THE EVOLUTION OF
RELIGION
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
BY
L. R. FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.
AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK STATES”
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY LECTURER
IN CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGY; CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE
GERMAN IMPERIAL ARCHÆOLOGICAL INSTITUTE; FELLOW
OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
LONDON: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
1905
Preface
{v}
A small book on a great and difficult subject must explain and
apologise for itself, especially if it cannot claim a _raison d’être_
as a handbook for beginners. Having accepted the stimulating
invitation to give in the spring of this year a short series of
lectures for the Hibbert Trust on some subject belonging to the
department of comparative religion, I felt that it was desirable to
avoid those topics that had been appropriated by former lecturers; and
also that the Trustees, as well as the audience, deserved that what
the lecturer put forth should embody the results of some personal and
original study. I finally selected for special discussion the ritual
of purification, and {vi} the influence of the ideas associated with
it upon law, morality, and religion; and secondly, the development of
prayer from lower to higher forms. These subjects do not appear to
have been as yet exhaustively treated by modern anthropology or
scientific and comparative theology, and I had already worked upon
them to some extent as “parerga” of the treatise that I am completing
for the Clarendon Press on the history of Greek cults. I am aware that
these special questions would well repay longer and more minute
research, and could each furnish material for a large volume. But
having been advised to publish the lectures more or less as they were
delivered, I put them forth as tentative and incomplete work. I
specially regret to have been unable to have gone further at present
into the Egyptian evidence, with the kindly proffered assistance of Mr
Griffiths, the Reader in Egyptology at Oxford.
The first two lectures, dealing with the methods and the value of the
study of comparative {vii} religion and its relations to anthropology,
are of a more general character. If they seem to occupy somewhat too
large a part of a work of this small compass, the urgency of the
questions they raise may serve as an apology. It was suggested to me
that some such pronouncement might be timely at the point we have
reached. For the subject is winning greater consideration, and even
receiving endowment, in the organisation of the newer Universities.
From the scientific point of view it is one of the most fascinating of
studies; and its practical importance for our colonial administrators
and our missionaries is obvious to those who reflect. It is also a
legitimate hope that its wider and more intelligent recognition in
England may tend to cool and temper the heated atmosphere of dogmatic
controversy, by presenting religious facts in their true proportion
and proper setting.
I must take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to many
friends for valuable {viii} assistance, and especially to my friend
and colleague, Mr R. Marett, to whose comprehensive knowledge of the
religious thought and ritual of savage races I owe many important
clues.
L. R. FARNELL.
_August_, 1905.
Contents
{ix}
LECTURES I. AND II.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS
LECTURE III.
THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR
INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM
LECTURE IV.
THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS
INDEX
ENDNOTES
The Evolution of Religion
{1}
LECTURES I. AND II.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS
The reasonable and sympathetic study of the various religions of
mankind, which are perhaps the clearest mirror we possess of human
feeling, aspiration, and thought in its highest and lowest forms, is
only possible for the individual or for the age that feels no
constraining call to suppress and obliterate all save one cherished
creed. Such study began, as we should expect, in the earlier Hellenic
period, the Hellenic religion throwing few or no obstacles in the way
of undogmatic investigation; and the first anthropologist of religion
is Herodotus. Then among Hellenistic {2} scholars and those of
pre-Christian Rome there were some who devoted themselves to the
collection and exposition of the religious institutions of foreign
races. But save a few short treatises, such as Plutarch’s _De Iside et
Osiride_, Sallustius’ _De Diis et Mundo_, Lucian’s _De Dea Syria_,
nothing has survived beyond the titles and the fragments of their
works; and by an irony of fortune we owe much of our knowledge of
Hellenic and other religions of the Mediterranean area to the
Christian controversialists, who reveal many of the essential features
of the various pagan creeds in order to expose them to obloquy: they
could not anticipate that we should gather as the fruit of their
labours a better appreciation than we could otherwise have gained of
the religions which they strove to destroy, and possibly of
Christianity itself. If I were attempting, as I do not propose to
attempt, to give a complete survey of the growth and development of
the study which we are considering, I should probably be able to cull
{3} but little material for the narrative from Byzantine and mediæval
sources. We may note that the spirit of these ages was, on the whole,
alien to our present interest; and that it is not till after the
Renaissance and the discovery of America that systematic work in this
field begins again. To two Spaniards of Peruvian and Mexican
descent,[3.1] we owe our knowledge of the religions of the Incas and
the Aztecs, that of the latter at least being of prime importance for
the student of the higher religions of mankind. A Polish nobleman of
the 16th century has left us a fairly detailed account of the
religious practices and beliefs of the then semi-pagan
Lithuania.[3.2] But it may be regarded as one of the greatest
achievements of the latter part of the 19th century to have raised the
comparative study of religion to a high position in the whole domain
of inductive speculation and inquiry. And {4} its development has been
mainly due to two independent lines of investigation. The first
stimulus came with the discovery and the interpretation of the sacred
books of the East, a momentous epoch in the history of European
thought, and certain important theories concerning religious origins
were put forth by Vedic scholars, and based on the evidence of Vedic
literature: at the same time the decipherment of the
Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian texts has contributed a wealth of new
material, and has started new problems of religious inquiry, which
specially concern the students of Hellenic as well as those of Semitic
antiquity. But an equally or, as some may think, more powerful factor
in the recent advance towards the organised knowledge of religions has
been the growth, in the last half-century, of the study that has
appropriated the name of anthropology, which is generally understood
to mean the study of primitive or savage man, both in the past and the
present, {5} in respect of his physical and mental conditions. It is
quite unnecessary for me to dilate on the high and manifold utility,
both practical and speculative, of this new branch of human inquiry;
the theme has become almost a popular commonplace in the leading
journalism of the day. And anthropology, defined as above, has a
definite value and object apart from its contributions to our
knowledge of the religions of the world. It is nevertheless true that
the religious interest in England is so strong and penetrating, that
many of our leading anthropologists, in their investigations of savage
society, have directed their attention mainly to religious or
quasi-religious phenomena. Even if their labours were confined to the
discovery and the exposition of savage ritual and belief, we should
still be greatly indebted to them; for to many of us at least the
savage man is interesting in his own right, whether it is true or not
that the study of his mental phenomena helps to explain the mental
phenomena of our higher selves or of the {6} higher races in the past.
But these writers claim, and I think with right, to have done more
than this, and by comparison, induction, and hypothesis to have thrown
some light on the evolution of religion from lower to higher forms,
and therefore to have laid the foundation for the science with which
we are concerned. Also attempts have been recently made by an
accomplished scholar of the new doctrine, Dr Frazer, to trace what may
be called the anthropological genesis of the central idea of
Christianity itself.[6.1] It is not then surprising that in England
at least such claims and such ambitions should excite mistrust, even
hostility, and the prestige of anthropology may have also suffered at
times from the indiscretion of its friends. Still, its work is of wide
vogue, its energy exuberant, and its influence in the future assured.
In considering, therefore, the aims and methods of the comparative
science of religion, it has appeared to me that its relations to
anthropology {7} are now one of the main points in the inquiry. And we
may seem to have reached a stage where it is desirable to test our
position, to take stock as it were, to examine our methods, and to
consider whether they are capable of improvement. The task is
difficult, and in facing it one must face the imputation of
presumption, especially as in a short course of lectures one must be
brief, and may therefore appear over-dogmatic.
If the comparative study of religion is to examine, as on the ground
of its title it must, the various recorded or discoverable religions
of every branch of the human family, then a part of anthropology,
limited, as it has usually chosen to limit itself, to the study of the
savage races, is obviously a sub-department of the whole. And its
work, conducted often under great difficulties, has been solid,
well-organised, and of high importance. Even those who deny its claim
to be called a science, whatever that word may mean, must admit that
it is at least an indispensable branch of historic {8} inquiry, and
that it has deepened the self-knowledge of mankind.
Some of its pioneers may have been overeager in their theorising,
premature in their attempts to reveal the origin of all religion in
some savage ritual or in the background of savage thought, for
instance in ancestor-worship or totemism. Such rash generalisations
are inevitable in the opening periods of a new study, and may be
discredited or abandoned without discrediting the investigations that
gave rise to them. We may have come to be aware of the excesses of the
students of totemism: we may have come to the conviction that neither
theirs nor any other special and single hypothesis has as yet supplied
us with the master-clue by which we can penetrate to the aboriginal
source of human religion: we may have found scientific reasons for
rejecting the belief that all gods arose as ghosts of departed
ancestors. But if we discard such theories of origin, we owe this
negative result to the maturer study of anthropology {9} itself; and
we may owe to it the positive induction that the religious product at
the different stages and in the different branches of mankind was a
complex growth from many different germs.
It has taught us also much more than this. It has shown us that all
through the present societies of savage men there prevails an
extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual
and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an
ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the
psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the
same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or
the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its
environment.
We have learnt to discover a certain savage style, as we may call it,
in myth and ritual; and anthropology has performed a twofold work of
comparison; for it has not only compared the various savage races of
mankind, but it has compared the results of this colligation {10} with
the religious phenomena of the higher races, and has revealed the
savage style in much of their mythology and ritual. It was first
discovered by the earlier investigators of the antiquity of Northern
Europe, such as the brothers Grimm and Mannhardt, that underlying the
religion of Christendom lay a stratum of peasant-ritual and belief,
not yet extinct nor likely soon to be, that reveals the same mental
condition in early Europe that exists among our savage contemporaries
in various parts of the world. Then the sacred edifice of Hellenism
was attacked; and the complacency of Hellenic scholars was sometimes
disturbed by the revelation, through a strict comparative method, of
the same savage style in much of Hellenic ritual and Hellenic myth.
Thus for the first time we came to understand the true significance of
many of the crude and repulsive facts in Hellenic religion--the human
sacrifices, the reverence paid to animals, stones, and trees, the
demonology and magic rites. Many of these practices {11} had lost
their meaning for the more advanced generations, who nevertheless
retained them under the strong constraint of religious conservatism;
but if we find the same practices among existing races who perform
them with a living and plenary faith as part of a quasi-logical
structure of belief, we can place them back into their proper setting
when we discover them still surviving in the higher and alien society.
Greek religion especially, having never violently broken with its own
past, is a bed of rich deposit still inviting exploration. And now
Hellenic scholars are ransacking the same treasure for further
anthropological material; while Assyriologists and Egyptologists are
treating a part of the phenomena of their special departments in the
same spirit.
We realise the gain of this: we are slowly and surely arriving at
inductive conclusions concerning the similarity of development through
which the higher and lower races have passed and are passing; the
solidarity of the human family appears stronger than we {12} might
have supposed. At the same time we have now to be on our guard against
certain common anthropological fallacies. Some of these are less
inevitable than others: for instance, that which we may call the
fallacy of simple enumeration. On the ground of the general inductive
belief that the higher races have at one time passed through a savage
phase, it is often too rashly assumed that each and all of them must
at one time have possessed a particular institution, such as totemism
or ancestor-worship, which, as a matter of fact, is found among the
majority of the savage races of to-day. This is to exaggerate the
principle of solidarity, to ignore the fact of the great diversity
actually observable among existing primitive societies, and the
possibility that it was just by avoiding some particular detrimental
institution that some of the higher peoples were able to proceed on
their path of progress. Again, the anthropological explanation is
often obliged to be hypothetical, for the evidence presented {13} is
often very fragmentary: by means of a reasonable and expert
imagination, an attempt is made to reconstruct a whole fabric out of
a few fragments. A single bone may enable the expert biologist to
reshape unerringly the once living animal; but in anthropology the
fragment in question may have descended from either one of two
differing organisms or organic institutions that may have left very
much the same imprint upon mythology and religion. For instance, a
full-fledged totemistic system, having fallen into decay, might leave
its trace in certain stories about animals or in occasional reverence
paid to a particular animal: but direct animal-worship, a religious
view that may be quite independent of totemism, or certain forms of
ancestor-worship may equally well have deposited the same
fossil-thought or fossil-rite.[13.1] And we know how recklessly the
theory of the ubiquitous practice {14} of human sacrifice has been
used to explain certain peculiar phenomena in later ritual, such as
the scourging of the Spartan boys, for example.
But a stricter anthropology can correct the over-narrow hypotheses of
its immaturity, and can render masterly aid to the evolutionary study
of the higher religions; for each of these, in spite of revelation or
transforming enthusiasm that would obliterate the past, contains a
mass of mysterious dead matter; and it is for the anthropologist to
show the prior functional organic significance of this. But if, in
obedience to the currently accepted limitation of his subject, he
confines himself mainly to the study of savage life and to the dead
matter of the higher religions, and yet is tempted to deal with the
more vital and essential elements in these, he will be liable to the
special bias of his own study. We may note such bias in recent
attempts to explain the essential features of the Eleusinian Mysteries
in the light of merely savage anthropology. {15} And of course we are
all apt to lose the sense of proportion and to exaggerate the
importance of the special phenomena to which we confine our regard.
The folk-lorist will be liable to over-emphasise the part played by
mythology in religion, and may ignore the higher importance of prayer
and ritual; for the most conscientious cobbler is never really able to
stick to his last. In fact, though the whole exposition of the higher
religions is impossible without anthropology, there is some danger at
present lest the part be at times mistaken for the whole. For
instance, we may feel with some uneasiness that recent expositions of
Hellenic religion tend, unintentionally no doubt, to distort the view
of the reader and to produce a false impression by exaggerating the
savage and primitive facts, missing the true perspective and
misjudging the whole. Our appreciation of Greek mythology may suffer
in the same way, unless we can keep the keen edge of our appreciative
faculty: the Greek myth has often its striking {16} affinities with
the Arunta or the Pawnee, and it is necessary for comparative
folk-lore and anthropology to point this out, and often to insist on
the beauty of the legend and the dignity of the religious thought
among savages: but it is unfortunate if these studies should result in
our loss of the perception that Greek mythology, after all, is the
most beautiful of any of which we have record.
The fallacy which I have so far tried to indicate arises from the
temper of mind that a special study is liable to engender. On the
other hand, there is a particular fallacy of method to which the
modern study of anthropology, as it has chosen to limit itself,
specially exposes us. It is liable to withdraw us from the immediate
entourage of a particular fact--a particular legend or a religious
service--to the distant circumference. It was inevitable for the
earliest pioneers of the study to travel far, for the circumference
was unexplored, and there were facts lying at the distant points that
concerned us. But, after all, our first {17} object of study should be
the more immediate environment of the thing which we wish to
understand. The student of Hellenic religion and myth may have
ultimately to roam, in a literary sense, into Central Australia and
the byways of America; but he ought first to explore the Mediterranean
regions and the lands of anterior Asia. It is interesting, and may be
necessary, to know “the Pawnee version of the Eleusinia”; but, for the
true understanding of the great Greek mystery, certain elements in the
Egyptian religion, in Mithraism, and in Christianity itself will
probably afford a more illuminative comparison. The mind of our
student is sometimes tempted, in fact, to travel too easily and too
cheaply to the other side of the globe, and to leave undone work that
should first have been done nearer home.
To reduce these ideas to something like a working formula of method,
may we say that the anthropology which the comparative study of any
one of the more complex and {18} advanced religions immediately
demands is “an adjacent anthropology”? For religious ideas, legends,
and ritual are most contagious, and tend to propagate themselves over
large contiguous areas: for, to reverse a stereotyped question, “what
is less its own than a people’s gods?” We greatly desiderate an
anthropology of the Mediterranean basin, including anterior Asia; for
there are strong reasons for the belief that from very early times the
frequent intercourse of the leading peoples in this region endowed
them with a common stock of religious ideas, ritual, and legend which
have probably left their impress on the higher religions of the world.
It is these that specially interest most of us, and we feel we cannot
solve their problems by means of savage anthropology alone. Why, after
all, should the latter term be restricted, as it usually is, to the
study of savage life? Doubtless we cannot so extend the use of the
word as to cover its full etymological signification: else it would
come to include the whole of human history {19} from the beginning
down to the present, and would lose its value as a mark of any special
science. But we might somewhat enlarge its present connotation with
advantage to the comparative method, and without a too wide departure
from current usage. We might define the anthropological study of any
one of the higher religions as an evolutionary study of its
embryology: the evolutionary law might appear in the first instance as
a proximate law of growth. For probably every one of the world-creeds
has inherited, apart from its own achievement, a double tradition, a
tradition from the more remote and one from the more immediate past.
The first may descend from immemorial antiquity, and from really
primitive or savage mental and social life; and it has been the task
of primitive anthropology to expound and explain the facts that this
tradition has deposited. But many if not most of these facts may be
regarded as functionally dead matter surviving in the more advanced
system of belief, and as not belonging {20} to its essential life. On
the other hand, from the immediate tradition much will be found to
have been taken over by an inevitable law of assimilation, certain
potent ideas which, though transformed, will enter into the very
life-blood of the new creed. And these are to be discovered and
analysed by what I have ventured to call an “adjacent” anthropology,
which will include a comprehensive study of the literature and
monuments belonging to the more proximate past of the race which
develops the new faith as well as of the races that are its nearer
neighbours.
Such a method, though not hitherto styled anthropological, has already
been applied by various scholars in the different parts of our field;
the exposition of the Babylonian elements in Judaic religion, of the
Judaic and pagan elements in Moslemism, are examples of it. On the
present occasion I would prefer to illustrate it by noting its
application to the scientific study of Christianity itself, of which
the remarkable complexity, {21} the variety of forms that it has
assumed in different parts of Christendom at different periods, seems
specially to invite the higher anthropological treatment. Moreover it
probably contains a richer deposit than any other of the
world-religions from the various streams of thought and belief that
nourished the life of early civilised or semi-civilised man. The
illustration drawn from our own religion will be also more personally
interesting to ourselves; and though the limits of time and my own
knowledge may prevent me from putting forth any original statement,
yet something may be gained and a more extended interest awakened by a
brief notice of what has been and what remains to be done.
There is now no need for apology if one wishes frankly to consider the
genesis of the fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of
earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto a certain religious
shyness, which belongs to the national character, may have made
English {22} scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology of our
national faith; and the progress of the subject owes more to foreign
workers. Our own theological students of distinction have not evaded
the question as to the early influences that may have moulded the
religious thought of Christ and St Paul; but these were naturally
sought mainly in the later Judaism; and though the debt of the
developed Christianity to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored,
yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic literature nor Greek
philosophy explain the whole complex of historic Christianity, is a
conviction of recent growth, and the investigations to which it has
prompted are recent. For instance, it was a new departure of great
promise for the future of our science when, in a course of Hibbert
lectures delivered some years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the
deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of ritual, organisation,
and even religious concept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other
mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few {23} students of Hellenic
religion in England have often noted its many ties of affinity with
our own, though of these there has been as yet no complete and
authoritative account. We may admit that the triumph of a new and
great creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps a sudden mental
transformation in the catechumens difficult to equate with any
formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot gainsay the experience
that as the religion establishes and organises itself, it draws
nourishment from the old soil which is full of the living germs of
past organisms. Therefore it was inevitable that Hellenic religion
should leave a deep impress upon earlier and later Christianity;
partly because the religious temper in the Greek world throughout the
centuries immediately preceding the adoption of Christianity was more
powerful and fervid than it had been in the days of Homer or Pericles,
and mainly because Hellenic converts became the pillars of the Church.
But the comparative student must pursue the {24} problem further
afield and beyond the track of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion,
which Professor Ramsay’s travels and investigations have assisted us
to know, must be seriously taken into account; for Phrygia was one of
the earliest homes of Christianity, its aboriginal religion had
germinated in ideas strikingly akin to some that are primary in all or
many of the creeds of Christendom; and the morbid and ecstatic
temperament of the native Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to
the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared again in certain
schismatic forms of Christian doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the
heresy of Montanism. Finally, we may learn much, even adopt much, from
our enemies. The most dangerous antagonists of Christianity were,
after all, the worship of Isis and Mithraism. It may be possible to
trace the influence of these on their conqueror: the great work of M.
Cumont on Mithras cult suggests at least many interesting religious
parallels; and even the older Zoroastrian {25} literature must be
considered within the range of necessary and legitimate comparison.
As I am here concerned with illustration of method rather than with
positive proof, I can only offer a very brief summary of the results
which the anthropological study of Christianity has hitherto achieved,
and may yet achieve.
The religious affinities discoverable between the earlier and later
“Mediterranean” systems may be classified according as they appear in
the legends, in nomenclature and terminology, in external symbols and
liturgical objects, in hieratic institutions, and finally in the
ideas, aspirations, and concepts of faith. As regards legend and
mythology, a great historic religion may of course claim to be free
from all mythology; nevertheless it is a matter of experience that
popular legends are sure at some period earlier or later to creep in,
for the people insist on telling the old stories under changed names.
I myself have heard the immemorial story of Odysseus walking inland
with his oar, which the rustic mistakes {26} for a winnowing-fan, told
about St Peter, St Paul, and St John on the coast of the Peloponnese;
just as an old Norse legend about Odin and Baldur is retold of Christ
and St Peter.[26.1] And students of mediæval hagiology will discover
more and more clearly various fragments of pre-Christian mythology
embedded in the legends of the saints. Such facts are the material of
comparative folk-lore, which plays a useful but quite subordinate part
in the work of comparative religion. Legends have indeed their own
independent interest, poetical, ethical, and other; but the importance
of mere mythology in the study of religion has been often much
overrated; St Augustine, mistaking Greek legends for Greek religion,
could discover no morality in it at all,[26.2] and modern scholars
have inherited the fallacy. Myths are often irresponsible, capricious,
volatile, and flit like a vapour round the solid structure of real
{27} belief and ritual. A high religion may attract low myths: some of
our own are not spotless, but Christianity can ignore them. The myth
that is an essential fact for the student of religion is that which
enshrines some living religious idea or institution, or one which
proves the survival of some ritual or faith that belonged to an older
system. I may note a few of this kind which illustrate the affinities
of Judaic, Christian, and pagan legend. The cessation of
human-sacrifice in the Mediterranean area, the awakening of the
conviction that the practice was abhorrent to a merciful God, implied
so momentous a change in religious and moral thought and practice that
it would be strange if it left no legendary record of itself. We may
discern one in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice; to which we find a
very striking and close parallel in the Laconian legend of Helen,
whose father intended to sacrifice her to God in order to stay a
plague:[27.1] {28} the eagle, the messenger of God, swooped down and
snatched the knife from the sacrificer’s hand, and let it fall on a
kid that was pasturing near. Again, we are all familiar with the story
of Jephtha’s vow: the fact is not so well known that a story identical
in nearly every detail was told of Idomeneus, the Cretan hero,[28.1]
who vowed that if he returned home from the Trojan war he would
sacrifice to God the first thing that he met on landing: his daughter
was the first that met him--and Idomeneus “did with her according to
his vow,” or intended to do so, and the people exiled him for it.
Different from these, but belonging to the inner circle, so to speak,
of sacred narrative, are one or two Gospel stories which are not
peculiar to Palestine or to our sacred books. The miraculous star that
guides sacred personages on a divine errand must be an Anatolian
star-legend, for it is told of Æneas and his voyage to Italy.[28.2]
And a critical appreciation of the {29} style of Hellenic folk-lore
detects at once a marked Hellenic colour in the legends that gather
around the birth and rearing of the Virgin in the apocryphal Gospel of
St James. More important and suggestive of much more is the
parallelism that we discover between the story of our Lord’s
temptation and the temptation of Zarathustra in the Zend-Avesta: here
also the evil god offers the holy prophet the kingdoms of the world if
he will fall down and worship him.[29.1]
Finally, it is not improbable that the strange legend preserved in
various late Greek MSS., of the Virgin Mary’s descent into
hell,[29.2] where she is shown the torments of the damned, is derived
ultimately from the Babylonian myth of the descent of Ischtar, which
in the Greek world transformed itself into the story of the descent of
Aphrodite. This suggestion is in harmony with the evidence which will
be {30} noticed below for the belief that the development of the
worship and the divine character of the Virgin owed much, directly or
indirectly, to the great Anatolian cult of the mother-goddess.
As regards the legend just mentioned, we may suppose direct borrowing,
or at least direct mental suggestion from an older mythology and
faith. To the other examples which I have adduced--probably only a few
among many that might be quoted--the theory of borrowing may be
inappropriate.
It may be more scientific, and certainly it is at present more
expedient, to be content with the assumption that for thousands of
years over contiguous human areas a similarity of religious
temperament, religious institutions, religious crises may tend to
produce a common stock of legend; whether the legend is true or false
is not our present concern.
I turn now to the second group of affinities, those in nomenclature
and terminology. This may at first sight appear a matter unimportant
{31} for the evolution of religion, and of merely linguistic concern.
A people changing its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, but
must adapt the old terminology to the new thought. It may be of
interest for the student of language to know that when St Paul
promises to “show you a mystery” he is borrowing the language of
paganism; that when Bishop Clemens[31.1] ecstatically exclaims, “The
Lord is our hierophant; bearing the sacred torch He has marked the
initiate with His own seal… once join our mystery and you will dance
in the choir of angels,” he is using the phraseology of the Eleusinian
and Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a style, upon which Dr
Hatch has sufficiently commented, is more than linguistic; for it
foreshadows a real though fortunately a temporary change which came
over Christianity in the first few centuries of its life, transforming
it from an open doctrine into a mystery organised after the old Greek
type. {32} Moreover the modern logical view of names as merely
indifferent speech-symbols, which can be changed without affecting the
essence of the things, was by no means the old-world view. The formula
_nomina sunt numina_ was valid in all the old religions of the
Mediterranean area, including earlier and even later Christianity: the
divine name was felt to be part of the divine essence and itself of
supernatural potency; and this will be seen to be of paramount
importance when we consider the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore the
propagation of a new religion was greatly assisted if it could allow
itself to employ some at least of the names potent and familiar in the
older creed. Now the personal names of the various deities of
paganism, owing to the mental illusion noted above, were necessarily
hateful to the new faith and were ruthlessly suppressed, surviving
merely as names of demons or for purposes of magic: only in remote
corners of the old world one or two may still be lingering, purified
as it {33} were and at peace, as in the modern chapel of “Panagia
Aphroditissa,” near the old Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred
names of Greek paganism were mere appellatives, possessing less
individual personality, and were therefore innocent in the ears of the
Christian propagandists. And two of these were destined to become
names of primary virtue in the terminology of the new faith. When the
apostles and their successors preached the Gospel of “the Saviour,”
this title could awaken at least a responsive religious thrill in the
hearts of the Hellenes who had been nursed in their ancestral
religion. For it had long been attached to their supreme god, and in
its feminine form to their beloved goddess Kore, and as applied to her
the appellative already connoted “salvation” after death;[33.1] and
already it had been used by the Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the
divine man, God’s representative on earth, “the {34} living image of
God,” as one of the later Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language
of the Rosetta inscription.[34.1] But in the history of divine names
none have been of greater import for paganism and Christianity alike
than “Kore-Parthenos” and that of the Greek and Phrygian “Divine
Mother,” the θεῶν Μήτηρ. It is at least probable that the
prevalence of the cult and the name of “Kore,” the goddess who
proffered salvation in the pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded
strong stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of Mariolatry, which
is one of those phenomena in the history of the Church which cannot be
adequately explained without looking beyond the limits of Christianity
proper. A passage in the Panarium of Epiphanios[34.2] is of singular
interest for those who wish to study the period of transition between
old things and {35} new. This writer tells us that on the night of the
5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, the worshippers met in the
sacred enclosure or temple of “Kore,” and having sung hymns to the
music of the flute till dawn, they descended by the light of torches
into an underground shrine and brought up thence a wooden idol on a
bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with the sign of the cross
on her brow, her hands, and her knees. And with the accompaniment of
flutes, hymns, and dances the image was carried round the central
shrine seven times, before it was restored again to its nether
dwelling-place: “and the votaries say that to-day at this hour
Kore--that is, the Virgin--gave birth to the Eternal.”
It is strange that Epiphanios should quote this rite as an example of
pure paganism. This cannot be true: the image has been carefully
signed with the cross in such a way as to suggest, not casual
violence, but the deliberate intention of the worshippers; nor {36}
could the formula, “the Virgin has born the Eternal,” have been part
of a purely pagan liturgy consecrated to the Hellenic Kore. Still less
could the service be purely Christian: at least I imagine that a naked
Virgin, kept in a cavern shrine and carried round with timbrels, would
be a unique fact in Christian archæology. The belief is forced upon
us that we have here a blending of at least two rival creeds in a
period of transition. An old ritual of Kore at Alexandria, the goddess
of the underworld whose statue was kept in a subterraneous cavern, may
have included a kind of passion play in which a holy child was born:
as this occurred near the beginning of January, it could all the more
easily be adapted to the requirements of a gradually prevailing
Christianity. The idol is sanctified with the sign of the cross, and
the child is called “the Aion.” This name betrays the influence at
work. The doctrine which laboured most zealously to combine the
various elements of the pagan and Christian creeds was Gnosticism,
{37} and “Aion” was a figure which the Gnostics borrowed from
Mithraism.[37.1] It seems that the religious rays from Hellas,
Persia, and Bethlehem converged at the “Korion” of Alexandria. But the
name Κόρη does not seem to have usually formed part of the sacred
title accepted by the early Church for the Mother of our Lord.
Probably the name had acquired a personal association with the pagan
goddess too strong to allow it to be used for the new faith;[37.2]
nor was the idea of virginity so directly connoted by it as by the
term παρθένος: hence ἡ ἁγνὴ παρθένος or ἡ ἁγία παρθένος is chosen for
the Christian appellation of Mary. But these words themselves belong
to the ancient hieratic vocabulary of Hellas, for the maiden-goddess
known by no other name than Parthenos had long been adored in {38}
various states of Asia Minor and Thrace;[38.1] “Hagne,” the “Holy
One,” was a divinity dear to the Arcadians;[38.2] and at Assos, the
chief port of Mysia, visited by St Paul on one of his journeys, an
inscription attests that “the Holy Virgin of our fatherland”--such is
her style--had been pre-eminent in the pagan worship.[38.3] Moreover
the sacred title, “the Mother of God,” was sympathetic with a very
ancient and dominant Mediterranean faith: in prehistoric times from
Crete, and at a later period from Phrygia, had gone forth the worship
of the divine mother, known generally as “the Gods’ Mother” or “the
Mother,” which had left a deep impress upon the religious imagination
of the various races of the Greek and Roman world. It is no paradox to
affirm that one of the streams {39} that fostered the later growth of
Mariolatry may have descended from the Minoan palace of
Knossos.[39.1]
As regards the third group in my classification, external symbols and
liturgical objects, we might suppose that these mainly belong to the
minutiæ of archæological study. A philosopher may ignore them as
trivial facts; but they have been the cause of too much bloodshed and
strife to be ignored by the history of religions, and the feelings
they excite are still powerful enough to divide the churches and the
sects of Christendom. Besides, if one religion borrows its symbols and
sacred objects from another, it probably borrows much more besides.
The use of candles and incense in churches, the fashion of certain
ecclesiastic vestments, can be shown to have descended to us from a
pre-Christian world. And it was quite natural that the new faith
should take over the religious property of paganism, whatever at least
it could {40} receive without violation of its own essential
principles. It is only the anthropological study of these particulars,
apparently insignificant in themselves, that enables us to understand
certain modern controversies, as for instance concerning incense, and
also to appreciate the extraordinary tenacity with which the
successive generations cleave to the smaller things of cult. These
latter are felt to be part of the spell which is exercised upon us by
an immemorial tradition, a spell that is all the stronger because it
works upon the “subconscious” self; and those who maintain them are
rarely aware of the aboriginal reason which prompts them. And often
the question about the symbols or the sacred objects of worship, as
distinct from the ideas and personalities, becomes obviously of prime
importance for the comparison and classification of religions. Thus
the distinction between iconic or idolatrous and aniconic or
non-idolatrous cults is of deep significance, for it may correspond to
the distinction between a more and a less {41} anthropomorphic
conception of the divinity, or to a belief that the embodiment of him
in material objects is right and seemly or wrong and unseemly. The
more spiritual a religion becomes, the greater is its inclination to
dispense with the idol and even to reprobate it; the worshipper of
Jahvé was thus set in antagonism to the surrounding tribes, and in
the Iranian region the Zarathustrian votary to the worshipper of the
Daevas. The history of Christianity in regard to this matter is
familiar to us all: in spite of the vehement protests of its apostles
and earlier propagandists who inherited the spiritual Judaic view, we
know that all the efforts of the iconoclastic emperors could not
suppress the veneration of images in the later period. Even in the
Teutonic north, Christianity came, in the days before the Reformation,
to assume an iconic character which is not accounted for by the
ancestral tradition of our pagan forefathers: who certainly carved
images, in spite of what Tacitus tells us, but do not appear to have
been markedly idolatrous. {42} We infallibly detect here the abiding
influence of Greco-Roman paganism, in which idolatry had taken so deep
a root, satisfying as it did the artistic-religious cravings of the
people. We have records of the transformation of the old statues into
Christian images; in an epigram we find Heracles pathetically
complaining that he is forced to become St Luke:[42.1] a beautiful
head of Aphrodite in Athens is rudely stamped with the cross, perhaps
to convert her into the Virgin:[42.2] at the present day there exists
in South Italy an image of a Madonna del Granato, holding a
pomegranate, which by a curious chain of evidence can be traced with
some probability back to the Hera of Argos, carved by Polycleitos.
Now the image may be regarded in two aspects: as a symbol merely
bringing close to the sense the spiritual idea of divinity, and {43}
serving to stimulate the prayerful thought of the worshipper: or it
may be venerated as the indwelling abode of the divinity, in which he
habitually resides, or into which, by spells and blood-offerings, he
may be compelled to enter. The first is the more spiritual and
advanced point of view, the orthodox aspect of the image in the iconic
churches of Christendom at most periods; and this is put forward as an
apology for what may seem idolatry: we may note in passing that the
same apology was put forward by the advanced champions of paganism.
The second is the more primitive view, accepted at most periods by the
people, and sometimes tolerated or even encouraged by certain of the
churches: the idol is regarded as miraculous, as infused with divine
power, perhaps itself the very divinity; and the uncultured Greeks who
whipped the idol of Pan with squills if food was scarce,[43.1] or
bound the image of Aphrodite with cords to prevent it running
away,[43.2] the {44} Breton smith mentioned by Renan, who threatened
the saint’s image with red-hot pincers to compel him to heal his son,
the modern savage who smears his idols with blood,[44.1] are to be
classed together in the morphology of religion.
Idolatry in this sense is a higher form of fetichism, which, strictly
defined, is the veneration of material objects, often shaped by art
and handled in such a way as to endow them with divine potency, which
bring good fortune to the owner. It is supposed to connote savagery,
but survivals of it are found in most civilised communities, and we
probably all inherit some faint impress of the fetichistic spirit, nor
need we be startled if we find it in the higher religions.