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Title: The evolution of religion
An anthropological study
Author: Lewis Richard Farnell
Release date: September 25, 2023 [eBook #71722]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1905
Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE EVOLUTION OF RELIGION ***
THE EVOLUTION OF
RELIGION
AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY
BY
L. R. FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.
AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK STATES”
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY LECTURER
IN CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGY; CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE
GERMAN IMPERIAL ARCHÆOLOGICAL INSTITUTE; FELLOW
OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY
NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
LONDON: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
1905
Preface
{v}
A small book on a great and difficult subject must explain and
apologise for itself, especially if it cannot claim a _raison d’être_
as a handbook for beginners. Having accepted the stimulating
invitation to give in the spring of this year a short series of
lectures for the Hibbert Trust on some subject belonging to the
department of comparative religion, I felt that it was desirable to
avoid those topics that had been appropriated by former lecturers; and
also that the Trustees, as well as the audience, deserved that what
the lecturer put forth should embody the results of some personal and
original study. I finally selected for special discussion the ritual
of purification, and {vi} the influence of the ideas associated with
it upon law, morality, and religion; and secondly, the development of
prayer from lower to higher forms. These subjects do not appear to
have been as yet exhaustively treated by modern anthropology or
scientific and comparative theology, and I had already worked upon
them to some extent as “parerga” of the treatise that I am completing
for the Clarendon Press on the history of Greek cults. I am aware that
these special questions would well repay longer and more minute
research, and could each furnish material for a large volume. But
having been advised to publish the lectures more or less as they were
delivered, I put them forth as tentative and incomplete work. I
specially regret to have been unable to have gone further at present
into the Egyptian evidence, with the kindly proffered assistance of Mr
Griffiths, the Reader in Egyptology at Oxford.
The first two lectures, dealing with the methods and the value of the
study of comparative {vii} religion and its relations to anthropology,
are of a more general character. If they seem to occupy somewhat too
large a part of a work of this small compass, the urgency of the
questions they raise may serve as an apology. It was suggested to me
that some such pronouncement might be timely at the point we have
reached. For the subject is winning greater consideration, and even
receiving endowment, in the organisation of the newer Universities.
From the scientific point of view it is one of the most fascinating of
studies; and its practical importance for our colonial administrators
and our missionaries is obvious to those who reflect. It is also a
legitimate hope that its wider and more intelligent recognition in
England may tend to cool and temper the heated atmosphere of dogmatic
controversy, by presenting religious facts in their true proportion
and proper setting.
I must take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to many
friends for valuable {viii} assistance, and especially to my friend
and colleague, Mr R. Marett, to whose comprehensive knowledge of the
religious thought and ritual of savage races I owe many important
clues.
L. R. FARNELL.
_August_, 1905.
Contents
{ix}
LECTURES I. AND II.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS
LECTURE III.
THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR
INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM
LECTURE IV.
THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS
INDEX
ENDNOTES
The Evolution of Religion
{1}
LECTURES I. AND II.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS
The reasonable and sympathetic study of the various religions of
mankind, which are perhaps the clearest mirror we possess of human
feeling, aspiration, and thought in its highest and lowest forms, is
only possible for the individual or for the age that feels no
constraining call to suppress and obliterate all save one cherished
creed. Such study began, as we should expect, in the earlier Hellenic
period, the Hellenic religion throwing few or no obstacles in the way
of undogmatic investigation; and the first anthropologist of religion
is Herodotus. Then among Hellenistic {2} scholars and those of
pre-Christian Rome there were some who devoted themselves to the
collection and exposition of the religious institutions of foreign
races. But save a few short treatises, such as Plutarch’s _De Iside et
Osiride_, Sallustius’ _De Diis et Mundo_, Lucian’s _De Dea Syria_,
nothing has survived beyond the titles and the fragments of their
works; and by an irony of fortune we owe much of our knowledge of
Hellenic and other religions of the Mediterranean area to the
Christian controversialists, who reveal many of the essential features
of the various pagan creeds in order to expose them to obloquy: they
could not anticipate that we should gather as the fruit of their
labours a better appreciation than we could otherwise have gained of
the religions which they strove to destroy, and possibly of
Christianity itself. If I were attempting, as I do not propose to
attempt, to give a complete survey of the growth and development of
the study which we are considering, I should probably be able to cull
{3} but little material for the narrative from Byzantine and mediæval
sources. We may note that the spirit of these ages was, on the whole,
alien to our present interest; and that it is not till after the
Renaissance and the discovery of America that systematic work in this
field begins again. To two Spaniards of Peruvian and Mexican
descent,[3.1] we owe our knowledge of the religions of the Incas and
the Aztecs, that of the latter at least being of prime importance for
the student of the higher religions of mankind. A Polish nobleman of
the 16th century has left us a fairly detailed account of the
religious practices and beliefs of the then semi-pagan
Lithuania.[3.2] But it may be regarded as one of the greatest
achievements of the latter part of the 19th century to have raised the
comparative study of religion to a high position in the whole domain
of inductive speculation and inquiry. And {4} its development has been
mainly due to two independent lines of investigation. The first
stimulus came with the discovery and the interpretation of the sacred
books of the East, a momentous epoch in the history of European
thought, and certain important theories concerning religious origins
were put forth by Vedic scholars, and based on the evidence of Vedic
literature: at the same time the decipherment of the
Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian texts has contributed a wealth of new
material, and has started new problems of religious inquiry, which
specially concern the students of Hellenic as well as those of Semitic
antiquity. But an equally or, as some may think, more powerful factor
in the recent advance towards the organised knowledge of religions has
been the growth, in the last half-century, of the study that has
appropriated the name of anthropology, which is generally understood
to mean the study of primitive or savage man, both in the past and the
present, {5} in respect of his physical and mental conditions. It is
quite unnecessary for me to dilate on the high and manifold utility,
both practical and speculative, of this new branch of human inquiry;
the theme has become almost a popular commonplace in the leading
journalism of the day. And anthropology, defined as above, has a
definite value and object apart from its contributions to our
knowledge of the religions of the world. It is nevertheless true that
the religious interest in England is so strong and penetrating, that
many of our leading anthropologists, in their investigations of savage
society, have directed their attention mainly to religious or
quasi-religious phenomena. Even if their labours were confined to the
discovery and the exposition of savage ritual and belief, we should
still be greatly indebted to them; for to many of us at least the
savage man is interesting in his own right, whether it is true or not
that the study of his mental phenomena helps to explain the mental
phenomena of our higher selves or of the {6} higher races in the past.
But these writers claim, and I think with right, to have done more
than this, and by comparison, induction, and hypothesis to have thrown
some light on the evolution of religion from lower to higher forms,
and therefore to have laid the foundation for the science with which
we are concerned. Also attempts have been recently made by an
accomplished scholar of the new doctrine, Dr Frazer, to trace what may
be called the anthropological genesis of the central idea of
Christianity itself.[6.1] It is not then surprising that in England
at least such claims and such ambitions should excite mistrust, even
hostility, and the prestige of anthropology may have also suffered at
times from the indiscretion of its friends. Still, its work is of wide
vogue, its energy exuberant, and its influence in the future assured.
In considering, therefore, the aims and methods of the comparative
science of religion, it has appeared to me that its relations to
anthropology {7} are now one of the main points in the inquiry. And we
may seem to have reached a stage where it is desirable to test our
position, to take stock as it were, to examine our methods, and to
consider whether they are capable of improvement. The task is
difficult, and in facing it one must face the imputation of
presumption, especially as in a short course of lectures one must be
brief, and may therefore appear over-dogmatic.
If the comparative study of religion is to examine, as on the ground
of its title it must, the various recorded or discoverable religions
of every branch of the human family, then a part of anthropology,
limited, as it has usually chosen to limit itself, to the study of the
savage races, is obviously a sub-department of the whole. And its
work, conducted often under great difficulties, has been solid,
well-organised, and of high importance. Even those who deny its claim
to be called a science, whatever that word may mean, must admit that
it is at least an indispensable branch of historic {8} inquiry, and
that it has deepened the self-knowledge of mankind.
Some of its pioneers may have been overeager in their theorising,
premature in their attempts to reveal the origin of all religion in
some savage ritual or in the background of savage thought, for
instance in ancestor-worship or totemism. Such rash generalisations
are inevitable in the opening periods of a new study, and may be
discredited or abandoned without discrediting the investigations that
gave rise to them. We may have come to be aware of the excesses of the
students of totemism: we may have come to the conviction that neither
theirs nor any other special and single hypothesis has as yet supplied
us with the master-clue by which we can penetrate to the aboriginal
source of human religion: we may have found scientific reasons for
rejecting the belief that all gods arose as ghosts of departed
ancestors. But if we discard such theories of origin, we owe this
negative result to the maturer study of anthropology {9} itself; and
we may owe to it the positive induction that the religious product at
the different stages and in the different branches of mankind was a
complex growth from many different germs.
It has taught us also much more than this. It has shown us that all
through the present societies of savage men there prevails an
extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual
and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an
ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the
psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the
same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or
the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its
environment.
We have learnt to discover a certain savage style, as we may call it,
in myth and ritual; and anthropology has performed a twofold work of
comparison; for it has not only compared the various savage races of
mankind, but it has compared the results of this colligation {10} with
the religious phenomena of the higher races, and has revealed the
savage style in much of their mythology and ritual. It was first
discovered by the earlier investigators of the antiquity of Northern
Europe, such as the brothers Grimm and Mannhardt, that underlying the
religion of Christendom lay a stratum of peasant-ritual and belief,
not yet extinct nor likely soon to be, that reveals the same mental
condition in early Europe that exists among our savage contemporaries
in various parts of the world. Then the sacred edifice of Hellenism
was attacked; and the complacency of Hellenic scholars was sometimes
disturbed by the revelation, through a strict comparative method, of
the same savage style in much of Hellenic ritual and Hellenic myth.
Thus for the first time we came to understand the true significance of
many of the crude and repulsive facts in Hellenic religion--the human
sacrifices, the reverence paid to animals, stones, and trees, the
demonology and magic rites. Many of these practices {11} had lost
their meaning for the more advanced generations, who nevertheless
retained them under the strong constraint of religious conservatism;
but if we find the same practices among existing races who perform
them with a living and plenary faith as part of a quasi-logical
structure of belief, we can place them back into their proper setting
when we discover them still surviving in the higher and alien society.
Greek religion especially, having never violently broken with its own
past, is a bed of rich deposit still inviting exploration. And now
Hellenic scholars are ransacking the same treasure for further
anthropological material; while Assyriologists and Egyptologists are
treating a part of the phenomena of their special departments in the
same spirit.
We realise the gain of this: we are slowly and surely arriving at
inductive conclusions concerning the similarity of development through
which the higher and lower races have passed and are passing; the
solidarity of the human family appears stronger than we {12} might
have supposed. At the same time we have now to be on our guard against
certain common anthropological fallacies. Some of these are less
inevitable than others: for instance, that which we may call the
fallacy of simple enumeration. On the ground of the general inductive
belief that the higher races have at one time passed through a savage
phase, it is often too rashly assumed that each and all of them must
at one time have possessed a particular institution, such as totemism
or ancestor-worship, which, as a matter of fact, is found among the
majority of the savage races of to-day. This is to exaggerate the
principle of solidarity, to ignore the fact of the great diversity
actually observable among existing primitive societies, and the
possibility that it was just by avoiding some particular detrimental
institution that some of the higher peoples were able to proceed on
their path of progress. Again, the anthropological explanation is
often obliged to be hypothetical, for the evidence presented {13} is
often very fragmentary: by means of a reasonable and expert
imagination, an attempt is made to reconstruct a whole fabric out of
a few fragments. A single bone may enable the expert biologist to
reshape unerringly the once living animal; but in anthropology the
fragment in question may have descended from either one of two
differing organisms or organic institutions that may have left very
much the same imprint upon mythology and religion. For instance, a
full-fledged totemistic system, having fallen into decay, might leave
its trace in certain stories about animals or in occasional reverence
paid to a particular animal: but direct animal-worship, a religious
view that may be quite independent of totemism, or certain forms of
ancestor-worship may equally well have deposited the same
fossil-thought or fossil-rite.[13.1] And we know how recklessly the
theory of the ubiquitous practice {14} of human sacrifice has been
used to explain certain peculiar phenomena in later ritual, such as
the scourging of the Spartan boys, for example.
But a stricter anthropology can correct the over-narrow hypotheses of
its immaturity, and can render masterly aid to the evolutionary study
of the higher religions; for each of these, in spite of revelation or
transforming enthusiasm that would obliterate the past, contains a
mass of mysterious dead matter; and it is for the anthropologist to
show the prior functional organic significance of this. But if, in
obedience to the currently accepted limitation of his subject, he
confines himself mainly to the study of savage life and to the dead
matter of the higher religions, and yet is tempted to deal with the
more vital and essential elements in these, he will be liable to the
special bias of his own study. We may note such bias in recent
attempts to explain the essential features of the Eleusinian Mysteries
in the light of merely savage anthropology. {15} And of course we are
all apt to lose the sense of proportion and to exaggerate the
importance of the special phenomena to which we confine our regard.
The folk-lorist will be liable to over-emphasise the part played by
mythology in religion, and may ignore the higher importance of prayer
and ritual; for the most conscientious cobbler is never really able to
stick to his last. In fact, though the whole exposition of the higher
religions is impossible without anthropology, there is some danger at
present lest the part be at times mistaken for the whole. For
instance, we may feel with some uneasiness that recent expositions of
Hellenic religion tend, unintentionally no doubt, to distort the view
of the reader and to produce a false impression by exaggerating the
savage and primitive facts, missing the true perspective and
misjudging the whole. Our appreciation of Greek mythology may suffer
in the same way, unless we can keep the keen edge of our appreciative
faculty: the Greek myth has often its striking {16} affinities with
the Arunta or the Pawnee, and it is necessary for comparative
folk-lore and anthropology to point this out, and often to insist on
the beauty of the legend and the dignity of the religious thought
among savages: but it is unfortunate if these studies should result in
our loss of the perception that Greek mythology, after all, is the
most beautiful of any of which we have record.
The fallacy which I have so far tried to indicate arises from the
temper of mind that a special study is liable to engender. On the
other hand, there is a particular fallacy of method to which the
modern study of anthropology, as it has chosen to limit itself,
specially exposes us. It is liable to withdraw us from the immediate
entourage of a particular fact--a particular legend or a religious
service--to the distant circumference. It was inevitable for the
earliest pioneers of the study to travel far, for the circumference
was unexplored, and there were facts lying at the distant points that
concerned us. But, after all, our first {17} object of study should be
the more immediate environment of the thing which we wish to
understand. The student of Hellenic religion and myth may have
ultimately to roam, in a literary sense, into Central Australia and
the byways of America; but he ought first to explore the Mediterranean
regions and the lands of anterior Asia. It is interesting, and may be
necessary, to know “the Pawnee version of the Eleusinia”; but, for the
true understanding of the great Greek mystery, certain elements in the
Egyptian religion, in Mithraism, and in Christianity itself will
probably afford a more illuminative comparison. The mind of our
student is sometimes tempted, in fact, to travel too easily and too
cheaply to the other side of the globe, and to leave undone work that
should first have been done nearer home.
To reduce these ideas to something like a working formula of method,
may we say that the anthropology which the comparative study of any
one of the more complex and {18} advanced religions immediately
demands is “an adjacent anthropology”? For religious ideas, legends,
and ritual are most contagious, and tend to propagate themselves over
large contiguous areas: for, to reverse a stereotyped question, “what
is less its own than a people’s gods?” We greatly desiderate an
anthropology of the Mediterranean basin, including anterior Asia; for
there are strong reasons for the belief that from very early times the
frequent intercourse of the leading peoples in this region endowed
them with a common stock of religious ideas, ritual, and legend which
have probably left their impress on the higher religions of the world.
It is these that specially interest most of us, and we feel we cannot
solve their problems by means of savage anthropology alone. Why, after
all, should the latter term be restricted, as it usually is, to the
study of savage life? Doubtless we cannot so extend the use of the
word as to cover its full etymological signification: else it would
come to include the whole of human history {19} from the beginning
down to the present, and would lose its value as a mark of any special
science. But we might somewhat enlarge its present connotation with
advantage to the comparative method, and without a too wide departure
from current usage. We might define the anthropological study of any
one of the higher religions as an evolutionary study of its
embryology: the evolutionary law might appear in the first instance as
a proximate law of growth. For probably every one of the world-creeds
has inherited, apart from its own achievement, a double tradition, a
tradition from the more remote and one from the more immediate past.
The first may descend from immemorial antiquity, and from really
primitive or savage mental and social life; and it has been the task
of primitive anthropology to expound and explain the facts that this
tradition has deposited. But many if not most of these facts may be
regarded as functionally dead matter surviving in the more advanced
system of belief, and as not belonging {20} to its essential life. On
the other hand, from the immediate tradition much will be found to
have been taken over by an inevitable law of assimilation, certain
potent ideas which, though transformed, will enter into the very
life-blood of the new creed. And these are to be discovered and
analysed by what I have ventured to call an “adjacent” anthropology,
which will include a comprehensive study of the literature and
monuments belonging to the more proximate past of the race which
develops the new faith as well as of the races that are its nearer
neighbours.
Such a method, though not hitherto styled anthropological, has already
been applied by various scholars in the different parts of our field;
the exposition of the Babylonian elements in Judaic religion, of the
Judaic and pagan elements in Moslemism, are examples of it. On the
present occasion I would prefer to illustrate it by noting its
application to the scientific study of Christianity itself, of which
the remarkable complexity, {21} the variety of forms that it has
assumed in different parts of Christendom at different periods, seems
specially to invite the higher anthropological treatment. Moreover it
probably contains a richer deposit than any other of the
world-religions from the various streams of thought and belief that
nourished the life of early civilised or semi-civilised man. The
illustration drawn from our own religion will be also more personally
interesting to ourselves; and though the limits of time and my own
knowledge may prevent me from putting forth any original statement,
yet something may be gained and a more extended interest awakened by a
brief notice of what has been and what remains to be done.
There is now no need for apology if one wishes frankly to consider the
genesis of the fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of
earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto a certain religious
shyness, which belongs to the national character, may have made
English {22} scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology of our
national faith; and the progress of the subject owes more to foreign
workers. Our own theological students of distinction have not evaded
the question as to the early influences that may have moulded the
religious thought of Christ and St Paul; but these were naturally
sought mainly in the later Judaism; and though the debt of the
developed Christianity to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored,
yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic literature nor Greek
philosophy explain the whole complex of historic Christianity, is a
conviction of recent growth, and the investigations to which it has
prompted are recent. For instance, it was a new departure of great
promise for the future of our science when, in a course of Hibbert
lectures delivered some years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the
deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of ritual, organisation,
and even religious concept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other
mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few {23} students of Hellenic
religion in England have often noted its many ties of affinity with
our own, though of these there has been as yet no complete and
authoritative account. We may admit that the triumph of a new and
great creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps a sudden mental
transformation in the catechumens difficult to equate with any
formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot gainsay the experience
that as the religion establishes and organises itself, it draws
nourishment from the old soil which is full of the living germs of
past organisms. Therefore it was inevitable that Hellenic religion
should leave a deep impress upon earlier and later Christianity;
partly because the religious temper in the Greek world throughout the
centuries immediately preceding the adoption of Christianity was more
powerful and fervid than it had been in the days of Homer or Pericles,
and mainly because Hellenic converts became the pillars of the Church.
But the comparative student must pursue the {24} problem further
afield and beyond the track of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion,
which Professor Ramsay’s travels and investigations have assisted us
to know, must be seriously taken into account; for Phrygia was one of
the earliest homes of Christianity, its aboriginal religion had
germinated in ideas strikingly akin to some that are primary in all or
many of the creeds of Christendom; and the morbid and ecstatic
temperament of the native Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to
the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared again in certain
schismatic forms of Christian doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the
heresy of Montanism. Finally, we may learn much, even adopt much, from
our enemies. The most dangerous antagonists of Christianity were,
after all, the worship of Isis and Mithraism. It may be possible to
trace the influence of these on their conqueror: the great work of M.
Cumont on Mithras cult suggests at least many interesting religious
parallels; and even the older Zoroastrian {25} literature must be
considered within the range of necessary and legitimate comparison.
As I am here concerned with illustration of method rather than with
positive proof, I can only offer a very brief summary of the results
which the anthropological study of Christianity has hitherto achieved,
and may yet achieve.
The religious affinities discoverable between the earlier and later
“Mediterranean” systems may be classified according as they appear in
the legends, in nomenclature and terminology, in external symbols and
liturgical objects, in hieratic institutions, and finally in the
ideas, aspirations, and concepts of faith. As regards legend and
mythology, a great historic religion may of course claim to be free
from all mythology; nevertheless it is a matter of experience that
popular legends are sure at some period earlier or later to creep in,
for the people insist on telling the old stories under changed names.
I myself have heard the immemorial story of Odysseus walking inland
with his oar, which the rustic mistakes {26} for a winnowing-fan, told
about St Peter, St Paul, and St John on the coast of the Peloponnese;
just as an old Norse legend about Odin and Baldur is retold of Christ
and St Peter.[26.1] And students of mediæval hagiology will discover
more and more clearly various fragments of pre-Christian mythology
embedded in the legends of the saints. Such facts are the material of
comparative folk-lore, which plays a useful but quite subordinate part
in the work of comparative religion. Legends have indeed their own
independent interest, poetical, ethical, and other; but the importance
of mere mythology in the study of religion has been often much
overrated; St Augustine, mistaking Greek legends for Greek religion,
could discover no morality in it at all,[26.2] and modern scholars
have inherited the fallacy. Myths are often irresponsible, capricious,
volatile, and flit like a vapour round the solid structure of real
{27} belief and ritual. A high religion may attract low myths: some of
our own are not spotless, but Christianity can ignore them. The myth
that is an essential fact for the student of religion is that which
enshrines some living religious idea or institution, or one which
proves the survival of some ritual or faith that belonged to an older
system. I may note a few of this kind which illustrate the affinities
of Judaic, Christian, and pagan legend. The cessation of
human-sacrifice in the Mediterranean area, the awakening of the
conviction that the practice was abhorrent to a merciful God, implied
so momentous a change in religious and moral thought and practice that
it would be strange if it left no legendary record of itself. We may
discern one in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice; to which we find a
very striking and close parallel in the Laconian legend of Helen,
whose father intended to sacrifice her to God in order to stay a
plague:[27.1] {28} the eagle, the messenger of God, swooped down and
snatched the knife from the sacrificer’s hand, and let it fall on a
kid that was pasturing near. Again, we are all familiar with the story
of Jephtha’s vow: the fact is not so well known that a story identical
in nearly every detail was told of Idomeneus, the Cretan hero,[28.1]
who vowed that if he returned home from the Trojan war he would
sacrifice to God the first thing that he met on landing: his daughter
was the first that met him--and Idomeneus “did with her according to
his vow,” or intended to do so, and the people exiled him for it.
Different from these, but belonging to the inner circle, so to speak,
of sacred narrative, are one or two Gospel stories which are not
peculiar to Palestine or to our sacred books. The miraculous star that
guides sacred personages on a divine errand must be an Anatolian
star-legend, for it is told of Æneas and his voyage to Italy.[28.2]
And a critical appreciation of the {29} style of Hellenic folk-lore
detects at once a marked Hellenic colour in the legends that gather
around the birth and rearing of the Virgin in the apocryphal Gospel of
St James. More important and suggestive of much more is the
parallelism that we discover between the story of our Lord’s
temptation and the temptation of Zarathustra in the Zend-Avesta: here
also the evil god offers the holy prophet the kingdoms of the world if
he will fall down and worship him.[29.1]
Finally, it is not improbable that the strange legend preserved in
various late Greek MSS., of the Virgin Mary’s descent into
hell,[29.2] where she is shown the torments of the damned, is derived
ultimately from the Babylonian myth of the descent of Ischtar, which
in the Greek world transformed itself into the story of the descent of
Aphrodite. This suggestion is in harmony with the evidence which will
be {30} noticed below for the belief that the development of the
worship and the divine character of the Virgin owed much, directly or
indirectly, to the great Anatolian cult of the mother-goddess.
As regards the legend just mentioned, we may suppose direct borrowing,
or at least direct mental suggestion from an older mythology and
faith. To the other examples which I have adduced--probably only a few
among many that might be quoted--the theory of borrowing may be
inappropriate.
It may be more scientific, and certainly it is at present more
expedient, to be content with the assumption that for thousands of
years over contiguous human areas a similarity of religious
temperament, religious institutions, religious crises may tend to
produce a common stock of legend; whether the legend is true or false
is not our present concern.
I turn now to the second group of affinities, those in nomenclature
and terminology. This may at first sight appear a matter unimportant
{31} for the evolution of religion, and of merely linguistic concern.
A people changing its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, but
must adapt the old terminology to the new thought. It may be of
interest for the student of language to know that when St Paul
promises to “show you a mystery” he is borrowing the language of
paganism; that when Bishop Clemens[31.1] ecstatically exclaims, “The
Lord is our hierophant; bearing the sacred torch He has marked the
initiate with His own seal… once join our mystery and you will dance
in the choir of angels,” he is using the phraseology of the Eleusinian
and Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a style, upon which Dr
Hatch has sufficiently commented, is more than linguistic; for it
foreshadows a real though fortunately a temporary change which came
over Christianity in the first few centuries of its life, transforming
it from an open doctrine into a mystery organised after the old Greek
type. {32} Moreover the modern logical view of names as merely
indifferent speech-symbols, which can be changed without affecting the
essence of the things, was by no means the old-world view. The formula
_nomina sunt numina_ was valid in all the old religions of the
Mediterranean area, including earlier and even later Christianity: the
divine name was felt to be part of the divine essence and itself of
supernatural potency; and this will be seen to be of paramount
importance when we consider the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore the
propagation of a new religion was greatly assisted if it could allow
itself to employ some at least of the names potent and familiar in the
older creed. Now the personal names of the various deities of
paganism, owing to the mental illusion noted above, were necessarily
hateful to the new faith and were ruthlessly suppressed, surviving
merely as names of demons or for purposes of magic: only in remote
corners of the old world one or two may still be lingering, purified
as it {33} were and at peace, as in the modern chapel of “Panagia
Aphroditissa,” near the old Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred
names of Greek paganism were mere appellatives, possessing less
individual personality, and were therefore innocent in the ears of the
Christian propagandists. And two of these were destined to become
names of primary virtue in the terminology of the new faith. When the
apostles and their successors preached the Gospel of “the Saviour,”
this title could awaken at least a responsive religious thrill in the
hearts of the Hellenes who had been nursed in their ancestral
religion. For it had long been attached to their supreme god, and in
its feminine form to their beloved goddess Kore, and as applied to her
the appellative already connoted “salvation” after death;[33.1] and
already it had been used by the Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the
divine man, God’s representative on earth, “the {34} living image of
God,” as one of the later Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language
of the Rosetta inscription.[34.1] But in the history of divine names
none have been of greater import for paganism and Christianity alike
than “Kore-Parthenos” and that of the Greek and Phrygian “Divine
Mother,” the θεῶν Μήτηρ. It is at least probable that the
prevalence of the cult and the name of “Kore,” the goddess who
proffered salvation in the pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded
strong stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of Mariolatry, which
is one of those phenomena in the history of the Church which cannot be
adequately explained without looking beyond the limits of Christianity
proper. A passage in the Panarium of Epiphanios[34.2] is of singular
interest for those who wish to study the period of transition between
old things and {35} new. This writer tells us that on the night of the
5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, the worshippers met in the
sacred enclosure or temple of “Kore,” and having sung hymns to the
music of the flute till dawn, they descended by the light of torches
into an underground shrine and brought up thence a wooden idol on a
bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with the sign of the cross
on her brow, her hands, and her knees. And with the accompaniment of
flutes, hymns, and dances the image was carried round the central
shrine seven times, before it was restored again to its nether
dwelling-place: “and the votaries say that to-day at this hour
Kore--that is, the Virgin--gave birth to the Eternal.”
It is strange that Epiphanios should quote this rite as an example of
pure paganism. This cannot be true: the image has been carefully
signed with the cross in such a way as to suggest, not casual
violence, but the deliberate intention of the worshippers; nor {36}
could the formula, “the Virgin has born the Eternal,” have been part
of a purely pagan liturgy consecrated to the Hellenic Kore. Still less
could the service be purely Christian: at least I imagine that a naked
Virgin, kept in a cavern shrine and carried round with timbrels, would
be a unique fact in Christian archæology. The belief is forced upon
us that we have here a blending of at least two rival creeds in a
period of transition. An old ritual of Kore at Alexandria, the goddess
of the underworld whose statue was kept in a subterraneous cavern, may
have included a kind of passion play in which a holy child was born:
as this occurred near the beginning of January, it could all the more
easily be adapted to the requirements of a gradually prevailing
Christianity. The idol is sanctified with the sign of the cross, and
the child is called “the Aion.” This name betrays the influence at
work. The doctrine which laboured most zealously to combine the
various elements of the pagan and Christian creeds was Gnosticism,
{37} and “Aion” was a figure which the Gnostics borrowed from
Mithraism.[37.1] It seems that the religious rays from Hellas,
Persia, and Bethlehem converged at the “Korion” of Alexandria. But the
name Κόρη does not seem to have usually formed part of the sacred
title accepted by the early Church for the Mother of our Lord.
Probably the name had acquired a personal association with the pagan
goddess too strong to allow it to be used for the new faith;[37.2]
nor was the idea of virginity so directly connoted by it as by the
term παρθένος: hence ἡ ἁγνὴ παρθένος or ἡ ἁγία παρθένος is chosen for
the Christian appellation of Mary. But these words themselves belong
to the ancient hieratic vocabulary of Hellas, for the maiden-goddess
known by no other name than Parthenos had long been adored in {38}
various states of Asia Minor and Thrace;[38.1] “Hagne,” the “Holy
One,” was a divinity dear to the Arcadians;[38.2] and at Assos, the
chief port of Mysia, visited by St Paul on one of his journeys, an
inscription attests that “the Holy Virgin of our fatherland”--such is
her style--had been pre-eminent in the pagan worship.[38.3] Moreover
the sacred title, “the Mother of God,” was sympathetic with a very
ancient and dominant Mediterranean faith: in prehistoric times from
Crete, and at a later period from Phrygia, had gone forth the worship
of the divine mother, known generally as “the Gods’ Mother” or “the
Mother,” which had left a deep impress upon the religious imagination
of the various races of the Greek and Roman world. It is no paradox to
affirm that one of the streams {39} that fostered the later growth of
Mariolatry may have descended from the Minoan palace of
Knossos.[39.1]
As regards the third group in my classification, external symbols and
liturgical objects, we might suppose that these mainly belong to the
minutiæ of archæological study. A philosopher may ignore them as
trivial facts; but they have been the cause of too much bloodshed and
strife to be ignored by the history of religions, and the feelings
they excite are still powerful enough to divide the churches and the
sects of Christendom. Besides, if one religion borrows its symbols and
sacred objects from another, it probably borrows much more besides.
The use of candles and incense in churches, the fashion of certain
ecclesiastic vestments, can be shown to have descended to us from a
pre-Christian world. And it was quite natural that the new faith
should take over the religious property of paganism, whatever at least
it could {40} receive without violation of its own essential
principles. It is only the anthropological study of these particulars,
apparently insignificant in themselves, that enables us to understand
certain modern controversies, as for instance concerning incense, and
also to appreciate the extraordinary tenacity with which the
successive generations cleave to the smaller things of cult. These
latter are felt to be part of the spell which is exercised upon us by
an immemorial tradition, a spell that is all the stronger because it
works upon the “subconscious” self; and those who maintain them are
rarely aware of the aboriginal reason which prompts them. And often
the question about the symbols or the sacred objects of worship, as
distinct from the ideas and personalities, becomes obviously of prime
importance for the comparison and classification of religions. Thus
the distinction between iconic or idolatrous and aniconic or
non-idolatrous cults is of deep significance, for it may correspond to
the distinction between a more and a less {41} anthropomorphic
conception of the divinity, or to a belief that the embodiment of him
in material objects is right and seemly or wrong and unseemly. The
more spiritual a religion becomes, the greater is its inclination to
dispense with the idol and even to reprobate it; the worshipper of
Jahvé was thus set in antagonism to the surrounding tribes, and in
the Iranian region the Zarathustrian votary to the worshipper of the
Daevas. The history of Christianity in regard to this matter is
familiar to us all: in spite of the vehement protests of its apostles
and earlier propagandists who inherited the spiritual Judaic view, we
know that all the efforts of the iconoclastic emperors could not
suppress the veneration of images in the later period. Even in the
Teutonic north, Christianity came, in the days before the Reformation,
to assume an iconic character which is not accounted for by the
ancestral tradition of our pagan forefathers: who certainly carved
images, in spite of what Tacitus tells us, but do not appear to have
been markedly idolatrous. {42} We infallibly detect here the abiding
influence of Greco-Roman paganism, in which idolatry had taken so deep
a root, satisfying as it did the artistic-religious cravings of the
people. We have records of the transformation of the old statues into
Christian images; in an epigram we find Heracles pathetically
complaining that he is forced to become St Luke:[42.1] a beautiful
head of Aphrodite in Athens is rudely stamped with the cross, perhaps
to convert her into the Virgin:[42.2] at the present day there exists
in South Italy an image of a Madonna del Granato, holding a
pomegranate, which by a curious chain of evidence can be traced with
some probability back to the Hera of Argos, carved by Polycleitos.
Now the image may be regarded in two aspects: as a symbol merely
bringing close to the sense the spiritual idea of divinity, and {43}
serving to stimulate the prayerful thought of the worshipper: or it
may be venerated as the indwelling abode of the divinity, in which he
habitually resides, or into which, by spells and blood-offerings, he
may be compelled to enter. The first is the more spiritual and
advanced point of view, the orthodox aspect of the image in the iconic
churches of Christendom at most periods; and this is put forward as an
apology for what may seem idolatry: we may note in passing that the
same apology was put forward by the advanced champions of paganism.
The second is the more primitive view, accepted at most periods by the
people, and sometimes tolerated or even encouraged by certain of the
churches: the idol is regarded as miraculous, as infused with divine
power, perhaps itself the very divinity; and the uncultured Greeks who
whipped the idol of Pan with squills if food was scarce,[43.1] or
bound the image of Aphrodite with cords to prevent it running
away,[43.2] the {44} Breton smith mentioned by Renan, who threatened
the saint’s image with red-hot pincers to compel him to heal his son,
the modern savage who smears his idols with blood,[44.1] are to be
classed together in the morphology of religion.
Idolatry in this sense is a higher form of fetichism, which, strictly
defined, is the veneration of material objects, often shaped by art
and handled in such a way as to endow them with divine potency, which
bring good fortune to the owner. It is supposed to connote savagery,
but survivals of it are found in most civilised communities, and we
probably all inherit some faint impress of the fetichistic spirit, nor
need we be startled if we find it in the higher religions.
In ancient Greece the fetich was common enough: sacred axes, sacred
sceptres, pyramidical or cone-shaped stones, rudely hewn {45}
tree-stumps, are examples which we find in the literature and art of
the historic or prehistoric periods; the most common kind of private
fetich was the gem, carried as an amulet. This superstitious view of
gems belonging to primitive faith has continued through many ages.
Moreover, both in the public and private religion of Christendom in
many periods, and even at the present time, we can easily recognise
the fetichistic value of the sacred objects, relics, crucifixes; and
the Bible itself might sometimes be carried as an amulet about the
person to secure one from danger, and its modern use in the English
legal oath, the witness “kissing the book,” conforms to a fetichistic
type of oath which was common in the primitive Teutonic
communities.[45.1] When Tertullian exclaims, “How great is the
difference between the wood of the cross and the shapeless wooden
emblems of Pallas or Ceres,”[45.2] he is thinking generally {46} of
the wide difference between Christianity and Hellenic polytheism. As
regards the attitude of the Christian and pagan worshippers towards
these emblems of their cult which Tertullian mentions, we are not sure
that any such general distinction could be drawn. The “adoration of
the true wood of the cross,” of which we have heard in recent times,
if we merely consider the nature of the religious object and the value
of the material thing for faith, must be called fetichistic: at least
I know of no other word equally appropriate in the terminology of the
science of religions. Doubtless the modern mind, in the performance of
such ritual practices, can distinguish between the inanimate or
material thing and the divine spirit which sanctifies it. But so also
can the intelligent savage, who cares nothing for his piece of wood
when he thinks the power-giving spirit has departed from it. The
fetichism then of the higher religions and of the savage faith is
morphologically the same; the vital difference lies in {47} the
conception of the divinity that is supposed to animate or sanctify the
material thing.
It would be wrong to attribute the fetichistic proclivities discovered
in the Christian communities wholly to the Hellenic or Mediterranean
strain in our religion; for we must reckon with the survival among the
later ritual-observances of the superstitions of the Northern peoples,
and fetichism was certainly characteristic of the early Teutonic,
Celtic, and Slavonic races. In this matter, as in others, we have to
note that the puritanism of the early Church could not prevail against
the strength of habit and immemorial tradition.
The illustration of this group of affinities may conclude with the
observation that the most cherished emblem of our creed, the type of
the cross itself, had already been in vogue as a religious symbol of
certain of the earlier pagan peoples; it played a part in the ancient
Egyptian[47.1] and {48} Assyrian ritual, and recently Dr Evans has
revealed to us in the Palace of Minos in Crete a chapel of the cross
dedicated to the worship of the divine mother.[48.1] We can go no
further than the surmise that the propagation of Christianity may have
been assisted by the fact that the emblem of the new faith would not
appear wholly unfamiliar to some of the converted races.
As regards the affinities discernible in respect of hieratic
institutions, the organisation of churches, the relations of Church
and State, I have only space to cite a few salient illustrations. The
earliest Christian Church, a private religious society united by the
bond of faith, the members contributing to each other’s wants, with a
simple democratic organisation of ecclesia and sacred officials, would
not strike the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an unfamiliar
phenomenon; for its family likeness {49} to the Hellenic “thiasoi” or
brotherhoods of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often been
commented on. They, like it, were often proselytisers, and, ignoring
the barriers of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle the
religious fellowship of man. “It is well to consider all men friends
and brothers, as being the family of God,” says Apollonius,[49.1]
echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil was ready prepared for
the new cosmopolitan religion.
In considering the history of the hierarchy in Christendom, we are
often obliged to turn our eyes back upon the pre-Christian period. For
instance, the insistence on the apostolic succession in the various
churches, a primary {50} article of faith with many at the present
time, is entirely in keeping with a very old Mediterranean tradition:
for we find it not infrequently maintained in Hellenic paganism that
the priest should descend directly from the god whom he serves, or
from the first apostle who instituted the particular cult or
mystery;[50.1] we hear of the priest being qualified “by descent and
by divine appointment.”[50.2] But in the earlier religious period the
succession or descent was regarded in the linear and physical sense:
this has become refined into the idea of a spiritual succession,
maintained however by a continuity of physical though mystic contact.
Here, as so often in the comparative study of religion, we have to
note {51} the physical and material ideas of the more primitive period
maintaining themselves in the later but translated into a spiritual
significance.
The relation between the priesthood and the State has been one of the
burning questions of the secular and religious history of Europe. To
understand fully all the features in the State organisation of the
Church and the many points of controversy, we need often to go far
back into the records of early Aryan and Mediterranean society. We may
mark here and there in the pagan Anatolian region the emergence of the
idea that the priest should be temporal lord,[51.1] while in most
early Aryan societies the subordination of the spiritual to the
secular power appears to have been maintained. A study of the sagas of
the North suggests the reflection that the struggle fought out to a
definite decision at the Reformation had already been decided in the
{52} Teutonic North in the far-off days before Christianity;[52.1]
also that the secular character of the married English priesthood in
our pre-Conquest period is only the reflex of old Teutonic custom.
The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a question that has agitated
and divided the churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves have
finished with it. To trace its origin and inner significance, a wide
anthropological study is necessary, and I may be able to return to it
in another association in a later lecture. Within the history of the
Church, we may trace back the religious ideas underlying the dogma of
celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of the third and fourth centuries,
and we may be right in connecting it with the growth of Mariolatry.
But the original source of the phenomenon lies far in the background
of our religion; the impulse to religious celibacy had long been
congenial to the temperament of {53} some of the Anatolian races. We
find it powerful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians; and in the
anthropology of primitive societies we are often confronted with the
idea that the virgin body is the only fit organ for the full divine
afflatus.
In another question of administration, in the position of women in
regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing
pre-Christian traditions.[53.1] Their present total exclusion from
sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the
Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all
in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in
fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek
influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be
fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth
century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the
“priestesses {54} of the Virgin Mary.”[54.1] It is still possible
that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.
If we try to give a complete account of any of the important
institutions of the churches, infant baptism or the Roman confession
for instance, we ought at least, before we can pronounce that any
particular one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to survey the
religions contiguous to or immediately preceding Christianity. As
regards the practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope to show,
may be explained as connected with a ritual of purification, its
institution cannot at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon in the
early Church. A very simple form of it appears to have been known to
the Judaic system, and it appears as a formal element in the
Babylonian liturgy:[54.2] as a spiritual relief to which a man might
voluntarily resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic {55}
oracle;[55.1] as part of the cathartic ritual which was preliminary
to initiation it was required by the ordinances of the Samothracian
Mysteries; and it is in an anecdote concerning these that we meet with
the first example of the free Protestant spirit reprobating the
practice.[55.2] We may infer that it was uncongenial to the character
and alien to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, in the record
of whose pagan institutions there is no hint of it, and Alcuin
complains of his Goths “that no one of the laity was willing to
confess to the priests.”[55.3] It may well have been a spontaneous
growth of southern Christianity; but it appears to have arisen first
within the early monastic orders,[55.4] and {56} as these in their
origin had certain affinities with the non-Christian mystic
brotherhoods, where the practice was not unknown, it is possible that
in this matter also a pre-Christian tradition was still of some
effect. Or, if this is unlikely, we must maintain that like conditions
evolve similar products over the whole area with which comparative
religion deals; and the most striking resemblance to a Christian
confessional is to be observed in the old Mexican ritual, if we can
trust Sahagun.[56.1] As regards the other suggested example, we
should probably find, if we followed out the history and origin of
infant baptism, that the pre-Christian tradition was a strong
efficient force in the settlement of the question; there were urgent
reasons at least why the rite should soon have come to be maintained
by the early Church, for analogous rites whereby the new-born child
was consecrated to the divinity were probably part of the hereditary
tradition of most of the converted races. {57} We know that many of
the Hellenes had been in the habit of passing the infant solemnly
round the fire, a purificatory and also consecrating process;[57.1]
the northern Teutons sprinkled the infant with water:[57.2] and when
Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian tribes were in the habit
of plunging the new-born into river-water, to harden the little ones,
he is mistaking a religious for a secular practice.[57.3] Looking at
the baptism of the adult neophyte, we find interesting resemblances to
the ceremonies of the pre-Christian mystic initiations; the idea
commonly expressed in these latter, that the catechumen died to his
old life and was born again, was eagerly adopted and developed by the
later religion, and here as there left its imprint on the ritual:
death and rebirth were actually simulated in the mystic
service.[57.4]
{58}
The affinities between Christian and pagan ritual, in many cases no
doubt the result of direct inheritance, demand a more detailed
investigation than they have yet received, especially in respect of
the festival calendar: even the early writers of the Church were of
opinion that the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary in
February, was a development of the old Roman Februalia instituted by
Numa;[58.1] and such names of Christian saints and bishops as
Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the popularity of the Hilaria, the festival
of Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much might be still discovered
by a minute knowledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined with travel
in Mediterranean lands and with personal observation of the ritual of
feast- and fast-days in the remoter villages.[58.2]
{59}
Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity
than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and
pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To
point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it
is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the
latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must
guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof
of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may
be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of
thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical
insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been
followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to
call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in
human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and
half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to
{60} mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a
personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God
was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination;
and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric
of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher
stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it
has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the
King.
More important still for the purposes of the religious comparison is
the wide prevalence in the Mediterranean communities of the belief in
the death and resurrection of the divinity: and this has been the
theme of much recent anthropological investigation.[60.1] This is not
{61} the time to examine into its origin and significance or to track
out the various phenomena that illustrate and group themselves around
it in the Mediterranean cults. I would merely call attention in
passing to the fact that the belief existed, and was probably
expressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St Paul’s own city of
Tarsos,[61.1] and that it was especially strong in the Attis
Mysteries of the Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete; we know that these
were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our
Lenten period and the beginning of Easter, that they were preceded by
fasting and began with lamentations, {62} the votaries gathering in
sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the
resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic
brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing,
the Hilaria.[62.1] The Christian fathers themselves were struck with
the deep resemblance between this and their own mystery, and they were
tempted to attribute it to the diabolic spirit of parody. We may take
the words of Firmicus Maternus,[62.2] with which he concludes his
description of such an Attis Mystery as I have outlined--“truly the
devil has Christians of his own”--as the text of a very important
chapter in comparative religion. We hear of a Christian convert in
Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the Hilaria; and Phrygia,
its ancestral home, was one of the earliest strongholds of
Christianity. Here at least we may assume that the {63} ancient dogma
and ritual of the people was one of the predisposing causes operating
in favour of the new.
The comparative student must also give careful consideration to what
are called the eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning
posthumous happiness, salvation, and damnation, not only of the
Judaic, but also of the Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian religions:
and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was they that were
most widely known in the area of the Greco-Roman world, and modern
theory has at times endeavoured to trace back the apocalyptic
literature of Christianity to Hellenic sources.[63.1] The
investigation would demand a careful study of the Eleusinian and the
Orphic Mysteries, in both of which we find the pregnant idea that
salvation after death depended {64} on a religious act of faith or on
a mystic communion with a divinity that might be attained on earth by
a sacrament or other liturgical means: and the inquiry will include
the question how far in these earlier systems the doctrine of
salvation by faith was actually blended with any admixture of the
ethical doctrine of salvation by works. And the problem, like many
others in the scientific study of religion, will be found to concern
philosophic as well as religious history.
The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Mediterranean world have long
been recognised as a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative
science; and both the lower and the higher anthropology can contribute
much that is essential to the full understanding of the evolution of
the Christian doctrine concerning the divine sacrifice and the Holy
Communion. I need not here enlarge on this subject, even by way of
mere illustration, for I have already dealt with it, however
inadequately, {65} in a former paper:[65.1] it is an intricate and
fascinating theme and invites further research.
But for proving the revival on the new Christian soil of the older
pre-Christian religious thought and aspiration, there is no special
subject so fruitful as the study of Mariolatry. I have already
suggested by way of illustration the possibility of such pagan titles
as “Kore-Parthenos,” the “Gods’ mother,” having exercised an abiding
influence in exciting and shaping the nascent thought of earlier
Christendom; and I affirmed that their prevalence corresponded to a
prevailing religious bias which turned the minds of many of the
peoples in the old world to cleave affectionately to the
mother-goddess or to the divine maid. Apart from mere titles, the
student of the latter days of paganism is forced to note at almost
every point the deep impress of such ideas and the enthusiasm they
evoked. In all the leading Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid
{66} held a dominant position, and the Orphic brotherhoods had ranged
the Mother by the side of the Son-God and the Father-God; and even in
the state-cults of the ancient centres of Hellenic civilisation, the
maternal character of the divine power had long been cherished.
Finally, the Phrygian religion of the Mother, to which even Mithraism,
a pre-eminently masculine or paternal religion, was obliged to
accommodate itself, had captured the greater part of the Greco-Roman
world; and was certainly very influential in the districts of Asia
Minor visited by St Paul and in every one of the cities of the Seven
Churches. The sentiment it evoked is expressed by the words of a poet
of the Middle Attic comedy: “For those who have true knowledge of
things divine, there is nothing greater than the Mother; hence the
first man who became civilised founded the shrine of the
Mother.”[66.1] This then is a leading factor in the religious
psychology of the converted nations with which we must reckon.
{67}
We cannot, in accordance with the laws of human nature, suppose that a
religious tradition of such hereditary power as this could wholly lose
its force under a changed creed. The gaps in the record will probably
make it impossible to supply a detailed and geographical statement
showing how in the various communities of the ancient cult the
personality of the pre-Christian goddess was fused gradually with the
ideal image of the Virgin-Mother of Christ. Only a few suggestive
facts in the development and organisation of Mariolatry may be
mentioned here. The heretic Montanists of Phrygia were charged with
deifying the Virgin and believing that one of their leaders was united
in a mystic marriage with her, a belief natural to Phrygian paganism;
and their founder Montanus is said to have originally been a priest of
Cybele.[67.1] The mother of Constantine, the {68} Empress Helena, who
is supposed to have been of Bithynian origin, was praised for decking
the grotto of Bethlehem with sacred gifts as the shrine of the
Virgin;[68.1] it is noteworthy that her earliest recorded chapel
should be a grotto or cave; for it was in such underground shrines
that the Phrygian Mother was commonly worshipped in her own land.
Another striking analogy to the ancient ritual of the mother-goddess
is presented by the feast called the κοίμησις and ἀνάληψις τῆς
θεοτόκου, first mentioned by Andreas of Crete (_circ._ 650 A.D.), but
probably in existence long before his time: the Mother of God dies and
rises again in the Assumption. It would be of special interest if we
could discover that this ritual first became canonical in Crete, the
home of Andreas; for in Crete as in Cyprus, where the Virgin succeeded
to the name of Aphrodite, we have traces of a similar rite in which
the goddess Aphrodite was laid out {69} as dead on a bier and was
afterwards raised to life.[69.1]
And is it nothing more than a coincidence that in the same city of
Ephesus, where during St Paul’s visit the fanatics raised a tumult in
behalf of their Virgin Artemis, some six centuries later the people
with equal ecstasy hailed the decision of the Synod that proclaimed
the Virgin-Mother of God (θεοτόκος)? The mention of Ephesus suggests
another consideration of the greatest importance for the study of the
development and propagation of the Christian dogma concerning the
virginity of the Mother of God. The Virgin-birth, an idea which has
long been a stumbling-block to science, and which has recently been
pronounced by some to be unessential to Christianity, was a dogma that
could easily be understood and even eagerly accepted by the converts
of Anatolia[69.2] and the {70} Greek world. In Ephesus itself the
ancient goddess had been imagined in some sense as a maternal or
generative divinity, yet also as a virgin, in whose ritual, conducted
partly by a priesthood of monks, a strong rule of austerity and
chastity was enforced.[70.1] The great Phrygian Mother was herself,
according to a native legend, miraculously conceived, and there are
grounds for suggesting that she was occasionally regarded as a
virgin.[70.2] The evidence indeed concerning such ideas in the
pre-Christian cults is always confused, casual, and often
contradictory, with no power apparently in themselves to develop a
fixed dogma of faith. It would be in fact unreasonable to maintain
that the Christian doctrines concerning the Virgin-Mother could have
been evoked merely by the spontaneous demand of the Anatolian or Greek
converts. But we may affirm that when that doctrine was {71} presented
to them, their own traditions had prepared their imaginations to
receive it as congenial. We meet in the late pagan literature passages
in praise of virginity as a divine quality quite as ecstatic and
extravagant as many in the Christian fathers.[71.1] Many of the
nations had long cherished the ideal of a virgin goddess; most had
been devotees of the Divine Mother. The successful propagation of
Christianity may have owed much to the means which it possessed for
satisfying these two sentiments and for reconciling them in a primary
article of faith. Then, we must certainly ascribe the exaltation of
Mary in the Church of the first six centuries to the enthusiasm
engendered by the older goddess-worships. Alexandria may have
contributed much more than we have already noted; and more than one
writer has explored the deep indebtedness of the developed Mariolatry
to the older figure of {72} Isis.[72.1] The extravagance of an
enthusiasm that was rooted in old pagan sentiment occasionally
engendered heresies. Besides the records concerning the Montanist, of
which the significance has already been noticed, most interesting and
valuable for our purpose is the sermon of Epiphanius against the
heresy of the Collideriani,[72.2] wild women who devoted themselves
to the worship of Mary, and whose orgiastic service he describes and
reprobates: in their processions they appear to have drawn the Virgin
round in a car strewn with raiment, and they solemnised a sacrament
with bread: and he adds that they came from Thrace, the immemorial
home of fanatic women and of the goddess “Artemis the Queen,” to whom
also offerings of corn were made.[72.3] The procession of a goddess
in a car was probably part of an old Thrako-Phrygian {73} ceremonial,
and we hear of a sacramental eating of bread in the service of Cybele.
We may finally note that the enthusiastic literature devoted to the
pre-Christian Divine Mother and Maid and to the Virgin-Mother of God
is the same in quality and tone. The prayer addressed to Isis in the
story of Apuleius reminds us of a Christian hymn of praise; and the
older liturgical or literary expressions would naturally colour the
later.[73.1]
Another question with which the comparative study of Christianity is
concerned touches the evolution of the Trinitarian idea.[73.2] Here
{74} again it is necessary carefully to sift the phenomena of the
contiguous religions, to consider whether they present such a
conception at all, and whether in any of them it had gained sufficient
vividness and power to be likely to evoke a dogma of religious
metaphysic. Moreover, to understand the complete genesis of the
Christian doctrine, we must trace out the idea of divine emanations in
the Mediterranean and the East; for the religions of the Iranian and
even the Greek world present us with parallels to the process whereby
the Holy Spirit becomes in relation to the personal God a distinct
though closely attached personality. In the Zoroastrian ritual the
Fravashi or Soul of Ahura receives reverence,[74.1] and in Greek
speculation and even cult the θεοῦ Πρόνοια or Divine Providence is
sometimes regarded as an individual and {75} personal power;[75.1]
nor is the conception of a plurality of beings within the limits of
the same personality unfamiliar to primitive thought. The subject is
one of the most intricate in the field of religious study, and the
more hopeful investigation of it would demand anthropological study in
its widest sense, combined with a knowledge of the later Greek
metaphysic which has clearly left its impress on our doctrine.
I will close these illustrations with the most obvious example of the
contribution of anthropological study to our knowledge of actual
Christendom. One of the most fruitful offshoots of the older Hellenic
system was hero-worship, which itself may have arisen as a development
of ancestor-cult. At first confined to the mythic figures of the past,
it came to be applied to founders of colonies, legislators, and even
to athletes; in its final development in the last centuries before
Christ it was chiefly consecrated to kings and dynasts, {76} the
founders of religious societies, men of science, and political
benefactors. The divine worship of the mortal, an idea abhorrent to
Judaism, and not accepted by the severer Zoroastrian, was part of the
state system of earlier and later Egypt, and was finally imposed on
the Greco-Roman world. The soil in which it had most rankly flourished
was Greek, and Greece and Anatolia were crowded with chapels
consecrated to recently living men or to faded figures who were
supposed to have once lived on earth, some of them perhaps actual
ancestors, some imaginary personages of the epic or legendary world,
some merely functional divinities of subordinate departments, like the
hero of the ploughshare or the tutelary hero of the potters. This
growth of polytheism had struck its roots so deeply that Christianity,
in spite of its monotheistic ideal, was unable to eradicate it. The
ancient hero may sometimes be lurking under the later disguise of the
saint: the mediæval guild, like the Attic fraternity of potters, {77}
had its sacred tutelary patron; and it is curious to observe that in
the matter of canonisation the Pope came to play exactly the same part
as the Delphic oracle had played in the public consecration of the
hero-cult: the divine authorisation is given or withheld by the vicar
or agent of God. The importance of this inherited tradition in
determining our religious estimate of historical Christendom is of the
highest: for whatever may have been or may be the orthodox dogma of
the Church concerning the status of the saint, such worship inevitably
means polytheism from the point of view of the popular faith: and we
gather that in many outlying communities of Christendom, as of the
ancient Greek world, the lower cult overshadows the higher. And this
is one of the most salient and sure examples that we can quote of the
direct influence of the older religions upon the later. This special
influence is mainly Greek, though the pagan North, the Celtic and
Lithuanian, and perhaps the {78} Teutonic peoples, have contributed
much to the tradition of saint-worship.
The illustrations given may suffice as a sketch of the various
applications of a comparative method to the problems that the
phenomena of Christianity offer to the student. In the choice of
illustration I may seem to have ignored the strength of the Judaic
element in determining the evolution; but I have considered it
unnecessary to touch on this, as it has long been the familiar theme
of scientific theology. I have also ventured to suggest that our own
religious history should be traced back to the period of our ancestral
paganism. And I would strongly recommend to the student of comparative
religion in England a devoted attention to the world of the Norse
Saga: for this has been strangely and fatally neglected by our English
system of culture, with grievous loss to our poetic imagination, and
to our knowledge of the early law and the religious institutions and
temperament of our ancestors. Such a work {79} as Golther’s _Handbuch
der germanischen Mythologie_ shows us what a harvest may be reaped in
that field for the science of religion. The subject in its own right
claims our interest, and certain phenomena in the old Teutonic
religion, its fatalistic ideas, its eschatologic beliefs concerning a
“day of judgment,” demand consideration in the light of more advanced
creeds. On the other hand it may be wrong to attribute to it any
direct influence on the inner development of Northern Christianity;
for there may be reason for the view that, when the new religion
conquered the Teutonic North, it found there in some sense a religious
vacuum, the old ritual and faith having lost its vitality and hold;
and certainly our ancestral paganism made no such struggle to survive
as did the Greco-Roman. Nevertheless the history of its institutions
may be necessary, as has been suggested already, to explain the
struggle between Church and State in Teutonic lands; and, further, it
is only the pages of the Norse Saga-book that can yield us {80} an
answer to the question whether we may not have inherited from remote
times a certain average racial law of religious temperament resulting
in a characteristic attitude towards matters of religion that may have
determined our religious history. If the answer were affirmative and
definite, the fact would have a practical no less than a speculative
importance. At least we shall not know ourselves completely in this or
in other matters if we continue to think that Greece and Rome and
Palestine are our sole intellectual and spiritual ancestors; in fact
we may say that no account of the history of Christianity in any
European State can be real and complete unless we can get back to the
pre-Christian past of that community.
Yet, while making full allowance for the influence of special
ancestral traditions, those who work on the lines which have been
indicated in the illustrations of method which I have selected, will
acquire the ever-growing conviction that Hellas has dominated the {81}
creed as she has dominated the intellectual history of Christendom;
that the new faith, in spite of its fierce or contemptuous intolerance
of the past, was only able to transform but not to abolish the
Mediterranean tradition: that in fact Sir Henry Maine’s often quoted
aphorism, while by no means wholly true, was truer in respect of
religious history than he himself was aware.
I have been speaking hitherto mainly on the relations of anthropology
to the comparative study of religion. And it may be well now to point
out that anthropology, as I have tried to define and distinguish its
functions, though an essential part, is only a part of the whole. For
we must know not only the past but the present conditions, not only
the embryology but the perfected growth. And, again, we compare
religions not merely to test theories of origin, ancestry, and
indebtedness, but also to form the proper estimate of each one, and to
correct the one-sided judgment that is always quick to pronounce this
phenomenon {82} or feature in any particular system as unique. If the
comparison reveals more divergences than parallels, the result is no
less important. And the comparative method should be applied not
merely to ritual, liturgy, hieratic institutions, legends, and dogmas,
but also to the varying phenomena and expressions of the religious
temperament in the various races. Only the study of the latter can
enable us to test the living force of a faith, the degree with which
it possesses the national mind; and such a study is only possible when
a nation has produced a rich religious literature or monuments of art
embodying the public and private worship and religious sentiment. We
know what we have gained by the discovery of the sacred books of the
East, by the interpretation of the Babylonian inscriptions, and from
their revelation to us in the Vedic, Iranian, and Mesopotamian
cult-centres of a fervour as deep and passionate as any that we find
in Hebraic or Christian writings. On the other hand, when a religion
has passed away, {83} as is the case with that of pre-Hellenic Rome,
without leaving any articulate expression of its inner life, our
knowledge of it can be superficial only, confined to mere ritual,
fragments of liturgies, and the externals of cult.
A dispassionate and uncontroversial study of that which is at least
one of the greatest forces in human society cannot but be interesting,
and fruitful also for other branches of inquiry, such as the history
of early law and morals, of which in many primitive communities the
religion is the only record. It may even solve certain problems
concerning the early migrations of races, as I have been convinced by
the investigation of various Greek cults. In England the trained
workers in this field are still unfortunately few, perhaps because a
certain latent prejudice, born of religious partisanship, is not yet
extinct, and may act somewhat as a deterrent. I have avoided hitherto
alluding to any of the practical and controversial considerations {84}
which the methodical pursuit and propagation of this science may
excite, though I am well aware that its practical effects may be of
high importance; but they are not immediately our concern at present.
There is, however, one such consideration that it is pertinent to
touch on before concluding the survey of the methods and functions of
this branch of historical inquiry, which deals much with origins and
with the evolution of higher forms of religion from the lower.
Discoveries of origins may appear to affect the validity of a creed or
certain articles of creed. That this is actually the case in regard to
the great problem with which the illustrations I have put before you
are mainly concerned, namely, the genesis of Christianity, has been
recently frankly admitted by a leading dignitary of the Roman Church:
who, moved by a rumour of anthropological research, has promptly
turned it to the profit of his cause by maintaining that the Roman
ritual and communion gains in force and validity by {85} the discovery
that it has inherited and absorbed the religious thought and practice
of ancient Greece and Rome. On the other hand, others may find the
exposition of the so-called pagan elements in the essence of
Christianity repugnant to their sentiment; and hence are inclined to
accept the dictum “that origin does not affect validity.” I imagine
the facts of religious psychology make somewhat against this aphorism.
But it only concerns the science of comparative religion, because in
the history of creeds validity has been very often found to maintain
itself mainly by an appeal to origin; and as our science, to
reiterate, is much concerned with origins, it is indirectly concerned
with those claims of validity that support themselves by such an
appeal.
Another cause of the paucity of workers in this field is the
complexity and difficulty of the subject, which can be handled
successfully only by the advanced and mature student. The
pre-requisites of competence are an {86} exact philological as well as
an archæological training, with a view to the proper appreciation
both of texts and monuments; secondly, a general acquaintance with the
problems and history of philosophy, and especially of ethics, and with
the history of early social institutions and law; thirdly, a
comprehensive study of anthropology. To this must be added a
sympathetic and minute knowledge of at least two of the great
world-religions, whereby alone a critical insight into the essential
and significant phenomena of the religious experiences of our race can
be obtained. The comparative science of religion has now become
possible, thanks partly to the labours of philological specialists in
the ancient languages of Europe and Asia, and partly to the
organisation of anthropological travel.
Let me conclude with remarking that subdivision of labour is
imperative in this field: and it is especially in Oxford that the
opportunities for the requisite preliminary {87} training are
plentiful. It would be a gain for more than science if we could see a
group of mature students organised here exploring the various
departments of this complex subject in co-operation and with mutual
assistance.
LECTURE III.
THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR
INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM
{88}
Among all the varied religious acts of man, there is probably none
that has been so widely prevalent throughout the different races of
mankind as the ritual of purification, nor does any idea seem to have
possessed so strong a legislative power in the various departments of
our life as the concept of purity. We can trace it back to instincts
that we appear to share with the higher animals, and we can track it
upwards through the complex rites of the higher religions. The record
presents us with a vast mass of phenomena which, as far as I am able
to discover, have not yet been reduced to system or unified by any
constructive {89} theory of evolution. In this lecture I venture to
attempt the systematisation of the subject, first giving a brief
summary of the main facts which are well known to the students of
primitive anthropology and comparative religion and which confront us
in nearly all the societies that have been explored.
In the stage of our conscious life which we may call, relatively to
man’s growth, primeval, certain bodily acts and states and certain
material substances are regarded as unclean and impure, likely to
imprint a stain upon the person. It is impossible here to attempt to
enumerate all the examples, and it is enough to mention a few that are
salient and typical. The generative processes of life, the states and
activities of the male and especially the female organism connected
with them, the bodily changes incident on puberty, are among the most
familiar phenomena with which the idea of impurity in some peculiar
sense has been universally associated. A chief centre or {90} “nidus”
of impurity is child-birth; but still more dangerously impure is its
counterpart, death and all the phenomena of death. In respect of
child-birth the idea is fading away from our civilised consciousness;
but it has left a deep deposit in our conscious or subconscious self
in regard to death. The material substance that has been most
generally felt to be impure is blood; the curious feeling that the
mere mention of the word often excites in certain modern people is a
faint reflex of the savage mental state in respect to the thing; and
the influence of this disposition upon advanced society raises the
most interesting question in which comparative law, ethics, and
religion are jointly concerned, and which will be considered later. To
continue our enumeration we may not find that the objects of the
inanimate world outside ourselves are usually regarded by primitive
thought as in themselves impure, but all or most of them are capable
of catching the infection from ourselves, from death or child-birth
{91} for instance: hence it may be necessary to break or destroy or
purify the utensils and furniture of the house where a death or a
birth has occurred. At a somewhat more advanced stage, certain
food-stuffs come to rank as impure, and a complicated code of “tapu”
is established for specially sanctified persons. Then we are
confronted, but not apparently in the most primitive period, with the
distinction between pure and impure animals, which also dictates
certain rules and practices of diet.
On the other hand certain natural things may come to be regarded as
specially “pure,” whether on the ground of a certain intrinsic
quality, because for instance they are bright and lustrous, or from
the fact that they were habitually used for cathartic or cleansing
processes, as fire, water, odorous wood or spices, or substances which
emitted a pungent odour such as sulphur. Such objects “are used in
ritual,” says Jamblichus,[91.1] {92} “because they are specially full
of the divine nature.” But the psychic phenomena and the corresponding
acts with which we are dealing may be well suspected of descending
from an age at which no definite concept of a divine nature had as yet
arisen, an age not yet perhaps even animistic, for in their crudest
form they do not seem necessarily to imply any articulate system of
belief in a world of ghosts and spirits. And this reflection brings us
to the first question of importance, what this primitive concept of
purity and impurity really is, and what were the sensations from which
it was evolved. Nothing is more difficult to describe than simple
sensations, but it is possible to distinguish one from another. And we
must distinguish between the modern feeling about cleanliness and the
primitive feelings which we are considering. That “cleanliness is next
to godliness” is an aphorism suggested no doubt by sensations
fundamentally akin to these; but many a savage who is most particular
about “impurity” {93} cares little or nothing for what we call
“cleanliness.” We consider that the cleansing acts we ourselves
perform are purely hygienic or pleasure-giving, partly connected with
the instinct of self-preservation, and some of them we find performed
by other animals than man.
But the savage ritual of purification does not by any means tend
necessarily to self-preservation, but at times may lead to
self-destruction, and no hygienic or utilitarian or secular
considerations will carry us far in explaining the cathartic code of
Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta, or Buddhism, or the impurity of tabooed
animals. These codes, while some of their prescriptions may be such as
modern utilitarian ideas might dictate, are obviously instinct with
religious or superstitious beliefs, and to explain the distinction
between the pure and the impure animals would need a long excursus
into primitive religion; the distinction is certainly not one between
wholesome and unwholesome, or pleasant and unpleasant, meat.
{94}
We may probably discover the nature of the instinct underlying much of
the cathartic custom-law by taking as our typical example the savage
feeling about blood. Evidence from almost every society in the world
yields proof that the stain of blood is the primary impurity that
needs a purifying ritual: hence arose a body of rules that were a
burden upon domestic life, hence the elaborate purifications of
warriors after battle or of the individual homicide. Such rules in no
way remind us of the natural desire to take a bath at the end of a
warm field-day: the savage purifications after battle may last for
weeks; it is recorded that a North American Indian tribe was
extirpated because it needed a month to wipe off the stain of a single
conflict, while their enemies needed only a week for that purpose and
therefore had the advantage of three weeks’ start in preparing for the
next attack. The sense-instinct that suggests all this is probably
some primeval terror or aversion evoked by certain objects, as we see
animals {95} shrink with disgust at the sight or smell of blood. The
nerves of savage man are strangely excited by certain stimuli of
touch, smell, taste, sight: the specially exciting object is something
that we should call “mysterious,” “weird,” or, still more
expressively, “uncanny.” To the primitive mind nothing was more
uncanny than blood, and there are people still who faint at the sight
of it: for “the blood is the life,” life and death are the great
primeval mysteries, and all the physical substances that are
associated with the inner principle of either partake of this
mysteriousness. For the savage, what is mysterious is also dangerous
and not to be lightly handled or approached. Now, the man who incurs
such stain not merely is exposed to some unaccountable danger himself,
but he is able to infect others by contagion; he spreads a sort of
miasma, he is the conducting vehicle of a dangerous spiritual
electricity--mere metaphors, which, however, may enable us to catch
something of the primitive thought. Such a {96} man therefore must
avoid communion with his fellows for a time, must be “tabooed”; and
will naturally endeavour to remove the “tapu” or dangerous “miasma” by
some magic rites of cleansing or release. The kinsmen of the recently
dead in all primitive societies are impure, because they have come
into contact with death, the chief source of all impurity; therefore
they must be isolated, and, until they are purified, must wear some
badge or external mark--which we call “mourning”--to warn others
against approaching them. The “tapu” still remains in civilised
communities; we abstain from intruding on the bereaved family, though
we give a different motive for our keeping aloof. It so often happens
that in such matters we act as the savage acts; but we must abandon
for a time our normal way of looking at things in order to imagine
his. To us a corpse may be an object of aversion, and it is in some
degree contagious; but our view of it, when we are cool, is secular
and scientific: while the primitive aspect of it is {97} supranormal
and mystic, and the contagion is something spiritual and incalculably
dangerous. In the Zend-Avesta we find an interesting special
application of this idea: the defiling power of the dead varies
directly according to the sanctity or rank of the deceased; thus it is
greatest in the corpse of the priest, somewhat less in that of a
warrior, and least in that of the husbandman:[97.1] _corruptio optimi
pessima_: the most sacred person can defile the most, because he is
charged with the most mysterious and therefore dangerous potency. The
Latin term “sacer” has the double meaning of “holy” and “accursed”:
from the same Greek root, αγ, spring a word connoting holiness and a
word meaning “pollution.” Primeval thought or feeling holds together
in a vague unity ideas that afterwards differentiate themselves and
even become antithetical. The same power of radiating dangerous
influence, supposed {98} to attach to the holy man, the polluted man
and the polluting thing, brought them originally under the same dim
conception.
It would not repay us here to endeavour to trace out and explain all
the minutiæ of this superstition: the long lists of pure and impure
things that one might compile do not disclose any single regulative
idea, and nothing is more baffling than the eccentricities of
prejudice and terror. But this superstition often proceeds with a
logic of its own: as a corpse is most unclean, and all who touch it
are impure, therefore dogs and wolves and carrion birds are impure and
must not be eaten: and anything that however distantly reminds us of
danger and death, such as quarrelsome acts and words, may come to be
rigidly prohibited during a ritual of purification. As blood is
primevally impure, therefore any substance analogous to it or of the
same colour might be regarded as ill-omened, such as beans or
pomegranates. The same kind of sensational aversion will cause
malodorous substances to {99} be regarded usually as unclean;
therefore food of an evil savour, or such as leaves unpleasant traces
in the person, will often be tabooed by certain strict sects.[99.1]
There is also a certain common-sense discoverable in the distinction
between substances on the ground of their greater or less
susceptibility to spiritual contagion: earthen pots, for instance,
have been often considered more easily infected than metal, and need
longer purification, liquid substances more dangerous conductors than
dry. “Should the dry mingle with the dry,” says Ahura Mazda in a
conversation with Zarathustra, “how soon all this material earth of
mine would be only one Peshôtanu,” which is as much as to say that
the earth would become a charnel-house of impurity. And
Darmesteter[99.2] remarks, in commenting on this verse, “Nowadays in
Persia, the Jews are {100} not allowed to go out of their house on a
rainy day, lest the religious impurity conducted through the rain
should pass from the Jew to the Mussalman.” We have here a view of
contagion that seems to agree with that of modern science, only the
latter is physical, the former mystic or spiritual. Again, the choice
of substances used for purification was not dictated by the modern
idea of a cleansing quality, but by a certain superstitious logic
which we can sometimes detect. If liquid substances have a natural
affinity for contagion, then if we take them while they are uninfected
and use them for lustration, they will easily absorb the impurities of
our own persons and rid us of them; therefore the modern savage or the
ancient Greek might think it desirable to daub himself with clay or
mud to wash away his taint: and from this example we see how distinct
these primeval lustral processes are from the modern hygienic washing,
to which nevertheless they often bear a close resemblance. By a
similar reasoning we {101} may explain an inconsistency that
occasionally appears in the cathartic ritual; a substance impure as
food might be used for purposes of lustration: for instance, we find
garlic used as a cathartic in the worship of the Phrygian god Mên at
Athens.[101.1] Fire, the universal purifier, may have been accredited
with this power by right of its own nature, but partly in all
probability because it was believed to dry up miasma and damp
infection.[101.2]
In the Zend-Avesta code, after drying for a whole year under the light
of the sun, the corpse at last becomes pure; for by the same natural
instinct that caused the aversion to blood, the sun’s light comes to
be regarded as the purest thing in the world: meat cooked by its
warmth is more sanctified than fire-cooked meat; and certain acts and
states of man have a greater defilement in the sun’s face.
So far I have been trying to present the {102} phenomena without
reference to any definite religious belief, to express them as far as
possible in terms of simple sensation; for, as was said at the
beginning of the discussion, it is possible that they have descended
from a pre-religious age. We may now ask how the baneful influence of
the impure thing in this primeval stage of thought was supposed to
work, unassisted by any spiritual agency such as spirit or god. We may
suppose that it produced its results indirectly by depressing the
vital energies of the man who was the victim of the superstition: the
savage might believe that it worked directly, by some mysterious law
of luck, paralysing a man’s force and spoiling his hunting and
fighting. This idea of a spontaneous mesmeric power of evil that
certain things possess seems to glimmer through the verse in the
Zend-Avesta. “Here am I,” says an unlucky man to those whom he meets,
“one who has touched the corpse of a man and who is powerless in mind,
powerless in tongue, {103} powerless in hand; do make me
clean.”[103.1] Is it an illusion to believe that we have here
penetrated to the psychological root of the whole matter? And here
there is no direct reference to spirit or god.
But at an early period such reference was made, and it was then that
this cathartic ritual really started on a momentous career. When the
doctrine of animism became firmly established, it attracted the ritual
and the ideas associated with it, and the animistic imprint upon them
can still be traced even in the higher religions. A dangerous spirit
was supposed to abide in the impure thing and to be evoked by the
unclean act; the potency which in the primeval stage of feeling had
been perhaps regarded merely as something mysteriously baneful and
“uncanny,” now becomes personal and intelligible and can be dealt with
and exorcised by certain efficacious rules. The stain of blood on the
homicide attracts the ghost of the slain to pursue him, certain foods
{104} are impure because evil spirits attach to them, disease is
specially their work, and a veritable pandemonium gathers around the
corpse, the woman in child-birth, and the new-born child.
Illustrations showing how this demoniac faith has pervaded the thought
of the world are broadcast in the records of primitive man as well as
in the higher literature of our race, the Vedic and Iranian sacred
books, the New Testament, the Pythagorean, Platonic, and Neoplatonic
texts. In the view of the Zend-Avesta, which regards the whole
universe as an overcharged battery of spiritual electricity, a single
careless act of accidental uncleanliness is a cosmic catastrophe:
legions of “drugs” or devils start up at once into existence to
destroy the world of righteousness.[104.1] Plato, though on the whole
he preserves his sanity in the matter, is under the dominion of
similar ideas, and Neoplatonism reverts back to the savage view,
believing that the chief aim of ἁγνείαι, or purifications, was to
{105} drive the evil spirits out of certain kinds of food.[105.1]
The deep animistic colouring that the conception we are analysing came
at a very early time to acquire may be responsible for a very
important event in the history of religion: the evolution, namely, of
the dualistic principle, the idea of the antagonism between good and
evil spirits, the germ of which we can already detect in the animistic
stage which may have preceded the faith in high personal gods. If the
impure things and acts are impregnated with evil spirits, it is
natural to suppose that the pure are the abode of the good, and these
are contrary the one to the other. It may have required a very long
period for a clear belief in the good spirit to crystallise; for to
the very primitive mind all spirits are mysteriously dangerous, even
the ghosts of one’s dearest kinsmen. Still, the ancestral spirits make
on the whole for righteousness, and can be given the position of
guardians of {106} the purification code. Thus the New Caledonians
avert the wrath of the ghosts of their ancestors by washing, fasting,
and chastity:[106.1] the ancient Greek might pray or sacrifice to
a vague animistic company of θεοὶ Ἀποτρόπαιοι or Μειλίχιοι, regarded
perhaps as ghosts of the lower world, to avert the impure omen or to
wash off the taint of blood.
Finally, the conception of purity comes under the dominion of the
higher faith in a personal god. In Greece, Apollo and Zeus attach to
themselves the ritual and the associated ideas; in Persia the whole
complex code of purity is established by Ahura Mazda; in Israel by
Jahvé, who enforces the minutest details of the law with insistence
on the purity of God.[106.2] In Babylonian as in Vedic religion, the
fire-god is pre-eminently the purifier, a name which is attached
particularly to Agni, and we find in the Babylonian liturgical texts
the {107} prayer,[107.1] “May the torch of the shining fire-god
cleanse me.” Nor does Buddhism appear to differ from Leviticus or the
Zend-Avesta in respect of the complications of its cathartic rules and
the importance it attached to them. The Buddhist missionary, I-Tsing,
exhorts the faithful to observe the elaborate prescriptions of the
Buddha, “because,” as he naively puts it, “gods and spirits get
disgusted with our ways of wearing garments and eating food.” With
this abundance of testimony before us, we are all the more surprised
to find that very little is forthcoming from the records of our own
ancestral paganism. We can scarcely believe that our Teutonic
ancestors were destitute of the idea of lustration, and that their
cleanliness and chastity, attested by the Roman writers and still more
clearly by their own sagas, were virtues of purely secular origin. And
in fact we have certain records of Teutonic ritual that seem to point
to cathartic ideas: “After the goddess Nerthus had gone on her annual
{108} procession round the villages,” as Tacitus informs us,[108.1]
“her chariot and garments and her own person were solemnly washed in
the waters of a sacred lake, as if the holy divinity had been polluted
by her intercourse with men.” It is also possible that the custom
still prevalent in the Teutonic populations of Europe, of leaping over
the bonfire on midsummer’s eve, is the relic of a ceremony of
fire-lustration performed before the beginning of harvest.[108.2]
Doubtless also they had the same rules as those prevailing in nearly
all communities, whether civilised or uncivilised, concerning the
purity of temples; for we have record of an Icelandic law that the
“Holy Place of Peace” was not to be defiled by blood or any human
uncleanness.[108.3] Still, though other evidence pointing in the same
direction might be gathered, it seems clear that the burden of the
cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on the consciences of our
fathers when the dawn {109} of their history begins. I am not aware of
any indication, for instance, that they regarded formal lustration
after bloodshed to be obligatory or desirable. And their comparative
freedom in regard to such ceremonies is a fact of great importance
with which we must reckon in our estimate of our later spiritual
history. We may at the same time believe, on general grounds, that
they also had at some remoter epoch passed through a period of bondage
to the same ideas and the same formalities that we find so generally
prevalent in other kindred and alien races.
The more interesting side of the inquiry now presents itself, the
question about the influence that these cathartic ideas may have
exercised upon religion, morality, and law. We may endeavour, for the
sake of systematisation, to maintain this tripartite classification,
although we find it becoming more and more illusory the further our
investigation travels back to the earlier social life of man.
But before attempting to survey the special {110} facts that present
themselves within these three departments, it is well to note one
phenomenon that concerns religion and morality in equal measure, and
is of perhaps greater importance than all others in the varied process
of the evolution of the cathartic idea. We have mainly been dealing so
far with facts that seem to belong to the most primitive deposit of
human consciousness and not properly to be ethical in the modern sense
at all: the stain of blood, even incurred by ruthless murder, the
stain of childbirth and the sexual processes, the contagion of the
corpse, are all for the same reason “suspect” to primitive man because
they involve vague and mysterious danger, not because they are
associated with the concept of sin. Nor does this latter concept
necessarily enter in, even when a more articulate animism has taken
possession of the superstition, and the impurity means the presence of
an evil spirit: the leper, the man who has come into contact with the
dead, {111} the blood-stained murderer, are all regarded as suffering
from the same trouble, though in greater or lesser degree. The idea of
purity and impurity, in fact, whether corporeal and external or
whether spiritual in the sense of its association with the world of
spirits, is still non-ethical, and we must not apply our moral
standards to it until a later stage. It arrives at this stage and at
its higher significance for morality when it has evolved the
conception of a pure heart, a pure soul. And that this latter, which
is one of the most pregnant of the concepts of developed ethics, was
actually evolved from the primitive ritualistic and demoniac
superstition can, I believe, be proved by the evidence, and accords
with a well-known psychologic law of early thought.
We deceive ourselves if we are content to say that terms such as “pure
heart,” “pure soul” are mere metaphors. The theory of metaphors is a
refuge for those who do not understand, or who do not wish to
understand, {112} religious history, and much might be said of the
far-reaching effects of this fallacy of interpretation. The soul was
not called “ψυχή” or “animus” or “spiritus” by mere metaphor: nor was
the phrase “white liver” a metaphor for the people who first applied
it to the coward. Primitive man may be the victim of false analogy and
association of ideas, but these mental processes mean for him
something other than metaphor means for us. It is not by way of
metaphor that the modern Basuto speaks of his heart “being black and
dirty,” that is, “impure” or “sad,” the same word being used for
corporeal impurity, sadness, and sin.[112.1] The colour of the impure
act or bodily state is, so to speak, transferred inwards: if the act
involves a physical stain, then, as things, {113} words, and thoughts
are so closely correlated in early psychology, the term “unclean
word,” “unclean thought” expresses a literal belief: gradually, as the
concept of mind and soul becomes more and more immaterial, we may
reach the spiritual concept of mental purity which is of value for
modern ethics. The example quoted above reveals the Basuto at the
half-way point in this evolution: and a certain North-American Indian
tribe, whose customs have been recorded by Miss Alice Fletcher,
appears to have reached the same mental stage; in her paper called the
“Shadow of a Ghost Lodge,”[113.1] she mentions that the kinsmen who
sit together isolated from others and mourning the dead for a period
must rigidly abstain from any tales of fighting or “bad words,” they
must forget old injuries and cancel all grudges. The mental process
that leads to this excellent _tapu_ may be stated thus: the mourners
are in a condition of deep impurity which they are endeavouring {114}
to cleanse away; quarrelling, vindictive speech, and memories would
intensify the impurity, because all these are associated with
bloodshed and death. This analogy may serve to explain the curious
rule prevailing at Athens that anyone who laid a suppliant-bough on
the altar in the Eleusinion during the period of the Eleusinian
Mysteries was liable to the penalty of death or a heavy fine.[114.1]
I would suggest that the underlying thought is the same: the laying
the suppliant-bough indicated a grievance and was a legally
quarrelsome act, and therefore a violation of the purity of the solemn
season. It was probably a similar chain of reasoning that induced the
Greeks and other races of the higher religion to enforce silence
before and during the sacrifice, not merely in order that the priest
should not be disturbed by the chatter of the crowd; for the word used
for this sacred silence is εὐφημία, “auspicious speech”: it is
obvious that the original motive of the rule {115} was to guard
against the utterance of any impure word that might produce an
ill-omened condition of mind in the congregation.
Of this development of the idea of spiritual from that of ritualistic
purity, the language of certain of the higher races affords the same
indication as we find in the Basuto phrase: the Latin “purus” and the
Greek καθαρός and φοῖβος themselves have an original material or
physical significance; the blood that is shed and the unburied corpse
emit a “miasma,” a defiling atmosphere charged with dangerous spirits,
and the same word μίασμα comes to denote a spiritual corruption of the
soul: touching a corpse is called “sin” in the Zend-Avesta;[115.1]
and it is significant that the same word which is used to express the
material idea of impurity in the Old Testament in the earlier books of
the Law is employed in the later and more advanced ethical vocabulary
of the Bible for a real sin against God as understood in the modern
sense.
{116}
Again, we have other evidence besides the linguistic that the earliest
conception of sin which we can call spiritual was still
half-materialistic, and was still closely allied to that of bodily
impurity. In the theory of earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away
like a physical taint, the atonement takes the form of certain
lustrations, and repentance is not considered necessary as a moral
condition of release. And to the same middle stage of development
belongs the process known as the transference of sin, whereby the sin
can be extracted as if it were a substance from the person of the
sinner and transferred into another man or animal or even an inanimate
object. Think of sin as an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of
quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.[116.1] It no doubt
belongs to a comparatively early {117} period of savage religion.
Among the Atkans, for instance,[117.1] we hear of such a release as
this: the sin, which in this case was a gross violation of a natural
law of the sex-instinct, was made to enter into certain weeds which
were worn about the person, and then, under a clear sun were carefully
thrown away, the sun himself being called to witness the act of
transference. In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking off of evils
was a great public festival: bands of warriors marched forth crying
out, “Go forth, all evils,” and then bathed in the river, while the
people shook out their clothes from the doors.[117.2] A similar
record speaks of the Inca praying to the river-god to bear away his
sins, which he had confessed in the sight of the sun. And during the
Peruvian purification a similar rule prevailed to that which was
noticed above, that all abusive language and strife was to be avoided.
Or again, the {118} belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be
induced to find another living-lodgment, suggests the scapegoat, a
familiar figure in Leviticus and in Greek ritual, the animal who bears
away with it into the wilderness the sins of the people, or is put to
death with the uttered prayer that into it may enter all the evils of
the community. The Judaic record tells us that Aaron “confessed over
him all the iniquities of the children of Israel… putting them on the
head of the goat”; after this, as the animal was in a high degree of
sin-infection, both Aaron and the man who led it away into the
wilderness must wash and change their clothes.[118.1] The Egyptian
rite described by Herodotus,[118.2] shows us the same idea
differently worked out: the head of the animal is severed with the
imprecation that it may bear the evils of the community, and is then
either thrown into the river so that the stream may carry them away,
or is sold to the Hellenes wherever there happens to be a Hellenic
market: Herodotus {119} does not tell us the reason of this, which,
however, is easily divined: the Hellene is the stranger who, as the
Egyptians hoped, might eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into
his alien person the people’s sins; for the eating of other people’s
sins is a recognised primitive process of transference.[119.1] What
is unique in the Egyptian management of the ceremony is the skilful
combination of religion and trade.
Finally, the ritual may demand a human scapegoat, who will fulfil
exactly the same function as the animal. He may be put to death, or
driven over the border, carrying away the national sins: he may be
very vile, and therefore a fitting receptacle for sin, like the
“κάθαρμα,” the “purifying man” in the Attic festival of the Thargelia,
who was led through the streets, whipped with rods, and at one time
burnt; or the slave at Marseilles,[119.2] who was fed up and
reverentially treated for {120} a year, and then was led forth in
solemn procession through the streets and expelled from the city,
praying that on him might fall all the evils of the community:[120.1]
or the scapegoat-man may be exceptionally holy, being the better able,
through his very holiness, to absorb harmlessly and dissipate the
evils of others. Thus even the miserable victim of the Thargelia was
mysteriously invested with a certain sacred character, and seems once
to have been regarded in a certain degree as the counterpart of the
divinity.[120.2]
Much of this ritual of sin-transference is altogether independent of
the higher gods; it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or mechanical
magic. At a later period it is harmonised with their service and
accompanied with prayer; and at this stage we note a curious
ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the primeval source of impurity,
becomes itself {121} a purifier, not by the law _similia similibus
curantur_, but owing to the growing power of the sacrificial concept.
“The blood of bulls and goats can wash away sins,” because the animal
that has been consecrated by contact with the altar becomes charged
with a divine potency, and its sacred blood, poured over the impure
man, absorbs and disperses his impurity. Illustrations are easily
gathered from Hellenic ritual,[121.1] which frequently employed the
blood of swine for cathartic purposes. On an early vase-painting we
see the hero Theseus seated on the altar of God the Atoner with pig’s
blood running down his body to cleanse him from the slaughter of the
brigands.[121.2] In the Judaic rule the blood of the red heifer was
{122} first sprinkled by the priest before the tabernacle of the
congregation seven times, but for special purposes of lustration the
“water of separation” was used, that is, water made holy by being
mingled with the ashes of the heifer that had been burnt. We have a
curious illustration of the double character of this water of
separation: being consecrated and holy, it was powerful to cleanse
away stain and sin: yet its own impure composition was not wholly
forgotten, for he who sprinkled the water or touched it was unclean
till evening.[122.1]
These ideas belong to very old-world thought, yet their reflex abides
with us still in the heart of a spiritual creed; for their association
is clear with the Christian conception of the transference of sin and
of the divine victim that takes upon himself the sins of the people.
As far as we have examined it as yet, the concept of a “pure heart” is
not necessarily wholly ethical; it is often coexistent with the ideas
of sin that do not clearly recognise {123} moral responsibility or the
essential difference between deliberate wrong-doing and the
ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. In the middle stage of
ethical-religious growth, an innocent Œdipus may yet be regarded as
πᾶς ἄναγνος, impure body and soul. The final point is reached when it
is realised that the blood of bulls and goats cannot wash away sin,
that nothing external can defile the heart or soul, but only evil
thoughts and evil will. This purged and idealised concept will then in
the progressive religions revolt against its own parentage, and will
prompt the eternal antagonism of the prophet against the ritual
priest, of the Christ against the Pharisee.
It would be interesting to trace the points of this long development,
which has here been hastily sketched, among the higher races of the
old world; but a brief and partial indication of its history among
some of them must here suffice. We are all acquainted with the final
evolution of the idea of purity in {124} Judaic history: but the
phenomena of its embryonic stages, as revealed in the ritual books of
the Old Testament, may not be so familiar. They present the Hebrew
mind in regard to this particular as on the same level with the
Zarathustrian Persian, the Vedic Indian, and the Hellene of the
seventh century. Purity is the strictest law of Jahvé, the pure god,
who intimates that he would punish Aaron with death if he heedlessly
entered the holy place without purification.[124.1] But the processes
by which it is secured are mechanical, quasi-magical, and the concept
itself appears more materialistic than spiritual, ritualistic rather
than ethical in our sense: the processes of cleansing are such as the
use of incense, lustrations with blood, water, and even fire,
cathartic methods which are almost universal: we hear nothing of
prayer or repentance. Blood is the chief impurity, whether shed
deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. The warriors after battle
must be purified {125} before they enter the camp.[125.1] Murder has
indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks a great advance in the
social development of human society: no satisfaction such as the
were-gilt was allowed for murder; but it is regarded as a sin rather
than a crime, and its sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on
which the blood is shed. “Blood defileth the land,” and “I the Lord
dwell among the children of Israel.”[125.2] Even the accidental
homicide must fly to the city of refuge, not merely to escape the
avenger of blood, who represents the old family right of the
blood-feud, but to rid the land of the impurity of his presence. Nor
must he return till the death of the high priest.[125.3] This latter
restriction has not yet been explained, so far as I am aware. I
venture the explanation that the high priest is regarded here as the
temporary representative of Jahvé, and as infected with the impurity
that cleaves to the outraged god; but when {126} he dies, the stain
that has been put upon the god fades away and his wrath ceases.
Finally, we may note the rule that when the murderer could not be
discovered, the nearest city must offer cathartic sacrifices, “and thy
sin”--that is, the ritualistic sin of having an impure spot of ground
in one’s territory--“shall then be forgiven thee.”[126.1] In fact the
Judaic law concerning homicide as shown in these books, though it has
advanced far beyond savagery, and has even attained to the modern view
that manslaying concerns the whole community, is yet barbaric on the
whole. The concept of purity aided development up to a certain point
and then probably retarded it. On the other hand, in the department of
sexual morality its operation was most powerful for good; it
consecrated and safeguarded the fundamental laws if it did not
actually construct or evoke them; but, as we should expect, the sexual
purity of the Hebrew code remains a religious law and does not pass
into the domain of secular ethic.
{127}
Another religion that is of equal value for our present purpose is the
Zarathustrian. Trusting as far as we may the translation and
interpretation of its sacred books, we may gather the impression from
the study of them that no religion on the earth has ever been under
such bondage to the cathartic ideal as this one; nor does it appear
very profitable at first sight to put the question here of the
influence of the idea of purity on religion, law, and morals, for the
idea seems all-absorbing and these three to have no independent
existence apart from it. It creates for the Mazdean believer a
morality of its own, with which the secular systems have little or
nothing to do. “Oh, maker of the world,” asks Zarathustra of Ahura
Mazda, “can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcase of a dog or
the corpse of a man?” The deity answers--“He cannot, oh holy
Zarathustra.”[127.1] Nor is there any purification possible for the
unforgivable sin of walking about after fifteen years of age were
{128} reached without a girdle or a proper shirt: “such a one goes
henceforth with power to destroy the world of righteousness.”[128.1]
On the other hand, the highest act of righteousness which brings
forgiveness of all sins to him who performs it is the pulling down of
a dakhma, the scaffold on which the corpses were hung according to the
Persian system of burial, after it had served its purpose; for
naturally it was a focus of impurity, and demons congregated there in
swarms.[128.2] And the Persian concept of purity makes its own law.
As the ritual of cleansing is the prime article of the Zarathustrian
code, so the sacrilegious cleanser, that is, the amateur who tried to
purify another without knowledge of the Mazdean ceremonies, brought
sterility upon the land and was punished with death.[128.3] And death
was the penalty for him who dared to carry a corpse alone, for the
dead body spread around the contagion of a myriad “drugs” or demons,
{129} and two men at least must set hand to it to prevent an
intolerable epidemic of impurity.[129.1] Legislation in the
Zend-Avesta is merciless beyond any recorded code; we must suppose
that it was mainly idle thunder, or Persia would have been
depopulated. The whole universe of Mazdeism is permeated with these
cathartic ideas, and a secular or physical view of things scarcely
glimmers through: the ritual order dominated what we call the material
as well as the spiritual world; the sun, moon, and stars are purified
by the Word. On this basis arose a religion of great exaltation and a
religious fervour of rare intensity: and the sacred books of Persia
are of great value for the present inquiry, for they show us more
clearly than any other record the spiritual concept of the pure heart
emerging from the ritualistic idea; while it is often hard in any
particular text to distinguish between the lower and the higher
significance. When God speaks to the prophet thus--“Purity {130} is
for man, next to life, the highest good: that purity, O Zarathustra,
that is in the religion of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with
good thoughts, words, and deeds,”[130.1] we believe we have reached a
high ethical conception; but the phrase is supposed by Darmesteter to
refer to him who cleanses himself according to the prescriptions of
the law. Yet in their cathartic code were the germs of an advanced
morality, and truthfulness and chastity were fostered by it.[130.2]
The lustrations were partly of the primitive type, taken over, as
usual, from a lower stratum of religion; their most interesting
features are the cleansing words that accompanied them, which were not
usually prayers but spells, formulæ of magic potency, but drawn from
a high {131} religion, such as these, for instance:--“The will of the
Lord is the Law of Righteousness”; “Holiness is the best of all Good:
it is also Happiness.”[131.1] Even the virtue of philanthropy is
given cathartic value in a spell-formula, “he who relieves the poor
makes Ahura King,” recited before the person was washed with the holy
water of Mazda and the “gômêz” of an ox.[131.2]
In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has been the “purest” the
world has known; but the high spiritual concept of purity that it
evolved never escaped nor struggled to escape, as did the Judaic and
Hellenic, from the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion was
doomed to ceremoniousness and sacerdotalism; and the modern student
who is fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius and its deep,
whole-hearted conviction must be prepared for the inevitable bathos
that awaits him. Its remoteness from the modern and civilised view of
things may be estimated from {132} the Zarathustrian text, in which
the prophet exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the diseased
limb with a cleansing spell and by the ejection of the demon, above
the surgeon who heals it with a knife.[132.1]
It is with a feeling of relief that we now turn to the survey of the
Hellenic phenomena, passing by as we must the Vedic and the Islamic,
which appear to be of lesser importance so far as I have been able to
study them. The Hellenic religion more than all others of the ancient
world is the mirror of the manifold civilisation of a people; for its
lesser intensity allowed it more varied application, and it was
obliged to reconcile itself speedily with the utilitarian and secular
forces of rational progress, which there was no sacerdotal caste
strong enough to oppose. And it is in the light of this religion
therefore that the concept of purity can best be studied in its
relations to law and morality. The history of the cathartic ritual in
Greece {133} does not begin till the eighth century; for the Homeric
age was strikingly sane, cheerful, and secular in its views about such
things. Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentleman would feel, that
it was wrong to go to a religious service “bedabbled in gore and
filth,” though Odysseus purifies his house with sulphur-fumigation
after the carnage of the fight, the world for whom Homer sang does not
appear to have been burdened with the ceremoniousness of purification
or with dread of the impurity of blood and death, or with any sort of
care for the vengeance or miasma of the ghost. An age that could rise
to the height of such a sentiment as “best of omens is it to fight for
one’s country,” was likely to be healthy-minded in all such matters.
The first mention of purification for bloodshed is in a poem of
Arctinos of the eighth century; and a certain ritual-code of purity
begins to emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic legislation comes
to be very rife in Greece, emanating chiefly from two centres as it
{134} seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom the domain of
ritual-purity belongs especially are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos; at
the same time the ghostly terrors of the underworld appear to be
gaining a greater hold on the Hellenic imagination, and “catharsis” is
specially needed to deal with these. Probably all this is only a
revival of aboriginal practices and superstitions rooted in the
Hellenic soil, a religion which the intellectualism of Homeric
civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, but which asserted
itself with renewed strength when that civilisation was overthrown.
Yet the revival, though apparently a “set-back,” bore fair fruit for
morality, law, and even religion. The history of Greek ethic must
reckon as it has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and the
history of Greek law with the fear of the ghost and the miasma of
bloodshed.
At first the idea is, as usual, ritualistic and non-moral: and much
that we find in savage communities, and in Judæa, Persia, and India,
we find again in Greece. As the Hebrew {135} warriors were purified
before returning to camp, so the Macedonian army was purified in
spring before the campaign,[135.1] and the misunderstood story of the
Phokians daubing themselves with gypsum before battle points to a
cathartic ritual.[135.2] And the Hellenic ceremonies agreed with
those of most other nations in regard to the causes of uncleanness and
the methods of deliverance: fire, water, blood, onions, the skins of
animals sacrificed, even clay and bran, are the usual purifying media.
In one method of κάθαρσις only the Hellenic ritual is unique so far as
I know: sacrificial communion with God was sometimes considered an
effective means of obliterating the impurity which the kinsmen
contracted by a death in the family: at Argos the mourners put off the
“tapu” by eating of the sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit
of the pure god in the sacred food could destroy {136} the miasma
within and around them.[136.1] The strongholds of Pharisaic
purification were the religious brotherhoods of Orphism and the
earlier Pythagoreanism, a religious-philosophic school closely
associated with the former; in these the law of “the pure life” is a
ceremonious law, specially concerned with abstinence from certain
food. But Greek thought did not remain long on this level: a saying is
attributed to Charondas of Catana, but perhaps of later origin, which
asserts that “foul speech is a defilement of the soul”;[136.2] and in
a fragment of Epicharmos of the fifth century, we have the utterance
of the higher gospel, “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all
thy body”; and the later Pythagorean literature, such as the “Golden
Song” of Hierocles, contains the doctrine that “purity of soul is the
only divine service”; “God has no more familiar abode on the earth
than the pure soul.” And to an unknown writer, probably of the same
{137} school,[137.1] we owe the dogma, “We worship God most meetly if
we render our own soul pure from every stain of evil.” There are two
epigrams in the Anthology, included in the fanciful collection of
Pythian oracles, expressing the same idea that holiness is a spiritual
fact independent of ceremonies or lustrations: “Oh stranger, if holy
of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the
lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all
ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.”[137.2] The other
maintains as clearly as Isaiah or the New Testament the uselessness of
all mere washing of hands: “The temples of the gods are open to all
good men, nor is there any need of purification: no stain can ever
cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart, for thy
soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body.”[137.3] The
better Greek mind attained this freedom the more easily in that it was
not strongly {138} or generally possessed with the belief in the
aboriginal impurity or sinfulness of the flesh and the earthly life.
And Greek ritual itself, conservative as it was and never abandoning
its code of purification, comes at last to be influenced by this freer
atmosphere and to reconcile ceremonious purity with a higher moral
law. Before the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros stood the text,
“Within the incense-filled sanctuary one must be pure; and purity is
to have righteous thoughts.”[138.1] An inscription on a temple in
Rhodes of the time of Hadrian[138.2] shows a strange blend of
primitive and advanced thought. Its preamble mentions “rules
concerning righteous entrance into the shrine.” “The first and
greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to
be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows the usual ceremonious
code of rules concerning the impurities of food, {139} funerals, and
natural affections of the body: and the last clause shows the ethical
idea penetrating even these, for the code prescribes that a person may
enter the shrine “on the same day after lawful married intercourse.”
This means that the adulteress was excluded, as she was at Athens by a
law quoted by Demosthenes.[139.1] It appears then that the liberal
ethic judgment attributed to Theano, the female Pythagorean teacher,
that while lawful intercourse was no bar to participating in a
religious service on the same day, the adulteress was to be for ever
excluded,[139.2] was not wholly out of accordance with the advanced
ritualistic code of Greece.
The above is some slight illustration of the development of the Greek
concept of purity and of its ethical influence. It remains to trace
its action in a very important department of law--the law of homicide.
Perhaps the most significant distinction between the code of a
civilised and that of a savage or {140} barbaric community lies in
their respective attitudes towards manslaughter or murder: in the
latter society it is mainly an affair between the families concerned,
to be settled by the were-gilt or the blood-feud: in the former the
whole community feels itself to be deeply concerned. Our Teutonic
ancestors, at the time of Tacitus and for centuries after, remained at
the lower stage, though we discern that the legal genius of the
Icelanders was impelling them towards the higher even before
Christianity reached them. What is strange is that some societies
appear to have attained a high general level of civilisation without
making this momentous advance: the Homeric world, for instance, was
scarcely abreast with the early Icelandic in this respect, although we
may see signs that the higher idea was ready to emerge in the later
Homeric period.[140.1] Then follows a blank in {141} our record which
may be tentatively filled up by the interpretation of mythology, until
in the developed Attic law--which we know better than the law of any
other Greek state--we find the modern idea fully recognised and
applied to a criminal code, probably from the sixth century onward,
though traces of legal barbarism still survive. We would gladly
discover the constructive forces, spiritual or political, that brought
this great reform about. The anthropology of our contemporary savage
societies has not yet supplied us with analogies that we could apply
to Greek history: a few savage states have indeed spontaneously
achieved the great advance from the blood-feud to a public law of
homicide, but there is no record showing how they have achieved it.
Some writers have supposed that the emergence of criminal law in
general is always due to some great increase of power in the central
government, probably to the development of the monarchy. But as a
universal axiom this cannot be accepted; for, as {142} Steinmetz in
his treatise on “The Development of Punishment”[142.1] has shown,
such a suggested cause is not found operative in the backward
communities of modern times that have developed a public criminal law.
Nor would it be reasonable to urge that the central authority was
stronger in Greece of the seventh century than in the earlier
monarchical period. Probably Steinmetz is right in his belief that
among savage societies the earliest criminal law arises from some
intense feeling of hatred or dread excited by acts that violate
religious feeling or secular interests. One of the earliest crimes to
be punished by death at the hands of the society is incest: the horror
that it excites among savages is a feeling that we may call religious.
We may not be able to show indeed that the primitive ideas of purity
would explain the earliest complicated codes of human marriage: but
the circles of kinship that are thus established seem certainly to
have been consecrated {143} at a very early time by the concept of
purity that came to be attached to them.[143.1] Now it is probable
that a similar religious feeling was operative in the case of
homicide.
If in any given society the primitive belief in the impurity of
bloodshed became intensified beyond a certain point, homicide might
easily come to be regarded no longer as a matter to be settled by the
families of the slayer and the slain, but as the deep concern of the
people of the land. We have seen that it was just this religious
concept of impurity that brought the act under the cognisance of the
national religious law of Israel: the people are terrified because the
soil has been made impure and their god has been stained. In the
Zend-Avesta we find that {144} the slaying of a water-dog was an
impure act against God, and was avenged by the whole community; and
sacrifice was offered to appease the holy soul of the dog.[144.1]
These facts then offer some analogy for the theory that I would
suggest, namely, that the civilised law in Greece concerning homicide
arose in the post-Homeric period through an intensification of the
feeling concerning the impurity of bloodshed and owing to the greater
hold that the terrors of the ghostly world had come to gain over the
later Hellenic imagination; for the ghost or the Erinys of the dead is
the embodiment of the miasma that arises from the slaying; and the
ghost knows how to drive it home, and is no respecter of persons, but
can make a whole area uninhabitable. The religious phenomenon and the
legal fact that I would connect as cause and effect are not found in
the Homeric period: both are found coexisting in the later. And much
legendary evidence accords with this hypothesis. {145} Perhaps the
earliest indication of the emergence of the idea in Greek society that
certain kinds of homicide concern the State, is found in the legends
about exile and excommunication for the shedding of kindred blood, the
exile, for instance, of Bellerophon and Ixion. Such exile is not the
ordinary flight of the homicide to avoid the avenger of blood; for in
the cases where a man is of the same kin as the slain, there is no
family avenger, but the whole community in horror cast him out lest
the curse should infect themselves. Kinsmen’s blood was more sacred
than other, therefore the shedding it spread the greater impurity over
the land. And the Greek legends suggest that this offence was one of
the earliest in the legal history of the race which awoke the
religious conscience of the State.[145.1] {146} Now if we assume that
the old ideas associated with kinship came to be extended to the whole
community of the polis--as might easily happen through the
intermarriage of the γένη--then a similar miasma would be caused
by the slaying of a citizen as by kindred murder: the State would feel
the supernatural peril of the act and would take cognisance.
The reasons for supposing that this was the actual order in the
Hellenic evolution of the homicide law may appear to rest on mere
legends, but legends are often direct and firsthand evidence of early
thought, and the stories about the slayers of kindred who were driven
out of the communities and who were the first applicants for the
ritual of purification, such as Ixion, Orestes, Theseus, accord well
with the early belief that the Erinyes were the ghostly avengers of
kindred slaughter. Then we find that in the Aithiopis, the poem of
Arctinos of Miletus, Achilles has to leave the army and retire to
Lesbos for {147} purification, although Thersites, whom he has slain,
is no real kinsman of his: whence we may draw the conclusion that the
State of Miletus, in the eighth century, had come to take cognisance
of the slaying of any citizen. And the Argives, in the fifth or fourth
century, offer atonement to Zeus Meilichios for a civic massacre, the
god who has a legendary association with purification for the shedding
of kindred blood. By the fifth century in Athens the religious feeling
concerning the sacredness of all life within the city had so deepened
that even the slaying of a slave caused a miasma and was a State
offence.[147.1]
Now when we examine certain details of Attic law, together with
certain expressions of sentiment concerning homicide in the classical
writers of Attica, we see the clear imprint of its origin. Accidental
homicide was as gravely regarded by the Athens of the fourth century
as by the old Hebrew code: such homicides must fly over the border,
but if they went by {148} a certain road, the State refused to allow
the avenger of blood to follow them: they must remain in exile until
they have won the forgiveness of one of the kinsmen of the
dead.[148.1] We may suppose that the kinsmen are regarded as taking
up the feud of the ghost, who is likely to be vindictive, even when
the slaying was accidental. Finally, when the pardoned homicide
returns he must go through elaborate purifications. These latter were
to wipe off the miasma, not to ease what we might call the burden of
conscience. And the community were obliged to expel temporarily even a
perfectly innocent man, because of their fear of the wrath of the
dead. This dread of the ghost is appealed to by an Attic orator as a
motive that should influence the judges to condemn the
prisoner.[148.2] The first legal preliminary in a case of murder,
which reveals clearly the religious origin of the State law, was the
solemn proclamation, made by one of the relatives holding {149} a
spear at the funeral, that the murderer should keep aloof from all the
holy and public places of the community.[149.1] And Antiphon strongly
expresses the popular sentiment that the unpunished murderer pollutes
the public altars and vitiates the atmosphere of the city:[149.2] and
the whole of Plato’s legislation[149.3] concerning homicide is based
on the idea of the miasma arising from bloodshed, and is quite in
accord with Attic law. The exile of the murderer purges the city as
well as his execution; therefore the accused was allowed to go out of
the country before the verdict.[149.4] The contagion was worse under
a roof than in the open air; therefore the Athenian judges insisted on
trying homicide in an unroofed court, “lest they should be under one
roof with the slayer.”[149.5] Also it is part of primitive animistic
belief that such miasma could cleave to things which had caused the
death of a man: hence the {150} inanimate object such as an axe or bar
of iron might be solemnly tried and, if found guilty, would be thrown
into the sea to rid the State of infection:[150.1] the same
superstition explains the old English law that a waggon which ran over
a man and caused his death should be given to God--“deodand”: that is,
it was to become a perquisite of the King, who represented God.
So far we seem to discern clearly the concept of purity evolving State
law in a very vital matter. And this is a great achievement. But it
might easily evolve law which from our point of view would be unjust
and superstitious. The terrors of the ghost, the inequitable wrath of
a pure god, the insistence on the ritualistic view of impurity, might
retard progress and prevent the evolution of the highest law which
regards extenuating circumstances and admits justifiable homicide.
Such law is not heard of in the Mosaic books, but it {151} existed in
the Attic code,[151.1] which specially on this account may be called
civilised. The court which tried admitted cases of homicide where the
plea of justification was raised was the Delphinion, and its
foundation legend claimed that it was instituted to try Theseus for
slaying the Pallantids who attacked him, and that the plea of
justifiable homicide was allowed.[151.2] The name of the court shows
that its patron is the pure god, and points to Crete and Delphi, the
chief centres of the ritual of purification. Now it is quite possible
that this momentous advance in law may have been prompted by the
healthy rationalism of the early Greek mind, to some extent by secular
utilitarian thought, which reacted on the religious view of purity. We
shall then say that the religion adapted itself dexterously to a
secular movement, as it usually did in Greece. Or it may {152} be the
truth that the advance was due to a spontaneous movement within the
religion itself, beginning perhaps in the seventh century, and to the
growing consciousness that the purity or impurity of an act depended
on motive and will. If this idea penetrated at an early time, as it
certainly did at a later, into the sacerdotal circle, then the priest
of Apollo might grant or withhold purification according to the degree
of justification the homicide might prove:[152.1] in this case a
court would be established at the instigation of the purifying god to
consider the circumstances. This explanation must remain a hypothesis,
but it is one that assumes the action of real forces.
Enough has been said to illustrate the intimate association of the
idea of purity with legal progress,[152.2] and it only remains to
indicate {153} very briefly its impress and effect on religious
institutions. One of the methods most frequently employed to attain
mental purity or freedom from the evil spirit is fasting; from all
human societies, primitive and advanced, we could gather a copious
stock of illustration. And mankind has, on the whole, agreed as to the
occasions at which the ritual is desirable; in spring before the crops
and the first-fruits appear, before the warriors go forth to battle,
before any kind of intimate communion with God, when the family is in
mourning for a kinsman and evil influences are abroad, fasting has
been practised as a mode of purging the body and safeguarding it
against spiritual harm or preparing it for the privilege of divine
intercourse. It has been held necessary before any mystic
initiation,[154.1] {154} the early Christian Church prescribing it
for the days preceding the Easter communion; also before the
individual can attain the divine afflatus of prophecy or the
supernatural potency for expelling evil spirits or working
wonder-cures. “Such kind goeth not forth save by prayer and fasting.”
The psychological basis of the ritual is the belief that certain
foods, and finally all food, are liable to engender evil influences in
the body; and, moreover, the experience that the abstinence generates
a peculiar mental condition of exaltation, ecstasy, and supra-normal
self-confidence: other ideas, such as the discipline of self-denial,
that come to gather round the practice are of later growth.
From the same primitive view of the relations between our body and the
spiritual world has arisen the enforcement of celibacy upon the
priesthood. To trace the phenomenon, {155} which is commonly or
exceptionally found in all human societies, throughout the history of
the churches, would require a separate chapter. It is not a late
growth in religion, nor of necessity a sign of high development. And
here again the original psychological motive is not a spirit of
self-mortification, but the belief that the chaste body is the purer
abode for the Divine Spirit, and the mental experience that such
self-abnegation usually engenders a stronger consciousness of
religious power. There are signs that the idea is losing its hold on
the modern consciousness, but we see the deep impress it has made upon
some of the ideas and dogmas of our religion. The institution of a
sacerdotal rule of celibacy corresponds to the view prevalent in any
given society of the priestly function; it is likely to be enforced
when the priest is invested with a specially prophetic and mystic
character, and is required to mediate between the society and God by
means of frequent communion with the {156} divinity: it is rare when
the civic and semi-secular view of the sacerdotal office prevails,
rare therefore among the Northern Aryans and in the pre-Christian
Greek and Roman states, although the Hellenic ritual generally
required virginity, or at least a prolonged chastity, in the
prophetess and occasionally in the ordinary priest. It was common in
the ecstatic religions of Anatolia, and in the worship of Cybele was
pushed to an unnatural extreme. It is interesting again to trace the
association between the Phrygian-Christian heresy of Montanism and the
older Phrygian paganism; and we have noted that Montanus, its founder,
the champion of celibacy, is reported to have been in his unconverted
days a priest of Cybele.
Again, the baptismal rite is a form of purification of world-wide
prevalence, as has been already intimated. The washing of the new-born
has been generally interpreted as a purgation of dangerous and evil
influence among the lower as well as the higher races. An interesting
form of such lustration is {157} recorded of the old Aztec home-life:
the midwife washed the infant with the prayer, “May this water purify
and whiten thy heart: may it wash away all that is evil.”[157.1] The
adult, before initiation into any mystic society, usually needed
elaborate purification; and this often took the form of baptism with
water and occasionally with blood: and in certain of the Mediterranean
religions the lustration was not merely regarded as a washing away of
the old sin, but as a spiritual rebirth.[157.2] In the Isis rites the
baptism with water was supposed to raise the mortal to the divinity:
in the description of the baptismal purification of Setis I. the words
occur: “I have purified thee with life and power, so as to make thee
young, like thy father Ra.” And the gods themselves were believed to
be reborn through the sprinkling of lustral water over their
images.[157.3] We discover the same theories held by the {158} early
Church concerning the Christian rite: the font washes away the taint
of the flesh, while at the same time the divine potency of the water
revivifies and recreates the catechumen, who dies to the old life and
is born again; so that the font, which itself was exorcised and
purified in the early period, was in some sense the womb of spiritual
life, and the rite is both an exorcism and a communion. Very soon in
the history of the Church it came to be regarded as of such serious
and critical significance that the catechumen must prepare himself for
it by prior purifications and exorcisms: such ceremonies as the
breathing on his forehead by the priest, the sacramental partaking of
the salt, the anointing with oil, together with the utterance of a
prayer that “the enemy might be put to flight,” have an obvious
cathartic significance.[158.1]
We must also regard confession as a kind of purification; for the
“speaking out” of {159} sin would be regarded as a real purgation and
deliverance at that period of thought when words might be viewed as
things, or at least as controlling things. This was its meaning in the
preliminary ritual of the Samothracian Mysteries, in the Mexican
religion[159.1] where it was associated with purification and the
concept of rebirth, and finally in the early Christian Church, where
it was specially imposed upon the priest before the Easter communion
as part of the purificatory preparation.[159.2] An interesting
formula of confession is found among the Babylonian liturgical
tablets: the penitent prays to the god and the goddess--“Let the seven
winds carry away my sighs… let the bird bear my wickedness to the
heavens: let the fish carry off my misery, let the river sweep it
away. Let the beast of the field take it from me. Let the waters of
the river wash me clean.” Here the purificatory confessional {160}
works partly by prayer to the high god, partly by the old idea of the
magic transference of sin into an alien substance.[160.1]
These are examples of practices in the advanced religions aiming at
the purging of internal and spiritual sin. But the older and more
materialistic view of impurity as a physical taint or as the miasma of
an evil spirit, has not wholly faded even from historic Christianity:
the ceremony of the churching of women, though transformed into a
thanksgiving service, has descended from an old cathartic ritual that
purged away the dangerous pollution of child-birth: and the
consecration of churches was originally merely a special application
of the old-world practice of purifying the house against demons, as we
may see from the legendary example given in the apocryphal “Acts of St
Thomas.”[160.2]
{161}
The facts which I have collected and exposed, incomplete as the
statement is, may justify what was said at the outset of the inquiry,
that the aboriginal idea of purity has struck deep roots in the soil
on which much of our ethical thought and feeling, many of our legal
and religious institutions, have grown and developed. The concept,
owing perhaps to its immemorial continuity of life and deep primeval
instinctiveness, if the word may pass, is liable to fantastic
exaggerations. It has sometimes proved itself an insurmountable
barrier to moral and legal progress. When it has crystallised into a
hard “pharisaic” form, it has arrested and imprisoned the life of a
hitherto progressive people. On the other hand, though its innate
quality, so to speak, is never secular-utilitarian, its contributions
to our civilisation have been, as we have seen, of inestimable
service. It has engendered the modern horror of murder {162} and
bloodshed, and the ideal of the chaste life: we owe to it in great
degree the delicate sensitiveness of spiritually gifted characters.
For good and for evil, it has been an instinctive religious force more
potent than any other of these in the mental evolution of man.
LECTURE IV.
THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS
{163}
There is no part of the religious service of mankind that so clearly
reveals the various views of the divine nature held by the different
races at the different stages of their development as the formulæ of
prayer, or reflects so vividly the material and psychologic history of
man. The historic material at our disposal is unfortunately modern,
not reaching back, that is to say, to a period earlier than some four
thousand years before Christ; but this can be supplemented, as usually
happens, by the evidence gathered from the lower societies, as well as
by the observation of practices that frequently accompany and are very
closely blended with prayer even in the higher religions, {164} and
that we may with confidence believe to have descended from an
immemorial antiquity. The question as to the origin of prayer is one
of great difficulty and of the deepest significance for the history
and philosophy of religion; for it inevitably involves the questions
concerning the origin of the belief in a personal divinity, concerning
the relation of magic to religion, of the spell-ritual which commands
or constrains to a prayer-ritual of humiliation and entreaty. Even if
I had an original and matured judgment to put before you on questions
of such importance, a single lecture would be a very inadequate space
for its exposition.[164.1] Therefore, though I may indicate, I will
not attempt in this lecture to decide on, the question of origin. I
will content myself with arranging the phenomena according as they
appear from our point of view to belong to a lower stratum of religion
or a higher; such an {165} arrangement begs no question, and agrees
with our experience that in all religions, whether savage or
civilised, lower and higher elements are able to coexist. I will first
give a general sketch of the facts, with some interpretation of them,
and will follow this with an illustrative selection of the prayers of
primitive and advanced communities.
According to the modern definition of prayer, man addresses uttered or
inaudible speech to a divine power conceived as Spirit or God, but
always as personal, in order to obtain material, moral, or spiritual
blessings: that part of the address that contains the actual prayer
will be often accompanied by words of homage, adoration, confession of
sin, expressions of doctrinal faith, statements concerning the
beneficent operations of the divinity in time past, self-assuring
utterances of confidence in divine protection or the divine promise.
Though the formulæ contain much positive statement and are by no
means confined to the optative mood, the attitude of the {166}
supplicator is always reverential and self-abased; modern religion
reprobates any idea of compelling the divinity; only it generally
seals its petitions with the mystic signature of a powerful name. If
this may pass as a fairly comprehensive and adequate account of modern
or advanced prayer, it will still be found to contain elements that
may descend from a very ancient mould of religious thought not easy to
reconcile with our higher religious consciousness; and it is no
adequate account of the various modes which less advanced societies
have used and are still using to express their desires to the
supernatural power. It has indeed been recently asserted, with some
plausibility,[166.1] that no savage community yet explored lacks the
conception of a high god making for righteousness; and certainly many
of the lower races have spontaneously developed genuine prayer in the
modern sense. Still it is sometimes reported by scientific observers
that some backward {167} peoples do not pray at all;[167.1] and it
appears not to be uncommon for the savage to regard his high god as
too remote to be addressed for any practical purpose.
But the savage, though he may pray as we do, has other ways of
addressing himself to the unseen personal agencies that he believes to
surround him; and these are the ways of magic and the magic-spell.
Having learned from human experience that he can project his
will-power by an occult process so as to subdue the mind of his
fellow-man, he experiments with this method upon the world of nature
and spirits: he deals with ghosts chiefly in this way, though he may
pray to them also; and he has no reluctance in applying his magic even
to the higher divinities. As magic-worker he stands on a different
footing altogether from the petitioner: his attitude towards the
supernatural power is self-confident and imperious, his speech is no
prayer but a command. He may project his will by dumb show, {168} by
action suggestive of his desire: but in most cases he will probably
prefer to accompany it with potent speech, so as to drive his will
home to the mark, so to speak: and the psychology of such magic
practices has been ably investigated by recent writers. The technical
name for such exercise of will upon another person is suggestion; a
modern application of it sometimes appears in the extreme form that we
call mesmerism or hypnotism. For the successful application of the
charm, it is often an essential condition that one should possess
oneself of the name of the person against whom it is directed, and at
times of his picture or effigy, for both the name and the picture are
regarded as vital parts of the whole individuality that one seeks to
control. The same ideas transferred into the world of supernatural
personalities account for the potency and deep significance that
attaches to the divine name, and for the prominence of the picture and
the effigy in the religious magic. But the savage has also {169}
learned from experience that he can work upon his fellows by entreaty,
flattery, soothing and endearing address: and it was obviously natural
for him to approach the divine powers in the same fashion, and to use
humble and prayerful petitions. Nor does there seem any reason why he
should not employ the methods of magic and prayer simultaneously or in
close conjunction on the same occasion. We may often in fact be in
doubt whether to interpret a certain primitive religious act from one
point of view or the other. Thus we are told that when the Khonds of
Orissa are about to enter on a campaign, “the priest cuts a branch and
dresses it and arms it, so as to personate one of the foe: thereupon
it is thrown down at the shrine of the war-god”:[169.1] This formal
appeal to the god is speechless, and may be thought to be a speechless
prayer; but it is of the same colour as a multifarious mass of
practices which are mimetic and which are intended to work by means of
suggestion. {170} A singular ritual is recorded of the rain societies
of North America:[170.1] emblems or picture-writing representing
clouds, with vertical drops symbolising rain, are placed on an altar,
ears of maize are placed by the side of them with other objects, and
the corn-ears are sprinkled with water, while at the same time prayers
are proffered to the ghosts that control the rain-supply. We would
wish to know what the manner of the praying is; but it seems clear
that we here have the ritual of prayer combined with magic-suggestion,
which consists in pretending to do the thing which it is desired to
bring about. Again, the primitive formulæ devised to drive out the
demons of disease and poverty are usually imperious commands and not
prayers: such as the Chinese “Let the devil of poverty
depart”;[170.2] the Greek, “Go out, hunger,”[170.3] and “To the
door, you ghosts.”[170.4]
{171}
But when, as in Buro, the bidding takes such a form as “Grandfather
small-pox, go away,”[171.1] the reverential and soothing address
allows us to approximate this to prayer, for in the liturgies of the
earlier as well as the advanced religions the divinity is commonly
addressed in terms of kinship. We shall note instances of real prayers
proffered by the uncultured races to a high god, yet retaining
something of the magic character and tone: we detect it in the mystic
employment of the name, in the reiteration of the same short phrase,
in the droning sing-song in which, according to Professor
Tylor,[171.2] savage prayers are usually intoned, the tone of a
mesmeric incantation. But gradually, as the concept of divinity
deepens in the progressive race, and the mind becomes penetrated with
the consciousness of the littleness of man and of the incomparable
greatness of God, the worshipper tends to become the humble petitioner
and prayer {172} comes to predominate over spell. And it has happened
in the legislation of the higher religions that magic at last becomes
“suspect” and tabooed: yet the most austere and purified religion
often unconsciously retains certain elements of spell-ritual, and even
legitimatises the spell by virtue of the distinction between white
magic and black. The distinction is morphologically unsound, and
arises generally from _ex-parte_ prejudice. We do not find, in fact,
if we broadly compare the phenomena of all religions, that cleavage
and irreconcilable antagonism between magic and religion which has
often been supposed. Even in religions that we must class as high, the
deity himself is often imagined to work by means of magic, and the
Christian Church itself has given its patronage and consecration to
practices of magical significance, such as the ordeal, purification,
certain forms of healing, exorcisms of evil spirits: all these will be
accompanied by prayers to God, but the prayers are so impregnated with
the ideas of {173} animistic magic that we can hardly regard them as
pure forms. Nevertheless, though the lower elements are so difficult
to eradicate, yet the experience of some few of the higher communities
may reassure us that as a religion progresses in spirituality it can
purge itself more and more thoroughly of these, and the progress is
from spell to prayer.
Again, we may compare the phenomena from the point of view of the
progress in aspiration. In the primitive period, when the struggle is
to live at all rather than to live well, the objects of prayer must be
material blessings, and these are still prominent in the liturgies of
the civilised societies. There is a sameness in all these, and the
chief distinction to note is between the prayers that look to the
individual alone and those that look to the good of the community. A
higher stage is reached when moral and spiritual qualities become the
object of prayer; and when this is attained, the principle of prayer
is likely to become more and more spiritual, and the {174} petitioner
more and more diffident in the expression of his material wants, and
with a growing consciousness that the Deity knows best what is good
for man, may rise to the height of the formula, “Thy will be done.” It
is interesting to note in how many races some such utterance has been
heard; and at times men may have been helped to it by the
consciousness which scientific advance had awakened, that the laws of
the material universe cannot be capriciously altered to suit the
temporary needs of the individual: a formula of acquiescence appears
then to be the deepest and truest prayer. Finally, in the evolution of
prayer we may consider that the consummation is marked by the theory,
maintained by later Greek philosophy and early Christian fathers
alike, that the true intention of prayer is not the mere petition for
some special blessing, but rather the communion with God, to whom it
is a spiritual approach. Here as often elsewhere, the highest
spiritual product of human thought {175} reveals its affinity with
some dimly remote primeval concept; for much of the spell-ritual at
which we have been glancing implies an idea of such communion, the
human agent endeavouring to charge himself with a potency drawn from a
quasi-divine source.
It remains now to take concrete examples from the record of prayer
illustrative of these phases of development. Looking first at the
savage races, we have already observed that some of their formulæ
seem to belong to the borderland between spell and prayer. When the
New Caledonian says over the fire that he kindles to increase the heat
of the sun, “Sun, I do this that you may be burning hot,” it is
obviously not a prayer that he utters to the sun-god but a formula
expressing the suggestion of his magic.[175.1] And when the Karens of
Burma at the threshing of the rice call out to the corn-mother, “Shake
thyself, grandmother, shake thyself. Let the paddy ascend till it
equals a hill, equals a mountain; shake thyself, {176} grandmother,
shake thyself,”[176.1] we have surely a command rather than a pure
prayer; for primitive vegetation-ritual works by compulsion rather
than entreaty. On the other hand, we have record of a genuine Karen
prayer addressed to “the God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains
and hills,” on the occasion when a sin of unchastity was supposed to
have sterilised the earth: “Do not be angry with me, do not hate me,
but have mercy on me and compassionate me.… Now I repair the
mountains, now I heal the hills.… Make thy paddy fruitful, thy rice
abundant.… If we cultivate but little, still grant that we may obtain
a little.” But the prayer is accompanied with rites that are purely
magical and aiming at the restoration of the earth.[176.2]
The buffalo clan among the Sioux Indians decorate themselves with
emblems of their totem animal before going on the war-path, {177} and
express the purpose of the dressing with a sententious phrase: “My
little grandfather is always dangerous when he makes an
attempt.”[177.1] Such an utterance, considered formally, is not a
prayer but a statement about the power of the buffalo, “the little
grandfather”; for it is an article of faith in the magic creed that
the supernatural force, which the spell aims at setting in operation,
can be made to work by definite statements that it is working; these
are suggestive assurances that increase one’s own confidence; and the
Sioux formula is of such a nature; only the coaxing and endearing
phrase of kinship seems to imply a half entreaty as well. We discern
more clearly the rudiments of a prayer in the words addressed by the
Santee Indians to the buffalo when they have offered him a feast:
“Grandfather, venerable man, thy children have made this feast for
you: may the food thus taken cause them to live {178} and bring them
good fortune.”[178.1] The account of the Sioux religion preserves a
quaint form of words which are used for the riddance of the ghost, to
despatch the soul of the deceased to the home of the dead: “You are
going to the animals, you are going to your ancestors, you came hither
from the animals and you are going back thither: do not face this way
again: when you go, continue walking.”[178.2] The tone of the words
is kind and considerate, but authoritative rather than supplicatory,
and unlike the formula which the same Indians are reported to use when
praying to their ancestors for good weather or good hunting, “Spirits
of the dead, have mercy on us.”[178.3] Certain prayers used
habitually by the Todas of the Nalgiri hills for the thriving of the
dairy and the buffalo herd have recently been published,[178.4] and
as the formulæ are all {179} in the optative mood--“May it be well
for the buffaloes, may there be no destroyer, etc.,” and there is an
appeal to divine personages or powers--“for the sake of such or such a
god may this happen”--we may class them as prayers; but the appeal is
very faint and the formulæ seem to be used as if they possessed a
self-dependent efficacy. More interesting and fervent is the address
to the sun, proffered by a solitary hunter of the half-christianised
Kekchi tribe of Indians:[179.1] his object is to secure game and food
in the wilderness both for himself and as an oblation to the god; but
in the very long and impassioned utterance, with its many repetitions,
there is very little direct entreaty: the Indian contents himself with
definite and reassuring statements concerning the omnipresence of the
deity and the ease with which the latter can execute his will: “It
will give you no trouble to give me all kind of game”; and a moving
{180} appeal is made on the ground of kinship: “Thou art my father:
who is my mother, who is my father? Only thou, O God.”
We may regard these utterances of the hunter not indeed as spells, for
his attitude is most reverent and loving, but as potent statement
effecting the purpose of prayer. Nor need we see Christian influence
in the striking phrase last quoted, though of course this is possible;
such endearing address is common both in the lower and higher
liturgies: the Egyptian appealed to Isis in similar terms[180.1]--“Oh
my father, my brother, my mother Isis,” the Babylonian addressed Bel
as father and mother,[180.2] and a Vedic hymn contains the phrase,
“Thou, oh Agni, art our father, we are thy kinsmen.”[180.3] Such
appeals, suggested by the affection between kinsmen {181} and the idea
of the kinship of man with God, belong to the alphabet of pure prayer.
Of still more value for the light it throws on the attitude of the
Indian’s mind to the powers of the unseen world, is the so-called
prayer of a Navajo Shaman belonging to the district of Arizona,
recently published in the _American Anthropologist_;[181.1] and to
understand it the circumstances must be briefly stated. The Shaman had
been telling the American inquirer the story of his tribe’s descent
through the lower world and their re-emergence: after the narrative he
fears that speaking about the lower regions may have caused his own
spiritual or astral part to have left his body and departed thither;
and he therefore proceeds to recite a long so-called prayer intended
to deliver his soul from the witchcraft that may be detaining it
below. We should not strictly call it a prayer at all, but a narrative
in the indicative mood stating that the war-gods of the tribe are
actually doing what he specially {182} wants them to do, namely, to go
down and rescue his soul from the woman-chieftain, “the underground
witch.” Every step of their way there and back is carefully recounted
several times over, so that they cannot go wrong; and when they are
supposed to have brought back his soul, the recital ends with the
joyful refrain, “The world before me is restored in beauty: my voice
is restored in beauty,” each phrase repeated five times. It is really
a spell-narrative about the gods, having the same effect as prayer,
and is a twofold illustration of the primitive idea that talking about
a thing makes it happen; an idea not wholly extinct among ourselves,
and possibly underlying some of the liturgies of higher religions.
For the rest, savages often pray very much as the civilised man, and
accompany some of their purifications and medicine-magic with real
prayers to higher gods to give them efficacy: for instance, the
African doctor administering the medicine shown him by {183} the
fetich holds it first up to heaven and prays, “Father Heaven, bless
this medicine that I now give.”[183.1] But I have not been able to
find any example of a savage prayer for moral or spiritual blessings.
An interesting feature is, however, observable in a verbose and very
exacting prayer made by the Khonds of Orissa to the earth-goddess;
after particularising very carefully their material wants, they
conclude with the words, “We are ignorant of what it is good to ask
for. You know what is good for us, give it us.”[183.2] This appears
to be a unique savage version of the great phrase, “Thy will be done.”
Turning now to the liturgies of the more advanced peoples,[183.3] we
may note briefly at the {184} outset one feature that is found in most
of them if not common to all; namely, the idea that the prayer gains
potency from the solemn utterance of the true divine name. The
phenomenon has been examined by recent writers on comparative
religion, especially by Giesebrecht in his treatise on _Die
Alt-testamentliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens_.[184.1] In primitive
psychology, the name is part of the personality, and the soul or power
of the individual inheres in it: therefore he who has the name of the
person, whether human, superhuman, or divine, can exercise a certain
control over him by means of its magical application. Thus in the
appeal to the god Ukko in the Kalevala, “Ukko, oh thou god in heaven,
Ukko come, we call upon thee, Ukko come, we need thee sorely,” there
is virtue in the threefold repetition of the name, and the passage is
part of an address which is called “magic words.” Evidence from {185}
Teutonic paganism, so far as I know, is lacking, although the idea has
left its clear imprint on the human saga. Its influence is strongest
and its operation most interesting in the liturgies of the
Mediterranean and of India. In old Latium, it seems, the pontifices
endeavoured to conceal the true names of the gods, lest they might be
wrongly used by unauthorised persons[185.1] or lest the enemy should
get the knowledge of them and therewith the power to draw the
divinities away. We may thus understand the often misinterpreted
statement in Herodotus, that the Pelasgian deities were nameless; and
the Greeks themselves must have been familiar with the ritual
precaution of keeping secret the divine name, as we may gather from
the phrase in the Euripidean fragment[185.2] about the enlightened
man “who knows the silent names of the gods”: it is curious to find
exactly the same expression in a Vedic hymn,[185.3] {186} in which
the sacrificial post, or tree to which the sacrifices were attached,
is thus addressed: “Where thou knowest, oh tree, the sacred names of
the gods, to that place make the offerings go.” It is possible that
the same superstition may have been the original cause of the custom
that has sometimes been observed of silent or inaudible prayer: the
formulæ with the divine name attached to them being of such potency
that they must be concealed.
The belief that the name belongs to the essence of the personality
explains the curious formula in the Umbrian prayer preserved in the
Tabulæ Iguvinæ, where the god Grabovius is implored to be propitious
to the “Arx Fisia” and to “the name of the Arx Fisia,” as if the name
of the city was a living and independent entity.
In the Greek liturgies we note the anxious care with which particular
qualifying epithets were selected and attached to the personal name of
the divinity, so as to make clear what was the precise operation of
divine {187} favour which the prayer aimed at evoking. This explains
why so many divinities, some of whom were scarcely known outside a
narrow area, were invoked as πολυώνυμε, “thou god of many names,” all
possible titles of power being summed up in one word. Certain passages
in the poets become intelligible only in the light of this idea: such
as the well-known phrase in the chorus of the _Agamemnon_ of
Æschylus:[187.1] “Zeus, whosoever the god is, if this name of Zeus is
dear to him, by this name I now appeal to him.” The thought and the
words of the Vedic poet are often the same as the Greek: Agni is
πολυώνυμος: “Agni, many are the names of thee the Immortal one”; and
again, “The father adoring gives many names to thee, oh Agni, if thou
shouldest take pleasure therein.”[187.2]
But it is in Egypt, the land of magic, where the idea of the potency
of the divine name {188} assumes dimensions that are truly gigantic.
In an early metaphysical theory of the origin of things, which in its
harmonious self-contradiction reaches quite to the level of Hegelian
philosophy, the universe is said to have come into being, and the
first god himself effects his own creation by the utterance of his own
portentous name:[188.1] in the beginning was the name. It is said of
the great god Ra that “his names are manifold and unknown, even the
gods know them not.” Naturally, therefore, the goddess Isis was
desirous of knowing his real name, and having discovered it by a ruse,
she became mistress over him and all gods.[188.2] In certain Egyptian
papyri containing Abraxas prayers, we find the prayer sometimes
coupled with the reminder that the petitioner knows the divine mystic
name;[188.3] thus equipped, the prayer is more than a mere humble
entreaty.
{189}
Was it from Egypt that the early Israelites derived the same mystic
illusion concerning the divine name, which to some of the scholars of
the last generation appeared to be a faith peculiar to the chosen
people? At least we are now enabled, by the recent exposition of the
facts, to understand the inner force of such prayers as the Psalmist’s
“Save me, oh God, by thy name and judge me by thy strength”:[189.1]
of Jahvé’s warning to his people in the Exodus to obey the angel whom
he sends them, “Obey his voice… for my Name is in him:”[189.2] of the
oath taken by those initiated into the Essenian sect not to reveal the
names of the angels:[189.3] of expressions in the New Testament
concerning the casting out of devils and the healing of the sick in
the name of Jesus: finally, of the significant baptismal phrase, “to
baptize into the name of Christ,”[189.4] which reveals the name as a
religious potency into which as into a {190} spiritual atmosphere the
adult catechumen or the initiated infant is brought. And these facts
of old-world religion and religious logic cast a new light on the
name-formulæ which close most of the prayers of the Christian Church,
and which are words of power to speed the prayer home; and though the
modern consciousness may often be unaware of this mystic function of
theirs, we may believe that it was more clearly recognised in the
early days of Christianity, for in the apocryphal acts of St John we
find a long list of mystical names and titles attached to Christ
giving to the prayer much of the tone of an enchantment.[190.1]
Connected as it seems with this superstition about names is the belief
that, in order to gain complete power over a human or divine
personality, it is necessary to know their origin and to express what
one knows about them in the charm: thus in the Kalevala the young
magician is taught the origin {191} of things in order that he may
know the proper enchantment against them, and a long account of the
origin of iron, regarded as a demoniac substance, occurs in the
word-magic used to cure the wound it inflicted. Hence we may account
for the descriptive or, so to speak, biographical element in charms
that are on the borderland of prayer. The exorciser of evil dreams in
the Atharva-Veda prays or sings thus: “We know, oh sleep, thy birth;
thou art the son of the divine women-folk, the instrument of Death.
Thou art the ender, thou art Death. Thus do we know thee, oh sleep: do
thou, oh sleep, protect us from evil dreams.”[191.1] And in the
worship of Agni the belief is expressed that “the prayers fill thee
with power and strengthen thee,” and this is at once followed by an
account of his nature and origin.[191.2] Is it then too far-fetched
to trace the survival of this old-world {192} thought, rooted as it is
in the magic of the word and the statement, in the prominence given to
the dogmatic biographical statement in our own liturgy? We regard it
as a confession of faith: it may also be regarded as an expression of
the worshipper’s knowledge of the divine personality, whereby he
raises himself into communion with it and thus gains power for his
prayer.[192.1]
Considering now in a more general survey the liturgies of the nations
that have attained culture, we might begin with our own fathers. But
so little that touches the inner life of their pre-Christian religion
has been preserved, that probably not much material for our present
purpose is to be discovered from the records. We know that they were
given to the employment of the rune or the spell, the rival or the
parent of prayer; and one of these, used by Odin to heal the sprained
foot of Baldur’s foal, is perhaps {193} the only surviving fragment of
Indo-Germanic poetry.[193.1] Odin sings, “Bone to bone, blood to
blood, limb to limb, as though they were glued together”; in a later
Norwegian, and also in a Scottish version, it is Christ who heals the
foal with the same magic words, strengthened however by the formula,
“Heal in the Holy Ghost’s name.” And this useful medicine-charm was
not forgotten by the Aryan Indians, for we find the words in the
Atharva-Veda, “Fit together, hair with hair, fit together, skin with
skin: thy blood, thy bone shall grow.”[193.2] Neither god nor ghost
was needed to help out the force of such incantations. But probably
some time before Christianity prayer had come to prevail over spell in
the Teutonic North, for there are traces there of a certain {194}
antagonism growing between magic and religion, which led to the
condemnation of certain forms of magic.[194.1]
An interesting question arises about a prayer-charm used by the early
English against sterility of the fields: “Hail be thou, Earth, Mother
of Men, wax fertile in the embrace of God, fulfilled with fruit for
the use of man.”[194.2] This poetic utterance implies a veritable
ἱερὸς γάμος, or holy marriage of earth and heaven in the Greek sense;
and reminds us vividly of the spell-formula, used in the Eleusinian
Mysteries and descending from the period when the purpose of these was
mainly agricultural, Υέ Κύε, “Rain and Conceive,” which was uttered by
the mystes, who folded his arms and glanced up to the sky at the first
word and down to the earth at the second: a spell-prayer for fertility
and human increase. It is probably then correct {195} to call this
phrase of our ancestors, which is the only surviving fragment, so far
as I am aware, of their pre-Christian liturgy, a spell-prayer that was
efficacious by way of suggestion rather than of entreaty.
Of the same ambiguous character was the old Roman chant of the priests
of Mars, “Enos Lases juvate,” “Help us, O spirits of our ancestors,”
repeated with the iteration common in enchantments and accompanied
with dancing and with the utterance of the word “triumpe.” From the
higher point of view the Roman prayers that have come down to us are
barren and dull; the well-known liturgical archive containing Rome’s
address to Jupiter in the critical days of the Hannibalic war is a
wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to bind the god as
well as the State.[195.1] In fact the spiritual side of the old Roman
character has left no trace of itself in any ritual or liturgy of
which we have record. The prayer of {196} Cato’s that has been
preserved is merely materialistic.[196.1]
We expect much more from Greece, and in some measure we are not
disappointed. Spell-ritual was no doubt always much in vogue,
especially for the purposes of agriculture and purification: we hear
of certain “magicians” or μάγοι of Cleonae who averted hailstorms with
incantations and the shedding of their own blood.[196.2] And a solemn
part of the State liturgy in Greece was a commination service, which
pronounced a curse on certain offences against the State. The
religious curse is an interesting phenomenon of which it is not easy
to give briefly a full and exact anthropological account; it is taken
up by the higher religions, but it by no means originated in them,
belonging to the sphere of spell rather than of prayer, and working
out its effect by means of magic suggestion. Even the {197} Jewish
service, which we still use on Ash Wednesday, employs curse-formulæ
in which there is no immediate reference to God, and they may have
been regarded originally as having an independent efficacy. This was
certainly the case in Greece, for the curse was itself personified as
an independent, personal power; and the Erinyes themselves, in some
degree the personal embodiments of the curse, work their effect on the
victim by singing a spell-song, according to Æschylus, which binds
his soul and withers him away.[197.1] And the many private
“devotiones” or “diræ” that have come down to us from Greek
antiquity, written usually on leaden tablets and consecrating the
enemy to the powers of the lower world, employ indeed an appeal to
these powers that may be interpreted as prayer, but their essential
quality is magical, and they certainly were supposed to operate as
spells against the individual, while even the divinities to whom they
are addressed appear to be constrained {198} rather than entreated. In
one interesting example of the first century A.D., found in
Ægina,[198.1] of Hellenic-Christian or possibly Judaic origin, the
curse takes on the form of a prayer for righteous vengeance--“I call
on the Highest God, the Lord of all spirits and of all flesh, before
whom every soul this day is humbled with supplication, against those
who have treacherously slain or poisoned the unfortunate Heracleia.”
In the Greek legal procedure a curse was sometimes uttered against
oneself if one forswore oneself or if one was guilty of the charge;
and here as in similar cases in Christian jurisprudence the curse is
an invocation of the high god who will punish perjury; but we find it
similarly employed in the animistic stage of religion, by the African
for instance, who takes an oath by his fetich,[198.2] “May this
fetich slay me if I do not fulfil the contract”; and in such cases we
must regard the curse as a spell working by {199} suggestion against
oneself rather than as a prayer.
Before considering Greek prayer proper, we may note as a last example
of an ambiguous formula, standing midway as it seems between spell and
prayer, the striking liturgical utterance of the old Dodonæan ritual,
employed for an agricultural service: the priestesses chanted the
refrain in two hexameters, the old metre of religion, “God was, God
is, God will be, oh Great God; the earth brings forth fruits,
therefore call on mother earth.”[199.1] The resemblance of this to
the early English formula quoted above is striking enough. The first
line belongs to an elevated religion and seems far removed from the
region of magic; but equally spiritual formulæ concerning the nature
and the attributes of God were used in the Zarathustrian and
Babylonian liturgies for magical purposes, just as texts from the
Bible and Koran have been. And the second line employs the same method
as the Navajo {200} Shaman employed, for it states that the divinity
is doing that very thing which it is the object of the liturgy to
bring about. The appeal to mother earth which is enjoined may have
been merely the invocation of her name, a spell at least as much as a
prayer. The same may be said of the other popular refrains chanted by
the husbandmen of ancient Greece to obtain good crops or fair
weather--“Give us big sheaves, sheaves,” to Demeter,[200.1] or “Come
forth, dear sun,” to the sun-god.[200.2]
The public prayers of Greece, those actually used in the
temple-service and the official liturgies, have not been preserved,
and in this respect the Greek record is very barren compared with the
Babylonian, Vedic, or Iranian. But though the actual formulæ are
lost, we can gather some impression from the inscriptions and other
literary sources as to the objects of prayer. The Athenian state
prayed, “For the {201} health and safety of the people of the
Athenians, their wives and children and all in the country,”[201.1]
and the formula might include a prayer for the prosperity of their
allies, such as Milesians or Platæans. But we have no indications
that the blessings prayed for included others besides the material
ones. The Lacedæmonians are commended by Socrates[201.2] for
refraining from specifying any particular want, either in their
private or public prayers, but contenting themselves with praying that
the gods should grant them τὰ καλὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς: the phrase has
something of a genuine ring, and is probably derived from a real
liturgy, but it is not absolutely precise; it seems, however, to
comprise spiritual blessings as well as material, and in this respect
to be unique among the public prayers in Greece, if we dare judge them
by the scanty record. Probably the formulæ were very old and the range
of aspiration usually narrow; and the {202} idea that moral advance
could be attained by prayer is perhaps hardly likely to have been
reflected in them; yet we must take note of the plaintive question put
by the Corcyræan state, weary of civic strife and massacre, to the
Dodonæan oracle, asking, “To what god or what hero shall we pray in
order to obtain concord, and to govern our city fairly and
well?”[202.1] and we find an educational official of Cos, in the
second century B.C., praying “for the health and the virtuous
behaviour of the boys.”[202.2]
We are better informed concerning the style of private prayer in
Greece, as also concerning the theory of prayer that gradually
commended itself to the highest intelligences. The average private man
was certainly capable of praying for blessings other than material. We
have the prayer of a potter of Metapontum, of the sixth century B.C.,
praying {203} to the god that he might “have a good report among
men.”[203.1] Among the prayers contained in the literature of the
fifth century, our interest is arrested by such utterances as
Pindar’s, “May I walk, oh God, in the guileless paths of life, and
leave behind me a fair name for my children”;[203.2] and again, “Oh
God that bringest all things to pass, grant me the spirit of reverence
for noble things”;[203.3] and by this of Euripides, “May the spirit
of chastity abide with me, the fairest gift of God.”[203.4] To this
age may belong the poetical fragment of a banquet song--for the Greeks
could pray genially and seriously in the midst of social
intercourse--which must have once had much vogue: “Oh Pallas, born of
waters, Queen Athena, mayest thou and thy father keep this city and
its citizens in prosperity, free from sorrow, civic discord, and
untimely deaths.”[203.5] The prayers of Xenophon and Plutarch may
{204} be taken as typical of the average ethical feeling of their
respective periods: the former petitions for “health, bodily strength,
good feeling among friends, safety in war, and wealth”;[204.1] the
latter for “wealth, concord, righteousness in word and deed.”[204.2]
Meantime the philosophers from Socrates onwards were insisting on the
more spiritual view of prayer, preaching that, in the first place,
there was no need to particularise one’s needs in one’s petitions to
God, for there was danger lest one should pray for what is injurious;
in the second place, that prayer should look only to the spiritual,
not the material life. And we owe to this theory some striking
utterances that must rank high in the literature of ethical religion:
such as the prayer of Socrates, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν,
“Grant me to become noble of heart”[204.3]; of Apollonius of Tyana,
ὦ θεοὶ δοίητέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα, “Oh gods, grant me that which I
deserve”[204.4]; the longer poetic {205} formula quoted by Plato,
“King Zeus, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil
keep from us though we pray for it”[205.1]: and with these we may
compare the dictum of Epictetus[205.2]: “In praying to the divine
powers ask for divine things, things free from fleshly or earthly
circumstance.” Other expressions of the Stoic sect are equally
striking for the spirit of fervent acquiescence and resignation that
inspires them. Here is the prayer of Epictetus: “Do with me what thou
wilt: my will is thy will: I appeal not against thy
judgments”[205.3]; and a poetic version of this has come down to us
from earlier stoicism--“Lead me, O God, and I will follow, willingly
if I am wise, but if not willingly I still must follow.” A prayer
recorded in the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas[205.4] seems almost an
echo of these: “I go whither Thou wilt, oh Jesus: Thy will be done.”
When the best thought of the age had {206} reached to such a point of
spiritual abstraction, it was natural that the same question should
arise as arose among the more philosophic adherents of early
Christianity, whether special prayers were justifiable at all. It
seems that at some period the Pythagorean school were inclined to
forbid prayer altogether,[206.1] for the reason that God knew better
how to give than man knew how to ask; but the later Neo-Platonism
discovered an ideal _raison-d’être_ for the practice, on the ground
that it raised the mind to direct communion and converse with God; and
this view is developed at great length by Proclus.[206.2]
This sketch of the Greek phenomena that belong to our subject may
close with an example of that perfervid mysticism that marks the
liturgies of latest paganism: the {207} following is the close of a
long address to Asclepios--an Hellenic deity attracted here into the
Egyptian circle--found in the treatise called _Asclepios_, attributed
to Apuleius:[207.1] “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because thou
hast shown thyself wholly to us: we rejoice that thou hast deigned to
consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these mortal bodies.
We have known thee, oh true life of the life of man.… Adoring thy
goodness, we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst be willing
to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.” Portions at
least of this prayer, which was the prelude to a communion supper,
would not surprise us if we found it in a Christian liturgy.[207.2]
{208}
It will be convenient next to glance at the records of the other great
branches of the ancient Aryan world, the Vedic Indians and the
Iranians. One does not read long in the sacred books of India without
attaining the conviction that the highest religion of the Vedas was
deeply penetrated with sacerdotal magic; which was so far from losing
its hold in the later period that it imprisoned the religious thought,
and the later Brahmanism was capable of the belief that without the
spell of the sacrifice the sun could not run his course in heaven. And
the recital of spells forms a great part of the Vedic ritual. Thus the
hymns say of the fire-god Agni, “The thoughtful men find Agni when
they have recited the spells”; and the gods themselves, like the Norse
divinities, work by spells: “Agni upholds the sky by his efficacious
spells.”[208.1] Yet the early record gives us also copious
illustration of real prayer, and occasionally of a very exalted tone.
It is true, as we should expect, {209} that material and temporal
advantages are by far the predominant objects of the petition: the
head of the household prays for wealth, offspring, victory in battle
or the races; with rare exceptions, the prayers are personal and
private rather than political, and are thus in marked contrast to the
Hellenic; yet we have a few that are evidently proffered for the
community,[209.1] and at times the deity is petitioned to grant an
abundant supply of valiant men. But even in the few prayers that
reflect the political life of the State, the individualistic spirit is
apt to appear. We have a curious example of a petition to Indra to
make a man powerful in the political assembly: “In this entire
gathering render, O Indra, me successful,” and this is combined with a
naïve spell whereby the politician endeavours to mesmerise the whole
meeting: he names the assembly--as our Speaker might name a
recalcitrant member--“We know thy name, {210} oh assembly.… Of them
that are sitting together I take to myself the power and the
understanding”: and again, “With my mind do I seize your
minds.”[210.1] But even when the prayer is personal and materialistic
a real fervour and a genial poetic freshness is often to be found.
Here is a beautiful prelude to a prayer for long life proffered to the
ancient heaven-god: “Many dawns have not yet dawned: grant me to live
in them, O Varuna.” And often the worshipper rises above mere material
aspirations, as in such appeals to Agni as the following: “May we be
well-doers before the gods.”[210.2] “Give us not up, oh Agni, to want
of thought.”[210.3] “Mayest thou bestow splendour, renown, and (wise)
mind upon such mortals as satisfy thee with refreshment, oh
Agni.”[210.4] “Drive far from us senselessness and anguish: drive far
all ill-will from whom thou attendest.”[210.5] {211} At times also
the hymns reveal a deep consciousness of sin and a desire for divine
forgiveness. “Through want of strength, thou strong and bright god,
have I gone astray. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy!”[211.1] “Agni,
drive away from us sin, which leads us astray.”[211.2] “By the
earth’s greatness, oh Agni, forgive us even committed sin, that we may
be great.”[211.3] “Whatever sin we have committed against thee in
thoughtlessness, men as we are, make thou us sinless before
Aditi.”[211.4] Yet we may suspect that the term sin is not always
used in these prayers in its modern ethical sense, not for instance in
the prayer, “From the sins which knowingly or unknowingly we have
committed, do ye, all gods, of one accord release us”;[211.5] and the
primitive concept on which the old magic of sin-transference was based
survives in such passages as the following: {212} “Pass far away, oh
sin of the mind: why dost thou utter things not to be uttered? Pass
away, I love thee not: to the trees and the forests go on!”[212.1]
“Enter into the rays, into smoke, oh sin; go into the vapours, and
into the fog.”[212.2] The context discloses only an indirect appeal
to a personal deity, though the term sin in the former passage is
clearly applied to what we should call moral offences.
In the Vedic ritual, then, we find a pure and spiritual form of
prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest
types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the
power of the worshipper but the power of the deity also is nourished
and strengthened by prayer;[212.3] and the prayer itself is usually
accompanied by a potent act. With this aspect of Vedic prayers we may
associate {213} the fact that Agni, the fire-god, appears as the chief
divinity to whom they are addressed; for his ritual is purificatory,
and the prayers are thus based on a liturgy of purification which
stimulates the mental or spiritual force of the worshipper.
We may now turn to another great Aryan stock, the Iranian, whose
earlier religion culminated in the Zarathustrian system. The relation
of spell to prayer is, on the whole, the same in the Zend-Avesta as we
find it in the Vedic hymns, a real spell can accompany a real prayer,
and the text of the prayer itself becomes a most potent charm. The
“sacerdotal” physician, who, as we have seen, occupied a higher rank
in the Zarathustrian estimate than the scientific practitioner, offers
first a genuine prayer to Ahura-Mazda for spiritual strength to deal
with the disease--“Give us, Ahura, that powerful sovereignty by the
strength of which we may smite down the drug (the demon).” Fraught
with this mesmeric power he then directs his spell {214} against the
sickness-demon: “To thee, oh Sickness, I say--Avaunt! To thee, oh
Death, I say--Avaunt!”[214.1] And in the ritual of purification,
which closely resembles the system of therapeutics, the formulæ of
prayers of the most exalted type in the sacred books are used, not as
prayers, but as cathartic spells.[214.2] It is not hard to discern
the steps that lead from this grade of thought to the highest at which
the religious speculation of the Zarathustrian arrived. The uttered
Word of God is given a supernatural cosmic force; and the prophet
pronounces that this utterance of the “Holy Word is of such a nature
that if all the corporeal and living world should learn it, and
learning hold fast to it, they should be redeemed from their
mortality.”[214.3] And we can understand why a large part of the
Zarathustrian liturgy should be devoted to the recital of formulæ
which are statements of the {215} Mazdean faith. Before rising in the
morning and retiring at night, the pious Persian was recommended to
say, “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deeds I do
willingly: all evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds I do
unwillingly.”[215.1] It is interesting to compare with our own creed
the following Mazdean confession: “I confess myself a Mazdayasnian of
Zarathustra’s order: I celebrate my praises for good thoughts, good
words, and good deeds.… With chanting praises I present all good
thoughts, good words, and good deeds, and with rejection I repudiate
all evil thoughts and words and deeds. Here I give to you, oh ye
Bountiful Immortals, sacrifice and homage with the mind,[215.2] with
words, deeds, and my entire person, yea, I offer to you the flesh of
my very body.”[215.3] The formulæ of confession, as well as other
parts of this liturgy, are penetrated with the idea of a
moral-theological {216} dualism to which our Christian theology has
been indirectly deeply indebted. The Mazdean proclaims his detestation
of the Daevas, and of Angra-Mainyu, the evil god. “Taught by Ahura, I
drive away Angra-Mainyu from this house, this borough”; such words are
“victorious, most healing,”[216.1] and could be used as the
recitation of our creed and paternoster have been used, as veritable
spells against the evil power or demon. But in comparing the
spell-prayers of the Persian with the Vedic, we are struck with the
superiority of the former liturgy in one respect, that here the spell
is only brought to bear on the demon, not on the highest god; the
prayer increases the spiritual force of the worshipper but does not
constrain Ahura.
And the Iranian prayers appear to rise above the Vedic in the
enthusiasm of the idea of righteousness that pervades them, and in the
conviction that the believer can aid Ahura-Mazda in the continual
struggle against the {217} power of evil and in helping towards the
final establishment of the righteous kingdom. He prays that, “Through
the good thought and the holiness of him who offers thee the due meed
of praise thou mayest, oh Lord, make the world of Resurrection appear
at thy will, under thy sovereign rule.”[217.1] “May we be such as
those who bring on this great Renovation.”[217.2] “May we help to
bring on the good government of Ahura, which is the best for us at
every present hour.”[217.3] “Be righteousness life-strong and clothed
with body. In that realm which shines with splendour as the sun, let
piety be present, and may she, through the indwelling of thy good
mind, give us blessings in reward for deeds.”[217.4] In fact the
greater number of the prayers are strikingly spiritual, and for
spiritual, not material blessings. The prophet asks Ahura, “How man
may become most like unto thee?”[217.5] and prays for “aids of grace,
beseeching what in accordance with {218} thy wished-for aim is
best.”[218.1] And the prayer is sometimes directed to abstract moral
powers, emanations of Ahura: “If the Mazda-Ahura and Righteousness and
Pious Concord be invokable, I implore through the good mind a kingdom
for myself, through whose increase we may conquer the Lie.” The
kingdom is here the “Desirable Kingdom of Righteousness.”[218.2]
Certainly the Mazdean kingdom was not of this world, and the
Zarathustrian religion is one of the least materialistic that the
world has known; its chief moral weakness being, as we have seen, its
bondage to ritualistic purity. We may note in conclusion, as showing
the continuity of the national spirit, the pronouncement of a Persian
Christian, Bishop Aphrahat of East Syria, that the only valid object
of prayer was purity of heart.[218.3]
Many of the phenomena that we have been noting among the Aryan races
confront us {219} again when we turn to the Chaldæan-Babylonian
liturgies. Here also there appears no real antagonism between spell
and prayer, magic and religion.[219.1] Spell-formulæ are used and
accompanied with a ritual of purification to drive out the evil
spirits of sickness; and the highest hymns containing real prayers can
be employed as texts for magic purposes; even the gods themselves work
by magic, and Marduk himself is invoked as the arch-magician.[219.2]
And the idea that the prayer could in some sense exercise compulsion
on the god appears in an anecdote told by Porphyry about a Chaldæan
who was an expert in “purifications of the soul: but found his efforts
thwarted because another man who was powerful in the same art had, by
means of mystic prayers, bound over the powers he had invoked not to
grant his demands.”[219.3] Yet by the side of all this we find often
an exalted {220} type of prayer, with spiritual and fervent
expressions of homage; and the religious law that “prayer absolves
from sin” is given as part of Marduk’s revelation to man.[220.1] A
large number of the records contain the liturgies used by the kings,
and while victory, health, and long life, the permanence of the
dynasty are the more usual objects of the petition, the deeper ethical
tone is often heard. The following are a few examples of the higher
aspirations of the Babylonian religion. The founder of the new
Babylonian kingdom has recorded his convictions for the guidance of
his successor: “Marduk sees through the lips, sees the heart: he who
keeps true to Bel and the son of Bel will last for ever.”[220.2] One
of the greatest prayers in this or any other liturgical collection is
that which Nebukadnezar made to Marduk on his accession:[220.3] “Oh
Eternal Ruler, Lord of All… lead the King by the right way… I am… the
work of thy hand: {221} after thy great mercy which thou showest to
all, oh Lord, grant that thy high majesty may show compassion upon me:
set in my heart the fear of thy Godhead: grant me what thou deemest
best: for thou it is that hast created my life.” This is scarcely the
Nebukadnezar whom we once thought we knew. There is also a pathetic
interest attaching to the prayer of Nabonnedos to the god Schamasch
for his son Belsazar:[221.1] “Prolong the days of Belsazar, my
first-born son--may he commit no sin.” The king Nabonnedos prays also
to Marduk: “May I rule as king according to thy wish… let me not in my
pride lose knowledge of thee, for it is thou that hast chosen me
out.”[221.2] The following phrases in a prayer to Marduk of an
unknown ruler are still more striking: “Oh Marduk, great Lord… let me
behold thy Godhead, let me attain my heart’s desire: set righteousness
on my lips and grace in my heart.”[221.3] {222} Among the attributes
of the gods there is a fervent recognition of their mercy and
compassionateness: Marduk is “the god full of mercy, who loves to
quicken that which is dead”;[222.1] and Ischtar, the goddess, is
invoked as “the helper of the oppressed, oh thou endowed with majesty;
thou who raisest the fallen and exaltest the trodden under
foot.”[222.2] And the same idea reappears in a hymn to another
goddess of like character with Ischtar, in which we catch the tones of
a high religious poetry of homage:[222.3] “Oh strong and majestic,
highest of the goddesses, radiant star… strongest of the goddesses
whose robe is the light: thou who dost course through heaven and
engirdle the earth… dealing punishment and pleading for men, rewarding
the just, leading the wanderer, overthrowing the enemy who feareth not
thy Godhead, protecting the captive, taking the weak by the hand--be
{223} gracious unto thy servant, who calls upon thy name with grace.”
This brief illustrative selection may close with the quotation of a
prayer or hymn of praise to Marduk, perhaps the most remarkable among
those that have as yet been translated:[223.1] “The Lord, peerless in
might, the King of grace, the Ruler of the lands, that bringeth peace
in heaven, that through his glance overthroweth the mighty. Lord, thy
seat is Babylon, thy crown Borsippa. Thy thought, oh Lord, passeth
over the wide heavens, and with thine eyes thou beholdest the
affliction of men, through the anger of thy countenance thou spreadest
lamentation, and thou takest him captive who regardeth thee not and
setteth himself up against thee. Through thy gracious countenance thou
showest men favour, thou lettest them see the light and they proclaim
thy Righteousness. Oh Lord of the lands, Light of Izizi, thou who
proclaimest grace, who is it whose {224} mouth doth not tell of thy
Righteousness, who doth not praise thy majesty, and glorify thy
lordship?… Look down upon the hands raised in prayer to thee. Grant
favour to thy city Babylon… and turn thy countenance upon thy house,
and give help to the sons of Babylon and all thy people.”
With all their spells and their magic, the higher minds of the
Babylonians knew how to pray, and the fervent and exalted tones of
such liturgies remind us of the religious poetry of Israel. And it is
interesting to note that among the few deities of Babylon whose ideal
reached to such a point of ethical development, the moon-god Sin
appears, who gave his name to Sinai, and who has been thought by some
to have had some original affinity with the God of Israel.[224.1]
As regards the liturgies of Egypt, so far as I have been able with
very limited opportunities to examine them, the superstition of the
spell lay so heavy on the Egyptian mind, {225} that prayer does not
seem able to extricate itself from its prepossession. Not only do the
deities work by means of spells and the magic of their names, but the
worshipper uses the same means to work upon them; and the prayer that
accompanies the spell seems usually to savour of self-confidence and
command. At least this is the impression one gathers from what is
published concerning the Book of the Dead and the ritual practised to
secure the happiness of the deceased. By utterance of words of
enchantment over pictures, the soul of the dead becomes
divine.[225.1] The magic word helps to transfer the power of the
deity into the fetich, and this with the word written upon it is
placed on the body of the dead: for instance, an amulet with the
words, “May the blood of Isis… and the word of power of Isis be mighty
to protect this mighty one”;[225.2] a terra-cotta lamp of the
Greco-Roman period, carved with the symbol {226} of the frog-headed
goddess Heqt, and bearing the words, “I am the Resurrection.”[226.1]
On an object placed under the head of the deceased to maintain the
warmth of the body, we find the following words, supposed to be
addressed by the spirit to Amen:[226.2] “I am a perfect spirit among
the companions of Ra, and I have gone in and come forth among the
perfect souls… grant thou unto me the things which my body needeth,
and heaven for my soul and a hidden place for my mummy.” “May the god
who himself is hidden and whose face is concealed, who shineth upon
the world in his forms of existence and in the underworld, grant that
my soul may live for ever.”[226.3] Here we have the statement of a
conviction that gains its assurance from magic, followed by prayer. It
seems that the Egyptian prayed to the gods, as if by such prayer he
might gain immortality, but that he trusted equally to {227} magical
means, to pictures and words of power from the sacred texts, and
employed at once the methods of religion and of enchantment.[227.1]
Looking at the Christian religion, we should find it hard to give a
succinct and accurate account of these phenomena in the various stages
of its history. We may be able to set forth the theories and
ritual-practices of the various churches and compare them with what we
find elsewhere; but it is more difficult to analyse accurately the
religious psychology, the thought and feeling which accompanies the
ritual: the quality of the mental state would depend partly on the
ancestral conditions and the strength of the ancestral instincts of
the individual. And the teaching of the most spiritual Christian
philosophy has not been able to prevent some touches of the old-world
magic from contaminating the worship. The theory of the leading
thinkers among the early Christian fathers agreed, as we have seen,
with the {228} pronouncement of later Greek philosophy. Both for
Clemens, who gives us the earliest theory of Christian prayer, without
finding, however, a clear logical system, and for Origen, the final
justification of prayer was communion with God, τὸ ἀνακραθῆναι τῷ
πνεύματι,[228.1] ὁμιλία πρὸς τὸν θεὸν ἡ εὐχή.[228.2] And Clemens
maintains that the true gnostic, he who has the true knowledge of God,
“works himself with God in his prayer so as to attain
perfection.”[228.3] The gnostic of Clemens, then, is not purely
petitionary in his prayer; by his spontaneous self-projection he
contributes something himself to the attainment of the end he prays
for; and, as I have ventured to suggest above, we may discern in this
theory the meeting-point of the more primitive and the more exalted
religious views.
Meantime the actual heretic sect of the gnostics were applying much of
the old magic {229} under new names and new texts, and did not even
care to discard wholly the old spell-nomenclature.[229.1] And even in
the orthodox churches, as we have seen, the mystic power and
liturgical use of the name has continued, being the inheritance of a
different religious world from that with which we are familiar or of
which we are conscious. We may also legitimately compare many of the
ritual acts which accompany prayer, for instance in the earlier and
later Roman Church, with the suggestive or mimetic religious actions
of less advanced cults. One of the most interesting examples that may
be quoted is the description of the blessing of the baptismal water on
the eve of the Epiphany, a custom prevalent in the earlier Church of
Rome:[229.2] the priest, while praying to God to sanctify the water,
dipped a crucifix thrice into it, recalling in his prayer the miracle
described in Exodus, the sweetening of the bitter water with wood;
then {230} followed antiphonal singing describing Christ’s baptism in
Jordan, which sanctified the water. We appear to have here a
combination of the great typical forms of the immemorial religious
energy, prayer pure and simple, the potent use of the spiritually
charged object, the fetich (in this case the crucifix), and an intoned
or chanted narrative which has the spell-value of suggestion.[230.1]
What maintained the use of the spell-prayer in full vigour throughout
the earlier and medieval epochs of Christendom, even in the orthodox
ritual, was chiefly the practice of exorcism and the belief in demons
and demoniac possession; and the legal institution of the ordeal
contributed also to its maintenance. As modern society has abandoned
such institutions, and the modern mind is no longer possessed with
demonology, so in the modern worship prayer has become more and more
purified from the associations of the spell; the traces that remain of
the latter are {231} faint and usually unintelligible to the modern
worshipper. And on the other side there is a progressive tendency
beginning to be felt, making for a reform of our liturgy in respect of
the objects for which prayer should be proffered. But in this respect,
as the comparison has shown, we cannot be said to have advanced as yet
beyond many of the old-world religions.
The special subjects of these last two lectures, the history of
purification and prayer, have only been presented in an inadequate
sketch. The full and exhaustive treatment of either would serviceably
fill a gap in the library of comparative religion. But they have
served my present purpose, if they have been able to illustrate and to
some extent test the value of the comparative study of the various
theologies of mankind.
[The End]
INDEX
Aion, 36, 37.
Anthropology, value of, 5: occasional defects in its method of
treating religious problems, 12-17: suggested improvements in method,
17-23.
Apostolic succession, 49-50.
Babylonian spells and prayers, 218-224.
Baptism, a cathartic ritual, 156-158: of infants, 56-57.
Buddhism, ideas concerning purity, 107.
Celibacy of priesthood, 154-156.
Christianity, comparison with earlier “Mediterranean” religions in
mythology, 25-30; in terminology, 30-39; external symbols, 39-48;
institutions and organisation, 48-58; in dogma and belief, 59-75:
_vide_ Prayer.
Collideriani, 72.
Comparative religion, method of study, 81-85: short survey of its
growth, 1-6.
Confession, 54-56, 158-160.
Cursing-ritual, a form of spell, 196-198.
Eschatological beliefs, 63-64.
Fasting, a cathartic ritual, 153-154.
Festivals, influence of pagan on Christian, 58.
Fetichism, 44-47: in Hellas, 44-45: in Christianity, 45-47.
Hellenism, influence on Christianity, 23.
Hero-worship, 75-76.
Hilaria, 62.
Homicide, cathartic origin of law concerning, 140-152.
Human incarnation of divinity, 59-60.
{233}
Human sacrifice, legends concerning, 27-28.
Idolatry, 40-44.
Indo-Germanic spell, 193.
Ischtar, legend of, 29.
Kalevala, 184, 191.
Kore, 33: gnostic-pagan worship of, 34-35, 65.
Mariolatry, 65, 69, 72.
Mexican religion, 3.
Montanism, 67.
Mother of God, 38, 66.
Names, religious influence of, 32, 184-192.
Parthenos, 37-38: _cf._ 65, 69, 70.
Peruvian religion, 3.
Phrygian religion, 24, 62, 66-68.
Prayer (_vide_ Spell) definition of, 165: distinction between prayer
and spell, 167-169: antagonism between them, 193-194: objects of
prayer, progress from material to spiritual, 173-174: prayer a form of
communion with the deity, 174: Christian theory of prayer, 227-228:
survival of spell in Christian liturgy, 228-230: Egyptian prayer, 188;
dominated by spell, 224-227: English, earliest example of
spell-prayer, 194: Eleusinian spell-prayer, 194: Hellenic prayer, 187,
200-205, 207; Hellenic spells, 196; spell prayer, 199-200; theory of
prayer in Hellenic philosophy, 206: Iranian liturgical magic, 199;
prayers and spells in Zarathustrian ritual, 213-218: Latin prayer,
185: Roman spell-prayer, 195: Peruvian prayer, 183 n. 3: savage
examples of real prayer, 182-183: Umbrian prayer, 186: Vedic
spell-formulæ combined with prayer, 208-213.
Purification: primitive ideas concerning pure and impure substances,
89-91: analysis of primitive sensation of impurity, 92-98:
purification after battle, 94; after funerals, 96: logical development
of idea of purity, 98-101: psychological effect of impure contact,
102-103: purity connected with belief in spirits, 103-104; dualism of
good and evil spirits, 105: with belief in gods, 106: earliest concept
non-moral, 110-111: evolution of idea of “pure heart,” 111-115:
cathartic sacrifice, 120-122: opposition between spiritual and
ritualistic {234} purity, 123: Iranian ideas, 97, 101, 107, 115,
127-132: Jewish, 124, 126: Hellenic, 132-139; influence on Hellenic
law, 140-152: influence of idea of purity on religious institutions,
152-160.
Rebirth, mystic sense of, 57.
Resurrection, belief in, 60-62: resurrection of divinity, 68.
Sacrifice, 64, 120-122.
Saint-worship, 77.
Savagery, survival of, in higher religion, 10, 11, 15, 17.
Scapegoat, cathartic use of, 119, 120.
Spell, examples of spell-prayer, 169, 170, 175, 180: spell-value of
the name in lower and higher religions, 184-192: use of narrative as a
spell-form of suggestion (Navajo prayer), 181-182: knowledge of origin
of person or substance useful for spell-purposes, 190-193: progress
from spell to prayer, 171-173.
Teutonic religion, 41, 51, 53, 55, 57, 78-80: ideas of purity,
107-109.
Thiasoi, 48-49.
Totemism, 13.
Transference of sin, 116-119.
Trinitarian ideas, 73-74.
Virginity, exaltation of, 70-71.
ENDNOTES
LECTURES I AND II NOTES
[3.1] Garcilasso de la Vega, _Royal Commentary of the Incas_ (Hakluyt
Society): Sahagun--transl. Jourdanet et Siméon.
[3.2] Jacob Laskowski, _vide_ Usener, _Götternamen_, p. 82, etc.
[6.1] _Golden Bough_, 2nd ed., vol. iii. p. 186.
[13.1] For instance, an ancestor may for certain reasons be worshipped
in the form of a snake, and yet this need not imply a snake-tribe or
any tribal worship of snakes in general.
[26.1] _Vide infra_, pp. 192, 193.
[26.2] _E.g._ _De Civ. Dei._, bk. 2, ch. 6: deos paganorum nunquam
bene vivendi sanxisse doctrinam.
[27.1] Plutarch, _Parallela_, 35. _Vide_ my _Cults of Greek States_,
vol. i. p. 93.
[28.1] Servius, _Æn._ iii. 121.
[28.2] _Ibid._, ii. 801.
[29.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv. (ed. Mills), p. 211.
[29.2] _Vide_ account of these in _Revue des Études grecques_, xiii.
(1900), p. 233, and _Annuaire de l’Association pour l’encouragement
des Études grecques_, 1871, p. 92.
[31.1] _Protrept._, 12, § 120 (p. 92 P).
[33.1] I have noticed the evidence of this in my forthcoming third
volume of the _Cults of the Greek States_.
[34.1] _C.I.G._, 4697.
[34.2] _Haeres._ 51, 22; Dindorf, vol. ii. p. 483, 12-29: _vide_
Philologus, 16, p. 354. I find that the view I have taken of this
important text agrees on the whole with that of Usener in his
_Untersuchungen_, p. 27.
[37.1] That Aion was a real figure of Mithraic religion has been
finally proved by the _Mithras-Liturgie_, published by Dieterich, p.
4, l. 21.
[37.2] Usener quotes a few examples from the liturgy of the Greek
Church and one or two from patristic literature, _Religionsgesch_.
_Untersuchungen_, 1, p. 28, n. 5: some of these are poetical.
[38.1] _Vide_ Artemis R. 37, in my _Cults of the Greek States_, vol.
ii. p. 567.
[38.2] Paus. 4, 33, 4: inscription in Dittenberger, _Sylloge_(2), 653.
[38.3] Vide _Report of American School at Athens_, vol. i., inscr. No.
xxvi.
[39.1] _Vide_ chapter on Cybele in the forthcoming third volume of my
_Cults of the Greek States_.
[42.1] _Anth. Pal._ xi. 269, “I am Heracles, the triumphant son of
Zeus; I am not Luke, but they compel me.”
[42.2] _Ephemeris Archaiologiké_, 1900, πίν. 5.
[43.1] Theocritus, _Id._ 7, 106.
[43.2] _Cults of Greek States_, vol. ii. p. 735: R. 25b.
[44.1] _Cf._ the method of Greco-Egyptian magic of strangling birds
before the idol of Eros, in order that their breath may animate it,
mentioned in an Abraxas papyrus, _Class. Rev._ 1896, p. 409.
[45.1] _Vide_ Schrader, _Real-Lexikon_, _s.v._ Eid.
[45.2] _Ad Nat._ i. 12.
[47.1] The _Tatu_, _Tat_, or _Ded_ pillar erected in the ritual of
Osiris, perhaps as a symbol of the resurrection of the god, had the
form of a cross: _vide_ Frazer, _Golden Bough_(2), ii. p. 141.
[48.1] Vide _Palace of Knossos_: Provisional Report for year 1903, p.
92: the writer quotes Babylonian and Assyrian examples.
[49.1] Epist. 395: the doctrines of the Orphic sects from the fourth
century B.C. onwards also emphasised the kinship of man with God, as
the well-known Orphic tablets, found in South Italy and Crete, reveal
(_Hell. Journ._ 3, p. 112: Miss J. Harrison, _Prolegomena to the Study
of Greek Religion_: Appendix by Prof. Murray, p. 660). In the
pseudo-Platonic _Axiochus_, p. 371 D, the sick man is assured of
salvation as being “of the family of God” γεννήτης τῶν θεῶν.
[50.1]
_E.g._ a priest of Megalopolis, a hierophantes of the Great Goddesses,
is spoken of as descended from “those who first established the mystic
worship of the Great Goddesses among the Arcadians,” _Eph. Archaiol._
1896, p. 122: the priests of Poseidon at Halikarnassos traced their
descent from those who brought his cult from Troezen at the foundation
of the city, _C.I.G._ 2655.
[50.2] At Cos, _vide_ Paton and Hicks, _Inscriptions of Cos_, No. 103
(Roman Imperial period).
[51.1] _E.g._ the priest of Cybele at Pessinus, and the priest of Ma
in the two Comanas.
[52.1] _Vide_ Golther, _Handbuch der germanischen Mythologie_, p. 612,
617.
[53.1] _Vide_ my paper in the _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_,
1904, on “The Position of Women in Ancient Religion.”
[54.1] _Vide infra_, p. 72.
[54.2] See King, _Babylonian Religion_, p. 211.
[55.1] _Vide_ chapter on “Apollo Cult” in my forthcoming fourth volume
of _Cults_.
[55.2] Plutarch, _Apophtheg. Lacon._ p. 229 D: Lysander is told by the
priest that before initiation he must confess his worst sin: he asks
if this was the gods’ command or the priests’, and on hearing that it
was the gods who enjoined it, he replied, “Then do you stand aside and
I will tell the gods if they ask me.”
[55.3] _Opp. Ep._ 96.
[55.4] _Vide_ Herzog, _Real-Encyclopädie_, _s.v._ _Beichte_.
[56.1] Jourdanet et Siméon, p. 24.
[57.1] Heszch, _s.v._ Ἀμφιδρόμια.
[57.2] _Vide_ Golther, _op. cit._ p. 555.
[57.3] _Polit._ p. 1336 B.
[57.4] In the Attis Mysteries the reborn and initiated were fed on
milk--Sallustius, _De Diis et Mundo_, 4: for a careful treatment of
the whole question, _vide_ Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, pp.
157-178: for various savage parallels showing the prevalence in
primitive societies of the idea of death and rebirth at initiation,
_vide_ Frazer, _Golden Bough_, vol. iii. pp. 424-446.
[58.1] _Vide_ Herzog, _Real-Encycl._, xii. p. 319.
[58.2] _Vide_ Trede, _Das Heidenthum in der römischen Kirche_, vol. i.
p. 280, “Neue und alte Fest-Lust.”
[60.1] _Vide_ Frazer’s _Golden Bough, passim_, especially vol. ii. pp.
115-168 (death and resurrection in rites of Adonis, Attis, Osiris,
Dionysos), and vol. iii. pp. 138-200: _cf._ articles by Bernard Cook
in _Classical Review_, 1903, 1904, on “Zeus Jupiter and the Oak”: we
must distinguish between the simulated death of the divine effigy, and
the simulated or real death of the human representative of divinity.
In Hellenic religion we can trace the idea in the worship of Pan, in
the legends and ritual of Artemis-Iphigenia and Aphrodite, vide _Cults
of the Greek States_, vol. ii. pp. 440-442, 650-652, and in the Cretan
worship of Zeus, vol. i. pp. 36-38: but it had lost its vitality in
the purely Hellenic cults of the classical period, and was only real
and energetic in the legends and ritual of Adonis and Dionysos.
[61.1] _Vide_ Dio Chrys., vol. ii. p. 16 (Dindorf), and K. O. Müller’s
_Sardon und Sardanapal_ (_Kleine Schriften_, vol. ii. p. 100): on a
coin published in British Museum Catalogue, “Lycaonia,” etc., pl.
xxxiii. 2, p. 180, we see the god on his lion standing on what may be
his pyre.
[62.1] _Vide_ especially Hippol., _Ref. Haeres._ 5, p. 118 (Miller):
Macrob., _Saturn._ 1, 21, 7: Arnobius, _Adv. Gent._ 5, 7, 16; 7, 49:
Julian, _Or._ 5, 168 C.
[62.2] _De error._ c. 22.
[63.1] For the Greek origin of the Christian apocalyptical literature,
_vide_ Dieterich, _Beitrage zur Erklärung der neu-entdeckten Petrus
Apokalypse_, Leipzig, 1893. The clearest trace of Orphic influence on
historic Christianity is the doctrine of purgatory, which was
popularised for the later ages by Vergil’s VIth _Æneid_: _vide_
especially the purgatorial theory in Servius’ Commentary, _Æn._ vi.
741.
[65.1] _Hibbert Journal_, January 1904.
[66.1] Alexis in Stobæus, _Florileg._ (Meineke), vol. iii. p. 83.
[67.1] _Vide_ Herzog, _Real-Encycl._, _s.v._ “Montanismus”: _cf._ the
article there on “Maria” and the chapter in Trede, _op. cit._ vol.
ii., “Die grosse Mutter.”
[68.1] Euseb. _v. Const._, iii. 43, 2.
[69.1] Vide _Cults of the Greek States_, pp. 650-652.
[69.2] One of the Babylonian goddesses is addressed in the same hymn
as “Mother, wife, and maid,” Jastrow, _Relig. Babyl. Assyr._, p. 459.
[70.1] Vide _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. ii., Artemis, R 133:
_cf._ Paus. 8, 13, 1.
[70.2] I am treating this question in an appendix to the Cybele
chapter in vol. iii. of my _Cults_, etc.
[71.1] _E.g._ fragment of Naumachius in Stobæus, _op. cit._, vol.
iii. pp. 16-17.
[72.1] _Vide_ specially Trede, _Das Heidenthum in der römischen
Kirche_: Renan, _Les origines du christianisme_, vol. vii. 572-573.
The resemblances are particularly striking between the Catholic and
the Isiac sacerdotalism.
[72.2] Hæres., 79.
[72.3] Herod., 4, 33.
[73.1] _Cf._ the prayer to Ninlil or Belit (a parallel form to
Ischtar) of Asarhaddon, “may the lips of Nin-lil, the Mother of the
Great God, utter daily a gracious word before Aschur for the King of
Assyria” (Jastrow, _op. cit._ p. 525). Mary was chiefly worshipped in
the same way as an intercessor.
[73.2] For the identity of Father and Son in the later Mithraic
cult-dogma, _vide_ Dieterich, _Eine Mithras-Liturgie_, p. 68: for the
Trinitarian idea in Mithraism, _vide_ Cumont, _Die Mysterien von
Mithra_ (_deutsche Ausgabe_), pp. 96, 145: Mr Cook endeavours to trace
it in the old Pelasgian cult of Zeus, _Class. Rev._ 1903, 1904: vide
_Hell. Journ._, 1901, p. 139, for Trinitarian symbolism in
Carthaginian worship. (Note a certain mystic sanctity attached to the
triad in later Greek philosophy, _e.g._ in Porphyry, Serv., Verg.,
_Ecl._, 5, 66: Io. Lydus, _de Mens._, 2, 19.)
[74.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. xxxi. pt. iii. p. 278.
[75.1] Vide _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. i. p. 306.
LECTURE III NOTES
[91.1] _De Mysteriis_, 5, 23.
[97.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv., Zend-Avesta, pt. i. pp.
58-59.
[99.1] _E.g._ onions, pease-soup, cheese: I-Tsing, _Records of the
Buddhist Religion_, p. 138, “onions have a foul smell and are impure”:
_cf._ list of impure substances in ritual inscription of Rhodes,
_C.I.G. Ins. Mar. Æg._ i. No. 789.
[99.2] _Sacred Books of the East_, Zend-Avesta, pt. i. p. 105.
[101.1] _C.I.A._, 3, 73.
[101.2] The purifying power that ashes possess in certain ritual may
be derivative from fire.
[103.1] _Op. cit._, pt. i. p. 120.
[104.1] _E.g. op. cit._, pp. 201, 204.
[105.1] _E.g._ Porphyry in Euseb., _Præp. Evang._, 4, 22.
[106.1] Steinmetz, _Die Entwickelung der Strafe_, vol. ii. p. 355.
[106.2] _Cf._ “Ye shall be holy, for I am holy,” Lev. xi. 44;
Deuteron. xxiii. 12.
[107.1] Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 500.
[108.1] _Germania_, c. 40.
[108.2] Golther, _op. cit._ p. 570.
[108.3] Golther, _op. cit._ p. 607.
[112.1] Casalis, _Les Bassoutos_, p. 269: among the Zulus, sin and
dirt are spoken of as the same,--“You have dirt, you are dirty” = “You
have done wrong,” Leslie, _Among the Zulus_, p. 170. (These and other
references to the evidence from savage society I owe to the kindness
of my friend Mr R. Marett.)
[113.1] P. 301.
[114.1] Andoc., _De Myst._, 110.
[115.1] _Op. cit._, p. 102.
[116.1] The same kind of ceremonious logic inspires the practice of
the Damaras, who, when making peace with an alien tribe, go into a
river with their foes and throw water into their faces to wash away
enmity.--Sir J. E. Alexander, _Expedition and Discoveries_, vol. ii.
p. 171.
[117.1] Veniaminoff ap. Petroff, _Alaska_, p. 158.
[117.2] Molina, _Fables and Rites of the Yncas_ (Hakluyt Society), p.
22.
[118.1] Lev. xvii.
[118.2] 2, 39.
[119.1] The cathartic process of transference applied to plague as
well as actual sin, _e.g._ Aristotle, _Frag._, 454, transference of
disease into a raven.
[119.2] Serv., _Æn._ 3, 57.
[120.1] In modern India a criminal and his wife sometimes undertake to
transfer into their own persons the sins of the Rajah and the Rani:
_Anthrop. Journ._, 1901, p. 302.
[120.2] _Vide_ chapter on Apollo Ritual, _Cults_, vol. iv.
[121.1] _Cf._ Blood-purification in Vedic ritual, Hillebrandt,
_Vedische Opfer und Zauber_, p. 179 (evil spirits driven away by a
reed dipped in blood of the sacrifice, p. 176): in the Lupercalia at
Rome the foreheads of youths were smeared with the blood of the
sacrificed goat and dog and then wiped with wool dipped in milk,
probably a piacular ceremony; _vide_ W. Fowler, _The Roman Festivals_,
p. 311.
[121.2] _Cf._ Apollon. Rhod., 4, 478, for pig’s blood in purification
from murder.
[122.1] Numbers c. 19.
[124.1] Levit. xvi. 2.
[125.1] Numbers xxxi. 19.
[125.2] Numbers xxxv.
[125.3] Numbers xxxv. 25.
[126.1] Deuteron. xxi.
[127.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv. part i. p. 81.
[128.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv. part i. p. 204.
[128.2] _Ib._ p. 88.
[128.3] _Ib._ p. 136.
[129.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv. p. 28.
[130.1] _Sacred Books of the East_, vol. iv. p. 56; _cf._ p. 141.
[130.2] The virtue of chastity is religious rather than ethical; the
courtesan is reprobated because she mingles the seed of believers and
unbelievers alike, _ib._ p. 205. Yet the Zarathustrian system escaped
the extravagant exaltation of mere virginity that is found in early
Christian literature: “the man who has a wife is far above him who
lives in continence” (Fargard, iv.-iii. _b_, p. 46).
[131.1] _Sacred Books_, vol. iv. p. 216.
[131.2] _Ib._ p. 216.
[132.1] _Sacred Books_, vol. iv. p. 87.
[135.1] Livy, 40, 6, 1-3: the whole host was led between the severed
limbs of a dog.
[135.2] Herod., 8, 27.
[136.1] Plutarch, _Quæst. Græc._, 24.
[136.2] Stobæus, _Florileg._ Meineke, vol. ii. p. 184.
[137.1] Mullach, _Frag. Philos._, Adespota.
[137.2] _Anth. Pal._, 14, 71.
[137.3] _Ib._ No. 74.
[138.1] Wilamowitz, _Isyllos_, 6; _Anth. Pal._, Adespota, ccxxxiii.
_b_: _cf._ inscription from Astypalaia in Collitz,
_Dialect-Inschriften_, No. 3472.
[138.2] _C.I.G. Ins. Mar. Æg._ 1, 789.
[139.1] In Neæram, § 85.
[139.2] Clem. Alex., _Strom._, 619, Pott.
[140.1] I believe that the trial scene on the shield of Achilles,
rightly interpreted, implies that the community are beginning to
decide whether the avenger shall accept the were-gilt or not.
[142.1] _Die Entwickelung der Strafe_, vol. ii. p. 347.
[143.1] An example is given by Steinmetz, _op. cit._ ii. p. 336, of
the punishment of incest among the _Pasemaher_: the guilty pair were
buried alive with a hollow pipe reaching from their mouths to the top
of the earth: if they survived seven days of this agony their lives
were spared: no explanation is offered, but it is not improbable that
the law is inspired by the idea that the earth could absorb their
impurity.
[144.1] _Sacred Books_, vol. iv. p. 169 (pt. i.).
[145.1] Vide _Cults of the Greek States_, vol. i. pp. 66-69:
Steinmetz, _op. cit._, vol. ii. p. 345, discusses a record concerning
the Ossetes, who live habitually in the system of the blood-feud, to
the effect that a person guilty of parricide was surrounded and burnt
in his house by the whole people, and he suggests that this may be the
first example among them of a State cognisance of murder.
[147.1] Antiphon, _Or._ 6, p. 764: _cf._ Eurip., _Hecuba_, pp.
291-292.
[148.1] Demosthenes, _c. Aristocrat._, pp. 643-644.
[148.2] Antiphon, p. 686.
[149.1] Plato, _Laws_, 873 A-B: Demosth., _c. Euerg._, p. 1160.
[149.2] P. 749; _cf._ 764.
[149.3] _Laws_, pp. 854, 865.
[149.4] Demosthenes, _c. Aristocrat._, p. 643.
[149.5] Antiphon, p. 709.
[150.1] Demosthenes, _op. cit._, p. 645: _cf._ the account in
Pausanias, 5, 27, 10, of the purification by the Eleans at Olympia of
the bronze ox which had caused the death of a boy.
[151.1] Drako appears to have systematised it, but it may have existed
as custom-law before his period.
[151.2] Paus., 1, 19, 1; 1, 28, 10: Plut., _vit. Thes._, 12, 18:
Demosth., _c. Aristocrat._, 74.
[152.1] We note the legend that purification was refused to Ixion, and
the express statement that no one would purify King Pausanias from his
brutal crime against the Olynthian maiden.
[152.2] The procedure by ordeal, prevalent in the ancient world and
common among contemporary savages, is probably derived from an
animistic conception of purity: the primitive theory appears to be
that, if the person is innocent, the pure spirit within him makes his
body able to resist the trial, and is not dependent upon any idea of a
higher god of righteousness. The ordeal procedure is very common in
African society: Post, _Afrikanisch. Jurisprud._, 2, p. 110.
[154.1] _E.g._ the Eleusinian, Mithraic, and Phrygian Mysteries: for
examples of it in savage initiation rites, see _Annual Report
Smithsonian Institute_, 1899-1900, p. 435.
[157.1] Sahagun, Jourdanet, pp. xxxix. and 455.
[157.2] _Vide supra_, p. 57.
[157.3] Vide _Archiv für Religionswissenschaft_, 1904, pp. 401-409.
[158.1] Duchesne, _Origines du culte Chrétien_, transl. by M’Clure, p.
296.
[159.1] Sahagun, _op. cit._, pp. 340-341.
[159.2] _Vide_ Herzog, _Real-Encyclop._, _s.v._ _Beichte._
[160.1] King, _Babylonian Religion_, p. 212.
[160.2] _Vide_ Von der Goltz, _Das Gebet_, p. 297: Cabrol, _Prière
Antique_, p. 316: the aspersion with holy water in the present Roman
ritual does not seem to have been obligatory in the early period:
_vide_ Duchesne, _Origines_, p. 404, Engl. transl.
LECTURE IV NOTES
[164.1] An interesting and original contribution to the solution of
the question will be found in a recent paper by Mr R. Marett in
_Folk-Lore_, 1904, “From Spell to Prayer.”
[166.1] _Vide_ A. Lang, _The Making of Religion_.
[167.1] Vide _Anthropolog. Journ._, 1904, p. 165.
[169.1] R. Marett, _op. cit._, p. 145.
[170.1] _Man_, 1902, p. 104.
[170.2] Frazer, _Golden Bough_(2) iii. 83.
[170.3] Plutarch, 693 F.
[170.4] At the Anthesteria, Photius, _s.v._ θύραζε κῆρες: Hesych.,
_s.v._
[171.1] Frazer, _op. cit._, iii. 98: _vide_ Marett, _op. cit._, p.
163.
[171.2] _Primitive Culture_, vol. ii. (concluding chapter).
[175.1] Marett, _op. cit._, p. 152.
[176.1] Tylor, _op. cit._, ii. p. 334.
[176.2] Frazer, _Golden Bough_,(2) vol. ii. p. 212.
[177.1] _Annual Report of Smithsonian Institute_, “Study of Sioux
Cults, by Dorsey,” 1899-1900, p. 381, etc.
[178.1] _Peabody Museum Reports_, vol. iii. p. 276, etc.
[178.2] _Annual Report Smithsonian Institute_, 1899-1900, pp. 420-421.
[178.3] Tylor, _op. cit._, ii. p. 331.
[178.4] _Folk-Lore_, 1904, p. 168: _Toda Prayer_, W. H. R. Rivers.
[179.1] Published by Carl Sapper in _Nördliches Mittel-Amerika_, vide
_Archiv für vergl. Relig. Wiss._, 1904, p. 468.
[180.1] Budge, _Egyptian Magic_, p. 49.
[180.2] Jastrow, _Religion Babyloniens Assyriens_, p. 490: _cf._ the
formula in the prayer of one of the early kings to the goddess
Ga-túm-dug: “I have no mother--Thou art my mother: I have no
father--Thou art my father,” Jastrow, p. 395.
[180.3] _Sacred Books_, vol. xlvi. p. 23.
[181.1] Vol. I.
[183.1] Tylor, _Prim. Cult._, ii. p. 333.
[183.2] Tylor, _op. cit._, ii. p. 335.
[183.3] I have only space to make a summary reference here to the very
noteworthy collection of Peruvian prayers preserved by De Molina,
_Fables and Rites of the Yncas_, p. 28, etc., 38, 56: they have all
the character of pure prayer, and occasionally reach a high spiritual
level: the only appearance of magic is in the sacrifice that
accompanies the singular petition “that the Creator and the sun may
remain ever young.”
[184.1] _Vide_ also Andrian in _Deutsch. Gesellsch. Anthropol._,
xxvii., 1896, p. 109.
[185.1] Serv., _Æn._, 2, 351.
[185.2] _Fr._ 781, _Phaethon._
[185.3] _Vedic Hymns_ (_Sacred Books_, etc.), pt. ii. p. 378.
[187.1] l. 160: cf. _Plat. Crat._, 400 E., “It is our custom in our
prayers to call the gods by whatsoever name they most rejoice to be
called by.”
[187.2] _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii., pp. 281, 372.
[188.1] Budge, _op. cit._, p. 161.
[188.2] Budge, _op. cit._, pp. 137-141.
[188.3] _Vide_ examples quoted by Ausfeld, _De Græcorum
Precationibus_, p. 519.
[189.1] Ps. 54, 31.
[189.2] c. 23, v. 21.
[189.3] Joseph, _De bell. Jud._, 2, 8.
[189.4] Acts 8, 16; 19, 5.
[190.1] Von der Goltz, _Das Gebet_, p. 353.
[191.1] _Hymns of the Atharva-Veda_ (_Sacred Books_, etc., xlii. p.
167).
[191.2] _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. p. 391.
[192.1] _Cf._ a formula in an Egyptian papyrus published by Kenyon
(122, v. 13), “I know thee, Hermes, who thou art and whence thou art
and what city is the city of Hermes”: quoted by Ausfeld, _op. cit._ p.
524, _n._ 1.
[193.1] The “Merseburg charm,” old High German tenth-century MS.:
_cf._ R. Chambers, _Fireside Stories_, Edinburgh, 1842. My attention
was called to the great antiquity of this Norse charm by Prof. Napier,
to whose kindness I owe these references.
[193.2] _Sacred Books_, xlii. p. 20.
[194.1] Golther, _op. cit._, pp. 647-648.
[194.2] In a pre-Conquest Cotton MS. in the British Museum, _vide_
Grein’s _Bibliothek der ängelsächsischen Poesie_: ed. Mülcker, vol. i.
p. 316.
[195.1] Livy, 22, 10.
[196.1] De Re Rustica, 139, 141: Wordsworth, _Fragments and Specimens
of Early Latin_, p. 335.
[196.2] Clemens, _Strom._, p. 754, Pott.
[197.1] _Eumen._, 332.
[198.1] Dittenberger, _Sylloge_(2), vol. iii. 816.
[198.2] Post, _Afrikanisch. Jurisprud._, 2, p. 128.
[199.1] Paus., 10, 12, 10.
[200.1] πλεῖστον οὖλον ἵει, ἴουλον ἵει, Athenæ., 618 E.
[200.2] The song sung by the children, probably an old weather-spell,
called φιληλίας, with the refrain, ἔξεχ᾽ ὦ φίλ᾽ ἥλιε, Pollux, 9, 123,
Athenæ., 619 B.
[201.1] _Ephem. Archaiol._, 1891, p. 82.
[201.2] Plato, _Alcibiad._, 2, p. 148 C.
[202.1] Collitz, _Dialect-Inschrift._, 1562, 1563, early fourth
century B.C.
[202.2] Collitz, 3648.
[203.1] Roberts, _Greek Epigraphy_, vol. i. p. 304.
[203.2] Nem., 8, 35.
[203.3] Ol., 13, 115.
[203.4] Med., 635.
[203.5] Bergk, _Frag. Lyr. Græc._, vol. iii., Scolia 2.
[204.1] _Œcon._, 11, 8.
[204.2] _De Superst._, p. 116 D.
[204.3] Plat., _Phædr._, 279 B.
[204.4] Philostr., _Vit. Apoll._, 4, 41.
[205.1] Plat., _Alcib._, 2, p. 143 A.
[205.2] Epictet. (Schenkle), p. 479.
[205.3] _Id._, p. 158.
[205.4] Von der Goltz, _Das Gebet_, p. 292.
[206.1] Diog. Laert. 8, 16, 7: yet, according to Clemens, “The
Pythagoreans enjoin that prayer should be uttered aloud, so that one
might never pray for what one would be ashamed that others should
hear,” _Strom._, p. 641, Pott.
[206.2] Porphyry ap. Proclus _in Tim._, 2, 64 B: Procl. _in Tim._, 2,
65: Sallustius, _De Diis et Mundo_, c. 16: _cf._ Max. Tyr., _Dissert._
xi.
[207.1] Vide _Archiv für vergl. Religionswissensch._, 1904, p. 395.
[207.2] The remarkable ethical fragment of an unknown philosopher,
Eusebios, in Ionic dialect, quoted by Stobæus, περὶ ἀρετῆς, § 85 (vol.
i. p. 39, Meineke), contains moral aspirations that strikingly
resemble New Testament doctrine, and may possibly have been intended
as a prayer, but it contains no appeal to a divinity: he may belong to
the Neo-Platonic sect, _vide_ Orelli, _Opusc. Græc. Sentent._, vol.
ii. p. 728.
[208.1] _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. p. 61.
[209.1] _E.g._, “Protect our people all around with those undeceived
guardians of thine, oh Agni,” _ib._, p. 158.
[210.1] Atharva-Veda (_Sacred Books_, vol. xlii. p. 138).
[210.2] _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. p. 376.
[210.3] _Ib._, p. 273.
[210.4] _Ib._, p. 383.
[210.5] _Ib._, p. 352.
[211.1] Quoted by Prof. Tylor, _Primitive Culture_, vol. ii. p. 339,
from Rig Veda, vii. 89, 3.
[211.2] _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. p. 181.
[211.3] _Ib._, p. 249.
[211.4] _Ib._, p. 354.
[211.5] Atharva-Veda, p. 164.
[212.1] Atharva-Veda, p. 163.
[212.2] _Ib._, p. 165.
[212.3] “Bring ye forward an ancient mighty speech to Agni.… May our
prayers increase Agni,” _Vedic Hymns_, pt. ii. p. 259: _cf._ p. 391,
“The prayers fill thee (oh Agni) with power and strengthen thee, like
great rivers the Sindhu.”
[214.1] _Sacred Books_, etc., vol. iv. (_Zend-Avesta_, pt. i. p. 228).
[214.2] _Ib._, pp. 145-147.
[214.3] _Sacred Books_, etc., vol. xxxi. (_Zend-Avesta_, pt. iii. p.
262.)
[215.1] _Zend-Avesta_, pt. i. p. 246.
[215.2] _Cf._ the Greek sentiment, θυσία ἀρίστη γνώμη ἀγαθή, Joann.
Damascen., _Sacr. Par._, tit. ix. p. 640.
[215.3] _Zend-Avesta_, pt. iii. p. 247.
[216.1] _Zend-Avesta_, pt. i. p. 138.
[217.1] Pt. i. p. 147.
[217.2] Pt. iii. pp. 33-34.
[217.3] _Ib._, p. 179.
[217.4] _Ib._, p. 106.
[217.5] _Ib._, p. 49.
[218.1] Pt. iii., p. 170.
[218.2] _Archiv f. Religionswiss._, 1904, p. 395.
[218.3] Von der Goltz, _Das Gebet_, p. 288.
[219.1] Jastrow, _Religion Babyloniens w. Assyriens_, vol. i. pp.
391-393, 423, 427.
[219.2] _Ib._, p. 497.
[219.3] S. Aug., _De Civ. Dei._, 10, 9.
[220.1] King, _Babylonian Religion_, p. 83.
[220.2] Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 401.
[220.3] _Ib._, p. 402.
[221.1] Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 408.
[221.2] _Ib._, p. 411.
[221.3] _Ib._, p. 501: the elevated tone of the old Babylonian royal
liturgy was still preserved under the later Seleukid rule, _vide_ p.
414.
[222.1] Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 501.
[222.2] _Ib._, p. 533.
[222.3] _Ib._, p. 536.
[223.1] Jastrow, _op. cit._, p. 509.
[224.1] Jastrow, _op. cit._, pp. 439-440.
[225.1] Budge, _Egyptian Magic_, pp. 108, 110, 120.
[225.2] _Ib._, p. 127.
[226.1] Budge, _Egyptian Magic_, p. 63.
[226.2] _Ib._, p. 119.
[226.3] _Ib._, p. 119.
[227.1] Budge, _Egyptian Magic_, p. 184.
[228.1] Origen, περὶ εὐχῆς, c. 10, 2.
[228.2] Clemens, _Strom._, vii., ch. 7, § 39, p. 854, Pott.
[228.3] _Ib._, § 38, p. 853, Pott.
[229.1] _Vide_ Von der Goltz, _op. cit._, p. 310.
[229.2] _Vide_ Usener, _Archiv für Religionswiss._, 1904, p. 293.
[230.1] _Vide supra_, pp. 181-182.
Transcriber’s Notes
This book is twelfth in the _Crown Theological Library_ series.
Page numbers are given in {curly} brackets.
Plain text version only: endnote markers are given in [square]
brackets.
Minor spelling inconsistencies (_e.g._ childbirth/child-birth,
Ahura-Mazda/Ahura Mazda, etc.) have been preserved.
Add title and author’s name to cover image.
Alterations to the text:
Convert footnotes to endnotes, relabel note markers (append the
original note number to the page number), and add a corresponding
entry to the TOC.
[Lecture IV]
Change “employs the same method as the Navajo _Sharman_ employed” to
_Shaman_.
“all evil thoughts, all _evils_ words, all evil deeds I do
unwillingly” to _evil_.
[End of text]
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