XVIII. Was I to recite the extravagant superstitions prevailing in
various places, the labour would be immense. It is very well known,
that the antient Gentiles worshiped the most despicable and vile
animals. The goat was the deity of one nation, the tortoise of another,
the beetle of another, and the fly of another. Even the Romans, who
were esteemed the most polished people in the world, were extremely
ridiculous in matters of religion; St. Austin, in many parts of his
Treatise, called The City of God, upbraids them with it; and the most
remarkable of their absurdities in this respect was, their adopting
such an innumerable quantity of deities, to separate and distinct
charges; the protection of the harvest, and the grain, belonged to
twelve different Gods, each of whom had his particular department.
To guard the door of the house, they had no less than three; the God
Lorculos had the care of the wood, the Goddess Cordea that of the
hinges, and the God Limentius looked after the pediment. St. Austin
jocosely remarks to them, that if each individual would appoint a
porter, they would find him capable of doing much more than any one of
their Gods, for he would be able to execute this whole business, better
than three of them, and with greater security. Pliny (who runs into
the opposite extreme of denying a Deity or a Providence, or at least
of affecting to doubt there is a Supreme Being) in giving an account
of the superstitious faith of the Romans, estimates the number of
their deities to exceed the number of their people. _Quam ob rem major
cœlitum populus, etiam quam hominum intelligi potest_ (Lib. 1. cap.
6.) The computation is not aggravated, as every man according to his
fancy, appointed himself Household Gods, to each of whom, he consigned
a particular charge, and besides this, worshiped all the established
Gods. The multifarious number may be inferred, not only from what St.
Austin has told us, but from the same Pliny, who says, they erected
temples and altars, to all the diseases and misfortunes, with which
mankind are visited: _Morbis etiam in genera descriptis, et multis
etiam pestibus, dum esse placatas trepido metu capimus_. It is certain,
that in Rome, there was a Temple erected to Fevers, and another to Ill
Luck.
XIX. The modern idolators, are not less blind than the antient ones.
The devil is worshiped in his own proper name by many people. In Pegu,
a kingdom in the Peninsula of India, although they worship God as the
author of all good, they pay more adoration to the devil, whom they
believe to be the author of all evil. Some people in the train of the
ambassador, whom Peter the Great, late Czar of Muscovy, sent to China,
met in the way an idolatrous priest praying, and they asked him whom he
worshiped? To which he answered in a magisterial tone, _I worship a God
whom the God you worship cast down from heaven, but after awhile my God
will throw yours down from heaven, and then will be seen great changes
among the sons of men_. They must in that region have had some account
of the fall of Lucifer; but they may wait long enough for a redeemer,
if they stay till their deity returns to heaven. From as ridiculous a
motive, the Jedices, a sect in Persia, never curse the devil, and that
is, that one day or other he may make his peace with God, and then may
revenge all the affronts they offer him.
XX. In the kingdom of Siam, they worship a white elephant, and four
Mandarines are appointed constantly to attend him, who serve him with
his meat and his drink, in a vessel of gold. In the Island of Ceylon,
they worshiped a tooth, which was pretended to have fallen from the
mouth of God; but Constantine de Bergania, a Portuguese, having got
possession of it, burnt it, to the great disgrace of the priests who
had invented the fable. The Indians of Honduras, worshiped a slave; but
neither the divinity nor the life of the poor creature lasted long,
for he died within a year, after which, they made a sacrifice of his
body, and substituted another in his place: but their believing, that
he who could not redeem himself from the confinement and restraint, in
which, by way of security they kept him, could make others happy, was
ridiculous enough. In the Southern Tartary, they worship a man who they
think is eternal, having been made to believe so by the artifices of
the priests appointed to his service. They only shew him in a private
place of the palace or temple, surrounded by a number of lamps, and
they always by way of precaution, in case he should die, keep another
man secreted, who is much like him, that he may be ready to take his
place, and seem as if he was still the same man. They call him Lama,
which signifies Father eternal, and such is their veneration for
him, that their greatest men procure by rich presents a part of his
excrements, which they put into a gold box, and wear it suspended from
their necks, as a precious relic. But no superstition appears to me
more extravagant, than what is practised at Balia, an Island in the
Indian Sea, to the eastward of Java, where every man has his separate
God, which he fixes upon just as his caprice dictates, either the trunk
of a tree, a stone, or a brute, and many of them change their Gods
every day, for they are allowed this liberty, and often worship for the
day the first thing they meet going out of their houses in a morning.