WE have now in a certain sense accomplished our intention of tracing the evolution of gods and of God. We have shown how polytheism came to be, and how from it a certain particular group of men, the early Israelites, rose by slow degrees, through natural stages, to the monotheistic conception. It might seem, therefore, as though the task we set before ourselves was now quite completed. Nevertheless, many abstruse and difficult questions still lie before us. Our problem as yet is hardly half solved. We have still to ask, I think, How did this purely local and national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the civilised world? How from an obscure corner of Lower Syria did the god of a small tribe of despised and barbaric tributaries slowly live down the great conquering deities of Babylon and Susa, of Hellas and Italy? And again, we have further to enquire, Why do most of the modern nations which have nominally adopted monotheism yet conceive of their god as compounded in some mystically incomprehensible fashion of Three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost? In short, I am not satisfied with tracing the idea of a god from the primitive mummy or the secondary ghost to the one supreme God of the ancient Hebrews; I desire also to follow on that developed concept till it merges at last in the triune God of modern Christendom. For, naturally, it is the god in whom men believe here and now that most of all concerns and interests us.
I 226may also add that, incidentally to this supplementary enquiry, we shall come upon several additional traits in the idea of deity and several important sources of earlier godhead, the consideration of which we had to postpone before till a more convenient season. We shall find that the process of tracking down Christianity to its hidden springs suggests to us many aspects of primitive religion which we were compelled to neglect in our first hasty synthesis.
The reader must remember that in dealing with so complex a subject as that of human beliefs and human cults, it is impossible ever to condense the whole of the facts at once into a single conspectus. We cannot grasp at a time the entire mass of evidence. While we are following out one clue, we must neglect another. It is only by examining each main set of components in analytical distinctness that we can proceed by degrees to a full and complete synthetic reconstruction of the whole vast fabric. We must therefore correct and supplement in the sequel much that may have seemed vague, inaccurate, or insufficient in our preliminary survey.
The Christian religion with which we have next to deal bases itself fundamentally upon the personality of a man, by name Jesus, commonly described as the Christ, that is to say “the anointed.” Of this most sacred and deified person it is affirmed by modern Christianity, and has been affirmed by orthodox Christians from a very early period, that he was not originally a mere man, afterwards taken into the godhead, but that he was born from the first the son of God, that is to say, of the Hebrew Jahweh; that he existed previously from all time; that he was miraculously conceived of a virgin mother; that he was crucified and buried; that on the third day he arose from the dead; and that he is now a living and distinct person in a divine and mystically-united Trinity. I propose to show in the subsequent chapters how far all these conceptions were already familiar throughout the world in which Christianity 227was promulgated, and to how large an extent the new religion owed its rapid success to the fact that it was but a r茅sum茅 or idealised embodiment of all the chief conceptions already common to the main cults of Mediterranean civilisation. At the moment when the empire was cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to cosmopolitanise religion, by taking into itself whatever was central, common, and universal in the worship of the peoples among whom it originated.
We will begin with the question of the incarnation, which lies at the very root of the Christian concept.
I have said already that in ancient Egypt and elsewhere, “The God was the Dead King, the King was the Living God.” This is true, literally and absolutely. Since the early kings are gods, the present kings, their descendants, are naturally also gods by descent; their blood is divine; they differ in nature as well as in position from mere common mortals. While they live, they are gods on earth; when they die, they pass over to the community of the gods their ancestors, and share with them a happy and regal immortality. We have seen how this essential divinity of the Pharaoh is a prime article in the religious faith of the Egyptian Pyramid-builders. And though in later days, when a Greek dynasty, not of the old divine native blood, bore sway in Egypt, this belief in the divinity of the king grew fainter, yet to the very last the Ptolemies and the Cleopatras bear the title of god or goddess, and carry in their hands the sacred tau or crux ansata, the symbol and mark of essential divinity.
The inference made in Egypt that the children of gods must be themselves divine was also made in most other countries, especially in those where similar great despotisms established themselves at an early grade of culture. Thus in Peru, the Incas were gods. They were the children of the Sun; and when they died, it was said that their father, the Sun, had sent to fetch them. The Mexican kings were likewise gods, with full control of the course of nature; 228they swore at their accession to make the sun shine, the rain fall, the rivers flow, and the earth bring forth her fruit in due season. How they could promise all this seems at first a little difficult for us to conceive; but it will become more comprehensible at a later stage of our investigation, when we come to consider the gods of cultivation: even at present, if we remember that kings are children of the Sun, and that sacred trees, sacred groves, and sacred wells are closely connected with the tombs of their ancestors, we can guess at the beginning of such a mental connexion. Thus the Chinese emperor is the Son of Heaven; he is held responsible to his people for the occurrence of drought or other serious derangements of nature. The Parthian kings of the Arsacid house, says Mr. Frazer, to whom I am greatly indebted for most of the succeeding facts, styled themselves brothers of the sun and moon, and were worshipped as deities. Numberless other cases are cited by Mr. Frazer, who was the first to point out the full importance of this widespread belief in man-gods. I shall follow him largely in the subsequent discussion of this cardinal subject, though I shall often give to the facts an interpretation slightly different from that which he would allow to be the correct one. For to me, godhead springs always from the primitive Dead Man, while to Mr. Frazer it is spiritual or animistic in origin.
Besides these human gods who are gods by descent from deified ancestors, there is another class of gods who are gods by inspiration or indwelling of the divine spirit, that is to say of some ghost or god who temporarily or permanently inhabits the body of a living man. The germ-idea of such divine possession we may see in the facts of epilepsy, catalepsy, dream, and madness. In all such cases of abnormal nervous condition it seems to primitive man, as it still seemed to the Jews of the age of the Gospels, that the sufferer is entered or seized upon by some spirit, who bodily inhabits him. The spirit may throw 229the man down, or may speak through his mouth in strange unknown tongues; it may exalt him so that he can perform strange feats of marvellous strength, or may debase him to a position of grovelling abjectness. By fasting and religious asceticism men and women can even artificially attain this state, when the god speaks through them, as he spoke through the mouth of the Pythia at Delphi. And fasting is always one of the religious exercises of god-possessed men, priests, monks, anchorites, and ascetics in general. Where races have learnt how to manufacture intoxicating drinks, or to express narcotic juices from plants, they also universally attribute the effects of such plants to the personal action of an inspiring spirit—an idea so persistent even into civilised ages that we habitually speak of alcoholic liquors as spirits. Both these ways of attaining the presence of an indwelling god are commonly practised among savages and half-civilised people.
When we recollect how we saw already that ancestral spirits may descend from time to time into the skulls that once were theirs, or into the clay or wooden images that represent them, and there give oracles, we shall not be surprised to find that they can thus enter at times into a human body, and speak through its lips, for good or for evil. Indeed, I have dwelt but little in this book on this migratory power and this ubiquitousness of the spirits, because I have desired to fix attention chiefly on that primary aspect of religion which is immediately and directly concerned with Worship; but readers familiar with such works as Dr. Tylor’s and Mr. Frazer’s will be well aware of the common power which spirits possess of projecting themselves readily into every part of nature. The faculty of possession or of divination is but one particular example of this well-known attribute. The mysteries and oracles of all creeds are full of such phenomena.
Certain persons, again, are born from the womb as incarnations of a god or an ancestral spirit. “Incarnate gods,” 230says Mr. Frazer, “are common in rude society. The incarnation may be temporary or permanent.... When the divine spirit has taken up its abode in a human body, the god-man is usually expected to vindicate his character by working miracles.” Mr. Frazer gives several excellent examples of both these classes. I extract a few almost verbatim.
Certain persons are possessed from time to time by a spirit or deity; while possession lasts, their own personality lies in abeyance, and the presence of the spirit is revealed by convulsive shakings and quiverings of the body. In this abnormal state, the man’s utterances are accepted as the voice of the god or spirit dwelling in him and speaking through him. In Mangaia, for instance, the priests in whom the gods took up their abode were called god-boxes or gods. Before giving oracles, they drank an intoxicating liquor, and the words they spoke in their frenzy were then regarded as divine. In other cases, the inspired person produces the desired condition of intoxication by drinking the fresh blood of a victim, human or animal, which, as we shall see hereafter, is probably itself an avatar of the inspiring god. In the temple of Apollo Diradiotes at Argos, a lamb was sacrificed by night once a month; a woman, who had to observe the rule of chastity, tasted its blood, and then gave oracles. At 脝gira in Ach忙a the priestess of the Earth drank the fresh blood of a bull before she descended into her cave to prophesy. (Note in passing that caves, the places of antique burial, are also the usual places for prophetic inspiration.) In southern India, the so-called devil-dancer drinks the blood of a goat, and then becomes seized with the divine afflatus. He is worshipped as a deity, and bystanders ask him questions requiring superhuman knowledge to answer. Mr. Frazer extends this list of oracular practices by many other striking instances, for which I would refer the reader to the original volume.
Of permanent living human gods, inspired by the constant 231indwelling of a deity, Mr. Frazer also gives several apt examples. In the Marquesas Islands there was a class of men who were deified in their lifetime. They were supposed to wield supernatural control over the elements. They could give or withhold rain and good harvests. Human sacrifices were offered them to appease their wrath. “A missionary has described one of these human gods from personal observation. The god was a very old man who lived in a large house within an enclosure.” (A temple in its temenos.) “In the house was a kind of altar, and on the beams of the house and on the trees around it were hung human skeletons, head down. No one entered the enclosure, except the persons dedicated to the service of the god; only on days when human victims were sacrificed might ordinary people penetrate into the precinct. This human god received more sacrifices than all the other gods; often he would sit on a sort of scaffold in front of his house and call for two or three human victims at a time. They were always brought, for the terror he inspired was extreme. He was invoked all over the island, and offerings were sent to him from every side.” Indeed, throughout the South Sea Islands, each island had usually a man who embodied its deity. Such men were called gods, and were regarded as of divine substance. The man-god was sometimes a king; oftener he was a priest or a subordinate chief. The gods of Samoa were sometimes permanently incarnate in men, who gave oracles, received offerings (occasionally of human flesh), healed the sick, answered prayer, and generally performed all divine functions. Of the Fijians it is said: “There appears to be no certain line of demarcation between departed spirits and gods, nor between gods and living men, for many of the priests and old chiefs are considered as sacred persons, and not a few of them will also claim to themselves the right of divinity. ‘I am a god,’ Tuikilakila would say; and he believed it too.” There is said to be a sect in Orissa who worship the Queen of England as their chief divinity; 232and another sect in the Punjab worshipped during his lifetime the great General Nicholson.
Sometimes, I believe, kings are divine by birth, as descendants of gods; but sometimes divinity is conferred upon them with the kingship, as indeed was the case even in the typical instance of Egypt. Tanatoa, king of Raiatea, was deified by a certain ceremony performed at the chief temple. He was made a god before the gods his ancestors, as Celtic chiefs received the chieftainship standing on the sacred stone of their fathers. As one of the deities of his subjects, therefore, the king was worshipped, consulted as an oracle, and honoured with sacrifices. The king of Tahiti at his inauguration received a sacred girdle of red and yellow feathers, which not only raised him to the highest earthly station, but also identified him with the heavenly gods. Compare the way in which the gods of Egypt make the king one of themselves, as represented in the bas-reliefs, by the presentation of the divine tau. In the Pelew Islands, a god may incarnate himself in a common person; this lucky man is thereupon raised to sovereign rank, and rules as god and king over the community. Not unsimilar is the mode of selection of a Grand Lama. In later stages, the king ceases to be quite a god, but retains the anointment, the consecration on a holy stone, and the claim to “divine right”; he also shows some last traces of deity in his divine power to heal diseases, which fades away at last into the practice of “touching for king’s evil.” On all these questions, again, Mr. Frazer’s great work is a perfect thesaurus of apposite instances. I abstain from quoting his whole two volumes.
But did ideas of this character still survive in the Mediterranean world of the first and second centuries, where Christianity was evolved? Most undoubtedly they did. In Egypt, the divine line of the Ptolemies had only just become extinct. In Rome itself, the divine C忙sar had recently undergone official apotheosis; the divine Augustus had ruled over the empire as the adopted son of the new-made 233god; and altars rose in provincial cities to the divine spirit of the reigning Trajan or Hadrian. Indeed, both forms of divinity were claimed indirectly for the god Julius; he was divine by apotheosis, but he was also descended from the goddess Venus. So the double claim was made for the central personage of the Christian faith: he was the son of God—that is to say of Jahweh; but he was also of kingly Jewish origin, a descendant of David, and in the genealogies fabricated for him in the Gospels extreme importance is attached to this pretended royal ancestry. Furthermore, how readily men of the Mediterranean civilisation could then identify living persons with gods we see in the familiar episode of Paul and Barnabas at Lystra. Incarnation, in short, was a perfectly ordinary feature of religion and daily life as then understood. And to oriental ideas in particular, the conception was certainly no novelty. “Even an infant king,” say the laws of Manu, which go to the root of so much eastern thinking, “must not be despised from an idea that he is a mere mortal: for he is a great deity in human form.”
To most modern thinkers, however, it would seem at first sight like a grave difficulty in the way of accepting the deity of an ordinary man that he should have suffered a violent death at the hands of his enemies. Yet this fact, instead of standing in the way of acceptance of Christ’s divinity, is really almost a guarantee and proof of it. For, strange as it sounds to us, the human gods were frequently or almost habitually put to death by their votaries. The secret of this curious ritual and persistent custom has been ingeniously deciphered for us by Mr. Frazer, whose book is almost entirely devoted to these two main questions, “Why do men kill their gods?” and “Why do they eat and drink their flesh and blood under the form of bread and wine?” We must go over some of the same ground here in rapid summary, with additional corollaries; and we must also bring Mr. Frazer’s curious facts into line with our general principles of the origin of godhead.
Meanwhile, 234it may be well to add here two similar instances of almost contemporary apotheoses. The dictator Julius was killed by a band of reactionary conspirators, and yet was immediately raised to divine honours. A little later, Antinous, the favourite of the emperor Hadrian, devoted himself to death in order to avert misfortune from his master; he was at once honoured with temples and worship. The belief that it is expedient that “one man should die for the people,” and that the person who so dies is a god in human shape, formed, as we shall see, a common component of many faiths, and especially of the faiths of the eastern Mediterranean. Indeed, a little later, each Christian martyrdom is followed as a matter of course by canonisation—that is to say, by minor apotheosis. Mr. Frazer has traced the genesis of this group of allied beliefs in the slaughter of the man-god in the most masterly manner. They spring from a large number of converging ideas, some of which can only come out in full as we proceed in later chapters to other branches of our subject.
In all parts of the world, one of the commonest prerogatives and functions of the human god is the care of the weather. As representative of heaven, it is his business to see that rain falls in proper quantities, and that the earth brings forth her increase in due season. But, god though he is, he must needs be coerced if he does not attend to this business properly. Thus, in West Africa, when prayers and offerings presented to the king have failed to procure rain, his subjects bind him with ropes, and take him to the grave of his deified forefathers, that he may obtain from them the needful change in the weather. Here we see in the fullest form the nature of the relation between dead gods and living ones. The Son is the natural mediator between men and the Father. Among the Antaymours of Madagascar, the king is responsible for bad crops and all other misfortunes. The ancient Scythians, when food was scarce, put their kings in bonds. 235The Banjars in West Africa ascribe to their king the power of causing rain or fine weather. As long as the climate is satisfactory, they load him with presents of grain and cattle. But if long drought or rain does serious harm, they insult and beat him till the weather changes. The Burgundians deposed their king if he failed to make their crops grow to their satisfaction.
Further than that, certain tribes have even killed their kings in times of scarcity. In the days of the Swedish king Domalde, a mighty famine broke out, which lasted several years, and could not be stayed by human or animal sacrifices. So, in a great popular assembly held at Upsala, the chiefs decided that King Domalde himself was the cause of the scarcity, and must be sacrificed for good seasons. Then they slew him, and smeared with his blood the altars of the gods. Here we must recollect that the divine king is himself a god, the descendant of gods, and he is sacrificed to the offended spirits of his own forefathers. We shall see hereafter how often similar episodes occur—how the god is sacrificed, himself to himself; how the Son is sacrificed to the Father, both being gods; and how the Father sacrifices his Son, to make a god of him. To take another Scandinavian example from Mr. Frazer’s collection: in the reign of King Olaf, there came a great dearth, and the people thought that the fault was the king’s, because he was sparing in sacrifices. So they mustered an army and marched against him; then they surrounded his palace and burnt it, with him within it, “giving him to Odin as a sacrifice for good crops.” Many points must here be noted. Olaf himself was of divine stock, a descendant of Odin. He is burnt as an offering to his father, much as the Carthaginians burnt ............