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

by Grant Allen

In West Africa, once more, a tribal queen used to sacrifice a man and woman in the month of March. They were killed with spades and hoes, and their bodies buried in the middle of a field which had just been tilled. At Lagos, in Guinea, it was the custom annually to impale a young girl alive soon after the spring equinox in order to secure good crops. A similar sacrifice is still annually offered at Benin. The Marimos, a Bechuana tribe, sacrifice a human being for the crops. The victim chosen is generally a short stout man. He is seized by violence or intoxicated (note that detail) and taken to the fields, where he is killed amongst the wheat “to serve as seed.” After his blood has coagulated in the sun, it is burned, along with that peculiarly sacred part, the frontal bone, the flesh attached to it, and the brain; the ashes are then scattered over the ground to fertilise it. Such scattering of the ashes occurs in many instances, and will meet us again in the case of Osiris.

In India, once more, the Gonds, like the Khonds, kidnapped Brahman boys, and kept them as victims to be sacrificed on various occasions. At sowing and reaping, after a triumphal procession, one of the lads was killed by being punctured with a poisoned arrow. His blood was then sprinkled over the ploughed field or the ripe crop, and his flesh was sacramentally devoured. The last point again will call at a later stage for further examination.

I will detail no more such instances (out of the thousands that exist) for fear of seeming tedious. But the interpretation I put upon the facts is this. Originally, men noticed that food-plants grew abundantly from the laboured and well-manured soil of graves. They observed that this richness sprang from a coincidence of three factors—digging, a sacred dead body, and seeds of foodstuffs. In time, they noted that if you dug wide enough and scattered seed far enough, a single corpse was capable of fertilising a considerable area. The grave grew into the field or garden. But they still thought it necessary to bury some one in the field; and most of the evidence shows that they regarded this victim as a divine personage; that they considered him the main source of growth or fertility; and that they endeavoured to deserve his favour by treating him well during the greater part of his lifetime. For in many of the accounts it is expressly stated that the intended victim was treated as a god or as a divine king, and was supplied with every sort of luxury up to the moment of his immolation. In process of time, the conception of the field as differing from the grave grew more defined, and the large part borne by seed in the procedure was more fully recognised. Even so, however, nobody dreamed of sowing the seed alone without the body of a victim. Both grain and flesh or blood came to be regarded alike as “seed”: that is to say, the concurrence of the two was considered necessary to produce the desired effect of germination and fertility. Till a very late period, either the actual sacrifice or some vague remnant of it remained as an essential part of cultivation. Mr. Frazer’s pages teem with such survivals in modern folk-custom. From his work and from other sources, I will give a few instances of these last dying relics of the primitive superstition.

Mr. Gomme, in his Ethnology in Folklore, supplies an account of a singular village festival in Southern India. In this feast, a priest, known as the Potraj, and specially armed with a divine whip, like the scourge of Osiris, sacrifices a sacred buffalo, which is turned loose when a calf, and allowed to feed and roam about the village. In that case, we have the common substitution of an animal for a human victim, which almost always accompanies advancing civilisation. At the high festival, the head of the buffalo was struck off at a single blow, and placed in front of the shrine of the village goddess. Around were placed vessels containing the different cereals, and hard by a heap of mixed grains with a drill-plough in the centre. The carcase was then cut up into small pieces, and each cultivator received a portion to bury in his field. The heap of grain was finally divided among all the cultivators, to be buried by each one in his field with the bit of flesh. At last, the head, that very sacred part, was buried before a little temple, sacred to the goddess of boundaries. The goddess is represented by a shapeless stone—no doubt a Terminus, or rather the tombstone of an artificial goddess, a girl buried under an ancient boundary-mark. Here we have evidently a last stage of the same ritual which in the case of the Khonds was performed with a human victim. It is worth while noting that, as part of this ceremony, a struggle took place for portions of the victim.

A still more attenuated form of the same ceremony is mentioned by Captain Harkness and others, as occurring among the Badagas of the Nilgiri Hills. I condense their accounts, taking out of each such elements as are most cognate to our purpose. Among these barbarians, the first furrow is ploughed by a low-caste Kurrumbar, who gives his benediction to the field, without which there would be no harvest. Here, the member of the aboriginal race is clearly looked upon as a priest or kinsman of the local gods, whose cooperation must be obtained by later intrusive races. But the Kurrumbar does not merely bless the field; he also sets up a stone in its midst; and then, prostrating himself before the stone, he sacrifices a goat, the head of which he keeps as his perquisite. This peculiar value of the oracular head retained by the priest is also significant. When harvest-time comes, the same Kurrumbar is summoned once more, in order that he may reap the first handful of corn, an episode the full importance of which will only be apparent to those who have read Mr. Frazer’s analysis of harvest customs. But in this case also, the appearance of the sacred stone is pregnant with meaning. We can hardly resist the inference that we have here to do with the animal substitute for a human sacrifice of the god-making order, in which the victim was slaughtered, a stone set up to mark the site of the sacrifice, and the head preserved as a god to give oracles, in the fashion with which we are already familiar. Comparing this instance with the previous one of the sacred buffalo and the still earlier cases of ancestral heads preserved as gods for oracular purposes, I think the affiliation is too clear to be disregarded.

Evidence of similar customs elsewhere exists in such abundance that I can only give a very small part of it at present, lest I should assign too much space to a subordinate question; I hope to detail the whole of it hereafter in a subsequent volume. Here is a striking example from Mr. Gomme’s Ethnology in Folklore, the analogy of which with preceding instances will at once be apparent.

“At the village of Holne, situated on one of the spurs of Dartmoor, is a field of about two acres, the property of the parish, and called the Ploy Field. In the centre of this field stands a granite pillar (Menhir) six or seven feet high. On May-morning, before daybreak, the young men of the village used to assemble there, and then proceed to the moor, where they selected a ram lamb, and, after running it down, brought it in triumph to the Ploy Field, fastened it to the pillar, cut its throat, and then roasted it whole, skin, wool, etc. At midday a struggle took place, at the risk of cut hands, for a slice, it being supposed to confer luck for the ensuing year on the fortunate devourer. As an act of gallantry the young men sometimes fought their way through the crowd to get a slice for the chosen amongst the young women, all of whom, in their best dresses, attended the Ram Feast, as it was called. Dancing, wrestling, and other games, assisted by copious libations of cider during the afternoon, prolonged the festivity till midnight.”

Here again we get several interesting features of the primitive ritual preserved for us. The connexion with the stone which enshrines the original village deity is perfectly clear. This stone no doubt represents the place where the local foundation-god was slain in very remote ages; and it is therefore the proper place for the annual renewal sacrifices to be offered. The selection of Maymorning for the rite; the slaughter at the stone pillar; the roasting of the beast whole; the struggle for the pieces; and the idea that they would confer luck, all show survival of primitive feeling. So does the cider, sacramental intoxication being an integral part of all these proceedings. Every detail, indeed, has its meaning for those who look close; for the struggle at midday is itself significant, as is also the prolongation of the feast till midnight. But we miss the burial of the pieces in the fields; in so far, the primitive object of the rite seems to have been forgotten or overlooked in Devonshire.

A still more attenuated survival is quoted by Mr. Gomme from another English village. “A Whitsuntide custom in the parish of King’s Teignton, Devonshire, is thus described: A lamb is drawn about the parish on Whitsun Monday in a cart covered with garlands of lilac, laburnum, and other flowers, when persons are requested to give something towards the animal and attendant expenses; on Tuesday it is killed and roasted whole in the middle of the village. The lamb is then sold in slices to the poor at a cheap rate. The origin of the custom is forgotten, but a tradition, supposed to trace back to heathen days, is to this effect: The village suffered from a dearth of water, when the inhabitants were advised by their priests to pray to the gods for water; whereupon the water sprang up spontaneously in a meadow about a third of a mile above the river, in an estate now called Rydon, amply sufficient to supply the wants of the place, and at present adequate, even in a dry summer, to work three mills. A lamb, it is said, has ever since that time been sacrificed as a votive thank-offering at Whitsuntide in the manner before mentioned. The said water appears like a large pond, from which in rainy weather may be seen jets springing up some inches above the surface in many parts. It has ever had the name of ‘Fair Water.’”

I mention this curious instance here, because it well illustrates the elusive way in which such divine customs of various origins merge into one another; and also the manner in which different ideas are attached in different places to very similar ceremonies. For Mr. Frazer has shown that the notion of a rain-charm is also closely bound up with the gods of agriculture; the Khond Meriah must weep, or there will be no rain that year; his red blood must flow, or the turmeric will not produce its proper red colour. (Compare the red blood that flowed from Poly-dorus’s cornel, and the Indian’s blood that drops from the Canadian bloodroot.) In this last instance of the King’s Teignton ceremony, it is the rain-charm that has most clearly survived to our days: and there are obvious references to a human sacrifice offered up to make a river-god in times long gone, and now replaced by an animal victim. The garlands of lilac, laburnum, and other flowers are, however, common adornments of the artificial god of cultivation; they occurred in the Dionvsiac rites and the Attis festival, and are still preserved in many European customs.