The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions

by Grant Allen

CHAPTER XI.—HUMAN GODS.

WE have now in a certain sense accomplished our intention of tracing the evolution of gods and of God. We have shown how polytheism came to be, and how from it a certain particular group of men, the early Israelites, rose by slow degrees, through natural stages, to the monotheistic conception. It might seem, therefore, as though the task we set before ourselves was now quite completed. Nevertheless, many abstruse and difficult questions still lie before us. Our problem as yet is hardly half solved. We have still to ask, I think, How did this purely local and national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the civilised world? How from an obscure corner of Lower Syria did the god of a small tribe of despised and barbaric tributaries slowly live down the great conquering deities of Babylon and Susa, of Hellas and Italy? And again, we have further to enquire, Why do most of the modern nations which have nominally adopted monotheism yet conceive of their god as compounded in some mystically incomprehensible fashion of Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In short, I am not satisfied with tracing the idea of a god from the primitive mummy or the secondary ghost to the one supreme God of the ancient Hebrews; I desire also to follow on that developed concept till it merges at last in the triune God of modern Christendom. For, naturally, it is the god in whom men believe here and now that most of all concerns and interests us.

I may also add that, incidentally to this supplementary enquiry, we shall come upon several additional traits in the idea of deity and several important sources of earlier godhead, the consideration of which we had to postpone before till a more convenient season. We shall find that the process of tracking down Christianity to its hidden springs suggests to us many aspects of primitive religion which we were compelled to neglect in our first hasty synthesis.

The reader must remember that in dealing with so complex a subject as that of human beliefs and human cults, it is impossible ever to condense the whole of the facts at once into a single conspectus. We cannot grasp at a time the entire mass of evidence. While we are following out one clue, we must neglect another. It is only by examining each main set of components in analytical distinctness that we can proceed by degrees to a full and complete synthetic reconstruction of the whole vast fabric. We must therefore correct and supplement in the sequel much that may have seemed vague, inaccurate, or insufficient in our preliminary survey.

The Christian religion with which we have next to deal bases itself fundamentally upon the personality of a man, by name Jesus, commonly described as the Christ, that is to say “the anointed.” Of this most sacred and deified person it is affirmed by modern Christianity, and has been affirmed by orthodox Christians from a very early period, that he was not originally a mere man, afterwards taken into the godhead, but that he was born from the first the son of God, that is to say, of the Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed previously from all time; that he was miraculously conceived of a virgin mother; that he was crucified and buried; that on the third day he arose from the dead; and that he is now a living and distinct person in a divine and mystically-united Trinity. I propose to show in the subsequent chapters how far all these conceptions were already familiar throughout the world in which Christianity was promulgated, and to how large an extent the new religion owed its rapid success to the fact that it was but a résumé or idealised embodiment of all the chief conceptions already common to the main cults of Mediterranean civilisation. At the moment when the empire was cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to cosmopolitanise religion, by taking into itself whatever was central, common, and universal in the worship of the peoples among whom it originated.

We will begin with the question of the incarnation, which lies at the very root of the Christian concept.

I have said already that in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, “The God was the Dead King, the King was the Living God.” This is true, literally and absolutely. Since the early kings are gods, the present kings, their descendants, are naturally also gods by descent; their blood is divine; they differ in nature as well as in position from mere common mortals. While they live, they are gods on earth; when they die, they pass over to the community of the gods their ancestors, and share with them a happy and regal immortality. We have seen how this essential divinity of the Pharaoh is a prime article in the religious faith of the Egyptian Pyramid-builders. And though in later days, when a Greek dynasty, not of the old divine native blood, bore sway in Egypt, this belief in the divinity of the king grew fainter, yet to the very last the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras bear the title of god or goddess, and carry in their hands the sacred tau or crux ansata, the symbol and mark of essential divinity.

The inference made in Egypt that the children of gods must be themselves divine was also made in most other countries, especially in those where similar great despotisms established themselves at an early grade of culture. Thus in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were the children of the Sun; and when they died, it was said that their father, the Sun, had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings were likewise gods, with full control of the course of nature; they swore at their accession to make the sun shine, the rain fall, the rivers flow, and the earth bring forth her fruit in due season. How they could promise all this seems at first a little difficult for us to conceive; but it will become more comprehensible at a later stage of our investigation, when we come to consider the gods of cultivation: even at present, if we remember that kings are children of the Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves, and sacred wells are closely connected with the tombs of their ancestors, we can guess at the beginning of such a mental connexion. Thus the Chinese emperor is the Son of Heaven; he is held responsible to his people for the occurrence of drought or other serious derangements of nature. The Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says Mr. Frazer, to whom I am greatly indebted for most of the succeeding facts, styled themselves brothers of the sun and moon, and were worshipped as deities. Numberless other cases are cited by Mr. Frazer, who was the first to point out the full importance of this widespread belief in man-gods. I shall follow him largely in the subsequent discussion of this cardinal subject, though I shall often give to the facts an interpretation slightly different from that which he would allow to be the correct one. For to me, godhead springs always from the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr. Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.

Besides these human gods who are gods by descent from deified ancestors, there is another class of gods who are gods by inspiration or indwelling of the divine spirit, that is to say of some ghost or god who temporarily or permanently inhabits the body of a living man. The germ-idea of such divine possession we may see in the facts of epilepsy, catalepsy, dream, and madness. In all such cases of abnormal nervous condition it seems to primitive man, as it still seemed to the Jews of the age of the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or seized upon by some spirit, who bodily inhabits him. The spirit may throw the man down, or may speak through his mouth in strange unknown tongues; it may exalt him so that he can perform strange feats of marvellous strength, or may debase him to a position of grovelling abjectness. By fasting and religious asceticism men and women can even artificially attain this state, when the god speaks through them, as he spoke through the mouth of the Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always one of the religious exercises of god-possessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and ascetics in general. Where races have learnt how to manufacture intoxicating drinks, or to express narcotic juices from plants, they also universally attribute the effects of such plants to the personal action of an inspiring spirit—an idea so persistent even into civilised ages that we habitually speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both these ways of attaining the presence of an indwelling god are commonly practised among savages and half-civilised people.