I give this interesting historical instance at some length because it is one of the best known, and also one of the most persistent. But everywhere, all the world over, similar evolutions have occurred on a shorter scale. The temple attendants, endowed for the purpose of performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into priests, who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. Bit by bit, prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the priests have become the depositaries of the divine traditions. They alone know how to approach the god; they alone can read the hidden signs of his pleasure or displeasure. As intermediaries between worshipper and deity, they are themselves half sacred. Without them, no votary can rightly approach the shrine of his patron. Thus at last they rise into-importance far above their origin; priestcraft comes into being; and by magnifying their god, the members of the hierarchy magnify at the same time their own office and function.
Yet another contributing cause must be briefly noted. Picture-writing and hieroglyphics take their rise more especially in connexion with tombs and temples. The priests in particular hold as a rule the key to this knowledge. In ancient Egypt, to take a well-known instance, they were the learned class; they became the learned class again under other circumstances in mediaeval Europe. Everywhere we come upon sacred mysteries that the priests alone know; and where hieroglyphics exist, these mysteries, committed to writing, become the peculiar property of the priests in a more special sense. Where writing is further differentiated into hieratic and demotic, the gulf between laity and priesthood grows still wider; the priests possess a special key to knowledge, denied to the commonalty. The recognition of Sacred Books has often the same result; of these, the priests are naturally the guardians and exponents. I need hardly add that side by side with the increase of architectural grandeur in the temple, and the increase of artistic beauty and costliness in the idols or statues and pictures of the gods, goes increase in the stateliness of the priestly robes, the priestly surroundings, the priestly ritual. Finally, we get ceremonies of the most dignified character, adorned with all the accessories of painting and sculpture, of candles and flowers, of incense and music, of rich mitres and jewelled palls,—ceremonies performed in the dim shade of lofty temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour of god or gods of infinite might, power, and majesty, who must yet in the last resort be traced back to some historic or prehistoric Dead Man, or at least to some sacred stone or stake or image, his relic and representative.
Thus, by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from necessary limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely forgotten. But to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from known sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he turns out to be—a human being. Whenever we go back to very primitive religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their ancestors. It is only when we take relatively advanced races with unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men or spirits. Unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed. Hence they are too much inclined, like Professor Robertson Smith, and even sometimes Mr. Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot mention in passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the deified ancestor. Yet the moment we get away from these advanced and too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or departmental deities are wholly wanting. Even in the great historical religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or ancestor-gods. And where, as in Egypt, the evidence is oldest and most complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the earliest documents.
It will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even more than this—to show that the apparently unresolvable element in later religions, including the Hebrew god Jahweh himself, can be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive conception of a ghost or ancestor.
CHAPTER V.—SACRED STONES.
I mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but which is of very high importance in early religion—the sacred tree, with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their general significance in the history of religion, and also from their special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel, who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism.
I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because, as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of the God of Israel.
All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), long described by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local peasants as sepolture dei giganti—the tombs of the giants. In Syria, Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas. Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners; and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and “poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish predecessors.