Anthropology

by Edward B. Tylor

To return to the souls of the dead which flit to and fro as ghosts. These, wherever they dwell, are naturally believed to keep up their interest in the living, and their families hold kindly intercourse with them. Thus, in North America a Mandan woman will talk by the hour to her dead husband or child; and a Chinese is bound to announce any family event, such as a wedding, to the spirits of his ancestors, present in their memorial tablets. The ghosts of dead kinsfolk are not only talked to but fed; the family offer them morsels of food at their own meals, and hold once a year a feast of the dead, when the souls of ancestors for generations back are fancied present and invisibly partaking of the food. Such offerings to the dead not only go on through the savage and barbaric world, but last on into higher civilization, their traces still remaining in Europe. The Russian peasant, who fancies the souls of his forefathers creeping in and out behind the saints’ pictures on the little icon-shelf, puts crumbs of cake there for them. One has only to cross the Channel to see how the ancient feast of the dead still keeps its primitive character in the festival of All Souls, which is its modern representative; even at the cemetery of Père-Lachaise they still put cakes and sweet-meats on the graves, and in Brittany the peasants that night do not forget to make up the fire and leave the fragments of the supper on the table, for the souls of the dead of the family who will come to visit their home. All this belongs to the ancestor-worship or religion of the divine dead, which from remote antiquity has been, as it is even now, the main faith of the larger half of mankind. But this worship does not come only from family affection, for the ghosts of the dead are looked upon as divine beings, powerful both for good and harm. The North American Indian, who prays to the spirits of his forefathers to give him good weather or luck in hunting, if he happens to fall into the fire will believe he has neglected to make some offering to the spirits, and they have pushed him in to punish him. In Guinea the negroes who regularly bring food and drink to the images of their dead relatives look to them for help in the trials of life, and in times of peril or distress crowds of men and women may be seen on the hill-tops or the skirts of the forest, calling in the most piteous and touching tones on the spirits of their ancestors. Such accounts help us to understand what real meaning there is in the ancestor-worship which to a Chinese or Hindu is the first business of life, and how the pious rites for the dead ancestors or lares formed the very bond which held a Roman family together. Our modern minds have rather lost the sense of this, and people often think the apotheosis of a dead Roman emperor to have been a mere act of insane pride, whereas in fact it was an idea understood by any barbarian, that at death the great chief should pass into as great a deity.

That barbarians should imagine the manes or ghosts of their dead to be such active powerful beings, arises naturally from their notions of the soul; but this requires a word of explanation. As during life the soul exercises power over the body, so after death when become a ghost it is believed to keep its activity and power. Such ghosts interfering in the affairs of the living are usually called good and evil spirits, or demons. There is no clear distinction made between ghosts and demons; in fact, savages generally consider the demons who help or plague them to be souls of dead men. Good or evil, the man keeps after death the temper he had in mortal life. Not long ago, in South India, where the natives are demon-worshippers, it was found that they had lately built a shrine of which the deity was the ghost of a British officer, a mighty hunter, whose votaries, mindful of his tastes in life, were laying on his altar offerings of cheroots and brandy. The same man will be a good spirit to his friends and an evil spirit to his enemies, and even to his own people he may be sometimes kind and sometimes cruel, as when the Zulus believe that the shades of dead warriors of their tribe are among them in battle and lead them to victory; but if these ghostly allies are angry and turn their backs, the fight will go against them. When people like the American Indians or the African negroes believe that the air around them is swarming with invisible spirits, this is not nonsense. They mean that life is full of accidents which do not happen of themselves; and when in their rude philosophy they say the spirits make them happen, this is finding the most distinct causes which their minds can understand. This is most plainly seen in what uncivilized men believe about disease. We have noticed already that they account for fainting or trance by supposing the soul to leave the body for a time, and here it may be added that weakness or failure of health is in the same way thought to be caused by the soul or part of it going out. In these cases, to bring the soul back is the ordinary method of cure, as where the North American medicine-man will pretend to catch his patient’s truant soul and put it back into his head, or in Fiji a sick native has been seen lying on his back, bawling to his own soul to come back to him. But in other conditions of disease the patient’s behaviour seems rather that of a man who has got a soul in him that is not his proper soul. In any painful illness, especially when the sick man is tossing and shaking in fever, or writhing in convulsions on the ground, or when in delirium or delusion he no longer thinks his own thoughts or speaks with his own voice, but with distorted features and strange, unearthly tones breaks into wild raving, then the explanation which naturally suggests itself is that another spirit has entered into or possessed him. Any one who watches the symptoms of a hysterical-epileptic patient, or a maniac, will see how naturally in the infancy of medical science demoniacal possession came to be the accepted theory of disease, and the exorcism or expulsion of these demons the ordinary method of treatment. It is so among savages, as when a sick Australian will believe that the angry ghost of a dead man has got into him and is gnawing his liver; or when in a Patagonian skin hut the wizards may be seen dancing, shouting, and drumming to drive out the evil demon from a man down with fever. Such ideas were at home in ancient history, as in the well-known Egyptian memorial tablet of the time of Rameses XII (12th century B.C.) to be seen in the Paris Library, and translated in Records of the Past, where the Egyptian god Khons was sent in his ark to cure the little princess Bentaresh of the evil movement in her limbs. When he came, the demon said, “Great god who chasest demons, I am thy slave, I will go to the place whence I came.” Then they made a sacrifice for that spirit, and he went in peace, leaving the patient cured. As far back as the history of medicine reaches, we find the contest between this old spirit-theory of disease and the newer ideas of the physicians, with their diet and drugs; and though the doctors have now taken the upper hand, yet in any nation short of the most civilized the earlier notions may still be found unchanged. When Prof. Bastian, the anthropologist, was travelling in Burma, his cook had an apoplectic fit, and the wife was doing her best to appease the offended demon who had brought it on, by putting little heaps of coloured rice for him, and prayers, “Oh, ride him not! Ah, let him go! Grip him not so hard! Thou shalt have rice! Ah, how good that tastes!” In countries where this theory of disease prevails, the patients’ own delusions work in with and confirm it in most striking ways. As fully persuaded as the bystanders of the reality of their demons, they will recognise them in the figures they dream of or see in their delirium, and what is more, under delusion or diseased imagination they so lose their sense of being themselves, as to talk with what they believe to be the voice of the demon within them, answering in its name, just as the sick princess did in Syria three thousand years ago. Englishmen in India and the far East often have the opportunity of being present at these strange old-world scenes, and hearing the demon-voice whisper, or squeak, or roar, out of the patient’s mouth, that he is the spirit so-and-so, and tell what he is come for; at last, when satisfied with what he wants, or subdued by the exorcist’s charms and threats, the demon consents to go, and then the patient leaves off his frantic screams and raving, his convulsive writhing quiets down, and he sinks into an exhausted sleep, often relieved for a time when the malady is one where mental treatment is effective. Nor is it necessary to go to India or China for illustrations of this early theory of disease. In Spain the priests still go on exorcising devils out of the mouths and feet of epileptic patients, though this will probably cease in a few years, when it is known how successfully that hitherto intractable disease may be treated with potassium bromide.

In other ways the notion of spirits serves to account for whatever happens. That certain unusually fierce wolves or tigers are “man-eaters” is explained by the belief that the souls of wicked men go out at night and enter into wild-beast bodies to prey on their fellow-men; these are the man-tigers and were-wolves—that is, “man-wolves”—which still live in the popular superstition of India and Russia. Again, we all know that many living people grow pale and bloodless and pine away; in Slavonic countries this is thought to be caused by blood-sucking nightmares, whose dreadful visits the patient is conscious of in his sleep, and these creatures are ingeniously accounted for as demon-souls dwelling in corpses, whose blood accordingly keeps fluid long after death; they call them vampires. It has been suggested that primitive men gained from their ideas of souls and spirits their first clear notions of a cause of anything, and this is at any rate so far true that rude tribes do find in the doings of spirits around them a reason for every stumble over a stone, every odd sound or feeling, every time they lose their way in the woods. Thus, in the scores of good and evil chances which meet the barbarian from hour to hour, he finds work for many friendly or unfriendly spirits. Especially his own luck or fortune takes shape in a guardian spirit who belongs to him and goes about with him. This may be, as the rude Tasmanians have thought, a dead father’s soul looking after his son, or such a patron-spirit as the North American warrior fasts for till he sees it in a dream; or it may be, like the genius of the ancient Roman, a spirit born with him for a companion and guardian through life. The genius of Augustus was a divine being to be prayed and sacrificed to, but how we moderns have left behind the thoughts of the ancients, while still using their words, is curiously seen in the changed meaning with which we now talk of the genius of Handel or Turner. Not less striking is the change which has come in our thoughts about the world around us, the sky and the sea, the mountains and the forests. We have learnt to watch the operation of physical laws of gravity and heat, of growth and decomposition, and it is only with an effort that we can get our imagination back to the remote days when men looked to an infinite multitude of spiritual beings as the causes of nature. Yet this belief arises plainly from the theory of the soul, for these spirits are looked upon as souls working nature much as human souls work human bodies. It is they who cast up the fire in the volcano, tear up the forest in the hurricane, spin the canoe round in the whirlpool, inhabit the trees and make them grow. The lower races not only talk of such nature-spirits, but deal with them in a thoroughly personal way which shows how they are modelled on human souls. Modern travellers have seen North Americans paddling their canoes past a dangerous place on the river and throwing in a bit of tobacco with a prayer to the river-spirit to let them pass. An African woodcutter who has made the first cut at a great tree has been known to take the precaution of pouring some palm-oil on the ground, that the angry tree-spirit coming out may stop to lick it up, while the man runs for his life. The state of mind to which these nature-spirits belong must have been almost as clearly remembered by the Greeks, when they could still fancy the nymphs of the lovely groves, and springs, and grassy meadows, coming up to the council of the Olympian gods and sitting around on the polished seats, or the dryads growing with the leafy pines and oaks, and uttering screams of pain when the woodman’s axe strikes the trunk. The Anglo-Saxon dictionary preserves the curious word woodmare for an echo (wudu-mær = wood-nymph), a record of the time when Englishmen believed, as barbarians do still, that the echo is the voice of an answering spirit; the word mare, for spirit or demon, appears also nightmare, the throttling dream-demon who was as real to our forefathers as he is to the natives of Australia now. Superseded by physical science, the old nature-spirits still find a home in poetry and folklore; the Loreley is only a modernized version of the river-demon who drowns the swimmer in the whirlpool; the healing water-spirits of the old sacred wells have only taken saints’ names, the little elves and fairies of the woods are only dim recollections of the old forest-spirits. It may surprise the readers of Huxley’s Physiography to recognise in fairy-tales the nature-spirits in whose personal shape præhistoric man imagined the forces of nature.

Above the commonalty of souls, demons, and nature-spirits, the religions of all tribes recognise higher spirits, or gods. Where ancestor-worship prevails, the souls of great chiefs and warriors or any celebrated persons may take this divine rank. Thus, the Mongols worship as good deities the great Genghis Khan and his princely family. The Chinese declare that Pang, who is worshipped by carpenters and builders as their patron divinity, was a famous artificer who lived long ago in the province of Shangtung, while Kwang-tae, the War-god, was a distinguished soldier who lived under the Han dynasty. The idea of the divine ancestor may even be carried far enough to reach supreme deity, as where the Zulus, working back from ghostly ancestor to ancestor, talk of Unkulunkulu, the Old-Old-one, as the creator of the world; or the Brazilian tribes say that Tamoi the Grandfather, the first man, dwelt among them and taught them to till the soil, at last rising to the sky, where he will receive their souls after death. Among the nature-spirits also the barbarian plainly perceives great gods who rule the universe. The highest deity of the African negroes is the Sky, who gives the rain and makes the grass grow, and when they wake in the morning they thank him for opening the door to let the sun in. Thus they are at the same stage of thought as our Aryan ancestors, whose great deity Dyu, sung of in the hymns of the Veda, was at once the solid personal Sky that rains and thunders, and the Heaven-god who animates it. This deity remains even in name in the Greek Zeus, and Latin Jupiter, the Heaven-father, both religions keeping up its double sense of sky and sky-god, belonging to the barbaric theology which could see massive life in the over-arching firmament, and could explain that life by an in-dwelling deity, modelled on the human soul. We may best understand what was meant by the Heaven-god, if we think of him as the soul of the sky. Among all the relics of barbaric religion which surround us, few are more striking than the phrases which still recognise as a deity the living sky, as “Heaven forgive me!” “The vengeance of Heaven will overtake him.” The rain and thunder are mostly taken as acts of the Heaven-god, as where Zeus hurls the thunderbolt and sends the showers. But some peoples have a special Rain-god, like the Khonds of Orissa, who pray to Pidzu Pennu that he will pour down the waters through his sieve upon their fields. Others have a special Thunder-god, like the Yorubas, who say it is Shango who casts down with the lightning-flash and the thunder-clap his thunder-axes, which are the stone celts they dig up in the ground; we English keep up the memory of the god Thunder or Thor in our word Thursday, which is a translation of Dies Jovis. In barbaric theology, Earth, the mother of all things, takes her place, as when the pious Ojibwa Indian digging up his medicine-plants is careful to leave an offering for great-grandmother Earth. No fancy of nature can be plainer than that the Heaven-father and the Earth-mother are the universal parents, nor could any ceremony acknowledge them more naturally than the Chinese marriage when bride and bridegroom prostrate themselves before Heaven and Earth. The Earth-goddess is clear in classic religion, Dēmētēr, Terra Mater, and perhaps the last trace of her worship among ourselves may be the leaving of the last handful of corn-ears standing in the field or the carrying it in triumph in the harvest-home. In modern times it is among the negroes of the Guinea coast that the clearest idea of the Sea-god is to be found, when the native kings, praying him not to be boisterous, would have rice and cloth and bottles of rum, and even slaves, cast into the sea as sacrifices. So a Greek or Roman general, before embarking on the dangerous waves, would sacrifice a bull to Poseidōn or Neptune. To men who could thus look on the sky, earth, and sea as animated, intelligent beings, the Sun, giver of light and life to the world, rising and crossing the sky and descending at night into the under-world whence he arose, has the clearest divine personality. There is a quaint simplicity in the account which not many years ago a Samoyed woman gave of her daily prayers; at sunrise, bowing to the sun, she said, “When thou, God, risest, I too rise from my bed!” and in the evening, “When thou, God, goest down, I too get me to rest.” As far back as ancient history reaches, the Sun-god appears, as where, in the pictures on Egyptian mummy-cases, Ra, the Sun, is seen travelling in his boat through the upper and lower regions of the universe. Every morning those modern ancients, the Brahmans, may be seen standing on one foot with their hands held out before them and their faces turned to the east, adoring the Sun: among the oldest prayers which have come down unchanged from the old Aryan world is that which they daily repeat, “Let us meditate on the desirable light of the divine Sun; may he rouse our minds!” The Moon-god or goddess marks the festivals of rude forest tribes who dance by the light of the full moon. It is not uncommon for the Moon to rank above the Sun, as perhaps for astronomical reasons was the case in ancient Babylonia; but more usually the Sun stands first, as seems to us more natural; and commonly Sun and Moon are looked on as a pair, brother and sister, or husband and wife. It is easy to understand why at the famous temple in Syria, Sun and Moon had no images like the other gods, because they themselves were to be seen by all men. No doubt this is why of all the old nature-gods they alone still have personal obeisance done to them among us to this day; in Germany or France one may still see the peasant take off his hat to the rising sun, and in England the new moon is saluted with a bow or curtsey, as well as the curious practice of “turning one’s silver,” which seems a relic of the offering of the moon’s proper metal. Fire, though hardly a deity of the first order, is looked upon as a personal being, and worshipped both for the good and harm it does to man, and as minister of the greater gods. Among the Aryan nations, the first word of the Veda is the name of Agni, the Fire-god (Latin Ignis), the divine priest of sacrifice; the Parsis, representatives of the religion of ancient Persia, whose most sacred place is the temple at the burning wells of Baku ([p. 273]), are typical fire-worshippers; among the old Greeks Hestia, the sacred hearth, was fed with fat and libations of sweet wine, and her name and worship went on in Rome in the temple of Vesta, with the eternal fire in her sanctuary. The Wind-gods are as well known to the North American Indians and the South Sea Islanders as they were to the Greeks, from whose religion they have come down to us so that every ploughman’s child hears of rude Boreas and gentle Zephyr. To conclude the list, the Rivers have seemed beings so far greater than the little spirits of the brooks, that they often, like Skamandros and Spercheios, had temples and priests of their own; men swore by them, for they could seize and drown the perjurer in their floods, and to the Hindus still the most awful of oaths is by a divine river, above all the Ganges.

Such a list of gods, the vast souls of the sky, earth and sea, of the sun and moon, and the rest of the great powers of nature, each with his own divine personality, his own rational purpose and work in the world, goes far to explain polytheism, as it is found in all quarters of the globe. The explanation cannot, however, be complete, because both the names and natures of many gods have become confused. A deity worshipped in several temples is apt to split up into several deities, and men go on worshipping these by different names after their first sense is forgotten. Among nations who have become blended by alliance or conquest, the religions also mix, and the various gods lose their distinct personality. The classical dictionary is full of examples of all this. The thundering sky and the rainy sky, Jupiter Tonans and Jupiter Pluvius, came to be adored like two distinct beings. The Latin Neptunus and the Greek Poseidōn, put together into one because both were sea-gods, form a curious divine compound. Under the name of Mercurius, god of trade, comes in another ancient deity, the Greek Hermes, messenger of the gods, leader of the dead into the land of Hades, god of thieves and merchants, of writing and science, who himself bears traces of having been pieced together out of yet older deities, among them the writing-god of ancient Egypt, the ibis-headed Thoth. This will give a notion of the confusion which begins in religion as soon as the worshippers cease to think of a deity by his first meaning and purpose, and only know of him as the god so-and-so, whose image stands in such-and-such a temple. The wonder is not that the origin of so many ancient gods is now hard to make out, but that so many show so clearly as they do what they were at first, a divine ancestor, or a sun, or sky, or river. The gods of barbaric religion also show plainly at work, in the minds of the rude theologians, a thought destined to vast importance in higher stages of civilization. Regarding the world as the battle-ground of good and evil spirits, some religions see these ranged in two contending armies with higher good and evil gods over them, and above all the sovereign good deity and evil deity. This system of dualism, as it is called, is worked out in the contest between the powers of light and darkness, under Ormuzd and Ahriman, the good and evil spirits, in the religion of ancient Persia. In barbaric stages of religion there appears also in rude forms the system of divine government, so well known in the faiths of more cultured nations. As among the worshippers themselves there are common men, and chiefs above them, and great rulers or kings above all, with high and low officers to do their bidding; so among their gods they frame schemes of lower and higher ranks of deities, with above all the majesty of a supreme deity. It is not agreed everywhere which god is to have this supremacy. As has been already said, men who look to the souls of the dead as their gods may hold even the highest divinity to be such a soul, an ancestor expanded into creator and ruler of the world. Often, and naturally, the heaven-god is looked upon as supreme creator and controller of the universe. Among the nations of West Africa, some say Heaven does his will through his servants, the lesser spirits of the air, but others think him too high above to trouble himself much with earthly things. The doctrine of the Congo negroes shows a thoughtful, if not a happy, philosophy of life. They say it is the crowd of good and evil spirits, souls of the departed, who are still active in the concerns of life, and mostly the evil spirits have the best of it; but now and then, when they have made the world unbearable, the great Heaven rouses himself, terrifies the bad demons with his thunder, and lets fly his thunderbolts at the most obstinate; then he goes back to rest, and lets the spirits rule as before. A more cheerful view of nature-spirits working beneath heaven is familiar to us in the Homeric court of the gods on Olympus, where Zeus, the personal sky, sits enthroned above, holding sway over the lower gods of earth, air, and sea. In other countries the Sun may be looked upon as supreme, as he is among many hill-tribes of India, where he rules over the gods of the forest and the plain, the tribe-gods, and the ancestral ghosts. Or there may be, as among the native tribes of North America, a Great Spirit, who is, as it were, the soul of the universe, which he created and still controls, supreme over even such mighty nature-gods as the sun and moon. When the reader goes on to study the religion and philosophy of the ancient civilized world, he will find men’s thoughts working in these same two ways toward pantheism or monotheism, according as they conceive the whole universe as one vast body animated by one divine soul, or raise to the same divine height the one deity who reigns supreme over the rest. It lies beyond our range to follow this argument further here.

Let us now look at the chief acts of barbaric worship, which are not hard to understand when it is borne in mind that the deities they are paid to are actual human souls, or transformed human souls, or beings modelled on human souls. Even among savages, prayer is already found; indeed, nothing could be more natural than that the worshipper should address with respectful words and entreaties for help a divine being who is perhaps his own grandfather. The prayers of barbarians have often been listened to and written down. Thus among the Zulus, the sacrificer says: “There is your bullock, ye spirits of our people. I pray for a healthy body that I may live comfortably, and thou so-and-so, treat me with mercy, and thou so-and-so” (mentioning by name the dead of the family). The following is part of a prayer of the Khonds, when offering a human sacrifice to the Earth-goddess: “By our cattle, our flocks, our pigs, and our grain we procured a victim and offered a sacrifice. Do you now enrich us. Let our herds be so numerous that they cannot be housed; let children so abound that the care of them shall be too much for the parents, as shall be seen by their burnt hands; let our heads ever strike against brass pots innumerable hanging from our roofs; let the rats form their nests of shreds of scarlet cloth and silk; let all the kites in the country be seen in the trees of our village, from beasts being killed there every day. We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us. Give it to us.” These two specimens of prayers are chosen because they show how closely prayer is connected with sacrifice, how the offering is brought and the favour asked with it, just as would be done to a living chief. Barbaric sacrifices are not mere formal tokens of respect; they are mostly food, and will be consumed by the divinity, though he, being a spirit, is apt to take only the spirit, flavour, or essence, of the viands; or he snuffs up the steam or smoke as it ascends from the altar fire, a spiritual food of much the same thin ethereal substance which the spirit or god himself is thought to be of. It is in the higher religions that the sacrificial rite loses its grosser sense of feeding the deity, so that although the drink-offering is still poured out and the bullock burnt on the altar, the act has passed into the giving up of something prized by the worshipper, and a sign of adoration acceptable to the god.

There are several ways in which the worshipper can hold personal intercourse with his deities. These, being souls or spirits, are of course to be seen at times in dreams and visions, especially by their own priests or seers, who thus get (or pretend to get) divine answers or oracles from them. Being a soul, the god can also enter a human body, and act and speak through it, and thus hysterical and epileptic symptoms, which we have seen to be ascribed to an evil demon possessing the patient, are looked on more favourably when the spirit is considered to be a deity come to inspire his minister and talk by his voice. The convulsions, the unearthly voice in which the possessed priest answers in the name of the deity within, and his falling into stupor when his god departs, all fit together, and in all quarters of the world the oracle-priests and diviners by familiar spirits seem really diseased in body and mind, and deluded by their own feelings, as well as skilled in cheating their votaries with sham symptoms and cunning answers. The inspiration or breathing-in of a spirit into the body of a priest or seer appears to such people a mechanical action, like pouring water into a jug. Also, as in the ordinary transmigration of souls, a deity is considered able to enter into the body of an animal, as when he flies from place to place in the form of a sacred bird, or lives in the divine snake fed and worshipped among the negroes of the Slave coast. This leads on to a belief which seems still stranger to our minds. The modern Englishman wonders that a human being, however ignorant, should prostrate himself before a stake stuck in the ground or a stone picked up by the wayside, and even talk to it and offer it food; but when the African or Hindu explains that he believes this stock or stone to be a receptacle in which a divine spirit has for a time embodied itself, this shows that there is a rational meaning in the act. Images of gods, from the rudely carved figures of ancestors which the Ostyaks set up in their huts, to the Greek statues shaped by Phidias or Praxiteles to represent the heaven-god or the sun-god, are mostly formed in the likeness of man—an additional proof of how these nature-gods are modelled on human beings. When such images stand to represent gods, the worshipper may look on them as mere signs or portraits, but commonly he is led by his spirit-philosophy to treat them as temporary bodies for the deities. A Tahitian priest, when asked about his carved wooden idol, would explain that his god was not always in the image, but only now and then flew to it in the body of a sacred bird, and at times would come out of the idol and enter his own (the priest’s) body, to give divine oracles by his voice. This takes us back to the times when, fifteen hundred years ago, Minucius Felix describes the heathen gods entering into their idols and fattening on the steam of the altars, or creeping as thin spirits into the bodies of men, to distort their limbs and drive them mad, or making their own priests rave and whirl about. Lastly, rude tribes may believe in and worship spirits without having come to build houses for them and set up tables for their food. Yet such temples and altars appear far back in barbaric religion, and remain still with the thoroughly human character of the worship as plain as ever in them; as when in India the image of Vishnu is washed and dressed by his attendants, and set up in the place of honour in his temple with a choice feast before him, and musicians and dancing girls to divert him. This is the more instructive to us, because we know Vishnu before his original meaning was so spoilt, when he was a sun-god, an animating principle or soul of the sun in personal human shape, and thus a remnant of præhistoric natural philosophy.

We have hitherto only looked at barbaric religion as such an early system of natural philosophy, and have said nothing of the moral teaching which now seems so essential to any religion. The philosophical side of religion has been kept apart from the moral side, not only because a clearer view may be had by looking at them separately, but because many religions of the lower races have in fact little to do with moral conduct. A native American or African may have a distinct belief in souls and other spirits as the causes of his own life and of the events of the surrounding world, and he may worship these ghostly or divine beings, gaining their favour or appeasing their anger by prayers and offerings. But though these gods may require him to do his duty towards them, it does not follow that they should concern themselves with his doing his duty to his neighbour. Among such peoples, if a man robs or murders, that is for the party wronged or his friends to avenge; if he is stingy, treacherous, brutal, then punishment may fall on him or he may be scouted by all good people; but he is not necessarily looked upon as hateful to the gods, and in fact such a man is often a great medicine-man or priest. While they hold also that the soul will continue to exist after death, flitting as a ghost or demon among the living or passing to the gloomy under-world or the shining spirit-land, they often think its condition will be rather a keeping-up of earthly character and rank, than a reward or punishment for the earthly life. If some readers find it difficult to understand such theology separate from morals, they may be reminded how, among more civilized nations, religions may drop into the same state by losing the use of the moral laws they profess; as when a Hindu may lead the wickedest of lives, while the priests for gifts make his peace with the gods, or as in Europe brigands are notoriously devout church goers. As a rule, the faiths of the higher nations have more and better moral influence than the faiths of the ruder tribes. Yet even among savages the practical effect of religion on men’s lives begins to show itself. The worship of the dead naturally encourages good morals; for the ancestor who, when living, took care that his family should do right by one another, does not cease this kindly rule when he becomes a divine ghost powerful to favour or punish. This manes-worship does not bring in new doctrines or reforms; indeed it is felt that nothing displeases the ancestral deity like changing the old customs he was used to. But for keeping up old-fashioned family goodness, the worship of ancestors has an influence over the many nations among whom it still prevails, from the Zulu, who believes that he must not ill-treat his brothers lest the father should come in a dream and make him ill, to the Chinese, who lives ever in presence of the family spirits, and fears to do wrong lest they should leave him to fall into distress and die. In the great old-world religions, where a powerful priesthood are the intellectual class, the educators and controllers of society, we find moral teaching fully recognised among the great duties of religion. The gods take on themselves the punishment of the wicked; the Heaven-god smites the perjurer with his thunderbolt, and the Nation-god brings sickness and death on the murderer. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls is brought to bear as a moral power; as where the Hindu books threaten evil-doers with being re-born in other bodies in punishment for their sins done in this, when the wicked shall be born again blind or deformed, the scandal-monger shall have foul breath and the horse-stealer shall go lame, the cruel man shall be born as a beast of prey, the grain-stealer as a rat; and thus, eating the fruits of past actions, men shall work out the consequences of their deeds, souls sunk in darkness being degraded to brutes, while the good rise in successive births to become gods. Even more widely spread is the doctrine that man’s life is followed by judgment after death, when evil-doers are doomed to misery, and only those who have lived righteously on earth will enter into bliss. How this doctrine prevailed in ancient Egypt, the papyrus strips of the Book of the Dead, and its pictures and hieroglyphic formulas on the mummy-cases, remain to show. Thus in any museum we may still see the scene of the weighing of the soul of the deceased, and his trial by Osiris, the judge of the dead, and the forty-two assessors, while Thoth, the writing-god, stands by to enter the dread record on his tablets. In the columns of hieroglyphics are set down the crimes of which the soul must clear itself, a curious mingling of what we should call ceremonial and moral sins, among them the following: “I have not privily done evil against mankind. I have not told falsehoods in the tribunal of Truth. I have not done any wicked thing. I have not made the labouring man do more than his task daily. I have not calumniated the slave to his master. I have not murdered. I have not done fraud to men. I have not changed the measures of the country. I have not injured the images of the gods. I have not taken scraps of the bandages of the dead. I have not committed adultery. I have not withheld milk from the mouths of sucklings. I have not hunted wild animals in the pasturage. I have not netted sacred birds. I am pure, I am pure, I am pure!” Thus, among the cultured old-world nations, already in the earliest historical ages theology had joined with ethics, and religion as a moral power was holding sway over society.

Animism, or the theory of souls, has thus been shown as the principle out of which arose the various systems of spirits and deities, in barbaric and ancient religions, and it has been noticed also, how already among rude races such beliefs begin to act on moral conduct. We here see under their simplest aspects the two sides of religion, its philosophical and its moral side, which the reader should keep steadily in view in further study of the faiths of the world. In looking at the history of a religion, he will have to judge how far it has served these two great purposes—on the one hand that of teaching man how to think of himself, the world around him, the awful boundless power pervading all—on the other hand that of practically guiding and strengthening him in the duties of life. One question the student will often ask himself—how it is that faiths once mighty and earnest fall into decay and others take their place. Of course to no small extent such changes have come by conquest, as where in Persia the religion of Mohammed well nigh stamped out the old Zoroastrian faith of Cyrus and Darius. But the sword of the conqueror is only a means by which religions have been set up and put down in the world by main force, and there are causes lying deeper in men’s minds. It needs but a glance through history at the wrecks of old religions to see how they failed from within. The priests of Egypt, who once represented the most advanced knowledge of their time, came to fancy that mankind had no more to learn, and upheld their tradition against all newer wisdom, till the world passed them by and left them grovelling in superstition. The priests of Greece ministered in splendid temples and had their fill of wealth and honours, but men who sought the secret of a good life found that this was not the business of the sanctuary, and turned away to the philosophers. Unless a religion can hold its place in the front of science and of morals, it may only gradually, in the course of ages, lose its place in the nation, but all the power of statecraft and all the wealth of the temples will not save it from eventually yielding to a belief that takes in higher knowledge and teaches better life.