Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of “lower” or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.
On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55; P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 589; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86–87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467–68; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254–56; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301–302; Castrén, Vorlesungen über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281; Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183, cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New Zealand, “by a Pakeha Maori” (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154), of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in New Zealand.
Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation when he makes his trader in The Beach of Falesà say: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country” (Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104–105). In Abyssinia, “Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits” (Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844, iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes “believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions” (A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).
This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes (Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) that in no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another’s pantheon “if they did not wholly alter their form, character, appearance, and not seldom their very name.” This seems an over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele’s own statement (Hist. comparée des anc. relig. égyptiennes et sémitiques, French trans., 1882, pp. 174–80) as to the adoption of Sumerian and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods’ images; and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon, in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon, in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117, 119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele’s own statement, p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.
A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas;[2] and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable.[3] It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods.[4] A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.
§ 2. The Process in India
The process thus deducible from the main conditions is found actually happening in more than one of the ancient cultures, as their history is now sketched. In the Rig-Veda, which if not the oldest is the least altered of the Eastern Sacred Books, the main line of change is obvious enough. It remains so far matter of conjecture to what extent the early Vedic cults contain matter adopted from non-Aryan Asiatic peoples; but no other hypothesis seems to account for the special development of the cult of Agni in India as compared with the content and development of the other early Aryan systems, in which, though there are developments of fire worship, the God Agni does not appear.[5] The specially priestly character of the Agni worship, and the precedence it takes in the Vedas over the solar cult of Mitra, which among the kindred Aryans of Iran receives in turn a special development, suggest some such grafting, though the relations between Aryans and the Hindu aborigines, as indicated in the Veda, seem to exclude the possibility of their adopting the fire-cult from the conquered inhabitants,[6] who, besides, are often spoken of in the Vedas as “non-sacrificers,”[7] and at times as “without Gods.”[8] But this is sometimes asserted even of hostile Aryans.[9] In any case the carrying on of the two main cults of Agni and Indra side by side points to an original and marked heterogeneity of racial elements; while the varying combination with them of the worship of other deities, the old Aryan Varuna, the three forms of the Sun-God Aditya, the Goddess Aditi and the eight Adityas, the solar Mitra, Vishnu, Rudra, and the Maruts, imply the adaptation of further varieties of hereditary creed. The outcome is a sufficiently chaotic medley, in which the attributes and status of the various Gods are reducible to no code,[10] the same feats being assigned to several, and the attributes of all claimed for almost any one. Here, then, were the conditions provocative of doubt among the critical; and while it is only in the later books of the Rig-Veda that such doubt finds priestly expression, it must be inferred that it was current in some degree among laymen before the hymn-makers avowed that they shared it. The God Soma, the personification of wine, identified with the Moon-God Chandra,[11] “hurls the irreligious into the abyss.”[12] This may mean that his cult, like that of his congener Dionysos in Greece, was at first forcibly resisted, and forcibly triumphed. At an earlier period doubt is directed against the most popular God, Indra, perhaps on behalf of a rival cult.[13] Later it seems to take the shape of a half-skeptical, half-mystical questioning as to which, if any, God is real.
From the Catholic standpoint, Dr. E. L. Fischer has argued that “Varuna is in the ontological, physical, and ethical relation the highest, indeed the unique, God of ancient India”; and that the Nature-Gods of the Veda can belong only to a later period in the religious consciousness (Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878, pp. 36–37). Such a development, had it really occurred, might be said to represent a movement of primitive freethought from an unsatisfying monotheism to a polytheism that seemed better to explain natural facts. A more plausible view of the process, however, is that of von Bradke, to the effect that “the old Indo-Germanic polytheism, with its pronounced monarchic apex, which ... constituted the religion of the pre-Vedic [Aryan] Hindus, lost its monarchic apex shortly before and during the Rig-Veda period, and set up for itself the so-called Henotheism [worship of deities severally as if each were the only one], which thus represented in India a time of religious decline; a decline that, at the end of the period to which the Rig-Veda hymns belong, led to an almost complete dissolution of the old beliefs. The earlier collection of the hymns must have promoted the decline; and the final redaction must have completed it. The collected hymns show only too plainly how the very deity before whom in one song all the remaining Gods bow themselves, in the next sinks almost in the dust before another. Then there sounds from the Rig-Veda (x, 121) the wistful question: Who is the God whom we should worship?” (Dyâus Asura, Ahuramazda, und die Asuras, Halle, 1885, p. 115; cp. note, supra, p. 30). On this view the growth of monotheism went on alongside of a growth of critical unbelief, but, instead of expressing that, provoked it by way of reaction. Dr. Muir more specifically argues (Sanskrit Texts, v, 116) that in the Vedic hymns Varuna is a God in a state of decadence; and, despite the dissent of M. Barth (Religions of India, p. 18), this seems true. But the recession of Varuna is only in the normal way of the eclipse of the old Supreme God by a nearer deity, and does not suffice to prove a growth of agnosticism. M. Fontane (Inde Védique, 1881, p. 305) asserts on other grounds a popular movement of negation in the Vedic period, but offers rather slender evidence. There is better ground for his account of the system as one in which different cults had the upper hand at different times, the devotees of Indra rejecting Agni, and so on (pp. 310–11).
To meet such a doubt, a pantheistic view of things would naturally arise, and in the Vedas it often emerges.[14] Thus “Agni is all the Gods”; and “the Gods are only a single being under different names.”[15] For ancient as for more civilized peoples such a doctrine had the attraction of nominally reconciling the popular cult with the skepticism it had aroused. Rising thus as freethought, the pantheistic doctrine in itself ultimately became in India a dogmatic system, the monopoly of a priestly caste, whose training in mystical dialectic made them able to repel or baffle amateur criticism. Such fortifying of a sophisticated creed by institutions—of which the Brahmanic caste system is perhaps the strongest type—is one of the main conditions of relative permanence for any set of opinions; yet even within the Brahmanic system, by reason, presumably, of the principle that the higher truth was for the adept and need not interfere with the popular cult, there were again successive critical revisions of the pantheistic idea.