temple. That very word “temple” bears witness to the fact, for it is
from the Greek τέμενος, a sacred grove set apart as a place of worship.
The aspiring lines of Gothic cathedrals simulate the trunks of slender
and majestic trees carrying the eye and the soul aloft, and by their
overreaching limbs shutting out the glare of day, thus leading the mind
to holy meditation. Tacitus describes the Germans as building no temples,
but worshipping their mysterious divinity, _secretum illud_, in the gloom
of the forest.
_5. Places and Sites._—Early man stays close to the soil. It is proved,
by the distribution of the oldest stone implements, that primitive
tribes were not generally migratory, and had little intercourse with
their neighbours. Hence the more closely did they study their immediate
surroundings; and a spot which was marked by some peculiar feature was
soon associated with their all-permeating religious notions, and was
deemed sacred.
These features can usually be easily recognised. A spring, well, or
fountain, where from dry earth, or out of the rock, pours forth the
crystal fluid on which depends the life of man and brute and plant, was
everywhere a holy spot. The brook which flowed from it, chattering its
endless tale among the pebbles, was scarcely less so. It was directly
said and oft repeated by the Greeks that the _manteia_, the holy
inspiration, was imparted at the fountain of Parnassus or at the Pierian
spring. The Moxos of Bolivia claim descent from the stream on which
their villages are situated, a more than figurative expression of their
dependence on it for food and drink.[192]
The sacred character of “high places,” such as hills, mountains, or
elevated plateaux, is intimately connected with the universal belief
in “the Father in Heaven,” the sky as the home and the throne of the
greatest divinities. I have already referred to the terrestrial “Hills of
Heaven,” located, as a rule, within the tribal area.[193]
A high hill or mountain, regarded by itself as a personality, would
justly be looked upon as of extraordinary might, and invoked as a potent
aid in the undertakings of life. In the invocations of the Quiches of
Central America, who live in the midst of lofty peaks, over one hundred
of them are named and implored for aid. The “Heart of the Hills” is the
title which the ancient Mexicans applied to one of their greatest gods.
A third and important trait which gave them sacredness is the strength of
the echo which is returned from their narrow gorges or precipitous sides.
Mountain worship is very generally oracular in character. Classical and
familiar examples of this are the Pythoness and the Roman Sibyl.
Mountain caves are natural temples, and as the cave, like the hollow
tree, is a ready-built house for the wandering savage, so it is also
marvellously adapted to his ends as a shrine. Throughout Mexico and
Central America we find the caves chosen as the temples of the mightiest
deities and the depositories of the holiest relics.[194]
The sacredness of some spots arose from their adaptation to certain
rites, religious or magical. Thus, for the haruspices to practise their
specialty in divination, they must choose a spot where they could watch
the flight of birds. The sacrifices to the god of heaven should be under
the open sky, and the Mayas of Yucatan believed that when the sun was
in the zenith and the sacred fire was kindled beneath it, the ineffable
Deity descended in the form of a bright plumaged _ara_ and partook of the
offering.
Places of this kind were of course laid under _tabu_, and thus reserved
for their sacred uses only. Sometimes they were enclosed, but often the
community was sufficiently informed about them to make this unnecessary.
The fame of these sacred places and the powers of the gods who dwelt
within them extended widely even in very primitive conditions. This gave
rise to the custom of pilgrimages, quite as familiar to the American
Indians before Columbus as to the Europeans of the Middle Ages. There
were famous holy places on the island of Cozumel and in Colombia and
Peru, to which pious palmers wended their way over many hundred miles of
weary journeying.
The local divinity naturally drew his colouring and his main attributes
from the spot itself, and those in turn gave a similar local physiognomy
to his rites and functions. We have thus a kind of geographical character
impressed on early religions, which their later developments retained
long after they had been severed from their first meanings and had
drifted to other climes and alien races.
_6. The Lower Animals._—The primitive mind did not recognise any deep
distinction between the lower animals and man. The savage knew that
the beast was his superior in many points, in craft and strength, in
fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with respect. To him, the
brute had a soul not inferior to his own, and a language which the wise
among men might on occasion learn. The strange powers and mysterious
faculties they often possess were to him inexplicable by any other
doctrine than that they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he
placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man himself, or
even identified them with the manifestations of the Highest.
None was in this respect a greater favourite than the bird. Its soaring
flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its plumage,
combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.
The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of
birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are extremely
common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the
faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive
tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine and the
special purveyors of the vital principle.
According to the myths of the Polynesians, the gods in the old times
used to speak to man through the carols of the feathered songsters; and
everywhere, to be able to understand the language of birds was equivalent
to being able to converse with the gods.
The chief god of the Murray River Australians was Nourali. He was
immortal, self-created, and the creator of all. The form under which
they conceived him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among nearly all
the tribes of the North-west Coast and the adjacent interior of British
America, the creation of the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is
personated in the dark thunder-cloud.
South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock, this “thunder-bird”
is a conspicuous figure in art and myth; and we could pursue our way
quite to the extreme south of the continent, and everywhere among
the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar sacred associations
connected with the birds.
They are universal in religions, and those which we meet in Christian
art, the eagle, the dove, etc., carry with them significations allied to
those they bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.[195]
Closely connected with these ideas was the reverence of the egg as the
symbol of the origin of life. Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic
mysteries the egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that
is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have retained with
the symbol in our customs relating to Easter eggs on the morning of the
Resurrection.
The derivation from the observation of the bird brooding on its nest is
obvious, and no wonder therefore that the symbol with allied myths and
rites extends through all religions.
In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida tribe of Northern India,
the goddess Nustoo, who created the world, came into life from a
self-evolved egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she had
formed and moulded the land for her abode. The Dyaks of Borneo relate
that after the Supreme Being had created the world, the god Ranying
descended to the new earth and formed there seven eggs, which contained
the germs of man and woman, all animals and plants.[196]
This example, of the bird, which I have given in some detail, will
illustrate the cult of an animal form. It by no means stands alone
in its universality. Perhaps even more striking is the so-called
“serpent-worship,” which has occupied the attention of so many writers.
The adoration of the serpent-symbol is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely
a native tribe can be named in regions where this animal is known, which
does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some writers have traced the
sentiment back to the anthropoid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in
tropical forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this extensive
question I cannot enter.
The symbolic value of most animal deities can be traced to some peculiar
trait of the species. Thus the lizard, very prominent in the religions
of Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its significance
from the nocturnal habits of some species and the diurnal habits of
others.[197] In America, the frog was the symbol of water, over a vast
area; and that it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will cause
no astonishment when we recall its amphibious nature. The fish, as the
emblem of life, familiar in Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest
Chaldean times, when Oannes, a form of the god Êa, appeared as half fish
and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-god who sows the seed of
man in the flood myths of both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but
another expression of the recognition of water as the source or condition
of life.
The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,” of the clans or gentes
among the American Indians, are not to be taken literally. They were not
understood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as mythical, ancient
beings, of supernatural attributes, who clothed themselves in those forms
for their own purposes.
_7. Man._—That when the brute was at times invested with the aureole of
the Divine, man himself should at times partake of its glory, need be
expected. But here let an important distinction be drawn. Never _as man_
was he clothed in the attributes of Deity, but just in so far as he was
deemed to be _more than man_. The Latin saying, _deus homini deus_, never
was true anywhere in its literal sense. Anthropism never existed in any
religion. Man or the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason of
any human attribute, but solely for those believed to be more than human,
superhuman.
The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains; the ancient Egyptians
and many another people did pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them
among the gods; but always because they considered them partakers of the
divine nature, sharers in that which is ever beyond mere humanity.[198]
This profound distinction between the human and the humanised divine
was sought to be expressed by most tribes by fashioning the images of
the gods in vaguely human shapes, but with non-human elements. Diana
with her hundred breasts, Brahma with his dozens of arms, Janus with
his double face, and scores of other instances will at once rise in the
memory. Enormous size, impossible features, accessories such as wings,
tails, multiple heads and limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a
depraved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious carver to express
in his work the non-human and superhuman character of the being he sets
before the adoring eyes of the votaries.
It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures, notably the ancient
Greeks, that the true distinction rose to full consciousness in the
artistic soul—that in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men in
their superior and matchless beauty, in their perfect symmetry and noble
proportions. They recognised that there is something in beauty itself,
which, in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of the
divine, and leads man to the contemplation of laws beyond those of nature
or of life, laws which are the expression of the deep harmonies of the
universe.
This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pursuing the merely objective,
the merely animal, it was led by the unseen hand which guides man to his
destiny into the path which conducted far beyond what the senses can
teach, into the realm of the ideal and the eternal, to
“the measures and the forms,
Which the abstract intelligence supplies,
Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.”
Such are some of the numberless objects with which primitive man
associated his idea of the Divine. The nature of this association must
not be misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said, that it was not
an identification of the spiritual with the material. The object was
hallowed, not from anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible
power.
_8. Life and its Transmission._—What Professor Otfried Müller has so
well said of the oldest forms of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds
true in all primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world of
Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable depth into definite forms
and individual expressions.”[199] All gods and holy objects were merely
vehicles through which Life and Power poured into the world from the
inexhaustible and impersonal source of both.
I will illustrate this first from the very ancient religion of the
Etruscans and then point out sufficient analogies in modern savage tribes.
That venerable people, whose massive cities built before Rome was founded
still survive, held that there was a single source of all existence,
animate and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mysterious “veiled
gods,” whose number was unknown and whose names were never uttered. They
were the channels of the divine Will, through which it passed to the
twelve highest known gods, called the _Consentes_ or Companions, and
these transmitted it through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins
called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence.
The word _genius_ means a producer or begetter; but not in any literal
sense, for not only every man and animate being had such a genius, but
also every plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object, had
one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to an act of the creative
power in the abstract or spiritual sense. The genii were the proximate
causes of existence, but they were themselves “emanations from the great
gods,” and these in turn were merely the channels of the inexhaustible
source of all life beyond.
This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also of the Greeks. I may
compare it with the belief of one of the most brutish of barbarian
hordes, the Itelmen of Kamtschatka.
Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate Power,
Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No worship and no offerings are
tendered him other than that certain pillars are erected and decked
with flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter is Kutka. It was
said of him that he had married all creatures and was the common father
of all. It was he who made land and water in their present forms and
invented all arts. To him the visible world owed its existence, though
not its origin. Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he is as
much cursed for the evils of life as praised for its advantages. It is he
who finds souls for all existences, and preserves their spirits when the
body decays.
We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the
often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented.
Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem
from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other
fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation.
We should consider whether they are not naïve symbols, chosen, with a
crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally
renewed life of nature.
This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those
objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked
rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are
too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an
interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.
There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites, deliberate indecencies,
practised under the cloak of religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased
priests. These were alienations and prostitutions of religion. In the
genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of the reproduction and
transmission of life were frequent and public, and were not associated
with thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible emblems of that
Spirit of Life which, beyond all else, was the unifying instinct of
religious expression.
This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God as Father, as parent of
whatever is, “Pan-genitor,” as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every
race, in all ages, have men’s prayers ascended to “Our Father who art in
heaven.”
Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we should hear him invoking
_Papang_, “Father”; or _Mamin-gata_, or _Mungan-naur_, “Our Father,” in
his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, it would be _To-ta_,
“Our Father”; with the American tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or
“great father”; in the Brahmānas of India, _Pita_, “Father”; with the
Greeks and Romans, _Dios Pater_, “the heavenly Father”; and with the
northern Vikings, _Odin All-father_.[201]
But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist between such terms and
that fatherhood of God which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In
heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the fatherhood of the
gods is physical fatherhood only”; and this is repeated by many Christian
theologians and commentators.[202]
It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not have been made but for
religious partisanship. Ethnologists are well aware that the word for
“Father” in primitive life is much more frequently a term of respect,
applied to elders, than necessarily denotive of kinship. The father,
_Pita_, of the Brahmānas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer
of all things, and far remote from physical parentage[203]; neither
in American nor Australian myths is “the Father above” identified
as the ancestor of the gens; among the Zulus, the best instructed
missionaries report that Unkululu, the “Father” of their creeds, was
not meant literally so, but only as “the means of helping the race into
being”[204]; and this is the general sense of the term in every instance
which I have analysed.
As some sort of a crude effort to express this comprehensibly, we
find that frequently in primitive myths and art the god, regarded
as the creator, is shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is,
of both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-mother,” or
“mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than non-sexual in nature.[205]
Such expressions are of constant occurrence, and some of the most
objectionable portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose from the
effort to translate this mystical characteristic into objective forms.
Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists
call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven
with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under
one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently
to the human heart.
The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of
Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life.
This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the
root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace
it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive
peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through
the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its
complete expansion it reaches the perfect _agape_, where the union of the
human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one
and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207]
This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical ideals is but the result
of a gradual evolution from those low beginnings which I have mentioned
as perceptible in most primitive religions.
It is the ripened manifestation of that profound psychical truth, so
incomparably expressed in the lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge:
“All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”
LECTURE V.
Primitive Religious Expression: In the Rite.
CONTENTS:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical
Rites—Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I.
Communal Rites: 1. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal
Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Commensality—The
“Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early
and Later Forms—4. The Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists.
II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating to Birth—Vows and
Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating
to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to
Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5. Relating
to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary
Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning.
We have seen how the religious sentiment finds expression in the Word and
in the Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the Act. This
is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It is a combination of forms and
ceremonies collectively known as Worship.
So important is it that one eminent German authority has declared the
ritual to be “the source of all religions”[208]; and Dr. W. Robertson
Smith, also a profound student of the subject, has maintained that “in
the study of ancient religions we must begin, not with the myth, but with
the ritual”; because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth was derived
from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”[209]
If I do not follow these authorities, it is because my own studies have
led me to a different opinion from theirs. I believe that every rite is
originally based on a myth. In later days the myth was often obscured or
lost, and another coined to explain the rite; and this second growth is
what has misled the authors I have quoted.
The evidence which has convinced me is, that in truly primitive condition
the rite is constantly a mimicry of the supposed doings of the god; or
it is a means of summoning him according to accepted statements; or it
is a method of communing with the Divine, plainly drawn from the facts
of suggestion and sub-conscious mentality. Occasionally it is a magical
procedure to constrain the deities; but this is rare in primitive
conditions.[210]
The mimicry or imitative origin of rites is well illustrated in that
in use for “rain-making,” one of the commonest of all. In periods of
drought, “The Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and
rattling vigorously a dry gourd containing pebbles to represent the
thunder, scatters water through a reed on the ground beneath, as he
imagines up above in the clouds do the spirits of the storm.”[211]
The Australian rite is analogous. The women of the tribe erect a hut of
leaves and branches, in which are placed some stones. The men enter, and
while some scatter bird’s down in the air, others scarify their arms and
let the blood drop upon the stones. These are then placed high up in
trees, and the hut demolished. The symbolism is, that the hut represents
the firmament; the down, the light cirrus clouds which precede the storm;
the stones, the heavy rain-clouds; the dropping blood, the fertilising
rain.[212] This is again an imitation of their myth of the making of rain
by the celestial powers.
Very many rites are of this character. Others again are of the nature of
an invitation to the divinity, based on beliefs and narratives of his
supposed actions or customs. The Mayas of Yucatan, for instance, had a
deity doubtless of solar character, who bore the name, “The Eye of the
Day.” The myth stated that his form was that of a bird of brilliant
plumage, and that he was nearest the earth at high noon about the summer
solstice. At that time, therefore, they constructed an altar in an open
spot, built upon it a fire and placed the sacred offerings. The people
then witnessed the gorgeous parrot, the sacred _ara_, descend through
the air to take the offerings, who was none other than the god himself,
responding to the invitation.[213]