the minutiæ of this superstition: the long lists of pure and impure
things that one might compile do not disclose any single regulative
idea, and nothing is more baffling than the eccentricities of
prejudice and terror. But this superstition often proceeds with a
logic of its own: as a corpse is most unclean, and all who touch it
are impure, therefore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are impure and
must not be eaten: and anything that however distantly reminds us of
danger and death, such as quarrelsome acts and words, may come to be
rigidly prohibited during a ritual of purification. As blood is
primevally impure, therefore any substance analogous to it or of the
same colour might be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or
pomegranates. The same kind of sensational aversion will cause
malodorous substances to {99} be regarded usually as unclean;
therefore food of an evil savour, or such as leaves unpleasant traces
in the person, will often be tabooed by certain strict sects.[99.1]
There is also a certain common-sense discoverable in the distinction
between substances on the ground of their greater or less
susceptibility to spiritual contagion: earthen pots, for instance,
have been often considered more easily infected than metal, and need
longer purification, liquid substances more dangerous conductors than
dry. “Should the dry mingle with the dry,” says Ahura Mazda in a
conversation with Zarathustra, “how soon all this material earth of
mine would be only one Peshôtanu,” which is as much as to say that
the earth would become a charnel-house of impurity. And
Darmesteter[99.2] remarks, in commenting on this verse, “Nowadays in
Persia, the Jews are {100} not allowed to go out of their house on a
rainy day, lest the religious impurity conducted through the rain
should pass from the Jew to the Mussalman.” We have here a view of
contagion that seems to agree with that of modern science, only the
latter is physical, the former mystic or spiritual. Again, the choice
of substances used for purification was not dictated by the modern
idea of a cleansing quality, but by a certain superstitious logic
which we can sometimes detect. If liquid substances have a natural
affinity for contagion, then if we take them while they are uninfected
and use them for lustration, they will easily absorb the impurities of
our own persons and rid us of them; therefore the modern savage or the
ancient Greek might think it desirable to daub himself with clay or
mud to wash away his taint: and from this example we see how distinct
these primeval lustral processes are from the modern hygienic washing,
to which nevertheless they often bear a close resemblance. By a
similar reasoning we {101} may explain an inconsistency that
occasionally appears in the cathartic ritual; a substance impure as
food might be used for purposes of lustration: for instance, we find
garlic used as a cathartic in the worship of the Phrygian god Mên at
Athens.[101.1] Fire, the universal purifier, may have been accredited
with this power by right of its own nature, but partly in all
probability because it was believed to dry up miasma and damp
infection.[101.2]
In the Zend-Avesta code, after drying for a whole year under the light
of the sun, the corpse at last becomes pure; for by the same natural
instinct that caused the aversion to blood, the sun’s light comes to
be regarded as the purest thing in the world: meat cooked by its
warmth is more sanctified than fire-cooked meat; and certain acts and
states of man have a greater defilement in the sun’s face.
So far I have been trying to present the {102} phenomena without
reference to any definite religious belief, to express them as far as
possible in terms of simple sensation; for, as was said at the
beginning of the discussion, it is possible that they have descended
from a pre-religious age. We may now ask how the baneful influence of
the impure thing in this primeval stage of thought was supposed to
work, unassisted by any spiritual agency such as spirit or god. We may
suppose that it produced its results indirectly by depressing the
vital energies of the man who was the victim of the superstition: the
savage might believe that it worked directly, by some mysterious law
of luck, paralysing a man’s force and spoiling his hunting and
fighting. This idea of a spontaneous mesmeric power of evil that
certain things possess seems to glimmer through the verse in the
Zend-Avesta. “Here am I,” says an unlucky man to those whom he meets,
“one who has touched the corpse of a man and who is powerless in mind,
powerless in tongue, {103} powerless in hand; do make me
clean.”[103.1] Is it an illusion to believe that we have here
penetrated to the psychological root of the whole matter? And here
there is no direct reference to spirit or god.
But at an early period such reference was made, and it was then that
this cathartic ritual really started on a momentous career. When the
doctrine of animism became firmly established, it attracted the ritual
and the ideas associated with it, and the animistic imprint upon them
can still be traced even in the higher religions. A dangerous spirit
was supposed to abide in the impure thing and to be evoked by the
unclean act; the potency which in the primeval stage of feeling had
been perhaps regarded merely as something mysteriously baneful and
“uncanny,” now becomes personal and intelligible and can be dealt with
and exorcised by certain efficacious rules. The stain of blood on the
homicide attracts the ghost of the slain to pursue him, certain foods
{104} are impure because evil spirits attach to them, disease is
specially their work, and a veritable pandemonium gathers around the
corpse, the woman in child-birth, and the new-born child.
Illustrations showing how this demoniac faith has pervaded the thought
of the world are broadcast in the records of primitive man as well as
in the higher literature of our race, the Vedic and Iranian sacred
books, the New Testament, the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic
texts. In the view of the Zend-Avesta, which regards the whole
universe as an overcharged battery of spiritual electricity, a single
careless act of accidental uncleanliness is a cosmic catastrophe:
legions of “drugs” or devils start up at once into existence to
destroy the world of righteousness.[104.1] Plato, though on the whole
he preserves his sanity in the matter, is under the dominion of
similar ideas, and Neoplatonism reverts back to the savage view,
believing that the chief aim of ἁγνείαι, or purifications, was to
{105} drive the evil spirits out of certain kinds of food.[105.1]
The deep animistic colouring that the conception we are analysing came
at a very early time to acquire may be responsible for a very
important event in the history of religion: the evolution, namely, of
the dualistic principle, the idea of the antagonism between good and
evil spirits, the germ of which we can already detect in the animistic
stage which may have preceded the faith in high personal gods. If the
impure things and acts are impregnated with evil spirits, it is
natural to suppose that the pure are the abode of the good, and these
are contrary the one to the other. It may have required a very long
period for a clear belief in the good spirit to crystallise; for to
the very primitive mind all spirits are mysteriously dangerous, even
the ghosts of one’s dearest kinsmen. Still, the ancestral spirits make
on the whole for righteousness, and can be given the position of
guardians of {106} the purification code. Thus the New Caledonians
avert the wrath of the ghosts of their ancestors by washing, fasting,
and chastity:[106.1] the ancient Greek might pray or sacrifice to
a vague animistic company of θεοὶ Ἀποτρόπαιοι or Μειλίχιοι, regarded
perhaps as ghosts of the lower world, to avert the impure omen or to
wash off the taint of blood.
Finally, the conception of purity comes under the dominion of the
higher faith in a personal god. In Greece, Apollo and Zeus attach to
themselves the ritual and the associated ideas; in Persia the whole
complex code of purity is established by Ahura Mazda; in Israel by
Jahvé, who enforces the minutest details of the law with insistence
on the purity of God.[106.2] In Babylonian as in Vedic religion, the
fire-god is pre-eminently the purifier, a name which is attached
particularly to Agni, and we find in the Babylonian liturgical texts
the {107} prayer,[107.1] “May the torch of the shining fire-god
cleanse me.” Nor does Buddhism appear to differ from Leviticus or the
Zend-Avesta in respect of the complications of its cathartic rules and
the importance it attached to them. The Buddhist missionary, I-Tsing,
exhorts the faithful to observe the elaborate prescriptions of the
Buddha, “because,” as he naively puts it, “gods and spirits get
disgusted with our ways of wearing garments and eating food.” With
this abundance of testimony before us, we are all the more surprised
to find that very little is forthcoming from the records of our own
ancestral paganism. We can scarcely believe that our Teutonic
ancestors were destitute of the idea of lustration, and that their
cleanliness and chastity, attested by the Roman writers and still more
clearly by their own sagas, were virtues of purely secular origin. And
in fact we have certain records of Teutonic ritual that seem to point
to cathartic ideas: “After the goddess Nerthus had gone on her annual
{108} procession round the villages,” as Tacitus informs us,[108.1]
“her chariot and garments and her own person were solemnly washed in
the waters of a sacred lake, as if the holy divinity had been polluted
by her intercourse with men.” It is also possible that the custom
still prevalent in the Teutonic populations of Europe, of leaping over
the bonfire on midsummer’s eve, is the relic of a ceremony of
fire-lustration performed before the beginning of harvest.[108.2]
Doubtless also they had the same rules as those prevailing in nearly
all communities, whether civilised or uncivilised, concerning the
purity of temples; for we have record of an Icelandic law that the
“Holy Place of Peace” was not to be defiled by blood or any human
uncleanness.[108.3] Still, though other evidence pointing in the same
direction might be gathered, it seems clear that the burden of the
cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on the consciences of our
fathers when the dawn {109} of their history begins. I am not aware of
any indication, for instance, that they regarded formal lustration
after bloodshed to be obligatory or desirable. And their comparative
freedom in regard to such ceremonies is a fact of great importance
with which we must reckon in our estimate of our later spiritual
history. We may at the same time believe, on general grounds, that
they also had at some remoter epoch passed through a period of bondage
to the same ideas and the same formalities that we find so generally
prevalent in other kindred and alien races.
The more interesting side of the inquiry now presents itself, the
question about the influence that these cathartic ideas may have
exercised upon religion, morality, and law. We may endeavour, for the
sake of systematisation, to maintain this tripartite classification,
although we find it becoming more and more illusory the further our
investigation travels back to the earlier social life of man.
But before attempting to survey the special {110} facts that present
themselves within these three departments, it is well to note one
phenomenon that concerns religion and morality in equal measure, and
is of perhaps greater importance than all others in the varied process
of the evolution of the cathartic idea. We have mainly been dealing so
far with facts that seem to belong to the most primitive deposit of
human consciousness and not properly to be ethical in the modern sense
at all: the stain of blood, even incurred by ruthless murder, the
stain of childbirth and the sexual processes, the contagion of the
corpse, are all for the same reason “suspect” to primitive man because
they involve vague and mysterious danger, not because they are
associated with the concept of sin. Nor does this latter concept
necessarily enter in, even when a more articulate animism has taken
possession of the superstition, and the impurity means the presence of
an evil spirit: the leper, the man who has come into contact with the
dead, {111} the blood-stained murderer, are all regarded as suffering
from the same trouble, though in greater or lesser degree. The idea of
purity and impurity, in fact, whether corporeal and external or
whether spiritual in the sense of its association with the world of
spirits, is still non-ethical, and we must not apply our moral
standards to it until a later stage. It arrives at this stage and at
its higher significance for morality when it has evolved the
conception of a pure heart, a pure soul. And that this latter, which
is one of the most pregnant of the concepts of developed ethics, was
actually evolved from the primitive ritualistic and demoniac
superstition can, I believe, be proved by the evidence, and accords
with a well-known psychologic law of early thought.
We deceive ourselves if we are content to say that terms such as “pure
heart,” “pure soul” are mere metaphors. The theory of metaphors is a
refuge for those who do not understand, or who do not wish to
understand, {112} religious history, and much might be said of the
far-reaching effects of this fallacy of interpretation. The soul was
not called “ψυχή” or “animus” or “spiritus” by mere metaphor: nor was
the phrase “white liver” a metaphor for the people who first applied
it to the coward. Primitive man may be the victim of false analogy and
association of ideas, but these mental processes mean for him
something other than metaphor means for us. It is not by way of
metaphor that the modern Basuto speaks of his heart “being black and
dirty,” that is, “impure” or “sad,” the same word being used for
corporeal impurity, sadness, and sin.[112.1] The colour of the impure
act or bodily state is, so to speak, transferred inwards: if the act
involves a physical stain, then, as things, {113} words, and thoughts
are so closely correlated in early psychology, the term “unclean
word,” “unclean thought” expresses a literal belief: gradually, as the
concept of mind and soul becomes more and more immaterial, we may
reach the spiritual concept of mental purity which is of value for
modern ethics. The example quoted above reveals the Basuto at the
half-way point in this evolution: and a certain North-American Indian
tribe, whose customs have been recorded by Miss Alice Fletcher,
appears to have reached the same mental stage; in her paper called the
“Shadow of a Ghost Lodge,”[113.1] she mentions that the kinsmen who
sit together isolated from others and mourning the dead for a period
must rigidly abstain from any tales of fighting or “bad words,” they
must forget old injuries and cancel all grudges. The mental process
that leads to this excellent _tapu_ may be stated thus: the mourners
are in a condition of deep impurity which they are endeavouring {114}
to cleanse away; quarrelling, vindictive speech, and memories would
intensify the impurity, because all these are associated with
bloodshed and death. This analogy may serve to explain the curious
rule prevailing at Athens that anyone who laid a suppliant-bough on
the altar in the Eleusinion during the period of the Eleusinian
Mysteries was liable to the penalty of death or a heavy fine.[114.1]
I would suggest that the underlying thought is the same: the laying
the suppliant-bough indicated a grievance and was a legally
quarrelsome act, and therefore a violation of the purity of the solemn
season. It was probably a similar chain of reasoning that induced the
Greeks and other races of the higher religion to enforce silence
before and during the sacrifice, not merely in order that the priest
should not be disturbed by the chatter of the crowd; for the word used
for this sacred silence is εὐφημία, “auspicious speech”: it is
obvious that the original motive of the rule {115} was to guard
against the utterance of any impure word that might produce an
ill-omened condition of mind in the congregation.
Of this development of the idea of spiritual from that of ritualistic
purity, the language of certain of the higher races affords the same
indication as we find in the Basuto phrase: the Latin “purus” and the
Greek καθαρός and φοῖβος themselves have an original material or
physical significance; the blood that is shed and the unburied corpse
emit a “miasma,” a defiling atmosphere charged with dangerous spirits,
and the same word μίασμα comes to denote a spiritual corruption of the
soul: touching a corpse is called “sin” in the Zend-Avesta;[115.1]
and it is significant that the same word which is used to express the
material idea of impurity in the Old Testament in the earlier books of
the Law is employed in the later and more advanced ethical vocabulary
of the Bible for a real sin against God as understood in the modern
sense.
{116}
Again, we have other evidence besides the linguistic that the earliest
conception of sin which we can call spiritual was still
half-materialistic, and was still closely allied to that of bodily
impurity. In the theory of earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away
like a physical taint, the atonement takes the form of certain
lustrations, and repentance is not considered necessary as a moral
condition of release. And to the same middle stage of development
belongs the process known as the transference of sin, whereby the sin
can be extracted as if it were a substance from the person of the
sinner and transferred into another man or animal or even an inanimate
object. Think of sin as an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of
quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.[116.1] It no doubt
belongs to a comparatively early {117} period of savage religion.
Among the Atkans, for instance,[117.1] we hear of such a release as
this: the sin, which in this case was a gross violation of a natural
law of the sex-instinct, was made to enter into certain weeds which
were worn about the person, and then, under a clear sun were carefully
thrown away, the sun himself being called to witness the act of
transference. In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking off of evils
was a great public festival: bands of warriors marched forth crying
out, “Go forth, all evils,” and then bathed in the river, while the
people shook out their clothes from the doors.[117.2] A similar
record speaks of the Inca praying to the river-god to bear away his
sins, which he had confessed in the sight of the sun. And during the
Peruvian purification a similar rule prevailed to that which was
noticed above, that all abusive language and strife was to be avoided.
Or again, the {118} belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be
induced to find another living-lodgment, suggests the scapegoat, a
familiar figure in Leviticus and in Greek ritual, the animal who bears
away with it into the wilderness the sins of the people, or is put to
death with the uttered prayer that into it may enter all the evils of
the community. The Judaic record tells us that Aaron “confessed over
him all the iniquities of the children of Israel… putting them on the
head of the goat”; after this, as the animal was in a high degree of
sin-infection, both Aaron and the man who led it away into the
wilderness must wash and change their clothes.[118.1] The Egyptian
rite described by Herodotus,[118.2] shows us the same idea
differently worked out: the head of the animal is severed with the
imprecation that it may bear the evils of the community, and is then
either thrown into the river so that the stream may carry them away,
or is sold to the Hellenes wherever there happens to be a Hellenic
market: Herodotus {119} does not tell us the reason of this, which,
however, is easily divined: the Hellene is the stranger who, as the
Egyptians hoped, might eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into
his alien person the people’s sins; for the eating of other people’s
sins is a recognised primitive process of transference.[119.1] What
is unique in the Egyptian management of the ceremony is the skilful
combination of religion and trade.
Finally, the ritual may demand a human scapegoat, who will fulfil
exactly the same function as the animal. He may be put to death, or
driven over the border, carrying away the national sins: he may be
very vile, and therefore a fitting receptacle for sin, like the
“κάθαρμα,” the “purifying man” in the Attic festival of the Thargelia,
who was led through the streets, whipped with rods, and at one time
burnt; or the slave at Marseilles,[119.2] who was fed up and
reverentially treated for {120} a year, and then was led forth in
solemn procession through the streets and expelled from the city,
praying that on him might fall all the evils of the community:[120.1]
or the scapegoat-man may be exceptionally holy, being the better able,
through his very holiness, to absorb harmlessly and dissipate the
evils of others. Thus even the miserable victim of the Thargelia was
mysteriously invested with a certain sacred character, and seems once
to have been regarded in a certain degree as the counterpart of the
divinity.[120.2]
Much of this ritual of sin-transference is altogether independent of
the higher gods; it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or mechanical
magic. At a later period it is harmonised with their service and
accompanied with prayer; and at this stage we note a curious
ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the primeval source of impurity,
becomes itself {121} a purifier, not by the law _similia similibus
curantur_, but owing to the growing power of the sacrificial concept.
“The blood of bulls and goats can wash away sins,” because the animal
that has been consecrated by contact with the altar becomes charged
with a divine potency, and its sacred blood, poured over the impure
man, absorbs and disperses his impurity. Illustrations are easily
gathered from Hellenic ritual,[121.1] which frequently employed the
blood of swine for cathartic purposes. On an early vase-painting we
see the hero Theseus seated on the altar of God the Atoner with pig’s
blood running down his body to cleanse him from the slaughter of the
brigands.[121.2] In the Judaic rule the blood of the red heifer was
{122} first sprinkled by the priest before the tabernacle of the
congregation seven times, but for special purposes of lustration the
“water of separation” was used, that is, water made holy by being
mingled with the ashes of the heifer that had been burnt. We have a
curious illustration of the double character of this water of
separation: being consecrated and holy, it was powerful to cleanse
away stain and sin: yet its own impure composition was not wholly
forgotten, for he who sprinkled the water or touched it was unclean
till evening.[122.1]
These ideas belong to very old-world thought, yet their reflex abides
with us still in the heart of a spiritual creed; for their association
is clear with the Christian conception of the transference of sin and
of the divine victim that takes upon himself the sins of the people.
As far as we have examined it as yet, the concept of a “pure heart” is
not necessarily wholly ethical; it is often coexistent with the ideas
of sin that do not clearly recognise {123} moral responsibility or the
essential difference between deliberate wrong-doing and the
ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. In the middle stage of
ethical-religious growth, an innocent Œdipus may yet be regarded as
πᾶς ἄναγνος, impure body and soul. The final point is reached when it
is realised that the blood of bulls and goats cannot wash away sin,
that nothing external can defile the heart or soul, but only evil
thoughts and evil will. This purged and idealised concept will then in
the progressive religions revolt against its own parentage, and will
prompt the eternal antagonism of the prophet against the ritual
priest, of the Christ against the Pharisee.