Daniel G. Brinton

Contents:—Visual Ideas—Fetishism—Not Object-Worship only—Identical with Idolatry—Modern Fetishism—Animism—Not a Stadium of Religion—The Chief Groups of Religious Objects: 1. The Celestial Bodies—Sun and Moon Worship—Astrolatry; 2. The Four Elements—Fire, Air (the Winds), Water, and the Earth—Symbolism of Colours; 3. Stones and Rocks—Thunderbolts—Memorial Stones—Divining Stones; 4. Trees and Plants—The Tree of Life—The Sacred Pole and the Cross—The Plant-Soul—The Tree of Knowledge; 5. Places and Sites—High Places and Caves; 6. The Lower Animals—The Bird, the Serpent, etc.; 7. Man—Anthropism in Religion—The Worship of Beauty; 8. Life and its Transmission—Examples—Genesiac Cults—The Fatherhood of God—Love as Religion’s Crown.

If we analyse the concepts which occupy our minds, we shall find that most of them are derived from the sense of sight; they are what psychologists call “visual ideas.” To these alone we owe the notions of space, size, form, colour, brightness, and motion.

By filling the brain with such images, sight becomes a mental stimulus of the highest order, and as we find it exerting its influence in other directions, so in the development of the religious sense it has always held a conspicuous place. It has led to the objective expression of that sense under visible forms, in images, pictures, sacred structures, symbolic colours and shapes, and natural substances.

This expression, universal in primitive conditions, is called fetishism, polytheism, and idolatry, the worship of stocks and stones. But I wish to impress upon you that nowhere in the world did man ever worship a stock or a stone, as such. Every fetish, be it a rag-baby or a pebble from the road-side, is adored, not as itself, but as possessing some mysterious, transcendental power, by which it can influence the future. In some obscure way it is the medium or agent of that supernatural Will, the recognition of which is at the basis of every religion.

The relation of the fetish to the spiritual power behind it, though everywhere recognised, was not easy to define. The Melanesians believe that the souls of the dead act through bones; while the independent spirits (vui) choose stones as their mediums; and they say that these objects are, as it were, limbs or members of these incorporeal powers.[152]

That the fetish itself is something else than the mere object, and is certainly not identified with it (as writers have often asserted), is evident from the words and actions of fetish worshippers. A South African negro offered food to a tree in the presence of an European traveller. The latter observed that a tree cannot eat. “Oh,” replied the negro, “tree not fetish. Fetish spirit; not seen; live in tree.”[153]

If a fetish does not bring good luck, it is thrown away, burned, or broken, as having lost its virtue, ceased to be the abode of power. One of efficacy, on the other hand, will bring a good price, and such are often sold and bought. Among the Papuans of New Guinea the fetishes are small wooden dolls dressed in coloured rags. They are believed to be the media through which the ancestral spirits operate. But if a man has bad luck, he will beat, or break, or cast away, as of no account, such an impotent object.[154]

These and scores of other examples which could be adduced disprove the assertion that man, even in his lowest phases of religious life, ever worshipped an object as an object. Even then, his intellectual insight penetrated to the recognition of something higher than phenomena in the world about him. As has been well said by a German writer, what is really worshipped in the object anywhere is not itself but “a transcendental x,” within and beyond it.[155]

It has been abundantly shown that amid the tribes of the West Coast of Africa, to whose gods the term fetish, feitiÇo, was first applied by the Portuguese, the recognition and worship of tribal and national divinities and even of a Supreme Being, ruler and creator of the world, are clearly displayed.[156]

The house of cards therefore, erected by Auguste Comte, to represent the religious progress of the race, the first floor of which was fetishism, the second polytheism, and the third monotheism, falls helplessly to the ground.

There is no real distinction between fetishism and idolatry, unless we choose to say that the latter refers to the worship of objects artificially shaped; but many fetishes are so likewise.

Nor can we say, with Professor Rialle, that fetishism confounds the unseen agent with the thing itself, while the idolatry of developed polytheism regards the agent as something exterior to the object, an independent existence.[157] For not only does fetishism recognise the power of the supernatural outside of all objects, but the idols of polytheism are unquestionably just as holy, just as much limbs of the gods, as the dolls of the Melanesians.

We cannot even take fetishism as a special form of the cult or external worship; for it goes hand in hand with every phase of objective religion. It is quite as prevalent now, in proportion to the general strength of the religious sentiment, as it ever was, and is visible in the sacredness which all sects of the highest religions attach to certain objects and places. When the Christian touches the bone of a saint that he may be healed of an infirmity, or when he speaks of his church edifice as “the house of God,” or when he packs in his trunk a Bible “for luck’s sake,” he is as much a fetish worshipper as the negro caboceer who collects around him a thousand pieces of rubbish because he thinks they have brought him good fortune.[158]

Modern folk-lore is full of fetishism, and it is a development of the religious sentiment which flourishes in all times and climes. Amulets, charms, lucky stones, everything that we now call by the familiar term of mascot, partakes of the nature of a fetish. Through some fancied potency, not to be found among its physical qualities, it is believed to bring us good fortune.

Nor is it a distinctive character of fetish worship, as has been maintained by some, that in it compulsion or constraint is endeavoured to be exercised on the gods to force them to be favourable and exert their power in aid of the supplicant. The earliest prayers are not of this character, as I showed in my last lecture; and, on the other hand, the notion of constraining the gods extended widely in higher religions and, indeed, probably in a metaphysical sense, was taught by the founder of Christianity himself, as in the parable of the unjust judge.

As there is nothing deeper than an external distinction between fetishism and idolatry, so there is no special form of religious thought which expresses itself as what has been called by Dr. Tylor, “animism,” the belief that inanimate objects are animated and possess souls or spirits. This opinion, which in one guise or another, is common to all religions and many philosophies, is merely a secondary phenomenon of the religious sentiment, and not a trait characteristic of primitive faiths. The idea of the World-Soul, manifesting itself individually in every form of matter from the star to the clod, is as truly the belief of the Sioux Indian or the Fijian cannibal, as it was of Spinoza or Giordano Bruno.[159]

This vague and universal divine potency extends through all nature, organic and inorganic, expressing itself in personality wherever separateness, oneness, is visible. Not merely did animals and trees share in the World-soul, but every object whatever. With the American Indians, the commonest sticks and stones, even the household vessel fashioned out of clay, or the hollowed stone on which the maize was pounded, had its spiritual essence, which might speak, act, and require to be venerated.[160] The Vitian Islanders held that each cocoanut had its own spirit, and occasionally many cocoanuts assembled for a jollification, at which times the joyous cracking of their sides kept the natives awake![161]

But no error would be greater than to confound this with a veneration of such objects in themselves.

To the mind of the savage, whatever displayed movement, emitted sound or odour, or by its defined limits and form indicated unity, was to him a manifestation in personality of that impersonal, spiritual Power of which he felt himself but one of the expressions. All other expressions shared his powers, and did not, in essence, differ from him. The brute, the plant, the stone, the wandering orbs of night, the howling wind, the crackling fire, the towering hill, all were his fellow-creatures, inspired by the same life as himself, drawing it from the same universal font of life.

It is not without reason, therefore, that the undeveloped religious longings ask for something concrete to represent divinity. Through its visible and audible traits the power of the Unseen Ruler is brought sharply to the consciousness. We sympathise even with the poor Oraons of Bengal, who, seeing nothing nobler to embody the divine, place a ploughshare on their altar as the object of adoration.[162]

Although in the limitless field of his religious insight everything in nature was to him a manifestation of divinity, primitive man everywhere indicated a preference for certain objects and groups of objects, evidently led to single them out on account of the strength or frequency of the appeals they make to his senses of sight and hearing.

With the utmost brevity I will enumerate the most important of these groups, and endeavour at the same time to point out why they were everywhere selected to convey conceptions of the nature and attributes of God.

1. The Celestial Bodies.—The first group that I shall mention is that of the Celestial Bodies, the Sun, Moon, and Stars. The traits which connected them with the ideas of the divine are almost too obvious to require mention. They are bringers of light and warmth, they define the momentous change of day and night, their motions usher in the seasons and mark the progress of time. They are remote, aloft, inscrutable, dwellers in a realm which man may distantly perceive but never enter.

So much has been written of solar myths and star worship that every reader is aware of their practical universality among early nations. It is probable that the division of our week into seven days arose either from the dedication of one to each of the seven greatest luminaries or to a division of the moon’s apparent course into four parts. Judicial astrology, which is not yet wholly dead, always maintained that the nativities were decided by the position of the stars.

All such survivals carry us back to primitive religions in which the astral bodies were prominent figures in the cult. Many writers have maintained that the American Indians from north to south were always and mainly sun-worshippers. Though this is too hasty a statement, everyone will acknowledge that the sun is ever a conspicuous figure in their myths and rites. So it is among the Polynesians and Africans, and so we find it in the early forms of Aryan, Semitic, and Egyptian belief.

It is at first sight strange that in many mythologies the moon plays a more important rÔle than the sun. But if we reflect that the night is the time when spirits walk abroad; when sounds strike the ear with mysterious notes; when nocturnal birds and beasts stir the senses with strange cries; when, on the other hand, the cooling zephyrs and soft moonlight bring sweet ease, and the gentle dews refresh the parched leaves; then we can understand why, both in modern folk-lore[163] and in primitive myths, the moon and the stars are often far more conspicuous than the flaming sun. The night, in fact, draws the veil from the spiritual world; as has been said so beautifully by Shelley:

A few examples will illustrate this: The Dieyeris of Australia believe that man and all other beings were created by the moon. In many American languages the moon is regarded as male and the sun is referred to as “his companion.” The Ipurinas, a Brazilian tribe, address the orb as “Our Father,” and imagine him a little old man who was their ancestor and still watches over their prosperity. In like manner the eastern Eskimos say that their ancestors came from the moon to the earth. With the rude tribes of southern Borneo it is stated that the veneration of the moon forms the chief basis of their worship and myths.[164]

I can but refer to the lesser luminaries of the night. The stars have at all times been associated with religious meditations. The various constellations are familiar to most primitive peoples and are personified under living forms. Widely in South America and Polynesia the Pleiades enjoyed an especial homage, as marking the advent of the seasons and as connected with the production of vegetable life. In Peru they were styled the gods of rains; and the natives of the Gulf of California venerated them to that degree that even to look at them heedlessly was deemed calamitous; while some Australians held that it was from them that fire first descended to the world.[165] In such remote districts as Australia and Greenland the Milky-way was regarded as the path by which the souls ascended to their homes in the sky. In the one land the Aurora Australis, in the other the Aurora Borealis, was looked upon as the dance of the gods across the star-lit vault. Indeed, the study of the stellar bodies and the definition of their periodical appearance date directly to the veneration they excited in religious minds.

2. The Four Elements.—The simple theory that the world is composed of four elements, fire, water, air, and earth, is one which presents itself so naturally to primitive thought that traces of it can be seen in most mythologies which have passed beyond the rudimentary forms.

Each of these elements has its own group of religious associations, and they present themselves with that uniformity which we find so universal in religious expression, to be explained, as I have so often said, by the identity everywhere of the psychic sources of religion.

Perhaps the earliest of all the elements to receive this adoration was fire. With its discovery man first entered into human social life. Everywhere and in all peoples it has been in a manner sacred. With the Kafirs every religious ceremony must be performed in front of a fire.[166] In the Rig Veda the crackling of the blazing twigs is regarded as the speech of the gods, just as it is to-day in Borneo. The institutions of the sacred fire and the perpetual fire recur in every continent, and we have but to enter a church of the Roman communion on the morning of Holy Saturday to witness the impressive ceremonies with which the creation of the “new fire” is to this day celebrated in our midst. The custom of passing an infant “through the fire” was as much practised by the Aztecs in Mexico as by the Moloch worshippers of Syria.[167] The Peruvians held that divine inspiration was to be obtained by sacrifices to the god of fire; and those of Guatemala adored it as their greatest and oldest deity.[168]

In all these and in a hundred other examples which I might cite, the main thought is that in fire and its products—warmth, heat, light, flame—lies the essential principle of life; and the worship of Life was the central, positive conception in primitive ceremonies.

The air to early man is recognised in motion as the winds; and these, in his myths and rites, occupy a conspicuous position. Conceived as four, blowing more or less directly from the four corners of the earth-plane, they are the rain-bringers, the gods of the seasons and the year, controlling the products of the harvest and hence the happiness and life of man. The outlines of the story are the same whether we listen to the Maoris of New Zealand, who tell us of Tawhiri-matea, god of the winds, who divided his progeny into four broods and sent one to each quarter of the compass; to the Eskimos, who narrate just the same of Sillam Innua, owner of the winds, and his four sons; or to a score of like myths which I could quote from American storyland.[169]

The house of the winds, where they are imagined to be stored, a mythical notion which Professor Schwartz has shown to be so wide-spread in the Old World, recurs with scarcely less frequency in the New World.[170]

Water, as moisture, the dew, the fertilising showers, the green bordered streams and lakes, was ever connected with vegetable life and its symbols. In most cosmogonies the land rose from the bosom of some primal sea; in most primitive geographies the solid earth is surrounded by the mighty ocean-stream which stretches out to the uttermost space.

“All of us,” said the Aztecs, “are children of water.” Hence the spring, the stream, the lake, was ever regarded as a beneficent being, who should rightly call for the adoration of the true in soul. Tlaloc, god of rains, and the many-named gods of the heavenly vase in which the rains were stored on high, were conspicuous figures in the American pantheon.[171]

Virgil speaks of “Oceanus, pater rerum”; and in the Finnish epic, the Kalewala, it reads: “Three infants came forth from the same womb; water the oldest, fire the youngest, and iron between them.”[172]

Water also entered into numberless rites of purification, of penitence, and sanctification.[173] Baptism by sprinkling or immersion belongs to the most ancient sacred rites; and the use of the fluid in divination, lustration, and libation was world-wide.

The most venerable god of Chaldean mythology was Êa, lord of the earth and “the waters under the earth.” He was the deity in whose gift were the harvest, the germination of seeds, the fertility of the soil. Extending the idea to embrace all life, the Aztecs worshipped the earth as Tonantzin, Our Beloved Mother, and the Peruvians as Mama Cocha, Mother Earth. From her womb, said they, do all that live proceed, and to her silent breast will all again return. Far below her opaque surface is the realm which the sun lights at night, the abode of happy souls, said the Aztecs, ruled by the clement Quetzalcoatl, who there abides until the time fixed for his return to men.

From beneath the earth, repeat a hundred mythologies, did the first of men emerge seeking the light above but losing the joy below. So that in such distant points as Kamtschatka and the Andaman Islands we meet the same prophetic myth that at the end of the world the present earth will be turned upside down, and its then inhabitants will rejoice in the perennial warmth and light of the happier under-world.[174]

Intimately associated with the worship of the four elements, and also with the myths of the cosmical concepts, we trace through primitive religions the sacredness and symbolism of colours. Everywhere, in all cults, they are connected with certain trains of religious thoughts, certain expressions of religious emotions, though by no means always the same. But I can only refer, in passing, to this extended subject, which has not yet received the psychologic analysis which its importance demands.[175]

3. Stones and Rocks.—When we turn from these universal elements, which we can readily conceive portrayed with some commensurate greatness the idea of the supernatural, to such a gross and material object as a stone, a common stone or rock, it is at first difficult to understand its wide-spread acceptance as a symbol of the divine. But if we reflect on its hardness and durability, on its colour and lustre, and on the strange shapes in which it is found, we can see why it was so chosen.

In the early Semitic records we often read of Beth-el, the House of God. This was usually nothing but an amorphous stone, which the god was supposed to inhabit. The holy Kaaba of Mahometanism is no doubt such an one, a rough, black piece of rock. The sacred image of Diana of the Ephesians was nothing more, and the Latin father Arnobius tells us that the image of earth, the Great Mother, brought to Rome from Phrygia with sumptuous pomp, was merely “a small black stone, rough and unhewn.”[176]

To this instance, where the stone represents the Earth as the common mother, we find many exact parallels in savage faiths. In the Tahitian myths, Papa, Rock, was the name of the wife of the first man, mother of the race of men, and under this form she was adored.[177] The Zulus considered certain stones as sacred, because from one such, which split in two, their ancestors emerged. Their neighbours, the Basutos, entertain the same notion of a spheroidal granite boulder in their country, and their worship of it consists in dancing around it and spitting at it. The Indians of Colombia asserted that all men were once stones, and all will again become such.[178] Those of Guatemala were wont to place a small polished stone in the mouth of the dying to receive the soul, and thus supply it with a permanent abode.

The most common of mascots is a “lucky stone,” and this goes back to the time when such was the favourite material for household fetishes. To this day the Canaras of India believe that the Bhutas, or familiar spirits, inhabit rough stones, and in Melanesia similar stones are held to be the abode of the vui or demonic intelligences.[179]

Another source of the sacredness of stones was their identification as “thunderbolts.” Certain ones were believed to be the missiles hurled from the sky by the Thunder God in the lightning flash; though the Peruvians had the prettier belief that, as the product of the heavenly fire, they must retain its ardency, and therefore used them as love charms.[180] Flint, which when struck with a bit of pyrites emits a spark, and meteoric stones were especially recognised by these marks as of celestial origin.

Such a flint stone, say the legends of the Nahuas, in the beginning of the world fell from heaven to earth; as it broke to pieces each fragment rose to life as a demi-god. All men, added the Mexicans, came originally from such stones.[181]

Yet another origin of god-stones was the custom of erecting them as monuments of the dead. We can see this in its simplicity in Southern Polynesia. When a chief dies, a coral slab about three feet long is placed erect over his grave—a tombstone, in other words. This is decked with flowers and garlands, food is offered it, and invocations pronounced before it, precisely as to a divinity. This is because the spirit of the departed chief is believed to dwell within it.[182]

It was equally sacred when the stone was a mere cenotaph erected in memory of a departed chief or saint. Such are found in all lands and in all cults. They are the menhirs of the Celts, and the grave-stones of the Koders of India, often painted in strong colours.[183]

Certain stones, especially those we call “precious,” the gems, have physical traits of transparency, lustre, and colour, which have ever made them prized, and led to the belief that they exercise peculiar powers on the mind.

Throughout Asia and America the varieties of jade or nephrite, a greenish, semi-translucent mineral, has had a wide-spread reputation for sacred meaning and magical potency. The chalchiuhite of the Mexicans, small green stones, believed to control the weather and representative of the goddess of the waters and the rains, were of this material.

By attentively gazing into the transparency of a quartz crystal, the Maya shaman of Yucatan still believes that he will see in its depths, unfolded by the god whose dwelling it is, the picture of the future and the decrees of fate.

4. Trees and Plants.—Primitive man was arboreal. A hollow tree was his home, its branches his place of refuge, its fruit his sustenance. Naturally the tree became associated with his earliest religious thoughts. It represented his protecting deity. He would not willingly injure it. When the Mandans cut a pole for their tents, they swath it in bandages so that its pain may be allayed. The Hidatsas would not cut down a large cottonwood tree, because it guarded their tribe. The Algonquins decked an old oak with offerings suspended to its branches, for the same reason.[184]

Trees from their dripping foliage, and because their shade was associated with the grey of a cloudy day, were believed to make the rains and thus to refresh the fields and fertilise the seeds of the vegetable world. The step was easily taken to extend this to all germs, animal as well as vegetable. Thus the tree came to symbolise the source of Life, and to represent both the clouds and rains and the fatherhood of men and brutes. It could cause flocks to multiply and the barren womb to conceive.[185]

Among the Mexicans, the tree was invoked as Tota, “Our Father,” and was spoken of as god of the waters and the green foliage. Some particular species was chosen as the totem of various American gentes, and in the earliest legends of Greece and Persia sundry famous families traced their descent from a tree.

These ideas led to the mythical association of the tree with the origin of life, and with various objective expressions of this in the cult.

In most American stories where we hear of the first of men emerging from the under-world, it is by climbing a tree. This tree also supports the sky, and is so represented in the native books of the Mayas and Nahuas.[186] The Yurucares of Bolivia relate that their god Tiri, when he would people the earth with men, cleft a tree, and from the opening came forth the various tribes of the world.[187]

When the tree was not worshipped as itself, but under a symbolic form, this was usually as the sacred pole or the cross.

The sacred pole was found widely among the American Indians. It was planted in the centre of their villages, or, if the tribe was nomadic, it was carried about in an ark or wrapping and set up in a tent by itself in their encampment. It typified the communal life of the tribe and represented the “mystery tree,” which was intimately associated in their legendary origin.[188]

In early art the cross as a sacred design is often derived from the conventional figure of a tree, and symbolises the force of life, the four winds, the rain, and the waters. This is notably the case in Mexico and Central America, where we have abundant testimony that this is the origin and meaning of the cross-symbol so frequent on their monuments.

The sacred tree is a conspicuous figure in the earliest bas-reliefs of the Chaldeans. It is often represented in a cruciform shape, and frequently a winged seraph is holding up to it a pine cone, the fruit of the sacred cedar, either as an emblem of fertility, or, more likely, as an aspergillum, with which to bedew it from the holy water, which is carried in a bucket in the other hand.[189]

That a tree is a “thing of life” it is hard for us even yet to doubt, and we can scarcely avoid being attracted by Fechner’s pleasing theories of a “plant-soul.”[190] The sound of the wind in the leaves, rising from the softest of mystic whispers to the roaring of the wild blast, seems to proceed from some mind or spirit. The Australians say that these are the voices of the ghosts of the dead, communing one with another, or warning the living of what is to come. They and other tribes also believe that it is through understanding this mysterious language that the “doctors,” or shamans, communicate with the world of spirits and derive their supernatural knowledge.[191] Hence we can easily see arose the myth of “the tree of knowledge,” which we find in the earliest Semitic annals and monuments. It belonged to the same species as the oracular oak of Zeus at Dodona, and the laurel of Apollo at Delphi, from the whispers of whose leaves the sibyls interpreted the sayings of the gods.

Not only was a tree the earliest house of man, it was also his first temple. That very word “temple” bears witness to the fact, for it is from the Greek t?e???, a sacred grove set apart as a place of worship. The aspiring lines of Gothic cathedrals simulate the trunks of slender and majestic trees carrying the eye and the soul aloft, and by their overreaching limbs shutting out the glare of day, thus leading the mind to holy meditation. Tacitus describes the Germans as building no temples, but worshipping their mysterious divinity, secretum illud, in the gloom of the forest.

5. Places and Sites.—Early man stays close to the soil. It is proved, by the distribution of the oldest stone implements, that primitive tribes were not generally migratory, and had little intercourse with their neighbours. Hence the more closely did they study their immediate surroundings; and a spot which was marked by some peculiar feature was soon associated with their all-permeating religious notions, and was deemed sacred.

These features can usually be easily recognised. A spring, well, or fountain, where from dry earth, or out of the rock, pours forth the crystal fluid on which depends the life of man and brute and plant, was everywhere a holy spot. The brook which flowed from it, chattering its endless tale among the pebbles, was scarcely less so. It was directly said and oft repeated by the Greeks that the manteia, the holy inspiration, was imparted at the fountain of Parnassus or at the Pierian spring. The Moxos of Bolivia claim descent from the stream on which their villages are situated, a more than figurative expression of their dependence on it for food and drink.[192]

The sacred character of “high places,” such as hills, mountains, or elevated plateaux, is intimately connected with the universal belief in “the Father in Heaven,” the sky as the home and the throne of the greatest divinities. I have already referred to the terrestrial “Hills of Heaven,” located, as a rule, within the tribal area.[193]

A high hill or mountain, regarded by itself as a personality, would justly be looked upon as of extraordinary might, and invoked as a potent aid in the undertakings of life. In the invocations of the Quiches of Central America, who live in the midst of lofty peaks, over one hundred of them are named and implored for aid. The “Heart of the Hills” is the title which the ancient Mexicans applied to one of their greatest gods.

A third and important trait which gave them sacredness is the strength of the echo which is returned from their narrow gorges or precipitous sides. Mountain worship is very generally oracular in character. Classical and familiar examples of this are the Pythoness and the Roman Sibyl.

Mountain caves are natural temples, and as the cave, like the hollow tree, is a ready-built house for the wandering savage, so it is also marvellously adapted to his ends as a shrine. Throughout Mexico and Central America we find the caves chosen as the temples of the mightiest deities and the depositories of the holiest relics.[194]

The sacredness of some spots arose from their adaptation to certain rites, religious or magical. Thus, for the haruspices to practise their specialty in divination, they must choose a spot where they could watch the flight of birds. The sacrifices to the god of heaven should be under the open sky, and the Mayas of Yucatan believed that when the sun was in the zenith and the sacred fire was kindled beneath it, the ineffable Deity descended in the form of a bright plumaged ara and partook of the offering.

Places of this kind were of course laid under tabu, and thus reserved for their sacred uses only. Sometimes they were enclosed, but often the community was sufficiently informed about them to make this unnecessary.

The fame of these sacred places and the powers of the gods who dwelt within them extended widely even in very primitive conditions. This gave rise to the custom of pilgrimages, quite as familiar to the American Indians before Columbus as to the Europeans of the Middle Ages. There were famous holy places on the island of Cozumel and in Colombia and Peru, to which pious palmers wended their way over many hundred miles of weary journeying.

The local divinity naturally drew his colouring and his main attributes from the spot itself, and those in turn gave a similar local physiognomy to his rites and functions. We have thus a kind of geographical character impressed on early religions, which their later developments retained long after they had been severed from their first meanings and had drifted to other climes and alien races.

6. The Lower Animals.—The primitive mind did not recognise any deep distinction between the lower animals and man. The savage knew that the beast was his superior in many points, in craft and strength, in fleetness and intuition, and he regarded it with respect. To him, the brute had a soul not inferior to his own, and a language which the wise among men might on occasion learn. The strange powers and mysterious faculties they often possess were to him inexplicable by any other doctrine than that they were divine; therefore, with wide unanimity, he placed certain species of animals nearer to God than is man himself, or even identified them with the manifestations of the Highest.

None was in this respect a greater favourite than the bird. Its soaring flight, its strange or sweet notes, the marked hues of its plumage, combined to render it a fit emblem of power and beauty.

The Dyaks of Borneo trace their descent to Singalang Burong, the god of birds; and birds as the ancestors of the totemic family are extremely common among the American Indians. The Eskimos say that they have the faculty of soul or life beyond all other creatures, and in most primitive tribes they have been regarded as the messengers of the divine and the special purveyors of the vital principle.

According to the myths of the Polynesians, the gods in the old times used to speak to man through the carols of the feathered songsters; and everywhere, to be able to understand the language of birds was equivalent to being able to converse with the gods.

The chief god of the Murray River Australians was Nourali. He was immortal, self-created, and the creator of all. The form under which they conceived him was that of a bird, a crow or eagle. Among nearly all the tribes of the North-west Coast and the adjacent interior of British America, the creation of the world is attributed to a raven, Yetl, who is personated in the dark thunder-cloud.

South of them, in the wide-spread Algonquin stock, this “thunder-bird” is a conspicuous figure in art and myth; and we could pursue our way quite to the extreme south of the continent, and everywhere among the aboriginal tribes we should discover similar sacred associations connected with the birds.

They are universal in religions, and those which we meet in Christian art, the eagle, the dove, etc., carry with them significations allied to those they bear in earlier and primitive symbolism.[195]

Closely connected with these ideas was the reverence of the egg as the symbol of the origin of life. Plutarch tells us that in the Bacchic mysteries the egg represented matter in its germinal condition, that is, the potentiality of life; and this meaning we have retained with the symbol in our customs relating to Easter eggs on the morning of the Resurrection.

The derivation from the observation of the bird brooding on its nest is obvious, and no wonder therefore that the symbol with allied myths and rites extends through all religions.

In the creation legend of the Yaros, a Dravida tribe of Northern India, the goddess Nustoo, who created the world, came into life from a self-evolved egg, and dwelt on the petals of a water-lily until she had formed and moulded the land for her abode. The Dyaks of Borneo relate that after the Supreme Being had created the world, the god Ranying descended to the new earth and formed there seven eggs, which contained the germs of man and woman, all animals and plants.[196]

This example, of the bird, which I have given in some detail, will illustrate the cult of an animal form. It by no means stands alone in its universality. Perhaps even more striking is the so-called “serpent-worship,” which has occupied the attention of so many writers. The adoration of the serpent-symbol is wonderfully wide-spread. Scarcely a native tribe can be named in regions where this animal is known, which does not pay it some sort of reverence. Some writers have traced the sentiment back to the anthropoid progenitor of man, supposed to dwell in tropical forests abounding in venomous snakes. But into this extensive question I cannot enter.

The symbolic value of most animal deities can be traced to some peculiar trait of the species. Thus the lizard, very prominent in the religions of Polynesia, Australia, and South Africa, derived its significance from the nocturnal habits of some species and the diurnal habits of others.[197] In America, the frog was the symbol of water, over a vast area; and that it has precisely the same meaning in Australia, will cause no astonishment when we recall its amphibious nature. The fish, as the emblem of life, familiar in Christian symbolism, dates back to earliest Chaldean times, when Oannes, a form of the god Êa, appeared as half fish and half man, and is a parallel of the fish-god who sows the seed of man in the flood myths of both the Brahmans and the Mexicans. It is but another expression of the recognition of water as the source or condition of life.

The totemic animals, or “eponymous ancestors,” of the clans or gentes among the American Indians, are not to be taken literally. They were not understood as animals of the sort we see to-day, but as mythical, ancient beings, of supernatural attributes, who clothed themselves in those forms for their own purposes.

7. Man.—That when the brute was at times invested with the aureole of the Divine, man himself should at times partake of its glory, need be expected. But here let an important distinction be drawn. Never as man was he clothed in the attributes of Deity, but just in so far as he was deemed to be more than man. The Latin saying, deus homini deus, never was true anywhere in its literal sense. Anthropism never existed in any religion. Man or the likeness of man was never worshipped by reason of any human attribute, but solely for those believed to be more than human, superhuman.

The tribes of Polynesia did adore their chieftains; the ancient Egyptians and many another people did pay their rulers divine honour, and rank them among the gods; but always because they considered them partakers of the divine nature, sharers in that which is ever beyond mere humanity.[198]

This profound distinction between the human and the humanised divine was sought to be expressed by most tribes by fashioning the images of the gods in vaguely human shapes, but with non-human elements. Diana with her hundred breasts, Brahma with his dozens of arms, Janus with his double face, and scores of other instances will at once rise in the memory. Enormous size, impossible features, accessories such as wings, tails, multiple heads and limbs, indicate not, as some would have it, a depraved artistic taste, but the effort of the pious carver to express in his work the non-human and superhuman character of the being he sets before the adoring eyes of the votaries.

It was only in a few gifted and glorious natures, notably the ancient Greeks, that the true distinction rose to full consciousness in the artistic soul—that in their corporeal forms the gods differ from men in their superior and matchless beauty, in their perfect symmetry and noble proportions. They recognised that there is something in beauty itself, which, in its highest expression, partakes truly and really of the divine, and leads man to the contemplation of laws beyond those of nature or of life, laws which are the expression of the deep harmonies of the universe.

This was the triumph of anthropomorphism. Pursuing the merely objective, the merely animal, it was led by the unseen hand which guides man to his destiny into the path which conducted far beyond what the senses can teach, into the realm of the ideal and the eternal, to

Such are some of the numberless objects with which primitive man associated his idea of the Divine. The nature of this association must not be misunderstood. I repeat what I have already said, that it was not an identification of the spiritual with the material. The object was hallowed, not from anything in itself, but as the medium of invisible power.

8. Life and its Transmission.—What Professor Otfried MÜller has so well said of the oldest forms of the Greek and Etruscan religions holds true in all primitive faiths: “To them, divinity seemed a world of Life, blossoming forth from an impenetrable depth into definite forms and individual expressions.”[199] All gods and holy objects were merely vehicles through which Life and Power poured into the world from the inexhaustible and impersonal source of both.

I will illustrate this first from the very ancient religion of the Etruscans and then point out sufficient analogies in modern savage tribes.

That venerable people, whose massive cities built before Rome was founded still survive, held that there was a single source of all existence, animate and inanimate. Its immediate agents were the mysterious “veiled gods,” whose number was unknown and whose names were never uttered. They were the channels of the divine Will, through which it passed to the twelve highest known gods, called the Consentes or Companions, and these transmitted it through those innumerable spirits, whom the Latins called Genii, to its realisation in objective existence.

The word genius means a producer or begetter; but not in any literal sense, for not only every man and animate being had such a genius, but also every plant, every city, every place, every inanimate object, had one also. Clearly, therefore, the word refers to an act of the creative power in the abstract or spiritual sense. The genii were the proximate causes of existence, but they were themselves “emanations from the great gods,” and these in turn were merely the channels of the inexhaustible source of all life beyond.

This was the doctrine of the Etruscans and also of the Greeks. I may compare it with the belief of one of the most brutish of barbarian hordes, the Itelmen of Kamtschatka.

Beyond all visible things, say they, is the ultimate Power, Dusdachtschish, invisible, remote. No worship and no offerings are tendered him other than that certain pillars are erected and decked with flowers and garlands in his honour. Their Jupiter is Kutka. It was said of him that he had married all creatures and was the common father of all. It was he who made land and water in their present forms and invented all arts. To him the visible world owed its existence, though not its origin. Many discreditable stories were told of him, and he is as much cursed for the evils of life as praised for its advantages. It is he who finds souls for all existences, and preserves their spirits when the body decays.

We must not be blinded to the true significance of such myths by the often material, coarse, and vulgar images under which they are presented. Indeed, if they are properly comprehended, we may explain and redeem from obloquy much in the heathen legends which Arnobius[200] and other fathers of the Church denounced with bitter and vehement imprecation. We should consider whether they are not naÏve symbols, chosen, with a crude innocence of evil, to convey objectively the idea of the eternally renewed life of nature.

This reflection will explain to us the true significance of those objects from ancient and savage cults which are preserved in the locked rooms of museums, in their secret drawers and curtained cases. They are too apt to be construed as proofs of impurity and degradation. Such an interpretation would be sadly at variance with the fact.

There were, indeed, and often, licentious rites, deliberate indecencies, practised under the cloak of religion by unscrupulous rulers and debased priests. These were alienations and prostitutions of religion. In the genuine and primitive faiths, the symbols of the reproduction and transmission of life were frequent and public, and were not associated with thoughts or acts of debauchery. They were visible emblems of that Spirit of Life which, beyond all else, was the unifying instinct of religious expression.

This instinct led man everywhere to call upon God as Father, as parent of whatever is, “Pan-genitor,” as he is styled in the Orphic hymns. In every race, in all ages, have men’s prayers ascended to “Our Father who art in heaven.”

Were we to listen to the rude Australian, we should hear him invoking Papang, “Father”; or Mamin-gata, or Mungan-naur, “Our Father,” in his various dialects. Among the Aztecs of Mexico, it would be To-ta, “Our Father”; with the American tribes of the north, “grand-father,” or “great father”; in the Brahmanas of India, Pita, “Father”; with the Greeks and Romans, Dios Pater, “the heavenly Father”; and with the northern Vikings, Odin All-father.[201]

But a vital distinction has been claimed to exist between such terms and that fatherhood of God which we have been taught to acknowledge. “In heathen religions,” asserts an eminent writer, “the fatherhood of the gods is physical fatherhood only”; and this is repeated by many Christian theologians and commentators.[202]

It is easy to refute this assertion. It would not have been made but for religious partisanship. Ethnologists are well aware that the word for “Father” in primitive life is much more frequently a term of respect, applied to elders, than necessarily denotive of kinship. The father, Pita, of the Brahmanas is at once the Creator, Preserver, and Destroyer of all things, and far remote from physical parentage[203]; neither in American nor Australian myths is “the Father above” identified as the ancestor of the gens; among the Zulus, the best instructed missionaries report that Unkululu, the “Father” of their creeds, was not meant literally so, but only as “the means of helping the race into being”[204]; and this is the general sense of the term in every instance which I have analysed.

As some sort of a crude effort to express this comprehensibly, we find that frequently in primitive myths and art the god, regarded as the creator, is shown or spoken of as “androgynous,”—that is, of both sexes at once. He is addressed as “father-mother,” or “mother-father,”—bi-sexual rather than non-sexual in nature.[205] Such expressions are of constant occurrence, and some of the most objectionable portions of the ritual and of idolatrous art arose from the effort to translate this mystical characteristic into objective forms.

Yet it remains true that the sexual antithesis, that which mythologists call the worship of “the reciprocal principles of nature,” is interwoven with the fibre of nearly all religions, primitive or developed. Under one form or another, it is the impulse which ever appeals most potently to the human heart.

The sentiment which attracts the one sex to the other, the passion of Love, exceeds all others in the power it exerts on the individual life. This it is, which in some of its forms, rude or refined, is at the root of half the expressions of the religious sentiment. We may trace it from crude and coarse beginnings in the genesiac cults of primitive peoples, through ever nobler and more delicate expressions, up through the celibate sacrifices of both sexes, spouses of God,[206] until in its complete expansion it reaches the perfect agape, where the union of the human with the divine in the life eternal, here on earth, or beyond, one and the same, is believed to have been reached.[207]

This, the loftiest of all the religious mystical ideals is but the result of a gradual evolution from those low beginnings which I have mentioned as perceptible in most primitive religions.

It is the ripened manifestation of that profound psychical truth, so incomparably expressed in the lines of the philosopher-poet, Coleridge: