The special selection and preservation of the head as an object of worship thus noted in New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago is also still found among many other primitive peoples. For instance, the Andamanese widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession: and the New Caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” Mr. Spencer quotes several similar examples, a few of which alone I extract from his pages.
“‘In the private fetish-hut of King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the earth.’ He ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to answer his expectations.’ Similarly among the Mandans, who place the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... There is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband—talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back.’”
This affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving stage of human death-conceptions. It seldom survives where burial has made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.
A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu notes that some of his West African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank; giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless like their ancestors. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance Mr. Frazer has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a subsequent chapter.
Throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution, this primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the chief known objects of worship survives undiluted: and ancestor-worship remains to this day the principal religion of the Chinese, and of several other peoples. Gods, as such, are practically unknown in China. Ancestor-worship also survives in many other races as one of the main cults, even after other elements of later religion have been superimposed upon it. In Greece and Rome, it remained to the last an important part of domestic ritual. But in most cases, a gradual differentiation is set up in time between various classes of ghosts or dead persons, some ghosts being considered of more importance and power than others; and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost—a ghost able to help, and from whose help great things may reasonably be expected.
Again, the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god of considerable importance. We shall trace out this idea more fully hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the present it must suffice to say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.
When we pass from the first plane of corpse-preservation and mummification to the second plane where burial is habitual, it might seem at a hasty glance as though continued worship of the dead, and their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. For we saw that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should return to plague the living. Nevertheless, natural affection for parents or friends, and the desire to ensure their good will and aid, make these seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them: while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become in time altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.
In these two later stages of thought with regard to the dead which accompany burial and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow more and more distinct from minor ghosts with an accelerated rapidity of evolution. They grow greater in proportion to the rise of temples and hierarchies. Furthermore, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless ghost tells in favour of an enlarged godship. The gods are thought of as more and more aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they are clothed with mighty attributes; they assume colossal size; they are even identified with the sun, the moon, the great powers of nature. But they are never quite omnipotent during the polytheistic stage, because in a pantheon they are necessarily mutually limiting. Even in the Greek and Roman civilisation, it is clear that the gods were not commonly envisaged by ordinary minds as much more than human; for Pisistratus dressed up a courtesan at Athens to represent Pallas Athene, and imposed by this cheap theatrical trick upon the vulgar Athenians; while Paul and Barnabas were taken at Lystra for Zeus and Hermes. Many similar instances will occur at once to the classical scholar. It is only quite late, under the influence of monotheism, that the exalted conceptions of deity now prevalent began to form themselves in Judaism and Christianity.
Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the origin of anything more than domestic religion—the cult of the manes, the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national deities. But kingship supplies us with the missing link. We have seen in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African god-making how the worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods; and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs. Especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men, and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. Thus kingship rapidly reacts upon godship. If the living king himself is great, how much greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god, the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and propitiated! In some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually in the end the greatest of any.
The consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts, tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the invention of written language sets a final seal on the godhead and might of great early ancestors. Among very primitive tribes, indeed, we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship. The chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate predecessors. The more ancient ancestors, as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with more advanced races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead; and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped ones. More than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, vires acquirit eundo. Thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity, whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.