Finally, the conception of purity comes under the dominion of the higher faith in a personal god. In Greece, Apollo and Zeus attach to themselves the ritual and the associated ideas; in Persia the whole complex code of purity is established by Ahura Mazda; in Israel by Jahvé, who enforces the minutest details of the law with insistence on the purity of God.[106.2] In Babylonian as in Vedic religion, the fire-god is pre-eminently the purifier, a name which is attached particularly to Agni, and we find in the Babylonian liturgical texts the prayer,[107.1] “May the torch of the shining fire-god cleanse me.” Nor does Buddhism appear to differ from Leviticus or the Zend-Avesta in respect of the complications of its cathartic rules and the importance it attached to them. The Buddhist missionary, I-Tsing, exhorts the faithful to observe the elaborate prescriptions of the Buddha, “because,” as he naively puts it, “gods and spirits get disgusted with our ways of wearing garments and eating food.” With this abundance of testimony before us, we are all the more surprised to find that very little is forthcoming from the records of our own ancestral paganism. We can scarcely believe that our Teutonic ancestors were destitute of the idea of lustration, and that their cleanliness and chastity, attested by the Roman writers and still more clearly by their own sagas, were virtues of purely secular origin. And in fact we have certain records of Teutonic ritual that seem to point to cathartic ideas: “After the goddess Nerthus had gone on her annual procession round the villages,” as Tacitus informs us,[108.1] “her chariot and garments and her own person were solemnly washed in the waters of a sacred lake, as if the holy divinity had been polluted by her intercourse with men.” It is also possible that the custom still prevalent in the Teutonic populations of Europe, of leaping over the bonfire on midsummer’s eve, is the relic of a ceremony of fire-lustration performed before the beginning of harvest.[108.2] Doubtless also they had the same rules as those prevailing in nearly all communities, whether civilised or uncivilised, concerning the purity of temples; for we have record of an Icelandic law that the “Holy Place of Peace” was not to be defiled by blood or any human uncleanness.[108.3] Still, though other evidence pointing in the same direction might be gathered, it seems clear that the burden of the cathartic ritual did not weigh heavily on the consciences of our fathers when the dawn of their history begins. I am not aware of any indication, for instance, that they regarded formal lustration after bloodshed to be obligatory or desirable. And their comparative freedom in regard to such ceremonies is a fact of great importance with which we must reckon in our estimate of our later spiritual history. We may at the same time believe, on general grounds, that they also had at some remoter epoch passed through a period of bondage to the same ideas and the same formalities that we find so generally prevalent in other kindred and alien races.
The more interesting side of the inquiry now presents itself, the question about the influence that these cathartic ideas may have exercised upon religion, morality, and law. We may endeavour, for the sake of systematisation, to maintain this tripartite classification, although we find it becoming more and more illusory the further our investigation travels back to the earlier social life of man.
But before attempting to survey the special facts that present themselves within these three departments, it is well to note one phenomenon that concerns religion and morality in equal measure, and is of perhaps greater importance than all others in the varied process of the evolution of the cathartic idea. We have mainly been dealing so far with facts that seem to belong to the most primitive deposit of human consciousness and not properly to be ethical in the modern sense at all: the stain of blood, even incurred by ruthless murder, the stain of childbirth and the sexual processes, the contagion of the corpse, are all for the same reason “suspect” to primitive man because they involve vague and mysterious danger, not because they are associated with the concept of sin. Nor does this latter concept necessarily enter in, even when a more articulate animism has taken possession of the superstition, and the impurity means the presence of an evil spirit: the leper, the man who has come into contact with the dead, the blood-stained murderer, are all regarded as suffering from the same trouble, though in greater or lesser degree. The idea of purity and impurity, in fact, whether corporeal and external or whether spiritual in the sense of its association with the world of spirits, is still non-ethical, and we must not apply our moral standards to it until a later stage. It arrives at this stage and at its higher significance for morality when it has evolved the conception of a pure heart, a pure soul. And that this latter, which is one of the most pregnant of the concepts of developed ethics, was actually evolved from the primitive ritualistic and demoniac superstition can, I believe, be proved by the evidence, and accords with a well-known psychologic law of early thought.
We deceive ourselves if we are content to say that terms such as “pure heart,” “pure soul” are mere metaphors. The theory of metaphors is a refuge for those who do not understand, or who do not wish to understand, religious history, and much might be said of the far-reaching effects of this fallacy of interpretation. The soul was not called “ψυχή” or “animus” or “spiritus” by mere metaphor: nor was the phrase “white liver” a metaphor for the people who first applied it to the coward. Primitive man may be the victim of false analogy and association of ideas, but these mental processes mean for him something other than metaphor means for us. It is not by way of metaphor that the modern Basuto speaks of his heart “being black and dirty,” that is, “impure” or “sad,” the same word being used for corporeal impurity, sadness, and sin.[112.1] The colour of the impure act or bodily state is, so to speak, transferred inwards: if the act involves a physical stain, then, as things, words, and thoughts are so closely correlated in early psychology, the term “unclean word,” “unclean thought” expresses a literal belief: gradually, as the concept of mind and soul becomes more and more immaterial, we may reach the spiritual concept of mental purity which is of value for modern ethics. The example quoted above reveals the Basuto at the half-way point in this evolution: and a certain North-American Indian tribe, whose customs have been recorded by Miss Alice Fletcher, appears to have reached the same mental stage; in her paper called the “Shadow of a Ghost Lodge,”[113.1] she mentions that the kinsmen who sit together isolated from others and mourning the dead for a period must rigidly abstain from any tales of fighting or “bad words,” they must forget old injuries and cancel all grudges. The mental process that leads to this excellent tapu may be stated thus: the mourners are in a condition of deep impurity which they are endeavouring to cleanse away; quarrelling, vindictive speech, and memories would intensify the impurity, because all these are associated with bloodshed and death. This analogy may serve to explain the curious rule prevailing at Athens that anyone who laid a suppliant-bough on the altar in the Eleusinion during the period of the Eleusinian Mysteries was liable to the penalty of death or a heavy fine.[114.1] I would suggest that the underlying thought is the same: the laying the suppliant-bough indicated a grievance and was a legally quarrelsome act, and therefore a violation of the purity of the solemn season. It was probably a similar chain of reasoning that induced the Greeks and other races of the higher religion to enforce silence before and during the sacrifice, not merely in order that the priest should not be disturbed by the chatter of the crowd; for the word used for this sacred silence is εὐφημία, “auspicious speech”: it is obvious that the original motive of the rule was to guard against the utterance of any impure word that might produce an ill-omened condition of mind in the congregation.
Of this development of the idea of spiritual from that of ritualistic purity, the language of certain of the higher races affords the same indication as we find in the Basuto phrase: the Latin “purus” and the Greek καθαρός and φοῖβος themselves have an original material or physical significance; the blood that is shed and the unburied corpse emit a “miasma,” a defiling atmosphere charged with dangerous spirits, and the same word μίασμα comes to denote a spiritual corruption of the soul: touching a corpse is called “sin” in the Zend-Avesta;[115.1] and it is significant that the same word which is used to express the material idea of impurity in the Old Testament in the earlier books of the Law is employed in the later and more advanced ethical vocabulary of the Bible for a real sin against God as understood in the modern sense.
Again, we have other evidence besides the linguistic that the earliest conception of sin which we can call spiritual was still half-materialistic, and was still closely allied to that of bodily impurity. In the theory of earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away like a physical taint, the atonement takes the form of certain lustrations, and repentance is not considered necessary as a moral condition of release. And to the same middle stage of development belongs the process known as the transference of sin, whereby the sin can be extracted as if it were a substance from the person of the sinner and transferred into another man or animal or even an inanimate object. Think of sin as an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.[116.1] It no doubt belongs to a comparatively early period of savage religion. Among the Atkans, for instance,[117.1] we hear of such a release as this: the sin, which in this case was a gross violation of a natural law of the sex-instinct, was made to enter into certain weeds which were worn about the person, and then, under a clear sun were carefully thrown away, the sun himself being called to witness the act of transference. In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking off of evils was a great public festival: bands of warriors marched forth crying out, “Go forth, all evils,” and then bathed in the river, while the people shook out their clothes from the doors.[117.2] A similar record speaks of the Inca praying to the river-god to bear away his sins, which he had confessed in the sight of the sun. And during the Peruvian purification a similar rule prevailed to that which was noticed above, that all abusive language and strife was to be avoided. Or again, the belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be induced to find another living-lodgment, suggests the scapegoat, a familiar figure in Leviticus and in Greek ritual, the animal who bears away with it into the wilderness the sins of the people, or is put to death with the uttered prayer that into it may enter all the evils of the community. The Judaic record tells us that Aaron “confessed over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel… putting them on the head of the goat”; after this, as the animal was in a high degree of sin-infection, both Aaron and the man who led it away into the wilderness must wash and change their clothes.[118.1] The Egyptian rite described by Herodotus,[118.2] shows us the same idea differently worked out: the head of the animal is severed with the imprecation that it may bear the evils of the community, and is then either thrown into the river so that the stream may carry them away, or is sold to the Hellenes wherever there happens to be a Hellenic market: Herodotus does not tell us the reason of this, which, however, is easily divined: the Hellene is the stranger who, as the Egyptians hoped, might eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into his alien person the people’s sins; for the eating of other people’s sins is a recognised primitive process of transference.[119.1] What is unique in the Egyptian management of the ceremony is the skilful combination of religion and trade.
Finally, the ritual may demand a human scapegoat, who will fulfil exactly the same function as the animal. He may be put to death, or driven over the border, carrying away the national sins: he may be very vile, and therefore a fitting receptacle for sin, like the “κάθαρμα,” the “purifying man” in the Attic festival of the Thargelia, who was led through the streets, whipped with rods, and at one time burnt; or the slave at Marseilles,[119.2] who was fed up and reverentially treated for a year, and then was led forth in solemn procession through the streets and expelled from the city, praying that on him might fall all the evils of the community:[120.1] or the scapegoat-man may be exceptionally holy, being the better able, through his very holiness, to absorb harmlessly and dissipate the evils of others. Thus even the miserable victim of the Thargelia was mysteriously invested with a certain sacred character, and seems once to have been regarded in a certain degree as the counterpart of the divinity.[120.2]
Much of this ritual of sin-transference is altogether independent of the higher gods; it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or mechanical magic. At a later period it is harmonised with their service and accompanied with prayer; and at this stage we note a curious ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the primeval source of impurity, becomes itself a purifier, not by the law similia similibus curantur, but owing to the growing power of the sacrificial concept. “The blood of bulls and goats can wash away sins,” because the animal that has been consecrated by contact with the altar becomes charged with a divine potency, and its sacred blood, poured over the impure man, absorbs and disperses his impurity. Illustrations are easily gathered from Hellenic ritual,[121.1] which frequently employed the blood of swine for cathartic purposes. On an early vase-painting we see the hero Theseus seated on the altar of God the Atoner with pig’s blood running down his body to cleanse him from the slaughter of the brigands.[121.2] In the Judaic rule the blood of the red heifer was first sprinkled by the priest before the tabernacle of the congregation seven times, but for special purposes of lustration the “water of separation” was used, that is, water made holy by being mingled with the ashes of the heifer that had been burnt. We have a curious illustration of the double character of this water of separation: being consecrated and holy, it was powerful to cleanse away stain and sin: yet its own impure composition was not wholly forgotten, for he who sprinkled the water or touched it was unclean till evening.[122.1]
These ideas belong to very old-world thought, yet their reflex abides with us still in the heart of a spiritual creed; for their association is clear with the Christian conception of the transference of sin and of the divine victim that takes upon himself the sins of the people.
As far as we have examined it as yet, the concept of a “pure heart” is not necessarily wholly ethical; it is often coexistent with the ideas of sin that do not clearly recognise moral responsibility or the essential difference between deliberate wrong-doing and the ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. In the middle stage of ethical-religious growth, an innocent Œdipus may yet be regarded as πᾶς ἄναγνος, impure body and soul. The final point is reached when it is realised that the blood of bulls and goats cannot wash away sin, that nothing external can defile the heart or soul, but only evil thoughts and evil will. This purged and idealised concept will then in the progressive religions revolt against its own parentage, and will prompt the eternal antagonism of the prophet against the ritual priest, of the Christ against the Pharisee.