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THE INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM ON PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY
* * * * *
_By the same Author_,
BUDDHISM IN CHRISTENDOM.
"The most learned, thoughtful, and thought-provoking work which has yet
appeared on this momentous question.... I read the book from cover to
cover with much interest."--_Truth._
"The present work is of the profoundest interest, and is certain to
command attention in all future discussions of the subject with which
it deals.... It is exceedingly ably written."--_Scotsman._
"The relation of Essenism to Buddhism is here dwelt upon with
some fresh illustration of the probably Indian origin of the
Therapeuts of Alexandria. Mr. Lillie's chapters on ritual and
observances are rendered attractive by a number of interesting
illustrations."--_Athenæum._
"Discusses the influence which Buddhism has had on Christianity. The
admission that there is any relationship at all between the two will
be vehemently denied by many good people, but no one can impartially
and fairly study Mr. Lillie's book, examine his evidence, and give due
weight to his arguments, without admitting that the connection not only
exists but is an intimate one."--_Evening Standard._
_Also_,
THE POPULAR LIFE OF BUDDHA.
"Contends that the atheistic and soulless Buddhism was drawn from the
'Great Vehicle,' which was a spurious system introduced about the time
of the Christian era, whereas the 'Little Vehicle,' compiled by Asoka,
contained the motto, 'Confess and believe in God.' There are a large
number of passages drawn from the sacred books, which tend to prove
that Mr. Lillie is right in his theory of Buddhist theology. Even Dr.
Rhys Davids admits that the Cakkavati Buddha was to early Buddhists
what the Messiah Logos was to early Christians. 'If this be so,' as Mr.
Lillie is justified in asking, how can an atheist believe in a 'Word of
God made flesh?'
"Mr. Lillie thus sums up the originalities of the Buddhist
movement:--Enforced vegetarianism for the whole nation; enforced
abstinence from wine; abolition of slavery: the introduction of
the principle of forgiveness of injuries in opposition to the _lex
talionis_; uncompromising antagonism to all national religious
rites that were opposed to the _gnosis_ or spiritual development of
the individual; beggary, continence, and asceticism for religious
teachers."--_Spectator._
"Contains many quotations from the Buddhist religious writings, which
are beautiful and profound--a most readable book."--_Saturday Review._
"Our author has unquestionably the story-teller's gift."--_St. James
Gazette._
* * * * *
THE INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM ON PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY
by
ARTHUR LILLIE
Author of "Buddhism in Christendom," etc.
[Illustration: Shield supported by two Unicorns]
London
Swan Sonnenschein & Co.
New York: Charles Scribner's Sons
1893
* * * * *
_UNIFORM WITH THIS VOLUME_,
The "Philosophy at Home" Series.
1 to 5. SELECTIONS FROM THE WORKS OF ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER--Translated
from the German by T. BAILEY SAUNDERS, M.A. (Oxon), viz.:--
1. THE WISDOM OF LIFE, 4th Edition.
2. COUNSELS AND MAXIMS, 3rd Edition.
3. RELIGION, A DIALOGUE, and other Essays, 3rd Edition.
4. THE ART OF LITERATURE, 2nd Edition.
5. STUDIES IN PESSIMISM, 3rd Edition.
6. OUTLINES OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION, by HERMANN LOTZE. Edited,
with an Introduction, by F. C. CONYBEARE, M.A. (Oxon).
7. THE PROBLEM OF REALITY, by E. BELFORT BAX.
8. THE INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM ON PRIMITIVE CHRISTIANITY, by ARTHUR
LILLIE.
* * * * *
PREFACE.
A volume that proves that much of the New Testament is parable rather
than history will shock many readers, but from the days of Origen and
Clement of Alexandria to the days of Swedenborg the same thing has been
affirmed. The proof that this parabolic writing has been derived from
a previous religion will shock many more. The biographer of Christ
has one sole duty, namely, to produce the actual historical Jesus. In
the New Testament there are two Christs, an Essene and an anti-Essene
Christ, and all modern biographers who have sought to combine the two
have failed necessarily. It is the contention of this work that Christ
was an Essene monk; that Christianity was Essenism; and that Essenism
was due, as Dean Mansel contended, to the Buddhist missionaries "who
visited Egypt within two generations of the time of Alexander the
Great." ("Gnostic Heresies," p. 31.)
The Reformation, in the view of Macaulay, was the struggle of layman
_versus_ monk. In consequence, many good Protestants are shocked to
hear such a term applied to the founder of their creed. But here I must
point out one fact. In the Essene monasteries, as in the Buddhist,
there was no life vow. This made the monastery less a career than a
school for spiritual initiation. In modern monasteries St. John of the
Cross can dream sweet dreams of God in one cell, and his neighbour may
be Friar Tuck, but to both the monastery is a prison. This alters the
complexion of the celibacy question, and so does the fact that the
Christians were fighting a mighty battle with the priesthoods.
The Son of Man envied the security of the crannies of the "fox."
He called his opponents "wolves." His flock after his death met
with closed doors for fear of the Jews. The "pure gospel," says the
Clementine Homilies (ch. ii. 17), was "sent abroad secretly" after the
removal to Pella. The new sect, not as Christians but as Essenes, were
tortured, killed, hunted down. To such, "two coats," "wives," daily
wine celebrations were scarcely fitted.
Twice has Buddhism invaded the West, once at the birth of
Christianity, and once when the Templars brought home from Palestine
Cabbalism, Sufism, Freemasonry. And our zealous missionaries in Ceylon
and elsewhere, by actively translating Buddhist books to refute them,
have produced a result which is a little startling. Once more Buddhism
is advancing with giant strides. Germany, America, England are overrun
with it. M. Léon de Rosny, a professor of the Sorbonne, announces that
in Paris there are 30,000 Buddhists at least. A French frigate came
back from China the other day with one-third of the crew converted
Buddhists. Schopenhauer admits that he got the philosophy which now
floods Germany from a perusal of English translations of Buddhist
books. Even the nonsense of Madame Blavatsky has a little genuine
Buddhism at the bottom, which gives it a brief life.
The religions of earth mean strife and partisan watch-cries, partisan
symbols, partisan gestures, partisan clothes. But as the daring climber
mounts the cool steep, the anathemas of priests fall faintly on the
ear, and the largest cathedrals grow dim, in a pure region where Wesley
and Fenelon, Mirza the Sufi and Swedenborg, Spinoza and Amiel, can
shake hands. If this new study of Buddhism has shown that the two
great Teachers of the world taught much the same doctrine, we have
distinctly a gain and not a loss. That religion was the religion of the
individual, as discriminated from religion by body corporate.
CONTENTS.
CHAP. PAGE
INTRODUCTORY 1
I. MOSES 4
II. BUDDHA 23
III. THE FOUR PRESAGING TOKENS 35
IV. AFTER BUDDHA'S DEATH 77
V. THE APOSTLES OF THE BLOODLESS ALTAR 98
VI. THE GOSPEL ACCORDING TO THE HEBREWS 111
VII. THE ESSENE JESUS 135
VIII. THE ANTI-ESSENE JESUS 144
IX. THE CHURCH OF JERUSALEM 160
X. JOHANNINE BUDDHISM 169
XI. RITES 174
INDEX 181
INFLUENCE OF BUDDHISM ON CHRISTIANITY
INTRODUCTORY.
In the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, July 15th, 1888, M. Émile Burnouf has
an article entitled "Le Bouddhisme en Occident."
M. Burnouf holds that the Christianity of the Council of Nice was due
to a conflict between the Aryan and the Semite, between Buddhism and
Mosaism:--
"History and comparative mythology are teaching every day more plainly
that creeds grow slowly up. None come into the world ready-made, and
as if by magic. The origin of events is lost in the infinite. A great
Indian poet has said, 'The beginning of things evades us; their end
evades us also. We see only the middle.'"
M. Burnouf asserts that the Indian origin of Christianity is no longer
contested: "It has been placed in full light by the researches of
scholars, and notably English scholars, and by the publication of
the original texts.... In point of fact, for a long time, folks had
been struck with the resemblances, or rather the identical elements
contained in Christianity, and Buddhism. Writers of the firmest faith
and most sincere piety have admitted them. In the last century these
analogies were set down to the Nestorians, but since then the science
of Oriental chronology has come into being, and proved that Buddha is
many years anterior to Nestorius and Jesus. Thus the Nestorian theory
had to be given up. But a thing may be posterior to another without
proving derivation. So the problem remained unsolved until recently,
when the pathway that Buddhism followed was traced, step by step, from
India to Jerusalem."
What are the facts upon which scholars abroad are basing the
conclusions here announced? I have been asked by the present publishers
to give a short and popular answer to this question. The theory of this
book, stated in a few words, is that at the date of King Asoka (B.C.
260), Persia, Greece, Egypt, Palestine had been powerfully influenced
by Buddhist propagandism.
Buddha, as we know from the Rupnath Rock inscription, died 470 years
before Christ. He announced before he died that his Dharma would endure
five hundred years. (Oldenburg, "Buddhism," p. 327.) He announced also
that his successor would be Maitreya, the Buddha of "Brotherly Love."
In consequence, at the date of the Christian era, many lands were on
the tip-toe of expectation. "According to the prophecy of Zoradascht,"
says the First Gospel of the Infancy, "the wise men came to Palestine,"
expecting, probably, Craosha, as the Jews expected Messiah. The time
passed. Jesus was executed. His followers dispersed in consternation.
The conception that he was the real Messiah was apparently long in
taking definite form.
First came a book of "sayings" only. Then a gospel was constructed--the
Gospel of the Hebrews--of which only a small fragment can be restored.
This was the basis of many other gospels. At the date of Irenæus (180
A.D.) they were very numerous. (Hœr i. 19.) As only the Old Testament,
at that time, was considered the Bible, the composers of these gospels
apparently thought it no great sin to draw on the Alexandrine library
of Buddhist books for much of their matter, it being a maxim of both
the Essenes and the early Christians that a holy book was more allegory
than history.
But before I compare the Buddhist and Christian narratives, I must say
a word about the early religion of the Jews.
CHAPTER I.
_Moses._
Until within the last forty years the Old Testament has been
practically a sealed book.
It found interpreters, no doubt--two great groups.
The first group pointed to its useless and arbitrary edicts, and
pronounced them the inventions of priests inspired by fraud and greed.
The second group practically admitted the arbitrary and useless nature
of most of the edicts, but maintained that they were given by the
All-wise, in a book penned by His finger, to miraculously prepare a
nation distinct from the other nations of the earth, for a special
purpose. They were "types" of a higher revelation, a "better covenant."
Practically, with both of these interpreters Mosaism was a pure comedy.
But comparative mythology, unborn yesterday, is telling a different
story. It shows that the religion of the Jews, far from having been a
distinct religion miraculously given to a peculiar people, had the same
rites and gods as the creeds of its Semitic neighbours. It shows us
these Semites, or descendants of Shem, in two great groups, differing
much in language and religion. It shows us the southern Semites, the
Arabs, the Himyarites, the Ethiopians. It shows us the northern
group, the Babylonians or Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Arameans, the
Canaanites, the Hebrews. It shows us their gods, El and Yahve, and
Astarte of Sidon; and going a step back shows how the Semites borrowed
from an earlier civilisation, that of the Acadians, the yellow-faced
Mongols who seem to have preceded the white races everywhere. "The
Semite borrowed the old Acadian pantheon _en bloc_," says Professor
Sayce ("Ancient Empires," p. 151).
But the work of the archæologist and the anthropologist has been still
more important.
The former has suddenly revealed to us chapters in the history of human
experience hitherto undreamt of. He has allowed us to peer far, far
into the past, to see man at an incalculable distance.
Thousands and thousands of years before Cain and Abel we see the
palæolithic man, "dolichocephalic and with prominent jaws," pursue
the great migrations of urus, reindeer, mammoth, and the thick-nose
rhinoceros from Cumberland to Algeria, and Algeria to Cumberland,
passing dry-shod to France, and from Sicily to Africa. He is naked. He
is armed with a javelin with a flint head. He is an animal, struggling
for survival with other animals. He eats his foes as wolves eat
vanquished wolves. To extract the marrow from their bones he cracks
them with his poor flint "celt" or "_langue du chat_;" and these
cracked human bones 240,000 years afterwards are found in caves and in
beds of gravel and sand, and brick earth, and tell their story. Some
are charred, which proves that the notion of sacrifice to an unseen
being was due to him.
To this poor savage our debt is quite incalculable.
1. He invented the missile. This made the monkey dominant in the animal
world. He became a man.
2. He invented religion.
Here the valuable work of the anthropologist chimes in. He has
collected the records of ancient and modern savages, and compared
them with the records of caves and beds of gravel. In this way he
has allowed us to peer into the mind of the stone-using savage, who
lived at least 240,000 years ago. And the Bible of the Jews, from
being a text-book for sermons which bewildered the moral sense even of
children, has become, for the study of the great evolution of religion,
one of the most valuable books in the world. It bridges the gap between
the neolithic or polished-stone-using man and Christ and Mahomet.
Before we go further, let us say a word about the authorship of the Old
Testament.
The Books of Moses were compiled by Ezra, at the date of Artaxerxes,
the King of the Persians.
It is to be observed that this is not an extravagant guess of German
theorists. It is stated authoritatively by Clement of Alexandria.
(Strom. i. 22.) Irenæus, Tertullian, Eusebius, Jerome, and Basil give
the same testimony. But a greater authority is behind. It is known that
Christ and His disciples, and the early fathers, used the Septuagint
or Greek version of the Bible, and Dr. Giles goes so far as to say
that there is no hint amongst the latter of the knowledge of even the
existence of the Hebrew version. In this Bible (2 Esdras xiv.), it is
announced distinctly that the "law was burnt;" and that Ezra, aided by
the Holy Ghost and "wonderful visions of the night," wrote down "all
that hath been done in the world from the beginning which was written
in thy law."
Let us write down a few dates from the accepted chronology.
B.C.
Adam 4004
Abraham 1996
Moses 1571
Nebuchadnezzar leads Jews in
captivity to Babylon 587
Jews restored 517 Ezra 457
Thus the story of Adam in its present form was written down 3547 years
after it had occurred. The story of Abraham was written down 1539
years after it occurred. The transactions between Yahve and Moses were
written down 1114 years after they occurred.
To gauge the full significance of this, let us call to mind that the
poet Tennyson a few years back compiled from old ballads and chronicles
the story of Arthur, a king separated from him by about the same gap
of time that parted Ezra and Moses. The poet was honest, according to
our ideas of honesty, and sought to give a faithful picture of Arthur's
court--with a success that is only moderate. But Ezra was not honest,
that is, in our sense of the word. His nation had been a captive of
the Babylonians, and had been released from slavery and the lash by
Cyrus. In consequence, the molten bulls of the temples of the Jewish
taskmasters stank in his nostrils, and led him to advocate the severe
nakedness of the Persian fire-altar. And he proposed to do this, not so
much by writing new books as by altering the old records and legends,
and proclaiming his views through the mouths of the time-honoured
patriarchs.
But all this involved a grotesque inference that he seems not to have
anticipated. If Abraham, Jacob, Moses, Solomon, knew in their secret
hearts that the one fierce hatred of Yahve was the graven image, their
assiduous idolatry spread over 1500 years must have been a pure comedy,
intended to insult Yahve, not to conciliate him.
What is the object of the religion of the savage? Anthropology has
recently answered this question.
The religion of the savage is a slavish reign of terror. His rites and
prohibitions are a vast apparatus of magic, to obtain food for the
tribe, and safety from the plague and the foeman. In language borrowed
from the New Zealander, it is a Great TABOO.
Early man found himself in the presence of the mighty forces of nature.
The thunder roared. The lightning struck his rude shelter. A hurricane
ruined his crops. The fever or the foeman came upon him. He had to
guess the meaning of all this. Some dead chief, much feared in life, is
seen in a dream, or his ghost appears. He is silent and looks very sad.
What is the cause of his sorrow? Want of food. The early savage knows
no other. A storm, a pestilence vexes the clan, and the chief appears
again, looking angry. The two facts are connected together. Beasts are
slaughtered, and perhaps human victims, and placed near his cairn. The
pestilence ceases. In this way the Hottentots have made an ancestor,
Tsui Goab, into their god. Indeed, ancestor worship is the basis of all
religions. But by and by, to resume our illustration, new calamities
vex the tribe. Tsui Goab is angry once more. Fresh efforts are made
to soothe him. Soon the Taboo develops into a number of complicated
superstitions.
"The savage," says Sir John Lubbock, "is nowhere free. All over
the world his daily life is regulated by a complicated, and often
most inconvenient set of customs (as forcible as laws), of quaint
prohibitions and privileges.... The Australians are governed by a
code of rules and a set of customs which form one of the most cruel
tyrannies that has ever, perhaps, existed on the face of the earth."
("Origin of Civilisation," p. 304.)
"The lives of savages," says Mr. Lang, "are bound by the most
closely-woven fetters of custom. The simplest acts are 'tabooed.' A
strict code regulates all intercourse." ("Custom and Myth.," p. 72.)
Now, unless this system is clearly understood, Mosaism will remain a
riddle. It is to be observed that Ezra, far from having relaxed the
reign of terror of the Great Taboo of savage survival, had enlarged the
number of petty faults and superstitions; and the Levites and Pharisees
at the date of Christ, far from considering all this a comedy, were the
most stiff-necked of believers. It results that a new religion that
proposed to ignore the chief edicts of the Taboo must have come from
some strong outside influence.
The two great foes of the savage, as Mr. Frazer shows in his able
work, the "Golden Bough," were the ghost and the necromancer. The first
was deemed all-powerful, and the second sought to use this power to
help the tribe and injure its rivals. His art was that of the farmer,
the warrior, the doctor--in fact, in his view, pure science. And the
laws and ordinances were a Great Taboo, acts forbidden or enjoined to
control the ghosts.
Let the Deuteronomist himself tell us what Israel was to expect if she
kept these laws and ordinances.
Yahve, it is said, "will love thee, and bless thee, and multiply thee,
and he will also bless the fruit of thy womb, and the fruit of thy
land, thy corn, and thy wine, and thine oil, the increase of thy kine
and the flocks of thy sheep.... The Lord will take away from thee all
sickness, and will put none of the evil diseases of Egypt which thou
knowest upon thee, but will lay them upon all them that hate thee....
Moreover, the Lord thy God will send the hornet amongst them, until
they that are left, and hide themselves from thee, be destroyed."
This was the religion of Moses. The ghostly head of the clan would
give abundant flocks and fertile ground to those who fed him with
burnt-offerings, but failing these, would send "the blotch, the itch,
the scab" (Deut. xxviii. 27), the victorious foeman--and change the
fertilising rain to the "powder and dust" of the desert.
"It must be admitted that religion," says Sir John Lubbock, "as
understood by the lower savage races, differs essentially from ours.
Thus their deities are evil, not good. They may be forced into
compliance with the wishes of man. They require bloody, and rejoice in
human sacrifices. They are mortal, not immortal; a part not the author
of nature. They are to be approached by dances rather than prayers, and
often approve what we call vice rather than what we esteem as virtue."
("Origin of Civil.," p. 133.)
In point of fact, the savage believes that sickness, death, thunder,
and other human ills come not from nature, but the active interference
of the god. He looks upon every one outside his tribe as an enemy. The
west coast negroes represent their deities as "black and mischievous,
delighting to torment them in various ways." The Bechuanas curse
their deities when things go wrong. All this throws light on the god
of the Hebrews. Professor Robertson Smith, in the new "Encyclopædia
Britannica," describes him as immoral, but perhaps it would be more
correct to say that he has the gang morality of a savage chief. He
counsels the Jews to borrow the poor silver bangles of the Egyptian
women, and then to treacherously carry them off (Exod. iii. 22),
because gang morality recognises no rights of property outside the
gang. All through the early books, stories of cheating and lying are
popular.
Palestine is a narrow strip of land between the Jordan and the
Mediterranean, surrounded by deserts. To it, from a city named Ur, in
Chaldea, 1996 years B.C., came Abraham and the Hebrews, or "Men from
Beyond." These little Semite clans were like the modern Bedouins. They
did not live in towns; they pitched their tents in the country. The
soil of Palestine, even in Abraham's day, was quite unable to support
these teeming hordes, for the sons of Abraham went several times to
Egypt to escape famine. In similar fashion, ten or twelve thousand
Arabs from Tripoli and Bengazi lately left their own country to reach
Egypt.
All this must be borne in mind. It has been debated whether the
earliest god of Israel was a sun-god or a moon-god, and whether his
name was El or Yahve. In point of fact, his name was Starvation, and
the Jewish Taboo a great food-making apparatus. This accounts for the
extreme ferocity with which the struggle for the land flowing with milk
and honey was carried on by the rival tribes.
"When thou comest nigh to a city to fight against it, then proclaim
peace to it.
"And it shall be, if it make thee an answer of peace and open unto
thee, then it shall be, that all the people that is found therein shall
be tributaries unto thee, and they shall serve thee.
"And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against
thee, then thou shalt besiege it:
"And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thy hands, thou shalt
smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword;
"But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in
the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself: and
thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the LORD thy God hath
given thee.
"Thus shalt thou do unto all the cities which are very far off from
thee, which are not of the cities of these nations."
The "cities that are very far off" mean, in reality, those that are
nearer to Moses in the desert than the cities of the promised land,
but the writer, composing imaginary laws for Moses in Jerusalem, some
hundred years after his death, overlooked this. These are not pretty
ones. These cities have to choose at once between slavery or extinction.
"But of the cities of these people, which the LORD thy God doth give
thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth.
"But thou shalt utterly destroy them, namely the Hittites, and the
Amorites, the Canaanites and the Perizzites, the Hivites and the
Jebusites, as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee." (Deut. xx. 10-17.)
It accounts, too, for the ferocity of the punishments for the
infringement of the Taboo. Death was the penalty. The man who fails to
pour dust on the blood of a pigeon that he has knocked down with an
arrow, the man who picks up sticks upon the Sabbath, the perfumer who
imitates a temple smell, the man who roasts the smallest particle of
fat or blood, the labourer who has an abscess and fails to take two
turtle doves as a "sin offering" to the priest at "the door of the
tabernacle of the congregation" (Levit. xv. 15), may all be cut off.
Every one may be stoned for infringing the Taboo.
Sir John Lubbock has pointed out that the god of the savage is of
limited power and intelligence, and that the Taboo was designed to
control rather than conciliate him. He cites the "Eeweehs" of the
Nicobar Islands, who put up scarecrows to frighten their gods, and the
inhabitants of Kamtschatka, who insult their deities if their wishes
are unfulfilled. He cites also the Rishis and heroes of the Indian
epics, who are constantly overcoming the gods of the Indian pantheon.
Certainly the early god of the Jew was not deemed all-powerful. When
the Jews fought against Askelon it is recorded:--
"The LORD was with Judah, and he drove out the inhabitants of the
mountain, but could not drive out the inhabitants of the valley,
because they had chariots of iron." (Judges i. 19.)
He wrestles with Jacob (Gen. xxxii. 29), and the superior wrestling of
the man forces the god to give his blessing. He strives to kill Moses,
but fails to do it. (Exod. iv. 24.) He is a purely local god, like
Kemosh and other Semitic deities.
"Surely Yahve is in this place," said Jacob in Mesopotamia, "and I knew
it not."
"David himself," says M. Soury, "who was not and could not have been
the monotheistic king of tradition, David, who had _teraphim_ in
his house, as had Jacob in his time, does he not seem to restrict
the kingdom of Yahve to the land of Israel when he complains that
Saul has driven him out from abiding in the inheritance of Yahve,
saying, 'Go, serve other gods'? Finally, many centuries afterwards the
contemporaries of Ezekiel still believed that Yahve, having abandoned
the country, could no longer see them." (Ezek. ix. 9.) (Soury,
"Religion of Israel," c. v.)
Anthropology divides the early races who used stone implements into two
groups, the palæolithic or rough-stone-using man, and the neolithic
man, who polished his implements. The editing of Ezra has burnished up
the early Hebrew a little, but it is plain that he had not emerged from
the stone age. His god is a stone. Jacob erected a menhir. A menhir is
a piece of chipped rock, erect, huge, imposing, the neolithic man's
first rude piece of sculpture, the neolithic man's god. Moses erected
a circle of these stone monoliths. Joshua erected twelve stone gods on
the Jordan, and sacrificed to them. (Josh. iv. 9.) Palestine abounds
in such circles archæologists tell us. These circles were the "high
places" of scripture.
Some hold that the Yahve who travelled with Israel in the Ark was a
stone. The mighty God of Jacob is called the "Stone of Israel." (Gen.
xlix. 24.) We read of Eben-ezer, the "Stone of Help," when the Ark
gives the victory to Samuel. (1 Sam. vii. 12.) Daniel's "stone cut
out of the mountain without hands" brake in pieces the kings and the
kingdoms. (Dan. ii. 45.) The "Shem Hamphoras," the stone in the Holy of
Holies in Solomon's temple, was said to be the "Stone of Jacob."
Circumcision, a savage rite, was performed with "knives of flint."
(Josh. v. 2.) Mr. Tylor ("Early History of Mankind," p. 216) shows us
that even at the date of the Mishna, the beast at the altar was killed
with the kelt of the neolithic man. Stones were the official weights in
Israel, and also the instruments of execution. David used the sling,
and perhaps the chipped stone missiles that we see in museums, and his
singing and dancing naked before the fetish, and the very unpleasant
scalps that purchased him a wife, savour a little of the latitude of
Polynesia. And his hanging up the hands and feet of Rechab and Baanah
remind us of the stakes crowned with sculls round the huts of the Dyaks
of Borneo.
"At a late date," says M. Soury, "we perceive in Hebrew legislation
the repression of monstrous habits and depraved tastes which are only
found amongst the very lowest savages. They are forbidden to tattoo
themselves, to eat insects, reptiles," etc. (Levit. xi. 31; xix. 28.)
I have still to record a quaint use of stones in Israel, another
survival from the stone age. In Astley's "Collection of Voyages" (vol.
ii., p. 674,) it is announced that the savages of West Africa consult
their god with a sort of "Odd or Even!" with nuts. In Israel, the
weightiest questions were settled by the same rude divination. "The
pebble is cast into the lap, but the whole disposing thereof is of
the Lord." (Prov. xvi. 33.) By this odd or even Saul was chosen to be
king and Jonah to be thrown overboard. By stones also malefactors were
judged in the Holy of Holies, but the exact method of this is a secret
that is lost.
In writing thus, of course, I do not believe myself to be dealing
with the actual neolithic period. Its survivals are tough. In India
before the Mutiny I was employed with a force sent to put down the
rebellion of the Santals. These, a branch of the Kolarias, represent
the early races that the Arya displaced. And their institutions were
singularly like those of the Jews. They worshipped in "high places"
rude circles of upright monoliths. They worshipped in "groves;" and
on one occasion we came across a slaughtered kid still warm, that
under the holy Sal tree had been sacrificed to obtain the help of
Singh Bonga against us. They had, like the Jews, twelve tribes. They
believed, like them, that death ended consciousness. They had marriage
by capture, softened down into a comedy, like other savage tribes. They
believed that all diseases were due to the wrath of evil spirits, or
the spell of a sorcerer. All through the night we could hear their war
tom-toms sounding, the tuph of the Jews (whence "tympanum," according
to Calmet). They fought with the bows and arrows and axes that are
marked "aboriginal weapons" in the South Kensington Museum. When we
met them in action a chief came forward like Goliath with gestures
and shouts of defiance. Like the Jews they were stiff-necked in their
conservatism. Buddhism and Buddha had risen in their very midst.
Brahmins, Mussulmans, Christians, had ruled them and plied them with
missionaries; but pious Hindoos, instead of converting them, had been
persuaded to offer sacrifices to Bagh Bhut, a tiger god, all-powerful
in Santal jungles. They recited at night their deeds of theft and
pillage and slaughter, like the Sioux Indians or the early Jews.
Circumcision is another savage rite. We find it with the Papuans.
We find it in Central America. We find it amongst the Australian
aborigines. That it was performed in Israel with knives of flint (Josh.
v. 4) argues a survival from the men of stone implements. Sanitary
precautions have been suggested as the origin of the rite, but such
an idea would be in advance of the filthy savages using it. The
"Encyclopædia Britannica" holds that it was a sacrifice to Aschera, the
goddess of generation, like a somewhat similar mutilation of females.
Professor Sayce ("Ancient Empires," p. 199) shows that with young men a
complete mutilation in honour of the Phœnician Ashtoreth was common.
Mr. Frazer ("Golden Bough," i. 169) explains another cruel law of
Leviticus. The Maoris believe that if anyone touches a dead body, and
then accidentally touches food, any one partaking of that food will
join the dead man in the shades. This superstition about the power
of the dead is the root idea of other practices, covering pictures
and looking-glasses whilst the corpse is still in the house, shunning
the graveyard at night when it is buried. It is treated as an enemy
who might pass his soul into the picture and do mischief. The death
penalty for touching Yahve's food (Levit. vii. 21) is probably the
same superstition. When God is supposed to be walking about on earth
in human form, as in the instance of a semi-divine savage chief, the
danger of touching his food increases enormously. Mr. Frazer shows that
the Mikado used to eat every day off new rude earthenware platters,
which were at once broken and buried, that no one might lose his life
by accidentally touching a particle of his food. ("Golden Bough," i.
166.) Mr. Frazer gives numerous instances, where the same fatality is
believed to result from food contaminated by a menstruous woman.
In the view of M. Soury, the early Jew was a tattooed savage, who
ate insects; but anthropology has shed an unexpected light on this.
The families, and small clans of early savages, had each some animal
as a Totem. They were tattooed with this for distinction, and it was
everywhere ruled that cat could not marry cat, or fox fox. A young man
tattooed as a fox would have to capture a lady with another crest,
"stunning her first with a blow from his dowak" perchance, like the
Australian savage described by Sir John Lubbock.
It has been shown by Professor Robertson Smith that the "unclean"
animals of the Old Testament are these totems. "So I went in and saw,
and behold every form of creeping things and abominable beasts and
all the _idols of the house of Israel_ pourtrayed upon the wall round
about." (Ezek. viii. 10.) This accounts for the hare being "abominable"
in Israel, and the beetle edible. It was meritorious to eat the totems
of one's foes, but the totems of friendly tribes, and one's own totems,
were tabooed. The origin of these ideas is much debated. The custom
is believed to be closely connected with marriage by capture. Female
infanticide was prevalent, as women only attracted ravishers. The story
of the sons of Benjamin capturing the daughters of Shiloh is a frequent
sort of story in savage annals. (Judges xxi.)
The sacrifice has puzzled the modern divine.
It is urged that rites are necessary to religion, and that the
sacrifice was an apparatus to train Israel to a deep sense of sin,
and a necessity for a blood atonement. It is contended that it was
merely a form, as only the useless portions of the carcase were given
to Yahve. Those who talk like this libel the Jewish patriarchs. With
savages the blood and the fat are considered the choicest morsels. To
stone a poor Jew because he ate a little fat with his supper would
have been infamous, if the whole affair was a harmless comedy. We have
shown that the one thought of the Jew was a mighty terror, a Great
Taboo. Starvation or rich harvests, victory or slavery, were due direct
to Yahve; and the bloody sacrifice was the one and sole instrument by
which he might be controlled.
As late as Leviticus it was believed that the burnt-offering actually
provided food and drink to the Maker of the universe. It is called the
"food of God" (Levit. xxi. 8), a phrase softened into "bread of God"
in our version, as the "Encyclopædia Britannica" (article "Bible") has
shown. It was believed also that God specially loved the smell. (Levit.
viii. 21.) More important still, as pointed out by Sir John Lubbock in
his "Origin of Civilisation," p. 272, human sacrifices are expressly
ordered in Leviticus (xxvii. 28, 29):--
"Notwithstanding, no devoted thing that a man shall devote unto the
LORD, of all that he hath, _both of man and beast_, and of the field of
his possession, shall be sold or redeemed: every devoted thing is most
holy unto the LORD.
"None devoted, which shall be devoted of men, shall be redeemed, but
shall _surely be put to death_."
"There is indeed no doubt that human victims were offered to Yahve,"
says M. Soury. "The young of man belonged to Yahve, just as did the
young of the animal and the fruit of the tree. All the gods of the
Semites,--El, Schaddai, Adon, Baal, Moloch, Yahve, Kemosh,--were
conceived in the likeness of Eastern monarchs. They had right absolute
over all that was born and all that died in their realms. Man admits
his vassalage. He adores the 'master,' and brings to his lord the
first-fruits of his flock, his field, and his family." ("Religion of
Israel," c. vi.)
The French author goes on to say that during their sojourn in Egypt the
Jews sacrificed human victims. (Ezek. xx. 26.) "In all the history of
religions there is no human sacrifice better established than that of
the daughter of Jephthah to Yahve. In the time of the Judges, who does
not know the story of Samuel and Agag? It is 'before Yahve,' at Gilgal,
that Samuel kills his victim. David appeased the wrath of Yahve, who
had afflicted the land with famine during three years, by delivering up
to the Gibeonites seven men of Saul's blood. The seven victims being
hanged 'on the hill before Yahve,' the deity was satisfied." (2 Sam.
xxi. 1-14.)
This human sacrifice is, of course, a survival of cannibalism. The
Australians, as Lumholtz ("Among Cannibals," p. 70) shows, consider
"talgoro" (human flesh) the daintiest of food. At their watchfires they
discourse upon the delicate fat round the kidneys as an alderman might
talk of calipash.
What is all this leading up to? Simply to this, that we must put far
away from us the theory of modern pulpits that the bloody sacrifice
was a comedy of the priest, a comedy of the Almighty. The sacrifice
was not a comedy at all. To the mind of the savage it was at once
business and science. It was the bank, the war office, the bureau
of agriculture, the college of physicians of the nation. By it alone
could the blood-loving Semite gods be influenced to give harvests,
shekels, victory; and the ferocious Taboo was pure science likewise.
The archer, for instance, who killed a partridge without covering the
blood with earth was killed in turn, because the Taboo was a mechanism
that could only be kept in working order by a remorseless attention to
its most minute rules. Writers like Kuenen and Lightfoot assure us that
it is quite impossible that Christianity can be due to any influence
outside Judaism, because it is such a very obvious development of
Jewish thought. This is a startling statement. Christianity pronounced
the slaughter of animals at the altar a piece of useless folly, and
tore up the great ordinances of Taboo, the Covenant between Israel and
the Maker of the Heavens. It proclaimed three Gods instead of one.
It pronounced that the Jewish holy books were parables rather than a
statement of actual facts. Such ideas were at this epoch current in the
West, owing to the activity of the missionaries of an Eastern creed.
To them we will now turn.