All over Islam we get such holy grave-mosques. The tomb of the Prophet at Medina heads the list: with the equally holy tomb of his daughter Fatima. Among the Shiahs, Ali’s grave at Nejef and Hoseyn’s grave at Kerbela are as sacred as that of the Prophet at Medina. The shrines of the Imams are much adored in Persia. The graves of the peers in India, the Ziarets of the fakeers in Afghanistan, show the same tendency. In Palestine, says Major Conder, worship at the tombs of local saints “represents the real religion of the peasant.”
I had originally intended, indeed, to include in this work a special chapter on these survivals in Islam, a vast number of which I have collected in various places; but my book has already swelled to so much larger dimensions than I had originally contemplated that I am compelled reluctantly to forego this disquisition.
One word, however, must be given to Egypt, where the cult of the dead was always so marked a feature in the developed religion, and where neither Christianity nor Islam has been able to obscure this primitive tendency. Nothing is more noticeable in the Nile Valley than the extraordinary way in which the habits and ideas as to burial and the preservation of the dead have survived in spite of the double and rapid alteration in religious theory. At Sak-karah and Thebes, one is familiar with the streets and houses of tombs, regularly laid out so as to form in the strictest sense a true Necropolis, or city of the dead. Just outside Cairo, on the edge of the desert, a precisely similar modern Necropolis exists to this day, regularly planned in streets and quarters, with the tomb of each family standing in its own courtyard or enclosure, and often very closely resembling the common round-roofed or domed Egyptian houses. In this town of dead bodies, every distinction of rank and wealth may now be observed. The rich are buried under splendid mausolea of great architectural pretensions; the poor occupy humble tombs just raised above the surface of the desert, and marked at head and foot with rough and simple Egyptian tombstones. Still, the entire aspect of such a cemetery is the aspect of a town. In northern climates, the dead sleep their last sleep under grassy little tumuli, wholly unlike the streets of a city: in Egypt, to this day, the dead occupy, as in life, whole lanes and alleys of eternal houses. Even the spirit which produced the Pyramids and the Tombs of the Kings is conspicuous in modern or mediaeval Cairo in the taste which begot those vast domed mosques known as the Tombs of the Khalifs and the Tombs of the Mamelooks. Whatever is biggest in the neighbourhood of ancient Memphis turns out on examination to be the last resting-place of a Dead Man, and a place of worship.
Almost every one of the great mosques of Cairo is either a tomb built for himself by a ruler—and this is the more frequent case—or else the holy shrine of some saint of Islam. It is characteristic of Egypt, however, where king and god have always been so closely combined, that while elsewhere the mosque is usually the prayer-tomb of a holy man, in Cairo it is usually the memorial-temple of a Sultan, an Emeer, a viceroy, or a Khedive. It is interesting to find, too, after all we have seen as to the special sanctity of the oracular head, that perhaps the holiest of all these mosques contains the head of Hoseyn, the grandson of the Prophet. A ceremonial washing is particularly mentioned in the story of its translation. The mosque of Sultan Hassan, with its splendid mausolem, is a peculiarly fine example of the temple-tombs of Cairo.
I will not linger any longer, however, in the precincts of Islam, further than to mention the significant fact that the great central object of worship for the Mahommedan world is the Kaaba at Mecca, which itself, as Mr. William Simpson long ago pointed out, bears obvious traces of being at once a tomb and a sacred altar-stone. Sir Richard Burton’s original sketch of this mystic object shows it as a square and undecorated temple-tomb, covered throughout with a tasselled black pall—a most funereal object—the so-called “sacred carpet.” It is, in point of fact, a simple catafalque. As the Kaaba was adopted direct by Mohammad from the early Semitic heathenism of Arabia, and as it must always have been treated with the same respect, I do not think we can avoid the obvious conclusion that this very ancient tomb has been funereally draped in the self-same manner, like those of Biskra, Algiers, and Kerouan, from the time of its first erection. This case thus throws light on the draping of the ashera, as do also the many-coloured draperies and hangings of saints’ catafalques in Algeria and Tunis.
Nor can I resist a passing mention of the Moharram festival, which is said to be the commemoration of the death of Hoseyn, the son of Ali (whose holy head is preserved at Cairo). This is a rude piece of acting, in which the events supposed to be connected with the death of Hoseyn are graphically represented; and it ends with a sacred Adonis-like or Osiris-like procession, in which the body of the saint is carried and mourned over. The funeral is the grand part of the performance; catafalques are constructed for the holy corpse, covered with green and gold tinsel—the green being obviously a last reminiscence of the god of vegetation. In Bombay, after the dead body and shrine have been carried through the streets amid weeping and wailing, they are finally thrown into the sea, like King Carnival. I think we need hardly doubt that here we have an evanescent relic of the rites of the corn-god, ending in a rain-charm, and very closely resembling those of Adonis and Osiris.
But if in Islam the great objects of worship are the Kaaba tomb at Mecca and the Tomb of the Prophet at Medina, so the most holy spot in the world for Christendom is—the Holy Sepulchre. It was for possession of that most sacred place of pilgrimage that Christians fought Moslems through the middle ages; and it is there that while faith in the human Christ was strong and vigorous the vast majority of the most meritorious pilgrimages continued to be directed. To worship at the tomb of the risen Redeemer was the highest hope of the devout mediæval Christian. Imitations of the Holy Sepulchre occur in abundance all over Europe: one exists at S. Stefano in Bologna; another, due to the genius of Alberti, is well known in the Ruccellai chapel at Florence. I need hardly recall the Sacro Monte at Varallo.
For the most part, however, in Christendom, and especially in those parts of Christendom remote from Palestine, men contented themselves with nearer and more domestic saints. From a very early date we see in the catacombs the growth of this practice of offering up prayer by (or to) the bodies of the Dead who slept in Christ. A chapel or capella, as Dean Burgon has pointed out, meant originally an arched sepulchre in the walls of the catacombs, at which prayer was afterwards habitually made: and above-ground chapels were modelled, later on, upon the pattern of these ancient underground shrines. I have alluded briefly in my second chapter to the probable origin of the cruciform church from two galleries of the catacombs crossing one another at right angles; the High Altar stands there over the body or relics of a Dead Saint; and the chapels represent other minor tombs grouped like niches in the catacombs around it. A chapel is thus, as Mr. Herbert Spencer phrases it, “a tomb within a tomb”; and a great cathedral is a serried set of such cumulative tombs, one built beside the other. Sometimes the chapels are actual graves, sometimes they are cenotaphs; but the connexion with death is always equally evident. On this subject, I would refer the reader again to Mr. Spencer’s pages.
So long as Christianity was proscribed at Rome and throughout the empire, the worship of the dead must have gone on only silently, and must have centred in the catacombs or by the graves of saints and martyrs—the last-named being practically mere Christian successors of the willing victims of earlier religions. “To be counted worthy to suffer” was the heart’s desire of every earnest Christian—as it still is among fresh and living sects like the Salvation Army; and the creed of self-sacrifice, whose very name betrays its human-victim origin, was all but universal. When Christianity had triumphed, however, and gained not only official recognition but official honour, the cult of the martyrs and the other faithful dead became with Christian Rome a perfect passion. The Holy Innocents, St. Stephen Protomartyr, the nameless martyrs of the Ten Persecutions, together with Poly carp, Vivia Perpétua, Félicitas, Ignatius and all the rest, came to receive from the church a form of veneration which only the nice distinctions of the theological mind could enable us to discriminate from actual worship. The great procession of the slain for Christ in the mosaics of Sant’ Apollinare Nuovo at Ravenna gives a good comprehensive list of the more important of these earliest saints (at least for Aryan worshippers) headed by St. Martin, St. Clement, St. Justin, St. Lawrence, and St. Hippolytus. Later on came the more mythical and poetic figures, derived apparently from heathen gods—St. Catharine, St. Barbara, St. George, St. Christopher. These form as they go a perfect new pantheon, circling round the figures of Christ himself, and his mother the Madonna, who grows quickly in turn, by absorption of Isis, Astarte, and Artemis, into the Queen of Heaven.
The love-feasts or agapo of the early Christians were usually held, in the catacombs or elsewhere, above the bodies of the martyrs. Subsequently, the remains of the sainted dead were transferred to lordly churches without, like Sant’ Agnese and San Paolo, where they were deposited under the altar or sacred stone thus consecrated, from whose top the body and blood of Christ was distributed in the Eucharist. As early as the fourth century, we know that no church was complete without some such relic; and the passion for martyrs spread so greatly from that period onward that at one time no less than 2300 corpses of holy men together were buried at S. Prassede. It is only in Rome itself that the full importance of this martyr-worship can now be sufficiently understood, or the large part which it played in the development of Christianity adequately recognised. Perhaps the easiest way for the Protestant reader to put himself in touch with this side of the subject is to peruse the very interesting and graphic account given in the second volume of Mrs. Jameson’s Sacred and Legendary Art.