measurable by our senses, and hence outside the domain of inductive
research. The tendency of organic forms and cosmic motions is always
toward it, but they always fall short of it.[288] We are aware of it only
through the longings of our sub-conscious minds, not through the laws of
our reasoning intelligence. Yet so intense is our conviction, not only
that it is true, but that final truth lies in it alone, that it has ever
been and will ever be the highest and strongest motive of human action.
Beginning with those arts which are avowedly the expression of beauty
in line, colour, or form, it is easy to show how they were fostered by
the religious sense. The inscribed shells and tablets from the mounds of
the Mississippi Valley present complex and symmetrical drawings, clearly
intended for some mythical being or supernatural personage.
Among the Salishan Indians of British Columbia, when a girl reaches
maturity she must go alone to the hills and undergo a long period of
retirement. At its close, she records her experiences by drawing a
number of rude figures in red paint on a boulder, indicating the rites
she has performed and the visions she has had.[289] Such rock-writing,
or petroglyphs, nearly always of religious import, are found in every
continent, and offer the beginnings of the art of drawing.
It is possible that the oldest known examples, scratched with a flint
on the bones of reindeers dug up in the caves of southern France, may
represent the totems or deified heroes of the clan. Certain it is that
a class of symbolic figures, which recur the world over, often dating
from remote ages, such as the crescent, the cross, the svastika, the
triskeles, the circle, and the square, were of religious intention, and
conveyed mystic knowledge or supernatural protection in the opinion of
those who drew them.
The early cultivation of painting in religious art arose chiefly from
the symbolism of colours, to which I previously made a passing allusion.
Its origin was in the effect which certain hues have upon the mind,
either specifically or from association. Colour-symbolism, indeed, forms
a prominent feature in nearly every primitive religion. The import of
the different colours varies, but not to the degree which excludes some
general tendencies. The white and the blue are usually of cheerful and
peaceful signification, the black and the red are ominous of strife and
darkness. In many tribes the yellow bore the deepest religious meaning.
The Mayas of Yucatan assigned it to the dawn and the east; and when the
Aztecs gathered around the dying bed of one they loved, and raised their
voices in the paean which was to waft the soul to its higher life beyond
the grave, they sang: “Already does the dawn appear, the light advances.
Already do the birds of yellow plumage tune their songs to greet thee.”
These symbolic colours are those with which the early temples were tinted
and the rude images of the gods stained. They were rarely harmonious,
but they were effective, and appealed to the people for whom they were
intended. Their preparation and their technical employment were improved,
and, as the art advanced, it reacted on the religion, directing its
conceptions of divinity into higher walks and toward nobler ideals.
Art in line and colour is of vast antiquity, probably preceding that in
shape or form, carving or sculpture. But this, too, we find was fairly
understood by the cave-dwellers of France and Switzerland at a time when
the great glacier still covered a good part of the European continent,
and there is scarcely a savage tribe to-day that does not make some rude
attempts at carving the images of its deities.
A natural object which has a chance resemblance to a man or beast is
chosen as a fetish, and the worshipper by chipping or rubbing increases
slightly the likeness. This is the infancy of the sculptor’s art, and
it is usually for a religious purpose that it is exercised. Soon it is
developed, and in stone, or bone, or wood, in baked clay, or rags, or
leaves, we find thousands of effigies in use to represent the tutelary
deities and the other denizens of the supernatural world.
So prominent was the early progress of religious art in this direction
that it gave the name to early religion itself. It was distinctly
“idolatry,” or “image worship,” the objective expression overwhelming the
inward sentiment.
Its excess in this direction led to reactions and protests as long ago as
the dawn of history. “Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image,
nor the likeness of anything,” was a command taken so literally that it
has swept away ever since in some of the Semitic peoples all interest in
plastic or pictorial art, whether sacred or secular. It was believed that
the contemplation of a divinity not represented by any visible object
would maintain and develop a higher conception than if portrayed under
tangible form, no matter how beautiful or how symbolic.
This opinion would not and did not exclude the cultivation of the
beautiful under non-sensuous forms, such as appeal to the ear rather
than to the eye. I refer to metre and music, to oratory and literary
composition.
From some cause which it might be difficult to explain satisfactorily
the natural expression of religious emotion in language is universally
metrical. The rites of every barbarous tribe are conducted in or
accompanied by rude chants or songs, which both stimulate the religious
feelings and give appropriate vent to them. Many of these chants are
mere repetitions of phrases, or refrains, destitute of meaning, but
they answer the purpose, and are the germs from which, in appropriate
surroundings, have been developed the great poems of the race, the
inspirations of its immortal bards.
Hundreds of examples of these primitive religious chants have been
collected of recent years, when, for the first time, their ethnologic
importance has been understood. They present a striking similarity,
whether from the Polynesian Islands, the desert-dwellers of Australia, or
the Navahoes and Sioux of our own reservations. Many of them are scarcely
more than inarticulate cries, but even these have a certain likeness,
containing the same class of vowels, and often leading, through this
physiological correlation of sound to emotion, to similar words in the
religious language of far-distant peoples.
Everywhere we find these metrical outbursts controlled by the sense of
rhythmical repetition; and it was to accentuate this that instruments of
music were first invented. Their rudest forms may be seen in the two flat
sticks which the Australians use to beat time for their singing in their
_corroborees_, or festal ceremonies; or in the hollow log, pounded by a
club, which some Central American tribes still employ. All the native
American musical instruments appear to have been first invented for
aiding the ritual; and tradition assigns with probability the same origin
for most of those in the Old World.
Uniform rhythmic motion is a powerful means of intensifying collective
suggestion; and its action is the more potent the more we yield our minds
to the control of their unconscious activities,—the realm in which the
religious sentiment is supreme.
In the initiation ceremonies of the Australians—called the _Bora_—the
youth are obliged to listen to long speeches from the old men, containing
instructions in conduct and the ancestral religious beliefs. Such
customs as this,—and in one or another form they are universal in
primitive religions—led to the development of the art of Oratory. It
was cultivated assiduously in primitive conditions. We have several
volumes largely filled with the prolix addresses of the Aztec priests and
priestesses on various solemn occasions, as birth, entering adult life,
marriage, etc.[290] To learn these long formulas by heart was one of the
duties, and not an easy one, of the neophytes.
In most tribes they are couched in forms apart from those of daily use,
the words being unusual, with full vowels and sonorous terminations. Some
of these peculiarities survive in the “pulpit eloquence” of our own day,
testifying to the influence of religious thought on the development of
the modes of dignified expression.
It was in this connection and under this inspiration that man invented
the greatest boon which humanity has ever enjoyed,—a system of writing, a
means of recording and preserving facts and ideas. Our present alphabet
is traced lineally back to the sacred picture-writing of ancient Egypt;
and the less efficient method employed by the natives of Mexico and
Central America originated in devices to preserve the liturgic songs
and religious formulas. For generations, in both areas, its chief
cultivation and extension lay with the priestly class: although its
final application to the uses of daily life was due to merchants rather
than to scholars.
This discovery made possible such a treasure as a literature; and that we
find its beginnings and oldest memorials chiefly of religious contents
is ample testimony to this incalculable debt we owe to the religious
sentiment. The papyri of Egypt, the codices of Central America, the
Sanscrit Rig Veda, and the Persian Vendidad testify to the diligence with
which the ancient worshippers sought to preserve the sacred chants and
formulas.
We discern the same anxiety among rude savages to pass down in their
integrity the liturgies of their worship; and in the “meday sticks” of
the Chipeways and the curiously incised wooden tablets of Easter Island,
we have the beginnings of written literature,—always the purpose being
religious in character.
It is unnecessary to dwell in detail upon the fostering influence of
early religion on the useful arts. In their numerous applications to the
ritual and the objective expression of the religious sentiment, they were
constantly stimulated by it and by the reward it was ever prepared to
offer, both in this world and that to come.
But one art of utility was so pre-eminently religious in its source that
it merits especial comment, that is, building or architecture. Nearly
all the great monuments of the ancient world, most of the important
structures of primitive tribes everywhere, have in them something
religious in aim, or are avowedly so. We know little or nothing of the
builders of the mysterious “megalithic monuments,” the dolmens and
cromlechs which to the number of thousands rise on the soil of France
and England; but their arrangement and character leave no doubt that
they were for some religious purpose. So the mighty piles which excite
our astonishment in the valley of the Nile or the Euphrates, or on the
highlands of Mexico, or in the tropical forests of Yucatan, reveal the
same inspiration.
In his altars and temples, in his shrines and funerary monuments, his
fanes and cathedrals, man has at all times expended his efforts and his
means with a prodigality lavished on no other edifices. The orders of
architecture arose from his desire to erect dwellings worthy of the god
who should inhabit them. No beauty of line, no majesty of proportion,
no abundance of decoration, was too great to secure this purpose. Such
surroundings in time imparted dignity and permanence to the cult, and
embellished the religious sentiment through noble artistic associations.
7. Let us now turn from these considerations of a general nature to the
more pointed one, whether primitive religions exerted an improving
influence on the independent life of the individual; for that is the test
to which all institutions should finally be brought.
The savage is not the type of a free man, although in popular estimation
he is generally so considered. He is, in fact, tyrannically fettered by
traditional laws and tribal customs. He is merged in his clan or gens,
against whose rules, often most painful and arbitrary, he dares take no
step. As an individual, he cannot escape from their invisible chains.[291]
His only avenue to permitted freedom is through the higher law of his
personal religion. If he pleads that his own tutelary spirit has ordered
him to an act contrary to custom, or that his own magical powers enable
him to defy established usage, his disregard of it will be condoned.
In savage life, the inspired and the insane are always ranked in the same
category as above the law. Among the Kamschatkans, if a man declares that
his personal divinity has in a dream commanded him to unite with some
woman of the tribe, it is her duty to obey, no matter what her position
or relationship.[292]
Although at times this freedom was doubtless abused, it secured for the
individual a degree of personal liberty which he could have attained in
no other manner. By recognising a law for the single conscience above
that of either ancestral usage or popular religion, it paved the way to
the development of the individual, free from all restraints other than
his clear judgment would lay upon himself.
He who possessed the hidden knowledge, the esoteric _gnosis_, was by that
knowledge released from bondage to his fellow-men. As the poet Chapman so
well says:
“There is no danger to a man who knows
What life and death is; there’s not any law
Exceeds his knowledge: neither is it lawful
That he should stoop to any other law.”
This sense of superiority to all surroundings is disclosed everywhere in
mystic religions. A Hindu prophetess was a few years ago imprisoned by
the English civic judge for violation of the local laws and disturbing
the peace. Her only statement in defence was: “Years ago, when a girl,
I met in the jungle, face to face, the god Siva. He entered into my
bosom. He abides in me now. My blessing is his blessing; my curse his
curse.”[293] The Malay, when he “runs amuck,” regards himself exonerated
from all restraint, moral or social; and that custom and belief are not
confined to his race.[294]
It was held among the ancients that those who are “born of God,” that is,
inspired by the divine afflatus, are not only above human law, but “are
not subject even to the decrees of Fate.”[295]
The ceremonial law, so powerful in primitive condition, must have exerted
a beneficial influence on the training of the individual. Its severe
restrictions, its minute and ceaseless regulations of his life, taught
him self-control and self-sacrifice. His first duty was not to himself
but to the other members of his clan or totem. Obedience and systematic
restraint were useful lessons inculcated on him from earliest childhood.
The Congo Negro, the Andaman Islander, the American Indian, for whom his
sponsors had taken vows at his birth, grew up to consider the fulfilment
of these the chief end of his life. Their violation would entail disaster
and disgrace not merely on himself but on his people. His religious
education, therefore, cultivated in him some of the finest qualities
of perfected manhood,—self-abnegation and altruism; for, as Professor
Granger well says, “The primitive idea of holiness implies as its chief
element, relation to the _communal_ life.”[296]
If, therefore, with some writers, we must concede that in primitive
conditions the individual was ever conceived with reference to the gens
or community, on the other hand, we must recognise the potency of the
religious element occasionally to separate him from others as one of “the
elect”; to train him in self-realisation and self-government; and to
cherish in his mind the germs of a free personality.[297]
More difficult is the decision of the question whether primitive
religions increased the happiness of the individual.
I have mentioned more than once the generally joyous character of many
of them, as seen in their rituals. But it would be a grave error not to
dwell also upon the dread of evil spirits which is so conspicuous a part
of most, and which keeps their votaries in a state of perpetual anxiety.
Nor can the self-sacrifice I have referred to increase the cheerfulness
of life, associated as it often is with painful mutilations, with
prolonged fasting, and exposure to cold and heat. The cruelty of the
ceremonies is often shocking, the edicts of the religious code merciless.
To compensate this, “the fearful looking forward to the wrath to come,”
the fertile source of mental misery in advanced faiths, scarcely exists
in those of primitive conditions. Death itself is thus deprived of its
greatest terror, and the indifference with which it is met by most
savages is matter of common note among travellers.
Nor does there exist in primitive conditions that fertile source of
human misery, religious bigotry or intolerance, with its fatal train
of persecutions, torture, and suspicion. The bloodiest sacrifices of
heathendom have never entailed such personal unhappiness as the gloomy
fanaticism of some forms of Christianity.
All these several lines of development are, it will be noted, external to
religion itself. They modify it, and are modified by it. But there are
other changes, wrought within the religious sense itself, which we must
now consider.
Religions, like all other institutions, are subject to growth and decay,
evolution and retrogression, development and death.
The vast majority of primitive faiths have disappeared totally, leaving
no trace behind except the nameless images of their gods, or not even
these. They were obliterated by conquest, or merged and lost in other
forms of belief, or degenerated and petrified until they died a natural
death.
Others grew and extended, vitalised by new thoughts, appropriate to
the new environment, or were carried far and wide by victorious rulers
or enthusiastic votaries. It is generally true, as Professor Toy has
observed, that, in early conditions, the life of a religion depends
on the life of the tribe or state which has adopted it, and that “the
larger the community, the more persistent and vigorous its religion will
be.”[298]
But the secret of success lay within rather than without; the particular
faith must pass through certain internal transformations in order to
fit it for the wider field opened to it. The chief of these stadia of
progress may be described as a transference of religious thought: 1. From
the object to the symbol; 2. From the ceremonial law to the personal
ideal; and 3. From the tribal to the national conception of religion.
1. The rudest phases of religion connect the ideas of the Divine with
particular external objects, a tree, a rock, a special place, around
which grow up a series of local myths and usages. Such ideas, to develop,
must break away from these connections with concrete and localised
relations. They must become generalised, and the symbol be substituted
for the object.
Instead of a particular tree, for instance, the sign of the tree, the
cross or the pole (_asherim_), will be adopted. This represents not the
original object but the personified activity, the spirit or god which was
supposed earlier to inhabit the given object or spot.
Thus the mind is freed from its bondage to a purely material,
geographically single, perception, and the first step is taken toward
universal or world-ideas of divinity. In metaphysical terms, it is a
passage from the concrete to the abstract, from the particular to the
general, from the real to the ideal; a line of progress which must
necessarily be followed by man’s intelligence in order to develop his
especially human attributes.
2. The second important step was that which substituted for the bare
and cold prescriptions of the ceremonial law the ideal of personal
perfection. The beginnings of this are visible even in the lowest
faiths, as we see in their veneration of those who, they considered, had
fulfilled most completely their notions of duty. Such persons were held
to have descended from the gods, or were inspired by them.
It is true these early ideals are of little more than physical strength
and mental cunning; but their attributes gradually expanded to include
corporeal beauty, intellectual power, and ethical grandeur.
We thus arrive, still in primitive conditions, to such personal ideals
as Quetzalcoatl among the Aztecs, of whom it was said in their legends
that he was of majestic presence, chaste in life, averse to war, wise and
generous in actions, and delighting in the cultivation of the arts of
peace; or as we see among the Peruvians, in their culture hero Tonapa,
of whose teachings a Catholic writer of the sixteenth century says: “So
closely did they resemble the precepts of Jesus, that nothing was lacking
in them but His name and that of His Father.”[299]
When these ideals were not distinctly men, but were partially or wholly
divine, nevertheless the contemplation of an existence whose chief aim
was to do good to those who complied with his instructions, to protect
those who fled to him, and to grant the petitions of those who prayed to
him, was both a comforting and ennobling conception.
3. Professor Thiele in his work on the ancient Egyptian religion
makes the wise observation: “The revolution brought about by religious
universalism is the greatest and most complete which the history of the
world can show.”[300]
It is true that no primitive religion aimed at universalism or even
deemed it desirable or possible. The gods of the gens or tribe belonged
to that community, were its own exclusively, and stood in antagonism to
all other gods. There was no notion of proselytising or missionary work,
no desire to extend the worship of the tribal god beyond the limits of
the tribe.
This exclusiveness was broken down by the inter-communication of
tribes, their confederations and conquests, which forced the religious
conceptions to take broader views. The priests and philosophers began
to recognise in the deities of other nations types of their own, as we
see in Greek and Roman writers. This gradually led to the comprehensive
speculations of the world-religions, in which all men are considered to
stand equally before God, and all entitled to the same share of His grace.
The early stages of these transitions are easily recognised in primitive
faiths. The adoption of foreign gods appears early. When a tribe met with
frequent reverses, it began to distrust the power of its own deities,
and apply to those of its conquerors for aid. The custom of exogamy
introduced divinities of other gentes. Personal and communal wants led to
pilgrimages to the famous oracles and fanes of distant religions, and the
votaries in returning brought with them the memory and the cult of alien
gods. In many such ways the barriers of the tribal faith were gradually
broken down.
* * * * *
We may expect to find faint traits or none of the purely abstract stage
of religion in the cults of savage tribes. Yet they are not absolutely
lacking.
This abstract stage is when the Idea, no longer merged in the Ideal,
stands by itself as the recognised guide of conscious effort. The
conception of infinity or perfection is not then conceived in relation
to a being or personality. It will still act as the loftiest motive of
action, the deepest source of spiritual joy.
Thus understood and recognised, it will not be a cold product of the
reason, but the warm and potent efflux of the heart, of the impulses,
and the emotions. In him who rises to this height, the sympathy for
and the active love of the good and the true will be all the stronger,
because he will see that man must hope only from man, from diligent
self-perfecting; but may thus hope confidently from the best there is in
man.
Toward this end, though unseen and unacknowledged, were all religions of
primitive peoples unconsciously directing and impelling the human mind.
Long has been the path, many the false routes followed, far away is still
the goal; but ever firmer in faith, and clearer in purpose, man will in
due time and fit season be established in this, the last and innermost
mystery of his religious nature.
FOOTNOTES
[1] “Religion,” observes Professor Toy, “must be treated as a product of
human thought, as a branch of Sociology, subject to all the laws that
control general human progress.”—_Judaism and Christianity_, p. 1.
[2] Rev. John M. Neale, _History of the Holy Eastern Church_, vol. i., p.
37.
[3] Granger, _The Worship of the Romans_, p. vii.
[4] A. H. Post, _Grundriss der ethnologischen Jurisprudenz_, Bd. i., s. 4.
[5] _The Science of Fairy Tales_, p. 2.
[6] _Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie_, Bd. xi., s. 124.