Chapter II: THE WORD FROM THE GODS.—If the mere name of the god was thus mighty (1)

and thus venerated, how much more the words he himself uttered! The “Word of God,” as understood by the worshippers, is the kernel and core of every faith on earth. Every religion is, to its votaries, a revelation. None is so material, none so primitive, as to claim any other foundation than the expressed will of divinity. None is so devoid of ritual as to lack some means of ascertaining this will.

The word from the gods is clothed under two forms, the Law and the Prophets,—in other terms, Precept and Prediction. In every religion, from the most primitive to the highest, we find these two modes of divine utterance.

In the earliest phases of religion, the law is essentially prohibitory. It is in the form of the negative, “Thou shalt not——.” Ethnologists have adopted for this a word from Polynesian dialects, _tabu_, or _tapu_, akin to _tapa_, to name,[129] that which was solemnly named or announced being sacred, and hence forbidden to the _profanum vulgus_.

The _tabu_ extends its veto into every department of primitive life. It forbids the use of certain articles of food or raiment; it hallows the sacred areas; it lays restrictions on marriage, and thus originates what is known as the totemic bond; it denounces various actions, often the most trivial and innocent, and thus lays the foundation for the ceremonial law.

The penalty for the infraction of the _tabu_ includes all that flows from the anger of the gods, reaching to death itself. A few examples, from the very rudest religions, will serve to illustrate this.

The Kamschatkans in the beginning of the last century were very low in the scale of humanity and curiously pessimistic. They had a hero-god, Kutka, their mythic progenitor, of whom they told many strange and disgusting stories. They cursed him oftener than they blessed him, and refused to believe that anything good could come from the gods. But to escape the ill-will of these malevolent beings they practised various ceremonies and refrained from sundry actions calculated to displease those capricious spirits. Thus, one must not cook fish and flesh in the same pot, or he would be punished with sores; he must not step in the tracks of a bear, or he would be visited with a skin disease; he must not scrape the snow from his shoes with a knife, or there would be violent storms; and so on, through a long law of prohibitions.[130]

The Mincopies of the Andaman Islands have no forms of worship, they have no invocations to the gods, their language, indeed, has no original word for “prayer.” They believe firmly, however, in the existence of numerous spirits, not the souls of the deceased, but self-created and undying, who will injure them if they commit certain transgressions, such as to cook turtle or fish by burning a particular kind of wood; to roast a pig instead of boiling it, and so on.[131]

The Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego have been often, though erroneously, quoted as a tribe devoid of religion. Their ceremonial law was rigid. The hairs that fell from the head must be burned, or the individual would fall ill; the name of the dead must not be mentioned, or the ghost would return and plague them; the young ducklings must not be killed, or bad weather would follow.[132]

The _tabu_ in Polynesia, whence it derives its name, was carried to an incredible degree of stringency. The dread of its violation was so vivid, that in itself it was often the cause of the death of the offender.[133]

The second form of the “Word from God” was when it was uttered as a prophecy, a prediction of the future. In this form it appears throughout the world under the innumerable aspects of divination, as oracles, prophetic utterances, forecasts of time to come, second-sight, clairvoyance, and the like.

The essence of every religious rite may be said to be divinatory, inasmuch as its final aim is either to learn or to modify the Will of God, and thus to influence the future of the individual or society by extra-natural agencies.

There is nothing in this derogatory to religion as an element of mind. The constant effort of the reason is to banish the idea of chance from the universe; and he who regards the Will of God as a law of the universe does exclude chance from its events just in proportion as he learns that Will and acts in conformity to it.

Prediction in primitive religions is by two widely different methods, Divination and Prophecy.

The diviner, relying on his own sense and reasoning powers, foretells the future by observation of certain trains of events which he believes reveal the intentions of the gods; the prophet is one inspired by the divine mind itself to speak its own words and to convey directly the thoughts and wishes of deity.

This distinction is visible in early religions. Any one can learn the “signs” and “omens” which will be auspicious or inauspicious for his undertakings; though, of course, to read their full significance one must have made special studies in the art of augury. To become an inspired prophet requires a much more serious preparation, and some form of communion direct with the gods must be established.

III.—THE WORD CONCERNING THE GODS. A brilliant French writer (E. Scherer) has said: “It was the Word that made the gods,” “_Le mot, c’est l’artisan des idoles_.” He but expressed in a pointed apothegm what the profound German mythologist Kuhn stated in more formal terms when he wrote: “The foundation of mythology is to be looked for in the domain of language.”

What, indeed, does the term “myth” itself mean? It is merely the Greek for “a word,” something spoken, and in this general sense it is used by Homer. Later, its connotation became restricted to what was spoken concerning the gods, the narratives of their doings, the descriptions of their abodes and attributes.

Men began to frame such tales the moment they consciously recognised the existence of such unseen agencies. They were founded on visions, dreams, and those vague mental states which, as I have shown, fill up so large a part of savage life. They were not intentional fictions, by any means, for the criteria between the real and unreal fade away in those psychic conditions, and the faintest hold on actuality is enough to guarantee an indefinitely complex fancy.

It was a strange error by one of the most earnest students of primitive religions, the Reverend W. Robertson Smith, when he advocated his theory that the myth was derived from the ritual, not the ritual from the myth.[134] Had he studied the actual religious condition of the rudest tribes, he would have found them with scarcely any ritual but a most abundant mythology; and he would have discovered that where the myth was taken from the ritual, it is when the latter has lost its original meaning, and some other is devised to explain it.

As examples of such notions, I may take the Bushmen of South Africa. They enjoy the general reputation of being the lowest of the human race. They have no temples, no altars, no ritual; yet the missionary Bleek collected among them thousands of tales concerning their gods in their relations to men and animals.[135]

The Andamanese are alleged to have no forms of worship whatever; but they have many myths about the mighty Puluga, self-created and immortal, about the origin of fire, and the transactions of the invisible spirits.

It would be easy to give many other examples, but it is enough to refute such an opinion by referring to the vast body of myths in all religious peoples which have no reference to ritual whatever.

The sources of mythology are psychic. They are not to be traced to the external world, whether ritual or natural. Myths are not figurative explanations of natural phenomena, they are not vague memories of ancestors and departed heroes, they are not philosophic speculations or poetic fancies. They are distinctly religious in origin, and, when genuine, are the fruit of that insight into the divine, that “beatific vision,” on which I have laid such emphasis as the real and only foundation of all religions whatsoever.

They receive their form and expression through spoken language, and are, therefore, intimately associated with, often dependent upon its sounds, and laws. In how many ways this may influence them I may briefly mention.

Primitive language is predominantly concrete. The connotations of its terms are mainly objective. By this necessity arose the materialisation of the spiritual thought. It had to be expressed under external imagery.

Primitive languages are usually intensely individualising and specific. There is scarcely a native tongue in America in which one could say “hand”; one must always add a pronoun indicating whose hand is meant, “my, thy, his,” hand.

The generic distinctions in such tongues are often far reaching and real, not purely formal, as with us. A word in the masculine or feminine gender is understood to mean that the object to which it refers is positively male or female. Many other distinctions are thus conveyed, as what is animate and inanimate, noble or vulgar, etc.

The result of these distinctions in such languages as the Aryan and Semitic was that the gods perforce were arranged sexually as male and female, and this persists to-day even in our English tongue.

Many myths arose directly from words, through casual similarities between them which were attributed to some divine cause. This is the theory so well known by the advocacy of Professor Max Müller, who is charged, unfairly I believe, with having called mythology a “disease of language.” He, Professor Kuhn, and others lay great and just stress on the influence of “paronomy,” that is, similarity in the sound of words, as the starting-point of myths. They have adduced endless examples from the classical tongues, but I shall content myself with two from wholly primitive sources.

I have just referred to the Andamanese as at the bottom of religious growth, but with an abundant mythology. In their tongue it happens that the word _garub_ means “night” and also a species of caterpillar. It is probably a mere coincidence of sound. But they saw in it much more. Night to them is a depressing period, and it would not have been created by the supreme Puluga without just cause. Evidently the double meaning of the word _garub_ indicated this. And as the wise men proceed on that universally sound opinion that when there is a row there is a woman in it, they perceive that some woman must have wantonly killed a _garub_, a caterpillar, in order that Puluga should have sent _garub_, the night, as a punishment. And this is the sum of a long mythical story.[136]

Another example is from a far distant area, from among the Carrier Indians of British America. The arctic fox which they hunt has a sharp yelp which sounds _khaih_. Their word for “light” is _yekkhaih_. Evidently the fox was the animal who first called for the light and, by the magical power of the word, obtained it. Through what difficulties he accomplished this is told in a long and curious myth obtained from them by Father Morice.[137]

In the development of myths it was, indeed, often the case that those concerning one deity could be told of another—singularly incongruous as it often was,—or that the divine attributes primarily assigned to a deity and drawn from its character could be transferred to a human type, as when those of a flower were placed on the god.[138]

It is equally an error to suppose that myths were at first mere stories and received their religious character later. The true myth has a religious aim from the outset, and is not the product of an idle fancy. Those who have taught otherwise have been misled by a superficial acquaintance with the psychology of savage tribes. Mythology comes from religion, not religion from mythology.

The savage understands perfectly the difference between a sacred and a secular story, between a narrative of the doings of the gods handed down from his ancestors, and the creation of the idle fancy brought forth to amuse a circle of listeners.

I have already referred to the strange similarity in the myths of savage nations far asunder in space and kinship. The explanation of this is not to be found in borrowing or in recollections from a common, remote unity; but in the laws of the human mind. The same myths are found all over the world, with the same symbolism and imagery, woven into cycles dealing with the same great questions of human thought. This is because they arise from identical psychic sources, and find expression under obligatory forms, depending on the relations of man to his environment, and on the unity of mental process throughout the race.

It is not possible for me at the present time to enter far into the vast temple of mythology. I must content myself with selecting a few of the most prominent mythical cycles, aiming by these to show how they form the ground-plan and substructure of the whole edifice of mythical narrative.

I will select seven which are the most prominent, those relating to: 1. the Cosmical Concepts; 2. the Sacred Numbers; 3. the Drama of the Universe; 4. the Earthly Paradise; 5. the Conflict of Nature; 6. the Returning Saviour; and 7. the Journey of the Soul.

_1._ _The Cosmical Concepts._—Wherever man is placed on the earth, he is guided in his movements by space and direction. These are among the earliest notions he derives from the impressions on his senses. His anatomical conformation, the anterior and posterior planes of his body and his right and left sides, lead him to a fourfold division of space, as before him and behind him, to one side or the other. He conceives the earth, therefore, as a plain with four quarters, the chief directions as four, to wit, the cardinal points, and the winds as four principal currents from these points. The sky is to him a solid covering, supported at each of its four corners by a tree, a pillar, or a giant, and is itself divided into four courts or regions like the earth.

These were his cosmical concepts, his primal ideas of the universe, and they entered deeply into his life, his acts, and his beliefs. He founded his social organisation on them, he pitched his tents or built his cities on their model, he oriented his edifices to simulate them, and framed his myths to explain and perpetuate them.

We find these concepts practically universal. The symbolic figures which represent them are scratched in the soil at the _Bora_, or initiation ceremonies of the Australians; they are etched into the pots and jars we dig up in the mounds of the Mississippi valley; they are painted in strange figures on the manuscripts of the Mayas and Mexicans; they reappear in the mysterious symbols of the svastika and the Chinese Ta-Ki; they underlie the foundation stones of Egyptian pyramids, and recur in the lowest strata of Babylonian ziggarats.[139]

_2. The Sacred Numbers._—The cosmical concepts were closely connected with the sacred numbers. Wherever we turn in myth and rite, in symbolism or sacred art, we find certain numbers which have a hallowed priority in religious thought. These numbers are pre-eminently the three and the four, and those derived from them. They are distinctly antithetic in character, arising from contrasting psychical sources, which I will briefly explain.

The number _four_ derives its sacredness in mythology from the cosmical concepts just mentioned. It was, therefore, connected with the objective and phenomenal world, and had a material and concrete origin and applications.

The number _three_, on the other hand, was surrounded with the halo of sanctity from the operations of the mind itself. These, the processes of thinking, are carried on by a triple or rather triune action of the intelligence, which logicians express in the three fundamental “laws of thought,” and in the trilogy of the syllogism. These ever-present laws of thinking impress themselves on the mind and mental acts whether they are recognised or not, and all the more absolutely in that involuntary action in which, as “sub-limital consciousness” or “psychic automatism,” I have revealed to you the true source of the conception of the Divine.[140]

How natural, then, that we should find in so many primitive faiths the belief in the triplicate nature of divinity, should find myths, idols, rites, so devised as to reflect and inculcate this! Such is the case, and it is easy to quote examples, whether we turn to the Indians of America or the Indians of Hindostan, whether we touch on the triads of ancient Egypt or those of the Druids, whether we recall the three Norns of Teutonic myth or the three Fates of the Hellenes. As a writer, who has made the subject his special branch, observes: “It is impossible to study any single system of worship throughout the world, without being struck with the peculiar persistence of the triple number in regard to Divinity.”[141]

The exception to this would naturally be where the concept of the number itself was too feeble to impress itself upon the myth. There are tribes who cannot count four, whose languages have no word for any number beyond two, and yet who are by no means deficient either in mythologies or practical arts.[142] Among these, we should look in vain for the sacredness of numbers.

_3. The Drama of the Universe._—I have already quoted the saying of the wise men of ancient India, “There is no limit to the knowing of the Self that knows.” He who through meditation and prayer has become one with God, knows what God knows. Thus it is that in the rudest tribes we find the story of the beginning of things clearly told as coming from the inspired knowledge of the seers.

This story has many points of similarity, wherever we find it, not owing, I hasten again to say, to any unity of origin in place, but due to the higher unity of the mind of man, and the necessary results of its activity.

Look in what continent we please, we shall find the myth of a Creation or of a primeval construction, of a Deluge or a destruction, and of an expected Restoration. We shall find that man has ever looked on this present world as a passing scene in the shifting panorama of time, to be ended by some cataclysm and to be followed by some period of millennial glory.

Whenever we have a fairly complete body of the mythology of a primitive stock, we discover the same scenario of the vast drama of the universe, varying abundantly in detail and local colour, but true to the grandiose lines of its composition.

It is instructive to analyse its various elements and trace them to their psychic sources. Let us begin with the modes of action of the creative power itself.

This mysterious power is known to man under three forms.

The simplest is that of the moulder or manufacturer, as the potter makes his pots, the shoemaker his shoes. This is the conception which underlies many myths of the Creator, as is shown by the names he bears. Thus the Australians called him Baiame, “the cutter-out,” as one cuts out a sandal from a skin, or a figure from bark. The Maya Indians used the term Patol, from the verb _pat_, to mould, as a potter his clay, Bitol, which has the same meaning, and Tzacol, the builder, as of a house.[143] With the Dyaks of Borneo, the Creator is Tupa, the forger, as one forges a spear-blade[144]; and so on.

The second form is that of creation in the sense of generation, and this is a constant simile in the myths, with reference to the process both in the vegetable and animal kingdoms.

The Creator is often referred to as the Father, the parent, more or less literally, of all that is. He has many such titles in the myths of America and Polynesia. In bi-sexual myths he is associated with some universal mother as the genetrix.

The third form is more recondite and loftier. In an earlier lecture I have emphasised how man is conscious within himself of the Will as an ultimate source of power. This he clearly recognised in his primitive conditions, and to its exertion repeatedly in his myths did he attribute the origin of things. They were self-evolved in the thought of the primal Being, or, as the native American expression is, they were “created by thought.”

We find this in the rudest tribes of North America; and among the sedentary Zuñis of New Mexico, it is said of their demiurge Awonawilona that at the beginning “he conceived within himself and thought outward in space,” in order to bring nature into existence. We see the connection in the Vitian dialect of Polynesian, in which _mania_ is “to think”; _mana_, a miracle, and the power to perform one. According to the myths of Hawaii, it was “by an act of the will” that their triple-natured Creator “broke up the night” (Po), and from its fragments evoked into being the world of light and life.[145]

Whatever the mode of creation, it was felt that it did not tell the whole story. The conceptions of time and space are in their essence limitless, and any creation must have been within them. Thus in Polynesian myth, Po represents not a dateless chaos but the debris of some former state of things; and in Algonquin legend the primeval ocean had engulfed some older world.[146]

This psychic molimen, ceaselessly acting, led in more developed mythologies to some defined fancies of these earlier periods of cosmic existence and thus to the myths of the Ages of the World or the Epochs of Nature. These are clearly outlined among the Mexicans, Mayas, Peruvians, and other tribes of the New World and among many on the Eastern Hemisphere. The Aztecs count them as four, each followed by a formidable catastrophe, nearly or quite destroying all that lived.

The last of these destructions was generally blended with the notion of the emergence of the solid land from the primeval waters; and this is the origin of the Deluge Myth, the story of the Universal Flood, which we find in so many primitive peoples. It has excited especial attention, and by writers has been explained as the remembrance of some local overflow, or the recollection of the Hebrew tradition. Its real origin, purely psychic and derived from the myth of the Epochs of Nature, I explained thirty years ago in discussing its prevalence among American tribes.[147]

_4. The Earthly Paradise._—Associated with this cycle is the myth of the terrestrial Paradise, watered by its four rivers, and enclosing the tree of life,—the happy abode of early man. The four rivers are the celestial streams from the four corners of the earth, watering the tree as the emblem of life. Thus we find it among the American Indians, the Sioux and the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Polynesians, the ancient Aryans and Semites, etc.[148] Its origin is purely psychic, and though we can easily understand how the writer of the Book of Genesis sought to identify these mythical streams with some known to him, it is strangely out of date for scholars of to-day to follow his footsteps in that vain quest.[149]

_5. The Conflict of Nature._—Another great cycle of psychic myths arose from the conflict of nature as apprehended by the primitive mind. Everywhere it seems to be raging around us. The hourly struggle of light with darkness; of day with night; of sunshine with storm; of summer with winter; of youth with age, of health with disease; of life with death; of all that makes toward good with all that makes toward evil—this endless battle of two principles underlies all movement and is forever stirring the soul to throw itself into the fray.

In a thousand forms this eternal combat was portrayed in myths, all pregnant with one meaning, bodying it forth in varied symbol and expression. The world-wide stories of the conflict of the first two brothers, of men with gods, of giants with heroes, of the deities among themselves, arose from this perception of the unceasing interaction of natural forces, imagined as a war between conscious existences.

_6. The Returning Saviour._—Out of this imagined turmoil and slaughter grew the wonderful mythical cycles concerning the Deliverer and Saviour. He would come from afar, out of the morning light or the distant sky, or he would be born of a virgin and the son of a god. He would lead his people to happiness and power, crushing by his might the enemies who afflicted them, whether on earth or among the envious gods. Blond-bearded and light-haired, even among Polynesians and Americans, we cannot err in seeing in this majestic figure the personified idea of Light, transferred from the plane of physical phenomena into that of psychical anticipation.[150]

_7. The Journey of the Soul._—Lastly, I mention the cycle which describes the journey of the soul after death. The extraordinary similarity which I and others have pointed out between the opinions on this subject among Egyptians, Greeks, ancient Celts, and North American Indians,[151] is not to be explained by any theory of inter-communication, nor “by chance,” as some have argued, but by fixed psychic laws, working over the same material under similar conditions.

The soul passes toward the west, crosses a sea or river to the abode of the departed, and meets everywhere nearly the same obstacles, to be overcome by proper preparations and mortuary ceremonies. I need not rehearse the details. They can be compared elsewhere. But their substantial identity confirms in an emphatic manner the thesis I am advocating, that in these universal mythical cycles we are dealing not with fragments of some one set of fancies borrowed from a common source, but with independent creations of the human intellect, framed under laws common to it everywhere, and which tend always to produce fruits generically everywhere the same.

LECTURE IV.

Primitive Religious Expression: In the Object.

CONTENTS:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship
only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a
Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects:
1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry;
2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water,
and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and
Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees
and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The
Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High
Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent,
etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty;
8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The
Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion’s Crown.

If we analyse the concepts which occupy our minds, we shall find that most of them are derived from the sense of sight; they are what psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone we owe the notions of space, size, form, colour, brightness, and motion.

By filling the brain with such images, sight becomes a mental stimulus of the highest order, and as we find it exerting its influence in other directions, so in the development of the religious sense it has always held a conspicuous place. It has led to the objective expression of that sense under visible forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures, symbolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.

This expression, universal in primitive conditions, is called fetishism, polytheism, and idolatry, the worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to impress upon you that nowhere in the world did man ever worship a stock or a stone, as such. Every fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the road-side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some mysterious, transcendental power, by which it can influence the future. In some obscure way it is the medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the recognition of which is at the basis of every religion.

The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power behind it, though everywhere recognised, was not easy to define. The Melanesians believe that the souls of the dead act through bones; while the independent spirits (_vui_) choose stones as their mediums; and they say that these objects are, as it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal powers.[152]

That the fetish itself is something else than the mere object, and is certainly not identified with it (as writers have often asserted), is evident from the words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South African negro offered food to a tree in the presence of an European traveller. The latter observed that a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro, “tree not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”[153]

If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown away, burned, or broken, as having lost its virtue, ceased to be the abode of power. One of efficacy, on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such are often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of New Guinea the fetishes are small wooden dolls dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be the media through which the ancestral spirits operate. But if a man has bad luck, he will beat, or break, or cast away, as of no account, such an impotent object.[154]

These and scores of other examples which could be adduced disprove the assertion that man, even in his lowest phases of religious life, ever worshipped an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual insight penetrated to the recognition of something higher than phenomena in the world about him. As has been well said by a German writer, what is really worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but “a transcendental _x_,” within and beyond it.[155]

It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes of the West Coast of Africa, to whose gods the term fetish, _feitiço_, was first applied by the Portuguese, the recognition and worship of tribal and national divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and creator of the world, are clearly displayed.[156]

The house of cards therefore, erected by Auguste Comte, to represent the religious progress of the race, the first floor of which was fetishism, the second polytheism, and the third monotheism, falls helplessly to the ground.

There is no real distinction between fetishism and idolatry, unless we choose to say that the latter refers to the worship of objects artificially shaped; but many fetishes are so likewise.

Nor can we say, with Professor Rialle, that fetishism confounds the unseen agent with the thing itself, while the idolatry of developed polytheism regards the agent as something exterior to the object, an independent existence.[157] For not only does fetishism recognise the power of the supernatural outside of all objects, but the idols of polytheism are unquestionably just as holy, just as much limbs of the gods, as the dolls of the Melanesians.

We cannot even take fetishism as a special form of the cult or external worship; for it goes hand in hand with every phase of objective religion. It is quite as prevalent now, in proportion to the general strength of the religious sentiment, as it ever was, and is visible in the sacredness which all sects of the highest religions attach to certain objects and places. When the Christian touches the bone of a saint that he may be healed of an infirmity, or when he speaks of his church edifice as “the house of God,” or when he packs in his trunk a Bible “for luck’s sake,” he is as much a fetish worshipper as the negro _caboceer_ who collects around him a thousand pieces of rubbish because he thinks they have brought him good fortune.[158]

Modern folk-lore is full of fetishism, and it is a development of the religious sentiment which flourishes in all times and climes. Amulets, charms, lucky stones, everything that we now call by the familiar term of _mascot_, partakes of the nature of a fetish. Through some fancied potency, not to be found among its physical qualities, it is believed to bring us good fortune.

Nor is it a distinctive character of fetish worship, as has been maintained by some, that in it compulsion or constraint is endeavoured to be exercised on the gods to force them to be favourable and exert their power in aid of the supplicant. The earliest prayers are not of this character, as I showed in my last lecture; and, on the other hand, the notion of constraining the gods extended widely in higher religions and, indeed, probably in a metaphysical sense, was taught by the founder of Christianity himself, as in the parable of the unjust judge.

As there is nothing deeper than an external distinction between fetishism and idolatry, so there is no special form of religious thought which expresses itself as what has been called by Dr. Tylor, “animism,” the belief that inanimate objects are animated and possess souls or spirits. This opinion, which in one guise or another, is common to all religions and many philosophies, is merely a secondary phenomenon of the religious sentiment, and not a trait characteristic of primitive faiths. The idea of the World-Soul, manifesting itself individually in every form of matter from the star to the clod, is as truly the belief of the Sioux Indian or the Fijian cannibal, as it was of Spinoza or Giordano Bruno.[159]

This vague and universal divine potency extends through all nature, organic and inorganic, expressing itself in personality wherever separateness, oneness, is visible. Not merely did animals and trees share in the World-soul, but every object whatever. With the American Indians, the commonest sticks and stones, even the household vessel fashioned out of clay, or the hollowed stone on which the maize was pounded, had its spiritual essence, which might speak, act, and require to be venerated.[160] The Vitian Islanders held that each cocoanut had its own spirit, and occasionally many cocoanuts assembled for a jollification, at which times the joyous cracking of their sides kept the natives awake![161]

But no error would be greater than to confound this with a veneration of such objects in themselves.

To the mind of the savage, whatever displayed movement, emitted sound or odour, or by its defined limits and form indicated unity, was to him a manifestation in personality of that impersonal, spiritual Power of which he felt himself but one of the expressions. All other expressions shared his powers, and did not, in essence, differ from him. The brute, the plant, the stone, the wandering orbs of night, the howling wind, the crackling fire, the towering hill, all were his fellow-creatures, inspired by the same life as himself, drawing it from the same universal font of life.

It is not without reason, therefore, that the undeveloped religious longings ask for something concrete to represent divinity. Through its visible and audible traits the power of the Unseen Ruler is brought sharply to the consciousness. We sympathise even with the poor Oraons of Bengal, who, seeing nothing nobler to embody the divine, place a ploughshare on their altar as the object of adoration.[162]

Although in the limitless field of his religious insight everything in nature was to him a manifestation of divinity, primitive man everywhere indicated a preference for certain objects and groups of objects, evidently led to single them out on account of the strength or frequency of the appeals they make to his senses of sight and hearing.

With the utmost brevity I will enumerate the most important of these groups, and endeavour at the same time to point out why they were everywhere selected to convey conceptions of the nature and attributes of God.

_1. The Celestial Bodies._—The first group that I shall mention is that of the Celestial Bodies, the Sun, Moon, and Stars. The traits which connected them with the ideas of the divine are almost too obvious to require mention. They are bringers of light and warmth, they define the momentous change of day and night, their motions usher in the seasons and mark the progress of time. They are remote, aloft, inscrutable, dwellers in a realm which man may distantly perceive but never enter.

So much has been written of solar myths and star worship that every reader is aware of their practical universality among early nations. It is probable that the division of our week into seven days arose either from the dedication of one to each of the seven greatest luminaries or to a division of the moon’s apparent course into four parts. Judicial astrology, which is not yet wholly dead, always maintained that the nativities were decided by the position of the stars.

All such survivals carry us back to primitive religions in which the astral bodies were prominent figures in the cult. Many writers have maintained that the American Indians from north to south were always and mainly sun-worshippers. Though this is too hasty a statement, everyone will acknowledge that the sun is ever a conspicuous figure in their myths and rites. So it is among the Polynesians and Africans, and so we find it in the early forms of Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian belief.

It is at first sight strange that in many mythologies the moon plays a more important rôle than the sun. But if we reflect that the night is the time when spirits walk abroad; when sounds strike the ear with mysterious notes; when nocturnal birds and beasts stir the senses with strange cries; when, on the other hand, the cooling zephyrs and soft moonlight bring sweet ease, and the gentle dews refresh the parched leaves; then we can understand why, both in modern folk-lore[163] and in primitive myths, the moon and the stars are often far more conspicuous than the flaming sun. The night, in fact, draws the veil from the spiritual world; as has been said so beautifully by Shelley:

“As if yet around her he lingering were,
Though the _veil of daylight_ concealed him from her.”

A few examples will illustrate this: The Dieyeris of Australia believe that man and all other beings were created by the moon. In many American languages the moon is regarded as male and the sun is referred to as “his companion.” The Ipurinas, a Brazilian tribe, address the orb as “Our Father,” and imagine him a little old man who was their ancestor and still watches over their prosperity. In like manner the eastern Eskimos say that their ancestors came from the moon to the earth. With the rude tribes of southern Borneo it is stated that the veneration of the moon forms the chief basis of their worship and myths.[164]

I can but refer to the lesser luminaries of the night. The stars have at all times been associated with religious meditations. The various constellations are familiar to most primitive peoples and are personified under living forms. Widely in South America and Polynesia the Pleiades enjoyed an especial homage, as marking the advent of the seasons and as connected with the production of vegetable life. In Peru they were styled the gods of rains; and the natives of the Gulf of California venerated them to that degree that even to look at them heedlessly was deemed calamitous; while some Australians held that it was from them that fire first descended to the world.[165] In such remote districts as Australia and Greenland the Milky-way was regarded as the path by which the souls ascended to their homes in the sky. In the one land the Aurora Australis, in the other the Aurora Borealis, was looked upon as the dance of the gods across the star-lit vault. Indeed, the study of the stellar bodies and the definition of their periodical appearance date directly to the veneration they excited in religious minds.

_2. The Four Elements._—The simple theory that the world is composed of four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, is one which presents itself so naturally to primitive thought that traces of it can be seen in most mythologies which have passed beyond the rudimentary forms.

Each of these elements has its own group of religious associations, and they present themselves with that uniformity which we find so universal in religious expression, to be explained, as I have so often said, by the identity everywhere of the psychic sources of religion.

Perhaps the earliest of all the elements to receive this adoration was _fire_. With its discovery man first entered into human social life. Everywhere and in all peoples it has been in a manner sacred. With the Kafirs every religious ceremony must be performed in front of a fire.[166] In the Rig Veda the crackling of the blazing twigs is regarded as the speech of the gods, just as it is to-day in Borneo. The institutions of the sacred fire and the perpetual fire recur in every continent, and we have but to enter a church of the Roman communion on the morning of Holy Saturday to witness the impressive ceremonies with which the creation of the “new fire” is to this day celebrated in our midst. The custom of passing an infant “through the fire” was as much practised by the Aztecs in Mexico as by the Moloch worshippers of Syria.[167] The Peruvians held that divine inspiration was to be obtained by sacrifices to the god of fire; and those of Guatemala adored it as their greatest and oldest deity.[168]

In all these and in a hundred other examples which I might cite, the main thought is that in fire and its products—warmth, heat, light, flame—lies the essential principle of life; and the worship of Life was the central, positive conception in primitive ceremonies.

The _air_ to early man is recognised in motion as the winds; and these, in his myths and rites, occupy a conspicuous position. Conceived as four, blowing more or less directly from the four corners of the earth-plane, they are the rain-bringers, the gods of the seasons and the year, controlling the products of the harvest and hence the happiness and life of man. The outlines of the story are the same whether we listen to the Maoris of New Zealand, who tell us of Tawhiri-matea, god of the winds, who divided his progeny into four broods and sent one to each quarter of the compass; to the Eskimos, who narrate just the same of Sillam Innua, owner of the winds, and his four sons; or to a score of like myths which I could quote from American storyland.[169]

The house of the winds, where they are imagined to be stored, a mythical notion which Professor Schwartz has shown to be so wide-spread in the Old World, recurs with scarcely less frequency in the New World.[170]

_Water_, as moisture, the dew, the fertilising showers, the green bordered streams and lakes, was ever connected with vegetable life and its symbols. In most cosmogonies the land rose from the bosom of some primal sea; in most primitive geographies the solid earth is surrounded by the mighty ocean-stream which stretches out to the uttermost space.

“All of us,” said the Aztecs, “are children of water.” Hence the spring, the stream, the lake, was ever regarded as a beneficent being, who should rightly call for the adoration of the true in soul. Tlaloc, god of rains, and the many-named gods of the heavenly vase in which the rains were stored on high, were conspicuous figures in the American pantheon.[171]

Virgil speaks of “Oceanus, _pater rerum_”; and in the Finnish epic, the Kalewala, it reads: “Three infants came forth from the same womb; water the oldest, fire the youngest, and iron between them.”[172]

Water also entered into numberless rites of purification, of penitence, and sanctification.[173] Baptism by sprinkling or immersion belongs to the most ancient sacred rites; and the use of the fluid in divination, lustration, and libation was world-wide.

The most venerable god of Chaldean mythology was Êa, lord of the _earth_ and “the waters under the earth.” He was the deity in whose gift were the harvest, the germination of seeds, the fertility of the soil. Extending the idea to embrace all life, the Aztecs worshipped the earth as Tonantzin, Our Beloved Mother, and the Peruvians as Mama Cocha, Mother Earth. From her womb, said they, do all that live proceed, and to her silent breast will all again return. Far below her opaque surface is the realm which the sun lights at night, the abode of happy souls, said the Aztecs, ruled by the clement Quetzalcoatl, who there abides until the time fixed for his return to men.

From beneath the earth, repeat a hundred mythologies, did the first of men emerge seeking the light above but losing the joy below. So that in such distant points as Kamtschatka and the Andaman Islands we meet the same prophetic myth that at the end of the world the present earth will be turned upside down, and its then inhabitants will rejoice in the perennial warmth and light of the happier under-world.[174]

Intimately associated with the worship of the four elements, and also with the myths of the cosmical concepts, we trace through primitive religions the sacredness and symbolism of _colours_. Everywhere, in all cults, they are connected with certain trains of religious thoughts, certain expressions of religious emotions, though by no means always the same. But I can only refer, in passing, to this extended subject, which has not yet received the psychologic analysis which its importance demands.[175]

_3. Stones and Rocks._—When we turn from these universal elements, which we can readily conceive portrayed with some commensurate greatness the idea of the supernatural, to such a gross and material object as a _stone_, a common stone or rock, it is at first difficult to understand its wide-spread acceptance as a symbol of the divine. But if we reflect on its hardness and durability, on its colour and lustre, and on the strange shapes in which it is found, we can see why it was so chosen.

In the early Semitic records we often read of Beth-el, the House of God. This was usually nothing but an amorphous stone, which the god was supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahometanism is no doubt such an one, a rough, black piece of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the Ephesians was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius tells us that the image of earth, the Great Mother, brought to Rome from Phrygia with sumptuous pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and unhewn.”[176]

To this instance, where the stone represents the Earth as the common mother, we find many exact parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian myths, _Papa_, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first man, mother of the race of men, and under this form she was adored.[177] The Zulus considered certain stones as sacred, because from one such, which split in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neighbours, the Basutos, entertain the same notion of a spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and their worship of it consists in dancing around it and spitting at it. The Indians of Colombia asserted that all men were once stones, and all will again become such.[178] Those of Guatemala were wont to place a small polished stone in the mouth of the dying to receive the soul, and thus supply it with a permanent abode.

The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,” and this goes back to the time when such was the favourite material for household fetishes. To this day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or familiar spirits, inhabit rough stones, and in Melanesia similar stones are held to be the abode of the _vui_ or demonic intelligences.[179]

Another source of the sacredness of stones was their identification as “thunderbolts.” Certain ones were believed to be the missiles hurled from the sky by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though the Peruvians had the prettier belief that, as the product of the heavenly fire, they must retain its ardency, and therefore used them as love charms.[180] Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits a spark, and meteoric stones were especially recognised by these marks as of celestial origin.

Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas, in the beginning of the world fell from heaven to earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment rose to life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans, came originally from such stones.[181]

Yet another origin of god-stones was the custom of erecting them as monuments of the dead. We can see this in its simplicity in Southern Polynesia. When a chief dies, a coral slab about three feet long is placed erect over his grave—a tombstone, in other words. This is decked with flowers and garlands, food is offered it, and invocations pronounced before it, precisely as to a divinity. This is because the spirit of the departed chief is believed to dwell within it.[182]

It was equally sacred when the stone was a mere cenotaph erected in memory of a departed chief or saint. Such are found in all lands and in all cults. They are the _menhirs_ of the Celts, and the grave-stones of the Koders of India, often painted in strong colours.[183]

Certain stones, especially those we call “precious,” the gems, have physical traits of transparency, lustre, and colour, which have ever made them prized, and led to the belief that they exercise peculiar powers on the mind.

Throughout Asia and America the varieties of jade or nephrite, a greenish, semi-translucent mineral, has had a wide-spread reputation for sacred meaning and magical potency. The _chalchiuhite_ of the Mexicans, small green stones, believed to control the weather and representative of the goddess of the waters and the rains, were of this material.

By attentively gazing into the transparency of a quartz crystal, the Maya shaman of Yucatan still believes that he will see in its depths, unfolded by the god whose dwelling it is, the picture of the future and the decrees of fate.

_4. Trees and Plants._—Primitive man was arboreal. A hollow tree was his home, its branches his place of refuge, its fruit his sustenance. Naturally the tree became associated with his earliest religious thoughts. It represented his protecting deity. He would not willingly injure it. When the Mandans cut a pole for their tents, they swath it in bandages so that its pain may be allayed. The Hidatsas would not cut down a large cottonwood tree, because it guarded their tribe. The Algonquins decked an old oak with offerings suspended to its branches, for the same reason.[184]

Trees from their dripping foliage, and because their shade was associated with the grey of a cloudy day, were believed to make the rains and thus to refresh the fields and fertilise the seeds of the vegetable world. The step was easily taken to extend this to all germs, animal as well as vegetable. Thus the tree came to symbolise the source of Life, and to represent both the clouds and rains and the fatherhood of men and brutes. It could cause flocks to multiply and the barren womb to conceive.[185]

Among the Mexicans, the tree was invoked as Tota, “Our Father,” and was spoken of as god of the waters and the green foliage. Some particular species was chosen as the totem of various American gentes, and in the earliest legends of Greece and Persia sundry famous families traced their descent from a tree.

These ideas led to the mythical association of the tree with the origin of life, and with various objective expressions of this in the cult.

In most American stories where we hear of the first of men emerging from the under-world, it is by climbing a tree. This tree also supports the sky, and is so represented in the native books of the Mayas and Nahuas.[186] The Yurucares of Bolivia relate that their god Tiri, when he would people the earth with men, cleft a tree, and from the opening came forth the various tribes of the world.[187]

When the tree was not worshipped as itself, but under a symbolic form, this was usually as the sacred pole or the cross.

The sacred pole was found widely among the American Indians. It was planted in the centre of their villages, or, if the tribe was nomadic, it was carried about in an ark or wrapping and set up in a tent by itself in their encampment. It typified the communal life of the tribe and represented the “mystery tree,” which was intimately associated in their legendary origin.[188]

In early art the cross as a sacred design is often derived from the conventional figure of a tree, and symbolises the force of life, the four winds, the rain, and the waters. This is notably the case in Mexico and Central America, where we have abundant testimony that this is the origin and meaning of the cross-symbol so frequent on their monuments.

The sacred tree is a conspicuous figure in the earliest bas-reliefs of the Chaldeans. It is often represented in a cruciform shape, and frequently a winged seraph is holding up to it a pine cone, the fruit of the sacred cedar, either as an emblem of fertility, or, more likely, as an aspergillum, with which to bedew it from the holy water, which is carried in a bucket in the other hand.[189]