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BL 80 .J5 1896
Jevons, F. B. 1858-1936.
An introduction to the
history of religion
AN INTRODUCTIOiM>
St? M
<lOCW.^\ cq-W)
TO THE
HISTORY OF RELIGION
BY
FRANK BYRON JEVONS, M.A., LiTT.D.
CLASSICAL TUTOR IN THE UNIVERSITY OF DURHAM
METHUEN & CO.
36 ESSEX STREET, W.C.
LONDON
1896
PREFACE
In this book the history of early religion is investigated on
the principles and methods of anthropology, and in the belief
that the interests of truth and religion are fundamentally
identical.
The work is intended primarily for students who require
an introduction to the history of religion, but will also, it is
hoped, prove interesting to students of folk-lore and anthro-
pology, and to the wider circle of general readers.
As far as I am aware, there is no other book which covers
exactly the same ground as this does, or which attempts to
summarise the results of recent anthropology, to estimate
their bearing upon religious problems, and to weave the whole
into a connected history of early religion.
Thus far, then, this book is original, namely, as far as
regards the use to which its materials are put; but the
materials themselves are largely, though not wholly, derived
from the writings of others. In all cases I have endeavoured
to express my obligations in the footnotes. I am, however,
more especially bound to mention here the name of the late
Professor Eobertson Smith, to whose Religion of the Semites
my obligations are too great for their expression to be confined
to footnotes. My indebtedness to the works of Messrs. E. B.
Tylor, A. Lang, and Frazer is here gratefully acknowledged.
CONTENTS
CHAP.
^I. INTRODUCTOKY
II. OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT
^ III. THE SUPERNATURAL
IV. SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
V. LIFE AND DEATH .
VI. TABOO: ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY
VII. THINGS TABOO
VIII. TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION
IX. TOTEMLSM ....
X. SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM ,
XI. ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR .
XII. ANIMAL SACRIFICE : THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL
XIII. FETISHISM . . , ,
'^ XIV. FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS
/
'/
XV. ANCESTOR-WORSHIP
XVI. TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP
XVII. NATURE-WORSHIP .
XVIII. SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM
XIX. MYTHOLOGY
XX. PRIESTHOOD
XXI. THE NEXT LIFE
XXII. THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS .
XXIII. THE MYSTERIES
XXIV. THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES
, XXV. MONOTHEISM
XXVI. THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF
INDEX ....
PAGE
1
11
V-
15
28 y
41
59
69
82
9t)
113
130
144
163
180
189
206
226
234 '
249
270
297
314
327
358
382
398
417
Vll
AN INTEODUCTION
TO
THE HISTORY OF RELIGIOT^
CHAPTEE I
INTRODUCTORY
The book now before the reader is not a History of Eeligion,
but an Introduction to the History of Eeligion : its object is
not to place a history of religion before the student, but to
prepare him for the study of that history, to familiarise him
with some of the elementary ideas and some of the commonest
topics of the subject. Much which would fill a large part of
a history of religion finds no place in this Introduction :
thus, for instance, religions such as Christianity, Moham-
medanism, Buddhism, which are the outcome of the teaching
of their individual founders, are not included within the scope
of this book. But these religions — which, on the analogy
of " positive " law, i.e. law enacted by a sovereign, have been
termed Positive religions — were all designed by their founders
to supersede certain existing religions, which, not being
enacted by the authority of any single founder, but being
practised as a matter of custom and tradition, may be called
customary religions. It is with these religions, their customs
and institutions, that this Introduction deals.
Now, religious institutions are not the only institutions ^
which an early people possesses : it has also social institutions,
such as those which regulate marriage, the organisation of
the family, the vengeance to be taken for the murder of a
2 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
kinsman, the holding of property, the government of the
commmiity, etc. ; and the study of these social institutions
forms one branch of the science of anthropology. But
religious institutions also all have their social side : religious
worship is a public institution ; the gods are the gods of the
community as a whole, and all the members of the community
are required by custom to unite in the performance of the
rites and sacrifices with which it is the custom of that
particular society to approach its gods. Thus, religious
customs and institutions seem, on their social side, to require
to be studied, like other social institutions, on the principles
and methods of anthropology. Of late years they have
been largely so studied ; and in this book it is proposed to
collect together the principal results of these recent investiga-
tions— an undertaking the more necessary because the
studies in question are at present scattered and on single
topics, and have not yet been focussed in such a way as to
show what their total bearing on the history of religion is.
But the proposal thus to apply the methods of science
and the principles of anthropology to the study of religion,
meets in some quarters with not unnatural and certainly not
unreasonable objections. We must therefore at the outset
make a brief statement of the methods in question, and
consider the objections that may be made to them. To
begin with, anthropology employs the Comparative Method :
the customs of some one uncivilised or semi-civilised people
are compared with the customs of another people in the
same stage of culture, and considerable resemblance is found
to exist between them, just as the flint arrow-heads made by
man bear always a striking likeness to each other, whether
they come from Europe or from Mexico, and the rudest
pottery from Greece cannot be distinguished from the
pottery of the ancient Peruvians. These resemblances enable
us to extend our knowledge considerably ; thus the way in
which cave-men contrived to fasten their stone axe-heads to
wooden handles becomes clear when they are placed side by
side with the axes, having stone heads fastened on to wooden
handles, which are used by some savages at the present day.
The purpose for which a stone implement was used by
primitive man may be very doubtful until it is compared
INTRODUCTORY 3
with the use made by living savages of some similiar
implement. So, too, the purpose of some rite or custom
practised by one people may be doubtful or unknown until
it is compared with the same or a similar rite performed
elsewhere under circumstances which clearly show its object.
Again, the Comparative Method is used in anthropology in
the same way as it is employed in deciphering fragmentary
ancient inscriptions : in inscriptions of a similar kind similar
formulae recur, thus in decrees of the Athenian people the
formula " resolved by the people " constantly recurs ; so, if
only a few letters of the formula can be traced in what is
plainly a decree, we can restore the missing letters with
confidence. In the same way, a custom consisting in the
performance of a series of acts may be found amongst
several peoples in its entirety, and may amongst another
people only survive in a multilated form, and then we can
infer with confidence that the missing acts also once formed
part of this now fragmentary custom.
It is clear, therefore, that the Comparative Method can
only be properly employed where the things compared
resemble each other. If, then, we apply the Comparative
Method to religion, we seem to be committed to the assump-
tion that all religions are alike — :and that is a proposition to
which no religious-minded person can be expected to assent,'!
especially when some writers apparently take it as self-
evident that all religion is fetishism or animism or what not.
Now, it is clear that the application of the Comparative \
Method to religion does imply that religions resemble one '
another, otherwise it would be useless to compare them.
But it is also equally clear that the use of the Comparative
Method implies that religions differ from one another,
otherwise it would be unnecessary to compare them. A
bilingual inscription (of sufficient length) in both Etruscan
and some known language would settle the problem of Etrus-
can: the resemblance in meaning would enable us to compare
the two languages together ; it is the differences which make
it necessary to have some such means of comparison.
Comparative anatomy would have no object if the structure
of all animals were exactly alike. If there were no differences
between languages, there would be no need of Comparative
4 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Philology. And so it is precisely because religions do differ
that the Comparative Method can ])e applied to them ; and
the use of the method is a standing disproof of the idea that
all religions are alike.
The Comparative Method, then, can only be used where
there are differences in the things compared. Indeed, we
may go further, and say that it is for the sake of ascertaining
these differences that the method is brought into use. Thus
it is not the recurring formuhe, the stereotyped official
phrases, which are the interesting points in Athenian
inscriptions, but their subject-matter in which they differ
from each other and which is studied for the light it throws
on the history of Athens. The various Indo-European
lano:ua2:es both resemble and differ from one another ; the
resemblances are studied for the light which they throw on
the differences, the differences are studied because in their
explanation lies the key to the process by which the various
languages all grew out of the common, original Aryan tongue.
All growth consists in a series of changes, and the
record of the successive differences is the history of the
thing's growth. It was by a succession of changes in one
direction that Italian was evolved out of Latin ; in another
French, in another Spanish. The primitive custom which
required vengeance to be taken for the murder of a kinsman
appears in one form in the Corsican vendetta, in a more
developed form in the Saxon demand for wer-geld, in a yet
more developed form in the Athenian laws against murder,
while in English law the prosecution has been taken entirely
out of the hands of the kin. Now, the stages by which the
final form of this or any other institution was reached in any
given country may all be recorded in the annals of that
country, but if some are missing the Comparative Method
warrants us in inferring that they were the same as those by
which the same institution reached its final form in other
countries. Thus by the Comparative Method we are enabled
to apply the theory of evolution to the study of social
institutions, and amongst others to the study of religious
customs and institutions, on their social side.
Here again, however, we are met with serious objections :
evolution is the development of higher forms of life and
INTRODUCTORY 5
thought out of lower, monotheism is the highest form of
religion, and therefore, on the general principles of evolution,!
must have been the final form reached by a slow evolution/
from such lower stages as polytheism, fetishism, ancestor
worship, etc. They, therefore, who believe in the, Bible must
consider the very notion of evolution as essentially inapplicable
to religion. Monotheism, according to Genesis, was revealed
to begin with, and therefore cannot have been reached by a
process of development. The truth was given to man at the
beginning, and therefore cannot be the outcome of evolution. '
Every step taken in religion by man since Adam, if it was
not in the right line of monotheism, must have been away
from the truth of revealed religion ; the only evolution,
the evolution of error. Man's imagination, when once it'
abandons the one guide, becomes the prey of all sorts of
perversion, of the monstrous customs of heathendom, which
it is useless to trace, as they lead only away from the truth,
and are as irrational and as little to be heeded as the ravings
of a mind distraught.
The validity of this reasoning all depends upon the tacit
assumption that evolution is the same thing as progress,
whereas in point of fact evolution is universal, but progress
is very rare — the civilised peoples of the earth are less
numerous than the semi-civilised and uncivilised ; and of
the civilised themselves the progressive peoples are a(
minority. Institutions not only grow but decay also, and
decay as well as growth is a process of evolution. Florid art
is evolved out of something simpler, but is not therefore
superior to it. The Roman Empire was evolved out of the
Roman Republic, and was morally a degeneration from it.
The polytheism of Virgil is not better, as religion, than that
of Homer; the polytheism of late Brahminism is certainly
worse than that of the earlier periods. Therefore, to say
that the only evolution in religion — except that which is on
the lines of the Bible — is an evolution of error, may be
quite true and yet not show that the idea of evolution is
inapplicable to heathen religions. Their evolution may well
have been, from the religious point of view, one long process
of degeneration. Progress is certainly as exceptional in
religion as in other things, and where it takes place must be
6 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
due to exceptional causes. The study of heathen religions,
therefore, on evolutionary principles, may throw some light
on true religion ; if we can ascertain the reasons why they
have failed to advance, we shall be able better to appreciate
the causes to which progress is really due. This, however,
assumes that it is possible scientifically to ascertain the law
of growth in the case of pagan religions ; and it may seem
that they are too hopelessly fallacious, almost insane, in
their perversions of the truth. But the study of fallacies is
a part, and a very valuable part of logic. Even insanity has
its laws, and it is only by their discovery that the medical
man can hope to cure the mind diseased. And though the
missionary has resources which the physician has not, still it
cannot but help him if he starts with a knowledge of the
savage's point of view. To the necessity of such knowledge for
the missionary, no more eloquent testimony could be given than
is afforded by the labour which missionaries have bestowed
on the study of native religions, and which provides most of
the material for the history of early forms of religion.
,-^ To accept the principle, therefore, that religion is evolved,
by no means pledges us to reject ob priori and without
examination the possibility that monotheism may have been
the original religion. Nor shall we so reject it here. On
the other hand, a writer who approaches the history of
religion from the anthropological standpoint cannot start by
assuming that monotheism was the original religion. He
must start from the facts provided by his science, namely, the
religious customs and institutions of the various peoples of
the world. And even so, he will not be able to work back
to the time of our first parents ; anthropology carries us no
further back than the period just before the civilised races
appear to our view. It is to this period, therefore, that
" primitive man," as he appears in these pages hereafter,
belongs ; and, let it be borne in mind, he is a hypothesis,
like the creatures which have left only a single bone, or a
j foot-print, behind — he is reconstructed from the traces he
\ has left. He is invented to account for the features common
to both civilised man and existing savages, or rather to their
ancestors. He is not purely identical with the savage as he
now exists, for the savage has existed for a long time, and
INTRODUCTORY 7
we cannot suppose without change — indeed, he can be shown
to have retrograded in many cases. Thus between " primitive
man " and our first parents there is a wide gap ; and the
anthropologist standing on primitive man's side of the gulf
cannot pretend to see or say with certainty what did or did
not happen on the other side. Science has not yet even
settled the question whether man's origin was monogenetic ,
or polygenetic — though the balance of opinion seems inclined I
to settle in favour of the former theory.
Whether the anthropologist will fall back upon the Book
of Genesis to assist him in his conjectures as to what happened
before the earliest times on which his science has any clear
light to throw, will depend upon the value he assigns to
Genesis, and the interpretation he puts upon it. Some
writers argue that Genesis may be literally true, but it
never says that religion was revealed. But it seems to me
that the account in Genesis could never have been written i
except by one who believed (1) that monotheism was the f
original religion, (2) that there never was a time in the
history of man when he was without religion, (3) that the i\
revelation of God to man's consciousness was immediate, !
direct, and carried conviction with it. Now, the first of ]
these three tenets is a point on which we have already |
touched, and the discussion of which we shall take up again
in its proper place. The second is a proposition the falsity
of which some writers have endeavoured to demonstrate by
producing savage peoples alleged to have no religious ideas
whatever. This point we have no intention of discussing,
because, as every anthropologist knows, it has now gone to
the limbo of dead controversies. Writers approaching the
subject from such different points of view as Professor
Tylor, Max Miiller, Eatzel, de Quatrefages, Tiele, Waitz,
Gerland, Peschel, all agree that there are no races, however
rude, which are destitute of all idea of religion.
The third is a point which must receive rather fuller
treatment here. To the religious-minded man, the existence,
the personality of God and communion with Him, are facts
of internal but immediate consciousness : he has as direct
perception of the light of the soul as he has of the light of
the eye. To him, therefore, since God has never at any time
8 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
left Himself without a witness, it is perfectly natural that
the same revelation, carrying conviction with it, should have
been made to all men in all times. It is this revelation,
this element in the common consciousness of all generations
of men, which for him constitutes the continuity /of religion.
He is aware that the facts of consciousness receive very
unequal degrees of attention ; the mind's eye can only be
focussed on one spot in the field of consciousness at the same
time, it is but on a chosen few of the mass of presentations
flowing in upon the mind that attention can at any one time
be concentrated. Indeed, the art of life consists in paying
attention to the right things and neglecting the rest; and
systematic inattention may be carried to such a pohit that
in course of time the very roar of Niagara becomes, if not
inaudible, at anyrate unnoticed. Here, then, we have the
explanation of that slow process of religious degeneration —
due to prolonged and increasing distraction of attention —
which is, as we have seen, one form of evolution. But as long
as religion exists at all, in however degenerate a form, somei-
faint consciousness of the fundamental facts must linger on —
and it is that consciousness, attenuated as it may be, which
constitutes that continuity without which there could be no
evolution. ,If evolution takes place, something must be
evolved ; and that something, as being continuously present
in all the different stages, may be called the continuum of
religion. Whether the movement of religion be upwards or
downwards, whether its evolution in any given case be a
process of progress or of degeneration, it is by the continuicm
running through all its forms that the highest stages and
the lowest are linked together.
Now the existence of this continuum the historian of
religion, if he is an evolutionist, has to accept. He is bound
to assume its presence from the very beginning of the process
of evolution — the process cannot begin without it. The
belief that the course of the w^orld is directed by divine
agency and personal will, is one the existence of which the
historian, even if he could not explain it, would still be
bound to assume. He is in exactly the same position as the
physicist is. The physicist has to assume the reality of the
external world before he can show what consequences his
INTRODUCTORY 9
science can trace from the assumption ; but he knows that
some philosophers, e.g. Hume and Mill, deny its reality ; and
that no proof of its reality has been discovered which all
philosophers accept. So, too, the historian of religion must
assume the reality of the facts of the religious consciousness
to begin with, else he cannot explain the various forms they
take in the course of their evolution, nor the various customs
and institutions in which they find outward expression. But
he knows that their reality is confidently denied as well as
stoutly asserted. Further, it is clear that physical science
cannot prove the existence of the external world ; if a
physicist were to undertake to devise a chemical experiment
which should prove or disprove the existence of matter, he
would show thereby that he had not got beyond the
Johnsonian stage of the discussion. Physical science, being a '
body of inferences which flow from the assumption, cannot
prove the assumption except by arguing in a vicious circle.
So, too, the history of religion has to assume, it cannot prove
or disprove, the reahty of the facts of the religious conscious-
ness. Perhaps another analogy may make this clearer.
It is only by a slow process of accumulation that human
knowledge has reached its present dimensions ; the science
of the modern savant has been evolved out of the errors of
the simple savage. But it would be obviously absurd, there-
fore, contemptuously to pooh-pooh the discoveries of modern
science as merely survivals of the old erroneous way of look-
ing at the world. And it is equally fallacious to talk, asf\
both friends and foes of religion do sometimes talk, as though! j
the application of the theory of evolution to religion would 1,
reduce the higher forms of it to mere survivals of barbarism, j-
animism, and so on. The art of Phidias was evolved out of
something of which we may almost say that it was artistic
only in intention ; but the man would be to be pitied who
could see nothing in the highest art of Grreece but survivals
of a barbaric stage of carving. Art is a mode of expression,
whereby the artist delivers himself of his message. It is
common to both barbaric and civilised man ; and the inference
is that it is neither peculiarly barbaric nor specifically civilised,
but universally human. So, too, with religion as a form of
thought, the perception of " the invisible things of Him
10 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
through the things that are made " ; it is common both to
barbaric and civilised man, but it is not therefore a barbaric
form of thought — rather it is a mode of cognition which is part
of human nature. The perfect beauty of fully-developed art
is of course not present in its rude beginnings ; but even the
barbaric artist is feeUng after the ideal if peradventure he
may find it.
In the case of science, the continuum which, however fine
and long drawn out, yet links the savant to the savage, is
their common belief in the uniformity of Nature. Now, the
savage doubtless often wrongly applies this belief. He
sees uniformities where they do not exist, but we do not
regard this as a proof that Nature is not uniform. He
ascribes events to their wrong causes, but this does not shake
our faith in the proposition that every event has a cause.
So, too, the belief that all things are ruled by supernatural
will is not proved to be false because it is often wrongly
applied. When the history of religion has recorded all the
wrong applications of the belief, the validity of the belief has
still to be tested on quite other grounds and with quite other
tests by the philosophy of religion. The validity of the
belief in the uniformity of Nature is in nowise affected by
the vast array of errors contained in the history of science.
Unfortunately, ^hough we all believe in the uniformity of
Nature, as we all believe in the reality of the external world,
there is no satisfactory way of proving either to be true.
The average man of science simply walks, and wisely walks,
by faith in these matters; he takes it for granted that Nature
is uniform and that the external world is real. And in
religion the average man may do worse than imitate the
example given him in science. It is the boast of science
that it deals with things, not names ; that it proves everything
by experience, brings every proposition to the test of immediate
consciousness. Religion has no other proof, no other test for
its truths ; it is by his own experience a man proves the
truth that " blessed are the humble and meek " ; it is by the
test of immediate consciousness that he learns — if he does
learn — that God " is not far from each one of us."
CHAPTER II
OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT
The savage imagines that even lifeless things are animated
by a will, a personality, a spirit, like his own ; and, wherever
he gets his conception of the supernatural from, to some at
least of the objects which surround him, and which are
supposed by him to be personal agents, he ascribes super-
natural power (ch. iii. " The Supernatural "). Some writers
have imagined that there was a time in the " prehistory " of
man, when he could not tell the natural from the supernatural,
and that consequently magic existed first and religion was
developed out of it. But this view seems to proceed on a
misconception of the nature of Sympathetic Magic (ch. iv.).
Be this as it may, it was natural that man should wish to
establish friendly relations with some of these supernatural
powers ; and the wish seemed one quite possible to carry
out, because he was in the habit of communicating with
certain beings, who, whether they possessed supernatural
powers or not, at anyrate were spirits, namely, the souls of
the departed (ch. v. " Life and Death "). But this assumes
that ghosts, or at anyrate some ghosts, were friendly to the
living, and were loved by them ; whereas it is sometimes
maintained that all ghosts are malevolent, and that the corpse-
taboo is a proof of the universal dread of the ghost. But
when we examine the institution of taboo generally, we find,
first, that taboo is transmissible (e.g. the mourner is as
dangerous as the corpse he has touched), and next, that its
transmissibility implies no hostility — the mourner is as
dangerous to those he loves as to those he hates (ch. vi.
" Taboo : its Transmissibility "). Taboo is not fear of " the
clinging ghost " nor of any physical emanation, but is the
11
12 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
conviction that there are certain things which must — abso-
^ lutely, and not on grounds of experience or "unconscious
utility " — be avoided (ch. vii. " Things Taboo "). It is the
categorical imperative " Thou shalt not — " which is the first
form assumed by the sense of social and moral obligation and
by religious commandments (ch. viii. " Taboo, Morality and
Eeligion ").
Primitive man, then, feeling it both necessary and possible
to establish permanent friendly relations with some of the
supernatural powers by which he was surrounded, proceeded
to do so. He not only ascribed to natural objects a personality
like his own ; he also noticed that, as men were organised in
kins (clans and families), so natural objects grouped them-
selves in natural kinds (genera and species). And as alliances
between human kins were formed by means of the blood-
covenant which made all the members of the two contracting
tribes blood-brothers, so he proceeded to make a blood-covenant
between a human kind and an animal species. This is
Totemism (ch. ix.). We may not be able to say a priori
why he chose animals first rather than any other natural
kind, but the hypothesis that he did so is the one which
alone, or best, accounts for the facts to be explained, and
therefore may be taken as a working hypothesis. It accounts
for animal worship, for the animal or serni-animal form of
many gods, for the "association" of certain animals with certain
gods, for "sacred" and for "unclean" animals, and for the
domestication of animals (ch. x. "Survivals of Totemism"). It
also accounts for the altar and for the idol (ch. xi. " Animal Sacri-
fice : The Altar "), and for animal sacrifice and for the sacra-
mental meal (ch. xii. "Animal Sacrifice: The Sacramental Meal").
Thus far we have been dealing with public worship, to
which the individual was admitted, not on his private merits,
but because he was a member of the tribe which had a
blood-covenant with a totem-species. If the individual,
however, wished to commend himself specially to supernatural
protection, there were two ways in which he might do so,
one illicit and one licit. He might address himself to one
of the supernatural powers which had no friendly relations
with his own tribe or any other — which was no " god " — and
this was in itself a suspicious way of proceeding, which the
OUTLINE OF THE ARGUMENT 13
community resented, and if harm came of it, visited with
punishment (ch. xiii. " Fetishism "). Or he might, with the
approval of the community, and by the intermediation of
the priest, place his family or himself under the immediate
protection of one of the community's gods. In any case,
however, licit or illicit, the ritual adopted was copied from
that observed by the community in approaching its gods
(ch. xiv. " Family Gods and Guardian Spirits "). Like all
other private cults, the worship of ancestors was modelled
on the public worship of the community ; and as the family
is an institution of later growth than the tribe or clan, the
worship of family ancestors is a later institution than the
worship of the tribal god (ch. xv. " Ancestor Worship ").
We now return to public worship. Species of trees and
plants might be, and were, taken for totems, as well as
species of animals. This led to the domestication of plants.
Another result was that bread (or maize) and wine came to
furnish forth the sacramental meal in the place of the body
and blood of the animal victim hitherto sacrificed (ch. xvi.
" Tree and Plant Worship "). The breeding of cattle and
cultivation of cereals made man more dependent than here-
tofore on the forces of nature (conceived by him as super-
natural powers), and led him to worship them with the same
ritual as he had worshipped his plant or animal totems
(ch. xvii. " Nature Worship "). Agriculture made it possible
to relinquish a wandering mode of existence for settled life ;
and settled life made it possible for neighbouring tribes to
unite in a larger political whole, or " state." But this
political union involved a fusion of cults, and that fusion
might take one of two forms : if the resemblance between
the gods worshipped by the two tribes was close, the two
gods might come to be regarded as one and the same god ;
if not, the result was polytheism (ch. xviii. " Syncretism and
Polytheism "). In either case the resulting modifications in
the tribal worship required explanation, and was explained,
as all things were explained by primitive man, by means of
a myth (ch. xix. " Mythology "). Myths were not the work \
of priests — that is but a form of the fallacy that the priest |
made religion, the truth being that religion made the priest/
(ch. XX. " Priesthood ").
14 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Sometimes the next life was conceived as a continuance
of this life, under slightly changed and less favourable
conditions (ch. xxi. " The Next Life "). Sometimes, by a
development of the belief that man after death assumed the
form of his totem, it was conceived as a transmigration of the
soul (ch. xxii. " The Transmigration of Souls "). Neither belief,
however, proved permanently satisfactory to the religious con-
sciousness ; and in the sixth century B.C. the conviction spread
from Semitic peoples to Greece, that future happiness depended
on communion with (some) God in this life by means of a
sacrament, and consisted in continued communion after death
(ch. xxiii. " The Mysteries "). In Greece this belief was
diffused especially by the Eleusinian Mysteries (ch. xxiv. " The
Eleusinia ").
There remains the question, what we are to suppose to
have been the origin of Monotheism (the subject of ch. xxv.),
on which will depend largely our theory of the Evolution of
Belief (discussed in ch. xxvi.).
CHAPTEE III
THE SUPERNATUKAL
There are no savages in existence to whom the use of
implements and the art of making fire are unknown ; and
vast as is the antiquity of the earliest remains of man, they
do not take us back to a time when he was ignorant of
the art of making either fire or stone-implements. It is
therefore mere matter of speculation whether there ever was
such a period of ignorance. It was man's physical inferiority
to his animal competitors in the struggle for existence which
made it necessary that he should equip himself with artificial
weapons, if he was to survive ; and the difficulty of main-
taining existence under the most favourable natural conditions
is so great for the savage even now, when he has fire and
tools at his command, that we may imagine he could not, in
the beginning, have long survived without them, if at all.
But as there must have been one weapon which was the
first to be made, one fire which was the first ever kindled,
we must either infer that for a time man was without fire
and without implements, or else we must assign this discovery
to some hypothetical, half-human ancestor of man. Which-
ever was the case, whether there was ever or never such a
period of human ignorance, the object of this chapter is to
argue that from the beginning man believed in a supernatural
spirit (or spirits) having affinity with his own spirit and
having power over him. It is of course only with the
existence of this belief that a history of religion has to do.
Its validity falls to be discussed by the philosophy of religion.
Thanks to the assiduous labours of a long line of men of
science, the laws of nature have been so exactly laid down,
and the universe works with such regularity nowadays, that
15
16 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
it is difficult even to conceive a time when there were no
natural laws. And yet to him who knows not the law of a
thing's movements, the thing's behaviour is as though it had
no law, for ex hypothesi he does not know what it will do
next. If, then, we suppose a time when no natural laws had
as yet been discovered, all things then must have appeared
to happen at haphazard ; and primitive man's experience
must have consisted of a stream of events as disjointed and
disconnected as the successive incidents in a dream. So
^schylus describes the condition of men before Prometheus :
oX Trpcora fiev ^Xenovrcs e^Xcnov naTrjVy
kXvovtcs ovk tj'kovov, aXX' oveLpdrcov
dXiyKioL fMop(pai(TL tov paKpbv ^iov
e(f)vpov cIkt] Travra.
Of what might happen in those early days, when nature
had but few laws to obey and obeyed them by no means
uniformly, we have fortunately plenty of contemporary
evidence : the fairy tales which were composed in the infancy
of the human race, and are still the delight of childhood,
faithfully reflect what actually happened in the daily life of
primitive man. The proof of this statement is the fact that
for savages now existing the incidents of which fairy tales
are made up, and which seem to us most extravagant and
supernatural, are matters of ordinary if not everyday
occurrence. The transformation of men into beasts and
vice versd is not only believed to take place, but is actually
witnessed by savages, and in the case of witches has been
proved in many an English court of law. " The Jacoons
believe that a tiger in their path is invariably a human
enemy who assumes by sorcery the shape of the beast to
execute his vengeance or malignity. They assert that, invari-
ably before a tiger is met, a man has been seen or might
have been seen to disappear in the direction from which
the animal springs. In many cases the metamorphosis they
assert has plainly been seen to take place" (Cameron).
The Bushmans say their wives can change themselves into
lions and so get food for the family (Anderson). Even in
Europe, a woman still (1860) living in Kirchhain changed
herself not long ago into a wolf, and scratched and tore a
THE SUPERNATURAL 17
girl going across the fields (Miihlhausen), The giant " who
had no heart in his body," and was invulnerable and immortal
because he had deposited his heart or soul in a safe place,
was but doing what the Minahassa of Celebes do whenever
they move into a new house : " A priest collects the souls of
the whole family in a bag, and afterwards restores them to
their owners, because the moment of entering a new house
is supposed to be fraught with supernatural danger." ^
The helplessness of primitive man set down in the midst
of a miiverse of which he knew not the laws, may perhaps be
brought home to the mind of modern man, if we compare the
universe to a vast workshop full of the most various and
highly-complicated machinery working at full speed. The
machinery, if properly handled, is capable of producing every-
thing that the heart of primitive man can wish for, but also,
if he sets hand to the wrong part of the machinery, is capable
of whirling him off between its wheels, and crushing and
killing him in its inexorable and ruthless movement. Further,
primitive man cannot decline to submit himself to the perilous
test : he must make his experiments or perish, and even so
his survival is conditional on his selecting the right part of
the machine to handle. Nor can he take his own time and
study the dangerous mechanism long and carefully before
setting his hand to it : his needs are pressing and his action
must be immediate.
It was therefore often at the actual cost and always at
the danger of his life that primitive man purchased that
working knowledge of the laws of nature and the properties of
matter, without which modern man could never have acquired
either the theoretic science or the material comfort which he now
enjoys. But if modern man owes his science and his comfort
to primitive man, primitive man in his turn owes his pre-
servation in his perilous quest to a gift by the power of which
mankind has conquered the material universe ; that gift is the
faith in the uniformity of nature, the belief that what has
once happened will in similar circumstances happen again.
The existence of this belief in the earliest times is a matter
susceptible of easy demonstration, and is of some importance
for the history of religion. It is important, because when it
1 Frazer, G. B. ii. 327.
18 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
, is overlooked we are liable to fall into the error of imagining
I that there was a time when man did not distinguish between
the natural and the supernatural. This error may take the
form of saying either that to primitive man nothing was
supernatural or that everything was supernatural. Nothing,
/it may be said, was supernatural, for, as in a dream the most
incongruous and impossible incidents are accepted by the
dreamer as perfectly natural, and are only recognised as
surprising and impossible when we wake and reflect on them,
so events which are seen by civilised man to be incredible
and impossible are to primitive man matters of everyday
occurrence, and are perfectly natural. On the other hand,
it is said that, when no natural laws are known there can be
no natural and necessary sequences of events, and everything
therefore is supernatural. According to this view, primitive
man lived in a state of perpetual surprise : he marvelled
every time he found that water was wet, he was racked with
anxiety every time he went to bed lest the sun should not
rise the next day, and he was filled with grateful astonishment
when he found that it did rise. But this view, sufficiently
improbable in itself, must be rejected for two reasons : first,
the very animals have, for instance, their lairs and their
customary drinking-places to which they resort in full con-
fidence that they will find them where they were before ; and
we cannot rate the intelligence of primitive man so far below
that of the animals, as to imagine that he was ever in doubt
whether, for instance, water would slake his thirst, or food
appease his appetite. Next, it is a fact of psychology that
the native tendency of the human mind to believe that what
has once happened will happen again is so strong that, until
experience has corrected it, a single occurrence is sufficient to
create an expectation of recurrence : the child to whom you
have given sweetmeats once, fully expects sweetmeats from
you at your next meeting.
We may then regard it as certain that from the
beginning there were some sequences of phenomena, some
laws which man had observed, and the occurrence of which
he took as a matter of course and regarded as natural. Or
putting ourselves at the practical point of view — the only
point of view which could exist for primitive man in his
THE SUPERNATURAL 19
strenuous and unrelaxing struggle for existence — we may
say that he discovered early how to set going certain
portions of the mechanism of nature to further his own
private ends, and that he felt neither surprise nor gratitude
when the machinery produced its usual results. It was
when the machinery did not produce its usual results that
he was astonished — when it produced nothing or produced
something the opposite of what he expected — when, for
instance, the cool water which aforetimes had refreshed his
limbs gave him, in his heated condition, erysipelas. And as
at the present day man takes to himself the credit of his
good actions and throws the blame of the bad on circum-
stances— over which he had no control — so we may be sure
that primitive man took to himself the credit of his
successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his
own advantage, but when the machinery did not v/ork he |
ascribed the fault to some overruling, supernsitiival power.
In fine, where the natural ended, the supernatural began.
Laws on which man could count and sequences which he
habitually initiated and controlled were natural. It was the
violation of these sequences and the frustration of his
expectations by which the belief in supernatural power was
not created but was first called forth.^ That this was the
first and earUest way in which man's attention was directed
to the supernatural is probable, because his earliest inductions
were necessarily framed on a narrow basis of experience, and
consequently must soon have broken down. He must
therefore from the beginning have been brought to confront
a mysterious power which was beyond both his calculation
and his control. In the next place, the shock of surprise
with which he witnessed the violation of his expectations
^ Since writing the above, I lind Waitz says {Introduction to Anthropology,
p. 368) "that which regularly and periodically recurs passes by unheeded,
because, being expected and anticipated, he (primitive man) is not obstructed
in his path" ; and that Major Ellis {Tshi-speaJcing Peoples, p. 21), quoting this
passage from Waitz, says : ' ' Hence the rising and the setting of the sun and
moon, the periodical recurrence of the latter, the succession of day by night,
etc., have excited no speculation in the mind of the Negro of the Gold Coast.
None of the heavenly bodies are worshipped ; they are too distant to be selected
as objects of veneration ; and the very regularity of their appearance impresses
him less than the evidences of power and motion exhibited by rivers, the sea,
storms, landslips, etc."
)
20 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was as great as that with which civilised man would witness
the unaccountable suspension or inversion of what he con-
sidered a law of nature ; for the tenacity with which a belief
is held does not vary with the reasonableness of the belief
or the amount of evidence for it ; but, on the contrary, those
people are usually most confident in their opinions who have
the least reason to be so. Again, it will hardly be doubted
that, when primitive man found his most reasonable and
justifiable expectations (as they appeared to him) frustrated
in a manner for which he could not account or find any
assignable cause, the feeling thus aroused in him would be
that which men have always experienced when they have
found themselves confronted by what they deemed to be
supernatural. At all times the supernatural has been the
miraculous, and the essence of miracle has been thought to
be the violation of natural law. Even where there is no
violation of natural laws, men may be profoundly impressed
with the conviction that they are in the hands of an
inscrutable, overruling, and supernatural power. To awaken
this conviction it is only necessary that their " reasonable "
expectations should be disappointed in some striking way, as,
for instance, by the triumph of the ungodly or the undeserved
suffering of the innocent. In fine, to be convinced of the
existence of the supernatural, it is sufficient that man should
realise his helplessness.
When, however, primitive man realised that he was in
the hands, at anyrate occasionally, of a mysterious and
supernatural power, it was inevitable that he should cast
about for some means of entering into satisfactory relations
with that power. We shall have to consider hereafter what
were the conditions which governed and directed his first
attempts ; here, however, we may note two things. The
first is, that it is not always necessarily to the disadvantage
but sometimes to the advantage of man that his reasonable
expectations may be miraculously disappointed — in other
words, the belief in the supernatural is not necessarily or
exclusively the outcome of fear. Thus " tradition says that
the people of Cape Coast first discovered the existence of
Djwi-j'ahnu [the local deity of Connor's Hill] from the
great loss which the Ashantis experienced at this spot
THE SUPERNATURAL 21
during their attack on Cape Coast on the 11th of July 1824.
The slaughter was so great and the repulse of the Ashantis
so complete, that the Fantis, accustomed to see their foes
carry everything before them, attributed the unusual result
of the engagement to the assistance of a powerful local god,"
and they set up a cult accordingly.^ The Kaffirs of Natal
make thankofferings and express gratitude to the spirits for
blessings received thus : " This kraal of yours is good ;
you have made it great. I see around me many children ;
you have given me them. You have given me many cattle.
You have blessed me greatly. Every year I wish to be thus
blessed. Make right everything at the kraal. I do not
wish any omens to come. Grant that no one may be sick
all the year." 2 In fine, as Mr. Clodd says, in primitive
religion there is " an adoration of the great and bountiful as
well as a sense of the maleficent and fateful." ^
The second thing to notice is that, as it was owing to
man's physical helplessness in his competition with his
animal rivals that he was compelled to exercise his intellect
in order to survive in the struggle for existence, so it was
his intellectual helplessness in grappling with the forces of
nature which led him into the way of religion ; and as it was
his intellectual faculties which gave him the victory over his
animal competitors, so it was the strength drawn by him
from his religious beliefs that gave him the couragfe to face
and conquer the mysterious forces which beset him.
Assuming, then, that from the beginning man was com-
pelled from time to time to recognise the existence of a
supernatural power intervening unaccountably in his affairs
and exercising a mysterious co'itrol over his destinies, we
have yet to inquire how he came to ascribe thin supernatural
power to a spirit having affinity with his own. Now, savages
all the world over believe that not only animals and plants
but inanimate things also possess life ; and the inference
that whatever moves has life, though mistaken, is so natural,
that we have no difficulty in understanding how the gliding
stream and the leaping flame may be considered to be
veritably living things. But savages also regard motionless
^ Ellis, Tsht-speaking Peoples, 40. ^ Shooter, Kafirs of Natal, 166.
^ Clodd, Myths and Dreams, 114.
22 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
objects as possessing life ; and this, too, is not hard to
understand : the savage who falls and cuts himself on a
jagged rock ascribes the wound to the action of the rock,
which he therefore regards as a living thmg. In this case
there is actual physical motion, though the motion is the
man's. In other cases the mere " movement of attention "
by which an object was brought within the field of conscious-
ness would suffice to lend the thing that appearance of
activity which alone was required to make it a thing of life.
Then, by a later process of reasoning, all things would be
credited with life ; we talk of a rock " growing " {i.e. projecting)
out of the ground, the peasant believes that stones actually
" grow " (i.e. increase), and as it is from the earth that all
things proceed, the earth must be the source of all life, and
therefore herself the living mother. In fine, all changes
whatever in the universe may be divided into two classes,
those which are initiated by man and those which are not ;
and it was inevitable from the first that man should believe
the source and cause of the one class to be Will, as he knew
it to be the cause and source of the other class of changes.
All the many movements, then, and changes which are
perpetually taking place in the world of things, were explained
by primitive man on the theory that every object which had
activity enough to affect him in any way was animated by a
life and will like his own — in a word (Dr. Tylor's word), on
the theory of animism. But the activity of natural pheno-
mena as thus explained neither proceeds from nor implies
nor accounts for belief in the supernatural. This may easily
be made clear. Primitive man's theory, his animism, con-
sists of two parts : the facts explained and the explanation
given — and in neither is anything supernatural involved.
Not in the facts explained, for the never-hasting, never-
resting flow of the stream, for instance, was just as familiar
and must have seemed just as " natural " to primitive as
to civilised man : there was nothing sit^?e?'natural in such
activity. But neither was the cause to which he ascribed
this activity supernatural ; for the cause assigned was a will
which, being exactly like his own, had nothing unusual,
mysterious, or supernatural about it ; for we must remember
two things, first, that for the average mind " explanation "
THE SUPERNATURAL 23
means likening the thing to be explained to something /
already familiar, and next, that the familiar, which often
most needs to be explained, is usually supposed to require
no explanation and to have nothing miraculous in it.
If, then, for the phrase " life and will " we substitute the
word " spirit," and say that in the view of primitive man all
things which possessed (or seemed to him to possess) activity
were animated by spirits, we must also add that those spirits
were not in themselves supernatural spirits. They only
became so when man was led to ascribe to them that super-
natural power which he had already found to exercise an
unexpected and irresistible control over his destiny. The
immediate causes of this identification are easily conjectured.
When a startling frustration of man's calculations brought
home to him the existence of an overruling power, man
would, as has been already said, eventually cast about for
means of entering into relations with that power. The first
thing to do for this purpose necessarily was to locate the
power ; and when primitive man was on the look-out for
some indication as to the place of origin whence this power
emanated, it would not be long before he found what he was
on the watch for. In some cases the indications would be so
clear that the identification would be immediate and indubit-
able ; the erysipelas which was the result of bathing when
overheated would be regarded as due to the supernatural
power of the water-spirit, and was so interpreted by an
Australian black-man. In other cases a longer process of
induction would be required ; the Peruvian mountaineer of
the time of the Incas, who fell ill when he had to descend
into the unhealthy valleys, ascribed his sickness to the super-
natural power of the sea, for it was only when he was in
sight of the sea that he was ill.
In this way the notion of supernatural power, which
originally was purely negative and manifested itself merely
in suspending or counteracting the uniformity of nature,
came to have a positive content. A natural agent, such as
the river-spirit, which at first confined its energies to the
production of its ordinary operations, namely, the ceaseless,
pauseless motion of the river, was eventually invested with
the supernatural power, transcending its natural sphere of
24 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
operation, of violating the laws of nature, and producing, say,
sickness. But when once one exceptional action of the river-
spirit had been put down as the outcome of supernatural
power, then in course of time even its ordinary operation
and the customary flow of the water would also come to be
regarded as having a supernatural cause, and as being the
manifestation, not merely of a spirit, but of a supernatural
spirit. Thus in course of time all the phenomena of nature,
even the discharge of the storm-cloud and the movement of
the stars in their courses, came to be regarded as due to
supernatural power.
To some readers this account of the conception of the
supernatural may, perhaps, seem to be an inversion of the
real process by which the conception was developed. Surely,
it will be said, the characteristic mark of things supernatural
is that they are things which it is beyond the power of man
to perform or to control, and from the very beginning he
must have learnt, by painful experience of the elements, that
he could not control the drenching tempest or command the
scorching sun. To this the reply is that primitive man for
long did not believe that these elemental phenomena were
beyond his control ; of which the proof is that at the present
day many savages are in the habit of making rain to fall, the
wind to blow, or the sun to stand still ; and they do not
consider the power of producing these results to be super-
natural. In Africa rain-makers are to be found in most
negro villages, and their reputation and even their lives
depend upon their success in making it. In the Isle of Man
there were, and in the Shetlands there still are, old women
who make a livelihood by selling winds to seamen. The
Australian black-fellow, in order that he may not be late for
supper, will delay you the setting of the sun. These results
are admittedly obtained by means of Sympathetic Magic.
But whether sympathetic " magic " — a question - begging
epithet — has anything supernatural about it, we have to
inquire.
The inquiry has a special interest for the history of
religion, because, according to a not uncommon view, all
religion has been developed out of magic ; the priest has been
evolved out of the sorcerer, the idol is but an elaborated
THE SUPERNATURAL 25
fetish. On this theory the distinction between the natural
and the supernatural was known to primitive man ; things
natural were things which men did, things supernatural were
things which the gods did, e.g. causing rain or sunshine.
But the distinction between men and gods, according to this
theory, was somewhat blurred, because man also by means of
magic art could do things supernatural, and even constrain
the gods to work his will. Gradually, however, he learned
that his powers were not supernatural, and that he could not
use force to the gods, but must persuade them by prayer and
sacrifice to grant his wishes. Then to attempt the super-
natural by means of magic became an invasion of the divine
prerogative, and the priest was differentiated by his orthodoxy
from the sorcerer. Thus, according to this view, divine
power and magic were originally identical, and the early
history of religion consists in the differentiation of the two,
and the partial triumph of the former.
But there are reasons for hesitating to accept this view,
and for believing, first, that religion and magic had different
origins, and were always essentially distinct from one another ;
next, that the belief in the supernatural was prior to the
belief in magic, and that the latter whenever it sprang up
was a degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion. In
this discussion everything turns on the recognition of the
difference between the negative and the positive aspects of
the supernatural : the negative aspect of supernatural power
becomes manifest to the mind of man in any striking violation
of that uniformity in nature which it is the inherent tendency
of man to count upon with confidence ; the positive aspect
of supernatural power is later displayed to man's conscious-
ness as the cause of the ordinary and familiar phenomena of
nature. Now, the very essence of the conception of the
supernatural in its negative aspect is that it is a power which
mysteriously overrides and overturns the best founded human
expectations, sometimes to man's disappointment, sometimes
to his more agreeable surprise.
TToXXoi [XOpcfioi TCdV ^aifiovtcov,
TToWa 8' diXTTTios KpaLvovai 6eoi'
Koi TCI doKTjdevT ovK eTeXeaBijy
T(OV S' a.80KT]TCDV TTOpOV TJVpC Bcog.
26 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
So far, then, as man was under the dominion of this conception
of the supernatural, he could not possibly believe that he
himself was in possession of supernatural power, or that he
was on a level with the wielders of it. And if, as we have
seen reason to believe, this the negative phase of the super-
natural dawned upon the mind of man before the positive,
then man could not have begun by thinking himself equal to
or more powerful than his gods. In fine, the power of the
supernatural was from the beginning conceived as something
different in kind from any power exercised by man.
Next, as has already been urged, the regular and familiar
phenomena of nature, such as the shining of the sun and the
descent of rain, were not at first regarded as supernatural,
nor was it the observation of such familiar facts which could
have stimulated the sentiment of the supernatural into
activity. Even when these phenomena were attributed (as
probably from the beginning they were attributed) to the
agency of indwelling spirits, and when material objects were
regarded as living things, those living things and those
indwelling spirits were not at first regarded as supernsitiiral
beings. Consequently, when man attempted, as undoubtedly
at first he did attempt, to make rain or sunshine, he was not
conscious, of attempting anything supernatural.* He could-
not know a 2^^'^ori and at the beginning what series of
changes it was possible for man to initiate and what not,
what effects in nature it was and what it was not possible
for man to produce. It was only by trying all things that
he could learn that not all things were possible for man ; and
it was only when he had learned that lesson that he could
extend the denotation of the term " supernatural " so as to
include in it " things impossible for man." It was only after
making many experiments that he learned that the power to
stay the sun or to make the wind to cease was supernatural.
He could not therefore have known whilst making his
experiments, that he was attempting the supernatural. The
conclusion that the things attempted were supernatural was
the consequence of his attempts, and was the very opposite
of the idea with which he started.
Finally, the means by which the savage attempts to
produce results which we should but which he does not
THE SUPERNATURAL 27
consider to be superhuman, are not regarded by him as
supernatural. He does not imagine that he possesses super-
natural power. His sympathetic magic is but one branch
of his science, and is not different in kind from the rest. He
neither produces, in his opinion, supernatural results nor uses
supernatural means to produce what he effects. Sympathetic
magic was not in the beginning identical with the super-
natural, nor was the conception of the latter evolved out of
or differentiated from the latter. But perhaps we had better
devote a separate chapter to the establishment of this point.
>
CHAPTEE IV
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC
The law of continuity holds not only in science but of
science. It is true not only of the subject-matter with
which science deals, but of the evolution of science itself.
The assured triumphs of modern science are linked to the
despised speculations of the savage by a chain which may be
ignored but cannot be snapped ; for, in the first place, though
the mass of observed facts which the modern investigator has
at his command is greater than that which was at the disposal
of the ancient student of nature, the accumulation has been
gradual; and, in the next place, the foundation, the principle,and
^ the methods of savage logic and scientific logic are identical.^
The foundation of both logics is the same, for it is the
uniformity of nature. What reason we have for believing
that nature is uniform is a matter much disputed by
philosophers. The cause of the belief, the inherent tendency
of the human mind to expect similar sequences or coexist-
ences in similar conditions, was as strong in primitive
man as in the modern savant ; and the savage not only
expects a cause to produce its effect, but also holds with
Mill that a single instance of the production of a phenomenon
by a given antecedent is enough to warrant the belief that it
will always tend to be produced by that antecedent. Thus,
" the king of the Koussa Kaffirs having broken off a piece of
a stranded anchor died soon afterwards, upon which all the
Kaffirs looked upon the anchor as alive, and saluted it
respectfully whenever they passed near it."^
1 See FolTc-Lore, ii. 2. 220, F. B. .levons, "Report on Greek Mythology"
(June 1891).
^ Lubbock, Origin of Civilisatiov; 1 88.
28
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 29
Here the Kaffirs' error consisted in jumping to the
conclusion that the molestation of the anchor was the cause
of the king's death ; and as it is against this class of error
that the inductive methods are designed to guard, the reader
may be tempted to imagine that it is in the ignorance of
those methods that the difference between savage and scientific
logic consists. But the reader would be mistaken. The
savage has not indeed formulated the methods, but he uses
them all to distinguish the antecedent which is the cause
from the other antecedents which have nothing to do with
the effect under investigation. Thus the Peruvian mountaineers
mentioned in the last chapter, who observed that a certain
kind of illness befell them whenever they were in sight of the
sea, were using the Method of Agreement in inferring that the
sea-spirit was the cause of that particular kind of illness.
The Method of Difference, according to which, if the intro-
duction of a new antecedent into a set of conditions already
known is immediately followed by the emergence of a new
effect, the new antecedent may be regarded as the cause of
the new effect, is employed by the Dusuns in Borneo, who,
according to Mr. Hatton {North Borneo, 233^), " attribute
anything — whether good or bad, lucky or unlucky — that
happens to them to something novel which has arrived in
their country. For instance, my living in Kindram has
caused the intensely hot weather we have experienced of
late." The Method of Concomitant Variations again plays a
large part in savage logic. According to this method, things
which vary together are causally related to one another, or,
vice versa, things which are related together vary together.
Hence the world-wide belief that, if the nail-parings or the
cut hair of a man pass into the possession of an enemy, the
enemy can injure the man ; and hence, too, the equally wide-
spread custom of burying hair or nail-parings, or otherwise
placing them beyond reach of an enemy. The shadow,
the image, the picture, and the name of a man are closely
related to him ; and therefore as they are treated so will
he suffer. Hence the witch could torture her victim by
roasting or wounding a waxen image of him. The savage
declines to be sketched or photographed for the same
1 Quoted in G. B. i. 174.
30 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
reason ; ^ the ancient Egyptian secured happiness hereafter by
having his tomb filled with pictures representing him engaged
in his favourite occupations and surrounded by luxury; wounds
inflicted on the shadow or the foot-prints of a man will take effect
on him ; savages frequently keep their names a profound secret,
and the safety and inviolability of the city of Eome depended
on the secrecy observed as to the name of its tutelary deity.
If the connection required by the method does not exist, then
it must be artificially created, as it easily may be : the
Ephesians placed their city under the protection of Artemis
by connecting the city and the temple with a rope seven
furlongs long. But the best exemplification of the savage
application of the Method of Concomitant Variations is the
waxing and the waning of the moon, with which the growth
and decay of all sorts of sub-lunar objects, plants, and
animals, things animate and inanimate, are associated ; and if
the reader is inclined to smile at the obvious folly and
puerility of the savage, let him remember that the weather
is still supposed, by educated people, to vary with the changes
of the moon ; and that as to the influence of her phases
on vegetation and the advisability of sowing on a waxing
moon, the founder of inductive logic. Bacon himself, thought
there was something in it : " videmus enim in plantationibus
et insitionibus aetatum luuce observationes non esse res omnino
f rivolas " {De Aug. Scient. iii. 4). So thin are the partitions
between savage and scientific logic.
The principle of induction, again, is the same in the logic
of the savage and the savant. That principle is the principle
of similarity in difference. Whether the induction be an
inference from particulars to particulars or to universals, it
proceeds from similars to similars, and would be impossible if
similar cases did not recur in experience. In such an induc-
^ "When Dr. Catat and his companions, MM. Maistre and Foncart, were
exploring the Bara country on the west coast of Madagascar, the peojile
suddenly became hostile. On the previous day, the travellers, not without
difficulty, had photographed the royal family, and now found themselves
accused of taking the souls of the natives with the object of selling them when
they returned to France. Denial was of no avail ; following the custom of the
Malagasays, they were compelled to catch the souls, which were then put into a
basket and ordered by Dr. Catat to return to their respective owners."^
1 Folk-Lorc, vi. 1. 75, from the Times of March 24, 1891.
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 31
tion, for instance, as that Socrates and Plato are mortal,
therefore Aristotle is mortal, it is because Socrates, Plato, and
Aristotle resemble each other in being men that we can infer
that they also resemble each other in being mortal. They also
resemble each other in other points, e.g. in being Greeks and
philosophers, etc., and differ from each other, e.g. in size and
weight ; but these points of resemblance and difference do not
affect the question : it is not because they were Greeks
that they died, and their differences in physical characteristics
did not exempt any of them from the common doom. These
irrelevant points, therefore, have to be set aside, or, in
technical language, " abstracted," and the result of the
abstraction is that we are enabled to assert the coexistence
of the two qualities of humanity and mortality. Now the
savage also is capable of abstract ideas and of asserting their
coexistence. He recognises the hardness of some substances
and the scent of others, and he wears a ring of iron in order
that it may impart its quality of hardness to his body, as he
might wear a flower for the sake of its scent ; or when he is
bargaining for a cow or asking a woman for wife, he chews a
piece of wood to soften the heart of the person he is dealing
with. In the same way, having discovered in the lion the
quality of courage, or in the deer that of swiftness, he eats
the former that he may become bold and the latter that he
may run well. So also he will eat an enemy to acquire his
boldness, or a kinsman to prevent his virtues from going out
of the family. The points of resemblance between what he
does and what he wishes to effect seem to the savage to be
the essential points for his purpose : the man of science
deems otherwise. Doubtless the man of science is right ; but
the savage is not therefore superstitious in this matter. He I
applies a principle of logic — to the wrong things perhaps, but'
still the process is one of logic, savage if you like, but not
superstitious.
The savage theory of causation, again, is not fundamentally
different from the scientific : it is only incomplete and
exaggerated. The effect is the offspring of the cause, and
resembles its parent ; to produce motion in a body you must
impart motion, to moisten a thing you must communicate
moisture to it. Hence the savage makes the generalisation
r
32 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
that like produces like ; and then he is provided with the
means of bringing about anything he wishes, for to produce
an effect he has only to imitate it. To cause a wind to blow,
he flaps a blanket, as the sailor still whistles to bring a
whistling gale. Before going on the warpath or the chase,
a mimetic dance, in which the quarry or the foe are repre-
sented as falling before his weapon, will secure him success.
If the vegetation requires rain, all that is needed is to dip a
branch in water and with it to sprinkle the ground. Or
a spray of water squirted from the mouth will produce a mist
sufficiently like the mist required to produce the desired
effect ; or black clouds of smoke will be followed by black
clouds of rain. If the moon's light threatens to fail, fire-
tipped arrows are shot up to it by the Hottentots ; and the
same remedy is applied by the Ojibways to the sun when
eclipsed.
To complete these outlines of savage logic, it is only
necessary to point out that hypothesis is an instrument of
thought which is of great service in primitive speculation.
A hypothesis is any assumption made for the purpose of
explaining a fact or facts already known to be true. But
whereas the assumptions of the savant are hypotheses, those
of the savage are called myths. Thus, when it is sought to
account for the observed fact that the moon periodically
decreases in size and that her appearance in the sky is the
signal for the departure of the sun, a savage hypothesis
accounting for the facts is that sun and moon are husband
and wife who have quarrelled and separated ; periodically
the moon makes overtures of reconciliation and periodically
wastes away before our eyes in grief at their rejection.
Or the observed facts of thunderstorms are accounted for on
the supposition that a jar of rain is carried by one spirit and
is smashed by the mace of another ; whence the crash of the
thunder and the descent of the rain. The importance of
hypothesis as a savage instrument of thought may be judged
by the fact that it is a quite tenable position that all the
countless myths in the world were originally explanatory
(^etiological) myths, primitive hypotheses.
It should now be clear that there is no fundamental
difference between savage and scientific logic, but that, on the
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 33
contrary, they are fundamentally identical. The uniformity
of nature, the principle of induction, the theory of causation,
the inductive methods, form the common framework of both
^ logics : the savage would probably be able to give his assent
to all the principles of Mill's logic. In other words, the
differences are not formal but material. The errors of the
early logician were extra-logical, and therefore were such as
could be remedied by no process of logic but only by wider
experience. The problem of induction is to ascertain the
cause (or effect) of a given phenomenon ; and the cause (or
effect) is to be looked for amongst the immediate antecedents
(or consequents) of that phenomenon. But the antecedents
(or consequents) comprise every single one of the countless
changes which take place in any part of the universe the
moment before (or after) the occurrence of the phenomenon
under investigation : any one of these antecedents (or conse-
quents) may be the cause (or effect), and there is nothing
d priori or in logic to make us select one rather than another.
It is plain, therefore, that as long as man is turned loose as it
were amongst these innumerable possible causes with nothing
to guide his choice, the chances against his making the right
selection are considerable, and that to speak of the savage's
choice as haphazard and illogical is to misconceive the nature
of logic. It should also be clear that no progress could be
made in science until man had distinguished, at anyrate
roughly, possible from absolutely impossible effects (or causes),
and had learned to dismiss from consideration the impossible.
Now it might be expected that, as it was only experience
which could show what was impossible, so experience would
suffice of itself to teach man this essential distinction. But,
as a matter of fact, experience by itself has done no such
thing, as is shown by the simple fact that great as is the age
and long as is the experience of the human race, the vast
majority of its members have not yet learnt from experience
that like does not necessarily produce like: four-fifths of
mankind, probably, believe in sympathetic magic, and therefore
neither need nor can make any intellectual progress, whilst
the progressive minority are precisely those from amongst
whom magic has been uprooted by its relentless foe, religion.
The reason why the real order and sequence of natural events
3
34 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
does not mechanically impress itself in its correct form upon
the human mind, is that the mind is not the "passive recipient
of external impressions, but reacts upon them and remodels
them, so that the ultimate shape taken by them depends as
much on the form of the mental mould, so to speak, into which
they are poured, as it does upon their own nature. In other
words, the mind does not pay equal attention to everything
which is presented to it : it only sees what it is prepared to
see. Thus the preconception that things causally related to
one another must be similar and vice mrsd — a preconception
due to the mental law by which similar ideas suggest one
another — is so strong as to prevent the savage from seeing
facts which are at variance with it, and thus the experience
which might be expected automatically to correct the error
serves but to strengthen it. But when the consequences of
that error came in conflict with the religious sentiment, that
hostility between magic and religion was aroused of which
the existence is universally admitted though differently
explained.
ly' Now the fallacy that things causally related must be
similar to one another, is one that the human mind, from its
very constitution, must have fallen into in its very first attempts
to interpret the complex manifold of nature. It is also a
fallacy from which most savages, who in this may be taken
as representing primitive man, have not yet escaped. But
the fallacy, though primeval, has nothing to do with magic
or the supernatural : it requires for its existence no belief in
supernatural powers or even in spirits, it might perfectly well
flourish in a region where neither religion nor magic had been
heard of. Thus the fact of a man's using this fallacious mode
of procedure to produce or forecast certain desired results
does not in the least tend to show that he considers the
process itself to be magical or supernatural ; the savage who
wears an iron ring to give strength to his body has not
advanced so far in science as the man who takes iron in a
tonic, but he no more believes himself to be dealing in magic
and spells than the educated persons of to-day do who fore-
cast the weather by the changes of the moon.
This will perhaps be made clearer if it be pointed out
t,hat it is not merely the fallacy of " like produces like," but
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 35
the inductive methods themselves which the savage uses in
order to work his wonders. Most of the examples of savage
logic already given in this chapter are instances of " sym-
pathetic magic " ; but as the means which the savage employs
for this purpose are precisely those used for the ordinary
commonplace purposes of life both by him and by civilised
man, it cannot be argued that those means are in themselves
considered magical or supernatural.
These, then, are the grounds on which it is here main-
tained that sympathetic magic, which is the germ of all magic, I
does not involve in itself the idea of the supernatural, but |
was simply the applied science of the savage. Yet out of the
theory of causation and the methods of induction, which under
certain rare, favouring conditions, and with the assistance of
the religious sentiment, developed into modern science, else-
where the process of evolution produced " one of the most
pernicious delusions that ever vexed mankind, the belief
in magic." It remains for us to inquire how this came
about.
Art magic is the exercise by man of powers which are
supernatural, i.e. of powers which by their definition it is
beyond man to exercise. Thus the very conception of magic
is one which is essentially inconsistent with itself ; and, being
such, the belief in it seems to be thought by many writers to
require no further explanation. Now, doubtless it is the
conception's very inconsistency with itself which gives it its
fascination ; the prospect of being able to do the impossible
. is singularly attractive. At anyrate the hold which the
idea, when once introduced, has over the mind of man is so
familiar a fact that it does not need to be proved. But
all this does not show how the idea ever could have occurred
to the human mind in the first instance ; it only proves what
a very suitable nidus was ready for the germ when it should
come. To read some writers, who derive the powers of
priests (and even of the gods) from those of the magician,
and who consider apparently that magic requires no explana-
tion, one would imagine that the savage, surrounded by
supernatural powers and a prey to supernatural terrors, one
day conceived the happy idea that he too would himself /
exercise supernatural power — and the thing was done ;
J
36 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
sorcery was invented, and the rest of the evolution of
religion follows without difficulty ; or, if any further explana-
tion is required, it is to be found in the fact that the imagina-
tion of the savage is unbridled. Now, though the savage, if
the idea that he too should have supernatural powers had been
suggested to him, would doubtless have thought the suggestion
excellent if it could be carried out, he would also have
inquired how the thing was to be done. It is one thing to
wish you had a certain power ; it is quite another thing to
imagine you have it — something, be it what it may, is
required to set the imagination to work, to start the idea
that it is possible to work impossibilities. The suggestion
that the savage fancy is so unbridled that it is capable of
believing anything, does not help us much here, for several
*' reasons. One is that, as Mr. Andrew Lang has conclusively
shown,^ the incredulity of the savage is quite as strong and
as marked as his credulity : he is proof against the invasion
^ of unfamiliar ideas. Another is that, according to the best
observers, the imagination of the savage is not unbridled but
is singularly sterile, and moves within remarkably narrow
\l limits. A third is that the savage's thought is subject to
mental laws as much as is civilised man's ; and that the
conception of art magic could not possibly have sprung up
uncaused and without a reason. If the conception were
confined to some one region, it might possibly be due to a
fortuitous combination of ideas or a fancied resemblance in
particular things which no general laws could assist us to
divine. But the belief in magic is world-wide, and should be
due to some widely working cause.
Dr. E. B. Tylor ^ has pointed out that " nations whose
education has not advanced far enough to destroy their
belief in magic itself " yet " cannot shut their eyes to the
fact that it more essentially belongs to, and is more thoroughly
at home among, races less civilised than themselves." " In
any country an isolated or outlying race, the lingering sur-
vivor of an older nationality, is liable to the reputation of
sorcery." It is from this fact that the explanation of magic
here advanced takes its start. In historic times the belief
in magic is fostered by the juxtaposition of two races, the
^ Myth, Fdtual, and Religion, i. 91. ^ Primitive Culture, cli. iv.
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 37
one more and the other less civilised. The one race, being J
the more civilised, has learnt (whether in the way suggested
in the last chapter or otherwise) that certain natural
phenomena are due to divine agency and are beyond the
power of man to influence or control. The other race, being
less civilised, has not yet learnt this lesson, has not yet ;
learnt to distinguish between what it is and what it is not /
possible for man to effect, but still employs for the production/
of both classes of effects indiscriminately those principles of/
induction which are common both to savage and scientific;
logic. Hence the more civilised race find themselves face to
face with this extraordinary fact, namely, that things which^'
they know to be supernatural are commonly and deliberately
brought about by members of the other race. But this is
what is meant by magic.
Now, if this be the correct account of the origin of the
idea of magic, it follows, first, that the idea was not due to
any freak of savage fancy, that it w^as not anybody's invention
nor the outcome of research, but was, like most other ideas,
simply and directly suggested by actual facts ; and, in the
next place, that the cause which suggested it is not local or
transient, but is the necessary and inevitable outcome of the
fact that some men progress more rapidly than others, and
consequently is, what we are in search of, namely, a world-
wide cause. y
It is, however, not essential to the production of the\/
idea of magic that there should be a difference of race
between those who are credited with magical power and those
who credit them with it. They may be members of the
same community. All that is requisite is the juxtaposition,
the coexistence of the more and the less enlightened views
of what man can effect in different sections of the community,
and the survival amongst the more backward members of the
belief in the power of certain processes to produce effects
which are deemed by the more advanced section to be super-
natural. Wherever these conditions were to be found, that
is everywhere, causes were at work which must inevitably
produce in the more (but by no means fully) advanced \
members a belief that the lower possessed magical powers. ^
That the lower section or race readily accepted the reputa-
38 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
tion thus put upon them, is the more intelligible because
sometimes it is practically the only thing which saves them
from extinction at the hands of their more advanced
neighbours or conquerors ; and at all times it is gratifying to
the despised " nigger " or " barbarian " to excite the terror of
his owner or his superior in civilisation. The privilege thus
conferred upon the lower race or section would be jealously
preserved and handed down ; and hence probably nowadays
all those who are credited by their neighbours with this
power firmly believe themselves that they possess it.
We may now proceed to consider the conditions under
which was waged that struggle for existence between magic
and religion, on the issues of which the future progress,
scientific as well as religious, of mankind depended. And
first let it be observed that, though evolution is universal,
progress, whether in religion, morality, science, or art, is
exceptional. The law of the survival of the fittest works
inexorably ; the fittest form of belief — be it the belief in
magic or the belief in religion — inevitably survives, only the
" fittest " is not necessarily or usually the highest ; it is that
which the particular race under its special conditions is
fittest for.
/ The hostility from the beginning between religion and
^ magic is, as has already been said, universally admitted ; its
origin is disputed. The suggestion made by those who regard
sorcery as the primeval fact of which religion was an offshoot,
that it is due to the priest's jealousy of the sorcerer, once his
confrhre, and then his professional rival, does not carry us
very far. To say nothing of the fact that he who says priest
says religion, i.e. of the fact that to assume without explana-
tion the existence of the priest is to leave the origin of
religion unexplained, the jealousy of the priest is not the fact
of real importance in the discussion. What we want to
know is why the jealousy of the priest woke an answering
chord in the heart of the average man, for without that
response the priest's jealousy would be powerless for good or
for evil. The probable answer is that the sentiment of the
supernatural, the conviction of the existence of an over-
ruling supernatural power, whatever the occasion under
which man first became aware of its existence as one of the
SYMPATHETIC MAGIC 39
facts of his internal experience, was offended by the pre- ^
tension of any merely human being to wield supernatural
power ; such a pretension was irreconcilable with the exist-
ence of the sentiment, and the shock which ensued from the
collision of the two resulted in the feeling, or rather was the
feeling, that the pretension was impious. But it is obvious
that the violence of the shock and the vigour of the conse-
quent reaction would depend considerably on the strength of
the sentiment and conviction of the supernatural. This
brings us to note that in the historical instances given by
Dr. Tylor of the existence in civilised races of the belief in
magic, those races have not yet reached the stage of develop-
ment in which sorcery is seen to be an absolute impossibility,
both from the religious and the scientific point of view.
Probably even their present stage of development is higher,
however, than that in which they were when the belief first
appeared amongst them. In fine, the triumph of magic,
where it was complete, is itself a considerable presumption
that the conflict began at a time when the religious sentiment
was quite immature and incapable of successfully asserting
itself. Where the sentiment of the supernatural succumbed,
it did not cease to exist, but was modified or misinterpreted)
in accordance with the magical view of the universe.
Progress in science and religion ceased, but the evolution and
organisation of magic into a system went on apace, until, where
a people is entirely given up to magic, the world is filled
with supernatural terrors, and life with the rites prescribed to /
exorcise them. On the other hand, where we find religiony/"
in the ascendant but sorcery coexisting with it, we may
infer that religion had become firmly established in the more
progressive section of the community before the contrast
between the beliefs of the more and the less enlightened
members had produced that confusion of ideas which is the
essential condition of the belief in magic. And here we may
remark that, as sorcery, when it is victorious^ does not kill
the sentiment of the supernatural, but, on the contrary, lives
on it and perverts it to its own uses, so there are few religions
which succeed in entirely uprooting the belief in magic from '
the minds of the most backward members of their congrega-
tions ; and that, owing to the vitality and tenacity of primitive
40 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
modes of thought, no religion is free from the danger of
relapse on the part of some of its believers and the recrud-
escence of a belief in magic. Hence it is that we find religion
and magic sometimes acting and reacting on one another.
Even a religion so comparatively developed as that of ancient
Rome, sanctioned the resort in times of stress, such as an
exceptional drought, to magic, and fell back on the lains
manalis as a rain-making charm. Sometimes religion will
have a fixed modus vivendi with sorcery, and take magic into
its own organisation, as in Chaldsea. On the other hand,
magic, even where its relation to religion is one of avowed
hostility, will implicitly recognise the superiority of its rival
by borrowing from or travestying its ritual ; the superstitious
mind, incapable of understanding prayer, will recite the
Lord's Prayer backwards as a spell more powerful than any
of its own ; and the Irish peasant uses holy water where
simple water would have been considered by his pre-Christian
ancestor as sufficiently efficacious.
J Consequently, everywhere now we find either (1) magic
surviving in countries where religion is dominant, or (2)
magic practically in sole possession of the human mind. By
the former fact some inquirers have been led to regard the
I two as originally identical ; by the latter, to regard magic as
that out of which religion has been evolved. But both
inferences may be as erroneous as it would be to infer
that, because in Southern Europe pagan practices are still
sometimes tolerated under the sheltering shadow of the
Church, therefore Christianity was evolved out of Aryan
polytheism. At anyrate, whether the attempt made in
this chapter and the last to offer a third explanation be
accepted or rejected, it is well to recognise that the facts
are not necessarily exclusive of the view that religion and
magic had different origins, nor absolutely conclusive in
favour of viewing religion as a mere variety or " sport " of
sorcery.
/
CHAPTER V
LIFE AND DEATH
AccOEDiNG to the view advanced in the previous chapters,
the belief that all natural phenomena have life, and that all
the many changes in nature are due to a will or wills
similar to man's, does not necessarily imply any belief in the
supernatural. The sequences of events which this piece of
primitive philosophy seeks to explain are themselves, ex
hyjjothcsi, uniform, familiar, in a word natural, not super-
natural ; and the explanation itself consists in assimilating
the things explained not to anything supernatural or
superhuman, but to something essentially characteristic of
human nature. The sentiment of the supernatural is not
aroused by events which happen as they were expected to
happen, but by some mysterious and unaccountable deviation
from the ordinary course of nature. It is specifically distinct
also from the terror which dangers inspire, or the respect
and admiration which the strength of the greater carnivora
may have exacted from primitive man ; and it seems psycho-
logically inadmissible, on the one hand, to derive it from any of
these feelings, and, on the other, to confound it either with
fear or with gratitude ; for though each of these latter two
emotions may go with it, neither is indispensable to it.
But though no belief in the supernatural is necessarily
implied in the view that all things which affect man possess
life, still the tv/o beliefs seem to have been universally
combined in varying degrees. This combination is, I
suggest, the first great step in or towards the evolution of
religion. The second great step was that which settled the
terms on which man was to live with the supernatural beings
by whom he was surrounded. Those terms could only be
41
42 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
terms either of hostility or of friendship ; indifference
towards the powers with whom it lay to thwart man's most
cherished hopes, and even his efforts to effect his own self-
preservation, was an impossible attitude. But permanent
resistance to such powers was an attitude equally impossible.
Primitive man in his struggle for existence must have
suffered so many defeats, his generalisations must have been
so often upset, his forecasts of the immediate future so often
disappointed, as perpetually to strengthen the belief that
amongst the forces against which he was contending there
V were many that were irresistible, supernatural. That,
relying upon magic, he thought to combat and actually to
coerce the supernatural beings that he had to deal with, is
difficult to believe. Much that civilised man regards as
magic is regarded by those who practise it not as sorcery
but as science, and its practice implies no intention to put
constraint upon supernatural beings. Of the practices which
are in intention magical, some are in their origin
" sympathetic " (i.e. pieces of savage science), and the rest are
perversions or parodies of acts of true worship ; but both
classes presuppose the conception of the supernatural : the
latter by the terms of its definition, the former because it
could not be used to constrain supernatural beings until the
beings to whom it was applied came to be thought super-
natural. In fine, both classes are subsequent in development
to the establishment of those permanent friendly relations
between worshipper and God in which worship takes its rise.
Again, in conjectures about primitive man, we argue back
from existing savages ; now, many of the cases in which
savages have been reported to apply constraint to their gods
and inflict punishment upon them, prove to be due to
misunderstanding — as we shall see in a subsequent chapter
on Fetishism — for the savage's terror of the supernatural is too
great to allow him wantonly to provoke its anger. We may
therefore reasonably doubt whether all the supposed cases of
coercion are not due to error in observation ; at anyrate we
may confidently assert that there is no tribe existing whose
attitude towards the supernatural is one of hostility pure and
simple, and whose faith is placed in magic alone, as there
must once have been, if they are right who hold that magic
LIFE AND DEATH 43
first existed and then religion was developed out of it. Be
that as it may, even those who maintain that man started
by considering himself and his own magical powers capable of
coercing the gods, admit that finally facts corrected that
vain opinion — in other words, that hostility towards the
supernatural was not a permanently possible attitude for man.
Whether man's attitude towards the supernatural has or
has not ever at any period been one of complete hostility, at
anyrate there came a time when he established friendly
relations with some of the supernatural powers by which he
was surrounded ; and the business of this chapter is to
conjecture what may have suggested to him the idea of
forming an alliance with the particular supernatural spirit
whose help and favour he desired. For, desirable as such an
alliance must have appeared, the question how to effect it
cannot have been easy to answer. The idea of alliance at
all, like most other ideas, is more likely to have been
suggested to man by some fact in his experience than to
have been manufactured by him either a 'priori or ex nihilo.
We have therefore to seek amongst the familiar facts of
primitive man's experience for something capable of
suggesting to his mind the possibility and the mode of
gaining the friendship and favour of a supernatural spirit.
To do this, it will be well to examine his views on spirits.
Hitherto all that it has been necessary to assume for
the purpose of the previous chapters has been that man
believed the gliding streams, the swaying trees, etc., to be
living things like himself, and having the same kind of
personality as himself. How he conceived that personality
we have not yet considered, but must consider now. As
Professor Tylor has demonstrated with abundant illustrations
in his Priraitixe Culture, dreams supply the principal factor
in the formation of the savage's conception of his own spirit.
His dream - experiences are to him real in exactly the
same way and degree as anything he does or suffers in his
waking moments : the places he visits are the real places,
the persons he sees the real persons. Hence a dilemma and
its solution. The dilemma is that at the time when he
knows from actual experience (in a dream) that he was in a
far country, his friends can testify that he was in his own
44 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
bed. The solution is that both he and his friends were
right : his body was in bed, but his spirit was away. As for
the appearance of his spirit, it is the counterpart or double
of himself (his body), for he has himself in dreams met the
spirits of friends who (in the flesh) were far away, and has
recognised them. As for the nature or constitution of the
spirit, it is essentially unsubstantial, and hence it is commonly
called by some word which means " breath " {spirit, spiritus,
animus, S02il, etc.), or " shade " (umbra, o-Koa, etc.). Or, as its
usual place of abode is inside the man, it may be identified
with one of the internal organs and called the " heart " or
" midriff." Or, again, it is the " life," because in its merely
temporary absence the sleeping body presents the appearance
of an almost lifeless body ; or it is the blood, because " the
blood is the life," and when blood is shed, life departs. Or,
finally, it may at one and the same time be all these things ;
and so a man may have, as amongst the Komans, four souls,
or, as amongst savages, even more.
The savage is thus equipped with an explanation of sleep,
death, and disease. Sleep is due to the temporary absence
of the spirit from the body — hence the belief that it is
dangerous to wake a sleeper suddenly and before his spirit
has had time to return to his body. Death is caused by, or
consists in, the permanent absence from the body of the
spirit. Illness is the threatened departure of the spirit.
Hence the remedy for illness is to tempt the wavering, and
as yet hesitating, spirit to return to its body. This may be
done in various ways, as, for instance, by making a display
of all the patient's best clothes, or by rehearsing the pains
and penalties incurred by spirits who wilfully desert their
true and lawful bodies. On the Congo, " health is identified
with the word ' Moyo ' (spirit. Lower Congo), and in cases of
wasting sickness, the Moyo is supposed to have wandered away
from the sufferer. In these cases a search party is sometimes
led by a charm doctor, and branches, land-shells, or stones
are collected. The charm doctor will then perform a series
of passes between the sick man and the collected articles. This
ceremony is called vutulanga moyo (the returning of the spirit)."^
1 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 287. The method by which,
among the Burats, a shaman restores a sick man his soul is described, ibid. 128.
LIFE AND DEATH 45
In Celebes, the Topantuniiasu whip the patient soundly,
in order that the spirit may feel sorry for its poor body,
and return to it to save it from further castigation.
In Ambon and the Uliase Islands the medicine-man flaps
a branch about, calling out the sick man's name, until
he has caught the wandering soul in the branch ; he
then strikes the patient's body and head with the branch,
and thus restores his soul to him. In Nias, the departing
soul is visible to the medicine-man alone ; he catches it with
a cloth, then with the cloth rubs the forehead and breast of
the patient, and thus saves him. The Haidah Indians have
soul-catchers, bone implements for catching the patient's soul
when it tries to fly away, specimens of which may be seen in
the Berlin Museum fiir Volkerkunde.^ Where, as in Sarawak,
the spirit or life is believed to reside, not in the blood or the
heart, but in the head or the hair, and the soul has deserted
the patient, he is cured by the restoration of his soul in the
shape of a bundle of hair. So, too, in Ceram, the hair may
not be cut because it is the seat of the man's strength ; the
Gaboon negroes, for the same reason, will not allow any of
their hair to pass into the possession of a stranger ; and the
same belief apparently prevailed in Eome, " unguium Diahs
et capilli segmina subter arborem felicem terra operiuntur." ^
Even when the sick man is really dead, there is un-
certainty whether the soul is for ever fled ; there is the
possibility that it may return. " It is in consequence of the
belief," amongst the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave Coast,
" that the soul does occasionally return after leaving the
body, that appeals to the dead to come back are always made
immediately after death ; and, generally speaking, it is only
when the corpse begins to become corrupt, and the relatives
thereby become certain that the soul does not intend to
return, that it is buried." ^ So, too, on the Gold Coast, " all
the most valuable articles belonging to the deceased are
placed round the corpse, and the dish that was most preferred
in life is prepared and placed before it ; the wailing being
interrupted every now and then, to allow the widows to
^ Bartels, Medicin der NaturvblTcer, 201-3.
2 Bastian, Allerlei, i. 401. Cf. Num. vi. 5, 18, and Judg. xvi. 17.
^ Ellis, Hwe-speaking Peoples, 156.
V
46 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
entreat the deceased to eat or drink," ^ the idea evidently
being that the soul may be tempted by these delicacies to
return. In Eastern Asia, again, the Arafuas tie the deceased
to an upright ladder, and invite him to join in the funeral
feast ; and it is only when they have placed food in his
mouth in vain that they bury him.^ On the Slave Coast,
too, " the corpse is washed, attired in the best clothes,
bedecked with ornaments, and placed in a chair, before which
a small table with food and drink is set out . . . the deceased
is implored to eat, and portions of food are put to his lips." ^
In China, too, according to the Li Yuu, " when one died they
went upon the house-top and called out his name in a pro-
longed note, saying, ' Come back, So-and-So.' After this they
filled the mouth (of the dead) with uncooked rice, and (set
forth as offerings to him) packets of raw flesh." *
At this point perhaps it is fitting that I should frankly
state to the reader what is my object in making these
quotations and those which I am about to make. Many
learned, and many unlearned, anthropologists hold that the
original, and, so to speak, the " natural " sentiment of man
towards his dead, is that of fear. So, too, many writers have
seen in fear the sole source of religion. So, too, again, many
moral philosophers, from the time of Thrasymachus or earlier,
have regarded selfishness, the selfish desires, personal fear,
and the baser passions, as the only natural impulses to action.
In this book the opposite view — that of Bishop Butler — is
maintained, namely, that love, gratitude, affection, are just as
" natural " as their opposites. Now, as regards the family
affections, there can be no possibility of doubt ; the infancy
of man is longer than that of any of the animals, most of
which can walk and take care of themselves almost, if not
quite, as soon as they are born. Man's infancy, on the other
hand, is so long that the human race could not have survived
in the struggle for existence, had not the parental instincts
and family affections been strong in primitive man. Existing
savages are in this respect " men, so to speak." In Samoa,
for instance, " whenever the eye is fixed in death, the house
^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 238. ^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 83.
^ Ewe-speaking Peojiles, 157-8.
■* Legge, The Li Ki, 369 {Sacred Books of the East).
LIFE AND DEATH 47
becomes an indescribable scene of lamentation and wailing.
' Oh, my father, why did you not let me die, and you live
here still ! ' ' Oh, my child, had I known you were going
to die ! of what use is it for me to survive you ? would that
I had died for you ! ' . . . These and other doleful cries . . .
are accompanied by the most frantic expressions of grief." ^
Among the negroes of the Slave Coast, " the widows and
daughters lament their lonely and unprotected state, somewhat
as follows : — ' I go to the market, it is crowded. There are
many people there, but he is not among them. I wait, but
he comes not. Ah me ! I am alone. Never more shall I see
him. It is over ; he is gone. I shall see him no more. Ah
me ! I am alone. I go into the street. The people pass,
but he is not there. Night falls, but he comes not. Ah
me ! I am alone. Alas ! I am alone. Alone in the day —
alone in the darkness of the night. Alas ! my father (or
husband) is dead. Who will take care of me ? ' " ^ Amongst
the negroes of the Gold Coast, " no sooner has the breath left
the body than a loud wailing cry bursts forth from the house,
and the women rush into the streets with disordered clothes
and dishevelled hair, uttering the most acute and mournful
cries." ^ Amongst the Ewe-speaking peoples of the Slave
Coast, " a death in a family is announced by an outbreak of
shrieks and lamentations on the part of the women, who
throw themselves on the ground, strike their heads against
the walls, and commit a variety of extravagances ; calling upon
the deceased meanwhile not to desert them, and endeavouring,
by all kinds of supplications, to induce the soul to return and
reanimate the body." ^ It not unfrequently happens that
what, in its origin, was spontaneous, comes in time to be
conventional ; and in Bonny ^ (as in China) there is a regular
ceremony entitled " recalling the soul to the house." Perhaps
also in the feast which is spread with the dead man's favourite
delicacies, to tempt his soul to return, we may have the origin
of the funeral feasts and wakes, which are universal, and
therefore need not be illustrated.
The natural affection which makes the relatives of the
* G. Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 227.
- Ellis, Yoruba-speaking Peoples, 157. ^ Tshi-speaMng Peoples, 237.
•* Ellis, 157. ° Bastian, Expedition an der Loango Kuste, i. 114.
48 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
deceased reluctant to believe that he can be dead, and which
leads the negroes of the Loango Coast to try to induce him to
eat, and makes them talk of his brave exploits, peradventure
he may be beguiled into listening and returning, does not
cease immediately, when it is ascertained that he is beyond
doubt dead. " Thus we read of the Mandan women going
year after year to take food to the skulls of their dead
kinsfolk, and sitting by the hour to chat and jest in their
most endearing strain with the relics of a husband or child ;
thus the Gruinea negroes, who keep the bones of parents in
chests, will go to talk with them in the little huts which
serve for their tombs." ^ We cannot doubt the affection with
which the Hos invite the soul to return to them when the
body has been burned —
"We never scolded you; never \\Tonged you;
Come to us back !
We ever loved and cherished you ; and have lived long together
Under the same roof;
Desert it not now !
The rainy nights, and the cold blowing days, are coming on ;
Do not wander here !
Do not stand by the burnt ashes ; come to us again !
You cannot find shelter under the peepul, when the rain comes down.
The soeul will not shield you from the cold bitter wind.
Come to your home !
It is swept for you and clean ; and we are there who loved you ever ;
And there is rice put for you ; and water ;
Come home, come home, come to us again ! " ^
The natural reluctance to believe that the beloved one
has gone from us for ever does not among savages limit
itself merely to poetical invitations to the spirit to return.
In the Marian Isles a basket is provided in the house for
the soul to rest in when it revisits its friends ; ^ and on the
Congo the relatives abstain for a year from sweeping the
house of the deceased, for fear they should unwittingly and
involuntarily sweep out the soul.* In Hawai, where ghosts
usually go to the next world, the spirit of a dear friend dead
may be detained by preserving his bones or clothes.^ The
^ Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 150 ; Catlin, N. A. Indians, i. 90 ; J. L. Wilson,
W. Africa, 394.
'^ Tylor, loc. cit. ii. 32. ^ Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 83.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 323. ' Bastian, Allerlei, i. 116.
LIFE AND DEATH 4^
belief that the spirit is attached to his former earthly tene-
ment is common enough, and indeed is a necessary outcome
of a very natural association of ideas ; a modern graveyard
is the haunt of ghosts, though the soul is in the next world ;
in ancient Eome —
"Terra tegit carnem, tumulum circumvolat umbra
Manes Orcus habet, spiritus astra petit " ;
the Fantees believed that the ghost remains in the neighbour-
hood of the corpse ; ^ and this belief enables the savage to
cheat his grief to some extent. In Fiji, "a child of rank
died under the care of Marama, the queen of Somosomo.
The body was placed in a box and hung from the tie-beam
of the chief temple, and for some months the best of food
was taken to it daily, the bearers approaching with the
greatest respect, and, after having waited as long as a person
would be in taking a meal, clapping their hands, as when a
chief has done eating, and retiring." ^ The persistence, even
amongst savages, of natural affection when the object of^'*^
affection is dead, may be further illustrated by a similar
example from a different quarter of the globe : " When a
child dies among the Ojibways, they cut some of its hair and
make a little doll, which they call the doll of sorrow. This
lifeless object takes the place of the deceased child. This
the mother carries for a year. She places it near her at the
fire, and sighs often when gazing on it. She carries it
wherever she goes. They think the child's spirit has entered
this bundle, and can be helped by its mother. Presents and
sacrificial gifts are made to it. Toys and useful implements
are tied to the doll for its use."^ In Guinea, so far from
being afraid of the dead man, they keep him for a whole
year or even several years in the house before burying him
— which leads to a sort of mummification.* In Bonny, where
also he is embalmed, they do not part with him even when
buried, but bury him in the house,^ as is customary on the
Amazon ^ and was the custom amongst the early Eomans,
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 335.
^ Williams, Fiji and tlie Fijians, i. 177.
^ Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 116 (Kohl's Kitchi Garni, 108).
^ Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 232. 5 Der Mcnsch, loc, cit,
'^ Wallace, Amazon, 346.
50 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Greeks, Teutons, and other Aryan peoples. Even when the
corpse is buried at a distance from the house, measures may
be and are taken to facilitate the return of the spirit to his
friends. Thus the Iroquois leave a small hole in the grave
in order that the soul may pass freely in and out ; ^ and
Count Goblet d'Alviella ^ conjectures that this practice was
known to Neolithic man : " There is a certain detail,
frequently observed in these dolmens, which has not failed to
exercise the minds of the archaeologists, especially when the
dolmens were supposed to be the work of one particular people.
It is the presence in one of the walls — generally the one
that closes the entrance — of a hole not more than large
enough for the passage of a human head. In the Caucasus
and on the coast of Malabar, these holes have given the
dolmens the popular name of ' dwarf - houses.' The hole
is too small to serve as a passage for living men or for
the introduction of the skeleton ; or even for inserting
the sacrifices, which, moreover, would be found piled up
against the interior wall. The most probable explanation
seems to be that it was intended for the soul to pass
through."
The belief that the soul cannot bring itself to desert its
body leads some peoples, who wish the soul to stay with
them, to burn the body, in order that the soul may be
detached and free to revisit them. Thus in Serendyk the
corpse is burnt to enable the soul to return, and the Catal
(on the coast of Malayala) burn the good and bury the bad,
for then the bad cannot return.^ But the soul, when
released, whether by burning or otherwise, from the body,
is apt to lose its way when it seeks to come home ; so to
the present day m the Tirol the corpse is always conveyed
to the cemetery by the high-road, in order that the souls may
have no difficulty in retracmg the route. Or care is taken
to catch the soul as soon as possible, so that it may not get
lost ; the Tonquinese cover the dying man's face with a cloth,
the Marian Islanders with a vessel, to catch the soul ; the
Payaguas (South America) do not cover the corpse's head
^ Bastian, OesL Asien, iii. 259. "The Ohio tribes bore holes in the coffin
to let the spirit pass in and out," Dorman, Prim. Sup. 20.
- Uihhcrt Lecture, 24. ^ Bastiau, Der Mensch, ii. 331.
LIFE AND DEATH 51
with earth, but with a vessel, and the Samoyeds put an
inverted kettle over his head.^
That the presence of the spirit of the departed is desired,
welcomed, and invited by many peoples, is shown by the
feasts held in honour of the dead, not only before the funeral,
but at intervals afterwards. Thus, " on the third, sixth, ninth,
and fortieth days after the funeral, the old Prussians and
Lithuanians used to prepare a meal, to which, standing at
the door, they invited the soul of the deceased ... if any
morsels fell from the table they were left lying there for the
lonely souls that had no living relations or friends to feed
them." 2 Six weeks after the funeral, the Tscheremiss go to
the grave, and invite the ghost to come to the house to a
feast, at which a seat and food are provided for him.^ Else-
where this feast becomes an annual all -souls' festival, and
as it is or was foimd amongst the Greeks (the Apaturia),
the Eomans (Parentalia or Feralia), the Zoroastrians, the
Bulgarians, the Eussians, the Icelanders, and other Aryan
peoples, we may perhaps infer that the practice goes back
to the earliest Indo-European times. It is, however, by no
means confined to the Aryan area, but is found amongst the
Mixteks, the Karens, the Kocch, the Barea, and in Tonquin
and Dahomey, as well as amongst the Tschuwasch and the
Tscherkess.* In Dabaiba, according to Hakluyt's Historie of
the West Indies (Decade vii. ch. 10), "in the sepulchers they
leave certayne trenches on high, wheremto euery yeere they
poure a little of the graine Maizium and certayne suppinges
or smal quantities of wine made after their manner, and they
suppose these thinges will bee profitable to the ghosts of
their departed friendes."
Where the dead are buried in the house, there is no need
to issue a formal invitation to the spirit to come back and
eat, for he can be and is fed as regularl}^ as the living
inmates. Thus in Bonny the dead are buried under the
doorstep, a funnel communicates with the mouth of the
deceased, and libations of blood are poured down the funnel
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, iv. 386. ^ Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 177.
2 Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 336.
^Bastian, loc. cit., and Tylor, Prim. Cult. ii. 36; cf. for Ashanti, Tshi-
speaking Peoples, 167.
52 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
by the negro every tirae he leaves the house.^ Even when
the burial-place is away from the house, the same provision
may be made for regularly tending the deceased. Thus in
the Tenger Mountains (in Java) a hollow bamboo is inserted
in the grave at burial, in order that offerings of drink and
food may be poured down it.^ In the houses in which the
bones of the chiefs of the Timmanees are kept there are
small openings through which food can be given to the dead.^
In ancient Mycenae an altar over one of the shaft-graves has
been discovered, with a tube leading into the grave ; the
altar is evidently not intended for the worship of the gods,
but is an layapa^ and the tube fulfils the same purpose as
the bamboo in Java and the funnel in Bonny ;^ while the
trench dug in Dabaiba has its exact parallel in the Greek
/3o^/309, into which Odysseus, for instance, poured the blood
of which the spirits were to drink. In historic times, in
Greece blood was daily offered in Tronis of Daulia to the
spirit of the hero-founder in the Mycensean mode : to y^ev
alfxa 8l oTTTj^ icT'^eovo-LV e? tov rdcjiop.^ In Peru " the relations
of the deceased used to pour some of the liquor named Chica
into the grave, of which a portion was conveyed by some
hollow canes into the mouth of the dead person." ^
Blood, which is the life, is the food frequently offered to
the dead. The priests of the Batta pour the blood of a fowl
on the corpse.^ In Ashanti the skeletons of deceased kings,
carefully preserved and mounted on gold wire, are seated
each on his own stool, and the living king washes each with
blood.^ The Marian Islanders anoint the bones of their
dead.^^ Then by a substitution of similars, it is considered
sufficient to colour the corpse, or some part thereof, with
some red substance taking the place of blood. Thus in Tanna,
" the face is kept exposed and painted red, and on the
following day the grave is dug and the body buried." ^^ The
^ Bastian, Bechtsverhdltnisse, 296, and Der Ifensch, ii. 335 ; cf. Liebrecht,
2ur Volkskunde, 399.
- Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 336. ^ Bastian, loc. cit.
■^ i(f> fjs Toh Tjpwcnv airodvoiiev, Poll. i. 8.
^ Rolide, Psyche, 33. ^ Pausanias, x. 4.
"^ Zarate, Conquest of Peru (translated in Kerr, Voyages and Travels, iv. 362).
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 365. ^ Ellis, Tshi-sjieaking Peoples, 168.
^" Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 281. ^^ Turner, Nineteen Years i7i Polynesia, 93.
LIFE AND DEATH 53
Kalmucks are content to cover the corpse with something
red whilst it is awaiting burial.^ And, according to Count
Goblet d'Alviella,^ "in certain graves, the earliest of which
go back to the reindeer age (those of Mentone, for example),
the bones of the dead are painted red with oligist or
cinnabar ; and in our own day some of the North American
tribes, who expose their dead on trees, collect the naked
bones and paint them red before finally burying them. An
analogous custom has been observed amongst the Mincopies
of the Andaman Islands and the Niams of Central Africa."
The feeling towards the dead in all these examples —
examples which a learned anthropologist would with ease, I
am convinced, have made many times as numerous — is or in
all cases may be that prompted by the affection, parental,
filial, conjugal, which was even more necessary for the self-
preservation of the human race in the earliest days than it is
in civilised times. But it is not here suggested that love
was the only feeling ever felt for the deceased. On the
contrary, it is admitted that fear of the dead was and is
equally widespread, and is equally "natural." What
inference, then, is to be drawn from these two sets of
apparently opposed facts, or what explanation is to be given
of them ? To this question the right answer is given both
by savages themselves and by careful observers of savage
modes of thought. Kubary, long a resident in the Pelew
Islands, says ^ the islanders " are only afraid of ghosts of
strangers, as they are safe from the ghosts of their own
people because of the good understanding which exists
between the family and its own ghosts." So on the Gold
Coast, though the spirit of the dead man wanders about, if
homeless, doing good or evil according to his disposition, it is
to his own family that he does good.* " Black people," said
a Zulu, " do not worship all Amatongo indifferently, that is,
all the dead of their tribe. But their father whom they
knew is the head by whom they begin and end in their
prayer, for they know him best, and his love for his children ;
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, vi. 607.
2 Hihhert Lecture, 17, referring to Castailhac, La France inehistorique, 292.
^ In Allerlei aus Volks und Menschenkunde, i. 10.
•^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 102.
54 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
they remember his kindness to them whilst he was living ;
they compare his treatment of them whilst he was living,
support themselves by it, and say, ' He will still treat us in
the same way now he is dead. We do not know why he
should regard others beside us ; he will regard us only.' " -^ In
fine, as we might reasonably expect, the man who was loved
during his lifetime did not immediately cease to be loved
even by savages, when he died, nor was he who was feared
in life less feared when dead.
In primitive societies there is no state or central power
administering justice between its members and protecting
them from external aggression. The only bond which unites
the society is the tie of blood. The individual exists only as
a member of a family or clan, and only so far as it supports
and protects him. The survival of the race thus depends on
the ready and effective aid rendered by the clan to its
members. Consequently the individual's only friends are his
clansmen, and " stranger " means " enemy " — guest and hostis
are philologically the same word. Nor does a man cease to
be a member of his clan when or because he dies. On the
contrary, his claims on his clansmen may then become more
sacred and more exacting than ever, for if he has been
murdered they must avenge him at all costs. It is then
quite intelligible that strangers, who as strangers were
enemies while alive, should continue to be hostile after
death ; and that clansmen, especially " the father whom they
knew," should both show and receive the loving-kindness
which during their lifetime marked their relations with their
fellow-members.
The object of this chapter was to conjecture what there
was in the daily experience of the earliest form of society
which may have suggested the possibility of maintaining
permanently friendly relations with some of the spirits by
which primitive man was surrounded and by which his
fortunes were influenced. The conjecture offered is that he
was ordinarily and naturally engaged in maintaining such
relations with the spirits of his deceased clansmen ; that he
was necessarily led to such relations by the operation of
^ Callaway, Religious System of Ainazulu, part ii., quoted by Tylor, Prim.
Cult. ii. 116.
LIFE AND DEATH 55
those natural affections which, owing to the prolonged, help-
less infancy of the human being, were indispensable to the
survival of the human race ; and that the relations of the
living clansman with the dead offered the type and pattern,
in part, though only in part, of the relations to be established
with other, more powerful, spirits.
The reader will already have noticed — if not, his
attention is now drawn to the fact — that hitherto, with the
exception of the last quotation (that referring to the Zulus)
no mention has been made of ancestor-worship. The reason
is not merely that ancestor-worship may be and is explained
— erroneously, in the opinion of the writer of these lines — as
due in its origin solely to fear, like all worship ; but that
ancestor - worship implies a belief on the part of the
worshipper that the spirit worshipped is a supernatural spirit.
Now, according to the thesis set forth in the previous
chapters, not all spirits are necessarily supernatural spirits ;
the man who believes the bowing tree or the leaping flame
to be a living thing like himself, does not therefore believe it
to be a supernatural being — rather, so far as it is like him-
self, it, like himself, is not supernatural, for we have seen
reason to reject the conjecture that man began by thinking
he himself possessed supernatural powers. With this dis-
tinction between spirits and supernatural spirits, it has not
been necessary for the purpose of this chapter to assume
that the spirits of the dead possessed in the earliest form
of society that power of thwarting man's best-grounded
anticipations, which is of the essence of supernatural power.
There may indeed be no a priori reason why man, when
casting round for the source of this mysterious, supernatural
interference with natural laws, should not have found it in
the action of the spirits of the dead as well as in that of any
other class of spirits. And, as a matter of fact, in some
religious systems the spirits of the dead are credited with
supernatural powers, though, it must be remarked, their
powers are not by any means so great as those of the
national or local gods, and the general feeling is that it is the
dead who are dependent on the living for their comfort and
even for their continued existence, rather than "oice versa ; in
Egypt the 7m was annihilated, if the survivors did not
56 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
embalm the body of the deceased and make images of the
dead man ; in Greece and Aryan India the main motive for
marriage was, and in China is, anxiety to provide descendants
competent to continue the rites on which the post-mortem
welfare of the deceased depends ; and amongst savages
generally the belief is that the dead stand in actual need of
the food that is offered to them. But, as a matter of fact,
there are grounds for believing that it was to another quarter
altogether than ancestral spirits that man looked in his
attempts to locate the supernatural in the external world.
This point will be fully discussed in a later chapter.
In the next place, if, as is here argued, man's communion
with the spirits of his dead suggested the possibility of
communication with other and supernatural spirits, then it
is intelligible that, if ever the ritual for approaching both
classes of spirits came to be the same, the similarity would
eventually react to the advantage and increased honour of
the spirits of the dead. The acts which constituted worship in
the case of the supernatural spirit would not differ from those
in which affection for a deceased father found its natural
expression ; and consequently, not differing, would come to be
worship in the case of the deceased ancestor also. Thus, on this
guess, ancestor-worship is secondary on and a by-product of the
act of worship in the proper sense {i.e. the worship of a god).
To restate the argument: (1) The family-feast held
immediately after the death of the deceased and repeated
at intervals afterwards, and the other offerings of food to
the deceased, are not originally acts of worship ; (2) the same
sort of offerings and festivals come to be employed in the
case of supernatural spirits and to constitute the (external)
worship of those spirits ; (3) the offerings to the spirits of
the dead then become ancestor-worship. This argument
depends for its validity largely on the identity, here alleged,
of the ritual for approaching spirits of the dead and super-
natural spirits. The identity cannot be exhibited fully until
the act of " worship " in the proper sense has been — as in
a later chapter it will be — fully set forth ; and the reader
is accordingly requested to suspend his final judgment on
the question till the full evidence is before him. There are,
however, some outstanding points to consider before we can
LIFE AND DEATH 57
proceed to consider this evidence. For instance, it will have
struck some readers as a serious omission that no reference
has been made in this discussion to the " uncleanness " which
is very generally, if not universally, considered to attach to
a corpse and to all who come in contact with it — an omission
all the more serious because this " taboo " has been explained
as due to fear lest the spirit of the deceased should lodge on
the person who touches the dead body.^ The omission,
however, has been intentional, and the reasons for it are
twofold. First, whatever the theory of this taboo, in practice
the taboo may and does coexist with love for and confidence in
the spirit of the deceased. Thus amongst the Pelew Islanders,
who, as has been said already, have no fear of the ghosts of
their own people, " because of the good understanding which
exists between the family and its own ghosts," the relatives
of the deceased are " unclean " for several days.^ In Samoa,
where the natural affection for the deceased finds touching
expression, " those who attended the deceased were most
careful not to handle food, and for days were fed by others
as if they were helpless infants . . . fasting was common
at such times, and they who did so ate nothing during the
day, but had a meal at night ; reminding us," says the Kev.
G. Turner,^ " of what David said when mourning the death
of Abner : ' So do God to me and more also, if I taste bread
or ought else till the sun be down.' The fifth day was a
day of ' purification.' They bathed the face and hands with
hot water, and then they were ' clean,' and resumed the usual
time and mode of eating." On the Gold Coast, where the
wives of the deceased try to tempt his soul to return by
offering him his favourite dish, " those persons who have
touched the corpse are considered unclean ; and after the
interment, they go in procession to the nearest well or brook,
and sprinkle themselves with water, which is the ordinary
native mode of purification." * In ancient Greece, also, where
ancestors were worshipped, the relatives were tabooed.^ In
1 1 have not been able to see the paper in which this explanation is put
forth ; but cf. Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 154.
2 Kubary in Allerlei, i. 6. ^ Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 228.
^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 241.
^ See my paper, "Funeral Laws and Folk-Lore in Greece," in the Classical
Review for June 1895, for instances,
58 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
China, too, where the spirit, so far from being feared, was, as
in Bonny, invited to return, the corpse is or was taboo ; for
we may infer from the question in Tlie Li Ki, ^ " Whoever
being engaged with the mourning rites for a parent bathed
his head or body ? " that the period of the mourning rites
was a time of " uncleanness " for the son.
It seems, therefore, that even if we were to admit that
this species of " uncleanness " originated in a savage theory
that the soul might settle on the " unclean," we could not
infer that deceased spirits were feared wherever this taboo
was found to exist. Next — and this is the second reason
why no reference has been previously made to this important
set of facts — there are several kinds of taboo, of which the
corpse-taboo is only one, and it seems proper to employ the
comparative method and consider the various kinds together.
We may thus perhaps avoid one-sided conclusions, and get
a general view, if not a general theory, of the subject. The
next chapter, therefore, deals with taboo.
^ Legge's translation {Sacred Books of the East), 181.
CHAPTER VI
TABOO : ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY
Taboo is a Polynesian word, said to mean "strongly marked";
but though the word is Polynesian, the institution is universal.^
Things are taboo which are thought to be dangerous to handle
or to have to do with : things " holy " and things " unclean "
are alike taboo ; the dead body, the new-born child ; blood
and the shedder of blood; the divine king as well as the
criminal ; the sick, outcasts, and foreigners ; animals as well
as men ; women especially, the married woman as well as
the sacred virgin ; food, clothes, vessels, property, house, bed,
canoes, the threshing-floor, the winnowing fan ; a name, a
word, a day ; all are or may be taboo because dangerous.
This short list does not contain one-hundredth part of the
things which are supposed to be dangerous ; but even if it
were filled out and made tolerably complete, it would, by
itself, fail to give any idea of the actual extent and import-
ance of the institution of taboo. If it were merely bodily
contact with the person or thing tabooed which entailed
danger, it would be sufficiently difficult for the savage to
avoid unintentionally touching some of all the many things
taboo. But the difiQculty and danger are multiplied by the
fact that involuntarily to catch sight of the tabooed object,
or to be seen by the tabooed person, is as dangerous as to
^ The best collections of facts are, for Polynesia, Waitz-Gerland, AntJiro-
pologie, vi. 343 fF. ; for food-taboos, A. E. Crawley in Folk-Lore, vi. 2 (June
1895), 130 ff. ; for taboos on women, A. E. Crawley in the Journal of the
Anthropological Institute^ xxiv. Nos. 2, 3, 4 (Nov. 1894, Feb. and May 1895),
116 flf., 219 fF., 430 ff. ; Frazer in the Encyclopcedia Britannica, s.v. "Taboo," and
n the Golden Bough, i. 109 ff. ; of. also Robertson Smith, Religion of the
Semites, 152 ff., 446 ff., 481. For instances not drawn from the above collec-
tions, the special references will be given in each case below.
59
60 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
touch, taste, or handle. Thus in Samoa, " Tupai was the
name of the high priest and prophet. He was greatly
dreaded. His very look was poison. If he looked at a
cocoa-nut tree it died, and if he glanced at a bread-fruit tree
it also withered away."^ The king of Loango may not, for
the same reason, see a river or tree, and he has to make
many long detours in consequence when he goes visiting.^
In some places girls when taboo have an equally poisonous
glance, and are made to wear very broad-brimmed hats,
in order that they may not infect the sun. The custom
common amongst savage royalties, of holding a state umbrella
over the king, may be, I conjecture, a survival from times
when the king was a divine king, and, like Tupai or a tabooed
woman, might do mischief with his eyes. In Whydah, " in
former times, on the eve of the day for the public procession
[of the sacred python], the priests and Daiih-si went round
the town, announcing the approach of the festival, and warn-
ing all the inhabitants, white and black, to close their doors
and windows, and to abstain from looking into the streets." ^
In ancient Greece' the same belief manifests itself in the
tale that Euryphylus was stricken with madness, when he
ventured to open the Xdpva^ or tabernacle, and look upon
the image of Dionysus ^symnetes.* In the mysteries, the
secret objects of worship were so taboo that it was only after
a long course of preparatory purification and communion that
it became safe for the worshipper to see them : " the eiroirreia
was the last and highest grade of initiation."^ In modern
folk-lore it is held to be fatal to see " the good people " —
" they are fairies : he who looks on them shall die."
On the same principle that seeing or being seen is
dangerous, mere proximity also is forbidden; and amongst
the Basutos, during harvest-time, the " unclean " may not
even approach the crop.^ In the same way, too, to hear is
as dangerous as to see ; thus amongst the Zulus, on receipt
of the news that a relative is dead, the hearer must sprinkle
himself with the blood of sacrifice, " to purify himself from
^ Turner, Samoa, 23. - Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 263-8.
^ Ellis, Eioc-speaking Peoples, 61. * Pausanias, viii. c. 19.
* Gardner and Jevons, Greek Antiquities, 278.
^ Casalis, Les Bassoutos, 266.
TABOO: ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY 61
the mourning,"^ though obviously from the nature of the case
there can have been no bodily or even visual contact with
the corpse to defile the mourner. Even the name of the
deceased, as well as the news of his death, is dangerous to
hear, and may not be pronounced. Thus the native tribes
of Tasmania, now extinct, " never mentioned the dead " ; ^
and the same reticence is observed by the Ainos,^ and the
Australian black-men.^ The Ostiaks avoid mentioning the
name of the deceased ; ^ the Caribs do not like to pronounce
the names of their dead.^ The same disUke is found in
Tierra del Fuego.' The Guaycorous never utter the name
of a deceased chief ,^ and the Abipones ^ abstain not only
from the name of the deceased, but from any word of which
the name may happen to form part. It would, however, be
an error to suppose that it is only the names of things
" unclean " and defiling, such as the name of one who is now
a corpse, are dangerous to hear ; in Polynesia, chiefs are so
sacred that their names are strictly taboo, and the com-
ponent syllables may not be used in common conversation.
In Sumatra, the name of the tiger is taboo, and when a
reference to him is unavoidable, euphemisms are employed,
and he is called " Grandfather," " Ancient One," " The Free,"
etc."^^ The later Jews shrank from pronouncing the actual
name of God, and made substitutions, to avoid unnecessary
contact even of this indirect kind with the consuming
holiness of the Lord. In ancient Greece, the rites to which
the initiated alone were admitted were so sacred that all
mention of them to the profane was tabooed — hence our
uncertainty as to what those rites really were.
We have, however, yet to mention the peculiar characteristic
of the institution of taboo, and that which gives it its widest
range and greatest power. That is the transmissibility, the
infection or contagion of taboo. Everything which comes in
^ Bastian, Der MenscJi, iii. 24.
2 Joicrnal of tJie AiUhropological Institute^ 238.
^ Ibid. 238. •* Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 86.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 362.
^ Pere Delaborde in the Recueil de divers voyages (a.d. 1684), 8.
'^ Reville, Religions des peuples non-civilises, i. 398.
8 Ibid. 384. » Ibid. 386.
^° Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 61.
62 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
contact with a tabooed person or thing becomes itself as
dangerous as the original object, becomes a fresh centre of
infection, a fresh source of danger to the community. In
the case of things " unclean," the modern mind can without
difficulty understand that, granted the original object is really
polluted, it communicates its pollution to whatever touches it.
It requires no great exercise of the imagination to comprehend
that in ancient Greece the offerings used for the purification of
a murderer, became, in the very process of purifying him,
themselves polluted and had to be buried.^ The rules about
the uncleanness produced by the carcases of vermin in
Leviticus xi. 32 ff., are also intelligible from this point of
view : " Whatever they touch must be washed ; the water
itself is then unclean, and can propagate the contagion ;
nay, if the defilement affect an (unglazed) earthen pot, it is
supposed to sink into the pores, and cannot be washed out,
so that the pot must be broken." ^ It is, however, strange
to find that the " infection of holiness " produces exactly the
same results as the pollution of uncleanness, that is to say,
it renders the thing touched taboo and therefore unusable.
But in Tahiti if a chief's foot touches the earth, the spot
which it touches becomes taboo thenceforth, and none may
approach it — chiefs are therefore carried in Tahiti when
they go out. If he enters a house, it becomes taboo ; no one
else may go into it ever after. No one may touch him, or
eat and drink out of a vessel which he has touched. In New
Zealand it is fatal to touch anything that is his or that he
has used ; none may use a bed that he has slept in. If a drop
of his blood happens to fall on anything, the thing on which
it falls becomes his property. When a missionary had saved
a choking Maori from death by extracting a bone from his
throat by means of a pair of tweezers, the first thing the
Maori did on recovering his breath was to claim the
tweezers : they had touched him and were taboo, and thereby
appropriated to him. In ancient Greece the priest and
priestess of Artemis Hymnia amongst the Orchomenians,
and the Eechabites amongst the Jews, might not enter a
private house,^ for the same reason as the Polynesian chief.
^ Pausanias, ii. 31. ^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 447.
•■' Pausanias, viii. 13, and Jer. xxv. 9 fF.
TABOO: ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY 63
The clothes as well as the drinking vessels of the Mikado
were fatal to those who touched them.^ Amongst the Tshi-
speaking peoples of the Gold Coast, "all the commoner
utensils that have been used during the festival [a general
remembrance of the dead], such as calabashes and earthen
pots, are carried out at daybreak on the ninth day, and
thrown away." ^ The Selli at Dodona were 'x^afiacevvai,,
i.e. abstained from sleeping in a bed, probably for the reason
that the bed would become too holy for anyone else to occupy
afterwards. They were also ai/tTrroTroSe?, and the priest and
priestess of Artemis Hymnia did not wash like other people,^
doubtless because of the excessive sanctity of their persons, just
as the Arabians of old might not wash or anoint the head ;
and the head of a Maori chief was so sacred that " if he only
touched it with his fingers, he was obliged immediately to
apply them to his nose, and snuff up the sanctity which they
had acquired by the touch, and thus restore it to the part
from whence it was taken." *
As tabooed persons render everything taboo with which
they come in contact, so holy places make everything in them
taboo. The fish in the sacred river Eeiti in Attica were
themselves, like the stream, sacred to Demeter,^ and might be
caught by her priests alone. In Pharse (a town of Achtea) there
was a stream sacred to Hermes, the fish of which, as being
sacred to the god, were taboo and might not be caught at all.^
In Yabe there is a certain deity's hut which is so taboo, that
whoso enters it, except on business, becomes the slave of
the priest.'^ On the Slave Coast any person accidentally
touched by the sacred python is thereby made dedicate to
the god and has to serve it for the rest of his life.^ By an
extension of the same principle, in Polynesia the holy places
of the gods and the houses of the most sacred chiefs became
asylums for fugitives. The very soil of holy places is sacred,
and communicates its sanctity to that which touches it :
hence in Peru, " none came within where the idol was, save
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 282. ^ Ellis, Tshi-speahing Peoj^Us^ 228.
^ Pausanias, viii. 14.
■* Frazer, Golden Bough, i. 191, quoting R. Taylor.
"^ Pausauias, i. 38. ^ Ihid. viii. 22.
' Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 219. ^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 57.
64 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the principal chiefs, who entered with much reverence and
veneration, having removed their sandals," ^ doubtless because
the sandals by contact with the sacred soil would become
taboo and unfit thereafter for daily use. In the same way in
Tonga, the upper garment was removed in the presence of the
king, because his glance would render it taboo, and therefore
useless afterwards.
The sanctity of the soil of sacred places gives rise to a
remarkable coincidence in the practices of two races so widely
separated as the ancient Mexicans and the negroes of the
Gold Coast. The former practised " eating earth in honour
of the god," the latter still " eat fetish." The Mexicans on
entering any sacred place, or by way of taking oath, touched
the soil with their finger and then placed the finger in the
mouth.2 Amongst the negroes, " to make an oath binding on
a person who takes it, it is usual to give him something to
eat or drink which in some way appertains to a deity . . .
the ordinary plan is to take something from the spot in
which the deity resides ... a little earth, or some leaves or
berries . . . this is (incorrectly) called ' eating fetish.' " ^
That this procedure somehow gives the deity of the place a
greater hold over the person taking oath than he would have
if the ceremony was omitted, is clear. How or why this
should be, may be difficult for the enlightened reader to
imagine, but it would be intelligible enough to the intending
perjurer, who at the present day in an English court of
justice kisses his thumb instead of " the book," and thinks
thereby to escape the consequences of his perjury. The
mediiBval practice of swearing by or on the relics of a saint, and
the classical custom of swearing or conjuring by the beard
(which partakes of the peculiar sanctity of the head), though
they do not involve eating or kissing, are inspired by the
same feeling ; indeed, we may say generally that the practice
of swearing " by " anything, and therefore the very conception
of an oath, is due in its origin to the feeling that the sacred-
ness of the object held or kissed communicates itself and
gives sacredness to the oath. Probably the earliest oaths
are those of " compurgation," and the person thus freeing
^ Payne, TJie New World called America, i. 513, quoting Juan de Bctanzos.
^ Sahaguu, Appendix to bk. ii. ^ Ellis, Tshi-spcakiiig Peoples, 196.
TABOO: ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY 65
himself from the charge made against him does so by
vokmtarily making himself taboo, by " eating fetish " or
otherwise devoting himself to the god. Thus his enemy no
longer can touch him, for he is taboo, nor is it necessary
that his enemy should touch him ; it is now the god's affair.
Oaths of witness then follow the analogy of purgatory
oaths.
But perhaps the most remarkable instance of the " con-
tagion " of taboo is to be found in the fact that it is capable
of infecting not only things but actions, and even time itself.
Thus amongst the Basutos, on the day of a chief's decease
work is tabooed : ^ the corpse " defiles " not only those who
come in contact with it, but all work done on the fatal
day. In Madagascar, work is taboo to the relatives of the
deceased for a longer or shorter time according to his rank.^
The Tshi-speaking negroes celebrate an annual feast for the
dead generally, and " the whole eight days are termed egwaJi
awotchwi, ' Eight Seats,' because it is a period of rest, during
which no work may be performed." ^ In the New World, the
funeral ceremonies of the kings of Mechoacan " lasted five days,
and in all that time no Fire was permitted to be kindled
in the City, except in the King's house and Temples, nor yet
any Corn was ground, or Market kept, nor durst any go out of
their houses."* And it is not only in the case of things
" unclean " that time itself becomes a channel of infection :
the " infection of holiness " is transmitted in the same way.
On the Gold Coast, " on the day sacred to or set apart for the
offering of sacrifice to a local god, the inhabitants abstain
from all work, smear their bodies with white clay, and wear
white cloths in sign of rejoicing." ^ On the Slave Coast,
" every general, tribal, and local god, with the exception of
Mawu, has his holy day." ^ Amongst the Tshi-speaking
peoples, " on the day sacred to it [the tutelary deity] all the
members of the family wear white or light-coloured cloths
and mark themselves with white .... no work of any kind
may be done, and should one of the members of the family
^ Casalis, Les Bassoutos, 275. ^ Reville, Bel. des peup. non-civ. ii. 167.
'^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 228.
^ Gage, A New Survey of tM West Indies, 160.
^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 74. ^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 79.
5
66 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
be absent on a journey, he must on that day make a halt." ^
In Polynesia, not only on the death of Tuitonga, or in time
of general mourning or of sickness in the royal family, but
before war (a sacred function), or before a great feast, a taboo-
day or days are proclaimed ; no one may cook food, no fire or
light may be kindled, no one may go outside of his house, no
domestic animal may utter a sound (dogs are muzzled, cocks
put under a calabash). In Mexico, too, the principal feasts
of the two chief deities, Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli,
were preceded by a taboo period, " notice of which was
solemnly given by the officials." ^ In Madagascar there are
days on which it is taboo to go outside the house or begin
any business ; " the child who comes into the world on one of
those days is drowned, exposed, or buried alive, for it belongs
to the gods, and therefore may not be kept from them." ^
This last quotation may make it easier to understand
why work is taboo on a holy day ; anything begun or done on
such a day belongs to the god, and is not for common use.
But the reference to a god is not indispensable ; work done
or begun on an " unclean " day is equally unfit for every-
day use, though there is no god for it to belong to. An
exact parallel may be found in the matter of raiment, of
" best clothes " and " mourning." The clothes which a mourner
wears become " defiled " by his contact with the deceased ;
and, when the days of his " impurity " are over, they are
cast aside ; they can no longer be used in his ordinary
avocations, for they would communicate to all that he touched
and to everything that he did the pollution with which they
are infected. He therefore confines himself to one set of
garments, in order not to spoil too many ; and if it is the
custom in his country to mark tabooed objects by some
special colour, he is expected to wear raiment of that colour,
to warn off those who otherwise might unwittingly come in
contact with him and become defiled. So, too, the clothes
which a man wore in the worship of the gods acquired
sanctity and could not be used in his ordinary avocations
(just as " among the later Jews the contact of a sacred volume
or a phylactery ' defiled the hands ' and called for an
^ Ellis, Tshi-sjJeaJcing Peoples, 93. ~ Payue, New World, i. 486.
^ Reville, Eel. deaiiewp. non-civ. i. 167.
TABOO: ITS TRANSMISSIBILITY 67
ablution " ^). A special set of garments therefore was
reserved for this purpose exclusively ; these were presumably
the best that the wearer possessed, and so " in early times best
clothes meant clothes that were taboo for the purposes of
ordinary life." '^ On the Gold Coast there is a special colour
(white) for holy days, distinguished from that distinctive
of mourning (red).^
Intermediate between the taboo on " best clothes " and
that on " mourning " is the New Zealand taboo already
mentioned on a garment on which the glance of a chief has
rested. Intermediate, too, between " holy days " and days of
mourning are the dies nefasti of the Komans and the rj/jiepac
dirocppciSe^ of the Greeks, which were neither dedicated to
any god nor " unclean," but were certainly taboo days.
To a certain extent, it is plain, the transmissibility or
infection of taboo can be explained by the laws of the Associa-
tion of Ideas : the sentiment with which a person or thing is
regarded colours all that is associated with that person or
thing, and may be revived by anything which remmds us of
it or him. " The glove upon that hand " has for the lover
some of the glamour which surrounds his mistress ; to all, the
scene of former misery is painful. So, too, the terror which
attaches to a thing taboo may be reawakened by anything
which calls it to mind ; of all things blood is most taboo ;
hence in Polynesia red berries are taboo, because of their
colour ; on the Gold Coast " every spot where the earth is of
a red colour is believed to be or to have been the place of
abode of a Sasabonsum," ^ and is taboo ; and in both countries
red is the colour used to signify that a thing is tabooed. But
whereas civilised man is aware that the association between
such ideas is merely mental, to the savage the connection is
real. The savage believes that the same terrible consequences
-—whatever they may be — which ensue on contact with
blood, do actually and really follow on contact with things
which by theu' colour or otherwise remind him thereof. That
primitive man should mistake the mental association for a
real connection was inevitable ; he could not do otherwise.
The reality of the connection was not for him matter of
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 452. ^ Jjyid. 453.
2 See Ellis, Tshi-s^eaking Peoples, 88, 89, 93, 156. ^ IMd. 35.
68 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
argument ; it was a self-evident fact, of which he had direct
consciousness and immediate certitude. But if this is so, if
man began with this belief, and did not infer or deduce it
from anything, then we must reject those theories which
represent taboo as being the consequence of some other belief,
such as that things taboo transmit a material, physical
pollution, or that some supernatural influence is transmitted,
or that the dead man's spirit adheres to those who touch the
corpse. The material, physical theory (implied in the use of
the terms " contagion," " infection " of taboo) is untenable,
because the belief in taboo is not an induction based upon
observation, experience, and experiment, but an a priori
conviction : it is not an inference from such facts of observa-
tion as that pitch, mud, etc., defile, but a belief prior to,
independent of, indeed, irreconcilable with the facts of experi-
ence. The theory of a supernatural cause is simply super-
fluous ; the connection between the two associated ideas was
a self-evident fact, which for the savage required no ex-
planation— supernatural or other — but was rather itself the
explanation of other things.
But though the laws of the Association of Ideas explain
the transmissibility of taboo and account for the fact that
whatever is mentally associated with the thing taboo awakens
the same terror as the thing itself, still they obviously cannot
explain why the thing itself is terrible to begin with. To
learn that, we must examine the things themselves.
CHAPTEE VII
THINGS TABOO
Before beginning to examine things taboo, with a view to
seeing whether they possess any common quality, whether
any general statement can be made with regard to them,
whether, in fine, it is possible to frame any induction from
them, it is plain that we must discriminate between things
which I will venture henceforth to distinguish as things
taboo and things tabooed. Both classes are " infectious " and
communicate their mysterious and dangerous qualities to
whatever they come in contact with ; but things tabooed are
those which would not possess the taboo-infection, if they
had not derived it from contact with something else taboo or
tabooed, whereas things taboo are those which do not derive
the contagion from anything else, but have it inherent in them-
selves. A single thing taboo might infect the whole universe ;
on the Loango Coast, a divine king's glance would infect a river
and the river infect all in its course ;-^ in modern Polish folk-
lore a corpse may not be carried over a stream,^ for the same
reason ; taboo persons are generally not allowed to be seen by
the sun, for they would infect him, and he the universe.
For the purpose of this chapter, therefore, we must set
aside things tabooed. Food, for instance, is not inherently
taboo, though it may become tabooed in many ways — if it is
touched, intentionally or unintentionally, by a sorcerer (in
the Mulgrave Islands), or by an Amatonga (amongst the Zulus),
or by a " tapued person " (in New Zealand), or by the Mikado,
or by the sick (in Fiji), or by mourners (Tahiti, New Zealand,
Samoa), or by a superior chief (Fiji and Tonga), or by an out-
cast (Burma and the Brahmins) ; and as the hands are
^ Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 263. ^ Am Urqtiell, iii. 51.
69
70 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
used for all sorts of things and are specially liable therefore
to become " unclean," not only are mourners not allowed in
Tahiti to feed themselves " lest the food, defiled by the touch
of their polluted hands, should cause their own death," ^ not
only has the tabooed person in Timor to be fed like a little
child, for the same reason,^ not only was sacred food consumed
in Mexico by a sort of " bob-cherry " performance without the
use of the hands,^ but in Tanna no food whatever might be
offered with the bare hands, as such contact might give the
food a potency for evil ; finally, as a taboo person can infect
things by his mere glance, it is a common precaution to allow
no one to see you take your food.*
Tabooed persons, too, must be distinguished from persons
taboo ; and under the former head must probably be placed
criminals and the sick. There is reason to think that in
primitive society the only criminals are the violators of taboo ;
and this crime carries its own punishment with it, for in the
act of breaking taboo the offender himself becomes tabooed,
and no one in the community will touch him or have any-
thing to do with him. In fine, as the only offence known to
primitive society is taboo-breaking, so the only punishment is
excommunication. As far as the early Indo-Earopeans are
concerned, the evidence of linguistic palaeontology is clear
upon the latter point : " wretch " is a word which goes back
to the earliest Aryan times, and it means an outlaw.^ Even
in historic times the Eoman community continued to protect
itself by the interdict from fire and water, the object of
which was probably in its origin rather to save those neces-
saries of life from pollution than to punish the offender.^ As
for the sick, the taboo on them is, I think, confined to
Polynesia, and is expressly explained as due to the fact that
an atua or spirit enters them : they are thereby tabooed, but
they are not taboo.
^ Wilkes, U.S. Exploring Expedition, iii. 115.
2 R^ville, Rcl. des p)eup. non-civ. ii. 162. " Payne, New World, i. 428.
■* Mr. Crawley gives instances from Abyssinia, Nubia, Madagascar, the Aztecs,
Cacongo, Cauna, Dahomey, Congo, the Monbuttoo, the Pongo Coast, Ashanti,
Tonga, the Bakairi, the Karaja, Loaugo Coast, Celebes, Sandwich Islands. Folk-
Lore, vi. 2. 140.
^ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, 350.
® Granger, Worship of the Romans, 266 ; cf. CicQxo pro S. Roscio, § 71.
THINGS TABOO 71
In the same way, it is clear that, for the purposes of
this chapter, we must class as tabooed and not as taboo all
persons, animals, and objects in which a supernatural spirit
takes up his abode. But though all supernatural beings are
inherently taboo, we are not yet in a position to convert the
proposition simply and say that all things taboo are super-
natural : we have to inquire without prejudice whether as a
matter of fact there are things taboo and yet not super-
natural. However this may turn out to be, a thing or
person may undoubtedly become tabooed by contact with the
supernatural. Hence strangers are not inherently taboo, but
as belonging to strange gods bring with them strange super-
natural influences. It is well, therefore, not to touch their
food or eat with them — as the Yule Islanders hold and are
supported by the Papuans of Humboldt Bay, the black-
fellows of Victoria, and the Atiu Islanders,^ as well as the
inhabitants of Van Diemen's Land.^ A common practice,
also, is to fumigate strangers, to drive away their evil
influences, or for the natives to offer blood to their own gods
and so gain divine protection. The early explorers of the
New World mistakenly regarded these proceedings as done
in their honour : in Palmeria, " when they recieue straungers
or newe guestes ... in token of friendshippe, they drawe a
little bloud from themselues either out of the tongue, hand,
arme, or any other part of the bodie." ^
Finally, to our list of things tabooed rather than taboo
we must add two — if originally they were two and not one
class — in which the institution of taboo has had marked
effects on the progress of civilisation ; they are property and
wives. In Polynesia, women before marriage are noa (common,
safe), afterwards tabooed. So, too, in Mayumbe it is death
to touch another man's wife, whereas unmarried women are
free to all ; ^ and, elsewhere on the Loango Coast, married
women are so taboo that things must not be handed directly
to them by a man, but must be put down on the ground for
them to pick up.^ In the same way a Waliah making
^ Crawley, loc. cit. ^ Reville, Bel. des peup. non-civ. ii. 159.
'"* Hakluyt, Histarie of the West Indies, Decade iv. ch. 4. Bernal Diaz
repeatedly makes the same mistake.
"* Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 244, ^ Ibid. 168.-
72 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
offerings to a Brahmin must not hand them but put them on
the ground for him to pick up.^ As for property generally,
in Polynesia the owner protects himself in possession by
tabooing it ; where fishing is conducted co-operatively, the
catch is tabooed until divided ; when a diamond mine was
supposed to have been found near Honolulu, King Tame-
hameha at once tabooed it, in order to appropriate it
exclusively to himself; and European shipmasters who did
not care for native visitors got their vessels tabooed by a
native chief. In the Moluccas charms are used for the
protection of property which have the power of bringing
illness or misfortune on the thief.^ And, according to
Hakluyt, the Caribs cultivated the plant called by them
Hay ; each man had his own plot of ground, and " euery one
incloseth his portion onely with a little cotton line and they
account it a matter of sacriledge if any passe ouer the corde
and treade on the possession of his neighbour, and holde it
for certayne that whoso violateth this sacred thing shall
shortly perish." ^ So, too, in Melanesia, "in the eastern islands,
the tambu [taboo] sign is often two sticks crossed and placed
in the ground. In such a manner, the St. Christoval native
secures his patch of ground from intrusion." ^ In Eastern
Central Africa, " the same word that is used for betrothing
a girl is also applied to the selecting of a piece of ground for
hoeing. A person who wants a new farm goes forth and
makes his selection. After doing so he takes bunches of
long grass and ties round the trees in that field. Everyone
that passes knows by the grass put upon the trees that the
field has been taken possession of. . . . In the same way
the intending husband points to the cloth that he has given
to the girl, and says, ' She is mine.' " ^
But the distinction between things tabooed and things
taboo is not the only distinction that it is necessary to draw.
The very conception of taboo, based as it largely is on the
association of ideas, is one peculiarly liable to extension by
analogy. If, for instance, a species of things is taboo, then
1 Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 53. ^ "Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologic, vi. 354.
^ Hakluyt, Eistorie of the West IndieSy Decside viii. ch. 6.
** Guppy, ITie Solomon Islands, 32.
° Duff Macdonald, Af7-icana, i. 118.
THINGS TABOO 73
ex abundantia cautelce, in the supererogation of precaution,
the whole genus to which the species belongs might well
come to be taboo. Or an individual which originally was
only taboo at certain periods of its existence might easily
come to be considered taboo at all times. Or we might
expect a priori that new social institutions would, on the
analogy of old ones, come to be protected by the power of
taboo. And, as a matter of fact, unless we are going to
ascribe division into castes to primitive society, we have
in them a clear case of the growth of a taboo, and of its
extension by analogy : the members of an inferior caste
are treated by the superior castes as criminals were treated
by primitive society; outcasts are, like outlaws, taboo —
eating, especially, must be avoided " with publicans and
sinners."
It was not, however, specially for the benefit of outcasts
that the last paragraph was penned. Of persons or things
inherently taboo we have now two classes left : one consists
of supernatural beings, the other includes blood, new-born
children with their mothers, and corpses ; and it is con-
ceivable that the taboo on one class was extended by analogy
to the other class. That is a question to be considered here-
after. At present our business is to show that blood, etc.,
are as a matter of fact taboo.
As for blood, its taboo character has been so fully
demonstrated by Mr. Frazer^ as to be beyond possibility of
doubt. Here it will suffice to add one or two instances to
his collection. Blood, as we have already seen, tabooes
whatever it falls on, and renders the object or spot useless
for all common purposes. Hence the very general precau-
tions taken to prevent royal or sacred blood from being
spilled on the ground. Thus in Angoy the blood of royal
women may not be shed, and if they have to be put to
death, their ribs must be broken.^ In Dahomi, in 1818,
Gezo dethroned Adanlosan, and " as the royal blood may not
be shed, Adanlosan, bound hand and foot, was walled up in
a small room, and left to die of starvation." ^ In Dabaiba
it was ordained that a priest who has offended " shall eyther
^ Golden Bough, i. 178 ff. ^ Bastian, Loango Kuste, i. 216.
^ Ellis, Mve-s2)eaJci7ig Peoples, 89.
74 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
be stoned to death or burned."^ So, too, the blood of
sacrifice was not allowed to be spilled on the ground either
in ancient Egypt or in ancient India; according to the
Grihya Siitra,^ " the effused blood, which at the time of
immolation was held in a vessel, should be thrown on
bundles of kiisa grass." Strabo,^ too, says of an Indian tribe
that they do not shed the blood of the victims they offer to
the gods, but strangle the animals. And in ancient Egypt,
" when an ox was sacrificed at the grave, a priestly official
caught in a vessel the blood which flowed from the throat
when cut (cf. Pyramid text, Teta, line 144)."^ Even to see
a thing taboo is dangerous. Blood therefore must not be
seen, and in ancient India, it appears from a Prayoga,^ " the
institutor of the sacrifice and the priests should sit during
the operation with their faces averted, so as not to behold
the sanguinary work." Naturally, therefore, the shedder of
blood is regarded as taboo. Amongst the Yumos of
Colorado the man-slayer is taboo for a month, during which
time he must fast ; ^ and the Kaffir is " unclean " after a
battle.^ Animal blood produces the same effects. The
Hottentot after a hunt must purify himself from the blood of
the animals he has slain.^
The " sanctity " or " uncleanness " of the new-born child
and its mother may next be illustrated. In West Africa,
" after childbirth, the mother is considered unclean for seven
days." ^ The Leaf-Wearers of Orissa also seclude a woman
after childbirth for seven days.^^ On the Loango Coast the
mother is taboo for as long as six months.^^ In Celebes she is
pamcdi ( = taboo) for a period the length of which is not
stated.12 Amongst the Australian tribes of lat. 31° 0' S.,
long. 138° 55' E., " for a short time after birth of child she
^ Hakluyt, Historie of the West Indies, Decade vii. ch. 10.
2 Quoted by Rajendralala Mitra, Indo-Aryans, i. 365. " P. 710.
■* A. Wiedemann in Am UrqueU, iii. 114.
5 MS. No. 1552, Sanskrit College of Calcutta, quoted by Rajendralala
Mitra, Indo-Aryans, i. 372.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 24. "^ Ihid.
8 lUd. 9 Ellis, TsM-s'peaJcing Peoples. 233.
'^^ Journal of the Anthropological Society y III. cxxxvi.
^^ Bastian, Loango Khlste, i. 184.
^- Waitz-Gerland, Anthropologic, vi. 355.
THINGS TABOO 75
is considered unclean." ^ In Central Australia " the mother
is isolated until she is able to leave her seclusion with the
baby."^ For the Australians generally, one moon is the
length of time stated.^ Being herself taboo, she tabooes
everything with which she comes in contact ; therefore, on
the Amazon, " when a birth takes place in the house, every-
thing is taken out of it, even the pans and pots, and bows
and arrows, till next day " ; * and in Western Africa the
mother " can touch nothing without rendering it also
unclean." ^ The vessels she has used must therefore, like
those of the Mikado, be burned ; and her hair — for it
conveys the infection of taboo — be likewise burned. Persons
taboo cannot take food into their hands without " infecting "
it and rendering it unfit for consumption. The Kaniagmut
mother therefore must be fed by others, and they, to avoid
the contagion, must not touch her but offer the food on a
stick. In Travancore the Veddah father shares the taboo,
and dare not eat anything but roots. Among the Piojes of
Putumayo, both parents fast for days after the birth of a
child.^ The Caribs, too, fasted on the occasion.'^ Finally,
the taboo is removed by some mode of purification : amongst
the Leaf -Wearers of Orissa the woman bathes and a feast is
made.^ Amongst the Alfoers, not only must the mother be
purified in running water, but, on the return from the stream,
the whole village must beat the father with sticks, wishing
good-luck to the new-born child.^ On the Gold Coast, when
three months have elapsed, the mother " makes offerings to
the tutelary deity of the family ; and then, attired in her
best clothes, and covered with gold ornaments, she pays visits
to her friends and neighbours, accompanied by a band of
singing women, who sing songs of thanksgiving for her safe
delivery." ^^
The new-born child also possesses the taboo-infection in
a high degree. Just as the Polynesian chief rendered the
^ Journal of the Anthrojjological Institute, xxiv. 2. 168. - Ibid. 183.
^ Ibid. 187. "* Wallace, Travels on the Amazmv, 345.
^ Ellis, loc. cit. ^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, viii. 222.
'^ Miiller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Ur-religionen, 212.
^ Journal of the Anthropological Society, III. cxxxvi.
^ Bastiaii, Oest. Asien, v. 270.
^^ Eilis, Tshi-speaking Teoples, 233.
76 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
ground on which he trod taboo, so amongst the Mexicans
children on the day of birth were so taboo they might not be
put upon the ground.^ Amongst the Dyaks, as commonly
in modern European folk-lore, new-born children are the
especial prey of evil spirits,^ that is to say are taboo, for the
restrictions of taboo are frequently thus explained, when the
institution itself has otherwise perished. The child, like the
mother, being thus " infectious," must be purified. Amongst
the Caribs, the purification was effected by sprinkling the
child with some of the father's blood.^ Amongst the Alfoers,
the child was washed in swine's blood.* On the Gold Coast
rum is squirted over the child by the father.^ The rum is a
substitute or surrogate for blood. Finally, in Polynesia, the
Tohunga or priest dips a green twig into water and sprinkles
the child's head, or else immerses the infant totally.^ The
common custom of washing the new-born child is probably
to be regarded as originally ceremonial rather than cleanly in
intent. Amongst the Damaras, " a new-born child is washed
— the only time he is ever washed in his life — then dried
and greased, and the ceremony is over."'^
The perfect parallel between the three notions of
" uncleanness," " holiness," and taboo pure and simple, is well
marked in the case of corpses — with which our list of things
inherently taboo concludes. As contact with what is holy or
taboo makes a thing holy or taboo, so in West Africa — and
indeed we may say universally — " those persons who have
touched the corpse are considered unclean."^ As the new-
born child or a " tapued person " tabooes the ground he
touches, so amongst the Buryats the corpse of a Shaman is
placed " on a felt carpet, so that it be not defiled by contract
with the ground " ; ^ and a lingering survival of this feeling
is probably the explanation of some modern European folk-
lore, e.g. in the Tirol a corpse must be conveyed by the high-
road ; ^^ in some parts of England the conveyance of a corpse
^ Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 41. - Ibid. 47.
2 Miiller, loc. cit. * Bastian, op. cit. v. 270.
^ Ellis, loc. cit. 6 Waitz-Gerlaiid, Anthrojwlogie, vi. 132 and 362.
■^ Galton, South Africa, 190.
^ Ellis, TsM-sjjeaJcing Peoples, 241.
^ Journal of the Anthro2Jological Institute, xxiv. 2. 135.
1° Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 329.
THINGS TABOO 77
over private property is supposed to give a right of way.
That contact with a corpse, like contact with things holy or
taboo, renders special vestments necessary, has been already
mentioned. Here we need only add one quotation to show
that the reason is that the garments are rendered useless,
and therefore, sometimes at least, must be destroyed. On
the Slave Coast, " at the end of the period of mourning the
widows put on clean cloths, the old cloths being burned. At
Agweh, men who have lost their head wives do this also."^
Not only are clothes taboo but the house also, either for a cer-
tain period (eight days amongst the Hill Dyaks,^ one according
to the funeral law of Ceos ^), or altogether, in which case the
house is deserted or destroyed (" usually the apartment in
which the deceased is buried is closed, and never used again,
and sometimes the roof is removed " *), just as amongst the
Ewe-speaking peoples the house of a person struck by the
lightning-god is plundered, and even in the Middle Ages a
murderer's house was formally and solemnly pulled down.^
That death, like the service of the gods, makes the day
on which it takes place taboo for other purposes, has
been already pointed out, as also that the very name
of the deceased or of a god may be tabooed. Again,
those who have touched holy things, or are — like the
priest and priestess of Artemis Hymnia^ — themselves
holy, may not eat like other people, i.e. may not touch
food with their hands, and on the same ground, namely, that
they would taboo their own food ; " those who attended the
deceased were most careful not to handle food, and for days
were fed by others as if they were helpless infants." '^ Hence
some peoples, pushing things to their logical conclusion,
fast altogether in mourning, as also in the case of vows (for
persons under a vow are dedicate and sacred to the god
^ Ellis, Ewe- sjjeaking Peoples, 160.
2 "VVaitz-Gerland, Anthropologie, vi. 355. ^ Roehl, Inscr. Ant. 895.
^ Ellis, Yoruha-speaJcing Peoples, 160. Cf. DobrizhofFer, History of the
Abijjones, ii. 273, "the house which he (the deceased) inhabited they pull
entirely to pieces " ; Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, 225, "a feast is celebrated,
and the house is then deserted for ever " ; Dorman, Primitive Superstitions,
"the Ojibways pulled down the house in which anyone had died "; so, too, the
Navajos, Seminoles, Arkansas, and New English tribes.
^Post, Geschlechtsgenossensckoft, 113. ^ Pausanias, viii. 13.
' Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 228.
78 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
to whom the vow is made). " Fasting was common at
such times (i.e. mourning), and they who did so ate nothing
during the day, but had a meal at night ; reminding us of
wliat David said when mourning the death of Abner : So do
God to me and more also, if I taste bread or ought else till
the sun be down." ^ Amongst the Ewe-speaking peoples,
" the relatives must fast." ^ Amongst the Tshi-speaking
peoples, " from the moment of death, the relatives of
the deceased, and the members of the household, abstain from
food and continue fasting as long as their strength permits." ^
Amongst the Yoruba-speaking peoples, " usage requires them to
refuse all food, at least for the first twenty-four hours, after
which they usually allow themselves to be persuaded to take
some nourishment.""* The Caribs also fasted during mourning.^
Holy persons, such as the Selli, and tabooed persons,
e.(/. candidates prepared for initiation in the Eleusinia,
generally may not wash, for fear, probably, lest the sanctity
should be communicated by the water to other persons or
things, in the same way as the impurity of the murderer in
Greece might be conveyed by the olierings used in his purifica-
tion. The hair and nail-parings of holy persons are also
capable of conveying the taboo-infection. Hence they either
remove their hair before entering into the taboo-state, or else
allow it to grow during that period and remove and dispose
of it carefully afterwards. These restrictions are common to
mourners, as well as to persons under a vow, or otherwise
sacred. In Central Africa, " while a woman's husband is
absent, she goes without anointing her head or washing her
face " ; ^ and amongst the ancient Mexicans the relatives of
a merchant abroad did not wash their heads or faces ^ — a
restriction which was probably part of a vow for the safety
of the absent one. In the Miaotze tribe, at a parent's death
the son remains in the house forty-nine days without
washing his face ; ^ and when it is said of the Leaf -Wearers
of Orissa that the only death ceremonies known to them are
^ Turner, NiTieteen Years in Polynesia, 228.
3 Ellis, 239.
° Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 328.
'^ Macdonald, Africana, i. 81.
^ Bastian, Dcr Mensch, ii. 111.
'^ Ellis, 158.
•» Ellis, 157.
■^ Saliagun, bk. iv. c. 19.
THINGS TABOO 79
bathing and fasting, this probably implies a previous
(ceremonial) unwashen state. Amongst the negroes of the
Gold Coast " the relations may not wash themselves or comb
their hair during the funeral ceremonies, in consequence of
which the rites themselves are sometimes styled Ofo,
' unwashed.' " ^ " In Agweh a widow is supposed to remain
shut up for six months in the room in which her husband is
buried, during which time she may not wash or change
her clothes. ... At the end of the period of mourning the
widows wash, shave the head, pare the nails, and put on clean
cloths, the old cloths, the hair, and the nail-parings being
burned." '^ Amongst the Crow Indians the widow shaves
her head and her mourning ceases when the hair has grown
again.^ In the Tonga Islands, at tlic death of a Tooitonga
the whole population shaved their heads.* In Savage Island
" the women singed off the hair of their heads as a token of
mourning on the death of their husbands."^ In Siam the
head is shaved as a sign of mourning.^ The classical reader
will be reminded of the Greek and Eoman funeral custom.
On the Gold Coast " the nearest relations of the deceased,
of both sexes, shave the head and all hair from their
bodies. This has commonly been regarded as a sign of grief ;
but, having in view the shaving of the head by women on
the sacred days of deities, which are days of rejoicing, it
appears rather to be a sign of respect." '' Amongst the Ewe-
speaking and the Yoruba-speaking peoples also, shaving
marks the termination of the period of mourning.^ Amongst
the Soumoo or Woolwa Indians of the New World, " the hair
is cropped in sign of mourning " ; ^ and the Australian blacks
" usually shave the head and plaster themselves with white
copi or pipe-clay." ^^ Amongst the Bakongo, on the death
of a chief, " all his followers shaved their heads in token of
mourning." ^^ Of the Abipones, last century it was noted
^ Ellis, Yortiha-s'pcaldng Peoples, 160.
- Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 160.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 328. "* Mariner, Tonga Islands, 214.
° Turner, Samoa, 306. '' Bastian, Otst. Asicn, iii. 320.
'Ellis, T shi- speaking Peopilcs, 241.
8 Ellis, Ewe, 160; Yoruha, 160.
'•' Journal of the Anthrop)ological Institute, xxiv. 2. 207.
^" Ibid. 188. ^^ Ward, Congo Cannibals, 43.
80 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
that " it is also a custom to shave the heads of widows . . .
and to cover them with a grey and black hood . . . which
it is reckoned a crime for her to take off till she marries
again. A widower has his hair cropped, with many
ceremonies, and his head covered with a little net-shaped hat,
which is not taken off till the hair grows again." ^ Of the
Indians of Guiana it still holds good that " the survivors
crop their hair," ^ and of the Fijians " many make themselves
' bald for the dead.' " ^
Purification, again, is required not only of the mourners,
but of all who may have touched the dead, just as contact
with a holy volume " defiled the hands " of the later Jews
and entailed ablution. " Contact with a corpse renders a
person unclean, and he must purify himself by washing
in water from head to foot." ^ " Those persons who have
touched the corpse are considered unclean ; and, after the
interment, they proceed in procession to the nearest well
or brook, and sprinkle themselves with water, which is the
ordinary native mode of purification." ^ In Samoa " the fifth
day (of mourning) was a day of ' purification.' They bathed
the face and hands with hot water, and then they w^ere ' clean,'
and resumed the usual time and mode of eating." ^ In Peru
" certain springs were assigned as places for ablution after
performing funeral rites." ^ In ancient Greece a basin of
lustral water was placed at the door of the house of mourning
for purposes of purification.^
Since, then, the reluctance to come in contact with a
corpse and the precautions taken by those who have to come
or have come into such contact are identical with the
reluctance and precaution observed in the case of other
things taboo or tabooed, it is reasonable to look for an
identical cause. Now, the supposed hostility or malevolence
of the spirit of the deceased will not serve as a common cause :
the phylacteries and the sacred volume of the Jews were not
^ Dobrizhoffer, History of the Ahi2)ones, ii. 18.
- Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, 224.
" Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 177. ^ Ellis, Five, 160.
. ^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 241.
^ Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 228.
■^ Payne, New World, i. 445 ; Markham, Rites and Laics of the Incas, 12.
8 Eur. Ale. 100.
THINGS TABOO 81
the seat of any hostile spiritual influence, the Mikado was
not malevolent towards his own people, and yet contact,
direct or indirect, with him or them was avoided as
scrupulously as contact with a corpse. Besides, the rites for
driving away the spirit of the deceased — and there are many
such rites ^ — are altogether distinct from and have nothing
in common with the precautions taken to prevent contact
with the corpse. Fear of evil spirits, therefore, cannot be
the source of the world-wide institution of taboo. What the
source was, we have yet to consider — in our next chapter.
^ For some Indo-European rites, see my paper in the Classical Review for
June 1895.
CHAPTEE VIII
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION
In Polynesia the institution of taboo was closely entwined
with the social and political constitutions of the various
states ; taboos were imposed by the priests and the nobility,
and the unwritten code of taboo corresponded in many
important respects with the legal and social codes of more
advanced civilisations. It is not, therefore, surprising that
the earher students of the system regarded it as an artificial
invention, a piece of state-craft, cunningly devised in the
interests of the nobility and priests. This view is, how-
ever, now generally abandoned. Wider researches have shown
that the institution is not due to state-enactment or to
priest-craft, for the simple reason that it is most at home in
communities which have no state-organisation, and flourishes
where there are no priests or no priesthood. Above all, the
belief is not artificial and imposed, but spontaneous and
universal.
Taboo was next explained, and is still explained, as a
religious observance ; everything belonging to or connected
with a god is forbidden or taboo to man. This explanation,
however, has the fault, fatal to a hypothesis, of not accounting
for all the facts. It is true that everything sacred is taboo ;
it is not true that everything taboo is sacred. Temples and
all the apparatus of ritual belong to the god, and therefore
are taboo ; and even the corpse-taboo may be brought into
a sort of harmony with this theory, if we assume that the
spirit which has left the corpse becomes a god, and if we
also further assume that the spirit is regarded as hostile by
the mourners. With a little more strain upon the theory,
it can be made also to explain the blood-taboo ; for the blood
82
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 83
is commonly regarded as the seat of, or as itself being the
life and the spirit. But it seems too great a strain to say
that " new-born children belonged also to the god, and there-
fore were strictly taboo, together with their mothers." ^ In
fine, it is impossible to make out that all things " unclean "
were originally " sacred," or to show that the carcases of
vermin ^ ever " belonged " to any god.
The latest theory of taboo is that put forward by Mr.
Crawley. In his own words, " the principle of Social Taboo
is an idea . . . that the attributes assigned to the individual
who is feared, loathed, or despised are materially transmissible
by contact of any sort." ^ The expression " Social Taboo "
seems to imply that its author does not claim for his principle
that it explains religious taboo. Anyhow, the gods are not
" loathed or despised," and their " attributes " would seem
rather to be desirable than things to be shunned. But, with-
out labouring the argument that no explanation is satisfactory
which does not account for all the facts, religious as well as
social ; and without denying that savages think " qualities "
are transmissible by physical contact ; we may still point out
that it is not the transmission of loathed or despised attributes
— such as the weakness and timidity of women — that savages
fear. " An Australian black-fellow, who discovered that his
wife had lain on his blanket . . . died of terror in a fort-
night." ^ There was something more here than fear of
becoming weak and timid. Again, it is surely a " social "
taboo which forbids a slave from touching a chieftain's food ;
but the sanction of the taboo is no mere fear of contracting
the chief's " qualities," as the following instance shows : — " It
happened that a New Zealand chief of high rank and great
sanctity had left the remains of his dinner by the wayside.
A slave, a stout, hungry fellow, coming up after the chief had
gone, saw the unfinished dinner, and ate it up without asking
questions. Hardly had he finished, when he was informed
by a horror-stricken spectator that the food of which he had
eaten was the chief's. ' I knew the unfortunate delinquent
well. He was remarkable for courage, and had signalised
^ Gerland, Anthropologie, vi. 346. ^ Lev. xi. 32 ff.
3 Folk-Lore (June 1895), vi. 2. 130.
^ Frazer, Golden Bought i. 170, referring to Journ. Anthrop. Inst. ix. 458.
/
84 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
himself in the wars of the tribe. . . . No sooner did he hear
the fatal news than he was seized by the most extraordinary
convulsions and cramp in the stomach, which never ceased
till he died, about sun-down the same day.' " ^ Contact with
the Mikado's clothes or drinking vessels was avoided, not
from fear of contracting any of his qualities, but because the
clothes would cause swellings and pains all over the body,
and the vessels would burn up the throat. Contact with a
corpse, which might, one would have thought, lead to con-
tracting the " quality " of death, produces loss of hair and
teeth.2 In Whydah the negroes may not look upon the
sacred python, when it goes in procession, because, if they
did, " their bodies would at once become the prey of loathsome
maggots."^ Fear of contracting the qualities of the thing
loathed does not, as far as appears, seem to be alleged by the
savage as his reason for avoiding persons or things taboo. He
is not commonly explicit as to the consequences of breaking
taboo ; he only gets so far as something plainly suggested by the
association of ideas, e.g. tabooed food will disagree with him
more or less seriously ; clothes be, like the robe steeped in
the blood of Nessus, more or less uncomfortable. But as a
rule the consequences are left in the vague ; they are matter
for private and divers conjectures — the one thing about
which the savage has no doubt is that the taboo must not
be broken. In fine, the imperative of taboo is categorical,
not hypothetical.
The last sentence will have reminded the reader that,
according to the Intuitionist school of moral philosophers,
what distinguishes the Moral Sentiment and Ethical Laws
from all others is precisely the fact that their commands are
categorical, and that they require unconditional obedience
without regard to the consequences. The man who is honest
because to be honest is the best policy, is not actuated by a
moral motive, for if dishonesty w^ere a better policy, he would,
for the same reason, pursue it ; whereas the truly good man
is he who does what is right because it is right, no matter
what the consequences. That there is further a real connec-
tion between taboo and morality has been noticed by Mr.
1 Frazer, op. cit. 168, and A Pakeha Maori, Old New Zealand, 96.
2 Crawley, Folk-Lore, loc, cit. ^ Ellis, Ewe-speaking Feo2)les, 61.
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELlGIOlSf 85
Frazer, who says taboo " subserved the progress of civilisation
by fostering conceptions of the rights of property and the
sanctity of the marriage tie. . . . We shall scarcely err in
believing that even in advanced societies the moral sentiments,
in so far as they are merely sentiments, and are not based on
an induction from experience, derive much of their force from
an original system of taboo." ^
We may now, taking leave of previous theories of taboo,
go on our own way ; and, as our starting-point, we will take
the fact that among savages universally there are some things
which categorically and unconditionally must not be done.
That this feeling is a " primitive " sentiment, a tendency
inherent in the mind of man, the following considerations
will, I hope, incline the reader to believe. Though all things
taboo are dangerous, not all dangerous things are taboo ; for
instance, it is not taboo to eat poisonous plants, handle
venomous serpents, jump over a precipice, beard the lion, or,
in fine, to do anything the danger of which you can discover
for yourself, either by your own experience or that of
others. On the contrary, it is things which experience could
never teach you to be dangerous that are taboo, such as %
touching a new-born child, or the water in which a holy
person has washed. Indeed, experience, so far from being
able to generate the belief that these things are dangerous,
would have shown that there was no danger in them, and
would not have given rise to but have destroyed the belief
— the proof of which is that, in Polynesia, the belief in taboo
has been broken down chiefly by the fact that Europeans
violated taboos innumerable, and were, as the natives saw,
none the worse. The sentiment, then, as it appears even
in its earliest and lowest manifestations, cannot have been
derived from experience ; it is prior to and even contradictory
to experience. In fine, it is an inherent tendency of the
human mind ; and as such it does not stand isolated and
alone, for in a previous chapter we have seen that the belief
in the uniformity of nature, the tendency to expect what
has once happened to happen again, is independent of, as it
is often disappointed by experience. Between these two
sentiments, namely, the positive belief that what you have done
^ Encydoptvdia Britannica, s.v. "Taboo,"
86 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
once you can do again, and the negative belief that there are
some things which you must not do, there are other points
of contact, as we shall have occasion to note, besides their
common origin.
The next point in our theory of taboo is that, though the
moral sentiment undoubtedly does " derive much of its force
from an original system of taboo," it is not merely in the
morality of advanced societies that taboo continues to display
its force, nor is taboo in its origin specifically moral. In
advanced societies there are other things which must not be
done, besides immoral acts, e.g. irreligious acts, breaches of
the code of honour, violations of etiquette, etc. And in
savage communities there are things taboo which are not
irreligious or immoral, but rather non-moral. But the senti-
ment, merely as a sentiment and apart from the reason or
justification of it, is the same in all cases, namely, that the
thing must not be done. The sentiment in itself, therefore, is
neither exclusively moral, religious, nor social. In other
words, the sentiment is purely formal and without content ;
the conviction that there are some things which must not be
done does not help us at all to know what things they are
which must not be done, just as the conviction that what has
happened once will happen again under similar circumstances
does not tell us whether the circumstances of the second
occasion of a given experience are similar to those of the
first — whether the a we have before us is really similar to the
a which was followed by h.
How primitive man settled what things were not to be
done there is no evidence to show. We will therefore
content ourselves with the fact that as far back as we can
see in the history — or rather the prehistory — of man, taboo
was never grossly material. It marked the awe of man in the
presence of what he conceived — often mistakenly — to be the
supernatural ; and if his dread of contact with blood, babes, and
corpses appears at first sight irrational, let us remember that
in these, the three classes of objects which are inherently
taboo, we have man in relation to the mystery of life and
death, and in his affinity to that supernatural power which
he conceived to be a spirit like himself. The danger of
contact with these objects is " imaginary," if you like, but it
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 87
is spiritual, i.e. it is the feeling that experience, sense-
experience, is not the sole source or final test of truth ; and
that the things which are seen bring man daily into relation
with things unseen. For, once more, the essence of taboo is
that it is, a priori, that without consulting experience it pro-
nounces certain things to be dangerous. Those things, as a
matter of fact, were in a sense not dangerous, and the belief in ,
their danger was irrational. Yet had not that belief existed, '
there would be now no morality, and consequently no civilisa-
tion. The things were indeed dangerous, but the danger was
for us men of to-day, not for those who obeyed the taboo — for
civilisation and not for the savage. It was a danger which
no experience at the time could have discovered, so remote
was it — and so great.
If the savage appears irrational in his choice of objects
to be taboo, his belief in the transmissibility of taboo was
equally irrational — and equally essential to the progress of man-
kind. The belief that every person who touched a thing
taboo became himself tabooed, and was a fresh centre of
infection to everyone and everything around him, is obviously
an a priori belief, which is due not to experience at all, but
to the association of ideas. The terror of the original taboo
spread to all associated with it, and everything that suggested
it. This belief was a fallacy, as experience would at
once have demonstrated, had the savage dared to make
the experiment. But this fallacy was the sheath which
enclosed and protected a conception that was to blossom and
bear a priceless fruit — the conception of Social Obligation.
To respect taboo was a duty towards society, because the man
who broke it caught the taboo contagion, and transmitted it
to everyone and everything that he came in contact with.
Thus the community had a direct and lively interest in
requiring that every member should respect taboo. On the
other hand, it was equally the interest of the individual to
avoid contact with things taboo, because the infection fell
first and most fatally on him. Thus private interest and
public good coincided exactly ; and the problem that puzzles
modern moral philosophers so much, namely, which of the two,
if they do not coincide, can a man reasonably be expected to
follow, was and would be still absolutely inconceivable in a
88 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
community where taboo is an institution. It seems, there-
fore, that those philosophers who regard selfishness as alone
" natural " and primitive, have neglected the actual facts of
the case, for from the beginning the sense of duty towards
society has been necessarily present as a restraining influence
on the individual. He has shrunk from violation of taboo
not merely as an individual, but also and always as a member
/ of society. The terror with which he viewed the prospect of
coming into personal contact with things taboo was identically
the same feeling with which he viewed the taboo-breaker.
Nor could he, if he broke taboo, hope by secrecy to conceal
his offence and escape his punishment, for the taboo contagion
infects, as we have seen, even those who unwittingly come in
contact with the thing taboo.
That society would not exist, if the individual members
thereof did not find their account in supporting it, is un-
deniable ; but it is equally true that no society could exist
unless the feeling of social obligation held it together. Now,
it is clear that the conviction that a man's own private
interest requires him to perform his duty towards the com-
munity must have done much to bind society together. It
is also obvious that a man must have been powerfully stimu-
lated to do his duty by the further conviction that it was
impossible for any violation of duty to be hid. The belief,
therefore, in the transmissibility of taboo effected two things.
, / First, by rendering it impossible even to imagine a divergence
between private and public good, it protected the growth of the
feeling of social obhgation until it was strong enough to stand
to some extent alone. Next, by inspiring the conviction that
all breaches of taboo must inevitably be promptly discovered,
it prepared the way for the higher feeling that, whether likely
to be discovered or not, wrong must not be done.
But though there were all these possibilities of good in
the institution of taboo, it was only amongst the minority of
mankind, and there only under exceptional circumstances,
that the institution bore its best fruit. For evolution and
, progress are not identical. Everywhere there has been
Revolution, but progress has been rare. Indeed, in many
respects the evolution of taboo has been fatal to the progress
of humanity. The belief in the transmissibility of taboo led,
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 89
for instance in Polynesia, to the desertion and inhuman
abandonment of the sick, who were regarded as taboo, and
therefore could not be ministered to, because those who
tended them would themselves become taboo. Again, the
taboo contagion spread so widely as to check man with its
iron hand in every attempt which he might make to subdue
nature and utilise her gifts. With its arbitrary and senseless
restrictions it overgrows healthy social tendencies and kills
them, as moss kills off grass or ivy strangles the tree. The
taboo laid on young mothers is extended to all women ; hence
the separation of man and wife (" I have scarcely ever seen
anything like social intercourse between husband and wife,"
says the Ojibway, Peter Jones), the degradation of women
and the destruction of natural affection (" the wife beheld
unmoved the sufferings of her husband, and the amusement
of the mother was undisturbed by the painful crying of her
languishing child " ^). In religion the institution also had a
baneful effect ; the irrational restrictions, touch not, taste not,
handle not, which constitute formalism, are essentially taboos
— indispensable to the education of man at one period of his
development, but a bar to his progress later.
The growth of taboo, then, need not detain us. It is
amply accounted for by the fatal rapidity with w^hich, thanks
to the association of ideas, it spreads over the whole of savage
and even semi-civilised life. But the process by which taboo
has been converted into an element of civilisation calls for
some explanation. The facts with which we have to reckon
in our attempt are these : on the one hand, w^e have a net-
work of innumerable taboos covering the whole life of the
savage, restricting in the most irrational and injurious manner
his incomings and outgoings, his mode of eating, his family
life, his whole existence, from the time when he is taboo as a
new-born child to the time when he is a corpse, and as such
is equally taboo. On the other, in modern civilisation we
have all these taboos cast aside, except those whicli subserve
the cause of morality and religion, and those which lend their
force to the code of honour, social etiquette,, and minor morals
generally. Evidently a process of selection — " natural " or
otherwise — has been at work, and the problem is to discover
^ Ellis, Polynesian Researches, iv. 126.
90 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the nature of that process. We might surmise that the
selective agency has been experience. Mankind has dis-
covered by experience the baleful consequences of certain
taboos, the beneficial effects of others, and has retained the
latter while rejecting the former. Not all communities have
been equally alert in the work of discrimination ; the most
discriminating, the quickest to learn by experience, have fared
best, the fittest have survived. This theory has its recognised
place in moral philosophy under the title of " the Unconscious
Utilitarianism of Common Sense " ; unconsciously, but none
the less effectively, mankind has selected for condemnation as
immoral those actions which militate against utility, and has
exacted as a moral duty the performance of those which tend
to the general good.
The difficulty I have in accepting this theory is that it
fails to take into account one of the most marked features of
taboo. The very life of taboo as an institution depends on
the success with which it forbids the appeal to experience
and prevents experiments from being made. If the field
of experience were open freely to the savage, doubtless
repeated experiment would in course of time teach him, as
the theory of unconscious utilitarianism requires that it
should. But taboo closes the field to him. He dare not
make the experiments which, if made, would enlighten him.
Even if accidentally and unintentionally he is led to make such
an experiment, instead of profiting by the experience, he dies
of fright, as did the Australian slave who ate his master's
dinner ; or if he does not die, he is tabooed, excommunicated,
outlawed ; and his fate in either case strengthens the original
respect for taboo. The vicious circle with which taboo
surrounds the savage is exactly like that which " sympathetic
magic " weaves round him. The belief that " like produces
like " — which is the foundation of sympathetic magic — blinds
his eyes to the facts which should undeceive him, and the
teachings of experience fall consequently in vain on ears which
will not hear.
Now, the fallacy that like produces like stands in the same
relation to the positive belief in the uniformity of nature
that the transmissibility of taboo stands in to the negative
belief that some things there are which must not be done.
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 91
Each belief, the positive and the negative, is inherent in man's
mind and indispensable to his welfare. Each, however, is
rendered barren or misleading by a fallacy due solely to the
association of ideas. From the fallacy of magic man was
delivered by religion ; and there are reasons, I submit, for
believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the
irrational restrictions of taboo.
The reader will have noticed for himself that the action
of taboo is always mechanical; contact with the tabooed
object communicates the taboo infection as certainly as
contact with water communicates moisture, or an electric
current an electric shock. The intentions of the taboo-
breaker have no effect upon the action of the taboo ; he may
touch in ignorance, or for the benefit of the person he
touches, but he is tabooed as surely as if his motive were
irreverent or his action hostile. Nor does the mood of the
sacred persons, the Mikado, the Polynesian chief, the
priestess of Artemis Hymnia, modify the mechanical action
of taboo ; their touch or glance is as fatal to friend as foe, to
plant life as to human. Still less does the morality of the
taboo-breaker matter ; the penalty descends like rain alike
upon the unjust and the just. In a word, there is no
rational principle of action in the operation of taboo ; it is
mechanical ; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary
association of ideas ; irrational, because its principle is " that
causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative
connection in fact." ^
On the other hand, the dominant conception of modern
civilisation is that the universe is intelligible, that it is
constructed on rational principles, and that the reasons of
things may be discovered. This is the avowed axiom of
metaphysics, which aims at proving the truth of its axiom by
presenting an orderly and rational system of the universe.
It is the tacit assumption, or the faith, of science, as is
shown by the fact that, if a hypothesis, such as that of
evolution, fails to account for all the facts which it professes
to explain, the man of science infers, not that the facts them-
selves are unintelligible and not to be accounted for on
rational principles, but that his hypothesis is at fault. The
^ A. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 95.
92 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
same assumption is made by the religious sentiment, which,
even when most distressed, for example by the apparent
triumph of injustice or by problems such as that of the origin
of evil, still holds that the facts are capable ultimately of a
satisfactory explanation.
The advance, then, which civilisation has made on savagery
consists, partially at least, in shaking off the bonds imposed
upon the mind by the association of ideas, in seeking a
rational instead of a mechanical explanation of things ; in fine,
to return to the subject of this chapter, in the rationalisation
of taboo. Now, wherever the operation of taboo is accepted
as an ultimate fact which requires no explanation, there no
advance towards its rationalisation can be made, and progress
is impossible. But as soon as a taboo is taken up into
religion, its character is changed ; it is no longer an arbitrary
fact, it becomes the command of a divine being, who has
reasons for requiring obedience to his ordinances. Not all
taboos, however, are taken up into religion ; there is a process
of selection and rejection. To the consideration of this
process we shall return shortly ; here all we are concerned
with is to point out that when the taboos which receive the
sanction of religion are regarded as reasonable, as being the
commands of a being possessing reason, then the other taboos
also may be brought to the test of reason, and man may
gradually learn to disregard those which are manifestly
unreasonable. The conviction begins to gain strength that
God does not forbid things without a reason ; at the same
time, religion, by selecting certain taboos to receive its
sanction, strengthens them and thereby relatively weakens
the force of those which it rejects. The fact that the latter
have not received the religious sanction creates a presump-
tion that they are less binding, and makes it easier for man
to discard them if they have no reason and no utility.
Hence, all the elaborate precautions which are taken by the
savage to prevent his food from becoming tabooed, dwindle
down to the etiquette of the dining-table ; the removal of a
garment, lest it should be tabooed by the glance of a superior,
is etiolated into civilised man's form of salutation; and the
interdict from fire and water as a social penalty survives
only in the cut direct. But though restrictions which are
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 93
manifestly unreasonable and useless have to a large extent
been broken down, there are many which nevertheless
continue to exist, because they are associated with occasions
and feelings, not religious indeed, but still sacred, for instance,
the wearing of mourning. This reflection may serve to
remind us that pure reason has no great motor power, and
is only one of the factors in progress. Taboo has indeed
been rationalised, but not in all cases by reason. To under-
stand this we must return to the taboos taken up into
religion.
These taboos, as we have said, when they receive the
sanction of relTgion receive a different character ; they are no
longer arbitrary facts, they are rules of conduct enjoined by
a divine being. In the lower forms of religion they are
scarcely more rational than other savage taboos, " but the
restrictions on individual licence which are due to respect
for a known and friendly power allied to man, however
trivial and absurd they may appear to us in their details,
contain within them germinant principles of social progress
and moral order ... to restrain one's individual licence, not
out of slavish fear, but from respect for a higher and
beneficent power, is a moral discipline of which the value
does not altogether depend on the reasonableness of the
sacred restrictions ; an English schoolboy is subject to many
unreasonable taboos, which are not without their value in the
formation of character." ^ In the higher forms of religion,
however, the trivial and absurd restrictions are cast off, and
those alone retained and emphasised which are essential to
morality and religion. The higher forms of religion, however,
are the fewer ; the lower include the vast majority of man-
kind, and this fact suffices to show that there is nothing, even
in " the respect for a known and friendly power allied to
man," which makes it inevitable that religion should
automatically rise from lower forms to higher and the
highest, nor — to confine ourselves to the matter in hand — is
there anything automatic in the growing reasonableness of
the sacred restrictions of the higher religions. If one
religion differs from another in the reasonableness and moral
value of its restrictions, the difference is due to some
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 154.
^
94 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
difference in their conditions. If the religion of one nation
differs from that of another in this way, it must be due to
some difference in the two nations ; the one nation is more
capable than the other of distinguishing between the
restrictions which are trivial and the restrictions which are
of paramount importance for the progress of civilisation.
But on examination it becomes apparent that it is not the
mass of a nation which initiates any reform in religion, any
discovery in science, any new form of art, any new teaching
in morals. It is the individual reformer, artist or moral
teacher, who starts the new idea, though it rests with the
mass to accept his teaching. We have then two factors to
take into account : the individual and the community. As
regards the former, no one pretends to have discovered the
law of the distribution of genius, or to explain why one age
or nation should be rich in men of genius and another
barren. We can only accept the fact that Greece produced
more geniuses in literature and art than any other country,
and that there was a remarkable series of religious teachers
in Israel. There is no law to account for the one fact or
the other ; nor can the manifestations of genius be exhibited
as the natural consequence of any general conditions. On
the other hand, the behaviour of the mass or generality of
the nation in face of the new teaching may be traced to the
general conditions at work upon them, and the law of the
direction which the new teaching took among them may
perhaps be ascertained ; " and after all it is for the most part
the conditions only, and not the originating causes of great
spiritual movements, which admit of analysis at the hands of
the historian." ^
It seems, then, that it is individual religious reformers
who have carried out the selective process by which the
innumerable taboos of savage life have been reduced to the
reasonable restrictions which are essential to the well-being
of mankind. And the prophets and religious teachers who
have selected this and rejected that restriction have usually
considered themselves in so doing to be speaking, not their
own words or thoughts, but those of their God. This beHef
has been shared by the community they addressed, otherwise
^ Piashdall, Universities of EuropCy i. 32.
TABOO, MORALITY, AND RELIGION 95
the common man would not have gained the courage to
break an ancient taboo. Certainly no mere appeal to reason
would counterbalance that inveterate terror, just as it was
no mere consideration of utility or of purely human interests
which supplied the religious reformer with his zeal, or that
prompted the denunciations of the prophets. Their message
was a supernatural message ; and in the same way the
process by which mischievous taboos were weeded out may
be termed a process not of Natural but of Supernatural
Selection.
CHAPTER IX
TOTEMISM
The last three chapters, though absolutely necessary for our
purpose, have been somewhat of a digression from the direct
line of the argument. The occasion of the digression was
the necessity of examining the subject of taboo generally, in
order to acertain whether the corpse-taboo necessarily implied
hostility on the part of the spirit of the dead man and
consequent fear on the part of the living. Various reasons
have been suggested in the course of the digression^ for
answering this question in the negative ; and if these reasons
be accepted, we are free to believe that the feasts in which
the dead were invited to partake were the spontaneous
expressions of natural affection ; and that the possibility of
dealings between man and spiritual beings may thus have
been suggested in the first instance. That the desire existed
in man to approach the supernatural beings by which he
was surrounded, will hardly be doubted, for the importance
of conciliating beings with irresistible power for good and for
evil was of the highest. It is clear also that the friendship
or alliance which man sought to establish between himself
and the spirits that he conceived to be supernatural, would be
modelled on that which bound together human friends or
allies, for there was no other form of alliance or friendship
known to him. We have therefore to ask what was the
earliest tie which bound man to man ; in other words, what
was the earliest form of society ?
That the nations of the world, before they settled in the
countries now occupied by them, were wanderers on the face
of the earth, nomads, is a matter which in the case of some
^ See above, pp. 80, 81,
96
TOTEMISM 97
peoples admits of historic proof, and is not doubted in the
case of the rest. The form which society takes amongst
nomads is that of tribes or clans, the members of which are
akin (however they count kinship) to one another. The
normal attitude of these clans to one another is that of
hostility ; consequently the very existence of a clan depends
upon the promptitude and success with which the whole of
the small community comes to the rescue of any one of its
members when threatened with danger, or, if too late to save
his life, inflicts punishment on the hostile clan. On the
other hand, not merely the slayer but all his kin are
responsible for his deed : if their clan is to exist, they must
protect him as any other member with their united strength ;
and hence, as the kinsmen of the slain man have the whole
of the slayer's clan arrayed against them, it is immaterial to
them whether they avenge themselves upon the actual slayer
or not, as long as they kill some one of his clan. Thus the
individual's only safety was in the help and protection of
the clan to which he belonged : outside that circle he was
helpless and alone. In fine, the only type of friendship
known to man, in this stage of society, is that of clansmen
one to another, each of whom is ready to lay down his life
to protect or avenge his kinsman.^ But if a man — or any
other being, for the matter of that — is not by birth one of
your kin, how then is it possible to form any friendly
relation, to enter into any engagement or compact with him ?
There is only one way : if he is not by birth one of your clan,
he must become one ; if the same blood does not circulate in
your veins, it must be introduced into them ; in a word, a
blood-covenant must be made between you, and then the
fellowship between you becomes sacred and inviolable, for you
are now kinsmen, one flesh and one blood. Examples of
this proceeding are to be found all over the world ; one or
two may be given here. " The exchange of blood is often
practised amongst the blacks of Africa, as a token of alliance
^ That the blood- feud is a world-wide and universal institution is so well
known that illustrations of it are unnecessary. A good collection will be found
in Post, Die Geschlechtsgenossenschaft cler Urzeit, 155-174. Other instances :
Uobrizhoffer, Abipones, ii. 280 ; Im Thurn, Indians of G-uianai 329 ; Joum. of
Anth. Inst. xxiv. 171 ff. ; Bastian, Dcr Mensch, iii. 25, 26.
98 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
and friendship. The Mambettu people, after having inflicted
small wounds upon each other's arms, reciprocally suck the
blood which flows from the incision. In the Unyora country
the parties dip two coffee-berries into the blood and eat them.
Amongst the Sandeh the proceedings are not so repulsive ;
the operator, armed with two sharp knives, inoculates the
blood of one person into the wound of the other." ^ The
exact manner in which this last operation is performed is
described by Mr. Ward, who himself submitted to it. After
noting that blood-brotherhood is " a form of cementing
friendship and a guarantee of good faith, popular with all
Upper Congo tribes," he proceeds : " An incision was made in
both our right arms, in the outer muscular swelling just bslow
the elbow, and as the blood flowed in a tiny stream, the
charm doctor sprinkled powdered chalk and potash on the
wounds, delivering the while, in rapid tones, an appeal to us
to maintain unbroken the sanctity of the contract ; and then
our arms being rubbed together, so that the flowing blood
intermingled, we were declared to be brothers of one blood,
whose interests henceforth should be united as ou' blood
now was." - In Surinam, when natives make a com>act, the
Godoman (priest) draws blood from the contracting parties,
pours some on the ground, and gives them the rest t' drink.^
The ancient Scyths preferred to drink the blood. Hi^'odotus *
says they poured into a great bowl wine mixed vith the
blood of the contracting parties ; then they dipped into the
bowl a dagger, some arrows, an axe, and a javelin, 'Hd when
they had done that, they made many imprecations £id drank
of the bowl, both they and the most distinguishec of their
followers. Again, " the drinking of blood on the ocasion of
an alliance, compact, or oath, was common among i© ancient
Magyars. The anonymous Notarius of King Bela.'c. 5. 6)
says, more imganismo fusis projyriis sanguinihus in niim vas
ratum fecerunt hiramentum'' ^ Among the Souther Slavs to
this day blood-feuds are common, and may be termina^d by the
parties to the feud becoming blood-brothers. This^ effected
^ Casati, Ten Years in Equatoria, i. 177.
^ Ward, Five Years with the Congo Cannibals, 131.
2 Bastian, Dcr Mcnsch, ii. 299. ^ Hdt. iv. 0-
'' Am UrqnaU, iii. 270.
TOTEMISM 99
by a representative of one hratstva sucking blood from the
vein of the right wrist of a representative of the other
hratstva, whereby all the members of the one clan become
blood-brothers to all the members of the other. Mohammedan
women do not veil themselves in the presence of such blood-
brothers, even if Christians, any more than they would before
their other blood-relations.""" This last instance is important,
because it faithfully preserves the primitive view that the
blood-brotherhood thus established is not a relationship
personal to the two parties alone, but extends to the whole
of each clan : my brother is, or becomes, the brother of all
my brethren ; the blood which flows in the veins of either
party to the blood-covenant flows in the veins of all his
kin.
Thus in this the most primitive form of society, men were
divided into clans or tribes ; these tribes were usually hostile
to one another, but might by means of the blood-covenant
make alliance with one another. The individual only existed
as long as he was protected by his clan ; he can scarcely be
said to have had an individual existence, so crushing was the
solidarity which bound kinsmen together under the pressure
of the clan's struggle for existence with other clans. If the
individual kinsman slew a stranger, the whole kin were
responsible ; if he was slain by a stranger, they all required
satisfaction. If the individual kinsman made a blood-
covenant with a stranger, the whole of each tribe was bound
thereby.
It was inevitable, therefore, that man, who imagined all
things, animate or inanimate, to think and act and feel like
himself, should imagine that the societies of these other
spirits was organised like the only society of which he had
any knowledge, namely, that form of human society into which
he himself was born. In so doing, primitive man was but
anticipating the Homeric Greek who modelled the society of
Olympus on an earthly pattern. Now, the things by which
man is surrounded are as a matter of fact divided into natural
kinds, genera and species ; and it is small wonder if man
detected a resemblance between the natural kinds of animals,
plants, etc., and the kins or clans into which human society
^ Am Urquelly i. 196.
100 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was divided. That he actually did consider these classes of
objects as organisations of the same kind as human clans, is
shown by the fact that savages have blood-feuds with these
natural kinds as they w^ould with clans of human beings.
Amongst the Kookies, a man's whole tribe takes vengeance if
one of them is killed by an animal or any wild beast ; and if
a tree has fallen on him and killed him, it is cut up by them
into the finest splinters, which are scattered to the winds : ^
it is not essential that the very animal should be killed, but
only that it should be one of the same species. ^ On the
other hand, it is believed that the whole of the animal's clan
will take up the blood-feud on behalf of any one of them
against men. The Lapps and Ostiaks dread a blood-feud
with the Bear clan, and accordingly, before killing a bear, they
try to persuade him to fall a willing sacrifice, by explaining
to him at length the exalted and flattering uses to which his
flesh, fat, and pelt will be put.^ The Arabs in the same way
must apologise to an animal before killing it.^ " It is
generally believed by the natives of Madagascar, that the
crocodile never, except to avenge an injury, destroys innocent
persons " ; ^ an aged native about to cross a river " addressed
himself to the crocodile, urging him to do him no injurj^,
because he had never done him (the crocodile) any ; and
assuring him that he had never engaged in war against any
of his species ... at the same time adding, that if he came
to attack him, vengeance, sooner or later, would follow ; and
that if he devoured him, all his relatives and all his race
would declare war against him." ^ The Indians of Guiana
endeavour also to avert blood-feuds with animals. " Before
leaving a temporary camp in the forest, where they have
killed a tapir and dried the meat on a babracot, Indians
invariably destroy this babracot, saying that should a tapir,
passing that way, find traces of the slaughter of one of his
kind, he would come by night on the next occasion when
Indians slept at that place, and, taking a man, would
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 25.
- Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 286, referring to As. Res. vii. 189.
2 Bastian, Der Meiisch, iii. 5. ** Ibid. 6.
5 Ellis, History of Madagascar, i. 53.
^ Ibid, 57, quoting "Monsieur de V., whose voyage to Madagascar was
published in 1722."
TOTEMISM 101
babracot him in revenge."-^ It is not, therefore, surprising if
man can have blood-feuds with animal clans as he has with
human, that he should seek to establish an alliance with one
of these kinds of beings, in the same way and on the same
principle as with one of the various human kins with which
he ceime in contact. It is to be presumed that in the choice
of an ally he would prefer the kind which he believed to
possess supernatural powers, or if several possessed such
powers, then the kind or species which possessed the greatest
power. In any case, however, it was not, and from the
nature of the circumstances could not be, an individual
supernatural being with which he sought alliance, but a class
or kind of beings with supernatural powers. Bat this is
precisely a totem. Y A totem is never an isolated individual,
but always a class of objects, generally a species of animals
or of plants, more rarely a class of inanimate natural objects,
very rarely a class of artificial objects."^ "It is not merely
an individual, but the species that is reverenced." ^ Thus, if
the owl be a totem, as in Samoa, and an owl was found dead,
" this was not the death of the god : he was supposed to be
yet alive and incarnate in all the owls in existence."* But
just as it was impossible in the then stage of society to make
an alliance with a single member of another kin or kind, and
therefore it was always the species and never an individual
merely that became a totem, so it was impossible for the
compact to be made between the totem species and one
individual man — it was also and necessarily a covenant
between the clan and the class of objects chosen as a totem.
In other words, from the beginning religion was not an affair
which concerned the individual only, but one which demanded
the co-operation of the whole community ; and a religious
community was the earliest form of society.
As a clan consists of those in whose veins the same blood
runs, and who are therefore one flesh, the totem animal is
spoken of, by the Mount Gambler tribe for instance, as being
their tumanaiig, i.e. their flesh, and is treated in all respects
as a clansman. Now, in the primitive, nomad stage, the most
sacred and inviolable duty is to respect the blood of the kin :
^ Im Tliurn, Indians of Gidana, 352. - Frazer, Totemism, 2.
^ Ibid, 15. ■* Turner, Samoa, 21.
102 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
a clan in which the kinsmen should shed each other's blood
would speedily perish ; only those clans could survive in the
struggle for existence which rigorously observed this funda-
mental duty. All blood, even of animals, was, as we have
seen, taboo, but the blood of a kinsman was even more, it was
sacred : the restriction, by this change in its content, is raised
from the taboo-level to the plane of morality. In times
when it became possible or customary to accept compensation,
wer-geld, for the slaying of a clansman, in lieu of the blood
which could alone originally atone for his death, no com-
pensation could be accepted for the killing of a clansman by
a clansman. It was the unpardonable offence ; the Erinyes
of a dead kinsman were implacable. In this case, and this
case alone, killing was murder. Now the totem animal is a
clansman, and its life therefore is sacred : a man never kills
his totem ; to do so would be murder. Thus the Osages
" abstained from hunting the beaver, ' because in killing that
animal they killed a brother of the Osages.' " ■'■ Abstaining
from killing his totem, he also endeavours to protect it from
being killed by others ; and if he fails to do so, then, amongst
the Indians of Columbia, " he will demand compensation," ^
as he would for the death of any other kinsman. The dead
totem animal is mourned for and buried with the same
ceremonies as a clansman. In Samoa, " if a man found a dead
owl by the roadside, and if that happened to be the incarna-
tion of his village god, he would sit down and weep over it
and beat his forehead with stones till the blood flowed." ^
Of all food, the totem is most taboo ; death and sicknesses of
various kinds are believed to be the consequence, if a man
eats, even unwittingly, of his totem animal or plant. Like
other things taboo, the totem as food is dangerous even to
see ; and it is well generally to avoid mentioning its name.
As the totem animal becomes a member of the human
clan, so the human clansman becomes a member of the
animal's clan. This he indicates " by dressing in the skin
or other part of the totem animal, arranging his hair and
mutilating his body so as to resemble the totem." ^ Thus,
among the Thlinkets, at a funeral feast a relative of the
^ Frazer, 8, quoting Lems aud Clark, i. 12. ^ Frazer, 8.
^ Turner, Niiieteen Years in Polynesia, 242. ^ Frazer, 26.
TOTEMISM 103
deceased appears clad in the dress that represents the totem,
and is welcomed by the assembly with the cry of the animal.^
Amongst the lowas, "the Buffalo clan wear two locks of hair
in imitation of horns." ^ Various peoples chip their teeth so
that they resemble the teeth of cats, crocodiles, or other
animals.
It is at the great crises of life that the totem dress is
especially worn, for thus the wearer is placed under the close
protection of the totem. The child, which at birth is taboo,
and as such is outside the community just as much as a
person who has been tabooed or outlawed, is received into
" the savage church," ^ by being dressed or painted to resemble
the tribal totem. The skin of the sheep, on which, at a
Eoman marriage, the bride and bridegroom were made to
sit, may be a relic of totemism.*
At death, the clansman was supposed to join his totem
and to assume the totem animal's form — this was intimated
sometimes by a ceremony such as that of the Thlinkets
described above, and sometimes by the grave-post or tomb-
stone. " In Armenia proper the oldest grave-stones are cut
into the shape of a crouching ram with the inscription on the
side of the body." ^ In Luzon a deceased chieftain is laid in
a monument shaped like a buffalo or a pig ; ^ and the Negritos
bury in a tomb roughly shaped to resemble an ox or a boar.''
Again, the ceremonies which amongst savage races generally
accompany " the introduction of the young to complete man-
hood or womanhood, and to full participation in the savage
church," which ceremonies " correspond, in short, to confirma-
tion," ^ are a part of totemism. Their design, or the leading
part of their design, is to communicate to him the blood of
the totem and the clan, and thus to unite him a second time
and more closely to the community in its religious aspect.
In the Dieyerie tribe of Australians the ceremony is thus
described : the boy is taken and his arm bound to the arm
of an old man ; the latter 's vein is opened above the elbow
^ Bastiai], RechtsverhaUnisse, 295. ^ Frazer, 27.
^ The phrase is Mr. A. Lang's, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i. 281.
•^ Frazer, 34. ^ Bastian, RechtsverMltnisse, 293.
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 272. 7 Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 231.
^ Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Religion, i, 281.
104 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
and his blood allowed to flow over the boy. Another and
another man is substituted, until the boy is completely
covered with blood,^ and thus is made effectually one blood
with the tribe. The blood is the life ; and that the ceremony
is intended to give a new life to the youth, and to be a new
birth for him, is proved by the fact that in some tribes the
youth is supposed first to be killed and then after initiation
has to pretend to forget all that ever he did or was before the
ceremony ; whilst in others a mimetic representation of the
resurrection of a clansman accompanies the ceremony.
As the totem animal is a member of his human clansmen's
tribe and the clansmen are members of the animal's clan, it
follows that men and totem animals are descended from a
common ancestor, which common ancestor is universally
conceived by primitive totem clans to have been animal and
not human ; and myths are accordingly invented to account for
the fact that some of his descendants have assumed human
form, " thus the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are descended from
a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight of its shell in
walking, contrived by great exertions to throw it off, and
thereafter gradually developed into a man." ^ When totemism
is decaying, myths are invented with precisely the opposite
purpose, namely, to explain how it was that the ancestor ever
assumed animal form. The " metamorphoses " of the gods in
Greek mythology are probably thus to be accounted for, as
Mr. Lang has argued in his Myth, Ritual, and Religion.
Let us now see how this alliance between a human kin
and a species of natural objects, conceived as superhuman,
affected the parties to it. Man's attitude to the world around
him was at once changed : he had gained the supernatural
ally he sought, and thus was enabled to make that free use
of nature which was the condition of material progress, but
which was debarred him by the restrictions imposed upon his
action by fear of supernatural terrors. But his ally's place
in nature was also changed by the alliance : this supernatural
power was distinguished from all others by the fact that it
was in alliance with him. It became a permanently friendly
power ; in a word, it became a god, whereas all other spirits
remained evil, or at anyrate hostile powers, by whom a man
^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 171. ^ Frazer, 3.
TOTEMISM 105
could only expect to be treated as he was treated by — and as
indeed he himself treated — members of a strange clan. Other
tribes might and did have their supernatural allies, as my
clan had, and those allies were gods, because they had a
definite circle of worshippers whom they permanently assisted,
but they were no gods of mine. But these two classes of
supernatural powers did not exhaust the world of superhuman
spirits : there were spirits not attached to any human clan,
having no circle of worshippers to whom they were friendly;
that is to say, they were hostile to all men, implacable.
In a previous chapter ^ we have examined and combated
the view that man begins by endeavouring to constrain and
coerce the supernatural powers by which he conceives himself
to be surrounded ; and that he is encouraged to use such
compulsion either because he has not yet learnt to distinguish
between the natural and the supernatural, and therefore
believes himself to be as strong as these spirits, or because he
thinks himself to possess magical powers and so to be
stronger than they. Now, this view, that man feels himself
a match or more than a match for the non-human powers by
which he is surrounded, is absolutely opposed to the abject
terror in which savages stand towards these spirits. What
Mr. Im Thurn says of the Indians of Guiana is true of all
savages : " It is almost impossible to overestimate the dreadful
sense of constant and unavoidable danger in which the Indian
would live, were it not for his trust in the protecting power of
his peaiman." ^ There is, however, an argument in support of
this view, which we did not mention at the time, because the
proper reply to it would have required us to anticipate this
chapter. The argument is that — the lowest savages having
none but material conceptions of the universe — evil spirits
originally " are dealt with by mere physical force " ; ^ and
instances may be found of the forcible, physical expulsion of
evil spirits.* But — to say nothing of the fact that taboo, the
most potent influence over the savage mind, is not a material
'^ Supra, pp. 24flf., 35 ff.
2 Im Thurn, Indians of Guiana, 333. The peaiman "is not simply the
doctor, but also in some sense the priest," p. 328.
'^ Payne, New World, i. 390.
^ Payne, loc. cit., and Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 158-182.
106 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
conception^ — forcible expulsion of evil spirits is in the
majority of cases one part of an annual ceremony, of which
an essential feature is some rite or other for gaining the
protection of the friendly god as a preliminary to this combat
with the evil spirits. Probably more accurate observation
would show that the assistance of a supernatural ally is a
sine qud non of all such demonstrations. At anyrate, if
totemism may be taken to be a stage of development through
which all peoples have passed, we may fairly argue that it was
the consciousness of possessing a supernatural ally which first
nerved the savage to attack a supernatural power.
Other writers, again, rightly recognising that the ruling
desire of the savage is to avoid giving offence to the many
evil spirits, have not only jumped to the conclusion that
religion was born of fear — ^^:)Wm2^s in orhe timor fecit deos —
but have been led by the prejudice to mal-observation of the
facts of savage life. For instance, it was in North America
that totemism flourished to a degree unequalled elsewhere
save in Australia ; and yet " amongst all of the American
tribes the worship of spirits that are malicious and not of
those that are good, is a characteristic that has been noticed
with much astonishment, and commented upon by travellers
and other writers " ^ — the fact being simply that the totem-
god is left out of account by these writers. " Pure unmixed
devil-worship prevails through the length and breadth of the
land," says another writer,^ who perhaps, however, only means
by " devil-worship " the worship of false gods, just as so many
travellers apply the term " sorcerer " to men whose function
in the community is actually to counteract magic and sorcery,
and who are then quoted to show that the priest is evolved
out of the sorcerer and religion out of magic. " But however
true it is that savage man feels himself to be environed by
innumerable dangers which he does not understand, and so
personifies as invisible or mysterious enemies of more than
human power, it is not true that the attempt to appease these
powers is the foundation of religion. From the earliest times,
J^ religion, as distinct from magic or sorcery, addresses itself to
—t kindred and friendly beings, who may indeed be angry with
^ Siipra, p. 68. " Dorman, Primlih-e Superstitions, 30.
^ Shea, Catholic Missions, 25.
TOTEMISM 107
their people for a time, but are always placable except to the
enemies of their worshippers or to renegade members of the
community. It is not with a vague fear of unknown powers,
but with a loving reverence for known gods who are knit to
their worshippers by strong bonds of kinship, that religion
in the only true sense of the word begins." ^ " When the
Spanish missionaries questioned the Indians as to the origin
of their gods, the usual reply was that they had come from
the air or heaven to dwell among them and do them good."^
The last words, which are not quite reconcilable with the
view that religion sprang from fear, express the native view.
In virtue of the kinship between the god and his
worshippers, the killing of a fellow-clansman comes to be
regarded in a totem-clan as the same thing as killing the
god. In Mangaia " such a blow was regarded as falling upon
the god [totem] himself ; the literal sense of ta atua [to kill
a member of the same totem-clan] being god-striking or god-
killing."^ Thus the blood-taboo, which became an element
of morality when it lent its force to the respect for kindred
blood, is now taken up into religion, and murder becomes not
only a moral but a religious offence. That the taboo on
new-born children and immature youths was made to yield
a higher significance when taken up by totemism, we have
already noted.* Here we need only add that the initiation
to which the youth was subjected is not merely ceremonial,
but is generally accompanied by such moral teaching as the
savage is capable of. Amongst the Koranas the boy is taught
not to steal, not to jeer at the weak or unfortunate, not to
drink the milk of goat or sheep, and not to eat the flesh of
jackal or hare.^
Thus loyalty to the clan-god is loyalty not merely to the
totem, but to the morality which, though elementary, is the
highest the savage knows ; and fidelity to the clan-god
involved hostility to false gods, for as the clans of men were
1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 55.
2 Payne, Mw World, i. 397.
2 Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, 38, and Frazer, 58.
^ Supra, p. 103. Children are often considered taboo, and therefore outside
the community, until they grow up and are initiated.
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 291.
108 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
hostile one to another, so were their gods. Hence the god
of each tribe protected his own men, and went in person with
them to war — an idea which totemism bequeathed to more
advanced stages in religion, for instance to Peruvian poly-
theism. " During the revolt of the Collao . . . the Colla
warriors . . . carried an idol of the Sun during the cam-
paign " ; ^ and to the polytheistic negroes of the Gold Coast,
where " in time of war the struggle is not carried on by the
opposing tribes alone, for the protecting deities of each side
are believed also to be contending together, each striving to
achieve success for his own people ; and they are believed to
be as much interested in the result of the war as the people
engaged."^ As loyalty to the god of the community is a
sentiment without which monotheism could never have
triumphed over lower forms of belief, so the recognition that
there could be other (hostile) gods as well as the god of a
man's own clan was the germ of polytheism. It is only by
the fusion of several tribes that a nation can be created, and
this fusion carries with it — or is caused by — the amalgama-
tion of their respective cults. But this only takes place after
totem times, when the nomad clan has become the village
community.
The relation between the human kin and the totem
species, which at first is one of alliance, and therefore, in
consequence of the blood-covenant, one of blood-relationship,
eventually changes its character somewhat, for the kinship
between men and animals comes to require explanation. The
requisite explanation is afforded by a myth which makes
the original ancestor of the two kins an animal. Hence the
members of the human community become the god's children,
and the god their father — not the actual, human father who
begat them, for he is alive (and when he dies, his death makes
no difference), but a hypothetical father, so to speak, i.e. one
that reason led them to assume, as the only way of account-
ing for the actual facts (namely, their kinship with their
totem) ; and the verification of this primitive hypothesis was
found by them in their inner experience, i.e. in the filial
reverence and affection which they felt towards him. Doubt-
less it was not all or most men who had this experience, or
^ Payne, New World, i. 515. ^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 77.
TOTEMISM 109
rather it was but few who attended to the feeling, but the
best must have paid heed to it and have found satisfaction in
dwelHng on it, else the conception of the deity would never
have followed the line on which as a matter of fact it developed.
The result was that the god tended to be conceived — and, when
the time for art came, to be represented — no longer in animal
but in human form.
The compact between the clan and its supernatural ally
not only altered the relation of each to the rest of the
universe, but it also changed the relation of the clansmen to
one another. Henceforth they were united not only by
blood but by religion : they were not merely a society but a
religious community. The aid rendered by the god to the
clan in its conflicts with its enemies, human or superhuman,
and his habitual affection for his own people, constituted a
claim both upon each member of the community and upon
the community as a whole. Hence, if any man offended the
clan-god, the god's quarrel was taken up by the whole of the
rest of the community, and by them, if necessary, the offender
was punished and the god avenged. The acts which offended
him were, roughly speaking, things which, according to the
savage's cl priori feeling, " must not be done," i.e. are taboo,
such as intruding upon the god's privacy, or having to do
with persons outside the community, namely, new-born
children, strangers, and outlaws, or coming into contact with
blood, and so on. Some of these acts, e.g. the shedding of
kindred blood, are condemned by us as immoral and sinful ;
we can therefore hardly blame the savage, to whom they were
all equally repugnant, for treating them all as offences both
against the community and against the god, and punishing
them as such. In this joint action of the community as a
collective whole, prompted by religion, we have the first
appearance of what was hereafter to be the state — the first,
because here the authority of the community is not delegated,
as it is when a war-leader is elected : the method of execut-
ing the criminal is stoning, in which the whole community
joins.
If it is in love and not in fear that religion in any true
sense of the word has its origin, it is none the less true that
fear — not of irrational dangers, but of deserved punishment —
110 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
is essential to the moral and religious education of man : it is
" the fear of the Lord " that is " the beginning of wisdom."
That the lowest savages are a perpetual prey to irrational
terror, and believe sickness and death to be unnatural and to
be the work in all cases of evil spirits, is matter of common
knowledge. It was inevitable, therefore, that the supernatural
ally of a human kin should continue to exercise this power
of causing disease and death. But whereas the belief that
disease is due to evil spirits is fatal not only to a right
understanding of the action of natural causes and to all
intellectual progress, but also prevents fear from becoming an
instrument in the moral education of man, the ascription of
^^ickness to the agency of a friendly power has a different
result. This action on his part, his departure from the
usually benevolent behaviour shown by him to his own people,
can only be explained by the assumption that he has been in
some way offended by them. The possible modes of offence
are known ; they are such as have been mentioned in the
last paragraph, and though they at first include many which
religion, as it advances, sets aside by a process of " super-
natural selection," they include offences which we recognise
to be immoral, and on the checking of which the further
progress of morality depended. But in that the earliest
stage of society, unless the restrictions which we see to be
irrational, and stigmatise as taboos, had been enforced, neither
could those have been enforced which really contained the
germs of morality.
We have seen, at the beginning of this chapter, that
there was one such restriction (against shedding kindred
blood) on which not merely the morality but the very exist-
ence of the clan depended, and that the mere fact of a clan's
survival in the struggle for existence is proof conclusive that
the restriction was obeyed. But though a clan's survival
proves that the restriction must have been obeyed, it does not
show what it was that made the clansmen obey it. In some
clans it was not obeyed, and those clans perished. That a
dim perception of the utility, perhaps of the necessity, of
curbing personal animosity may have existed, we will admit.
But that a savage, smarting under personal resentment, would
stay his hand, out of consideration for such a remote and
TOTEMISM 111
uncertaiu contingency as the possibility of eventual injury
to a future generation, is a supposition opposed to all we
know of savages. There must have been some other motive,
and that a strong one, appealing to personal fear. That
motive was doubtless in part supplied by fear of punishment
at the hands of the collective community. But such punish-
ment was only meted out when the offence was against the
god of the community ; and what stimulated the community
to its duty in this regard was the manifestation from time to
time of the god's wrath, in the shape of pestilence, etc.,
betokening that an offence had been committed against him.
Thus in Peru, in the time of the Incas, "when any general
calamity occurred, the members of the community were
rigorously examined, until the sinner was discovered and
compelled to make reparation " ; ^ and the same interpretation
was put upon private calamity, e.g. amongst the Abipones,
" at his first coming the physician overwhelms the sick man
with an hundred questions : ' Where were you yesterday ? '
says he. ' What roads did you tread ? Did you overturn
the jug and spill the drink prepared from the maize ?
What? have you imprudently given the flesh of a tortoise,
stag, or boar [totem-gods] to be devoured by dogs ? ' Should
the sick man confess to having done any of these things,
' It is well,' replies the physician, ' we have discovered the
cause of your disorder.' " ^ The same thing is reported from
Mexico, Peru, Honduras, Yucatan, Salvador,^ and was common
enough in other quarters of the globe. Nor must it be
supposed that it was only offences against ritual that provoked
the god to manifest his displeasure. " In Tahiti, sickness
was the occasion for making reparation for past sins, e.g.
by restoring stolen property."^ But sickness and public
calamities are not perpetual, and as " sanctions " they are
external at the best : they are too intermittent and accidental
to exert the uniform pressure necessary if any permanent
moral advance is to be made, and they rather punish than
prevent transgression. It is not only external and physical
1 Payne, New World, i. 443.
2 Dobrizhoffer, History of the Abipones, ii. IS.
^ Dorman, Primitive Superstitions^ 57.
"^ "VVaitz, Anthropiologie, vi. 396.
112 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
punishment which enforces the restrictions essential to the
tribe's existence, but also the internal consciousness of having
disregarded the claim which the affection of the protecting
clan-god for his people establishes on one and all of the
community.. In a word, from the beginning, offences against
I the community are felt not only as immoral but also as sins.
To the external sequence of calamity consequent upon
transgression there corresponds the internal sense of lesion
in the bond of mutual goodwill which marks the alliance
between the clansmen and their god.
We have now examined the way in which men and gods
were affected respectively by the alliance formed between
them. But what shall we say of the third member to the
alliance, the totem species of plant or animal ? did it remain
unaffected by the^ alliance ? Mr. Frazer concludes his
Totemism with the following pregnant passage : " Considering
the far-reaching effects produced on the fauna and flora of a
district by the preservation or extinction of a single species
of animals or plants, it appears probable that the tendency
of totemism to preserve certain , species of plants and animals
must have largely influenced the organic life of the countries
where it has prevailed. But this question, with the kindred
question of the bearing of totemism on the original domestica-
tion of animals and plants, is beyond the scope of the present
article." ^ Neither has a history of religion anything appar-
ently to do with the domestication -of plants and animals.
, Yet it is only by taking it as our starting-point that we can
solve the difficult and important problem, why so few traces
of totemism are to be found in the great ciAolisations of thfe
world.
^ Frazer, Totemism, 95, 96.
CHAPTEE X
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM
Important as totemism is as a stage of religious development,
it ^s almost more important in the history of material civilisa-
tion, for totemism was the prime motor of all material
progress. Material progress means the accumulation of
wealth. Of the various forms which wealth can take, the
most important is food, for until food is provided it is
impossible to proceed to the production of any other kind
of wealth. If the whole time and energies of a community
are exhausted in scraping together just enough food to carry
on with, there is no leisure or strength left for the production
of any other kind of wealth. Now, that is the case in which
those nomad clans find themselves who depend for their
food aipon hunting, fishing, and ^the gathering of fruits and
roots — the " natural basis of subsistence." ^ But with those
wan:dering clans which succeed in domesticating the cow,
sheep, goat, and other animals, the case is very different.
The labour of obtaining food is greatly economised, and the
labour thus set free can be employed in the production of
those other kinds of wealth which constitute the riches of a
pastoral people. When cereals and other food-plants come
to be cultivated, and agriculture makes a wandering life no
longer possible, food-production is still further quickened,
and " the substitution of an artificial for a natural basis of
subsistence " 2 is completed. Until this substitution takes
place, civilisation is impossible ; and whatever started this
substitution, i.e. led to the domestication of plants and
animals, started the movement of material progress.
Now, of the innumerable species of plants and animals
^T&jne, New TForld, i. 27 Q. ^ ^Ihid.
8
114 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
which exist or have existed on the face of the earth, only
a relatively very small number are capable of domestication ;
and before they were brought under cultivation there was
nothing whatever in their appearance or in man's scanty
experience to indicate that they, and they alone, could be
domesticated. How, then, did he light upon exactly those
kinds which were capable of cultivation ? Simply by trying
all. Those kinds which were incapable of domestication
remained wild ; the few that could be cultivated became
our domestic animals and plants. But though man " tried "
all kinds, he was not aware that he was making experiments,
still less that the consequence of his attempts would be the
" domestication " of certain species. How could he be, when
the very idea of " domestic animals " had not yet dawned
upon man's mind ? It could, then, have been no considera-
tion of utility, no prospective personal benefit, no foresight
of the consequences, that made man all over the globe
attempt to domesticate every species of animal that he came
across — indeed, he did not know that he was " domesticating "
it.^ The suggestion that his motive was amusement ^ does
not supply an adequate cause ; granted that amusement might
lead a man here and there to capture an animal and try to
tame it, we cannot suppose the whole human race in every
latitude and on every continent giving itself up to this kind
of " amusement," as we must suppose, if we are thus to
account for the domestication of animals — to say nothing
of plants. And when we bear in mind that the savage is
usually incapable of steady, continuous, persistent effort, we
shall require a more potent cause than amusement as a
motive for the long labour of domestication. But in totemism
we have a cause persistent, world-wide, and adequate to
account for the facts. The totem animal, not merely an
individual but the whole species, is reverenced, protected,
and allowed, or rather encouraged to increase and multiply
over the whole area traversed by the tribe — and the area
^ The above argument is borrowed from Galton, Inquiries into Human
FaciUty, 243-270. He also recognises the sanctity of certain animals as one of
the causes leading to the domestication of animals, but does not mention
totemism, and thinks that the savage's habit of making pets is the chief cause.
2 Lord Karnes, Sketches, bk. i. sk. 1 (Payne, 282).
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 115
required for the support of a nomad family is considerable.
This treatment is continued for generations, for it is the
religion of the tribe. The appearance of the animal is
welcomed with rejoicing as the manifestation of the tribal
deity, offerings are made to it, and, being free from molesta-
tion, it discovers the fact, acquires confidence, and if it has
the instinct of domestication, ceases to be wild. In a word,
the animal becomes tame — which is a different thing from
being tamed.
It may perhaps seem inconsistent with this theory of
the origin of an artificial food-supply, that the totem is never
consumed as food. But it is not by eating their cattle that
a pastoral people become rich, but by abstaining from eating
them. The cattle are their capital ; the interest thereof, on
which they live, consists of the milk and its products. It
is not until nomad life is given up and agriculture has
provided another and even more abundant source of food,
that the community becomes rich enough to afford to eat the
flesh of their cattle ; and by that time the clan, of which
the totem was an honoured member, and to which its flesh
was taboo, has itself dissolved and made way for those local
organisations which hold a nation together. In the same
way, it is not by consuming corn that wheat is grown, but
by abstaining from its consumption. To make it an extinct
species, all that is required is to consume every ear of corn
existing. The savage required no teaching in the art of
consumption ; it is the lesson of abstinence which it is hard
for him to learn. That lesson he was incapable of teaching
himself, but totemism taught him. The fact that the
agricultural is universally a later stage in the development
of civilisation than the pastoral, is, we may conjecture,
because animal preceded plant totems : animals have the
blood which is necessary for the blood-covenant between the
human kin and the totem kind ; and it was only later that
plants possessing a sap or juice which may act as blood,
especially if it is reddish in colour, came to be adopted as
totems.
The domestication of plants is a question to which we
shall recur in a subsequent chapter, and the reader is
requested, therefore, to suspend judgment on this point. But,
116 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
as it may appear a paradox to assert that men learnt to eat
cattle by abstaining from eating them, perhaps a few more
words in elucidation should be given. The ordinary theory
of the beginnings of domestication is presumably that the
hunter, having learnt by experience that beef was good, or
that " mountain sheep are sweet," resolved to spare the
young animals and breed from them. To this there are two
objections. First, the savage, having practically no thought
for the morrow, is habitually reckless and wasteful in con-
sumption, eats all he can, and only goes hunting again when
there is absolutely nothing left to eat. Next, as a matter
of fact, their cattle are precisely the animals which pastoral
peoples do not eat. "The common food of these races is
milk or game ; cattle are seldom killed for food, and only
on exceptional occasions, such as the proclamation of a war," ^
etc. Amongst the Zulus the killing of a cow " is seldom and
reluctantly done." ^ "A Kaffir does not often slaughter his
cattle, except for sacrifice or to celebrate a marriage." ^
" Every idea and thought of the Dinka is how to acquire and
maintain cattle ; a kind of reverence would seem to be paid
to them ... a cow is never slaughtered, but when sick it
is segregated from the rest and carefully tended in the large
huts built for the purpose . . . indescribable is the grief when
either death or rapine has robbed a Dinka of his cattle. He
is prepared to redeem their loss by the heaviest sacrifices,
for they are dearer to him than wife or child." * " Though
the Indian women breed fowl and other domestic animals
in their cottages, they never eat them . . . much less kill
them."^ The Battas of Sumatra (who are totemists) have
domesticated " the buffalo, dog, pig, goat, fowl, and horse ;
buffaloes and goats, dogs and horses (which latter are care-
fully fattened), as a rule never serve for food except at
festivals." «
It is therefore the ordinary theory of domestication that
is paradoxical, for it assumes that man domesticates animals
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 297.
2 Ihid. quoting Shaw, Memorials of South Africa, 59.
^ Shooter, Kafirs of Natal, 28.
4 Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, i. 163.
^ Ulloa, quoted in Galton, Inqxiiries into H%iman Faculty, 247.
^ Waitz, Anthrojjologle, v, 1, 183,
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 117
for no other purpose than to eat them, and then does not
eat them. On the other hand, the view here advanced is
that totemism is or has been world-wide — it can be traced
in Australia, North America, Central America, South
America, Africa, Asia, Polynesia ^ — that probably every species
of animal has been worshipped as a totem somewhere or
other, at some time or other : that, in consequence of the
respect paid to them, those animals which were capable of
domestication became gradually tame of themselves ; and
finally, in consequence of changing circumstances — religious,
social, and economic — as totemism and the taboo on the flesh
of the totem faded away, the habit of eating those domesticated
animals which are good for food grew slowly up. The
growth of this habit will be traced in the chapter on the
Sacrificial Meal. Here, however, one or two points may be
noted. If our theory be true, we should expect to find, even
amongst those peoples who have taken to eating domesticated
animals, traces of reluctance to kill or consume animals
which once were forbidden food. Such traces are found. To
kill an ox was once a capital offence in Greece,^ and the
word ^ov(j)6vLa implies that such slaughter was murder.^
In England, it was in Caesar's time a religious offence to
eat fowl (as it was amongst the South American Indians
mentioned above in the quotation from Ulloa), goose, or
hare ; * and yet they were bred, he says. Caesar feels that
there is something strange in this, but (anticipating Lord
Kames) he conjectures that the creatures were bred
for amusement, " animi voluptatisque causa." But there
are two obvious objections to this : first, if they were
bred merely for amusement, there could have been no
religious offence in eating them ; next, if there was a taboo
on eating them, they were not domesticated merely for
amusement. Wild animals are undoubtedly commonly kept
as pets by savages,^ but savages have no scruples about
killing pets. Thus Captain Speke says, " I was told Suna
kept buffaloes, antelopes, and animals of all sorts . . . M'tese,
^ Frazer, Totemism, 91-9. ^ Varro, M. E. ii. 5.
^Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 306.
^Cses. B. G. V. 12 : "giistare fas non putant ; haec tamen alunt."
'^Galton, Human Faculty, 243 If., gives instances.
118 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
his son, no sooner came to the throne than he indulged in
shooting them down before his admiring wives, and now he
has only one buffalo and a few parrots left." ^ If the fowl
and other domestic animals bred by the South American
Indians were merely pets, we should not find that " if a
stranger offers ever so much money for a fowl they refuse
to part with it , ' or that, on seeing it killed, the Indian
woman " shrieks, dissolves into tears, and wrings her hands
as if it had been an only son." ^
Other animals which civilised man is reluctant to feed
on are swine,^ dogs, and horses. The two latter animals are
of importance for our argument, not merely because they
show how long the loathing set up by the original taboo can sur-
vive its cause, but also because they remind us that domestic
animals serve other purposes than that of providing an
artificial food-supply. According to our theory, animals that
were capable of domestication became tame of themselves,
in consequence of the respect and protection afforded to
them as to other totem animals ; and it was only in the
course of time that it gradually dawned on the mind of man
that he might make economic use of them. On the other
hand, the ordinary view is that man first saw how useful
^ Galton, 02J. cit. 249. ^ Ulloa, ap. Galton, 247.
'^ The swine, like the hare, was forbidden food to the Hebrews. With regard
to the former animal, the facts seem to be as follows : The swine as a domesti-
cated animal was not known to the undispersed Semites or to the Sumerian
population of Babylon (Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 261); on the other
hand, its flesh was forbidden food to all the Semites {Religion of the Semites,
218). The inference, therefore, is that (1) it was after their dispersion that
the Semites became acquainted with the swine as a domestic animal, (2) it was
forbidden food from the time of its first introduction and sjiread amongst them.
In the next place, (1) the pig can only be housed and reared amongst a settled,
i.e. agricultural, population, (2) tlie pig is associated especially with the w^orship
of agricultural deities, e.g. Demeter, Adonis, and Aphrodite. The inference
again is that, as agriculture and the religious rites associated with it spread
together, it was in connection with some form of agricultural worship that the
domestication of the pig found its way amongst the various branches of the
Semitic race. Finally, the swine (1) was esteemed sacrosanct by some
Semites, (2) is condemned in Isaiah (Ixv, 4, Ixvi. 3, 16 ; cf. Religion of
Semites, 291) as a heathen abomination. The inference, then, is that the
worship Avith Avhich the swine was associated did not find equal acceptance
amongst all the Semites. "Where it did find acceptance, the flesh was forbidden
because it Avas sacred ; where it did not, it was prohibited because of its
association wdth the worship of false gods.
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 119
the dog would be in hunting, and how pleasant, I suppose,
the horse would be to ride ; and then, without more ado,
deliberately set to work to domesticate the animals. The
early history of man's first faithful comrade, the dog, escapes
our ken ; but not so with the horse. It is as certain as
things of this kind can be, that the primitive Indo-European
reared droves of tame or half-tame horses for generations, if
not centuries, before it ever occurred to him to ride or drive
them,^ and this fact, inexplicable on the ordinary theory,
coafirms our hypothesis. To sum up, the cause which our
h}pothesis postulates, namely, that man spared and protected
certain animals without any thought of making economic use
of them, is a mra causa, for men do so treat their totem
arimals. That animals worshipped as totems do become tame,
is also matter of fact. In Shark's Bay " the natives there
n,!ver kill them [kites], and they are so tame that they will
perch on the shoulders of the women and eat from their
haids." ^ Further, our hypothesis accounts for all the facts,
especially for such survivals as the lingering reluctance of
civilised man to eat the flesh of certain animals. It also
accounts for savages making pets. It is the tameness of the
lot em animal which suggests the idea of taming other
3reatures. Again, it alone supplies a motive strong enough
to restrain the savage from recklessly devouring or destroying
(instead of breeding from) the animals he caught or tamed.
Finally, it admits of verification ; for if it can be shown
that not merely is the treatment of totem animals such as
would naturally result in the taming of those that were
domesticable, but that some domestic animals were actually
totems, all the verification that can be required will be forth-
coming. This will be seen to be the case with cattle in
Egypt, and probably elsewhere also.
It seems, then, if the above argument commends itself to
the reader, that totemism, and totemism alone, could have
led to that " substitution of an artificial for a natural basis
of subsistence " which consisted in the domestication of plants
and animals, and which constituted the advance from savagery
^ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 263 ; and Hehn, Kulturpflanzen und
Hausthiere,^ 19 fF.
^Woodfield, ajp. Galton, oj). cit. 251.
120 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
to cmlisation. But totemism did not universally lead to
civilisation, or invariably develop into a higher form of
religion. On the contrary, the civilised and civilising peoples
are in the minority, and totemism still exists.
Now, if we consider the geographical distribution of
totemism, we find that the two countries in which it is (or
was at the time of the discovery of those countries) most
marked are Australia and North America ; while the peoples
in which its traces are hardest to find are the Semitic ard
the Indo-European. If, again, we consider the geographical
distribution of those species of animals which are capable
of domestication and on the domestication of which tie
possibility of civilisation depended, we shall find that " tie
greatest number belonged to the Old World, those of
America were fewer, and Australia had none at all " ^ ; indeed,
of the three species occurring in America (reindeer, llama,
and paco), none come into account in this argument, for
they are outside the totem-area of North America. It will
scarcely be considered a merely fortuitous coincidence —
however we may explain it — that the two areas in whicii
totemism lasted longest and flourished most are precisely thos^
in which there are no domesticable animals. Nor is it a
merely accidental occurrence that the peoples who have most
completely thrown off totemism, are precisely those which
have by the domestication of plants and animals attained
to civilisation. The inference is that the domestication to
which totemism inevitably leads (when there are any ^
animals capable of domestication) is fatal to totemism.
The fundamental principle of totemism is the alHance of a^^^,^,
clan with an animal species, and when the clan ceases to "■'
exist as a social organisation the alliance is dissolved also.
But with the transition from a nomad to a settled form of
life, which the domestication of plants and animals entails,
the tie of blood-relationship, indispensable to the existence of
a wandering tribe, is no longer necessary to the existence of
the community: local association and the bond of neigh-
bourhood take its place, for the restriction of civic and
political rights to the actual descendants of the original clan
is inconsistent with the expansion of the community. By
^ Payne, 283.
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 121
this expansion of society beyond the narrow bounds of blood-
relationship, the germ of higher religious belief which
totemism envelops is enabled also to burst its sheath, and
man's conception of the deity sloughs off the totem-god. But
though totemism perished in the very process of producing
the advance from savagery to civilisation, still even in the
civilisation of the Old World survivals of the system may be
traced.
" For the Egyptians totemism may be regarded as
certain." ^ Egypt was divided into nomes or districts, in
each of which a different animal was revered by the
inhabitants. It was not an individual animal, but the
whole species which was thus reverenced, and it was by all
the inhabitants of the nome that it was revered. The lives
of such animals were sacred, each in its own nome, and their
flesh might not be consumed as food by the inhabitants of that
nome. The god of the district manifested himself in the
species sacred to that district. But this is not a survival of
totemism. It is totemism, the thing itself.
No one, however, alleges that the religion of Egypt never
got beyond totemism. On the contrary, we can see side by
side with it in Egypt many of the stages and processes by
which religion gradually divested itself of this its first
protecting envelope, just as we may see sedimentary rocks
by the side of the igneous rocks from which they are
derived. Indeed, even in the lowest stratum of Egyptian
totemism we may detect signs if not evidence of the
disintegrating process : the bond of kinship, the tie of blood
is relaxed. It is to be presumed that the inhabitants of a
nome did not for ever continue to be' blood-relations of one
another, as they probably were when first they settled in the
district ; and the belief that the sacred species of animal was
one blood and one flesh with the human tribe also faded.
But though the blood-tie which held the human clansmen
together, and which also bound the human clansmen to the
animal, was relaxed and faded away from memory, the effects
which it produced continued to exist. Thus, the sacred
animal, whether it was still believed to be a blood-relation or
not, received the same obsequies and was mummified in the
^ Frazer, 94.
122 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
same way as man ; and the killing by one nome of an
animal sacred to another was avenged in effect, if not
consciously, in the spirit with which the blood-feud was
exacted on behalf of a slaughtered kinsman.
Another and a further stage of development is reached,
when one particular specimen of the species is selected as
being the one which the deity has chosen to abide in, as, for
instance, the calf marked by twenty-nine particular signs
which showed that the Calf-god Apis was present in him.
On the one hand, the concentration of veneration on an
individual would tend to withdraw sanctity from the rest of
the species, and the result might easily be a final separation
of the animal-god from the animal species. On the other
hand, that in Egypt at anyrate the worship of an individual
animal, such as the Apis-calf, is the outcome of totemism,
is plain from two things : first, the rest of the species did
continue to be sacred — eating cow's flesh was as abhorrent to
the Egyptians as cannibalism — and, next, " when the sacred
animal died, the god as such did not die with him, but at
once became incorporated in another animal resembling the
first," ^ evidently, as in Samoa, when an owl died, " this
was not the death of the god ; he was supposed to be yet
alive and incarnate in all the owls in existence." ^
That, in spite of the ties which bound him to the rest of his
species, the animal-god did shake off his humbler relations,
and came to be worshipped in his higher aspect exclusively,
is certain ; and the process was facilitated by the dissolution
of the bonds which tied down his worship to one particular
nome. Apis, e.g.^ came to be worshipped all over Egypt.
But the fact that his cult was originally local, not universal,
is shown by the circumstance that his calf, wherever in
Egypt it appeared, was taken to Memphis and kept there.
Thus not only was the individual animal exalted above the
rest of his species, but the god that dwelt in him was far
removed from all his worshippers, except those who dwelt in
the immediate neighbourhood of his animal manifestation.
Thus he gained in magnificence both ways, and in both ways
the associations which bound him to his animal form and
^ Wiedemann, Die Religion der alien Aegypter, 96.
2 Turner, Samoa, 21, see above, p. 101.
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 123
origin were weakened. The universalising of a cult is due to
political causes : the political ascendancy of the nome from
which the reigning dynasty derived would be marked by the
extension of the local worship. The synoikismos which makes
a nation also makes a pantheon.
But these causes are external, social, and political, not
religious. They may and did loosen bonds which checked the
progress of religion, but they were not themselves the force
which was struggling to get free. But it is to the action of
that force that we must attribute the dissociation of the god
from his animal form, and his gradual appearance in human
shape, which took place in Egypt. Here, however, our
immediate concern is not to explain how this force operated,
but to point out that the totemism which, as we have seen,
demonstrably existed in Egypt, along with other higher
elements of religion, did eventually become refined into a
pantheon of anthropomorphic gods. "It is remarkable,"
says Dr. Wiedemann,^ " in view of the important part which
the sacred animal plays in cultus, how relatively seldom it
is portrayed. For a thousand representations of the gods,
scarcely one will be found of an animal. The god appears
either in human form, or as a man with the head of the
animal sacred to him." Now, whether the mischbild of an
animal-headed man was intended to intimate the idea that the
god was of the same flesh with both his human kin and his
animal kind, or is due to purely graphic considerations, as
Dr. Wiedemann, who does not believe in totemism, is
inclined to think, the fact remains that in the nome where a
certain species was sacred the god is represented as a man
with the head of that animal. In Mendes, e.g., the goat was
sacred and the god goat - headed. And as for the great
gods universally worshipped in the Egyptian religion, as Mr.
Lang says, " it is always in a town where a certain animal is
locally revered that the human-shaped god wearing the head
of the same animal finds the centre and chief holy place of his
worship." ^ The last stage is reached when the god casts
aside his animal garb altogether, and the animal is thought
and spoken of as being sacred to him, but has no other or
more intimate relation with him.
^ Oj). clt. p. 97. ^ Lang, Myth, Ritxml, and Religion, ii. 104.
124 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The question now arises, whether, supposing that in Egypt
or elsewhere we find a purely anthropomorphic god having an
animal associated with him in art and sacred to him in
ritual, but having none of those further relations to a sacred
species of animals and a particular human kin which are of
the essence of totemism, we are justified in assuming that the
worship (or part of the worship) of that god is a survival of
totemism ? Plainly the answer to this question depends
on whether there is any other way in which gods become
associated in ritual and art with animals. If there is, we
shall have to consider in each particular case which is the
more probable genesis of the given association. If not, we
may provisionally, and until further cause be shown, assume
the association to have been totemistic. Now, there is only
one other way wdiich has been suggested to account for
the association, and which is also a method applicable to
other countries in which gods are associated with animals
as well as to Egypt.^ It is that the animals were chosen as
symbols to express some attribute, some aspect of the might
and majesty, of the gods.
We will begin by admitting the beauty and the value
of symbolism. Nay ! we will insist that there are truths
which can only be shadowed forth by means of symbols. At
the same time, as it is possible to detect a symbolism where
it was never meant, we must be on our guard against
" ridiculous excess." The fact to be explained is that
certain animals are considered sacred. The suggestion is
that the auunals were chosen to typify certain divine
attributes, and as the symbols of certain excellences. But
" if one surveys the list of sacred beasts, it is found to
include all the more important representatives of the fauna of
Egypt, mammals, birds, fishes, amphibia, insects." ^ Surely
this should give us pause. Innocence may be typified by the
dove, and cunning have the serpent for its symbol ; and as
regards insects, for the ant and the bee — let them pass. But
all insects ? The symbol theory is getting strained. How-
^ The suggestions that the hieroglyphs reacted on worship, and that the
ambiguity of some Egyptian names of gods led to animal-worship, apply only
to Egypt, and are inadequate to account for all even of the Egyptian facts.
2 Wiedemann, llel. d. alten Aegyptcr, 94.
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 125
ever, even if " the lord of flies " derived his title from some
quality unstated, but typified by those insects, was it not,
from the symbolic point of view, superfluous to offer them a
sacrifice, a whole ox, as was done in Leucas ? ^ Again, the
sacred animal or plant may not be eaten, which is hard to
explain on the symbolic theory. The loxidte may have
abstained from eating asparagus,^ but does anyone believe
that it was for its symbolism ? There is no evidence to
show or reason to believe that the asparagus symbolised
anything whatever. And why should this devotion to a
symbol, wholly inexplicable on the symbolist theory, be
limited in each case to one clan or neighbourhood? That
nobody but the loxidae — if they — saw anything symbolical in
the asparagus, can be understood ; but when the symbol was
one that could be appreciated by " the meanest under-
standing," why was it appropriated exclusively by one
clan ?
The symbol theory simply does not account for the facts
which it is framed to explain ; and totemism at present is
the only satisfactory answer to the question why certain
plants and animals are sacred. When, then, we turn to
Greece, and find that every god and goddess has his or her
sacred animal, we may consider that mere fact as con-
stituting a reasonable presumption that part of the deity's
ritual has its roots in totemism. It is also, however, not
unreasonable to demand other confirmatory evidence. Now,
in Greece we do not find totemism anywhere as a living,
organic system, as in Ancient Egypt. This may be due to
our ignorance of Greek peasant life. But we do find
fragments of the system, one here and another there, which,
if only they had not been scattered but had been found
together, would have made a living whole. Thus we have
families whose names indicate that they were originally
totem clans, e.g. there were Cynadse at Athens, as there was
a Dog clan amongst the Mohicans ; but we have no evidence
to show that the dog was sacred to the Cynadge in historic
times. On the other hand, storks were revered by the
Thessalians, but there is nothing to show that there was a
^ Aelian, xi. 8 (Lang, op. cit. 278).
2 Plutarch, Theseits, 14 (Lang, ibid.).
126 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Stork clan in Thessaly. And though " the Myrmidons
claimed descent from the ants and revered ants," ^ even this
is not quite enough to establish totemism as " a going
concern " ; we should like to know a little more about the
" reverence " paid them. Were they, when found dead,
buried like clansmen ? It is said that at Athens " whoso-
ever slays a wolf, collects what is needful for its burial." ^
Elsewhere in Greece there was a Wolf clan, and in Athens
itself a Wolf -hero, i.e. a totem which had cast off its animal
form and emerged human. The wolf was also a sacred
animal, but its worshippers were not a Wolf clan. Again,
"the lobster was generally considered sacred by the Greeks,
and not eaten ; if the people of Seriphos . . . found a dead
one, they buried it and mourned over it as over one of
themselves." 3 But there is no Lobster clan on record.
Thus, in Greece, though we have all the parts of the system,
we do not find them combined in a living whole. Still, no
fair-minded man will deny that for the Greeks totemism is
" highly probable." ^ The wonder is not that there are so
few, but that there are so many traces left. Even in the
Mycenaean period there are indications, slight and con-
jectural of course, that animal-worship, which undoubtedly
existed then, had passed beyond the purely totemistic
stage.^ Agriculture, and with it those agricultural rites
and myths which overlaid and undermined totemism,
had been known not only to the Greeks before they entered
Greece, but to all the European members of the Aryan race
before they scattered and settled in their historic habitations.^
Pastoral life, which is itself the result of totemism, and in its
turn reacts upon and modifies the totemistic system, was a
stage of development which had been reached by the Aryan
race even before the European branch had separated from
the Hindo-Persian. How remote, then, must be the period
when the undivided -Aryans were hunters, living on the
" natural basis of subsistence," and making those blind
^ Lang, op. cit. 277.
2 Schol. ad Apoll. Rhod. ii. 124 (Lang, loc. cit.).
3 Frazer, 15, and Aelian, N. A. xiii. 26. * Frazer, 94.
^ Journal of Hellenic Studies, xiv. 81, 270.
6 Sclirader, Prehistoric Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, 284 ff (English
translation).
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 127
attempts to domesticate their totem-animals without which
there were no civilisation now.
We have seen it to be, as the late Professor Eobertson
Smith showed, " a universal rule, that even the most primitive
savages have not only enemies, but permanent allies (which
at so early a stage in society necessarily means kinsfolk)
among the non-human or superhuman animate kmds by
which the universe is peopled," ^ and those allies are animals,
plants, etc., conceived as having supernatural powers, that is
to say, are totems. All peoples in a state of savagery, on
a " natural basis of subsistence," in the hunter stage, are
totemists. Further, it is totemism alone which could have
produced that transition from the natural to an artificial basis
of subsistence, which is effected by the domestication of plants
and animals, and which results in civilisation. In other
words, the mere fact that a people possesses material civilisa-
tion requires us to believe that in a state of savagery it was
totemist. Again, the association of an animal with a god in
art and ritual has as yet found no other, even plausible,
explanation than that the worship of the god contains in it,
as one of its elements, a survival of totemism. Finally —
and this is a new point — " unclean " animals are animals
which may neither be eaten nor be touched even, that is to
say, they are totem animals (they are always species, not
mere individuals), which have become detached both from
the human clan by which originally they were revered, and
from the god to whom in course of time ..they came to be
sacred.
Amongst the Semites, as amongst the Aryans, we no-
where find totemism a living organism, though we find all
the disjecti memhra. Or, to change the metaphor, we may
represent to ourselves totemism as a triangle, of which the
three sides are, (1) a clan, (2) a species of animals, and (3)
a god, varyingly conceived as animal or human ; while the
angles of the triangle are the relations in which the gods,
men, and animals stand to each other. There are many
relations in which animals and men may stand to each other,
as there are many angles at which one straight line can
stand to another ; but as there is only one angle at which the
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 137.
128 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
two sides of a triangle can stand to each other, namely, that
determined by the side which the angle subtends, so there is
only one relation in which men can stand to animals in totem-
ism, namely, that determined by the system. Now, amongst
the Semites we never find the complete triangle of totemism :
sometimes one side is missing, sometimes another, sometimes
the third, but in every case the angle of the two remaining
sides, i.e. the relation betw^een men and god, god and animal,
animal and men, shows what the missing side must have been.
To begin with the first side of the triangle : we find deities
in animal or semi-animal form, such as Dagon. Then we
have deities associated — at the totemistic angle, so to speak
— with particular species of animals, e.g. Astarte with swine,
the Syrian Atargatis with fish, the Sun-god with horses.-^
The animal side of the triangle, again, is connected with the
third side, men, at the totemistic angle, that is to say, we
have a human clan treating a species of animal as they do
their clansmen, e.g. " when the B. Harith, a tribe of South
Arabia, find a dead gazelle, they wash it, wrap it in cerecloths,
and bury it, and the whole tribe mourns for it seven days." ^
When, then, we find the animal side of the triangle by itself,
and apart from the other two sides, we still can infer the
triangle to which it belonged ; or, to drop metaphor, when we
find that vermin were " sacred " ^ and mice " unclean," * we
remember that mice were totem animals in Greece,^ and
insects among the sacred beasts of Egypt. Finally, to
complete our round of the totemist triangle, we find men in
the totemist relation to the animal god in Baalbek, where the
god- ancestor of the inhabitants was worshipped in the form
of a lion.^
Thus the d 2^'i^iori argument that the prehistoric Semites,
while they were yet an undivided people, and before they
had settled down in those territories in which history knows
them, were (like all other peoples in a state of savagery)
acquainted with totemism, is confirmed not only by the
^ 2 Kings xxiii. 11 (Robertson Smith, Semites, 293).
2 Robertson Smith, Semites, 444.
2 Ezek. viii. 10 [Semites, 293).
^ Isa. Ixvi. 17 (ibid.).
^ Lang, op. cit. i. 277.
^ Robertson Smith, op. cit. 444.
SURVIVALS OF TOTEMISM 129
reflection that but for totemism their material civilisation,
their transition to pastoral and agricultural life, is not to be
accounted for, but also by the survivals to be found amongst
them even in historic times.
And yet the most remarkable argument in support of
the theory remains to be set forth.
CHAPTEE XI
ANIMAL SACRIFICE : THE ALTAR
In the last chapter we saw -^ that the practice of selecting
one individual of the totem species, e.g. the calf in which Apis
was supposed to manifest himself, and concentrating on it
the reverence which was due to the whole species, was a
relatively late development of totemism. It is also, in its
ultimate consequences, inconsistent with the principle of
totemism, according to which the owl totem god, for instance,
was not incorporate in any one bird more than in any other,
but was " incarnate in all the owls in existence." ^ We have
also seen that it is the belief of societies which are held
together by the bond of blood-relationship, that it is the
same blood which runs in the veins of all blood-relations — it
is the blood of their common ancestor. Hence the blood-
covenant between two individuals is a covenant between their
respective kins : it is not merely the blood of the two persons
that has been mingled and made one, but the blood of the
two clans. It follows, therefore, that the blood of any one
animal of the totem species is not the blood of that individual
merely, but of the whole species. In the same way, therefore,
that the blood of the tribe as a whole is communicated in
initiation ceremonies to the youth, by allowing the blood of
older members to flow over him,^ so it is obvious the blood
of the totem species as a whole might be communicated to
the person or thing over which the blood of any individual
of the species was allowed to flow. But the blood is the life :
it is — like breath, heart, etc. — one of the things identified by
savages with the spirit or soul. The blood of any individual
totem animal, therefore, is the spirit, not of that particular
1 Supra, p. 122. 2 Turner, Samoa, 21. ' Supra, p. 103.
130
ANIMAL SACRIFICE; THE ALTAR 131
animal, but of the totem species : it is, if not the totem god,
at anyrate that in which he, as the spirit or soul of the
species, resides, and by which his presence may be conveyed
into any person or thing.
When, therefore, a totem clan required the presence of
its supernatural ally, the procedure, we may say the ritual,
to be adopted was obvious : the blood of a totem animal must
be shed. It must not, however, be spilt upon the ground —
that, as we have seen,^ was taboo, a thing not to be done, for
the ground on which it was spilt would thereby become
charged with all the sanctity of the sacred blood ; and any
person who thereafter, when there was nothing to distinguish
that dangerous spot from the surrounding soil, in unavoidable
ignorance set foot upon it, would become taboo. Approach-
ing the subject from this point of view, we shall not be
surprised to find it a widespread and ancient custom to
apply the blood of the sacred animal either to a pile of
stones, heaped together for the purpose, or to a monolith
erected for this end. We may not be able to say why races
in the most opposite quarters of the globe and in all ages,
races which have attained to civilisation, those which have
remained in savagery, those which have produced the semi-
civilisations of the New World, should all adopt this
particular mode of avoiding spilling the sacred blood of the
divine animal on the earth, or at anyrate of thus notifying
that such blood had so been spilled on the spot, but the fact
itself is certain. The reason can hardly be that there was
no other ready and convenient way of attaining the same
object, for an upright pole would serve the same end, and,
as a matter of fact, is used for the same purposes both in the
Old World and the New. But as it takes more labour to dress
and set up a pole, or to erect a monolithic pillar, than to
heap together a pile of stones, we may regard the heap of
stones as the earliest object to which the blood was applied.
Now, that the altars of the Old World religions, though
used for other purposes as well, and for the expression of far
higher religious conceptions, were also used to receive the
blood of sacrifice, is too well known to need illustration. In
the words of the late Professor Eobertson Smith, whose line
1 Supra, p. 73.
132 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
of argument we shall now follow, with some illustrations of
our own, " whatever else was done in connection with a
sacrifice, the primitive rite of sprinkling or dashing the
blood against the altar, or allowing it to flow down on the
ground at its base, was hardly ever omitted ; and this
practice was not peculiar to the Semites, but was equally the
rule with the Greeks and Eomans, and indeed with the
ancient nations generally." ^ The altar of the more civilised
members of these races was, of course, not a mere heap of
stones : it was a much more elaborate and artistic structure
of stone than a mere cairn or rough monolithic pillar. But
when we find that amongst the more backward members of
these races piles of stones or rough single stones were used
for the same purposes as the more finished structure, we can
hardly draw a line between them. Thus, in the sacred
enclosure of the Dioscuri at Pharse there was a primitive
structure of this kind which was both used as an altar and
called an altar, ffcofio^ \l6cov XoydBcov ; ^ and in Arabia " we
find no proper altar, but in its place a rude pillar or heap
of stones, beside which the victim is slain, the blood being
poured out over the stone or at its base." ^ Even amongst
the northern Semites, in their earlier days, the ancient law
of Ex. XX. 24, 25 " prescribed that the altar must be of earth
or unhewn stone ; and that a single stone sufficed appears
from 1 Sam. xiv. 32 sqq." ^ In the semi-civilisations of the
New World, as well as in the greater ci\dlisations of the Old,
the primitive cairn came to assume the shape first of a
dresser on which the victim was cut up, and then of a table
on which offerings were laid ; but the transition is even
clearer in the New World than the Old, for in the former the
primitive pile of stones was not discarded, but a table-stone
was placed upon it : " the flat stones on which the flesh and
blood-offerings were left for the spirits, raised on a pile of
smaller stones, became the altar. In the most advanced
times, in Mexico and Central America, the human sacrifice
was slain with a stone knife on a stone slab, slightly elevated
in the middle." ^ We find the same connecting link between
^ Religion of the Semites, 202. ^ Pansanias, viii. c. 22.
^ Religion of the Semites, 201. ^ Ibid. 202.
" Payne, Neio World, i. 410.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 133
the primitive heap of stones and the perfect altar in a
quarter of the globe far removed alike from the Old
World and the New. In Samoa, Fonge, and Toafa " were the
names of two oblong smooth stones on a raised platform of
loose stones . . . offerings of cooked taro and fish were laid
on the stones, accompanied by prayers for fine weather." ^
This instance is the more valuable, because it comes from a
community which was still totemistic at the time. Finally,
in a latitude and amongst a race of men widely different
from any yet mentioned, we have the so-called " sacrificial
piles " of the Samoyeds (a Mongoloid and probably Finnic
race), which occur in the Island of Waigatz and along' the
coast between the Pechora and the Yenesei ; a slight natural
eminence is chosen for the site, and on it " a rough layer or
platform of stones and driftwood " is constructed, and masses
of bones of bear and deer that have been sacrificed mark
the use to which this, the most primitive form of altar, has
been put.^
But whereas the primitive heap of stones ultimately
developed into a dresser or table and became an altar in
the specific sense of the word, the primitive unhewn stone or
pillar continued, w^here it remained in use, to be a baetylion,
a beth-el, the object in which the god manifested himself
when the blood was sprinkled or dashed upon it. Such a
primitive rude stone pillar was the masseha of which Hosea
speaks ^ " as an indispensable feature in the sanctuaries of
northern Israel in his time," ^ and the Arabian nosh with its
ghabghab (trench or pit) in front of it, into which the blood
collected. Such, too, was the monolith mentioned in the
P0200I Vuh, a collection of the sacred traditions of the
Quiches (Central America), put together and committed to
writing by a native shortly after the conquest. It, too, had a
ghahghab or trench before it, which was filled with the blood
of sacrifice ; ^ and that the deity entered the stone when the
blood was dashed on it, is clear from such passages as these —
" but in truth it was no stone then : like young men came
^ Turner, Samoa, 24.
^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 400.
^ iii. 4 ; cf. Isa. xix. 19. ^ Religion of the SemiteSy 203.
^ Brasseur de Bonrbourg, Popol Vuh, 259.
134 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
each of them [the gods] then," ^ or " the blood of birds and
deer was poured by the hunters on the stone of Tohil and
Avilix [gods] ; and when the gods had drunk the blood,
the stone spake." ^ So, too, the offering of blood gave
the stones worshipped by the Scandinavians the power of
prophecy.^
The consequence of this differentiation of the altar and
the pillar was that, though originally they were identical in
use and purpose, in Hebrew and Canaanite sanctuaries " the
two are found side by side at the same sanctuary, the altar
as a piece of sacrificial apparatus, and the pillar as a visible
symbol or embodiment of the presence of the deity." *
Similar causes produce similar results, and we shall therefore
not be surprised to find that in Polynesia the same evolution
took place. In Ellice Island, " Foilape was the principal god,
and they had a stone at his temple," that is the unhewn
monolith, but " there was an altar also on which offerings of
food were laid." ^ The " sacrificial piles " of the Samoyeds
exhibit the same association : " from the midst of all this
[mass of bones] there rise a number of sticks and poles —
some being less than a foot and others as long as 6 feet," ^
only here the altar is associated, not with the stone pillar,
but with the wooden post which serves the same purpose ;
in the same way as in " the local sanctuaries of the Hebrews,
which the prophets regard as purely heathenish . . . the
altar was incomplete unless an ashera stood beside it." ^
This ashera appears again amongst peoples which differ as
widely as possible from one another in race and place and
time : it is presupposed by the ^oava of the Greeks ; it is
found amongst the Ainos ; ^ the gods of the Brazilian tribes
were represented by poles stuck upright in the ground, at
the foot of which offerings were laid ; the Hurd Islanders
" in their houses had several stocks or small pillars of wood,
4 or 5 feet high, as the representatives of household gods,
and on these they poured oil [which takes the place of fat
1 Brasseur de Bourbourg, Po2)ol Vuh, 259.
2 Op. cit. 253. s Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 269.
^ Religion of the Semites, 204. ^ Turner, Samoa, 281.
^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 400.
'' Religion of the Semites, 187.
* HoNvard, Trans- Siberian Savages, 45, 84, 198.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 135
or blood], and laid before them offerings of cocoa-nuts and
fish " ; ^ the Kureks at irregular times slaughter a reindeer or
a dog, put its head on a pole facing east, and, mentioning no
name, say, " This for Thee : grant me a blessing." ^
It is evident that we have already passed the dividing
line between the primitive unhewn monolith and the idol ;
indeed, the Samoyed poles " at and near their summits are
roughly cut to resemble the features of the human face." ^
Thus the ashera becomes the wooden idol, the monolith the
marble statue of the god, with which the altar still continues
to be associated. In confirmation of this, we may note that
in many cases, of which illustrations will be given shortly,
the idol is smeared with blood in the same way as the stone
pillar or wooden post originally was. But, as the idol grows
more artistic, this practice is discontinued, and it is the altar
alone on which the blood is dashed or sprinkled. Then a
house is built for the god, in which his treasures may be
stored ; the idol, which from the value of its materials and
workmanship is the most precious of the god's own treasures,
is removed into this temple, and altar and idol are dissociated,
for the altar remains where it was originally, and the
slaughter of the victim and the sprinkling of the altar with
blood are therefore done outside the temple. In Peru, as in
the Old World, even when the god had come to dwell in the
house which men provided for him when they took to
dwelling in houses themselves, his ritual continued to be
celebrated outside the temple, in the open air, as it had been
celebrated before any building was erected in his sanctuary.*
It was not the altar that was set up near the temple, but
the temple which was erected there, because there was an
altar near. And it was not in any and every place that an
altar could be set up — not even the primitive heap of stones
or wooden post. Nor would every stone or any piece of
wood serve. To understand this we must return once more
to the subject of taboo.
The principle of the transmissibihty of taboo is the
1 Turner, Samoa, 294. ^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 109.
^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 400.
** For Peru, see Payne, New World, i. 460 ; for the Semites, Robertson Smith,
Hcligion of the Semites, 197.
\
136 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
arbitrary and irrational association of ideas : blood, for
instance, is inherently taboo and to be shunned ; anytliing,
therefore, that reminds the savage of it, either by its fluid
consistency or merely by its colour, awakens the same terror,
and is equally to be avoided. Hence certain localities,
whether because of their blood-red soil, or of their trees with
trunks of ghastly white (for white also is a taboo colour,
possibly from the pallor of the corpse — even negro corpses
are said to be pallid), or from some other accidental associa-
tion of ideas, arouse the taboo terror in the savage and are
shunned by him. Of the law of the association of ideas he
knows nothing : he only knows that on approaching certain
places he is filled with the same sort of terror as he experi-
ences on seeing blood or a corpse. If and when he reasons
on the matter, the explanation he gives to himself and others
is that the spot is the haunt of a supernatural power, and
that is why he feels as he does feel. For the savage the
world is full of such haunted spots. On the Gold Coast
every spot where the earth is of a red colour is the abode
of a Sasabonsum, a malignant spirit.^ When, however, the
savage has gained an ally amongst the supernatural powers
surrounding him, if in one of these haunted places he sees
his totem, animal or plant, the character of the locality is
thereby somewhat changed to his apprehension : it is still
the haunt of a spirit, but of a friendly one ; it still is to be
avoided, but not from slavish fear, rather from a respectful
desire not to intrude on the privacy of the god — so he now
interprets his feeling, which is indeed really changed by the
new association of ideas. Above all, it is now a place which,
under due restrictions and with proper precautions, may be
approached by him, when he wishes to seek the presence of
his powerful protector for a legitimate end, e.g. to renew the
blood-covenant with him. Again, everything in this holy
place — earth, stones, trees, and, excepting animal life, there
can hardly be anything else in it — everything in it partakes
of its sanctity. As we have seen,^ both in West Africa and
in ancient Mexico, the soil was holy. And according to the
prescription in the ancient law of Exodus, already referred
^ Ellis, Tshi-sj^eaking Peojyles, 35.
- Siiin'a, p. 64 ; cf. also the chapter on Fetishism.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 137
to, the altar must be made of earth or unhewn stone. It
was the earth, stones, or wood of such a holy place which
alone could have possessed the sanctity desirable in a
structure which the god was to be invited to enter in order
that his worshippers might have communion with him. The
sentiment of the supernatural which filled the hearts and
minds of the worshippers during the rite seems to be
different, however, from the awe which prevents transgression
on holy places. The latter is — except when mingled with
the former — purely negative, restrictive, prohibitory. The
former is a feeling psychologically as distinct from the
feelings of awe or terror, as, say, the feeling of beauty from
other pleasurable feelings ; its earliest manifestation appears
to be on occasions when the natural order of things is
suspended, and it is thereafter revived when man is conscious
of the presence of the cause of that suspension.
In the earliest times, then, there were holy places ; it
was out of the materials spontaneously offered by them that
the primitive altar was made, the idol elaborated, and within
their bounds that the temple eventually was built.
The theory, on the other hand, that the idol was an
" elaborated fetish," is one against which some arguments
will be offered in a subsequent chapter on Fetishism. Here,
however, we must make some remarks on a slightly different
view, namely, that which would confound the primitive altar
with rocks which form a conspicuous feature in many land-
scapes, and which are often believed by savages to possess
supernatural powers, like waterfalls and other striking
natural features. Now, in the first place, these rocks are
natural features of the landscape, whereas the primitive altar
is always an artificial structure ; and, next, they possess
'their supernatural powers inherently, i.e. quite independently
of anything man does, whereas the altar requires the
application of the blood of sacrifice, if the deity is to enter it.
In fine, these natural objects and the dread of them are survivals
from the pre-totemistic stage, when everything which was
supposed by the savage to possess activity, or was associated
by him with events affecting his fortunes, was also supposed
to possess a life and powers like his own.^ The primitive
^ Su2Jra, p. 21.
138 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
altar, on the other hand, is the creation and the outcome of
the needs of totemism.^ Further, as long as it remains an
altar pure and simple, it never becomes the embodiment of
the god, nor, though highly sacred, does it acquire super-
natural power. As long as totemism was a living force, it
would be difficult or impossible to confuse 'the sacrificial pile,
at which the deity manifested himself, with the god himself,
or even to imagine that he was permanently present in the
altar, for the totem animals were seen by the savage daily,
and it was with their species that his clan made the blood-
covenant, and in each and every member of the species that
the god dwelt. Mr. Williams has accurately observed and
precisely stated the totemist's attitude towards his sacrificial
piles, when, after noting that " idolatry — in the strict sense
of the term — the Fijian seems never to have known ; for he
makes no attempt to fashion material representations of his
gods," ^ he goes on to say, " stones are used to denote the
locality of some gods and the occasional resting-places of
others." ^ The same observation has been made with regard
to savages generally by Mr. Howard : " My personal inquiries
amongst almost every variety of heathen worshippers,
including the most degraded types in India, in China, and
also the devil-worshippers in Ceylon, have never yet secured
from any of them the admission which would justify me in
thinking that the red-bedaubed stone or tree, or any image
in front of which they worshipped, was supposed to contain
m esse the god to which that worship was addressed." ^
In the course of time, however, three changes do
undoubtedly take place : the rite of sacrifice tends to become
formal ; the god comes to be conceived as the ancestor of
the race ; the clan expands into a tribe, of which the majority
of members dwell remote from the original monolithic altar.
Consequently, when, at stated intervals, the tribe does gather
together at the old altar-stone of their forefathers to do
sacrifice, the stone itself, in which the god is to manifest
himself, easily becomes identified with the god — the majority
of the tribe know it only in this aspect — and with the god
as their common ancestor. Thus amongst the Red Indians,
1 Sujjra, p. 131. ^ Williams, Fiji and the Fljians, 216.
3 Ibid. 221. * Howard, Trans-Siberian Savages, 202.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 139
totemists, the place of national worship for the Oneidas was
the famous Oneida stone from which they claim descent.
The Dacotahs also claimed descent from a stone, and offered
sacrifices to it, calling it grandfather. " They thought the
spirit of their ancestor was present in this stone, which is
their altar for national sacrifices. The Ojibways had such
stones, which they called grandfather." -^ That, in such
circumstances, a rough likeness to the human face should be
given to the monolith or pole, and the transition from the
altar to the idol made, is easily comprehensible. But this
did not always take place : the idol of Astarte at Paphos
was never anthropomorphised, but remained a mere conical
stone to the last ; and countless other monolithic altars,
which never attained to such dignity as to have a temple
erected behind them, have survived all over the world. It is
the fortunes of these ' unhewn stones — the posts and the
cairns would soon perish and be forgotten w^hen not renewed
— that we have now to follow.
It seems to be a law that a people must either advance \
in religion or recede. The choice is always before it ; and
evolution — which is not the same thing as progress — takes
place, whichever course be chosen. Where no higher form
of religion was evolved out of totemism, therefore, retro-
gression took place ; and it is this retrogression, so far as it
is exhibited in the fate of the monolithic altar, which now
will be traced. The beginning of the process has been
indicated in the last paragraph in the case of the Oneidas
and other Eed Indians : in the identification of the god with
the father of the race was implicit the idea of the divine
fatherhood of man ; but this germ, which in the Old World
bore its fruit, thanks to certain select minds who dwelt upon
what v/as thus disclosed to them, amongst the Indians
mentioned was sterilised by the further identification of the
god with the monolith. This was in part, as we said in the
last paragraph, directly due to the expansion of the com-
munity; the framework of totemism is a narrow circle of
blood-relations, and when that circle expands the framework
cracks, and the disintegration of the system begins.
When the stone has in this way become, not the
^ Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 133.
140 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
occasional, but the permanent dwelling-place of the god, the
rite of sacrifice is in danger of becoming a meaningless and
superfluous ceremony, for its object is to procure the presence
of the god, and the god now is already present, or rather the
stone is the god. Hence the rite dwindles until the only
trace left of it is that the stone is painted red, as amongst
the Waralis of Konkan.^ By this time the totem-alliance is
so completely dissolved that the totem animal, which has
hitherto been required to provide the blood for smearing the
stone, now is completely dissociated from the worship, and
drops altogether out of view. But when the totem animal
f is no longer sacrificed, when the stone has itself become the
god, and its history has been forgotten, there is little left by
which to distinguish it from the other class of stones, notable
natural features of the landscape, to which supernatural
powers were ascribed in the pre-totemistic period. There are,
however, still some distinguishing marks. The natural stones
still are what all supernatural powers were until man learnt
to make allies amongst them, hostile ; but the quondam
altar stones are still, traditionally, friendly powers, who will,
like the stone of the Monitarris, if a sacrifice is offered, cause
an expedition to be successful,^ and not merely abstain from
doing injury. The friendly relation of the primitive altar or
rather god to its original circle of worshippers is clear in a
case such as that mentioned by Caillie, of a stone which
travelled of its own accord thrice round an African village
whenever danger threatened the inhabitants. And the rock
in Fougna, near Gouam, in the Marian Islands, which is
regarded as the ancestor of men, ranks itself at once with the
Oneida stone. In many cases, however, the quondam altar
has lost even these traces of its once higher estate; natural
stones have attracted to themselves, or have come to share
in, the few remnants of the full rite of worship once accorded
to the artificial structure ; and all distinction between the
two classes is obliterated. Thus the retrograde totemist
1 Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 139.
- This and the other examples of stone- worship in this chapter are taken,
unless other references are given, from Girard de Rialle, 3fythologie Comxtarec,
12-32, who, however, draws no distinctions between the various kinds of
stone-worship.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 141
apparently relapses into precisely the same stage as that
which his pre-totemist forefather occupied. But as this is a
matter which raises the important question, how far we can
take the savage to represent " primitive " man, it is necessary
to note that the post-totemistic stage, though in much it
resembles the pre-totemistic, also differs much from it. In
both stages, any and every rock that impresses the imagination
of the savage may by him be credited with life and even
with supernatural powers ; he simply returns in the later
period to the animism of the earlier, or rather he has never
abandoned it. But he returns to it with an idea which was
wholly unknown to him in the first period, namely, the
conception of " worship," the idea, not merely of sacrifice, but
of offering sacrifice " to " someone. Now, this conception, or
rather these conceptions, as should be by this time clear,
have their origin in totemism : " worship," as an act in its
rudimentary stage, means only the sprinkling of blood upon
the altar ; the blood sprinkled is that of the totem animal,
and the only object of the rite is to renew the blood-covenant
between the totem clan and the totem species and to procure
the presence of the totem god. The idea of offering a
sacrifice " to " a god is a notion which can only be developed
in a later stage of totemism, when, on the one hand, the
monolith has come to be identified with the god, and, on the
other, the god is no longer in the animal. Above all,
" worship," on its inner side and in the ideas and emotions
correlated with the rite and the external act, implies the
existence, for the worshipper, of a god, i.e. not merely of a
supernatural being as such, but of a supernatural being who
has " stated relations with a community." ^ The ex-totemist,
therefore, who retains nothing of his forefathers' beliefs and
rites but the idea that it is possible to appease a supernatural
being by offering sacrifices "to" him, may gravely mislead
the historian of " primitive " religion. Indeed, he has led
some students to imagine that his inherited habit of offering
sacrifices to stones and rocks is a primitive practice out of
which religion has sprung, while the truth is that the worship
of stones is a degradation of a higher form of worship. The
mere existence of sacrifice is an indication of the former
1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 119.
142 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
existence of totemism. The very idea of a temporary compact
between an individual man and a supernatural power is
derived from the original form of alliance, which was always
and necessarily between clans, not between individuals.
A more varied and interesting chapter in the history of
the monolithic altar is that of its fortunes when a higher
form of religion invades the land. If the cult of any given
altar and the local sanctuary in which it stands is too vigor-
ous to be extinguished, it may be adopted by the invading
and dominant race, and incorporated into their religion. This
amalgamation of cults bears the technical name of " syn-
cretism." Thus, in the New World, the Incas, when they
invaded Peru, bringing wdth them their worship of the Sun,
built temples of the Sun in some of the local sanctuaries ; and,
in the Old World, the totem animals whose blood from of old
had been dashed on the primitive monolith, continued to be
offered at the same altar even when it had been appro-
priated to the service of the Sun-god or Sky-spirit, Zeus or
Apollo. If, on the other hand, the local cult had already
decayed, if sacrifice was rarely offered, and the monolith w^as
but the object of traditional veneration, then the respect or the
sanctity attaching to it came in course of time to require
explanation, and an explanation spontaneously sprang up
which commended itself to the now dominant beliefs and
traditions of the new religion. Thus, in Mexico, the sanctity
of the monolith of Tlalnepautla was accounted for by the
belief that the great culture-god Quetzalcoatl had left on it
the imprmt of his hand ; and, in the Old World, " monolithic
pillars or cairns of stone are frequently mentioned in the
more ancient parts of the Old Testament as standing at
sanctuaries, generally in connection with a sacred legend about
the occasion on which they were set up by some famous
patriarch or hero." ^ But matters did not always progress so
peaceably. Frequently, both in its own interests, and, we
may add, to the ultimate benefit of mankind, the higher
religion found it necessary to undertake the suppression of
the older cults. Thus Inca Eoca threw down the monolith
worshipped by the inhabitants of a certain village ; the
Councils of Tours (567) and Nantes (895) ordered the
1 Robertson Smith, op. cit. 203.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE ALTAR 143
destruction of such stones and the excommunication of their
worshippers ; in the seventh century, Archbishop Theodore,
and in the eighth, King Edgar, found it necessary to denounce
the worship of stones in England. In most cases the new
rehgion eventually triumphed, but in none without a long
struggle. The superstitious man of Theophrastus' time still
anointed the stones at the cross-ways. Arnobius tells us
that, when he was yet a pagan and came across a sacred
stone anointed with oil, he spoke low and prayed to it ; in
many parts of France, at this day, pierres files are the objects
of superstitious veneration, and are believed to influence the
crops ; and finally, in Norway certain stones are still anointed,
and supposed to bring good luck to the house.
Now, that the practice of anointing these stones has been
handed down to the modern peasant from the time when
they were altars on which the blood of sacrifice was smeared,
will not be doubted. But if that be admitted, then the case
for the view, advanced above, that the sacrifices offered to
stones by the ex-totemist are also survivals of worship at an
altar, is strengthened. The only difference, from this point
of view, between the peasant and the savage is that the
ancestral totemism of the savage died a natural death, so to
speak, while that of the peasant was killed by an invading
religion. Both return to their original animism, or rather
have never got, in this respect, beyond it ; and both retain
practices which are manifestly survivals of that " primitive
rite of sprinkling or dashing the blood against the altar, or
allowing it to flow down on the ground at its base," which,
" whatever else was done in connection with a sacrifice, was
hardly ever omitted."
What else was done in connection with a sacrifice we
have now to state.
CHAPTER XII
ANIMAL SACRIFICE : THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL
That, amongst the Semitic and Aryan peoples, the eating of
the victim was part of the sacrificial rite, is too well known
to need illustration. We shall therefore confine ourselves
to quoting the late Professor Eobertson Smith's account of
the most primitive form of the Semitic ceremony, as practised
by certain heathen Arabs (Saracens), and described by Mlus :
" The camel chosen as the victim is bound upon a rude altar
of stones piled together, and when the leader of the band
has thrice led the worshippers round the altar in a solemn
procession accompanied with chants, he inflicts the first
wound, while the last words of the hymn are still upon the
lips of the congregation, and in all haste drinks of the blood
that gushes forth. Forthwith the whole company fall on the
victim with their swords, hacking off pieces of the quivering
flesh and devouring them raw, with such wild haste that in
the short interval between the rise of the day-star, which
marked the hour for the service to begin, and the disappear-
ance of its rays before the rising sun, the entire camel, body
and bones, skin, blood, and entrails, is wholly devoured." ^
As for the Aryan peoples, we have nothing so primitive
as the Semitic ceremonial described in this extract, but the
ancient Prussians retained some ancient features of the original
rite in one of their festivals, though with later accretions.
The community met together in a barn, and a ram was
brought in. The high priest laid his hands upon this victim,
and invoked all the gods in order, mentioning each by name.
1 Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 338. In this chapter, again, I
follow his line of argument to the best of my ability, and add one or two
illustrations from the rites of non-Semitic peoples.
144
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 145
Then all who were present lifted up the victim and held it
aloft whilst a hymn was sung. When the hymn was finished,
the ram was laid upon the ground, and the priest addressed
the people, exhorting them to celebrate solemnly this feast
transmitted to them from their forefathers, and to hand on
in their turn the tradition of it to their children. The
animal was then slain, its blood was caught in a bowl, and
the priest sprinkled with it those present. The flesh was
given to the women to cook in the barn. The feast lasted
all night, and the remnants were buried early in the morning
outside the village, in order that birds or beasts might not
get them.^
The more revolting details of the Semitic rite, " the
scramble described by Mlus, the wild rush to cut gobbets of
flesh from the still quivering victim," ^ are not of the essence
of the ceremony, but incidental, and due merely to the
uncivilised condition of the worshippers. As such they give
way among the later Arabs to a more orderly partition of
the sacrificial flesh amongst those present. It was, however,
necessary to mention them here for two reasons : first, they
show, by their very want of civilisation, that the Arabians
retained the primitive form of the rite ; and next, they find
their parallel not merely amongst other uncivilised peoples,
but also in the strange reversions practised in the " mysteries "
of the ancient world. These will be discussed in a later
chapter, and so all we need say of them here is that different
local sanctuaries differed in the degree of tenacity with which
they adhered to primitive " uses " : some gave them up soon,
others retained them long and late. We may conjecture,
therefore, that when a reversion to a lower or more barbarous
ritual suddenly spreads in a civilised community, it is one of
these more conservative and out-of-the-way sa-nctuaries which
is the centre of diffusion.
Turning, however, from these barbarous and accidental
adjuncts to the more important features of the rite, we may
notice how the sacrificial meal differs from ordinary eating.
In the first place, the victim must be consumed there and
then, avToOc, on the spot where the sacrifice takes place,
" there before the Lord," in the sanctuary wherein the altar
^ Bastian, Der Menseh, iii. 154. ^ Religion of the Semites, 341.
lo \
146 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
is erected. The Eev. G. Turner noted this feature in the
Polynesian ritual. At the annual feast in May, he says, " the
food brought as an offering was divided and eaten, ' there
before the Lord,' " ^ and, at their annual festival, " they feasted
with and before their god." ^ Far away from Polynesia, the
Tehuelche Patagonians celebrate births, marriages, and deaths
by the sacrifice of mares, and the animals are eaten on the
spot.^ In a similar clime, but at the opposite end of the
earth's pole, the same rule is observed ; amongst the Jakuts,
when a sacrifice is offered for a sick man's recovery, " tongue,
heart, and liver are cooked and placed on a specially prepared
one-legged table, the top of which has a roimd hole in the
centre. The rest of the meat is consumed by the Jakuts." *
The Mongols regard it as sacrilege to leave any of the sacred
victim unconsumed ; ^ and in certain feasts of the Eed
Indians the meat must be wholly consumed.^ Eeturning to
the Old World, we find that in Arcadia, the home of lingering
cults, the sacrifice to Apollo Parrhasios must be consumed in
the sanctuary : dvaXtaKovcnv avrodi rov lepelov ra Kpea?
Even more interesting is the case of the Meilichioi. The
festival at which the Athenians made sacrifice to Zeus
Meilichios, the Diasia, was one of the most ancient of their
institutions ; but though they adhered closely to the ancient
and primitive use, the Locrians of Myonia were still more
faithful to the ritual which they had received from the
common ancestors of Locrians and Athenians alike, for, like
the Saracens and the Prussians, they offered the sacrifice by
night, and consumed the victim before the rising of the
sun : vvKT€pLval Be at Bvalai 6eoU tol<; MetXt^tot? elal kol
avaXwaai ra Kpea avrodt irplv rj i]Xiov eiTLG'^elv vo/jLc^ovac.^ It
is therefore interesting to note the recurrence of this feature
in another branch of the Aryan race, the Hindoos. According
to the Grihya Sutra, "the time" for the Siilagava sacrifice "was
after midnight, but some authorities preferred the dawn." ^
In the next place, it was of the essence of the rite that
^ Turner, Polynesia, 241. 2 Turner, Samoa, 26.
3 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, i. 200.
* Bastian, Allerlei, i. 208. ^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 151.
^ Miiller, Gesehichte der Ainerikanischen Urreligionen, 86.
' Pausanias, viii. 38. ^ md, x. 8.
^ Rajendralala Mitra, Indo-Aryans, i. 364.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 147
all, without exception, who were present should partake of
the victim ; and as the rite originally was a blood-covenant,
or the renewal thereof between the totem clan and its
supernatural ally, the primitive usage required the presence
of every clansman. But even in later times, when private
sacrifice had come to be common, custom required that
the whole of the household, or whatever the society making
the sacrifice was, should partake of the victim. In some
cases it is the individual members of the community who,
like the Saracens, are eager to obtain their share of the
sacred flesh ; while elsewhere it is the community as a whole
which is impressed with the necessity of compelling its
members to partake. In the West Indies, the former was
the case. The priest, says Hakluyt, " cutteth him (the
victim) into smal peeces, and being cutte diuideth him in
this manner to be eaten . . . and whosoeuer should haue no
parte nor portion of the sacrificed enemie woulde thinke he
shoulde bee ill accepted that yeere."^ In Peru, also, the
same alacrity was shown. "The bodies of the sheep were
divided and distributed as very sacred things, a very small
piece to each person." ^ The Eed Indians represent probably
a stage through which the ancestors of the Incas passed, and
with them the whole community partook of the victim.^ In
Hawaii, there may not have been less alacrity, but there was
more compulsion. On the eighth day of the temple feast,
the whole of the sacred offering (a pig) had to be eaten;
any man who refused to eat would be put to death, and if
the whole offering were not consumed, a terrible visitation
would descend upon all the inhabitants.* Amongst the
Kaffirs, when an ox is offered to the Amachlosi, " the flesh
is distributed and eaten." ^ As regards societies smaller or
other than that of the clan or village community; at the
Yagna sacrifice to the sun, each of the company of Brahmins
ate a piece of the liver of the sacrificial ram, and thereby
entered into communion with the deity.
As the development of religion in China has many
^ Hakluyt, Eistorie of the West Indies, Decade vi. ch. vi.
2 Markham, Rites and Laws of the Yncas, 28.
^ Miiller, Amerik. Urreligionen, 86.
•» Bastian, Ber Mensch, iii. 152. ^ Hartmann, Die Volker Afrikas, 224.
148 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
peculiar features, it is the more necessary to call attention to
the important points in which it follows the same laws and
lines as other countries ; and if, as we have sought to show,
totemism has at one time or other l^een universal throughout
the world, then its outcome, namely, animal sacrifice, should be
found in China as well as elsewhere. It is so found ; it is
the subject of one of the Confucian books, the Li Ki ; and it
is a large part of the state religion. The greatest of the
sacrifices was, like several which we have already mentioned,
annual (at the winter solstice).^
The victim was not only killed, but eaten : " the viands
of the feast were composed of a calf." ^ The practice of
eating the flesh raw, as in the Saracen rite, seems once to
have been known. "At the sacrifices in the time of the Lord
of Yu . . . there were the offerings of blood, of raw flesh,
and of sodden flesh." ^ Even the reversion to this savage
practice, which is seen in some of the " mysteries " of ancient
Greece, appears also in China, for in times of public calamity
animals are torn in pieces,* as by the Bacchae. And, to
come back to the matter in hand, namely, the primitive custom
w^hich demanded that the whole clan should partake of the
victim, " when there was a sacrifice at the She altar of a
village, some one went to it from every house." ^ Again, by
a post-Confucian custom, the Chinese pour wine (a very
general substitute for blood) from a beaker on the straw
image of Confucius, and then all present drink of it and taste
the sacrificial victim in order to participate in the grace of
Confucius.^
In Thibet, in the time of Marco Polo, when a wether
was offered on behalf of a child, the flesh was divided
amongst the relatives.'^ Finally, to conclude these illustra-
tions of the primitive custom requiring all present to partake
of the victim, in the Pelew Islands sickness is attributed to
the wrath of a god, who is appeased by the sacrifice of a pig,
goat, or turtle, which must be consumed by the mvalid's
relatives and by the god.^
In the last quotation, it will be noted that the victim is
1 Legge, The Li Ki, i. 416 {Sacred Books of the East). ^ Ibid. 417.
" Ibid. 443. ^ Ihid. 307. ^ Ihid. 425. « Bastian, Der Mcnsch, iii. 154.
■7 Ihid. 157. ^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 43.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 149
to be consumed by the god as well as by his worshippers,
just as in Samoa the people feasted, as the Eev. G. Turner
says, " with " as well as " before their god." ^ But in the
Yagna sacrifice the victim is eaten sacramentally, as a means
of entering into communion with the god ; and the Chinese
view of sacrifice is the same. According to Professor Legge,
" the general idea symbolised by the character Ki is an
offering whereby communication and communion with
spiritual beings is effected." ^ These are two different,
though not necessarily inconsistent aspects of the sacrificial
rite : one is the eating with the god, the other the eating of
the god. Both require examination and illustration. We
will begin with the latter.
In the Saracen rite, with a description of which this
chapter began, the whole of the victim, " body and bones,
skin, blood, and entrails," was consumed by the worshippers.
The same thing is perhaps implied by the words of Pausanias
in what he says about the offerings to Apollo Parrhasios and
to the Meilichioi. The Mongols also regarded it as sacrilege
to leave any of the sacred victim unconsumed ; and in
Hawaii a terrible visitation was the penalty for not consum-
ing the whole of the offering. The consumption of the bones,
blood, skin, and entrails is evidently a practice which advan-
cing civilisation could not but discard ; and we find that the
ancient Prussians had left it behind, but what they did not
eat had to be disposed of somehow, and it was buried. In
Samoa the custom was the same as in ancient Prussia :
" whatever was over after the meal was buried at the beach " ; ^
and so elsewhere in Polynesia : " they were careful to bury
or throw into the sea whatever food was over after the
festival."* In Thibet, at the end of the rite already described,
the bones of the animal were carried away in a coffer.
Amongst the Jakuts, " the bones and other offal are burnt,
and the sacrifice is complete." ^ The Tartars, who make
their gods of a sheep-skin, eat the body of the sheep and
burn the bones.^ In the Hindoo Siilagava sacrifice, " the
tail, hide, tendons, and hoof of the victim are to be thrown
^ Samoa, 26.
^ Turner, Samoa, 57.
^ Bastian, AllcrUi, i. 208.
^ Legge, op. cit. 201 (note).
■* Turner, Polynesia, 241.
^ Bastian, Der Mensdi, ii. 257.
150 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
into the fire."^ Amongst the Kaffirs, on occasion of the
sacrifice of an ox to the Amachlosi, when the flesh has been
eaten, " many tribes burn the bones of the victim." ^ The
Tscheremiss at the annual feast to their supreme god Juma,
poured the blood of the victim in the fire : head, lungs, and
heart were offered, the rest eaten, and the remnants, if any,
were thrown into the fire.^ Our English word " bon-fire "
= bone-fire points in the same direction. Finally, burning
was the mode adopted by the Hebrews.^
Now this custom (of eating the whole of the victim)
requires explanation, not the custom of burning or burying
what was not eaten, that is plainly the mode adopted by
advancing civilisation for effecting the same end — whatever
it was — that the primitive worshipper accomplished by
consuming the whole of the victim. But the custom of
consuming everything, even bones, entrails, tendons, etc., could
only have originated in a barbarous stage of society. Evi-
dently, therefore, the belief also which led to the custom
could only have originated in savagery. Therefore, again, it
is to savage ideas that we must look for an explanation, not
to conceptions which could only have been formed long after
the custom. Of such savage ideas there are several which
might well have given rise to the practice in question. It is,
for instance, a belief amongst various savage hunters that if
the bones of an animal are put together and carefully buried,
the animal itself will hereafter revive. They accordingly
take this precaution, partly in order to secure a supply of
game in the future, and partly because they think that, if
the animal is not thus buried, the surviving animals of the
species resent the indignity, and desert the country or decline
to be captured.^ But this custom and belief do not help us :
they might account for the burying of the bones, but they do
not account for burning the bones or for what really requires
explanation, namely, the custom of consuming the bones, etc.
Indeed, the two customs are, as we now see, fundamentally
1 Rajendralala Mitra, Indo-Aryans, i. 365.
2 Hartmann, Die Volkcr Afrikas, 224. ^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 157.
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 239, referring to Lev. vii. 15 ff.,
xix. 6, xxii. 30.
^ For instances, see Frazer, Golden Bough, ch. iii. § 12.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 151
inconsistent with one another : the one aims at destroying
the bones, and is observed in the case of sacred animals ; the
other at preserving them, and is observed in the case of
game.
Another savage parallel may be found in a belief already
illustrated,^ namely, that the food of a divine king, such as the
Mikado, or a superior chief, is fatal to his subjects or slaves.
Much more, therefore, would the sacrificial animal of which a
god had partaken be fatal, and great would be the need to
save incautious, heedless persons from the danger of eating
the remains which they might find lying about. Here we
are approaching the true explanation ; but, since we hope to
show before the end of this chapter that the conception of
the god's eating the victim only came relatively late, we
cannot see in it the origin of the primitive custom in
question, though we do see in it a powerful reinforcement
thereof.
Again, it is a savage belief that you can injure a man
not merely by means of his nail-parings, hair-clippings, and
other things associated with him, but also by the refuse of
his food. In Victoria, the natives believe that " if an enemy
gets possession of anything that has belonged to them, even
such things as bones of animals they have eaten, broken
weapons, feathers, portions of dress, pieces of skin, or refuse
of any kind, he can employ it as a charm to produce illness
in the person to whom they belonged. They are therefore
very careful to burn up all rubbish or uncleanness before
leaving a camping-place " ; ^ and " the practice of using a man's
food to injure him is found in Polynesia generally, Tahiti, the
Washington Islands, Fiji, Queensland, and amongst the Zulus
and Kaffirs."^ Now, this belief, coexisting as it does in
Polynesia with the custom of burying the remnants of the
sacrificial meal, cannot but strengthen the observance of that
custom. But it is to be doubted whether it was the origin
of the practice. The eagerness displayed by the Saracen
worshippers to obtain a portion of the victim, and the dismay
of Hakluyt's West Indians if they failed to get a piece, both
show that originally, as in Peru, the victim was accounted
^ Supra, pp. 83, 84. ^ Dawson, Australian Ahorigiius, 54,
^ Folk- Lore, vi. 134, note 2.
152 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
" very sacred indeed " ; and that the emotion which swayed
the worshippers, and their motive for devouring the whole of
the victim, was not fear lest the remnants should be used
against them, still less anxiety about what might happen to
incautious strangers, but desire on the part of each to obtain
for himself as much as possible of something that was in the
highest degree desirable. Now, that the sacrificial animal
should be accounted " very sacred indeed " is intelligible
enough, if it was (in the savage times when the whole victim
was consumed) the totem animal and god of the clan making
the sacrifice. As for the eagerness of the worshippers, it
need not be doubted ; but of the savage's motives for that
eagerness we ought to try and form for ourselves some clear
idea.
In the sacrificial rite itself, as an external act of worship,
the essential feature is that the worshipper should partake of
the offering ; but it is only after a time that this central
feature disengages itself from the repulsive accessories which
were indeed inevitable concomitants of a savage feast, but
were no part of the essence of the rite. We may therefore
reasonably expect to find the rite on its inward side, i.e. as it
presented itself to the worshipper, following a parallel line of
development. That the idea of " communication and com-
munion with spiritual beings," w^hich, as we have seen, is the
Chinese conception of sacrifice, is the aspect of the rite which
has persisted longest, we will take for granted. Whether it
was present dimly, and obscured or overlaid by other associa-
tions, but still implicitly present to the consciousness of
savage man, is a question which depends for its answer on
what view w^e take of that identity in difference which exists
between civilised and uncivilised man, and makes the whole
world kin. We may regard selfishness and the baser desires
as alone "natural" and as constituting the sole identity; or,
by the same question-begging epithet, we may credit the
savage with the " natural " affections as well. The question
has always divided philosophers, not merely in Europe, but
in China, where Seun sides with Hobbes, and Han-yu antici-
pated the view of Butler that good instincts as well as bad
are natural. If, therefore, here we take our stand, without
hesitation, but without argument, on the side of the latter, it
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 153
is not that we wish to ignore the other view, but because
this is not the place to discuss it. We shall therefore, with
the reader's leave, assume that the mere existence of the
family and of the clan implies the existence of some measure
of affection between parents and children and between blood-
relations.^ But if this be granted, the rest follows : where
affection exists in one direction it may come to exist in
others ; and communion is sought only with those towards
whom we have affection. Here, then, lay the germ : in the
conception of the clan-god as a permanently friendly power.
As the leader of the clan in war, he claimed and received the
affectionate loyalty of those on whom he conferred protection
and victory; as the father of his worshippers, the filial affec-
tion of his children. It was not always or everywhere that
the seed bore fruit: in the case of many savages still
existing, e.g. most or all of the Australian aborigines, the
conception of the totem-god as a protecting power has been
lost, and they have lapsed almost into their original animism.
But where it did germinate, its growth was accompanied
by the intellectual and material development, by the move-
ment towards civilisation, of the peoples amongst whom it
flourished.
But the desire for union with the spiritual being with
whom the fate and fortunes of the tribe were identified, was
necessarily in savage times enveloped and conditioned by
savage modes of thought and savage views of nature and her
processes. One of these views has been called in by some
writers to explain in part the motive with which the sacri-
ficial victim was originally eaten : it is that with the flesh
the qualities of the animal are absorbed and assimilated ; and
as a matter of fact some savages do eat tiger to give them
courage, or deer to give them fleetness. But, it is important
to note, it is not the characteristic quality of the totem
animal that the savage, in his sacrificial meal, desires to
appropriate : many or most totems — turtle, snail, cockle, etc.
— have, as mere animals, no obviously desirable qualities to
recommend them. It is not the natural but the supernatural
1 Professor Tylor {Academy, No. 1237, N.S. p. 49) regards it as a "fact
that savage families, with all their rough ways, are held together by a bond of
unselfish kindness, which is one of the wonders of human nature."
154 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
qualities of the totem that the savage wishes to assimilate.
It is as god, not as animal, that the totem furnishes the
sacrificial meal. The savage seeks against the supernatural
powers by which he is surrounded a supernatural ally ; and it
is in the confidence which the sacrificial rite affords him that
he undertakes that forcible, physical expulsion of evil spirits
which has already been mentioned.^ Hence, then, his
eagerness to partake of the victim — an eagerness so great
that none of the animal was left uneaten. It was the desire
to fortify himself as completely as possible for the dangerous
encounter for which it was the preparation.
When, however, advancing civilisation made the complete
consumption of the animal impossible, the remnants of the
sacrificial feast were naturally treated with every precaution
known to the savage, both to protect himself against his
enemies, and to protect his friends against the danger of in-
advertently eating food so highly taboo as was the flesh of a
totem animal. Here, perhaps, the reader may feel it a diJB&-
culty that the totem animal should be tabooed food and yet
should be eaten by his worshippers. The difficulty and its
solution are exactly the same here as in connection with in-
truding on holy places. Such places are indeed forbidden
ground, yet those who would seek the god must enter them,
and so may enter them for that purpose and with due pre-
cautions. On the Loango Coast, the sanctuary of a certain
god may be entered by those who seek his aid, but all others
become his slaves for ever if they trespass on his precincts.^
Now, what is characteristic of the sacrificial meal all over the
world is precisely the fact that it is distinguished from ordinary
eating by restrictions and precautions which are the same
everywhere and amongst all races : the meal must be eaten
in a- certain place, at a certain time, by certain persons, in a
certain way, for a certain purpose. As we have seen, only
clansmen may eat of it, and everyone of them must partake
of it. They must consume it, wholly, in the sanctuary, there
and then. It is not at all times that the rite is celebrated,
but once a year that the feast is held and the conflict with
evil spirits undertaken — and then only after due preparation
by fasting, etc. ; for, as those who have come into contact with
^ Supra, p. 105. ' Supra, p. 63 ; Bastian, Loango Kiiste, 218.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE; THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 155
things taboo, e.g. mourners, have to fast, etc.,^ so those who are
about to enter into such contact have to observe the same rule.
The " unclean " must not communicate their uncleanness to
the community ; much more,therefore,must those who are about
to enter into relation with sacred things avoid carrying with
them any uncleanness ; and in both cases they are tabooed, i.e.
isolated, for a time, that they may not, in the one instance,
contract, or in the other, communicate, " uncleanness." From
this point of view it is possible to explain another restriction,
or rather precaution, namely, that which requires the sacrifice
to be nocturnal. The fasting which is obligatory on mourners
is only compulsory during the daylight ; and the same remark
applies to the fasting of those who are under a vow.^
The annual sacrifice and eating of the god could not, how-
ever, continue to be the only sacrifice : pestilence, which
proved the presence of evil spirits and the necessity of
expelling them ; war, which involved an encounter not merely
with the human foe but with his supernatural ally,^ came at
irregular periods, and consequently the annual rite came to be
supplemented by other sacrifices. Not only did the number
of these supplementary sacrifices come to be increased, but
the character of the rite was greatly changed in pastoral times.
But, before going on to pastoral times, it will be well to
ask how our argument stands exactly with regard to the
pre-pastoral period, when man lived by hunting and fishing,
and, in a word, was on the natural basis of subsistence.
It stands thus : on the one hand, we find savages, who
are still on the natural basis, treating their totem animals as
gods, sometimes — not always, for we know totemism only in
various stages of decay. On the other hand, we find in
pastoral times, or later, animals sacrificed which once had
been, and in Egypt even still were, totems. For instance, on
the Gold Coast there is a god Brahfo, " antelopes are sacred to
him, and no worshipper of Brahfo may molest one or eat of
its fiesh," * yet once a year an antelope is killed and " the
1 Supra, pp. 77, 78. 3 ^j^^
^ Hence it is that war is regarded by so many savages as a religious function,
for which preparation must be made by various forms of abstinence and purifi-
cation and other religious rites and ceremonies, e.g. those of the fetiales.
* Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 64.
156 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
flesh is cut up and divided between the chiefs, head-men, and
priests." ^ But we have as yet no instance of a totem animal
sacrificed by a totem clan in the hunting stage. It is there-
fore conceivable, though improbable, that the sacrifice of totem
animals dates from pastoral times, i.e. the period of domestic-
ated animals, and does not go back to the hunter stage.
This is improbable for two main reasons : first, if sacrifice
originated with the slaughter of domesticated animals, we
should expect only domesticated animals to be sacrificed,
whereas wild animals also are sacrificed, as we have just seen ;
next, the sacrificial rite, altar stones, the idols which grew
out of them, the partition of the victim amongst all the wor-
shippers, are known to the Eed Indians, who cannot have first
learnt the rite in connection with domesticated animals and
then extended it by analogy to wild animals, because they
have not any domesticated animals. Indeed, the horrible
human sacrifices of the semi-civilised peoples of Central
America are due, I conjecture, to the fact that in their
nomad period they sacrificed wild animals ; and in their
settled, city life they could get little game, and had no domestic-
ated animals to provide the blood which was essential for the
sacrificial rite. Still, though in North America the circle of
worshippers was a totem clan, which offered animal sacrifice,
and though there are traces of the annual killing, by the clan,
of its totem animal,^ still, in the absence of an actual instance
of the eating as well as the killing of the totem, we must re-
gard it merely as a working hypothesis that in pre-pastoral
times the animal sacrificed and eaten by the totem clan was
the totem animal. The point, however, is of less importance,
if we were right in contending^ that domesticated animals
were totems before they were domesticated, and owed their
domestication to the fact that they were totems. For we
have instances in which they are sacrificed by the clan to
which they are sacred. Once a year the Todas, by whom the
buffalo is held sacred, and treated " even with a degree of
adoration," kill and eat a young male calf, and " this is the
only occasion on which the Todas eat buffalo flesh." ^ The
Abchases once a year sacrifice an ox : " any man who did not
^ Ellis, Tshi-sjyeaking Peox>les, 225. ^ Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 90.
^ Supra, \). 114 ff. '^ Frazer, op. cit. 136.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 157
get at least a scrap of the sacred flesh would deem himself
most unfortunate. The bones are carefully collected, burned
in a great hole, and the ashes buried there." ^
We have already had occasion to note that in the begin-
ning pastoral peoples do not kill their cattle.^ In East
Africa, " the nomad values his cow above all things, and weeps
for its death as for that of a child." ^ He cannot afford to
kill his cattle, for one thing ; and, for another, they are his
totem animal. Hence, in the beginning of the pastoral period,
sacrifice is a rare and solemn rite. The cattle are the
property of the clan, and are only slaughtered for the annual
clan sacrifice. But if the clan prospers, things alter. The
taste for flesh -meat develops, and with the increase of wealth
in the shape of flocks and herds, the means for the more
frequent gratification of the taste are afforded. Excuses for
killing meat, under the pretext of sacrifice, become common ;
thus a Zulu said to Bishop Callaway, " Among black-men
slaughtering cattle has become much more common than
formerly ... 0, people are now very fond of meat, and a
man says he has dreamed of the Idhlozi, and forsooth he says
so because he would eat meat." * Hence, sacrifice tends to
become less awful and more frequent. The Madi or Moru
tribe sacrifice a sheep annually, for religious purposes ; but
" this ceremony is observed on a small scale at other times,
if a family is in any great trouble, through illness or bereave-
ment . . . the same custom prevails at the grave of departed
friends, and also on joyous occasions, such as the return of
a son home after a very prolonged absence." ^ Thus the
sacrificial feast becomes a festival of rejoicing ; and private
generosity manifests itself in an invitation to the whole of
the community to make glad in the name of religion. Nor
is the god excluded from the invitation, for he too is a
member of the clan. In Samoa, " the people feasted with and
before their god."^ In a different zone, " when a Jakut is
about to start on a long journey to get skins, he carves an
^ Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 135 (note). 2 ^u'pra, p. 116.
2 Religion of Semites, 297, quoting Miinzinger, Ostafr. Studien,^ 547.
^ Callaway, Religious System of the Aonazulu, 172.
^ Felkin, Notes on the Madi or Moru Tribe of Central Africa, quoted by
Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 138.
^ Turner, Samoa, 26.
158 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
idol of wood and smears it with the blood of an animal which
he sacrifices in its honour. With the flesh he entertains the
shaman and guests, the idol occupying the seat of honour." ^
The Tartars do not begin a meal until they have first smeared
the mouth of their god Nacygai with fat.^ On the Slave
Coast, every god has his festival or sacred day, when sacrifice
is offered, and the blood of the sacrifice is always smeared on
his image, as it is the blood which " especially belongs to or
is particularly acceptable to the god," whilst the body is eaten
(unless it is a human body) by the worshippers.^ The
Quiches rubbed the mouths of their idols with blood,*
evidently that they might drink it. The ancient Peruvians,
according to a contemporary, " every month sacrifice their
own children and paint the mouths of their idols with the
blood of their victims," ^ or, as it is put more generally, " they
anointed the Imaca with the blood from ear to ear." ^ In
Mexico, the blood of the captives offered to any god was
smeared on the idol's mouth.^ When the Samoyedes offer
sacrifice, at their " sacrificial piles," " the blood of the sacri-
fice is smeared on the slits which represent the mouths of the
gods."^ Whether the blood which was dashed on the altar
stone, before it had come to be shaped into an idol, was
supposed to be consumed by the god, there is nothing to
show ; and it would be hazardous to affirm it.
This state of things, the period when all slaughter of cattle
was sacrificial, and every member of the clan was entitled to his
share of the victim, has left its traces behind it in various parts
of the world. Among the Zulus, " when a man kills a cow —
which, however, is seldom and reluctantly done, unless it hap-
pens to be stolen property — the whole population of the hamlet
assemble to eat it without invitation." ^ Among the Damaras
" another superstition \i.e, in addition to that which forbids
clans from eating their totem animals] is that meat is
common property. Every slaughter is looked upon as a kind
of sacrifice or festal occasion. Damaras cannot conceive that
* Bastian, Allerlei, i. 213. - Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 154.
' Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, 79. ^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 269.
^ X^res, La C&nqiiete du Pirou (Ternaux-Corapans, iv. 53).
^ Markham, Rites and Laws of the Yncas, 55.
' Sahagun, Appendix. s Journ. Anth. Inst. xxiv. 400.
^ Shaw, Memorials of So^Uh Africa, 59, quoted in Religion of Semites, 284.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 159
people should eat meat as their daily food. Their chiefs kill
an ox when a stranger comes, or half a dozen oxen on a
birth or circumcision feast, or any great event, and then
everybody present shares the meat. . . . Damaras have a
great respect, almost reverence, for oxen." ^ The same notion
that sacrifice is the only excuse or reason for killing meat,
reappears far from South Africa, in Polynesia. In Hudson's
Island, " even the killing 'of a pig had to be done in a temple,
and the blessing of the god asked before it could be cooked
or eaten." ^ So in New Guinea, all " their great festivals are
connected with the worship of the gods. Many pigs are killed
on these occasions." ^ The idea that all the clan have a right
to partake, shows itself amongst the Tehuelche Patagonians,
who celebrate births, marriages, and deaths by the sacrifice of
mares, to the feast on which all may come.* In the Old
World, the idea that all slaughter is sacrifice is found amongst
the Aryan peoples : it is Indian and Persian ; ^ and at Athens
the hestiaseis or feasts at which the hestiator entertained his
tribe ^ or his phratry or his deme''' are a survival of the
same feeling. Finally, amongst the Hebrews, " a sacrifice
was a public ceremony of a township or of a clan (1 Sam. ix.
12, XX. 6) . . . the crowds streamed into the sanctuary from
all sides, dressed in their gayest attire (Hos. ii. 15, E. v. 13),
marching joyfully to the sound of music (Isa. xxx. 29), and
bearing with them not only the victims appointed for sacrifice,
but store of bread and wine to set forth the feast (1 Sam. x.
3). The law of the feast was open-handed hospitality ; no
sacrifice was complete without guests, and portions were freely
distributed to rich and poor within the circle of a man's
acquaintance (1 Sam. ix. 13 ; 2 Sam. vi. 19, xv. 11 ; Neh. viii.
10). Universal hilarity prevailed; men ate, drank, and were
merry together, rejoicing before their god." ^ The ideal here
implied was earthly, but it was not selfish. The interests
prayed for were those of the community, not of the individual.
The festival was a renewal of the bond between the worshippers
^ Gal ton, South Africa, 138. ^ Turner, Samoa, 290.
3 Ibid. 349. ^ Journ. of Anth. Inst. i. 200.
^ Religion of Semites, 255 ; Manu, v. 31 ; Hdt. i. 132 ; Strabo, xv. iii. 13.
6 Poll. iii. 67.
■^ Corpus Inscr. Atticarum, ii. 163, 578, 582, 602, 603, 631.
^ Religion of the Semites, 254.
160 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
and his god, but it also strengthened the bonds of family,
national, social, and moral obligations. The joint eating and
drinking was a bond of fellowship. By it the god and his
worshippers were united. But it was only as a member of
the clan, not on his private merits, that the individual was
admitted to this meal. All worship of this kind was public,
and taught that a man lived not to himself but also for his
fellows.^ Again, when all feasts are religious, and the gods
are invited to all rejoicings, there is and can be " no habitual
sense of human guilt." ^ Nor, as the god is the god of the
community ^ rather than of the individual, could any such
feeling be awakened as long as the community prospered.
But when public disaster or national calamity supervened, one
or both of two things happened : the individual sought super-
natural protection by means not included in or recognised by
the public worship of the community ; and the older, gloomier
rite of worship,* which still continued, regained its former
and more than its former importance.
Public disaster, as we have seen,^ was interpreted as the
sign of individual sin. At the same time, the older annual
sacrificial rite, so different from the common joyous festivals,
was felt, in consequence of its difference, to require some
explanation. That explanation was found in the view that it
was an atonement for the sins of the people ; that it was
piacular : hence its gloomy nature. The feasting with the
god, which was characteristic of the ordinary festival, was
here out of place ; and the worshipper left the whole of the
victim for the offended god. Thus doubly consecrated to the
service of the god, the victim was sacrosanct, and contact
with it proportionately dangerous. The whole of the victim
therefore was treated as the uneaten remains alone had been
treated before — burnt. Doubtless also a motive for burnt-
offerings was the feeling that the offering was etherealised,
and thus made a more fitting form of food for a spiritual
being. But it was the sacrosanct nature of the piacular
1 Religion of the Semites, 263, 264. 2 j^^ 255.
^ "The natives worship not so much individually as in villages or com-
munities. Their religion is more a public than a private matter." — The Rev.
Duff Macdonald, Africana, i. 64.
^ Sttpra, p. 155. ^ gu2}ra, jx 111.
ANIMAL SACRIFICE: THE SACRIFICIAL MEAL 161
victim which first made buiiiing necessary ; and then sacrifice
by fire was extended to the god's portions of the victim, even
in ordinary sacrifices.
But the revival of the gloomy annual rite, in the new
shape of piacular sacrifice, reacted not only on the mode of
sacrifice, but on the nature of the victim. The piacular
sacrifice was conceived as the atonement for the sin of a
member of the community ; it was a member of the com-
munity, therefore, that ought to suffer, or, if he could not be
discovered, then at least a life of the same kind, i.e. human,
must be offered. This was probably the origin of the sacrifice
of human beings to the gods amongst the Mediterranean
peoples. Amongst the Americans it was, as we have said,
due to the lack of domesticated animals — an explanation
which also covers the case of Polynesia, where the pig and
the rat were the only quadrupeds that were known. The
slaughter of human beings to accompany a dead chief to the
next world is not sacrifice in the sense in which the word
has been used in this chapter. Such slaughter was in all
probability known in early Indo-European times,^ and is
widespread in Africa, where the sacrifice of human beings
in the worship of the gods may have been simply borrowed
from the ritual at the grave.
If, however, at the piacular sacrifice, an animal continues
to be sacrificed, as it originally was, then an explanation has
to be found to account for the victim's being animal and not
human. The explanation forthcoming is that the animal
is a " scape-goat " and a substitute for the human being who
ought to be slain. Thus in Cochin- China the king makes a
yearly offering in February to the heaven and the earth for
benefits received. In ancient times this offering consisted
in a slaughtered animal, placed on an altar, over which wine
was poured. The offering is now conceived as a piaculum
for the sins which every man is conscious of having com-
mitted, and which could only be expiated by death : the
animal is regarded as being slain instead of a man.^ If,
^ Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 464.
^ Bastian, Oest. Asien, iv. 411. For the scape-goat amongst the Hebrews,
see Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 397, 422 ; in classical antiquity
and amongst other peoples, Frazer, Golden Bough, ii. 182-217.
II
162 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
again, the god insists on human life, an alien is offered, as,
e.g., on the Gold Coast,^ amongst the ancient Greeks, and
universally amongst the ancient Mexicans.
The primitive, annual, nocturnal rite was also revived in
the " mysteries " of the ancient world, but with them we
shall deal hereafter. It remains for us now to discuss the
devices to which the individual resorted, when the god of
the community failed to render him efficient protection,
or when the services required were not such as a god of
the community ought to afford. This will require a fresh
chapter.
^ Ellis, Tshi- speaking Peoples, 169.
CHAPTER XIII
FETISHISM
Fetishism is often supposed to have its home and place of
origin amongst the negroes of West Africa. It is certainly
amongst the inhabitants of the Gold Coast and Slave Coast
that the subject can best be studied ; but if our conclusions
are to be of any value, they should not be based on the hasty
reports of passing visitors or the statements of semi-civilised
natives, and "fetishism" should not be detached from the
general religious beliefs of those who practise it. Fortunately,
within the last few years trustworthy information has been
placed at the command of the student, and a signal service
to the science of religion has been rendered by Lieutenant-
Colonel Ellis, First Battalion, West India Eegiment, from
whose valuable works {The Tshi-speahing Peoples, The Ewe-
speaking Peoples, and The Yoruba-speahing Peoples) the follow-
ing account is taken.
The Gold Coast is inhabited by various Tshi-speaking
tribes (of whom the best known are the Fantis and the
Ashantis), who are all of the true negro type, as distinguished
from the Negroids in the Mohammedan States to the north
and the Congoese in the regions to the south. There are
four classes of deities worshipped by them: (1) General
Deities, few in number ; (2) Local Deities, very numerous ;
(3) Tutelary Deities of sections of the community; (4)
Tutelary Deities of individuals. General deities are those
generally worshipped by all or most of the different tribes,
such as Bobowissi (" blower of clouds ") or Nana-Nyankupon
(" lord of the sky "). Local deities are confined to one
locality and one particular natural object, such as Tahbi,
who resides in or under the rock on which Cape Coast Castle
163
164 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
is built; Cudjo, the god of a shoal or reef between Cape
Coast Castle and Acquon Point ; Kottor-krabah, who resided
at the wells now known by that name ; Behnya, the god of
the river Behnya, and so on. To which of these two classes
Srahmantin and Sasabonsum are to be assigned, it is difficult
to say. " In one sense they are local, since every district
has one or more ; and in another sense they are general,
since they are known all over the coast by these names.
Properly speaking, it seems as if Srahmantin and Sasabonsum
were each a name of a genus of deities, every member of
which possesses identical characteristics ; though these names
are in each locality used to designate individual deities."
Sasabonsum is implacable ; once angered he can never be
mollified or propitiated. Wherever the earth is of a red
colour, there is, or has been, a Sasabonsum : the redness is
caused by the blood of the wayfarers he has devoured. The
third class of deities are the tutelary deities of particular
sections of the community, such as towns, families, the
inhabitants of any division of the town (a town-company),
the frequenters of any market, etc. These tutelary deities
differ from the local deities in this respect : the latter
1 ^usually dwell each in his own locality (hill, river, rock,
lagoon, etc.), and enter the images which are made of them
to receive their worshippers' sacrifices and prayers ; but the
tutelary deity, though it is not absolutely and irrevocably
confined to the material object (wooden figure, stone, calabash,
etc.), which is its usual abode, for it can leave that abode
and enter into and " possess " a priest, does usually and at
ordinary times dwell in that material object. When a family
grows so large that it must divide, and the branch in whose
keeping the tutelary deity does not continue consequently
requires a new one, or when a new " tow^n-company " is
formed, application is made to the priest of some local deity,
who goes to the hill, rock, or river, etc., where the local deity
resides, and communicates with him ; subsequently the priest
becomes " possessed," and, being inspired by the local deity,
whose priest he is, says he is directed to go to the abode of
the local deity, " and take therefrom a stone or some of the
earth ; or to make a wooden figure out of the wood of a tree
growing there, or something of that kind." This he does.
FETISHISM 165
pouring some rum on the ground as an offering, " and then,
dancing before them, and, bearing the object which is now
believed to be the receptacle or ordinary abode of an in-
dwelling god," he proceeds to install it in the place where
it is henceforth to be and continue as a tutelary deity ; as
such it, like local and general deities, has a sacred day of its
own, on which its worshippers do no work, shave their heads,
paint themselves with white clay, and wear white clothes.
Sacrifices are offered to the tutelary as to the general and
local deities. The tutelary deity of a family protects the
members from sickness and misfortune generally. The
tutelary deities of a " town-company " have each a special
function : the principal one protects the fighting men of the
company in war ; another " perhaps watches that no quarrel
or division takes place between the members of the company;
another may watch over them when dancing or holding a
festival; and a third may take care of the drums." We
now come to the fourth and last class, termed by Colonel
Ellis "the Tutelary Deities of individuals." These "deities"
resemble those of the third class, inasmuch as they dwell in
exactly the same sort of objects — wooden figures, stones, or
a pot containing a mixture of earth and blood — but they
differ from them in several important points. First, the spot
from which the wood or stone or earth is taken is not a spot
frequented by a local deity, but one haunted by a Sasabonsum.
Next, no priest is employed or consulted by the man who
wants such a suhman, as its name is. Third, though offerings
are made to the suhman by its owner, they are made in
private — public opinion does not approve of them. Fourth,
whereas the function of the tutelary deity of a family or
town-company, etc., is to protect the members of that section,
" one of the special attributes of a suhman is to procure the
death of any person whom its worshipper may wish to have
removed " — indeed, " the most important function of the
suhman appears to be to work evil against those who have
injured or offended its worshipper ; its influence in other
matters is very secondary." Fifth, a suhman can communicate
its own powers to other objects, and the owner of a suhman
sells such charms. Finally, if a suhman does not prove
efficacious, the man concludes that either a spirit does not
166 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
' dwell in the object, or that, if it does, it is indisposed to
; serve him : " in either case he throws away the receptacle
; he had prepared for the spirit, and recommences de novo.
But, so great is the fear of giving possible offence to any
superhuman agent, that before discarding it he invariably
makes some offering to it to avert its anger."
^.^ Here I interrupt the summary of Colonel Ellis's account
to make some remarks. As w^e have seen, Colonel Ellis finds
a difficulty in saying what class of god Sasabonsum belongs
to. I would suggest that the source of the difficulty is that
Sasabonsum is not a god at all ; and I would point to several
differences between Sasabonsum on the one hand, and general
deities, local deities, and tutelary deities of sections of the
community on the other hand. The latter have each a
definite circle of worshippers ; Sasabonsum, none. They have
priests of their own ; Sasabonsum has not. Further, their
worship is public and approved ; Sasabonsum's is secret and
illicit. They do good, more or less, to their worshippers ;
Sasabonsum (" malignant ") is implacable and does good to
nobody. In fine, Sasabonsum is a spirit with whom no body
of worshippers has established permanent friendly relations,
and is not, therefore, a god at all. The worship of the
general deities, the local deities, and the tutelary deities of
particular sections of the community is religious worship,
for they are gods of the or a community ; but dealings with
Sasabonsum and the manufacture of suhmans are in the
nature of " black art," as Sasabonsum is not one of the
community's gods.
Now, let us listen to Colonel Ellis again. The Portuguese
discoverers of West Africa (1441-1500) were familiar in
Europe with relics of saints, charmed rosaries, amulets, and
charms generally, for which the Portuguese term was feitigos.
When, then, they found the Tshi-speaking negroes worshipping
pieces of stone and other tangible, inanimate objects such as
the tutelary deities (whether of individuals or of sections of
the community) dwelt in, they naturally regarded these small
objects as charms, and called them feitigos. They could not
have applied the term to a natural feature of the landscape,
such as a river, valley, rock, etc., in which a general or local
deity dwelt and where he was worshipped. Now the term
FETISHISM 167
feitigo or fetish is not strictly applicable even to a suhman,
much less to the tutelary deity of a family or town-company,
because the feitigos of Europe at the end of the fifteenth
century were genuine charms, ix. tangible and inanimate
objects believed to possess inherent supernatural powers of
their own ; whereas even the suhman was, and is, conceived to
be a spirit dwelling in the inanimate object. This error,
sufficiently misleading if it had only invplved a false concep-
tion of the nature of tutelary deities of individuals and
sections of the community, unfortunately has grown still
further, for the term fetish has come to be applied to all the
objects of negro-worship, even to local and general deities.
For this error we have principally to thank De Brosses, who
thought he had discovered in fetishism the origin of religion,
and was led to define a fetish (m his Die Gulte des Dieiox
Fdtiches, 1760) in this misleading manner: "Anything which
people like to select for adoration," for examples, " a tree,
a mountain, the sea, a piece of wood, the tail of a lion, a
pebble, a shell, salt, a fish, a plant, a flower, certain animals,
such as cows, goats, elephants, sheep, or anything like these."
Hence the mistaken belief, widespread once in the learned
world, that the negro worships an inanimate object, a stock or
a stone, knowing it to be inanimate. For another, if possible,
more misleading error Bosman (through De Brosses) is ulti-
mately responsible. He gives the following as a statement
made to him by a native : " If any of us is resolved to under-
take anything of importance, we first of all search out a god
to prosper us in our designed undertaking ; and, going out of
doors with this design, take the first creature that presents
itself to our eyes, whether dog, cat, or the most contemptible
animal in the world, for our god, or, perhaps, instead of that,
any inanimate object that falls in our way, whether a stone,
a piece of wood, or anything else of the same nature. This
new-chosen god is immediately presented with an offering,
which is accompanied by a solemn vow, that if he pleaseth
to prosper our undertakings, for the future we will always
worship and esteem him as a god. If our design prove
successful, we have discovered a new and assisting god, which
is daily presented with fresh offerings ; but if the contrary
happen, the new god is rejected as a useless tool, and conse-
168 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
quently returns to his primitive estate. We make and break
our gods daily, and consequently are the masters and inventors
of what we sacrifice to." The contemptuous tone of this
description must strike the reader. The explanation is that
the native informant of Bosman " in his youth lived among
the French, whose language he perfectly understood and
spoke," and as a consequence he " ridiculed his own country
gods." Doubtless he was, as Colonel Ellis suggests, " anxious
to appear superior to his more superstitious fellow-country-
men, and to greater advantage to his European acquaintance,"
and so he stated the native practices, but suppressed every-
thing that would make them intelligible and rational. The idea
of coercion, as applied to a deity, appears to Colonel Ellis, after
making inquiries in all directions, and after an experience of
the Gold Coast extending over thirteen years, " to be quite
foreign to the mind of the negro . . . the negroes so implicitly
believe in the superhuman power of the gods, and hold them
generally in such awe, that I am convinced no coercion is
ever there attempted or even thought of. The testimony of
all the natives I have consulted on this point seems to me
conclusive."
The best proof of the accuracy of Colonel Ellis's observa-
tions is that they are, as we shall shortly see, confirmed,
unintentionally, by the parallels afforded by observers of
other widely remote races and religions. As a preliminary
to resuming our argument where we dropped it at the end of
the last chapter, however, let us ask. What now is the meaning
of " fetishism " ? Colonel Ellis has classified for us the
general, local, and sectional deities of the Gold and Slave
Coasts, together with the guardian spirits of individuals and
the charms to which a guardian spirit or sithman has com-
municated its own powers. We may, if we like, call all these
things fetishes, as De Brosses and Comte did and Bastian
does. The only objection to this is that then the word has
no meaning, or a meaning so nebulous as to be useless for
scientific purposes. Thus, if we included under the term all
the objects enumerated except the suhman charms, we might
put a meaning on the word, for then all the things designated
by it would be things worshipped. But the suhman charms .^-j—
are not worshipped. Nor can we, if we apply the name to
FETISHISM 169
all the objects enumerated above, define a fetish as everything
connected with religion ; for the feeling with which the
suhman charm is viewed by its owner is not religious. But,
without pressing these objections, we may observe that the
very business of a history of religion is to ascertain in what
relation the classes of things enumerated above stand to one
another ; and to lump them all together as fetishes does not
help forward the work of distinction and arrangement, but
rather retards and confounds it ; for what does it help us to
be told that all religion originates in fetishism, if fetishism
means everything that has to do with religion ? or that
Zeus was a fetish, if a fetish only means anything that is-
worshipped ?
On the other hand, we may, if we like, consider that
fetishism must be something very low and degraded, and that
therefore the term had better be confined to the suhman and
the charms derived from it, the lowest of Colonel Ellis's
classes. But in that case, so far from the idol's being " an
elaborated fetish,"^ the suhman or fetish is itself but an
imitation idol, made after the fashion and on the pattern of r
the genuine idol of a local or general deity. And if we
confine the term fetish to the charm made from the suhman,
then it is not the idol that is an elaborated fetish, but the
fetish that is the remnant or survival of an imitation idol.
Finally, whatever the meaning we choose to put upon the
term " fetish," no harm can be done, if when we mean " local
deity " or " guardian spirit," etc. — terms fairly plain — we say
" local deity " or " guardian spirit," etc., as the case may be,
instead of calling them " fetishes," which may mean one thing
to one person and another to another, because it has no
generally accepted scientific definition. Let us now pick
up the thread of our argument from the end of the last
chapter.
A god, we will repeat, is not a supernatural being as'^
such, but one having stated, friendly relations with a definite '
circle of worshippers, originally blood-relations of one another.
It is with the clan that his alliance is made, and it is the
fortunes of the clan, rather than of any individual member
thereof, that are under his protection. Consequently, if
^ Supra, p. 137.
^-^
170 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
things go ill with the individual clansman, he must do one
of two things : he must either commend himself specially
to the protection of the god of the community, or he must
seek the aid of some other supernatural power. The latter
course, however, is disloyal to the community, and if the
community is vigorous and strong enough to suppress dis-
loyalty, such infidelity is punished by outlawry. It was
therefore the former course which was first attempted, and
we will begin with it accordingly.
The answer to the question, how to commend oneself to
the protection of the deity, could not have been difficult to
find, it was hit on by so many different races in exactly the
same form. The alliance between the community and the
god took the shape of a blood - covenant. Even private
individuals can, as we have already seen,^ at a certain stage
in the development of society, form a blood-covenant between
themselves, which only binds themselves, and does not in-
clude their clansmen in the benefits to be derived from it.
Obviously, therefore, a covenant between the god and the
individual worshipper could be sealed in the same way ; and
the individual accordingly offers his own blood on the altar
or to the idol. The occasions on which the worshipper
requires the god's special favour are various. It may be that
the god's favour has been lost and must be regained ; thus
amongst the Quissamas an offering of the worshipper's own
blood appeases the offended " fetish." ^ Sickness may be the
mark of his anger, so on the Loango Coast whoever wishes to
be healed by the " fetish " Bingu, must shave his head and
paint himself red,^ which is equivalent to covering himself
with his own blood. In the Tonga Islands equivalents are
not accepted ; a finger joint must be cut off to procure the
recovery of a sick relation. ^ The Australian aborigines and
the Tscherkess also cut off a finger in sickness. Wealthy
w^omen of the Sudra caste offer a golden finger in place of the
real flesh and blood. The Abipones substituted an offering
■ ^ Su2)ra, p. 101.
2 As lie is called in the Journal of the Anthrojjological Institute, i. 192. What
kind of god he really was, I cannot make out.
2 Bastian, Loango Kiiste, i. 270. Here, too, I cannot make out whether this
" fetish " is a general or a local god, or even whether he is a god at all.
•* Mariner, T'onga Islands, ii. 210,
FETISHISM 171
of hair for an offering of blood,^ This last is a common
practice : it is probably what is meant by the shaving of the
head on the part of the worshipper of Bingu just mentioned ;
it was frequent amongst the Semites and the Greeks, and|
even survives in modern times.^ To return to the blood-
offering : evil dreams are due to evil spirits, so in the New
World, " among the Ahts, when a person starts in a dream
with a scream, a relative will cut his arms and legs and
sprinkle the blood around the house." ^ In Greece, the
'^aXa^o(f)v\aKe<;, if they had no victim to offer to avert the
threatening hail-storm, fell back on the ancient ways, and drew
blood from their own fingers to appease the storm.* The
transition from boyhood to manhood was a time when the
youth required specially to be placed under the protection of
the god, and this was effected by scourging him till his blood
ran on the altar, amongst the Spartans ; by cutting off a
finger, amongst the Mandans ; ^ amongst the Dieyerie tribe of
the Australians, by making down his back ten or twelve long
cuts, the scars of which he carries to his grave.^
Other special occasions on which the worshipper offers
his blood are great festivals. Thus, in Samoa, at the feast in
June in honour of Taisumalie, after the meal " followed club
exercise, and in terrible earnestness they battered each other's
scalps till the blood streamed down and over their faces and
bodies ; and this as an offering to the deity. Old and young,
men, women, and children, all took part in this general
melee and blood-letting, in the belief that Taisumalie would
thereby be all the more pleased with their devotedness, and .
answer prayer for health, good crops, and success in battle."''/ ^^ ^
Amongst the Semites, a familiar instance of the blood-offering; \ f^ ■.
in distress is that of the priests of Baal.^ On joyful occasions,\
also, the rite is observed, as, for instance, at marriages. In 5
Samoa, the bride " was received with shouts of applause, and "
as a further expression of respect " (?), " her immediate friends,
young and old, took up stones and beat themselves until their
^ Bastian, Der Menscli, iii. 4. ^ Jieligion of the Semites, 335.
^ Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 61.
•* Plutarch, ed. Wyttenbach, ii. 700 E. ; Seneca, Qucest. Nat. 4. 6.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 4. ^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 171.
' Turner, Samoa, 57. ^1 Kings xviii. 28.
I
(
172 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
heads were bruised and bleeding." ^ In Equatoria, part of
the Donagia wedding ceremony is a survival of the blood-
letting rite. " The husband scratches the sides and shoulders
of the bride (with nails prepared a long time before) till the
blood starts, as is required by custom." ^ To commend
themselves and their prayers, the Quiches pierced their ears
and gashed their arms, and offered the sacrifice of their blood
to their gods.^ The Mexicans bled their ears or tongues in
honour of Macuilxochitl * and many other gods. The practice
of drawing blood from the ears is said by Bastian ^ to be
common in the Orient ; and Lippert ^ conjectures that the
marks left in the ears were valued as visible and permanent
indications that the person possessing them was under the
protection of the god with whom the worshipper had united
himself by his blood-offering. In that case, earrings were
originally designed not for ornament, but to keep open and
^therefore permanently visible the mark of former worship.
1 The marks or scars left on legs or arms from which blood had
been drawn w^ere probably the origin of tattooing, as has
I occurred to various anthropologists. Like most other ideas,
we may add, that of tattooing must have been forced on man ;
it was not his own invention, and, being a decorative idea, it
must have followed the laws which regulate the development
of all decorative art. A stick or bone is prized because of
itself it suggests, or bears somewhat of a likeness to, some
object, e.g. the head of an animal ; and the primitive artist
completes the likeness suggested. So the scars from cere-
monial blood-letting may have suggested a figure ; the
resemblance was deliberately completed ; and next time the
scars were from the beginning designedly arranged to form
a pattern. That the pattern then chosen should be a picture
of the totem animal or the god to whom the blood was
offered, would be suggested by a natural and almost inevitable
association of ideas. That the occasion selected for the
operation should be early in life, and should be one of which
it was desirable that the worshippers should carry a visible
and permanent record, e.g. initiation, whether into manhood
^ Turner, Polynesia, 187. ^ Casati, Ten Years in Equatoria, i. 69.
•^ Brasseur de Bourbourg, Popol Vuh, 229, 259. '^ Sahagun, i. xiv.
^ Der Mcnsch, iii, 4, ^ CuUurgeschichte dcr Mensclilicit, ii. 328.
FETISHISM 173
or, as amongst the Battas/ priesthood, is also comprehensible ; ^
and when we recollect that in death the clansman is often
supposed to be reunited to his totem,^ we can understand the
belief of the Esquimaux and Fiji Islanders, that none but the
tattooed can enter their respective paradises.*
By the time that the blood-letting rite has come to be
stereotyped and obligatory on all in the form of tattooing, or
in its original form has come to be too usual to secure the
undivided attention which a man's own fortunes seem to him
to require, there will be a tendency — unless the community
exhibits that loyalty to its own gods which is essential both
to the existence and to the moral and religious development
of the tribe — to seek the aid of supernatural spirits other
than the tribal god. Now, for the savage, supernatural
beings are divided into three classes — the gods of hife own '
tribe, those of other tribes, and spirits which, unlike thej
first two classes, have never obtained a definite circle of
worshippers to offer sacrifice to them and in return receive
protection from them. This last class, never having been
taken into alliance by any clan, have never been elevated
into gods. There is, in the case we are now considering, no
question of seeking the aid of strange gods — they are pre-
sumably already too much engaged in looking after their own
worshippers to meet the exorbitant demands of the man who
is dissatisfied with his own proper gods. Thus in Peru, " each
province, each nation, each house, had its own gods, different
from one another ; for they thought that a stranger's god,
occupied with someone else, could not attend to them, but
only their own." ^ It is therefore to the third class of spirits
that he must turn. He has not far to go to find them: he
can scarcely set out from the camp or village in any direction
without passing some spot, a conspicuous rock, a gloomy
1 Bastian, Oest. Asien, v. 45.
2 The rite of circumcision has probably been ditfiised from one single centre.
Whether the practice belongs in its origin to the class of ceremonies described
in the text, is matter of conjecture. The existence, in the New World, of a
rite similar, except that it is confined to an offering of blood, seems to favour
the conjecture.
^ Supra, p. 103. "* Bastian. op. cit. vi. 151.
^ Garcilasso de la Vega, Boyal Commentaries of the Yncas (Hakluyt Soc),
1. 4/.
174 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
glade, which tradition or the taboo-fear ^ has marked as the
abode of one of these spirits. In the Pelew Islands, for
instance, a most trustworthy observer ^ says that, besides the
tribal and family gods, there are countless other spirits of
earth, mountain, woods, and streams, all of which are mis-
chievous and of all of which the islanders are in daily fear.
So, too, on the Slave and Gold Coasts, the malignant spirits
Srahmantin and Sasabonsum haunt places easily recognisable
— where the earth is red, or silk cotton trees grow. If the
savage has little difficulty in finding the abode of him whom
he seeks, he has also little doubt as to the manner of ap-
proaching him : he will treat him as he would his tribal god
— he knows no other way of opening communication with
supernatural beings. He adapts, therefore, the tribal ritual.
Bishop Caldwell's very careful observations in Tinnevelly are
so instructive in this respect, that we will summarise them
here, inserting in brackets what is necessary to bring out the
parallel between the religious and the sacrilegious rites. In
Tinnevelly evil spirits have no regular priests ; but when it
becomes necessary, in consequence of some pressing need, to
resort to the aid of these spirits, some one is chosen or offers
himself to be the priest for the occasion, and is dressed up
in the insignia of the spirit. [As blood is the sacrifice to a
god, so] in the dance with which the evil spirits [like the
tribal god ^] are worshipped, the dancer in an ecstasy draws
his own blood and drinks that of the victim,* a goat, say,
and thus the spirit passes into him and he has the power of
prophecy. [As the sacrifice of the sacred victims was a
solemn mystery to be celebrated by night and terminated
before sunrise, so] the worship of the evil spirits must be
performed by night, and the general opinion is that night is
the appropriate time for their worship. [As the god was
supposed to be in or to enter the victim, and the entrance
of a god into possession of a human being is universally
manifested by the shivering, convulsive movements of the
possessed person, it was a common custom to pour water on
1 Supra, p. 136.
" Kubary (long a resident in the islands) in Bastian, Allerlei, i. 46.
^ Religion of the Semites, 432.
■* See, below, the chapter on the Priesthood.
FETISHISM 175
the animal victims, which naturally shivered, and by their
shivering showed that the god had entered the victhn. So
in Tinnevelly] water was poured on the animal, which, when
it shivered, was pronounced an acceptable sacrifice. [As
the god was sacramentally consumed, so] " the decapitated
victim is held so that all its blood flows over the altar of
the evil spirit. When the sacrifice is completed, the
animal is cut up on the spot and stripped of its skin. It
is stuffed with rice and fruit and offered to the spirit, and
forms a holy meal in which all present at the sacrifice
partake." ^
Bishop Caldwell's account shows that in Tinnevelly the
mode of approaching the spiiits who are as yet unattached
to any body of regular worshippers, is modelled on the sacri-
ficial rite of the established gods. In the Tinnevelly pro-
ceedings, indeed, it is not an individual who is seeking the
assistance of one of these unattached spirits, but a reference
to the early part of this chapter will show that the method
by which the negro of Western Africa obtains a suhmaii is
an exact copy of the legitimate ritual by which a family
obtains a family god ; and in the next chapter we shall see
that all over the world these private cults are modelled on, t
derived from and later than the established worship of the -
gods of the community. The difference between the private
cult of one of these outlying, unattached spirits and the public
worship of the community's gods does not lie in the external
acts and rites, for these are the same in both cases, or as
nearly the same as the imitator can make them. ISTor does
the difference lie in the nature of the spirits whose aid is
invoked ; for, on the one hand, the community originally drew
its god from the ranks of the innumerable spiritual beings by
which primitive man was surrounded ; and, on the other hand,
the outlying, unattached spirits, who were not at first taken
into alliance, and so raised to the status of gods, may ulti-
mately be domesticated, so to speak, and made regular
members of a pantheon. The difference lies first in the
division which this species of individual enterprise implies
and encourages between the interests of the individual and
of the community, at a time when identity of interest is
^ Bishop Caldwell in Allerlei, L 164-8.
176 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
essential to the existence of society, and when the unstable
equilibrium of the small community requires the devotion of
every member to prevent it from falling. From this point
of view the proceedings in Tinnevelly, being the act of the
community, are quite different from those of a private
individual: they may, if great benefit to the community is
derived from them {e.g. if a pestilence is stayed in conse-
quence thereof), result in the community's acquiring a new
god, and one who takes an active interest in the welfare of
his new worshippers collectively. In the Pelew Islands at
the present day, unattached spirits not unfrequently become
gods in the proper sense of the word ^ in some such way ;
and in ancient Greece friendly relations were similarly
established with all the local spirits. But in these cases it is
the public good which is sought and promoted by the joint act
of the community, and under the directions of a priest acting
in the name of the community's gods. Thus, the negro,
according to Colonel Ellis,'^ who requires a tutelary deity for
his family, applies to the priest. In the New World, also, the
natives of Hispaniola did not make and break their gods at
will. It was not enough, for instance, that a tree should move
in a mysterious way for it to be straightway worshipped by
the individual who was awestruck. Before it could become
an object of worship, it must be recognised as the residence
of a god by a priest, and a due ritual must be provided for it,
as appears from the account given by Father Eoman, a com-
panion of Columbus : " A person travelling sees some tree
that seems to move or shake its roots, on which, in great
alarm, he asks who is there ? To this the tree answers that
such and such a Buhuitihu knows and will inform " ; the
Buhuitihu is fetched, and " then standing up addresses the
tree with many titles as if some great lord, then asks who it
is, what he does there, why he sent for him, and what he
would have him do ; whether he desires to be out, whether he
will accompany him, where he will be carried, and if a house
is to be built and endowed for his reception ? Having re-
ceived satisfactory answers, the tree is cut down and formed
into a cemi [idol], for which a house is built and endowed, and
cogiaba or religious ceremonies performed there at certain
^ Kubary in Allerlei, i. 46. - Supra, j). 164.
FETISHISM 177
stated times." ^ Very different is it when an individual
privately resorts to one of these spirits, because the request
which he has to prefer is such that he dare not make it
publicly to the clan-god, who is the guardian of the com-
munity's interest and the tribal morality. There is all the
difference in the world between applying to the clan-god and
to a spirit who has no reason to look with friendly eyes on
your fellow-clansmen, but rather, presumably, takes a pleasure
'in injuring them. Naturally, such a suspicious proceeding
is resented by the community, and, should disastrous conse-
quences ensue to any of its members, is punished by death.
Certainly it implies malignity in the person dealing with
such spirits, and a conscious, deliberate opposition to the
public interest and the recognised morality of the tribe. In
fine, the witch, whether of present-day Africa or mediseval
Europe, is a person who, believing him or herself to possess
the power, by means of magic, to cause loss, bodily torture,
and death to his or her neighbours, uses that power, and is
therefore morally exactly on a par with a person who, intend-
ing to poison by strychnine, should accidentally administer
nothing more dangerous than phenacetine. If amongst the
persons thus attacked some by a coincidence happen to die,
and the poisoner regards their deaths as evidence of his success,
the community (being equally unable to tell strychnine from
phenacetine) may regard them as reason for his execution.
A more accurate knowledge of science, of course, would have
enabled the tribunals to distinguish the innocent from the
guilty, and the murderer to distinguish poisons from non-
poisons.
Magic is, in fact, a direct relapse into the state of things
in which man found himself when he was surrounded by
supernatural beings, none of which was bound to him by any
tie of goodwill, with none of which had he any stated re-
lations, but all were uncertain, capricious, and caused in him
unreasoning terror. This reign of terror magic tends to re-
establish, and does re-establish wherever the belief in magic
prevails. The first step towards man's escape from it was
the confidence, given to him by his alliance with the clan-god,
^ Kerr, Voyages, iii. 138-9. A fuller account in Payne, New World,
l 396.
12
178 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
that his fortunes and his destiny were no longer at the mercy
of capricious powers, but in the hands of a being who was
friendly to him and was actuated by intelligible and reasonable
motives. Magic, therefore — the dealing with spiritual beings
other than the gods of the community — is in two ways the
negation of religion, and necessarily incurs its hostility. First,
the desertion of a worshipper is offensive ingratitude to the
clan-god, who accordingly may withdraw his protection from
the community, which is collectively responsible (as in the
blood-feud) for the acts of any of its members. Next, the
fundamental principle of religion — belief in the wisdom and
goodness of God — is violated by the belief in magic, by the
idea that a good man can come to harm, or that a bad man
is allowed to injure him.
But magic is more than a mere reversion, for in his
relapse man carries with him in a perverted form something
of his higher estate. In the beginning, if he could not
influence the supernatural powers which surrounded him to
his own good, neither could he to his fellow-man's harm. But
in his relapse he takes with him the only idea which a mind
so relapsing can entertain of worship, namely, that it is a
sequence of external actions, particularly potent over super-
natural beings. The armoury, therefore, on which he relies
for working evil to his fellow-man consists in rites which are
parodies or perversions of the worship of the community's
gods ; or " sympathetic magic," which has already been ex-
plained in Chapter IV.; and charms, of which a word here.
Charms or amulets are material objects, in which no spirit
resides either permanently or occasionally, but which are
associated with something, be it blood, or babe, or corpse, or
good spirit or bad, which is taboo. They therefore catch the
taboo-infection and become charged with the properties of
the thing taboo. They may serve, therefore, to do injury to
others, by communicating the taboo-contagion ; or, by their
dangerous character and the fear they inspire, they may pro-
tect the owner from both human and superhuman , foes ; or
they may, from some association or other of ideas, be lucky.
'^ To sum up : the difference between religion and magic is
radical. Psychologically, it is impossible, from the malignity
which is the motive of magic, to derive the tie of affection
FETISHISM 179
which binds fellow-worshippers to one another, and to the
being they worship. And as for the external acts which are
/ common to the two, the sacrificial rite originates with the
^ worship of the gods of the community : wherever else it
occurs it is borrowed from their worship — and this brings us
again to Family Gods and Guardian Spirits of individuals.
CHAPTEK XIV
FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS
It is still a much disputed question what was the original
form of human marriage, but in any case the family seems
to be a later institution than the clan or community, what-
ever its structure, and family gods consequently are later
than the gods of the community. If promiscuity, or if
polyandry and the matriarchate, were the original state of
things, then the family was admittedly a later develop-
ment. And so also it was, if the patriarchate with monogamy
or polygamy prevailed from the beginning. In the latter
case, the gods of the patriarch were necessarily also the gods
of his married children and his grandchildren ; as long as
the patriarch and his children and children's children dwelt
together and formed the community, the married children
and bheir respective families could have no separate gods of
their own. When, however, circumstances made it possible
for the families which formed such a patriarchal community
to exist apart from one another, and this was only possible
in relatively late times, then it became also possible for them
to have gods of their own in addition to those that they
worshipped along with their kinsmen. In Western Africa,
as appears from the account cited at the beginning of last
chapter from Colonel Ellis, families obtain their cults from
the sanctuaries of the estabhshed gods, by the mediation of
the priests. It is from the gods of the community also
that individuals in some cases obtain their guardian spirits.
Thus in Samoa, " at child-birth the help of several ' gods '
was invoked in succession, and the one who happened to be
addressed at the moment of the birth was the infant's
180
FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS 181
totem " ^ (this individual totem is quite distinct in Samoa
from the clan totem, and is the child's guardian spirit).
But though both guardian spirits and family gods may
be obtained from the ranks of the community's gods, it is
quite possible for the reverse process to take place. Thus in
the Pelew Islands, where the gods are totem-gods, each tribe
and each family has its own totem-god, and as a tribe
develops into a state, the god of the family or tribe which
is the most important politically becomes the highest god.^
And as a guardian spirit in some cases becomes hereditary
and so a family god, the cirpulation of gods becomes
complete ; but as the community is prior chronologically to
the family, and the emancipation of the individual from the
customs which subordinate him and his interests to the
community is later even than the segregation of the family,
the flow of gods has its source in the gods of the community
originally. It is not, however, always that a tribe has
sufficient cohesion amongst its members to develop into a
state. More often, indeed usually, the clan is unstable and
eventually dissolves. Then its members, formerly united in
the worship of the god that protected them, scatter ; and the
god becomes a mere memory, a name. His worship ceases,
for now nothing brings his worshippers together. He is
remembered vaguely as a good god ; and if a white man asks
the savage why then he does not worship him, the savage,
not knowing, invents, and says it is unnecessary, the god is
good and is quite harmless. So the white man falls into
one of two errors : either he concludes that fear is the source
of the savage's religion, and that he only worships evil spirits,
or he sees in it " a monotheistic tendency," or perhaps a
trace of primeval monotheism. The first error is due to the
fact that, though the savage's conscience reproaches him,
when he falls ill, for neglecting his gods, and so far fear
plays a part in his education, still he does receive bene-
fits from his gods, assistance in war, etc., and looks on
them with friendly eyes. The other error lies in taking
a single fact and explaining it without reference to its
context.
When a clan does so dissolve, or when in consequence
^ Frazer, Totemism, 55. ^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 16.
182 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
of the clan's expansion the clan-altar becomes remote from
the majority of the tribe, the need of a more immediate
protector and of more intimate and constant relations with
him makes itself felt, with the result that a guardian spirit
or family god is chosen, not always and probably not
originally from amongst the gods of the community (if there
be more than one). But whether the guardian spirit of the
individual be drawn from the gods or from other unattached,
supernatural spirits, the ritual adopted by the individual is
that used by the community in worshipping its own gods.
In E'orth America, where totemism is the form of the
community's religion, the individual also selects an animal
species (not an individual animal) which is to be to him
what the clan totem is to the clan. We may call it an
individual totem, or a manitoo (an Indian word for spirit,
familiar to English readers in the phrase Great Manitoo, i.e.
_P the Great Spirit), or a guardian spirit. The period at
which such a manitoo is chosen is the time when the boy is
to enter on the rights and duties of full manhood — a time of
life often chosen by totem peoples for the initiation of the
youth into the worship of the clan totem. The blood-offer-
ing which forms part of the latter ceremony is found in the
former also. The Mosquito Indians in Central America
" sealed their compact with it [the individual totem] Jay draw-
ing blood from various parts of their body." ^ The tattooing
which is the outcome of the blood-letting rite accompanies
and marks the choice of a guardian spirit. The Indians of
Canada " tattooed their individual totems on theu^ bodies." ^
The fasting which is the preparation for contact with things
holy, and therefore for participation in the clan sacrifice, is
an indispensable preliminary to the selection of a manitoo.^
^The animal of which the youth dreams first during these
rites becomes his individual totem. As the community
seal their alliance with the totem species by the sacrifice of
one of its members, so the individual kills one of the species
which is to be his totem, and which henceforth will be
sacred to him, and will be neither killed nor eaten by him.
From the skin of the one member of the species which he
^ Frazer, Totemism, 55 (Bancroft, Naiive Races, i. 740).
^ Frazer, loc. cit. ^ Waitz, Anthr&pologie, iii. 118, 191.
FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS 183
kills he makes his " medicine-bag " ; ^ and though the whole
species is sacred to him, it is to this bag that he pays his
especial devotion, just as in Egypt, though all cows were
sacred, one was chosen and considered to be the special
embodiment of Apis. " Feasts were often made, and dogs
and horses sacrificed to a man's medicine-bag." ^ So, too, the
West African negro, it will be remembered, offers sacrifices
to his suhman, which is thus to be distinguished from an
amulet. What Colonel Ellis says of the respect which the
negro shows to his suhman is amply corroborated by the
reverence the Indian pays to his medicine-bag : so far from
abusing it, or punishing it, if it did not act, " days and even
weeks of fasting and penance of various kinds were often
suffered to appease this fetish, which he imagined he had in
some way offended." ^ So far from throwing it away, " if an
Indian should sell or give away his medicine-bag, he would
bo disgraced in his tribe. If it was taken away from him in
battle, he was for ever subjected to the degrading epithet of
' a man without medicine.' " * Finally, we may notice that
throughout the Eed Indian ritual no priest appears — a fact
which indicates that here we have to do with a fairly
primitive state of things.
Going north, we find that amongst the Samoyedes every
man must have a protecting spirit: he gives the shaman the
skin of any animal he chooses, the shaman makes it into
human likeness, and the worshipper makes offerings to it
when he wants anything.^ Here, where totemism as the
form of the community's religion has faded, the individual
totem has also shrunk somewhat ; the skin of the animal
evidently corresponds to the medicine-bag of the North
American Indians, but the animal species is apparently not
held sacred by the individual any longer. The rites of
fasting, blood-letting, etc., and the method of choosing an
animal, are not mentioned ; and the intervention of the
priest indicates that we have to do with a comparatively
advanced stage of religion. But the human likeness given to
the skin, and, above all, the offerings made to it, show that it
^ This is not a native expression, but the French settlers'.
2 Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 158 fF.
•^ Dorman, loc. cit. "* Ihid. ^ Bastian, Der MenscJi, ii. 129.
184 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
has not dwindled to a mere charm, but is still the abode of a
protecting spirit. Amongst the Jakuts — to keep in northern
zones — the skin has disappeared, the human likeness is given
to a wooden idol, the connection of the idol with a totem
animal survives only in the fact that the idol is smeared with
blood, and it is not for life but for some special occasion or
purpose that a guardian spirit is thus invoked. But the
sacrifice to the idol and the feast at which it occupies the
seat of honour -^ show that it is still the abode of a spirit, and
not a mere mechanical charm. Here, too, the shaman takes
part in the proceedings.
In Brazil, the maraca or tammaraca is a calabash or
gourd containing stones and various small articles. Every
Brazilian Indian has one. It is all-powerful. Its power is
communicated to it by a priest, who gets it from a far-off
spirit. Sacrifices, especially human, are made to it.^ Here,
the original totem animal has left not even its skin. The
bag of animal skin — which amongst the Eed Indians also
is a receptacle for various small articles that are " great
medicine " — has been given up for what we may call a box,
supplied by the vegetable world. The Brazilian maraca
finds its exact parallel in East Central Africa. When the
" diviners give their response they shake a small gourd filled
with pebbles, and inspect pieces of sticks, bones, claws,
pottery, etc., which are in another gourd." ^ Eeturning to
the New World, it was usual for the priests amongst the
northern Indians of Chili to have "some square bags of
painted hide in which he keeps the spells, like the maraca
or rattle of the Brazilian sorcerers." ^ Elsewhere in the New
World, in the Antilles, there were tutelary deities (Chemis)
of the individual and of the family which resided in idols, of
human or animal form, and the figure of the Chemi was
tattooed on the worshipper.^ In Peru, " conopas " were the
tutelary deities of individuals ; they received sacrifices, and
might be handed down from father to son.^
Leaving the New World, we may note in passing that
1 Bastian, Allerlei, i. 213.
2 Miiller, Amerikan. Urreligion. 262 ; cf. Dorman, o^). cit. 159.
2 DiifF Macdojiald, Africana, 44. ^ Kerr, Voyages, v. 405.
^ Miiller, op. clt. 171. c Dorman, op, cit. 160.
FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS 185
" the evidence for the existence of individual totems in
Australia, though conclusive, is very scanty." ^ We go on,
therefore, to Polynesia, where " tiki " is what " totem " is in
North America. To every individual, every family, and every
community, there is a tiki or totem animal. The individual "~"^
totem is chosen from amongst the animals worshipped as
totems by the various communities. It is chosen, by a
method already described,^ at the birth of the child. But
there are indications that originally the ceremony took place,
not at birth, but at the same time of life as amongst the Ked
Indians.^ It is therefore interesting to notice that the
tendency to antedate the ceremony, which in Polynesia has
become fully established, had already begun to manifest itself
in America ; and further, that the mode of choice is the
same in both cases, but that in America, apparently, the
field of choice had not yet become limited to animals already
totems. " Among the tribes of the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,
when a woman was about to be confined, the relations
assembled in the hut and drew on the fioor figures of
different animals, rubbing each one out as soon as it was
finished. This went on till the child was born, and the
figure that remained sketched on the ground was the child's
tona or totem." ^ That in Polynesia also the choice was not
originally limited to animals or plants already totems and
therefore domesticated — if they were species capable of
domestication — may be indicated by the fact that amongst
the Maoris Tiki is the name of a god — the god of plants
that have not been domesticated. Elsewhere Tiki is the god
of tattooing — which again points to the connection between
tattooing and the totem.
As, then, guardian spirits and family gods are found in -f
Africa, Asia, America, Australia, and Polynesia, we may not
unreasonably look for them in the Old World. We shall
1 Frazer, op. cit. 53.
2 Supra, pp. 180, 181. ^ Waitz, Anthropologie, vi. 320.
■* Frazer, op. cit. 55. In Eastern Central Africa, at the "mysteries" which
take place at puberty "in the initiation of males, figures of the whale are
made on the ground, and in the initiation of females, figures of leopards,
hyenas, and such animals as are seen by those that never leave their homes."
— Duff Macdonald, Africana, i. 131. Perhaps these puberty- mysteries are
remnants of the custom of choosing an individual totem at that time of life.
186 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
also expect to find that their cult is modelled there as else-
where on the cult of the great gods. As totemism had been
almost completely metamorphosed by subsequent develop-
ments of religion, we need not expect to find much of it in
the guardian spirits and family gods of the Old World ;
and if the idols in which the Chemis of the Antilles dwelt
had come to be anthropomorphic in some cases, we need not
be surprised if they were invariably anthropomorphic in
Greece or Rome, nor if the tutelary deities of families or
individuals in those countries were drawn from the ranks of
the community's gods, as was the case in Polynesia.
Amongst the Semites, the teraphim, the worship of which
was apparently not considered idolatrous amongst the
Hebrews, were family gods. They were figures of wood or
metal, with heads shaped into the likeness of a human face ;
they served as house-oracles, and were worshipped by the
Chaldseans and by the inhabitants of Syria.^
That at Rome the Genius was the guardian spirit of the
individual, and that the Lares and Penates were family gods,
no one will question. It is, however, interesting to note
that both the Genius and the Lares are associated with
animals, the former with the snake and the latter with the
dog, and so betray probably their totemistic origin. The life
of the individual was in some cases supposed to depend upon
the life of the snake in which his genius lived; the man's
health depended on his genius,^ and " when the serpent which
was the genius of the father of the Gracchi was killed,
Tiberius died." ^ This exactly agrees with the account given
of the individual totem amongst the Guatemaltecs : many
" are deluded by the Devil to believe that their life depends
on the Life of such and such a Beast (which they take to
them as their familiar Spirit), and think that when that beast
dies they must die ; when he is chased, their hearts pant ; when
he is faint, they are faint ; nay, it happens that by the Devil's
delusion they appear in the shape of that Beast (which com-
monly by their choice is a Buck or Doe, a Lion or Tigre, Dog
or Eagle), and in that Shape have been shot at and wounded." *
1 Avi Urquell, v. 92. 2 preller, Romis'che Mytjiologie,^ ii. 198.
^ Jevons, Plutarch's Romane Questions, xlviii.
^ Gage, A New Survey of the West Indies,^ 334.
FAMILY GODS AND GUARDIAN SPIRITS 187
The resemblance between the Guatemaltec belief and the
European belief about the wounding of witches is so close as
to suggest that the animal in which the familiar spirit of the
European witch appeared may have been a last lingering
survival — like the serpent of the Gracchi and the Genius of
the Eomans — of an individual totem. The dog, with which
the Lares are associated, appears in European folk-lore as a
form in which ghosts manifest themselves,^ and the Lar is
conceived not only as the house-spirit but as the spirit of a
deceased ancestor. Probably we here have ancestor-worship
amalgamating with the worship of a guardian spuit, who
originally appeared in totem shape. In Polynesia, a deceased
ancestor, and not a god, is sometimes chosen as a totem," but
that is an exception to the general rule, and probably late.
In Greece, the Athenians distinguished between 6eol
iroLTpLoi, lepa irdrpia and Oeol TrarpwoL, lepa iraipwa. The former
were certainly the national gods. Whether the latter were
family gods is less certain. On the one hand, the privilege
of worshipping them seems to have been confined to true-
born Athenians, and to have been a mark of full citizenship,^
which would show that they were the gods of the Athenians
as distinguished from other Greeks. On the other hand,
their worship was carried on in the private houses of those
qualified to worship them, which rather points to their being
family gods drawn, as in Polynesia, from the ranks of the
community's gods. These Oeol mrarpMoc or kpKeloi or fiv'x^i'Oi
were worshipped in the fjiv^ol of the house, and one of them
was apparently Hecate,* to whom the dog was sacred ; and
the dog is, as we saw, associated with the household gods of
the Romans also. An apparent trace of guardian spirits in
Greece is the Hesiodic doctrine of haipLov€<; and what is
obviously implied in the word evSalfMcov, namely, that the man
to whom the word is applied has a good Saifjucov. The
dya6o^ SaijbLcov, again, like the genius of the Romans, appears
as a snake ; and there was a variety of harmless snake, the
specific name of which was d<ya6ohaipLove<;.^ We may note
that before Hesiod, i.e. in the Homeric poems, there is no
^ Jevons, op. a^.-xl.-xlii. ^ Waitz, Anthropologk, vi. 317, 321, 324.
3 Ar. Ath. Pol. ■* Eur. Med. 397 ; Rohde, Psyche, 232.
5 Rolide, op. cit. 233.
188 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
mention of ancestor-worship, and after him no cult of
guardian spirits. Whether we are to connect these two
facts, and infer that ancestor-worship, springing up in post-
Homeric times, amalgamated with the cult of the guardian
spirit (as in Rome with the cult of the Lar), and then over-
shadowed it altogether, is a point which I will not do more
than suggest for consideration. At any rate, it is obviously
desirable that we should now go on to consider the question
of ancestor- worship in general ; and, bearing in mind that it
is essentially a private worship and a purely family affair, we
may not inappropriately sum up the results of this chapter
as affecting cults of this kind. They are as follows. When-
ever and wherever cults of this kind are found — and they
are found in every quarter of the globe — they are assimilated
to the ritual used in the worship of the community's gods ;
and the tutelary spirits themselves assume the same external
form as the public gods. Next, it is more probable that the
individual should imitate the community's ritual than the
community an individual's ; and in some cases it is avowedly
the individual that borrows his guardian spirit from the
ranks of the community's gods. Finally, the family is an
institution which appears relatively late in the history of
society. If, therefore, we find points of similarity between
the ritual used in ancestor-worship and that used in the
worship of the public gods, we shall not fall into the error of
treating it as an isolated and unparalleled fact in the history
of religion, but shall rather regard it as subject to the same
laws and to be explained in the same way as the rest of the
class of private cults to which it belongs.
CHAPTEE XV
ANCESTOR-WOESHIP
A DESCRIPTION has already been given, in Chapter V., of the
spontaneous outbursts of sorrow, " the indescribable scenes of
lamentation and wailing," as Mr. Turner calls them, which
take place amongst savages on the occasion of a death ; and
of the uncertainty whether death has really supervened, the
reluctance to believe that it has, the endeavours to detain
the soul of the dying man by offering him his favourite
dishes, displaying his most cherished possessions, praising his
noble deeds ; the attempts to recall the soul, when the man
is dead, to induce it to abide with the survivors ; in fine, the
desire to dwell on the memory and to seek communion with
the spirits of those who have been loved and lost. The
object of that chapter was to suggest that the avenue of
communication thus opened between the savage and the spirits
of his dead may have served to suggest to him a way of
approaching other beings, who like the dead were spirits, but
unlike them possessed supernatural powers ; for the dead do
not seem, in any of the ceremonies described, to appear as
supernatural beings. The being with whom the savage seeks
communion in these rites is " the father whom he knew," not
a daemon of any kind. At death, as in sleep, the spirit
deserts the body, but does not in either case necessarily
thereby gain supernatural powers. After death, indeed, the
ghost's relation to the living is rather one of dependence, for
food, comfort, and even continuance of existence. In fine,
these spontaneous demonstrations of affection, grief, and
desire for reunion with the departed do not amount to
worship. We have therefore now to trace the process by
which they developed into ancestor-worship.
189
190 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The first condition of any such development is that the
demonstrations, at first spontaneous, should become con-
ventional and harden into custom. This is not the same
thing as saying that grief ceases to be genuine when the
manner of its expression becomes conventional. On the
contrary, in the first place, beneath " the outward trappings
and the signs of woe " there may be " that which passes
show " ; and, in the next place, the existence of a conventional
mode of expressing the mourner's woe shows that public
opinion considers grief in these circumstances right and
proper ; such demonstrations, in fact, are not the isolated
expression of unusual susceptibility, but an indication of the
habitual affection even of a savage for those nearest and
dearest to him. When, then, it has become the tribal custom
for relatives to perform certain acts, on the occasion of a
death, which were originally spontaneous and now are the
conventional expressions of grief, it becomes possible for fear
to operate in support of this as of other tribal customs,
though it was not in fear that either it or they originated.
Custom is one of the earliest shapes in which duty presents
itself to the consciousness of the savage : it is what is expected
of him, both by the community and, in his better moments,
by himself as a good member of the community. Now, the
savage regards all sickness as the work of spirits — not
necessarily of evil spirits, as is commonly and carelessly said.
When, therefore, he falls ill, he casts about in his mind for
the spirit who may be the cause of his sickness ; and if, like
the African chief mentioned by Lippert,^ he has been
negligent of the rites which it is customary to perform to
a deceased parent, he naturally interprets his headache
as a reminder from the neglected ghost. In a word, fear of
punishment is an indispensable instrument in the education of
man, be he savage or be he civilised ; but fear of punishment
is not the same thing as fear of evil spirits. The latter is
irrational, and is sterile both morally and intellectually,
while the former implies a standard of duty (or custom),
and opens out the possibility of moral and intellectual
progress.
That the ceremonies out of which ancestor-worship was
^ Lippert, Kulturgeschichte, iii. 75.
J
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 191
to develop did not originate in fear, and that the spirit of
a deceased kinsman was not a mere evil spirit, is a contention
in support of which some arguments have been already
adduced in Chapter V. ; and which is also supported by the
examination of some other customs not mentioned in that
chapter — for instance, that of blood-letting at the grave.
Thus, in Australia, " members of the tribe stand or kneel
over the body in turns, and with a large boomerang they
strike each other on the head till a quantity of blood flows
over the body " ^ In Central Australia, " they beat their
heads until the blood flows, and weep bitterly, if a near
relation." 2 in the Northern Territory of South Australia,
" the women score their heads and thighs till the blood flows
freely . . . the men score their thighs only."^ Elsewhere
in South Australia, " besides weeping and howling, the female
relatives make numerous superficial incisions upon the thigh
from 6 to 12 inches long."* In the New World, at a
funeral, the Dacotahs " gash their legs and arms," ^ and as
for the Crows, " blood was streaming from every conceivable
part of the bodies of all."^ In the semi-civilisation of
Central America, the Aztecs " mangled their flesh as if it had
been insensible, and let their blood run in profusion."^ In South
America, Brazilian aborigines cut off fingers, and the same
mutilation appears in Fiji : " his little finger had been cut
off in token of affection for his deceased father."^ The
Scyths wounded the lobes of their ears at their king's death.^
In the New Hebrides, the wounding took a less severe form :
" they scratched their faces till they streamed with blood." ^^
In Rome, the women scratched their faces till the blood ran.-^^
In Tahiti, it sufficed to smear some blood on a rag and drop
the rag in the grave.^^ In Tanna, it was enough if the face
of the corpse, instead of being smeared with the relatives'
1 Journal of Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 187.
2 IbU. 183. 3 iii^^ 178. 4 7j^-^^ 185.
^ Dorman, Primitive Superstitions, 217. ^ Ibid. ' Ihid. 218.
^ Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 177.
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 328. '^^ Turner, Samoa, 335.
11 Cic. de Leg. 2, 23, 59 ; 25, 64 ; Festus, s.v. radere ; Plin. N. H. 11,
37, 157 ; Propert. 3. 13&. 11 ; Serv. ad Aen. iii. 67, v. 78, xii. 606 ; Roscher's
Lexikon, ii. 238.
1^ Bastian, loc. cit.
192 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
blood, was painted red.^ In West Africa, it was the relatives
(wives) who were painted on this occasion.^
To interpret this ceremony as due to fear and as an
indication that the spirit of the deceased is regarded as an
evil spirit, would be unreasonable on two accounts. First,
the ceremony is always associated with demonstrations of
grief, and therefore probably adds volume to the flow of that
emotion, whereas fear would check it. Next, death is not
the only occasion on which the blood of the tribe is applied
to the body of a clansman : at birth,^ at the dawn of
manhood,* and at marriage,^ the same ceremony is observed,
and it is reasonable, therefore, to suppose that it has the
same intention. On those occasions the object is to com-
municate the blood which is the life of the clan to the
clansman when he has especial need of it. I would suggest,
therefore, that originally the blood-letting rite at the grave
was one of the various devices, described in Chapter V.,
for retaining or recalling the life which was on the point of
leaving, or had left, perhaps not beyond recall, its earthly
tenement ; and that the blood was intended to strengthen the
bond between the clansman and his clan at a time when it
was obviously tending to snap.
But as the outward acts which constitute the ceremony
tend by a natural process to become less revolting and less
cruel until eventually the actual effusion of blood is dispensed
with, and some other colouring matter takes its place ; so the
feeling and the ideas of which the outward act was the
expression, tend to change with changing circumstances.
When this demonstration of grief and of affection has become
conventional, the neglect of it inevitably comes to be regarded
as a want of respect to the deceased, and the performance of
it is regarded no longer as a crude attempt to give fresh life
to the deceased, but as something done to please him. Hence,
in the Tonga Islands, they " wound the head and cut the
flesh in various parts with knives, shells, clubs, spears, etc.,
in honour of the deceased " ; ^ and in Samoa the blood is
regarded as an offering to the dead. " Doleful cries are
^ Turner, Polynesia, 93. 2 Ellis, TsM-spcaking Peoples, 268.
2 Supra, p. 76. ■* Supra, p. 103. ^ Supra, p. 171.
^ Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii. 212.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 193
accompanied by the most frantic expressions of grief, such as
rending garments, tearing the hair, thumping the face and
eyes, burning the body with small piercing firebrands, beating
the head with stones till the blood runs ; and this they called
an ' offering of blood ' for the dead. Everyone acquainted
with the historical parts of the Bible will here observe
remarkable coincidences." ^ But offerings of the worshipper's
blood are, as we have seen,- made to gods, and the scars which
the operation leaves, or the tatooing to which it leads, are
interpreted as marks showing that the worshipper is under
the protection of the god to whom the offering has been
made.^ When, therefore, as in Australia, " widows as a rule
have a number of cuts made on their back as a sign of
mourning,"'^ and the blood shed by the relatives comes to
be regarded as an offering " to " the deceased, there is an
obvious danger of the ceremony coming to be considered as
worship of the deceased, by those who practise it as a matter
of custom, and explain it by obvious, and incorrect, analogies.
Hence it was forbidden to the Hebrews : " Ye shall not make
any cuttings in your flesh for the dead, nor print any marks
upon you : I am the Lord," ^ whereas the cuttings and marks
would imply that the dead man was the lord of those who
made the cuttings in their flesh. Where, however, the
tendency was not thus checked, i.e. everywhere else, ancestor-
worship was free to develop ; but its development required
the co-operation of other causes, which we shall shortly set
forth. But first it is necessary to consider the very interesting
question of the hair-offering.
The fact that mourners all over the world do cut off their
hair and shave their heads, is well established. The reason
for their doing so is disputed. Mr. Frazer^ regards the
proceeding as a means of disinfecting the mourners from the
taboo contagion, analogous to the breaking of the vessels used
by a taboo person. The late Professor Eobertson Smith ^
regarded it as an offering of the hair, in which, as in the
blood, the life of the individual is commonly beheved to
1 The Rev. G. Turner, Polynesia, i. 227.
2 Supra, p. 170. « ^ Supra, p. 172.
^ Journal of Anthropological Institute, xxiv. 195. ^ Lev. xix. 28.
^ Golden Bough, i. 206-7. ' Religion of the Semites, 325 If.
13
194 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
reside. The two views, however, are not irreconcilable, and
the analogy of the blood-offering, as explained in our last
paragraph, enables us to combine them. Originally, the hair
was cut off at once in order that it might not catch and
convey the taboo infection: the hair was not an offering to
the deceased, any more than the blood of the clan, which was
communicated in order to revivify him, was an offering in his
honour. Then the custom is continued even when the
reason is forgotten ; and meanwhile the practice has grown
up of commending one's individual prayers and fortunes to
the gods by offering one's blood or hair to them. Finally,
the mourning custom, the original reason of which has been
forgotten, calls for explanation, and is explained on the
analogy of the offerings to the gods. That it is so explained
by those who practise it, is clear from examples of the
custom, in which it is done in honour of or " for " the
deceased.^ That originally it was a measure of disinfection,
is clear from the fact that it is observed in cases where the
theory of an offering is quite inapplicable.^
The history of food-offerings to the dead is, on the theory
here suggested, exactly parallel to that of hair and blood-
offerings. Originally, the dead were supposed to suffer from
hunger and thirst as the living do, and to require food — for
which they were dependent on the living. Eventually, the
funeral feasts were interpreted on the analogy of those at
which the gods feasted with their worshippers — and the dead
were now no longer dependent on the living, but on a level with
the gods. The food-offering is, however, more interesting
in one way than the offerings of blood or hair : it enables
us to date ancestor-worship relatively. It was not until
agricultural times that the sacrificial rite became the cheer-
ful feast at which the bonds of fellowship were renewed
between the god and his worshippers.^ It could not there-
fore have been until agricultural times that the funeral feast
came to be interpreted on the analogy of the sacrificial feast.
Offerings of food, hair, and blood, then, are elements both
of the rites for the dead and of the worship of the gods.
But they do not together constitute ancestor-worship : they
are its elements — as yet, however, held in suspension and
^ Supra, p. 192. 2 Prazer, loc. cit. ^ Supra, p. 159.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 195
waiting for something to precipitate them. In other words,
worship in any proper sense of the word implies worshippers,
united either by the natural bond of blood or by the
artificial bond of initiation. In the case of ancestor-worship,
the body of worshippers is supplied by the family and united
by the natural bond of blood. But the family is a comparat-
ively late institution in the history of society. It does not
come into existence until nomad life has been given up. A
nomad society, to maintain itself in the struggle for existence
at all, must consist of a larger group than that of parents and
children, i.e. two generations ; and in the patriarchal form,
the group consists of three or four generations. It is not
until the comparative safety of settled life and of village
communities has been attained, that it is possible for a son,
as soon as he marries, to sever himself from the group into
which he was born, and become the founder of a family. In
nomad times, he and his wife and children are not a family,
but members of the group to which he belongs by birth :
they do not form a separate organism or institution, having
separate interests from the rest of the community, regulating
its own affairs. Thus once more we are brought to the
period of settled, agricultural life as the earliest time at which
the " worship " of ancestors begins.^
When ancestor- worship is established as a private cult,
it, like other private cults, is steadily assimilated in form, in
its rites and ceremonies, to the public worship of the gods.
The animals which provided the food that the deceased
originally was supposed to consume, are now sacrificed
according to the ritual observed in sacrificing animals
to the gods. In West Africa, " water and rum are
poured on the grave, and the blood of living sacrifices, who
are killed on the spot, is sprinkled on it." ^ In Equatorial
Africa, " the son who succeeds the deceased in power
immolates an ox on the grave." ^ Amongst the Basutos an
ox was slaughtered on the grave as soon as the deceased was
^ " But the worship of ancestors is not primal. The comparatively late
recognition of kinship by savages, among whom some rude form of religion
existed, tells against it as the earliest mode of worship." — Clodd, 3Iyths and
Dreams,^ 113.
2 Ellis, Uwe-speakmg Peoples, 112.
^ Casati, Ten Years in Uqioatoria, ii. 210.
196 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
buried. 1 The Battas pour the blood of a fowl on the corpse.^
The Tehuelche (Patagonians) sacrifice mares with all the rites
previously described.^ It is not surprising, therefore, that
the o-raves on which these sacrifices were offered should,
like the sacrifices themselves, be affected by the tendency to
assimilate the private cult of ancestors to the public worship
of the gods. The cairns which are frequently erected to
mark a grave, and on which the sacrifice was offered, would
recall the primitive altar to mind. The single stone or
wooden post erected on a grave was converted into a human
shape, on the analogy of the idol to which the community's
sacrifices were offered. Thus, in De Peyster's Island, " a
stone was raised at the head of the grave, and a human head
carved on it." * Amongst many American tribes " a grave-
post is roughly hewn into the image of the person over whose
body it is placed." ^ The practice is reported of the Indians
of Quebec (" anointing and greasing that man of wood as if
Kving," says Father Salamant), the Ottawas, Algonkins,
Alaskans, the Indians of the North- West, the natives of
Chili, of the West Indies, Nicaragua, the Isthmus, Peru, and the
Mayas and the Aztecs. Where cremation prevailed, the ashes
were placed in hollow wooden statues, hollow clay images, or
urns having on the outside a representation of the deceased.^
When the assimilation of the rites for the dead to the
ritual of the gods has proceeded thus far, it naturally happens
that in many cases some superhuman powers are ascribed to
the spirits of the dead. But it never happens that the
spirits of the dead are conceived to be gods. For this there
are several obvious reasons. Man is dependent on the gods ;
but the spirits of his deceased ancestors are dependent on
him. The house-father, when he dies, does not cease to be
" the father whom they knew " ; though dead, and sometimes
differing in degree of power from his sons, who in their turn
will be " worshipped," he does not — like the gods — differ in
kind from mortal men. Above all, the gods of the
community, merely from the fact that they have the whole
of the community for their worshippers and under their
^ Casalis, Les Bassoiitos, 264. 2 Bastian, OesL Asien, v. 365.
'•^ Supra, p. 146. 4 Turner, Samoa, 286.
^ Dormau, Primitive Superstitions, 117. ^ Ibid.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 197
protection, must inevitably be regarded as greater powers
than a spirit who is only worshipped by the narrow circle of
a single family, and cannot do much even for them.
To speak of the gods as " deified ancestors," is to use
an expression which covers some ambiguity of thought. If
what is implied is that in a community possessing the con-
ception of divine personality, certain ancestors are, by some
unexplained process, raised to the rank of gods, the statement
may be true, but it does not prove that the gods, to whose
rank the spirit is promoted, were themselves originally
ghosts — which is the very thing that it is intended to prove.
What then of these gods ? Either they are believed to be
the ancestors of some of their worshippers, or they are not.
If they are believed to be the ancestors of their worshippers,
then they are not believed to have been human : the
worshipper's pride is that his ancestor was a god and no
mere mortal. Thus certain Greek families believed that
they were descended from Zeus, and they worshipped Zeus,
not as ancestor but as god. The " deified ancestor " theory,
however, would have us believe that there was once a man
named Zeus, who had a family, and his descendants thought
that he was a god. Which is simplicity itself. If, on the
other hand, a god is not believed to be the ancestor of any
of his worshippers, then to assert that he was really a
" deified ancestor " is to make a statement for which there is
no evidence — it is an inference from an assumption, namely,
that the only spirits which the savage originally knew were
ghosts. This assumption, however, is not true : the savage
believes the forces and phenomena of nature to be personalities
like himself, he does not believe that they are ghosts or
worked by ghosts. In fine, the notion that gods were evolved
out of ghosts is based on an unproved assumption and the
simple fallacy of confusing ancestors human and ancestors
divine. The fact is that ancestors known to be human were
not worshipped as gods, and that ancestors worshipped as
gods were not believed to have been human.
This last remark leads us to a generalisation which,
though obvious, is important : it is that wherever ancestor-
worship exists, it exists side by side with the public worship
of the gods of the community. The two systems develop on
/
198 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
lines which are parallel, indeed, and therefore never meet ;
whereas, if they had moved on the same line of development,
/- one would have absorbed the other. In other words, if
jN,^ ancestor-worship were the source of religion, if gods were
originally ghosts, w^e may be reasonably sure that ancestor-
X worship would have died in giving birth to the higher form
of religion, or rather that it would have been transformed
into it. In the newly-evolved organism we should have
traced survivals here and there, rudimentary organs inherited
from the previous state of things. We should also have
found races who had never got beyond the earlier stage, or
had relapsed into it. But we should not everywhere have
found the two systems alive together : we might as well
expect to find the chrysalis still living by the side of the
butterfly which has emerged from it.
The clear demarcation between the two systems, their
mutual exclusiveness to the last, is an indication that they
start from different presuppositions and are addressed to
different objects. At the same time, the parallelism between
them shows that they have their respective sources in the
same region of feeling. That feeling is piety, filial piety in
the one case, piety towards the protecting god of the clan
in the other. Here we have displayed the secret of the
strength of ancestor- worship, and also of its weakness. Of
its strength, because, as Confucius says, " Filial piety and
fraternal submission ! are they not the root of all benevolent
actions ? " ^ Of its weakness, because it is inadequate of
' itself to satisfy the demands of the religious instinct. In
China, the people, excluded from participation in the state -
worship of Heaven, decline upon the lowest forms of religion,
in their desire for communion with a supernatural power.
This desire, where it exists, cannot be satisfied by the
substitution of a human object of adoration for the super-
natural which it craves to feed on ; and the present religious
condition of China shows how unpractical Confucius was in
recommending the average man to regard his human father
as a god : " nor in [filial obedience] is there anything so
essential as to reverence one's father ; and as a mark of
reverence there is nothing more important than to place him
^ Lun-yu, i. 2. 2 (Douglas, Cmifucianism, 119).
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 199
on an equality with Heaven. Thus did the noble lord of
Chow. Formerly he sacrificed on the round altar to the
spirits of his remote ancestors, as equal with Heaven ; and in
the open hall he sacrificed to Wan Wang (his father) as equal
with Shang-te [the Supreme Being]." ^
The organised worship of ancestors is bound up with the
patriarchate and the patria potestas. The service which it
rendered to civilisation consists in the aid it afforded to the
development of the family, the nidus of mortality. " Filial
piety," said Confucius, " is the beginning of virtue " ; and
before him E-yin had said, " the commencement is in the
family and state ; the consummation is in the Empire." ^
But when ancestor-worship has rendered its service to A
civilisation, there is a reason for its being cast aside. As an ^
institution, it works in support of the patria potestas : the
worship can only be carried on by sons, sons therefore are
ardently desired ; marriage is a means simply to the wor-
ship which the man requires for himself after death, and
is not a holy estate in and for itself. Woman is in the
family but not of it ; she is treated as an inferior, and is
debarred from co-operating in the cause of civilisation and
from rendering to the progress of morality the services which
are peculiarly her own. Rooting out ancestor- worship in Europe .
gave the Christian Church much trouble for many centuries. ^
There remain certain topics connected with ancestor-
worship — human sacrifice and cannibalism — which are not
attractive, but cannot be ignored, especially by a writer who
argues for the origin of ancestor-worship in the filial piety
of the patriarchal family of a comparatively late, i.e. the
agricultural, period. We will begin with human sacrifice.
The first thing to note is that it appears at a much earlier
period in the rites for the dead than it does in the ritual
of the gods. As regards the latter : in the totemistic period
the only sacrifice known is that of animals ; in the beginning
of the agricultural period also human sacrifice is foreign to the
cheerful feast in which the god and his worshippers meet
together ; it is not until the self-satisfaction of that time has
given way to the " habitual sense of human guilt " of a still
later period, that human life comes to be regarded as the
1 Douglas, op. cit. 121. - Op. cit. 123 and 118.
200 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
necessary expiation of human sin.^ But whereas human
sacrifice comes thus late in the history of religious ritual, the
practice of immolating human beings at a tomb apparently
comes fairly early in the development of the rites of the
dead ; such immolation certainly has a totally different origin
and meaning from human sacrifice in religious ritual. The
persons butchered at the grave of a savage chieftain are usually
his wives and other attendants ; and the object of the
slaughter evidently is exactly the same as that of providing
food for the dead — the deceased follows the same pursuits,
enjoys the same rank, and requires the same food and attend-
ance when dead as during life. It is this identity between the
purpose of food-offerings and of the slaughter of attendants
which shows the latter to be one of the primitive elements
out of which systematic ancestor-worship was subsequently
organised. Where such slaughter continued to be customary
at the time when human sacrifice had come to be part
of the ritual of the gods, it came to be interpreted
on the analogy of human " sacrifice " in the proper (i.e.
religious) sense of the word, just as the offerings of blood,
hair, and food came to be similarly interpreted, or misinter-
preted. But human sacrifice (again in the proper sense of
the word) was only offered in seasons of fear and tribulation ;
and slaughter at the tomb now came to be ascribed to the
same emotion of fear. The idea that slaughter at the tomb
was from the beginning due to fear of the ghost, seems to
me to overlook two important facts : the first is that the
ghost is from the beginning dependent on the living —
according to many peoples, he cannot even find his way to
the place where he would be, without their assistance ; the
next is, that affection is quite as capable of extravagant excess
as fear. Let the reader recall the well-known instance of
the Eed Indian son who coolly killed a white man, the close
friend of his father, because he could not think how his father,
just dead, would be able to get on without his old friend to
talk to. The fact is that an utter disregard for human life
may well exist, does frequently coexist, with devoted attach-
ment to particular persons.^ So much for that unpleasant topic.
^ Supra, p. 161.
" Mr. James Dawson, who is well fLualified to speak, says of the Australians
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 201
As for cannibalism : it is not sufficiently general or
uniform in its manifestations to allow of any general state-
ment with regard to it. Sometimes it is religious in
intention, sometimes the alternative to starvation ; sometimes
it is due to a perverted taste for food, sometimes it is
practised medicinally ; here it is only clansmen that are
eaten, there only aliens. The cases in which it is religious
in intention have been discussed in a previous chapter.^
They are highly exceptional, and need not detain us. Nor
need we do more than note that " the negro man-eater
certainly takes human flesh as food purely and simply, and
not from any religious or superstitious reason." ^ The Caribs
bred children as a food-supply of this kind, as they might
poultry. That the belief in the possibility of acquiring the
courage or other attributes of an animal or man by consuming
his or its flesh, does lead to cannibalism in some cases, may be
taken as proved ; ^ in such cases it is only selected portions
of the body that are consumed, and those " medicinally," not
as food. That some peoples eat only aliens is undoubted ;
and the rigour of the restriction is illustrated by an incident
that happened recently on the Congo, where " one man, who
{Australian Aborigines, ]). iv.), who are sometimes ranked as the lowest of
savages : "It may be truly said of them, that, with the exception of the low
estimate they naturally place on life, their moral character and modesty — all
things considered — compare favourably with those of the most highly cultivated
communities of Europe " ; if those who doubt this were themselves "to listen to
their guileless conversation, their humour and wit, and their expressions of
honour and affection for one^another, " they would have to admit ' ' that they
are at least equal, if not superior, to the general run of white men." Still
lower in the scale of humanity are the Shoshones (California): " Those who
have seen them unanimously agree that they of all men are lowest . . . having no
clothes, scarcely any cooked food, in many instances no weapons " (Bancroft,
Native Races, i. 440). Yet one traveller says, "They are very rigid in their
morals," and "honest and trustworthy, but lazy and dirty" ; another, that
they are "frank and communicative"; another, "highly intelligent and
lively . . . the most virtuous and unsophisticated of all the Indians " ; another,
" the most pure and uncorrupted aborigines . . . scruj)ulously clean . . . and
chaste in their habits." Of the Dinka, Schweinfurth says {Heart of Africa, i.
169), "Notwithstanding that certain instances maybe alleged which seem to
demonstrate that the character of the Dinka is unfeeling, these cases never
refer to such as are bound by the ties of kindred . . . the accusation is quite
unjustifiable that family affection, in our sense, is at a low ebb among them."
^ Supra, p. 161.
2 Captain Hinde, speaking at the British Association, 1895.
^ Folk-Lore, June 1892 (Hartland, The Sin-Eater).
202 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was placed on sentry-go, shot his own father, and then
expressed regret, because by the rule of the tribe he could
not eat the body of his parent." ^
Finally, there are instances in which only members
of the tribe are eaten. This practice is reported by
Herodotus ^ of the Padtei — probably the Gonda of the
Northern Dekkan, who still maintain the custom — and his
statement, that few of them attain to old age, because a man
is at once killed when he shows symptoms of illness, is
curiously confirmed by the words of Captain Hinde, speaking
of a different race : " On the Lomami Eiver no grey hairs were
to be seen, because the adults were eaten when they began
to manifest signs of decrepitude." We may therefore
believe Herodotus when he makes the same statement of
the Massagetse,^ especially as the mode of consumption
described by him reappears amongst the Bangala ; * and of
the Issedones,-'' whose treatment of the bones of the deceased
finds its parallel in the remarkable discoveries made just now
in Egypt by Dr. Flinders Petrie; and whose invitations to
friends to partake in the feast are paralleled by a similar
custom in Luzon.^ It is not, therefore, db 'priori improbable
that the Irish followed the custom, as Strabo reports,"^
especially as it is said to have been found amongst another
branch of the Aryan peoples, the Wends.^ It occurs also in
the Uaaupc's Valley, South America,^ amongst the Battas of
Sumatra, the Kookies, the inhabitants of Sindai and of the
Floris Islands,^^ and the Australians.^^ The Quissamas kill
and eat criminals of their own tribe.^^ In Francis Island,
" thieves were killed and their bodies eaten — only in such
cases was there cannibalism."^^
To understand the custom, we must place ourselves at
the savage point of view. We must remember the savage's
habitual disregard for human life, and that amongst nomads,
compelled by the severity of the struggle for existence to
abandon the aged who cannot keep up with the enforced
I Captain Hinde, loc. cit. ^ Hdt. iii. 99. ^ jj^t. i. 216.
"* Schneider, Relig. d. AfriTc. Naturvolkcr, 135. ^ Hdt. iv. 26.
6 Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 272. '' Strabo, iv. v. 4. ^ Bastian, loc. cit.
^ Wallace, On the Amazon,^ 346. -^^ Bastian, loc. cit.
II Journal of the Anthropol oyiral Institide, xxiv. 182, 196.
12 Ibid. i. 187. 13 Turner, Samoa, 300.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 203
marches of the tribe, the aged meet their fate vohmtarily,
manfully, and without any sense of hardship. Next, strange
as at first sight it may appear, eating aged relatives neither
implies want of respect to them nor prevents them from being
worshipped after death. The evidence is clear on both points.
Strabo says of the Irish that they regard it as an honour ;
Herodotus, that the Massagetee consider it " the happiest
issue," and count it a misfortune when disease prevents them
from " attaining to sacrifice " ; the Issedones gilded the skull
and made yearly offerings to it.^ Throughout, the w^ords of
Herodotus, as Stein remarks ad locc, imply ceremonial killing
and the solemnity of sacrifice. In fine, the custom is probably
simply one of the savage's attempts " to make sure that the
corpse is properly disposed of, and can no longer be a source
of danger to the living, but rather of blessing." ^ By this
disposal of it, the life of the clan is, according to savage
notions, kept within the clan ; the good attributes of the dead
man are communicated to his km ; and his spirit is not set
adrift to wander homeless abroad — if it were so cut off from
the ties uniting it to the clan, it would become dangerous :
hence, even when inhumation has become usual, the ancient
practice of eating survives, amongst the Quissamas and in
Francis Island, in the case of criminals, whose spirits, owing
to their dangerous propensities, are especially likely to give
trouble, if they are not treated in the ancient and more
respectful manner. Where the dog was the totem animal
— and as the dog is the commonest and earliest domesticated
animal, he must have been a common totem — these same
ends would be secured by making him, as a member of the
clan, consume the body ; and this may be the origin of the
practice of giving corpses to be devoured by dogs, a practice
which is common to the Northern Mongolians,^ the Parthians,*
the Hyrcanians,^ the ancient Persians,^ and has left its
traces amongst the Parsis : " their funeral ritual requires
that when a corpse is brought to the Dakhma, or the place
where it is to be given up to the vultures, it should first
be exhibited to one or more dogs . . . this ceremonial is called
^ Hdt. iv. 26. ^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 370.
^ Prejvalsky, Mongolia, i. 14. "* Justin, xli. 3.
5 Cic. Quart. Tusc. i. 45. ^ Hdt. i. 140.
204 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Sagdid (Vendidad Farg. vii. 3). That this is a relic of the
former detestable custom, is evident from the fact of the said
Scriptures enjoining the exposure of corpses that dogs and
carrion birds may see and devour them (Vendidad Farg. v. 73,
74)." 1
Where the relatives could not or would not adopt either of
these modes, the corpse, which is one of the things inherently
taboo/^ had to be isolated in some manner. There were
various ways of effecting this isolation : inhumation — which
prevented the ghost from swelling the " inops inhumataque
turba " of spirits — and cremation need no illustration. The
practice of abandoning the house or room in which the corpse
lay, and thus isolating it, has been illustrated already.^ But the
custom of suspending the corpse between heaven and earth
for the same purpose is not so familiar. It is found, however,
amongst the Australians : " a stage consisting of boughs is
built in the branches of a tree, the corpse placed thereon and
covered with boughs." * It is practised by the Aleuts,^ the
Mandans, the Santa Fe tribes, the Dacotahs, the Western
Ojibways, the Assiniboins, and on the Columbia Eiver.^
Amongst the Samoyedes, the bones of a dead shaman are
put in a tree ; and in Equatorial Africa, Mbruo, a rain-
maker, " selected for his tomb an old tree, being possessed by
an idea that it was indecorous for a prince to be placed in
contact with the earth ; and he gave orders that the upper
part of the tree was to be hollowed out lengthwise, and his
body placed inside it in an upright position."^
In conclusion, the reader may have noticed that there is
one class of offerings (weapons, implements, utensils, etc.) of
which no mention has been made in this chapter. The fact
is they differ in nothing from the offerings, e.g. of food, which
have been discussed : the ghost requires them, as he does
food, and is dependent for them on the living. Eventually,
however, owing to the analogy of certain features in the
ritual of the gods, they come to be interpreted as gifts to
^ Rajendralala Mitra, Indo-Aryans, ii. 162.
2 Sujjra, p. 76. ^ Supra, p. 77.
^ Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 178 ; cf. 182, 186, 195.
^ Bancroft, Xative Races, i. 93. ^ Dorman, Prim. Sup)erstitions, 168.
^ Casati, Uquatoria. i. 170.
ANCESTOR-WORSHIP 205
appease the manes. But these features, and the " gift
theory of sacrifice " to which they give rise, cannot be
adequately explained until we come to see the influence of
agricultural beliefs on religion — the subject of our next
chapter. Here, therefore, we will content ourselves with
noting that the theory that the things so given to the
deceased are things which belonged to him and to which his
ghost might cling, does not account for the fact that in
neolithic interments the flint implements, etc., are perfectly
unused, and that the Ojibway Indians place new guns and
blankets on the grave in case the deceased's own are old or
inferior.^ The motive, therefore, is not fear of the clinging
ghost.
1 Journal of the Anthropological Institute, 112.
CHAPTEE XVI
TREE AND PLANT WOKSHIP
The savage's theory of causation is animistic ; that is to say,
he regards everything, animate or inanimate, which acts or
produces an effect as possessing like powers and passions,
motives and emotions, with himself. That trees and plants
especially possessed like parts and passions with himself, was
an inference in which he was confirmed not merely by the
fact that they possess (vegetable) life, but by the blood-like
sap which many exude when cut, and by the shrieks which
they utter when felled. But animism is rather a primitive
philosophical theory than a form of religious belief : it
ascribes human, not superhuman, powers to non-human
beings and things. When, however, the attention of the
savage is directed by the occurrence of some incomprehen-
sible or strikingly unexpected and unaccountable event to the
sentiment of the supernatural latent in his consciousness ;
when he ascribes irresistible power over his own fortunes to
some animate or inanimate object, then that object becomes
marked off from other things and is distinguished from them
by the possession of superhuman powers, and by the fact that
in it the savage sees the external source of that sentiment of
the supernatural of which he is conscious within himself.
That the savage in his blind search for the supernatural
amongst external objects was frequently in all lands led to
believe that trees and plants exercised supernatural powers,
is a well-known fact. That he would then seek to establish
an alliance between his tribe and the species which he
believed to possess any especial power over his own fate, is
an inference which the existence of animal totems would
justify us in drawing a 'priori. And as a matter of fact we
206
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 207
have good evidence of the existence of plant and tree totems.
" The Karama tree is the totem of the Dravidian Kharwars
and Manjihs." ^ Kujur is the name both of a Dravidian sept
and of a jungle herb which the sept does not eat.^ " The
Bara sept is evidently the same as the Barar of the Oraons,
who will not eat the leaves of the har tree or Ficus indica.
In Mirzapur they will not cut this tree. ... A Tiga sept
takes its name from a jungle root which is prohibited to
them."^ In Berar and Bombay "it is said that a betrothal, in
every other respect irreproachable, will be broken off if the
two houses are discovered to pay honour to the same tree —
in other words, if they worship the same family totem."*
These family totems are called Devaks (guardian gods), and
are animals or trees. " The Devak is the ancestor or head
of the house, and so families which have the same guardian
cannot marry. ... If the Devak be a fruit-tree . . . some
families abstain from eating the fruit of the tree which forms
their devak or badge." ^ In North America, " the Eed Maize
clan of the Omahas will not eat red maize," ^ and they. Like
the Dravidian septs, seem to have believed themselves
descended from their totem.^ On the Gold Coast of Africa,
there is a clan called Abradzi-Fo, " plantain-family," and " in
the interior members of this family still abstain from the
plantain." ^
We have already seen^ that animals may be chosen as
totems of individuals as well as of tribes : thus, in Central
America, " nagualism is one of the ancient forms of worship,
and consists in choosmg an animal as the tutelary divinity of
a child, whose existence will be so closely connected with it
that the life of one depends on that of the other." ^*^ So, too,
in Europe, amongst Aryan peoples, Romans ^^ and Teutons,^^
there is evidence enough to show the existence of a belief
that the fate and life of a man may be mystically involved
with that of his " birth-tree," i.e. a tree planted at his birth :
^ Crooke, Popular Religion and Folk-Lorc of Northern India, 22.
2 Ihid. 283. 3 hoc. cit. ^ /j^^ 286.
5 Ihid. 287. « Frazer, Totemism, 11. 7 7j^^_ e.
8 Ellis, TsU-speaking Peoples, 207. ^ Supra, p. 182.
^^ Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 458.
^^ Manuliardt, Antikc JFald und Feld-kuUe, 23.
^- Mannhardt, Baumkultus, 32 and 50.
208 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
his life depends on and terminates with that of the tree ; he
grows or withers as his tree grows or withers.
To return, however, to the clan totem. We may expect
to find the history of the tree totem passing through much
the same stages as that of the animal totem : thus an
individual tree or some few individuals may come to enjoy
the whole of the worship which was originally bestowed upon
all the members of the species ; and this was the case with
the sacred olive of Athene at Athens, and with the maypole
of the Teutons, which was to the village what the " birth-
tree " was to the individual, " it was the genius tutelmns, the
alter ego of the whole community," ^ which afforded an
asylum to every member of the village community,^ protected
the villagers from all harm,^ and brought them all blessings.^
Or, again, the species may continue to be worshipped ; but,
owing to the relaxation of the blood-tie consequent upon
settled life and political development, the worship may be
thrown open to all and not confined to the clan : thus in
Greece and Eome the laurel and the ivy, in Assyria the
palm-tree, were species of plants whose worship was general
and not in historic times restricted to any one tribe ; in
India, " among the sacred trees the various varieties of the
fig hold a conspicuous place . . . the various fig-trees hold
an important part in the domestic ritual. . . . The piiml is
worshipped by moving round it in the course of the sun . . .
this regard for the pipal {Ficus religiosa) extends through
Africa, New Zealand, Australia, Sumatra, and Ja'. x." ^
As the animal totem eventually in some cases assumes
human form, and, after passing through various intermediate
shapes, becomes an anthropomorphic god, so we may expect
the tree totem to be anthropomorphised ; and this is often
the case. The Dryads or tree-nymphs of the Greeks will
occur to the reader at once ; and amongst the Aryans of
Northern Europe, Mannhardt has shown conclusively that the
tree-spirit was represented by a human being or a human
figure tied to a tree or set on a tree-top, or enveloped in
tree-leaves (" Jack in the green "), or otherwise associated
with the tree. When, then, we find a Zev<; evBepBpo^ or a
1 Mannhardt, B. K. 182. ^ Loc. cit. '^ Ibid. 53. ^ Ihid. 37.
^ Crooke, op. cit. 247-9.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 209
Ac6pvcro<i GuSepSpo^, and that in Greece "images of the gods
were set on trees," ^ and that the Ephesian Artemis was
believed to dwell within the stem of an oak, we are justified
in believing that these deities were either originally tree
totems or that their worship has absorbed that of some
tree totem ; and the same conclusion holds good, when
we find that a species of tree or plant is " associated "
with some god, e.g. the laurel with Apollo or the ivy with
Dionysus.
As totem tribes name themselves after their animal totem,
and continue to be designated by the name even when they
have left the totem stage behind, so with plant totems. On
the Grold Coast, the Abradzi-fo or Plantain family still abstain
from the plantain, as the Leopard, Dog, and Parrot families
abstain from leopards, dogs, and parrots respectively.^ We
can therefore hardly refuse to believe that the Corn-stalk
family and the Palm-oil Grove family had the corn-stalk and
palm-tree for totems originally, though we do not happen to
have evidence to show that they contmue to show respect to
the plants from which they take their name. Amongst the
Greeks and Komans tree and plant worship may probably
account for such names as ^rjyacelf; ^ and Fabius ; and in
North Europe there are instances which may possibly be
X emote survivals of this practice.*
As the animal totem was at certain seasons taken round
,<J.he settlement in order to fortify the inhabitants with super-
natural powers against supernatural dangers, e.g. the python
procf -on in Whydah, so in North Europe " the begging
pro/ jsions with May-trees or May-boughs from door to door
ha' everywhere originally a serious and, so to speak, sacra-
F jntal significance ; people really believed that the god of
growth " [rather the tree totem] " was present unseen in the
bough ; by the procession he was brought to each house to
bestow his blessing." ^ So, too, the god presumably was
originally present in the switch of rowan with which the
Scottish milkmaid protects her cattle from evil spirits ; and,
^ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 278.
^ Ellis, Tshi-speaMng Peoples^ 206-7.
^ Corp. Inscrip. Att. ii. 108, 435, etc.
^ Manuhardt, B. K. 51. ^ Frazer, G. B. i. 86, translating B. K. 315.
14
210 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
on the same principle, in India " most Vaishnava sects wear
necklaces and carry rosaries made of holy basil." ^
As in death the clansman was believed to rejoin the
animal totem, so " the Oraons of Bengal revere the tamarind
and bury their dead under its branches." ^ This is probably
a contributing cause to the practice of suspension burial
mentioned in a previous chapter.^ " Some of the semi-
Hinduised Bengal Ghonds have the remarkable custom of
tying the corpses of adult males by a cord to the mahua tree
in an upright position previous to burial."*
Finally, tree totems, like animal totems, make their
appearance in the marriage rite. Amongst some of the
Dravidian races a branch of the sacred mahua tree " is placed
in the hands of the bride and bridegroom during the
ceremony,"^ evidently to bring them under the immediate
protection of the totem-god, and by way of worship " they
also revolve round a branch of the tree planted in the
ground," just as in Northern Europe amongst the Wends the
bride had to worship the " life-tree " of her new^ home.^ Or
the bride and bridegroom are married first to trees and then
to each other.'^
Much more important, however, than tree totems for the
history of religion and of civilisation in general are plant
totems, for it was through plant-worship that cereals t.
food-plants came to be cultivated, and it was in consequence
of their cultivation that the act of worship received a
remarkable extension. With regard to the origin of cultiva-
tion, " it has usually been held that cultivation must have
taken its rise from the accident of chance seeds being scat-
tered about in the neighbourhood of the hut or of the
domestic manure heap — the barbaric kitchen-midden."^ But
something more, considerably more, than this is necessary to
account for the origin of cultivation : seeds must be retained
from one year to the next for the purpose of sowing them,
and such retention implies, first, that primitive man was aware
of the necessity of saving seeds, and, second, that he had the
self-control to save them instead of eating them. To account
1 Crooke, op. cit. 257. - Ibid. 256. ^ Supra, p. 204.
4 Crooke, 251. 5 Loc. cit. ^ B. K. 161, 174, 182.
' For examples, Crooke, 258 ff. » Q^aiit Allen, The Attis, 45.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 211
for such self-control in the savage, whose habit is " to eat and
destroy with lavish prodigality whatever he possesses in the
pure recklessness of the moment," ^ we must suppose some
exceptionally powerful motive. Without some such stimulus,
" primitive man, careless of the future as he is, would scarcely
be likely deliberately to retain seeds from one year to the
next for the purpose of sowing them." ^ That motive could
only have been religious. Our argument therefore in outline
will be to show, first, that cereals and food-plants are actually
totems amongst savages ; next, that the treatment of totem-
plants generally is such that the seeds are necessarily
preserved from one year to the next, simply because
the plants are totems, and without any view to their
cultivation ; third, that amongst civilised peoples the rites
and worship connected with cereals and agriculture are
exactly what they would have been if the cereals had been
totems.
That savages do adopt food-plants and cereals as totems,
we have already seen. We need only mention the Red Maize
clan of the Omahas in North America, and the Plantain and
Corn-stalk clans of the Gold Coast. We have also seen that
the tree-spirit or totem-god was supposed to be actually
present, not only in the tree, but in any branch of it, and
that the presence of the god in the branch brought blessing
and protection to his worshippers. We have next to note
that amongst the European Aryans it was customary not only
to carry such branches in procession, as already described,
but also to plant them on the roof or in front of the door of
a house,^ in order to secure the permanent presence and
supernatural protection of the tree-spirit. Planting the
branch in this position was an annual ceremony, and the
branch was preserved from one year to the next, and then
a fresh one was substituted with the same ceremonies. We
may infer, therefore, that those savages whose totems were
plants adopted much the same means for obtaining the
constant protection of their god as those whose totems
were trees. Just as in the case of animal totems the god
was supposed to dwell or manifest himself in any and every
individual of the species, and consequently the death of any
^ Loc. cit. 2 ^^ ^^ 605.
■■y
212 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
individual is not the death of the god, so, according to the
belief of the North European Aryans, a vegetation spirit
inhabited not a single plant, but several individuals or the
whole species, and consequently did not perish in the autumn
with the individual.-"- Hence any sheaf would, like any
branch, contain the god ; and if preserved in the house or
tent from one year to the next, it would secure the presence
and protection of the god in the interval between the autumn
and the spring, during which there was no growth or life of
plants in the field. But the preservation of the sheaf would
also teach primitive man the fact — of which in the beginning
he must have been ignorant — that food-plants are produced
from seeds, and can be produced from seeds which have been
kept from one year to the next. It would also form in him
the habit of preserving seeds to sow them.
That our Aryan forefathers in Europe were in the habit
of thus preserving a sheaf and worshipping it, has been
conclusively proved by Mannhardt^ from an examination of
harvest customs still surviving. Several ears of corn are bound
together, worshipped, preserved for the year, and supposed to
influence the next harvest. In Great Britain the ears are
still sometimes bound together, made into the rude form of a
female doll, clad in a paper dress, and called the Corn Baby,
Kern Baby, or the Maiden,^ sometimes also, in England and
elsewhere in Europe, the Old Woman or Corn Mother.*
That the practice is not peculiar to the Aryan peoples, and
that its explanation must be sought in some world-wide
belief, is shown by the existence of the custom in the New
World, both in Central and in South America. Thus in
Peru " they take a certaine portion of the most fruitefull of the
Mays [maize] that growes in their farmes . . . they put
this Mays in the richest garments they have, and, being thus
wrapped and dressed, they worship this Pirua and hold it in
great veneration, saying it is the Mother of the Mays of their
inheritances, and that by this means the Mays augments and
is preserved " ; ^ and in Mexico " the damsels that served
Chicomecoatl carried each one on her shoulders seven ears of
1 B. K. 4. 2 ^ ^ 209 note, 212, 213.
3 Frazer, G. B. i. 344. 4 jj^-^^ 333 ff.
^ Laug, Custom arid Myth,- 19, quoting Grimston's translation of Acosta.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 213
maize rolled in a rich mantle." ^ After the festival in which
they carried this maize in procession, " the folk returned to
their houses, and sanctified maize was put in the bottom of
every granary, and it was said that it was the heart " [life,
spirit] " thereof, and it remained there till taken out for
seed." 2
Originally a clan that had a plant or animal for its totem
worshipped the actual plant or animal as a being possessed of
supernatural powers. Then the totem -god was conceived as
a spirit manifesting itself in any and every member of the
species ; then, again, gradually this spirit was conceived as
having human shape ; and, finally, the anthropomorphic god
becomes so detached from the species that his origin is quite
forgotten, and the plant or animal is merely sacred to him, or
a usual sacrifice to him, or simply " associated " with him in art.
In the examples cited in the last paragraph, the food-plant
is still itself worshipped, but the first step towards anthro-
pomorphism has been taken. The female dress which it
wears is evidently intended to indicate that the indwelling
spirit would, if seen, appear in human shape. So in Bengal
the plantain tree is " clothed as a woman and worshipped." ^
This transition stage in the development of the goddess out
of the plant may be compared to the half-human, half-animal
shape of the animal totems of Egypt. The next stage in the
evolution is completed when the goddess is represented in
purely human form, but expresses her connection with the
plant by her functions, attributes, or name so clearly that
her origin is undisguised. Thus the origin of the Mexican
goddess of maize, Xilonen, is expressed without any possibility
of disguise by her name (from xilotl, " young ear of maize ")
as well as by her function ; and the same may be said of
the Peruvian Saramama or Maize- mother and the Hindoo
Bhogaldai or Cotton-mother. Finally, the Mexican goddess
Chicomecoatl and the Greek Demeter are representatives of
the stage in which it is forgotten that the goddess was
originally a plant, and her origin is indicated only by the
fact that the former is represented as carrying stalks of
maize in her hand, the latter as wearing a corn-garland, and
both as having cereals offered to them.
1 Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 358. 2 j^i^^ 362. 3 Crooke, 255.
214 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The primary object of a totem alliance between a human
kin and an animal kind is to obtain a supernatural ally
against supernatural foes. Annually the totem clan sacrifices
its animal god, and by partaking of the sacrificial meal fortifies
its members against supernatural dangers for the forthcoming
year, renews the alliance, and enters into fresh and closer
communion with the totem-god. In the case of clans having
for their totems trees and plants which do not produce edible
fruits or seeds, communion with the god was sought by
another means, which we reserve for separate discussion here-
after. In the case, however, of totem trees and plants which
do produce edible seeds and fruits, the sacramental meal was
possible ; and its evolution, which we now have to trace,
followed lines so parallel in the Old World and the New, that
it is evident that the causes at work to produce it were not
exceptional or peculiar to any one race or time or clime, but
were general causes yielding general laws for the history of
early religion.
The first stage in the development of this form of the
sacramental meal is that in which the plant totem or vegeta-
tion spirit has not yet come to be conceived of as having
human form. In this stage the seeds or fruits are eaten at
a solemn annual meal, of which all members of the community
(clan or family) must eat, and of which no fragments must be
left — two conditions essential, as we have seen,-^ in the
sacrificial meal of the animal totem. Of this stage we have
a survival in the Lithuanian feast Samborios. Annually in
December, in each household, a mess, consisting of wheat,
barley, oats, and other seeds, was cooked ; of it none but
members of the household could partake, and every member
must partake ; nothing might be left, or if left, the remains
must be buried.^ A similar survival was the Athenian
Pyanepsion, an annual feast (occurring at the end of the
procession in which the eiresione was carried) in which also
a mess of all sorts of cereals (Trdvo-Trepfxa) was cooked and
consumed by the household.^ In Sicily, the Kotytis feast had
degenerated considerably. Like the Athenian feast, it began
with a procession in which the branch of a tree was carried
round the community, but the only trace of the original
1 Supra, p. 145. ^ ;^^ /,- ^ 249 ; cf. supra, p. 149 ff. ^ JF. F. K. 227.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 215
meal of which all were expected to partake was the practice
of throwing the fruits, which had been attached to the branch,
to be scrambled for by the people.^ In the New World,
Chicomecoatl's feast in April began with a procession of
youths carrying stalks of maize and other herbs through the
maize-fields ; and then a mess of tortillas, chian flour, maize,
and beans was eaten in the goddess's temple " in a general
scramble, take who could." ^
The second stage is that in which the plant totem has
come to be conceived of as a spirit having human form. At
this stage the custom is to represent the spirit by a dough
image of human form. Thus in Mexico " they made out of
dough an image of the goddess Chicomecoatl, in the court-
yard of her temple, offering before it all kinds of maize, beans,
and chian." ^ Father Acosta describes the image more
particularly. " Presently there stepped foorth a Priest,
attyred with a shorte surplise full of tasselles beneath, who
came from the top of the temple with an idoll made of paste,
of wheat and mays mingled with hony, which had the eyes
made of the graines of greene glasse and the teeth of the
grains of mays. . . . Then did he mount to the place where
those were that were to be sacrificed, showing this idoll to
every one in particular, saying unto them. This is your god." *
That the dough image was sacramentally eaten in Mexico, we
shall see shortly. It was also so eaten in the Old World.
" In Wermland the House-mother makes a dough doll, in the
shape of a little girl, out of the corn of the last sheaf
garnered, and it is distributed between and consumed by the
assembled members of the household." ^ In Bourbonnais " a
fir-tree is planted in the last load of corn, and on the top is
fastened a man of dough. Tree and dough-man are taken to
the mairie, and there kept till the end of the vintage, when a
general harvest festival is celebrated, and the mayor divides
the dough figure and distributes it amongst the people to
eat." ^ This " contamination " of tree-worship and the
worship of the vegetation spirit has its parallels in the New
World. " Every year, at the season of the maize harvest,
1 Bancroft, iii. 258. 2 jj^.^^^ 350. 3 ^j^^, 421.
'^ Acosta, Grimston's translation (Hakluyt Soc), ii. 347.
^ Mannhardt, Mytliologische Forschungen, 179. ^ B. K. 205.
216 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the mountaineer Peruvians had a solemn festival, on which
occasion they set up two tall straight trees like masts,
on the top of which was placed the figure of a man, sur-
rounded by other figures and adorned with flowers. The
inhabitants went in procession, armed with bows and arrows,
and regularly marshalled into companies, beating their drums,
and with great outcries and rejoicings, each company in
succession discharging their arrows at the dressed-up figures." ^
(This ceremony corresponds to the solemn slaughter of the
animal totem, in the responsibility for which every member
of the community must take his share, Religion of the Semites,
p. 284.) In Mexico we have a similar "contamination"
combined with the sacrifice and sacramental eating of the
god : at a festival in the tenth month of the Mexican year, a
tree was felled and the trunk erected. A paste figure, repre-
senting Xiuhtecutli, was placed on the top, and young men
vied with each other in climbing up the ropes which main-
tained the tree trunk in position, but very few reached the
top. The first to do so seized the figure, stripped it of its
insignia, broke it in pieces (as the mayor in Bourbonnais
does), and scattered the fragments amongst the crowd below,
who disputed and fought for them.^
In the next stage, the dough or paste, which was an
appropriate material for the image of a cereal goddess, spreads
to the rites of other deities ; and a dough image (of animal or
human shape) takes the place of the animal or human victim
which originally furnished forth the sacramental meals of non-
cereal deities. In the Old World this extended application
of the dough image seems to have been confined to local cults,
and not to have been adopted into the State ritual. Thus
amongst the Greeks the use of cakes in the shape of animals
as offerings at the Diasia is mentioned as a peculiarly local
use.^ Amongst the Semites there are indications that the
image assumed human form. According to Ibn Kutaiba, the
Banu Hanifa, before their conversion, made an image of their
god out of a paste of dates, butter, milk and meal, and consumed
1 Zarate, Conquest of Peru, 361 (in Kerr, Voyages, iv.).
2 Sahagun, bk. ii. c. 19. Climbing the May-pole is a European custom also ;
see B. K. 209.
^ dv/jLara iTri.x^pi.a Tliuc. i. 126 (riglitly explained by the scholiast).
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 217
it sacramentally.^ In the New World the use of dough for
the images of non-cereal deities was adopted in the State
ritual, and became quite common. Thus the human images of
the Tlalocs,^ or mountain -gods, and of Omacatl,^ the god of
banquets, were made of dough, and were consumed sacra-
mentally. Further, the rite of sacrifice was accomplished
upon these paste idols, e.g. once a year a dough statue was
made of Huitzilopochtli, and a priest hurled a dart into its
breast. This was styled " killing the god Huitzilopochtli, so
that his body might be eaten." ^ Father Acosta's account,
though it omits the " killing of the god," is worth quoting : —
" The Mexicaines in the moneth of Male . . . did minsrle a
quantitie of the seede of beetes with rosted Mays, and then
they did mould it with honie, making an idoll of that paste
in bignesse like to that of wood." It was conveyed in pro-
cession from the temple to the court by maidens " crowned
with garlands of Mays rosted and parched " ; and then to
various places in the neighbourhood of the city by young men
" crowned after the same manner like vnto the women." On
their return, " all the virgins came out of their convent,
bringing peeces of paste compounded of beetes and rosted
Mays, . . . and they were of the fashion of great bones."
Then " certaine ceremonies with singing and dauncing " were
used, " by meanes whereof they [the peeces of paste] were
blessed and consecrated for the flesh and bones of this idoll "
(Vitzilipuztli). " The ceremonies, dancing, and sacrifice ended,
. . . the priests and superiors of the temple tooke the idoll of
paste, which they spoyled of all the ornaments it had, and
made many peeces, as well of the idoll itself e as of the
tronchons which were consecrated, and then they gave them
to the people in maner of a communion, beginning with the
greater, and continuing vnto the rest, both men, women, and
little children, who received it with such teares, feare, and
reverence, as it was an admirable thing, saying that they did
eate the flesh and bones of God, wherewith they were grieved.
Such as had any sicke folkes demaunded thereof for them, and
carried it with great reverence and veneration." ^
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 157. - Sahagun, ii. 16 and i. 21. ^ Ibid. i. 15.
^ Sahagun, bk. iii. c. 1, § 2, and Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 299.
^ Acosta (Grimston's trans., pp. 356-361 in the Hakluyt Society's edition).
218 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The final stage is that in which the use of dough or paste
has become so firmly established in the sacramental meal, that
it is no longer felt to be necessary to give them the shape of
the deity, whether human or animal. Thus in the New World
annually amongst the Mayas, consecrated wafers were broken,
distributed, and preserved as a protection against misfortune
for the year.-^ In Peru, in August, four sheep were offered to
four divinities, and " when this sacrifice was offered up, the
priest had the sancu ['a pudding of coarsely ground maize']
on great plates of gold, and he sprinkled it with the blood of
the sheep. . . . The high priest then said in a loud voice, so
that all might hear : ' Take heed how you eat this sancu ;
for he who eats it in sin, and with a double will and heart,
is seen by our father the Sun, who will punish him with
grievous troubles. But he who with a single heart partakes
of it, to him the Sun and the Thunder will show favour, and
will grant children, and happy years and abundance, and all
that he requires.' Then they all rose up to partake, first
making a solemn vow, before eating the yahuar-sancu [' yalinar,
blood ; sancu, pudding '], in which they promised never to
murmur against the Creator, the Sun, or the Thunder ; never
to be traitors to their lord the Ynca, on pain of receiving
condemnation and trouble. The priest of the Sun then took
what he could hold on three fingers, put it into his mouth,
and returned to his seat. In this order and in this manner
of taking the oath all the tribes rose up, and thus all partook,
down to the little children. . . . They took it with such care
that no particle was allowed to fall to the ground, this being
looked upon as a great sin." ^ Acosta's account is as follows : —
" The Mamaconas of the Sunne, which were a kind of Nunnes
of the Sunne, made little loaves of the flower of Mays, died
and mingled with the bloud of white sheepe, . . . then pre-
sently they commanded that all strangers should enter, . . .
and the Priests . . . gave to every one a morcell of these
small loaves, saying vnto them that they gave these peeces to
the end that they should be vnited and confederated with the
Ynca ; . . . and all did receive and eate these peeces, thanking
the Sunne infinitely for so great a favour which he had done
^ Waitz, Anthropologie, iv. 330.
- Maikham, llitcs and Laics of the Tncas, 27.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 219
them. . . . And besides this communion (if it be lawfull to
vse this word in so diveHsh a matter) . . . they did likewise
send of these loaves to all their Giiacas, sanctuaries, or idolls." ^
In the Old World the use of wafers or cakes not in human or
animal shape has not left many traces. In Tartary they were
used, as one eye-witness, Father Grueber, testifies : " This only
do I affirm, that the devil so mimics the Catholic Church
there, that although no European or Christian has ever been
there, still in all essential things they agree so completely
with the Eoman Church as even to celebrate the sacrifice of
the Host with bread and wine : with my own eyes have I seen
it."^ As for the Aryan peoples, we find these consecrated
cakes associated, amongst the ancient Prussians, with the rite
which we have already ^ quoted as a typical instance of the
sacrificial meal. Whilst the flesh of the animal victim was
cooking, rye-cakes were made and were baked, not in an
oven, but by being continually tossed over the fire by the
men standing round, who threw it and caught it.* These
consecrated wafers survive also in " Beltane cakes." These
cakes are made on the evening before Beltane, May 1 (0. S.) ;
in Eoss-shire they are called tcharnican, i.e. " hand-cake,"
because they are made wholly in the hand (not on a board
or table like common cakes), and are not to be put upon any
table or dish ; they must never be put from the hand ^ — like
the Peruvian sanc2c, to allow which to fall from the hand was
a great sin.
On the other hand, the ritual appropriate to animal
totems came in course of time to be applied sometimes to
tree-totems. Thus the Esthonians once a year smeared their
trees with blood.^ " Castren tells us that the Ostiaks
worshipped a larch-tree, to the branches of which they
hung the skins of animals as offerings " ; '^ and the Totonacs
made a dough of first-fruits and the blood of infants, of which
men and women partook every six months,^ much as the
Peruvians mingled the blood of sheep with the sancu, and
as the Hebrews were forbidden to offer the blood of sacrifice
^ Acosta, 355. ^ Grueber, in Thevenot, Divers Voyages, iv.
^ Supra, p. 144. * Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 156.
^ Folk-Lore, vi. i. *^ Bastian, Ocst. Asien, iv. 42.
7 D'Alviella, Hilhert Lecture, 1891, p. 109. ^ Bancroft, iii. 440.
220 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
with leavened bread.-"^ Another way in which the ritual of
plant deities came to be affected by and assimilated to that
of animal deities, was that when the plant deity ceased to
be regarded as immanent in the plant species he did not at
once come to be regarded as having human form : as a matter
of fact, he is commonly conceived to have animal shape.^
The explanation of this, I suggest, is that at the time when
vegetation-spirits were thus invested with animal forms,
the only gods (other than plant totems) knowm to their
worshippers were animal totems, and consequently the only
shape which a plant deity could assume, different from the
plant, was that of an animal — the only shape which totem-
gods at the time were known to have. When, then, vegetation
spirits were supposed to appear as animals, it was fitting that
those animals should be sacrificed to them ; and in the Old
World we find that a cereal deity like Demeter has an animal,
the pig, sacred and sacrificed to her.
But the rite of worship with which tree-worshippers
usually approached their god, and placed themselves in com-
munion with him and under his protection, was of a different
kind. There were two ways in which early man sought to
effect an external union between himself and the god he
worshipped : by the sacrificial meal he incorporated the
substance of the god into his own body ; by blood-letting
rites and the hair-offering, he, so to speak, incorporated
himself with the god. Now, though the former method is
not absolutely impossible for the tree-worshipper — for
throughout Northern India the worshippers of the sacred
nim tree chew its leaves in order to gain the protection of
the deity against the death-pollution, and " the Kauphatas of
Cutch get the cartilage of their ears slit and in the slit a nim
stick is stuck," ^ and thus the substance of the god is incor-
porated in the body of the devotee — still the practical
inconveniences are so great, that it is the second method
that is generally used ; and Mr. Hartland, in the second
volume of his Legend of Perseus, has demonstrated learnedly
and conclusively not only that the union may be effected by
the incorporation of any portion of the worshipper (blood,
1 Ex. xxiii. 18. 2 Yoy instances, see Frazer, G. B. eh. iii. § 10.
" Crooke, Folk-Lwe of Northern India, 253.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 221
hair, saliva) with the god, but that, according to primitive
modes of thought (i.e. thought guided by the association of
ideas and not by reason), anything worn by or belonging to,
or even merely handled by a man, is part and parcel of the
man. Hence the widespread " practice of tying rags or
leaving portions of clothing upon a sacred tree or bush " ^ is
a sacramental rite. " Our examination of the practices of
throwing pins into wells, of tying rags on bushes and trees,
of driving nails into trees and stocks, of throwing stones and
sticks on cairns, and the analogous practices throughout the
world, leads to the conclusion that they are to be interpreted
as acts of ceremonial union with well, with tree, or stock, or
cairn," ^ i.e. with the water-spirit, tree-spirit, etc. " My shirt
or stocking, or a rag to represent it, placed upon a sacred
bush, or thrust into a sacred well — my name written upon
the walls of a temple — a stone or a pellet from my hand cast
upon a sacred image or a sacred cairn — a remnant of my
food cast into a sacred waterfall or bound upon a sacred tree,
or a nail from my hand driven into the trunk of the tree — is
thenceforth in continual contact with divinity ; and the
effluence of divinity, reaching and involving it, will reach
and involve me. In this way I may become permanently
united with the god."^
The characteristic of the things chosen, all over the
world, for thus placing the worshipper in communion with
his god, is that they are things having no commercial value,
rags, nail-parings, hair, stones, etc., — they may be " offerings,"
if so we choose to term them, but they are not gifts. Still,
occasionally, articles of value are included amongst them, and
gifts of value are commonly made to the gods of civilised
communities. In ancient Greece, where offerings were hung
upon sacred trees, as is shown by the results of the excava-
tions in Olympia* and discoveries in Cyprus,^ the practice of
making gifts of great value was well established even in
Homeric times.^ But this was not the original practice
anywhere, as Mr. Hartland has conclusively proved, and
1 Hartland, Perseus, ii. 200. 2 q^^ cif. 228. ^ q^^ ^iL 214-5.
^ Helbig, Homerische Epos, 314. ^ Cauer, Homerkritik, 197.
^ Od. iii. 273 : -rroWa S' dydX/xaT dvri\pev {i.e. fastened to trees or altar),
v<pd(r/iaTd re XP^^^^ '^^'
222 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
we have now to trace the origin of the idea and practice of
making presents to the gods. To do so, we must return to
our plant totems.
Our argument, to show that it is to totemism we owe the
cultivation of plants as well as the domestication of animals,
may be summed up thus far as follows : food-plants are
adopted by savages as totems ; that the savage ancestors of
civilised races took cereals for their totems is a point of
which we have not, and under the circumstances could not,
expect to have, direct evidence ; but we have proof that they
treated cereal plants in the same way as savages treat their
totem-plants, i.e. they kept from one year to the next a
bundle of plants, for the sake of the protection afforded by
the immanent spirit, just as a branch of a sacred tree was
kept for the same purpose ; that the sheaf thus preserved
would yield seeds and suggest sowing is clear, and it is
certain that the sacred sheaf was used for that purpose.
But if the cereal was a totem, then originally it must have
been forbidden as food (except at the solemn annual sacra-
mental meal), just as the animal totem was taboo, and just
as in Africa the Plantain-family abstain from the plantain.
How then did it come to be a staple article of food ? In all
probability in the same way as the animal totem : originally
the animal totem was sacrificed and eaten only once a year ;
then, as flocks and herds multiplied, and the taste for flesh-
meat developed, trivial pretexts for slaughtering victims were
frequently found or invented, until at last the only traces to
be found of the original taboo are, e.g., the ceremonial rite
which, amongst Mohammedans, the butcher is expected to
observe, or the small offering to the gods which, amongst the
Hindoos of Manu's time, the consumer had to make before
eating, or the Tartars' practice of not beginning a meal until
they have first smeared the mouth of their god Nacygai with
fat,^ i.e. until the god has himself eaten of the meat.
Now, if cultivated plants were originally, like domestic
animals, forbidden food, we should expect to find some traces
of the original taboo in the case of cereals as we do in the
case of flesh-meat ; and such traces, I suggest, we find in the
widespread reluctance to eat the new corn, etc., until some
^ Bastian, Der Mensch, iii. 154.
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 223
ceremony has been performed with the first-fruits to make it
safe to eat the new crop. Further, as the ceremony which
made the animal victim's flesh safe to eat consisted in
assigning to the god the share of the food which fell to him
of right as a member of the clan, we should expect to find
that the ceremony which made the corn lawful food consisted
in inviting the god to partake of the first-fruits ; and as a
matter of fact we do find indications that this was actually
the case. In the Tonga Isles the first-fruits of yams, etc., are
offered to the divine Tooitonga.^ In Mexico, no one dared
eat of the green maize before the festival in honour of the
Maize-maiden, Xilonen ; ^ and although we are not told that
the goddess was supposed to consume the offerings, we may
perhaps infer it from the fact that in Mexico new wine was
taboo until the god of wine had in person (i.e. in the person
of a man clad in the god's insignia, and supposed to be the
earthly tabernacle of the divine spirit) visited the house and
opened the cask.^
But though we can thus catch a glimpse of a time when
the first-fruits of the earth, like the flesh of the animal
victim, furnished forth the joint meal of which both the god
and his worshippers partook, and by which the bond of
fellowship between them was renewed, still, the prevailing
view in civilised times was that the first-fruits were a tribute
paid to the deity. According to this relatively late view, the
deity is no longer a spirit immanent in the corn, etc., but a
god to whom mankind are debtors for the boon which he
bestows upon them by causing the plant to grow : he is no
longer one of a body of clansmen, all of whom have rights
(if not equal rights) to share in the joint produce of the
community ; he is now the lord of the soil from which he
causes crops to be yielded. In a word, the comparatively
modern idea of property has been introduced into religion,
and the relations between the gods and their worshippers
have been adjusted to the requirements of the new concep-
tion,^ and have been placed upon a property basis. Hence-
forth offerings of all kinds continued to be made as they had
^ Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii. 127. ^ Sahaguii, ii. c. 28.
3 Ibid. i. c. 21.
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 390 ; cf. Ill, 222, 241, 261.
224 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
been made before this new social institution, but the tendency
now was to interpret them as gifts from man to god. The
animal which originally had been the god, and for long after
was sacred in its own right as a member of the clan, was now
property, and only became holy by being presented as a gift
— " consecrated " — to the god. The " offerings " by which
the worshipper had united himself with his god became
property ; and to be accepted as gifts must be valuable.
Hence in the long run arose religious difficulties : the
traditional ritual showed that the animal was consumed as
food by the deity ; the new view made that food a gift from
the worshipper; thus the god had to be fed by man. The
traditional custom of attaching offerings to tree or altar had
for its object " the attainment of some wish or the granting
of some prayer " ; ^ the new view required that the offering
should be a gift. Thus religion was in danger of becoming
the art of giving something in order to get more in return, a
species of higgling in the celestial market,^ ridiculed by
Lucian, denounced by the Psalmist, and exposed in the
EuthypliTO. Amongst the Hebrews this danger was met by
the teaching of the prophets that God requires no material
oblation, but justice, mercy, and humility. Amongst the
Hindoos the notion that sacrifice consists in the voluntary
loss of property, and that thereby merit is acquired, reduced
religion to mere magic ; sacrifices of sufficient magnitude
gave man the same power of absolute command over the
gods as in folk-tales Solomon exercises over the djinn. It is
true that, both in India and in Greece, philosophers argued
for a higher view of sacrifice : thus Isocrates maintained that
the truest sacrifice and service was for a man to make
himself as good and just as possible ; ^ and throughout the
Upanishads the idea recurs that " there was something far
better, far higher, far more enduring, than the right perform-
ance of sacrifice ; that the object of the wise man should be
to know, inv/ardly and consciously, the Great Soul of all ; and
^ Hartland, Perseus, ii. 200.
2 ''E/j.TTopLKT) dpa Tis OLv etTj, u 'EvdiKppov, T^x^V V oa-LOTTji deois Kal dvOptbiroLS Trap*
dW-nXoiu, Plato, Eitthyjjhro, 14 E.
^ Isoc. Nicoc. 20 : yj-yov dk dvfxa tovto KaWiarov eJvai Kal depairelav fxeyicrTT^v,
iav ws ^eXTKrrov /cat diKaioTarov cravrbv irapexv^-
\
TREE AND PLANT WORSHIP 225
that by this knowledge his individual soul would become
united to the Supreme Being, the true and absolute self." ^
But it is also true that this teaching remained practically
sterile ; and the reason of the sterility seems to lie in the
fact, the general law, that it is only by, and in the name of,
religion that reforms in religion have been accomplished : it
is only by a higher form of reHgion that a lower is expelled.
Finally, the gift- theory of sacrifice has in modern times
contributed to a fundamentally erroneous conception of the
history of religion. It has been supposed that all offerings
were from the very beginning gifts, whereas in truth the .
earliest "offerings" were but means for placing the worshipper ^
in physical contact and permanent communion with his god.
This erroneous supposition has then been combined with the
theory that to primitive man all supernatural powers were
malevolent; and the conclusion has been drawn, that the
offerings were intended to appease these malevolent gods, that
religion had its origin in fear — whereas a god is a friendly
power from whom man expects aid and protection, and with
whom he seeks communion. Sometimes the two fallacies —
the gift-theory of sacrifice and the fear-theory of religion —
are combined with the further error that ancestor-worship is
the earliest form of religion, thus : " The basis or core of
worship is surely offering — that is to say, the propitiation of
the ghost by just such gifts of food, drink, slaves, or women
as the savage would naturally make to a living chief with
whom he desired to curry favour." ^ But the core of
worship is communion ; offerings in the sense of gifts are a
comparatively modern institution both in ancestor- worship
as in the worship of the gods ; and ancestor-worship is later
than, and modelled on, the worship of the gods.
^ Rhys Davids, Hibbert Lecture, 1881, p. 28.
2 Grant Allen, The Attis, 93.
15
CHAPTEE XVII
NATURE-WORSHIP
What raised man from savagery to civilisation was the
transition from a natural to an artificial basis of food-supply,
i.e. was the domestication of animals and cultivation of
plants ; and such domestication and cultivation was, as we
have endeavoured to show, the outcome, not the designed
but none the less the inevitable outcome, of the earliest
y form of rehgion, that is, totemism, the worship of plants and
animals. Having shown that religion gave the first impetus
to material progress, we have now to show how material
progress reacted on religion, how the widening circle of
human activity brought man into more extensive contact
with the forces of nature, rendering their co-operation with
him more necessary, and giving him fresh reasons to establish
friendly relations and a permanent alliance with the powers
on whose goodwill the increase of his flocks or the fertility
of his fields depended.
The hunter must have a knowledge of the habits of
the quarry ; the herdsman must know not only where to
find pasture for his fiocks, but, to some extent, the conditions
which favour the growth of herbage : he has a very direct
interest in the rains and the streams which water the earth.
Further, he must be able to see some distance ahead, to be
ready with his preparations to take care of the younglings
of his herd when born ; he must be able to compute time.
Now, though it may appear to us that no very extensive
observation would be required on the part of primitive man
to discover that the same amount of time always elapsed
between one new moon and the next, or to calculate how
many days that period consisted of, yet when we remember
226
NATURE-WORSHIP 227
that there still are savages unable to count more than five,
and many who cannot count more than twenty, we shall see
that very considerable mental effort must have been necessary
before the savage could determine with certainty that the
lunar month consisted of twenty-eight days ; and from what
we know of the natural man's aversion to exertion of any
kind, we may be sure that he would not have taken this
trouble except for some practical end and some manifest
benefit to be derived from it. For the nomad, dependent
on roots, berries, and the chase, the computation of time has
no inducement. For the herdsman there is an evident
advantage in being able to calculate in how many months
he may expect his flocks to bring forth their young. Thus
there are several natural forces with which, and on which,
the herdsman has to reckon : streams, fountains, clouds, the
sky and the moon. In the pastoral stage, man's interests
have become wide enough to make him desire the co-opera-
tion of all these forces ; and all, it is hardly necessary to
remark, came to be worshipped by him in consequence.
For the agriculturist, even greater powers of prevision
are necessary. " The cultivator must so arrange his labours
that his land may be in tilth, and ready for the seed, at a
time favourable to germination ; the time of the growth of
the plant must coincide with the season of rain, its blossoming
with warm weather, and its maturity with the hottest
sunshine."^ To count by lunar months, in making all
these calculations, would inevitably lead to error, for the
interval from one midsummer to another is greater than
twelve lunar months, and not so great as thirteen. We may
conjecture that it was the loss and damage caused by the
errors consequent on counting by lunar months that awoke
early man to the necessity of better calculation, and led
him to notice that from spring to summer the days grew
longer, from summer to winter shorter, until eventually he
discovered that the shadow of a familiar object cast by the
noon-day sun is longest on the shortest day, the winter
solstice ; shortest on the longest day, the summer solstice,
and then calculated the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
Hence the four great festivals of the agricultural stage of
1 Payne, New World, i. 348.
,228 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
civilisation are the winter solstice (brumalia, Yule, Christmas),
the vernal equinox (Easter, A.S. Eostra, a goddess), the
summer solstice (the great festival of Olympian Zeus), and
the autumn equinox. But the importance of the sun, as
the cause of all growth, was to the cultivator even greater
than its importance as a measurer of time. At the same
time, the varying qualities of soil must have impressed man
in the agricultural stage with the idea that the earth could
yield or refuse increase to the crops at will. Thus the
cultivator was compelled to feel his dependence on these
two nature-powers, to seek their co-operation, and add two
more to the list of deities inherited by him from the pastoral
stage.
That this was the actual order of events, at any rate in
the case of our own forefathers, seems to be indicated by
the results of linguistic palaeontology ; the undivided Indo-
Europeans were acquainted with the moon as the " measurer "
of time,^ they worshipped a sky-spirit,^ and they had not
yet passed out of the pastoral stage ; ^ they had not learnt to
calculate the solar year * — that was reserved for the agricul-
tural stage, i.e. the period after the separation of the Indian
from the European branch.
That man in the pastoral and agricultural periods would
be impressed with the desirability of winning the permanent
favour of the spirit of the river, or clouds, earth, moon, sun,
or sky, will hardly be doubted; nor can it be doubted, if
the argument of our previous chapters be admitted, that
the ritual employed by the totemist to unite himself with
the new supernatural powers whose favour he desired would
be formed on the analogy of the rites with which he
worshipped his plant or animal totem — he knew no other
way of worship. Those rites were first the sacrificial meal,
jby which the substance of the god was incorporated in the
'worshipper; second, the offerings by which the worshipper
was placed in contact with the god. In the case of streams
and fountains, it is the second method which obviously
commended itself, and, as we have seen in the last chapter, it
has actually left abundant survivals all over the world.
1 Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 306 ff. ^ Qp cit. 417.
3 Op. cit. 287. 4 Oj). cit. 309.
NATURE-WORSHIP 229
Here we need only add that it is not merely offerings which
the worshipper immerses, but on occasion his own body :
" bathing is throughout India regarded as a means of re-
ligious advancement " ; ^ and the world-wide use of water for
purposes of (ceremonial) purification was in its origin, we
may conjecture, simply a means of gaining for the worshipper
the protection of the water-spirit against the consequences
of pollution. From the practice of immersion, the stream
or pool becomes a place of oracle and divination, the will
of the deity being indicated according as the water swallows
or rejects the offering cast into it ^ — the origin of the ordeal
of water as applied to witches. The principle of the
sacramental meal is not indeed inapplicable to the water-
spirit, but instances are not common : traces of it may be
found in the belief that drinking the sacred water proves
fatal or injurious to the criminal or the perjurer, as in
Mexico or on the Gold Coast " eating fetish," i.e. eating sacred
soil, does.^
In the case of non-totem deities which, like sun, moon,
and sky, are beyond the reach of physical contact, it might
be supposed that neither form of totem rites could be
applied, that external, physical union was impossible, but
this is not the case ; there were various means of getting
over the difficulty. In the first place, it is to be remembered
that the basis of totemism is primitive man's discovery that,
I as men are united to one another in kindreds, so natural
objects can be classed in natural kinds — hence the totem
alliance between a human kin and a natural kind. Now, the
waters on the earth and those in the sky obviously belong
to the same kind, and communion with one member of the
i species is, according to the belief on which totemism is based,
\ communion with all. Hence the worshipper who, wishing
a river-god to grant a vow, unites himself with the god by
throwing some " offering " into the water, follows exactly
the same process when he wishes to commend himself to
the waters above the earth. In Estland, when rain was
wanted, something was cast into a certain sacred brook :
" streams or lakes which, the moment wood or stones are
1 Crooke, FolTc-Lorc of Northern India, 20.
2 Robertson Smith, Religion of Semites, 178. ^ Supra, p. 64.
230 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
thrown into them, cause rain and storm clouds to appear,
occur all over Europe." ^ On the same principle, in times
of drought the agriculturist seeks to place his plants under
the protection of the spirit of waters by immersing in a
stream the representative (human or otherwise) of the
vegetation spirit.^
But if communication could thus be effected with the
spirits of sky and cloud, then neither were sun and moon
inaccessible to would-be worshippers, for they are of the
genus fire, and whatever is cast into a fire on earth would
establish communion with the greater and the lesser lights
in the sky, as in the case of the waters on and over the
earth. It is, at any rate, in this way that the Ainus make
their offerings to the sun — all fire, including that of the sun,
being divine to them.^ The parallel thus drawn between fire
and water is confirmed by the purificatory powers of both ;
the person or thing that passes through or over a fire is
brought in contact and in communion with the fire-god.
When totemism has become so far disintegrated that it
is forgotten that the animal sacrificed is the god himself,
then animal sacrifice can be and is extended by analogy from
totem to non-totem deities ; the sacrifice of an animal is then
the traditional mode of approaching certain deities, and is
inferred to be the proper mode of worshipping all deities.
Hence we get a second means of establishing union between
man and gods who are spatially remote from him : animals
are sacrificed to them as to other gods, but whereas tradition
determined what animals should be sacrificed to totem gods,
analogies (more or less fanciful) had to be sought to determine
the proper sacrifices to non-totem gods, — horses were sacrificed
to the sun, perhaps because of his motion, and also to the
sea, perhaps from the shape and movements of its waves ;
river-gods were supposed to appear, often as bulls, often as
serpents. The blood of sacrifice, in the case of non-totem
as well as of totem gods, is then dashed upon an altar or
stone, and the gods of both kinds are supposed to visit or
1 Mannhardt, JV. F. K. 341, note 1, who, however, regards these as instances
of sympathetic magic.
2 B. K. 356, note, for instances.
^ Howard, Trans-Siberian Savages, 172.
NATURE-WORSHIP 231
manifest themselves in the stone. Hence it is that the
Peruvians " in their temples adored certain stones, as repre-
sentatives of the sun." ^ But though this would be the
natural and obvious mode of sacrifice to the sun, there was
a manifest propriety in combining this with the first-
mentioned mode (viz. casting " offerings " into fire), and
casting not only offerings, but also sacrificial victims into the
flames, for thus the essence of the victim's flesh was wafted
into the air, and rose upwards to the divinity in the sky
above. This mode was in harmony with the tendency which,
from other causes,^ had arisen to burn those portions of the
victim which were intended for the god ; and when not only
sun and sky gods, but all the gods, were supposed to reside
aloft and at a distance, and when the spirits of the dead also
were relegated to a distant other world, the practice of burnt
offerings had even more to recommend it.
There remains yet a third w^ay in which the worshipper
could place himself in communication with distant and non-
totem gods ; and it is one of some importance both . in the
history of religion and for the right comprehension of that
history. The origin of animal sacrifice is not the desire of
the worshipper " to curry favour " with the deity by offering
him a present of food, but is due to the fact that the animal
was the god, of whose substance the worshipper partook.
Ij'he god was himself the victim that was offered in the
'sacrificial rite. Ultimately that fact was indeed forgotten,
but whilst the true comprehension of the fact remained it
must have appeared essential to the act of worship that the
god should be the sacrifice to the god ; and we shall see
hereafter, in the chapter on the Priesthood, that, as a matter
of fact, this mystic principle has left many traces behind it.
Here, however, we have only to suggest that this principle
afforded in early times a solution of the problem, with what
sacrifice should a god, like the sun, belonging to the genus
fire, be approached? Obviously, with fire. And as the
totem-animal was sacrificed annually to the totem-god, so fires
would annually be kindled as an offering to the Sun. That
the summer solstice should be chosen, when the sun's power
was greatest, is natural enough. Hence, then, the fire-
^ Zarate, Conquest of Peru (in Kerr, Voyages, iv. 360). ^ Supra, p. 160.
232 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
festivals on Midsummer Eve or Midsummer Day which
survive so generally all over Europe,^ and the African custom
of worshipping the moon by shooting flaming arrows towards
her.^ Mr. Frazer, however, who apparently inclines to regard
religion as developed out of magic, consistently enough says,
" The best general explanation of these European fire-festivals
seems to be the one given by Mannhardt, namely, that they
are sun-charms or magical ceremonies intended to ensure a
proper supply of sunshine for men, animals, and plants ; " ^
and, following Mannhardt, he also explains the custom
of burning the representative of the vegetation spirit as a ^J
piece of sympathetic magic, having the same object as the
Midsummer bonfires. But sympathetic magic implies that
an effect is produced in virtue of the similarity between that
effect and its cause, and without the intervention of any
supernatural being — there is nothing religious about it. -
Now, neither is there anything religious in the Midsummer
rites as at present practised by European peasants ; but
then these rites are survivals, and in religion a survival
consists in the continued performance of acts, originally
having a religious significance, after all religious significance
has departed from them. Thus no one doubts that streams
and wells were once considered supernatural powers, or the
abodes of supernatural spirits, having, amongst other powers,
that of curing disease. Nor can it be doubted that originally
the worshipper placed himself in contact with, and under the
protection of, the spirit by bathing in the water. That the
" sacred " wells, which are common enough now, were origin-
ally worshipped as gods is tolerably clear. But the practice
of resorting to them is now a survival — it is, in the proper
sense of the word, a superstition ; that is to say, those who
believe that water from a certain well will cure diseases of
the eye, believe so, not because they suppose any spirit to
dwell in the water, but simply because it is the tradition that
that water does, as a matter of fact, cure eye-disease. But it
would be erroneous to infer that, because now no spirit is
supposed to effect the cure, therefore the belief never had a
religious element in it ; and in the same way it is not safe to
1 For instances, see Frazer, G. B. ii. 58 fF., and Mannhardt, W. F. K. 309.
- Reville, Pcuples non- civilises, i. 58. ^ G. B. ii. 267-8.
NATURE-WORSHIP 23
o
iufer that because there is now no element of religion in the
Midsummer rites, therefore there never was. Eather, I would
suggest, the inference is that the fire-festivals, occurring as
they do at the summer solstice, are like other festivals
occurring on that day, survivals of early sun-worship ; while
the burning of the vegetation spirit's representative is the
early cultivator's method of commending his crops to the sun-
spirit, as immersion is his method of placing them under the
care of the sky-spirit or rain-god. On the other hand, if
we regard these fire-festivals and water -rites as pieces of
sympathetic magic, they are clear instances in which man
imagines himself able to constrain the gods — in this case the
god of vegetation — to subserve his own ends. Now, this
vain imagination is not merely non -religious, but anti-
religious ; and it is difficult to see how religion could have
been developed out of it. It is inconsistent with the abject
fear which the savage feels of the supernatural, and which is
sometimes supposed to be the origin of religion ; and it is
inconsistent with that sense of man's dependence on a
superior being which is a real element in religion.
CHAPTER XVIII
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM
The material progress made by man, as he advanced from
the material basis of subsistence on roots, fruits, and the
chase, first to pastoral and then to agricultural life, required
that he should make an ever-increasing use for his own ends
of natural forces. These forces were to him living beings
with superhuman powers, of whom he stood in dread, but
whose co-operation he required. Without some confidence
that it was possible, if he set about it in the right way, to
secure their favour and assistance, his efforts would have
been paralysed. That confidence was given him by religion ;
he was brought into friendly relations with powers from
which, in his previously narrow circle of interests, he had
had little to hope or to gain ; and thus the number of his
gods had been increased.
Pastoral life and even a rudimentary form of agriculture
are compatible with a wandering mode of existence, in which
the sole ties that can keep society together are the bonds of
blood-kinship and a common cult. But the development
of agriculture is only possible when the tribe is permanently
settled in a fixed abode ; and then it becomes possible for
neighbours, not of kindred blood, to unite in one community.
In a word, political progress becomes possible ; and political
progress at this stage consists in the fusion or synoikismos of
several tribes into a single State. This process also had its
effect upon religion : a clan is a religious community as well
as a body of kinsmen, and the fusion of two clans implied
the fusion of their respective cults. In many cases the
resemblances of the two cults may well have been so great
as rather to promote than hinder the alliance ; thus when
234
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 235
we find, as occasionally happens, that in some villages two
May-poles (survivals of tree-worship) are used at a harvest
festival instead of one, the inference ^ rightly seems to be that
two communities, both worshipping trees, if not the same
species of tree, have in neighbourliness united their worship.
Or, again, when we find that the branch which the tree-
worshipper annually carries round the community, in order
that the spirit present in it may confer blessings on all to
whom it is presented, is hung with various kinds of fruits
and associated with cereals, we may infer that tree-worshipper
and plant-worshipper have found no difficulty in uniting in
a joint festival and common act of worship. So, too, in the
Lithuanian Samborios, the Athenian Pyanepsion, and the
Mexican offering to Chicomecoatl, the common feature is
that cereals and leguminous plants of all kind are combined
in one offering ; and the implication is that the festival was
one common to all the cultivators and worshippers of the
various plants represented in the offering.
Again, two communities might happen to agree, though
for different reasons, in offering the same kind of animal
in their annual sacrifice. Thus the moon-worshipper seems
very generally to have believed that the moon-spirit mani-
fested herself on earth in the shape of a cow, and that a
cow was therefore the proper victim to offer, on the principle
that the deity is to be offered to himself. A fusion, there-
fore, between a family of moon-worshippers and a family
whose original totem and traditional deity was the cow,
would meet with no difficulty on the ground of religion, if
prompted by neighbourliness or political reasons. So, too,
the clan that bred horses would be prepared to recognise
fellow-worshippers in a clan that was in the habit of offering
horses to the sun ; one that owned bulls, to unite with one
whose river-deity was bull-shaped.
Or neighbourhood and neighbourliness might lead to the
use of a common altar and sacred place by tv/o or more
clans, each offering a different victim, because having different
totems, and each sacrificing at different times ; until the
fusion became complete, and nothing more would be required
but a myth to explain how it was that the one god worshipped
1 Mannhardt, JF. F. K. 260,
236 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
at the altar appeared in different animal shapes, or had
different animals offered to him.
Fusion of this kind — syncretism — would be materially
facilitated at first by the fact that the gods had originally
no proper names. As long as the clan had only one god, no
name was required, the gods of hostile clans were sufficiently
distinguished by the fact that they were the gods of other
clans : " the deity " was the deity of our clan, just as " the
river " is that near which I dwell, and whose geography-book
name I may not know. But the possession of a proper name
gives more individuality to a god ; and fusion between two
gods, each possessing this higher degree of personality, is
more difficult than between two nameless spirits. On the
other hand, fusion is not impeded, if of the two gods one
possesses a name and the other does not, only the advantage
is with the one having a personal name. He readily absorbs
the nameless one : thus the cult of the Greek god of wine
was a combination of the worship of a vegetation spirit and
of the spirit of the vine, but the former was nameless, and
therefore it was the latter, Dionysus, that gave its name
to the god. So, too, when we find that in different places
half a dozen different animals — wolf, roe, goat, ram, mouse,
grasshopper, lizard, swan, hawk, eagle — to say nothing of
plants {e.g. the laurel), were associated with or offered to
Apollo, we are justified in inferring that as many different
nameless totem gods, plant or animal, have been absorbed by
the spirit which was fortunate enough to possess the personal
name Apollo. Whether that spirit was or was not a sun-
god is a question to which no decisive answer is forthcoming.
But it is clear that fusion between the cult of the sun-god
and the worship of other gods would be considerably facilitated
by the fact that burnt-offerings played a part in the ritual
both of the sun-god and of other gods. The agriculturist,
whose crops required sunshine, acknowledged his dependence
on the sun and worshipped him. In many cases the sun-god
might continue to be consciously distinguished from the plant
totem or vegetation spirit, but in many, perhaps most, cases
the agriculturist would worship both gods in a common
festival, and combine their ritual : he had to make offerings
to both, and to both it was possible to convey his offerings
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 237
by casting them into a fire. Thus the Druids, at their great
quinquennial festival, constructed a colossal Jack of the Green,
placed inside it both animal victims and human criminals
(captives, or, in default thereof, clansmen), and burnt the
whole.^ That in course of time their festival might come
to be regarded as a feast in honour of some one god, is
readily intelligible ; and as long as the different gods con-
cerned were nameless, none could appropriate the festival.
A similar combination of cults is indicated by the fact that
before temples were known,^ and, for the matter of that,
after they were common, the altars of the gods — whether
Aryan or Semitic or Hamitic — were usually to be found in
the neighbourhood of a sacred tree, or trees, and a sacred
stream. Now the cultivator whose crops required watering
(and the herdsman whose pasturage was dependent on the
water-spirit) had an interest in worshipping the spirit of
waters as well as the vegetation spirit ; and, as the common
association of sacred grove and sacred stream shows, he
sought, for the place of his worship, a spot in which he could
at one and the same time approach both spirits in a joint
act of worship, and there he set up the altar-stone on which
he dashed the blood of sacrifice. To this spot he resorted at
the fixed festivals of the agricultural calendar — the solstices
and equinoxes — and also on extraordinary occasions, when
drought, sterility, or disease awoke in him a consciousness of
the necessity of renewing the bond with the gods to whose
protection it was the custom of the clan to resort with con-
fidence in cases of emergency. On such occasions there was
a fixed ritual to be observed : some " offerings " must be cast
into the river, others hung upon the trees, the blood of
sacrifice be sprinkled on the stone, and the victim's flesh be
solemnly consumed by the assembled clan. It was on the
exact and punctilious performance of all these various pro-
ceedings that the success of the act of worship {i.e. a sense
of reconciliation with the god, and the termination of the
drought, or the staying of the plague) depended. The
omission of any one of them, or the failure to perform them
in the exact manner prescribed by custom and tradition,
1 B. K. 526 ; C?es. B. G. vi. 16 ; Strabo, iv. c. 198 ; Diod. v. 32.
2 Sujpra, p. 135.
238 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
would invalidate the whole. In a word, the proceedings,
from the time of entering to the moment of leaving the
sacred place, tended to present themselves to the worshipper's
mind as one single act of worship. That the various con-
stituent parts of that act had had different origins, was a fact
which would inevitably tend to be obscured and eventually
forgotten. That the various rites composing the one act of
worship had been originally addressed to different spirits, would
pari passu also tend to be forgotten ; indeed, if the spirits
were nameless, it would be difficult for several generations
of worshippers to hold them clearly apart in their minds.
What would be present to the consciousness of any given
worshipper would be, that on certain occasions, e.g. when
danger of any kind threatened, it was the customary thing
to resort to the sacred place of the clan, and there to perform
certain external acts, and that, if those acts were performed
in the proper way, the danger would be averted by the
supernatural power or powers friendly to the clan and
haunting the grove. Whether one or more spirits were
concerned in granting the prayers of the community might
be matter for speculation ; the unity of the act of worship,
however, would be a presumption in favour of the unity of
the power worshipped. Thus in Aricia there was a sacred
grove or forest, the forest of the inhabitants, Nemus, which
was thus resorted to ; and the numen of the spot was known
simply as " the forester," Nemorensis. Eventually, " the
forester " was identified with a goddess having a more
individual name and a higher degree of personality — Diana.
On the analogy, therefore, of Diana Nemorensis, we may
conjecture that deities with double names, Phoebus Apollo,
Pallas Athene, and so on, were originally distinct deities
whose cults have been combined by syncretism.
But it is not here alleged that even spirits whose abodes
were so closely associated together as were those of tree-
spirits and river-spirits necessarily or generally blended
together, or were absorbed by a god with a more developed
personality. Each of the gods might have such a marked
personality that fusion was impossible. The Dryads, the
j^ereids, the Naids, the nymphs of trees and streams, con-
tinued to exist side by side with the greater gods of Greece.
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 239
In a word^ where syncretism di(^ not take place, polytheism
arose. And it is with polytheism that we have now to deal.
The development of polytheism is in the main the outcome
of early political progress, as was indicated at the beginning
of this chapter ; the political union of two or more com-
munities involved religious union also. Thus, the southern
tribes of the Gold Coast, Fantis, form one confederation ;
the northern tribes, Ashantis, a rival and more powerful
confederation. Each has its own federal god — Bobowissi
the god of the southern, Tando the god of the northern
federation ; and whenever a tribe revolts from the Ashantis
it renounces the^ Ashanti god Tando, and is admitted
to the southern federation by joining in the worship of
Bobowissi. ■'•
But though the development of polytheism is in the main |
the outcome of political causes and of the synoikis7nos by
which a State and a nation are made, still a tendency to
polytheism manifests itself in even earlier times. The sky-
god, whose favour is essential to the herbage which supports
the herdsman's cattle, as well as to the farmer's crops, may
be worshipped concurrently with the totem plant or animal,
and retain his independence, as the Dyaus, Zeus, Jupiter, of
the Aryans, did. Again, as the worship of two spirits at one
festival sometimes results in a combination of the two cults
and in the syncretism of the two deities, so, conversely, the
worship of one deity at two different festivals sometimes ends
in the production of two deities : at the spring or Easter
festival of the agricultural calendar, the rites appropriate to
the green corn or maize are celebrated, and later in the year
the worship of the ripe ear takes place, with the result that
the Corn-Maiden, or Kern Baby, is differentiated from the
Old Woman or Corn-Mother — Kore from Demeter, Xilonen
from Chicomecoatl.
In this connection we may note that amongst savages
there are sex-totems,^ and amongst civilised peoples what we
may call sex-mysteries : sex-totems are animals which are
exclusively sacred to the women of the tribe, or exclusively
to the men ; sex-mysteries are those from participation in
which one or other sex is excluded. Now, the mysteries
^ Ellis, TsM'Speaking Peo])les, 33. 2 Prazer, Totemism, 51-3.
240 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
which are celebrated exclusively by women, and from which
men are excluded, are generally connected with agriculture
and agricultural deities, e.g. the Thesmophoria, the rites of
the Bona Dea, and sundry Hindu ceremonies.^ Further, it
is a well-known fact that amongst savages agriculture is left
to the women : amongst the Mam-Niam " the men most
studiously devote themselves to their hunting, and leave the
culture of the soil to be carried on exclusively by the
women ; " ^ amongst the Kafirs " the women are the real
labourers, the entire business of digging, planting, and
weeding devolves on them ; " ^ " whilst the Monbuttoo
women attend to the tillage of the soil and the gathering of
the harvest, the men, except they are absent, either for war
or hunting, spend the entire day in idleness." ^ In fine, it
may be said of Africa generally, that " the wife has the chief
share of the hoeing and cultivation of the soil ; " ^ as it was
said of the ancient Peruvians, " these women give great
assistance to their husbands in all the labours belonging to
husbandry and domestic affairs, or rather, these things fall
entirely to their lot." ^ It is therefore an easy guess that
the cultivation of plants was one of woman's contributions
to the development of civilisation ; and it is in harmony
with this conjecture that the cereal deities are usually, both
in the Old World and the New, female. The agricultural or
semi-agricultural mysteries, therefore, from which even in
civilised times women continued to exclude men, may be
survivals of early times, when agriculture was a cult as well
as a craft, a mystery as well as a ministerium, and when,
further, the craft (and therefore the cult) was the exclusive
prerogative of the wives of the tribe. That cultivated plants
were originally totems we have already argued. If women
were the first cultivators, it will follow that cereals were
originally sex-totems. Agriculture, however, when its benefits
became thoroughly understood, was not allowed, amongst
civilised races, to continue to be the exclusive prerogative of
^ Crooke, Folk-Lore of Northern India, 41 and 43.
2 Schweinfurth, Heart of Africa, ii. 12 (E.T.).
2 Shooter, Kafirs of Natal, 17. ^ Schweinfurth, ii. 90.
5 DufF Macdonald, Africana, i. 137.
^ Zarate, Conqiiest of Peru {Kqxy, Voyages, iv. 351).
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 241
women ; and the Corn-goddess, Maiden or Mother, had to
admit to the circle of her worshippers the men as well as
the wives of the tribe. Hence, though the corn-spirit
continued to be of the sex of her original worshippers, and
though women continued to play a part in the myths about
the goddess as well as in her worship {e.g. the maidens who
carried the ears of maize in Mexico and Peru, and those who
are represented on Greek monuments as carrying ears of
corn), still Demeter took her place with the other deities ;
the men of the tribe participated in her worship (though the
youths who figured in the Eiresione procession at the
Pyanepsion had to dress up as women ^), and the Eleusinian
mysteries were open to men as well as to women.
Political development in early times — to turn to the main
cause of polytheism — depends on two conditions : first, the
causes which tend to induce neighbouring communities to
act together and blend together in one political whole, or
State, must be more powerful than the causes which tend to
keep them apart ; and next, the causes which tend to keep
them apart are two, namely, first the tie of blood, which unites
the members of a community together and marks them off
from strangers, and next the tie of a common worship, to
which none but members of the community are admitted.
Both these dividing influences must be overcome, if a State of
any size and political importance is to grow up. In a word,
in early times polytheism is the price which must be paid
for political development. The loyalty to the clan and to
the clan-god, the conviction that the religious community
formed by the tribe constitutes it a peculiar people, is
essential to monotheism and inconsistent with political
growth : politically the Jewish State was insignificant and at
the mercy of its neighbours ; at the present day the Jews
are scattered and form no political community ; but they
retain their original loyalty to the blood-bond and to the
God of their fathers.
That different tribes would exhibit different degrees of
attachment to their ancestral faith, different degrees of
jealousy for their clan-god, follows from the variety of
^ /card 7i'fat/cas ia-ToXiafxivoL, Photius, Bihlioth, c. 239, p. 322 ; Mannhardt,
W. F. K. 216.
l6
242 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
human nature. But when the first step towards polytheism
has been taken, when once the tribe's worship has been
finally divided between the totem and another deity — though
this does not take place probably without many relapses, by
the process of syncretism, into the old custom of a single
sanctuary and a single totem to a single tribe — the develop-
ment of polytheism is easy and rapid ; the need for friendly
relations with all the natural forces by which man's fortunes
are or can be supposed to be affected is so great that one
after another all are gradually brought within the circle of
his worship. But this is a process which cannot take place
without affecting the nature, character, and position of the
gods. For instance, the original clan-god was omnipotent :
the worshipper appealed to him in any and every need, with
confidence that he could, if he so willed, save him. But
when, by the fusion of several communities, the members of
the new State found themselves the worshippers of several
omnipotent gods, some adjustment of their relations was
necessary. That adjustment often took the form of a
division of labour, and we can see clearly in some cases how
a god originally all-powerful would come to be a merely
departmental god. In the view of early man war is a holy
function : before going into battle, sacrifice is offered to the
clan-god, the warriors are consecrated to him and are placed
under the taboos ordinarily imposed on those who are in
direct and special communion with the clan-god. Whether
the clan-god be an animal totem or a vegetation spirit, or
what not, he is all-powerful, and only exercises this power of
protecting his warriors by the way, so to speak. But if of
several tribes uniting in a political federation one is dis-
tinguished for its success in war, the inference inevitably
will be that its god has special powers of conferring victory
in war ; and the other clans federated with it will worship its
god more especially and rather than their own in time of war.
Thus a god who, like Mars, was admittedly in the beginning
a vegetation spirit, may end by becoming the war-god of a
nation. Again, the sacred trees ^ and sacred stream ^ of a holy
place are habitually used as oracles ; and if some sacred
place for some reason or other gains repute as a place for
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 194. - Op. cit. 187,
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 243
oracles, the god of the spot may, like Apollo in Delphi, come
to be specially the god of divination and of prophecy.
It may perhaps be thought that if Mars was, as is now
generally admitted, originally a vegetation spirit, he must
also originally have been a functional deity, and not an
all-powerful god ; and so, generally, that all gods were at
first departmental or functional, and that the conception of
omnipotence was only gradually built up in the history of
religion. But on the hypothesis that vegetation spirits were
plant totems, this is not so. That at a certain stage of
development it was considered to be the special business of
the Corn -mother, or Maize-mother, or Cotton-mother, to look
after the growth of their respective plants, and see that they
prospered, is not denied. The importance of the plants to
man is quite sufficient reason for his requiring a supernatural
power to tend them, and none was so proper as the spirit
originally supposed to be immanent in them. And the same
observation will apply to animals of economic importance.
But obviously the case is different with plants and animals
of no value to men for food or any other purpose : man has
no interest in the multiplication of crocodiles, sharks, snakes,
and insects, or plants and trees which he can neither eat nor
otherwise make use of. When, then, he worships the super-
natural beings immanent in such plants and animals — and
he does adopt all of them as totems — the purpose of his
worship is not to secure their multiplication, for he has no
interest therein, and, consequently, the immanent deities
must be worshipped because of their possession of supernatural
powers other than purely functional. If the only thing the
crocodile totem could do was to increase the number of
crocodiles, there would be — to borrow a word from the
Political Economist — a positive " disutility " in his worship.
Nor would the utility of the butterfly, in that case, be
sufficient to induce men to adopt it as a totem, as some
tribes do. Now, the original wild ancestors of our domestic-
ated plants and animals did not differ in any obvious way
from other wild animals and plants : the savage could not
foresee that the oyster would and the turtle would not come to be
cultivated ; and if he adopted them both as totems, it was not
in order to eat them, for he adopts, in the same way, plants
244 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
and animals which he cannot eat, and moreover the totem-
plant or animal is precisely the species which he abstains
from eating. In fine, he worshipped plant totems for the
same reason as he worshipped animal totems, and he
worshipped totems which eventually turned out to possess
economic utility for the same reason as he worshipped those
which eventually proved to have none ; and that reason was
that he believed them to be supernatural beings possessing
the power to protect him from all dangers, and to confer on
him all blessings. That eventually the prayers which he
addressed to the Corn-spirit or Maize-spirit came to be
mainly prayers for good crops, was due to the various causes
which we have already suggested : the growth of polytheism
led to a division of labour amongst deities, the economic
importance of food-plants made their multiplication a matter
of especial desire, and the spirit immanent in them, being
their life, naturally came to be considered to be the spirit
that made them grow. But even so there are clear traces
enough in late times that the vegetation spirit, though mainly
concerned with vegetation, continued to exercise other powers :
the tree-spirit of the Lithuanians had control over rain and
sunshine,^ and amongst the northern Europeans generally the
vegetation spirit brought blessings of all kinds, and not
merely prosperity to the crops.^ Therefore also the general
supernatural powers exercised by Demeter, Dionysus, Chico-
mecoatl, etc., may have been inherited and not extended to
them in late times on the analogy of the other gods of the
pantheons to which they belonged.
But when once the conception of departmental deities
had been developed by polytheism, it extended widely. The
animistic belief that everything was a living being, and the
root-conception of totemism, that things are united in kinds
as men are united in kins, was combined with the new idea
that the spirit immanent in any species of beings or class of
things had the functional power of promoting the utility of
that class. Hence a large number of new, minor deities,
whose co-operation man must secure. That worship was
necessary for this end was self-evident. That the worship
of the new deities should be modelled on that of the old was
' B. K. 37. 2 ^, ^^ 52,
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 245
inevitable. But to understand the difficulty in the way of
extending the old rules of worship to cover the new instances,
some explanation is required. In the earliest form of
sacrifice a theophany of the totem-god was procured by
dashing the blood of the totem-animal on the altar-stone :
the victim was the god, the blood was the life, the spirit of
the species to which the animal belonged. No invocation,
therefore, was required, no naming the god was necessary ;
the god had no name, indeed, and the only god who could
pass into the altar was the spirit immanent in the animal,
that is to say, the totem-god of the clan. To this day,
survivals of this state of things may be found : the Kureks
at irregular times slaughter a reindeer or a dog, put its head
on a pole facing east, and, mentioning no name, say, " This
for Thee : grant me a blessing." ^ But when polytheism
grew up, when one clan worshipped several gods, it would be
necessary to distinguish. Especially, when the same animal
might be offered to different gods, would there be nothing to
guarantee that the right god passed into the altar. Hence
the advantage of having different names for the different
gods, and the custom of invoking a god by his name before
slaying the victim that was intended for him. Those who
did not know the name of the god could not offer him a
sacrifice, could not enter into communion with him, could
not gain his ear for any prayer. Hence the profound and
successful secrecy with which the name of the tutelary
deity of Eome was guarded, that no foe might induce him
to abandon Eome. Finally, we may note that savages
generally believe that knowledge of a man's name confers
power over the man himself ; a man's name — or, for that
matter, a god's name — is part of himself in the savage's
opinion, and consequently, just as hanging clothes on a sacred
tree places the wearer in contact with the divinity of the
tree, just as writing a name on temple-walls puts the owner
of the name in continual union with the deity of the temple,
so for early men the knowledge, invocation, and vain repeti-
tion of the deity's name constitutes in itself an actual, if
mystic, union with the deity named.
To return to our minor and departmental deities, of
1 Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 109.
"^
246 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
whom the Roman Di Indigetes are the most remarkable
example, it is clear, first, that for the worship of these
generic deities it was essential that their names should be
known, and second, that, when known, the mere repetition of
their names would be an act of worship sufficient for the
purpose, though not, of course, excluding sacrifice as well, if
it were deemed advisable. Hence in Rome the pontifices
kept registers (indigitamenta) of the names of all these Di
Indigetes. From what is said by writers quoting from
or basing themselves on Varro, who had access to the
indigitamenta, it seems probable that there were four classes
of these functional deities : the first consisted of those in-
dwelling in articles of food, clothing, and other necessaries of
life, and the second of those in certain parts of houses
(door, hinge, threshold, etc.) ; but the other two classes are
the most interesting, because the di comprised in them are
all immanent, not in material things, but in processes — the
various processes, (1) of farming, (2) of human life — and
they showed that the Roman had reached the conclusion that
anything whatever to which a class-name could be given had
a real existence, affording a sphere for the function of a
spiritual being. Examples of Di Indigetes are the spirit of
sowing (a satione Sator), harrowing (ab occatione deus Occator),
dunging (a stercoratione Sterculinius), of doors (Forculus a
foribus), hinges (Cardea a cardinibus), of the threshold
(Limentinus), of talking (Locutius), of the cradle (Cunina),
etc. The most probable derivation of the word indiges is from
indu (cf. evhov and indu-perator = im-2oerator) and ag (the
stem of agere), in the sense of the god that acts, manifests
himself, or is immanent in a thing.
But though it is the Di Indigetes of Rome with which
we are most familiar, it is not to be inferred that it was in
Rome alone that polytheism worked with disintegrating effect,
and produced these functional deities. We meet with them
in every quarter of the globe. In Africa, the negro has
" tutelary deities, each of which is for a special purpose.
These also are inanimate objects, possessing indwelling spirits.
One perhaps watches that no quarrel or division takes place,"
like the Latin Concordia, " another may watch over them
when dancing or holding a festival, and a third may take
SYNCRETISM AND POLYTHEISM 247
care of the drums. Each of these minor guardian gods has,
as it were, a special duty." ^ To turn to the New World, in
Mexico there were similar gods of black maize, roasted maize,
banners, metal objects, bucklers, etc.^ In Asia, we find that
" the sword was worshipped by the Eajputs ; ... in Bengal,
the carpenters worship their adze, chisel, and saw ; and the
barbers their razors, scissors, and mirror ; . . . the writer class
worship their books, pens, and inkstands. ... In Bombay,
jewellers worship their pincers and blow-pipe ; carriers worship
an axe, and market gardeners a pair of scales," ^ and so on.
The corn-sieve is sacred in India, as was the mystica vannus
laccJii in G-reece ; and the worship of the plough, which is
carried on still in India, and used to be practised by the
ancient Teutons, survives in England in the customs of
Plough Monday. This kind of worship, therefore, sometimes
called fetishism, so far from being the origin of religion, is
later than, and a degeneration from, the original state of r
things.
The last development of polytheism is anthropomorphism.
This was a stage which had not been reached in ancient Italy
in historic times : before the invasion of that country by the
anthropomorphic gods of Greece, the Italians neither con-
ceived their many gods to have human form, nor had
human-shaped idols, nor imagined their gods to marry and
give in marriage. To this stage of religious belief, to
distinguish it from polytheisms such as those of Greece and
Mexico, of which the deities are anthropomorphic, and have
a correspondingly higher degree of personality, the name
polydaemonism, as it has been suggested,* might be given
rather than polytheism. At any rate, it is well to bear in
mind the fact that a people may have many gods, and none
of them in human form.
With the effects which anthropomorphism produced on
the general course of civilisation we have not here to deal :
it produced and perfected the two forms of art which the
nineteenth century has been able to appreciate but little, and
to produce not at all — sculpture and architecture. In
^ Ellis, Tshi-speaking Peoples, 86, 87. ^ Sahagun, i. xxii.
^ Crooke, Folk-Lore of N. India, 305 ff.
■* Jevons, Plutarch's liomane Questions.
248 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
religion, anthropomorphism made it possible to bring
polytheism into something like a system, to bring all the
gods to dwell together in one Olympus, to organise them into
a society framed on the model of human society, and to
establish their relations to one another by means of
mythology. It is therefore of mythology that our next
chapter must treat.
CHAPTEE XIX
MYTHOLOGY ("
As long as man is on the natural basis of subsistence, as
long as he lives on roots, fruits, and the produce of the chase,
so long it takes him the whole of his time to scrape together
enough food to live on, and progress is impossible. It is the
domestication of plants and animals which enables him to
produce a greater food supply in a shorter time, which gives
him leisure, sets free a large part of his energies, and gives
him time to meditate the further appropriation of natural
powers to his own purposes, and so makes material progress
possible. The consequent increase of wealth brings in its
train the institution of private property. This development
of material civilisation — itself due to religion — reacts upon
religion. In every cult there are two tendencies or impulses,
the mystic and the practical, the need of the blessings which
the supernatural power can bestow and the desire for
communion with the author of those blessings. The latter
manifests itself from the first, as we have seen, both in the
sacrificial meal and in the sacramental offerings, by means of
which the worshipper seeks to unite himself with the object
of his worship. But it tended to be obscured, and material
progress tended to emphasise the practical object of cult, in
two ways. Polytheism disintegrated the totem-god and gave
birth to functional deities, thus suggesting and fostering the
idea that as these deities had only one function to perform —
and that one of material benefit to man — their only function
was to perform it for man's benefit. At the same time, the
conception of property was introduced into the relations
between God and man in such a way that sacrifice tended to
appear as a bargain in which the latter had so much the better
249
250 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
that he got everything and practically gave nothing. Thus
the practical impulse in worship was gradually exaggerated
till its absurdity became gross ; and the mystic impulse had
been thrust into the background until it was almost entirely
lost to view. How it came to reassert itself we shall have
soon to inquire, but we can now no longer delay to recognise
that in religion, besides the mystic and practical tendencies,
there is also the speculative tendency, and whereas the
former manifest themselves in cult, the latter finds expres-
sion in mythology. It is indeed true that in early religions,
while it was absolutely incumbent on a man to perform
exactly and punctiliously the external acts which constituted
the ritual and cult of the clan or state to which he belonged,
yet " belief in a certain series of myths was neither obligatory
as a part of true religion, nor was it supposed that, by
believing, a man acquired religious merit and conciliated the
favour of the gods."^ It is also true that there is a
conspicuous absence of religious feeling from most myths.
Still it is impossible for us to exclude the consideration of
mythology.^
Myths are not like psalms or hymns, lyrical expressions
of religious emotion ; they are not like creeds or dogmas,
statements of things which must be believed : they are
narratiyes. They are not history, they are tales told about
gods and heroes, and they all have two characteristics : on
the one hand, they are to us obviously or demonstrably
untrue and often irrational ; on the other hand, they were to
their first audience so reasonable as to appear truths which
were self-evident. Many myths are (or in their original
form were) designed to explain some name, ritual, or what-
ever seemed to require explanation : the name of Shotover
Hill is explained to be due to the fact that Little John once
shot over it. Other myths explain nothing and point no
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 17.
^ The view of mythology in this chapter is that of a disciple of Mr. Andrew
Lang ; and the student is referred to Mr. Lang's article on Mythology in the
Encyclopcedia Britannica, his Myth, Ritual, and Religion, and his Custom arid
Myth. The most comprehensive account of the various theories which have
been held on the subject of mythology is to be found in Gruppe, Die griechischen
Culte und Mythen (the English reader will find a briefer account by the present
writer in the article on Mythology in Chambers's Encyclopaedia).
MYTHOLOGY 251
moral : they are tales told for the sake of the telling and
repeated for the pleasure of hearing, like fairy-tales.
A fundamental article in the totem faith is that the
human kin and the animal kind are one flesh, one blood,
members of the same clan, bound by the sacred tie of blood
to respect and assist each other. Then the question naturally
arises, if the human and the animal members are brothers,
how is it that they wear such different shapes ? and the
answer obviously is that they were not always different :
once upon a time they were the same, and then something
occurred to make them different. Thus, " the Cray-fish clan
of the Choctaws were originally cray-fish and lived under-
ground, coming up occasionally through the mud to the
surface. Once a party of Choctaws smoked them out, and,
treating them kindly, taught them the Choctaw language,
taught them to walk on two legs, made them cut off their
toe-nails and pluck the hair from their bodies, after which
they adopted them into the tribe. But the rest of their
kindred, the cray-fish, are still living underground."^ In
course of time, as we have seen, it comes to be believed that
the totem-god is the father of his worshippers, and the
question again arises, how can human beings be descended
from an animal forefather ? and the answer is on the same
principle as before. " Thus the Turtle clan of the Iroquois are
descended from a fat turtle, which, burdened by the weight
of its shell in walking, contrived by great exertions to throw
it off, and thereafter gradually developed into a man."^ Later,
again, in consequence of the development of anthropomorphism,
it comes to be believed that the proper and original shape of
the gods is human ; and then the belief that the family is
descended from a god in animal form requires explanation ;
and the obvious inference is that as the god's real and
normal shape is human, he must have transformed himself
temporarily on this occasion and for some especial purpose :
thus Zeus changes himself into a swan to win Leda, into a
bull to win Europa.
In art and ritual the gradual process by which the
originally animal or vegetation god became eventually human
in form can be clearly traced, with all the intermediate steps.
^ Frazer, Totemism, 4. ^ Ibid. 3.
252 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The god appears occasionally on Egyptian monuments in
purely animal form ; the skin of the animal totem, a branch
of the god-tree, some actual ears of wheat or maize, are
worshipped as very god. Then the semi-human nature of
the god is expressed by clothing a human image in an animal
skin,^ or placing a human figure (of dough, etc.) on a tree, or
clothing a tree or a sheaf of ears in human dress, or a human
being in a sheaf or leaves. Then, when the animal or plant
origin of the god has been altogether forgotten, the god is
simply " associated " in art with the plant or animal :
Demeter wears a garland of wheat-ears, Chicomecoatl carries
maize-stalks in her hand, Apollo stands beside a dolphin ; and
finally, even these symbols are dropped. The same evolution
is abundantly illustrated in mythology : the Turtle of the
Iroquois corresponds to the purely animal form of the
Egyptian gods ; Zeus, who is at one time human and at
another animal, corresponds to the misch-hild, the human
body with animal head, which is the most common Egyptian
mode of representing the gods, or to the half-human, half-
vegetable deity represented by a sheaf wrapped in human
raiment. The " association " of a deity with a plant appears
in the myth of the Eed Maize clan of the Omahas, who say
that " the first man of the clan emerged from the water
with an ear of red maize in his hand."^ Finally, even the
" association " disappears in the myth of the Pima Indians
about the maize-spirit : " one day, as she lay asleep, a rain-
drop fell on her naked bosom, and she became the ancestress
of the maize-growing Pueblo Indians." ^
In course of time, the clan may forget that their animal
god was their ancestor, and then a fresh reason is required to
account for the alliance between the human kin and the
animal kind, and so " some families in the islands Leti, Moa,
and Lakor reverence the shark, and refused to eat its flesh,
because a shark once helped one of their ancestors at sea." ^
Or the clan may remember that it was descended from an
animal, but — owing to the general disappearance of animal-
worship — forget that the animal was a god, in which case
^ "Apre/its earrjKev afxirexofihrj 54pfxa i\d<pov, Paus. viii. c. 37.
^ Frazer, op. cit. 6.
^ Payne, N'ew World, i. 414 not e 4. ^ Frazer, op. cit. 7.
MYTHOLOGY 253
" transformation " still appears as a feature in the story, but
it is no longer due to divine agency : " the Kalang, who have
claims to be considered the aborigines of Java, are descended
from a princess and a chief who had been transformed into
a dog."^
Now, we began by noting that, though many myths are
aetiological, i.e. designed to explain something, many are not,
but are rather like fairy-tales ; and it is evident that we are
now, after starting with the former, rapidly approaching the
latter class : the transformation of the Kalang chief reminds
us of the enchanters and enchantresses of the Arabian Nights ;
the helpful Papuan shark belongs to the same order of
creatures as Arion's dolphin and the " friendly animals " of
numerous nursery tales. What then are the relations
between the two classes ?
To begin with — granted that the tendency to ask the
reason why, the desire " rerum cognoscere causas " (provided
the things be interesting), is characteristic of man generally
— it is clear that curiosity would be inevitably aroused by
the totemistic beliefs that human beings are descended from
animals and that animals help men : some explanation would
eventually be felt to be necessary, and as a matter of fact
explanations of the kind already illustrated are forthcoming.
It is clear also that when the beliefs were dead and forgotten,
the stories which had been invented to account for them
would, if they survived, ipso facto be dissevered from the
beliefs ; and would now appear no longer as reasons or
explanations, but as statements of facts which occurred
" once upon a time," — incidents, anecdotes. And, as still
happens with anecdotes, there was nothing to prevent them
from being appropriated to (or by) the wrong persons : the
original dolphin-myth was attached to the historic Arion,
whilst the totem-dolphin, the original of the myth, was
absorbed by the god Apollo. But a single incident does not
' make a story. " There was once a man and he was changed
into a dog," is not a statement of sufficient interest to live
long in the memory ; but it may have the requisite interest
if either I believe that the man in question was an ancestor
of my own, or if I know something about the man, other-
^ Frazer, ojp. cit, 6.
254 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
wise, e.g. if I know him as the hero of other incidents. So
that, granted that the incidents which compose myths are
explanations which have survived the beliefs they were
invented to explain, we have yet to learn why they came to
be grouped together — a point of first-rate importance, because
they would not have survived if they had not been combined
together. We cannot suppose that they were first dissevered
from the beliefs on which they originally depended for their
existence, and then were subsequently combined so as to
obtain a renewed existence, because they would probably
have perished in the interval. We must therefore suppose
that they were combined into tales ere yet the beliefs or
institutions which gave them their first lease of life had
perished. This means that the various parts of one
institution, for instance, must have had each its separate
explanation, and that these explanations were combined into
one whole, the unity of which corresponded to the unity of
the institution. An illustration will make this clearer, and
we will choose one which shall serve to remind us that the
relations of men to their totem-animal and to their animal
kindred are not the only things for which early man required
an explanation, and are not by any means the only source
of the incidents to be found in myths and fairy-tales.
Ceremonies may continue to be performed as a matter
of custom and tradition long after their original purpose
and object have been forgotten ; but they will not continue
to be performed unless some reason or other is forthcoming,
and usually the reason which commends itself is some
inference from the nature of the ceremony itself, which is
indeed an incorrect inference but is so easy and so readily
understood that various people can arrive at it for themselves,
and all can appreciate it at once. The explanations which
thus come to be given of religious ritual form an important
class of setiological myths, and have the further interest for
us that they afford instances of myths which from the
beginning were tales and not merely single incidents : a single
rite might consist of a series of acts, each of which demanded
its own explanation ; and the unity of the rite might produce
a unity of interest and action in the resulting myth. For
an instance we must obviously turn to a complex ritual, and
MYTHOLOGY 255
we will take the ritual which resulted from the syncretism
of the wine -god Dionysus and a vegetation spirit. It is
probable that the festival of Dionysus at Thebes and elsewhere ^
began with a procession in which a branch, or something else
originally representative of the vegetation spirit, was carried
round the cultivated fields adjacent to the city, in the same
way as the ears of maize were carried at the feast of the
Mexican Chicomecoatl, or branches by the European Aryans
generally on similar occasions — the purpose being the same
in all cases, namely, to place the crops under the blessing of
the vegetation spirit. The branch or image or what not
was carried by a man dressed up as a woman, just as the
elpea-LcovT} was carried by youths dressed up as women —
perhaps, as previously hinted, because the worship of the
vegetation spirit was originally confined to women. This is
the first act of the ceremony : the carrying of the symbol of
the god by a man dressed as a woman. Then, by a custom
common in Europe and exactly paralleled in Mexico, a human
figure was attached to the top of a tree- trunk previously
felled and prepared, and the trunk was hoisted by ropes into
an upright position. This, as we have seen, is an indication
of the presence of the anthropomorphic vegetation or tree-
spirit in the tree.^ The image was then pelted with stones
until it fell, when it was torn in pieces by the crowd of
women celebrating the festival. Stoning was the mode
adopted of killing first the animal and afterwards the plant
totem, because by means of it the whole community could
share jointly and equally in the responsibility of killing the
god. In the third and final act of the ritual, the woman
who in the scramble secured the head of the image raced off
with it, and nailed it to the door or roof of the chief house
of the town or of the temple, just as the branch is fastened,
after its procession round the fields, to the door or roof of
the landlord's house, in northern Europe, and just as the
elpecr LcovT) was similarly attached to the temple of Apollo.
Now there came a time when the original meaning of all
1 For what follows I am largely indebted to Mr. A. G. Bather's original
and exhaustive paper on " The Problem of the Bacchce," Journal of Hellenic
Studies, 1894, vol. xiv. ii. 244-64.
2 Supra, p. 215.
256 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
three parts of the festival was forgotten, and the spectators
were reduced to their own conjectures. The leading fact
and the starting-point for all attempts at explanation was
that the festival was in honour of the god Dionysus, and
whatever was done or represented in it must be something
redounding to his glory. Then who was represented by the
figure on the tree-top which was treated with such hostility
and hatred, pelted and pulled to pieces by the women ? It
must be some enemy of the god, whose destruction was a
triumph for Dionysus and was therefore commemorated in
this festival. The women evidently were on the side of the
god — must have been his worshippers — therefore the man
was not one of Dionysus' worshippers. Perhaps that accounts
for the opposition between him and the god : he would not
bow down to Dionysus, whereas the women accepted the god
cheerfully — the women of a community would be more
likely to welcome a novelty in worship than the head of the
family and representative of the old worship. But why is
the man dressed in woman's clothes ? no man in his senses
would go about in public dressed up like a woman. No ;
but it is just one of the powers of the wine-god that he
makes men lose their senses — and that may account, too, for
the women killing their own king, they must have been
frenzied to do that. So there only remain two things not
clear now, why is the god not represented at his own festival ?
and what is the meaning of the tree being suddenly hauled
up erect ? Perhaps the god is supposed to be present,
invisible but directing everything ; and in that case it is he
who causes the tree-top to rise, after inducing his foe to
mount it, in order that, after exposing him to ridicule, he may
cause him to perish at the hands of the women of his own
family.
We have only now to fill in the proper names in order
to have the myth of Pentheus which affords the framework
of Euripides' play, the BacclicE. Pentheus is the king who
resists the introduction of the worship of Dionysus,^ and is
consequently bereft of his senses and led in woman's clothes
as a laughing-stock through his own town by Dionysus.
^ I explained the similar myths of Lycurgus, Eleutherte, and Tiryns in
much the same way in Folk-Lore, June 1891, vol. ii. ii. 238-41.
MYTHOLOGY 257
The women of Thebes, headed by Agave, the mother of
Pentheus, are the women who accept the god, and become
maenads. It is to enable Pentheus to spy their worship that
Dionysus bends down a pine-tree, sets him on the top,
and then lets it go. Finally, it is Agave who, with the
other bacchse, pelts and pulls to pieces her own son and
carries off his head and sets it on his own palace-gable.
The tendency of syncretism to yield myths is not
confined to Greece. Let us take a pair of instances from
the New World. The Chibchas of New Granada had a
goddess who dwelt as a serpent in Lake Iguaque, but whose
name, Bachue, " simply means ' she who suckles the maize,' " ^
i.e. she was a maize-mother, a plant totem, from whom the
Chibchas traced their descent. Evidently the worshippers of
this maize-mother had united their worship with that of a
clan having an animal, a serpent, for totem ; and the worship
of the water-spirit had further been incorporated with that of
Bachue, with the result that a myth had to be invented to
account for it all, and was to the effect that " on the first
day of the world there emerged from its [Lake Iguaque's]
waters a beautiful woman named Bachue or Fuzachagua
[ = the good woman], carrying in her arms a child three years
old. These were the ancestors of the race : when the world
was peopled, they returned to the lake, and disappeared in
its waters in the form of serpents." ^ The syncretism of a
maize-goddess and a bird-totem has given rise to the myth
told by the Canari Indians, in the district southward of
Quito. There were once two brothers whose provisions were
exhausted; "the herbs and roots which they were able to
collect scarcely sufficed for their sustenance, and hunger
sorely pressed them, until two parrots entered their hut in
their absence and prepared them a meal of cooked maize,
together with a supply of the fermented liquor (chicha),
which is made by steeping it in water. This happened day
by day, until at length one of the birds was made captive by
the brothers. When thus captured, it changed into a beautiful
woman, from whom the brothers obtained the maize-seed and
learned the art of cultivating it, and who ultimately became
the ancestress of the Canari nation."^ Possibly the maize
1 Payne, Mw World, i. 455. ^ j^^i^^ 3 /j^, 327.
17
258 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was originally the totem of the women, the parrot of the men,
of the tribe ; for the cultivation of maize, Mr. Payne adds, " was
in the earliest times the exclusive task of the women of the
tribe. It is only in a later stage that it is shared by the
men," and then the men would be admitted to the worship of
the maize-goddess, and the maize totem would be placed by
the side of the parrot totem, till the worship of the two
blended in one whole, and required a myth to explain it.
There was a time in the history of man when as yet the
first tale had not been told, and the very idea of story-telling
had not yet occurred to his mind. When it did occur, it
was probably due to suggestion and not to his own unaided
invention ; and probably also it was an idea of very slow
and gradual growth. The explanations which primitive man
I ^ound for the various problems which perplexed him were of
course, to him, actual facts, not pieces of imagination ; and
they were mostly single incidents, usually destitute of interest
except for the community for whom they were originally
designed — they might and did supply materials for tales, but
they were not themselves tales. Some of these explanations,
however, being designed to explain a series of phenomena,
would spontaneously form a series of incidents, forming a
true tale, e.g. as in the case of the myth of Pentheus ; and
some, as for instance the Caiiari myth, would have a charm
of their own which would win and delight other people
besides the actual descendants of the bird-maiden. The man
whose memory affectionately retained as many of these myths
as he could gather, and who could repeat them well, would
always command an audience. When he had told all he
could easily remember, the tribute of praise couched in the
appealing imperative, " Go on 1 " would stimulate him to
rack his memory, with the result that semi- consciously he
might substitute for the original incident or character some
analogous one — the transformation into an animal instead
of a bird, a god for a goddess, a jealous Hera for an irate
Dionysus — and when what was first done semi-consciously
came to be done with full consciousness and deliberation, the
art of story-telling would be accomplished. Again, tales
with a permanent human interest would easily spread beyond
the limits of the original audience, and so would tend to
MYTHOLOGY 259
become detached from the belief or ritual or other institution
which they were first invented to explain. But in such
circumstances statements which were in the first place
explanations of something come themselves to require
explanation : the Kalang chief was transformed into a dog,
or a maiden into a bird, but why ? The question was
inevitable, and the answer would add a fresh incident to the
story, a fresh complication to the plot. Further, the answer
would be sought amongst incidents already familiar to the
narrator and his audience, or would be framed on the analogy
of one of them. Now, of such incidents there would be
plenty that had been framed by early man to account for the
numerous problems which interested him. One such problem
was raised by taboos : to approach certain persons under
certain circumstances, mourners, women, and others, was
tabooed, but why ? because once someone violated the taboo,
and he or the tabooed person suffered a certain dreadful
thing — in folk-tales the tabooed wife is often changed into a
serpent or a bird.^ Now, deities who confer benefits on man,
teach him to cultivate maize for instance, frequently disappear,
when they have completed theii' beneficent work — sometimes,
like Bachue, disappear in animal form. Here we have a
series of very easy " chances " for the story-teller ransacking
his memory : the parrot-maiden who married a human being
eventually departed as she came in the shape of a bird, and
so departed because her husband violated a certain taboo.
Such a story would be interesting even to those who did not
claim to be descended from the heroine, and were not
interested in the cultivation of maize. It would be interesting
enough to spread, mW volitare per ora virum. And as a
matter of fact it is the type of a class of tales found all over
the world, and known as Swan-maiden tales, from the best-
known example, the Arabian Nights' tale of " Hasan of
Bassorah." ^
The incidents which compose the Swan-maiden story are
such as have been familiar probably to every race at a certain
stage of its development, and accordingly — unless we make
the somewhat arbitrary and certainly unproved assumption
1 Lang, Custom and Myth,^ 75 fF.
2 See Hartland, Science of Fairy Tales, cc. x. and xi.
260 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
that there was only one race of men capable of telling tales
— those incidents may have been put together in this
particular combination at any place in the inhabited world.
But it does not follow that this particular combination would
be formed by every race which was familiar with the separate
incidents. The Canari combination might indeed spring up
independently in several centres, for a number of tribes trace
their descent to the maize-mother or a cereal goddess, and
the circumstances which w^ould lead to a belief in the trans-
formation of the goddess into an animal are fairly common
also ; and the particular animal might be a bird in several
cases ; or, if it was a serpent, then we should get a tale of
the Melusine class. But the further incidents of the
departure of the beneficent deity, and in animal form, and
that form a bird (or serpent), and that departure in
consequence of a violation of taboo — though they might
conceivably have been combined in this particular sequence
more than once, probably are not, on the theory of chances,
likely to have come together in this particular form. When,
then, we find the story with its full complement of incidents
(or in a form which clearly postulates the previous existence
of the full complement) in several different places, we should
conclude that it has spread to them from its place of origin.
We have, then, now to consider the problem of the diffusion
of myths.
One way in which a myth might be diffused is the
dispersion of the people to whom it was known. The Indo-
Europeans spread from their original home, wherever that
was, until they covered Europe and part of Asia ; and if
they had any tales interesting enough to live, those tales
may well have been diffused over all the area eventually
covered by the Indo-Europeans. But it is quite certain that
the circulation of those tales would not be confined to the
Indo-European public : they would find their way to all
peoples with whom the Indo-Europeans had dealings, and
there would be an international exchange of tales as well as
of goods. In other words, borrowing is a factor in the
-^^iffusion of myths as well as tradition. And when we reflect
that the Oceanic or Malay race has come to extend from the
Sandwich Islands on the west to Madagascar on the east, and
MYTHOLOGY 261
from Formosa on the north to New Zealand on the south,
we shall be inclined to believe that it may well have exchanged
tales with the negroes of Africa and the Mongols and Aryans
of Asia, if not also with the peoples of Central America.
When, then, we find any given myth widely diffused,
there are three ways in which its diffusion may be accounted
for, namely, borrowing, tradition, and independent origin.
Of these three the two latter are of somewhat restricted
operation. The theory that a myth has originated in-
dependently in several different places is applicable mainly
where the myth is a single incident or simple com-
bination of two or three incidents ; and where the incident
or combination is such that it would or might easily
arise in consequence of the action of causes known to exist
in the supposed places of origin. Amongst the problems
which savages speculate on, the cause of lunar eclipses is
one ; and a [ fairly common solution hit upon is that the
moon is swallowed by some monster. To postulate
borrowing or tradition to account for the fact that different
peoples believe the moon's disappearance to her being
gradually swallowed up, seems superfluous. Or, again, the
regularity with which the sun moves along his allotted path
calls for explanation, and the inference that he does so
because somebody compels or has compelled him is so easy
and obvious that various people may well have hit upon it
independently of each other. But when the myth is even
moderately complex, the theory of independent origin seems
to become inapplicable.
The difficulties in the way of applying the tradition-
theory are so great, that it has almost entirely been given up.
A story common to several different branches of the same
race may have been inherited by them from their undivided
forefathers, but it may also have originated after the dis-
persion, and have spread by borrowing from one branch to
another long after they had dispersed from the original home.
There is little agreement amongst experts as to what, indeed
whether any, myths can be traced back to the original home
of the Indo-Europeans, for instance. As for tracking back a
myth by the hypothesis of tradition, from the uncertain home
of the Indo-Europeans to the cradle of the human race, the
262 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
attempt is not to be made. Myths that are world-wide are
either such as by their relative complexity show that they
have spread by borrowing, or such as by their absolute
simplicity show that they may have originated amongst any
race in the earliest stage of culture discernible by palaeontology.
That stage was not confined to any one portion of the globe
— the Stone Age gives us no clue to the place of man's
origii;! on earth.
^.. There remain two classes of myths to which we have not
/yet alluded, those about the origin of the world and of man,
and flood-myths. The myths about the origin of man, so far
as they have any uniformity at all, seem to be constructed ,
on the analogy of the totemist's belief about the ancestor of
his clan : the first man grew out of an animal — " belched up
by a cow," say the Zulus — or out of a tree, or out of the
ground like a tree, or out of a rock or mountain. The
cosmogonic myths include some which regard the universe as
" the hollow of a vast cocoa-nut shell, divided into many
imaginary circles, like those of mediaeval ' speculation " ^ —
these seem to be borrowed ; others regard " many of the
things in the world as fragments of the frame of a semi-
supernatural and gigantic being, human or bestial, belonging
to a race which preceded the advent of man " ^ — and these
too are perhaps not above the suspicion of being borrowed ;
and others, again, credit the totem -ancestor, whether in
animal or human form, with having something to do with the
construction of the world as known to the particular myth-
maker. Of flood-myths — as of cosmogonic myths — some are
not native to the peoples amongst whom they are reported
as having been found, but are due to Christian influences.
Others have not been derived from European settlers, and
may be genuine native productions : the mythical descent of
the tribe from a mountain — e.g. the Babylonian " mountain
of mankind " — involves the necessity of explaining how the
ancestor came to be on the mountain from which he issued,
and the savage hypothesis is that he must have been
compelled to go there, and compelled obviously by a flood.
Others are possibly not myths at all, but traditions of a local
inundation.
^ Lang, Ahjth, Futual, and Religion, i. 194. ^ Op. cit. i. 166.
MYTHOLOGY 263
•7\jV[yths, then, it seems, are in their origin attempts to
explain things — the phenomena of nature, the constitution of
the universe, and the descent of man — which in later times
form the subject-matter of science and of philosophy. They
are the firs,t_, outcome of the speculative tendency in man, the
first application of the reason and of the scientific imagina-
tion to the solution of problems which have never ceased
to engage the attention of man. In a word, mythology is
primitive man's science and philosophy, and is the first
ancestor of the philosophy and science of the modern savant.
But further, these primitive speculations on perennial
problems took the shape of narratives : their common form
is that so-and-so takes place or took place because somebody
once did such-and-such a thing. These narratives, relating,
as facts which took place, what were really only inferences,
could not be and were not distinguished by primitive man
from the traditions of his time which were more or less
historic, hin fine, mythology was largely primitive man's
history as well as his science and his philosophy ; and the
impossibility of his distinguishing these narratives from
actual traditions accounts for the fact that the early history
of all peoples contains some admixture — greater or less —
of mythology. Further, again, some of these explanatory
narratives become, as we have seen, tales told for the sake
of the telling, works of the poetic imagination. Thus
mythology was primitive man's romance as well as his >^
history, his science, and his philosophy.
""Now, explanations of all kinds inevitably take their
colour and character to a large extent from the character
of their author : in seeking to account for a person's
conduct, the uncharitable and unchristian man finds an
unchristian explanation, and imputes uncharitable motives.
In astronomy even, allowance has to be made for " the per-
sonal equation," and modern histories reflect the political
or personal prepossessions of the modern historian. Poetry
reflects or rather expresses the tone and morahty — austere
or sensual — of the poet ; successful poetry, of the poet's
generation. Literature reveals the religion or want of
religion of the age. And this brings us to the relation of
mythology to religion.
264 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The narratives in which primitive speculations were em-
bodied were not merely intellectual exercises, nor the work of
the abstract imagination : they reflect or express the mind of
the author in its totality, for they are the work of a human
being, not of a creature possessing reason and no morality, or
imagination and no feeling. They wdll therefore express the
morality of the author and his generation ; the motives
ascribed to the heroes of the narrative wil ^be such as actuated
the men by whom and for whom the narrative was designed ;
they may be high or low according as the standard of the
time is high or low, but they cannot be higher than the
best which the author could find in his own heart. In the
same way, then, as the moral tone and temper of the author
and his age makes itself felt in these primitive speculations,
so will the religious spirit of the time. ~)In fine, mythology
is not religion. Mythology is not the source of religion,
though it is the '^source of science, philosophy, poetry, an^
history.;^ Mythology is no more the source of religion than
it is of morality ; but just as the latter is expressed in a man's
thoughts — in what he likes to dwell on and how he likes to
imagine himself faring — in a man's actions, in a people's
poetry, so mythology is one of the spheres of human
activity in which religion may manifest itself, one of the
departments of human reason which religion may penetrate,
/ suffuse, and inspire. Hence we may expect that the early
narratives, in which the science and poetry, the history and
philosophy, of early peoples are embodied, will in different
peoples differ in religious spirit. For instance, if we grant
for a moment that the cosmogonies which appear with such
similarity in early Hebrew and Chaldoean records, were a
piece of primitive science attempting to account for the
constitution of the universe, then we have in them a
striking example of the vast difference between primitive
narratives which are inspired by the religious spirit and
primitive narratives which are not so penetrated. The same
considerations will apply to the various narratives of the
Flood, or to a comparison of the Paradise of the Book of
Genesis with the Babylonians' Garden of Eden or the
Persians' Eran Vej. It is the differences in these early
narratives, not their resemblances, which are important on
MYTHOLOGY 265
this view. The resemblances are due to the human reason,
which in different places working on the same material comes
to similar inferences. The difference which distinguishes the
Hebrew from all other primitive narratives testifies that the
religious spirit was dealt in a larger measure to the Hebrews /
than to other peoples.
In a previous chapter ^ we have seen that primitive
man starts with a fundamental conviction that there are
certain things which must not be done ; and the human reason,
in the endeavour to determine what are the things which
must not be done, goes as far astray as it did in its primitive
attempts to solve the problems of science. Primitive logic,
at the mercy of the association of ideas, tended to multiply
the number of things forbidden, until man's every step
in life was entangled in a i^etwork of taboo. Some of
these prohibitions were required in the interests of man-
kind, others not ; and progress, in this respect, consisted
in the survival of the fittest of these restraints and the
rejection of the rest. The share of religion in this process
consisted in what we have called the supernatural selection
of the fittest of these restraints : the religious spirit
rejected those which were repugnant to the religious
consciousness, and retained those which were essential to the
moral law and to the conception of " holiness." Now, as the
human reason, by its very constitution, was impelled to
interpret the fundamental feeling that there are certain
things which must not be done, so it was impelled to
interpret the phenomena of nature, society, and life, in order
to furnish an answer to the problems which those phenomena
suggested. And as the restraining and selective agency of
the religious spirit was required to criticise the interpreta-
tions put forward by the reason in the one case, so it was
required in the other. Thus, in the primitive pieces of
science, to which reference was made in the last paragraph,
the conspicuous fact is that in the Hebrew narratives there
has been what we have called a supernatural selection, and
a rejection of the elements which are inconsistent with
monotheism and the higher religion of the Hebrews. But
we can trace the action of supernatural selection even
^ Supra p. 85.
266 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
further, and gain a still farther confirmation of the fact
that the primitive science of these early narratives was
the work of the human reason, and proceeded from a
different source from that whence the religious elements
in them came. As those features of a primitive hypothesis
which were repugnant to the religious consciousness were
rejected by it, so might the whole of such a hypothesis be
repugnant and be rejected accordingly in toto. The selective
process could not be confined to portions of a myth ; it would
inevitably be applied to discriminate one myth from another,
and result in the rejection of those which were incon-
sistent with the particular stage of religious development of
the time. Explanations of the kind familiar in primitive
science might occur, and be rejected by the mind to which
they occurred, or fail to obtain any vogue in the community,
because they were below the spiritual level of the
community ; or they might commend themselves to the
community, but be repugnant to the religious consciousness
of the more spiritual members, and be rejected by their
influence. The result would be twofold : the imagination
would be more and more excluded from the region of
speculation which produced the ordinary myths of early
peoples ; and more and more restricted to the path of
religious meditation. Now, these two features are both
characteristic of the Hebrew Scriptures : their poverty in
myths has struck every inquirer ; their richness in
devotional poetry is familiar to all.
The extraordinary notion that mythology is religion is the
outcome of the erroneous and misleading practice of reading
modern ideas into ancient religions. It is but one form of
the fallacy that mythology was to the antique religions
what dogma is to the modern — with the superadded fallacy
that dogma is the source, instead of the expression, of religious
conviction. Mythology is primitive science, primitive philo-
sophy, an important constitutent of primitive history, the
source of primitive poetry, but it is not primitive religion.
It is not necessarily or usually even religious. It is not the
proper or even the ordinary vehicle for the expression of
the religious spirit. Prayer, meditation, devotional poetry,
are the chosen vehicles in thought and word ; ritual in
MYTHOLOGY 267
outward deed and act. Myths originate in a totally different
psychological quarter : they are the work of the human
reason, acting in accordance with the laws of primitive
logic ; or are the outcome of the imagination, playing with
the freedom of the poetic fancy. In neither case are they
primarily the product of religious feeling : it is not the
function of feeling to draw inferences. It is for moral
feeling, or religious, to reject what is alien to it, to penetrate
what is compatible with it. Hence the selective function of
the religious consciousness depends upon the sensitiveness of
that consciousness. Where its sensitiveness was great, only
those pieces of primitive science survived which were capable
of being informed by the religious spirit. Far different was
the case with those nations in whom the religious spirit was
late in waking. The explanations which savages invent to
account for things that puzzle them are of necessity, like
their inventors, savage. If, then, a nation advances from
savagery, through barbarism and semi-barbarism, to civilisa-
tion, and if the myths which were invented in the savage
stage are not rejected by the religious consciousness, but
continue to live, in virtue of their connection with the
institutions which also are transmitted from the earlier to
the later stages of the national life, the result will be that
a civilised generation will find itself saddled with myths
that attribute to the gods actions of a savage, irrational, and
even disgusting description. Philosophers like Plato, then,
may argue that tales of this kind, which cannot be true
and must be demoralising, ought to be thrown overboard
altogether ; but the majority of people, to whom these tales
have been taught as part of their traditional religion, cannot
away with them in this fashion. At the same time they
cannot accept them wholly and literally. A via media,
therefore, has to be sought, and this ma media has always
been found in allegory : the obvious meaning of the myths
cannot be the true one, but they must have some meaning,
therefore they must contain a hidden meaning, intentionally
concealed by the authors of the myth. This was the ex-
planation given of Sanskrit mythology in early times in India,
and of Greek mythology by Anaxagoras and Empedocles in
Greece and by the Stoics of Eome.
268 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The assumption at the base of all forms of the alle-
gorical theory is that in early times there existed a class of
philosophers teaching profound philosophy, and conveying it
in the form of fables. Now the existence of this caste of
philosophers, if it is a historic fact, ought to be capable of
being demonstrated in accordance with the ordinary canons
of historical criticism ; and it is Lobeck's contribution to the
science of mythology that he proved, once and for all, the
entire absence of any proof, or even presumption, in favour
of the historical existence of these philosophers. Since
Lobeck's time — his Aglaophamus was published in 1829 —
the application of the theory of evolution to the science of
man has enabled us to trace back civilised peoples through
the Iron Age and the Bronze Age to the time when their
ancestors had only flint implements, and were unacquainted
even with the rudiments of agriculture. At the same time
the study of savages still in the Stone Age has revealed the
fact that not only are the implements made and used by
them the same all over the world, but that the institutions
and conceptions by which they govern their lives have an
equally strong resemblance to one another. The presumption,
therefore, that our Indo-European forefathers of the Stone
Age had beliefs and practices similar to those of other
peoples in the same stage of development, is very strong ;
and it is confirmed by the fact that amongst the most
backward members of civilised communities, amongst those
classes which have made relatively little advance in civilisa-
tion, folk-lore discovers abundant traces of superstitions
which find exact analogues in savage customs. For the proof,
however, that the irrational elements in the mythology and
folk-tales of civilised nations — the taboos and metamorphoses,
the incest and bestiality — are survivals from savagery, we
must refer the reader to the works of Mr. Andrew Lang
mentioned at the beginning of this chapter.
That the allegory theory of mythology survived to the
present century, until it received its deathblow from Lobeck,
was due partly to the belief that the inner, esoteric meaning
of the myths was taught to the initiated at the Eleusinian
and other mysteries by the priests, to whom it was handed
down by their predecessors, the inventors of this mode of
MYTHOLOGY 269
teaching. This belief, which we shall have to examine
shortly, derived considerable sustenance from two fallacies.
One was based on the illicit importation of modern ideas
into ancient institutions : it was naturally but erroneously
inferred that because in modern religions great stress is
laid upon what a man believes, the same importance was
ascribed to this side of religion in ancient times, whereas
" the antique religions had for the most part no creed ; they
consisted entirely of institutions and practices." -^ Hence,
then, the first fallacy, that of believing that the business of
the ancient priest was to teach. There was no authoritative
dogma for him to teach, and as a matter of fact he did not
teach. The other fallacy consisted in the assumption that
mythology was the work of the priests — which is but a form
of the wider and coarser fallacy that religion is the invention
of priestcraft.
It seems, therefore, to be desirable that, before resuming
the direct thread of our argument, and showing how the
mystic tendency, obscured under polytheism, was revived by
the mysteries, we should indicate the place of the priest-
hood in early religion, and show that it was not the priest
that made religion, but religion that made the priest.
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites. 16.
.->"
CHAPTEK XX
PRIESTHOOD
In all early religions, priests are marked off from other
worshippers, partly by what they do, and partly by what
they may not do ; and there is so much agreement between
the different religions on both points, that we obviously
have to do with the effects of a cause or causes operating
uniformly in all parts of the world. At the same time there
are certain features of the priesthood which, though they
recur in various religions, are not uniformly present in all :
they are not essential parts of the antique conception of
priesthood. It is clear, therefore, that any general theory
on the subject must account for both the uniformity in
certain characteristics and the want of uniformity in the
other characteristics. The general cause which a theory
postulates must be such that its operation would produce
the complete uniformity of the one class and the only
partial uniformity of the other class of features.
The most important point in which only partial uniformity
prevails is tenure of office. Some priesthoods are annual,
some tenable for five years, some for twelve, some for life ;
of some the tenure is terminable on certain contingencies;
others are hereditary. Sometimes priests form an order
apart, and in that case the order in some places consists
of priests appointed for life, sometimes of hereditary priests.
In one country there may be only one form of priesthood,
e.g. an order of hereditary priests as in Israel, or an order
of priests chosen for life, as amongst the negroes of the Gold
Coast. In another, life-priests, annual and quinquennial
priesthoods, and priesthoods terminable on certain con-
tingencies, may all exist side by side, as, e.g., in ancient Greece.
And the tenure of even hereditary priesthood may be made
270
PRIESTHOOD 271
terminable — as far as the individual is concerned — on certain
contingencies, or on attaining a certain age, e.g. manhood ;
for, whereas some priesthoods could not commence before
manhood, others could only be held before that period.
Having illustrated the want of uniformity in this feature
of the priesthood, and having noted that it will require
explanation, we may proceed to examine the features in
which uniformity prevails. First, we will take the fact
that in all religions there are certain things which priests
may not do : there may be, there is, a want of agreement
in details, as to the particular things, but the general
principle is universal. When, however, we come to examine
the details, we find that, though the particular things which
are thus forbidden in antique religions vary, they all agree
in certain points : they are prohibitions which have no
spiritual value {e.g. the priestess of Athene at Athens might
not eat cheese^), no ethical import {e.g. the prohibition
of attendance at funerals ^), and no practical utility (e.g. the
prohibition of seeing an army under arms ^) ; in fine, they
constitute the " irrational element " in the conditions of
priesthood, and have exactly the same value for the historian
as the irrational element of myth has : they indicate that
the institution has been transmitted to civilised man from
ancestors who were in a less advanced stage of culture than
he, and to whom, consequently, these prohibitions appeared,
when they made them, perfectly reasonable. It is clear,
then, that any general theory of the priesthood must account
for these prohibitions ; and to be a satisfactory theory must
account for them all. The nature of the class of facts
requiring explanation may be inferred from the summary Mr.
Frazer gives * of the prohibitions or rules of life observed by the
Flamen Dialis at Eome ; " they were such as the following : the
Flamen Dialis might not ride or even touch a horse, nor
see an army under arms, nor wear a ring which was not
broken, nor have a knot on any part of his garments ; no
fire except a sacred fire might be taken out of his house ;
1 Strabo, ix. 395. ^ Lev. x. 6, xxi. 1-5 ; Plato, Laws, 947 C.
2 Festus, 2496, 22 for the Flamen Dialis, and Schomann, Antiquities
Gfrecques, ir. ii. 507 for Greek priests.
^ G.B. i. 117.
272 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
he might not touch wheaten flour or leavened bread ; he
might not touch or even name a goat, a dog, raw meat,
beans, and ivy ; he might not walk under a vine ; the feet
of his bed had to be daubed with mud ; his hair could be
cut only by a free man and with a bronze knife, and his
hair and nails when cut had to be buried under a lucky
tree ; he might not touch a dead body, nor enter a place
where one was burned ; he might not see work being done
on holy days ; he might not be uncovered in the open air ;
if a man in bonds were taken into his house, he had to
be unbound, and the cords had to be drawn up through a
hole in the roof and so let down into the street. His wife,
the Flaminica, had to observe nearly the same rules, and
others of her own besides. She might not ascend more
than three steps of the kind of staircase called Greek ; at
a certain festival she might not comb her hair ; the leather
of her shoes might not be made from a beast that had died
a natural death, but only from one that had been slain or
sacrificed ; if she heard thunder she was tabooed till she
had offered an expiatory sacrifice." The theory that priestly
taboos were symbolical of the religious qualifications required
of the priest, can hardly be stretched to cover all the facts.
It may explain partly why some taboos were retained in
advancing civilisation ; it cannot explain their original imposi-
tion. We shall have, therefore, to find another explanation
of their origin. Their abolition it is which is due to the
religious sentiment, not their origin ; and the same selective
process which gradually weeded out the irrational prohibi-
tions permitted the survival of those which could be explained
as the outward and visible symbols of higher things.
We now turn from the things which priests may not do,
to the other feature characteristic of and common to all
priests in early religions, namely, the things which they. do.
Here, too, in the midst of what at first sight appears to be
endless variety, we find a principle of uniformity : the priest^
had charge of the ritual of the sanctuary in which he served.
It was his business to see that the various external acts which
constituted that ritual were performed in the order and
manner prescribed by custom. The prescribed details might
and did vary greatly in different places : thus in Sicyon a pig
PRIESTHOOD 273
might not be offered to Aphrodite ; in Megara she was the only-
deity to whom it could be offered. But uniformly the priest's
office was to draw near to the god and to introduce the
worshipper to him. The central feature of the priestly
function, the key to his position and place in the ritual, was
that by inviolable custom he and he alone could kill the
victim which the worshipper brought and on the sacrifice
of which the worshipper's hope depended of commending
himself to the god and renewing the bond with him. The
priest alone dealt (actually or formally) the first and fatal
blow at the victim : hence his power of rejecting a worshipper
who brought the wrong kind of victim or failed to fulfil any
of the preliminary conditions (of fasting, purification, etc.)
which the custom of the sanctuary exacted. It is the power
and duty of dealing the first blow which is universally
characteristic of the antique priesthood ; and as this duty is
involved with the act of sacrifice which is the centre and
origin of ancient religious institutions, we may reasonably
consider that in it we have an indication of the direction in
which we must look for the origin of the priesthood. What
was it that caused a primitive community to agree in looking
upon one particular man as peculiarly qualified or privileged
to strike the first blow ?
To answer this question, we must note that in civilised
communities the priest as a rule only intermediates between
the god and the worshipper, in the sense that by sacrificing the
victim which the latter brings he puts him into communi-
cation with the former, and so enables him to make his
prayer. The priest may, from his constant attendance upon
the sanctuary and the zeal with which he looks after the
interests of the deity, have, as Chryses in the Iliad has, some
personal influence with the god ; but, as a rule, in civilised
times the priest does not himself exercise supernatural powers.
But to this rule there are exceptions, well established in
civilised countries and more common amongst uncivilised
peoples. For instance, a supernatural power of foreseeing
the future may be exercised by the priest or priestess, who
is then believed to be temporarily inspired or " possessed " by
the god. Two instances must suffice for us. In Fiji, " one
who intends to consult the oracle dresses and oils himself . . .
i8
274 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
there is placed before the priest a dish of scented oil, with
which he anoints himself ... in a few minutes he trembles ;
slight distortions are seen in his face and twitching movements
in his limbs. These increase to a violent muscular action,
which spreads until the whole frame is strongly convulsed,
and the man shivers as with a strong ague fit. . . . The priest
is now possessed by his god, and all his words and actions
are considered as no longer his own, but those of the deity
who has entered into him. Shrill cries of ' It is I ! it is I ! '
fill the air, and the god is thus supposed to notify his
approach. While giving the answer, the priest's eyes stand
out and roll as in a frenzy ; his voice is unnatural, his face
pale, his lips livid, his breathing depressed, and his entire
appearance like that of a furious madman. The sweat runs
from every pore, and tears start from his strained eyes ; after
which the symptoms gradually disappear. The priest looks
round with a vacant stare, and as the god says, ' I depart,'
announces his actual departure by violently flinging himself
down on the mat." ^ The other instance is contained in
Virgil's description of the " possession " of the Sibyl : —
" Ventum erat ad limen, cum virgo ' Poscere fata
Tempus' ait ; ' deus, ecce deus ! ' ciii talia fanti
Ante fores subito non vultus, non color iinus,
Non comptae mansere comae ; sed pectus anhelum,
Et rabie fera corda tument ; maiorque videri,
Nee mortale sonans, adflata est numine quando
lam propiore dei . . .
At Phcebi nondum patiens immanis in antro
Bacchatur vates, magnum si pectore possit
Excussisse deum ; tanto magis ille fatigat
Os rabidum fera corda domans fingitque premendo."^
But the Apollo who entered the Sibyl and prophesied
through her lips could also in the same w^ay give supernatural
strength ; ^ and in the orgiastic worship of Dionysus the
worshippers were supposed by the Greeks to be endowed with
superhuman physical power by the god on whose body they
had fed. Amongst savages even more extensive powers are
believed to be exercised, not temporarily, but permanently,
by human beings of whom a god has taken not temporary
1 Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i. 224. ^ j^ji y\^ 45 ff,^ 77 ff^
^ Paus. X. xxxii. 6.
PRIESTHOOD 275
but permanent possession. Thus in the Marquesas Islands
there was a class of men who " were supposed to wield a super-
natural power over the elements ; they could give abundant
harvests or smite the ground with barrenness ; and they could
inflict disease or death." ^ In South America, the Chibchas
had a high pontiff, and " by a long and ascetic novitiate
this ghostly ruler was reputed to have acquired such sanctity
that the waters and the rain obeyed him and the weather de-
13ended on his will." ^ From Africa Mr. Frazer gives a long
list of kings who are consulted as oracles, and can mllict or
heal sickness, withhold rain, and cause famine ; and from
Cambodia he quotes the two kings of Fire and of Water, who
control those elements respectively ; and again, " the Buddhist
Tartars believe in a great number of living Buddhas, who
officiate as Grand Lamas at the head of the most important
monasteries." ^ In the semi-civilisations of the New World
" the Mexican kings at their accession took an oath that they
would make the sun to shine, the clouds to give rain, the
rivers to flow, and the earth to bring forth fruits in
abundance," ^ and the Incas of Peru were revered like gods.
In the Old World the kings of Egypt were deified in their
lifetime, and the Mikado belonged to the same class of sacred
potentates, who are (or were) also to be found in Ethiopia,
Southern India, Siam, Sumatra, Babylon ; and of whom
probable traces were to be found even in Europe.
Of these wielders of supernatural power, some, it will have
been noted, are high priests, some kings, and some, like the
Incas of Peru and the kings of Egypt, both kings and high
priests. This creates a presumption that originally these
possessors of supernatural power united in their own person
the functions w^hich afterw^ards came to be held by separate
officials : originally there was but one supreme institution, and
it was only in course of time that the priestly function and the
royal were separated, and that the one institution became two.
This presumption is both confirmed and explained by the
taboos which attach to the institution. Not only priests but
kings are subject to taboos, and the royal taboos are of the
same kind as the priestly. To take a parallel which recent
investigation has made possible, the Flamen Dialis, it will be
1 Frazer, G. B. i. 38. - Ibid. 44. ^ j^^^ 42. " Ibid. 49.
276 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
remembered, was limited as to the food he might eat or even
see, as to the garments he might wear ; he might not ride, or
see work done on holy days. Now, not only was " the Sabbath
known, at all events in Accadian times, as a dies nefastus,
a day on which certain work was forbidden to be done," but
" the king himself, it is stated, must not eat flesh that has been
cooked over the coals or in the smoke, he must not change the
garments of his body, white robes he must not wear, sacrifices
he may not offer, in a chariot he may not ride." ^ In civilised
communities the restrictions imposed upon both kings and
priests have usually decreased in number and dwindled down
to mere survivals — therein keeping pace with the diminution
of the sacred powers ascribed to each. In less advanced stages
of culture, where high priests and kings each exercise the
divine powers deputed to them more extensively, the restrictions
are more numerous and more real ; and both the powers and
the limitations are united and more extensive in the case of
rulers who are, like the Egyptian, at once high priest and king.
The parallel between the royal and the priestly office further
extends to the conditions of tenure — kingship may be hered-
itary or elective, annual or lifelong, etc. — and, as we shall
hereafter see, to the manner of consecration. At this point,
however, our business is to see how the natural operation of the
taboos would tend to differentiate the primitive institution
into the two separate institutions of royalty and priesthood.
The infectiousness of taboo is such that the energies of
primitive society are devoted to isolating the tabooed person
or thing. A human being in whom the divine afflatus is
permanently present is highly taboo, and the most stringent
measures are taken to isolate him ; and that is the original
reason of the restrictions imposed on priests and kings. But
the isolation acts or tends to act in a way not originally
contemplated : even if it does not lead to the permanent and
absolute seclusion of the ruler in his palace (as was the case
with the Mikado and other sacred kings, in Ethiopia, Sabsea,
Tonquin, and in Corea and Loango at the present day ^), still
the number of prohibitions to which he is subjected is enough
(as the taboos on the Flamen Dialis may show) to hamper
and restrict him in such a way that he is as effectually cut
^ Sayce, Higher Criticism, 75. ^ G. B, 164.
PRIESTHOOD 277
off from intercourse with his subjects and the discharge of
the active duties of kingship as if he were absolutely
confined to his palace. The result is that all real power
passes out of the hands of a man in such a helpless con-
dition. For a time the institution of king-priest may endure,
because there are found men who are content to enjoy
the power without the glory of ruling. But generally the
pressure of external foes eventually makes it necessary for
the king-priest to entrust the command of his subjects to a
war-king. The office of war-king may be intended to be
temporary ^ — annual, or terminable at the end of the campaign
— but it usually results in becoming lifelong and frequently
hereditary. 2 If the war-king, further, is not content with
military power, but arrogates to himself the rest of the
temporal power that originally belonged to the priest-king,
and then succeeds in founding a family, the result will be the
existence side by side of two institutions — one, the kingship,
in which the temporal power is centred; the other, the
pontificate, in which the spiritual powers remain.^ But the
divinity which hedged in the priest-king was inevitably
transferred with the transference of part of his functions to
the temporal king. Even when the latter was, like the
Tycoon of Japan, a mere usurper, the same fate eventually
overtook his descendants as had befallen the Mikado, whose
functions they usurped : " entangled in the same inextricable
web of custom and law, they degenerated into mere puppets,
hardly stirring from their palaces, and occupied in a perpetual
round of empty ceremonies, while the real business of
government was managed by the council of state." ^ When,
then, the war -king was not a unsurper but was duly con-
secrated by the king-priest, the divine character of the
original office would be likely a fortiori to be transmitted to
the new institution (as in Mexico), wholly or in part. If the
divine character was transmitted only in such degree that
the king was not impeded in his work, the institution of
royalty was safe from the danger which deprived the original
institution of half its power ; but if in a greater degree, then
some means of evading the hampering restrictions of the
^ So in Mangaia, ih. 120. ^ So in Tonquin, oc. cii.
^ So in Mexico and Colombia, ibid. 44, 113. "* Ibid. 119.
278 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
office had to be found. One such means was that adopted
by the Mikado : it consisted in abdicating on the birth of a
son and doing homage to the child, on whom thus fell all the
restrictions, while the father, acting in the infant monarch's
name, exercised all the power.^ It is in a similar way, we
may conjecture, that the priesthoods administered by young
men or children were transferred to them by their fathers ;
for the rules which would hamper the father in his daily life
and work could be observed with less practical inconvenience
in the case of the young or infant son. For, it need hardly
be remarked, the priest, even when temporal power had passed
to the kingship, still retained the divine character, and with
it the incapacity for mixing in the affairs of daily life, which
attached to the priest-king. Thus in Tartary, we find Father
Grueber saying, " Duo hoc in Eegno Eeges sunt, quorum prior
Remi neg;otiis recte administrandis incumbit, et Dena
dicitur ; alter ab omni negotiorum extraneorum mole avulsus,
intra secretos palatii sui secessus otio indulgens, Numinis
instar adoratur . . . hunc veluti Deum verum et vivum,
quem et Patrem teternum et coelestem vocant, . . . adorant." ^
In this connection we may note it as a further indication
of the original indivisible unity of the office of priest and
.'^ing, that even when the two functions have come to be
exercised by different persons there is a perpetual tendency
to revert to the old organic unity : it is not merely that each
of the separate offices retains some part of the divine
character ' that attached to the undivided office, but the
functions themselves tend to reunite — reverting in their
unity sometimes to the priest and sometimes to the king.
If, for instance, the priesthood becomes (or remains) heredit-
ary, and temporal rulers are appointed ad hoc and from time
to time, the temporal functions naturally relapse into the
priesthood in the intervals (longer or shorter) when no judge
or war leader is forthcoming. Indeed, even in the latest
times, the consecration of the king by a priest testifies to the
original source of the king's office. On the other hand, if
the kingship becomes hereditary but the priesthood not,
then, in spite of the existence of priests, priestly functions
tend to attach themselves to the kingly office ; hence it is a
^ Loc. cit. 2 Thevenot, Divers Voyages, iv. 22.
PRIESTHOOD 279
very general feature of the kingship in ancient times that
the king can offer sacrifice, like a priest. If this reunion of
the two functions becomes so intimate as to amount to a
reversion to the ancestral organism, so to speak, then the
same process of fission which originally gave birth to the
king will be repeated ; and the temporal ruler, whose office
originated in a delegation of power from the king-priest,
will himself have to appoint a delegate to do those warlike
duties which the sanctity of his office prevents him from
discharging himself — by the side of a fiacrCkev^; we shall find
a TToXifiap^o^:, by the side of the " king " a heretoga. The
tendency to reversion, however, which manifests itself particu-
larly when either of the derived offices is hereditary, may be
averted without danger to the hereditary principle, if the
hereditary priest (or king) delegates his temporal (or priestly)
fmictions to his brother, or other relative and his descendants.
A further and remarkable fact which tends to connect
kingship and priesthood together, and to prove their
common origin, is the common fate to which divine kings and
divine priests alike were liable : at the end of a certain
period of time the king had to commit suicide or was put
to death. In India, the king of Calicut had to cut his throat
in public at the end of a twelve years' reign ; so, too, the king
of Quilacare in South India.^ The divine kings of Meroe in
Ethiopia could be ordered to die whenever the priests
chose.^ In various parts of Africa, kings and priests having
supernatural powers are put to death, sometimes when old
age threatens, sometimes when they have developed the
least bodily blemish, such as the loss of a tooth ; and the
executioner may be the destined successor of the king.
Amongst the ancient Prussians, the ruler, whose title was
God's Mouth, might commit suicide by burning himself in
front of the sacred oak.^ Amongst other peoples ^ death
seems not to have been insisted on at all unless drought or
pestilence or other calamities occurred. But even so, a
difficulty was found in obtaining persons willing to take
office. In Savage Island, '• of old they had kings, but as they
were the high priests as well, and were supposed to cause the
1 Frazer, G. B. i. 224. 2 ^^^ 2I8.
^Ibid. 223. 4 E.g. the Swedes, iUd. 47.
280 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
food to grow, the people got angry with them in times of
scarcity, and killed them, so the end of it was that no one
wished to be king." ^ On the other hand, it is clear that
peoples who wished to retain the institution of kingship
would have to give up requiring suicide of the king. The
requirement, however, would not have been made in the first
instance if there had not been a very powerful motive —
whatever the motive might have been — for making it ; and
the motive operated against the abolition of this condition of
holding royal office, as also it must have operated in inducing
the occupants of the office to comply with it. Eventually
the condition was evaded. Amongst the Western Semites,
in Babylon, the tenure of office seems to have been annual —
the original term, as we shall hereafter argue — and at the
end of the year the king was put to death. In course of
time the community seem to have consented to an evasion :
when the time for execution came, the king abdicated, and a
criminal was allowed to reign in his stead for live days, at
the end of which time the criminal was executed and the
king resumed his throne.^ Elsewhere the king abdicates
annually, and a temporary king is appointed but is not
killed, he is only subject to a mock execution.^ In two
places (Cambodia and Jambi) the temporary kings come of a
stock believed to be akin to the royal family.* Sometimes
the mock king is not appointed annually, but once for all
for a few days at the beginning of the reign, which seems to
indicate that in this case the custom of annually executing
a substitute for the king had given way to the practice of
executing one, once for all, at the accession of the king.
Finally, it is suggested by Mr. Frazer that a criminal would
probably not at first have been accepted by the community
as an adequate substitute : hence possibly the original substitute
was the king's firstborn son.^ The practice of sacrificing the
firstborn to the gods is well known.
It seems probable that originally the office of divine
priest-king was held for a year, because in that case the
difficulty and cruelty of insisting on the fulfilment of the
condition of tenure would naturally lead to an extension
1 Turner, Samoa, 304. 2 prazer, op. cit. 227. ^ Ibid. 228-31.
4 Ibid. 234. 5 Ibid.
PRIESTHOOD 281
first to some definite period, as for instance to twelve years
(or, since as some priesthoods were quinquennial, perhaps to
five years), then for life, provided that natural death was not
allowed to interfere with the suicide or execution which was
in the bond. To prevent this last contingency, some peoples
made the appearance of the first indication of old age,
the first physical blemish, a sign for execution, and to the
end a physical blemish in a priest was widely deprecated :
" sacerdos non integri corporis quasi mali ominis res vitanda
est." 1
It seems, then, that the functions habitually performed by
the priest in the civilised states of ancient times, and the
powers which he exercised less frequently, and the restrictions
which were laid upon him, were all inherited by him from his
predecessor the divine priest. It seems also that the similar
restrictions and the similar sanctity of the ordinary king of
historic times were inherited by him from his predecessor the
divine king. And the existence of these divine priests and
divine kings — in all quarters of the globe, as the instances
accumulated by the learning of Mr. Frazer show — points to
the fact that in the early history of the race, in patriarchal
times, each wandering community of fellow-tribesmen had
over it a person who was in some sense divine, both priest
and king, and whose death, voluntary or imposed, at the end
of a year, was regarded by the community and accepted by
the victim as imperative in the highest interests of the com-
munity. We have therefore to inquire why this was believed ;
and it is only proper that we should begin by stating Mr.
Frazer's answer to the question.
Mr. Frazer thinks that men began by believing them-
selves to be possessed of magical powers, and consequently
that the distinction between men and gods was somewhat
blurred — apparently that it was difficult or impossible for
primitive man to tell whether a certain person, his own ruler
in this case, was a very great magician or a god. Further,
apparently the primitive community seem to have come to
the conclusion that their chief was a god, and that, having
got hold of a god, it was desirable to retain him for purposes
of their own. But the god might grow old and feeble, which
^ Seueca, Controv. So in Mexico, Saliagun (pp. 62 and 97 of the French trans. ).
A
282 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
would be a pity, and he might die and so slip through their
hands altogether. Both misfortunes, however, could be
averted by inducing his soul to migrate into another healthy
young body. This was effected by killing the god : his soul
then had perforce to leave its old body, and by some means,
not quite clear, it was supposed to enter the body of the
murderer, who thus became the new god. Eventually, how-
ever, according to Mr. Frazer, men learned to distinguish
between magic and religion, and then they placed their faith
in the former no longer, but in prayer and sacrifice — not now
deeming themselves indistinguishable from gods.
The doctrine that magic is prior to, or even in origin
coeval with, religion has already failed to win our assent,^
and we have also argued that the idea of man's coercing the
gods for his own ends belongs to a different set of thoughts
and feelings from those in which religion originates, and must
be later in point of development, because gods must exist first
before coercion can be applied to them.^ We do not, there-
fore, propose to repeat our arguments on the general question
of the priority of religion or magic. Nor do we propose to
traverse the statement that divine power can be transmitted
by the person who possesses it to someone else. What we
are here concerned to show is that, apart from these questions,
there is evidence to show, first, that these kings and priests
were not gods, and, next, that the divine powers they possessed
were not native to them and inherent in them, in virtue of
their magic, but communicated to them or derived by them
from the gods.
This may take us a step further towards the answer to
the main question of this chapter, namely, how and why did
the community come to regard it as the privilege or duty of
some one particular member to exercise the priestly function
of dealing the first and fatal blow at the sacrificial victim ?
To answer that it was because that person was the chief of
the tribe, will not advance us much now that we recognise the
^ Supra, p. 177-9.
- If it be argued that tlie magical means of coercion may have existed before
the gods did, we must refer the reader again to our attempt to show that all
such magic is derived from, or rather a distortion or parody of, the worship of
the gods.
PRIESTHOOD 283
original unity of the kingly and the priestly office : the king
was the person who exercised the priestly function, and the
priest was the person who discharged the kingly office. In
other words, we have seen how kings came to exist, and how
priests came to be : our problem now is how did a man come
to be king-priest ? Not by inheritance, because the office
was originally annual, and was terminated by the death,
voluntary or imposed, of the king-priest at the end of the
year. Nor by election, because the office was open to anyone
who chose to take it with the penalty attached — hence it
died out in some cases for want of volunteers. Mr. Frazer's
solution apparently is that it was originally the greatest
magician, or, what in consequence of the primitive incapacity
to distinguish between men and gods comes to the same
thing, a god. We have therefore to inquire whether the
divine priests and kings were gods or indistinguishable from
gods.
To begin with, it will be conceded that the Sibyl, who
temporarily possessed supernatural knowledge, was distinguish-
able and distinct from Apollo who " possessed " her ; the
worshippers of Dionysus, who were endowed with superhuman
strength, different from the god whom they worshipped. The
more extensive powers of causing food to grow which were
exercised in Savage Island by the king — until the office fell
and remained vacant — were exercised by him as high priest,
and therefore he too seems to be a priest as distinct from a
god. And Father Grueber spoke of the Lama as " veluti Deum
verum et vivum," and says " numinis instar adoratur." Now,
in Mexico, where the priest was allowed to evade the violent
death which attached to his office, on condition that he found a
substitute (a war-captive), the distinction between the human
victim and the god was always steadily preserved, in spite of
the fact that for the year preceding the sacrifice the captive
was dressed in the insignia of the god and styled by the name
of the god, just as in Greece the priestesses of the Leukippides
were themselves called the Leukippides.^ Thus Father Acosta
says : " They tooke a captive such as they thought good, and
afore they did sacrifice him vnto their idoUs, they gave him
the name of the idoU, saying, he did represent the same idoll.
^ Pans. III. xvi.
284 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
And during the time that this representation lasted, which
was for a yeere in some feasts . . . they reverenced and
worshipped him in the same maner as the proper idoll ; . . .
the feast being come and hee growne fatte, they killed him,
opened him, eat him, making a solempne sacrifice of him." ^
The presumption therefore is that the South Indian king in
Quilacare who at the end of twelve years of reigning had to
kill himself in public, in front of an idol, and who " performed
this sacrifice to the idol and undertook this martyrdom for
love of the idol," ^ like the Aztec victim, " did represent the
same idoll." But though most or all of the Aztec deities had
human representatives of the kind described, the distinction
is always maintained between the human " image," as he was
called in Mexico, and the actual idol or god to whom and
before whom he was sacrificed. And the Mexican idea
doubtless was all that was intended by the king of Iddah
when he told the English officers of the Niger Expedition
with unintentional offensiveness : " God made me after His
own image ; I am all the same as God ; and He appointed me
a king." ^ At any rate his concluding words do not lend
much support to Mr. Frazer's theory that it is by being
magicians that men come to be divine kings and priests. On
the contrary, they constitute an explicit statement of the
king of Iddah's consciousness that his sacred office was
bestowed upon him and his powers delegated to him from
above. Now, this belief, that the divine spirit can and does
enter into men and fill them in a greater or less degree, is
universal. On the truth of the belief the historian has not
to pronounce : he has only to note that the universality of
the consciousness, if it cannot demonstrate, neither can it
impair, the truth of the belief. Nor does it follow that,
because man has often mistaken the conditions under which
the Holy Spirit descends upon man, or the tokens of its
manifestation, therefore the belief is untrue. The belief in
the universality of causation is none the less true because
particular things have been and often are supposed to stand
as cause and effect to each other and are not really so related.
^ Acosta, History of the Indies (Grimston's translation in the Hakluyt
Society's edition, ii. 323).
2 G. B. i. 224. 3 2j^, 42.
PRIESTHOOD 285
The sacrificial and sacramental meal, which from the
beginning has been the centre of all religion, has from the
beginning also always been a moment in which the conscious-
ness has been present to man of communion with the god of
his prayers — without that consciousness man had no motive
to continue the practice of the rite. In the beginning, again,
the sacramental meal required, for the annual renewal of the
blood-covenant, that the worshipper should partake of the
body and blood of the victim : this participation was the
condition and cause of the communication of spiritual and
supernatural protection to the worshipper against the super-
natural dangers by which primitive man was surrounded. It
was by drinking the blood of sacrifice that the priestess of
Apollo in Deiras obtained the power of prophecy and became
" possessed " by the god."^ Amongst the Scandinavians a
blood-offering gave even the sacred altar-stone the power of
prophecy ; ^ and the Balonda and Barotse have a similar
" medicine " with which they can make images of wood and
clay prophesy.^ But the blood or the fat of the victim or the
oil obtained from it might be sprinkled or smeared on the
altar-stone or on the lintel of a house to indicate the presence
and protection of the god ; and in the same way the oil used
in the consecration of the king indicated that it was not in
virtue of his own merits — still less of his magical powers —
but of the entry in him of the divine spirit that " divine
right" was bestowed upon him and that he became king.
Again, it was of the skin of the victim that the first idols
probably were made : the Kuriles make their idols by wrap-
ping an image in the skin of an animal they have slaughtered
for the purpose,* and the custom of dressing an idol thus was
known to the Greeks. In all these cases the use of the skin
was probably not merely symbolical but was supposed to
ensure the god's actual presence in the idol, just as in
Northern Europe enveloping the human representative of the
vegetation spirit in a sheaf or green leaves probably imparted
a divine character to him. In the same way, when the
human " image " of an Aztec deity was dressed in the insignia
of the god, it was not merely a ceremonial attire but was
^ Paus. ii. C. 24 : yevaafx^prj toO at/xaros rj yvvrj Kdroxos iK tov deov yiverai.
2 Bastian, Der Mensch, ii. 269. ^ IMd. 258. '^ Ibid. 258.
286 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
thought to invest him with some of the divine powers ; and
when the priest, after s:icrificing him, clad himself in the skin
of the human victim,^ he undoubtedly resumed the divine
powers which at the beginning of the year he had resigned
to the " image " of the god, for thus clad he ran through the
streets to sanctify them, as the Luperci ran for the same
purpose, though not in the same guise.
When tree and plant worship prevails, the tree or plant
is figured as the body of the god, and eating some part
thereof continues to be regarded as the cause or condition of
divine possession. In India, the leaves of a sacred tree are
eaten to obtain supernatural protection against the death-
pollution.- In ancient Greece, Apollo's priestess was inspired
not only by drinking the blood of sacrifice, but equally by
eating the leaves of the laurel.^ The sacramental eating of
the body of cereal deities we have already enlarged on.*
Here we have to note that the blood of vegetation spirits
consisted in the sap of the tree or juice of the plant ; and if
the plant worshipped happened to be one the juice of which
was a poison or an intoxicant, the clan would find itself in
possession of a particularly potent deity. Ordeal by poison,
in which the deity recognises and spares the innocent, sprang
up in the one case ; the orgiastic rites of the wine-god in the
other, for the intoxication, being due to the juice of the vine
(the blood of the god), was evidently due to the action of
the divine substance on the worshipper ; and his strange
behaviour was taken as a manifestation of divine " posses-
sion." Hence in course of time any man who behaved in
this way, without having drunk wine, was considered to be
" possessed " by a god. It need perhaps scarcely be remarked
that as plant-worship has been universal, every plant capable
of producing intoxication in every part of the globe has been
discovered and has been employed for the purpose ; and so
the idea that frenzied conduct indicates " possession " is
universal. A few instances must suffice.
Among the northern Indians of Chili, it was the case
that " such as happen to be subject to epilepsy or St. Vitus'
dance are considered as especially marked out for the service "
^ Sahagun, i. c. viii. - Supra, p. 220.
^ Lucian, Bis accus. 1. ■* Supra, cli. xvi.
PRIESTHOOD 287
of the priests.^ A man becomes a Shaman by being " pos-
sessed " ; he is generally by nature a nervous, hysterical
subject, easily sent into a trance ; sometimes Shamans select
such a subject, sometimes he declares himself.''^ Where the
symptoms do not naturally exist, they may be artificially
induced, as, e.g., by the dancing Dervishes. In course of time
violent symptoms may cease to be expected of the man who
is to be a priest, but still the diviner, seer, or priest is expected
to be marked off by his nature from other men : thus amongst
the Amazulu a man is so set apart, when " he dreams many
things, and his body is muddled and he becomes a house of
dreams."^ In the Tonga Islands the native term {fahe-gehe)
for priest means a " man who has a peculiar or distinct sort
of mind or soul, differing from that of the generality of
mankind, which disposes some god occasionally to inspire
him." 4
Admission to the priesthood may be perfectly unorganised,
or it may be a hereditary privilege, or it may be obtained by
initiation at the hands either of an individual or a corporation ;
but the one indispensable condition of admission in all cases
is that there shall be some outward and visible indication
or guarantee that a god has entered him. Thus in the Tonga
Islands " a god is believed to exist at that moment {i.e. the
moment of inspiration) in the priest and to speak from his
mouth " (in the same way the Peruvian word for priest means
" he who speaks," i.e. by inspiration ^), " but at other times a
priest has no other respect paid to him than what his own
proper family rank may require," ^ and " those only in general
are considered priests who are in the frequent habit of being
inspired by a particular god. It most frequently happens
that the eldest son of a priest, after his father's death,
becomes a priest of the same god who inspired his father."^
So, too, in the Pelew Islands, a god can take possession of
any man he pleases, temporarily or permanently ; if per-
manently, the " possessed " is recognised and installed as
1 Kerr, Voyages, v. 405. ^ Bastian, AUerlei, i. 124.
2 Callaway, Religimts System of the Amazulu, 259.
^ Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii. 80.
^ Garcilasso de la Vega, Royal Commentaries of the Incas (Hakluyt Society's
edition, i. 277).
^ Mariner, loc. cit, "^ Mariner, ii. 127.
288 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
priest, and as such exercises great political power, however
low his origin. When he dies, the god is unrepresented
until some one begins to go about in a wild, ecstatic,
" possessed " manner, with sufficient pertinacity eventually
to convince the community, which at first laughs at him.^
In Guiana, " the office of peaiman was formerly hereditary.
If there was no son to succeed the father, the latter chose
and trained some boy from the tribe — one with an epileptic
tendency being preferred," and " the peaiman, when in the
midst of his frantic performance, seems as though overcome
by some fearful fit, or in the extreme of raving madness." ^
The Tinneh " have no regular order of Shamans ; anyone
when the spirit moves him may take upon him their duties
and pretensions."^ Among the Thlinkeets, shamanism is
mostly hereditary, but the son must be initiated, i.e. he must
fast, kill an otter and keep the skin (it not being lawful to
kill an otter save for this purpose), and his hair is never cut.*
Amongst the Clallams the initiation takes the form of a
pretended death and resurrection, which elsewhere is the
condition of initiation into various mysteries : the candidate
fasts till apparently dead, his body is plunged into a river
(this they call " washing the dead "), he then runs off into a
wood, and reappears equipped in the insignia of a medicine-
man.^
Where the priesthood forms a corporation, as for instance
in the Sandwich Islands, where " the priests appear to be
a distinct order or body of men, living for the most part
together," ^ some form of initiation is always required. The
priests of the Batta tatoo themselves with the figures of
beasts and birds, and eat buffalo flesh during the ceremony.'''
A Eoman Catholic missionary among the Suahili, describing
the initiation of candidates for the priesthood, observes that
a leading feature in the ceremony consisted in the candidate's
eating a sacramental meal — a fact which, as the sacramental
meal is the essence of every form of early religion, is not
surprising, but which to him appeared " a satanic imitation
of the Communion." He could not, however, smile contempt
^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 31. " Im Thurn, Indians of Ghiiana, 334.
' Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 142. ^ Ihid. 145. ^ Ibid. 155.
^ Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii. 127. '' Bastian, Ocst. Asien, v. 45.
PRIESTHOOD 289
at the parody, the solemnity with which the proceedings
were conducted was too awe-inspiring : a victim was slain,
the blood sprinkled on the candidate, and the flesh eaten,
before the morning dawn, by the priests and those who had
previously partaken of a similar meal.^ Finally, the selection
of a candidate may be made, as in the case of the Dalai
Lama, by lot : this also is a direct expression of the divine
will. Divination by water, i.e. by consultation of the water-
spirit, we have already explained.^ Here we have only to
add that our word " lot " is etymologically identical with
kXclEo^;, twig, small stick, from which comes the Greek word
for " lot," KXr]po^ ; ^ and that the use of pieces of wood
for drawing lots is due to the presence of the tree-god
therein.
This review of the modes in which admission to the
priesthood is obtained lends no countenance to the theory "f"
that it is by being a magician that a man becomes a priest or
king or king-priest. On the contrary, it is inspiration by
the god of the community which makes a man a priest ; and
this conclusion is confirmed by the fact that a clear line is
drawn between priest and magician. In those who believe
that the idol is an elaborated fetish, it is consistent to main-
tain that the priest is a successful sorcerer ; but we have
seen reason to reject the former idea, and the latter is not
borne out by the facts of the case. Those facts are some-
times obscured by the European traveller's habit of applying
the terms conjurer, witch, sorcerer to any native who professes
to exercise supernatural powers, without inquiring as to the
use or source of those powers, or even when he knows that
the conjurer is the priest of the community, as, e.g., when it
is said that " the jugglers perform the offices not only of
soothsayers and physicians but also of priests." * Fortunately,
however, it is quite clear on examination in most cases that
there are two distinct classes of men comprised under these
undiscriminating epithets, one bringing about disease and
death in the community, the other counteracting the machina-
tions of the first class, and also bringing positive blessings to
^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 142. ^ Supra, p. 229.
^ Schrader, Prehistoric Antiquities, 279.
^ Dobrizhoffer, History oftlic Ahipones.
19
290 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the community in the way of good crops, etc. This distinction
is generally recognised by travellers in Africa, when they
speak of the witch and the witch-finder ; and amongst the
Indians of Guiana we find kenaimas who cause mischief, and
the peaiman who cures it : " it is almost impossible to over-
estimate the dreadful sense of constant and unavoidable
danger in which the Indian would live, were it not for his
trust in the protecting power of the peaiman." ^ Further
examination shows that the one class derive their powers
from the god who protects and is worshipped by the com-
munity, the other from spirits who are bound by no ties of
fellowship or goodwill to the community. Thus the Australian
" sorcerer " is universally believed to get his powers from the
good spirit who lives beyond the sky.^ In the Pelew Islands,
besides the tribal and family gods, there are countless other
spirits of earth, mountains, woods, and streams, all of which
are mischievous, and of which the islanders are in daily fear.
It is with these spirits that the sorcerers deal. The priests
live generally in peace with the sorcerers, but the attitude of
the community is shown by the fact that sorcerers are liable
to be put to death for exercising their powers.^ The fact
that it is in the interests of the community that the powers
derived from the tribal god are exercised, is shown by the
frequent combination of the office of chief and priest in one
person : amongst the Murrings (Australia) the " sorcerer " is
respected highly, is chief at once and " sorcerer." ^ Amongst
the Damaras " the chiefs of tribes have some kind of sacer-
dotal authority — more so than a mihtary one. They bless
the oxen." ^ As for the Haidahs, the chief is the principal
" sorcerer," and " indeed possesses but little authority save
from his connection with the preter-human powers."^ The
chief of the Salish " is ex officio a kind of priest." ^ Amongst
the Eskimo the Angakuts (priests) are " a kind of civil magis-
trates," amongst the Zulus " ' the heaven is the chief's,' he
can call up clouds and storms ... in New Zealand every
Eangatira has a supernatural power . . . among the Zulus
* the Itongo (spirit) dwells with the great man ; he who
^ Im Thurn, Indians of Chiiana, 333. ^ Bastian, Allerlei, i. 248.
'^ Ihid. 46. ^ Ihid. 248. ^ Galton, South Africa, 1S9.
^ Bancroft, Native Races, iii. 150. ' Ibid. 154.
PRIESTHOOD 291
dreams is the chief of the village ' . . . the Kaneka chiefs
are medicine men." ^
Thus we are brought round once more to the priest-king
and to our question, how did a man come to be invested with
the office ? Negatively, we have urged reasons to reject Mr.
Frazer's theory that it was by becoming so great a magician
that his fellow-tribesmen thought he was a god. Positively,
we have argued that in all cases the human " image " of the
god is distinguished from the god, and that the divine spirit
must enter the man before he can be the human represent-
ative of the god, just as the altar-stone must be dashed with
blood, anointed with oil, clad in the skin of the sacred anunal,
etc., before the god can be considered to be present in it.
Further, the modes of consecration — whether of priest or
king — are various, but they can all be traced back to the
primitive idea of the sacrificial meal, namely, that it is by parti^'
cipation in the blood of the god that the spirit of the god enters
into the worshipper. It is therefore to some feature of the
ritual of the primitive sacrificial meal that we must look for
the solution of our problem. Now, the mere drinking of the
blood would not suffice to mark off one of the worshippers,
for all the clansmen drank of the blood, and all so far became
possessed of the divine spirit. But on the man who was to
be the king-priest that spirit descended in a larger measure ;
and it was some act performed by him, and him alone, during
the rite, that marked him off as thenceforth more holy than
his fellow-men.
Now we have seen that in historic times the distinguish-
ing function of the priest, and the key to his priestly power,
is that he deals the first and fatal blow at the victim. Unless
the victim is slain there can be no sacrifice, no drawing near
to the god, and the community must be left defenceless
against its supernatural foes. But the victim is the animal
whose life the clan are bound to respect as the life of a
clansman, to kill it is murder (as in the Bouphonia at
Athens), nay ! it is killing the god. The clansman, therefore,
whose religious conviction of the clan's need of communion
with the god was deepest, would eventually and after long
waiting be the one to strike, and take upon himself the issue,
^ Lang, Custom and Myth, 237.
292 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
for the sake of his fellow-men. " The dreadful sacrifice is
performed not with savage joy but with awful sorrow." ^ So
great was the difficulty of finding anyone to strike the first
blow, that the practice of stoning the victim to death was
frequently adopted, as thereby the responsibility was divided
amongst all the clansmen — a practice which survived in the
custom in Northern Europe of pelting the representative of
the vegetation spirit, in the similar XiOo^oKia of the Greeks
{e.g. in the Pentheus myth) and a New World custom already
referred to.^ That shedding even human blood is a crime,
the responsibility of which must be shared by all the com-
munity, appears from the fact that, when a criminal has to
be executed, it is a negro custom to tear him to pieces.
Amongst the Hottentots the chief gives the first blow, and
then the rest fall on the criminal and beat him to death ; ^
and amongst the Tuppin Imbas, when a captive is to be
eaten, the man who deals him the first blow incurs the guilt,
and, as blood must have blood, the king draws blood from his
arm, and for the rest of the day he must remain in his
hammock.^ But the fact that the priest in all rehgions slays
the victim suftices to show that the earlier custom of stoning
must have given place universally to that which gave rise to
the priesthood.
That blood-guiltiness would attach to the man who struck
the first blow is evident. But the king-priest is distinguished
from his fellows by his superior holiness, and it is not clear
that the act of dealing the blow would i]3S0 facto give him
that larg-er measure of the divine afflatus which marked the
priest off from his fellow-worshippers. In the Philippine
Islands it does indeed seem to have been the belief that the
slaying of the victim was, if not the cause, at any rate the
occasion of the god's entering into the slayer, as appears from
^ Robertson Smith, s.v. " Sacrifice " in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
2 Supra, p. 215-6. For other instances, see G. B. i. 264 ; B. K. 413 ; Myth.
Forsch. 209 ; Journal of Hellenic Studies, xiv. ii. 252-3 ; the \ido^o\ca in
Troezen (Pans. ii. xxxii. 2), at the Elensinia, the Lnpercalia, and Nonse
Cajirotinse ; and cf. the stoning of tlie <pdp/xaKos (Harp. s.v.).
'^ So too the scapegoat in Asia Minor, the Mannirius Vetus in Rome, and
the slave at the Chaeronean festival, were beaten — not as a piece of sympathetic
magic.
^ Bastiau, I)er Ilensch, iii. 3.
PRIESTHOOD 293
the account of an old traveller (who when he says " le Diable "
means the god of the savages) : " II y a de ces prestres qui
ont vn commerce particulier auec le Diable . . . il passe
quelquesfois dans le corps de leur Sacrificateurs & dans ce
peu de temps que dure le Sacrifice, il leur fait dire &
executer des choses qui remplissent de crainte les assistans
. . . le Sacrifice . . . se fait en frappant la Victime, auec
certaines ceremonies, que le Sacrificateur fait en cadance,
marquee par vn tambour ou par vne cloche, c'est dans ce
temps-la que le Diable les possede, qu'il leur fait faire mille
contorsios & grimace et a la fin, ils disent ce qu'ils croyent
auoir veu ou entendu." ^ But against this we have to set the
universal belief that it is by drinking the god's blood that
the god enters the worshipper. It is therefore to this part
of the rite we must look. Now, the slayer of the victim
would naturally be the first to drink of the blood ; and it is
entirely in accord with primitive ideas to suppose that the
first blood was considered to contain more of the sacred life
than the rest — we need only recall to mind the universal
reluctance to partake of the first-fruits of the field, as
containing the divine life in its most potent form. So by
the European custom the man who ate the first apple from
the tree in which the vegetation spirit dwelt became the
human representative of the spirit for the year.^ Thus it
was the man who greatly darmg first killed the victim and
drank the first draught of the sacred life who thereby became
the human " image " or representative or vicegerent of the
god, priest and king for a year, by which time the blood-
covenant required to be renewed, and again a victim had to
be slain, a slayer found.
There remains the question why the priest-king forfeited
his life at the end of the year. Now the forfeit attached to
the office : the moment the office was undertaken, the forfeit
was incurred. But it was by a man's own voluntary act that
the office was assumed ; and that act had two elements, the
office two sides. There was the blood-guiltiness attaching to
the killing of the god, and there was the sanctity brought by
the drinking of the sacred blood. It must therefore have
^ Thevenot, Divers Voyages, iv., "Relation des Isles Philippines."
2 B. K. 409.
294 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
been in one of these two characters that the king-priest was
slain. Mr. Frazer's view is that he was slain as being the
god. This, however, is unsatisfactory from our point of view,
for two reasons. The first is that the evidence, as we have
argued, seems to indicate that the king-priest was as a matter
of fact regarded, both by himself and others, as the god's vice-
gerent, rather than as himself the god. The other is that if he
was regarded as the god and slain as such, then there would
from that time on have been no further need or possibility of
animal sacrifice : the priest who slew the slayer would in
turn be slain, and so human sacrifice and cannibalism would
have been the universal type of the sacrificial meal, whereas,
first, cannibalism as a ritual is the exception, not the rule,
and next, every religious institution, and every survival in
religion which has a bearing on the question, points to the
sacramental eating first of totem-animals and then of totem-
plants.
We are therefore forced back on the other hypothesis,
that it was as the shedder of divine blood that the king-
priest's blood was shed, that it was the blood-guiltiness
attaching to his original act which made his life forfeit from
the first. For a year the sanctity of the divine blood in his
veins ensured his safety ; at the end of that time the penalty
was exacted. If it be asked why at the end of a year, the
only answer is that in early times the community seem to
have felt the need of an annual renewal of the blood-covenant
with their god ; the yearly sacrifice is the oldest ; at the end
of a year they felt that the sacred blood that was in them
had departed from them ; and if from them, then from the
king-priest, whom accordingly it was now safe to slay, and
their duty to slay. That the exaction of the penalty would
eventually come to be deferred, is probable enough, and is
confirmed by the historic instances in which it was only
enforced at the end of a twelve years' reign. Then it
would be deferred indefinitely to the appearance of the first
physical blemish indicative of old age, or until famine or
disaster warned the community that the spilling of divine
blood had not yet been avenged. But, in the absence of such
monitions, the penalty might even be evaded altogether, with
the consent of the community, by the substitution of the
PRIESTHOOD 295
priest-king's firstborn son/ for whom again a substitute
might be found in a criminal or a captive, until even the
taking of such lives was felt to be a stumblingblock. By
this time the office may have become hereditary ; and thus
would arise the necessity on occasion of devolving some of
the functions, e.g. war (for war is, as we have seen, a sacred
function in primitive times) or legislation upon a younger
brother or other relative less hampered by the divinity and
the restrictions which hedged in the priest-king. Or the
sanctity of the office might extend to the whole family of the
priest-king, in which case his descendants would constitute a
hereditary order of priests, the eldest representative being
high priest. Then, too, a war -king would have to be sought
outside the limits of the priestly family. To his office also
sanctity would attach ; he too would require consecration
and receive a Te/-t6z/o9. But whereas political progress tended
to give the king a larger kingdom and greater powers, all con-
centrated in his one person, it tended to diminish the import-
ance of the priest, for it brought polytheism in its train, and
so multiplied the number of the priests, proportionately
dividing their power.
The growing tendency, which the above view postulates,
to defer and then to remit the forfeit of the king-priest's life,
can hardly be dissociated from the change which gradually
took place in men's view of animal sacrifice. At first, sacri-
fice was the killing of the god manifested in the animal.
Then the rite came to be regarded as a sacrifice to the god,
now conceived to be present in the altar-stone on which the
blood was dashed. Finally, the sacrifice was a meal in which
the god took part, and the animal's life was no longer con-
sidered sacred — the animal was but the chattel of the tribe
that bred it. Now these changes must have materially assisted
the tendency to remit the king-priest's penalty : as long as
the animal was the god, the blood-guiltiness of the slayer
called for his death ; when the animal was rather a sacrifice
to than of the god, the death of the priest would be required
^ In view of the existence of a survival of annually killing the king- priest in
Babylon, it may be well to note that an Accadian text expressly states that
sin may be expiated by the vicarious sacrifice of the eldest son (Sayce's Ap-
pendix, p. 418, to his edition oi HcU. i. and ii. ).
296 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
rather by tradition than by any living sentiment of necessity.
When the animal was a mere chattel, the execution even of
a captive would be unmeaning ; of a firstborn son, shocking.
Nor can we fail in this connection to note that, whereas
drinking the blood was of the essence of the rite originally,
in course of time it came to be generally dropped or pro-
hibited— possibly on grounds of refinement, but possibly also
on religious grounds, on the ground that no man should be
allowed to communicate so closely with the divine life.
Finally, we may note that the original idea of taboo is
identical neither with that of holiness nor that of unclean-
ness, but is the root-idea out of which both these were sub-
sequently differentiated and developed : it is simply that
which must not be touched or approached. Now the king-
priest was strictly taboo in the original sense : both as the
shedder of blood and as the partaker in divine life, he was
not to be approached, during his year.
We have endeavoured to show that the institution of
the priesthood was the natural, necessary, and inevitable out-
come of the primeval rite of the sacrificial meal ; and that
from the beginning the priest had no other means of drawing
near to his god than those open to all his fellow- worshippers ;
he was distinguished from them only by his greater readiness
to sacrifice himself for their religious needs. We have found
nothing to support the notion that religion is the invention
of priests, and we have been obliged to dissent both from the
view that primitive man was uncertain whether he was a god
or not, and from the view that the priest was a sorcerer who
had got on in the world.
We have next to show how the mystic view of sacrifice, as
communion, struggled to reassert itself against the commercial
view of sacrifice, as giving in order to get something, which
had overlaid it ; and how this affected man's view of the
future state. But first we must understand what his view of
the other world was, to begin with.
CHAPTEE XXI
THE NEXT LIFE
As to man's future state many very different views have been
held and are held by different peoples. To some it appears
but a continuation of the present life, for others it involves
a retribution for what has been done in this world ; and each
of these theories has many varieties. The retribution may
consist in a simple reversal of this life's lot, so that those who
have fared ill here will be well off in the next world, and vice
versd ; or the better lot in the next world may be reserved
either for those who in this were persons of quality, or for
those who distinguished themselves by their valour, or by
their virtue, or by their piety. Or the next life may be
for all men alike a continuance of this, under more pleasant
conditions, or under more gloomy conditions, but in either
case the rank and occupation of the deceased will be what
they were in this life, even the scars and mutilations of the
body surviving with the other marks of personal identity.
Or, again, life may be continued, but in such a way that
personal identity is concealed, as for instance by the trans-
migration of the soul into an animal body, or is forgotten, as
by the souls that drink the waters of Lethe before being re-
born, or merged in the divine essence. Or the soul may not
survive death at all — only the fruit of its moral or immoral
acts may be transmitted.
An equally great variety of opinion prevails as to the
situation and topography of the next world. It may be on
the earth's surface, or under it or above it. If on it, then it
is a far-off land, a garden behind far distant hills, a land
beyond a distant river, an island across the sea, a far-off
western world. Or it may be above the earth, in the sun,
297
298 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the moon, the stars, or above the solid firmament of the sky.
If below the earth, it may be one vast and gloomy realm, or
it may be mapped out into many various divisions. If the
retribution theory is held, then the heaven may be above the
earth, or it may be underground. If it is underground, then
the places of bliss and punishment are topographically distin-
guished ; if the heaven is above the world, then it may or
may not be locally distinguished from the abode of the gods.
The underground hell may or may not have places of
torture ; if it has, they too may be more or less numerous.
The number of heavens may extend to the third, the seventh,
or even go as high as thirty.
Into the mass of bewildering details, of which these are
but a few, some order has been introduced by the labour of
various writers, especially Professor E. B. Tylor, in his
Primitive Culture. He has shown, for instance, that the
retribution theory appears generally at a later stage of
culture than the continuance theory; and that the concep-
tions of the next world as a far-off land, a western world, an
underground abode, or as located in the sun, moon, stars, or
sky, are of common occurrence amongst different peoples, and
are conceptions such as might be formed independently by
different peoples, and need not have been borrowed by one
from another. These conclusions may be regarded as well
established, and we shall make them the basis for an attempt
to trace the growth of the belief in a future state.
Whether the funeral rites practised by man in the lowest
stage of culture known to us, and also in the earliest times
from which we have interments, were prompted by love or
fear, by the desire to detain the spirit of the one loved and
lost, or by the wish to drive off the ghost, may be a disputed
question. But that these rites show primitive man to have
believed that the ghost lingered for some time in the neigh-
bourhood of the survivors, is universally admitted. Nor can
there be any doubt as to the cause of the belief : the memory
of the departed is still fresh in the minds of the survivors,
and the occasions are frequent which suggest to their minds
the picture of the deceased engaged in his familiar guise and
occupations. As time goes on, the memory of him is revived
less often and at longer and longer intervals, and it is in
THE NEXT LIFE 299
occasional dreams that he appears most vividly to mind.
Such appearances are regarded by the savage as visits of the
dead man ; and the fact has to be accounted for that such
visits, at first frequent, gradually become separated by longer
and longer intervals. The obvious explanation is, in part at
any rate, that the ghost is now further off, and it takes him
longer to make the journey. Hence the belief in a far-off
land on the surface of the earth is, I suggest, the first hypo-
thesis as to the dwelling-place of the dead. In Borneo, it is
situated, for the Idaan race, on the summit of Kina Balu ; in
West Java, on the mountain Gungung Danka ; the dwelling-
place of the dead, according to the Chilians, was Gulcheman
beyond the mountains ; " hidden among the mountains of
Mexico lay the joyous garden of Tlalocan."^
Whether burial is the oldest mode of disposing of corpses,
or is later than cremation — as seems indicated by the fact that
in the oldest interments known to archaeologists the body is
always partially burnt — burial is and long has been univer-
sally known and practised, and no one doubts that it is the
burial of bodies underground which has given rise to the belief
that the abode of the dead is also underground. The belief
is widely spread : " in North America, the TacuUis held that
the soul goes after death into the bowels of the earth . . .
among rude African tribes, it is enough to cite the Zulus,
who at death will descend to live among the Abapansi, ' the
people underground.' " ^ Amongst the Karens, a rude Asiatic
tribe, the land of the dead is held to be below the earth. The
Aryan peoples undoubtedly held the same view : the Eoman
Orcus and the Greek Hades are underground. The Baby-
lonians placed " the land whence none return," as it was termed
by them, in the bowels of the earth ; and the Hebrew Sheol
is the name both for the grave and for the subterranean abode
of the departed. As to the nature of this realm and the kind
of life spent by its inhabitants, there is a unanimity which is
a striking illustration of the fact that under similar conditions
similar minds will reach similar conclusions. In it, accordincr
to the Hurons, " day and night the souls groan and lament " ; ^
the region of Mictlan, the subterranean land of Hades in
Mexico, " was an abode looked forward to with resignation,
1 Tylor Primitive Culture, ii. 60 and 61. ^ ^j^^ gg_ 3 /^^-^^ 79^
300 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
but scarcely with cheerfulness."^ The Yoruba proverb runs:
" A corner in this world is better than a corner in the world
of spirits." The ghost of Achilles rejected consolation :
" Nay ! speak not comfortably to me of death, 0 great
Odysseus. Eather would I live on ground as the hireling
of another, with a landless man who had no great livelihood,
than bear sway among all the dead." ^ " The Hades of the
Babylonian legends closely resembles the Hades of the Homeric
poems. It is the gloomy realm beneath the earth, where the
spirits of the dead flit about in darkness, with dust and mud
for their food and drink, and from whence they escape at
times to feed on the blood of the living. Here the shades of
the great heroes of old sit each on his throne, crowned and
terrible, rising up only to greet the coming among them of
one like unto themselves . . . good and bad, heroes and
plebeians, are alike condemned to this dreary lot ; a state of
future punishments and rewards is as yet undreamed of ;
moral responsibility ends with death. Hades is a land of
forgetfulness and of darkness, w^here the good and evil deeds
of this life are remembered no more ; and its occupants are
mere shadows of the men who once existed, and whose con-
sciousness is like the consciousness of the spectral figures in
a fleeting dream." ^ For the Sheol of the Old Testament we
may quote Smith's Dictionary of the Bible : it is " the vast
hollow subterranean resting-place which is the common
receptacle of the dead. It is deep (Job xi. 8) and dark (Job
xi. 21, 22); in the centre of the earth (Num. xvi. 30 ; Deut.
xxxii. 22), having within it depths on depths (Prov. ix. 18),
and fastened with gates (Isa. xxxviii. 10) and bars (Job xvii.
16). In this cavernous realm are the souls of dead men,
the Eephaim and ill-spirits (Ps. Ixxxvi. 13,lxxxix. 48 ; Prov.
xxiii. 14; Ezek. xxxi. 17, xxxii. 21). It is all-devouring
(Prov. i. 12, XXX. 16), insatiable (Isa. v. 14), and remorseless
(Cant. viii. 6). . . . Job xi. 8, Ps. cxxxix. 8, and Amos ix. 2
merely illustrate the Jewish notions of the locality of Sheol
in the bowels of the earth. . . . Generally speaking, the
Hebrews regarded the grave as the final end of all sentient
and intelligent existence, ' the land where all things are
^ Loc. cit. ~ Od. xi. 486 (Butcher aud Lang's trans.).
■^ Sayce, Hihhert Lecture, 364.
THE NEXT LIFE 301
forgotten' (Ps. vi. 5, Ixxxviii. 10-22; Isa. xxxviii. 9-20;
Eccles. ix. 10 ; Ecclus. xvii. 27, 28)."
In this view of the future life there is no room for the
retribution theory : all men alike go to Hades or Sheol, the
all-devouring. Indeed, the continuance theory is generally
clearly involved in it. In the Babylonian underworld, those
who were in their lifetime heroes, retain their thrones. In
the Greek Hades, Achilles is still a king, and the phantom
Orion hunts phantom beasts ; and " there the soul of the
dead Karen, with the souls of his axe and cleaver, builds his
house and cuts his rice ; the shade of the Algonquin hunter
hunts souls of beaver and elk, walking on the souls of his
snow-shoes over the soul of the snow ; the fur- wrapped
Kamchadal drives his dog-sledge ; the Zulu milks his cows
and drives his cattle to kraal ; South American tribes live on,
whole or mutilated, healthy or sick, as they left this world,
leading their old lives." ^ So, too, in Virgil, the ghost of
Deiphobus shows its ghastly wounds to ^neas. In Sheol
the kings of the nations have their thrones,^ and the mighty
their weapons of war.^
The idea that, in the underground ghost-land, the soul
continues to follow the same pursuits as in life, gave rise
to the custom of burying with him the necessary weapons,
implements, pottery, clothes, etc.; and, as habits are less
easily changed than opinions, this custom continued to be
practised even when the continuance theory which originated
it had given way to the retribution theory. It was, how-
ever, impossible that the custom should continue without
affecting belief ; and the way in which it affected the
retribution theory was twofold : it modified men's con-
ception first of the nature of the blissful state, and second
of the means by which it is to be attained. It made, that is
to say, future bliss to consist simply in pursuing earthly
occupations under more delightful conditions than exist in
this life, or existed in the dreary shadow-land to which the
continuance theory first gave birth ; and, in the next place,
the persistence of ancestor-worship made it appear that the
soul's attainment to future bhss depended in part at any
rate on something that the survivors could do for it. Thus,
1 Tylor, 75-6. ^ jsa. xiv. 9. » ^^ek. xxxii. 27.
302 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
in the Scandinavian Walhalla, the warriors ride forth to the
fight as they did on earth, only at the end of the day and the
fray those who have been killed go back to the banquet and
enjoy it, just as much as their victors do. In Egypt, where
the heaven was also one of material, though more peaceful,
delights, access to it depended quite as much upon the due
performance of the elaborate funeral rites by the survivors,
as upon the virtue and piety of the deceased himself. It is
clear, then, that ancestor-worship was a considerable hindrance
to the acquisition or reception of a purer and more spiritual
conception of the future life. It is therefore important for
the historian of religion to note that ancestor-worship was
forbidden to the Jews : the worship of God did not permit
of ancestor-worship. This prohibition, however, was not
in itself either the cause of or a stimulus to a higher view
of man's future state : it only cleared the ground of weeds
which might have choked its growth. As a matter of fact,
though the soil was thus prepared, it was not until the time
of the Captivity that the first seeds were sown in it.
Here too, perhaps, it will be well to note that in these
early speculations as to ghost-land, whether it be placed in
an underground region or in some far-off' land upon the
earth's surface, there is nothing religious : they have nothing
to do with the service of the gods, they are totally uncon-
nected with the sacrificial meal by which communion with
the god of the tribe is sought : they are purely philosophical
speculations. Eeligion did not originate from ancestor-
worship, nor ancestor-worship from religion. It is important
also to remember that complete consistency is not to be
found or expected in these or any other speculations indulged
in by man when in a low stage of culture. Impressed by
the broad fact that the dead do not return to life, he may
describe the underground abode as one from which there is
no return. But this cannot, with him, weigh against the
fact that ghosts are occasionally seen ; and that fact in its
turn in no wise impairs his belief that there is a distant
world which is the proper abode of departed souls. Indeed,
at the present day, in Christian countries, the superstitious
believe that graveyards are haunted, though they would not
deny that the souls of the dead are really in heaven or in
THE NEXT LIFE 303
hell.^ So too the Zulu, who believes that the dead join the
Abapansi, the underground people, none the less recognises
the soul of an ancestor in the snake which visits his kraal.
And, generally speaking, we may say that the belief of the
totemist, that the dead man rejoins his totem and is trans-
formed into the shape of the animal totem, may live for a
long time by the side of the belief in a ghost-land.
Indeed, just as the key to the origin of species is the
persistence, transmission, and development of qualities origin-
ally peculiar to an individual, and constituting it a mere
" sport " or " variety," so the key to the evolution of the
many forms of religion is in many cases to be found in the
persistence, side by side, of beliefs that were originally but
" sports " or " varieties " of the same stock. Thus the belief
in the appearance of ghosts is but a form of the continuance
theory, or rather is the continuance theory in its original
form : the ghost, as it appears in dreams or m visions,
continues to have the same outward presentment as the man
himself had in life. The belief that ghosts continue their
favourite occupations in a ghost-land, whether underground
or on a remote part of the surface of the earth, is equally a
form of the continuance theory. But when the original form
of a belief persists by the side of a later form, a certain
inconsistency is felt between them ; and if it be such as to
be felt very strongly, the result will be that what were
origmally but varieties of the same idea will become two
different species of belief. An example may make this
clearer. The original form of the belief in a ghost-land
simply postulated that that land was far away : the belief
that it was far down in the bowels of the earth, in depth
below depth, was but a slight variation on the original belief
— the essential was that ghost-land was far away, in which
dimension of space did not matter. But though the concep-
tion of ghost-land as an underground world establislied itself,
we may say, universally, and gradually drove out the older
^ This simple consideration seems to me to be fatal to Rohde's extravagant
idea tliat the Hades of Homer is a sort of " fault" in the strata of Greek belief,
and is different from the tenets held by the Greeks both before and after the
Homeric period. To say that because there is, according to Homer, no return
from Hades, therefore there were, in Homer's opinion, no ghosts to haunt the
living, betrays want of sympathy with primitive modes of thought.
304 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
belief in a far-off land, still the older belief, or rather a
reminiscence of it, still lingered here and there ; and, being
different from the now dominant faith in an underworld, it
called for explanation. That explanation was fairly obvious
and easily forthcoming. Here were old men declaring that
in then- time, or in times they had heard of, the spirits
of the dead used to go to a far-off land, not to the under-
ground w^orld as they do now. Obviously, therefore, things
have changed : in the good old times men did not go to the
dreary, gloomy nether land ; they went to a garden beyond
the hills, lighted and cheered by the rays of the sun, very
different from the sunless abodes of Hades. But that is over
now ; to this generation the gates of that bright land are
closed ; and if they were open to the men of yore, that is
because men were heroes in the brave days of old. This, I
submit, is the origin of Hesiod's myth ^ of the fourth and
last of those ac^es of which the Golden Age was the first.
The heroes who fell at the siege of Troy or of Thebes were
placed by Zeus, after death, in a land at the uttermost
bounds of the earth,^ where they continue in happiness.^ In
Babylon also there were " blissful fields beyond Datilla," * to
which in bygone times a few persons, e.g. Xisuthros and his
wife, not heroes but pious persons, had been admitted, though
the gates were closed to all else. Sometimes the explanations,
invented to account for the difference in the treatment of
this generation and of bygone generations, do not invoke
the superior valour or piety of the latter to account for the
change — indeed, such ideas belong to the retribution theory,
and probably were comparatively late additions to the original
form of explanation, which contented itself with the simple
fact that the first man or men dwell there, and all other souls
go to the homes of underground. Thus in Iranian mythology,
Yima, the first man, and his generation, live and have lived
from the beginning of history in the Far-off Land, Eran Vej,
an earthly paradise.^ Even here, however, the original
^ Hesiod, Works and Days, 156-73.
^ 168, Zeiis Kpoj'iSijs Karevaaae irarrip es irelpaTa yairjs.
^ 170, /cat Toi fiev vaiovcnv dKTjdea dvjjLov e'xovres.
^ Sayce, Herodotus, i.-iii. App. 392.
^ For this, see Mr. Alfred Nutt in The Voyage of Bran, 309-11.
THE NEXT LIFE 305
explanation has been adapted and altered to supply material
for cosmological speculation. Eran Vej is said to have been
created by Ahura Mazda, whereas the Far-off Land, as we
have seen, had nothing to do with religion, and was not
supposed to have been created by, or to be in any way
connected with, the gods. In this respect we get a truer
view of the Far-off Land in certain tales which go back to
the time when its delights — so bright by comparison with
the underground world — were still matter of tradition, when
its existence (if only it could be discovered) was still believed
in, but its origin, as ghost-land, was forgotten. These are
those tales of a land of Cockaigne, with which even antiquity
was acquainted,^ which a Solon could describe in verse,^
and which are the earliest types of many a subsequent
Utopia.
We may then take it as a general law that the human
mind is capable of holding, simultaneously, beliefs which are
inconsistent up to a certain (undefinable) point ; but if, by
the force of circumstances, the inconsistency becomes too
great, an explanation will be invented ; and that explanation
will exaggerate and stereotype the difference, so that what
were but two varieties of the same original opinion will
become two quite different beliefs, capable of being logically ^
held by the same person. Let us apply this canon to the
belief in the underground ghost-land.
Inasmuch as the abode of the dead is underground, the
entrance to it must be through some hole in the ground, cave,
etc. Thus the souls of the Baperi in South Africa go down
through the cavern of Marimatle ; in Mexico there were
two such caverns, Chalchatongo and Mictlan, which were the
entrances to the nether world ; " North German peasants
still remember, on the banks of the swampy Dromhng, the
place of access to the land of departed souls " ; ^ in ancient
Kome the mundus or opening through which the spirits of
the dead came up thrice a year for their offerings was in the
Comitium ; in Ireland it was believed in the fifteenth century
A.D. that Sir Owain descended into the nether world with the
monk Gilbert through St. Patrick's purgatory, a cavern in the
1 See Mr. Nutt on the "Hapj)y Other "World," op. cit.
2 Frag. 38 (Bergk % 3 Tyj^^,^ ^-^ ^5^
20
306 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
island of Lough Derg, County Donegal ; ^ in Timor earthquakes
are dreaded, because the souls may escape through the chasms
thus ojDcned ; ^ the entrance to the Accadian underworld " was
believed to be in the marshes beyond the mouth of the
Euphrates." ^ Many peoples can tell of living men who, before
Sir Owain, have descended by those openings, and have
returned to describe the underworld.
But these openings, being of necessity local, are known
only to the neighbouring inhabitants. There is, however, one
entrance to the nether world which is familiar to many
different peoples ; and it is known to many, because the facts
which prove it to be a gate of the underworld are patent to
all. Those facts are that the sun disappears below the
surface of the earth in the west, and emerges again from it
in the east ; therefore in the night he must have travelled
from west to east below the earth, i.e. through the realm of
the dead. Among the natives of Encounter Bay the sun is
feminine : " every night she descends among the dead, who
stand in double lines to greet her and let her pass." * Amongst
the Magyars it is day in Kalunga, the land of the dead, when
it is night on earth, because the sun passes through it by
night, as it is also believed to do by the people of Mangaia,^
and was believed to do by the ancient Egyptians to the end.
" The New Zealander who says ' the sun has returned to Hades,'
simply means that it has set " ; ^ and it was an Aztec saying
that the sun goes at evening to lighten the dead.^ The hole
in the ground, therefore, through which the sun descends
below the earth is the entrance through which, according to
many peoples, the souls of the dead have to gain admission
to the underworld. In Australia they travel for that purpose
to Nynamnat, the sunset ; in Torres Strait, to kibuka, the
western world ; ^ in Polynesia, too, they go west ; to the west,
likewise, the spirits of the Iroquois, of the Fijians, and of the
Brazihans ; in Virginia the cave Popogusso lies west, west the
Gulchinam of the Chilians.^ Odysseus found the entrance to
1 Tylor, ii. 55-7.
2 Bastian, Die VerUeihs-OHc der abgeschieden Scclc, 52.
2 Sayce, Herodotus, i.-iii. App. 392.
^ Lang, Mijth, Ritual, ami licUgion, i. 129. ^ Bastian, o;;. cit. 52.
« Tylor, 66. ' Ibid. 72.
« Bastiau, 39. " Ibid. 64.
THE NEXT LIFE 307
Hades in the west. In Babylonia " the mountain of the west,
where the sun set, was a pre-eminently funereal place,'' and
" the entrance to Hades was near this mountain of the west." ^
But though the belief in an entrance in the far-off west
is common and widely spread, it did not occur to every people,
or did not always find favour. For instance, it did not become
known to the Aryan peoples until after they had settled in
the countries occupied by them in historic times ; and even
then it did not dawn upon all of them, for it was unknown to
the Komans, who until late times were quite satisfied with
the opening in the Comitium, and regularly continued to roll
away the stone, the lapis manalis, which blocked it, in order
to allow the manes to come up for their offerings, on August
24th, October 5 th, and November 8th. In other countries,
as in Greece and Babylonia, the western gate remained only
one of several entrances to the underworld, with nothing
to distinguish it particularly from the rest. And neither
Greeks nor Eomans (by their own unaided efforts) nor the
Babylonians got beyond the old belief in a gloomy, sunless
Hades or Orcus, the common destination of all men, good
or bad.
Elsewhere, however, the glowing west of the sunset
became the place where the souls of the departed assembled
to wait for the moment when the sun's arrival would open
the portals of the nether world and let them in. According
as the sun set beyond a plain, the sea, or mountains, the
bright gathering-place was an island across the sea, a place
behind the hills or beyond some distant fields. In any case,
what was the constant gathering-place of the continually
dying came necessarily to be a place in which spirits of
the dead were constantly to be found, and so a permanent
abode of the dead. But the old belief in the underground
world of ghosts was much too firmly rooted in the minds
of men to be ousted by this new view ; and accordingly an
accommodation was found — both the nether world and the
western world were abodes of the dead. Then the existence
of two such different abodes, one gloomy and sunless, the
other suffused with light and warmth, called for explanation ;
and this demand was, I conjecture, if not the cause, at any-
^ Lenormant, Chaldean Magic (E. T.), 168.
308 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
rate the occasion of the retribution theory. The question
became pressing, which souls went to the cheerful western
home, which to the dreary world below ? Probably it was
taken for granted at first that the chiefs, who took the best
things here, had a right to the more attractive region after
death ; then, that the best warriors would claim an entrance.
The two views were combined by the Alits : " In Vancouver's
Island, the Ahts fancied Quawteaht's calm, sunny, plenteous
land in the sky as the resting-place of high chiefs, who live
in one great house . . . while the slain in battle have
another to themselves. But otherwise all Indians of
low degree go deep down under the earth to the land of
Chay-her, with its poor houses and no salmon and small
deer, and blankets so small and thin, that when the dead
are buried the friends often bury blankets with them." ^
" The rude Tupinambas of Brazil think the souls of such
as had lived virtuously, that is to sslj, who have well avenged
themselves and eaten many of their enemies, will go behind
the great mountains, and dance in beautiful gardens with
the souls of their fathers ; but the souls of the effeminate
and worthless, who have not striven to defend their country,
will go to Aygnan."2 in the Tonga Islands it is only
aristocratic souls that go to Bolotu, the western and fortunate
isle, " full of all finest fruits and loveliest flowers, that fill
the air with fragrance, and come anew the moment they
are plucked ; birds of beauteous plumage are there, and hogs
in plenty, all immortal save when killed " to be eaten, and even
then "new living ones apx^ear immediately to fill their places."^
There was, then, in the west, at the entrance of the
sun's nether domains, a happy other-world to which the
souls of the valiant and the virtuous went ; and there was
^ the old, cheerless, unhappy other-world to which went the
cowards and the bad. To call the one Heaven and the
other Hell, would be misleading, for these terms bear a
reference to religion, and the latter further implies a place
of torment. Now, as we have said, early speculations on
the other- world were philosophical rather than religious : it
was only in course of time that the happy other-world came
to be adopted into antique religions. The Jews were cut off
1 Tylor, 85. 2 7^^^ 86-7. '"^ Ibid, 62.
THE NEXT LIFE 309
by their primitive prohibition of ancestor-worship from the
philosophical speculations which resulted in a happy other-
world of bodily delights ; and it was only by degrees that
the cheerless nether ghost-land came to be a place of active
torment. Egyptian religion is instructive on both points.
The righteous soul went to the happy fields of Aalu, where
the height of the corn, we are told, " is seven cubits, and
that of the ears is two (in some readings four) cubits," ^ but
the reward of the righteous is not spiritual, it is earthly ;
and, as depicted on the monuments of the old Empire, it
has not risen above the level of peoples in the continuance-
stage of development — except that their dead do not enjoy
their occupations much, and the Egyptian did enjoy his :
" the tomb of Ti at Sakkarah, for instance, presents us with
pictures of the after-world, in which the dead man lives
over again his life in this ; he farms, hunts, superintends
his workmen and slaves, and feasts, just as he had done on
earth." 2 A more naive confession of the fact that the
happy other-world of the Egyptian was only an improvement
on the original ghost-land, and not a place of spiritual bliss
superior to the delights of this world, could not be found than
that which is contained in the rubric to the first chapter of
the Book of the Dead, describing the lot of the righteous
soul : " There shall be given to him bread and beer, and flesh
upon the tables of Ea ; he will work in the fields of Aaru,
and there shall be given to him the wheat and barley which
are there, for he shall flourish as though he were wpon earth " ^
— no higher or more spiritual ideal entered or could enter
into the composition of the Egyptian abode of bliss, because
its origin was essentially non-religious. But if the happy
world had not been developed into a heaven, neither on the
monuments of the old Empire had the cheerless underground
world become a place of torment : " we should look in vain
in them for those representations of the torments and trials
which await the dead below, of the headless souls and
horrible coils of the monstrous serpent Apepi, that startle
us on the pictured walls of the royal tombs at Thebes." *
In India, too, the underground world originally, like
^ Kenoiif, Hihhert Lecture, 181. ^ Sayce, Hdt. i.-iii. 346.
3 Renouf, Hihlcrt Lecture, 192-3. ^ Sayce, 347.
310 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Hades and Sheol, was the land to which went the souls of
all, good and bad ; but then the happy other-world drew
off a portion of its population, namely, the souls of those who
in their lives had been worshippers of Soma, and left only
the bad to go to the world below. At first, apparently,
the contrast between the cheerlessness of the old ghost-land
and the delights of the happy world, where soma could be
drunk for ever, seems to have constituted sufficient punish-
ment for the bad. But in course of time, in India, as in
Egypt, torments were added, and " the ultimate outcome of
this evolution," in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C., " is a
series of hell visions, which for puerile beastliness and
horror outvie anything perhaps that even this hideous phase
of theological fancy has pictured." ^
The idea that the place where the sun went down was
the entrance to the nether world, led, as we have seen, to the
belief that there was a happy other-world in the west. But it
also led men to find a happy other-world elsewhere, e.g. in the
sun or in the sky. How it might naturally do so will be clear,
if we reflect that it was the sun's descent below the horizon
which was supposed to open the western entrance to ghost-
land : thus the funeral dirges of the Dayaks describe how
the spirits of the departed have to run westward at full
speed, through brake and briar, over rough ground and
cutting coral, to keep up with the sun, and slip through
the clashing gates by attaching themselves to him.^ Now,
though holding on to the sun in order to win through the
momentarily open entrance was at first simply a means by
which the ghost might reach its underground abode, yet it
was indispensable and all-important, and so might easily
come to be considered the only thing necessary for the
ghost who was to be at peace, and to be released from the
cruel race after the sun. The ghost, it should perhaps be
said, who could not keep up with the sun and arrive at the
entrance simultaneously with him, has to recommence the
race next day : hence rest and release for the departed spirit
were only to be found in catching up and joining the sun —
after that came peace. Thus the sun was the resting-place
of the departed. But the old belief in the underground
^ Nutt, op. cit. 323, - Bastian, op. cit. 25.
THE NEXT LIFE 311
spirit-land still continued to exist ; and the fact that there
were two other - worlds was explained by the retribution
theory. The sun was the abode of departed chiefs and
warriors among the Apalaches of Florida and the Natchez
of the Mississippi ; the sun or the bright sky generally was
the happy other-world assigned in India to the soma
devotee.
The idea that the souls of the righteous went to the sun
was one of the many different and inconsistent beliefs for
which accommodation was found, somehow or other, in the
state -religion of ancient Egypt. But as provision was already
made in the blissful fields of Aalu for the departed, an abode
in the sun was superfluous ; and it never succeeded in
displacing the former, because it held out no particular
attractions, whereas in Aalu the departed was just as well
off as if he were alive. Hence, union with the sun continued
to be simply an alternative — not the only alternative, as
we shall see — to Aalu. Attempts, however, were made to
bring the sun theory into organic relation with the other
elements of Egyptian religion. In the Middle and New
Empires, the Osiris myth gave rise to those ideas of after-
death torments which find such ample expression on the
monuments of the period and in the Booh of the Dead ; ^
and it was by union with the sun, Osiris, by becoming an
Osiris, that the deceased was enabled to pass by and triumph
over all the horrible monsters and dangers which beset his
path through the underworld. Now this provided the
Egyptian with a motive for desiring to become an Osiris,
but it did not diminish his desire for the earthly and
agricultural delights of Aalu, and it did not entirely clear
up the relations of these two forms of beatification. Philo-
sophy therefore came to the rescue : all things and beings
are made of certain elements, or rather they are but different
compounds of one element, different modes of one essence, for
there is but one thing real in all the universe, and that is
the divine essence, God. Eventually, all things and beings
must be resolved into their constituent parts, must revert to
the original essence of which they are but transient modes.
The divine essence was the god Osiris ; to become an Osiris
^ Sayce, loc. cit.
.*fi'
312 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was to be merged in the divine essence. This view afforded
a reconciliation of the belief in Aaru and the Osiris doctrine :
the soul first went to Aaru, and then became an Osiris ; the
soul entered " the blissful fields of Aalu, there to be purified
from all the stains of its eaxly life, and, after becoming
perfect in wisdom and knowledge, to be absorbed into the
divine essence."^
Finally, we may note that the happy western world
under certain circumstances shared the fate which over-
took the far-off land. As we have seen in the chapter on
Mythology, a primitive hypothesis, if detached from the
belief or custom, etc., which it was invented to explain,
becomes a myth. It may be so detached from its basis,
either because the belief, etc., on which it was based has
changed or perished, or because it has sufficient romantic
interest in itself to be worth telling and hearing, quite
apart from its " topical allusions." In this way the far-off
land, when it was depopulated, so to speak, by the intro-
duction of the underground world as the abode for the
dead, became first a place to which none now go or can go,
and then an earthly paradise, and finally a land of Cockaigne,
Utopia. Now, though the belief in the happy western
world never perished wherever it became known, still it
might become detached from its basis, inasmuch as rumours
of it as a place of high delight might spread to peoples who
had as yet not advanced to the conception of a happy
other-world. To such a people, having no conception of
the retribution theory, and having only one ghost-land — and
that a dreary one — for the reception of all ghosts, righteous
or unrighteous, alike, the rumour might penetrate of a happy
land in the bright west, the inhabitants of which dwelt in
fabulous delights and never died. The wonder and romance
of the tale would be heightened by the added fact that all
the inhabitants were righteous. And the natural objection
of the sceptic, that if there were such a happy land every-
body would go there, would be met by the statement, made
on the same authority as the original rumour, that the place
is over the western sea, an island, a fortunate island, to
which only those favoured by the gods are carried, and the
1 Sayce, 345.
THE NEXT LIFE 313
road to which no living man ever yet discovered. A tale
so romantic would be readily caught up by story-tellers,
ever as eager as their hearers for some new thing, and by
them be worked into their tales. In some such way as this,
I suggest, the rumour of the blissful fields of Aalu spread
from Egypt to Greece. The resemblance of the name of the
Egyptian fields to that of the " Elysian " plains of Homer
may be accidental, but it is perhaps more than fortuitous
that it was in Egypt that Menelaus heard for the first
and only time of the Elysian plains to which he was
ultimately to be carried by the deathless gods, according to
Proteus.^ Be this as it may, there are other imaginary
and romantic happy lands in Greek literature, and all are
what we should expect on the hypothesis sketched above :
there is the isle of Syria, at the turning-place of the sun,
where death never enters and sickness is unknown ; there is
the land of the Hyperboreans (west as well as north), to
which man never found his way by sea or land ; ^ there are
the islands of the Hesperides, the islands of the Blest, and
the dwellings, in the east and in the west, of the righteous
Ethiopians, who once more bring us to the neighbourhood
of Egypt. From the Greeks the rumour of this wonder-
land spread to the Celts ; and Irish literature is full of
tales telling, as The Voyage of Bran tells,^ of a happy island
from which the man who discovers it cannot return — an
island in which, according to the Adventures of Connla, there
was no death and no sin ; and, according to the tale of
Cuchulinn's Sick Bed, there are all manner of delights.
When, however, the western world has thus become a mere
wonderland, it inevitably becomes confused with the far-off
land, which also in course of time becomes a merely
romantic conception ; and fairy islands and enchanted moun-
tains become the scene of exactly the same kind of romantic
adventures.
1 Homer, Ocl. xv. 403. - Pindar, Pyth. x. 30.
^ K. Meyer, The Voyage of Bran, 142 ; cf. Classical Review, x. ii. 121-5
(March 1896).
CHAPTEE XXII
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS
Thus far we have been engaged in tracing the evolution of
the primitive philosophical theory of a ghost-land, and have
seen it successively assume the shapes of a far-off land, an
underground world, a western island or other abode of the
blessed, a happy other-world in the sun or sky, until at last
ghosts and ghost-land alike are dissolved by an advanced
philosophy into the ocean of divine essence. It is time,
therefore, to recall to mind that, even when the belief in
ghost-land first arose, there was another view as to man's
future state, inconsistent indeed but coexistent nevertheless
with the ghost-land theory : it was that after death man
rejoined his totem and assumed the shape of the plant or
animal that he worshipped. We have therefore now to
trace the career of this view. In most, the vast majority, of
cases it had no career. The people which held the view
were either progressive or they were not. If they were not,
then ex hypothesi no development in their views took place :
the two views as to the future state remained, as amongst
the Zulus, inconsistent and coexistent. On the other hand,
if the people were progressive, then everything in totemism
that was capable of being taken up into the higher forms of
religion which supervened was so transformed, and the rest —
including this particular feature of totemism — lingered on as
a mere survival, in the shape of tales of men being changed
into animals, and, in out-of-the-way and backward places, in
the belief that such changes still take place. It may there-
fore seem at first sight as though in no case could there be
any development of this particular feature of totemism, namely,
a belief in the posthumous transformation of man into a
314
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 315
plant or animal (a different belief from that in metem-
psychosis or the transmigration of souls — as different as an
acorn is from an oak). As a matter of fact, there is only
one combination of circumstances under which the develop-
ment in question has ever taken place ; that is, the contact of
a more advanced religion, holding the doctrine of retribution
in a developed form, with a less advanced religion, adhering
to the belief that after death man rejoins his totem. That
contact, moreover, must take place under peculiar circum-
stances : the two religions must exist side by side in the
same community, political or social ; and the higher religion
must be one bent on finding room within itself for the beliefs
of all sections of the social or political community in which
it is the dominant force. Now, in the ancient world there
were, from the nature of the case, only two countries in
which this peculiar combination could occur. They were
Egypt and India. Let us begin with Egypt.
Ancient religions knew no dogma and consequently no
heresies. The only one which was an exclusive religion and
whose God was a " jealous " God, was the Hebrew religion.
To this exclusiveness and jealousy is due the fact that the
Jews remained monotheists ; while the toleration which
other peoples showed to foreign worships, though it led to
polytheism, facilitated political growth by means of synoi-
Jcismos} In any large community, and particularly in a state
formed, like Egypt, by the amalgamation of many small
states, there will be found various strata of belief, from the
lowest superstition to the highest form of religion capable of
existing in the given time and place. The beliefs which are
held by the wealthiest and most cultured classes will find
expression in the literature and on the monuments of the
nation ; the beliefs of the masses will go unrecorded. Thus,
the monuments of ancient Egypt express the hopes, the fears,
the beliefs of the ruling classes. Those beliefs might or
might not be shared by the common people; they certainly
would not and could not be forced on them either by a
Church — which did not exist — or by the State. And if the
fellaheen had beliefs and rites of their own, they would find,
no place on the monuments, but they would not therefore
1 Supra, Ch. XVIII. " Syncretism and Polytheism."
316 INTRODUCTION fo HISTORY OF RELIGION
cease to exist. Thus, totemism continued to flourish, until
Greek and Eoman times, in the rites and customs of the
common people, though the religion of the ruling classes had
more than half emerged from the totemistic stage even in
the time of the earliest monuments.
N'ow, just as the animal names and half-animal forms of
the gods depicted on the monuments betray their totemistic
origin,^ so the representations of the future state betray the
existence of a large number of persons who had not yet cast
aside the belief that after death they would rejoin the totem,
in favour of the newer belief that they would go to the plains
of Aalu. The older totemistic belief must have been shared,
at this time, by some proportion of the more cultured classes,
for we find from the monuments that, as many departed souls
preferred going to Aalu to union with Osiris, so many
preferred — and were allowed, in the opinion of their class —
to migrate into some animal. But what marks this belief as
different from and an advance upon the simple totemistic
faith, is, first, that the deceased may migrate into any animal
he pleased — this was evidently because there were many
different totems, and each man would be sure to choose his
own ; and, next, that it was only the good who were allowed
to do this. Thus the retribution theory held by one portion
of the community has influenced and modified the totemism
of another section : it is only on condition of conforming to
the moral standard of the time — a high one — that the
totemist was allowed to conform to the practice of his
fathers and join them in animal shape. On the other hand,
it is clear that as yet we have by no means reached metem-
psychosis. Let us go on.
In the long course of advancing civilisation, the cultured
classes of ancient Egypt all dropped the belief that a man
ought to rejoin his totem after death. Aalu and Osiris
triumphed, and the belief that souls migrated posthumously
into plants and animals survived amongst the educated
no longer as a religious conviction, but simply as an echo of
what once had been an ordinary thing, but now was simply
an incident of romance. Of such a romance we have an
example in the tale of Batta, contained in a papyrus of the
' Supra, pp. 124 fF.
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 317
nineteenth or perhaps the eighteenth century: as often as Batta
is killed in one shape he reappears in another — a flower, a
bull, a tree, a man. With the decay of totemism amongst
the cultured, first the moral obligation to migrate into the
totem animal had relaxed and the permission to assume any
form whatever had been acted on ; and then the belief had
lost its religious character and passed into the nature of
romance.
Amongst the uneducated, however, totemism still con-
tinued to exist ; and — whether it was that the ranks of
condemned souls were supposed to be recruited most largely
from amongst the uneducated, or that the assumption of
animal shape w^as at last thought an unworthy reward of
virtue — the doctrine came to be held that the wicked soul
" was sentenced to the various torments of hell, or to wander
like a vampire between heaven and earth, or else doomed to
transmigrate into the bodies of animals, until permitted to
regain its original body and undergo a fresh trial." ^ Thus
in Egypt the artificial combination of the retribution theory
with totemism at last produced a real theory of metem-
psychosis ; and, for the purpose of avoiding confusion between
the Egyptian and the Indian forms of the belief in the
transmigration of souls, it is important to note three things :
the first is that it is only the wicked who are doomed by the
Egyptian theory to transmigration; the next is that Egyptian
transmigration is a circular process — the soul of a man
migrates into animals, birds, fish, but finally returns to its
human form ; the third is that there is no escape from the
cycle when once it has started, it is only after reaching
human form again that the soul has another trial and another
chance of becoming an Osiris. Bearing these facts in mind,
let us turn to India.
A happy other-world in the sun or sky was known in
India as early as the time of the Vedas,^ and by the sixth
century B.C. an elaborate hell had been worked out by the
dominant religion. In India, totemism was to be found ;
indeed, well-marked traces of it survive to the present day.^^
In India, as in Egypt, the dominant religion and the lower
1 Sayce, Hdt. i.-iii. 345. ^ jq-^tt, 02;. dt. 320.
2 Crooke, Folk-Lore of Northern India^ ch. viii.
318 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
forms acted and reacted on one another, with the result that
the retribution theory of the former had to be reconciled
with the belief of the totemist in a posthumous transforma-
tion into the shape of the plant or animal totem. " Thus in
the Chandogya Upanishad we read : ' Those whose conduct
has been good will quickly attain some good birth, birth as
a Brahmana or as a Kshatriya or a Vaisya ; . . . ' and in the
Kaustutaki Brahmana Upanishad : ' . . . he is born either as
a worm, or a grasshopper, or a fish, or a bird, or a lion, or a
boar, or a serpent, or a tiger, or a man, or some other
creature, according to his deeds and his knowledge.' " ^ Here
we have a genuine theory of transmigration of souls : the
simple totemist belief has been enlarged so as to meet the
views of those who, not being totemists, were not bound to
be changed into any one particular animal, and man has been
introduced into the list of metamorphoses. But though, in
India as in Egypt, the totemist faith has been generalised
and dissociated from the totem animal, and though in both
countries the migrating soul may return to human form, here
all resemblance ceases. In Egypt, metempsychosis was first
made a means of rewarding the righteous exclusively, and
then exclusively an instrument for punishing the wicked.
But in India it was applied to both good and bad alike : the
retribution theory was infused into metempsychosis — all men
were born again, but the good got a good birth, the bad a
bad one, according to their deeds and deserts. In the next
place, there was a cycle of transformations in Egypt, with the
possibility of escape on the completion of the cycle. But in
India there was no cycle and no escape : the good got a good
birth, and then bad behaviour might cause him to be reborn
lower in the scale — but whether the soul behaved well or ill,
it always had to be born again.
Now, to the pessimist the prospect of living for ever, in
one form or another, is an evil. It was a pessimist, therefore,
Gotama, who revolted against the Brahminist doctrine of the
transmigration of souls. Gotama, the " enlightened," the
Buddha, struck at the root of the theory he attacked by
denying the existence of the soul altogether — he also denied
the existence of a God — therefore there could be no trans-
^ Rhys Davids, Hibbcrt Lecture, 81.
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 319
migration of souls. What did take place, according to the
Buddha, was transmission (not transmigration) of harma,
character (not soul). The good and evil that men do live
after them — not in the changes, good or bad, which their
actions bring about during their own lifetime, or in the
effects they produce on their contemporaries or in the
memory of those who come after them, but — in a fresh
individuality, a fresh ego, which never would have come into
being at all, had it not been for the desire of existence
entertained by the previous member of the chain, and which
is good or bad according as he was good or bad. Plato's
doctrine — based upon the Egyptian view — is similar and
simpler : he allows the existence of a soul, which is enamoured
of the delights of the body, and so even when it has escaped
from one body returns to another, because it craves after
existence and the bodily delights that go therewith. Accord-
ing to Buddhism, there is no soul : it is the craving after
existence and corporeal pleasures which results in renewed
existence ; and therefore it is the extinction (nirvana) of this
craving (not the extinction of the soul, for there is no soul)
which is the Buddhist's object.^ This extinction of the
desires men can accomplish by being righteous. Thus the
motive of the Buddhist is annihilation, the giving up of the
craving for a future life of any kind, even in heaven. In
any given chain of existences, the karma of that chain is
transmitted ; and if the karma take the form of an ever-
weakenmg desire for existence and ever-increasing righteous-
ness, there will come a time when the desire will cease, and
" then no new link will be formed in the chain of existence ;
there will be no more birth ; for birth, decay, and death,
grief, lamentation, and despair, will have come, so far as
regards that chain of lives, for ever to an end." ^
Thus the goal of Buddhism was the extinction of exist-
ence, just as in Egypt the transmigration of the soul was
terminated by the dissolution of the individual in the vague
of the One, the All, the divine essence, Osiris. But this
external resemblance must not blind us to the real difference
between the two theories. In Egypt it was only the bad,
not all men, who were doomed to transmigration. In Egypt
1 Rhys Davids, Hihhcrt Lecture, 88-109. 2 jj^^^^ 99,
320 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
there was a cycle of changes to be suffered ; in Buddhism
karma is transmitted in a direct line, which may be continued
to infinity. In Egypt escape is possible only on the comple-
tion of the cycle, and then it is, first, conditional on the
favourable judgment of the god Osiris, and is, next, effected
by union with Osiris ; whereas in Buddhism, which denies
the existence both of the soul and of God, escape neither
depends on divine judgment nor consists in the absorption of
the soul into the divine essence.
In connection with the theory of metempsychosis, and
as a preliminary to our investigation of the subject of the
Mysteries, it remains for us to give a short account of
Pythagoreanism.
The unanimous voice of antiquity proclaimed that
Pythagoras (in the sixth century B.C.) taught the doctrine
of the transmigration of souls, and — with how much truth
may be questioned — that he derived the doctrine from
Egypt, and that he himself remembered his experiences in
his previous states, which, if true, would have made it
unnecessary, we might suppose, for him to learn the fact
of transmigration from anyone else, Egyptian or other.
Empedocles, a follower of Pythagoras, taught — doubtless in
accord with his master's teaching — that the cause of trans-
migration w^as sin, that the term of transmigration was thirty
thousand years, that he himself had served that term, and
that finally his soul, like others in the same case, would
become a god — which indeed it had been from the beginning.^
Pindar, who was a contemporary of Empedocles, and picked
up some Pythagoreanism on his visits to Sicily, also lets us
see that it was only the wicked who were doomed to
transmigration, the good went straight to a happy other-
world ; and that, after transmigration and return to human
form, the soul had to be judged by Persephone, and might
then enter the abodes of bliss. In quite recent years there
have been discovered in graves near Thurii and Petelia, that
is in the home of Pythagoreanism, three golden tablets
bearing inscriptions.^ These inscriptions contain directions
to the deceased Pythagorean with whom they were buried, to
^ Jevons, History of Greek Literature,"^ 105.
- Dieterich, NeJcyia, 85.
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 321
enable him to find his way about in the underworld, thus :
" On the left you will find a stream and near it a white
poplar : go not near that stream ; you will find another, cool
water flowing from the mere of Memory ; in front of it are
guards. Say, ' I am the child of earth and starry sky ; I am
of heavenly origin, as ye yourselves know full well. I am
parched and perishing with thirst ; give me at once cool
water flowing from the mere of Memory,' and they will give
you of the divine stream to drink." ^ The tablets were
buried with the deceased, because they possessed a magical
power to direct and protect him. The name of Persephone
occurs on two of them, thus confirming what Pindar says ;
the cause of transmigration is said to be sin, its nature a
cycle (kvk\o<;), and the soul that escapes from the cycle
becomes a god — thus confirming Empedocles. To this we
must add that when the soul is said to become a god or
God,2 and still more when it is said to be a child of earth
and starry sky,^ the expression was one which could be taken
in two senses, a religious sense and a philosophical sense. It
could be taken by the Pythagorean to mean either that his
individual personality would be dissolved in the One, the All,
the sky ; or that his personal identity would continue in a
blissful life in a happy other-world. The latter is the view
which commends itself to Pindar (in his second Olympian),
the former makes itself felt in Euripides,* and is expressed
in the funeral inscription on the grave of the Athenians
who fell at Potidaea in B.C. 431.^ But the average man
did not distinguish the two views very clearly : whether
the place was the sky, or the ether, or Olympus, or Elysium,
he did not curiously inquire — he used all the terms
convertibly.^
This brief sketch will suffice to show that Pythagoreanism
is very different, not only from Buddhism, which is not a
belief in the transmigration of souls, but also from the Indian
doctrine, which is. The idea that Pythagoreanism was
1 The iiiscription is in Kaibel, /. G. S. I. 641, and Dieterich, loc. cit.
- debs iyevov i^ avOpuiirov, Kaibel, /. G. S. I. 642.
^ 77JS Trais et'/Al Kai ovpavov aarepbevTos, Kaibel, 641.
^Supp. 531. ^ C. I. A.i. 442.
^ This is apparent from the various funeral inscriptions given in Dieterich,
106-7.
21
322 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
borrowed from India is impossible : it differs from the Indian
doctrine in all four of its cardinal points, namely, the cause of
transmigration (sin), the nature (a cycle), the fact of escape,
and the mode of escape (trial before a deity). Next, if
Pythagoreanism were as independent, in its origin, of the
Egyptian doctrine as it is of the Indian, it ought to differ
equally in its character. But the four points in which it
differs from the Indian theory are four points (not the only
points) in which it is identical with the Egyptian. This,
combined with the tradition of antiquity that Pythagoras
derived his doctrine from Egypt, would sufhce to prove its
Egyptian origin. But there are further resemblances. The
Egyptian philosophy which taught that the soul returns to
the divine essence from which it sprang, is reproduced in the
Pythagorean teaching that the soul emanated from and
finally returns to the ether, the starry sky. And just as
the Egyptian philosophers adopted religious terminology to
convey their speculations, and taught that to become God
or a god, Osiris or an Osiris, was the same thing as being
merged in the divine essence, so Pythagoreanism taught
that for the soul to become 6eo<; or Bal/jLcop was the same
thing as for it to dissolve into ether or into the starry sky,
of which it was the offspring. But even granting that
Pythagoras could and did invent out of his own head a
theory exactly resembling in its cardinal points a doctrine
which in Egypt was the result of slow centuries of evolu-
tion, still we must think it strange that the minor details
and non-essential accessories should be the same. Let us
illustrate this point. In the Pythagorean inscription already
quoted, the departed soul is represented as anxiously eager
to drink of cool, flowing water. No such anxiety is ever
expressed in literature, as far as I am aware, by any Greek
ghost not holding Pythagorean doctrines.-^ But in the
inscriptions on tombs in ancient Egypt ^ the deceased
commonly prays for this lustral water. This may, however,
be a fortuitous agreement, for libations of water are offered
in ancestor-worship by the Hindus. But the Hindus did not
1 In Homer, ghosts are offered water {Od. x. 520), but they prefer blood
{Od. xi. 49).
2 For examples, see Renouf, Hibhert Lecture, 127-41.
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 323
conceive some supernatural being as giving the water to the
deceased, whereas, as we have seen, the Pythagoreans did.
And, oddly enough, so did the Egyptians. And again,
though such an idea as the Pythagorean notion of super-
natural " guards " giving the ghost water to drink is
unknown elsewhere in Greece, it is an ordinary feature of
the pictures on Egyptian tombs : " the most usual representa-
tion of this is the picture in which the goddess Nut pours
out the water of life to the deceased, from the interior of a
sycamore-tree. In a picture published by M. Chabas, the
deceased kneels before Osiris, and receives from him the
water of life from a vessel under which is written cinch ha,
' that the soul may live.' " ^ Again, in the Egyptian Book of
the Bead the deceased is directed to protect himself, in his
long and perilous journey through the underworld with its
monsters of all kinds, not only by the use of amulets and
talismans, but by proclaiming " I am Osiris." ^ So the
Pythagorean ghost is to proclaim that he is divine. Again,
it is not likely that the idea of issuing a guide to the under-
world occurred straight off to Pythagoras, whereas the
Egyptian Book of the Bead took centuries to form. If it be
said that a small gold tablet is not to be compared with the
Book of the Bead, which has hundreds of chapters, the
answer is that the verses on the Pythagorean tablets are but
extracts from a greater work ; ^ and that in Egypt the most
important of the talismans which were buried (like the
Pythagorean tablets) with the deceased was one which had
an extract from the Book of the Bead (namely, chapter xxx.)
engraved upon it : " the rubric directs it to be placed upon
the heart of the deceased person." *
The foreign origin of Pythagoreanism is further attested
by the fact that its attachments to native Greek beliefs are
so few, so slight, and so forced. Thus, in order to find a
footing for the doctrine that the soul of man emanated from
the divine essence, that man was a compound of earth and
ether, and so returned, body to earth and soul to ether,^
1 Renoiif, 141. 2 j^^-^^ ^92^
^ Dietericli, Nekyia, 85. "* Renouf, 192.
•^ C. I. A. i. 442 (the Potidpean inscription) : aidrip ixk(i i/'u^as vireSi^aro,
324 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the Pythagorean was forced in despair to clutch at a text in
Hesiod which taught not that men but that gods were first
created from the union of Earth and Sky.^ Again, in Egypt
it was right that the supreme god, Osiris, should judge the
departed ; and he could properly be present in the nether
world, because the Egyptians believed that he, the sun,
travelled every night through the underworld. In Greece,
however, Zeus, the supreme god, had nothing to do with the
nether world ; the god Hades was already appropriated to
the old dreary ghost-land ; so the Pythagorean had to be
content with Persephone as the deity who regulated admission
to the abodes of bliss. Again, the idea that souls had any-
where to go to, except to the old cheerless, sunless ghost-land,
was absolutely unknown to the Greeks. So, in order to
form a conception of an abode of bliss for the righteous dead,
Pindar and other poets drew upon the descriptions of Elysium
and the fortunate isles,^ contained in epic poetry ; and thus
eventually the plains of Elysium came to be, what in Greece
they had never been before, namely, the abode of the dead.
In fine, there is nothing in Pythagoreanism which is not
to be found in the religion of ancient Egypt ; and there
is much which is unintelligible, if taken by itself, but is at
once seen to have a meaning when restored to the Egyptian
context from which it was taken. The doctrine which in
Egypt took centuries to develop, cannot have been invented
in Magna Graecia by one man, though one man might well
bring back from Egypt a mixture of the leading doctrines and
some unimportant accessories and introduce them in the
form of a " mystery " into his own country. Again, the
theory of the transmigration of souls is not a simple but a
complex idea. It is not an idea w^hich could spring up
wherever totemism existed, else it would be as widespread
as are the animal and half-animal gods which totemism has
everywhere left behind it. Metempsychosis is a complex
idea, it is a combination of the retribution theory with a
^ The plirase in the Pythagorean inscription, 777s Trats el/xl Kai ovpavoO
darepoevTos, is from Hesiod, Theog. 105 :
adavdruiv lepov yivos aiev iovTcov,
ot Tijs T d^ey^povTo Kal Ovpavov darepdevros,
2 Stqjra, pp. 312, 313.
THE TRANSMIGRATION OF SOULS 325
living belief in the transformation of men into animals ; and
this combination is one which could not have taken place in
Magna G-raecia, because neither of the elements of which the
theory is composed was in existence there. Totemism had
been transmuted into a higher form of belief even in
Mycenaean times ; the retribution theory was as yet unknown.
In the time of Homer and Hesiod, the souls of all men, good
and bad alike, went to one and the same place, the under-
ground ghost-land. Even after their time there is no hint
of any difference in the future state of the good and of the
bad, until the time of the Pythagorean and other mysteries ;
and then such references are always made in connection with
the mysteries, and as part of the doctrine taught at the
mysteries. Why this should be, and why the retribution
theory should have begun to stir the minds both of the
Greeks and of the Jews about the same time, i.e. from the
time of the Captivity of the Jews onwards, are the questions
to which we must address ourselves in the next chapter.
Let us therefore sum up and conclude this.
There are certain elements of the belief in a future world
that recur so constantly and under such different circum-
stances in the various religions which we have examined in
this chapter, that we must regard them as latent in the
human mind, and ready to manifest themselves whenever the
conditions requisite to evoke them are brought into play.
They are, that the soul continues to exist after death, that its
fate then depends upon its deeds in this life, that it must
undergo a transformation of some kind and rejoin the object
of its worship. In two of the religions that we have
mentioned, those of the Greeks and the Jews, these elements
had not been synthesised before the sixth century, and we
have yet to see whether and how far they were combined
subsequently. In other religions, e.g. those of India and of
Egypt, the synthesis had been effected to some extent ; but
that the synthesis was not one which could permanently
recommend itself as satisfactory to the religious consciousness,
is demonstrated by the fact of its leading in the one country
to the Buddhist denial of the existence both of the soul and
of God, and in the other to a pantheism which equally denied
personal immortality. If we seek for reasons why these
326 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
attempts failed to produce a faith capable of satisfying the
religious consciousness, the first fact that strikes us is that
they were premature. While the continuance theory was
still so strong in its hold upon the minds of men that they
could conceive no future life except as an exact reproduction
of the conditions and activities of this life, the retribution
theory was fused with it, so that the rewards and punish-
ments were pictured in the grossest and most materiahstic
fashion. On the other hand, before the belief that man
must undergo a posthumous transformation had been
dissociated from the idea of transformation into animal or
plant form, it was infused with the retribution theory, so that
the soul could not escape from a material body on this view,
any more than from its material occupations and delights on
the other. A further reason why these attempts failed to
satisfy the religious consciousness, is that they did not proceed
from it : they were in their origin the speculations of
primitive philosophy. They were indeed adopted into
religion, but, in the case both of India and Egypt, they were
fatal to it. The after-death communion with God which
they offered was either purely formal and external, as must
be the case when there are many gods for the soul to meet ;
or absolute absorption and extinction. That communion
during life was at once a condition and an anticipation of
what was to be hereafter, was a conception which could not
arise where sacrifice had degraded into the giving of some-
thing in order to get more. In other words, no religious
synthesis of the elements of belief in a future state could be
effected as long as, on the one hand, that belief was out of
relation to the central act of worship, the sacrificial meal ;
or as long, on the other hand, as the sacramental character
of that act was obscured. We have therefore to consider in
the next chapter how far these two conditions were fulfilled
by the religious movements amongst the Greeks and Jews
from the sixth century B.C. onwards.
CHAPTER XXIII
THE MYSTEEIES
The sixth century B.C. shows a hitherto unheard-of and
inconceivable innovation in rehgion. Hitherto the only
circle of worshippers conceivable had been one the members
of which were united by blood ; the only religious community
to which a man could belong was that into which he had
been born. In the nomad stage of society the tribal god was
worshipped by the members of the tribe and by them alone :
the same hostility to all other tribes which made " strangers "
synonymous with " enemies " made it impossible for any but
the tribe to approach the tribal god. The tribe, and
therefore the worshippers of the god, consisted only of those
born into the tribe. Even when circumstances compelled
the tribe to abandon its nomad habits, to settle finally in one
local habitation, and to form a permanent fusion, social,
political, and religious, with its neighbours, the new and
enlarged community thus formed consisted exclusively of the
members of the amalgamating tribes and their blood-
descendants : citizenship — membership of the new political
community — was an inherited privilege ; and the only gods
whose cults were open to a man were those of the state to
which he belonged by birth. On the one hand, the local
cults were jealously closed to all but citizens of the place.
On the other, the citizen was not free to choose his religion :
the only gods to whom he had access were those of the
community into which he was born.
But in the sixth century B.C. we find in the ancient world
new rites and cults arising which differ from all previous
ones, first in that they were open to all men, and next
in that membership was voluntary and spontaneous. They
327
328 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
were not always or necessarily new religions, for in them the
old gods of the nation might still be worshipped, though
with new rites. They can scarcely be called sects even, for
their members were not required to give up the ordinary
hereditary worship of the state to which they belonged. But
the idea was now for the first time expressed in action that
a man could belong to a religious community which was
distinct from the state. The possibility of choice between
the worship to which he was born and another was now
before him. Freedom of choice entails personal responsibility
for the choice made, and makes it necessary that the man
should decide between competing claims in the tribunal of
his own heart and conscience. Such reflection and judgment
in matters religious eventually deprive a traditional and
■ hereditary religion of much of the advantage which, in its
competition with newer forms, it derives from the fact that
it is hereditary and traditional ; and the habit of reflection,
even if it finds none of the newer forms acceptable, cannot
fail to reveal some of the weak points in the older. Thus
the innovations of the sixth century in course of time
/ contributed their share to the disintegration of the antique
religions and to the preparation of the soil for the reception
of Christianity ; and no one who reflects how great is the
strength of custom and tradition, and how slow is the growth
of the critical faculty, will consider the time too long for
the effect. Eather the marvel is, first that a new form of
religious communion should ever have arisen, and next that
it should have been allowed by the dominant religions to
exist for so long. These, then, are the two points that we
must begin with.
The new movement had its origin in the Semitic area of
the ancient civilised world, and in the national calamities
which befell the Northern Semites in the seventh and sixth
centuries B.c.^ The strength of the national religions of
antiquity lay largely in the fact that they were national.
But in that fact there also lurked the possibility of danger.
As long as the nation prospered, the relations between the
national gods and their worshippers were taken to be
satisfactory ; but when political disaster overtook the state,
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of (lie Semites, 3r»7 ff.
THE MYSTERIES 329
the inference was that the national gods were unwilling or
unable to protect their worshippers. The worshipper might
therefore seek to avert the divine wrath or he might seek to
flee it ; but either course was bound to introduce modifications
into the national religion and to mark a new departure, for
in either case the worshipper sought for closer communion,
whether with the national or other and more powerful gods.
The consequences of the closer attention thus concentrated
on the facts of the religious consciousness and the inner
revelation thereby gained were twofold. First, in the place
of the gloomy anticipations of a dismal abode after death in
Sheol, a confidence and hopefulness with regard to the
future life began to manifest themselves, which find their
highest expression, " with extraordinary splendour," ^ in the
Psalms. The second consequence was one which affected
in various ways and degrees the conception and performance
of the central rite of religion, the act of sacrifice.
Amongst the Hebrews, the effect produced upon the
more spiritual minds took the form of the conviction that
animal sacrifice was valueless and meaningless. The gift
theory of sacrifice, the idea that the worshipper presented
offerings in return for which he was entitled to receive
blessings, already stood condemned. Now it became clear
that communion with God was not to be effected by the
blood of bulls and rams, or by any physical, mechanical
means ; and the necessity of the sacrifice of a broken and
contrite spirit was inculcated. This, however, did not satisfy
the yearnings of those whose faith required for its support
the performance of some outward and visible act of worship.
They felt, as men always have felt, that sacrifice, to be real,
to be perfect and complete, must be in some sense external
to themselves. They were warned by their national
calamities, the tokens of divine wrath, that the sacrifices
which they had customarily offered were not an adequate
means of communion. But the Northern Semites were
incapable of rising to the height of the more spiritual minds
amongst the Hebrews, and of casting aside animal sacrifice ;
and they followed a via media. The customary sacrifices
they abandoned, and they sought for other forms of sacrifice,
^ Mr. Gladstone in tlie North American Review for March 1896.
330 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
unusual, extraordiuary, and therefore presumably more
potent. Such sacrifices, owing to the uneven rate at which
religion progresses in different districts, were forthcoming.
Even where religion generally had advanced far beyond the
stage of animal-worship, survivals of such worship were to be
found here and there in out-of-the-way and backward places.
Generally, all that was left of the religious respect paid to
the original animal god was a vague feeling that the
creature was not to be touched by man — was " unclean."
But at some obscure sanctuaries and in some unprogressive
rituals the animal still continued to be offered in sacrifice;
and though the fact that the animal had once been a god
might have disappeared from memory, the sacrifice of an
animal almost universally held to be unclean would be
deemed mysterious by all and by some even offensive. It
was therefore to such " abominations " as the sacrifice of dogs,
swine, mice, and horses that the Northern Semites resorted
in order to avert the divine wrath. In some cases this
revival of ancient modes of religion was carried still further ;
and a direct reversion to the primitive conception of sacrifice
produced a new form of religious community. Where the
bond of blood-relationship is the only tie which holds a
community together, such expressions as that the tribesmen
are of one blood or one flesh are understood literally, in the
most concrete, physical sense ; and it is to the joint meals of
the clansmen as much as to their common origin that this
physical unity of the kin is ascribed. To the Arab the life
of the stranger who partakes of his meal is, for a time at
anyrate, sacred, because for the time he becomes of one
blood with him. The same view as to the effect of commen-
sality is at the bottom of the Eoman confarreatio, and is
implied in the Greek worship of Zeus Xenios. In the case
of the sacrificial meal the bond created between the par-
ticipants was one of peculiar force and sanctity, because
all became partakers in the divine life of the sacred animal.
This conception had indeed, as a rule, been obliterated in
course of time by the growth of the gift theory of sacrifice
and the degradation of the animal from its original sanctity
to the level of a mere chattel. But the spread of the gift
theory had not been so uniform or so complete as entirely
THE MYSTERIES 331
and everywhere to destroy the original sacramental character
of the sacrificial meal, and accordingly it becomes a prominent
and indeed in its consequences the most important feature of
the religious revivalism of the sixth century B.C. Hitherto
the only religious organisation to which a man could belong
had been the kin or community into which he was born ;
and now that the political disasters which threatened the
very existence of the political community testified to the
permanent estrangement of the gods of the community from
their worshippers, men's minds were roused to look about
for some other religious community in which to find shelter
from the divine wrath. No such organisation was in existence,
or rather those which existed were not available, for strange
gods had each his own circle of worshippers closed to all
outside it and open only to those born into it. But though
no open circle was in existence, the unifying efficacy of the
sacrificial meal made it possible to form one ; and in it we
have the principle of voluntary religious associations, which
were (unlike that of the community) open to all, and
membership in which did not depend upon birth, but was
constituted by partaking in the divine life and blood of the
sacred animal.
Thus in the Semitic area the characteristic features of
the new movement of the sixth century B.C. were, first, a
tendency to discard the gift- theory of sacrifice and seek a
closer communion with God ; next, a more hopeful view of
the life after death. The gift theory might be discarded in
favour either of the sacrifice of a contrite heart, or of the
mystic sacrifice of a divine animal, or of religious association
constituted by the participation in the divine life of the
sacred animal ; but in any case the effort to draw nearer to
God was accompanied and marked by the greater confidence
with which man looked forward to the next world. In a
word, a religious basis was henceforth provided for that belief
in immortality which in its original shape had rather belonged
to primitive philosophy. In that respect the new movement
rose superior to the eschatology of the Egyptian and Indian
religions, for the eschatology of both was not generated by
the religious spirit, but was due to the incorporation of early
philosophical speculations into those religions — an incorpora-
332 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
tion which eventually in Egypt led to the denial of individual
immortality, and in India to the Buddha's denial of the
existence of the soul at all. But though hopefulness as to
the future world was now associated with and conditional on
spiritual communion in this life, the attempt to bring the
religious belief in the future life into relation with the
central rite of religion, sacrifice, was either not made or was
made prematurely. Where animal sacrifice was discarded,
no external sacrificial rite was left with which the belief
could be connected. Where mystic sacrifices were revived,
the belief was indeed associated with the rite, but the
association was premature, because the rite itself had no
permanent vitality : the reversion to mystic sacrifices merely
escaped from the error of the gift theory to fall into a
recrudescence of barbarous ritual acts, such as those of
dismembering the divine animal and drinking its blood.
The wave of religious revivalism which had its centre
of diffusion in the Semitic area, was speedily propagated over
the Greek cities of Asia Minor, over Hellas itself, and
finally over Italy. The widespread conviction amongst the
Northern Semites that divine wrath could be averted by
extraordinary, piacular sacrifices, was one easily communicated
and readily picked up and conveyed to Greece by individuals.
And it was probably in the form of purificatory ceremonies
and sacrifices that the new movement first travelled to
Greece. Thus it was from Crete that the Athenians, for
instance, in B.C. 596 summoned Epimenides ^ to purify their
city, when they wished to cleanse themselves from the
pollution caused by the murder of Cylon's followers at the
altars of the gods. He ordered sheep, black and white, to be
driven in all directions from the Acropolis ; and when they
had wandered as far as they would, they w^ere to be sacrificed
wherever they lay down ; and the altars on which they were
to be immolated were not to be dedicated to any known god
by name, but simply to the proper deity.^ Hence, long after,
altars might be found in various places in Attica which bore
no dedication, and were therefore popularly known as the
nameless altars or as altars of the unknown gods.
^ Aristotle, 'A^". ttoX. c. 1.
- T'^ irpoariKovTL, Dloj. Ltert. i. 110 and 112.
THE MYSTERIES 333
It was, however, not only cities that required purification
from poUution ; private individuals also might need to be
reconciled with the offended gods ; and ministers to their
spiritual wants were forthcoming, though they have not,
like Epimenides or Empedocles after him, bequeathed their
names to posterity. Collectively they were known as
agyrtce, a Greek substantive derived from a verb,^ meaning
to beg alms or make a collection, in order to defray the expense
of the sacrifice which was an essential part of their mysteries.
The agyrtes professed by means of his rites to purify men
from the sins they had themselves committed, or from an
ancestral curse or hereditary guilt, and so to secure to those
whom he purified an exemption from the evil lot in the next
world which awaited those who were not initiated. The
agyrtes travelled from city to city with his apparatus — a pile
of sacred books, a tame serpent, a drum, a chest, a magic
mirror, etc. — laden on a donkey's back.^ Arrived at his
temporary destination, he pitched his tent, which also was
carried by the donkey, and in which the mysteries were to
be celebrated ; and then, with attendants to carry a portable
shrine, i.e. " a miniature temple on a salver or board," ^ and
to beat the drum, he proceeded to parade the streets in
procession, he himself dancing ecstatically to the sound of
the drum, and either carrying the sacred serpent or else
gashing his legs or cutting his tongue till the blood flowed
from it.* Thus he succeeded in attracting a crowd, which
he drew after him to his tent, where those who chose con-
sulted him, and by the aid of his books and his magic
mirror, which probably he used in the same way as it is
used in Egypt at the present day, he replied to them.
But in all this there was nothing to make any such
permanent change in Greek religion as did actually follow
upon this invasion of Greece by Oriental rites. The
calamities which befell Greek states were at this time merely
casual, not catastrophic, as in the Semitic area ; and there
1 ayeipeiv. ^"Ovos dyuv (ivvr-qpia, Ar. Frogs, 159.
^ Ramsay, Church in the Roman Empire,'^ 127. Such were the silver shrines
of Diana of Acts xix. Cf. the Oeo^opoi and pa6(popot in Ignatius, Ephes. § 9 ;
and for a picture of them, Schreiber, KuUhist, Bilderatlas, xvii. 10.
** Lucian, Lucius^ 35.
\
334 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
was therefore no permanent demand for the services of such
men as Epimenides and Empedocles. On the other hand,
the agyrtce were itinerant, and their ministrations inter-
mittent. In a word, to account for the permanent changes
wrought in Greece by the wave of revivalism which spread
from the Northern Semites over Hellas, it is obvious, first,
that there must have been some more permanent motive at
work upon the Greek mind than the fear inspired by casual
political disasters, and next, that there must have been some
more stationary and permanent organisation for the propaga-
tion of the new movement than was provided by the itinerant
and intermittent agency of the agyrtce. Now the Greek with
his joyous nature had no abiding sense of sin, and if he
welcomed the strange sacrifices and stirrinc? rites from the
East, it was partly because there was in them the promise
of a more satisfactory sacrament than the gift-sacrifices of the
traditional religion provided, and partly because they opened
up a brighter and more hopeful view of the life after death.
It is beyond doubt that other and less worthy motives were
also at work : love philtres, charms for bewitching enemies,
and spells generally, were both demanded and supplied ; and
for the agyrtes who supplied them an itinerant life was a
necessity, if only for the sake of escaping detection and
exposure. But with the agyrtes who settled definitely in one
place, founded a permanent religious association, and so gave
a guarantee of earnestness and faith in his mission, the case
is different — and it is with him that we now have to deal.
Amongst the religious associations of the Greeks ^ there
were certain societies, known variously as thiasi, erani, or
orgeones, the constitution of which is fairly well known to us
from inscriptions (usually votes of thanks to the officials).
The inscriptions do not carry us further back than the fourth
century B.C., but we have plenty of literary evidence of the
existence of these associations in the fifth century, and thiasi
are recognised even as early as B.C. 594, in the legislation of
Solon, as legal societies, the bye-laws of which were acknow-
ledged and enforced by the state, so far as they were not
in conflict with the law of the land.^ These thiasi were
^ For what follows, see Foucart, Des Associations Religicuses cJiez les Grccs,
2 Gardner and Jevons, Chxch Antiquities, 560.
THE MYSTERIES 335
voluntary associations for religious purposes, which differed
from the cult of the national gods in the fact that only
members of the state were admitted to the worship of the
state's gods, whereas the thiasi were open to all, to women,
to foreigners, to slaves, and to freed men ; and all members of
the society, whatever their origin, enjoyed the same rights.
But though all, without distinction of sex or origin, might
become members of a thiasus, there were certain conditions
to be fulfilled first : there was an entry - fee to pay, and
the officers of the society had to satisfy themselves that the
candidate for admission was suitable. The affairs of the
society were regulated by its " law " (i.e. its articles of associa-
tion) and by the decrees of the general assembly of the
members. The " law " laid down the conditions of admission
into the society and the circumstances under which members
might be expelled ; the times at which the assembly was to
hold its regular meetings ; the amount of subscription to be
paid by members, the means for enforcing payment, and the
circumstances under which delay in payment was allowed ;
the dues to be paid in money or kind by those who offered
sacrifices in the society's temple ; the purposes on which the
society's revenues might be expended ; the terms on which
money might be lent to members, and the security they were
to offer; the nature and value of testimonials voted to
benefactors ; the steps to be taken to enforce this " law,"
to carry out the decrees of the assembly, or to punish those
who injured the society.^ The general assembly, consisting
of all the members of society, had absolute control over
the affairs of the society, and met once a month for the
transaction of business. It elected annually the officers of
the society, who took an oath of obedience to it on entering
office, and on quitting office were again accountable to it.
Where the " law " of the society prescribed the duties of
an officer, he had only to obey it ; when cases arose not
foreseen by the law, he had to seek instructions from the
assembly. The officers included, besides a secretary and a
treasurer, a president,^ who represented the society when
1 Foucart, 13. The Greek terms are vd/xos, xJ/TjcpiafiaTa, and dyopd.
^ dpxi.dLaaLT7]s at Delos, dpx^po.vt.aT'q^ at Rhodes and at the Peirseeus,
apxepavos at Amorgos ; Foucart, 27.
336 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
necessary in the law-courts, but whose power is otherwise
vague and was probably rather honorific than real ; and
certain officials, sometimes called episcojn, sometimes epimeletcB^
who in some places had the right of convoking the assembly,
and in others shared the functions of the treasurer or the
secretary. All these officials were, so to speak, civil officers,
and were elected by the votes of the assembly. The religious
functions were discharged by a priest, priestess, or sacrificers,^
who were chosen by lot — a recognised mode of consulting the
divine will. The duties of the priest (or priestess) were to
conduct the sacrifices and the rites, to open and close the
temple at the proper times, to preside over the purification
/ and initiation of members, and to celebrate the mysteries, for
the performance of which the society existed. The funds of
the society were devoted, first to the purchase and maintenance
of a sanctuary,^ or sacred enclosure, containing a temple, a hall
in which to hold the sacred banquet, and other buildings ; next,
to defraying the cost of the monthly sacrifices ; third, to the
payment of salaries ; and last, not unfrequently to the burial
of deceased members. These societies were usually in debt or
in danger of it, and the treasurer (who was, when the society
could so contrive it, a man of means and generosity) not
uncommonly came to the rescue of the society with his private
purse. When the poorer members were assisted by the society,
it was not as a matter of charity but on the principle of a
mutual benefit society : the money was advanced on security,
and had to be repaid by the borrower. On the other hand,
an inscription recently published shows that the poorer
members of a society were sometimes charitably assisted by
the wealthier.*
The constitution of these societies, as described in the
last paragraph, is obviously modelled on the republican
institutions which prevailed in many of the Greek states
of the fourth century B.C., and cannot be earlier than that
period. In previous times it must have been different, and
^ ivlaKoiroi, iTn/xeXrjrai, also aivdiKoc or Xoyicrral. ^ lepoiroioL
■* Co7'2). Inscr. Atticarum, iv. ii. 6246, 12 : i(pp6vTi.aeu 8^ toO Kal roi>s
8r)fxoTiKovs /J.eT^x^'-^ ^'^^ dedopievojv virb tCov dpyeuvuv (piKavOpuiruv. The inscrip-
tion is not later than B.C. 159.
THE MYSTERIES 337
naturally much simpler. Probably in the beginning there
was only one official, the priest : the finances of the society
were not so great as to require a treasurer, nor its archives so
extensive as to call for a secretary. It was only with the
growth of the society, if it did grow (for many of these
associations probably never got beyond a rudimentary stage
of existence), that the number of members increased, the
revenues swelled, and the expenses of the ritual developed
so much that the priest became unable to manage the
whole, and that a division of labour became necessary
between a secretary, treasurer, president, and priest.^ The
ease and simplicity with which an agyvtes could found one
of these associations in their simplest form may be seen
from an inscription,^ which, though it is in date as late as
the second century of our era, is yet probably in spirit and
essentials true to its type. The inscription was discovered
in 1868 near the silver mines of Laureion in Attica, and
it shows how the worship of an Oriental deity, in this case
Men Tyrannos {i.e. the Sovereign Moon), might be introduced
into Greece. The worship of Men was widely spread over
Asia Minor : the image of the god figures on the coins of
nearly all the towns of Phrygia, Lydia, and Pisidia, as well
as on some of the monuments of Pamphylia, Caria, and
Thrace. The author of the inscription was a Lycian slave,
working in the mines for his owner, a Eoman proprietor ;
and it was the god Men himself, who, in a vision or dream,
bade Xanthos establish his cult : " I, Xanthos, a Lycian,
belonging to Caius Orbius, have consecrated the temple of
Men Tyrannos, in conformity with the will of the god."
To erect a temple was an undertaking beyond the resources
which Xanthos had at his disposal, so he simply appropriated
a deserted hereon and adapted it to his own purposes. As
founder and priest of the cult, he himself composed and
engraved (as the style and spelling sufficiently show) the
" law " of the new cult. In it he laid down the conditions
under which the temple might be used, sacrifices offered,
and erani or banquets held : no one who was " unclean "
might approach the temple, sacrifices might not be offered
without the co-operation of the founder, Xanthos, and in
1 Foucart, 26. 2 j;fo. 38 in Foucart, op. cU.
22
338 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
case of his death or absence his functions could only be
discharged by someone nominated by him in person.^
The " law " thus laid down by Xanthos was probably
somewhat simpler than that which formed the basis of
the earliest thiasi. Plato talks of the piles of books which
itinerant agyrtm carried about mth them,^ and they were
doubtless handed down by the original founder of a thiasiis
to his successors. These books contained, as we learn from
Plato, instructions as to the ritual to be observed in sacrifice ;
and, according to Demosthenes,^ it was from such sacred
books, belonging to the tJiiasus of Sabazios, that -^schines
read the formulae which had to be recited during the purifi-
cation and initiation of those who wished to be admitted to
these mysteries.
In these private mysteries, as in the public mysteries
which we shall have to describe hereafter, we have to
distinguish between the preliminary ceremonies of purification
and preparation and the actual rite for the celebration of
which the religious organisation, public or private, existed.
For the private mysteries we get our information mainly
from the passage of Demosthenes already referred to. The
exact order of proceedings, the precise acts to be performed
by the novice, his very attitude and gesture at each stage
of the proceedings, seem to have been prescribed in the ritual-
book ; and the function of the youthful ^^schines was to
read out these instructions so that the novice might know
what next to do. The first step in the preliminary ceremony
was to place the candidate under the protection of the
god, and this was done by throwing a fawn-skin round him.
In this act we note the survival or revival of one of the
oldest beliefs connected with animal-worship, namely, that the
animal god may reside in the skin of the animal just as
a tree-god may reside in the bough of a tree. In this faith,
totem tribes on solemn occasions clothe themselves in the
skin of the totem animal, and more advanced peoples made
idols of animal-gods by stuffing the hide, or later (as in Greece)
clothed a human-shaped idol with the skin.* When the
1 Foucart, 119 ff.
2 ^ij3\u}v de S/xadou irap^x^^'^^'- • • • 'f^^' ^^ dvTjiroKovffi, Rep. 364 E.
3 De Cor. § 259. ^ p^ug. viii. c. 37.
THE MYSTERIES 339
candidate had been thus commended to the god, the next
thing was that he should be purified. To this end, he
was stripped and made to crouch down upon the ground,
and then bowls of water were poured over him. In some
mysteries this purification by water was such a prominent
and important feature in the ceremony, that those who
practised it took their name from it, and were known
(and derided) as Bapt?e. In others, however, a more
startling and paradoxical mode of purification was in vogue :
the novice was cleansed with a mixture of clay and bran.
When these ceremonies, which were made the more awe-
inspiring by ecstatic ejaculations from the attendants, were
completed, the candidate was bidden to rise from his kneeling,
crouching position, and to cry out, Bad have I escaped and better
have I found — words which were intended to express the
conviction that he was now purified in heart and spiritually
prepared for the actual mystery, fivcrri'ipiov, the solemn
rite by which he was to be admitted into fellowship with
the god and his worshippers. That this rite was in the
nature of a sacramental meal, is obvious. The main expenses
of these private religious associations are shown by the
inscriptions to have consisted in the sacrifices and sacred
banquets, and in the building and maintenance of the
edifices in which to celebrate them. The leading character-
istic of the religious revival of the sixth century B.C., both
in the Semitic area and as transplanted into Greece, is a
reaction against the gift theory of sacrifice, and a reversion
to the earlier sacramental conception of the offering and the
sacrificial meal as affording actual communion with the god
whose flesh and blood were consumed by his worshippers.
To try to discover anything else in the case of the more
respectable of the private mysteries, to seek for something
secret and mysterious, is chercJie?' midi a qicatorze heures.
That sacrifices were oflered and eaten was a fact about which
there was no concealment. The feeling of reverential awe
with which the worshipper partook of the sacrament
doubtless could not be conveyed in words : so far, indeed,
there may have been secrecy, though not concealment.
After participation in the sacred meal, the candidate
was a novice no longer, but a member of the religious con-
340 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
fraternity, united by a mystic bond with his fellow-worshippers.
As such it became his duty to promote the interests of the
association, to gain new members for it, and to extend its
influence. He therefore took part in the procession of the
society which paraded the streets in order to attract fresh
followers, and wearing a garland of fennel or poplar, and
bearing the sacred cist or the mystic winnowing fan, or
carrying a tame serpent in both hands above his head, he
danced wildly along, testifying to his membership by shriek-
ing the words, Evoe Saboe ! Hyes Attes ! Attes Hyes ! But
this method of proselytising was probably limited to the
poorer and more struggling associations, which could not
afford to build temples, but met in the private house of one
of the wealthier members, or of the promoter of the organisa-
tion, and did not offer sacrifice of animals, but partook of
sacred wafers or cakes, such as came to furnish forth the
sacramental meal both in the New World and the Old, when
cereal gods took their place by the side of animal gods.^
In spite of the fact not only that these " private "
mysteries were open to all, but also that the most strenuous
efforts were made by the members to obtain the largest
possible number of adherents, these associations at the best
were sects, and narrow ones : and as such they were exposed
to the same dangers as are all sects, that is to say, being
withdrawn, by the nature of the case, from the sane and
healthy action of public opinion, they were liable to run into
extravagance and excess. The danger was in this case all
the greater, because the essence and the attraction of the rites
which these associations were formed to celebrate lay in the
fact that the ritual was different from that of the ordinary
cult, was strange, unusual, mysterious, and therefore more
^ The passage of the De Corona (259, 260) on which the above account is
based runs as folloAVS : av'r]p 8^ yevofievos rrj /xTjrpi TeXovar] ras ^i^Xovs dveyiy-
pojcTKes Kai r&XXa avvecKevcopoO, rrjv /x^v vvKta ve^pi^cjp Kal KpaTrjpi^uv Kal Kadalpcjv
Toi/i TeXov/j^yovs Kal airoix6.TTWv rip irrjXip Kal rots iriTOpoit Kal aj'tcrrds dirb rod
KadapfxoO KeXevdju X^7ei»'* ''E(f)vyov KaKOv, evpov dfieivov, iwl t<^ fjLTjS^ya TrwTrore
TTjXt/coCr' 6XoX{i^ai. crep-vvvbixevos , . . iv 5k rats ijfxipais tovs KaXovs didaovs &ywp
5ta tCjv odQv tovs i<TT€(pav(t}/ji^}/ovs tQ /xapddip Kal ry Xcvkt], tovs 6(p€LS rods irapeias
dXi§<j3v Kal xjirkp TTJs K€(paX^s aloopCov, Kal ^oQv Ei/oT aadoi, Kal iiropxovixevos "Trji
&TTr]S, &TTr]S v-qs, ^^apxos Kal irpo-qyefiuiv Kal KL<7TO(f>6pos Kal XiKVO(p6pos Kal TOiavra
iiirb tQ)V ypq.5icov irpo(xayopev6u.ei>o$, puadbu Xafi^dvcjv roiroiv ^vOpvirra Kal arp^w-
Tovj Kal perjXaTa.
THE MYSTERIES 341
potent as ritual. Again, the very object of the strangeness
of these new rites, of the whirling dances, the frenzied shrieks,
and the streams of blood which flowed over the devotees as
they scourged or gashed their limbs or their tongues, was
to work upon the worshipper's emotions until he had no
control over them, and was swept away by the tide of ecstasy
which was shared, as he saw, by his fellow- worshippers.
Add to this that an essential feature of these revivalist rites
consisted in returning to the primitive fashion of offering the
solemn and awful sacrifice of the totem-god by night, and
we shall understand that these private mysteries were both
morally and spiritually at the best in a state of unstable
equilibrium, and might easily lapse into the excesses and
debauchery which attended the spread of the Baccanalia in
Italy. The very freedom with which the organisation of
these societies was permitted worked in the same direction.
It is doubtful whether there was in Athens any restriction
on the formation of these societies : foreigners were not,
as a rule, allowed to acquire or possess land in Attica, but
when they wished to purchase a site for a temple in which
to worship their own gods after their own fashion, they were
allowed to do so, as we know from the stone-record of the
decree which gave permission, on the express ground that
there was no law to forbid the proceeding : ^ the purpose to
which the site was to be applied constituted actually a reason
in favour of allowing the foreigners to acquire Athenian soil.
But whether this Attic law allowed Athenian citizens to
partake in such foreign worships is another and disputed
question. It has been both asserted and denied ^ that the
legal penalty for the introduction of new gods (in the sense
of inducing citizens to worship other than their ancestral
gods) was death ; but, without undertaking to settle this
obscure point, we may note that there is no instance on
record in which anyone was even prosecuted, much less
condemned, on the sole charge of introducing new gods :
there were always other counts in the indictment, which
seems to indicate that for some reason or other there was no
prospect of getting a jury to convict on the ground simply
^ The Citians, ^do^av ^vyofxa t/cerei/etf, C. /. A.
* Gardner and Jevous, Grcc'c Antiquities, 219 and 560,
342 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
of worshipping strange gods. Whatever danger there may
have been for the Athenian citizen in such worship, could
be to some extent, if not wholly, averted by a demonstration
of the mythological identity of the foreign deity, say Sabazios
or Cybele, with some Greek god or goddess, as Dionysos or
Khea ; and it is possible that fear of the law as well as the
desire of commending a strange god by proving him to be
merely an old deity under a new name, may have helped to
give the gods of the Orphic mythology the hazmess of outline
and want of definition which at once marks them off from
the genuine gods of Greece, and enables any one to be
identified with any other. Be this as it may, it is certain
that no penalty attached to the private worship of the
established gods with the new ecstatic ritual, and that no
permission or licence had to be obtained from the state in
order to organise a thiasus or orgeon for the purpose. Con-
sequently any adventuress who chose might set up as priestess,
and, under the pretence of orgiastic worship, might make
her house the scene of " orgies " in the modern sense of
the word.
That this actually was done in some cases is certain, but
that all private mysteries were a mere excuse or occasion
for debauchery is improbable in itself, and is contradicted by
the evidence. If any charge of this kind could have been
brought or even insinuated with any degree of probability
by Demosthenes against the mother of ^schines, we may
be sure that it would not have been omitted. There is not in
the speech of Demosthenes any suggestion that Glaucothea's
thictsus was anything but respectable from the moral point
of view : there is contempt for the semi-menial functions
performed by ^schines in the ritual, there is a satirical
juxtaposition of the barbarous rites and the solemn formula,
Bad have I escaped and better have I found, to emphasise
the absui^dity and folly of people who imagmed that spiritual
regeneration was to be effected by the external application
of a mixture of clay and bran, but even Demosthenes does
not venture to hint at anything worse than folly in the
members of the thiasus, and perhaps semi-conscious imposture
on the part of the promoters of the organisation. In a word,
the attitude of the better class of Athenians towards these
THE MYSTERIES 343
private mysteries was very much that taken by many
educated people at the present day towards spiritualistic
seances, or towards the methods adopted by the Salvation
Army.
In the case of the larger and more permanent associations,
which were wealthy enough to possess investments, to build
and maintain temples, halls, and dwellings for their officials,
and which were not exploited in the interests of a promoter,
but were managed by the free votes of all the members, it
is obvious that we must set aside the theory of imposture,
conscious or semi-conscious, and of inordinate folly : if the
number of members could be maintained at the level necessary
to keep such a voluntary organisation in working order, it
must have been because this particular form of religious
society provided some spiritual satisfaction which was not
otherwise to be obtained. Nor on this point are we confined
to cb 'priori reasoning : we have the evidence of the inscrip-
tions to show that the members of these societies were
largely foreigners and slaves, in other words, to show that
the worship was a genuine worship, such as they were
familiar with in their own country, and welcomed in a strange
land. That such " barbarous," i.e. foreign, worship should be
despised by the better class Greek, and that contempt and
distrust should be the feelings manifest in Greek literature
towards this importation from abroad, is perfectly natural,
but is not an absolutely final verdict in the matter, nor a
condemnation from which there is no appeal. For one thing,
religious progress may outstrip the advance of material
civilisation ; for another, it was not in the domain of religion
that ancient Greece rendered its service to the cause of
civilisation. We cannot therefore accept the literary Greek
as a specially qualified judge in matters religious, but must
endeavour to form our own opinion.
At the outset, however, it must be noted that there is in
our own day and circumstances a cause at work which tends
to make our judgment unduly unfavourable to these early
attempts to escape from the gift theory of sacrifice, and to \
bring the belief in a future life into some living relation \
with religion. In the conviction that spiritual regeneration
or conversion, to be real, must manifest itself in making the
344 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
man a better man morally, so much stress is now laid on
the necessity of moral improvement, that the spiritual change
is frequently regarded merely as a particularly efficacious,
perhaps the only really efficacious, means of effecting a moral
change. The identity of the spiritual life and the moral is
emphasised ; their difference, and the wider area of the former,
tends to be lost from view. When, then, we find that in
the antique religions there was a lively, if intermittent, sense
of the need of a reconciliation between God and man, and a
craving for a spiritual life and communion with Him, but at
the same time find, though many external acts and ceremonies
were prescribed, no moral amendment was insisted upon, we
are apt to infer that there was no real rehgious force at work
either. Whereas the truth would rather seem to be that the
force was religious, but was misdirected. The aspiration to
communion with God, not only in this life but in the next,
can only be described as religious ; and it was misdirected,
not merely because erroneous conceptions of the Godhead ^'
were entertained, but because there was no consciousness
that it was in the direction of moral purity that satisfaction
for the spiritual aspiration was to be sought. It would,
however, be rash to infer that because a consciousness of the
connection between moral reform and spiritual progress W/'
wanting, therefore the connection itself was wanting. Tha
would be much the same as arguing that because Socrates,
Plato, and Aristotle had no name for the conscience or the
will, therefore they possessed no conscience and no will. In
fine, many must have failed to obtain even the degree of
spiritual communion which was open to them, who would
have attained to it had they been taught the necessity first
of amending their lives. Of the rest, those who regarded '
the mere acts of ceremonial purification as all-important and
of sole importance, derived no more spiritual benefit from
them than they would have derived from the rites and
ceremonies of a higher religion ; but those who considered
them merely as aids in their search for the better, cannot have
failed in some measure to escape from evil. Doubtless the
purificatory acts themselves were very barbarous and puerile,
and especially do they seem so to us who would rather they
had purified their hearts ; but, trivial as the acts were, their
THE MYSTERIES 345
spirit and intent were religious ; mistaken though the rites
were, the desire of the worshipper was to fit himself to
approach his God ; and though we may despise or deplore
the means he adopted, we may also hesitate to assert that
the yearnings of his heart were wholly defrauded in the
result, or that his spiritual travail brought forth no moral fruits.
We can, however, go a step further than this. We need
not rely exclusively on the d^ priori argument that the genuine
desire for closer communion with God, in both worlds, must
result in a more godly and righteous life. We have direct
and explicit evidence to show that in the private mysteries
moral amendment was actually laid down as the condition of
such communion and of future bliss. In the second book of
his Republic} Plato wishes to insist on the fact that righteous-
ness is desirable in itself and without regard to consequences,
that the truly moral man is he who loves and does what is
right for its own sake, and simply and solely because it is
right. He therefore denounces the common, vulgar teaching
that honesty pays, because so many people at once jump to
the conclusion that the only reason for doing what is right
is the material advantages which ensue from right-doing ; in
^ word, that it is not reasonable or sensible to do what is right
^' c its own sake. But if the bourgeois doctrine, that prosperity
1r this world is the proper motive for honesty, appears im-
moral to Plato, much more monstrous does it seem to him that
the doctrine of future rewards and punishments should be
used to bribe men into doing what is right and frighten them
from doing wrong. And it was precisely this doctrine which,
according to Plato, was taught in the private mysteries by
Musseus and Orpheus : in the next world the righteous
received blessings ^ and a life of happiness as a reward for
their virtue ^ in this life ; whereas evil-doers were punished
in Hades.
In the face, therefore, of this explicit testimony from a
hostile witness, it seems impossible to maintain * that the wide
diffusion and permanent success of the private mysteries in
■^ 363 C. ^ Ibid. veaviKurepa rayada . . . wapa dewv SiSoacrt rots diKaioLS.
^ Ibid. dp€T7]s /LucrOSv.
^ As, e.g., M. Foucart does at the end of his otherwise excellent work,
already quoted.
/
-\
346 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Greece can be wholly accounted for by the supposition that
they required a lower standard, moral and spiritual, than
that attained by the ordinary religion of the Greek citizen,
and were consequently welcomed by the lower members of
Greek society, as affording an escape from the exacting
demands of the state religion. Nor can we accept as com-
pletely satisfactory the view that the ecstatic ritual merely
supplied a spur and stimulus to the grosser natures, and gave
them a pseudo-spiritual, sensual excitement. That this was
the effect in some cases is true ; but the influence of public
opinion and the force of the law were quite strong enough
both in Greece and Italy to purge out such depravities ; and
we must not form our judgment of antiquity solely by the
revelations of its law courts. The majority of the private
mysteries, certainly those that had the element of permanence
in them, cannot have lived solely on the unhealthy tendencies
of society, or have thriven for centuries on outbursts of
excitement which in their nature are necessarily spasmodic
and transitory. The doctrine that future happiness depended
upon righteousness in this life — whatever its intrinsic value
from the point of view of moral philosophy — was a great
advance upon anything previously known in Greek religion ;
and the extent to which it had spread in Plato's time is
shown both by the alarm which it caused in his mind and
by the vast amount of " Orphic " literature which it rapidly
called into existence. If it be asked why then did the
mysteries not effect the moral regeneration of Greece, we
may suggest two reasons. First, the morality which was
taught was simply the ordinary morality of Greek life : no
new moral truths were revealed. On the best natures no
fresh demand was made : they ex hypothesi were already
living up to the highest moral standard of the time ; and so
for them the message had nothing new. If they were dis-
satisfied and uneasy, without knowing why, the mysteries
could not help them : St. Clement tried them all and found
all empty. In the next place, the spirit of exclusiveness was
wanting from these organisations : their members were not
expected to renounce the worship of the state gods. Thus
those members who had been living below the ordinary
standard of morality, and who were induced by participation
THE MYSTERIES 347
in the mysteries to amend their lives, were liable to relapse
to their old level, which was so much easier to maintain, and
with which the state gods, at anyrate, had no quarrel to find.
So far from trying to sever themselves from the
traditional religion, the members of the new organisations
endeavoured to show the fundamental identity of the two ;
and they succeeded in their attempt because the two were
fundamentally identical. The belief in a happy other-world
was indeed something unknown to traditional Greek belief,
which regarded Hades as a dismal abode, equally dreary for
all men. But the rites and ceremonies which were thought
essential for that closer union with God on which future
bliss was conditional were not new to Greece : they were
in Greece as in the Semitic area, revivals of a ritual which,
though it had disappeared in most places, still lingered in
old-world out-of-the-way sanctuaries, and which, because it
was archaic and unfamiliar, was regarded as particularly
potent. This fact is of cardmal importance for the right
comprehension of the mysteries. If the new movement
spread so rapidly and widely over Greece, and took such firm
root everywhere, it was because, in addition to its promise of
future bliss, there was nothing really foreign about its rites
and ceremonies : they were absolutely in harmony with the
spirit of the customary religion of Greece, for they belonged
to a stage of its development which it had not yet outgrown.
This is, again, the element of truth in the modern view which
would see in the movement nothing but a relapse from the
civilisation the Greeks had reached, and a return to semi-
barbarous practices which they had abandoned : the rites and
ceremonies were a reversion, but the doctrine of future
happiness was an advance. Finally, the fact that the
movement was a revivalist movement explains both its
original success and its ultimate failure as a religious move-
ment— its success, because it was a reversion to the original
sacramental character of sacrifice ; its failure, because the
conviction that some sacrifice external to man was necessary
to the reconciliation of God and man, could not be per-
manently satisfied by animal sacrifice.
The archaic religious practices which were revived in and
by the mysteries, though not new to Greece, were not, of
-r
348 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
course, confined to Greece ; on the contrary, they are or have
been world-wide, and though they belong to a particular
stage of religious development, they are confined to no
particular century or country. Ceremonial purification by
water, which plays a large part in the mysteries, is to be
found everywhere, and was known to the Homeric Greeks
long before the time of the mysteries. The practice, again,
of placing a person or thing in direct communication with
an animal-god by wrapping the person or thing in the skin
of the animal, is, as we have already seen, world-wide : it was
practised by the European branch of the Aryans from pre-
historic times. The crouching posture which the novice had
to assume during the preliminary purification may or may
not have been known to the Semites, but it was certainly
part of the archaic Greek ceremony of purification known
as Alo^ Kcphtov} The ceremonial use of clay is a point of
sufficient importance to require rather closer examination.
In the mysteries, daubing the novice with clay was part
of the process by which he was cleansed and purified ; and
pouring water over him was another. Now, as it is not
obvious at first sight how rubbing a person with mud can
clean him, and as symbolism affords an easy explanation even
of things which never had any symbolical meaning, some
modern writers have explained that the candidate was first
plastered with clay and then washed clean with water, to
express symbolically and by outward act the internal and
spiritual purification which he was undergoing. But, un-
fortunately for this explanation, the actual order of proceedings
was otherwise : the novice was first soused with water, and
then made clean with mud. The words of Demosthenes^
are quite exphcit upon both points. The clay it was that
possessed the cleansing properties ; and that is what is meant
by Plutarch when he speaks ^ about " cleansings unclean and
purifications impure." Hence, too, according to the teaching
of the mysteries, sinners were in the next world buried in clay*
1 Daremberg et Saglis, Diet, des Antiquites, s.v.
" Siqjra, p. 340. a jq^ Supcrstitione, 12.
Plato, Tvc^;. 363 C : tovs ok avoalovs ad Kal ddiKovs is infKov riua KaropUTTovaiP
iv A'idov ; Phccd. 69 C : 8s hv dfxvrjTos Kal dWXecrros els A't'Sov d(f)iK7]Tai, iv
^opjSdpip Keiaerai.
THE MYSTERIES 349
— obviously to cleanse and purify them of their wicked-
ness.
Now, there are at the present day plenty of people who
plaster themselves with clay. The negroes of the West
Coast of Africa, when engaged in the service of a god, notify
the fact by dressing in white and covering themselves with
white clay if the service be of a festal character, with red
if it be of a more serious kind. This reminds us of the
Polynesian custom of painting things which are taboo red,
the colour of blood ; and, in point of fact, persons who are
about to undertake some sacred function, or who are actively
engaged in the service of the gods, are very generally con-
sidered taboo, and are marked off as such, in order that
other people may abstain from contact with them, and that so
they may neither carry pollution into the worship, nor com-
municate the " infection of holiness " to others. The most
familiar instance of this precaution is (I submit) afforded
by savage warfare : to the savage, war is a sacred function,
the tribal god himself fights for his clan, the warriors are
engaged in his service, as such they are taboo and dangerous,
and they notify the fact by donning " war-paint." Thus the
Ethiopians who served the great king in his invasion of
Greece, painted half their bodies with white clay when they
were going into battle, and the other half with red.^ That
the Greeks themselves had once followed this practice, is
proved by an odd instance of its survival or rather revival
in historic times. The Phocians, who were always at war
with the Thessalians, and were always getting the worst of it,
at last, in despair, sent to Elis for a seer (/jLdvTt<;), Tellies by
name, to help them ; and he put them up to a device. He
took six hundred of their bravest men, made them plaster
themselves and their armour all over with white clay, and
then sent them to make a night attack upon the foe, which
they did with such success that they killed four thousand
Thessalians.2 Now, Herodotus regards this as nothing but
^ Hdt. vii. 69 : rod d^ (rib/xaros rd fikv -ij/jLiav i^rfXeicpoyTo y{i\jjifi Idvres es [xdxrjv,
TO 5e &X\o T]fJiLav fj-CXTip.
^ Hdt. viii. 27 : Tellies crocpi^eTai avrolai Toi6v8e- yvxpibaas &v8pas e^aKoaiovs
rCiV ^(i}Keu}v toi/s dpiarovs, avTOvs re tovtovs Kal ra 6ir\a avrCjv, vvktos iiredTjKaro
rots SecraaXoicrt.
350 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
a clever and somewhat humorous device on the part of the
holy man : the Phocians recognised each other in the darkness
by their war-paint, and the Thessalians were terrified by six
hundred apparitions in white. But it seems more likely that
if the Phocians sent to Elis for a seer, it was because they
wanted some advice as to the way in which they might
win the favour of the gods ; and Tellies must have had a
reputation for knowing the proper ritual to be observed in
the conduct of war. Evidently, amongst the traditions stored
up in his mind, one was that warriors should be prepared for
battle by previous purification and by dedication to the gods.
Whether Tellies was aware that the war-paint was but the
outward sign that the warriors were dedicate and so taboo,
or whether he regarded the daubing as part of the purificatory
ceremony, there is nothing to show. But in the mysteries,
by the time of Plato, the daubing, though it still did not
take place until after the novice had been purified by water,
and so had become fit to be dedicated, was regarded as but
a second and more potent means of cleansing. In fine, if we
divide the preliminary ceremonial of the mysteries into two
parts, namely, (1) purification, and (2) dedication, the plastering
with clay, which originally was the first stage in (2), came
eventually to be regarded as the last stage in (1).
To cover the whole of the body with clay is a process
which, though effectual, naturally tends to be abridged if
possible. Mourners, who are highly taboo, and are bound to
notify their condition in order that no one may inadvertently
touch them, in various countries substitute white clothing for
white clay, and either (like the West Coast negroes on festal
days) only daub their faces, or dispense with the daubing
altogether. In Greece, it can be shown that the mystce only
daubed their faces. For the various strange acts which the
mystce had to perform, reasons had to be given ; and the
reasons took the form of myths — the mystce had to do the
thing because once some god or hero or supernatural being
did it. Hence from the myths we can sometimes gain
important information as to the ritual. Now, the myth in
this case is that the Titans, when about to murder the infant
Bacchus, plastered their faces in order that they might not
be recognised : therefore those who worshipped the mystic
THE MYSTERIES 351
Bacchus were to daub their faces also with white clay. If
the ritual had been for the worshippers to plaster themselves
all over, we may be sure the Titans would have done the
same.
The idea that play-acting may be a sacred function is not
quite so unfamiliar to the modern mind as the sanctity of
war : it is pretty generally known that in Greece tragedy and
comedy were part of the worship of Dionysus. It need not
therefore surprise us to find that the actor, like the warrior,
was a sacred person during the discharge of his function, and
that his sanctity was notified to the world in much the same
way. The satyric chorus, out of which tragedy was de-
veloped, wore goat-skins, and were called goats (rpdyoL), to
mark their intimate relation with the goat-god,^ just as the
novice in, the mysteries was clad in a fawn-skin. The actor
had his " war-paint " with which he smeared his face, to
indicate that he was under the protection of the wine-god,
and therefore inviolable. But as regards the colour of his
paint, he adopted, not the Phocian but the Polynesian use :
he smeared his face blood-colour, with the lees of wine. The
blood of the vine and the vine-god was thus put to the same
use as the skin of the animal-god. The actor smeared his
face with wine-lees, not for practical or utilitarian but for
religious reasons — for exactly the same reasons as other
persons dedicated to the gods painted their faces with white
clay or red.
It seems, then, that the rite of painting the face was not
imported into Greece. It had existed from of old amongst
the Greeks as well as amongst the Semites. It was revived
first amongst the latter and then in Greece by the new
movement of the sixth century B.C., by the conviction that
a better lot in the next world was to be obtained by a
reversion to archaic and potent ritual. And the same holds
good of the other rites of purification and dedication in the
mysteries by which the candidate was prepared to partake of
the sacramental meal, participation in which admitted him
to the new society, and bound him with a mystic bond to
the god and to his fellow-worshippers. It also holds good of
the sacramental meal itself : that the worshipper who ate
Gardner and Jevons, Greek Antiquities, 662-5.
352 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
of the meat of sacrifice was partaking in the divine life of
the sacred animal was a conception which had largely dis-
appeared from view, especially in the cities, the centres of
civilised life. But in the country, where things change more
slowly and ideas move less rapidly, the old notion, together
with the old and more or less barbarous ritual of drinking
the blood and scrambling for the victim's flesh (or for the
sacred wafers and cakes), still lingered on, until the sixth
century wave of revivalism made it once more a potent
factor in the development of religion. Doubtless the revived
conception and the revived ritual, as taught and practised by
the agyrtce, and in the thiasi and orgcones, at first appeared
to the Greeks who dwelt in cities as something new and
foreign. But they were not long in discovering that the
supposed foreign novelty had the sanction and authority of
some of their own native and venerable sanctuaries. One
Greek god there was with whose worship the supposed new
rites could be seen by everybody to be fundamentally
identical, namely, Dionysus. And accordingly the cult of
Dionysus, who hitherto, as a god of vegetation and harvest
generally, and of the vine and the vintage in particular, had
been almost exclusively a rustic god, now spread from the
country to the towns. It was in the middle of the sixth
century, in the time of the Pisistratidpe, that tragedy, the
worship of Dionysus, found its way from the country into
Athens, and was taken under the patronage of the state.
In these circumstances, it is not surprising that the
deities Sabazios, Zagreus, and lacchus, who were worshipped
with the revived rites in the East, should have been identified
by their Greek worshippers with Dionysus. At the same
time the differences as well as the resemblance between say
Zagreus and Dionysus had to be explained ; and the explana-
tions of the likeness in unlikeness necessarily took the form
of myths. Further, as there was no priesthood whose
function was to teach, as there were no revealed books, no
Church to formulate a creed or enforce a dogma, the field
was open to all-comers, and every worshipper was at liberty
not merely to believe, but also to frame any explanation he
chose. Many explanatory myths accordingly were framed,
some of which were more and others less plausible. The
THE MYSTERIES 353
more convincing soon spread beyond the limits of the first
audience — of thiasotce or orgeoiies — to whom they were
addressed : as we have already seen, the founder of a tliiasus
provided the sacred books which prescribed the ritual and
gave its explanation, and the successful establishment of a
thiasus probably depended largely on whether the myths
were of a satisfactory and convincing character. Hence a
wide circulation for those which commended themselves to
the average Greek : they were essential to the successful
propagation of the new worship. But explanatory myths
were required not only to prove the fundamental identity of
the new god with the old, but also to give a reason for the
peculiar character of the purificatory and dedicatory rites
and for the remarkable ritual of the sacrifice. Finally, the
new teachmg of hope with regard to the life to come had to
be brought into some connection with the customary religion,
to be grafted on it, if it was to grow. Now, the same
tendency which made both Greeks and Komans take it for
granted that in foreign deities they could detect their own
gods under different names, made the religious Greek, who
recognised Dionysus in Zagreus, take it for certain that the
new teaching about the next life must have once formed
part of his own religion, if only he could rediscover it, just
as the new rites turned out to have been preserved in certain
out-of-the-way sanctuaries. The only question was which
of the great men of old had taught the doctrine. Plainly
it must have been someone who had visited the other world,
and so could speak on the subject with authority. That
person could only have been Orpheus. The teaching
therefore was the teaching of Orpheus ; and from that
position it was but an easy step to ascribe to Orpheus not
only the substance but the actual words of any particular
metrical myth which, owing to its popularity, had detached
itself from the circle of worshippers for which it was originally
intended and had circulated widely but anonymously. Such
literature, of which inconsiderable fragments have survived
to our own day, accordingly came to be known as Orphic,
and the religious associations whose worship these myths
were composed to explain and justify came to be spoken of
as Orphic mysteries. In the second half of the sixth
23
354 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
century B.C., this literature was " edited " in some sense or
other at the court of Pisistratus (whose patronage of tragedy
shows his favourable inclination to the cult of Dionysus)
by Onomacritus. Then the Pythagorean doctrine of the
transmigration of souls spread from Lower Italy to Greece,
and Pythagorean pantheism was imported into Orphic
literature. The change thus brought about in the character
and tendency of Orphic literature is important for the history
of the mysteries, and especially (as we shall see in the next
chapter) for the right comprehension of the public mysteries,
the Eleusinia.
The tyranny of Pisistratus lasted from B.C. 560 to
B.C. 527, and the literary activity of Onomacritus must
accordingly be placed before the latter date. The floruit of
Pythagoras is agreed to be about B.C. 530, and accordingly
the Pythagorean brotherhoods can scarcely have spread from
Lower Italy to Greece in time to have influenced Onomacritus
in his work (whatever its nature) in connection with Orphic
literature and the new movement. Now, before the
appearance of Pythagoreanism in Greece, the Orphic
mysteries, whether disseminated by itinerant agyrtm or
taking local and permanent form in the shape of thiasi,
were a religious innovation struggling for recognition ; and
the object of their adherents was to prove that the apparently
new rites and new objects of worship, so far from being alien
or offensive to the traditional religion and established gods,
were fundamentally identical with them and more venerable
forms of them. The proof of these statements consisted in
the production of myths, of religious legends, associating the
new deities and rites with the deities of the accepted Greek
mythology. After the introduction of Pythagoreanism into
Hellas, these very myths are themselves taken as a basis and
are explained as allegorical or symbolical statements of a
pantheistic philosophy. In the pre-Pythagorean period, that
is to say, the object aimed at was religious and practical,
namely, to secure the recognition and acceptance of the new
rites and the new faith. But the aim of the later literature
was philosophical and speculative, namely, to show that the
Orphic myths led to some particular theory of the origin
of man, of evil, or of the world. Now, these philosophical
THE MYSTERIES 355
theories differed, according to the taste and tendencies of the
particular theoriser, in the speculations which they evolved
out of the Orphic myths, but they all agree in taking the
same myth for their basis ; and this indicates that, before
Pythagoreanism reached Greece, one of the religious legends
that were invented to reconcile the new Orphic movement
with the customary religion had been so successful that it
had driven out all its competitors and had established itself
as the orthodox explanation of the new worship. The myth
or legend which could do that must, we may be sure, have
had in it something of the charm which has enabled certain
folk-tales and fairy-tales to find a home in every quarter of
the globe, and to outlive the mightiest empires of the world.
And as a matter of fact, the myth in question is a folk-tale,
belonging to the type known to folk-lorists as the Trans-
formation-Conflict, of which the oldest variant is the Tale of
Batta, told in an Egyptian papyrus of the nineteenth century
B.C., and the most familiar variant is that which occurs in
the Arabian Nights. The wide distribution of the tale is
proved by Mr. Hartland in the first volume of his learned
Legend of Perseus, but as he does not give our variant, it
shall be set forth here. The " motives " of the Orphic
adaptation of the tale are several : to connect Zagreus with
the traditional Greek mythology, to show his real identity
under apparent difference with Dionysus, to prove that
Zagreus is the real, original Dionysus, and not a new-comer
or colourable imitation, and finally to explain the ritual of
his worship.
Zagreus was the son of Zeus by Persephone, and even
in his childhood the government of the world was destined
for him by Zeus. This promise aggravated the natural
jealousy which since the time of Homer had been the most
prominent feature in Hera's character ; and she conspired
with the Titans, the ancient enemies of Zeus, for the
destruction of Zagreus. They accordingly disguised them-
selves by smearing their faces with clay, and made friends
with the infant Zagreus. They showed him various things
(which accordingly were shown in the sacred cist to his
worshippers in the mysteries), and when he was engaged in
looking at himself in the mirror which they had presented to
356 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
him, they fell upon him. Thereupon Zagreus goes through a
series of transformations in his conflict with the Titans in his
endeavours to escape from them ; but finally, when he was in
the shape of a bull, the Titans overpowered him, tore him
piece-meal, and devoured his flesh (wherefore his worshippers
also were to consume his flesh). The heart of Zagreus,
however, was rescued by Athene and conveyed by her to
Zeus, who swallowed it ; and so Zagreus was born again as
" the new Dionysus," the son of Zeus and Semele. This last
incident — in which someone by swallowing a portion of the
bodily substance of the hero becomes the parent of the hero
in one of his re-births — has at first sight a fantastic. Oriental
air ; but it is a widespread incident in folk-tales, and must
have been familiar to the average Greek, else it would not
have proved so successful as an explanation of the funda-
mental identity of Zagreus and Dionysus.
Thus far we have been dealing with myth and with a
genuine folk-tale. We now proceed to the philosophical
speculations which individual thinkers endeavoured to read
into this folk-tale, and we find ourselves in a very different
atmosphere. Zeus in his anger smote the evil Titans with
his thunderbolts, and reduced them to ashes. From those
ashes sprang the human race. Hence the two elements in
man, the Titanic and the Dionysiac, the evil and the divine,
the material and the spiritual. Thus the folk-tale of early
Orphic literature was made to afford a basis for the Pytha-
gorean teaching of the opposition of the body to the soul,
and the efforts of the latter to escape from imprisonment in
the former and to rejoin the world-soul, the divine essence,
which was sometimes by accommodation termed Ouranos,
sometimes Zeus. In the same vein the Orphic myth of the
dismemberment of Zagreus by the Titans was made to bear
witness to Pythagorean pantheism : the body of Zagreus was
the one reahty, the divine essence of all things, which is
robbed of its divine unity by the action of the Titanic or
evil element and split up into the manifold of the phenomenal
world. But the longing of the soul to escape from its fleshly
prison, to merge itself in the divine essence and so shuffle off"
its individual existence, is a testimony at once to the original
unity which existed before its harmony was broken by the
THE MYSTERIES 357
intrusion of evil, and to the ultimate destiny of the soul
when purified.
It is, however, no part of our task to pursue further these
speculations, which, indeed, are rather philosophical than
religious. Eather we have to inquire how the original
Orphic doctrine of the future life was modified by its fusion
with Pythagoreanism. But to do this we must know what
the Orphic doctrine, not later than the time of Onomacritus, was.
That, however, is a question which can only be answered
when we have some notion of the teaching on this subject
associated with the greatjublic mysteries, the Eleusinia.
Meanwhile it is hoped that enough has been said to show
how the new worship was grafted on to the old religion, and
how the way was made easy for a man to join the new
movement without ceasing to worship the state gods.
CHAPTEE XXIV
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES
In the last chapter we were concerned with religious associa-
tions which were founded and organised by private individuals,
which to the end remained as they had been from the begin-
ning in the hands of private individuals, and so may be
called " private mysteries." But there also arose in Greece,
as a consequence of the wave of revivalism which spread over
that country in the sixth century B.C., " public mysteries,"
and it is of importance that the meaning of the term
" public " in this connection should be clearly understood.
The term does not imply that these mysteries were more
widely open to the general public than the " private "
mysteries were : both alike were open to all who chose to go
through the ceremony of initiation. Nor does the distinction
consist merely in the fact that more persons availed them-
selves of the permission in the one case than in the other ;
for, though it is true as a matter of fact that a greater
number did go to the " public " mysteries, yet that was
simply because they were more widely known, and their
wider fame was due to the fact that they were under the
management of some famous State. This, however, indicates
that in some cases the State's attitude towards the new
movement was not one merely of tolerance but one of actual
participation : for some reason or other the State adopted the
new principle of initiation, fivrjcn^, instead of the old principle
of birthright, of citizenship, as the qualification for admission
to the worship of the State gods. Now, this was a violation
of all the traditional ideas, according to which none but the
members of a tribe or state would be listened to by the gods
of that state or tribe, and the human members of the
358
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 359
community were as jealous as the divine of strangers. It is
therefore important to note that it was only in the case of
one State, Athens, that the sixth century wave of revivalism
broke through this jealous exclusiveness — though in after
years other States imitated Athens — and it was only one cult
in that State which was thus thrown open to all Greeks, bond
or free, men or women. The worship of Demeter in Eleusis
became a " mystery," i.e. was thrown open to all who chose
to become initiated, become mystce, but the worship of the
same goddess elsewhere, e.g. at the Athenian Thesmophoria,
was not thrown open thus.
What distinguishes then " public " or State mysteries
both from the ordinary public worship and from " private "
mysteries is that in the State mysteries, by an exception
wholly alien to the spirit of the antique religions and strictly
confined to an exceptional case, the State adopted initiation
as the qualification for joining in the national worship of a
national god, as the qualification for admission to a cult
hitherto confined to citizens. Private mysteries, on the other
hand, were not attached to an ancient cult ; they sprang up in-
dependently ; membership in them conferred admission to their
own rite, not to any State-sanctuary or State-worship. But
State mysteries threw open some one particular cult and adopted
exceptionally fjLV7]o-L<; as the qualification for admission to that
one cult and that alone. But an innovation which might have
led to the substitution of an international religion for the
hitherto prevailing national worships, an innovation which
certainly accustomed men who were dissatisfied with their
customary religion to project their thoughts beyond their
local gods, an innovation which at the least is a strange
and unparalleled departure from the prevailing traditional
ideas, is a change which, it might be thought, requires some
explanation. The Athenians themselves in later times were
quite aware of the necessity of some explanation, and found
it in the comfortable doctrine of their own " liberality." ^ We
may, however, be sure that that is not the right reason to be
given for so great a departure from the very essence and life
of antique religion. And why did their liberality extend no
further ? why did it choose this particular cult rather than
^ Isoc. Paneg. 28 : ovtojs ij TrdXts rj/xCov . , . (pLKavdpdoTrus eax^^'
360 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
any other in which to display itself ? There is no reason in
the nature of the cult itself to account for its being singled
out. The probability is that its selection was purely
accidental and wholly undesigned. The great changes in
institutions and constitutions are rarely deliberately planned;
they generally spring from some accidental departure from
the traditional path, so slight as originally to be overlooked
altogether, or condoned, if challenged, as of no practical
importance. The variation may die out altogether ; it msiy
soon prove so mischievous as to call for complete repression ;
or, from unforeseen circumstances, it may bring unforeseen
advantages and commend itself by its success in spite of its
irregularity. The Athenian explanation of the conversion oi
the cult of the Eleusinian Demeter into a " mystery " is
obviously unhistorical. Modern scholars have paid Kttle or
no attention to the point ; and it is a problem which we shall
have to endeavour to solve for ourselves in this chapter.
That little regard has been paid to this important point,
is probably due to the long prevailing but now slowly
dissolving view that the chief characteristic of the mysteries
was secrecy, and that the most important problem was to
discover their secrets. Hidden wisdom and esoteric doctrines
were supposed to have been handed down from priest to
priest, and by them communicated under a vow of secrecy to
the initiated. But the mysteries were not secret societies :
v* they were open to all without distinction ; and all could be
initiated into every grade, even the last and the highest.
The priests, again, formed no secret order, but were plain
citizens, having no such superiority in education or political
or social position that they could be in exclusive possession
of any sublime religious knowledge — and, as we have said,
the whole Greek world was at liberty to learn the whole of
what they had to teach. But the priests were not preachers
or teachers : their official duties consisted simply in knowing
and performing the traditional ritual. About the doctrine of
immortality and the future blessedness of those who partook
in the mysteries, there was no concealment whatever : Pindar,
^schylus, and Sophocles openly refer to it ; Aristophanes
parodies it ; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which was an
official publication, so to speak, states it expressly and
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 361
explicitly. It is therefore not surprising to find that no oath
of secrecy was required of the candidate for initiation. The
herald called indeed for silence/ but it was for silence during
the sacred ceremonies, the silence that befits religious worship,
and naturally accompanies the concentration of the mind
upon higher things. It is true also that silence was observed
afterwards as to the ceremonies by the initiated, but this too
was a reverential silence rather than an attempt at conceal-
ment, and the motive which prompted it was the same as
that which required the candidate to be prepared by fasting
and purification before participating in the mysteries : things
sacred must not be polluted by contact with things or persons
unclean ; indeed, such contact is, owing to the infection of
holiness, dangerous to the unclean. Hence, if participation
in and knowledge of the mysteries were withheld from all who
were not duly initiated, the object of such exclusion was not
a desire to keep the mysteries a secret, but fear of the danger
which contact between the holy and the unclean would bring
upon both. So, too, the silence observed after initiation was
not for the sake of concealment, but in order to prevent
pollution and its consequent dangers. The identity, or at
least the close connection between a thing and its name, not
only makes the utterance of a holy name an invocation which
ensures the actual presence of the deity invoked, it also makes
the holy name too sacred for common use or even for use at
all. Thus even to speak of the mysteries to the uninitiated,
the profane, would be just as dangerous as to allow such
unclean persons to take part in the sacred ceremonies.
Hence the revelation of the mysteries was a crime which the
State undertook to punish — not because of any violation of
secrecy, but because of the danger to the unclean, and in
order to avert the divine wrath which such pollution might
bring on the community at large.
The secrecy, then, which shrouded the celebration of the
mysteries was accidental, and not deliberately designed for
purposes of concealment. Failing to observe this, however,
many modern scholars have supposed that, where so much
Concealment was practised, some marvellous secret must have
been hid ; while other scholars, arguing from the fact that
^ ^Trtrdrret tV CLwir-qv, Sopater in Waiz, Ehet. Gr. 8. 118, 24 ff.
">
362 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
nothing marvellous in the mysteries has ever been discovered,
have concluded that the secret was so well kept simply because
there was nothing to reveal. The truth may well lie between
these extremes : there must have been something to reveal, else
^Eschylus, for instance, could not have been prosecuted for
revealing it ; but that something need not have been anything
marvellous — it probably simply consisted in certain ancient
ritual acts which appeared mysterious to the worshipper because
their original meaning had been forgotten, and which were chiefly
impressive because the worshipper believed that through them
he reached closer union with the Divine Nature, and received
the hope of eternal life. It will therefore be necessary to
attempt not only to ascertain the nature and original meaning
of this archaic ritual, but also to guess how the new doctrine
of future bliss came to be attached to the worship of Demeter.
The latter problem is sometimes solved by the simple assertion
that Demeter was a " chthonic," i.e. underground deity ; and
as such naturally exercised an influence over the underground
world to which the souls of the dead departed. But not all
deities are chthonic that are simply asserted to be so ; and
the proposed solution fails to explain how it is that of the
many places in which Demeter was worshipped, Eleusis was
the only spot in all Greece in which Demeter was sufliciently
" chthonic " to be connected with the doctrine of a future life.
Another way out of the difficulty is sometimes found by the
aid of mythology : the daughter of Demeter is Persephone,
the seed-corn, which descends below the earth only in due
time to be raised again to life, and it is from this mythical
analogy that the Greek belief in immortality arose. But this
explanation fails to explain the very thing which requires
explanation. It is not the Greek belief in a future life
which requires explaining — that existed from of old. It is
the belief in future blessedness, in a " heaven," as distinct
from the weary, dreary Hades of Homeric times, that requires
to be accounted for ; and the analogy of the seed-corn, the
myth of Persephone's rape, could not have produced that.
Neither Persephone, then, nor Demeter had originally
any connection with the belief in a happy other-world : both
were goddesses long before the retribution theory made its
appearance in Greece. Neither had Demeter or her daughter
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 363
Kore, the Maiden, anything originally to do with Persephone :
in Homer, Demeter is a goddess, but not the mother of
Persephone, and Persephone is wife of the god Hades and
queen of the dead, but is not the daughter of Demeter, and
was not carried off by Hades against her mother's will. Yet
in the " Homeric " Hymn to Demeter, which is much later
than the Iliad and Odyssey, but is certainly not later than
the middle of the sixth century B.C., Persephone has become
identified with Kore, and it is participation in the worship of
Demeter and Persephone which confers the better lot in
the next world. But it was in the sixth century B.C. that
Greece was invaded by the teaching that the next life was
not necessarily and for all men the shadowy, empty, weary
existence which it had hitherto been supposed to be, but that
there were rites of purification and sacrifices of a sacramental
kind which gave man a better hope of the next world.
Sanctuaries, therefore, in which archaic ritual still prevailed,
were eagerly sought out ; and it so happened that just at
this time one sanctuary, of which the rites were peculiarly
ancient and striking, was now first thrown open to the
Athenians — it was the sanctuary at Eleusis. To it, then,
those Athenians who were touched by the new movement
repaired, being convinced that its antique and mysterious
ceremonial offered the kind of worship of which they were
in search, and on participation in which future blessedness
was conditional. But though the strange and unfamiliar
rites satisfied the emotions, the mind still required to under-
stand how and why the worship was connected with the
doctrine of happiness in the next world. The necessary
explanation took, as usual, the form of a myth, i.e. of a
hypothesis such as the facts themselves seemed to point to.
This myth is contained in the Hymn to Demeter, which
accordingly is the source to which we must look for informa-
tion as to the Eleusinian rites in their earliest form.
The soil of Attica was as a rule poor and thin, but there
was one spot of exceptional fertility — the Parian plain, the
territory of the small State of Eleusis. The wealth which
the fertility of its soil gave to Eleusis enabled it to maintain
its independence long after all the other village-communities
in Attica had been merged in the Athenian State ; it was
364 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
not until the time of Solon ^ that Eleusis was brought into
political union with Athens, and the goddesses of Eleusis took
their place amongst the deities of the Athenian State. The
long resistance to this political synoikismos and religious
fusion which the Eleusinians offered was probably due to
religious causes. Like other primitive agricultural com-
munities, the Eleusinians worshipped the corn which they
cultivated, both the ripe ear the Corn-Mother, and the green
blade or Corn-Maiden.^ Their cultivation of the corn was to
them no mere agricultural operation, but a religious worship.
Their abundant crops were due in their eyes not to their own
skill in farming, or to the chemical properties of the soil, but
to the favour which ^ the Corn- Goddess shov/ed to her true and
faithful worshippers. Now that favour was earned by the
minute and punctilious performance of the traditional rites
and ancient worship of the goddesses ; and it was not to be
expected that the Eleusinians would either forsake their own
goddesses, who blessed them exceedingly, for strange gods, or
admit foreigners as fellow-citizens, fellow-worshippers, and
partners in the blessings which the Eleusinian goddesses had
the power to bestow.
The nature of the Eleusinian goddesses was obviously the
same as that of cereal goddesses all over the world ; and their
ritual identical with that everywhere used in the worship of
plant totems. Originally every ear of com was sacred to the
tribe which took corn for its totem, just as every owl was
sacred to an Owl-clan. Then some one particular ear or
sheaf of ripe corn was selected to represent the Corn-Spirit,
and was preserved until the following year, in order that the
worshippers might not be deprived during the winter of the
presence and protection of their totem. The corn thus pre-
served served at first unintentionally as seed, and suggested
the practice of sowing ; and even when a larger and proper
stock of seed-corn was laid in, the one particular sheaf was
still regarded as the Corn-Mother, which, like the Peruvian
Mother of the Maize,^ determined by her supernatural power
the kind and quantity of the following harvest. In Eleusis
this sheaf was dressed up as an old woman,* and was pre-
^ Hdt. i. 30. 2 cf. supra, p. 239, 241, 243.
Supra, p. 212, •• /f. If, v. 101 : yprft TraXaLyevi'C ivaXiyKios,
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 365
served from harvest to seed-time in the house of the head-
man of the village originally, and in later times in a temple.
This sheaf was probably highly taboo, and not allowed to be
touched or even seen ^ except on certain occasions, and then
only by those who had elaborately purified themselves of
their uncleanness : the whole future harvest depended on the
sheaf in question, and its sanctity would naturally be great
and anxiously protected. It was at the time of sowing, after
the seed had been committed to the ground, and during the
period of uncertainty as to whether the young plant, the
Maiden or Corn-Maiden, would ever appear above ground,
that the favour of the Corn-Mother was especially necessary,
and that her protection was particularly invoked. The rites
by which the Eleusinians on this occasion annually sought to
place themselves in close communion with their goddess, were
rather solemn than joyous, more in the nature of a fast than
a festival. They purified their fields by fire, running over
them in all directions with lighted torches for this purpose.^
Their children they purified in the same way, passing them
through the fire by night,^ or making them jump over it, in
a way which survives here and there in Europe even to the
present day. The adults prepared themselves for the crowning
ceremony by fasting * and abstaining from washing ^ for nine
days. They also " renewed the bond " with their deity by
offerings of their own blood, which they made to flow, not as
in Polynesia by beating each other's heads with clubs, but by
pelting each other with stones.^ At the end of this trying
time of preparation and preliminary purification, they were
ritually " clean " and prepared for the two great and solemn
acts of worship by which they were to be united to their
deity and to become recipients of her favour. The first
was a sacrament. As the worshippers of animal totems at
their annual sacrifice consumed the flesh of their god and
thus partook of his divine life, so the worshippers of the
Corn-Goddess annually partook of the body of their deity, i.e.
1 For the consequences of seeing things taboo, see supra, pp. 59, 60.
'- H. H. V. 48 : arpoocpdr aldo/xei^as datdas fxera x^pf^i-^ ^x^^^^'
^ Ibid. 239 : vvkto-s bk Kp^irreaKe irvpbs fi^vei. ^ Ibid. 49.
^ Ibid. 50 : ou5€ xpoa jSdXXero Xovrpois.
^ For this practice elsewhere in Greece, see supra, p. 292.
366 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
of a cake or paste or posset made of the meal of wheat and
water. ^ The joint participation in this by all the worshippers
not only renewed the bond between them and their deity, it
also once more united the fellow-worshippers in a mystic
bond with one another ; and for the younger members, now
taking part in the ceremony for the first time, it was an
initiation, fivrjai^. Thus fortified by this sacramental meal,
the worshippers were considered to be properly prepared for
the second great act of worship. This consisted in the pre-
sentation to the eyes of the worshippers of the actual ear or
sheaf which was the Corn-Mother herself, and which might
now be seen without danger, because her worshippers were
no longer " unclean." This manifestation of the Corn-Goddess
afforded not merely a visible hope and tangible promise that
the sowing of the seed should be followed by a harvest of
ripe corn, but in itself constituted a direct communion with
the deity ; and it was in the confidence inspired by that
communion that the worshipper ventured to breathe the
simple prayer for the fall of rain and the growth of the
crops ^ with which the ceremony terminated.
Those were the rites on which the prosperity of Eleusis
and the welfare, both spiritual and material, of its citizens
depended. They were the rites which, with whatever addi-
tions, constituted the Eleusinian mysteries. Theii' meaning
may have been obscure even to the Eleusinians of the sixth
century B.C. To the town-bred Athenian of Solon's time,
whom the Eleusinians had hitherto jealously and successfully
excluded from any share in the worship of their powerful
goddesses, the ritual now thrown open must have appeared
even more mysterious, and by its gloomy and in some respects
even savage character must have been unusually impressive.
But though the vagueness of the rites made it easy for the
Athenian to read into them a meaning which was not theirs
originally ; and although the rites were archaic enough to
carry conviction to those who started with the belief that
happiness in the next world was to be secured by the per-
formance of mysterious rites in this ; still something more
definite than this, some explicit statement, was necessary.
At the same time the relation of the Eleusinian goddesses
^ H. H. V. 208 : dX0t koI v8up. ^ ve, Kve.
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 367
to the company of the Athenian deities into which they were
now received, had to be defined to the popular satisfaction ;
and the myth which did this explained also why it was that
the worship of the two goddesses conferred future bliss on
the worshippers.
Whether the etymological meaning of the name Demeter
is or is not " corn-mother," whether Demeter was originally
a cereal goddess or a chthonic deity, it is certain that her
form and functions were such as to allow of her being readily
identified with the various nameless corn-goddesses who were
worshipped locally in various parts of Greece, and that the
cereal goddess who was probably known in Eleusis, as in
various parts of Europe still, as the Old Woman, was at once
identified by the Athenians with the Demeter of Homer and
of their own Thesmophoria. The only point that required
any explanation here was that whereas Demeter certainly
dwelt with the other gods and goddesses in Olympus, the Old
Woman of Eleusis equally certainly dwelt, for part of the
year, in the house of the head-man of the village of Eleusis,
and was actually seen there once a year by the whole body
of worshippers. There was, of course, no difficulty in
imagining that Demeter did actually descend from Olympus
and dwell for a time in Eleusis, and that she appeared in the
guise of an old woman to the Eleusinians, who accordingly did
not recognise in her the goddess Demeter ; '^aXeirol Be deol
OvrjTolaLv opaaOai} But Demeter must have had some
motive for thus withdrawing herself from Olympus and
seeking for a home in the abodes of men, as she first did,
according to Eleusinian tradition, in the house of Keleos, a
mythical kmg of Eleusis. If she withdrew from the courts
of Zeus and the company of her fellow-gods and goddesses,
it obviously was because she had some cause of quarrel with
them. Equally plain was it that the quarrel had some
reference to her daughter the Corn-Maiden, for the time at
which Demeter appeared at Eleusis in the disguise of an old
woman was the time during which the young corn was
below ground : when the green blade at length shot up, the
old woman was no longer seen in Eleusis — she returned
to Olympus. In other words, Demeter's wrath terminated
1 H. H. V. 111.
368 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
with her daughter's reappearance on the shores of light. It
must then have been her daughter's disappearance which
caused Demeter's wrath, and Olympian Zeus must have had
some share in her daughter's disappearance or some responsi-
bility for it.
The fact that Kore the Maiden, Demeter's daughter, spent
part of her life below the earth's surface would probably in
itself have been quite sufficient reason for identifying her with
Persephone, the wife of Hades. But in the sixth century
B.C., when the doctrine of future bliss was finding its way into
Greece, and rites as strange and imposing as those of Eleusis
appeared to the Athenians, were supposed to carry with them
a special hope of future happiness, it was inevitable that an
attempt should be made to identify one of the Eleusinian
goddesses with Persephone, in whose power it was, as queen
of Hades, to make or mar man's lot after death. Further,
this identification was confirmed on reflection by several
considerations. It accounted in a satisfactory way for the
Eleusinian belief that Demeter had resided with them : if
Demeter descended from Olympus, it was obviously in quest
of her daughter ; for, as Persephone was the wife of Hades,
she must have been carried off by him to his underground
abode. Again, when the ritual acts performed traditionally
in any cult requu^ed explanation, it was the common form in
mythology to say that they were performed by the worship-
pers because the deity himself had originally performed them.
It was therefore self-evident that Demeter had originally
fasted and abstained from washing for nine days ; and as
these were recognised modes of expressing mourning, they
plainly indicated the grief she felt at the loss of her daughter.
And since Demeter, like her worshippers, rushed wildly about
in all directions, carrying torches in her hand, it must have
been because she did not know what had become of her
daughter, or whither she had gone — Hades must have carried
off Persephone without Demeter's knowledge or consent.
Although the Athenians might concede to the Eleusinians
that Demeter dwelt for a time in Eleusis in the house of
Keleos, they could not admit that that was her permanent
abode : she must have eventually returned to Olympus ; and
if so, then there must have been a reconciliation efi'ected
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 369
between her and the denizens of Olympus. But the only
reconciliation possible was the restoration of her daughter.
That her daughter was restored to the upper world was a fact
about which the Eleusinians had no doubt, for they them-
selves saw and worshipped the Corn-Maiden when she re-
appeared from underground. At the same time it was
beyond doubt that Persephone's proper home was in the
house of Hades. The only inference, therefore, which could
be drawn from these facts was that both were true, and that
she spent part of her time with Hades and part with Demeter
in Eleusis. To some Eleusinians, jealous for the honour of
their local goddess, this arrangement may not have appeared
a worthy compromise or a sufficiently great triumph for
Demeter ; but this difficulty was got over by the adaptation
of an incident so common in folk-tales and so familiar, that
its adequacy for the purpose could not be doubted. Per-
sephone was ill-advised enough to partake of food — a pome-
granate— in the house of Hades ; and, as everyone knew, to
do so was to put herself into the power of Hades for ever :
joint-eating establishes, according to primitive ideas, a sacred
bond between guest and host, which not only makes (as
amongst the Arabs) the guest's life inviolable, but also (as in
the case of mortals who partake of fairy food) makes him one
of the host's clan, and, as such, subject to the customs of the
clan. This was a law which even Zeus himself could not
override, so Demeter felt it no ground of complaint against
him that her daughter was only restored to her for part of
the year ; and though it had been with Zeus' connivance that
Hades originally carried off the maiden, Demeter relaxed her
wrath against Olympus. As long as Persephone was with
Hades underground, Demeter refused her gifts to mankind,
no crops grew,^ and no sacrifices could be offered by mortals
to the gods in Olympus.^ But with the restoration, through
Zeus' intervention, of Persephone to her mother, i.e. with the
first appearance of the green blade above ground, the period
of fasting, of sorrow and anxious expectation, was over, recon-
ciliation was effected not only between Zeus and Demeter, but
between man and his gods ; and the goddess, revealing her-
self to the Eleusinians as now no longer the Old Woman but as
1 R. H. V. 306. 2 75^_ 312.
24
/
370 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Demeter,^ bade them henceforth worship her, with rites
commemorative of her sufferings, and with the hope of that
future bliss which her daughter had it in her power to bestow
upon man after death.^
Thus the political union of Eleusis with Athens entailed
/ the admission of all Athenian citizens to the worship of the
Eleusinian goddesses. But the Athenians thus admitted
imported their own ideas, religious and mythological, into the
worship. This widening of the circle of worshippers would
under any circumstances have deprived the cult of some of
its local narrowness and have expanded its religious signifi-
cance ; for Athenians would not take part in the Eleusinian
worship merely to secure the favour of these powerful
goddesses to the Eleusinians : the Athenian worshipper
resorted to the Eleusinian sanctuary for the blessings,
spiritual or material, which he might himself derive thence.
It was, however, no part of the original design of the
Eleusinian cult to bring blessings on the Athenians, but
simply to secure fertility to the Rarian plain. The inclusion,
therefore, of Athenians in the Eleusinian circle of worshippers
necessarily involved the expansion of the cult from a purely
local and agricultural worship into an element of national
religion. This development was effected not by any change
in the ritual — to alter that would have been to forfeit the
favour of the two goddesses — but in the feelings and beliefs
with which the new worshippers performed the rites. And
this change in feeling and belief found its expression in the
Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which is evidently composed in
the attempt to pour new wine into the old bottles, and to
show that the new Athenian doctrine as to the real person-
ality of the Corn-Mother and Maiden, so far from being at
variance with the Eleusinian tradition, is presupposed by it
and gives it a far higher religious significance.
But though the Eleusinian cult in becoming Athenian
would have become broader, it would not have attained the
1 H. H. V. 268 :
et/it 5k Ar)/iiriT7]p Tifiaoxo'S, ijre /x^yiaTov
ddavdroLS dvrjTolcri r 6vap /cat x'^PI^'^ rirvKTai.
- For ail analysis of the Homeric Hymn to Deraeter, see Aj^pendix, p. 377
below.
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 371
religious importance it did attain, had not the opening of the
Eleusinian sanctuary to the Athenians just coincided with the
first marked stirrings of the new movement in religion which
spread from the Semitic area to Greece in the sixth century
B.C. And though the association of the Eleusinian ritual
with the doctrine of future happiness gave it the potency of
great importance, the Eleusinian cult would never have exer-
cised any influence on Greek thought and Greek religion, if
admission to it had been confined, as it was at first, strictly
to Attic citizens. It is to this, therefore, the next point in
the history of the Eleusinian mysteries, that we must next
turn.
The new movement of the sixth century spread first in
the form of a belief in the possibility of closer communion
with the gods than was afforded by the gift theory of sacrifice. /^
There .was a revival of the sacramental view of sacrifice and
a reversion to a more primitive form of ritual. The immediate
consequence was that those sanctuaries of the national gods
which, like the Eleusinian, had for some reason or other ad-
hered faithfully to an archaic form of ritual, became thronged
with worshippers who had come under the influence of the
new movement. These, however, were but the first ripples of
the wave from the East which was speedily to invade Greece :
wandering agyrtce introduced the rites and the worship of
foreign gods ; religious organisations, thiasi, were formed by
the agyrtce and sanctioned by the legislation of Solon, for the
worship of lacchus, Zagreus, Sabazios, Cybele, and other deities
unknown before in Greece. The spread of these new cults
was facilitated first by their resemblance to that of Dionysus,
and next by the Orphic mythology which sought to prove the
identity of lacchus, Sabazios, or Zagreus with Dionysus. The
attitude of the tyrant Pisistratus towards the new movement
was one of favour and protection. It was at his court and
with his countenance that Onomacritus organised the Orphic
literature which was to prove that these foreign gods were
not foreign but the originals of the god known to the Greeks
as Dionysus. It was by Pisistratus that tragedy, part of the
ritual of Dionysus, was welcomed from the country into the
town. And it was by Pisistratus that the cult of lacchus
was incorporated into the Eleusinian rites.
372 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
The consequence of this incorporation was an expansion of
the cult of the Eleusinian goddesses even greater than that
which followed on the union of Eleusis with Athens. The
ritual was enlarged : the image of lacchus was conveyed in
procession by his worshippers from his temple in Athens,
along the Sacred Way, to Eleusis, and there placed in the
Eleusinion by the side of the two goddesses. This was an
expression in outward act of the union of the two cults, and
constituted an addition to the Eleusinia, but not a modification
of them. But the introduction of lacchus did also modify
the Eleusinia : lacchus was identified with Dionysus, and the
dramatic performances which were part of the worship of
Dionysus now became part of the ritual of Eleusis. The
original, primitive agricultural rites were not dropped : the
sacrament of the kvk6cov was still administered, and the ear
of corn was still exhibited. Indeed, these were always the
most sacred part of the whole ritual. But to this ritual
other things were added. It was the promise of future bliss
which, drew worshippers to Eleusis ; and this promise had no
original or intimate connection with the primitive agricultural
rites of Eleusis. But it was connected with the myth which,
owing to Athenian influence, had entirely transformed the
meaning and purport of the rites. It was therefore naturally
the myth which was emphasised ; and the requisite emphasis
was given when the introduction of lacchus enabled the
principle of dramatic representation to be transferred from
the worship of Dionysus to that of Demeter and Persephone.
The sacred drama performed at Eleusis consisted mainly,
probably entirely, of choral odes and dances, as was the case
with tragedy itself in its earlier stages of development and at
the time when the Dionysiac element was first introduced
into the Eleusinia. The excavations on the site of Eleusis
have shown " that at Eleusis there was no provision for the
production of strange stage-effects. Never at any time was
there in the shallow stage of a Greek theatre any room for
those elaborate effects in which modern stage-managers delight.
All was simplicity and convention. But at Eleusis there
was not even a stage. The people sat tier above tier all
round the building, and whatever went on had to go on in
their midst. If they were dazzled by strange sights, these
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 373
strange sights must have been very simply contrived. If
they saw gods descending from the sky or rising from the
ground, they must have been willing to spread round the
very primitive machinery, by which such ascents and descents
would be accomplished, an imaginative halo of their own." ^
Whether the infant lacchus played any part in the
Eleusinian drama is matter for conjecture. The birth,
Tovai, of various deities appears as the title of various lost
comedies ; and, according to the Orphic theology, lacchus was
the child of Persephone, It may be, therefore, that the birth
of lacchus formed the subject of some of the choral odes and
dances. Persephone was made in Orphic mythology to be
the mother of lacchus, chiefly because thus the reception
of the foreign god was facilitated. That the cult of lacchus
had gained a footing in Athens before it was incorporated
with the Eleusinia, is shown by the fact that there was a
temple of lacchus, an laccheion, in Athens, in which the
image of lacchus was kept always, except for the few days
when it was taken to Eleusis to take part in the Eleusinia.
That the cult of lacchus was introduced into Athens by
private individuals, as a private worship, and was carried on
by means of one of the ordinary private religious associations,
or thiasi, may be considered as certain on the analogy of
all the other Eastern cults, which without exception were
introduced in this way. But this thiasus of lacchus, like all
other thiasi, would be open to all who chose to become
members of it, and probably large numbers did choose to
join it. When, therefore, Pisistratus ordained that the
circle of the Eleusinian deities should be enlarged by the
addition of lacchus to their number, and that the statue of
lacchus should accordingly be carried in solemn procession
by its worshippers from Athens to Eleusis, and there by
them be placed by the side of the two goddesses, he not
only enlarged the number of the Eleusinian deities, he
also enlarged the circle of their worshippers. Indeed, the
object of Pisistratus may have been to draw to Eleusis
worshippers who might otherwise have preferred to place
their hope of future blessedness in the worship of Dionysus.
If his object was to increase the number of worshippers at
^ Gardner and Jevons, Greek Antiquities, 283.
374 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the sanctuary of Eleusis, he succeeded beyond his expectation.
Since this thiasus, like all other thiasi, was open to all who
chose to become members of it, whether native Athenians or
foreigners ; and since all members of this thiasus were
qualified to follow the procession of lacchus, and present
themselves at Eleusis, a foreigner who wished to see the
Eleusinian rites had only first to join the thiasus of lacchus.
Thus the rites of Eleusis now for the first time came to be
" mysteries " in the proper sense of the word, that is to say,
they became rites which were open to all who chose to be
initiated, to become mystce — they were no longer a local
cult, admission to which was confined as a birthright to
citizens, they were potentially catholic ; and initiation, /ivrjatf;,
not civitas, was the qualification for membership. Initiation
into the worship of lacchus took place at the lesser
mysteries,^ and eventually was required of all who wished
to be admitted to the greater mysteries at Eleusis ; but a
memory of the time when the lesser mysteries of lacchus
were peculiarly the portal by which foreigners obtained
admission to the Eleusinia, still survives in the myth that
the lesser mysteries were invented for the benefit of
Heracles, who wished to be admitted to the Eleusinian rites,
but could not be initiated because he was a foreigner ;
therefore the lesser mysteries were invented and thrown
open to all foreigners ^ (Greeks, not barbarians).
The popularity of lacchus and of the Eleusinian mysteries
was enormously increased in B.C. 480 — half a century
after the expulsion of the Pisistratidcie — by the fact that
the great and glorious victory over the Persians at Salamis
was won on the very day appointed for the procession of
lacchus from Athens to Eleusis ; and when Athens, in
consequence of her self-sacrifice and devotion in the Persian
wars, became the leading state in Greece, the mysteries of
Eleusis grew yet more famous, and became the chief agent
in the conversion of the Greek world from the Homeric
view of Hades to a more hopeful belief as to man's state
after death. We have therefore now to trace the several
stages through which the belief passed.
^ Steph. Byz. s.v. ''A7pa, Nonn. Dio7i. xxvi. 307.
2 Schol. ad Aristoph. Pint. 1014.
THE ELEUSINIAN MYSTERIES 375
In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, which presents us
with the belief as it existed before the intrusion of lacchus
and of Orphic doctrines into theEleusinia, both punishments
and rewards await men after death ; but it is not for their
morally good or bad deeds that men are rewarded and
punished respectively. The doctrine is not ethical, but
ritual : the man who offers to Demeter and Persephone the
worship which is grateful to them is rewarded with prosperity
in this world ^ and happiness in the next ; ^ the man who
slights the goddesses in this world, and neglects the oppor-
tunity of salvation offered by the Eleusinian rites, is punished
in Hades by the offended Persephone for the indignity put
upon her.^ The pimishment is purely retributive, not refor-
matory ; and there is no attempt to describe the nature of the
happy life — the man who has partaken of the sacrament of
the KVK6C0V and who has enjoyed the communion conferred
by the sight of the mysteries is " blessed," 6\^lo(;, that is all.
It is not Ukely that the incorporation of the cult of
lacchus into the Eleusinia would be effected without
ultimately modifying the original behef as presented in the
Homeric Hymn ; and one such modification can be traced
with some certainty. The Orphic mysteries, which laid
weight on ceremonial purification, especially cleansing by
mud, as a preparation without which no one could partake
of the sacramental sacrifice and the blessings which it
ensured, taught that if a man failed to purify himself thus
in this world he would have to be purified hereafter ; and
hence they represented the wicked as being plunged into
mud in the next world,* while the good enjoyed " everlasting " ^
happiness. Thus the idea that the life after death must be
eternal, which had not occurred to the writer of the Homeric
Hymn, had now become established, in Orphic literature
at least ; and the rewards had become eternal, but the
punishment purgatorial. And that this view eventually was
adopted by the worshippers at Eleusis, is shown by Aristophanes'
parody, in which ^ evil-doers are represented as buried in mud.
1 ff. H. V. 488. 2 Ibid. 480. ^ /j^-^^ 365,9^
^ ad'iKOvs is TTTjXov TLva KaTop6TTovaiP ev A'idov, Plato, Eep. 363 C.
•^ aidbvLos, ibid.
6 Ar. Frogs, 145 fF. and 273 ff.
376 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Both in the passage from Aristophanes and in the passage
from Plato referred to in the last paragraph, the wicked
who are punished are offenders against morality ; and here
we may probably see the influence of Pythagoreanism on the
original Orphic doctrine. Pythagoras borrowed from Egypt
the idea of a day of judgment after death, on which the
future fate of man would be decided, according to the good
or evil he had done ; and it is clear from the Pythagorean
tablets that it was Persephone who, according to the Pytha-
goreans, sat in judgment on the souls of the departed, and
dismissed them to bliss or woe. Hence, when Pythagoreanism
blended with the Orphic theology, the theory of ethical
retribution would easily be imported into Orphic literature;
and it is not to be supposed that the Eleusinian mysteries
would remain at a lower moral level than the Orphic, or
reject a conception which so readily commends itself to the
conscience of man.
Thus by the beginning of the Christian era the mysteries
had permeated the Greek world with several ideas of great
importance for the subsequent development of religion.
They were, first, the doctrine of future punishments and
rewards ; next, that happiness hereafter is conditional on
communion with some deity in this life ; third, that such
communion, with its hope of future bliss, was freely open to
all (Greeks and Eomans), whether men or women, bond or
free, who chose to avail themselves of the grace thus offered
by the mysteries ; and finally, the conception of a religious
community the bounds of which were not limited by those
of any political community, and the members of which were
knit together not by the tie of blood or a common citizenship,
but by the bond of spiritual fellowship and the participation
in a common religious worship.
Owing to the influence of the Neo-Platonic philosophy,
it is possible that philosophical pantheism may have come
to be read into the mysteries by both worshippers and
officials, but there is no reason to believe that the mysteries
at any time taught monotheism.
APPENDIX TO CHAPTEE XXIV
ANALYSIS OF THE HYMN TO DEMETER
1-21. The daughter of Demeter is carried off by Aidoneus,
with the permission of Zeus, but without the knowledge of
her mother. She was gathering flowers on the Nysian plain,
and had stretched out her hands to pluck a marvellously
beautiful narcissus, when the earth yawned. Hades appeared,
and carried her off shrieking in his chariot to his underground
abode.
The name Persephone is carefully avoided by the
poet, until line 56, because by the phrase "daughter of
Demeter " Eleusinians would naturally understand Kore to
be meant, whereas if the name Persephone had been used
they might not have realised that it was Kore who was
being spoken of. So, too, the Athenian auditor, not yet
accustomed to the idea that Persephone was the daughter
of Demeter, only finds out incidentally in 56, when it is, so
to speak, too late to protest (for his sympathies are by that
time enlisted) that the daughter of Demeter is Persephone.
The permission of Zeus is put in the forefront of the story,
in line 3, because otherwise there would be no reason
why Demeter should be angry with Zeus, and then it
would be impossible to account for Demeter 's forsaking
Olympus and residing in Eleusis, which is one of the most
important facts that the poet had to provide an explanation
for.
22—87. Demeter hears the cries of her daughter as she is
carried off, and rushes to seek her, but can find no trace.
For nine days she seeks her everywhere, carrying torches in
her hand, abstaining from eating, drinking, and washing, in
her grief. On the tenth day Hecate tells her that she
377
378 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
heard Persephone's voice, but knows not who carried her
off; and Demeter and Hecate together go to Helios, who
informs them that Hades, with Zeus' consent, had carried
off Demeter's daughter.
It was necessary that Demeter should not at first know
what had become of her daughter, because the torch-rite
showed that the goddess had wandered about (else her
w^orshippers would not have done so) ; and she would not
have wandered, if she had known where to look for her
daughter. At the same time it was necessary that she
should discover Zeus' complicity, else there would be no
motive for that residence of the Corn-Goddess in Eleusis
which was an article of firm faith with the Eleusinians.
All-seeing Helios therefore is naturally introduced into the
story ; but Hecate is so useless for the action of the story
that we may conjecture she was introduced for purely ritual
reasons.
88—183. Wrathful with Zeus, Demeter forsook Olympus
and descended to earth, in disguise ; and no mortal who
saw her knew that she was Demeter.^ At length she drew
near to the house of Keleos, who was then lord of Eleusis ;
and took her seat, in the guise of an old woman, by the
Parthenian Well. There the four daughters of Keleos came
to draw water, saw the Old Woman, and inquired her story.
She had been carried off from her Cretan home by pirates,
but had escaped from them, and would be grateful to find
employment such as might befit a woman of her age, e.g.
as nurse. They declared that any of the citizens (some
of whose names are mentioned, honoris caiisd) would
welcome her, but especially their own father and their
mother, who had a young son to nurse. After consulta-
tion with their parents, they conduct her to the house of
Keleos.
Throughout this section, for a hundred lines, the poet
carefully avoids all mention of the name Demeter. The
reason is that the Eleusinians originally only knew the cereal
goddess as the Old Woman ; and there would be an obvious
impropriety of feeling in the poet's thrusting his new doctrine
^ Line 94 : ovd^ tl^ dvSpuJv
elaopSuiv ylv(j}aKe ^adv^wvuv re yvvaiKun'.
ANALYSIS OF THE HYMN TO DEMETER 379
in just here, for he would naturally wish, in describing what
happened at Eleusis, to adhere as closely as possible to the
Eleusinian point of view. Further, the object of the poet
was not to deny that the goddess dwelt as the Old Woman
in the house of the head-man, but to account for the fact ;
nor did he wish to deny that the Eleusinians were ignorant
of the identity of the Old Woman with Demeter — he only
wished to show that their ignorance was natural, excusable,
indeed the doing of the goddess herself, and does not aftbrd
any presumption that the Old Woman was not Demeter.
The prominent part which the women, the wife and daughters
of Keleos, play, and the fact that it is they who first meet
the Corn-Goddess and introduce her to Eleusis, points to a
tradition that it was the women of Eleusis who first cultivated
corn,^ and, like the women of Athens in the Thesmophoria,
worshipped the Corn-Goddess by themselves.
184-300. Demeter entered the house of Keleos and
sat down in silence and sorrow, and smiled not, and neither
ate nor drank, in her grief for her daughter, until lambe by
her drollery brought a smile to her lips. Then Metaneira,
the wife of Keleos, offered her wine, but she declined it,
saying it was forbidden her ; but she bade meal and water
be mixed and offered her. Then she nursed the young son,
Demophoon, and at night would pass the child through fire,
to make him immortal, but her beneficent design was frus-
trated by Metaneira, who once saw her, and exclaimed that
she was killing her son. In her anger Demeter revealed
who she was, pronounced that Demophoon, though he could
not now become deathless, should become famous, and that
in his day the Eleusinians should ever shed each other's
blood.2 Then, having bidden that a shrine and altar be
erected to her, she departed. All night long the women
did worship to the goddess, and on the morrow the men
began building the temple.
Demeter refuses to drink wine,^ because wine, the sur-
^ Supra, p. 239-242.
^ 266 : 7rat5es 'EXevcrtv^wv TrdXefxov Kal (pvXoiriu alvriv
aikv a\krj\oL(xi avvd^ova' iffiara xdvTa.
^ 207 : ov yap defxirov ol ^(paaKe
irlveiv oXvov ipv6p6v.
380 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
rogate of blood, was excluded from the non-animal sacrifice
offered fco cereal deities. The incident of Demophoon is
invented to account for the common practice of passing
children over a fire for purification and to make them thrive.
The erection of the temple marks the transition of the cult
of the Corn-Goddess from the hands of the women into those
of the men. The shedding of Eleusinian blood by Eleusinians
is introduced so awkwardly and gratuitously that its mention
must be due to ritual reasons — to the necessity of accounting
for this particular way of offering the worshipper's blood to the
deity, i.e. by stoning each other (the ^aXKyrv'^).
301 ad Jin. Demeter, in her resentment against Zeus,
caused a famine, no crops grew, and no sacrifices could be
offered to the gods. Nor did she relax her wrath, but sat
apart from the other gods in her temple at Eleusis, until
Zeus sent Hermes to bid Hades allow Persephone to be seen
of her mother. Hades consented, but first set forth to
Persephone the honour she gained by being his wife, and the
authority she exercised over the dead to punish those who in
their lifetime had neglected to do her worship. She was then
restored to her mother at Eleusis ; but, having been beguiled
by Hades to eat, though only a pomegranate, she was still
so far in his power that she would have to spend one-third
of each year with him. Demeter then being reconciled with
Zeus, allowed the crops once more to grow, and showed to
Triptolemos, Diodes, Eumolpos, and Keleos the ritual with
which they were henceforth to worship her. Then the
two goddesses returned to Olympus ; and blessed is the man
who has seen what is to be seen in their sacred rites :
wealth is his in this life and happiness in the next. Greatly
blessed is the mortal whom they accept.
In the fully developed form of the Eleusinian mysteries,
the last thing revealed and the highest revelation made to the
worshipper was something which was visibly exhibited by
the hierophant to the eyes of the worshipper. This revela-
tion was the crown and consummation of the rites ; and it
was to this part of the mysteries that the taboo of silence
pre-eminently applied. Herein the later mysteries did but
faithfully adhere to the primitive agricultual ritual of Eleusis,
for in the Homeric Hymn the same taboo of silence is solemnly
ANALYSIS OF THE HYMN TO DEMETER 381
imposed as to the sights revealed to the worshipper/ and
it is the communion thus afforded rather than the sacra-
mental KVKeayp which is the crowning point of the ritual.
When, then, we find that in later times an ear of corn was
exhibited,^ we may fairly infer that it was an ear of corn
which was exhibited in the primitive agricultural rites, and
that it was originally the embodiment of the Corn-Goddess.
^ 477 : rd r oviruiearl irape^i/Jiev ovre TrvOeaOai
oijT dx^^tf fieya yap tl dewv ayo$ iaxd-vet aiiB-^v.
6\/3tos,ios rdS' 6Tr(i}ir€V iinxdoviwv dv6pdnroju.
^ PMlosophumena, viii. 115, ed. Miller.
CHAPTEE XXV
MONOTHEISM
If we accept the principle of evolution as applied to religion
— and the many different forms of religion seem to be best
accounted for by the theory of evolution — it seems to
follow that monotheism was developed out of polytheism.
The process of evolution is from the simple and homo-
geneous to the more complex and highly organised,
from lower forms of life to the higher. The implements,
the language, the science, the art, the social and political
institutions of civilised man, have all been slowly evolved
out of much simpler and more savage forms : our language
has been traced back to the common speech out of which all
.J Aryan tongues have been evolved ; our institutions to the
tribal customs of the wandering Teutons ; we can see and
handle the bronze and flint imjplements actually used by our
" own forefathers. Whether, therefore, we treat religion as an
. institution, and apply to it the same comparative method as
to, legal and political institutions ; or examine it as belief,
intha same -way as we trace the slow growth of scientific
conceptions of the universe ; the presumption is that, here
as everywhere else, the higher forms have been evolved
out of lower forms, and that monotheism has been developed
out of a previous polytheism. ./ Eeligion is an organism
which runs through its various stages, animism, totemism,
polytheism, monotheism. The law of continuity links
together the highest, . lowest, and intermediate forms. The
form of the religious idea is ever slowly changing, the
content remains the same always.
The presumption thus raised by the general process of
evolution, that monotheism is developed out of polytheism, --j-
382
MONOTHEISM 383
is greatly strengthened by a survey of the general course of
religion. Wherever we can trace its course, we find that
every people which has risen above the most rudimentary
stages has become polytheistic. This statement holds true
of peoples in all quarters of the globe, in all stages of culture,
in all ages of time. Since, then, all the peoples whose
development is matter of direct observation have been
polytheists, and since in the vast majority of cases we can
directly observe the facts, the presumption, when we come to
a people whose annals do not record a period of polytheism,
is that the annals are, for whatever reason, faulty — not that *
the people is an exception to general law. The essence of
the argument from induction is that it is an inference from
cases which we can observe to others which are beyond our
power of direct observation. Now there is only one people
in this exceptional case — the Jewish people.
But we are not confined to mere presumptions — whether
drawn from the general process of evolution or from the
course of religious development in particular — to show that
monotheism was developed out of polytheism. We have
more direct evidence, of two kinds. First, in pol}d;heism we
can see forces at work which in more than one recorded case
have brought it to the verge of monotheism. Next, in the "
Jewish monotheism we can trace apparent survivals -of a
previous polytheism. . ^ '>
The first step towards monotheism is taken when, one
deity is, as not unusually happens, conceived to be supreme
over all the others, and the rest are but his vassals, his
ministers or angels. This is due to the transferejace of the
relations which obtain in human society to the community of
the gods : they, like men, are supposed to have a king over
them. The next step is the result of the constant tendency
of the ancients to identify one god with another :
Herodotus had no difficulty- in recognising the gods of
Greece under the names which the Egyptians gave to their
own deities ;^C8esar and Tacitus did n,ot hesitate to identify
the gods of Gaul and Germany with those of Eome. And
this was the more easy and reasonable, because in many
cases the gods in question were really the deification of some
one and the same natural phenomenon — sun, moon, etc. But
384 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
the most powerful impulse to the movement was given by
metaphysical speculation : all real things are equally real, the
reality of all is identical, there is only one reality— Grod.
From this it followed that the various gods, believed by the
vulgar to be different beings, were but different aspects or
manifestation of one deity, in whom and in whose personality
all met and were merged. As The Book of the Dead ^ puts
it : " Osiris came to Mendes ; there he met the soul of Ea ;
they embraced and became as one soul in two souls." The
various forms in which the one real existence manifests
himself are his own creation, whether they be material,
human, or divine. Thus he, according to an expression of the
Egyptian theologians, perpetually " creates his own members,
which are the gods," ^ or says, " I am the maker of heaven
and of the earth. . . . It is I who have given to all the gods
the soul which is within them. ... I am Chepera in the
morning, Ea at noon, Tmu in the evening." ^ But though
maker of the earth, the one reality is " a spirit more
spiritual than the gods ; the holy soul which clothes itself
with forms, but itself remains unknown." *
But while, on the one hand, we thus see polytheism
approaching monotheism, on the other, we find among the
monotheistic Jews survivals from a time when they
apparently, like other Semites, were polytheists. The
constant relapses of the mass of the people into idolatrous
worship, as revealed by the denunciations in Scripture against
such backsliding, seem to indicate a slow upward movement
from polytheism, which was not yet complete, and so far as
it was successful was due to the lifting power of a few great
minds, striving to carry a reluctant people with them to the
higher ground of monotheism. More conclusive, however, is
the evidence afforded by the religious institutions of the Jews
and by the ritual of Jehovah. Every god has some animal
or other which and which alone it is proper to sacrifice to him.
■This close connection between a sacred animal and the god
to whom it is sacred and is sacrificed points, as we have
seen, to the ultimate identity of the god and the animal, and
1 Ch. xvii., lines 42, 43. ^ D'Alviella, Hihhert Lecture, 214.
3 Le Page Renouf, Hibhcrt Lecture, 221, 222.
^ D'Alviella, loc. cit., quoting Maspero, Peuples de V Orient,'^ 279.
MONOTHEISM 385
to an original totemism. From the nature of the sacrifice,
therefore, e.g. whether animal or vegetable, we can infer
something as to the origin of the god, whether he is
descended from a plant or an animal totem. Further, if
several kinds of animal are sacrificed, e.g. to Apollo, we can
infer something as to the history of the god, namely, that under
the one name, Apollo, several different gods have somehow
come to be worshipped. When, then, we find that" not only
were animals sacrificed to Jehovah, but at the agricultural
feast of Unleavened Bread a sheaf of corn played a
prominent part, as in the agricultural rites at Eleusis ; when
we find that the Levitical law prescribed that oxen, sheep,
goats, bread and wine should be offered at the sanctuary,
the inference plainly seems to be that at the one altar a
plurality of deities were worshipped, and the plural name
" Elohim " used of the one God seems to add the evidence
of language to that afforded by the comparative study of
institutions.
Finally, the same causes which were at work elsewhere
to evolve monotheism out of polytheism were in existence
amongst the Jews. There was the same tendency to,
identify one god with another ; and this tendency was
considerably reinforced by the Semitic habit of applying
general terms expressing lordship, e.g. Baal, to their, gods ; so
that the difficulty would rather be to distinguish one Baal
from another than to believe them the same god. Among
the Jews, too, there would be the same tendency to project
human relations on to things divine, to conceive the divine
personality by what was known of the human, to imagine the
community of the gods as reflecting the social relations of
men. Hence the growth of the monarchy in the Jewish
state would naturally be reflected by the development of
the idea of one God, Lord and King of all. " In Greece and ^
Kome the kingship fell before the aristocracy ; in Asia the
kingship held its own, till in the larger states it developed ^.\
into despotism, or in the smaller ones it was crushed by .
a foreign despo1)ism. This diversity of political fortune is
reflected in the diversity of religious development. . . . The
tendency of the West, where the kingship succumbed, was
towards a divine aristocracy of many gods, only modified by
25
386 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
a weak reminiscence of the old kingship in the not very
effective sovereignty of Zeus ; while in the East the national
god tended to acquire a really monarchic sway. What is
often described as the natural tendency of Semitic religion
towards ethical monotheism, is in the main nothing more
than a consequence of the alliance of religion with
monarchy." ^
Thus the hypothesis that monotheism was evolved out of
^ polytheism has much to be said in its favour. There is the
presumption afforded by the nature of evolution in general,
and by the development of religion in particular ; there is
the improbability that the one doubtful case of the Jews
should be an exception to a general law ; there are the
apparent survivals even in Jewish monotheism of a
previous polytheism ; there is the constant tendency of
polytheisms to pass into monotheism, and the evidence for
the existence of that tendency amongst the Jews them-
selves. But before we can accept the hypothesis, we must
hear what, if anything, can be said against it.
We may, to begin with, admit that religion may advance
from lower stages to higher ; that Christianity is a higher
form of religion than Judaism ; that within the limits of the
Old Testament itself a " progressive revelation " may be
traced ; and that, following the same line back, we may by
the scientific use of the imagination conjecture in the
unrecorded past a form of monotheism more rudimentary
than any otherwise known to science. We may further
admit the principle of evolution as applied to religion, but
then we shall find that the argument from analogy tells
rather against than for the hypothesis that monotheism is
evolved from polytheism. If we are to treat religion as an
organism and as subject to the same laws as govern the evolu-
tion of organisms, we must decline to take the two highest
existing species and say that either is descended from the other ;
for that would be to repeat the vulgar error of imagining that
men are supposed to be descended from apes. Indeed, if
we base ourselves on evolutionary principles, we may safely
say that, whatever be the genesis and history of monotheism,
one thing is certain, namely, that it cannot have been developed
^ Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 74.
T'-
MONOTHEISM -387
out of polytheism. Both species may be descended from a
common ancestor, but not one from the other. Further, the
original form out of which the two later varieties were
developed must have so developed by a series of intermediate
forms. "We should therefore expect, if we could trace
monotheism back through these intermediate forms, to find
some of them of such a kind that it would be difficult to say
whether, strictly speaking, they were forms of monotheism or
not, though they clearly were not forms of polytheism. Thus
the essence of monotheism is that in it the worshipper
worships only one god. What then shall we say of the
worshipper who worships one god alone, but believes that the
gods worshipped by other tribes exist, and are really gods,
though his own attitude towards them is one of hostility ?
It is obvious that his is a lower form of faith than that of
the man who worships only one god, and believes that, as for
the gods of the heathen, they are but idols. Yet though his
is not the highest form of monotheism, to call it polytheism
would be an abuse of language. But if several tribes, each
holding this rudimentary form of monotheism, coalesced into
one political whole, and combined their gods into a pantheon,
each tribe worshipping the others' gods as well as its own,
we should have polytheism ; while another tribe, of the same
stock, might remain faithful to its god and develop the
higher forms of monotheism. Thus polytheism and mono-
theism would both be evolved out of one and the same
rudimentary form and common ancestor.
It may be said that to argue thus is to derive polytheism
from monotheism, which is just as erroneous as to derive
monotheism from polytheism, or to argue that apes are
descended from men. It becomes necessary, therefore, to
insist on 'the plain fact that religion is not an organism :
religion is not an animal, or a plant, that it must obey
identically the same laws of growth and evolution. It may
be that there are resemblances between religion as an
organisation and an animal organism. It is certain that
there are great differences. It may well be that the
resemblances are sufficient to create an analogy between the
two cases ; but the differences make it inevitable that at
some point or other the analogy should break down ; and
1
INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
what that point is, where the line is to be drawn, is a
question which cannot be settled cl 'priori or by a considera-
tion merely of the laws of animal life, but only by careful
study of the facts and history of religion itself. We can
say with certainty that a seed, if it is to become a full-grown
tree, must pass through certain intermediate stages ; that a
butterfly must once have been a chrysalis. But we cannot,
on the strength of these analogies froln organic iife, say that
religion to reach monotheism must pass through a stage of
polytheism ; or that, if it grows at all, it must in all cases,
however different they may be, run through the same suc-
cessive forms.
We can infer with certainty on seeing an oak that it
sprang from an acorn, because of the innumerable instances
known in which acorns do develop into oaks. In the same
way, if there were many instances known of the way in
which monotheism grows up, we might infer with tolerable
confidence that one particular instance, the history of which
did not happen to be recorded, obeyed the same laws of
growth as all the others. Even if monotheism sprang up in
two independent peoples, and its history was fully known
in one case and very imperfectly known in the other, we
should naturally and reasonably employ our knowledge of the
one to fill up the gaps in our knowledge of the other. But,
as a matter of fact, not even this is the case. On the
contrary, the monotheism of the Jews is a unique and
solitary phenomenon in the history of reUgion. [N'owhere
else in the world has the development of religion culminated
in monotheism. The reasonable inference from this patent
and fundamental fact is, that nowhere else can religion have
developed along the same lines as amongst the Jews. The
very fact that all other nations have travelled -along a line
leading to polytheism, and that all have failed to get beyond
it, constitutes a presumption that monotheism is not to be
reached by the route that leads to polytheism. If it is
possible to reach monotheism via polytheism, it is at least a
remarkable fact that of all the peoples of the world no single
one is known to have done so. It can hardly be alleged
that it is by external, accidental circumstances that the
consummation has been prevented. Had some one, some
MONOTHEISM 389
few peoples, only failed, their failure might be imputed to
some accident due to their peculiar circumstances. But
when the same experiment has been tried under the most
diverse conditions of culture, clime, and time ; when the
circumstances have been varied to the utmost ; when the
seed has been sown in soils the most different and been
developed under climatic conditions the most diverse, and
yet has always refused to produce monotheism, or anything
but polytheism ; the inference seems to be that the refusal is
due not to the circumstances being unfavourable, but to the
seeds being of the wrong kind.
We can, however, go further than- this, if we allow our-
selves to be guided by the actual facts of religious history
and not by the uncertain analogy drawn from the life-history
of plant and animal organisms. What the actual poly-
theisms known to science pass into is either fetishism, as is
the case with most African tribes,^ or pantheism, as in Egypt ;
never monotheism. The tendencies which have been sup-
posed in polytheism to make for monotheism have always
been purely pantheistic — speculative rather than practical,
metaphysical rather than religious ; and, as being meta-
physical speculations, have always been confined to the
cultured few, and have never even leavened the polytheism of
the masses. A god supreme over all the other members of
the pantheon is very different from the one and only God of
even the lowest form of monotheism ; and the fact that Zeus
lords it over the other gods, as a human king over his
subjects, is no evidence or sign of any monotheistic tendency :
it proceeds from no inner consciousness that the object of
man's worship is one and indivisible, one and the same God
always. It is scarcely a religious idea at all : it is not drawn
from the spiritual depths of man's nature, it is a conception
borrowed from politics, for the purpose not of unifying the
multiplicity of gods, but of putting their multiplicity on an
intelligible and permanent basis. On the other hand, the
idea of a world-soul, a one reality of which all things animate
or inanimate, human and divine, are the manifestations, does
indeed reduce the multiplicity of the gods, amongst other
things, to unity ; but it is a metaphysical speculation, not a
^ See for this, Chapter XIII. supra, "Fetishism."
\
390 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
fact of which the religious consciousness has direct intuition ;
and hence it is never, like a purely religious movement,
propagated through the mass of average, unphilosophical
mankind. They are not to be touched by complicated
arguments ; and the philosopher is not consumed by that zeal
x)f the Lord which enables the religious reformer to fire his
fellow-men. The prophets of Israel denounced the worship
of 'false gods. The philosophers of Egypt found accommoda-
tion for them as manifestations of the one real existence.
The belief that the one reality is equally real in all its forms,
and that all its forms are equally unreal, is not a creed which
leads to the breaking of idols, the destruction of groves and
high places, or the denunciation of all worship save at the
altar of the Lord. Pantheism is the philosophical comple-
ment of a pantheon ; but the spirit which produced the
monotheism of the Jews must have been something very
different. Nor is it easy to see why among the Jews alone
monarchy should have yielded monotheism. If monarchy,
like monotheism, had been an institution peculiar to the
Jews, there might be something in the argument. , But
monarchy has flourished amongst most peoples, much more
successfully than among the Jews, and nowhere has it had
monotheism for its concomitant. Even " the supposed mono-
theistic tendency of the Semitic as opposed to the Hellenic
or Aryan system of religion," which " is in the main nothing
more than a consequence of the alliance of religion with
monarchy, . . . cannot in its natural development fairly be
said to have come near to monotheism."^ Amongst the Jews,
alone of the Semites, did it follow a line other than that of
" its natural development."
With syncretism — the practice of not merely identifying
different gods, but of fusing their cults into one ritual — the
case is somewhat different. On the one hand, it is probable
that several gods have gone to the makmg up of, say, the
one god Apollo, in whose worship the rites of all are united.
On the other, it is certain that for the Greek of any recorded
period the personality of Apollo was as individual as his
own. But even if we were to admit that the ritual of
Jehovah is to be accounted for in this way, we should be no
^ Robertson Smith, op. cit. 74 and 75.
MONOTHEISM 391
nearer to the desired conclusion that polytheism passes into
monotheism ; for, though syncretism on this theory terminates ,
in monotheism, it does not start in polytheism. On the
contrary, the analysis of the ritual even of polytheistic gods
leads us back simply to inchoate monotheism. The earliest
form of society, the clan, is not only a social community,
it is also a religious society : fellow-tribesman and fellow-
worshipper are convertible terms, because the members of
the clan are united to one another, not only by the bond of
kinship, but also by joint communion in the sacramental
sacrifice of the totem-god. Hence changes in the social or
political structure may react upon the cult of the community, ^
and vice versd. Thus, if two or more clans amalgamate, for
any reason, their cults also will be amalgamated, for the
ratification, or rather the very constitution of the political
union, consists in the joint worship of the confederating clans
at the same altar. When a tribe of the Fantis joins the
confederation of the Ashantis, it does so by renouncing the
worship of the Fanti god and joining that of the Ashanti
confederation. Now, if the gods of the amalgamating clans
have each a strongly marked individuality and a firm hold
upon their worshippers, the result will be that each clan will
worship the gods of the other clans — or the god of the clan
which leads in the confederacy — without renouncing its own
totem-god ; and so the tribe which before amalgamation had
but its own one god will after the amalgamation worship two
or more gods. In this case, polytheism is the consequence of .
synoikismos, of political growth. But polytheism is not the
consequence in all cases : syncretism is at first the more
common consequence, because it is only by a slow process of
development that gods acquire an individuality sufficiently well
marked, and characteristics sufficiently specific, to prevent
their being confused with other gods having a similar origin
and the same ritual as themselves. At first the clan-god
has not even a name of his own : he requires none, for the
clan has no other god from whom he needs to be dis-
tinguished. For long, a general name or epithet suffices for
all his needs. It is very late that he acquires a personal
name, absolutely peculiar to himself. When, then, two or
more clans, whose ideas of their gods are in this fluid state.
392 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
amalgamate, it is almost inevitable that their gods should be
unified : what is essential to their political union is that each
should partake of the other's sacrifice and so become of one
blood and one worship with each other ; each . therefore
brings to a common altar its own animal- totem, each in turn
(lashes the blood of sacrifice on the same altar-stone, and
each partakes of the other's victim. Thus the god of each
passes into or manifests himself at the same altar and on the
occasion of the same complex act of worship, and the
identity of the altar and the unity of the ritual so add to the
difficulty of mentally separating two nameless gods who have
now nothing to distinguish them, that the very memory
of their difference soon dies away. Even more rapid and
complete is this process of syncretism, if one of the two' gods'
has a personal name and the other has not; for the one with
a name survives in the minds of men, and inherits altar and
worship and all, whereas the nameless god is forgotten
outright. In this way a god, whose worshippers were so
vividly impressed with his personality as to appropriate to
him a proper name, might, as his worshippers absorbed one
tribe after another into their confederacy, come to inherit
several different rituals : the various tribes might come to
worship at his altar with their own rites and their own
victims, but it would be at his altar and in his name. Thus,
even if we admit that the complex sacrificial rites of the
Levitical law are an instance of syncretism, inevitably
consequent on the political process by which the Jews were
formed into one state ; still we are not thereby taken back
from monotheism to previous polytheism, and we do gain an
explanation not only of the ritual, but also of the backsliding
which has been supposed to be a survival of polytheism ; for
some tribes doubtless would be reluctant to abandon their
own gods entirely, and would seek to continue their worship
concurrently with that of Jehovah.
s/The sacrifices offered to Jehovah point back, then, not to
polytheism but to a low form of monotheism, in which each
clan that offered sacrifice worshipped but one god, though
that god was conceived in the form of the animal ox plant
which was sacrificed. This brings us to the question whether
totemism, that lowest form of monotheism, is the earliest
MONOTHEISM 393
form of religion ; and for the answer to the question we are
reduced to conjecture. One certain fact, however, we ha.ve
to go upon, if we accept the theory of evolution as applied to
religion : it is that, then, the law of continuity must prevail
throughout the history of religion, that is to say, there must ,
be a continuum in religion, something which is cofnmon to all
religions, so far as they are religious, and which, however
much its forms may change in the course of evolution,
underlies them all. This continuum is sometimes assumed to i^
be animism. But though animism exercises great influence
over religion in its early stages, directing its course and
determining its various forms, it is not in itself a religious
idea nor a product of the religious consciousness. It is the
belief that all things which act, all agents, are personal
agents ; and this theory is a piece of primitive science, not of
early religion. Not all personal agents are supernatural, nor .
are all supernatural powers gods.^ Thus a specifically religious
conception has to be imported into animism if it is to have any
religious character at all. The religious element is no part of
animism pure and simple. To make the personal agents of
animism into supernatural agents or divine powers, there must
be added some idea which is not contained in animism pure
and simple ; and that idea is a specifically religious idea, one
which is apprehended directly or intuitively by the religious
consciousness. ^The difference, whatever it may be, between
human and divine personality is matter of direct, though
internal, perception.;) Like other facts of consciousness, it
may or may not, sometimes does and sometimes does not,
arrest the attention of any given man. There are times, as
Homer says, when all men have need of the gods, and when,
in the words of ^schylus,^ he prays and supplicates the
gods who never believed in them before. That the gods
have the power, sometimes the will, to save ; that silent
prayer to them is heard and direct answer given to the heart
— all these are certainly parts of the religious idea, and as
certainly are no part of animism pure and simple.
0
; 1 Supra, pp. 22, 106, 107.
2 Persce, 497 : deovs 8i tis
rb irplv vofii^cov ovSafiov t6t' eiJ%6To
\iTaiat.
\
> —
394 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
That the divine personality does impress itself in these
and other ways upon men, that it impresses itself unequally
on different men, unequally on the same man at different
time^ — these things are all matters of immediate conscious-
ness, are direct perceptions. Whether these perceptions
I correspond to actual facts is not a question for the historian
of religion to discuss : the eye of the soul may or may not
be constituted, as the eye of the body is said to be, in such a
way that from its very structure it cannot but be a false
guide as to the light. The historian, however, has to
' recognise that these perceptions do exist ; that — whether
there exists anything objective corresponding to them
or not — they are facts of consciousness ; that they are .
universal, though they may play a little or a large part
or no part at all in the life of this man or that ; that
they form part of the continuum in religious evolution ;
and that they are specifically religious, not animistic. " ' In
Xanimism man projects his own personality on to external
nature : ^in religion he is increasingly impressed by the
divine personality ; and, however faint or ill-attended to
we may imagine this consciousness to have been in the
early stages of the evolution of religion, it is in and by
itself a higher form of religious thought than we get
in animal-worship, in totemism. \At first sight this may ^
appear to settle the question : evolution proceeds by lower
forms to higher, totemism is the lower and therefore the
original form. ^But in reality the question is not settled
quite so easily. It is true that the advance, in religion as
in other things, from lower to higher is a process of evolution.
j It is not true that every process of evolution is an advance :
decay is a form of evolution as much as growth. In art that
form survives which is best adapted to the taste of the age
— and the age may have no taste ; or it may have worse
taste than the previous age or better, and there will then be
a decline or an improvement in art, as the case may be. But
\ decline and improvement are equally part of the evolution in
' art, for in each case that form survives which is best fitted
to survive under the given conditions, though it is not
necessarily or always or commonly the highest form of art.
In morals and in religion, evolution thus may follow ^
MONOTHEISM 395
4'
wavering course : first advance, then retrogression ; then
perhaps a fresh start is made by those who deviated, and
they move in the right direction indeed, but not so accurately
for the goal as those who never strayed ; and everywhere it -
is the many who lapse, the few who hold right on — the
progressive peoples of the earth are in the minority.
Totemism, which is at least the worship of one god, declines
into the worship of many gods ; j^ytheism may in some
few civilised peoples rise towards pantheism, but in most^
cases degenerates into fetishism ; monotheism passes in one^
case from Judaism into Christianity, but in another iiito i^
Mohammedanism ; sacrifice degenerates from a sacrament
into the making of gifts, and then, except in the case of.
Christianity, into mere magic used to constrain the gods to ..
do the will of man.
It seems, then, that neither the course of evolution in
general, nor that of religious evolution in particular, is so
uniformly upward as to warrant the general proposition that
of two related forms the higher must have been evolved out
of the lower. Eelapse is at least sufficiently common in the
history of religion to make it conceivable that totemism was
a degeneration from some simpler form of faith, for evolution
does, though progress does not always, move from the simple
to the complex, from less to more fully differentiated forms.
Further, we have seen reason to believe ^ that the distinction
between the natural and the supernatural has always been
known to man ; that it was only by slow degrees he came to
attribute supernatural powers to the personal agents of
animism ; and later still, that he took an animal for his clan-
god. Here, then, we have the stage in religious development
out of which, on the one hand, a relatively higher form of
monotheism was evolved, and, on the other, by a process of
degeneration but still of evolution, totemism was developed.
That it was only amongst one people of the earth that
this simple and amorphous monotheism was developed into
something higher, and everywhere else degenerated into
the grosser form of animal-worship, is a fact which will
not surprise us when we reflect that, though evolution
is ' universal, progress is exceptional. Progress in higher
1 Supra, p. 18 ff.
396 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
matters is always due to the minority, to individual thinkers,
discoverers, reformers. And there is no known law of the dis-
tribution of genius : in literature and art, for instance, the
great names are as frequent B.C. as a.d. Progress does not
multiply them or produce them : they initiate it. That in
historic times progress in religion is due to individual
teachers, prophets, and reformers, may be taken to be
undoubted ; and we may venture to infer that whatever
progress was made in prehistoric times was made in the
same way. The growth of civilisation seems to have no
power to increase the number of geniuses born in a century ;
and it would be difficult to prove that it is impossible for a
mind of the highest powers to be born of a race in a rude
and semi-civilised or even uncivilised state. But it may
perhaps be argued that a mind so born would fail to develop
because of its unfavourable environment. Here, however,
we must distinguish between the two kinds of knowledge,
first the intuitive or immediate, and second that which is
gained by means of inference, inductive or deductive, v As
regards the latter, a Newton might be born out of due
season, in a race which knew no processes of mathematical
inference, and so might fail, because he found no mental
instruments, no mathematical methods, in existence, to do
what otherwise he might have done. But this is not the
case, or not so much so, with the knowledge which is
intuitive : the artist of to-day has better means — materials
and methods elaborated by his predecessors — for expressing
himself, but he has not a more direct perception of the
truth than had the prehistoric artist who has bequeathed to
us his sketches of the reindeer and the mammoth. Now, the
artist's source of truth is his direct perception of things
external ; \but of spiritual things the knowledge comes by
inward intuition, by direct perception of thmgs not ap-
prehended by the outward senses. In the degree of this
knowledge men vary ; and of old as at the present day
" the million rose to learn,|the one to teach." We may
explain this as due to revelation or to greater powers of
spiritual insight or in some other way, but the fact remains
that men do thus vary, and that it is the minority who
teach, who reform religion and impart to it its progress.
MONOTHEISM 397
Eeligious progress moves wholly on one line, that of
personality, and is the unveiling, revealing disclosure of
what is implied therein. But the divine personality
impresses itself unequally on different minds, and it is
to those most impressed by it that religious progress is due :
to them monotheism was disclosed, the divine personality was
in their own belief revealed ; and we cannot maintain it to
be impossible or even improbable that such revelation may
have been made even to primitive man.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF
Beliefs are about facts — facts of external consciousness and
internal consciousness — and are statements that facts are
thus and thus. The ultimate test of a belief is whether the
facts actually are as stated and believed to be — i.e. is the
appeal to consciousness.
Differences of belief (which may be compared to the
variations of organisms), so far as they are not due to
erroneous logical processes, may be explained in one of two
ways: (1) the j^oioers of vision (spiritual, moral, aesthetic)
may be supposed to vary from individual to individual, as do
those of physical vision, and for the same (unexplained but
not therefore supernatural) causes. This assumes that the
facts are themselves always the same, but that one man,
having better sight, sees them and their relations to each
other better than other people, and therefore differently from
other people. This accounts for the origin of different
varieties of belief. The perpetuation of any variety depends
solely on the conditions under which it occurs : whatever
varieties of belief are not favoured by the conditions, by their
environment, will perish — the rest will survive (the surviving
belief will not necessarily be that of the keenest-sighted man,
but that which accords with what the average sight can see
of the facts). The survival of a new variety of belief implies
harmony between the reformer's vision and the average man's
view of the facts, on this theory; and therefore the theory
fails to explain any advance — unless, indeed, we postulate
that the new variety or " sport " at once alters the conditions
and makes them favourable to itself and its own growth.
Now this is what really takes place in the case of belief (bad
398
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 399
ones propagate themselves thus as well as good), and it seems
to be equally true of organisms, e.g. man has modified his
environment to favour his own growth.
There is, of course, the possibility that the same causes
which raise (or lower) the powers of vision in the individual
at the same time raise them in different degrees in all the
other members of the race ; and in the same way it is con-
ceivable that the same causes which produced an atmosphere
such as the earth possesses also favoured the occurrence of
forms of life such as would survive in that atmosphere. But
here we are supplementing the negative method of exclusions,
which is the essence of the " survival " theory, by a positive
cause which does away with chance — the survival of one
variety will not be due to the fact that it happened by
chance to be the one which survived, whilst the ninety-nine
perished (on the ground that of a hundred different
varieties one must be more in harmony with the conditions
than the ninety-nine), but to the fact that both the occurrence
of the variety and the change in conditions necessary for
its survival are the joint effects of one common cause (or
collocation of causes or causa causarum).
That the change in conditions should synchronise with
the first occurrence of the new variety, and should take place
just in time to favour its development, rather fits in with
the theory of design than with that of the accidental survival
of the variety which happened to be best adapted to pre-
existing conditions. In this connection note we have no
evidence that forms of life incapable of surviving under
conditions found on this planet ever did occur upon the earth :
all we can say is that if they occurred, they would, ex
hypothesi, perish. Note, too, there is nothing to compel us
to believe that such radically unfit forms ever did occur.
The position of the argument simply is that if we assume
the existence of fit and unfit forms side by side, we need not
call in the theory of design to account for the existence of
forms specially adapted to the conditions under which they
occur — we can explain their survival as due to the selective
agency of the conditions (assumed to be constant).
It is only for the purpose of dispensing with the design
theory that the occurrence of radically unfit forms is
A
400 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
necessary. No argument can be drawn from the fact that
of the numerous forms capable of existing for a longer or
shorter time, some eventually perish — for they are, ex
hypothesi, not radically unfit, but simply less fit than others.
If, then, we confine ourselves to the facts, the only forms
we have experience of are forms fit in some measure or other :
radically unfit forms are unproven — a mere hypothesis.
The one thing certain is that forms of life capable of
surviving must have existed in the beginning. And granted
that unfit forms also existed (or rather failed to exist), their
existence (or failure to exist) throws no light either on the
survival or on the origin of the forms which were capable of
surviving. The fit survived because they were fit, not because
others were fundamentally unfit.
But the absence of fundamentally unfit forms seems
to indicate that the forms of life which first occurred on
this planet were the outcome of the same causes as the
conditions which favoured their development. And it seems
fairly obvious that what favoured their growth might favour
their origin (which is only the earliest period of growth).
And so generally throughout the course of development,
the causes which bring about a change in the conditions
would also produce a variation fit to survive in the new
conditions and to take the place of the antiquated species.
(2) The other theory of the origin of varieties in belief,
i.e. of the fact that one man sees (spiritually or morally)
what another cannot see, is not that he has greater powers
of vision, but that he has more revealed to him. On this
theory the survival of a new variety must be due to the fact
that a similar revelation is simultaneously or subsequently
made to those who accept the new belief, so that to them
also more is revealed than was known before. This would
be in accordance with the view already set forth, that the
same cause (not necessarily a personal cause) which produces
a new variety also produces the conditions favourable to the
survival of that variety.
On the other hand, this theory (1) would make teaching
quite unnecessary, whereas, as a matter of fact, teaching
seems to be an essential condition (perhaps not the only one)
of any extension in the disciples' range of vision, and (2)
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 401
would make the process of spiritual or moral reform purely
mechanical, quite apart from the rest of man's nature and
absolutely necessitarian.
As regards the last consideration, the " higher 'power of
vision " theory is just as fatal to free will as the revelation
theory.
Now, if the facts of the internal consciousness are realities
in the same sense as the facts of the external consciousness,
then they must be the same for all men, and equally
available for all. And from the religious point of view it
must be that all who seek can find them out, that the door
will open to all who knock.
The latter consideration points to the rejection of necessi-
tarianism : it implies that the truth can be perceived by any-
one who chooses to look for it, that the facts are there all
the time for those who will attend to them. This is not,
however, inconsistent with the revelation theory as such ; but
it requires us to believe that as attention is a matter of
personal will and choice, so the revelation of new facts is a-
matter of personal grace, invariably accorded but strictly
conditional on the free exercise of the seeker's will. Thus
the facts are equally open to all, and if not equally revealed
are equally ready to reveal themselves. So, too, external
facts have to be learnt by humble and patient watching for
them.
This theory then will account for the two fundamental
explicanda : (1) that differences in the range of vision do
exist in different individuals ; (2) that the facts, the reality,
the truth are equally open to all minds.
The " greater power of vision " theory is then superfluous.
And note that it is only a hypothesis, its only evidence is
that it explains the facts. It is not capable of independent
verification ; and, as a matter of scientific psychology, the
faculty theory has been discarded as an erroneous and mis-
leading statement of the simple fact that different minds do
behave in different ways. Some minds seek religious truth
more earnestly than others, have a greater hunger and thirst
for righteousness. Even to the reformer the greater measure
of revelation is accorded because of his greater importunity.
Thus the ultimate reason for variety of belief seems to be
26
402 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
TO OTL, the fact that men in the exercise of their free will
pay varying degrees of attention to the facts ; and this is an
ultimate fact, for which we are not in a position to assign a
reason, any more than we can assign a reason for " sports "
differing from the other individuals of the species, or for the
fact that bodies tend towards one another in the manner
formulated by the law of gravity. From it we can deduce
things as they are ; for it we can assign no scientific cause.
Indeed, if we could assign a cause (other than the individual's
own free choice) we should thereby deny the freedom of the
will, and have to ask why the potter blames the pots for the
flaws in them of his own making. Free will is the ultimate
term to which we come when we look at the facts of
" internal consciousness " in our endeavour to escape from
the endless chain of scientific causation, just as a First Cause
is the ultimate term and mode of escape when we look at
the facts of " external consciousness." Personality is the
concept which supplies the solution in both cases : the free
will of a personal agent is the unifying principle of experi-
ence in both spheres.
But as the First Cause acts by laws which, though natural
laws, are God's laws and the expression of His will, so the
free will of the human agent acts with equal regularity, and
in the same way under the same circumstances. No scientific
account of nature or of man is possible save on this assump-
tion, namely, that there is not only a uniformity of nature but
a uniformity of human nature. But this latter uniformity
is the expression of the free will of the human agent, just as
the former is of God's will. It is from this point of view
that we have to inquire why and how erroneous as well as
correct beliefs originate and are evolved.
First, we must distinguish true and false belief. Beliefs
are about facts, are statements about facts, statements that
certain facts will be found to occur in a certain way or be
of a certain kind. If the facts are found to be or occur as
stated, the belief is correct ; if not, not. The only final
test is the actual facts — the test of immediate consciousness.
Consciousness is a sphere, one half or hemisphere being
" external consciousness," the other consisting of the internal
facts of consciousness, That certain acids corrode certain
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 403
things, is a statement the only test of whose truth is
immediate observation, the presentation of the external fact
to the consciousness. So, too, the statement that revenge is
sweet. A behef is an inference, and as such is the work
of the reason. The reason endeavours to anticipate the
movement of facts ; and the movement of reason is distinct
from the movement of facts, for it may go wrong altogether,
and leads us to expect something which, after all, does not
happen.
At first sight it might appear that here we have the
source of errors in religion : the human reason goes astray —
and that doubtless is the reason of some religious errors.
But if we put all the blame on the erring human reason,
then in the case of correct beliefs we must assign it all the
credit. In other words — to come back to our proper sub-
ject, the evolution of belief — the religious progress which
admittedly has taken place will be purely intellectual — the
religious sentiment has had no share in it.
But there is another source of mistaken belief besides
mere intellectual errors of calculation, so to speak, from
correct premisses : there is mal-observation of the facts on
which the reasoning is based. It is possible under the
influence of a preconception to overlook certain facts, and by
leaving them out of consideration to make any right con-
clusion impossible, however correct the process of reasoning
applied to the incomplete premisses. Again, it is possible to
mistake one person for another, one thing for another, to
be unable to perceive that a certain shade of colour is green
not blue, dark purple not black, pale cream not white.
Thus religious progress may consist not only in the
correction of intellectual errors by the intellect, but also in
renewed and closer attention to the facts presented in or
by the religious consciousness — in a finer sense of what is
repugnant to religious feeling. Here there is no process of
inference, but an appeal to the testimony of consciousness,
just as the question whether a given thing is or is not of
exactly the same shade of colour as another given thing, is
one which can only be settled by an appeal to the con-
sciousness. In both cases the test of truth consists in the
facts of the case, and in immediate consciousness of them.
404 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Again, between the conviction that everything has a
cause, and ability to assign the cause of everything that
happens, there is a great distance. Man started in the
beginning with the former, and is yet a long way off the
latter. So far as he has bridged the gap, he has done so
simply by closer and closer attention to the facts of con-
sciousness. Even the destruction of erroneous canons of
reasoning, e.g. like produces like, has been effected simply
by the process of verification.
But the conviction with which man started was neither
the result of any process of reasoning (no satisfactory reason-
ing has even yet been found for its proof) nor could it have
been the result of experience, in the beginning when man had
as yet had no experience. It was a conviction, undemonstrated
and unproved, if not incapable of proof, yet one without which
science could have made not only no progress, but not even a
beginning.
So, too, the conviction that changes not caused by man
are yet due to will, was a similar form of thought, a mode
in which man could not help thinking, and without which
religion could have made no progress.
But just as the conviction that everything has a cause
does not help us to determine whether A, B, or C is the
cause of Z, and does not prevent us from selecting A, B, C,
or D as the cause when it really is K, so the conviction
that changes not caused by man are due to will did not
enable man to identify the Being whose will it was, nor
prevent him from ascribing that will to many erroneous
sources.
That man should in the beginning make many mistakes,
needs no explanation. But it would be an error to suppose
that his mistaken inferences were automatically corrected by
their discrepancy with actual facts. Scientific knowledge is
the possession even now of but few : the vast majority have
not learnt to correct their inferences or verify their conclusions
by comparing them with facts. Even when facts force
themselves on their notice, they are disregarded : we note
and remember those which confirm our preconceived opinions,
and set aside the rest. The same is true of religion. In
fine, it is neither the origin nor the growth nor the survival
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 405
of error that need surprise us (for error has its laws of growth
and propagation), but that truth should ever supplant it.
ISTow, it is possible to look at a thing without seeing it —
e.g. to look at a rock without seeing its resemblance to a
human face or figure. And when once the thing has been
pointed out by somebody else, it is impos^ble to look at it
without seeing it. This is as true of spiritual and mental
vision as it is of physical sight. The one thing needful for
the spread and propagation of the true view is that there
should be someone to point it out. After that, the convin-
cing power of facts should suffice. The preconceptions, the
wrong way of looking at the facts, the overlooking of them,
stand in the way and require to be removed by the assistance
of someone who sees what he wishes you to see. That it is
Grod with whom the religious heart communes in prayer, is a
fact of immediate consciousness — which is none the less a
fact because another looks at it without seeing it, or is as
unable to distinguish it from some other fact of consciousness,
as he may be to distinguish dark purple from black, the
personal ambition which really moves him from the patriotism
which stirs him in part though not as completely as he
thinks.
That a man who sees the fact is able to assist others
to concentrate their attention until they also see it, is un-
doubted— it is the only means of spreading any teaching,
scientific, aesthetic, or religious. It is the condition of the
growth of a belief. Is it not the condition or a condition of
the origin also ? What the reformer first sees in his own
mind and heart he sees in consequence of his communing with
God and of His teaching. Be this as it may, the mode of
propagation is that the learner learns to see facts which he
did not see before : ex hypothesi at first he cannot see them,
but he believes that he may come to have immediate con-
sciousness of them, and he so believes because he has faith
in his master. The reason he cannot see them is that
preconceptions block his view or direct it amiss. These
preconceptions, ex hypothesis are erroneous conclusions
reached by a reasoning process, or simple want of teaching
how to use the eye of the mind and direct it to the proper
quarter. To lay aside or cast off these preconceptions means
406 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
giving up belief in them, admitting that they are wrong ; and
such an admission is only possible to the humble-minded :
humility is the first condition of learning. The man who
thinks he knows has no desire to learn ; the man who is
sure he is right cannot set about amending his ways.
The period of faith does not terminate, however, when
the pupil has come to have immediate consciousness of the
facts which at first he could not see : the new facts of con-
sciousness have to be reconciled with other (real or apparent)
facts, e.g. the all-powerfulness with the all-goodness of God,
and such reconciliation may be beyond the reasoning power
of the individual or of man ; but faith persists that the belief
will ultimately be found to be justified by the facts. Here
note that faith is not something peculiar or confined to
religion, but is interwoven with every act of reason, no
matter what the subject - matter to which the reasoning
process is applied. The object of reason is to infer facts.
The facts of which we have immediate consciousness at any
moment are relatively very few. But the reasoning processes
enable us to judge what certain facts will be, which at the
moment are not immediately present to consciousness. The
only reason why we believe that any given process will
enable us to anticipate correctly the movement of facts, is
that in the past it has so enabled us, and was verified by the
facts. Here we evidently assume that facts will in the future
continue to move on the same lines as in the past, "and not
swerve off in some totally different direction — in a word,
we assume that nature is uniform. Now this belief that
facts will behave in the future as in the past, that fire, e.g.,
will not cease to burn, is a piece of pure faith. The difference
between this faith and religious faith is that no great effort
of will is required for it — the reason of which is that facts
apparently irreconcilable with it are not of frequent occurrence.
The moment such facts are alleged, e.g. as in the case of the
way in which material objects are alleged to behave at
spirituaHstic seances, an effort of will to maintain the faith
in the uniformity of nature is stimulated, which in the case
supposed takes the form sometimes of angry denunciations
of the folly of human nature, or confident assertions that the
alleged facts will be found on closer inspection to be no facts
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 407
at all. In the case of religious faith, the apparently irrecon-
cilable facts are of more frequent occurrence, e.g. the difficulty
of reconciling much that happens in the world with the faith
that all that happens is for the best. Such dijSiculties require
an act of will, if faith is to reassert itself ; and the energy
thus stimulated may expend itself in renewed efforts to
harmonise the apparently conflicting facts. The desire to
unify our experience is a perennial need of human nature.
The faith that it can be unified is not peculiar to religion,
but is the base of all science. The track by which science
has marched in its conquest of nature is marked by the ruins
of abandoned hypotheses. One hypothesis is cast aside in
favour of another which explains a greater number of facts ;
and though no hypothesis, not even evolution, accounts for
all the facts of the physical universe {i.e. for all the external
facts of consciousness), yet no man of science believes that
the facts are incapable of explanation : on the contrary, he
believes that they are only waiting for the right hypothesis,
and that then they will all fall into line. In a word, as a
man of science, in his scientific labours he walks by faith —
by the faith that the universe is constructed on rational
principles, on principles the rationality of which the human,
or at anyrate the scientific, mind can comprehend. His
faith is that the external facts of consciousness do form one
consistent, harmonious whole, regulated by the laws of nature,
and that- we can more or less comprehend the system which
the physical universe forms. The moral philosopher holds the
same faith with regard to the facts of morality, that they too
are consistent with one another and are all consistent with
reason and with the moral aspirations of man rightly con-
strued. The religious mind believes that these facts, all facts,
external or internal, of which we have immediate consciousness,
can be reconciled with one another, or rather actually are
harmonious and consistent, if only we could see them as they
are, instead of looking at them without seeing them. But
this, the religious, faith which looks forward to the synthesis
of all facts in a manner satisfying to the reason, to the moral
and to the spiritual sense alike, covers a much larger area
than either science or moral philosophy, and is much more
liable to meet with facts apparently irreconcilable with it.
I
408 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
Hence the effort of will is a much more frequent and more
marked feature of religious than of scientific faith.
Scientific investigations made by means of the microscope
or telescope entail a considerable expenditure of will-power
and a considerable exercise of scientific faith — of faith that
the results will be worth the labour, and of will-power in the
concentration of attention for long hours on what is presented
to the eye. The attitude of the religious mind differs from
that of the scientific, in that it is one not of critical observa-
tion but of trustful waiting and watching, and its faith is in
a personal God, and not in natural laws conceived as working
mechanically. But the religious mind equally with the
scientific is engaged in the contemplation of facts of immediate
consciousness, and as great concentration of attention is
required in the one case as in the other. And once more
it is only by an appeal to the facts of consciousness that the
truth of any statement or of any process of reasoning can be
demonstrated. But to observe with the exactitude which
science requires is an art not acquired in a day : what the
microscope presents to the eye of the trained observer is
something very different from what is seen when the
microscope is used for the first time. For one thing, the
trained microscopist knows how to use his instrument, but,
what is more important, he knows how to use his eye — a
knowledge which is only obtained by habitual concentration
of the attention upon what is presented to the eye. The
fact that the untrained observer does not see something is no
proof that the thing is not there to be seen. This considera-
tion may serve to illustrate the proposition that though the
same facts are present in the spiritual consciousness of all
men, they are not equally discerned by all. Thus there is
an a priori reason why the historian of religion should assume
that man being man began with a spiritual consciousness of
the same content as now. There is no reason why he should
assume that man began by realising all that was contained
in that consciousness. In this respect the " external con-
sciousness " is the counterpart of the internal : the laws which
science has discovered to pervade the facts of the physical
universe, of external consciousness, were at work when man
first appeared, but man was not then aware of them. But
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 409
even then he was so far conscious of the uniformity of nature
as to act upon it : once bitten, doubtless he was twice shy —
else he would have soon perished. Even then, too, he acted
on the belief that everything had a cause — but for him every
cause was personal, every effect the effect of some will or
other. This, however, was not a religious belief : the wills he
assumed rivers and trees to have were in his eyes natural
not supernatural, not superhuman, but like his own human
will. They were inferences, immediate inferences, made by
his reason from the facts of his external consciousness, and
were an early piece of philosophy — ^^just as to this day theism-
is a philosophical rather than a religious belief. That man
from the beginning had some conception, some sentiment, of
the supernatural, is not here denied. What is maintained
is that that sentiment was not derived from the external
facts of which he was conscious, but frpm his own heart : the
sense of his dependence on a supernatural will, not his own,
though personal like his own, was found by him in his inner
consciousness — a fact of which he had no more doubt than
he doubted that fire burns. That he should look for that
supernatural will amongst the external, physical embodiments
of will, such as plants, animals, rivers, clouds, etc., by which
he was surrounded, was an inevitable consequence of the fact
that he had as yet made little progress in the work of dis-
criminating the contents of his consciousness, external and
internal. But that the contemplation of such external
objects could be the source of the sentiment of the super-
natural, is impossible — that lay within him.
It is an established fact of psychology that every act,
mental or physical, requires the concurrence, not only of the
reason and the will, but of emotion : in any given act one of
these three elements may predominate so much that the other
two may easily be overlooked ; but that they are present for
all that, is agreed by all psychologists. That for the con-
centration of the attention on the facts of spiritual conscious-
ness an effort of the will is required, we have already argued.
Coleridge, indeed, said that it required the greatest effort
that man could make. Be that as it may, no one will doubt
that acts of worship are accompanied by emotion. Nor can
there be any doubt as to the quality of that emotion : it is
410 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
desirable, it has its own peculiar joy, peace, and blessedness ;
it is envied by those who think they cannot share it ; it
strengthens those who feel it in the habit and activity of
faith. Now these are facts which cannot be overlooked
when we come to consider that religion and worship are
universal among mankind. It is true that the widest-spread
forms of religious belief are the lowest, but the persistence
of religion under conditions the most unfavourable for its
survival is proof that even in those conditions it 'has not
I entirely lost its prerogative. We may therefore safely infer
;f that from the beginning man not only recognised liis depend-
ence on a personal and supernatural >vill, but that he found
a peculiar happiness in the recognition. To put it another
way : as the laws of nature were in existence and in operation
long before they were formulated by man, so before the truth
was formulated that God is Love, His love was towards all
His creatures ; and as even primitive man acted on the con-
viction that nature is uniform, so his heart responded with
love to the divine love, though he may have reasoned little
or not at all on either point. Indeed, the reason of primitive
man was ex hypothesi undeveloped ; and, in any case,
religious belief is not an inference reached by reason, but is
the immediate consciousness of certain facts. Those facts,
however, may be and are taken, like other facts of conscious-
ness, as the basis for reasoning, and as the premisses from
which to reach other facts not immediately present to con-
sciousness. The motive for this process is the innate desire of
man to harmonise the facts of his experience, to unite in one
synthesis the facts of his external and his inner consciousness.
The earliest attempt in this direction took the form of ascrib-
ing the external prosperity which befell a man to the action
of the divine love of which he was conscious within himself ;
and the misfortunes which befell him to the wrath of the
justly offended divine will. Man, being by nature rehgious,
began by a religious explanation of nature. To assume, as is
often done, that man had no religious consciousness to begin
with, and that the misfortunes which befell him inspired him
with fear, and fear led him to propitiate the malignant beings
whom he imagined to be the causes of his suffering, fails to
account for the very thing it is intended to explain, namely, the
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 411
existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread
of malignant beings : it does not account for the grateful
worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfac-
tion which man finds in that worship.
JLj-^ the conviction that all events have will for their
cause, and in the recognition, bringing with it its own delight,
of man's dependence on that will, there was nothing to
suggest to the mind of man more than one object of worship ;
and there is reason to believe that it is a psychological
impossibility for the mind of man to seek communion with
two objects of worship simultaneously. It is, however,
certain that — with the^disputed) exception of the Hebrews
— polytheism has been universal amongst mankind ; and it
is certain that man sought the God, of whose " everlasting
power and divinity " from the beginning he was conscious in
his heart, in external nature. And there can be no reason-
able doubt that this was one of the consequences of his
attempt to synthesize the external and internal facts of
consciousness by a reasoning process : all external objects
were conceived by him as personal, and he identified now
one and now another of them with the will with which his
heart prompted him to seek communion. If, as is maintained
in this book, animals were the first of the external objects
that thus came to be worshipped, and totemism was the first
form of that worship, then for a long period man continued
to have only one object of worship, namely, the totem
or tribal god. It was not usually until one tribe united
with another or several others to form a new political whole
and a new religious community, that polytheism came into
existence.
Polytheism presupposes totemism : its existence is in
itself proof of the existence of totemism in a previous stage.
The animal sacrifices offered to polytheistic gods, the animal
forms in which those gods appear in mythology, the animals
with which they are associated in art, find their only
satisfactory explanation in the hypothesis that those gods
were originally totem animals. Totemism, again, is an
attempt to translate and express in outward action the union
of the human will with the divine. In totemism that
outward act took the form of animal sacrifice, because in that
412 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
stage of intellectual development man sought to reconcile his
internal and external experience by identifying the personal
divine will, which manifested itself to his inner consciousness,
with one of the personal agents in the external world that
exercised an influence on his fortunes ; and the personal
agents which his immature reasoning led him to regard as
exercising that influence were various species of animals.
Having thus chosen as the seat of that influence an external
agent, he necessarily adopted an external means of communion
with it ; and the only means which man in that stage of
social development (the tribal) knew for effecting permanent
union with anyone external to the tribe, was a blood-covenant.
The covenant with the animal totem therefore took the form
of participating in the blood of the animal totem. Animal
sacrifice continued as an institution long after totemism was
a thing of the forgotten past ; but as a survival it points
back to totemism, as totemism in its turn points to the
previous conviction of the necessity and the comfort of union
with the divine will.
It is a commonplace that no lie can circulate unless it
contains some truth ; that it is the element of truth in it
which is seen to correspond to facts, and therefore is
supposed to lend its countenance to the elements of error
associated with it. So in religion, the notion that animal
sacrifice was an essential condition of communion with God
was an error ; but it was an error which could neither have
come into existence nor have continued to exist, unless there
had been a desire for such communion — and the desire is
inexplicable except on the assumption that its satisfaction
\ was found, as a matter of immediate consciousness, to bring
I spiritual comfort. But it was the patent truth of the facts
that floated the erroneous reasoning imposed upon them.
The fact that some degree of spiritual communion — in
proportion to the extent to which God was revealed to the
particular worshipper — was attained after the offering of
animal sacrifice, was fallaciously interpreted to imply that
communion was the effect of animal sacrifice : post hoc ergo
propter hoc. The truth that some external act of worship
is necessary to the continued exercise of the habit of faith,
may easily be made into an argument in favour of a
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 413
mischievous rite. Errors may attach themselves to the
truth, but the truth must first be there before they can do
so. In this sense, that is to say logically, totemism, animal-
worship, presupposes a stage in which man had not yet found,
as he supposed, in the external world the source of his inner
consciousness of the divine, and had not yet identified it,
by a process of vain reasoning, with an animal species.
The historical existence of this stage can only be matter
of conjecture, and must rest mainly on the difficulty
of supposing that man, the moment he was man, invented
the idea of animal sacrifice — an idea which, whatever
its origin, can hardly be regarded as innate or even as
obvious.
The nature of religious belief in the pre-totemistic stage
is also entirely matter of conjecture. That it was exclusively
of the nature of fear is, however, improbable. Man did
indeed find himself in the midst of a world of forces (con-
ceived by him as personal agents) over which he had in the
main no control, and by which his fortunes were affected,
often disastrously. But these forces were not all of them
inimical, that he should fear them. Again, love and gratitude
are just as natural, just as much integral parts of the con-
stitution of man, as fear and hatred. There is no probability
in the idea that the only emotion early man felt or was
capable of feeling was fear. Indeed, the fact that in the
totemistic stage he selected now one and now another of the
personal agents, which made up the world for him, as the
embodiment of the Being after whom his heart instinctively
sought peradventure it might find Him, is itself a presump-
tion that he did not regard everything external with fear.
In the same way the fact that in the stage of totemism the
clan has but one totem, one tribal god, constitutes some
presumption that man was conscious of but one God,
before he identified Him with one or other of the forces
of nature. So far belief in this stage may be termed
monotheism ; for, as already said, there is reason to believe
that polytheism was developed out of totemism, and does
not occur until a relatively late period in the evolution of
society.
On the other hand, man's consciousness of God must, in
414 INTRODUCTION TO HISTORY OF RELIGION
this early stage, have been so rudimentary, ex hypothesi, as to
permit of His coming to be conceived, by a process of vain
reasoning, as manifesting Himself in animal form. And this
is in accordance with all that science teaches as to early man's
undeveloped condition, material and mental, social and moral.
Once more, we must remember that the facts of consciousness
'■ were the same for early as for civilised man ; but they were
not as yet discriminated They swam before man's untrained
eye, and ran into one another. Even the fundamental
division of objects into animate and inanimate had not been
fixed. But even so, all was not irrational chaos for man.
In the outer world of his experience, the laws of nature,
which " are God's laws, worked with the same regularity
then as now. In the world of his inner experience, God
was not far from him at any time. If he could not
formulate the laws of nature, at least he had the key to their
comprehension in the conviction, not expressed but acted
on, that nature was uniform. If his spiritual vision was
dim, his consciousness of God was at least so strong, to
start with, that he has never since ceased seeking after
Him. The law of continuity holds of religion as of other
things.
Finally, sacrifice and the sacramental meal which followed
on it are institutions which are or have been universal. The
sacramental meal, wherever it exists, testifies to man's desire
for the closest union with his god, and to his consciousness
of the fact that it is upon such union alone that right social
relations with his fellow-man can be set. But before there
can be a sacramental meal there must be a sacrifice. That
is to say, the whole human race for thousands of years has
been educated to the conception that it was only through a
divine sacrifice that perfect union with God was possible for
man. At times the sacramental conception of sacrifice
appeared to be about to degenerate entirely into the gift
theory ; but then, in the sixth century B.C., the sacramental
conception woke into new life, this time in the form of a
search for a perfect sacrifice — a search which led Clement ^
and Cyprian ^ to try all the mysteries of Greece in vain. But of
^ Euseb. Prmpar. Evangel, ii. 2.
2 Foucart, Associations Eeligieuses, 76, note 2.
THE EVOLUTION OF BELIEF 415
all the great religions of the world it is the Christian Church
alone which is so far heir of all the ages as to fulfil the
dumb, dim expectation of mankind : in it alone the sacra-
mental meal commemorates by ordinance of its founder the
divine sacrifice which is a propitiation for the sins of all
mankind.
INDEX
A
Aalu, 309-12, 313, 316
Abapansi, 299, 303
Abchases, sacrifice, 156, 157
AbijjoneSjiiame ofdeadtalioo, 61 ; mourn-
ing, 79, 80 ; sickness due to sin. 111
Abstract ideas, familiar to the savage,
31
Accadia, 276 ; underworld, 306
Achilles, 300, 301
Acropolis, 332
Actors, sacred, 351
Adoration as primitive as fear in
religion, 21
iEschines, 338-40
^schylus, 16 ; and the mysteries, 360,
362
Affection, parental, 152, 153
Affection, natural, of savages, 200-
Africa, sacrifices to the dead, 195 ;
sacred trees, 208
Africa, Central, property taboo, 72 ;
wives do not wash in husband's
absence, 78
Africa, Equatorial, tree-burial, 204
'Ayadodaifioves, 187
'A7a^6s daifiwv, 187
Agave, 257
'Ayeipecv, 333^
'Ayopd, 335^
Agreement, Method of, used by savages,
29
Agricultural times, sacrificial rite first
becomes a cheeiful feast, 194 ; an-
cestor-Avorship dates from, 194, 195
Agriculture, later than pastoral life,
115 ; compatible with nomad life,
234 ; generally left by savages to the
women, 240, 258, 379
Agyrt«, 333-4, 352, 371
Ahts, blood offering, 171 ; next world,
308
Ahura Mazda, 305
27
Ainos, name of dead taboo, 61 ; altar-
pole, 134 ; offerings to the sun, 230
Alaskans, grave-pcsts, 196
Aleuts, suspension burial, 204
Alfoers, after child-birth mother puri-
fied, father beaten, 75 ; child washed
in blood, 76
Algonkuins, grave-posts, 196
Aliens, eaten, 201-2
Allegory, as the interpretation of
mythology, 268
Alliance between clan and god, 169,
170 ; between totem and clan, 214
Ally, supernatural, sought by man, 154
Altar, a pole or pile to mark the place
on which the blood of the totem is
shed, 131 ; survival of the pile in
Greece, 132, in New "World, Samoa,
and the Samoyeds, 133; pile becomes
a dresser or altar, ib. ; the pillar, a
beth-el, ih. : pile and pillar combined,
134 ; Avooden pillar becomes wooden
image, stone pillar the marble image
of the god, 135, 139 ; idol, like altar,
smeared with blood, ib. ; materials
not to be taken from any chance
place, 135, but from a taboo-
spot, 136, 137 ; primitive altars to
be clistinguished from stones wor-
shipped, 137 ; primitive altar not at
first a god, 138 ; a common, used by
two or more tribes, 235 ; generally
near sacred tree and stream, 237
Altar-stone, anointed with oil, or clad
in skin, 291
Amatongo, 53
Amazon peoples, dead buried in house,
49 ; mothers taboo after child-birth, 7 5
Amazulu, priests, 287
Ambon, cure for disease, 45
Amulets. See Charms
Anaxagoras, on myths, 267
Ancestor-Avorship, not the source of
belief in the supernatural, 55 ; causes
4i8
INDEX
desire for sons, 56 ; a by-product
ih. ; guardian spirits, 187, . 188 ;
esseutially a private worship, 188 ;
expressions and acts of sorrow do not
amount to worship, 189 ; such acts
must first become matter of custom,
190 ; blood-letting to revivify the
deceased comes to be regarded as an
"offering" to him, 190-2; parallel
of hair - offerings, 193-4; so the
funeral feast is interpreted as in
honour of the dead, 194 ; date of
this change, ih. ; then when the
family comes into existence a body
of worshippers is provided, 195 ;
date, ih. ; assimilated to the worship
of the gods, 195 ; altars and idols,
196 ; superhuman powers now
ascribed to the deceased, 196, 197 ;
the "deified ancestor" fallacy, 197 ;
gods not originally ghosts, 197-8 ;
ancestor- worship does not satisfy the
religious instinct, 198 ; bound up
with the patriarchate and eventually
an obstacle to progress, 199 ; not
based on fear, nor the source of
religion, 225 ; its effects on the
belief in the next world, 301-2 ; for-
bidden to the Jews, 302 ; not the
source of religion, ih. ; libations of
water in, 323-4
Angakuts, 290
Angels, 383
Angoy, royal blood may not be shed, 73
Animal-headed gods, 123
Animals, sacrificed to non-totem deities,
230 ; sacred, change of status in,
295-6 ; sacred to gods, 384
Animate and inanimate, a division
unknown to primitive man, 414
Animism, 21 ff'. ; no element of the
supernatural necessarily present in,
22, but usually present, 41 ; rever-
sions to, 141ff. ; not 'j)&T se religious,
206, 393, 409 ; in it man projects
his own personality on to nature,
394
'Al'tTTTOTToSeS, 63
Annihilation, 319
Annual sacrifice and renewal of blood-
covenant, 294
Antelope, as totem, 155
Anthropology, deals with social and
religious institutions, 2 ; and employs
the Comparative Method (q.v.), 2
Anthropomorphism, of tree-totems,
208-9 ; consequence of polytheism,
247 ; gradual growth traceable in
art and mythology, 252
Antilles, guardian spirits, 184
Ants, as totems, 126
Apalaches, 311
Apaturia, 51
Apepi, 309
Aphrodite, 273
Apis, calf marked by twenty-nine signs,
122 ; in which the god manifested
himself, 130 ; though all other cows
were also sacred, 183
Apollo, laurel associated with, 209 ;
absorbed many other (totem) gods,
236, 385 ; associated with dolphin,
252 ; dissociated from dolphin-myth,
253 ; eires20?ie attached to his temple,
255 ; personality individual though
ritual complex, 390 ; possesses the
Sibyl, 274, 283 ; communicates
power of prophecy by blood of
sacrifice. 285 ; by eating of laurel-
leaves, 286
Apollo Parrhasios, sacrifice to be con-
sumed in sanctuary, 146 ; and
entirely, 149
'Airocppddes {Tjfxepat), 67
Apple, eating the first, 293
Arabian KigJits, 253, 259, 355
Arabians might not ay ash the head,
63 ; blood-feuds with animals, 100 ;
primitive altar, 132 ; the nosb, 133 ;
sacrificial rite, 144 ; joint-eating,
330. S'ee Hebrews, Israel, Jews,
Semites
Arafuas, funeral feasts, 46
Arcadia, primitive form of sacrificial
meal, 146
'Apx€pavLaT7j$, 335-
'Apxepavos, 335-
'Apxi-di-o-cTl-TTjs, 335^
Aricia, 238
Arion, 253
Aristophanes, parodies Eleusinia, 375-6
Armenia, totem tombstones, 103
Arnobius, anointed sacred stones, 143
Art, in its highest forms, not a survival
of barbarism, though evolved, 10 ;
exhibits gradual growth of anthro-
pomorphism, 252 ; progress in, 396
Artemis, image clad in skin, 252^ ; the
Ephesian, 209
Artemis Hvmnia, jiriestess of, taboo,
62, 63, 77
Aryan. See Indo-European
Ashantis, defeated by Fantis, 21 ; offer
blood to the dead, 52 ; their con-
federation, 239
Ashera, 134, 135
Asia, functional deities, 247
Asparagus, as totem, 125
Assiniboins, suspension burial, 204
Association of an animal with a god,
124, 127 ; of a human figure and
tree, 208-9 ; in art, 252
Association of Ideas, accounts for
transmissibility of taboo, 67 ; 91
INDEX
419
Associations, religious, 331^ff.
Assyria, sacred trees, 208
Astarte, associated with swine, 128 ;
idol of, 139
Atargatis, 128
Athene, sacred olive of, 208 ; priestess
of, 271
Athens, sacred olive of, 208
Atiu Islanders, eat not with strangers,
71
Atonement for sin, 160, 161
Attendants, slaughtered at grave, 200
Attention, unequally distributed over
field of consciousness, 8, 34 ; "move-
ment of att." a factor in animism, 22
Australian black - men, belief as to
erysipelas, 23 ; make the sun stand
still, 24 ; name of dead taboo, 61 ;
eat not with strangers, 71 ; mothers
taboo after child-birth, 74, 75 ;
mourning, 79 ; terror of taboo, 83 ;
puberty ceremonies, 103, 104 ; muti-
lation, 170 ; blood-offerings to the
dead, 191, 193 ; their natural affec-
tion and moral character, 200^ ;
sacred trees, 208. See Victoria
Aygnan, 308
Aztecs, blood-offerings to the dead,
191 ; grave-posts, 196. See Mexico
B
Baal, 385
Baalbek, totemism in, 128
Babracot, 100
Babylonians, myths, 262 ; next world,
299, 300, 301, 304 ; divine kings,
275 ; office annual, 280 ; western
world, 307
Baccanalia, 341
Bacchfe, 256
Bacchus, murdered by Titans, 350 ff.
Bachue, myth of, 257, 259
Bacon, on the moon, 30
Baetylion, 133
Bakongo, mourning, 79
^aWijTvs, 380
Balonda, 285
Bangala, cannibalism, 202
Banu Hanifa, 216
Baperi, 305
Baptie, 339
Baptism, 76
Bara country, belief as to photography,
301
Barea, funeral feasts, 51
Barotse, 285
BacrtXei^s, 279
Basutos, their crops taboo to the
unclean, 60 ; taboo-day, 65 ; sacrifices
to the dead, 195
Batta, tale of, 316-7, 365
Battas (the), offer blood to the dead,
52 ; do not kill their domesticated
animals, 116 ; sacrifices to the dead,
196 ; cannibalism, 202 ; priests, 288
Beard, swearing by the, 64
Beating, to draw a blood - offering,
171
Beaver-totem, 102
Behnya, 164
Belief, not required in antique religions,
250 ; a belief not untrue because
universal, 284 ; species of, arise from
sports or varieties, 303-5 ; the test
of, 398, 402 ; differences of, how
explained, 398 f., 400 ; teaching
essential to propagation of, 400,
405 ; evolution of, not purely intel-
lectual, 403-4. See Validity
Beltane cakes, 219
Best clothes, QQ, See Garments
Beth-el, 133
Bhogaldai, 213
Birth, of lacchus, 373
Birth-trees, 207
Black art, 166
Blemish, phj'^sical, requires death of
divine king, 279 ; deprecated in
priest, 289
Blest, Islands of the, 313
Blood, taboo, 59, 67 73, 74 ; so may
not be shed, 74 ; nor allowed to
touch the ground, 75 ; shedder of
blood "unclean," 75 ; used for puri-
fication, 76 ; of clan communicated
at crises to individual clansmen, 103,
104 ; sap of plants serves for blood,
115 ; the same blood flows in the
veins of all the clan, 130, and of all
the totem- species, ih. ; is the spirit
of the species, 131 ; and is shed to
procure a theophany, ih. ; and taboos
the spot, which is therefore marked,
ih. ; dashed on altar of evil spirits,
175 ; of clan applied to clansman at
birth, puberty, marriage, death, 192 ;
extended as an offering from animal
to cereal deities, 219, 220 ; repre-
sented by fat or oil, 285 ; by sap of
tree, 286 ; drinking, cause of inspira-
tion, 286, 293, 296 ; ceases to be
an adequate means of communion,
329
Blood-covenant, 97 ff. ; originally only
between tribes, 99 ; later between
individuals, 142 ; sacrifice originally
a, 147 ; between clan and clan-
god, 170 ; between individuals, ib. ;
between individual and clan-god,
170-3
Blood-feud, 54, 97, 122
Blood-letting, as a protection against
foreigners, 71
420
INDEX
Blood- offerings, to the dead, 51, 52 ;
as a means of commendation to the
gods, 170 If., 220;' in worship of
unattached s^^irits, 174 ; to guardian
spirits, 182 ; at the gi'ave, 191, not
due to fear but desire to revivify the
deceased, 190-2 ; in the Eleusinia,
365, 380
Blood -relationship, necessary bond of
nomad but not of settled life, 120
Bloodshed, evaded, 292
Blood-tie, bond of society, 54, 330 ;
broken down, 376
Bobowissi, a general deity, 163 ; chief
god of Fanti confederation, 239
Bolotu, 308
Bw/x6s Xidcov Xoydooji', 132
Bona Dea, 240
Bond, between gods and man, renevred,
237
Bones, buried to procure resurrection
of animal, 150
Bon-fire = bone-fire, 150
Bonny, ceremony of recalling the soul,
47 ; embalming, 49 ; dead buried
under doorstep, 51
Book of the Dead, 309, 311, 323,
384
Borneo, next world, 299. See Dusuns
Borrowing of myths, 260-1
Bo^poj, 52
BoiKpjvLa, 117, 291
Bourbonnais, dough-man, 215-6
Brahtb, 155
Bran, Voyage of, 313
Branch, carried in procession, 255.
See Procession
Bratstva, 99
Brazil, altar-pole, 134 ; guardian spirits,
184 ; fingers cut off in honour of
dead, 191 ; western world, 306
Brumalia, 228
Buddha, 318 ft\, 332
Buffalo, totem, 103
Buhuitihu, 176
Bulgarians, funeral feasts, 51
Bulls, sacrificed to rivers, 230
Burats, their remedies for disease,
441
Burial, in house, 49, 50 ; of bad people,
50 ; of totem animals, 126 ; its
object isolation of the corpse, which
is taboo, 204 ; effected by suspension,
ib. See Cremation, Inhumation
Burmah, outcasts taboo, 69
Burning, to avoid bloodshed, 73, 74
Burnt-offering, subsequent to growth
of the conception of a piaculum,
160-1 ; facilitates syncretism, 236
Buryats, corpse of Shaman taboo, 76
Butler, Bp., 46, 152
Butterfly, as totem, 243
C
Cairns, which mark graves come to be
regarded as altars, 196
Calamity, due to sin, 160
Caldwell, Bp., 174-6
Calendar, the agricultural, 225-8
Calf-god, 122
Calicut, kings of, 279
Cambodia, 275, 280
Canada, Indians of, totems and
tattooing, 182
Caiiari Indians, myth, 257-8, 260
Cannibalism, rarely religious in in-
tention, 201 ; practiced on aliens,
201, on kinsmen, 202 ; latter implies
no disrespect, nor prevents ancestor-
worship, 203 ; but aims at keeping
the good qualities of the deceased
within the clan, 203
Cape Coast natives discover Djwi-
j'ahnu, 20, 21
Cardea, 246
Caribs, name of dead taboo, 61 ;
property taboo, 72 ; jnourners fast,
78 ; fasted after a birth, 75 ; then
purified child, 76 ; their canni-
balism, 201
Caste, based on taboo, 73
Catal (the), burn the good, bury the
bad, 50
Categorical Imperative, 85
Cattle, not eaten by pastoral peoples,
116. See Domesticated Animals
Caucasus, " dwarf-houses " in, 50
Causation, savage theory of, 31 ;
animistic, 206 ; universality of,
284 ; man's belief in, inherent and
undemonstrated, 404
Celebes, the Topantunuasu remedy
for disease, 45 ; mothers taboo
after child-birth, 74. See Minahassa
Celts, 313
Ceos, funeral laAV, 77
Ceram, hair may not be cut in, 45
Cereal deities, generally feminine, why,
240
Cereals, cultivation of, 210 ; as totems,
211
Chferonea, 292^
XaXa^o0i'\aK'es, 171
Chalcatongo, 305
Chaldfea, magic in, 40 ; house-gods,
186
HafxaievvaL, 63
Charms, 165 ; not worshipped, 168 ;
no spirit resides in them, 178,
333
Chay-her, 308
Cheese, not to be eaten by priestess of
Athene, 271
Chemis, 184, 186
INDEX
421
Chepera, 384
Cheremiss, Cherkess, Chuwasli. >S'e6
Tscheremiss, Tscherkess, Tschuwasch
Chibchas, myth of Bacliue, 257 ; their
priest-king, 275
Chica, offered to the dead, 52
Chicoraecoatl, corresponds to tlie
Corn-Mother, 212-3 ; her feast, 215 ;
syncretism in her ritual, 235 ; differ-
entiated from Xilonen, 239 ;
"associated" with maize-plant,
252 ; her procession, 255
Chiefs, taboo in Tahiti and New
Zealand, 62 ; go to the happy other-
world, 308
Child-birth taboos the mother, 74
Children, taboo at birth, 75 ; so are
prey of evil spirits, 76 ; must be
purified, 76 ; dressed like totem, 103
Chile, grave-posts, 196
Chili, guardian spirits, 184; "posses-
sion," 286 ; next world, 299 ;
western world, 306
China, soul invited to return (Li Yun),
46 ; ancestor-worship, 56 ; mourners
tabooed, 58 ; sacrifice in, 147,
148, 149; ancestor - worship does
not satisfy the religious instinct in,
198
Choctaws, 251
Christianit}', a higher form of mono-
theism than Judaism, 386 ; sacra-
ment and sacrifice in, 414-5
Christmas, 228
Chryses, 273
Church (the savage), 103
Churching of women, 75
Circumambulation, 210
Cist, 355
Citians, 341
Civilisation, material, due to religion,
249
Civitas, 374
Clallam, ordination, 288
Clan, bound by blood-tie, 54 ; whole
clan must partake of sacrificial meal,
147 ; when clan dissolves its worship
ceases, 181 ; named after its totem,
209
Clan-god, leader in war and father of
the clan, 153
Clansmen, eaten _
worshippers, 327
Clay, cleansing by, 339, 348-51, 355
Clement, 346, 414
Clothes, best, 66. See Garments
Cochin-China, piaculum, 161
Cockaigne, 305, 312-3
Cockle, as totem, 153
Coercion, not applied by man to the
gods, 42 ; not applied by man to
supernatural powers, 105, 168, 183 ;
201-2 : = fellow-
anti-religious and therefore not the
source of religion, 233
Colour, taboo-colours, white, 65, %^,
79 ; red, 67, 349
Columbia (Indians of), totems, 102 ;
suspension burial, 204
Comitium, 305, 307
Communion, with dead and with
supernatural powers, 56 ; is the
object of the sacrificial meal, 152 ;
effected by physical assimilation
of the supernatural qualities of the
divine animal, 152, 153 ; with plant-
totems, 214-9 ; with tree-totems,
220-2; " Satanic imitation of,"
288 ; condition of future happiness,
326, 376 ; followed on sacrifice,
412. See Sacrament
Community, the only religious, origin-
ally the State, 328-9
Comparative Method, applied to
institutions, is based on resemblances
between the institutions of different
peoples, 2, 3 ; but also implies
difference, 3 ; is employed to estab-
lish those differences, 4 ; and to
trace their succession {i.e. their
history and evolution), 4
Compurgation, origin of, 64, 65
Concomitant Variations, Method of,
used by savages, 29
Concordia, 246
Confarreatio, 330
Confirmation, in " the savage church,"
103
Confucius, 198, 199 ; communion with,
148
Congo, remedies for disease, 44 ;
Avelcome the dead, 48 ; blood-
covenant, 98 ; cannibalism, 201
Connla, adventures of, 313
Conopas, 184
Conscience, 343
Consciousness, facts of the religious,
394 ; the external, 408 ; attcmj^ts to
reconcile the facts of the external
and internal, 410
Consecration, of kings, 285
Contagion of taboo, 65. Sec Infection
Contamination, of tree and plant
worship, 215-6. See Syncretism
Continuity, Law of, holds of science, 28
Continmim of religious evolution, 8 ; of
the evolution of science, 10 ; in
religion, 393-4
Corn, not to be ground on taboo-da3'^s,
65 ; as totem, 364 ; ear of, exhibited
in the Eleusinia, 372, 381 ; .'^heaf of,
in the Eleusinia and the Feast of
Unleavened Bread, 385
Corn-baby, how made, 212
Corn-goddess, 241
422
INDEX
Coni-Maiden, differentiated from Corn-
Mother, 239, 241 ; in the Eleusinia,
346 ff.
Corn-Mother, how made, 212 ; differen-
tiated from Corn-Maiden, 239, 241,
243 ; in the Eleusinia, 364 ft".
Corn-sieve, 247
Corn-stalk family, 209, 211
Corporation, of priests, 288 ff.
Corpses, taboo, 76 ; may not touch the
ground, ih. ; defile clothes, 77 ;
devoured by dogs (totem - animal),
203-4. See Cannibalism, Burial
Cosmogony, 262, 264
Cotton-Mother, 243
Councils of Tours and Xantes, suppress
stone -worship, 142, 143
Cray-fish Clan, myth of origin, 251
Creation, myths as to, 262
Cremation, 50, 299. Sec Burial,
Corpses, Inhumation
Crete, 332
Criminals, taboo, 59 ; are those who
have violated taboo, 70 ; eaten, 202
203 ; executed in place of divine
king, 280
Crow Indians, mourning, 79 ; blood-
offerings to the dead, 191
Cuchulinn, 313
Cudjo, 164
Cults, private and family, how related
to public cults, 1 88 ; local, open only
to inhabitants, 327. See "Worship
Ciinina, 246
Custom, the first form in which duty
presents itself, 190
Customary Religions, defined, 1
Cut direct, 92
Cycle of transmigration, 317, 321
Cylon, 332
Cynadfe, 125
Cyprian, 414
Cyprus, 221
D
Dabaiba, funeral feasts, 51 ; blood
may not be shed, 73, 74
Dacotahs, descended from a stone, 139 ;
blood -offerings to the dead, 191 ;
suspension bmial, 204
Dagon, 123
Dahomey, funeral feasts, 51
Aai/xwv, 322
Aai/JLoues, 187
Damaras, washed only when born, 76 ;
all slaughter is sacrifice, 158, 159 ;
divine kings, 290
Dance, as worship, 174
Dai)h-si. See Wliydah
Datilla, 304
Daubing, for purification, 349 ff.
Daulia. See Tronis
David, 57, 78
Day, taboo-day, 65, 66
Dead, treatment of, 45-53 ; washed
with blood, 52 ; painted red, 53 ;
fear of, 53 ; relations with, suggest
possibility of friendly relations with
spirits, 54 ; dependent on the living,
55 ; name of, taboo, 61 ; require
food, 194 ; buried in trees, 210 ;
washing the, 288 ; do not return,
though ghosts do, 302 ; rejoin to-
tem, 303. See Burial, Corpses,
Ghosts, Mourners, Spirits
Death, savage theory of, 44
Death and resurrection, pretended, 288
Deceased. See Dead, Corpses, Ghosts,
Spirits
Decorative art, its origin, 172
Defilement, 66. See Uncleanness
Degeneration, a process of evolution, 8
"Deified ancestors," the fallacy of the
expression, 197
Deiphobus, 301
Deiras, 285
Deities, General, Local, and Tutelary,
163 ; difierence between them, 164 ;
tutelary, 165. See Family Gods
Delphi, 243
Demeter, fish sacred to, 63 ; associated
with cereals, 213 ; pig sacrificed to
her, 220 ; differentiated from Kore,
239 ; worshipped originally by
women only, 241 ; associated with
wheat, 252 ; her Eleusinian cult
thrown open to all, 359 ; its connec-
tion with the doctrine of future bliss,
362; "chthonic," ib. ; and Perse-
phone, ib. ; as the Old Woman of
Eleusis, 367 ff. ; name of, avoided in
H. H. to Demeter, 88-183, 378
Demosthenes, 338-40
Dena, 278
Departmental gods, how they arose,
242
De Peyster's Island, grave-posts, 196
Dervishes, Dancing, 287
Design, theory of, 399, 400
Devaks, 207
Devil-worship, 106
Di Indigetes, 245-6
Dialis, his hair-clippings and nail-
parings buried, 45. See Flamen
Diamond- mine tabooed by Tame-
ham eha, 72
Diana, 238
Diasia, victim consumed before sun-
rise, 146 ; cakes in shape of animals,
216
Dies nefasti, 67, 276
Dieyerie, puberty ceremonies, 103, 104,
171
INDEX
423
Difference, Method of, used by savages,
29
Ditfusion of myths, 260
Dining-table, etiquette of, 92
Dinkas, do not kill their cows, 116 ;
their natural alfection, 200-
Alouvctos ^vdevdpos, 209
Dionysus, syncretised with vegetation-
spirit, 236 ; in mythology, 255 ff. ;
and the ivy, 209 ; supernatural
powers of his worshippers, 274, 283 ;
in private mysteries, 842 ; identified
with Oriental gods in the private
mysteries, 352 tf.
Dionysus ^symnetes, his Xdpva^ taboo,
60
Ai'os Kudiov, 348
Dioscuri, primitive altar of, 132
Disease, savage theory of, 44 ; remedies
for, 44, 45 ; sent by spirits, 110 ;
and as punishment by gods, 111 ;
cured by spirits of streams and
wells, 232 ; an occasion for renewing
the bond between gods and man, 237
Disutility, 243
Divination, water used for, 229, 289 ;
how gods of, arise, 242-3
Divine right, 285
Djinn, 224
Dog-clan, 125
Dogs, reluctance to feed on, 118 ;
associated with Lares, 187 ; with
Hecate, ib. ; as totem - animal,
devours corpses, 203-4 ; as totem,
209 ; ancestor of the Kalang, 253
Doll of sorrow, 49 ; of dough, 215-6
Dolphin, friendly, 253
Domesticated auimals, originally to-
tems, 156 ; property of the tribe,
157 ; sacrificed at first rarely, then
more often, 157
Domesticated plants, 210 ff.
Domestication of plants and animals,
the starting-point of civilisation,
113 ; due not to "amusement" but
tototemism, 114, 117 ; which taught
the savage the lesson of abstinence,
115 ; reluctance to kill or eat
domesticated animals survives, 117,
118 ; domestication the uninten-
tional effect of totemism, 118,
119 ; geographical distribution of
domesticable animals, 120 ; domesti-
cation fatal to totemism, ib.
Dough, eaten sacramentally, 215-9
Drama, sacred, in the Eleusinia, 372-3
Dra vidians, tree and plant totems, 207
Dreams, how they affect the savage's
conception of personality, 43 ; as a
means of choosing a guardian spirit,
182
Dromling, 305
Druids, 237
Dryads, originally tree - totems, 208 ;
not absorbed by the greater gods, 238
Dusans (the) of Borneo, use the Method
of Difference, 29
Dwarf-houses, 50
Dyaks, new-born children prey of evil
spirits, 76 ; mourning - taboo, 77 ;
next world, 310
Dyaus, 239
E
Ear of corn, preserved from harvest to
spring, 364. See Corn, Sheaf
Ear-rings, their origin, 172
Earth, agriculturist's dependence on,
228
Earthly Paradise, 304
Easter, a festival in the primitive
agricultural calendar, 228 ; rites of
the green corn (or maize) celebrated,
239
Eating an animal to acquire its
qualities, 31 ; eating earth in honour
of the god, 64 ; eating fetish, 64 ;
eating with and of the god, 149,
151 ; with the god, 157, 158 ; joint
eating a bond of fellowship with men
and gods, 159, 160 ; eating con-
stitutes a sacred bond, 330, 369
Eclipses, myths about, 261
Eden, 264
Edgar, King, attacks stone- worship, 143
Egyj)tians (ancient), 30 ; blood not to
be shed, 74 ; totemism, 121 ff. ;
cannibalism, 202 ; kings divine,
275; next world, 302, 309-12;
metempsychosis, 315-7, 319, 320,
322-3. See Aalu, Apepi, Apis,
Batta, Book of the Dead, Calf- god,
Chepera, Ka, Memphis, Mendes,
Meroe, Nut, Osiris, Ra, Sakkarah,
Thebes
Eight Seats, 65
Eiresione, youths dressed as women,
241 ; carried in procession, 255
Eleusinia, \cdo^o\ia, 292"^. See
Mysteries
Eleusis, its synoikismos with the
Athenian state, 364
Eleutherfe, 256^
Elis, 349
Ellice Island, altar and pillar, 134
Elohim, 385
Elysian plains, 313
Elysium, 321, 324
Embalming, 49
'H/uepai aTTOcppades, 67
Emotion, in religion, 409, 411
Empedocles, on myths, 267j 320-1
Encounter Bay, 306
424
INDEX
Epliesians' use of Method of Concomi-
tant Variations, 30
Epilepsy, sign of possession, 286
Epimeletae, 336
Epimenides, 332
Episcopi, 336
'ETTOTrreta of things taboo in the
mysteries, 60, 380
Equatoria, blood-offering at marriage,
172
Equinoxes, 227-8
Eran Vej, 264 ; the Far-off Land,
304 ; created by Ahura Mazda, 305
Erani, 334-6, 337
Erinyes, 102
Error, has its laws and its process of
evolution, 5, 6
'Ecrxdpa, 52
Eschatology, 331
Eskimo, 290
Esoteric doctrines, in the Eleusinia, 360
Essence, the divine, 311, 319, 322
Esthonians, smear trees with blood, 219
Estland, rain procured, 230
Ethiopia, divine kings, 275 ; ordered
by priests to die, 279
Ethiopians, war - paint, 349 ; (the
righteous), 313
Etiquette, 86, 92
^vOalfjLiov, 187
Euripides, 321
Europa, 251
Euryphylus, violated taboo, 60
Everlasting punishment, 375
Evoe Saboe, 340
Evolution, does it apply to religion ?
5 ; E. universal, progi-ess exceptional,
5, 38 ; applied to religion (or art)
does not involve the inference that
religion (or art) is mere barbarism,
9, 10 ; and progress not identical,
88 ; of taboo, 88, 89 ; in religion,
382, 386-7 ; not synonymous with
progress, 394-5
Ewe-speaking peoples, believe that the
soul occasionally returns to the
body, 45 ; tempt the soul of the
deceased to return, 46 ; funeral
lamentations, 47 ; ghosts harm
strangers only, 53 ; sacred python
taboo, 60 ; sacred python communi-
cates taboo, 63 ; taboo-days, 65 ;
royal blood may not be shed, 73 ;
mourners taboo, 77 ; lightning-god,
77 ; mourners, 78, 79 : sacrificial
meal, 158 ; sacrifices to the dead, 195
Experience, sole test of truth in
religion as well as science, 10 ; did
not teach man what effects he could
and what he could not produce, 33 ;
not the base of taboo, 85, 87
External world. See World
F
Fabius, 209
Face, painting of, 350-1
Faculty theory, 401
Fairies, taboo to see, 60
Fairy-tales, reflect primitive man's
ignorance of natural laws, 16 ; their
origin, 253-4
Faith, the foundation of science as
well as of religion, 10, 17 ; inter-
M'oven with every act of reason, 406 ;
in religion, 407 ; in science, ib.
Fallacies. See Error
Family, the, a later institution than
the clan, 180, 188 ; does not come
into existence until after nomad
times, 195
Family affections, strong amongst
savages, 46 ff. ; continued in death,
53 ; and suggest friendly relations
with supernatural spirits, 54, 55
Family gods, 164 ; how obtained, ih. ;
from the gods of the community,
180 ; and vice versa, 181 ; or from
guardian spirits, ib. ; amongst
Semites, 186 ; in Rome, ib. ; in
Greece, 187, 188
Fantis attribute their victory over the
Ashautis to a hitherto unknown
god, 21 ; on ghosts, 49 ; their con-
federation, 239
Far-off Land, 297 ff. ; origin of belief
in, 298-9
Fasting, of mourners, 57, 77 ; of
mothers after child-birth, 65 ; to
appease guardian-sjjirit, 183 ; in
Eleusinia, 365, 368
Fat substitute for blood, 285
Fatherhood, of God, 108, 109, 139
Fawn-skin, in mysteries, 338, 351
Fear not the only occasion on which
the belief in the supernatural mani-
fests itself, 20 ff. ; alleged to be the
"natural "sentiment towards the
dead, 46 ; of deceased not source of
mourning-taboo, 58 ; nor of taboo
generally, SO, SI ; of spirits, 105 ;
counteracted by alliance with a god,
105. 106 ; not the only feeling felt to-
wards spirits, 106 ; not the origin of
religion, 106, 107, 109 ; a necessary
element in education, 110 ; of super-
natural powers, 166 ; of punishment
indispensable in education, 190 : not
the source of the rites of the dead,
192 ; not the reason why implements
are buried with the deceased, 205 ;
not the core of worship, 225 ; of
the supernatural felt l^y the savage,
233
Feiticos, 166
INDEX
425
Feralia, 51
Fetish and idol, 25 ; eating f., 64
Fetishism, the word feltic^o wrongly
applied by the Portuguese to tutelary
deities, 166, 167 ; extended hy De
Brosses to anything worshipped,
167 ; by Bosnian to things known
to be inanimate yet worshipped,
167, 168 ; now useless for scientific
purposes, 169 ; idol not an elabor-
ated fetish, lb. ; a degeneration of
religion, 247 ; the outcome of poly-
theism, 389
Fig-trees, sacred. 208
Fiji, affection for dead, 49 ; the sick
taboo, 69 ; chiefs taboo, ih. ; mourn-
ing, 80 ; mutilation in honour of
the dead, 191 ; priest "possessed,"
274 ; western world, 306
Filial relation of clansmen to clan-god,
108, 109
Fingers cut off as offerings, 170 ; cut
off in honour of the dead, 191
Fire, the first, 15 ; purification by,
365, 368 ; a genus capable of totem-
istic worship, 229, 230 ; purificatory
powers of, 230 ; offerings cast into,
230-1 ; fires as offerings, 231-2 ;
passing through, 380 ; not to be
kindled on taboo days, 65
First-born, sacrifice of, 295-6
Fittest, survival of, 38 ; to survive not
necessarily the highest, 394-5
Flam en Dial is, 271
Flaminica, 272
Flint implements, their purpose as-
certained by Comparative Method,
2, 3 ; the first ever made, 15
Flood-myths, 262
Florida, 311
Floris Islands, cannibalism, 202
Folk-lore, 268, 369
Food, not inherently taboO; 69 ; may
be "infected" by mourners and
Other tabooed j)ersons, 69, 70 ; totem
taboo as, 102 ; survival of the taboo,
118 ; remnants of, used to injure the
eater, 151 ; dangerous to others,
154 ; required by the dead, 194
Forculus, 246
Formalism, 89
Fortunate I«les, 312-3
Fowls, not eaten in England in Cfesar's
time, 117 ; nor by the Battas,
. 116.
Francis Island, cannibalism, 202
Free will, 402
Friends = clansmen, 54
Fumigation of strangers, 71
Functional deities, 246-7
Funeral feasts, 45 - 7 ; feasts not
originally acts of worship, 56
Funerals, priests not allowed to attend,
271
Funnel used for conveying blood-offer-
ings, 51, 52
Future state, in Homeric times, 374 ;
in the Hymn to Demeter, 375
Fuzachagua, 257
G
Gaboon negi-oes, will not part with
their hair, 45
Garments, removed lest they be tabooed,
64, 67, 92 ; tabooed by mourning, 66
Gautama. Bee Gotama
Gazelle as totem, 128
Genesis, see Monotheism, 5 ; does it
say that monotheism was revealed ? 7
Genius, no law of its distribution, 94,
396; guardian spirit, 186; associated
with animals, 'ih. \ of Ti. Gracchus,
ib. ; man suffers as animal genius
suffers, ih. ; familiar spirit, a survival
of animal genius, 187
Genius tutelaris, 208
Ghab-ghab, 133
Ghonds, tree-burial, 210
Ghosts, feared only if strangers, 53, 54 ;
not always credited with supernatural
powers, 55 ; send sickness, 190 ; do
not acquire supernatural powers until
a relatively late time, 196 ; not the
original gods, 197-8 ; linger in neigh-
bourhood of survivors, 298 ; follow
their favourite occupations in ghost-
land, 303
Ghost-land, belief in, philosophical, 302
Giant Avho had no heart in his body, 17
Gift-theory of sacrifice, 204-5, 224-5,
330-1, 333
Girls. Bee Women
Glaucothea, 342
Goats, 351
God, name of, taboo, 61 ; the divine
essence, 311 ; existence of, denied
by Buddha, 319 ; the Unknown,
332
Gods, defined, 104 ; a god fights for
his clan, 108 ; the god of the com-
numity, 160 ; gods distinguished
from other supernatural powers, 166 ;
have a definite circle of worshippers,
169 ; strange gods, 173 ff". ; worship
ceases wdien clan dissolves, 181 ;
feast with their worshippers, 194 ;
killing of the, 216, 255, 291-6;
gods are friendly powers, 225 ;
themselves the victims offered to
themselves, 231 ; how their number
was increased, 234, 239 ; originally
had no proper names, 236 ; how
affected by polytheism, 242, 249 ;
426
INDEX
not originally departmental, but
omnipotent, 243-4 ; how they ac-
quired names, 245 ; tribal, wor-
shipped by tribe only, 327 ; state-
gods by members of state only, ih. ;
introduction into Athens of new,
341 ; identity of, with sacred
animals, 384-5 ; at first have no
names, 391 ; times when all men
have need of them, 393. See Family
Gods, Guardian Spirits, Spirits,
Supernatural
God's Mouth, 279
Gold Coast. See Tshi-speaking peoples.
Golden Age, 304
Voval, 373
Gonda, probably same as Padrei, 202
Gotama, 318 tf.
Gourd, serves as medicine-bag, 184
Grave-posts, carved in totem form,
103 ; made into human form, 196
Graveyards haunted, 302
Greece, Apaturia, 51 ; ancestor-worship
in, 56 ; mourners tabooed, 57 ; water
used for purification, 80 ; purifica-
tion, SO ; totemism in, 125 ; blood
dashed on altar, 132 ; hair-offering,
171, blood-offering, ih. ; unattached
spirits become gods, 176 ; sacred
species of plants, 208 ; images on
trees, 209 ; priesthood in, 270. See
Achilles, Acropolis, Actors, .^s-
chines, ^schylus, 'A7a^6s daifxojv,
Agave, 'Ayeipeiv, 'Ayopd, Agyrtre,
Anaxagoras, 'AvLTrroTrodes, Apaturia,
Aphrodite, Apollo, 'Airocppddes,
Arcadia, 'ApxepavtaTTjs, 'Apxi-0'-o.o-l-Tr]S,
Aristophanes, Arion, Artemis,
Athene, Athens, Bacchfe, Bacchus,
BaXX-^TVs, BaptiB, BacrtXei/s, Bw/ios,
BoOpos, Bovcpopia, Ceos, Chffironea,
XaXa^ocpvXaKes, Xa/u.aLevvai, Chryses,
Citians, Crete, Cylon, Cynadte,
Cyprus, Aai/xiou, Deiras, Delphi,
Demeter, Demosthenes, Diasia,
Dionysus, Aios Kcpdiov, Dioscuri,
Dryads, Eiresione, Eleusinia,
Eleusis, Eleuthera?, Elis, Elysian
Plains, Elysium, Empedocles,
Ephesians, Epimeletfe, Epimenides,
Episcopi, Erani, Erinyes, 'Eax^pa,
Bv5ai/ji(i}v, Europa, Euryphylus,
Evoe Saboe, Glaucothea, Foj^ai,
Hades, Hecate, Helios, Hera, Her-
acles, Hermes, Hesiod, Hesperides,
Hestiaseis, Hierophant, Hymn,
Hyes, lacchus, 'lepd, 'leporroLoi,
loxidpe, Isocrates, KXddos, KXrjpos,
Kore, Kotytis, KpaTrjpi^uu, KvKedJv,
Adpva^, Laureion, Leda, Leucas,
Leukippides, ALdojSoXia, Locrians,
Lupercalia, Mdz^rts, iMeilichioi, Men,
Menelaus, Mv-rjais, Mycen?e, Myr-
midons, Mysteries, Naids, lSa6(f>opoL,
'Se^pi^ojv, Xoyaos, Odysseus, "OX/Stos,
Olympia, Olympus, Onomacritus,
Orgeones, Orion, Pallas, UdvaTcpfia,
Pentheus, Persephone, Petelia,
Pharse, ^dpfiaKos, STj-yauls, Phocians,
Phoebus, Pindar, Pisistratus, Plato,
Plutarch, HoX^fiapxos, Potidsea,
Prometheus, Proteus, ^T/^tV^uara,
Pyanepsion, Pythagoreanism, Keiti,
Sabazios, Salamis, Selli, Semele,
Seriphos, Sicily, Sicyon, Solon,
Spartans, Syria, Tellies, Tefxevos,
Thebes, Qeoi, Qeocpopoi, Qeos, Thes-
mophoria, Thessalians, Thiasi, Thu-
rii, TpdyoL, Tronis, Troy, Xanthos,
'^oava, Zagreus, Zeus
Ground, tabooed where taboo persons
step, 62, cf. 73-6. See Soil
Guardian spirits, derived from the
community's gods, 180, 181 ; but
not always, 182 ; but always like
them, 182 ; fasting a preliminary
to choosing them, ib. ; the in-
dividual totem, 182 ; the medicine-
bag, 183, or a skin, ib., or a wooden
idol, 184 ; in case of plant totems,
a calabash or gourd serves, 184 ;
sacrifice offered, 183, 184 ; in Old
AVorld, 185-8 ; as genius, 186 ; as
familiar spirit, 187 ; as dai/xopes,
ib. ; connected vnth. ancestor -wor-
ship, 187
Guatemaltecs, guardian spirits, 186
Guaycorous, name of dead taboo, 61
Guiana, mourning, 80 ; feuds with
tapirs, 100, 101 ; dread of super-
natural spirits, 105 ; priests, 288,
290
Guilt, cause of calamity, 160 ; sense
of, relatively late, 199
Guinea negi'oes, talk vdth their dead,
48 ; preserve their bodies, 49
Gulcheman, 299, 306
Gulchinam, 306
Gungung Danka, 299
H
Hades, undergi-ound, 299 ; of Homer
not a "fault," 303^; entrance in
the west, 307 ; (the god), 324, 327 ;
in Eleusis, 368 if.
Haidah Indians, cure for sickness, 45 ;
divine kings, 290
Hair, clippings of, buried, 29 ; seat of
life and strength, 45 ; to be removed
before or after entering on a taboo
state, 78, 79 ; instead of blood-offer-
ing, 170, 171 ; of Thlinkeet shaman
not cut, 288
INDEX
427
Hair-offerings, to the dead, at first to
prevent transmission of taboo, then
interpreted as off'erings in honour of
deceased, 193-4, 220
Hand-cakes, 219
Hands, defiled by things sacred, 66 ;
by taboo i:)ersons, 70 ; by wives,
71
Han-yu, 152
Happiness, future, 375 ; on what con-
ditional, 376
Harith, 128
Harvest-customs, 212
Hasan of Bassorah, 259
Hawai, ghosts detained in, 48 ; sacri-
ficial meal, 147, 149
Hay, the plant called, 72
Heart = life, spirit, 213
Heaven, 308
Heavenly bodies, not worshipped on
Gold Coast, 19^ ; light of, renewed
by Sympathetic Magic, 32 ; myths
about, 32
Hebrews, primitive altar, 133, 134 ;
sacrificial meal, 150, 159 ; blood-
oflferings and tatooing in honour of
the dead forbidden, 193 ; forbidden
to mix blood with leavened bread,
219, 220 ; their cosmogony, 264-5 ;
their poverty in myths, 266 ; next
world, 299; have a "jealous" god,
315 ; more spiritual view of sacrifice,
329
Hecate, associated with dog in Greece,
187 ; in the H. to Demeter, 370
Helios, 370
Hell, 298, 308, 310, 317
Hera, 258, 355
Heracles, 374
Heretoga, 279
Hermes, fish sacred to, 63
Herobn, 337
Hesiod, 304, 324
Hesperides, 313
Hestiaseis, 159
Hestiator, 159
Hierophant, 380
Hinde, Captain, 201-2
Hispaniola, unattached spirits become
gods, 176
Hobbes, 152
Hole left in tomb to facilitate exit of
soul, 50
Holiness, infection of, 62, 65
Holy days, 65-7 ; holy places, taboo
yet entered, 154 ; holy things,
taboo, 59 ; holy water, 40
Homeric Hades not a "fault," 303^ ;
Hymn to Demeter, date of, 363 ; the
mythology of, 363 it ; analysis of,
377-81
Honduras, sickness due to sin. 111
Horses, reluctance to feed on, 118 ;
sacrificed to sun and sea, 230 ;
ofi"ered to sun, 235
Hos, invite the dead to return, 48
Host, 219
Hottentots, renew the light of the
moon, 32 ; shedder of (animal) blood
taboo, 74 ; mode of execution, 292
House-father, 196
House-mother, 215
Hudson's Island, all slaughter is sacri-
fice, 159
Huitzilopochtli, 217
Human sacrifice, 156, 161 ; appears in
the rites for the dead earlier than in
the ritual of the gods, 199 ; relatively
a late intrusion in the latter, 200 ; in
the former, due not to fear of ghost,
but desire to provide him with
service, 200
Humboldt Bay, Papuans of, eat not
Avith strangers, 71
Humility, essential to progress, 406
Hunting stage, 156
Hurd Islands, altar- pillar, 134
Hurons, 299
Hyes Attes, 340
Hymn to Demeter, Analysis of, 377-81
Hyperboreans, 313
Hypothesis, in savage logic, 32 ; yields
myths, 32
Iacchus, identified with Dionysus,
352 ff. ; introduced into theEleusinia,
371 ff.
Icelanders, funeral feasts, 51
Iddah, 284
Idol, supposed to be an elaborated
fetish, 24 ; smeared with blood, 135 ;
not an elaborated fetish, 169 ; made
of skin, 285
Idolatry, unkno-s^Ti in Fiji and amongst
savages generally, 138
'lepa TrcLTpia, irarpcfa, 187
'lepoTTOLoi, 336-
Illness. See Sickness, Disease
Image, of the god, 286, 293
Immersion, 229
Imperatives, categorical and hypo-
thetical, 84, 85
Impurity. See Un cleanness
Inattention, Systematic, the cause of
religious degeneration, 8
Incas, suppress stone - worship, 142 ;
revered like gods, 275. See Peru
Incidents, do not make a tale, 253
Incredulity of the savage, 36
India, blood not to be shed, 74 ; tree-
totemism, 210 ; next world, 309, 310;
divine kings, 275. See Bhogaldai
428
INDEX
Indians, do not kill tlieir fowls, 116.
Sec Canada, Caiiari, Choctaws,
Columbia, Crow, Dacotahs, Guiana,
Haidah, Hurons, lowas, Iroquois,
Mosquito, Ojibways, Oniahas, Otta-
was, Piraa, Pueblo, Quebec, Sho-
shones, Soumoo, Thlinkeets
Indiges, derivation of, 2-16
Indigitamenta, 246
Individual (the), depended for existence
on his clan, 99
Indo-Europeans, funeral feasts, 51 ;
taboo, 70 ; totemism of, 126 ; human
sacrifice, 161 ; measurement of time,
228 ; sky-spirit, ih. ; in the pastoral
stage, ih. ; their sky-spirit, 239 ;
mythology, 260, 261 ; did not know
the western entrance to the other
world, 307
Induction, principle of, same in
savage as in scientific logic, 30,
33
Inductive Methods, practised by
savages, 29, 33, 35
Infancy, the helplessness of man's,
makes family ailection necessary, 46
Infection, of holiness, 62, 65 ; of taboo,
69
Inhumation, 204, 299
Initiation, into private mysteries, 338 ;
into public, 358-61
Inscriptions, mutilated, restored by
Comparative Method, 3, 4 ; Pytha-
gorean, 320, 321 ; funeral, 321
Insignia, of god put on his image,
285-6
Interdict, a taboo, 70
Intoxicants, origin of, 286
Intuitionism, 84
Invocation, not original in worship,
245 ; how it acts, 361
lowas, buffalo-totem, 103
loxidfe, abstained from asparagus, 125
Iranian next world, 304
Irish, cannibalism, 202, 203
Iroquois, facilitate return of soul, 50 ;
totems, 104 ; the Turtle-clan, 251 ;
western world, 306
Irrational element, in myth, 268 ; in
priestly taboos, 271
Isocrates on sacrifice, 224
Israel, priesthood, 270
Issedones, cannibalism, 202, 203
Ivy, sacred, 208 ; associated with
Dionysus, 209
Jack in the Green, 208, 237
Jacoons believe in transformation, 16
Jakuts, sacrificial meal, 146, 149, 157,
158 ; guardian spirits, 184
Jambi, 280
Java, blood -off'erings to dead, 52 ;
sacred trees, 208 ; next world,
299
Jehovah, his ritual, 384-5
Jews, name of God taboo, 61 ; politic-
ally insignificant, 241 ; ancestor-
worship prohibited, 302, 308 ; excep-
tional nature of their religion, 383,
386, 388. 8ec Hebrews, Levitical
Law, Monotheism, Semites
Judgment, day of, 376
Juggler, 289
Juma, 150
Jupiter, 239
Ka, 55
Katfirs of Xatal pray and make thanks-
gi-vings, 21, 28, 29 ; shedder of blood
taboo, 74 ; do not kill their cows,
116 ; sacrificial meal, 147, 149 ;
women farm, 240
Kalang, descended from a dog, 253,
259
Kalmucks, funeral customs, 53
Kalunga, 306
Kanekas, priests, 291
Kaniagmut, mothers may not feed
themselves, 76
Karens, funeral feasts, 51, 299, 301
Karma, 319 fi".
Kauphatas, 220
Kenaimas, 290
Kern-baby. See Corn- baby
Ki, symbolises communion, 149
Killing the god, 216, 217, 255, 291-6
Kina Balu, 299
Kinds (natural), analogous to human
kins, 99 ; blood-feuds with them,
180
Kings, divine, 275 ff.
Kinsman, slaughter of, murder, 102
KXd5os, 289
K\77pos, 289
Knowledge, intuitive and inferential,
396
Kocch, funeral feasts, 51
Kookies, feuds with natural kinds, 100 ;
cannibalism, 202
Koranas, puberty ceremonies and
lessons, 107
Kore, 239 ; not originally connected
with Persephone, 363 ; in Eleusis,
368 8".
Kottor-krabah, 164
Kotytis, 214-5
Koussa Kafiirs' belief in the Uniformity
of Nature, 28, 29
KpaTTjpl^cov, 339, 340^
KvKecbv, 372, 375, 381
INDEX
429
Knreks, altar-pole, 135, 245
Kiiriles, 285
Lakor, 252
Lama, 275, 283, 289
Lains manalis, 40, 307
Lapps, feuds with bears, 100
Lares, 186, 187, 188
Xdpva^ of Dionysus iEs5'miietes taboo,
60
Laureion, 337
Laurel, 208 ; associated with Apollo,
209
Law, of thiasi, 335, 338
Laws, natural, God's laws, 402. See
Nature, Continuity, Fittest (survival
of)
Laws of Nature, in operation before
they were formulated, 410
Leaf- wearers. See Orissa
Leda, 251
Lees, 351
Leopard, as totem, 209
Lethe, 297
Leti, 252
Leucas, 125
Leukippides, 283
Leviticai Law, 384, 392
Li Ki, 58
Li Yun. See China
Libations of blood, 51, 52
Life, the Next, variety of opinions as
to, 297 ; retribution theory later than
continuance theory, 298 ; origin of
belief in a Far-off Land, 298-9 ; in
the Underground World, 299-301 ;
which implies the continuance
theory, 301; detrimental effect of
ancestor- worship on religious view of
next life, 302 ; ghost-land not a
religious idea, ih. ; differentiation of
the Far-off Land from the Under-
ground World and its consequences,
303 ; origin of belief in a Happy
Other-world, 304 ; and of Utopia,
305 ; differentiation of the Lender-
ground Other - world from the
Western World, 305-10 ; the sun
as the Happy Other- World, 310-12 ;
Happy Western AVorld also becomes
a Utopia. 312 ; in Greece and in
Ireland, 313
Life-tree, 210
Like produces like, 31, 34, 90
Limentinus, 246
Lion, as totem, 128
Aido^oXia, 292 and note ; in Eleusis,
365
Lithuanians, funeral feasts, 51 ; sacra-
mental meal, 214 ; tree-spirit, 244
Little John, 250
Loango, King of, taboo, 60, 69 ; wives
taboo, 71 ; mothers taboo after child-
birth, 74 ; red paint for blood-offer-
ing, 170
Lobeck, on mythology, 268
Lobster, as totem, 126
Locrians, primitive form of sacrificial
meal, 146
Locutius, 246
Logic, scientific and savage, 28 AT. ; no
fundamental difference between them,
32 ff
Lomami Pdver, cannibalism, 202
Lord's Prayer, 40
Lot, means of divine selection, 289 ;
derivation of the word, ib.
Love, the source of religion, 109, 110 ;
the divine, 410
Loyalty to the totem-god, 107, 108 ;
to clan-god necessary, 173, 177
Lupercalia, 292^
Luperci, 286
Luzon, totem-tombstones, 103 ; canni-
balism, 202
Lycurgus, 256^
M
Machinery of nature, primitive man
owes his mastery of it to his faith
in Uniformity of Nature, 17 ; takes
the credit of its action to himself, 19
Madagascar, taboo-days, 65, 66 ; feuds
with crocodiles, 100. See Malagasays
Madi, sacrifice, 157
Magic, religion supposed to be evolved
out of, 24 ff. ; their hostility, 34, 38 ;
magic defined, 35 ; its origin, 35 ff.,
40 ; recognised in Rome andChaldrea,
40 ; a parody of religion, 42 ; a re-
lapse in religious development, not
its source, 177 ; an offence to the
clan-god, 178 ; and fundamentally
irreligious, ib. ; a parody of religion,
ib. ; and divine powers originally
indistinguishable according to ]!ilr.
Frazer, 281 ff. See Sympathetic
Magna Grrecia, 324-5
Magyars, 306 ; blood-covenant, 98
Mahua tree, 210
Maiden, how made, 212
Maize-mother, 364 ; originally omni-
potent, 243 ; myth of, 257-8
Maizium, offered to the dead, 51
Malabar, "dwarf-houses," 50
Malagasays' belief as to photography
30^
Malay race, its extent, 260-1
Malayala. See Catal
i^Iamaconas, 218
Mambettu, blood-covenant, 98
430
INDEX
Mammoth, 396
Mamnrius Vetus, 292-^
Mandan women chat with their dead,
48 ; puberty ceremonies, 171 ; sus-
pension burial, 204
Manes, 307
Mangaia, 306 ; totemism, 107
Manitoo, 182
MdpTLs, 349
Manu, 222
Maori, chiefs taboo, 62, 63 ; their god
Tiki, 185
Maraca, 184
Marian Islanders, welcome the dead,
48 ; catch the soul, 50 ; anoint
bones of the dead, 52 ; survival of
altar, 140
Marimatle, 305
Marquesas Islands, 275
Marriage, owes its sanctity to a
primeval taboo, 71, 72
Marriage-rites, tree-totems in, 210
Mars, 242-3
Massagetee, cannibalism, 202, 203
Masseba, 133
May-boughs, in procession, 209
May-pole, 208, 21 6^
May-poles, two for one community
(syncretism), 234-5
May-trees, in procession, 209
Mayas, grave-posts, 196 ; consecrated
wafers, 218
Mayumbe, wives taboo, 71
Mechoacan, taboo-day, 65
Medicine-bag, 183
Meilichioi, 146, 149
Melanesia, property taboo, 72
Melusine, 260
Memory, mere of, 321
Memphis, 122
Men, dressed in women's clothes, 241,
256
Men Tyrannos, 337
Mendes, 123
Menelaus, 313
Meroe, 279
Metamorphoses, 104
Metempsychosis. See Transmigi-ation
Mexico, soil sacred, 64 ; Tezcatlipoca's
taboo-days, 66 ; sacred food to be
eaten without using the hands, 70 ;
new-born child taboo, 76 ; did not
wash in a relative's absence, 78 ;
sickness due to sin, 111 ; primitive
stone altar, 132 ; survivals of stone-
worship, 142 ; sacrificial meal, 158 ;
blood - offerings, 172 ; maize wor-
shipped, 212-3; "contamination,"
216 ; new wine l)roached by the
wine-god, 223 ; functional deities,
247 ; kings control weather, 275 ;
priest evades execution, 283 ff. ; next
world, 299, 300, 305, 306. See
Aztecs, Chicomecoatl, Huitzilo-
pochtli, Mictlan, Omacatl, Quetzal-
coatl, Tlalocan, Tlalocs, Totonacs,
Xilonen
Miaotze, do not wash after parent's
death, 78
Mice, unclean, 128
Mictlan, 299, 305
Midsummer fire-festivals, 232
Mikado, taboo, 63, 69, 75, 81, 84 ;
worshipped, 275 ; loss of power,
277 ; evades royal taboos, 278
Mill, J. S., 9, 28
Minahassa of Celebes, believe in the
" external soul," 17
Mincopies, paint the dead red, 53
Mirror, magic, 333, 355
Missionaries, their services to the
study of religion, 6
Mixteks, funeral feasts, 51
Moa, 252
Mock kings, 280
Mohammedanism, butchers, 222 ; a
lower form of monotheism than
Judaism, 395
Moluccas, property taboo, 72
Monarchy, its reaction on religious
institutions, 385-6, 390
Monbuttoo, women farm, 240
Mongols, sacrificial meal, 146, 149 ;
dogs eat corpses, 203
Monitarris, 140
Monolith altars, 131 if. ; legends and
myths about, 142
Monotheism, revealed according to
Genesis,. 5 ; may have been the
original religion, 6, 7 ; but cannot
be assumed to have been such by
the anthropologist, 6 ; supposed
tendency to, 181 ; deleterious to
political growth, 315 ; presumption
that it was evolved out of polytheism
afforded (1) by the general course of
evolution, 382, (2) by religious
evolution in particular, 383, (3) by
the forces at work on polytheism,
383, (4) by the survivals of poly-
theism to be found in Jewish mono-
theism, 384-5, (5) by the reaction of
monarchy on religion amongst the
Jews, 385-6; but (1) the presump-
tion afforded by evolution is against
the derivatiqn of monotheism from
polytheism, 386-7, (2) religion is not
an organism, 387, (3) the mono-
theism of the Jews is unique and
so must be due to peculiar causes,
888-9, (4) the supposed monotheistic
tendencies of polytheism never pro-
duce monotheism, 389, 390, (5)
syncretism may be present in mono-
INDEX
431
theism, but does not take us back to
polytheism, 390-2, but (6) points to
a low form of monotheism, 393-4,
(7) totemism, the lowest form of
religion known to science, may be a
relapse, 395, (8) progress is initiated
by individuals, 396, (9) revelation
may have been made to primitive
man, 396-7
Months, lunar, 227
Moon has sympathetic power over sub-
lunar objects, 30 ; light renewed,
32 ; as "measurer," 228 ; rites used
in worship of, 229
Moon-spirit, in cow-shape, 235
Moral sentiment, 84, 85
Morality, bound up with religion from
the first, 109, 111, 112; and
spiritual regeneration, 343 tf. ; and
future happiness, 345, 375-6
Moru. See Madi
Mosquito Indians, their guardian
spirits, 182
Mothers, taboo after child-birth, 74 ;
may not feed herself, 75 ; nor eat,
75 ; must be purified, 75 ; and make
off'erings, 75
Mount Garabier, totems, 101
Mountain of mankind, 262
Mourners, painted or clad with white,
350
Mourning, raiment, QQ, 77, 93 ; days
of, 65-7
Uvxoi, ]87
Mud, in mysteries, 339, 348-51 ;
purification by, 375-6
Mi;7?(ris, 374 ; as qualification for
admission to private mysteries,
339 ; to public, 358-9, 366
Mulgrave Islands, sorcerers taboo,
69
Mundus, 305
Murder, of a kinsman requires ven-
geance, 4 ; off'erings used in purifica-
tion for, transmit taboo, 62, 102
Murrings, sorcerers, 290
MucTT/jptoi', 339
Mutilation, 191
Mycense, blood-off'erings, 52
Mycenaean period, totemism in, 126,
325
Myrmidons, 126
Mystse, painted their faces white, 350,
359
Mysteries, objects of worship were
taboo, and might not be seen by the
uninitiated, 60 ; all mention of
them taboo, 61 ; candidates might
not wash, 78 ; a reversion to the
barbaric form of the sacrificial rite,
145, 148 ; annual, nocturnal rite,
162 ; sex-mysteries, 239, 240 ; those
celebrated by women generally
agricultural, 240 ; the Eleusinian,
probably first confined to women,
241 ; supposed esoteric teaching,
268-9
Mysteries, Private, 338 if. ; purification
and initiation, 338-9 ; proselytism,
340 ; the dangers attendant on,
340-1 ; no restriction in Athens on
their formation, 341-2 ; not usually
occasions for debauchery, 342 ;
genuine worship, 343 ; religious in
intent, 343-5 ; morally beneficial,
345-6 ; yet did not morally regener-
ate Greece, 346-7 ; causes of success
and failure, 347 ; purificatory rites
essentially Greek, 348 ; though
paralleled elsewhere, ! 349, 350 ;
mythical explanation of the rites,
350-1 ; identification with Dionysiac
ritual, 351-2 ; Orphic myths, 353-6 ;
Pythagorean philosophy evolved out
of them, 357
Mysteries, Public, 358 ff. ; meaning of
"public," 358-9 ; difference between
public and "private" mysteries,
359 ; secrecy not the characteristic
of "mysteries," 360-2 ; future happi-
ness and the worship of Demeter in
Eleusis, 361-2 ; Demeter and Perse-
phone, 363 ; the primitive ritual of
Eleusis, 363-5 ; thrown open to
Athenians, 366 ; myth invented to
explain connection between the Old
Woman, Demeter, Persephone, and
the future life, 367-70 ; expansion
of the Demeter cult consequent on
its being thrown open to Athenians,
370 ; introductionoflacclius into the
Eleusinian cult, 371 ; consequences
thereof, 372-3 ; the cult becomes for
the first time a "mystery," 374 ;
doctrine of future bliss as held in
Eleusis, 375-6 ; resemblance to Feast
of Unleavened Bread, 385 ; the
proper meaning of the word, 374
Mysticism, 231
Myths, to account for variation in
apparent size of moon, 32 ; for
thunderstorms, ib. ; to account for
descent of men from animals, 104 ;
for animal form of tribal ancestor,
108 ; to account for the worship or
reverence of stones, 142 ; to account
for syncretism, 235-6 ; belief in, not
required by ancient religions, 250 ;
defined, ih. ; some ?etiological, some
not, 250-1 ; to explain difference of
shape between human and animal
clansmen, 251 ; to explain descent of
human beings from an animal, ih. ;
gradual anthropomorphism traceable
4 "2 ''
INDEX
in mythology, 252 ; to account for
alliance between human kin and
animal kind, 252 ; "transformation"
the usual expedient, 252-3 ; ietiologi-
cal tend to pass into non-setiologi-
cal myths, 25-3 ; because primitive
explanations were ahvays thrown
into narrative form, ib. ; and the ex-
planation often became detached
from or survived the explicandum,
253-4 ; not incidents only but con-
tinuous narratives might arise from
the explanation of, e.g., complex
ritual, 254 ; example from myth of
Pentheus, 255. 256, 257 ; of the
Chibchas, 257 ; and the Caiiari
nation, 257-8 ; continuity of narra-
tive thus suggested was imitated at
first undesignedly and then deliber-
ately, 258-9 ; diffusion of myths,
by dispersion of the peoples possess-
ing them, 260 ; by borrowing,
260-1 ; independent origin of similar
myths, 261 ; tradition, 261-2 ;
myths as to creation, 262 ; flood-
myths, ib. ; mythology, primitive
science, history, and romance, 263 ;
reflects the religion of the time, 264 ;
supernatural selection in mythology,
265-6 ; mythology not religion nor
the work of the religious spirit,
266-7 ; savage myths transmitted to
civilised times, 267 ; allegorical ex-
planations of mythology, 268 ; of
the fortunate isles, 312-3 ; Orphic,
354 ff".
N
Nacygai, 222
Nagualism, 207
Naids, 238
Nail-parings, 29
Names, kept secret, 30 ; gods originally
had none, 236 ; their utility in wor-
ship, 245 ; of gods, kept secret, ib. ;
part of the person named, ib. ; names
and things identical, 361
Nana-Nyankupon, 163
Xa60opoi, 3333
Natchez, 311
Natural, love and gratitude as natural
as the selfish and baser desires, 46 ;
aifections, 152, 153
Nature, laws of, primitive man's
ignorance of, 16 ; but his ignorance
not absolute, 18, 19
Nature-worship, ritual used in, based
on totem-rites, 228
Ne^SptTwi', 338, 3401
Necessitarianism, 401
Negritos, totem-tombstones, 103
Nemorensis, Nemus, 238
Neolithic man, left a hole in tombs,
50 ; interments, new implements
found, 205
Nereids, 238
New Guinea, all slaughter is sacrifice,
159
New Hebrides, blood-oft'eriiigs to the
dead, 191
New Zealand, chiefs taboo, 62 ;
mourners taboo, 69 ; terror of taboo,
83 ; sacred trees, 208 ; underworld,
306
New World. Sec Abipones, Alaskans,
Aleuts, Algonkins, Amazon, Antilles,
Apalaches, Bachue, Brazil, Buhui-
tihu, Caiiari, Caribs, Chemis,
Chibchas, Chica, Chile, Conopas,
Dabaiba, Florida, Fuzachagua,
Guatemaltecs, Gulcheman, Gul-
chinam, Hispaniola, Honduras,
Incas, Indians, Kenaima, Mama-
conas, Maraca, Mayas, Mechoacan,
Mexico, Palmeria, Peaiman, Peru,
Pirua, Sancu, Tammaraca, Tehuan-
tepec, Tehuelche, Tlalnepautla,
Xiuhtecutli, Yucatan
Newton, 396
Niams, paint the dead red, 53 ; women
farm, 240
Nias, cure for disease, 45
Nicaragua, grave-posts, 196
Nim tree, 220
Nirvana, 319
Nomad life, rudimentary agiiculture
possible in, 234
Nome, sacred animal of, 121
'Sopios, 3351
Nonse Caprotina?, 292^
Non-totem deities, 229 if.
North Americans, paint the dead red,
53
Norway, stones anointed, 143
No§b, 133
Nut, 323
Nynamnat,
306
0
Oak, 209
Observation, exact, essential to mental
progi-ess, 408
Occator, 246
Odysseus, 306-7
Offerings, to the dead, not originally
ancestor-worship, 56 ; for purifica-
tion transmit taboo, 62, 78 ; burnt,
160, 161 ; not always gifts, 221 ;
how they become gifts, 224 ; why
cast into fire, 230-1 ; similarity of
offerings facilitates syncretism, 235 ;
in complex ritual, 237
INDEX
433
Oil substitute for fat, the surrogate of
blood, 285
Ojibways, renew the light of the sun,
32 ; atfection for the dead, 49 ;
descended from a stone, 139 ; sus-
pension burial, 204 ; bury new
implements with deceased, 205
OXjStos, 375
Old Woman, hoAV made, 212 ; differ-
entiated from Corn-Maiden, 239 ;
in Eleusis, 364 ff. ; in H. H., 378-9
Olive, the sacred, 208
Olympia, 221
Olympus, 248, 321
Omacatl, 217
Omahas, red-maize totem, 211 ; myth,
252
Oneida stone, 139
Onomacritus, 354, 357, 371
Oracles, by water, 229
Oracular gods, how they arise, 242
Oraons, tree-totems, 210
Orbius, 337
Orcus, 299, 307
Ordeal, by poison, 286. See Water,
Witch
Organism, religion as an, 382, 387
Orgeones, 334-6, 338-42, 352
Orgies, 342
Orion, 301
Orissa, Leaf-wearers of, mothers taboo
after child-birth, 74 ; purified, 75 ;
funeral rites, 77
Orphic literature, 346, 353 ff. ; litera-
ture and mythology, 371, 375
Osages, beaver- totem, 102
Osiris, union of deceased with, 311 ;
and transmigration, 317 ; as the
divine essence, 319, 322 ; the divine
essence, 384
Ostiaks, name of dead taboo, 61 ; feuds
with bears, 100 ; tree-worship, 219
Ottawas, grave -posts, 196
Outcasts, taboo, 69
Owain, Sir, 305-6
Owl, totem, 101
Owl-clan, 364
Oyster, a totem, 243
PADiEi, eat kinsmen, 202
Pallas Athene, 238
Palmeria, blood-letting, 71
Palm-oil Grove family, 209
Palm-tree, 208
Ildvairepiia, 214
Pantheism, in Egypt, 311-2 ; and
personal immortality, 325 ; succeeds
polytheism, 389 ; scarcely a religious
idea, 389, 390
Paradise, garden of, 264
28
Parentalia, 51
Parrot, as totem, 209 ; transformation
into, 258
Parsis, corpses shown to (originally
eaten by) dogs, 203-4
Parthians, dogs eat corpses, 203
Pastoral life, 126 ; pastoral stage, 155 ff. ;
peoples do not kill their cattle, 157
Patagonians. See Tehuelche
Patria potestas, 199
Patriarchate and family worship, 180 ;
and ancestor- worship, 199
Payaguas, catch the soul, 50, 51
Peaiman, gives protection against
supernatural powers, 105 ; how
selected, 288 ; protection against
kenaim.a, 290
Pelew Islanders, fear only stranger
ghosts, 53, 57 ; sacrificial meal,
148 ; unattached spirits become
gods, 174, 176 ; priests, 287-8 ;
sorcererci, 290
Penates, 186, 187
Pentheus, 256-7-8 ; Xido^oXia, 292
Perjury, 64
Persephone, in Pythagoreanism, 320-1,
324 ; the doctrine of future
bliss, 362 ; had originally no con-
nection with Kore, 363 ; judges the
dead, 376 ; name of, avoided in
beginning of Hymn to Demeter, 377
Persians, dogs eat corj)ses, 203 ; Eran
Vej, 264. See Ahura Mazda, Eran
Vej, Iranian, Parsis, Sagdi'd
Personality, how conceived by the
savage, 43 ; the divine conceived on
the human, 385 ; impresses itself on
man, 394 ; the solution of ultimate
problems, 402 ; external objects con-
ceived under the category of, 409,
411
Peru, theory as to mountain sickness,
23, 29 ; offer food to dead, 52 ;
sacred soil taboo, 63, 64 ; purifica-
tion, 80 ; the god fights for his
people, 108 ; calamity caused by
sin. 111 ; temple-ritual in, 135 ;
sacrificial meal, 147, 151, 152, 158 ;
each people had its own gods, 173 ;
guardian spirits, 184 ; grave-posts,
196 ; Mother of the Maize, 212 ;
tree and plant worship, 216 ; killing
the god, ib. ; communion, 218 ;
stones represent sun, 231 ; women
farm, 240 ; priests, 287
Petelia, 320
Petrie, Dr. Flinders, 202
Pets, not the origin of domesticated
animals, 117, 118
Pharce, its sacred stream, 63 ; j)i'iniitive
altar, 132
^dp,uaKOS, 2922
434
INDEX
^rjyaLeis, 209
Philippine Islands, sacriiice, 292-3
Philosophy and the next life, 302,
311
Philtres, 333
Phociaus, war-paint, 349
Phcebiis Apollo, 238
Phylactery, taboo, 66
Piacular sacrifice, 160, 161 ; in Greece,
332
Pierres fites, 143
Piety, 198
Pima Indians, 252
Pindar, 320, 321, 324
Pins, 221
Pioj^s of Puturaayo, parents fast after
child-birth, 75
Pipal, 208
Pipe-clay, used to mark taboo persons,
79
Piriia, 212
Pisistratus, 354, 371, 373
Plants, as totems, 206-25 ; carried in
procession, 209 ; domestication of,
210 ff. ; preserved from one year
to next, 211 ; worshipped, 212 ;
anthropomorphised, 213 ; eaten
sacramentally, 214 ; tabooed as
food, 222-3
Plant deities, female, 213 ; sacra-
mental eating of, 286
Plantain family, 209, 211, 222
Plato, on myths, 267 ; his theory of
transmigration, 319
Plough Monday, 247
Plutarch, 348
Ho\€/j.apxos, 279
Polydsemonism, 247
Polynesia, chiefs' names taboo, 61 ;
temples and chiefs' houses act as
asylums, 63 ; taboo-days, 66 ; wives
taboo, 71 ; property taboo, 72 ;
infant immersion, 76 ; the sick
taboo, 70 ; mourners may not feed
themselves, 77 ; sacrificial meal.
146, 149 ; remnants of food used
to injure the eater, 151 ; western
world, 306
Polytheism, has its germ in totem-
ism, 108 ; due to synoikismos, 234,
239, 241 ; but may originate earlier,
239 ; development of, 242 ; pre-
supposes totemism, 411. See Mono-
theism
Pomegranate, 380
Popogusso, 306
Popol Vuh, 133, 134
Portuguese, authors of term "fetish,"
166
Positive Religions, defined, 1
Possession, 164, 174, 175, 274, 283,
286 flf".
Potidaea, 321
Preconceptions, in religion, 405
Pre-totemistic period, 413
Priest, supposed to be evolved out of
sorcerer, 24, 35, 38, 106 ; among the
Tshi, 164, 165 ; his functions paro-
died, 174 ; required for the installa-
tion of a new deity, 164-5, 176 ; none
in Red Indian ritual, 183 ; marked
off from other men by what they do
and what they may not do, 270 ;
uniformity complete and partial, of
the dilierent religions, ib. ; partial
uniformity in tenure of office,
270-1 ; complete uniformit}' in the
presence of the "irrational element"
of the restrictions laid upon them,
272 ; and in the fact that the ritual
of the sanctuary is entrusted to
them, 272 ff. ; the priest alone may
kill the victim, 273 ; this the
source of the power of the priesthood,
ib. ; why has he alone the right ? ib. ;
priests believed to exercise super-
natural powers, 273-5 ; kings also,
ib. ; this points to primitive institu-
tion of priest -kingship, 275 ; as
also does the parallel between royal
and priestly taboos, 275-6 ; and the
similarity in the conditions of tenure
of oflSce, 276 ; action of taboo in
differentiating the two offices, 276-8 ;
persistent tendency to revert to
the original unity of the two, 278-9 ;
both originally had to be executed or
to commit suicide, 279, 280 : at the
end of a yoar, 280-1 ; why ? ib. ;
Mr. Frazer's theory, 281-2 ; objec-
tions to it, 282 ff. ; king-priests not
gods, but receive their powers from
the gods, 283-4 ; by participation
in the sacrificial meal, or some
derived rite, 285 ff. ; ordination may
or may not be organised, 287-9 ;
priest-king distinguished from
sorcerer by using his powers for the
good of the community, 289-91 ;
from the rest of the community by
the fact that he not only killed the
god, 291-3, but drank the first,
most potent draught of the divine
blood, 293 ; his life forfeit because
he killed the god, 293-4 ; the forfeit
gradually remitted, 294-5 ; the
remission facilitated by change in
the status of the divine animal,
295-6 ; priest-king doubly taboo,
296 ; no secret order in Eleusis,
360
Primitive Man, defined, 6 ; between
him and our first ancestors a wide
gap, 7
INDEX
435
Procession, of tree or plant totem, 209 ;
of May-trees, ib. ; of the vegetation-
spirit, 255
Progress, always evolution, but not
all evolution progress, 5 ; the in-
equality of, produces belief in magic,
37 ; political progi'ess, its nature,
234 ; its effects on religion, 234, 239 ;
its conditions, 241 ; its wavering
course, 394-5 ; its rarity, 395-6 ;
due to individuals, 396 ; consists in
closer attention to the facts of con-
sciousness, 403-4
Prometheus, 16
Property, owes its sacredness to a
primeval taboo, 72 ; the conception
of, introduced into religion, 223-4
Prophets, their work, 94
Proteus, 313
Prussians, funeral feasts, 51 ; primitive
sacrifical rite, 144, 145, 149 ; conse-
crated bread, 219 ; divine king, 279
Psalms, 329
'^Tjcpia/JLaraf 335^
Puberty-ceremonies, 103, 104, 107, 171
Publicans, taboo, 73
Pueblo Indians, myth of origin, 252
Purgatory, 375
Purification, of mourners, 57, 61, 80 ;
of mothers, 75; of new-born children,
76 ; generally, 80 ; by water, 229 ;
in the mysteries, 339 ff., 348, 355 ;
by fire, 365, 368 ; ceremonial, in the
Orphic mysteries, 375 ; in the next
world, ib.; by fire, 380
Pyanepsion, 214, 235
Pythagoreanism, 320-5 ; and the
Orphic mysteries, 354 ff., 376
Python, sacred, taboo, 63
Q
Qualities, of an animal absorbed by
eating, 153, 154
Quawteaht, 308
Quebec, Indians of, grave-posts, 196
Quetzalcoatl, 142
Quiches, sacrificial meal, 158 ; altar
and trench, 133, 134 ; blood-off"er-
ing, 172
Quilacare, 279, 284
Quissamas, blood-offering, 170 ; canni-
balism, 202, 203
R
Ra, 389, 304
Rags, tied on trees, 221
Rain-makers, in Africa, 24
Rain-making, not considered a super-
natural power, 26 ; how effected, 32
Rain, procured, 229, 230
Rangatire, 290
Rarian Plain, the, 370
Reason, not the sole source of progress,
93
Rechabites, taboo, 62
Red, a taboo colour, 67, 349 ; for
daubing trees, stones, altars, etc.,
138 ; as a substitute for blood of
sacrifice, 140
Red Indians, sacrificial meal, 147
Red Maize clan and totem, 207, 211, 252
Reforms, due to minority and to
individual thinkers, 94
Reindeer, 396
Reindeer age, dead painted red, 53
Reiti, fish in, taboo, 63
Relapse, common in religion, 395
Relics, swearing by, 64
Religion, known to all savage peoples,
7 ; aids primitive man in the struggle
for existence, 21 ; supposed to be
evolved out of magic (q.v.), 24;
hostile to magic, 34 ; makes the
priest, 38 ; first and second steps in
evolution of, 41 ; an affair of the
community always, 101 ; its opposi-
tion to magic, 178 ; cannot psycho-
logically be derived from magic, 179 ;
has not its source in ancestor-worship,
198 ; not developed out of coercion
of the gods, 233 ; gives man the
confidence to appropriate natural
forces to his own use, 234 ; two
tendencies in, the mystic and the
practical, 249 ; the former thrust
into the background by the latter,
250 ; the speculative tendency, 250 ;
makes the priest, is not made by
him, 269 ; not derived from ancestor-
Avorship, 302 ; had no share in early
speculations as to the next life, 302,
308 ; a citizen not free to choose his
own, 327 ; disintegration of tradi-
tional, 328 ; strength and w^eakness
of national, 328-9 ; as an organism,
382, 387 ; the divine personality
impresses itself on man, 394 ; pro-
gress in, consists in closer attention
to facts of immediate consciousness,
404-5
Retribution theory, 297 ff. ; its occasion,
307-8 ; when it produces metem-
psychosis, 315 ; produces metem-
psychosis in India, 318 ; unknowTi
to Homer and Hesiod, 325 ; mani-
fests itself amongst Greeks and
Jews about 600 B.C., 325
Retrogression, in religion, 139 ff.
Revelation, in Genesis, 7 ; of God to
man, a fact of immediate conscious-
ness, 7 ; constitutes the continuum
of the evolution of religion, 8 ;
436
INDEX
primitive, 396-7 ; progi-essive, 386 :
as the cause of origin of varieties of
belief, 400-1
Reversion, in religion, 145 ; of separate
offices of king and priest to their
original unity, 278 ; to primitive
ritual, 329, 330, 371
Eevivalisni, 329 fF. ; spreads from
Semitic area to Greece, 332 ; its
permanence in the latter, 333
Rhea, 342
Right of way conferred by corpse, 76, 77
Rites for the dead, 56
Ritual, how a complex, arises, 237-8 ;
complex ritual gives rise to myths,
254-6 ; under charge of priest, 272 ;
reversion to primitive, 329, 330, 371
Eiver-gods, 230
Rohde, 3031
Rome, name of, kept secret, 30 ; magic
officially recognised in, 40 ; each
Roman had four souls, 49 ; dead
buried in the house, ib. ; blood
dashed on altar, 132 ; blood-offerings
to the dead, 191 ; " birth - trees, "
207 ; sacred species of plants, 208 ;
tutelary deity of, 245. See Aricia,
Baccanalia, Bona Dea, Brumalia,
Cardea, Comitium, Concordia, Con-
farreatio, Cunina, Deiphobus, Di
Indigites, Dialis, Diana, Dies nefasti,
Fabius, Feralia, Flaminica, Forculus,
Jupiter, Lapis Manalis, Lares, Limen-
tinus, Locutius, Mamurius Yetus,
Manes, Mars, Mundus, Nemorensis,
Nonse Caprotinee, Occator, Orcus,
Parentalia, Patria Potestas, Penates,
Sator, Sterculinus, Virgil
Rowan, 209
Rum, substitute for blood, 76
Russians, funeral feasts, 51
S
Sabazios, 338
Sabbath, 65, QQ ; in Accadia, 276
Sacrament, 214-5-6-7-8-9 ; in private
mysteries, 339 ; in the Eleusinia,
372, 375, 381, 414 ; in Christianity,
415
Sacrifice, originally designed to procure
the presence of the god, 131 ff., 140 ;
tends to become meaningless, 140 ;
the rite, 144 ff. ; amongst the
Saracens, 144, Prussians, 144, 145 ;
the meal, 145 ff,; how it differs
from ordinary eating, 145, 146 ;
must be eaten on the spot, 146 ; all
the community must partake, 147 ;
the whole victim must be consumed,
149 ff. ; remains to be burnt or buried,
not to procure resurrection of animal.
150, nor to avert danger from other
people, 151, nor from the com-
municants, ih., but to procure the
utmost benefit to the communicant,
152, and to assimilate the qualities
of the divine animal, 153, 154 ;
sacrificial meal may be eaten only
by clansmen, 154, once a year, ih. ;
after due preparation, 155 ; and at
night-time, ib, ; sacrifices other
than annual, 155 ; sacrifice did
not originate with the slaughter of
domesticated animals, 156 ; human
sacrifice sometimes due to lack of
animals, 156 ; animal sacrifice, at
first rare, becomes an excuse for
eating meat, 157, and merry-making,
159 ; then the gloomy, annual
sacrifice is regarded as piacular, 160 ;
and human beings must be offered
for human offences, 161, or a scape-
goat found, ih.; parody of, 174, 175 ;
to guardian spirits, 183, 184 ; ex-
tended from the ritual of the gods
to the rites for the dead, 195 ; animal
sacrifice alone known in totemistic
times, 199 ; annual, 214 ; gift theory
of, 224-5 ; becomes higgling, 224,
and mere magic, ih. ; killing the
animal = killing the god, 291 ; the
first to strike forfeits his life, 291-2 ;
of first-born, 295 ; animal sacrifice
at last cast aside, 329 ; revived, 330 ;
reversion to barbarous forms of, has
no pemianent vitality, 332 ; piacular
in Greece, 332 ; revival of the sacra-
mental view of, 371 ; primitive
attempt to make man and God at one,
411-2 ; animal, presupposes totem-
ism, 412 ; universal, 414 ; the \)V0-
paideutic of the world to Christ,
414-5
Sacrificial meal, parodied, 175 ; protec-
tion against supernatural danger,
214 ; all must partake, no remnants
be left, ih. ; furnished by plants,
214-6 ; the moment of communion,
285 ; the means of conveying super-
natural powers, ih. ; no theory of the
next life satisfactory which is out of
relation to, 326 ; unconnected Avith
belief in ghost-land, 302 ; constitutes
a bond of fellowship, 330
Sacrificial piles, of Samoyeds, 134
Sagdid, 204
St. Christoval, property taboo, 72
St. Patrick's i^urgatory, 305
St. Vitus' dance, 286
Sakkarah, 309
Salamis, 374
Salish, priest-king, 290
Salutations, 92
INDEX
437
Salvador, sickness due to sin, 111
Salvation Army, 343
Saraborios, 214, 235
Samoa, mourning-taboo, 60 ; high-
priest taboo, 66, 69 ; funei-al
lamentations, 47 ; mourners taboo,
69 ; purification, 80 ; owl-totem, 101,
102; primitive altar, 133 ; sacrificial
meal, 149 ; sacrifice, 157 ; blood-
offering at marriage, 171, 172 ;
guardian spirits, 180, 181 ; blood-
offerings to the dead, 192
Samoyedes, their guardian spirits, 183 ;
tree burial, 204 ; sacrificial meal,
158 ; primitive altar, 133, 134, 135 ;
catch the soul, 51
Sanctuary, in mysteries, 336. See
Holy Places
Sancu, 218
Sandals removed on entering sacred
(taboo) places, 63, 64
Sand eh, blood- covenant, 98
Sandwich Isles, priests, 288
Sanskrit mythology, 267
Santa F^, suspension burial, 204
Samcens, their sacrificial rites, 144, 149,
151
Saramama, 213
Sarawak, cure for disease, 45
Sasabonsum, 67, 136, 164, 165 ; not a
god at all, 166, 174
Sator, 246
Savage Island, mourning, 79 ; decline
of kingship, 279, 280, 283
Scandinavians, primitive altar, 134,
285
Scape-goat, 161^
Scars, in next world, 297, 301
Science, evolved out of savage specula-
tion, 9, 17, 28, but not therefore a
mere survival of savage error, 10 ;
assumes but cannot prove existence
of external world and the Uniformity
of Nature, 8-10 ; walks by faith, 10 ;
primitive, is mythology, 263
Scyths, blood-covenant, 98 ; blood-
offerings to the dead, 191
Seats, eight, 65
Secrecy, not characteristic of the
mysteries, 360, but accidental, 361
Selection, Supernatural, 95, 110
Selli, were taboo, 63, 78
Semele, 356
Semites, totem ism of, 127 ff. ; swine
amongst, 118 ; dashed blood on the
altar, 132 ; hair-offering, 171 ; blood -
offering, ib. ; family gods, 186 ; their
national calamities, 328 ; polytheists,
384 ; their Baalim, 385 ; their
tendency to monotheism, 385-6,
390. See Arabia, Ashera, Assyria,
Astarte, Atargatis, Baal, Baalbek,
Babylonians, Baetylion, Banu
Hanifa, Bethel, Chald?ea, Dagon,
Datilla, David, Djinn, Eden, Elohini,
Genesis, Ghab-ghab, Harith, Hasan,
Hebrews, Israel, Jehovah, Jews,
Levitical Law, Masseba, Moham-
medanism, Nosb, Rechabites,
Sabbath, Saracens, Sheol, Solomon,
Teraphim, Unleavened Bread,
Xisuthros
Sequences, natural and supernatural,
18 ; natural, 22 ; originally natural,
subsequently supernatural, 23, 24
Serendyk, corpse burnt, 50
Seriphos, lobster sacred in, 126
Serpent, in mysteries, 333
Seun, 152
Sex-mysteries. See Mysteries
Sex-totems. See Totemism
Shaman, cures disease, 44^ ; corpse
taboo, 76 ; and guardian spirits,
183-4 ; how selected, 287-8
Shark, as a friendly animal, 252
Shark's Bay, totems, 119
Shaving, before or after entering on a
taboo state, 79
Sheaf, worshipped, 212 ; man wrapped
in, 285 ; preserved from harvest to
spring, 364 ; dressed up as an old
woman, 364-5 ; highly taboo, 365 ;
shown to worshippers, 366. See
Ear, Corn
Sheep-skin, relic of totemism in Rome,
103
Sheol, 299, 300, 301 ; gives Avay to a
more hopeful conception, 329
Shivering, sign of possession, 174-5
Shoshones, moral character, 200^
Shotover Hill, 250
Siam, mourning, 79 ; divine kings, 275
Sibyl, 274, 283
Sicily, 214-5
Sick (the), tabooed in Polynesia only,
70
Sickness, in the belief of the Australians,
Peruvians, 23 ; not necessarily the
work of evil spirits, 190
Sicyon, ritual in, 272-3
Silence, observed in and as to the
mysteries, 361
Sin, brings calamity, 109-12
Sindai, cannibalism, 202
Skin, for clothing images, 252 ; used
for making idols, 285 ; for wrapping
representative of the god in, 285-6 ;
for clothing idols and novices, 338
Sky-spirit, known to Indo-Europeans,
228 ; rites, 239 ; resists syncretism
239
Slave, beaten, 292=^
Slave Coast. See Ewe-speaking peoples
and Yoruba-speaking peoples
438
INDEX
Slavs, blood-feud and covenant, 98, 99
Sleep, savage tlieory of, 44
Snail, as totem, 153
Snake, the genius of Ti. Gracchus,
186 ; deceased appears as, 303
Social Obligation and taboo, 87, 88
Society, its earliest form, 96, 97, 99
Soil, of sacred places taboo, 63, 64 ;
tabooed by blood, 73, 74 ; by new-
born children, 75, 76 ; of taboo
places taboo, 136
Solaryear, unknown to Indo-Europeans,
228
Solomon, 224
Solon, 305, 334
Solstices, 227-8
Soma, 310, 311
Sorcerer, and priests, 24, 35 ; misuse of
the word, 106 ; confused with priest,
289 ; distinction, 289 If.
Sorrow, doll of, 49
Soul, man may have several, 44 ;
departs from body in sickness and
sleep, 44 ; may be made to return,
45, 46 ; hole left in tomb to facilitate
return, 50 ; existence of, denied by
Buddha, 318 ; the child of earth
and starry sky, 321. See Spirits,
Transmigration
Soumoo Indians, mourning, 79
Spartans, scourging as blood-oftering,
171
Species, not the individual, worshipped
as totem, 211, 212
Spirit, the Holy, 284
Spirits, not necessarily supernatural,
23 ; various names for, 43 ; friendly
relations with, 54 ; to be dis-
tinguished from supernatural spirits,
55 ; unattached, how worshipped,
173, 174 ; such worship disloyal to
clan-god, 177 ; familiar, 187 ; human
and supernatural, 189 ; how the
former come to have supernatural
powers, 196 ; not all supernatural,
395. See Family Gods, Gods,
Guardian Spirits, Soul
Spiritual regeneration and morality,
343 flf.
Spiritualism, 343
Srahmantin, 164, 174
State, does not exist in early times,
54 ; first appears in the collective
action of a totem-clan, 109
State-cults, confined to citizens, 359
Sterculinus, 246
Stoics, on myths, 267
Stones, their "worship" secondary on
altar-worship, 139 ff. ; and has mis-
led students, 141 ; incorporated into
higher religions, 142 ; suppressed by
them, 142, 143
Stoning, to avoid bloodshed, 73, 74
the mode of killing adopted to
distribute the guilt equally, 255 ;
the divine victim, to divide responsi-
bility, 292
Storks, revered by the Thessalians,
125
Story-telling, how it arose, 258
Strangers = enemies, 54, 327
Strangers, tabooed but not inherently
taboo, 71
Streams, sacred, 237, 242. See Water-
spirits
Struggle for existence, man's physical
inferiority to animals in, 15 ; his
consequent development of the in-
tellectual faculties, 21 ; how religion
aided him, 21
Suahili, ordination, 288
Subsistence, artificial and natural basis
of, 113
Substitutes for blood, 52, 53
Sudra caste, mutilation, 170
Suhman, how it differs from other
deities, 165, 167 ; modelled on idol,
169, 175 ; sacrifice offered to it, 183
Suicide, of divine kings, 279 ff.
Sulagava sacrifice, 146, 149
Sumatra, tiger's name taboo, 61 ; sacred
trees, 208 ; divine kings, 275 ; may
not be seen by taboo persons, 69 ;
agi'iculturist's dependence on, 228 ;
rites used in worship of, 229, 230 :
horses sacrificed to, ih. ; fires as
offerings to, 231-2 ; myths about his
movements, 261
Sun, as next world, 298 ; disappears
below gi-ound, 306 ; hence belief in
a hajipy Avestern world, 307-8; rest-
ing-place for the departed, 310. See
Heavenly bodies
Sun-charms, 232
Sunday, 65, 66
Sun-god, 128
Supernatural, interference with laws
of nature, 18-23, 55 ; man believed
in the, from the first, 15, 18 ft". ;
endeavoured to establish relations
with it, 20 ff. ; regarded it as a
spirit having affinity with his own,
21 ; but not all spirits supernatural,
23 ; man seeks to locate the s., 23 ;
s. power originally purely negative,
23 ; only manifests itself later in
natural phenomena, 24 ; its positive
and negative aspects, 25 ; man does
not believe himself to possess super-
natural poAvers, 26 ; familiar se-
quences not regarded as supernatural,
26, 41 ; belief in, distinct from fear
or gratitude, 41 ; usually combined
with animism, ih. ; man's relations
INDEX
439
to the s., 42 ; he does not attempt
to coerce it, ib. ; but to ally himself
with it, 43 ; sentiment of, distinct
from taboo -terror, 137 ; supernatural
beings, three kinds of, 173 ; super-
natural powers exercised by trees and
plants, 206 ; distinction between
supernatural and the natural always
known to man, 395 ; man seeks it in
external nature, 408, 411, 413
Supernatural Selection in mythology,
265-6 ; in the taboos laid on the
priesthood, 272
Superstitious Man, anoints stones, 143
Surinam, blood-covenant, 98
Surrogate. See Substitute
Survival, of the iittest not usually
survival of the best, 394-5 ; theory
of, essentially negative, 399
Survival theory, 297 ff.
Survivals, in religion are rites from
which the religious element has
departed, 232
Suspension-burial, 204
Swan-maiden tales, 259
Swearing, origin and meaning of, 64
Sweeping house sweeps out spirits, 48
Swine, reluctance to feed on, 118
Symbolism, inadequate to account for
animal- worship, 124 ; inadequate to
explain royal and priestly taboos,
272 ; applied to puriticatory rites in
the private mysteries, 348
Sympathetic Magic, not supposed, by
those who use it, to produce super-
natural etfects, 25-7 ; fatal to pro-
gress, 33 ; instances of, 35 ; simply
the applied science of the savage,
35 ; and taboo, 90 ; not the explana-
tion of fire festivals, 232-3
Syncretism, implies synoikismos, 235,
and facilitates it, ib. ; when im-
possible, 238 ; gives rise to myths,
255 ff. ; in monotheism, 390-2,
393-4 ; facilitated by absence of
names of gods, 391-2
Synoikismos, 123 ; involves syncretism,
234 ; inconsistent with monotheism,
315 ; does not always produce poly-
theism, 391
Syria (the countrv), 186
Syria (the island)", 313
Tablets, Pythagorean, 320-1
Taboo, on mourners does not exclude
love of dead, 57, 58 ; meaning of
"taboo," 59; transmissibility of,
59-68 ; conveyed by sight, 59, 60 ;
by hearing, 60, 61 ; by things
"unclean," 62; by things "holy,"
62 ; by persons, 62, 63 ; by holy
places, 63 ; by the soil, 63, 64 ;
infects time, 65, 67 ; raiment, 66,
67 ; transmissibility due to Associa-
tion of Ideas, 67, not to belief either
in material pollution or supernatural
influence, 68 ; things taboo and
things tabooed, 69 ; food not taboo,
69 ; criminals and the sick tabooed,
70 ; persons and things in which a
supernatural spirit dwells tabooed,
71 ; property and Avives tabooed,
71 ; taboo extended from species to
genus, 71, 72 ; blood, inherently
taboo, 73, 74 ; new-born children,
ditto, 75, 76 ; their mothers, ditto,
74, 75 ; corpses, ditto, 76-80 ; ex-
planations of, 82-85 ; not a piece of
state-craft, 82 ; nor a purely religious
observance, 82, 83 ; nor merely the
transmission of (loathed) qualities,
83, 84 ; consequences of breaking
taboo, 84 ; taboo categorical not
hypothetical, 84,;85 ; a "primitive"
sentiment, 85 ; difterence between
things taboo and things dangerous,
85 ; taboo prior to and contradictory
of experience, 85 ; not specifically
moral, social, or religious, 86 ; simply
= ' ' thou shalt not, " 86, 87 ; essential
to morality, 87 ; and to sense of
Social Obligation, 87, 88 ; for it
made Private and General Good
coincide, 88 ; evolution of taboo
not always beneficent, 88, 89 ; its
growth rapid and fatal, 89 ; not
checked automatically by Uncon-
scious Utilitarianism, 90 ; action of
taboo mechanical and irrational, 91 ;
rationalised by religion, 92, and a
process of Supernatural Selection,
93-5 ; taboo taken up into totem-
ism, 109 ; on flesh of totem, 117 ;
colours taboo, 136, 349 ; places, ib.;
terror purely negatiA^e, 137 ; imposed
on those about to communicate, 155 ;
source of charms or amulets, 178 ;
infection communicated by the hair,
194 ; on tree and plant totems as
food, 222-3 ; in myths and fairy
tales, 259 ; uniformly laid on priests,
271-2 ; imposed upon divine priest-
kings, 275 fl". ; differentiates the two
ofiices, 276-8 ; source of the ideas of
holiness and uncleanness, 296 ; taboo
of silence in the Eleusinia, 361, 380
Tacullis, 299
Tahbi, 163
Tahiti, chiefs taboo, 62 ; mourners
taboo, 69, and may not feed them-
selves, 70 ; sickness due to sin, 111 ;
blood -off'erings to the dead, 191
440
INDEX
Talismans, 323
Tamarind, as totem, 210
Tamehameha, tabooed a diamond
mine, 72
Tammaraca, 184
Tando, 239
Tanna, corpse painted red, 52 ; food
not to be offered with bare hands,
70 ; paint for blood, 191-2
Tartars, sacrificial meal, 149, 158 ;
sacrament, 219, 222 ; grand Lamas,
275 ; kings differentiated from
l^riests, 278
Tasmanians (extinct), name of dead
taboo, 61
Tattooing, its origin, 172 ; condition
of entering paradise, 173 ; marks
choice of a guardian spirit, 182 ;
forbidden to the Hebrews, 193 ; in
ordination, 288
Tcharnican, 219
Tehuantepec, choice of individual
totem, 185
Tehuelche, sacrificial meal, 146, 159 ;
sacrifices to the dead, 196
Tellies, 349
"^ifievos, 295, 3363
Temples, origin of, 135, 237
Tenger ]\[ountains. See Java
Tenure of priestly office, 270-1
Teraphim, 186
Teutons, birth -trees, 207 ; their May-
pole, 208
Thebes (Greece), 255-7, 304
Thebes (Egypt), 309
Theodore, Archbishop, denounces
stone- worship, 143
Geot Trdrpioi, Trarp'ZoL, 187
SeocpopoL, 3333
Oeos, 322
Thesmophoria, 240, 359, 367, 379
Thessalians, worshipped storks, 125 ;
war with Phocians, 349
Thiasi, 334-6, 338-42, 352, 371,
373-4
Thibet, sacrificial meal, 148, 149
Thieves, eaten, 202, 203
Thlinkets, totem - dress, 102, 103 ;
priests, 288
Thurii, 320
Ti, 309
Tierra del Fuego, name of dead taboo,
61
Tiki, Polynesian for totem, 185 ; god
of tattooing and of wild plants, ib.
Time, infected by taboo, 65 ; primitive
computation of, 226-7
Timmanees, offer food to the dead,
52
Timor, tabooed persons may not feed
themselves, 70 ; underworld, 306
Tinneh, 288
Tinnevelly, M-orship of evil spirits,
174, 175, 176
Tirol, mode of conveying corpse, 50 ;
corpse taboo, 76
Tiryns, 256^
Titans, 350 ff. ; myth, 355-6
Tlalnepautla, 142
Tlalocan, 299
Tlalocs, 217
Tmu, 384
Todas, sacrifice, 156
Tombstones, carved in totem form,
103
Tonga, king's glance taboos what it
lights on, 64 ; mutilation, 170 ;
blood-offerings to the dead, 192 ;
first-fruits, 223 ; priests, 287 ; happy
other- world, 308
Tonquinese, cover dying man's face
with a cloth, 50 ; funeral feasts, 51
Tonsure, 171^
Tooitonga. See Tuitonga
Topantunuasu. See Celebes
Torch-rite, 365, 378
Torres Strait, 306
Totemism, has its origin in the tribal
stage of society, 96, 97 ; based upon
the blood-covenant, 97, 98 ; and the
division of things into natural kinds,
99, 100 ; with which clans can have
blood-feuds and blood-covenants,
100 ; a totem always a species, never
an individual, 101 ; its life respected,
as the life of a clansman, 102;
buried, when dead, ib. ; totemist
wears a totem-dress, 102, 103, es-
pecially at great crises, 103 ; rejoins
the totem at death, ib. ; men de-
scended from totem ancestor, 104 ;
the totem a god, 104, 105 ; killing
a clansman = killing the god, 107 ;
loyalty to the totem-god, 107, 108 ;
totem-clan a religious community,
109. Survivals of T., 113-29:
domestication of animals and plants,
113-21 ; in Egypt, 121-3 ; in
Greece, 125, 126 ; amongst the
Semites, 127-9 ; totemism world-
wide, 117 ; based on blood-relation-
ship, 139 ; the totem taboo as food,
yet eaten, 154 ; totemism in pastoral
and prepastoral times, 155 ; dates
from before pastoral times, 156 ;
clansman reunited to totem in
death, 173, 303 ; individual totems,
182 ff. , 185. Tree and Plant Totems,
206-25 : one individual appropri-
ates the worship accorded originally
to tlie whole species, 208 ; worship
no longer confined to the clan,
ib. ; tree-totem anthropomorphised,
208-9 ; clan names itself after
INDEX
441
totera^ 209 ; branch or plant carried
in (sacramental) procession, ib. ;
dead buried in totem-tree, 210 ;
tree appears in marriage-rite, ih. ;
plant-totems the source of domesti-
cated plants, 210 ft".; plant- totems
preserved, for their supernatural
protection, from one year to the
next, 211 ; and -worshipped, 212 ;
plant - totem anthropomorphised,
213 ; plant furnishes the sacramental
meal, 214 ; seeds eaten sim2)liciter,
214, 215 ; made into a dough-doll,
215-6 ; use of dough-dolls spreads to
non-cereal deities, 216 ; wafers take
the place of the dolls, 218-9 ; blood
extended from animal to plant-
totems, 219, 220 ; two modes of
communion with tree-totems, 220,
by eating, ib. ; and by incorporation
of the worshipper with the object
of his worship, 220-2 ; survival
of original taboo on plant-totems
as food, 222-3 ; importation into
religion of the conception of " i^ro-
perty," 223-4; consequent "gift
theory" of sacrifice, 224-5 ; degrada-
tion of religion, 224 ; erroneous
■views of history of religion, 225 ;
totem-gods absorbed by syncretism,
236 ; sex-totems, 239 ; how totem-
gods were aftected by polytheism,
242-3, 249 ; totemism, in India,
317 ; under what conditions alone
it results in metempsychosis, 314-5 ;
in Egypt in Gmeco-Roman times,
316 ; i)asses into polytheism, 395 ;
the earliest form of religion known
to science may be a relapse from an
earlier and purer form, 395 ; totem-
sacrifice aims at the union of man
with the divine, 411-2 ; presupposes
a previous stage in religious develop-
ment, 413 ; a form of monotheism, ib.
Totonacs, dough and blood, 219
Tragedy, 352
Tpdyoi, 351
Transformation, of men into beasts,
amongst Jacoons, Bushmans, in
Kirchhain, 16, 251, 253, 257, 259 ;
posthumous transformation into
totem-animal, 314-5, 325-6
Transformation Conflict, 355 ft".
Transmigration of Souls, 314-26;
totemism does not always result in,
314 ; conditions under which alone
it does so result, 315 ; in Egypt,
315-7 ; in India, 317-20; Buddhist
revolt against Brahminist transmi-
gration, 318-9 ; differences between
Egyptian and Indian doctrines, 319,
320 ; Pytbagoreanism, 320 ft". ; its
difference from the Indian doctrine,
321 ; its resemblances to the Egyp-
tian, 322-3 ; its slight attachment
to native Greek beliefs, 323-4 ;
impossibility of its being native,
324-5 ; elements of the belief in
a future state, 325 ; why their
synthesis before 600 e.g. was un-
satisfactory to the religious con-
sciousness, 326
Travancore. See Veddahs
Trees, as totems, 207 ; dead buried in,
210 ; in marriage-rites, 210 ; human
figure attached to, 215-6, 255 ; rags
tied on, 221 ; hung with fruits
(syncretism), 235 ; sacred, 242 ;
clothed in human dress, 252
Tree-burial, 204, 210
Tree-gods, present in "lots," 289
Trenches, offerings made vj, 51, 52
Triangle, totemistic, 127 If.
Tronis, blood-offerings, 52
Troy, 304
Tscheremiss, feast the dead, 51 ;
sacrificial meal, 150
Tscherkess, funeral feasts, 51 ; mutila-
tion, 170
Tschuwasch, funeral feasts, 51
Tshi-speaking peoples, tempt the soul
of the deceased to return, 45 ; funeral
lamentations, 47 ; purify mourners,
57 ; vessels taboo, 63 ; eat fetish,
64 ; taboo-days, 65 ; taboo colours,
67 ; mother unclean after child-
birth, 74, 75 ; purified, 75, 76 ;
corpses taboo, 76 ; mourners, 77,
79 ; the god fights for his own
people, 108 ; survival of totemism,
155 ; their deities, 163 ft". ; paint for
blood, 192; plant - totems, 207;
functional deities, 247
Tuitonga, 66, 79, 223
Tumanang, 101
Tupai, 60
Tuppin Irnbas, blood-guiltiness, 292 ;
next life. 308
Turtle, as totem, 153, 243
Turtle-clan, 104 ; myth of origin,
251-2
Tycoon, 277
U
Uaaupes Valley, cannibalism, 202
Uliase Islands, cure for disease, 45
Umbrellas, to save the sun from l^eing
polluted by taboo persons, 60
Unclean things, transmit their taboo,
62 ; infect time, 65 ; unclean
animal, 127 ; the unclean forbidden
to communicate, 155 ; unclean
animals make a more potent sacri-
442
INDEX
fiee, 330 ; the unclean might not
have to do directly or indirectly
with the mysteries, 361 ; nor ap-
proach sacred sheaf, 364
Uncleanness, of mourners, 57, 58, 69 ;
and of all who have come in contact
with death, 76, 80 ; of the shedder
of blood, 75 ; of mothers after child-
birth, 75 ; of new-born children, 76
Unconscious Utilitarianism, 90
Underground world, 299 ff., 303, 305
Uniformity of Nature, not proved by
science, nor disproved by the errors
of science, 9, 10 ; assumed in savage
as well as in scientific logic, 28 ;
expression of God's will, 402 ; of
human action, of man's free will,
ih. ; assumed not proved, 406 ; acted
on by primitive man, 409
Union, political, implies religious
union, 239
Unleavened Bread, 385
Unyora, blood-covenant, 98
Upanishads, on sacrifice, 224-5
Utopia, 305, 312-3
Validity of a belief not affected by the
fact that it has been evolved out of
something else, 10 ; of religious
beliefs to be discussed by philo-
sophy of religion, ih.
Vancouver's Island, 303
Van Diemen's Land, strangers not
eaten Avith, 71
Vannus, 247
Vedas, 317
A^'eddahs of Travancove, fathers fast
after child-birth, 75
Vegetation, placed under protection of
water-spirit, 230
Vegetation-spirit, ceases to be im-
manent in corn and becomes lord
of the soil, 223 ; syncretised \vith
Dionysus, 236 ; \nth water-spirits,
237 ; omnipotent not departmental,
244 ; carried in procession, 255 ; re-
presented by a man in a sheaf or
green leaves, 285 ; enters him who
eats the first-fruit of tree, 293
Vengeance for the dead, 54
Vermin, unclean, 62 ; sacred, 128
Victim, the, first eaten jointly by god
and worshipper, 159, then resigned
wholly to the god, 160
Victoria, remnants of food used to
injure the eater, 151
Virgil, 274
Virginia, 306
A''ision, spiritual, 398 ff.
Vitzilipuztli. See Huitzilopochtli
Voluntary religious associations, 331
Vows, those under, fast and are taboo,
155
W
"Wafers, sacramental, 218-9 ; in the
private mysteries, 340
Walhalla, 302
Waliah, may not offer presents with
his hands, 71, 72
War, a holy function, 155^, 242, 295,
349
War-captives, executed in place of
priest, 283-4
War-god, how developed, 242
War-king, 277, 295
War-paint, 349
Washing, not permitted to taboo
persons, 78 ; e.g. mourners, 78, 79 ;
abstained from, 365, 368
Water, used for ceremonial purification,
57, 75, 76, 80, 229 ; for divination,
ih.y 289 ; ordeal by, ih. ; sacramental
use of, 229 ; waters over the earth,
ih. ; water-spirit, 230 ; ghosts drink,
322-3 ; for purification in mysteries,
339, 348
Water-spirits, 221
Wells, sacred, 221, 232
Wends, cannibalism, 202 ; life-tree, 210
Wer-geld, 102
Wermland, sacrament, 215
West Indies, sacrificial meal; 147,
151 ; grave-posts, 196
White, taboo-colour, 65, 79, 349
Whydah, sacred (taboo) python, 60 ;
python procession, 209
Widows and widowers, shave their
heads or cut their hair, 79, 80
Will, the source of all human actions
and believed to be source of all other
changes, 22, 409, 411
Winds, on sale in Shetlands and Isle
of Man, 24
Wine, forbidden in the Eleusinia,
380-1
Witches, changed into animals, 16 ;
use waxen images, 29 ; seek to do
mischief, 177 ; their familiars, 187 ;
ordeal by water, 229. See Priest,
Sorcerer
Wives, tabooed, 71, 72 ; killed at
husband's grave, 200
Wolf-clan and hero, 126
Women, taboo, 59, so wear broad-
brimmed hats, 60 ; debased by
ancestor-worship, 199 ; amongst
savages generally do the agriculture,
240, 258 ; probably first cultivated
plants, 240, 258 ; hence cereal
deities feminine, 241, 258, 379
INDEX
443
Work, not to be done on taboo-days,
65
World, external, cannot be proved to
exist, 8 ; its existence assumed by-
physical science, 9
World-soul, 389, 390
Worship, religious, a public institu-
tion, 2 ; of gods, 56 ; its original
form and meaning, 141 ; all origin-
ally public, 160 ; public worship
parodied in the worship of evil
spirits, 174, 175 ; how private
differed from public, 175 ff. Private
worship, a blood-covenant between
individual and the god, 170 ;
relation of private to public, 188 ;
worship of non - totem deities
modelled on that of totems, 244-5 ;
need of an outward act of, 329
Wretch, meaning and origin, 70
X
Xanthos, 337-8
Xilonen, 213, 223, 239
Xisuthros, 304
Xiuhtecutli, 216
Zbava, 134
Y
Yabe, deity's hut makes intruders
taboo, 63
Yagna sacrifice, 147, 149
Yima, 304
Yoruba-speaking peoples, funeral
lamentations, 47 ; mourners fast,
78 ; mourners, 79 ; next world, 300
Young men, priests, 278
Yucatan, sickness due to sin, 111
Yule, 228
Yule Islanders, eat not with strangers,
71
Yumos, man-slayer taboo, 74
Zagreus, identified with Dionysus,
352 ff.
Zeus, and fetishism, 169 ; and ancestor-
worship, 197 ; the sky-spirit, 239 ;
absorbs totem-deities, 251-2 ; the
Golden Age, 304 ; had not to do with
the nether world, 324 ; in Orphic
myths, 355-6 ; reflects the weakness
of monarchy in Hellas, 386, 389
Zei>s ^vdeudpos, 208
Zeus, Olympian, 228
Zeus Xenios, 330
Zoroastrians, funeral feasts, 51
Zulus, worship only ghosts of their
own tribe, 53, 54 ; purify on hearing
anything taboo, 60 ; Amatonga
taboo, 69 ; do not kill their cattle,
116 ; remnants of food used to in-
jure the eater, 151 ; sacrificial feasts
excuse for eating meat, 157 ; whole
clan claims to eat, 158 ; myths,
262 ; divine kings, 290 ; next world,
299. 301
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