THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD

TWO main schools of religious thinking exist in our midst at the present day: the school of humanists and the school of animists. This work is to some extent an attempt to reconcile them. It contains, I believe, the first extended effort that has yet been made to trace the genesis of the belief in a God from its earliest origin in the mind of primitive man up to its fullest development in advanced and etherealised Christian theology. My method is therefore constructive, not destructive. Instead of setting out to argue away or demolish a deep-seated and ancestral element in our complex nature, this book merely posits for itself the psychological question, “By what successive steps did men come to frame for themselves the conception of a deity?”—or, if the reader so prefers it, “How did we arrive at our knowledge of God?” It seeks provisionally to answer these profound and important questions by reference to the earliest beliefs of savages, past or present, and to the testimony of historical documents and ancient monuments. It does not concern itself at all with the validity or invalidity of the ideas in themselves; it does but endeavour to show how inevitable they were, and how man’s relation with the external universe was certain a priori to beget them as of necessity.

In so vast a synthesis, it would be absurd to pretend at the present day that one approached one’s subject entirely de novo. Every enquirer must needs depend much upon the various researches of his predecessors in various parts of his field of enquiry. The problem before us divides itself into three main portions: first, how did men come to believe in many gods—the origin of polytheism; second, how, by elimination of most of these gods, did certain races of men come to believe in one single supreme and omnipotent God—the origin of monotheism; third how, having arrived at that concept, did the most advanced races and civilisations come to conceive of that God as Triune, and to identify one of his Persons with a particular divine and human incarnation—the origin of Christianity. In considering each of these three main problems I have been greatly guided and assisted by three previous enquirers or sets of enquirers.

As to the origin of polytheism, I have adopted in the main Mr. Herbert Spencer’s remarkable ghost theory, though with certain important modifications and additions. In this part of my work I have also been largely aided by materials derived from Mr. Duff Macdonald, the able author of Africana, from Mr. Turner, the well-known Samoan missionary, and from several other writers, supplemented as they are by my own researches among the works of explorers and ethnologists in general. On the whole, I have here accepted the theory which traces the origin of the belief in gods to primeval ancestor-worship, or rather corpse-worship, as against the rival theory which traces its origin to a supposed primitive animism.

As to the rise of monotheism, I have been influenced in no small degree by Kuenen and the Teutonic school of Old Testament criticism, whose ideas have been supplemented by later concepts derived from Professor Robertson Smith’s admirable work, The Religion of the Semites. But here, on the whole, the central explanation I have to offer is, I venture to think, new and original: the theory, good or bad, of the circumstances which led to the elevation of the ethnical Hebrew God, Jahweh, above all his rivals, and his final recognition as the only true and living god, is my own and no one else’s.

As to the origin of Christianity, and its relations to the preceding cults of corn and wine gods, I have been guided to a great extent by Mr. J. G. Frazer and Mannhardt, though I do not suppose that either the living or the dead anthropologist would wholly acquiesce in the use I have made of their splendid materials. Mr. Frazer, the author of that learned work, The Golden Bough, has profoundly influenced the opinions of all serious workers at anthropology and the science of religion, and I cannot too often acknowledge the deep obligations under which I lie to his profound and able treatises. At the same time, I have so transformed the material derived from him and from Dr. Robertson Smith as to have made it in many ways practically my own; and I have supplemented it by several new examples and ideas, suggested in the course of my own tolerably wide reading.

Throughout the book as a whole, I also owe a considerable debt to Dr. E. B. Tylor, from whom I have borrowed much valuable matter; to Mr. Sidney Hartland’s Legend of Perseus; to Mr. Lawrence Gomme, who has come nearer at times than anyone else to the special views and theories here promulgated; and to Mr. William Simpson of the Illustrated London News, an unobtrusive scholar whose excellent monographs on The Worship of Death and kindred subjects have never yet received the attention They deserve, at the hands of unprejudiced students of religion. My other obligations, to Dr. Mommsen, to my friends Mr. Edward Clodd, Professor John Rhys, and Professor York Powell, as well as to numerous travellers, missionaries, historians, and classicists, are too frequent to specify.

Looking at the subject broadly, I would presume to say once more that my general conclusions may be regarded as representing to some extent a reconciliation between the conflicting schools of humanists and animists, headed respectively by Mr. Spencer and Mr. Frazer, though with a leaning rather to the former than the latter.

At the same time it would be a great mistake to look upon my book as in any sense a mere eirenicon or compromise. On the contrary, it is in every part a new and personal work, containing, whatever its value, a fresh and original synthesis of the subject. I would venture to point out as especially novel the two following points: the complete demarcation of religion from mythology, as practice from mere explanatory gloss or guesswork; and the important share assigned in the genesis of most existing religious systems to the deliberate manufacture of gods by killing. This doctrine of the manufactured god, to which nearly half my book is devoted, seems to me to be a notion of cardinal value. Among other new ideas of secondary rank, I would be bold enough to enumerate the following: the establishment of three successive stages in the conception of the Life of the Dead, which might be summed up as Corpse-worship, Ghost-worship, and Shade-worship, and which answer to the three stages of preservation or mummification, burial, and cremation; the recognition of the high place to be assigned to the safe-keeping of the oracular head in the growth of idol-worship; the importance attached to the sacred stone, the sacred stake, and the sacred tree, and the provisional proof of their close connection with the graves of the dead; the entirely new conception of the development of monotheism among the Jews from the exclusive cult of the jealous god; the hypothesis of the origin of cultivation from tumulus-offerings, and its connection with the growth of gods of cultivation; the wide expansion given to the ancient notion of the divine-human victim; the recognition of the world-wide prevalence of the five-day festival of the corn or wine god, and of the close similarity which marks its rites throughout all the continents, including America; the suggested evolution of the god-eating sacraments of lower religions from the cannibal practice of honorifically eating one’s dead relations; * and the evidence of the wide survival of primitive corpse-worship down to our own times in civilised Europe. I could largely increase this rapid list of what I believe to be the new contributions here made to the philosophy of religious evolution; but I purposely refrain. I think it will be allowed that if even a few of these ideas turn out on examination to be both new and true, my book will have succeeded in justifying its existence.

* While this work was passing through the press a similar
theory has been propounded by Mr. Flinders Petrie in an
article on “Eaten with Honour,” in which he reviews briefly
the evidence for the custom in Egypt and elsewhere.

I put forth this work with the utmost diffidence. The harvest is vast and the labourers are few. I have been engaged upon collecting and comparing materials for more than twenty years. I have been engaged in writing my book for more than ten. As I explain in the last chapter, the present first sketch of the conclusions at which I have at last arrived is little more than provisional. I desire in my present essay merely to lay down the lines of the general theory which after so many years of study I incline to accept. If my attempt succeeds in attracting public attention, I hope to follow it up by several other volumes in which the main opinions or suggestions here set forth may be reinforced and expanded by copious collections of evidence and illustrations. If it fails to arouse public attention, however, I must perforce be satisfied with this very inadequate preliminary statement. I should also like to add here, what I point out at greater length in the body of the work, that I do not hold dogmatically to all or to a single one of the ideas I have now expressed. They are merely conceptions forced upon my mind by the present state of the evidence; and I recognise the fact that in so vast and varied a province, where almost encyclopaedic knowledge would be necessary in order to enable one to reach a decided conclusion, every single one or all together of these conceptions are liable to be upset by further research. I merely say, “This is how the matter figures itself to me at present, on the strength of the facts now and here known to us.”

A few chapters of the book were separately published in various reviews at the time they were first written. They were composed, however, from the outset, as parts of this book, which does not therefore consist of disconnected essays thrown into line in an artificial unity. Each occupies the precise place in the argument for which it was first intended. The chapters in question are those on “Religion and Mythology,” and “The Life of the Dead,” contributed under the titles of “Practical Religion” and “Immortality and Resurrection” to the Fortnightly Re-view; that on “Sacred Stones,” contributed under the same name to the same periodical; and that on “The Gods of Egypt,” which originally appeared in the Universal Review. I have to thank the proprietors and editors of those magazines for permission to print them in their proper place here. They have all been altered and brought up as far as I could bring them to the existing state of our knowledge with regard to the subjects of which they treat.

In dealing with so large a variety of materials, drawn from all times and places, races and languages, it would be well-nigh impossible to avoid errors. Such as my own care could discover I have of course corrected: for the rest, I must ask on this ground the indulgence of those who may happen to note them.

I have endeavoured to write without favour or prejudice, animated by a single desire to discover the truth. Whether I have succeeded in that attempt or not, I trust my book may be received in the same spirit in which it has been written,—a spirit of earnest anxiety to learn all that can be learnt by enquiry and investigation of man’s connection with his God, in the past and the present. In this hope I commit it to the kindly consideration of that small section of the reading public which takes a living interest in religious questions.

THE EVOLUTION OF THE IDEA OF GOD.

CHAPTER I.—CHRISTIANITY AS A RELIGIOUS STANDARD.

I propose in this work to trace out in rough outline the evolution of the idea of God from its earliest and crudest beginnings in the savage mind of primitive man to that highly evolved and abstract form which it finally assumes in contemporary philosophical and theological thinking.

In the eyes of the modern evolutionary enquirer the interest of the origin and history of this widespread idea is mainly psychological. We have before us a vast and pervasive group of human opinions, true or false, which have exercised and still exercise an immense influence upon the development of mankind and of civilisation: the question arises, Why did human beings ever come to hold these opinions at all, and how did they arrive at them? What was there in the conditions of early man which led him to frame to himself such abstract notions of one or more great supernatural agents, of whose objective existence he had certainly in nature no clear or obvious evidence? Regarding the problem in this light, as essentially a problem of the processes of the human mind, I set aside from the outset, as foreign to my purpose, any kind of enquiry into the objective validity of any one among the religious beliefs thus set before us as subject-matter. The question whether there may be a God or gods, and, if so, what may be his or their substance and attributes, do not here concern us. All we have to do in our present capacity is to ask ourselves strictly, What first suggested to the mind of man the notion of deity in the abstract at all? And how, from the early multiplicity of deities which we find to have prevailed in all primitive times among all human races, did the conception of a single great and unlimited deity first take its rise? In other words, why did men ever believe there were gods at all, and why from many gods did they arrive at one? Why from polytheism have the most advanced nations proceeded to monotheism?

To put the question in this form is to leave entirely out of consideration the objective reality or otherwise of the idea itself. To analyse the origin of a concept is not to attack the validity of the belief it encloses. The idea of gravitation, for example, arose by slow degrees in human minds, and reached at last its final expression in Newton’s law. But to trace the steps by which that idea was gradually reached is not in any way to disprove or to discredit it. The Christian believer may similarly hold that men arrived by natural stages at the knowledge of the one true God; he is not bound to reject the final conception as false merely because of the steps by which it was slowly evolved. A creative God, it is true, might prefer to make a sudden revelation of himself to some chosen body of men; but an evolutionary God, we may well believe, might prefer in his inscrutable wisdom to reveal his own existence and qualities to his creatures by means of the same slow and tentative intellectual gropings as those by which he revealed to them the physical truths of nature. I wish my enquiry, therefore, to be regarded, not as destructive, but as reconstructive. It only attempts to recover and follow out the various planes in the evolution of the idea of God, rather than to cast doubt upon the truth of the evolved concept.

In investigating any abstruse and difficult subject, it is often best to proceed from the known to the unknown, even although the unknown itself may happen to come first in the order of nature and of logical development. For this reason, it may be advisable to begin here with a brief preliminary examination of Christianity, which is not only the most familiar of all religions to us Christian nations, but also the best known in its origins: and then to show how far we may safely use it as a Standard of Reference in explaining the less obvious and certain features of earlier or collateral cults.

Christianity, then, viewed as a religious standard, has this clear and undeniable advantage over almost every other known form of faith—that it quite frankly and confessedly sets out in its development with the worship of a particular Deified Man.

This point in its history cannot, I think, be overrated in importance, because in that single indubitable central fact it gives us the key to much that is cardinal in all other religions; every one of which, as I hope hereafter to show, equally springs, directly or indirectly, from the worship of a single Deified Man, or of many Deified Men, more or less etherealised.

Whatever else may be said about the origin of Christianity, it is at least fairly agreed on either side, both by friends and foes, that this great religion took its rise around the personality of a certain particular Galilean teacher, by name Jesus, concerning whom, if we know anything at all with any approach to certainty, we know at least that he was a man of the people, hung on a cross in Jerusalem under the procuratorship of Caius Pontius Pilatus. That kernel of fact—a man, and his death—Jesus Christ and him crucified—is the one almost undoubted historical nucleus round which all the rest of a vast European and Asiatic system of thought and belief has slowly crystallised.

Let us figure clearly to ourselves the full import of these truths. A Deified Man is the central figure in the faith of Christendom.

From the very beginning, however, a legend, true or false (but whose truth or falsity has no relation whatever to our present subject), gathered about the personality of this particular Galilean peasant reformer. Reverenced at first by a small body of disciples of his own race and caste, he grew gradually in their minds into a divine personage, of whom strange stories were told, and a strange history believed by a group of ever-increasing adherents in all parts of the Græco-Roman Mediterranean civilisation. The earliest of these stories, in all probability—certainly the one to which most importance was attached by the pioneers of the faith—clustered about his death and its immediate sequence. Jesus, we are told, was crucified, dead, and buried. But at the end of three days, if we may credit the early documents of our Christian faith, his body was no longer to be found in the sepulchre where it had been laid by friendly hands: and the report spread abroad that he had risen again from the dead, and lived once more a somewhat phantasmal life among the living in his province. Supernatural messengers announced his resurrection to the women who had loved him: he was seen in the flesh from time to time for very short periods by one or other among the faithful who still revered his memory. At last, after many such appearances, more or less fully described in the crude existing narratives, he was suddenly carried up to the sky before the eyes of his followers, where, as one of the versions authoritatively remarks, he was “received into heaven, and sat on the right hand of God”—that is to say, of Jahweh, the ethnical deity of the Hebrew people.

Such in its kernel was the original Christian doctrine as handed down to us amid a mist of miracle, in four or five documents of doubtful age and uncertain authenticity. Even this central idea does not fully appear in the Pauline epistles, believed to be the oldest in date of all our Christian writings: it first takes full shape in the somewhat later Gospels and Acts of the Apostles. In the simplest and perhaps the earliest of these definite accounts we are merely told the story of the death and resurrection, the latter fact being vouched for on the dubious testimony of “a young man clothed in a long white garment,” supplemented (apparently at a later period) by subsequent “appearances” to various believers. With the controversies which have raged about these different stories, however, the broad anthropological enquiry into the evolution of God has no concern. It is enough for us here to admit, what the evidence probably warrants us in concluding, that a real historical man of the name of Jesus did once exist in Lower Syria, and that his disciples at a period very shortly after his execution believed him to have actually risen from the dead, and in due time to have ascended into heaven.

At a very early date, too, it was further asserted that Jesus was in some unnatural or supernatural sense “the son of God”—that is to say, once more, the son of Jahweh, the local and national deity of the Jewish people. In other words, his worship was affiliated upon the earlier historical worship of the people in whose midst he lived, and from whom his first disciples were exclusively gathered. It was not, as we shall more fully see hereafter, a revolutionary or purely destructive system. It based itself upon the common conceptions of the Semitic community. The handful of Jews and Galileans who accepted Jesus as a divine figure did not think it necessary, in adopting him as a god, to get rid of their own preconceived religious opinions. They believed rather in his prior existence, as a part of Jahweh, and in his incarnation in a human body for the purpose of redemption. And when his cult spread around into neighboring countries (chiefly, it would seem, through the instrumentality of one Paul of Tarsus, who had never seen him, or had beheld him only in what is vaguely called “a vision”) the cult of Jahweh went hand in hand with it, so that a sort of modified mystic monotheism, based on Judaism, became the early creed of the new cosmopolitan Christian church.

Other legends, of a sort familiar in the lives of the founders of creeds and churches elsewhere, grew up about the life of the Christian leader; or at any rate, incidents of a typical kind were narrated by his disciples as part of his history. That a god or a godlike person should be born of a woman by the ordinary physiological processes of humanity seems derogatory to his dignity—perhaps fatal to his godhead: * therefore it was asserted—we know not whether truly or otherwise—that the founder of Christianity, by some mysterious afflatus, was born of a virgin. Though described at times as the son of one Joseph, a carpenter, of Nazareth, and of Mary, his betrothed wife, he was also regarded in an alternative way as the son of the Hebrew god Jahweh, just as Alexander, though known to be the son of Philip, was also considered to be the offspring of Amon-Ra or Zeus Ammon. We are told, in order to lessen this discrepancy (on the slender authority of a dream of Joseph’s), how Jesus was miraculously conceived by the Holy Spirit of Jahweh in Mary’s womb. He was further provided with a royal pedigree from the house of David, a real or mythical early Hebrew king; and prophecies from the Hebrew sacred books were found to be fulfilled in his most childish adventures. In one of the existing biographies, commonly ascribed to Luke, the companion of Paul, but supposed to bear traces of much later authorship, many such marvellous stories are recounted of his infantile adventures: and in all our documents, miracles attest his supernatural powers, while appeal is constantly made to the fulfilment of supposed predictions (all of old Hebrew origin) as a test and credential of the reality of his divine mission.

* On this subject, see Mr. Sidney Hartland’s Legend of
Perseus, vol. i.

We shall see hereafter that these two points—the gradual growth of a myth or legend, and affiliation upon earlier local religious ideas—are common features in the evolution of gods in general, and of the God of monotheism in particular. In almost every case where we can definitely track him to his rise, the deity thus begins with a Deified Man, elevated by his worshippers to divine rank, and provided with a history of miraculous incident, often connected with the personality of preexistent deities.

In the earlier stages, it seems pretty clear that the relations of nascent Christianity to Judaism were vague and undefined: the Christians regarded themselves as a mere sect of the Jews, who paid special reverence to a particular dead teacher, now raised to heaven by a special apotheosis of a kind with which everyone was then familiar. But as the Christian church spread to other lands, by the great seaports, it became on the one hand more distinct and exclusive, while on the other hand it became more definitely dogmatic and theological. It was in Egypt, it would seem, that the Christian Pantheon (if I may be allowed the expression in the case of a religion nominally monotheistic) first took its definite Trinitarian shape. Under the influence of the old Egyptian love for Triads or Trinities of gods, a sort of mystical triune deity was at last erected out of the Hebrew Jahweh and the man Jesus, with the aid of the Holy Spirit or Wisdom of Jahweh, which had come to be regarded by early Christian minds (under the influence of direct divine inspiration or otherwise) as a separate and coordinate person of this composite godhead. How far the familiar Egyptian Trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus may have influenced the conception of the Christian Trinity, thus finally made up of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we shall discuss at a later stage of our enquiry; for the present, it may suffice to point out that the Græco-Egyptian Athanasius was the great upholder of the definite dogma of the Trinity against opposing (heretical) Christian thinkers; and that the hymn or so-called creed known by his name (though not in all probability of his own composition) bears the impress of the mystical Egyptian spirit, tempered by the Alexandrian Greek delight in definiteness and minuteness of philosophical distinction.

In this respect, too, we shall observe in the sequel that the history of Christianity, the most known among the religions, was exactly parallel to that of earlier and obscurer creeds. At first, the relations of the gods to one another are vague and undetermined; their pedigree is often confused and even contradictory; and the pantheon lacks anything like due hierarchical system or subordination of persons. But as time goes on, and questions of theology or mythology are debated among the priests and other interested parties, details of this sort get settled in the form of rigid dogmas, while subtle distinctions of a philosophical or metaphysical sort tend to be imported by more civilised men into the crude primitive faith. The belief that began with frank acceptance of Judaism, plus a personal worship of the Deified Man, Jesus, crystallised at last into the Catholic Faith in one God, of three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.

Quibbles are even made, and discussions raised at last as to the question whether Father and Son are “of one substance” or only “of like substance”; whether the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son, or from the Father only; and so on ad infinitum.

It was largely in other countries than Judæa, and especially in Gaul, Rome, and Egypt, too, as I believe, that symbolism came to the aid of mysticism: that the cross, the tau, the labarum, the fish, the Alpha and Omega, and all the other early Christian emblems were evolved and perfected; and that the beginnings of Christian art took their first definite forms. Such forms were especially to a great extent evolved in the Roman catacombs. Christianity, being a universal, not a local or national, religion, has adopted in its course many diverse elements from most varied sources.

Originally, it would seem, the Christian pantheon was almost exclusively filled by the triune God, in his three developments or “persons,” as thus rigorously conceived by the Alexandrian intelligence. But from a very early time, if not from the first dawn of the Christian cult, it was customary to reverence the remains of those who had suffered for the faith, and perhaps even to invoke their aid with Christ and the Father. The Roman branch of the church, especially, accustomed to the Roman ancestor-worship and the Roman reverence for the Du Manes, had its chief places of prayer in the catacombs, where its dead were laid. Thus arose the practice of the invocation of saints, at whose graves or relics prayers were offered, both to the supreme deity and to the faithful dead themselves as intercessors with Christ and the Father. The early Christians, accustomed in their heathen stage to pay respect and even worship to the spirits of their deceased friends, could not immediately give up this pious custom after their conversion to the new creed, and so grafted it on to their adopted religion. Thus the subsidiary founders of Christianity, Paul, Peter, the Apostles, the Evangelists, the martyrs, the confessors, came to form, as it were, a subsidiary pantheon, and to rank to some extent almost as an inferior order of deities.

Among the persons who thus shared in the honours of the new faith, the mother of Jesus early assumed a peculiar prominence. Goddesses had filled a very large part in the devotional spirit of the older religions: it was but natural that the devotees of Isis and Pasht, of Artemis and Aphrodite, should look for some corresponding object of feminine worship in the younger faith. The Theotokos, the mother of God, the blessed Madonna, soon came to possess a practical importance in Christian worship scarcely inferior to that enjoyed by the persons of the Trinity themselves—in certain southern countries, indeed, actually superior to it. The Virgin and Child, in pictorial representation, grew to be the favourite subject of Christian art. How far this particular development of the Christian spirit had its origin in Egypt, and was related to the well-known Egyptian figures of the goddess Isis with the child Horus in her lap, is a question which may demand consideration in some future treatise. For the present, it will be enough to call attention in passing to the fact that in this secondary rank of deities or semi-divine persons, the saints and martyrs, all alike, from the Blessed Virgin Mary down to the newest canonised among Roman Catholic prelates, were at one time or another Living Men and Women. In other words, besides the one Deified Man, Jesus, round whom the entire system of Christianity centres, the Church now worships also in the second degree a whole host of minor Dead Men and Women, bishops, priests, virgins, and confessors.

From the earliest to the latest ages of the Church, the complexity thus long ago introduced into her practice has gone on increasing with every generation. Nominally from the very outset a monotheistic religion, Christianity gave up its strict monotheism almost at the first start by admitting the existence of three persons in the godhead, whom it vainly endeavoured to unify by its mystic but confessedly incomprehensible Athanasian dogma. The Madonna (with the Child) rose in time practically to the rank of an independent goddess (in all but esoteric Catholic theory): while St. Sebastian, St. George, St. John Baptist, St. Catherine, and even St. Thomas of Canterbury himself, became as important objects of worship in certain places as the deity in person. At Milan, for example, San Carlo Borromeo, at Compostella, Santiago, at Venice, St. Mark, usurped to a great extent the place of the original God. As more and more saints died in each generation, while the cult of the older saints still lingered on everywhere more or less locally, the secondary pantheon grew ever fuller and fuller. Obscure personages, like St. Crispin and St. Cosmas, St. Chad and St. Cuthbert rose to the rank of departmental or local patrons, like the departmental and local gods of earlier religions. Every trade, every guild, every nation, every province, had its peculiar saint. And at the same time, the theory of the Church underwent a constant evolution. Creed was added to creed—Apostles’, Nicene, Athanasian, and so forth, each embodying some new and often subtle increment to the whole mass of accepted dogma. Council after council made fresh additions of articles of faith—the Unity of Substance, the Doctrine of the Atonement, the Immaculate Conception, the Authority of the Church, the Infallibility of the Pope in his spiritual capacity. And all these also are well-known incidents of every evolving cult: constant increase in the number of divine beings; constant refinements in the articles of religion, under the influence of priestly or scholastic metaphysics.

Two or three other points must still be noted in this hasty review of the evolution of Christianity, regarded as a standard of religion; and these I will now proceed to consider with all possible brevity.

In the matter of ceremonial and certain other important accessories of religion it must frankly be admitted that Christianity rather borrowed from the older cults than underwent a natural and original development on its own account. A priesthood, as such, does not seem to have formed any integral or necessary part of the earliest Christendom: and when the orders of bishops, priests, and deacons were introduced into the new creed, the idea seems to have been derived rather from the existing priesthoods of anterior religions than from any organic connexion with the central facts of the new worship. From the very nature of the circumstances this would inevitably result. For the primitive temple (as we shall see hereafter) was the Dead Man’s tomb; the altar was his gravestone; and the priest was the relative or representative who continued for him the customary gifts to the ghost at the grave. But the case of Jesus differs from almost every other case on record of a Deified Man in this—that his body seems to have disappeared at an early date; and that, inasmuch as his resurrection and ascension into heaven were made the corner-stone of the new faith, it was impossible for worship of his remains to take the same form as had been taken in the instances of almost all previously deified Dead Persons. Thus, the materials out of which the Temple, the Altar, Sacrifices, Priesthood, are usually evolved (as we shall hereafter see) were here to a very large extent necessarily wanting.

Nevertheless, so essential to religion in the minds of its followers are all these imposing and wonted accessories that our cult did actually manage to borrow them readymade from the great religions that went before it, and to bring them into some sort of artificial relation with its own system. You cannot revolutionize the human mind at one blow. The pagans had been accustomed to all these ideas as integral parts of religion as they understood it: and they proceeded as Christians to accommodate them by side-issues to the new faith, in which these elements had no such natural place as in the older creeds. Not only did sacred places arise at the graves or places of martyrdom of the saints; not only was worship performed beside the bones of the holy dead, in the catacombs and elsewhere; but even a mode of sacrifice and of sacrificial communion was invented in the mass,—a somewhat artificial development from the possibly unsacerdotal Agape-feasts of the primitive Christians. Gradually, churches gathered around the relics of the martyr saints: and in time it became a principle of usage that every church must contain an altar—made of stones on the analogy of the old sacred stones; containing the bones or other relics of a saint, like all earlier shrines; consecrated by the pouring on of oil after the antique fashion; and devoted to the celebration of the sacrifice of the mass, which became by degrees more and more expiatory and sacerdotal in character. As the saints increased in importance, new holy places sprang up around their bodies; and some of these holy places, containing their tombs, became centres of pilgrimage for the most distant parts of Christendom; as did also in particular the empty tomb of Christ himself, the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem.

The growth of the priesthood kept pace with the growth of ceremonial in general, till at last it culminated in the mediaeval papacy, with its hierarchy of cardinals, archbishops, bishops, priests, and other endless functionaries. Vestments, incense, and like accompaniments of sacerdotalism also rapidly gained ground. All this, too, is a common trait of higher religious evolution everywhere. So likewise are fasting, vigils, and the ecstatic condition. But asceticism, monasticism, celibacy, and other forms of morbid abstinence are peculiarly rife in the east, and found their highest expression in the life of the Syrian and Egyptian hermits.

Lastly, a few words must be devoted in passing to the rise and development of the Sacred Books, now excessively venerated in North-western Christendom. These consisted in the first instance of genuine or spurious letters of the apostles to the various local churches (the so-called Epistles), some of which would no doubt be preserved with considerable reverence; and later of lives or legends of Jesus and his immediate successors (the so-called Gospels and the Acts of the Apostles). Furthermore, as Christianity adopted from Judaism the cult of its one supreme divine figure, now no longer envisaged as Jahweh, the national deity of the Hebrews, but as a universal cosmopolitan God and Father, it followed naturally that the sacred books of the Jewish people, the literature of Jahweh-worship, should also receive considerable attention at the hands of the new priesthood. By a gradual process of selection and elimination, the canon of scripture was evolved from these heterogeneous materials: the historical or quasi-historical and prophetic Hebrew tracts were adopted by the Church, with a few additions of later date, such as the Book of Daniel, under the style and title of the Old Testament. The more generally accepted lives of Christ, again, known as Evangels or Gospels; the Acts of the Apostles; the epistles to the churches; and that curious mystical allegory of the Neronian persecution known as the Apocalypse, were chosen out of the mass of early Christian literature to form the authoritative collection of inspired writing which we call the New Testament. The importance of this heterogeneous anthology of works belonging to all ages and systems, but confounded together in popular fancy under the name of the Books, or more recently still as a singular noun, the Bible, grew apace with the growth of the Church: though the extreme and superstitions adoration of their mere verbal contents has only been reached in the debased and reactionary forms of Christianity followed at the present day by our half-educated English and American Protestant dissenters.

From this very brief review of the most essential factors in the development of the Christian religion as a system, strung loosely together with a single eye to the requirements of our present investigation, it will be obvious at once to every intelligent reader that Christianity cannot possibly throw for us any direct or immediate light on the problem of the evolution of the idea of God. Not only did the concept of a god and gods exist full-fledged long before Christianity took its rise at all, but also the purely monotheistic conception of a single supreme God, the creator and upholder of all things, had been reached in all its sublime simplicity by the Jewish teachers centuries before the birth of the man Jesus. Christianity borrowed from Judaism this magnificent concept, and, humanly speaking, proceeded to spoil it by its addition of the Son and the Holy Ghost, who mar the complete unity of the grand Hebrew ideal. Even outside Judaism, the selfsame notion had already been arrived at in a certain mystical form as the “esoteric doctrine” of the Egyptian priesthood; from whom, with their peculiar views as to emanations and Triads, the Christian dogmas of the Trinity, the Logos, the Incarnation, and the Holy Ghost were in large part borrowed. The Jews of Alexandria, that eastern London, formed the connecting link between Egyptian heathenism, Hellenic philosophy, and early Christianity; and their half-philosophical, half-religious ideas may be found permeating the first writings and the first systematic thought of the nascent church. In none of these ways, therefore, can we regard Christianity as affording us any direct or immediate guidance in our search for the origin and evolution of the concepts of many gods, and of one God the creator.

Still, in a certain secondary and illustrative sense, I think we are fully justified in saying that the history of Christianity, the religion whose beginnings are most surely known to us, forms a standard of reference for all the other religions of the world, and helps us indirectly to understand and explain the origin and evolution of these deepest among our fundamental spiritual conceptions.

Its value in this respect may best be understood if I point out briefly in two contrasted statements the points in which it may and the points in which it may not be fairly accepted as a typical religion.

Let us begin first with the points in which it may.

In the first place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in the fact that beyond all doubt its most central divine figure was at first, by common consent of orthodox and heterodox alike, nothing other than a particular Deified Man. All else that has been asserted about this particular Man—that he was the Son of God, that he was the incarnation of the Logos, that he existed previously from all eternity, that he sits now on the right hand of the Father—all the rest of these theological stories do nothing in any way to obscure the plain and universally admitted historical fact that this Divine Person, the Very God of Very God, being of one substance with the Father, begotten of the Father before all worlds, was yet, at the moment when we first catch a glimpse of him in the writings of his followers, a Man recently deceased, respected, reverenced, and perhaps worshipped by a little group of fellow-peasants who had once known him as Jesus, the son of the carpenter. On that unassailable Rock of solid historical fact we may well be content to found our argument in this volume. Here at least nobody can accuse us of “crude and gross Euhemerism.” Or rather the crude and gross Euhemerism is here known to represent the solid truth. Jesus and his saints—Dominic, Francis, Catherine of Siena—are no mere verbal myths, no allegorical concepts, no personifications of the Sun, the Dawn, the Storm-cloud. Leaving aside for the present from our purview of the Faith that one element of the older supreme God—the Hebrew Jahweh,—whom Christianity borrowed from the earlier Jewish religion, we can say at least with perfect certainty that every single member of the Christian pantheon—Jesus, the Madonna, St. John Baptist, St. Peter, the Apostles, the Evangelists—were, just as much as San Carlo Borromeo or St. Thomas of Canterbury or St. Theresa, Dead Men or Women, worshipped after their death with divine or quasi-divine honours. In this the best-known of all human religions, the one that has grown up under the full eye of history, the one whose gods and saints are most distinctly traceable, every object of worship, save only the single early and as yet unresolved deity of the Hebrew cult, whose origin is lost for us in the mist of ages, turns out on enquiry to be indeed a purely Euhemeristic god or saint,—in ultimate analysis, a Real Man or Woman.

That point alone I hold to be of cardinal importance, and of immense or almost inestimable illustrative value, in seeking for the origin of the idea of a god in earlier epochs.

In the second place, Christianity is thoroughly typical in all that concerns its subsequent course of evolution; the gradual elevation of its central Venerated Man into a God of the highest might and power; the multiplication of secondary deities or saints by worship or adoration of other Dead Men and Women; the growth of a graduated and duly subordinated hierarchy of divine personages; the rise of a legend, with its miracles and other supernatural adjuncts; the formation of a definite theology, philosophy, and systematic dogmatism; the development of special artistic forms, and the growth or adoption of appropriate symbolism; the production of sacred books, rituals, and formularies; the rise of ceremonies, mysteries, initiations, and sacraments; the reverence paid to relics, sacred sites, tombs, and dead bodies; and the close connexion of the religion as a whole with the ideas of death, the soul, the ghost, the spirit, the resurrection of the body, the last judgment, hell, heaven, the life everlasting, and all the other vast group of concepts which surround the simple fact of death in the primitive human mind generally.

Now, in the second place, let us look wherein Christianity to a certain small extent fails to be typical, or at least to solve our fundamental problems.

It fails to be typical because it borrows largely a whole ready-made theology, and above all a single supreme God, from a pre-existent religion. In so far as it takes certain minor features from other cults, we can hardly say with truth that it does not represent the average run of religious systems; for almost every particular new creed so bases itself upon elements of still earlier faiths; and it is perhaps impossible for us at the present day to get back to anything like a really primitive or original form of cult. But Christianity is very far removed indeed from all primitive cults in that it accepts ready-made the monotheistic conception, the high-water-mark, so to speak, of religious philosophising. While in the frankness with which it exhibits to us what is practically one half of its supreme deity as a Galilean peasant of undoubted humanity, subsequently deified and etherealised, it allows us to get down at a single step to the very origin of godhead; yet in the strength with which it asserts for the other half of its supreme deity (the Father, with his shadowy satellite the Holy Ghost) an immemorial antiquity and a complete severance from human life, it is the least anthropomorphic and the most abstract of creeds. In order to track the idea of God to its very source, then, we must apply in the last resort to this unresolved element of Christianity—the Hebrew Jahweh—the same sort of treatment which we apply to the conception of Jesus or Buddha;—we must show it to be also the immensely transfigured and magnified ghost of a Human Being; in the simple and forcible language of Swinburne, “The shade cast by the soul of man.”

Furthermore, Christianity fails to be typical in that it borrows also from pre-existing religions to a great extent the ideas of priesthood, sacrifice, the temple, the altar, which, owing to the curious disappearance or at least un-recognisability of the body of its founder (or, rather, its central object of worship), have a less natural place in our Christian system than in any other known form of religious practice. It is quite true that magnificent churches, a highly-evolved sacerdotalism, the sacrifice of the mass, the altar, and the relics, have all been imported in their fullest shape into developed Christianity, especially in its central or Roman form. But every one of these things is partly borrowed, almost as a survival or even as an alien feature, from earlier religions, and partly grew up about the secondary worship of saints and martyrs, their bones, their tombs, their catacombs, and their reliquaries. Christianity itself, particularly when viewed as the worship of Christ (to which it has been largely reduced in Teutonic Europe), does not so naturally lend itself to these secondary ceremonies; and in those debased schismatic forms of the Church which confine themselves most strictly to the worship of Jesus and of the supreme God, sacerdotalism and sacramentalism have been brought down to a minimum, so that the temple and the altar have lost the greater part of their sacrificial importance.

I propose, then, in subsequent chapters, to trace the growth of the idea of a God from the most primitive origins to the most highly evolved forms; beginning with the ghost, and the early undeveloped deity: continuing through polytheism to the rise of monotheism; and then returning at last once more to the full Christian conception, which we shall understand far better in detail after we have explained the nature of the yet unresolved or but provisionally resolved Jehovistic element. I shall try to show, in short, the evolution of God, by starting with the evolution of gods in general, and coming down by gradual stages through various races to the evolution of the Hebrew, Christian, and Moslem God in particular. ‘And the goal towards which I shall move will be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter,—the proof that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of a Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed with increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.

CHAPTER II.—RELIGION AND MYTHOLOGY.

At the very outset of the profound enquiry on which we are now about to embark, we are met by a difficulty of considerable magnitude. In the opinion of most modern mythologists mythology is the result of “a disease of language.” We are assured by many eminent men that the origin of religion is to be sought, not in savage ideas about ghosts and spirits, the Dead Man and his body or his surviving double, but in primitive misconceptions of the meaning of words which had reference to the appearance of the Sun and the Clouds, the Wind and the Rain, the Dawn and the Dusk, the various phenomena of meteorology in general. If this be so, then our attempt to derive the evolution of gods from the crude ideas of early men about their dead is clearly incorrect; the analogy of Christianity which we have already alleged is a mere will o’ the wisp; and the historical Jesus himself may prove in the last resort to be an alias of the sun-god or an embodiment of the vine-spirit.

I do not believe these suggestions are correct. It seems to me that the worship of the sun, moon, and stars, instead of being an element in primitive religion, is really a late and derivative type of adoration; and that mythology is mistaken in the claims it makes for its own importance in the genesis of the idea of a God or gods. In order, however, to clear the ground for a fair start in this direction, we ought, I think, to begin by enquiring into the relative positions of mythology and religion. I shall therefore devote a preliminary chapter to the consideration of this important subject.

Religion, says another group of modern thinkers, of whom Mr. Edward Clodd is perhaps the most able English exponent, “grew out of fear.” It is born of man’s terror of the great and mysterious natural agencies by which he is surrounded. Now I am not concerned to deny that many mythological beings of various terrible forms do really so originate. I would readily accept some such vague genesis for many of the dragons and monsters which abound in all savage or barbaric imaginings—for Gorgons and Hydras and Chimæras dire, and other manifold shapes of the superstitiously appalling. I would give up to Mr. Clodd the Etruscan devils and the Hebrew Satan, the Grendels and the Fire-drakes, the whole brood of Cerberus, Briareus, the Cyclops, the Centaurs. None of these, however, is a god or anything like one. They have no more to do with religion, properly so called, than the unicorn of the royal arms has to do with British Christianity. A god, as I understand the word, and as the vast mass of mankind has always understood it, is a supernatural being to be revered and worshipped. He stands to his votaries, on the whole, as Dr. Robertson Smith has well pointed out, in a kindly and protecting relation. He may be angry with them at times, to be sure; but his anger is temporary and paternal alone: his permanent attitude towards his people is one of friendly concern; he is worshipped as a beneficent and generous Father. It is the origin of gods in this strictest sense that concerns us here, not the origin of those vague and formless creatures which are dreaded, not worshipped, by primitive humanity.

Bearing this distinction carefully in mind, let us proceed to consider the essentials of religion. If you were to ask almost any intelligent and unsophisticated child, “What is religion?” he would answer offhand, with the clear vision of youth, “Oh, it’s saying your prayers, and heading your Bible, and singing hymns, and going to church or to chapel on Sundays.” If you were to ask any intelligent and unsophisticated Hindu peasant the same question, he would answer in almost the self-same spirit, “Oh, it is doing poojah regularly, and paying your dues every day to Mahadeo.” If you were to ask any simple-minded African savage, he would similarly reply, “It is giving the gods flour, and oil, and native beer, and goat-mutton,” And finally if you were to ask a devout Italian contadino, he would instantly say, “It is offering up candles and prayers to the Madonna, attending mass, and remembering the saints on every festa.”

And they would all be quite right. This, in its essence, is precisely what we call religion. Apart from the special refinements of the higher minds in particular creeds, which strive to import into it all, according to their special tastes or fancies, a larger or smaller dose of philosophy, or of metaphysics, or of ethics, or of mysticism, this is just what religion means and has always meant to the vast majority of the human species. What is common to it throughout is Custom or Practice: a certain set of more or less similar Observances: propitiation, prayer, praise, offerings: the request for divine favours, the deprecation of divine anger or other misfortunes: and as the outward and visible adjuncts of all these, the altar, the sacrifice, the temple, the church; priesthood, services, vestments, ceremonial.

What is not at all essential to religion in its wider aspect—taking the world round, both past and present, Pagan, Buddhist, Mohammadan, Christian, savage, and civilised—is the ethical element, properly so called. And what is very little essential indeed is the philosophical element, theology or mythology, the abstract theory of spiritual existences. This theory, to be sure, is in each country or race closely related with religion under certain aspects; and the stories told about the gods or God are much mixed up with the cult itself in the minds of worshippers; but they are no proper part of religion, strictly so called. In a single word, I contend that religion, as such, is essentially practical: theology or mythology, as such, is essentially theoretical.

Moreover, I also believe, and shall attempt to show, that the two have to a large extent distinct origins and roots: that the union between them is in great part adventitious: and that, therefore, to account for or explain the one is by no means equivalent to accounting for and explaining the other.

Frank recognition of this difference of origin between religion and mythology would, I imagine, largely reconcile the two conflicting schools of thought which at present divide opinion between them on this interesting problem in the evolution of human ideas. On the one side, we have the mythological school of interpreters, whether narrowly linguistic, like Professor Max Müller, or broadly anthropological, like Mr. Andrew Lang, attacking the problem from the point of view of myth or theory alone. On the other side, we have the truly religious school of interpreters, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, and to some extent Mr. Tylor, attacking the problem from the point of view of practice or real religion. The former school, it seems to me, has failed to perceive that what it is accounting for is not the origin of religion at all—of worship, which is the central-root idea of all religious observance, or of the temple, the altar, the priest, and the offering, which are its outer expression—but merely the origin of myth or fable, the mass of story and legend about various beings, real or imaginary, human or divine, which naturally grows up in every primitive community. The latter school, on the other hand, while correctly interpreting the origin of all that is essential and central in religion, have perhaps underestimated the value of their opponents’ work through regarding it as really opposed to their own, instead of accepting what part of it may be true in the light of a contribution to an independent but allied branch of the same enquiry.

In short, if the view here suggested be correct, Spencer and Tylor have paved the way to a true theory of the Origin of Religion; Max Müller, Lang, and the other mythologists have thrown out hints of varying value towards a true theory of the Origin of Mythology, or of its more modern equivalent and successor, Theology.

A brief outline of facts will serve to bring into clearer relief this view of religion as essentially practical—a set of observances, rendered inevitable by the primitive data of human psychology. It will then be seen that what is fundamental and essential in religion is the body of practices, remaining throughout all stages of human development the same, or nearly the same, in spite of changes of mythological or theological theory; and that what is accidental and variable is the particular verbal explanation or philosophical reason assigned for the diverse rites and ceremonies.

In its simplest surviving savage type, religion consists wholly and solely in certain acts of deference paid by the living to the persons of the dead. I shall try to show in the sequel that down to its most highly evolved modern type in the most cultivated societies, precisely similar acts of deference, either directly to corpses or ghosts as such, or indirectly to gods who were once ghosts, or were developed from ghosts, form its essence still. But to begin with I will try to bring a few simple instances of the precise nature of religion in its lowest existing savage mode.

I might if I chose take my little collection of illustrative facts from some theoretical writer, like Mr. Herbert Spencer, who has collected enough instances in all conscience to prove this point; but I prefer to go straight to an original observer of savage life and habit, a Presbyterian missionary in Central Africa—the Rev. Duff Macdonald, author of Africana—who had abundant opportunities at the Blantyre Mission for learning the ideas and practice of the Soudanese natives, and who certainly had no theoretic predisposition towards resolving all religious notions into the primitive respect and reverence for the dead or the worship of ancestors.

Here, in outline, but in Mr. Macdonald’s own words, are the ideas and observances which this careful and accurate investigator found current among the tribes of the heart of Africa. “I do not think,” he says, “I have admitted any point of importance without having heard at least four natives on the subject. The statements are translations, as far as possible, from the ipsissima verba of the negroes.”

The tribes he lived among “are unanimous in saying that there is something beyond the body which they call spirit. Every human body at death is forsaken by this spirit.” That is the almost universal though not quite primitive belief, whose necessary genesis has been well traced out by Mr. Herbert Spencer, and more recently in America with great vigour and clearness by Mr. Lester Ward.

“Do these spirits ever die?” Mr. Macdonald asks. “Some,” he answers, “I have heard affirm that it is possible for a troublesome spirit to be killed. Others give this a direct denial. Many, like Kumpama, or Cherasulo, say, ‘You ask me whether a man’s spirit ever dies. I cannot tell. I have never been in the spirit-world, but this I am certain of, that spirits live for a very long time.’”

On the question, “Who the gods are?” Mr. Macdonald says: “In all our translations of Scripture where we found the word God we used Mulungu; but this word is chiefly used by the natives as a general name for spirit. The spirit of a deceased man is called his Mulungu, and all the prayers and offerings of the living are presented to such spirits of the dead. It is here that we find the great centre of the native religion. The spirits of the dead are the gods of the living.

“Where are these gods found? At the grave? No. The villagers shrink from yonder gloomy place that lies far beyond their fields on the bleak mountain side. It is only when they have to lay another sleeper beside his forefathers that they will go there. Their god is not the body in the grave, but the spirit, and they seek this spirit at the place where their departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s house that is their temple; and if no tree grow here they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple rites. If this spot become too public, the offerings may be defiled, and the sanctuary will be removed to a carefully-selected spot under some beautiful tree. Very frequently a man presents an offering at the top of his own bed beside his head. He wishes his god to come to him and whisper in his ear as he sleeps.”

And here, again, we get the origin of nature-worship:

“The spirit of an old chief may have a whole mountain for his residence, but he dwells chiefly on the cloudy summit. There he sits to receive the worship of his votaries, and to send down the refreshing showers in answer to their prayers.”

Almost as essential to religion as these prime factors in its evolution—the god, worship, offerings, presents, holy places, temples—is the existence of a priesthood. Here is how the Central Africans arrive at that special function:

“A certain amount of etiquette is observed in approaching the gods. In no case can a little boy or girl approach these deities, neither can anyone that has not been at the mysteries. The common qualification is that a person has attained a certain age, about twelve or fourteen years, and has a house of his own. Slaves seldom pray, except when they have had a dream. Children that have had a dream tell their mother, who approaches the deity on their behalf. (A present for the god is necessary, and the slave or child may not have it.)

“Apart from the case of dreams and a few such private matters, it is not usual for anyone to approach the gods except the chief, of the village. He is the recognised high priest who presents prayers and offerings on behalf of all that live in his village. If the chief is from home his wife will act, and if both are absent, his younger brother. The natives worship not so much individually as in villages or communities. Their religion is more a public than a private matter.”

But there are also further reasons why priests are necessary. Relationship forms always a good ground for intercession. A mediator is needed.

“The chief of a village,” says Mr. Macdonald, “has another title to the priesthood. It is his relatives that are the village gods. Everyone that lives in the village recognises these gods; but if anyone remove to another village he changes his gods. He recognises now the gods of his new chief. One wishing to pray to the god (or gods) of any village naturally desires to have his prayers presented through the village chief, because the latter is nearly related to the village god, and may be expected to be better listened to than a stranger.”

A little further on Mr. Macdonald says: “On the subject of the village gods opinions differ. Some say that every one in the village, whether a relative of the chief or not, must worship the forefathers of the chief. Others say that a person not related to the chief must worship his own forefathers, otherwise their spirits will bring trouble upon him. To reconcile these authorities we may mention that nearly everyone in the village is related to its chief, or if not related is, in courtesy, considered so. Any person not related to the village chief would be polite enough on all public occasions to recognise the village god: on occasions of private prayer (which are not so numerous as in Christendom) he would approach the spirits of his own forefathers. Besides, there might be a god of the land. The chief Kapeni prays to his own relatives, and also to the old gods of the place. His own relatives he approaches himself; the other deities he may also approach himself, but he often finds people more closely related and consequently more acceptable to the old gods of the land.”

The African pantheon is thus widely peopled. Elimination and natural selection next give one the transition from the ghost to the god, properly so called.

“The gods of the natives then are nearly as numerous as their dead. It is impossible to worship all; a selection must be made, and, as we have indicated, each worshipper turns most naturally to the spirits of his own departed relatives; but his gods are too many still, and in farther selecting he turns to those that have lived nearest his own time. Thus the chief of a village will not trouble himself about his great-great-grandfather: he will present his offering to his own immediate predecessor, and say, ‘O father, I do not know all your relatives, you know them all, invite them to feast with you.’ The offering is not simply for himself, but for himself and all his relatives.”

Ordinary ghosts are soon forgotten with the generation that knew them. Not so a few select spirits, the Cæsars and Napoleons, the Charlemagnes and Timurs of savage empires.

“A great chief that has been successful in his wars does not pass out of memory so soon. He may become the god of a mountain or a lake, and may receive homage as a local deity long after his own descendants have been driven from the spot. When there is a supplication for rain the inhabitants of the country pray not so much to their own forefathers as to the god of yonder mountain on whose shoulders the great rain-clouds repose. (Smaller hills are seldom honoured with a deity.)”

Well, in all this we get, it seems to me, the very essentials and universals of religion generally,—the things without which no religion could exist—the vital part, without the ever-varying and changeable additions of mere gossiping mythology. In the presents brought to the dead man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the central element of all worship, the practical key of all cults, past or present.

On the other hand, mythologists tell us nothing about the origin of prayer and sacrifice: they put us off with stories of particular gods, without explaining to us how those gods ever came to be worshipped. Now, mythology is a very interesting study in its own way: but to treat as religion a mass of stories and legends about gods or saints, with hardly a single living element of practice or sacrifice, seems to me simply to confuse two totally distinct branches of human enquiry. The Origin of Tales has nothing at all to do with the Origin of Worship.

When we come to read Mr. Macdonald’s account of a native funeral, on the other hand, we are at once on a totally different tack; we can understand, as by an electric flash, the genesis of the primitive acts of sacrifice and religion.

“Along with the deceased is buried a considerable part of his property. We have already seen that his bed is buried with him; so also are all his clothes. If he possesses several tusks of ivory, one tusk or more is ground to a powder between two stones and put beside him. Beads are also ground down in the same way. These precautions are taken to prevent the witch (who is supposed to be answerable for his death) from making any use of the ivory or beads.

“If the deceased owned several slaves, an enormous hole is dug for a grave. The slaves are now brought forward. They may be either cast into the pit alive, or the undertakers may cut all their throats. The body of their master or their mistress is then laid down to rest above theirs, and the grave is covered in.

“After this the women come forward with the offerings of food, and place them at the head of the grave. The dishes in which the food was brought are left behind. The pot that held the drinking-water of the deceased and his drinking-cup are also left with him. These, too, might be coveted by the witch, but a hole is pierced in the pot, and the drinking calabash is broken.

“The man has now gone from the society of the living, and he is expected to share the meal thus left at his grave with those that have gone before him. The funeral party breaks up; they do not want to visit the grave of their friend again without a very good reason. Anyone found among the graves may be taken for a cannibal. Their friend has become a citizen of a different village. He is with all his relatives of the past. He is entitled to offerings or presents which may come to him individually or through his chief. These offerings in most cases he will share with others, just as he used to do when alive,” Sometimes the man may be buried in his own hut.

“In this case the house is not taken down, but is generally covered with cloth, and the verandah becomes the place for presenting offerings. His old house thus becomes a kind of temple.... The deceased is now in the spirit-world, and receives offerings and adoration. He is addressed as ‘Our great spirit that has gone before.’ If anyone dream of him. it is at once concluded that the spirit is ‘up to something.’ Very likely he wants to have some of the survivors for his companions. The dreamer hastens to appease the spirit by an offering.”

So real is this society of the dead that Mr. Macdonald says: “The practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the grave is found on the West Coast. A chief summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and then cuts off his head. If the chief forget anything that he wanted to say, he sends another slave as a postscript.”

I have quoted at such length from this recent and extremely able work because I want to bring into strong relief the fact that we have here going on under our very eyes, from day to day, de novo, the entire genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of all that is most central and essential to religion—worship, prayer, the temple, the altar, priesthood, sacrifice. Nothing that the mythologists can tell us about the Sun or the Moon, the Dawn or the Stormcloud, Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, comes anywhere near the Origin of Religion in these its central and universal elements. Those stories or guesses may be of immense interest and importance as contributions to the history of ideas in our race; but nothing we can learn about the savage survival in the myth of Cupid or Psyche, or about the primitive cosmology in the myth of the children of Kronos, helps us to get one inch nearer the origin of God or of prayer, of worship, of religious ceremonial, of the temple, the church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any other component part of what we really know as Religion in the concrete. These myths may be sometimes philosophic guesses, sometimes primitive folk-tales, but they certainly are not the truths of Religion. On the other hand, the living facts, here so simply detailed by a careful, accurate, and unassuming observer, strengthened by the hundreds of similar facts collected by Tylor, Spencer, and others, do help us at once to understand the origin of the central core and kernel of religion as universally practised all the world over.

For, omitting for the present the mythological and cosmological factor, which so often comes in to obscure the plain religious facts in missionary narrative or highly-coloured European accounts of native beliefs, what do we really find as the underlying truths of all religion? That all the world over practices essentially similar to those of these savage Central Africans prevail among mankind; practices whose affiliation upon the same primitive ideas has been abundantly proved by Mr. Herbert Spencer; practices which have for their essence the propitiation or adulation of a spiritual being or beings, derived from ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all except the greatness of the connoted attributes, to the souls of men. “Whenever the [Indian] villagers are questioned about their creed,” says Sir William Hunter, “the same answer is invariably given: ‘The common people have no idea of religion, but to do right [ceremonially] and to worship the village god.”

In short, I maintain that religion is not mainly, as the mistaken analogy of Christian usage makes us erroneously call it, Faith or Creed, but simply and solely Ceremony, Custom, or Practice. And I am glad to say that, for early Semitic times at least, Professor Robertson Smith is of the same opinion.

If one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of observances essentially similar to those just described among the Central African tribes. Its core is worship. Its centre is the God—that is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative. The religion of China is to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. The making of offerings and burning of joss-paper before the Family Dead form its principal ceremonies. In India, while the three great gods of the mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and its own special cult of its little domestic altar.

“The first Englishman,” says Sir William Hunter, “who tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.”

Omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max-Müllerism, that ancestor-worship must necessarily be a “non-Aryan” feature (though it exists or existed in all so-called Aryan races), this simple description shows us the prevalence over the whole of India of customs essentially similar to those which obtain in Central Africa and in the Chinese provinces.

The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as the Central African tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, farre pio et saliente mica.

I will not go on to point out in detail at the present stage of our argument how Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and Shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion of the ancient Ac-cadians; how other observers have performed the same task for the Egyptians and Japanese; and how like customs have been traced among Greeks and Amazulu, among Hebrews and Nicaraguans, among early English and Digger Indians, among our Aryan ancestors themselves and Andaman Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel abounds with examples. Of Netherland Island I read, “The skulls of their ancestors were treasured for gods of the New Hebrides, “The people worshipped the spirits of their ancestors. They prayed to them, over the kava-bowl, for health and prosperity.” In New Caledonia, “Their gods were their ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised.” At Tana, “The general name for gods seemed to be aremha; that means a dead man, and hints,” says the Rev. George Turner, with pleasing frankness, “alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship.” When the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, “Compassionate father, here is some food for you; eat it. Be kind to us on account of it.” Those who wish to see the whole of the evidence on this matter marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, where they will find abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast and overwhelming phalanx.

What concerns us in this chapter a little more is to call attention by anticipation to the fact that even in Christianity itself the same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the Christian religion. And I make these remarks provisionally here in order that the reader may the better understand to what ultimate goal our investigation will lead him.

It is the universal Catholic custom to place the relics of saints or martyrs under the altars in churches. Thus the body of St. Mark the Evangelist lies under the high altar of St. Mark’s, at Venice; and in every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited within the altar itself. So well understood is this principle in the Latin Church, that it has hardened into the saying, “No relic, no altar.” The sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. The entire Roman Catholic ritual is a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry at an altar, and its connection with the primitive form is still kept up by the necessary presence of human remains in its holy places.

Furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended from the early Christian meeting-places in the catacombs or at the tombs of the martyrs, which are universally allowed to have been the primitive Christian altars. We know now that the cruciform dome-covered plan of Christian churches is derived from these early meeting-places at the junction of lanes or alleys in the catacombs; that the nave, chancel, and transepts indicate the crossing of the alleys, while the dome represents the hollowed-out portion or rudely circular vault where the two lines of archway intersect. The earliest dome-covered churches were attempts, as it were, to construct a catacomb above ground for the reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or martyr. Similarly with the chapels that open out at the side from the aisles or transepts. Etymologically, the word chapel is the modernised form of capella, the arched sepulchre excavated in the walls of the catacombs, before the tomb at which it was usual to offer up prayer and praise. The chapels built out from the aisles in Roman churches, each with its own altar and its own saintly relics, are attempts to reproduce above ground in the same way the original sacred places in the early Christian excavated cemeteries. We will recur to this subject at much greater length in subsequent chapters.

Thus Christianity itself is linked on to the very antique custom of worship at tombs, and the habit of ancestor-worship by altars, relics, and invocation of saints, even revolutionary Protestantism still retaining some last faint marks of its origin in the dedication of churches to particular evangelists or martyrs, and in the more or less disguised survival of altar, priesthood, sacrifice, and vestments.

Now, I do not say ancestor-worship gives us the whole origin of everything that is included in Christian English minds in the idea of religion. I do not say it accounts for all the cosmologies and cosmogonies of savage, barbaric, or civilised tribes. Those, for the most part, are pure mythological products, explicable mainly, I believe, by means of the key with which mythology supplies us; and one of them, adopted into Genesis from an alien source, has come to be accepted by modern Christendom as part of that organised body of belief which forms the Christian creed, though not in any true sense the Christian religion. Nor do I say that ancestor-worship gives us the origin of those ontological, metaphysical, or mystical conceptions which form part of the philosophy or theology of many priesthoods. Religions, as we generally get them envisaged for us nowadays, are held to include the mythology, the cosmogony, the ontology, and even the ethics of the race that practises them. These extraneous developments, however, I hold to spring from different roots and to have nothing necessarily in common with religion proper. The god is the true crux. If we have once accounted for the origin of ghosts, gods, tombs, altars, temples, churches, worship, sacrifice, priesthoods, and ceremonies, then we have accounted for all that is essential and central in religion, and may hand over the rest—the tales, stories, and pious legends—to the account of comparative mythology or of the yet unfounded science of comparative idealogy.

Once more, I do not wish to insist, either, that every particular and individual god, national or naturalistic, must necessarily represent a particular ghost—the dead spirit of a single definite once-living person. It is enough to show, as Mr. Spencer has shown, that the idea of the god, and the worship paid to a god, are directly derived from the idea of the ghost, and the offerings made to the ghost, without necessarily holding, as Mr. Spencer seems to hold, that every god is and must be in ultimate analysis the ghost of a particular human being. Once the conception of gods had been evolved by humanity, and had become a common part of every man’s imagined universe—of the world as it presented itself to the mind of the percipient—then it was natural enough that new gods should be made from time to time out of abstractions or special aspects and powers of nature, and that the same worship should be paid to such new-made and purely imaginary gods as had previously been paid to the whole host of gods evolved from personal and tribal ancestors. It is the first step that costs: once you have got the idea of a god fairly evolved, any number of extra gods may be invented or introduced from all quarters. A great pantheon readily admits new members to its ranks from, many strange sources. Familiar instances in one of the best-known pantheons are those of Concordia, Pecunia, Aius Locutius, Rediculus Tutanus. The Romans, indeed, deified every conceivable operation of nature or of human life; they had gods or goddesses for the minutest details of agriculture, of social relations, of the first years of childhood, of marriage and domestic arrangements generally. Many of their deities, as we shall see hereafter, were obviously manufactured to meet a special demand on special occasions. But at the same time, none of these gods, so far as we can judge, could ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and ancestor-worship had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles and practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god could not otherwise have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of new beings could readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.

Still, to admit that other elements have afterwards come in to confuse religion is quite a different thing from admitting that religion itself has more than one origin. Whatever gives us the key to the practice of worship gives us the key to all real religion. Now, one may read through almost any books of the mythological school without ever coming upon a single word that throws one ray of light upon the origin of religion itself thus properly called. To trace the development of this, that, or the other story or episode in a religious myth is in itself a very valuable study in human evolution: but no amount of tracing such stories ever gives us the faintest clue to the question why men worshipped Osiris, Zeus, Siva, or Venus; why they offered up prayer and praise to Isis, or to Artemis; why they made sacrifices of oxen to Capitolian Jove at Rome, or slew turtle-doves on the altar of Jahweh, god of Israel, at Jerusalem. The ghost-theory and the practice of ancestor-worship show us a natural basis and genesis for all these customs, and explain them in a way to which no mythological enquiry can add a single item of fundamental interest.

It may be well at this point to attempt beforehand some slight provisional disentanglement of the various extraneous elements which interweave themselves at last with the simple primitive fabric of practical religion.

In the first place, there is the mythological element. The mythopoeic faculty is a reality in mankind. Stories arise, grow, gather episodes with movement, transform and transmute themselves, wander far in space, get corrupted by time, in ten thousand ways suffer change and modification. Now, such stories sometimes connect themselves with living men and women. Everybody knows how many myths exist even in our own day about every prominent or peculiar person. They also gather more particularly round the memory of the dead, and especially of any very distinguished dead man or woman. Sometimes they take their rise in genuine tradition, sometimes they are pure fetches of fancy or of the romancing faculty. The ghosts or the gods are no less exempt from these mythopoic freaks than other people; and as gods go on living indefinitely, they have plenty of time for myths to gather about them. Most often, a myth is invented to account for some particular religious ceremony. Again, myths demonstrably older than a particular human being—say Cæsar, Virgil, Arthur, Charlemagne—may get fitted by later ages to those special personalities. The same thing often happens also with gods. Myth comes at last, in short, to be the history of the gods; and a personage about whom many myths exist, whether real or imaginary, a personification of nature or an abstract quality, may grow in time to be practically a divine being, and even perhaps to receive worship, the final test of divinity.

Again, myths about the gods come in the long run, in many cases, to be written down, especially by the priests, and themselves acquire a considerable degree of adventitious holiness. Thus we get Sacred Books; and in most advanced races, the sacred books tend to become an important integral part of religion, and a test of the purity of tenets or ceremonial. But sacred books almost always contain rude cosmological guesses and a supernatural cosmogony, as well as tales about the doings, relationships, and prerogatives of the gods. Such early philosophical conjectures come then to be intimately bound up with the idea of religion, and in many cases even to supersede in certain minds its true, practical, central kernel. The extreme of this tendency is seen in English Protestant Dissenting Bibliolatry.

Rationalistic and reconciliatory glosses tend to arise with advancing culture. Attempts are made to trace the pedigree and mutual relations of the gods, and to get rid of discrepancies in earlier legends. The Theogony of Hesiod is a definite effort undertaken in this direction for the Greek pantheon. Often the attempt is made by the most learned and philosophically-minded among the priests, and results in a quasi-philosophical mythology like that of the Brahmans. In the monotheistic or half-monotheistic religions, this becomes theology. In proportion as it grows more and more laboured and definite the attention of the learned and the priestly class is more and more directed to dogma, creed, faith, abstract formulae of philosophical or intellectual belief, while insisting also upon ritual or practice. But the popular religion remains usually, as in India, a religion of practical custom and observances alone, having very little relation to the highly abstract theological ideas of the learned or the priestly.

Lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of sentiment, of broad humanitarianism of adventitious emotion, is allowed to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of practice and observance.

We are constantly taught that “real religion” means many things which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense, but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion towards a spiritual being or set of beings.

Owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. They do not sufficiently see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime factors—worship and sacrifice. In all early religions, the practice is at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. We, nowadays, look back upon these early cults, which were cults and little else, with minds warped by modern theological prejudices—by constant wrangling over dogmas, clauses, definitions, and formularies. We talk glibly of the Hindu faith or the Chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the Hindu practice or the Chinese observances. By thus wrongly conceiving the nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. We shall only get right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion, and when we recognise that the growth and development of the myth have nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. The science of comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing study in its own way: but it has no more to do with the origin of religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. There are ethical rules in most advanced cults: there are geological surmises in most sacred books: but neither one nor the other is on that account religion, any more than the history of Jehoshaphat or the legend of Samson.

What I want to suggest in the present chapter sums itself up in a few sentences thus: Religion is practice, mythology is story-telling. Every religion has myths that accompany it: but the myths do not give rise to the religion: on the contrary, the religion gives rise to the myths. And I shall attempt in this book to account for the origin of religion alone, omitting altogether both mythology as a whole, and all mythical persons or beings other than gods in the sense here illustrated.

CHAPTER III.—THE LIFE OF THE DEAD.

The object of this book, we saw at the beginning, is to trace the evolution of the idea of God. But the solution of that problem implies two separate questions—first, how did men begin to frame the idea of a god at all; and second, how did they progress from the conception of many distinct gods to the conception of a single supreme God, like the central deity of Christianity and of Islam. In other words, we have first to enquire into the origin of polytheism, and next into its gradual supersession by monotheism. Those are the main lines of enquiry I propose to follow out in the present volume.

Religion, however, has one element within it still older, more fundamental, and more persistent than any mere belief in a god or gods—nay, even than the custom or practice of supplicating and appeasing ghosts or gods by gifts and observances. That element is the conception of the Life of the Dead. On the primitive belief in such life, all religion ultimately bases itself. The belief is in fact the earliest thing to appear in religion, for there are savage tribes who have nothing worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult of their dead relatives. It is also the latest thing to survive in religion; for many modern spiritualists, who have ceased to be theists, or to accept any other form of the supernatural, nevertheless go on believing in the continued existence of the dead, and in the possibility of intercommunication between them and the living. This, therefore, which is the earliest manifestation of religious thought, and which persists throughout as one of its most salient and irrepressible features, must engage our attention for a little time before we pass on to the genesis of polytheism.

But the belief in continued life itself, like all other human ideas, has naturally undergone various stages of evolution. The stages glide imperceptibly into one another, of course; but I think we can on the whole distinguish with tolerable accuracy between three main layers or strata of opinion with regard to the continued existence of the dead. In the first or lowest stratum, the difference between life and death themselves is but ill or inadequately perceived; the dead are thought of as yet bodily living. In the second stratum, death is recognised as a physical fact, but is regarded as only temporary; at this stage, men look forward to the Resurrection of the Body, and expect the Life of the World to Come. In the third stratum, the soul is regarded as a distinct entity from the body; it survives it in a separate and somewhat shadowy form: so that the opinion as to the future proper to this stage is not a belief in the Resurrection of the Body, but a belief in the Immortality of the Soul. These two concepts have often been confounded together by loose and semi-philosophical Christian thinkers; but in their essence they are wholly distinct and irreconcilable.

I shall examine each of these three strata separately.

And first as to that early savage level of thought where the ideas of life and death are very ill demarcated. To us at the present day it seems a curious notion that people should not possess the conception of death as a necessary event in every individual human history. But that is because we cannot easily unread all our previous thinking, cannot throw ourselves frankly back into the state of the savage. We are accustomed to living in large and populous communities, where deaths are frequent, and where natural death in particular is an every-day occurrence. We have behind us a vast and long history of previous ages; and we know that historical time was occupied by the lives of many successive generations, all of which are now dead, and none of which on the average exceeded a certain fixed limit of seventy or eighty odd years. To us, the conception of human life as a relatively short period, bounded by a known duration, and naturally terminating at a relatively fixed end, is a common and familiar one.

We forget, however, that to the savage all this is quite otherwise. He lives in a small and scattered community, where deaths are rare, and where natural death in particular is comparatively infrequent. Most of his people are killed in war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed by accidents in the chase, or by thirst or starvation. Some are drowned in rapid rivers; some crushed by falling trees or stones; some poisoned by deadly fruits, or bitten by venomous snakes; some massacred by chiefs, or murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen. In a large majority of instances, there is some open and obvious cause of death; and this cause is generally due either to the hand of man or to some other animal; or failing that, to some apparently active effort of external nature, such as flood, or lightning, or forest fires, or landslip and earthquake. Death by disease is comparatively rare; death by natural decay almost unknown or unrecognised.

Nor has the savage a great historic past behind him. He knows few but his tribesmen, and little of their ancestors save those whom his parents can remember before them. His perspective of the past is extremely limited. Nothing enables him to form that wide idea of the necessity and invariability of death which to us is so familiar. That “all men are mortal” is to civilised man a truism; to very early savages it would necessarily have seemed a startling paradox. No man ever dies within his own experience; ever since he can remember, he has continued to exist as a permanent part of all his adventures. Most of the savage’s family have gone on continuously living with him. A death has been a rare and startling occurrence. Thus the notion of death as an inevitable end never arises at all; the notion of death as due to natural causes seems quite untenable. When a savage dies, the first question that arises is “Who has killed him?” If he is slain in war, or devoured by a tiger, or ripped up by an elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate, or murdered by a tribesman, the cause is obvious. If none of these, then the death is usually set down to witchcraft.

Furthermore, the mere fact of death is much less certain among primitive or savage men than in civilised communities. We know as a rule with almost absolute certainty whether at a given moment a sick or wounded man is dead or living. Nevertheless, even among ourselves, cases of doubt not infrequently occur. At times we hesitate whether a man or woman is dead or has fainted. If the heart continues to beat, we consider them still living; if not the slightest flutter of the pulse can be perceived, we consider them dead. Even our advanced medical science, however, is often perplexed in very obscure cases of catalepsy; and mistakes have occurred from time to time, resulting in occasional premature burials. The discrimination of true from apparent death is not always easy. Vesalius, the eminent anatomist, opened a supposed corpse in which the heart was seen to be still beating; and the Abbé Prévost, who had been struck by apoplexy, was regarded as dead, but recovered consciousness once more under the surgeon’s scalpel. Naturally, among savages, such cases of doubt are far more likely to occur than among civilised people; or rather, to put it as the savage would think of it, there is often no knowing when a person who is lying stiff and lifeless may happen to get up again and resume his usual activity. The savage is accustomed to seeing his fellows stunned or rendered unconscious by blows, wounds, and other accidents, inflicted either by the enemy, by wild beasts, by natural agencies, or by the wrath of his tribesmen; and he never knows how soon the effect of such accidents may pass away, and the man may recover his ordinary vitality. As a rule, he keeps and tends the bodies of his friends as long as any chance remains of their ultimate recovery, and often (as we shall see in the sequel) much longer.

Again, in order to understand this attitude of early man towards his wounded, his stricken, and his dead, we must glance aside for a moment at the primitive psychology. Very early indeed in the history of the human mind, I believe, some vague adumbration of the notion of a soul began to pervade humanity. We now know that consciousness is a function of the brain; that it is intermitted during sleep, when the brain rests, and also during times of grave derangement of the nervous or circulatory systems, as when we faint or assume the comatose condition, or are stunned by a blow, or fall into catalepsy or epilepsy. We also know that consciousness ceases altogether at death, when the brain no longer functions; and that the possibility of its further continuance is absolutely cut off by the fact of decomposition. But these truths, still imperfectly understood or rashly rejected by many among ourselves, were wholly unknown to early men. They had to frame for themselves as best they could some vague working hypothesis of the human mind, from data which suggested themselves in the ordinary course of life; and the hypothesis which they framed was more or less roughly that of the soul or spirit, still implicitly accepted by a large majority of the human species.

According to this hypothesis every man consists of two halves or parts, one material or bodily, the other immaterial or spiritual. The first half, called the body, is visible and tangible; the second half, called the soul, dwells within it, and is more or less invisible or shadowy. It is to a large extent identified with the breath; and like the breath it is often believed to quit the body at death, and even to go off in a free form and live its own life elsewhere. As this supposed independence of the soul from the body lies at the very basis of all ghosts and gods, and therefore of religion itself, I may be excused for going at some length into the question of its origin.

Actually, so far as we know by direct and trustworthy evidence, the existence of a mind, consciousness, or “soul,” apart from a body, has never yet been satisfactorily demonstrated. But the savage derived the belief, apparently, from a large number of concurrent hints and suggestions, of which such a hypothesis seemed to him the inevitable result. During the daytime he was awake; at night he slept; yet even in his sleep, while his body lay curled on the ground beside the camp-fire, he seemed to hunt or to fight, to make love or to feast, in some other region. What was this part of him that wandered from the body in dreams?—what, if not the soul or breath which he naturally regarded as something distinct and separate? And when a man died, did not the soul or breath go from him? When he was badly wounded, did it not disappear for a time, and then return again? In fainting fits, in catalepsy, and in other abnormal states, did it not leave the body, or even play strange tricks with it? I need not pursue this line of thought, already fully worked out by Mr. Herbert Spencer and Dr. Tylor. It is enough to say that from a very early date, primitive man began to regard the soul or life as something bound up with the breath, something which could go away from the body at will and return to it again, something separable and distinct, yet essential to the person, very vaguely conceived as immaterial or shadowy, but more so at a later than at an earlier period. *

* The question of the Separate Soul has recently received
very full treatment from Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, and
Mr. Sidney Hartland in The Legend of Perseus.

Moreover, these souls or spirits (which quitted the body in sleep or trance) outlived death, and appeared again to survivors. In dreams, we often see the shapes of living men; but we also see with peculiar vividness the images of the departed. Everybody is familiar with the frequent reappearance in sleep of intimate friends or relations lately deceased. These appearances, I fancy, are especially frequent during the first few months of bereavement, and gradually weaken in frequency and vividness as time goes on. The reason for both sets of phenomena I take to be this: the nervous structures, accustomed to be stimulated in particular combinations by intercourse with the dead friend, miss automatically their wonted stimulation; and being therefore in a highly nourished and unstable state, are peculiarly ready to undergo ideal stimulation in sleep, as we know to be the case with other well-nurtured and underworked nerve-centres. Or, to put it less materially, the brain falls readily into a familiar rhythm. But in course of time the channels atrophy by disuse; the habit is lost; and the dream-appearances of the dead friend grow more and more infrequent. The savage, however, accepts the dream-world as almost equally real with the world of sense-presentation. As he envisages the matter to himself, his soul has been away on its travels without its body, and there has met and conversed with the souls of dead friends or relations.

We must remember also that in savage life occasions for trance, for fainting, and for other abnormal or comatose nervous conditions occur far more frequently than in civilised life. The savage is often wounded and fails from loss of blood; he cuts his foot against a stone, or is half killed by a wild beast; he fasts long and often, perforce, or is reduced to the very verge of starvation; and he is therefore familiar, both in his own case and in the case of others, with every variety of unconsciousness and of delirium or delusion. All these facts figure themselves to his mind as absences of the soul from the body, which is thus to him a familiar and almost every-day experience.

Moreover, it will hence result that the savage can hardly gain any clear conception of Death, and especially of death from natural causes. When a tribesman is brought home severely wounded and unconscious, the spectator’s immediate idea must necessarily be that the soul has gone away and deserted the body. For how long it has gone, he cannot tell; but his first attempts are directed towards inducing or compelling it to return again. For this purpose, he often addresses it with prayers and adjurations, or begs it to come back with loud cries and persuasions. And he cannot possibly discriminate between its temporary absence and its final departure. As Mr. Herbert Spencer well says, the consequences of blows or wounds merge into death by imperceptible stages. “Now the injured man shortly ‘returned to himself,’ and did not go away again; and now, returning to himself only after a long absence, he presently deserted his body for an indefinite time. Lastly, instead of these temporary returns, followed by final absence, there sometimes occurred cases in which a violent blow caused continuous absence from the very first; the other self never came back at all.”

In point of fact, during these earlier stages, the idea of Death as we know it did not and does not occur in any form. There are still savages who do not seem to recognise the universality and necessity of death—who regard it on the contrary as something strange and unatural, something due to the machination of enemies or of witchcraft. With the earliest men, it is a foregone conclusion, psychologically speaking, that they should so regard it; they could not form any other concept without far more extended knowledge than they have the means of possessing. To them, a Dead Man must always have seemed a man whose soul or breath or other self had left him, but might possibly return again to the body at any time.

Each of the three stages of thought above discriminated has its appropriate mode of disposing of its dead. The appropriate mode for this earliest stage is Preservation of the Corpse, which eventuates at last in Mummification.

The simplest form of this mode of disposal of the corpse consists in keeping it in the hut or cave where the family dwell, together with the living. A New Guinea woman thus kept her husband’s body in her hut till it dried up of itself, and she kissed it and offered it food every day, as though it were living. Many similar cases are reported from elsewhere. Hut preservation is common in the very lowest races. More frequently, however, owing to the obvious discomfort of living in too close proximity to a dead body, the corpse at this stage of thought is exposed openly in a tree or on a platform or under some other circumstances where no harm can come to it. Among the Australians and Andaman Islanders, who, like the Negritoes of New Guinea, preserve for us a very early type of human customs, the corpse is often exposed on a rough raised scaffold. Some of the Polynesian and Melanesian peoples follow the same practice. The Dyaks and Kyans expose their dead in trees. “But it is in America,” says Mr. Herbert Spencer, “that exposure on raised stages is commonest. The Dakotahs adopt this method; at one time it was the practice of the Iroquois; Catlin, describing the Mandans as having scaffolds on which ‘their dead live as they term it,’ remarks that they are thus kept out of the way of wolves and dogs; and Schoolcraft says the same of the Chippewas.” Generally speaking, at the lowest grades of culture, savages preserve the actual bodies of their dead above ground, either in the home itself, or in close proximity to it. We shall recur later on to this singular practice.

A slight variant on this method, peculiar to a very maritime race, is that described by Mr. H. O. Forbes among the natives of Timurlaut:

“The dead body is placed in a portion of a prau fitted to the length of the individual, or within strips of gaba-gaba, or stems of the sago-palm pinned together. If it is a person of some consequence, such as an Orang Kaya, an ornate and decorated prau-shaped coffin is specially made. This is then enveloped in calico, and placed either on the top of a rock by the margin of the sea at a short distance from the village, or on a high pile-platform erected on the shore about low-tide mark. On the top of the coffin-lid are erected tall flags, and the figures of men playing gongs, shooting guns, and gesticulating wildly to frighten away evil influences from the sleeper. Sometimes the platform is erected on the shore above high-water mark, and near it is stuck in the ground a tall bamboo full of palm-wine; and suspended over a bamboo rail are bunches of sweet potatoes for the use of the dead man’s Nitu. When the body is quite decomposed, his son or one of the family disinters the skull and deposits it on a little platform in his house, in the gable opposite the fireplace, while to ward off evil from himself he carries about with him the atlas and axis bones of its neck in his luon, or siri-holder.”

This interesting account is full of implications whose fuller meaning we will perceive hereafter. The use of the skull and of the talisman bone should especially be noted for their later importance. For skulls are fundamental in the history of religion.

Cases like these readily pass into the practice of Mummifying, more especially in dry or desert climates. Even in so damp a tropical country as New Guinea, however, D’Albertis found in a shed on the banks of the Fly River two mummies, artificially prepared, as he thought, by removal of the flesh, the bones alone being preserved with the skin to cover them. Here we have evidently a clear conception of death as a serious change, of a different character from a mere temporary absence. So, too, Mr. Chalmers says of the Koiari people in the same island, “They treat their dead after this fashion. A fire is kept burning day and night at the head and feet for months. The entire skin is removed by means of the thumb and forefinger, and the juices plastered all over the face and body of the operator (parent, husband, or wife of the deceased). The fire gradually desiccates the flesh, so that little more than the skeleton is left.” But mummification for the most part is confined to drier climates, where it is artificially performed down to a very evolved stage of civilisation, as we know well in Peru and Egypt.

One word must be said in passing as to the frequent habit of specially preserving, and even carrying about the person, the head or hand of a deceased relative. This has been already mentioned in the case of Timurlaut; and it occurs frequently elsewhere. Thus Mr. Chalmers says of a New Guinea baby: “It will be covered with two inches of soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” Similarly, in the Andaman Islands, where we touch perhaps the lowest existing stratum of savage feeling, “widows may be seen with the skulls of their deceased partners suspended round their necks.” The special preservation of the head, even when the rest of the body is eaten or buried, will engage our attention at a later period: heads so preserved are usually resorted to as oracles, and are often treated as the home of the spirit. Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected many similar instances, such as that of the Tasmanians who wore a bone from the skull or arm of a dead relation. He rightly notes, too, that throughout the New World “the primitive conception of death as a long-suspended animation seems to have been especially vivid;” and we find accordingly that customs of this character are particularly frequent among American savages. Thus, to draw once more from his great storehouse, the Créés carried bones and hair of dead relations about for three years; while the Caribs and several Guiana tribes distributed the clean bones among the kinsmen of the deceased. In the Sandwich Islands, also, bones of kings and chiefs were carried about by their descendants, under the impression that the dead exercised guardianship over them.

At this stage of thought, it seems to me, it is the actual corpse that is still thought to be alive; the actual corpse that appears in dreams; and the actual corpse that is fed and worshipped and propitiated with presents.

Ceremonial cannibalism, which will be more fully considered hereafter, appears in this stratum, and survives from it into higher levels. The body is eaten entire, and the bones preserved; or the flesh and fat are removed, and the skin left; or a portion only is sacramentally and reverently eaten by the surviving relations. These processes also will be more minutely described in the sequel.

The first stage merges by gradual degrees into the second, which is that of Burial or its equivalent. Cave-burial of mummies or of corpses forms the transitional link. Indeed, inasmuch as many races of primitive men lived habitually in caves, the placing or leaving the corpse in a cave seems much the same thing as the placing or leaving it in a shed, hut, or shelter. The cave-dwelling Veddahs simply left the dead man in the cave where he died, and themselves migrated to some other cavern. Still, cave-burial lingered on late with many tribes or nations which had for ages outlived the habit of cave-dwelling. Among the South American Indians, cave-burial was common; and in Peru it assumed high developments of mummification. The making of an artificial cave or vault for the dead is but a slight variant on this custom; it was frequent in Egypt, the other dry country where the making of mummies was carried to a high pitch of perfection. The Tombs of the Kings at Thebes are splendid instances of such artificial caves, elaborated into stately palaces with painted walls, where the dead monarchs might pass their underground life in state and dignity. Cave-tombs, natural or artificial, are also common in Asia Minor, Italy, and elsewhere.

During the first stage, it may be noted, the attitude of man towards his dead is chiefly one of affectionate regard. The corpse is kept at home, and fed or tended; the skull is carried about as a beloved object. But in the second stage, which induces the practice of burial, a certain Fear of the Dead becomes more obviously apparent. Men dread the return of the corpse or the ghost, and strive to keep it within prescribed limits. In this stage, the belief in the Resurrection of the Body is the appropriate creed; and though at first the actual corpse is regarded as likely to return to plague survivors, that idea gives place a little later, I believe, to the conception of a less material double or spirit.

And here let us begin by discriminating carefully between the Resurrection of the Body and the Immortality of the Soul.

The idea of Resurrection arose from and is closely bound up with the practice of burial, the second and simpler mode of disposing of the remains of the dead. The idea of Immortality arose from and is closely bound up with the practice of burning, a later and better innovation, invented at the third stage of human culture. During the early historical period all the most advanced and cultivated nations burnt their dead, and, in consequence, accepted the more ideal and refined notion of Immortality. But modern European nations bury their dead, and, in consequence, accept, nominally at least, the cruder and grosser notion of Resurrection. Nominally, I say, because, in spite of creeds and formularies, the influence of Plato and other ancient thinkers, as well as of surviving ancestral ideas, has made most educated Europeans really believe in Immortality, even when they imagine themselves to be believing in Resurrection. Nevertheless, the belief in Resurrection is the avowed and authoritative belief of the Christian world, which thus proclaims itself as on a lower level in this respect than the civilised peoples of antiquity.

The earliest of these two ways of disposing of the bodies of the dead is certainly by burial. As this fact has recently been called in question, I will venture to enlarge a little upon the evidence in its favour. In point of time, burial goes back with certainty to the neolithic age, and with some probability to the palaeolithic. Several true interments in caves have been attributed by competent geologists to the earlier of these two periods, the first for which we have any sure warranty of man’s existence on earth. But, as I do not desire to introduce controversial matter of any sort into this exposition, I will waive the evidence for burial in the palaeolithic age as doubtful, and will merely mention that in the Mentone caves, according to Mr. Arthur Evans, a most competent authority, we have a case of true burial accompanied by neolithic remains of a grade of culture earlier and simpler than any known to us elsewhere. In other words, from the very earliest beginning of the neolithic age men buried their dead; and they continued to bury them, in caves or tumuli, down to the end of neolithic culture. They buried them in the Long Barrows in England; they buried them in the Ohio mounds; they buried them in the shadowy forests of New Zealand; they buried them in the heart of darkest Africa. I know of no case of burning or any means of disposal of the dead, otherwise than by burial or its earlier equivalent, mummification, among people in the stone age of culture in Europe. It is only when bronze and other metals are introduced that races advance to the third stage, the stage of cremation. In America, however, the Mexicans we*re cremationists.

The wide diffusal of burial over the globe is also a strong argument for its relatively primitive origin. In all parts of the world men now bury their dead, or did once bury them. From the Tombs of the Kings at Pekin to the Pyramids of Memphis; from the Peruvian caves to the Samoyed graveyards, we find most early peoples, most savage peoples, most primitive peoples, once or still engaged in one or other form of burying. Burial is the common and universal mode; burning, exposure, throwing into a sacred river, and so forth, are sporadic and exceptional, and in many cases, as among the Hindus, are demonstrably of late origin, and connected with certain relatively modern refinements of religion.

Once more, in many or most cases, we have positive evidence that where a race now burns its dead, it used once to bury them. Burial preceded burning in preheroic Greece, as it also did in Etruria and in early Latium. The people of the Long Barrows, in Western Europe generally, buried their dead; the people of the Round Barrows who succeeded them, and who possessed a far higher grade of culture, almost always cremated. It has been assumed that burning is primordial in India; but Mr. William Simpson, the well-known artist of the Illustrated London News, calls my attention to the fact that the Vedas speak with great clearness of burial as the usual mode of disposing of the corpse, and even allude to the tumulus, the circle of stones around it, and the sacred temenos which they enclose. According to Rajendralala Mitra, whose high authority on the subject is universally acknowledged, burial was the rule in India till about the thirteenth or fourteenth century before the Christian era; then came in cremation, with burial of the ashes, and this continued till about the time of Christ, when burial was dispensed with, and the ashes were thrown into some sacred river. I think, therefore, until some more positive evidence is adduced on the other side, we may rest content with our general conclusion that burial is the oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains of the dead among humanity after the general recognition of death as a positive condition. It probably took its rise in an early period, while mankind was still one homogeneous species; and it has been dispersed, accordingly, over the whole world, even to the most remote oceanic islands.

What is the origin of this barbaric and disgusting custom, so repugnant to all the more delicate sentiments of human nature? I think Mr. Frazer is right in attributing it to the terror felt by the living for the ghosts (or, rather, at first the corpses) of the dead, and the fear that they may return to plague or alarm their surviving fellow tribesmen.

In his admirable paper on “Certain Burial Customs as Illustrative of the Primitive Theory of the Soul,” Mr. Frazer points out that certain tribes of early men paid great attention to the dead, not so much from affection as from selfish terror. Ghosts or bodies of the dead haunt the earth everywhere, unless artificially confined to bounds, and make themselves exceedingly disagreeable to their surviving relatives. To prevent this, simple primitive philosophy in its second stage has hit upon many devices. The most universal is to bury the dead—that is to say, to put them in a deep-dug hole, and to cover them with a mighty mound of earth, which has now sadly degenerated in civilised countries into a mere formal heap, but which had originally the size and dignity of a tumulus. The object of piling up this great heap of earth was to confine the ghost (or corpse), who could not easily move so large a superincumbent mass of matter. In point of fact, men buried their dead in order to get well rid of them, and to effectually prevent their return to light to disturb the survivors.

For the same reason heavy stones were often piled on the top of the dead. In one form, these became at last the cairn; and, as the ghosts of murderers and their victims tend to be especially restless, everybody who passes their graves in Arabia, Germany, and Spain is bound to add a stone to the growing pile in order to confine them. In another form, that of the single big stone rolled just on top of the body to keep it down by its mass, the makeweight has developed into the modern tombstone. In our own times, indeed, the tombstone has grown into a mere posthumous politeness, and is generally made to do duty as a record of the name and incomparable virtues of the deceased (concerning whom, nil nisi bonum); but in origin it was nothing more than the big, heavy boulder, meant to confine the ghost, and was anything but honorific in intention and function.

Again, certain nations go further still in their endeavours to keep the ghost (or corpse) from roaming. The corpse of a Damara, says Galton, having been sewn up in an old ox-hide is buried in a hole, and the spectators jump backwards and forwards over the grave to keep the deceased from rising out of it. In America, the Tupis tied fast all the limbs of the corpse, “that the dead man might not be able to get up, and infest his friends with his visits.” You may even divert a river from its course, as Mr. Frazer notes, bury your dead man securely in its bed, and then allow the stream to return to its channel. It was thus that Alaric was kept in his grave from further plaguing humanity; and thus Captain Cameron found a tribe of Central Africans compelled their deceased chiefs to “cease from troubling.” Sometimes, again, the grave is enclosed by a fence too high for the dead man to clear even with a running jump; and sometimes the survivors take the prudent precaution of nailing the body securely to the coffin, or of breaking their friend’s spine, or even—but this is an extreme case—of hacking him to pieces. In Christian England the poor wretch whom misery had driven to suicide was prevented from roaming about to the discomfort of the lieges by being buried with a stake driven barbarously through him. The Australians, in like manner, used to cut off the thumb of a slain enemy that he might be unable to draw the bow; and the Greeks were wont to hack off the extremities of their victims in order to incapacitate them for further fighting. These cases will be seen to be very luminiferous when we come to examine the origin and meaning of cremation.

Burial, then, I take it, is simply by origin a means adopted by the living to protect themselves against the vagrant tendencies of the actual dead. For some occult reason, the vast majority of men in all ages have been foolishly afraid of meeting with the spirits of the departed. Their great desire has been, not to see, but to avoid seeing these singular visitants; and for that purpose they invented, first of all, burial, and afterwards cremation.

The common modern conception of the ghost is certainly that of an immaterial or shadowy form, which can be seen but not touched, and which preserves an outer semblance of the human figure. But that idea itself, which has been imported into all our descriptions and reasonings about the ghost-beliefs of primitive man, is, I incline to think, very far from primitive, and has been largely influenced by quite late conceptions derived from the cremational rather than the burial level of religious philosophy. In other words, though, in accordance with universal usage and Mr. Frazer’s precedent, I have used the word “ghost” above in referring to these superstitious terrors of early man, I believe it is far less the spirit than the actual corpse itself that early men even in this second stage were really afraid of. It is the corpse that may come back and do harm to survivors. It is the corpse that must be kept down by physical means, that must be covered with earth, pressed flat beneath a big and ponderous stone, deprived of its thumbs, its hands, its eyes, its members. True, I believe the savage also thinks of the ghost or double as returning to earth; but his psychology, I fancy, is not so definite as to distinguish very accurately between corpse and spirit. The accurate differentiation of the two belongs rather, it seems to me, to the post-cremational and more spiritual philosophy than to the primary or preservative, and the secondary or inhumational.

Anybody who looks at the evidence collected by Mr. Frazer will see for himself that precautions are taken rather against the return of the actual physical body than against the return of the ghost or spirit. Or perhaps, to be more precise, the two are hardly thought of at this early stage in separation or antithesis.

If we look at the means taken to preserve the body after death among the majority of primitive peoples, above the Tasmanian level, this truth of the corpse being itself immortal becomes clearer and clearer. We are still, in fact, at a level where ghost and dead man are insufficiently differentiated. In all these cases it is believed that the dead body continues to live in the grave the same sort of life that it led above ground; and for this purpose it is provided with weapons, implements, utensils, food, vessels, and all the necessaries of life for its new mansion. Continued sentient existence of the body after death is the keynote of the earliest level of psychical philosophy. First, the corpse lives in the hut with its family: later, it lives in the grave with its forefathers.

But side by side with this naïve belief in the continued existence of the body after death, which survives into the inhumational stage of evolution, goes another and apparently irreconcilable belief in a future resurrection. Strictly speaking, of course, if the body is still alive, there is no need for any such special revivification. But religious thought, as we all know, does not always pride itself upon the temporal virtues of logic or consistency; and the savage in particular is not in the least staggered at being asked to conceive of one and the same subject in two opposite and contradictory manners. He does not bring the two incongruities into thought together; he thinks them alternately, sometimes one, sometimes the other. Even Christian systematists are quite accustomed to combine the incongruous beliefs in a future resurrection and in the continued existence of the soul after death, by supposing that the soul remains meanwhile in some nondescript limbo, apart from its body—some uncertain Sheol, some dim hades or purgatory or “place of departed spirits.” The savage is scarcely likely to be more exacting in this matter than our doctors of divinity.

It is the common belief of the second or inhumational stage, then, that there will be at some time or other a “General Resurrection.” No doubt this General Resurrection has been slowly developed out of the belief in and expectation of many partial resurrections. It is understood that each individual corpse will, or may, resurge at some time: therefore it is believed that all corpses together will resurge at a single particular moment. So long as burial persists, the belief in the Resurrection persists beside it, and forms a main feature in the current conception of the future life among the people who practise it.

How, then, do we progress from this second or inhumational stage to the third stage with its practice of burning, and its correlated dogma of the Immortality of the Soul?

In this way, as it seems to me. Besides keeping down the ghost (or corpse) with clods and stones, it was usual in many cases to adopt other still stronger persuasives and dissuasives in the same direction. Sometimes the persuasives were of the gentlest type; for example, the dead man was often politely requested and adjured to remain quiet in the grave and to give no trouble. But sometimes they were less bland; the corpse was often pelted with sticks, stones, and hot coals, in order to show him that his visits at home would not in future be appreciated. The ordinary stake and mutilation treatment goes, it is clear, upon the same principle; if the man has no feet or legs of his own, he cannot very well walk back again. But further developments of the like crude idea are to cut off the head, to tear out the heart, to hack the body in pieces, to pour boiling water and vinegar over the dangerous place where the corpse lies buried. Now burning, I take it, belonged originally to the same category of strong measures against refractory ghosts or corpses; and this is the more probable owing to the fact that it is mentioned by Mr. Frazer among the remedies recommended for use in the extreme case of vampires. Its original object was, no doubt, to prevent the corpse from returning in any way to the homes of the living.

Once any people adopted burning as a regular custom, however, the chances are that, coteris paribus, it would continue and spread. For the practice of cremation is so much more wholesome and sanitary than the practice of burial that it would give a double advantage in the struggle for existence to any race that adopted it, in peace and in war. Hence it is quite natural that when at a certain grade of culture certain races happened to light upon it in this superstitious way, those races would be likely to thrive and to take the lead in culture as long as no adverse circumstances counteracted the advantage.

But the superstitions and the false psychology which gave rise at first to the notion of a continued life after death would not, of course, disappear with the introduction of burning. The primitive cremationists may have hoped, by reducing to ashes the bodies of their dead, to prevent the recurrence of the corpse to the presence of the living; but they could not prevent the recurrence of the ghost in the dreams of the survivors; they could not prevent the wind that sighed about the dead man’s grave, the bats that flitted, the vague noises that terrified, the abiding sense of the corpse’s presence. All the factors that go to make up the ghost or the revenant (to use a safe word less liable to misinterpretation) still remained as active as ever. Hence, I believe, with the introduction of cremation the conception of the ghost merely suffered an airy change. He grew more shadowy, more immaterial, more light, more spiritual. In one word, he became, strictly speaking, a ghost as we now understand the word, not a returning dead man. This conception of the ghost as essentially a shade or shadow belongs peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating peoples. I can answer for it that among negroes, for example, the “duppy” is conceived as quite a material object. It is classical literature, the literature of the cremating Greeks and Romans, that has familiarised us most with the idea of the ghost as shadowy and intangible. Burying races have more solid doubles. When Peter escaped from prison in Jerusalem, the assembled brethren were of opinion that it must be “his angel.” The white woman who lived for years in a native Australian tribe was always spoken of by her hosts as a ghost. In one word, at a low stage of culture the revenant is conceived of as material and earthly; at a higher stage, he is conceived of as immaterial and shadowy.

Now when people take to burning their dead, it is clear they will no longer be able to believe in the Resurrection of the Body. Indeed, if I am right in the theory here set forth, it is just in order to prevent the Resurrection of the Body at inconvenient moments that they take to burning. To be sure, civilised nations, with their developed power of believing in miracles, are capable of supposing, not only that the sea will yield up its dead, but also that burnt, mangled, or dispersed bodies will be collected from all parts to be put together again at the Resurrection. This, however, is not the naïve belief of simple and natural men. To them, when you have burnt a body you have utterly destroyed it, here and hereafter; and we know that mutilation and burning were employed for this very purpose in the case of vampires and other corpses whose total suppression was desirable. Sepoys were blown from the guns in the Indian mutiny for the express reason that, according to the Hindu belief, that method of disposing of them destroyed not only the body but the soul as well—got rid of them entirely. The ordinary human idea is that when you burn a body you simply annihilate it; and on that very account early Christians preferred burial to cremation, because they thought they stood thereby a better chance at the Resurrection. It is true they allowed that the divine omnipotence could make new bodies for the martyrs who were burnt; but for themselves, they seem to have preferred on the average to go on afresh with their old familiar ones.

Naturally, therefore, among cremating peoples, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body tended to go out, and what replaced it was the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul. You may burn the body, but the spirit still survives; and the survival gives origin to a new philosophy of ghosts and revenants, a new idea of the inner nature of ghosthood. Gradually the spirit gets to be conceived as diviner essence, entangled and imprisoned, as it were, in the meshes of the flesh, and only to be set free by means of fire, which thus becomes envisaged at last as friendly rather than destructive in its action on the dead body. What was at first a precaution against the return of the corpse becomes in the end a pious duty; just as burial itself, originally a selfish precaution against the pranks and tricks of returning corpses, becomes in the end so sacred and imperative that unburied ghosts are conceived as wandering about, Archytas-wise, begging for the favour of a handful of sand to prevent them from homeless vagabondage for ever. Nations who burn come to regard the act of burning as the appointed means for freeing the ghost from the confining meshes of the body, and regard it rather as a solemn duty to the dead than as a personal precaution.

Not only so, but there arises among them a vague and fanciful conception of the world of shades very different indeed from the definite and material conception of the two earlier stages. The mummy was looked upon as inhabiting the tomb, which was furnished and decorated for its reception like a house; and it was provided with every needful article for use and comfort. Even the buried body was supplied with tools and implements for the ghost. The necessities of the shade are quite different and more shadowy. He has no need of earthly tools or implements. The objects found in the Long Barrows of the burying folk and the Round Barrows of the cremationists well illustrate this primordial and far-reaching difference. The Long Barrows of the Stone Age people are piled above an interment; they contain a chambered tomb, which is really the subterranean home or palace of the body buried in it. The wives and slaves of the deceased were killed and interred with him to keep him company in his new life in the grave; and implements, weapons, drinking-cups, games, trinkets, and ornaments were buried with their owners. The life in the grave was all as material and real as this one; the same objects that served the warrior in this world would equally serve him in the same form in the next. It is quite different with the Round Barrows of the Bronze Age cremationists. These barrows are piled round an urn., which determines the shape of the tumulus, as the chambered tomb and the corpse determine the shape of the earlier Stone Age interments. They contain ashes alone; and the implements and weapons placed in them are all broken or charred with fire. Why? Because the ghost, immaterial as he has now become, can no longer make use of solid earthly weapons or utensils. It is only their ghosts or shadows that can be of any use to the ghostly possessor in the land of shades. Hence everything he needs is burnt or broken, in order that its ghost may be released and liberated; and all material objects are now conceived as possessing such ghosts, which can be utilised accordingly in the world of spirits.

Note also that with this advance from the surviving or revivable Corpse to the immortal Soul or Spirit, there goes almost naturally and necessarily a correlative advance from continued but solitary life in the tomb to a freer and wider life in an underground world of shades and spirits. The ghost gets greatly liberated and emancipated. He has more freedom of movement, and becomes a citizen of an organised community, often envisaged as ruled over by a King of the Dead, and as divided into places of reward and punishment. But while we modern Europeans pretend to be resurrectionists, it is a fact that our current ghostly and eschatological conceptions (I speak of the world at large, not of mere scholastic theologians) have been largely influenced by ideas derived from this opposite doctrine—a doctrine once held by many or most of our own ancestors, and familiarised to us from childhood in classical literature. In fact, while most Englishmen of the present day believe they believe in the Resurrection of the Body, what they really believe in is the Immortality of the Soul..

It might seem at first sight as though a grave discrepancy existed between the two incongruous ideas, first of burying or burning your dead so that they may not be able to return or to molest you, and second of worshipping at their graves or making offerings to their disembodied spirits. But to the savage mind these two conceptions are by no means irreconcilable. While he jumps upon the corpse of his friend or his father to keep it in the narrow pit he has digged for it, he yet brings it presents of food and drink, or slays animals at the tomb, that the ghost may be refreshed by the blood that trickles down to it. Indeed, several intermediate customs occur, which help us to bridge over the apparent gulf between reverential preservation of the mummified body, and the coarse precautions of burial or burning. Thus, in many cases, some of which we shall examine in the next chapter, after the body has been for some time buried, the head is disinterred, and treasured with care in the family oratory, where it is worshipped and tended, and where it often gives oracles to the members of the household. A ceremonial washing is almost always a feature in this reception of the head; it recurs again and again in various cases, down to the enshrinement of the head of Hoseyn at Cairo, and that of St. Denis at the abbey of the same name, to both of which we shall allude once more at a far later stage of our enquiry. For the present, it must suffice to say that the ceremonial and oracular preservation of the head—the part which sees, and speaks, and eats, and drinks, and listens—is a common feature in all religious usages; that it gives rise apparently to the collections of family skulls which adorn so many savage huts and oratories; that it may be answerable ultimately for the Roman busts and many other imitative images of the dead, in which the head alone is represented; and that when transferred to the sacred human or animal victim (himself, as we shall hereafter see, a slain god), it seems to account for the human heads hung up by the Dyaks and other savages about their houses, as also for the skulls of oxen and other sacred animals habitually displayed on the front of places of worship, whose last relic is the sculptured oxen’s heads which fill the metopes in some Greek and most Roman temples. Much of this, I admit, will be little comprehensible to the reader at the present stage of our argument: but I beg him to bear in mind provisionally this oracular and representative value of the head or skull from this point forth; he will find, as he proceeds, its meaning will become clearer and ever clearer at each successive stage of our exposition.

I ought also to add that between complete preservation of the corpse and the practice of burial there seems to have gone another intermediate stage, now comparatively rare, but once very general, if we may judge from the traces it has left behind it—a stage when all the body or part of it was sacramentally eaten by the survivors as an act of devotion. We will consider this curious and revolting practice more fully when we reach the abstruse problem of sacrifice and sacrament; for the present it will suffice to say that in many instances, in Australia, South America, and elsewhere, the body is eaten, while only the bones are burned or buried. Among these savages, again, it usually happens that the head is cleaned of its flesh by cooking, while the skull is ceremonially washed, and preserved as an object of household veneration and an oracular deity. Instances will be quoted in succeeding chapters.

Thus, between the care taken to prevent returns of the corpse, and the worship paid to the ghost or shade, primitive races feel no such sense of discrepancy or incongruity as would instantly occur to civilised people.

The three stages in human ideas with which this chapter deals may be shortly summed up as corpse-worship, ghost-worship, and shade-worship.

CHAPTER IV.—THE ORIGIN OF GODS.

MR. Herbert Spencer has traced so admirably in his Principles of Sociology the progress of development from the Ghost to the God that I do not propose in this chapter to attempt much more than a brief recapitulation of his main propositions, which, however, I shall supplement with fresh examples, and adapt at the same time to the conception of three successive stages in human ideas about the Life of the Dead, as set forth in the preceding argument. But the hasty resume which I shall give at present will be fleshed out incidentally at a later point by consideration of several national religions.

In the earliest stage of all—the stage where the actual bodies of the dead are preserved,—Gods as such are for the most part unknown: it is the corpses of friends and ancestors that are worshipped and reverenced. For example, Ellis says of the corpse of a Tahitian chief that it was placed in a sitting posture under a protecting shed; “a small altar was erected before it, and offerings of fruit, food, and flowers were daily presented by the relatives, or the priest appointed to attend the body.” (This point about the priest is of essential importance.) The Central Americans, again, as Mr. Spencer notes, performed similar rites before bodies dried by artificial heat. The New Guinea people, as D’Albertis found, worship the dried mummies of their fathers and husbands. A little higher in the scale, we get the developed mummy-worship of Egypt and Peru, which survives even after the evolution of greater gods, from powerful kings or chieftains. Other evidence in abundance has been adduced from Polynesia and from Africa. Wherever the actual bodies of the dead are preserved, there also worship and offerings are paid to them.

Often, however, as already noted, it is not the whole body but the head alone that is specially kept and worshipped. Thus Mr. H. O. Forbes says of the people of Buru: “The dead are buried in the forest in some secluded spot, marked often by a merang or grave-pole; over which at certain intervals the relatives place tobacco, cigarettes, and various offerings. When the body is decomposed, the son or nearest relative disinters the head, wraps a new cloth about it, and places it in the Matakau at the back of his house, or in a little hut erected for it near the grave. It is the representative of his forefathers, whose behests he holds in the greatest respect.”

Two points are worthy of notice in this interesting account, as giving us an anticipatory hint of two further accessories whose evolution we must trace hereafter; first the grave-stake, which is probably the origin of the wooden idol; and second, the little hut erected over the head by the side of the grave, which is undoubtedly one of the origins of the temple or praying-house. Observe also the ceremonial wrapping of the skull in cloth, and its oracular functions.

Similarly, Mr. Wyatt Gill, the well-known missionary, writes of a dead baby at Boera, in New Guinea: “It will be covered with two inches of soil, the friends watching beside the grave; but eventually the skull and smaller bones will be preserved and worn by the mother.” And of the Suau people he says: “Enquiring the use of several small houses, I learned that it is to cover grave-pits. All the members of a family at death occupy the same grave, the earth that thinly covered the last occupant being scooped out to admit the newcomer. These graves are shallow; the dead are buried in a sitting posture, hands folded. The earth is thrown in up to the mouth only. An earthen pot covers the head. After a time the pot is taken off, the perfect skull removed and cleansed—eventually to be hung up in a basket or net inside the dwelling of the deceased over the fire, to blacken in the smoke.” In Africa, again, the skull is frequently preserved in such a pot and prayed to. In America, earthenware pots have been found moulded round human skulls in mounds at New Madrid and elsewhere; the skull cannot be removed without breaking the vessel. Indeed, this curious method of preservation in pots seems to be very widespread; we get perhaps a vague hint or reminiscence of its former prevalence in Europe in the story of Isabella and the pot of basil.

The special selection and preservation of the head as an object of worship thus noted in New Guinea and the Malay Archipelago is also still found among many other primitive peoples. For instance, the Andamanese widows keep the skulls of their husbands as a precious possession: and the New Caledonians, in case of sickness or calamities, “present offerings of food to the skulls of the departed.” Mr. Spencer quotes several similar examples, a few of which alone I extract from his pages.

“‘In the private fetish-hut of King Adolee, at Badagry, the skull of that monarch’s father is preserved in a clay vessel placed in the earth.’ He ‘gently rebukes it if his success does not happen to answer his expectations.’ Similarly among the Mandans, who place the skulls of their dead in a circle, each wife knows the skull of her former husband or child, ‘and there seldom passes a day that she does not visit it, with a dish of the best cooked food.... There is scarcely an hour in a pleasant day, but more or less of these women may be seen sitting or lying by the skull of their child or husband—talking to it in the most pleasant and endearing language that they can use (as they were wont to do in former days), and seemingly getting an answer back.’”

This affectionate type of converse with the dead, almost free from fear, is especially characteristic of the first or corpse-preserving stage of human death-conceptions. It seldom survives where burial has made the feeling toward the corpse a painful or loathsome one, and it is then confined to the head alone, while the grave itself with the body it encloses is rather shunned and dreaded.

A little above this level, Mr. Du Chaillu notes that some of his West African followers, when going on an expedition, brought out the skulls of their ancestors (which they religiously preserved) and scraped off small portions of the bone, which they mixed with water and drank; giving as a reason for this conduct that their ancestors were brave, and that by drinking a portion of them they too became brave and fearless like their ancestors. Here we have a simple and early case of that habit of “eating the god” to whose universality and importance Mr. Frazer has so forcibly called attention, and which we must examine at full in a subsequent chapter.

Throughout the earlier and ruder phases of human evolution, this primitive conception of ancestors or dead relatives as the chief known objects of worship survives undiluted: and ancestor-worship remains to this day the principal religion of the Chinese, and of several other peoples. Gods, as such, are practically unknown in China. Ancestor-worship also survives in many other races as one of the main cults, even after other elements of later religion have been superimposed upon it. In Greece and Rome, it remained to the last an important part of domestic ritual. But in most cases, a gradual differentiation is set up in time between various classes of ghosts or dead persons, some ghosts being considered of more importance and power than others; and out of these last it is that gods as a rule are finally developed. A god, in fact, is in the beginning at least an exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost—a ghost able to help, and from whose help great things may reasonably be expected.

Again, the rise of chieftainship and kingship has much to do with the growth of a higher conception of godhead; a dead king of any great power or authority is sure to be thought of in time as a god of considerable importance. We shall trace out this idea more fully hereafter in the religion of Egypt; for the present it must suffice to say that the supposed power of the gods in each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to the increased power of kings or emperors.

When we pass from the first plane of corpse-preservation and mummification to the second plane where burial is habitual, it might seem at a hasty glance as though continued worship of the dead, and their elevation into gods, would no longer be possible. For we saw that burial is prompted by a deadly fear lest the corpse or ghost should return to plague the living. Nevertheless, natural affection for parents or friends, and the desire to ensure their good will and aid, make these seemingly contrary ideas reconcilable. As a matter of fact, we find that even when men bury or burn their dead, they continue to worship them: while, as we shall show in the sequel, even the great stones which they roll on top of the grave to prevent the dead from rising again become in time altars on which sacrifices are offered to the spirit.

In these two later stages of thought with regard to the dead which accompany burial and cremation, the gods, indeed, grow more and more distinct from minor ghosts with an accelerated rapidity of evolution. They grow greater in proportion to the rise of temples and hierarchies. Furthermore, the very indefiniteness of the bodiless ghost tells in favour of an enlarged godship. The gods are thought of as more and more aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they are clothed with mighty attributes; they assume colossal size; they are even identified with the sun, the moon, the great powers of nature. But they are never quite omnipotent during the polytheistic stage, because in a pantheon they are necessarily mutually limiting. Even in the Greek and Roman civilisation, it is clear that the gods were not commonly envisaged by ordinary minds as much more than human; for Pisistratus dressed up a courtesan at Athens to represent Pallas Athene, and imposed by this cheap theatrical trick upon the vulgar Athenians; while Paul and Barnabas were taken at Lystra for Zeus and Hermes. Many similar instances will occur at once to the classical scholar. It is only quite late, under the influence of monotheism, that the exalted conceptions of deity now prevalent began to form themselves in Judaism and Christianity.

Mere domestic ancestor-worship, once more, could scarcely give us the origin of anything more than domestic religion—the cult of the manes, the household gods, as distinct from that of the tribal and national deities. But kingship supplies us with the missing link. We have seen in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African god-making how the worship of the chief’s ancestors gives rise to tribal or village gods; and it is clear how, as chieftainship and kingship widen, national gods of far higher types may gradually evolve from these early monarchs. Especially must we take the time-element into account, remembering that the earlier ancestors get at last to be individually forgotten as men, and remain in memory only as supernatural beings. Thus kingship rapidly reacts upon godship. If the living king himself is great, how much greater must be the ancestor whom even the king himself fears and worships; and how infinitely greater still that yet earlier god, the ancestor’s ancestor, whom the ancestor himself revered and propitiated! In some such way there grows up gradually a hierarchy of gods, among whom the oldest, and therefore the least known, are usually in the end the greatest of any.

The consolidation of kingdoms and empires, and the advance of the arts, tell strongly with concurrent force in these directions; while the invention of written language sets a final seal on the godhead and might of great early ancestors. Among very primitive tribes, indeed, we find as a rule only very domestic and recent objects of worship. The chief prays for the most part to his own father and his immediate predecessors. The more ancient ancestors, as Mr. Duff Macdonald has so well pointed out, grow rapidly into oblivion. But with more advanced races, various agencies arise which help to keep in mind the early dead; and in very evolved communities these agencies, reaching a high pitch of evolution, make the recent gods or kings or ghosts seem comparatively unimportant by the side of the very ancient and very long-worshipped ones. More than of any other thing, it may be said of a god, vires acquirit eundo. Thus, in advanced types of society, saints or gods of recent origin assume but secondary or minor importance; while the highest and greatest gods of all are those of the remotest antiquity, whose human history is lost from our view in the dim mist of ages.

Three such agencies of prime importance in the transition from the mere ghost to the fully developed god must here be mentioned. They are the rise of temples, of idols, and, above all, of priesthoods. Each of these we must now consider briefly but separately.

The origin of the Temple is various; but all temples may nevertheless be reduced in the last resort either into graves of the dead, or into places where worship is specially offered up to them. This truth, which Mr. Herbert Spencer arrived at by examination of the reports of travellers or historians, and worked up in connection with his Principles of Sociology, was independently arrived at through quite a different line of observation and reasoning by Mr. William Simpson, the well-known artist of the Illustrated London News. Mr. Simpson has probably visited a larger number of places of worship all over the world than any other traveller of any generation: and he was early impressed by the fact which forced itself upon his eyes, that almost every one of them, where its origin could be traced, turned out to be a tomb in one form or another. He has set forth the results of his researches in this direction in several admirable papers, all of which, but especially the one entitled The Worship of Death, I can confidently recommend to the serious attention of students of religion. They contain the largest collection of instances in this matter ever yet made; and they show beyond a doubt the affiliation of the very idea of a temple on the tomb or grave of some distinguished dead person, famous for his power, his courage, or his saintliness.

The cave is probably the first form of the Temple. Sometimes the dead man is left in the cave which he inhabited when living; an instance of which we have already noticed among the Veddahs of Ceylon. In other cases, where races have outgrown the custom of cave-dwelling, the habit of cave-burial, or rather of laying the dead in caves or in artificial grottoes, still continues through the usual conservatism of religious feeling. Offerings are made to the dead in all these various caves: and here we get the beginnings of cave-temples. Such temples are at first of course either natural or extremely rude; but they soon begin to be decorated with rough frescoes, as is done, for example, by the South African Bushmen. These frescoes again give rise in time by slow degrees to such gorgeous works as those of the Tombs of the Kings at Thebes; each of which has attached to it a magnificent temple as its mortuary chapel. Sculpture is similarly employed on the decoration of cave-temples; and we get the final result of such artistic ornament in splendid cave-temples like those of Ellora. Both arts were employed together in the beautiful and interesting Etruscan tomb-temples.

In another class of cases, the hut where the dead man lived is abandoned at his death by his living relations, and thus becomes a rudimentary Temple where offerings are made to him. This is the case with the Hottentots, to take an instance at a very low grade of culture. Of a New Guinea hut-burial, Mr. Chalmers says: “The chief is buried in the centre; a mat was spread over the grave, on which I was asked to sit until they had a weeping.” This weeping is generally performed by women—a touch which leads us on to Adonis and Osiris rites, and to the Christian Pietà. Mr. Spencer has collected several other excellent examples. Thus, the Arawaks place the corpse in a small boat and bury it in the hut; among the Creeks, the habitation of the dead becomes his place of interment; the Fantees likewise bury the dead person in his own house; and the Yucatanese “as a rule abandoned the house, and left it uninhabited after the burial.” I will not multiply quotations; it will be better to refer the reader to Mr. Spencer’s own pages, where a sufficient number of confirmatory examples are collected to satisfy any but the most prejudiced critic. “As repeated supplies of food are taken to the abandoned house,” says Mr. Spencer, “and as along with making offerings there go other propitiatory acts, the deserted dwelling house, turned into a mortuary house, acquires the attributes of a temple.”

A third origin for Temples is found in the shed, hut, or shelter, erected over the grave, either for the protection of the dead or for the convenience of the living who bring their offerings. Thus, in parts of New Guinea, according to Mr. Chalmers, “The natives bury their dead in the front of their dwellings, and cover the grave with a small house, in which the near relatives sleep for several months.”

“Where house-burial is not practised,” says Mr. Spencer, once more, “the sheltering structure raised above the grave, or above the stage bearing the corpse, becomes the germ of the sacred building. By some of the New Guinea people there is a ‘roof of atap erected over’ the burial-place. In Cook’s time the Tahitians placed the body of a dead person upon a kind of bier supported by sticks and under a roof. So, too, in Sumatra, where ‘a shed is built over’ the grave; and so, too, in Tonga. Of course this shed admits of enlargement and finish. The Dyaks in some places build mausoleums like houses, 18 feet high, ornamentally carved, containing the goods of the departed—sword, shield, paddle, etc. When we read that the Fijians deposit the bodies of their chiefs in small enbures or temples, we may fairly conclude that these so-called temples are simply more-developed sheltering structures. Still more clearly did the customs of the Peruvians show that the structure erected over the dead body develops into a temple. Acosta tells us that ‘every one of these kings Yncas left all his treasure and revenues to entertaine the place of worshippe where his body was layed, and there were many ministers with all their familie dedicated to his service.’”

Note in the last touch, by anticipation, one origin of priesthood. On the other hand, we saw in Mr. Duff Macdonald’s account of the Central African natives that those savages do not worship at the actual grave itself. In this case, terror of the revenant seems to prevent the usual forms of homage at the tomb of the deceased. Moreover, the ghost being now conceived as more or less freely separable from the corpse, it will be possible to worship it in some place remote from the dreaded cemetery. Hence these Africans “seek the spirit at the place where their departed kinsman last lived among them. It is the great tree at the verandah of the dead man’s house that is their temple: and if no tree grow here, they erect a little shade, and there perform their simple rites.” We have in this case yet another possible origin for certain temples, and also, I will add by anticipation of a future chapter, for the sacred tree, which is so common an object of pious adoration in many countries.

Beginning with such natural caves or such humble huts, the Temple assumes larger proportions and more beautiful decorations with the increase of art and the growth of kingdoms. Especially, as we see in the tomb-temples and pyramids of Egypt and Peru, does it assume great size and acquire costly ornaments when it is built by a powerful king for himself during his own lifetime. Temple-tombs of this description reach a high point of artistic development in such a building as the so-called Treasury of Atreus at Mycenæ, which is really the sepulchre of some nameless prehistoric monarch. It is admirably reconstructed in Perrot and Chipiez.

Obviously, the importance and magnificence of the temple will react upon the popular conception of the importance and magnificence of the god who inhabits it. And conversely, as the gods grow greater and greater, more art and more constructive skill will constantly be devoted to the building and decoration of their permanent homes. Thus in Egypt the tomb was often more carefully built and splendidly decorated than the house; because the house was inhabited for a short time only, but the tomb for eternity. Moreover, as kings grew more powerful, they often adorned the temples of their ancestors with emulous pride, to show their own greatness. In Egypt, once more, the original part of all the more important temples is but a small dark cell, of early origin, to which one successive king after another in later dynasties added statelier and ever statelier antechambers or porches, so that at last the building assumed the gigantic size and noble proportions of Karnak and Luxor. This access of importance to the temple cannot have failed to add correspondingly to the dignity of the god; so that, as time went on, instead of the early kings being forgotten and no longer worshipped, they assumed ever greater and greater importance from the magnificence of the works in which their memory was enshrined. To the very end, the god depends largely on his house for impressiveness. How much did not Hellenic religion itself owe to the Parthenon and the temple of Olympian Zeus! How much does not Christianity itself owe to Lincoln and Durham, to Amiens and Chartres, to Milan and Pisa, to St. Mark’s and St. Peter’s! Men cannot believe that the deities worshipped in such noble and dimly religious shrines were once human like themselves, compact of the same bodies, parts, and passions. Yet in the last instance at least we know the great works to be raised in honour of a single Lower Syrian peasant.

With this brief and imperfect notice of the origin of temples, which will indirectly be expanded in later portions of my work, I pass on from the consideration of the sacred building itself to that of the Idol who usually dwells within it.

Where burial prevails, and where arts are at a low stage of development, the memory of the dead is not likely to survive beyond two or three generations. But where mummification is the rule, there is no reason why deceased persons should not be preserved and worshipped for an indefinite period; and we know that in Egypt at least the cult of kings who died in the most remote times of the Early Empire was carried on regularly down to the days of the Ptolemies. In such a case as this, there is absolutely no need for idols to arise; the corpse itself is the chief object of worship. We do find accordingly that both in Egypt and in Peru the worship of the mummy played a large part in the local religions; though sometimes it alternated with the worship of other holy objects, such as the image or the sacred stone, which we shall see hereafter to have had a like origin. But in many other countries, where bodies were less visibly and obviously preserved, the worship due to the ghost or god was often paid to a simulacrum or idol; so much so that “idolatry” has become in Christian parlance the common term for most forms of worship other than monotheistic.

Now what is the origin and meaning of Idols, and how can they be affiliated upon primitive corpse or ghost worship?

Like the temple, the Idol, I believe, has many separate origins, several of which have been noted by Mr. Herbert Spencer, while others, it seems to me, have escaped the notice even of that profound and acute observer.

The earliest Idols, if I may be allowed the contradictory expression, are not idols at all—not images or representations of the dead person, but actual bodies, preserved and mummified. These pass readily, however, into various types of representative figures. For in the first place the mummy itself is usually wrapped round in swathing-cloths which obscure its features; and in the second place it is frequently enclosed in a wooden mummy-case, which is itself most often rudely human in form, and which has undoubtedly given rise to certain forms of idols. Thus, the images of Amun, Khem, Osiris, and Ptah among Egyptian gods are frequently or habitually those of a mummy in a mummy-case. But furthermore, the mummy itself is seldom or never the entire man; the intestines at least have been removed, or even, as in New Guinea, the entire mass of flesh, leaving only the skin and the skeleton. The eyes, again, are often replaced, as in Peru, by some other imitative object, so as to keep up the lifelike appearance. Cases like these lead on to others, where the image or idol gradually supersedes altogether the corpse or mummy.

Mr. H. O. Forbes gives an interesting instance of such a transitional stage in Timorlaut. “The bodies of those who die in war or by a violent death are buried,” he says; “and if the head has been captured [by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the grave to represent the missing member, and to deceive and satisfy his spirit.” There is abundant evidence that such makeshift limbs or bodies amply suffice for the use of the soul, when the actual corpse has been destroyed or mutilated. Sometimes, indeed, the substitution of parts is deliberate and intentional. Landa says of the Yucatanese that they cut oft the heads of the ancient lords of Cocom when they died, and cleared them from flesh by cooking them (very probably to eat at a sacrificial feast, of which more hereafter); then they sawed off the top of the skull, filled in the rest of the head with cement, and, making the face as like as possible to the original possessor, kept these images along with the statues and the ashes. Note here the usual preservation of the head as exceptionally sacred. In other cases, they made for their fathers wooden statues, put in the ashes of the burnt body, and attached the skin of the occiput taken off the corpse. These images, half mummy, half idol, were kept in the oratories of their houses, and were greatly reverenced and assiduously cared for. On all the festivals, food and drink were offered to them.

Mr. Spencer has collected other interesting instances of this transitional stage between the corpse or mummy and the mere idol. The Mexicans, who were cremationists, used to burn a dead lord, and collect the ashes; “and after kneading them with human blood, they made of them an image of the deceased, which was kept in memory of him.” Sometimes, as in Yucatan, the ashes were placed in a man-shaped receptacle of clay, and temples or oratories were erected over them. “In yet other cases,” says Mr. Spencer, “there is worship of the relics, joined with the representative figure, not by inclusion, but only by proximity.” Thus Gomara tells us that the Mexicans having burnt the body of their deceased king, gathered up the ashes, bones, jewels, and gold in cloths, and made a figure dressed as a man, before which, as well as before the relics, offerings were placed. It is clear that cremation specially lends itself to such substitution of an image for the actual dead body. Among burying races it is the severed skull, on the contrary, that is oftenest preserved and worshipped.

The transition from such images to small stone sarcophagi, like those of the Etruscan tombs, is by no means a great one. These sarcophagi contained the burnt ashes of the dead, but were covered by a lid which usually represented the deceased, reclining, as if at a banquet, with a beaker in his hands. The tombs in which the sarcophagi were placed were of two types; one, the stone pyramid or cone, which, says Dr. Isaac Taylor, “is manifestly a survival of the tumulus”; the other, the rock-cut chamber, “which is a survival of the cave.” These lordly graves are no mere cheerless sepulchres; they are abodes for the dead, constructed on the model of the homes of the living. They contain furniture and pottery; and their walls are decorated with costly mural paintings. They are also usually provided with an antechamber, where the family could assemble at the annual feast to do homage to the spirits of departed ancestors, who shared in the meal from their sculptured sarcophagus lids.

At a further stage of distance from the primitive mummy-idol we come upon the image pure and simple. The Mexicans, for example, as we have seen, were cremationists; and when men killed in battle were missing, they made wooden figures of them, which they honoured, and then burnt them in place of the bodies. In somewhat the same spirit the Egyptians used to place beside the mummy itself an image of the dead, to act as a refuge or receptacle for the soul, “in case of the accidental destruction of the actual body.” So the Mexicans once more, if one of their merchants died on a journey, were accustomed to make a statue of wood in the shape of the deceased, to which they paid all the honours they would have done to his actual corpse before burning it. In Africa, while a king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Mr. Spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for the bodies of the dead. The Roman imagines wore masks of wax, which preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. Perhaps the most curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in Westminster Abbey.

There are two other sources of idol-worship, however, which, as it seems to me, have hardly received sufficient attention at Mr. Spencer’s hands. Those two are the stake which marks the grave, and the standing stone or tombstone. By far the larger number of idols, I venture to believe, are descended from one or other of these two originals, both of which I shall examine hereafter in far greater detail. There is indeed no greater lacuna, I fancy, in Mr. Spencer’s monumental work than that produced by the insufficient consideration of these two fruitful sources of worshipful objects. I shall therefore devote a considerable space to their consideration in subsequent chapters; for the present it will suffice to remark that the wooden stake seems often to form the origin or point of departure for the carved wooden image, as well as for such ruder objects of reverence as the cones and wooden pillars so widely reverenced among the Semitic tribes; while the rough boulder, standing stone, or tombstone seems to form the origin or point of departure for the stone or marble statue, the commonest type of idol the whole world over in all advanced and cultivated communities. Such stones were at first mere rude blocks or unhewn masses, the descendants of those which were rolled over the grave in primitive times in order to keep down the corpse of the dead man, and prevent him from returning to disturb the living. But in time they grew to be roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and finally to be decorated with a rude representation of a human head and shoulders. From this stage they readily progressed to that of the Greek Hermæ. We now know that this was the early shape of most Hellenic gods and goddesses; and we can trace their evolution onward from this point to the wholly anthropomorphic Aphrodite or Here. The well-known figure of the Ephesian Artemis is an intermediate case which will occur at once to every classical reader. Starting from such shapeless beginnings, we progress at last to the artistic and splendid bronze and marble statues of Hellas, Etruria, and Rome, to the many-handed deities of modern India, and to the sculptured Madonnas and Pietàs of Renaissance Italy.

Naturally, as the gods grow more beautiful and more artistically finished in workmanship, the popular idea of their power and dignity must increase pari passu. In Egypt, this increase took chiefly the form of colossal size and fine manipulation of hard granitic materials. The so-called Memnon and the Sphinx are familiar instances of the first; the Pashts of Syenite, the black basalt gods, so well known at the Louvre and the British Museum, are examples of the second. In Greece, effect was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in the Aphrodites and Apollos, or by costliness of material, as in the chryselephantine Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon. But we must always remember that in Hellas itself these glorious gods were developed in a comparatively short space of time from the shapeless blocks or standing stones of the ruder religion; indeed, we have still many curious intermediate forms between the extremely grotesque and hardly human Mycenæan types, and the exquisite imaginings of Myron or Phidias. The earliest Hellenic idols engraved by Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez in their great work on Art in Primitive Greece do not rise in any respect superior to the Polynesian level; while the so-called Apollos of later archaic workmanship, rigidly erect with their arms at their sides, recall in many respects the straight up-and-down outline of the standing stone from which they are developed.

I should add that in an immense number of instances the rude stone image or idol, and at a still lower grade the unwrought sacred stone, stands as the central object under a shed or shelter, which develops by degrees into the stately temple. The advance in both is generally more or less parallel; though sometimes, as in historical Greece, a temple of the noblest architecture encloses as its central and principal object of veneration the rough unhewn stone of early barbaric worship. So even in Christendom, great churches and cathedrals often hold as their most precious possession some rude and antique image like the sacred Bambino of Santa Maria in Ara Coli at Rome, or the “Black Madonnas” which are revered by the people at so many famous Italian places of pilgrimage.

Nor do I mean to say that every Idol is necessarily itself a funereal relic. When once the idea of godship has been thoroughly developed, and when men have grown accustomed to regard an image or idol as the representative or dwelling-place of their god, it is easy to multiply such images indefinitely. Hundreds of representations may exist of the self-same Apollo or Aphrodite or Madonna or St. Sebastian. At the same time, it is quite clear that for most worshippers, the divine being is more or less actually confused with the image; a particular Artemis or a particular Notre Dame is thought of as more powerful or more friendly than another. I have known women in Southern Europe go to pray at the shrine of a distant Madonna, “because she is greater than our own Madonna.” Moreover, it is probable that in many cases images or sacred stones once funereal in origin, and representing particular gods or ghosts, have been swallowed up at last by other and more powerful deities, so as to lose in the end their primitive distinctness. Thus, there were many Baals and many Ashteroths; probably there were many Apollos, many Artemises, many Aphrodites. It is almost certain that there were many distinct Hermæ. The progress of research tends to make us realise that numberless deities, once considered unique and individual, may be resolved into a whole host of local gods, afterwards identified with some powerful deity on the merest external resemblances of image, name, or attribute. In Egypt at least this process of identification and centralisation was common. Furthermore, we know that each new religion tends to swallow up and assimilate to itself all possible elements of older cults; just as Hebrew Jahwehism tried to adopt the sacred stones of early Semitic heathenism by associating them with episodes in the history of the patriarchs; and just as Christianity has sanctified such stones in its own area by using them sometimes as the base of a cross, or by consecrating them at others with the name of some saint or martyr.

But even more than the evolution of the Temple and the Idol, the evolution of the Priesthood has given dignity, importance, and power to the gods. For the priests are a class whose direct interest it is to make the most of the greatness and majesty of the deities they tend or worship.

Priesthood, again, has probably at least two distinct origins. The one is quasi-royal; the other is quasiservile.

I begin with the first. We saw that the chief of an African village, as the son and representative of the chief ghosts, who are the tribal gods, has alone the right to approach them directly with offerings. The inferior villager, who desires to ask anything of the gods, asks through the chief, who is a kinsman and friend of the divine spirits, and who therefore naturally understands their ideas and habits. Such chiefs are thus also naturally priests. They are sacred by family; they and their children stand in a special relation to the gods of the tribe, quite different from the relation in which the common people stand; they are of the blood of the deities. This type of relation is common in many countries; the chiefs in such instances are “kings and priests, after the order of Melchizedek.”

To put it briefly, in the earliest or domestic form of religion, the gods of each little group or family are its own dead ancestors, and especially (while the historic memory is still but weak) its immediate predecessors. In this stage, the head of the household naturally discharges the functions of priest; it is he who approaches the family ghosts or gods on behalf of his wives, his sons, his dependants. To the last, indeed, the father of each family retains this priestly function as regards the more restricted family rites; he is priest of the worship of the lares and penates; he offers the family sacrifice to the family gods; he reads family prayers in the Christian household. But as the tribe or nation arises, and chieftainship grows greater, it is the ghosts or ancestors of the chiefly or kingly family who develop most into gods; and the living chief and his kin are their natural representatives. Thus, in most cases, the priestly office comes to be associated with that of king or chief. Indeed, we shall see hereafter in a subsequent chapter that many kings, being the descendants of gods, are gods themselves; and that this union of the kingly and divine characters has much to do with the growth of the dignity of godhead. Here, however, I waive this point for the present; it will suffice for us to note at the present stage of our argument that in a large number of instances the priesthood and the kingship were inherent and hereditary in the self-same families.

“The union of a royal title with priestly duties,” says Mr. Frazer in The Golden Bough, “was common in ancient Italy and Greece. At Rome and in other Italian cities there was a priest called the Sacrificial King or King of the sacred rites (Rex Sacrificulus or Rex Sacrorum), and his wife bore the title of Queen of the Sacred Rites. In republican Athens, the second magistrate of the state was called the King, and his wife the Queen; the functions of both were religious. Many other Greek democracies had titular kings, whose duties, so far as they are known, seem to have been priestly. At Rome the tradition was that the Sacrificial King had been appointed after the expulsion of the kings in order to offer the sacrifices which had been previously offered by the kings. In Greece a similar view appears to have prevailed as to the origin of the priestly kings. In itself the view is not improbable, and it is borne out by the example of Sparta, the only purely Greek state which retained the kingly form of government in historical times. For in Sparta all state sacrifices were offered by the kings as descendants of the god. This combination of priestly functions with royal authority is familiar to every one. Asia Minor, for example, was the seat of various great religious capitals, peopled by thousands of ‘Sacred slaves,’ and ruled by pontiffs who wielded at once temporal and spiritual authority, like the popes of mediaeval Rome. Such priest-ridden cities were Zela and Pes-sinus. Teutonic Kings, again, in the old heathen days seem to have stood in the position and exercised the powers of high priests. The Emperors of China offer public sacrifices, the details of which are regulated by the ritual books. It is needless, however, to multiply examples of what is the rule rather than the exception in the early history of the kingship.”

We will return hereafter in another connexion to this ancient relation of kingship with priesthood, which arises naturally from the still more ancient relation of the king to the god.

Where priesthood originates in this particular way, little differentiation is likely to occur between the temporal and the ecclesiastical power. But there is a second and far more potent origin of priesthood, less distinguished in its beginnings, yet more really pregnant of great results in the end. For where the king is a priest, and the descendant of the gods, as in Peru and Egypt, his immediate and human power seems to overshadow and as it were to belittle the power of his divine ancestors. No statue of Osiris, for example, is half so big in size as the colossal figure of Rameses II. which lies broken in huge pieces outside the mortuary temple of the king it commemorates, among the ruins of Thebes. But where a separate and distinct priesthood gets the management of sacred rites entirely into its own hands, we find the authority of the gods often rising superior to that of the kings, who are only their vicegerents: till at last we get Popes dictating to emperors, and powerful monarchs doing humble penance before the costly shrines of murdered archbishops.

The origin of independent or quasi-servile priesthood is to be found in the institution of “temple slaves,”—the attendants told off as we have already seen to do duty at the grave of the chief or dead warrior. Egypt, again affords us, on the domestic side, an admirable example of the origin of such priesthoods. Over the lintel of each of the cave-like tombs at Beni Hassan and Sakkarah is usually placed an inscription setting forth the name and titles of its expected occupant (for each was built during the life-time of its owner), with an invocation praying for him propitious funeral rites, and a good burial-place after a long and happy life. Then follows a pious hope that the spirit may enjoy for all eternity the proper payment of funereal offerings, a list of which is ordinarily appended, together with a statement of the various anniversaries on which they were due. But the point which specially concerns us here is this: Priests or servants were appointed to see that these offerings were duly made; and the tomb was endowed with property for the purpose both of keeping up the offerings in question, and of providing a stipend or living-wage for the priest. As we shall see hereafter, such priesthoods were generally made hereditary, so as to ensure their continuance throughout all time: and so successful were they that in many cases worship continued to be performed for several hundred years at the tomb; so that a person who died under the Early Empire was still being made the recipient of funeral dues under kings of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.

I give this interesting historical instance at some length because it is one of the best known, and also one of the most persistent. But everywhere, all the world over, similar evolutions have occurred on a shorter scale. The temple attendants, endowed for the purpose of performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into priests, who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. Bit by bit, prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the priests have become the depositaries of the divine traditions. They alone know how to approach the god; they alone can read the hidden signs of his pleasure or displeasure. As intermediaries between worshipper and deity, they are themselves half sacred. Without them, no votary can rightly approach the shrine of his patron. Thus at last they rise into-importance far above their origin; priestcraft comes into being; and by magnifying their god, the members of the hierarchy magnify at the same time their own office and function.

Yet another contributing cause must be briefly noted. Picture-writing and hieroglyphics take their rise more especially in connexion with tombs and temples. The priests in particular hold as a rule the key to this knowledge. In ancient Egypt, to take a well-known instance, they were the learned class; they became the learned class again under other circumstances in mediaeval Europe. Everywhere we come upon sacred mysteries that the priests alone know; and where hieroglyphics exist, these mysteries, committed to writing, become the peculiar property of the priests in a more special sense. Where writing is further differentiated into hieratic and demotic, the gulf between laity and priesthood grows still wider; the priests possess a special key to knowledge, denied to the commonalty. The recognition of Sacred Books has often the same result; of these, the priests are naturally the guardians and exponents. I need hardly add that side by side with the increase of architectural grandeur in the temple, and the increase of artistic beauty and costliness in the idols or statues and pictures of the gods, goes increase in the stateliness of the priestly robes, the priestly surroundings, the priestly ritual. Finally, we get ceremonies of the most dignified character, adorned with all the accessories of painting and sculpture, of candles and flowers, of incense and music, of rich mitres and jewelled palls,—ceremonies performed in the dim shade of lofty temples, or mosques, or churches, in honour of god or gods of infinite might, power, and majesty, who must yet in the last resort be traced back to some historic or prehistoric Dead Man, or at least to some sacred stone or stake or image, his relic and representative.

Thus, by convergence of all these streams, the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity of unbounded glory and greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from necessary limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely forgotten. But to the last, observe this curious point: all new gods or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop up first, of demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from known sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he turns out to be—a human being. Whenever we go back to very primitive religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their ancestors. It is only when we take relatively advanced races with unknown early histories that we find them worshipping a certain number of gods who cannot be easily and immediately resolved into dead men or spirits. Unfortunately, students of religion have oftenest paid the closest attention to those historical religions which lie furthest away from the primitive type, and in which at their first appearance before us we come upon the complex idea of godhead already fully developed. Hence they are too much inclined, like Professor Robertson Smith, and even sometimes Mr. Frazer (whose name, however, I cannot mention in passing without the pro-foundest respect), to regard the idea of a godship as primordial, not derivative; and to neglect the obvious derivation of godhead as a whole from the cult and reverence of the deified ancestor. Yet the moment we get away from these advanced and too overlaid historical religions to the early conceptions of simple savages, we see at once that no gods exist for them save the ancestral corpses or ghosts; that religion means the performance of certain rites and offerings to these corpses or ghosts; and that higher elemental or departmental deities are wholly wanting. Even in the great historical religions themselves, the further back we go, and the lower down we probe, the closer do we come to the foundation-stratum of ghosts or ancestor-gods. And where, as in Egypt, the evidence is oldest and most complete throughout, the more do we observe how the mystic nature-gods of the later priestly conceptions yield, as we go back age by age in time, to the simpler and more purely human ancestral gods of the earliest documents.

It will be our task in the succeeding chapters of this work to do even more than this—to show that the apparently unresolvable element in later religions, including the Hebrew god Jahweh himself, can be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the primitive conception of a ghost or ancestor.

CHAPTER V.—SACRED STONES.

I mentioned in the last chapter two origins of Idols to which, as I believed, an insufficient amount of attention had been directed by Mr. Herbert Spencer. These were the Sacred Stone and the Wooden Stake which mark the grave. To these two I will now add a third common object of worship, which does not indeed enter into the genesis of idols, but which is of very high importance in early religion—the sacred tree, with its collective form, the sacred grove. All the objects thus enumerated demand further attention at our hands, both from their general significance in the history of religion, and also from their special interest in connexion with the evolution of the God of Israel, who became in due time the God of Christianity and of Islam, as well as the God of modern idealised and sublimated theism.

I will begin with the consideration of the Sacred Stone, not only because it is by far the most important of the three, but also because, as we shall shortly see, it stands in the direct line of parentage of the God of Israel.

All the world over, and at all periods of history, we find among the most common objects of human worship certain blocks of stone, either rudely shaped and dressed by the hand, or else more often standing alone on the soil in all their native and natural roughness. The downs of England are everywhere studded with cromlechs, dolmens, and other antique megalithic structures (of which the gigantic trilithons of Stonehenge and Avebury are the best-known examples), long described by antiquaries as “druidical remains,” and certainly regarded by the ancient inhabitants of Britain with an immense amount of respect and reverence. In France we have the endless avenues of Carnac and Locmariaker; in Sardinia, the curious conical shafts known to the local peasants as sepolture dei giganti—the tombs of the giants. In Syria, Major Conder has described similar monuments in Heth and Moab, at Gilboa and at Heshbon. In India, five stones are set up at the corner of a field, painted red, and worshipped by the natives as the Five Pandavas. Theophrastus tells us as one of the characteristics of the superstitious man that he anoints with oil the sacred stones at the street corners; and from an ancient tradition embedded in the Hebrew scriptures we learn how the patriarch Jacob set up a stone at Bethel “for a pillar,” and “poured oil upon the top of it,” as a like act of worship. Even in our own day there is a certain English hundred where the old open-air court of the manor is inaugurated by the ceremony of breaking a bottle of wine over a standing stone which tops a tumulus; and the sovereigns of the United Kingdom are still crowned in a chair which encloses under its seat the ancestral sacred stone of their heathen Scottish and Irish predecessors.

Now, what is the share of such sacred stones in the rise and growth of the religious habit?

It is hardly necessary, I suppose, to give formal proof of the familiar fact that an upright slab is one of the commonest modes of marking the place where a person is buried. From the ancient pillar that prehistoric savages set up over the tumulus of their dead chief, to the headstone that marks the dwarfed and stunted barrow in our own English cemeteries, the practice of mankind has been one and continuous. Sometimes the stone is a rough boulder from the fields; a representative of the big block which savages place on the grave to keep the corpse from rising: sometimes it is an oblong slab of slate or marble; sometimes, and especially among the more advanced races, it is a shapely cross or sculptured monument. But whenever on earth interment is practised, there stones of some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost invariably mark the place of burial.

Again, as presents and sacrifices are offered at graves to the spirits of the dead, it is at the stone which records the last resting-place of the deceased that they will oftenest be presented. As a matter of fact we know that, all the world over, offerings of wine, oil, rice, ghee, corn, and meat are continually made at the graves of chiefs or relations. Victims, both human and otherwise, are sacrificed at the tomb, and their blood is constantly smeared on the headstone or boulder that marks the spot. Indeed, after a time, the grave and the stone get to be confounded together, and the place itself comes to have a certain sacredness, derived from the ghost which haunts and inhabits it.

Four well-marked varieties of early tombstone are recognised in the eastern continent at least, and their distribution and nature is thus described by Major Conder: “Rude stone monuments, bearing a strong family resemblance in their mode of construction and dimensions, have been found distributed over all parts of Europe and Western Asia, and occur also in India. In some cases they are attributable to early Aryan tribes; in others they seem to be of Semitic origin. They include menhirs, or standing stones, which were erected as memorials, and worshipped as deities, with libations of blood, milk, honey, or water poured upon the stones: dolmens, or stone tables, free standing—that is, not covered by any mound or superstructure, which may be considered without doubt to have been used as altars on which victims (often human) were immolated: cairns, also memorial, and sometimes surrounding menhirs; these were made by the contributions of numerous visitors or pilgrims, each adding a stone as witness of his presence: finally cromlechs, or stone circles, used as sacred enclosures or early hypæthral temples, often with a central menhir or dolmen as statue or altar.”

There can be very little doubt that every one of these monuments is essentially sepulchral in character. The menhir or standing stone is the ordinary gravestone still in use among us: the dolmen is a chambered tomb, once covered by a tumulus, but now bare and open: the cairn is a heap of stones piled above the dead body: the stone circle is apparently a later temple built around a tomb, whose position is marked by the menhir or altar-stone in its centre. And each has been the parent of a numerous offspring. The menhir gives rise to the obelisk, the stone cross, and the statue or idol; the dolmen, to the sarcophagus, the altar-tomb, and the high altar; the cairn, to the tope and also to the pyramid; the cromlech, or stone circle, to the temple or church in one at least of its many developments.

Each of these classes of monuments, Major Conder observes, has its distinctive name in the Semitic languages, and is frequently mentioned in the early Hebrew literature. The menhir is the “pillar” of our Authorised Version of the Old Testament; the dolmen is the “altar”; the cairn is the “heap”; and the stone circle appears under the names Gilgal and Hazor. The significance of these facts will appear a little later on when I reach a more advanced stage in the evolution of stone-worship.

In the simplest and most primitive stage of religion, such as that pure ancestor-cult still surviving unmixed among the people of New Guinea or the African tribes whose practice Mr. Duff Macdonald has so admirably described for us, it is the corpse or ghost itself, not the stone to mark its dwelling, which comes in for all the veneration and all the gifts of the reverent survivors. But we must remember that every existing religion, however primitive in type, is now very ancient; and it is quite natural that in many cases the stone should thus come itself to be regarded as the ghost or god, the object to which veneration is paid by the tribesmen. In fact, just in proportion as the ghost evolves into the god, so does the tombstone begin to evolve into the fetish or idol.

At first, however, it is merely as the rude unshapen stone that the idol in this shape receives the worship of its votaries. This is the stage that has been christened by that very misleading name fetishism, and erroneously supposed to lie at the very basis of all religion. Here are a few interesting samples of this stage of stone-worship, taken from the very careful Samoan collection of Mr. Turner, of the London Missionary Society:

“Fonge and Toafa were the names of the two oblong smooth stones which stood on a raised platform of loose stones inland of one of the villages. They were supposed to be the parents of Saato, a god who controlled the rain. When the chiefs and people were ready to go off for weeks to certain places in the bush for the sport of pigeon-catching, offerings of cooked taro and fish were laid on the stones, accompanied by prayers for fine weather and no rain. Any one who refused an offering to the stones was frowned upon; and in the event of rain was blamed and punished for bringing down the wrath of the fine-weather god, and spoiling the sports of the season.”

Here, even if one doubts that Saato was a deceased Weather-doctor, and that Fonge and Toafa were his father and mother (which I do not care to insist upon), it is at least clear that we have to deal essentially with two standing stones of precisely the same sort as those which habitually mark sepulture.

Of the gods of Hudson’s Island, Mr. Turner gives this very interesting and suggestive account:

“Foelangi and Maumau were the principal gods. They had each a temple; and under the altars, on which were laid out in rows the skulls of departed chiefs and people, were suspended offerings of pearl-shell and other valuables. Foelangi had an unchiselled block of stone to represent him—something like a six feet high gravestone.... Offerings of food were taken to the temples, that the gods might first partake before anyone else ate anything.... Husked cocoanuts were laid down, one before each skull.”

And of St. Augustine Island he writes: “At the Temple of Maumau there stood a nine feet high coral sandstone slab from the beach.... Meat offerings were laid on the altars, accompanied by songs and dances in honour of the god.”

Similarly, about one of the Gilbert Group, Mr. Turner says:

“They had other gods and goddesses, and, as was common in this group, had sandstone slabs or pillars set up here and there among the houses. Before these shrines offerings of food were laid during the day, which the priests took away stealthily by night and made the credulous believe that gods and not mortals had done it. If the stone slab represented a goddess it was not placed erect, but laid down on the ground. Being a lady they thought it would be cruel to make her stand so long.”

In these cases, and in many others, it seems to me clear that the original gravestone or menhir itself is the object of worship, viewed as the residence of the ghost or god in whose honour it was erected. For in Samoa we know that the grave “was marked by a little heap of stones, a foot or two high,” and at De Peyster’s Island “a stone was raised at the head of the grave, and a human head carved on it”—a first step, as we have already seen, towards the evolution of one form of idol.

Similar instances abound everywhere. Among the Khonds of India, every village has its local god, represented by an upright stone under the big tree on the green, to use frankly an English equivalent. (The full importance of this common combination of sacred stone and sacred tree will only come out at a later stage of our enquiry.) In Peru, worship was paid to standing stones which, says Dr. Tylor, “represented the penates of households and the patron-deities of villages”—in other words, the ghosts of ancestors and of tribal chiefs. “Near Acora,” says the Marquis de Nadaillac, “the bodies were placed under megalithic stones, reminding us of the dolmens and cromlechs of Europe. One vast plain is covered with erect stones, some forming circles, some squares, and often covered in with large slabs which entirely closed round the sepulchral chamber.” In Fiji the gods and goddesses “had their abodes or shrines in black stones like smooth round milestones, and there received their offerings of food.” An immense number of similar instances have been collected by Dr. Tylor and other anthropologists.

But when once the idea of the sacredness of stones had thus got firmly fixed in the savage mind, it was natural enough that other stones, resembling those which were already recognised as gods, should come to be regarded as themselves divine, or as containing an indwelling ghost or deity. Of this stage, Mr. Turner’s Samoa again affords us some curious instances.

“Smooth stones apparently picked up out of the bed of the river were regarded as representatives of certain gods, and wherever the stone was, there the god was supposed to be. One resembling a fish would be prayed to as the fisherman’s god. Another, resembling a yam, would be the yam god. A third, round like a breadfruit, the breadfruit god—and so on.”

Now, the word “apparently” used by this very cautious observer in this passage shows clearly that he had never of his own knowledge seen a stone thus selected at random worshipped or deified, and it is therefore possible that in all such cases the stone may really have been one of sepulchral origin. Still, I agree with Mr. Spencer that when once the idea of a ghost or god is well developed, the notion of such a spirit as animating any remarkable or odd-looking object is a natural transition. *

* The whole subject is admirably worked out in The
Principles of Sociology, § 159.

Hence I incline to believe Mr. Turner is right, and that these stones may really have been picked out and worshipped, merely for their oddity, but always, as he correctly infers, from the belief in their connexion with some god or spirit.

Here is another case, also from Polynesia, where no immediate connexion with any particular grave seems definitely implied:

“Two unchiselled ‘smooth stones of the stream’ were kept in a temple at one of the villages, and guarded with great care. No stranger or over-curious person was allowed to go near the place, under penalty of a beating from the custodians of these gods. They represented good and not malicious death-causing gods. The one made the yams, breadfruit, and cocoanuts, and the other sent fish to the nets.

“Another stone was carefully housed in another village as the representative of a rain-making god. When there was overmuch rain, the stone was laid by the fire and kept heated till fine weather set in.”

Further instances (if fairly reported) occur elsewhere. “Among the lower races of America,” says Dr. Tylor, summarising Schoolcraft, “the Dakotahs would pick up a round boulder, paint it, and then, addressing it as grandfather, make offerings to it, and pray it to deliver them from danger.” But here the very fact that the stone is worshipped and treated as an ancestor shows how derivative is the deification—how dependent upon the prior association of such stones with the tomb of a forefather and its indwelling spirit. Just in the same way we know there are countries where a grave is more generally marked, not by a stone, but by a wooden stake; and in these countries, as for instance among the Samoyedes of Siberia, sticks, not stones, are the most common objects of reverence. (Thus, again, stick-worship is found “among the Damaras of South Africa, whose ancestors are represented at the sacrificial feasts by stakes cut from trees or bushes consecrated to them, to which stakes the meat is first offered.”) But here, too, we see the clear affiliation upon ancestor-worship; and indeed, wherever we find the common worship of “stocks and stones,” all the analogies lead us to believe the stocks and stones either actually mark the graves of ancestors or else are accepted as their representatives and embodiments.

The vast majority, however, of sacred stones with whose history we are well acquainted are indubitably connected with interments, ancient or modern. All the European sacred stones are cromlechs, dolmens, trilithons, or menhirs, of which Mr. Angus Smith, a most cautious authority, observes categorically, “We know for a certainty that memorials of burials are the chief object of the first one, and of nearly all, the only object apparently.” So many other examples will come out incidentally in the course of the sequel that I will not labour the point any further at present. Among the most remarkable instances, however, I cannot refrain from mentioning the great Sardinian sacred stones, which so often occur in the neighbourhood of the nuraghi, or ancient forts. These consist of tall conical monoliths, rough and unhewn in the oldest examples, rudely hewn in the later ones, and occasionally presenting some distant resemblance to a human face—the first rough draft of the future idol. “Behind the monolith lies the burial-place, ten to fourteen yards long by one or two in width.” These burial-places have been examined by the Abbate Spano.

“He was satisfied that several bodies had been buried together in the same tomb, and that these were therefore family burial-places. When the death of one of the members of the tribe occurred, one of the great transverse stones which covered the long alley built behind the monolith was removed, and then replaced until the time came for another body to claim its place in the tomb. The monolith, called by the Sardinian peasants pietra dell’ altare, or altar-stone, because they believe it to have been used for human sacrifice, always faces the south or east.”

Such a surviving tradition as to the human sacrifices, in an island so little sophisticated as Sardinia, has almost certainly come down to us unbroken from a very early age.

I have already stated that the idol is probably in many cases derived from the gravestone or other sacred stone. I believe that in an immense number of cases it is simply the original pillar, more or less rudely carved into the semblance of a human figure.