Part 9

_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 τέμενος, 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

“the measures and the forms, Which the abstract intelligence supplies, Whose kingdom is where Time and Space are not.”

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 Brahmānas 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 Brahmānas 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.