But when, as in Buro, the bidding takes such a form as “Grandfather small-pox, go away,”[171.1] the reverential and soothing address allows us to approximate this to prayer, for in the liturgies of the earlier as well as the advanced religions the divinity is commonly addressed in terms of kinship. We shall note instances of real prayers proffered by the uncultured races to a high god, yet retaining something of the magic character and tone: we detect it in the mystic employment of the name, in the reiteration of the same short phrase, in the droning sing-song in which, according to Professor Tylor,[171.2] savage prayers are usually intoned, the tone of a mesmeric incantation. But gradually, as the concept of divinity deepens in the progressive race, and the mind becomes penetrated with the consciousness of the littleness of man and of the incomparable greatness of God, the worshipper tends to become the humble petitioner and prayer comes to predominate over spell. And it has happened in the legislation of the higher religions that magic at last becomes “suspect” and tabooed: yet the most austere and purified religion often unconsciously retains certain elements of spell-ritual, and even legitimatises the spell by virtue of the distinction between white magic and black. The distinction is morphologically unsound, and arises generally from ex-parte prejudice. We do not find, in fact, if we broadly compare the phenomena of all religions, that cleavage and irreconcilable antagonism between magic and religion which has often been supposed. Even in religions that we must class as high, the deity himself is often imagined to work by means of magic, and the Christian Church itself has given its patronage and consecration to practices of magical significance, such as the ordeal, purification, certain forms of healing, exorcisms of evil spirits: all these will be accompanied by prayers to God, but the prayers are so impregnated with the ideas of animistic magic that we can hardly regard them as pure forms. Nevertheless, though the lower elements are so difficult to eradicate, yet the experience of some few of the higher communities may reassure us that as a religion progresses in spirituality it can purge itself more and more thoroughly of these, and the progress is from spell to prayer.
Again, we may compare the phenomena from the point of view of the progress in aspiration. In the primitive period, when the struggle is to live at all rather than to live well, the objects of prayer must be material blessings, and these are still prominent in the liturgies of the civilised societies. There is a sameness in all these, and the chief distinction to note is between the prayers that look to the individual alone and those that look to the good of the community. A higher stage is reached when moral and spiritual qualities become the object of prayer; and when this is attained, the principle of prayer is likely to become more and more spiritual, and the petitioner more and more diffident in the expression of his material wants, and with a growing consciousness that the Deity knows best what is good for man, may rise to the height of the formula, “Thy will be done.” It is interesting to note in how many races some such utterance has been heard; and at times men may have been helped to it by the consciousness which scientific advance had awakened, that the laws of the material universe cannot be capriciously altered to suit the temporary needs of the individual: a formula of acquiescence appears then to be the deepest and truest prayer. Finally, in the evolution of prayer we may consider that the consummation is marked by the theory, maintained by later Greek philosophy and early Christian fathers alike, that the true intention of prayer is not the mere petition for some special blessing, but rather the communion with God, to whom it is a spiritual approach. Here as often elsewhere, the highest spiritual product of human thought reveals its affinity with some dimly remote primeval concept; for much of the spell-ritual at which we have been glancing implies an idea of such communion, the human agent endeavouring to charge himself with a potency drawn from a quasi-divine source.
It remains now to take concrete examples from the record of prayer illustrative of these phases of development. Looking first at the savage races, we have already observed that some of their formulæ seem to belong to the borderland between spell and prayer. When the New Caledonian says over the fire that he kindles to increase the heat of the sun, “Sun, I do this that you may be burning hot,” it is obviously not a prayer that he utters to the sun-god but a formula expressing the suggestion of his magic.[175.1] And when the Karens of Burma at the threshing of the rice call out to the corn-mother, “Shake thyself, grandmother, shake thyself. Let the paddy ascend till it equals a hill, equals a mountain; shake thyself, grandmother, shake thyself,”[176.1] we have surely a command rather than a pure prayer; for primitive vegetation-ritual works by compulsion rather than entreaty. On the other hand, we have record of a genuine Karen prayer addressed to “the God of heaven and earth, God of the mountains and hills,” on the occasion when a sin of unchastity was supposed to have sterilised the earth: “Do not be angry with me, do not hate me, but have mercy on me and compassionate me.… Now I repair the mountains, now I heal the hills.… Make thy paddy fruitful, thy rice abundant.… If we cultivate but little, still grant that we may obtain a little.” But the prayer is accompanied with rites that are purely magical and aiming at the restoration of the earth.[176.2]
The buffalo clan among the Sioux Indians decorate themselves with emblems of their totem animal before going on the war-path, and express the purpose of the dressing with a sententious phrase: “My little grandfather is always dangerous when he makes an attempt.”[177.1] Such an utterance, considered formally, is not a prayer but a statement about the power of the buffalo, “the little grandfather”; for it is an article of faith in the magic creed that the supernatural force, which the spell aims at setting in operation, can be made to work by definite statements that it is working; these are suggestive assurances that increase one’s own confidence; and the Sioux formula is of such a nature; only the coaxing and endearing phrase of kinship seems to imply a half entreaty as well. We discern more clearly the rudiments of a prayer in the words addressed by the Santee Indians to the buffalo when they have offered him a feast: “Grandfather, venerable man, thy children have made this feast for you: may the food thus taken cause them to live and bring them good fortune.”[178.1] The account of the Sioux religion preserves a quaint form of words which are used for the riddance of the ghost, to despatch the soul of the deceased to the home of the dead: “You are going to the animals, you are going to your ancestors, you came hither from the animals and you are going back thither: do not face this way again: when you go, continue walking.”[178.2] The tone of the words is kind and considerate, but authoritative rather than supplicatory, and unlike the formula which the same Indians are reported to use when praying to their ancestors for good weather or good hunting, “Spirits of the dead, have mercy on us.”[178.3] Certain prayers used habitually by the Todas of the Nalgiri hills for the thriving of the dairy and the buffalo herd have recently been published,[178.4] and as the formulæ are all in the optative mood—“May it be well for the buffaloes, may there be no destroyer, etc.,” and there is an appeal to divine personages or powers—“for the sake of such or such a god may this happen”—we may class them as prayers; but the appeal is very faint and the formulæ seem to be used as if they possessed a self-dependent efficacy. More interesting and fervent is the address to the sun, proffered by a solitary hunter of the half-christianised Kekchi tribe of Indians:[179.1] his object is to secure game and food in the wilderness both for himself and as an oblation to the god; but in the very long and impassioned utterance, with its many repetitions, there is very little direct entreaty: the Indian contents himself with definite and reassuring statements concerning the omnipresence of the deity and the ease with which the latter can execute his will: “It will give you no trouble to give me all kind of game”; and a moving appeal is made on the ground of kinship: “Thou art my father: who is my mother, who is my father? Only thou, O God.”
We may regard these utterances of the hunter not indeed as spells, for his attitude is most reverent and loving, but as potent statement effecting the purpose of prayer. Nor need we see Christian influence in the striking phrase last quoted, though of course this is possible; such endearing address is common both in the lower and higher liturgies: the Egyptian appealed to Isis in similar terms[180.1]—“Oh my father, my brother, my mother Isis,” the Babylonian addressed Bel as father and mother,[180.2] and a Vedic hymn contains the phrase, “Thou, oh Agni, art our father, we are thy kinsmen.”[180.3] Such appeals, suggested by the affection between kinsmen and the idea of the kinship of man with God, belong to the alphabet of pure prayer.
Of still more value for the light it throws on the attitude of the Indian’s mind to the powers of the unseen world, is the so-called prayer of a Navajo Shaman belonging to the district of Arizona, recently published in the American Anthropologist;[181.1] and to understand it the circumstances must be briefly stated. The Shaman had been telling the American inquirer the story of his tribe’s descent through the lower world and their re-emergence: after the narrative he fears that speaking about the lower regions may have caused his own spiritual or astral part to have left his body and departed thither; and he therefore proceeds to recite a long so-called prayer intended to deliver his soul from the witchcraft that may be detaining it below. We should not strictly call it a prayer at all, but a narrative in the indicative mood stating that the war-gods of the tribe are actually doing what he specially wants them to do, namely, to go down and rescue his soul from the woman-chieftain, “the underground witch.” Every step of their way there and back is carefully recounted several times over, so that they cannot go wrong; and when they are supposed to have brought back his soul, the recital ends with the joyful refrain, “The world before me is restored in beauty: my voice is restored in beauty,” each phrase repeated five times. It is really a spell-narrative about the gods, having the same effect as prayer, and is a twofold illustration of the primitive idea that talking about a thing makes it happen; an idea not wholly extinct among ourselves, and possibly underlying some of the liturgies of higher religions.
For the rest, savages often pray very much as the civilised man, and accompany some of their purifications and medicine-magic with real prayers to higher gods to give them efficacy: for instance, the African doctor administering the medicine shown him by the fetich holds it first up to heaven and prays, “Father Heaven, bless this medicine that I now give.”[183.1] But I have not been able to find any example of a savage prayer for moral or spiritual blessings. An interesting feature is, however, observable in a verbose and very exacting prayer made by the Khonds of Orissa to the earth-goddess; after particularising very carefully their material wants, they conclude with the words, “We are ignorant of what it is good to ask for. You know what is good for us, give it us.”[183.2] This appears to be a unique savage version of the great phrase, “Thy will be done.”
Turning now to the liturgies of the more advanced peoples,[183.3] we may note briefly at the outset one feature that is found in most of them if not common to all; namely, the idea that the prayer gains potency from the solemn utterance of the true divine name. The phenomenon has been examined by recent writers on comparative religion, especially by Giesebrecht in his treatise on Die Alt-testamentliche Schätzung des Gottesnamens.[184.1] In primitive psychology, the name is part of the personality, and the soul or power of the individual inheres in it: therefore he who has the name of the person, whether human, superhuman, or divine, can exercise a certain control over him by means of its magical application. Thus in the appeal to the god Ukko in the Kalevala, “Ukko, oh thou god in heaven, Ukko come, we call upon thee, Ukko come, we need thee sorely,” there is virtue in the threefold repetition of the name, and the passage is part of an address which is called “magic words.” Evidence from Teutonic paganism, so far as I know, is lacking, although the idea has left its clear imprint on the human saga. Its influence is strongest and its operation most interesting in the liturgies of the Mediterranean and of India. In old Latium, it seems, the pontifices endeavoured to conceal the true names of the gods, lest they might be wrongly used by unauthorised persons[185.1] or lest the enemy should get the knowledge of them and therewith the power to draw the divinities away. We may thus understand the often misinterpreted statement in Herodotus, that the Pelasgian deities were nameless; and the Greeks themselves must have been familiar with the ritual precaution of keeping secret the divine name, as we may gather from the phrase in the Euripidean fragment[185.2] about the enlightened man “who knows the silent names of the gods”: it is curious to find exactly the same expression in a Vedic hymn,[185.3] in which the sacrificial post, or tree to which the sacrifices were attached, is thus addressed: “Where thou knowest, oh tree, the sacred names of the gods, to that place make the offerings go.” It is possible that the same superstition may have been the original cause of the custom that has sometimes been observed of silent or inaudible prayer: the formulæ with the divine name attached to them being of such potency that they must be concealed.
The belief that the name belongs to the essence of the personality explains the curious formula in the Umbrian prayer preserved in the Tabulæ Iguvinæ, where the god Grabovius is implored to be propitious to the “Arx Fisia” and to “the name of the Arx Fisia,” as if the name of the city was a living and independent entity.
In the Greek liturgies we note the anxious care with which particular qualifying epithets were selected and attached to the personal name of the divinity, so as to make clear what was the precise operation of divine favour which the prayer aimed at evoking. This explains why so many divinities, some of whom were scarcely known outside a narrow area, were invoked as πολυώνυμε, “thou god of many names,” all possible titles of power being summed up in one word. Certain passages in the poets become intelligible only in the light of this idea: such as the well-known phrase in the chorus of the Agamemnon of Æschylus:[187.1] “Zeus, whosoever the god is, if this name of Zeus is dear to him, by this name I now appeal to him.” The thought and the words of the Vedic poet are often the same as the Greek: Agni is πολυώνυμος: “Agni, many are the names of thee the Immortal one”; and again, “The father adoring gives many names to thee, oh Agni, if thou shouldest take pleasure therein.”[187.2]