BL 430 , H6 6 1923 Hopkins, Edward Washburn, 1857-1932.

Origin and evolution of religion

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I

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

The Religions of India India Old and New The Great Epic of India Epic Mythology The History of Religions

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION

OF RELIGION

1/

BY

E. WASHBURN HOPKINS, PH.D, LL.D.

PROFESSOR OF SANSKRIT AND COMPARATIVE PHILOLOGY

YALE UNIVERSITY

NEW HAVEN

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

MDCCCCXXIII

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CONTENTS

CHAPTER I.	Theories of Religious Origins .	•	•	PAGE 1
II.	The Worship of Stones, Hills,	Trees,	and
	Plants . . . .			13
III.	The Worship of Animals			32
IV.	The Worship of Elements and Heavenly
	Phenomena			47
V.	The Worship of the Sun .			58
VI.	The Worship of Man			67
VII.	The Worship of Ancestors			73
VIII.	Religious Stimuli .			88
IX.	The Soul .			109
X.	The Self as Soul			136
XI.	Sacrifice .			151
XII.	The Ritual .			180
XIII.	The Priest and the Church			204
XIV.	Religion and Mythology .			226
XV.	Religion and Ethics			245
XVI.	Religion and Philosophy			274
XVII.	The Triad . . . .			291
XVIII.	The Hindu Trinity			302
XIX.	The Buddhistic Trinity .			318
XX.	The Christian Trinity			335
XXI.	The Reality of Religion .			350
	Index .	•		361

CHAPTER I

THEORIES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGINS

Every religion is a product of human evolution and has been conditioned by social environment. Since man has developed from a state even lower than savagery and was once intellectually a mere animal, it is reasonable to attribute to him in that state no more religious conscious¬ ness than is possessed by an animal. What then, the his¬ torian must ask, are the factors and what the means whereby humanity has encased itself in this shell of reli¬ gion, which almost everywhere has been raised as a pro¬ tective growth about the social body?

The simplest answer to this question has been that man is not a mere animal but differs from the beast in having an immortal soul and a religious instinct. The argument is as follows : Assuming that there are no races which can be shown to be utterly devoid of religion, this element of human thought, because it is universal, we must consider as essential; hence, being essential, belief in a soul and in spiritual life is part of human nature; based on this natural conviction religion is the product of man’s religious instinct.

But the historian may assume neither the universality of religion (for there are human groups which make this an assumption of doubtful validity) nor the existence of a soul, because even the “religious instinct” does not require this assumption. Therefore the instinct itself cannot be assumed. Nor is such an instinct probable. Children have no religious ideas or impressions. Per¬ sonally, the investigator may or may not believe in God,

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

2

soul, and a future life; but bis task is merely to show how belief in these and other components of religion arose and he can do this only by arranging in orderly progression all available data.

It is inevitable, however, that this study embrace man in the past as well as in the present and the psychological processes of prehistorical man cannot be known. Thus, heavily handicapped, the historian is liable to fall into one of two errors, either assuming that primordial man was the counterpart of what is now called primitive or arguing that, as man was at first pre-logical, he was then quite outside of our present comprehension. Moreover, even what is usually called primitive is often clearly un- primitive. For example, the Redskin (Amerind) as com¬ pared with the Negro or Australian is far from being a primitive savage. Then there is sometimes the question whether an apparently primitive group has not relapsed from a higher state.

Nevertheless, a modicum of safety lies in the recogni¬ tion of danger and the historian is generally justified in treating low forms of religion like low forms of art as comparatively primitive and in arguing that the lowest forms of religion as found among savages today prob- • ably reflect the forms of religion known to such savages as existed in remote antiquity.

Theories to account for the origin and explain the growth of religion are numerous. Orthodoxy maintained in ancient India that there was one inspired religion and all other religions were decadent forms of it, while in the sixth century B. C. heterodox Hindus said that all religions were invented by the priests for their own profit. The same theories sprang up independently cen¬ turies later in Europe. It is sufficient to say of these and similar theories that they were crude but probably honest guesses based on inadequate information. In the imme-

THEORIES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGINS

3

diate past sundry theories have arisen based on a wider survey and deeper knowledge. They alone demand atten¬ tion at present, since they are founded on an immense number of careful observations and are upheld by dif¬ ferent schools of capable investigators.

Thnjirst, which is still held by many sociologists, is that connected with the names of Sir Edward Tylor and Herbert Spencer. It is usually called animism and is based on these facts and inductions. The savage believes that what is active is alive and that, being alive, an object, animal or material, has within it the same sort of spirit which man recognizes in himself. Hence he peoples the world with spirit-inhabited objects. He thinks also that, when he dreams, his spirit is abroad performing the acts which he imagines himself as doing in his dreams. Hence he acquires the notion of a spirit independent of the body and attributes to other men, animals, and ob¬ jects a spirit and spiritual powers similar to his own. Again, as he sees in dreams a dead man apparently still active, he infers that the spirit of the dead still lives and that he himself when dead will still live, as will his ani¬ mals and weapons. Because still living spirits may be malicious, the savage placates these potential foes ; hence offerings to ghosts. Ghostly spirits are gradually en¬ dowed with more superhuman power and are then revered as gods.

The chief objections to this theory are, first, that the most primitive savage does not possess so clear an idea of spirit in distinction from body as is here implied ; sec¬ ond, that the argument does not account in a satisfactory manner for undoubted cases of direct worship of natural phenomena ; third, that if the theory were true, one would expect to find a universal cult of ghosts, which is by no means the case.

The second theory, called naturalism, with which is -

4

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

generally connected the name of Max Muller, but which is widely held by other German scholars — it might almost be called the German theory as contrasted with English animism — is based on the tendency of savages to fear and revere objects of nature that seem to them powerful, such as a waterfall or thunderstorm or majestic tree, to all of which they attribute life and anthropopathic na¬ ture. In like manner they revere venerable human phe¬ nomena, kings and wizards, and they people the sky with imagined kings and wizards as gods of natural phenom¬ ena, with underlings, as on earth. Man instinctively re¬ gards the sun as a great personage and the moon and stars as mother and children, or as shepherd and sheep. Man personifies all objects of nature and reveres what is awesome.

The chief objections to this theory are that it assumes in the savage a too pronounced tendency toward per¬ sonification and that it ignores animism altogether or holds that a belief in spirits is secondary and negligible ; man’s attitude toward natural phenomena is made the base of all religion. Owing to instances cited by Muller of misunderstanding of myths by later generations, lead¬ ing to perverted religious views, this has been described as the theory holding that religion arises from a disease of language; but this is incorrect, since the question of language is not vital to the theory.

A theory that “religion is the child of magic” has been developed by Sir J. G. Frazer, whose formula is ex¬ plained on the supposition that man first tries to control nature by magical means and finding this impossible re¬ sorts to entreaty, which is the hall-mark of religion as distinguished from magic. But this is no explanation of the principles of religion, since magic itself is largely re¬ ligious. In fact, there is a good deal to be said for the objection urged by Durkheim, to the effect that magic is

THEORIES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGINS 5

the child of religion rather than that religion is the child of magic.

Durkheim’s own theory, which is in general the French theory, has no formal designation but may be called col¬ lectivism, though illnsionism would be a fitting name for it. It assumes totemism as the earliest form of religion, holds incidentally that the totem-name comes from some convenient animal living near by, and builds up all reli¬ gions data on the distinction between the tabooed, or sacra, and the common. The collective representation of a human group in regard to taboo things is religions be¬ lief, and this belief as to the sacred power or totemic force acts as a moral power. The totem is the symbol of the group as well as of the totemic force, a power which becomes the god of the community. Since it is at once the symbol of the society and of the god, the god and the society must be one and the same. The god is in fact the clan personified. As all religions, having a totemic origin, pass through the same phases, it follows that God and society are identical. All religions rites are social in origin and exhibit rules of conduct as to sacred things. Collective representation in regard to a mass of sacred things leads to the supposed existence of a world of sacred things and of extraordinary powers. Since col¬ lective representation is produced in the main by social excitement it follows that religion is born of mental effer¬ vescence. It is, accordingly, merely an idea or illu¬ sion, but as its effects are real it may be said to have reality.

This theory has been set forth with such a wealth of detail and such enthusiasm that it has already won many converts, and even upon those not converted it has made a profound impression. One weighty objection to it is that it assumes totemism as the historical base of all forms of religion; without the totemic power and symbol there

6

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

would be no starting-point for the collective representa¬ tion of society as a spiritual power.

But the fundamental objection which will eventually overthrow this theory is that it ignores or minimizes beyond reason the individual in favor of the group. What is true of ritual and even of ethics as being in general a group-product is here transferred to primitive thought and emotion. Now it is perfectly true that environment in great measure determines religious values that affect the group as a whole and, inclusively, the individual. The cow is holy in India and the Todas have a cult of the buffalo ; both animals are of prime importance as a source of food. The food-supply of the Australians comes in large part from animals which the natives hunt and whose prototypes they imagine to be their own ancestors. Most of the religious or magical activities of an Australian clan are connected with the conservation and propaga¬ tion of these animals. But, as has been remarked by Pro¬ fessor King, in Africa, where food is at hand without effort, hunting has no religious significance. Environ¬ ment thus conditions the concerted social activity of a clan and any magical or religious system is primarily the product of its economic and social life. In so far, it is quite correct to say that society (the human group) conditions religion and it is a facile task to point out, for example, that the great religious functions of the He¬ brews, state feasts and celebrations, still express an an¬ cient economic status. Without the first-fruits and har¬ vests there would have been no such expression; a reli¬ gious feast still celebrates the ancient vintage.

Yet between religion as a system, conditioned by social economics, and a subjective religious state of mind there is a distinction, which this theory does not ignore but com¬ bats by assuming that a man’s mind is wholly the product of his social environment. But while it can be shown that

‘THEORIES of RELIGIOUS ORIGINS 7

a state-religion is bnt one aspect of economic life, it by no means follows that the individual’s religions thought and feeling are merely the reflex of gronp-mentality. It is of course true that any one in dividual’s state of mind is more or less the product of his whole being as condi¬ tioned by intercourse with others. What the group seeks the individual seeks ; its aim is his ; its likes and dislikes are his. Otherwise he soon drops out of the group, per¬ force.1 Uniformity is the bond of the group and the in¬ dividual mind reflects the mind of the group. Yet no group-coercion can utterly stifle the individual, nor is religions emotion on the part of the individual wholly dependent on the group, any more than the savage’s fear of a power suddenly apprehended is a product of group- influence. Neither social nor economic conditions deter¬ mine the savage’s attitude, and the proof of this lies in the fact that his attitude, expressing fear or hope, is uni¬ versally found in savage life, whatever be the economic or social surroundings. Deprecation, a rudimentary reli¬ gious attitude, is common to most savages in the pres¬ ence of an awesome object or event.

Hence, while it must be admitted that religious ideas in general reflect a man’s habitat and group, it is a serious error to imagine that the habitat or group in which he is born produces his religious state of mind. The French theory does not hesitate to insist that man does not think at all as an individual; there is no such thing as an.in-^ dividual mentality and consequently all religious thought is social. But it is pure assumption that the mind of the group is so overwhelmingly coercive that the individual mind is entirely subservient to it. All that can be affirmed is that the social atmosphere affects the religious con-

1 This is true of animals as "well as of men; any disparity or dissimilarity../ in the individual causes it to be rejected by the group, through a^. in¬ stinctive objection to whatever is opposed to its solidarity.

8

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

sciousness. French scholars working more or less with Durkheim and largely inspired by him maintain that “all religious consciousness is a product of social atmos¬ phere.” They regard the individual as a single cell inca¬ pable of thought except as part of the collective con¬ sciousness. The group thinks only as a whole, as the mob wills as a whole. Mob-mentality is as powerful as mob- emotion. The individual not only has no ideas of his own, he is incapable of originating any ideas.2

A different line of approach to the conclusion that 1 1 re¬ ligion is a product of social intercourse” is found by some writers who underestimate religious data as not really religious. Thus it is argued that, when a savage makes obeisance to a dangerous object, this is not in re¬ ality a religious act but only ‘ ‘ a first step, as a mediating principle, to religion,” the step we make “when we treat a live wire with caution.” Not a happy illustration, be¬ cause we do not think of placating the wire. Similarly, although it is admitted that the Hurons sacrificed tobacco or fat “as a mark of respect to some deity or deities,” these acts are said to be not religious and “hardly above the level of mere practical expedients. ’ ,3 But if the act of sacrificing to a deity be not a religious act, what is it? To make such a sacrifice is to assume that the object or power to whom sacrifice is made has volition to help or to harm and may be placated. Surely this is the same atti¬ tude as is taken by most worshippers in bodies usually called religious.

Yet, although the influence of collective suggestion has been exaggerated in Durkheim ’s theory and the distinc¬ tion between religion and the “first step” toward reli¬ gion is imperceptible, it remains a pregnant fact that

2 For a criticism of this theory, see Clement C. J. Webb, Group Theories of Religion and the Individual , London, 1916.

3 Irving King, The Development of Religion, N. Y., 1910, pp. 65, 81, 82.

THEORIES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGINS

9

religion is an organic part of social activity. The idea that the religions consciousness is born of social excite¬ ment and intoxication, in which for the first time man conceives of himself as unhuman and of a world different from the normal (for this is the gist of Durkheim’s the¬ ory) is not substantiated by the facts, nor is it altogether novel, for it was preceded by the extraordinary theory of Gruppe that religion began when some Syrian first got drunk and being intoxicated imagined himself divine ; and, too, the influence of the group has long been recog¬ nized ; but it is still well to remember that a great part of what is called religion is strictly social. How do laws ac¬ quire religious value and validity, as for example in In¬ dia, where the code is regarded as inspired! Because all law is originally custom, the modus vivendi adopted by the group, and this again harks back to greater antiquity, which receives religious color from the authority of precedent in that it is imagined a sin to transgress the customs of the fathers, who remain in memory as mem¬ bers of the group still having authority. In matters lack¬ ing that authority, sin is what at the present time offends the tribal consciousness of unity. The earliest law-givers in India proclaimed that such and such acts w3re sinful because they violated ancient custom. Thus they distin¬ guished as “sinful in the north” certain acts which were “not sinful in the south” and promised eternal felicity to those who did not commit the (local) sins enumerated. Not content with this, however, whenever possible they drew upon the example of the gods, as known by report, to enforce their decrees, yet always in the form “so did the gods of old,” laying quite as much stress upon the authority of antiquity as upon divine precedent, as may be seen from the circumstance that it was a matter of in¬ difference whether the formula ran “for so did the gods of old” or “for so did the sages of old.” The religious

10

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

motive was in both cases identical ; sin was contravention Sof well established custom. So religious and govern¬ mental functions were at first undifferentiated, and even in the civilized nations of antiquity as well as among savages today kingship and religious leadership tend to coincide. It is for this reason that in primitive societies morality and law make one whole and that this whole is religious. Thus one can speak only of religious mo¬ rality and religious law or of the complex, religious moral law. So rites and ceremonies, originally social or eco¬ nomic or both, become religious, and the individual shar¬ ing therein may be described as socially religious. Such a pastime as dancing, such an economic ceremony as the theatrical propagation of crops by masked dancers, are originally social functions which acquire religious value.

This common custom of masking oneself as an animal leads to the consideration of the question whether such primitive mysticism implies in the actor a different sort of mentality from that of civilized man. It has been ar¬ gued by the French scholars already referred to that primitive man was actually so different from us that he is today incomprehensible. He had a “pre-logical” mind, which appears to mean that he was a mystic. He believed, for example, that he was both a man and an animal, and that he could injure an enemy by injuring an image or knowing and misusing the enemy’s name. But the argu¬ ment as to being at the same time a man and a wolf pre¬ supposes that the savage has a clear conception of man as distinct from wolf ; otherwise it would not be illogical to believe that a man might be a wolf. So the Hindu priest at the sacrifice becomes unhuman and then formally “be¬ comes a man again” at its conclusion. So, too, piercing an image to make the enemy suffer or operating with a name as if it affected the owner of the name are not illogical acts when one believes that image and name are

THEORIES OF RELIGIOUS ORIGINS

11

parts of personality. These and many other instances cited to prove pre-logical mentality in savages are fonnd also among peoples to whom it would he impossible to deny logical mentality. All that one can say is that the savage takes for granted what has not been proved. But he seeks neither to prove nor disprove; his act logically follows on what he believes. Savages as we know them are by no means illogical. There is therefore no force to the conclusion drawn in this theory that pre-logical col¬ lective representation must be irrational and hence all religion, being based thereon, is illusory. All mysticism today is regarded in this theory as inherited from the pre- logical state. Yet Durkheim grants religion a certain re¬ ality on the ground that no human institution based on error could endure, though what endures is actually noth¬ ing more than the expression of social activities. That is to say, collective representations are not fundamentally false, though based on pre-logical mentality, because they express something that existed, namely, the activity and reality of the group, which reality we call religions.4

What is really fonnd in the lowest mental states is not lack of logic bnt inability to distinguish between mind and matter. To early man all substance is the same, neither material nor immaterial. The most primitive savages do not regard the two as separate. All matter is sentient and has mentality; all spirits are analogous to the minds of men, that is, encased in body, or rather indissolubly one with the material in which they appear. It is not a distinct spirit in a thing which such savages recognize but, so to speak, a spiritized thing, an object imbued with power.

4 Incidentally, Durkheim derives ideas of cause, substance, time, and space also from collective representation originally social and religious and hence illusory. But classification, here represented as beginning by reason of the group, already exists in the very recognition of the group. See Webb, op. cit., pp. 71 f.

12

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

The object does not possess a power as something dis¬ tinct from the body but is itself powerful. Each object has a different power, but there is to the savage no one universal power of which the single object expresses a part. Of this false interpretation of mana as a world- power it will be necessary to speak later. At present it is important to understand that the belief in an undif¬ ferentiated whole precedes the belief in spirit as some¬ thing distinct from body. A study of the objects of wor¬ ship will help to make this clear.

CHAPTER II

THE WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, TREES,

AND PLANTS

Man lias worshipped everything on earth, including himself, stones, hills, flowers, trees, streams, wells, ocean, and animals. He has worshipped everything he could think of beneath the earth, metals, caves, serpents, and under-world ghosts. Finally, he has worshipped every¬ thing between earth and heaven and everything in the heavens above, mist, wind, cloud, rainbow, stars, moon, sun, the sky itself, though only in part has he worshipped the spirits of all these objects. Yet with all this bewilder¬ ing jumble to his discredit, man to his credit has never really worshipped anything save what he imagined be¬ hind these phenomena, the thing he sought and feared, power.

Categories, such as those of Saussaye, who divides re¬ ligious objects of worship into heavenly and earthly, or those of Max Muller, whose divisions are objects “seiz- able, half-seizable, and non-seizable,” as illustrated by a stone, a hill, and a star, are not useful and may be worse than useless in suggesting a false chronological series, for some of the lowest savages worship stars and half-civilized men today worship stones. There is no as¬ cending scale followed by all men. But for convenience we shall have to examine these objects in order and we may as well begin with the worship of stones and hills, things apparently most lifeless. Erudite titles for the divisions here following would be litholatry, orolatry, dendrolatry, astrolatry, theriolatry, pyrolatry, nephelol-

14

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

atry, opliilolatry, etc., but -latry is not always synony¬ mous with, worship ; there may be an observance, a serv¬ ice, without actual worship.

The worship of stones and hills: Stone-worsliip may be addressed to a mere stone, a fetish, a totem, an idol, or a symbol. The stone may be a pebble, a rock, lonely or other¬ wise remarkable, or a flint weapon or aerolite. In all these forms, as far as known to each community, stones have been worshipped by Finns, Lapps, South Sea Islanders, Africans, Redskins, Peruvians, Greeks, Romans and other Aryans, Syrians, Dravidians, Egyptians, and Chi¬ nese. At the present day the inhabitants of Kateri in South India worship a stone, which if neglected will turn into a wild ox, and in Northern India not only the wild tribes but recognized castes of civilized society worship stones which they believe to be alive and possessed of volition.1 Food and drink are presented to stones today in Nigeria to effect cures. There is in these cases no idea of a spirit in the stone ; it is the stone itself as being power¬ ful and wilful which is propitiated.

If one ask a Yankee farmer why his fields every year have a fresh crop of stones (they do indeed annually come to the surface), he will say that they climb up from below and he almost believes that they work up of their own volition. In the Middle Ages the peasants believed this and more, for they thought the stones had power to move about as living beings. Vows were made to them by our own ancestors. The Lapps, some African tribes, and the Peruvians shared with the Amerinds and the Greeks the belief that stones could propagate themselves, and even that the human race had sprung from stones. Among the

i The 1 1 divinity ’ ’ of Bhuvaneshvar is a shaped block of granite about eight feet long sunk in the ground. At Kamakhya on the Brahmaputra a rude cleft rock represents the goddess. Most of the stones worshipped are unshaped rocks.

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 15

Semites, the Canaanites especially, and, among the Ar¬ yans, the Kelts worshipped and anointed stones. Simi¬ larly, Jacob after using a stone as a pillow anointed it and Rachel concealed stones in the tent, probably “ wit¬ ness stones” (Gen. 28:11-22; 31:34).

The notion that stones are the children of earth inter¬ changes with the belief that they are the bones of earth, both views presupposing the assumption that earth is an organic whole and stones are part of the earth-mother. But a lone rock or curious stone is revered for itself and becomes one of the earliest forms of gods. A suggestive stone often from its very shape serves as a phallus, not at first of a god but in itself worshipful. So a rock re¬ motely suggesting a human shape becomes a god per se before it is recognized as an image or idol of a higher divinity. Thus, in Greece, the stone image of Cybele or Athena (a square stone at Mantinea) or the Argive Hera was an object of worship afterwards called by one of these names.

Different in origin are the betyls or heavenly stones, whose divinity derived from their origin. A blazing stone striking the earth would always inspire fear and subse¬ quent religious regard or worship, as in the case of many known betyls (probably the Kaaba stone at Mecca is of tills sort). Transferred from Syria to Greece by the way of Crete the name Baityloi or Betels (perhaps bethels?) was generally applied to these heavenly visitors, wor¬ shipped under various names by the Romans, Finns, and other Europeans, and probably several of the more re¬ vered objects of this class came West with the name, like the Black Mother and the Cretan betyl, afterwards the stone at Delphi that was regarded as the god given to Kronos by Rhea. Along with these, however, other stones called cerauniae or lapides fulminis, which were in reality not aerolites but relics of the stone age, were worn as

16

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

amulets, etc., though supposed to have fallen from the sky. In Central America, the sacred stones of the Mayas were certainly betyls ; but they were recognized as iden¬ tical with the earth-goddess and deified as such. The Zeus Kasios of the Greeks was an aerolite, as the name, of Semitic origin, indicates. One of the forms of Shiva in India is a rock, but this is probably, like his hill-form, from an adaptation of an earlier cult of these objects not (in the case of the rock) as of heavenly origin but as in itself worshipful. Red paint, representing blood, is smeared on such stones in India and America as a sign of worship. In India, as in Syria and Greece, the aerolite is apt to become the phallic emblem.2

Stone-worship is not racial nor is it merely primitive in time. At this hour is worshipped in Bengal a stone which fell in 1880; it is at present “the miraculous god.”3 About the same time an aerolite fell in Greenland ; it has been an object of religious regard ever since. The atti¬ tude toward non-aerolite stones may today be illustrated in the case of Hindu peasants. They do not think a spirit is in the stone but they regard the stone itself as having personality, life, activity, volition. A group of five stones in India (thirty in Greece) is sometimes found as a re¬ ligious unit similar to the stone circles of Europe and to the groups of stones set by the Amerinds, though not al¬ ways numbered or placed precisely in a circle. The se¬ cret of these stones is not always the same. In some cases they may represent astronomical wisdom, but we must guard ourselves against accepting this as a general ex¬ planation. In Burma, for example, the stones appear like a miniature Stonehenge, yet the circle is not fixed but grows, for each stone is a monument to a great man

2 This was not noticed by Lenormant in his article on “Les Betyles” ( Hevue cle I’histoire des religions, iii, p. 31).

s Crooke, The Foimlar Feligion and Folk-lore of Northern India, I, p. 82.

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 17

added to the circle at his death, a sort of Westminster, combining pious and religious feeling. The dead are little divinities and this rude circle of Burma is, in reality, essentially like a Jain temple, where the divinities are images of saints. The spot is holy ground; the peasant bows to the stone. European trilith erections may often be tombs, and menhirs may be memorials of this sort. Such a stone may even be a totem and the first altar was probably itself a divinity before it served as a sacrificial table.

The ceremony of throwing a stone among the Romans involved the invocation of Jupiter and it has thence been supposed that Jupiter himself was originally a stone, as for other reasons scholars have interpreted Jupiter as an oak. But nothing is more fallacious than to identify a deity with an object of ceremony. Nevertheless, although Jupiter was not a stone, there was a stone identified with Jupiter in Rome, as with Zeus in Greece, and on this stone as a god the Romans took the oath.

Here may be mentioned the common practice in India of taking up a stone as a witness. If one wishes to hale an offender to court one seizes a stone and calls it an officer. The stone mounted in the Hindu marriage ceremony was originally a millstone and seems to be merely a symbol of constancy or endurance, though modern practice iden¬ tifies the stone with the wife of Shiva or with the divine protector of the field and family.

A stone may be half human and yet divine enough to excite religious awe and veneration. Of this sort are first the stones like those of the Profile Rock in the "White Mountains. No Indian could see this apparent face of rock without imagining it the face of a more than human yet manlike being. A face so grave, so stern, so lifelike was necessarily revered. A similar face juts out near Castine ; this also was worshipped by the Amerinds, but

IS

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

it never became a god. It was something uncannily dan¬ gerous and thought of as a sachem’s head, revered to the point of worship but still as something only half divine. In other localities a similar superstition clings to “Lot’s wife” and to the rock that in India was once the wife of a saint, who was cursed to live as a rock because she de¬ ceived her husband. In Peru there are stones which were formerly human beings, but “they became impious and were petrified.” These are still human. But there is also a rock in India, which is the remains of the nymph Rambha, who tried to seduce a saint and was turned into a rock, although she was the fairest nymph born of Ocean. In Greece we have the parallel figure, and Nioba fingitur lapidea .

When we hear of a stone being put into water to pro¬ duce rain it is not always because the stone has magical power; sometimes the stone represents a divine power. On the other hand, it must not be concluded that a stone is a holy power because it works wonders. A millstone is magically efficacious not because of the stone but because of the hole in it. In the Rig-V eda we read that a god cured a girl by drawing her through the hole in the middle of his chariot- wheel. Any perforated jewel is thus doubly valu¬ able. Noses and ears were not perforated at first to carry rings, but the rings were carried to keep open the hole. Coins with a hole in them are prophylactic like jewels. The Shalagrama stone now represents Vishnu; it was originally a stone holy in itself and twice as holy when perforated.

The holy stones revered by the inhabitants of the Pyre¬ nees are half fetish and half divinity and the same is true of the similar stones of the Hebrides and those generally revered by the Dravidians. The African fetish-stone also in its original form is not a material thing containing a spirit but an animate being and is treated as such, being

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 19

cajoled or beaten to be helpful, just as the stone fetish called Hermes was treated in Greece. Whether we term such objects gods or not is a matter of indifference. They are supernatural powers, potent and volitive. In conclu¬ sion it may be noticed that the aerolite, destined to be- come a god or fetish when it alights, is in transit regarded as a falling soul, as in India, or, as in South America, it is the still flaming butt of a god’s cigar.

The lone stone to the villager is a guardian god. And what the rock is to the villager the hill is to the larger community. It is a being, alive and capable of aiding or injuring. It was not at first to the spirits of the hills that the Chinese offered sacrifice but to the hills themselves as powers. There is, so to speak, only a quantitative dif¬ ference between stone and hill. Only the higher intelli¬ gence regards the holy hill as holy because a spirit lives in it or gives oracles there. To the less developed mind the hill itself is divine. The rude peasants under the Ural Mountains regard them thus even now ; the hill is a living divinity, not the abode of divinity. The oath-mountain to them is itself the witness and punisher of perjury. In In¬ dia, only two thousand years ago, it was believed that mountains lived and married and had children by rivers. Anthropomorphism by no means necessarily precedes an- thropopathism. The hill has no human form but it has human passion and divine, that is, more than human power. Hills as abodes of heavenly gods are of course doubly holy and when, as in the case of the Himalayas, they merge with the sky, they are regarded not as parts of earth but of heaven. When a pilgrim comes down the mountain he is said in the great Hindu epic to “return to earth.” Hills, like chasms, are often revered as spirit- homes.

Earth itself receives a nominal homage as mother paired with father sky in many savage cosmogonies, but

20

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

earth to a savage is only what he knows of it; he is not apt to pay devotion to earth as a divine power. He re¬ veres rather the hills and chasms (leading to the under¬ world) as homes of ghosts and spirits. Sundry savages (Australian and early German) believe that children come out of earth by way of streams,4 and early German religion had a cult of a mother goddess presumed to be Earth.

The advent of agriculture increases the observance and regard for both earth and sun. A sort of rude hoe-agri¬ culture is as old as cattle-raising, but till a people has fixed habitations and gardens it does not develop much religious interest in earth. Then arise the boundary-gods and field-protectors found in India and elsewhere. A general primitive Mother-goddess is often a personifica¬ tion of earth. But, although the cult of such a Mother- goddess is found in the earliest Asiatic and European civilizations it is not certain that the female deity repre¬ sents Mother Earth. In India, however, as late as 1901 the census enrolls “ worshippers of earth, of sun, of divine female rivers, of snakes, and of disease god¬ desses’’ in one district of Bengal.

When the cult of spirits has superseded that of spirit¬ ual objects, matter as alive and volitive, the stone be¬ comes the home of a spirit, as in Iceland and in later fetisli-forms. A third stage is represented by the change from a divine thing to an accessory of a more divine spirit, stone pillars, originally divine, standing by a shrine, massebas, for ghosts or gods, and altars, as well as stones used to bring rain. Many stone monuments, however, have become sacred simply through association with the dead or with divinity. Not every obelisk was it-

4 For the primitive cult of earth, see Albrecht Dietrich, Mutter Erde (1905).

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 21

self divine; so dolmens and tombstones become sacred through association with the dead, though tombs were really worshipped, as in the case of Norwegian cairns. Carved images, idols, are later than natural idols but are worshipped as readily; in fact, in some cases artificial images are so primitive that they appear as the first monuments. The only religious symbols of some very primitive South American tribes are figures made to frighten away demons and the Neolithic age already had carved figures of presumably religious or magical import. In Africa a rude pillar portrays a spirit and sometimes is anointed in order to attract spirits. The worship of images is almost universal but is finally tabooed by the highest religions, Mohammedan, Roman Catholic, etc., or is permitted only as an indulgence to a weak mind. Thus, Du Bois, one of the early Roman Catholic mission¬ aries in India, reports that the common people indubi¬ tably worship the image itself, but that the better edu¬ cated repudiate such worship. The same holds for this missionary’s own religion. The uneducated peasant who bows to the image in Southern Europe, especially when that image moves its eyes or otherwise seems to be alive, is certainly worshipping the thing he sees. The matter was put succinctly to the writer by a Hindu gentleman who was kind enough to answer a blunt question as to whether he really worshipped the image to which he bowed. “This,” he replied, “is mere matter of intelli¬ gence. I being completely devil-upped (developed) wor¬ ship only myself5 but conform out of liberality to popular

s The then 1 1 Saint of Benares ’ ’ also explained that he ‘ ‘ worshipped only himself, ” as divine soul. Worship of images is a later trait of Bud¬ dhism, which inevitably followed from the early regard for relics combined with images of Buddha. These relics and images paved the way to the shrine, which, adopted by the Brahmans, became a temple, unknown to early India.

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

22

superstition. My wife, lacking intelligence and not being devil-upped, worships bare image.”6

The Worship of Trees and Plants: The cult of trees is one of the oldest, as it is one of the most widely extended forms of worship. It is also one of the latest to yield to a higher type of religion. It appeals to the savage who fears the forest; to the barbarian who sees in the tree the spirit of productivity ; and to civilized man, to whom the tree is emblematic of divinity. The deification of plants and grains is later than that of trees. Probably the tree- world as a whole was an earlier object of cult than any individual tree, as the savage dreads the power of the jungle and placates it rather than that of any one tree known to him. The forest as a whole is dangerous also to the more advanced animist who fears the spirits of the wild, though they may be offset by the gentle fairies and elves likewise living in the wood. These are the first ar¬ boreal spirits in distinction from the trees themselves. But the tree per se. is also beneficent or maleficent and is treated as such. It gives a welcome shade or fruit or it is poisonous or lacerates. On the whole, however, it is prob¬ ably the forest rather than the single tree which received first religious regard as a terrifying object. As soon as man began to think in terms of spirit he imagined demons misleading him and making noises in the jungle, spirits comparable to the Jinns of desert or mountain. There is an Amazon tribe which recognizes no spiritual power save Caypor, a demon who ‘ Meads people around in a circle when they are lost in the wood,” not a ghost, be it ob¬ served, but a spirit of nature comparable to a mermaid as a product of the sea. Man easily personifies or human¬ izes natural causes when he observes an effect. A Vedic

6 The image of stone is sometimes the earlier idol, but often this is not the case, the trunk or root of a tree serving as an image before stone is hewed into shape.

WORSHIP OP STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 23

hymn of some three thousand years ago (Rig- Veda, 10, 146) expresses this artlessly by saying that if one hears a noise in the forest like a wagon creaking or a tree crash¬ ing down it is because the Girl of the Wood is playing there ; she will not hurt one unless one tries to track her, but it is well to set out an offering for her, who is the Mother of the wild animals. In the main this Indian god¬ dess is a kindly being, slaying only when aggrieved. She is really made of the noises in the wood, a prototype of all sylvan deities, fauns, sylvani, and other mates of hamadryads, who die with the wood, like the Tyrolese Wildfanger. Some, like the Hindu Rakshasas, are fierce. Many of the beliefs of this early stage linger late into modern times. The shrieking plant and bleeding tree are analogous creations, showing that the idea of a spirit in¬ habiting the plant is more modern than the idea of the plant as a spiritized whole. The bush-soul is another mat¬ ter. In this conception a human being unites his soul with something in the Hush’ (forest), a shrub or branch, be¬ lieving himself secure so long as the sacred repository is preserved intact. This is a very common notion and has no connection with totemism, though the soul may be united with either animal or plant.

In India, tree-marriages are common. The wife who otherwise would get the evil result of a third marriage on the part of her husband thus casts the evil on the tree substitute, she herself becoming the fourth wife. This is a modern survival of a more general custom, according to which a tree7 was actually wedded to a human being, as being a similar anthropopathic creature. Thus, in the Hindu epic, a woman who wants children embraces a tree. The same epic treats the trees as sentient beings having

7 The wedding of the tulsi plant to the stone shalagrama is a religions mystery, in which the plant represents a human bride and the stone a divine bridegroom.

24

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

volition, though elsewhere they are regarded not as them¬ selves holy beings but as abodes of spirits. This latter was the rationalized Buddhistic belief, namely, that trees were not, as the Brahmans taught, living beings, but homes of spirits called dryads, described as “goddesses born in trees and to be worshipped by those wishing to have chil¬ dren.” Here, as in Northern Europe, the tree inverted (its roots above in heaven) is the divine Tree of Life and whoso worships it worships God. A tree alone in a vil¬ lage is an object of veneration everywhere, but some are especially to be worshipped either because of their useful¬ ness or because the rustling of their leaves is believed to be a divine, oracular voice, or the sound shows that spirits whisper there. Every leaf of the pipal (which is wor¬ shipped as the abode of Vishnu) houses a god, though it is. possible that a belief in it as a totem may have strengthened its divinity, as is the case with the nim tree. Probably the veneration of many trees and plants arises from their medicinal (magical) power, as is the case with the tulsi plant sacred to Vishnu. Shiva is incorporate in the sandal-wood tree as well as identified with the world-tree of life.8

The most important element in all the Indian data is the belief in the vital power of the tree itself (not the

s The Yggdrasil, or tree of Odin and of life, had one root in the sky, one in giant-land, and one in the under-world. The Hindu tree of life roots in heaven and its head is this life below. When the Vedic poet asks from what tree (wood) the world was fashioned, he may mean material, vXtj. In Japan, the world tree, the tree of heaven, and the tree of im¬ mortality are united into one. In the Genesis story, the tree of life is identical with the tree of knowledge, in that the divine fruit imparts divine attributes of either kind. It may be remarked that the so-called “tree of knowledge’’ of the Buddhists, the Bo-tree, is not a tree imparting knowl¬ edge but merely the tree under which Gotama (Buddha) chanced to sit when he acquired perfect knowledge or wisdom. Also the famous aJcshaya- vata of Gaya was not primarily an “indestructible banyan,” as understood nowadays, but a tree which makes indestructible the offerings to the Manes.

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 25

tree-spirit) as revealed in the tree-marriage, which shows that the woman marrying a tree draws to herself its very life. The tree is thus in itself the productive power and fertilizing strength emanates from it. It is for this rea¬ son that the spiritual or vital power of rebirth and re¬ production is connected with the May-tree and for the same reason women and goddesses in childbirth cling to trees, as depicted in Greece and India.9 Incidentally, the persistent belief in metempsychosis of a sort in such folk¬ lore as “out of her breast there grew a rose,” etc., im¬ plies that the victim grows up again as a plant ; the rose is the girl herself.

Whether wood-spirits are kind or not depends on cir¬ cumstances. The Finns regard them as gentle; they call the forest-spirit “gentle god of the wood” and give him the “honey goddess” as wife. The Amerinds ’ spirit was ferocious, like themselves, a cruel demon, and the Rus¬ sian forest deity was brutal and misleading, though this type appears also in Sweden and Japan, while in Switzer¬ land the wood-spirits are tricky rather than cruel, steal¬ ing milk and children, yet recovering for man the cow he has lost.

So far as is possible we may attempt a progressive se¬ ries by following the social advance as conditioned by economic facts. We have seen that as Brahmanism pre¬ cedes Buddhism, so the older Brahman cult of the tree as a spirit-entity precedes the Buddhist belief in hamadryad and dryad. Later than tree-cult in general is plant-cult, as the fear of the jungle-power precedes the worship of plants and grains. The Patagonian, who has no notion of a spirit of vegetation, worships the tree alone. The more

9 For the same reason a pregnant woman worships a Sharni tree, in which lives the Shakti or essential power of the Fire-god, a common rite today, the worship consisting in offerings and a light, with quadruple circumam- bulation, which ensures to the embryo protection and heat.

26

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

advanced Mexican recognizes the same spirit which was worshipped by the Egyptians and Semites, the vegeta¬ tion-spirit, as a great power of nature, probably the Mother. In India so marked was the cult of trees that the Greeks said: “ These Indians worship especially trees”; withal long after the deities of garden and grain had a rival cult. Probably the peeled rods before Japanese tem¬ ples revert to a similar cult of trees, as in Europe a similar use of stalks and peeled rods symbolized just this, a fact we are apt to forget, as we forget how recent is the observance. Our forefathers in Europe only a few centu¬ ries ago were worshipping stones, tombs, plants, trees, springs, rivers, and mountains, not to speak of cows and birds, as objects of their reverence. Traces of this still remain in popular rites. In particular, it was not till long after the advent of Christianity that the reverence paid to trees diminished. The Norsemen derived the first men from trees,10 and, later, worshipped tree-born gods. In India, the Creator was born of a lotus and the tulsi is only one of a host of plants originally divine and then associated with higher divinity, as an asliera stands be¬ side a shrine, the old god becoming a symbol of the new. “He who dwelt in the bush” mav have been, like Zeus in the oak, a later god inhabiting an older, as the sycamore- gods of Egypt preserved the still more ancient divinity of the tree. The “talking (oracular) tree” of Grecian and Persian myth is reflected in the tree of soothsayers (Judges 9:37; see the revised version) ; we may compare the divining rod, virgula divina.

The cult of trees, however, is not universal. China is without it even in the attenuated form of cultivating deities living beside trees. It has only the borrowed myth of the tree of life. Nor is tree-cult, even in tree-worship-

This myth is found among the Sioux Indians as ■well as among the Greeks and Persians.

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 27

ping countries, as widespread and fundamental as some scholars would have us believe. Not all the great gods of antiquity originate from plants and trees, neither Mars nor Apollo, for example, though the first has been called a vegetal god and the second has been explained as a deified apple. Even among the Semites, who worshipped trees very generally, a god’s tree was the tree where the god chanced to live, so that the cypress, for example, was holy to different gods. The great gods of Babylon, of Greece, of Germany, of India, are not of vegetal origin, nor were Osiris and Adonis trees but spirits of vegeta¬ tion, which is another matter. Half a dozen references occur in the Old Testament showing a belief in prophetic and sacred trees j11 but data indicating that the origin of the Hebrew Yahweh is to be found in a female date-palm, even with the analogies drawn from other Semitic sources, are not sufficient to corroborate this striking suggestion. In Siam there is a pretty superstition con¬ nected with the tree-spirit. The house-spirit is an inde¬ pendent entity living in the peak of the house and pro¬ tecting its inmates. But also the spirit of the tree is kindly and when the tree is cut down to make a house, this spirit still lives in the planks shaped from the tree and thence watches over the family. Many plants shaped like parts of a body or looking like a body are used as drugs simply because they oppose disease-demons, being themselves spiritual powers (suggested by the shape), one devil thus offsetting another.

Plants or grains yielding an intoxicant have generally been deified, as in India, Persia, and Mexico. The Soma, or Horn, plant, which produces intoxication, is thus re¬ garded as a divine power. Both in India and Persia the worship of this plant was enhanced by accepting it as

11 Compare 1 Sam. 14: 2, and 22: 6; 2 Sam. 5: 24; Ex. 3: 4.

28

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

identical with the moon, to which it bore a resemblance in color, in swelling, and as an exliilarant. It thus really passed into another sphere and became a god of light, power, and truth, a warrior spirit of the sky, with ac¬ credited battles and amours. A religious drinking-bout honored the Hindu god, much as the Amazon Indians had a religious beer-festival celebrated with music and less pleasing effects similar to those of the Hindus. A de¬ graded form of the same tendency leads today in India to the solemn cult of a bottle of whiskey.12 In the later cult of Zoroaster, the Horn became the plant of life, which be¬ stows immortality and gives all highest earthly goods, such as wealth, strength, and wisdom to men, and hus¬ bands to girls. In India eventually only the priests may partake of this mystical divine juice, which is at the same time a plant-product and a god, and only those who par¬ take may be reckoned “gods on earth. ” To drink the dei¬ fied liquor is to become divine ; one absorbs divinity much in the same way as a totem-worsliipper renews power. But other plants, such as millet or maize, in that they give sustenance, are also revered and as among the Semites receive due worship. Plant-totems were thus originally quasi parents in that they gave life. But it does not fol¬ low that corn-mothers and rites of reproduction prove totemism. In the Eiresione festival of the Greeks there is the same propitiation of the spirit of vegetation and ensuing benediction as is found in the harvest-festivals of Northern Europe.

Survivals of the religious importance of trees are mainly confined in Europe to petty or pretty supersti¬ tions in regard to the use of amulets, the May-tree, etc. Rapping on wood three times implies taking protection in the Cross with invocation of the Trinity. The Christ-

12 Oman, The Brahmans, Theists, and Muslirns of India, p. 173.

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 29

mas tree first symbolized the second blossoming of trees in mild winters between the days of St. Martin (our In¬ dian summer) and St. Andrew, November 11 to 30. The celebration, first current in Germany in the seventeenth century, marked a saint ’s miracle in making a summer day in winter ; the tree then had no lights. Later the cele¬ bration was connected with St. Nicholas’s day as Christ’s day. An earlier tree-celebration belonged to the Attis-cult (March 25) ; this tree was decorated.13 In mediaeval plays, the Christmas tree was associated rather with the tree of Paradise, of which it was regarded as a part. The use of incense came from the Orient to Greece and so to Europe a thousand years before Christ. In India, every god has his own preferred and detested incense, so that perfume to one god is stench to another and the many woods from which incense comes are therefore carefully enumerated in Hindu ritualistic works. The primary use of incense may have been apotropaic, to keep off evil spirits; this use becoming ritualized would then have been maintained with altered interpretation, as a service, like the dance ; the gods being pleased with the odor, like the savor of sacrifice, a kind of sublimated food, as is the case with tobacco-offerings. In the Chinese wedding-cere¬ mony incense is still used to drive away evil spirits.

The temple-idea comes to the fore first in the sacred grove, as a home of spirits, and this in turn reverts to the jungle as habitat of mysterious powers. Such formal groves set apart for deities were known, for example, to the Assyrians, Romans, Greeks, and Hindus, whose “ divine woods” and “ groves of the gods” are celebrated

13 The decorated pine-tree of the Attis-cult, however, represented the god himself as lord of vernal vegetation. Although Christmas Day was transferred from March 25 to December 25, the Christmas tree itself does not appear to have been borrowed from this cult. A decorated “tree of victory’ ’ formed part also of a popular Hindu celebration.

30

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OP RELIGION

in the epic. But the grove as temple is even more primi¬ tive than is illustrated by Druidic and classical instances. In Fais, one of the Caroline Islands, the Polynesian god Bongola had no temple, but at certain times he occupied a special grove, where during his visit there was taboo of talking. Tintir, the original name of Babylon, where many tree-spirits were worshipped, is said to mean the “grove of the gods.” Even the Australians kept their re¬ ligious implements in a sacred (taboo) place hidden among rocks or trees, and this form of temple may have preceded god-houses (bethels) and the genuine (Roman) templum idea of an earthly place “cut off ” to correspond to a heavenly region selected by diviners, as it would also have been older than the tomb-temple or edifice raised over a grave.

To our religious sense the idea of resurrection is asso¬ ciated with St. Paul’s appeal to the analogous resurrec¬ tion of grain. All around the Mediterranean and far north in Central Europe this resurrection of plant life had been made the centre of religious ritual long before Paul’s day. The analogy too had been emphasized in the Greek ritual mystery of the resurrection and its divine participants, the Mother-goddess and her daughter, grain, as early as the eighth century B. C., and man had been taught by Orphic wisdom that by participating in these rites he himself might 4 ‘ rise again. ’ ’ The dying god who should rise again was well known to the South, and in the North there were ritual observances to ensure the future life of the corn-mother. Sometimes this is spoken of as the death and resurrection of the year or year- demon ; but it was at bottom not so much the year as the grain and vegetation whose death and resurrection in¬ terested the people. All this is too well known on the European side to treat here in detail ; but it is worth men¬ tioning that we find the same idea of the grain-mother

WORSHIP OF STONES, HILLS, AND PLANTS 31

and her daughter (both divine) in South America. Wher¬ ever agriculture obtains and winter is a deadly influence, these ideas become prominent and have more than once been incorporated in myth, as in the tales of Adonis, Demeter, etc.

CHAPTER III

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

Between man and beast there is, to a savage, only a linguistic difference; in other respects the beast is man’s “younger brother,” as the Hindu calls him, not as he also calls the gods the younger brothers of the demons, but because he recognizes in the animal a being akin to himself, having the same feelings, desires, and needs, but gifted with other speech and other occult powers, which, as in the case of some men, also gifted with superior in¬ telligence, lead a common man to approach the beast with religious respect. The first nature-fakir too is the savage, who publishes accounts of animal intelligence, of beasts consorting with men, of animals as progenitors and creators, of sapient serpents, and of frog-maidens marrying humans. The soul of a man when he is alive and when he is dead is liable to pass into the body of an ani¬ mal, and a god in the same way may inhabit a beast. Finally, a beast may be the ancestor of a clan of men or may, like a plant, as in Australia, develop into man.

Such in brief is the philosophy of animal-worship. Ani¬ mals are worshipped as great living powers and as ghosts, just as men are worshipped, while in addition there is something more mysterious in an animal, powers of strength and cunning to which men cannot attain. The very strong or savage beasts are universally revered for their prowess, the lion in Africa, the tiger in India, the eagle and bear in America, the bear in Yezo. For strength and virility the bull was worshipped in Greece and Egypt ; for their wisdom the Amerind bent in reverence

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

33

before the beavers, who once were men, and all over the world those animals which have provided men with food have been worshipped as givers of life and sustenance, the cow in India, Africa, and Scandinavia, the buffalo in South India, the kangaroo in Australia, etc. Accident is also contributory to the worship of many individual ani¬ mals. Cortez left a sick horse behind him and the beast was deified, offered meat-sacrifice, consequently starved to death, then received a cult and was worshipped as the 4 4 god of thunder. ’ ’ A donkey imported to Africa was re¬ garded by certain tribesmen, who had never seen such a beast, as a wise divinity and consulted as an oracle. Horses were oracular to the early Germans and the Hindu Kunbhis offer them bloody sacrifice. In ancient times horses were themselves sacrificed in India as they are now by the Shamans, who hold that they carry up the soul. The cat and dog are worshipped in India, but for different reasons. The cat is the vehicle of a birth-demon, and the dog is the vehicle of a god, but the latter animal is revered also because it is connected with the spirits (which in turn are connected with the moon at which the dog bays) and because it is a house-protector, not only from thieves but from spirits. As connected with spirits it has become the Slavic guardian of the departing soul, for which reason in Tibet the bodies of the dead are given to dogs to eat. Further, as an animal 4 4 useful when alive and not very good to eat when dead” the dog was quite recently chosen as the 4 4 totem” of the Bengal Bauris.1 The dog has in individual instances frequently

1 Crooke, op cit., II, p. 222, explains the divinity of the dog on the para¬ doxical grounds advanced by Campbell, who thinks that dogs are wor¬ shipped because they kill men. For the dog as a psychopomp, compare the “bitch of heaven,” Sarama (Hermes?) and, perhaps of cognate import, Kerberos, the dog of hell or of death, in Greece and India. This points to an early exposure of corpses, eaten by dogs. Hekate had originally a bitch’s head. See Paton, Spiritism and the Cult of the Dead in Antiquity, p. 123.

34

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

been deified in India. For example, in Bangalore there is the tomb and shrine of a Raja’s pet dog, which served him so well that after death the Raja established a cult for it, with priests paid to keep up the service in its honor. Ordinarily, however, the Hindu regards the dog as impure owing to its intercourse with spirits.2 A good deal has been made of the Hindu epic story of the hero who refused to enter heaven without his dog, but this is a late feature (he has no dog till the moment of his ascent to heaven) and the dog is only an apparitional form of a god. Some of the Amerinds derived from a dog and a woman, but they sacrificed dogs, as their dearest posses¬ sions, to honor a guest.

A savage does not take sides in animal feuds. An Afri¬ can worships impartially the goat and its enemy, as the Amerind worshipped the good spirit and the evil spirit, the goat’s foe, because he deprecates its rage; the goat, because it gives him food and because also it shivers un¬ cannily (so a shivering tree is worshipped).

Among birds, the goose was taboo to the Briton and worshipped by the Romans; the dove was holy to Mexi¬ cans and Semites ; the eagle was revered by some Arabs and Amerinds (sometimes as creator) ; the owl, holy to the Germans, was worshipped by Africans and Amerinds, who offered tobacco to it. The goose or swan received in India a double honor. It was the totem of extra-Indic tribes and by Hindu philosophers was taken as a type of soul and god. The philosophers did not take the totem of a wild Hansa clan as the emblem of the divine, as some ethnologists say, but invented it independently, not be¬ lieving that the bird was an ancestor of theirs but that its lone and lofty flight typified an elevated spirit.

Of beast and bird form are the human-faced gods of

2 Unclean animals are usually those possessed by or representing spirit¬ ual powers, more particularly ghosts, such as the unclean animals of Greek

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

35

beastly shape and human-shaped gods of beastly face, centaurs, Assyrian lions, the pantheon of Egypt, Baby¬ lonian demons of similar character, the Holy Turtle and Grandfather Snake of the Amerinds, etc. Not sirens, for they are winged souls. In India, crows are real sirens, that is, reincorporated souls of men. Perhaps in classical antiquity they owed their quasi divinity as associates of Apollo in divination to the same belief, that they were re¬ born human souls. The great departed Fathers used to help Hindu warriors in this form, coming as birds to the battle-field and fanning their hot faces with cooling wings.

Among fishes, holy to the Syrians, the shark is most widely revered in the Pacific, obviously because it is most feared. Some savages derive from fish, as others come from frogs, turtles, crocodiles, snakes, and insects ; but the resultant totemic worship is confined to the descend¬ ants and is independent of peculiar attributes in the an¬ cestors. Some of the fish-stories connecting men and fishes may be totemic but this is not to be assumed off¬ hand. The Hindu Noah called Father Manu was saved from the deluge by a fish and the modern totem-scholar says, “probably a fish-totem. ” But the historian will point out that in the original story a grateful fish, not alluded to as ancestor but explained as a fish that had once been saved from death by Manu, in turn saved Manu from death. Then when Brahman had become a great god the story was fastened on him; he was the savior “in fish-form,” until Vishnu superseded Brahman, when in turn Vishnu became the god in fish-form. So the story re¬ mains to the glory of Vishnu till the totem-hunter refers it to a totem-god, though the Aryan Hindus had no totems and there is no hint in the original story that the

and Hebrew; in the latter case the implication is that the cult inimical to the Yahweh cult is represented by the animal.

36

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

fish was connected with Mann in any way except by ties of gratitude. Other fish-stories have a quasi religious in¬ terest. Thus there is the Hindu fish that swallows a man or swallows a woman or swallows a man and his boat. One of these Hindu fishes swallows a merchant, who is found alive in his belly.3 Nearly all the fish-totemism in India is connected with eels as totems, not of Aryans but of the Wild Tribes, but pretended totemism abounds. Thus there is a delightful tale about Kliwaja Khizr, who is called “a sort of totem’ ’ of the Shiah Mohammedans. He was a Mohammedan saint who had charge of the wa¬ ter of immortality and so in Bengal he became a water- god and has recently been adopted as the “ totem” of a sect, a good illustration of the loose way the unliistorical ethnologist cites evidence of totemism. In ancient days the Aryans had no divine fishes. At present certain fishes are holy because connected with divinities revered at the bathing-places where the fishes live beside the god, just as in Greece the sacred fishes got their sacredness from their sacred habitat, not because they were totems. The only really divine water-animal in India is the crocodile, which shows no trace of totemism and is now revered because he is connected with a god, originally because he was feared. As water repels evil spirits, so fishes, because of their water-nature, when painted on the wall, guard in India against demons.

Serpents are among the earliest and most widely wor¬ shipped creatures. No one who has seen a boa constrictor, a cobra, a python, or a rattlesnake can question that such a being would be the object of devout regard on the part of any man who worshipped any animal. But any snake’s beauty, sinuous motion, mysterious habits, power of fas¬ cination, its association with tombs and trees, at the roots of which it is apt to live, its suggestive shape, are enough

3 Crooke, op. cit., II, pp. 253 f.

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

37

to make it respected as a being having occult and obscene powers. Its abode and cunning give it a reputation for wisdom; its wisdom helps its reputation for evil; its hole makes it a guardian of treasure; and when it is honored with a temple, where treasure is stored, this reputation is increased. Because it lives about the altar and the house, where it gets food, and perhaps especially because it lives in tombs, it is regarded as the reembodied spirit of the dead, coming up out of the under-world for its meals. Aeneas regarded the serpent at the altar as the local genius of the place or the spirit of his father. The old Germans thought that snakes and mice, also coming out of the ground, were peculiarly apt to be re¬ incarnated spirits. The Pied Piper and the Bishop of Hatto had to deal with such spirits. The Hindu today gives his house-snake its daily meal of milk, believing it may be his ancestor in new form. The Lithuanians wor¬ shipped and sacrificed to the house-snakes as relatives and guardians. Mythologically, the lightning appears as the snake of the sky and dragon serpents oppose the gods of right and order in Babylon and India. The Scandina¬ vian Midgard-snake was of similar nature, as were the Semitic snakes, which represented, like the Egyptian Apep, unfriendly powers of nature. The sapient serpent of Eden, which had legs (the Hindu says that only a snake can see a snake’s legs), combines wisdom and enmity to man. The Hebrews worshipped serpents down to the days of Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4). A totemic origin may ex¬ plain the Indian dragon-serpent Nagas, probably of Dra- vidian or Mongolian extraction. They have a friendly human nature. Chinese dragon-worship is a survival of serpent-worship. The wisdom of the snake makes it the protecting genius of the physician in Greece and the pre- Apollo oracle, as it is a prophetic genius elsewhere. The Africans worship snakes ; the Amerinds, particularly

38

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Mexicans, both worshipped the snake itself and exalted it into a deity. Tobacco was offered to the rattler, which (says Henry in his Travels) “really received it with pleasure”; the snake was called “grandfather” by the Amerinds, who besought it to take care of their families. The snake’s supposed power of healing, one side of its. wisdom, led to its becoming emblematic of life and re¬ production, more especially as it was connected with other phases of life in its association with trees as spirits of productivity and with the sun, an aspect prominent in Hindu sun-worship and Naga-cult. All this led to tree- and-serpent worship, which, though overemphasized by early observers, is really connected with the sun-cult and phallic worship. Fergusson, in his work on this subject, imagines that Hindu snake-worship is Turanian and Buddhistic as opposed to Brahmanism and Shivaism, but there are no cogent reasons to support this view. Sun-worship and serpent-worship may have been united as early as ‘heliolithic’ culture.4

There is an extravagance in India called 4 i snake-love, ’ ’ which has been given a mystic religious interpretation still more extravagant. But the matter is perfectly sim¬ ple. A snake-charmer must endure the bite of a poisonous snake. He does not extract the poison but accustoms him¬ self to it by taking larger doses from time to time till the bite ceases to affect him. He even learns to depend on his daily “dope” like an opium or hashish victim and his love for the poison explains “snake-love.” Among Mexicans and our northern Indians a religious observ¬ ance seems to be connected with the “mound snake,” probably a parallel to the “furrow-snake” of Dravidian

4 Serpent-worship is one of the elements ascribed by Elliot Smith to the first worship of the sun and the erection of megaliths, which elements, he thinks, were carried from Asia to America, along with the svastika, tattoo¬ ing, couvade, and mummification.

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

39

villages, which are thus protected. The flying serpent was a form of storm or wind god among the Aztecs, obviously due to the shape of the storm. Myths connected with snakes are not illuminating as to the character of ser¬ pent-worship. They are of great variety, some the result of quite modern interpretation, as when the beach-marks on the Adirondack coast made by trilobites are explained by the present inhabitants as tracks of the serpent of Eden.

Although insects as well as reptiles are worshipped, the attitude toward them is as of one but half believing in the power of the divinity. But ants in India are really worshipped and offerings are made to them to induce them to answer prayer and send blessings, such as chil¬ dren. Locusts, too, are taken seriously. A peasant will catch one and tell it to go in safety and inform its com¬ panions how well it has been treated, so that other locusts may spare his field, as he has spared their representative. The grasshopper has no mantic reputation in India as he had among the Greeks. Insects and vermin derive at times a respect rather than worship from being imagined as reembodied souls of human beings. But in Buddhistic and Jain circles, what prevents a man from killing ver¬ min is only his interpretation of the rule “do as you would be done by,” not the fear of killing his relatives.

The worship of animals is embodied in totemism. Early records show that animals used as a food supply were regarded as sacred ; the life-giver of a clan was the clan’s parent. The clan, after eating its parent, regularly reaches a point where it eats the life-giver only on special occasions, when the clan-tie is renewed by this physical communion, and finally the totem becomes so sacred that it is not eaten at all, the clan nourishing itself on other sustenance. In all these stages the totem-animal is only a revered brother or ancestor, not exactly a divinity. An-

40

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

tliropomorphism (a figure on the totem-pole) and the feeling that the totem has the same needs and feelings as man, go far to intensify the belief in kinship between the growing “divinity” and mere man. The totem differs from the fetish in being the object of a clan-cult, not the god of an individual. Decadent forms of totemism are where the term is applied to the relation existing between an individual and the imagined protective animal seen in a dream and accepted as a tutelary animal. Numerous other distortions of simple totemism pass under the same name and some scholars have even thought that totemism was once the aboriginal universal form of religion. But in fact totemism in its real form, where a human clan is akin to an animal-clan regarded as quasi divine, is far from universal. It belongs to a hunting stage of life and, as taboo is most pronounced in an agricultural stage, it is not apt to prevail where taboo is most pronounced, as in Polynesia. Plants as food-givers have also been regarded as totems. Exogamy had originally no direct or neces- sarv connection with totemism. Sacred crests are found without totemism and do not necessarily imply it, any more than do other observances implying respect for animals. The true totem as an object of special re¬ gard or worship is a being part human and part divine. Although the grotesque creatures thus represented are more beastly than godlike, yet the totem-beast has a peculiar religious interest in that it is a primitive at¬ tempt to embody the conception of a power somewhat more than man spiritually (powerfully), yet not alien to man, a rude prototype of the god-man; as his wor¬ shippers, through communion with him, were raised to kinship with the divine or superhuman.

Probably a direct reverence for the animal led in Egypt to the strange animal-god depicted as cat or hippopota¬ mus with human attributes and it may have been some

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

41

sort of totemic relationship with man which gave such an animal its human aspect. But it is also possible, as the cat and hippopotamus are not represented as ancestors of clans, that the human shape was no more than the embodi¬ ment of an attempt to make the animal human, much as the old gods representing sky and storm in India and Ger¬ many were better realized under the aspect of giants and finally of quite antliropopathic beings. Indra in India and Zeus and Thor were superhuman, but they were quite human in their feelings and lives, exalted but subject to anger, love, etc., and living a life of battle and feasting, having wives, children, and retainers. A certain gro¬ tesqueness often indicates merely the human admirer’s wish to exhibit superhuman power. Thus the many¬ breasted Artemis and the many-armed Shiva are the re¬ sult of trying to express superhuman powers. The Louvre has a picture by Rubens in which the same idea of spe¬ cial fecundity is presented by a many-breasted female. These distorted types were early Greek but late Hindu forms, though in India the literary imagination, earlier than the plastic arts, had already invested the gods with many members, such as the sun-god with his thousand arms, drawn, so to speak, from nature.

There is also another kind of symbolism which is a real factor in religion. As in Arabia clouds are “camels,” so in India they are the “red cows” of dawn; the sun is a red horse, also an eagle, the “swift bird” of the sky, as the Zulus call the lightning, which in India is a snake; while in India and America wind is a bird or caused by a bird’s wings. The Mexican pantheon is one third a divine menagerie of animal forms, such as the winged snake. Eclipse to the ancient Germans was a wolf de¬ vouring sun and moon; in India, the original “seizer” (eclipse-demon) has today become the evil soul of a dead man whose chariot is drawn by eight steeds. The sun

42

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

had seven steeds, horses or deer; the fruitful god of in¬ crease in Germany and India had a car drawn by goats. In all these cases a fancied resemblance associates god and symbol. Speed and coursers, productivity and goats, zigzag lightning and snake-movement, wind and flapping of wings, these are mental parallels. Almost every god in India has an animal representative which typifies him more or less clearly. Even the death-god Yama’s steed, the buffalo, is explicable as a late (not early) associa¬ tion of the god of the South with the beast revered in the South as a quasi divinity. Thus, as there is a close imag¬ ined connection between wisdom and water, as if wisdom were a purified knowledge, the emblem of the god of wa¬ ter and wisdom is a fish, both in Babylon and India. Is it then necessary to suppose that Ea and Varuna were originally fish-gods ? If Varuna has a fish as his symbol, does not the scaly form of Ea point to the fact that the fish (by implication) is rather symbolic than a sign of the god’s original fish-nature? So the god of love in India was born of water, as in Greece, and for this reason has a fish-svmbol, as some fish were sacred to Aphrodite. It is unlikely that both love-divinities were at first fishes. So when Brahman rides a swan it is unnecessary to imag¬ ine that Brahman was originally a bird-totem, or that, because Vishnu has a horse’s head, he was at first a horse, rather than that his liorse-form reflects his sun-horse character; or that Shiva, who rides a bull, was originally a bull, and his consort, who rides a lion and tiger, was a beast. In Dahomey, the elephant is a god and a beast not to be eaten because he is so wise; in India, the god of cleverness in later times is given an elephant’s head, ap¬ parently because both the god and the elephant, origi¬ nally worshipped for himself, are useful chiefly in clearing away difficulties. With the god of wisdom goes the rat as symbol and the rat in India plays the role of the clever

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

43

animal; lie is as naturally associated with personified divine cleverness as a red horse is with red fire and a fleet antelope with the wind-god. The wisdom of the rat as a worshipped animal may have associated him with a clever god in India, as in Greece he is associated with Apollo without implying a rat-totem or a rat-soul in either case. In the end the old object of worship becomes a mere symbol of the new god.

Some symbols are not at this late day quite clear. The demon-goddess of smallpox is associated with a donkey because (they say) she withdraws so slowly; but she may have ridden an ass because she comes so quickly (the ass typifies greater speed than the horse). The moon-god has ten horses, perhaps because there were originally ten months. Janus has two faces because he faces both ways, but in India the creator has four, because he sees on every side and represents the four quarters ; so four elephant- gods represent space. In Africa likewise there is a hill- god with four faces representing “air” (space), to whom four times a year a baby is sacrificed, its flesh being buried in the earth, for the African god is earthly and hence is also represented as a snake (so our Indians had an earth-snake) and as such, a reproductive power, it ap¬ pears with the legs of a goat. Yet at bottom it is only four¬ faced space, air and earth as a whole, to which, as four winds, the Amerinds offered their first whiffs of tobacco.

Symbolism lies on the surface in a four-faced god ; but just as obvious is the symbolism of many legs and arms to indicate more than usual power and in the same way the association of god and animal reverts to an obvious connection between them. It is not because an owl is a totem that to eat an owl’s eye imparts superhuman eye¬ sight in India, but because the owl (an evil night-bird in Babylonia) sees in the dark. To the Amerinds that same owl, because it sees in the dark and is of preternatural

44

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

solemnity, was a bird of wisdom even “wiser than the bea¬ ver,” Parkman says. Why, then, when the owl is associ¬ ated with Athene, must we believe that it is the original Athene? The owl was wise, hence divine, and as such associated with the wise goddess. Savage and barbarian, working out their conception of divinity, give what they can to indicate power and cleverness more than mortal. They succeed pretty well. Extra arms and feet; bull- form and goat-form for virility; wings for flight; a thou¬ sand eyes for sight, etc. To represent gods as mere men would be profane, as mere animals would be meaningless. As divine animals (and there are many such) are repre¬ sented as having human attributes, so divinities not of animal origin are represented as having that which indi¬ cates their powers.

There are, however, many doubtful cases. The goddess of love could have no more fitting symbol (as pure sym¬ bol) than a pair of turtle doves; but Syrian doves were worshipped in their own right and may therefore have been associated with her, as owls were probably wor¬ shipped before they represented Athene. Yet in the light of comparative religious tendencies it is just possible that the owl itself was a mere symbol, as we find svmbols among savages. Thus the African garden-god, Orislia Oko, representing fertility with a phallic emblem, has honey-bees as messengers, a crude but natural symbol, and Aroni, a one-legged forest-god, has a dog’s head, because he is half inclined to run after those who meet him and devour them, but (as in India) if one is brave one escapes. In the same environment, the Yoruba Af¬ rican country, the sea-goddess has a scaly form and long hair (mermaid style). The lowest savages thus express ideas symbolically. There was a time when sym¬ bolism ran mad and much nonsense was said in defense thereof. Now the tide has turned and scholars hesitate to

THE WORSHIP OF ANIMALS

45

see symbolism anywhere. Every symbol is the relic of a lost cult or god. But really there is such a thing as reli¬ gious symbolism and we do not have to wait for the sick fancy of civilization to find it. The jackal that haunts a cemetery becomes a jackal-human god; the bull, wor¬ shipped for itself, becomes associated with a Zeus who was never a bull; but the “ swift steed of the sun” was never anything but a symbol and the Lamb of God and sacred Fish do not represent animals but ideas.5

The lamb was the sacrificial animal, but as applied to Christ it merely symbolized him as the sacrifice. So the dove of peace became a mere symbol of peace and love, though originally a goddess of maternity. Some artistic attributes remain to us as a heritage of old belief. The horns of Moses represent magical power ; the halo of the saint represents the cloud surrounding divinity (rather than the protective plate over Greek statues), etc. The application of symbolism is as common outside of reli¬ gion as within; a knife beneath the pillow is for bravery; the white feather, for cowardice ; honey, for sweet speech, etc. In religion, symbolism is a help and a hindrance. It provides a sign for an idea and is useful in recalling the idea. But when, instead of recalling, it replaces the idea, it becomes a menace. The witless Yogin who gazes for¬ ever at the sky, or holds the nails against the palm till the hand is pierced, is only the empty-headed conserver of noble symbols whose meaning he has lost.6

5 The fish-symbol has been explained by Pischel as a relic of Hindu fish-worship, which is highly improbable; it is more likely to hare come from Egypt. The fish symbolizes immortality as a power oyerriding death (watery chaos). The connection with ichthys as representing Iesos Christos Theou (h) T7ios Soter (son of God, Sayior) was an ingenious utilization of the Greek word.

6 A word here as to the symbol of the cross. It represents an historical incident only. The fact that the syastika was an ancient symbol of good luck and that it sometimes appeared as a cross is a mere accident. As a

46

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

symbol the svastika was known in Egypt, common in Buddhism, and found in the Far East and in America. It is apparently not known to early India; but it is earlier than the triskelion sign and the interpretation of its two forms as right and left (or male and female) symbols seems also to be late. Elliot Smith’s idea that it was peculiarly Egyptian (thence conveyed to South America) is opposed to the fact that the svastika is found in Germany, Scandinavia, and the Swiss Lake Dwellings, as well as in Great Britain and North America. Compare R. C. Temple in the Journal of the Anthropological Society of Bombay, listed with other articles on the gvastika in the exhaustive essay of Thomas Wilson in the United States National Museum Report, 1894. The Om, sacred syllable of India, has been interpreted as a svastika by Mr. II. N. Deb (1921), on the basis of the early form of the letter O.

CHAPTER IV

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS AND HEAVENLY PHENOMENA

Long before the four or five1 elements were recognized as snch they were worshipped as natural powers. Water is worshipped in springs and streams by the savages of Africa and a river-cult is known to the Mongolians. Water washes away evil, disease, and old age; whence arose the idea that there was somewhere a fountain of youth or of immortality, the antithesis of which later was known as the (Hindu) “ river of death. ” Magically, water is like fire in that evil spirits will not cross it. Water cleanses mentally. The Mimir spring (of wisdom) in Germany; Ea, god of water and wisdom in Babylon; Varuna, the “wise” god of water in India, are illustrations. Water cleanses morally. Baptism was practiced in Babylon. Re¬ ligious use of water is prominent in the cult of the Amer¬ inds. The Creeks bathed annually, after purging and fasting, to “wash out the sins of the year.” The Califor¬ nia sweat-bath removed ill and evil (in India this is merely a physical remedy). Strength returns after the bath; power is renewed by means of the water, whose divine power is absorbed through immersion. Hence, sprinkling with water kept off evil, thought of as demon, even in the rites of Polynesians, Hindus, etc., of which general belief our Christian baptism is a final expres¬ sion, derived from Judaism. Compare the baptism of the proselyte and “bathing in Jordan.” As a divine sen¬ tient power water, like fire, will not harm the innocent.

1 In India space (aether) was a fifth element.

48

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

In early Vedic lore tlie Beas River cast out (saved) the saint Vasishtha, because he was innocent, but usually the notion is that pure water will regurgitate and, so to speak, spit out the impure man, which leads to the deadly ordeal preserved to our own day in the trial of witches. Survivals of the belief in water-purity may be found in present-day symbolism. In India, the hands are washed before a present is accepted, to show that the recipient is not taking a bribe (“to take with oiled hands” is to ac¬ cept a bribe). Mourners often avoid washing lest the death-power infecting them infect the stream. One swears by water (stream or well) and at the same time sips it or takes it into the hand. Curse-water is potent to injure ; as a divine power it even dries up grain and clouds.2 Water as the source of life and strength is the birthplace of eager desire (love is born of water) and Kama, Love, as “water-born” reflects in late Hindu mythology the Rig- Vedic declaration that desire, the seed of mind, was the first offspring of the primeval waters.

Now, although advanced savage types, like the Mon¬ golians, imagine that the stream has a spirit in it, and this interpretation is of course common in the modern fancy of maids in springs, nymphs, mermaids, and the sea-god, yet the more primitive savage, like the Ainu, thinks of the stream itself as being angry and revengeful, just as hail (not a spirit of hail) is averted by a Hindu peasant’s knife, with the idea that hail itself will be afraid.3 So the Pacific Islander’s “hymn to rain” is clearly not to any rain-demon in the downpour but to the

2 Later the curse- and ordeal-water becomes (as does fire) a mere in¬ strument in the hands of a higher divinity, as in India, the Old Testament, New England witch-trials, etc.

3 Crooke points out that the blood-sacrifice to hail is made in Kumaon today, as of old in Argolis. A rain-god may not be a god born of rain but a god who sees to it that rain comes as part of his general beneficence.

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS

49

physical drops ; ocean is itself a fearful entity before an ocean-spirit exists. Greek Arethousa means merely the “flowing” stream till it becomes a river-goddess. A simi¬ lar form in India becomes the goddess of fluency. The Kaffirs sacrifice grain and animals to rivers as to poten¬ cies. The nymph, like the dryad, is a later phase.

Water and air (wind) go together in the worship of storm-winds. Saussaye denies that wind per se was ever divine, but this is an error. Homer’s Winds are godlings. Not only as wind-spirit, but as the blowing wind itself, wind has been worshipped by Hindus and Eskimos, to give only two examples. “Hurricane” was a personified storm-wind and Yata in India was not the spirit in the wind but the wind itself personified, anthropomorphized, as was inevitable. Thunder is always taken as the voice of a god who is the storm (“"Who doubtetli Indra when he hears him thunder?”). The sweeping storm-winds called Maruts in the Veda are worshipped with Indra as raging powers, now eagles, now warriors, in poetic metaphor, but always as gods identical with the natural phenomena they really are, and also- as protecting tutelary deities to the devout, like cherubim. In this, as in similar cases, man treats phenomena as he would treat intelligent men, humors or coerces, placates or fears. If a man is drown¬ ing, to help him would be to affront the river ; wise men let him drown to avoid a similar fate. This attitude is found both in cases where the river is an intelligent be¬ ing and where there is a river-spirit. The four winds rep¬ resenting space as a whole, as has already been shown, are divine powers.

Fire-worship, which reached its highest point in an- / cient Persia, is part of sun-worship in Mexico and sun and fire are recognized as one even by savages, while lightning soon becomes, as in ancient India, a third in this early triad. But probably fire-worship precedes sun-wor-

50

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

ship everywhere, as it does in Rome. Magic has much to do with tire, but like water, tire is purificatory and re¬ mains in religion as well as in magic. Man must have looked on fire first as a wild animal full of dangers to man. Long before he paid any attention to sun and moon, he feared and cultivated fire, a house-friend as well as a destructive force. All over the world he built special receptacles for it and gave care to its preservation. In at least three ancient communities were instituted vestal virgins whose primary care was to tend the fire. Formal vestals were known to Romans, Peruvians, and Kelts; but also among the Damaras, a tribe so low as to be un¬ able to count above three, the chief’s daughters are set to watch the sacred fire, to which, as to rain, they offer sacrifice. The extinction of a public fire is a public ca¬ lamity and those responsible for it are slain. But if pol¬ luted or formally extinguished, as at certain seasons is the case among the Muskhogean Indians, it is solemnly relighted at a feast of first-fruits. In America, the wor¬ ship of fire and sun go together and it is sometimes im¬ possible to distinguish the two cults. The Potawotamis, “fire-makers,” for example, were devotees of both fire and sun, and kept up an undying fire worshipped as sun- fire. Fire is an excellent example of a phenomenon wor¬ shipped per se without implication of a spirit in it. Even the civilized Yedic Aryans regard the actual leaping fire as a living thing swallowing oblations, while acting also as messenger to the heavenly gods. They do not pray to a spirit of fire but to fire itself conceived in priestly fashion but still phenomenal, a divine creature instinct with life and power. Centuries afterwards, this Fire as divinity is human enough to fight battles as a warrior, dally amorously with kings’ daughters, play tricks, etc., like a Greek god, till finally he becomes a goat, a produc¬ tive, faunlike creature; for heat and love are then for-

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS

51

rnally recognized as liis forms, the fire of fever and of digestion being also phases of the Fire-god. Like water in that it purifies, fire becomes a moral power and finds out sinners in ordeals (walking through fire, over hot plates, etc.) ; it is in India the type of purity. Perhaps as coming from heaven it is especially divine, for in most mythologies, such as those of India and Greece and of the Amerinds, it is brought to man from heaven, but it does not need a heavenly origin to make it worshipful. It is not merely as “a symbol of the Supreme God” that fire speaks and is worshipped in the Avesta, but as phe¬ nomenon conceived as a divine being.4

The worship of atmospheric and heavenly phenomena is more primitive than is often admitted. Among the Hill Tribes of India are found the personification and worship of Rainbow, who to Homer is a divine messenger but to classical Hindu mythology is Indra’s how (it is a god’s bow to the Polynesians also) or a swing. Even in the Rig-Veda a poet sings about his having mounted upon the heavenly swing. But in modern India and in Africa (Dahomey), the rainbow is a celestial snake, which has led to the suggestion that treasure found at the foot of the rainbow may be a serpent’s hoard. In the Pacific, Morileu Islands, the Rainbow is a powerful god, a fact which makes it unnecessary to imagine Iris as originally a plant. By the same token, the deification of Dawn by savages makes somewhat strained Herbert Spencer’s ex¬ planation of the Yedic Dawn-goddess as the ghost of a former Miss Dawn. In this category, the weakness of animism and ghostism (if, for clearness, the word may be pardoned) as universal solvents of religion becomes pain¬ fully apparent. No one who reads the Rig-Veda impar-

4 In the Eig-Veda, Fire is father of man, but from beginning to end of Hindu mythology he is both element and god. On his role as mediator and member of a triad (trinity), see below, chapter XVTI.

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

52

tiallv can question for a moment that Fire and Dawn and Wind were phenomenal gods from the beginning, and a wider outlook only confirms this fact. Atmospheric phe¬ nomena are worshipped all over the world in and for themselves, just as earthly objects are worshipped. Clouds and storm and rainbow and dawn are real beings to savages and as such they have life and power and volition and are deprecated, cajoled, worshipped, just as sun and stars and moon are divine powers to such savages as have anything to do with beings so remote. Not all savages, for though all are buffeted by storm it takes a certain amount of self-interest to call a savage’s atten¬ tion to the sun or moon as of any practical value to him¬ self, and all religious phenomena are fundamentally practical. Man did not sentimentalize over phenomenal powers, did not worship them as beautiful, did not care much for them one wav or another till they forced them- selves upon his attention by becoming pertinent to his life and needs ; but when this happened he took steps at once to bring himself into satisfactory relationship with them.

We have already seen how savages treat rain and hail, which have been discussed too logically as forms of wa¬ ter. As a matter of fact their water-nature has nothing to do with their divinity; they are worshipped as sepa¬ rate powers, fruit-giving, fruit-destroying, worshipped practically. So the Melanesians of New Guinea, who be¬ long to about the lowest stratum of savagery, venerate heavenly bodies, and in 1857 the very savage savages of Danger Island were discovered greeting the Pleiades with religious joy and feasting. The Sabaism of astrolatry has its primitive expression in the occasional worship of stars by savages because these stars are connected with their welfare, bring a harvest, or something of that sort. The Hottentots worship Dawn as bringer of day, and

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS

53

Night, supposed by some scholars to be merely a poetical goddess, is really revered in Bengal by natives who have not inherited the cult from the Vedas. When a savage begins to imagine his past history he is usually logical enough to derive his tribe from some substance or crea¬ ture that by evolution or propagation eventually pro¬ duced the thinker and speculator. Sometimes he specu¬ lates even on the origin of the world and gets far enough to imagine a sky and earth pair, later refined into Sky Father and Earth Mother, bnt such beings in so far as they do not affect him are negligible. This is the reason that creator-gods are not worshipped unless they keep on and do something more important to the savage of to¬ day. So, although Dyaus-Zeus- Jupiter, Father Sky, is about the only certain equation of proto-Aryan myth¬ ology, he was of no special moment in Vedic religion and became important to Greek and Homan only as he became much more than an ancestor. The reason why the Poly¬ nesian sun-god Tane became important is that from be¬ ing a mere “lord of the year,” that is, the sun as creator and timepiece of the year, he took a prominent part in regulating crops, so that he is now a god of vegetation and forests. The gods that get a certain preeminence always tend to expand thus. Unto him who has, shall be given. Tongaloa was the Polynesian god of the ocean; then, because of the affinity between the waters on the earth and those above, in rain and clouds, he became god of the sky ; and then again as lord of sea and sky he be¬ came gradually not only the greatest but the highest god, “having the sun as his eye,” exactly as Varuna, god of water, became god of the sky and also had the sun as his eye.

As the worship of stars may on occasion arise among savages because they are useful to him (or he thinks so, which religiously amounts to the same thing), so among

54

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

higher minds a star-cult is established on the basis of utility from two other points of view. The prior is prob¬ ably (not demonstrably) the view that stars are the souls of ancestors and as such are still actively interested in family affairs on earth. Groups of stars thus at a very early period represent fathers or seers of old; sometimes

constellations are also holv animals. The more erudite

•/

view is that which comes when man begins to notice the regular order of the starry host and to connect the site and movement of stars with earth and himself, born in the templum of earth under the influence of such or such a star. This attitude toward stars is not so early as popu¬ lar histories of civilization represent it. The “ Chaldeans ” and their star-cult are not important historically till the eighth century, B. C., and in Babylon divination by the liver came before that by the stars. Carried to Greece, star-cult received a fresh interpretation which swept the older pantheon into a world of strange light-bodies. Mysticism had its way among the later thinkers of the second century, B. C., till all astrolatrv became more or less a system of magic, profitable but probably not exercised wholly for profit, as the influence of the stars was (as it is still) really believed in by both the enquirer and the dispenser of astral lore. In India, the peasants generally believe that stars are the souls of people, though in ancient times they serve also as soul-worlds, that is, each soul receives a star as its home; but the prevailing belief even then was that stars are souls, and groups of stars are beasts. In the TVest, however, where worship of earthly animals had been given up, their sidereal shapes, lion, bull, fishes, formed a collection of heavenly powers, and were mythologically united with old tales, till out of this museum of natural historv twelve be- came the signs of the zodiac and even the aether in which

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS

55

they moved was worshipped with hymns and sacrifice. Most potent of heavenly bodies were the planets, which revived by their names the cult of Mars, Venus, etc.

These planets, in turn, had each its metal, plant, and stone, potent through them, and they too were worshipped as were, at this time, the elements qua elements, which had already been deified in the East. All the lower spheres were, however, controlled by the upper; and over all reigned the power of fixed order as a determin¬ ing Fate or Necessity; through whose power cycle suc¬ ceeds cycle as a duplication of previous events (deter¬ mined by the stars). Among all these stars and planets Venus was most exalted and formed a triad with sun and moon (copied from the Babylonian cult of Ishtar with Shamash and Sin).

Moon-worship is a trait of African religion and is well known in the oldest religious literature of Egypt, Baby¬ lon, and India. In some cases it is probably older than sun-worship for it belongs more to the hunting stage than to the agricultural, though the moon’s influence on plant- life is also recognized. In India, the moon is “lord of plants” because it is identified with the holy Soma-plant, but the literature of primitive agriculture teems with references to the effect of the moon on the growth of vegetables. In Deuteronomy, the moon is said to bring forth plants like the sun, but, on the other hand, the moon’s evil influence on men appears to be recognized by the Psalmist (121: 6). It is common wisdom to our farm¬ ers that one should “plant by the moon.”5

In magic, the moon is all-important, particularly with women, who naturally pay special respect to the moon.

s Compare the directions given in F. L. Pattee’s House of the Blade Bing. One must plant by the moon; everything that strikes down must be planted when the moon is going down ; but ‘ 1 beans and peas and such truck must be put in when the moon is in the up. ’ ’

56

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Women desiring children prayed to the moon and took vows on the day of the full moon in ancient India and to- day they worship the moon that their children may escape diseases, offering an oblation, and fast on new moon day. The climate has something to do with the relative value of the sun and moon. The sun is more needed in the colder Punjab than in Bengal, where the moon is more wor¬ shipped. The Dravidians worship both sun and moon, while the Khonds regard the sun as the supreme god, though the Sonthals, their relations, worship neither sun nor moon. In Central India, the Kurs set up to both gods columns carved with figures of sun and moon and treat these columns as gods. In India also, as in Southern Australia, moon-phases possess a separate divinity. In Terra del Fuego, the inhabitants desire warmth and so revere the sun, disregarding the moon; in Brazil, both are worshipped. Astrology made the “measurer” (moon) particularly revered. It divides time and in India its twenty-eight days are divided and then sub-divided, mak¬ ing holy moon-days at the “joint-days,” with intervals corresponding to our weekly divisions. Besides other rea¬ sons for revering the moon, it is, in Hindu belief, the place where the spirits of the dead go for a time ; at the new and full moon they are more active.6 But worship of the moon in India took place rather on the new moon day than on the full moon day.

The magic connected with the cult of the moon as a deity of the dead may have hindered its popularity as an object of religious regard, but probably the growth in civilization had a more powerful effect. Except in astrola- try, as a product of astrology, moon-cults are of sec-

6 Our week probably represents a lunar division, though some dispute this; but see Roscher, Die Hcbdomadenlehren, pp. 31 f. On the moon-phases of Osiris, see Frazer, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, pp. 319 f. Sinai may have been named from the moon-god Sin.

THE WORSHIP OF ELEMENTS

r t 01

ondary importance7 and seem to have been left in the hands of women and magicians. Soma-cult gave the moon a purely fictitious religious value in India and in Persia. In civilized communities, worship of the moon wanes rapidly and survives as a dummy for witch-practices and the silly superstitions practiced in India (drinking moon¬ beams, rubbing warts at the time of a waning moon, etc.) and elsewhere. Domestic ceremonies belong to the new moon (national celebrations at the full moon are more for light than for worship), as many of them have to do with sacrifice to the ancestors and the new moon is fateful; in India to look at the August moon brings danger of false accusations, but its fourth day is especially sacred. Even the Buddhists worshipped the new moon.8

7 Sin, moon-god of ITr and Harran, became popular as an old Sumerian ‘ 1 lord of knowledge, ’ ’ but his powers were augmented by astrolatry, apart from which he was, like the Egyptian moon, a sailor, or boat-god, of little importance as compared with the sun ; moon-cult is not prominent in the actual worship. Compare Jastrow, Aspects of Religious Belief in Baby¬ lonia ancl Assyria, p. 114. So Japan had originally an important sun-goddess and a minor male moon-deity. In China the (new) moon-goddess receives a perfunctory worship in autumn as the western deity ( i.e the new moon), antithetic to the sun-god of the east.

8 The moon is goddess in China, Greece, and Rome; god in Egypt, India, and Babylonia. Grammatical gender often determines the sex of the deity.

CHAPTER V

THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN

Several savage tribes that worship the sun have been mentioned in connection with the cult of the moon. The worship of the sun in particular belongs to the Persians, Egyptians, Amerinds, and Dravidians, who regard the sun as a beneficent god. The ancient belief in the efficacy of going with the sun still remains with us in various un¬ considered ways, such as waiting at table and dealing cards, which really reflect a primitive usage preserved in religious rites in India and China and known among the Kelts as “ walking the deazil,” that is going about a sacred object with the right hand toward it.

Classical antiquity gives us little idea of the impor¬ tance of sun-worship, since neither Greek nor Roman laid any stress on it. Even in Homer a very secondary position is occupied by Helios; Apollo gets all the glory. As the Greeks imported Selene and moon-worship from the Semites (the native Greek mind regarded the moon only as of magical value), so the Romans imported the state worship of both moon and sun from the Sabines. Helios received no part of earth till Rhodos was made for him, says Pindar, and this poetical statement is not far wrong for the Aryans of Greece. In India, on the other hand, the sun was worshipped from the earliest period under one form or another and as late as the tenth century of our era there were six flourishing sects of sun-worship¬ pers, though the native cult had been developed partly under Persian influence. In Persia itself, the cult of the sun eventually gave rise to that mystic religion known as

THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN

59

Mithraism, which at one time threatened the success of Christianity. In this, however, as in the Apollo-cult of Greece, there is little or no real sun-worship; a later growth obscured whatever original sun-cult existed. The sun has often been thus elevated to a new position. Even in the seventeenth century, the Mohammedan Akbar at¬ tempted to revive sun-worship, but of course to him the sun was acceptable only as a symbol. What Akbar really tried to do was to make a new religion, taking the old sun-cult as an expression of the belief in one pure god. This is not important for the history of real sun-worship. The same thing was attempted by Amen-hotep IV in Egypt, who violently introduced among his people the worship of the “disc-sun” (Aten-Ra), as a monotheistic or pantheistic improvement on polytheism, perhaps a re¬ finement of the older Southern sun-cult.

Curiously enough, these attempts, which represent a personal predilection and possibly owed their inception to outside influence, are not without a parallel in America, where also the sun attained such divinity that it was taken as type of the Supreme God, though the rational¬ istic theologian who argued out such a divinity was first led to imagine a “god even higher than the sun,” be¬ cause he observed that the sun itself went to its daily task like a menial or like an inanimate arrow shot from a bow; hence there must be a lord of the menial or shooter of the arrow. This too, however, was a momentary and individual expansion of what was otherwise a com¬ plete surrender to the sun-deity, a god exalted by Mexi¬ cans and Peruvians to the highest place, as even the northern Indians almost universally worshipped the same deity. As in Babylon, so in Mexico and Peru, the worship of the sun absorbed other cults. To the Mexican god were offered the most monstrous sacrifices of human beings. The sun here was distinctly the genius of productivity,

60

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

although in Peru the cult was heightened by the political pretensions of the rulers, all of whom were of the solar race.

The sun is distinctly a royal god and besides his power as fertilizer and sustainer he receives added glory as patron or ancestor of the king. So in Egypt the king is identified with Ba, in Babylon the king represents Sha- masli, and in Borne the emperor becomes an incorpora¬ tion of Sol invictus. In the Chaldean system the sun oc- cupied the central position among the seven circles of the universe; the other planets revolved about it; it was the King Sun, the heart of the world, the ruler of elements and seasons, the regulator of the stars, the chief divinity in nature, hence intelligent, not as a spirit in the sun but as being itself the mens mundi.1 Philosophy finally sepa¬ rated the sun from reason and Christianity in the fourth century turned the day of the new sun into the birthday of Christ, while Sunday, as first day, still represents the importance given to the sun in the astrological week.

Instead of becoming the recipient of bloody sacrifices, as god of productivity, the sun is sometimes regarded as a gentle creator, whose work is recognized as that of a preserver and whose cult consists in harmless offerings of vegetables, as is the case with Vishnu, whose disc and three strides betray his solar origin, but who hates bloodshed and violence; or again the sun remains, as a creator whose work is done, a god to whom it is useless to offer any sacrifice. Thus the Khonds of India sav: “In the beginning sun, the great god of light, created a wife, the earth-goddess. He is our chief god; she was the origi- nator of evil. Hence we sacrifice to her and not to him, for it is necessary to placate her alone; he is good, he need not be placated; hence he receives from us no sacrifice,

i Cuinont, Astrology end Religion among the Greeks and Romans, pp. 127 f.

THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN 61

but we recognize him with a spring festival in his honor.” In like manner the Oraons regard the sun as supreme god, but they do not pray to him, “ because he does no harm,” while to evil spirits they make sacrifice, “to placate them.” It is for the same reason, though not generally acknowledged, that there are only one or two temples to Brahman the Creator. His work is done and man wor¬ ships the gods who are active, Vishnu as preserver, Shiva as destroyer.

The fact that such savages as the Khonds worship the sun as good as well as highest god brings up the question of savage ethics. It is doubtful whether any more primi¬ tive ideas exist than those of the Bechuanas of Africa, who worship rain as a beneficent power, or those of the Abipones of Paraguay, who recognize Ananga, a power that might be called either god or devil. He is worshipped and causes sickness, but he also sends wealth. Since even the fetish is a moral power, punishing theft and adul¬ tery, it is unnecessary to argue that the power (called spirit) of the Guana Indians is not native, because he “rewards the good and punishes the wicked.”2 The sun in particular is apt to be esteemed a moral guardian from the fact that he sees all things ; nothing can be hidden from him (or he is the eye of heaven) ; he is watcher as well as purifier and renovator. In Egypt, the sun-god is the first moral guardian of the world.

The progress in sun-worship may be illustrated by two sun-hymns found in the literature of India. The first dates back to the earliest period (though that was already civilized) and represents the sun as a material but divine body instinct with power, a measurer of time, an observer of man’s acts, also as eye of the Heaven-god: “Up now bis beams are bearing him, that everyone may see the

2 Compare d’Orbigny in his criticism of Felix de Azara, L’liomme americain (1839) and Tylor’s comments ad hoc.

62

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

sun, yon god who knows all beings well. Afar like thieves the stars withdraw before the sun, who seetli all. Wide through the world his beams are seen, like fires in all their brilliancy. Swift art thou, visible to all, maker of light art thou, 0 Sun; thou shinest through a lightsome world. Before the people of the gods thou risest up, be¬ fore all men, that everyone may see the sun, with whom, 0 pure bright Heaven, as eye, thou lookest down on busy man. Across the sky and spaces wide thou goest, meas¬ uring the days and watching generations pass. Seven yellow steeds thy chariot drag, bright-haired one, 0 far- seeing Sun. The sun has yoked his seven3 pure steeds, the daughters of his wheeled car, and with them as his steeds he fares.”

A later poet added these words: “Out of darkness we have come, looking for the highest light, the god among gods. 0 Sun, as thou risest, helper of thy friends, to the highest sky, do thou bring to naught this sickness of my heart, this jaundice.” That is, he has utilized the hymn to make a charm connecting yellow sun and yellow jaun¬ dice, but in doing so he has inserted the significant words “highest light, god among gods.” Still later, by a thou¬ sand years or so, an epic poet composed another hymn to the sun, a hymn which shows how the god has now become supreme, the light of lights physically and morally.4

“Thou art, 0 Sun, the eye of the world, the source of all that is, the origin of all things, the refuge of the wise, the door, the resort of them that seek salvation. Thou upholdest the world in pity. The priests adore thee; the

3 Seven is an indeterminate ‘several’ but was taken literally in the seven steeds of the sun, seven fathers, seven saints, seven rivers, seven worlds, etc. See below on the triad (ch. XVII).

4 The earlier hymn is Rig-Veda 1, 50; the later is found in the Ma* habharata, III, 3. With the epithet “the door” compare the Bab. This hymn is to be repeated in conjunction with the repetition of the hundred and eight “names of the sun.” The translation omits a few verses.

THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN

63

saints adore thee. Purified ones and angels and singers of heaven follow thy course. All the gods have worshipped thee, and the Seven Fathers, through worshipping thee and offering to thee the flowers of heaven,5 obtain all their desires; as by adoring thee they [originally] obtained heaven. In all the seven worlds naught is higher than thou ; no being of heaven equals thee in glory ; for in thee is all light ; lord of light art thou ; and in thee are all the elements, in thee all knowledge and wisdom and religious ardor [heat] . Through thy energy the artizan of the gods [called all-maker] made the discus wherewith Vishnu slew the demon of darkness. Thou art thyself all-maker, as thou art the Creator. For it is thou who givest life, in summer drawing up with thy rays the moisture of earth and pouring it down again in the rainy season, giving rain, giving grain, giving life. When the thunderbolts bellow in the clouds and the clouds pour forth lights, these are thy rays, gleaming in the clouds as lightning flashes. But kind art thou. Not fire nor house nor woolen clothes warm us and comfort us as dost thou. All the earth with its thirteen continents is illuminated by thee as one [one god thou shinest on all the different lands] ; one and the same art thou wherever shining; thou art the only god ever busy to do men good, and not men only but all the three worlds [earth, atmosphere, and sky]. If so be thou risest not, blind is the world forthwith; through thy grace alone can men perform their tasks. The day of Brahman the Creator lasts for a thousand ages; of that day thou art the beginning and the end; thou art lord of the lords of all the ages and aeons [lord of all time] and when at last shall come the end of that great day [time], then sprung from thee shall likewise be that fire which shall consume the world. Universal dis-

5 That is, they offer the only imaginable offering one can find in heaven.

64

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

solution will ensue and, born of thy anger against a sin¬ ful world, tire shall leap forth and there shall be naught left save that tire itself. Yet this as lightning making clouds and Hoods and storms and death more universal still shall then become twelve suns, to dry again that Hood in Hoods of Hre ; but all of them art thou, all the twelve suns, as thou art all the gods, Indra, Yislmu, Brahman the Creator, Agni [fire-god] ; and not alone art thou that fire visible [Agni], but thou art the fire invisible which is thought; aye, intellectual fire, subtle intelligence, that too art thou and thou art the eternal [world-power] Brahma.6 Pure soul, the swan, art thou, yet thou art also he-that-quickens, light, crowned god. Thou art all the names of the sun [sun under every aspect, as pure, strong, ruler, dark-killer, infinite, ineffable, eternal, etc.] ; god of light and god of right and god who makes the day; god of the seven steeds, lord of the yellow steeds, swift runner, slayer of darkness [all these are but the names of the same god], the god of gods. On the sixth day of the moon or on the seventh day, whoso worships thee shall obtain thy grace, and thy grace shall give him good fortune. Blessed are thy worshippers, for they shall be free from danger, free from pain, free from all afflic¬ tion ; long shall they live and abide in good health who be¬ lieve in thee as the soul of the world. 0 Lord of suste¬ nance, give us today our food. I bow to thee and to the red runner, the god Aruna, who redly runs before thee, thy servant, my lord; I bow to thy rod [the rod of punish¬ ment] ; I bow to thy bolt, the lightning; to all the saints who follow thee and take refuge in thee, unto these also I bow. Oh, deliver me, who am thy suppliant. ”

When this sun-god desires to have human progeny he mystically touches the pure daughter of royal race chosen for this honor and she conceives in purity unblemished,

e Xeuter Brahma, the Absolute, not the masculine Brahman, Creator.

THE WORSHIP OF THE SUN

65

so that she still remains a virgin,7 and bears a son. But the babe is put into a box and floats away upon the river till in good time he is rescued by a deserving man and grows up a demi-god yet earthly hero. In such wise men trace their descent from the gods.

From the time of the Rig-Veda the sun was emblematic of supreme godhead; in the Upanishads, God is the “sun that all shines after”; in philosophy, the sun is typical of God. It is not then foreign to Hindu thought when the beings “of endless light” appear in Buddhism, though some scholars seek to derive them from Persia.

As the sun marks the seasons and the years, lie be¬ comes typical of the regular succession of events. This leads to the conception of an established order in the uni¬ verse and the sun may then become the leading Power, the planet around which (whom) and through the power of which the world revolves and is. Such was the King Sun in the Chaldean system and such was the conception un¬ derlying the heresy of Amen-liotep IV. But the idea of an Order governing the universe is elsewhere connected rather with the Sky as a whole than with the sun-god. Sky as personified Heaven and Supreme Lord thus be¬ comes the exemplar of the divine Order called the Way in China and is regarded as the physical and moral sup¬ port of the universe. In India, Varuna, “the wise god,” is Heaven thus personified as king of unswerving rule, beside whom and dimly looming in the background lies Right Order, which, not at first but before the end of the Rig-Veda, was also personified. Thus Right Order, Rita, was originally a priestly conception and connoted the sacrificial order of the seasons but was then extended to embrace the whole order of the world as a moral order, not merely an orderly succession of events. Probablv the

7 Virgin birth is attributed also to Zoroaster, whose mother conceived him immaculately (in the strict sense), and in later tradition to Buddha.

66

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

very first notion of seasonal regularity came with the establishment of rites to mark seed-time and harvest, from which eventually grew up the conception of a world ordered morally as well as physically, and it was as “eye” of this moral power that the all-seeing Sun en¬ hanced this conception on the moral side. A similar Power of Order appears in the person of the Egyptian goddess Maat. In all these early but already civilized communities the idea of right is fundamentally based on the concep¬ tion of conformity to the underlying harmony of life, agreement with the great motiv of existence, and religion is thus an attempt to bring man into concord with eter¬ nal divine law. It is on a grander scale the same motive as that which in his narrow intellectual environment makes the savage obey the law of the little world he knows ; he feels intuitively that he must be in harmony with the conditions of his outer life and that, as he must conform to the law of the tribe in order to live well, so he must conform to the laws of the spiritual forces en¬ circling him.

CHAPTER VI

THE WORSHIP OF MAN

Our line between man and beast is drawn with a view to certain suppositions, such as that man has language, reason, or soul, and the beast lacks these human attri¬ butes ; but a savage is not troubled with such modern ideas and to him a beast has language, reason, and soul just as a man has. Again, we make a distinction between men and gods ; gods have immortality and more than human powers and attributes. But a savage thinks that a man who has more than human powers is a sort of god and he judges human powers by his own norm, while attributes such as immortality do not appear to him to be especially divine. In short, he makes no very clear categories of beast, man, and god and in consequence his worship of one is that of the others ; it is not worship in the sense of implied recognition of unliuman divinity, but rather the profound respect suitable in the presence of a spiritual power vastly superior to that of the wmrshipper, yet equally appropriate to beast, man, and god. Hence even today in India the word worship, puja, is applied to all three, sometimes to the horror of the missionary, who thinks puja is worship in his own limited sense. All ex¬ traordinary creatures are mysterious, and what is mys¬ terious is to be feared, and what is feared is either shunned or honored, worshipped.

This rule applied to man works out very simply among savages and semi-civilized peoples. In some savage tribes, twins, extraordinary and mysterious, are regarded as unlucky, in some as lucky, and they are either exposed

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

(is

to die or receive unusual honor in consequence, an ob¬ servance approaching worship, but not identical. But albinos and poets and crazy people, being still more re¬ markable, are apt to be revered as quite unliuman, quasi divine beings, spiritually as physically superhuman. Especially priests, being in touch with the spiritual world, and kings, having superhuman power, are objects of a respectful regard that is not differentiated from that paid to gods; they are really worshipped. The Roman emperor, called divine, was only the successor of a series of kings and priests who were gods to their Eastern sub¬ jects, as after his day lived the king-gods of Mexico and Peru and even today the masses of India recognize the emperor of India as a divinity. The peasants of Poly¬ nesia, of Russia, of the Orient generally and the em¬ perors of Europe have still believed till lately that there’s a divinity doth hedge a king, perhaps because it is a di¬ vinity of a more striking sort, so to speak, than is usually found on earth. According to all Hindu scriptures a king is “compounded of gods” and a priest is “a god on earth.” In Egypt the king was identified with the sun-god or was the son of the sun. In Babylonia the king was divine per se till in later times, with the increase in Semitic power, he lost divinity but became representative of the divine, the Semites as a race never having admitted the divinity of man except as totemism may have implied a divine brotherhood between man and a superhuman ani¬ mal god. In rare cases a priest becomes a king, as when the high-priest of Tibet becomes the temporal ruler, but the theory that kings were originally priests, in Baby¬ lonia and elsewhere, is as a general statement a per¬ version of history and of existing facts. The chief of a tribe in most combative communities becomes its head not as priest but as warrior, and the medicine man or priest has his separate part, as with our Indians, the

THE WORSHIP OF MAN

69

Hindus, the Greeks, Romans, etc. Power over the lives of his people gives the king his divine superhumanity; power over spiritual powers gives the priest his influ¬ ence and exalts him into a superior being. The living chiefs of African tribes, like American sachems, are not worshipped as priests, but they maintain their power by strength and violence, and in Africa, as in Polynesia, they are invested with a sacred character, which in the latter case leads to taboos similar to but stricter than those sur¬ rounding the priests of Greece and Rome.

Probably the earliest superhuman humans were those who were “ possessed”1 by a spirit; they through com¬ munion with the spirit themselves possessed extraor¬ dinary spirituality, which, as in the case of the Micro- nesian Ululia (“entered” and so “possessed”), makes one feared as having supernatural power. But creatures of this sort, whose more familiar form is that of the re¬ ligious lunatic, the howling dervish, the mantic madman, the dancing ecstatic prophet, are only the first phase of development. The priest who is god on earth must have more than this temporary conjunction with divinity; he must become the permanent representative of the divine and not only his wild utterances but his sober and con- sidered speech and action must be those of the divinity with which he is imbued. Such is the Guru or religious chief of the Hindu sects ; such service is given to him as to the gods ; he is in reality to his own sect what the Brahman priesthood claimed to be as a whole, divinity on earth.

Then come those kings whose acts of beneficence or power made them, in story, more than human. We may doubt whether they were men receiving divine honors,

1 Possession is where a spirit rules a mind, as distinct from obsession, where, as in the case of an incubus or succubus, a malicious spirit rules or enslaves a human body.

70

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

but the after age regarded them as men who were gods while still alive, Rama and Krishna and gods of this ilk. The divinity of the Chinese emperor is not of this sort, but rather he is divine because he is chosen as the highest incorporation of the Way, the representative of the Su¬ preme Lord of Heaven.

But in a god-fearing and god-seeking country any ac¬ cident may make a man a god or godling, as it may make him one of the semi-divine heroes of the land. Only lately an American was thus canonized in Japan. In India, Nicholas, the hero of Delhi, was a god to his followers, who would have worshipped him had he not forbidden them to do so. Not a century ago a tramp came to a Hindu village and fell asleep at a deserted shrine. When the vil¬ lagers awoke they found him there asleep. Nothing could persuade them that he was not the god returned. He in turn awoke to find himself the object of worship; food, drink, attendance, reverence, all were his. Alarmed at first he protested that he was only a poor villager like them¬ selves. But they would not believe him; rather they be¬ lieved in him and he, finding the post an easy one, re¬ mained there ever afterwards and lived and died a god.

Moreover every true Hindu wife is like Eve and “she for God in him” represents her attitude toward her hus¬ band, to whom she makes offerings, and whom she wor¬ ships as her divinity. This is no phrase, and though this attitude is enjoined upon her by divine (inspired) law it is not as a merely legal injunction that she regards it. It is her delight thus to deify her husband. When she rises in the morning she worships first of all the sun and afterwards the tulsi plant and a pipal tree ; then she does obeisance to her husband and in particular worships his big toe, bathing and anointing it and offering to her hus¬ band incense, as she would to any other god.

In circumstances where gods are produced so easily

THE WORSHIP OF MAN

71

and the gods of the sky are also intimate with men, there spring np the demi-gods, half divine, half human. Such demi-gods are not all mythological ; they are at times the offspring of human mothers or fathers and their clever¬ ness or power leads their contemporaries or descendants to ascribe to them one parent who is more than human. Sons of gods by human mothers are of course more com¬ mon than sons of goddesses by human fathers. The father¬ hood of a child was uncertain. But the divine man does not even now require a divine parent. Extraordinary powers, especially spiritual, prove divinity to the credulous East. Chunder Sen, only a few decades ago, was merely a popu¬ lar excitable Hindu preacher ; but his congregation adored him literally and he ended by believing himself adorable, not only inspired but divine. In Persia also, in the last century, the Bab was taken as incarnate God; though Zoroaster and Mohammed through their own teachings repressed this tendency and became not divine but merely more than human, men filled with divine inspiration and power. Apotheosis depends largely on the definition of the word god; sometimes it connotes only a superman. A “ sacrifice to gods having human nature” is formally recognized by orthodox Hindus, and the Puranas tell the history of men who became gods, though such cases al¬ ways refer to the past and today it is doubtful whether the gods mentioned were ever men at all.

The phase of temporary divinity must also be noticed. In savage cults, the wolf-man as wolf-worshipper not only represents the god, he is the god, the very wolf-god he portrays with his mask; but when he removes the mask he becomes mere man again. So in the Tantric rites, the divine essence converts for a night an ordinary woman into a goddess, as in less degree a common man becomes a temporary prophet, filled with divine power, a sort of god. A fetish is a temporary divinity and the plant substi-

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

72

tuted for Soma (when this is impossible to get) is, for the

occasion, mystically converted by the priest into the

divinity (Soma), so that the worshippers believe that in

partaking thereof they have become partakers of the

real substance of divinity.

%/

But it makes a difference whether a man is alive or dead. When the poor African said, “My chieftain is my god, for I fear him more than all,” he worshipped a liv¬ ing man-god. But the worship of Buddha is not quite wor¬ ship of man, but of a figure originally not a god but only superhuman, a figure imagined of fictitious value, not representing divinity till long after Buddha the man had ceased to live. Again, as the Absolute, Buddha is a philo¬ sophical abstraction, not a case of man-worship. So the worship of ancestors is not precisely the same as the wor¬ ship of living men. The dead ancestor is no longer a man.

CHAPTER VII

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

Historically, man worshipped first and enquired later what he was worshipping; so we may leave the enquiry as to what is implied by the phenomena of ancestor-worship till we have examined the phenomena themselves. The worship of ancestors is the worship not of ghosts in gen¬ eral but of a restricted band of ghosts, which in turn is only one band among other bands of spirits. Dead men who have become gods are not deified qua ancestors but as heroes, kings, sages, ancestral by repute to the clan or tribe, Romulus, Confucius, nowadays Shivaji, and the like, not actual ancestors worshipped by one family. As gods become men (in the Kalevala and Persian epic ; cf. Gen. 6:4), so men may become spirits as a class apart from disease-spirits and nature-spirits. In Africa we find communities where ghosts are in general feared, but less than gods, and within the band of ghosts the ancestral ghosts have a special cult. In Micronesia, popular con¬ sciousness discriminates between other spirits and ghosts and between general and family ghosts. Here Li Raba is Famine, Uota is a conical rock-spirit in the sea, revered, as were stones in Arabia ; but neither of these is a ghost. So Saritou is a spirit that cooks the dead ghosts but is not himself a ghost. The only real ancestral ghost is the one fed for a time by a special family, but he is never wor¬ shipped till he becomes so vague that he merely makes one of a group of Fathers, worshipped with other family ghosts in the same way, a general host of tribal powers remembered only en masse as protective genii, different

71

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

from gods and other spirits, who may be diseases per¬ sonified or ghosts of discontented and malicious nature that torment men. But when, as in Babylonia, all spirits are malicious, disease-bringing devils, it is not certain whether they are in any one case ghosts or personified diseases, as both groups have the same character, in op¬ position to the friendly gods. Thus a specified disease or pain is clearly not a ghost, but ghosts are clearly intended to be included in exorcisms against devils bringing distress and disease. On the other hand, ghosts as good, protecting spiritual powers are not gods. In Polynesia, ghosts have one cult; gods, another. The Australians have common ghosts and ancestral ghosts, who are not gods, but besides these they fear other spiritual powers not of the ghost-class and in particular recognize a non-ghostly creator-god. The lowest Philippine savage in the same way puts the ghost into one category and the creator-god into another. But human memory is frail and fallible and what may happen is that a vague remote tribal ancestor becomes so great in tribal esteem that he is to later gen¬ erations a general spiritual power, perhaps in the guise of a culture-hero who is no longer thought of as a former man but as an omnipotent power; yet such a development is problematical in most concrete instances and the usual rule is that the ancestor in some form, perhaps not hu¬ man, is thought of as having created the world or the gods and as such is respectfully spoken of rather than worshipped, as was the case with Unkulunkula, whose “divinity” was an invention of the missionaries, as Bishop Callaway said.1

The family feeds its dead, but other people pay no at¬ tention to them unless they become malignant. The excep¬ tions are the rare ghosts that have been great kings or heroes, such as Tammuz and Gilgamesh (now known to

i Callawav, UnkulunTcula, p. 124 (1868).

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

75

have been kings). The only ghost of a common sort that is treated with kindly consideration is the relative, in par¬ ticular the defunct father of a family. For such a ghost most races, so long as they think he is near, do something, feed him, entreat him to be kind, or at least pay him the courtesy of asking him to be content and go away. This last is the earlier attention paid to ghosts in general, a rit¬ ual on stated occasions. Yet the family ghost in many hun¬ dred tribes is not asked to depart, but to remain; he is regarded as being still a kind father interested in his off¬ spring and desirous of aiding their welfare. That there is a ghost, that something survives, is implied as primi¬ tive belief by the practice of burying implements, toys, horses, wives, etc., with the dead and sending the soul down a stream or over water in a boat (as do the Afri¬ cans and as did the Scandinavians). Just how the ghost is treated depends on the dead (probably) and on the tribal disposition. The apotropaic method of treatment is found, it is true, in many tribes, but in about as many more the relatives seek to keep the dead with them as a tutelary genius.

If elsewhere dread prompts the noise and beating which drives away the ghost, the picture can be offset by that of the mother giving her dead babe a few drops from her breast and by the first rites of Amerinds, Africans, and Dravidians when they feed the dead. Thus the (Dra- vidian) Gasiyas of Mirzapur invite the deceased with the words: “Accept this offering of fowl; sit in the corner and bless your offspring. ” An ancestral ghost “is often the best friend of the cultivator and of the peasant pro¬ prietor too, if he treats him with proper respect.”2 The Yedic Aryans “put a stone between themselves and death” in the burial ritual; but this was only to keep the infection of death from spreading back to the village.

2 Crooke, op. cit., I, pp. 176, 182.

76

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

For the dead and buried man they had only a kindly feel- ing, a conviction that though “gone before ” (the San¬ skrit designation of the ghost) he would return to dine with them once a month at the feast in honor of the still living dead. Many Amerinds showed for ghosts affection rather than fear.3 The Veddas deemed the family ghost a friendly spirit eager to help. To sacrifice human beings at a funeral is to serve the dead with attendants, etc. Even to eat the dead is a mark of esteem and sometimes of love. Thus the African mother eats her babe to keep its ghost with her; it is a mark of real affection. Even as late as the time of Zoroastrian mythology the same idea appears. The first man and woman devoured their first children because they loved them to excess.4

The dread of the ghost comes largely from the belief that whether well disposed or not, it needs a body and may occupy the mourner’s as a new habitation. Hence the danger of eating and yawning before the ghost is settled. Fasting here is an act of self-preservation not of puri¬ fication. Sneezing is lucky because it shows that one has evicted an undesirable would-be tenant. But in Africa it indicates that the owner’s soul is suffering and hence he is greeted with a local prosit. The Hindus thought sneez¬ ing lucky.6 To protect openings through which a ghost may slip, ears and noses are be-ringed. Bells too are rung to keep off the dead, which may have been the first use of

s The food for the dead does not necessarily imply desire to content and so dismiss the ghost, since it is often bidden to remain in its old home. Sometimes an image or a sort of cage of hair is hung up for it to enter, thinking it has a new body; for ghosts are easily tricked. This is not due to affection, however, but to fear lest the ghost enter a human body; yet it shows that the ghost is still a kindly neighbor.

4 On the Veddas of Ceylon and the Africans, see C. G. Seligman, Notes on the Veddas (1908) and The Veddas (1911); J. V7. Vfilson, Western Africa; Nassau, Fetichism; and Ellis, The Tshi-speaking Peoples, p. 159.

5 Ellis, op. cit. p. 203; Warren, Proc. Am. Or. Soc., 1885, May, p. xvii.

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

77

temple bells and gongs. The bell, because it frightens ghosts, has itself become a godling to the Gonds, as iron has become a godling among the Agarias, partly because iron scares ghosts and partly because the Agarias, smelting iron, look on it as a divinity in that it gives them their livelihood. Many practices survive showing the desire to ward oft spirits and ghosts. So the circular motion of the ring is imitated in waving hands and fire¬ brands (the Hindu epic says especially that these must be “waved in a circle”) ; then comes the waving motion for itself, in banners on temples ; the curve of the iron horseshoe, which is twice potent to “bring luck” (i.e., avert ill) in India and England; and the waving of salt and mustard (in India used especially to avert the evil eye). Ghosts and all spirits are frightened by red (blood) in many countries ; in India also by black, white, and yel¬ low; hence the wide use of tumeric and white as mourn¬ ing (suggested first by death pallor), as in China and Australia. The victim’s color is white at the sacrifices of human beings, in Ashanti, where the mourner’s color is red. In India, grain is offered to ghosts (at funerals) as well as to other spirits, as a means of satisfying both spirits and ghosts and so indirectly as a means of keeping them away. In Africa, the same sort of offering is made but before the spirit declares its own attitude as benefi¬ cent or malignant ; it is an attempt to ingratiate one¬ self with a doubtful power. If the spirit be naturally kind, the offering will keep it contented; if naturally malig¬ nant, it will appease. In general, rice or other grain is used not as a “symbol of fruitfulness,” as it has been in¬ terpreted in the wedding-ceremony in India and else¬ where, but as a spirit-offering of this sort. This is proved by the fact that in India it is used not only at weddings but also at funerals ; and when a man returns from a journey he passes a stone seven times around his child’s

78

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

Read and throws rice around the child, which can be only to keep off infection (evil influence or spirit) liable to be carried by the traveller. Moreover, the grain at the wed¬ ding is parched, which it would not be if it were a symbol of fruitfulness. But it is true that there has arisen a gen¬ eral feeling that grain is a blessing-bringer (like salt, a preservative and hence lucky), and when in India one decorates a pole with seven kinds of grain and elevates it in the barnyard, it is probably with a very remote no¬ tion of ghosts ; a sense that it is lucky is all that remains.

The religious proceeding with the ghost is logically like that in the case of savage gods. When the god Pambi sends a drought upon the Manganjas, the priestess of this god offers him a handful of grain, crying out, “ En¬ joy this grain and then hear our prayer/’ at the same time offering the god a libation of beer and flinging wa¬ ter into the air, with the usual naive combination of reli¬ gious petition and magical science which appears in the ritual of the Australian, who seeks magically to control, while he religiously entreats the grain-power.

Ghosts that are not wanted about a house at all are in¬ differently ancestral or not. These comprise such com¬ mon ghosts as the Hindu Dund or Headless Horseman, a torso lacking funeral rites, the Australian Ulthana, the Airi or Wild Huntsman (ghost of a slain hunter) ; grave¬ yard ghosts of the unappeased, called in India Smasans or Masans and by false etymology regarded as “devour- ers” (really ‘ ‘graveyarders”), like Lemures. The Tolas are Hindu will-of-the-wisps, though not always ghosts. They may serve as types of those spirits of which only a dogmatist would assert that they were certainly ghosts or certainly nature-spirits. Any one such phenomenon might be either, according to circumstances. If a mur¬ derer has recently been executed, it is probably his ghost. Ordinarily it is a marsh-spirit.

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

79

The apotropaic rites are thus, in general, rites to keep off malignant influences, whether ghostly or animistic. From the ritual it is usually impossible to decide the genesis of the evil influence. But that is no argument against the fact that ghosts are not in primitive thought identical with nature-spirits. The usual attitude of the savage is that there are numberless influences, some ghostly, some not of human origin, all of which may he offensive; and that ghosts are mainly a nuisance in try¬ ing to get hack into human bodies ; but that, again, among the ghosts one’s own family ghosts are not naturally malevolent. So in a wider sense, the hero-ghost belongs not to one family but to a tribe and he lives a life of beneficence, helping the tribe by oracular advice and otherwise, sometimes appearing visibly in battle to aid them, etc. Such an exalted ghost receives worship; but the ordinary feeding of a family ghost is not worship at all.

Both family affection and tribal reverence, as has been shown, make welcome guests of ghosts who are kin. There is no general rule, but fear is obviously not always the motive shown. Our Indian widows used to make regular pilgrimages to the skulls6 of their dead and weep over them as sincerely as a formal custom permitted, yet the custom itself was evidence of a kindly affection rather than of fear. On the other hand, any ghost of a man mur¬ dered or cut off untimely might well be conceived as un¬ friendly. Sometimes the cult of ancestors in general, good or bad, rises to the dignity of a state religion, as in Ashanti and Dahomey.

A feast for the dead implies only that the dead re¬ ceive food from the living; as with the family ghost, it is not an act of worship. The idea of feeding the dead still

s The Romans also kept the skull, afterwards in effigy, as the most vital part of the corpse, perhaps as the seat of the mind or soul, a Semitic view.

80

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

lingers in drinking to the memory of the dead, originally a libation for the dead to consume. Real worship of ghosts among savages is not particularly primitive nor is the custom by any means universal. The Amerinds rarely worshipped the dead at all, never generally ; the Austra¬ lians have only a rudimentary cult of the dead, scarcely more than a care for the dead body, a few simple acts to show that the ghost is not forgotten and exhortations to it to go away. The more advanced peoples in the same race show the more honor to the dead. Thus the Melane¬ sians and Micronesians have more cult of ghosts than the less advanced Polynesians ; but even among the Microne¬ sians it was only chieftains whose ghosts were really worshipped.

But most civilized peoples have gone through and sur¬ passed this cult by idealizing the ghosts as heroes or giving up gliost-worship altogether. Yet ghost-cult has left little if any trace among the Babylonians, where spirits are malicious rather than kind. One hero is deified without dying, so that he is really not a ghost, and kings are called divine as well before as after death. In gen¬ eral, there was no Semitic cult of ancestors, only avoid¬ ance of ghosts. Babylonian ghosts live in a soul-prison whence there is no escape. Marduk only revivifies those who are deathly sick, and only a goddess, Ishtar, is actu¬ ally raised from the under-world, when sprinkled with the water of life. There is no real ghost-worship in Babylon, only a libation-cult, which is no more than a sort of all¬

souls remembrance of the dead. Biblical passages as to offering food to the dead reveal that the practice is con¬ sidered wrong (Dent. 26: 14, food; Num. 6: 18, Nazarite; hair may have been an offering of strength). Like the Babylonian hero, Enoch is translated and Elijah is car¬ ried to heaven without going to Slieol, but ordinarily no such divine fate is for the ghost, and the whole trend of

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

81

Hebrew worship opposed such a cult. Heroes had no cult, though the dead were consulted. Between Hebrew and Babylonian stood the Persian worshipper of Fravasliis, good ghosts changed into protective spirits, who, like the Hindu Fathers, appear in bird-form and later are iden¬ tified with star-spirits. Enough of this Persian view has survived among the Armenians to make them believe that the dead dwell for three days by the tomb and they keep up the observance of the dead by feasting at the tomb once a week and on certain yearly occasions.7 Among other Aryans the Kelts may have held a vague belief in metempsychosis and possibly had ancestor-worship. The Romans worshipped no ghosts, not even heroes, except in rare cases, and had no belief in the continued individ¬ ual existence of souls. They believed in an angry ghost, active till appeased, but thought that a dead man joined the indiscriminate group of Di Manes and thus, as a corporation, all souls after a fashion became a sort of divine throng, a family group of inferior godlings, whose “worship” consisted in seeing to it that they remained underground where they belonged, a ceremony called Lemuria, to drive them away. There was also a later ceremony to propitiate them, which treats the Fathers in a more kindly spirit. But in neither case was there the intimate relation which existed between living and dead in Greece, where the evil ghost came back to haunt and the good to give advice and was honored as hero, just as in India today, where the Vir (Latin vir) is such a hero, when indeed he is not confused with the Mohammedan Pir (saint), which often happens. Such a Vir is an an¬ cestor so honored that he receives worship even from those not of his own family.

In some regards the Roman belief resembled that of the Semite and Egyptian, who also did not worship or

7 Abeghian, Armenischer YoOcsglauVe (1899).

82

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

think of the dead as important to his own life; but ex¬ pended care on the dead man to keep him safely away, with that fear of the ghost which must be distinguished from ghost-worship. Probably in early Egyptian belief only kings were fortunate enough to live hereafter. Such a distinction is common among savages; it excludes the possibility of general ghost-worship.

The condition of the ghost in the next life requires the family’s care, first to provide it with its usual para¬ phernalia, weapons, implements, food, drink, wife, slaves, and other objects and persons, whose remains are found in the earliest graves, and second, to provide it with a proper body. The Kelts thought it went on living just the same as in life, with the same body and the same interests and financial obligations, but the Hindus and Egyptians by magical formulas “made a body” for it, the Hindus taking nine plus one days to “restore the eyes” and other parts. In modern usage something remains of this care of the dead in Purim and All-Souls’ Hay and in fu¬ neral flowers; something also of the desire to avoid or get rid of the dead, in the “wake” and in opening the windows after a death; among some half-civilized peo¬ ple ghosts are still attracted by honey, probably used like hair and pitch as a sort of flypaper to catch and keep the ghost. Calling up ghosts as oracles, necromancy, still obtains among the deluded and ignorant.8 Aristocratic ghosts usually had a special home, a Valhalla or Elysium, but the common mass went underground to a pit, the grave, and then slept, or followed the sun to darkness in the "West (as in Babylon, Greece, and India). Probably the earliest idea was that the soul lingered in its own home, where it was buried (the Lares are home-keeping ghosts), then, when burial was in the outside ground,

s Necromancy may have been introduced among the Aryans (Homer, etc.) from the Semites. See L. B. Paton, Spiritism , p. ]50.

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

83

that it lived alone in the earth; then with others in an assembly underground; finally as a shade it sought the West as the place of vanished light; but, when the body was cremated, the distinguished soul went up with the fire and smoke to a higher region. In their tombs the ghosts of Rome still guarded the roads leading to the city, as they still cry in epitaphs to the passer-by for consideration and flowers. Our masses for the dead still echo the benedictions and offerings of antiquity, as our winter wreaths outside the window (sometimes negli¬ gently hung inside) offer the ghosts a refuge from cold and our Yule log still burns to warm them, as fires in Ireland were lighted in the fields for that purpose. While ghosts are physically weak they are also, as shad¬ owy, tenuous, windy substances, very swift and able to pass through matter, but their intellectual power seems to be confined to foresight and oracular wisdom. In Egypt they mediate between man and gods, recommending to the latter such men as give the ghosts food and prayers. In Hebrew belief the ghosts (ancestors) were originally conscious and potent powers, though not divine ; but the prophets “cut the root of ancestor-worship by denying the conscious existence of the dead.”9

Ghost-worship has been preserved as ancestor-worship by the Mongolians and reaches its height in the elabo¬ rate ritual of the Chinese cult, in which the chief fea¬ ture is worship of the fathers of the family. The nature- cult of the Sky-god or Heaven was amalgamated with it by assuming that the emperor’s ancestor was the Su¬ preme God Heaven, and when ancestor-worship was car¬ ried into Japan it there also throve at the expense of Shintoism, which, contrary to common opinion, is not a cult of ancestors. The stages leading up to this racial exaltation of ghosts are to be found in the Mongolian

9 Paton, op. cit., p. 270.

84

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

savages who practice Shamanism in its crudest form. These inhabitants of the wild regions of Eastern Europe and Siberia regard ancestors as great powers apart from the gods. They both minister to the needs of these great powers and utilize them as the really active agen¬ cies in the spiritual world. The Tunguse, for example, are first and foremost ancestor-worshippers. As a form only they ask the great god for rain, but the petition is really directed to the ancestors: often the formality of asking the god is ignored altogether. The lowest gods alone can be directly approached by men and they only through the Somo or dead ancestors, who in turn can be influenced only through the Shaman priest, an individual whose priestly power is not inherited but inborn. A family may be Shamanistic but not necessarilv so, for each son in turn must prove by ecstatic performances that he can control the ghosts. When approved, the Shaman visits, on the soul of a sacrificed horse, either heaven or hell and procures what is sought from the ancestral ghosts, who in turn control the gods and devils, living- above and below, as do the ghosts. But merely to drive ghosts away no great formality (such as the horse-sacri¬ fice) is needed.

In the preceding pages gods have been derived from various sources and it has been shown that they begin generally with spirits of a neutral character and disposi¬ tion, who develop into gods of more marked personality and nature. No very great or supreme god, however, has risen from an ancestral ghost. Objective natural phe¬ nomena (sun, storm, etc.) or natural processes personi¬ fied (seasonal change, order) have been thus exalted, sometimes as good, sometimes as evil. Little devils are sometimes ghosts and sometimes natural objects or pro¬ cesses (diseases). Moreover, a great god is never a de-

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

85

partmental god solely. He may begin as sun or storm or agricultural spirit, but as lie becomes greater lie assimi¬ lates other functions and ends by becoming master of all and general ruler, adapting himself to an expanding so¬ cial or tribal expansion. Now in many cases when a god is first discovered it is after he has passed through such an experience and consequently it is difficult to analyze his character with sufficient certitude ; he may have begun as a god of storm or sun-god or tree-god, and from being the commanding figure, as tree-god or sun-god, gone on to embrace other provinces, as the sun-god in India and the moon-god in Ur, or as the water-god in both India and Babylonia became more than they were originally.

On the other hand, and this is more important because it has been more disregarded, a small community may have a protecting spirit of a general character (compare Mars, for war and agriculture), like the village-gods in India, who are not apparently ghosts and yet are not markedly identified with any special natural phenomenon, as in Champa the “Lady of the City” is the local goddess, like Athena.10 They are the local godlings to whom the villagers pray and sacrifice and who exercise a general superintendence of the community, helping it, punishing it, of no account outside the community, bound up with it, expressing it. As such a community expands, it carries its communitv-god with it as a war-fetisli, as a harvest- god, as a general spiritual sustainer, till in time it be¬ comes a great god of a great people. If a god of this sort is the protector of a littoral community, it is apt to be re¬ garded as a water-god, because the people are more con-

10 The “Lady of the City’* is formally identified with “Shiva’s wife/’ but she is originally a sort of Belit, representing a place, a local Champa (Annam) mother-goddess, of no origin except that she personifies the local (people’s) spiritual life objective in their home, something like “America” in a semi-civilized form, a spiritualized ‘ 1 My Country, ’tis of Thee. ’ ’

86

ORIGIN AND EVOLUTION OF RELIGION

cerned with water than with tillage; if inland, a liunter- god or farmer-god; but this is only the most obvious side. All the time it is the god, the god of the tribe, and turns as the tribe turns, grows with it. In the end it becomes the Father of the people; not as an ancestral ghost but as protector and guardian and giver of sustenance and aid. It is, however, at all times identified with the people’s in¬ terest. Such a spirit may of course be a Mother, and many of the Hindu godlings come under this head; but no Hindu Mother becomes a war-god and in general most of the mother-gods remain local unless expanded as earth-mothers or goddesses of love. Different communi¬ ties differ in regard to the strictness with which gods of an expanding nature are held to their first concern. Con¬ sequently, some races develop gods more departmental than others. Other races tend to let the departmental side lapse and keep the god as general guardian. So the Sem¬ ites credited their gods with local concern but attributed to them a general power and oversight out of all relation to the conception of them as water-god, sun-god, or moon- god. On the other hand, Aryan communities generally confined their clan-gods to special departments par ex¬ cellence but granted them over and above their special concern a wide general supervision, so that while Indra is chiefly a storm-god like Hadad he gradually becomes a god-of-all-work and even acts as a sun-god ; and Varuna (like Ea) becomes a heaven-god (of sky-waters) and gen¬ eral guardian of ethics. So the pre-Aztec Tlaloc, god of fertility, became a sun-god. In Mexico, as in Greece, the previous local goddesses of fertility were made to marry the conquerors’ (Aztec) gods. In Peru, the great god of the seacoast was a .sea-god, that is, the sea-god becomes the great god of the littoral, as inland the sun and lake be¬ come the great gods ; but in all these cases the gods rose far above their original limitations and natural func-

THE WORSHIP OF ANCESTORS

87

tions. In India, Rama and Krishna may have been deified heroes, hut they were certainly not revered as ancestors, nor was Ishtar worshipped as a family ghost even if she was originally a human queen. To sum up, a dead person may become a god, but a great god is not worshipped as ancestor, and the ancestor qua ancestor is less likely to become a clan-god than is the hero or culture-spirit, who belongs to the clan or people not as an ancestor but as an adopted child. A god, finally, is often called grandfather, for respect, without intent to ascribe fatherhood. Thus the Amerinds whose totem is the fox have a cult of the owl, which, according to their own legend, conceived af¬ fection for them, and taught them to revere him, call him Grandfather, and dance and sing in his honor.

We have now passed in review most of the material of which gods have been made. Yet stones, trees, mountains, rivers, stars, sun, animals, and men, living and dead, do not exhaust the interminable list. In one small community of India are worshipped the “mother-goddess of the threshing-floor,” Sodal Mata; the goddess of roads and steeps, Telia, to whom are offered libations of oil ; a dei¬ fied tree, Anjan Dea; the goddess of smallpox, Sitala (re¬ vered with heaps of stones, to resemble pustules) ; Bhulat, a cowherd, probably an historical person, and Singaja, a man who lived three hundred years ago and is now a god remembered with an annual fair at his tomb in September; and besides all these and the usual gods of a fairly large pantheon, reverence is paid to a god called “Fifty-Six,” Chappan Deo, who represents “the largest number of places to which a lost wife or child may have strayed” and is worshipped as a real divinity.11

11 Nimar District Gazetteer, p. 59. The little settlement was once a Jain community.

CHAPTER VIII

RELIGIOUS STIMULI

That the outer form of religion is more or less shaped by outer factors is easily shown and has already been il¬ lustrated. Thus, to give a few obvious examples, the rea¬ son why there is no cult of agricultural spirits in Kam¬ chatka is that there is no agriculture there; the reason why East-Wind was a god in South America and is today a devil in India is that this wind regularly brought long- desired rain to the American coast and as regularly in Central India brings a parching dust, which shows demo¬ niac maliciousness. In the same way the outer form of the cult, in monkey-worship, mountain-worship, lake-worship, is adventitious, varying according to circumstances of food, temple material, accessibility, etc. Now, in line with this, anthropologists have been prone to say that natural environment conditions man himself as well as his gods and worship, so that his religious mentality represents the result of home and heritage, that is, his environment individually and racially; man, it is said, is the product of “ nature and nurture.” This is true, but only to a limited extent.

For were it altogether true, men from a religious point of view would be much more diverse than they are now. As it is, no matter what the environment and heritage, men are different rather by grade than by capacity. At about the same cultural stage the religious expression is rather uniform than diverse, with the same primitive re¬ actions in the low grades and almost identical results in the highest grades, ethical and philosophical. The great

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diversity in great religions does not come from nature and nurture, but from sporadic and extraordinary per¬ sonalities which do not seem to be the result of environ¬ ment except to a small extent, and it is these great personalities which have made all great religions. A per¬ sonality of this sort not only sums up the best that nature and nurture have bestowed, but springs beyond and stands out apart from the mass, as a sport blossoms out without logical connection with its nature or nurture. Every great thinker adds to home and heritage some¬ thing not to be interpreted in terms of either; what he hands on to posterity is the old religion plus himself, which may be the most important factor of all. But these different great thinkers in their turn think so much alike that the same phenomenon repeats itself in the highest as in the lowest grade, and just as the lowest religious activities are similar, whether occurring in India or America or Africa, so the higher reaches of religion, as of philosophy, are the same; the supreme believers wor¬ ship the same Supreme God everywhere.

But if this be so, the cause must lie in human nature it¬ self. This is so much alike all the world over that it more than counterbalances accidents of home and heritage, which do not really make man what he is in any one place, but only modify him. It is then in the nature of man as man that the most primitive stimuli to religious birth and growth are to be sought. And as man is a com¬ plex, so there is no one stimulus to which religion can be referred ; but the combined factors of his being work to¬ gether to a religious outcome. Nor is it correct to say that of these factors, which can be grouped roughly as emo¬ tional and intellectual, the emotional have complete prece¬ dence. For prior to anything which can be called religion there are only fear and hope without consciousness of a spiritual power to which fear or hope is directed; but

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from the very beginning of religious experience there is present with these a modicum of intellectual activity.

”Let us take, for example, the attitude of the junglemen already cited. There is an indefinite something which they fear and try to propitiate, not a person hut a power or group of powers which they imagine in the rushing river, the spreading tree, the advance of fever, and propitiate as some sort of power, they know not what, in which they believe because of its effect and generally malign activ¬ ity. Now this is almost the lowest form of religion. There is no recognized spirit which these savages propitiate, only a vague power which they logically imagine from the effect produced. This logical imagination is really at the base of the attempt to propitiate, and it is the same logical imagination which “ bodies forth the forms of things unknown.” Those “who in the night imagining some fear suppose the bush a bear,” or the disease a de¬ mon, connect effect and cause, as at a later stage the cob¬ web on the grass argues a fairy maker of the web, or in the case of a child, the chair that hurts is regarded as malevolent. This it is which makes the Ainu believe that the river which drowns his brother has done so on pur¬ pose. All effects are so judged. Especially is it easy to imagine life in motion, difficult to imagine that activity does not imply life, and that active life does not imply will. Thus to the savage the river, in that it moves and acts, is a power possessed of will, as, to the semi-civilized, the sun is still a similar volitive power. Moreover, even far down in the scale of savagery, the world as under¬ stood by the savage is either a creation arguing a crea¬ tor, as among the lowest savages of Australia, or an evolution from primordial matter, as among the Polyne¬ sians and Californians. It is as much logic with the savage as with the philosopher when the former argues a “cut¬ ter-out of the world” or other creator-gods. From imagi-

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nation logically working comes also the idea of the self persisting after death. The sleeper sees his dead alive and active again and argues that his own personality will live after death as he imagines others so living.

As a race advances, imagination invents more ad¬ vanced gods, corresponding to the cultural advance of the community in other regards and among these will he found many abstract divinities. But it is an error to think that divine abstractions are necessarily of civilized origin. Masses of them are invented by communities scarcely to be called civilized and the same process pro¬ duces virtually the same divinity in different localities. Thus abstractions of physical objects are found among the Romans and Slavs, and the tendency to invest attri¬ butes with personality leads to such parallel forms as Thor’s daughter Thunder and Mars’ wife Bravery (Ne- rio) and Indra’s wife Power (Sachi). Or the abstraction stands alone and the same thought produces the same result, as in the three sister Norms and three sister Moi- rai. The more advanced the people the more advanced will be the abstraction. In India, the god Dharma (Jus¬ tice, Right) is a late divinity and still later comes the Scribe of Dharma, who, like Gabriel, keeps the account of man’s sins in his ledger. On the other hand, Kindness, Piety, and other abstractions are deities at a pre-Vedic period. “Come to us with Abundance,” prays a Vedic poet to the god of increase, and even the oldest com¬ mentator is not sure whether Abundance is a female deity or a common noun. But probably in all such cases, though there was no cult, the abstraction was vaguely felt as connoting some sort of personality, a usage still reflected in our poetic speech, but a personality having volition, the will to come or not. It was thus the doorpost, threshing-floor, threshold, harvest, etc., were regarded by the Slavs, Teutons, and Romans, whose Numina were

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animate volitive powers, as were the plough, furrow, grindstone, and drum of the Yedic Aryans, although we can scarcely avoid speaking of them as spirits of the plough, etc.

But abstractions as such are not much cared for or in¬ voked. Often they have no cult or receive a cult only be¬ cause they cease to be pure abstractions and are identi¬ fied with something more real, the sun, the dead chief, etc. Thus in Greece and India, Piety and Justice are sel¬ dom invoked as divinities and the creator Vishnu is much more real than the abstract Maker. Nor can imagination conceive of gods as too unhuman. Especially must the head-god be like the head of the state. Ruled by a king a people will not recognize a “matriarchal” divinity, which is one of the reasons whv Hera becomes subordinate to Zeus, though, if the state changes, the goddess of a ma¬ triarchal state is apt to become androgynous or male, as in Babylon. The gods too will be placed in septs and clans, corresponding to social orders, and as the moral order changes so the gods change, or, as with many lesser gods, disappear, as Zeus in Homer becomes quite another Zeus in Aeschylus and Plato. We ourselves no longer ascribe to the Divinity “sinful acts,” and it was the sinful acts of the Lord of Beings in India that led to this Father-god being superseded by gods to whom no such acts could be attributed. It is only when imagination and logic have worked for ages in conjunction with an ever developing moral sense that man arrives at the supreme imagination of a moral creator and governor of the universe usurping the functions of previous deities. Imagination also oper¬ ates in the making of myths, associating natural processes with a group of ideas, and in the making of symbols, where a thought is associated with a sign. Examples of both are the seasonal myth, the death of the year, and

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water as a symbol of purity or of wisdom, as in Baby¬ lonia, Germany, and India.

Bnt as all horses are more or less alike yet some breeds are more nervous than others, so though all men are much alike some are more imaginative than others, as some are more passionate, and this predisposition affects reli¬ gion as it does art and literature. Hence the religious ex¬ perience of different races has not been identical. No one ladder has led to the higher stages of religion.

To turn now to the emotional factors of religion, a very crude dictum of ignorant antiquity asserted that Fear first fashions gods. Tribes whose gods are the dear spirits of the family, who guide and protect them, have more love than fear for divine powers and in a dog’s religion probably love and fear are inextricably united, but just as we are commanded first to fear God and then to love him, and are instructed that perfect love casteth out fear, so we may assume that fear of divinity generally pre¬ cedes love, as malicious demons precede beneficent gods. But what sort of fear? Obviously an automatic expression of fear, such as dodging a blow or closing eyes before dust or shrinking from a suddenly revealed precipice, has no religious meaning. But when one fears the eventual effect of an approaching thunderstorm, reason and imagination come into play before one deprecates the power that may slay. Again, the religious expression differs as danger is actual or potential. When the danger is merely possible and remote, as in danger of drought which may lead to hunger, the expression is not merely deprecatory but hopeful, and the prayer for good sounds with the cry not to harm. Fear from a religious point of view is thus first of all intelligent and then hopeful. So in the earliest Aryan expression of religious feeling the god is besought not to kill with lightning-stroke but to bring good, and the same union here expressed poetically in our oldest

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literature is really present in the most primitive expres¬ sion of savage religious feeling, as when the Australian savage begs the favor of the powers he is trying to co¬ erce ; he fears, yet at the same moment he hopes ; he seeks to compel, yet at the same moment unconsciously voices the feeling of subjection and dependence. In no case is religious fear automatic or instinctive. In every case it is a reasoned fear. It is a common error to assert that fear of the dark shows innate or instinctive fear of the supernatural. Both observation and induction here are faulty. Savages are not afraid of the darkness but of de¬ mons and other foes in the darkness, and children prop¬ erly brought up are not afraid of the darkness ; they fear only to be alone and if they woke in daylight and thought themselves deserted they would be fearful too. Even ani¬ mals as nervous as horses do not fear the dark if it hides no harm, as in a New England pasture. When, as in In¬ dia, cattle fear the darkness, it is because they know what danger darkness hides. Fear of solitude or of falling and of other such dangers is instinctive as a racial inherit¬ ance, not a sign of instinctive belief in the supernatural. As for animals, when a dog bristles in the dark, it is be¬ cause he becomes aware of something material not yet explained ; he fears the unknown as the first stage of de¬ fence.1

The dictum of Petronius cited above has been accepted in a modified sense by Tiele, who makes fearsome de¬ pendence the root of all religion. Yet what truth might lie in this is vitiated by the connotation of dependence in the scheme of Tiele ’s philosophy, according to which it is the beginning of loving trust and confidence. Even the low-

i Mr. Josiah Morsein in his Pathological Aspects of Beligxcn makes the common mistake of grouping instinctive fears with mental reasoned fears. Dr. Brinton, too, taught that man has a subconscious apperception of spirituality shown by fear of darkness.

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est savage, according to Tiele, feels a religious fear which interprets itself to the savage’s own consciousness as a need of communion with the divine power and the need of a redeemer. But this interpretation of savage thought is almost grotesque. To a savage, as to a beast, whatever is unknown is uncanny, and whatever is uncanny is feared. There is no beginning of a feeling of need of com¬ munion with a divine power in the savage’s fear of a dis¬ ease-devil.2

It is to be noticed further that though fear is promi¬ nent in savage religions, it is not always undiluted fear. Even among the most primitive peoples may be found the same mixture of fear and attachment toward ghosts that conditions human intercourse, while in the higher reli¬ gions hope, admiration, and sympathy unite with fear to make a complex far removed from abjection. The Yedic seer who fears and hopes also admires and is in full sym¬ pathy with the terrible power of the god of storms, whose glorious exhibition fills him with exultation as well as dread. Yet the Yedic religion is of an advanced type, and the usual primitive attitude toward dangerous powers is one rather of antagonism than sympathy. Late among religious emotions is that of thankfulness. When the fear is stilled and the hope gratified the savage rejoices, but to offer thanks to the spiritual powers for their favor is as rare as to thank a man for service. Some savages seem utterly without any sense of gratitude toward their human neighbors and it is not strange that toward the spirits their attitude is the same. Even literary religions

2 Not less extravagant is Tiele ’s argument that man has an innate hope of immortality because he invents tales of immortal gods. The statements on rvhich Tiele ’s theory is built are also, to say the least, of doubtful validity. Thus he asserts that the idea of redemption is 1 1 absolutely gen¬ eral’ 1 (universal) and that a belief in immortality is found among all peoples. See Tiele, Science of Religion, Ontology, pp. 74, 113, 124.

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are often devoid of the expression of thankfulness, and most of the so-called thanksgiving festivals of savages are merely joyous feasts, though occasional observers, interpreting advanced savagery, speak, for example, of some Amerinds as 4 4 eating thanksgiving to the Great Spirit” for meat, snow, etc.3

Derived from fear, through regret that one has of¬ fended against a spirit’s desires, repentance is another emotion which belongs only to higher religions and yet can be traced back to primitive apprehension, though without understanding the sinner’s position it is difficult to distinguish mere regret from repentance. In the early religious hymns of the Yeda the consciousness of sin comes first in the recognition of its punishment and re¬ pentance is vague because the sinner really does not know why he is punished. He suffers and recognizes that suf¬ fering is divine punishment, but, as he is not aware of any faults he lias committed, he asks: “How have I of- fended my god? Was the fault due to drunkenness, gam¬ bling, anger? Whatever I have done I have done unwit¬ tingly. May I again be friends with my god!” Much the same attitude appears in the early Babylonian hymns. In other words, the first literary expression in this re¬ gard reproduces exactly the attitude of the savage who argues from his hurt that he has been attacked by an evil power and is anxious to do what he can to frighten away or satisfy the evil influence. If he can frighten it off, he does so ; but he is apt also to try persuasive measures in the form of offering or sacrifice, according as he conceives of the power more personally. Thus after a defeat in battle, more victims are offered to the presumably of¬ fended gods. When the volcano almost destroys a village which has been led away from worship of the fiery god, it is pacified by offerings placed in the path of the lava

3 Catlin, North American Indians, I,ipp. 145, 213, and II, p. 159.

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by the savages, whose fear makes them repent of their apostasy.4

From this crnde beginning, repentance as a religions factor can be traced np to its highest expression as grief at grieving divine love and a retnrn to conformity with the demands made by that love, in which, to the more exalted and sensitive human spirit, fear is entirely sub¬ merged in affection. Repentance through fear of conse¬ quences hereafter is a middle position between the two.

The measure of the emotional side of religion is seen in praise, gifts, performance of what pleases the divinity, music, dance, etc. But it is not always clear why a par¬ ticular act occurs, since all religious rituals are a jumble and the same act is performed for opposite reasons. Thus dancing is employed both to attract demons and frighten them away, and gifts to spirits are given as often to keep them off as to allure them. So in higher religions, as has been remarked by Durkheim, the service becomes stereo¬ typed, a form applicable to various situations, as when mass is said for a wedding or a funeral.

The existence of fear as a recognized aspect of ad¬ vanced religions need not be insisted upon. The word “terror” expresses the attitude of the early Teutons to¬ ward their gods. The Hindu says, “It is fear alone that makes men virtuous,” and also, “God is a great fear.” Modern life has retained as mere form many usages originally inspired by the fear of spirits, such as placing candles about the dead, spitting for good luck (really to avert evil), together with many other good-luck prac¬ tices. Our April FooPs Day has an exact counterpart in India, where the original idea of expelling demons is more obvious. Fear becomes systematized in taboo when,

4 This happened in one of the Pacific islands. When the Christianized savages found that prayer to the new God was in vain, they reverted to the old worship of the volcano, whereupon the lava stopped flowing!

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as in Polynesia, this becomes so pervasive as to underlie most religions activities. But all religions are necessarily expressed more or less in taboo-form, and it must be rec¬ ognized that ethical advance has been made through taboo, in that it opposes theft and adultery on the part of others ; that is, taboo at least defines certain acts as sins. But it is a common exaggeration to insist that theft, adul¬ tery, and murder have become ethically wrong through taboo. From the religious point of view, taboo is impor¬ tant as registering a neutral zone between what is evil and what is holy. The object or act to be avoided is simply fearsome, the stage represented being antecedent to a for¬ mal distinction between accursed and holy, devilish and divine. The undefined mana or power, not conceived as a spirit, gives its power to personal spirits, who are thought of as beings possessed of great mana. The mana itself, however, may infect in non-personal form objects, places, times, and acts, so that they inspire fear. The priest who possesses mana is a magician but without the magician’s power of controlling spirits, and has therefore been said to exercise ‘ 4 negative magic.” In the establishment of custom taboo has both aided and injured spiritual de¬ velopment, in insisting on the one hand on ethical ob¬ servances and on the other on ritual. It survives today in many superstitions.

Antithetic to fear is hope, and this too as a religious factor has been systematized in fetishism in contrast to the religion of fear in taboo. The fetish in its most primi¬ tive form is a mascot, that is, not an object inhabited by a spirit, as is generally asserted, but a luck-bringing volitive object in which spirit and will are one with mat¬ ter, differing from our mascots only in that the mascot involuntarily brings success. A later form of fetish is an object regarded as inhabited by a spirit. Both kinds, however, are treated in the same way, cajoled and pun-

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ished as luck-bringers that are respectively expected to give success or have failed to do so. No religions attitude is older than this, for in different form the same thought inspired the cave-men of France, who gave themselves luck by the magic of the painted form of the beasts they would slay. These pictures acted as fetishes in that they brought good luck, but they probably differed from the fetish in being magical compelling powers, not objects of prayer and entreaty, for the fetish is besought as a god and is sometimes preserved in a god-house even when dis¬ carded. When an object manifests itself as inclining to be beneficial, as when a stone picked up brings hunting- luck, it is treasured as something potentially capable of the wish to confer benefits. When it fails to do so, it is first implored, then threatened and beaten, and then dis¬ carded, exactly as a human being might be treated. The fetish is not primarily a clan-object (like a totem), but is an individual tutelary power devoted to one man. It may, however, become a clan-object and even develop into a god, but these are secondary forms. The outstanding feature of the fetish is that it objectifies hope and faith in some quasi spiritual power, signifying that man feels himself dependent on some more than human power.5 But hope and fear work together and it would be absurd to say that any primitive race had a religion based wholly on either, as it is no less absurd to suppose that both or either can exist religiously without intelligent imagina¬ tion. All religions, even the most primitive, combine strands of thought and emotion. If self-preservation is a law of nature, fear and hope, which are exercised in pre¬ serving that law, may be called instinctive elements of religion, though, as already shown, there is no instinctive belief in spiritual powers.

\

5 See on this point and especially on the wrong assumption that a fetish is originally a spirit, the writer’s History of Religions, pp. 35 f.

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Like fear and hope of the mind, hunger and thirst of the body have played a great part in establishing primi¬ tive religions, since these appetites have moulded reli¬ gious systems. The root of totemism is hunger and the root of the cult of divine intoxicants is thirst, but in the latter case, though simple thirst leads to the concoction