Chapter I: THE COMMUNAL RITES, those for the benefit of the community, be it

large or small, may be classed under four forms: 1, the assemblage; 2, the festal function; 3, the sacrifice; and 4, the communion with the Divine.

_1. The Assemblage._—Of these the _assemblage_ should first be considered, as it is the necessary condition of all communal worship. The _ecclesia_, the meeting, the gathering together, the congregation, has a far higher importance than for the mere purpose of unity in an outward function. It is the means by which that most potent agent in religious life, _collective suggestion_, is brought to bear upon the mind. It has been instinctively recognised by every religion, and especially by mystical teachers, as an indispensable element in the dissemination of doctrine.

Strange, indeed, is the influence on the individual of “the crowd,” when it is animated by deep feeling, by positive belief, by intense activity! It is difficult even for the calmest mind not to be thrilled with the contagious impulses of an assemblage tossed on the waves of wild religious emotion. Its vertiginous passion whirls those who yield to it out of themselves, beyond their senses, into some lofty, hyper-sensuous state, where reason totters and reality fades. We have but to watch an active “revival,” or the hysterical outbursts of an old-fashioned “camp-meeting,” to be convinced of this.

These effects are hastened and strengthened by the Liturgy, the responsive songs and chants, the music, the dancing hand in hand, the touch of flesh, and the intoxication of breath with breath,—all that the theologians class as the _anaphora_, the going back and forth of mind and mind, through the varied forms of sensuous expression.[218]

All this is perfectly familiar to primitive religions. Among the rude tribes of our Western plains, the Dakotas and Chipeways for instance, thousands will gather at the annual festivals to unite in common worship and ceremonies. The first missionaries to Mexico report it a common sight to see six or seven thousand natives moving as one man in the swaying figures of the sacred dances; and it were easy to multiply examples. Everywhere was the religious value of worship in common recognised.

_2. The Festal Function._—I have already referred to the fact that although the fear of demons and ghosts prevailed generally in early faiths, their prevailing character was by no means always gloomy.

In early conditions the public religious ceremonies have an atmosphere of joyousness about them. They are thanksgivings and merrymakings, such as still exist among us in pale survivals in our harvest homes, Christmas festivities, and Easter-tide amusements. In ancient Greek and Roman rites this is still more visible. “Worship the gods with a joyous heart,” prescribes Cicero; and true to the precept, the Romans included among their acts of worship such cheering adjuncts as theatrical performances, horse races, games, and dancing girls. No sign of mourning was permitted, no word of lamentation was allowed, and a serene mood, a joyous countenance and bright garments were enjoined, that the gaiety of the occasion might not suffer diminution.[219]

There was nothing in this peculiar to the Romans. The same is well known to be true of the Greeks; Jacob Grimm is our authority that the religious rites of the ancient Germans were as a rule cheerful, and those which were most cheerful were “the earliest and the commonest”; while Robertson Smith testifies to the effect that the early Semitic ceremonies were likewise gay and festal, passing at times into a truly orgiastic character.[220]

Probably most of us will feel some surprise when this trait of early and heathen religions is pressed upon our attention. We have been accustomed to hear of their dark and cruel mysteries, their immolations and holocausts, their cries of anguish and blood-stained altars, until we have imagined that light-hearted gaiety was even farther from their teachings than it is from our own faith, whose cardinal principle is the holiness of suffering and self-abnegation.

Nothing could be wider from the truth. Probably the first of all public rites of worship was one of joyousness, to wit, the invitation to the god to be present and partake of the repast. To spread a meal and ask the deity to share it, that which is called _commensality_, belongs to the most archaic of ceremonies. Captain Clark tells us of the Western Indians that “feasts form an essential part of every ceremony.” There is a certain solemnity observed about them, even when not strictly religious in character. The first mouthful is offered to the gods, and “something in the manner of a grace” is usual when the person begins and finishes his meal.[221]

It was but a step from this to purely religious banquets, festal commemorations for thanksgiving, in acknowledgment of benefits received. They were derived from the older practice of asking the god to share the common meal, not, as some have argued, from the later custom of offering food before the idols. Such solemn banquets occur where idols are unknown, or form a minor element in religious expression. Sacrificial banquets assume a different phase, to which I shall presently refer.

Next in antiquity to the commensality of God with man, was the sacred procession, that which is known as the “ceremonial circuit.”

Jacob Grimm informs us that the ancient Germans were accustomed at certain seasons to carry the images of the gods, Holda, Bertha, and others, or the sacred symbols, the plough, the ship, etc., around the borders or marches of the tribal territory, over which they were held to exercise especial protection. Thus they bestowed the active beneficence of their personal presence on these confines. This divine progress was accompanied with shouts and songs and joyous acclamations.[222]

To this day in central France, when the seed is sown in the spring and the husbandman has trusted his labour and his grain to the uncertain season, the image of Our Lady of Mercy is solemnly carried through the prepared fields, with song and prayer, that her blessing may rest upon them, and the grain return a hundred-fold.

Far away from France and Germany, up in the chilly valleys of the Peruvian Andes, when the natives used to fear, for their crops, killing frost or withering drought, the sacred _huaca_, the divine guardian of the village, was brought forth and carried in solemn procession around the fields, and its intercession beseeched in moving cries and with abundant gifts.[223]

Numberless other examples of this universal rite might be mentioned, a rite the shadow of which still falls among us in the processional and recessional of high Protestant churches. Among primitive peoples and in the folk-lore of modern nations, it develops into the forms which are known as “the sinistral and dextral circuits,” depending on whether the procession is from right to left or the reverse, connected doubtless with the motion of the celestial bodies, and with the reverse of that motion, each appropriate to certain forms of worship. Throughout the American tribes this is always a point of the greatest importance, and constantly appears, not merely in their religious exercises, but in their social customs, their arts, and their habits of life.[224]

I mentioned that the old Romans used to consider theatrical entertainments a proper part of a religious ceremony. They were not alone in that. In fact, the opinion was so universal that students of literary origins are agreed that the beginning of the drama, both comedy and tragedy, was in sacred scenic representations of the supposed doings of the gods. We may recognise the earliest form of the drama in the masked actors of the American Indian medicine dances. They usually take the part of some lower animal, comic or serious, the face concealed either with a part of its hide, or with a wooden mask, on which is painted some semblance or symbol of the animal. The language of the actor is appropriate to his rôle, and often involves curious modifications of the customary tongue, to suit the creature he represents.[225]

Long before the discovery of America by Columbus the native tribes of Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru had developed from this source a dramatic literature, which, like that of the early Greek classic period, had thrown off its first, purely religious garb, and had developed into an independent art, devoted equally to Melpomene and Thalia, the tragic and the comic muses.

These latter, of which a few specimens survive, were exotic plants compared to the indigenous growth of the American sacred dramas. So essential, indeed had these become to the native notions of worship of any sort, that the Christian missionaries were fain to compromise the situation, and permit them to remain, merely changing the names of the heathen gods to those of Christian saints, and modifying where necessary the wording of the older text and its heathen _scenario_.

The extreme of these festal rejoicings is seen in the orgiastic ceremonies so widely prevalent in early cults, the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia, the “Witches’ Sabbath” of the Middle Ages, and the like. They are nowise peculiar to primitive religions, although in them they hold a more conspicuous place. Within a year, the “angel-dancers” of Hoboken, New Jersey, have reproduced them in their true original colours, and they are always ready to crop out under the influence of the proper stimuli to the religious emotions.

In their earliest forms, they are far from deserving the odium which attached to them later. The Bacchantes of Greece were, at first, not a rout of dissolute women, but an inspired train of devout virgins and chaste matrons. No man was permitted in the ranks under pain of death. This was true also in Rome, in the Orient, and in many tribes of America. It was a later and an evil innovation which sanctioned the unrestrained mingling of the sexes in these wild processions of intoxicated fanatics. Their intoxication was, however, with the divine spirit, not the purple grape-juice. They were, as the Greeks said, “theoleptic,” possessed or infuriated with the maddening joy of the gods, drunk with the celestial ambrosia.

To our cold observation, they were in hysterical mania, with minds disordered by religious excitement, worked up to a high contagious pitch through collective suggestion, following crazily the disordered fancies of their sub-conscious selves, mistaking them for the inspiration of divine emanations.

_3. The Sacrifice._—In the custom of offering to the divine visitant a portion of the food and drink, we discover the origin of sacrifice. The word has acquired sad associations, seen in our common expression “to make a sacrifice,” which signifies some painful self-surrender.

This was foreign to its original meaning. The sacrifice at first was a free-will offering, a pleasing and grateful recognition of the kindness of the deity. The first-fruits, the young kid, the earliest ear of corn to mature, were offered to the beneficent being who had sent them for the good of man. It was the willing acknowledgment we pay to a kind friend. The earliest species of sacrifice is in the nature of a thank-offering. They were of the class which has been termed “honorific,” and were little more than “meals offered to the deity.”[226]

I may illustrate it from a custom of the Papuans of New Guinea. They believe, being ancestral worshippers, that the good things of life are mainly owing to the continuing solicitude of their departed progenitors. Therefore, to testify their gratitude, once in several years they dig up the skulls of those deceased relations, paint them with chalk, decorate them with feathers and flowers, and placing them on a scaffold, offer to them food and trinkets.[227]

There is nothing of fear in this rite, and nothing fearful, for it is made the occasion of a merry festival.

Soon, however, in the development of the cult it was perceived that loss and affliction abounded and increased; the gods grew careless of their votaries, or angry with them. They must be pacified and propitiated. Hence arose the second form of sacrifices, those which are called “conciliatory” or “piacular.”[228] They were atoning in significance, mystic in their symbolism, expiatory in their aims. The gods were displeased at what man had done or had left undone, and they must be reconciled by humility and self-abnegation.

In this the primitive worshipper acted towards his deity just as he would toward an earthly superior whose displeasure he had incurred. There was no new sentiment or line of action introduced. The rite of sacrifice in any of its phases offers nothing apart from the general motives of mankind.

The most common reason for early sacrifice was to expiate breaches of the ceremonial law. Whether this occurred intentionally or not of purpose, it was deemed requisite to make amends by some painful act, to pacify the demonic power behind the law.

Naturally, the greater the self-denial displayed in the offering, the higher its merit and the more efficacious its character. The ancient Germans laid it down that in time of famine beasts should first be slain and offered to the gods. Did these bring no relief, then men must be slaughtered; and if still there was no aid from on high, then the chieftain of the tribe himself must mount the altar[229]; for the nobler and dearer the victim, the more pleased were the gods!

The same doctrine prevailed practically through most primitive religions, and was carried to a like extent. Painful mutilations of oneself, the lopping of a finger, scarification, driving thorns through the tongue or the flesh elsewhere, burning with hot coals, scourging, and supporting crushing weights: these are but a few of the many terrible sufferings which the individual inflicted on himself.

Thus steeled to pain in his own person, he knew no limit to its infliction on others. The tortures of captives or of slaves dedicated to the gods, common in American religions, formed part of the religious value of the ceremony. Not merely captives and slaves, but those of his own household and blood, his nearest and his dearest, must the true worshipper be prepared to surrender, were it his first-born son or the wife of his bosom. It was not heartlessness or cruelty which prompted him, but obedience to that law of the supernatural, which ever claims for itself supremacy over all laws and all passions of the natural man.

Traces of human sacrifice are discovered in the early history of even the noblest religions, and the rite extended so widely that scarce a cult can be named in which it did not exist.

What rendered them the more general was the underlying belief that, let the sacrifice be sufficiently exalted, the gods _could not_ resist it. They were constrained by its magical power, and whatever was desired could be extorted from them, with or without their volition. So to this day teach the Hindu priests, and so believed the ancient Romans and various primitive nations.

_4. The Communion with God._—The idea of atonement in the piacular sacrifice is in reality that of being _one with the god_, that of entering into union or communion with him. This, indeed, lies largely at the base of all the forms of ritualistic worship. Its purpose, more or less clearly avowed, is to bring into spiritual unison the worshipper and the worshipped.

A few examples from American rites will illustrate this.

The natives of Nicaragua at the time of maize gathering were accustomed to sacrifice a man to the gods of the harvest. Around the altar were strewn grains of corn. Over these the worshippers stood and with flint knives let blood from the most sensitive parts of their bodies, the drops falling on the grains. These were then eaten as holy food, part of the sacrifice.[230]

Something very similar obtained in Peru. At the time of the vernal equinox, all strangers were bidden to leave the sacred city of Cuzco, where the Inca resided. A human victim was immolated, and the spotless “Virgins of the Sun” were deputed to mingle his blood with meal and bake it into small cakes. These were distributed among the people and eaten, and one was sent to every holy shrine and temple in the kingdom.[231] Precisely such a rite prevailed among the ancient Germans. At the harvest supper the spirit of the corn, represented latterly under the form of an animal but in earlier days as a child, was slain and eaten by those who had aided in the harvest. It was the literal and corporeal union of man and the god.[232]

Still clearer was the similar ceremony of the Aztecs. A youth was chosen and named for the god. For months his every wish was gratified. Then he was slain on the altar and his fresh blood was mixed with dough which was divided among the worshippers and eaten. Thus they became partakers of the Divine Nature.[233]

The fearful similarity of this ceremony both in its form and in its intention to that of the Christian Eucharist could not escape the notice of the Spanish missionaries. They attributed it to the malicious suggestions of the Devil, thus parodying in cruel and debased traits the sacred mysteries of the Church. But the psychologist sees in them all the same inherent tendency, the same yearning of the feeble human soul to reach out towards and make itself a part of the Divine Mind.