Comparative Religion

by J. Estlin Carpenter

SACRED PRODUCTS

In the intimate connection of religion with life all primitive interests are placed under its sanction. A large portion of time is occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with it. To the bounty of its powers they owe abundant food and safety or success in war. Beneath its protection the newly born enter the world, and to its care the elders are committed when they die. Its holy persons rule in their midst; its holy places are all round about them; its sacred objects are in their homes. It is not surprising, therefore, that all the higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws, its stories of the gods and their dealings with each other or with man, should be ascribed to the same origin. Where individuality is hampered at every turn by time-honoured conventions, and personal initiative is imperfectly developed and timidly confined within the narrowest limits, all higher intellectual products, command over nature, inventions, poetry and song, the usages of the social order, and the rituals for serving the gods, carry with them a secret force, a mysterious authority, which passes the bounds of human wisdom, and has been imparted from some higher source. Each man is dimly conscious that his single wit could not have compassed these things; he does not observe the long processes and imperceptible stages of advance; he accepts the theory offered to him by those who should know best, and looks back to the days when kindly powers took in hand the instruction of men.

Thus at the present day many of the Australian tribes whose condition has probably changed little since the date of the oldest civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty institutions as ordained by beings above. Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any custom, the answer is that Nurrundere commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the marriage laws for their respective tribes; Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws which the old people handed down from generation to generation.

The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast prehistoric period before the Flood the people round the lower Euphrates had lived without rule or order, like the beasts of the field, till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek historian called Cannes, appeared out of the Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. He taught them arts and laws, and wrote concerning the generation of mankind, their different ways of life, and their civil polity. It was no other than Ea, god of the encircling Deep, the source of all. Historic inscriptions told of his "books," which may have included ancient oracles, and which certainly laid down the duties of a king. So the famous code of Hammurabi (about 1950 B.C.), recently discovered at Susa (1901), was handed to him, as the tablet shows, by the great Sun-god, Shamash.

The Egyptian priests, perhaps as late as the great Nineteenth Dynasty, before the days of Moses, threw into definite shape the vague traditions of immemorial antiquity, when men had lived devouring one another, ignorant how to till the ground. Osiris (p. [119]) taught the art of tillage, the use of the plough and hoe, how to grow wheat and barley, and the culture of the vine; and Isis added the domestic arts of making bread and weaving linen. Osiris, moreover, appointed the offerings to the gods, regulated the ceremonies, composed the texts and melodies of the hymns. And among his successors was Thoth of Hermopolis (p. [8]), who introduced astronomy and divination, medicine, arithmetic, and geometry, and whose "books," embracing a kind of religious encyclopædia, were known to the Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, in the second century of our era.

So Zeus gave laws to Minos in Crete, and Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to Lycurgus; Numa, the traditional founder of the Roman ceremonial law, received instruction from the nymph Egeria. The shepherd slave, Zaleucus (whom Eusebius placed about 660 B.C.), taught the Locrians what Athena had first taught him, and prefaced his laws by enjoining them to revere the gods as the real causes of all things fair and good in life, and keep their hearts pure from all evil, inasmuch as the gods do not take pleasure in the sacrifices of the wicked, but in the righteous and fair conduct of the good.

From the New World come a series of similar figures. Mr. Curtin claims to show that the vast area of the American continent is pervaded by one system of thought incalculably old. In the central group of the most sacred personages is the Earth with Sky and Sun conceived sometimes as identical sometimes as distinct. The Earth-maiden on whom the Sun has gazed, becomes a mother, and gives birth to a great hero. He bestows on men all gifts that support existence, and it is through him that the race lives and prospers. To the Algonkins he was Michabo or Manibozho, the "Great Light," who imparted vision, author of wisdom, arts, and institutions. Among the Toltecs at Tulla he was Quetzalcoatl, virgin-born, founder of civilisation, who organised worship without human or animal sacrifices, and endured no war. The Miztecs called him Votan, prince and legislator of his people, representative of a higher wisdom, so that he rose to be the mediator between earth and heaven. In the plains of Begota the white-bearded Bohica appeared to the Mozca Indians, taught them how to sow and build, formed them into communities, contrived an outlet for the waters of their great lake, and, having settled the government and the ritual, retired into ascetic penance for two thousand years. Out of the depths of Lake Titicaca in Peru there rose one day the son and daughter of the sun and moon, Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo, sent by their father in compassion for men's wretched plight. They taught the ignorant folk agriculture, the chief trades, the art of building cities, aqueducts, and roads, and Mama Ogllo showed the women how to spin and weave. Then when all was in order, and overseers were appointed to see that each one did his duty, they went back to the skies.

These stories all belong to the class known as myths. They are not accounts of what actually happened, they are the work of religious imagination operating on a particular group of facts, and endeavouring to explain them. The scope of mythology, whatever may be its particular origins, is of the widest compass. It embraces the whole field of nature and life. It first came into modern view through the study of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome. The discovery of Sanskrit and the investigation of its literature, especially of the Vedic hymns, concentrated the attention of scholars for a time, pre-eminently under the genius of Max Müller, on the relations of myth to language, and the resolution of various deities of India and Greece into the phenomena of dawn and sunshine, of the thunderstorm or the moon.

But it was gradually found necessary to abandon one after another of the philological identifications which had at one time been proposed with confidence. New aspects of mythology demanded consideration. It was not only concerned with the incidents and powers of nature, or with the various relations of the gods. It appeared also in the field of ritual. It often contained antique secrets of the meaning of religious performance. It was the key to the dramatised representations of the sacred dance, the ceremonials on which depended the welfare of the tribe. And in proportion as action acquired a larger psychological recognition in shaping the character of religion, and belief receded into the background, the significance of the development of myths was changed.