A Modern Zoroastrian

by S. Laing

Religions, ‘working hypotheses’—Newman’s illative sense—Origins of religions—Ghosts and spirits—Fetishes—Nature-worship—Solar myths—Planets—Evolution of nature-worship—Polytheism, pantheism, and theism—Evolution of monotheism in the Old Testament—Evolution of morality—Natural law and miracle—Evidence for miracles—Insufficiency of evidence—Absence of intelligent design—Agnosticism—Origin of evil—Can only be explained by polarity—Optimism and pessimism—Jesus, the Christian Ormuzd—Christianity without miracles.

Having thus, I may hope, given the reader some precise ideas of what are the boundaries and conditions of human knowledge, we may proceed to consider their application to the highest subjects, religions and philosophies.

In the introductory chapter of this work I have said that all religions are in effect ‘working hypotheses,’ by which men seek to reconcile the highest aspirations of their nature with the facts of the universe, and bring the whole into some harmonious concordance. I said so for the following reasons. In a discussion at the Metaphysical Society on the uniformity of laws of nature, recorded in the ‘Nineteenth Century,’ Huxley is represented as saying that he considered this uniformity, not as an axiomatic truth like the first postulates of geometry, but as a ‘working hypothesis’; adding, however, that it was an hypothesis which had never been known to fail. To this some distinguished advocates of Catholic theology replied, that their conviction was of a higher nature, for their belief in God was a final truth which was the basis of their whole intellectual and moral nature, and which it was irrational to question. This is in effect Cardinal Newman’s celebrated argument of an ‘illative sense,’ based on a complete assent of all the faculties, and which was therefore a higher authority than any conclusions of science. The answer is obvious, that complete assent, so far from being a test of truth, is, on the contrary, almost always a proof that truth has not been attained, owing either to erroneous assumptions as to the premises, or to the omission of important factors in the solution of the problem. To give an instance, I suppose there could not be a stronger case of complete assent than that of the Inquisitors who condemned the theories of Galileo. They had in support of the proposition that the sun revolved round the earth the testimony of the senses, the universal belief of mankind in all ages, the direct statement of inspired Scripture, the authority of the infallible Church. Was all this to be set aside because some ‘sophist vainly mad with dubious lore’ told them, on grounds of some new-fangled so-called science, that the earth revolved round its axis and round the sun? ‘No; let us stamp out a heresy so contrary to our “illative sense,” and so fatal to all the most certain and cherished beliefs of the Christian world, to the inspiration of the Word of God, and to the authority of His Church.’ ‘E pur si muove,’ and yet the earth really did move; and the verdict of fact was that Galileo and science were right, and the Church and the illative sense wrong.

In truth the distinction between the conclusions of science and those of religious creeds might be more properly expressed by saying that the former are ‘working hypotheses’ which never fail, while the latter are ‘working hypotheses’ which frequently fail. Thus, the fundamental hypothesis of Cardinal Newman and his school of a one infinite and eternal personal Deity, who regulates the course of events by frequent miraculous interpositions, so far from being a necessary and axiomatic truth, has never appeared so to the immense majority of the human race: and even at the present day, in civilised and so-called Christian countries, its principal advocates complain that ninety-nine out of every hundred practically ignore it. It is not so with the uniformity of the laws of nature. No palæolithic savage ever hesitated about putting one foot after another in chase of a mammoth from a fear that his working hypothesis of uniform law might fail, the support of the solid earth give way, and with his next step he might find himself toppling over into the abyss of an infinite vacuum. In like manner Greeks and Romans, Indians and Chinese, monotheists, polytheists, pantheists, Jews and Buddhists, Christians and Mahometans, all use standard weights in their daily transactions without any misgivings that the law of gravity may turn out not to be uniform. But religions theories vary from time to time and from place to place, and we can in a great many cases trace their origins and developments like those of other political and social organisms.

To trace their origins we must, as in the case of social institutions, look first at the ideas prevailing among those savage and barbarous races who are the best representatives of our early progenitors; and secondly at historical records. In the first case we find the earliest rudiments of religious ideas in the universal belief in ghosts and spirits. Every man is conceived of as being a double of himself, and as having a sort of shadowy self, which comes and goes in sleep or trance, and finally takes leave of the body, at death, to continue its existence as a ghost. The air is thus peopled with an immense number of ghosts who continue very much their ordinary existence, haunt their accustomed abodes, and retain their living powers and attributes, which are exerted generally with a malevolent desire to injure and annoy. Hence among savage races, and by survival even among primitive nations of the present day, we find the most curious devices to cheat or frighten away the ghost, so that he may not return to the house in which he died. Thus, the corpse is carried out, not by the door, but by a hole made for the purpose in the wall, which is afterwards built up, a custom which prevails with a number of widely separated races—Greenlanders, Hottentots, Algonquins, and Fijians; and the practice even survives among more civilised nations, such as the Chinese, Siamese, and Thibetans; nor is it wholly extinct in some of the primitive parts of Europe.

This idea obviously led to the practice of constructing tents or houses for the ghosts to live in, and of depositing with them articles of food and weapons to be used in their ghostly existence. In the case of great chiefs, not only their arms and ornaments are deposited, but their horses, slaves, and wives were sacrificed and buried with them, so that they might enter spirit-land with an appropriate retinue. The early Egyptian tombs were as nearly as possible facsimiles of the house in which the deceased had lived, with pictures of his geese, oxen, and other possessions painted on the walls, evidently under the idea that the ghosts of these objects would minister to the wants and please the fancy of the human ghost whose eternal dwelling was in the tomb where his mummy was deposited.

Another development of the belief in spirits is that of fetish-worship, in which superstitious reverence is paid to some stock or stone, tree or animal, in which a mysterious influence is supposed to reside, probably owing to its being the chosen abode of some powerful spirit. This is common among the negro races, and it takes a curious development among many races of American Indians, where the tribe is distinguished by the totem, or badge of some particular animal, such as the bear, the tortoise, or the hare, which is in some way supposed to be the patron spirit of the clan, and often the progenitor from whom they are descended. This idea is so rooted that intermarriage between men and women who have the same totem is prohibited as a sort of incest, and the daughter of a bear-mother must seek for a husband among the sons of the deer or fox. Possibly a vestige of the survival of this idea may be traced in the coat-of-arms of the Sutherland family, and the wild cat may have been the totem of the Clan Chattan, while the oak tree was that of the Clan Quoich, with whom they fought on the Inch of Perth. Be this as it may, it is clearly a most ancient and widespread idea, and prevails from Greenland to Australia; while it evidently formed the oldest element of the prehistoric religion of Egypt, where each separate province had its peculiar sacred animal, worshipped by the populace in one nome, and detested in the neighbouring one.

By far the earliest traces of anything resembling religious ideas are those found in burying-places of the neolithic period. It is evident that at this remote period ideas prevailed respecting ghost or spirit life and a future existence very similar to those of modern savages. They placed weapons and implements in the graves of the dead, and not infrequently sacrificed human victims, and held cannibal feasts. Whether this was done in the far more remote palæolithic era is uncertain, for very few undoubted burials of this period have been discovered, and those few have frequently been used again for later interments. We can only draw a negative inference from the absence of idols which are so abundant in the prehistoric abodes explored by Professor Schliemann, among the very numerous carvings and drawings found in the caves of the reindeer period in France and Germany, that the religion of the palæolithic men, if they had any, had not reached the stage when spirits or deities were represented by images.