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

by Grant Allen

As a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst. Sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned, and sometimes slaughtered. And in later and less perfect forms of piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the various elements of the complex problem. People had got accustomed to certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial, and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr. Robertson Smith writes of ancient Egypt: “Bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” Compare the annual mourning for Adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament, and atonement in the Mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of the Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the solemn mourning of Good Friday.

Now, I do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these very mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. Often enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of public expiation are evidently present. Usually, too, the victim is slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god, and its blood poured forth for him. Thus, in the Hebrew ritual both of the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar, “before Jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has a special significance. In the Semitic held, as Dr. Robertson Smith observes (and I would add, in most others), “the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred victim.” But the identity of god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the sheep-Aphrodite was worshipped in Cyprus with an annual mystic and piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to us.

On the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, I will not attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. Most sacrifices seem in the last resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. Most seem to be sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. I do not even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by consideration of numerous mixed examples, I have always placed each particular fact in its best and most effective position for illustration. The elements of the problem are so involved and so closely interosculating. For instance, I do not doubt that the great Phoenician and Carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which I was compelled at first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor do I doubt that the Greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was a mitigation or attenuation of such gigantic human holocausts as these, or as those attributed to the British Druids. Asclepiades states expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for human sacrifice; and so, in the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of Isaac, the dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, Abraham, intends to offer as a royal victim to his tribal god. Abraham says that the god himself will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers itself. So at the great temple of Astarte at Eryx, where the victims were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the altar. At the Dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity. (Compare, of course, the Hebrew shewbread.) I need not pursue this line of thought any further. It must be obvious that many sacrifices at least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline theology.

I would like to add, however, that the ideas here formulated must give a new meaning to many points we could not at first understand in ceremonies mentioned in our earlier chapters. I will take only one example—that of the place of Samoyed sacrifice which Baron Nordenskiôld saw on Vaygats Island. We can now divine the meaning of the heap of reindeer skulls piled around the rude open-air shrine; for reindeer are the sacred and the-anthropic animals of the northern races; while the preservation of their heads at the hypothral altar of the elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and oracular meaning. We can also guess why remains of a fireplace could be seen by the side, at which the sacrificial and sacramental meal was habitually prepared; and why the mouths of the idols were smeared with blood, in order to make the older gods or ghosts participators in the festival. Indeed, any reader who has followed me thus far, and who now turns back to the earlier chapters of this book, will find that many details appear to him in quite a different light, and will see why I have insisted beforehand on some minor points which must have seemed to him at the time wholly irrelevant.

Many other curious ceremonies that seem equally meaningless at first in narratives of travel will also come to have a significant meaning when thus regarded. For instance. Mr. Chalmers tells us that among the New Guinea natives of particular districts, “pigs are never killed but in the one place, and then they are offered to the spirit. The blood is poured out there, and the carcase is then carried back to the village, to be divided, cooked, and eaten. Pigs’ skulls are kept and hung up in the house. Food for a feast, such as at house-building”—a most pregnant hint—“is placed near the post where the skulls hang, and a prayer is said. When the centre-post is set up, the spirits have wallaby, fish, and bananas presented to them, and they are besought to keep that house always full of food, and that it may not fall when the wind is strong.” If we recall other cases elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that the pigs in these instances are killed as sacred victims at the grave of the chief family ancestor; especially when Mr. Chalmers also tells us that “each family has a sacred place where they carry offerings to the spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they greatly fear.” When sickness, famine, or scarcity of fish occur, it is these spirits that have to be appeased. And if we recollect once more that in so many cases the central post of the hut is based on a human or animal victim, both in New Guinea and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that to this household god or foundation-ghost the offerings at the central post are presented. Finally, the skulls of the pigs which are kept in the house and hung on the post remind us on the one hand of the skulls of ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on the other hand of the skulls of theanthropic victims kept by the people of India at their festivals, or fastened by early Greeks and Romans on their temples. “They cook the heads of their slain enemies,” says Mr. Chalmers again, “to secure clean skulls to put on sacred places.” Adequately to develop the hints thus suggested, however, would require another book as long as the present one.

Yet here is just one more such hint, from the same author, too pregnant to be omitted.

“When the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation, and call over the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding: ‘There is your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentiful, you all will be full of shame, and so shall we.’

“When they go on trading expeditions, they present their food to the spirits at the centre-post of the house, and ask the spirits to go before them and prepare the people, so that the trading may be prosperous.

“When sickness is in the family, a pig is brought to the sacred place of the great spirit” (probably the chief ancestral ghost), “and killed. The carcase is then taken to the sacred place of the family, and the spirits are asked to accept it. Sins are confessed, such as bananas that are taken, or cocoanuts, and none have been presented, and leave not given to eat them. ‘There is a pig; accept, and remove the sickness.’ Death follows, and the day of burial arrives. The friends all stand round the open grave, and the chief’s sister or cousin” (the primitive priestess) “calls out in a loud voice, ‘You have been angry with us for the bananas we have taken (or cocoanuts, as the case may be), and you have, in your anger, taken this child. Now let it suffice, and bury your anger.’ The body is then placed in the grave, and covered over with earth.”

Here we have in brief a perfect epitome of savage theology, savage ceremonial, and savage atonement. I could enlarge not a little on its numerous implications.