waters take hold of his hand!"
III. "He who fears not his God, will be cut off even like a
reed. He who honors not his goddess, his bodily strength will
waste away; like to a star of heaven, his splendor will pale;
he will vanish like to the waters of the night."
3. All this is religion, of the purest, loftiest kind; fruitful, too, of
good, the only real test of true religion. The deep humility, the
trustful appeal, the feeling of dependence, the consciousness of
weakness, of sin, and the longing for deliverance from them--these are
all very different from the pompous phrases of empty praise and sterile
admiration; they are things which flow from the heart, not the fancy,
which lighten its weight of sorrow and self-reproach, brighten it with
hope and good resolutions, in short, make it happier and better--what no
mere imaginative poetry, however fine, can do.
4. The radical distinction, then, between religious feeling and the
poetical faculty of mythical creation, is easy to establish and follow
out. On the other hand, the two are so constantly blended, so almost
inextricably interwoven in the sacred poetry of the ancients, in their
views of life and the world, and in their worship, that it is no wonder
they should be so generally confused. The most correct way of putting
the case would be, perhaps, to say that the ancient Religions--meaning
by the word the whole body of sacred poetry and legends as well as the
national forms of worship--were made up originally in about equal parts
of religious feeling and of mythology. In many cases the exuberance of
the imagination gained the upper hand, and there was such a riotous
growth of mythical imagery and stories that the religious feeling was
almost stifled under them. In others, again, the myths themselves
suggested religious ideas of the deepest import and loftiest sublimity.
Such was particularly the case with the solar and Chthonic Myths--the
poetical presentation of the career of the Sun and the Earth--as
connected with the doctrine of the soul's immortality.
5. A curious and significant observation has been made in excavating the
most ancient graves in the world, those of the so-called Mound-builders.
This name is not that of any particular race or nation, but is given
indiscriminately to all those peoples who lived, on any part of the
globe, long before the earliest beginnings of even the remotest times
which have been made historical by preserved monuments or inscriptions
of any kind. All we know of those peoples is that they used to bury
their dead--at least those of special renown or high rank--in deep and
spacious stone-lined chambers dug in the ground, with a similar gallery
leading to them, and covered by a mound of earth, sometimes of gigantic
dimensions--a very hill. Hence the name. Of their life, their degree of
civilization, what they thought and believed, we have no idea except in
so far as the contents of the graves give us some indications. For, like
the later, historical races, of which we find the graves in Chaldea and
every other country of the ancient world, they used to bury along with
the dead a multitude of things: vessels, containing food and drink;
weapons, ornaments, household implements. The greater the power or
renown of the dead man, the fuller and more luxurious his funeral
outfit. It is indeed by no means rare to find the skeleton of a great
chief surrounded by those of several women, and, at a respectful
distance, more skeletons--evidently those of slaves--whose fractured
skulls more than suggest the ghastly custom of killing wives and
servants to do honor to an illustrious dead and to keep him company in
his narrow underground mansion. Nothing but a belief in the continuation
of existence after death could have prompted these practices. For what
was the sense of giving him wives and slaves, and domestic articles of
all kinds, food and weapons, unless it were for his service and use on
his journey to the unknown land where he was to enter on a new stage of
existence, which the survivors could not but imagine to be a
reproduction, in its simple conditions and needs, of the one he was
leaving? There is no race of men, however primitive, however untutored,
in which this belief in immortality is not found deeply rooted,
positive, unquestioning. The _belief_ is implanted in man by the _wish_;
it answers one of the most imperative, unsilenceable longings of human
nature. For, in proportion as life is pleasant and precious, death is
hideous and repellent. The idea of utter destruction, of ceasing to be,
is intolerable to the mind; indeed, the senses revolt against it, the
mind refuses to grasp and admit it. Yet death is very real, and it is
inevitable; and all human beings that come into the world have to learn
to face the thought of it, and the reality too, in others, before they
lie down and accept it for themselves. But what if death be _not_
destruction? If it be but a passage from this into another
world,--distant, unknown and perforce mysterious, but certain
nevertheless, a world on the threshold of which the earthly body is
dropped as an unnecessary garment? Then were death shorn of half its
terrors. Indeed, the only unpleasantness about it would be, for him who
goes, the momentary pang and the uncertainty as to what he is going to;
and, for those who remain, the separation and the loathsome details--the
disfigurement, the corruption. But these are soon gotten over, while the
separation is only for a time; for all must go the same way, and the
late-comers will find, will join their lost ones gone before. Surely it
must be so! It were too horrible if it were not; it _must be_--it _is_!
The process of feeling which arrived at this conclusion and hardened it
into absolute faith, is very plain, and we can easily, each of us,
reproduce it in our own souls, independently of the teachings we receive
from childhood. But the mind is naturally inquiring, and involuntarily
the question presents itself: this solution, so beautiful, so
acceptable, so universal,--but so abstract--what suggested it? What
analogy first led up to it from the material world of the senses? To
this question we find no reply in so many words, for it is one of those
that go to the very roots of our being, and such generally remain
unanswered. But the graves dug by those old Mound-Builders present a
singular feature, which almost seems to point to the answer. The tenant
of the funereal chamber is most frequently found deposited in a
crouching attitude, his back leaning against the stone-lined wall, and
_with his face turned towards the West, in the direction of the setting
sun_.... Here, then, is the suggestion, the analogy! The career of the
sun is very like that of man. His rising in the east is like the birth
of man. During the hours of his power, which we call the Day, he does
his allotted work, of giving light and warmth to the world, now riding
radiant and triumphant across an azure sky, now obscured by clouds,
struggling through mists, or overwhelmed by tempests. How like the
vicissitudes that checker the somewhat greater number of hours--or
days--of which the sum makes up a human life! Then when his appointed
time expires, he sinks down,--lower, lower--and disappears into
darkness,--dies. So does man. What is this night, death? Is it
destruction, or only a rest, or an absence? It is at all events _not_
destruction. For as surely as we see the sun vanish in the west this
evening, feeble and beamless, so surely shall we behold him to-morrow
morning rise again in the east, glorious, vigorous and young. What
happens to him in the interval? Who knows? Perhaps he sleeps, perhaps he
travels through countries we know not of and does other work there; but
one thing is sure: that he is not dead, for he will be up again
to-morrow. Why should not man, whose career so much resembles the sun's
in other respects, resemble him in this? Let the dead, then, be placed
with their faces to the west, in token that theirs is but a setting like
the sun's, to be followed by another rising, a renewed existence, though
in another and unknown world.
6. All this is sheer poetry and mythology. But how great its beauty, how
obvious its hopeful suggestiveness, if it could appeal to the groping
minds of those primitive men, the old Mound-Builders, and there lay the
seed of a faith which has been more and more clung to, as mankind
progressed in spiritual culture! For all the noblest races have
cherished and worked out the myth of the setting sun in the most
manifold ways, as the symbol of the soul's immortality. The poets of
ancient India, some three thousand years ago, made the Sun the leader
and king of the dead, who, as they said, followed where he had gone
first, "showing the way to many." The Egyptians, perhaps the wisest and
most spiritual of all ancient nations, came to make this myth the
keystone of their entire religion, and placed all their burying-places
in the west, amidst or beyond the Libyan ridge of hills behind which the
sun vanished from the eyes of those who dwelt in the valley of the Nile.
The Greeks imagined a happy residence for their bravest and wisest,
which they called the Islands of the Blest, and placed in the furthest
West, amidst the waters of the ocean into which the sun descends for his
nightly rest.
7. But the sun's course is twofold. If it is complete--beginning and
ending--within the given number of hours which makes the day, it is
repeated on a larger scale through the cycle of months which makes the
year. The alternations of youth and age, triumph and decline, power and
feebleness, are there represented and are regularly brought around by
the different seasons. But the moral, the symbol, is still the same as
regards final immortality. For if summer answers to the heyday of noon,
autumn to the milder glow and the extinction of evening, and winter to
the joyless dreariness of night, spring, like the morning, ever brings
back the god, the hero, in the perfect splendor of a glorious
resurrection. It was the solar-year myth with its magnificent
accompaniment of astronomical pageantry, which took the greater hold on
the fancy of the scientifically inclined Chaldeans, and which we find
embodied with such admirable completeness in their great epic. We shall
see, later on, more exclusively imaginative and poetical races showing a
marked preference for the career of the sun as the hero of a day, and
making the several incidents of the solar-day myth the subject of an
infinite variety of stories, brilliant or pathetic, tender or heroic.
But there is in nature another order of phenomena, intimately connected
with and dependent on the phases of the sun, that is, the seasons, yet
very different in their individual character, though pointing the same
way as regards the suggestion of resurrection and immortality--the
phenomena of the Earth and the Seed. These may in a more general way be
described as Nature's productive power paralyzed during the numbed
trance of winter, which is as the sleep of death, when the seed lies in
the ground hid from sight and cold, even as a dead thing, but awaking to
new life in the good time of spring, when the seed, in which life was
never extinct but only dormant, bursts its bonds and breaks into verdant
loveliness and bountiful crops. This is the essence and meaning of the
Chthonic or Earth-myth, as universal as the Sun-myth, but of which
different features have also been unequally developed by different
races according to their individual tendencies. In the Chaldean version,
the "Descent of Ishtar," the particular incident of the seed is quite
wanting, unless the name of Dumuzi's month, "The Boon of the Seed" ("_Le
Bienfait de la Semence._" Lenormant), may be considered as alluding to
it. It is her fair young bridegroom, the beautiful Sun-god, whom the
widowed goddess of Nature mourns and descends to seek among the dead.
This aspect of the myth is almost exclusively developed in the religions
of most Canaanitic and Semitic nations of the East, where we shall meet
with it often and often. And here it may be remarked, without digressing
or anticipating too far, that throughout the ancient world, the Solar
and Chthonic cycles of myths have been the most universal and important,
the very centre and groundwork of many of the ancient mythic religions,
and used as vehicles for more or less sublime religious conceptions,
according to the higher or lower spiritual level of the worshipping
nations.
8. It must be confessed that, amidst the nations of Western Asia, this
level was, on the whole, not a very lofty one. Both the Hamitic and
Semitic races were, as a rule, of a naturally sensuous disposition; the
former being, moreover, distinguished by a very decidedly material turn
of mind. The Kushites, of whom a branch perhaps formed an important
portion of the mixed population of Lower Mesopotamia, and especially the
Canaanites, who spread themselves over all the country between the
great rivers and the Western Sea--the Mediterranean--were no exception
to this rule. If their priests--their professed thinkers, the men
trained through generations for intellectual pursuits--had groped their
way to the perception of One Divine Power ruling the world, they kept it
to themselves, or, at least, out of sight, behind a complicated array of
cosmogonic myths, nature-myths, symbols and parables, resulting in
Chaldea in the highly artificial system which has been sketched
above--(see Chapters V. and VI.)--a system singularly beautiful and
deeply significant, but of which the mass of the people did not care to
unravel the subtle intricacies, being quite content to accept it entire,
in the most literal spirit, elementary nature-gods, astronomical
abstractions, cosmogonical fables and all--questioning nothing, at peace
in their mind and righteously self-conscious if they sacrificed at the
various time-honored local shrines, and conformed to the prescribed
forms and ceremonies. To these they privately added those innumerable
practices of conjuring and rites of witchcraft, the heirloom of the
older lords of the soil, which we saw the colleges of learned priests
compelled, as strangers and comparative newcomers, to tolerate and even
sanction by giving them a place, though an inferior one, in their own
nobler system (see p. 250). Thus it was that, if a glimmer of Truth did
feebly illumine the sanctuary and its immediate ministers, the people at
large dwelt in the outer darkness of hopeless polytheism and, worse
still, of idolatry. For, in bowing before the altars of their temples
and the images in wood, stone or metal in which art strove to express
what the sacred writings taught, the unlearned worshippers did not stop
to consider that these were but pieces of human workmanship, deriving
their sacredness solely from the subjects they treated and the place
they adorned, nor did they strive to keep their thoughts intent on the
invisible Beings represented by the images. It was so much simpler,
easier and more comfortable to address their adoration to what was
visible and near, to the shapes that were so closely within reach of
their senses, that seemed so directly to receive their offerings and
prayers, that became so dearly familiar from long associations. The bulk
of the Chaldean nation for a long time remained Turanian, and the
materialistic grossness of the original Shumiro-Accadian religion
greatly fostered its idolatrous tendencies. The old belief in the
talismanic virtues of all images (see p. 162) continued to assert
itself, and was easily transferred to those representing the divinities
of the later and more elaborate worship. Some portion of the divine
substance or spirit was supposed somehow to pass into the material
representation and reside therein. This is very clear from the way in
which the inscriptions speak of the statues of gods, as though they were
persons. Thus the famous cylinder of the Assyrian conqueror
Asshurbanipal tells how he brought back "the goddess Nana," (i.e., her
statue) who at the time of the great Elamite invasion, "had gone and
dwelt in Elam, a place not appointed for her," and now spoke to him the
king, saying: "From the midst of Elam bring me out and cause me to
enter into Bitanna"--her own old sanctuary at Erech, "which she had
delighted in." Then again the Assyrian conquerors take especial pride in
carrying off with them the statues of the gods of the nations they
subdue, and never fail to record the fact in these words: "I carried
away _their gods_," beyond a doubt with the idea that, in so doing, they
put it out of their enemies' power to procure the assistance of their
divine protectors.
9. In the population of Chaldea the Semitic element was strongly
represented. It is probable that tribes of Semites came into the country
at intervals, in successive bands, and for a long time wandered
unhindered with their flocks, then gradually amalgamated with the
settlers they found in possession, and whose culture they adopted, or
else formed separate settlements of their own, not even then, however,
quite losing their pastoral habits. Thus the Hebrew tribe, when it left
Ur under Terah and Abraham (see page 121), seems to have resumed its
nomadic life with the greatest willingness and ease, after dwelling a
long time in or near that popular city, the principal capital of Shumir,
the then dominant South. Whether this tribe were driven out of Ur, as
some will have it,[BJ] or left of their own accord, it is perhaps not
too bold to conjecture that the causes of their departure were partly
connected with religious motives. For, alone among the Chaldeans and all
the surrounding nations, this handful of Semites had disentangled the
conception of monotheism from the obscuring wealth of Chaldean
mythology, and had grasped it firmly. At least their leaders and elders,
the patriarchs, had arrived at the conviction that the One living God
was He whom they called "the Lord," and they strove to inspire their
people with the same faith, and to detach them from the mythical
beliefs, the idolatrous practices which they had adopted from those
among whom they lived, and to which they clung with the tenacity of
spiritual blindness and long habit. The later Hebrews themselves kept a
clear remembrance of their ancestors having been heathen polytheists,
and their own historians, writing more than a thousand years after
Abraham's times, distinctly state the fact. In a long exhortation to the
assembled tribes of Israel, which they put in the mouth of Joshua, the
successor of Moses, they make him say:--"Your fathers dwelt on the other
side of the flood" (i.e., the Euphrates, or perhaps the Jordan) "in old
time, even Terah, the father of Abraham and the father of Nachor, _and
they served other gods_." And further on: "... Put away _the gods which
your fathers served on the other side of the flood_ and in Egypt, and
serve ye the Lord.... Choose you this day whom you will serve, whether
the gods which your fathers served that were on the other side of the
flood, or the gods of the Amorites, in whose land ye dwell; as for me
and my house, we will serve the Lord." (Joshua, xxiv. 2, 14, 15.) What
more probable than that the patriarchs, Terah and Abraham, should have
led their people out of the midst of the Chaldeans, away from their
great capital Ur, which held some of the oldest and most renowned
Chaldean sanctuaries, and forth into the wilderness, partly with the
object of removing them from corrupting associations. At all events that
branch of the Hebrew tribe which remained in Mesopotamia with Nahor,
Abraham's brother (see Gen. xxiv. xxix. and ff.), continued heathen and
idolatrous, as we see from the detailed narrative in Genesis xxxi., of
how Rachel "had stolen _the images that were her father's_" (xxxi. 19),
when Jacob fled from Laban's house with his family, his cattle and all
his goods. No doubt as to the value and meaning attached to these
"images" is left when we see Laban, after having overtaken the
fugitives, reprove Jacob in these words:--"And now, though thou wouldst
needs be gone, because thou sore longedst for thy father's house, yet
wherefore hast thou stolen _my gods_?" (xxxi. 30), to which Jacob, who
knows nothing of Rachel's theft, replies:--"With whomsoever _thou
findest thy gods_, let him not live" (xxxi. 32). But "Rachel had taken
the images and put them in the camel's furniture, and sat upon them. And
Laban searched all the tent, but found them not" (xxxi. 34). Now what
could have induced Rachel to commit so dishonorable and, moreover,
dangerous an action, but the idea that, in carrying away these images,
her family's household "gods," she would insure a blessing and
prosperity to herself and her house? That by so doing, she would,
according to the heathens' notion, rob her father and old home of what
she wished to secure herself (see page 344), does not seem to have
disturbed her. It is clear from this that, even after she was wedded to
Jacob the monotheist, she remained a heathen and idolater, though she
concealed the fact from him.
10. On the other hand, wholesale emigration was not sufficient to remove
the evil. Had it indeed been a wilderness, unsettled in all its extent,
into which the patriarchs led forth their people, they might have
succeeded in weaning them completely from the old influences. But,
scattered over it and already in possession, were numerous Canaanite
tribes, wealthy and powerful under their chiefs--Amorites, and Hivites,
and Hittites, and many more. In the pithy and picturesque Biblical
language, "the Canaanite was in the land" (Genesis, xii. 6), and the
Hebrews constantly came into contact with them, indeed were dependent on
their tolerance and large hospitality for the freedom with which they
were suffered to enjoy the pastures of "the land wherein they were
strangers," as the vast region over which they ranged is frequently and
pointedly called. Being but a handful of men, they had to be cautious in
their dealings and to keep on good terms with the people among whom they
were brought. "I am a stranger and a sojourner with you," admits
Abraham, "bowing himself down before the people of the land," (a tribe
of Hittites near Hebron, west of the Dead Sea), when he offers to buy of
them a field, there to institute a family burying-place for himself and
his race; for he had no legal right to any of the land, not so much as
would yield a sepulchre to his dead, even though the "children of Heth"
treat him with high honor, and, in speaking to him, say, "My lord," and
"thou art a mighty prince among us" (Genesis, xxiii.). This transaction,
conducted on both sides in a spirit of great courtesy and liberality, is
not the only instance of the friendliness with which the Canaanite
owners of the soil regarded the strangers, both in Abraham's lifetime
and long after his death. His grandson, the patriarch Jacob, and his
sons find the same tolerance among the Hivites of Shalem, who thus
commune among themselves concerning them:--"These men are peaceable with
us; therefore let them dwell in the land and trade therein; for the
land, behold it is large enough for them; let us take their daughters
for wives, and let us give them our daughters." And the Hivite prince
speaks in this sense to the Hebrew chief:--"The soul of my son longeth
for your daughter: I pray you, give her him to wife. And make ye
marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us and take our
daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us, and the land shall be
before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions
therein."