Chapter II: THE WORD FROM THE GODS.—If the mere name of the god was thus mighty (2)

That a tree is a “thing of life” it is hard for us even yet to doubt, and we can scarcely avoid being attracted by Fechner’s pleasing theories of a “plant-soul.”[190] The sound of the wind in the leaves, rising from the softest of mystic whispers to the roaring of the wild blast, seems to proceed from some mind or spirit. The Australians say that these are the voices of the ghosts of the dead, communing one with another, or warning the living of what is to come. They and other tribes also believe that it is through understanding this mysterious language that the “doctors,” or shamans, communicate with the world of spirits and derive their supernatural knowledge.[191] Hence we can easily see arose the myth of “the tree of knowledge,” which we find in the earliest Semitic annals and monuments. It belonged to the same species as the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, and the laurel of Apollo at Delphi, from the whispers of whose leaves the sibyls interpreted the sayings of the gods.

Not only was a tree the earliest house of man, it was also his first temple. That very word “temple” bears witness to the fact, for it is from the Greek τέμενος, a sacred grove set apart as a place of worship. The aspiring lines of Gothic cathedrals simulate the trunks of slender and majestic trees carrying the eye and the soul aloft, and by their overreaching limbs shutting out the glare of day, thus leading the mind to holy meditation. Tacitus describes the Germans as building no temples, but worshipping their mysterious divinity, _secretum illud_, in the gloom of the forest.

_5. Places and Sites._—Early man stays close to the soil. It is proved, by the distribution of the oldest stone implements, that primitive tribes were not generally migratory, and had little intercourse with their neighbours. Hence the more closely did they study their immediate surroundings; and a spot which was marked by some peculiar feature was soon associated with their all-permeating religious notions, and was deemed sacred.

These features can usually be easily recognised. A spring, well, or fountain, where from dry earth, or out of the rock, pours forth the crystal fluid on which depends the life of man and brute and plant, was everywhere a holy spot. The brook which flowed from it, chattering its endless tale among the pebbles, was scarcely less so. It was directly said and oft repeated by the Greeks that the _manteia_, the holy inspiration, was imparted at the fountain of Parnassus or at the Pierian spring. The Moxos of Bolivia claim descent from the stream on which their villages are situated, a more than figurative expression of their dependence on it for food and drink.[192]

The sacred character of “high places,” such as hills, mountains, or elevated plateaux, is intimately connected with the universal belief in “the Father in Heaven,” the sky as the home and the throne of the greatest divinities. I have already referred to the terrestrial “Hills of Heaven,” located, as a rule, within the tribal area.[193]

A high hill or mountain, regarded by itself as a personality, would justly be looked upon as of extraordinary might, and invoked as a potent aid in the undertakings of life. In the invocations of the Quiches of Central America, who live in the midst of lofty peaks, over one hundred of them are named and implored for aid. The “Heart of the Hills” is the title which the ancient Mexicans applied to one of their greatest gods.

A third and important trait which gave them sacredness is the strength of the echo which is returned from their narrow gorges or precipitous sides. Mountain worship is very generally oracular in character. Classical and familiar examples of this are the Pythoness and the Roman Sibyl.

Mountain caves are natural temples, and as the cave, like the hollow tree, is a ready-built house for the wandering savage, so it is also marvellously adapted to his ends as a shrine. Throughout Mexico and Central America we find the caves chosen as the temples of the mightiest deities and the depositories of the holiest relics.[194]

The sacredness of some spots arose from their adaptation to certain rites, religious or magical. Thus, for the haruspices to practise their specialty in divination, they must choose a spot where they could watch the flight of birds. The sacrifices to the god of heaven should be under the open sky, and the Mayas of Yucatan believed that when the sun was in the zenith and the sacred fire was kindled beneath it, the ineffable Deity descended in the form of a bright plumaged _ara_ and partook of the offering.

Places of this kind were of course laid under _tabu_, and thus reserved for their sacred uses only. Sometimes they were enclosed, but often the community was sufficiently informed about them to make this unnecessary.

The fame of these sacred places and the powers of the gods who dwelt within them extended widely even in very primitive conditions. This gave rise to the custom of pilgrimages, quite as familiar to the American Indians before Columbus as to the Europeans of the Middle Ages. There were famous holy places on the island of Cozumel and in Colombia and Peru, to which pious palmers wended their way over many hundred miles of weary journeying.

The local divinity naturally drew his colouring and his main attributes from the spot itself, and those in turn gave a similar local physiognomy to his rites and functions. We have thus a kind of geographical character impressed on early religions, which their later developments retained long after they had been severed from their first meanings and had drifted to other climes and alien races.

_6. The Lower Animals._—The primitive mind did not recognise any deep distinction between the lower animals and man. The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many points, in craft and strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with respect. To him, the brute had a soul not inferior to his own, and a language which the wise among men might on occasion learn. The strange powers and mysterious faculties they often possess were to him inexplicable by any other doctrine than that they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man himself, or even identified them with the manifestations of the Highest.

None was in this respect a greater favourite than the bird. Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.

The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are extremely common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine and the special purveyors of the vital principle.

According to the myths of the Polynesians, the gods in the old times used to speak to man through the carols of the feathered songsters; and everywhere, to be able to understand the language of birds was equivalent to being able to converse with the gods.

The chief god of the Murray River Australians was Nourali. He was immortal, self-created, and the creator of all. The form under which they conceived him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among nearly all the tribes of the North-west Coast and the adjacent interior of British America, the creation of the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is personated in the dark thunder-cloud.

South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock, this “thunder-bird” is a conspicuous figure in art and myth; and we could pursue our way quite to the extreme south of the continent, and everywhere among the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar sacred associations connected with the birds.

They are universal in religions, and those which we meet in Christian art, the eagle, the dove, etc., carry with them significations allied to those they bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.[195]

Closely connected with these ideas was the reverence of the egg as the symbol of the origin of life. Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic mysteries the egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have retained with the symbol in our customs relating to Easter eggs on the morning of the Resurrection.

The derivation from the observation of the bird brooding on its nest is obvious, and no wonder therefore that the symbol with allied myths and rites extends through all religions.

In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida tribe of Northern India, the goddess Nustoo, who created the world, came into life from a self-evolved egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she had formed and moulded the land for her abode. The Dyaks of Borneo relate that after the Supreme Being had created the world, the god Ranying descended to the new earth and formed there seven eggs, which contained the germs of man and woman, all animals and plants.[196]

This example, of the bird, which I have given in some detail, will illustrate the cult of an animal form. It by no means stands alone in its universality. Perhaps even more striking is the so-called “serpent-worship,” which has occupied the attention of so many writers. The adoration of the serpent-symbol is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely a native tribe can be named in regions where this animal is known, which does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some writers have traced the sentiment back to the anthropoid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in tropical forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this extensive question I cannot enter.

The symbolic value of most animal deities can be traced to some peculiar trait of the species. Thus the lizard, very prominent in the religions of Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its significance from the nocturnal habits of some species and the diurnal habits of others.[197] In America, the frog was the symbol of water, over a vast area; and that it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will cause no astonishment when we recall its amphibious nature. The fish, as the emblem of life, familiar in Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest Chaldean times, when Oannes, a form of the god Êa, appeared as half fish and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-god who sows the seed of man in the flood myths of both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but another expression of the recognition of water as the source or condition of life.

The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,” of the clans or gentes among the American Indians, are not to be taken literally. They were not understood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as mythical, ancient beings, of supernatural attributes, who clothed themselves in those forms for their own purposes.

_7. Man._—That when the brute was at times invested with the aureole of the Divine, man himself should at times partake of its glory, need be expected. But here let an important distinction be drawn. Never _as man_ was he clothed in the attributes of Deity, but just in so far as he was deemed to be _more than man_. The Latin saying, _deus homini deus_, never was true anywhere in its literal sense. Anthropism never existed in any religion. Man or the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason of any human attribute, but solely for those believed to be more than human, superhuman.

The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains; the ancient Egyptians and many another people did pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them among the gods; but always because they considered them partakers of the divine nature, sharers in that which is ever beyond mere humanity.[198]

This profound distinction between the human and the humanised divine was sought to be expressed by most tribes by fashioning the images of the gods in vaguely human shapes, but with non-human elements. Diana with her hundred breasts, Brahma with his dozens of arms, Janus with his double face, and scores of other instances will at once rise in the memory. Enormous size, impossible features, accessories such as wings, tails, multiple heads and limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a depraved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious carver to express in his work the non-human and superhuman character of the being he sets before the adoring eyes of the votaries.

It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures, notably the ancient Greeks, that the true distinction rose to full consciousness in the artistic soul—that in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men in their superior and matchless beauty, in their perfect symmetry and noble proportions. They recognised that there is something in beauty itself, which, in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of the divine, and leads man to the contemplation of laws beyond those of nature or of life, laws which are the expression of the deep harmonies of the universe.

This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pursuing the merely objective, the merely animal, it was led by the unseen hand which guides man to his destiny into the path which conducted far beyond what the senses can teach, into the realm of the ideal and the eternal, to

“the measures and the forms,
Which the abstract intelligence supplies,
Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.”

Such are some of the numberless objects with which primitive man associated his idea of the Divine. The nature of this association must not be misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said, that it was not an identification of the spiritual with the material. The object was hallowed, not from anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible power.

_8. Life and its Transmission._—What Professor Otfried Müller has so well said of the oldest forms of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds true in all primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world of Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable depth into definite forms and individual expressions.”[199] All gods and holy objects were merely vehicles through which Life and Power poured into the world from the inexhaustible and impersonal source of both.

I will illustrate this first from the very ancient religion of the Etruscans and then point out sufficient analogies in modern savage tribes.

That venerable people, whose massive cities built before Rome was founded still survive, held that there was a single source of all existence, animate and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mysterious “veiled gods,” whose number was unknown and whose names were never uttered. They were the channels of the divine Will, through which it passed to the twelve highest known gods, called the _Consentes_ or Companions, and these transmitted it through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence.

The word _genius_ means a producer or begetter; but not in any literal sense, for not only every man and animate being had such a genius, but also every plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object, had one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to an act of the creative power in the abstract or spiritual sense. The genii were the proximate causes of existence, but they were themselves “emanations from the great gods,” and these in turn were merely the channels of the inexhaustible source of all life beyond.

This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also of the Greeks. I may compare it with the belief of one of the most brutish of barbarian hordes, the Itelmen of Kamtschatka.

Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate Power, Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No worship and no offerings are tendered him other than that certain pillars are erected and decked with flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter is Kutka. It was said of him that he had married all creatures and was the common father of all. It was he who made land and water in their present forms and invented all arts. To him the visible world owed its existence, though not its origin. Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he is as much cursed for the evils of life as praised for its advantages. It is he who finds souls for all existences, and preserves their spirits when the body decays.

We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented. Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation. We should consider whether they are not naïve symbols, chosen, with a crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally renewed life of nature.

This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.

There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites, deliberate indecencies, practised under the cloak of religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased priests. These were alienations and prostitutions of religion. In the genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of the reproduction and transmission of life were frequent and public, and were not associated with thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible emblems of that Spirit of Life which, beyond all else, was the unifying instinct of religious expression.

This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God as Father, as parent of whatever is, “Pan-genitor,” as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every race, in all ages, have men’s prayers ascended to “Our Father who art in heaven.”

Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we should hear him invoking _Papang_, “Father”; or _Mamin-gata_, or _Mungan-naur_, “Our Father,” in his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, it would be _To-ta_, “Our Father”; with the American tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or “great father”; in the Brahmānas of India, _Pita_, “Father”; with the Greeks and Romans, _Dios Pater_, “the heavenly Father”; and with the northern Vikings, _Odin All-father_.[201]

But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist between such terms and that fatherhood of God which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the fatherhood of the gods is physical fatherhood only”; and this is repeated by many Christian theologians and commentators.[202]

It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not have been made but for religious partisanship. Ethnologists are well aware that the word for “Father” in primitive life is much more frequently a term of respect, applied to elders, than necessarily denotive of kinship. The father, _Pita_, of the Brahmānas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of all things, and far remote from physical parentage[203]; neither in American nor Australian myths is “the Father above” identified as the ancestor of the gens; among the Zulus, the best instructed missionaries report that Unkululu, the “Father” of their creeds, was not meant literally so, but only as “the means of helping the race into being”[204]; and this is the general sense of the term in every instance which I have analysed.

As some sort of a crude effort to express this comprehensibly, we find that frequently in primitive myths and art the god, regarded as the creator, is shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is, of both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-mother,” or “mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than non-sexual in nature.[205] Such expressions are of constant occurrence, and some of the most objectionable portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose from the effort to translate this mystical characteristic into objective forms.

Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently to the human heart.

The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life. This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its complete expansion it reaches the perfect _agape_, where the union of the human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207]

This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical ideals is but the result of a gradual evolution from those low beginnings which I have mentioned as perceptible in most primitive religions.

It is the ripened manifestation of that profound psychical truth, so incomparably expressed in the lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge:

“All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.”

LECTURE V.

Primitive Religious Expression: In the Rite.

CONTENTS:—The Ritual a Mimicry of the Gods—Magical
Rites—Division of Rites into I. Communal, and II. Personal. I.
Communal Rites: 1. The Assemblage—The Liturgy—2. The Festal
Function—Joyous Character of Primitive Rites—Commensality—The
“Ceremonial Circuit”—Masks and Dramas—3. The Sacrifice—Early
and Later Forms—4. The Communion with God—Pagan Eucharists.
II. Personal Rites: 1. Relating to Birth—Vows and
Baptism—2. Relating to Naming—The Personal Name—3. Relating
to Puberty—Initiation of Boys and Girls—4. Relating to
Marriage—Marriage “by Capture” and “by Purchase”—5. Relating
to Death—Early Cannibalism—Sepulchral Monuments—Funerary
Ceremonies—Modes of Burial—Customs of Mourning.

We have seen how the religious sentiment finds expression in the Word and in the Object. It remains to consider it as revealed in the Act. This is known as the Rite or the Ritual. It is a combination of forms and ceremonies collectively known as Worship.

So important is it that one eminent German authority has declared the ritual to be “the source of all religions”[208]; and Dr. W. Robertson Smith, also a profound student of the subject, has maintained that “in the study of ancient religions we must begin, not with the myth, but with the ritual”; because, he adds, “in almost every case the myth was derived from the ritual, and not the ritual from the myth.”[209]

If I do not follow these authorities, it is because my own studies have led me to a different opinion from theirs. I believe that every rite is originally based on a myth. In later days the myth was often obscured or lost, and another coined to explain the rite; and this second growth is what has misled the authors I have quoted.

The evidence which has convinced me is, that in truly primitive condition the rite is constantly a mimicry of the supposed doings of the god; or it is a means of summoning him according to accepted statements; or it is a method of communing with the Divine, plainly drawn from the facts of suggestion and sub-conscious mentality. Occasionally it is a magical procedure to constrain the deities; but this is rare in primitive conditions.[210]

The mimicry or imitative origin of rites is well illustrated in that in use for “rain-making,” one of the commonest of all. In periods of drought, “The Indian rain-maker mounts to the roof of his hut, and rattling vigorously a dry gourd containing pebbles to represent the thunder, scatters water through a reed on the ground beneath, as he imagines up above in the clouds do the spirits of the storm.”[211]

The Australian rite is analogous. The women of the tribe erect a hut of leaves and branches, in which are placed some stones. The men enter, and while some scatter bird’s down in the air, others scarify their arms and let the blood drop upon the stones. These are then placed high up in trees, and the hut demolished. The symbolism is, that the hut represents the firmament; the down, the light cirrus clouds which precede the storm; the stones, the heavy rain-clouds; the dropping blood, the fertilising rain.[212] This is again an imitation of their myth of the making of rain by the celestial powers.

Very many rites are of this character. Others again are of the nature of an invitation to the divinity, based on beliefs and narratives of his supposed actions or customs. The Mayas of Yucatan, for instance, had a deity doubtless of solar character, who bore the name, “The Eye of the Day.” The myth stated that his form was that of a bird of brilliant plumage, and that he was nearest the earth at high noon about the summer solstice. At that time, therefore, they constructed an altar in an open spot, built upon it a fire and placed the sacred offerings. The people then witnessed the gorgeous parrot, the sacred _ara_, descend through the air to take the offerings, who was none other than the god himself, responding to the invitation.[213]

The magical class of rites was common in the Orient. To this day in China it is believed that if a military camp be laid out in a particular form, and under the proper auspicious conditions, not only is it impregnable by foes, but neither gods nor demons can prevail against it. Many later rituals are thus magical, or have magical elements in them by the aid of which the celebrant claims to control the powers divine.

The Mexican Nagualist, or priest, for instance, after he has performed his magical rites and spoken the words of power, does not hesitate to shout: “Lo! I myself am here! I am most furious! I make the loudest noise! I respect no one! Even sticks and stones tremble before me! What god or mighty demon dares face me?”[214] Here, through the power of the rite, the celebrant has become as one of the gods themselves.

These examples further serve to illustrate a fundamental distinction in rites themselves. It has been well expressed by a German writer, Dr. Freihold, who has said that their tendencies point toward one of two aims, either to bring down the god to men, to have “God with us”; or, to elevate the man to God, to clothe him with supernatural powers. The one culminates in the epiphany, the other in the apotheosis. The writer quoted believes that this special culmination of one or the other of these tendencies is largely a matter of race, that it is an ethnic trait, and explains much otherwise obscure in the historical development of religions.[215]

Without entering into this interesting but too extensive inquiry, I will remark that these two tendencies run closely parallel to the division of rites which I shall adopt, a division based on a comparison of the large numbers which I have classified in the study of primitive religions.

This division is also twofold. It embraces, first, all those rites which are primarily intended for the benefit of the community; and, second, all those primarily intended for the benefit of the individual. The former I shall call _communal_, the latter, _personal_ rites.

It is the more necessary that I shall insist on this distinction because it has been overlooked and even denied by some eminent scholars. Dr. Robertson Smith, for example, with whom I have been before compelled to disagree, refused to recognise personal worship in primitive conditions. He wrote thus: “It was the community and not the individual who was sure of the help of its deity.” The individual, he adds, was obliged to have recourse to merely magical measures for his own protection.[216]

This statement is contradicted by nearly every primitive religion known to me; and it can be explained only by the concentration of the writer’s mind on a faith so peculiar as that of the ancient Hebrews.[217]