Part 9

Connected as it seems with this superstition about names is the belief that, in order to gain complete power over a human or divine personality, it is necessary to know their origin and to express what one knows about them in the charm: thus in the Kalevala the young magician is taught the origin {191} of things in order that he may know the proper enchantment against them, and a long account of the origin of iron, regarded as a demoniac substance, occurs in the word-magic used to cure the wound it inflicted. Hence we may account for the descriptive or, so to speak, biographical element in charms that are on the borderland of prayer. The exorciser of evil dreams in the Atharva-Veda prays or sings thus: “We know, oh sleep, thy birth; thou art the son of the divine women-folk, the instrument of Death. Thou art the ender, thou art Death. Thus do we know thee, oh sleep: do thou, oh sleep, protect us from evil dreams.”[191.1] And in the worship of Agni the belief is expressed that “the prayers fill thee with power and strengthen thee,” and this is at once followed by an account of his nature and origin.[191.2] Is it then too far-fetched to trace the survival of this old-world {192} thought, rooted as it is in the magic of the word and the statement, in the prominence given to the dogmatic biographical statement in our own liturgy? We regard it as a confession of faith: it may also be regarded as an expression of the worshipper’s knowledge of the divine personality, whereby he raises himself into communion with it and thus gains power for his prayer.[192.1]

Considering now in a more general survey the liturgies of the nations that have attained culture, we might begin with our own fathers. But so little that touches the inner life of their pre-Christian religion has been preserved, that probably not much material for our present purpose is to be discovered from the records. We know that they were given to the employment of the rune or the spell, the rival or the parent of prayer; and one of these, used by Odin to heal the sprained foot of Baldur’s foal, is perhaps {193} the only surviving fragment of Indo-Germanic poetry.[193.1] Odin sings, “Bone to bone, blood to blood, limb to limb, as though they were glued together”; in a later Norwegian, and also in a Scottish version, it is Christ who heals the foal with the same magic words, strengthened however by the formula, “Heal in the Holy Ghost’s name.” And this useful medicine-charm was not forgotten by the Aryan Indians, for we find the words in the Atharva-Veda, “Fit together, hair with hair, fit together, skin with skin: thy blood, thy bone shall grow.”[193.2] Neither god nor ghost was needed to help out the force of such incantations. But probably some time before Christianity prayer had come to prevail over spell in the Teutonic North, for there are traces there of a certain {194} antagonism growing between magic and religion, which led to the condemnation of certain forms of magic.[194.1]

An interesting question arises about a prayer-charm used by the early English against sterility of the fields: “Hail be thou, Earth, Mother of Men, wax fertile in the embrace of God, fulfilled with fruit for the use of man.”[194.2] This poetic utterance implies a veritable ἱερὸς γάμος, or holy marriage of earth and heaven in the Greek sense; and reminds us vividly of the spell-formula, used in the Eleusinian Mysteries and descending from the period when the purpose of these was mainly agricultural, Υέ Κύε, “Rain and Conceive,” which was uttered by the mystes, who folded his arms and glanced up to the sky at the first word and down to the earth at the second: a spell-prayer for fertility and human increase. It is probably then correct {195} to call this phrase of our ancestors, which is the only surviving fragment, so far as I am aware, of their pre-Christian liturgy, a spell-prayer that was efficacious by way of suggestion rather than of entreaty.

Of the same ambiguous character was the old Roman chant of the priests of Mars, “Enos Lases juvate,” “Help us, O spirits of our ancestors,” repeated with the iteration common in enchantments and accompanied with dancing and with the utterance of the word “triumpe.” From the higher point of view the Roman prayers that have come down to us are barren and dull; the well-known liturgical archive containing Rome’s address to Jupiter in the critical days of the Hannibalic war is a wary and cleverly drawn legal document, intended to bind the god as well as the State.[195.1] In fact the spiritual side of the old Roman character has left no trace of itself in any ritual or liturgy of which we have record. The prayer of {196} Cato’s that has been preserved is merely materialistic.[196.1]

We expect much more from Greece, and in some measure we are not disappointed. Spell-ritual was no doubt always much in vogue, especially for the purposes of agriculture and purification: we hear of certain “magicians” or μάγοι of Cleonae who averted hailstorms with incantations and the shedding of their own blood.[196.2] And a solemn part of the State liturgy in Greece was a commination service, which pronounced a curse on certain offences against the State. The religious curse is an interesting phenomenon of which it is not easy to give briefly a full and exact anthropological account; it is taken up by the higher religions, but it by no means originated in them, belonging to the sphere of spell rather than of prayer, and working out its effect by means of magic suggestion. Even the {197} Jewish service, which we still use on Ash Wednesday, employs curse-formulæ in which there is no immediate reference to God, and they may have been regarded originally as having an independent efficacy. This was certainly the case in Greece, for the curse was itself personified as an independent, personal power; and the Erinyes themselves, in some degree the personal embodiments of the curse, work their effect on the victim by singing a spell-song, according to Æschylus, which binds his soul and withers him away.[197.1] And the many private “devotiones” or “diræ” that have come down to us from Greek antiquity, written usually on leaden tablets and consecrating the enemy to the powers of the lower world, employ indeed an appeal to these powers that may be interpreted as prayer, but their essential quality is magical, and they certainly were supposed to operate as spells against the individual, while even the divinities to whom they are addressed appear to be constrained {198} rather than entreated. In one interesting example of the first century A.D., found in Ægina,[198.1] of Hellenic-Christian or possibly Judaic origin, the curse takes on the form of a prayer for righteous vengeance--“I call on the Highest God, the Lord of all spirits and of all flesh, before whom every soul this day is humbled with supplication, against those who have treacherously slain or poisoned the unfortunate Heracleia.” In the Greek legal procedure a curse was sometimes uttered against oneself if one forswore oneself or if one was guilty of the charge; and here as in similar cases in Christian jurisprudence the curse is an invocation of the high god who will punish perjury; but we find it similarly employed in the animistic stage of religion, by the African for instance, who takes an oath by his fetich,[198.2] “May this fetich slay me if I do not fulfil the contract”; and in such cases we must regard the curse as a spell working by {199} suggestion against oneself rather than as a prayer.

Before considering Greek prayer proper, we may note as a last example of an ambiguous formula, standing midway as it seems between spell and prayer, the striking liturgical utterance of the old Dodonæan ritual, employed for an agricultural service: the priestesses chanted the refrain in two hexameters, the old metre of religion, “God was, God is, God will be, oh Great God; the earth brings forth fruits, therefore call on mother earth.”[199.1] The resemblance of this to the early English formula quoted above is striking enough. The first line belongs to an elevated religion and seems far removed from the region of magic; but equally spiritual formulæ concerning the nature and the attributes of God were used in the Zarathustrian and Babylonian liturgies for magical purposes, just as texts from the Bible and Koran have been. And the second line employs the same method as the Navajo {200} Shaman employed, for it states that the divinity is doing that very thing which it is the object of the liturgy to bring about. The appeal to mother earth which is enjoined may have been merely the invocation of her name, a spell at least as much as a prayer. The same may be said of the other popular refrains chanted by the husbandmen of ancient Greece to obtain good crops or fair weather--“Give us big sheaves, sheaves,” to Demeter,[200.1] or “Come forth, dear sun,” to the sun-god.[200.2]

The public prayers of Greece, those actually used in the temple-service and the official liturgies, have not been preserved, and in this respect the Greek record is very barren compared with the Babylonian, Vedic, or Iranian. But though the actual formulæ are lost, we can gather some impression from the inscriptions and other literary sources as to the objects of prayer. The Athenian state prayed, “For the {201} health and safety of the people of the Athenians, their wives and children and all in the country,”[201.1] and the formula might include a prayer for the prosperity of their allies, such as Milesians or Platæans. But we have no indications that the blessings prayed for included others besides the material ones. The Lacedæmonians are commended by Socrates[201.2] for refraining from specifying any particular want, either in their private or public prayers, but contenting themselves with praying that the gods should grant them τὰ καλὰ ἐπὶ τοῖς ἀγαθοῖς: the phrase has something of a genuine ring, and is probably derived from a real liturgy, but it is not absolutely precise; it seems, however, to comprise spiritual blessings as well as material, and in this respect to be unique among the public prayers in Greece, if we dare judge them by the scanty record. Probably the formulæ were very old and the range of aspiration usually narrow; and the {202} idea that moral advance could be attained by prayer is perhaps hardly likely to have been reflected in them; yet we must take note of the plaintive question put by the Corcyræan state, weary of civic strife and massacre, to the Dodonæan oracle, asking, “To what god or what hero shall we pray in order to obtain concord, and to govern our city fairly and well?”[202.1] and we find an educational official of Cos, in the second century B.C., praying “for the health and the virtuous behaviour of the boys.”[202.2]

We are better informed concerning the style of private prayer in Greece, as also concerning the theory of prayer that gradually commended itself to the highest intelligences. The average private man was certainly capable of praying for blessings other than material. We have the prayer of a potter of Metapontum, of the sixth century B.C., praying {203} to the god that he might “have a good report among men.”[203.1] Among the prayers contained in the literature of the fifth century, our interest is arrested by such utterances as Pindar’s, “May I walk, oh God, in the guileless paths of life, and leave behind me a fair name for my children”;[203.2] and again, “Oh God that bringest all things to pass, grant me the spirit of reverence for noble things”;[203.3] and by this of Euripides, “May the spirit of chastity abide with me, the fairest gift of God.”[203.4] To this age may belong the poetical fragment of a banquet song--for the Greeks could pray genially and seriously in the midst of social intercourse--which must have once had much vogue: “Oh Pallas, born of waters, Queen Athena, mayest thou and thy father keep this city and its citizens in prosperity, free from sorrow, civic discord, and untimely deaths.”[203.5] The prayers of Xenophon and Plutarch may {204} be taken as typical of the average ethical feeling of their respective periods: the former petitions for “health, bodily strength, good feeling among friends, safety in war, and wealth”;[204.1] the latter for “wealth, concord, righteousness in word and deed.”[204.2]

Meantime the philosophers from Socrates onwards were insisting on the more spiritual view of prayer, preaching that, in the first place, there was no need to particularise one’s needs in one’s petitions to God, for there was danger lest one should pray for what is injurious; in the second place, that prayer should look only to the spiritual, not the material life. And we owe to this theory some striking utterances that must rank high in the literature of ethical religion: such as the prayer of Socrates, δοίητέ μοι καλῷ γενέσθαι τἄνδοθεν, “Grant me to become noble of heart”[204.3]; of Apollonius of Tyana, ὦ θεοὶ δοίητέ μοι τὰ ὀφειλόμενα, “Oh gods, grant me that which I deserve”[204.4]; the longer poetic {205} formula quoted by Plato, “King Zeus, grant us the good whether we pray for it or not, but evil keep from us though we pray for it”[205.1]: and with these we may compare the dictum of Epictetus[205.2]: “In praying to the divine powers ask for divine things, things free from fleshly or earthly circumstance.” Other expressions of the Stoic sect are equally striking for the spirit of fervent acquiescence and resignation that inspires them. Here is the prayer of Epictetus: “Do with me what thou wilt: my will is thy will: I appeal not against thy judgments”[205.3]; and a poetic version of this has come down to us from earlier stoicism--“Lead me, O God, and I will follow, willingly if I am wise, but if not willingly I still must follow.” A prayer recorded in the apocryphal Acts of St Thomas[205.4] seems almost an echo of these: “I go whither Thou wilt, oh Jesus: Thy will be done.”

When the best thought of the age had {206} reached to such a point of spiritual abstraction, it was natural that the same question should arise as arose among the more philosophic adherents of early Christianity, whether special prayers were justifiable at all. It seems that at some period the Pythagorean school were inclined to forbid prayer altogether,[206.1] for the reason that God knew better how to give than man knew how to ask; but the later Neo-Platonism discovered an ideal _raison-d’être_ for the practice, on the ground that it raised the mind to direct communion and converse with God; and this view is developed at great length by Proclus.[206.2]

This sketch of the Greek phenomena that belong to our subject may close with an example of that perfervid mysticism that marks the liturgies of latest paganism: the {207} following is the close of a long address to Asclepios--an Hellenic deity attracted here into the Egyptian circle--found in the treatise called _Asclepios_, attributed to Apuleius:[207.1] “We rejoice in thy divine salvation, because thou hast shown thyself wholly to us: we rejoice that thou hast deigned to consecrate us to eternity, while we are still in these mortal bodies. We have known thee, oh true life of the life of man.… Adoring thy goodness, we make this our only prayer… that thou wouldst be willing to keep us all our lives in the love of thy knowledge.” Portions at least of this prayer, which was the prelude to a communion supper, would not surprise us if we found it in a Christian liturgy.[207.2]

{208}

It will be convenient next to glance at the records of the other great branches of the ancient Aryan world, the Vedic Indians and the Iranians. One does not read long in the sacred books of India without attaining the conviction that the highest religion of the Vedas was deeply penetrated with sacerdotal magic; which was so far from losing its hold in the later period that it imprisoned the religious thought, and the later Brahmanism was capable of the belief that without the spell of the sacrifice the sun could not run his course in heaven. And the recital of spells forms a great part of the Vedic ritual. Thus the hymns say of the fire-god Agni, “The thoughtful men find Agni when they have recited the spells”; and the gods themselves, like the Norse divinities, work by spells: “Agni upholds the sky by his efficacious spells.”[208.1] Yet the early record gives us also copious illustration of real prayer, and occasionally of a very exalted tone. It is true, as we should expect, {209} that material and temporal advantages are by far the predominant objects of the petition: the head of the household prays for wealth, offspring, victory in battle or the races; with rare exceptions, the prayers are personal and private rather than political, and are thus in marked contrast to the Hellenic; yet we have a few that are evidently proffered for the community,[209.1] and at times the deity is petitioned to grant an abundant supply of valiant men. But even in the few prayers that reflect the political life of the State, the individualistic spirit is apt to appear. We have a curious example of a petition to Indra to make a man powerful in the political assembly: “In this entire gathering render, O Indra, me successful,” and this is combined with a naïve spell whereby the politician endeavours to mesmerise the whole meeting: he names the assembly--as our Speaker might name a recalcitrant member--“We know thy name, {210} oh assembly.… Of them that are sitting together I take to myself the power and the understanding”: and again, “With my mind do I seize your minds.”[210.1] But even when the prayer is personal and materialistic a real fervour and a genial poetic freshness is often to be found. Here is a beautiful prelude to a prayer for long life proffered to the ancient heaven-god: “Many dawns have not yet dawned: grant me to live in them, O Varuna.” And often the worshipper rises above mere material aspirations, as in such appeals to Agni as the following: “May we be well-doers before the gods.”[210.2] “Give us not up, oh Agni, to want of thought.”[210.3] “Mayest thou bestow splendour, renown, and (wise) mind upon such mortals as satisfy thee with refreshment, oh Agni.”[210.4] “Drive far from us senselessness and anguish: drive far all ill-will from whom thou attendest.”[210.5] {211} At times also the hymns reveal a deep consciousness of sin and a desire for divine forgiveness. “Through want of strength, thou strong and bright god, have I gone astray. Have mercy, Almighty, have mercy!”[211.1] “Agni, drive away from us sin, which leads us astray.”[211.2] “By the earth’s greatness, oh Agni, forgive us even committed sin, that we may be great.”[211.3] “Whatever sin we have committed against thee in thoughtlessness, men as we are, make thou us sinless before Aditi.”[211.4] Yet we may suspect that the term sin is not always used in these prayers in its modern ethical sense, not for instance in the prayer, “From the sins which knowingly or unknowingly we have committed, do ye, all gods, of one accord release us”;[211.5] and the primitive concept on which the old magic of sin-transference was based survives in such passages as the following: {212} “Pass far away, oh sin of the mind: why dost thou utter things not to be uttered? Pass away, I love thee not: to the trees and the forests go on!”[212.1] “Enter into the rays, into smoke, oh sin; go into the vapours, and into the fog.”[212.2] The context discloses only an indirect appeal to a personal deity, though the term sin in the former passage is clearly applied to what we should call moral offences.

In the Vedic ritual, then, we find a pure and spiritual form of prayer; yet a certain spell-power may attach even to the highest types, for we find not infrequently the conception that not only the power of the worshipper but the power of the deity also is nourished and strengthened by prayer;[212.3] and the prayer itself is usually accompanied by a potent act. With this aspect of Vedic prayers we may associate {213} the fact that Agni, the fire-god, appears as the chief divinity to whom they are addressed; for his ritual is purificatory, and the prayers are thus based on a liturgy of purification which stimulates the mental or spiritual force of the worshipper.

We may now turn to another great Aryan stock, the Iranian, whose earlier religion culminated in the Zarathustrian system. The relation of spell to prayer is, on the whole, the same in the Zend-Avesta as we find it in the Vedic hymns, a real spell can accompany a real prayer, and the text of the prayer itself becomes a most potent charm. The “sacerdotal” physician, who, as we have seen, occupied a higher rank in the Zarathustrian estimate than the scientific practitioner, offers first a genuine prayer to Ahura-Mazda for spiritual strength to deal with the disease--“Give us, Ahura, that powerful sovereignty by the strength of which we may smite down the drug (the demon).” Fraught with this mesmeric power he then directs his spell {214} against the sickness-demon: “To thee, oh Sickness, I say--Avaunt! To thee, oh Death, I say--Avaunt!”[214.1] And in the ritual of purification, which closely resembles the system of therapeutics, the formulæ of prayers of the most exalted type in the sacred books are used, not as prayers, but as cathartic spells.[214.2] It is not hard to discern the steps that lead from this grade of thought to the highest at which the religious speculation of the Zarathustrian arrived. The uttered Word of God is given a supernatural cosmic force; and the prophet pronounces that this utterance of the “Holy Word is of such a nature that if all the corporeal and living world should learn it, and learning hold fast to it, they should be redeemed from their mortality.”[214.3] And we can understand why a large part of the Zarathustrian liturgy should be devoted to the recital of formulæ which are statements of the {215} Mazdean faith. Before rising in the morning and retiring at night, the pious Persian was recommended to say, “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deeds I do willingly: all evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds I do unwillingly.”[215.1] It is interesting to compare with our own creed the following Mazdean confession: “I confess myself a Mazdayasnian of Zarathustra’s order: I celebrate my praises for good thoughts, good words, and good deeds.… With chanting praises I present all good thoughts, good words, and good deeds, and with rejection I repudiate all evil thoughts and words and deeds. Here I give to you, oh ye Bountiful Immortals, sacrifice and homage with the mind,[215.2] with words, deeds, and my entire person, yea, I offer to you the flesh of my very body.”[215.3] The formulæ of confession, as well as other parts of this liturgy, are penetrated with the idea of a moral-theological {216} dualism to which our Christian theology has been indirectly deeply indebted. The Mazdean proclaims his detestation of the Daevas, and of Angra-Mainyu, the evil god. “Taught by Ahura, I drive away Angra-Mainyu from this house, this borough”; such words are “victorious, most healing,”[216.1] and could be used as the recitation of our creed and paternoster have been used, as veritable spells against the evil power or demon. But in comparing the spell-prayers of the Persian with the Vedic, we are struck with the superiority of the former liturgy in one respect, that here the spell is only brought to bear on the demon, not on the highest god; the prayer increases the spiritual force of the worshipper but does not constrain Ahura.