What would be likely to work more powerfully on the minds of a crude, sensitive people, in an early stage of the world, with no elaborate discipline of religious thought, than the facts and phenomena of death? Plainly, around this centre there must be deposited a vast quantity of ideas and fantasies. The task is to discriminate them, trace their individual origin, and classify them.
One of the most interesting and difficult questions connected with the subject before us is this: What, in any given time and place, were the limits of the popular belief? How much of the current representations in relation to another life were held as strict verity? What portions were regarded as fable or symbolism? It is obvious enough that among the civilized nations of antiquity the distinctions of literal statement, allegory, historic report, embellished legend, satire, poetic creation, philosophical hypothesis, religious myth, were more or less generally known. For example, when Aschylus makes one of his characters say, "Yonder comes a herald: so Dust, Clay's thirsty sister, tells me," the personification, unquestionably, was as purposed and conscious as it is when a poet in the nineteenth century says, "Thirst dived from the brazen glare of the sky and clutched me by the throat." So, too, when Homer describes the bag of Aolus, the winds, in possession of the sailors on board Ulysses' ship, the half humorous allegory cannot be mistaken for religious faith. It is equally obvious that these distinctions were not always carefully observed, but were often confounded. Therefore, in respect to the faith of primitive times, it is impossible to draw any broad, fixed lines and say conclusively that all on this side was consciously considered as fanciful play or emblem, all on that side as earnest fact. Each particular in each case must be examined by itself and be decided on its own merits by the light and weight of the moral probabilities. For example, if there was any historic basis for the myth of Herakles dragging Cerberus out of Hades, it was that this hero forcibly entered the Mysteries and dragged out to light the enactor of the part of the three headed dog. The aged North man, committing martial suicide rather than die in his peaceful bed, undoubtedly accepted the ensanguined picture of Valhalla as a truth. Virgil, dismissing Aneas from the Tartarean realm through "the ivory gate by which false dreams and fictitious visions are wont to issue," plainly wrought as a poet on imaginative materials.
It should be recollected that most of the early peoples had no rigid formularies of faith like the Christian creeds. The writings preserved to us are often rather fragments of individual speculations and hopes than rehearsals of public dogmas. Plato is far from revealing the contemporaneous belief of Greece in the sense in which Thomas Aquinas reveals the contemporaneous belief of Christendom. In Egypt, Persia, Rome, among every cultured people, there were different classes of minds, the philosophers, the priests, the poets, the warriors, the common multitude, whose modes of thinking were in contrast, whose methods of interpreting their ancestral traditions and the phenomena of human destiny were widely apart, whose respective beliefs had far different boundaries. The openly skeptical Euripides and Lucian are to be borne in mind as well as the apparently credulous Hesiod and Homer. Of course the Fables of Asop were not literally credited. Neither, as a general thing, were the Metamorphoses of Ovid. With the ancients, while there was a general national cast of faith, there were likewise varieties of individual and sectarian belief and unbelief, skepticism and credulity, solemn reason and recreative fancy.
The people of Lystra, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, actually thought Barnabas and Paul were Zeus and Hermes, and brought oxen and garlands to offer them the sacrifices appropriate to those deities. Peisistratus obtained rule over Athens by dressing a stately woman, by the name of Phye, as Athene, and passing off her commands as those of the tutelary goddess. Herodotus ridicules the people for unsuspiciously accepting her.2 The incredibleness of a doctrine is no obstacle to a popular belief in it. Whosoever thinks of the earnest reception of the dogma of transubstantiation the conversion of a wheaten wafer into the infinite God by nearly three quarters of Christendom at this moment, must permit the paradox to pass unchallenged. Doubtless the closing eye of many an expiring Greek reflected the pitiless old oarsman plying his frost cold boat across the Stygian ferry, and his failing ear caught the rush of the Phlegethonian surge. It is equally certain that, at the same time, many another laughed at these things as childish fictions, fitted only to scare "the baby of a girl."
Stricken memory, yearning emotion, kindled fancy, a sensitive and timorous observation of natural phenomena, rustling leaves, wavering shadows, apparent effects of unknown causes, each is a superstitious mother of beliefs. The Sonora Indians say that departed souls dwell among the caves and rocks of the cliffs, and that the echoes often heard there are their voices. Ruskin suggests that the cause of the Greeks surrounding the lower world residence of Persephone with poplar groves was that "the frailness, fragility, and inconstancy of the leafage of the poplar tree resembled the fancied ghost people." We can very easily imagine how, in the breeze at the entrance to some subterranean descent,
"A ghostly rank Of poplars, like a halted train of shades,
Trembled."
The operations of fierce passions, hate, fright, and rage, in a brain boiling with blood and fire, make pictures which the savage afterwards holds in remembrance as facts. He does not by reflection consciously distinguish the internal acts and sights of the mind from objective verities. Barbarians as travellers and psychologists have repeatedly observed usually pay great attention to the vagaries of madmen, the doings and utterances of the insane. These persons are regarded as possessed by higher beings. Their words are oracles: the horrible shapes, the grotesque scenes, which their disordered and inflamed faculties conjure up, are eagerly caught at, and such accounts of them as they are able to make out are treasured up as revelations. This fact is of no slight importance as an element in the hinting basis of the beliefs of uncultivated tribes. Many a vision of delirium, many a raving medley of insanity, has been accepted as truth.3 Another phenomenon, closely allied to the former, has wrought in a similar manner and still more widely. It has been a common superstition with barbarous nations in every part of the world, from Timbuctoo to Siberia, to suppose that dreams are real
2 Lib. i. cap. 60.
3 De Boismont, Rational History of Hallucinations, ch. 15: Of Hallucinations considered in a Psychological, Historical, and Religious Point of View.
adventures which the soul passes through, flying abroad while the body lies, a dormant shell, wrapped in slumber. The power of this influence in nourishing a copious credulity may easily be imagined.