MILTON 127speaks in a famous sonnet of the time “when all our fathers worshipped stocks and stones.” That familiar and briefly contemptuous phrase of the Puritan poet does really cover the vast majority of objects of worship for the human race at all times and in all places. We have examined the stones; the stocks must now come in for their fair share of attention. They need not, however, delay us quite so long as their sister deities, both because they are on the whole less important in themselves, and because their development from grave-marks into gods and idols is almost absolutely parallel to that which we have already followed out in detail in the case of the standing stone or megalithic monument.

Stakes or wooden posts are often used all the world over as marks of an interment. Like other grave-marks, they also share naturally in the honours paid to the ghost or nascent god. But they are less important as elements in the growth of religion than standing stones for two distinct reasons. In the first place, a stake or post most often marks the interment of a person of little social consideration; chiefs and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour; the commonalty have to be satisfied with wooden marks, as one may observe to this day at P猫re Lachaise, or any other great Christian cemetery. In the second place, the stone monument is far more lasting and permanent than the wooden one. Each of these points counts for something. For it is 128chiefs and great men whose ghosts most often grow into gods; and it is the oldest ghosts, the oldest gods, the oldest monuments that are always the most sacred. For both these reasons, then, the stake is less critical than the stone in the history of religion.

Nevertheless, it has its own special importance. As the sacred stone derives ultimately from the great boulder piled above the grave to keep down the corpse, so the stake, I believe, derives from the sharp-pointed stick driven through the body to pin it down as we saw in the third chapter, and still so employed in Christian England to prevent suicides from walking. Such a stake or pole is usually permitted to protrude from the ground, so as to warn living men of the neighbourhood of a spirit.

At a very early date, however, the stake, I fancy, became a mere grave-mark; and though, owing to its comparative inconspicuousness, it obtains relatively little notice, it is now and always has been by far the most common mode of preserving the memory of the spot where a person lies buried. A good example, which will throw light upon many subsequent modifications, is given by Mr. Wyatt Gill from Port Moresby in New Guinea. “The body,” he says, “was buried. At the side was set up a stake, to which were tied the spear, club, bow and arrow of the deceased, but broken, to prevent theft. A little beyond was the grave of a woman: her cooking utensils, grass petticoats, etc., hung up on the stake.” Similar customs, he adds, are almost universal in Polynesia.

Though worship of stakes or wooden posts is common all over the world, I can give but few quite unequivocal instances of such worship being paid to a post actually known to surmount an undoubted grave. Almost the best direct evidence I can obtain is the case of the grave-pole in Buru, already quoted from Mr. H. O. Forbes. But the following account of a Samoyed place of sacrifice, extracted from Baron Nordenskiold’s Voyage of the Vega, is certainly suggestive. On a hillock on Vaygats Island 129the Swedish explorer found a number of reindeer skulls, so arranged that they formed a close thicket of antlers. Around lay other bones, both of bears and reindeer; and in the midst of all “the mighty beings to whom all this splendour was offered. They consisted’ of hundreds of small wooden sticks, the upper portions of which were carved very clumsily in the form of the human countenance, most of them from fifteen to twenty, but some of them three hundred and seventy centimetres in length. They were all stuck in the ground on the southeast part of the eminence. Near the place of sacrifice there were to be seen pieces of driftwood and remains of the fireplace at which the sacrificial meal was prepared. Our guide told us that at these meals the mouths of the idols were besmeared with blood and wetted with brandy; and the former statement was confirmed by the large spots of blood which were found on most of the large idols below the holes intended to represent the mouth.” At a far earlier date, Stephen Burrough in 1556 writes as follows to much the same effect in his interesting narrative printed in Hakluyt: “There I met againe with Loshak, and went on shore with him, and he brought me to a heap of Samoeds idols, which were in number about 300, the worst and the most unartificiall worke that ever I saw: the eyes and mouthes of sundrie of them were bloodie, they had the shape of men, women, and children, very grossly wrought, and that which they had made for other parts was also sprinkled with blood. Some of their idols were an olde sticke with two or three notches, made with a knife in it. There was one of their sleds broken and lay by the heape of idols, and there I saw a deers skinne which the foules had spoyled: and before certaine of their idols blocks were made as high as their mouthes; being all bloody, I thought that to be the table wheron they offered their sacrifice.”

In neither of these accounts, it is true, is it distinctly mentioned that the place of sacrifice was a Samoyed cemetery: 130but I believe this to be the case, partly from analogy, and partly because Nordenski么ld mentions elsewhere that an upturned sled is a frequent sign of a Samoyed grave. Compare also the following account of a graveyard among nominally Christian Ostyak Siberians, also from Nordenski么ld: “The corpses were placed in large coffins above ground, at which almost always a cross was erected.” [The accompanying woodcut shews that these crosses were rude wooden stakes with one or two crossbars.] “In one of the crosses a sacred picture was inserted which must be considered a further proof that a Christian rested in the coffin. Notwithstanding this, we found some clothes, which had belonged to the departed, hanging on a bush beside the grave, together with a bundle containing food, principally dried fish. At the graves of the richer natives the survivors are even said to place along with food some rouble notes, in order that the departed may not be altogether without ready money on his entrance into the other world.”

To complete the parallel, I ought to add that money was also deposited on the sacrificial place on Vaygats Island. Of another such sacrificial place on Yalmal, Nordenski么ld says, after describing a pile of bones, reindeer skulls, and walrus jaws: “In the middle of the heap of bones stood four erect pieces of wood. Two consisted of sticks a metre in length, with notches cut in them.... The two others, which clearly were the proper idols of this place of sacrifice, consisted of driftwood roots, on which some carvings had been made to distinguish the eyes, mouth, and nose. The parts of the pieces of wood, intended to represent the eyes and mouth, had recently been besmeared with blood, and there still lay at the heap of bones the entrails of a newly killed reindeer.”

Indeed, I learn from another source that “the Samoyedes feed the wooden images of the dead”; while an instance from Erman helps further to confirm the same conclusion. According to that acute writer, among the Ostyaks 131of Eastern Siberia there is found a most interesting custom, in which, says Dr. Tylor, “we see the transition from the image of the dead man to the actual idol.” When a man dies, they set up a rude wooden image of him in the yurt, which receives offerings at every meal and has honours paid to it, while the widow continually embraces and caresses it. As a general rule, these images are buried at the end of three years or so: but sometimes “the image of a shaman (native sorcerer),” says Tylor, “is set up permanently, and remains as a saint for ever.” For “saint” I should say “god”; and we see the transformation at once completed. Indeed, Erman adds acutely about the greater gods of the Ostyaks: “That these latter also have a historical origin, that they were originally monuments of distinguished men, to which prescription and the interest of the Shamans gave by degrees an arbitrary meaning and importance, seems to me not liable to doubt.”

With regard to the blood smeared upon such Siberian wooden idols, it must be remembered that bowls of blood are common offerings to the dead; and Dr. Robertson Smith himself, no friendly witness in this matter, has compared the blood-offerings to ghosts with those to deities. In the eleventh book of the Odyssey, for example, the ghosts drink greedily of the sacrificial blood; and libations of gore form a special feature in Greek offerings to heroes. That blood was offered to the sacred stones we have already seen; and we noticed that there as here it was specially smeared upon the parts representing the mouth. Offerings of blood to gods, or pouring of blood on altars, are too common to demand particular notice; and we shall also recur to that part of the subject when we come to consider the important questions of sacrifice and sacrament. I will only add here that according to Maimonides the Sabians looked on blood as the nourishment of the gods; while the Hebrew Jahweh asks indignantly in the fiftieth 132Psalm, “Will I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?”

To pass on to more unequivocal cases of stake-worship, where we can hardly doubt that the stake represents a dead man, Captain Cook noticed that in the Society Islands “the carved wooden images at burial-places were not considered mere memorials, but abodes into which the souls of the departed retired.” So Ellis observes of Polynesians generally that the sacred objects might be either mere stocks and stones, or carved wooden images, from six to eight feet long down to as many inches. Some of these were to represent “tu,” divine manes or spirits of the dead; while others were to represent “tu,” or deities of higher rank and power. To my mind, this is almost a distinction without a difference; the first being ghosts of recently deceased ancestors, the second ghosts of remoter progenitors. The ancient Araucanians again fixed over a tomb an upright log, “rudely carved to represent the human frame.” After the death of New Zealand chiefs, wooden images, 20 to 40 feet high, were erected as monuments. I might easily multiply instances; but I refrain lest the list grow tedious.

Dr. Codrington notes that the large mouths and lolling tongues of many New Zealand and Polynesian gods are due to the habit of smearing the mouth with blood and other offerings.

Where men preserve the corpses of their dead, images are not so likely to grow up; but where fear of the dead has brought about the practice of burial or burning, it is reasonable that the feelings of affection which prompted gifts and endearments to the mummy in the first stage of thought should seek some similar material outlet under the altered circumstances. Among ourselves, a photograph, a portrait, the toys of a dead child, are preserved and cherished. Among savages, ruder representations become necessary. They bury the actual corpse safely out of sight, but make some rough wooden imitation to represent 133it. Thus it does not surprise us to find that while the Marianne Islanders keep the dried bodies of their dead ancestors in their huts as household gods, and expect them to give oracles out of their skulls, the New Zealanders, on the other hand, “set up memorial idols of deceased persons near the burial-place, talking affectionately to them as if still alive, and casting garments to them when they pass by,” while they also “preserve in their houses small carved wooden images, each dedicated to the spirit of an ancestor.” The Coast Negroes “place several earthen images on the graves.” Some Papuans, “after a grave is filled up, collect round an idol, and offer provisions to it.” The Javans dress up an image in the clothes of the deceased. So, too, of the Caribs of the West Indies, we learn that they “carved little images in the shape in which they believed spirits to have appeared to them; and some human figures bore the names of ancestors in memory of them.” From such little images, obviously substituted for the dead body which used once to be preserved and affectionately tended, are derived, I believe, most of the household gods of the world—the Lares and Penates of the Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of the Semites.

How absolutely image and ancestor are identified we can see among the Tenimber Islanders, with whom “the matmate are the spirits of their ancestors which are worshipped as guardian spirits or household gods. They are supposed to enter the house through an opening in the roof, and to take up their abode temporarily in the skulls, or in images of wood or ivory, in order to partake of the offerings.”

A few more facts in the same direction may help to bring out in still stronger relief this close equivalence of the corpse and the image. A New Guinea mother keeps the mummied body of her child, and carries it about with her; whereas a West African mother, living in a tribe where terror of the dead has induced the practice of burial, makes 134a little image of her lost darling out of a gourd or calabash, wraps it in skins, and feeds it or puts it to sleep like a living baby. Bastian saw Indian women in Peru, who had lost an infant, carrying about on their backs a wooden doll to represent it. At a somewhat higher level, “the spiritual beings of the Algonquins,” says Dr. Tylor, to whom I owe not a few of these instances, “were represented by, and in language completely identified with, the carved wooden heads” (note this point) “or more complete images, to which worship and sacrifice were offered.” In all these instances we see clearly, I think, the course of the genesis of household deities. In Siam, the ashes of the dead are similarly moulded into Buddhist images, which are afterwards worshipped as household gods.

Mr. Herbert Spencer has collected several interesting examples some of which I will borrow, as showing incidentally how much the growth of the idol or image depends upon such abstraction of the real body for burial or its equivalent. While a deceased king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with meat and drink. When Charles VI. of France was buried, “over the coffin was an image of the late king, bearing a rich crown of gold and diamonds, and holding two shields.... This image was dressed with cloth of gold.... In this state was he solemnly carried to the church of Notre Dame.” Madame de Motteville says of the father of the great Cond茅, “The effigy of this prince was waited upon for three days, as was customary”—forty days having been the original time during which food was supplied to such effigies at the usual hours. Monstrelet describes a like figure used at the burial of Henry V. of England: and the Westminster Abbey images already noticed belong to the same category.

As in the case of sacred stones, once more, I am quite ready to admit that when once the sanctity of certain stakes or wooden poles came to be generally recognised, it 135would be a simple transference of feeling to suppose that any stake, arbitrarily set up, might become the shrine or home of an indwelling spirit. Thus we are told that the Brazilian tribes “set up stakes in the ground, and make offerings before them to appease their deities or demons.” So also we are assured that among the Dinkas of the White Nile, “the missionaries saw an old woman in her hut offering the first of her food before a short thick staff planted in the ground.” But in neither of these cases is there necessarily anything to show that the spot where the staff was set up was not a place of burial; while in the second instance this is even probable, as hut interments are extremely common in Africa. I will quote one other instance only, for its illustrative value in a subsequent connexion. In the Society Islands, rude logs are clothed in native cloth (like Monigan’s idol) and anointed with oil, receiving adoration and sacrifice as the dwelling-place of a deity. This custom is parallel to that of the Caribs, who took a bone of a dead friend from the grave, wrapped it up in cotton, and enquired of it for oracles.

Mr. Savage Landor, in his interesting work The Hairy Ainu, figures and describes some curious grave-stakes of those Japanese aborigines. The stakes on the men’s graves are provided with a phallic protuberance; those on the women’s with an equally phallic perforation. This fact helps to illustrate the phallicism of sacred stones in Syria and elsewhere.

Among the Semitic peoples, always specially interesting to us from their genetic connexion with Judaism and Christianity, the worship of stakes usually took the form of adoration paid to the curious log of wood described as an ashera. What kind of object an ashera was we learn from the injunction in Deuteronomy, “Thou shalt not plant an ashera of any kind of wood beside the altar of Jahweh.” This prohibition is clearly parallel to that against any hewn stone or “graven image.” But the Semites in general worshipped as a rule at a rude stone altar, 136beside which stood an ashera, under a green tree,—all three of the great sacred objects of humanity being thus present together. A similar combination is not uncommon in India, where sacred stone and wooden image stand often under the shade of the same holy peepul tree. “The ashera,” says Professor Robertson Smith, “is a sacred symbol, the seat of the deity, and perhaps the name itself, as G. Hoffmann has suggested, means nothing more than the ‘mark’ of the divine presence.” Those who have followed me so far in the present work, however, will be more likely to conclude that it meant originally the mark of a place where an ancestor lay buried. “Every altar,” says Professor Smith, again, “had its ashera, even such altars as in the popular preprophetic forms of the Hebrew religion were dedicated to Jehovah.”

The Semitic sacred pole was treated in most respects like the other grave-stakes and idols we have hitherto considered; for an Assyrian monument from Khorsabad, figured by Rawlinson, represents an ornamental pole, planted beside an altar; priests stand before it engaged in an act of worship, and touch the pole with their hands, “or perhaps,” says Professor Smith, “anoint it with some liquid substance.” That the ashera was also draped, like the logs of the Society Islanders, or Monigan’s Irish idol, we learn from the famous passage in Second Kings (xxiii. 7) where it is said that the women “wove hangings for the ashera.” Dr. Robertson Smith illustrates this passage by the parallel of the sacred erica at Byblus, which was “a mere dead stump, for it was cut down by Isis and presented to the Byblians wrapped in a linen cloth and anointed with myrrh like a corpse. It therefore represented the dead god” (Osiris, or rather in its origin Adonis). “But as a mere stump, it also resembles the Hebrew ashera.” So near may a man come to the perception of a truth, and yet so utterly may he miss its actual import.

I will dwell no longer upon these more or less remote derivatives of the grave-stake. I will only say briefly that in 137my opinion all wooden idols or images are directly or indirectly descended from the wooden headpost or still more primitive sepulchral pole. Not of course that I suppose every wooden image to have been necessarily once itself a funereal monument. Donatello’s Magdalen in San Giovanni at Florence, the blue-robed and star-spangled Madonna of the wayside shrine, have certainly no such immediate origin. But I do believe that the habit of making and worshipping wooden images arose in the way I have pointed out; and to those who would accuse me of “gross Euhemerism,” I would once more remark that even in these highest Christian instances the objects of veneration are themselves in the last resort admitted to have been at one time Galilean women. Nay, is not even the wayside shrine itself in most Catholic countries more often than not the mortuary chapel erected where some wayfarer has died a violent death, by murder, lightning, accident, or avalanche?