impressions they made
upon his various senses? Did he really need to argue out the belief
that they had souls, before he felt drawn to wonder at them, and to
seek to enter into relations with them?
Animism.--The word Animism, it should here be noticed, is used in the
study of religions in a wider sense than that of Mr. Tylor. Many of
the great religions are known to have arisen out of a primitive
worship of spirits and to have advanced from that stage to a
worship of gods. The god differs from the spirit in having a marked
personal character, while the spirits form a vague and somewhat
undistinguishable crowd; in having a regular _clientèle_ of
worshippers, whereas the spirit is only served by those who need to
communicate with him; in having therefore a regular worship, while
the spirit is only worshipped when the occasion arises; and in being
served from feelings of attachment and trust, and not like the
spirits from fear. When gods appear, some writers hold, then and not
till then does religion begin; before that point is reached magic and
exorcism are the forms used for addressing the unseen beings, but
when it is reached we have worship; intercourse is deliberately
sought with beings who hold regular relations with man. The word
Animism is best employed to denote the worship of spirits as
distinguished from that of gods. Whether or not early man derived his
belief in the multitude of spirits by which he believed himself to be
surrounded, from his belief in the separable human soul, there is no
doubt that he did consider himself to be so surrounded. Animism in
this sense is undoubtedly the beginning of some at least of the great
religions.
3. The Minor Nature-worship came First.--M. Réville holds[3] that the
tree and the river and other such beings were the first gods, and
that the deification of the great powers of nature came afterwards as
an extension of the same principle. Mr. Max Müller seems to share
this view when he says that man was led from the worship of
semi-tangible objects, which provided him with semi-deities, to that
of intangible objects, which gave him deities proper. The Germans, as
a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and
that the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above,
these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to be
worshipped as well as the greater ones. The English school let the
sanctity of these objects come to them as it were from below; when
man has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they have
spirits too, and worships the spirits he supposes to dwell in them.
It does not seem that these theories are entirely exclusive of each
other. French writers suppose that the minor nature-worship first
sprang up of itself, half-animal man respecting the animals as
rivals, the trees as fruit-bearers for his hunger, and so on, and
that spirits were added to these beings when the great animistic
movement of thought in which these writers believe took place, of
course at a very early period.[4]
[Footnote 3: Réville, _Histoire des religions des peuples
non-civilisés_, ii. 225.]
[Footnote 4: This view is the basis of M. André Lefèvre's _La
Religion_. Paris, 1892.]
4. The Great Nature-powers came First.--We come in the last place to
that class of deities which we spoke of first--the powers of nature.
By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is the
original form of all religion. We shall give two of the leading
theories on the subject, that of Mr. Max Müller and that of Ed. von
Hartmann.
Mr. Max Müller has written very strongly against the view that
fetishism is a primary form of religion, and holds that the worship
of casual objects is not a stage of religion once universally
prevalent, but is, on the contrary, a parasitical development and of
accidental origin. He does not tell us what the original religion of
mankind was. The work in which he deals most directly with this
question[5] is concerned chiefly with the Indian faith, the early
stages of which he regards as the most typical instance of the growth
of religion generally. He does not, however, tell us definitely out
of what earlier kind of religion that of the Aryans grew, which India
best teaches us to know, or what religion they had before they
developed that of the Vedic hymns. We may infer, however, what his
view on this point is from the very interesting sketch he draws of
the psychological advance man could make, in selecting objects of
reverence, from one class of things to another (p. 179, _sqq._).
First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Müller
denies that mankind as a whole ever did worship; such things as
stones, shells, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; such
as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the
material for what may be called _semi-deities_. And third, intangible
objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in
these are to be seen the germs of _deities_. At each of these stages
man is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; from
the first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he grasps
successive objects of worship not for themselves but for what they
seem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of the
infinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ of
religion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix his
regards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in them
something great and transcendent. He applies to them great titles; he
calls them _devas_, shining ones; _asuras_, living ones; and, at
length, _amartas_, immortal ones. At first these were no more than
descriptive titles, applied to the great visible phenomena of nature
as a class. They expressed the admiration and wonder the young mind
of man felt itself compelled to pay to these magnificent beings. But
by giving them these names he was led instinctively to regard them as
persons; he ascribed to them human attributes and dramatic actions,
so that they became definite, transcendent, living personalities. In
these, more than in any former objects of his adoration, his craving
for the infinite was satisfied. Thus the ancient Aryan advanced,
"from the visible to the invisible, from the bright beings that could
be touched, like the river that could be seen, like the thunder that
could be heard, like the sun, to the devas that could no longer be
touched or heard or seen.... The way was traced out by nature
herself."
[Footnote 5: _Lectures on the Origin of Religion_, 1882.]
This famous theory is, when we come to examine it, rather puzzling.
It does not account for the first beginnings of religion except by
inference, and it does so in two contradictory ways; for, on the one
hand, Mr. Max Müller enumerates tangible objects first as those from
which men rose to higher objects, and on the other he denies that
fetishism is a primitive formation. He suggests that there were
earlier gods than the devas, but he tells us nothing about them,
except that they were not fully deities; they were only semi-deities,
or not deities at all. The worship of spirits he leaves entirely out
of consideration; religion did not, in his view, begin with Animism.
When he does tell us of the beginnings of religion, what is his view?
The religion of the Aryans began, and it is a type--the other
religions presumably began in the same way, _e.g._ those of China and
of Egypt--by the impression made on man from without by great natural
objects co-operating with his inner presentiment of the infinite,
which they met to a greater degree than any objects he had tried
before. Religion was due accordingly to æsthetic impressions from
without, answering an æsthetic and intellectual inner need. Those
needs, then, which led men to make gods of the great powers of earth
and heaven were not of an animal or material nature, but belonged to
the intellectual part of his constitution. Those who framed such a
religion for themselves must have been raised above the pressing
necessities and cares of savage life; they were not absorbed in the
task of making their living, but had leisure to stand and admire the
heavenly bodies, and to analyse the impressions made on them by the
waters and the thunder. Nay, they had sufficient power of abstraction
to form a class of such great beings, to bestow on them a common
title, not only one but several progressive common titles, each
expressing a deeper reflection than the last. Thus did they reflect
on the nature of the cosmic powers, taken as a class. This,
evidently, is not the beginning of religion. It is the religion of a
comparatively lofty civilisation; lower stages of civilisation, and
of religion also, must have preceded this one. Even the heavenly
bodies, it appears to many scholars, must have been worshipped by men
who regarded them not with æsthetic admiration and intellectual
satisfaction only, but in the light of more pressing and practical
interests.
We take Edward von Hartmann as the representative of those who, like
Mr. Max Müller, trace the origin of religion to the worship of the
heavenly powers, but who carry back that worship to the earliest
stage. Writers who disagree with his philosophy take grave exception
to his treatment of religion, for he regards religion, as he
considers consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparable
element of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his way
upwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain in
egoistic eudæmonism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which at
that stage of man's life determined all his actions. The account,
however, given by Von Hartmann of the beginning of religion in the
adoration of the powers of nature is of singular freshness and power,
and we can deduct from it, after stating it, the peculiarities
arising out of his philosophical system.
The first religion that existed in the world had for its objects the
heavenly powers. The objects worshipped are known, indeed, before
religion begins; the illusions of early thought have settled on the
heavenly powers before they are worshipped; on the outward object the
mind has conferred the character of a living and acting being, which
it is henceforth to wear. This transformation, poetic fancy, not mere
logic and not merely utilitarian considerations, has brought about.
But religion only begins when man sets himself to worship these
beings, and to this he is driven by his material needs. Religion
begins in a being as yet without religion and without morality. The
need for food is the motive that brings about the change, for that
pure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able to
help or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set his
plants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revive
them. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set up
relations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly power
who is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to it
his wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. He
worships the heavenly powers, and religion has begun. Worship lends
to these powers, though they were known before, a fixity and reality
they did not formerly possess. Von Hartmann is inclined to trace all
the various worships of these powers, which have prevailed in the
most different parts of the earth, to the same original centre, while
at the same time he maintains that even if all the instances of this
worship cannot be referred to any common origin, it must have arisen
in this way, wherever men of the same nature dwelt; the psychological
necessity of this development accounts for the appearance of this
same religion in different lands and among dissimilar races.
The worship of the heavenly powers, accordingly, is with this writer
the original religion. While admitting that the worship of domestic
spirits grew up in the way described by the English anthropologists,
he denies that Animism is ever a religion by itself without being
combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism could
ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pass
from having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever it
appears, it is a religion of decay. All the religion in the world has
come from the worship of nature, which, whether arising at one centre
or at several, spread over the world, and is to be recognised,
clearly or dimly, in the religions of all lands.
This view of the origin of religion is shared in the main by Otto
Pfleiderer,[6] and other German writers. It was from the impressions
made on man by the powers of nature, these scholars hold, and not
from his belief in spirits, that his religion came. But it was not
necessarily due to pure egoism, as Von Hartmann represents; the
earliest religions need not, they hold, have been a mere attempt at
bribery. The motives which first caused man to worship the heavenly
powers surely arose from other needs than that for food alone. The
intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he
lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far
as that could be attained; the æsthetic need, the desire to have to
do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the
desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself
under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though
in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear
consciousness, entered into the earliest worship of the heavenly
powers. This view has the great advantage over that of Von Hartmann,
that it makes the development of religion continuous from the first,
instead of representing it as being originally a purely selfish
thing, into which the character of affection and devotion only
entered at some subsequent stage. If man's nature is essentially
religious, then all that constitutes religion must have been with him
from the first, in however unconscious and undeveloped form.
[Footnote 6: _Philosophy of Religion_, vol. iii. chap. i.]
Conclusion.--We have enumerated the different kinds of gods
worshipped by early man--fetishes, spirits, the powers of nature. We
have found a general agreement that fetishism is not an original form
of religion, but a product of the decay of higher forms in
unfavourable conditions. As to the other two kinds of deities, it is
impossible to deny that gods have been formed from the very first in
each of these two ways. The domestic worship of the early world
cannot be derived from nature-worship, but grew out of the belief
awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above.
That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derived
from the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved,
or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on
early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we
can understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a very
intelligible thing, even without Mr. Tylor's theory of souls to
explain it. What more natural than that the savage should worship the
great oak or the waterfall, or should think himself surrounded by
invisible beings, even if he did not frame the latter on the model of
the human soul? We arrive therefore at the conclusion that with the
exception of the doctrines about death and the abode of spirits, we
must regard the worship of nature as the root of the world's
religion.
We must beware, however, of imputing to the thoughts of early men
about their gods, any such qualities as consistency or regularity.
The power of holding at one and the same time religious beliefs which
are inconsistent with each other, is one which even in the most
developed religions is by no means wanting; and how much more was
this the case among men who lived before there was any exact thought!
The savage could have a variety of gods of very different natures,
who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god,
that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god he
was seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when there
were so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made his
gods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiences
and impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in an
endless variety of ways. One god came to the front here and another
there; an object was deified here from one reason and there from
another; new gods in time turned old and were less thought of while
forgotten gods of former days came back to memory and were worshipped
once more. Endless change, endless recurrences of growth and of decay
filled up those great spaces and periods, measureless and trackless
almost as the expanses of the ocean, that were covered by the
prehistoric life of mankind.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
Jevons, _Introduction to the History of Religion_, 1896.
E. S. Hartland, in _Proceedings of Oxford Congress of the History of
Religion_, p. 21, _sqq._
Of the large class of books reporting the manners and beliefs of
special savage races we may specify--
D. G. Brinton, _The Myths of the New World_, 1896.
W. W. Gill, _Myths and Songs from the South Pacific_, 1876.
Kingsley, Miss, _West African Studies_, 1899.
Callaway, _The Religious System of the Amazulu_, 1863-72.
Duff Macdonald, _Africana, the Heart of Heathen Africa_, 1882.
G. Grey, _Journals of Two Expeditions of Discovery in North-Western
and Western Australia_, 1841.
Spencer and Gilpen. _Native Tribes of Central Australia_, 1899.
CHAPTER IV
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--BELIEF
We have seen from what materials early man made his gods. As the gods
differed in their origin, they differed also from the very first in
the mode of their development. The great nature-gods gave rise to one
kind of religion, and the minor nature-gods to another, the thought
of the departed members of the household to a third. But these
various religions could not develop side by side without influencing
each other. These different worships began in the very earliest times
to get mixed up together; there is none of the great religions which
we do not find to be a combination of them. It will be well to
consider them in the first place separately.
1. Growth of the Great Gods.--Taking them in the order we have
already followed, we come first to the great nature-worship, of which
heaven, the sun, the moon, the stars, dawn and sunset, and then the
phenomena of the weather, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, are
the objects. It cannot be too clearly borne in mind that what was
worshipped was originally the natural object itself, regarded, after
the earliest habit of thought, as living. To heaven itself, to the
sun as he rose or set, to the storm itself, men addressed prayers and
made offerings; and in many quarters, both among savages and in the
great religions, the same thing occurs to this day.
But it was impossible for man to stop here, his imagination would not
allow him to do so. In some races, imagination was more active than
in others, but nowhere was it quite inoperative; and so it happened
that man was led, here to a greater there to a less extent, beyond
the direct and simple adoration of the powers of nature. When he
began to give them names, a first and a great step was taken in
advance of the original simplicity. A name is a power; if it is
anything more than a mere title or label, and all primitive names are
more than this, it brings with it associations of its own, and thus
men are led to ascribe to the object indicated by the name, a new
character and new powers. They proceed to argue about the name and
draw conclusions from it as to the nature of the being they worship,
and so come to think of their deity in quite a different manner. Even
to classify objects together and give them a common title, "the
bright ones," or "the living ones," as the early Aryans did, gives
them an independent position of their own, and tempts the imagination
to go further in describing them. Striving to find names for those
beings he worships and thinks about so much, early man gives them the
names of living creatures with whom he is familiar, and in this way
he brings them much nearer to himself, and at the same time appears
to himself to know a great deal more about them. The moon, for
example, has horns, the moon is a cow. Heaven is over all, heaven is
a father. And as he knows all about a cow, and all about a father, he
at once has these deities made much more real to him, they have an
independent existence to him. But, on the other hand, he has got
something more in his deity than there is in the natural object. It
is no longer the mere naked heaven or the mere moon he worships; but
these beings with additions made to them by his own imagination.
As time goes on the additions grow more and more. Having got living
persons for his deities, early man readily goes on to weave their
histories and their relations. If the moon is a cow, the sun is a
bull chasing her round the sky. This is an instance of a principle
which obtains in many at least of the early religions and which it is
important to remember, viz. that the powers of nature were first
identified with animals. The zoomorphic stage of the nature-gods
comes before the anthropomorphic (_cf._ the signs of the zodiac), and
in many savage tribes it still survives.
But it is when the gods begin to be thought of after the likeness of
human beings that the decisive step is made in their development. If
heaven is a father, it is easy to go on from that. Earth will be the
corresponding mother (an idea found all over the world); and all men
will be their children. If the sun is invested with a name of
masculine gender (but the sun is frequently feminine), he must do
feats becoming such a character. If the storm is a male god, he will
be a warrior or a huntsman. Thus the god acquires a personal
character and an independent movement; what is told about him has
reference, of course, to the natural object he sprang from, or the
season with which he is connected; but the deity is becoming more and
more separate from the natural object, and acquiring a character and
history of his own. The stories connected with the god vary according
to the habits and the imaginations of different peoples; in some
cases the gods remain pure and exalted beings, in others savage and
indecent myths are accumulated around them, and these primitive myths
adhere to their persons long after they themselves have felt an
upward tendency and acquired a civilised character with the moral
elevation of their peoples. We shall see in many instances how the
nature-gods were personified, made into beasts, made into men, and
surrounded with myths and legends. That is the natural history of the
nature-gods; the process through which they must pass if they grow at
all.
Polytheism.--Another general feature of the worship of the great
natural objects has to be mentioned. Each god has a history of his
own; he has grown up separately as men concentrated their attention
upon him. But as one god grows up after another, or as the gods who
grow up in two countries are afterwards brought together, it comes to
pass that there are many of them, and none of them is necessarily
supreme. What is the worshipper to do? The least reflection will
convince us that in any act of worship man fixes his attention on one
object only. That belongs to the very nature of religion; as a child
could not treat several men at once as its father, nor a servant be
equally faithful to several masters, so man naturally tends to have
one god. He turns to the highest he knows, who is most likely to be
able to help him, and there cannot be two highests, but only one. But
man's position in the early world does not allow him to be true to
this religious instinct. As he sees one aspect of the world to-day,
and another to-morrow, he cannot, when his god is a power of nature,
always see the same god before him. But can he not worship another
god when the first one is out of sight and out of mind? Though he
worshipped heaven yesterday, can he not worship the sun to-day, or
the storm, or the great sea? And though the former generation
worshipped one of these beings in the foremost place, may not the
existing generation devote itself principally to another? That power
does not cease to be a deity which is not immediately before his
mind. It is still a deity, and in a while he will turn to it again,
and make it first. Thus it comes about by inevitable logic that when
man gets his gods from nature, he has a number of them. When he gets
a new god he does not deny the god he had before; he is not yet in a
position to conclude that there can only be one god. When he is
worshipping he feels as if there were only one; but this feeling
applies at different times to a number of different beings, and from
such inconsistency he lacks the power to free himself. The other is a
god too; all the gods he has ever worshipped he may on occasion
worship again. Nor can he refuse to recognise the gods of others; to
them no doubt they are gods, if not to him; they are beings of the
same class with his god. And thus early man is a polytheist.
Polytheism is a complex product; it is the addition to each other of
a number of cults which have grown up separately.
In Polytheism, however, very different religious positions are
possible. Men may feel that the whole set of the gods in whose
existence they believe have claims on them, and may regard themselves
as worshippers of them all, resorting, as feeling and old association
moves them, now to one and now to another, or defining the places or
occasions at which each of them is to be sought, or in some other way
adjusting their various claims; or, on the other hand, while
believing in the existence of many gods, they may confine their
worship to one. A man knows that there are many gods, but says that
he has only to do with one of them. This is a religious position very
frequently met with in antiquity. A circle of gods is believed in,
but one of them comes into prominence at a time and is worshipped as
supreme. This is called Kathenotheism: the worship of one god at a
time. The title was invented by Mr. Max Müller, who also gives the
title of Henotheism to that position in which many gods are believed
in as existing, but worship is given to only one. The following are
examples of the various positions:--
The language of Polytheism is--"Father Zeus that rulest from Ida,
most glorious, most great, and thou sun that seest all things, and
ye rivers and thou earth, and ye that in the underworld punish
whosoever sweareth falsely--be ye witnesses."--_Iliad_, iii. 280.
The Jews at the time of Josiah were accomplished polytheists, as we
may see from the catalogue of the worships suppressed at Jerusalem by
that monarch, 2 Kings xxiii. The gods of each of the surrounding
tribes appear to have been worshipped there, and the old gods of the
separate tribes and families of Israel appear to have been kept up.
Kathenotheism.--The Vedic poets, as we shall see, speak of the god
they are immediately addressing as supreme, and heap upon him all the
highest attributes, while not thinking of denying the divinity of
other gods.
The language of Henotheism is--"Thou, O Jehovah, art far above all
the earth; thou art exalted far above all gods" (Ps. xcvii. 9).
"There is none like unto Thee among the gods, O Lord!... Thou art
great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God alone" (Ps. lxxxvi.
8, 10). Here the other gods are recognised as existing, but only
one is worshipped. Compare also St Paul: "There are gods many, and
lords many, but to us there is one God" (1 Cor. viii. 5, 6).
The language of Monotheism is--"All the gods of the peoples are
idols: but Jehovah made the heavens" (Ps. xcvi. 5), and "Thou shalt
have no other god before Me."
A further religious position to be noticed here is that of Dualism.
Not all dualism comes from nature-worship, but in a land where a
beneficent and a harmful natural force are in striking antagonism to
each other, this may take place. Man, when he interprets the kindly
influences of nature as the blessings of the good god, naturally
interprets the agencies which blight or ruin as being also the
manifestation of a living power, but of an evil one. Thanks to the
good god alternate, in this case, with efforts to counteract or to
appease the bad one; if the two appear to be nearly balanced, then
neither is supreme, and both overawe the mind and receive worship.
But in general we may remark that the greater nature-worship is of an
elevating tendency. It brings man into relations with powers which
are truly great, and places him even physically in the position of
looking up, not down. Where the nature-power is a harsh one, a
scorching sun, a tempestuous sea, the self-command and self-sacrifice
called out by the worship of them may be, if not carried to extremes,
a bracing discipline; but with some exceptions the nature-gods are
good, and have to do with light and with kindness.
2. The Minor Nature-worship.--The worship of the great powers of
nature has a universal character; it can be carried on anywhere;
wandering tribes carry it with them; heaven and the sun and the winds
can be addressed in every land. The minor nature-worship differs from
it in this respect: an animal is only worshipped in the country where
it occurs, and the worship of the tree, the well, the stone, is
altogether local. With this local nature-worship the world was, in
early times, thickly overspread; and manifold survivals of it are
still to be found even in lands where the primitive religion has been
longest superseded. This is the religion of local observance and
local legend, which clings to the face of a country in spite of
public changes of creed, and, when the old religion has departed, is
found to have secured a shelter for itself in the new one.
In this minor nature-worship which spreads its network over all the
early world, the character of primitive society is clearly
represented; the small communities have their small local
worships--each clan, almost each kraal, has its shrine, its god, and
limits itself to its own sacred things. Religion is a bond connecting
together the members of small groups of men, but separating them from
the members of other groups. The following are some of the more
important developments of this.
(_a_) The Worship of Animals.--Primitive man had to hold his own
against the animals by force of strength and cunning; and he was well
acquainted with them. He respected them for the qualities in which
they excelled him, the hare for his swiftness, the beaver for his
skill, the fox for his craftiness. What he worshipped, however, was
not the individuals of a species, but the species as a whole,
typified perhaps in a great hare or a great fox, the mythical first
parent of the species, and possessing its qualities in a supreme
degree. It happened apparently over the whole world, with the
exception of most branches of the Aryan family, that men at a very
early stage regarded themselves as related by the tie of descent,
some to one species of animals or of plants and some to another. From
this belief tribes took their names, each member tattooing the figure
of his animal ancestor on his person. The Bechuanas, for example, are
divided into crocodile-men, fish-, ape-, buffalo-, elephant-, and
lion-men, and so on. The hairy or scaly ancestor is the "totem" of
the tribe, and they consider that animal sacred, and will not eat the
flesh of it. All who bear the same totem regard each other as of
kindred blood, as descended from the same ancestor. The totem may
also be a vegetable, in which case no member of the stock will gather
or eat it.
Totemism is to be seen in operation at the present day in various
parts of the world. North America is, perhaps, its classic land in
modern times. It is, however, a stage of society through which all
races have at one time or another passed. According to the latest
investigations totemism is not to be regarded as itself a religion;
the totem being regarded not as a superior but as an equal. Its
influence on the early growth of religion, however, was great, and
widely ramified.[1] From this two important consequences follow which
will meet us again and again in our study of the great religions. The
first is animal-worship, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and of
perplexing import. Mr. McLennan has shown that much at least of the
widespread worship of animals is to be traced to an early totem-stage
of society,[2] when animals were held sacred as the ancestors of men.
In the second place, totemism explains the view taken in the early
world of the nature of religious fellowship. In modern times people
regard each other as brothers in religion when they believe the same
doctrines. It is belief, an intellectual or spiritual agreement, that
binds them together. The ancient religious union was of a quite
different nature. People then regarded each other as brothers because
they were of the same blood, descended from the same ancestor. In the
Bible the Hebrews are all descended from Abraham, the Edomites from
Esau, etc. That is the necessary condition of brotherhood in early
times; only those could join in a religious rite who were of the same
blood. For men of another blood there was another worship, another
god. It is an earlier stage of this view, when men are of the same
worship because they are descended from the same animal, and when
they worship that animal.
[Footnote 1: J. G. Frazer, "Totemism," in the _Encyclopædia
Britannica_, vol. xxiii., and now his _Totemism and Exogamy_. It was
formerly held that the Semites were an exception, having never passed
through the totemistic stage. Mr. Robertson Smith, in his _Religion
of the Semites_, maintains that, though they are past that stage when
we first know them, the traces of it are apparent in their
institutions, and that their sacrifices especially are based on ideas
belonging to it. Wellhausen does not agree with him in this.]
[Footnote 2: _Fortnightly Review_, 1869-70. See also Mr. Lang's
_Myth, Ritual and Religion_ in many passages.]
(_b_) Trees, Wells, Stones.--The worship of each of these three is in
itself a great subject, and we can do no more than mention the
leading views which appear to have entered into them. Mannhardt in
his _Feld- und Waldkulte_ and Frazer in _The Golden Bough_ have
studied the survivals of tree-worship in the local customs of the
peasantry of Europe. Early man appears to have worshipped trees as
wonderful living beings; but his thought soon advanced to the
conception of a tree-spirit, of which the tree itself was either the
body or the dwelling, and which possessed various powers, such as
that of commanding rain, or that of causing fertility in plants or in
animals. From the tree-spirit, again, the tree-god was further
formed, a being who was able to quit the sacred tree or who presided
over many trees. Of these beliefs the fast-decaying usages of the
Maypole and the Harvest May still remind us.
The well, in a similar manner, may first have been worshipped in and
for itself, and then a nymph may have been added to it. The worship
of wells consisted in throwing precious articles into them, or
hanging such offerings on the surrounding trees, and asking some boon
from the deity.[3] Rivers and lakes were also held sacred. The
worship of stones, that is of stones not treated by art, but regarded
as sacred in the form in which they were found, was widely diffused
among early races; but this is a subject on which light is still
called for. The Caaba of Mecca and the stone of the temple of Diana
at Ephesus are famous isolated instances of it; but it has been
suggested that the standing stones or menhirs which are found in
every part of Europe, and in the south and west of Asia, were objects
of this worship. In Palestine these stones are not found, though they
occur in the neighbouring lands; and this is attributed by Major
Conder[4] to the zeal of the orthodox kings, who, we know from the
Bible, destroyed all the monuments of idolatry in their territory.
[Footnote 3: In Mr. G. A. Gomme's _Ethnology in Folklore_ many sacred
wells are mentioned which are still, or were lately, frequented in
England. St. Wallach's well and bath, in the parish of Glass,
Morayshire, was much resorted to within living memory.]
[Footnote 4: _Scottish Review_, 1894, vol. xvii. p. 33, "Rude Stone
Monuments in Syria."]
What is common to these cults, and cannot be disregarded, is their
local nature. This gives its colour to all the religion of early man.
The god of the sacred tree cannot be worshipped anywhere else than
where the tree stands, and he who would have his wishes granted by
the well must come to it. The deity of this kind of religion has his
abode at a certain spot, and he is a fixed, not a movable deity.
There is a story, or a set of stories, connected with his shrine, and
there are observances of one kind or another to be done there; and
this goes on from age to age. Now a deity who is fixed to one spot
will be worshipped by the people who dwell around that spot. The god
will have his own people and dwell among them, and they alone will be
his worshippers. And thus the surface of the earth comes to be
parcelled out among a number of deities, each seated, like a little
prince, at his own court among his own people. In passing from his
own home to a distant spot, a man will leave the territory of his own
god and enter on that of another, and as the god can only be
worshipped at his own shrine, the man will leave his religion when he
leaves his home, and either be compelled to serve the gods of
strangers, or to perform no religious duties at all.[5] Thus the
ideas connected with totemism meet and harmonise in many old
countries with those connected with local shrines.[6] Those dwelling
around the shrine form a kindred of one blood, of which the local god
is both the progenitor and the living head. Religion is thus both
strictly tribal and strictly local. It is for his brethren of the
tribe, for those in whose veins the blood of the same divine ancestor
runs, that a man's enthusiasm is kindled in acts of worship; it is
his duty to his clan that he then realises, the prosperity of his
clan that he desires. To those of other stems no religious bond
unites him, they are men of another blood, of another worship. His
religious duty is to love his neighbour, or fellow-tribesman, to hate
his enemy, the man of another tribe. And on the other hand, as
religion consists in approaches to a particular spot and the
performance of certain rites, it is left behind when these rites are
accomplished, and the man is away from his god. The sanctuary is
regarded with extreme veneration, often with shrinking and terror,
but distance makes a change, the religion alters with travel, and is
left behind. This religion was on the whole a more exciting and
intense thing than that of the great nature powers; and was far more
interwoven with social life; but it also presented the greatest
obstacles to progress, limiting men's affections to their own kin and
their own land, and confining them in an inveterate conservatism.
[Footnote 5: As illustrating this circle of ideas, compare the
following passages in the Bible: Genesis xxviii.; Ruth i. 16; 1 Sam.
xxvi. 19; 2 Kings v. 17; and of a later period, Psalm xlii.]
[Footnote 6: See on this whole subject Mr. Robertson Smith's
_Religion of the Semites_.]
3. The State after Death.--The belief that the human spirit was not
extinguished at the death of the body, but entered on an existence
without the body somewhere else, opened the door to a wide range of
speculation; and the ideas arrived at by early man as to the place of
spirits and the life beyond, are a principal part of that antique
religion of which the great systems are the heirs. The funeral
practices of prehistoric times, when various articles were placed in
the tomb along with the body of the departed hero or father, and
various sacrifices made to him at his burial or cremation and at
anniversary festivals afterwards, show that the spirits of the dead
were conceived as carrying on the same kind of existence as they had
led here, though an existence unsubstantial and of little power;
"strengthless heads" Homer calls them. Food and drink were of use to
them; for the finer part of it was supposed to reach them. The taste
of blood revived them; and various pleasures were possible to
them.[7] This belief, it will be seen, differs from all the modern
doctrines of a continued existence. It is not the resurrection of the
body that the savage believes in. He knows well enough that the body
does not rise; but he also knows that the spirit can exist and move
and do a number of things that were done in life, without the body.
Nor can he be said to believe in the immortality of the soul. That
term describes a free and unfettered existence after death, but to
the savage the spirit after death has but a troubled and frail
existence; it is tethered to certain spots on the earth, known to it
formerly; it cannot do much, it lives under many limitations and
constraints. Nor, again, can it be said that retribution after death
is a true designation of the early belief. That may be found here and
there in early times, but generally the other life is less under a
divine government than this one; death takes a man away from his god
as well as from his family, and the dead are left to themselves.
[Footnote 7: On this subject compare Mr. Tylor's _Primitive Culture_,
twelfth and thirteenth chapters.]
While, however, this is the general background of primitive belief
about the other life, imagination is at work on the subject very
early, and various features of that life are touched with more vivid
colours, here in one way and there in another. The place where the
departed stay, their occupations, their delights, are variously
described; the land where they dwell is modelled on a land that is
known, with the addition of ideal features; they do very much what
they did on earth, hunt or feast, make music or carry on discussions.
In some cases there is a judgment-seat before which the soul appears
for its trial, and here of course the spirit-world must be divided
into two parts or more, for the reception of those who are approved
and of those who are condemned. The detailed description of the
abodes of the blest and of the damned, by no means peculiar to
Christianity, are later developments in the early world. Hell, Mr.
Tylor says, is unknown to savage thought. The doctrine of
transmigration, however, whether into plants or into lower animals,
is of early growth.
Growth of the Great Religions out of these Beliefs.--These various
developments of thought about the gods did, as a matter of fact, take
place in primitive times, and that is almost all that can be said. In
the religion of savages the various elements we have so briefly
indicated cross and recross each other, in endless combinations; none
of them is to be found entirely by itself. There is no fetish worship
which is not accompanied by traces of an early belief in great gods;
there is no belief in great gods which is not accompanied by a belief
in lower spirits. With regard to every savage religion the student
has to ask what the constituent elements of it are, in what way the
various beliefs of the early world, beliefs arising from such
different sources, meet in it and combine with one another.
In each of the higher religions, too, the same questions have to be
asked. The beliefs which we have sketched are the materials out of
which they also arose. They did not _originate_ the belief in high
gods with power over nature, nor the belief in the lesser spirits
which busy themselves with man's affairs. They did not originate the
belief in a life after death, nor was it left to them to appoint
sacred seasons in the year, or to consecrate the spots to which
worship has always clung. All these beliefs are prehistoric, and what
remained for the great religions was not to bring them forward for
the first time, but to surround them with a new kind of authority,
and to establish as a matter of positive ordinance or revelation what
had formerly grown up without any ordinance by the unconscious work
of custom. It was not left for any of the great founders to plant
religion in the world as a new thing, but only to add to the old
religion new forms and new sanctions.
It may be said that if these are the elements of which religion as a
whole is made, then religion arose at first out of illusions. That is
no doubt true, in a sense. It was an illusion on the part of early
man to suppose that the powers of heaven were animated beings who
could be his allies and answer his appeals; it was an illusion to
think that the tree or the stone contained a spirit, and an illusion
to think that men's spirits can go and wander about the earth by
themselves, leaving their bodies untenanted. But these illusions were
after all only the outward and inadequate expression in which the
spirit of religion then clothed itself. Religion must always express
itself in terms of the knowledge which exists in the world at a
particular time; and if the knowledge is defective to which the world
has attained, religious beliefs must share in its defects. But, on
the other hand, religion is something more than knowledge; it is also
faith and communion, and these can be deep and true, even when the
knowledge which provides their forms of expression is greatly
mistaken. And when the forms of knowledge in which religion has
clothed itself are found to be mistaken, religion has power to leave
them behind and to adopt other forms, as the tree is clothed with
fresh leaves in place of those which are withered.
Yet it would be wrong to admit that even in its character as
knowledge early religion was illusion and no more. The poetic
faculty, the faculty which prompts us to find outside us what we feel
to be within us and to assert its reality, led man right and not
wrong. What he worshipped was not the bare object which met the eye
and ear, but the thing as he conceived it. He conceived that there
was without him that of which his inner consciousness bore witness,
an ideal, a being not grasped by the senses, which could help him,
with which he could hold intercourse, which had the power he himself
had not. This, not the faulty outward expressions in which the
sentiment clothed itself, was the living and growing element of his
religion.
In addition to the books cited in this chapter, we may mention--
C. Bötticher, _Der Baumkultus der Hellenen_, 1856.
J. Ferguson, _Tree and Serpent Worship_, 1868.
J. Ferguson, _Rude Stone Monuments in all Countries_, 1872.
J. G. Fraser, _Totemism and Exogamy_, 4 vols. 1910. An immense
collection of material on the subject of totemism, with fresh
conclusions as to the origin and meaning of the system.
CHAPTER V
EARLY DEVELOPMENTS--PRACTICES
In early religion it is important to remember that belief counted for
much less than it now does; a man's religion consisted in the
religious acts he did, and not in the beliefs or thoughts he
cherished about his god. Worship, moreover, is that element of
religion which in all ages and lands is apt to advance most slowly.
Even in times of ferment of ideas and change of belief, we often see
that the worship of a former time, be it simple or stately, goes on
in its old forms, as if it were a thing that could not change. Men
alter their beliefs more readily than their habits, especially the
habits connected with their faith. If this is the case generally, it
was much more the case in the early world than it is now. The
religion of a shrine in old times consisted of a certain story about
the god, and certain acts done before or near the object which
represented him. There was no compulsion, however, to believe the
story if a man did the acts or took part in them. As to his private
beliefs no one inquired; if he took part in the proper acts of
worship he counted as a religious man, unless he went so far as
openly to flout the current opinions of his time.
Nor were the acts which went to make up religion of an elaborate or
difficult nature. No minute ritual regulated in early times the
approaches to the deity; they were a matter of common knowledge, and
were fixed not by law, which did not yet exist in any form, but by
public custom and public opinion. The manner in which a god is to be
served is known of course to his own people who dwell around him;
others do not know it. The immigrants from Assyria had to send for a
Hebrew to teach them the ritual of the God of Palestine, as they were
on his ground and did not know the right way to worship Him (2 Kings
xvii. 24 _sqq._). It is later that the rite becomes a mystery, known
only to the professional guardian of the shrine or to the initiated
few.
Sacrifice is an invariable feature of early religion. Wherever gods
are worshipped, gifts and offerings are made to them of one kind or
another. It is in this way that, in antiquity at least, the relation
with the deity was renewed, if it had been slackened or broken, or
strengthened and made sure. Sacrifice and worship are in the ancient
world identical terms. The nature of the offering and the mode of
presenting it are infinitely various, but there is always sacrifice
in one form or another. Different deities of course receive different
gifts; the tree has its roots watered, or trophies of battle or of
the chase are hung upon its branches; horses are thrown into the sea.
But of primitive sacrifice generally we may affirm that it consists
of such food and drink as men themselves partake of. Whether it be
the fruit of the field or the firstling of the flock that is offered
at the sacred stone, whether the offering is burnt before the god or
set down and left near him, or whether he is summoned to come down
from the sky or to travel from the far country to which he may have
gone, it is of the materials of a meal that the sacrifice consists.
In some cases it appears to be thought that the god consumes the
offering, as when Fire is worshipped with offerings which he burns
up, or when a fissure in the earth closes upon a victim; but in most
cases it is only the spirit or finer essence of the sacrifice that
the god enjoys; the rest he leaves to men. And thus sacrifice is
generally accompanied by a meal. The offering is presented to the god
whole, but the worshippers help to eat it. The god gets the savour of
it which rises into the air towards him, while the more material part
is devoured below. Every sacrifice is also a festival.[1] If this be
the case it is unnecessary to spend much time in considering a number
of theories formerly regarded with favour as to the original meaning
and intention of sacrifice. The view that it is originally simply a
bribe to the deity to induce him to afford some needed help, receives
a good deal of countenance from primitive expressions. "_Do ut des_,"
"I give to thee that thou mayest give to me." "Here is butter, give
us cows!" "By gifts are the gods persuaded, by gifts great kings."
Was early sacrifice then simply a business transaction, in which man
bringing a prayer to the deity brought a gift too, as he was
accustomed to do to the great ones of the earth, in order that the
deity might be well disposed towards him and grant his petition? Even
if this was the case, if sacrifice were offered with the direct and
almost the avowed intention of getting good value for it, yet if it
takes the form of a meal, it is lifted above the most sordid form of
bribery. There is a difference between slipping money into a man's
hand and asking him to dinner, even if the object aimed at be in both
cases the same; and when the invitations are numerous and formal,
there must be a moral, not an immoral, relation between the two
parties. Where the sacrifice is a meal, intercourse is sought for; a
certain sympathy exists between worshipper and worshipped; they stand
to each other not only in the relation of briber and bribed, buyer
and seller, but in that of patron and client, or of father and son.
[Footnote 1: Mr. Tylor (_Prim. Cult._ vol. ii. p. 397) states that
"sacrifices to deities, from the lowest to the highest levels of
culture, consist, to the extent of nine-tenths or more, of gifts of
food and sacred banquets."]
But granting that early sacrifice was for the most part a meal, an
observance, with a social element in it, between the god and the
worshipper, what was the object of this meal, what was the motive for
holding it? In some cases it looks as if the intention had been to
strengthen the god, and to make him more vigorous, so that he might
be able to do what was wanted of him. In the Vedic hymns this motive
undeniably is to be met with. The notion is by no means unknown in
early thought, that not only does man need God, but that God is also
dependent on man, and capable of being aided and encouraged. In rites
which are not strictly sacrifices, we notice men seeking to
sympathise with their gods in what the gods are doing, and to take a
share in it by doing similar things themselves. The Christmas and
Easter fires in pagan times connected with the worship of the sun,
are examples of this, and many other instances might be cited.
This, however, is not the principal motive of early sacrifice. All
the incidents of it suggest that it is not merely a thing offered to
the deity, but a thing in which man takes part; if it is a meal, it
is one of which the god and the worshippers partake in common. In
China the ancestors are invited to the family feast; their place is
set for them; their share in the feast is placed before them. In the
_Iliad_,[2] we have an account of a solemn religious act: after
prayers the victims were slaughtered, choice slices were cut from
them and cooked at the fire by the worshippers, who then ate and
drank their fill; after this "all day long they worshipped the god
with music, singing the beautiful pæan to Apollo, and his heart was
glad to hear." In the Bible we know that the blood is poured out for
the Deity, and in various sacrifices the parts He is to have are
specified, while the rest is to be eaten by the priests. In the
earlier sacrifices of the Hebrews there are no priests; those who
present the sacrifice consume it after the act of presentation, and
the occasion is one of mirth and jollity, as at a banquet (1 Sam. ix.
12, 13, and the following description; see also Exod. xxxii. 5, 6).
In fact it is a banquet. This is specially plain in the sacrifices of
the Semites, as Mr. Robertson Smith has shown. Early Semitic usage
exhibits clearly how sacrifice was an act of communion, in which the
god and his human family proclaimed and renewed their unity with each
other. The details may differ in other races, but in general it may
be said that early sacrifice was an act done not by an individual,
though plenty of individual sacrifices are also to be met with, but
by a tribe, in which all the partakers of the blood of the tribe took
part before the god who was their common ancestor, and who, as it
were, presided over and shared in their feast. In some cases of
totem-clans the totem animal is sacrificed, and all the members of
the clan eat their animal ancestor (only on such a solemn occasion
could the totem be eaten), and so renew their bond of membership and
brotherhood. A covenant is made by sacrifice, to which the deity and
all the members of his people are parties.
[Footnote 2: I. 457 _sqq._]
To these primitive conceptions others no doubt should be added. The
mood was not always the same which prevailed when the tribe renewed
its union with its god; that depended on circumstances. In general
the sacrifice of early days is a joyous thing, but to a fierce god
cruel rites belonged. When cannibalism was practised it also was such
a primitive sacrifice, and the most powerful means, no doubt, of
cementing the union of the god with the members of the tribe. When
the god was noted for suffering, a tragic tone prevailed, and the
sacrifice might have a dramatic character and represent the leading
incident in the history of the god.
If we trace the history of sacrifice in any particular people we find
two opposite tendencies at work in connection with it. On the one
hand there is a disposition to smooth matters, to drop the harsher
practices, to let an animal victim suffice where a man used to be
sacrificed, to let the man off with some slight mutilation, such as
circumcision; or to allow poor people to offer a less costly victim
than the former custom claimed--the rite, in fact, becomes civilised,
and adapts itself to the feelings of a humaner period. On the other
hand there is a tendency to add to the value of the offerings, and to
reckon the efficacy of sacrifice by its cost and painfulness. In
periods of outward distress sacrifice attains a deeper earnestness,
nothing is to be left undone, and no cost to be spared to bring the
deity back to his people; darker customs which had become obsolete
are revived again,[3] the ceremonial is made more elaborate, new
kinds of sacrifice are introduced. The old social aspect of sacrifice
grows faint; it becomes a propitiation or a trespass-offering; the
notion is entertained that sacrifice is the more efficacious the more
it has cost, or the more magnificent and awful its mode of
presentation.
[Footnote 3: An instance of human sacrifice has just taken place in a
remote part of Russia.]
Prayer is the ordinary concomitant of sacrifice; the worshipper
explains the reason of the gift, and urges the deity to accept it,
and to grant the help that is needed. The prayers of the earliest
stage are offered on emergencies, and often appear to be intended to
attract the attention of the god who may be engaged in another
direction. The requests they contain are of the most primary sort.
Food is asked for, success in hunting or fishing, strength of arm,
rain, a good harvest, children, etc. The prayers have a ring of
urgency; they state the claims the worshipper has on the god, and
mention his former offerings as well as the present one; they praise
the power and the past acts of the deity, and adjure him by his whole
relationship to his people (and also to their enemies) to grant their
requests. As life grows more secure, the note of immediate urgency
fades out of prayer; being a feature not of an occasional worship
arising from some pressing need, but of a worship statedly offered at
set times, it tends to run into forms, and to become fixed and to
have the nature of a liturgy. Then it comes about that the words
themselves are regarded as sacred, and that the efficacy of the
sacrifice is supposed to be partly dependent on them. They are
incantations which the deity cannot resist,--charms which in
themselves have virtue to secure the desired result.
Sacred Places, Objects, Persons.--The early world had no temples, nor
idols, nor priests. The worship of nature does not suggest the
enclosing of a space for religious acts. The natural object itself
being the sacred thing, worship is brought to it where it stands; the
gift is carried to the tree or to the well, and if the deities are
conceived as being above the earth, then the tops of hills are the
spots where man can be nearest to them. High places are sacred in all
lands. Groves and remote spots are also sacred. When man was carrying
on his struggle with the wild beasts he would regard with terror the
places where they had their lairs and strongholds; it was in this
form that the feeling of mystery with which moderns regard places
where they are cut off from all human intercourse, first appealed to
man. After this earliest stage had passed, and the grove had come to
be regarded as the dwelling of a deity, it became a place man did not
dare to approach except with the necessary precautions. We may here
explain a notion which plays a great part in early religion, but is
not specially connected with any one institution of it, the notion,
namely, of taboo. Taboo is a Polynesian term, and indicates that
which man must not use or touch, because it belongs to a deity. The
god's land must not be trodden, the animal dedicated to the god must
not be eaten, the chief who represents the god must not be lightly
treated or spoken of. These are examples of taboo where the
inviolable object or person belongs to a good god, and where the
taboo corresponds exactly with the rule of holiness.[4] But instances
are still more numerous among savages of taboo attaching to an object
because it is connected with a malignant power. The savage is
surrounded on every side by such prohibitions; there is danger at
every step that he may touch on what is forbidden to him, and draw
down on himself unforeseen penalties. The nature of the early deities
also excludes idolatry in connection with them; there is no need for
a representation of a being who is visibly present, and can be
extolled and worshipped in his own person. It was at a later stage,
when the god came to be personified and separated in thought from his
natural basis, that the need arose to make representations of him to
aid the imagination. The stones of early religion are not idols. They
are natural, not artificial stones; they are not images of the god,
but the god himself, or at least that in which the divine spirit
dwells,[5] or with which it associates itself for the purpose of
worship. And, further, the earliest time knows no priests; there is
no special class to whom alone the celebration of sacrifice is
entrusted. It would be quite inconsistent with the whole view of
sacrifice which then prevailed, to suppose that it could be done by
proxy. It was a man's own act, by which he identified himself with
his god and with his tribe, and that could only be done by a personal
service. We often find kings and chiefs sacrificing. Agamemnon does
so, Abraham and Saul do so, though the sacrifice of the latter is
disapproved of by the priestly writer. David does so without being
rebuked for it. The king or chief does this as the natural head of
his clan; some one must take the leading part in the transaction. As
religion is the principal part of politics, and the first business of
the state is to keep itself right with the gods, the head of the
state is its most natural representative on such an occasion. The
head of a household also sacrifices for his house, not only to the
spirits of the house, but in cases like that of Job, where there is
no question of ancestor-worship. Early custom did not fix in any
uniform manner by whose hands a sacrifice was to be made.
[Footnote 4: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 142,
_sqq._]
[Footnote 5: _Religion of the Semites_, by W. R. Smith, p. 192.]
Magic.--In another direction, however, we see in the earliest times
the growth of a class of persons with religious functions and
attributes. While the ordinary worship of the gods does not require
the services of any special class, there is everywhere found the man
of special knowledge and gifts, to whom men resort for needs lying
outside the scope of that worship. Every savage religion contains a
certain amount of magic, of practices, that is to say, by which it is
thought possible to influence or to foretell outward events. Early
man is not limited in his views of what may happen by any accurate
knowledge of natural laws, or of the sequence of cause and effect,
and he imagines it possible to influence nature in various ways. He
imitates what he supposes to be the causes of things, judging that
the effect will also follow; or he uses such powers as he may have
over spirits, to induce or compel them to accomplish his wishes; or
he manipulates objects he believes to have a hidden virtue, in a way
he believes calculated to bring about the desired result. Magic is
thus related both to the cult of spirits and to that of casual
objects, both to animism and to fetishism. There is generally a
special person in a tribe who knows these things, and is able to work
them. It may be the chief or king,--there are many instances in which
the chief is believed to have power to bring rain,--or it may be a
separate functionary, medicine-man, sorcerer, diviner, seer, or
whatever name be given him. He has more power over spirits than other
men have, and is able to make them do what he likes. He can heal
sickness, he can foretell the future, he can change a thing into
something else, or a man into a lower animal or a tree, or anything;
he can also assume such transformations himself at will. He uses
means to bring about such results; he knows about herbs, he has
stones or other objects endowed with special virtues, he also has
recourse to rubbing, to making images of affected parts of the body,
and to various other arts. Very frequently he is regarded as
inspired. It is the spirit dwelling in him which brings about the
wonderful results; without the spirit he could not do anything. While
the details of course vary infinitely in different tribes, the figure
of the worker of magic is an essential feature of any general sketch
of early religion. He is often a person of great political
importance; being supposed to be in closer alliance than any one else
with spiritual beings, he has a power which is much dreaded, and
which even the chief cannot disregard.
Of Sacred Seasons there can be but few in the earliest human life,
when there is no fixed measure of time, nor any notion of regularity,
but all depends on the occurrence of need and of danger. As soon as
agriculture was engaged in, however, attention must have been fixed
on the recurrence of the seasons, and the measures of time afforded
by the moon must, at least, have been observed. The summer and the
winter solstice, the equinoxes, the new moons, these were to the
early cultivator epochs to be observed; and certain annual feasts are
found to have come into use in very early times, epochs of man's
simplest and earliest calendar, and occasions for tribal gatherings
and for such fixed religious observances as we have described. A
private religious emergency arising in the interval between two
feasts is dealt with by means of a vow; the help of the deity, that
is to say, is claimed at once, but the payment of the due
consideration for it on man's part is deferred till the time of
sacrifice comes round.[6]
[Footnote 6: Genesis xxviii. 20; Judges xi. 30; 2 Sam. xv. 8.]
Character of Early Religion.--We have now passed in review the
principal observances and usages of primitive religion; but before
concluding this chapter some remarks have to be made as to the
position religion held in the life of ancient times, and as to the
spirit and temper which it exhibited. In the first place, as we
remarked above, religion was in these times the most important branch
of the public service. Every uncommon occurrence had to be laid
before the god, and no important step could be taken without
consulting him; and it was a principal duty of the head of the state
to keep the god on good terms with the tribe, and to apply to him for
all the aid and protection the tribe required from him. In attending
to this, however, the chief was acting for his tribesmen; where there
was no chief these matters were not neglected, but were looked after
by common spontaneous action by the members of the tribe. The god was
their lord, their father, and they must always take him along with
them. This identification of the god with the interests of his
subjects is so close that the latter are troubled with no doubts as
to whether or not their god is with them. If they observe the
customary rules for cultivating his friendship, he must be with them;
they never imagine that he can be estranged from them. It is the
habitual attitude of early religion to take it for granted that the
god goes with his people (he generally has no other people to go
with) and helps them against their adversaries. To doubt this and to
resort to sacrifices of atonement to bring him back from his
estrangement is a later stage of religion. But if religion is in this
way a public matter, a matter of the tribe and its concerns, what
place is there in it for the individual? Individual cares and needs
may form the subject of prayers and vows, but religion on the whole
has to do with the tribe, not with the individual, or with the
individual only as a member of the tribe. It is the duty of every one
to take his part in the public approaches to the god; he must either
do so or be cut off from his tribe. For his own griefs there is
little comfort in the tribal worship; indeed, personal sorrows and
perplexities meet with but little consideration in early religion. As
the tribe is in no doubt of the goodwill of its god, and regards him
as a firm ally not easily turned away, old religion has a confident
and joyous air, strongly contrasting with the doubts and the
contrition of modern faith. The acts of worship are feasts at which
the members of the tribe rejoice and make merry before their god. To
the delights of feasting those of dance and song are added ("The
people sat down to eat and drink, and rose up to play"), and
frequently the merrymaking goes to the pitch of frenzy; the
worshippers dance themselves into an ecstasy; they feel the god
taking possession of them, and are hurried along by the sacred
inspiration to behaviour they would not dream of at any other time.
Early Religion and Morality.--How did this early religion bear upon
morality? In how far was it a power for righteousness? There are two
sides to this question. In the first place, the religion of the
infant world was a strong influence for the restraint of individual
excess. The god being the parent of the tribe, its customs had his
sanction, he had no higher interest than its welfare, he was
identified with all its enterprises, its battles were his battles
also. The worship of the god therefore made strongly for loyalty to
the tribe, and for the observance of its customs; it caused a man to
forget his own interest where that of the tribe was concerned, and
unhesitatingly to sacrifice himself for the public cause. But, on the
other hand, primitive religion was an intensely conservative force;
it subjected the whole life to the customs of the tribe, and
discouraged spontaneity and independence in moral action. The duties
it prescribed were of a conventional order; a man had no duties to
those beyond his tribe, and to his fellow-tribesmen religion bade him
rather walk by rule than consult his own feelings. Of the morality
which consists in discipline and subordination to the community,
early religion was an efficient school; to the higher morality, the
law of which is found written in the heart, and which aims at
rendering higher services than those of custom, it did not attain.
The worship of the higher nature-powers, the heavenly powers of light
and kindness, tending as it did to transcend the limits of place and
of nationality, was destined powerfully to foster a more generous
morality than that of the tribal worship, and this tendency was no
doubt dimly felt by early man long before it was possible for him to
follow it.
CHAPTER VI
NATIONAL RELIGION
We now leave behind us the beliefs and practices of savage and
barbarous tribes, and turn to those of mighty empires. The gulf which
lies between these two parts of our subject is obviously a wide one;
and in many instances there is no bridge by which the student can
pass from one to the other. Often it is a matter of inference rather
than of direct proof that the great systems are built out of the
materials accumulated, as we have seen, in the prehistoric period.
But the inference is sufficiently strong to rest upon; in some cases
we are able to see quite clearly how the religion of the empire arose
by an uninterrupted growth out of that of the tribe; and in the cases
where this cannot be so fully made out, we yet judge that the result
came about in a similar way. We pause therefore at this point to ask
what is the nature of the transition at which we have arrived, or, in
other words, what constitutes the difference between the primitive
and the later religions? The difference is probably not one of
magnitude only; it consists not merely in the fact that the religion
of the empire is that of a much larger number of people than that of
the tribe; there is a difference in character as well as in
dimensions. With a view to the examination of this point it will be
found convenient to consider some of the proposed classifications of
religions, as most of these, though for different reasons, place the
religions of the early world in a different category from those known
to us historically.
The old-fashioned Classification of Religions was that of the true
and the false. This our principle forbids us to accept, since we
regard the various faiths of the world as stages in the development
of religion, and therefore all relatively true.
Another division which has done good service is that into natural and
revealed religion. By natural religion has generally been understood
such religion as human reason could attain to without supernatural
aid. But this description does not apply to any religious system that
ever prevailed largely in any country; the actual religions have all
been the work of custom and age-long tradition, not of the deliberate
operation of reason. Natural religion therefore is a term which is of
no use to us in classification; since none of the actual religions
which we have to study answers to that title. Nor is revealed
religion a term we can conveniently use in such a work as this. Many
religions claim to be the result of revelation, but few make it at
the outset of their career. The title tells us nothing about the
original character of a religion, but only that at some period in its
career the claim was made for it that its origin was supernatural. If
we grouped the revealed religions together we might find that the
members of the group had no similarity to each other beyond the
accidental circumstance that the claim of revelation had been made
for them. Besides, science cannot possibly take the revealed
character of any religion for granted, but must examine each such
faith to see if its growth cannot be accounted for without that
assumption.
The term "natural" religion has, however, other meanings than that
just mentioned, and some of these we may find to be of more service.
It is proposed to divide religions into "natural" and "positive," or
into those which have grown up and those which have been founded. The
earlier religions were not due to the personal action of outstanding
individuals (at least if they were, as surely they must have been in
part, the individuals and their struggles are unrecorded), but were
the work of unconscious growth, and were produced by forces, which,
as they were at work in every part of the early world, may be called
natural. These religions do not appeal to the authority of any
founder, but are borne forward by custom and tradition. Some of the
later systems, on the contrary, bear the names of their founders, and
are said to have been introduced into the world at a certain time and
place. Their beginning is fixed, and they have a body of beliefs and
practices which belong to their original constitution, and possess
authority for all subsequent generations of believers.
This classification promises well at first, but it is difficult to
apply it; some religions pass imperceptibly from the stage of custom
to that of statute, and in many religions both elements are so
largely present that it is difficult to strike the balance between
them. We are led to the conclusion that the real difference between
the earlier and the later religions is a more vital one than any of
these classifications would indicate. The authority and the positive
character of the later systems is a symptom of the change which has
produced them, but the change itself lies deeper. The higher form of
religion is due to a great step which has been taken in civilisation;
it is one of the features of the advance of society to a new stage.
Rise of National Religion.--It is an immense step in human progress
when a set of barbarous tribes unite to form a nation. Under the
strong hand of some chief or under the pressure of some great
necessity, they give up the isolation which is both the weakness and
the strength of the tribal state of society, they choose some strong
place for their centre, they submit to a common government, and while
still remembering their separate tribal traditions and usages, they
learn to act as members of a greater community than the tribe. This
is the beginning of civilisation proper. Law takes the place of
custom; the state undertakes to punish crime, and private vengeance
is discouraged; the state also undertakes the protection of the weak,
so that humane sentiment appears, and a security is engendered in
which the arts and sciences can spring up and flourish.
When this takes place a new type of religion also makes its
appearance. While each of the tribes may long retain its own gods,
and its peculiar rites, some one god, perhaps the god of the
strongest tribe, assumes a higher position than the rest; his worship
becomes the central religion of the community, round which the other
worships arrange themselves by degrees, until there comes to be a
system embracing them all, but itself possessing a new character. In
this way a national religion comes into existence. The details of
this process are in every case beyond our observation. It is not
perhaps for centuries after the national religion has come into
operation, that reflection is turned towards it; not till the art of
writing has come to some perfection is it described and formulated
and made statutory; and by that time all accurate memory of its
beginnings has faded away, and its origin is explained instead by a
set of legends. But though its beginnings, like all beginnings, are
obscure, the national religion is there. It has its history; the
great man who brought the tribes together, or who first devised for
them a higher form of worship, is remembered as its founder; the
foundation is ascribed to the inspiration of the chief god himself;
its sacred forms are written down and obtain the force of divine
laws, the will of the deity is a thing clearly known and expressed in
positive terms.
It is not asserted that this description will apply to the origin of
all the national religions; the character and the circumstances of
one nation differ from those of another, and it need not be supposed
that they all reached their state worships in the same way. Some
religions have become national by conquest rather than growth; while
some which may truly be called national never attained to any
national organisation. The process we have described, however, may be
regarded as the typical one for the rise of a national out of tribal
religions, and indicates to us what we may regard as the real and
substantial difference between the stage with which we have been
occupied and that to which we are now to turn. All other differences
between the prehistoric and the historical religions may be traced to
this one. Before the religion of a nation has systematised its
doctrine and its ritual so as to merit the name of positive, before
it has provided itself with a detailed ritual or a fixed creed, or a
regular priesthood, or a set of sacred books, the momentous step has
already been taken, the new form of religious consciousness has
appeared. Men have begun to believe not only in the tribal but in the
national god or gods, and a national religion has come into
existence.
The advance from tribal to national worship is one of the most
momentous in the whole history of religion. The nature of the change
involved in it may be summed up as follows.
1. Men obtain a Greater God than they had before. Formerly a man
believed in the god of his tribe, one deity among many, as his tribe
was one among many, each having its own god; but now he comes to know
a god who is higher than the other tribal gods, as the king whom the
tribes have united to obey is greater than the tribal chiefs. The god
stands at a greater distance than before from the worshipper;
familiarity is lessened, and religion becomes capable of a deeper
reverence and adoration. Although the worship of the tribal god is
still kept up, yet if the new-born national consciousness is strong,
the national form of religion rather than the tribal will determine
the religious sentiment of the individual.
2. New Social Bond.--The nature of the social force exerted by
religion is altogether changed. In tribal religion the tie of the
worshippers both to their god and to each other is that of blood; the
god is their common lineal ancestor, whose blood is in the veins of
all the tribesmen. The social bond supplied by such a religion is
limited to the members of the tribe; a man's fellow-tribesmen are his
brothers, but all other men are his enemies; with them he is at war
as his god is. Social duty is a matter of blood relationship, and
extends only to the kindred. When a national religion is arrived at,
a social obligation of a new kind will evidently make its appearance.
The national god is related by blood to only one of the tribes
composing the nation; the bond between him and the other tribes must
be of another nature. He has conquered their gods or they have
voluntarily accepted him as their chief god; in any case it is not
the tie of blood that binds them to him, but some more ideal tie,
like that between a king and his subjects, or between a patron and
his clients. And they now have a religious connection also with men
who are not their kindred. The national worship is inconsistent with
the gross materialism of the system of kinship, and places instead of
it the belief in a god further above the world, and therefore more
spiritual, and obligations to men which, as they are not derived from
a common blood, are somewhat more purely moral.
3. A Better God.--The new god of the nation as he is higher above the
world is a being of higher and better character. He belongs to all
the tribes, and is not the mere partisan of any; like the king, he is
above tribal jealousies, and is interested in checking the violence
of all, and securing justice to all. He may be appealed to by those
who have suffered violence and who have no earthly helper; and thus
he tends to become an ideal of justice and fatherly kindness, and to
reflect in the world above the sentiments springing up in the world
below, in favour of the repression of violence and the administration
of even-handed justice.
In these directions the religion of the nation tends to rise above
that of the tribe. The tribal worships may continue almost as they
were, the tribal gods may still be worshipped, the tribal jealousies
and conflicts still be carried on in spite of the new union, and all
the superstitions of early religion may long survive; yet a new
religious force has appeared which will in time produce a complete
new system. The true principle of classification, therefore, must be
drawn from the difference between tribal and national religion, as
this is the most vital difference, and that from which all the others
which we mentioned may be derived.
The transition thus sketched took place at widely different periods
in different parts of the world; it began early and has taken place
even in modern times, while very many tribes in various parts of the
globe have not yet arrived at it. It is a transition of which it is
manifestly impossible to exhibit the detail; in most cases the detail
is not known, and it were a profitless task to trace how primitive
religions met, united or remained apart, and how their crossings in
one case led to a national religion, and in many others led to no
such result. Much, no doubt, is to be found on such points in special
works, and much still remains to be discovered. Various instances of
the formation of national religions will meet us in our subsequent
chapters.
The Inca Religion.--We give, however, at this point an example of the
transition we have described, drawn from a quarter remote from the
great movements of history, and in which the facts are plain and
uncontested. Of the two great civilised communities of the New World,
discovered by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, Mexico presents
a worship compounded of many elements, which, along with high and
lofty morality and great magnificence of ritual, yet retains an
extraordinary amount of cruelty and savage horror. In Peru, however,
we find a state religion which superseded savage cults still
remembered in the country, and from the _Royal Commentaries of the
Incas_, written by the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega in the beginning of
the seventeenth century,[1] we are able to describe the religion of
Peru both before and after the Inca reformation.
[Footnote 1: Printed by the Hakluyt Society.]
"Before the Incas," this writer tells us, "each province, each
nation, and each house had its own gods, different from one another,
for they thought that a stranger's god could not attend to them but
only their own." They worshipped all manner of deities; of these are
mentioned herbs, plants, flowers, all kinds of trees, high hills,
great rocks, and the chinks in them; caves, pebbles, emeralds. They
also worshipped animals; the tiger, the lion, and the bear for their
fierceness, and the monkey for his cunning; these they did not kill,
but went down on the ground to worship them and would even suffer
themselves to be devoured by them, since they regarded these animals
as their own ancestors. All kinds of animals they treated in this
way; there was not an animal, how filthy and vile soever, so the
quaint words tell us, they did not look on as a god. Other Indians,
again, worshipped things from which they derived benefit, such as
great fountains and rivers; some worshipped the earth, and called it
mother, because it yielded their fruits; some the sea, calling it
Mamacocha; and a great number of other objects of adoration are
mentioned. They sacrificed animals and maize, but also men and women,
and these not only captives taken in war but also their own children,
smearing the idol with the blood. (In other quarters of the globe
this is a symbolic act showing that the idol and the worshippers all
partake in the same life.) Some tribes were fiercer than others, and
practised cannibalism more extensively. They were also well provided
with sorcerers and witches.
All this the Incas altered. They were a princely family, regarding
whose origin and accession to power various legends are told; the god
they worshipped was the sun, and they considered and called
themselves the children of the sun. Their father the sun, they said,
had sent their forefathers to teach the tribes various things they
very much needed to learn; to cultivate the fields, to breed flocks,
to live in peace, to respect the wives and daughters of others, and
to have no more than one wife. The Incas knew better, it was said,
than the rest how to choose a god, and they declared that men should
worship the sun, who gave light and heat and made things grow; they
should be grateful for his benefits, and he would reward them if they
were obedient. The Indians accordingly took the sun for their god
"without father or brothers"; they considered the moon to be his
sister and wife, but did not worship her. Besides this, we hear the
Incas sought a supreme god, and called him "Pachacamac," that is
"soul of the world." This being gave life to the world and supported
it, but they did not build temples to him or offer him any sacrifice;
they worshipped him in their hearts as an unknown god.
The practice of the Inca religion as described to us by several
Spanish writers falls a good deal short of this doctrine. Many beings
were worshipped besides the sun; a number of prayers were addressed
to the Creator and the sun and thunder. Many sacred objects also were
adored, such as embalmed bodies of ancestors and various idols. They
practised all kinds of magic, and, worst of all, many boys and girls
were offered in sacrifice, even before the Incas and on great public
occasions. The reformation of the Incas is evidently not complete; if
it had not been arrested by the arrival of the Spaniards it may be
that the purifying agency of the new religion would have found much
still to do. Enough, however, is seen to afford strong confirmation
of the principle that religion gains infinitely in elevation when a
national worship appears. The Incas were no doubt the heads of a
tribe which had conquered others, and imposed its religion on them.
The lesser conquered worships do not die out at once, but continue
along with the central one. But the latter expresses the national
spirit and aspirations; and, as settled life fosters the growth of
intelligence and of public spirit, the central worship must more and
more supersede the others, while itself casting off its superstitious
and backward elements and becoming reasonable and elevating.
It will be convenient to indicate at this stage the further line of
study to be followed in this volume. As it is our aim to trace,
however inadequately, the growth of the religion of the world as a
whole, it is necessary that we should confine ourselves to those
parts of religious history which lie in the line of that growth, or
which serve in a conspicuous manner to illustrate the principles
according to which it has taken place. It is by no means our purpose
to give an account of all the religions of the world, nor do we seek
to form a complete magazine of the curious phenomena with which this
vast field of study is in every part so well supplied. If we have
interposed the foregoing brief account of the religion of the Incas,
it is not because of its own intrinsic importance, but because it
supplies within so brief a compass such an apt example of that
process which occurs so often in the growth of religion, by which the
unorganised rites of a multitude of clans and families give way when
the nation comes into being, to the higher and better religion of the
state. In the same way the great religions of which we must next
speak have, no doubt, only a loose connection with the central line
of the world's religious progress. No work professing to deal ever so
cursorily with our subject could omit to deal with the religion of
China nor with that of Egypt; yet neither of these faiths perhaps has
permanently enriched the religious consciousness of mankind. The
religion of Babylonia, with which each of these is connected, was
also of isolated and independent growth, and is far away from us both
in time and in historical connection. Like great and solitary
mountains of ancient formation, each on a continent distant from
ours, these faiths attract us not because we depend on them, but
because they are interesting in themselves. It was out of the same
jungle of primitive beliefs and rites, out of which our own religion
has at length grown, that each of these lifted its head to such
heights as it attained.
After disposing of these great systems we come to the developments,
much later in point of time, which have led to the highest religion
yet attained. And here two great races or groups of peoples have to
be considered, each in its own way singularly gifted and each
contributing in a distinctive manner to the growth of religion. These
are the Semitic and the Indo-European families. Under each of these
heads we find several well-marked religions; and the nature of the
case itself points out our further procedure. Taking up first the
Semitic group,--including Islam,--since this part of the subject lies
at a greater distance from ourselves, we shall inquire whether there
is any common element in the various religions it comprises, or, in
other words, if there is a Semitic religion which may be regarded as
the origin from which the Semitic religions alike sprang, and which
gave them a common character; and we shall then proceed to discuss
the Semitic religions each by itself. We shall then discuss the
common belief of the Aryans, and go on to the religions of the more
important Aryan nations. Our last chapters will deal with
Christianity and will point out the nature of development which our
study as a whole may have taught us to recognise in the religion of
mankind.
BOOKS RECOMMENDED
On the classification of Religions see Tiele's article on "Religion"
in the _Encyclopædia Britannica_, Ninth Edition.
Alb. Reville, Lectures on the Origin and Growth of Religion as
illustrated by the Native Religions of Mexico and Peru. _Hibbert
Lectures_, 1884.
De la Saussaye, Third Edition, pp. 5-16, gives a good conspectus of
the various classifications which have been proposed.
PART II
ISOLATED NATIONAL RELIGIONS
CHAPTER VII
BABYLON AND ASSYRIA
The religion of Babylonia, of which that of Assyria is a late form,
as the Assyrians appropriated all they could of the religion and the
literature of this southern empire which they conquered, cannot be
classed along with any other without some inconvenience. In point of
remoteness in time it takes precedence even of the religions of China
and of Egypt; like these great faiths it also is, in its earlier
stage, a growth by itself in a land and people of its own, where
apparently it grew up independently from rude beginnings. It is
undoubtedly one of the Semitic religions; but it had a character of
its own which other Semitic religions did not share, and of the
simple and early Semitic religious attitude which will be set forth
in another chapter it retained but little. It had an immense
influence. Its ideas entered the religion of the Old Testament by
several roads. Abram came to Canaan through Haran from Ur of the
Chaldees; and in Canaan the religious ideas, myths, and legends of
Babylon must have been well known. The discovery of this code of
Hammurabi has shown that many of the laws of Moses were laws of
Babylonia long before Moses. In a later period the tread of
Babylonian soldiery was heard in Palestine many a time before the
great captivity, in which Israel sat down and wept remembering Zion
by the waters of Babylon. In Greece also we find that ideas which
came from Babylon had become known, by way of Phenicia, at a very
early period. Recent discoveries, however, seems to make it
impossible to assign to the religion of Mesopotamia any other place
than the first among the great faiths of the world. The ancient
connection between Mesopotamia and Egypt, surmised till now rather
than known, is coming to light, and it appears, at least, possible
that the first of these countries may have to be regarded as the
source of all the civilisations of antiquity. The pantheon of Egypt
has striking similarities to that of Babylonia, and some of the
Egyptian temples show traces of derivation from the lands of the
Tigris and Euphrates. The similarities in the case of China are not
so marked, but they are substantial. In Babylonia, therefore, we may
be dealing not with one of three isolated religions, but with the
mother of the other two. If, as Mr. Lockyer holds,[1] Egypt borrowed
astronomy from Babylon in connection with temple-building, more than
5000 years B.C., the religion of Babylon must indeed be carried far
into the past.
[Footnote 1: _Dawn of Astronomy_, 1894.]
People and Literature.--Certain parts of Babylonian religion are much
ruder and more superstitious than the exalted star-worship which is
its central feature, and these have been ascribed to peoples who
dwelt in Babylonia before the supposed Semitic conquest, viz. the
Accadians in the north and the Sumerians to the south, peoples not
related to the Semites in blood or in language, but generally called
Turanian, and thought to be perhaps akin to the Chinese. The
cuneiform writing which remained in use for millenniums after the
Semitic immigration as the sacred literary form, was supposed to have
been the invention of these peoples, who had also made some progress
in plastic art.
There is, however, no direct evidence of the alleged early Semitic
invasion, and the Sumerian hypothesis of which it is a feature is now
regarded by some with less confidence. It is based on linguistic
phenomena. Hammurabi, 2250 B.C., reigned over a realm whose subjects
were of different tongues, and entrusted his records to two methods
of writing. The old Sumerian language, which cannot, in the opinion
of the best scholars, be shown to have affinity with any language of
the ancient world, came to be confined to matters of religion and
magic, and was superseded by the Assyro-Babylonian, which was
Semitic. But the feeble ray of the Sumerian hypothesis can be
dispensed with in the light which is shining on ancient Babylonia
from other quarters. For its information about that ancient land the
world was formerly dependent on the scanty notices of Greek and Latin
writers, but within the last half-century astonishing new sources of
information have been opened up. Explorations carried on by scholars
of many lands have made us acquainted with Babylonian and Assyrian
temples and palaces, and with many a great royal inscription. Great
libraries, made of brick tablets, have been discovered buried under
the ruins of the cities, and the gradual decipherment and arrangement
of this old literature is proceeding as fast as able and devoted
workers can overtake it. Those who know the subject best declare that
no complete history of Babylonian religion can yet be written. The
texts now in our possession embody many documents of much more remote
age, yet the information is as yet too fragmentary and often of too
doubtful interpretation, while the proportion it bears to the whole
of Babylonian life is too little known to supply a solid foundation
for history. With this caution we proceed to state the results which
are considered likely to prove well founded. As we saw, several
features remain in the religion in later times which appear to throw
light back upon its early condition, and it may be best to begin with
these before describing the noble structure presented on the whole by
this religion.
1. Worship of Spirits.--The Babylonians, like the Chinese, believed
the world to be thickly peopled with spirits of all kinds; and saw in
each movement in nature the action of a "zi" or spirit. These spirits
could be to some extent controlled; though their character was not
known, yet certain charms and incantations were believed to have
power over them, and communication with the unseen world took,
therefore, the form of magic. The earliest portions of the sacred
literature consist of spells or charms believed to possess this
virtue, and these were never displaced from the collection; on the
contrary, new spells were written even after higher spiritual beings
were known and more ethical forms of addressing them had been
devised. Especially were all pains and diseases ascribed to the
agency of spirits or of sorcerers and witches, their human allies,
and the sick person naturally sent for an exorcist to expel the
spirit which was tormenting him. Some spirits were more powerful than
others, and the stronger spirit was invoked to rebuke and drive out
the weaker. The spirit of heaven and the spirit of earth were adjured
to conjure the plague-demon, the demon who was afflicting the eye,
the heart, the head, or any other part of the body. Assertions are
not wanting in the cuneiform literature that beliefs and practices of
this kind formed no part of the true religion of Babylonia, and some
scholars regard it as a late degeneration. The analogy of similar
cases points, however, to the conclusion that magic is everywhere an
early form of religion which is only overshadowed, not killed, when a
great religion arises, and which tends to reappear. It may be said
that there is no evidence of any break in Babylonian religion; if the
Sumerians yielded to the Semites, this led to no religious
revolution; the religion is Semitic from first to last.
2. Animals.--A step above this trafficking with spirits is the
worship of animals, which Mr. Sayce considers to have been an early
form of Babylonian religion, and to afford an explanation of various
features in it. Like the gods of Egypt and those of Greece, many of
the gods of Babylon have animal emblems; this appears both in the
representations of them and in their legends. The winged bulls and
eagle-headed men of Babylonian art represent the same rise of the
gods which we know to have taken place in Egypt, from the animal to
the semi-human, and then to the fully human form. An intermediate
stage in Babylonia is that the god stands on the back of the animal
with which presumably he was formerly identified. We have an Assyrian
Dagon whose head and shoulders are covered with a fish's skin; we
have gods and goddesses who are human figures with the exception of
their wings; we have winged dragons; we have the great bulls with
human head and wings which stood as guardian deities to ward off evil
spirits at the portal of a palace. The following animals were also
connected with gods: the antelope, the serpent, which came to be the
embodiment of cunning and wickedness, the goat, the pig, the vulture.
We thus see that the rise from zoomorphism to anthropomorphism which
the Greeks afterwards carried to the highest point attainable by the
resources of art, began in Babylonia.
Like all early religions, that of Babylonia is broken up into a
multiplicity of local worships. There is no common system, but each
place has its own god or gods and its own sacred rites. In Egypt we
shall find reason to believe that this state of matters had its
origin in an early totemistic arrangement of society; whether the
same was the case in Babylonia or not, it is vain to speculate.
Babylonian religion as we see it has risen far above the direct
worship of animals. Each god comes before us in a certain local
connection and with a special character, but they tend to grow like
each other, and their worship is organised on the same plan. The gods
of Babylonia undoubtedly belonged to different towns, and though
attempts were made in later times to bring them all together in an
imperial Babylonian religion, and to settle their relations to each
other, these attempts led to no system which was finally accepted.
The number of the recognised great gods varied, and there was always
a large number of minor gods. Each god has his own early history;
here as everywhere it is the case that the individual gods are
earlier than the system which seeks to connect them together.
The Great Gods.--The great gods of Babylonia belong to the elements
and to the heavenly bodies. When we first see them, they are not,
like the gods of the western Semites, lords and masters, characters
taken from human families; they are not husbands and fathers but
creators and universal powers. Another mark about them is that they
have originally no wives. When they come to have wives, these are
simply doubles of themselves with no special character. A consort is
given to the god by adding a feminine termination to his name, thus
Bel receives Belit, Anu has Anat. Finally Babylonian religion is more
and more directed to the heavenly bodies. It is Astral religion
carried to its furthest point. This fixed the arrangement of its
temples, the occupations of its priests.
We rapidly pass in review the principal Gods. One of the oldest is Ea
of Eridu, a town which stood in old times at the head of the Persian
Gulf. He is a god of the deep, whether it was that he was considered
to have come over the water from another land, or whether he is
connected with the belief which was held in Babylonia as elsewhere,
that all things originally arose out of the abyss. In later forms of
the legend his name appears as Oannes, and he is an amphibious being,
half-fish, half-man, who rises from the deep and instructs men in
arts and sciences. Works were preserved bearing his name, for he was
an author. He continues, even when little direct worship is addressed
to him, one of the greatest of the gods. Ana the sky, is the god of
Erech on the lower Euphrates. Like the Chinese, the men of Erech
regarded the sky itself as the highest god, and the maker and ruler
of all things. In Babylonia, however, the notion became spiritualised
more than in China; at first we hear that his dwelling became the
refuge of the gods during the Deluge, but in later times he is
regarded as a being quite above heaven and all created beings, and
even all the gods. A third great god is Bel of Nippur, not the later
Bel of Babylon, but an older one, identical with the Accadian
Mullilla, the lord of the under-world. The earliest gods of this
religion are those of the sea, the earth, and the sky. As they belong
to different districts of the country, they can scarcely be called a
trinity. A better approach to a trinity is formed by Ea of Eridu,
Davkina his wife who is the earth, and the sun-god Dumuzi, their
offspring. The son of Ea, also named Miri-Dugga or Merodach (Marduk),
is identified with the Egyptian Osiris; they have the same symbol,
each is a sun-god, and each has a sister who is also his wife,
Merodach has Istar, and Osiris, Isis. In Sergul the principal deity
was the fire-god, sometimes called Savul; in Cutha they worshipped
Nergal the god of death, the "strong one" who had his throne beneath.
Cutha was a favourite place of sepulture with the Babylonians. Rimmon
was a god of wind, Matu of storms. There is a dragon Tiamat, with
whom the great gods have to contend.
The sun and the moon were worshipped everywhere; each city had its
own sun-god and its own moon-god. The preference generally shown by
nomads for the moon, since their journeys are made by night, is kept
up in early Babylonia, where the moon-god is regarded as the father
of the sun-god, and as the greater being. In Ur of the Chaldees the
moon was the principal deity. There were also towns such as Larsa and
Sippara, where the sun was the chief god; and many of the great gods
of later times were originally sun-gods. The Chaldeans, moreover,
were proverbially star-watchers, and a "zigurrath" or observatory, a
building of seven spheres corresponding to those of the planets as
they pass through the signs of the zodiac, and like them rising up to
the seat of God at the North Star, was a regular part of the later
Babylonian temple. To Babylonia is due the practice of the
orientation of temples; that is to say, the arrangement of the
building in such a way that its principal axis shall point exactly in
a desired direction. Some of the Babylonian temples were oriented so
that the sun should shine to the western end of them on the day of
the spring equinox when the inundation of the rivers began on which
the prosperity of the country so much depended. The temple was thus
an astronomical instrument of a high degree of accuracy, and the
priests who directed its building and served in it when built were
men of science and learning. A religion which is connected with the
heavenly bodies, though it does not fully supply the needs of the
lower orders and has too little energy to cope with superstition,
tends to produce a priesthood who form centres of enlightenment and
civilisation throughout the country. This was in the highest degree
the case in Babylonia. To these old astronomers the world owes the
signs of the zodiac, which were fixed not later than in the fifth
millennium B.C., and in which we see how early man beheld in the
nightly heavens the creatures which on earth he regarded as divine,
so that he worshipped them in both regions. The institution of the
Sabbath is also Babylonian; whether it was connected with the changes
of the moon, or with a week of days named after the seven planets, is
not certain. Seven is a sacred number in Babylonia, as we find in
many a connection.
Mythology.--We come lastly, in our attempt to enumerate those parts
of Babylonian religion which have entered deeply into human thought,
to the myths. The heroic legends and romances are the most
interesting and the best-known portions of the newly-recovered
literature. We have already noticed some fragments of mythology, such
as the story of the fish-god who comes up daily from the sea, the
moon being the father of the sun, and the family history of Ea and
Davkina, with the sun their child. The two latter are evidently
inconsistent with each other. But the story about the son of Ea and
Davkina has an important further development. His name is Duzu or
Dumuzu, and he is the Tammuz of whom we hear in the Bible (Ezekiel
viii. 14), who is adored by women raising lamentations for him. He is
said to be the sun-god of spring, to whom the heat of summer is
fatal, and who dies in June. It is when moisture is failing from the
ground that he is bemoaned. His home is in Eden, for Eden belongs to
Babylonian legend, which places it near Eridu. There grows the great
world-tree which the gods love; it rises from the centre of the
world, and is nourished from springs which Ea himself replenishes. It
is a cedar (Yggdrasil, the ash-tree, we shall find, occupies the same
position with the Northern Teutons); it is sometimes found in a
highly conventional form with the figure of a cherub at each side of
it, each of whom holds in his hand a fruit. In this tree scholars
recognise both the tree of life and the tree of knowledge with which
we are familiar. The knowledge of the priests in Babylonia was not
for every one, but was jealously guarded, and kept for the initiated
alone.
From Tammuz we naturally pass to Istar, one of the few goddesses of
old Babylonia, and by far the most famous of them. Istar was
originally the goddess of the earth, and both mother and sister of
the sun-god, for we are led to believe that she is at first the same
as Davkina. The great myth of the descent of Istar describes how she
goes down to the kingdom of the shades to seek the waters that shall
give life again to her bridegroom Tammuz. The poem in which the
narrative is preserved gives a description of the "house of darkness,
where they behold no light," and then tells how, at the orders of
Ninkigal or Allat, queen of Hades, Istar is deprived, successively,
in spite of her remonstrances, of all her ornaments, and how the
plague-demon Namtar is bidden to strike her with all manner of
diseases. The result of Istar's disappearance under the earth is that
all love and courtship cease both among men and the lower animals,
and Ea himself is appealed to, to bring to an end so unnatural a
state of affairs. A messenger is sent to the lower regions to cause
the release of Istar and the reascent of Tammuz. This goddess,
however, is known not only from this legend; she has many forms, and
passed through various fortunes. The Istar of Erech herself lures
Tammuz to his destruction. In early times Istar is also the evening
star, the bright companion of the moon. Her leading character,
however, seems to be that of a goddess of love. Fertility depends on
her; she goes under the earth to find her lover. In this character
she attracted in Babylonia a worship noted for impurity, which under
the name of Ashtoreth is found also in Phenicia and in Syria. There
is also, however, a warlike Istar, a strict goddess served by
Amazons, and capable of identification with the Greek Artemis, as the
Istar of love is identified with Aphrodite.
Much more primitive than the legend of Istar are some parts of the
Babylonian accounts of the creation. There are several of these
accounts, some newly discovered. In one the old god Ea peoples the
original chaos with a variety of strange monsters. In another the
birth of the gods is narrated as well as that of the world; we find
also that chaos is itself conceived as a female monster, a dragon of
evil, and the god has to do battle with this power of darkness and
evil, and to bring light and the habitable world up from its realm.
It is certainly true that the Babylonian legends of the creation are
crude and inconsistent with each other, and that the account in
Genesis belongs to a much higher order of thought. The Babylonian
account of the deluge and the ark is more closely parallel to the
Bible narrative; the two cannot possibly be independent of each
other, and there may be no impropriety in holding that the Hebrew
writers were acquainted with myths of general diffusion in the world
they lived in.
The State Religion.--The Babylonian and Assyrian religion of which we
hear in the Bible (_cf._ I
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