Chapter III: Front Matter (3)

4. I have already mentioned that the idea of Power is one of the first to be connected with deity. The god is one who can do more than man. Especially any sudden and striking display of force, either in the material or immaterial world, stimulates the religious sense. The historian Buckle claimed that the inhabitants of countries subject to earthquakes are peculiarly superstitious. In myths and names, the hurricane of the tropics, the storm-winds of higher latitudes, indeed all sudden and tremendous outbreaks of natural violence, are regarded as exhibitions of divine Power.

Notably is this the case with the thunder storm. That manifestation of tremendous power has excited the religious feelings of all races. Moreover, the highly charged electrical atmosphere exerts a special influence on the nervous system, predisposing it to emotional outbreaks. The roll and reverberation of the thunder, the zigzag flash and destructive blow of the lightning and the roar of the tempest, combine to present the phenomenon as a manifest display of supernatural power. Hence in innumerable tribes the thunder god was identified with, or was the peer of, the highest in the Pantheon.[86] The same is true of potent and coercive mental traits. Their possessors are regarded as partaking of the deific being to a greater extent than others, or even actually divine. It is not merely that they excite the emotion of fear. That is a shallow interpretation of the psychic process. Underlying it is the deeper suggestion of energy, of action, of the spiritual mastery of material existence. This is as real, though not so clear, in the mind of the savage as in that of the philosopher.

This is also seen in the names and titles applied to the concept of Divinity by all nations. They speak of God “All-mighty,” the “Omnipotent Ruler”; and ever the attribute of indefinite power belongs to the great gods.

In early religions the manifestations of power are personified as single deities. We thus find in native American myths the figures of Huracan, the hurricane; Huemac, the Strong Hand, god of earthquakes, and numberless thunder, lightning, and storm gods.

5. It has been remarked by a German historian that the richest development of early poetry has been found among tribes dwelling by the ocean or among mountains; and another writer has claimed that the most rapid development of religions has taken place where the broad expanses of deserts or seas have stimulated the mind to contemplation of spacial magnitude on earth and in the sky.[87]

The languages of primitive peoples bear traces of this. In the Aztec tongue any wide level prairie is called _teotlalli_, godland; and the ocean, _teoatl_, godwater; among the Peruvians the term _huaca_, holy, is synonymous with “vast” or “immense.” With the Polynesians _taula_, the ocean space, is the home of the gods and where the souls go at death. The traveller Castren once stood on the shore of the Arctic Ocean with a Samoyed. Turning to the native, he asked, “where is Num?” (their chief god). “There,” instantly replied the Samoyed, waving his hand toward where “loomed the dark broad sea.”[88]

In many cults this idea is attempted expression by assigning to deities hugeness of size. The colossal stone images of Easter Island, the huge statues of the Maoris, are endeavours to present it to the senses.

In more developed faiths the same tendency prevails. The Buddhists rival each other in constructing enormous statues of Sakya Muni; in the Sanscrit Upanishads, Aditi, who represents the endless visible expanse, is termed “mother and father of all gods and men, the substance of whatever has been or shall be born”[89]; and according to some Mahommedan writers, God is so great that it is 72,000 days’ journey between his eyes!

* * * * *

Such are some of the potent stimuli which stir the depths of man’s psychical nature, awakening in him the belief in unknown powers far beyond his ability to measure or to cope with. Not from any conscious act of intelligence, not from any process of voluntary reasoning, is that belief born, but from the unknown, the unplumbed abyss of the sub-conscious mind.

Let not this be considered as something degrading to the religious conceptions themselves. Though all are drawn from out the human spirit itself, and are nowise the direct revelations their believers think them, yet who dare measure the height and the depth of the sub-conscious intelligence? It draws its knowledge from sources which elude scientific research, from the strange powers which we perceive in insects and other lower animals, almost, but not wholly, obliterated in the human line of organic descent; and from others, now merely nascent or embryonic, new senses, destined in some far off æon to endow our posterity with faculties as wondrous to us as would be sight to the sightless.

More than this: the teachings of the severest science tell us that Matter is, in its last analysis, Motion, and that motion is nought else than Mind[90]; and who dare deny that in their unconscious functions our minds may catch some overtones, as it were, from the harmonies of the Universal Intelligence thus demonstrated by inductive research, and vibrate in unison therewith?

LECTURE III.

Primitive Religious Expression: in the Word.

CONTENTS:—An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical
Potency—The Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The Name as an
Attribute—The Sacred Names—The Ineffable Name—“Myrionomous”
Gods—“Theophorous” Names—Suggestion and Repetition as
Stimulants—I. The Word _to_ the gods: Prayer—Its Forms,
Contents, and Aims—II. The Word _from_ the gods: The Law and
the Prophecy—The Ceremonial Law, or _tabu_—Examples—Divination
and Prediction—III. The Word _concerning_ the gods:
The Myths—Their Sources chiefly Psychic—Some from
Language—Examples—Transference—Similarities—The Universal
Mythical Cycles: 1. The Cosmical Concepts; 2. The Sacred
Numbers; 3. The Drama of the Universe; Creation and Deluge
Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise; 5. The Conflict of Nature; 6.
The Returning Saviour; 7. The Journey of the Soul—Conclusion as
to these Identities.

There is a pleasant myth told by the inhabitants of the island of Mangaia in the South Pacific. When the Creator of all things had ordered the solid land to rise from the primeval waters, he walked abroad to survey his work. “It is good,” said he aloud to himself. “Good,” answered an echo from a neighbouring hill. “What!” exclaimed the Creator. “Is some one here already? Am not I first?” “I first,” answered the echo. Therefore the Mangaians assert that earliest of all existences is the bodiless Voice.[91] It is their way of saying, “In the beginning was the Word.”

Not only may we call it the first, it is also the mightiest of the unseen agencies which mould man and his destinies.

“Power over men,” remarks Count Tolstoï in one of his essays, “lies not in material force, but in thought and its clear expression.” Disraeli, that subtlest of diplomats, once said, “We govern men with—words.”

No idea can be clearly conveyed to another unless there is a word to express it. Inward thought and outward utterance are the correlated conditions of intelligent advancement. The spoken word evokes in the mind of the hearer the picture, the emotion, the reasoning, which is occupying our own. A thousand minds are brought instantly to bear on the same thought by the words in the mouth of one. I cannot place too high the instant and magical effect of the word.

Not only does it convey a new thought to the mind, but it is itself the begetter of thought. It is a seed sown, which grows and branches, bearing flower and fruit, beauteous and everlasting, or noxious and destructive.

Through the faculty of speech, social life becomes possible; on it depends the sweet interchange of souls; by it we are led to think in unison; through it we share the meditations of the philosopher, and the inspired visions of the poet and the prophet.

If there is any way in which the spirits of the sky and air, the hosts of the Divine, can touch and teach our souls, it must be chiefly through the spoken word.

Every religion of the world bears witness to this. There is no other element in them in which all join with like unanimity. From the rudest to the ripest they echo the verse of the evangelist philosopher when he wrote: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The highest teachings of them all are expressed in the formula: “And the word of the Lord came saying—”

We may go back to the earliest forms of the ancient Egyptian religion, and we find the doctrine that the man who had learned and could pronounce the divine words revealed through the god Thoth (Thought, Mind), by their utterance would be elevated to the god, and be blended with him, as one and inseparable. “The primary idea concerning the ritual formulas was assimilation to God, brought about by the power of the words themselves.”[92]

Probably in all primitive faiths the word is regarded as a magical power in itself. In Egypt it was believed that by words the most powerful of the gods could be made obedient to the will of man. By them, as exorcisms or incantations everywhere, demons could be loosed or bound, and spirits summoned from the vasty deep. The stock in trade of the Indian medicine-man is principally his store of exorcisms, and among the Goras of North-Western India any one can become a priest who will learn the formulas which compel the demons.[93]

Our word “charm” comes from the Latin _carmen_, the sacred rhythmic formula, such as Virgil averred could by its occult power drag the moon from the sky.

“Carmina vel cælo possunt deducere lunam.”

There were such songs scarcely less potent among the Australian Blacks, which could summon the rain in dry seasons or cause it to cease in floods.[94]

No demon, however malevolent, can resist, in their belief, the power of the right word. The natives of New South Wales say that an evil spirit in the shape of a dwarf with monstrous head roams the woods at night and devours those whom he meets. But if the man utters the word “Boonbolong,” the dwarf passes on his way and does not harm him.[95]

When Jesus was in Capernaum, and at his command an unclean spirit had gone out of a man possessed, the multitude said one to the other,—τις εστι ουτος λογος, “What is this Word, by the authority and might of which this man casts out devils?” (Luke iv., 36.) They believed he used some cabalistic formula of exorcism which constrained the demons to obey his will.

Nowhere did the Word display its terrible effect more fearfully than in the curse or imprecation. In ancient Assyria, writes Professor Sayce, “The power of the _mamit_, or curse, was such that the gods themselves could not transgress it.”[96] Not only did it unloose the demons of destruction, but it constrained the gods against their will, changing them from protectors to enemies.[97]

Amid savage tribes, in undoubted and repeated instances, the curse kills as certainly as a knife. Among the western Indians of our country, when a medicine-man “gathers his medicine,” that is, rises to the full height of inspired volition, and utters a withering curse on his antagonist, commanding him to die, the latter knows all hope is lost. Sometimes he drops dead on the spot, or at best lingers through a few days of misery.[98] The Australians believe that the curse of a potent magician will kill at the distance of a hundred miles.[99]

Not only is the word thus mighty in the unseen world, but it is itself the very efflux and medium of the divine power itself.

Thus in the drama of creation recorded in the first chapter of Genesis we read: “And God said, ‘Light, be,’ and light was”; and in the corresponding myth of the Quiche Indians of Central America, the maker of the world calls forth, _Uleu!_ Earth! and at the word the solid land grew forth.[100]

Sir George Grey relates a story that in New Zealand there was a huge, carved wooden head, which could speak, and by the dreadful might of its words slew all who approached it. But when by superior magic its voice was reduced to a whisper, its power was gone and it was destroyed.[101]

It is to be noted that the magical influence of the word is _independent of its meaning_. It is distinctly _not_ the idea, image, or truth which it conveys to which is ascribed its efficacy. On the contrary, the most potent of all words are those which have no meaning at all or of which the sense has been lost.

This is constantly seen in the formulas of savage tribes. They preserve archaisms of language no longer understood by those who utter them, and in other instances they are obviously made up of syllables strung together without regard to intelligibility.

The same fact is abundantly shown in the cabalistic jargon of classical and mediæval diviners, and in the charms drawn from contemporary folk-lore. Indeed, the famous cabalist, Pico de Mirandola, asserts that a word without meaning has most influence over the demons.

Not only one or a few words may be thus unintelligible, but long communications may be in articulate sounds conveying no thought whatever. This is the “gift of tongues,” the power to speak in unknown languages.

It is common in savage life. Many of the important chants at the sacred ceremonies are mere iterations of meaningless syllables. The idea would seem to be that what men cannot understand, the gods do; or else, that it is the god expressing himself through human organs but in a speech unknown to human ears. Bishop Galloway says that the charm songs of the Zulus are often quite unintelligible to themselves[102]; and this is one of many examples.

Of all words, the most sacred is the Name. In primitive thought, the personal name of an individual is not merely an attribute, it is an integral part of his Self, his Ego. The Eskimos say that a man consists of three parts, his body, his soul, and his name, and of these the last mentioned alone achieves immortality. This seems very advanced. Most of our ambitious men appear to think more of rendering their names than their souls worthy of immortality. Very generally, the name was associated with the personal guardian spirit, derived from it or indicating it, and hence received a ceremonial sanctity.[103]

As being a part of oneself, injury or contumely heaped upon a name reacted upon the individual who bore it, and even life could be destroyed in this manner.

For this reason, throughout America the natives rarely disclosed their real appellations, but were designated by nicknames. In Australia some tribes were so cautious that the young men on entering adult life renounced the names by which they had been known and assumed no other; while a woman preserved indeed her appellation, but no one except her husband was entitled to pronounce it.[104] The Dyaks take the prudent precaution, after an attack of illness, to change their names; so that the demon who sent the sickness may not recognise them, and continue his malevolent pursuit.[105]

In Polynesia, where the name was not thus concealed, it could be applied, according to the ceremonial law, only to the person, although it was generally a common noun. Hence arose the curious custom called _tepi_. All words which formed part of the name of the chieftain, and all syllables of other words which had a similar sound were dropped from the language and others substituted for them during his lifetime. Thus, forty or fifty of the most common terms of the language would drop out of use at once, and as many more be materially changed in sound, to the great annoyance of missionaries and visitors.[106]

The Kamschatkans were so particular that they would not name the bear or wolf, for these animals understood the language of men, and would be offended at such familiarity![107]

Even if it does not hear, the power for good or evil which a being has, can, in primitive opinion, be communicated through its name. For that reason the priest known as the _flamen dialis_ among the Romans would not only avoid touching a dog or bear, but he would not pronounce their names, lest he should be contaminated! And to this day a Mohammedan, if he pronounces the word for “hog,” will spit, that his mouth may not be defiled by the name of the unclean beast.

Even more universal was the avoidance of the names of the dead. This prevailed throughout Africa, Australia, Tasmania, Polynesia, and America. The reason was, that the name was held to be a part of the spirit of the departed, and to pronounce it would disturb the rest of the grave, and probably indeed bring the perturbed spirit to the circle of auditors.[108]

If such was the case with the names of men and beasts, how sacred must be the names of the gods!

This is an extraordinary feature, common to the rudest superstitions of savage and the most developed faiths of civilised lands, and it has for its basis the conception of the name as a real attribute, a part of the Self.

“In all the religions of ancient Asia,” writes Lenormant, “the mysterious Name was considered a real and divine being, who had a personal existence and exclusive power over both nature and the world of spirits.”[109]

In the name dwelt the essential power of the deity. An Egyptian magical formula, placed in the mouth of a god, reads:

“I am the elect of millions of years.
Were my name spoken on the bank of a river, it would be consumed;
Were it uttered on earth, fire would burst from the ground.”[110]

The knowledge of this name by another enabled him to exert a power over the god himself. That by naming a demon, he can be forced to appear, was a cardinal principle of ancient magic. “The list of divine names possessed by the Roman pontiffs in their _indigitamenta_ was their most efficacious magical instrument, laying at their mercy all the forces of the spirit world.”[111]

For this reason, the gods of ancient Egypt sedulously concealed their names, and we cannot doubt that it was the fear of some such subjection of their deity through the malicious use of his name, which led the early Jews to conceal it so well that it is now lost. It was the same with the Semitic Arabians. Instead of the true divine name, they substituted Allah, the Mighty One, so that now the original is conjectural or unknown.

This extends to the rudest tribes. The African traveller Holub says that the actual name of the god of the Marutse and allied tribes along the Zambesi river is Njambe; but to avoid revealing this, they employ the term Molemo, “He above.” Among the south-eastern Australian tribes their leading deity is Turramulun (the One-legged), who lives in the sky. His name is never revealed to women, nor to youths before their initiation to manhood.[112]

The Choctaw Indians regarded the name of their highest divinity as self-existing, essential, and unspeakable. Therefore, when it was necessary to refer to him, they adopted a circumlocution, for, says their historian, “according to their fixed standard of speech, had they made any nearer approach to the beloved Name, it would have been reckoned a profanation.”[113]

How completely this notion has survived among ourselves is shown by the second clause of that prayer on which we have all been brought up, “Hallowed be Thy Name.” But how few who repeat it reflect that the name referred to, whatever it was, is now through long concealment totally lost!

Thus we see that the doctrine of “the ineffable Name” is the common property of savage and cultured faiths.

From the misuse of the name to compel the obedience of the god, or to injure his dignity and worth, came the idea of profanity, sternly forbidden by the early Jewish law,—“Take not the name of the Lord in vain”—and by many other faiths of a primitive aspect.

Quite consistently with this idea of real existence in names, the god who had many names had just as many powers or faculties. For that reason, the prominent gods of ancient Egypt, especially Isis, were called upon by so numerous epithets that the Greeks spoke of them as “myrionomous,” ten-thousand-named. In later Babylonian times all the names of the fifty great gods were ascribed to Êa, by which process they were themselves absorbed into his being. “When they lost their names, they lost their personality as well.”[114] To the Mohammedan the “One hundred names of God” repeated in the Koran express the multitude of His powers.

The same tendency is visible in the native religions of America. The Mexicans applied many names to the same divinity, and in the _Popol Vuh_, the sacred book of the Quiches, the chief deity is called by a variety of titles, some sounding strange to us, as “the opossum-hunter,” the “green snake,” the “calebash,” all of symbolic sense.[115]

In the South Seas, the name of a god, adopted by a chief, identified him in the opinion of the people with the god and secured for him the reverence and adoration ascribed to his divine namesake.[116]

This idea is that which in many early and later faiths led to what are called the “theophorous” or god-bearing names, where the individual is called by the proper name of a saint or god. They were especially frequent in early Semitic religions, and are customary among Catholics to-day.[117]

We find their origin in the custom, very general among the American Indians, for the person to take the name of the spirit who appears to him during the vigils and fasts which attend the ceremonies of initiation to manhood. By assuming the name of the divinity, the two natures or essences are believed to be united. This was precisely also the opinion of the early Christians, as we see in the expression of St. Ephrem, a Syrian saint of the fourth century: “Merciful was the Lord in that He clad on our Names. His Names make us great; our Names make Him small.”[118]

If we seek the explanation of this strange power attributed to words and names, often apart from their signification, we shall find it in their extreme activity as agents of mental suggestion. They are intense psychic stimulants, stirring the soul to its depths. The Word is by odds the most effective of all agencies to bring about altered and abnormal mental conditions either in the individual or in the mass. Through it, judiciously applied, the profoundest hypnotic trance, or the wildest, maniacal nervous seizures can be produced at will.[119]

The repetition of a word greatly heightens its suggestive influence and promotes the exclusion from the mind of all other concepts and associations than its own. In many languages, a word repeated is equivalent to the superlative degree, and in every tongue the repetition has a similar effect, as in the phrase: “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Sabaoth.”

No words in this relation are more efficient than names. Consider what our own lives would be if we had to change our names every year, how it would seem to obliterate our personality, how it would dissipate all dreams of posthumous glory and renown. Our consciousness of Self would suffer diminution, and the keenest interest of our lives would be lost. Our name is really and truly a part of ourselves, and he who would rob us of it would leave us poor indeed. Why is every point of view carved with the names of obscure tourists, why does it give us pleasure to note our names among the hundreds at some grand function, but that we think it more desirable to live “as naked nominations, without desert or noble deeds,” as Sir Thomas Browne said, than to pass away and leave not that little which the Roman poet considered the least,—_nominis umbra_, “the shadow of a name.”

For the practical purposes of life the name confers or creates the personality. This fact exerted a profound influence in the earliest development of religion. The vague sense of spiritual power first became centred in the idea of an individual, of a personal god, when it received a name.

The primitive words of barbaric tongues used to signifying the divine have not the connotation of individuality. _Wakan_, _mahopa_, _manito_, _teotl_, _huaca_, _ku_, are such words from American languages, not one of which conveys the concept of personality. That concept was first gained when some single expression of spiritual power was differentiated and named.[120]

The essential religious element in the Word is its power to bring man into relation to the gods. This is possible in three directions,—we may address them; they may address us; or we may talk about them. These furnish the three forms of sacred expression in speech: 1. The word _to_ the gods,—Prayer; 2. The word _from_ the gods,—Revelation; and 3. The word _about_ the gods,—the Myth. We will consider each of these.