Part 8

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:

“As if yet around her he lingering were, Though the _veil of daylight_ concealed him from her.”

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.