Part 6

Again, we have other evidence besides the linguistic that the earliest conception of sin which we can call spiritual was still half-materialistic, and was still closely allied to that of bodily impurity. In the theory of earlier ritual, the sin can be washed away like a physical taint, the atonement takes the form of certain lustrations, and repentance is not considered necessary as a moral condition of release. And to the same middle stage of development belongs the process known as the transference of sin, whereby the sin can be extracted as if it were a substance from the person of the sinner and transferred into another man or animal or even an inanimate object. Think of sin as an inner vapour or exhalation and the idea of quasi-mechanical transference is intelligible.[116.1] It no doubt belongs to a comparatively early {117} period of savage religion. Among the Atkans, for instance,[117.1] we hear of such a release as this: the sin, which in this case was a gross violation of a natural law of the sex-instinct, was made to enter into certain weeds which were worn about the person, and then, under a clear sun were carefully thrown away, the sun himself being called to witness the act of transference. In the ancient Peruvian Church, the shaking off of evils was a great public festival: bands of warriors marched forth crying out, “Go forth, all evils,” and then bathed in the river, while the people shook out their clothes from the doors.[117.2] A similar record speaks of the Inca praying to the river-god to bear away his sins, which he had confessed in the sight of the sun. And during the Peruvian purification a similar rule prevailed to that which was noticed above, that all abusive language and strife was to be avoided. Or again, the {118} belief that the sin is an evil spirit that can be induced to find another living-lodgment, suggests the scapegoat, a familiar figure in Leviticus and in Greek ritual, the animal who bears away with it into the wilderness the sins of the people, or is put to death with the uttered prayer that into it may enter all the evils of the community. The Judaic record tells us that Aaron “confessed over him all the iniquities of the children of Israel… putting them on the head of the goat”; after this, as the animal was in a high degree of sin-infection, both Aaron and the man who led it away into the wilderness must wash and change their clothes.[118.1] The Egyptian rite described by Herodotus,[118.2] shows us the same idea differently worked out: the head of the animal is severed with the imprecation that it may bear the evils of the community, and is then either thrown into the river so that the stream may carry them away, or is sold to the Hellenes wherever there happens to be a Hellenic market: Herodotus {119} does not tell us the reason of this, which, however, is easily divined: the Hellene is the stranger who, as the Egyptians hoped, might eat the infected flesh and thereby absorb into his alien person the people’s sins; for the eating of other people’s sins is a recognised primitive process of transference.[119.1] What is unique in the Egyptian management of the ceremony is the skilful combination of religion and trade.

Finally, the ritual may demand a human scapegoat, who will fulfil exactly the same function as the animal. He may be put to death, or driven over the border, carrying away the national sins: he may be very vile, and therefore a fitting receptacle for sin, like the “κάθαρμα,” the “purifying man” in the Attic festival of the Thargelia, who was led through the streets, whipped with rods, and at one time burnt; or the slave at Marseilles,[119.2] who was fed up and reverentially treated for {120} a year, and then was led forth in solemn procession through the streets and expelled from the city, praying that on him might fall all the evils of the community:[120.1] or the scapegoat-man may be exceptionally holy, being the better able, through his very holiness, to absorb harmlessly and dissipate the evils of others. Thus even the miserable victim of the Thargelia was mysteriously invested with a certain sacred character, and seems once to have been regarded in a certain degree as the counterpart of the divinity.[120.2]

Much of this ritual of sin-transference is altogether independent of the higher gods; it is worked by mesmeric or mimetic or mechanical magic. At a later period it is harmonised with their service and accompanied with prayer; and at this stage we note a curious ritualistic phenomenon. Blood, the primeval source of impurity, becomes itself {121} a purifier, not by the law _similia similibus curantur_, but owing to the growing power of the sacrificial concept. “The blood of bulls and goats can wash away sins,” because the animal that has been consecrated by contact with the altar becomes charged with a divine potency, and its sacred blood, poured over the impure man, absorbs and disperses his impurity. Illustrations are easily gathered from Hellenic ritual,[121.1] which frequently employed the blood of swine for cathartic purposes. On an early vase-painting we see the hero Theseus seated on the altar of God the Atoner with pig’s blood running down his body to cleanse him from the slaughter of the brigands.[121.2] In the Judaic rule the blood of the red heifer was {122} first sprinkled by the priest before the tabernacle of the congregation seven times, but for special purposes of lustration the “water of separation” was used, that is, water made holy by being mingled with the ashes of the heifer that had been burnt. We have a curious illustration of the double character of this water of separation: being consecrated and holy, it was powerful to cleanse away stain and sin: yet its own impure composition was not wholly forgotten, for he who sprinkled the water or touched it was unclean till evening.[122.1]

These ideas belong to very old-world thought, yet their reflex abides with us still in the heart of a spiritual creed; for their association is clear with the Christian conception of the transference of sin and of the divine victim that takes upon himself the sins of the people.

As far as we have examined it as yet, the concept of a “pure heart” is not necessarily wholly ethical; it is often coexistent with the ideas of sin that do not clearly recognise {123} moral responsibility or the essential difference between deliberate wrong-doing and the ritualistic or accidental or involuntary sin. In the middle stage of ethical-religious growth, an innocent Œdipus may yet be regarded as πᾶς ἄναγνος, impure body and soul. The final point is reached when it is realised that the blood of bulls and goats cannot wash away sin, that nothing external can defile the heart or soul, but only evil thoughts and evil will. This purged and idealised concept will then in the progressive religions revolt against its own parentage, and will prompt the eternal antagonism of the prophet against the ritual priest, of the Christ against the Pharisee.

It would be interesting to trace the points of this long development, which has here been hastily sketched, among the higher races of the old world; but a brief and partial indication of its history among some of them must here suffice. We are all acquainted with the final evolution of the idea of purity in {124} Judaic history: but the phenomena of its embryonic stages, as revealed in the ritual books of the Old Testament, may not be so familiar. They present the Hebrew mind in regard to this particular as on the same level with the Zarathustrian Persian, the Vedic Indian, and the Hellene of the seventh century. Purity is the strictest law of Jahvé, the pure god, who intimates that he would punish Aaron with death if he heedlessly entered the holy place without purification.[124.1] But the processes by which it is secured are mechanical, quasi-magical, and the concept itself appears more materialistic than spiritual, ritualistic rather than ethical in our sense: the processes of cleansing are such as the use of incense, lustrations with blood, water, and even fire, cathartic methods which are almost universal: we hear nothing of prayer or repentance. Blood is the chief impurity, whether shed deliberately, accidentally, or righteously. The warriors after battle must be purified {125} before they enter the camp.[125.1] Murder has indeed become a tribal offence, and this marks a great advance in the social development of human society: no satisfaction such as the were-gilt was allowed for murder; but it is regarded as a sin rather than a crime, and its sinfulness is the uncleanness of the land on which the blood is shed. “Blood defileth the land,” and “I the Lord dwell among the children of Israel.”[125.2] Even the accidental homicide must fly to the city of refuge, not merely to escape the avenger of blood, who represents the old family right of the blood-feud, but to rid the land of the impurity of his presence. Nor must he return till the death of the high priest.[125.3] This latter restriction has not yet been explained, so far as I am aware. I venture the explanation that the high priest is regarded here as the temporary representative of Jahvé, and as infected with the impurity that cleaves to the outraged god; but when {126} he dies, the stain that has been put upon the god fades away and his wrath ceases. Finally, we may note the rule that when the murderer could not be discovered, the nearest city must offer cathartic sacrifices, “and thy sin”--that is, the ritualistic sin of having an impure spot of ground in one’s territory--“shall then be forgiven thee.”[126.1] In fact the Judaic law concerning homicide as shown in these books, though it has advanced far beyond savagery, and has even attained to the modern view that manslaying concerns the whole community, is yet barbaric on the whole. The concept of purity aided development up to a certain point and then probably retarded it. On the other hand, in the department of sexual morality its operation was most powerful for good; it consecrated and safeguarded the fundamental laws if it did not actually construct or evoke them; but, as we should expect, the sexual purity of the Hebrew code remains a religious law and does not pass into the domain of secular ethic.

{127}

Another religion that is of equal value for our present purpose is the Zarathustrian. Trusting as far as we may the translation and interpretation of its sacred books, we may gather the impression from the study of them that no religion on the earth has ever been under such bondage to the cathartic ideal as this one; nor does it appear very profitable at first sight to put the question here of the influence of the idea of purity on religion, law, and morals, for the idea seems all-absorbing and these three to have no independent existence apart from it. It creates for the Mazdean believer a morality of its own, with which the secular systems have little or nothing to do. “Oh, maker of the world,” asks Zarathustra of Ahura Mazda, “can he be clean again who has eaten of the carcase of a dog or the corpse of a man?” The deity answers--“He cannot, oh holy Zarathustra.”[127.1] Nor is there any purification possible for the unforgivable sin of walking about after fifteen years of age were {128} reached without a girdle or a proper shirt: “such a one goes henceforth with power to destroy the world of righteousness.”[128.1] On the other hand, the highest act of righteousness which brings forgiveness of all sins to him who performs it is the pulling down of a dakhma, the scaffold on which the corpses were hung according to the Persian system of burial, after it had served its purpose; for naturally it was a focus of impurity, and demons congregated there in swarms.[128.2] And the Persian concept of purity makes its own law. As the ritual of cleansing is the prime article of the Zarathustrian code, so the sacrilegious cleanser, that is, the amateur who tried to purify another without knowledge of the Mazdean ceremonies, brought sterility upon the land and was punished with death.[128.3] And death was the penalty for him who dared to carry a corpse alone, for the dead body spread around the contagion of a myriad “drugs” or demons, {129} and two men at least must set hand to it to prevent an intolerable epidemic of impurity.[129.1] Legislation in the Zend-Avesta is merciless beyond any recorded code; we must suppose that it was mainly idle thunder, or Persia would have been depopulated. The whole universe of Mazdeism is permeated with these cathartic ideas, and a secular or physical view of things scarcely glimmers through: the ritual order dominated what we call the material as well as the spiritual world; the sun, moon, and stars are purified by the Word. On this basis arose a religion of great exaltation and a religious fervour of rare intensity: and the sacred books of Persia are of great value for the present inquiry, for they show us more clearly than any other record the spiritual concept of the pure heart emerging from the ritualistic idea; while it is often hard in any particular text to distinguish between the lower and the higher significance. When God speaks to the prophet thus--“Purity {130} is for man, next to life, the highest good: that purity, O Zarathustra, that is in the religion of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with good thoughts, words, and deeds,”[130.1] we believe we have reached a high ethical conception; but the phrase is supposed by Darmesteter to refer to him who cleanses himself according to the prescriptions of the law. Yet in their cathartic code were the germs of an advanced morality, and truthfulness and chastity were fostered by it.[130.2] The lustrations were partly of the primitive type, taken over, as usual, from a lower stratum of religion; their most interesting features are the cleansing words that accompanied them, which were not usually prayers but spells, formulæ of magic potency, but drawn from a high {131} religion, such as these, for instance:--“The will of the Lord is the Law of Righteousness”; “Holiness is the best of all Good: it is also Happiness.”[131.1] Even the virtue of philanthropy is given cathartic value in a spell-formula, “he who relieves the poor makes Ahura King,” recited before the person was washed with the holy water of Mazda and the “gômêz” of an ox.[131.2]

In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has been the “purest” the world has known; but the high spiritual concept of purity that it evolved never escaped nor struggled to escape, as did the Judaic and Hellenic, from the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion was doomed to ceremoniousness and sacerdotalism; and the modern student who is fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius and its deep, whole-hearted conviction must be prepared for the inevitable bathos that awaits him. Its remoteness from the modern and civilised view of things may be estimated from {132} the Zarathustrian text, in which the prophet exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the diseased limb with a cleansing spell and by the ejection of the demon, above the surgeon who heals it with a knife.[132.1]

It is with a feeling of relief that we now turn to the survey of the Hellenic phenomena, passing by as we must the Vedic and the Islamic, which appear to be of lesser importance so far as I have been able to study them. The Hellenic religion more than all others of the ancient world is the mirror of the manifold civilisation of a people; for its lesser intensity allowed it more varied application, and it was obliged to reconcile itself speedily with the utilitarian and secular forces of rational progress, which there was no sacerdotal caste strong enough to oppose. And it is in the light of this religion therefore that the concept of purity can best be studied in its relations to law and morality. The history of the cathartic ritual in Greece {133} does not begin till the eighth century; for the Homeric age was strikingly sane, cheerful, and secular in its views about such things. Though Hektor feels, as any modern gentleman would feel, that it was wrong to go to a religious service “bedabbled in gore and filth,” though Odysseus purifies his house with sulphur-fumigation after the carnage of the fight, the world for whom Homer sang does not appear to have been burdened with the ceremoniousness of purification or with dread of the impurity of blood and death, or with any sort of care for the vengeance or miasma of the ghost. An age that could rise to the height of such a sentiment as “best of omens is it to fight for one’s country,” was likely to be healthy-minded in all such matters. The first mention of purification for bloodshed is in a poem of Arctinos of the eighth century; and a certain ritual-code of purity begins to emerge in Hesiod. Henceforward cathartic legislation comes to be very rife in Greece, emanating chiefly from two centres as it {134} seems, Delphi and Crete. The gods to whom the domain of ritual-purity belongs especially are Apollo, Zeus, and Dionysos; at the same time the ghostly terrors of the underworld appear to be gaining a greater hold on the Hellenic imagination, and “catharsis” is specially needed to deal with these. Probably all this is only a revival of aboriginal practices and superstitions rooted in the Hellenic soil, a religion which the intellectualism of Homeric civilisation had happily suppressed for a time, but which asserted itself with renewed strength when that civilisation was overthrown. Yet the revival, though apparently a “set-back,” bore fair fruit for morality, law, and even religion. The history of Greek ethic must reckon as it has not yet done with the ritual of purity, and the history of Greek law with the fear of the ghost and the miasma of bloodshed.

At first the idea is, as usual, ritualistic and non-moral: and much that we find in savage communities, and in Judæa, Persia, and India, we find again in Greece. As the Hebrew {135} warriors were purified before returning to camp, so the Macedonian army was purified in spring before the campaign,[135.1] and the misunderstood story of the Phokians daubing themselves with gypsum before battle points to a cathartic ritual.[135.2] And the Hellenic ceremonies agreed with those of most other nations in regard to the causes of uncleanness and the methods of deliverance: fire, water, blood, onions, the skins of animals sacrificed, even clay and bran, are the usual purifying media. In one method of κάθαρσις only the Hellenic ritual is unique so far as I know: sacrificial communion with God was sometimes considered an effective means of obliterating the impurity which the kinsmen contracted by a death in the family: at Argos the mourners put off the “tapu” by eating of the sacrifice to Apollo, believing that the spirit of the pure god in the sacred food could destroy {136} the miasma within and around them.[136.1] The strongholds of Pharisaic purification were the religious brotherhoods of Orphism and the earlier Pythagoreanism, a religious-philosophic school closely associated with the former; in these the law of “the pure life” is a ceremonious law, specially concerned with abstinence from certain food. But Greek thought did not remain long on this level: a saying is attributed to Charondas of Catana, but perhaps of later origin, which asserts that “foul speech is a defilement of the soul”;[136.2] and in a fragment of Epicharmos of the fifth century, we have the utterance of the higher gospel, “If thou art pure of soul, thou art pure of all thy body”; and the later Pythagorean literature, such as the “Golden Song” of Hierocles, contains the doctrine that “purity of soul is the only divine service”; “God has no more familiar abode on the earth than the pure soul.” And to an unknown writer, probably of the same {137} school,[137.1] we owe the dogma, “We worship God most meetly if we render our own soul pure from every stain of evil.” There are two epigrams in the Anthology, included in the fanciful collection of Pythian oracles, expressing the same idea that holiness is a spiritual fact independent of ceremonies or lustrations: “Oh stranger, if holy of soul, enter the shrine of the holy God, having but touched the lustral water: lustration is an easy matter for the good, but all ocean with its streams cannot cleanse the evil man.”[137.2] The other maintains as clearly as Isaiah or the New Testament the uselessness of all mere washing of hands: “The temples of the gods are open to all good men, nor is there any need of purification: no stain can ever cleave to virtue. But depart, whosoever is baneful at heart, for thy soul will never be washed by the cleansing of the body.”[137.3] The better Greek mind attained this freedom the more easily in that it was not strongly {138} or generally possessed with the belief in the aboriginal impurity or sinfulness of the flesh and the earthly life. And Greek ritual itself, conservative as it was and never abandoning its code of purification, comes at last to be influenced by this freer atmosphere and to reconcile ceremonious purity with a higher moral law. Before the temple of Asclepios at Epidauros stood the text, “Within the incense-filled sanctuary one must be pure; and purity is to have righteous thoughts.”[138.1] An inscription on a temple in Rhodes of the time of Hadrian[138.2] shows a strange blend of primitive and advanced thought. Its preamble mentions “rules concerning righteous entrance into the shrine.” “The first and greatest rule is to be pure and unblemished in hand and heart and to be free from an evil conscience.” Then follows the usual ceremonious code of rules concerning the impurities of food, {139} funerals, and natural affections of the body: and the last clause shows the ethical idea penetrating even these, for the code prescribes that a person may enter the shrine “on the same day after lawful married intercourse.” This means that the adulteress was excluded, as she was at Athens by a law quoted by Demosthenes.[139.1] It appears then that the liberal ethic judgment attributed to Theano, the female Pythagorean teacher, that while lawful intercourse was no bar to participating in a religious service on the same day, the adulteress was to be for ever excluded,[139.2] was not wholly out of accordance with the advanced ritualistic code of Greece.