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Title: The Idea of God in Early Religions
Author: F. B. Jevons
Release Date: May 5, 2008 [eBook #25338]
Language: English
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THE IDEA OF GOD IN EARLY RELIGIONS
by
F. B. JEVONS, LITT.D.
Professor of Philosophy in the
University of Durham
Cambridge:
at the University Press
1913
First Edition, 1910
Reprinted 1911, 1913
_With the exception of the coat of arms at the foot, the
design on the title page is a reproduction of one used by
the earliest known Cambridge printer, John Siberch, 1521_
PREFACE
In _The Varieties of Religious Experience_ the late Professor William
James has said (p. 465): 'The religious phenomenon, studied as an
inner fact, and apart from ecclesiastical or theological
complications, has shown itself to consist everywhere, and at all its
stages, in the consciousness which individuals have of an intercourse
between themselves and higher powers with which they feel themselves
to be related. This intercourse is realised at the time as being both
active and mutual.' The book now before the reader deals with the
religious phenomenon, studied as an inner fact, in the earlier stages
of religion. By 'the Idea of God' may be meant either the
consciousness which individuals have of higher powers, with which they
feel themselves to be related, or the words in which they, or others,
seek to express that consciousness. Those words may be an expression,
that is to say an interpretation or a misinterpretation, of that
consciousness. But the words are not the consciousness: the feeling,
without which the consciousness does not exist, may be absent when the
words are spoken or heard. It is however through the words that we
have to approach the feeling and the consciousness of others, and to
determine whether and how far the feeling and the consciousness so
approached are similar in all individuals everywhere and at all
stages.
F. B. JEVONS.
HATFIELD HALL,
DURHAM.
_October, 1910_
CONTENTS
PAGE
BIBLIOGRAPHY ix
I. INTRODUCTION 1
II. THE IDEA OF GOD IN MYTHOLOGY 30
III. THE IDEA OF GOD IN WORSHIP 60
IV. THE IDEA OF GOD IN PRAYER 103
V. THE IDEA AND BEING OF GOD 152
INDEX 167
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Allen, Grant. The Evolution of the Idea of God. London, 1897.
Anthropology and the Classics. Oxford, 1908.
Bastian, A. Volks- und Menschenkunde. Berlin, 1888.
Bousset, W. What is Religion? (English Translation). London, 1907.
Crawley, A.E. The Idea of the Soul. London, 1909.
Fossey, C. La Magie Assyrienne. Paris, 1902.
Frazer, J.G. Early History of the Kingship. London, 1895.
---- The Golden Bough. London, 1900.
---- Psyche's Task. London, 1909.
Gardner, P. Modernity and the Churches. London, 1909.
Hobhouse, L.T. Morals in Evolution. London, 1906.
Höffding, H. The Philosophy of Religion (English Translation).
London, 1906.
Hollis, A.C. The Masai. Oxford, 1905.
---- The Nandi. Oxford, 1909.
James, W. The Varieties of Religious Experience. London, 1902.
Jastrow, M. Jun. Study of Religion. London, 1901.
Jevons, F.B. Introduction to the History of Religion. London,
1896.
---- Religion in Evolution. London, 1906.
---- Study of Comparative Religion. London, 1908.
Lang, A. Magic and Religion. London, 1901.
---- The Making of Religion. London, 1898.
Mackenzie, W.D. The Final Faith. London, 1910.
Marett, R.R. The Threshold of Religion. London, 1909.
Mitchell, H.B. Talks on Religion. London, 1908.
Nassau, R.H. Fetichism in West Africa. London, 1904.
Parker, K.L. The Euahlayi Tribe. London, 1905.
Saussaye, P.D.C. de la. Religionsgeschichte. Freiburg i. B., 1889.
Schaarschmidt, C. Die Religion. Leipzig, 1907.
Thompson, R.C. Semitic Magic. London, 1908.
Tisdall W. St C. Comparative Religion. London, 1909.
Transactions of the Third International Congress of the History of
Religions. Oxford, 1908.
Tylor, E.B. Primitive Culture. London, 1873.
Westermarck, E. Origin and Development of Moral Ideas. London,
1906.
Wundt, W. Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig, 1904-6.
I
INTRODUCTION
Every child that is born is born of a community and into a community,
which existed before his birth and will continue to exist after his
death. He learns to speak the language which the community spoke
before he was born, and which the community will continue to speak
after he has gone. In learning the language he acquires not only words
but ideas; and the words and ideas he acquires, the thoughts he thinks
and the words in which he utters them, are those of the community from
which he learnt them, which taught them before he was born and will go
on teaching them after he is dead. He not only learns to speak the
words and think the ideas, to reproduce the mode of thought, as he
does the form of speech, of the circumambient community: he is taught
and learns to act as those around him do--as the community has done
and will tend to do. The community--the narrower community of the
family, first, and, afterwards, the wider community to which the
family belongs--teaches him how he ought to speak, what he ought to
think, and how he ought to act. The consciousness of the child
reproduces the consciousness of the community to which he belongs--the
common consciousness, which existed before him and will continue to
exist after him.
The common consciousness is not only the source from which the
individual gets his mode of speech, thought and action, but the court
of appeal which decides what is fact. If a question is raised whether
the result of a scientific experiment is what it is alleged by the
original maker of the experiment to be, the appeal is to the common
consciousness: any one who chooses to make the experiment in the way
described will find the result to be of the kind alleged; if everyone
else, on experiment, finds it to be so, it is established as a fact of
common consciousness; if no one else finds it to be so, the alleged
discovery is not a fact but an erroneous inference.
Now, it is not merely with regard to external facts or facts
apprehended through the senses, that the common consciousness is
accepted as the court of appeal. The allegation may be that an
emotion, of a specified kind--alarm or fear, wonder or awe--is, in
specified circumstances, experienced as a fact of the common
consciousness. Or a body of men may have a common purpose, or a common
idea, as well as an emotion of, say, common alarm. If the purpose,
idea or emotion, be common to them and experienced by all of them, it
is a fact of their common consciousness. In this case, as in the case
of any alleged but disputed discovery in science, the common
consciousness is the court of appeal which decides the facts, and
determines whether what an individual thinks he has discovered in his
consciousness is really a fact of the common consciousness. The idea
of powers superior to man, the emotion of awe or reverence, which goes
with the idea, and the purpose of communicating with the power in
question are facts, not peculiar to this or that individual
consciousness, but facts of the common consciousness of all mankind.
The child up to a certain age has no consciousness of self: the
absence of self-consciousness is one of the charms of children. The
child imitates its elders, who speak of him and to him by his name. He
speaks of himself in the third person and not in the first person
singular, and designates himself by his proper name and not by means
of the personal pronoun 'I'; eventually the child acquires the use and
to some extent learns the meaning of the first personal pronoun; that
is, if the language of the community to which he belongs has developed
so far as to have produced such a pronoun. For there was a period in
the evolution of speech when, as yet, a first personal pronoun had not
been evolved; and that, probably, for the simple reason that the idea
which it denotes was as unknown to the community as it is to the child
whose absence of self-consciousness is so pleasing. For a period, the
length of which may have been millions of years, the common
consciousness, the consciousness of the community, did not discover or
discriminate, in language or in thought, the existence of the
individual self.
The importance of this consideration lies in its bearing upon the
question, in what form the idea of powers superior to man disclosed
itself in the common consciousness at that period. It is held by many
students of the science of religion that fetishism preceded polytheism
in the history of religion; and it is undoubted that polytheism
flourished at the expense of fetishism. But what is exactly the
difference between fetishism and polytheism? No one now any longer
holds that a fetish is regarded, by believers in fetish, as a material
object and nothing more: everyone recognises that the material object
to which the term is applied is regarded as the habitation of a
spiritual being. The material object in question is to the fetish what
the idol of a god is to a god. If the material object, through which,
or in which, the fetish-spirit manifests itself, bears no resemblance
to human form, neither do the earliest stocks or blocks in which gods
manifest themselves bear any resemblance to human form. Such unshaped
stocks do not of themselves tell us whether they are fetishes or gods
to their worshippers. The test by which the student of the science of
religion determines the question is a very simple one: it is, who
worships the object in question? If the object is the private property
of some individual, it is fetish; if it is worshipped by the community
as a whole, it, or rather the spirit which manifests itself therein,
is a god of the community. The functions of the two beings differ
accordingly: the god receives the prayers of the community and has
power to grant them; the fetish has power to grant the wishes of the
individual who owns it. The consequence of this difference in function
is that as the wishes of the individual may be inconsistent with the
welfare of other members of the community; as the fetish may be, and
actually is, used to procure injury and death to other members of the
community; a fetish is anti-social and a danger to the community,
whereas a god of the community is there expressly as a refuge and a
help for the community. The fetish fulfils the desires of the
individual, the self; the god listens to the prayers of the community.
Let us now return to that stage in the evolution of the community
when, as yet, neither the language nor the thought of the community
had discovered or discriminated the existence of the individual self.
If at that stage there was in the common consciousness any idea,
however dim or confused, of powers superior to man; if that idea was
accompanied or coloured by any emotion, whether of fear or awe or
reverence; if that emotion prompted action of any kind; then, such
powers were not conceived to be fetishes, for the function of a fetish
is to fulfil the desires of an individual self; and until the
existence of the individual self is realised, there is no function for
a fetish to perform.
It may well be that the gradual development of self-consciousness, and
the slow steps by which language helped to bring forth the idea of
self, were from the first, and throughout, accompanied by the gradual
development of the idea of fetishism. But the very development of the
idea of a power which could fulfil the desires of self, as
distinguished from, and often opposed to, the interests of the
community, would stimulate the growth of the idea of a power whose
special and particular function was to tend the interests of the
community as a whole. Thus the idea of a fetish and the idea of a god
could only persist on condition of becoming more and more inconsistent
with, and contradictory of, one another. If the lines followed by the
two ideas started from the same point, it was only to diverge the
more, the further they were pursued. And the tendency of fetishism to
disappear from the later and higher stages of religion is sufficient
to show that it did not afford an adequate or satisfactory expression
of the idea contained in the common consciousness of some power or
being greater than man. That idea is constantly striving, throughout
the history of religion, to find or give expression to itself; it is
constantly discovering that such expressions as it has found for
itself do it wrong; and it is constantly throwing, or in the process
of throwing, such expressions aside. Fetishism was thrown aside sooner
than polytheism: for it was an expression not only inadequate but
contradictory to the idea that gave it birth. The emotions of fear and
suspicion, with which the community regarded fetishes, were emotions
different from the awe or reverence with which the community
approached its gods.
What practically provokes and stimulates the individual's dawning
consciousness of himself, or the community's consciousness of the
individual as in a way distinct from itself, is the dash between the
desires, wishes, interests of the one, and the desires, wishes and
interests of the other. But though the interests of the one are
sometimes at variance with those of the other, still in some cases,
also, the interests of the individual--even though they be purely
individual interests--are not inconsistent with those of the
community; and in most cases they are identical with them--the
individual promotes his own interests by serving those of the
community, and promotes those of the community by serving his own. In
a word, the interests of the one are not so clearly and plainly cut
off from those of the other, that the individual can always be
condemned for seeking to gratify his self-interests or his own
personal desires. That is presumably one reason why fetishism is so
wide-spread and so long-lived in Western Africa, for instance: though
fetishes may be used for anti-social purposes, they may be and are
also used for purposes which if selfish are not, or are not felt to
be, anti-social. The individual owner of a fetish does not feel that
his ownership does or ought to cut him off from membership of the
community. And so long as such feeling is common, so long an
indecisive struggle between gods and fetishes continues.
Now this same cause--the impossibility of condemning the individual
for seeking to promote his own interests--will be found on examination
to be operative elsewhere, viz. in magic. The relation of magic to
religion is as much a matter of doubt and dispute as is that of
fetishism to religion. And I propose to treat magic in much the same
way as I have treated fetishism. The justification which I offer for
so doing is to be found in the parallel or analogy that may be drawn
between them. The distinction which comes to be drawn within the
common consciousness between the self and the community manifests
itself obviously in the fact that the interests and desires of the
individual are felt to be different, and yet not to be different, from
those of the community; and so they are felt to be, yet not to be,
condemnable from the point of view of the common consciousness. Now,
this is precisely the judgment which is passed upon magic, wherever it
is cultivated. It is condemnable, it is viewed with suspicion, fear
and condemnation; and yet it is also and at the same time viewed and
practised with general approval. It may be used on behalf of the
community and for the good of the community, and with public approval,
as it is when it is used to make the rain which the community needs.
It may be viewed with toleration, as it is when it is believed to
benefit an individual without entailing injury on the community. But
it is visited with condemnation, and perhaps with punishment, when it
is employed for purposes, such as murder, which the common
consciousness condemns. Accordingly the person who has the power to
work the marvels comprehended under the name of magic is viewed with
condemnation, toleration or approval, according as he uses his power
for purposes which the common consciousness condemns, tolerates or
approves. The power which such a person exerts is power personal to
him; and yet it is in a way a power greater and other than himself,
for he has it not always under his control or command: whether he
uses it for the benefit of the community or for the injury of some
individual, he cannot count on its always coming off. And this fact is
not without its influence and consequences. If he is endeavouring to
use it for the injury of some person, he will explain his failure as
due to some error he has committed in the _modus operandi_, or to the
counter-operations of some rival. But if he is endeavouring to
exercise it for the benefit of the community, failure makes others
doubtful whether he has the power to act on behalf of the community;
while, on the contrary, a successful issue makes it clear that he has
the power, and places him, in the opinion both of the community and of
himself, in an exceptional position: his power is indeed in a way
personal to himself, but it is also greater and other than himself.
His sense of it, and the community's sense of it, is reinforced and
augmented by the approval of the common consciousness, and by the
feeling that a power, in harmony with the common consciousness and the
community's desires, is working in him and through him. This power,
thus exercised, of working marvels for the common good is obviously
more closely analogous to that of a prophet working miracles, than it
is to that of the witch working injury or death. And, in the same way
that I have already suggested that gods and fetishes may have been
evolved from a prior indeterminate concept, which was neither but
might become either; so I would now suggest that miracles are not
magic, nor is magic miracles, but that the two have been
differentiated from a common source. And if the polytheistic gods,
which are to be found where fetishism is believed in, present us with
a very low stage in the development of the idea of a 'perfect
personality,' so too the sort of miracles which are believed in, where
the belief in magic flourishes, present us with a very low stage in
the development of the idea of an almighty God. Axe-heads that float
must have belonged originally to such a low stage; and rods that turn
into serpents were the property of the 'magicians of Egypt' as well as
of Aaron.
The common source, then, from which flows the power of working marvels
for the community's good, or of working magic in the interest of one
individual member and perhaps to the injury of another, is a personal
power, which in itself--that is to say, apart from the intention with
which it is used and apart from the consequences which ensue--is
neither commendable nor condemnable from the community's point of
view; and which consequently can neither be condemned nor commended by
the common consciousness, until the difference between self and the
community has become manifest, and the possibility of a divergence
between the interests of self or _alter_ and those of the community
has been realised. Further, this power, in whichever way it comes to
be exercised, marks a strong individuality; and may be the first, as
it is certainly a most striking, manifestation of the fact of
individuality: it marks off, at once, the individual possessing such
power from the rest of the community. And the common consciousness is
puzzled by the apparition. Just as it tolerates fetishes though it
disapproves of them and is afraid of them, so it tolerates the
magician, though it is afraid of him and does not cordially approve of
him, even when he benefits an individual client without injuring the
community. But though the man of power may use, and apparently most
often does use, his power, in the interest of some individual and to
the detriment of the community; and though it is this condemnable use
which is everywhere most conspicuous, and probably earliest developed;
still there is no reason why he should not use, and as a matter of
fact he sometimes does use, his power on behalf of the community to
promote the food-supply of the community or to produce the rain which
is desired. In this case, then, the individual, having a power which
others have not, is not at variance with the community but in harmony
with the common consciousness, and becomes an organ by which it acts.
When, then, the belief in gods, having the interests of the community
at heart, presents itself or develops within the common consciousness,
the individual who has the power on behalf of the community to make
rain or increase the food supply is marked out by the belief of the
community--or it may be by the communings of his own heart--as
specially related to the gods. Hence we find, in the low stages of the
evolution of religion, the proceedings, by which the man of power had
made rain for the community or increased the food-supply, either
incorporated into the ritual of the gods, or surviving traditionally
as incidents in the life of a prophet, e.g. the rain-making of Elijah.
In the same way therefore as I have suggested that the resemblances
between gods and fetishes are to be explained by the theory that the
two go back to a common source, and that neither is developed from the
other, so I suggest that the resemblances between the conception of
prophet and that of magician point not to the priority of either to
the other, but to the derivation or evolution of both from a prior and
less determinate concept.
Just as a fetish is a material thing, and something more, so a
magician is a man and something more. Just as a god is an idol and
something more, so a prophet or priest is a man and something more.
The fetish is a material thing which manifests a power that other
things do not exhibit; and the magician is a man possessing a power
which other men have not. The difference between the magician and the
prophet or priest is the same as the difference between the fetish and
the god. It is the difference between that which subserves the wishes
of the individual, which may be, and often are, anti-social, and that
which furthers the interests of the community. Of this difference each
child who is born into the community learns from his elders: it is
part of the common consciousness of the community. And it could not
become a fact of the common consciousness until the existence of self
became recognised in thought and expressed in language. With that
recognition of difference, or possible difference, between the
individual and the community, between the desires of the one and the
welfare of the other, came the recognition of a difference between
fetish and god, between magician and priest. The power exercised by
either was greater than that of man; but the power manifested in the
one was exercised with a view to the good of the community; in the
case of the other, not. Thus, from the beginning, gods were not merely
beings exercising power greater than that of man, but beings
exercising their power for the good of man. It is as such that, from
the beginning to the end, they have figured both in the common
consciousness of the community, and in the consciousness of every
member born into the community. They have figured in both; and,
because they have figured both in the individual consciousness and the
common consciousness, they have, from the beginning, been something
present to both, something at once within the individual and without.
But as the child recognises objects long before he becomes aware of
the existence of himself, so man, in his infancy, sought this power or
being in the external world long before he looked for it within
himself.
It is because man looked for this being or power in the external world
that he found, or thought he found, it there. He looked for it and
found it, in the same way as to this day the African negro finds a
fetish. A negro found a stone and took it for his fetish, as Professor
Tylor relates, as follows:--'He was once going out on important
business, but crossing the threshold he trod on this stone and hurt
himself. Ha! ha! thought he, art thou there? So he took the stone, and
it helped him through his undertaking for days.' So too when the
community's attention is arrested by something in the external world,
some natural phenomenon which is marvellous in their eyes, their
attitude of mind, the attitude of the common consciousness, translated
into words is: 'Ha! ha! art thou there?' This attitude of mind is one
of expectancy: man finds a being, possessed of greater power than
man's, because he is ready to find it and expecting it.
So strong is this expectancy, so ready is man to find this being,
superior to man, that he finds it wherever he goes, wherever he looks.
There is probably no natural phenomenon whatever that has not
somewhere, at some time, provoked the question or the reflection 'Art
thou there?' And it is because man has taken upon himself to answer
the question, and to say: 'Thou art there, in the great and strong
wind which rends the mountains; or, in the earthquake; or, in the
fire' that polytheism has arisen. Perhaps, however, we should rather
use the word 'polydaemonism' than 'polytheism.' By a god is usually
meant a being who has come to possess a proper name; and, probably, a
spirit is worshipped for some considerable time, before the
appellative, by which he is addressed, loses its original meaning, and
comes to be the proper name by which he, and he alone, is addressed.
Certainly, the stage in which spirits without proper names are
worshipped seems to be more primitive than that in which the being
worshipped is a god, having a proper name of his own. And the
difference between the two stages of polydaemonism and polytheism is
not merely limited to the fact that the beings worshipped have proper
names in the later stage, and had none in the earlier. A development
or a difference in language implies a development or difference in
thought. If the being or spirit worshipped has come to be designated
by a proper name, he has lost much of the vagueness that characterises
a nameless spirit, and he has come to be much more definite and much
more personal. Indeed, a change much more sinister, from the
religious point of view, is wrought, when the transition from
polydaemonism to polytheism is accomplished.
In the stage of human evolution known as animism, everything which
acts--or is supposed to act--is supposed to be, like man himself, a
person. But though, in the animistic stage, all powers are conceived
by man as being persons, they are not all conceived as having human
form: they may be animals, and have animal forms; or birds, and have
bird-form; they may be trees, clouds, streams, the wind, the
earthquake or the fire. In some, or rather in all, of these, man has
at some time found the being or the power, greater than man, of whom
he has at all times been in quest, with the enquiry, addressed to each
in turn, 'Art thou there?' The form of the question, the use of the
personal pronoun, shows that he is seeking for a person. And students
of the science of religion are generally agreed that man, throughout
the history of religion, has been seeking for a power or being
superior to man and greater than he. It is therefore a personal power
and a personal being that man has been in search of, throughout his
religious history. He has pushed his search in many directions--often
simultaneously in different directions; and, he has abandoned one line
of enquiry after another, because he has found that it did not lead
him whither he would be. Thus, as we have seen, he pushed forward, at
the same time, in the direction of fetishism and of polytheism, or
rather of polydaemonism; but fetishism failed to bring him
satisfaction, or rather failed to satisfy the common consciousness,
the consciousness of the community, because it proved on trial to
subserve the wishes--the anti-social wishes--of the individual, and
not the interests of the community. The beings or powers that man
looked to find and which he supposed he found, whether as fetishes in
this or that object, or as daemons in the sky, the fire or the wind,
in beast or bird or tree, were taken to be personal beings and
personal powers, bearing the same relation to that in which, or
through which, they manifested themselves, as man bears to his body.
They do not seem to have been conceived as being men, or the souls of
men which manifested themselves in animals or trees. At the time when
polydaemonism has, as yet, not become polytheism, the personal beings,
worshipped in this or that external form, have not as yet been
anthropomorphised. Indeed, the process which constitutes the change
from polydaemonism to polytheism consists in the process, or rather is
the process, by which the spirits, the personal beings, worshipped in
tree, or sky, or cloud, or wind, or fire came gradually to be
anthropomorphised--to be invested with human parts and passions and to
be addressed like human beings with proper names. But when
anthropomorphic polytheism is thus pushed to its extreme logical
conclusions, its tendency is to collapse in the same way, and for the
same reasons, as fetishism, before it, had collapsed. What man had
been in search of, from the beginning, and was still in search of, was
some personal being or power, higher than and superior to man. What
anthropomorphic polytheism presented him with, in the upshot, was with
beings, not superior, but, in some or many cases, undeniably inferior
to man. As such they could not thenceforth be worshipped. In Europe
their worship was overthrown by Christianity. But, on reflection, it
seems clear not only that, as such, they could not thenceforth be
worshipped; but that, as such, they never had been worshipped. In the
consciousness of the community, the object of worship had always been,
from the beginning, some personal being superior to man. The apostle
of Christianity might justifiably speak to polytheists of the God
'whom ye ignorantly worship.' It is true, and it is important to
notice, that the sacrifices and the rites and ceremonies, which
together made up the service of worship, had been consciously and
intentionally rendered to deities represented in human form; and, in
this sense, anthropomorphic deities had been worshipped. But, if
worship is something other than sacrifice and rite and ceremony, then
the object of worship--the personal being, greater than man--presented
to the common consciousness, is something other than the
anthropomorphic being, inferior in much to man, of whom poets speak in
mythology and whom artists represent in bodily shape.
Just as fetishism developed and persisted, because it did contain,
though it perverted, one element of religious truth--the accessibility
of the power worshipped to the worshipper--so too anthropomorphism,
notwithstanding the consequences to which, in mythology, it led, did
contain, or rather, was based on, one element of truth, viz. that the
divine is personal, as well as the human. Its error was to set up, as
divine personalities, a number of reproductions or reflections of
human personality. It leads to the conclusion, as a necessary
consequence, that the divine personality is but a shadow of the human
personality, enlarged and projected, so to speak, upon the clouds, but
always betraying, in some way or other, the fact that it is but the
shadow, magnified or distorted, of man. It excludes the possibility
that the divine personality, present to the common consciousness as
the object of worship, may be no reproduction of the human
personality, but a reality to which the human personality has the
power of approximating. Be this as it may, we are justified in saying,
indeed we are compelled to recognise, that in mythology, all the world
over, we see a process of reflection at work, by which the beings,
originally apprehended as superior to man, come first to be
anthropomorphised, that is to be apprehended as having the parts and
passions of men, and then, consequently, to be seen to be no better
than men. This discovery it is which in the long run proves fatal to
anthropomorphism.
We have seen, above, the reason why fetishism becomes eventually
distasteful to the common consciousness: the beings, superior to man,
which are worshipped by the community, are worshipped as having the
interests of the community in their charge, and as having the good of
the community at heart; whereas a fetish is sought and found by the
individual, to advance his private interests, even to the cost and
loss of other individuals and of the community at large. Thus, from
the earliest period at which beings, superior to man, are
differentiated into gods and fetishes, gods are accepted by the common
consciousness as beings who maintain the good of the community and
punish those who infringe it; while fetishes become beings who assist
individual members to infringe the customary morality of the tribe.
Thus, from the first, the beings, of whom the community is conscious
as superior to man, are beings, having in charge, first, the customary
morality of the tribe; and, afterwards, the conscious morality of the
community.
This conception, it was, of the gods, as guardians of morality and of
the common good, that condemned fetishism; and this conception it was,
which was to prove eventually the condemnation of polytheism. A
multitude of beings--even though they be divine beings--means a
multitude, that is a diversity, of ideas. Diversity of ideas,
difference of opinion, is what is implied by every mythology which
tells of disputes and wars between the gods. Every god, who thus
disputed and fought with other gods, must have felt that he had right
on his side, or else have fought for the sake of fighting.
Consequently the gods of polytheism are either destitute of morality,
or divided in opinion as to what is right. In neither case, therefore,
are the gods, of whom mythology tells, the beings, superior to man,
who, from the beginning, were present in the common consciousness to
be worshipped. From the outset, the object of the community's worship
had been conceived as a moral power. If, then, the many gods of
polytheism were either destitute or disregardful of morality, they
could not be the moral power of which the common consciousness had
been dimly aware: that moral power, that moral personality, must be
other than they. As the moral consciousness of the community
discriminated fetishes from gods and tended to rule out fetishes from
the sphere of religion; so too, eventually, the moral consciousness of
the community came to be offended by the incompatibility between the
moral ideal and the conception of a multitude of gods at variance with
each other. If the common consciousness was slow in coming to
recognise the unity of the Godhead--and it was slower in some people
than in others--the unity was logically implied, from the beginning,
in the conception of a personal power, greater and higher than man,
and having the good of the community at heart. The history of religion
is, in effect, from one point of view, the story of the process by
which this conception, however dim, blurred or vague, at first, tends
to become clarified and self-consistent.
That, however, is not the only point of view from which the history of
religion can, or ought to be, regarded. So long as we look at it from
that point of view, we shall be in danger of seeing nothing in the
history of religion but an intellectual process, and nothing in
religion itself but a mental conception. There is, however, another
element in religion, as is generally recognised; and that an emotional
element, as is usually admitted. What however is the nature of that
emotion, is a question on which there has always been diversity of
opinion. The beings, who figured in the common consciousness as gods,
were apprehended by the common consciousness as powers superior to
man; and certainly as powers capable of inflicting suffering on the
community. As such, then, they must have been approached with an
emotion of the nature of reverence, awe or fear. The important, the
determining, fact, however, is that they were approached. The emotion,
therefore, which prompted the community to approach them, is at any
rate distinguishable from the mere fright which would have kept the
community as far away from these powers as possible. The emotion which
prompted approach could not have been fear, pure and simple. It must
have been more in the nature of awe or reverence; both of which
feelings are clearly distinguishable from fear. Thus, we may fear
disease or disgrace; but the fear we feel carries with it neither awe
nor reverence. Again, awe is an inhibitive feeling, it is a feeling
which--as in the case of the awe-struck person--rather prevents than
promotes action or movement. And the determining fact about the
religious emotion is that it was the emotion with which the community
approached its gods. That emotion is now, and probably always was,
reverential in character. The occasion, on which a community
approaches its gods, often is, and doubtless often was, a time when
misfortune had befallen the community. The misfortune was viewed as a
visitation of the god's wrath upon his community; and fear--that 'fear
of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom'--doubtless played a
large part in the complex emotion which stirred the community, not to
run away but to approach the god for the purpose of appeasing his
wrath. In the complexity of an emotion which led to action of this
kind, we must recognise not merely fear but some trust and
confidence--so much, at least, as prevented the person who experienced
it from running away simply. The emotion is not too complex for man,
in however primitive a stage of development: it is not more complex
than that which brings a dog to his master, though it knows it is
going to be thrashed.
That some trust and confidence is indispensable in the complex feeling
with which a community approaches its gods, for the purpose of
appeasing their wrath--still more, for beseeching favours from
them--seems indisputable. But we must not exaggerate it. Wherever
there are gods at all, they are regarded by the community as beings
who can be approached: so much confidence, at least, is placed in them
by the community that believes in them. Even if they are offended and
wrathful, the community is confident that they can be appeased: the
community places so much trust in them. Indeed its trust goes even
further: it is sure that they do not take offence without reasonable
grounds. If they display wrath against the community and send calamity
upon it, it is, and in the opinion of the community, can only be,
because some member of the community has done that which he should not
have done. The gods may be, on occasion, wrathful; but they are just.
They are from the beginning moral beings--according to such standard
of morality as the community possesses--and it is breaches of the
tribe's customary morality that their wrath is directed against. They
are, from the beginning, and for long afterwards in the history of
religion, strict to mark what is amiss, and, in that sense, they are
jealous gods. And this aspect of the Godhead it is which fills the
larger part of the field of religious consciousness, not only in the
case of peoples who have failed to recognise the unity of the Godhead,
but even in the case of a people like the Jews, who did recognise it.
The other aspect of the Godhead, as the God, not merely of mercy and
forgiveness, but of love, was an aspect fully revealed in Christianity
alone, of all the religions in the world.
But the love God displays to all his children, to the prodigal son as
well as to others, is not a mere attribute assigned to Him. It is not
a mere quality with which one religion may invest Him, and of which
another religion, with equal right, may divest Him. The idea of God
does not consist merely of attributes and qualities, so that, if you
strip off all the attributes and qualities, nothing is left, and the
idea is shown to be without content, meaning or reality.
The Godhead has been, in the common consciousness, from the beginning,
a being, a personal being, greater than man; and it is as such that He
has manifested Himself in the common consciousness, from the beginning
until the present day. To this personality, as to others, attributes
and qualities may be falsely ascribed, which are inconsistent with one
another and are none of His. Some of the attributes thus falsely
ascribed may be discovered, in the course of the history of religion,
to have been falsely ascribed; and they will then be set aside. Thus,
fetishism ascribed, or sought to ascribe, to the Godhead, the quality
of willingness to promote even the anti-social desires of the owner of
the fetish. And fetishism exfoliated, or peeled off from the religious
organism. Anthropomorphism, which ascribed to the divine personality
the parts and passions of man, along with a power greater than man's to
violate morality, is gradually dropped, as its inconsistency with the
idea of God comes gradually to be recognised and loathed. So too with
polytheism: a pantheon which is divided against itself cannot stand.
Thus, fetishism, anthropomorphism and polytheism ascribe qualities to
the Godhead, which are shown to be attributes assigned to the Godhead
and imposed upon it from without, for eventually they are found by
experience to be incompatible with the idea of God as it is revealed in
the common consciousness.
On the other hand, the process of the history of religion, the process
of the manifestation or revelation of the Godhead, does not proceed
solely by this negative method, or method of exclusion. If an
attribute, such as that of human form, or of complicity in anti-social
purposes, is ascribed, by anthropomorphism or fetishism, to the divine
personality, and is eventually felt by the common consciousness to be
incompatible with the idea of God, the result is not merely that the
attribute in question drops off, and leaves the idea of the divine
personality exactly where it was, and what it was, before the
attribute had been foisted on it. The incompatibility of the quality,
falsely ascribed or assigned, becomes--if, and when, it does
become--manifest and intolerable, just in proportion as the idea of
God, which has always been present, however vaguely and ill-defined,
in the common consciousness, comes to manifest itself more definitely.
The attribution, to the divine personality, of qualities, which are
eventually found incompatible with it, may prove the occasion of the
more precise and definite manifestation; we may say that action
implies reaction, and so false ideas provoke true ones, but the false
ideas do not create the new ones. The false ideas may stimulate closer
attention to the actual facts of the common consciousness and thus may
stimulate the formation of truer ideas about them, by leading to a
concentration of attention upon the actual facts. But it is from this
closer attention, this concentration of attention, that the newer and
truer knowledge comes, and not from the false ideas. What we speak
of, from one point of view, as closer attention to the facts of the
common consciousness, may, from another point of view, be spoken of as
an increasing manifestation, or a clearer revelation, of the divine
personality, revealed or manifested to the common consciousness. Those
are two views, or two points of view, of one and the same process. But
whichever view we take of it, the process does not proceed solely by
the negative method of exclusion: it is a process which results in the
unfolding and disclosure, not merely of what is in the common
consciousness, at any given moment, but of what is implied in the
divine personality revealed to the common consciousness. If we choose
to speak of this unfolding or disclosure as evolution, the process,
which the history of religion undertakes to set forth, will be the
evolution of the idea of God. But, in that case, the process which we
designate by the name of evolution, will be a process of disclosure
and revelation. Disclosure implies that there is something to
disclose; revelation, that there is something to be revealed to the
common consciousness--the presence of the Godhead, of divine
personality.
II
THE IDEA OF GOD IN MYTHOLOGY
The idea of God is to be found, it will be generally admitted, not
only in monotheistic religions, but in polytheistic religions also;
and, as polytheisms have developed out of polydaemonism, that is to
say, as the personal beings or powers of polydaemonism have, in course
of time, come to possess proper names and a personal history, some
idea of divine personality must be admitted to be present in
polydaemonism as well as in polytheism; and, in the same way, some
idea of a personality greater than human may be taken to lie at the
back of both polydaemonism and fetishism.
If we wish to understand what ideas are in a man's mind, we may infer
them from the words that he speaks and from the way in which he acts.
The most natural and the most obvious course is to start from what he
says. And that is the course which was followed by students of the
history of religion, when they desired to ascertain what idea exactly
man has had of his gods. They had recourse, for the information they
wanted, to mythology. Later on, indeed, they proceeded to enquire into
what man did, into the ritual which he observed in approaching his
gods; and, in the next chapter, we will follow them in that enquiry.
But in this chapter we have to ask what light mythology throws upon
the idea man has had of his gods.
Before doing so, however, we cannot but notice that mythology and
polytheism go together. Fetishism does not produce any mythology.
Doubtless, the owner of a fetish which acts knows and can tell of the
wonderful things it has done. But those anecdotes do not get taken up
into the common stock of knowledge; nor are they handed down by the
common consciousness to all succeeding generations of the community.
Mythology, like language, is the work, and is a possession, of the
common consciousness.
Polydaemonism, like fetishism, does not produce mythology; but, for a
different reason. The beings worshipped in the period of polydaemonism
are beings who have not yet come to possess personal names, and
consequently cannot well have a personal history attached to them. The
difficulty is not indeed an absolute impossibility. Tales can be told,
and at a certain stage in the history of fiction, especially in the
pre-historic stage, tales are told, in which the hero has no proper
name: the period is 'once upon a time,' and the hero is 'a man'
_simpliciter_. But myths are not told about 'a god' _simpliciter_. In
mythology the hero of the myth is not 'a god,' in the sense of any god
you like, but this particular, specified god. And the reason is clear.
In fiction the artist creates the hero as well as the tale; and the
primitive teller of tales did not find it always necessary to invent a
name for the hero he created. The hero could, and did, get along for
some time without any proper name. But with mythology the case is
different. The personal being, superior to man, of whom the myth is
told, is not the creation of the teller of the tale: he is a being
known by the community to exist. He cannot therefore, when he is the
hero of a myth, be described as 'a god--any god you like.' Nor is the
myth a tale which could be told of any god whatever: if a myth is a
tale, at any rate it is a tale which can be told of none other god but
this. Indeed, a myth is not a tale: it is an incident--or string of
incidents--in the personal history of a particular person, or being,
superior to man.
It is then as polydaemonism passes into polytheism, as the beings of
the one come to acquire personal names and personal history, and so to
become the gods of the other, that mythology arises. It is under
polytheism that mythology reaches its most luxuriant growth; and when
polytheism disappears, mythology tends to disappear with it. Thus, the
light which mythology may be expected to throw on the idea of God is
one, which, however it may illumine the polytheistic idea of God, will
not be found to shine far beyond the area of polytheism.
Myths then are narratives, in which the doings of some god or gods are
related. And those gods existed in the belief of the community, before
tales were told, or could be told, about them. Myths therefore are the
outcome of reflection--of reflection about the gods and their
relations to one another, or to men, or to the world. Mythology is not
the source of man's belief of the gods. Man did not begin by telling
tales about beings whom he knew to be the creations of his own
imagination, and then gradually fall into the error of supposing them
to be, after all, not creatures of his own imagination but real
beings. Mythology is not even the source of man's belief in a
plurality of gods: man found gods everywhere, in every external object
or phenomenon, because he was looking for God everywhere, and to every
object, in turn, he addressed the question, 'Art thou there?'
Mythology was not the source of polytheism. Polytheism was the source
of mythology. Myths preserve to us the reflections which men have made
about their gods; and reflection, on any subject, cannot take place
until the thing is there to be reflected upon. The result of prolonged
reflection may be, indeed must be, to modify the ideas from which we
started, for the better--or, it may be, for the worse. But, even so,
the result of reflection is not to create the ideas from which it
started.
From this point of view, it becomes impossible to accept the theory,
put forward by Max Müller, that mythology is due to 'disease of
language.' According to his theory, simple statements were made of
such ordinary, natural processes as those of the rising, or the
setting, of the sun. Then, by disease of language, the meaning of the
words or epithets, by which the sun or the dawn were, at the
beginning, designated or described, passed out of mind. The epithets
then came to be regarded as proper names; and so the people, amongst
which these simple statements were originally made, found itself
eventually in possession of a number of tales told of persons
possessing proper names and doing marvellous things. Thus, Max
Müller's theory not only accounted for the origin of tales told about
the gods: it also explained the origin of the gods, about whom the
tales were told. It is a theory of the origin, not merely of
mythology, but also of polytheism.
Thus, even on Max Müller's theory, mythology is the outcome of
reflection--of reflection upon the doings and behaviour of the sun,
the clouds, wind, fire etc. But, on his theory, the sun, moon etc.,
were not, at first, regarded as persons, at all: it was merely owing
to 'disease of language' that they came to be so regarded. Only if we
make this original assumption, can we accept the conclusions deduced
from it; and no student now accepts the assumption: it is one which is
forbidden by the well-established facts of animism. Sun, moon, wind
and fire, everything that acts, or is supposed to act, is regarded by
early man as animated by personal power. If, therefore, the external
objects, to which man turned with his question, 'Art thou there?' were
regarded by him, from the beginning, as animated by personal power,
the theory that they were not so regarded falls to the ground; and,
consequently, we cannot accept it as accounting for the origin of
polytheism.
Doubtless, during the time of its vogue, Max Müller's theory was
accepted precisely because it did profess to account for the origin of
polytheism, and because it denied polytheism any religious value or
meaning whatever. On the theory, polytheism did not originate from any
religious sentiment whatever, but from a disease of language. And this
was a view which naturally commended itself to those who were ready to
say and believe that polytheism is not religion at all. But the
consequences of saying this are such as to make any science of
religion, or indeed any history of religion, impossible. Where the
idea of God is to be found, there some religion exists; and to say
that, in polytheism, no idea of God can be found, is out of the
question. If then polytheism is a stage in the history of religious
belief, we have to consider it in relation to the other stages of
religious belief, which preceded or followed it. We have to relate the
idea of God, as it appeared in polytheism, with the idea as it
appeared in other stages of belief. In order to do this, we must first
discover what the polytheistic idea of God is; and for that purpose we
must turn, at any rate at first, to the myths which embody the
reflections of polytheists upon the attributes and actions of the
Godhead, or of those beings, superior to man, whose existence was
accepted by the common consciousness. It may be that the reflections
upon the idea of God, which are embodied in mythology, have so tended
to degrade the idea of God, that religious advance upon the lines of
polytheism became impossible, just as the conception of God as a being
who would promote the anti-social wishes of an individual, rendered
religious advance upon the lines of fetishism impossible. In that
case, religion would forsake the line of polytheism, as it had
previously abandoned that of fetishism.
A certain presumption that myths tend to the degradation of religion
is created by the mere use of the term 'mythology.' It has come to be
a dyslogistic term, partly because all myths are lies, but still more
because some of them are ignoble lies. It becomes necessary,
therefore, to remind ourselves that, though we see them to be untrue,
they were not regarded as untrue by those who believed in them; and
that many of them were not ignoble. Aeschylus and Sophocles are
witnesses, not to be disbelieved, on these points. In their writings
we have the reflections of polytheists upon the actions and attributes
of the gods. But the reflections made by Aeschylus and Sophocles, and
their treatment of the myths, must be distinguished from the myths,
which they found to hand, just as the very different treatment and
reflection, which the myths received from Euripides, must be
distinguished from them. In both cases, the treatment, which the myths
met with from the tragedians, is to be distinguished from the myths,
as they were current among the community before and after the plays
were performed. The writings of the tragedians show what might be made
of the myths by great poets. They do not show what the myths were in
the common consciousness that made them. And the history of mythology
after the time of the three great tragedians makes it clear enough
that even so noble a writer as Aeschylus could not impart to mythology
any direction other than that determined for it by the conditions
under which it originated, developed and ran its course.
Mythology is the work and the product of the common consciousness. The
generation existing at any time receives it from preceding
generations; civilised generations from barbarous, and barbarous
generations from their savage predecessors. If it grows in the process
of transmission, and so reflects to some extent the changes which take
place in the common consciousness, it changes but little in character.
The common consciousness itself changes with exceeding slowness; it
retains what it has received with a conservatism like that of
children's minds; and, what it adds must, from the nature of the case,
be modelled on that which it has received, and be of a piece with it.
But, though the common consciousness changes but slowly, it does
change: with the change from savagery to civilisation there goes moral
development. Some of the myths, which are re-told from one generation
to another, may be capable of becoming civilised and moralised in
proportion as do those who tell them; but some are not. These latter
are incidents in the personal history of the gods, which, if told at
all, can only be told, as they had been told from the beginning, in
all their repulsiveness. They survive, in virtue of the tenacity and
conservatism of the common consciousness; and, as survivals, they
testify to the moral development which has taken place in the very
community which conserves them. By them the eye of modern science
measures the development and the difference between the stage of
society which originally produced them and the stage which begins to
be troubled by them. They are valuable for the purposes of modern
science because they are evidence of the continuity with which the
later stages have developed from the earlier; and, also, because they
are the first outward indications of the discovery which was
eventually to be made, of the difference between mythology and
religion--a difference which existed from the beginning of mythology,
and all through its growth, though it existed in the sphere of feeling
long before it found expression for itself in words.
The course of history has shown, as a matter of fact, that these
repulsive and disgusting myths could not be rooted out without
uprooting the whole system of mythology. But the course of history has
also shown that religion could continue to exist after the destruction
of mythology, as it had done before its birth. But, of this the
generations to whom myths had been transmitted and for whom mythology
was the accepted belief, could not be aware. In their eyes the attempt
to discredit some myths appeared to involve--as it did really
involve--the overthrow of the whole system of mythology. If they
thought--as they undoubtedly did think--that the destruction of
mythology was the same thing as the destruction of religion, their
error was one of a class of errors into which the human mind is at no
time exempt from falling. And they had this further excuse, that the
destruction of mythology did logically and necessarily imply the
destruction of polytheism. Polytheism and mythology were complementary
parts of their idea of the Godhead. Demonstrations therefore of the
inconsistency and immorality involved in their idea were purely
negative and destructive; and they were, accordingly, unavailing until
a higher idea of the unity of the Godhead was forthcoming.
Until that time, polytheism and mythology struggled on. They were
burdened, and, as time went on, they were overburdened, with the
weight of the repulsive myths which could not be denied and disowned,
but could only be thrust out of sight as far, and as long, as
possible. These myths, however offensive they became in the long run
to the conscience of the community, were, in their origin, narratives
which were not offensive to the common consciousness, for the simple
reason that they were the work of the common consciousness, approved
by it and transmitted for ages under the seal of its approval. If they
were not offensive to the common consciousness at the time when they
originated, and only became so later, the reason is that the morality
of the community was less developed at the time of their origin than
it came to be subsequently. If they became offensive, it was because
the morality of the community tended to advance, while they remained
what they had always been.
It may, perhaps, be asked, why the morality of the community should
tend to change, and the myths of the community should not? The reason
seems to be that myths are learned by the child in the nursery, and
morality is learned by the man in the world. The family is a smaller
community than the village community, the city, or the state; and the
smaller the community, the more tenacious it is of its customs and
traditions. The toys of Athenian children, which have been discovered,
are, all, the toys which children continue to use to this day. In the
Iliad children built sand-castles on the sea-shore as they do now; and
the little child tugged at its mother's dress then as now. Children
then as now would insist that the tales told to them should always be
told exactly as they were first told. Of the discrepancy between the
morality exhibited by the heroes of nursery-tales and that practised
by the grown-up world the child has no knowledge, for the sufficient
reason that he is not as yet one of the grown-up world. When he enters
the grown-up world, he may learn the difference; but he can only enter
the grown-up world, if there is one for him to enter; and, in the
childhood of man, there is none which he can enter, for the adults
themselves, though of larger growth, are children still in mind.
Custom and tradition rule the adult community then as absolutely as
they rule the child community. In course of time, the adult community
may break the bonds of custom and tradition; but the community which
consists of children treasures them and hands them on. Within the
tribe, thenceforth, there are two communities, that of the adults and
that of the children. The one community is as continuous with itself
as the other; but the children's community is highly conservative of
what it has received and of what it hands on--and that for the simple
reason that children will be children still. It is this homogeneity of
the children's community which enables it to preserve its customs,
traditions and beliefs. And as long as the community of adults is
homogeneous, it also departs but little from the customs, traditions
and beliefs, which it has inherited from the same source as the
children's community has inherited them. The two communities, the
children's and the adults', originate and develop within the larger
community of the tribe. They differentiate, at first, with exceeding
slowness; the children's community changes more slowly even than the
adults'--its weapons continue to be the bow and arrow, long after
adults have discarded them; and the bull-roarer continues sacred in
its eyes to a period when the adult community has not only discarded
its use but forgotten its meaning. In its tales and myths it may
preserve the memory of a stage of morality which the adult community
has outgrown, and has left behind as far it has left behind the
bull-roarer or the bow and arrow. And the stage of morality, of which
it preserves the memory, is one from which the adult community in past
time emerged. Having emerged, indeed, it found itself, eventually,
when made to look back, compelled to condemn that which it looked back
upon.
What, then, were these myths, with which the moralised community might
find itself confronted? They were tales which originated in the mind
of the community when it was yet immature. They preserve to us the
reflections of the immature mind about the gods and what they did. And
it is because the minds, which made these reflections, were immature,
that the myths which embodied or expressed these reflections, were
such as might be accepted by immature minds, but were eventually found
intolerable by more mature minds. It may, perhaps, be said--and it may
be said with justice--that the reflections even of the immature mind
are not all, of necessity, erroneous, for it is from them that the
whole of modern knowledge has been evolved or developed, just as the
steam-plough may be traced back to the primitive digging-stick:
reflection upon anything may lead to better knowledge of the thing, as
well as to false notions about it. But the nations, which have
outgrown mythology, have cast it aside because in the long run they
became convinced that the notions it embodied were false notions. And
they reached that conclusion on this point in the same way and for
the same reason as they reached the same conclusion in other matters;
for there is only one way. There is only one way and one test by which
it is possible to determine whether the inferences we have drawn about
a thing are true or false, and that is the test of experience. That
alone can settle the question whether the thing actually does or does
not act in the way, or display the qualities alleged. If it proves in
our experience to act in the way, or to display the qualities, which
our reflection led us to surmise, then our conception of the thing is
both corrected and enlarged, that is to say, the thing proves to be
both more and other than it was at first supposed to be. If experience
shows that it is not what we surmised, does not act in the way or
display the qualities our reflection led us to expect, then, as the
conclusions we reached are wrong, our reflections were on a wrong
line, and must have started from a false conception or an imperfect
idea of the thing.
It is collision of this kind between the conclusions of mythology and
the idea of the gods, as the guardians of morality, that rouses
suspicion in a community, still polytheistic, first that the
conclusions embodied in mythology are on a wrong line, and next that
they must have started from a false conception or imperfect idea of
the Godhead. By its fruits is the error found to be error--by the
immorality which it ascribes to the very gods whose function it is to
guard morality. Mythology is the process of reflection which leads to
conclusions eventually discarded as false, demonstrably false to
anyone who compared them with the idea of the Godhead which he had in
his own soul. Mythology worked out the consequences of the assumption
that it is to the external world we must look for the divine
personality of whose presence in the common consciousness, the
community has at all times, been, even though dimly, aware. Doubts as
to the truth of myths were first aroused by the inconsistency between
the myths told and the justice and morality which had been from the
beginning the very essence of divine personality. The doubts arose in
the minds and hearts of individual thinkers; and, if those individuals
had been the only members of the community who conceived justice and
morality to be essential qualities of the divine personality, then it
would have been necessary for such thinkers first to convert the
community to that view. Now, one of the consequences of the prevalence
of mythology is that the community, amongst whom it flourishes, comes
to be, if not doubtful, then at times forgetful, of the fact that the
gods of the community are moral beings and the guardians of morality.
That fact had to be dismissed from attention, for the time being,
whenever certain myths were related. And, the more frequently a fact
is dismissed from attention, the less likely it is to reappear on the
surface of consciousness. Thus, the larger the part played by
mythology in the field of the common consciousness, the greater its
tendency to drive out from attention those moral qualities which were
of the essence of divine personality. But, however large the part
played by mythology, and however great its tendency to obliterate the
moral qualities of the gods, it rarely, if indeed ever, entirely
obliterates them from the field of the common consciousness.
Consequently, the individual thinkers, who become painfully aware of
the contrast and opposition between the morality, which is essential
to a divine personality, and the immorality ascribed to the gods in
some myths, have not to deal with a community which denies that the
gods have any morality whatever, but with a community which is ready
to admit the morality of the gods, whenever its attention is called
thereto. Thus, though it may be that it is in this or that individual
that the inconsistency between the moral qualities, which belong to
the gods, and the immoral actions which mythology ascribes to the
gods, first manifests itself, to his distress and disturbance, still
what has happened in his case happens in the case of some, and may
happen in the case of all, other members of the community. The
inconsistency then comes to exist not merely for the individual but
for the common consciousness.
It was the immorality of mythology which first drew the attention of
believers in polytheism to the inconsistency between the goodness,
which was felt to be of the essence of the divine nature, and the
vileness, which was imputed to them in some myths; but it is the
irrationality and absurdity of mythology that seems, to the modern
mind, to be its most uniform characteristic. So long as the only
mythology that was studied was the mythology of Indo-European peoples,
it was assumed, without question, that the myths could not really be,
or originally have been, irrational and absurd: they must conceal,
under their seeming absurdity and outwardly irrational appearance,
some truth. They must have had, originally, some esoteric meaning.
They must have conveyed--allegorically, indeed--some profound truths,
known or revealed to sages of old, which it was the business of modern
students to re-discover in mythology. And accordingly profound
truths--scientific, cosmographic, astronomical, geographical,
philosophic or religious--were discovered. There was no knowledge
which the early ancestors of the human race were not supposed to have
possessed, and their descendants to have forgotten.
But, when it came to be discovered, and accepted, that the ancestors
of the Indo-European peoples had once been savages, and that savages,
all the world over, possessed myths, it became impossible to maintain
that such savages possessed in their mythologies treasures of truth
either scientific or religious. Myths have no esoteric meaning.
Obviously we must take them to be what we find them to be amongst
present-day savages, that is, absurd and irrational stories, with no
secret meaning behind them. Yet it is difficult, indeed impossible, to
accept this as the last word on the subject. The stories are rejected
by us, because they are patently absurd and irrational. But the savage
does not reject them: he accepts them. And he could not accept and
believe them, if he, as well as we, found them irrational and absurd.
In a word, it is the same with the irrationality as it is with the
immorality of mythology: myths are the work and the product of the
common consciousness. As such, myths cannot be viewed as irrational by
the common consciousness in which they originated, and by which they
were accepted and transmitted, any more than they were regarded as
immoral.
Obviously, the common consciousness which produces mythology cannot
pronounce the myths, when it produces them, and accepts them, absurd.
On the contrary, they are rational, in its eyes, and according to its
level of understanding, however absurd the growth of knowledge may
eventually show them to be. Myths, then, in their origin, are told and
heard, narrated and accepted, as rational and intelligible. As
narrated, they are narratives: can we say that they are anything more?
or are they tales told simply for the pleasure of telling? Tales of
this latter kind, pure fiction, are to be found wherever man is. But,
we have already seen some points in which myths differ from tales of
this kind: in fiction the artist creates his hero, but in myths the
being superior to man, of whom the story is told is not the creation
of the teller of the tale; he is a being known to the community to
exist. Another point of difference is that a myth belongs to the god
of whom it is told and cannot properly be told of any other god. These
are two respects in which the imagination is limited, two points on
which, in the case of myths, the creative imagination is, so to speak,
nailed down. Is it subject to any further restriction in the case of
myths? Granted that an adventure, when once it has been set down to
one god, may not be set down to another, is the creative imagination
free, in the case of mythology, as it is in the case of pure fiction,
to invent the incidents and adventures, which eventually--in a lexicon
of mythology--go to make up the biography of the god? The freedom, it
appears, is of a strictly limited character.
It is an induction, as wide as the world--being based on mythologies
from all parts of the world--that myths are aetiological, that their
purpose is to give the reason of things, to explain the origin of
fire, agriculture, civilisation, the world--of anything, in fact, that
to the savage seems to require explanation. In the animistic period,
man found gods everywhere because everywhere he was looking for gods.
To every object that arrested his attention, in the external world, he
put, or might put, the question, 'Art thou there?' Every happening
that arrested the attention of a whole community, and provoked from
the common consciousness the affirmation, 'Thou art there,' was, by
that affirmation, accepted as the doing of a god. But neither at this
stage, nor for long after, is there any myth. The being, whose
presence is thus affirmed, has at first no name: his personality is of
the faintest, his individuality, the vaguest. Mythology does not begin
until the question is put, 'Why has the god done this thing?' A myth
consists, or originally consisted, of the reason which was found and
adopted by the common consciousness as the reason why the god did what
he did do. It is in this sense that myths are aetiological. The
imagination which produces them is, in a sense, a 'scientific
imagination.' It works within limits. The data on which it works are
that this thing was done, or is done, by this god; and the problem set
to the mythological imagination is, 'Why did he, or does he, do it?'
The stories which were invented to answer this question constituted
mythology; and the fact that myths were invented for the purpose of
answering this question distinguishes them from stories in the
invention of which the imagination was not subject to restriction, was
not tied down to this god and to this action of his, and was not
limited to the sole task of imagining an answer to the question, 'Why
did he do it?' All myths are narratives, but not all narratives are
myths. Some narratives have men alone for their heroes. They are
imaginative but not mythological. Some narratives are about gods and
what they did. Their purpose is to explain why the gods did what they
did do, and those narratives are mythological.
It may, perhaps, seem that the imagination of early man would from the
first be set to work to invent myths in answer to the question, 'Why
did the god do this thing?' But, as a matter of fact, man can get on
for a long time without mythology. A striking instance of this is
afforded by the _di indigites_ of Italy. Over everything man did, or
suffered, from his birth to his death, one of these gods or goddesses
presided. The Deus Vagitanus opened the lips of the new-born infant
when it uttered its first cry; the Dea Ossipago made the growing
child's bones stout and strong; the Deus Locutius made it speak
clearly; the goddess Viriplaca restored harmony between husband and
wife who had quarrelled; the Dea Orbona closed a man's eyes at death.
These _di indigites_ had shrines and received sacrifices. They were
distinguished into gods and goddesses. Their names were proper names,
though they are but words descriptive of the function which the deity
performed or presided over. Yet though these _di indigites_ are gods,
personal gods, to whom prayer and sacrifice are offered, they have no
mythology attached to them; no myths are told about them.
The fact thus forced on our notice by the _di indigites_ of Rome
should be enough to warn us that mythology does not of necessity
spring up, as an immediate consequence of the worship of the gods. It
may even suggest a reason why mythology must be a secondary, rather
than a primary consequence of worship. The Romans were practical, and
so are savages: if they asked the question, 'Why did this god do this
thing?' they asked it in no spirit of speculation but for a practical,
common-sense reason: because they did not want this thing done again.
And they offered sacrifices to the god or goddess, with that end in
view. The things with regard to which the savage community first asks
the question, 'Why did the god do it?' are things disastrous to the
community--plague or famine. The answer to the question is really
implied by the terms in which the question is stated: the community,
or some member of the community has transgressed; he must be
discovered and punished. So long and so far as the question is thus
put and thus answered, there is little room for mythology to grow in.
And it did not grow round the _di indigites_ in Italy, or round
corresponding deities in other countries.
But the question, 'Why did the god do it?' is susceptible, on
reflection, of another kind of answer. And from minds of a more
reflective cast than the Roman, it received answer in the form of
mythology, of aetiological myths. Mythology is the work of reflection:
it is when the community has time and inclination to reflect upon its
gods and their doings that mythology arises in the common
consciousness. For everything which happens to him, early man has one
explanation, if the thing is such as seems to him to require
explanation, and the explanation is that this thing is the doing of
some god. If the thing that arrests attention is some disaster, which
calls for remedy, the community approaches the god with prayer and
sacrifice; its object is practical, not speculative; and no myth
arises. But if the thing that arrests attention is not one which calls
for action, on the part of the community, but one which stimulates
curiosity and provokes reflection, then the reflective answer to the
question, why has this thing been done by whatever god that did it, is
a myth.
Thus the mood, or state of mind, in which mythology originates is
clearly different from that in which the community approaches its
offended gods for the purpose of appeasing them. The purpose in the
latter case is atonement and reconciliation. The state of mind in the
former case is one of enquiry. The emotion, of mingled fear and hope,
which constitutes the one state of mind, is clearly different from the
spirit of enquiry which characterises and constitutes the other state
of mind. The one mood is undeniably religious; the other, not so. In
the one mood, the community feels itself to be in the presence of its
gods; in the other it is reflecting and enquiring about them. In the
one case the community appears before its god; in the other it is
reflectively using its idea of god, for the purpose of explaining
things that call for explanation. But the idea of God, when used in
this way, for the purpose of explaining things by means of myths, is
modified by the use it is put to. It is not merely that everything
which happens is explained, if it requires explanation, as the doing
of some god; but the motives which early man ascribed, in his
mythological moments, to the gods--motives which only undeveloped man
could have ascribed to them--became part of the idea of God on which
mythology worked and with which myths had to do. The idea of god thus
gradually developed in polytheistic myths, the accumulated reflections
of savage, barbarous and semi-barbarous ancestors, tends eventually to
provoke reaction. But why? Not merely because the myths are immoral
and irrational. But because of the essential impiety of imputing
immoral and irrational acts to the divine personality. Plainly, then,
those thinkers and writers who were painfully impressed by such
impiety, who were acutely conscious that divine personality was
irreconcilable with immorality and irrationality, had some other idea
of God than the mythological. We may go further: we may safely say
that the average man would not have been perturbed, as he was, by
Socrates, for instance, had he, also, not found within him some other
idea of God than the mythological. And we can understand, to some
extent, how this should be, if we call to mind that, though mythology
grows and luxuriates, still the worship of the gods goes on. That is
to say, the community, through it all, continues to approach its gods,
for the purpose, and with the emotion of mingled fear and hope, with
which it had always come into the presence of its gods. It is the
irreconcilability of the mood of emotion, which is essentially
religious, with the mythological mode of reflective thought, which is
not, that tends to bring about the religious reaction against
mythology. It is not however until the divergence between religion
and mythology has become considerable that the irreconcilability
becomes manifest. And it is in the experience of some individual, and
not in the common consciousness, that this irreconcilability is first
discovered. That discovery it is which makes the discoverer realise
that it is not merely when he comes before the presence of his gods in
their temples, but that, whenever his heart rises on the tide of
mingled fear, hope and thanksgiving, he comes into the presence of his
God. Having sought for the divine personality in all the external
objects of the world around him in the end he learns, what was the
truth from the beginning,--that it is in his heart he has access to
his God.
The belief in gods does not of necessity result in a mythology. The
instance of the _di indigites_ of Italy is there to show that it is no
inevitable result. But mythology, wherever it is found, is of itself
sufficient proof that gods are, or have been, believed in; it is the
outcome of reflection and enquiry about the gods, whom the community
approaches, with mingled feelings of hope and fear, and worships with
sacrifice and prayer. Now, a mythology, or perhaps we should rather
say fragments of a mythology, may continue to exist as survivals, long
after belief in the gods, of whom the myths were originally told, has
changed, or even passed away entirely. Such traces of gods dethroned
are to be found in the folk-lore of most Christian peoples. Indeed,
not only are traces of bygone mythology to be found in Christendom;
but rites and customs, which once formed part of the worship of now
forgotten gods; or it may be that only the names of the gods survive
unrecognised, as in the names of the days of the week. The existence
of such survivals in Europe is known; their history has been traced;
their origin is undoubted. When, then, in other quarters of the globe
than Europe, amongst peoples which are as old as any European people,
though they have no recorded history, we find fragments of mythology,
or of ritual, or mere names of gods, without the myths and the ritual
which attach elsewhere to gods, the presumption is that here too we
have to deal with survivals of a system of worship and mythology,
which once existed, and has now gone to pieces, leaving but these
pieces of wreckage behind. Thus, amongst the Australian black-fellows
we find myths about gods who now receive no worship. But they never
could have become gods unless they had been worshipped at some time;
they could not have acquired the proper, personal names by which they
are designated in these surviving myths, if they had not been
worshipped long enough for the words which designate them to become
proper names, i.e. names denoting no other person than the one
designated by them. Amongst other backward peoples of the earth we
find the names of gods surviving, not only with no worship but no
myths attached to them; and the inference plainly is that, as they are
still remembered to be gods, they once were objects of worship
certainly, and probably once were subjects of mythology. And if, of a
bygone religious system all that remains is in one place some
fragments of mythology, and in another nothing but the mere names of
the gods, then it is nothing astonishing if elsewhere all that we find
is some fragment of worship, some rite, which continues to be
practised, for its own sake, even though all memory of the gods in
whose worship it originated has disappeared from the common
consciousness--a disappearance which would be the easier if the gods
worshipped had acquired no names, or names as little personal as those
of the _di indigites_. Ritual of this kind, not associated with the
names of any gods, is found amongst the Australian tribes, and may be
the wreckage of a system gone to pieces.
Here, too, there is opportunity again, for the same error as that into
which students of mythology once fell before, when they found, or
thought they found, in mythology, profound truths, known or revealed
to sages of old. The survivals mentioned in the last paragraph may be
interpreted as survivals of a prior monotheism or a primitive
revelation. But if they are survivals, at all, then they are
survivals from a period when the ancestors of the present-day Africans
or Australian black-fellows were in an earlier stage of social
development--in an earlier stage even of linguistic development and of
the thought which develops with language--than their descendants are
now. Even in that earlier stage of development, however, man sought
for God. If he thought, mistakenly, to find Him in this or that
external object, he was not wrong in the conviction that underlay his
search--the conviction that God is at no time afar off from any one of
us.
III
THE IDEA OF GOD IN WORSHIP
We have found mythology of but little use in our search after the idea
of God; and the reason, as we have suggested, is that myth-making is a
reflective process, a process in which the mind reflects upon the
idea, and therefore a process which cannot be set up unless the idea
is already present, or, rather we should say, has already been
presented. When it has been presented, it can become food for
reflection, but not until then. If then we wish to discover where and
when it is thus immediately presented, let us look for it in worship.
If it is given primarily in the moment of worship, it may be
reproduced in a secondary stage as a matter for reflection. Now, in
worship--provided that it be experienced as a reality, and not
performed as a conventionality--the community's purpose is to approach
its God: let us come before the Lord and enter His courts with praise,
are words which represent fairly the thought and feeling which, on
ordinary occasions, the man who goes to worship--really--experiences,
whether he be polytheist or monotheist. I have spoken of 'the moment
of worship,' but worship is, of course, a habit: if it is not a habit,
it ceases to be at all, in any effective sense. And it is a habit of
the community, of the common consciousness, which is continuous
through the ages, even though it slowly changes; and which, as
continuous, is conservative and tenacious. Even when it has become
monotheistic, it may continue to speak of the one God as 'a great god
above all other gods,' in terms which are survivals of an earlier
stage of belief. Such expressions are like the clouds which, though
they are lifting, still linger round the mountain top: they are part
of the vapour which had previously obscured from view the reality
which was there, and cannot be shaken at any time.
Worship may include words spoken, hymns of praise and prayer; but it
includes also things done, acts performed, ritual. It is these acts
that are the facts from which we have now to start, in order to infer
what we can from them as to the idea of God which prompted them. There
is an infinite diversity in these facts of ritual, just as the gods of
polytheism are infinite in number and kind. But if there is diversity,
there is also unity. Greatly as the gods of polytheism differ from one
another, they are at least beings worshipped--and worshipped by the
community. Greatly as rituals vary in their detail, they are all
ritual: all are worship, and, all, the worship rendered by the
community to its gods. And there can be no doubt as to their object or
the purpose with which the community practises them: that purpose is,
at least, to bring the community into the presence of its Lord. We may
safely say that there can be no worship unless there is a community
worshipping and a being which is worshipped. Nor can there be any
doubt as to the relation existing between the two. The community bow
down and worship: that is the attitude of the congregation. Nor can
there be any doubt as to the relation which the god bears, in the
common consciousness, to his worshippers: he is bound to them by
special ties--from him they expect the help which they have received
in ages past. They have faith in him--else they would not worship
him--faith that he will be what he has been in the past, a very help
in time of trouble. The mere fact that they seek to come before him is
a confession of the faith that is in them, the faith that they are in
the presence of their God and have access to Him. However primitive,
that is rudimentary, the worship may be; however low in the scale of
development the worshippers may be; however dim their idea of God and
however confused and contradictory the reflections they may make
about Him, it is in that faith that they worship. So much is implied
by worship--by the mere fact that the worshippers are gathered
together for worship. If we are to find any clue which may give us
uniform guidance through the infinite variety in the details of the
innumerable rituals that are, or have been, followed in the world, we
must look to find it in the purpose for which the worshippers gather
together. But, if we wish to be guided by objective facts rather than
by hasty, _a priori_ assumptions, we must begin by consulting the
facts: we must enquire whether the details of the different rituals
present nothing but diversity, or whether there is any respect in
which they show likeness or uniformity. There is one point in which
they resemble one another; and, what is more, that point is the
leading feature in all of them; they all centre round sacrifice. It is
with sacrifice, or by means of sacrifice, that their gods are
approached by all men, beginning even with the jungle-dwellers of
Chota Nagpur, who sacrifice fowls and offer victims, for the purpose
of conciliating the powers that send jungle-fever and murrain. The
sacrificial rite is the occasion on which, and a means by which, the
worshipper is brought into that closer relation with his god, which he
would not seek, if he did not--for whatever reason--desire it. As
bearing on the idea of God, the spiritual import, and the practical
importance, of the sacrificial rite is that he who partakes in it can
only partake of it so far as he recognises that God is no private idea
of his own, existing only in his notion, but is objectively real. The
jungle-dweller of Chota Nagpur may have no name for the being to whom,
at the appointed season and in the appointed place, he sacrifices
fowls; but, as we have seen, the gods only come to have proper,
personal names in slow course of time. He may be incapable of giving
any account, comprehensible to the civilised enquirer, of the idea
which he has of the being to whom he offers sacrifice: more
accomplished theologians than he have failed to define God. But of the
reality of the being whom he seeks to approach he has no doubt. It is
not the case that the reality of that being, by whomsoever worshipped,
is an assumption which must be made, or a hypothesis that must be
postulated, for the sake of providing a logical justification of
worship. The simple fact is that the religious consciousness is the
consciousness of God as real, just as the common consciousness is the
consciousness of things as real. To represent the reality of either as
something that is not experienced but inferred is to say that we have
no experience of reality, and therefore have no real grounds for
inference. We find it preferable to hold that we have immediate
consciousness of the real, to some extent, and that by inference we
may be brought, to a larger extent, into immediate consciousness of
the real.
Of the reality of Him, whom even the jungle-dweller of Chota Nagpur
seeks to approach, it is only possible to doubt on grounds which seek
to deny the ultimate validity of the common consciousness on any
point. With the inferences which men have drawn about that reality,
and the ideas those inferences have led to, the case is different.
What exactly those ideas are, or have been, we have, more or less, to
guess at, from such facts as the science of religion furnishes. One
such set of facts is comprised under the term, worship; and of that
set the leading fact everywhere is the rite of sacrifice. By means of
it we may reasonably expect to penetrate to some of the ideas which
the worshippers had of the gods whom they worshipped. Unfortunately,
however, there is considerable difference of opinion, between students
of the science of religion, as to the idea which underlies sacrifice.
One fact from which we may start is that it is with sacrifice that the
community draws near to the god it wishes to approach. The outward,
physical fact, the visible set of actions, is that the body of
worshippers proceed, with their oblation, to the place in which the
god manifests himself and is to be found. The inference which follows
is that, corresponding to this series of outward actions, there is an
internal conviction in the hearts and minds of the worshippers: they
would not go to the place, unless they felt that, in so doing, they
were drawing near to their god.
In thus drawing near, both physically and spiritually, they take with
them something material. And this they would not do, unless taking the
material thing expressed, in some way, their mental attitude, or
rather their religious attitude. The attitude thus expressed must be
part of, or implied by, the desire to approach the god both physically
and spiritually. The fact that they carry with them some material
thing, expresses in gesture-language--such as is used by explorers
towards natives whose speech is unknown to them--the desire that
actuates them. And thus much may be safely inferred, viz. that the
desire is, at any rate, to prepossess favourably the person
approached.
Thus man approaches, bearing with him something intended to please the
god that he draws near. But though that is part of his intention, it
is not the whole. His desire is that the god shall be pleased not
merely with the offering but with him. What he brings--his
oblation--is but a means to that end. Why he wishes the god to be
pleased with him, we shall have to enquire hereafter. Thus far,
however, we see that that is the wish and is the purpose intimated by
the fact that he brings something material with him.
It seems clear also that the something material, with which the
community draws near to its god, need only be something which is
conceived to be pleasing to the god. All that is necessary is that it
should express, or symbolise, the feeling with which the community
draws near. So long as it does this, its function is discharged. What
it is of importance to notice, and what is apt to be forgotten, is the
feeling which underlies the outward act, and without which the action,
the rite, would not be performed. The feeling is the desire of the
worshipper to commend himself. If we take this point of view, then the
distinction, which is sometimes drawn between offerings and sacrifice,
need not mislead us. The distinction is that the term 'sacrifice' is
to be used only of that which is consumed, or destroyed, in the
service; while the term 'offering' is to be used only of what is not
destroyed. And the reason for drawing, or seeking to draw, the
distinction, seems to be that the destruction, or consumption, of the
material thing, in the service, is required to prove that the offering
is accepted. But, though this proof may have come, in some cases, to
be expected, as showing that the community was right in believing that
the offering would be acceptable; the fact remains that the
worshippers would not start out with the offering in their hands,
unless they thought, to begin with, that it was acceptable. They would
not draw near to the god, with an offering about the acceptability of
which they were in doubt. Anything therefore which they conceived to
be acceptable would suffice to indicate their desire to please, and
would serve to commend them. And the desire to do that which is
pleasing to their god is there from the beginning, as the condition on
which alone they can enter his presence. Neglect of this fact may lead
us to limit unduly the potentialities contained in the rite of
sacrifice, from the beginning.
The rite did, undoubtedly, in the long course of time, come in some
communities to be regarded and practised in a spirit little better
than commercial. Sacrifices came to be regarded as gifts, or presents,
made to the god, on the understanding that _do ut des_. Commerce
itself, when analysed, is nothing but the application of the principle
of giving to get. All that is necessary, in order to reduce religion
to commercial principles, is that the payment of vows made should be
contingent on the delivery of the goods stipulated for; that the thing
offered should be regarded as payment; that the god's favour should be
considered capable of being bought. It is however in communities which
have some aptitude for commerce and have developed it, that religion
is thus interpreted and practised. If we go back to the period in the
history of a race when commerce is as yet unknown, we reach a state of
things when the possibility of thus commercialising worship was, as
yet, undeveloped. At that early period, as in all periods, of the
history of religion, the desire of the worshippers was to be pleasing,
and to do that which was pleasing, to him whom they worshipped; and
the offerings they took with them when they approached his presence
were intended to be the outward and visible sign of their desire. But
in some, or even in many, cases, they came eventually to rely on the
sign or symbol rather than on the desire which it signified; and that
is a danger which constantly dogs all ritual. Attention is
concentrated rather on the rite than on the spiritual process, which
underlies it, and of which the rite is but the expression; and then it
becomes possible to give a false interpretation to the meaning of the
rite.
In the case of the offerings, which are made in the earliest stages of
the history of religion, the false interpretation, which comes in some
cases to be put upon them by those who make the offerings, has been
adopted by some students of the history of religion, as the true
explanation, the real meaning and the original purpose of offerings
and sacrifice. This theory--the Gift-theory of sacrifice--requires us
to believe that religion could be commercialised before commerce was
known; that religion consists, or originally consisted, not in doing
that which is pleasing in the sight of God, but in bribing the gods;
that the relatively late misinterpretation is the original and true
meaning of the rite; in a word, that there was no religion in the
earliest manifestation of religion. But it is precisely this last
contention which is fatal to the Gift-theory. Not only is it a
self-contradiction in terms, but it denies the very possibility of
religious evolution. Evolution is a process and a continuous process:
there is an unbroken continuity between the earliest and the latest of
its stages. If there was no religion whatever in the earliest stages,
neither can there be any in the latest. And that is why those who hold
religion to be an absurdity are apt to adopt the Gift-theory: the
Gift-theory implies a degrading absurdity from the beginning to the
end of the evolutionary process--an unbroken continuity of absurdity.
On the other hand, we may hold by the plain truth that there must have
been religion in the earliest manifestations of religion, and that
bribing a god is not, in our sense of the word, religious. In that
case, we shall also hold that the offerings which have always been
part of the earliest religious ritual were intended as the outward and
visible sign or symbol of the community's desire to do that which was
pleasing to their god; and that it is only in the course of time, and
as the consequence of misinterpretation, that the offerings come to
be regarded as gifts made for the purpose of bribing the gods or of
purchasing what they have to bestow. Thus, just as, in the evolution
of religion, fetishism was differentiated from polytheism, and was
cast aside--where it was cast aside--as incompatible with the demands
of the religious sentiment, so too the making of gifts to the gods,
for the purpose of purchasing their favour, came to be differentiated
from the service which God requires.
The endeavour to explain the history and purpose of sacrifice by means
of the Gift-theory alone has the further disadvantage that it requires
us to close our eyes to other features of the sacrificial rite, for,
if we turn to them, we shall find it impossible to regard the
Gift-theory as affording a complete and exhaustive account of all that
there was in the rite from the beginning. Indeed, so important are
these other features, that, as we have seen, some students would
maintain that the only rite which can be properly termed sacrificial
is one which presents these features. From this point of view, the
term sacrifice can only be used of something that is consumed or
destroyed in the service; while the term offering is restricted to
things which are not destroyed. But, from this point of view, we must
hold that sacrifices, to be sacrifices in the specific must not merely
be destroyed or consumed, for then anything that could be destroyed
by fire would be capable of becoming a burnt-offering; and the burning
would simply prove that the offering was acceptable--a proof which may
in some cases have been required to make assurance doubly sure, but
which was really superfluous, inasmuch as no one who desires his
offering to be accepted will make an offering which he thinks to be
unacceptable. Sacrifices, to be sacrifices in the specific sense thus
put upon the word, we must hold to be things which by their very
nature are marked out to be consumed: they must be articles of food.
But even with this qualification, sacrifices are not satisfactorily
distinguished from offerings, for a food-offering is an offering, and
discharges the function of a sacrifice, provided that it is offered.
That it should actually be consumed is neither universally nor
necessarily required. That it is often consumed in the service is a
fact which brings us to a new and different feature of the sacrificial
rite. Let us then consider it.
Thus far, looking at the rite on its outward side, from the point of
view of the spectator, we have seen that the worshippers, carrying
with them something material, draw near to the place where the god
manifests himself. From this series of actions and gestures, we have
inferred the belief of the worshippers to be that they are drawing
near to their god both physically and spiritually. We have inferred
that the material oblation is intended by the worshippers as the
outward and visible sign of their wish to commend themselves to the
god. We have now to notice what has been implied throughout, that the
worshippers do not draw near to the god without a reason, or seek to
commend themselves to him without a purpose. And if we consult the
facts once more, we shall find that the occasions, on which the god is
thus approached, are generally occasions of distress, experienced or
apprehended. The feelings with which the community draws near are
compounded of the fear, occasioned by the distress or danger, and the
hope and confidence that it will be removed or averted by the step
which they are taking. Part of their idea of the god is that he can
and will remove the present, or avert the coming, calamity; otherwise
they would not seek to approach him. But part also of their idea is
that they have done something to provoke him, otherwise calamity would
not have come upon them. Thus, when the worshippers seek to come into
the presence of their god, they are seeking him with the feeling that
he is estranged from them, and they approach him with something in
their hands to symbolise their desire to please him, and to restore
the relation which ordinarily subsists between a god and his
worshippers. Having deposited the offering they bring, and having
proffered the petition they came to make, they retire satisfied that
all now is well. The rite is now in all its essential features
complete. But though complete, as an organism in the early stages of
its history may be complete, it has, like the organism, the power of
growth; and it grows.
The conviction with which the community ends the rite is the joyful
conviction that the trouble is over-past. The joy which the community
feels often expresses itself in feast and song; and where the
offerings are, as they most commonly are, food-offerings or
animal-sacrifice, the feast may come to be regarded as one at which
the god himself is present and of which he partakes along with his
worshippers. The joy, which expresses itself in feast and song, may,
however, not make itself felt until the prayer of the community has
been fulfilled and the calamity has passed away; and then the feast
comes to be of the nature of a joyful thank-offering. But it is
probably only in one or other of these two cases that the offering
comes to be consumed in the service of feast and song. And although
the rite may and does grow in this way, still this development of
it--'eating with the god'--is rather potentially than actually present
in the earliest form of the rite.
From this point of view, sacrificial meals or feasts are not part of
the ritual of approach: they belong to the termination of the
ceremony. They mark the fact of reconciliation; they are an
expression of the conviction that friendly relations are restored. The
sacrificial meal then is accordingly not a means by which
reconciliation is effected, but the outward expression of the
conviction that the end has been attained; and, as expressing, it has
the force of confirming, the conviction. Where the sacrificial rite
grows to comprehend a sacrificial feast or meal, there the
food-offering or sacrifice is consumed in the service. But the rite
does not always develop thus; and even without this development it
discharges its proper function. Before this development, it is on
occasions of distress that the god is approached by the community, in
the conviction that the community has offended, and with the object of
purging the community and removing the distress, of appeasing the god
and restoring good relations. Yet even at this stage the object of the
community is to be at one with its god--at-one-ment and communion so
far are sought. There is implied the faith that he, the community's
god, cannot possibly be for ever alienated and will not utterly
forsake them, even though he be estranged for the time. Doubtless the
feast, which in some cases came to crown the sacrificial rite, may,
where it was practised amongst peoples who believed that persons
partaking of common food became united by a common bond, have come to
be regarded as constituting a fresh bond and a more intimate
communion between the god and his worshippers who alike partook of the
sacrificial meal. But this belief is probably far from being, or
having been, universal; and it is unnecessary to assume that this
belief must have existed, wherever we find the accomplishment of the
sacrificial rite accompanied by rejoicing. The performance of the
sacrificial rite is prompted by the desire to restore the normal
relation between the community and its god. It is carried out in the
conviction that the god is willing to return to the normal relation;
when it has been performed, the community is relieved and rejoices,
whether the rejoicing does or does not take form in a feast; and the
essence of the rejoicing is the conviction that all now is well, a
conviction which arises from the performance of the sacrificial rite
and not from the meal which may or may not follow it.
Where the institution of the sacrificial feast did grow up, the
natural tendency would be for it to become the most important feature
in the whole rite. The original and the fundamental purpose of the
rite was to reconcile the god and his worshippers and to make them at
one: the feast, therefore, which marked the accomplishment of the very
purpose of the rite, would come to be regarded as the object of the
rite. In that, however, there is nothing more than the shifting
forward of the centre of religious interest from the sacrifice to the
feast: there is nothing in it to change the character or conception
of the feast. Yet, in the case of some peoples, its character and
conception did change in a remarkable way. In the case of some
peoples, we find that the feast is not an occasion of 'eating with the
god' but what has been crudely called 'eating the god.' This
conception existed, as is generally agreed, beyond the possibility of
doubt, in Mexico amongst the Aztecs, and perhaps--though not beyond
the possibility of doubt--elsewhere.
The Aztecs were a barbarous or semi-civilised people, with a long
history behind them. The circumstances under which the belief and
practice in question existed and had grown up amongst them are clear
enough. The Aztecs worshipped deities, and amongst those deities were
plants and vegetables, such as maize. It was, of course, not any one
individual specimen that they worshipped: it was the spirit, the
maize-mother, who manifested herself in every maize-plant, but was not
identical with any one. At the same time, though they worshipped the
spirit, or species, they grew and cultivated the individual plants, as
furnishing them with food. Thus they were in the position of eating as
food the plant, the body, in which was manifested the spirit whom they
worshipped. In this there was an outward resemblance to the Christian
rite of communion, which could not fail to attract the attention of
the Spanish priests at the time of the conquest of Mexico, but which
has probably been unconsciously magnified by them. They naturally
interpreted the Aztec ceremony in terms of Christianity, and the
spirit of the translation probably differs accordingly from the spirit
of the original.
We have now to consider the new phase of the sacrificial--indeed, in
this connection, we may say the sacramental--rite which was found in
Mexico, and to indicate the manner in which it probably originated.
The offerings earliest made to the gods were not necessarily, but were
probably, food-offerings, animal or vegetable; and as we are not in a
position to affirm that there was any restriction upon the kind of
food offered, it seems advisable to assume that any kind of food might
be offered to any kind of god. The intention of offerings seems to be
to indicate merely that the worshippers desire to be pleasing in the
sight of the god whom they wish to approach. At this, the simplest and
earliest stage of the rite, the sacrificial feast has not yet come
into existence: it is enough if the food is offered to the god; it is
not necessary that it should be eaten, or that any portion of it
should be eaten, by the community. There is evidence enough to warrant
us in believing that generally there was an aversion to eating the
god's portion. If the worshippers ate any portion, they certainly
would not eat and did not eat, until after the god had done so. At
this stage in the development of the rite, the offerings are
occasional, and are not made at stated, recurring, seasons. The reason
for believing this is that it is on occasions of alarm and distress
that the community seeks to draw near its god. But though it is in
alarm that the community draws nigh, it draws nigh in confidence that
the god can be appeased and is willing to be appeased. It is part of
the community's idea of its god that he has the power to punish; that
he does not exercise his power without reason; and that, as he is
powerful, so also he is just to his worshippers, and merciful.
But though occasional offerings, and sacrifices made in trouble to
gods who are conceived to be a very help in time of trouble, continue
to be made, until a relatively late period in the history of religion,
we also find that there are recurring sacrifices, annually made. At
these annual ceremonies, the offerings are food-offerings. Where the
food-offerings are offerings of vegetable food, they are made at
harvest time. They are made on the occasion of harvest; and that they
should be so made is probably no accident or fortuitous coincidence.
At the regularly recurring season of harvest, the community adheres to
the custom, already formed, of not partaking of the food which it
offers to its god, until a portion has been offered to the god. The
custom, like other customs, tends to become obligatory: the
worshippers, that is to say the community, may not eat, until the
offering has been made and accepted. Then, indeed, the worshippers may
eat, solemnly, in the presence of their god. The eating becomes a
solemn feast of thanksgiving. The god, after whom they eat, and to
whom they render thanks, becomes the god who gives them to eat. What
is thus true of edible plants--whether wild or domesticated--may also
hold true to some extent of animal life, where anything like a 'close
time' comes to be observed.
As sacrificial ceremonies come to be, thus, annually recurring rites,
a corresponding development takes place in the community's idea of its
god. So long as the sacrificial ceremony was an irregularly recurring
rite, the performance of which was prompted by the occurrence, or the
threat, of disaster, so long it was the wrath of the god which filled
the fore-ground, so to speak, of the religious consciousness; though
behind it lay the conviction of his justice and his mercy. But when
the ceremony becomes one of annual worship, a regularly recurring
occasion on which the worshippers recognise that it is the god, to
whom the first-fruits belong, who gives the worshippers the harvest,
then the community's idea of its god is correspondingly developed. The
occasion of the sacrificial rite is no longer one of alarm and
distress; it is no longer the wrath of the god, but his goodness as
the giver of good gifts, that tends to emerge in the fore-ground of
the religious consciousness. Harvest rites tend to become feasts of
thanksgiving and thank-offerings; and so, by contrast with these
joyous festivals, the occasional sacrifices, which continue to be
offered in times of distress, tend to assume, more and more, the
character of sin-offerings or guilt-offerings.
We have, however, now to notice a consequence which ensues upon the
community's custom of not eating until after the first-fruits have
been offered to the god. Not only is a habit or custom hard to break,
simply because it is a habit; but, when the habit is the habit of a
whole community, the individual who presumes to violate it is visited
by the disapproval and the condemnation of the whole community. When
then the custom has established itself of abstaining from eating,
until the first-fruits have been offered to the god, any violation of
the custom is condemned by the community as a whole. The consequence
of this is that the fruit or the animal tends to be regarded by the
community as sacred to the god, and not to be meddled with until after
the first-fruits have been offered to him. The plant or animal becomes
sacred to the god because the community has offered it to him, and
intends to offer it to him, and does offer it to him annually. Now it
is not a necessary and inevitable consequence that an animal or plant,
which has come to be sacred, should become divine. But where we find
divine animals or animal gods--divine corn or corn-goddesses--we are
entitled to consider this as one way in which they may have come to be
regarded as divine, because sacred, and as deities, because divine.
When we find the divine plant or animal constituting the sacrifice,
and furnishing forth the sacrificial meal, there is a possibility that
it was in this way and by this process that the plant or animal came
to be, first, sacred, then divine, and finally the deity, to whom it
was offered. In many cases, certainly, this last stage was never
reached. And we may conjecture a reason why it was not reached.
Whether it could be reached would depend largely on the degree of
individuality, which the god, to whom the offering was made, had
reached. A god who possesses a proper, personal name, must have a long
history behind him, for a personal name is an epithet the meaning of
which comes in course of time to be forgotten. If its meaning has come
to be entirely forgotten, the god is thereby shown not only to have a
long history behind him but to have acquired a high degree of
individuality and personality, which will not be altered or modified
by the offerings which are made to him. Where, however, the being or
power worshipped is, as with the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur,
still nameless, his personality and individuality must be of the
vaguest; and, in that case, there is the probability that the plant or
animal offered to him may become sacred to him; and, having become
sacred, may become divine. The animal or plant may become that in
which the nameless being manifests himself. The corn or maize is
offered to the nameless deity; the deity is the being to whom the corn
or maize is habitually offered; and then becomes the corn-deity or
maize-deity, the mother of the maize or the corn-goddess.
Like the _di indigites_ of Italy, these vegetation-goddesses are
addressed by names which, though performing the function of personal
names and enabling the worshippers to make appeals to the deities
personally, are still of perfectly transparent meaning. Both present
to us that stage in the evolution of a deity, in which as yet the
meaning of his name still survives; in which his name has not yet
become a fully personal name; and in which he has not yet attained to
full personality and complete individuality. This want of complete
individuality can hardly be dissociated from another fact which goes
with it. That fact is that the deity is to be found in any plant of
the species sacred to him, or in any animal of the species sacred to
him, but is not supposed to be found only in the particular plant or
animal which is offered on one particular occasion. If the
corn-goddess is present, or manifests herself, in one particular sheaf
of corn, at her harvest festival this year, still she did manifest
herself last year, and will manifest herself next year, in another.
The deity, that is to say, is the species; and the species, and no
individual specimen thereof, is the deity. That is the reason which
prevents, or tends to prevent, deities of this kind from attaining
complete individuality.
This want of complete individuality and of full personality it is
which characterises totems. The totem, also, is a being who, if he
manifests himself in this particular animal, which is slain, has also
manifested himself and will manifest himself in other animals of the
same species: but he is not identical with any particular individual
specimen. Not only is the individuality of the totem thus incomplete,
but in many instances the name of the species has not begun to change
into a proper personal name for the totem, as 'Ceres' or
'Chicomecoatl' or 'Xilonen' have changed into proper names of personal
deities. Whether we are or are not to regard the totem as a god, at
any rate, viewed as a being in the process of acquiring individuality,
he seems to be acquiring it in the same way, and by the same process,
as corn-goddesses and maize-mothers acquired theirs, and to present to
our eyes a stage of growth through which these vegetation-deities
themselves have passed. They also at one time had not yet acquired
the personal names by which they afterwards came to be addressed. They
were, though nameless, the beings present in any and every sheaf of
corn or maize, though not cabined and confined to any one sheaf or any
number of sheaves. And these beings have it in them to become--for
they did become--deities. The process by which and the period at which
they may have become deities we have already suggested: the period is
the stage at which offerings, originally made at irregular times of
distress, become annual offerings, made at the time of harvest; the
process is the process by which what is customary becomes obligatory.
The offerings at harvest time, from customary, become obligatory. That
which is offered, is thereby sacred; the very intention to offer it,
this year in the same way as it was offered last year, suffices to
make it sacred, before it is offered. Thus, the whole species, whether
plant or animal, becomes sacred, to the deity to whom it is offered:
it is his. And if he be as vague and shadowy as the power or being to
whom the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur make their offerings at
stated seasons, then he may be looked for and found in the plant or
animal species which is his. The harvest is his alone, until the
first-fruits are offered. He makes the plants to grow: if they fail,
it is to him the community prays. If they thrive, it is because he is,
though not identical with them, yet in a way present in them, and is
not to be distinguished from the being who not only manifests himself
in every individual plant or animal of the species, though not
identical with any one, but is called by the name of the species.
Whether we are to see in totems, as they occur in Australia, beings in
the stage through which vegetation deities presumably passed, before
they became corn-goddesses and mothers of the maize, is a question,
the answer to which depends upon our interpretation of the ceremonies
in which they figure. It is difficult, at least, to dissociate those
ceremonies from the ritual of first-fruits. The community may not eat
of the animal or plant, at the appropriate season, until the head-man
has solemnly and sparingly partaken of it. About the solemnity of the
ceremonial and the reverence of those who perform it, there is no
doubt. But, whereas in the ritual of first-fruits elsewhere, the
first-fruits are, beyond possibility of doubt or mistake, offered to a
god, a personal god, having a proper name, in Australia there is no
satisfactory evidence to show that the offerings are supposed, by
those who make them, to be made to any god; or that the totem-spirit,
if it is distinguished from the totem-species, is regarded as a god.
There has accordingly been a tendency on the part of students of the
science of religion to deny to totemism any place in the evolution of
religion, and even to regard the Australian black-fellows as
exemplifying, within the region of our observation, a pre-religious
period in the process of human evolution. This latter view may safely
be dismissed as untenable, whether we do or do not believe totemism to
have a religious side. There is sufficient mythology, still existing
amongst the Australian tribes, to show that the belief in gods
survives amongst them, even though, as seems to be the case, no
worship now attaches to the gods, with personal names, who figure in
the myths. That myths survive, when worship has ceased; and that the
names of gods linger on, even when myths are no longer told of them,
are features to be seen in the decay of religious systems, all the
world over, and not in Australia alone. The fact that these features
are to be found in Australia points to a consideration which hitherto
has generally been overlooked, or not sufficiently weighed. It is that
in Australia we are in the midst of general religious decay, and are
not witnessing the birth of religion nor in the presence of a
pre-religious period. From this point of view, the worship of the
gods, who figure in the myths, has ceased, but their names live on.
And from this point of view, the names of the beings worshipped, in
the totemistic first-fruits ceremonies, have disappeared, though the
ceremonies are elaborate, solemn, reverent, complicated and
prolonged; and religion has been swallowed up in ritual.
Even amongst the Aztecs, who had reached a stage of social
development, barbarous or semi-civilised, far beyond anything attained
by the Australian tribes, the degree of personality and individuality
reached by the vegetation deities was not such that those deities had
strictly proper names: the deity of the maize was still only 'the
maize-mother.' Amongst the Australians, who are so far below the level
reached in Mexico, the beings worshipped at the first-fruits
ceremonies may well have been as nameless as the beings worshipped by
the jungle-dwellers of Chota Nagpur. Around these nameless beings, a
ritual, simple in its origin, but luxuriant in its growth, has
developed, overshadowing and obscuring them from our view, so that we,
and perhaps the worshippers, cannot see the god for the ritual.
In Mexico the vegetation-goddesses struggled for existence amongst a
crowd of more developed deities, just as in Italy the _di indigites_
competed, at a disadvantage, with the great gods of the state. In
Australia the greater gods of the myths seem to have given way
before--or to--the spread of totemism. Where gods are worshipped for
the benefits expected from them, beings who have in charge the
food-supply of the community will be worshipped not only annually at
the season of the first-fruits, but with greater zeal and more
continuous devotion than can be displayed towards the older gods who
are worshipped only at irregular periods. Not only does the existence
of mythology in Australia indicate that the gods who figure in the
myths were once worshipped, though worship now no longer is rendered
to them; but the totemistic ceremonies by their very nature show that
they are a later development of the sacrificial rite. The simplest
form of the rite is that in which the community draw near to their
god, bearing with them offerings, acceptable to the god: it is at a
later stage in the development of the rite that the offerings, having
been accepted by the god, are consumed by the community, as is the
case with the totem animals and plants. At its earliest stage, again,
the rite is performed, at irregular periods, on occasions of distress:
it is only at a more advanced stage that the rite is performed at
fixed, annual periods, as in Australia. And this change of periodicity
is plainly connected with the growth of the conviction that the annual
first-fruits belong to the gods--a conviction springing from the
belief that they are annually accepted by the god, a belief which in
its turn implies a prior belief that they are acceptable. In other
words, the centre of religious interest at first lies in approaching
the god, that is in the desire to restore the normal state of
relations, which calamity shows to have been disturbed. But in the
end, religious interest is concentrated on, and expressed by, the
feast which terminates the ceremony and marks the fact that the
reconciliation is effected. What is at first accepted by the god at
the feast comes to be regarded as belonging to him and sacred to him:
the worshippers may not touch it until a portion of it, the
first-fruits, has been accepted by him. Thus the rite which indicates
and marks his acceptance becomes more than ever the centre of
religious interest. The rite may thus become of more importance than
the god, as in Australia seems to be the case; for the performance of
the rite is indispensable if the community is to be admitted to eat of
the harvest. When this point of view has been reached, when the
performance of the rite is the indispensable thing, the rite tends to
be regarded as magical. If this is what has happened in the case of
the Australian rite, it is but what tends to happen, wherever ritual
flourishes at the expense of religion. If it were necessary to assume
that only amongst the Australian black-fellows, and never elsewhere,
did a rite, originally religious, tend to become magical, then it
would be _a priori_ unlikely, in the extreme, that this happened in
Australia. But inasmuch as this tendency is innate in ritual, it is
rather likely that in Australia the tendency has run its course, as it
has done elsewhere, in India, for example, where, also, the
sacrificial rite has become magical. Whether a rite, originally
religious, will become assimilated to magic, depends very much on the
extent to which the community believes in magic. The more the
community believes in magic, the more ready it will be to put a
magical interpretation on its religious rites. But the fact that, in
the lower communities, religion is always in danger of sinking into
magic, does not prove that religion springs from magic and is but one
kind of magic. That view, once held by some students, is now generally
abandoned. It amounts simply to saying once more that in the earliest
manifestations of religion there was no religion, and that religion is
now, what it was in the beginning--nothing but magic. If that position
is abandoned, then religious rites are, in their very nature, and from
their very origin, different from magical rites. Religious rites are,
first, rites of approach, whereby the community draws nigh to its god;
and, afterwards, rites of sacramental meals whereby the community
celebrates its reconciliation and enjoys communion with its god. Those
meals are typically cases of 'eating with the god,' celebrated on the
occasion of first-fruits, and based on the conviction, which has
slowly grown up, that 'the earth is the Lord's, and the fulness
thereof.' Meals, such as were found in Mexico, and have left their
traces in Australia, in which the fruit or the animal that was offered
had come to be regarded as standing in the same relation to the god
as an individual does to the species, are meals having the same origin
as those in which the community eats with its god, but following a
different line of evolution.
The object of the sacrificial rite is first to restore and then to
maintain good relations between the community and its god. Pushed to
its logical conclusion, or rather perhaps we should say, pushed back
to the premisses required for its logical demonstration, the very idea
of renewing or restoring relations implies an original understanding
between the community and its god; and implies that it is the
community's departure from this understanding which has involved it in
the disaster, from which it desires to escape, and to secure escape
from which, it approaches its god, with desire to renew and restore
the normal relations. The idea that if intelligent beings do something
customarily, they must do so because once they entered into a
contract, compact or covenant to do so, is one which in Plato's time
manifested itself in the theory of a social compact, to account for
the existence of morality, and which in Japan was recorded in the
tenth century A.D. as accounting for the fact that certain sacrifices
were offered to the gods. Thus in the fourth ritual of 'the Way of the
Gods'--that is Shinto--it is explained that the Spirits of the Storm
took the Japanese to be their people, and the people of Japan took the
Spirits of the Storm to be gods of theirs. In pursuance of that
covenant, the spirits on their part undertook to be Gods of the Winds
and to ripen and bless the harvest, while the people on their part
undertook to found a temple to their new gods; and that is why the
people are now worshipping them. It was, according to the account
given in the fourth ritual, the gods themselves who dictated the
conditions on which they were willing to take the Japanese to be their
people, and fixed the terms of the covenant. So too in the account
given in the sixth chapter of Exodus, it was Jehovah himself who
dictated to Moses the terms of the covenant which he was willing to
make with the children of Israel: 'I will take you to me for a people,
and I will be to you a God.' In Japan it was to the Emperor, as high
priest, that the terms of the covenant were dictated, in consequence
of which the temple was built and the worship instituted.
The train of thought is quite clear and logically consistent. If the
gods of the Winds were to be trusted--as they were unquestionably
trusted--it must be because they had made a covenant with the people,
and would be faithful to it, if the people were. The direct statement,
in plain, intelligible words, in the fourth ritual, that a covenant of
this kind had actually been entered into, was but a statement of what
is implied by the very idea, and in the very act, of offering
sacrifices. And sacrifices had of course been offered in Japan long
before the tenth century: they were offered, and long had been offered
annually to the gods of the Harvest. Probably they had been offered to
the gods of the Storms long before they were offered to the gods of
the Winds; and the procedure narrated in the fourth ritual records the
transformation of the occasional and irregular sacrifices, made to the
winds when they threatened the harvest with damage, into annual
sacrifices, made every year as a matter of course. Thus, we have an
example of the way in which the older sacrifices, made originally only
in times of disaster, come to be assimilated to the more recent
sacrifices, which from their nature and origin, are offered regularly
every year. Not only is there a natural tendency in man to assimilate
things which admit of assimilation and can be brought under one rule;
but also it is advisable to avert calamity rather than to wait for it,
and, when it has happened, to do something. It would therefore be
desirable from this point of view to render regular worship to deities
who can send disaster; and thus to induce them to abstain from sending
it.
In the fourth Shinto ritual the gods of the Winds are represented as
initiating the contract and prescribing its terms. But in the first
ritual, which is concerned with the worship of the gods of the
Harvest, it is the community which is represented as taking the first
step, and as undertaking that, if the gods grant an abundant harvest,
the people will, through their high priest, the Emperor, make a
thank-offering, in the shape of first-fruits, to the gods of the
Harvest. This is, of course, no more an historical account of the way
in which the gods of the Harvest actually came to be worshipped, than
is the account which the fourth Shinto ritual gives of the way the
gods of the Winds came to be worshipped. In both cases the worship
existed, and sacrifices had been made, as a matter of custom, long
before any need was felt to explain the origin of the custom. As soon
as the need was felt, the explanation was forthcoming: if the
community had made these sacrifices, for as long back as the memory of
man could run, and if the gods had granted good harvests in
consequence, it must have been in consequence of an agreement entered
into by both parties; and therefore a covenant had been established
between them, on some past occasion, which soon became historical.
This history of the origin and meaning of sacrifice has an obvious
affinity with the gift-theory of sacrifice. Both in the gift-theory and
the covenant-theory, the terms of the transaction are that so much
blessing shall be forthcoming for so much service, or so much sacrifice
for so much blessing. The point of view is commercial; the obligation
is legal; if the terms are strictly kept on the one part, then they
are strictly binding on the other. The covenant-theory, like the
gift-theory, is eventually discovered by spiritual experience, if
pushed far enough, to be a false interpretation of the relations
existing between god and man. Being an interpretation, it is an outcome
of reflection--of reflection upon the fact that, in the time of
trouble, man turns to his gods, and that, in returning to them, he
escapes from his trouble. On that fact all systems of worship are
based, from that fact all systems of worship start. If, as is the case,
they start in different directions and diverge from one another, it is
because men, in the process of reflecting upon that fact, come to put
different interpretations upon it. And so far as they eventually come
to feel that any interpretation is a misinterpretation, they do so
because they find that it is not, as they had been taught to believe, a
correct interpretation but a misinterpretation of the fact: there is
found in the experience of returning to God, something with which the
misinterpretation is irreconcilable; and, when the misinterpretation is
dispersed, like a vapour, the vision of God, the idea of God, shines
forth the more brightly. One such misinterpretation is the reflection
that the favour of the gods can be bought by gifts. Another is the
reflection that the gods sell their favours, on the terms of a covenant
agreed upon between them and man. Another is that that which is offered
is sacred, and that that which is sacred is divine--that the god is
himself the offering which is made to him.
In all systems of worship man not only turns to his gods but does so
in the conviction that he is returning, or trying to return, to
them--trying to return to them, because they have been estranged, and
access to them is therefore difficult. Accordingly, he draws near to
them, bearing in his hands something intended to express his desire to
return to them. The material, external symbol of his desire--the
oblation, offering or sacrifice which he brings with him because it
expresses his desire--is that on which at first his attention centres.
And because his attention centres on it, the rite of sacrifice, the
outward ceremony, develops in ways already described. The object of
the rite is to procure access to the god; and the greater the extent
to which attention is concentrated on the right way of performing the
external acts and the outward ceremony, the less attention is bestowed
upon the inward purpose which accompanies the outward actions, and for
the sake of which those external actions are performed. As the object
of the rite is to procure access, it seems to follow that the proper
performance of the rite will ensure the access desired. The reason why
access is sought, at all, is the belief--arising on occasions when
calamity visits the community--that the god has been estranged, and
the faith that he may yet become reconciled to his worshippers. The
reason why his wrath descends, in the shape of calamities, upon the
community, is that the community, in the person of one of its members,
has offended the god, by breaking the custom of the community in some
way. For this reason--in this belief and faith--access is sought, by
means of the sacrificial rite; and the purpose of the rite is assumed
to be realised by the performance of the ceremonies, in which the
outward rite consists. The meaning and the value of the outward
ceremonies consists in the desire for reconciliation which expresses
itself in the acts performed; and the mere performance of the acts
tends of itself to relieve the desire. That is why the covenant-theory
of sacrifice gains acceptance: it represents--it is an official
representation--that performance of the sacrificial ceremony is all
that is required, by the terms of the agreement, to obtain
reconciliation and to effect atonement. But the representation is
found to be a misrepresentation: the desire for reconciliation and
atonement is not to be satisfied by outward ceremonies, but by
hearkening and obedience. 'To obey is better than sacrifice and to
hearken than the fat of rams.' Sacrifice remains the outward rite, but
it is pronounced to have value only so far as it is an expression of
the spirit of obedience. Oblations are vain unless the person who
offers them is changed in heart, unless there is an inward, spiritual
process, of which the external ceremony is an expression. Though this
was an interpretation of the meaning of the sacrificial rite which was
incompatible with the covenant-theory and which was eventually fatal
to it, it was at once a return to the original object of the rite and
a disclosure of its meaning. Some such internal, spiritual process is
implied by sacrifice from the beginning, for it is a plain
impossibility to suppose that in the beginning it consisted of mere
external actions which had absolutely no meaning whatever, for those
who performed them; and it is equally impossible to maintain that such
meaning as they had was not a religious meaning. The history of
religion is the history of the process by which the import of that
meaning rises to the surface of clear consciousness, and is gradually
revealed. Beneath the ceremony and the outward rite there was always a
moral and religious process--moral because it was the community of
fellow-worshippers who offered the sacrifice, on occasions of a breach
of the custom, that is of the customary morality, of the tribe;
religious because it was to their god that they offered it. The very
purpose with which the community offered it was to purge itself of the
offence committed by one of its members. The condition precedent, on
which alone sacrifice could be offered, was that the offence was
repented of. From the beginning sacrifice implied repentance and was
impossible without it. But it sufficed if the community repented and
punished the transgressor: his repentance however was not
necessary--all that was necessary was his punishment.
The re-interpretation of the sacrificial rite by the prophets of
Israel was that until there was hearkening and obedience there could
be nothing but an outward performance of the rite. The revelation made
by Christ was that every man may take part in the supreme act of
worship, if he has first become reconciled to his brother, if he has
first repented his own offences, from love for God and his fellow-man.
The old covenant made the favour of God conditional on the receipt of
sacrificial offerings. The new covenant removes that limit, and all
others, from God's love to his children: it is infinite love. It is
not conditional or limited; conditional on man's loving God, or
limited to those who love Him. Otherwise the new covenant would be of
the same nature as the old. But love asks for love; the greater love
for the greater love; infinite love for the greatest man is capable
of. And it is hard for a man to resist love; impossible indeed in the
end: all men come under and into the new covenant, in which there is
infinite love on the one side, and love that may grow infinitely on
the other. If it is to grow, however, it is in a new life that it must
grow: a life of sacrifice, a life in which he who comes under the new
covenant is himself the offering and the 'lively sacrifice.'
The worshipper's idea of God necessarily determines the spirit in
which he worships. The idea of God as a God of love is different from
the idea of Him as a God of justice, who justly requires hearkening
and obedience. The idea of God as a God who demands obedience and is
not to be put off with vain oblations is different from that of a God
to whom, by the terms of a covenant, offerings are to be made in
return for benefits received. But each and all of these ideas imply
the existence, in the individual consciousness, and in the common
consciousness, of the desire to draw near to God, and of the need of
drawing nigh. Wherever that need and that desire are felt, there
religion is; and the need and the desire are part of the common
consciousness of mankind. From the beginning they have always
expressed or symbolised themselves in outward acts or rites. The
experience of the human race is testimony that rites are
indispensable, in the same way and for the same reason that language
is indispensable to thought. Thought would not develop were there no
speech, whereby thought could be sharpened on thought. Nor has
religion ever, anywhere, developed without rites. They, like language,
are the work of the community, collectively; and they are a mode of
expression which is, like language, intelligible to the community,
because the community expresses itself in this way, and because each
member of the community finds that other members have thoughts like
his, and the same desire to draw near to a Being whose existence they
doubt not, however vaguely they conceive Him, or however
contradictorily they interpret His being. But, if language is
indispensable to thought, and a means whereby we become conscious of
each other's thought, language is not thought. Nor are rites, and
outward acts, religion--indispensable though they be to it. They are
an expression of it. They must be an inadequate expression; and they
are always liable to misinterpretation, even by some of those who
perform them. The history of religion contains the record of the
misinterpretations of the rite of sacrifice. But it also records the
progressive correction of those misinterpretations, and the process
whereby the meaning implicit in the rite from the beginning has been
made manifest in the end.
The need and the desire to draw nigh to the god of the community are
felt in the earliest of ages on occasions when calamity befalls the
community. The calamity is interpreted as sent by the god; and the god
is conceived to have been provoked by an offence of which some member
of the community had been guilty. We may say, therefore, that from
the beginning there has been present in the common consciousness a
sense of sin and the desire to make atonement. Psychologically it
seems clear that at the present day, in the case of the individual,
personal religion first manifests itself usually in the consciousness
of sin. And what is true in the psychology of the individual may be
expected within limits to hold true in the psychology of the common
consciousness. But though we may say that, in the beginning, it was by
the occurrence of public calamity that the community became conscious
that sin had been committed, still it is also true to say that the
community felt that it was by some one of its members, rather than by
the community, that the offence had been committed, for which the
community was responsible. It was the responsibility, rather than the
offence, which was prominent in the common consciousness--as indeed
tends to be the case with the individual also. But the fact that the
offence had been committed, not by the community, but by some one
member of the community, doubtless helped to give the community the
confidence without which its attitude towards the offended power would
have been simply one of fear. Had the feeling been one of fear, pure
and unmixed, the movement of the community could not have been towards
the offended being. But religion manifests itself from the beginning
in the action of drawing near to the god. The fact that the offence
was the deed of some one member, and not of the community as a whole,
doubtless helped to give the community the confidence, without which
its attitude towards the offended power would have been simply one of
fear. But it also tended necessarily to make religion an affair of the
community rather than a personal need: sin had indeed been committed,
but not by those who drew near to the god for the purpose of making
the atonement. They were not the offenders. The community admitted its
responsibility, indeed, but it found one of its members guilty.
We may, therefore, fairly say that personal religion had at this time
scarcely begun to emerge. And the reason why this was so is quite
clear: it is that in the infancy of the race, as in the infancy of the
individual, personal self-consciousness is as yet undeveloped. And it
is only as personal self-consciousness develops that personal religion
becomes possible. We must not however from this infer that personal
religion is a necessary, or, at any rate, an immediate consequence of
the development of self-consciousness. In ancient Greece one
manifestation--and in the religious domain the first manifestation--of
the individual's consciousness of himself was the growth of
'mysteries.' Individuals voluntarily entered these associations: they
were not born into them as they were into the state and the
state-worship. And they entered them for the sake of individual
purification and in the hope of personal immortality. The desire for
salvation, for individual salvation, is manifest. But it was in rites
and ceremonies that the _mystae_ put their trust, and in the fact that
they were initiated that they found their confidence--so long as they
could keep it. The traditional conviction of the efficacy of ritual
was unshaken: and, so long as men believed in the efficacy of rites,
the question, 'What shall I do to be saved?' admitted of no
permanently satisfactory answer. The only answer that has been found
permanently satisfying to the personal need of religion is one which
goes beyond rites and ceremonies: it is that a man shall love his
neighbour and his God.
But in thus becoming personal, religion involved man's fellow-men as
much as himself. In becoming personal thus, religion became, thereby,
more than ever before, the relation of the community to its God. The
relation however is no longer that the community admits the
transgressions of some one of its members: it prays for the
forgiveness of 'our trespasses'; and though it prays for each of its
members, still it is the community that prays and worships and comes
before its God, as it has done from the beginning of the history of
religion. It is with rites of worship that the community, at any
period in the history of religion, draws nigh to its god; for its
inward purpose cannot but reveal itself in some outward manifestation.
Indeed it seeks to manifest itself as naturally and as necessarily as
thought found expression for itself in the languages it has created;
and, though the re-action of forms of worship upon religion sometimes
results, like the re-action of language upon thought, in misleading
confusion, still, for the most part, language does serve to express
more or less clearly--indeed we may say more and more clearly--that
which we have it in us to utter.
As there are more forms of speech than one, so there are more forms of
religion than one; and as the language of savages who can count no
higher than three is inadequate for the purposes of the higher
mathematics, so the religion of man in the lower stages of his
development is inadequate, compared with that of the higher stages.
Nevertheless the civilised man can come to understand the savage's
form of speech; and it would be strange to say that the savage's form
of speech, or that his form of religion, is unintelligible nonsense.
Behind the varieties of speech and of religion there is that in the
spirit of man which is seeking to express itself and which is
intelligible to all, because it is in all. Though few of us understand
any but civilised languages, we feel no difficulty in believing that
savage languages not merely are intelligible but must have sprung from
the same source as our own, though far inferior to it for every
purpose that language is employed to subserve. The many different
forms of religion are all attempts--successful in as many very various
degrees as language itself--to give expression to the idea of God.
IV
THE IDEA OF GOD IN PRAYER
The question may perhaps be raised, whether it is necessary for us to
travel beyond worship, in order to discover what was, in early
religions, or is now, the idea of God, as it presents itself to the
worshipper. The answer to the question will depend partly on what we
consider the essence of religion to be. If we take the view, which is
held by some writers of authority on the history of religion, that the
essence of religion is adoration, then indeed we neither need nor can
travel further, for we shall hold that worship is adoration, and
adoration, worship.
To exclude adoration, to say that adoration does not, or should not,
form any part of worship, seems alike contrary to the very meaning of
the word 'worship' and to be at variance with a large and important
body of the facts recorded in the history of religion. The courts of a
god are customarily entered with the praise which is the outward
expression of the feeling of adoration with which the worshippers
spiritually gaze upon the might and majesty of the god whom they
approach. He is to them a great god, above all other gods. Even to
polytheists, the god who is worshipped at the moment, is, at that
moment, one than whom there is no one, and nought, greater, _quo nihil
maius_. A god who should not be worshipped thus--a god who was not the
object of adoration--would not be worthy of the name, and would hardly
be called a god. So strongly is this felt that even writers who
incline to regard religion as an illusion, define gods as beings
conceived to be superior to man. The degree of respect, rising to
adoration, will vary directly with the degree of superiority
attributed to them; but not even in the case of a fetish, so long as
it is worshipped, is the respect, which is the germ of adoration,
wholly wanting. Even in the case of gods, on whom, on occasion, insult
is put, it is precisely in moments when their superiority is in doubt
that the worship of adoration is momentarily wanting. Worship without
adoration is worship only in name, or rather is no worship at all.
Only with adoration can worship begin: 'hallowed be Thy name'
expresses the emotion with which all worship begins, even where the
emotion has not yet found the words in which to express itself. It is
because the emotion is there, pent up and seeking escape, that it can
travel along the words, and make them something more than a succession
of syllables and sounds.
If then it is on the wings of adoration that the soul has at all times
striven to rise to heaven to find its God, even though it flutters but
a little height and soon falls again to the ground, then we must admit
that from the beginning there has been a mystical element, or a
tendency to mysticism, in religion. In the lowest, and probably in the
earliest, stages of the evolution of religion, this tendency is most
manifest in individual members of the community, who are subject to
'possession,' ecstasy, trance and visions, and are believed, both by
themselves and others, to be in especial communion with their god.
This is the earliest manifestation of the fact that religion, besides
being a social act and a matter in which the community is concerned,
is also one which may profoundly affect the individual soul. But in
these cases it is the exceptional soul which is alone affected--the
seer of visions, the prophet. And it is not necessarily in connection
with the ordinary worship, or customary sacrifice, that such instances
of mystic communion with the gods are manifested. For the development
of the mystical tendency of worship and sacrifice, we must look, not
to the lowest, or to the earliest, stages of religious evolution, but
to a later stage in the evolution of the sacrificial meal. It is
where, as in ancient Mexico, the plant, or animal, which furnishes
forth the sacrificial meal, is in some way regarded as, or identified
with, the body of the deity worshipped, that the rite of sacrifice is
tinged with mysticism and that all partakers of the meal, and not some
exceptional individuals, are felt to be brought into some mystic
communion with the god whom they adore.
In these cases, adoration is worship; and worship is adoration--and
little more. Judging them by their fruits, we cannot say that the
Mexican rites, or even the Greek mysteries, encourage us to believe
that adoration is all that is required to make worship what the heart
of man divines that it should be. Doubtless, this is due in part to
the fact that the idea of God was so imperfectly disclosed to the
polytheists of Mexico and Greece. Let us not therefore use Greece and
Mexico as examples for the disparagement of mysticism or for the
depreciation of man's tendency to seek communion with the Highest. Let
us rather appeal at once to the reason which makes mysticism, of
itself, inadequate to satisfy all the needs of man. The reason simply
is that man is not merely a contemplative but an active being. If
action were alien to his nature, then man might be satisfied to gaze,
and merely gaze, on God. But man is active and not merely
contemplative. We must therefore either hold that religion, being in
its essence adoration and nothing more, has no function to perform, or
sphere to fill, in the practical life of man; or else, if we hold
that it does, or should, affect the practice of his life, we must
admit that, though religion implies adoration always, it cannot
properly be fulfilled in quietism, but must bear its fruit in what man
does, or in the way he does it. The being or beings whom man worships
are, indeed, the object of adoration, an object _quo nihil maius_; but
they are something more. To them are addressed man's prayers.
It is vain to pretend that prayer, even the simple petition for our
daily bread, is not religious. It may perhaps be argued that prayer is
not essential to religion; that it has not always formed part of
religion; and that it is incompatible with that acquiescence in the
will of God, and that perfect adoration of God, which is religion in
its purest and most perfect sense. Whether there is in fact any
incompatibility between the petition for deliverance from evil, and
the aspiration that God's will may be done on earth, is a question on
which we need not enter here. But the statement that prayer has not
always formed part of religion is one which it should be possible to
bring to the test of fact.
In the literature of the science of religion, the prayers of the lower
races of mankind have not been recorded to any great extent by those
who have had the best opportunities of becoming acquainted with them,
if and so far as they actually exist. This is probably due in part to
their seeming too obvious and too trivial to deserve being put on
record. It may possibly in some cases be due to the reticence the
savage observes towards the white man, on matters too sacred to be
revealed. The error of omission, so far as it can be remedied
henceforth, will probably be repaired, now that savage beliefs are
coming to be examined and recorded on the spot by scientific students
in the interests of science. And the reticence of the savage promises
to avail him but little: the comparative method has thrown a flood of
light on his most sacred mysteries.
There may however be another reason why the prayers of the lower races
have not been recorded to any great extent: they may not have been
recorded for the simple reason that they may not have been uttered.
The nature and the occasion of the rite with which the god is
approached may be such as to make words superfluous: the purpose of
the ceremony may find adequate expression in the acts performed, and
may require no words to make it clear. If a community approaches its
god with sacrifice or offering, in time of sore distress, it
approaches him with full conviction that he understands the
circumstances and the purpose of their coming. Words of
dedication--'this to thee' is a formula actually in use--may be
necessary, but nothing more. Indeed, the Australian tribes, in rites
analogous to harvest-offerings, use no spoken words at all. We cannot,
however, imagine that the rites are, or in their origin were,
absolutely without meaning or purpose. We must interpret them on the
analogy of similar rites elsewhere, the purpose of which is expressed
not merely, as in Australia, by gesture-language, but is reinforced by
the spoken word. Indeed, we may, perhaps, go even further, and believe
that as gesture-language was earlier than speech, so the earliest
rites were conducted wholly by means of ritual acts or gestures; and
that it was only in course of time, and as a consequence of the
development of language, that verbal formulae came to be used to give
fuller expression to the emotions which prompted the rites.
If then we had merely to account for cases in which prayer does not
happen to have been recorded as a constituent part of the rite of
worship, we should not be warranted in inferring that prayer was
really absent. The presumption would rather be that either the records
are faulty, or that prayer, even though not uttered in word, yet
played its part. The ground for the presumption is found in the nature
of the occasions on which the gods are approached in the lower stages
of religion. Those occasions are either exceptional or regularly
recurring. The exceptional occasions are those on which the community
is threatened, or afflicted, with calamity; and on such occasions,
whether spoken words of prayer happen to have been recorded by our
informants, or not, it is beyond doubt that the purpose of the
community is to escape the calamity, and that the attitude of mind in
which the god is approached is one of supplication or prayer. The
regularly recurring occasions are those of seed-time and harvest, or
first-fruits. The ceremonies at seed-time obviously admit of the
presumption, even if there be no spoken prayers to prove it, that they
too have a petitionary purpose; while the recorded instances of the
prayers put up at harvest time, and on the occasion of the offering of
first-fruits, suffice to show that thanksgiving is made along with
prayers for continued prosperity.
It is however not merely on the ground of the absence of recorded
prayers that it is maintained that there was a stage in the evolution
of religion when prayer was unpractised and unknown. It is the
presence and the use of spells which is supposed to show that there
may have been a time when prayer was as yet unknown, and that the
process of development was a progress from spell to prayer. On this
theory, spells, in the course of time, and in accordance with their
own law of growth, become prayers. The nature and operation of this
law, it may be difficult or impossible now for us to observe. The
process took place in the night of time and is therefore not open to
our observation. But that the process, by which the one becomes the
other, is a possible process, is perhaps shown by the fact that we can
witness for ourselves prayer reverting or casting back to spell.
Wherever prayers become 'vain repetitions,' it is obvious that they
are conceived to act in the same way as the savage believes spells to
act: the mere utterance of the formula has the same magical power, as
making the sign of the cross, to avert supernatural danger. If prayers
thus cast back to spells, it may reasonably be presumed that it is
because prayer is in its origin but spell. It is because oxygen and
hydrogen, combined, produce water, that water can be resolved into
oxygen and hydrogen.
This theory, when examined, seems to imply that spell and prayer, so
far from being different and incompatible things, are one and the same
thing: seen from one point of view, and in one set of surroundings, it
is spell; seen from another point of view, and in other surroundings,
it is prayer. The point of view and the circumstances may change, but
the thing itself remains the same always. What then is the thing
itself, which, whether it presents itself as prayer or as spell, still
always remains the same? It is, and can only be, desire. In spell and
prayer alike the common, operative element present is desire. Desire
may issue in spell or prayer; but were there no desires, there would
be neither prayer nor spell. That we may admit. But, then, we may, or
rather must go further: if there were no desire, neither would there
be any action, whatever, performed by man. Men's actions, however,
differ endlessly from one another. They differ partly because men's
desires, themselves, differ; and partly because the means they adopt
to satisfy them differ also. It would be vain to say that different
means cannot be adopted for attaining one and the same end. Equally
vain would it be to say that the various means may not differ from one
another, to the point of incompatibility. If then we regard prayer and
spell as alike means which have been employed by man for the purpose
of realising his desires, we are yet at liberty to maintain that
prayer and spell are different and incompatible.
That there is a difference between prayer and spell--a difference at
any rate great enough to allow the two words to be used in
contradistinction to one another--is clear enough. The cardinal
distinction between the two is also clear: a spell takes effect in
virtue of the power resident in the formula itself or in the person
who utters it; while a prayer is an appeal to a personal power, or to
a power personal enough to be able to listen to the appeal, and to
understand it, and to grant it, if so it seems good. That this
difference obtains between prayer and spell will not be denied by any
student of the science of religion. But if this difference is
admitted, as admitted it must be, it is plain that prayer and spell
are terms which apply to two different moods or states of mind. Desire
is implied by each alike: were there no desire, there would be neither
prayer nor spell. But, whereas prayer is an appeal to some one who has
the power to grant one's desire, spell is the exercise of power which
one possesses oneself, or has at one's command.
That the two moods are different, and are incompatible with one
another, is clear upon the face of it: to beg for a thing as a mercy
or a gift is quite different from commanding that the thing be done.
The whole attitude of mind assumed in the one case is different from
that assumed in the other. It is possible, indeed, to pass from the
one attitude to the other. But it is impossible to say that the one
attitude is the other. It is correct to say that the one attitude may
follow the other. But it is to be misled by language to say that the
one attitude becomes the other. It is possible for one and the same
man to fluctuate between the two attitudes, to alternate between
them--possible, though inconsistent. The child, or even that larger
child, the man, may beg and scold, almost in the same breath. The
savage, as is well known, will treat his fetish in the same
inconsequential way. That it is inconsequential is a fact; but it is a
fact which, if learned, is but very slowly learned. The process by
which it is learned is part of the evolution of religion; and it is a
process in the course of which the idea of God tends to disengage
itself from the confusion of thought and the confusion of feeling, in
which it is at first enshrouded.
We, indeed, at the present day, may see, or at any rate feel, the
difference between magic and religion, between spell and prayer. And
we may imagine that the difference, because real, has always been seen
or felt, as we see and feel it. But, if we so imagine, we are
mistaken. The difference was not felt so strongly, or seen so
definitely, as to make it impossible to ascribe magic to Moses, or
rain-making to Elijah. In still earlier ages, the difference was still
more blurred. The two things were not discriminated as we now
discriminate them: they were not felt then, as they are felt now to be
inconsistent and incompatible. It was the likeness between the two
that filled the field of mental vision, originally. Whether a man
makes a petition or a command, the fact is that he wants something;
and, with his attention centred on that fact, he may be but little
aware, as the child is little, if at all, aware, that he passes, or is
guilty of unreasonable inconsistency in passing, from the one mood to
the other, and back again. It is in the course of time and as a
consequence of mental growth that he becomes aware of the difference
between the two moods.
If we insist on maintaining that, because spell and prayer are
essentially different, men have at all times been fully conscious of
the difference, we make it fundamentally impossible to explain the
growth of religion, or to admit that it can have any growth. Just as,
on the argument advanced in our first chapter, gods and fetishes have
gradually been differentiated from some conception, prior to them, and
indeterminate; just as magician and priest, eventually distinguished,
were originally undistinguished, for a man of power was potentially
both and might become either; so spell and prayer have come to be
differentiated, to be recognised as different and fundamentally
antagonistic, though originally the two categories were confused.
The theory that spell preceded prayer and became prayer, or that magic
developed into religion, finds as little support in the facts afforded
by the science of religion, as the converse theory of a primitive
revelation and a paradisaical state in which religion alone was known.
For what is found in one stage of evolution the capacity must have
existed in earlier stages; and if both prayer and spell, both magic
and religion, are found, the capacity for both must have pre-existed.
And instead of seeking to deny either, in the interests of a
pre-conceived theory, we must recognise both potentialities, in the
interest of truth.
Just as man spoke, for countless thousands of years, before he had
any idea of the principles on which he spoke, of the laws of speech or
of the grammar of his language; just as he reasoned, long before he
made the reasoning process matter of reflection, and reduced it to the
laws of logic; so from the beginning he was religious though he had no
more idea that there were principles of religion, than that there were
principles of grammar or laws of correct thought. 'First principles of
every kind have their influence, and indeed operate largely and
powerfully, long before they come to the surface of human thought and
are articulately expounded' (Ferrier: _Institute of Metaphysics_, p.
13).
But this is not to say that primitive man argued, or thought, with
never an error, or spoke with never a mistake, until by some
catastrophe he was expelled from some paradise of grammarians and
logicians. Though correct reasoning was logical before the time of
Aristotle, and correct speech grammatical before the time of Dionysius
Thrax; there was before, as there has been since, plenty both of bad
logic and bad grammar. But that is very different from saying that, in
the beginning, all reasoning was unsound, or all speech ungrammatical.
To say so, would be as unmeaning and as absurd as to say that
primitive man's every action was immoral, and his habitual state one
of pure, unmitigated wickedness. If the assumption of a primitive
paradise is unworkable, neither will the assumption of a primitive
inferno act, whether it is for the evolution of the grammar of
language or morality, or of logic or religion, that we wish to
account. It is to ask too much, to ask us to believe that in the
beginning there was only wrong-doing and no right, only error and no
correctness of thought or speech, only spell and no prayer. And if
both have been always, as they are now, present, there must also
always have been a tendency in that which has prevailed to conquer. We
may say that, in the process of evolution, man becomes aware of
differences to which at first he gave but little attention; and, so
far as he becomes conscious of them, he sets aside what is illogical,
immoral, or irreligious, because he is satisfied it is illogical,
immoral, or irreligious, and for no other reason.
The theory that spell preceded prayer in the evolution of religion
proceeds upon a misconception of the process of evolution. At one time
it was assumed and accepted without question that the vegetable and
animal kingdoms, and all their various species, were successive stages
of one process of evolution; and that the process proceeded on one
line and one alone. On the analogy of the evolution of living beings,
as thus understood, all that remained, when the theory of evolution
came to be applied to the various forms of thought and feeling, was to
arrange them also in one line; and that, it was assumed, would be the
line which the evolution of religion had followed. On this assumption,
either magic must be prior to religion, or religion prior to magic;
and, on the principle that priority must be assigned to the less
worthy, it followed that magic must have preceded religion.
It will scarcely be disputed that it was on the analogy of what was
believed to be the course of evolution, in the case of vegetable and
animal life, that the first attempts to frame a theory of the
evolution of religion proceeded, with the result that gods were
assumed to have been evolved out of fetishes, religion out of magic,
and prayer out of spell. To disprove this, it is not necessary to
reject the theory of evolution, or to maintain that evolution in
religion proceeds on lines wholly different from those it follows
elsewhere. All that is necessary is to understand the theory of the
evolution of the forms of life, as that theory is held by naturalists
now; and to understand the lines which the evolution of life is now
held to have followed. The process of evolution is no longer held to
have followed one line alone, or to have described but one single
trajectory like that of a cannon-ball fired from a cannon. The process
of evolution is, and has been from the beginning, dispersive. To
borrow M. Bergson's simile, the process of evolution is not like that
of a cannon-ball which followed one line, but like that of a shell,
which burst into fragments the moment it was fired off; and these
fragments being, as it were, themselves shells, in their turn burst
into other fragments, themselves in their turn destined to burst, and
so on throughout the whole process. The very lines, on which the
process of evolution has moved, show the process to be dispersive. If
we represent the line by which man has risen from the simplest forms
of life or protoplasm by an upright line; and the line by which the
lowest forms of life, such as some of the foraminifera, have continued
on their low level, by a horizontal line starting from the bottom of
the upright line, then we have two lines forming a right angle. One
represents the line of man's evolution, the other that of the
foraminifera. Between these two lines you may insert as many other
lines as necessary. That line which is most nearly upright will
represent the evolution of the highest form of vertebrate, except man;
the next, the next highest; and so on till you come to the lines
representing the invertebrates; and so on till you come to the lines
which are getting nearer and nearer to the horizontal. Thus you will
have a whole sheaf of lines, all radiating indeed from one common
point, but all nevertheless dispersing in different directions.
The rush of life, the _élan de la vie_, is thus dispersive; and if we
are to interpret the evolution of mental on the analogy of physical
life, we shall find, M. Bergson says, nothing in the latter which
compels us to assume either that intelligence is developed instinct,
or that instinct is degraded intelligence. If that be so, then, we may
say, neither is there anything to warrant us in assuming either that
religion is developed magic, or magic degraded religion. Spell is not
degraded prayer, nor is prayer a superior form of spell: neither does
become or can become the other, though man may oscillate, with great
rapidity, between the two, and for long may continue so to oscillate.
The two moods were from the beginning different, though man for long
did not clearly discriminate between the two. The dispersive force of
evolution however tends to separate them more and more widely, until
eventually oscillation ceases, if it does not become impossible.
The dispersive force of evolution manifests itself in the power of
discrimination whereby man becomes aware of differences to which, in
the first confusion of thought, he paid little attention; and
ultimately may become conscious of the first principles of reason,
morality or religion, as normative principles, in accordance with
which he feels that he should act, though he has not always acted, and
does not always act in accordance with them. In the beginning there is
confusion of feeling and confusion of thought both as to the quarter
to which prayer is addressed and as to the nature of the petitions
which should be proffered. But we should be mistaken, if from the
confusion we were to infer that there was no principle underlying the
confusion. We should be mistaken, were we to say that prayer, if
addressed to polytheistic gods, is not prayer; or that prayer, if
addressed to a fetish, is not prayer. In both cases, the being to whom
prayer is offered is misconceived and misrepresented by polytheism and
fetishism; and the misconception is due to want of discrimination and
spiritual insight. But failure to observe is no proof either that the
power of observation is wanting or that there is nothing to be
observed. The being to whom prayer is offered may be very different
from the conception which the person praying has of him, and may yet
be real.
Petitions, then, put up to polytheistic gods, or even to fetishes, may
still be prayers. But petitions may be put up, not only to
polytheistic gods, or to fetishes, but even to the one god of the
monotheist, which never should be put up. 'Of thy goodness, slay mine
enemies,' is, in form, prayer: it is a desire, a petition to a god,
implying recognition of the superiority of the divine power, implying
adoration even. But eventually it comes to be condemned as an
impossible prayer: spiritually it is a contradiction in terms. If
however we say that it is not, and never was, prayer; and that only by
confusion of thought was it ever considered so, we may be told that,
as a simple matter of actual fact, it is an actual prayer that was
actually put up. That it ought not--from the point of view of a later
stage in the development of religion--to have been put up, may be
admitted; but that it was a prayer actually put up, cannot be denied.
To this the reply seems to be that it is with prayer as it is with
argument: a fallacy is a fallacy, just as much before it is detected
as afterwards. The fact that it is not detected does not make it a
sound argument; still less does it prove either that there are now no
principles of correct reasoning or that there were none then; it only
shows that there was, on this point, confusion of thought. So too we
may admit--we have no choice but to admit--that there are spiritual
fallacies, as well as fallacies of logic. Of such are the petitions
which are in form prayers, just as logical fallacies are, in form,
arguments. They may be addressed to the being worshipped, as fallacies
are addressed to the reason; and eventually their fallacious nature
may become evident even to the reason of man. But it is only by the
evolution of prayer, that is by the disclosure of its true nature,
that petitions of the kind in question come to be recognised and
condemned as spiritual fallacies. The petitioner who puts up such
petitions is indeed unconscious of his error, but he errs, for all
that, just as the person who uses a fallacious argument may be
himself the victim of his fallacy: but he errs none the less because
he is deceived himself. There are normative principles of prayer as
well as the normative principles of thought; and both operate 'long
before they come to the surface of human thought and are articulately
expounded.' It is in thinking that the normative principles of thought
emerge. But it is by no means the case that they come to the surface
of every man's thought. So too it is in prayer that the normative
principles of prayer emerge; yet men require teaching how to pray.
Some petitions are permissible, some not.
If then there are normative principles of prayer, just as there are of
action, thought and speech; if there are petitions which are not
permissible, and which are not and never can be prayers, though by a
spiritual fallacy, analogous to logical fallacies, they may be thought
to be prayers, what is it that decides the nature of an admissible
petition? It seems to be the conception of the being to whom the
petition is addressed. Thus it is that prayer throws light on the idea
of God. From the prayers offered we can infer the nature of the idea.
The confusion of admissible and inadmissible petitions points to
confused apprehension of the idea of God. It is not merely imperfect
apprehension but confused apprehension. In polytheism the confusion
betrays itself, because it leads to collision with the principles of
morality: of the gods who make war upon one another, each must be
supposed to hold himself in the right; therefore either some gods do
not know what is right, or there is no right to be known even by the
gods. From this confusion the only mode of escape, which is
satisfactory both to religion and to morality, is to recognise that
the unity of morality and the unity of the godhead mutually imply one
another. But so long as a plurality of gods, with a shifting standard
of morality, is believed in, the distinction between admissible and
inadmissible petitions cannot be firmly or correctly drawn.
A tribal god is petitioned to slay the tribe's enemies, because he is
conceived as the god of the tribe and not the god of its enemies. If
the declaration, that 'I am thy servant,' is affirmed with emphasis on
the first personal pronoun, so as to imply that others are no servants
of thine, the implication is that thy servants' enemies are thy
enemies; whereas if there is, for all men, one God only, then all men
are his servants, and not one person, or one tribe, alone. The
conception of God as the god of one tribe alone is an imperfect and
confused apprehension of the idea of God. But it is less so than is
the conception of a god as belonging to one individual owner, as a
fetish does. To a fetish the distinctive, though not the only, prayer
offered, precisely is 'Slay mine enemies'; and therein it is that lies
the difference between a fetish and a god of the community. The
difference is the same in kind as that between a tribal god and the
God of all mankind. The fetish and the tribal god are both inadequate
ideas of God; and the inadequacy implies confusion--the confusion of
conceiving that the god is there only to subserve the desires and to
do the will of the individual worshipper or body of worshippers.
Escape from this confusion is to some extent secured by the fact that
prayers to the community's god are offered by the community aloud, in
public and as part of the public worship; and, consequently, with the
object of securing the fulfilment of the desires of the community as a
community. The blessing on the community is, at this stage, the only
blessing in which the individual can properly share, and the only one
for which he can pray to the god of the community. Thus the nature of
the petitions, and the quarter to which permissible petitions can be
addressed, are determined by the fact that prayer is an office
undertaken by the community as a community. If the desires which an
individual entertains are such as would be repudiated by the
community, because injurious to the community, they cannot be
preferred, in the presence of the community, to the god of the
community; and thus permissible petitions begin to be differentiated
from those which are impermissible--a normative principle of prayer
emerges, and the idea of God begins to take more definite form, or to
emerge somewhat from the mist which at first enveloped it.
But though permissible petitions be distinguished from petitions
which are impermissible, it by no means follows that impermissible
petitions cease to be put up. What actually happens is that since the
community does not, and cannot, allow petitions, conceived to be
injurious to itself, to be put up to its god, they are put up
privately to a fetish; or, to put the matter more correctly, a being
or power not identified with the welfare of the community is sought
in such cases; and the being so found is known to the science of
religion as a fetish. But though a fetish differs from a god,
inasmuch as the fetish will, and a god will not, injure a member of
the tribe, the distinction is not clear-cut. There are things which
both alike may be prayed to do: both may be besought to do good to
the individual who addresses them. To this protective mimicry the
fetish owes in part its power of survival. For the same reason spell
and magic contrive to continue their existence side by side with
religion and prayer. What conduces to this result is that at first
the god of the community is conceived as listening to the prayers of
the community rather than of the individual: from the beginning it
is part of the idea of God that He cares for all His worshippers
alike. This conviction, to be carried out to its full consequences,
both logical and spiritual, requires that each individual worshipper
should forget himself, should renounce his particular inclinations,
should abandon himself and long to do not his own will but that of
God. But before self can be consciously abandoned, the consciousness
of self must be realised. Before self-will can be surrendered, its
existence must be realised. And self-consciousness, the recognition
of the existence of the will and the reality of the self, comes
relatively late both in the history of the community and in the
personal history of the individual. At first the existence of the
individual will and the individual self is not recognised by the
community and is not provided for in the community's worship and
prayers. It is the community, as a community, and not as so many
individual worshippers, offering separate prayers, that first
approaches the community's god. The existence of the individual
worshipper, as an individual is not denied, it is simply unknown, or
rather not realised by the community. But its stirrings are felt in
the individual himself: he is conscious of desires which are other
than those of the community, and the fulfilment of which forms no
part of the community's prayers to the community's god. His
self-consciousness, his consciousness of himself as contrasted with
the community, is fostered by the growth of such desires. For the
fulfilment of some of them, those which are manifestly anti-social,
he must turn to his fetish, or rely upon the power of magic. Even for
the fulfilment of those of his desires which are not felt to be
anti-social, but which find no place in the prayers of the community,
he must rely on some other power than that of the god of the
community; and it is in spells, therefore, that he continues to trust
for the fulfilment of these innocent desires, inasmuch as the prayers
of the community do not include them.
The existence, in the individual, of desires, other than those of the
community, wakes the individual to some consciousness of his
individual existence. The effort to secure the fulfilment of those
desires increases still further his self-consciousness, for he resorts
to powers which are not exercised solely in the interests of the
community, as are the powers of the community's god. But his
increasing self-consciousness cannot and does not fail to modify his
character and action as a worshipper of the community's gods. It
modifies his relation to the community's gods in this sense, viz. that
he appears before them not merely as a member of the community
undistinguished from other members, but as an individual conscious to
some extent of his individuality. He continues to take part in the
worship of the gods, but he comes to it conscious of wishes of his own
which may become petitions to the god, so far as they are not felt to
be inconsistent with the good of the community.
Of this stage we have ample evidence afforded by the cuneiform
inscriptions of Assyria. Spells employed to the hurt of any worshipper
of the gods are spells against which the worshipper may properly
appeal to the gods for protection. A god is essentially the protector
of his worshippers, and he protects each as well as all of them. Each
of them may therefore appeal to him for protection. But though any one
of them may so appeal, it is apparently only in course of time that
individual petitions of this kind come to be put up to the gods. And
the evidence of the cuneiform inscriptions is particularly interesting
and instructive on the way in which this came about.
In the 'Maklu' tablets we find that the writers of the tablets are, or
anticipate that they may be, the victims of spells. The inscriptions
themselves may be regarded, and by some authorities are described, as
counter-charms or counter-spells. They do in fact include, though they
cannot be said to consist of, counter-spells. Their typical feature is
that they include some such phrase as, 'Whoever thou art, O witch, I
bind thy hands behind thee,' or 'May the magic thou hast made recoil
upon thyself.' If the victim is being turned yellow by sickness, the
counter-spell is 'O witch, like the circlet of this seal, may thy face
grow yellow and green.'
The ceremonies with which these counter-spells were performed are
indicated by the words, and they are ceremonies of the same kind as
those with which spells are performed: they are symbolic actions, that
is to say, actions which express by gesture the same meaning and
intention as are expressed by the words. Thus, from the words:
'As the water trickleth away from his body
So may the pestilence in his body trickle away,'
it is obvious that this counter-spell accompanied a ceremonial rite of
the kind indicated by the words. As an image of the person to be
bewitched was used by the workers of magic, so an image of her 'who
hath bewitched me' is used by the worker of the counter-spell, with
the words:
'May her spell be wrecked, and upon her
And upon her image may it recoil.'
If, now, such words, and the symbolical actions which are described
and implied, were all that these Maklu tablets contained, it might be
argued that these counter-spells were pure pieces of magic. The
argument would not indeed be conclusive, because though the sentences
are in the optative mood, there would be nothing to show on what, or
on whom, the speaker relied for the fulfilment of his wish. But as it
happens, it is characteristic of these Maklu tablets that they are all
addressed to the gods by name, e.g. 'May the great gods remove the
spell from my body,' or 'O flaming Fire-god, mighty son of Anu! judge
thou my case and grant me a decision! Burn up the sorcerers and
sorceress!' It is the gods that are prayed to that the word of the
sorceress 'shall turn back to her own mouth; may the gods of might
smite her in her magic; may the magic which she has worked be crumbled
like salt.'
Thus these Maklu petitions are not counter-spells, as at first sight
they may appear; nor are they properly to be treated as being
themselves spells for the purpose of counteracting magic. They are in
form and in fact prayers to the gods 'to undo the spell' and 'to force
back the words' of the witch into her own mouth. But though in the
form in which these Maklu petitions are preserved to us, they appear
as prayers to the gods, and not as spells, or counter-spells; it is
true, and important to notice, that, in some cases, the sentences in
the optative mood seem quite detachable from the invocation of the
gods. Those sentences may apparently have stood, at one time, quite
well by themselves, and apart from any invocation of the gods; that
is to say, they may originally have been spells or counter-spells, and
only subsequently have been incorporated into prayers addressed to the
gods.
Let us then assume that this was the case with some of these Maklu
petitions, and let us consider what is implied when we make the
assumption. What is implied is that there are some wishes, for
instance those embodied in these Maklu petitions, which may be
realised by means of spells, or may quite appropriately be preferred
to the gods of the community. Such are wishes for the well-being of
the individual worshipper and for the defeat of evil-doers who would
do or are doing him wrong. When it is recognised that individuals--as
well as the community--may come with their plaints before the gods of
the community, the functions of those gods become enlarged, for they
are extended to include the protection of individual members of the
community, as well as the protection of the community, as such; and
the functions of the community's gods are thus extended and enlarged,
because the members of the community have become, in some degree,
individuals conscious of their individuality. The importance, for the
science of religion, of this development of self-consciousness is that
the consciousness of self must be realised before self can
consciously be abandoned, that is before self-will can be consciously
surrendered.
As is shown by the Maklu petitions, there may come, in the course of
the evolution of religion, a stage in which it is recognised that the
individual worshipper may petition the gods for deliverance from the
evil which afflicts them. And the petitions used appear in some cases,
as we have seen, to have been adopted into the ritual of the gods,
word for word as they were found already in existence. If then they
were, both in the words in which they were expressed, and in the
purpose which they sought to achieve, such that they could be taken
up, as they were and without change, into the ritual of the
community's gods, it would seem that, even before they were so taken
up, they could not have been wholly, if at all, alien to the spirit of
religion. What marks them as religious, in the cuneiform inscriptions,
is their context: it shows that the power, relied on for the
accomplishment of the desires expressed in these petitions, was the
power of the gods. Remove the context, and it becomes a matter of
ambiguity, whether the wish is supposed, by those who utter it, to
depend for its realisation on some power, possessed and exercised by
those who express the wish, or whether it is supposed to depend on the
good will of some being vaguely conceived, and not addressed by name.
But if eventually the wish, and the words in which it was expressed,
are taken up into the worship of the gods, there seems a balance of
probability that the wish was from the beginning rather in the nature
of religion than of magic, rather a petition than a command; though
the categories were not at first discriminated, and there was at first
no clear vision of the quarter from which fulfilment of the wish was
hoped for.
From this point of view, optative sentences, sentences which express
the wishes of him who pronounces them, may, in the beginning, well
have been ambiguous, because there was, in the minds of those who
uttered them, no clear conception of the quarter to which they were
addressed: the idea of God may have been vague to the extreme of
vagueness. Some of these optative sentences however, were such that
the community as a whole could join in them; and they were
potentially, and became actually, prayers to the god of the community.
The being to whom the community, as a whole, could pray, was thereby
displayed as the god of the community. The idea of God became, so far,
somewhat less vague, somewhat more sharply defined. Optative
sentences, however, in which the community could not join, in which no
one but the person who framed them could take part, could not be
addressed to the god of the community. The idea of God thus was
defined negatively: there were wishes which could not be communicated
to him--those which were repugnant to the well-being of the community.
The prayers of savages, that is of the men who are probably still
nearest to the circumstances and condition of primitive man, furnish
the material from which we can best infer what was the idea of God
which was present in their consciousness at those moments when it was
most vividly present to them. In view of the infinite number and
variety of the forms of religion and religious belief, nothing would
seem, _a priori_, more reasonable than to expect an equally infinite
number of various and contradictory ideas. Especially should this seem
a reasonable expectation to those who consider the idea of God to be
fundamentally, and of its very nature, impossible and untenable. And
so long as we look at the attempts which have been made, by means of
reflection upon the idea, to body it forth, we have the evidence of
all the mythologies to show the infinite variety of monstrosities,
which reflection on the idea has been capable of producing. If then we
stop there, our _a priori_ expectation of savage and irrational
inconsistency is fulfilled to abundance and to loathsome excess. But
to stop there is to stop short, and to accept the speculations of the
savage when he is reflecting on his experience, instead of pushing
forward to discover for ourselves, if we may, what his experience
actually was. To discover that, we cannot be content to pause for
ever on his reflections. We must push back to the moment of his
experience, that is to the moments when he is in the presence of his
gods and is addressing them. Those are the moments in which he prays
and in which he has no doubt that he is in communion with his gods. It
is, then, from his prayers that we must seek to infer what idea he has
of the gods to whom he prays.
When, however, we take his prayers as the evidence from which to infer
his idea of God, instead of the luxuriant overgrowth of speculative
mythology, we find everywhere a bare simplicity, and everywhere
substantial identity. If this is contrary to our expectation and at
first seems strange, let us bear in mind that the science of morals
offers a parallel, in this respect, to the science of religion. At one
time it was, unconsciously but none the less decidedly, assumed that
savages had a multiplicity of irrational and disgusting customs but no
morals. The idea that there could be a substantial identity between
the moral rules of different savage races, and even between their
moral rules and ours, was an idea that simply was not entertained.
Nevertheless, it was a fact, though unnoticed; and now it is a fact
which, thanks to Dr Westermarck, is placed beyond dispute. 'When,' he
says, 'we examine the moral rules of uncivilised races we find that
they in a very large measure resemble those prevalent among nations
of culture.' The human spirit throughout the process of its evolution
is, in truth, one; the underlying unity which manifests itself
throughout the evolution of morality is to be found also in the
evolution of religion; and it is from the prayers of man that we can
infer it.
The first and fundamental article of belief implied by the offering of
prayers is that the being to whom they are offered--however vaguely he
may be conceived--is believed to be accessible to man. Man's cry can
reach Him. Not only does it reach Him but, it is believed, He will
listen to it; and it is of His very nature that He is disposed to
listen favourably to it. But, though He will listen, it is only to
prayers offered in the right spirit that He will listen. The earliest
prayers offered are in all probability those which the community sends
up in time of trouble; and they must be offered in the spirit of
repentance. It is with the conviction that they have offended that the
community first turns to the being worshipped, by whom they hope to be
delivered from the evil which is upon them, and by whom they pray to
be forgiven.
Next, the offering of prayer implies the belief that the being
addressed, not merely understands the prayers offered, but has the
power to grant them. As having not only the power, but also the will
so to do, he is approached not only with fear but also with hope. No
approach would or could be made, if nothing could be hoped from it;
and nothing could be hoped, unless the being approached were believed
to have the power to grant the prayer. The very fact that approach is
made shows that the being is at the moment believed to be one with
whom it rests to grant or refuse the supplication, one than whom no
other is, in this respect at least, more powerful, _quo nihil maius_.
But prayers offered in time of trouble, though they be, or if they be,
the earliest, are not the only prayers that are offered by early man.
Man's wishes are not, and never were, limited: escape from calamity is
not, and never has been, the only thing for which man is capable of
wishing. It certainly is not the only thing for which he has been
capable of praying. Even early man wishes for material blessings: the
kindly fruits of the earth and his daily food are things for which he
not only works but also prays. The negro on the Gold Coast prays for
his daily rice and yams, the Zulu for cattle and for corn, the Samoan
for abundant food, the Finno-Ugrian for rain to make his crops grow;
the Peruvian prayed for health and prosperity. And when man has
attained his wish, when his prayers have been granted, he does not
always forget to render thanks to the god who listened to his prayer.
'Thank you, gods'; says the Basuto, 'give us bread to-morrow also.'
Whether the prayer be for food, or for deliverance from calamity, the
natural tendency is for gratitude and thanks to follow, when the
prayer has been fulfilled; and the mental attitude, or mood of
feeling, is then no longer one of hope or fear, but of thankfulness
and praise. It is in its essence, potentially and, to varying degrees,
actually, the mood of veneration and adoration.
'My lips shall praise thee,
So will I bless thee while I live:
I will lift up my hands in thy name,
And my mouth shall praise thee with joyful lips.'
From the prayers that are offered in early, if not primitive,
religions we may draw with safety some conclusions as to the idea,
which the worshippers had before their minds, of the being to whom
they believed they had access in prayer. He was a being accessible in
prayer; and he had it in his power, and, if properly approached, in
his will, to deliver the community from material and external evils.
The spirit in which he was to be properly approached was one of
confession and repentance of offences committed against him: the
calamities which fell upon the community were conceived to have fallen
justly. He was not conceived to be offended without a cause. Doubtless
the causes of offence, like the punishments with which they were
visited, were external and visible, in the sense that they could be
discovered and made plain to all who were concerned to recognise
them. The offences were actions which not only provoked the wrath of
the god, but were condemned by the community. They included offences
which were purely formal and external; and, in the case of some
peoples, the number of such offences probably increased rather than
diminished as time went on. The _Surpu_ tablets of the cuneiform
inscriptions, which are directed towards the removal of the _mamit_,
the ban or taboo, consequent upon such offences, are an example of
this. Adultery, murder and theft are included amongst the offences,
but the tablets include hundreds of other offences, which are purely
ceremonial, and which probably took a long time to reach the luxuriant
growth they have attained in the tablets. For ceremonial offences a
ceremonial purification was felt to suffice. But there were others
which, as the Babylonian Penitential Psalms testify, were felt to go
deeper and to be sins, personal sins of the worshipper against his
God. The penitent exclaims:
'Lord, my sins are many, great are my misdeeds.'
The spirit, in which he approaches his God, is expressed in the words:
'I thy servant, full of sighs, call upon thee.
Like the doves do I moan, I am o'ercome with sighing,
With lamentation and groaning my spirit is downcast.'
His prayer is that his trespasses may be forgiven:
'Rend my sins, like a garment!
My God, my sins are unto seven times seven.
Forgive my iniquities.'
And his hope is in God:
'Oh, Lord, thy servant, cast him not away,
The sins which I have committed, transform by thy grace!'
The attitude of mind, the relation in which the worshipper finds
himself to stand towards his God, is the same as that revealed in the
Psalm of David:
'Wash me throughly from mine iniquity,
And cleanse me from my sin.
For I acknowledge my transgressions:
And my sin is ever before me.
Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.
Cast me not away from thy presence.'
The earliest prayers offered by any community probably were, as we
have already seen, those which were sent up in time of trouble and
inspired by the conviction that the community's god had been justly
offended. The psalms, from which quotations have just been given, show
the same idea of God, conceived to have been justly offended by the
transgressions of his servants. The difference between them is that,
in the later prayers, the individual self-consciousness has come to
realise that the individual as well as the community exists; that the
individual, as well as the community, is guilty of trespasses; and
that the individual, as well as the community, needs forgiveness. That
is to say, the idea of God has taken more definite shape: God has been
revealed to the individual worshipper to be 'My God'; the worshipper
to be 'Thy servant'; and what is feared is not merely that the
worshipper should be excluded from the community, but that he should
be cast away from communion with God. The communion, aspired to, is
however still such communion as may exist between a servant and his
master.
Material and external blessings, further, are, together with
deliverance from material and external evil, still the principal
subjects of prayer in the Psalms both of the Old Testament and of the
cuneiform inscriptions; and, so far as this is the case, the
worshipper's prayer is that his individual will may be done, and it is
because he has received material and external blessings, because his
will has been done, that his joyful lips praise and bless the Lord.
That is to say, the idea of God, implied by such prayer and praise, is
that He is a being who may help man to the fulfilment of man's desires
and to the realisation of man's will. The assumption required to
justify this conception is that in man, man's will alone is operative,
and never God's. This assumption has its analogy in the fact, already
noticed, that in the beginning the individual is not self-conscious,
or aware of the individuality of his own existence. When the
individual's self-consciousness is thus but little, if at all,
manifested, it is the community, as a community, which approaches its
god and is felt to be responsible for the transgressions which have
offended him. As self-consciousness comes to manifest itself, more and
more, the sense of personal transgression and individual
responsibility becomes more and more strong. If now we suppose that at
this point the evolution, or unfolding, of the self ceases, and that
the whole of its contents is now revealed, we shall hold that, in man,
man's will alone can operate, and never God's. It is indeed at this
point that non-Christian religions stop, if they get so far. The idea
of God as a being whose will is to be done, and not man's, is a
distinctively Christian idea.
The petition, which, as far as the science of religion enables us to
judge, was the first petition made by man, was for deliverance from
evil. The next, in historical order, was for forgiveness of sins; and,
then, when society had come to be settled on an agricultural basis and
dependent on the harvest, prayer was offered for daily bread. In the
Lord's Prayer, the order of these petitions is exactly reversed. A
fresh basis, or premiss, for them, is supplied. They are still
petitions proper to put forward, if put forward in the consciousness
of a fact, hitherto not revealed--that man may do not his own will
but the will of Our Father, who is in heaven.
Prayer is thus, at the end, what it was at the beginning, the prayer
of a community. But whereas at the beginning the community was the
narrow and exclusive community of the family or tribe, at the end it
is a community which may include all mankind. Thus, the idea of God
has increased in its extension. In its intension, so to speak, it has
deepened: God is disclosed not as the master and king of his subjects
and servants, but as the Father in heaven of his children on earth. It
has however not merely deepened, it has been transformed, or rather it
is to be approached in a different mood, and therefore is revealed in
a new aspect: whereas in the beginning the body of worshippers,
whether it approached its god with prayer for deliverance from
calamities or for material blessings, approached him in order that
their desires might be fulfilled; in the end the worshipper is taught
that approach is possible only on renunciation of his own desires and
on acceptance of God's will. The centre of religion is transposed: it
is no longer man and his desires round which religion is to revolve.
The will of God is to be the centre, to which man is no longer to
gravitate unconsciously but to which he is deliberately to determine
himself. As in the solar system the force of gravity is but one, so in
the spiritual system that which holds all spiritual beings together
is the love which proceeds from God to his creatures and may
increasingly proceed from them to Him. It is the substitution of the
love of God for the desires of man which makes the new heaven and the
new earth.
From the point of view of evolution the important fact is that this
new aspect of the idea of God is not something merely superposed upon
the old: if it were simply superposed, it would not be evolved.
Neither is the disclosure, to the soul, of God as love, evolved from
the conception of Him as the being from whom men may seek the
fulfilment of their desires. To interpret the process of religious
evolution in this way would be to misinterpret it, in exactly the same
way as if we were to suppose that, only when the evolution of
vegetable life had been carried out to the full in all its forms, did
the evolution of animal life begin. Animals are not vegetables carried
to a rather higher stage of evolution, any more than vegetables are
animals which have relapsed to a lower stage. If then we are to apply
the theory of evolution to spiritual life, as well as to bodily life,
we must apply it in the same way. We must regard the various forms, in
the one case as in the other, as following different lines, and
tending in different directions from a common centre, rather than as
different and successive sections of one and the same line. Spell no
more becomes prayer than vegetables become animals. Impelled by the
force of calamity to look in one direction--that of deliverance from
pestilence or famine--early man saw, in the idea of God, a refuge in
time of trouble. Moved at a later time by the feeling of gratitude,
man found in the idea of God an object of veneration; and then
interpreted his relation as that of a servant to his lord. Whichever
way this interpretation was pushed--whether to mean that the servant
was to do things pleasing to his lord, in order to gain the fulfilment
of his own desires; or to imply that his transgressions stood ever
between him and his offended master--further advance in that direction
was impossible. A new direction, and therefore a fresh point of
departure, was necessary. It was forthcoming in the Christian idea of
God as the heavenly Father. That idea when revealed is seen to have
been what was postulated but never attained by religion in its earlier
stages. The petitions for our daily bread, for forgiveness of sins,
and for delivery from evil, had as their basis, in pre-Christian
religions, man's desire. In Christianity those petitions are preferred
in the conviction that the making of them is in accordance with God's
will and the granting of them in accordance with His love; and that
conviction is a normative principle of prayer.
V
THE IDEA AND BEING OF GOD
Men thought, spoke and acted for long ages before they began to
reflect on the ways in which they did so; and, when they did begin to
reflect, it was long before they discovered the principles on which
they thought, spoke and acted, or recognised them as the principles on
which man must speak, if he is to speak intelligibly; on which, as
laws of thought, he must think, if he is to think correctly; and on
which, as laws of morality, he must act, if he is to act as he should
act.
But though many thousands of years elapsed before he recognised these
laws, they were, all the time, the laws on which he had to think,
speak and act, and did actually think, speak and act, so far as he did
so correctly. When, then, we speak of the evolution of thought, speech
and action, we cannot mean that the laws of thought, for instance,
were in the beginning different from what they are now, and only
gradually came to be what they are at present. That would be just the
same as saying that the law of gravitation did not operate in the way
described by Newton until Newton formulated the law. The fact is that
science has its evolution, just as thought, speech and action have.
Man gradually and with much effort discovers laws of science, as he
discovers the laws of thought, speech and action. In neither case does
he make the laws; all that he does in either case is to come to
recognise that they are there. But the recognition is a process, a
slow process, attended by many mistakes and set-backs. And this slow
process of the gradual recognition or discovery of fundamental laws,
or first principles, is the process in which the evolution of science,
as well as the evolution of thought, speech and action, consists. It
is the process by which the laws that are at the bottom of man's
thought, speech and action, and are fundamental to them, tend to rise
to the surface of consciousness.
It is in this same process that the evolution of religion consists. It
is the slow process, the gradual recognition, of the fundamental idea
of religion--the idea of God--which tends to rise to the surface of
the religious consciousness. Just as laws of thought, speech and
action are implied by the very conception of right thought or speech
or action, so the idea of God is implied by the mere conception of
religion. It is implied always; it is implicit from the very
beginning. It is disclosed gradually and imperfectly. The process of
disclosure, which is the evolution of the idea, may, in many
instances, be arrested at a stage of very early imperfection, by
causes which make further development in that direction impossible;
and then, if further progress is to be made, a fresh movement, in a
fresh direction must be made. Just as men do not always think
correctly, or act rightly, though they tend, in different degrees, to
do so; so too, in religion, neither do they always move in the right
direction, even if they move at all. They may even deteriorate, at
times, in religion, as, at times, they deteriorate in morality. But it
is not necessary to infer from this undoubted fact that there are no
principles of either morality or religion. We are not led to deny the
existence of the laws of logic or of grammar, because they are
frequently disregarded by ourselves and others.
The principles, or rather some particular principle, of morality may
be absolutely misconceived by a community, at some stage of its
history, in such a way that actions of a certain kind are not
condemned by it. The inconsistency of judgment and feeling, thus
displayed, is not the less inconsistent because it is almost, if not
entirely, unconscious. In the same way a community may fail to
recognise a principle of religion, or may misinterpret the idea of
God; still the fact that they misinterpret it is proof that they have
it--if they had it not, they could not interpret it in different ways.
And the different interpretations are the different ways in which its
evolution is carried forward. Its evolution is not in one continuous
line, but is radiative from one common centre, and is dispersive. That
is the reason why the originators of religious movements, and the
founders of religions, consider themselves to be restoring an old
state of things, rather than initiating a new one; to be returning to
the old religion, rather than starting a new religion. But in point of
fact they are not reverting to a bygone stage in the history of
religion; they are starting afresh from the fundamental principles of
religion. From the central idea of religion, the idea of God, they
move in a direction different from any hitherto followed. Monotheism
may in order of time follow upon polytheism, but it is not polytheism
under another name, any more than prayer is spell under another name.
It is something very different: it is the negation of polytheism, not
another form of it. It strikes at the roots of polytheism; and it does
so because it goes back not to polytheism but to that from which
polytheism springs, the idea of God; and starts from it in a direction
which leads to a very different manifestation of the idea of God. And
if monotheism displaces polytheism, it does so because it is found by
experience to be the more faithful interpretation of that idea of God
which even the polytheist has in his soul. In the same way, and for
the same reasons, polytheism is not fetishism under another name. The
gods of a community are not the fetishes of individuals. The
difference between them is not a mere difference of name. Polytheism
may, or may not, follow, in order of time, upon fetishism; but
polytheism is not merely a form of fetishism. The two are different,
and largely inconsistent, interpretations, or misinterpretations, of
the same fundamental idea of God. They move in different directions,
and are felt by the communities in which they are found, to tend in
the direction of very different ends--the one to the good of the
community, the other, in its most characteristic manifestations, to
the injury of the community. In fetishism and polytheism we see the
radiative, dispersive, force of evolution manifesting itself, just as
in polytheism and monotheism. The different lines of evolution radiate
in different directions, but those lines, all point to a common centre
of dispersion--the idea of God. But fetishism, polytheism and
monotheism are not different and successive stages of one line of
evolution, following the same direction. They are lines of different
lengths, moving in different directions, though springing from a
common centre--the soul of man. It is because they have a common
centre, that man, whichever line he has followed, can fall back upon
it and start afresh.
The fact that men fall victims to logical fallacies does not shake our
faith in the validity of the principles of reason; nor does the fact
that false reasoning abounds the more, the lower we descend in the
scale of humanity, lead us to believe that the principles of reason
are invalid and non-existent there. Still less do we believe that,
because immature minds reason often incorrectly, therefore correct
reasoning is for all men an impossibility and a contradiction in
terms. And these considerations apply in just the same way to the
principles of religion and the idea of God, as to the principles of
reason. Yet we are sometimes invited to believe that the existence of
religious fallacies, or fallacious religions, is of itself enough to
prove that there is no validity in the principles of religion, no
reality in the idea of God; that because the uncultured races of
mankind are the victims of error in religion, there is in religion no
truth at all: the religion of civilised mankind consists but of the
errors of the savage disguised in civilised garb. So far as this view
is supposed to be the outcome of the study of the evolution of
religion, it is due probably to the conception of evolution from which
it proceeds. It proceeds on the assumption that the process of
evolution exhibits the continuity of one and the same continuous line.
It ignores the radiative, dispersive movement of evolution in
different lines; and overlooks the fact that new forms of religion
are all re-births, renaissances, and spring not from one another, but
from the soul of man, in which is found the idea of God. It further
assumes not merely that there are errors but that there is no truth
whatever in the lowest, or the earliest, forms of religion; and that
therefore neither is there any truth in the highest. But this
assumption, if applied to the principles of thought, speech or action,
would equally prove thought to be irrational, speech unintelligible,
moral action absurd; and evolution would be the process by which this
fundamental irrationality, unintelligibility and absurdity was worked
out.
Either this is the conclusion, or some means must be sought whereby to
distinguish the evolution of religion from the evolution of thought,
speech and morals, and to show that--whereas in the case of the
latter, evolution is the process in which the principles whereon man
should think, speak and act, tend to manifest themselves with
increasing clearness--in the case of religion, there is no such
progressive revelation, and no first principle, or fundamental idea,
which all forms of religion seek to express. But any attempt to show
this is hopeless: the science of religion is engaged throughout in
ascertaining and comparing the ideas which the various races of men
have had of their gods; and in tracing the evolution of the idea of
God.
The science of religion, however, it may be said, is concerned
exclusively with the evolution, and not in the least with the value or
validity, of the idea. But neither, we must remember, is it concerned
to dispute its value or to deny its validity; and no man can help
drawing his own conclusions from the established fact that the idea is
to be found wherever man is to be found. If, however, by the idea of
God we mean simply an intellectual idea, merely a verbal proposition,
we shall be in danger of drawing erroneous conclusions. The historian
of religion, in discussing the idea of God, its manifestations and its
evolution, is bound to express himself in words, and to reduce what he
has to say to a series of verbal propositions. Nothing, therefore, is
more natural than to imagine that the idea of God is a verbal,
intellectual proposition; and nothing is more misleading. If we start
from this misleading notion, then, as words are but words, we may be
led to imagine that the idea of God is nothing more or other than the
words: it is mere words. If however this conclusion is, for any
reason, displeasing to us, and if we stick to the premiss that the
idea of God is a verbal proposition, then we shall naturally draw a
distinction between the idea of God and the being of God; and, having
thus fixed a great gulf between the idea and the being of God, we
shall be faced with the difficulty of crossing it. We may then feel it
to be not merely difficult but impossible to get logically to the
other side of the gulf; that is to say, we shall conclude that the
being of God is an inference, but an inference which never can be
logically verified: the inference may be a correct or an incorrect
inference, but we cannot possibly know which it is. From the idea of
God we can never logically infer His being. Since then no logic will
carry us over the chasm we have fixed between the idea and the being
of God, if we are to cross it, we must jump it: we must take the leap
of faith, we must believe the passage possible, just because it is
impossible. And those who take the leap, do land safely--we have their
own testimony to that--as safely as, in _King Lear_, Gloucester leaps
from the cliff of Dover; and they well may
'Think that the clearest gods, who make them honours
Of men's impossibilities, have preserv'd them.'
But, in Gloucester's case, there was no cliff and no abyss; and, in
our case, it may be well to enquire whether the great gulf between the
idea and the being of God has any more reality than that down which
Gloucester, precipitating, flung himself. The premiss, that the idea
of God is a mere verbal proposition, may be a premiss as imaginary as
that from which Gloucester leaped. If the idea of God is merely a
proposition in words, and if words are but words, then the gulf
between idea and being is real. If the being of God is an inference
from the idea of God, it is merely an inference, and an inference of
no logical value. And the same remark holds equally true, if we apply
it to the case of any finite personal being: if the being of our
neighbours were an inference from the idea we have formed of them, it
also would be an inference of no logical value. But, fortunately,
their being does not depend on the idea we have formed of them: it
partially reveals itself to us in our idea of them, and partially is
obscured by it. It is a fact of our experience, or a fact experienced
by us. We interpret it, and to some extent misinterpret it, as we do
all other facts. If this partly true, and partly false, interpretation
is what we mean by the word 'idea,' then it is the idea which is an
inference from the being of our neighbour--an inference which can be
checked by closer acquaintance--but we do not first have the idea of
him, and then wonder whether a being, corresponding more or less to
the idea, exists. If we had the idea of our fellow-beings
first--before we had experience of them--if it were from the edge of
the idea that we had to leap, we might reasonably doubt whether to
fling ourselves into such a logical, or rather into such an illogical,
abyss. But it is from their being as an experienced fact, that we
start; and with the intention of constructing from it as logical an
idea as lies within our power. What is inference is not the being but
the idea, so far as the idea is thus constructed.
The idea, thus constructed, may be constructed correctly, or
incorrectly. Whether it is constructed correctly or incorrectly is
determined by further experience. What is important to notice is first
that it is only by further experience, personal experience, that we
can determine how far the construction we have put upon it is or is
not correct; and, next, that so far as the construction we have put
upon it is correct, that is to say is confirmed by actual experience,
it is thereby shown to be not inference--even though it was reached by
a process of inference--but fact. The process of inference may be
compared to a path by which we struggle up the face of a cliff: it is
the path by which we get there, but it is not the firm ground on which
eventually we rest. The path is not that which upholds the cliff; nor
is the inference that on which the being of God rests. The being of
God is not something inferred but something experienced. It is by
experience--the experience of ourselves or others--that we find out
whether what by inference we were led to expect is really something of
which we can--if we will--have experience. And that which is
experienced ceases, the moment it is experienced, to be inferential.
The experience is fact: the statement of it in words is truth. But
apart from the experience, the words in which it is stated are but
words; and, without the experience, the words must remain for ever
words and nothing more than words.
If then by the idea of God we mean the words, in which it is
(inadequately) stated, and nothing more, the idea of God is separated
by an impassable gulf from the being of God. Further, if we admit that
the idea is, by its very nature, and by the very facts of the case,
essentially different from the being of God, then it is of little use
to continue to maintain that the being of God is a fact of human
experience. In that case, the supposed fact of experience is reduced
to something of which we neither have, nor can have, any idea, or
consciousness, whatever. It thereby ceases to be a fact of experience
at all. And it is precisely on this assumption that the being of God
is denied to be a fact of experience--the assumption that being and
idea are separated from one another by an impassable gulf: the idea we
can be conscious of, but of His being we can have no experience. We
must therefore ask not whether this gulf is impassable, but whether it
exists at all, or is of the same imaginary nature as that to which
Gloucester was led by Edgar.
That there may be beings, of whom we have no idea, is a proposition
which it is impossible to disprove. Such beings would be _ex hypothesi_
no part of our experience; and if God were such a being, man would
have no experience of Him. And, having no experience of Him, man could
have no idea of Him. But the experience man has, of those beings whom
he knows, is an experience in which idea and being are given together.
Even if in thought we attend to one rather than to the other of the two
aspects, the idea is still the idea of the being; and the being is
still the being of the idea. So far from there being an impassable gulf
between the two, the two are inseparable, in the moment of actual
experience. It is in moments of reflection that they appear separable
and separate, for the memory remains, when the actual experience has
ceased. We have then only to call the memory the idea, and then the
idea, in this use of the word, is as essentially different from that of
which it is said to be the idea, as the memory of a being or thing is
from the being or thing itself. If we put the memory into words, and
pronounce those words to another, we communicate to him what we
remember of our experience (modified--perhaps transmogrified--by our
reflections upon it) but we do not communicate the actual experience,
simply because we cannot. What we communicate may lead him to actual
experience for himself; but it is not itself the experience. The memory
may give rise, in ourselves or in others to whom we communicate, to
expectation and anticipation; and the expectation is the more likely
to be realised, the less the memory has been transmogrified by
reflection. But, both the memory and the anticipation are clearly
different from actual experience. It is only when they are confused
with one aspect of the actual experience--that which we have called the
idea--that the idea is supposed to be detachable from the being of whom
we have actual experience. The idea is part of the experience; the
memory obviously is not.
If then it be said that the being of God is always an inference and is
never anything more, the reply is that the being of anything whatever
that is remembered or expected is, in the moment of memory or of
anticipation, inferential; but, in the moment of actual experience, it
is not inferred--it is experienced. And what is experienced is, and
from the beginning has always been, in religions of the lower as well
as of the higher culture, at once the being and the idea of God.
INDEX
Aaron, 11
Adoration, 108 ff., 126, 144
Aeschylus, 37
Aetiological myths, 50, 53
Africans, 59
Allegory, 47
Animism, 17, 35, 50
Anthropomorphism, 18 ff., 27
Anti-social character of fetishism, 8, 14
Anu, 136
Aristotle, 121
Assyria, 134 ff.
Atonement, 54, 75
Australians, 57, 58, 59, 86-89, 113, 114
Awe, 24
Axe-heads, 11
Aztecs, 77, 78, 88
Babylonian psalms, 145
Basutos, 143
Being, and idea, 161 ff.
Bergson, 123, 125
Black-fellows, 57
Bow, and arrow, 42
Bull-roarer, 42
Burnt-offerings, 72
Calamity, 73, 97, 103
Ceres, 84
Chicomecoatl, 84
Child (the), and the community, 1, 14
Child (the), and self-consciousness, 3
Children, their toys, 41;
and tales, 41;
community of, 42
Chota Nagpur, 63, 64, 65, 83, 85, 88
Christ, 100
Christianity, 19, 26, 57, 148, 151
Commerce, 69
Common consciousness, capable of emotion and purpose, 2, 3, 14;
the source and the criterion of the individual's speech, thought and
action, 2, 3;
its attitude towards magic, 9 ff., 18;
and tales, 31;
and mythology, 37, 38, 48
Communion (Christian), 77
Communion, 110, 111, 147
Corn-deities, 82 ff.
Counter-spells, 134 ff.
Covenant, the old and the new, 100
Covenant-theory, 92 ff., 98 ff.
Cuneiform inscriptions, 134 ff., 147
Custom, 41, 42, 98
Desire (and prayer), 118 ff.
Desires, of individual and community, 7, 8, 9
Digging-stick, 43
Di indigites, 51-53, 56, 58, 83, 88
Dionysius Thrax, 121
Disease of language, 33, 34
Dog, and master, 25
_Do ut des_, 68
Eating with the god, 74, 77, 91
Ecstasy, 110
Elijah, 13, 119
Emotion, 2, 3, 7, 23, 54, 55
Emperor, of Japan, 93, 95
Euripides, 37
Europe, 57
Evolution, and revelation, 29, 122, 150, 152 ff.
Exodus, 93
Expectation, 164
Experience, 44, 161 ff.
Faith, 62
Fallacies, 127, 128, 157
Fear, 25, 103
Feast, sacrificial, 74 ff.
Ferrier, 121
Fetishism, 4-8, 13-15, 20, 21, 27, 30, 31, 36, 120, 123, 126,
129-131, 156
Fiction, 31, 32
Finno-Ugrians, 143
Fire-god, 136
First-fruits, 80 ff., 90, 115
Folk-lore, 57
Food-offerings, 72, 78, 89
Food-supply, 12, 13
Foraminifera, 124
Forms, of speech and of religion, 106
Gesture-language, 66, 114
Gift-theory, 68 ff., 95
Gloucester, 160
Godhead, unity of, 23;
a personal being, 26
Gods, 4-6, 8, 12, 14, 16, 21, 22, 25, 26, 44
Gold-coast, 143
Grammar, 121
Gravitation, 153
Greece, 104, 111
Harvest-gods, 94 ff.
Harvest-offerings, 114, 115
Harvest-rites, 81, 85
Hero, of tales, 30;
of myths, 31
History of religion, 23, 27, 28, 29, 30
Idea, and being, 161 ff.
Idol, and fetish, 4, 13
_Iliad_, 41
Imagination, in tales and myths, 49, 50, 51
Immorality, of mythology, 47
Immortality, 105
Individual (the), 4, 14, 132 ff.
Indo-Europeans, 47, 48
Inference, 162 ff.
Israel, 93, 100
Italy, 51, 56
Japan, 92 ff.
Jehovah, 93
Jews, 26
_King Lear_, 156 ff.
Language, 101, 102, 106, 107
Law, 153 ff.
Locutius, 52
Logic, 121
Love, 26, 100, 105, 150
Magic, 8 f., 9, 10, 11 f., 12, 91, 116, 119, 120, 123, 125, 133 ff.
Maize-mother, 77, 88
Maklu tablets, 134 ff.
Mamit, 145
Max Müller, 33, 34
Meal, sacrificial, 74 ff.
Memory, 164
Mexico, 77, 78, 88, 91, 110, 111
Miracles, 10 ff.
Monotheism, 58, 61, 155
Moods, 119
Morality, 21, 22, 25, 26, 41, 44-46, 125, 141 ff., 154
Moses, 93, 119
Mysteries, 104 ff., 111
Mysticism, 110
Myths, 20-22, 30 ff., 39, 40, 43, 47, 48-52, 55-58, 60
Names, 16, 52, 57, 64, 82 ff.
Narratives, and myths, 33, 40, 49, 51
Negroes, 15
Nursery-tales, 41
Obedience, 98, 100, 101
Oblations, 65, 66, 73, 97, 98
Offerings, 67 ff., 85 ff.
Optative sentences, 139 ff.
Orbona, 52
Origin, of gods and of mythology, 34
Ossipago, 51
Penitential Psalms, 145, 147
Personality, 3, 4, 11, 17, 20, 28, 29, 45, 54, 55, 82, 83, 86
Peruvians, 143
Petitions, 126, 128, 130 ff.
Plague, 52
Plato, 92
Polydaemonism, 16 ff.;
change to polytheism, 18, 30;
and mythology, 31, 32
Polytheism, 4, 7, 16, 18, 22, 30-32, 35, 36, 40, 61, 155
Possession, 110
Power, man of, 12 ff.
Prayer, 108 ff.
Priests, 120
Principles, 121, 123, 128, 153 ff.
Prophet and magician, 10 ff.
Protoplasm, 124
Psalms of David, 146, 147
Quietism, 112
Rain-making, 9, 12, 13, 119
Reconciliation, 98
Reflection, 33, 36, 53-56, 60, 96
Religion, 8 ff., 35, 39, 54-56, 104 ff.
Revelation, 29, 58
Reverence, 24
Ritual, 31, 57, 61-63, 101 ff., 114
Romans, the, 52, 53
Sacrifice, 52, 63, 64, 67 ff., 72, 73, 79 ff., 85, 97 ff.
Salvation, 105
Samoans, 143
Search, for God, 59
Seed-time, 115
Self, 3, 4, 7, 104, 132 ff., 137, 148
Self-renunciation, 149
Shinto, 92 ff.
Sign (of the cross), 116
Sin, 103, 104, 145 ff.
Socrates, 55
Sophocles, 37
Species, 83 ff., 91, 92
Speech, 3, 121, 153 ff.
Spells, 115 ff., 134 ff., 150, 151
Survivals, 38, 56, 57, 58, 59
Taboo, 145
Tales, and myths, 31-33, 49, 51
Totems, 84 ff.
Tylor, Professor, 15
Vagitanus, 51
Vegetation-deities, 81 ff.
Veneration, 151
Viriplaca, 52
Water, 135
Way of the Gods, 92 ff.
Western Africa, 8, 15
Will, of God, 149 ff.
Wind, spirits of, 93 ff.
Witches, 134 ff.
Worship, 19, 55, 57, 58, 60-63
Xilonen, 84
Zulus, 143
CAMBRIDGE: PRINTED BY JOHN CLAY, M.A. AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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