How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see among the Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the matmate are the spirits of their ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or household gods. They are supposed to enter the house through an opening in the roof, and to take up their abode temporarily in the skulls, or in images of wood or ivory, in order to partake of the offerings.”
A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in still stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the image. A New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child, and carries it about with her; whereas a West African mother, living in a tribe where terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial, makes a little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash, wraps it in skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby. Bastian saw Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat higher level, “the spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe not a few of these instances, “were represented by, and in language completely identified with, the carved wooden heads” (note this point) “or more complete images, to which worship and sacrifice were offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I think, the course of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the ashes of the dead are similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which are afterwards worshipped as household gods.
Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples some of which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the growth of the idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the real body for burial or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of France was buried, “over the coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and diamonds, and holding two shields.... This image was dressed with cloth of gold.... In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre Dame.” Madame de Motteville says of the father of the great Condé, “The effigy of this prince was waited upon for three days, as was customary”—forty days having been the original time during which food was supplied to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the Westminster Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.
As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be generally recognised, it would be a simple transference of feeling to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave, wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles.
Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work The Hairy Ainu, figures and describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance; those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and elsewhere.
Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood described as an ashera. What kind of object an ashera was we learn from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an ashera of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.” But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar, beside which stood an ashera, under a green tree,—all three of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together. A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree. “The ashera,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G. Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,” says Professor Smith, again, “had its ashera, even such altars as in the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to Jehovah.”
The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the ashera was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings (xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove hangings for the ashera.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the parallel of the sacred erica at Byblus, which was “a mere dead stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis). “But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew ashera.” So near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may he miss its actual import.
I will dwell no longer upon these more or less remote derivatives of the grave-stake. I will only say briefly that in my opinion all wooden idols or images are directly or indirectly descended from the wooden headpost or still more primitive sepulchral pole. Not of course that I suppose every wooden image to have been necessarily once itself a funereal monument. Donatello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at Florence, the blue-robed and star-spangled Madonna of the wayside shrine, have certainly no such immediate origin. But I do believe that the habit of making and worshipping wooden images arose in the way I have pointed out; and to those who would accuse me of “gross Euhemerism,” I would once more remark that even in these highest Christian instances the objects of veneration are themselves in the last resort admitted to have been at one time Galilean women. Nay, is not even the wayside shrine itself in most Catholic countries more often than not the mortuary chapel erected where some wayfarer has died a violent death, by murder, lightning, accident, or avalanche?