which characterises totems. The totem, also, is a being who, if he
manifests himself in this particular animal, which is slain, has also
manifested himself and will manifest himself in other animals of the
same species: but he is not identical with any particular individual
specimen. Not only is the individuality of the totem thus incomplete,
but in many instances the name of the species has not begun to change
into a proper personal name for the totem, as 'Ceres' or
'Chicomecoatl' or 'Xilonen' have changed into proper names of personal
deities. Whether we are or are not to regard the totem as a god, at
any rate, viewed as a being in the process of acquiring individuality,
he seems to be acquiring it in the same way, and by the same process,
as corn-goddesses and maize-mothers acquired theirs, and to present to
our eyes a stage of growth through which these vegetation-deities
themselves have passed. They also at one time had not yet acquired
the personal names by which they afterwards came to be addressed. They
were, though nameless, the beings present in any and every sheaf of
corn or maize, though not cabined and confined to any one sheaf or any
number of sheaves. And these beings have it in them to become--for
they did become--deities. The process by which and the period at which
they may have become deities we have already suggested: the period is
the stage at which offerings, originally made at irregular times of
distress, become annual offerings, made at the time of harvest; the
process is the process by which what is customary becomes obligatory.
The offerings at harvest time, from customary, become obligatory. That
which is offered, is thereby sacred; the very intention to offer it,
this year in the same way as it was offered last year, suffices to
make it sacred, before it is offered. Thus, the whole species, whether
plant or animal, becomes sacred, to the deity to whom it is offered:
it is his. And if he be as vague and shadowy as the power or being to
whom the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur make their offerings at
stated seasons, then he may be looked for and found in the plant or
animal species which is his. The harvest is his alone, until the
first-fruits are offered. He makes the plants to grow: if they fail,
it is to him the community prays. If they thrive, it is because he is,
though not identical with them, yet in a way present in them, and is
not to be distinguished from the being who not only manifests himself
in every individual plant or animal of the species, though not
identical with any one, but is called by the name of the species.
Whether we are to see in totems, as they occur in Australia, beings in
the stage through which vegetation deities presumably passed, before
they became corn-goddesses and mothers of the maize, is a question,
the answer to which depends upon our interpretation of the ceremonies
in which they figure. It is difficult, at least, to dissociate those
ceremonies from the ritual of first-fruits. The community may not eat
of the animal or plant, at the appropriate season, until the head-man
has solemnly and sparingly partaken of it. About the solemnity of the
ceremonial and the reverence of those who perform it, there is no
doubt. But, whereas in the ritual of first-fruits elsewhere, the
first-fruits are, beyond possibility of doubt or mistake, offered to a
god, a personal god, having a proper name, in Australia there is no
satisfactory evidence to show that the offerings are supposed, by
those who make them, to be made to any god; or that the totem-spirit,
if it is distinguished from the totem-species, is regarded as a god.
There has accordingly been a tendency on the part of students of the
science of religion to deny to totemism any place in the evolution of
religion, and even to regard the Australian black-fellows as
exemplifying, within the region of our observation, a pre-religious
period in the process of human evolution. This latter view may safely
be dismissed as untenable, whether we do or do not believe totemism to
have a religious side. There is sufficient mythology, still existing
amongst the Australian tribes, to show that the belief in gods
survives amongst them, even though, as seems to be the case, no
worship now attaches to the gods, with personal names, who figure in
the myths. That myths survive, when worship has ceased; and that the
names of gods linger on, even when myths are no longer told of them,
are features to be seen in the decay of religious systems, all the
world over, and not in Australia alone. The fact that these features
are to be found in Australia points to a consideration which hitherto
has generally been overlooked, or not sufficiently weighed. It is that
in Australia we are in the midst of general religious decay, and are
not witnessing the birth of religion nor in the presence of a
pre-religious period. From this point of view, the worship of the
gods, who figure in the myths, has ceased, but their names live on.
And from this point of view, the names of the beings worshipped, in
the totemistic first-fruits ceremonies, have disappeared, though the
ceremonies are elaborate, solemn, reverent, complicated and
prolonged; and religion has been swallowed up in ritual.
Even amongst the Aztecs, who had reached a stage of social
development, barbarous or semi-civilised, far beyond anything attained
by the Australian tribes, the degree of personality and individuality
reached by the vegetation deities was not such that those deities had
strictly proper names: the deity of the maize was still only 'the
maize-mother.' Amongst the Australians, who are so far below the level
reached in Mexico, the beings worshipped at the first-fruits
ceremonies may well have been as nameless as the beings worshipped by
the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur. Around these nameless beings, a
ritual, simple in its origin, but luxuriant in its growth, has
developed, overshadowing and obscuring them from our view, so that we,
and perhaps the worshippers, cannot see the god for the ritual.
In Mexico the vegetation-goddesses struggled for existence amongst a
crowd of more developed deities, just as in Italy the _di indigites_
competed, at a disadvantage, with the great gods of the state. In
Australia the greater gods of the myths seem to have given way
before--or to--the spread of totemism. Where gods are worshipped for
the benefits expected from them, beings who have in charge the
food-supply of the community will be worshipped not only annually at
the season of the first-fruits, but with greater zeal and more
continuous devotion than can be displayed towards the older gods who
are worshipped only at irregular periods. Not only does the existence
of mythology in Australia indicate that the gods who figure in the
myths were once worshipped, though worship now no longer is rendered
to them; but the totemistic ceremonies by their very nature show that
they are a later development of the sacrificial rite. The simplest
form of the rite is that in which the community draw near to their
god, bearing with them offerings, acceptable to the god: it is at a
later stage in the development of the rite that the offerings, having
been accepted by the god, are consumed by the community, as is the
case with the totem animals and plants. At its earliest stage, again,
the rite is performed, at irregular periods, on occasions of distress:
it is only at a more advanced stage that the rite is performed at
fixed, annual periods, as in Australia. And this change of periodicity
is plainly connected with the growth of the conviction that the annual
first-fruits belong to the gods--a conviction springing from the
belief that they are annually accepted by the god, a belief which in
its turn implies a prior belief that they are acceptable. In other
words, the centre of religious interest at first lies in approaching
the god, that is in the desire to restore the normal state of
relations, which calamity shows to have been disturbed. But in the
end, religious interest is concentrated on, and expressed by, the
feast which terminates the ceremony and marks the fact that the
reconciliation is effected. What is at first accepted by the god at
the feast comes to be regarded as belonging to him and sacred to him:
the worshippers may not touch it until a portion of it, the
first-fruits, has been accepted by him. Thus the rite which indicates
and marks his acceptance becomes more than ever the centre of
religious interest. The rite may thus become of more importance than
the god, as in Australia seems to be the case; for the performance of
the rite is indispensable if the community is to be admitted to eat of
the harvest. When this point of view has been reached, when the
performance of the rite is the indispensable thing, the rite tends to
be regarded as magical. If this is what has happened in the case of
the Australian rite, it is but what tends to happen, wherever ritual
flourishes at the expense of religion. If it were necessary to assume
that only amongst the Australian black-fellows, and never elsewhere,
did a rite, originally religious, tend to become magical, then it
would be _a priori_ unlikely, in the extreme, that this happened in
Australia. But inasmuch as this tendency is innate in ritual, it is
rather likely that in Australia the tendency has run its course, as it
has done elsewhere, in India, for example, where, also, the
sacrificial rite has become magical. Whether a rite, originally
religious, will become assimilated to magic, depends very much on the
extent to which the community believes in magic. The more the
community believes in magic, the more ready it will be to put a
magical interpretation on its religious rites. But the fact that, in
the lower communities, religion is always in danger of sinking into
magic, does not prove that religion springs from magic and is but one
kind of magic. That view, once held by some students, is now generally
abandoned. It amounts simply to saying once more that in the earliest
manifestations of religion there was no religion, and that religion is
now, what it was in the beginning--nothing but magic. If that position
is abandoned, then religious rites are, in their very nature, and from
their very origin, different from magical rites. Religious rites are,
first, rites of approach, whereby the community draws nigh to its god;
and, afterwards, rites of sacramental meals whereby the community
celebrates its reconciliation and enjoys communion with its god. Those
meals are typically cases of 'eating with the god,' celebrated on the
occasion of first-fruits, and based on the conviction, which has
slowly grown up, that 'the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness
thereof.' Meals, such as were found in Mexico, and have left their
traces in Australia, in which the fruit or the animal that was offered
had come to be regarded as standing in the same relation to the god
as an individual does to the species, are meals having the same origin
as those in which the community eats with its god, but following a
different line of evolution.
The object of the sacrificial rite is first to restore and then to
maintain good relations between the community and its god. Pushed to
its logical conclusion, or rather perhaps we should say, pushed back
to the premisses required for its logical demonstration, the very idea
of renewing or restoring relations implies an original understanding
between the community and its god; and implies that it is the
community's departure from this understanding which has involved it in
the disaster, from which it desires to escape, and to secure escape
from which, it approaches its god, with desire to renew and restore
the normal relations. The idea that if intelligent beings do something
customarily, they must do so because once they entered into a
contract, compact or covenant to do so, is one which in Plato's time
manifested itself in the theory of a social compact, to account for
the existence of morality, and which in Japan was recorded in the
tenth century A.D. as accounting for the fact that certain sacrifices
were offered to the gods. Thus in the fourth ritual of 'the Way of the
Gods'--that is Shinto--it is explained that the Spirits of the Storm
took the Japanese to be their people, and the people of Japan took the
Spirits of the Storm to be gods of theirs. In pursuance of that
covenant, the spirits on their part undertook to be Gods of the Winds
and to ripen and bless the harvest, while the people on their part
undertook to found a temple to their new gods; and that is why the
people are now worshipping them. It was, according to the account
given in the fourth ritual, the gods themselves who dictated the
conditions on which they were willing to take the Japanese to be their
people, and fixed the terms of the covenant. So too in the account
given in the sixth chapter of Exodus, it was Jehovah himself who
dictated to Moses the terms of the covenant which he was willing to
make with the children of Israel: 'I will take you to me for a people,
and I will be to you a God.' In Japan it was to the Emperor, as high
priest, that the terms of the covenant were dictated, in consequence
of which the temple was built and the worship instituted.
The train of thought is quite clear and logically consistent. If the
gods of the Winds were to be trusted--as they were unquestionably
trusted--it must be because they had made a covenant with the people,
and would be faithful to it, if the people were. The direct statement,
in plain, intelligible words, in the fourth ritual, that a covenant of
this kind had actually been entered into, was but a statement of what
is implied by the very idea, and in the very act, of offering
sacrifices. And sacrifices had of course been offered in Japan long
before the tenth century: they were offered, and long had been offered
annually to the gods of the Harvest. Probably they had been offered to
the gods of the Storms long before they were offered to the gods of
the Winds; and the procedure narrated in the fourth ritual records the
transformation of the occasional and irregular sacrifices, made to the
winds when they threatened the harvest with damage, into annual
sacrifices, made every year as a matter of course. Thus, we have an
example of the way in which the older sacrifices, made originally only
in times of disaster, come to be assimilated to the more recent
sacrifices, which from their nature and origin, are offered regularly
every year. Not only is there a natural tendency in man to assimilate
things which admit of assimilation and can be brought under one rule;
but also it is advisable to avert calamity rather than to wait for it,
and, when it has happened, to do something. It would therefore be
desirable from this point of view to render regular worship to deities
who can send disaster; and thus to induce them to abstain from sending
it.
In the fourth Shinto ritual the gods of the Winds are represented as
initiating the contract and prescribing its terms. But in the first
ritual, which is concerned with the worship of the gods of the
Harvest, it is the community which is represented as taking the first
step, and as undertaking that, if the gods grant an abundant harvest,
the people will, through their high priest, the Emperor, make a
thank-offering, in the shape of first-fruits, to the gods of the
Harvest. This is, of course, no more an historical account of the way
in which the gods of the Harvest actually came to be worshipped, than
is the account which the fourth Shinto ritual gives of the way the
gods of the Winds came to be worshipped. In both cases the worship
existed, and sacrifices had been made, as a matter of custom, long
before any need was felt to explain the origin of the custom. As soon
as the need was felt, the explanation was forthcoming: if the
community had made these sacrifices, for as long back as the memory of
man could run, and if the gods had granted good harvests in
consequence, it must have been in consequence of an agreement entered
into by both parties; and therefore a covenant had been established
between them, on some past occasion, which soon became historical.
This history of the origin and meaning of sacrifice has an obvious
affinity with the gift-theory of sacrifice. Both in the gift-theory and
the covenant-theory, the terms of the transaction are that so much
blessing shall be forthcoming for so much service, or so much sacrifice
for so much blessing. The point of view is commercial; the obligation
is legal; if the terms are strictly kept on the one part, then they
are strictly binding on the other. The covenant-theory, like the
gift-theory, is eventually discovered by spiritual experience, if
pushed far enough, to be a false interpretation of the relations
existing between god and man. Being an interpretation, it is an outcome
of reflection--of reflection upon the fact that, in the time of
trouble, man turns to his gods, and that, in returning to them, he
escapes from his trouble. On that fact all systems of worship are
based, from that fact all systems of worship start. If, as is the case,
they start in different directions and diverge from one another, it is
because men, in the process of reflecting upon that fact, come to put
different interpretations upon it. And so far as they eventually come
to feel that any interpretation is a misinterpretation, they do so
because they find that it is not, as they had been taught to believe, a
correct interpretation but a misinterpretation of the fact: there is
found in the experience of returning to God, something with which the
misinterpretation is irreconcilable; and, when the misinterpretation is
dispersed, like a vapour, the vision of God, the idea of God, shines
forth the more brightly. One such misinterpretation is the reflection
that the favour of the gods can be bought by gifts. Another is the
reflection that the gods sell their favours, on the terms of a covenant
agreed upon between them and man. Another is that that which is offered
is sacred, and that that which is sacred is divine--that the god is
himself the offering which is made to him.
In all systems of worship man not only turns to his gods but does so
in the conviction that he is returning, or trying to return, to
them--trying to return to them, because they have been estranged, and
access to them is therefore difficult. Accordingly, he draws near to
them, bearing in his hands something intended to express his desire to
return to them. The material, external symbol of his desire--the
oblation, offering or sacrifice which he brings with him because it
expresses his desire--is that on which at first his attention centres.
And because his attention centres on it, the rite of sacrifice, the
outward ceremony, develops in ways already described. The object of
the rite is to procure access to the god; and the greater the extent
to which attention is concentrated on the right way of performing the
external acts and the outward ceremony, the less attention is bestowed
upon the inward purpose which accompanies the outward actions, and for
the sake of which those external actions are performed. As the object
of the rite is to procure access, it seems to follow that the proper
performance of the rite will ensure the access desired. The reason why
access is sought, at all, is the belief--arising on occasions when
calamity visits the community--that the god has been estranged, and
the faith that he may yet become reconciled to his worshippers. The
reason why his wrath descends, in the shape of calamities, upon the
community, is that the community, in the person of one of its members,
has offended the god, by breaking the custom of the community in some
way. For this reason--in this belief and faith--access is sought, by
means of the sacrificial rite; and the purpose of the rite is assumed
to be realised by the performance of the ceremonies, in which the
outward rite consists. The meaning and the value of the outward
ceremonies consists in the desire for reconciliation which expresses
itself in the acts performed; and the mere performance of the acts
tends of itself to relieve the desire. That is why the covenant-theory
of sacrifice gains acceptance: it represents--it is an official
representation--that performance of the sacrificial ceremony is all
that is required, by the terms of the agreement, to obtain
reconciliation and to effect atonement. But the representation is
found to be a misrepresentation: the desire for reconciliation and
atonement is not to be satisfied by outward ceremonies, but by
hearkening and obedience. 'To obey is better than sacrifice and to
hearken than the fat of rams.' Sacrifice remains the outward rite, but
it is pronounced to have value only so far as it is an expression of
the spirit of obedience. Oblations are vain unless the person who
offers them is changed in heart, unless there is an inward, spiritual
process, of which the external ceremony is an expression. Though this
was an interpretation of the meaning of the sacrificial rite which was
incompatible with the covenant-theory and which was eventually fatal
to it, it was at once a return to the original object of the rite and
a disclosure of its meaning. Some such internal, spiritual process is
implied by sacrifice from the beginning, for it is a plain
impossibility to suppose that in the beginning it consisted of mere
external actions which had absolutely no meaning whatever, for those
who performed them; and it is equally impossible to maintain that such
meaning as they had was not a religious meaning. The history of
religion is the history of the process by which the import of that
meaning rises to the surface of clear consciousness, and is gradually
revealed. Beneath the ceremony and the outward rite there was always a
moral and religious process--moral because it was the community of
fellow-worshippers who offered the sacrifice, on occasions of a breach
of the custom, that is of the customary morality, of the tribe;
religious because it was to their god that they offered it. The very
purpose with which the community offered it was to purge itself of the
offence committed by one of its members. The condition precedent, on
which alone sacrifice could be offered, was that the offence was
repented of. From the beginning sacrifice implied repentance and was
impossible without it. But it sufficed if the community repented and
punished the transgressor: his repentance however was not
necessary--all that was necessary was his punishment.
The re-interpretation of the sacrificial rite by the prophets of
Israel was that until there was hearkening and obedience there could
be nothing but an outward performance of the rite. The revelation made
by Christ was that every man may take part in the supreme act of
worship, if he has first become reconciled to his brother, if he has
first repented his own offences, from love for God and his fellow-man.
The old covenant made the favour of God conditional on the receipt of
sacrificial offerings. The new covenant removes that limit, and all
others, from God's love to his children: it is infinite love. It is
not conditional or limited; conditional on man's loving God, or
limited to those who love Him. Otherwise the new covenant would be of
the same nature as the old. But love asks for love; the greater love
for the greater love; infinite love for the greatest man is capable
of. And it is hard for a man to resist love; impossible indeed in the
end: all men come under and into the new covenant, in which there is
infinite love on the one side, and love that may grow infinitely on
the other. If it is to grow, however, it is in a new life that it must
grow: a life of sacrifice, a life in which he who comes under the new
covenant is himself the offering and the 'lively sacrifice.'
The worshipper's idea of God necessarily determines the spirit in
which he worships. The idea of God as a God of love is different from
the idea of Him as a God of justice, who justly requires hearkening
and obedience. The idea of God as a God who demands obedience and is
not to be put off with vain oblations is different from that of a God
to whom, by the terms of a covenant, offerings are to be made in
return for benefits received. But each and all of these ideas imply
the existence, in the individual consciousness, and in the common
consciousness, of the desire to draw near to God, and of the need of
drawing nigh. Wherever that need and that desire are felt, there
religion is; and the need and the desire are part of the common
consciousness of mankind. From the beginning they have always
expressed or symbolised themselves in outward acts or rites. The
experience of the human race is testimony that rites are
indispensable, in the same way and for the same reason that language
is indispensable to thought. Thought would not develop were there no
speech, whereby thought could be sharpened on thought. Nor has
religion ever, anywhere, developed without rites. They, like language,
are the work of the community, collectively; and they are a mode of
expression which is, like language, intelligible to the community,
because the community expresses itself in this way, and because each
member of the community finds that other members have thoughts like
his, and the same desire to draw near to a Being whose existence they
doubt not, however vaguely they conceive Him, or however
contradictorily they interpret His being. But, if language is
indispensable to thought, and a means whereby we become conscious of
each other's thought, language is not thought. Nor are rites, and
outward acts, religion--indispensable though they be to it. They are
an expression of it. They must be an inadequate expression; and they
are always liable to misinterpretation, even by some of those who
perform them. The history of religion contains the record of the
misinterpretations of the rite of sacrifice. But it also records the
progressive correction of those misinterpretations, and the process
whereby the meaning implicit in the rite from the beginning has been
made manifest in the end.