Chapter II: Part 2

In another question of administration, in the position of women in regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing pre-Christian traditions.[53.1] Their present total exclusion from sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the “priestesses {54} of the Virgin Mary.”[54.1] It is still possible that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.

If we try to give a complete account of any of the important institutions of the churches, infant baptism or the Roman confession for instance, we ought at least, before we can pronounce that any particular one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to survey the religions contiguous to or immediately preceding Christianity. As regards the practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope to show, may be explained as connected with a ritual of purification, its institution cannot at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon in the early Church. A very simple form of it appears to have been known to the Judaic system, and it appears as a formal element in the Babylonian liturgy:[54.2] as a spiritual relief to which a man might voluntarily resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic {55} oracle;[55.1] as part of the cathartic ritual which was preliminary to initiation it was required by the ordinances of the Samothracian Mysteries; and it is in an anecdote concerning these that we meet with the first example of the free Protestant spirit reprobating the practice.[55.2] We may infer that it was uncongenial to the character and alien to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, in the record of whose pagan institutions there is no hint of it, and Alcuin complains of his Goths “that no one of the laity was willing to confess to the priests.”[55.3] It may well have been a spontaneous growth of southern Christianity; but it appears to have arisen first within the early monastic orders,[55.4] and {56} as these in their origin had certain affinities with the non-Christian mystic brotherhoods, where the practice was not unknown, it is possible that in this matter also a pre-Christian tradition was still of some effect. Or, if this is unlikely, we must maintain that like conditions evolve similar products over the whole area with which comparative religion deals; and the most striking resemblance to a Christian confessional is to be observed in the old Mexican ritual, if we can trust Sahagun.[56.1] As regards the other suggested example, we should probably find, if we followed out the history and origin of infant baptism, that the pre-Christian tradition was a strong efficient force in the settlement of the question; there were urgent reasons at least why the rite should soon have come to be maintained by the early Church, for analogous rites whereby the new-born child was consecrated to the divinity were probably part of the hereditary tradition of most of the converted races. {57} We know that many of the Hellenes had been in the habit of passing the infant solemnly round the fire, a purificatory and also consecrating process;[57.1] the northern Teutons sprinkled the infant with water:[57.2] and when Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian tribes were in the habit of plunging the new-born into river-water, to harden the little ones, he is mistaking a religious for a secular practice.[57.3] Looking at the baptism of the adult neophyte, we find interesting resemblances to the ceremonies of the pre-Christian mystic initiations; the idea commonly expressed in these latter, that the catechumen died to his old life and was born again, was eagerly adopted and developed by the later religion, and here as there left its imprint on the ritual: death and rebirth were actually simulated in the mystic service.[57.4]

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The affinities between Christian and pagan ritual, in many cases no doubt the result of direct inheritance, demand a more detailed investigation than they have yet received, especially in respect of the festival calendar: even the early writers of the Church were of opinion that the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary in February, was a development of the old Roman Februalia instituted by Numa;[58.1] and such names of Christian saints and bishops as Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the popularity of the Hilaria, the festival of Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much might be still discovered by a minute knowledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined with travel in Mediterranean lands and with personal observation of the ritual of feast- and fast-days in the remoter villages.[58.2]

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Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to {60} mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination; and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the King.

More important still for the purposes of the religious comparison is the wide prevalence in the Mediterranean communities of the belief in the death and resurrection of the divinity: and this has been the theme of much recent anthropological investigation.[60.1] This is not {61} the time to examine into its origin and significance or to track out the various phenomena that illustrate and group themselves around it in the Mediterranean cults. I would merely call attention in passing to the fact that the belief existed, and was probably expressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St Paul’s own city of Tarsos,[61.1] and that it was especially strong in the Attis Mysteries of the Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete; we know that these were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our Lenten period and the beginning of Easter, that they were preceded by fasting and began with lamentations, {62} the votaries gathering in sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing, the Hilaria.[62.1] The Christian fathers themselves were struck with the deep resemblance between this and their own mystery, and they were tempted to attribute it to the diabolic spirit of parody. We may take the words of Firmicus Maternus,[62.2] with which he concludes his description of such an Attis Mystery as I have outlined--“truly the devil has Christians of his own”--as the text of a very important chapter in comparative religion. We hear of a Christian convert in Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the Hilaria; and Phrygia, its ancestral home, was one of the earliest strongholds of Christianity. Here at least we may assume that the {63} ancient dogma and ritual of the people was one of the predisposing causes operating in favour of the new.

The comparative student must also give careful consideration to what are called the eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning posthumous happiness, salvation, and damnation, not only of the Judaic, but also of the Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian religions: and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was they that were most widely known in the area of the Greco-Roman world, and modern theory has at times endeavoured to trace back the apocalyptic literature of Christianity to Hellenic sources.[63.1] The investigation would demand a careful study of the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, in both of which we find the pregnant idea that salvation after death depended {64} on a religious act of faith or on a mystic communion with a divinity that might be attained on earth by a sacrament or other liturgical means: and the inquiry will include the question how far in these earlier systems the doctrine of salvation by faith was actually blended with any admixture of the ethical doctrine of salvation by works. And the problem, like many others in the scientific study of religion, will be found to concern philosophic as well as religious history.

The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Mediterranean world have long been recognised as a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative science; and both the lower and the higher anthropology can contribute much that is essential to the full understanding of the evolution of the Christian doctrine concerning the divine sacrifice and the Holy Communion. I need not here enlarge on this subject, even by way of mere illustration, for I have already dealt with it, however inadequately, {65} in a former paper:[65.1] it is an intricate and fascinating theme and invites further research.

But for proving the revival on the new Christian soil of the older pre-Christian religious thought and aspiration, there is no special subject so fruitful as the study of Mariolatry. I have already suggested by way of illustration the possibility of such pagan titles as “Kore-Parthenos,” the “Gods’ mother,” having exercised an abiding influence in exciting and shaping the nascent thought of earlier Christendom; and I affirmed that their prevalence corresponded to a prevailing religious bias which turned the minds of many of the peoples in the old world to cleave affectionately to the mother-goddess or to the divine maid. Apart from mere titles, the student of the latter days of paganism is forced to note at almost every point the deep impress of such ideas and the enthusiasm they evoked. In all the leading Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid {66} held a dominant position, and the Orphic brotherhoods had ranged the Mother by the side of the Son-God and the Father-God; and even in the state-cults of the ancient centres of Hellenic civilisation, the maternal character of the divine power had long been cherished. Finally, the Phrygian religion of the Mother, to which even Mithraism, a pre-eminently masculine or paternal religion, was obliged to accommodate itself, had captured the greater part of the Greco-Roman world; and was certainly very influential in the districts of Asia Minor visited by St Paul and in every one of the cities of the Seven Churches. The sentiment it evoked is expressed by the words of a poet of the Middle Attic comedy: “For those who have true knowledge of things divine, there is nothing greater than the Mother; hence the first man who became civilised founded the shrine of the Mother.”[66.1] This then is a leading factor in the religious psychology of the converted nations with which we must reckon.

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We cannot, in accordance with the laws of human nature, suppose that a religious tradition of such hereditary power as this could wholly lose its force under a changed creed. The gaps in the record will probably make it impossible to supply a detailed and geographical statement showing how in the various communities of the ancient cult the personality of the pre-Christian goddess was fused gradually with the ideal image of the Virgin-Mother of Christ. Only a few suggestive facts in the development and organisation of Mariolatry may be mentioned here. The heretic Montanists of Phrygia were charged with deifying the Virgin and believing that one of their leaders was united in a mystic marriage with her, a belief natural to Phrygian paganism; and their founder Montanus is said to have originally been a priest of Cybele.[67.1] The mother of Constantine, the {68} Empress Helena, who is supposed to have been of Bithynian origin, was praised for decking the grotto of Bethlehem with sacred gifts as the shrine of the Virgin;[68.1] it is noteworthy that her earliest recorded chapel should be a grotto or cave; for it was in such underground shrines that the Phrygian Mother was commonly worshipped in her own land. Another striking analogy to the ancient ritual of the mother-goddess is presented by the feast called the κοίμησις and ἀνάληψις τῆς θεοτόκου, first mentioned by Andreas of Crete (_circ._ 650 A.D.), but probably in existence long before his time: the Mother of God dies and rises again in the Assumption. It would be of special interest if we could discover that this ritual first became canonical in Crete, the home of Andreas; for in Crete as in Cyprus, where the Virgin succeeded to the name of Aphrodite, we have traces of a similar rite in which the goddess Aphrodite was laid out {69} as dead on a bier and was afterwards raised to life.[69.1]

And is it nothing more than a coincidence that in the same city of Ephesus, where during St Paul’s visit the fanatics raised a tumult in behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six centuries later the people with equal ecstasy hailed the decision of the Synod that proclaimed the Virgin-Mother of God (θεοτόκος)? The mention of Ephesus suggests another consideration of the greatest importance for the study of the development and propagation of the Christian dogma concerning the virginity of the Mother of God. The Virgin-birth, an idea which has long been a stumbling-block to science, and which has recently been pronounced by some to be unessential to Christianity, was a dogma that could easily be understood and even eagerly accepted by the converts of Anatolia[69.2] and the {70} Greek world. In Ephesus itself the ancient goddess had been imagined in some sense as a maternal or generative divinity, yet also as a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted partly by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of austerity and chastity was enforced.[70.1] The great Phrygian Mother was herself, according to a native legend, miraculously conceived, and there are grounds for suggesting that she was occasionally regarded as a virgin.[70.2] The evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, and often contradictory, with no power apparently in themselves to develop a fixed dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreasonable to maintain that the Christian doctrines concerning the Virgin-Mother could have been evoked merely by the spontaneous demand of the Anatolian or Greek converts. But we may affirm that when that doctrine was {71} presented to them, their own traditions had prepared their imaginations to receive it as congenial. We meet in the late pagan literature passages in praise of virginity as a divine quality quite as ecstatic and extravagant as many in the Christian fathers.[71.1] Many of the nations had long cherished the ideal of a virgin goddess; most had been devotees of the Divine Mother. The successful propagation of Christianity may have owed much to the means which it possessed for satisfying these two sentiments and for reconciling them in a primary article of faith. Then, we must certainly ascribe the exaltation of Mary in the Church of the first six centuries to the enthusiasm engendered by the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may have contributed much more than we have already noted; and more than one writer has explored the deep indebtedness of the developed Mariolatry to the older figure of {72} Isis.[72.1] The extravagance of an enthusiasm that was rooted in old pagan sentiment occasionally engendered heresies. Besides the records concerning the Montanist, of which the significance has already been noticed, most interesting and valuable for our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius against the heresy of the Collideriani,[72.2] wild women who devoted themselves to the worship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he describes and reprobates: in their processions they appear to have drawn the Virgin round in a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised a sacrament with bread: and he adds that they came from Thrace, the immemorial home of fanatic women and of the goddess “Artemis the Queen,” to whom also offerings of corn were made.[72.3] The procession of a goddess in a car was probably part of an old Thrako-Phrygian {73} ceremonial, and we hear of a sacramental eating of bread in the service of Cybele.

We may finally note that the enthusiastic literature devoted to the pre-Christian Divine Mother and Maid and to the Virgin-Mother of God is the same in quality and tone. The prayer addressed to Isis in the story of Apuleius reminds us of a Christian hymn of praise; and the older liturgical or literary expressions would naturally colour the later.[73.1]

Another question with which the comparative study of Christianity is concerned touches the evolution of the Trinitarian idea.[73.2] Here {74} again it is necessary carefully to sift the phenomena of the contiguous religions, to consider whether they present such a conception at all, and whether in any of them it had gained sufficient vividness and power to be likely to evoke a dogma of religious metaphysic. Moreover, to understand the complete genesis of the Christian doctrine, we must trace out the idea of divine emanations in the Mediterranean and the East; for the religions of the Iranian and even the Greek world present us with parallels to the process whereby the Holy Spirit becomes in relation to the personal God a distinct though closely attached personality. In the Zoroastrian ritual the Fravashi or Soul of Ahura receives reverence,[74.1] and in Greek speculation and even cult the θεοῦ Πρόνοια or Divine Providence is sometimes regarded as an individual and {75} personal power;[75.1] nor is the conception of a plurality of beings within the limits of the same personality unfamiliar to primitive thought. The subject is one of the most intricate in the field of religious study, and the more hopeful investigation of it would demand anthropological study in its widest sense, combined with a knowledge of the later Greek metaphysic which has clearly left its impress on our doctrine.

I will close these illustrations with the most obvious example of the contribution of anthropological study to our knowledge of actual Christendom. One of the most fruitful offshoots of the older Hellenic system was hero-worship, which itself may have arisen as a development of ancestor-cult. At first confined to the mythic figures of the past, it came to be applied to founders of colonies, legislators, and even to athletes; in its final development in the last centuries before Christ it was chiefly consecrated to kings and dynasts, {76} the founders of religious societies, men of science, and political benefactors. The divine worship of the mortal, an idea abhorrent to Judaism, and not accepted by the severer Zoroastrian, was part of the state system of earlier and later Egypt, and was finally imposed on the Greco-Roman world. The soil in which it had most rankly flourished was Greek, and Greece and Anatolia were crowded with chapels consecrated to recently living men or to faded figures who were supposed to have once lived on earth, some of them perhaps actual ancestors, some imaginary personages of the epic or legendary world, some merely functional divinities of subordinate departments, like the hero of the ploughshare or the tutelary hero of the potters. This growth of polytheism had struck its roots so deeply that Christianity, in spite of its monotheistic ideal, was unable to eradicate it. The ancient hero may sometimes be lurking under the later disguise of the saint: the mediæval guild, like the Attic fraternity of potters, {77} had its sacred tutelary patron; and it is curious to observe that in the matter of canonisation the Pope came to play exactly the same part as the Delphic oracle had played in the public consecration of the hero-cult: the divine authorisation is given or withheld by the vicar or agent of God. The importance of this inherited tradition in determining our religious estimate of historical Christendom is of the highest: for whatever may have been or may be the orthodox dogma of the Church concerning the status of the saint, such worship inevitably means polytheism from the point of view of the popular faith: and we gather that in many outlying communities of Christendom, as of the ancient Greek world, the lower cult overshadows the higher. And this is one of the most salient and sure examples that we can quote of the direct influence of the older religions upon the later. This special influence is mainly Greek, though the pagan North, the Celtic and Lithuanian, and perhaps the {78} Teutonic peoples, have contributed much to the tradition of saint-worship.

The illustrations given may suffice as a sketch of the various applications of a comparative method to the problems that the phenomena of Christianity offer to the student. In the choice of illustration I may seem to have ignored the strength of the Judaic element in determining the evolution; but I have considered it unnecessary to touch on this, as it has long been the familiar theme of scientific theology. I have also ventured to suggest that our own religious history should be traced back to the period of our ancestral paganism. And I would strongly recommend to the student of comparative religion in England a devoted attention to the world of the Norse Saga: for this has been strangely and fatally neglected by our English system of culture, with grievous loss to our poetic imagination, and to our knowledge of the early law and the religious institutions and temperament of our ancestors. Such a work {79} as Golther’s _Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie_ shows us what a harvest may be reaped in that field for the science of religion. The subject in its own right claims our interest, and certain phenomena in the old Teutonic religion, its fatalistic ideas, its eschatologic beliefs concerning a “day of judgment,” demand consideration in the light of more advanced creeds. On the other hand it may be wrong to attribute to it any direct influence on the inner development of Northern Christianity; for there may be reason for the view that, when the new religion conquered the Teutonic North, it found there in some sense a religious vacuum, the old ritual and faith having lost its vitality and hold; and certainly our ancestral paganism made no such struggle to survive as did the Greco-Roman. Nevertheless the history of its institutions may be necessary, as has been suggested already, to explain the struggle between Church and State in Teutonic lands; and, further, it is only the pages of the Norse Saga-book that can yield us {80} an answer to the question whether we may not have inherited from remote times a certain average racial law of religious temperament resulting in a characteristic attitude towards matters of religion that may have determined our religious history. If the answer were affirmative and definite, the fact would have a practical no less than a speculative importance. At least we shall not know ourselves completely in this or in other matters if we continue to think that Greece and Rome and Palestine are our sole intellectual and spiritual ancestors; in fact we may say that no account of the history of Christianity in any European State can be real and complete unless we can get back to the pre-Christian past of that community.

Yet, while making full allowance for the influence of special ancestral traditions, those who work on the lines which have been indicated in the illustrations of method which I have selected, will acquire the ever-growing conviction that Hellas has dominated the {81} creed as she has dominated the intellectual history of Christendom; that the new faith, in spite of its fierce or contemptuous intolerance of the past, was only able to transform but not to abolish the Mediterranean tradition: that in fact Sir Henry Maine’s often quoted aphorism, while by no means wholly true, was truer in respect of religious history than he himself was aware.

I have been speaking hitherto mainly on the relations of anthropology to the comparative study of religion. And it may be well now to point out that anthropology, as I have tried to define and distinguish its functions, though an essential part, is only a part of the whole. For we must know not only the past but the present conditions, not only the embryology but the perfected growth. And, again, we compare religions not merely to test theories of origin, ancestry, and indebtedness, but also to form the proper estimate of each one, and to correct the one-sided judgment that is always quick to pronounce this phenomenon {82} or feature in any particular system as unique. If the comparison reveals more divergences than parallels, the result is no less important. And the comparative method should be applied not merely to ritual, liturgy, hieratic institutions, legends, and dogmas, but also to the varying phenomena and expressions of the religious temperament in the various races. Only the study of the latter can enable us to test the living force of a faith, the degree with which it possesses the national mind; and such a study is only possible when a nation has produced a rich religious literature or monuments of art embodying the public and private worship and religious sentiment. We know what we have gained by the discovery of the sacred books of the East, by the interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, and from their revelation to us in the Vedic, Iranian, and Mesopotamian cult-centres of a fervour as deep and passionate as any that we find in Hebraic or Christian writings. On the other hand, when a religion has passed away, {83} as is the case with that of pre-Hellenic Rome, without leaving any articulate expression of its inner life, our knowledge of it can be superficial only, confined to mere ritual, fragments of liturgies, and the externals of cult.

A dispassionate and uncontroversial study of that which is at least one of the greatest forces in human society cannot but be interesting, and fruitful also for other branches of inquiry, such as the history of early law and morals, of which in many primitive communities the religion is the only record. It may even solve certain problems concerning the early migrations of races, as I have been convinced by the investigation of various Greek cults. In England the trained workers in this field are still unfortunately few, perhaps because a certain latent prejudice, born of religious partisanship, is not yet extinct, and may act somewhat as a deterrent. I have avoided hitherto alluding to any of the practical and controversial considerations {84} which the methodical pursuit and propagation of this science may excite, though I am well aware that its practical effects may be of high importance; but they are not immediately our concern at present. There is, however, one such consideration that it is pertinent to touch on before concluding the survey of the methods and functions of this branch of historical inquiry, which deals much with origins and with the evolution of higher forms of religion from the lower. Discoveries of origins may appear to affect the validity of a creed or certain articles of creed. That this is actually the case in regard to the great problem with which the illustrations I have put before you are mainly concerned, namely, the genesis of Christianity, has been recently frankly admitted by a leading dignitary of the Roman Church: who, moved by a rumour of anthropological research, has promptly turned it to the profit of his cause by maintaining that the Roman ritual and communion gains in force and validity by {85} the discovery that it has inherited and absorbed the religious thought and practice of ancient Greece and Rome. On the other hand, others may find the exposition of the so-called pagan elements in the essence of Christianity repugnant to their sentiment; and hence are inclined to accept the dictum “that origin does not affect validity.” I imagine the facts of religious psychology make somewhat against this aphorism. But it only concerns the science of comparative religion, because in the history of creeds validity has been very often found to maintain itself mainly by an appeal to origin; and as our science, to reiterate, is much concerned with origins, it is indirectly concerned with those claims of validity that support themselves by such an appeal.

Another cause of the paucity of workers in this field is the complexity and difficulty of the subject, which can be handled successfully only by the advanced and mature student. The pre-requisites of competence are an {86} exact philological as well as an archæological training, with a view to the proper appreciation both of texts and monuments; secondly, a general acquaintance with the problems and history of philosophy, and especially of ethics, and with the history of early social institutions and law; thirdly, a comprehensive study of anthropology. To this must be added a sympathetic and minute knowledge of at least two of the great world-religions, whereby alone a critical insight into the essential and significant phenomena of the religious experiences of our race can be obtained. The comparative science of religion has now become possible, thanks partly to the labours of philological specialists in the ancient languages of Europe and Asia, and partly to the organisation of anthropological travel.

Let me conclude with remarking that subdivision of labour is imperative in this field: and it is especially in Oxford that the opportunities for the requisite preliminary {87} training are plentiful. It would be a gain for more than science if we could see a group of mature students organised here exploring the various departments of this complex subject in co-operation and with mutual assistance.

LECTURE III. THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM

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Among all the varied religious acts of man, there is probably none that has been so widely prevalent throughout the different races of mankind as the ritual of purification, nor does any idea seem to have possessed so strong a legislative power in the various departments of our life as the concept of purity. We can trace it back to instincts that we appear to share with the higher animals, and we can track it upwards through the complex rites of the higher religions. The record presents us with a vast mass of phenomena which, as far as I am able to discover, have not yet been reduced to system or unified by any constructive {89} theory of evolution. In this lecture I venture to attempt the systematisation of the subject, first giving a brief summary of the main facts which are well known to the students of primitive anthropology and comparative religion and which confront us in nearly all the societies that have been explored.

In the stage of our conscious life which we may call, relatively to man’s growth, primeval, certain bodily acts and states and certain material substances are regarded as unclean and impure, likely to imprint a stain upon the person. It is impossible here to attempt to enumerate all the examples, and it is enough to mention a few that are salient and typical. The generative processes of life, the states and activities of the male and especially the female organism connected with them, the bodily changes incident on puberty, are among the most familiar phenomena with which the idea of impurity in some peculiar sense has been universally associated. A chief centre or {90} “nidus” of impurity is child-birth; but still more dangerously impure is its counterpart, death and all the phenomena of death. In respect of child-birth the idea is fading away from our civilised consciousness; but it has left a deep deposit in our conscious or subconscious self in regard to death. The material substance that has been most generally felt to be impure is blood; the curious feeling that the mere mention of the word often excites in certain modern people is a faint reflex of the savage mental state in respect to the thing; and the influence of this disposition upon advanced society raises the most interesting question in which comparative law, ethics, and religion are jointly concerned, and which will be considered later. To continue our enumeration we may not find that the objects of the inanimate world outside ourselves are usually regarded by primitive thought as in themselves impure, but all or most of them are capable of catching the infection from ourselves, from death or child-birth {91} for instance: hence it may be necessary to break or destroy or purify the utensils and furniture of the house where a death or a birth has occurred. At a somewhat more advanced stage, certain food-stuffs come to rank as impure, and a complicated code of “tapu” is established for specially sanctified persons. Then we are confronted, but not apparently in the most primitive period, with the distinction between pure and impure animals, which also dictates certain rules and practices of diet.

On the other hand certain natural things may come to be regarded as specially “pure,” whether on the ground of a certain intrinsic quality, because for instance they are bright and lustrous, or from the fact that they were habitually used for cathartic or cleansing processes, as fire, water, odorous wood or spices, or substances which emitted a pungent odour such as sulphur. Such objects “are used in ritual,” says Jamblichus,[91.1] {92} “because they are specially full of the divine nature.” But the psychic phenomena and the corresponding acts with which we are dealing may be well suspected of descending from an age at which no definite concept of a divine nature had as yet arisen, an age not yet perhaps even animistic, for in their crudest form they do not seem necessarily to imply any articulate system of belief in a world of ghosts and spirits. And this reflection brings us to the first question of importance, what this primitive concept of purity and impurity really is, and what were the sensations from which it was evolved. Nothing is more difficult to describe than simple sensations, but it is possible to distinguish one from another. And we must distinguish between the modern feeling about cleanliness and the primitive feelings which we are considering. That “cleanliness is next to godliness” is an aphorism suggested no doubt by sensations fundamentally akin to these; but many a savage who is most particular about “impurity” {93} cares little or nothing for what we call “cleanliness.” We consider that the cleansing acts we ourselves perform are purely hygienic or pleasure-giving, partly connected with the instinct of self-preservation, and some of them we find performed by other animals than man.

But the savage ritual of purification does not by any means tend necessarily to self-preservation, but at times may lead to self-destruction, and no hygienic or utilitarian or secular considerations will carry us far in explaining the cathartic code of Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta, or Buddhism, or the impurity of tabooed animals. These codes, while some of their prescriptions may be such as modern utilitarian ideas might dictate, are obviously instinct with religious or superstitious beliefs, and to explain the distinction between the pure and the impure animals would need a long excursus into primitive religion; the distinction is certainly not one between wholesome and unwholesome, or pleasant and unpleasant, meat.

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We may probably discover the nature of the instinct underlying much of the cathartic custom-law by taking as our typical example the savage feeling about blood. Evidence from almost every society in the world yields proof that the stain of blood is the primary impurity that needs a purifying ritual: hence arose a body of rules that were a burden upon domestic life, hence the elaborate purifications of warriors after battle or of the individual homicide. Such rules in no way remind us of the natural desire to take a bath at the end of a warm field-day: the savage purifications after battle may last for weeks; it is recorded that a North American Indian tribe was extirpated because it needed a month to wipe off the stain of a single conflict, while their enemies needed only a week for that purpose and therefore had the advantage of three weeks’ start in preparing for the next attack. The sense-instinct that suggests all this is probably some primeval terror or aversion evoked by certain objects, as we see animals {95} shrink with disgust at the sight or smell of blood. The nerves of savage man are strangely excited by certain stimuli of touch, smell, taste, sight: the specially exciting object is something that we should call “mysterious,” “weird,” or, still more expressively, “uncanny.” To the primitive mind nothing was more uncanny than blood, and there are people still who faint at the sight of it: for “the blood is the life,” life and death are the great primeval mysteries, and all the physical substances that are associated with the inner principle of either partake of this mysteriousness. For the savage, what is mysterious is also dangerous and not to be lightly handled or approached. Now, the man who incurs such stain not merely is exposed to some unaccountable danger himself, but he is able to infect others by contagion; he spreads a sort of miasma, he is the conducting vehicle of a dangerous spiritual electricity--mere metaphors, which, however, may enable us to catch something of the primitive thought. Such a {96} man therefore must avoid communion with his fellows for a time, must be “tabooed”; and will naturally endeavour to remove the “tapu” or dangerous “miasma” by some magic rites of cleansing or release. The kinsmen of the recently dead in all primitive societies are impure, because they have come into contact with death, the chief source of all impurity; therefore they must be isolated, and, until they are purified, must wear some badge or external mark--which we call “mourning”--to warn others against approaching them. The “tapu” still remains in civilised communities; we abstain from intruding on the bereaved family, though we give a different motive for our keeping aloof. It so often happens that in such matters we act as the savage acts; but we must abandon for a time our normal way of looking at things in order to imagine his. To us a corpse may be an object of aversion, and it is in some degree contagious; but our view of it, when we are cool, is secular and scientific: while the primitive aspect of it is {97} supranormal and mystic, and the contagion is something spiritual and incalculably dangerous. In the Zend-Avesta we find an interesting special application of this idea: the defiling power of the dead varies directly according to the sanctity or rank of the deceased; thus it is greatest in the corpse of the priest, somewhat less in that of a warrior, and least in that of the husbandman:[97.1] _corruptio optimi pessima_: the most sacred person can defile the most, because he is charged with the most mysterious and therefore dangerous potency. The Latin term “sacer” has the double meaning of “holy” and “accursed”: from the same Greek root, αγ, spring a word connoting holiness and a word meaning “pollution.” Primeval thought or feeling holds together in a vague unity ideas that afterwards differentiate themselves and even become antithetical. The same power of radiating dangerous influence, supposed {98} to attach to the holy man, the polluted man and the polluting thing, brought them originally under the same dim conception.

It would not repay us here to endeavour to trace out and explain all the minutiæ of this superstition: the long lists of pure and impure things that one might compile do not disclose any single regulative idea, and nothing is more baffling than the eccentricities of prejudice and terror. But this superstition often proceeds with a logic of its own: as a corpse is most unclean, and all who touch it are impure, therefore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are impure and must not be eaten: and anything that however distantly reminds us of danger and death, such as quarrelsome acts and words, may come to be rigidly prohibited during a ritual of purification. As blood is primevally impure, therefore any substance analogous to it or of the same colour might be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or pomegranates. The same kind of sensational aversion will cause malodorous substances to {99} be regarded usually as unclean; therefore food of an evil savour, or such as leaves unpleasant traces in the person, will often be tabooed by certain strict sects.[99.1] There is also a certain common-sense discoverable in the distinction between substances on the ground of their greater or less susceptibility to spiritual contagion: earthen pots, for instance, have been often considered more easily infected than metal, and need longer purification, liquid substances more dangerous conductors than dry. “Should the dry mingle with the dry,” says Ahura Mazda in a conversation with Zarathustra, “how soon all this material earth of mine would be only one Peshôtanu,” which is as much as to say that the earth would become a charnel-house of impurity. And Darmesteter[99.2] remarks, in commenting on this verse, “Nowadays in Persia, the Jews are {100} not allowed to go out of their house on a rainy day, lest the religious impurity conducted through the rain should pass from the Jew to the Mussalman.” We have here a view of contagion that seems to agree with that of modern science, only the latter is physical, the former mystic or spiritual. Again, the choice of substances used for purification was not dictated by the modern idea of a cleansing quality, but by a certain superstitious logic which we can sometimes detect. If liquid substances have a natural affinity for contagion, then if we take them while they are uninfected and use them for lustration, they will easily absorb the impurities of our own persons and rid us of them; therefore the modern savage or the ancient Greek might think it desirable to daub himself with clay or mud to wash away his taint: and from this example we see how distinct these primeval lustral processes are from the modern hygienic washing, to which nevertheless they often bear a close resemblance. By a similar reasoning we {101} may explain an inconsistency that occasionally appears in the cathartic ritual; a substance impure as food might be used for purposes of lustration: for instance, we find garlic used as a cathartic in the worship of the Phrygian god Mên at Athens.[101.1] Fire, the universal purifier, may have been accredited with this power by right of its own nature, but partly in all probability because it was believed to dry up miasma and damp infection.[101.2]

In the Zend-Avesta code, after drying for a whole year under the light of the sun, the corpse at last becomes pure; for by the same natural instinct that caused the aversion to blood, the sun’s light comes to be regarded as the purest thing in the world: meat cooked by its warmth is more sanctified than fire-cooked meat; and certain acts and states of man have a greater defilement in the sun’s face.

So far I have been trying to present the {102} phenomena without reference to any definite religious belief, to express them as far as possible in terms of simple sensation; for, as was said at the beginning of the discussion, it is possible that they have descended from a pre-religious age. We may now ask how the baneful influence of the impure thing in this primeval stage of thought was supposed to work, unassisted by any spiritual agency such as spirit or god. We may suppose that it produced its results indirectly by depressing the vital energies of the man who was the victim of the superstition: the savage might believe that it worked directly, by some mysterious law of luck, paralysing a man’s force and spoiling his hunting and fighting. This idea of a spontaneous mesmeric power of evil that certain things possess seems to glimmer through the verse in the Zend-Avesta. “Here am I,” says an unlucky man to those whom he meets, “one who has touched the corpse of a man and who is powerless in mind, powerless in tongue, {103} powerless in hand; do make me clean.”[103.1] Is it an illusion to believe that we have here penetrated to the psychological root of the whole matter? And here there is no direct reference to spirit or god.

But at an early period such reference was made, and it was then that this cathartic ritual really started on a momentous career. When the doctrine of animism became firmly established, it attracted the ritual and the ideas associated with it, and the animistic imprint upon them can still be traced even in the higher religions. A dangerous spirit was supposed to abide in the impure thing and to be evoked by the unclean act; the potency which in the primeval stage of feeling had been perhaps regarded merely as something mysteriously baneful and “uncanny,” now becomes personal and intelligible and can be dealt with and exorcised by certain efficacious rules. The stain of blood on the homicide attracts the ghost of the slain to pursue him, certain foods {104} are impure because evil spirits attach to them, disease is specially their work, and a veritable pandemonium gathers around the corpse, the woman in child-birth, and the new-born child. Illustrations showing how this demoniac faith has pervaded the thought of the world are broadcast in the records of primitive man as well as in the higher literature of our race, the Vedic and Iranian sacred books, the New Testament, the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic texts. In the view of the Zend-Avesta, which regards the whole universe as an overcharged battery of spiritual electricity, a single careless act of accidental uncleanliness is a cosmic catastrophe: legions of “drugs” or devils start up at once into existence to destroy the world of righteousness.[104.1] Plato, though on the whole he preserves his sanity in the matter, is under the dominion of similar ideas, and Neoplatonism reverts back to the savage view, believing that the chief aim of ἁγνείαι, or purifications, was to {105} drive the evil spirits out of certain kinds of food.[105.1]

The deep animistic colouring that the conception we are analysing came at a very early time to acquire may be responsible for a very important event in the history of religion: the evolution, namely, of the dualistic principle, the idea of the antagonism between good and evil spirits, the germ of which we can already detect in the animistic stage which may have preceded the faith in high personal gods. If the impure things and acts are impregnated with evil spirits, it is natural to suppose that the pure are the abode of the good, and these are contrary the one to the other. It may have required a very long period for a clear belief in the good spirit to crystallise; for to the very primitive mind all spirits are mysteriously dangerous, even the ghosts of one’s dearest kinsmen. Still, the ancestral spirits make on the whole for righteousness, and can be given the position of guardians of {106} the purification code. Thus the New Caledonians avert the wrath of the ghosts of their ancestors by washing, fasting, and chastity:[106.1] the ancient Greek might pray or sacrifice to a vague animistic company of θεοὶ Ἀποτρόπαιοι or Μειλίχιοι, regarded perhaps as ghosts of the lower world, to avert the impure omen or to wash off the taint of blood.

Finally, the conception of purity comes under the dominion of the higher faith in a personal god. In Greece, Apollo and Zeus attach to themselves the ritual and the associated ideas; in Persia the whole complex code of purity is established by Ahura Mazda; in Israel by Jahvé, who enforces the minutest details of the law with insistence on the purity of God.[106.2] In Babylonian as in Vedic religion, the fire-god is pre-eminently the purifier, a name which is attached particularly to Agni, and we find in the Babylonian liturgical texts the {107} prayer,[107.1] “May the torch of the shining fire-god cleanse me.” Nor does Buddhism appear to differ from Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta in respect of the complications of its cathartic rules and the importance it attached to them. The Buddhist missionary, I-Tsing, exhorts the faithful to observe the elaborate prescriptions of the Buddha, “because,” as he naively puts it, “gods and spirits get disgusted with our ways of wearing garments and eating food.” With this abundance of testimony before us, we are all the more surprised to find that very little is forthcoming from the records of our own ancestral paganism. We can scarcely believe that our Teutonic ancestors were destitute of the idea of lustration, and that their cleanliness and chastity, attested by the Roman writers and still more clearly by their own sagas, were virtues of purely secular origin. And in fact we have certain records of Teutonic ritual that seem to point to cathartic ideas: “After the goddess Nerthus had gone on her annual {108} procession round the villages,” as Tacitus informs us,[108.1] “her chariot and garments and her own person were solemnly washed in the waters of a sacred lake, as if the holy divinity had been polluted by her intercourse with men.” It is also possible that the custom still prevalent in the Teutonic populations of Europe, of leaping over the bonfire on midsummer’s eve, is the relic of a ceremony of fire-lustration performed before the beginning of harvest.[108.2] Doubtless also they had the same rules as those prevailing in nearly all communities, whether civilised or uncivilised, concerning the purity of temples; for we have record of an Icelandic law that the “Holy Place of Peace” was not to be defiled by blood or any human uncleanness.[108.3] Still, though other evidence pointing in the same direction might be gathered, it seems clear that the burden of the cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on the consciences of our fathers when the dawn {109} of their history begins. I am not aware of any indication, for instance, that they regarded formal lustration after bloodshed to be obligatory or desirable. And their comparative freedom in regard to such ceremonies is a fact of great importance with which we must reckon in our estimate of our later spiritual history. We may at the same time believe, on general grounds, that they also had at some remoter epoch passed through a period of bondage to the same ideas and the same formalities that we find so generally prevalent in other kindred and alien races.

The more interesting side of the inquiry now presents itself, the question about the influence that these cathartic ideas may have exercised upon religion, morality, and law. We may endeavour, for the sake of systematisation, to maintain this tripartite classification, although we find it becoming more and more illusory the further our investigation travels back to the earlier social life of man.