In more developed faiths the same tendency prevails. The Buddhists rival each other in constructing enormous statues of Sakya Muni; in the Sanscrit Upanishads, Aditi, who represents the endless visible expanse, is termed “mother and father of all gods and men, the substance of whatever has been or shall be born”[89]; and according to some Mahommedan writers, God is so great that it is 72,000 days’ journey between his eyes!
Such are some of the potent stimuli which stir the depths of man’s psychical nature, awakening in him the belief in unknown powers far beyond his ability to measure or to cope with. Not from any conscious act of intelligence, not from any process of voluntary reasoning, is that belief born, but from the unknown, the unplumbed abyss of the sub-conscious mind.
Let not this be considered as something degrading to the religious conceptions themselves. Though all are drawn from out the human spirit itself, and are nowise the direct revelations their believers think them, yet who dare measure the height and the depth of the sub-conscious intelligence? It draws its knowledge from sources which elude scientific research, from the strange powers which we perceive in insects and other lower animals, almost, but not wholly, obliterated in the human line of organic descent; and from others, now merely nascent or embryonic, new senses, destined in some far off æon to endow our posterity with faculties as wondrous to us as would be sight to the sightless.
More than this: the teachings of the severest science tell us that Matter is, in its last analysis, Motion, and that motion is nought else than Mind[90]; and who dare deny that in their unconscious functions our minds may catch some overtones, as it were, from the harmonies of the Universal Intelligence thus demonstrated by inductive research, and vibrate in unison therewith?
LECTURE III.
Primitive Religious Expression: in the Word.
Contents:—An Echo Myth—The Power of Words—Their Magical Potency—The Curse—Power Independent of Meaning—The Name as an Attribute—The Sacred Names—The Ineffable Name—“Myrionomous” Gods—“Theophorous” Names—Suggestion and Repetition as Stimulants—I. The Word to the gods: Prayer—Its Forms, Contents, and Aims—II. The Word from the gods: The Law and the Prophecy—The Ceremonial Law, or tabu—Examples—Divination and Prediction—III. The Word concerning the gods: The Myths—Their Sources chiefly Psychic—Some from Language—Examples—Transference—Similarities—The Universal Mythical Cycles: 1. The Cosmical Concepts; 2. The Sacred Numbers; 3. The Drama of the Universe; Creation and Deluge Myths; 4. The Earthly Paradise; 5. The Conflict of Nature; 6. The Returning Saviour; 7. The Journey of the Soul—Conclusion as to these Identities.