The idea of a transaction by which the gods are legally bound—so much help for so much worship—may be present in all magical ritual; but in some religions the analogy of human relations according to law is explicitly extended to the relations of men with gods. The Jewish religion was based on a covenant; and, according to some theologians, so is the Christian. It has often been said that Roman religion implied a belief in legal obligation imposed upon the gods by rites duly performed; and Mr. Warde Fowler, who thinks more highly than some have done of the genuineness of religious feeling amongst the Romans, at least in private worship, yet says that in the vota publica we find something like a bargain or covenant with the deity in the name of the State.[336] Legal obligation implies effectual sanctions that may be brought to bear upon transgressors, gods or men; and at a low stage of Animism, when no spirit exceeds the rank of demon, there may be no incongruity in bringing to reason a recalcitrant spirit by stopping his rations or maltreating his image; but when high gods have obtained the homage of men, to punish them calls for great audacity or very subtle management. The Chinese have managed the matter to admiration. The Emperor of China acknowledged himself subject to the spirits of Earth and Heaven; but he himself was the son of Heaven, and all other spirits were subject to him. He ruled alike over the dead and the living. He made deities and appointed them their functions; promoted them and distributed amongst them titles of honour, if they did good works; or, if they failed in their duties, degraded them. In the Pekin Gazette one finds “the deities figuring, not occasionally but very frequently, in every department of official business, and treated much as if they were highly respectable functionaries of a superior order, promoted to some kind of upper house, whose abilities and influence were nevertheless still at the service of the State.”[337] Nowhere has the unity of Church and State been so completely realised, and the pax deorum so conclusively established. One may interpret the facts at discretion: an animist may accept them literally and seriously; a devotee of Magic may regard decrees in the Pekin Gazette as spells that have coercive power in the spirit-world; a Confucian mandarin will think that an excellent plan has been devised for enlisting the superstitions of the simple-minded in support of law and order. We may suppose that for him Animism is but an episode in the history of human thought.
Another way of excluding spiritual caprice, which we might suppose to have been discovered by philosophers, but which appears to be older than what we usually call “Philosophy,” is to subordinate the gods to Fate. The idea has been attributed to the astronomers or astrologers of Babylon that Fate must be above the gods as the constant heaven of the fixed stars is above the planets:[338] an analogy characteristic of magical thought. But the roots of the idea of Fate are much older and wider spread in the slow, steady growth of the belief in uniformity, which is the common ground of Magic and Science; and (as I have said) before laws of nature had been discovered, Fate was an all-comprehensive Magic. Fate reduces the gods to the status of wheels in a machine; omens and oracles, instead of being sent or inspired by the gods, are also part of the machinery, and may point to their destruction; prayers and sacrifices are other parts of the machinery and, at most, may be a means of assuaging the anxiety of one’s own heart. A stern way of envisaging the world: but it gives not only security against the gods, but also resignation and tranquillity.
Philosophical Christianity regards the actions of God as always manifested, in the physical order, through “second causes,” or, in other words, in “the laws of nature”; and, in the spiritual order, as always observing the moral laws that are the principles of divine Reason; in either case there can be no variableness nor shadow of turning.
Magic, like Science, believes in uniformities of nature, and seeks by a knowledge of them to control events; but Magic is so eager to control events that it cannot wait to learn the true uniformities; it is not moved, like Science, by curiosity as to the truth, but by blind desire for present results. The cult of spirits seeks to control events not by knowledge of their natural causes, but by appealing to hyperphysical causes, and it resembles the belief in Free Will, by which men hope, through the influx of some unknown energy, to escape the bondage of their own vices: for Kant rightly treated “Freedom” as a cosmological problem, the supposed intervention of a cause that is transcendent and not in the course of nature. The intervention of Free Will (whether divine or human) is sought in order to avert injurious fortune, to realise our personal or social schemes more quickly and cheaply than our own efforts can, to avoid the consequences of our own actions, amongst which is bondage to our own vices: for all these, give us variability, miracle, caprice. But to foresee and control events physical or social, including the conduct of others, to be confident in the effects of our own actions according to our purposes, and in the stability of our own character: for all these, there must be uniformity. In the long run the latter considerations determine our thoughts; and the necessity of uniformity to a rational life may be one cause of our belief (so far out-running the evidence) in uniformities of causation and of space-relations and of all that we mean by natural law.
CHAPTER VII
OMENS
§ 1. The Prevalence of Omens
“When great disasters are about to befall a state or nation it often happens that there is some warning,” says Herodotus.[339] It happens, indeed, not only to states and nations, but to eminent men, or even to common men, children and old women. An old woman who in England sees the new moon for the first time through glass, will not be surprised when, next morning, the market-basket drops from her arm in the middle of the street. In Fiji, if a woman putting bananas into a pot let one fall on the outside, or if the bread-fruit burst in roasting, she wrung her hands in dismay and cried aloud.[340] The whole world is full of such portents, and has been many thousands of years; and there is no clearer disproof of the vulgar error that age is the mother of wisdom than this, that the older the race grows the less it attends to them: or rather, whilst it attends to them more and more sedulously up to a certain critical hour—reached by the Greeks (say) 400 B.C., and by Western Europe (say) A.D. 1600—it then begins to disregard, rapidly neglects them, till in a comparatively short time what is called the “enlightened” part of mankind forgets to take account of them at all; although it is well known that an eclipse of the moon a little before sunrise in the sign of Leo was a token that Darius should be defeated at Arbela; that on the first day that Julius Cæsar sat on the golden throne and wore the purple robe, an ox, having been sacrificed, was found to have no heart—at which Cæsar himself was surprised, and soon after he was assassinated; and that many signs and wonders announced quite recently the coming of the Spaniards into Mexico; Montezuma had visions and grew melancholy; the idol of Quetzalchoatl declared that a strange people approached to possess his kingdom, and so did witches and sorcerers; a stone spoke and warned him; a lake overflowed its banks; a pyramid of fire was seen in the sky; monsters were born with two heads, and there were other portents, all to no purpose.[341]
Omens, enjoyed with fear and trembling by all men in all ages, have sometimes been conceived of as due to magical power, but much more generally as the sendings of demons or gods; although the fact that they are rarely of any use to the recipient, or even intelligible to him until after the event, makes it very improbable that they involve the intervention of any intelligent cause. And what are we to think of the intelligence of mankind, who in spite of their experience of omens during so many ages, were still eager to observe them?