But veneration is inherent in the human breast. Presently mankind, emerging from intellectual infancy, began to detect absurdity in creation without a Creator, in effects without causes. As yet, however, they did not dare to throw upon a Single Being the whole onus of the world of matter, creation, preservation, and destruction. Man, instinctively impressed by a sense of his own unworthiness, would hopelessly have attempted to conceive the idea of a purely Spiritual Being, omnipotent and omnipresent. Awestruck by the admirable phenomena and the stupendous powers of Nature, filled with a sentiment of individual weakness, he abandoned himself to a flood of superstitious fears, and prostrated himself before natural objects, inanimate as well as animate. Thus comforted by the sun and fire, benefited by wind and rain, improved by hero and sage, destroyed by wild beasts, dispersed by convulsions of Nature, he fell into a rude, degrading, and cowardly Fetissism, the faith of fear, and the transition state from utter savagery to barbarism.
In support of this opinion it may be observed that this religion—if indeed Fetissism merit that sacred name—in its earliest form contains no traces of a Godhead or a Creator.[211] It is a systematic worship of the personified elements, productions, and powers of Nature, male and female, and supported by a host of associates and subordinates. Its triad is Indra, the Æther-god; Varuna ([Greek: ουρανος: ouranos]), the Sun-god; and Agni, the Fire-god. The polytheistic triad of the Puranas being then unknown, the Creator, Brahma, appears in the Vedas; the Preserver, Vishnu, inferior to Indra, represents the firmament; and Siwa is proved by Lassen to have been a local god, subsequently admitted by the Brahmans into their vast Pantheon. Still further from man’s belief in those early days is the bold and original thought of the Upanashids and Vedantas, destined so soon to fall before the formulæ of the schools and law-books, the Puranas and other traditions. There Brahm, or the One Almighty, is made the pinnacle of the gorgeous pagoda of belief; the whole universe, matter and spirit, is represented to be the very substance and development of the Demiurgos. In support of their grand Pantheism the Brahma-Sutra declares the human soul to be a portion of the Deity—divinæ particula auræ—“the relation not being that of master and servant, but that of the whole and part.” Creation was assumed to be the extension of the Creator’s essence, as the mathematical point produces by its increase length, depth, and breadth by endowing empty space with the properties of figure. From this refined and metaphysical dogma, this theoretical emanation of being from, and its corollary, refusion into, the Soul of the World, springs the doctrine of Metempsychosis, “implying belief in an after-state of rewards and punishments and a moral government of creation.” The votary of Hinduism has now progressed so far as to symbolize the vulgar idolatry of the people. Beneficent animals are explained as symbols of Brahma’s creative and Vishnu’s preserving functions; wild and ferocious beasts are typified as the Deity’s destroying power. They revere men of splendid abilities and glorious actions as having more of the divine essence and a directer emanation than the vulgar herd. Hence the senseless idol worship of the unlearned. Select forms also, as the cleft of a tree, are chosen to represent materially—oculis subjecta fidelibus—the passive power of generation, an upright rock expressing the active.
Thus semi-civilized man explains away the follies of his childhood, and excuses himself for leaving the ignorant in the outer glooms of a symbolical faith. But does knowledge precede ignorance—the explanation the fable? Or is it reasonable to suppose that a symbol, a type, a myth, was ever worshipped, or that men were ever ashamed of their gods? The Hindu, and indeed many a Christian, still adores the bull and cow, the rock, the river, the idol, the relic, and the actual image; they do not kneel before its metaphysics. The learned explain them into mere deifications. They are, however, still deities to the layman and the esoteric; and any attempt to allegorize them would be held, as in ancient Greece, like the reform of Epicurus, mere Atheism. We must, however, justly to appreciate these ancient dogmas, rebecome the primitive children of earth—man in his infancy.[212] The wisdom of Egypt, the learning of the East are now puerility. But “who knows what luminous proofs were propagated under the disguise of their old idolatry? Who cannot see that imagination, first active faculty of the mind, was fostered by myth, the moral sense by fable, and the first vacillating steps of knowledge were encouraged by precepts now seemingly childish and absurd?” (Dabistan). Confucius was as disposed to primarize secondary causes as his predecessors. Owning that he knew nothing about the gods, he therefore preferred to avoid the subject.
The ancient Persians, according to Herodotus, who conversed with them, ignored Dualism, their later scheme. Rejecting the images of gods and angels, they worshipped without personification or allegory æthereal fire drawn from the Sun. The universe was their temple, their altars Pyrætheia, or circles of stones, in the centre of which stood the kiblah of their simple ignicolism. The very Puritans of heathenry, they hated the grandiose fanes of the Egyptians, they plundered their magnificent tombs, slew their bestial deities, and devoured their garden gods. Presently symbolism began to intrude upon the simple and primitive faith of Iran. Light and fire, according to Strabo, were worshipped as the fittest emblems of spirit and subtile intelligence. Zoroaster was made to believe in a God, “the Best, Incorruptible, Eternal, Unmade, Indivisible, and most Unlike everything”; in fact, an abstraction, a negative. Yet Hyde, Anquetil du Perron, and other moderns make the Parsee sect to represent with their complicated system of rites and ceremonies, their legion of supernatural beings, powers, and influences, and abstruse Dualism, the pure ignicolism of the old Guebre.
But the dark epoch of savage Atheism having fulfilled its time, already in the Fetissism, the Polytheism, the Pantheism, the Metempsychosis dogma, and the Idolatry of the early East may be descried the dawning of an enlightened Theism. Like the dogma of a future state of rewards and punishments in Moses’ day, it was not unknown though unexplored. The Hindus had their Vedas Shashwata, and the Guebres their Akarana Zarwána. The former ruled the triads; the latter was superior to Hormuzd, the Sun, and Ahriman Ahura-mana, the Evil Principle personified. So the Greeks had a [Greek: Θεος: Theos], and the Romans a Deus, ignored except as a theory. The Arabs and the Mexicans in their vast Polytheism still distinguished Al, the Supreme Being, from the crowd of subaltern gods, angels and devils, mediators, subordinate intelligences, incarnations, transmigrations, emanations, manifestations, and similar earthly representatives. Here, then, was the thought-germ of an eternal, unmade, incorruptible, and creative Deity. Enveloped in the mists and shades of priestly fraud and popular ignorance, still the dogma did exist; and so comforting has been its light to the soul of man, that no earthly power has ever availed to extinguish it.
The Vedas Shashwata has been interpreted by philologists to signify the Sun. Akarana Zarwána (boundless time) is clearly synonymous with venerable Chronos. So the Mulungu of East Africa and the Uhlungu of the Kafirs mean equally a spirit, the sun, or the firmament. Amongst the Masai race, near Kilimanjaro, Engai, the Creator, is feminine, God and rain being confounded.
The similarity of belief, of manners and customs, and even of the coincidence of lawful and unlawful food, between India and Egypt is too striking to be accounted for by mere chance. The Fetissism of the one exactly resembled that of the other. Both worshipped personified Nature, or Manushya-Ohakta; they exalted into godhead and adored the objects of gratitude and reverence, of hope and fear. The “great holy family” of India became, on the banks of the Nile, Osiris, Isis, and Horus. Osiris, afterwards typified as the “incarnate Goodness of the Supreme,” perished to overcome Evil, was raised to life once more, and became the Judge of the quick and the dead. Isis again is the giver of Death, and Horus, or Hor, the entrance or re-entrance into Life. Every male deity in both systems had his Sakti, or passive energy, symbolized by a woman. Both mythologies had sacred cattle. Eggs, onions, and beans—favourite articles of diet among the present Muslims—were forbidden to both for mystical reasons. The lotus flower, an aboriginal of India, and connected with the superstitions of either country, has perished out of Egypt with the Muslims, who have no object in preserving the exotic. In Indian mythology was the Trisiras, in Egypt the Tevnon, in Greece and Rome the Cerberus, that three-headed dog in Hades, whose existence must have been communicated from one people to another. India worships the Sacred Serpent, the modern Muslim of Egypt adores that of Jebel Shaykh Haridi. Hindu Yogis and Saunyasis still wander to the banks of the Nile, and prostrate themselves before its ruined fanes. Society in India was divided into four great separate bodies—priests, soldiers, tradesmen, and serviles. The Egyptians numbered a sacerdotal order, a military caste, husbandmen, tradesmen and artificers, and, lastly, the shepherds, their abomination. Diodorus Siculus enumerates five castes. The fifth, however, or shepherds, probably did not belong to society; they were outcasts, corresponding with the Hindu mixed bloods. In ancient Persia the rigid castes were also four in number. And as the Aryas or Hindus of Aryavarrta, the Land of Men, are aborigines of Ariana and cognates of the Arian race, perhaps this system of artificial and unnatural distinctions arose in the regions of Mid-Asia. Indeed, Sir W. Jones came to a broader conclusion; namely, that the three primitive races of mankind must originally have migrated from a vast central region of earth, and that that region was Iran.
As time wore on, Pantheism, which sees a deity everywhere, even within ourselves, regarded the terrestrial gods as earthly vessels animated with a spark of the Universal Soul. The subaltern deities, the objects of Sabæan worship, as the sun, the moon, and the fixed stars, were held to be superior mediating powers with the Almighty Power. A thousand interpretations, physical, symbolical, mystical, and astronomical, were framed by the wise of Memphis. And as amongst the Hindus, so the Deity of Egypt was, though revealed to the initiated, sedulously obscured to the vulgar by a host of Avatars and incarnations, of transmigrations and subordinate intelligences.
History is silent upon that most interesting subject, the early connexion of India and Egypt. There are, however, still traces of its existence through Arabia, although Wilford greatly exaggerated the subject. Throughout Oman and Eastern Arabia there are traces to the present day of castish prejudice. No Kabílí, or man of noble tribe, however poor, will become a Haddâd (blacksmith), a Shámmár (shoemaker, in Hindustani Chamár), a Dabbagh (tanner), and a Nayyál (dyer). The Hindus of Maskat have an Avatar. Every Pandit knows that Shiva and his wife, under the names of Kapot-Eshwara and Kapot-Eshwari, visited Mecca, and were there worshipped under the form of male and female pigeons. This notes a direct communication along the coast of the Shepherd Kings. Again, it is possible that in ages now forgotten the Æthiopians may have received from the Hindus their arts, sciences, and civilization, which would naturally float northwards with the Nile.
From Egypt these dogmas passed over to Greece, from Greece to the Rasenian people of ancient Etruria. This diffusion, proved by the similarity of their belief, is supported by old tradition. Herodotus explains the fable of the black pigeon that fled to Dodona, and there established the oracle on the ground that it was founded by a female captive from the Thebaïd. The manifest resemblance of the rites and ceremonies, the processions and mysteries, together with the historic fact that the greatest minds in Greece had studied with the priest-philosophers of Helispotes and Memphis, are the main points of circumstantial evidence whence rose Warburton’s luminous theory that the knowledge of the “Secret One” was preserved by the esoteric, but concealed for fear of the profane. He was an atheist who believed in a Single Deity because he thus degraded and dishonoured the vulgar gods; and the ancients, most pious men, solemnly tore to pieces all guilty of similar impiety. The Arcana, however, were sacred; under their shadow any dogma might flourish.