THE SPIRIT-WORLD.
Religion of Lower Races, 342—Souls, 343—Burial, 347—Future
Life, 349—Transmigration, 350—Divine Ancestors, 351—Demons,
352—Nature Spirits, 357—Gods, 358—Worship, 364—Moral Influence,
368.
It does not belong to the plan of this book to give a general account
of the many faiths of mankind. The anthropologist, who has to look at
the religions of nations as a main part of their life, may best become
acquainted with their general principles by beginning with the simple
notions of the lower races as to the spirit-world. That is, he has to
examine how and why they believe in the soul and its existence after
death, the spirits who do good and evil in the world, and the greater
gods who pervade, actuate, and rule the universe. Any one who learns
from savages and barbarians what their belief in spiritual beings means
to them, will come into view of that stage of culture where the religion
of rude tribes is at the same time their philosophy, containing such
explanation of themselves and the world they live in as their uneducated
minds are able to receive.
The idea of the soul which is held by uncultured races, and is the
foundation of their religion, is not difficult to us to understand, if
we can fancy ourselves in their place, ignorant of the very rudiments
of science, and trying to get at the meaning of life by what the senses
seem to tell. The great question that forces itself on their minds is one
that we with all our knowledge cannot half answer, what the life is which
is sometimes in us, but not always. A person who a few minutes ago was
walking and talking, with all his senses active, goes off motionless and
unconscious in a deep sleep, to wake after a while with renewed vigour.
In other conditions the life ceases more entirely, when one is stunned
or falls into a swoon or trance, where the beating of the heart and
breathing seem to stop, and the body, lying deadly pale and insensible,
cannot be awakened; this may last for minutes or hours, or even days, and
yet after all the patient revives. Barbarians are apt to say that such
a one died for a while, but his soul came back again. They have great
difficulty in distinguishing real death from such trances. They will talk
to a corpse, try to rouse it and even feed it, and only when it becomes
noisome and must be got rid of from among the living, they are at last
certain that the life has gone never to return. What, then, is this soul
or life which thus goes and comes in sleep, trance, and death? To the
rude philosopher, the question seems to be answered by the very evidence
of his senses. When the sleeper awakens from a dream, he believes he
has really somehow been away, or that other people have come to him.
As it is well known by experience that men’s bodies do not go on these
excursions, the natural explanation is that every man’s living self or
soul is his phantom or image, which can go out of his body and see and be
seen itself in dreams. Even waking men in broad daylight sometimes see
these human phantoms, in what are called visions or hallucinations. They
are further led to believe that the soul does not die with the body, but
lives on after quitting it, for although a man may be dead and buried,
his phantom-figure continues to appear to the survivors in dreams and
visions. That men have such unsubstantial images belonging to them is
familiar in other ways to the savage philosopher, who has watched their
reflexions in still water, or their shadows following them about, fading
out of sight to reappear presently somewhere else, while sometimes for
a moment he has seen their living breath as a faint cloud, vanishing
though one can feel that it is still there. Here then in few words is the
savage and barbaric theory of souls, where life, mind, breath, shadow,
reflexion, dream, vision, come together and account for one another in
some such vague confused way as satisfies the untaught reasoner. The Zulu
will say that at death a man’s shadow departs from his body and becomes
an ancestral ghost, and the widow will relate how her husband has come in
her sleep and threatened to kill her for not taking care of his children;
or the son will describe how his father’s ghost stood before him in
a dream, and the souls of the two, the living and the dead, went off
together to visit some far-off kraal of their people. The Malays do not
like to wake a sleeper, lest they should hurt him by disturbing his body
while his soul is out. The Ojibwas describe how one of their chiefs died,
but while they were watching the body, on the third night his shadow came
back into it, and he sat up and told them how he had travelled to the
River of Death, but was stopped there and sent back to his people. The
Nicaraguans, when questioned by the Spaniards as to their religion, said
that when a man or woman dies, there comes out of their mouth something
that resembles a person and does not die, but the body remains here—it
is not precisely the heart that goes above, but the breath that comes
from their mouth and is called the life. The lower races sometimes
avoid such confusion of thoughts as this, by treating the breath, the
dream-ghost, and other appearances, as being separate souls. Thus, some
Greenlanders reckoned man as having two souls, his shadow and his breath;
and the Fijians said that the “dark spirit” or shadow goes down to the
world below, but the “light spirit” or reflexion seen in water stays near
where he dies. The reader may call to mind examples how such notions of
the soul lasted on hardly changed in the classic world; how in the Iliad
the dead Patroklos comes to the sleeping Achilles, who tries in vain to
grasp him with loving hands, but the soul like smoke flits away below the
earth; or how Hermotimos, the seer, used to go out from his body, till at
last his soul, coming back from a spirit-journey, found that his wife had
burnt his corpse on the funeral pile, and that he had become a bodiless
ghost. At this stage the idea of the soul was taken up by the Greek
philosophers and refined into more metaphysical forms; the life and mind
were separated by dividing the soul into two, the animal and the rational
soul, and the conception of the soul as of thin ethereal substance gave
place to the definition of the immaterial soul, which is mind without
matter. To follow the discussion of these transcendental problems in
ancient and modern philosophy will occupy the student of metaphysics,
but the best proof how the earlier and grosser soul-theory satisfied the
uncultured mind is that to this day it remains substantially the belief
of the majority of the human race. Even among the most civilized nations
language still plainly shows its traces, as when we speak of a person
being in an _ecstasy_ or “out of himself” and “coming back to himself,”
or when the souls of the dead are called _shades_ (that is, “shadows”)
or _spirits_ or _ghosts_ (that is, “breaths”), terms which are relics of
men’s earliest theories of life.
It may have occurred to some readers that the savage philosopher
ought, on precisely the same grounds, to believe his horse or dog to
have a soul, a phantom-likeness of its body. This is in fact what the
lower races always have thought and think still, and they follow the
reasoning out in a way that surprises the modern mind, though it is
quite consistent from the barbarian’s point of view. If a human soul
seen in a dream is a real object, then the spear and shield it carries
and the mantle over its shoulders are real objects too, and all lifeless
things must have their thin flitting shadow-souls. Such are the souls
of canoes and weapons and earthen pots that the Fijians fancy they see
swimming down the stream pellmell into the life to come, and the ghostly
funeral gifts with which the Ojibwas imagine the souls of the dead laden
on their journey to the spirit-land—the men carrying their shadowy guns
and pipes, the women their baskets and paddles, the little boys their
toy bows and arrows. The funeral sacrifices, which in one shape or other
are remembered or carried on still in every part of the globe, give us
the clearest idea how barbaric religion takes in together the souls of
men, animals, and things. In Peru, where a dead prince’s wives would
hang themselves in order to continue in his service, and many of his
attendants would be buried for him to take their souls with him, people
declared that they had seen those who had long been dead walking about
with their sacrificed wives, and adorned with the things that were put in
the grave for them. So only a few years since in Madagascar it was said
that the ghost of King Radama had been seen dressed in a uniform buried
with him, and mounted on one of the horses that were killed at his tomb.
With such modern instances before us, we understand the ancient funeral
rites of which the traces remain in the burial-mounds on our own hills,
with their skeletons of attendants lying round the chief, and the bronze
weapons and golden arm-rings. Classic literature abounds in passages
which show how truly the modern barbarian represents the ancient; such
are the burning of Patroklos with the Trojan captives and the horses
and hounds, the account of the Scythian funerals by Herodotus, and his
story of Melissa’s ghost coming back shivering because the clothes had
not been burnt for her at her burial. There are districts in India where
the _suttee_ or “goodwife” is even now burnt on her husband’s funeral
pile. In Europe, long after the wives and slaves ceased thus to follow
their master, the warrior’s horse was still solemnly killed at his grave
and buried with him. This was done as lately as 1781 at Treves, when a
general named Friedrich Kasimir was buried according to the rites of the
Teutonic Order; and in England the pathetic ceremony of leading the horse
in the soldier’s funeral is the last remnant of the ancient sacrifice.
Other quaint relics of the old funeral customs are to be met with. There
are German villages where the peasants put shoes on the feet of the
corpse (the “hell-shoon” with which the old Northmen were provided for
the dread journey to the next world), and elsewhere a needle and thread
is put in for them to mend their torn clothes, while all over Europe, at
an Irish wake for instance, the dead has a piece of money put in his hand
to pay his way with.
Mention has just been made of ancient burial-mounds. Seeing how
barbarians reverence and fear the souls of the dead, we may understand
the care they take of their bodies, leaving the hut as a dwelling for
the dead, or drying the corpse and setting it up on a scaffold, or
burying it in a canoe or coffin, or building up a strong tomb over it,
or for the ashes, if the people have taken to cremation. Prehistoric
burial-places in our own country are still wonders to us for the labour
they must have cost their barbaric builders. Most conspicuous are the
great burial-mounds of earth or cairns of stones. Some of the largest of
these appear to date from the stone-age. But their use lasted on through
the bronze-age into the iron-age; and to this day in the Highlands of
Scotland the memory of the old custom is so strong, that the mourners,
as they may not build a cairn over the grave in the churchyard, will
sometimes set up a little one where the funeral procession stops on the
way. Within the old burial-mounds or barrows, there may be a cist or rude
chest of stone slabs for the interment, or a chamber of rude stones,
sometimes with galleries. Many such stone structures are to be seen above
ground, especially the _dolmens_, _i.e._ stone tables, formed of three
or four great upright stones, with a top-stone resting on them, such as
Kit’s Coty House, not far from Rochester. The remains dug up show that
the dolmens were tombs. Another kind of early stone monuments are the
_menhirs_, _i.e._ long stones set up singly. It happens that the Khasias
of north-east India have gone on to modern times setting up such rude
pillars as memorials of the dead, so that it may be reasonably guessed
that those in Brittany for instance had the same purpose. Another kind of
rude stone structures well known in Europe are the _cromlechs_, or stone
circles, formed of upright stones in a ring, such as Stanton Drew, not
far from Bristol. There is proof that the stone circles have often to do
with burials, for they may surround a burial-mound, or have a dolmen in
the middle. But considering how tombs are apt to become temples where the
ghost of the buried chief or prophet is worshipped, it is likely that
such stone circles should also serve as temples, as in the case of South
India at the present time, where cocks are actually sacrificed to the
village deity, who is represented by the large stone in the centre of a
cromlech. Rude stone monuments may be traced in a remarkable line on the
map, from India across to North Africa, and up the west side of Europe
(_see_ Fergusson’s map.) The purpose of them all is not fully understood,
especially the lines of great stones at Carnac and Abury, and Stonehenge
with its great hewn upright and cross stones. But, as has been here
shown, there are facts which go far to explain the meaning of dolmens,
menhirs, and cromlechs. The fanciful speculations of the old-fashioned
antiquaries, such as that the dolmens were “Druid’s altars,” are giving
place to sober examination such as the reader may find in Lubbock’s
_Prehistoric Times_.
In the barbaric religion, which has left such clear traces in our midst,
what is supposed to become of the soul after death? The answers are many,
but they agree in this, that the ghosts must be somewhere whence they can
come to visit the living, especially at night time. Some tribes say that
the soul continues to haunt the hut where it died, which is accordingly
deserted for it; or it hovers near the burial-ground, which is sometimes
the place of village resort, so that the souls of ancestors can look on
kindly, like the old people sitting round the village green watching the
youngsters at their sports; or the ghosts flit away to some region of the
dead in the deep forests or on mountain-tops or far-away islands over
the sea, or up on the plains above the sky, or down in the depths below
the ground where the sun descends at night. Such people as the Zulus can
show the holes where one can descend by a cavern into the under-world
of the dead, an idea well known in the classic lake Avernus, and which
has lasted on to our own day in St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Lough Dearg.
By a train of fancy easy to follow, it is often held that the home
of the dead has to do with that far-west region where the sun dies at
night. Islanders like the Maoris imagine the souls speeding away from the
westernmost cape of New Zealand, just as on the coast of Brittany, where
Cape Raz stands out westward into the ocean, there is the “bay of souls,”
the launching-place where the departed spirits sail off across the sea.
Many rude tribes think the spirit-world to be the pleasant land they see
in dreams, where the dead live in their spirit-villages, and there is
game and fish in plenty, and the sun always shines; but others fancy it
the dim land of shadows, the cavernous under-world of night. Both ideas
are familiar to us in poetry—one in the earthly paradise of the legends,
the other in such passages as describe Odysseus’ visit to the bloodless
ghosts in the dreary dusk of Hades, or the shadows of the dead in
Purgatory wondering to see Dante there, whose fleshly body, unlike their
own phantom forms, stops the sunlight and casts a shadow.
Hitherto we have been speaking of the bodiless souls or ghosts of the
dead, but it also agrees with their nature that they may enter into new
bodies and live again on earth. In fact one of the most usual beliefs
of the lower races is that the souls of dead ancestors are re-born in
children, an idea which explains the fact of children having a likeness
to the father’s or mother’s family. For instance, the Yoruba negroes
greet a new-born child with the salute, “Thou art come!” and then set
themselves to decide what ancestral soul has returned. It does not,
however, follow that the body in which the soul takes up its new abode
should be human: it may enter into a bear or jackal, or fly away in a
bird, or, as the Zulus think, it may pass into one of those harmless
snakes which creep about in the huts, liking the warmth of the family
hearth, as they did while they were old people, and still kindly taking
the food given by their grandchildren. In such simple forms there appears
among the lower races the notion of transmigration which in Brahmanism
and Buddhism becomes a great religious doctrine.
To return to the souls of the dead which flit to and fro as ghosts.
These, wherever they dwell, are naturally believed to keep up their
interest in the living, and their families hold kindly intercourse with
them. Thus, in North America a Mandan woman will talk by the hour to her
dead husband or child; and a Chinese is bound to announce any family
event, such as a wedding, to the spirits of his ancestors, present in
their memorial tablets. The ghosts of dead kinsfolk are not only talked
to but fed; the family offer them morsels of food at their own meals, and
hold once a year a feast of the dead, when the souls of ancestors for
generations back are fancied present and invisibly partaking of the food.
Such offerings to the dead not only go on through the savage and barbaric
world, but last on into higher civilization, their traces still remaining
in Europe. The Russian peasant, who fancies the souls of his forefathers
creeping in and out behind the saints’ pictures on the little icon-shelf,
puts crumbs of cake there for them. One has only to cross the Channel to
see how the ancient feast of the dead still keeps its primitive character
in the festival of All Souls, which is its modern representative; even
at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise they still put cakes and sweet-meats
on the graves, and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to
make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table, for
the souls of the dead of the family who will come to visit their home.
All this belongs to the ancestor-worship or religion of the divine dead,
which from remote antiquity has been, as it is even now, the main faith
of the larger half of mankind. But this worship does not come only from
family affection, for the ghosts of the dead are looked upon as divine
beings, powerful both for good and harm. The North American Indian, who
prays to the spirits of his forefathers to give him good weather or luck
in hunting, if he happens to fall into the fire will believe he has
neglected to make some offering to the spirits, and they have pushed him
in to punish him. In Guinea the negroes who regularly bring food and
drink to the images of their dead relatives look to them for help in
the trials of life, and in times of peril or distress crowds of men and
women may be seen on the hill-tops or the skirts of the forest, calling
in the most piteous and touching tones on the spirits of their ancestors.
Such accounts help us to understand what real meaning there is in the
ancestor-worship which to a Chinese or Hindu is the first business of
life, and how the pious rites for the dead ancestors or lares formed
the very bond which held a Roman family together. Our modern minds have
rather lost the sense of this, and people often think the apotheosis of
a dead Roman emperor to have been a mere act of insane pride, whereas in
fact it was an idea understood by any barbarian, that at death the great
chief should pass into as great a deity.
That barbarians should imagine the manes or ghosts of their dead to be
such active powerful beings, arises naturally from their notions of the
soul; but this requires a word of explanation. As during life the soul
exercises power over the body, so after death when become a ghost it
is believed to keep its activity and power. Such ghosts interfering in
the affairs of the living are usually called good and evil spirits, or
demons. There is no clear distinction made between ghosts and demons;
in fact, savages generally consider the demons who help or plague them
to be souls of dead men. Good or evil, the man keeps after death the
temper he had in mortal life. Not long ago, in South India, where the
natives are demon-worshippers, it was found that they had lately built a
shrine of which the deity was the ghost of a British officer, a mighty
hunter, whose votaries, mindful of his tastes in life, were laying on
his altar offerings of cheroots and brandy. The same man will be a good
spirit to his friends and an evil spirit to his enemies, and even to
his own people he may be sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, as when
the Zulus believe that the shades of dead warriors of their tribe are
among them in battle and lead them to victory; but if these ghostly
allies are angry and turn their backs, the fight will go against them.
When people like the American Indians or the African negroes believe
that the air around them is swarming with invisible spirits, this is not
nonsense. They mean that life is full of accidents which do not happen
of themselves; and when in their rude philosophy they say the spirits
make them happen, this is finding the most distinct causes which their
minds can understand. This is most plainly seen in what uncivilized men
believe about disease. We have noticed already that they account for
fainting or trance by supposing the soul to leave the body for a time,
and here it may be added that weakness or failure of health is in the
same way thought to be caused by the soul or part of it going out. In
these cases, to bring the soul back is the ordinary method of cure, as
where the North American medicine-man will pretend to catch his patient’s
truant soul and put it back into his head, or in Fiji a sick native has
been seen lying on his back, bawling to his own soul to come back to him.
But in other conditions of disease the patient’s behaviour seems rather
that of a man who has got a soul in him that is not his proper soul. In
any painful illness, especially when the sick man is tossing and shaking
in fever, or writhing in convulsions on the ground, or when in delirium
or delusion he no longer thinks his own thoughts or speaks with his own
voice, but with distorted features and strange, unearthly tones breaks
into wild raving, then the explanation which naturally suggests itself
is that another spirit has entered into or possessed him. Any one who
watches the symptoms of a hysterical-epileptic patient, or a maniac, will
see how naturally in the infancy of medical science demoniacal possession
came to be the accepted theory of disease, and the exorcism or expulsion
of these demons the ordinary method of treatment. It is so among savages,
as when a sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead
man has got into him and is gnawing his liver; or when in a Patagonian
skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming to
drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever. Such ideas were at
home in ancient history, as in the well-known Egyptian memorial tablet
of the time of Rameses XII (12th century B.C.) to be seen in the Paris
Library, and translated in _Records of the Past_, where the Egyptian
god Khons was sent in his ark to cure the little princess Bentaresh of
the evil movement in her limbs. When he came, the demon said, “Great
god who chasest demons, I am thy slave, I will go to the place whence
I came.” Then they made a sacrifice for that spirit, and he went in
peace, leaving the patient cured. As far back as the history of medicine
reaches, we find the contest between this old spirit-theory of disease
and the newer ideas of the physicians, with their diet and drugs; and
though the doctors have now taken the upper hand, yet in any nation short
of the most civilized the earlier notions may still be found unchanged.
When Prof. Bastian, the anthropologist, was travelling in Burma, his
cook had an apoplectic fit, and the wife was doing her best to appease
the offended demon who had brought it on, by putting little heaps of
coloured rice for him, and prayers, “Oh, ride him not! Ah, let him go!
Grip him not so hard! Thou shalt have rice! Ah, how good that tastes!”
In countries where this theory of disease prevails, the patients’ own
delusions work in with and confirm it in most striking ways. As fully
persuaded as the bystanders of the reality of their demons, they will
recognise them in the figures they dream of or see in their delirium, and
what is more, under delusion or diseased imagination they so lose their
sense of being themselves, as to talk with what they believe to be the
voice of the demon within them, answering in its name, just as the sick
princess did in Syria three thousand years ago. Englishmen in India and
the far East often have the opportunity of being present at these strange
old-world scenes, and hearing the demon-voice whisper, or squeak, or
roar, out of the patient’s mouth, that he is the spirit so-and-so, and
tell what he is come for; at last, when satisfied with what he wants,
or subdued by the exorcist’s charms and threats, the demon consents to
go, and then the patient leaves off his frantic screams and raving,
his convulsive writhing quiets down, and he sinks into an exhausted
sleep, often relieved for a time when the malady is one where mental
treatment is effective. Nor is it necessary to go to India or China for
illustrations of this early theory of disease. In Spain the priests still
go on exorcising devils out of the mouths and feet of epileptic patients,
though this will probably cease in a few years, when it is known how
successfully that hitherto intractable disease may be treated with
potassium bromide.
In other ways the notion of spirits serves to account for whatever
happens. That certain unusually fierce wolves or tigers are “man-eaters”
is explained by the belief that the souls of wicked men go out at night
and enter into wild-beast bodies to prey on their fellow-men; these are
the man-tigers and were-wolves—that is, “man-wolves”—which still live in
the popular superstition of India and Russia. Again, we all know that
many living people grow pale and bloodless and pine away; in Slavonic
countries this is thought to be caused by blood-sucking nightmares,
whose dreadful visits the patient is conscious of in his sleep, and
these creatures are ingeniously accounted for as demon-souls dwelling
in corpses, whose blood accordingly keeps fluid long after death; they
call them vampires. It has been suggested that primitive men gained from
their ideas of souls and spirits their first clear notions of a cause
of anything, and this is at any rate so far true that rude tribes do
find in the doings of spirits around them a reason for every stumble
over a stone, every odd sound or feeling, every time they lose their
way in the woods. Thus, in the scores of good and evil chances which
meet the barbarian from hour to hour, he finds work for many friendly or
unfriendly spirits. Especially his own luck or fortune takes shape in
a guardian spirit who belongs to him and goes about with him. This may
be, as the rude Tasmanians have thought, a dead father’s soul looking
after his son, or such a patron-spirit as the North American warrior
fasts for till he sees it in a dream; or it may be, like the _genius_ of
the ancient Roman, a spirit born with him for a companion and guardian
through life. The genius of Augustus was a divine being to be prayed and
sacrificed to, but how we moderns have left behind the thoughts of the
ancients, while still using their words, is curiously seen in the changed
meaning with which we now talk of the genius of Handel or Turner. Not
less striking is the change which has come in our thoughts about the
world around us, the sky and the sea, the mountains and the forests.
We have learnt to watch the operation of physical laws of gravity and
heat, of growth and decomposition, and it is only with an effort that
we can get our imagination back to the remote days when men looked to
an infinite multitude of spiritual beings as the causes of nature. Yet
this belief arises plainly from the theory of the soul, for these spirits
are looked upon as souls working nature much as human souls work human
bodies. It is they who cast up the fire in the volcano, tear up the
forest in the hurricane, spin the canoe round in the whirlpool, inhabit
the trees and make them grow. The lower races not only talk of such
nature-spirits, but deal with them in a thoroughly personal way which
shows how they are modelled on human souls. Modern travellers have seen
North Americans paddling their canoes past a dangerous place on the river
and throwing in a bit of tobacco with a prayer to the river-spirit to let
them pass. An African woodcutter who has made the first cut at a great
tree has been known to take the precaution of pouring some palm-oil on
the ground, that the angry tree-spirit coming out may stop to lick it
up, while the man runs for his life. The state of mind to which these
nature-spirits belong must have been almost as clearly remembered by the
Greeks, when they could still fancy the nymphs of the lovely groves, and
springs, and grassy meadows, coming up to the council of the Olympian
gods and sitting around on the polished seats, or the dryads growing with
the leafy pines and oaks, and uttering screams of pain when the woodman’s
axe strikes the trunk. The Anglo-Saxon dictionary preserves the curious
word _woodmare_ for an echo (_wudu-mær_ = wood-nymph), a record of the
time when Englishmen believed, as barbarians do still, that the echo is
the voice of an answering spirit; the word _mare_, for spirit or demon,
appears also _nightmare_, the throttling dream-demon who was as real to
our forefathers as he is to the natives of Australia now. Superseded by
physical science, the old nature-spirits still find a home in poetry and
folklore; the Loreley is only a modernized version of the river-demon who
drowns the swimmer in the whirlpool; the healing water-spirits of the old
sacred wells have only taken saints’ names, the little elves and fairies
of the woods are only dim recollections of the old forest-spirits. It
may surprise the readers of Huxley’s _Physiography_ to recognise in
fairy-tales the nature-spirits in whose personal shape præhistoric man
imagined the forces of nature.
Above the commonalty of souls, demons, and nature-spirits, the religions
of all tribes recognise higher spirits, or gods. Where ancestor-worship
prevails, the souls of great chiefs and warriors or any celebrated
persons may take this divine rank. Thus, the Mongols worship as good
deities the great Genghis Khan and his princely family. The Chinese
declare that Pang, who is worshipped by carpenters and builders as
their patron divinity, was a famous artificer who lived long ago
in the province of Shangtung, while Kwang-tae, the War-god, was a
distinguished soldier who lived under the Han dynasty. The idea of the
divine ancestor may even be carried far enough to reach supreme deity,
as where the Zulus, working back from ghostly ancestor to ancestor, talk
of Unkulunkulu, the Old-Old-one, as the creator of the world; or the
Brazilian tribes say that Tamoi the Grandfather, the first man, dwelt
among them and taught them to till the soil, at last rising to the sky,
where he will receive their souls after death. Among the nature-spirits
also the barbarian plainly perceives great gods who rule the universe.
The highest deity of the African negroes is the Sky, who gives the
rain and makes the grass grow, and when they wake in the morning they
thank him for opening the door to let the sun in. Thus they are at the
same stage of thought as our Aryan ancestors, whose great deity _Dyu_,
sung of in the hymns of the Veda, was at once the solid personal Sky
that rains and thunders, and the Heaven-god who animates it. This deity
remains even in name in the Greek _Zeus_, and Latin _Jupiter_, the
Heaven-father, both religions keeping up its double sense of sky and
sky-god, belonging to the barbaric theology which could see massive
life in the over-arching firmament, and could explain that life by an
in-dwelling deity, modelled on the human soul. We may best understand
what was meant by the Heaven-god, if we think of him as the soul of the
sky. Among all the relics of barbaric religion which surround us, few
are more striking than the phrases which still recognise as a deity
the living sky, as “Heaven forgive me!” “The vengeance of Heaven will
overtake him.” The rain and thunder are mostly taken as acts of the
Heaven-god, as where Zeus hurls the thunderbolt and sends the showers.
But some peoples have a special Rain-god, like the Khonds of Orissa, who
pray to Pidzu Pennu that he will pour down the waters through his sieve
upon their fields. Others have a special Thunder-god, like the Yorubas,
who say it is Shango who casts down with the lightning-flash and the
thunder-clap his thunder-axes, which are the stone celts they dig up in
the ground; we English keep up the memory of the god Thunder or Thor in
our word _Thursday_, which is a translation of _Dies Jovis_. In barbaric
theology, Earth, the mother of all things, takes her place, as when the
pious Ojibwa Indian digging up his medicine-plants is careful to leave an
offering for great-grandmother Earth. No fancy of nature can be plainer
than that the Heaven-father and the Earth-mother are the universal
parents, nor could any ceremony acknowledge them more naturally than
the Chinese marriage when bride and bridegroom prostrate themselves
before Heaven and Earth. The Earth-goddess is clear in classic religion,
Dēmētēr, Terra Mater, and perhaps the last trace of her worship among
ourselves may be the leaving of the last handful of corn-ears standing in
the field or the carrying it in triumph in the harvest-home. In modern
times it is among the negroes of the Guinea coast that the clearest idea
of the Sea-god is to be found, when the native kings, praying him not to
be boisterous, would have rice and cloth and bottles of rum, and even
slaves, cast into the sea as sacrifices. So a Greek or Roman general,
before embarking on the dangerous waves, would sacrifice a bull to
Poseidōn or Neptune. To men who could thus look on the sky, earth, and
sea as animated, intelligent beings, the Sun, giver of light and life
to the world, rising and crossing the sky and descending at night into
the under-world whence he arose, has the clearest divine personality.
There is a quaint simplicity in the account which not many years ago
a Samoyed woman gave of her daily prayers; at sunrise, bowing to the
sun, she said, “When thou, God, risest, I too rise from my bed!” and
in the evening, “When thou, God, goest down, I too get me to rest.” As
far back as ancient history reaches, the Sun-god appears, as where, in
the pictures on Egyptian mummy-cases, Ra, the Sun, is seen travelling
in his boat through the upper and lower regions of the universe. Every
morning those modern ancients, the Brahmans, may be seen standing on
one foot with their hands held out before them and their faces turned
to the east, adoring the Sun: among the oldest prayers which have come
down unchanged from the old Aryan world is that which they daily repeat,
“Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun; may he rouse
our minds!” The Moon-god or goddess marks the festivals of rude forest
tribes who dance by the light of the full moon. It is not uncommon for
the Moon to rank above the Sun, as perhaps for astronomical reasons was
the case in ancient Babylonia; but more usually the Sun stands first, as
seems to us more natural; and commonly Sun and Moon are looked on as a
pair, brother and sister, or husband and wife. It is easy to understand
why at the famous temple in Syria, Sun and Moon had no images like the
other gods, because they themselves were to be seen by all men. No doubt
this is why of all the old nature-gods they alone still have personal
obeisance done to them among us to this day; in Germany or France one may
still see the peasant take off his hat to the rising sun, and in England
the new moon is saluted with a bow or curtsey, as well as the curious
practice of “turning one’s silver,” which seems a relic of the offering
of the moon’s proper metal. Fire, though hardly a deity of the first
order, is looked upon as a personal being, and worshipped both for the
good and harm it does to man, and as minister of the greater gods. Among
the Aryan nations, the first word of the Veda is the name of _Agni_, the
Fire-god (Latin _Ignis_), the divine priest of sacrifice; the Parsis,
representatives of the religion of ancient Persia, whose most sacred
place is the temple at the burning wells of Baku (p. 273), are typical
fire-worshippers; among the old Greeks Hestia, the sacred hearth, was fed
with fat and libations of sweet wine, and her name and worship went on
in Rome in the temple of Vesta, with the eternal fire in her sanctuary.
The Wind-gods are as well known to the North American Indians and the
South Sea Islanders as they were to the Greeks, from whose religion they
have come down to us so that every ploughman’s child hears of rude Boreas
and gentle Zephyr. To conclude the list, the Rivers have seemed beings
so far greater than the little spirits of the brooks, that they often,
like Skamandros and Spercheios, had temples and priests of their own;
men swore by them, for they could seize and drown the perjurer in their
floods, and to the Hindus still the most awful of oaths is by a divine
river, above all the Ganges.
Such a list of gods, the vast souls of the sky, earth and sea, of the
sun and moon, and the rest of the great powers of nature, each with his
own divine personality, his own rational purpose and work in the world,
goes far to explain polytheism, as it is found in all quarters of the
globe. The explanation cannot, however, be complete, because both the
names and natures of many gods have become confused. A deity worshipped
in several temples is apt to split up into several deities, and men
go on worshipping these by different names after their first sense is
forgotten. Among nations who have become blended by alliance or conquest,
the religions also mix, and the various gods lose their distinct
personality. The classical dictionary is full of examples of all this.
The thundering sky and the rainy sky, Jupiter Tonans and Jupiter Pluvius,
came to be adored like two distinct beings. The Latin Neptunus and the
Greek Poseidōn, put together into one because both were sea-gods, form
a curious divine compound. Under the name of Mercurius, god of trade,
comes in another ancient deity, the Greek Hermes, messenger of the gods,
leader of the dead into the land of Hades, god of thieves and merchants,
of writing and science, who himself bears traces of having been pieced
together out of yet older deities, among them the writing-god of ancient
Egypt, the ibis-headed Thoth. This will give a notion of the confusion
which begins in religion as soon as the worshippers cease to think of a
deity by his first meaning and purpose, and only know of him as the god
so-and-so, whose image stands in such-and-such a temple. The wonder is
not that the origin of so many ancient gods is now hard to make out, but
that so many show so clearly as they do what they were at first, a divine
ancestor, or a sun, or sky, or river. The gods of barbaric religion also
show plainly at work, in the minds of the rude theologians, a thought
destined to vast importance in higher stages of civilization. Regarding
the world as the battle-ground of good and evil spirits, some religions
see these ranged in two contending armies with higher good and evil
gods over them, and above all the sovereign good deity and evil deity.
This system of dualism, as it is called, is worked out in the contest
between the powers of light and darkness, under Ormuzd and Ahriman, the
good and evil spirits, in the religion of ancient Persia. In barbaric
stages of religion there appears also in rude forms the system of divine
government, so well known in the faiths of more cultured nations. As
among the worshippers themselves there are common men, and chiefs above
them, and great rulers or kings above all, with high and low officers
to do their bidding; so among their gods they frame schemes of lower
and higher ranks of deities, with above all the majesty of a supreme
deity. It is not agreed everywhere which god is to have this supremacy.
As has been already said, men who look to the souls of the dead as their
gods may hold even the highest divinity to be such a soul, an ancestor
expanded into creator and ruler of the world. Often, and naturally,
the heaven-god is looked upon as supreme creator and controller of the
universe. Among the nations of West Africa, some say Heaven does his will
through his servants, the lesser spirits of the air, but others think him
too high above to trouble himself much with earthly things. The doctrine
of the Congo negroes shows a thoughtful, if not a happy, philosophy
of life. They say it is the crowd of good and evil spirits, souls of
the departed, who are still active in the concerns of life, and mostly
the evil spirits have the best of it; but now and then, when they have
made the world unbearable, the great Heaven rouses himself, terrifies
the bad demons with his thunder, and lets fly his thunderbolts at the
most obstinate; then he goes back to rest, and lets the spirits rule as
before. A more cheerful view of nature-spirits working beneath heaven is
familiar to us in the Homeric court of the gods on Olympus, where Zeus,
the personal sky, sits enthroned above, holding sway over the lower gods
of earth, air, and sea. In other countries the Sun may be looked upon as
supreme, as he is among many hill-tribes of India, where he rules over
the gods of the forest and the plain, the tribe-gods, and the ancestral
ghosts. Or there may be, as among the native tribes of North America,
a Great Spirit, who is, as it were, the soul of the universe, which he
created and still controls, supreme over even such mighty nature-gods
as the sun and moon. When the reader goes on to study the religion and
philosophy of the ancient civilized world, he will find men’s thoughts
working in these same two ways toward pantheism or monotheism, according
as they conceive the whole universe as one vast body animated by one
divine soul, or raise to the same divine height the one deity who reigns
supreme over the rest. It lies beyond our range to follow this argument
further here.
Let us now look at the chief acts of barbaric worship, which are not hard
to understand when it is borne in mind that the deities they are paid to
are actual human souls, or transformed human souls, or beings modelled on
human souls. Even among savages, prayer is already found; indeed, nothing
could be more natural than that the worshipper should address with
respectful words and entreaties for help a divine being who is perhaps
his own grandfather. The prayers of barbarians have often been listened
to and written down. Thus among the Zulus, the sacrificer says: “There is
your bullock, ye spirits of our people. I pray for a healthy body that I
may live comfortably, and thou so-and-so, treat me with mercy, and thou
so-and-so” (mentioning by name the dead of the family). The following
is part of a prayer of the Khonds, when offering a human sacrifice to
the Earth-goddess: “By our cattle, our flocks, our pigs, and our grain
we procured a victim and offered a sacrifice. Do you now enrich us. Let
our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so
abound that the care of them shall be too much for the parents, as shall
be seen by their burnt hands; let our heads ever strike against brass
pots innumerable hanging from our roofs; let the rats form their nests
of shreds of scarlet cloth and silk; let all the kites in the country be
seen in the trees of our village, from beasts being killed there every
day. We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is
good for us. Give it to us.” These two specimens of prayers are chosen
because they show how closely prayer is connected with sacrifice, how
the offering is brought and the favour asked with it, just as would be
done to a living chief. Barbaric sacrifices are not mere formal tokens
of respect; they are mostly food, and will be consumed by the divinity,
though he, being a spirit, is apt to take only the spirit, flavour, or
essence, of the viands; or he snuffs up the steam or smoke as it ascends
from the altar fire, a spiritual food of much the same thin ethereal
substance which the spirit or god himself is thought to be of. It is in
the higher religions that the sacrificial rite loses its grosser sense of
feeding the deity, so that although the drink-offering is still poured
out and the bullock burnt on the altar, the act has passed into the
giving up of something prized by the worshipper, and a sign of adoration
acceptable to the god.
There are several ways in which the worshipper can hold personal
intercourse with his deities. These, being souls or spirits, are of
course to be seen at times in dreams and visions, especially by their
own priests or seers, who thus get (or pretend to get) divine answers
or oracles from them. Being a soul, the god can also enter a human
body, and act and speak through it, and thus hysterical and epileptic
symptoms, which we have seen to be ascribed to an evil demon possessing
the patient, are looked on more favourably when the spirit is considered
to be a deity come to inspire his minister and talk by his voice. The
convulsions, the unearthly voice in which the possessed priest answers
in the name of the deity within, and his falling into stupor when his
god departs, all fit together, and in all quarters of the world the
oracle-priests and diviners by familiar spirits seem really diseased in
body and mind, and deluded by their own feelings, as well as skilled
in cheating their votaries with sham symptoms and cunning answers. The
inspiration or breathing-in of a spirit into the body of a priest or
seer appears to such people a mechanical action, like pouring water
into a jug. Also, as in the ordinary transmigration of souls, a deity
is considered able to enter into the body of an animal, as when he
flies from place to place in the form of a sacred bird, or lives in the
divine snake fed and worshipped among the negroes of the Slave coast.
This leads on to a belief which seems still stranger to our minds. The
modern Englishman wonders that a human being, however ignorant, should
prostrate himself before a stake stuck in the ground or a stone picked
up by the wayside, and even talk to it and offer it food; but when the
African or Hindu explains that he believes this stock or stone to be a
receptacle in which a divine spirit has for a time embodied itself, this
shows that there is a rational meaning in the act. Images of gods, from
the rudely carved figures of ancestors which the Ostyaks set up in their
huts, to the Greek statues shaped by Phidias or Praxiteles to represent
the heaven-god or the sun-god, are mostly formed in the likeness of
man—an additional proof of how these nature-gods are modelled on human
beings. When such images stand to represent gods, the worshipper may
look on them as mere signs or portraits, but commonly he is led by his
spirit-philosophy to treat them as temporary bodies for the deities. A
Tahitian priest, when asked about his carved wooden idol, would explain
that his god was not always in the image, but only now and then flew to
it in the body of a sacred bird, and at times would come out of the idol
and enter his own (the priest’s) body, to give divine oracles by his
voice. This takes us back to the times when, fifteen hundred years ago,
Minucius Felix describes the heathen gods entering into their idols and
fattening on the steam of the altars, or creeping as thin spirits into
the bodies of men, to distort their limbs and drive them mad, or making
their own priests rave and whirl about. Lastly, rude tribes may believe
in and worship spirits without having come to build houses for them and
set up tables for their food. Yet such temples and altars appear far
back in barbaric religion, and remain still with the thoroughly human
character of the worship as plain as ever in them; as when in India the
image of Vishnu is washed and dressed by his attendants, and set up in
the place of honour in his temple with a choice feast before him, and
musicians and dancing girls to divert him. This is the more instructive
to us, because we know Vishnu before his original meaning was so
spoilt, when he was a sun-god, an animating principle or soul of the
sun in personal human shape, and thus a remnant of præhistoric natural
philosophy.
We have hitherto only looked at barbaric religion as such an early system
of natural philosophy, and have said nothing of the moral teaching
which now seems so essential to any religion. The philosophical side
of religion has been kept apart from the moral side, not only because
a clearer view may be had by looking at them separately, but because
many religions of the lower races have in fact little to do with moral
conduct. A native American or African may have a distinct belief in souls
and other spirits as the causes of his own life and of the events of the
surrounding world, and he may worship these ghostly or divine beings,
gaining their favour or appeasing their anger by prayers and offerings.
But though these gods may require him to do his duty towards them, it
does not follow that they should concern themselves with his doing his
duty to his neighbour. Among such peoples, if a man robs or murders,
that is for the party wronged or his friends to avenge; if he is stingy,
treacherous, brutal, then punishment may fall on him or he may be scouted
by all good people; but he is not necessarily looked upon as hateful to
the gods, and in fact such a man is often a great medicine-man or priest.
While they hold also that the soul will continue to exist after death,
flitting as a ghost or demon among the living or passing to the gloomy
under-world or the shining spirit-land, they often think its condition
will be rather a keeping-up of earthly character and rank, than a reward
or punishment for the earthly life. If some readers find it difficult
to understand such theology separate from morals, they may be reminded
how, among more civilized nations, religions may drop into the same
state by losing the use of the moral laws they profess; as when a Hindu
may lead the wickedest of lives, while the priests for gifts make his
peace with the gods, or as in Europe brigands are notoriously devout
church goers. As a rule, the faiths of the higher nations have more and
better moral influence than the faiths of the ruder tribes. Yet even
among savages the practical effect of religion on men’s lives begins to
show itself. The worship of the dead naturally encourages good morals;
for the ancestor who, when living, took care that his family should do
right by one another, does not cease this kindly rule when he becomes
a divine ghost powerful to favour or punish. This manes-worship does
not bring in new doctrines or reforms; indeed it is felt that nothing
displeases the ancestral deity like changing the old customs he was
used to. But for keeping up old-fashioned family goodness, the worship
of ancestors has an influence over the many nations among whom it still
prevails, from the Zulu, who believes that he must not ill-treat his
brothers lest the father should come in a dream and make him ill, to the
Chinese, who lives ever in presence of the family spirits, and fears
to do wrong lest they should leave him to fall into distress and die.
In the great old-world religions, where a powerful priesthood are the
intellectual class, the educators and controllers of society, we find
moral teaching fully recognised among the great duties of religion. The
gods take on themselves the punishment of the wicked; the Heaven-god
smites the perjurer with his thunderbolt, and the Nation-god brings
sickness and death on the murderer. The doctrine of the transmigration
of souls is brought to bear as a moral power; as where the Hindu books
threaten evil-doers with being re-born in other bodies in punishment
for their sins done in this, when the wicked shall be born again
blind or deformed, the scandal-monger shall have foul breath and the
horse-stealer shall go lame, the cruel man shall be born as a beast of
prey, the grain-stealer as a rat; and thus, eating the fruits of past
actions, men shall work out the consequences of their deeds, souls sunk
in darkness being degraded to brutes, while the good rise in successive
births to become gods. Even more widely spread is the doctrine that
man’s life is followed by judgment after death, when evil-doers are
doomed to misery, and only those who have lived righteously on earth
will enter into bliss. How this doctrine prevailed in ancient Egypt, the
papyrus strips of the Book of the Dead, and its pictures and hieroglyphic
formulas on the mummy-cases, remain to show. Thus in any museum we may
still see the scene of the weighing of the soul of the deceased, and his
trial by Osiris, the judge of the dead, and the forty-two assessors,
while Thoth, the writing-god, stands by to enter the dread record on
his tablets. In the columns of hieroglyphics are set down the crimes of
which the soul must clear itself, a curious mingling of what we should
call ceremonial and moral sins, among them the following: “I have not
privily done evil against mankind. I have not told falsehoods in the
tribunal of Truth. I have not done any wicked thing. I have not made
the labouring man do more than his task daily. I have not calumniated
the slave to his master. I have not murdered. I have not done fraud to
men. I have not changed the measures of the country. I have not injured
the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the
dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not withheld milk from the
mouths of sucklings. I have not hunted wild animals in the pasturage. I
have not netted sacred birds. I am pure, I am pure, I am pure!” Thus,
among the cultured old-world nations, already in the earliest historical
ages theology had joined with ethics, and religion as a moral power was
holding sway over society.
Animism, or the theory of souls, has thus been shown as the principle out
of which arose the various systems of spirits and deities, in barbaric
and ancient religions, and it has been noticed also, how already among
rude races such beliefs begin to act on moral conduct. We here see under
their simplest aspects the two sides of religion, its philosophical
and its moral side, which the reader should keep steadily in view in
further study of the faiths of the world. In looking at the history of
a religion, he will have to judge how far it has served these two great
purposes—on the one hand that of teaching man how to think of himself,
the world around him, the awful boundless power pervading all—on the
other hand that of practically guiding and strengthening him in the
duties of life. One question the student will often ask himself—how it is
that faiths once mighty and earnest fall into decay and others take their
place. Of course to no small extent such changes have come by conquest,
as where in Persia the religion of Mohammed well nigh stamped out the old
Zoroastrian faith of Cyrus and Darius. But the sword of the conqueror
is only a means by which religions have been set up and put down in the
world by main force, and there are causes lying deeper in men’s minds. It
needs but a glance through history at the wrecks of old religions to see
how they failed from within. The priests of Egypt, who once represented
the most advanced knowledge of their time, came to fancy that mankind had
no more to learn, and upheld their tradition against all newer wisdom,
till the world passed them by and left them grovelling in superstition.
The priests of Greece ministered in splendid temples and had their fill
of wealth and honours, but men who sought the secret of a good life
found that this was not the business of the sanctuary, and turned away
to the philosophers. Unless a religion can hold its place in the front
of science and of morals, it may only gradually, in the course of ages,
lose its place in the nation, but all the power of statecraft and all
the wealth of the temples will not save it from eventually yielding to a
belief that takes in higher knowledge and teaches better life.