The subsequent devotion of India aspiresby different paths to reach communion with the Infinite Spirit or Universal Self. The supreme reality is presented in the triple aspects of Being, Thought, and Bliss (saccidānanda). To know him alone as the Self of all selves, is the goal rather of meditation than of prayer. Existence, understanding, and joy, these are the ultimates of all experience, and he who has attained them prays no more: "Seeking for emancipation I go for refuge to that God who is the guiding light to the understanding of all souls." This is the note of much of the later mystical piety of Hinduism. It speaks in the language both of religion and of philosophy.
In the first, the believer looks to his heavenly Lord with adoring faith (p.128) and lowly love (bhakti), and feels the inflowing of divine favour or grace (prasāda). The long line of mediæval poets transmitted from generation to generation passionate impulses of devotion which expressed themselves again and again in legend and song. "Search in thy heart," pleaded the weaver Kabir in the fifteenth century, "search in thy heart of hearts, there is God's place of abode." Not, however, without conditions: "Unless you have a forgiving spirit, you will not see God." He might describe himself in his humility as "the worst of men"; that only made the marvel of divine grace more wonderful: "I am thy son; Thou art my Father; we both live in the same place."
On the philosophical side a modern manual of Hindu practice endeavours to combine religion and metaphysics. Ere the believer rises from bed in the morning he should confess his unworthiness: "O Lord of the universe, O All-Consciousness, presiding Deity of all, Vishnu, at thy bidding, and to please thee alone, I rise this morning, and enter on the discharge of my daily duties. I know what is righteous, yet I feel no attraction for it; I know what is not righteous, yet I have no repulsion from it. O Lord of the senses, O Thou seated in the heart, may I do thy commands as ordered by thee in my conscience." But in order to remind him of his divine origin, in this age of sordid interests and low ideals, he is enjoined also to look upon himself as the reflected image of God, the Eternal, the All-Knowing, the All-Glad, and to recite the ancient verse, "I am divine and not anything else, I am indeed Brahma above all sorrows, my form is Being, Intelligence, and Bliss, and eternally free is my nature."
The duties of offering and prayer may be performed from day to day, or they may be reserved for special occasions of enterprise, danger, and thanksgiving. They mark the incidents of the week, the month, the year; there are sabbaths, new moons, seed-time and harvest, and new year festivals. This periodicity affects the whole community together. But there are also personal events, markingsuccessive stages in each individual career, which must be placed under the shelter of religion, and do not all occur at the same time. From his entry into the world to his departure from it each person passes at certain crises out of one condition into another, and the transition requires the protection of the powers above. Birth, the attainment of adolescence, marriage, death, are the chief occasions marked by what M. van Gennep has called "rites of passage." They are all connected with mysteries of life.
For life, in the lower culture, is exposed perpetually to dangers of all kinds. Demonic influences continually threaten it; strange pollutions beset it; the blood in which it is often located has about it something weird, uncanny, sometimes unclean. So there are preliminary rites for bringing in the soul of the child as yet unborn from its home in the ground, among the flowers and trees, or in wells and lakes and running streams. Among tribes which regard the mother as unclean before birth, the uncleanness is transmitted to the child, and ceremonies of purification must be performed for both. The child must be guarded against the evil eye, perils of infection of various kinds, or the attacks of hostile demons. The ritual of cleansing must be scrupulously performed. When Apollo and the future Buddha were born, divine beings received them; Apollo was washed in fair water, and wondrousstreams, warm and cold, descended from the sky for the Indian babe. Sometimes there is such haste to place the infant under divine care that it is borne away at once to the temple, as Turner noticed among the Nanumangans of Hudson's island, that its first breathings, when only a few seconds old, may take place in the presence of the god, and his blessing be invoked on the essentials of its life.
Around the cradle friendly influences must be secured, the child must be duly incorporated into the circle of the cosmic powers and of human life. He is laid upon the ground for contact with the supporting earth, and presented to the great vivifier, the sun, or held over the fire. Out of the bath grew a rite of immersion designed to solemnise his admission into the guild of mankind, and wash away the strange element of evil which seemed to inhere in human nature. In Peru this was exorcised by the priest, who bade it enter the water, which was then buried in the ground. The Aztec ritual of baptism, according to the native writer Sahagun, began: "O child, receive the water of the lord of the world which is our life. It is to wash and purify. May these drops remove the sin which was given to thee before the creation of the world, since all of us are under its power." This was a real act of regeneration, for the priest concluded: "Now he liveth anew, and is born anew, now he ispurified and cleansed, now our Mother the water again bringeth him into the world."
After purification comes the ceremony of giving the name, fittingly performed in the temple, as in Greece, Rome, or Mexico. Elements of personality inhere so strangely in names, that this rite also acquires great significance. Perhaps the name of some ancestor is chosen, who may thus endow the child with some of his qualities, or at least be invoked for protection and aid. Divine powers have watched over his birth (p.121); others may decide his destiny, like the three Greek fateful goddesses Klotho, Lachesis, and Atropos, or the venerable Scandinavian Norns. Or the aid of the stars must be invoked, and a horoscope must be prepared by the astrologer. Sometimes a special guardian power may be chosen for the infant, sometimes the choice is reserved for him at a later stage. Or he may be dedicated from the outset to some hallowed service, as the child Samuel was given to Yahweh.
More important even than the rites of birth and infancy are those of the attainment of adolescence, when the youth is admitted to the privileges of manhood and instructed in the secrets of the tribe. All round the world the lower culture has its ceremonies of initiation, which have sometimes survived in more refined forms in more highly organised societies. They involve seclusion from the common life, for no woman must be cognisantof what takes place, severe bodily trials to test the youth's power of endurance—fasts, scourging, loss of front teeth, tattooing (so that his status may be recognisable at once) and other forms of personal scarification and pain, under which the feeble sink, and the happiest are those who die, escaping the humiliations of the weakling's lot. Long abstinence in lonely places begets strange dreams and visions, and raises nervous excitability to its highest pitch. Strange forms appear with hideous faces and mysterious trappings; appalling sounds are heard; and it is only when the hours of terror are past that the initiated learns that the awful figures were his own kinsmen in masks and disguises, and the Australian is told that what he took to be the signal of Daramulun's advent was produced by the whirling of the bull-roarer. In the midst of these pantomimic incidents the novice dies to rise again. Perhaps he is buried in the fetish-house; or he passes through the bath into his new condition; or he is vivified by the sprinkling of blood. But he awakes to a fresh life. He must be utterly forgetful of the old; he must even sometimes feign ignorance of his parents' home and names. The elders then impart to him the customs and traditions of the tribe. He learns the rules of conduct, and duties of reverence and obedience to the aged, who are thus, in tribes without formal government, placed under the protection of religion. Thestrain of prolonged excitement and attention fixes precept and counsel indelibly upon his memory, and he knows that the penalty of betrayal will be death.
The ancient Indian ritual was more refined. The three upper castes, the Brahman, the noble, and the cultivator of the land, belonged to the "twice-born." Only to these was the study of the Veda permitted. When the youth was led to his teacher to be invested with the sacred thread, the symbol of his dignity, blessings were uttered and holy water was sprinkled on him. Then for the first time was he permitted to repeat the sacred verse (known as the Gāyatrī, Rig Veda, iii. 62, 10), "Let us meditate on that excellent glory of the divine Vivifier, may he enlighten our understandings," which is still recited daily by millions of devout Hindus. One of the later books of the Zoroastrian faith lays down that "it is necessary for all those of the good religion to celebrate the ritual and becomenavazûd, newly born," or born again. The ceremony began with a purification which lasted nine nights, and included sprinkling with water; the candidate for the priesthood must be of the age of fifteen; he must confess his sins, endure the scourge; and might then be regarded as regenerate.
Within the whole group of initiates secret societies were often formed, bound together by special vows, and using the instrumentality of religion. Observers in West Africa andelsewhere (they are also common in Polynesia and Melanesia) have differed widely as to their value, some denouncing them for their intolerable tyranny, others finding them useful agents of police. They are the forerunners of more purely religious associations such as may be seen in the mysteries of Greece. Here, too, were ceremonies of initiation, here were pantomimic representations of divine events, secrets of communion with deity, and promises of life beyond the grave. Most famous, of course, were the mysteries of Eleusis, in charge of the great family of the Eumolpids. Already in the Homeric hymn to Demeter, before the days of Jeremiah and Ezekiel, all Greece had been bidden to come to Eleusis, and receive initiation into the rites of the Lady Mother and the Maid. There were preliminaries of purification, which a Christian apologist like Clement of Alexandria could compare with the baptism of the Church. Cleansed from the stain of sin, the candidate was required to be devout and holy. What was the precise nature of the revelation which he was permitted to see is uncertain. The passion-drama of the mother's loss of her daughter, her search and recovery, may have grown out of some seasonal vegetation ceremonies. But they had taken on higher meanings. The secret might not be divulged in detail; there is, however, a large amount of testimony that ideas of death and re-birth or resurrectionplayed a great part in this, as in other mystery-religions; the Homeric hymn to Demeter holds out intimations of immortality; and by some kind of communion with the deity the salvation of the believer was assured.
The rites of the Phrygian Sabazius touch the processes of the lower culture at more than one point. In his great oration "on the Crown" (315 B.C.) Demosthenes twits his opponent Æschines in such terms as these: "You assisted your mother in the initiations, you read aloud the books (the ritual prayers), and took part in the rest of the plot. You put on (or, you robed the candidates in) fawn-skins; you sprinkled them with water from the bowl; you purified and rubbed them with clay and bran, then you raised them from their purification, and bade them say, 'I have fled the bad, and found the better.'" On the gold Orphic tablets discovered in South Italy and Crete occur strange phrases: "I, a kid, fell into the milk," "O blessed and happy one, thou hast put off thy mortality and hast become divine," which are interpreted with great probability as references to a ritual of milk-baptism in which the initiate was born again.
That idea was certain expressed in the mysteries of Isis, which were widely spread in the Eastern Mediterranean (p.40). Here, too, was a solemn kind of death and re-birth; here, too, lustrations of the purest water, the priestly declaration of the pardon of thegods, the mystic revelation of the Goddess, herself identified with all deities in turn; and here, after the vision, the assurance of a blessed life to come. The candidate for initiation into the rites of Mithra must mount slowly through seven stages. The details of the ritual of the successive grades are unknown; but in accordance with ancient Iranian practice repeated ablutions were imposed till the cleansing waters had washed away all stains of guilt. The Mithraic sacraments so closely resembled Christian usage that they were vehemently denounced by Church writers as a Satanic parody. They were certainly supposed to secure happiness in the world to come. The believer who had passed through the blood-bath of the slaughtered bull was said to be "re-born for ever."
Associated with sacrifice and prayer, and partaking at once of the characters of magic and mystery, is the sacred dance. Rhythmic movement of body and limbs readily becomes the expression of strong feeling; and the feeling in its turn may be reawakened by the solemn renewal of the action. When it imitates the motions of the warrior or the huntsman it comes to possess a magical value, and the women who remain at home will dance all day while their husbands are engaged in battle or the chase. Does it not quicken their courage or enhance their skill? The child in an elementary school now learnshis action-songs, and sows the grain and reaps the harvest. He does not, however, suppose that he is promoting nature's work. But the women whose social progress has advanced to agriculture, instead of imitating the gambols of the wolf or bear, will celebrate the operations of the fields to stimulate their effectiveness, and at a later stage still will go forth into the vineyards with timbrel and song. There are dances for courtship and marriage, dances in initiations and mysteries, dances even for the funeral. There are solemn preparations, as in the snake-dance of the secret order of the Snakes among the Moquis of Arizona, when the members must not only wash the snakes, but themselves as well and everything about them (in the same water), and fast for one day. Then any one who has been bitten will be healed, and when the pipe is lit, the clouds from it will rise and form rain-clouds, and the rain will fall upon the altar and the sacred things. Or the dance will serve for the reunion of the tribe, and becomes a great social as well as a religious institution. The Sun-dance of the Blackfoot Indians (p.35) is the supreme expression of their religion, and their great annual religious gathering. It must originate in a woman's vow for the recovery of the sick, and the ceremonies are spread over a considerable time. Some come for enjoyment, some to fast and pray. Some must discharge their vows for the healing of sick kinsfolk; others pay the price of deliverancefrom peril by the infliction of self-torture in the sun-lodge.
The vow, the fast, and all the varied forms of asceticism which Eastern religions have so abundantly produced, all involve common elements of sacrifice and self-subjection. The vow, indeed, has in part the nature of a contract. It is not magic, it is a bargain. There is no constraint, the deity may avail himself of what is offered, or may not. If Yahweh will go with me, says Jacob, and provide me food to eat and clothes to wear, he shall be my god and get his tithe. But the vow involves the surrender of something otherwise desirable. It is the same with the ascetic, who gives up food, or clothing, or sleep, or the bath, or speech, or a fixed home; who sits between four fires under a blazing sun; who lacerates his back with the scourge or his flesh with knives; who holds a flower-pot in his hand till the fingers grow round it immovably; who hangs himself up by hooks in his bare back, or loads himself from neck to feet with chains. Men may fast religiously to overcome bodily desire; or to prepare the higher insight for strange openings of vision. "The continually stuffed body," say the Amazulu, "cannot see secret things." Lacordaire bade the brethren of his Order scourge him that he might humble himself, and taste the pain of his Redeemer. But the extremer forms of asceticism (especially as a life-long practice) are always based on the idea that they are inthemselves meritorious; they produce desert and desert leads to reward. They are a mode of establishing a claim on the future bounty of heaven; they are, after all, only another form of "doing business with the gods."
In the intimate connection of religion with life all primitive interests are placed under its sanction. A large portion of time is occupied with its ceremonials. The fortunes of the tribe are bound up with it. To the bounty of its powers they owe abundant food and safety or success in war. Beneath its protection the newly born enter the world, and to its care the elders are committed when they die. Its holy persons rule in their midst; its holy places are all round about them; its sacred objects are in their homes. It is not surprising, therefore, that all the higher possessions of the tribe, its arts and crafts, its traditions, its customs and laws, its stories of the gods and their dealings with each other or with man, should be ascribed to the same origin. Where individuality is hampered at every turn by time-honoured conventions, and personal initiative is imperfectly developed and timidly confined within the narrowest limits, all higher intellectual products, command over nature, inventions, poetry and song, the usages ofthe social order, and the rituals for serving the gods, carry with them a secret force, a mysterious authority, which passes the bounds of human wisdom, and has been imparted from some higher source. Each man is dimly conscious that his single wit could not have compassed these things; he does not observe the long processes and imperceptible stages of advance; he accepts the theory offered to him by those who should know best, and looks back to the days when kindly powers took in hand the instruction of men.
Thus at the present day many of the Australian tribes whose condition has probably changed little since the date of the oldest civilisations of antiquity, regard their scanty institutions as ordained by beings above. Ask the Narrinyeri why they adhere to any custom, the answer is that Nurrundere commanded it. Baiame and Bunjil laid down the marriage laws for their respective tribes; Bunjil, moreover, taught the Kulin the arts of life; and Daramulun gave the Yuin laws which the old people handed down from generation to generation.
The elaborate cultures of Babylonia and Egypt claimed similar origins. In the vast prehistoric period before the Flood the people round the lower Euphrates had lived without rule or order, like the beasts of the field, till a wondrous Fish-Man, whom the Greek historian called Cannes, appeared out of the Persian Gulf with wisdom from the sea. Hetaught them arts and laws, and wrote concerning the generation of mankind, their different ways of life, and their civil polity. It was no other than Ea, god of the encircling Deep, the source of all. Historic inscriptions told of his "books," which may have included ancient oracles, and which certainly laid down the duties of a king. So the famous code of Hammurabi (about 1950 B.C.), recently discovered at Susa (1901), was handed to him, as the tablet shows, by the great Sun-god, Shamash.
The Egyptian priests, perhaps as late as the great Nineteenth Dynasty, before the days of Moses, threw into definite shape the vague traditions of immemorial antiquity, when men had lived devouring one another, ignorant how to till the ground. Osiris (p.119) taught the art of tillage, the use of the plough and hoe, how to grow wheat and barley, and the culture of the vine; and Isis added the domestic arts of making bread and weaving linen. Osiris, moreover, appointed the offerings to the gods, regulated the ceremonies, composed the texts and melodies of the hymns. And among his successors was Thoth of Hermopolis (p.8), who introduced astronomy and divination, medicine, arithmetic, and geometry, and whose "books," embracing a kind of religious encyclopædia, were known to the Christian teacher, Clement of Alexandria, in the second century of our era.
So Zeus gave laws to Minos in Crete, and Apollo revealed the Spartan constitution to Lycurgus; Numa, the traditional founder of the Roman ceremonial law, received instruction from the nymph Egeria. The shepherd slave, Zaleucus (whom Eusebius placed about 660 B.C.), taught the Locrians what Athena had first taught him, and prefaced his laws by enjoining them to revere the gods as the real causes of all things fair and good in life, and keep their hearts pure from all evil, inasmuch as the gods do not take pleasure in the sacrifices of the wicked, but in the righteous and fair conduct of the good.
From the New World come a series of similar figures. Mr. Curtin claims to show that the vast area of the American continent is pervaded by one system of thought incalculably old. In the central group of the most sacred personages is the Earth with Sky and Sun conceived sometimes as identical sometimes as distinct. The Earth-maiden on whom the Sun has gazed, becomes a mother, and gives birth to a great hero. He bestows on men all gifts that support existence, and it is through him that the race lives and prospers. To the Algonkins he was Michabo or Manibozho, the "Great Light," who imparted vision, author of wisdom, arts, and institutions. Among the Toltecs at Tulla he was Quetzalcoatl, virgin-born, founder of civilisation, who organised worship without human or animal sacrifices, and endured nowar. The Miztecs called him Votan, prince and legislator of his people, representative of a higher wisdom, so that he rose to be the mediator between earth and heaven. In the plains of Begota the white-bearded Bohica appeared to the Mozca Indians, taught them how to sow and build, formed them into communities, contrived an outlet for the waters of their great lake, and, having settled the government and the ritual, retired into ascetic penance for two thousand years. Out of the depths of Lake Titicaca in Peru there rose one day the son and daughter of the sun and moon, Manco Capac and Mama Ogllo, sent by their father in compassion for men's wretched plight. They taught the ignorant folk agriculture, the chief trades, the art of building cities, aqueducts, and roads, and Mama Ogllo showed the women how to spin and weave. Then when all was in order, and overseers were appointed to see that each one did his duty, they went back to the skies.
These stories all belong to the class known as myths. They are not accounts of what actually happened, they are the work of religious imagination operating on a particular group of facts, and endeavouring to explain them. The scope of mythology, whatever may be its particular origins, is of the widest compass. It embraces the whole field of nature and life. It first came into modern view through the study of classical antiquityin Greece and Rome. The discovery of Sanskrit and the investigation of its literature, especially of the Vedic hymns, concentrated the attention of scholars for a time, pre-eminently under the genius of Max Müller, on the relations of myth to language, and the resolution of various deities of India and Greece into the phenomena of dawn and sunshine, of the thunderstorm or the moon.
But it was gradually found necessary to abandon one after another of the philological identifications which had at one time been proposed with confidence. New aspects of mythology demanded consideration. It was not only concerned with the incidents and powers of nature, or with the various relations of the gods. It appeared also in the field of ritual. It often contained antique secrets of the meaning of religious performance. It was the key to the dramatised representations of the sacred dance, the ceremonials on which depended the welfare of the tribe. And in proportion as action acquired a larger psychological recognition in shaping the character of religion, and belief receded into the background, the significance of the development of myths was changed.
As religion, however, became more self-conscious, the intellectual element in it gained more force and energy, and the thinkers of the priestly schools endeavoured to bring the claims of different deities into some sort of order, and regulate the hierarchy of heaven.But they were often confronted with ancient elements of savagery which could be imperfectly harmonised with the more refined ideas of a progressive culture. Thus already in Homer, Zeus, as supreme God, bears one significant epithet; he ismêtieta, full ofmêtisor counsel. The word is of doubtful derivation, but with the strong tendency of Greek imagination to turn abstract ideas into persons, Mêtis is presented by Hesiod (next in literary succession to Homer) as the daughter of Ocean, the Hellenic equivalent of the Babylonian Deep, source of all being even for the gods. Greek thought was not yet ripe for the ontological conception of wisdom or intelligence as inherent in the divine nature, so the union of Thought with Zeus is represented mythologically as a marriage, and Mêtis becomes the bride of the great "king of gods and men." The result is conceived in truly savage fashion. In order to possess her in the most intimate manner, and embody her in his own person, Zeus suddenly swallows her. Mythology, of course, has to provide a reason; she would bear a son who would overthrow him. The poet (or perhaps his editor), desirous of correcting this brutal selfishness, suggests a further plea; the goddess should be his perpetual monitor, and warn him inwardly of good and evil. The myth is being directly moralised. Whatever, therefore, may be the origins of myth, whether in connection with tribaltradition, in the interpretation of the incidents of nature—as when a Siberian described to Baron von Wrangell the occultation of one of Jupiter's moons by saying that the blue star had swallowed another very small star and soon after vomited it up again—or in endeavours to picture the characters and relations of the gods, the beginnings of the world, the birth of man, the entry of evil, sin, and death, or the condition of those who have already passed away, the myth becomes the reflex of the culture in the midst of which it rises. It is the depository of human experience, of man's criticism of his own life. And in its representations of a distant age when gods visibly consorted with men, and deigned to instruct them in the conditions of social welfare, mythology is the direct product of religion.
When the gods have withdrawn from human fellowship, and no longer choose their brides from the dwellers upon earth, or even vouchsafe to appear among them in various forms for temporary help or promise of blessing, the communications from heaven do not cease altogether. The Vedic poet might challenge the existence of Indra, the fool might say in his heart, "There is no God"; but the Powers above never left themselves without a witness. The negro going out of his hut one morning strikes his foot against a peculiarly shaped stone. "Art thou there?" he inquires, and recognises the presence of a guardian andhelper. The Samoan watches the behaviour of a spinning cocoa-nut, or the flight of a bird to right or left. The Central Asiatic notes the cracks on a tortoise's shell, much as a modern palmist traces the lines in a human hand. The liver is selected as the special seat of the prophetic faculty, and Babylonian and Etruscan developed a common diagnosis of its marks. The Celt divined by the water of wells, or the smoke and flames of ascending fires, and slew his prisoners that the secrets of destiny might be discovered in their entrails. China and Rome made divination the basis of elaborate state systems. Rome produced a literature of Augury, with books of regulations and minutes of procedure, while Plato commended it as "the art of fellowship between gods and men," and the philosophy of the Stoics justified it on the ground of a providential harmony between nature and man, so that divine guidance was vouchsafed to human need. Did not clouds and stars move by Heaven's great ordinance?
The lot took the responsibility of decision out of the hands of man, and vested it in the presiding deity. There is always a mystery in chance, which could be interpreted as the will of God. The oath implied that the heavenly Powers could be at any moment summoned to attest man's veracity; and the vow must be fulfilled, though it might cost Jephthah the sacrifice of his daughter. Perjury and broken vows were early recognisedamong the gravest of crimes. The ordeal was in like manner the inquisition of a divine judge. When the Adum draught was administered to an accused Ashanti upon the Gold Coast, the god condescended to enter with it; he looked around for the signs of guilt, and if he found none he returned with the nauseous mixture to the light of day. It was a procedure analogous to the ancient rite embedded in the Levitical Law as the test of a wife's faithlessness (cp.Num. v. 11sqq.).
Another mystery lay in dreams, which have been connected with supersensual powers all the world over. To the savage who cannot analyse his experience the dream-world is as real as that of his waking hours. The dreams that follow fasts, whether compulsory through deficient food, or voluntary through preparation for some solemn event, possess peculiar vividness; and, when attention has been fixed upon some expected crisis, readily acquire a prophetic significance. Divine forms are seen, and strange intimations are conveyed from another world. The dream verses of the Icelander brought tidings from those who had been lost at sea. To sleep upon the grave of a dead kinsman, still more of a hero or a seer, was the means of receiving communications from the wisdom of the dead. Did not philosophy teach that in sleep the mind is less hampered by its physical environment, and attains truth more nearly;and what condition was so suitable, therefore, for the beneficent revelation of a god?
In Greece, accordingly, the practice of sleeping at the tombs of heroes or in the temples of gods was regularly organised. The sanctuaries of Æsculapius, of which more than two hundred can be traced round the Eastern Mediterranean and in Italy, were specially frequented by patients who resorted thither for medical treatment and the advice of the god. The sufferer must pass through the preliminary discipline of the bath, and to his purifications must add the due offering of a sheep. The victim's fleece was carried into the holy precincts, and on it the sick man lay down for the night. In the visions of the dark hours the god appeared, and prescribed the mode of cure, or even condescended to operate himself. An inscription at Epidaurus records that the stiffened fingers of a patient were straightened out and restored for use by the god's own grasp. Was it surprising that Æsculapius should become the object of increasing reverence, and in the second century of our era should be enthroned in the highest as "Saviour (or Preserver) of the universe"?
Under other conditions the visitation of the god expresses itself in poetic form. Among the ruder peoples whose songs are of the simplest—perhaps the most childish—kind, the faculty of rhythmic utterance seems superhuman. Words, lines, stanzas, followeach other with a spontaneity which seems out of the reach of ordinary effort. The chants of worship have been again and again carried back to divine authorship in a distant past. The marriage of speech with music is no art of man. So the Finnic hero, Wäinamöinen, conceived by the wind, and born (after seven hundred years in the womb) by the maiden Dmatar, added to his gifts of fertility and fire the invention of the harp, and the teaching of wisdom, poetry, and music to man. Odin was the god of wisdom and poetry for Scandinavia, god also of the holy draught, which, like the Indian Soma, gave inspiration. The poet brewed Odin's mead, bore Odin's cup; and in old Teutonic speech wasgodh-mālugr, "god-inspired." Hermes passed in Greece as the inventor of the lyre, which he gave to Apollo, chief among the deities who declared to man the unerring counsel of Zeus; and Homer already counts singer and song as alike divine.
The lovely forms of the Muses, daughters of Zeus and Memory, or with an alternative mother in Harmony, were endowed with functions of song and prophecy, and between them and the historic poets stood a group, half mythical, half human, whose names were attached to actual hymns and poems. Such were Orpheus, Musseus, Eumolpus, Thamyris, and Linos. The verses ascribed to them tended to acquire an authoritative character; they were cited as a rule or norm for conduct;they were on the way to become a Scripture. Homer and Hesiod were employed in the same way; and Plato denounces the mendicant prophets who went to rich men's doors offering to make atonements, and quoting Homer and Hesiod as religious guides. Nevertheless, though he proposed to banish from his ideal State the poets who said unworthy things of the gods, he elsewhere formulates the highest claim for poetry as a supernatural product. The poets are only the interpreters of the gods by whom they are severally possessed; "God takes away the minds of the poets;" "God himself is the speaker, through them he is conversing with us." It is the lament of the Bantus of South Africa that since the white man came the springs of music and song have ceased to flow: "The spirits are angry with their children, and do not teach them any more."
Another mode of converse between deity and man was found in the oracle. Widespread was the belief that through certain chosen persons or in certain peculiar spots the gods deigned to communicate with those who sought their aid. Such agencies were peculiarly numerous in the Hellenic world, and the oracle at Delphi acquired supreme importance. As early as the eighth century B.C., in the days of Amos and Isaiah, it is rising into prominence as an authority that may take the leading place in Greek religion. At one time it almost seemed as if it might succeedin co-ordinating the separate and often opposing forces of the City States, and blend them into national unity. If that hope was ever cherished by its guardians, they failed to realise it. The higher minds discerned in it capacities which were never fulfilled. They saw it give counsel to rival powers, promote enterprise, and support plans of colonisation. They knew that it exercised a far-reaching moral authority; it compelled reverence for oaths, and secured respect for the lives of women, suppliants, and slaves; and again and again in true prophetic spirit it subordinated ritual to ethical demands. With the widest outlook over human affairs, Plato proposes to establish the midpoint of religious legislation in Delphi at Apollo's shrine: "He is the god who sits in the centre, on the navel of the earth, and he is the interpreter of religion to all mankind." It is the note of universalism: had not Jeremiah proclaimed two centuries before on behalf of Yahweh at Jerusalem: "My house shall be called a house of prayer for all nations"?
When the Israelites had renewed their temple in the days of Darius, and the scribes were beginning to busy themselves with the remains of their national literature, Greek writers also interested themselves in the collection of the utterances of the past. About 500 B.C. Onomacritus gathered together the oracles of Musæus. It was the first instance of what became a frequent practicein later days; one of Plato's disciples, Heracleides of Pontus, undertook a similar task; so did Chrysippus the Stoic. A special literature was thus begotten. The circumstances which called for the successive oracles were duly narrated; and had Delphi maintained its early position, here would have lain the nucleus of a Scripture, which might have developed into a permanent record of revelation.
Italy, in like manner, had itslibri fatales, its sacred books of destiny. There were Etruscan oracles under the name of the nymph Begoe or Vegone; there were the Marcian Songs, said to have been adopted as genuine by the Roman Senate in 213 B.C. The ancient city of Veii had its books; Tibur (Tivoli) the "lots" of the nymph Albunea. Most famous of all were the Sibylline books, brought (according to later tradition) from Cumæ to Rome, perhaps in the last days of the monarchy, or a little later (about 500 B.C.), and placed in the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitol under the charge of two special guardians. These were afterwards increased to ten, and in the year 51 B.C. to fifteen. The office remained till the books were destroyed in A.D. 400, when Christianity had been finally established as the imperial religion. What they contained is doubtful; how they were consulted is not known. Their aid was sought after prodigies, pestilence, or disaster had awakened general alarm; but their actualwords were not made public. Nevertheless they supplied the basis for important religious innovations. The introduction of Greek deities by their sanction profoundly affected Roman religious ideas, and left deep marks on literature and art.
In the year 83 B.C. the temple which contained the books was burned. The greatest anxiety was displayed for their restoration. Envoys were sent to Sicily, Greece, and Asia Minor to collect fresh verses; they were deposited in a new temple, and prophecies were founded on them in the last days of the Republic. But it was believed that spurious verses had got into circulation, and Augustus ordered a rigid examination. Some two thousand volumes, it is alleged, were destroyed; those which were admitted as genuine were removed to a temple of Apollo which Augustus had himself dedicated on the Palatine hill. Here are the characteristics of a Canon. The books are kept under special charge in a temple. Their authority suffices to modify old cults and introduce new. When they perish, they must be restored. The false must be separated from the true, the genuine eliminated from the spurious. The Amoral element in them seems to have been entirely subordinated to the ritual; but they were believed to express in seasons of difficulty and danger the demands of the gods.
The transition to what are formally called "Sacred Books" leaves a considerableliterature upon the boundary. The collection of the ancient national Finnic songs, made with so much patience by the Swedish Lonrott, under the name of the Kalevala, presents no claim to inspiration, but it is the poetical expression of the national religion. In the literature of the Eddas, the Volospa (p.248) is a product of the prophetic spirit. After Herodotus remarked that Homer and Hesiod made the gods of the Greeks, the Homeric poems acquired more and more authority, until by the usage of centuries they gained a semi-canonical position. Lectures were given upon their sacred text, and the most extravagant methods of interpretation were employed to reconcile them with the world-view of philosophy. The ancient Egyptian accepted the "Book of the Dead" as his guide to the next world. Chapters of it were inscribed on the walls of his tomb, engraved on his coffin, or laid inside it with his mummy. It contained the charms needful for the preservation of his soul on its journey to the land of the West. Its authors were unknown, but it contained the secrets of the life to come.
The "Bibles of Humanity," as the foundation-books of the great religions have been called, belong to one continent. Asia has been the mother of them all. The oldest takes shape in India in the Vedic hymns; and the immense literatures of Brahmanism, early and later Buddhism, and the Hinduism whichfinally drove Buddhism off the field, follow in due course. Cognate in language with the immigrant Aryans, the ancient Persians preserved, amid many losses, some of the compositions of their prophet Zarathustra, mingled with religious documents of later date, known to modern students by the name Zend Avesta. Palestine produces Judaism, with its collection of national literature embracing law, history, prophecy, poetry, and wisdom. Judaism gives birth to Christianity, which sets its New Testament beside the Old; and Judaism and Christianity lie behind Mohammed and the Koran, where the person and the book blend in the closest union.
In the Far East Chinese culture reposes on the so-called Classics, the five King and the four Shu, which had a chequered history till they finally acquired their position as fountains of knowledge and models of composition. The ancient odes of the Shî King, the traditions of rulers and the counsels of statesmen in the Shu King, the collections of the teaching of Confucius and Mencius, and the remaining works which need not be mentioned here, raise none of the claims which have been preferred for the Indian Veda, or the Christian Bible. Nor does the singular little book of aphorisms ascribed to Lao-Tsze, which serves as the starting-point for Taoism (p.67). The Shintoist of Japan finds the earliest records of his religion in the national chronicles known as the Kojiki and the Nihongi; and themodern believer, who has been offered an infallible Bible, responds with a profession of faith in the practical inerrancy of his own traditional books.
Some smaller communities claim a passing word. The Jains (p.61), once the rivals of the Buddhists, possess a sacred literature only less copious. Group after group appears in mediæval India singing the hymns of its founder, such as the Kabir-panthis, till the poet Tulsi-Das (born 1532) embodies in his version of the ancient Rāmāyana the essence of Hindu religion for some ninety millions from Bengal to the Punjab. The Sikhs (p.62) stay themselves upon the words of their holy teachers in theĀdi-Granth. The followers of Mani in the third century of our era, who threatened the progress of the Christian Church, and spread all the way from Carthage to Middle Asia, possessed a gospel and epistles of their Prophet, portions of which were brought to Berlin a few years ago from Chinese Turkestan. The Druzes of the Lebanon, whose origin goes back to the Caliph Hakim at Cairo in the eleventh century A.D., treasure the documents of the faith in 111 treatises and epistles, starting from Hakim's vizier, Hamza. And the hapless prophet of Persia, who designated himself the Bab (p.70), composed in theBeyyan(among numerous other works) an exposition of the Truth for his disciples. For such small communities a sacred literature is in fact a necessity.Without it they have no adequate cohesion. It is at least one of the conditions of permanent resistance to the forces of decay.
Around the Scriptures of the greater religions devout reverence has gathered with ardent faith. The Hindu term Veda (meaning literally "knowledge") has a narrower and a wider sense. In its limited application it denotes the four collections of hymns, of ritual formulæ, and sacrificial songs, of which the Rig-Veda is the most important (p.10). Their history must be inferred from their contents; of the circumstances of their formation there is no external evidence, save that the early Buddhist texts show that the fourth or Atharva-Veda had not acquired canonical value in the days of the Teacher Gotama. But the term Veda is also extended to include a mass of ceremonial compositions known as Brāhmanas, attached to one or other of the ancient collections, and handed down in different religious schools. These are all included more or less definitely in what a Western theologian might term "Revelation." They are technically designated asçrutior "hearing"; they form the matter of the sacred teaching transmitted orally, which must be reserved for a special order and not imparted to the world outside.
The books of household law, on the other hand, prescribing the domestic ceremonies for birth, marriage, and death, regulating caste-privileges, and laying down rules forthe conduct of life, were open to all. But just as the Rig-Veda was exalted into a reproduction on earth of what existed eternally in heaven, so endeavours were made to convert the legal works current in particular schools into sacred codes of divine origin. One was boldly ascribed to Vishnu, who communicated it to the goddess of the earth. Another, most famous of all, was attached to Manu, the eponymous hero of the human race. "Father Manu" he is called in the Rig-Veda, and as the sire of mankind he was the founder of social and moral order. First king, and Rishi (or seer) privileged to behold the sacred texts, he was the inventor of rites and author of the maxims of law. And yet higher dignity belonged to him, for he sprang from the Self-Existent and could thus be identified with Brahma himself; and as Prajāpati (p.143) he took part in the creation of the world. In due course poetry and philosophy had their turn. The immense epic known as the Mahābhārata, where tradition and myth and imaginative speculation are blended in rich confusion, was put in the scales by the gods against the four Vedas, and its sanctity outweighed them all.
The Buddhist Scriptures were early grouped in three divisions under the title of the Three Baskets. The teachings of the Supremely Enlightened were of course absolutely true, and his rules for the members of his Order were of compelling authority. It was assumedthat they were recited correctly at an assembly held immediately after his decease. The "Buddha-Word" thus became the infallible standard of faith and practice. There are traces of provision to meet difficulties in case different elders should believe themselves to possess varying traditions of the Buddha's commands: but not even the enormous expansion of the Scriptures of the Great Vehicle, as preserved in China and Japan, shook the faith of the disciple in the authentic character of their doctrine. The higher teaching belonged to the later years of the Buddha's life, and was transmitted by special channels. It is much as if Gnosticism had established itself in the Christian Church of the second century, and had formed its literature into a Canon beside our New Testament. Nepal, according to the testimony of Bryan Hodgson, raised its sacred books into objects of worship. Chinese respect was satisfied when they were issued from time to time (p.66) with a preface by the imperial Son of Heaven.
The oldest portion of the sacred literature collected under the name of the Zend Avesta consists of five hymns (called Gathas), ascribed to Zarathustra himself. They bear many marks of high antiquity, and they acquired a peculiar sanctity, so that the later sacrificial hymns already regard them as objects of homage to which worship should be offered. Above the actual Scriptures rose a radiant figure, in which the conception of revelationwas impersonated. Iranian thought was markedly idealist; each earthly object had its spiritual type, its antecedent or counterpart in the heavenly realm. The religion and law of Zarathustra had their representative in Daena, who is already celebrated with pious praise in the Avesta. Sacrifice is offered to her as she dwells in the Heavenly House, the Abode of Song. Thence Zarathustra summons her, beseeching her fellowship—she is associated with Cista, "religious knowledge"—and he asks of her mystic powers and righteousness in thought and speech and deed. Later teaching declared her to be produced by Vohu Mano, the "Good Mind" of Ahura Mazda himself (p.131). As the actual utterance of the Lord Omniscient, the sacred Law might also be called hismãthra çpentaor "Holy Word."
Jewish theology was not altogether deficient in similar conceptions. Corresponding to the Torah or Law imparted to Moses, was a heavenly Torah, infinitely richer in content. It formed one of a mysterious group of seven Realities which existed, like the Throne of Glory, Eden, and Gehenna, before the making of the earth and sky. It was a kind of epitome of all possible cosmic relations, so that as an architect frames his plan for a city, God looked into the Torah when he would create the world. Christian theology has never employed this imagery to express its conception of Revelation. But it lies at the back of the curious language of the Koran concerning the "Motherof the Book" (p.13). Mohammedan theologians reckoned no less than ten ways in which the Prophet received his revelations. Sometimes the divine inspiration came in a dream, sometimes like the noise of a bell through which he recognised the words which Gabriel wished him to understand. Other books had been given previously to Moses, to David, to Jesus, and each nation would be summoned to its own book at the judgment. The believer in Islam recognised in the "Mother of the Book" the pre-existent or Eternal Word, which God from time to time "sent down" to his Prophet. It had definite size and aspect for Arab imagination. The commentator Jalâlain described it as existing in the air above the seventh heaven. There angel guardians defended it from theft by Satan or the change of any of its contents. It was as long as from heaven to earth, and as broad as from east to west; and its consistency was of one white pearl. Was it surprising that Mohammedan faith should support the utterance of the pious Câdi Iyâd (who died in Morocco, A.D. 1149): "The Koran, as it lies between the two covers is God's own word, which he imparted by way of inspiration to the Prophet. Therefore is it in every way inimitable, and no man can produce anything like it"?
Christian theology has refrained from these physical emblems. But it was possible for a scholar of unquestioned learning to declarein the pulpit of the University of Oxford barely half a century ago (1861) that "the Bible is none other than the voice of him that sitteth upon the throne. Every book of it, every chapter of it, every verse of it, every word of it, every syllable of it (where are we to stop?), every letter of it, is the direct utterance of the Most High ... faultless, unerring, supreme."
The expression of religion in action produces the offering and the prayer: by sacrifice and devotion, with thanksgiving and requests, do men approach their gods. But there is another way of entering into fruitful obedience to them. Certain kinds of conduct may be acceptable to them, and others not. Are these concerned only with ceremonial acts, or do they include the behaviour of men to each other? How far does religion promote or regulate what we call morality? What are their relations, and how do they affect one another? This question has been discussed in innumerable treatises; attention can only be invited to it here from the point of view of the historical comparison of religions, without reference to philosophical definitions. Every one admits a connection of some sort, for good or for evil, at some period in their respective development. They may not have started hand in hand. Their alliance may be disbanded, and morality may claim total independence. But at some time on the journey they have marched together.
The difficulty of the inquiry arises in part from the variety of views as to the scope and essence of both morality and religion. Where do they begin, and in what do they consist? The philosopher may demand a complete recognition of the freedom of the will, and the independent activity of the conscience, and savages who have no such words are set down as destitute of morality, just as those who have no Heavenly Father and no devil, no heaven and no hell, are described as without religion. It is obviously impossible to expect to find everywhere our categories of right and wrong; yet even Lord Avebury lent his high authority to the statement that there are many savages almost entirely without moral feeling largely on the ground of the absence of ideas of sin, remorse, and repentance. Mr. Huxley in the same way declared it obvious that the lower religions are entirely unethical.
On the other hand, the idealist strenuously affirms the intimacy of the connection. We are assured that the historical beginning of all morality is to be found in religion; or that in the earliest period of human history, religion and morality were necessary correlates of each other; or that all moral commandments have originally the character of religious commandments. And the student of comparative religion like the late Prof. Robertson Smith cautiously affirms that "in ancient society all morality,as morality was then understood, was consecrated and enforced by religiousmotives and sanctions." The words which we have italicised contain exactly the limitation which is ignored by the philosopher who requires that the gods shall be patterns of conduct, and administrators of an ethical world-order. Plainly the question is settled in different ways according to different standards of what religion and morality mean. If we are content to begin low enough down, we may see reason to believe that in that stage of thought in which religion, magic, and custom are so strangely intertwined, morality is also not wanting. Even the Fijian, who called some of his gods by hideous names, such as "the Rioter," "the Brain-eater," "the Murderer," regarded theft, adultery, and such offences, as serious.
The difficulty of broad general statements lies in the imperfection of our knowledge. Again and again closer observation has revealed quite unexpected secrets. Whole ranges of belief, feeling, action, formerly concealed from observation, have been brought to light. Thus about twenty years ago Major Ellis, writing of the Ewe, Tshi, and Yoruba peoples on the Gold Coast, laid it down that "religion at the stage of growth at which we find it among these three groups of tribes, has no connection with morals, or the relations of men to one another." But the German missionary, Jakob Spieth, now tells us (1911) that among the Ewe-speaking folk not only does Mother Earth punish with death those who have swornfalsely, but Mawu, God, who knows the thoughts and hearts of men, who is the giver of everything good upon the earth—very patient and never angry—will not allow one brother to deceive another, or suffer the king to judge unrighteously, or permit one to burn another's house down. Morality here is more than rudimentary; the justice of man is put under the guardianship of God, who requires "truth in the inward parts." Another West African observer, Major Leonard, on the Lower Niger, describes religion as intermingled with the whole social system of the tribes under his view. It supplies the principle on which their law is dispensed and morality adjudicated. The entire organisation of their common life is so interwoven with it that they cannot get away from it. Like the Hindus, "they eat religiously, drink religiously, bathe religiously, dress religiously, and sin religiously."
The beginnings of morality can no more be discovered historically than the beginnings of religion. Language, in various nations, implies that it springs out of custom. The foundation of practical ethics, whatever may be the ultimate interpretation of such terms as duty and conscience in more advanced cultures, lies in social usage. When any custom is established with sufficient strength to serve as a rule demanding observance, so that its breach evokes some feeling, the seed of morals is already germinating. No group however small, no society however crude, can coherewithout some such customs. They may be formed in various ways; they are strengthened by habitual repetition; they acquire the sanction of the past, they are usually referred, when men have begun to ask how they came into being—just as they ask about their own origin—to some great First Man, or some superhuman personality in the realm above (p.171). But always there are some things allowable, and others forbidden: some things may (or even must) be done, others may not.
When custom has gained this power, it carries with it an element of control. Impulse must not be inconsiderately indulged, it must be governed. Private interests must be subordinated to a rule, and conduct conformed to a standard of behaviour. In the ruder culture, where the supply of food is of urgent importance, such rules gather around the produce of the chase or of the ground. Among the Australian Kurnai, for example, all game caught by the men, all roots or fruits collected by the women, must be shared with others according to definite arrangements. Methodic distribution is obligatory, and self-denial in sharing and eating is thus impressed upon the young. Moreover certain varieties of food are strictly forbidden to women, children, and boys before initiation.
Prohibitions of this kind, extending over many branches of conduct, are found all over the world. They are often designated by aterm in use in Polynesia, taboo (tabuortapu). Their origin has been much disputed, owing to the extraordinary complexity of the circumstances with which they are concerned. Taboo contains emphatically an element of mystery. It comes out of a vague dim background, and implies that some strange power will be set in perilous operation if a certain thing is done. Such a power, obscure, indefinite, not personalised, but mightier than men, has been recognised at the base of religion under another term, the Melanesianmana(p.80). Taboo has been accordingly described as a negativemana. It is a prohibition against calling the weird uncanny force into the open, where it may do unexpected hurt.
The objects and actions placed under such taboos are various; and it is for the anthropologist and the psychologist, if they can, to discover their origin and application in each particular case. They involve ideas of purity and defilement, the holy and the common, the clean and the unclean. They gather in particular round blood, which rouses in some animals as in many human beings an instinctive aversion and disgust, and yet is at the same time sacred as a seat of life. They enter at the great crises of existence, birth and death; the mother, and perhaps also the new-born child, are unclean, and must be purified; the corpse defiles whoever touches it. They attend the sexual processes, which are the occasion of releasing dangerousenergies. So they affect people as well as things. The king is charged with this mysterious force, and is hedged round with taboos lest it should suddenly burst forth against the intruder on his sanctity. The chief, the priest, possess it in less degree. And it is transmitted to what belongs to them. Their weapons, their food and, above all, their persons, are sacred. The oft-quoted story of the Maori may still be repeated here: it is not the only case of the kind. Strong and stalwart, he found some food beside the path, and ate it. He learned shortly afterwards that it was the remains of the king's meal. He had violated a royal taboo. The secret power had him in its grasp: he was speedily seized with cramp in the stomach, and in a few hours died.
Ritual religions are full of survivals of such taboos. "O Maker of the material world," inquires Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, "can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcass of a dog, or the corpse of a man?" In ancient Israel various foods were forbidden by religious law; the priest might not touch a dead body; when a murder had been committed and the murderer could not be found, the elders of the city must solemnly purify the ground which unpunished bloodshed had defiled. Early Roman religion contained many such prohibitions; from certain sacrifices women and strangers and fettered criminals must withdraw; there are traces of taboo oniron and shoe-leather, on burial grounds and spots where thunder-bolts were supposed to have fallen, and on certain days, especially those connected with the cult of the dead. Such taboos still play a great part in savage society, and exert no little moral force in preserving honesty and order. In Samoa, observed Turner, objects placed under taboo are perfectly safe; they are in no danger of theft. Primitive morality is thus brought under the sanction of religion.
All over the world, as we have seen (p.161), the young receive a very severe training in preparation for their entry into the full privileges and duties of the tribe. They are then instructed in the traditional rules of conduct, the proper abstinences, the right behaviour of the sexes. Such ceremonies are recognised as of great importance in communities of the simplest form without political control, for it is through them that the social ties of tribal kinship gain coherence and strength. Various observers have testified to the consideration displayed in Australia, for instance, towards the aged, the sick, and the infirm. The blind are often carefully tended, and the best fed. "As a matter of fact," says Mr. Marett, "the earlier and more democratic types of primitive society, uncontaminated by our civilisation, do not present many features to which the modern conscience can take exception; but display rather the edifying spectacle of religiousbrotherhoods encouraging themselves by mystical communion to common effort."
In West Africa Miss Kingsley noted the close connection in negro communities between religion and life. To get through day or night a man must be right in the religious point of view; he must be on working terms with the great world of spirits round him. In spite of much make-believe the secret societies in which the men are enlisted under solemn oaths, are recognised as important moral agencies. The Ukuku, recently described by Dr. Nassau, could settle tribal quarrels, and proclaim or enforce peace, when no individual chief or king could end the strife. Such organisations regulate marriage laws, the duties of parents and children, the privileges of eldership, the recognition of age and worth. The entry into them lies through the rites of religion.
"I have studied these societies," wrote Miss Kingsley; "I am in possession of fairly complete knowledge of three of them. I know men acquainted with ten other societies, and their information is practically the same as my own, viz. that those rites consist in a series of oath-takings as you pass from grade to grade ... Each grade gives him a certain amount of instruction in the native law. Each grade gives him a certain function in carrying out the law. And finally, when he has passed through all the grades, which few men do, when he has sworn the greatest oathof all, when he knows all the society's heart's secret, that secret is 'I am I,' the one Word. The teaching of that Word is law, order, justice, morality. Why the one Word teaches it, the man does not know. But he knows two things: one that there is a law-god, and the other that, so says the wisdom of our ancestors, his will must be worked or evil will come. So in his generation he works to keep the young people straight."
Taboos may be violated unconsciously, and tribal laws may be transgressed sometimes intentionally, sometimes by accident. The resulting guilt must be removed, if the offender or the community is not to incur the wrath of the affronted Powers. Sin, like holiness, has this peculiar property that it can be communicated by contact. Savage morality does not always rise above the confusion between the physical and the mental. Evil qualities such as uncleanness can be transferred from persons to things, just as from things to persons. Pains and diseases can be extracted from the sufferer, and magically sent into animals or objects which can be driven away or destroyed; and moral evil can be similarly removed. When an Atkhan of the Aleutian Islands had committed a serious offence and desired to unburden himself, he chose a time when the sun was clear, picked up certain weeds, and carried them about his person. After they were thus sufficiently impregnated by contactwith him, he laid them down, called the sun to witness, cast his sins upon them, and threw them into the fire. The consuming flame burned away his guilt.
The Peruvian made his confession to the sun, and then bathed in an adjoining river. There he rid himself of his iniquity, saying "O thou river, receive the sins I have this day confessed to the sun, carry them down to the sea, and let them never more appear." The oldest and the most recent rituals repeat the same idea in various forms. In one of the Vedic ceremonials of sacrifice, the sacrificer and his wife towards the close bathed and washed each other's backs. Then having wrapped themselves in fresh garments, they stepped forth, and we read: "Even as a snake casts its skin, so does he cast away all his sin. There is in him not so much sin as there is in a toothless child." Water was likewise employed in Babylonia, where the incantation ran, "I have washed my hands, I have cleansed my body with pure spring water which is in the town of Eridu. All evil, all that is not good, in my body, my flesh, my limbs, begone!" Or, "By the wisdom of thy holy name let the sin and the ban which were created for man's misery be removed, destroyed, and driven away."
Like physical evil such as disease, so moral evil might be attributed to the action of spirits, and periodic ceremonies might be performed for purging the community by driving themout. Sometimes the sins were buried in the ground; sometimes they were thrown into the river; sometimes they were concentrated on a person or an animal; or were magically expelled under the sanction of religion into some object which could be destroyed. In the annual celebration of the Thargelia at Athens, in the month of May, under the solemn sanction of Apollo, two "purifying men" were led through the streets to be whipped with rods, and then driven over the border of the state, bearing the people's sins. The Levitical ritual (Lev. xvi) incorporated at a late date a solemn ceremony on the tenth day of the first month of the ancient religious year (in September), when an act of atonement was performed for the whole nation. Two goats were brought into the sanctuary, and lots were cast upon them. One was dedicated to Yahweh, over the other the high priest confessed the iniquities of the children of Israel; and by the laying on of hands he transferred them to the head of the doomed animal, which was then led forth into the wilderness for a mysterious power of evil, Azazel. As the temporary adjuncts of so much guilt, the high priest and the goat-leader were required to purify themselves afterwards by bathing; the high priest must change his robes, and the goat-leader wash his clothes.
So in modern times in Nigeria the town sins are annually laid on some unhappy slave-girl, perhaps selected some time before. As sheis led through the street the householders come forth and discharge the year's accumulated evil on her; then she is dragged to the river, bound, and left to drown. Japan is satisfied without a life. The ancient ritual of purification shows that in the early centuries of the national history a public ceremony was occasionally performed. In the revival of Shinto usage which marked the late reign, it was re-enacted by imperial decree in 1872 for half-yearly celebration on June 30 and December 31, at all Shinto shrines. Four or five days before these dates the believer was enjoined to procure from his priest a piece of white paper cut in the shape of a garment. On this he was to write his name and sex, with the year and month of his birth; then he must rub it over his body, and finally breathe on it. His sins would thus be transferred to the paper robe, which was to be taken back to the priest. Offerings of food and purifying ceremonies would complete the believer's release. The paper garments with their load of guilt were then to be packed in cases which were to be put in boats, rowed out to sea, and committed to the deep. There they would be carried to the great Sea Plain by the Maiden of Descent-into-the-Current, who would convey them to the Maiden of the Swift Opening, dwelling in the Eight Hundred Meetings of the Brine of the Eight Brine Currents. She would swallow them down with a gurgling sound, and theLord of the Breath-blowing Place would finally blow them away into the Root-Country, the bottom apparently of the under-world!
The relation of morality to religion tends to become more definite along different lines of thought, which are constantly intertwined, and of which three are only isolated here for the purpose of the briefest possible illustration of the forms in which they have appeared historically. In the first place, the world may be regarded as a scene in which rival powers of help and hurt are engaged in constant conflict; and the physical dualism thus exhibited may be reproduced in the sphere of morals as a contest between powers of good and evil. Secondly, the course of nature may be viewed as a world-order, where seasonal uniformities are the manifestation of a permanent principle of harmony which is the guide of human conduct, and the vicissitudes of daily or annual experience are interpreted as the judgments of heaven on man's doings, national or personal. And thirdly, the development of the individual conscience may surmount the confusion which ranks ritual offences along with moral transgressions, and the ethical life may be set wholly free from ceremonial bondage, and carried up into the realm of spirit.
The lower culture all over the world ascribes disease or accident, madness, calamity, and death, to the agency of hostile powers lyingin wait for man, and breaking in on his security. The violences of the elements, the hurricane, the flood, the earthquake, the volcanic eruption, are in the same way the work of giants towering in might above the common herd of the demons of air, water, or earth. The spirits of the evil dead, especially of powerful magic-men, Shamans, and the like, of malicious character, are potent for sickness and disaster. But in their unorganised ranks there is no controlling or directing force. Here and there some figure or group emerges into prominence. At the head of the demonic hosts of Babylonian mythology is a band of seven ruling spirits, perhaps the windy counterparts of the sun and moon and the five planets. In Egyptian story Set (or by his Greek name Typhon) is the evil opposite of the good Osiris whom he does to death; or it is the sun himself who is attacked in his nightly journey by the serpent Apap with his monstrous crew. Scandinavian mythology was full of these conflicts. The oppositions of light and darkness, storm and calm, warmth and cold, were felt with unusual vehemence. Over the motley multitude of powers infesting forest and field, the wind and the water, rose the giants of mountain and cataract, the furious blast, the curdling frost. The giants of the frost were evil powers, like the wolf Fenris, and the serpent Nidhogg, who lay beneath one of the roots of the mighty cosmic tree (in Niflheim,a second being among the frost-giants, and a third among the gods), for ever gnawing till the great world's end. Above them rose the dread goddess Hel, the "hollow," once, apparently, the name of the grave, and then of the power that ruled the gloomy underworld, the abode of those who had not fallen upon the battle-field. She, in her turn, was subordinated to Loki, once reckoned among the gods, capricious and tricky, who becomes the father of Hel, the wolf Fenris, and the Midgard snake, and leads the forces of evil for the destruction of the world. He compasses the death of Balder the fair, Odin perishes by the wolf, and Thor by the serpent; though god and wolf and serpent in their turn sink in common ruin. But the powers engaged in the strife are all superhuman; man has no share in the warfare, save when the warriors pass at death into the abode of the gods, and take their place beside them in the final conflict. Loki is no Devil, he does not tempt, or interfere with the children of earth; he does not affect their present conduct or future destiny.