Human incarnations of the elephant-headed god Gunputty.
The Lingayats are the Unitarians of Hindooism, for they believe in only one god, Siva, rejecting the other two persons of the Hindoo Trinity. Yet “they esteem the Jangam or priest as superior even to the deity. They pay homage to the Jangam first and to Siva afterwards. The Jangam is regarded as an incarnation of the deity. . . . In practice the Jangam is placed first and, as stated above, is worshipped as {p405} god upon earth.”[1407] In 1900 a hill-man in Vizagapatam gave out that he was an incarnate god, and his claims to divinity were accepted by a following of five thousand people, who, when a sceptical government sent an armed force to suppress the movement, which threatened political trouble, testified to the faith that was in them by resisting even to the shedding of their blood. Two policemen who refused to bow the knee to the new god were knocked on the head. However, in the scuffle the deity himself was arrested and laid by the heels in gaol, where he died just like a common mortal.[1408] At Chinchvad, a small town about ten miles from Poona in western India, there lives a family of whom one in each generation is believed by a large proportion of the Mahrattas to be an incarnation of the elephant-headed god Gunputty. That celebrated deity was first made flesh about the year 1640 in the person of a Brahman of Poona, by name Mooraba Gosseyn, who sought to work out his salvation by abstinence, mortification, and prayer. His piety had its reward. The god himself appeared to him in a vision of the night and promised that a portion of his, that is, of Gunputty’s holy spirit should abide with him and with his seed after him even to the seventh generation. The divine promise was fulfilled. Seven successive incarnations, transmitted from father to son, manifested the light of Gunputty to a dark world. The last of the direct line, a heavy-looking god with very weak eyes, died in the year 1810. But the cause of truth was too sacred, and the value of the church property too considerable, to allow the Brahmans to contemplate with equanimity the unspeakable loss that would be sustained by a world which knew not Gunputty. Accordingly they sought and found a holy vessel in whom the divine spirit of the master had revealed itself anew, and the revelation has been happily continued in an unbroken succession of vessels from that time to this. But a mysterious law of spiritual economy, whose operation in the history of religion we may deplore though we cannot alter, has decreed that the miracles {p406} wrought by the god-man in these degenerate days cannot compare with those which were wrought by his predecessors in days gone by; and it is even reported that the only sign vouchsafed by him to the present generation of vipers is the miracle of feeding the multitude whom he annually entertains to dinner at Chinchvad.[1409]
Worship of the Maharajas as incarnations of Krishna.
A Hindoo sect, which has many representatives in Bombay and Central India, holds that its spiritual chiefs or Maharajas, as they are called, are representatives or even actual incarnations on earth of the god Krishna. Hence in the temples where the Maharajas do homage to the idols, men and women do homage to the Maharajas, prostrating themselves at their feet, offering them incense, fruits, and flowers, and waving lights before them, as the Maharajas themselves do before the images of the gods. One mode of worshipping Krishna is by swinging his images in swings. Hence, in every district presided over by a Maharaja, the women are wont to worship not Krishna but the Maharaja by swinging him in pendulous seats. The leavings of his food, the dust on which he treads, the water in which his dirty linen is washed, are all eagerly swallowed by his devotees, who worship his wooden shoes, and prostrate themselves before his seat and his painted portraits. And as Krishna looks down from heaven with most favour on such as minister to the wants of his successors and vicars on earth, a peculiar rite called Self-devotion has been instituted, whereby his faithful worshippers make over their bodies, their souls, and, what is perhaps still more important, their worldly substance to his adorable incarnations; and women are taught to believe that the highest bliss for themselves and their families is to be attained by yielding themselves to the embraces of those beings in whom the divine nature {p407} mysteriously coexists with the form and even the appetites of true humanity.[1410]
Pretenders to divinity among Christians.
Christianity itself has not uniformly escaped the taint of these unhappy delusions; indeed it has often been sullied by the extravagances of vain pretenders to a divinity equal to or even surpassing that of its great Founder. In the second century Montanus the Phrygian claimed to be the incarnate Trinity, uniting in his single person God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost.[1411] Nor is this an isolated case, the exorbitant pretension of a single ill-balanced mind. From the earliest times down to the present day many sects have believed that Christ, nay God himself, is incarnate in every fully initiated Christian, and they have carried this belief to its logical conclusion by adoring each other. Tertullian records that this was done by his fellow-Christians at Carthage in the second century; the disciples of St. Columba worshipped him as an embodiment of Christ; and in the eighth century Elipandus of Toledo spoke of Christ as “a god among gods,” meaning that all believers were gods just as truly as Jesus himself. The adoration of each other was customary among the Albigenses, and is noticed hundreds of times in the records of the Inquisition at Toulouse in the early part of the fourteenth century. It is still practised by the Paulicians of Armenia and the Bogomiles about Moscow. The Paulicians, indeed, presume to justify their faith, if not their practice, by the authority of St. Paul, who said, “It is not I that speak, but Christ that dwelleth in me.”[1412] Hence the members of this Russian sect are known as the Christs. “Among them men and women alike take upon themselves the calling of teachers and prophets, and in this character they lead a strict, ascetic life, refrain from the most ordinary and innocent pleasures, exhaust themselves by long fasting {p408} and wild ecstatic religious exercises, and abhor marriage. Under the excitement caused by their supposed holiness and inspiration, they call themselves not only teachers and prophets, but also ‘Saviours,’ ‘Redeemers,’ ‘Christs,’ ‘Mothers of God.’ Generally speaking, they call themselves simply Gods, and pray to each other as to real gods and living Christs or Madonnas.”[1413]
Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit.
Incarnation of the Holy Ghost.
In the thirteenth century there arose a sect called the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, who held that by long and assiduous contemplation any man might be united to the deity in an ineffable manner and become one with the source and parent of all things, and that he who had thus ascended to God and been absorbed in his beatific essence, actually formed part of the Godhead, was the Son of God in the same sense and manner with Christ himself, and enjoyed thereby a glorious immunity from the trammels of all laws human and divine. Inwardly transported by this blissful persuasion, though outwardly presenting in their aspect and manners a shocking air of lunacy and distraction, the sectaries roamed from place to place, attired in the most fantastic apparel and begging their bread with wild shouts and clamour, spurning indignantly every kind of honest labour and industry as an obstacle to divine contemplation and to the ascent of the soul towards the Father of spirits. In all their excursions they were followed by women with whom they lived on terms of the closest familiarity. Those of them who conceived they had made the greatest proficiency in the higher spiritual life dispensed with the use of clothes altogether in their assemblies, looking upon decency and modesty as marks of inward corruption, characteristics of a soul that still grovelled under the dominion of the flesh and had not yet been elevated into communion with the divine spirit, its centre and source. Sometimes their progress towards this mystic communion was accelerated by the Inquisition, {p409} and they expired in the flames, not merely with unclouded serenity, but with the most triumphant feelings of cheerfulness and joy.[1414] In the same century a Bohemian woman named Wilhelmina, whose head had been turned by brooding over some crazy predictions about a coming age of the Holy Ghost, persuaded herself and many people besides that the Holy Ghost had actually become incarnate in her person for the salvation of a great part of mankind. She died at Milan in the year 1281 in the most fragrant odour of sanctity, and her memory was held in the highest veneration by a numerous following, and even honoured with religious worship both public and private.[1415]
Modern incarnations of Jesus Christ.