CHAPTER VIII.--THE GODS OF EGYPT.

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THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD

AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGINS OF RELIGIONS

BY GRANT ALLEN

AUTHOR OF “PHYSIOLOGICAL ÆSTHETICS” “THE COLOURS OF FLOWERS”

“FORCE AND ENERGY” ETC

LONDON: GRANT RICHARDS 1897

PREFACE

|TWO main schools of religious thinking exist in our midst at the

present day: the school of humanists and the school of animists. This

work is to some extent an attempt to reconcile them. It contains, I

believe, the first extended effort that has yet been made to trace the

genesis of the belief in a God from its earliest origin in the mind of

primitive man up to its fullest development in advanced and etherealised

Christian theology. My method is therefore constructive, not

destructive. Instead of setting out to argue away or demolish a

deep-seated and ancestral element in our complex nature, this book

merely posits for itself the psychological question, “By what

successive steps did men come to frame for themselves the conception of

a deity?”--or, if the reader so prefers it, “How did we arrive at

our knowledge of God?” It seeks provisionally to answer these profound

and important questions by reference to the earliest beliefs of savages,

past or present, and to the testimony of historical documents and

ancient monuments. It does not concern itself at all with the validity

or invalidity of the ideas in themselves; it does but endeavour to show

how inevitable they were, and how man’s relation with the external

universe was certain _a priori_ to beget them as of necessity.

In so vast a synthesis, it would be absurd to pretend at the present day

that one approached one’s subject entirely _de novo_. Every enquirer

must needs depend much upon the various researches of his predecessors

in various parts of his field of enquiry. The problem before us divides

itself into three main portions: _first_, how did men come to believe

in many gods--the origin of polytheism; _second_, how, by elimination

of most of these gods, did certain races of men come to believe in one

single supreme and omnipotent God--the origin of monotheism; _third_

how, having arrived at that concept, did the most advanced races and

civilisations come to conceive of that God as Triune, and to identify

one of his Persons with a particular divine and human incarnation--the

origin of Christianity. In considering each of these three main problems

I have been greatly guided and assisted by three previous enquirers or

sets of enquirers.

As to the _origin of polytheism_, I have adopted in the main Mr. Herbert

Spencer’s remarkable ghost theory, though with certain important

modifications and additions. In this part of my work I have also been

largely aided by materials derived from Mr. Duff Macdonald, the able

author of _Africana_, from Mr. Turner, the well-known Samoan missionary,

and from several other writers, supplemented as they are by my own

researches among the works of explorers and ethnologists in general. On

the whole, I have here accepted the theory which traces the origin

of the belief in gods to primeval ancestor-worship, or rather

corpse-worship, as against the rival theory which traces its origin to a

supposed primitive animism.

As to the _rise of monotheism_, I have been influenced in no small

degree by Kuenen and the Teutonic school of Old Testament criticism,

whose ideas have been supplemented by later concepts derived from

Professor Robertson Smith’s admirable work, _The Religion of the

Semites_. But here, on the whole, the central explanation I have to

offer is, I venture to think, new and original: the theory, good or bad,

of the circumstances which led to the elevation of the ethnical Hebrew

God, Jahweh, above all his rivals, and his final recognition as the only

true and living god, is my own and no one else’s.

As to the _origin of Christianity_, and its relations to the preceding

cults of corn and wine gods, I have been guided to a great extent by

Mr. J. G. Frazer and Mannhardt, though I do not suppose that either the

living or the dead anthropologist would wholly acquiesce in the use I

have made of their splendid materials. Mr. Frazer, the author of that

learned work, _The Golden Bough_, has profoundly influenced the opinions

of all serious workers at anthropology and the science of religion, and

I cannot too often acknowledge the deep obligations under which I lie to

his profound and able treatises. At the same time, I have so transformed

the material derived from him and from Dr. Robertson Smith as to have

made it in many ways practically my own; and I have supplemented it

by several new examples and ideas, suggested in the course of my own

tolerably wide reading.

Throughout the book as a whole, I also owe a considerable debt to Dr. E.

B. Tylor, from whom I have borrowed much valuable matter; to Mr. Sidney

Hartland’s _Legend of Perseus_; to Mr. Lawrence Gomme, who has come

nearer at times than anyone else to the special views and theories

here promulgated; and to Mr. William Simpson of the _Illustrated London

News_, an unobtrusive scholar whose excellent monographs on _The Worship

of Death_ and kindred subjects have never yet received the attention

They deserve, at the hands of unprejudiced students of religion. My

other obligations, to Dr. Mommsen, to my friends Mr. Edward Clodd,

Professor John Rhys, and Professor York Powell, as well as to numerous

travellers, missionaries, historians, and classicists, are too frequent

to specify.

Looking at the subject broadly, I would presume to say once more that

my general conclusions may be regarded as representing to some extent

a reconciliation between the conflicting schools of humanists and

animists, headed respectively by Mr. Spencer and Mr. Frazer, though with

a leaning rather to the former than the latter.

At the same time it would be a great mistake to look upon my book as

in any sense a mere eirenicon or compromise. On the contrary, it is in

every part a new and personal work, containing, whatever its value, a

fresh and original synthesis of the subject. I would venture to

point out as especially novel the two following points: the complete

demarcation of religion from mythology, as practice from mere

explanatory gloss or guesswork; and the important share assigned in the

genesis of most existing religious systems to the deliberate manufacture

of gods by killing. This doctrine of the manufactured god, to which

nearly half my book is devoted, seems to me to be a notion of cardinal

value. Among other new ideas of secondary rank, I would be bold enough

to enumerate the following: the establishment of three successive stages

in the conception of the Life of the Dead, which might be summed up as

Corpse-worship, Ghost-worship, and Shade-worship, and which answer

to the three stages of preservation or mummification, burial, and

cremation; the recognition of the high place to be assigned to the

safe-keeping of the oracular head in the growth of idol-worship; the

importance attached to the sacred stone, the sacred stake, and the

sacred tree, and the provisional proof of their close connection with

the graves of the dead; the entirely new conception of the development

of monotheism among the Jews from the exclusive cult of the jealous god;

the hypothesis of the origin of cultivation from tumulus-offerings,

and its connection with the growth of gods of cultivation; the wide

expansion given to the ancient notion of the divine-human victim; the

recognition of the world-wide prevalence of the five-day festival of

the corn or wine god, and of the close similarity which marks its

rites throughout all the continents, including America; the suggested

evolution of the god-eating sacraments of lower religions from the

cannibal practice of honorifically eating one’s dead relations; * and

the evidence of the wide survival of primitive corpse-worship down to

our own times in civilised Europe. I could largely increase this rapid

list of what I believe to be the new contributions here made to the

philosophy of religious evolution; but I purposely refrain. I think

it will be allowed that if even a few of these ideas turn out on

examination to be both new and true, my book will have succeeded in

justifying its existence.

* While this work was passing through the press a similar

theory has been propounded by Mr. Flinders Petrie in an

article on “Eaten with Honour,” in which he reviews briefly

the evidence for the custom in Egypt and elsewhere.

I put forth this work with the utmost diffidence. The harvest is vast

and the labourers are few. I have been engaged upon collecting and

comparing materials for more than twenty years. I have been engaged in

writing my book for more than ten. As I explain in the last chapter, the

present first sketch of the conclusions at which I have at last arrived

is little more than provisional. I desire in my present essay merely to

lay down the lines of the general theory which after so many years of

study I incline to accept. If my attempt succeeds in attracting public

attention, I hope to follow it up by several other volumes in which

the main opinions or suggestions here set forth may be reinforced and

expanded by copious collections of evidence and illustrations. If it

fails to arouse public attention, however, I must perforce be satisfied

with this very inadequate preliminary statement. I should also like to

add here, what I point out at greater length in the body of the work,

that I do not hold dogmatically to all or to a single one of the ideas

I have now expressed. They are merely conceptions forced upon my mind by

the present state of the evidence; and I recognise the fact that in so

vast and varied a province, where almost encyclopaedic knowledge would

be necessary in order to enable one to reach a decided conclusion, every

single one or all together of these conceptions are liable to be upset

by further research. I merely say, “This is how the matter figures

itself to me at present, on the strength of the facts now and here known

to us.”

A few chapters of the book were separately published in various reviews

at the time they were first written. They were composed, however, from

the outset, as parts of this book, which does not therefore consist

of disconnected essays thrown into line in an artificial unity. Each

occupies the precise place in the argument for which it was first

intended. The chapters in question are those on “Religion and

Mythology,” and “The Life of the Dead,” contributed under

the titles of “Practical Religion” and “Immortality and

Resurrection” to the _Fortnightly Re-view_; that on “Sacred

Stones,” contributed under the same name to the same periodical;

and that on “The Gods of Egypt,” which originally appeared in the

_Universal Review_. I have to thank the proprietors and editors of those

magazines for permission to print them in their proper place here. They

have all been altered and brought up as far as I could bring them to

the existing state of our knowledge with regard to the subjects of which

they treat.

In dealing with so large a variety of materials, drawn from all times

and places, races and languages, it would be well-nigh impossible

to avoid errors. Such as my own care could discover I have of course

corrected: for the rest, I must ask on this ground the indulgence of

those who may happen to note them.

I have endeavoured to write without favour or prejudice, animated by a

single desire to discover the truth. Whether I have succeeded in that

attempt or not, I trust my book may be received in the same spirit in

which it has been written,--a spirit of earnest anxiety to learn all

that can be learnt by enquiry and investigation of man’s connection

with his God, in the past and the present. In this hope I commit it to

the kindly consideration of that small section of the reading public

which takes a living interest in religious questions.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD.

CHAPTER I.--CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD.

|I propose in this work to trace out in rough outline the evolution of

the idea of God from its earliest and crudest beginnings in the savage

mind of primitive man to that highly evolved and abstract form which it

finally assumes in contemporary philosophical and theological thinking.

In the eyes of the modern evolutionary enquirer the interest of the

origin and history of this widespread idea is mainly psychological. We

have before us a vast and pervasive group of human opinions, true or

false, which have exercised and still exercise an immense influence upon

the development of mankind and of civilisation: the question arises, Why

did human beings ever come to hold these opinions at all, and how did

they arrive at them? What was there in the conditions of early man which

led him to frame to himself such abstract notions of one or more great

supernatural agents, of whose objective existence he had certainly

in nature no clear or obvious evidence? Regarding the problem in this

light, as essentially a problem of the processes of the human mind, I

set aside from the outset, as foreign to my purpose, any kind of enquiry

into the objective validity of any one among the religious beliefs thus

set {002}before us as subject-matter. The question whether there may

be a God or gods, and, if so, what may be his or their substance and

attributes, do not here concern us. All we have to do in our present

capacity is to ask ourselves strictly, What first suggested to the mind

of man the notion of deity in the abstract at all? And how, from the

early multiplicity of deities which we find to have prevailed in all

primitive times among all human races, did the conception of a single

great and unlimited deity first take its rise? In other words, why did

men ever believe there were gods at all, and why from many gods did

they arrive at one? Why from polytheism have the most advanced nations

proceeded to monotheism?

To put the question in this form is to leave entirely out of

consideration the objective reality or otherwise of the idea itself.

To analyse the origin of a concept is not to attack the validity of the

belief it encloses. The idea of gravitation, for example, arose by slow

degrees in human minds, and reached at last its final expression in

Newton’s law. But to trace the steps by which that idea was gradually

reached is not in any way to disprove or to discredit it. The Christian

believer may similarly hold that men arrived by natural stages at the

knowledge of the one true God; he is not bound to reject the final

conception as false merely because of the steps by which it was slowly

evolved. A creative God, it is true, might prefer to make a sudden

revelation of himself to some chosen body of men; but an evolutionary

God, we may well believe, might prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to

reveal his own existence and qualities to his creatures by means of

the same slow and tentative intellectual gropings as those by which

he revealed to them the physical truths of nature. I wish my enquiry,

therefore, to be regarded, not as destructive, but as reconstructive.

It only attempts to recover and follow out the various planes in the

evolution of the idea of God, rather than to cast doubt upon the truth

of the evolved concept.

In{003} investigating any abstruse and difficult subject, it is often

best to proceed from the known to the unknown, even although the unknown

itself may happen to come first in the order of nature and of logical

development. For this reason, it may be advisable to begin here with

a brief preliminary examination of Christianity, which is not only the

most familiar of all religions to us Christian nations, but also the

best known in its origins: and then to show how far we may safely use

it as a Standard of Reference in explaining the less obvious and certain

features of earlier or collateral cults.

Christianity, then, viewed as a religious standard, has this clear and

undeniable advantage over almost every other known form of faith--that

it quite frankly and confessedly sets out in its development with the

worship of a particular Deified Man.

This point in its history cannot, I think, be overrated in importance,

because in that single indubitable central fact it gives us the key to

much that is cardinal in all other religions; every one of which, as I

hope hereafter to show, equally springs, directly or indirectly, from

the worship of a single Deified Man, or of many Deified Men, more or

less etherealised.

Whatever else may be said about the origin of Christianity, it is at

least fairly agreed on either side, both by friends and foes, that

this great religion took its rise around the personality of a certain

particular Galilean teacher, by name Jesus, concerning whom, if we know

anything at all with any approach to certainty, we know at least that

he was a man of the people, hung on a cross in Jerusalem under the

procuratorship of Caius Pontius Pilatus. That kernel of fact--a man, and

his death--Jesus Christ and him crucified--is the one almost undoubted

historical nucleus round which all the rest of a vast European and

Asiatic system of thought and belief has slowly crystallised.

Let us figure clearly to ourselves the full import of these truths.

{004}A Deified Man is the central figure in the faith of Christendom.

From the very beginning, however, a legend, true or false (but whose

truth or falsity has no relation whatever to our present subject),

gathered about the personality of this particular Galilean peasant

reformer. Reverenced at first by a small body of disciples of his

own race and caste, he grew gradually in their minds into a divine

personage, of whom strange stories were told, and a strange history

believed by a group of ever-increasing adherents in all parts of the

Græco-Roman Mediterranean civilisation. The earliest of these stories,

in all probability--certainly the one to which most importance was

attached by the pioneers of the faith--clustered about his death and its

immediate sequence. Jesus, we are told, was crucified, dead, and buried.

But at the end of three days, if we may credit the early documents of

our Christian faith, his body was no longer to be found in the sepulchre

where it had been laid by friendly hands: and the report spread abroad

that he had risen again from the dead, and lived once more a somewhat

phantasmal life among the living in his province. Supernatural

messengers announced his resurrection to the women who had loved him: he

was seen in the flesh from time to time for very short periods by one

or other among the faithful who still revered his memory. At last,

after many such appearances, more or less fully described in the crude

existing narratives, he was suddenly carried up to the sky before the

eyes of his followers, where, as one of the versions authoritatively

remarks, he was “received into heaven, and sat on the right hand of

God”--that is to say, of Jahweh, the ethnical deity of the Hebrew

people.

Such in its kernel was the original Christian doctrine as handed down to

us amid a mist of miracle, in four or five documents of doubtful age and

uncertain authenticity. Even this central idea does not fully appear

in the Pauline epistles, believed to be the oldest in date of all our

Christian {005}writings: it first takes full shape in the somewhat

later Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. In the simplest and perhaps the

earliest of these definite accounts we are merely told the story of the

death and resurrection, the latter fact being vouched for on the

dubious testimony of “a young man clothed in a long white

garment,” supplemented (apparently at a later period) by subsequent

“appearances” to various believers. With the controversies

which have raged about these different stories, however, the broad

anthropological enquiry into the evolution of God has no concern. It is

enough for us here to admit, what the evidence probably warrants us in

concluding, that a real historical man of the name of Jesus did once

exist in Lower Syria, and that his disciples at a period very shortly

after his execution believed him to have actually risen from the dead,

and in due time to have ascended into heaven.

At a very early date, too, it was further asserted that Jesus was in

some unnatural or supernatural sense “the son of God”--that is to

say, once more, the son of Jahweh, the local and national deity of

the Jewish people. In other words, his worship was affiliated upon the

earlier historical worship of the people in whose midst he lived, and

from whom his first disciples were exclusively gathered. It was not, as

we shall more fully see hereafter, a revolutionary or purely destructive

system. It based itself upon the common conceptions of the Semitic

community. The handful of Jews and Galileans who accepted Jesus as a

divine figure did not think it necessary, in adopting him as a god,

to get rid of their own preconceived religious opinions. They believed

rather in his prior existence, as a part of Jahweh, and in his

incarnation in a human body for the purpose of redemption. And when his

cult spread around into neighboring countries (chiefly, it would seem,

through the instrumentality of one Paul of Tarsus, who had never seen

him, or had beheld him only in what is vaguely called “a vision”)

the cult {006}of Jahweh went hand in hand with it, so that a sort of

modified mystic monotheism, based on Judaism, became the early creed of

the new cosmopolitan Christian church.

Other legends, of a sort familiar in the lives of the founders of creeds

and churches elsewhere, grew up about the life of the Christian leader;

or at any rate, incidents of a typical kind were narrated by his

disciples as part of his history. That a god or a godlike person should

be born of a woman by the ordinary physiological processes of humanity

seems derogatory to his dignity--perhaps fatal to his godhead: *

therefore it was asserted--we know not whether truly or otherwise--that

the founder of Christianity, by some mysterious afflatus, was born of a

virgin. Though described at times as the son of one Joseph, a carpenter,

of Nazareth, and of Mary, his betrothed wife, he was also regarded in an

alternative way as the son of the Hebrew god Jahweh, just as Alexander,

though known to be the son of Philip, was also considered to be the

offspring of Amon-Ra or Zeus Ammon. We are told, in order to lessen

this discrepancy (on the slender authority of a dream of Joseph’s),

how Jesus was miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit of Jahweh in

Mary’s womb. He was further provided with a royal pedigree from the

house of David, a real or mythical early Hebrew king; and prophecies

from the Hebrew sacred books were found to be fulfilled in his most

childish adventures. In one of the existing biographies, commonly

ascribed to Luke, the companion of Paul, but supposed to bear traces of

much later authorship, many such marvellous stories are recounted of

his infantile adventures: and in all our documents, miracles attest his

supernatural powers, while appeal is constantly made to the fulfilment

of supposed predictions (all of old Hebrew origin) as a test and

credential of the reality of his divine mission.

* On this subject, see Mr. Sidney Hartland’s Legend of

Perseus, vol. i.

We {007}shall see hereafter that these two points--the gradual growth

of a myth or legend, and affiliation upon earlier local religious

ideas--are common features in the evolution of gods in general, and of

the God of monotheism in particular. In almost every case where we can

definitely track him to his rise, the deity thus begins with a Deified

Man, elevated by his worshippers to divine rank, and provided with a

history of miraculous incident, often connected with the personality of

preexistent deities.

In the earlier stages, it seems pretty clear that the relations of

nascent Christianity to Judaism were vague and undefined: the Christians

regarded themselves as a mere sect of the Jews, who paid special

reverence to a particular dead teacher, now raised to heaven by a

special apotheosis of a kind with which everyone was then familiar. But

as the Christian church spread to other lands, by the great seaports, it

became on the one hand more distinct and exclusive, while on the other

hand it became more definitely dogmatic and theological. It was in

Egypt, it would seem, that the Christian Pantheon (if I may be allowed

the expression in the case of a religion nominally monotheistic) first

took its definite Trinitarian shape. Under the influence of the old

Egyptian love for Triads or Trinities of gods, a sort of mystical triune

deity was at last erected out of the Hebrew Jahweh and the man Jesus,

with the aid of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom of Jahweh, which had come

to be regarded by early Christian minds (under the influence of direct

divine inspiration or otherwise) as a separate and coordinate person of

this composite godhead. How far the familiar Egyptian Trinity of Osiris,

Isis, and Horus may have influenced the conception of the Christian

Trinity, thus finally made up of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we shall

discuss at a later stage of our enquiry; for the present, it may suffice

to point out that the Græco-Egyptian Athanasius was the great upholder

of the definite dogma of the Trinity against opposing (heretical)

Christian thinkers; and {008}that the hymn or so-called creed known by

his name (though not in all probability of his own composition) bears

the impress of the mystical Egyptian spirit, tempered by the Alexandrian

Greek delight in definiteness and minuteness of philosophical

distinction.

In this respect, too, we shall observe in the sequel that the history of

Christianity, the most known among the religions, was exactly parallel

to that of earlier and obscurer creeds. At first, the relations of the

gods to one another are vague and undetermined; their pedigree is often

confused and even contradictory; and the pantheon lacks anything like

due hierarchical system or subordination of persons. But as time goes

on, and questions of theology or mythology are debated among the priests

and other interested parties, details of this sort get settled in the

form of rigid dogmas, while subtle distinctions of a philosophical or

metaphysical sort tend to be imported by more civilised men into the

crude primitive faith. The belief that began with frank acceptance of

Judaism, plus a personal worship of the Deified Man, Jesus, crystallised

at last into the Catholic Faith in one God, of three persons, the

Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Quibbles are even made, and discussions raised at last as to the

question whether Father and Son are “of one substance” or only “of

like substance”; whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and

the Son, or from the Father only; and so on _ad infinitum_.

It was largely in other countries than Judæa, and especially in Gaul,

Rome, and Egypt, too, as I believe, that symbolism came to the aid of

mysticism: that the cross, the tau, the labarum, the fish, the Alpha

and Omega, and all the other early Christian emblems were evolved and

perfected; and that the beginnings of Christian art took their first

definite forms. Such forms were especially to a great extent evolved

in the Roman catacombs. Christianity, being a universal, not a local or

national, religion, has {009}adopted in its course many diverse elements

from most varied sources.

Originally, it would seem, the Christian pantheon was almost exclusively

filled by the triune God, in his three developments or “persons,”

as thus rigorously conceived by the Alexandrian intelligence. But from

a very early time, if not from the first dawn of the Christian cult, it

was customary to reverence the remains of those who had suffered for the

faith, and perhaps even to invoke their aid with Christ and the Father.

The Roman branch of the church, especially, accustomed to the Roman

ancestor-worship and the Roman reverence for the Du Manes, had its

chief places of prayer in the catacombs, where its dead were laid.

Thus arose the practice of the invocation of saints, at whose graves

or relics prayers were offered, both to the supreme deity and to the

faithful dead themselves as intercessors with Christ and the Father. The

early Christians, accustomed in their heathen stage to pay respect

and even worship to the spirits of their deceased friends, could not

immediately give up this pious custom after their conversion to the

new creed, and so grafted it on to their adopted religion. Thus the

subsidiary founders of Christianity, Paul, Peter, the Apostles, the

Evangelists, the martyrs, the confessors, came to form, as it were, a

subsidiary pantheon, and to rank to some extent almost as an inferior

order of deities.

Among the persons who thus shared in the honours of the new faith,

the mother of Jesus early assumed a peculiar prominence. Goddesses

had filled a very large part in the devotional spirit of the older

religions: it was but natural that the devotees of Isis and Pasht, of

Artemis and Aphrodite, should look for some corresponding object of

feminine worship in the younger faith. The Theotokos, the mother of

God, the blessed Madonna, soon came to possess a practical importance

in Christian worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by the persons of

the Trinity themselves--in certain southern countries, indeed, actually

superior {010}to it. The Virgin and Child, in pictorial representation,

grew to be the favourite subject of Christian art. How far this

particular development of the Christian spirit had its origin in Egypt,

and was related to the well-known Egyptian figures of the goddess

Isis with the child Horus in her lap, is a question which may demand

consideration in some future treatise. For the present, it will be

enough to call attention in passing to the fact that in this secondary

rank of deities or semi-divine persons, the saints and martyrs, all

alike, from the Blessed Virgin Mary down to the newest canonised among

Roman Catholic prelates, were at one time or another Living Men and

Women. In other words, besides the one Deified Man, Jesus, round whom

the entire system of Christianity centres, the Church now worships also

in the second degree a whole host of minor Dead Men and Women, bishops,

priests, virgins, and confessors.

From the earliest to the latest ages of the Church, the complexity thus

long ago introduced into her practice has gone on increasing with every

generation. Nominally from the very outset a monotheistic religion,

Christianity gave up its strict monotheism almost at the first start by

admitting the existence of three persons in the godhead, whom it vainly

endeavoured to unify by its mystic but confessedly incomprehensible

Athanasian dogma. The Madonna (with the Child) rose in time practically

to the rank of an independent goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic

theory): while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John Baptist, St.

Catherine, and even St. Thomas of Canterbury himself, became as

important objects of worship in certain places as the deity in person.

At Milan, for example, San Carlo Borromeo, at Compostella, Santiago, at

Venice, St. Mark, usurped to a great extent the place of the original

God. As more and more saints died in each generation, while the cult of

the older saints still lingered on everywhere more or less locally,

the secondary pantheon grew ever fuller and fuller. Obscure personages,

{011}like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas, St. Chad and St. Cuthbert rose

to the rank of departmental or local patrons, like the departmental and

local gods of earlier religions. Every trade, every guild, every nation,

every province, had its peculiar saint. And at the same time, the

theory of the Church underwent a constant evolution. Creed was added

to creed--Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth, each embodying

some new and often subtle increment to the whole mass of accepted dogma.

Council after council made fresh additions of articles of faith--the

Unity of Substance, the Doctrine of the Atonement, the Immaculate

Conception, the Authority of the Church, the Infallibility of the Pope

in his spiritual capacity. And all these also are well-known incidents

of every evolving cult: constant increase in the number of divine

beings; constant refinements in the articles of religion, under the

influence of priestly or scholastic metaphysics.

Two or three other points must still be noted in this hasty review of

the evolution of Christianity, regarded as a standard of religion; and

these I will now proceed to consider with all possible brevity.

In the matter of ceremonial and certain other important accessories of

religion it must frankly be admitted that Christianity rather borrowed

from the older cults than underwent a natural and original development

on its own account. A priesthood, as such, does not seem to have formed

any integral or necessary part of the earliest Christendom: and when

the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons were introduced into the

new creed, the idea seems to have been derived rather from the existing

priesthoods of anterior religions than from any organic connexion

with the central facts of the new worship. From the very nature of the

circumstances this would inevitably result. For the primitive temple

(as we shall see hereafter) was the Dead Man’s tomb; the altar was

his gravestone; and the priest was the relative or representative who

continued for him the customary gifts to the ghost {012}at the grave.

But the case of Jesus differs from almost every other case on record of

a Deified Man in this--that his body seems to have disappeared at an

early date; and that, inasmuch as his resurrection and ascension into

heaven were made the corner-stone of the new faith, it was impossible

for worship of his remains to take the same form as had been taken in

the instances of almost all previously deified Dead Persons. Thus, the

materials out of which the Temple, the Altar, Sacrifices, Priesthood,

are usually evolved (as we shall hereafter see) were here to a very

large extent necessarily wanting.

Nevertheless, so essential to religion in the minds of its followers

are all these imposing and wonted accessories that our cult did actually

manage to borrow them readymade from the great religions that went

before it, and to bring them into some sort of artificial relation with

its own system. You cannot revolutionize the human mind at one blow.

The pagans had been accustomed to all these ideas as integral parts

of religion as they understood it: and they proceeded as Christians

to accommodate them by side-issues to the new faith, in which these

elements had no such natural place as in the older creeds. Not only did

sacred places arise at the graves or places of martyrdom of the saints;

not only was worship performed beside the bones of the holy dead, in the

catacombs and elsewhere; but even a mode of sacrifice and of sacrificial

communion was invented in the mass,--a somewhat artificial development

from the possibly unsacerdotal Agape-feasts of the primitive Christians.

Gradually, churches gathered around the relics of the martyr saints: and

in time it became a principle of usage that every church must contain

an altar--made of stones on the analogy of the old sacred stones;

containing the bones or other relics of a saint, like all earlier

shrines; consecrated by the pouring on of oil after the antique fashion;

and devoted to the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass,

which became by degrees more and more expiatory and sacerdotal in

{013}character. As the saints increased in importance, new holy places

sprang up around their bodies; and some of these holy places, containing

their tombs, became centres of pilgrimage for the most distant parts of

Christendom; as did also in particular the empty tomb of Christ himself,

the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.

The growth of the priesthood kept pace with the growth of ceremonial in

general, till at last it culminated in the mediaeval papacy, with its

hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and other

endless functionaries. Vestments, incense, and like accompaniments of

sacerdotalism also rapidly gained ground. All this, too, is a common

trait of higher religious evolution everywhere. So likewise are fasting,

vigils, and the ecstatic condition. But asceticism, monasticism,

celibacy, and other forms of morbid abstinence are peculiarly rife in

the east, and found their highest expression in the life of the Syrian

and Egyptian hermits.

Lastly, a few words must be devoted in passing to the rise and

development of the Sacred Books, now excessively venerated in

North-western Christendom. These consisted in the first instance

of genuine or spurious letters of the apostles to the various local

churches (the so-called Epistles), some of which would no doubt be

preserved with considerable reverence; and later of lives or legends of

Jesus and his immediate successors (the so-called Gospels and the Acts

of the Apostles). Furthermore, as Christianity adopted from Judaism

the cult of its one supreme divine figure, now no longer envisaged

as Jahweh, the national deity of the Hebrews, but as a universal

cosmopolitan God and Father, it followed naturally that the sacred books

of the Jewish people, the literature of Jahweh-worship, should also

receive considerable attention at the hands of the new priesthood. By a

gradual process of selection and elimination, the canon of scripture

was evolved from these heterogeneous materials: the historical or

quasi-historical and prophetic Hebrew {014}tracts were adopted by the

Church, with a few additions of later date, such as the Book of Daniel,

under the style and title of the Old Testament. The more generally

accepted lives of Christ, again, known as Evangels or Gospels; the Acts

of the Apostles; the epistles to the churches; and that curious mystical

allegory of the Neronian persecution known as the Apocalypse, were

chosen out of the mass of early Christian literature to form the

authoritative collection of inspired writing which we call the New

Testament. The importance of this heterogeneous anthology of works

belonging to all ages and systems, but confounded together in popular

fancy under the name of the Books, or more recently still as a singular

noun, the Bible, grew apace with the growth of the Church: though the

extreme and superstitions adoration of their mere verbal contents has

only been reached in the debased and reactionary forms of Christianity

followed at the present day by our half-educated English and American

Protestant dissenters.

From this very brief review of the most essential factors in the

development of the Christian religion as a system, strung loosely

together with a single eye to the requirements of our present

investigation, it will be obvious at once to every intelligent reader

that Christianity cannot possibly throw for us any direct or immediate

light on the problem of the evolution of the idea of God. Not only

did the concept of a god and gods exist full-fledged long before

Christianity took its rise at all, but also the purely monotheistic

conception of a single supreme God, the creator and upholder of all

things, had been reached in all its sublime simplicity by the Jewish

teachers centuries before the birth of the man Jesus. Christianity

borrowed from Judaism this magnificent concept, and, humanly speaking,

proceeded to spoil it by its addition of the Son and the Holy Ghost, who

mar the complete unity of the grand Hebrew ideal. Even outside Judaism,

the selfsame notion had already been arrived at in a certain mystical

{015}form as the “esoteric doctrine” of the Egyptian priesthood;

from whom, with their peculiar views as to emanations and Triads, the

Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the Logos, the Incarnation, and the

Holy Ghost were in large part borrowed. The Jews of Alexandria, that

eastern London, formed the connecting link between Egyptian

heathenism, Hellenic philosophy, and early Christianity; and their

half-philosophical, half-religious ideas may be found permeating the

first writings and the first systematic thought of the nascent church.

In none of these ways, therefore, can we regard Christianity as

affording us any direct or immediate guidance in our search for the

origin and evolution of the concepts of many gods, and of one God the

creator.

Still, in a certain secondary and illustrative sense, I think we are

fully justified in saying that the history of Christianity, the religion

whose beginnings are most surely known to us, forms a standard of

reference for all the other religions of the world, and helps us

indirectly to understand and explain the origin and evolution of these

deepest among our fundamental spiritual conceptions.

Its value in this respect may best be understood if I point out briefly

in two contrasted statements the points in which it may and the points

in which it may not be fairly accepted as a typical religion.

Let us begin first with the points in which it may.

In the first place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in the fact that

beyond all doubt its most central divine figure was at first, by common

consent of orthodox and heterodox alike, nothing other than a particular

Deified Man. All else that has been asserted about this particular

Man--that he was the Son of God, that he was the incarnation of the

Logos, that he existed previously from all eternity, that he sits now on

the right hand of the Father--all the rest of these theological stories

do nothing in any way to obscure the plain and universally admitted

historical fact that this Divine Person, the Very God of Very God, being

of one {016}substance with the Father, begotten of the Father before all

worlds, was yet, at the moment when we first catch a glimpse of him

in the writings of his followers, a Man recently deceased, respected,

reverenced, and perhaps worshipped by a little group of fellow-peasants

who had once known him as Jesus, the son of the carpenter. On that

unassailable Rock of solid historical fact we may well be content to

found our argument in this volume. Here at least nobody can accuse us

of “crude and gross Euhemerism.” Or rather the crude and gross

Euhemerism is here known to represent the solid truth. Jesus and his

saints--Dominic, Francis, Catherine of Siena--are no mere verbal myths,

no allegorical concepts, no personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the

Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present from our purview of the Faith

that one element of the older supreme God--the Hebrew Jahweh,--whom

Christianity borrowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we can say at

least with perfect certainty that every single member of the Christian

pantheon--Jesus, the Madonna, St. John Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles,

the Evangelists--were, just as much as San Carlo Borromeo or St. Thomas

of Canterbury or St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, worshipped after their

death with divine or quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known of

all human religions, the one that has grown up under the full eye of

history, the one whose gods and saints are most distinctly traceable,

every object of worship, save only the single early and as yet

unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose origin is lost for us in the

mist of ages, turns out on enquiry to be indeed a purely Euhemeristic

god or saint,--in ultimate analysis, a Real Man or Woman.

That point alone I hold to be of cardinal importance, and of immense or

almost inestimable illustrative value, in seeking for the origin of the

idea of a god in earlier epochs.

In the second place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in all that

concerns its subsequent course of evolution; the gradual {017}elevation

of its central Venerated Man into a God of the highest might and

power; the multiplication of secondary deities or saints by worship or

adoration of other Dead Men and Women; the growth of a graduated and

duly subordinated hierarchy of divine personages; the rise of a legend,

with its miracles and other supernatural adjuncts; the formation of a

definite theology, philosophy, and systematic dogmatism; the development

of special artistic forms, and the growth or adoption of appropriate

symbolism; the production of sacred books, rituals, and formularies;

the rise of ceremonies, mysteries, initiations, and sacraments; the

reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs, and dead bodies; and the

close connexion of the religion as a whole with the ideas of death,

the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the resurrection of the body, the last

judgment, hell, heaven, the life everlasting, and all the other vast

group of concepts which surround the simple fact of death in the

primitive human mind generally.

Now, in the second place, let us look wherein Christianity to a certain

small extent fails to be typical, or at least to solve our fundamental

problems.

It fails to be typical because it borrows largely a whole ready-made

theology, and above all a single supreme God, from a pre-existent

religion. In so far as it takes certain minor features from other cults,

we can hardly say with truth that it does not represent the average run

of religious systems; for almost every particular new creed so bases

itself upon elements of still earlier faiths; and it is perhaps

impossible for us at the present day to get back to anything like a

really primitive or original form of cult. But Christianity is very far

removed indeed from all primitive cults in that it accepts ready-made

the monotheistic conception, the high-water-mark, so to speak, of

religious philosophising. While in the frankness with which it exhibits

to us what is practically one half of its supreme deity as a Galilean

peasant of undoubted humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised,

it allows us to get down at a single {018}step to the very origin of

godhead; yet in the strength with which it asserts for the other half

of its supreme deity (the Father, with his shadowy satellite the Holy

Ghost) an immemorial antiquity and a complete severance from human life,

it is the least anthropomorphic and the most abstract of creeds. In

order to track the idea of God to its very source, then, we must apply

in the last resort to this unresolved element of Christianity--the

Hebrew Jahweh--the same sort of treatment which we apply to the

conception of Jesus or Buddha;--we must show it to be also the

immensely transfigured and magnified ghost of a Human Being; in the

simple and forcible language of Swinburne, “The shade cast by the soul

of man.”

Furthermore, Christianity fails to be typical in that it borrows also

from pre-existing religions to a great extent the ideas of priesthood,

sacrifice, the temple, the altar, which, owing to the curious

disappearance or at least un-recognisability of the body of its founder

(or, rather, its central object of worship), have a less natural place

in our Christian system than in any other known form of religious

practice. It is quite true that magnificent churches, a highly-evolved

sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the mass, the altar, and the

relics, have all been imported in their fullest shape into developed

Christianity, especially in its central or Roman form. But every one

of these things is partly borrowed, almost as a survival or even as

an alien feature, from earlier religions, and partly grew up about the

secondary worship of saints and martyrs, their bones, their tombs, their

catacombs, and their reliquaries. Christianity itself, particularly when

viewed as the worship of Christ (to which it has been largely reduced in

Teutonic Europe), does not so naturally lend itself to these secondary

ceremonies; and in those debased schismatic forms of the Church which

confine themselves most strictly to the worship of Jesus and of the

supreme God, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism have been brought down to

a minimum, {019}so that the temple and the altar have lost the greater

part of their sacrificial importance.

I propose, then, in subsequent chapters, to trace the growth of the

idea of a God from the most primitive origins to the most highly evolved

forms; beginning with the ghost, and the early undeveloped deity:

continuing through polytheism to the rise of monotheism; and then

returning at last once more to the full Christian conception, which we

shall understand far better in detail after we have explained the nature

of the yet unresolved or but provisionally resolved Jehovistic element.

I shall try to show, in short, the evolution of God, by starting with

the evolution of gods in general, and coming down by gradual stages

through various races to the evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and

Moslem God in particular. ‘And the goal towards which I shall move will

be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter,--the proof

that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of

a Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed

with increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.

CHAPTER II.--RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.

|At {020}the very outset of the profound enquiry on which we are now

about to embark, we are met by a difficulty of considerable magnitude.

In the opinion of most modern mythologists mythology is the result of

“a disease of language.” We are assured by many eminent men that the

origin of religion is to be sought, not in savage ideas about ghosts

and spirits, the Dead Man and his body or his surviving double, but in

primitive misconceptions of the meaning of words which had reference

to the appearance of the Sun and the Clouds, the Wind and the Rain, the

Dawn and the Dusk, the various phenomena of meteorology in general. If

this be so, then our attempt to derive the evolution of gods from the

crude ideas of early men about their dead is clearly incorrect; the

analogy of Christianity which we have already alleged is a mere will

o’ the wisp; and the historical Jesus himself may prove in the

last resort to be an alias of the sun-god or an embodiment of the

vine-spirit.

I do not believe these suggestions are correct. It seems to me that

the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of being an element in

primitive religion, is really a late and derivative type of adoration;

and that mythology is mistaken in the claims it makes for its own

importance in the genesis of the idea of a God or gods. In order,

however, to clear the ground for a fair start in this direction, we

ought, I think, to begin by enquiring into the relative positions of

mythology and religion. I shall therefore {021}devote a preliminary

chapter to the consideration of this important subject.

Religion, says another group of modern thinkers, of whom Mr. Edward

Clodd is perhaps the most able English exponent, “grew out of fear.”

It is born of man’s terror of the great and mysterious natural agencies

by which he is surrounded. Now I am not concerned to deny that many

mythological beings of various terrible forms do really so originate. I

would readily accept some such vague genesis for many of the dragons and

monsters which abound in all savage or barbaric imaginings--for

Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire, and other manifold shapes of the

superstitiously appalling. I would give up to Mr. Clodd the Etruscan

devils and the Hebrew Satan, the Grendels and the Fire-drakes, the

whole brood of Cerberus, Briareus, the Cyclops, the Centaurs. None of

these, however, is a god or anything like one. They have no more to do

with religion, properly so called, than the unicorn of the royal arms

has to do with British Christianity. A god, as I understand the

word, and as the vast mass of mankind has always understood it, is

a supernatural being to be revered and worshipped. He stands to his

votaries, on the whole, as Dr. Robertson Smith has well pointed out, in

a kindly and protecting relation. He may be angry with them at times, to

be sure; but his anger is temporary and paternal alone: his permanent

attitude towards his people is one of friendly concern; he is worshipped

as a beneficent and generous Father. It is the origin of gods in this

strictest sense that concerns us here, not the origin of those vague

and formless creatures which are dreaded, not worshipped, by primitive

humanity.

Bearing this distinction carefully in mind, let us proceed to consider

the essentials of religion. If you were to ask almost any intelligent

and unsophisticated child, “What is religion?” he would answer

offhand, with the clear vision of youth, “Oh, it’s saying your

prayers, and heading your Bible, and singing hymns, and going to church

{022}or to chapel on Sundays.” If you were to ask any intelligent

and unsophisticated Hindu peasant the same question, he would answer in

almost the self-same spirit, “Oh, it is doing poojah regularly,

and paying your dues every day to Mahadeo.” If you were to ask any

simple-minded African savage, he would similarly reply, “It is giving

the gods flour, and oil, and native beer, and goat-mutton,” And

finally if you were to ask a devout Italian contadino, he would

instantly say, “It is offering up candles and prayers to the Madonna,

attending mass, and remembering the saints on every festa.”

And they would all be quite right. This, in its essence, is precisely

what we call religion. Apart from the special refinements of the

higher minds in particular creeds, which strive to import into it all,

according to their special tastes or fancies, a larger or smaller dose

of philosophy, or of metaphysics, or of ethics, or of mysticism, this

is just what religion means and has always meant to the vast majority

of the human species. What is common to it throughout is Custom

or Practice: a certain set of more or less similar Observances:

propitiation, prayer, praise, offerings: the request for divine favours,

the deprecation of divine anger or other misfortunes: and as the outward

and visible adjuncts of all these, the altar, the sacrifice, the temple,

the church; priesthood, services, vestments, ceremonial.

What is not at all essential to religion in its wider aspect--taking

the world round, both past and present, Pagan, Buddhist, Mohammadan,

Christian, savage, and civilised--is the ethical element, properly so

called. And what is very little essential indeed is the philosophical

element, theology or mythology, the abstract theory of spiritual

existences. This theory, to be sure, is in each country or race closely

related with religion under certain aspects; and the stories told about

the gods or God are much mixed up with the cult itself in the minds

of worshippers; but they are no proper part of religion, strictly

so called. In a single word, I contend that religion, as such,

is essentially {023}practical: theology or mythology, as such, is

essentially theoretical.

Moreover, I also believe, and shall attempt to show, that the two have

to a large extent distinct origins and roots: that the union between

them is in great part adventitious: and that, therefore, to account

for or explain the one is by no means equivalent to accounting for and

explaining the other.

Frank recognition of this difference of origin between religion and

mythology would, I imagine, largely reconcile the two conflicting

schools of thought which at present divide opinion between them on this

interesting problem in the evolution of human ideas. On the one side,

we have the mythological school of interpreters, whether narrowly

linguistic, like Professor Max Müller, or broadly anthropological, like

Mr. Andrew Lang, attacking the problem from the point of view of myth or

theory alone. On the other side, we have the truly religious school of

interpreters, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, and to some extent Mr. Tylor,

attacking the problem from the point of view of practice or real

religion. The former school, it seems to me, has failed to perceive

that what it is accounting for is not the origin of religion at all--of

worship, which is the central-root idea of all religious observance, or

of the temple, the altar, the priest, and the offering, which are its

outer expression--but merely the origin of myth or fable, the mass

of story and legend about various beings, real or imaginary, human

or divine, which naturally grows up in every primitive community. The

latter school, on the other hand, while correctly interpreting the

origin of all that is essential and central in religion, have perhaps

underestimated the value of their opponents’ work through regarding it

as really opposed to their own, instead of accepting what part of it

may be true in the light of a contribution to an independent but allied

branch of the same enquiry.

In short, if the view here suggested be correct, Spencer and {024}Tylor

have paved the way to a true theory of the Origin of Religion; Max

Müller, Lang, and the other mythologists have thrown out hints of

varying value towards a true theory of the Origin of Mythology, or of

its more modern equivalent and successor, Theology.

A brief outline of facts will serve to bring into clearer relief

this view of religion as essentially practical--a set of observances,

rendered inevitable by the primitive data of human psychology. It will

then be seen that what is fundamental and essential in religion is the

body of practices, remaining throughout all stages of human development

the same, or nearly the same, in spite of changes of mythological or

theological theory; and that what is accidental and variable is the

particular verbal explanation or philosophical reason assigned for the

diverse rites and ceremonies.

In its simplest surviving savage type, religion consists wholly and

solely in certain acts of deference paid by the living to the persons of

the dead. I shall try to show in the sequel that down to its most highly

evolved modern type in the most cultivated societies, precisely similar

acts of deference, either directly to corpses or ghosts as such, or

indirectly to gods who were once ghosts, or were developed from ghosts,

form its essence still. But to begin with I will try to bring a few

simple instances of the precise nature of religion in its lowest

existing savage mode.

I might if I chose take my little collection of illustrative facts from

some theoretical writer, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has collected

enough instances in all conscience to prove this point; but I prefer

to go straight to an original observer of savage life and habit, a

Presbyterian missionary in Central Africa--the Rev. Duff Macdonald,

author of _Africana_--who had abundant opportunities at the Blantyre

Mission for learning the ideas and practice of the Soudanese natives,

and who certainly had no theoretic predisposition towards resolving all

religious notions into {025}the primitive respect and reverence for the

dead or the worship of ancestors.

Here, in outline, but in Mr. Macdonald’s own words, are the ideas and

observances which this careful and accurate investigator found current

among the tribes of the heart of Africa. “I do not think,” he says,

“I have admitted any point of importance without having heard at least

four natives on the subject. The statements are translations, as far as

possible, from the _ipsissima verba_ of the negroes.”

The tribes he lived among “are unanimous in saying that there is

something beyond the body which they call spirit. Every human body at

death is forsaken by this spirit.” That is the almost universal though

not quite primitive belief, whose necessary genesis has been well traced

out by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and more recently in America with great

vigour and clearness by Mr. Lester Ward.

“Do these spirits ever die?” Mr. Macdonald asks. “Some,” he

answers, “I have heard affirm that it is possible for a troublesome

spirit to be killed. Others give this a direct denial. Many, like

Kumpama, or Cherasulo, say, ‘You ask me whether a man’s spirit ever

dies. I cannot tell. I have never been in the spirit-world, but this I

am certain of, that spirits live for a very long time.’”

On the question, “Who the gods are?” Mr. Macdonald says: “In

all our translations of Scripture where we found the word God we used

_Mulungu_; but this word is chiefly used by the natives as a general

name for spirit. The spirit of a deceased man is called his Mulungu,

and all the prayers and offerings of the living are presented to such

spirits of the dead. It is here that we find the great centre of the

native religion. The spirits of the dead are the gods of the living.

“Where are these gods found? At the grave? No. The villagers shrink

from yonder gloomy place that lies far beyond their fields on the bleak

mountain side. It is only {026}when they have to lay another sleeper

beside his forefathers that they will go there. Their god is not the

body in the grave, but the spirit, and they seek this spirit at the

place where their departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the

great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s house that is their

temple; and if no tree grow here they erect a little shade, and

there perform their simple rites. If this spot become too public,

the offerings may be defiled, and the sanctuary will be removed to a

carefully-selected spot under some beautiful tree. Very frequently a

man presents an offering at the top of his own bed beside his head. He

wishes his god to come to him and whisper in his ear as he sleeps.”

And here, again, we get the origin of nature-worship:

“The spirit of an old chief may have a whole mountain for his

residence, but he dwells chiefly on the cloudy summit. There he sits

to receive the worship of his votaries, and to send down the refreshing

showers in answer to their prayers.”

Almost as essential to religion as these prime factors in its

evolution--the god, worship, offerings, presents, holy places,

temples--is the existence of a priesthood. Here is how the Central

Africans arrive at that special function:

“A certain amount of etiquette is observed in approaching the gods.

In no case can a little boy or girl approach these deities, neither can

anyone that has not been at the mysteries. The common qualification

is that a person has attained a certain age, about twelve or fourteen

years, and has a house of his own. Slaves seldom pray, except when they

have had a dream. Children that have had a dream tell their mother,

who approaches the deity on their behalf. (A present for the god is

necessary, and the slave or child may not have it.)

“Apart from the case of dreams and a few such private matters, it

is not usual for anyone to approach the gods except the chief, of the

village. He is the recognised high priest {027}who presents prayers and

offerings on behalf of all that live in his village. If the chief

is from home his wife will act, and if both are absent, his younger

brother. The natives worship not so much individually as in villages or

communities. Their religion is more a public than a private matter.”

But there are also further reasons why priests are necessary.

Relationship forms always a good ground for intercession. A mediator is

needed.

“The chief of a village,” says Mr. Macdonald, “has another title

to the priesthood. It is his relatives that are the village gods.

Everyone that lives in the village recognises these gods; but if anyone

remove to another village he changes his gods. He recognises now the

gods of his new chief. One wishing to pray to the god (or gods) of any

village naturally desires to have his prayers presented through the

village chief, because the latter is nearly related to the village god,

and may be expected to be better listened to than a stranger.”

A little further on Mr. Macdonald says: “On the subject of the village

gods opinions differ. Some say that every one in the village, whether a

relative of the chief or not, must worship the forefathers of the chief.

Others say that a person not related to the chief must worship his own

forefathers, otherwise their spirits will bring trouble upon him. To

reconcile these authorities we may mention that nearly everyone in the

village is related to its chief, or if not related is, in courtesy,

considered so. Any person not related to the village chief would be

polite enough on all public occasions to recognise the village god:

on occasions of private prayer (which are not so numerous as in

Christendom) he would approach the spirits of his own forefathers.

Besides, there might be a god of the land. The chief Kapeni prays to his

own relatives, and also to the old gods of the place. His own relatives

he approaches himself; the other deities he may also approach himself,

but he often {028}finds people more closely related and consequently

more acceptable to the old gods of the land.”

The African pantheon is thus widely peopled. Elimination and natural

selection next give one the transition from the ghost to the god,

properly so called.

“The gods of the natives then are nearly as numerous as their dead. It

is impossible to worship all; a selection must be made, and, as we have

indicated, each worshipper turns most naturally to the spirits of his

own departed relatives; but his gods are too many still, and in farther

selecting he turns to those that have lived nearest his own time.

Thus the chief of a village will not trouble himself about his

great-great-grandfather: he will present his offering to his own

immediate predecessor, and say, ‘O father, I do not know all your

relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.’ The

offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his

relatives.”

Ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with the generation that knew them.

Not so a few select spirits, the Cæsars and Napoleons, the Charlemagnes

and Timurs of savage empires.

“A great chief that has been successful in his wars does not pass out

of memory so soon. He may become the god of a mountain or a lake, and

may receive homage as a local deity long after his own descendants have

been driven from the spot. When there is a supplication for rain the

inhabitants of the country pray not so much to their own forefathers as

to the god of yonder mountain on whose shoulders the great rain-clouds

repose. (Smaller hills are seldom honoured with a deity.)”

Well, in all this we get, it seems to me, the very essentials and

universals of religion generally,--the things without which no religion

could exist--the vital part, without the ever-varying and changeable

additions of mere gossiping mythology. In the presents brought to the

dead man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the central element of

all worship, the practical key of all cults, past or present.

On {029}the other hand, mythologists tell us nothing about the origin of

prayer and sacrifice: they put us off with stories of particular gods,

without explaining to us how those gods ever came to be worshipped. Now,

mythology is a very interesting study in its own way: but to treat as

religion a mass of stories and legends about gods or saints, with hardly

a single living element of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply to

confuse two totally distinct branches of human enquiry. The Origin of

Tales has nothing at all to do with the Origin of Worship.

When we come to read Mr. Macdonald’s account of a native funeral,

on the other hand, we are at once on a totally different tack; we can

understand, as by an electric flash, the genesis of the primitive acts

of sacrifice and religion.

“Along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his

property. We have already seen that his bed is buried with him; so also

are all his clothes. If he possesses several tusks of ivory, one tusk or

more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. Beads

are also ground down in the same way. These precautions are taken to

prevent the witch (who is supposed to be answerable for his death) from

making any use of the ivory or beads.

“If the deceased owned several slaves, an enormous hole is dug for a

grave. The slaves are now brought forward. They may be either cast into

the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. The body of

their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs,

and the grave is covered in.

“After this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and

place them at the head of the grave. The dishes in which the food was

brought are left behind. The pot that held the drinking-water of the

deceased and his drinking-cup are also left with him. These, too, might

be coveted by the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot, and the

drinking calabash is broken.

“The {030}man has now gone from the society of the living, and he is

expected to share the meal thus left at his grave with those that have

gone before him. The funeral party breaks up; they do not want to visit

the grave of their friend again without a very good reason. Anyone found

among the graves may be taken for a cannibal. Their friend has become

a citizen of a different village. He is with all his relatives of the

past. He is entitled to offerings or presents which may come to him

individually or through his chief. These offerings in most cases he will

share with others, just as he used to do when alive,” Sometimes the

man may be buried in his own hut.

“In this case the house is not taken down, but is generally covered

with cloth, and the verandah becomes the place for presenting offerings.

His old house thus becomes a kind of temple.... The deceased is now in

the spirit-world, and receives offerings and adoration. He is addressed

as ‘Our great spirit that has gone before.’ If anyone dream of him. it

is at once concluded that the spirit is ‘up to something.’ Very likely

he wants to have some of the survivors for his companions. The dreamer

hastens to appease the spirit by an offering.”

So real is this society of the dead that Mr. Macdonald says: “The

practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the grave is found on

the West Coast. A chief summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and

then cuts off his head. If the chief forget anything that he wanted to

say, he sends another slave as a postscript.”

I have quoted at such length from this recent and extremely able work

because I want to bring into strong relief the fact that we have here

going on under our very eyes, from day to day, _de novo_, the entire

genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of all that is most central

and essential to religion--worship, prayer, the temple, the altar,

priesthood, sacrifice. Nothing that the mythologists can tell us about

the Sun or the Moon, the Dawn or the Stormcloud, {031}Little Red Riding

Hood or Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, comes anywhere near the Origin

of Religion in these its central and universal elements. Those stories

or guesses may be of immense interest and importance as contributions

to the history of ideas in our race; but nothing we can learn about the

savage survival in the myth of Cupid or Psyche, or about the primitive

cosmology in the myth of the children of Kronos, helps us to get one

inch nearer the origin of God or of prayer, of worship, of religious

ceremonial, of the temple, the church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any

other component part of what we really know as Religion in the concrete.

These myths may be sometimes philosophic guesses, sometimes primitive

folk-tales, but they certainly are not the truths of Religion. On the

other hand, the living facts, here so simply detailed by a careful,

accurate, and unassuming observer, strengthened by the hundreds of

similar facts collected by Tylor, Spencer, and others, do help us at

once to understand the origin of the central core and kernel of religion

as universally practised all the world over.

For, omitting for the present the mythological and cosmological

factor, which so often comes in to obscure the plain religious facts

in missionary narrative or highly-coloured European accounts of

native beliefs, what do we really find as the underlying truths of all

religion? That all the world over practices essentially similar to those

of these savage Central Africans prevail among mankind; practices whose

affiliation upon the same primitive ideas has been abundantly proved

by Mr. Herbert Spencer; practices which have for their essence the

propitiation or adulation of a spiritual being or beings, derived from

ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all except the greatness of

the connoted attributes, to the souls of men. “Whenever the [Indian]

villagers are questioned about their creed,” says Sir William Hunter,

“the same answer is invariably given: ‘The common people have no

idea of religion, {032}but to do right [ceremonially] and to worship the

village god.”

In short, I maintain that religion is not mainly, as the mistaken

analogy of Christian usage makes us erroneously call it, Faith or Creed,

but simply and solely Ceremony, Custom, or Practice. And I am glad to

say that, for early Semitic times at least, Professor Robertson Smith is

of the same opinion.

If one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it

is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of

observances essentially similar to those just described among the

Central African tribes. Its core is worship. Its centre is the God--that

is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative. The religion of China is

to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. The making of

offerings and burning of joss-paper before the Family Dead form its

principal ceremonies. In India, while the three great gods of the

mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice

at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and

its own special cult of its little domestic altar.

“The first Englishman,” says Sir William Hunter, “who tried

to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans

described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship

quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has

usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude

unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes

a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the

attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the

half-Hinduised low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan

fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief

that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.”

Omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous

supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max-Müllerism,

that ancestor-worship must necessarily {033}be a “non-Aryan” feature

(though it exists or existed in all so-called Aryan races), this simple

description shows us the prevalence over the whole of India of customs

essentially similar to those which obtain in Central Africa and in the

Chinese provinces.

The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once

into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the

great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as

the Central African tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were

the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and

whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral

spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly

of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family

deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so,

too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice

done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, _farre pio et

saliente mica_.

I will not go on to point out in detail at the present stage of our

argument how Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and

Shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion

of the ancient Ac-cadians; how other observers have performed the same

task for the Egyptians and Japanese; and how like customs have been

traced among Greeks and Amazulu, among Hebrews and Nicaraguans, among

early English and Digger Indians, among our Aryan ancestors themselves

and Andaman Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel abounds with

examples. Of Netherland Island I read, “The skulls of their ancestors

were treasured for gods of the New Hebrides, “The people worshipped

the spirits of their ancestors. They prayed to them, over the kava-bowl,

for health and prosperity.” In New Caledonia, “Their gods were their

ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised.” At Tana, “The

general name for gods seemed to be _aremha_; that means a _dead man_,

and hints,” {034}says the Rev. George Turner, with pleasing frankness,

“alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship.” When

the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, “Compassionate

father, here is some food for you; eat it. Be kind to us on account of

it.” Those who wish to see the whole of the evidence on this matter

marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of

Mr. Herbert Spencer’s _Principles of Sociology_, where they will find

abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast

and overwhelming phalanx.

What concerns us in this chapter a little more is to call attention

by anticipation to the fact that even in Christianity itself the

same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most

distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the Christian

religion. And I make these remarks provisionally here in order that the

reader may the better understand to what ultimate goal our investigation

will lead him.

It is the universal Catholic custom to place the relics of saints or

martyrs under the altars in churches. Thus the body of St. Mark the

Evangelist lies under the high altar of St. Mark’s, at Venice; and

in every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited

within the altar itself. So well understood is this principle in the

Latin Church, that it has hardened into the saying, “No relic, no

altar.” The sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and

is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. The entire Roman Catholic

ritual is a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry

at an altar, and its connection with the primitive form is still kept up

by the necessary presence of human remains in its holy places.

Furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended from the

early Christian meeting-places in the catacombs or at the tombs of

the martyrs, which are universally allowed to have been the primitive

Christian altars. {035}We know now that the cruciform dome-covered plan

of Christian churches is derived from these early meeting-places at the

junction of lanes or alleys in the catacombs; that the nave, chancel,

and transepts indicate the crossing of the alleys, while the dome

represents the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular vault where the

two lines of archway intersect. The earliest dome-covered churches

were attempts, as it were, to construct a catacomb above ground for the

reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or martyr. Similarly with

the chapels that open out at the side from the aisles or transepts.

Etymologically, the word chapel is the modernised form of _capella_,

the arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of the catacombs, before the

tomb at which it was usual to offer up prayer and praise. The chapels

built out from the aisles in Roman churches, each with its own altar and

its own saintly relics, are attempts to reproduce above ground in the

same way the original sacred places in the early Christian excavated

cemeteries. We will recur to this subject at much greater length in

subsequent chapters.

Thus Christianity itself is linked on to the very antique custom of

worship at tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship by altars, relics,

and invocation of saints, even revolutionary Protestantism still

retaining some last faint marks of its origin in the dedication of

churches to particular evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or less

disguised survival of altar, priesthood, sacrifice, and vestments.

Now, I do not say ancestor-worship gives us the whole origin of

everything that is included in Christian English minds in the idea

of religion. I do not say it accounts for all the cosmologies and

cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilised tribes. Those, for the

most part, are pure mythological products, explicable mainly, I believe,

by means of the key with which mythology supplies us; and one of them,

adopted into Genesis from an alien source, has come to be accepted by

modern Christendom as part of {036}that organised body of belief which

forms the Christian creed, though not in any true sense the Christian

religion. Nor do I say that ancestor-worship gives us the origin of

those ontological, metaphysical, or mystical conceptions which form

part of the philosophy or theology of many priesthoods. Religions, as

we generally get them envisaged for us nowadays, are held to include the

mythology, the cosmogony, the ontology, and even the ethics of the race

that practises them. These extraneous developments, however, I hold to

spring from different roots and to have nothing necessarily in common

with religion proper. The god is the true crux. If we have once

accounted for the origin of ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples,

churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods, and ceremonies, then we have

accounted for all that is essential and central in religion, and may

hand over the rest--the tales, stories, and pious legends--to the

account of comparative mythology or of the yet unfounded science of

comparative idealogy.

Once more, I do not wish to insist, either, that every particular and

individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent

a particular ghost--the dead spirit of a single definite once-living

person. It is enough to show, as Mr. Spencer has shown, that the idea

of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from

the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without

necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer seems to hold, that every god is and

must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. Once

the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become

a common part of every man’s imagined universe--of the world as it

presented itself to the mind of the percipient--then it was natural

enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of

abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same

worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as

had previously been paid to the whole host of gods {037}evolved from

personal and tribal ancestors. It is the first step that costs: once you

have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may

be invented or introduced from all quarters. A great pantheon readily

admits new members to its ranks from, many strange sources. Familiar

instances in one of the best-known pantheons are those of Concordia,

Pecunia, Aius Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus. The Romans, indeed, deified

every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or

goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations,

of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements

generally. Many of their deities, as we shall see hereafter, were

obviously manufactured to meet a special demand on special occasions.

But at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can judge, could

ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and ancestor-worship

had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and

practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god could not

otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of

new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.

Still, to admit that other elements have afterwards come in to confuse

religion is quite a different thing from admitting that religion itself

has more than one origin. Whatever gives us the key to the practice of

worship gives us the key to all real religion. Now, one may read through

almost any books of the mythological school without ever coming upon

a single word that throws one ray of light upon the origin of religion

itself thus properly called. To trace the development of this, that,

or the other story or episode in a religious myth is in itself a very

valuable study in human evolution: but no amount of tracing such stories

ever gives us the faintest clue to the question why men worshipped

Osiris, Zeus, Siva, or Venus; why they offered up prayer and praise to

Isis, or to Artemis; why they made sacrifices of oxen to Capitolian

Jove {038}at Rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar of Jahweh, god

of Israel, at Jerusalem. The ghost-theory and the practice of

ancestor-worship show us a natural basis and genesis for all these

customs, and explain them in a way to which no mythological enquiry can

add a single item of fundamental interest.

It may be well at this point to attempt beforehand some slight

provisional disentanglement of the various extraneous elements which

interweave themselves at last with the simple primitive fabric of

practical religion.

In the first place, there is the mythological element. The mythopoeic

faculty is a reality in mankind. Stories arise, grow, gather episodes

with movement, transform and transmute themselves, wander far in

space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand ways suffer change and

modification. Now, such stories sometimes connect themselves with living

men and women. Everybody knows how many myths exist even in our own

day about every prominent or peculiar person. They also gather more

particularly round the memory of the dead, and especially of any very

distinguished dead man or woman. Sometimes they take their rise in

genuine tradition, sometimes they are pure fetches of fancy or of the

romancing faculty. The ghosts or the gods are no less exempt from

these mythopœic freaks than other people; and as gods go on living

indefinitely, they have plenty of time for myths to gather about them.

Most often, a myth is invented to account for some particular religious

ceremony. Again, myths demonstrably older than a particular human

being--say Cæsar, Virgil, Arthur, Charlemagne--may get fitted by later

ages to those special personalities. The same thing often happens also

with gods. Myth comes at last, in short, to be the history of the gods;

and a personage about whom many myths exist, whether real or imaginary,

a personification of nature or an abstract quality, may grow in time to

be practically a divine being, and even perhaps to receive worship, the

final test of divinity.

Again, {039}myths about the gods come in the long run, in many cases,

to be written down, especially by the priests, and themselves acquire a

considerable degree of adventitious holiness. Thus we get Sacred Books;

and in most advanced races, the sacred books tend to become an important

integral part of religion, and a test of the purity of tenets or

ceremonial. But sacred books almost always contain rude cosmological

guesses and a supernatural cosmogony, as well as tales about the doings,

relationships, and prerogatives of the gods. Such early philosophical

conjectures come then to be intimately bound up with the idea of

religion, and in many cases even to supersede in certain minds its

true, practical, central kernel. The extreme of this tendency is seen in

English Protestant Dissenting Bibliolatry.

Rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses tend to arise with advancing

culture. Attempts are made to trace the pedigree and mutual relations

of the gods, and to get rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. The

Theogony of Hesiod is a definite effort undertaken in this direction for

the Greek pantheon. Often the attempt is made by the most learned

and philosophically-minded among the priests, and results in a

quasi-philosophical mythology like that of the Brahmans. In the

monotheistic or half-monotheistic religions, this becomes theology. In

proportion as it grows more and more laboured and definite the attention

of the learned and the priestly class is more and more directed to

dogma, creed, faith, abstract formulae of philosophical or intellectual

belief, while insisting also upon ritual or practice. But the popular

religion remains usually, as in India, a religion of practical custom

and observances alone, having very little relation to the highly

abstract theological ideas of the learned or the priestly.

Lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of

sentiment, of broad humanitarianism of adventitious emotion, is allowed

to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of

practice and observance.

We are {040}constantly taught that “real religion” means many things

which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense,

but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion towards a

spiritual being or set of beings.

Owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the

origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with

savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony,

philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. They do not sufficiently

see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime

factors--worship and sacrifice. In all early religions, the practice is

at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. We, nowadays, look back upon

these early cults, which were cults and little else, with minds warped

by modern theological prejudices--by constant wrangling over dogmas,

clauses, definitions, and formularies. We talk glibly of the Hindu

faith or the Chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the Hindu

practice or the Chinese observances. By thus wrongly conceiving the

nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. We shall only get

right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion,

and when we recognise that the growth and development of the myth have

nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. The science of

comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing

study in its own way: but it has no more to do with the origin of

religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. There are

ethical rules in most advanced cults: there are geological surmises

in most sacred books: but neither one nor the other is on that account

religion, any more than the history of Jehoshaphat or the legend of

Samson.

What I want to suggest in the present chapter sums itself up in a few

sentences thus: Religion is practice, mythology is story-telling. Every

religion has myths that accompany it: but the myths do not give rise

to the religion: {041}on the contrary, the religion gives rise to the

myths. And I shall attempt in this book to account for the origin of

religion alone, omitting altogether both mythology as a whole, and

all mythical persons or beings other than gods in the sense here

illustrated.

CHAPTER III.--THE LIFE OF THE DEAD.

|The {042}object of this book, we saw at the beginning, is to trace the

evolution of the idea of God. But the solution of that problem implies

two separate questions--first, how did men begin to frame the idea of

a god at all; and second, how did they progress from the conception of

many distinct gods to the conception of a single supreme God, like the

central deity of Christianity and of Islam. In other words, we have

first to enquire into the origin of polytheism, and next into its

gradual supersession by monotheism. Those are the main lines of enquiry

I propose to follow out in the present volume.

Religion, however, has one element within it still older, more

fundamental, and more persistent than any mere belief in a god or

gods--nay, even than the custom or practice of supplicating and

appeasing ghosts or gods by gifts and observances. That element is the

conception of the Life of the Dead. On the primitive belief in such

life, all religion ultimately bases itself. The belief is in fact the

earliest thing to appear in religion, for there are savage tribes who

have nothing worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult

of their dead relatives. It is also the latest thing to survive in

religion; for many modern spiritualists, who have ceased to be theists,

or to accept any other form of the supernatural, nevertheless go on

believing in the continued existence of the dead, and in the possibility

of intercommunication between them and the living. This, therefore,

which is the earliest manifestation of religious thought, {043}and

which persists throughout as one of its most salient and irrepressible

features, must engage our attention for a little time before we pass on

to the genesis of polytheism.

But the belief in continued life itself, like all other human ideas,

has naturally undergone various stages of evolution. The stages glide

imperceptibly into one another, of course; but I think we can on the

whole distinguish with tolerable accuracy between three main layers or

strata of opinion with regard to the continued existence of the dead.

In the first or lowest stratum, the difference between life and death

themselves is but ill or inadequately perceived; the dead are thought

of as yet bodily living. In the second stratum, death is recognised as

a physical fact, but is regarded as only temporary; at this stage, men

look forward to the Resurrection of the Body, and expect the Life of the

World to Come. In the third stratum, the soul is regarded as a distinct

entity from the body; it survives it in a separate and somewhat shadowy

form: so that the opinion as to the future proper to this stage is not a

belief in the Resurrection of the Body, but a belief in the Immortality

of the Soul. These two concepts have often been confounded together by

loose and semi-philosophical Christian thinkers; but in their essence

they are wholly distinct and irreconcilable.

I shall examine each of these three strata separately.

And first as to that early savage level of thought where the ideas of

life and death are very ill demarcated. To us at the present day it

seems a curious notion that people should not possess the conception of

death as a necessary event in every individual human history. But that

is because we cannot easily unread all our previous thinking, cannot

throw ourselves frankly back into the state of the savage. We are

accustomed to living in large and populous communities, where deaths

are frequent, and where natural death in particular is an every-day

occurrence. We have behind us a vast and long history of previous ages;

and {044}we know that historical time was occupied by the lives of many

successive generations, all of which are now dead, and none of which

on the average exceeded a certain fixed limit of seventy or eighty odd

years. To us, the conception of human life as a relatively short period,

bounded by a known duration, and naturally terminating at a relatively

fixed end, is a common and familiar one.

We forget, however, that to the savage all this is quite otherwise. He

lives in a small and scattered community, where deaths are rare, and

where natural death in particular is comparatively infrequent. Most of

his people are killed in war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed

by accidents in the chase, or by thirst or starvation. Some are drowned

in rapid rivers; some crushed by falling trees or stones; some poisoned

by deadly fruits, or bitten by venomous snakes; some massacred by

chiefs, or murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen. In a large

majority of instances, there is some open and obvious cause of death;

and this cause is generally due either to the hand of man or to some

other animal; or failing that, to some apparently active effort of

external nature, such as flood, or lightning, or forest fires, or

landslip and earthquake. Death by disease is comparatively rare; death

by natural decay almost unknown or unrecognised.

Nor has the savage a great historic past behind him. He knows few but

his tribesmen, and little of their ancestors save those whom his parents

can remember before them. His perspective of the past is extremely

limited. Nothing enables him to form that wide idea of the necessity and

invariability of death which to us is so familiar. That “all men are

mortal” is to civilised man a truism; to very early savages it would

necessarily have seemed a startling paradox. No man ever dies within his

own experience; ever since he can remember, he has continued to exist

as a permanent part of all his adventures. Most of the savage’s family

have gone on continuously living with him. A death has been a rare and

startling occurrence. {045}Thus the notion of death as an inevitable end

never arises at all; the notion of death as due to natural causes seems

quite untenable. When a savage dies, the first question that arises is

“Who has killed him?” If he is slain in war, or devoured by a

tiger, or ripped up by an elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate, or

murdered by a tribesman, the cause is obvious. If none of these, then

the death is usually set down to witchcraft.

Furthermore, the mere fact of death is much less certain among primitive

or savage men than in civilised communities. We know as a rule with

almost absolute certainty whether at a given moment a sick or wounded

man is dead or living. Nevertheless, even among ourselves, cases of

doubt not infrequently occur. At times we hesitate whether a man

or woman is dead or has fainted. If the heart continues to beat, we

consider them still living; if not the slightest flutter of the pulse

can be perceived, we consider them dead. Even our advanced medical

science, however, is often perplexed in very obscure cases of catalepsy;

and mistakes have occurred from time to time, resulting in occasional

premature burials. The discrimination of true from apparent death is not

always easy. Vesalius, the eminent anatomist, opened a supposed corpse

in which the heart was seen to be still beating; and the Abbé Prévost,

who had been struck by apoplexy, was regarded as dead, but recovered

consciousness once more under the surgeon’s scalpel. Naturally, among

savages, such cases of doubt are far more likely to occur than among

civilised people; or rather, to put it as the savage would think of it,

there is often no knowing when a person who is lying stiff and lifeless

may happen to get up again and resume his usual activity. The savage

is accustomed to seeing his fellows stunned or rendered unconscious by

blows, wounds, and other accidents, inflicted either by the enemy, by

wild beasts, by natural agencies, or by the wrath of his tribesmen; and

he never knows how soon the effect of such accidents may pass away, and

the man may recover his {046}ordinary vitality. As a rule, he keeps and

tends the bodies of his friends as long as any chance remains of their

ultimate recovery, and often (as we shall see in the sequel) much

longer.

Again, in order to understand this attitude of early man towards his

wounded, his stricken, and his dead, we must glance aside for a moment

at the primitive psychology. Very early indeed in the history of the

human mind, I believe, some vague adumbration of the notion of a soul

began to pervade humanity. We now know that consciousness is a function

of the brain; that it is intermitted during sleep, when the brain rests,

and also during times of grave derangement of the nervous or circulatory

systems, as when we faint or assume the comatose condition, or are

stunned by a blow, or fall into catalepsy or epilepsy. We also know

that consciousness ceases altogether at death, when the brain no longer

functions; and that the possibility of its further continuance is

absolutely cut off by the fact of decomposition. But these truths, still

imperfectly understood or rashly rejected by many among ourselves, were

wholly unknown to early men. They had to frame for themselves as best

they could some vague working hypothesis of the human mind, from data

which suggested themselves in the ordinary course of life; and the

hypothesis which they framed was more or less roughly that of the soul

or spirit, still implicitly accepted by a large majority of the human

species.

According to this hypothesis every man consists of two halves or parts,

one material or bodily, the other immaterial or spiritual. The first

half, called the body, is visible and tangible; the second half, called

the soul, dwells within it, and is more or less invisible or shadowy. It

is to a large extent identified with the breath; and like the breath

it is often believed to quit the body at death, and even to go off in a

free form and live its own life elsewhere. As this supposed independence

of the soul from the body lies at the very basis of all ghosts and gods,

and therefore of {047}religion itself, I may be excused for going at

some length into the question of its origin.

Actually, so far as we know by direct and trustworthy evidence, the

existence of a mind, consciousness, or “soul,” apart from a body,

has never yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. But the savage derived

the belief, apparently, from a large number of concurrent hints and

suggestions, of which such a hypothesis seemed to him the inevitable

result. During the daytime he was awake; at night he slept; yet even in

his sleep, while his body lay curled on the ground beside the camp-fire,

he seemed to hunt or to fight, to make love or to feast, in some

other region. What was this part of him that wandered from the body in

dreams?--what, if not the soul or breath which he naturally regarded as

something distinct and separate? And when a man died, did not the soul

or breath go from him? When he was badly wounded, did it not disappear

for a time, and then return again? In fainting fits, in catalepsy,

and in other abnormal states, did it not leave the body, or even play

strange tricks with it? I need not pursue this line of thought, already

fully worked out by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. It is enough to

say that from a very early date, primitive man began to regard the soul

or life as something bound up with the breath, something which could go

away from the body at will and return to it again, something separable

and distinct, yet essential to the person, very vaguely conceived as

immaterial or shadowy, but more so at a later than at an earlier

period. *

* The question of the Separate Soul has recently received

very full treatment from Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and

Mr. Sidney Hartland in The Legend of Perseus.

Moreover, these souls or spirits (which quitted the body in sleep or

trance) outlived death, and appeared again to survivors. In dreams,

we often see the shapes of living men; but we also see with peculiar

vividness the images of the departed. Everybody is familiar with the

frequent reappearance {048}in sleep of intimate friends or relations

lately deceased. These appearances, I fancy, are especially frequent

during the first few months of bereavement, and gradually weaken in

frequency and vividness as time goes on. The reason for both sets of

phenomena I take to be this: the nervous structures, accustomed to be

stimulated in particular combinations by intercourse with the dead

friend, miss automatically their wonted stimulation; and being therefore

in a highly nourished and unstable state, are peculiarly ready to

undergo ideal stimulation in sleep, as we know to be the case with other

well-nurtured and underworked nerve-centres. Or, to put it less

materially, the brain falls readily into a familiar rhythm. But in

course of time the channels atrophy by disuse; the habit is lost; and

the dream-appearances of the dead friend grow more and more infrequent.

The savage, however, accepts the dream-world as almost equally real with

the world of sense-presentation. As he envisages the matter to himself,

his soul has been away on its travels without its body, and there has

met and conversed with the souls of dead friends or relations.

We must remember also that in savage life occasions for trance, for

fainting, and for other abnormal or comatose nervous conditions occur

far more frequently than in civilised life. The savage is often wounded

and fails from loss of blood; he cuts his foot against a stone, or is

half killed by a wild beast; he fasts long and often, perforce, or is

reduced to the very verge of starvation; and he is therefore familiar,

both in his own case and in the case of others, with every variety of

unconsciousness and of delirium or delusion. All these facts figure

themselves to his mind as absences of the soul from the body, which is

thus to him a familiar and almost every-day experience.

Moreover, it will hence result that the savage can hardly gain any clear

conception of Death, and especially of death from natural causes. When

a tribesman is brought home severely wounded and unconscious, the

spectator’s immediate {049}idea must necessarily be that the soul has

gone away and deserted the body. For how long it has gone, he cannot

tell; but his first attempts are directed towards inducing or compelling

it to return again. For this purpose, he often addresses it with

prayers and adjurations, or begs it to come back with loud cries and

persuasions. And he cannot possibly discriminate between its temporary

absence and its final departure. As Mr. Herbert Spencer well says,

the consequences of blows or wounds merge into death by imperceptible

stages. “Now the injured man shortly ‘returned to himself,’ and

did not go away again; and now, returning to himself only after a long

absence, he presently deserted his body for an indefinite time. Lastly,

instead of these temporary returns, followed by final absence, there

sometimes occurred cases in which a violent blow caused continuous

absence from the very first; the other self never came back at all.”

In point of fact, during these earlier stages, the idea of Death as we

know it did not and does not occur in any form. There are still

savages who do not seem to recognise the universality and necessity of

death--who regard it on the contrary as something strange and unatural,

something due to the machination of enemies or of witchcraft. With the

earliest men, it is a foregone conclusion, psychologically speaking,

that they should so regard it; they could not form any other concept

without far more extended knowledge than they have the means of

possessing. To them, a Dead Man must always have seemed a man whose soul

or breath or other self had left him, but might possibly return again to

the body at any time.

Each of the three stages of thought above discriminated has its

appropriate mode of disposing of its dead. The appropriate mode for this

earliest stage is Preservation of the Corpse, which eventuates at last

in Mummification.

The simplest form of this mode of disposal of the corpse consists in

keeping it in the hut or cave where the family dwell, together with the

living. A New Guinea woman thus {050}kept her husband’s body in her

hut till it dried up of itself, and she kissed it and offered it food

every day, as though it were living. Many similar cases are reported

from elsewhere. Hut preservation is common in the very lowest races.

More frequently, however, owing to the obvious discomfort of living in

too close proximity to a dead body, the corpse at this stage of thought

is exposed openly in a tree or on a platform or under some other

circumstances where no harm can come to it. Among the Australians and

Andaman Islanders, who, like the Negritoes of New Guinea, preserve for

us a very early type of human customs, the corpse is often exposed on

a rough raised scaffold. Some of the Polynesian and Melanesian peoples

follow the same practice. The Dyaks and Kyans expose their dead in

trees. “But it is in America,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “that

exposure on raised stages is commonest. The Dakotahs adopt this method;

at one time it was the practice of the Iroquois; Catlin, describing the

Mandans as having scaffolds on which ‘their _dead live_ as they term

it,’ remarks that they are thus kept out of the way of wolves and

dogs; and Schoolcraft says the same of the Chippewas.” Generally

speaking, at the lowest grades of culture, savages preserve the actual

bodies of their dead above ground, either in the home itself, or

in close proximity to it. We shall recur later on to this singular

practice.

A slight variant on this method, peculiar to a very maritime race, is

that described by Mr. H. O. Forbes among the natives of Timurlaut:

“The dead body is placed in a portion of a _prau_ fitted to the length

of the individual, or within strips of _gaba-gaba_, or stems of the

sago-palm pinned together. If it is a person of some consequence, such

as an _Orang Kaya_, an ornate and decorated _prau_-shaped coffin is

specially made. This is then enveloped in calico, and placed either on

the top of a rock by the margin of the sea at a short distance from

the village, or on a high pile-platform erected on the shore {051}about

low-tide mark. On the top of the coffin-lid are erected tall flags,

and the figures of men playing gongs, shooting guns, and gesticulating

wildly to frighten away evil influences from the sleeper. Sometimes the

platform is erected on the shore above high-water mark, and near it is

stuck in the ground a tall bamboo full of palm-wine; and suspended over

a bamboo rail are bunches of sweet potatoes for the use of the dead

man’s _Nitu_. When the body is quite decomposed, his son or one of the

family disinters the skull and deposits it on a little platform in his

house, in the gable opposite the fireplace, while to ward off evil from

himself he carries about with him the atlas and axis bones of its neck

in his _luon_, or _siri_-holder.”

This interesting account is full of implications whose fuller meaning we

will perceive hereafter. The use of the skull and of the talisman bone

should especially be noted for their later importance. For skulls are

fundamental in the history of religion.

Cases like these readily pass into the practice of Mummifying, more

especially in dry or desert climates. Even in so damp a tropical country

as New Guinea, however, D’Albertis found in a shed on the banks of the

Fly River two mummies, artificially prepared, as he thought, by removal

of the flesh, the bones alone being preserved with the skin to cover

them. Here we have evidently a clear conception of death as a serious

change, of a different character from a mere temporary absence. So, too,

Mr. Chalmers says of the Koiari people in the same island, “They treat

their dead after this fashion. A fire is kept burning day and night at

the head and feet for months. The entire skin is removed by means of

the thumb and forefinger, and the juices plastered all over the face

and body of the operator (parent, husband, or wife of the deceased).

The fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so that little more than the

skeleton is left.” But mummification for the most part is confined to

drier climates, where it is artificially performed {052}down to a very

evolved stage of civilisation, as we know well in Peru and Egypt.

One word must be said in passing as to the frequent habit of specially

preserving, and even carrying about the person, the head or hand of

a deceased relative. This has been already mentioned in the case of

Timurlaut; and it occurs frequently elsewhere. Thus Mr. Chalmers says

of a New Guinea baby: “It will be covered with two inches of soil, the

friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller

bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” Similarly, in the

Andaman Islands, where we touch perhaps the lowest existing stratum of

savage feeling, “widows may be seen with the skulls of their deceased

partners suspended round their necks.” The special preservation of the

head, even when the rest of the body is eaten or buried, will engage our

attention at a later period: heads so preserved are usually resorted to

as oracles, and are often treated as the home of the spirit. Mr. Herbert

Spencer has collected many similar instances, such as that of the

Tasmanians who wore a bone from the skull or arm of a dead relation.

He rightly notes, too, that throughout the New World “the primitive

conception of death as a long-suspended animation seems to have been

especially vivid;” and we find accordingly that customs of this

character are particularly frequent among American savages. Thus, to

draw once more from his great storehouse, the Créés carried bones

and hair of dead relations about for three years; while the Caribs and

several Guiana tribes distributed the clean bones among the kinsmen of

the deceased. In the Sandwich Islands, also, bones of kings and chiefs

were carried about by their descendants, under the impression that the

dead exercised guardianship over them.

At this stage of thought, it seems to me, it is the actual corpse that

is still thought to be alive; the actual corpse that appears in dreams;

and the actual corpse that is fed and worshipped and propitiated with

presents.

Ceremonial {053}cannibalism, which will be more fully considered

hereafter, appears in this stratum, and survives from it into higher

levels. The body is eaten entire, and the bones preserved; or the

flesh and fat are removed, and the skin left; or a portion only is

sacramentally and reverently eaten by the surviving relations. These

processes also will be more minutely described in the sequel.

The first stage merges by gradual degrees into the second, which is that

of Burial or its equivalent. Cave-burial of mummies or of corpses forms

the transitional link. Indeed, inasmuch as many races of primitive men

lived habitually in caves, the placing or leaving the corpse in a cave

seems much the same thing as the placing or leaving it in a shed, hut,

or shelter. The cave-dwelling Veddahs simply left the dead man in the

cave where he died, and themselves migrated to some other cavern. Still,

cave-burial lingered on late with many tribes or nations which had

for ages outlived the habit of cave-dwelling. Among the South

American Indians, cave-burial was common; and in Peru it assumed high

developments of mummification. The making of an artificial cave or vault

for the dead is but a slight variant on this custom; it was frequent in

Egypt, the other dry country where the making of mummies was carried

to a high pitch of perfection. The Tombs of the Kings at Thebes are

splendid instances of such artificial caves, elaborated into stately

palaces with painted walls, where the dead monarchs might pass

their underground life in state and dignity. Cave-tombs, natural or

artificial, are also common in Asia Minor, Italy, and elsewhere.

During the first stage, it may be noted, the attitude of man towards his

dead is chiefly one of affectionate regard. The corpse is kept at home,

and fed or tended; the skull is carried about as a beloved object. But

in the second stage, which induces the practice of burial, a certain

Fear of the Dead becomes more obviously apparent. Men dread the return

of the corpse or the ghost, and strive to keep {054}it within prescribed

limits. In this stage, the belief in the Resurrection of the Body is the

appropriate creed; and though at first the actual corpse is regarded

as likely to return to plague survivors, that idea gives place a little

later, I believe, to the conception of a less material double or spirit.

And here let us begin by discriminating carefully between the

Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul.

The idea of Resurrection arose from and is closely bound up with the

practice of burial, the second and simpler mode of disposing of the

remains of the dead. The idea of Immortality arose from and is closely

bound up with the practice of burning, a later and better innovation,

invented at the third stage of human culture. During the early

historical period all the most advanced and cultivated nations burnt

their dead, and, in consequence, accepted the more ideal and refined

notion of Immortality. But modern European nations bury their dead,

and, in consequence, accept, nominally at least, the cruder and grosser

notion of Resurrection. Nominally, I say, because, in spite of creeds

and formularies, the influence of Plato and other ancient thinkers, as

well as of surviving ancestral ideas, has made most educated Europeans

really believe in Immortality, even when they imagine themselves to be

believing in Resurrection. Nevertheless, the belief in Resurrection is

the avowed and authoritative belief of the Christian world, which thus

proclaims itself as on a lower level in this respect than the civilised

peoples of antiquity.

The earliest of these two ways of disposing of the bodies of the dead is

certainly by burial. As this fact has recently been called in question,

I will venture to enlarge a little upon the evidence in its favour. In

point of time, burial goes back with certainty to the neolithic age, and

with some probability to the palaeolithic. Several true interments in

caves have been attributed by competent geologists to the earlier of

these two periods, the first for which we {055}have any sure warranty

of man’s existence on earth. But, as I do not desire to introduce

controversial matter of any sort into this exposition, I will waive the

evidence for burial in the palaeolithic age as doubtful, and will merely

mention that in the Mentone caves, according to Mr. Arthur Evans, a

most competent authority, we have a case of true burial accompanied by

neolithic remains of a grade of culture earlier and simpler than any

known to us elsewhere. In other words, from the very earliest beginning

of the neolithic age men buried their dead; and they continued to bury

them, in caves or tumuli, down to the end of neolithic culture. They

buried them in the Long Barrows in England; they buried them in the Ohio

mounds; they buried them in the shadowy forests of New Zealand; they

buried them in the heart of darkest Africa. I know of no case of burning

or any means of disposal of the dead, otherwise than by burial or its

earlier equivalent, mummification, among people in the stone age

of culture in Europe. It is only when bronze and other metals are

introduced that races advance to the third stage, the stage of

cremation. In America, however, the Mexicans we*re cremationists.

The wide diffusal of burial over the globe is also a strong argument for

its relatively primitive origin. In all parts of the world men now bury

their dead, or did once bury them. From the Tombs of the Kings at Pekin

to the Pyramids of Memphis; from the Peruvian caves to the Samoyed

graveyards, we find most early peoples, most savage peoples, most

primitive peoples, once or still engaged in one or other form of

burying. Burial is the common and universal mode; burning, exposure,

throwing into a sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and

exceptional, and in many cases, as among the Hindus, are demonstrably of

late origin, and connected with certain relatively modern refinements of

religion.

Once more, in many or most cases, we have positive evidence that where a

race now burns its dead, it used once {056}to bury them. Burial preceded

burning in preheroic Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in early

Latium. The people of the Long Barrows, in Western Europe generally,

buried their dead; the people of the Round Barrows who succeeded them,

and who possessed a far higher grade of culture, almost always cremated.

It has been assumed that burning is primordial in India; but Mr. William

Simpson, the well-known artist of the _Illustrated London News_, calls

my attention to the fact that the Vedas speak with great clearness of

burial as the usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and even allude to

the tumulus, the circle of stones around it, and the sacred _temenos_

which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high

authority on the subject is universally acknowledged, burial was the

rule in India till about the thirteenth or fourteenth century before

the Christian era; then came in cremation, with burial of the ashes, and

this continued till about the time of Christ, when burial was dispensed

with, and the ashes were thrown into some sacred river. I think,

therefore, until some more positive evidence is adduced on the other

side, we may rest content with our general conclusion that burial is the

oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains

of the dead among humanity after the general recognition of death as a

positive condition. It probably took its rise in an early period, while

mankind was still one homogeneous species; and it has been dispersed,

accordingly, over the whole world, even to the most remote oceanic

islands.

What is the origin of this barbaric and disgusting custom, so repugnant

to all the more delicate sentiments of human nature? I think Mr. Frazer

is right in attributing it to the terror felt by the living for the

ghosts (or, rather, at first the corpses) of the dead, and the fear that

they may return to plague or alarm their surviving fellow tribesmen.

In his admirable paper on “Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of

the Primitive Theory of the Soul,” Mr. Frazer points out that certain

tribes of early men paid great {057}attention to the dead, not so much

from affection as from selfish terror. Ghosts or bodies of the dead

haunt the earth everywhere, unless artificially confined to bounds, and

make themselves exceedingly disagreeable to their surviving relatives.

To prevent this, simple primitive philosophy in its second stage has hit

upon many devices. The most universal is to bury the dead--that is to

say, to put them in a deep-dug hole, and to cover them with a mighty

mound of earth, which has now sadly degenerated in civilised countries

into a mere formal heap, but which had originally the size and dignity

of a tumulus. The object of piling up this great heap of earth was to

confine the ghost (or corpse), who could not easily move so large a

superincumbent mass of matter. In point of fact, men buried their dead

in order to get well rid of them, and to effectually prevent their

return to light to disturb the survivors.

For the same reason heavy stones were often piled on the top of the

dead. In one form, these became at last the cairn; and, as the ghosts

of murderers and their victims tend to be especially restless, everybody

who passes their graves in Arabia, Germany, and Spain is bound to add

a stone to the growing pile in order to confine them. In another form,

that of the single big stone rolled just on top of the body to keep

it down by its mass, the makeweight has developed into the modern

tombstone. In our own times, indeed, the tombstone has grown into a mere

posthumous politeness, and is generally made to do duty as a record of

the name and incomparable virtues of the deceased (concerning whom,

_nil nisi bonum_); but in origin it was nothing more than the big, heavy

boulder, meant to confine the ghost, and was anything but honorific in

intention and function.

Again, certain nations go further still in their endeavours to keep the

ghost (or corpse) from roaming. The corpse of a Damara, says Galton,

having been sewn up in an old ox-hide is buried in a hole, and the

spectators jump backwards {058}and forwards over the grave to keep the

deceased from rising out of it. In America, the Tupis tied fast all the

limbs of the corpse, “that the dead man might not be able to get up,

and infest his friends with his visits.” You may even divert a river

from its course, as Mr. Frazer notes, bury your dead man securely in

its bed, and then allow the stream to return to its channel. It was thus

that Alaric was kept in his grave from further plaguing humanity; and

thus Captain Cameron found a tribe of Central Africans compelled their

deceased chiefs to “cease from troubling.” Sometimes, again, the

grave is enclosed by a fence too high for the dead man to clear even

with a running jump; and sometimes the survivors take the prudent

precaution of nailing the body securely to the coffin, or of breaking

their friend’s spine, or even--but this is an extreme case--of hacking

him to pieces. In Christian England the poor wretch whom misery had

driven to suicide was prevented from roaming about to the discomfort of

the lieges by being buried with a stake driven barbarously through him.

The Australians, in like manner, used to cut off the thumb of a slain

enemy that he might be unable to draw the bow; and the Greeks were wont

to hack off the extremities of their victims in order to incapacitate

them for further fighting. These cases will be seen to be very

luminiferous when we come to examine the origin and meaning of

cremation.

Burial, then, I take it, is simply by origin a means adopted by the

living to protect themselves against the vagrant tendencies of the

actual dead. For some occult reason, the vast majority of men in all

ages have been foolishly afraid of meeting with the spirits of the

departed. Their great desire has been, not to see, but to avoid seeing

these singular visitants; and for that purpose they invented, first of

all, burial, and afterwards cremation.

The common modern conception of the ghost is certainly that of an

immaterial or shadowy form, which can be seen but not touched, and which

preserves an outer semblance {059}of the human figure. But that idea

itself, which has been imported into all our descriptions and reasonings

about the ghost-beliefs of primitive man, is, I incline to think,

very far from primitive, and has been largely influenced by quite late

conceptions derived from the cremational rather than the burial level

of religious philosophy. In other words, though, in accordance with

universal usage and Mr. Frazer’s precedent, I have used the word

“ghost” above in referring to these superstitious terrors of early

man, I believe it is far less the spirit than the actual corpse itself

that early men even in this second stage were really afraid of. It is

the corpse that may come back and do harm to survivors. It is the corpse

that must be kept down by physical means, that must be covered with

earth, pressed flat beneath a big and ponderous stone, deprived of its

thumbs, its hands, its eyes, its members. True, I believe the savage

also thinks of the ghost or double as returning to earth; but his

psychology, I fancy, is not so definite as to distinguish very

accurately between corpse and spirit. The accurate differentiation of

the two belongs rather, it seems to me, to the post-cremational and more

spiritual philosophy than to the primary or preservative, and the

secondary or inhumational.

Anybody who looks at the evidence collected by Mr. Frazer will see for

himself that precautions are taken rather against the return of the

actual physical body than against the return of the ghost or spirit. Or

perhaps, to be more precise, the two are hardly thought of at this early

stage in separation or antithesis.

If we look at the means taken to preserve the body after death among the

majority of primitive peoples, above the Tasmanian level, this truth

of the corpse being itself immortal becomes clearer and clearer. We are

still, in fact, at a level where ghost and dead man are insufficiently

differentiated. In all these cases it is believed that the dead body

continues to live in the grave the same sort of life that it led

above ground; and for this purpose it is provided {060}with weapons,

implements, utensils, food, vessels, and all the necessaries of life for

its new mansion. Continued sentient existence of the body after death

is the keynote of the earliest level of psychical philosophy. First, the

corpse lives in the hut with its family: later, it lives in the grave

with its forefathers.

But side by side with this naïve belief in the continued existence

of the body after death, which survives into the inhumational stage of

evolution, goes another and apparently irreconcilable belief in a future

resurrection. Strictly speaking, of course, if the body is still alive,

there is no need for any such special revivification. But religious

thought, as we all know, does not always pride itself upon the temporal

virtues of logic or consistency; and the savage in particular is not

in the least staggered at being asked to conceive of one and the same

subject in two opposite and contradictory manners. He does not bring

the two incongruities into thought together; he thinks them alternately,

sometimes one, sometimes the other. Even Christian systematists

are quite accustomed to combine the incongruous beliefs in a future

resurrection and in the continued existence of the soul after death,

by supposing that the soul remains meanwhile in some nondescript limbo,

apart from its body--some uncertain Sheol, some dim hades or purgatory

or “place of departed spirits.” The savage is scarcely likely to be

more exacting in this matter than our doctors of divinity.

It is the common belief of the second or inhumational stage, then, that

there will be at some time or other a “General Resurrection.” No

doubt this General Resurrection has been slowly developed out of

the belief in and expectation of many partial resurrections. It is

understood that each individual corpse will, or may, resurge at some

time: therefore it is believed that all corpses together will resurge

at a single particular moment. So long as burial persists, the belief

in the Resurrection persists beside it, {061}and forms a main feature in

the current conception of the future life among the people who practise

it.

How, then, do we progress from this second or inhumational stage to the

third stage with its practice of burning, and its correlated dogma of

the Immortality of the Soul?

In this way, as it seems to me. Besides keeping down the ghost (or

corpse) with clods and stones, it was usual in many cases to adopt

other still stronger persuasives and dissuasives in the same direction.

Sometimes the persuasives were of the gentlest type; for example, the

dead man was often politely requested and adjured to remain quiet in the

grave and to give no trouble. But sometimes they were less bland; the

corpse was often pelted with sticks, stones, and hot coals, in order to

show him that his visits at home would not in future be appreciated. The

ordinary stake and mutilation treatment goes, it is clear, upon the same

principle; if the man has no feet or legs of his own, he cannot very

well walk back again. But further developments of the like crude idea

are to cut off the head, to tear out the heart, to hack the body in

pieces, to pour boiling water and vinegar over the dangerous place where

the corpse lies buried. Now burning, I take it, belonged originally

to the same category of strong measures against refractory ghosts or

corpses; and this is the more probable owing to the fact that it is

mentioned by Mr. Frazer among the remedies recommended for use in the

extreme case of vampires. Its original object was, no doubt, to prevent

the corpse from returning in any way to the homes of the living.

Once any people adopted burning as a regular custom, however, the

chances are that, _cœteris paribus_, it would continue and spread. For

the practice of cremation is so much more wholesome and sanitary than

the practice of burial that it would give a double advantage in the

struggle for existence to any race that adopted it, in peace and in

war. Hence it is quite natural that when at a certain grade of culture

certain races happened to light upon it {062}in this superstitious way,

those races would be likely to thrive and to take the lead in culture as

long as no adverse circumstances counteracted the advantage.

But the superstitions and the false psychology which gave rise at first

to the notion of a continued life after death would not, of course,

disappear with the introduction of burning. The primitive cremationists

may have hoped, by reducing to ashes the bodies of their dead, to

prevent the recurrence of the corpse to the presence of the living; but

they could not prevent the recurrence of the ghost in the dreams of the

survivors; they could not prevent the wind that sighed about the dead

man’s grave, the bats that flitted, the vague noises that terrified,

the abiding sense of the corpse’s presence. All the factors that go

to make up the ghost or the revenant (to use a safe word less liable to

misinterpretation) still remained as active as ever. Hence, I believe,

with the introduction of cremation the conception of the ghost merely

suffered an airy change. He grew more shadowy, more immaterial, more

light, more spiritual. In one word, he became, strictly speaking, a

ghost as we now understand the word, not a returning dead man. This

conception of the ghost as essentially a shade or shadow belongs

peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating peoples. I can answer for

it that among negroes, for example, the “duppy” is conceived as

quite a material object. It is classical literature, the literature of

the cremating Greeks and Romans, that has familiarised us most with the

idea of the ghost as shadowy and intangible. Burying races have

more solid doubles. When Peter escaped from prison in Jerusalem, the

assembled brethren were of opinion that it must be “his angel.” The

white woman who lived for years in a native Australian tribe was always

spoken of by her hosts as a ghost. In one word, at a low stage of

culture the _revenant_ is conceived of as material and earthly; at a

higher stage, he is conceived of as immaterial and shadowy.

Now {063}when people take to burning their dead, it is clear they will

no longer be able to believe in the Resurrection of the Body. Indeed, if

I am right in the theory here set forth, it is just in order to prevent

the Resurrection of the Body at inconvenient moments that they take to

burning. To be sure, civilised nations, with their developed power of

believing in miracles, are capable of supposing, not only that the

sea will yield up its dead, but also that burnt, mangled, or dispersed

bodies will be collected from all parts to be put together again at

the Resurrection. This, however, is not the naïve belief of simple

and natural men. To them, when you have burnt a body you have utterly

destroyed it, here and hereafter; and we know that mutilation and

burning were employed for this very purpose in the case of vampires and

other corpses whose total suppression was desirable. Sepoys were

blown from the guns in the Indian mutiny for the express reason

that, according to the Hindu belief, that method of disposing of them

destroyed not only the body but the soul as well--got rid of them

entirely. The ordinary human idea is that when you burn a body you

simply annihilate it; and on that very account early Christians

preferred burial to cremation, because they thought they stood thereby

a better chance at the Resurrection. It is true they allowed that the

divine omnipotence could make new bodies for the martyrs who were burnt;

but for themselves, they seem to have preferred on the average to go on

afresh with their old familiar ones.

Naturally, therefore, among cremating peoples, the doctrine of the

Resurrection of the Body tended to go out, and what replaced it was the

doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. You may burn the body, but the

spirit still survives; and the survival gives origin to a new philosophy

of ghosts and _revenants_, a new idea of the inner nature of ghosthood.

Gradually the spirit gets to be conceived as diviner essence, entangled

and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes of the flesh, and only to be

set free by means {064}of fire, which thus becomes envisaged at last as

friendly rather than destructive in its action on the dead body. What

was at first a precaution against the return of the corpse becomes

in the end a pious duty; just as burial itself, originally a selfish

precaution against the pranks and tricks of returning corpses, becomes

in the end so sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts are conceived

as wandering about, Archytas-wise, begging for the favour of a handful

of sand to prevent them from homeless vagabondage for ever. Nations

who burn come to regard the act of burning as the appointed means for

freeing the ghost from the confining meshes of the body, and regard it

rather as a solemn duty to the dead than as a personal precaution.

Not only so, but there arises among them a vague and fanciful conception

of the world of shades very different indeed from the definite and

material conception of the two earlier stages. The mummy was looked

upon as inhabiting the tomb, which was furnished and decorated for its

reception like a house; and it was provided with every needful article

for use and comfort. Even the buried body was supplied with tools

and implements for the ghost. The necessities of the shade are

quite different and more shadowy. He has no need of earthly tools or

implements. The objects found in the Long Barrows of the burying

folk and the Round Barrows of the cremationists well illustrate this

primordial and far-reaching difference. The Long Barrows of the Stone

Age people are piled above an interment; they contain a chambered tomb,

which is really the subterranean home or palace of the body buried in

it. The wives and slaves of the deceased were killed and interred with

him to keep him company in his new life in the grave; and implements,

weapons, drinking-cups, games, trinkets, and ornaments were buried with

their owners. The life in the grave was all as material and real as

this one; the same objects that served the warrior in this world

would equally serve him in the same form in the next. {065}It is quite

different with the Round Barrows of the Bronze Age cremationists. These

barrows are piled round an urn., which determines the shape of the

tumulus, as the chambered tomb and the corpse determine the shape of

the earlier Stone Age interments. They contain ashes alone; and the

implements and weapons placed in them are all broken or charred with

fire. Why? Because the ghost, immaterial as he has now become, can no

longer make use of solid earthly weapons or utensils. It is only their

ghosts or shadows that can be of any use to the ghostly possessor in the

land of shades. Hence everything he needs is burnt or broken, in order

that its ghost may be released and liberated; and all material objects

are now conceived as possessing such ghosts, which can be utilised

accordingly in the world of spirits.

Note also that with this advance from the surviving or revivable

Corpse to the immortal Soul or Spirit, there goes almost naturally and

necessarily a correlative advance from continued but solitary life in

the tomb to a freer and wider life in an underground world of shades and

spirits. The ghost gets greatly liberated and emancipated. He has more

freedom of movement, and becomes a citizen of an organised community,

often envisaged as ruled over by a King of the Dead, and as divided into

places of reward and punishment. But while we modern Europeans pretend

to be resurrectionists, it is a fact that our current ghostly and

eschatological conceptions (I speak of the world at large, not of mere

scholastic theologians) have been largely influenced by ideas derived

from this opposite doctrine--a doctrine once held by many or most of

our own ancestors, and familiarised to us from childhood in classical

literature. In fact, while most Englishmen of the present day believe

they believe in the Resurrection of the Body, what they really believe

in is the Immortality of the Soul..

It might seem at first sight as though a grave discrepancy existed

between the two incongruous ideas, first of burying {066}or burning your

dead so that they may not be able to return or to molest you, and second

of worshipping at their graves or making offerings to their disembodied

spirits. But to the savage mind these two conceptions are by no means

irreconcilable. While he jumps upon the corpse of his friend or his

father to keep it in the narrow pit he has digged for it, he yet brings

it presents of food and drink, or slays animals at the tomb, that the

ghost may be refreshed by the blood that trickles down to it. Indeed,

several intermediate customs occur, which help us to bridge over the

apparent gulf between reverential preservation of the mummified body,

and the coarse precautions of burial or burning. Thus, in many cases,

some of which we shall examine in the next chapter, after the body has

been for some time buried, the head is disinterred, and treasured with

care in the family oratory, where it is worshipped and tended, and where

it often gives oracles to the members of the household. A ceremonial

washing is almost always a feature in this reception of the head; it

recurs again and again in various cases, down to the enshrinement of the

head of Hoseyn at Cairo, and that of St. Denis at the abbey of the same

name, to both of which we shall allude once more at a far later stage of

our enquiry. For the present, it must suffice to say that the ceremonial

and oracular preservation of the head--the part which sees, and speaks,

and eats, and drinks, and listens--is a common feature in all religious

usages; that it gives rise apparently to the collections of family

skulls which adorn so many savage huts and oratories; that it may be

answerable ultimately for the Roman busts and many other imitative

images of the dead, in which the head alone is represented; and that

when transferred to the sacred human or animal victim (himself, as we

shall hereafter see, a slain god), it seems to account for the human

heads hung up by the Dyaks and other savages about their houses, as also

for the skulls of oxen and other sacred animals habitually displayed on

the front of places of {067}worship, whose last relic is the sculptured

oxen’s heads which fill the metopes in some Greek and most Roman

temples. Much of this, I admit, will be little comprehensible to the

reader at the present stage of our argument: but I beg him to bear in

mind provisionally this oracular and representative value of the head or

skull from this point forth; he will find, as he proceeds, its meaning

will become clearer and ever clearer at each successive stage of our

exposition.

I ought also to add that between complete preservation of the corpse

and the practice of burial there seems to have gone another intermediate

stage, now comparatively rare, but once very general, if we may judge

from the traces it has left behind it--a stage when all the body or part

of it was sacramentally eaten by the survivors as an act of devotion.

We will consider this curious and revolting practice more fully when we

reach the abstruse problem of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present

it will suffice to say that in many instances, in Australia, South

America, and elsewhere, the body is eaten, while only the bones are

burned or buried. Among these savages, again, it usually happens

that the head is cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the skull is

ceremonially washed, and preserved as an object of household veneration

and an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted in succeeding chapters.

Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the

worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense

of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised

people.

The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be

shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship.

CHAPTER IV.--THE ORIGIN OF GODS.

|MR. {068}Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his _Principles of

Sociology_ the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that

I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief

recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall

supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the

conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of

the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty _resume_

which I shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a

later point by consideration of several national religions.

In the earliest stage of all--the stage where the actual bodies of the

dead are preserved,--Gods as such are for the most part unknown: it is

the corpses of friends and ancestors that are worshipped and reverenced.

For example, Ellis says of the corpse of a Tahitian chief that it was

placed in a sitting posture under a protecting shed; “a small altar

was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were

daily presented by the relatives, or the priest appointed to attend the

body.” (This point about the priest is of essential importance.) The

Central Americans, again, as Mr. Spencer notes, performed similar

rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. The New Guinea people,

as D’Albertis found, worship the dried mummies of their fathers

and husbands. A little higher in the scale, we get the developed

mummy-worship of Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution

{069}of greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. Other evidence

in abundance has been adduced from Polynesia and from Africa. Wherever

the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship and

offerings are paid to them.

Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body but the head

alone that is specially kept and worshipped. Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says

of the people of Buru: “The dead are buried in the forest in some

secluded spot, marked often by a _merang_ or grave-pole; over which at

certain intervals the relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various

offerings. When the body is decomposed, the son or nearest relative

disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places it in the

Matakau at the back of his house, or in a little hut erected for it near

the grave. It is the representative of his forefathers, whose behests he

holds in the greatest respect.”

Two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account, as giving

us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories whose evolution

we must trace hereafter; first the grave-stake, which is probably the

origin of the wooden idol; and second, the little hut erected over the

head by the side of the grave, which is undoubtedly one of the origins

of the temple or praying-house. Observe also the ceremonial wrapping of

the skull in cloth, and its oracular functions.

Similarly, Mr. Wyatt Gill, the well-known missionary, writes of a dead

baby at Boera, in New Guinea: “It will be covered with two inches of

soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull

and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” And of

the Suau people he says: “Enquiring the use of several small houses,

I learned that it is to cover grave-pits. All the members of a family

at death occupy the same grave, the earth that thinly covered the last

occupant being scooped out to admit the newcomer. These graves are

shallow; the dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands folded.

{070}The earth is thrown in up to the mouth only. An earthen pot covers

the head. After a time the pot is taken off, the perfect skull removed

and cleansed--eventually to be hung up in a basket or net inside the

dwelling of the deceased over the fire, to blacken in the smoke.”

In Africa, again, the skull is frequently preserved in such a pot and

prayed to. In America, earthenware pots have been found moulded round

human skulls in mounds at New Madrid and elsewhere; the skull cannot

be removed without breaking the vessel. Indeed, this curious method of

preservation in pots seems to be very widespread; we get perhaps a vague

hint or reminiscence of its former prevalence in Europe in the story of

Isabella and the pot of basil.

The special selection and preservation of the head as an object of

worship thus noted in New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago is also still

found among many other primitive peoples. For instance, the Andamanese

widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession:

and the New Caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present

offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” Mr. Spencer quotes

several similar examples, a few of which alone I extract from his pages.

“‘In the private fetish-hut of King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull

of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the

earth.’ He ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to

answer his expectations.’ Similarly among the Mandans, who place

the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her

former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does

not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... There is scarcely

an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen

sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband--talking to it

in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as

they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer

back.’”

This {071}affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from

fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving

stage of human death-conceptions. It seldom survives where burial has

made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is

then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it

encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.

A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu notes that some of his West

African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls

of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off

small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank;

giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and

that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless

like their ancestors. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit

of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance Mr. Frazer

has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a

subsequent chapter.

Throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution, this

primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the chief known

objects of worship survives undiluted: and ancestor-worship remains to

this day the principal religion of the Chinese, and of several

other peoples. Gods, as such, are practically unknown in China.

Ancestor-worship also survives in many other races as one of the

main cults, even after other elements of later religion have been

superimposed upon it. In Greece and Rome, it remained to the last

an important part of domestic ritual. But in most cases, a gradual

differentiation is set up in time between various classes of ghosts or

dead persons, some ghosts being considered of more importance and power

than others; and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally

developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an exceptionally

powerful and friendly ghost--a ghost able to help, and from whose help

great things may reasonably be expected.

Again, {072}the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with

the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any

great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god

of considerable importance. We shall trace out this idea more fully

hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the present it must suffice to

say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly

increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.

When we pass from the first plane of corpse-preservation and

mummification to the second plane where burial is habitual, it might

seem at a hasty glance as though continued worship of the dead, and

their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. For we saw

that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should

return to plague the living. Nevertheless, natural affection for parents

or friends, and the desire to ensure their good will and aid, make these

seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that

even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them:

while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they

roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become in

time altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.

In these two later stages of thought with regard to the dead which

accompany burial and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow more and more

distinct from minor ghosts with an accelerated rapidity of evolution.

They grow greater in proportion to the rise of temples and hierarchies.

Furthermore, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless ghost tells in

favour of an enlarged godship. The gods are thought of as more and more

aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they

are clothed with mighty attributes; they assume colossal size; they are

even identified with the sun, the moon, the great powers of nature. But

they are never quite omnipotent during the polytheistic stage, because

in a pantheon they are {073}necessarily mutually limiting. Even in

the Greek and Roman civilisation, it is clear that the gods were not

commonly envisaged by ordinary minds as much more than human; for

Pisistratus dressed up a courtesan at Athens to represent Pallas Athene,

and imposed by this cheap theatrical trick upon the vulgar Athenians;

while Paul and Barnabas were taken at Lystra for Zeus and Hermes. Many

similar instances will occur at once to the classical scholar. It is

only quite late, under the influence of monotheism, that the exalted

conceptions of deity now prevalent began to form themselves in Judaism

and Christianity.

Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the

origin of anything more than domestic religion--the cult of the manes,

the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national

deities. But kingship supplies us with the missing link. We have seen in

Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African god-making how the

worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods;

and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods

of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs.

Especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that

the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men,

and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. Thus kingship rapidly

reacts upon godship. If the living king himself is great, how much

greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and

worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god,

the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and

propitiated! In some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of

gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually

in the end the greatest of any.

The consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts,

tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the

invention of written language sets {074}a final seal on the godhead and

might of great early ancestors. Among very primitive tribes, indeed,

we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship.

The chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate

predecessors. The more ancient ancestors, as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so

well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with more advanced

races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead;

and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch

of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively

unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped

ones. More than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, _vires

acquirit eundo_. Thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods

of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the

highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity,

whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.

Three such agencies of prime importance in the transition from the mere

ghost to the fully developed god must here be mentioned. They are the

rise of temples, of idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. Each of these

we must now consider briefly but separately.

The origin of the Temple is various; but all temples may nevertheless

be reduced in the last resort either into graves of the dead, or into

places where worship is specially offered up to them. This truth,

which Mr. Herbert Spencer arrived at by examination of the reports

of travellers or historians, and worked up in connection with his

_Principles of Sociology_, was independently arrived at through quite a

different line of observation and reasoning by Mr. William Simpson,

the well-known artist of the _Illustrated London News_. Mr. Simpson has

probably visited a larger number of places of worship all over the world

than any other traveller of any generation: and he was early impressed

by the fact which forced itself upon his eyes, that almost every one of

them, where its origin could be {075}traced, turned out to be a tomb in

one form or another. He has set forth the results of his researches in

this direction in several admirable papers, all of which, but especially

the one entitled _The Worship of Death_, I can confidently recommend to

the serious attention of students of religion. They contain the largest

collection of instances in this matter ever yet made; and they show

beyond a doubt the affiliation of the very idea of a temple on the tomb

or grave of some distinguished dead person, famous for his power, his

courage, or his saintliness.

The cave is probably the first form of the Temple. Sometimes the dead

man is left in the cave which he inhabited when living; an instance

of which we have already noticed among the Veddahs of Ceylon. In other

cases, where races have outgrown the custom of cave-dwelling, the habit

of cave-burial, or rather of laying the dead in caves or in artificial

grottoes, still continues through the usual conservatism of religious

feeling. Offerings are made to the dead in all these various caves: and

here we get the beginnings of cave-temples. Such temples are at first

of course either natural or extremely rude; but they soon begin to be

decorated with rough frescoes, as is done, for example, by the South

African Bushmen. These frescoes again give rise in time by slow degrees

to such gorgeous works as those of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes;

each of which has attached to it a magnificent temple as its

mortuary chapel. Sculpture is similarly employed on the decoration of

cave-temples; and we get the final result of such artistic ornament

in splendid cave-temples like those of Ellora. Both arts were employed

together in the beautiful and interesting Etruscan tomb-temples.

In another class of cases, the hut where the dead man lived is abandoned

at his death by his living relations, and thus becomes a rudimentary

Temple where offerings are made to him. This is the case with the

Hottentots, to take an instance at a very low grade of culture. Of a New

Guinea {076}hut-burial, Mr. Chalmers says: “The chief is buried in

the centre; a mat was spread over the grave, on which I was asked to

sit until they had a weeping.” This weeping is generally performed by

women--a touch which leads us on to Adonis and Osiris rites, and to

the Christian Pietà. Mr. Spencer has collected several other excellent

examples. Thus, the Arawaks place the corpse in a small boat and bury

it in the hut; among the Creeks, the habitation of the dead becomes his

place of interment; the Fantees likewise bury the dead person in his own

house; and the Yucatanese “as a rule abandoned the house, and left it

uninhabited after the burial.” I will not multiply quotations; it

will be better to refer the reader to Mr. Spencer’s own pages, where a

sufficient number of confirmatory examples are collected to satisfy

any but the most prejudiced critic. “As repeated supplies of food are

taken to the abandoned house,” says Mr. Spencer, “and as along with

making offerings there go other propitiatory acts, the deserted dwelling

house, turned into a mortuary house, acquires the attributes of a

temple.”

A third origin for Temples is found in the shed, hut, or shelter,

erected over the grave, either for the protection of the dead or for the

convenience of the living who bring their offerings. Thus, in parts of

New Guinea, according to Mr. Chalmers, “The natives bury their dead in

the front of their dwellings, and cover the grave with a small house, in

which the near relatives sleep for several months.”

“Where house-burial is not practised,” says Mr. Spencer, once more,

“the sheltering structure raised above the grave, or above the stage

bearing the corpse, becomes the germ of the sacred building. By some

of the New Guinea people there is a ‘roof of atap erected over’ the

burial-place. In Cook’s time the Tahitians placed the body of a dead

person upon a kind of bier supported by sticks and under a roof. So,

too, in Sumatra, where ‘a shed is built over’ the grave; and so,

too, in Tonga. Of course {077}this shed admits of enlargement and

finish. The Dyaks in some places build mausoleums like houses, 18 feet

high, ornamentally carved, containing the goods of the departed--sword,

shield, paddle, etc. When we read that the Fijians deposit the bodies of

their chiefs in small _enbures_ or temples, we may fairly conclude that

these so-called temples are simply more-developed sheltering structures.

Still more clearly did the customs of the Peruvians show that the

structure erected over the dead body develops into a temple. Acosta

tells us that ‘every one of these kings Yncas left all his treasure and

revenues to entertaine the place of worshippe where his body was layed,

and there were many ministers with all their familie dedicated to his

service.’”

Note in the last touch, by anticipation, one origin of priesthood. On

the other hand, we saw in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central

African natives that those savages do not worship at the actual grave

itself. In this case, terror of the _revenant_ seems to prevent the

usual forms of homage at the tomb of the deceased. Moreover, the ghost

being now conceived as more or less freely separable from the corpse,

it will be possible to worship it in some place remote from the dreaded

cemetery. Hence these Africans “seek the spirit at the place where their

departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the great tree at the

verandah of the dead man’s house that is their temple: and if no tree

grow here, they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple

rites.” We have in this case yet another possible origin for certain

temples, and also, I will add by anticipation of a future chapter, for

the sacred tree, which is so common an object of pious adoration in many

countries.

Beginning with such natural caves or such humble huts, the Temple

assumes larger proportions and more beautiful decorations with the

increase of art and the growth of kingdoms. Especially, as we see in the

tomb-temples and pyramids {078}of Egypt and Peru, does it assume great

size and acquire costly ornaments when it is built by a powerful king

for himself during his own lifetime. Temple-tombs of this description

reach a high point of artistic development in such a building as the

so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenæ, which is really the sepulchre

of some nameless prehistoric monarch. It is admirably reconstructed in

Perrot and Chipiez.

Obviously, the importance and magnificence of the temple will react upon

the popular conception of the importance and magnificence of the god who

inhabits it. And conversely, as the gods grow greater and greater,

more art and more constructive skill will constantly be devoted to the

building and decoration of their permanent homes. Thus in Egypt the tomb

was often more carefully built and splendidly decorated than the house;

because the house was inhabited for a short time only, but the tomb for

eternity. Moreover, as kings grew more powerful, they often adorned

the temples of their ancestors with emulous pride, to show their own

greatness. In Egypt, once more, the original part of all the more

important temples is but a small dark cell, of early origin, to which

one successive king after another in later dynasties added statelier

and ever statelier antechambers or porches, so that at last the building

assumed the gigantic size and noble proportions of Karnak and Luxor.

This access of importance to the temple cannot have failed to add

correspondingly to the dignity of the god; so that, as time went on,

instead of the early kings being forgotten and no longer worshipped,

they assumed ever greater and greater importance from the magnificence

of the works in which their memory was enshrined. To the very end, the

god depends largely on his house for impressiveness. How much did not

Hellenic religion itself owe to the Parthenon and the temple of Olympian

Zeus! How much does not Christianity itself owe to Lincoln and Durham,

to Amiens and Chartres, to Milan and Pisa, to St. Mark’s and {070}St.

Peter’s! Men cannot believe that the deities worshipped in such noble

and dimly religious shrines were once human like themselves, compact of

the same bodies, parts, and passions. Yet in the last instance at least

we know the great works to be raised in honour of a single Lower Syrian

peasant.

With this brief and imperfect notice of the origin of temples, which

will indirectly be expanded in later portions of my work, I pass on from

the consideration of the sacred building itself to that of the Idol who

usually dwells within it.

Where burial prevails, and where arts are at a low stage of development,

the memory of the dead is not likely to survive beyond two or three

generations. But where mummification is the rule, there is no reason

why deceased persons should not be preserved and worshipped for an

indefinite period; and we know that in Egypt at least the cult of kings

who died in the most remote times of the Early Empire was carried on

regularly down to the days of the Ptolemies. In such a case as this,

there is absolutely no need for idols to arise; the corpse itself is the

chief object of worship. We do find accordingly that both in Egypt

and in Peru the worship of the mummy played a large part in the local

religions; though sometimes it alternated with the worship of other

holy objects, such as the image or the sacred stone, which we shall see

hereafter to have had a like origin. But in many other countries, where

bodies were less visibly and obviously preserved, the worship due to

the ghost or god was often paid to a simulacrum or idol; so much so that

“idolatry” has become in Christian parlance the common term for most

forms of worship other than monotheistic.

Now what is the origin and meaning of Idols, and how can they be

affiliated upon primitive corpse or ghost worship?

Like the temple, the Idol, I believe, has many separate origins, several

of which have been noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer, {080}while others, it

seems to me, have escaped the notice even of that profound and acute

observer.

The earliest Idols, if I may be allowed the contradictory expression,

are not idols at all--not images or representations of the dead person,

but actual bodies, preserved and mummified. These pass readily, however,

into various types of representative figures. For in the first place the

mummy itself is usually wrapped round in swathing-cloths which obscure

its features; and in the second place it is frequently enclosed in a

wooden mummy-case, which is itself most often rudely human in form, and

which has undoubtedly given rise to certain forms of idols. Thus,

the images of Amun, Khem, Osiris, and Ptah among Egyptian gods

are frequently or habitually those of a mummy in a mummy-case. But

furthermore, the mummy itself is seldom or never the entire man; the

intestines at least have been removed, or even, as in New Guinea, the

entire mass of flesh, leaving only the skin and the skeleton. The eyes,

again, are often replaced, as in Peru, by some other imitative object,

so as to keep up the lifelike appearance. Cases like these lead on to

others, where the image or idol gradually supersedes altogether the

corpse or mummy.

Mr. H. O. Forbes gives an interesting instance of such a transitional

stage in Timorlaut. “The bodies of those who die in war or by a

violent death are buried,” he says; “and if the head has been captured

[by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the grave to represent the

missing member, and to deceive and satisfy his spirit.” There is

abundant evidence that such makeshift limbs or bodies amply suffice

for the use of the soul, when the actual corpse has been destroyed or

mutilated. Sometimes, indeed, the substitution of parts is deliberate

and intentional. Landa says of the Yucatanese that they cut oft the

heads of the ancient lords of Cocom when they died, and cleared them

from flesh by cooking them (very probably to eat at a sacrificial feast,

of which more hereafter); then they sawed {081}off the top of the skull,

filled in the rest of the head with cement, and, making the face as like

as possible to the original possessor, kept these images along with the

statues and the ashes. Note here the usual preservation of the head as

exceptionally sacred. In other cases, they made for their fathers wooden

statues, put in the ashes of the burnt body, and attached the skin of

the occiput taken off the corpse. These images, half mummy, half idol,

were kept in the oratories of their houses, and were greatly reverenced

and assiduously cared for. On all the festivals, food and drink were

offered to them.

Mr. Spencer has collected other interesting instances of this

transitional stage between the corpse or mummy and the mere idol. The

Mexicans, who were cremationists, used to burn a dead lord, and collect

the ashes; “and after kneading them with human blood, they made of

them an image of the deceased, which was kept in memory of him.”

Sometimes, as in Yucatan, the ashes were placed in a man-shaped

receptacle of clay, and temples or oratories were erected over them.

“In yet other cases,” says Mr. Spencer, “there is worship of the

relics, joined with the representative figure, not by inclusion, but

only by proximity.” Thus Gomara tells us that the Mexicans having

burnt the body of their deceased king, gathered up the ashes, bones,

jewels, and gold in cloths, and made a figure dressed as a man, before

which, as well as before the relics, offerings were placed. It is clear

that cremation specially lends itself to such substitution of an image

for the actual dead body. Among burying races it is the severed skull,

on the contrary, that is oftenest preserved and worshipped.

The transition from such images to small stone sarcophagi, like those

of the Etruscan tombs, is by no means a great one. These sarcophagi

contained the burnt ashes of the dead, but were covered by a lid which

usually represented the deceased, reclining, as if at a banquet, with a

beaker in his hands. The tombs in which the sarcophagi were placed were

of two types; one, the stone pyramid or {082}cone, which, says Dr. Isaac

Taylor, “is manifestly a survival of the tumulus”; the other, the

rock-cut chamber, “which is a survival of the cave.” These lordly

graves are no mere cheerless sepulchres; they are abodes for the dead,

constructed on the model of the homes of the living. They contain

furniture and pottery; and their walls are decorated with costly mural

paintings. They are also usually provided with an antechamber, where the

family could assemble at the annual feast to do homage to the spirits

of departed ancestors, who shared in the meal from their sculptured

sarcophagus lids.

At a further stage of distance from the primitive mummy-idol we come

upon the image pure and simple. The Mexicans, for example, as we have

seen, were cremationists; and when men killed in battle were missing,

they made wooden figures of them, which they honoured, and then burnt

them in place of the bodies. In somewhat the same spirit the Egyptians

used to place beside the mummy itself an image of the dead, to act as

a refuge or receptacle for the soul, “in case of the accidental

destruction of the actual body.” So the Mexicans once more, if one of

their merchants died on a journey, were accustomed to make a statue of

wood in the shape of the deceased, to which they paid all the honours

they would have done to his actual corpse before burning it. In Africa,

while a king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the

palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Mr.

Spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for

the bodies of the dead. The Roman _imagines_ wore masks of wax, which

preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. Perhaps the most

curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is

to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in

Westminster Abbey.

There are two other sources of idol-worship, however, which, as it seems

to me, have hardly received sufficient attention at Mr. Spencer’s

hands. Those two are the stake which {083}marks the grave, and the

standing stone or tombstone. By far the larger number of idols, I

venture to believe, are descended from one or other of these two

originals, both of which I shall examine hereafter in far greater

detail. There is indeed no greater lacuna, I fancy, in Mr. Spencer’s

monumental work than that produced by the insufficient consideration

of these two fruitful sources of worshipful objects. I shall therefore

devote a considerable space to their consideration in subsequent

chapters; for the present it will suffice to remark that the wooden

stake seems often to form the origin or point of departure for the

carved wooden image, as well as for such ruder objects of reverence

as the cones and wooden pillars so widely reverenced among the Semitic

tribes; while the rough boulder, standing stone, or tombstone seems to

form the origin or point of departure for the stone or marble statue,

the commonest type of idol the whole world over in all advanced and

cultivated communities. Such stones were at first mere rude blocks or

unhewn masses, the descendants of those which were rolled over the grave

in primitive times in order to keep down the corpse of the dead man, and

prevent him from returning to disturb the living. But in time they grew

to be roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and finally to be decorated

with a rude representation of a human head and shoulders. From this

stage they readily progressed to that of the Greek Hermæ. We now know

that this was the early shape of most Hellenic gods and goddesses;

and we can trace their evolution onward from this point to the wholly

anthropomorphic Aphrodite or Here. The well-known figure of the Ephesian

Artemis is an intermediate case which will occur at once to every

classical reader. Starting from such shapeless beginnings, we progress

at last to the artistic and splendid bronze and marble statues of

Hellas, Etruria, and Rome, to the many-handed deities of modern India,

and to the sculptured Madonnas and Pietàs of Renaissance Italy.

Naturally, {084}as the gods grow more beautiful and more artistically

finished in workmanship, the popular idea of their power and dignity

must increase _pari passu_. In Egypt, this increase took chiefly the

form of colossal size and fine manipulation of hard granitic materials.

The so-called Memnon and the Sphinx are familiar instances of the first;

the Pashts of Syenite, the black basalt gods, so well known at the

Louvre and the British Museum, are examples of the second. In Greece,

effect was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in the Aphrodites and

Apollos, or by costliness of material, as in the chryselephantine Zeus

and the Athene of the Parthenon. But we must always remember that in

Hellas itself these glorious gods were developed in a comparatively

short space of time from the shapeless blocks or standing stones of the

ruder religion; indeed, we have still many curious intermediate forms

between the extremely grotesque and hardly human Mycenæan types, and

the exquisite imaginings of Myron or Phidias. The earliest Hellenic

idols engraved by Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez in their great work on

_Art in Primitive Greece_ do not rise in any respect superior to

the Polynesian level; while the so-called Apollos of later archaic

workmanship, rigidly erect with their arms at their sides, recall in

many respects the straight up-and-down outline of the standing stone

from which they are developed.

I should add that in an immense number of instances the rude stone image

or idol, and at a still lower grade the unwrought sacred stone, stands

as the central object under a shed or shelter, which develops by degrees

into the stately temple. The advance in both is generally more or less

parallel; though sometimes, as in historical Greece, a temple of the

noblest architecture encloses as its central and principal object of

veneration the rough unhewn stone of early barbaric worship. So even

in Christendom, great churches and cathedrals often hold as their most

precious possession some rude and antique image like {085}the sacred

Bambino of Santa Maria in Ara Cœli at Rome, or the “Black Madonnas”

which are revered by the people at so many famous Italian places of

pilgrimage.

Nor do I mean to say that every Idol is necessarily itself a funereal

relic. When once the idea of godship has been thoroughly developed,

and when men have grown accustomed to regard an image or idol as the

representative or dwelling-place of their god, it is easy to multiply

such images indefinitely. Hundreds of representations may exist of the

self-same Apollo or Aphrodite or Madonna or St. Sebastian. At the same

time, it is quite clear that for most worshippers, the divine being is

more or less actually confused with the image; a particular Artemis or

a particular Notre Dame is thought of as more powerful or more friendly

than another. I have known women in Southern Europe go to pray at the

shrine of a distant Madonna, “because she is greater than our own

Madonna.” Moreover, it is probable that in many cases images or sacred

stones once funereal in origin, and representing particular gods or

ghosts, have been swallowed up at last by other and more powerful

deities, so as to lose in the end their primitive distinctness. Thus,

there were many Baals and many Ashteroths; probably there were many

Apollos, many Artemises, many Aphrodites. It is almost certain that

there were many distinct Hermæ. The progress of research tends to

make us realise that numberless deities, once considered unique and

individual, may be resolved into a whole host of local gods, afterwards

identified with some powerful deity on the merest external resemblances

of image, name, or attribute. In Egypt at least this process of

identification and centralisation was common. Furthermore, we know

that each new religion tends to swallow up and assimilate to itself

all possible elements of older cults; just as Hebrew Jahwehism tried to

adopt the sacred stones of early Semitic heathenism by associating them

with episodes in the history of the patriarchs; and just as Christianity

has sanctified {086}such stones in its own area by using them sometimes

as the base of a cross, or by consecrating them at others with the name

of some saint or martyr.

But even more than the evolution of the Temple and the Idol, the

evolution of the Priesthood has given dignity, importance, and power

to the gods. For the priests are a class whose direct interest it is to

make the most of the greatness and majesty of the deities they tend or

worship.

Priesthood, again, has probably at least two distinct origins. The one

is quasi-royal; the other is quasiservile.

I begin with the first. We saw that the chief of an African village, as

the son and representative of the chief ghosts, who are the tribal

gods, has alone the right to approach them directly with offerings. The

inferior villager, who desires to ask anything of the gods, asks through

the chief, who is a kinsman and friend of the divine spirits, and who

therefore naturally understands their ideas and habits. Such chiefs are

thus also naturally priests. They are sacred by family; they and their

children stand in a special relation to the gods of the tribe, quite

different from the relation in which the common people stand; they are

of the blood of the deities. This type of relation is common in many

countries; the chiefs in such instances are “kings and priests, after

the order of Melchizedek.”

To put it briefly, in the earliest or domestic form of religion, the

gods of each little group or family are its own dead ancestors, and

especially (while the historic memory is still but weak) its immediate

predecessors. In this stage, the head of the household naturally

discharges the functions of priest; it is he who approaches the family

ghosts or gods on behalf of his wives, his sons, his dependants. To the

last, indeed, the father of each family retains this priestly function

as regards the more restricted family rites; he is priest of the worship

of the _lares_ and _penates_; he offers the family sacrifice to the

family gods; he reads family prayers in the Christian household. But as

{087}the tribe or nation arises, and chieftainship grows greater, it is

the ghosts or ancestors of the chiefly or kingly family who develop

most into gods; and the living chief and his kin are their natural

representatives. Thus, in most cases, the priestly office comes to be

associated with that of king or chief. Indeed, we shall see hereafter in

a subsequent chapter that many kings, being the descendants of gods, are

gods themselves; and that this union of the kingly and divine characters

has much to do with the growth of the dignity of godhead. Here, however,

I waive this point for the present; it will suffice for us to note at

the present stage of our argument that in a large number of instances

the priesthood and the kingship were inherent and hereditary in the

self-same families.

“The union of a royal title with priestly duties,” says Mr. Frazer

in _The Golden Bough_, “was common in ancient Italy and Greece.

At Rome and in other Italian cities there was a priest called the

Sacrificial King or King of the sacred rites (_Rex Sacrificulus or Rex

Sacrorum_), and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites.

In republican Athens, the second magistrate of the state was called the

King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. Many

other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they

are known, seem to have been priestly. At Rome the tradition was that

the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the expulsion of the kings

in order to offer the sacrifices which had been previously offered by

the kings. In Greece a similar view appears to have prevailed as to the

origin of the priestly kings. In itself the view is not improbable, and

it is borne out by the example of Sparta, the only purely Greek state

which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in

Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of

the god. This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is

familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of

various great religious capitals, peopled by thousands of ‘Sacred

{087}slaves,’ and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal

and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such

priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pes-sinus. Teutonic Kings, again, in

the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position and exercised

the powers of high priests. The Emperors of China offer public

sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books. It

is needless, however, to multiply examples of what is the rule rather

than the exception in the early history of the kingship.”

We will return hereafter in another connexion to this ancient relation

of kingship with priesthood, which arises naturally from the still more

ancient relation of the king to the god.

Where priesthood originates in this particular way, little

differentiation is likely to occur between the temporal and the

ecclesiastical power. But there is a second and far more potent origin

of priesthood, less distinguished in its beginnings, yet more really

pregnant of great results in the end. For where the king is a priest,

and the descendant of the gods, as in Peru and Egypt, his immediate and

human power seems to overshadow and as it were to belittle the power of

his divine ancestors. No statue of Osiris, for example, is half so big

in size as the colossal figure of Rameses II. which lies broken in huge

pieces outside the mortuary temple of the king it commemorates, among

the ruins of Thebes. But where a separate and distinct priesthood gets

the management of sacred rites entirely into its own hands, we find the

authority of the gods often rising superior to that of the kings, who

are only their vicegerents: till at last we get Popes dictating to

emperors, and powerful monarchs doing humble penance before the costly

shrines of murdered archbishops.

The origin of independent or quasi-servile priesthood is to be found in

the institution of “temple slaves,”--the attendants told off as we

have already seen to do duty at the grave of the chief or dead warrior.

Egypt, again affords {089}us, on the domestic side, an admirable example

of the origin of such priesthoods. Over the lintel of each of the

cave-like tombs at Beni Hassan and Sakkarah is usually placed an

inscription setting forth the name and titles of its expected occupant

(for each was built during the life-time of its owner), with an

invocation praying for him propitious funeral rites, and a good

burial-place after a long and happy life. Then follows a pious hope that

the spirit may enjoy for all eternity the proper payment of funereal

offerings, a list of which is ordinarily appended, together with a

statement of the various anniversaries on which they were due. But the

point which specially concerns us here is this: Priests or servants were

appointed to see that these offerings were duly made; and the tomb was

endowed with property for the purpose both of keeping up the offerings

in question, and of providing a stipend or living-wage for the priest.

As we shall see hereafter, such priesthoods were generally made

hereditary, so as to ensure their continuance throughout all time:

and so successful were they that in many cases worship continued to be

performed for several hundred years at the tomb; so that a person

who died under the Early Empire was still being made the recipient of

funeral dues under kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.

I give this interesting historical instance at some length because it

is one of the best known, and also one of the most persistent. But

everywhere, all the world over, similar evolutions have occurred on

a shorter scale. The temple attendants, endowed for the purpose of

performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into priests,

who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. Bit by bit,

prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the

priests have become the depositaries of the divine traditions. They

alone know how to approach the god; they alone can read the hidden signs

of his pleasure or displeasure. As intermediaries between worshipper and

deity, they are themselves half sacred. {090}Without them, no votary

can rightly approach the shrine of his patron. Thus at last they rise

into-importance far above their origin; priestcraft comes into being;

and by magnifying their god, the members of the hierarchy magnify at the

same time their own office and function.

Yet another contributing cause must be briefly noted. Picture-writing

and hieroglyphics take their rise more especially in connexion with

tombs and temples. The priests in particular hold as a rule the key to

this knowledge. In ancient Egypt, to take a well-known instance, they

were the learned class; they became the learned class again under

other circumstances in mediaeval Europe. Everywhere we come upon sacred

mysteries that the priests alone know; and where hieroglyphics exist,

these mysteries, committed to writing, become the peculiar property

of the priests in a more special sense. Where writing is further

differentiated into hieratic and demotic, the gulf between laity and

priesthood grows still wider; the priests possess a special key to

knowledge, denied to the commonalty. The recognition of Sacred Books has

often the same result; of these, the priests are naturally the guardians

and exponents. I need hardly add that side by side with the increase

of architectural grandeur in the temple, and the increase of artistic

beauty and costliness in the idols or statues and pictures of the gods,

goes increase in the stateliness of the priestly robes, the priestly

surroundings, the priestly ritual. Finally, we get ceremonies of the

most dignified character, adorned with all the accessories of painting

and sculpture, of candles and flowers, of incense and music, of rich

mitres and jewelled palls,--ceremonies performed in the dim shade of

lofty temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour of god or gods of

infinite might, power, and majesty, who must yet in the last resort be

traced back to some historic or prehistoric Dead Man, or at least to

some sacred stone or stake or image, his relic and representative.

Thus, {091}by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or

ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and

greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from necessary

limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever

more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely

forgotten. But to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods

or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of

demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from known

sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he

turns out to be--a human being. Whenever we go back to very primitive

religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their

ancestors. It is only when we take relatively advanced races with

unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number

of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men

or spirits. Unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the

closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away

from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before

us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed.

Hence they are too much inclined, like Professor Robertson Smith, and

even sometimes Mr. Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot mention in

passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a

godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious

derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the

deified ancestor. Yet the moment we get away from these advanced and

too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple

savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral

corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites

and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or

departmental deities are wholly wanting. Even in the great historical

religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we

{092}probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or

ancestor-gods. And where, as in Egypt, the evidence is oldest and most

complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods

of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age

in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the

earliest documents.

It will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even

more than this--to show that the apparently unresolvable element

in later religions, including the Hebrew god Jahweh himself, can

be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive

conception of a ghost or ancestor.

CHAPTER V.--SACRED STONES.

|I {093}mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as

I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr.

Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which

mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of

worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but

which is of very high importance in early religion--the sacred tree,

with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus

enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their

general significance in the history of religion, and also from their

special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel,

who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as

the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism.

I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only

because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because,

as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of

the God of Israel.

All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the

most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either

rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone

on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of

England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other

antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of

Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), {094}long described

by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by

the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect

and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and

Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local

peasants as _sepolture dei giganti_--the tombs of the giants. In Syria,

Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa

and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a

field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas.

Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious

man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners;

and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn

how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and

“poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in

our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air

court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle

of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns

of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under

its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish

predecessors.

Now, what is the share of such sacred stones in the rise and growth of

the religious habit?

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to give formal proof of the familiar

fact that an upright slab is one of the commonest modes of marking the

place where a person is buried. From the ancient pillar that prehistoric

savages set up over the tumulus of their dead chief, to the headstone

that marks the dwarfed and stunted barrow in our own English cemeteries,

the practice of mankind has been one and continuous. Sometimes the stone

is a rough boulder from the fields; a representative of the big block

which savages place on the grave to keep the corpse from rising:

sometimes it is an oblong slab of slate or marble; sometimes, and

especially among the more advanced races, it is {095}a shapely cross or

sculptured monument. But whenever on earth interment is practised, there

stones of some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost invariably mark the

place of burial.

Again, as presents and sacrifices are offered at graves to the spirits

of the dead, it is at the stone which records the last resting-place of

the deceased that they will oftenest be presented. As a matter of fact

we know that, all the world over, offerings of wine, oil, rice,

ghee, corn, and meat are continually made at the graves of chiefs or

relations. Victims, both human and otherwise, are sacrificed at the

tomb, and their blood is constantly smeared on the headstone or boulder

that marks the spot. Indeed, after a time, the grave and the stone get

to be confounded together, and the place itself comes to have a certain

sacredness, derived from the ghost which haunts and inhabits it.

Four well-marked varieties of early tombstone are recognised in the

eastern continent at least, and their distribution and nature is thus

described by Major Conder: “Rude stone monuments, bearing a strong

family resemblance in their mode of construction and dimensions, have

been found distributed over all parts of Europe and Western Asia, and

occur also in India. In some cases they are attributable to early

Aryan tribes; in others they seem to be of Semitic origin. They include

_menhirs_, or standing stones, which were erected as memorials, and

worshipped as deities, with libations of blood, milk, honey, or water

poured upon the stones: _dolmens_, or stone tables, free standing--that

is, not covered by any mound or superstructure, which may be considered

without doubt to have been used as altars on which victims (often human)

were immolated: _cairns_, also memorial, and sometimes surrounding

menhirs; these were made by the contributions of numerous visitors

or pilgrims, each adding a stone as witness of his presence: finally

_cromlechs_, or stone circles, used as sacred enclosures or early

hypæthral temples, often {096}with a central menhir or dolmen as statue

or altar.”

There can be very little doubt that every one of these monuments is

essentially sepulchral in character. The menhir or standing stone is

the ordinary gravestone still in use among us: the dolmen is a chambered

tomb, once covered by a tumulus, but now bare and open: the cairn is a

heap of stones piled above the dead body: the stone circle is apparently

a later temple built around a tomb, whose position is marked by the

menhir or altar-stone in its centre. And each has been the parent of

a numerous offspring. The menhir gives rise to the obelisk, the stone

cross, and the statue or idol; the dolmen, to the sarcophagus, the

altar-tomb, and the high altar; the cairn, to the tope and also to the

pyramid; the cromlech, or stone circle, to the temple or church in one

at least of its many developments.

Each of these classes of monuments, Major Conder observes, has its

distinctive name in the Semitic languages, and is frequently mentioned

in the early Hebrew literature. The _menhir_ is the “pillar” of

our Authorised Version of the Old Testament; the _dolmen_ is the

“altar”; the _cairn_ is the “heap”; and the stone circle appears

under the names Gilgal and Hazor. The significance of these facts will

appear a little later on when I reach a more advanced stage in the

evolution of stone-worship.

In the simplest and most primitive stage of religion, such as that pure

ancestor-cult still surviving unmixed among the people of New Guinea or

the African tribes whose practice Mr. Duff Macdonald has so admirably

described for us, it is the corpse or ghost itself, not the stone to

mark its dwelling, which comes in for all the veneration and all

the gifts of the reverent survivors. But we must remember that every

existing religion, however primitive in type, is now very ancient; and

it is quite natural that in many cases the stone should thus come itself

to be regarded as the ghost or god, the object to which veneration is

{097}paid by the tribesmen. In fact, just in proportion as the ghost

evolves into the god, so does the tombstone begin to evolve into the

fetish or idol.

At first, however, it is merely as the rude unshapen stone that the idol

in this shape receives the worship of its votaries. This is the stage

that has been christened by that very misleading name fetishism, and

erroneously supposed to lie at the very basis of all religion. Here are

a few interesting samples of this stage of stone-worship, taken from the

very careful Samoan collection of Mr. Turner, of the London Missionary

Society:

“Fonge and Toafa were the names of the two oblong smooth stones

which stood on a raised platform of loose stones inland of one of the

villages. They were supposed to be the parents of Saato, a god who

controlled the rain. When the chiefs and people were ready to go off for

weeks to certain places in the bush for the sport of pigeon-catching,

offerings of cooked taro and fish were laid on the stones, accompanied

by prayers for fine weather and no rain. Any one who refused an offering

to the stones was frowned upon; and in the event of rain was blamed

and punished for bringing down the wrath of the fine-weather god, and

spoiling the sports of the season.”

Here, even if one doubts that Saato was a deceased Weather-doctor, and

that Fonge and Toafa were his father and mother (which I do not care to

insist upon), it is at least clear that we have to deal essentially with

two standing stones of precisely the same sort as those which habitually

mark sepulture.

Of the gods of Hudson’s Island, Mr. Turner gives this very interesting

and suggestive account:

“Foelangi and Maumau were the principal gods. They had each a temple;

and under the altars, on which were laid out in rows the skulls of

departed chiefs and people, were suspended offerings of pearl-shell and

other valuables. Foelangi had an unchiselled block of stone to represent

him--something like a six feet high gravestone.... {098}Offerings of

food were taken to the temples, that the gods might first partake before

anyone else ate anything.... Husked cocoanuts were laid down, one before

each skull.”

And of St. Augustine Island he writes: “At the Temple of Maumau there

stood a nine feet high coral sandstone slab from the beach.... Meat

offerings were laid on the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in

honour of the god.”

Similarly, about one of the Gilbert Group, Mr. Turner says:

“They had other gods and goddesses, and, as was common in this group,

had sandstone slabs or pillars set up here and there among the houses.

Before these shrines offerings of food were laid during the day, which

the priests took away stealthily by night and made the credulous believe

that gods and not mortals had done it. If the stone slab represented a

_goddess_ it was not placed erect, but laid down on the ground. Being a

_lady_ they thought it would be cruel to make her stand so long.”

In these cases, and in many others, it seems to me clear that the

original gravestone or menhir itself is the object of worship, viewed as

the residence of the ghost or god in whose honour it was erected. For in

Samoa we know that the grave “was marked by a little heap of stones, a

foot or two high,” and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was raised

at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it”--a first

step, as we have already seen, towards the evolution of one form of

idol.

Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every

village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the

big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full

importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree

will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship

was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the

penates of households {099}and the patron-deities of villages”--in

other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near

Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under

megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe.

One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some

squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed

round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had

their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones,

and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number

of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other

anthropologists.

But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly

fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones,

resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to

be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost

or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some

curious instances.

“Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were

regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was,

there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed

to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam

god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god--and so on.”

Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in

this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a

stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore

possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of

sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the

idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as

animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. *

* The whole subject is admirably worked out in The

Principles of Sociology, § 159.

Hence I incline {100}to believe Mr. Turner is right, and that these

stones may really have been picked out and worshipped, merely for their

oddity, but always, as he correctly infers, from the belief in their

connexion with some god or spirit.

Here is another case, also from Polynesia, where no immediate connexion

with any particular grave seems definitely implied:

“Two unchiselled ‘smooth stones of the stream’ were kept in a

temple at one of the villages, and guarded with great care. No stranger

or over-curious person was allowed to go near the place, under penalty

of a beating from the custodians of these gods. They represented good

and not malicious death-causing gods. The one made the yams, breadfruit,

and cocoanuts, and the other sent fish to the nets.

“Another stone was carefully housed in another village as the

representative of a rain-making god. When there was overmuch rain, the

stone was laid by the fire and kept heated till fine weather set in.”

Further instances (if fairly reported) occur elsewhere. “Among the

lower races of America,” says Dr. Tylor, summarising Schoolcraft,

“the Dakotahs would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then,

addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it, and pray it to

deliver them from danger.” But here the very fact that the stone

is worshipped and treated as an ancestor shows how derivative is the

deification--how dependent upon the prior association of such stones

with the tomb of a forefather and its indwelling spirit. Just in the

same way we know there are countries where a grave is more generally

marked, not by a stone, but by a wooden stake; and in these countries,

as for instance among the Samoyedes of Siberia, sticks, not stones, are

the most common objects of reverence. (Thus, again, stick-worship

is found “among the Damaras of South Africa, whose ancestors are

represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes

consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first {101}offered.”)

But here, too, we see the clear affiliation upon ancestor-worship; and

indeed, wherever we find the common worship of “stocks and stones,”

all the analogies lead us to believe the stocks and stones either

actually mark the graves of ancestors or else are accepted as their

representatives and embodiments.

The vast majority, however, of sacred stones with whose history we are

well acquainted are indubitably connected with interments, ancient

or modern. All the European sacred stones are cromlechs, dolmens,

trilithons, or menhirs, of which Mr. Angus Smith, a most cautious

authority, observes categorically, “We know for a certainty that

memorials of burials are the chief object of the first one, and of

nearly all, the only object apparently.” So many other examples will

come out incidentally in the course of the sequel that I will not labour

the point any further at present. Among the most remarkable instances,

however, I cannot refrain from mentioning the great Sardinian sacred

stones, which so often occur in the neighbourhood of the _nuraghi_, or

ancient forts. These consist of tall conical monoliths, rough and unhewn

in the oldest examples, rudely hewn in the later ones, and occasionally

presenting some distant resemblance to a human face--the first rough

draft of the future idol. “Behind the monolith lies the burial-place,

ten to fourteen yards long by one or two in width.” These

burial-places have been examined by the Abbate Spano.

“He was satisfied that several bodies had been buried together in the

same tomb, and that these were therefore family burial-places. When

the death of one of the members of the tribe occurred, one of the great

transverse stones which covered the long alley built behind the monolith

was removed, and then replaced until the time came for another body

to claim its place in the tomb. The monolith, called by the Sardinian

peasants _pietra dell’ altare_, or altar-stone, because they believe

it to have been used for human sacrifice, always faces the south or

east.”

Such {102}a surviving tradition as to the human sacrifices, in an island

so little sophisticated as Sardinia, has almost certainly come down to

us unbroken from a very early age.

I have already stated that the idol is probably in many cases derived

from the gravestone or other sacred stone. I believe that in an immense

number of cases it is simply the original pillar, more or less rudely

carved into the semblance of a human figure.

How this comes about we can readily understand if we recollect that by a

gradual transference of sentiment the stone itself is at last identified

with the associated spirit. Here, once more, is a transitional instance

from our Polynesian storehouse.

The great god of Bowditch Island “was supposed to be embodied in a

stone, which was carefully wrapped up with fine mats, and never seen

by any one but the king” (note this characteristic touch of kingly

priesthood), “and that only once a year, when the decayed mats were

stripped off and thrown away. In sickness, offerings of fine mats were

taken and rolled round the sacred stone, and thus it got busked up to

a prodigious size; but as the idol was exposed to the weather out of

doors, night and day, the mats soon rotted. No one dared to appropriate

what had been offered to the god, and hence the old mats, as they were

taken off, were heaped in a place by themselves and allowed to rot.”

Now the reasonableness of all this is immediately apparent if

we remember that the stones which stand on graves are habitually

worshipped, and anointed with oil, milk, and blood. It is but a slight

further step to regard the stone, not only as eating and drinking, but

also as needing warmth and clothing. As an admirable example of the same

train of thought, working out the same result elsewhere, compare this

curious account of a stone idol at Inniskea (a rocky islet off the Mayo

coast), given by the Earl of Roden, as late as 1851, in his _Progress of

the Reformation in Ireland_: “In {103}the south island, in the house

of a man named Monigan, a stone idol, called in the Irish ‘Neevougi,’

has been from time immemorial religiously preserved and worshipped. This

god resembles in appearance a thick roll of home-spun flannel, which

arises from the custom of dedicating a dress of that material to

it whenever its aid is sought; this is sewn on by an old woman, its

priestess, whose peculiar care it is. Of the early history of this idol

no authentic information can be procured, but its power is believed to

be immense; they pray to it in time of sickness; it is invoked when a

storm is desired to dash some hapless ship upon their coast; and, again,

the exercise of its power is solicited in calming the angry waves, to

admit of fishing or visiting the mainland.”

Nor is this a solitary instance in modern Europe. “In certain mountain

districts of Norway,” says Dr. Tylor, “up to the end of the last

century, the peasants used to preserve round stones, washed them every

Thursday evening,.... smeared them with butter before the fire, laid

them in the seat of honour on fresh straw, and at certain times of the

year steeped them in ale, that they might bring luck and comfort to the

house.”

The first transitional step towards the idol proper is given in some

rude attempt to make the standing stone at the grave roughly resemble

a human figure. In the later Sardinian examples, two conical lumps,

representing the breasts, seem to mark that the figure is intended to

be female--either because a woman is buried there, or to place the spot

under the protection of a goddess. From this rude beginning we get every

transitional form, like the Hermæ and the archaic Apollos, till we

arrive at the perfect freedom and beauty of Hellenic sculpture. Says

Grote, in speaking of Greek worship, “their primitive memorial erected

to a god did not even pretend to be an image, but was often nothing

more than a pillar, a board, a shapeless stone, or a post [notice the

resemblance to ordinary grave-marks] receiving care and decoration from

the {104}neighbourhood as well as worship.” Dr. Tylor, to whose great

collection of instances I owe many acknowledgments, says in comment on

this passage, “Such were the log that stood for Artemis in Euboea;

the stake that represented Pallas Athene ‘sine effigie rudis palus,

et informe lignum;’ the unwrought stone at Hyethos, which ‘after the

ancient manner’ represented Heracles; the thirty such stones which the

Pharæans in like fashion worshipped for the gods; and that one which

received such honour in Boeotian festivals as representing the Thespian

Eros.” Such also was the conical pillar of Asiatic type which stood

instead of an image of the Paphian Aphrodite, and the conical stone

worshipped in Attica under the name of Apollo. A sacred boulder lay in

front of the temple of the Trœzenians, while another in Argos bore

the significant name of Zeus Kappotas. “Among all the Greeks,”

says Pausanias, “rude stones were worshipped before the images of the

gods.” Among the Semites, in like manner, Melcarth was reverenced at

Tyre under the form of two stone pillars.

Intermediate forms, in which the stone takes successively a face, a

head, arms, legs, a shapely and well-moulded body, are familiar to all

of us in existing remains. The well-known figures of Priapus form a

good transitional example. “At Tâbala, in Arabia,” says Professor

Robertson Smith, “a sort of crown was sculptured on the stone

of al-Lat to mark her head.” Indeed, to the last, the pillar or

monolithic type is constantly suggested in the erect attitude and

the proportions of the statue among all except the highest Hellenic

examples. I may add, that even in Islam itself, which so sternly forbids

images of any sort, some traces of such anthropomorphic gravestones may

still be found. I noticed in the mosque of Mehemet Ali at Cairo that

the headstones of the Vice-regal family were each adorned with a fez and

tassel.

It is worth noting that the obelisk, also, doubtless owes its origin to

the monolith or standing stone. Whatever fresh {105}sacredness it may

later have obtained from the associations of sun-worship, as a solar

ray, cannot mask for any wide anthropological enquirer the fact that it

is by descent a mere shapeless head-stone, with a new symbolic meaning

given to it (as so often happens) in a new religion. The two obelisks’

which stand so often before Egyptian temples are clearly the analogues

of the two pillars of Melcarth at Tyre, and the sacred pair at Paphos,

Hera-polis, and Solomon’s temple. In the same way, the Indian tope and

the pyramid are descendants of the cairn, as the great stone-built tombs

of the Numidian kings in Algeria seem to be more advanced equivalents of

the tumulus or round barrow. And let me clear the ground here for

what is to follow by adding most emphatically that the genesis of

stone-worship here sketched out precludes the possibility of phallic

worship being in any sense a primitive form of it. The standing stone

may have been, and doubtless often was, in later stages; identified with

a phallus; but if the theory here advocated is true, the lingam, instead

of lying at the root of the monolith, must necessarily be a later and

derivative form of it. At the same time, the stone being regarded as

the ancestor of the family, it is not unnatural that early men should

sometimes carve it into a phallic shape. Having said this, I will say

no more on the subject, which has really extremely little to do with the

essentials of stone worship, save that on many gravestones of early

date a phallus marked the male sex of the occupant, while breasts, or a

symbolical triangle, or a mandorla, marked the grave of a woman.

Sometimes, both forms of god, the most primitive and the most finished,

the rude stone and the perfect statue, exist side by side in the same

community.

“In the legendary origin of Jagannath,” says Sir William Hunter,

“we find the aboriginal people worshipping a blue stone in the depths

of the forest. But the deity at length wearies of primitive jungle

offerings, and longs for the cooked food of the more civilised Aryans,

upon {106}whose arrival on the scene the rude blue stone gives place

to a carved image. At the present hour, in every hamlet of Orissa, this

twofold worship coexists. The common people have their shapeless stone

or block, which they adore with simple rites in the open air; while

side by side with it stands a temple to one of the Aryan gods, with its

carved idol and elaborate rites.”

Where many sacred stones exist all round, marking the graves of the

dead, or inhabited by their spirits, it is not surprising, once more,

that a general feeling of reverence towards all stones should begin to

arise--that the stone per se, especially if large, odd, or conspicuous,

should be credited to some extent with indwelling divinity. Nor is it

astonishing that the idea of men being descended from stones should

be rife among people who must often, when young, have been shown

headstones, monoliths, boulders, or cromlechs, and been told that the

offerings made upon them were gifts to their ancestors. They would

accept the idea as readily as our own children accept the Hebrew myth

of the creation of Adam, our prime ancestor, from “the dust of the

ground”--a far less promising material than a block of marble or

sandstone. In this way, it seems to me, we can most readily understand

the numerous stories of men becoming stones, and stones becoming men,

which are rife among the myths of savage or barbarous peoples.

Fernandez de Piedrahita says that the Laches “worshipped every stone

as a god, as they said they had all been men.” Arriaga tells us the

Peruvians paid honour to “very large stones, saying that they were

once men.” In the American _Report of the Bureau of Ethnology for

1880_, several stories are told of metamorphosis of men into stones

from the Iroquois legends. According to Dorman, the Oneidas and

Dakotahs claim descent from stones, to which they ascribe animation. An

interesting intermediate form, which shows the growth of this idea, is

given in Arriaga’s statement that the Marcayoc, or idol worshipped

in {107}Peru as the patron of the village, “is sometimes a stone and

sometimes a mummy”: in other words, it depended upon circumstances

whether they reverenced the body itself or the gravestone that covered

it. Among the Coast Negroes, when a person dies, a stone is taken to a

certain house--the village valhalla--to represent his ghost; and among

the Bulloms, women “make occasional sacrifices and offerings of rice

to the stones which are preserved in memory of the dead.” At Tanna,

in the New Hebrides, Mr. Gray, a missionary, found “a piece of sacred

ground, on which were deposited the stones in which they supposed

the spirits of their departed relatives to reside”; and Commander

Henderson, commenting upon a similar case from Vati Island, says these

“were the only form of gods the natives possessed, and into them they

supposed the souls of their departed friends and relatives to enter.”

Some of them “had a small piece chipped out on one side, by means of

which the indwelling ghost or spirit was supposed to have ingress or

egress.” Of a third sort, rudely fashioned by hand, Captain Henderson

says acutely, “these, it seemed to me, were the beginnings of a graven

image--a common stone, sacred as the dwelling-place of an ancestral

ghost.” *

* I owe this and several other references to Mr. Spencer’s

Appendix, as I do some of my previously cited cases to Mr.

Lang or Dr. Tylor.

Classical and Hebrew literature are full of examples of such stones,

believed to have been once human. Niobe and Lot’s wife are instances

that will at once occur to every reader. In Boeotia, Pausanias tells

us, people believed Alkmene, the mother of Herakles, was changed into a

stone. Perseus and the Gorgon’s head is another example, paralleled by

the Breton idea that their great stone circles were people, who, in the

modern Christianised version of the story, were turned into stone for

dancing on a Sunday. (About this Christianisation I shall have a word

to say further on; meanwhile, observe the similar name of the Giant’s

Dance given to the great Stonehenge {108}of Ireland.) In the same way

there is a Standing Rock on the upper Missouri which parallels the story

of Niobe--it was once a woman, who became petrified with grief when

her husband took a second wife. Some Samoan gods (or ancestral ghosts)

“were changed into stones,” says Mr. Turner, “and now stand up in

a rocky part of the lagoon on the north side of Upolu.”

On the other hand, if men become stones, stones also become men, or at

least give birth to men. We get a good instance of this in the legend of

Deucalion. Again, by the roadside, near the city of the Panopoeans, lay

the stones out of which Prometheus made men. Manke, the first man

in Mitchell Island, came out of a stone. The inhabitants of the New

Hebrides say that “the human race sprang from stones and the earth.”

On Francis Island, says Mr. Turner, “close by the temple there was

a seven-feet-long beach sandstone slab erected, before which offerings

were laid as the people united for prayer”; and the natives here

told him that one of their gods had made stones become men. “In

Melanesia,” says Mr. Lang, “matters are so mixed that it is not easy

to decide whether a worshipful stone is the dwelling of a dead man’s

soul, or is of spiritual merit in itself, or whether the stone is the

spirit’s outward part or organ.” And, indeed, a sort of general

confusion between the stone, the ghost, the ancestor, and the god,

at last pervades the mind of the stone-worshipper everywhere. “The

curious anthropomorphic idea of stones being husbands and wives, and

even having children,” as Dr. Tylor calls it--an idea familiar to the

Fijians as to the Peruvians and Lapps--is surely explicable at once by

the existence of headstones either to men or women, and the confusion

between the mark and the ghost it commemorates.

An interesting side-point in this gradual mixing up of the ghost and the

stone, the god and the image, is shown in a gradual change of detail

as to the mode of making offerings at the tomb or shrine. On the great

trilithon in Tonga, {109}Miss Gordon-Cumming tells us, a bowl of kava

was placed on a horizontal stone. Here it must have been supposed that

the ghost itself issued forth (perhaps by night) to drink it, as the

serpent which represented the spirit of Anchises glided from the tomb

to lick up the offerings presented by Æneas. Gradually, however, as the

stone and the ghost get more closely connected in idea the offering

is made to the monument itself; though in the earlier stages the

convenience of using the flat altar-stone (wherever such exists) as a

place of sacrifice for victims probably masks the transition even to the

worshippers themselves. Dr. Wise saw in the Himalayas a group of stones

“erected to the memory of the petty Rajahs of Kolam,” where “some

fifty or sixty unfortunate women sacrificed themselves.” The blood,

in particular, is offered up to the ghost; and “the cup-hollows which

have been found in menhirs and dolmens,” says Captain Conder, “are

the indications of the libations, often of human blood, once poured on

these stones by heathen worshippers.” “Cups are often found,” says

a good Scotch observer, “on stones connected with the monuments of the

dead, such as on the covering stones of kistvaens, particularly those of

the short or rarest form; on the flat stones of cromlechs; and on stones

of chambered graves.” On the top of the cairn at Glen Urquhart, on

Loch Ness, is an oblong mass of slate-stone, obviously sepulchral, and

marked with very numerous cups. When the stones are upright the notion

of offering the blood to the upper part, which represents the face or

mouth, becomes very natural, and forms a distinct step in the process of

anthropomorphisation of the headstone into the idol.

We get two stages of this evolution side by side in the two deities of

the Samoyed travelling ark-sledge, “one with a stone head, the other a

mere black stone, both dressed in green robes with red lappets, and

both smeared with sacrificial blood.” In the Indian groups of standing

stones, representing the Five Pandavas, “it is a usual practice,”

{110}says Dr. Tylor, “to daub each stone with red paint, forming, as

it were, a great blood-spot where the face would be if it were a shaped

idol.” Mr. Spencer, I think, hits the key-note of this practice in an

instructive passage. “A Dakotah,” he says, “before praying to a

stone for succour paints it with some red pigment, such as red ochre.

Now, when we read that along with offerings of milk, honey, fruit,

flour, etc., the Bodo and Dhimals offer ‘red lead or cochineal,’ we

may suspect that these three colouring matters, having red as their

common character, are substitutes for blood. The supposed resident ghost

was at first propitiated by anointing the stone with human blood; and

then, in default of this, red pigment was used, ghosts and gods being

supposed by primitive men to be easily deceived by shams.” It

is possible, too, that with the process of idealisation and

spiritualisation it might be supposed a substitute would please the gods

equally well, or that redness generally was the equivalent of blood, in

the same way as the Chinese burn paper money and utensils to set free

their ghosts for the use of ancestral spirits.

In any case, it is interesting to note that the faces of many Hindu gods

are habitually painted red. And that this is the survival of the same

ancient custom we see in the case of Shashti, protectress of children,

whose proper representative is “a rough stone as big as a man’s

head, smeared with red paint, and set at the foot of the sacred

vata-tree.” Like customs survived in Greece down to the classical

period. “The faces of the ancient gilded Dionysi at Corinth,” says

Mr. Lang, quoting Pausanias, “were smudged all over with cinnabar,

like fetish-stones in India or Africa.” In early South Italy, too,

the Priapus-Hermes, who protected the fields, had his face similarly

“daubed with minium.” Is it possible to dissever these facts from

the cannibal banquets of the Aztec gods, where the images had lumps of

palpitating human flesh thrust into their lips, {111}and where their

faces were smeared with the warm blood of the helpless victims?

Only in one instance, however, have I been able to trace the custom of

painting with red directly back to cannibalism, and that is among the

man-eaters of the New Hebrides, where, when a man died, and his body was

laid out in a piece of thick native cloth, “the face was kept exposed

and painted red.” I believe with this practice must ultimately be

correlated the red-painted faces of the Corinthian Dionysi.

Another point of considerable interest and importance in the evolution

of stone worship is connected with the migration of sacred stones. When

the Israelites left Egypt, according to the narrative in Exodus, they

carried the bones of Joseph with them. When Rachel left her father’s

tent she stole the family teraphim to accompany her on her wanderings.

When Æneas flew from burning Troy, he bore away to his ships his

country’s gods, his Lares and Penates. All of these tales, no doubt,

are equally unhistorical, but they represent what, to the people who

framed the legends, seemed perfectly natural and probable conduct. Just

in the same way, when stone-worshippers migrate from one country to

another, they are likely to carry with them their sacred stones, or at

least the most portable or holiest of the number.

Here is a very good illustrative case, once more from that most valuable

storehouse, Turner’s _Samoa_. The Fijian gods and goddesses we saw,

according to Tylor, “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like

smooth round millstones, and there received their offerings of food.”

But on a certain Samoan island, says Mr. Turner, “In a district said

to have been early populated by settlers from Fiji, a number of fancy

Fijian stones were kept in a temple, and worshipped in time of war. The

priest, in consulting them, built them up in the form of a wall, and

then watched to see how they fell. If they fell to the westward, it was

a sign that the enemy there was to be {112}driven; but if they fell to

eastward, that was a warning of defeat, and delay in making an attack

was ordered accordingly.”

I cannot find room here for many detailed instances of similar

migrations; but there are two examples in Britain so exceedingly

interesting that even in so hasty a notice I cannot pass them by without

a brief mention. The inner or smaller stones at Stonehenge are known to

be of remote origin, belonging to rocks not found nearer Salisbury

Plain than Cumberland in one direction or Belgium in the other. They are

surrounded by a group of much larger stones, arranged as trilithons, but

carved out of the common sarsen blocks distributed over the neighbouring

country. I have tried to show elsewhere that these smaller igneous

rocks, untouched by the tool, * were the ancient sacred stones of an

immigrant tribe that came into Britain from the Continent, probably

over a broad land-belt which then existed where the Straits of Dover now

flow; and that the strangers on their arrival in Britain erected these

their ancestral gods on the Plain of Amesbury, and further contributed

to their importance and appearance by surrounding them with a circle of

the biggest and most imposing grey-wethers that the new country in which

they had settled could easily afford.

* So Moses in the legend commanded the children of Israel to

build “an altar of whole stones, over which no man hath lift

up any iron”; and so of the boulders composing the altar on

Mount Ebal it was said, “Thou shah not lift up any iron tool

upon them.” The conservatism of religion kept up the archaic

fashion for sacred purposes.

The other case is that of the Scone stone. This sacred block, according

to the accredited legend, was originally the ancestral god of the Irish

Scots, on whose royal tumulus at Tara it once stood. It was carried by

them to Argyllshire on their first invasion, and placed in a cranny of

the wall (say modern versions) at Dunstaffnage Castle. When the Scotch

kings removed to Scone, Kenneth II. took the stone to his new lowland

residence. Thence Edward I. {113}carried it off to England, where it has

ever since remained in Westminster Abbey, as part of the chair in

which the sovereigns of Britain sit at their coronation. The immense

significance of these facts or tales will be seen more clearly when we

come to consider the analogies of the Hebrew ark. Meanwhile, it may help

to explain the coronation usage, and the legend that wherever the Stone

of Destiny is found “the Scots in place must reign,” if I add a

couple of analogous cases from the history of the same mixed Celtic

race. According to Dr. O’Donovan, the inauguration stone of the

O’Donnells stood on a tumulus in the midst of a large plain; and on

this sacred stone, called the Flagstone of the Kings, the elected chief

stood to receive the white wand or sceptre of kingship. A cylindrical

obelisk, used for the same purpose, stands to this day, according to Dr.

Petrie, in the Rath-na-Riogh. So, too, M’Donald was crowned King of

the Isles, standing on a sacred stone, with an impression on top to

receive his feet. He based himself, as it were, upon the gods his

ancestors. The Tara stone even cried aloud, Professor Rhys tells us,

when the true king placed his feet above it. The coronation stone exists

in other countries; for example, in Hebrew history, or half-history, we

learn that when Abimelech was mads king it was “by the plain of

the pillar that was in Shechem”; and when Jehoash was anointed by

Jehoiada, “the king stood by a pillar, as the manner was.” In front

of the church of Sant’ Ambrogio at Milan stands the stone pillar at

which the Lombard kings and German emperors took the coronation oath,

under the ancient lime-trees which overshadow the piazza.

Now, it is quite true that Mr. Skene, the best authority on Celtic

Scotland, rejects this story of the Stone of Destiny in most parts as

legendary: he believes the Scone stone to have been merely the sacred

coronation-block of the Pictish Kings at Scone, and never to have

come from Ireland at all. Professor Ramsay thinks it is a piece of red

{114}sandstone broken off the rock of that district of Scotland. Even

Professor Rhys (who gives a most interesting account of the Tara Stone)

seems to have doubts as to the migration. But, true or not, the story

will amply serve my purpose here; for I use it only to illustrate the

equally dubious wanderings of a Hebrew sacred stone, at which we will

arrive in due time; and one legend is surely always the best possible

parallel of another.

In the course of ages, as religions develop, and especially as a few

great gods grow to overshadow the minor ancestral Lares and spirits,

it often comes about that sacred stones of the older faith have a new

religious significance given them in the later system. Thus we have seen

the Argives worshipped their old sacred stone under the name of Zeus

Kappotas; the Thespians identified theirs with the later Hellenic Eros;

and the Megarians considered a third as the representative of Phoebus.

The original local sacred stone of Delos has been found on the spot

where it originally stood, beneath the feet of the statue of the Delian

Apollo. And this, I am glad to see, is Mr. Andrew Lang’s view also;

for he remarks of the Greek unwrought stones, “They were blocks which

bore the names of gods, Hera, or Apollo, names perhaps given, as De

Brosses says, to the old fetishistic objects of worship, _after_

the anthropomorphic gods entered [I should say, were developed in]

Hellas.” So, too, in India, the local sacred stones have been

identified with the deities of the Hindu pantheon; Mr. Hislop remarks

that in every part of the Deccan (where Hinduism is of comparatively

late introduction) four or five stones may often be seen in the ryot’s

field, placed in a row and daubed with red paint, which the peasants

call the Five Pandavas; but, says Dr. Tylor, “he reasonably takes

these Hindu names to have superseded more ancient appellations.”

Islam, in like manner, has adopted the Kaaba, the great black stone

of the Holy Place at Mecca; and the Egyptian religion gave {115}a

new meaning to the pillar or monolith, by shaping it as an obelisk to

represent a ray of the rising sun-god.

Sometimes the sanctity of the antique stones was secured in the later

faith by connecting them with some legend or episode of the orthodox

religion. Thus the ancient sacred stone kept at Delphi--no doubt the

original oracle of that great shrine, as the rude Delian block was the

precursor of the Delian Apollo--was explained with reference to the

later Hellenic belief by the myth that it was the stone which Kronos

swallowed in mistake for Zeus: an explanation doubtless due to the fact

that this boulder was kept, like Monigan’s Irish idol and the Samoan

god, wrapped up in flannel; and in the myth, Rhea deceived Kronos by

offering him, instead of Zeus, a stone wrapped in swaddling-bands.

There is here indeed food for much reflection. The sacred stone of the

Trœzenians, in like manner, lay in front of the temple; but it was

Hellenised, so to speak, by the story that on it the Trœzenian elders

sat when they purified Orestes from the murder of his mother.

In modern Europe, as everybody knows, a similar Christianisation of holy

wells, holy stones, and holy places has been managed by connecting them

with legends of saints, or by the still simpler device of marking a

cross upon them. The cross has a threefold value: in the first place,

it drives away from their accustomed haunts the ancient gods or spirits,

always envisaged in early Christian and mediæval thought as devils or

demons; in the second place, it asserts the supremacy of the new faith;

and in the third place, by conferring a fresh sanctity upon the old holy

place or object, it induces the people to worship the cross by the

mere habit of resorting to the shrine at which their ancestors so long

worshipped. Gregory’s well-known advice to St. Augustine on this

matter is but a single example of what went on over all Christendom.

In many cases, crosses in Britain are still found firmly fixed in old

sacred stones, usually recognisable by their unwrought condition. The

finest {116}example in Europe is probably the gigantic monolith of

Plumen in Brittany, topped by an insignificant little cross, and still

resorted to by the peasants (especially the childless) as a great place

of worship. The prehistoric monuments of Narvia in the Isle of Man have

been Christianised by having crosses deeply incised upon them. Other

cases, like the Black Stones of Iona, which gave sanctity to that Holy

Isle long before the time of Columba, will doubtless occur at once to

every reader. With many of the Scotch sculptured stones, it is difficult

to decide whether they were originally erected as crosses, or are

prehistoric monuments externally Christianised.

I have thus endeavoured briefly to suggest the ultimate derivation of

all sacred stones from sepulchral monuments, and to point out the very

large part which they bear in the essential of religion--that is to say,

worship--everywhere. There is, however, one particular application to

which I wish to call special attention, because of its peculiar

interest as regards the origin of the monotheistic god of Judaism and

Christianity. Hitherto in this chapter, I have intentionally made but

very few allusions to the faith and the sacred stones of the Hebrews,

because I wished first to give a general view of the whole ramifications

and modifications of stone-worship before coming down to the particular

instance in which we modern Europeans are most deeply interested. I will

now, however, give a brief summary of what seems to me most suggestive

and important in the early Semitic stone-cult. These results are no

doubt already familiar in outline to most cultivated readers, but it

is possible they may appear in a somewhat new light when regarded in

connexion with the general history of stone-worship as here elucidated.

That the Semites, as well as other early nations, were stone-worshippers

we know from a great number of positive instances. The stone pillars of

Baal and the wooden Ashera cones were the chief objects of adoration in

the Phoenician religion. The Stone of Bethel was apparently a menhir:

{117}the cairn of Mizpeh was doubtless a sepulchral monument. The

Israelites under Joshua, we are told, built a Gilgal of twelve standing

stones; and other instances in the early traditions of the Hebrews will

be noticed in their proper place later on. Similarly, among the Arabs of

the time of Mohammed, two of the chief deities were Manah and Lât,

the one a rock, the other a sacred stone or stone idol: and the Kaaba

itself, the great black stone of local worship, even the Prophet was

compelled to recognise and Islamise by adopting it bodily into his

monotheistic religion.

The stone worship of the Semites at large, though comparatively

neglected by Professor Robertson Smith, must have played a large part

in the religion of that race, from which the Hebrews were a special

offshoot. “In Arabia,” says Professor Smith, “where sacrifice by

fire was almost unknown, we find no proper altar, but in its place a

rude pillar or heap of stones, beside which the victim is slain, the

blood being poured out over the stone or at its base.” To the great

orientalist, it is true, the sacred stone or altar, like the sacred

tree and the sacred fountain, are nothing more than “common symbols

at sanctuaries”; he thinks of them not as gods but merely as

representatives of the god, arbitrarily chosen. After the evidence

I have already adduced, however, I think it will be seen that this

position is altogether untenable; indeed, Dr. Smith himself uses many

phrases in this connexion which enables us to see the true state of the

case far more clearly than he himself did. “The sacred stones [of the

Arabs], which are already mentioned by Herodotus, are called _ansab_,

i.e., stones set up, pillars. We also find the name _ghariy_,

‘blood-bedaubed,’ with reference to the ritual just described [of

sacrifice at the _nosb_ or sacred pillar]. The meaning of this ritual

will occupy us later: meantime the thing to be noted is that the altar

is only a modification of the _nosb_, and that the rude Arabian usage

is the primitive type out of which all the elaborate altar ceremonies

of the {118}more cultivated Semites grew. Whatever else was done in

connexion with a sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling or dashing

the blood against the altar, or allowing it to flow down on the ground

at its base, was hardly ever omitted; and this practice was not peculiar

to the Semites, but was equally the rule with the Greeks and Romans, and

indeed with the ancient nations generally.”

“It is certain,” says Professor Smith again, “that the original

altar among the Northern Semites, as well as among the Arabs, was a

great stone or cairn, at which the blood of the victim was shed.”

There is no difference, he declares, between the Hebrew altar and the

Arabian standing stone. “Monolithic pillars or cairns of stone are

frequently mentioned in the more ancient parts of the Old Testament as

standing at Sanctuaries, generally in connexion with a sacred legend

about the occasion on which they were set up by some famous patriarch

or hero. In the biblical story, they usually appear as mere memorial

structures without any definite ritual significance; but the

pentateuchal law looks on the use of sacred pillars as idolatrous. This

is the best evidence that such pillars held an important place among the

appurtenances of Canaanite temples; and as Hosea speaks of the pillar

as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of Northern Israel in

his time, we may be sure that by the mass of the Hebrews the pillars of

Shechem, Bethel, Gilgal, and other shrines were looked upon, not as mere

memorials of historical events, but as necessary parts of the ritual

apparatus of a place of worship.... From these evidences, and especially

from the fact that libations of the same kind are applied to both, it

seems clear that the altar is a differentiated form of the primitive

rude stone pillar. But the sacred stone is more than an altar, for in

Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries the altar, in its developed form as a

table or hearth, does not supersede the pillar; the two are found side

by side at the same sanctuary, the altar as a piece of sacrificial

apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the

{119}presence of the deity, which in process of time comes to be

fashioned and carved in various ways, till ultimately it becomes a

statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone, just as the sacred tree or post

was ultimately developed into an image of wood.”

In spite of much obvious groping in the dark in this and other passages

of the _Religion of the Semites_, it is clear that the learned professor

recognised at least one central fact--“the sacred stone at Semitic

sanctuaries was from the first an object of worship, a sort of rude idol

in which the divinity was somehow supposed to be present.” Again, he

notes that “Jacob’s pillar is more than a mere landmark, for it is

anointed, just as idols were in antiquity, and the pillar itself, not

the spot on which it stood, is called ‘the house of God,’ as if the

deity were conceived actually to dwell in the stone, or manifest himself

therein to his worshippers. And this is the conception which appears to

have been associated with sacred stones everywhere. When the Arab daubed

blood on the _nosh_, his object was to bring the offering into direct

contact with the deity; and in like manner the practice of stroking the

sacred stone with the hand is identical with the practice of touching or

stroking the garments or beard of a man in acts of supplication before

him.” Elsewhere he says: “So far as evidence from tradition and

ritual goes, we can only think of the sacred stone as consecrated by the

actual presence of the godhead, so that whatever touched it was brought

into immediate contact with the deity.” And he quotes a line from an

Arab poet in which the Arabian gods are expressly described as “gods

of stone.”

It is thus clear that sacred stones were common objects of worship with

the Semites in general, and also with the Hebrew people in particular.

But after the exclusive worship of Jahweh, the local Jewish god,

had grown obligatory among the Jews, it became the policy of the

“Jehovist” priests to Jehovise and to consecrate the sacred stones

of Palestine by bringing them into connexion {120}with the Jehovistic

legend and the tales of the Patriarchs. Thus Professor Cheyne comments

as follows upon the passage in Isaiah where the prophet mocks the

partizan of the old polytheistic creed as a stone-worshipper--“Among

the smooth stones of the valley is thy portion: They, they are thy lot:

Even to them hast thou poured a drink offering: Thou hast offered a meat

offering: “The large smooth stones referred to above were the fetishes

of the primitive Semitic races, and anointed with oil, according to a

widely spread custom. It was such a stone which Jacob took for a pillow,

and afterwards consecrated by pouring oil upon it. The early Semites and

reactionary idolatrous Israelites called such stones Bethels.... i.e.,

houses of _El_ (the early Semitic word for God) *.... In spite of the

efforts of the ‘Jehovist’ who desired to convert these ancient

fetishes into memorials of patriarchal history, the old heathenish use

of them seems to have continued especially in secluded places.”

* Say rather, “for a god.”

Besides the case of the stone at Bethel, there is the later one (in our

narrative) when Jacob and Laban made a covenant, “and Jacob took a

stone, and set it up for a pillar. And Jacob said unto his brethren,

Gather stones; and they took stones and made an heap: and they did eat

there upon the heap.” So, once more, at Shalem, he erects an altar

called El-Elohe-Israel; he sets a pillar upon the grave of Rachel, and

another at the place at Luz where God appeared to him. Of like import is

the story of the twelve stones which the twelve men take out of Jordan

to commemorate the passage of the tribes. All are clearly attempts to

Jehovise these early sacred stones or local gods by connecting them with

incidents in the Jehovistic version of the ancient Hebrew legends.

That such stones, however, were worshipped as deities in early times,

before the cult of Jahweh had become an exclusive one among his

devotees, is evident from the Jehovistic {121}narrative itself, which

has not wholly succeeded in blotting out all traces of earlier religion.

Samuel judged Israel every year at Bethel, the place of Jacob’s sacred

pillar: at Gilgal, the place where Joshua’s twelve stones were set

up; and at Mizpeh, where stood the cairn surmounted by the pillar of

Laban’s covenant. In other words, these were the sanctuaries of the

chief ancient gods of Israel. Samuel himself “took a stone and set it

between Mizpeh and Shem and its very name, Eben-ezer, “the stone of

help,” shows that it was originally worshipped before proceeding on

warlike expeditions, though the Jehovistic gloss, “saying, Hitherto

the Lord hath helped us,” does its best, of course, to obscure the

real meaning. So at Peran, in New Guinea, Mr. Chalmers saw “a large

peculiarly-shaped stone,” by name Ravai, considered very sacred.

Sacrifices are made to it, and it is more particularly addressed in

times of fighting. “Before setting forth, offerings are presented,

with food,” and the stone is entreated to precede the warriors into

battle. Wherever a stone has a name, it is almost certainly of mortuary

origin. It was to the stone-circle of Gilgal, once more, that Samuel

directed Saul to go, saying, “I will come down unto thee, to offer

burnt-offerings, and to sacrifice sacrifices of peace-offerings.”

It was at the cairn of Mizpeh that Saul was chosen king; and after the

victory over the Ammonites, Saul went once more to the great Stonehenge

at Gilgal to “renew the kingdom,” and “there they made Saul

king before Jahweh in Gilgal; and there they sacrificed sacrifices of

peace-offerings before Jahweh.” This passage is a very instructive and

important one, because here we see that in the opinion of the writer at

least Jahweh was then domiciled at Gilgal, amid the other sacred stones

of that holy circle.

Observe, “however, that when Saul was directed to go to find his

father’s asses, he was sent first to Rachel’s pillar at Telzah, and

then to the plain of Tabor, where he was to meet “three men going up

to God [not to Jahweh] at Bethel,” {122}evidently to sacrifice, “one

carrying three kids, and another carrying three loaves of bread,

and another carrying a bottle of wine.” These and many other like

memorials of stone-worship lie thickly scattered through the early books

of the Hebrew Scriptures, sometimes openly avowed, and sometimes cloaked

under a thin veil of Jehovism.

On the other hand, at the present day, the Palestine exploration has

shown that no rude stone monuments exist in Palestine proper, though

east of the Jordan they are common in all parts of the country. How,

then, are we to explain their disappearance? Major Conder thinks that

when pure Jehovism finally triumphed under Hezekiah and Josiah, the

Jehovists destroyed all these “idolatrous” stones throughout the

Jewish dominions, in accordance with the injunctions in the Book of

Deuteronomy to demolish the religious emblems of the Canaanites. Jahweh,

the god of the Hebrews, was a jealous God, and he would tolerate no

alien sacred stones within his own jurisdiction.

And who or what was this Jahweh himself, this local and ethnic god of

the Israelites, who would suffer no other god or sacred monolith to live

near him?

I will not lay stress upon the point that when Joshua was dying,

according to the legend, he “took a great stone” and set it up by

an oak that was by the sanctuary of Jahweh, saying that it had heard all

the words of Jahweh. That document is too doubtful in terms to afford

us much authority. But I will merely point out that at the time when we

first seem to catch clear historic glimpses of true Jahweh worship, we

find Jahweh, whoever or whatever that mystic object might have been,

located with his ark at the Twelve Stones at Gilgal. It is quite clear

that in “the camp at Gilgal,” as the later compilers believed,

Jahweh, god of Israel, who had brought his people up out of Egypt,

remained till the conquest of the land was completed. But after the end

of the conquest, the {123}tent in which he dwelt was removed to Shiloh;

and that Jahweh went with it is clear from the fact that Joshua cast

lots for the land there “before Jahweh, our God.” He was there still

when Hannah and her husband went up to Shiloh to sacrifice unto Jahweh;

and when Samuel ministered unto Jahweh before Eli the priest. That

Jahweh made a long stay at Shiloh is, therefore, it would seem, a

true old tradition--a tradition of the age just before the historical

beginnings of the Hebrew annals.

But Jahweh was an object of portable size, for, omitting for the present

the descriptions in the Pentateuch, which seem likely to be of late

date, and not too trustworthy, through their strenuous Jehovistic

editing, he was carried from Shiloh in his ark to the front during the

great battle with the Philistines at Ebenezer; and the Philistines were

afraid, for they said, “A god is come into the camp.” But when the

Philistines captured the ark, the rival god, Dagon, fell down and broke

in pieces--so Hebrew legend declared--before the face of Jahweh. After

the Philistines restored the sacred object, it rested for a time

at Kirjath-jearim, till David, on the capture of Jerusalem from the

Jebusites, went down to that place to bring up from thence the ark of

the god; and as it went, on a new cart, they “played before Jahweh

on all manner of instruments,” and David himself “danced before

Jahweh.” Jahweh was then placed in the tent or tabernacle that David

had prepared for him, till Solomon built the first temple, “the house

of Jahweh,” and Jahweh’s ark was set up in it, “in the oracle of

the house, the most holy place, even under the wings of the cherubim.”

Just so Mr. Chalmers tells us that when he was at Peran, in New Guinea,

the peculiarly-shaped holy stone, Ravai, and the two wooden idols, Epe

and Kivava, “made long ago and considered very sacred,” were for the

moment “located in an old house, until all the arrangements necessary

for their removal to the splendid new dubu prepared for them are

completed.” And so, too, at the opposite end of the scale of

civilisation, as Mr. {124}Lang puts it, “the fetish-stones of Greece

were those which occupied the holy of holies of the most ancient

temples, the mysterious fanes within dark cedar or cypress groves, to

which men were hardly admitted.”

That Jahweh himself, in the most ancient traditions of the race, was

similarly concealed within his chest or ark in the holy of holies,

is evident, I think, to any attentive reader. It is true, the later

Jehovistic glosses of Exodus and Deuteronomy, composed after the

Jehovistic worship had become purified and spiritualised, do their best

to darken the comprehension of this matter by making the presence of

Jahweh seem always incorporeal; and even in the earlier traditions, the

phrase “the ark of the covenant of Jahweh” is often substituted for

the simpler and older one, “the ark of Jahweh.” But through all the

disfigurements with which the priestly scribes of the age of Josiah and

the sacerdotalists of the return from the captivity have overlaid the

primitive story, we can still see clearly in many places that Jahweh

himself was at first personally present in the ark that covered him.

And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship they

had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was

nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there

at Horeb, when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when

they came out of the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they

admit--that the object or objects concealed in the ark consisted of a

sculptured stone or stones; and that to dance or sing before this stone

or these stones was equivalent to dancing or singing before the face of

Jahweh.

The question whether the mysterious body concealed in the ark was or was

not a lingam or other phallic object I purposely omit to discuss here,

as not cognate to our present enquiry. It is sufficient to insist that

from the evidence before us, first, it _was_ Jahweh himself, and second,

it was an object made of stone. Further than that ’twere {125}curious

to enquire, and I for one do not desire to pry into the mysteries.

Not to push the argument too far, then, we may say this much is fairly

certain. The children of Israel in early times carried about with them

a tribal god, Jahweh, whose presence in their midst was intimately

connected with a certain ark or chest, containing a stone object or

objects. This chest was readily portable, and could be carried to the

front in case of warfare. They did not know the origin of the object in

the ark with certainty, but they regarded it emphatically as “Jahweh

their god, which led them out of the land of Egypt.” Even after its

true nature had been spiritualised away into a great national deity, the

most unlimited and incorporeal the world has ever known (as we get him

in the best and purest work of the prophets), the imagery of later times

constantly returns to the old idea of a stone pillar or menhir. In the

embellished account of the exodus from Egypt, Jahweh goes before the

Israelites as a pillar or monolith of cloud by day and of fire by night.

According to Levitical law his altar must be built of unhewn stone,

“for if thou lift up thy tool upon it thou hast polluted it.” It is

as a Rock that the prophets often figuratively describe Jahweh, using

the half-forgotten language of an earlier day to clothe their own

sublimer and more purified conceptions. It is to the Rock of Israel--the

sacred stone of the tribe--that they look for succour. Nay, even when

Josiah accepted the forged roll of the law and promised to abide by

it, “the king stood by a pillar (a menhir) and made a covenant before

Jahweh.” Even to the last we see in vague glimpses the real original

nature of the worship of that jealous god who caused Dagon to break

in pieces before him, and would allow no other sacred stones to remain

undemolished within his tribal boundaries.

I do not see, therefore, how we can easily avoid the obvious inference

that Jahweh, the god of the Hebrews, who later became sublimated and

etherealised into the God {126}of Christianity, was in his origin

nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of

Israel, however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all,

the unhewn monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.

CHAPTER VI.--SACRED STAKES.

|MILTON {127}speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our

fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly

contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast

majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in

all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for

their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite

so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less

important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks

into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have

already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or

megalithic monument.

Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of

an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the

honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as

elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct

reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the

interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great

men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty

have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day

at Père Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second

place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than

the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is

{128}chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and

it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are

always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less

critical than the stone in the history of religion.

Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred stone

derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the grave to keep

down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from the sharp-pointed

stick driven through the body to pin it down as we saw in the third

chapter, and still so employed in Christian England to prevent suicides

from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to protrude from

the ground, so as to warn living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit.

At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere

grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative inconspicuousness, it

obtains relatively little notice, it is now and always has been by far

the most common mode of preserving the memory of the spot where a person

lies buried. A good example, which will throw light upon many subsequent

modifications, is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New

Guinea. “The body,” he says, “was buried. At the side was set up

a stake, to which were tied the spear, club, bow and arrow of the

deceased, but broken, to prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave

of a woman: her cooking utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the

stake.” Similar customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.

Though worship of stakes or wooden posts is common all over the world, I

can give but few quite unequivocal instances of such worship being paid

to a post actually known to surmount an undoubted grave. Almost the

best direct evidence I can obtain is the case of the grave-pole in Buru,

already quoted from Mr. H. O. Forbes. But the following account of

a Samoyed place of sacrifice, extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s

_Voyage of the Vega_, is certainly suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats

Island {129}the Swedish explorer found a number of reindeer skulls, so

arranged that they formed a close thicket of antlers. Around lay other

bones, both of bears and reindeer; and in the midst of all “the

mighty beings to whom all this splendour was offered. They consisted’ of

hundreds of small wooden sticks, the upper portions of which were carved

very clumsily in the form of the human countenance, most of them

from fifteen to twenty, but some of them three hundred and seventy

centimetres in length. They were all stuck in the ground on the

southeast part of the eminence. Near the place of sacrifice there were

to be seen pieces of driftwood and remains of the fireplace at which the

sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide told us that at these meals the

mouths of the idols were besmeared with blood and wetted with brandy;

and the former statement was confirmed by the large spots of blood

which were found on most of the large idols below the holes intended to

represent the mouth.” At a far earlier date, Stephen Burrough in 1556

writes as follows to much the same effect in his interesting narrative

printed in Hakluyt: “There I met againe with Loshak, and went on shore

with him, and he brought me to a heap of Samoeds idols, which were in

number about 300, the worst and the most unartificiall worke that ever I

saw: the eyes and mouthes of sundrie of them were bloodie, they had the

shape of men, women, and children, very grossly wrought, and that which

they had made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood. Some of

their idols were an olde sticke with two or three notches, made with a

knife in it. There was one of their sleds broken and lay by the heape of

idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which the foules had spoyled:

and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as high as their

mouthes; being all bloody, I thought that to be the table wheron they

offered their sacrifice.”

In neither of these accounts, it is true, is it distinctly mentioned

that the place of sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: {130}but I

believe this to be the case, partly from analogy, and partly because

Nordenskiôld mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled is a frequent

sign of a Samoyed grave. Compare also the following account of a

graveyard among nominally Christian Ostyak Siberians, also from

Nordenskiôld: “The corpses were placed in large coffins above ground,

at which almost always a cross was erected.” [The accompanying

woodcut shews that these crosses were rude wooden stakes with one or two

crossbars.] “In one of the crosses a sacred picture was inserted

which must be considered a further proof that a Christian rested in the

coffin. Notwithstanding this, we found some clothes, which had belonged

to the departed, hanging on a bush beside the grave, together with a

bundle containing food, principally dried fish. At the graves of the

richer natives the survivors are even said to place along with food some

rouble notes, in order that the departed may not be altogether without

ready money on his entrance into the other world.”

To complete the parallel, I ought to add that money was also deposited

on the sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of another such sacrificial

place on Yalmal, Nordenskiôld says, after describing a pile of bones,

reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws: “In the middle of the heap of bones

stood four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted of sticks a metre in

length, with notches cut in them.... The two others, which clearly were

the proper idols of this place of sacrifice, consisted of driftwood

roots, on which some carvings had been made to distinguish the eyes,

mouth, and nose. The parts of the pieces of wood, intended to represent

the eyes and mouth, had recently been besmeared with blood, and

there still lay at the heap of bones the entrails of a newly killed

reindeer.”

Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the

wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps further

to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute writer, among

the Ostyaks {131}of Eastern Siberia there is found a most interesting

custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition from the

image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man dies, they set

up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which receives offerings

at every meal and has honours paid to it, while the widow continually

embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried

at the end of three years or so: but sometimes “the image of a shaman

(native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is set up permanently, and remains

as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say “god”; and we

see the transformation at once completed. Indeed, Erman adds acutely

about the greater gods of the Ostyaks: “That these latter also have a

historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished

men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by

degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to

doubt.”

With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden idols, it

must be remembered that bowls of blood are common offerings to the dead;

and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly witness in this matter,

has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts with those to deities. In the

eleventh book of the Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink greedily of

the sacrificial blood; and libations of gore form a special feature in

Greek offerings to heroes. That blood was offered to the sacred stones

we have already seen; and we noticed that there as here it was specially

smeared upon the parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to

gods, or pouring of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular

notice; and we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come

to consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will

only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on blood

as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh asks indignantly

in the fiftieth {132}Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink

the blood of goats?”

To pass on to more unequivocal cases of stake-worship, where we can

hardly doubt that the stake represents a dead man, Captain Cook noticed

that in the Society Islands “the carved wooden images at burial-places

were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which the souls of

the departed retired.” So Ellis observes of Polynesians generally that

the sacred objects might be either mere stocks and stones, or carved

wooden images, from six to eight feet long down to as many inches. Some

of these were to represent “tu,” divine manes or spirits of the

dead; while others were to represent “tu,” or deities of higher

rank and power. To my mind, this is almost a distinction without a

difference; the first being ghosts of recently deceased ancestors, the

second ghosts of remoter progenitors. The ancient Araucanians again

fixed over a tomb an upright log, “rudely carved to represent the

human frame.” After the death of New Zealand chiefs, wooden images,

20 to 40 feet high, were erected as monuments. I might easily multiply

instances; but I refrain lest the list grow tedious.

Dr. Codrington notes that the large mouths and lolling tongues of many

New Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to the habit of smearing the

mouth with blood and other offerings.

Where men preserve the corpses of their dead, images are not so likely

to grow up; but where fear of the dead has brought about the practice of

burial or burning, it is reasonable that the feelings of affection

which prompted gifts and endearments to the mummy in the first stage

of thought should seek some similar material outlet under the altered

circumstances. Among ourselves, a photograph, a portrait, the toys of

a dead child, are preserved and cherished. Among savages, ruder

representations become necessary. They bury the actual corpse safely

out of sight, but make some rough wooden imitation to represent {133}it.

Thus it does not surprise us to find that while the Marianne Islanders

keep the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household

gods, and expect them to give oracles out of their skulls, the New

Zealanders, on the other hand, “set up memorial idols of deceased

persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them as if

still alive, and casting garments to them when they pass by,” while

they also “preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each

dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor.” The Coast Negroes “place

several earthen images on the graves.” Some Papuans, “after a grave

is filled up, collect round an idol, and offer provisions to it.” The

Javans dress up an image in the clothes of the deceased. So, too, of the

Caribs of the West Indies, we learn that they “carved little images in

the shape in which they believed spirits to have appeared to them; and

some human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them.”

From such little images, obviously substituted for the dead body which

used once to be preserved and affectionately tended, are derived, I

believe, most of the household gods of the world--the Lares and Penates

of the Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.

How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see among the

Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the _matmate_ are the spirits of their

ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or household gods.

They are supposed to enter the house through an opening in the roof, and

to take up their abode temporarily in the skulls, or in images of wood

or ivory, in order to partake of the offerings.”

A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in still

stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the image. A

New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child, and carries it

about with her; whereas a West African mother, living in a tribe where

terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial, makes {134}a

little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash, wraps it in

skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby. Bastian saw

Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their

backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat higher level, “the

spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe

not a few of these instances, “were represented by, and in language

completely identified with, the carved wooden heads” (note this

point) “or more complete images, to which worship and sacrifice were

offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I think, the course

of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the ashes of the dead are

similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which are afterwards worshipped

as household gods.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples some of

which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the growth of the

idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the real body for burial

or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, a

figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished

with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of France was buried, “over the

coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and

diamonds, and holding two shields.... This image was dressed with cloth

of gold.... In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre

Dame.” Madame de Motteville says of the father of the great Condé,

“The effigy of this prince was waited upon for three days, as was

customary”--forty days having been the original time during which food

was supplied to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes

a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the

Westminster Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.

As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit

that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be

generally recognised, it {135}would be a simple transference of feeling

to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine

or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian

tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them

to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among

the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman

in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff

planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there

necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up

was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even

probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote

one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent

connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth

(like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and

sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to

that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave,

wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles.

Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work _The Hairy Ainu_, figures and

describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The

stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance;

those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This

fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and

elsewhere.

Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their

genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes

usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood

described as an _ashera_. What kind of object an _ashera_ was we learn

from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an _ashera_

of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is

clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.”

But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar,

{136}beside which stood an _ashera_, under a green tree,--all three

of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together.

A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and

wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree.

“The _ashera_,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred

symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G.

Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the

divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present

work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally

the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,”

says Professor Smith, again, “had its _ashera_, even such altars as in

the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to

Jehovah.”

The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other

grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian

monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental

pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act

of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says

Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the

_ashera_ was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or

Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings

(xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove _hangings_ for

the _ashera_.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the

parallel of the sacred _erica_ at Byblus, which was “a mere dead

stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped

in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore

represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis).

“But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew _ashera_.” So

near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may

he miss its actual import.

I will dwell no longer upon these more or less remote derivatives of the

grave-stake. I will only say briefly that in {137}my opinion all wooden

idols or images are directly or indirectly descended from the wooden

headpost or still more primitive sepulchral pole. Not of course that

I suppose every wooden image to have been necessarily once itself a

funereal monument. Donatello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at Florence,

the blue-robed and star-spangled Madonna of the wayside shrine, have

certainly no such immediate origin. But I do believe that the habit of

making and worshipping wooden images arose in the way I have pointed

out; and to those who would accuse me of “gross Euhemerism,” I would

once more remark that even in these highest Christian instances the

objects of veneration are themselves in the last resort admitted to have

been at one time Galilean women. Nay, is not even the wayside shrine

itself in most Catholic countries more often than not the mortuary

chapel erected where some wayfarer has died a violent death, by murder,

lightning, accident, or avalanche?

CHAPTER VIL--SACRED TREES.

|The {138}sacred tree stands less obviously in the direct line of

ancestry of gods and of God than the sacred stone and the sacred

stake which we have just considered. I would willingly pass it over,

therefore, in this long preliminary inquisition, could I safely do so,

in order to progress at once to the specific consideration of the God

of Israel and the rise of Monotheism. But the tree is nevertheless so

closely linked with the two other main objects of human worship that I

hardly see how I can avoid considering it here in the same connexion:

especially as in the end it has important implications with regard

to the tree of the cross, as well as to the True Vine, and many other

elements of Christian faith and Christian symbolism. I shall therefore

give it a short chapter as I pass, premising that I have already entered

into the subject at greater length in my excursus On the Origin of

Tree-Worship, appended to my verse translation of the _Attis_ of

Catullus.

The worship of sacred trees is almost as widely diffused over the whole

world as the worship of dead bodies, mummies, relics, graves, sacred

stones, sacred stakes, and stone or wooden idols. The great authorities

on the subject of Tree-Worship are Mannhardt’s _Baumkultus_ and Mr.

J. G. Frazer’s _The Golden Bough_. Neither of those learned and acute

writers, however, has fully seen the true origin of worship from funeral

practices: and therefore it becomes necessary to go over the same

ground again briefly here from the point of view afforded us by the

corpse-theory and {139}ghost-theory of the basis of religion. I shall

hope to add something to their valuable results, and also incidentally

to show that all the main objects of worship together leads us back

unanimously to the Cult of the Dead as their common starting-point.

Let us begin in this instance (contrary to our previous practice) by

examining and endeavouring to understand a few cases of the behaviour of

tree-spirits in various mythologies. Virgil tells us in the Third Æneid

how, on a certain occasion, Æneas was offering a sacrifice on a tumulus

crowned with dogwood and myrtle bushes. He endeavoured to pluck up some

of these by the roots, in order to cover the altar, as was customary,

with leaf-clad branches. As he did so, the first bush which he tore up

astonished him by exuding drops of liquid blood, which trickled and fell

upon the soil beneath. He tried again, and again the tree bled human

gore. On the third trial, a groan was heard proceeding from the tumulus,

and a voice assured Æneas that the barrow on which he stood covered the

murdered remains of his friend Polydorus.

Now, in this typical and highly illustrative myth--no doubt an ancient

and well-known story incorporated by Virgil in his great poem--we

see that the tree which grows upon a barrow is itself regarded as the

representative and embodiment of the dead man’s soul, just as elsewhere

the snake which glides from the tomb of Anchises is regarded as the

embodied spirit of the hero, and just as the owls and bats which haunt

sepulchral caves are often identified in all parts of the world with the

souls of the departed.

Similar stories of bleeding or speaking trees or bushes occur abundantly

elsewhere. “When the oak is being felled,” says Aubrey, in his

_Remains of Gentilisme_, “it gives a kind of shriekes and groanes that

may be heard a mile off, as if it were the genius of the oak lamenting.

E. Wyld, Esq., hath heared it severall times.” Certain Indians, says

Bastian, dare not cut a particular plant, because there comes out of

it a red juice which they take for its blood. {140}I myself remember

hearing as a boy in Canada that wherever _Sanguinaria Canadensis_, the

common American bloodroot, grew in the woods, an Indian had once been

buried, and that the red drops of juice which exuded from the stem when

one picked the flowers were the dead man’s blood. In Samoa, says Mr.

Turner, the special abode of Tuifiti, King of Fiji, was a grove of large

and durable afzelia trees. “No one dared cut that timber. A story is

told of a party from Upolu who once attempted it, and the consequence

was that blood flowed from the tree, and that the sacrilegious strangers

all took ill and died.” Till 1855, says Mannhardt, there was a sacred

larch-tree at Nauders in the Tyrol, which was thought to bleed whenever

it was cut. In some of these cases, it is true, we do not actually know

that the trees grew on tumuli, but this point is specially noticed about

Polydorus’s dogwood, and is probably implied in the Samoan case, as I

gather from the title given to the spirit as king of Fiji.

In other instances, however, such a doubt does not exist. We are

expressly told that it is the souls of the dead which are believed to

animate the speaking or bleeding trees. “The Dieyerie tribe of South

Australia,” says Mr. Frazer, “regard as very sacred certain trees

which are supposed to be their fathers transformed; hence they will not

cut the trees down, and protest against settlers doing so.” Some of

the Philippine Islanders believe that the souls of their forefathers

inhabit certain trees, which they therefore spare. If obliged to fell

one of these sacred trunks, they excuse themselves by saying that it was

the priests who made them fell it.

Now, how did this connexion between the tree and the ghost or ancestor

grow up? In much the same way, I imagine, as the connexion between the

sacred stone or the sacred stake and the dead chief who lies buried

beneath it. Whatever grows or stands upon the grave is sure to share the

honours paid to the spirit that dwells within it. Thus a snake or other

animal seen to glide out of a tomb is {141}instantly taken by savages

and even by half-civilised men as the genius or representative of the

dead inhabitant. But do trees grow out of graves? Undoubtedly, yes.

In the first place, they may grow by mere accident, as they might grow

anywhere else; the more so as the soil in such a case has been turned

and laboured. But beyond this, in the second place, it is common all

over the world to plant trees or shrubs over the graves of relatives or

tribesmen. Though direct evidence on this point is difficult to obtain,

a little is forthcoming. In Algeria, I observed, the Arab women went

on Fridays to plant flowers and shrubs on the graves of their immediate

dead. I learned from Mr. R. L. Stevenson that similar plantings take

place in Samoa and Fiji. The Tahitians put young casuarinas on graves.

In Roman Catholic countries the planting of shrubs in cemeteries takes

place usually on the _jour des morts_, a custom which would argue for it

an immense antiquity; for though it is a point of honour among Catholics

to explain this _fete_ as of comparatively recent origin, definitely

introduced by a particular saint at a particular period, its analogy to

similar celebrations elsewhere shows us that it is really a surviving

relic of a very ancient form of Manesworship.

In Græco-Roman antiquity it is certain that trees were frequently

planted around the barrows of the dead; and that leafy branches formed

part of the established ceremonial of funerals. I cannot do better than

quote in this respect once more the case of Polydorus:=

```Ergo instauramus Polydoro funus, et ingens

```Aggeritur tumulo tellus; stant Manibus aræ,

```Cæruleis mœstæ vittis atraque cupresso.=

Suetonius again tells us how the tumulus of the divine Augustus was

carefully planted; and the manner in which he notes the fact seems to me

to argue that some special importance was attached to the ceremony. The

acacia is one of the most sacred trees of Egypt; and Egyptian monuments,

with their usual frankness, show us a sarcophagus {142}from which an

acacia emerges, with the naïve motto, “Osiris springs forth.”,

An incident which occurred during the recent Sino-Japanese war shows how

easily points of this sort may be overlooked by hasty writers in formal

descriptions. One of the London illustrated papers printed an account of

the burial of the Japanese dead at Port Arthur, and after mentioning the

simple headstone erected at each grave volunteered the further statement

that nothing else marked the place of interment. But the engraving which

accompanied it, taken from a photograph, showed on the contrary that a

little tree had also been planted on each tiny tumulus.

I learn from Mr. William Simpson that the Tombs of the Kings near Pekin

are conspicuous from afar by their lofty groves of pine trees.

Evergreens, I believe, are specially planted upon graves or tumuli

because they retain their greenness throughout the entire winter, and

thus as it were give continuous evidence of the vitality and activity of

the indwelling spirit. Mr. Frazer has shown in _The Golden Bough_

that mistletoe similarly owes its special sanctity to the fact that it

visibly holds the soul of the tree uninjured in itself, while all the

surrounding branches stand bare and lifeless. Accordingly, tumuli are

very frequently crowned by evergreens. Almost all the round barrows in

southern England, for example, are topped by very ancient Scotch firs;

and as the Scotch fir is not an indigenous tree south of the Tweed,

it is practically certain that these old pines are the descendants of

ancestors put in by human hands when the barrows were first raised over

the cremated and buried bodies of prehistoric chieftains. In short,

the Scotch fir is in England the sacred tree of the barrows. As a rule,

however, in Northern Europe, the yew is the species specially planted

in graveyards, and several such yews in various parts of England and

Germany are held to possess a peculiar sanctity. The great clump of very

ancient yews in {143}Norbury Park near Dorking, known as the Druids’

Grove, has long been considered a holy wood of remote antiquity. In

southern Europe, the cypress replaces the yew as the evergreen most

closely connected with tombs and cemeteries. In Provence and Italy,

however, the evergreen holme-oak is almost equally a conventional

denizen of places of interment. M. Lajard in his able essay _Sur le

Culte du Cypres_ has brought together much evidence of this worship of

evergreens, among the Greeks, Etruscans, Romans, Phoenicians, Arabs,

Persians, Hindus, Chinese, and American nations.

Sacred trees, especially when standing alone, are treated in many

respects with the same ceremonial as is employed towards dead bodies,

mummies, graves, sacred stones, sacred stakes, and carved idols or

statues. In other words, the offerings to the ghost or god may be made

to the tree that grows on the grave just as well as to any other of the

recognised embodiments of the indwelling spirit. Darwin in the _Voyage

of the Beagle_ describes how the Indians of South America would greet

with loud shouts some sacred tree, standing solitary on some high part

of the Pampas; libations of brandy and maté were poured into a hole at

its base to gratify the soul of the deity who dwelt there. One of these

tree-gods had a name, Walleechu. The Congo people, again, put calabashes

of palm-wine at the foot of “trees treated as idols.” In other

cases, blood is smeared on the tree; or oil is offered to it. Mr.

Duff Macdonald’s Central Africans kill chickens at the foot of the

“prayer tree,” and let its blood trickle down to the roots. Oldfield

saw at Addacoodah fowls and many other articles of food suspended as

offerings to a gigantic tree. Sir William Hunter mentions that once a

year at Beerbhoom the Santals “make simple offerings to a ghost who

dwells in a Bela tree.” In Tonga, the natives lay presents of food

at the foot of particular trees which they believe to be inhabited by

spirits. I need not multiply {144}instances; they may be found by the

hundred in Dr. Tylor and other great anthropological collections.

Furthermore, the sacred tree is found in the closest possible connection

with the other indubitably ancestral monuments, the sacred stone and the

idol. “A Bengal village,” says Sir William Hunter, “has usually

its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn

stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red lead”; the last being

probably a substitute for the blood of human or animal victims with

which it was once watered. “Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a

tree does duty for a deity; and the attendant priest, when there is

one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low castes. The rude

stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its

sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts

or gods of the village.” That is to say, we have here ancestor-worship

in its undisguised early native development.

I may mention here in brief that, as we shall hereafter see, this

triple combination of stone, log, and tree forms almost the normal or

invariable composition of the primitive shrine the whole world over.

The association of the sacred tree with actual idols or images of

deceased ancestors is well seen in the following passage which I quote

from Dr. Tylor: “A clump of larches on a Siberian steppe, a grove

in the recesses of a forest, is the sanctuary of a Turanian tribe.

Gaily-decked idols in their warm fur coats, each set up beneath its

great tree swathed with cloth or tinplate, endless reindeer-hides and

peltry hanging to the trees around, kettles and spoons and snuff-horns

and household valuables strewn as offerings before the gods--such is the

description of a Siberian holy grove, at the stage when the contact of

foreign civilisation has begun by ornamenting the rude old ceremonial

it must end by abolishing. A race ethnologically allied to these

tribes, though risen to higher culture, kept up remarkable relics of

tree-worship in Northern Europe. In {145}Esthonian districts, within the

present century, the traveller might often see the sacred tree,

generally an ancient lime, oak, or ash, standing inviolate in a

sheltered spot near the dwelling-house; and the old memories are handed

down of the time when the first blood of a slaughtered beast was

sprinkled on its roots, that the cattle might prosper, or when an

offering was laid beneath the holy linden, on the stone where the

worshipper knelt on his bare knees, moving from east to west and back,

which stone he kissed when he had said, ‘Receive the food as an

offering.‘” After the evidence already given, I do not think there can

be a reasonable doubt, in such a combination of tree and stone, that we

have here a sacrifice to an ancestral spirit.

Similarly, in the courtyard of a Bodo house is planted the sacred

euphorbia of Batho, the national god, to which a priest offers prayer

and kills a pig. In the island of Tjumba, in the East Indies, a

festival is held after harvest, and vessels are filled with rice as a

thank-offering to the gods. Then the sacred stone at the foot of a palm

tree is sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed animal, and rice is

laid on the stone for the gods. When the Khonds settle a new village, a

sacred cotton tree must be planted with solemn rites, and beneath it is

placed the sacrificial stone which embodies or represents the village

deity. Among the Semites, says Professor Robertson Smith, “no

Canaanite high place was complete without its sacred tree standing

beside the altar.” We shall only fully understand the importance of

these facts, however, when we come later to consider the subject of the

manufacture of gods by deliberate process, and the nature of the bloody

ceremonial which always accompanies it.

In some of the above instances it is incidentally mentioned that the

trunks of sacred trees are occasionally draped, as we saw to be also

the case with sacred stones, sacred stakes, idols, and relics. Another

example of this practice is given in the account of the holy oak of

Romowe, venerated {146}by the ancient Prussians, which was hung with

drapery like the _ashera_, and decked with little hanging images of the

gods. The holy trees of Ireland are still covered with rag offerings.

Other cases will be noticed in other connexions hereafter.

Once more, just as stones come to be regarded as ancestors, so by a like

process do sacred trees. Thus Galton says in South Africa, “We passed

a magnificent tree. It was the parent of all the Damaras.... The savages

danced round it in great delight.” Several Indian tribes believe

themselves to be the sons of trees. Many other cases are noted by Mr.

Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. I do not think it is necessary for our

argument to repeat them here. Sometimes, however, especially in later

rationalising times, the sacred tree is merely said to have been planted

by the god or hero whom it commemorates. Thus the cypresses of Herakles

at Daphne were believed to have been set on the spot by that deity,

while the tamarisk at Beersheba was supposed to have been placed there

by Abraham.

I hope it is clear from this rapid _resume_ that all the facts about the

worship of sacred trees stand exactly parallel to those with regard to

the worship of graves, mummies, idols, sacred stones, sacred stakes,

and other signs of departed spirits. Indeed, we have sometimes direct

evidence of such affiliation. Thus Mr. Turner says of a sacred tree on a

certain spot in the island of Savaii, which enjoyed rights of sanctuary

like the cities of refuge or a mediæval cathedral: “It is said that

the king of a division of Upolu, called Atua, once lived at that spot.

After he died, the house fell into decay; but the tree was fixed on as

representing the departed king, and out of respect for his memory it was

made the substitute of a living and royal protector.” By the light

of this remark we may surely interpret in a similar sense such other

statements of Mr. Turner’s as that a sweet-scented tree in another

place “was held to be the habitat of a household god, and anything

aromatic {147}which the family happened to get was presented to it as

an offering;” or again, “a family god was supposed to live” in

another tree; “and hence no one dared to pluck a leaf or break a

branch.” For family gods, as we saw in a previous chapter, are really

family ghosts, promoted to be deities.

In modern accounts of sacred trees much stress is usually laid upon the

fact that they are large and well-grown, often very conspicuous,

and occupying a height, where they serve as landmarks. Hence it has

frequently been taken for granted that they have been selected for

worship on account of their size and commanding position. This, however,

I think, is a case of putting the cart before the horse, as though one

were to say that St. Peter’s and Westminster Abbey, the Temple of Karnak

or the Mosque of Omar, owed their sanctity to their imposing dimensions.

There is every reason why a sacred tree should grow to be exceptionally

large and conspicuous. Barrows are usually built on more or less

commanding heights, where they may attract general attention. The ground

is laboured, piled high, freed from weeds, and enriched by blood and

other offerings. The tree, being sacred, is tended and cared for. It is

never cut down, and so naturally on the average of instances grows to be

a big and well-developed specimen. Hence I hold the tree is usually big

because it is sacred, not sacred because it is big. On the other hand,

where a tree already full-grown is chosen for a place of burial, it

would no doubt be natural to choose a large and conspicuous one. Thus I

read of the tree under which Dr. Livingstone’s heart was buried by his

native servant, “It is the largest in the neighbourhood.”

Looking at the question broadly, the case stands thus. We know that in

many instances savages inter their dead under the shade of big trees.

We know that such trees are thereafter considered sacred, and worshipped

with blood, clothes, drapery, offerings. We know that young shrubs

{148}or trees are frequently planted on graves in all countries. We know

that whatever comes up on or out of a grave is counted as representative

of the ghost within it. The presumption is therefore in favour of any

particular sacred tree being of funereal origin; and the onus of proving

the opposite lies with the person who asserts some more occult and less

obvious explanation.

At the same time I am quite ready to allow here, as in previous

instances, when once the idea of certain trees being sacred has grown

common among men, many trees may come to possess by pure association

a sanctity of their own. This is doubtless the case in India with the

peepul, and in various other countries with various other trees. Exactly

the same thing has happened to stones. And so, again, though I believe

the temple to have been developed out of the tomb or its covering, I

do not deny that churches are now built apart from tombs, though always

dedicated to the worship of a God who is demonstrably a particular

deified personage.

Another point on which I must touch briefly is that of the sacred grove

or cluster of trees. These often represent, I take it, the trees planted

in the _temenos_ or sacred tabooed space which surrounds the primitive

tomb or temple. The _koubbas_ or little dome-shaped tombs of Mahommedan

saints so common in North Africa are all surrounded by such a walled

enclosure, within which ornamental or other trees are habitually

planted. In many cases these are palms--the familiar sacred tree of

Mesopotamia, about which more must be said hereafter in a later chapter.

The well-known _bois sacré_ at Blidah is a considerable grove, with

a _koubba_ in its midst. A similar _temenos_ frequently surrounded the

Egyptian and the Greek temple. I do not assert that these were always of

necessity actual tombs; but they were at any rate cenotaphs. When once

people had got accustomed to the idea that certain trees were sacred to

the memory of their ancestors or their gods, it would be but a slight

step to plant such trees {149}round an empty temple. When Xenophon, for

example, built a shrine to Artemis, and planted around it a grove of

many kinds of fruit trees, and placed in it an altar and an image of the

goddess, nobody would for a moment suppose he erected it over the body

of an actual dead Artemis. But men would never have begun building

temples and consecrating groves at all if they had not first built

houses for the dead god-chief, and planted shrubs and trees upon his

venerated tumulus. Nay, even the naïve inscription upon Xenophon’s

shrine--“He who lives here and enjoys the fruits of the ground must

every year offer the tenth part of the produce to the goddess, and out

of the residue keep the temple in repair”--does it not carry us back

implicitly to the origin of priesthood, and of the desire for perpetuity

in the due maintenance of the religious offices?

I shall say nothing here about the evolution of the great civilised

tree-gods like Attis and Adonis, so common in the region of the eastern

Mediterranean, partly because I have already treated them at some length

in the essay on Tree-Worship to which I have alluded above, and partly

because they would lead us too far afield from our present subject. But

a few words must be devoted in passing to the prevalence of tree-worship

among the Semitic peoples, intimately connected as it is with the rise

of certain important elements in the Christian cult.

“In all parts of the Semitic area,” says Professor Robertson Smith,

“trees were adored as divine.” Among the species thus honoured he

enumerates especially the pines and cedars of Lebanon, the evergreen

oaks of the Palestinian hills, the tamarisks of the Syrian jungles, and

the acacias of the Arabian wadies. Most of these, it will be noted, are

evergreens. In Arabia, the most striking case on record is that of the

sacred date-palm at Nejran. This was adored at an annual feast, when it

was “all hung with fine clothes and women’s ornaments.” A similar

tree existed at Mecca, to which the people resorted annually, {150}and

hung upon it weapons, garments, ostrich eggs, and other offerings. In a

sacred acacia at Nakla a goddess was supposed to live. The modern

Arabs still hang pieces of flesh on such sacred trees, honour them with

sacrifices, and present them with rags of calico and coloured beads.

As regards the Phoenicians and Canaanites, Philo Byblius says that

plants were in ancient times revered as gods, and honoured with

libations and sacrifices. Dr. Robertson Smith gives several instances.

Christianity has not extinguished the veneration for sacred trees in

Syria, where they are still prayed to in sickness and hung with rags.

The Moslems of Palestine also venerate the sacred trees of immemorial

antiquity.

In the Hebrew scriptures tree-worship constantly appears, and is frankly

dwelt with by Professor Robertson Smith, who does not refuse to connect

with this set of beliefs the legend of Jahweh in the burning bush. The

local altars of early Hebrew cult were habitually set up “under green

trees.” On this subject I would refer the reader to Dr. Smith’s own

interesting disquisition on p. 193 of The Religion of the Semites.

With regard to the general sacredness of vegetation, and especially of

food-plants, such as corn, the vine, and the date-palm, I postpone that

important subject for the present, till we come to consider the gods

of cultivation, and the curious set of ideas which gradually led up to

sacramental god-eating. In a theme so vast and so involved as that of

human religion, it becomes necessary to take one point at a time, and to

deal with the various parts in analytic isolation.

We have now examined briefly almost all the principal sacred objects of

the world, according to classes--the corpse, the mummy, the idol, the

sacred stone, the sacred stake, the sacred tree or grove; there remains

but one other group of holy things, very generally recognised, which I

do not propose to examine separately, but to which {151}a few words may

yet be devoted at the end of a chapter. I mean, the sacred wells. It

might seem at first sight as if these could have no possible connection

with death or burial; but that expectation is, strange to say, delusive.

There appears to be some reason for bringing wells, too, into the

widening category of funereal objects. The oxen’s well at Acre, for

example, was visited by Christian, Jewish, and Moslem pilgrims; it was

therefore an object of great ancient sanctity; but observe this point:

there is a _mashhed_ or sacred tomb beside it, “perhaps the modern

representative of the ancient Memnonium.” Every Egyptian temple had

in like manner its sacred lake. In modern Syria, “cisterns are always

found beside the grave of saints, and are believed to be inhabited by a

sort of fairy. A pining child is thought to be a fairy changeling, and

must be lowered into the cistern.” The similarity of the belief about

holy wells in England and Ireland, and their frequent association with

the name of a saint, would seem to suggest for them a like origin.

Sacred rivers usually rise from sacred springs, near which stands a

temple. The river Adonis took its origin at the shrine of Aphaca: and

the grave of Adonis, about whom much more must be said hereafter, stood

near the mouth of the holy stream that was reddened by his blood. The

sacred river Belus had also its peculiar Memnonium or Adonis tomb. But I

must add that sacred rivers had likewise their annual god-victims, about

whom we shall have a great deal to say at a later stage of our enquiry,

and from whom in part they probably derived their sanctity. Still, that

their holiness was also due in part, and originally, to tombs at their

sources, I think admits of no reasonable doubt.

The equivalence of the holy well and the holy stone is shown by the fact

that while a woman whose chastity was suspected had to drink water of a

sacred spring to prove her innocence, at Mecca she had to swear seventy

oaths by the Kaaba.

Again, {152}sacred wells and fountains were and are worshipped with just

the same acts of sacrifice as ghosts and images. At Aphaca, the pilgrims

cast into the holy pool, jewels of gold and silver, with webs of linen

and other precious stuffs. A holy grove was an adjunct of the holy

spring: in Greece, according to Botticher, they were seldom separated.

At the annual fair of the Sacred Terebinth, or tree and well of Abraham

at Mamre, the heathen visitors offered sacrifices beside the tree, and

cast into the well libations of wine, with cakes, coins, myrrh, and

incense: all of which we may compare with the Ostyak offerings to

ancestral grave-stakes. At the holy waters of Karwa, bread, fruit, and

other foods were laid beside the fountain. At Mecca, and at the Stygian

Waters in the Syrian desert, similar gifts were cast into the holy

source. In one of these instances at least we know that the holy well

was associated with an actual burial; for at Aphaca, the holiest shrine

of Syria, the tomb of the local Baal or god was shown beside the sacred

fountain. “A buried god,” says Dr. Robertson Smith quaintly, in

commenting on this fact, “is a god that dwells under ground.” It

would be far truer and more philosophical to say that a god who dwells

underground is a buried man.

I need not recall the offerings to Cornish and Irish well-spirits, which

have now degenerated for the most part into pins and needles.

On the whole, though it is impossible to understand the entire genesis

of sacred founts and rivers without previous consideration of deliberate

god-making, a subject which I reserve for a later portion of our

exposition, I do not think we shall go far wrong in supposing that

the sacred well most often occurs in company with the sacred tree,

the sacred stone or altar, and the sacred tomb; and that it owes its

sanctity in the last resort, originally at least, to a burial by its

side; though I do not doubt that this sanctity was in many cases kept up

by the annual immolation of a fresh victim-god, of a type whose genesis

will hereafter {153}detain us. Indeed, Dr. Robertson Smith says of the

Semitic worship in general, “The usual natural symbols are a fountain

or a tree, while the ordinary artificial symbol is a pillar or pile of

stones: but very often all three are found together, and this was the

rule in the more developed sanctuaries.” I cannot agree with him on

the point of “symbolism”: but the collocation of objects is at least

significant.

Thus, in ultimate analysis, we see that all the sacred objects of the

world are either dead men themselves, as corpse, mummy, ghost, or god;

or else the tomb where such men are buried; or else the temple, shrine,

or hut which covers the tomb; or else the tombstone, altar, image, or

statue, standing over it and representing the ghost; or else the stake,

idol, or household god which is fashioned as their deputy; or else the

tree which grows above the barrow; or else the well, or tank, or spring,

natural or artificial, by whose side the dead man has been laid to rest.

In one form or another, from beginning to end, we find only, in Mr.

William Simpson’s graphic phrase, “the Worship of Death,” as the

basis and root of all human religion.

CHAPTER VIII.--THE GODS OF EGYPT.

|WE {154}have now completed our preliminary survey of the nature and

origin of Gods in general. We have seen how men first came to believe in

the objective existence of these powerful and invisible beings, how they

learnt to invest them with majestic attributes, and how they grew to

worship them under the various forms of mummies or boulders, stone or

wooden idols, trees or stumps, wells, rivers, and fountains. In short,

we have briefly arrived at the origin of Polytheism. We have now to

go on to our second question--How from the belief in many gods did men

progress to the belief in one single God, the creator and upholder of

all things? Our task is now to reconstruct the origin of Monotheism.

But Monotheism bases itself entirely upon the great God of the Hebrews.

To him, therefore, we must next address ourselves. Is he too resoluble,

as I hinted before, into a Sacred Stone, the monument and representative

of some prehistoric chieftain? Can we trace the origin of the Deity of

Christendom till we find him at last in a forgotten Semitic ghost of the

earliest period?

The chief Hebrew god Jahweh, when we first catch a passing glimpse of

his primitive worship by his own people, was but one among a number of

competing deities, mostly, it would appear, embodied by their votaries

in the visible form of stone or wooden pillars, and adored by a small

group of loosely-connected tribes among the mountain region in the

southwest of Syria. The confederacy among {155}whom he dwelt knew

themselves as the Sons of Israel; they regarded Jahweh as their

principal god, much as the Greeks did Zeus, or the early Teutons their

national hero Woden. But a universal tradition among them bore witness

to the fact that they had once lived in a subject condition in Egypt,

the house of bondage, and that their god Jahweh had been instrumental in

leading them thence into the rugged land they inhabited throughout

the whole historical period, between the valley of Jordan and the

Mediterranean coast. So consistent and so definite was this traditional

belief that we can hardly regard it otherwise than as enclosing a kernel

of truth; and not only do Kuenen and other Semitic scholars of the

present day admit it as genuine, but the Egyptologists also seem

generally to allow its substantial accuracy and full accord with

hieroglyphic literature. This sojourn in Egypt cannot have failed to

influence to some extent the Semitic strangers: therefore I shall begin

my quest of the Hebrew god among the Egyptian monuments. Admitting that

he was essentially in all respects a deity of the true Semitic pattern,

I think it will do us good to learn a little beforehand about the people

among whom his votaries dwelt so long, especially as the history of the

Egyptian cults affords us perhaps the best historical example of the

growth and development of a great national religion.

A peculiar interest, indeed, attaches in the history of the human mind

to the evolution of the gods of Egypt. Nowhere else in the world can

we trace so well such a continuous development from the very simplest

beginnings of religious ideas to the very highest planes of mysticism

and philosophic theology. There are savage cults, it is true, which show

us more clearly the earliest stages in the process whereby the simple

ancestral ghost passes imperceptibly into the more powerful form of a

supernatural deity: there are elevated civilised creeds which show

us more grandly in its evolved shape the final conception of a single

supreme Ruler of the Cosmos. But there is no other {156}religious system

known to us in which we can follow so readily, without a single break,

the whole evolutionary movement whereby the earlier ideas get gradually

expanded and etherealised into the later. The origin of the other great

historical religions is lost from our eyes among dim mists of fable: in

Egypt alone, of all civilised countries, does our record go back to

the remote period when the religious conception was still at the common

savage level, and follow it forward continuously to the advanced point

where it had all but achieved, in its syncretic movement, the ultimate

goal of pure monotheism.

I would wish, however, to begin my review of this singular history

by saying, once for all, that while I make no pretensions to special

Egyptological knowledge, I must nevertheless dissent on general

anthropological grounds from the attitude taken up by Mr. Le Page

Renouf in his _Lectures on the Religion of Ancient Egypt_. That learned

writer’s work, indeed, is, scientifically speaking, half a century

behind its time. It is written as though the doctrine of evolution had

never been promulgated; and every page contains glaring contradictions

of the most elementary principles of human development. Mr. Renouf

still adheres to the discredited ideas that polytheism grew out of

an antecedent monotheism; that animal-worship and other low forms of

adoration are “symbolical” in origin; and that “the sublimer

portions of the Egyptian religion are not the comparatively late result

of a process of development or elimination from the grosser.” Such

theories would of themselves be extremely improbable, even on the

fullest and best evidence; but the evidence which Mr. Renouf brings

forward to support them is of the flimsiest description. A plain survey

of the Egyptian monuments in the Nile valley, and of the known facts

about Egyptian religion, will lead any unbiassed mind, free from

the warping influence of preconception, and accustomed to wide

anthropological enquiry, to precisely opposite and more probable

conclusions. For it must be carefully borne in mind {157}that on

these subjects the specialist is the last man whose opinions should be

implicitly and unhesitatingly accepted. The religion of Egypt, like the

religion of Judæa or the religion of Hawaii, must be judged, not

in isolation, but by the analogies of other religions elsewhere; the

attempt to explain it as an unrelated phenomenon, which has already been

found so disastrous in the case of the Semitic and the Aryan cults, must

be abandoned once for all by the comparative psychologist as a hopeless

error. The key to the origin of the Egyptian faith is to be found,

not in the late philosophising glosses quoted by M. de Rougé and his

English disciple, but in the simple, unvarying, ancestral creeds of

existing African savages.

Looked at from this point of view, then--the evolutionary point of

view--nothing can be clearer than the fact that the early

Egyptian religion bases itself entirely upon two main foundations,

ancestor-worship and totemism.

I will begin with the first of these, which all analogy teaches us to

consider by far the earliest, and infinitely the most important. And I

may add that it is also, to judge by the Egyptian evidence alone, both

the element which underlies the whole religious conceptions of the Nile

valley, and likewise the element which directly accounts, as we shall

see hereafter, for all the most important gods of the national pantheon,

including Osiris, Ptah, Khem, and Amen, as well perhaps as many of

their correlative goddesses. There is not, in fact, any great ethnical

religion on earth, except possibly the Chinese, in which the basal

importance of the Dead Man is so immediately apparent as in the ancient

cult of Pharaohnic Egypt.

The Egyptian religion bases itself upon the tomb. It is impossible for

a moment to doubt that fact as one stands under the scanty shade of the

desert date-palms among the huge sun-smitten dust-heaps that represent

the streets of Thebes and Memphis. The commonest object of worship

on all the monuments of Nile is beyond doubt the Mummy: sometimes the

private mummy of an ancestor {158}or kinsman, sometimes the greater

deified mummies of immemorial antiquity, blended in the later

syncretic mysticism with the sun-god and other allegorical deities,

but represented to the very last in all ages of art--on the shattered

Rameseum at Thebes or the Ptolemaic pillars of still unshaken

Denderah--as always unmistakable and obvious mummies. If ever there was

a country where the Worship of the Dead was pushed to an extreme, that

country was distinctly and decisively Egypt.

“The oldest sculptures show us no acts of adoration or of

sacrifice,” says Mr. Loftie, “except those of worship at the shrine

of a deceased ancestor or relative.” This is fully in keeping with

what we know of the dawn of religion elsewhere, and with the immense

importance always attached to the preservation of the mummy intact

throughout the whole long course of Egyptian history. The Egyptian,

in spite of his high civilisation, remained always at the first

or corpse-preserving stage of custom as regards the dead. To him,

therefore, the life after death was far more serious than the life on

earth: he realised it so fully that he made endless preparations for it

during his days above, and built himself a tomb as an eternal mansion.

The grave was a place of abode, where the mummy was to pass the greater

part of his existence; and even in the case of private persons (like

that famous Tih whose painted sepulchre at Sakkarah every tourist to

Cairo makes a point of visiting) it was sumptuously decorated with

painting and sculpture. In the mortuary chambers or chapels attached to

the tombs, the relations of the deceased and the priests of the cemetery

celebrated on certain fixed dates various ceremonies in honour of the

dead, and offered appropriate gifts to the mummy within. “The tables of

offerings, which no doubt formed part of the furniture of the chambers,

are depicted on the walls, covered with the gifts of meat, fruits,

bread, and wine which had to be presented in kind.” These _parentalia_

undoubtedly formed the main feature of the practical religion {159}of

early Egypt, as exhibited to us on all the monuments except the late

tomb-caves of royal personages, devoted to the worship of the equally

mummified great gods.

The Egyptian tomb was usually a survival of the cave artificially

imitated. The outer chamber, in which the ceremonies of the offertory

took place, was the only part accessible, after the interment had been

completed, to the feet of survivors. The mummy itself, concealed in its

sarcophagus, lay at the bottom of a deep pit beyond, by the end of a

corridor often containing statues or idols of the deceased. These idols,

says M. Maspero, were indefinitely multiplied, in case the mummy itself

should be accidentally destroyed, in order that the _Ka_ (the ghost or

double) might find a safe dwelling-place. Compare the numerous little

images placed upon the grave by the Coast Negroes. It was the outer

chamber, however, that sheltered the _stele_ or pillar which bore the

epitaph, as well as the altar or table for offerings, the smoke from

which was conveyed to the statues in the corridor through a small

aperture in the wall of partition. Down the well beyond, the mummy in

person reposed, in its eternal dwelling-place, free from all chance of

violation or outrage. “The greatest importance,” says Mr. Renouf,

“was attached to the permanence of the tomb, to the continuance of

the religious ceremonies, and to the prayers of passers-by.” Again,

“there is a very common formula stating that the person who raised

the tablet ‘made it as a memorial to his fathers who are in the nether

world, built up what he found was imperfect, and renewed what was found

out of repair.’” In the inscription on one of the great tombs at

Beni-Hâssan the founder says: “I made to flourish the name of my

father, and I built chapels for his _ka_ [or ghost]. I caused statues

to be conveyed to the holy dwelling, and distributed to them their

offerings in pure gifts. I instituted the officiating priest, to whom I

gave donations in land and presents. I ordered funeral offerings for

all the feasts of the nether world [which are then enumerated {160}at

considerable length]. If it happen that the priest or any other cease to

do this, may he not exist, and may his son not sit in his seat.”

All this is highly instructive from the point of view of the origin of

priesthood.

How long these early religious endowments continued to be respected is

shown by Mr. Renouf himself in one instructive passage. The kings who

built the Pyramids in the Early Empire endowed a priestly office for the

purpose of celebrating the periodical rites of offering to their ghosts

or mummies. Now, a tablet in the Louvre shows that a certain person who

lived under the Twenty-sixth Dynasty was priest of Khufu, the builder of

the Great Pyramid, who had endowed the office two thousand years before

his time. We have actually the tombs of some of his predecessors who

filled the same office immediately after Khufu’s death. So that in

this instance at least, the worship of the deceased monarch continued

for a couple of thousand years without interruption. “If in the case

of private interments,” says M. Maspero, “we find no proof of

so persistent a veneration, that is because in ordinary tombs the

ceremonies were performed not by special priests, but by the children

or descendants of the deceased person. Often, at the end of a few

generations, either through negligence, removals, ruin, or extinction of

the family, the cult was suspended, and the memory of the dead died out

altogether.”

For this reason, as everywhere else among ancestor-worshippers, immense

importance was attached by the Egyptians to the begetting of a son who

should perform the due family rites, or see that they were performed

by others after him. The duty of undertaking these rites is thoroughly

insisted upon in all the maxims or moral texts; while on the other hand,

the wish that a man may not have a son to perform them for him is the

most terrible of all ancient Egyptian imprecations. “Many centuries

after the construction of a tomb, Egyptian travellers have left a

record upon its walls of the splendour of the sacred abode, {161}of the

abundance of the materials which they found provided for the fulfilment

of the rites for the departed, and of their own repetition of the

funeral formula.” In fact, the whole practical religion of the

ordinary Egyptians, as a plain observer sees it to-day in the vast mass

of the existing monuments, consists almost exclusively in the worship of

the _ka_--the _genii, manes, or lares_ of the departed.

If even the common herd were thus carefully embalmed--if even the

lesser functionaries of the court or temple lay in expensive tombs,

daintily painted and exquisitely sculptured--it might readily be

believed that the great kings of the mighty conquering dynasties

themselves would raise for their mummies eternal habitations of special

splendour and becoming magnificence. And so they did. In Lower Egypt,

their tombs are barrows or pyramids: in Upper Egypt they are artificial

caves. The dreary desert district west of the Nile and south of Cairo

consists for many miles, all but uninterruptedly, of the cemetery of

Memphis--a vast and mouldering city of the dead--whose chief memorials

are the wonderful series of Pyramids, the desecrated tombs piled up for

the kings of the Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Dynasties. There,

under stone tumuli of enormous size,--barrows or cairns more carefully

constructed,--the Pharaohs of the Old Empire reposed, in peace in

sepulchres unmarked by any emblems of the mystic gods or sacred beasts

of later imagination. But still more significant and infinitely more

beautiful are the rock-hewn Tombs of the Kings at Thebes, belonging

to the great monarchs of the Eighteenth, Nineteenth and Twentieth

Dynasties, when the religion had assumed its full mystical development.

Those magnificent subterranean halls form in the truest and most literal

sense a real necropolis, a town of mummies, where each king was to

inhabit an eternal palace of regal splendour, decorated with a profusion

of polychromatic art, and filled with many mansions for the officers

{162}of state, still destined to attend upon their sovereign in the

nether world. Some of the mural paintings would even seem to suggest

that slaves or captives were sacrificed at the tomb, to serve their lord

in his eternal home, as his courtiers had served him in the temporal

palaces of Medinet-Hâbu or the corridors of Luxor.

M. Mariette has further shown that the huge Theban temples which skirt

in long line the edge of the desert near the Valley of Tombs were really

cenotaphs where the memory of the kings buried hard by was preserved and

worshipped. Thus the Rameseum was the _mastabah_ or mortuary chapel for

the tomb and ghost of Rameses II.; the temple of Medinet-Hâbu fulfilled

the same purpose for Rameses III.; the temple of Kurneh for Rameses I.;

and so forth throughout the whole long series of those gigantic ruins,

with their correlated group of subterranean excavations.

At any rate, it is quite impossible for any impartial person to examine

the existing monuments which line the grey desert hills of the Nile

without seeing for himself that the mummy is everywhere the central

object of worship--that the entire practical religion of the people was

based upon this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond

the grave, and upon the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal

offerings to the _manes_ of ancestors. Everything in Egypt points to

this one conclusion. Even the great sacred ritual is the Book of the

Dead: and the very word by which the departed are oftenest described

means itself “the living,” from the firm belief of the people that

they were really enjoying everlasting life. _Mors janua vitae_ is the

short summing-up of Egyptian religious notions. Death was the great

beginning for which they all prepared, and the dead were the real

objects of their most assiduous oublie and private worship.

Moreover, in the tombs themselves we can trace a gradual development of

the religious sentiment from Corpse-Worship {163}to God-Worship. Thus,

in the tombs of Sakkarah, belonging to the Old Empire (Fifth Dynasty),

all those symbolical representations of the life beyond the tomb

which came in with the later mysticism are almost wholly wanting. The

quotations from (or anticipations of) the Book of the Dead are few and

short. The great gods are rarely alluded to. Again, in the grottos of

Beni-Hassan (of the Twelfth Dynasty) the paintings mostly represent

scenes from the life of the deceased, and the mystic signs and deities

are still absent. The doctrine of rewards and punishments remains as

yet comparatively in abeyance. It is only at the Tombs of the Kings at

Thebes (of the Eighteenth Dynasty) that entire chapters of the Book of

the Dead are transcribed at length, and the walls are covered with “a

whole army of grotesque and fantastic divinities.”

“But the Egyptians,” it will be objected, “had also great gods,

distinct from their ancestors--national, or local, or common gods--whose

names and figures have come down to us inscribed upon all the

monuments.” Quite true: that is to say, there are gods who are not

immediately or certainly resolvable into deified ancestors--gods

whose power and might were at last widely extended, and who became

transfigured by degrees beyond all recognition in the latest ages. But

it is by no means certain, even so, that we cannot trace these greater

gods themselves back in the last resort to deified ancestors of various

ruling families or dominant cities; and in one or two of the most

important cases the suggestions of such an origin are far from scanty.

I will take, to begin with, one typical example. There is no single god

in the Egyptian pantheon more important or more universally diffused

than Osiris. In later forms of the national religion, he is elevated

into the judge of the departed and king of the nether world: to be

“justified by Osiris,” or, as later interpreters say, “a justified

Osiris,” is the prayer of every corpse as set forth in his funeral

{164}inscription; and identification with Osiris is looked upon as the

reward of all the happy and faithful dead. Now Osiris, in every one of

his representations and modes, is simply--a Mummy. His myth, to be sure,

assumed at last immense proportions; and his relations with Isis and

Horus form the centre of an endless series of irreconcilable tales,

repeated over and over again in art and literature. If we took mythology

as our guide, instead of the monuments, we should be tempted to give him

far other origins. He is identified often with other gods, especially

with Amen; and the disentanglement of his personality in the monuments

of the newer empire, when Ra, the sun-god, got mixed up inextricably

with so many other deities, is particularly difficult. But if we neglect

these later complications of a very ancient cult, and go back to the

simplest origin of Egyptian history and religion, we shall, I think,

see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental symbolism

into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings

nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to

be--a revered and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the

town or little district of This by Abydos.

I do not deny that in later ages Osiris became much more than this. Nor

do I deny that his name was accepted as a symbol for all the happy and

pious dead. Furthermore, we shall find at a later stage that he was

identified in the end with an annual slain Corn-God. I will even allow

that there may have been more than one original Osiris--that the word

may even at first have been generic, not specific. But I still maintain

that the evidence shows us the great and principal Osiris of all as a

Dead Chief of Abydos.

We must remember that in Egypt alone history goes back to an immense

antiquity and yet shows us already at its very beginning an advanced

civilisation and a developed picture-writing. Therefore the very oldest

known state of Egypt {165}necessarily presupposes a vast anterior era

of slow growth in concentration and culture. Before ever Upper or Lower

Egypt became united under a single crown, there must have been endless

mud-built villages and petty palm-shadowed principalities along the

bank of the Nile, each possessing its own local chief or king, and

each worshipping its own local deceased potentates. The sheikh of

the village, as we should call him nowadays, was then their nameless

Pharaoh, and the mummies of his ancestors were their gods and goddesses.

Each tribe had also its special totem, about which I shall have a little

more to say hereafter; and these totems were locally worshipped almost

as gods, and gave rise in all probability to the later Egyptian Zoolatry

and the animal-headed deities. To the very last, Egyptian religion bore

marked traces of this original tribal form; the great multiplicity of

Egyptian gods seems to be due to the adoption of so many of them, after

the unification of the country, into the national pantheon. The local

gods and local totems, however, continued to be specially worshipped

in their original sites. Thus the ithyphallic Amen-Khem was specially

worshipped at Thebes, where his figure occurs with unpleasant frequency

upon every temple; Apis was peculiarly sacred at Memphis; Pasht at

Bubastis; Anubis at Sekhem; Neith at Sais; Ra at Heliopolis; and Osiris

himself at Abydos, his ancient dwelling-place.

Even Egyptian tradition seems to preserve some dim memory of such a

state of things, for it asserts that before the time of Menes, the first

king of the First Dynasty, reputed the earliest monarch of a united

Egypt, dynasties of the gods ruled in the country. In other words, it

was recognised that the gods were originally kings of local lines

which reigned in the various provinces of the Nile valley before the

unification.

In the case of Osiris, the indications which lead us in this direction

are almost irresistible. It is all but certain that Osiris was

originally a local god of This or Thinis, a {166}village near Abydos,

where a huge mound of rubbish still marks the site of the great deity’s

resting-place. The latter town is described in the Harris papyrus as

Abud, the hand of Osiris; and in the monuments which still remain at

that site, Osiris is everywhere the chief deity represented, to whom

kings and priests present appropriate offerings. But it is a significant

fact that Menes, the founder of the united monarchy, was born at the

same place; and this suggests the probability that Osiris may have

been the most sacred and most venerated of Menes’s ancestors.

The suggestion derives further weight from the fact that Osiris

is invariably represented as a mummy, and that he wears a peculiar

head-dress or cap of office, the same as that which was used in

historical times as the crown of Upper Egypt. He also holds in his hands

the crook and scourge which are the marks of kingly office--the crook

to lead his own people like a shepherd, the scourge to punish evil-doers

and to ward off enemies. His image is therefore nothing more nor less

than the image of a Mummied King. Sometimes, too, he wears in addition

the regal ostrich plumes. Surely, naught save the blind infatuation of

mythologists could make them overlook the plain inference that Osiris

was a mummified chief of Abydos in the days before the unification of

Egypt under a single rule, and that he was worshipped by his successors

in the petty principality exactly as we know other kingly mummies were

worshipped by their family elsewhere--exactly, for example, as on the

famous Tablet of Ancestors found at Abydos itself, Sethi I. and Rameses

II. are seen offering homage to seventy-six historical kings, their

predecessors on the throne of United Egypt.

Not only, however, is Osiris represented as a king and a mummy, but we

are expressly told by Plutarch (or at least by the author of the tract

_De Osiride_ which bears his name) that the tomb of Osiris existed at

Abydos, and that the richest and most powerful of the Egyptians were

desirous of being buried in the adjacent cemetery, in order that

{167}they might lie, as it were, in the same grave with the great god

of their country. All this is perfectly comprehensible and natural if we

suppose that a Thinite dynasty first conquered the whole of Egypt; that

it extended the worship of its own local ancestor-god over the entire

country; and that in time, when this worship had assumed national

importance, the local god became the chief figure in the common

pantheon.

I had arrived at this opinion independently before I was aware that Mr.

Loftie had anticipated me in it. But in his rare and interesting _Essay

on Scarabs_ I find he has reached the same conclusions.

“The divinity of Pharaoh,” says Mr. Loftie, “was the first article

in the creed of the pyramid period, the earliest of which we know

anything. As time went on, though the king was still called divine, we

see him engaged in the worship of other gods. At last he appears as

a priest himself; and when Herodotus and the later Greek historians

visited Egypt, there was so little of this part of the old religion left

that it is not even mentioned by them as a matter of importance.” This

is quite natural, I may remark parenthetically, for as the antiquity

and grandeur of the great gods increased, the gulf between them and mere

men, even though those men were kings, their offspring, must always have

grown ever wider and wider. “I have myself no doubt whatever,” Mr.

Loftie goes on, “that the names of Osiris and of Horus are those of

ancient rulers. I think that, long before authentic history begins, Asar

and Aset his wife reigned in Egypt, probably in that wide valley of the

Upper Nile which is now the site of Girgeh and Berbé” (exactly where

I place the principality of Osiris). “Their son was Hor, or Horus,

the first king of Upper and Lower Egypt; and the ‘Hor seshoo.’ the

successors of Horus, are not obscurely mentioned by later chroniclers.

I know that this view is not shared by all students of the subject,

and much learning and ingenuity have been spent to prove that Asar,

and Aset, and Hor, and {168}Ptah, and Anep, are representations of the

powers of nature; that they do not point to ancient princes, but to

ancient principles; and that Horus and his successors are gods and were

never men. But in the oldest inscriptions we find none of that mysticism

which is shown in the sculptures from the time of the eighteenth dynasty

down to the Ptolemies and the Roman Emperors.” In short, Mr.

Loftie goes on to set forth a theory of the origin of the great gods

essentially similar to the one I am here defending.

Though a little out of place, I cannot help noting here the curious

confirmatory fact that a number of ibis mummies have been found at

Abvdos in close proximity to the mound where M. Mariette confidently

expected to discover in the rock the actual tomb of Osiris himself.

Hence we may conclude that the ibis was in all probability the totem of

Abydos or This, as the bull was of Memphis, the crocodile of the Fayoum,

the cat of Bubastis, and the baboon of Thebes. Now, the ibis-god of

Abydos is Thoth; and it is noteworthy that Thoth, as recorder, always

accompanies Osiris, in later legend, as judge of the dead: the local

mummy-god, in other words, has as his assessor the local totem-god; and

both are commonly to be seen on the monuments of Abydos, in company with

Horus, Anubis, Isis, and other (probably) local divinities.

It is quite easy to see how, with this origin, Osiris would almost

inevitably grow with time to be the King of the Dead, and supreme judge

of the nether regions. For, as the most sacred of the ancestors of the

regal line, he would naturally be the one whom the kings, in their

turn, would most seek to propitiate, and whom they would look forward

to joining in their eternal home. As the myth extended, and as mystical

interpretations began to creep in, identifications being made of the

gods with the sun or other natural energies, the original meaning of

Osiris-worship would grow gradually obscured. But to the last, Osiris

himself, in spite of all corruptions, is represented {169}as a mummy:

and even when identified with Amen, the later intrusive god, he still

wears his mummy-bandages, and still bears the crook and scourge and

sceptre of his primitive kingship.

It may be objected, however, that there were many forms of Orisis, and

many local gods who bore the same name. He was buried at Abydos, but was

also equally buried at Memphis, and at Philæ as well. The pretty little

“Temple on the Roof” at Denderah is an exquisitely elaborate chapel

to the local Osiris of that town, with chambers dedicated to the various

other Osiris-gods of the forty-two nomes of ancient Egypt. Well, that

fact runs exactly parallel with the local Madonnas and the local Apollos

of other religions: and nobody has suggested doubts as to the human

reality of the Blessed Virgin Mary because so many different Maries

exist in different sacred sites or in different cathedrals. Our Lady

of Loretto is the same as Our Lady of Lourdes. Jesus of Nazareth was

nevertheless born at Bethlehem: he was the son of Joseph, but he was

also the son of David, and the son of God. Perhaps Osiris was a common

noun: perhaps a slightly different Osiris was worshipped in various

towns of later Egypt; perhaps a local mummy-god, the ancestor of some

extinct native line, often wrongly usurped the name and prerogatives of

the great mummy-god of Abydos, especially under the influence of late

priestly mysticism. Moreover, when we come to consider the subject

of the manufacture of gods, we shall see that the body of an annual

incarnation of Osiris may have been divided and distributed among all

the nomes of Egypt. It is enough for my present purpose if I point out

in brief that ancestor-worship amply explains the rise and prevalence

of the cult of Osiris, the kingly mummy, with the associated cults of

Horus, Isis, Thoth, and the other deities of the Osirian cycle.

I may add that a gradual growth of Osiris-worship is clearly marked on

the monuments themselves. The simpler {170}stelæ and memorials of the

earliest age seldom contain the names of any god, but display votaries

making offerings at the shrine of ancestors. Similarly, the scenes

represented on the walls of tombs of early date bear no reference to the

great gods of later ages, but are merely domestic and agricultural in

character, as may be observed at Sakkarah and even to some extent also

at Beni-Hassan. Under the Sixth Dynasty, the monuments begin to make

more and more frequent mention of Osiris, who now comes to be regarded

as Judge of the Dead and Lord of the Lower World; and on a tablet of

this age in the Boulak Museum occurs for the first time the expression

afterwards so common, “justified by Osiris.” Under the Twelfth

Dynasty, legend becomes more prominent; a solar and lunar character

seems to be given by reflex to Osiris and Isis: and the name of Ra,

the sun, is added to that of many previously distinct and independent

deities. Khem, the ithyphallic god of the Thebaid, now also assumes

greater importance, as is quite natural under a line of Theban

princes: and Khem, a local mummy-god, is always represented in his

swathing-clothes, and afterwards confounded, certainly with Amen, and

probably also with the mummy-god of Abydos. But Osiris from this time

forward rises distinctly into the front rank as a deity. “To him,

rather than to the dead, the friends and family offer their sacrifices.

A court is formed for him. Thoth, the recorder [totem-god of Abydos],

Anubis the watcher, Ra the impersonation of truth, and others, assist

in judgment on the soul.” The name of the deceased is henceforth

constantly accompanied by the formula “justified by Osiris.” About

the same time the Book of the Dead in its full form came into existence,

with its developed conception of the lower world, and its complicated

arrangement of planes of purgatorial progress.

Under the Eighteenth Dynasty, the legend thickens; the identifications

of the gods become more and more intricate; Amen and Ra are sought and

found under innumerable {171}forms of other deities; and a foundation

is laid for the esoteric Monotheism or pantheistic nature-worship of

the later philosophising priesthood. It was under the Nineteenth Dynasty

that the cult of local Triads or Trinities took fullest shape, and that

the mystical interpretation of the religion of Egypt came well into the

foreground. The great Osirian myth was then more and more minutely and

mystically elaborated; and even the bull Apis, the totem-god of Memphis,

was recognised as a special incarnation of Osiris, who thus becomes,

with Amen, the mysterious summing-up of almost all the national

pantheon. At last we find the myth going off into pure mysticism, Osiris

being at once the father, brother, husband, and son of Isis, and also

the son of his own child Horus. * Sentences with an almost Athanasian

mixture of vagueness and definiteness inform us how “the son proceeds

from the father, and the father proceeds from his son”; how “Ra is

the soul of Osiris, and Osiris the soul of Ra and how Horus his child,

awakened by magical rites from his dead body, is victorious over Set,

the prince of darkness, and sits as Osiris upon the throne of the father

whom he has revived and avenged. Here as elsewhere the myth, instead of

being the explanation of the god, does nothing more than darken counsel.”

* “Stories like the Osiris myth,” says Mr. Lang, “spring

from no pure religious source, but embody the delusions and

fantastic dreams of the lowest and least developed human

fancy and human speculation.” This sentence enforces

precisely the same idea that I have previously expressed in

chapter ii. as to the real relations of religion and

mythology. The myth nowhere explains the cult; it casts no

light upon its origin or history; on the contrary, it only

obscures and overshadows the underlying kernel of genuine

fact.

In like manner, I believe, Ptah was originally a local mummy-god of

Memphis, and Khem of Ap, afterwards known as Chemmis.

This gradual growth of a dead and mummified village chief, however,

into a pantheistic god, strange as it may seem, is not in any way more

remarkable than the gradual growth {172}of a Galilean peasant into the

second person of an eternal and omnipotent Godhead. Nor does the myth

of the death and resurrection of Osiris (to be considered hereafter in

a later chapter) militate against the reality of his human existence

any more than the history of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ

militates against the human existence of Jesus of Nazareth. “Gross and

crude euphemerism” may be bad; but airy and fantastic Max-mullerism

appears to me just as unphilosophical.

The difficulty of the evolution, indeed, is not at all great, if we

consider the further fact that even after the concept of godship had

been fully developed, the king still remained of like nature with the

gods, their son and descendant, a divine personage himself, differing

from them only in not having yet received eternal life, the symbol of

which they are often shown in sculpture as presenting with gracious

expressions to their favoured scion. “The ruling sovereign of

Egypt,” says Mr. Le Page Renouf, “was the living image of and

vicegerent of the sun-god. He was invested with the attributes of

divinity, and that in the earliest times of which we possess monumental

evidence.” And quite naturally, for in antique times gods had ruled

in Egypt, whose successor the king was: and the kings before Menes were

significantly known as “the successors of Horus.” As late as the

times of the Ptolemies, we saw, there were priests of Menes and other

Pharaohs of the most ancient dynasties. The pyramid kings took the title

of the Golden Horus, afterwards copied by their descendants; and from

Chafra onward the reigning monarch was known as the Son of Ra and the

Great God. Amenophis IL, during his own lifetime, is “a god good like

Ra, the sacred seed of Amen, the son whom he begot.” And on all the

monuments the king is represented of the same superhuman stature as the

gods themselves: he converses with them on equal terms; they lead him by

the hand into their inmost sanctuaries, or present him with the symbols

of royal rule and of eternal life, like friends of the family.

The {173}former guerdon bestows upon him the same rank they themselves

had held on earth; the latter advances him to share with them the

glories of the other existence. In the temple of Kurneh, Rameses I.

(then dead) receives the offerings and liturgies of his royal grandson.

Hard by, Rameses II. offers to Amen-ra, Khonso, and Rameses I., without

distinction of divinity. On the side wall, Sethi I. receives similar

divine honours from the royal hands: while in the centre chamber Sethi

himself officiates before the statue of his father placed in a shrine.

The King is thus but the Living God: the God is thus but the Dead King.

I conclude, therefore, that a large part of the greater Egyptian

gods--the national or local gods, as opposed to those worshipped by each

family in its own necropolis--were early kings, whose myths were later

expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and adorned by

priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies. But down to

the very latest age of independence, inscriptions of the god Euergetes,

and the goddess Berenice, or representations like that at Philæ, of

the god Philadelphus suckled by Isis, show that to the Egyptian mind

the gulf between humanity and divinity was very narrow, and that the

original manhood of all the deities was an idea quite familiar to

priests and people.

There was, however, another class of gods about which we can be somewhat

less certain; these are the animal-gods and animal-headed gods which

developed out of the totems of the various villages. Such bestial types,

Professor Sayce remarks, “take us back to a remote prehistoric age,

when the religious creed of Egypt,” say rather, the custom of Egypt,

“was still totemism.” But in what precise relation totemism stood to

the main line of the evolution of gods I do not feel quite so sure in my

own mind as does Mr. Herbert Spencer. It seems to me possible that the

totem may in its origin have been merely the lucky-beast or badge of a

particular tribe (like the regimental {174}goat or deer); and that from

being at first petted, domesticated, and to some extent respected on

this account, it may have grown at last, through a confusion of ideas,

to share the same sort of divine honours which were paid to the

ghosts of ancestors and the gods evolved from them. But Mr. Frazer has

suggested a better origin of totemism from the doctrine of the Separable

Soul, which is, up to date, the best explanation yet offered of this

obscure subject. Be that as it may, if the totems were only gradually

elevated into divinities, we can easily understand Mr. Renouf’s remark

that the long series of tombs of the Apis bulls at Sakkarah shows “how

immeasurably greater the devotion to the sacred animals was in the later

times than in the former.”

May I add that the _worship_ of totems, as distinct from the mere _care_

implied by Mr. Frazer’s suggestion, very probably arose from the

custom of carving the totem-animal of the deceased on the grave-stake or

grave-board? This custom is still universal among the Indian tribes of

Northwestern America.

Nevertheless, whatever be the true origin of the totem-gods, I do not

think totemism militates in any way against the general principle of

the evolution of the idea of a god from the ghost, the Dead Man, or the

deified ancestor. For only after the concept of a god had been formed

from ancestor-cult, and only after worship had been evolved from the

customary offerings to the mummy or spirit at the tomb, could any other

object by any possibility be elevated to the godhead. Nor, on the other

hand, as I have before remarked, do I feel inclined wholly to agree with

Mr. Spencer that every individual god was necessarily once a particular

Dead Man. It seems to me indubitable that after the idea of godhead had

become fully fixed in the human mind, some gods at least began to be

recognised who were directly framed either from abstract conceptions,

from natural objects, or from pure outbursts of the mythopoeic faculty.

I do not think, therefore, that the existence {175}of a certain

(relatively unimportant) class of totem-gods in Egypt or elsewhere is

necessarily inconsistent in any way with our main theory of the origin

of godhead.

Be this as it may, it is at any rate clear that totemism itself was

a very ancient and widespread institution in early Egypt. Totems are

defined by Mr. Frazer as “a class of material objects which a savage

regards with superstitious respect, believing that there exists between

him and every member of the class an intimate and altogether special

relation.” “Observation of existing totem tribes in Africa, Australia,

and elsewhere,” says Sir Martin Conway, “shows us that one or more

representatives of the totem are often fed or even kept alive in

captivity by the tribe.” Mr. Frazer tells us that “amongst the

Nar-rinyeri in South Australia, men of the snake clan sometimes catch

snakes, pull out their teeth, or sew up their mouths, and keep them as

pets. In a pigeon clan of Samoa a pigeon was carefully kept and fed.

Amongst the Kalong in Java, whose totem is a red dog, each family as a

rule keeps one of these animals, which they will on no account allow to

be struck or ill-used by any one.” In the same way, no doubt, certain

Egyptian clans kept sacred bulls, cats, crocodiles, hawks, jackals,

cobras, lizards, ibises, asps, and beetles. Mummies of most of

these sacred animals, and little images of others, are common in the

neighbourhood of certain places where they were specially worshipped.

Whether the animal-headed gods represent a later stage of the same

totem-worship, or whether they stand merely for real ancestor-gods

belonging to a particular totem-clan, and therefore represented by its

totem, is not a question easily settled. But at any rate it is clear

that many gods are the equivalents of such totem-animals, as is the case

with the hawk-headed Horus, the jackal-headed Anubis, the cow-headed

Athor, the ram-headed Knum, the cat-headed Pasht, the lion-headed

Sekhet, the ibis-headed {176}Thoth, and the kestrel-headed Khons. These

gods appear on the earlier monuments as beasts alone, not as human

forms with bestial heads. Till the Twelfth Dynasty, when a totem-god

is mentioned (which is not often), “he is represented,” says Mr.

Flinders Petrie, “by his animal.” Anubis, for example, at this

stage, is merely a jackal; and as M. Maspero puts it, “Whatever may

have been the object of worship in Thoth-Ibis, it was a bird, not a

hieroglyph, that the earliest ibis-worshippers adored.” There were

other totems, however, which were less fruitful in deities, but which

entered largely in artistic forms into the later religious symbolism.

Such were especially the asp and the sacred scarabæus, which almost

rival the sun-disk in the large part they play in the developed

religious art-language of the great temple-building dynasties. I may

add that among the other symbols of this curious emblematical

picture-writing are the Tau or _crux ansata_, by origin apparently a

combined _linga_ and _yoni_; the lotus, the sceptre, the leek, and the

crescent.

There is, however, yet a third class of divine or quasidivine beings

in the newer Egyptian Pantheon to which Mr. Andrew Lang, in his able

introduction to the _Euterpe_ of Herodotus, still allows that great

importance may be attached. These are the elemental or seemingly

elemental deities, the Nature-Gods who play so large a part in all

rationalistic or mystical mythologies. Such are no doubt Nut and Seb,

the personal heaven and earth, named as early as the inscription on the

coffin of Menkaoura of the Fourth Dynasty in the British Museum: such

perhaps (though far less certainly) are Khons, identified with the

rising sun, and Tum, regarded as the impersonation of his nightly

setting. But none of the quite obviously elemental gods, except Ra, play

any large part in the actual and practical worship of the people:

to adopt the broad distinction I have ventured to draw in our second

chapter, they are gods to talk about, not gods to adore--mythological

conceptions rather than religious beings. Their names occur {177}much in

the sacred texts, but their images are rare and their temples unknown.

It is not Nut or Seb whose figures we see carved abundantly in relief on

the grey sandstone pillars of Karnak and Luxor, painted in endless file

on the gesso-covered walls of the Tombs of the Kings, or represented by

dozens in the great collection of little bronze idols that fill so many

cabinets at the Boulak Museum. The actual objects of the highest worship

are far other than these abstract elemental conceptions: they are

Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis, Khem, Pasht, and Athor. The quaint or

grotesque incised figures of Nut, represented as a female form with arms

and legs extended like a living canopy over the earth, as at Denderah,

belong, I believe, almost if not quite exclusively to the Ptolemaic

period, when zodiacal and astrological conceptions had been freely

borrowed by the Egyptians from Greece and Asia. Nut and Seb, as gods,

not myths, are in short quite recent ideas in Egypt. Even sun-disk Ra,

himself, important as he becomes in the later developed creed, is hardly

so much in his origin a separate god as an adjunct or symbol of divinity

united syncretically with the various other deities. To call a king

the sun is a common piece of courtier flattery. It is as Amen-Ra or as

Osiris that the sun receives most actual worship. His name is joined

to the names of gods as to the names of kings: he is almost as much a

symbol as the Tau or the Asp; he obtains little if any adoration in his

simple form, but plenty when conjoined in a compound conception with

some more practical deity of strictly human origin. Even at the great

“Temple of the Sun” at Heliopolis, it was as the bull Men or Mnevis

that the luminary was adored: and that cult, according to Manetho, went

back as far as the totemistic times of the Second Dynasty.

To put it briefly, then, I hold that the element of nature-worship is

a late gloss or superadded factor in the Egyptian religion; that it is

always rather mythological or explanatory than religious in the strict

sense; and that it does {178}not in the least interfere with our general

inference that the real Egyptian gods as a whole were either ancestral

or totemistic in origin.

From the evidence before us, broadly considered, we may fairly

conclude, then, that the earliest cult of Egypt consisted of pure

ancestor-worship, complicated by a doubtfully religious element of

totemism, which afterwards by one means or another interwove itself

closely with the whole ghostly worship of the country. The later gods

were probably deified ancestors of the early tribal kings, sometimes

directly worshipped as mummies, and sometimes perhaps represented by

their totem-animals or later still by human figures with animal heads.

Almost every one of these great gods is localised to a particular

place--“Lord of Abydos,” “Mistress of Senem,” “President of

Thebes,” “Dweller at Hermopolis,” as would naturally be the case

if they were locally-deified princes, admitted at last into a national

pantheon. In the earliest period of which any monuments remain to us,

the ancestor-worship was purer, simpler, and freer from symbolism or

from the cult of the great gods than at any later time. With the gradual

evolution of the creed and the pantheon, however, legends and myths

increased, the syncretic tendency manifested itself everywhere,

identifications multiplied, mysticism grew rife, and an esoteric faith,

with leanings towards a vague pantheistic monotheism, endeavoured to

rationalise and to explain away the more gross and foolish portions of

the original belief. It is the refinements and glosses of this final

philosophical stage that pass current for the most part in systematic

works as the true doctrines of Egyptian religion, and that so many

modern enquirers have erroneously treated as equivalent to the earliest

product of native thought. The ideas as to the unity of God, and the

sun-myths of Horus, Isis, and Osiris, are clearly late developments or

excrescences on the original creed, and betray throughout the esoteric

spirit of priestly interpretation. To the very last, the Worship of

the Dead, and the {179} crude polytheism based upon it, were the true

religion of the ancient Egyptians, as we see it expressed in all the

monuments.

Such was the religious world into which, if we may believe the oldest

Semitic traditions, the Sons of Israel brought their God Jahweh and

their other deities from beyond the Euphrates at a very remote period of

their national history. And such, in its fuller and more mystical form,

was the religion practised and taught in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt, at

the moment when the Christian faith was just beginning to evolve itself

round the historical nucleus of the man Christ Jesus, and him crucified.