Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

The ceremonies connected with the cultus of the rice-spirit in the East Indies still perpetuate in living faith beliefs once vital in the peasantry of Europe, and surviving to this day (as Mannhardt and Frazer have shown) in many a usage of the harvest-field. Out of this group of ideas arise divine forms which express mysteries of life and time. What is it that guides the circle of the year? What power brings forth the blade out of the ground, and clothes the woods with verdure? As the months follow their constant course, are not the seasons the organs of some sacred force, lovely figures as Greek poets taught, born of Zeus and Themis (holy law); or angels of the Most High, ruling over heat and cold, summer and winter, spring and autumn, as the later Israel conceived the continuance of God's creative work? And when the fields are bare and the leaves fall, have not the energies of vegetation suffered an arrest, to come to life again when the great quickening of the spring returns? So while here and there dim speculations (as in India or Persia or the Orphic hymns of Greece) hover round Time, the generator of all things, and the recurring periodicity of the Year, more concrete imagination conceives the processes of the growth, decay, and revival of vegetation under the symbols of the life, the death, and resurrection of the deities of corn and tree.

To such a group belong different forms in Egypt, Syria and Greece, whose precise origin cannot always be traced amid the bewildering variety of functions which they came to fulfil. But they all illustrate the same general theme. In the ritual of their worship similar motives and symbols may be traced; and the incidents of their life-course were presented in a sort of sacred drama which reproduced the central mystery. Such were Osiris in Egypt, Adonis (as the Greeks called the Syrian form of the ancient Babylonian Tammuz), Attis of Phrygia in Asia Minor, and in Greece the Thracian Dionysus, and the divine pair Demeter and her daughter Persephonê blended with the figure of Korê "the Maid."

The worship of Osiris early spread throughout Egypt, and its various phases have given rise to many interpretations of his origin and nature. Recent studies have converged upon the view that he was primarily a vegetation deity. In the festival of sowing, small images of the god formed out of sand or vegetable earth and corn, with yellow faces and green cheek-bones, were solemnly buried, those of the preceding year being removed. On the temple wall of his chamber at Philæ stalks of corn were depicted springing from his dead body, while a priest poured water on them from a pitcher. This was the mystery of him "who springs from the returning waters." The annual inundation brought quickening to the seed, and in the silence and darkness of the earth it died to live.

Of this process Osiris became the type for thousands of years. Already in the earliest days of the Egyptian monarchy he is presented as the divine-human king, benevolent, wise, just. To him in later times the arts and laws of civilised life could be traced back; he was the founder of the social order and the worship of the gods. But the jealousy of his brother Set brought about his death. The ancient texts do not explicitly state what followed. But his body was cut to pieces and his limbs were scattered, until his son Horus effected their reunion. Restored to life, he ascended to the skies, and became "Chief of the Powers," so that he could be addressed as the "Great God." There by his resurrection he became the pledge of immortality. Each man who died looked to him for the gift of life. Mystically identified with him, the deceased bore the god's name and was thus admitted into fellowship with him. Over his body the ceremonies once performed upon Osiris were repeated, the same formulæ were recited, with the conviction that "as surely as Osiris lives, so shall he live also." But magic was early checked by morals, and by the sixth dynasty Osiris had also become the august and impartial judge (p. [8]).

Such might be the splendid evolution of a deity of the grains. But food was not, of course, the only need. The family as well as each individual must be maintained. Mysterious powers wrought through sex. Strange energies pulsed in processes of quickening, and these, too, were interpreted in terms of divine agency. They found their parallels in the operations of nature (like the Yang and Yin of ancient China), and begot new series of heavenly forms. The greater gods all had their consorts. Birth must be placed under divine protection, just as the organ of generation might itself be sacred. The Babylonian looked to the spouse of Marduk, "creator of all things," to whom as Zēr-panîtum, "seed-creatress," the processes of generation were especially referred. Or with ceremony and incantation the child was set beneath the care of Ishtar, queen of Nineveh, and goddess of the planet Venus. The Greek prayed to Hera, Artemis, or Eileithyia; and all round the world superhuman powers, for good or ill, gathered round the infant life, whose aid must be sought, or whose hurt averted. Dread agencies of disease, like fever, smallpox, or cholera, were in like manner personalised. Demonic forces cut short the tale of years. From the equator to the arctic zone Death is ascribed in the lowest culture to witchcraft. Strange stories were told of his intrusion into the world, commonly through man's transgression of some divine command. And gradually the other world must be ruled like this; the multitudes of the dead need a sovereign like the living; and after the fashion of Osiris the Indian Yama, "first to spy out the path" to the unseen realm, becomes the "King of Righteousness" before whom all must in due time give their account (p. [244]).

Such deities, however, represent much more than the physical life. They have a social character, and have become the expression of organised morality. On this field another group of divine powers comes into view, symbols of order in the home or the city, charged with the maintenance of the family or the State. Round the hearth-fire gathers a peculiar sanctity. There is the common centre of domestic interests; there, too, the agent by which gifts are conveyed to the spirits of the dead. There, then, was a sacred force, dwelling in the hearth itself, and animating the fire that burned upon it. The Greek Hestia seems originally to have been not the goddess who made the hearth holy, nor the sacrificial fire which it sustained, but the mysterious energy in the actual stones upholding the consecrated flame. All kinds of associations were attached to it; and though her personality remained somewhat dim and indistinct, and carven forms of her were rare, and her worship was never sacerdotalised like that of the Latin Vesta, she nevertheless had the first place in sacrifice and prayer. She was worshipped in the city council-hall. Athenian colonists carried her sacred fire across the seas. The poets provided her with a pedigree, and made her "sister of God most high, and of Hera the partner of his throne." The sculptor placed her statue at Athens beside that of Peace. The family deity expanded into an emblem of the unity of government and race. But the primitive character of the ancient hearth-power still clung to her. She never rose into the lofty functions of guide and protector of moral order like the great city-gods Zeus, Athena, or Apollo.

In Rome numerous powers were recognised in early days as guardians of the home and the farm-lands. Vesta had her seat upon the hearth, which was the centre of the family worship, and afterwards became the object of an important city-cult. The store-chamber behind was the dwelling-place of the Penates, and with its contents no impure person might meddle. Where farm met farm stood the chapel of the local Lares, and there whole households assembled, masters and slaves together, in annual rejoicings and good fellowship. Brought into the home, the Lar became the symbol of the family life, and the ancestral pieties gathered round him. More vague and elastic was the conception of the Genius, a kind of spiritual double who watched over the fortunes of the head of the home, and through the marriage-bed provided for the continuity of descent. This protecting power could take many forms with continually expanding jurisdiction. The city, the colony, the province, the "land of Britain," Rome, the Emperor himself, were thus placed under divine care, or rather were viewed as in some way the organs of superhuman power. In the energy which built up states and brought peoples into order lived something that was creative and divine.

From distant times in many forms of society it was felt that there was something mysterious in sovereignty. The king (once connected with the priest) was hedged round with some sort of divinity which expressed itself in language amazing to the modern mind. In the ancient monarchies of Egypt and Babylon the royal deity was the fundamental assumption of government, and it was represented upon the monuments beside the Nile with startling realism. In later days the Greek title Theos (god) was boldly assumed by the sovereigns of Egypt and Syria. It was conferred, with the associated epithet Sotér (Saviour or Preserver), as early as 307 B.C., on Demetrius and his father Antigonus, who liberated Athens from the tyranny of Cassander. On the Rosetta stone (in the British Museum) Ptolemy V, 205 B.C., claims the same dignity, and is described as "eternal-lived," and "the living image of Zeus." Ephesus designated Julius Cæsar as "God manifest and the common Saviour of human life."

This is something more than the extravagance of court-scribes, or the fawning adulation of oriental dependents. In the worship paid to the Roman Emperor many feelings and associations were involved. The power which had brought peace, law, order, into the midst of a multitude of nations and languages, and subdued to itself the jarring wills of men, seemed something more than human. When Tertullian of Carthage coined the strange word "Romanity," he summed up the infinite variety of energies which spread one culture from the Persian Gulf to the Atlantic, from the cataracts of the Nile to the sources of the Tyne. Of this mysterious force the Emperor was the symbol. So Augustus was saluted throughout the East as "Son of God," and in inscriptions recently discovered in Asia Minor, and referred by the historian Mommsen to the year 11 or 9 B.C., we read the startling words: "the birthday of the God is become the beginning of glad tidings (evangelia[[2]]) through him to the world." He is described as "the Saviour of the whole human race"; he is the beginning of life and the end of sorrow that ever man was born. An inscription at Philæ on the Nile equated him with the greatest of Greek deities, for he is "star of all Greece who has arisen as great Saviour Zeus."

[[2]] The word which designates our "Gospels."