YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY PAGAN CHRISTS BY THE SAME AVTHOB. ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD. NEW ESSAYS TOWARDS A CRITICAL METHOD. WLNNOWINGS FROM WORDSWORTH. WALT WHITMAN : An Appreciation. THE PERVERSION OF SCOTLAND. MONTAIGNE AND SHAKESPEARE. (Second Edition, with additional Essays on cognate subjects.) BUCKLE AND HIS CRITICS : a Sociological Study. THE SAXON AND THE CELT : a Sociological Study. MODERN HUMANISTS: Essays on Carlyle, Mill, Emerson, Arnold, Ruskin and Spencer. (Fourth Edition.) THE FALLACY OF SAVING : a Study in Economics. THE EIGHT HOURS QUESTION: a Study in Economics. (Second Edition.) THE DYNAMICS OF RELIGION: an Essay in English Culture-History. (By "M. W. Wiseman.") A SHORT HISTORY OF FREETHOUGHT, Ancient and Modern. (Second Edition : 2 vols.) PATRIOTISM AND EMPIRE. (Third Edition.) STUDIES IN RELIGIOUS FALLACY. AN INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH POLITICS. WRECKING THE EMPIRE. A SHORT HISTORY OF CHRISTIANITY. CHRISTIANITY AND MYTHOLOGY. (Second Edition.) CRITICISMS. 2 vols. TENNYSON AND BROWNING AS TEACHERS. ESSAYS IN ETHICS. ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGY. 2 vols. LETTERS ON REASONING. (Second Edition.) DID SHAKESPEARE WRITE "TITUS ANDRONICUS " ? PIONEER HUMANISTS: Essays on Machiavelli, Bacon, Hobbes, Spinoza, Shaftesbury. Mandeville, Gibbon, and Mary Wollstonecraft. TRADE AND TARIFFS. COURSES OF STUDY. CHAMBERLAIN : A STUDY. PAPERS FOR THE PEOPLE. CHARLES BRADLAUGH. By Mrs. Bradlaugh Bonner. Part II. by J. M. R. PAGAN CHRISTS STUDIES IN COMPARATIVE HIEROLOGY BY JOHN M. EOBEETSON SECOND EDITION, EEVISED AND EXPANDED [ISSUED FOE THE EATIONALIBT PBESB ASSOCIATION, LIMITED ] London : WATTS & CO., 17 JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STREET, E.O. 1911 CONTENTS PAOB PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION xi INTRODUCTION ixi Part I. THE EATIONALE OE BELIGION Chap. I.— THE NATURALNESS OP ALL BELIEF. § 1. Origin of Gods from fear — from love — Beloved Gods the Christs of the world's pantheon — Arbitrary Classifications 1 § 2. All beliefs results of reasoning — Taboo — Formulas of Mr. Lang and Dr. Jevons — Primary and secondary taboo — Moral correla tions — Theory of religion and magic 4 § 3. Dr. Jevons's theories of religious evolution — Contradictions — Thesis of " superstition " - 7 § 4. Scientific view of the " religious consciousness " — idea of " the supernatural " — Pear versus gratitude — Rise of magic— Meaning of "religion" - 9 § 5. Dr. Frazer's definition — its inadequacy — Conflict of formulas — Antiquity of magic — Analogies of religion, magic, and science — Magic homogeneous with religion — Inconsistencies of magic — Magic in the Old Testament — Inconsistencies of later religion 11 § 6. The scientific induction — Magic and religion interfluent — The theory of prayer — Dr. Jevons's reasoning here reduces the religious type to the Atheists and Agnostics 20 § 7. Dr. Jevons's series of self-contradictions— His coincidence with Dr. Prazer in excluding belief from the concept of religion 22 § 8. His contradictory doctrine of the conditions of survival in religion — Value of his work — Causes of its fallacies - 27 § 9. The continuity of religious phenomena — Homogeneity of all magic and religious ritual — Elijah as magician — Comparative harmfulness of priesthoods and sorcerers — The dilemma of Christian ethics— Philosophy in religion — Dr. Jevons's psycho logy — "Impressions" versus "projections" — Results of his classification — Religion " rational " even if not " reasonable " 28 § 10. Dr. Prazer's sociological vindication of the sorcerer — Its a priori character — Its antinomianism — Its confusion of the problem of the beginnings of culture with that of the spread of civilisation — Checked by induction — Sketch of the actual evolution — The need to guard against deduction from presuppositions 35 39 vi CONTENTS § 11. The beginning of the end of religion— Early interweaving of cosmology and ethics — Pear and gratitude alike operative in time — Ancestor-worship — Dr. Jevons's thesis of its lateness — His argument finally a petitio prvncipii— Evidence against him from his own pages — " Ghosts " versus " spirits " § 12. Historic view of ancestor-worship — Conflict of formulas of Mr. Lang and Dr. . Frazer— The anthropological solution — Fluctuations in the status of ancestor-Gods— Taboo of names not necessarily oblivion — Gods' names tabooed — Gods relatively raised and ancestors depressed — Primary deification of ancestors implied in the facts — Verbalist definitions of " ancestor " — Ancestors one of the types of friendly God — Gods originating from abstractions — Arguments of Von Ihering and Fustel de Coulanges on ancestor-worship — Propitiation from fear and from love — Horde-ancestor Gods and family Gods — Evolution of law-giving God - - 47 § 13. Interactions of norms of conduct — Religion and monarchy — Religious cast given to law and ethics — The authoritarian element a mark of religion 55 § 14. Definition of religion - 57 CHAP. IL— COMPARISON AND APPRAISEMENT OP RELIGIONS. § 1. Early Forces of Beform. Christian partisanship — Difficulty of being impartial — The authoritarian ideal — Genius and religious reform — Rarity of reform through priesthoods — Reality of priestcraft - - 59 § 2. Beform as a Beligious Process. Fictitious literature — Reform by strategy — Conditions of moral betterment for the Hebrews — Conditions of religious survival - - 63 § 3. Polytheism and Monotheism. Religious evolution conditioned politically and socially — Monotheism and polytheism alike thus conditioned — No unique bias in the case of Israel — Pressures towards monotheism and towards polytheism — The former usually an external bias, without psychological sincerity — Hebrew and Roman theology compared — Monotheism does grow out of polytheism — Hebrew monotheism not a monarchic but a sacerdotal creation — Monotheistic and polytheistic ethic compared — The conventional view — Ethic associated with "Supreme" Gods — -Rational tests — Ethic of post -exilic Judaism — Economic forces in cult-making — Chastening effects of national disaster - - 66 § 4. Hebrews and Babylonians. Babylonian influences on Judaic thought — Higher developments of polytheism — International ethic lower among monotheists than among polytheists 74 § 5. Forces of Beligious Evolution. The socio-political factors — Social decadence in Mesopotamia, with religious activity — Fatality of imperialism 78 § 6. The Hebrew Evolution. Rise of the cult of Yahweh — Literary beginnings — Practical polytheism — The attempted reforms of Josiah — Probable negative results — Developments of Yahwism CONTENTS vii in the exile — Effects of Persian contact — The Return a process of hierocratic selection — The process of literary fabrication — Higher literary fruition - 80 § 7. Post-Exilic Phases. Cramping effects of racial sectarianism- Change nevertheless inevitable — Modifications of belief — Hebrew thought monotheistic only on the surface — Polytheistic super stition never eliminated — Early Christian and Moslem thought on the same plane — Social failure in Jewry as elsewhere — - Expansion of Jewry in Gentile lands — Hellenistic reactions — The Maccabean renascence - . 85 § 8. Bevival and Disintegration. The renascence a second process of hierocratic selection — Parallel case of Parsism — Special fecundity of Jews — Renewed process of doctrinal modification — Development of a Secondary God — The Jesuist movement— Its dependent relation to Judaism up till the destruction of the Temple — Fusion of the secondary God-ideas in Jesus — The economic situation — Separate Christism a result of the fall of the Temple — Later Judaism — Persistence of sacrifice up to the political catastrophe — Conventional comparisons of Hebrew and Greek ethic and character 89 § 9. Conclusion. All religions processes of evolutionary change — General law of the substitution of Son-Gods for the older — Analogous cases in Greece, Babylon, Egypt, Persia, and Jewry — The psychological process — Modification of Indra — His supersession by Krishna — -Adaptations of Osiris — Advent of Serapis — Jesus — Apollo, Dionysos, and Zeus — Recession of the Supreme God — Heresy and dissent phases of the total evolu tionary process — Conditions of sect-survival — Conditions of survival for deities — The Holy Spirit — The Virgin Mother — Yahweh and Jesus — Mary and Anna — Joseph and Mary — Christ-making thus a form of Secondary-God-making — All Secondary Gods evolved from prior materials — The moral meta morphosis of Bacchus — "Culture-religion " thus an evolution from "nature-religion" - 94 PART II. SECONDAEY GOD-MAKING CHAP. I.— THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD. § 1. Totemism and Sacraments 99 § 2. Theory and Ritual of Human Sacrifice - 105 § 3. The Christian Crucifixion 118 § 4. Vogue of Human Sacrifice 122 § 5. The Divinity of the Victim 130 § 6. The Cannibal Sacrament 140 § 7. The Semitic Antecedents 144 § 8. The Judaic Evolution 148 § 9. Specific Survivals in Judaism - 158 viii CONTENTS PAGE § 10. The pre-Christian Jesus-God 162 § 11. Private Jewish Eucharists ¦""> § 12. The Eucharist in Orthodox Judaism 17s § 13. Special Features of the Crucifixion Myth 180 § 14. Possible Historical Elements 188 § 15. The Gospel Mystery-Play 194 § 16. The Mystery-Play and the Cultus 204 § 17. Further Pagan Adaptations - 206 § 18. Synopsis and Conclusion : Genealogy of Human Sacrifice and Sacrament - - 209 Diagram - 211 CHAP. IL— THE TEACHING GOD. § 1. Primary and Secondary Ideas 214 § 2. The Logos - 218 § 3. Derivations of the Christian Logos 223 § 4. The Search for a Historical Jesus 228 § 5. The Critical Problem 231 § 6. Collapse of the Constructive Case 234 § 7. Parallel Problems 237 § 8. The Problem of Buddhist Origins 239 § 9. Buddhism and Buddhas - 241 § 10. The Cruces 246 § 11. Sociological Clues 249 § 12. Buddhism and Asoka 253 § 13. The Buddha Myth 258 § 14. The Problem of Manichaeus 266 § 15. The Manichaaan Solution 267 § 16. The Case of Apollonius of Tyana 274 PART III. MITHEAISM 1. Introductory 281 2. Beginnings of Cult 283 3. Zoroastrianism 4. Evolution of Mithra 5. The Process of Syncretism 6. Symbols of Mithra 298 7. The Cultus 8. The Creed 9. Mithraism and Christianity g15 10. Further Christian Parallels 32q 11. The Vogue of Mithraism qqa 12. Absorption in Christianity g27 13. The Point of Junction 034 286 288294 303 310 CONTENTS ix Part IV. THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMERICA PAGE § 1. American Racial Origins- 339 § 2. Aztecs and Peruvians 346 § 3. Primitive Religion and Human Sacrifice 349 § 4. The Mexican Cultus 355 § 5. Mexican Sacrifices and Sacraments 360 § 6. Mexican Ethics 366 § 7. The Mexican White Christ . 370 § 8. The Fatality of the Priesthood 373 § 9. The Religion of Peru 376 § 10. Conclusion 380 APPENDICES. A. The Eating of the Crucified Human Sacrifice 389 B. Dramatic and Ritual Survivals 391 C. Replies to Criticisms : — § 1. General Opposition — The Hibbert Journal 396 § 2. The Rev. Alfred Ernest Crawley 402 § 3. The Rev. Dr. St. Clair Tisdall 408 § 4. The Rev. Father Martindale 413 § 5. Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter - 427 § 6. Professor Carl Clemen . 435 INDEX 439 PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION SINCE the first issue of this work in 1903, but especially within the past few years, its main positions have been brought into extensive discussion by other writers, notably in Germany, where the Christus- mythe of Professor Arthur Drews has been the theme of many plat form debates. The hypothesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God, first indicated in Christianity and Mythology, and further propounded in the first edition of this book, has received highly important and independent development at the hands of Professor W. Benjamin Smith in his Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906), and in the later expo sition of Professor Drews. For one whose tasks include other busy fields, it is hardly possible to give this the constant attention it deserves; but the present edition has been as fully revised as might be ; and some fresh elucidatory material has been embodied, without, however, any pretence of including the results of the other writers named. Criticism of the book, so far as I have seen, has been to a surprising degree limited to subsidiary details. The first part, a discussion of the general principles and main results of hierology as regards the reigning religion, has been generally ignored, under circumstances which suggest rather avoidance than dissidence. But much more surprising is the general evasion of the two theses upon which criticism was specially challenged in the Introduction — the theses that the gospel story of the Last Supper, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, and the Eesurrection is demonstrably not originally a narrative, but a mystery-drama, which has been transcribed with a minimum of modification ; and that the mystery- drama was inferribly an evolution from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was " Jesus the Son of the Father." Against this twofold position I have seen not a single letailed argument. Writers who confidently and angrily undertake ;o expose error in another section of the book pass this with at most i. defiant shot. Like the legendary Scottish preacher, they recognise i difficult passage, and, having looked it boldly in the face, pass )n." Even Professor Sehmiedel, to my surprise, abstains from xii PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION argument on an issue of which his candour and acumen must reveal to him the gravity. It is but fair to say that even sympathetic readers do not often avow entire acquiescence. Professor Drews leaves this an open question. But I should have expected that such a proposition, put forward as capital, would have been dealt with by critics who showed themselves much concerned to discredit the book in general. * They seem to have been chiefly excited about Mithraism, either finding in the account of that ancient cultus a provocation which the other parts of the volume did not yield, or seeing there openings for hostile criticism which elsewhere were not patent. One Eoman Catholic ecclesiastic has represented me as a " modern apostle " of the bull-slaying God. It would seem that a semblance, however illusory, of rivalry in cult propaganda is more evocative of critical conflict than any mere scientific disintegration of the current creed. Of the attacks upon the section " Mithraism," as well as of other criticisms of the book, I have given some account in Appendix C. It is to be regretted that it should still be necessary to make replies to criticisms in these matters consist largely of exposures of gross mis representation, blundering, bad faith, and bad feeling, as well as bad reasoning, on the part of theological critics. In the case of a hostile critique in the Hibbert Journal, which did not incur these charac terisations, I made an amicable appeal for space in which to reply and set forth my own case ; but my request was refused. Broadly speaking, the critical situation is one of ferment rather than of decisive conflict. Those devoted Danaiides, the professional theologians, continue their labours with the serious assiduity which has always marked them, exhibiting their learned results in dialectic vessels which lack the first elements of retention. The theologians are as much occupied with unrealities to-day, relatively to the advance of thought, and as sure of their own insight, as were their predecessors of three hundred years ago, expounding the functions of the devil. In Germany they are not yet done discussing the inner significance of the tale of Satan's carrying Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple or to a mountain top. Professor Zahn circumspectly puts it that Jesus felt himself so carried. Friedrich Spitta as circumspectly replies that that is not what the gospels say, but does not press that point to finality. Professor Harnack pronounces that the story in Matthew is the older. Spitta cogently proves that it is the later, and that Mark has minimised Luke. Wellhausen's theory of the priority of Mark he shows to be finally untenable ; and his own conclusion he declares to give a decisive result as regards PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xiii the life of Jesus — namely, that Jesus believed firmly in his Messiah- ship from the moment of his baptism onwards, and that he held by it in terms of his own inner experience of divine and fiendish influences.1 And this is history, as written by scholarly theological experts. The fact that the whole Temptation story is rationally traceable to a Babylonian sculpture of the Goat-God beside the Sun- God, interpreted by Greeks and Eomans successively as an education of Apollo or Jupiter by Pan on a mountain top, or a musical contest between them, has never entered the experts' consciousness. They are writing history in the air. Spitta confidently decides that neither the community nor the disciples nor Paul set up the Messianic conception of Jesus ; and yet he has not a word to say on the problem of Paul's entire ignorance of the Temptation story. Seventy years before, our own experts had ascertained with equal industry and certainty that " most probably our Lord was placed [by Satan] not on the sheer descent [from the temple] into the valley (Jos. War, V, v, 2 ; Ant. XV, xi, 5), but on the side next the court where stood the multitude to whom He might thus announce himself from Dan. vii, 13 (1 Ghron. xxi, 16), see Bp. Pearson, VII, f. and g. Solomon's porch was a cross building to the temple itself, and rose 120 cubits above it. From the term used by both Evan gelists, it is certain that the Tempter stood on no part (tou vaov) of the sanctuary."1 Thus does the "expert" elucidation of the impossible go on through the generations. The " experts " of to-day are for the most part as far behind the historic science of their time as were their predecessors ; and their results are just as nugatory as the older. But they are just as certain as were their predecessors that they are at the true point of view, and have all the historical facts in hand. Orthodox and heterodox alike, in the undertaking to set forth the manner of the rise of Christianity, either wholly disregard the principles of historical proof or apply these principles arbitrarily, at their own convenience. Pfleiderer, latterly more and more bitterly repugning the interpretations of other scholars, alternately repre sented the personality of Jesus as a profoundly obscure problem, and offered fallacious elucidations thereof, with perfect confidence !in his own selection of certainties.8 Dr. Heinrici, offering a com- iprehensive view of Das Urchristentum (1902), ignores all historical difficulties on the score that he is discussing not the truth but the 1 Die Vermchwio Jesu, in Bd. iii, H. 2, of Zur Qeschichte und Literatur des Vrehris- Itentums, 1907, pp. 92-3. a Notet on the Four Gospels, etc., 1838, p. 220. t s See the Appendix to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology. xiv PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION influence of Christianity, and so sets forth a copious account of the psychology of the Gospel Jesus which for critical science has no validity whatever. Dr. Schweitzer, in his Von Beimarus zu Wrede (Eng. trans., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910), after ably confuting all the current conceptions of the Founder, sets forth one which incurs fatal criticism as soon as it is propounded. The old fashion of manipulating the evidences, on the other hand, is still practised from time to time even by distinguished experts like Professor Bousset, a scholar who has done original and important work in outlying provinces of research. But how little critical validity attaches to Bousset's vindication of the main Christian tradition has been crushingly set forth in the brochure of the late Pastor Kalthoff, Was wissen wir von Jesus ? (Lehmann, Berlin : 1904), in reply to Bousset's discourse under the same title. Professing, for instance, to found on such historical data as the mention of an otherwise unknown " Chrestus " by Suetonius, Bousset deliberately denaturalises the passage to suit his purpose, and then makes it vouch for a " Christian " community at Eome when none such can be shown to have existed. Kalthoff rightly likens such a handling of documents to the methods of the professed rationalisers denounced by Lessing in his day. Many of the liberal " school of to-day are in fact at the standpoint of the semi- rationalist beginnings of Biblical criticism among the eighteenth- century deists ; on behalf of whom we can but say that they were at least sincere pioneers, and that Lessing, in substituting for their undeveloped critical method the idea of a divine " Education of Mankind " through all religious systems alike, retrograded to a standpoint where the rational interpretation of history ceases to be possible, and where the critic stultifies himself by censuring pro cesses of thought which, on his own principles, should be envisaged as part of the divine scheme of "education." Yet that nugatory formula in turn is pressed into the service of a theology which is consistent only in refusing to submit to scientific and logical tests. Then we have the significant portent of the pseudo-biological school of the Eev. Mr. Crawley,2 according to which nothing in religion is new and nothing true, but all is more or less productive of "vitality," and therefore precious, so that no critical analysis matters. Here the tribunals of historical and moral truth are brazenly closed ; and the critical issue is referred to one commis' sioned for the instant by the defender of the faith, whose hand i See Appendix last cited. a See Appendix C to the present volume. PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xv to-mouth interpretations and generalisations of Christian history, worthy of a neophyte's essay, are complacently put forth as the vindication of beliefs and rites that are admittedly developments from mere savagery. And this repudiation of all intellectual morals, this negation of the very instinct of truth, is profusely flavoured with a profession of zeal for the morals of sex and the " instinct of life." Incidentally, too, an argument which puts all critical tests out of court is from time to time tinted with a suggestion of decent concern for historical research. So, too, among the scholars who reconstruct Christian origins at will, some profess to apply a critical " method " or set of methods by which they can put down all challenges of the reality of their subject-matter. In Appendix C, I have shown what such " method " is worth in the hands of Professor Carl Clemen. Their general procedure is simply that of scholastics debating in vacuo, assuming what they please, and rejecting what they please. It is the method by which whole generations of their predecessors elucidated the details of the sacerdotal system pf the Hebrews in the wilderness, until Colenso — set doubting about sacred tradition by an intelligent Zulu — established arithmetically the truth of Voltaire's verdict that the whole thing was impossible. Then the experts, under cover of orthodox outcry, changed the venue, avowing no shame for their long aberration. In due time the modern specialists, or their successors, will realise that their main positions as to Christian origins are equally fabulous ; but they or their successors will continue to be conscious of their professional perspicacity, and solemnly or angrily contemptuous of all lay criticism of their "method." " Wir Gelehrten vom Each," they still call themselves in Germany — " we scholars by profession " — thus disposing of all lay criticism. It is not surprising that alongside of this vain demonstration of the historicity of myth there spreads, among determined believers in the historicity, an uneasy disposition to ground faith on the very " will to believe," called by the name of " spiritual experience." With a confidence equal to that of the professional documentists, such believers maintain that their own spiritual autobiographies can establish the historical actuality of what rationalist critics describe as ancient myths. " The heart answers, I have felt." Some of these reasoners, proceeding on the lines of the pseudo-Paul (1 Cor. ii), dispose inexpensively of the historical critic by calling him " imper- cipient." They themselves are the percipients "vom Fach." Other apologists, with a little more modesty, reiterate their conviction that xvi PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION the Christian origins must have been what they have been accus tomed to think— that no religious movement can have risen without a revered Founder, and that the spread and duration of the Christian movement prove its Founder to have been a very great personality^ indeed. Abstractly put, such a theorem logically ends in the bald claim of the theorist to special " percipience," and a denial of per- cipience to all who refuse their assent. It has latterly come to be associated, however, with an appeal to historical analogy in the case of the modern Persian movement of the Bab, the lessons of which in this connection have been pressed upon orthodox believers by the late Mr. Herbert Eix. Mr. Six, whose personality gave weight and interest to all his views, seems to have set out as a Unitarian preacher with a fixed belief in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, despite a recognition of the weakness of the historical basis. Noting " with what a childlike mind those ancient Christians came to all questions of external fact — how independent of external fact the truth they lived by really was,"1 he yet assumed that any tale passed on by such believers must have had a basis in a great personality. " Those gospel stories," he wrote, " come down to us by tradition handed on by the lips of ignorant peasants, so that we can never be quite sure that we have the precise truth about any incident."2 Here both the positive and the negative1 assumptions are invalid. We do not know that all the gospel stories were passed on by peasants ; and we never know whether there was any historical basis whatever for any one tale. But on such assump tions Mr. Eix founded an unqualified conviction that the Gospel Jesus "headed a new spiritual era," "altered the whole face of things," " gave us a new principle to live by," and " revolutionised the whole world of human affection ";3 and in his posthumous work, Babbi, Messiah, and Martyr (1907), he presents one more Life of Jesus framed on the principle of excluding the supernatural and taking all the rest of the gospels as substantially true. Yet towards the close of his life he seems to have realised either that this process was illicit or that it could not claim acceptance on historical grounds. Writing on the Bab movement, he speaks not only of "those belated theologians who still think the case of a supernatural Christianity can be historically proved by evidence drawn from the latter part of the first century," but of the " utter insecurity of the historical foundation" of Christianity; and he avows " how hopeless it is to try to base religion upon historical? 1 Sermons, Addresses, and Essays, 1907, p. 1. a 13. p. 107. "Id. p. 5, PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xvii documents."1 Then comes the exposition of how the Bab movement rose in the devotion evoked by a remarkable personality ; and how within thirty years the original account of the Founder was so completely superseded by a legendary account, full of miracles, that only one copy of the original document, by a rare chance, has survived. The argument now founded on this case is an attempt to salve the historicity of Jesus in surrendering the records. Eenan pointed to the Bab movement as showing how an enthusiastic cult could arise and spread rapidly in our own day by purely natural forces. Accepting that demonstration, the Neo-Unitarians press the corollary that the Bab movement shows how rapidly myth can overgrow history, and that we have now a new analogical ground for believing that Jesus, like the Bab, was an actual person, of great persuasive and inspiring power. But while the plea is perfectly reasonable, and deserves every consideration, it is clearly inconclusive. Cult beginnings are not limited to one mode ; and the fatal fact remains that the beginnings of the Christist cult are wrapped in all the obscurity which surrounds the alleged Founder, while we have trustworthy contemporary record of the beginnings of the Bab movement. Place the two cases beside that of the Bacchic cult in Greece, and we have a cult-type in which wild devotion is given to a wholly mythical Founder. The rationalist critic does not affirm the impossibility of an evolution of the Christist movement on the lines of that of the Bab : he leaves such a priori reasoning to the other side, simply insisting that there is no good historical evidence whatever, while there are strong grounds for inferring a mythical foundation. And those who abstractly insist on the historicity of Jesus must either recede from their position or revert to claims expressive merely of the personal equation — statements of the con vincing force of their " religious experience," or claims to a special faculty of " percipience." To all such claims the sufficient answer is that, arrogance apart, they are matched and cancelled by similar claims on the part of believers in other creeds ; and that they could have been advanced with as much justification by ancient believers in Dionysos and Osiris, who had no more doubt of the historicity of their Founders than either an orthodox or a Unitarian Christian has to-day concerning the historicity of Jesus. In short, the closing of historical problems by insistence on the personal equation is no more permissible among intellectual freemen than the settling of scientific 1 Id. pp. 295-6, 300. xviii PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION questions thereby. Callous posterity, if not contemporary criticism, ruthlessly puts aside the personal equation in such matters, and reverts to the kind of argument which proceeds upon common grounds of credence and universal canons of evidence. And this reversion is now in process. Already the argument for the historicity of the main gospel narrative is being largely grounded : even by some "experts" on the single datum of the mention of " brethren of the Lord," and "James the brother of the Lord," in two of the Pauline epistles. This thesis is embodied in one of the ablest arguments on the historicity question that I have met with. It was put in a letter to me by a lay correspondent, open-mindedly seeking the truth by fair critical tests. He began by arguing that the data of a "Paul party," a "Cephas party," and an "Apollos party " in Corinth, if accepted as evidence for the personalities of the three party-leaders named, carry with them the inference of a Christ of whom some logia were current. If then the writer of the epistle — whether Paul or another — ignored such logia, the silence of Paul " is no argument for ignorance of such logia in general. This ingenious argument, I think, fails in respect of its unsupported premiss. Christists might call themselves " of Christ " simply by way of disavowing all sectarian leadership. On the face of the case, the special converts of Paul were Christists without any logia of Christ to proceed upon. Equally ingenious, but I think equally inconclusive, is the further argument that the challenge, " Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?" (1 Cor. ix, 1), implies that Paul's status was discredited on the score that he had not seen the Lord, while other apostles had. But the dispute here turns finally on the question of the authenticity of the epistle as a whole, or the chapter or the plea in particular. As coming from Paul, it is a weak plea : multitudes were said to have " seen " Jesus ; the apostle would have claimed, if anything, authorisation by Jesus. But as a traditional claim it is intelligible enough. Now, this portion of the epistle is one of those most strongly impugned by the tests of Van Manen as betraying a late authorship and standpoint — that of ecclesiastics standing for their income and their right to marry. The conception of Paul battling against his converts for his salary and " the right to lead about a wife," within a few pages of his declaration (vii, 8-9) to the unmarried and to widows, " It is good for them if they abide even as I ; but if they have not continency, let them marry " — this is staggering even to believers in the authenticity of " the four " or all of the epistles, and gives the very strongest ground for treating the irreconcilable passage in chapter ix, * PEEFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION xix if not the whole chapter, as a subsequent interpolation. That the same hand penned both passages is incredible. Thus we como to the " brethren of the Lord " with an indes tructible presumption against the text. They are mentioned as part of the case for that claim to marry which is utterly excluded by chapter vii. And the claim for salaries and freedom to marry is as obviously likely to be the late interpolation as is the doctrine of asceticism to be the earlier. Given then the clear lateness of the passage, what does the phrase "brethren of the Lord" prove? That at a period presumably long subsequent to that of Paul there was a tradition of a number of Church leaders or teachers so named. Who were they ? They are never mentioned in the Acts. They are never indicated in the gospels. Brethren of Jesus are there referred to (Mt. xii, 46, xiii, 55 ; Mk. iii, 31, 32 ; Lk. viii, 19, 20 ; Jn. vii, 3, 5, 10) ; but, to say nothing of the facts that three of these passages are plainly duplicates, and that only in one are any of the brethren named, there is never the slightest suggestion that any one of them joined the propaganda. On the contrary, it is expressly declared that "even his brethren did not believe on him " (Jn. vii, 5). How then, on that basis, supposing it to have a primary validity, are we to accept the view that the James of Gal. i, 19, was a uterine brother or a half-brother of the Founder, who before Paul's advent had come to something like primacy in the Church, without leaving even a traditional trace of him as a brother of Jesus in the Acts ? Either the gospel data are historically decisive or they are not. By excluding them from his "pillar texts"1 Professor Schmiedel admits that they are bound up with the supernatural view of Jesus. ' The resort to the argument from the epistles is a partial confession that the whole gospel record is open to doubt ; and that the speci fication of four brothers and several sisters of Jesus in one passage is a perplexity. It has always been so. Several Fathers accounted for them as children of Joseph by a former wife ; several others made them children of Clopas and "the other" Mary, and so only cousins of Jesus. If the gospel record is valid evidence, the question is at an end. If it is not, the evidence from the epistles falls. "Brethren of the Lord" is a late allusion, which may stand for a mere tradition or may tell of a group name ; and the mention of James as a " brother " (with no hint of any others) in the epistle to the Galatians can perfectly well be an interpolation, even supposing the epistle to be genuine. 1 For an examination of these I may refer the reader to the Appendix to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology. xx PEEEACE TO THE SECOND EDITION I have here examined the whole argument because it is fully the strongest known to me on the side of the historicity of Jesus ; and I am concerned to evade nothing. The candid reader, I think, will admit that even if he holds by the historicity it cannot be established on the grounds in question. He will then, I trust, bring an open mind to bear on the whole reasoning of the Second Part of the ensuing treatise. As in the case of the second edition of Christianity and Mytho logy I am deeply indebted to Mr. Percy Vaughan for carefully reading the proofs of these pages, and revising the Index. April, 1911. INTRODUCTION My purpose in grouping the four ensuing studies is to complement and complete the undertaking of a previous volume, entitled Christianity and Mythology. That was substantially a mythological analysis of the Christian system, introduced by a discussion of mythological principles in that particular connection and in general. The bulk of the present volume is substantially a synthesis of Christian origins, introduced by a discussion of the principles of hierology. Such discussion is still forced on sociology by the special pleaders of the prevailing religion. But the central matter of the book is its attempt to trace and synthesise the real lines of growth of the Christian cultus ; and it challenges criticism above all by its theses — (l) that the gospel story of the Last Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, Crucifixion, and Eesurrection, is visibly a transcript of a Mystery Drama, and not originally a narrative ; and (2) that that drama is demonstrably (as historic demonstration goes) a symbolic modification of an original rite of human sacrifice, of which it preserves certain verifiable details. That the exact point of historic connection between the early eucharistic rite and the late drama-story has still to be traced, it is needless to remark. Had direct evidence on this head been forth coming, the problem could not so long have been ignored. But it is here contended that the lines of evolution are established by the details of the record and the institution, in the light of the data of anthropology ; and that we have thus at last a scientific basis for a history of Christianity. As was explained in the introduction to Christianity and Mythology, these studies originated some twenty- five years back in an attempt to realise and explain The Eise of Christianity Sociologically Considered "; and it is as a beginning of such an exposition that the two books are meant to be taken. In A Short History of Christianity the general historic conception is outlined ; and the present volume offers the detailed justification of the views there summarily put as to Christian origins, insofar as they were not fully developed in the earlier volume. On one point, the origins of Manichfflism, the present work departs from the xxii INTRODUCTION ordinary historic view, which was accepted in the Short History ; the proposed rectification here being a result of the main investigation. In this connection it may be noted that Schwegler had already denied the historicity of Montanus — a thesis which I have not sought to incorporate, though I somewhat incline to accept it. Whether or not I am able to carry out the original scheme in full, I am fain to hope that these inquiries will be of some small use towards meeting the need which motived them. Mythology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on hierology ; and hierology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on sociology. The third and fourth sections of this book, accordingly! are so placed with a view to the comparative elucidation of the growth of Christianity. If it be objected that they are thus "tendency" writings, the answer is that they were independently done, and are as complete as I could make them in the space. Both are revisions and expansions of lectures formerly published in " The Eeligious Systems of the World," that on Mithraism being now nearly thrice its original length. Undertaken and expanded without the aid of Professor Cumont's great work, Textes et Monuments Figure's relatifs aux Mysteres de Mithra (1896-9), it has been revised in the welcome light of that magistral performance. To M. Cumont I owe much fresh knowledge, and the correction of some errors, as well as the confirmation of several of my conclusions; and if I have ventured here and there to dissent from him, and above all to maintain a thesis not recognised by him — that Mithra in the legend made a " Descent into Hell " — I do so only after due hesitation. The non-appearance of any other study of Mithraism in English may serve as my excuse for having carried my paper into some detail, especially by way of showing how much the dead cult had in common with the living. Christian origins cannot be understood without making this comparison. It is significant, however, of our British avoidance of comparative hierology wherever it bears on current beliefs, that while Germany has contributed to the study of Mithraism, among many others, the learned treatise of Windischmann and that in Eoscher's Lexikon, France the zealous researches oi Lajard, and Belgium the encyclopaedic and decisive work of Professor Cumont, England has produced not a single independent book on the subject. In compensation for such neglect, we have developed a signal devotion to Folklore. If some of the favour shown to that expansive study be turned on serious attempts to understand the INTEODUCTION xxiii actual process of growth of world-religions, the present line of research may be extended to advantage. The lecture on the religions of Ancient America has in turn been carefully revised and much enlarged, not because this subject is equally ignored among us — for there is a sufficiency of information upon it in English, notably in one of the too-little utilised collections of " Descriptive Sociology " compiled for Mr. Spencer — but because again the comparative bearing of the study of the dead cults on that of the living has not been duly considered. In particular I have entered into some detail tending to support the theory — not yet to be put otherwise than as a disputed hypothesis — that certain forms and cults of human sacrifice, first evolved anciently in Central Asia, passed to America on the east, and to the Semitic peoples on the west, resulting in the latter case in the central " mystery " of Christianity, and in the former in the Mexican system of human sacrifices. But the psychological importance of the study does not, I trust, solely stand or fall with that theory. On the general socio logical problem, I may say, a closer study of the Mexican civilisation has dissolved an opinion I formerly held — that it might have evolved from within past the stage of human sacrifice had it been left to itself. Whatever view be taken of the scope of religious heredity, there will remain in the established historic facts sufficient justification for the general title of " Pagan Christs," which best indicates in one phrase the kinship of all cults of human sacrifice and theophagous sacrament, as well as of all cults of which the founder figures as an inspired teacher. That principle has already been broadly made good on the first side by the incomparable research of Dr. J. G. Erazer, to whose " Golden Bough " I owe both theoretic light and detail knowledge. I ask, therefore, that when I make bold to reject Dr. Frazer's suggested solution (ed. 1900) of the historic problem raised by the parallel between certain Christian and non-Christian sacra, I shall not be supposed to undervalue his great treasury of ordered know ledge. On the question of the historicity of Founders, I have made answer in the second edition of Christianity and Mythology to certain strictures of his which seem to me very ill-considered. What I claim for my own solution is that it best satisfies the ruling principles of his own hierology. In this connection, however, I feel it a duty to avow that the right direction had previously been pointed out by the late Grant Allen in his Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), though at the outset of his work he obscured it for many of us by insisting on the xxiv INTEODUCTION absolute historicity of Jesus, a position which later-on he in effect abandons. It is after ostensibly setting out with the actuality of " Jesus the son of the carpenter " as an " unassailable Eock of solid historical fact " (p. 16) that he incidentally (p. 285) pronounces "the Christian legend to have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making sacrifices " as that practised by the Khonds. Finally (p. 391) he writes that " at the outset of our inquiry we had to accept crudely the bare fact " that the cult arose at a certain period, and that " we can now see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency in human nature." Eeturning to Allen's book after having independently worked out in detail precisely such a derivation and such a theory, I was surprised to find that where he had thus thrown out the clue I had not on a first reading been at all impressed by it. The reason probably was that for me the problem had been primarily one of historical derivation, and that Allen offered no historical solution, being satisfied to indicate analogies. And it was probably the still completer disregard of historical difficulties that brought oblivion upon the essay of Herr Kulischer, Das Leben Jesu eine Sage von dem Schicksale und Erleb- nissen der Bodenfrucht, insbesondere der sogenannten palastinensischm Erstlingsgarbe, die am Passahfeste im Tempel dargebracht wurck (Leipzig, 1876), in which Dr. Frazer's thesis of the vegetal character of the typical slain and rearising deity is put forth without evidence, but with entire confidence. Kulischer had simply posited the analogy of the Vegetation-God and the vegetation- cult as previous students had done that of the Sun-God and the sun-myth, not only without tracing any process of transmutation, but with a far more arbitrary interpretation of symbols than they had ventured on. His essay thus remains only a remarkable piece of pioneering, which went broadly in the right direction, but missed the true path. It is not indeed to be assumed that if he had made out a clear historical case it would have been listened to by his generation. The generation before him had paid little heed to the massive and learned treatise of Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebrcter (1842), wherein the derivation of the Passover from a rite of human sacrifice is well made out, and that of the Christian eucharist from a modified Jewish sacrament of theophagy is at least strikingly argued for. Ghillany had further noted some of the decisive analogies of sacrificial ritual and gospel narrative which are founded on in the following pages ; and was substantially on the right historic track, though he missed some of the archaeological proofs of the INTEODUCTION xxv prevalence of human sacrifice in pre-exilic Judaism. Daumer, too, went far towards a right historical solution in his work Der Feuer und Molochdienst der alien Hebraer, which was synchronous with that of his friend Ghillany, and again in his treatise Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums (1847). His later proclamation of Meine Conversion (1859) would naturally discredit his earlier theses ; but the disregard of the whole argument in the hierology of that day is probably to be explained as due to the fact that the conception of a " science of religions " — specified by Vinet in 1856 as beginning to grow up alongside of theology— had not then been constituted for educated men. The works of Ghillany and Daumer have been so far forgotten that not till my own research had been independently made and elaborated did I meet with them. To-day, the conditions of hierological research are very different. A generation of students is now steeped in the anthropological lore of which Ghillany, failing to profit by the lead of Constant, noted only the details preserved in the classics and European histories ; and the scientific significance of his and Daumer's and Kulischer's theories is clear in the light of the studies of Tylor, Spencer, and Frazer. Grant Allen, with the ample materials of recent anthropology to draw upon, made a vital advance by connecting the central Christian legend with the whole process of religious evolution, in terms not of a priori theology but of anthropological fact. If, however, the lack of historical demonstration, and the uncorrected premiss of a con ventional historical view, made his theory at first lack significance for a reader like myself, it has probably caused it to miss its mark with others. That is no deduction from its scientific merit ; but it may be that the historical method will assist to its appreciation. It was by way of concrete recognition of structural parallelism that I reached the theory, having entirely forgotten, if I had ever noted, Allen's passing mention of one of the vital details in question — that of the breaking of the legs of victims in primitive human sacrifice. In 1842 Ghillany had laid similar stress on the detail of the lance-thrust in the fourth gospel, to which he adduced the classic parallel noted hereinafter. And when independent researches thus yield a variety of particular corroborations of a theory reached other wise by a broad generalisation, the reciprocal confirmation is, I think, tolerably strong. The recognition of the Gospel Mystery- Play, it is here submitted, is the final historical validation of the whole thesis, which might otherwise fail to escape the fate of dis regard which has thus far befallen the most brilliant speculation of the a priori mythologists in regard to the Christian legend, from the xxvi INTEODUCTION once famous works of Dupuis and Volney down to the little noticed Letture sopra la mitologia vedica of Professor de Gubernatis. However that may be, Grant Allen's service in the matter is now from my point of view unquestionable. Of less importance, but still noteworthy, is Professor Huxley's sketch of " The Evolution of Theology," with which, while demurring to some of what I regard as its uncritical assumptions (accepted, I regret to say, by Allen, in his otherwise scientific ninth chapter), I find myself in considerable agreement on Judaic origins. Professor Huxley's essay points to the need for a combination of the studies of hierology and anthro pology in the name of sociology, and on that side it would be unpardonable to omit acknowledgment of the great work that has actually been done for sociological synthesis. I am specially bound to make it in view of my occasional dissent on anthropological matters from Spencer. Such dissent is apt to suggest difference of principle in a disproportionate degree; and Spencer's own iconoclasm has latterly evoked a kind of criticism that is little concerned to avow his services. It is the more fitting that such a treatise as the present should be accompanied by a tribute to them. However his anthropology may have to be modified in detail, it remains clear to some of us, whom it has enlightened, that his elucidations are of fundamental importance, all later attempts being related to them, and that his main method is permanently valid. In regard to matters less habitually contested, it is perhaps needless to add that I am as little lacking in gratitude for the great scholarly services rendered to all students of hierology by Professor - Ehys Davids, when I venture to withstand his weighty opinion on Buddhist origins. My contrary view would be ill-accredited indeed if I were not able to support it with much evidence yielded by his scholarship and his candour. And it is perhaps not unfitting that, by way of final word of preface to a treatise which sets out with a systematic opposition to the general doctrine of Dr. E. B. Jevons, I acknowledge that I have profited by his survey of the field, and even by the suggestiveness of some of his arguments that seem to me to go astray. Part I. THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION Chapter I. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF § 1. It seems probable, despite theological cavils, that Petronius was right in his signal saying, Fear first made the Gods. In the words pf a recent hierologist, " we may be sure that primitive man took to himself the credit of his successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his own advantage, but when the machinery did not work he ascribed the fault to some over-ruling supernatural power. : It was the violation of [previously exploited] sequences, and ihe frustration of his expectations, by which the belief in super natural power was, not created, but first called forth." The fact that this writer proceeds to repudiate his own doctrine is no reason why we should, save to the extent of noting the temerity pi his use of the term " supernatural." There are some very strong reasons, apart from the a priori one cited above, for thinking that Jihe earliest human notions of superhuman beings were framed in lierms of fear. Perhaps the strongest of all is the fact that savages ^ind barbarians in nearly all parts of the world appear to regard jisease and death as invariably due to purposive hostile action, ^hether normal, magical, or "spiritual."8 Not even old age is for ¦•' ' F. B. Jevons, Introduction to the History of Beligion, 1896, p. 19; cp. p. 23, p. 137, and >. 177. Cp. Adam Smith, essay on The History of Astronomy, sect. iii. » 2 Jevons, as cited, pp. 106, 233, 410. Exactly the same self-contradiction is committed >y Professor Robertson Smith, on the same provocation of the phrase, Primus in oroe teos fecit timor. See his Beligion of the Semites, pp. 27, 35, 55, 88, 129. 8 Cp. John Mathe-w, Eaglehawk and, Crow, 1899, pp. 91, 123, 144 ; Sir A. B. Ellis, The Ishi-speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, pp. 13-14; Livingstone, Travels and lesearches in South Africa, ed. 1905, p. 409 ; Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, 3rd ed. l, 44-5; Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 171-sa., 361; MaryH. Sngsley, West African Studies, ed. 1901, pp. 98-100, 105-9, 178 ; Spencer and Gillen, Native bribes of Central Australia, 1899, p. 48 ; Northern Tribes of Central AustraUa, 1904, p. 479 ; lev. R. Taylor. Te Ika a Maui : or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, p. 137 ; W. W. .keat, Malay Magic, 1900. pp. 56-57, 94, 410, 533 sq. ; J. Chalmers, Pioneer Life and Work in Tew Guinea, 1895, p. 199 ; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, in. 275 ; v, 53, 67-69, 160 ; vii, 350, etc.; Admiral Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 894, pp. 164-5, 363 ; A. B. Wallace, Travels on the Amazon and Bio Negro, 2nd ed. 1889, p. 347-8; A. F. Calvert, The Aborigines of Western Australia, 1894, p. 20; G. Taplin, The Tarrinyeri: An Account of the Tribes of South Australian Aborigines, 2nd ed. Adelaide, 2 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION many of these primitive thinkers a probable natural cause of death.' If then the life of early man was not much less troublous than that of contemporary primitives, he is likely to have been moved as much as they to conceive of the unseen powers as malevolent. On the Gold Coast," says a close student, "the majority of these spirits are malignant I believe that originally all were conceived as malignant." And how, indeed, could it be otherwise ? Those who will not assent have forgotten, as indeed most anthropologists strangely forget when they are discussing the beginnings of religion, that man as we know him is descended from something less human, more brute, something nearer the predatory beast life of fear and foray. 1878, pp. 19, 25; Perceval Landon, Lhasa, 2nd ed. 1905, p. 39; W. A. Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa, 1898, pp. 73, 75; Turner, Samoa a Hundred Tears Ago, 1884, pp. 21, 321; A. E. Pratt, Two Years among the New Guinea Cannibals, 1906, p. 312; Paul Kollmann, Tlu Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 166; Lionel Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, pp. 75, 152; Dobrizhoffer, An Account of the Abipones, Eng. tr. 1821, ii, 84; W. Ellis, Polynesim Besearches, 2nd ed. 1831, i, 395-6 ; iv, 293, 315 ; Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, 1892, pp. 195, 199; B. Douglas Howard, Life with Trans-Siberian Savages, 1893, p. 193; Adolf Bastion, Der Mensah in der Geschichte, 1860, ii, 106 sq., 116 sq. ; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 138; E. Clodd, TomTit Tot, 1898, pp. 133-4; E.Crawley, The Mystic Base, 1902, pp. 18-23, 26-28 ; Boss, Pansebeia, 4th ed. 1672, p. 100 ; N. W. Thomas, art. in Journal of the African Society, October, 1908, p. 24 ; D. M. Kranz, Natur- und Kulturleben der Zulus, 1880, p. 106; S. P. Oliver, Madagascar, 1886, ii, 39. At a higher stage of civilisation, or among tribes who have had some contact wijii white men, we find a differentiation in which medical treatment is recognised, and only the obscurer maladies or dangerous wounds are magically dealt with. Cp. Schrader, Pre- historic Antiquities of the Aryan Peoples, Eng. tr. 1890, p. 420, with Miss Kingsley.'TFeji African Studies, p. 153, and Brine, as cited, p. 174. It cannot be said that this view of disease was transcended among the most civilised nations of antiquity, the scientific views of the Greek physicians being accepted onlyb| the few. Under Christianity there was a nearly complete reversion to the savage viewi which subsisted until the assimilation of Saracen science in the Middle Ages. Op. Mosheim's notes to Cudworth's Intellectual System, Harrison's trans. 1845, ii, 284-6; A.D, White, History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1897, ii, i, 3, 25, and refs. 1 In some cases old age is recognised as a sufficient cause. Cp. Rev. J. Macdonnld, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 164; Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, 1876, p. 35 ; Decle, as cited, pp. 489, 491; Crawley, as cited, p. 26. 3 A. B. Ellis, as cited, p. 12. Cp. Schweinfurth, as cited, and Major Mockler-Ferryna%, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 384 : " Beneficent spirits are almost unknown to itfl pessimistic African, to whom existence must seem a veritable struggle." "Their [the Matabele's] idea of power, known or unknown, is always associated with evil" (Decle, as cited, p. 165 : cp. pp. 153, 343). To the same effect W. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, i, 336; Bev. B. Taylor, Te Dca a Maui, as cited, and p. 104 ; Livingstone, Travels and BeseanW- ed. 1905, pp. 405, 409-10; Calvert, as cited, p. 38; Perceval Landon, Lhasa, 2nd ed. 190£l 36-38, 40 ; Hyades and Deniker, Mission Scientif. du Cap Horn, 1891, cited by Hobhoua Morals in Evolution, 1906, i, 46 ; T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, pp. 189, M H. Cayley Webster, Through New Guinea and the Cannibal Countries, 1898, p. 357; ItoM cited in C. Lennox's James Chalmers of New Guinea, 1903, p. 76 ; Joh. Warneck, m Beligion der Batak, 1909, pp. 2-3. The last-cited writer is particularly emphatic as to the overwhelming predominance of thef actor of fear in thereligion which he presents : " Dieee Furcht, nicht die Pietat, nicht das Abhangigkeitsgeftthl von derGottheit, ist die treibenile Kraft " Of theancient Boman, again, it can be said that "he was beset on all sideB by imaginary foes" (Professor Granger, The Worship of the Bomans, 1895, p. 75). The same statement can be made with nearly the same emphasis concerning the population ol Christian Greece. See J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek BeUtm 1910, pp. 9-25, 47, 256, and passim. And as the common folk of Christian Greece are very much on the pagan plane of thought (td. p. 51), the inference as to pagan Greece is cleu. °.P; G- n°^,oS • OefhtohtedesTeufels, 1869, i 20, and Das Beligionswesen der rohesten NaW- vplker, 1880, pp. 34,171; Sir H. Johnston .George Grenfell and the Congo, 1908, ii, 63Mi K. Basmussen, The People of the Polar North, 1908, pp. 123-5; Miss J. E. Harrison, Pw- legomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, 2nd ed. 1908, pp. 7, 9; Thurston Castes and Tribn, as cited ii, 86, 180, 215 427 ; vii, 354. Mr. Decle notes one or two African eTceptiont; ^ tribe on the Tangamka plateau have a vague sort of Supreme Being called LaVn who nil good and evil passions " (p. 293) ; the Wakamba have a similar conception and r™ teS notable for not believing that death is caused by witchcraft (p. 489) ; and the Won™ mweii have the idea of a Superior being whose help might be invoked" (p. 346) The axpmtiS all occur in the lake region. Cp. Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza 1899 p leg e THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 3 When in the period of upward movement which we term civilisation, as distinct from animal savagery, there could arise thrills of yearning or gratitude towards unknown powers, we are aaons off from the stage of subterhuman growth in which the germs of conceptual religion must have stirred. If the argument is to be that there is no religion until man loves his Gods, let it be plainly put, and let not a verbal definition become a petitio principii. If, again, no numina are to be termed Gods but those who are loved, let that proposition too be put as a simple definition of term. But if we are to look for the beginnings of the human notion of numina, of unseen spirits who operate in Nature and interfere with man, let it be as plainly put that they presumably occurred when fear of the unknown was normal, and gratitude to an Unknown impossible. But in saying that fear first made the Gods, or made the first Gods, we imply that other God-making forces came into play later ; and no dispute arises when this is affirmed of the process of making the Gods of the higher religions, in their later forms. Even here, at the outset, the play of gratitude is no such ennobling exercise as to involve much lifting of the moral standpoint ; and even in the i higher religions gratitude to the God is often correlative with fear of the evil spirits whom he wards off. This factor is constantly : present in the gospels and in the polemic of the early Fathers j1 and ,has never disappeared from religious life. The pietist who in our ;own day pours out thanks to " Providence" for saving him in the .earthquake in which myriads have perished is no more ethically attractive than philosophically persuasive ; and the gratitude of : savages and barbarians for favours received and expected can hardly ;have been more refined. It might even be said that a cruder egoism ¦ presides over the making of Good Gods than over the birth of the Gods i of Fear ; the former having their probable origin in an individualistic ;as against a tribal instinct. But it may be granted that the God swho ostensibly begins as a private guardian angel or family spirit Jmay become the germ of a more ethical cultus than that of the God jgenerically feared. And the process chronically recurs. There is, ^indeed, no generic severance between the Gods of fear and the Gods Jof love, most deities of the more advanced races having both aspects : 'nevertheless, certain specified deities are so largely shaped by men's 'affections that they might recognisably be termed the Beloved Gods. „ l Cp. Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, i, 48-52, ii, 11 ; Lactantius, Div. Inst, iv, 15 ; Tertullian, tApol. 23, 40 ; Augustine, De Civ. Dei, B. i. passim. j 2 This is said in a different sense from that of the proposition of Miss Harrison (Pro legomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, 2nd ed, pp. xii and 6) that the religion of fear of evil has ethical value as recognising the ' mystery " thereof. 4 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION It will on the whole be helpful to an understanding of the subject if we name such Gods, in terms of current conceptions, the Christs of the world's pantheon. That title, indeed, no less fitly includes figures which do not strictly rank as Gods ; but in thus widely relating it we shall be rather elucidating than obscuring religious history. Only by some such collocation of ideas can the inquirer surmount his presuppositions and take the decisive step towards seeing the religions of mankind as alike man-made. On the other hand, he is not thereby committed to any one view in the field of history proper ; he is left free to argue for a historical Christ as for a historical Buddha. Even on the ground of the concept of evolution, however, scientific agreement is still hindered by persistence in the old classi fications. The trouble meets us on one line in arbitrary fundamental separations between mythology and religion, early religion and early ethics, religion and magic, genuine myths and non-genuine myths.1 On another line it meets us in the shape of a sudden and local reopening of the problem of theistic intervention in a quasi-philo sophical form, or a wilful repudiation of naturalistic method when the inquiry reaches current beliefs. Thus results which were reached by disinterested scholarship a generation ago are sought to be sub verted, not by a more thorough scholarship, but by keeping away from the scholarly problem and suggesting a new standard of values, open to no rational tests. It may be well, therefore, to clear the ground so far as may be of such dispute at the outset by stating and vindicating the naturalistic position in regard to it. § 2. In the midst of much dispute, moral science approaches agree ment on the proposition that all primitive beliefs and usages, however strange or absurd, are to be understood as primarily products of judgment, representing theories of causation or guesses at the order of things. To such agreement, however, hindrance is set up by the reversion of some inquirers to the old view that certain savage notions are " irrational " in the strict sense. Thus Dr. F. B. Jevons decides that " there is no rational principle of action in taboo : it is mechanical ; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary associa tion of ideas ; irrational, because its principle is [in the words of Mr. Lang] ' that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact.' "a Again, Dr. Jevons lays it doW 1 Cp. the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed p 2 n Jevons, X»irod«cM(m cited, p. 91; Lang, Myth, Bitual, and Beligion, 1st ed i 95 » As cited, pp. 11-12. Cp. p. 68, where the question is begged with much sfmpiieity. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 5 that "Taboo is the conviction that there are certain things which must — absolutely must, and not on grounds of experience of ' unconscious utility ' — be avoided." It is significant that in both of these passages the proposition runs into verbal insignificance or counter-sense. In the first cited we are told (1) that a certain association of ideas is arbitrary because its basis is an arbitrary association of ideas, and (2) that it is all the while a " causal " (i.e., a non-arbitrary) connection in thought. In the last we are in effect told that the tabooer is conscious that he is not proceeding on an ancestral experience when he is merely not conscious of doing so. When instructed men thus repeatedly lapse into mere nullities of formula, there is presumably something wrong with their theory. Now, the whole subject of taboo is put outside science by the assumption that the practice is in origin " irrational" and "absolute" and "arbitrary" and independent of all experience of utility. As Dr. Jevons himself declares in another connection, the savage's thought is subject to mental laws as much as is civilised man's. How, then, is this dictum to be reconciled with that ? What is the " law " of the savage's " arbitrariness "? Conceivably part of it lies before us in Dr. Jevons's page of denial. The very illustration first given by him for the proposition last cited from him is that " the mourner is as dangerous as the corpse he has touched," " the mourner is as dangerous to those he loves as to those he hates." Here, one would suppose, was a pretty obvious clue to an intelligible causation. Is it to be " arbitrarily " decided that primitive men never observed the phenomena of con tagion from corpse to mourners, and from mourners to their families ; or, observing it, never sought to act on the experience ? Is it not notorious that among contemporary primitives there is often an intense and vigilant fear of contagious disease?1 The only fair objection to accepting such a basis for one species of taboo is that for other species no such explanation is available. But what science looks for in such a matter is not a direct explana tion for every instance : it suffices that we find an explanation or explanations for such a principle or conception as taboo, and then recognise that, once set up, it may be turned to really " arbitrary " account by chiefs, priests, and adventurers. " Arbitrary " has two significations, in two references : it means " illogical " in reference to reason, or " representative of one will as against the general will." In the first sense, it is here irrelevant, for 1 E.g., Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 306, 322. 6 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION no one pretends that taboo is right ; but it may apply in the other in a way not intended by Dr. Jevons. For nothing can be more obvious than the adaptability of the idea of taboo, once crystallised or conventionalised in a code, to purposes of individual malice, and to all such procedure as men indicate by the term priestcraft." Dr. Jevons, in his concern to prove, what no one ever seriously disputed, that priests did not and could not create the religious or superstitious instinct, leaves entirely out of his exposition, and even by implication denies, the vitally relevant truth that they exploit it, And in overlooking this he sadly burdens, if he does not wreck, his own unduly biassed theory of the religious instinct as something relatively " deep," and as proceeding in terms of an abnormal con sciousness of contact with " the divine." For if those relatively " arbitrary " and " irrational " forms of taboo do not come from the priest — that is, from the religion-maker or -monger, whether official or not — they must, on Dr. Jevons's own showing, come from " religion." It may be that he would not at once reject such a conclusion; for the apparent motive of much of his treatment of taboo is the sanctification of it as an element in the ancestry of the Christian religion. For this purpose he is ready to go to notable lengths, as when he allows cannibalism to be sometimes "religious in inten tion." But while insisting at one point on the absolute unreasoned- ness and immediate certitude of the notion of taboo, apparently in order to place it on all fours with the " direct consciousness " which for him is the mark of a religious belief, he admits in so many words, as we have seen, that it is " arbitrary " and " irrational," which is scarcely a way of accrediting it as a religious phenomenon. Bather the purpose of that aspersion seems to be to open the way for another aggrandisement of religion as having suppressed irrational taboo. On the one hand we are told2 that the savage's fallacious belief in the transmissibility of taboo was "the sheath which enclosed and protected a conception that was to blossom and bear a priceless fruit — the conception of Social Obligation." This is an arguable thesis, not framed by Dr. Jevons for the purposes of his theorem, but spontaneously set forth by several missionaries.8 Here we need but note the implication of the old fallacy that when any good is seen to follow upon an evil we must assume the evil to have been a conditio sine qua non of the good. The missionaries and 1 P. 201. 2 P. 87. 3 E.g., Bev. Bichard Taylor, Te Ika a Maui: or. New Zealand and ita TnhnhHsmta 1870, pp. 8, 163 sq. ; Bev. J. Buller, Forty Years in New Zealand, 1878, p?203. InhaUtma' THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 7 Dr. Jevons have assumed that but for the device of taboo there could have been no social code — a thesis not to be substantiated either deductively or inductively. But with this problem we need not now concern ourselves, since Dr. Jevons himself turns the tables on it. After the claim has been made for the salvatory action of taboo, we read1 that " it was only among the minority of mankind, and there only under exceptional circumstances, that the institution bore its best fruit Indeed, in many respects the evolution of taboo has been fatal to the progress of humanity." And again : — In religion the institution also had a baneful effect : the irrational restric tions, touch not, taste not, handle not, which constitute formalism, are essentially taboos — essential to the education of man at one period of his development, but a bar to his progress later. But now is introduced3 the theorem of the process by which taboo has been converted into an element of civilisation : it is this : — Prom the fallacy of magic man was delivered by religion ; and there are reasons for believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the irrational restrictions of taboo.8 In the higher forms of religion the trivial and absurd restrictions are cast off, and those alone retained which are essential to morality and religion.4 We shall have to deal later with the direct propositions here put ; but for the moment it specially concerns us to note that the d&nou- ment does not hold scientifically or logically good. The fact remains that irrational taboo as such was, in the terms of the argument, strictly religious ; that religion in this aspect had " no sense in it," inasmuch as taboo had passed from a primitive precaution to a priest-made convention ;6 and that what religion is alleged to deliver man from is just religion. Thus alternately does religion figure for the apologist as a rational tendency correcting an irrational, and as an irrational tendency doing good which a rational one cannot. And the further we follow his teaching the more frequently does such a contradiction emerge. § 3. At the close of his work, apparently forgetting the propositions of his first chapter as to the priority of the sense of obstacle in the primitive man's notion of supernatural forces, Dr. Jevons affirms that the " earliest attempt " towards harmonising the facts of the " external and inner consciousness " — by which is meant observation and reflection — took the form of ascribing the external prosperity which befell a man to the 1 P. 88. a P. 89. s P. 91. 4 P- 93- 5 Cp. Bev. B. Taylor, as cited, ch. viii. 8 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION action of the divine love of which he was conscious within himself ; and the misfortunes which befell him to the wrath of the justly offended divine will.1 Here we have either a contradiction of the thesis before cited, or a resort to the extremely arbitrary assumption that in taking credit to himself for successful management of things, and imputing his mis carriages to a superior power, the primitive man is not trying to " harmonise the facts of his experience." Such an argument would be on every ground untenable ; but it appears to be all that can stand between Dr. Jevons and self-contradiction. The way to a sound position is by settling impartially the definition of the term ' reU gion." How Dr. Jevons misses this may be gathered from the continuation of the passage under notice : — Man, being by nature religious, began by a religious explanation of nature. To assume, as is often done, that man had no religious consciousness to begin with, and that the misfortunes which befell him inspired him with fear, and fear led him to propitiate the malignant beings whom he imagined to be the causes of his suffering, fails to account for the very thing it is intended to explain — namely, the existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant beings : it does not account for the grateful worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man finds in that worship. As we have seen, Dr. Jevons himself had at the outset plainly posited what he now describes as a fallacious assumption. On his prior showing, man's experience of apparent hostility in Nature first called forth" his belief in supernatural power. The inter posed phrase, ' was not created but," looks like an after attempt to reconcile the earlier proposition with the later. But there is no real reconciliation, for Dr. Jevons thus sets up only the vain suggestion that the primitive man was from the first conscious of the existenoe of good supernatural powers but did not think they did him any good — another collapse in countersense — or else the equally unmanage able notion that primitive man recognised helpful supernatural beings, but was not grateful to them for their help. That the argument has not been scientifically conducted is further clear from the use now of the expression " superstitious dread "as the equivalent of " fear," while " grateful worship " stands for " satis faction." Why " superstitious dread " and not " superstitious grati tude " ? A scientific inquiry wiU treat the phenomena on a moral par, and will at this stage simply put aside the term " superstition," It is relevant only as imputing a superior degree of gratuitousness of belief (whether by way of fear or of satisfaction) at a comparatively i Work cited, p. 410. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 9 advanced state of culture. To call a savage superstitious when he fears a God, and religious when he thanks one, is not only to warp the science of religion " at the start, but to block even the purpose in view, for, as we have seen, Dr. Jevons is constrained by his own motive of edification to assume that the benignant God ought by rights to be sometimes feared. §4. Putting aside as unscientific all such prejudgments, and leaving the professed religionist his personal remedy of discriminating finally between "true" and "false" religion, let us begin at the beginning by noting that " religious consciousness " can intelligibly mean only a given direction of consciousness. And if we are to make any consistent specification of the point at which conscious ness begins to be religious, we shall put it impartially in simple animism — the spontaneous surmise, seen to be dimly made or makable even by animals, " that not only animals and plants, but inanimate things, may possess life." Dr. Jevons rightly points out1 that this primary notion ' neither proceeds from nor implies nor accounts for belief in the swperaatural " ; and he goes on to show (developing here the doctrine which he ultimately repudiates) how the latter notion would arise through man's connecting with certain agencies or spirits " the frustrative or molestive power " which he had already found to exercise an unexpected and irresistible control over his destiny." "In this way," continues Dr. Jevons, suddenly granting much more than he need or ought, "the notion of super natural power, which originally was purely negative and manifested itself merely in suspending or counteracting the uniformity of nature, came to have a positive content." From this point, as might have been divined, the argument becomes confused to the last degree. We have been brought to the supernatural as a primitive product of (a) the recognition of irregular and frustrative forces in nature, and (6) the identification of them as personalities or spirits like man. But immediately, in the interests of another preconception, the theorist proceeds in effect to cancel this by arguing that, when men resort to magic, the idea of the super natural has disappeared. His proposition is that " the belief in the supernatural was prior to the belief in magic, and that the latter, whenever it sprang up, was a degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion,"2 inasmuch as it assumed man's power to control the forces of Nature by certain stratagems. And as he argues at the 1 P. 22. 2 p. 25, 10 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION same time that " religion and magic had different origins, and were always essentially distinct from one another," it is implied that religion began in that belief in a (frustrative) supernatural which is asserted to have preceded magic. That is to say, religion began in the recognition of hostile or dangerous powers. Now, a logically vigilant investigator would either not have said that belief in a supernatural was constituted by the recognition of hostile personal forces in Nature, or, having said it, would have granted that magic was an effort to circumvent supernatural as well as other forces. Dr. Jevons first credits the early savage with, among other things, a conception of supernatural power which excluded the idea of man's opposition, and then with the power so to transform his first notion as to see in the so-called supernatural merely forms of Nature. An intellectual process achieved in the civilised world only as a long and arduous upward evolution on scientific lines is thus supposed to have been more or less suddenly effected as a mere matter either of ignorant downward drift or of perverse experiment by primeval man, or at least by savage man, It is not easy to be more arbitrary in the way of hypothesis. Combating the contrary view, which makes magic prior to religion, Dr. Jevons writes : — To read some writers, who derive the powers of priests (and even of the gods) from those of the magician, and who consider apparently that magic requires no explanation, one would imagine that the savage, surrounded by supernatural powers and a prey to supernatural terrors, one day conceived the happy idea that he too would himself exercise supernatural power — and the thing was done : sorcery was invented, and the rest of the evolution of religion follows without difficulty.1 It is difficult to estimate the relevance of this criticism without knowing the precise expressions which provoked it ; but as regards any prevailing view of evolution it is somewhat pointless. " One day" is not the formula of evolutionary conceptions. But Dr. Jevons's own doctrine, which is to the effect that magical rites arose by way of parody of worship-rites after the latter had for ages been in undisputed possession, suggests just such a catastrophic conception as he imputes. Eejecting the obvious evolutionary hypothesis that explicit magic and explicit religion so-called arose confusedly together — that magic employs early religious machinery because it is but a contemporary expression of the state of mind in which religion rises and roots — he insists that magic cannot have been tried save by way of late " parody," in an intellectual atmosphere 1 Pp. 35, 36. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 11 which, nevertheless, he declares to be extremely conservative,1 and which is therefore extremely unlikely to develop such parodies.2 Dr. Jevons's doctrinal motive, it is pretty clear, is his wish to relieve " religion " of the discredit of " magic," even as he finally and remorsefully seeks to relieve it of the discredit of originating in "fear." Having no such axe to grind, the scientific inquirer might here offer to let " religion " mean anything Dr. Jevons likes, if he will only stick to one definition. But science must stipulate for some term to designate a series of psychological processes which originate in the same order of cognitions and conceptions, on the same plane of knowledge, and have strictly correlative results in action. And as such a term would certainly have to be applied sooner or later to much of what Dr. Jevons wants to call " religion," we may just as well thrash out the issue over that long-established name. § 5. The need for an understanding becomes pressing when we compare with the conceptions of Dr. Jevons those of Dr. J. G. Frazer, as set forth in the revised edition of his great work, The Golden Bough. Having before the issue of his first edition " failed, perhaps inexcusably," he modestly avows, " to define even to myself my notion of religion," he was then " disposed to class magic loosely under it as one of its lower forms." Now he has "come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. E. B. Jevons in recognising a funda mental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion."3 On this view he defines religion as " a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. In this sense," he adds, " it will readily be perceived that religion is opposed in principle both to magic and to science." The first comment on such a proposition is that it all depends on what you mean by " principle." If religion means only the act of propitiation and conciliation of certain alleged powers, its " principle " may be placed either in the hope that such propitiation will succeed or in the feeling that it ought to be tried. In either case, the accuracy of the proposition is far from clear. But we 1 P. 36. 2 Dr. Jevons has latterly (Sociological Beview, April, 1908) treated the problem in a very lucid essay on "The Definition of Magic," in which he discusses the positions of Dr. Frazer, MM. Hubert and Mauss, and Professor Wundt. He sums up, without dogmatism. on the side of the view of Wundt, which, as I understand it, is in harmony with that set forth in these pages, and is certainly in apparent opposition to that of Dr. Jevons as here criticised. I infer that Dr. Jevons has now modified his theory, but leave my discussion standing, for what it is worth. [Note to 2nd ed.'] . s Golden Bough, 2nd ed., pref., p. xvi, and i, 63, note. 4 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. 1, 63. 12 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION must widen the issue. It will be seen that Dr. Erazer's formal definition of religion is as inadequate as that implied in the argument of Dr. Jevons, though his practical handling of the case is finally the more scientific. On the above definition, belief is no part of religion;1 and neither is gratitude; though fear may be held to be implied in propitiation. Further, religion has by this definition nothing to do with ethics; and even conduct shaped by way of simple obedience to a God's alleged commands is barely recognised under the head of " propitiation." Finally, a theist who has ever so reverently arrived at the idea of an All- wise Omnipotence which needs not to be propitiated or conciliated, has on Dr. Frazer's definition ceased to be religious. It will really not do. I am not here pressing for a wider definition, as do some professed rationalists, by way of securing for my own philosophy or ethic the prestige of a highly respectable name; nor do I even endorse their claim as for themselves. I simply urge that as a matter of scientific convenience and consistency the word must be allowed to cover at least the bulk of the phenomena to which it has immemorially been applied. Where Dr. Frazer by his definition makes religion " nearly unknown " to the Australian, because the Australian (mainly for lack of the wherewithal) does not sacrifice,2 Mr. Lang ascribes to them a higher or deeper religious feeling on that very account. Such chaos of definition must be averted by a more comprehensive theory. Whether or not we oppose magic to religion, we cannot exclude from the latter term the whole process of non- propitiatory religious ethic, of thanksgiving ritual, and of cosmo- logical doctrine. Later we shall have to deal with Dr. Jevons's attempt to withdraw the term from theistic philosophy and from mythology ; but we may provisionally insist that emotional resigna tion to " the divine will " is in terms of all usage whatsoever a religious phenomenon. It remains to consider the alleged severance between religion and magic. It is interesting to find Dr. Jevons and Dr. Frazer here partially at one, as against the general opinion of anthropologists. That may be cited from a theologian, Professor T. W. Davies, in whose doctoral thesis on Magic, Divination, and Demonology—i performance both learned and judicious— it is argued that "all 1 A similar criticism, I find, is passed by Mr. Lang (Magic and Belinim, iom Tin 48 49 etc.) who.seeks to turn Dr. Frazer's oversight to the account of huX'nTheo^y of' In occult primeval but non-primitive monotheism. It is doubly unfortnnntn that Dr fionaeiismerr0rShOUld ^™ ** ^^ *° S6Bm Part °* the ^SSSlSS'SJS^Sta^tS 3 Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i, 71. 8 The Making of Beligion : cp. Magic and Beligion, passim. <; THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 13 magic is a sort of religion."1 Dr. Frazer, while agreeing with Dr. Jevons that they are " opposed," differs from him in holding that magic preceded religion; and by an odd fatality Dr. Frazer con tradicts himself as explicitly as does Dr. Jevons. After avowing the belief that " in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion,"2 he also avows that the antagonism between the two seems to have made its appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined, or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose, man wooed the good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in the same breath, knowing or recking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he contrived to get what he wanted.3 Proceeding with his ostensible support of the thesis that magic preceded religion, Dr. Frazer, in his admirably learned way, gives us fresh illustrations of the "same confusion of magic and religion" in civilised and uncivilised peoples.4 From Dr. Oldenberg he cites the observation that " the ritual of the very sacrifices for which the metrical prayers were composed is described in the older Vedic texts as saturated from beginning to end with magical practices which were to be carried out by the sacrificial priests " ; and that the Brahmanic rites of marriage initiation and king-anointing " are complete models of magic of every kind, and in every case the form of magic employed bears the stamp of the highest antiquity."5 From Sir Gaston Maspero he accepts the weighty reminder that in regard to ancient Egypt we ought not to attach to the word " magic " the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity ; and this arrest could only be effected by means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do what was demanded of him.6 A closely similar state of things is seen in the practice of the Maoris, who, when using coercive spells " to compel the Gods to 1 Work cited, pp. 1, 3. 2 Pref ., p. xvii ; cp. i, 70. 8 i, 64-65. i See his previous instances, pp. 19, 33, 45. s Oldenberg, Die Beligion des Veda, pp. 59, 477. Bef . also to pp. 311, 369, 476, 522. 6 Maspero, Etudes de mytholoaie et d'archiologie igyvtienne, i, 106. Cp. Dr. Frazer's further citations from Brman and Wiedemann, to the same effect ; and see Budge, Intr. to trans, of Book of the Dead, p. cxlvii.; Davies, Magic, Divination, and Demonology, 1898, p. 2 ; and Hillebrandt, Bitual-literatur, 1897, p. 167 sq., there cited. 14 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION yield to their wishes, added sacrifices and offerings at the same time to appease as it were their anger for being thus constrained." And the missionary who on these data represents the Maoris as rather coercing their Gods than praying to them, puts their usage on all fours with that of many French Catholics. To all this, obviously, Dr. Jevons may reply that it does not prove the priority of magic to religion.2 Neither, however, does it give any basis for Dr. Jevons's thesis of the secondariness of magic. It simply sets forth that in the earliest available records, as in the practice of contemporary savages, magic so-called and propitiatory religion so-called co-exist and cohere. In Dr. Frazer's own wordB, they were not yet differentiated from each other — differentiated, that is, in the moral estimate of priest and worshipper. But in the terms of the proposition, the practice of propitiation was there; and there is nothing to show that it was a late variation on confident magic. On the other hand, the documentary evidence, so far as it goes, is in favour of the priority of magic so-called. " The magical texts formed the earliest sacred literature of Chaldaea. This fact remains unshaken."8 What, then, becomes of the argument that magic and religion so-called are " opposed " because they are logically inconsistent with each other ? Like Dr. Jevons, Dr. Frazer makes a good deal of the theoretic analogy of magic with science, both being alleged to rest upon the assumption of the "uniformity of nature" and "the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically."4 Now, while we need not hesitate to see in magic in particular, even as in religion in general, man's early gropings towards science, we must not let ourselves be by a mere verbalism confused as to what magic is. Obviously it does not assume the uniformity of nature ; inas much as it assumes to control nature by different devices, framing i Bev. B. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui: or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, pp. 18W. Cp. p. 102 as to prayers and medicine. ^" a For that thesis there is some support in the testimonies which limit the •religion"of some primitive tribes to a few forms of magic. According to Messrs. Spencer and GiUeu there is hardly anything else m the mental apparatus of manv trihe.«,«« 1898, PP. 253-4; O. Weber, Die Literatur der BabyTonir^Afsy^^p^ A "W * Dr. Frazer further writes (p. 61) that in both " the elements of ™«ii!.i' Sf Th".,.. .„,* of accident are banished from the course of nature™ Th tei? a furthe »;S* ."^ffitEi logical confusion. Magic certainly recognises "caprice" in its ''nature- ?„3 T «S2 certainly notes "chance "and "accident," which are not neaStion» nf w ' \ , T. uniformity of nature. Where could science place them ZtiK a?,Pe0tS 0,,'« them ; and if she does not recognise them, how can sheYame o? ban?shthsS? T.°£T, scientific force of the terms, op. the author's Letters on Seasoning vii ' As THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 15 new procedures where the old fail. It does not even invariably assume strict uniformity in the magical processus itself ; but that is the one sort of uniformity of cause and effect that the magician as such approaches to conceiving. Now, this conception connects much less with that of what we may term the normal relation of man to nature than with that of his relation to the sets of forces apprehended by late thought as " spiritual," but by early thought merely as unseen. Early man, presumably, had a normal notion of the process of breaking a stone or killing a foe ; and there if anywhere lay the beginnings of his science. As Adam Smith put it, "Fire burns and water refreshes, heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature ; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters."1 As Comte put it, primitive man never made a god of weight.2 But even as he thought the invisible or inferrible personalities could do many kinds of " great " things, so he thought that, by taking pains, he could ; inasmuch as he never clearly differentiated them from himself in nature and capacity. Thus his magic was part of his way of thinking about what was for him the occult " or inferred side of things, which way of thinking as a whole was his religion. To speak in terms of Dr. Jevons's primary position, he was as magician interfering with the sequences of nature as he supposed the occult personalities did. On yet another ground, we are disallowed from charging incon sistency on primitive or ancient religious thought in respect of divergences from later conceptions. One of the more notable of those divergences is the idea that the Gods themselves are subject to the course of Nature, or the law of Fate : it is reached by modern redskins, as it was by some ancient Egyptians,4 and it stands out from the religious speculation of ancient Greece.5 In both stages it is compatible with propitiation ; and yet it gives a quasi-logical basis for the resort to magic, regarded as a temporary circumvention of the law of things. So with the belief in opposed deities : even if 1 Essay on the History of Astronomy, sect. iii. a Philosophie Positive, 4e ed. iv, 491. 8 J. G. Midler, Geschichie der Amerikanischen Vrreligionen, ed. 1867, p. 149. * Prof. Erman, Handbook of Egyptian Beligion, Eng. trans. 1907, pp. 91, 255. 5 Herodotus, i, 91 ; Homer, Iliad, xiv, 434-442 ; Philemon ap. Stobaei Serm. lxii, 8 ; Aeschylus, Prom. Vinct. 908-927; Diogenes Laert. vii, 74 (149) ; ix, 6 (7) ; Clemens Alexand. Stromata, v, 14 ; Plutarch, De Exilio, xi ; De Defectu Orac. xxviii-xxix ; De Stoic. Bepug- nant. xxxiv; De Placitis Philos. i, § 7, 17 ; ii, 25-28; Aulus Gellius, vi, 1, 2 ; Seneca, De Proyidentia, v, 5-7 ; Cicero, De Divinatione, ii, 10. A history of the discussion on the , subject seems wanting. Cp. H. N. Coleridge, Introduction to the Study of the Greek Classic 'Poets, Pt. i, 2nd ed. 1834, pp. 184-187 : and Ueberweg, History of Philosophy, Eng. trans, i, 1 194-196. V. Fabricius, in his essay De Jove et Fato in P. Vergili Aeneide (1896, p. 21), sums :up: Nullo Vergili carminis loco Jovem fato subiectum esse plane ac Clare dici nobis 'confitendum est. Sunt quidem nonnulla qulbus Jovis potentia et fati vis simul dominari videntur." This coincides with the summary of H. N. Coleridge as to Homer, 16 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION none be regarded as evil, like Ahriman, there is nothing specially inconsistent in a magic that seeks to employ a power of which, in the terms of the case, no deity has a monopoly. On this basis poly theism offers an easy way out of the indictment for inconsistency. When Porphyry asked Abammon, " Does not he who says he will burst the heavens, or reveal the secrets of Isis, or expose the arcanum in the adytum, or scatter the members of Osiris to Typhon — does not he who says this, by thus threatening what he knows not and cannot do, prove himself grossly foolish?" — the sage answers with confi dence that such threats are used against not any of the celestial Gods but a lower order of powers, and that the theurgist commands these as existing superior to them in the order of the Gods," and possessing power " through a union with the Gods " in virtue of his magic.1 That is, of course, a late and sophisticated account of the matter : the earlier theologian simply did not realise that any charge of inconsistency could arise. In any case, the Old Testament abounds in cases of sympathetic magic : the sprinkling of the blood of the hallowed sacrifice upon the ears and thumbs and toes of the priests ;J the holding up of the arms of Moses,8 in the attitude of the Sun-God and War-God Mithra,4 to sway the battle ; the sending forth of the scape-goat ;5 the blowing of the trumpets before the walls of Jericho;6 , the raising of the widow's son by Elijah, " stretching himself upon the child three times "7 — all these are acts neither of prayer nor of propitiation, but of sympathetic magic, " which is the germ of all magic "; and the theorist may be defied to show that they stood for a " degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion."8 If, indeed, he could show it, he would be putting a rod in pickle for his theory of the super-excellence of Hebrew monotheism, which evolved itself with these accompaniments. The early priest, then, is to be called inconsistent in his resort to magic only on the view that he had the definite modern conception of the Omnipotence of a supernatural power ; and this he simply had not. It is, then,^quite beside the case to argue, as does even Dr. Frazer,9 that "the fatal flaw of magic lies in its total mis conception of the particular laws which govern" natural sequences. That is not a differentiation between magic and religion ; for the " religious " conception that nature is to be affected by propitiating 1 Jamblichus, De Mysteriis, Ep. Porph. and vi 5-7 It ia nnlowmti,- «. 4 j- ¦..„ Abammon the Chaldeans never use ^^^^T^^I^X i Zendavesta, Mihir Yasht, xxxi, 5 Lev. xvi' ' e Ex', xvi*' 9~13- 7 1 K^SS xvii, 21. B jevons, Introd. pp. 25, 35. I ff°S|.' ¦> THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 17 unseen powers is just as fatally wrong ; and it arose in the same fashion by association of ideas," men assuming that nature was ruled by a personality like themselves. Why, then, is the "flaw" dwelt upon ? If it be to prepare for the view that at a certain stage a portion of mankind began to " abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake themselves to religion instead,"1 the answer is that on Dr. Frazer's own showing men for whole ages practised both concurrently ; a and that in the terms of the case they are as likely to have taken to magic because prayer failed as vice versa. Dr. Frazer, indeed, only diffidently suggests that " a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account." But by his own showing he has no right to this hypo thesis even on an avowal of diffidence. As well might the contrary theory of Dr. Jevons be supported by the suggestion that the inherent falsehood and barrenness of the theory of prayer and propitiation set the more resourceful part of mankind on a more effectual control of nature by way of magic.3 Had not men all along been trying both ? Equally untenable, surely, is the distinction drawn by Dr. Frazer4 between "the haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs," and the attitude of the priest " with his awful sense of the divine majesty and his humble prostration in presence of it." Dr. Frazer can hardly mean to be ironical ; but his words may very well serve to convey such a sense when applied to the attitude of the priesthoods of all ages, Brahmanical8 or Papal, Semitic or Aryan. It would be difficult to distinguish in the matter of modesty between Moses6 and the magicians of Pharaoh, or Samuel and the Witch of Endor, or Elijah and the priests of Baal, or an 'excommunicating and flag-blessing bishop and an incantating wizard. 1 Gf. B. i, 75. 3 See for further instances in Babylonian practice, Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 316- 319. Compare Dr. Frazer's Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, pp. 46, j94, for instances of late combinations of " magic " with " religion " ; and p. 97 for an instance among contemporary primitives. |i 8 Cp. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, 2nd ed. iv, 294-5, where it is noted that the islanders ( try different priests and sorcerers as more civilised people try different doctors. The "sorcerers were a distinct class among the priests of the island ; and their art appears to .claim equal antiquity with the other parts of that cruel system of idolatry," etc. (Cp. i, 6379; iii, 36-37.) The difference is simply socio-political: the sorcerer is an independent performer who does not run a God or a temple. * G. B. i, 64. Contrast Erman, Handbk. of Eg. Bel., p. 148. * Cp. Dr. Frazer's own citations as to the Brahmans, G. B. i, 145-6. :' ' And the Lord said unto Moses, See, I have made thee a God to Pharaoh," Exodus jvii, 1. Cp. xvii, 11; xviii, 15, etc. Steinthal's theory (Essay on Prometheus, Eng. tr. by ,-B. Martineau in vol. with Goldziher, p. 392), that from the Yahwist point of view Moses must ultimately die for playing the heathen God in bringing water from the rock, will (inardly consist with such passages. C 18 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION All the while we have Dr. Frazer's own assurance that for long ages the priest was the magician. If, seeking to form a just judgment, we turn to actual evidence for the attitude of the primitive magician, it lies to our hand in Livingstone's account of the negro rain-doctors of Bechuanaland, Here we have a typical dialogue between the missionary and the magician. The latter complained in friendly fashion to the mis sionary, " You see we never get rain, while those tribes who never pray as we do [i.e., Christian fashion] obtain abundance." "This," the missionary confesses, " was a fact ; and we often saw it raining on the hills ten miles off, while it would not look at us ' even with one eye.' " When the rain-doctor set to work, on the score that " the whole country needs the rain I am making," there ensues the argument : — " M.D. [i.e., Livingstone] . So you really believe that you can command the clouds ? I think that can be done by God alone. " Bain Doctor. We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I pray to him by means of these medicines, and, the rain coming, of course it is then mine " M.D. But we are distinctly told in the parting words of our Saviour that we can pray to God acceptably in his name ' alone, and not by means of medicines. " B.D. Truly ! but God told us differently. He made black men first, and did not love us as he did the white men Other tribes place medicines about our country to prevent the rain, so that we may be dispersed by hunger and go to them and augment their power. We must dissolve their charms by our medicines. God has given us one little thing which you know nothing of. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can make rain. We do not despise those things which you possess, though we are ignorant of them. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, though you are ignorant of it." " This [adds Livingstone] is a brief specimen of their mode of reasoning, which is often remarkably acute. I never suc ceeded in convincing a single individual of the fallacy of his belief ; and the usual effect of discussion is to produce the impression that you yourself are not anxious for rain."1 Quite so. How could the missionary hope to convince the rain- needy? Delusion for delusion, which was the more "religious"? And which was the plainer " fallacy " of the two fashions of prayer? The true solution of the problem is that set forth in the essay 1 Missionary Travels and Besearches in South Africa, ed. 1861, pp. 17, 18 (ed. 1905, p. 16). THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 19 Sur le totemisme of M. Durkheim,1 who may be supposed to speak for scientific sociology if any one does. In that essay he deals incidentally with the view of Dr. Frazer that the Australian Aruntas2 are at the stage of pure magic, not having yet reached religion. Dr. Jevons, on the contrary, would regard them as truly religious in respect of their totem sacrament. M. Durkheim, applying the inductive method, notes indeed3 that the life of the Aruntas is " stamped with religiosity, and that this religiosity is in origin essentially totemic "; but he adds : " The territory is covered with sacred trees, and groves, and mysterious grottos, where are piously preserved the objects of the cult. None of those sacred places is approached without a religious terror." And he concludes : " What is essential is that the rites of the Aruntas are at all points com parable to those which are found in systems incontestably religious : then they proceed from the same ideas and the same sentiments ; and it is arbitrary to refuse them the same title." The final condemnation of Dr. Frazer's definition, however, is, as we shall see cause later to say of that of Dr. Jevons, that in strictness it ignores the bulk of the religious life of mankind. He himself avows that only a part of mankind has ever abandoned magic and taken to "religion instead." In his own words, magic is a "universal faith," a "truly Catholic creed";4 and he might, without extending his ample anthropological learning, further establish this fact by reference to current religion. If religion is to mean only the ideas of " the more thoughtful part of mankind," we shall simply be committed to a new inquiry as to who are the more thoughtful ; and the agnostic will have something to say on that head. Are they the believers in the efficacy of prayer ? Insofar as such believers profess belief in an Omnipotent and Unchanging Providence, they stultify their theistic creed as vitally as ever did the magician. Prayer presupposes the changeableness of a Divine will declared to be unchangeable. Then prayer, like magic, is funda- ; mentally opposed to belief in an omnipotent deity ! Where shall : we stop? Dr. Frazer6 supposes the reader to ask, "How was it that intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic?"; , and he thoughtfully and rightly answers that before the age of . science it was really not easy to detect. But he could hardly say as much of prayer, whereof the " fallacy " was detected among > \ L' Annie Sociologique, Se annie, 1902. 2 Described by Messrs. Spencer and Gillen (in their Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899). ( 8 P. 87. * Id. i, It. •> Id. i, 78. 20 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION Hebrews and heathens thousands of years ago. Yet by his definition the contemporary believer in prayer is religious and the ancient worshipper of Isis was not. On such principles there can be no science of religion whatever, any more than there is a science of orthodoxy. In order to classify the very phenomena with which Dr. Frazer mainly occupies himself, we should have to create a new set of terms for nine-tenths of them, recognising " religion " only as a certain procedure that chronically obtruded itself among them. And then would come Dr. Jevons to explain that this religion was not a religion at all, inasmuch as it resulted from a process of reasoning ! Science, then, is driven to reject both apriorisms alike, and to proceed to find a definition by way of a loyal induction. §6. As thus. In terms of many observations, and of some of Dr, Jevons's admissions, we are led to realise that the idea of what we term " the supernatural " not only does not mean for primitive man a consistent distinction : it does not mean it for civilised man. Yet the logical burden of Dr. Jevons's as of Dr. Frazer's indictment against magic is simply that it is inconsistent1 with the admission i of the "superiority" — the " super "-ness — of the "divine" to the human. For the purpose of his plea, he necessarily ignores the salient historical fact made clear by Dr. Frazer, that men have abundantly practised magic towards the very Gods to whom they prayed, and whose " supernaturalness " they not only avowed but believed in to the extent of holding them " immortal." Assyrian, Egyptian, and Indian religious literatures alike are full of cases of such practice. It may be argued that that is still an imperfect conception of " the supernatural ": that the consistent conception requires the ascription of eternity, of omnipotence, of uncreatednessi of never-having-begun. But then men have also humbly prayed) without thought of magic, to Gods to whom they were grateful and whom they believed to be suffering sons of older Gods ; and these attitudes of mind Dr. Jevons has fully certificated as " religious." But, again, men have similarly prayed to mere " saints." What degree, then, of recognition of superiority is to be regarded as con stituting recognition of " the " supernatural ? One is moved to ask, 1 Dr. Jevons distinguishes between "sympathetic magic" (exemplified in "killing the God ",and other devices to produce fertility, rain, etc.) and " art magic." The former, he says, "does not involve in itself the idea of the supernatural, but was simply the applied science of the savage." Art magic, he says, " is the exercise by man of powers which are supernatural— i.e., of powerB which by their definition it is beyond man to exercise ThuB the very conception of magic is one which is essentiauy inconsistent with itself " (p 35). THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 21 What is the theorist's own conception of "the supernatural"? and, What does he mean by the term when he speaks of " supernatural terrors "? When the critic is himself so far from a clear definition, it is very obviously a mere rhetorical device to say that for the magic- monger the conception of the supernatural " by definition " is incon sistent with his practice. He had never given any definition;1 neither had the " religious man " who is alleged to have preceded him ; and it was simply impossible that they should. The a priori argument against him is thus irrelevant from the start, no less than the a posteriori ; and both are further negligible as being inferribly motived by a non-scientific purpose. The right view is to be reached on another line. Proceeding on the clear lines of human psychology, we can be absolutely certain of this, that a savage may alternately seek to propitiate and seek to coerce or circumvent a human enemy whom he regards as normally stronger than himself. As Dr. Jevons notes, savage hunters on killing a bear will use a ritual to propitiate the bear clan. As he is well aware, Brahmans and other priests have taught that an ascetic or a ritualist can by his practices gain power to coerce or command the highest Gods,2 to whom ordinary men can but pray. Such a notion, he argues, is a negation of a super natural in that it assumes the Gods to be subject to an order of causation which man can control. But, once more, is it not equally a negation of a supernatural to assume, as the highest religions have done and do, that man can persuade the God by prayer, or propitiate him by confession and sacrifices, or keep him friendly by professing esteem and gratitude ? Is not every one of these acts an assumption that the God's moral and mental processes are on a par with those of men, and that he is merely stronger than they ? So considered, in what sense is he supernatural? And is not the inconsistency gross when men at once practise prayer and ascribe to their deity fore-ordination of all things ? It is not too much to say that the procedure by which Dr. Jevons classifies magic as anti- religious must logically end in so classing every historic religion, and 1 In the Egyptian system, magic was normally operated through a God or Goddess (usually Isis) who " delivers the sick and suffering from the gods and goddesses who afflict them" (Benouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 212). It was thus on the same moral plane with not only the religion of the Homeric Greeks but that of Catholic Christianity, in which the saints are separately invoked and the will of Mary is practically omnipotent. So with the virtue of the words of Thoth, and of the names of the Gods (Budge, Introd. pp. cxlviii-ix, clxv) : similar beliefs were held by the Jews and by the Christian Father Origen. 2 See Bhys Davids's Buddhism, 10th ed. p. 34. and American Lectures on Buddhism, p. 103; Frazer, as cited above; Granger, The Worship of the Bomans, 1895, pp. 290-1; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 335. 22 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION leaving the title to the name vested solely in professed Agnostics and Atheists. Some reasoners have actually so allotted the term ; but that conclusion will scarcely suit Dr. Jevons's book, so to speak. In view of the whole facts, the terms " belief in the supernatural " must be recognised as signifying for practical purposes merely belief in a personal power that is superhuman, or rather extra-human, yet quasi-human. And such powers are the Gods alike of the earliest savage and the contemporary Christian, the humble offerer of prayer and the practiser of magic. The offerer of prayer, it is true, remains substantially the original type, loyally prostrate before power; civilisation having developed the original docility of the cowed savage through the deadly discipline of great despotisms. On the other hand, the magician of the past has either succumbed to that discipline or developed into the man of science — a function which he finds the worshipper of power often sharing with him. But just as they can so coincide now in practice, they coincided at the start in psychology. This view of the case finally follows from another of Dr. Jevons's most definite positions ; for he repeatedly describes the primitive " sacramental meal " as truly religious, in that it is a " higher " form of sacrifice than the mere gift-sacrifice, being a means of communion with the God, who actually joined in the meal. He does not deny it the title of " religion " even when it involves the conception that in the sacramental meal the God is actually eaten.1 In each of these cases the worshipper certainly believed he had acquired a force not previously his own, even as does the practiser of magic ; while the eating of the God is the reductio ad absurdum of his " superiority." Here, then, is even a more complete stultification of the logical idea of the supernatural than is committed by the magician, and it is actually made to validate the " religion " of the sacrificer as against the anti-religion of the magic-monger. § 7. This contradiction naturally reiterates itself in Dr. Jevons's treatise at a hundred points : being fundamental, it strikes through the entire argument. While premising that religion is " universally human," and finally contending that man is " by nature religious," and therefore "began by a religious explanation of nature,"2 he pronounces8 that " four-fifths of mankind, probably, believe in sympathetic magic," which, he declares, not only " does not involve in itself the idea of the supernatural,"4 but is "hostile from the 1 Pp. 224, 295. 2 P. 410. Cp. pp. 7, 9. 8 P, 33. 4 p. 35, THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 23 beginning"1 to religion, and is the "negation" thereof.2 While affirming that the belief in the supernatural (= religion) was prior to magic, he explains8 that it was man's " intellectual helplessness in grappling with the forces of nature which led him into the way of religion " {i.e., the way in which he began, before he had tried his intellect), and, again, that religion led certain men out of magic, though at the same time they were converted by simply seeing that magic is inefficacious. Again, reverting for one purpose to his original doctrine of the primacy of fear, Dr. Jevons writes4 : — Magic is, in fact, a direct relapse into the state of things in which man found himself when he was surrounded by supernatural beings, none of which was bound to him by any tie of goodwill, with none of which had he any stated relations, but all were uncertain, capricious, and caused in him unreasoning terror. This reign of terror magic tends to re-establish, and does re-establish, wherever the belief in magic prevails.6 A few chapters further on, discussing fire-festivals and water rites, without asking wherein they psychologically differ from sacramental meals, he writes6 : — If we regard those fire-festivals and water rites as pieces of sympathetic magic, they are clear instances in which man imagines himself able to constrain the gods — in this case the god of vegetation — to subserve his own ends. Now, this vain imagination is not merely non-religious, but anti- religious ; and it is difficult to see how religion could have been developed out of it. It is inconsistent with the abject fear which the savage feels of the supernatural, and which is sometimes supposed to be the origin of religion ; and it is inconsistent with that sense of man's dependence on a superior being which is a real element in religion. The contradiction is absolute. For one purpose, magic is declared to restore the primary reign of terror ; for another purpose it is declared to be incompatible with a reign of terror, which is now at once implied and denied to be the primary state. We are in fine told that the savage does and does not fear a " supernatural." Another series of contradictions is set up by the theorist's deter mination at certain points so to define religion "as to secure a unique status for Judaism and Christianity — a breach of scientific method on all fours with his dichotomy of religion and magic. Dealing with the Egyptian conception of a future state, and noting how the first chapter of the Book of the Dead promises a future life which simply repeats the earthly, he declares that " no higher or 1 P. 38. a P. 178. " Fundamentally irreligious " is the expression in the Index. 8 P. 21. * P. 177. • On p. 290 Dr. Jevons notes how the Indians of Guiana would live in terror of wizards were it not for the protection of other wizards. Here things are balanced 1 Is magic, then, anti-magical? e P. 233. 24 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION more spiritual ideal entered or could enter into the composition of the Egyptian abode of bliss, because its origin was essentially non- religious."1 Such being, however, the nature of the conception of the future life entertained by at least nine-tenths of the human race, savage and civilised, we are here again asked to associate the "universally human" influence with only a fraction of ostensible religious doctrine on one of the most specifically religious topics. In the same fashion every modification of religious doctrine under the influence of political and religious thought is classed as non-religious. Thus, we are told2 that " the eschatology of the Egyptian and Indian religions was not generated by the religious spirit, but was due to the incorporation of early philosophical specu lations into those religions." Further (in flat defiance of Mr. Lang's doctrine as to the primary and pious character of savage Supreme Gods), Dr. Jevons lays it down that the idea of a Supreme God, at the head of a pantheon, " is scarcely a religious idea at all ; it is not drawn from the spiritual depths of man's nature ; it is a conception borrowed from politics ";s and pantheism in turn " is a metaphysical speculation, not a fact of which the religious consciousness has direct intuition."4 The upshot is that only that idea is religious which " proceeds from an inner consciousness " of connection with or perception of deity : there must be no process of reasoning, no philosophy, no criticism. Dr. Frazer's view of religion as beginning in criticism of magic is ruled out as Dr. Frazer ruled out magic itself. And if it should be supposed that on this definition primary animism is clearly religious, Dr. Jevons has his veto ready : " In animism man projects his own personality on to external nature ; in religion he is increasingly [why only increasingly?] impressed by the divine personality."6 Now, postponing for the moment the scientific answer — the answer of elementary and ultimate psychology — to Dr. Jevons, we have only to turn to the next chapter of his own treatise to find him nullifying this stage of his definition as he has nullified every other. First we are asked to note that faith is not something peculiar or confined to religion, but is interwoven with every act of reason," and that " the period of faith does not terminate when the pupil has come to have immediate consciousness of the facts which he could not see." Next, we are assured7 that " the religious mind believes that all facts of which we have immediate consciousness can be reconciled with one another," and that " the religious faith which 1 P. 309. 2 P. 331. • P. 389. * Pp. 389-390. 6 p. 394, 6 p. ^g, 7 p. 407. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 25 looks forward to the synthesis of all facts in a manner satisfying to the reason covers a much larger area than either science or moral philosophy." Either, then, the religious person becomes utterly irreligious when he thus reasons beyond the immediate "facts," so-called, of his consciousness, or Dr. Jevons's definition of religion is once more cancelled by himself. If, again, we return to the chapter on " Taboo, Morality, and Beligion," where it is argued that religion rationalised taboo, we read that " when the taboos which receive the sanction of religion are regarded as reasonable, as being the commands of a being possessing reason, then the other taboos also may be brought to the test of reason." x On the later view, this is an essentially irreligious process. It is true that Dr. Jevons hastens to say,2 " Taboo has indeed been rationalised, but not in all cases by reason," and to urge8 that the prophets and other religious reformers who dis criminate between taboos " have usually considered themselves in so doing to be speaking, not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God " — that is, have spoken as do cannibal priests among Polynesians and the impostor priests of the Slave Coast.4 This, however, does not save his thesis from the fatal reproach of having explicitly admitted the element of reason for a moment into the religious process. And the lapse recurs, again with a contradiction. In the closing chapter we have from Dr. Jevons successively these three propositions : — A belief is an inference, and as such is the work of the reason. The reason endeavours to anticipate the movement of facts.5 It is an established fact of psychology that every act, mental or physical, requires the concurrence, not only of the reason and the will, but of emotion.6 Indeed, the reason of primitive man was ex hypothesi undeveloped ; and, in any case, religious belief is not an inference reached by reason, but is the immediate consciousness of certain facts.7 These internecine dicta are offered without apology or apparent misgiving as steps in a continuous process of argument. And just such another series occurs in the chapter in which Dr. Jevons undertakes to make out the characteristic thesis that " Mythology is not religion." In passing, and apart from the scientific rebuttal, it may be well to note that what Dr. Jevons calls " the extraordinary notion that mythology is religion,"8 has never been propounded by any writer in the only sense in which it would be either false or 1 P. 92. 2 P. 93. s P. 94. 4 See refs. in Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 84. Cp. Bev. B. Taylor, Te Dca a Maui : or. New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, p. 183, as to the Maoris. 6 P. 403, 6 P. 409. ' P. 410. 8 P. 266. 26 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION extraordinary— that is, that " mythology is the whole of religion." That it is an element in religion and an aspect or function of "the religious consciousness" is affirmed by Dr. Jevons himself in the very act of denying it. As thus : — Mythology was primitive man's romance, as well as his history, his science, his philosophy.1 The narratives in which primitive speculations [i.e., myths] were embodied were not merely intellectual exercises, nor the work of the abstract imagina tion : they reflect or express the mind of the author in its totality, for they are the work of a human being, not of a creature possessing reason and no morality, or imagination and no feeling In the same way, then, as the moral tone and temper of the author and his age makes itself felt in these primitive speculations, so will the religious spirit of the time Mythology is one of the spheres of human activity in which religion may manifest itself : one of the departments of human reason which religion may penetrate, suffuse, and inspire.* Mythology is primitive science [etcetera] , but it is not primitive religion. It is not necessarily or usually even religious. It is not the proper [!] or even the ordinary vehicle for the religious spirit. Prayer, meditation, devotional poetry, are the chosen vehicles in thought and word ; ritual in outward deed and act. Myths originate in a totally different psychological quarter : they are the work of the human reason, acting in accordance with the laws of primitive logic ; or are the outcome of the imagination, playing with the freedom of the poetic fancy. In neither ease are they primarily , the product of religious feeling : IT IS NOT THE FUNCTION OF FEELING TO DEAW INFEEENCES.8 It is here categorically asserted, first, that myths are not the work of any one side of the human personality — neither of reason without moral feeling nor of imagination without feeling." Finally, it is asserted that they are the work either of reason without feeling or of imagination without feeling. After the express denial that any human being can mythologise with one faculty only, and the necessary implication that religious feeling may " penetrate " the other faculties in the act of myth-making or myth-believing, we are told that myths originate in a " totally different psychological quarter " from the " religious spirit." As to the other italicised propositions, it may suffice at this point to note (1) that it is plainly wrong to say mythology is primitive science, history, etcetera, in the sense in which it is not {i.e., is not the whole of) primitive religion ; (2) that prayer and devotional poetry are normally full of myths ; (3) that ritual is in many cases conceived (though clearly not originated) by the worshipper as an imitation of an episode in the history of the God {i.e., a myth) ; and (4) that by explicitly reducing religion to 1 P- 263. 2 P. 264. s pp. 266-7. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 27 " feeling " Dr. Jevons, like Dr. Frazer, has eliminated every belief as such from religious consciousness. Tantum relligio ! §8. One sample more may suffice to complete the justification of our criticism that Dr. Jevons's interesting and suggestive treatise is flawed throughout by fatal contradiction. In discussing totemism, he certifies, first, the primitive belief of men in their descent from a totem animal as established or verified for them " in their inner experience — i.e., in the filial reverence and affection which they felt towards him,"1 thus salving as truly religious the grossest possible " projection of man's own personality " on Nature, while the spontaneous animism which early man shared with animals is denied the status of " direct consciousness." Then, taking the totemist's experience, thus highly classed, he writes : — Doubtless it was not all or most men who had this experience, or rather it was but few who attended to the feeling ; but the best must have paid heed to it and have found satisfaction in dwelling on it, else the conception of the deity would never have followed on the lime on which as a matter of fact it was developed.2 Turning to the chapter on " The Evolution of Belief," we have this almost flatly contrary deliverance : — The perpetuation of any variety [of belief] depends solely on the conditions under which it occurs : whatever varieties of belief are not favoured by the conditions, by their environment, will perish — the rest will survive (the surviving belief will not necessarily be that of the keenest-sighted man, but that which accords with what the average sight can see of ihe facts).* In another chapter, yet again, we have still a third view of the process of survival, and one which excludes both of the preceding. In order to credit to the " truly " religious principle the rationalisation of taboo, Dr. Jevons, as we said, claimed that the rationalisers con sidered themselves to be propounding "not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God " ; and he thereupon notes that "this belief has been shared by the community they addressed, otherwise the common man would not have gained the courage to break an ancient taboo. Certainly no mere appeal to reason would counterbalance that inveterate terror."4 On this view any dictum of any accredited priest would be decisive, irrespective of the " average sight "; and this despite of Dr. Jevons's refusal to recognise priestcraft as a factor in the creation of taboo in particular or religion in general. i P. 108. Compare this with the decision that a political mode of thought has no part in religion. 2 Pp. 108-109. * P. 398, l Pp. 94-95. 28 THE EATIONALE OE EELIGION A theory of religion which lands its framer in such a congeries of contradictions as these, I submit, is fully convicted of vital fallacy. And certainly the fallacy is not the result either of imperfect knowledge of the ground or of speculative incompetence : it stands visibly for the misguiding force of a false preconception or prejudice. On much of Dr. Jevons's book every student, I think, will put a very high estimate : it is studious, well-informed, original, independent in method and in doctrine, and, though deeply preju diced, nearly always temperate even when most fallacious. In places it reaches a really high level of scholarly and critical efficiency, notably in the chapter on " The Mysteries," where the tracing of the adoption and adaptation of the primary Eleusinian cult to the purposes of Athens and the cults of Demeter and Persephone is as satisfying as it is ingenious. Dr. Jevons is there thus successful, to my thinking, because he is on ground which he has surveyed dispassionately and scientifically, unaffected by his occultist predilections. It is when he has his eye on current religion and its line of descent that, omitting much of the due scholarly research and staking all on the vindication of his sympathies, he yields us a series of logical miscarriages fully as striking as his measure of success in his disinterested inquiry. Howsoever this may be, his series of contradictions leaps to the eyes ; and unless consistency is to be a burden only for the naturalists, unless the supernaturalist is to be let dogmatise in hierology as in religion on the basis of his mere "inner conscious ness," his main argument must simply be removed from the scientific field. § 9. The clear solution, as distinguished from the rebuttal, of all such contradictions is to recognise that, however we may grade religious conceptions and systems, they are all parts of one process, even as are political conceptions and systems. To say that magic is hostile to religion is like saying that either republicanism or monarchism is hostile to politics. For primitive man there are no conceptual divisions between religion and science, worship and art ; and the distinction between art-magic and sympathetic-magic — made after the express declaration that mere sympathetic magic was " the germ of all magic " — is an arbitrary stroke of pro-Christian classification, which, nonetheless, logically defeats its purpose. For the primitive sacramental meal was demonstrably on the plane of sympathetic magic inasmuch as, even when it did not kill the victim in a mimetic fashion, it was a making-friends with the God in the way of human THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 29 fraternisation ; and it is to this sacrament that Dr. Jevons, for obvious reasons, accords the special religious rank. It is worse than idle to seek to keep it on a plane apart by framing a formula of " direct consciousness " on the part of the worshippers that they were descended from an animal progenitor on the score that they felt filially towards him. The professed magic-monger's conscious ness was rather more direct than theirs. But the definitions them selves give up the case. " Applied science " is just " art," and " art-magic " is thus just a form of what Dr. Jevons calls sym pathetic-magic. Moreover, the ritual of supplication and gratitude, which he declares to be strictly religious, is visibly framed in the same spirit of expectation of profit as is seen in the magic ritual. A study of the human-sacrifice ritual of the Khonds, cited hereinafter, will make clear both the congruity and the conjunction. It is certainly true that the one ritual becomes hostile to the other when magic is practised by the sorcerer as an outsider, secretly competing with or undermining the priest.1 But in that sense any one religious system is hostile to any other in the same field ; and in the same sense heresy is hostile to orthodoxy, and dissent to the official cult, without ceasing to be a form of religion. Such a dis tinction is on all fours with that between "religion" and "super stition," disposed of by Hobbes as a mere marking off of the " allowed " belief from that " not allowed." If the alleged " hos tility " between religion and magic is reducible to a mere distinction between quasi-communal and individualistic sorcery, the whole dispute passes from the plane of psychological theory to that of simple sociological classification. We pass from a debate over a fallacy to a debate over a mere plea for a particular terminology. But now there arises a fresh fallacy of ethical discrimination. The communal sorcery, called religion, is falsely certificated as moral and humanitarian. It is no more so than the other. In Africa the private or amateur sorcerer (usually a victim of the professional "witch-doctor") is regarded as the enemy of mankind; but it is precisely by the public magician — witch-doctor, rain-doctor, sorcerer — that the alleged amateur is nefariously "smelt out" and given up to slaughter.8 If it be argued that "religious" magic aims at the public good and " mere " magic at private harm, the answer is that the public magician is often notoriously a murdering scoundrel, and the alleged private sorcerer an innocent man done to death. 1 Cp. Tiele, Egyptian BeUgion, pp. 180-2 ; Budge, Introd. to Book of the Dead, p. cli ; W. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, as cited above. 2 Cp. Prof. E. Doutte, Magie et religion dans VAfriaue du nord, Alger, 1909, pp. 3d!-&. 8 Cp. Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, pp. 152-4. 30 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION And that is not all. On the separatist theory, the legend of Elijah's calling down fire from heaven makes him an irreligious magician^ in that he was not only acting irregularly and unofficially, but going through the procedure of a sorcerer with absolute confidence in his power to control the will of his God. His machinery of supereroga tory watering of his sacrifice — which, as regards the coming rain, was sympathetic magic — was " religiously " gratuitous presumption ; and he was staking the whole fortunes of his cult on the chance that his prayer would be miraculously answered. He was, in fact, coercing his God by making the God's credit with his people depend upon the God's obedience to his wishes.1 It will not avail to acquit Elijah on the score of faith when the faith of the magician in his means of controlling the Gods is made precisely his offence. Among native tribes of the Victoria Nyanza region, " the people, in fact, hold that rulers must have power over Nature and her phenomena." Here the " anti-theistic " magic is the main element in the communal religion ; and once more the separatist theory breaks down. That priests in many ages and stages of culture have been hostile to magic is true just in the sense in which it is true that — with deeper cause — they have been hostile to science. In the early and " dark " ages of Christendom the priests of the Christian Church, primed by a magical-medical doctrine of the curing of sickness by the laying on of hands, denounced as atheistic the view of disease passed on by pagan science.8 Those priests were all the while practisers of exorcisms,4 and were none the less, for Dr. Jevons, highly religious. In the same way the intensely religious Ainu of Saghalien, who practise magic for the cure of disease and resort to professional wizards for the same purpose,5 resent as irreligious the attempt to promote the earth's fertility by manure. When Mr. Batchelor, the missionary, proposed to dig and manure his garden, and explained his wish to his Ainu gardener, that religious personage, strong in his inner consciousness, thus rebuked him: " What, will you, a clergyman and preacher of religion, so dishonour and insult the Gods ? Will not the Gods give due increase without your attempting to force their hand or endeavouring to drive Nature ? "8 i " To control a deity by means other than prayer and good life is anti-theistic " (Jevons, Introd. to Holland's trans, of Plutarch's Bomane Questions, 1892, p. xxix). 2 Paul Kollmann, The Victoria Nyanza, 1899, p. 168. s Cp. A. D. White, Hist, of the Warfare of Science with Theology, 1897, ii, 26-28 and refs. ; Lea, Hist, of the Inquisition, 1888, iii, 395, 410, and refs. ; Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, i, 48 ; Augustine, De Civ. Dei, xxii, 8; Tract. 7 in Johann., §12; Clementine Homilies, ii, 12; E. T. Wittington, Medical History, 1894, pp. 121-2. 4 Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, vi, 43 ; Clemens Bomanus, De Virginitate, Ep. ii, 12 Origen, Against Celsus, vii, 67 ; Tortullian, Apol., 23, 40. Cp. Lecky, Hist, of Eur Morali. 6th ed. i, 381. 6 Batchelor, The Ainu of Japan, 1892, pp. 196-7. 6 j^, p, 256. THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 31 Here we have the very doctrine of Dr. Jevons and Dr. Frazer : the manuring missionary was an " arrogant " magician, seeking to control the unseen powers in a way which was not the Ainu way. (That, it appears, was usually expectoration.) " Considerably sur prised," says Mr. Batchelor, " I looked at him to see if he were joking. But he was quite serious." Poor Mr. Batchelor was being treated as his cloth had treated the doctors in the days of unflawed faith. Happily the Ainu did not possess an Inquisition. True it may be, again, that magic is at some points a lowering of the religious sentiment ; though much of the quasi-scientific reflection on this head appears to be a mere echo of ecclesiastical declamation. If we were seriously to inquire which has done the more harm in the way of hindering civilisation, strangling science, obscuring the facts of Nature, and prompting human cruelty, it would soon be found that the organised cults which curse the magician have been by far the more pernicious.1 The barbarisation wrought by the attempts of the courageously " superstitious " few to practise witchcraft is trifling beside that compassed by the no less superstitious many in putting supposed witches to death. This holds good of the general life of Africa through whole millenniums, in which countless millions of human beings have been slain as sorcerers and witches on the accusation of professional witch doctors; and again of the inferrible life of the Hebrews and the recorded witchcraft-manias of Christendom. And if this side of the problem be waived, the fact remains that the Christian religion, which Dr. Jevons and the rest rank as the highest and purest of religious systems, historically took its rise in the " reversion" from theistic faith to a form of sympathetic magic, the eucharist, and was practically rooted as a State cult throughout Europe by the assumption of magical functions on the part of the priest, not only in the administration of the eucharist itself, but in the claim to exercise " supernatural " powers of exorcism and to wield super natural" instruments in the form of holy relics. Such practices certainly represent an intellectual and moral declension from the ethic of all the leading Greek schools and of the nobler rabbins. In other cases a differentiation between magician and priest may have been in origin economic and political, apart from any ethical motive. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, while ancestors are imaged, and the images, as being made potent by soul-stuff, have 1 See below, Part iv, § 5, as to the intensification and perpetuation of both ordinary and sacramental cannibalism and human sacrifice by priesthoods in ancient Mexico, Dm, and New Zealand. " 32 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION places in the temples where ancestors are worshipped, the higher Gods are without images or temples, and are prayed to only in conjunction with ancestors or spirits ; and here it is noted that the magician " has nothing to do with the worship of the Gods, but operates on the relations with spirits and souls," while the priest attends to the matters relating to the higher Gods.1 The explanation appears to lie in the fact that, as among the Eomans, every Batak house-father is priest as regards ancestors, souls, and spirits. The priest-managed cult is either the survival of one imposed on the populace by conquerors and specially provided for (as probably was the case in Eome), or a result of priestly enterprise in imitation of foreign systems.2 Its ethical content is a matter of other chances. Granted, yet again, that dissenting magic, whether beneficent or maleficent in intention, is logically inconsistent with the conceptions of deity normally professed by the magic-monger himself, it is here on all fours with the total structure of the official creed, which soever it be. The conception of sacrifice in all its forms is morally irreconcilable with the doctrine of divine justice and goodness, and was on that very ground repudiated by the greater Hebrew and pagan moralists ; and with the doctrine of salvation by sacrifice falls the doctrine of salvation by faith. Press that one ethical principle, and the whole apparatus of official Christian ethic collapses, even as the apparatus of prayer and providentialism falls by the test of the principles of divine omniscience, beneficence, and foreordination. Dr. Jevons's principle of exclusion, in fact, finally makes tabula rasa of the whole field of religious institutions and religious life, and leaves us recognising only a factor which he has expressly excluded from his definition of the religious consciousness — to wit, philosophy. Here, again, the theoretic separation is spurious. In terms of many parts of Dr. Jevons's exposition, early religion is just the effort to unify the cosmos through a conception of deity ; and early philosophy was nothing else. To stamp as religious only those forms of thought in which the believer has " direct consciousness " of " the divine," excluding every process of meditation and inference as such, is to include in religion the phenomena of hallucination and even of insanity (to say nothing of the liberal expansion of the i Warneck, Die Beligion der Batak, 1909, pp. 5, 6 t J r Wa™50k notea :*' *»» *he. Hindus in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries forced Indian God-forms on theBataks m place of others of their own. but has no clear theory of the process or the antecedents. He notes again (ib.) that " only gradually were Gods and men differentiated"; but surmises that the habit of speaking reverently of "God" as distinct from the five Over-Gods is a 'survival of an earlier and I purer God-idea " (p 7) It seems much more likely, in view of his own narrative, to be a derivatio^ from Islam THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 33 formula to include men's belief in their personal descent from an animal), and to bar out as non-religious the theism which stands on the thesis that this scheme of things cannot be without a mind." On the other hand, ordinary animism, which Dr. Jevons rules out, is certainly a belief in terms of almost though not quite unreflecting consciousness ; and to proceed to disqualify it on the ground that it is a projection of man's personality into Nature is to evoke a fatal challenge; for if this is to be said of animism, it will certainly have to be said much more emphatically of theism. The " impression of the divine personality " of which Dr. Jevons speaks is precisely the projection of the subject's personality into the unknown, and this by Dr. Jevons's own showing. To judge from his later argument, while he at times professes to waive the question of the veracity of the religious consciousness, he is much disposed to let it be its Own verification.1 This, however, he can scarcely venture-on in the case of the primitive man's belief that he descended from a fox, a bear, or a serpent. It is one thing to pronounce such a belief "truly religious," by way of securing in advance the "true" heredity of the Christian eucharist; it is another to put such a "fact of consciousness" beside the Christian consciousness of direct divine intercourse and inner answer to prayer. On the latter step must follow the admission that the so-called religious form of " consciousness " is by far the more self- projecting, the less truly receptive, of the two, save indeed where it is merely the mouthpiece of the other. Otherwise Dr. Jevons's undertaking ends in the edifying decree that the company of the truly religious includes every mahdi, every fakir, every sibyl, every savage seer, every spiritualist, every epileptic Salvationist, every Corybantic worshipper of Cybele or Kali, and repels not only a Thomas Aquinas, a Pascal, a Hegel, a Spinoza, a Martineau, but every similar thinker who in antiquity prepared the very doctrines which the " feelers " demonstrably took as the theme of their alleged consciousness.2 It can hardly be that in thus shaping his definition Dr. Jevons aimed at demonstrating subtly the sub-rationality of religion. He has, indeed, by his theorem of " direct consciousness," brought religion to precisely the position he assigned to taboo — that of an "irrational" and "arbitrary" association of ideas. He accepted * Pd 389 393-4 397 405 2 For an' emphatic contradiction of such a view see Mr. Lester Ward's Outlines of Sociology, 1898, pp. 27-29. I do not find, however, that Mr Ward's doctrine here is in harmony with that laid down by him in Dynamic Sociology, i, 11. For a mediatory view see the end of this chapter. D 34 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION from Mr. Lang, as we saw, the verdict that taboo is thus irrational because its principle is "that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact." Yet this is exactly the principle which he vindicates on behalf of the religious conscious ness. Its notion of causal connection is to be in very truth equivalent to causative connection in fact. It is not to reason ; it is not to seek evidence or submit to tests ; it is to bring all experience in submission to itself. And it is not only the belief in a Good Male God that is thus assured of its superiority in virtue of its arbitrariness ; it is every hallucination of every savage, every vision of the Virgin by a neurasthenic Catholic, every epiphany of Isis or Aphrodite or Cotytto in the past — nay more, every dream of a devil ! It seems a sinister service to latter-day religion thus to demonstrate that it is on all fours not with purified philosophy, but with the most unintelligible forms of taboo and the darkest forms of " superstition." Once more, however, the scientific course consists not in taking advantage of the logical suicide of those who conduct the other, but in setting forth the fundamental analogy of the psychological processes thus arbitrarily differentiated. The " direct conscious ness " of the theist — sheer hallucination apart — is simply a rever sion to the earlier man's confidence in his animistic conceptions, doubled with the conscious resistance to sceptical criticism seen in every dream-interpreter and ghost-seer of the country-side. The per sistence is simply a matter of temperament and degree of enlighten ment : there are men who can transcend this like other testimonies of their direct consciousness, in learning to see it as a kind of hallucination which may be predicted to arise in some cases in regard to any theistic conception which any thinker may contrive to set up. Where there are images of the Virgin, men and women will , have visions of the Virgin ; where there are images of animal-Gods, there will be visions of animal-Gods. Between " impressions " and " projections " there is no such psychological gulf as Dr. Jevons assumes. If there were, the political influence on doctrine which he classes as non-religious would still be in terms of his other theorem truly religious, for the act of thinking of rule in heaven in terms of rule on earth is a sufficiently docile surrender to an impression on consciousness, and would be made by multitudes with the possible minimum of reflection, But, in truth, a minimum of reflection there needs must be in every process of belief ; and what Dr. Jevons at times describes as pure processes of direct consciousness are demonstrably not so, or are so THE NATUEALNESS OF ALL BELIEF 35 only in the sense in which the same thing may be predicated of the thinking of the primitive magician. The man who says he is con scious of an inward answer to prayer is not conscious of it as he is of the sound of a voice ; what he experiences is a sense of satis faction, which (albeit only the result of a release of nervous tension) he infers to come as a direct communication from deity ; 1 and such inference is merely a more casual and less meditated process of reasoning than those which Dr. Jevons dismisses as non-religious. It is thus less rational as being less " reasonable "; but it is not "irrational" save in the loose sense of "fallacious." It is more arbitrary, but only in the sense that it is less mindful of reason and more egotistic, more self-willed, than the process which appeals fraternally to other men's judgments. Arbitrary in Dr. Jevons's implied sense of having no basis it cannot be : so to define the term is to reduce it to insignificance. However vicious religious reasoning may be, it remains reasoning. § 10. To say this, however, is certainly not to endorse the surprising thesis latterly put forth by Dr. Frazer, to the effect that magic- mongering, after all, has been a great factor in human progress.2 His first suggestion was, as we have seen, that a recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the saner men seeking for a truer insight into nature. But after suggesting this " with all due diffidence," he has latterly come to hold with con fidence that it was the clever impostors who, by obtaining monarchic power, were the means of breaking up savage conservatism, and so of making progress possible. It is a singular argument. The public sorcerer " may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king"; and the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe accord ingly follow the profession. The most sagacious are the most likely to see through its fallacies, and, becoming conscious deceivers, will as such "generally come to the top."8 Only the cleverest can survive : all sorcerers run a constant risk of being killed for their failures; and the honest men are likely to be soonest knocked on the head. "The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the 1 I am not here reasoning a priori, but from a knowledge of concrete cases. It is to be wished that a scientific study should be made of the processes of religious consciousness, familiar and other. But even without that, the crudity of Dr. Jevons's psychological apparatus is sufficiently evident. 2 In his great work on Totemism and Exogamy (iv, 25 sa.) Dr. Frazer has recently argued, without any reference to the wider thesis here under criticism, that magic may be reckoned the nursing-mother of art, inasmuch as it moved early man to copy objects— a more plausible theory than the one here criticised. But it also is open to much objection. 3 Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, p. 82. 36 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character." Once supreme, the clever rogue " may, and often does, turn his- talents, his experience, his resources, to the service of the public." Being a knave, he is not likely to miscarry : witness the contrasted careers of Augustus and George III. Thus magic makes the monarch : " it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one : it substituted a monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men.'' The custom-ruled savage in the free tribal state is utterly unpro- gressive, " and the ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest." But the rise of one man to supreme power breaks the spell ; and the tribe " enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress." " The great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilisation The Assyrians, the Greeks, the Eomans, the Arabs, are our witnesses in the past All the first great strides towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic govern ments."8 Great, therefore, was the service of the sorcerer. Oddly enough, Dr. Frazer, whose outstanding merit is the fulness of his proofs for his theses, offers us no evidence whatever in support of this thesis beyond the perfunctory allusions to ancient civilisation just cited, which are wholly beside the case. He is severe on a priori theories of kingly origins, but his own argument here is almost wholly a priori. True, some savage kings are magicians = priests; but many are not ; and the wide learning of Dr. Frazer evidently does not suggest to him a single case in which the clever knave who has achieved kingship performs the services he is supposed to be able to render.4 On the contrary, we have the testimony6 that where the chieftaincy and priesthood meet in the same person, both are of a low order " — among the Fijians. There is really no reason to think that early progress was made as Dr. Frazer suggests : his philosophic antinomianism is gratuitous. And it is not persisted in ; for once more we find him reverting6 to the view that, as the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent, it is " slowly displaced by religion : in other words, the magician gives way to the 1 Id. p. 83. 2 Id. p. 84. s jp. 56-58, and those discussed in Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 42 sq., 70 sq., 74 sq. That proposed by M. Salomon Beinach : " A body (ensemble) of scruples which put obstacles to the free exercise of our faculties " (Orpheus, 6e. edit. p. 4), is obviously defective. As M. Beinach goes on to avow, he has in view only a particular kind of scruples — to wit, taboos. But this delimitation of religion, like that of Dr. Frazer, excludes the main body of credences and myths. One of the most symmetrical is that of Professor A. Beville :— " La religion est la determination de la vie humaine par le sentiment d'un lien unissant l'esprit humain a l'esprit mysterieux dont il reconnait la domination sur le monde et sur lui- meme, et auquel il aime a se sentir uni" (ProUgomenes, p. 34). But this is finally marked by theological particularism, and is thus not truly inductive. Constant's was more objective : — " Nous avons defini le sentiment religieux, le besoin que l'homme eprouve de se mettre en communication avec la nature qui l'entoure, et les forces inconnues qui lui semblent animer cette nature" (La Beligion, 1824, i, pt. ii, p. 1). But Constant extends his definition in practice to simple cosmic emotion. Citing from Byron's Island the passage beginning " How often we forget all time, when lone," he writes; "On nous assure que certains hommes accusent Lord Byron d'atheisme et d'impiet6. II y a plus de religion dans ces douze vers que dans les ecrits passes, presents et f uturs de tous ces denonciateurs mis ensemble " (pt. i, pp. 106-7). Chapter II. COMPAEISON AND APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS § 1. Early Forces of Beform. The main obstacle to a " science of religion," naturally, is the survival either of simple belief in a given religion or of sociological predilections set up by such a belief ; and we have seen how a scholarly treatise may still be affected by one or the other. That a learned and thoughtful " Introduction to the History of Religion " should treat the whole vast drama of religious development up till the period of the Eoman Empire as " the propaideutic of the world to Christ"1 is perhaps not to be wondered at in view of English culture-conditions in general ; but it is none the less unfortunate. A view of the history of religion which merely ignores or discredits on the one hand the entire religious life of the non- Christian world, and on the other the entire monotheistic or unitarian evolution in the Christian world, cannot meet the needs of scientific thought. The perorational statement that " of all the great religions of the world it is the Christian Church alone which is so far heir of all the ages as to fulfil the dumb, dim expectation of mankind," is but a sectarian shibboleth ; and the claim, ' In it alone the sacramental meal commemorates by ordinance of its founder the divine sacrifice which is a propitiation for the sins of all mankind," is an all-too- simple solutibn of the historic problem. We are being treated merely to a new adjustment of " Christian Evidence." On the side of science, again, there is certainly a danger that the necessary effort to eliminate partisanship and predilection may somewhat sway the balances. Dr. Jevons justly argues2 that religion is no more to be conceived or classified in terms of primeval superstition than science is to be classified in terms of primeval animism and magic. But the very tactic of his own treatise, aiming as it does at certificating one set of developments on behalf of the special apparatus of the Christian Church, is a hindrance to the recognition of religion as an aspect of the process of civilisation. In terms of the analogy with science, religion ought to be to-day at a far higher level than it was in ancient Syria, or in the Graeco- 1 Work cited, Index, s.v. Sacrifice, end. Cp. p. 415. 2 Work cited, p. 9. 59 60 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION Eoman decadence. But here the special-pleader reverts to the Newmanian thesis of " special genius," arbitrarily placing the highest genius for religion in antiquity, and implying (apparently) that whatever genius there has been since is joyfully subservient to that. Now, genius is certainly a factor in every line of mental evolution, in the sense that all marked mental capacity is a " variation "; and insofar as religions have been moralised or rationalised, genius for righteousness or for reason has clearly been at work. But just as certain as the fact of genius is the fact that it is in large part wasted ; and we shall utterly misread the history of mankind if we conceive the " religious consciousness " as readily susceptible of impulses from the moral or rational genius of the gifted few.1 On the contrary, nothing is harder than even the partial imposition of the higher view on the religious multitude; and this precisely because the crowd supposes (with the countenance of Dr. Jevons) that it has " inner consciousness " of the veracity of its congenital beliefs. King Akhunaton of Egypt, presumably, had such conscious ness of the truth of his monotheism ; but even his autocratic power failed to annul the inner consciousness of the polytheists around him, or, for that matter, the " direct consciousness " of the priests that their bread was buttered on the polytheistic side.2 There is, I think, no known case in history of a " going " priest hood reforming its own cult, in the sense of willingly making an important change on moral lines. There is indeed abundant reason to credit priesthoods with the alteration of the rule under which the priest himself was the primary subject for sacrifice;8 but the change consisted solely in laying the burden upon others. Apart from the presumptive changes of view set up in Israel during the exile, it seems to have been always by kings (or queens or heroes4) that human sacrifices were suppressed in antiquity, never by the choice of priesthoods.6 Thus King Eurypylus is associated with the abolition of the human sacrifice to Artemis Triclaria ; 6 Cecrops with the substitution of cakes for living victims to Zeus Lycseus ;' 1 Dr. Jevons, to be sure, has denied that the religious process is either moral or rational ; but here we must try to save his thesis from himself. Otherwise it becomes a mere disguised assertion that all religious truth is revealed, that genius consists in getting the revelation, and that beliefs otherwise got are either not true or not religious. Of such a doctrine there can be no historical discussion. 2 Cp. Tiele, Egyptian Beligion, pp. 23, 179-185 ; Maspero, Hist, ancienne des peuples de I 'orient, 4e edit. pp. 53-54, 285-6 ; Diodorus Siculus, i, 73. 8 Cp. Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, iii, 114 ; Frazer, Golden Bough, ch. i, § 1 ; ch. iii, § 1 ; Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, p. 291 ; Jevons, Introd. to Hist, of Belig., pp. 281-296. 1 Dr. Frazer gives a list of hero-stories in his note on Pausanias in his edition, ix, 26, 7. « Cp. Bastian, as cited, iii, 109. • Pausanias, vii, 19. ' Id. viii, 2. APPEAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS 61 Iphicrates1 and Gelon2 with the attempted stoppage of human sacrifices at Carthage ; King Diphilus with its cessation at Cyprus ; Amosis with its abrogation at Heliopolis in Egypt.8 In the ancient history of Japan, it is an Emperor who, about the beginning of the Christian era, recoils from the practice of burying servitors alive at the funeral of a prince ; and it is on his appeal that one of his ministers hits on the device of substituting clay images.4 Among the Samoans one legend ran that the human sacrifices to the Sun, which were destroying the race, were put an end to by the lady Ui giving herself up and being accepted by the pacified Sun as his bride ; while another version makes Ui the daughter of the King of Manu'a, who gave up his daughter as a final sacrifice, and then abolished the practice.6 In another case a Tongan queen, named Manu, saved alive a number of those destined for her husband's cannibal feasts ; and in yet another a cannibal God — presumably the priest or incarnation of a higher deity — is destroyed by the action of a daring youth.6 The powerful King Einow of Tonga, again, showed a disposition to check some forms of human sacrifice ; ' and King Gezo of Dahome is credited with " materially reducing the number of human sacrifices throughout his kingdom " 8 during his lifetime. King Gelele, again, promising that " by and by, little by little, much may be done " in the way of curtailing the sacrifices, declared : " If I were to give up this custom at once, my head would be taken off to-morrow."9 Such was the power of the priests. Similarly the abolition of human sacrifices in ancient China was effected only by the action of humane princes ; and the attempt in earlier times seems to have involved insurrection and desperate war. Elsewhere such attempts are known to have failed, and the work of King Gezo of Dahome was undone after him. " The 1 Porphyry, De Abstinentia, ii, 56. 2 Plutarch, Begum et imper. apophtheg., Gelon, i. s Porphyry, last cit. n, 55. 4 J. Murdoch, A History of Japan, 1910, i, 69. 5 Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, pp. 201-2. 6 Id. pp. 236-8. 7 Mariner, Tonga Islands, 1827, ii, 178. 8 Sir A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890, pp. 128, 136. 9 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 359. 10 Cp. Kurz, Memoire sur I 'etat politique et religieux de la Chine 2300 ans avant notre ere, from Nouveau Journal Asiatique, 1830 (?), pp. 74-82 ; and Miss Simcox, Primitive Civilisations, ii, 36-37. Terrien de la Couperie pronounces all human sacrifices in ancient China to have been introduced under alien influence (Western Originof the Early Chinese Civilisation, 1894, pp. 134, 362-3, citing in support Edkins, Church Beview, xvi, 339 ; xix, 55-6). The practice of siikn— the voluntary submission of servants to be buried alive^in the grave of their masters— he represents to have begun 678 B.o. in the west State of Ts'in, "undoubtedly under Tartar influence," and to have been common in the fourth century, but to have ceased after 210 B.C., when it had been made compulsory at the funeral of She Hwang Ti. Thereafter wooden figures were buried in the graves as surrogates, as in Japan. M. La Couperie, however, appears to accept simple suttee as indigenous ; and it is hard to see how the purely alien character of either siiln or human sacrifice proper can be established for all China (pp. 132-8). He notes that the drowning of girls, as brides for the Eiver-God, was suppressed in Wei after 424 by a new Governor, but survived elsewhere. (Pp. 90, 359.) 62 THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION fetisheer is all-powerful in Dahome. The last monarch was notably desirous of modifying the horrors and the expenses of the national worship : his son has been compelled to walk in the old path of blood."1 The strongest characteristic of priesthoods is their conservatism ; and though moral and religious innovators have arisen among them, practical moral reforms have always to be forced on them from the outside.2 Where a powerful king resists them from humane motives, even if he put them down by force for the time, he is not unlikely to be the victim in the end.3 Where substitutes have been made for human sacrifices among " nature- folk" without governmental pressure, as apparently among the Malays and some tribes in India, there is no priesthood to speak of ; and these simple people have silently attained what passes for a great " reform " where "religious history" is concerned. For every man of moral genius, probably, who has been able to modify for the better the form or course of an organised religion, there have been ten who were slain or silenced by its organisation. Indeed, if we reckon solely the ostensible historical cases of fortunate innovation on the direct appeal of genius, the balance is immeasurably the other way. What is more, the economic and social conditions in antiquity were such that the man who succeeded even indirectly in modifying a cult or creed for the better did so by some measure of fraud. Dr. Jevons, as we have seen, lightly decides that such reformers " have usually considered themselves to be speaking, not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God." If they did, be it said once more, they would only be feeling as did the common run of early priests in their normal procedure. The full significance of the case will come out much better if we say that reformers found they stood the best chance of a hearing when they professed to be speaking the words of the God. What this meant in the way of demoralisation it is depressing to surmise. It is indeed customary of late to substitute for the exaggerated notion of/" pagan " priestcraft that used to be held by most Christians and by some freethinkers the much more arbitrary notion ol an absolute rectitude in the pristine " religious conscious ness"; but critical science can accept no such fantasy. There are 1 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 149. " To abolish human sacrifice here," says Burton in another passage, "is to abolish Dahome. The practice originates from filial piety ; it is sanctioned by long use and custom ; and it is strenuously upheld by a powerful and interested priesthood." (Id. ii, 26.) 2 See below, Part IV, § 5, as to the similar rule in the lower civilisations of Polynesia, and in ancient Mexico. 3 See the case of King Mesi of Porto Novo, narrated by Sir A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890, p. 145 ; and cp. B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1909, introd, p. xi. 4 The legend of the saving of Sunahsepa, offered for a sacrifice on behalf of King Harischandra (B. W. Frazer, Lit. Hist, of India, pp. 87-89), is obscure. APPRAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 63 evidences of conscious fraud on the surface of the most primitive- looking cults known to us ; the majority of travellers unhesitatingly impute fraud to the magicians and priests of savage tribes; and while there is reason to believe that early man and savage man have a less clear sense than we of the difference between truth and falsehood (in this respect partly approximating to the child-mind), there is really no reason for supposing them less capable of resort to wilful deception. On the contrary, they seem in religious matters to have been more prompt at fabrication, in the ratio of the greater credulity they met with. Unless, then, we proceed with Dr. Jevons to make gratuitous exceptions in favour of all cases on the line of evolution of our own creed, we must conclude that the ancient conditions often, if not always, drove reformers to make- believe. § 2. Beform as a Beligious Process. The case may become clearer if we look for illustration to the phenomena of fictitious literature. It will hardly be suggested that the Semites and Greeks who wrote religious treatises or hymns and ascribed them to famous men of centuries before, were under a hallucination as to the source of their thoughts. They did but seek for them the passport of a name that challenged respect. Precisely, then, as the "prophetic" writer put his words in the mouth of a dead prophet (a common way of aiming at reforms), making him say, "Thus saith the Lord," so in many cases at least the living prophet must have been perfectly conscious that his spoken words were " not the Lord's, but his own." In fact, the saner the prophet, and the saner his counsel, the more likely was he to know how he came by it ; though his feeling that he was on the side of the God would greatly relieve his scruples about professing to be the God's mouthpiece. The man who, on the other hand, was so far beside himself as to suppose that Omnipotence was speaking through him, was much less likely to have wise counsels to give. In any case, crazed or prudent, right or wrong, all alike ran the risk of being denounced by the others as " false prophets,"2 and stoned accord ingly. Thus reform was a matter either of persuading kings or of managing fellow-priests and fellow-worshippers ; and genius for management would be fully as important as genius for righteousness. In the case, for instance, of a substitution of animal for human sacrifices, or of dough-dolls for sacrificial animals or men or children, 1 Cp. the author's Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 27. 2 Cp. Jeremiah xxvi, 11; xxvii, 9-10; xxviii, 1-17; xxix, 8, 9, etc. 64 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION the reformer of a priest-ruled cult had to play at once upon the credulity and the self-interest of the worshippers. It is clear from the Hebrew books that for the early Hebrews as for the Phoenicians the first-born of man as well as of animals was at one time a customary sacrifice ; 1 and the myth of Abraham and Isaac confesses the fact in the act of supplying a pretext for a change. In the story of the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter, again, it is evident that human sacrifice must once have been normal to permit of the idea of the application of the vow to a human being; and the declaration that a special annual mourning was set up for the alleged tragedy of mischance is an ethical fiction. In all likelihood the ground of it was an annual sacrifice of a maiden, which was transmuted into an act of lamentation for one traditionally sacrificed. So with the obvious fiction of Joshua's imprecating on the rebuilder of Jericho the curse of slaying his sons for the foundations:2 the practice had clearly been normal, and the representing of it as a foredoomed horror is a late invention. And no less clear is it, from the story of the sacrifice of a virgin imposed by the Delphic Oracle on the Messenians in their war with the Spartans,8 that the practice, wherever it originated, was religiously established among the early Greeks. Such story-telling as that of the Isaac myth, and that of the suicide of the despairing Aristodemus, convinced that he had slain his daughter in vain,4 was the natural device6 of the humane reformer, who was much more likely to be relatively a rationalist than to be abnormally subject to religious ecstasies or trances. Mohammed is indeed a case to the contrary, he being credited with opposing the practice of female infanticide ; but the very fact that in the Koran no tale is framed to carry the point is a confirmation of our view. In an old cult, a bald command to forego or reverse an established rite would be bewildering to the worshippers, whereas a myth describing a process of commutation would find easy acceptance where such a commutation was already agreeable to normal feeling. Normal feeling, on the other hand, was often the matrix of the J Cp. Exod xiii, 2 ; xxxiv, 20 ; Lev. xxvii, 28-29 ; Numb, iii, 41 ; xviii. 15. mrrifi^'t^Vh-Wn^88, XV1' J*- r. ? is 5?* unlikely that the sons of King Hiel were sacrificed to the God Joshua. See below, Pt. II ch i § 10 8 Pausanias, iv, 9. i paug tv j3 hv 7«nftoa;?™h^yf^PT?IIo^orus' II' HP ot the kia substituted for the child Dionysos foraT»n1n^^h,Tv,H-Srf4 Winckler, Gesch. Babyloniens und Assyriens, 1892, pp. 64-65 ; Jastrow, Belig. of Bab. and Assyr., pp. 38-39. Cp. Miss Simcox's Primitive Civilisations, 1894, i, 282-3. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 79 thousand three hundred years before our era, and long ages before historic Hellas was so named. This polity failed and fell, and on its ruins there rose successively the terrible and tyrannous empires of Assyria and later Babylon, wherein no doctrine of civil freedom could survive, though the code of Hammurabi remained the code of his people. Under such rule, whatever flower of moral genius might bloom in high or cloistered places, men in the mass could not be aught but fixedly superstitious, morally shortsighted, good only in virtue of their temperaments and the varying pressure of crude law and cruder custom. Whether they worshipped one God or many, a Most High or a Mediator, a Mother Goddess or a Trinity, their ethic was unalterably narrow and their usage stamped with primeval grossness ; for wherever the life of fortuitous peace bred a gentler humanity and a higher civilisation, the Nemesis of empire and conquest hurled a new barbarism on its prey, only to adopt anew the old cults, the old lore, the old delusions. So, on the bases of civilisation laid by the old Sumer-Akkadians, the Baby lonian and the Assyrian wrestled and overthrew each other time and again till the Persian overthrew the Babylonian ; and all the while the nameless mass from generation to generation dreamed the old dreams, with some changes of God-names and usages, but no transformation of life, and no transfiguration of its sinister battlefield. In no ancient State, certainly not in pre-exilic Jewry, did men think and brood more over religion, in theory and practice, than they did in Babylon;1 and in such a hotbed "religious genius" must be presumed to have arisen. But while it could leave its traces in higher doctrine, and join hands fruitfully with nascent science, it could never restore the freer polity of Sumer-Akkadia, though it could humbly cherish the Akkadian dream that Hammurabi would come again,2 as Messiah, to begin a new age. On the broad fields of sword-ruled ignorance there could thrive only such vain hopes and the rank growths of superstition. Better Gods were not to be set up, save in unseen shrines, on a worsening earth. As in Egypt and in Hindostan, religion was of necessity determined in the main by the life-conditions of the mass ; and to the mass, or to powerful classes, priesthoods must always minister. What Mesopotamian civilisation finally yielded to the common stream of human betterment was the impulse of its cosmogony and its esoteric pantheism to science and philosophy in the new life of unimperialised Greece, and the concrete store of its astronomical 1 Jastrow, pp. 245-8 ; Tiele, Hist, comp., pp. 243-247. 2 Jastrow, pp. 532-3. 80 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION knowledge, alloyed with its astrology. Its current ethic was doubt less abreast of the Ten Commandments and the Egyptian ritual of the judgment day ; and its commerce seems to have evolved an adequate working system of law, besides a notable system of banking ; but a civilisation which itself failed to reach popular well-being and international equity could pass on no important moral ideal to posterity. On the contrary, it bequeathed the fatal lust of empire, so that on the new imperial growth of Persia there followed, by way of emulation, that of Macedonia, to be followed by that of Borne, which ended in the paralysis and prostration of the whole civilisation of the Mediterranean world. And in the last stages of that decadence we find arising a nominally new religion which is but a fresh adapta tion of practices and principles as old as Akkadia, and which is beset by heresies of the same derivation. § 6. The Hebrew Evolution. At this point the Mesopotamian succession is seen to mingle with that of Judaea, which in turn falls to be conceived and appraised, as a total evolution, in terms of the conditions. As has been briefly noted above, Judaic monotheism was equally with Mesopotamian polytheism a result of political circumstances. The Jewish national history as contained in the sacred books is demonstrably a vast fiction to one half of its extent, as tested by the admissions of the other ; and the fiction was a gradual construction of its priests and prophets in the interest of the cult which finally triumphed. From the more ancient memories or documents which are pre served among the priestly fictions — records such as are included in the closing chapters of the book of Judges — we realise that after the alleged deliverance from Egypt and the fabulous Mosaic legislation in the wilderness the religion of Israel in Canaan was one of local cults, with no priesthood apart from the local functioning of single Levites," presumably members of a previous race of inhabitants who knew " the manner of the God of the land."1 These function aries can best be realised as belonging to the lower types of Indian fakirs and Moslem dervishes.2 And even in this primitive stage, when the only general political organisation was an occasional con federation of tribes for a given purpose,8 some had already developed the abnormal vices associated with corrupt civilisations.4 It is not unlikely that the beginnings of a centralised system occurred at a shrine answering to the description of that of Shiloh in the book of I 2 Kings xvii, 26. 2 Cp. Marti, Gesch. der isr. Belig., § 23, p. 96. 8 Jud. xx. 4 Jud. xix, 22. APPRAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS 81 Samuel; but the legend of that "prophet" is more likely to be an Evemerised version of the fact that the God of the shrine was Samu-El, a form of the Sem or Samas of the Samaritans and other Semites, who is further Evemerised as Samson in the book of Judges.1 At this stage we find the priests of the shrine notoriously licentious, and their methods primitively barbaric ;3 and the only semblance of a national or even tribal religion is the institution of the movable ark, a kind of palladium, containing amulets or a sacred stone, which might be kept by any chief or group strong enough to retain it8 and able to keep a Levite for its service. Even on the face of the official and myth-loaded history, it was by a band of ferocious filibusters at this level of religion that an Israelite kingdom or principality was first set up, and a shrine of Yah or Yahweh instituted in the captured Jebusite stronghold of Zion, where a going worship must already have existed. From such a point forward the kingdom, waxing and shrinking by fortune of war, would tend to develop commercially and otherwise on the general lines of Semitic culture, assimilating the higher Syrian civilisation wherever it met with it. The art of writing by means of the alphabet, received either from the kindred Phoenicians or direct from Babylon,4 would be early acquired in the course of the traffic between the coast cities and the inland States ; and with such culture would come the religious ideas of the neighbouring peoples. It is impossible to construct any save a speculative narrative of the religious evolution out of the mass of late pseudo-history, in which names known to have been those of Gods are assigned to patriarchs,6 heroes, kings, and miracle-working prophets, all in turn made subservient to Yahweh of Israel. But from the long series of invectives against other cults in the pseudo-historical and prophetic books, the contradictory fiats as to local worships in the Pentateuch,6 and the bare fact of the existence of Yahweh's temple at Jerusalem, we can gather clearly enough that that particular worship at that place was aggrandised by a few kings of Israel or of Judah, and relatively slighted by many others ; that its priests did their utmost, 1 This circumstance reminds us of the risk of assuming, with some critics, that Herakles had been first deified among the Greeks between the time of the composition of the Iliad and that of the OdysBey, because in the first poem he is a mere human hero, in the second a demigod (H. N. Coleridge, Introd. to the Classic Poets, Pt. I, 2nd ed. 1834, p. 278). He may have been Evemerised in Ionia at the time of the framing of the Iliad, though previously of divine status; whereas the Odyssey may have been composed in another environment, where his divine status was maintained (cp. Samuel Butler, On the Trapanese Origin of the Odyssey, 1893, and The Authoress of the Odyssey, 1897, chs. viii-x). Neither solution is certain. 2 1 Sam. ii, 13-16, 22. 8 1 Sam. vii, 1-2. 4 L. Geiger, Development of the Human Bace, Eng. tr. 1880, p. 67. 8 Cp. Winckler, Gesch. Israels, Th. II, 1900 ; E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, § 309. 0 Cp. Deut. xii and xv,20, with Ex. xx, 24-26. G 82 THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION but in vain, by vaticination, literary fraud, and malediction, to terrorise kings and people into suppressing the rival shrines and cults ; that all the while their own had the degraded features of the rest j1 and that their " monotheism " was merely of the kind ascribed by Flaubert to the sun-priests at Carthage, who derided their own brethren of the cult of the moon — though rage rather than derision is the normal note of the priests of Yahweh. The main motives of their separatism are visibly their perquisites and their monopoly. There is a certain presumption that the story of the reforms of King Josiah — a movement which compares with that of Akhunaton in Egypt — is founded on fact, seeing that the record confesses Josiah to have died miserably, where the general burden of the history required him to prosper signally, as a reward for his Yahwism. It may well have been that the hostility he evoked among his subjects wrought his ruin. In any case it may be taken as certain that even had he prospered, his effort to abolish the multitude of cults would have failed as Akhunaton's did ; and there is finally no disguise of the fact of its failure. Neither in Israel nor in Judah had even the merely monopolist monotheism of the Yahwist priests made popular headway ; and if at this stage there did exist monotheists of a higher type, prophets whose aim was just government, wise policy, and decent living, they stood not a better but a worse chance of con verting kings or commoners, rich or poor. The popular religion was determined by the popular culture-stage and life-conditions. In Babylon, however, while many doubtless went over bodily to the native cults, the stauncher Yahwists would tend to be made more zealous by their very contact with the image-using systems ; and the state of critical consciousness thus set up2 would tend to give a certain new definiteness to the former less-reasoned hostility to the rival worships. The conception of Yahweh as incapable of being imaged would promote a kind of speculation such as had already occurred among the " idolatrous " priesthoods themselves ; and that intercourse took place between the Yahwists and some Babylonian teachers is proved by their now giving a new significance to the Assyro-Babylonian institution of the Sabbath,8 and developing their whole ceremonial and temple law on Mesopotamian lines.4 Indeed, the simple fact that from this time forward the spoken language of Judaea became Aramaic or " Chaldee " is evidence that their Babylonian sojourn affected their whole culture. I ?,Ki5gs xxiii' 7- . 2 Cp' the special denunciations of idols in Ezekiel xx. B Cp. Sack, Die Altnildische Beligion im Uebergange vom Bibelthume zum Talmudismvs, 1889, p. 22 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 76-77. 4 Jastrow, pp. 610-611, 696-8; Sayce, pp. 77-78. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 83 With the anti-idolatrous Persian conquerors of Babylon, again, a Jewish sympathy would naturally subsist; and the favourable conditions provided for the captives by Cyrus may explain the apparent feebleness of the first Eeturn movement. However that may be, it is probable that to the intervention of Cyrus is due the very existence of the later historic Judaism, and of the bulk of the Hebrew Bible. Had he not conquered Babylon, Hebrew " mono theism" would in all likelihood have disappeared like the other monotheisms of Palestine, absorbed by the mass of Semitic poly theism in the Semitic empire ; for even when the Eeturn began, the monotheistic ideal had no great force. It is true that the commercial success which began to accrue to many of the Jews in Babylon would dispose them afresh to magnify the name of Yahweh as the God of their salvation;1 but a merely Babylonian Judaism, despite its Talmud, could have had no historic fruit. It is clear that, despite the preliminary refusal to join hands with the Samaritans and other populations around,2 the immigrants gradually mixed more and more with the surrounding Semitic tribes, whose cults were singly of the same order as the Yahwist ; and the old polytheism would thus have re-arisen but for the coming, a century later, of new zealots, whose sense of racial and religious separateness may have been sharpened at Babylon by competition, as well as by concourse, with the Mazdean cult. The alternation of the Persian phrase " God of heaven" with "God of Jerusalem"8 in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the final predominance of the former title in the latter book, suggests a new process of challenge and definition, which, however, would concern the majority of Yahwists much less than it did their theologians. What all could appreciate was the consideration that if the cult were not kept separate it would lose its revenue-drawing power. When once the laxer elements had been eliminated, or at least sacerdotally discountenanced, the social conditions were vitally different from the pre-exilic. Gathered together on the traditional site for the very purpose of instituting the cult of Yahweh and no other, the recruited and purged remnant gave their priests such an opportunity for building up a hierocracy as had never before been in that region ; and the need and the opportunity together wrought the evolution. To speak of the doctrine thus instituted as the product of a unique order of religious consciousness is to substitute occult l Cp. E. Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums (1901), iii, 216. 2 Cp. Eobertson Smith, Old Test, in Jewish Church, 2nd ed. p. 278. 8 Ezra, i, 2, 3; iii, 1; iv, 1; vii, 6, 12, 15-19, 21. 84 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION • forces for natural laws. Insofar as it had any philosophic content, any breadth of cosmic conception, it borrowed from the inductive monotheism or pantheism (the conceptions constantly and inevitably shade into each other) of the deeper thinkers of Babylon1 or its Persian conquerors ; and such a content was precisely that element in the creed which counted for least in its institution. What drew or held the votaries together was the concept of a God dwelling in the temple of Jerusalem, and there only ; and conferring special favours in the matters of rainfall and healing on those who brought gifts to his shrine. The worshippers were no more transcendentalist than their priests. They were but hypnotised by the unexampled series of literary fabrications on which the creed was refounded — a body of written sacrosanct lore such as had never before been brought within the reach of any save priestly students. We are in danger, perhaps, of unduly stigmatising the Hebrew forgers when we consider their work by itself, keeping in mind the enormous burden of delusion and deceit that it has so long laid upon mankind. In their mode of procedure there was really nothing abnormal ; they did but exploit the art of writing — first acquired by the race for commercial purposes — on the lines of immemorial priestly invention ; and we must not pass upon them a censure that is not laid on the mythologists and scribes of Egypt or the theologers and poets of India and Greece. Our business is to understand, not to blame, save insofar as a sophistic praise still compels demur. And the historical processus may be sufficiently realised in noting, without binding ourselves to, the conclusions broadly reached by scholars a generation ago, to the effect that the first collected edition of the pretended Mosaic law, comprised in the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua, contained some eighty chapters ; and the second, over a century later, a hundred and twenty ; ninety more being added afterwards.2 1 As to these cp. Hommel, Semitischen Vblker und Sprachen, i, 315-316 ; Jastrow, Belig. of Bab. and Assyria, pp. 147, 437-442 ; Sayce, Hib. Lect. pp. 108, 142, 191-2, 215, 305, 346 ; Baentsch, Altorientalischer und israelitischer Monotheismus, 1906. pp. 5-35, 101-4. Marti (Gesch. der isr. Bel. 1907, pp. 25-26) throws doubt on the reality of the monotheising or panthelsing tendency seen by Baentsch in the higher Babylonian lore. Akhunaton, he argues, is the only clear case of the kind in remote antiquity. Akhunaton was really more of a sectarian than of a pantheist. For the monotheism of the later prophets, finally, Prof. Marti falls back devoutly on supernaturalism. Not the reflection of the prophets, not logic, not philosophy, but " Jahwe selber, der sich seinen Propheten kundgab " (§ 34, p. 168). Solvuntur tabulce. 2 Kuenen, Lecture on The Five Books of Moses, Eng. tr. 1870, pp. 13-14. Later criticism tends to date everything later. Cp. Kuenen's Hexateuch, Eng. tr. pp. 299, 307, 315; WeU- hausen, Prolegomena to the History of Israel, Eng. tr. p. 9. Prof. Marti, a conservative supernaturalist, dates the primary Yahwist scroll before 800 B.C.: that of the Elohist about 750; their combination between 650 and 600; the Kernel of Deuteronomy about 621; the Law of Holiness (Lev. xvii-xxvi) between 540 and 520 ; the Priestly Codex between 500 and 450 ; ita combination with the Law of Holiness before 450 ; and the final combinations by Ezra's successors about 400 (Gesch. der isr. Bel., § 14). We are not here concerned, how ever, to work out tbe details of the documentary problem. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 85 Such a literary usage, indeed, gave a unique opportunity to literary and religious genius, and it was variously availed of. Lyrics of religious emotion, commonly ascribed to the semi-mythic David, to whose legend apparently accrued the lyric attributes of the God of that name ;x sententious and proverbial wisdom, similarly fathered on Solomon ; dramatic discussion of the ethical dilemma of all theism, in the singularly isolated and foreign- seeming book of Job ; and express argumentation against the fanatical racial separatism of the post-exilic theocracy, in the hardly less isolated romances of Ruth and Jonah — all this goes with the mass of pseudo-history, cosmology, and prophecy, to make up the library which we call the Hebrew Bible. It may be taken as certain that a body of students familiar with the whole range of such a literature had from it an amount of intellectual stimulation not theretofore paralleled in the Semitic world ; and from the rabbinical life of centuries we might reasonably expect some fine fruit of ethical and philosophic thought. But again, on close inquiry, we become sadly aware of the fatality of the evolutionary process, in little Jewry as in the great States that decayed around. § 7. Post-Exilic Phases. If we look first to the vogue of Biblical Judaism in Palestine, we have to note that from the consummation of the Eeturn the cult was jealously closed not only to the people of Samaria, who presumed to worship a Yahweh on their own sacred hill, but to the country people around who had been left behind by the Assyrian conqueror.2 The sociological conditions were thus such that, when the first force of the new conditions was spent, intellectual anchylosis was bound to set in. The learned class, devotedly absorbed in a literature regarded as divinely inspired, must rapidly become in general incapable of new thought ; and their religious philosophy could of itself make no further progress. This is what is seen to take place. But for their traditional rejection of images — a principle in which they had been encouraged by the Mazdeans whom they had met at Babylon — they would even have reverted by that path to normal polytheism. As it was, remaining peculiar in this respect, they did but think of their God as an imageless yet anthropomorphite being who made his home in their temple and either ignored or detested the neighbour nations which had idols. 1 Cp. Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 170, sq.; and refB. in A Short History of Free- thought, i. 101. 2 2 Kings xxiv, 14; xxv, 11-12. 86 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION Save for higher speculations which could not appeal to the majority even of the student class, they made no progress towards a consistent and comprehensive monotheism. What extension of speculative thought occurred was rather in the direction of dualism. The doctrine of the Adversary, developed either from the Persian Ahriman or the Babylonian figure of the Goat-God,1 or else from both, begins to figure in the later writings ; and, once dramatically installed in the brilliant book of Job, was sure to figure more and more in the general consciousness. All the while, the normal eastern ideas of multitudinous angels and evil spirits had never been absent, though they were denounced when associated with other cults; and in point of general superstition there can have been little to choose between Jew and Gentile.2 On the side of the belief in angels, again, the very desire to spiritualise and elevate the deity of the older traditions led to the imagining of new divine beings. Among the Samaritans, who, setting out with a Pentateuch, developed quite as much zeal as had the Judeans for the God of Israel, the expression " angel of God " or " angels of God " was frequently substituted for " God " or " Gods " in Genesis ; and the Chaldee paraphrasts did as much, at times adding further " the word of the Lord " or " the Shekinah " as a compromise where " angel " seemed inadequate.8 Similarly the later Jews read angels of God" where their sacred books inconveniently spoke of Gods." In the book of Nehemiah, yet again, we have the mention of the " Good Spirit " of God,6 an idea apparently derived from Mazdeism,6 and sure to set up a special divine concept. Such conceptions in all likelihood grew up by way of analogy from the phenomena of monarchical government7 in which the " word " or " hands " or "eye" of the autocrat became names for his chief functionaries or representatives. It would be hard to show that a " monotheism " which really accepted, as absolutely as any polytheism, a vast plurality of divine beings, had any moral or spiritual efficacy in virtue of merely setting forth a tyranny of a Supreme God over hosts of angels, with a rebel party included, rather than a kind of feudal family oligarchy like that of Olympus, in which the Chief God is partially thwarted by 1 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, Part III, Div. i, § 10. The vision of the high-priest Joshua (Zech. iii, 1, 2) standing before "the angel of the Lord" (originally, no doubt, "the Lord," as in v. 2) with " the Satan " (= the Accuser or Adversary) on the right hand to accuse him, seems to me clearly Babylonian and not Persian. 2 See refs. in A Short History of Freethought, i, 120. 8 G. L. Bauer, Theology of the Old Testament, Eng. tr. 1837, p. 5. 4 Cp. Ps. xcvii, 7, 9, and Heb. i, 6. 8 Neh. ix, 20. 8 See below, Part III, § 5. 7 Cp. Jastrow, Beligion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 433. APPRAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS 87 the others. The difference is much more one of political habit and outlook than of either ethic or philosophy. The Jews derived from Babylon the idea of a Creator-God;1 and if that be the valuable principle in monotheism their polytheistic kindred are entitled to the credit. So with the idea of a Supreme-God:2 the Hebrew specialty lay solely in putting a greater distance between God and Angels than did the Mesopotamian, and in rejecting (for the time being) the notions of triads and of a divine family. So little difference was there between the two states of mind that the Christian Fathers freely applied the term "Gods" to the Angels of the Judseo-Christian system.8 For the rest, it is significant that the beginnings alike of rational science and of rational ethics were made, not among the Hebrew monotheists, but among Babylonian and Greek polytheists, who went far in cosmic and moral philosophy while the post-exilic Jews were devotees of a God whose passionate and capricious will took the place of both natural and moral law. A "consistent, remorseless, naked monotheism," in short, never prevailed among the Jews any more than in any other people. Such a concept, save in the case of scattered thinkers, as often Gentiles as Jews, has never doctrinally or conceptually flourished till the rise of modern Deism, Islam having in turn capitulated to the notion of inferior good and evil spirits. Some small and isolated communities in antiquity probably approached nearer than the Jews ever did to the bare notion of a single (tribal) God, without " sons," or angels, or a Chosen One, and without an Adversary ; and the ancient pantheists, tending as pantheism usually does to repass into theism, at times reached in that way a far purer form of monotheism than that of the Hebrew books. While the creed, despite its rooted traditionalism, was thus of its own nature lapsing into new indirect forms of polytheism, the secular problem of political life was no more being solved in Jewry than elsewhere. In the day of the Restoration we already find the rich taking usury from the poor;6 and in the last of the canonical prophets we find crudely indicated the pressure of that deep doubt as to the God's good government which makes the theme of the book of Job. That the faithful deceive the deity and each other, 1 Cp. Jastrow, pp. 433-4, 441-2 ; Sayce, pp. 142, 205. " The knowledge that there is a supreme spiritual Being, unique in his nature, Creator and upholder of all things, is wholly wanting to ancient Israel " (Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, p. 428). 2 Sayce, pp. 122-129, 187. 8 See the point fully set forth in J. A. Farrer's Paganism and Christianity, ch. i. Cp. Supernatural Beligion, ed. 1902, pp. 71-80. 4 Le Page Benouf, while pronouncing that the Egyptian doctrine of the one and only God stopped short in Pantheism" (Hibbert Lectures, p. 230), admits that Egyptian monotheistic doctrine better meets the definition of Cardinal Newman than any other (Id. pp. 215-216). s Neh. v, 6. 88 THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION and that many despair of Yahweh's rule1 — such are the testimonies of the closing pages of the Old Testament. Only the cohesive power of ceremonialism, the unchanging pressure of popular superstition, and — last, but certainly not least — the economic success of the shrine, maintained the priestly State. There had presumably now begun among the dispersed Jews the rule of sending gifts to the temple, a practice which in a later age made an economic basis for a whole order of rabbins and scribes ; and on the same basis there would be partly maintained a considerable population of pauper devotees. Under such circumstances the high-priest, another- Babylonian adaptation, was practically what the king had been in the past ; and the post was intrigued for, and at a pinch murdered for,2 like any other eastern throne. One indirect result of the priestly policy was the development of the faculty of the Jews for prospering in other lands. Placed as they were, a small community among great States, it behoved them, like the Dutch of to-day, to be linguists for the sake of their commerce ; and when the post-exilic priesthood, like that of post- Eeformation Scotland, found their account in teaching their people to read the sacred books, they were at once preparing them to succeed among the less-schooled populations around and creating an abnormal tie between the dispersed ones and the sacred city. But, on the other hand, the surrounding cultures could not but affect the Jewish. On the Persian overlordship followed the Mace donian ; and where the similar Persian creed had failed to do more than modify the Jewish, the manifold Greek culture which spread under the Seleucids and the Ptolemies penetrated Syrian life in all directions. In that world of chronic strife and deteriorating character, where already all men had attained the fatal temper, seen later at large in decadent Eome, of acquiescence in the rule of the most successful commander as such, the tranquil cynicism of Greek cosmopolitan culture was as appropriate in Jewry as elsewhere. So far did the assimilation go that the hierarchy at length was definitely faced by a Hellenising party, convinced of the futility of the tribal religion, even as the pre-exilic Yahwists had been ; and high-priests were found to take the bribes and do the work of heathenism. There was, as we have seen, no moral or philosophic elevation in the Judaic cult to countervail intellectually such a movement ; and had not Antiochus Epiphanes, in a spirit of fanaticism wholly alien to the general policy of the Diadochi, proceeded to coerce and outrage 1 Malachi i, 7-8, 14 ; ii, 8-10, 17 ; iii, 5, 8-14. 2 Josephus, 11 Antia. vii, § 1. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 89 the zealots of Jerusalem, their worship would have dwindled very much as it did in the old time. But that act elicited the singular genius of the Maccabean family, under whom the desperate tenacity of the most devoted part of the race at length triumphed over its foes to the point of re-establishing a State in which the king was priest, as previously the priest had been king. In the face of such a consummation, all the promises and pretensions of the old cult seemed newly justified ; and a newly exultant faith emerged. § 8. Bevival and Disintegration. Thus for a second time was a Yahwist remnant selected, the bulk of the educated class passing over to the neighbouring polities, and their place being taken by new popular material of a more zealous order. Judaism was in fact the product not of a racial bias but of a socio-political selection, such as might have taken place under similar conditions in any race whatever ; and ever since the Dispersion the same selective process has continued, the unzealous Jews always tending to be absorbed in the populations among whom they live. Something similar has actually occurred among the Parsees. Even, however, if the Jewish evolution were as unique as it is conventionally represented to have been, the special case would no more be an exception to universal sociological law than is the phenomenon of marsupials to biological law. There has simply been survival in the Judaic case, chiefly in virtue of the fact of Sacred Books, where similar creed-tendencies were usually annihi lated under the ancient regimen of tyrannous violence. One result of the desperate frequency of bloodshed and massacre in the Jewish sphere was a passion for fecundity, as against the need for restraint of numbers that was felt in the City States of Greece in their pro gressive period; and the Jews thus abounded, and carried their religion with them, where other creeds died out. Irresistible, however, is the law of strife among unenlightened men, and no less so the law of change among all. In the stress of the Maccabean struggle we find the doctrine of the Messiah already so far developed that a secondary God is the due result. The Christ of the Book of Enoch is substantially a deity: " before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were made, his name was called before the Lord of the Spirits "-,1 he is at once Chosen One, Son of God and Son of Man ; he is judge at the Day of Judgment;2 and as "Son of the Woman"8 he clearly l Schodde's trans, xlviii, 3, 6. As to the date of the book, see pp. 26, 41-43, 237, 239. 2 Cp. Schodde's Introd., pp. 52, 54, 134. 3 Enoch lxii, 4, 5. 90 THE EATIONALE OF BELIGION relates to the Babylonian myth in the Book of Eevelation. And seeing that " in him dwells the Spirit of Wisdom " he is in effect at once the Sophia and the Logos of the Apocrypha and of the Platonising Philo Judaeus. But the evolution did not end there. Under the new Asmonean dynasty there broke out in due course all the violences native to the hereditary monarchy of the ancient world ; and once again the play of outside influences, which the feuds of competitors for the throne brought to bear, affected the hereditary creed within its central sphere. The Greek translation of the sacred books became the normal version ; and to that version were added books not admitted into the Hebrew canon, some of them elaborating new theological conceptions. As the Jewish State came more and more into the whirl of the battling empires of Seleucids and Ptolemies, soon to be crushed by Eome, the dynasty of king-priests passed away before the energy of new competitors ; and once more kings, not even Jewish by descent, subsisted beside high-priests of their own choosing. At length, under the Idumean Herod the Great, a man born to rule amid plots and feuds, to drown rebellions in blood and to outwit enemies by outgoing them in audacity, Eastern craft exploited at once Greek culture and Eoman power with such address that Hellenism gained ground against the utmost stress of organised conservatism ; while among the common people, conscious of an evil fate, movements of quietism and asceticism and Mahdism undermined the ancient prestige of the temple-cult. Once again the tribal faith was being disintegrated. One of the movements emerging though not originating at this time is the cult associated with the quasi-historic name of Jesus. As organised Yahwism had been retrospectively fathered on the fictitious legislation of Moses, so the Jesuine cult is in turn fathered on Jesus in a set of narratives stamped with myth, and incapable of historical corroboration even when stripped of their supernaturalism. To the eye of comparative science the central feature in the cult as it appears in the oldest documents is the eucharist, an institution common to many surrounding religions, and known to have been in ancient and secret usage among sections of the Jews.1 Descending perhaps from totemistic times, it invariably involved some rite or symbolism of theophagy, or eating of a divine victim; and a sacrificed God-man was the natural mythic complement of the ritual. 1 See below, Part II, ch. i. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 91 In the case of the Jesuine cult, an actual historic person may or may not have been connected with the doctrine; and for such a connection there is a quasi-historic basis in an elusive figure of a Jesus who appears to have been put to death by stoning and hanging about a century before the death of Herod. On the other hand the name in its Hebrew and Aramaic forms had probably an ancient divine status, being borne by the mythic Deliverer Joshua, and again by the quasi-Messianic high-priest of the Eestoration. It was thus in every aspect fitted to be the name of a new Demigod who should combine in himself the qualities of the Akkadian Deliverer-Messiah and the Sacrificed God of the most popular cults of the Graeco-Eoman, Egyptian, and west-Asiatic world. In this aspect only is it to be historically understood. But before con sidering it in its type, we have to consider it in its genetic relation to Judaism, and so complete our estimate of the evolution of that cult to the moment of its definite arrest. That the cult of Jesus the Christ was being pushed in rivalry with that of pure Judaism among the Jews of the Dispersion before the destruction of the Temple appears from the nature of the oldest documents as well as from the tradition. Such competition was the more easy because the life of the synagogue was largely inde pendent of that of the central temple, and craved both rites and teaching which should make up for the sacrificial usages which were the chief institutions at Jerusalem. But that Jesuism could have successfully dispensed with the main cult among either Jews or Gentiles while the Temple remained standing is inconceivable. When it did begin to make substantial progress late in the second century of its own era, its main prestige undoubtedly came from the Jewish sacred books ; and had the Temple been allowed to remain in active existence, that prestige would have accrued to it as of old. Conceivably, however, there might have happened a development of Jesuism under Judaism, the new cult exploiting the old and being tolerated or adopted by it. In that case there would have occurred yet once more a disintegration of a quasi-monotheism in terms of a virtual polytheism. And towards such disintegration marked progress had been made under the aegis of Judaism. Note has already been taken of the entrance of new and prac tically polytheistic ideas into the cult at the very moment of its ostensible purgation of polytheistic tendencies ; and in the course of four centuries these ideas had been much developed. To the " Good 1 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, pp. 298, 345, 363-4, and A Short History of Chris tianity, pp .8, 14, 402-3. Also below. Part II, ch. i, § 10. 92 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION Spirit" of Nehemiah and the Logos or "Word" of intermediate writers had been added the personified Sophia or " Wisdom " of the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus and Enoch ; and while the Samaritans seem to have conceived, on old Semitic lines, of a female Holy Spirit, symbolised like several Gods and Goddesses by a dove,1 the Jews proper who came into contact with Greek thought developed with the help of the Platonists the originally eastern notion of the Logos into a new Jewish deity.2 In their anxiety to avoid Goddess-worship, they even represented the Deity as generat ing the Son out of himself (« yao-rphi) ;8 and those who later made Jesus speak of "My Mother the Holy Spirit"4 were unable to prevail against the old prejudice. It was thus on Judaically laid lines that Jesuism ultimately completed its theology. But had not the Temple been overthrown, either the Judaic evolution would have kept the Jewish Logos in organic relation to the Yahwist worship and sacred books, or the movement would have been overshadowed. All would have depended on its economic sustenance. Had it promised a useful reinforcement to the Jewish high-priest's powers of attracting proselytes and revenue,6 it would doubtless have been exploited in the name of Judaism, very much as it was by the early Christists ; and in view of the historic facts it is reasonable to say that had their system survived, the temple-priests would so have exploited it. Inasmuch, finally, as the element of Messianism, reduced to a form of purely theological Soterism, was actually exploited by the Christists without specially calling forth the wrath of Borne, the temple priesthood might have done as much. It was in fact the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem, provoked by the desperate courage of the zealots of the old faith, that alone made possible the separate rise of Christism and its ultimate erection into the State religion of the declining Eoman empire. To say this, however, is to say that Jewish monotheism so-called — in reality a tribal system using a monotheistic terminology — was 1 As to the Samaritan cultus of a sacred dove, see Beland, Dissert, de Monte Garizim, § 13 (Diss. Misc. 1706, i, 147). Schfirer (Hist, of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ, 2nd Div. Eng. tr. i, 8, note) says : " The assertion that the Samaritans worshipped the image of a dove is a slander first appearing in the Talmud "; but that it was for them a divine symbol is another proposition. The Samaritan symbol may or may not have been borrowed from Egypt, where Amun, as the spirit of life, was represented as a bird hovering above the body of Osiris when he is about to resume life. Being thus "the usual symbol of the soul and of new life " (Tiele, Egypt. Bel. p. 150), it would readily apply to the idea of the God's baptism (Matt, iii, 16). As to the ancient symbolism of Dove, Wind, Life, and Holy Ghost, see Gubernatis, Letture sopra la mitologia vedica, 1874, p. 145, sq.; and as to the belief that the Gods entered into birds cp. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, 2nd ed. i, 323, 366. 2 See below, Part II, ch. ii. 8 Septuagint version of Ps. ex, 3 (eix in Sept.). 4 Origen, Comm. on John iii, § 63. Other heretics made the Holy Spirit the Sister of Jesus. Epiphanius. Haeres. liii. 8 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 347. APPEAISEMENT OF EELIGIONS 93 from first to last an unstable doctrine, always running risk of dissolution into polytheism, avowed or sophisticated ; that it was so dissolving at the time of the destruction of its temple ; and that its offshoot, Christism, is a resultant of the process. If then mono theism is as such intrinsically superior to other forms of religion, Christianity is one of the inferior faiths, representing as it does the dissolvent process in question. To the eye of science, of course, it is neither inferior nor superior save in respect of its ethical and intellectual reactions ; and towards an estimate of these we proceed by a comparative study of the religious principles on which Christism is built up. Meantime, while the Hebrew literature obviously plays a large part in the intellectual colouring of the new Christist world, it would be difficult to show that Judaism made for higher life in the post-Roman world. So far as it made proselytes, it was by appeal ing to normal superstition, to belief in the mysterious potency of a particular God-name, and of the rites of his cult.1 To scientific and philosophical thought it passed on no moralising and unifying conception of life, for it had none such to give. Moslem monotheism, in furnishing a temporary habitat for scientific thought,2 did more for civilisation both directly and indirectly ; but Moslem thought had to be fertilised by the re-discovered philosophy of Greece before it could attain to anything. And insofar as a philosophical and scientific monotheism arose in the medieval period, it inherits far more from Greek thought — which indeed had early undergone Semitic influences — than from Hebrew dogma. As for the direct influence of Judaism on life, the most favourable view is to be reached by noting that the most applauded moral teaching of the Gospels is either Judaic or a Judaic adaptation of other codes. The first Gospel-makers did bub put in the mouth of the demigod sayings and ideals long current in Jewry. But this again amounts to saying that men with ideals in Jewry were glad to turn to a new movement in which their ideals might have a place, finding the established cult sunk in ceremonialism. And when we contemplate the mass of its ceremonial law, the endless complex of taboo and sacrifice and traditionary custom and super stition, we can but say that if men were good under such a regimen it was in spite of and not in virtue of it. Moral reason is there outraged at every turn; and the anti-sacrificial doctrines of the J Cp. A Short History of Freethought, i, 120. Seville (ProUgomines, p. 313) admits the nullity of Judaism on the scientific side. ne seems to imply that it made an end of the notion of planetary deities ; but it really held by planetary angels all along, and passed on the idea to Kepler. 94 THE EATIONALE OF EELIGION prophets were stedfastly disregarded to the end. If it be suggested that in such a system religion has got rid of the irrational element in taboo, and left only what is " essential to religion and morals," we can but recall the classic case of the Briton's verdict on the folly of the French nation in making the uniforms of its army " white, which is absurd, and blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the blue-horse." We come within sight of the truth when we listen to Eenan's dictum that of the Jewish race we may say the very best and the very worst without fear of error, since it presents both extremes. Therein the Jewish race is simply on all fours with all others, as Eenan might easily have realised if he could once have got rid of the racial presupposition in his moral estimates. Judaism, in short, wrought no abnormal development in thought or life ; and its very failure was on the lines of the failures of the systems and civilisations around it. The champion of the current creed, though an expert in Greek lore, resorts to the conventional judgment1 that 'the Greek with his joyous nature had no abiding sense of sin." It is the dictum also of Eenan : "A profound sentiment of human destiny was always lacking to the Greeks": they had "no arri&re pensie of social disquietude or melancholy ": their childlike serenity was "always satisfied with itself": "gaiety has always characterised the true Hellene."2 A closer student of Greek religion than Eenan, and one perhaps more sympathetic than. Dr. Jevons, declares of this doctrine : " It is the absolute contrary of the facts I seek to set forth."8 And two of the Germans who have studied Greece most closely and most independently have agreed in the verdict that " The Greeks were less happy than most men think."4 Their verdict is likely to cancel the conventional formula for those who will weigh both in critical balances. It was the Greeks, when all is said, who passed on to Christianity its type of torturing fiend :6 it was the Greek adoption of Christianity, " the religion of sorrow," that preserved to the world that growth from a pagan germ on Judaic soil; and it was "the Greek," finally, who constructed tbe Christian creed. § 9. Conclusion. There has thus emerged from a survey of the comparative I Jevons, Introduction, p. 334. 2 Les Apdtres, ed. 1866, pp. 324, 328, 329. 3 J. Girard, Le Sentiment religieux en Grice, p. 7. Cp. Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, 2nd ed. pp. ix, 1-10. 4 Burckhardt, Griechische Culturgeschichte, i, 11, citing Boeckh. 6 E-g., Eurynomos, ' who according to the antiquarians at Delphi is a daimon in Hades, and eats the flesh of the dead clean to the bones His colour is a blueish-black, like that of the flies that infest meat, and he shows his fangs." Pausanias, x, 28. APPEAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS 95 evolution of religions the conclusion that not only do all undergo change in spite of the special religious aversion to change, but all evolve by the same laws, their differences being invariably reducible to effects of environment. Of this the decisive proof is the fact that, under the very roof of a professed monotheism, there arose as aforesaid a secondary God-idea on the lines of a normal process of polytheism. The law of the process is everywhere an interposition of a new God, evolved by later psychosis, between the worshippers and the earlier God, so long as the God-idea remains a psychic need. Only the violent rupture with Christism, and the ensuing feud, prevented Judaism from obeying the law in the normal manner : what happened was that on the severance of the new cult from the old, the older deity was himself modified, with, for a time, somewhat grotesque results.1 But for Christists the new God stands to the old in the convenient relation that was normal in the original environment — that of son. Even as Apollo, and Athene^ and Attis, and Herakles, and Dionysos, had to become children of Zeus, and Merodach the son of Ea, and Khonsu the son of Amun at Thebes,2 and Mithra the son of Ahura-Mazda, the Judaeo-Greek Logos had to be the son of Yahweh, the anti-Judaic animus of the Gnostics failing to oust the already formed myth.8 Such an evolution stands in all cases alike for the simple need of the worshipper who has ceased to relate fully to the old environ ment, and is appealed to by a cult coming from an environment like his own, or adapts his old God to a new moral climate. In the oldest systems known to us such modifications are seen taking place. Already in the Vedas, Indra, originally a God of thunder and storm, has been "touched with emotion" till he becomes of the order of the Beloved Gods, giving and receiving the love of men;4 and still his cult was in its own sphere largely superseded by that of Krishna,6 who could better be made to play the part. In Egypt, again, Osiris is visibly made to meet the need for a " nearer God " by assuming new characteristics from age to age;6 and yet, after millenniums of possession, he seems to have waned before Serapis, who in turn ceded, not without force, to Jesus.7 All the while, indeed, inferior 1 Cp. Hershon, Genesis with a TaVmudical Commentary, 1883, pp. 1, 45, 60, 98, 121, 124, 236, 258, 297, 330, 358, 368. 2 As to the evolution of humbler "popular" Gods, see Erman, Handbook, as cited, pp. 74-79. 8 Cp. A Short History of Christianity, pp. 113-117. 4 Muir, Sanskrit Texts, v, 103 sa. 6 Vishnu Purdna, B. v, cc. 10, 11, 12, 30 (Wilson's trans. 1840, pp. 522-8, 588). Cp. Muir, Texts, iv, ch. ii, § 5. 6 Cp. Tiele, Egyptian Beligion, Eng. tr. pp. 118-120, 139, 140, 167, 168, 185, etc.; Erman, as cited, pp. 80-81. 7 The Egyptian cults were forcibly abolished by Theodosius in 381. 96 THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION deities were popular by reason of the same general need for a God "near at hand."1 In the so-called " Aryan " religions the process is essentially the same. Apollo had to supervene on Zeus, as Zeus had done on Kronos ; and " that father lost, lost his," in a sufficiently primitive myth. Where new culture-contacts follow each other rapidly, and the rites of one accredited Son-God fail to meet the newest psychic needs, another is given him as a brother ; and so Dionysos, grouped in another triad, stands alongside of Apollo. This is accomplished in spite of the most furious resistance of kings and men who see in the new cult only evil and madness ; till in time the priests of Apollo, who can have been no less resentful, give it a place in their chief temple.2 In all such developments, the new God partially supersedes the older,8 whatever formalities be maintained ; and no further explanation is needed for the fact, so fallaciously stressed in some modern propaganda, that many savages recognise a Supreme God or Creator to whom they do not sacrifice or pray.4 The Supreme God, so to speak, has retired from business, in virtue not of any superiority of character but of the law of divine superannuation . Nor is there any limit to the process of substitution save in the cessation of the need. All heresy, all dissent, is but a subsidiary phase of the process which in old time evolved new Gods. The early Church could live down the manifold imaginations of Gnosticism, because they were framed for the speculative minds, and such minds tended to disappear as the intellectual decadence continued ; but only after long convulsions, desperate persecution, and much exhaustion, could it live down its more intimate heresies ; and when Arianism and Manichaeism seemed at length destroyed, it was only to rise again in new forms, philosophic on the one side, popular on the other. And the Gods survive in the ratio of their capacity to meet either order or need — that is to say, in the ratio of the adaptive skill and economic address of their prophets and priests. Without such adaptation they are insalvable. In the orthodox Christian trinity, framed under Judaic restrictions, the Holy Spirit has been 1 Cp. Prof. Erman, Handbook, as cited, p. 75. 2 Plutarch, De Ei ap. Delphi, ix. Cp. Girard, Le Sentiment religieux en Grice, 1869, p. 240. 8 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 103 ; Maspero, Hist, ancienne, pp. 286-7 : Jastrow, p. 118; Tiele, Egypt. Bel. p. 155. 4 Cp. A Short History of Freethought, i, 94 ; Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 48 sq.) ; Barth, Beligions of India, p. 18 (as to Varuna) ; Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, i, 324 ; Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii, 105-6 ; and cases cited by Krasinski, Sketch of the Beligious Hlst°rvof the Slavonic Nations, ed. 1851, p, 13, and by Buchner, Force and Matter, Eng. tr. p. 393. APPRAISEMENT OF RELIGIONS 97 from first to last, technically speaking, a failure, being for all practical purposes superseded by the Virgin Mother, and for all philosophic purposes merged in the Logos on the one hand and in the Father-God on the other. But just as Jesus tended to supersede Yahweh, so Mary in large measure tended to supersede Jesus, who is seen to have become more inaccessible and supernal as his Mobher was made in her turn to play the part of Mediator. There are even traces in later medieval art of a tendency to make Mary's mother, Saint Anna, take the place of the Father in a new trinity ; and the similar tendency to create a secondary trinity out of the human father and mother and son, Joseph and Mary and Jesus, is not yet exhausted.1 It depends upon the total fortunes of civilisa tion whether that tendency shall be realised, or be arrested by the culture-forces which are at present disintegrating all theistic thought. In fine, Christ-making is but a form or stage of God-making, the Christs or Son-Gods being but secondary Gods. Of necessity they are evolved out of prior material — the material, it may be, of primitive cults to which men reverted in times of distress and despair of help from the Gods in nominal power; but when the reversion persists the old material is transformed, and the result is a new God who, Antseus-like, has fresh vitality through contact with the primary sources of religious emotion, but is turned to the account of new phases of emotion, moral and other. Thus in the Hellenised cult of the Thrakian Bacchus, out of the very riot of savagery, the reek of blood and of living flesh torn by the hands and teeth of wine-maddened Mosnads, there arises the dream of absorp tion in the God, and of utter devotion to his will, even as we meet it in the suicide-seeking transports of the early Christians. And thus, on the aesthetic side of the evolution, from the rude block of the rustic Beer-God8 there is ultimately fashioned, under the hands even of the unbelieving Euripides, the gracious form of the calm God of Joy : — No grudge hath he of the great ; No scorn of the mean estate ; But to all that liveth His wine he giveth, Griefless, immaculate.4 J Cp. A Short History of Christianity, pp. 235-6. 2 Cp. Girard, Le Sentiment religieux en Grece, pp. 396-402. K. O. Mtiller had previously put it (Hist. Lit. Anc. Greece, p. 289) that there was an " intense desire felt by every worshipper of Bacchus to fight, to conquer, to suffer, in common with him," and that this led to the satyric element in the festivals. Haigh (Tragic Drama of the Greeks, 1896, p. 21) points out that the satyric chorus was anything but devotional, and that the temper m question belonged to "the orgiastic worship of Dionysos, as performed by ecstatic Mcenads at Thebes and Delphi, where the dominant note, undoubtedly, was one of agonised sympathy with the sufferings of the God." Cp. Miss Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, ch. x. " Op. Miss Harrison, Prolegomena, 2nd ed. pp. 415-425. • BacohcB, 421-3. Gilbert Murray's translation. . 98 THE RATIONALE OF RELIGION And even such a mystery as Hellenic hands wrought out of the hypostasis of the Beer-God, Hellenistic hands could shape from that of a man of sorrows, moulding from the sombre figure of the human sacrifice, slain a million times through aeons of ignorance, a God of another and a more enduring cast. In the understanding of this secondary process lies the comprehension of the history of what may be conveniently termed " culture-religion " as distin guished from the " Nature religion " studied under the head of anthropology. In terms of this distinction we may say that hierology proper begins with the typically secondary Gods, where anthropology in the ordinary sense ends.1 But it is essential to a scientific view that we remember there has been no break in the evolution, no supernatural or enigmatic interposition ; and this will be sufficiently clear when we study the evolution of the secondary Gods in detail.. 1 Cp. Tiele, Outlines, p. 6. Paet II. SECONDARY GOD-MAKING Chapteb I. THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD § 1. Totemism and Sacraments. THEEE is an arguable case for the theory that the belief in a dying and re-arising Saviour-God, seen anciently in the cults of Adonis, Attis, Herakles, Osiris, and Dionysos, originated obscurely in the totem-sacramonts of savages who ate a sacred animal in order to preserve their identity of species with it.1 There is, however, a much stronger case for the simpler theory that the belief in question originated on another line in the practice of sacrificing by way of sympathetic magic a victim who, as such, became a God, but was not supposed to rise again in his own person.2 The first of these theories is in the nature of the case incapable of proof;8 and it is not necessary, for a rational comparison and appreciation of the historic cults, to establish it, any more than to assume that either derivation excludes the other. We should profit little by our know ledge of the manifold God-making powers of early man if we supposed that any given Saviour-cult could originate only in such a line or lines of descent ; and in point of fact the proposal to hark back to totemism seems to overlook the fact that a sacramental meal ostensibly can originate apart from totemism. It is not plausible to suppose, for instance, that the eating of bread in a primitive eucharist implied that the partakers originally 1 Cp. S. Eeinach, Cultes, Mythes, et Beligions, i (1908) introd. and passim; and Orpheus, introd.; Durkheim, Sur le totemisme, in L'Annte Sociologique, 5e Annee, 1902, pp. 114, 117 ; F._B. Jevons. Introd. to Hist, of Belig. 1S96, p. 154. A clear case of totem-sacrament was said to be lacking till the discovery of that of the Aruntas, discussed by M. Durkheim, and by Dr. Frazer in the preface to the second edition of his Golden Bough. But a case of the same order, apparently, is noted by J. G. Mtiller from the testimony of a traveller among the redskins in Arkansas. Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, 2te Aufl. , pp. 606-7. See also that cited by Eobertson Smith, Belig. of the Semites, p. 277, note. 2 Cp. Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. vol. iii, ch. iii, §§ 15, 16. 8 It should be noted that the whole theory of the totemistic origin of agriculture, animal-oulture, metaUurgy, etc, originated by Dr. Jevons and confidently developed by M. Eeinach, is rejected by Dr. Frazer in his recent monumental work on Totemism and Exogamy (4 vols. 1910), In point of fact, totems are -not found to coincide with the special pursuits of totem-tribes. Work cited, iv, 18. 99 100 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD had the corn for their special totem;1 or (supposing the God Dionysos to have been a simple deification of the sacramental Soma or Haoma, as Agni was of the sacrificial fire) 2 to conclude that the first Soma-drinkers made their ritual beverage on the score that they were of the grape or any analogous totem. Both inductively and deductively we seem rather led to conclude that totems might or might not be sacramentally eaten ; and that animals like men might be sacramentally eaten without any reference to totemism. It is apt to be forgotten that at bottom the word " sacred " {hieros) equates with " taboo "; and that an animal might be made taboo for a variety of reasons — as being too valuable to kill, or as being unwholesome, or as being for occasional killing only. On the difficult subject of totemism, the suggestion may here be incidentally offered that the totem was in origin merely the group's way of naming itself.8 Such group-names were as necessary as individual names ; and while a person could readily be labelled from the place of his birth or any family incident at that period, or by a physical or moral peculiarity, clans of the same stock could with difficulty be distinguished in the nomadic state save by arbitrary names, which could best be drawn from the list of natural objects. Indeed, it is hard to conceive how otherwise nomadic clans could first name themselves. What other vocables were available ?* Spencer's suggestion that totemism originated in misinterpretation of wie&names6 raises the difficulty that nicknames presuppose names. Spencer fully realises this in the case of individuals, but overlooks it in the case of the group, since he apparently supposes the tribal totem-name to come through the nickname of an already-named individual. When we realise that for sheer lack of other words the 1 Dr. Jevons appears to argue (pp. 115-117) that the first agriculturists were so only in virtue of having made totems of the cereals they cultivated. He explicitly suggests that the agricultural comes later than the pastoral stage " because animal preceded plant totems." On this view men of the bear or wolf or eagle totem could have neither crops nor herds. The interesting argument of M. Eeinach (as cited above), a development of that of Dr. Jevons, raises the same set of difficulties. 2 See above, p. 53. 3 In his Social Origins (1903) Mr. Andrew Lang quite independently advanced a theory of the totem which is broadly in accord with the following, put forth by me in the same year. He, however, inferred the process of naming to have begun in " sobriquets given by group to group," showing that such ostensible sobriquets occur in France, England, and elsewhere, to this day. (Cp.Jiis Secret of tlie Totem, 1905, p. 126 sq.) But, admitting his contention that a group has " far more need of names for its neighbours than of a name for itself," I still submit that a group needed a name for itself, were it only to answer the question of a stranger or new neighbour, " Who are you ? " If this be recog nised, there need be no trouble about reconciling the adoption by late groups or clans of "derisive" nicknames with the thesis that the early group-names were "rather honour- giving than derisive." Need they have been either ? 4 Mr. Mathew (Eaglehawk and Crow, 1899, p. 109) notes the very suggestive fact that Australian communities as wholes are often named from one of their own verbal negatives, as if the " No " of a tribesman to the alien whom he could not understand gave the latter his ground for naming. Here we have purely alien naming. In the exogamous classes within the tribes, again, we have naming by consent, with animal names. " Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed. vol. i, § 172, p. 327. TOTEMISM AND SACEAMENTS 101 early group could hardly have any name whatever save from a natural object, and when we so recast the explanation, the objection which meets the first form of the nickname theory — that it ascribes too much latitude to verbal misunderstanding1 — falls to the ground. In the primitive state, we must presume, objects and actions were first named by onomatopoeia, or else, sensations and actions being first so named, objects were metaphorically named from sensations and actions ; 2 and so with attributes. A definite doctrine as to beginnings is hard to justify, and is not here essential : it suffices to realise that objects would be somehow named before individuals and groups were, whether or not individuals were named before groups. And while persons might readily be named or nicknamed Tall or Short, Straight or Crooked, Quick or Slow, tribes could only in rare instances be so distinguished ; while nothing would be more easy than for one family or clan to say to another, You are the Wolves, we the Bears ; you the Trees, we the Birds, and so on.8 Some such agreement would be necessary ; for the mere bestowal of names of whim or derision by groups or clans on each other — sometimes suggested as an explanation of the phenomenon — would yield a multitude of names for each group.4 The same difficulty meets Spencer's theory that the belief in animal descent came through a nickname, and the totem symbol from that. Spencer, I repeat, had not fully considered the special conditions of the naming of groups. His correction of common assumptions as to the naming of individuals is important, though it is perhaps precarious in respect of the assumption that contemporary savage ways of naming children were primordial; but there is a clear hiatus between his doctrine of individual names and nicknames, and his suggestion as to tribal totem-names. He merely rejects other explanations without justifying his own. "Why," he asks,6 "did there occur so purely gratuitous an act as that of fixing on a symbol for the tribe ? That by one tribe out of multitudes so strange a whim might be displayed is credible. But that by tribes unallied in type and scattered throughout the world, there should have been independently adopted so odd a practice, is incredible." Now, the naming of groups is no more gratuitous or strange than the naming of individuals : groups needed to name themselves and each other as such, just as individuals did ; and as Spencer admits animal-nicknames to be natural,' he ' Frazer, Totemism. p. 95. 2 Cp. Geiger, Development of the Human Bace. Eng. tr. 1880, pp. 24, 28-29. Kangaroo and emu, eaglehawk and crow, iguana, opossum, etc., are among the names of the Australian " classes." 4 This consideration does not seem to be met by Mr. Lang's " sobriquet " theory. 5 Vol. cited, § 170, p. 333. « Note to § 176, p. 346. ' §§ 170, 181. 102 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD cannot well deny animal names to be natural in the case of clans or tribes. If there is anything certain about early man it is that he regarded animals as on a level with him, and all objects as possibly animate. For tribal purposes, then, these were the natural names ; and a formal agreement would be required for their adoption. In no other way could groups speak with each other about each other, at least when they became numerous. And until fixed dwellings or hamlets did away with the need, the expedient would subsist for the reason for which it began. This period, however, would be immensely long, and the memory of the genesis would infallibly be lost. Given the original circum stances, "verbal misunderstanding" was thus inevitable. When, that is to say, the comparatively early savage learned that he was a Bear," and that his father and grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really impossible that, after ages in which totem names thus passed current, he should fail to assume that his folk were descended from a bear, which as a matter of course became at a later stage an Ancestor-God.2 The belief was inevitable precisely because the totem was not a nickname, but a name antecedent to nicknames ; and because descent from an animal was the easiest way of explaining or conceiving a " beginning " of men. And while some totem names might conceivably have been chosen by way of striking up a helpful alliance with an animal family,8 the fact that the list of totems includes sand, sparrows, pigeons, bats, and so on, is hardly open to that interpretation ; while the principle of simply naming from an already-named object seems to meet all cases alike. Such a procedure has actually been noted among the contem porary natives of the island of Efati in the New Hebrides, where the people are all divided into families or clans, each of which has a distinctive name, such as manui, the cocoa-nut, namkatu a species of yam, naui, the yam," etc.4 Similarly the exogamous 1 The later evolution of totemism is searchingly studied in Mr. Lang's Secret of the Totem. 2 Dr. Frazer (Totemism, 1887, p. 95) remarks : " Sir John Lubbock also [with Spencer] thinks that totemism arose from the habit of naming persons and families after animals ; but in dropping the intermediate links of ancestor-worship and verbal misunderstanding he has stripped the theory of all that lent it even an air of plausibility "(citing the Origin of Civilisation, p. 260). Those links being duly inserted, the theory, let us trust, has rather more "air of plausibility" than some of Dr. Frazer's own hypotheses in other fields. His own final theory of the totem (Totemism and Exogamy, 1910, iv, 57 sq.) is quite unsatisfactory. 8 So Dr. Jevons, Introd. to Hist, of Belig. pp. 101-104. "The fundamental principle of totemism," he finally asserts (p. 120), " is tbe alliance of a clan with an animal species." 4 Eev. D. Macdonald, Oceania : Linguistic and Anthropological, 1889, pp. 182-3. The primitiveness of the Efatese is attested by the fact that " The woman is the mother of the clan — that is, every child, male or female, belongs to the family of the mother." Id. ' Totemism," observes Mr. Lang (The Secret of the Totem, 1905, p. 142), "certainly arose in an age when, if descent was reckoned, and if names were inherited, it was on the spindle side." TOTEMISM AND SACRAMENTS 103 " classes " of the Australian tribes are always named from animals, plants, objects, etc.;1 and in most of the tribes of West Africa there are some men with a totem surname who with men of the same surname in other tribes claim a common descent from the original totem.2 Livingstone noted the same usage among the Bechuanas, whole tribes being known as " they of the monkey," 8 and so on — a state of things in which the cognomen could be carried from any one tribe into others. So among the Narrinyeri of South Australia, "every tribe has its ngaitye, that is, some animal which they regard as a sort of good genius, which takes an interest in their welfare — something like the North- American Indian totem No man or woman will kill her ngaitye, except it happens to be an animal which is good for food, when they have no objection to eating them* Never theless, they will be very careful to destroy the remains," from the usual fear of sorcery.6 Here we have the rationale of the totem. " It appears to me," writes the last witness, " that the ngaitye of the Narrinyeri is the same as the aitu of the Samoans, but it is not regarded with so much veneration by the former as by the latter. The names are evidently derived from one original, ngaitye being the same word as aitu, only with the addition of consonants."6 Now, the aitu of Samoa is simply the primary form of the Gods. At his birth a Samoan was supposed to be taken under the care of some God, or aitu, as it was called. The help of several of these Gods was probably {sic) invoked in succession on the occasion, and the one who happened to be addressed just as the child was born was fixed on as the child's God for life." 7 Each God was supposed to appear in " some visible incarnation " — beast, fish, bird, animal, shell-fish, or creeping thing. " A man would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the God of another man, but the incarnation of his own particular God he would consider it death to injure or eat." " This class of genii, or tutelary deities, they call aitu f ale, or Gods of the house." In fine, the family-name or tribe-name, plant or animal or what not, first becomes an ancestor, who re-incarnates himself, and as 1 J. Mathew, Eaglehawk and Crow, 1899, pp. 100, 102 sa., 108-9; Spencer and Gillen, Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904, App. B. 2 Major Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 394. 3 Missionary Travels and Besearches in South Africa, 1857, p. 13 ; ed. 1905, p. 5. 4 Cp. Stewart, as cited from Fison and Howitt by Frazer, Totemism, p. 7 ; and Mathew, as cited, p. 110. 8 Bev. G. Taplin, The Narrinyeri, 2nd ed. p. 63. In Formosa, again, the natives observe a kind of totemism, each tribe being supposed to be under the tutelage of some bird, beast, or reptile." W. A. Pickering, Pioneering in Formosa, 1898, p. 72. 6 Taplin, p. 64 ; Mathew, p. 112. It is noteworthy that by the account of Thevenet the true form of the word totem was ote = family or tribe. Frazer, Totemism, p. 1. ' Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, p. 17. 104 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD such is not normally to be eaten. This is ' the rule in the vast majority of cases.1 But among the ill-supplied Australians2 he may be eaten when he is eatable, being regarded all the while as a God- ancestor,8 whose remains must be safeguarded from sorcery ; while among the well-supplied Samoans he is strictly taboo, though any man may eat another man's ancestor-God. In neither case is there any sign of the idea of a totem-sacrament ; and Livingstone's Bechuana tribes, like the Samoans, never ate their totem, " using the term ila, hate or dread, in reference to killing it." And it is difficult to conceive that a sacramental eating of the totem was originally a matter of course. To say nothing of the normal veto on the eating of one's own kin, the people whose totem was the sand, or the thunder, or the evening star, or the moon, or the hot wind, for instance, must have been hard put to it to conform to the principle ; and while those of the centipede might contrive to accept it, the folk of the lion-totem must have found their sacrament precarious. While, again, in virtue of the primeval logic which regarded inter fusion of blood as a creation of kinship, and the eating of lion as a way of becoming brave, the belief in the totemic descent, once set up, might at times lead to the practice of eating the totem, the eating of a lamb sacrament, on the other hand, is not plausibly to be so accounted for. There is, however, no difficulty in under standing how the totem animal might come to be at once revered and shunned, or regarded as " unlucky " when met. For instance, a Basuto of the crocodile totem, who did not often see crocodiles, might naturally feel when he met one as " civilised " people have been known to feel when they see an ancestor in a dream — he might take the meeting, that is, as a warning that trouble or death was about to overtake him. On the totem name had followed inevitably the belief in the totem ancestry, and occasionally the prohibition of the totem animal as food ; and to both concepts attached all the hallucinations that early clustered around names. When, however, we come to deal with religions as distinguished from religion, we are at a stage far removed from simple totemism, though many of the early hallucinations still remain in possession, 1 See Frazer on Totemism, passim. 2 The old disputes as to the food supplies of the Australians may here be revived. See Prof. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, pp. 148-9 ; and cp. Spencer and Gillen, Native Tribes of Central Australia, 1899, pp. 21, 25, 37, 46, 50 ; Northern Tribes, 1904 pp 36-7. Mr. Mathew (Eaglehawk and Crow, pp. 80, 89) in general denies that the aborigines are hunger-pinched, but does not show much of a case to the contrary. Even in New Zealand, where, though the natives were at a higher culture-level, there were no land animals, famines were so often set up by wars that this is suggested as the origin of their canni balism. Eev. E. Taylor, Te Ilea a Maui : or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, 1870, pp. 9-10. 8 Stewart, as above cited, and the other instances given by Dr. Frazer. THEORY AND RITUAL OF HUMAN SACRIFICE 105 as in the animal-Gods of Egypt and the animal-angels of Judaism. For our purpose of comparison and comprehension, then, we may fitly take up the conception of the slain Saviour-God as it existed, on the one hand, in the ancient cults amid which Christianity arose, and as it has been found, on the other hand, elsewhere and in later times in cults of primitive cast. § 2. Theory and Bitual of Human Sacrifice. The sacrifice of a Saviour-God is a specialisation of the general practice of human sacrifice, which takes many forms.1 The most readily intelligible are those in which (a), after a tribal war, captives are ritually slain to appease or compensate the spirits of those killed in fighting ; (6) those in which, in time of pestilence or danger, or by way of precaution, victims are slain to propitiate the deities supposed to be concerned ; (c) those by way of thank-offerings to the Gods after a victory;2 and {d) those in which, on the death of a savage chief, slaves and wives — and, it may be, animals — are slain to accompany him in the "other " life, whatever it may be. The victims in the last case are the analogues of the weapons and the food placed in or on or near the grave in ordinary savage burial. The fourth form of ritual slaying is sometimes differentiated from human sacrifice "in the true sense" as being simply a provision, dictated by filial piety, for the comfort and dignity of a savage aristocrat in the other world.8 It is well to note the distinc tion; but it is no less important to realise how completely the conception in this case fuses psychologically with that behind the express sacrifice of a victim to appease a deity, and, further, how the funeral sacrifice leads up to the " messenger " and " scapegoat " sacrifices, which blend in that of the Saviour-God-Man. All three of the forms specified are common in savage and barbaric life, and it is in the psychic atmosphere of such conventional blood-shedding that there grows up the whole body of the religious doctrine of sacrifice. Human sacrifice, indeed, may be defined as one speciali sation of ritual slaughter and sacrament. Strictly speaking, the "messenger" and "scapegoat" victims are also outside the primary conception of sacrifice inasmuch as J For lists of instances in all times and countries see Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, iii, 110-112 ; Constant, De la religion, liv. xi, ch. ii (ed. 1833, vol. iv, P- 168 s«.) ; and Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, 1867, i, 326 sq. . Those thank-offerings are not as a rule spontaneous ; the Gods demand them, as their fruits of the victory, through the priests "( A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 119). 8 Cp. Major Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 389; Mary H, Kingsley, Travels in West Africa, 1897, p. 442. 106 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD they are not, or not necessarily, offered up to any God by way of propitiation. The pharmakos or " magic-man " (literally " medicine man," but not in the received sense of that term) who was ritually beaten and put to death in the festival called Thargelia at Athens was strictly a scapegoat, upon whom were put all evils, the people's sins included : he took them away, and was killed to complete the process of riddance, but was not "offered up" to any God. But in point of fact the Hebrew scapegoat was specifically a "sin offering"; and of the two goats concerned one was "for the Lord" and the other "for Azazel," the Goat-God.2 And even in the Greek case the act of ritual slaying is akin to the others inasmuch as all alike are supposed to work either the salvation or benefit of the community or the good of an eminent individual. As we shall see, the slaying which it most concerns us to trace, that of the Saviour-God, may in some cases be only in this general sense a sacrifice, being conceivably rather an act of ritual magic, like the slaying of the pharmakos, than a propitiation of a God, since the victim (even in the case of the scapegoat) is a God. But, as we shall see, the forms of the slaying assimilated, all being alike " religious," and the psychic connotations were very much the same. Of the first of the four common forms above specified the typical examples are those furnished by the practice of the North-American Indians,4 who commonly added cannibalism6 to their torture-sacrifices, apparently combining the motives which led some savages to eat their dead by way of symbolic " communion," and those which suggested the eating of brave enemies, or animals, in the hope of acquiring their courage. This last is still common in Africa ; where, again, we have instances of individual appeasement of the slain. " In cases of murder or manslaughter a sacrifice is made to lay the spirit of the victim ";6 and among the Nilotic negroes, when a warrior has killed a man, he must in propitiation shave his head, catch a fowl, hang it round his neck by the beak, and cut away the body, leaving the head hanging.7 Here the fowl is a surrogate for i See the argument of Miss J. E. Harrison, Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, 2nd ed. 1908, pp. 95-109. 2 Lev. xvi, 5-11. Marg. 3 Miss Harrison (p. 109) begs the question when she says that "the ceremonials of sacrifice and riddance express widely different conditions and sentiments in the mind of the worshipper." 4 Lafitau, Mosurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, ii, 266 sq.; Waitz, Anthropologic der NaturvBlker, iii, 159. 6 Not always. The Pani and the Natchez are said not to have practised cannibalism, though the latter at times and the former customarily offered human sacrifices (Waitz, iii, 159). But these tribes were among the least savage. 6 Livingstone, Popular Account of Missionary Travels and Besearches, 1861, p. 292; ed. 1905, p. 405. Compare the slaughter of Polixena on the grave of Achilles. Euripides, Hecuba, 535 sq. Sir H. H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 794. THEORY AND RITUAL OF HUMAN SACRIFICE 107 the man. In the case of funeral sacrifices also, we shall see, the element of cannibalism enters ; and here too the primary principle appears to have been that which underlay " kin-eating," though a new sacramental element begins to be involved. In any case the procedure is clearly religious. A contemporary anthropologist tells that among the Unyoro and other tribes of Uganda, before British rule, on the death of a king, " a circular pit was dug, not more than five feet in diameter, and about twelve feet deep. The king's bodyguard seized the first nine Unyoro men they met and threw them alive into the pit. Then the dead body of the king was rolled in bark-cloth, and the skin of a cow, newly killed, wrapped round it and sewn. This bundle was then lowered in the midst of the nine men in the pit, no clay was filled in, but another cowskin was stretched tightly across the opening and pegged down all round. A covering of grass was then neatly laid over the skin, and the multitude who were present at the funeral set to work at once to build a, temple over the grave.1 A head man was appointed as watcher, and very many of the personal servants of the deceased were appointed to live in the temple, and their descendants after them. It was the duty of the surrounding country to see that they were supplied with food." "How any beings could hit on this method of honouring a dead king," he concludes, "passes the range of the most morbid imagina tion."2 The really surprising thing is that a professed anthropologist in the twentieth century should have been so perplexed. The cruelly simple usage in question is one of the most familiar types of human sacrifice ;8 and even the further development of " messenger " sacri fices, which we shall have to consider later, proceeds on the same primitive and transparent reasoning. In the still later development of the Man-God sacrifice, which partly involves the last-mentioned, the psychic causation is more complicated, and, as we shall see, the variations of practice set up a variety of problems. In some forms it is simple enough. At Benin, for instance, hundreds of criminals were sacrificed annually at one festival, at the rate of twenty-three a day. On these occasions the king, regally attired, " addressed 1 There is here suggested the interesting question whether the 'adytum or cave which was the nucleus of Semitic and other ancient temples (see Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 306) was originally a victim-pit or grave. On the other hand compare the usage as to upper chambers," noted hereinafter. 2 Uganda and its Peoples : Notes on the Protectorate of Uganda, especially the Anthro pology and Ethnology of the Indigenous Baces, by J. F. Cunningham, F.E.G.S., F.Z.S., 1905, p. 31. Cp. pp. 56, 318. 8 Mr. Cunningham notes (pp. 32-33) that the nine victims must belong to the king's tribe. The reason is obvious : they must be his friendly servants. This is quite clear in the case of the Baganda kings, whose chief attendants were sacrificed. Cp. Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the British Expedition to the Niger, 1848, i, 328. In other parts of Africa the number of twelve victims is common : see Great Benin, by H. Ling Both, 1903, D: JO. It is hardly necessary to recall the sacrifices of twelves in the Hebrew cult, or that of the twelve Trojans to the manes of Patroclus by Achilles. In the latter case the theory W£- 2 ^e tllat tlle slaiu would serve as slaves to Patroclus in the Shades, an office for Which, in the circumstances, only enemies were available. 108 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD the victims in a kind voice, telling them he was sending them with a message1 to his father. They were to salute his father, and tell him that his son was not ready to join him yet, but he sent them, the victims, to be with his father and salute him."2 In less primitive societies we shall find the office of messenger doubled with that of the sacrificed God-Man. He in turn appears at times to be doubled with the Scapegoat, or remover of sins and evil spirits ; and there are yet other variants — e.g., the simple sacrifices of victims slain in treaty-making as "blood of reconciliation."8 But if each phase be handled in a scientific spirit, it will be found to reveal in turn much if not all of its anthropological significance. The most remarkable of the Man-God-slaying cults which have come under what maybe termed scientific observation, while actually in force, is that which prevailed till fifty or sixty years ago among the mountaineer Khonds,4 or Kui, of Orissa. The first observer, Major Maepherson, was a man abnormally qualified in his day both for the study of the sacrificial rite and for its peaceful abolition ; and science owes him on the former head nearly as much as civilisation does on the latter. It would be hard to find an anthropological research before his day more marked by the scientific spirit. On the face of his report, there are various reasons for regarding the Khonds as a Dravidian race6 driven to the hills (where they subjugated other aborigines) by invading Oriyas ; and one of several grounds for surmising that their religion derives from ancient Central- Asiatic sources is the fact that, like the Chinese, they show great respect for parents and ancestors. One of their boasts is, or was, " that they reverence their fathers and mothers, while the Hindus treat theirs with contempt." 6 Another reason is their rejection alike of temples and images. " They regard the making, setting-up, and worshipping of images of the Gods as the most signal proof of conscious removal to a hopeless distance from communion with them ; a confession of utter despair of being permitted to make any 1 " The slaying of victims to convey messages is a later modification ; and is seemingly at variance with the accepted idea that the dead are cognizant of what is taking place in the world." Sir A. B. Ellis, Ewe-speaking Peoples, p. 118. 2 C. Punch, cited by H. Ling Both, Great Benin, 1903, p. 74. 8 Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, p. 444. 4 The name is often spelt Kandh or Khand, but it is officially declared that the proper spelling is Kondh. See Thurston's Castes and Tribes of Southern India, Madras, 1909, iii, 356. Kondh or Khond (from the Telugu word Konda, a hill) is a name given by neigh bouring peoples. Those so named call themselves Kui. The race is found, in various stages of civilisation, and with varying dialects, in other parts of southern India. Id. pp. 357, 367. 8 Cp. Elie Beclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 247-8; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. ii. 271. Dalton, Ethnography of Bengal, p. 243, classes the Khonds as certainly Dravidian. So Grierson, in Thurston, iii, 357. 8 Memorials of Service in India. From the Correspondence of the late Major S. C. Maepherson, C.B. Edited by his brother, William Maepherson. London, 1865, p. 67. THEORY AND RITUAL OF HUMAN SACRIFICE 109 direct approach to the deity : a sense of debarment which they them selves have never felt."1 Yet another reason is the fact that they had no official priesthood, the function being open to anyone who felt called to assume it, and went through the normal preliminary symptoms of a state of trance. Politically the hill Khonds of Orissa were governed in general by patriarchs, patriarchal councils, and popular assemblies ; and there was no trace of Christian influences — the very existence of the tribes having been unknown to the Government before 1835. Their religious system was a normal polytheism, with a Supreme Creator God, known as Boora Pennu or Light God, at the head. Under him were Tari (or Bera) Pennu,2 the Earth-Goddess, and certain second-class deities of natural or social forces, as rain, vegetation, increase, hunting, war, and boundaries. Next came the deified sinless men of the first age, who were the tutelary Gods of tribes and septs ; and under these ranked a multitude of local spirits, all named Gods, who presided over villages, houses, hills, fountains, streams, forests, and so forth. With the second order of Gods was ranked Dinga, the judge of the dead and allotter of retribution, who has some appear ance of being taken over from another cult. It was to Tari, the Earth-Goddess, that human sacrifices were offered ; and from the fact that they occurred only among certain tribes, who theoretically admitted the inferiority of Tari to Boora, but gave her their chief devotion and credited her as the Boora- worshippers did Boora with raising fallen man from misery and introducing civilisation, it may be inferred that the cults were originally independent. In the Maliahs (hill districts) of Goomsur, the sacrifice was to " Thadha Pennu," the Earth-Goddess, symbolised as a peacock.8 To the last, the sect of Boora regarded human sacri fice " with the utmost abhorrence as the consummation of human guilt, and believed it to have been adopted under monstrous delusions devised by Tari as the mother of falsehood, with a view solely to the 1 Id. p. 103. It is open to question whether the psychological analysis here does not partly stand for the thought of the observer. Lack of art, and of permanent dwellings, may be the true explanation. See above, Pt. I, ch. ii, p. 71 note, andcp. Voe Memorials, p. 106, n., as to similar phenomena among mountaineers in Siam. See also Lubbock, Origin of Civilisation, 5th ed. p. 374, as to the lack of temples and images among the Malagasy, the wild tribes of Cambodia, the Toorkmans, and other races of Siberia ; and Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 1861, p. 88, as to the primitive Tannese, who " have no idols." Dapper, a seventeenth-century Dutch traveller, who sojourned at Benin, describes the natives as holding that it would be absurd to make images of "God" who is invisible, though they have many images of their "idol-Gods." Here again the psychology of the observer is suspect. (Both, Great Benin, 1901, p. 50.) 2 Dr. John Shortt, " Contribn. to the Ethnology of Jeypore " in Trans, of Ethnol. Soc. N.S. vol. vi (1868), p. 271, gives the names of the two deities in another district as Bona Peimu and Tari Peimu. 8 Eeport of Mr. Eussell. 1837, in Selections from the Becords, Govt, of India, No. V. Human Sacrifice and Infanticide, 1154, cited by E. Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Southern India, 1906, p. 511 ; also in Castes and Tribes of Southern India, iii, 372. 110 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD final destruction of her followers." 1 It is told of Boora, too, that he interfered, through a minor God, according to one myth, to substitute a buffalo for a man as an oblation to Tari ; and this miracle is com memorated at an annual great festival of Boora, called the " jakri " or " dragging," on account of the way in which the buffalo — previ ously treated as a meriah— ia finally handled. According to another account, Boora sent four divine agents to prevent a human sacrifice for which Tari had called. Afterwards, however, her worshippers relapsed. The common relationship of exogamous tribes, who are constantly at war yet habitually intermarry,8 is the apparent explanation of such a permanent schism. But it seems not impossible thab the sacrificial cult was originally that of a conquered race, and that a section of the Khonds adopted it from them, as so often happens where a primitive rite or mystery practised by aborigines is able to appeal to later comers.4 It was from an apparently subject race who partici pated in the cult that the Tari-worshipping Khonds purchased their human victims. As normally practised, the rite was not totemistic,6 but of the nature of " sympathetic magic," and the purpose was to promote agricultural fertility ; but it was also resorted to as a special means of propitiation in the case of a pestilence or other sign of divine displeasure, such as a calamity in the family of a chief ; and individual families similarly made propitiation for individual disaster. The victim, called the meriah, or tokki, or keddi,a was in all cases either purchased from the procuring caste (who at times kidnapped children from the plains for the purpose) or bred as a hereditary victim, a number of families being set apart and cherished for the purpose, so that he — or she, for it was often a woman — was either personally willing to be slain on religious grounds or was the property of the sacrificers. As it was the universal conviction that 1 Maepherson, p. 98. Cp. p. 131, and Shortt, as cited, p. 271. 2 Maepherson, pp. 108, 109 ; Shortt, as cited. _ s Maepherson, p. 69. 4 See Memorials, p. 124 ; and cp. Short History of Freethought, 2nd ed. i, 43-44. The Sect of Boora represent that the Tari-worshippers, debased by her tuition, lived like savages "until by intercoursewithus.as in receiving wives, they became civilised " (p. 110). But tribes of the Boora-worshippers practised female infanticide (p. 113). 8 Id. pp. 65, 114, 115. 6 In one case, where an Elephant-God was worshipped, the victim was fastened to and swung by the proboscis of a wooden elephant, and thus identified with the God (Major- General Campbell, Narrative of Thirteen Years' Service among the Wild Tribes of Khondistan, 1864, pp. 51, 126). This rite may have been totemistic; but where the Earth- Goddess was figured as a bird, and the Earth-God as a peacock, these creatures were not sacrificed (Id. pp. 51. 54). ' So also in the Maliahs of Goomsur. Eussell, cited by Thurston, p. 511. Both motives were acted on in the human sacrifices of the Pawnees and the Dakotas in North America. Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, p. 132. 8 Meriah is the Oriya word ; the others are Khond terms. The former probably means "messenger"— the victim being a messenger to the deity. Dalton, Ethnography of Bengal, 1872, p. 29. THEOEY AND EITUAL OF HUMAN SACEIFICE 111 the meriah became a God by the act of sacrifice, there was no difficulty in keeping up the supply ; and in times of famine Khonds would sell their own children as victims, considering the sacrificial death a highly honourable one. And the Meriah, being consecrated from the beginning, had unlimited sexual liberty, his intercourse with the wife or daughter of any tribesman being welcomed as a boon from the deity. Generally, however, he had assigned to him a wife, herself a destined victim, and mother of victims to come.1 The special religio-ethical feature of the rite was the universally accepted doctrine that the victim, if not a volunteer, must be "bought with a price,"2 and died " for all mankind," not merely for the Khonds ;8 and this view was set forth in the ritual, though it also expressed distinctly the local demand for greater wealth. An odd feature of it was that, although the flesh of the slain victim was cut up into shreds so that a piece might be buried in every field, the recited myth told that Tari demanded blood because when the earth was soft mud she made it firm by the blood she dropped when she cut her finger.4 And there was put in her mouth the injunc tion: "Behold the good change! cut up my body to complete it."s It thus appears that originally the victim had represented the Earth- Goddess herself ; and in a variant of the Khond legend in which two women, Karaboodi and Thartaboodi, figure as the ' only two females on the earth," each with a male son, the former, finding that a drop of her blood hardens the wet earth, tells her son to cut her up, which he does. Thereafter the God " Boora Panoo " comes upon the scene, and the cult of human sacrifice is methodi cally established, the spirit of Karaboodi insisting on its continuance when her descendants offer a monkey as a substitute for a man.6 Obviously it is an agricultural rite ; and it may be that the pretence of drying up the soft mud was a magical device to put the evil spirits of drought on a false scent. The sacrificial rite lasted three or five days. On the first, the meriah' s hair, previously kept long, was shaved off — save in cases where it had been shorn ten or twelve days before — and the people 1 Maepherson, p. 116. 2 Shortt, as cited, p. 273 ; Campbell, as cited, p. 52 ; Bussell, as cited by Thurston. Among the Khonds of the Maliahs of Goomsur, private families purchased children, and reared them as future victims. "Criminals, or prisoners captured in war," says Bussell, are not considered fitting subjects." 8 Maepherson, pp. 98. 115, 116, 117, 122, 136. 4 Shortt, p. 271; Maepherson, pp. 121, 124. 6 Maepherson, p. 121 ; Shortt, p. 271. M. Elie Eeclus (Primitive Folk, pp. 312-313, 316- 317) makes the doctrine more explicit, saying that according to the Khond legend ' Tari had intended each time to submit to the sacrifice in her own person," saying, " I am the meriah : I come to be immolated," and that her worshippers in each case persuaded her to accept a proxy. 6 Thurston, Castes and Tribes, iii, 368-370, following the statement of Mr. A. B. Jayaram Moodaliar. 112 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD passed the night in a licentious revel.1 On the second, he was carefully bathed and newly clothed, taken in procession to the sacred (or taboo) Meriah grove, where he was fastened to a stake, seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric8 (red dye), garlanded with flowers, and worshipped during the day by the assembly, who again spent the night in debauchery. On the third day he was given milk to drink, and the final act of ritual and sacrifice began. At this stage we are struck by the importance of the priest : "a great and fitly instructed priest alone can officiate "; and it is to be gathered from the accounts of the Janni, as well as from the ritual (l) that he was traditionally a celibate and recluse, parading his austerities and securing sanctity by personal unclean- ness; (2) that it was primarily his function to brave the curse of the sacrificed and deified victim ; and (3) that it was thus the priestly influence that maintained the sacrifice. Four days after the sacrifice of the meriah there was sacrificed a buffalo, of which the remains were left for the meriah' s spirit 4— a safeguard against blood-guiltiness.6 The ritual, however, was so framed to begin with as to distribute the responsibility over the village headman or patriarch and the body of the people. On the one hand, the victim reproached his slayers while avowing the belief that he was made a God by the act ; on the other hand, the priest and the headman, pleading this, defended themselves by reciting the circumstances under which he was purchased and dedicated, he consenting as a child. The idea seems to have been to set forth thoroughly both points of view, so that there should be no misunderstanding about the religious nature of the act, and the responsibility of the entire community for it ; but whether by way of sympathetic imagination on the part of some ritual-making priest, or by simple adoption of the actual language of some past sufferer, the victim in one form of the ritual was made to invoke a curse upon the priest, while the latter declared that it was he, as minister of the Creator God, who gave the death its virtue, and threatened to deprive the resisting one of a place among the Gods.6 Finally he was either fastened to a cross of which the horizontal bar, pierced by the upright, could be 1 Maepherson, pp. 107, 117, 118 ; Shortt, as cited. 2 Sometimes placed between two shrubs. Maepherson, p. 118. 8 Turmeric is a principal crop with the Khonds, and part of their argument for a blood sacrifice was that blood was needed to secure the deep red colour of the plant. 4 Maepherson, p. 130. Cp. p. 108, as to the buffalo sacrifice to Boora Pennu. And see hereinafter as to the buffalo sacrifice among the Bataks. 8 The primitive sense of the danger incurred by the sacrificer is often apparent in these Dravidian rites. See Thurston, Castes and Tribes, iv, 313. 6 Maepherson, pp. 120-7. An abbreviated account of the ritual is given in 3. M. Ludlow's British India, its Races and its History, 1858, i, 25-30. THEORY AND EITUAL OF HUMAN SACEIFICE 113 raised or lowered at will,1 or placed in the cleft or split made in a long branch of a green tree, which was made to grasp his neck or chest, the open ends being closed and tightly tied so as to imprison him in the wood, and make as it were a cross, of which he was the upright ; and it appears to have been at this stage that there occurred one of the most significant acts in the entire ritual. It being essential that the victim should finally not resist, his arms and legs, or, where the arms were sufficiently secured, the legs only, were broken, save in cases where the end was attained by drugging him with opium or datura.2 This accomplished, the priest slightly wounded the victim with an axe, and the crowd instantly cut him to pieces, leaving untouched the head and intestines. These, after being carefully watched in the interim, were next day, in some cases, burned to ashes with a whole sheep ; and the ashes were spread over the fields, or laid as a paste over the houses and granaries. In the same spirit, the portions of flesh were solemnly carried to the participating villages, religiously divided among the people, and buried in the fields, each man placing his piece in the earth " behind his back without looking." Upon this ritual there were many local variations. Major- General Campbell, who had followed Maepherson in the Khond agency, tells of a form of the rite in which the victim was first drugged, then taken to the place of execution, where his head and neck were placed in the cleft of a strong split-bamboo, the ends of which were secured and held ; whereafter the priest with his axe broke the joints of the legs and arms, and the sacrifice was consum mated by the people in the usual frightful way.8 Among the Khonds of the Maliahs of Goomsur there was much feasting and intoxication for a month prior to the sacrifice ; on the day before the rite the victim was intoxicated with toddy, garlanded, bound to a post bearing the peacock effigy of the Earth-Goddess,4 and ritually addressed as a God. On the next day he was again intoxicated and anointed with oil, of which each one present sought to obtain a touch for his own head. Finally a hog was sacrificed; and the 1 See the photograph of a preserved "Meriah sacrifice post," given by Thurston, Notes, p. 510 ; Castes and Tribes, iii, 377. 2 Shortt, p. 274 ; Maepherson, p. 119. The main details are confirmed by Major-General Campbell (Narrative of Thirteen Years' Service among the Wild Tribes of Khondistan, 1864), who, following the report of Mr. Bussell, describes the victims as being "stupefied with toddy " (pp. 54-5). Similarly in the human sacrifices formerly offered by the nomad tribe of Koravas, the viotim (tricked) was made drunk. Thurston, Castes and Tribes, m,464. 8 Narrative cited, pp. 112-113. ¦ii T^ere appears to be some confusion, as the effigy was further associated with the village deity Zakaree Pennu, represented by three stones. This deity appears to be of the generic type elsewhere called " Jenkery," and propitiated in the same fashion. Thurston, ethnographic Notes, pp. 512-513; Castes and Tribes, iii, 374-5. I 114 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD victim was stifled in the mud made with its blood, then cut in pieces. A buffalo calf was afterwards maimed in front of the post, and on the third day was killed and eaten,1 visibly as a surrogate. Among the hill tribe called Codooloo, as among the Khonds, there were two sects, of which one offered human sacrifices to the God " Jenkery." In this case the purchased victim had absolute sexual liberty and the right to eat and drink whatever he would. From the moment of seizure till the sacrifice he was kept intoxicated. The signal for slaughter was a wound in the stomach, with the blood from which the image of the God was besmeared. Then he was cut to pieces, everyone trying to secure a morsel, to be presented to the God of his own village. In yet other cases, according to M. Elie Eeclus, the two methods of preventing the victim's struggles were combined. " She must not die in her bonds, since she dies voluntarily, of her own freewill, as they say. He [the priest] loosens her from the stake, stupefies her by making her gulp down a portion of opium and datura, then breaks her elbows and knees with the back of the hatchet.8 Other variations are noted in the use of the drug;4 and in different districts the entire sacrifice varied. Thus among the Kotaya hill tribes the victim was taken before the image of the Earth-Goddess, and rice, coloured (red) with turmeric, was thrown on his hair,6 while he was kept under the influence of opium. In this case the victim had enjoyed special privileges for an unspecified period, all his wishes being granted, and every woman in the village being at his command as a concubine.6 No quasi-crucifixion is specified, the victim being simply stabbed " in the stomach," and the blood used to bathe the idol, whereafter he was cut to pieces by the crowd. In yet another case (at Eamgherry and Lutchampore) the victim was placed in irons, new clothed, made drunk with arrack, and forced into the "temple"' of the Goddess, a hole three feet deep. There his throat was cut and his head cut off ; the remains being 1 Bussell, cited by Thurston, Notes, pp. 511-13. 2 Eeport of Mr. Arbuthnot, 1837, cited by Thurston, Notes, pp. 513-514 ; Castes, iii, 375. 8 Elie Beclus, Primitive Folk, Eng. tr. p. 319. In the matter of references M. Eeclus is notably careless, and I have been unable to trace all of his authorities. His own special studies, however, give his synopsis a measure of authority. The inadequacy of our English works of reference in regard to India is more surprising than the laxities of M. Eeclus. Even the valuable recent compilations of Mr. Thurston, a monument of disin terested scientific devotion, does not give all the details ; but he appends a bibliography to his article on the Kondhs. 4 H. B. Eowney (Wild Tribes of India, 1882, p. 105) follows Eussell's report (cited also by Campbell, pp. 54-55). 5 So among the Coodooloo, who coloured the rice with saffron, and brought the victim before the God. Arbuthnot, as cited. Among the hill Koyis (kin of the Khonds) of the Godavari district, again, sheep sacrificed to the Goddess of small-pox and cholera " have garlands hung round their necks, their heads are adorned with turmeric, and pots of cold water are poured over them." Thurston, iv, 59. 8 Arbuthnot, as cited. 7 Shortt, pp. 274-5. THEOEY AND EITUAL OF HUMAN SACEIFICEv covered with earth and with a pile of stones. When the\ victim was to be sacrificed, the hole was cleared out afresh for purpose. In this district occurred yet another variation. Every third year two victims were sacrificed in honour of the Goddess ; and, whether thus triennially or annually, at Bundair in Jeypore there were sacri ficed to the Sun-God at one festival three victims, " one at the east, one at the west, and the third in the centre of the village." 1 In this case each victim was tied by the hair to a post near his grave, over which he was suspended horizontally with the face downwards, his legs and arms being held outstretched by the assistants.2 He was then beheaded, and the head, stuck on the stake, was there left to decay. A further variation was in the direction of the principle that the infliction of pain made the sacrifice specially efficacious.8 In some districts the victim, after being exposed on a couch, and led in procession round the place of sacrifice, was put to death by slow burning, or by applying hot brands to the body on a sloping pyre, and tortured as long as possible, " it being believed that the favour of the Earth-Goddess, especially in respect of the supply of rain, will be in proportion to the quantity of tears which may be extracted." It is needless to recapitulate the further variants at any length. Victims were stoned, beaten to death with tomahawks or heavy iron rings ; they were strangled; they were crushed between two planks ;5 they were drowned in a pool in the jungle, or in a trough filled with pig's blood Sometimes the victim was slowly roasted ; sometimes he was despatched by a blow to the heart, and the priest plunged a wooden image into the gaping wound, that the mannikin might be gorged with blood." 6 All that is constant is the principle of a redemptory bloody sacrifice. But by way of synopsis it may be noted that there prevail certain principles of procedure and symbolism, especially (l) that of stupefying or laming the victim to secure apparent acquiescence ; (2) the counter-principle of the need either for suffering as such or for such suffering as shall cause the victim to weep much — a con ception belonging to sympathetic magic ; (3) the anointing, and the 1 Shortt, p. 275. 2 On this method cp. Dalton, Ethnography of Bengal, 1872, p. 292. n s This concept is found among the Ostiaks of Siberia, who used to sacrifice reindeer in the manner of a bloody atonement," killing them slowly by stabbing in different parts, or suffocating by repeated immersion. Erman, Travels in Siberia, Eng. tr. 1848, ii, 54. 4 Maepherson, pp. 118, 130; Shortt, p. 274. 8 For this see Campbell, as cited, pp. 57-58. . 6 Eeclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 319-320. M. Eeclus (in translation) always speaks of the single victim as a woman, but either sex served. 116 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD consequent sanctification of the oil ; (4) the deification of the victim ; (5) the according to him of remarkable privileges, sexual and social ; and (6) a certain propensity to the symbol of the cross. Seeing that the drinking of the soma was primordially a religious act in the East, and that intoxicants play a similar part among modern Polynesians,1 it seems not impossible that the drugging or intoxicating of the victim was a development from a form of the rite in which he took part in a common banquet ; but of this no clear trace had been left, save among the Eedskins of the past.2 It is to be noted, too, that while the destined child victim among the Khonds went about freely, in some cases at least the adult victim was kept fettered, though well fed, in the house of the village patriarch. 8 Very significant, further, is the horrible stratagem employed by the Bataks of the Malay Peninsula to secure acquiescence from the boy victim in their Pangulabalang , a sacrifice of one to be sent out for the overthrow of enemies." " A boy is taken from a stranger tribe, and for a time well-fed with titbits, till he has grown quite trustful. Then one day he is taken and blindfolded ; a hole is dug, and he is put in it ; and the sorcerer comes and asks him : ' Wilt- thou go where we send thee ? ' ' Wilt thou do only good to us, and evil to our enemies ? ' ' Wilt thou aid us in war and overthrow our enemies ? ' — and so on. To all the questions the trusting boy answers ' Yes.' Meanwhile lead has been melted on the fire; it is thrown suddenly on his neck, whereof he dies. The corpse is burned; but the ashes and fat are carefully preserved. These remains are now precious magic-medicine, for through them the spirit of the dead may be forced to do all he promised in life."4 Here too the victim is evidently deified, and his ritual " willingness" is an essential element in the efficacy of the sacrifice. It is to be noted, finally, that when, by the persuasions of Maepherson or the menaces of his successors, open human sacrifices were put an end to among the Khonds, they treated the henceforth substituted buffalo very much as they had treated the meriah. The ritual accosts him as a human being, and commiserates him, as it 1 "There is no public rite whatsoever, and scarcely any in private, at which the ceremony of drinking cava does not form a usual and often most important part." Mariner, Tonga Islands, 1827, ii, 150. Cp. p. 167, and Turner, Samoa, 1884, pp. 20, 51, 334 ; also Cook's Voyages, iii (by King), 1785, p. 161. 2 Cp. Lafitau, Mosurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, ii, 295. 3 Hunter, Orissa, ii, 97 ; Shortt, as cited, p. 273. Major-General Campbell, whose attempts to discredit some of Macpherson's statements recoiled badly on himself, states first (p. 53) that meriahs "are seldom subjected to any restraint," and again that "when of age to understand for what purpose they are intended they are chained ; two had been years in chains ; one so long that he could not recollect ever having been at liberty " (p. 57). 4 Wurm, Handbuch der Beligionsgeschichte, etc., Aufl. 1908, p. 70 ; Warneck, Die BeUaion der Batak, 1909, pp. 64-65. THEOEY AND EITUAL OF HUMAN SACEIFICE 117 did the meriah, for being sold; he is frequently anointed; he is implored to be a willing sacrifice ; cakes are offered to him ; he is promised a happy immortality in the paradise of the Earth-Goddess ; and he is instantly cut to pieces, and the fragments buried in the fields, as was done with the flesh of the human victim. A song preserves (inaccurately) the memory of the work done by Maepherson and Campbell.1 Among the Koyis " a langur monkey is frequently substituted" for the hitman victim, "and called for occasion Ekuroma Potu — i.e., a male with small breasts. This name is given in the hope of persuading the Goddess [Mamili or Pele] that she is receiving a human sacrifice."2 The sheep or goats offered by the same tribe to the smallpox-Goddess are given toddy to drink ; their acceptance is regarded as of good omen ; and when they are eaten the women are excluded from the repast,8 as happens in so many cannibal banquets.4 And, again, there is record that it is or was recently " the practice, a few years ago, at every Dassara festival in Jeypore, Vizagapatam, to select a specially fine ram, wash it, shave its head, affix thereto red and white bottu and naman (sect marks) between the eyes and down the nose, and gird it with a new white cloth after the manner of a human being. The animal being then fastened in a sitting posture, certain puja (worship) was performed by a Brahman priest, and it was decapitated."6 Here we have the plainest substitution of the animal for the man; and the process entitles us to credit the old record in the Satapatha Brahmana that " in the beginning the sacrifice most acceptable to the Gods was man," and that " for the man a horse was substituted, then an ox, then a sheep, then a goat, until at length it was found that the Gods were most pleased with offerings of rice and barley."6 What has happened under our own eyes is very likely to have happened in progressive periods of ancient civilisation. The progression from man to animals has repeatedly occurred,7 and it is impossible to explain such cases as either survivals or revivals of totem sacrifices. The victims are the J Thurston, Castes and Tribes, iii, 371, 378-9, 381-2-4-5. 2 Id. iv, 58. 8 Id. iv, 59. _ 4 This is the probable explanation of the throwing of clods by the women at the men in the surrogate sacrifice of the buffalo among the Khonds of the Ganjam Maliahs. Id. iii, 385. 8 Id. iv, 379. 6 E. W. Frazer, Lit. Hist, of India, 1898, p. 43, citing the Satapatha Brahmana, xii, 3, 5. Cp. p. 85, citing the Aitareya Brahmana, iii, 8. .„. Among the natives of the Gold Coast, where human sacrifices are a matter of simple killing and use of blood, " a regularly descending scale of sacrifice, from human victim to bullock, from bullock to sheep, and from sheep to fowl, may be traced. The Chama god Prah, to which human victims were formerly offered, has now a builock sacrificed to him ; and Bebnya, the war-god of Elmina, has descended from human victim to bullock, and from the latter to sheep. Fohsu, at the Salt Pond at Cape Coast, has within a short period descended from sheep to fowl." A. B- EUis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 72. 118 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD ordinary domestic animals;1 and they are ceremonially invested with the attributes and the divinity of the human being. It is reasonable to assume that the same evolution as is here traced took place in at least some of the ostensible surrogate sacrifices in Greece' and elsewhere, seeing that there are so many records or traditions of the suppression of human sacrifices in the countries in question. And all this is in keeping with the theory of the present inquiry. § 3. The Christian Crucifixion. To those who have not realised how all religion has been evolved from savage beginnings, it will seem extravagant to suggest that the story of the Christian crucifixion has been built up from a practice such as those above described. And yet the grounds for inferring such a derivation are extremely strong. Some doubt has been cast, not quite unjustly, upon such inferences in general, as a result of criticism of Dr. Frazer's ingenious guess that the gospel crucifixion incidentally reproduced the features of the sacrifice of a mock-king in the Perso-Babylonian feast of the Sacasa. The vital difficulty of such a theory is that it takes the gospel episode as historical on the strength of detailed narratives which — save in the episode of Barabbas, whereby the main history is undermined — give no hint of such a coincidence as is surmised, and which, if true narratives, could not conceivably omit to record it had it occurred. But scientific hierology is not held down to that theory, which, in any case, seeks to account only for certain features of the cruci fixion story, notably the mock-crowning and the scourging. These features are indeed probably to be explained through the analogies to which Dr. Frazer points, though not on his assumption of a historical episode ; but there are other features, such as the cross itself, and the resurrection, to which the clues lie, unemphasised, in other sections of Dr. Frazer's survey ; and there are yet others which he has not ostensibly studied. Some of these are illuminated by the rite of human sacrifice among the Khonds. Their placing of the victim, for instance, either on a cross or in a cleft bough in such a way as to make a living cross,8 wherein the God is as it were part of the living tree, is a singularly suggestive parallel. But no ^There are reasons, hereinafter set forth, for seeing in the sacrifice of cocks, in certain cases, an old substitution for human sacrifices ; and the same surmise arises in some sacrifices of goats. (See Thurston, Castes and Tribes, i, 74; iv, 193; v, 235; vi, 76: as to cocks see v, 106, 392, 467, and as to sacrifice of he-goat and three cocks, ii, 376.) But the point can be made out in the case of other animals in recent times. 2 Cp. Paul Stengel, Opfergebrduche der Griechen, 1910, p. 93, citing his Kultusalter- tilmer, 117 sq. 8 This detail islobserved in a surrogate sacrifice of a pig in Polynesia, and in sacrifices of goats and huma,r( beings in Nigeria. See below, % 8. THE CHEISTIAN CRUCIFIXION 119 less so is the detail as to the breaking of the victim's arms and legs, to make him seem unresisting, and the substitution of opium as being less cruel. This last principle is found to have been acted on by the Karhada Brahmans of Bombay. In their secret human sacrifice, described by Sir John Malcolm, the unsuspecting victim — often a stranger long hospitably entertained for the purpose — was drugged ; and in his drugged state was led three times round the idol of the Goddess, whereafter his throat was cut.1 Yet again, the same principle is found so far away as Mexico, where, in one annual sacrifice to the Fire-God, the victims were painted red like the Khond meriah, and a narcotic powder was thrown in their faces. They too were sub jected to special suffering, being thrown into the fire before being sacrificed with the knife in the usual way.2 And in the Mexican sacrifice, also, the God was expressly represented by a tree, stripped of bark and branches, but covered with painted paper. Let us now take the Christian parallels. In the fourth gospel it is told that after the death of Jesus on the cross, in order " that the bodies might not stay on the cross on the Sabbath," the Jews " asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken and they might be taken away." But the soldiers broke only the legs of the "two others," these not being yet dead : Jesus they spared, piercing his heart with a lance, " that the scripture might be fulfilled : A bone of him shall not be broken." The other gospels say nothing on this point ; but all four tell of the offering of a drink, and the first two synoptics mention it both before and after the act of crucifying. In Matthew, "vinegar mixed with gall" is offered beforehand, and refused after tasting; and a sponge of vinegar is offered, apparently in sympathy, after the cry of Eli, Eli. In the first passage the text has evidently been tampered with ; for the Vulgate and Ethiopic versions, the Sinaitic, Vatican, and Bezan codices, and many old MSS., read wine for vinegar, while the Arabic version reads myrrh for gall? In Mark, more significantly, the first drink becomes " wine spiced with myrrh," and is refused without tasting ; and here the commentators recognise that the purpose was presumably to cause stupefaction, and so lighten the suffering.4 In ' Crooke, Popular Beligion and Folklore of Northern India, 1896, ii, 170-1. 2 Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. vi. § 34 (i, 306-7). 8 See Varior. Bible, Alford's Greek N.T., Blackader's N.T., McClellan's N.T., and Gill's Exposition on Mt. xxvii, 34. A.cc°T.liin8 to several Talmudic passages, the Jews gave to any man about to be executed a grain of frankincense in a cup of wine," and the tradition runs that the ladies of Jerusalem gave this to the doomed ones. Gill's Expos, on Mk. xv, 23, citing T. Bab. Sanhedrin, fol. 43, 1 ; Bemdbar Babba, sect. 10, fol. 198, 4, etc. Cp. Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, 1883, p. 150 note 10, But if this were so, the practice was 120 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD Luke, this detail entirely disappears, and the vinegar offered on the cross is given in mockery. In John also, only the drink offered on the cross is mentioned ; and of this it is said that " When Jesus had received the vinegar he said, It is finished." Then follows the detail as to the breaking of the legs. It is needless here to challenge afresh the historical value of the conflicting records, wherein a slight detail, of no historical importance, enters only to take varying forms for symbolical reasons. What we are concerned with is the source of the symbolism. One compiler clearly knows of a drink offered before the crucifixion, and implies that it was intended to cause euthanasia, for he notes that it was refused. The divine victim must be a conscious sufferer. A later compiler ignores altogether this detail, and notes only that the slayers tormented the victim with a drink of vinegar. Both details alike are un-Eoman,1 for the torment was trivial, while the narcotic would be inconsistent with what was meant to be an exemplary punishment. The theologising fourth gospel, in turn, makes the victim accept the drink of vinegar as the last symbolic act of sufferance ;2 but then suddenly alludes to a detail not specified by the others — a concluding act of limb-breaking, from which the divine victim escapes for dogmatic reasons, the fact of his death being made certain by a lance-thrust in the side. We must infer that the limb-breaking was known to occur in certain circumstances, and that the writer or an interpolator of the fourth gospel saw need to make it clear that the bones of the Messiah remained unbroken. He being, according to the fourth gospel, the true paschal sacrifice, it was important that the law as to the Passover should in him be fulfilled.8 On what data, then, did the different evangelists proceed? What had they under notice ? Not an original narrative : their dissidence is almost complete. Not a known official practice in Eoman crucifixions ; for the third gospel treats as an act of mockery what the first and second do not so regard ; and the fourth describes the act of limb-breaking as done to meet a Jewish demand, which in extended to executions from sacrifices. It cannot have originated as an amelioration of a punishment of which the first purpose was to cause suffering. In any case, there is no suggestion that any drink was offered to the two thieves : here we are dealing with a sacrificial ritual in which only the central victim is a true sacrifice. See below, § 9. 1 Josephus indeed tells (Wars, v, 11, § 1) that during the siege of Jerusalem the Eomans crucified vast multitudes of the Jews who sought to escape, first scourging them, and then torturing them in different ways ; but this is expressly declared to be an act at once of military vengeance and of terrorism, whereas thetdrink of vinegar was either a mere trifling insult or an act of relief. 2 Psalm Ixix, 21, would lead Judaists ignorant of old Jewish usage so to regard such a draught. 8 Exodus xii, 46; Num. ix, 12 (cp. Ps. xxxiv, 20, where "the righteous " would be held to apply to the Messiah). This very law points to memories of the act of limb-breaking in sacrifice. THE CHEISTIAN CEUCIFIXION 121 the synoptic narrative could not arise. Mere breaking of the legs, besides, would be at once a laborious and an inadequate way of making sure that the victims were dead ;! the spear-thrust would be the natural and the sufficient act ; yet only one victim is speared. Only one hypothesis will meet the whole case. The different narratives testify to the existence of a ritual or rituals of crucifixion or quasi-crucifixion, in variants of which there had figured the two procedures of breaking the legs of the victim and giving him a narcotic. Of these procedures neither is undersbood by the evan gelists, though by some of them the latter is partly comprehended ; and they accordingly proceed to turn both, in different fashions, to dogmatic account. Their conflict is thus insoluble, and their testimony alike unhistorical. But we find the psychological clue in the hypothesis of a known ritual of a crucified Saviour-God, who had for universally-recognised reasons to appear to suffer as a willing victim.2 Being crucified — that is, hung by the hands or wrists to a tree or post, and supported not by his feet but by a bar between his thighs — he would tend to struggle (unlike the Khond victim, whose arms were free) chiefly with his legs ; and if he were to be prevented from struggling, it would have to be either by breaking the legs or by stupefying him with a drug. The Khonds, we have seen, used anciently the former horrible method, but learned to use the latter also. Finally, the detail of the spear-thrust in the side, bestowed only on the ostensibly divine victim, suggests that in some similar ritual that may have been the mode of ceremonial slaying. We have but to recognise that among some of the more civilised peoples of the Mediterranean similar processes had been sometimes gone through about two thousand years ago, and we have the conditions which may account for the varying gospel narratives. And if there had occurred in the Mediterranean world such an evolution as we see among the Khonds and elsewhere, we have in the story of the betrayal by Judas, incredible and unintelligible as the narratives stand, one more item of sacrificial practice. The Pauline phrase "bought with a price" (1 Cor. vi, 20) ostensibly conveys the meaning of "ransomed," and is not applied to Jesus. But the paying of a price to Judas by the high-priests would become quite intelligible as one more detail in a mystery-drama ' The statement of Lactantius (Div. Inst, iv, 26) that it was usual for the executioners t R5eaB: *n.e bones of those crucified is without foundation, and is confuted by the absence of the detail from the synoptics. The crurifragium, or punishment by limb-breaking, was quite a different thing. Even the sacrificial victims are required to be of a willing mind." Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, 2. Cp. Macrobius, Sat. iii, 5 ; Lucan, Pharsalia, i, 611, 122 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD growing out of a ritual of human sacrifice. " Judas " in any case is presumably only a development from Joudaios, a Jew; and the basis of the episode, thus understood, would be the Gentile imputa tion on the Jews of having sold the Lord as a human sacrifice. And the doctrine put in the mouth of Caiaphas in the fourth gospel (xi, 50-51) is a doctrine of human sacrifice. § 4. Vogue of Human Sacrifice. Given the prima facie fitness of the hypothesis, however, there at once arises the question, What positive evidence have we for the existence in the Mediterranean world of any such man-sacrificing ritual about the beginning of the Christian era ? As to the commonness of the practice among "savage" or primitive peoples, there is no question. It is frequent to this day in parts of Africa,2 and in the Malay Archipelago;8 it is probably not wholly obsolete in India ; 4 and it occurs from time to time in primi tive Russia, among ignorant and fanatical peasants.6 In Polynesia and Maori New Zealand it was normal in the past century ; and among Redskins it occurred, as a religious usage in war time, as late as 1837.6 And the ancient testimonies show the practice at no distant time to have subsisted among nearly all the races then known, especially among the Semites and the ' barbarians." Despite some allegations to the contrary, human sacrifices were normal among all branches of the Aryan race.7 Lusitanians,8 Gauls,9 and Teutons1 alike, at the period of their contact with the Romans, normally 1 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 354. 2 See above, pp. 106-9 ; and cp. Miss Kingsley , West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, pp. ISO, 123; Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 161,200; Partridge. Cross Biver Natives, 1905, pp. 56-59, 62; Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, pp. 218, 226 ; Sir A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 117 sq.; The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, pp. 32, 35-72, 85, 228-30, etc. ; Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, ed. 1900, pp. 41-42. 8 Warneck, Die Beligion der Batak, 1909, p. 126. 4 As to recent instances in India, see Crooke, Popular Beligion andFolklore of Northern India, ed. 1896, ii, 169 sq.; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, iii, 379, iv, 56-58 ; and Prof. H. L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, Eng. tr. 1909, p. 42. Cp. E. W. Frazer, Lit. Hist, of India, p. 43, as to surviving fears on the subject. Cp. Sir G. S. Eobertson, The Kaffirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1900, p. 401, as to the occasional sacrifice of Moslem prisoners of war by the Aryan Kafirs before their subjection to Afghanistan. 8 Prof. H. L. Strack, The Jew and Human Sacrifice, as cited, pp. 38-42 : Westminster Gazette, Feb. 6, 1906. 6 Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, p. 132. 7 As to ancient Aryan India, cp. Eajendralala-Mitra, Indo-Aryans, 1881, ii, 70 ; Tylor, Primitive Culture, 3rd ed. i, 465-7 ; W. Crooke. Popular Beligion and Folklore of Northern India, ii, 167, and refs., and p. 320; Barth, Religions of India. Eng. tr. pp. 67-59; H. H. Wilson, Jour, of Boy. Asiat. Soc, vol. xiii, 1852, pp. 96-107 ; E. W. Frazer, Lit. Hist, of India, 1898, pp. 43, 89. 8 Strabo, iii, 3, §§ 6, 7. 8 Cicero, pro. M. Fonteio, xiv ; Csesar, De Bello Gallico, vi, 16 ; Lactantius, Div. Inst, i, 21 ; Strabo, iv, 4, § 5 ; Dionys. Halicarn. i, 38 ; Pomponius Mela, iii, 2 ; Lucan, i, 444-5 ; Tertullian, Apologeticus, ix ; Justin, xxvi, 2. 10 Strabo, vii, 2, § 3 ; TacituB, Germania, ix, xxxix; Procopius, Bell. Goth, ii, 15. Other testimonies are collected by Grimm, Teutonic Mythology, Eng. tr. i, 44-6. Cp. Montelius, Temps prehistoriques en Suide, Beinach's tr. 1895, pp 263, 300. See also Vigfusson and Powell, Corpus Poeticum Boreale, i, 120, 409-10, as to the human sacrifices to Thor. VOGUE OF HUMAN SACRIFICE 123 sacrificed to their Gods captives and prisoners, sometimes by burn ing,1 sometimes by hanging,2 sometimes by crucifying,8 sometimes by throat-cutting or other letting of blood.4 Of the ancient Slavs we have equivalent records.6 Among some tribes of the more easterly GalatsB6 and the Massagetae7 and other Scythians8 similar usages were reported ; and while human sacrifices had in the time of Herodotus, by his account, long ceased to be offered in Egypt,9 the memory of them was, to say the least, sufficiently fresh among the Greeks and Romans. ° The records of the substitution of a goat for a boy in sacrifice to Dionysos at Potniee,11 and of a hart in substitution for a virgin at Laodicea ;12 the stories of King Athamas, called upon by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his firstborn son Phryxos,18 of King Lycaon who sacrificed a child to Zeus,14 of Aristodemos offering up his child on the call of the oracle when the method of the lot failed, 6 and of Menelaos sacrificing two children in Egypt when stayed by contrary winds,16 tell of a once recognised conception and practice ; and those of the sacrificing of three Persian boys to Dionysos Omestes at the battle of Salamis,17 and of seven children by the Persians to the God of the Underworld when they were entering Greece,18 are equally significant. Among the Eretrians and Magnesians, again, sacrifices of human firstlings were said to have been anciently offered ; 19 in Sparta, in Chios, and in Tenedos,20 there were similar memories ; and the custom was notoriously well established in Thrace.21 There is reason, too, to infer an act of child sacrifice behind Pausanias's tale of the infant placed in the forefront of an Elean army.2 Anciently, it would seem, human sacrifice of all kinds was 1 E.g., among the Gauls, as described by Caesar. 2 Paulus Orosius, v, 16 ; Procopius, as cited. 8 Among the Gauls. Strabo, iv, 4, § 5. 4 Among the Cimbri (Strabo, vii, 2, § 3) and Scythians (Herodotus, iv, 62). 5 Ram baud, Hist, de la Bussie, 2e edit. pp. 32-34, 53, 57, 85 ; Bastian, Der Mensch, iii, 108. 6 Diodorus, v, 32. 7 Herod, iv, 94. 8 Herod, iv, 103. 9 Herod. ii, 45, 119. Cp., however, Diodorus, i, 88 ; A.m61ineaM,Lamorale&gyptiennequinze siecles avant notre ere, 1892, introd. p. 76 ; Lane, Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians, ed. 1871, ii, 229-230 ; Constant, De la Beligion, 1833. iv, 180 ; and Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebraer, 1842, pp. 116-117. The testimonies as to human sacrifice in early Egypt are abundant. Cp. the citations from Manetho in Eusebius, Prceparatio Evangelica, iv, 16; In laude Constantini, c. 13; Porpbyry, De Abstinentia, ii, 55; Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, c. 73 (cp. c. 31) ; and the scenes on the monuments copied by Pleyte, La religion des pri-Israelites, 1862, PI. v. 10 Cp. Ovid, Fasti, v, 621, 629 ; Lactantius, Div. Inst, i, 21 ; .ffineid, x, 517, 520 ; Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 7 ; Plutarch, Quast. Roman. 83. " Pausanias, ix, 8. 12 Eusebius, In laude Constantini, u. 13. 18 Apollodorus, 1, 9, §§1,2; Herodot. vii, 197 ; Pausanias, ix, 34. 11 Pausanias, viii, 2. Cp. iv, 9. JJ Pausanias, iv, 9. 18 Herodot. ii, 119. }1 Phitarch, Themistocles, xiii. They were said to be nephews of Xerxes. ™ Herodot. vii, 114. 19 Plutarch, De Pyth. Orac. xvi. J" Porphyry, De Abstinentia, ii, 55 ; Eusebius, In laude Constantini, c. 13. See also •STS* "• 6". as to the sacrifices to Artemis at Patras in Achaia. ™ Herodot. ix, 119. 22 Pausanias, vi, 20. Cp. J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek ReUgion, 1910, pp. 272-3, 124 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD common to the Hellene stock ; 1 and the attempts of Mr. Gladstone and others to elevate that race by ascribing their unquestioned acts to the influence of their neighbours, merely substitute a confession of weak imitativeness for one of savage proclivity. The sacrificing of children in particular may or may not have spread from the Semites, among whom it was at one time normal, as it was among the pre-Christian Mexicans and Peruvians, and seems to have been till quite recently among the northern Zulus.4 Female infants were frequently put to death among the Arabs before Mohammed,6 whether or not by way of sacrifice ; as they have been in China and elsewhere in Asia in recent times ; 6 and they were sacrificed on special grounds in the South Sea Islands7 before the arrival of the missionaries. Among the North American Indians propitiatory sacrifices of children are known to have occurred in the nineteenth century.8 It was among the Semites, in any case, that they were most common in the Mediterranean world. The standing provision in the Hebrew code, and the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jephthah's daughter tell of a once regular practice ; and the Greek and Latin testimonies as to Carthaginian usage are over whelming.9 The association of Carians with Greeks in the sacrifice of the sons of Phanes in the Perso-Egyptian war — a rite consum mated by the drinking of their blood, mixed with wine and water — suggests the preponderance of eastern influence, especially as regards the sacramental conception.10 Such practices gradually became more and more rare among the civilised peoples, and are held to have subsisted latterly in only one or two places in the civilised parts of the Roman Empire;11 and there are various traces of the gradual process of mitigation. In the Leucadian sacrifice of a man to Apollo by throwing him from a rock into the sea — of which Strabo preserves the memory12 — the last stage 1 Cp. E. H. Hall, The Oldest Civilization of Greece, 1901, p. 297 ; Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, 1907, p. 12, 2 Above, p. 64. 8 Acosta, followed in Purchas his Pilgrimes, ed. 1906, xv, 304, 331-2. 4 Eev. J. Macdonald, Light in Africa, 1890, p. 157. Cp. Colenso, sermon on Abraham's Sacrifice, 1864, p. 2, as to Zulu sacrifices. Quasi-sacrificial treatment of the body of a chief's child which died while its father was sick is noted by the missionary Holden, cited by Krapf , Natur- und Kulturleben der Zulus, p. 107. As to the burying alive of infants see A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 234. 8 Sale, Prelim. Diss, to Koran, 1833, p. 137. 6 Prof. E. H. Parker, China, 1901, p. 273 ; Thurston, Ethnographic Notes in Soutliern India, 1906, p. 502 sl° Ga88""i. xlii. 24. 5 Suetonius, Aug. xv. * Suetonius, Claudius, xxv. » The late resort to human sacrifices by Elagabalus (Lamprid. Heliogab. cc. 7, 8) is : spoken of as an innovation, and is not further traced ; but its toleration suggests that the ff1 1% ¦? • not beoonie obsolete. The story preserved by Eusebius (Hist. Eccles. vii, 10) ,tnat Valerian was led by the "chief of the Egyptian magi "to resort to child sacrifice is clearly a pious fiction. The story against Nero (Sueton. 36) is more probable. " De Abstinentia, ii, 54-57. Cp. cc. 8, 27, 51. ; ,„ *» "Hide Constantini, c. 13 ; Preep. Evang. iv, 16. JJ Octavms, ed. var. 1672, p. 297. S L,tt etantius, i, 21, Bays only sanguine humano colitur. Porphyry (56) says they slay a man lo^afa/Kpox avSpuirov). The victim was probably a criminal, dying as a gladiator. S" 11S^J^1olian, Apologeticus, ix, and Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten HebrOer, 1842, ui, ' VPte- Tne shrine was of Etruscan foundation. Marcellus, 3. is j)e Abstm. ii, 8. 14 Apologeticus, ix. 130 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD worship of the Latiarian Jove.1 His further allusion to the practice of drinking the blood of slain gladiators as a remedy for epilepsy suggests many further possibilities of the same kind; and he expressly asserts that the men of his day have seen a man burnt alive as Hercules.2 § 5. The Divinity of the Victim. On the classic side there is thus abundant evidence as to the practice of human sacrifice, and some as to sacramental cannibalism, in the historic period ; but what the theory finally requires is either the sacrifice of a victim who, as being specifically divine, is the subject of a eucharist, or the proof that such a eucharist could be combined with the sacrifice of a divine victim. Now, in the Khond cult, as we have seen, not only is the victim deified, but the propi tiated Goddess figures in the myth as the original sacrifice. An ostensibly similar myth is found in ancient Babylon, in a creation story, where Marduk is actually decapitated in order that the first "man maybe made from his blood and "bone."8 After such pre cedents, the deification of sacrificed victims could readily follow; though the probability is, of course, that the myth was framed to explain an already established usage of deification. Of this concep tion we have already seen a clear trace in the old Mediterranean world in the sacrifices of the Albanians to the Moon-Goddess; and for fuller light we turn first to the cult of Dionysos. Not only is there the story of the substitution of a goat for a boy in the sacrifice j to Dionysos at Potnise,4 but there is the combined significance of ' {a) the myth of the rending of the divine boy Dionysos, in the form of a bull, by the Titans ;6 {b) the fact that in the ritual mystery the worshippers tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth;6 (c) the peculiar Dionysiak ritual at Tenedos, where a gravid cow was treated as a woman in labour, and her calf, devoted to the God, was made to wear the tragic cothurni, while the slayer was formally pursued with stones and had to fly into the sea;7 {d) the actual rending of men as Dionysiak sacrifices at Chios and Tenedos;8 and {e) the peculiar procedure in the Athenian Bouphonia or religious " murder 1 Adv. Gnosticos, 7. 2 j# xv 4 PauIaS^'ix.'s8. *"* TahUU °f Cre*tion- ««. Introd. i, pp. 1-lx, Ixxxvii. 8 Pausanias! viii 37; Npnnus, Dionysiaca, vi, 205; Arnobius, Adv aentet v 19 8 Arnobius, as cited ; Firmicus Maternus ftmYi^Ilt. .- f ' ; .¦ t,.-., Inst, i, 21; Clemens Alexandr. Protrept U- PhTtarcr frt £,¦ fl*?VV"- La,c'antl.u8' Jjw' See the whole mythology collected by Dr. Frazer G3 SwOsa ' ISlS *"* °$m8' ™' .2nl£o?pn3m.enatanimaLXii'3i- CP' E°bertson Smith, ReUg. of the Semites, p. 453; 8 Porphyry, De Abstinentia, ii, 55. THE DIVINITY OF THE VICTIM 131 of the ox," 1 where the ceremonial flight of the slayers, their repudiaT" tion of guilt, and the solemn trial and condemnation of the weapons used as being the guilty things, all go to show that the ox repre sented either a divinity or a human victim, or the former by develop ment from the latter.2 The theory of Eobertson Smith, that the animal sacrifice is the earlier, need not be here considered. It rests' on the assumption that the primordial communion-sacrifice was totemistic ; and this has not been and cannot be proved. On the other hand we have many traces of the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice in historic times ; and this is all that is required to solve the historic problem. From another side we see the same principle at work in the old Theban sacrifice to Amun,8 wherein the ram, the symbolic and sacred animal of the God, never otherwise sacrificed, was on the annual festival-day of the God offered up to him, the skin being placed on the God's statue. As Herodotus tells the story, there was then brought beside the image of Amun an image of " Herakles," pre sumably Khonsu, the Son of the God in the Theban Trinity ;4 where after " all who are in the temple beat themselves in mourning for the ram, and then bury him in a holy sepulchre." Whatever may have been the parts played by father and son respectively in this rite, it is clear that the slaying of the ram — presumptively a lamb — repre sented the death of the God, whose resurrection would necessarily follow, like that of Osiris. In the ritual worship of Herakles, the man burned alive represented the God,5 who in the myth dies on the funeral pyre. Another rite practised in the worship of the Syrian Goddess indicates in a different way the original connection of an animal sacrifice with a human sacrifice and a sacrament. In the Syrian ritual, the stranger who came to sacrifice had to offer up a sheep, of which he partook, on whose skin he knelt, and whose head he placed on his in the act of supplication.6 The symbolism is here fairly complete. And in yet another rite, that of the sacrifice and sacramental eating of a camel among the Sinaitic Arabs of the fourth century, it was clearly avowed that the young white camel was a ' Pausanias, i, 24, 28 ; Porphyry, De Abstin. ii, 29-30. 2 See the argument of Dr. Frazer, G. B. ii, 294-5 ; and the remarks of MM. Hubert et Mauss, Essai sur le sacrifice, in L' Annie Sociologique, 2e Annee, 1899, pp. 68-69. 3 Herodotus, ii, 42. Cp. Wilkinson'B note in Eawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii, p. 78 ; and Wiedemann, Bel. of the Anc. Egyptians, Eng. tr. pp. 104, 124-5. The identification, however, is not certain. Osiris was ' the child " at Thebes (Benouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 84) ; and Horus has Heraklean features (Tiele, Egypt. Bel. p. 42). But Khonsu at Thebes was Khonsu-Ea, and at Komombo was compounded with Horus. Wiedemann, as cited. ' Tertullian, Apol. c. 15. Cp. Eobertson Smith, Belig. of the Semites, p. 353, citing K. O. Mtiller, as to the burning of an effigy of the God on the pyre. See also Frazer, G.B. iii, 171. 8 Lucian, Dea Syria, lv. Cp. Eobertson Smith, Bel. of the Semites, p. 455. 'See the story of Nilus as given by Prof. Eobertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, PP. 263, 320, 342 sq. 132 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD substitute for a human sacrifice, young and beautiful captives being the preferred victims. In this case the blood of the wounded camel was drunk by the tribesmen, and the animal was cut to pieces and instantly devoured raw. That at a remote period the human victim was so eaten, it is difficult to doubt.1 Proceeding on the maxim that the myth is always long posterior to the rite which it pretends to explain, we must suppose that before the composition of the legends concerning the Titans and the birth, death, and rebirth of Dionysos, such a primitive rite as the legend describes had actually been performed. Between a ritual in which the victim is torn to pieces for burial in the fields, and one in which the victim is eaten by the worshippers, there is a process of develop ment to be accounted for. Two hypotheses are open. The Khond rite may be a modification of an original ritual of cannibalism ; or the ancient Dionysiak rite may stand for a transformation of the typical rite, in which, an animal having been substituted for a human victim, the eating of it became a means to communion with the God whom the animal mystically represented. Broadly speaking, one process is as likely as the other ; and both have evidently taken place. While the Khonds did not eat their human sacrifice, the Gonds, a kindred Dravidian race, by one account actually did ; 2 and many medieval and modern instances of kin-eating and other ritual cannibalism are on record.8 In one of the most recently noted instances of human sacrifice among contemporary savages, which is also the most primitive that has been observed — the cult of the Snake-God at Ebritum in Southern Nigeria — the annual victims seem to have been eaten regularly ; and of the four hundred slain on the occasion of the death of a great chief, " all were killed at Ebritum as offerings to the God, and then eaten by the Aro people, the flesh being distributed through the late chief's country. These victims were looked upon as sacred, and those who ate their flesh ate Gods, and thus assimilated within themselves something of the divine attributes and power. The victims were not fattened before being killed."4 In another tribe, the Ibo, the sacrifice and eating of a male or female slave is still a regular part of the " Okuku " or post-funeral ceremony for a chief ; and in this case the victim is " bought with a price " after the chief's death, fattened, and treated 1 The argument of Eobertson Smith to the contrary (p. 345) is quite inconclusive. That the human sacrifice was not eaten by Arabs in the fourth century is no proof that in more savage times it was not eaten by that as by other races. 2 Frazer, G. B. ii, 241, citing Punjab Notes and Queries, ii, 127 sq., § 721. 8 Above, p. 128 ; Hartland,Leff<»Ki of Perseus, ii, 245-6, and ch. 13. 4 C. Partridge, Cross Biver Natives, being some Notes on the Primitive Pagans of Obubura HiU District, Southern Nigeria, 1905, p. 59. THE DIVINITY OF THE VICTIM 133 with particular kindness, in the Asiatic fashion.1 Instances of ritual cannibalism may easily be multiplied. In the annual human holocaust at Whydah, a century ago, the sacrifice of one man thrown from a height with his hands tied, a muzzled crocodile, and a pair of pigeons with clipped wings, terminated the celebration ; and the man in this case was devoured by the multitude.2 And to this day, in the words of one observer, " no great human sacrifice offered for the purpose of appeasing the Gods and averting sickness or mis fortune is considered to be complete unless either the priests or the people eat the bodies of the victims."8 The same sacramental element is seen in the eating of parts of the sacrificed captives of war at Bonny. In the Tonga Islands, again, the bodies of enemies slain in war were dedicated to the Gods, and a few sacramentally eaten : this at a stage of civilisation at which many of the community, and particularly the women, regarded the proceeding with disgust ;6 and similar survivals were noted in the Marquesas.6 In Fiji7 and Tahiti8 dedication to the Gods was a preliminary to every act of public cannibalism. Among the Niam-Niams of Nubia, too, it appears to have been chiefly in times of war that cannibalism was resorted to ; and though a white onlooker ascribed the act in such a case to sheer " blood-thirstiness and hatred,"9 it was doubtless a religious proceeding. The same inference arises in the cases in which Eed skins in modern times have been known to eat human flesh in time of war; since they did it " with repugnance," though they believed it to produce courage.10 Even the infliction of torture may have a religious as distinct from a merely revengeful motive,11 as in a sacrifice among the Eedskins in which the victim, a slave, was burned by a slow fire, with progressive mutilation and partial eating, followed by killing and the eating of the remains. Finally the partakers beat on their huts " to compel the soul of the defunct to abandon the village."12 Here we have a systematic ritual.18 1 Major A. Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, p. 161. Cp. p. 160 as to the wholesale sacrifices of the past. Major Leonard mistakenly ascribes the good treatment of the victim to fear of driving him to suicide or to escape. It is to be under stood in the light of Khond and other practices. 2 4. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890, p. 154. 3 Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 390. There follows an account of one such carnival sacrament by Consul Hutchinson, who witnessed it at Bonny in 1859. 4 J. Smith, Trade and Travels in the GuVph of Guinea, 1851, p. 82. 8 Mariner, Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. 1827, i, 172-3. 8 Herman Melville, Typee, ch. xxxii. a S; Wllliams. Eiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, pp. 43, 177. » W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, ed. 1831, iv, 317, 358-9 ; J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprise, ed. 1838, pp. 472-3-4. lo ^1"7einiurth, The Heart of Africa. 3rd ed. i, 285. ii g-dmu"al Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, p. 135. See above, p. 115. ii Lafitau, Montr s des sauvages ameriquains, 1724. ii, 277-9. ?° (tor another case of ritual sacrifice and sacrament see Lafitau, pp. 295-304; 134 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD We may therefore conclude that primordially the human sacrifice was normally eaten, as it was by the semi-civilised Mexicans at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is in fact certain that anthro pophagy has been practised in all parts of the world in the savage and semi-civilised stages ;x and it is no less certain that cannibalism had persisted long in its religious form after it had ceased to be a normal practice : the rationale of the act being, not that men to the last offered the Gods that which they commonly liked for themselves, but that they held it a sacred experience to continue to eat what they believed the God to eat.2 On the other hand, the recoil from cannibalism which everywhere marks the rise of humanity would, in the more civilised Asiatic states, lead on one hand to the setting apart of criminals for the human sacrifices, and on the other to the substitution of an animal, which, partly in virtue of survivals of totemism and partly in virtue of the current conception of all sacrifice,8 could pass as the representative and incarnation of the God, and would at the same time serve for the typical sacramental meal, but no longer in a totemistic sense. A certain difficulty arises as to the use of criminals for sacrificial purposes. As we have seen, the Khonds vetoed it, and rejected 1 Cp. Prof. Joly, Man before Metals, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 341-351 ; Letourneau, Sociology, Eng. tr. B. iii, ch. 12 ; Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3rd ed. i, 265 ; A. Seville, Jro- ligomenes, p. 183; .T. G. Miiller, Amerikan. Urreligionen, p. 629; Maury, La Terre et I 'Homme. 4e ed. pp. 751-2 ; Lubbock, Prehistoric Times, 5th ed. p. 177 ; Peschel, The Baces of Man, Eng. tr. 1876, pp. 161-4 ; Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 78. 2 J. G. Mtiller, as cited, p. 632. " Cannibalism as it now exists among them [the Nigerians] is purely a religious relic." " It is evident that cannibalism not only had. but still has, a spiritual or sacrificial significance" (Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 324, 403). Mr. Basil Thomson pronounces no less emphatically, as to the cannibalism of the Fijians, that "the tabus and ceremonies surrounding it clearly indicate its religious origin," giving many details in support (The Fijians: A Study in the Decay of Custom, 1908, p. 104). Similarly Major Mockler- Ferryman (British West Africa, as cited, p. 390) pronounces that the religious psychic idea of cannibalism, as being ordained by the Gods, "is the primary cause of West African cannibalism, and very possibly the origin of it among anthropophagous peoples." Among the Sese Islanders of the Victoria Nyanza, again, there is a secret society, the Bachichi, whose object is to continue the custom of eating the dead (Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, p. 73 ; Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 692-3 ; Liberia, 1906, ii, 1059). See below, p. 136. The cannibal Papuans of New Guinea, it is noted, "would not commit cannibalism in the presence of a white man or a native woman" (A. E. Pratt, Two Years among^ the Cannibals of New Guinea, 1906, p. 224). The same observation applies to the Fijians (Thomson, as above cited). See W. Schneider, Die Naturvblker, 1885, i, 195-200, for the theory that religious cannibalism began as an imitation of the supposed practice of the Gods. Cp. Thomson, as cited, p. 103; Eev. B. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, p. 191; and Peschel, as cited, p. 164. Prof, Eobertson Smith similarly argues that Arab sacrifices were neither gifts to the Gods nor — even in the sacrifice of first-born sons — offerings of what was most precious to the sacrificer, but offerings of the most sacred kind of victim, as the sacred blood of the species there flows purest and strongest (Bel. of Semites, 2nd ed. note E, p. 465). This squares to some extent with the view ascribed to Varro (in Augustine, Civ. Dei, vii, 19) that the Phoenicians and the Gauls offered human sacrifices quia omnium seminum optimum est genus humanum. 8 MM. Hubert et Mauss, in their valuable Essai sur le sacrifice (L' Annie Sociologiqife, 2e Annee, 1899), seem to argue that sanctity was in all cases wholly conferred on the victim by the ritual. This was certainly the rule, but there were exceptions, notably in the case of human victims. The essential point is that every victim had something divine (Id. p. 127). 4 Cp. Frazer, G. B. ii, 438-9, as to the sacrament of the sacred ram among the Kalmucks, THE DIVINITY OF THE VICTIM 135 even prisoners of war. In view of the nearly universal principle1 among the higher races of antiquity that the sacrifice must be pure and without blemish, a criminal would seem to be the last man to suit the part ; and among the Mesopotamian Semites a genuine and precious sacrament was anciently insisted on.2 This appears to have been the idea underlying the common rule that the victim should be a male, which prevailed among the peoples of Nigeria in recent times as regards both men and animals.8 Yet these tribes, as we have seen, sacrifice indifferently a female or a male slave to-day;4 and of the practice at Benin it is told that "the people who were kept for sacrifice were bad men or men with bad sickness — they were all slaves "; and that a slave who committed a murder was put apart as a fit victim for the common good.6 A woman again, was the usual sacrifice to the Bain-God;6 and women slaves were among those sacrificed to save the city.7 So among the Egyptians, even in our era, there was a usage of sacrificing a virgin annually to the Nile.8 The idea of fitness, in short, could easily and spontaneously vary.9 So, among the Greeks, virgins are typical victims for human sacrifice ; and the Goddess known simply as Parthenos, sometimes associated with Athene^ and by Herodotus identified with Iphigeneia,10 is probably but an abstraction from a once annual virgin-sacrifice. But it is found that in primitive communities the act of execution " constantly assumes sacrificial forms";11 and it is told of the Bataks of Sumatra that they ate their executed criminals, without any other resort to cannibalism, the relatives of the executed man being entitled to the best pieces.12 The same is told of the people of Francis Island in the South Pacific : ' Thieves were killed and their bodies eaten : only in such cases was there cannibalism."13 In the case of the Bataks at least 1 The Spartans seem to have made a partial exception. Plato, Alcib. ii. Cp. as to the later attitude, Athenseus, viii, 67 ; Malachi, i, 7, 8, 13. 2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 78; Tiele, Hist, comparee, p. 247; Smith, Belig. of the Semites, p. 343 ; Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, i, 337-341. 8 H. Ling Both, Great Benin, p. 70 ; Major Glyn Leonard, Tribes of Lower Nigeria, 1906, p. 200. 4 Above, p. 132. 8 Ling Both, p. 70. 8 Id. pp. 54, 71. 7 Id. App. p. x. 8 Lane, Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians, ed. 1871, ii, 229-230. Evidently the female victim was selected with some idea of f urniBhing a bride to the propitiated deity. Cp. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of the Kingship, 1905, P. 179 sq. jo Newton, Essays in Art and Archaeology, 1880, pp. 435-6. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 373, as to Helena Dendrites. ... „B°°.er'8on Smith. Beligion of the Semites, p. 351, note. Cp. Macrobius, Saturnalia, j't-' , onys- Halicarn. ii, 10; K. O. Mtiller, Dorians, Eng. tr. i, 354-5, and Eamsay, Bom. Antiq. 1851, p. 309. It seems clear that the barbaric mind regarded the executed criminal very much as it did the enemy in battle; and the "devoting" of captured enemies as sacrifices is anciently common to Hebrews, Teutons (above, § 4), American indigenes (Delow, Part IV, § 5), Eomans (Livy, viii, 10), and Greeks (Diodorus Siculus, xi, 65). As to the COi?nw n of 8aoriflee with execution see also Dennett, Nigerian Studies, 1910, pp. 193-4. Maury, La Terre et I 'Homme, ie edit. pp. 751-2. i8 Turner, Samoa, p. 300. 136 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD there would seem to be a clear survival of an anthropophagous sacrament, as it can hardly be supposed that people not otherwise cannibalistic would desire to devour an executed relative for the sheer pleasure of eating human flesh. And the accepted explanation of Batak practice is one which chimes with all we know of the motives to theophagy. "The cannibalism so common in Sumatra derives in any case originally from the desire to obtain, through the means of the eaten flesh of a newly-slain man, the enrichment of one's own life-stock by his tondi"1 — that is, the many specific spirits which animate his limbs and organs. The Bataks of to-day hardly realise the motive, though their licit cannibalism is now limited to the eating of brave warriors wounded and taken captive, and of certain criminals, as aforesaid.2 But with other primitives there is no discrimination. An old Chinese description of Tibet preserves record of a Tibetan practice of sending criminals of certain kinds to be eaten by a tribe of savages north of Burma.8 The latter may have proceeded on the Batak principle ; but of this there is no trace, they being ostensibly ready to eat anybody's exiles. Among the Manyema of Uganda, till the other day or even now, it has been the rule that the dead are always eaten by their kindred in the nearest village4 — a limitation which suggests modification of an original kin-eating by the example of cannibalism after warfare. The view that the criminal was a proper sacrifice, in fact, might readily grow out of the circumstance that the earlier victims had been normally captives ; 5 and this collocation of ideas we actually find in the custom of Dahome, where human sacrifice was so recently and so systematically practised. The annual victims, as distinguished from the holocaust at the death of a king, were commonly captives and criminals, these being normally the king's perquisite.6 As the death holocaust proceeded on the assumption that the king must enter the Death-land well attended, so the annual sacrifices, which might number about thirty, were contributions of filial piety to that retinue. The time of sacrifice was accordingly the only time of capital punishment in the year.7 Here the process of reasoning is 1 Warneck, Die Beligion der Batak, 1909, p. 9. Cp. Bev. E. Taylor, Te Ika a Maui, 1870, pp. 352-3. 2 Maury assumes that all Batak criminals are or formerly were eaten : Warneck limits the usage to " certain criminals — for example, adulterers." The selection is explained by the tondi motive, adulterers being instances of excessive sexual energy. 8 Klaproth, Description du Tibet (tr. from Chinese), 1831, pp. 72, 273. 4 J. F. Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples, 1905, p. 318. 5 Cp. in this connection the Eouen legend discussed by Dr. Frazer, Lectures on the Early History of Kingship, 1905, pp. 186-192. 6 Cp. A.B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 229. 7 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 19-20, 22, 28. Similarly Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the British Expedition to the Biver Niger, 1848, i, 249, note that among the Ibus the human beings sacrificed " are mostly slaves or persons convicted of great offences," But these offences, it should be remembered, may be purely ceremonial. THE DIVINITY OF THE VICTIM 137 sufficiently transparent. If an enemy of the tribe from without could suffice, so, it might be argued, would an enemy of the tribal law from within, he being, besides, one of the king's or God's own people. And among the Aztecs, accordingly, we find the law decreeing that thieves who had stolen gold and silver— thieves par excellence, so to speak — were annually sacrificed with the regular victims to the God Xipe, patron of the goldsmiths. Like many other victims, they were flayed, and the priest wore their skins, thus figuring as the God in their persons.1 We have, again, the record of Csesar that in the wholesale human sacrifices of the Gauls the offering up of those who had committed thefts or other crimes was considered " more grateful to the immortal Gods "; but that " when the supply of that species fell short, they descended to sacrifices of the innocent." And there is reason to think, with M. de Belloguet,8 that the peculiar sacrifices in question (in which numbers of men were burned alive in large simulacra) were derived from some early Carthaginian or other Phoenician cult. Needless to say, the simple recoil in more civilised periods from the idea of a wilful sacrifice of the innocent — a recoil clearly seen in Greek and Semitic legends — would encourage the resort for victims to the unfortunates under sentence of death. Finally, we have the express statement of Porphyry that in the annual sacrifice of a man to the ancient Semitic deity Kronos at Rhodes, a prisoner condemned to death was selected and kept till the Kronian festival, when he was led outside the city gates and, having been given wine to drink, put to death.4 Here we have at length a close parallel in the Mediterranean world to what we have seen reason to regard as a typical detail in the gospel mystery-play. The Kronian victim at Ehodes we know cannot have been originally a criminal ; and it is much more likely than not that he originally personated either the God Kronos,6 or, as seems most probable, the only-begotten son " Ieoud, whom in a Phoenician myth7 Kronos is said to have sacrificed after dressing him in royal robes. To this clue we shall return after a further survey. In the meantime, we may take it as established (l) that the giving of a narcotic to the J Clavigero, History of Mexico, Eng. tr. ed. 1807, B. vi, § 30 (i, 297). 2 De Bella Gallico, vi, 16. 3 Ethnogenie Gauloise, Ptie iii, Le Ginie Gaulois, 1868, pp. 190, 203. 4 De Abstinentia, ii, 54. Dr. Frazer (6>. B. iii, 149) reads "made him drunk with wine," which goes somewhat beyond the Greek, o'lvov Trortaavres ; but some degree of stupe faction may be inferred. 8 In the Arab sacrifice described by Nilus, the saorificers drank wine with the victim (Smith, p. 344, note), but this act may have had another significance. 8 So Dr. Frazer, G. B. iii, 149-150. 7 Preserved by Eusebius from Philo of Byblos, Prceparatio Evangelica, iv, 16, 138 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD victim — which we have seen practised among the Khonds, and which we find transferred in India and elsewhere to animal victims1 who are presumably surrogates — derives from ancient usage ; and (2) that the original purpose of the rite was not held to be defeated by the selection for sacrifice of a prisoner sentenced to death. In a community where social duty was deeply impressed on all, as in medieval Japan, it was possible to secure every year a victim who practised ascetic abstinence, and was finally put to death on behalf of the community,2 and this may well have been the early ideal.8 As the Japanese human scapegoat, though of course no longer sacrificed, is even now called the ' one-year god-master," and was anciently called the abstainer," it is not difficult to conceive that this may have been one of the ways in which kingship grew up. But in more sophisticated societies, as we know, the extremer obligations of the kingship were overridden, and victims must in most States have been hard to procure.5 It is true that in primitive communities the fear of death seems surprisingly slight among doomed victims ; and the known readiness of Chinamen to sell themselves as substitutes for condemned criminals points the same moral. But none the less there has been an evolution of the faculty of apprehension. An intermediate stage is seen in the medieval State of Malabar, where condemned men volunteered to immolate themselves in honour of a God, giving themselves twelve wounds with as many knives, and thereby winning funeral honours.7 The tendency in less rigorously drilled communities than Japan would be, first, towards a general unwillingness which had to be met by the bribe of a year's licence, and, later, to a state of things in which nobody would volunteer, and the victim must be either bred and bought, as among the Khonds, or taken from among the condemned criminals. These, however, would include persons condemned for impiety, who even for the Christians were explicitly anathemata, that is, objects " devoted " to the Gods.8 The same title of anathema 1 Crooke, Popular Belig. and Folklore of N. India, 1896, i, 173 ; Lindesay Brine, Travels amongst American Indians, 1894, pp. 368-9 (case of turkey sacrifice in Central America). - Lafcadio Hearn, Japan, p. 166. 8 At Benin in 1825 Fawckner " saw a man who had given himself as a sacrifice to the fetish, and the sacrificial procession in bis case was immense. For some time before, be had had the free run of the market-place, on the usual principle ; and before being drowned he was made drunk (Ling Both, Great Benin, 1903, p. 84). In India, again, Brahmans committing suicide from ascetic motives have been frequently deified in modern times (Crooke, The Beligion and Folklore of Northern India, as cited, i, 193). This squares with the deification of Amilcar by the Carthaginians on the score that he had sacrificed himself for his country (Herod, vii, 167). In Nigeria a mother could be deified for sacri ficing her son. Dennett, Nigerian Studies. 1910, p. 23. 4 Cp. the theory of Jevons, Introd. to Hist, of Belig., p. 275 sq. 5 Cp. Jevons, p. 280. _. £P:.Iiln6 Both. Great Benin, pp. 43, 64, 65, 66, 74, 82, 84 ; and ch. xiv of B. Thomson's The Fijians, on The Insouciance of Native Eaces." 7 Marco Polo, Voyages and Travels, iii, 20 (Morley's ed. p. 153). ^8 i cor. xvi, 22, THE DIVINITY OF THE VICTIM 139 was given to the sacred objects hung up or deposited in the temples and to the man denounced for impiety.1 So that, even if the wide spread usage of granting abnormal privileges to the victim, whether human or animal,2 were originally a way of asserting his divinity, a criminal was not ineligible. Thus, though it does not seem to be clearly proved that the victims put to death in the Thargelia festival at Athens were latterly criminals,3 it is highly probable that they were. Early religion looked to the physical side of sacrifice ; and if the criminal were whole, no question of his fitness would arise for more primitive worshippers, save where, as among the Khonds, the practice of purchase set up a special credence.4 In one Greek sacrifice, indeed, that performed at Leucadia, an " ugly or deformed person " seems to have been chosen as the victim.5 When, again, the developing religious consciousness became capable of shrinking from the anomaly of calling a criminal sacred," there was, as we shall see later, a symbolical way out of the difficulty. Symbolism, too, would further the modification of the sacrificial meal. Long before the more civilised peoples revolted from the act of human sacrifice, they would recoil, we must suppose, from the act of anthropophagy ; and in regard to many rites of human sacri fice we find stories of substitution of animals and of waxen and other images and cakes by order of humane kings.6 The Eoman devices of the kind are well known, and their resort to images of straw is paralleled among the Gonds of India in our own time ; 7 while the modern Malays offer dough models of human beings, called " the substitute," 8 and the Bataks of Sumatra employ a number of sym bolic sacrifices of images of human beings, some made of bananas, some of wood — all plainly suggestive of a process of substitution for former human sacrifices.9 The same process of substitution may be confidently inferred in the case of the rite practised in the Chinese 1 Cp. C. T. Newton, Essays in Art and Archeology, 1880, p. 193; also index, s.v., Dedications. 2 Above, pp. 111,114; below, pp. 154, 183; and Part IV, §§ 3, 5. 8 Cp. Frazer, G. B. iii, 125, and art. Thabgelta in Smith's Diet, of Antiq. The victim " cast out " at Massilia in a similar rite is expressly described as a poor man who sold himself for a year's keep (Petronius ap. Serv. in Virg. 2En., iii, 57) ; and as poor men can be thus bought to undergo the death penalty in China to day, they may have been so purchaseable at Athens. 4 Another exception will be found noted below, Part II, ch. ii, § 15. 5 Frazer, as last cited. Cp. Schomann, Griechische Alterthilmer, ii, 225, as to the resort to criminals for human sacrifices. 8 Porphyry, De Abstin. ii, 55. Above, p. 60. 7 Crooke, Beligion and Folklore of N. India, ii, 176. See also p. 167. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 208, note, and below, Pt. IV, § 6, as to Mexico ; and Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, iv, 58, as to the making of an earthen figure of a woman for a propitiatory sacrifice by the Koyis. 8 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, p. 72. 8 Wajneck, Die Beligion der Batak, 1909, pp. 95-98, 125, 140 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD Spring Festival, held annually on the fourth of February. The chief magistrate of each department, crowned with flowers, is carried in a chair in procession, surrounded by figures representing mythological personages ; and before him is carried a huge decorated figure of a buffalo, in terra-cotta, with gilded horns, behind which goes a child, with one foot shod and the other naked, who constantly beats the buffalo. Behind him march labourers carrying their agricultural implements ; and the procession goes out (and returns) by the eastern gate of the town, " to meet the spring." When it is over, the buffalo is broken up, and the pieces, with a vast number of small buffalo figures carried in the interior of the figure, are distributed to all the people ; whereafter the governor delivers a discourse in praise of agriculture.1 What has historically taken place, doubtless, is first a substitution of a buffalo, as among the Khonds, for the original human victim, of whom the flower-crowned governor is a surviving trace. Later, Chinese thrift and mandarin policy substituted an image for the buffalo, adding a multitude of small figures of it for distribution with the pieces of the image, as was once done in the case of the living victim. For the rest, the turn of mind which made myths out of the misunderstood survivals of totemism would have no difficulty in finding reasons for eating any given animal in the worship of any given God, whether or not the primordial sacrifice had been that of an animal. Thus the worshippers of Dionysos could feel they were commemorating the dismemberment of the God when they ate the raw flesh of a bull or a kid; other devotees ate a young dog;2 and further symbolic modification easily followed, on lines common to many pagan cults. § 6. The Cannibal Sacrament. Given such a modification, however, we have to reckon with a tendency that is seen to have been chronic in religious history — the tendency, namely, to revert to a foreign or archaic form of sacrifice or mystery in times of national disaster and uncertainty.8 It is expressed alike in the Eoman resort to eastern and Egyptian Gods 1 Pauthier, Chine Moderne, 2e partie, 1853, pp. 649-650. 2 Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxix, 14. Cp. Eobertson Smith, Bel. of Semites, p. 273. In a dog- sacrifice by hill tribes in India, the victim is first drugged with spirits and hemp, then killed with sticks and stones. So elsewhere with a buffalo. (Crooke, Belig. and Folklore of N. India, i, 173.) In such cases, as we have seen, there is a strong presumption that the animal is a surrogate for a human being. Cp. Dennett, Nigerian Studies, p. 124. 8 Cp. Eobertson Smith, Semites, p. 339 ; Pausanias, iv, 9 ; vii, 38; viii, 2; ix, 34; Granger; The Worship of the Romans. 1895, p. 300; Gibbon, ch. ii, Bohn ed. i, 41 ; ch. xxxiv (iii, 554); Boissier, La Fin du Paganisme, i, 31; Mariner, Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. i, 190, 300; J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 1837, p. 549; Bhys, Celtic Britain, 2nded. p. 69 ; Murray, Rise of the Greek Epic, p. 15 ; and above, p. 65. THE CANNIBAL SACEAMENT 141 in times of desperate war, in the revival or preservation of the cults of subdued races,1 in the multiplication of magical rites for decaying civihsations, and in the chronic reversion during times of excitement to palmistry and other modes of fortune-telling.2 And that the idea of religious anthropophagy prevailed in the early Christian world is obvious from the central ritual of the cult, where the formulas: "Take eat, this is my body"; "Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood," cannot conceivably be other than adaptations from a mystery ritual in which a sacrificed God so spoke by the mouth of his priest.8 In the fourth gospel we have an amplification in the same sense, the act of symbolical anthropophagy or theophagy being made the means to immortality : — I am the bread of life I am the living bread, which came down out of heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever : yea, and the bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have not life in your selves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life ; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is true meat, and my blood is true drink. Se that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him.4 The very repetitions are ritualistic ; we have them in the ritual of the Khonds, and in the ritual of the pre-Christian Mexicans.6 And there is another curious parallel in a certain ritual of Dahome, where, with all the stress of human sacrifice, cannibalism occurred in one set of cases only — those killed by lightning, a death " which renders sepulture, as among the Eomans, unlawful." In these cases the official " wives " of the Thunder-God " place the body upon a platform, cut from it lumps which they chew without eating, crying to passers-by : ' We sell you meat, fine meat, come and buy.'"6 Now, the eucharist stands both in the myth and in the nature of the cult in the closest relation to the act of human sacrifice ; and to explain the latter without reference to the former is to miss part of the problem. For the compilers of the fourth gospel, as we have noted, the Crucified One is the final and universal paschal sacrifice, being slain at the time of the paschal lamb-eating, whereas in the ' Cp. K. 0. MtiUer, Introd. to Mythology, Eng. tr. pp. 169, 193-4 ; 2 Kings xvii, 26 ; Hero dotus, ii, 171. Cp. Short History of Freethought, i, 43-5. Such a revival was noted among upper-class people in England in connection with the extensive volunteering for service in South Africa in 1899-1900 ; and there are clear traces of it in every age. 8 See Frazer, G. B., 2nd ed. ii, 134, and refs., as to the priests of Attis at Pessinus and Rome; and cp. Jevons, pp. 273-5. The usage was widespread, being found among the Polynesians and the aboriginal magicians of California, and in several of the cults of pre- Christian Mexico. See J. G. Mflller, Amerikanische Urreligionen, pp. 77, 493, 577 ; Mariner, Tonga, Islands, 1827, i, 101, 290 ; W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 373-5 ; iv, 309 -10, * John vi, 48-56. e Cp. Sahagun, passim. 8 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 143. 142 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD synoptics he had previously partaken thereof. And that this con ception existed among the Judaeo-Christists before the gospels were written is clear from the book of Revelation, where we have a Judaic writer of the early days of the Gentile schism1 identifying Jesus with the Alpha and the Omega = the Almighty, and at the same time with "the Lamb that was slain," and that has seven horns and eyes, like the symbol of Mithra, the slain God actually appearing as a Lamb in the vision. Thus in the Jesuine eucharist, as in so many others, there is embodied the primitive countersense of the God eating himself, in that the sacred or sacrificial animal which he eats is his own manifestation. There could not well occur in respect of the lamb the further myth-evolution seen in some other cults, as in that of the goat-eating Dionysos, where "we have the strange spectacle of a God sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy." But the primary principle is the same: whether through totemism or through an early application of the zodiacal principle, making the spring sacrifice consist in a lamb because the Sun is then in the constellation of the Ram-Lamb, the lamb stands for the God ; and " as the God is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the God's own self, the God eats of his own flesh."2 In the gospel legend this happens by a double necessity, inasmuch as the God must found his own eucharist before his death. It was doubtless by way of refining upon the earlier practice of flesh-eating that in the synoptics the God is made to call the bread his flesh ; though in the course of the supper he presumptively ate of the prescribed flesh of his special symbol and representative, the lamb. In the same way the Mithraists, whose God was symbolised by both the bull and the lamb, had a sacred meal of bread and wine and one of bread and water, though the God is normally figured as slaying the bull, and a lamb was at certain times eaten in the jgoysteries.3 So in the mystical eucharist of the Egyptians, wherein the divine beings " eat the God Bah [God of the water-flood] and drink the drink offerings,"4 the "cakes and ale" so constantly mentioned in the funeral ritual clearly stand for bread and wine as symbolising flesh and blood, the cakes being made of white grain, and the ale from red grain.6 The worshippers of Dionysos inferribly did the same when his worship was linked to that of Demeter or Ceres, the Corn-Goddess, and in his cult in turn the wine was 1 Cp. Bev. ii, 9 ; iii, 9. 2 Frazer G. B., ii, 167. s See below, Part III, Mithraism, §§ 6, 9. 4 Book of the Dead, ch. lxv, Budge's tr. pp. 120, 156. 8 xd. ch. cxxiv, tr. p. 187. THE CANNIBAL SACRAMENT 143 mixed with water.1 But it is on record that though some Christian worshippers in the second century and later, whether imitating the Mithraists or proceeding on general ascetic principles, substituted water for wine in the normal sacrament (a mixture of wine and water being the common usage), an actual lamb was in many churches anciently sacrificed and eaten at Easter, and that when that usage ceased a baked image of a lamb was substituted.8 And vestiges of both customs survive to this day in the practice of the Catholics of Italy, wherein an actual body of a lamb as well as a confectionery image is blessed by the priest, with the Easter eggs, and sometimes bread.4 There were in reality two ideals in the early Church : that set forth by a number of the Fathers down to Augustine, according to which the ritual of the Holy Supper is purely mystical ; 6 and another, resting on the natural feeling that the ritual language was gratuitously fantastic if taken as wholly mystical. This, the realistic view, founds on the whole historical analogy of sacrifice, which always meant a communion with the God in partaking of a common meal,8 and often, further, a partaking of the God7 under the form of his animal or human representative — this after the principle of totemism, if ever present in the particular cult, had been long overlaid by a later mysticism. In short, if men ate the paschal sacrament of the Lamb by way of eating the God, they were doing what was pleasing to the God ; and if they further regarded the God as incarnate in human shape, they were equally entitled or committed to eating him in that form. But are we then to suppose that in any Mediterranean population about the beginning of the Christian era a religious sect could sacrifice a human being and afterwards sacramentally eat of the flesh ? In the records of the man-sacrifice of the Babylonian Sacasa or Zakmuk, to which Dr. Frazer looks for the original of a rite 1 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 360. 2 Bingham, Antiq. of the Christian Church, B. xv, ch. ii, U 5, 7. Hatch, Hibbert Lectures, p. 300. The criticism of Dr. Cheetham on this passage (The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, 1897, p. 149) denies the sacrifice on the altar (cp. Bingham, Bk. xv, ch. ii, § 3), but admits that a lamb, blessed by the Pope, was eaten. But there is evidence that a lamb is actually sacrificed on the altar in at least one place to this day. A picture representing the practice was published some years ago in (I think) the Daily Graphic. 4 Order of Divine Service for Easter, according to the use of tlie Church of Rome (Art and Book Company : London), 1899, p. 99. The offices of " Blessing of the Houses— the Lamb— the Eggs " are not given in the official Office of Holy Week according to the Roman Rite, published by Washbourne, London, 1896. 0 Augustine, De Doctr. Chr. iii, 16, § 24; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trvpho, xli; tn"? Alexan|l1'- Pedagogue, i, 6 ; Tertullian, Against Marcion, iv, 40. 0 Op. Jevons, p. 288 ; and The Dynamics of Religion, pp. 146-53. The blunder of Bentley, sometimes recklessly backed up by Christian writers to this day, is repudiated by all com petent scholars. Cp. Newton, Essays in Art and Archeology, 1880, p. 186. Cp. Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Beligion, 2nd ed. ii, 251, and Decharme, as there cited. 144 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD copied by the Jews in their Purim feast and incidentally applied to the execution of a historic Jesus, there is no trace of a subsequent anthropophagous or other sacrament ; any more than a rite of resurrection. Yet such a sacrament would seem to be primordial ; and the idea of resurrection, developed as a doctrine of individual immortality from the primary conception of the annual revival of vegetation, had become part of the mystery rituals of Osiris and Dionysos, and of the Eleusinia, long before the Christian era. It is the same doctrine that we find in pre-Christian Mexico, particularly in the worship of Huitzilopochtli, concerning which a discerning mythologist of the last generation noted that the practice of making from dough and seeds and children's blood small images of the God, which were treated like human victims and eaten, signified his death and the eating of his body : — Whereas the God dies, it must be religiously and as a sacrifice ; and whereas the anthropomorphic God dies, he dies as a human sacrifice accord ing to the established usages his heart is out out and his body eaten as was done in every human sacrifice. Was the thought thereby signified that the God, when his body was eaten, became part thereof, and so communi cated himself ? Doubtless, but not abstractly, metaphysically, or at all Ohristianly or morally, but simply on his Nature side, which is the essence of the Feast-God. In seeds he gives his body to nourish his worshippers Broadly, the God entertains the sacrificer at the sacrifice through the sacri ficial meal ; and when the slave, as so often happens, represents the God to whom he is sacrificed, the eating of his flesh is an eating of the God's.1 With the comparative " morality " of the heathen and Christian sacraments we need not here concern ourselves. But it is to be noted that among the early Christians the sacramental bread was treated as having medicinal virtue ; and that in the Middle Ages it became practically a fetish.2 § 7. The Semitic Antecedents. In view of such an evolution, which may or may not have a historical connection with the old Asiatic rite seen surviving among the Khonds and Gonds, we may perhaps infer where we cannot trace the development that preceded the reduction of the Jesus myth to its present form. An important light is also thrown on the problem by the speculation of Dr. Frazer, inasmuch as it indicates clues which are not affected by the miscarriage of his actual theorem ; and to these we may profitably turn. Dr. Frazer's hypothesis is that the " mockeries '' of the J J. G. Mtiller, Geschichte der Amerikanischen Urreligionen, 2te Aufl. 1867, p. 606. ¦* Bingham, Christian Antiquities, B. xv, iv, §§ 7-20 ; v, §§ 5-9 ; Lea, History of the Inquisition, l, 49. THE SEMITIC ANTECEDENTS 145 crucifixion represent the application to the case of Jesus of the usages of the Perso-Babylonian festival of the Sacaea,1 which he is disposed to identify with the very ancient New Year festival known as the Zakmuk or Zagmuku.2 From this he holds the Jews to have derived their (certainly post-exilic) feast of Purim, of the origin of which such a fictitious account is given in the book of Esther, whereof the Esther and Mordecai strongly suggest the God-names Ishtar and Merodach. Purim, in its main features, resembles alike the accounts given of the Sacasa and those given of Zakmuk ; and the suggestion is that the Jews, in borrowing the festival, may have copied from the Babylonians the Sacaaa practice of putting to death at that date " a malefactor, who, after masquerading as Mordecai, in a crown and royal robe, was hanged or crucified in the character of Haman." This in itself is not incredible ; nor is it unlikely that the fast which precedes the feasting of Purim was, in Babylon, a ceremonial mourning for a God or demigod who died like Tammuz or Adonis, and like him rose again on the third day. Then comes the suggestion that Jesus was crucified in the character of Haman. Now arises, however, the problem as to dates. Purim occurred in the middle of the lunar month of Adar, the last of the Jewish sacred year, which, says Dr. Frazer, " corresponds roughly to March." In Conder's Handbook, as it happens, it is made to run from January 28th to February 25th, leaving (for us) an interval of eleven days unaccounted for between the end of the year and the beginning of the next, which sets out with 1st Nisan = 8th March. What the Jews did to round the cycle was to insert a thirteenth lunar month seven times in nineteen years. This intercalary month was pre sumptively placed at the end of the year, with the effect of retarding the New Year and making Nisan (also called Abib = ripe ears) run into our April. The practical point for us, then, is that there were several weeks between Purim and the Babylonian Zakmuk, which fell early " in Nisan. Doubtless the Jews put Purim earlier to prevent its clashing with their Passover, which was originally a spring festival of the same order. But then the Sacasa, according to Berosus, fell in the Babylonian month of Lous, which answers to July ; and Jesus, again, is crucified at the Passover, which occurs in the middle of Nisan, the lamb being set apart on the 10th, while " unleavened bread " began on the 15th. Thus none of the dates Mentioned by Berosus, as cited in Athenseus, xiv, 44 (p. 639 C.) ; and by Dio Chryaos- »• OraJ; iv, p. 6 (ed. Dindorf, vol. i, p. 76). Mentioned in recently recovered cuneiform inscriptions. See Sayce, Hibbert !ctures, pp. 64-68; and Jastrow, Beligions of Assyria and Babylonia, Index, under Zagmuk, or may possibly be as late as September. Lang, Magic and Beligion, p. 145. 146 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD fit, Jesus being crucified, according to the story, a month after the Jewish festival in which Haman figures, and months before that of the Sacaea in which a mock king was hanged or crucified. Of these difficulties, which Dr. Frazer avows, Mr. Lang makes the most.1 Dr. Frazer's suggested solutions are — (l) that Berosus may be wrong about the date of the Sacaaa ; (2) that Jesus may really have been crucified in Adar, at the feast of Purim, and not in Nisan, at the feast of the Passover — Christian sentiment preferring the latter date, and making the change in tradition ; (3) that the Jews may sometimes (cp. Esther iii, 7) have put Purim alongside of the Passover. For the rest, he suggests that Barabbas was the Mordecai of the year ; and cites from Philo the story of Carabbas, who was made to play the part of a mock king at Alexandria, by way of burlesquing King Agrippa. The name Carabbas, it is suggested, may be a copyist's error for Barabbas, which, Dr. Frazer thinks, may have been the standing name for a figure in a mock sacrifice, since it means " Son of the Father," and points to the old Semitic cults in which king's sons were sacrificed by or for their fathers. Now, the mere difficulty about dates would not be fatal to Dr. Frazer's very interesting and ingenious theory if that were otherwise on a sound footing. That there were two calendar usages in regard to the Sacaea becomes probable when we note (1) that the Jews, under Babylonian influence, had separated their ecclesiastical from their civil year — their ecclesiastical new year (the older) being in autumn, while the civil year began in spring,8 and (2) that they had a second or little Passover, a month after the first, for those who could not keep that.4 Under the changing dynasties of Meso potamia there might easily be such a duplicating of the Sacaea ; and as a matter of fact Zakmuk was a festival day in many Babylonian cults.6 On the other hand, the Jews would readily antedate their Purim to separate it from the Passover ; and Christian tradition might very well falsify a date of which it had no documentary record. But this last consideration calls up a far more serious 1 Sometimes very amusingly, but with unwonted diff usoness and repetition, in Magic and Beligion, pp. 123-204. As Mr. Lang shows (p. 138, etc.). Dr. Frazer has left in his text (ii, 254, note; iii, 152-3) contradictory surmises as to dates. The immense mass of details ! in his book may well excuse such an oversight ; but Mr. Lang undoubtedly shows his theory to be otherwise inharmonious in detail. 2 Dr. Frazer states (iii, 193, note) that " the first to call attention to this passage " in Philo was Mr. P. Wendland, in Hermes, in 1898. This, I may mention, is a mistake. I myself discussed the Carabbas story in the National Reformer so long ago as March 3rd, 1889, and certainly some previous writer— I think Babbi Wise— had called my attention to it. 8 Wellhausen, Prolegomena, Eng. tr. pp. 108-9 ; cp. Exodus xii, 2. Cp. Max Mtiller. Natural Beligion, pp. 529-530. Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 232. 4 Num. ix, 10, 11, s See Jastrow, Index, under Zagmuk. THE SEMITIC ANTECEDENTS 147 objection to the form of Dr. Frazer's proposition — the above-noted objection, namely, that he is accepting the historic actuality of the crucifixion, the inscriptions on the cross, the " of Nazareth," the mockery by the soldiers, the utterances of Pilate, the episode of Barabbas, and all the rest of it. To a critic who accepts all this the critical answer obviously is : If you thus take for granted the genuineness of such a highly detailed narrative, how can you possibly account for its absolute omission of any shadow of allusion to the Haman-and-Mordecai show of which you suppose the crucifixion to have accidentally become part ? This objection Dr. Frazer does not try to meet ; and it is hard to see how he could meet it. A thorough inquiry, surely, must take account of all aspects of the gospel problem, not merely of ostensible parallels in pagan usage to one aspect of the crucifixion story. The whole documentary problem, surely, must be taken into account ; and the historical criticism of the entire legend reckoned with. We are not dealing with a generally credible and corroborated narrative in which a single episode raises surmise of extraneous factors not recognised in the text, but with one which begins and ends in absolute and immemorial myth and is stamped with supernaturalism in every sentence. By Dr. Frazer's own repeated avowal, we ought not to look to the current narrative of the origin of a rite for the historical fact, but to the rite for the origin of the narrative. If this law does not hold of the Christian eucharist it holds of nothing ; and the eucharist is the keystone of the arch built over the death of the God in the gospels. Dr. Frazer obviously proceeds on the common assumption that the teachings of the Gospel Jesus testify to an indubitable per sonality. But that view, so natural at first sight, has reached its lowest degree of credit among special students precisely at the moment of Dr. Frazer's unquestioning acceptance of it.1 Anthro pology and hierology cannot afford thus to ignore the special historical problems of the very creed on which confessedly their results must finally come to bear. Several of Dr. Frazer's remarks, however, suggest that in the very act of bringing his invaluable research into relation with the creeds of his contemporaries he had regarded as outside his field of study some of the most significant and best-established facts as to the doctrinal evolution of Christism among the Jews.2 , J See hereinafter, Pt. II, ch. ii, §§ 4-6 ; and Christianity and Mythology, Pt. III. j_ ni?;17' his note (ii, p. 3, n. 3) on the anticipations of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in Philo Judajus. 148 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD § 8. The Judaic Evolution. Rejecting, then, as not merely unwarranted but excluded by the evidence, Dr. Frazer's assumption of the historicity of the crucifixion, we have to note carefully the inferences which his research really warrants. When these are drawn it will be found that his notable hypothesis does not fall to the ground in its essentials. He has really added signally to his former great services by bringing together the evidences for the existence of a mock-kingly sacrifice among the Semites before the Christian era, and by skilfully elucidating the whole primitive psychology of such rituals. It needs only that his procedure be freed, on the principles of scientific mythology, from the difficulty set up by accepting one set of palpable myths as history. When criticism has done its worst against his manipulation of the Sacaea, Zakmuk, and Purim, it will be found that there remains clearly open the inference that certain details of the crucifixion myth are drawn from some old Semitic rite resembling the Sacsea, not by way of Purim in its Evemerised Jewish form, but in a simpler form, in which there was no Ishtar or Merodach. Precisely because the practice of human sacrifice to the Vege tation-God was so nearly universal as Dr. Frazer has shown it to be, it is unnecessary to assume that the Jews owed their variant of it solely to a late contact with another nation. The Athenians had in their Thargelia, which like the Passover was a feast of first fruits,2 a usage of human sacrifice which as we have seen corresponded at points with the Babylonian, inasmuch as the victims were maintained in potentially riotous ease, and were latterly chosen from the criminal class, though they cannot originally have been so. The sacrifice, indeed, does not seem to have belonged to the earlier worship of Apollo at all,8 and the calling of the victims pharmakoi, "medicine men," suggests an adaptation of a West- Asiatic usage, the more so as quasi- Semitic sacrifices were in use among the Eretrians and Magnesians.4 In all likelihood this was the very sacrifice of purifi cation said to have been prescribed to the plague-stricken Athenians 1 Much of Mr. Lang's criticism of Dr. Frazer's theory turns on the fact that it seeksto combine a great many disparate sacrificial motives. This is not absolutely an effective objection, inasmuch as religion is full of inconsistencies; but Dr. Frazer imputes too much power of combination to a given cult. Popular sacrifice must clearly subsist on a simple basis. And there may have been forced changes, as thQ Sacsea is said by Strabo to have been founded by Cyrus, after his victory over the Sacse, though Saogea is also given as the name of a Persian Goddess (Strabo, xi, 8, § 5). Cp. Selden, De Diis Syris, ed. 1680, pp. 269-270. 2 Preller, Griech. Muthol. 2nd ed. i, 202, note; Frazer, iii, 127, and refs.; Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, ii, § 74. 8 K. F. Hermann, Gottesdienst. Alterth. § 60 ; Culturgesch. der Griechen und BSmer, 1857, i, 54. . 4 Plutarch, De Pyth. Orac. xvi. THE JUDAIC EVOLUTION 149 by the Cretan Epimenides,1 when two youths voluntarily gave them selves as victims.2 But if the Athenians could take such a rite from Crete or Asia Minor, there is reason to conclude that it was known in Palestine, in a simpler form than the Babylonian, before the exile. That there were such forms is to be inferred from both early and late evidence. Firstly, we have the whole tradition of the Passover, with which, and not with Purim, the crucifixion myth comes chronologically in touch on the face of the case. Among the aspects of the gospel myth which the analogy of the Saeasa leaves untouched are (l) the mourning for the victim ; (2) his alleged divinity and his titles of Son of God and Son of Man ; (3) his participation in a sacramental meal in which his flesh is mystically eaten ; (4) his execution along with two criminals ; (5) his resurrection ; (6) his subsequent status as Messiah or Christos. Now, the first three of those characteristics are as cognate with the paschal rite as they are alien to Purim ; the fourth can be shown historically to connect with paschal usage ; and the others develop naturally from the preceding. That there is no need to go to Purim for an actual killing or sacrificing of quasi- royal victims or malefactors in connection with a sacrificial festival appears from the legend of the hanging of seven king's sons " before the Lord," an event which happens according to the narrative at the barley harvest, that is, at the time of the Passover.8 In the face of this familiar record it is obliviously asserted by Mr. Lang that " sacrificed victims are not hanged." 4 He has given thirteen cases of human sacrifice in which victims were not hanged, but has apparently not consulted his Bible. Now, the expressions before the Lord " and " unto the Lord " mean sacrifice or nothing ; and that the hanging of Saul's sons was by way of propitiation is clear from the remark in the context that " after that, God was intreated for the land." 6 Further, hanging is the mode not only in the sacrificing of Saul's sons but in the offering up " unto the Lord " J Diogenes Laertius, i, 110 (I, x, 4) ; AthenEeus, xiii, 78. * As no mention is made either of any later voluntary sacrifice or of any selection of innocent victims, the inference seems clear that they were latterly bought, or condemned criminals." See above, p. 138. 8 Cp. 2 Sam. xxi, 6-9, with Deut. xvi, 9; Lev. xxiii, 10-14; and see Eobertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, p. 398. Cp. Ghillany, p. 544, and Tract Sanhedrin, f . 89, 1, there cited, as to the custom of executing criminals during the festival. The barley harvest, it should be noted, began in the Jericho plain and Jordan valley at passover time, and became general in the uplands in the next month, wheat ripening later. In Egypt the harvests are still earlier, flax and barley being harvested in March, and wheat in April. Mr. Lang (Magic and Beligion, pp. 116-117) has overlooked the fact that a feast could thus be at once a harvest feast and vernal." The Thargelia in May was in similar case. ' Magic and Beligion, pp. 131, 132, 174. 8 CP- the admission of the Bev. Edward Day, Tlie Social Life of the Hebrews, New York, J'n1^213' Kaliech, Comm, on Leviticus, i, 391-2. ° 2 Sam. xxi, 14. In the same way the stoning and burning of Achan and his family and cattle is clearly a sacrificial act. Josh, vii, 24-26. 150 THE SACEIEICED SAVIOUE-GOD of the heads of the people as described in Numbers xxv, 4. Equally sacrificial, in spirit and in occasion, though the usual formula is not applied to it, is the hanging of the five kings by Joshua in the pseudo-history ; and in the case of his hanging of the king of Ai, where the procedure is exactly the same, it is explicitly told, in the Hebrew, that he "devoted" all the people of Ai, as he had done those of Jericho.1 As Ai is an imaginary city,2 we must conclude that the legend points to a customary rite. Finally, a comparison of a passage in Deuteronomy in which every hanged man is declared to be " the curse of God,"8 with the passages cited from the book of Joshua, proves that "the curse of God" meant " devoted to God,"4 since in the former the course prescribed is precisely that followed in the pseudo-history, namely, the taking down and burying of the victim within the day. Thus all hanged men were in ancient Jewry sacrifices to the Sun-God or the Bain-God,6 and the Pauline epistle unconsciously clinches the point in citing the misunderstood text.6 It may in fact be taken as historically certain that human sacrifice in this aspect was a recognised part of Hebrew religion down till the Exile.7 And here, as at so many other points, we find a specific parallel between Hebrew usage and that of the natives of Africa. At the death of a Nigerian chief or notable, the slaves slain to " raise him up by the head and feet " are buried with him ; and others are " hung in the different compartments of the house " and in the street or roadway ; the heads of these being afterwards cut off and regarded as conveying luck.8 Again, near a certain Long Juju shrine in Southern Nigeria, where human sacrifice was regularly practised until its capture by the British troops, it was noted that beside a minor temple at Ibum were " trees on which murderers and thieves used to be hanged." 9 That the hanging had a religious significance is proved by the fact that when the capture took place there was 1 Josh, viii, 24-29 ; x, 15-26. 2 Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 110. 8 Deut. xxi, 23, margin. 4 The double meaning is found also in the Greek term anathema = devoted, and accursed. 6 Cp. Eobertson Smith, Bel. of the Semites, p. 264, as to the principle that the sacrifice should be seen only by the God or planet propitiated. In the old sacrifices to the sun among the Samoans, "the body was laid out on a pandanus tree, and there the sun devoured it." Turner, Samoa a Hundred Years Ago, 1884, p. 201. On p. 342 (2nd ed. p. 3611 Smith argues that early executions for infamous crimes were not sacrifices ; but as already noted he says later (p. 351, note) that all executions became sacrificial. 8 Gal. iii, 13. 7 Cp. Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der altcn Hebrder, 1842 ; Daumer, Der Feuer wnd Molochdienst der alten Hebraer, 1842, passim ; Kalisch, Coram, on Leviticus, i, 381-416 ; Day, The Social Life of the Hebrews, 1901, p. 212. A selection from the epithets bestowed upon Ghillany, who first laid stress on the facta, will be found in Kalisch (i, 404-5, note), who zealously balances between avowal and repudiation. 8 Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 444-5. 9 C. Partridge, Cross River Natives, 1905, p. 60. THE JUDAIC EVOLUTION 151 found " the last sacrifice, a white goat, trussed up in the branches of a palm-tree and starving to death." J And it is expressly explained concerning the sacrifice of a woman to the Eain-God at Benin that " a woman was taken, a prayer made over her, and a message saluting the Bain-God put in her mouth ; then she was clubbed to death and put up in the execution-tree " [St. Andrew's-cross-wise] " so that the rain might see." a Semitic usage is all that need be proved in the present connec tion; but it may be further noted (l) that animal victims were hanged to a tree in the cult of the Syrian Goddess in the second century of our era;8 (2) that human victims were bound or hanged to trees in the sacrificial rites of the pre-Christian Mexicans ; (3) that human victims were frequently if not habitually hanged in sacrifice to Odin,6 as well as to other Teutonic deities;6 (4) that in certain cases of human sacrifice in Tahiti the slain victim was " suspended from the sacred tree "; 7 (5) that the devoted bodies of slain enemies were hanged on a tree by the Tongans;8 (6) that among Obubura natives a lamb in a propitiatory sacrifice was "fastened into the topmost prong of a pole" and set up, with a palm branch on which was impaled a yam, at the entrance of the compound ;° (7) that some of the northern Eedskins hanged dogs to poles with running knots " in honour of their divinities"; that the nomads similarly attached skins of wild beasts to trees ; and that the Floridan's elevated other offerings.10 It is significant that among the early Odin-worshippers, as among Greeks and Semites, king's sons were sacrificed in substitution for their fathers ; and that latterly slaves and criminals were substituted in such rites.11 From the nature of the case, too, it is probable that the victim was hanged not by the neck but by the hands.12 In some of the Scandinavian cases the victim was wounded with a javelin as well as hanged ; and one myth specifies a hanging which lasted nine nights.18 In any 1 Id. p. 55. "Everything which is sacrificed, such as cattle, goats, fowls, &c, must be white." Id. p. 56. Cp. A. B. Ellis, Tshi-Speaking Peoples, p. 85. 2 H. Ling Both, Great Benin, 1903, p. 71. See the photographs reproduced on the cover and at pp. 62, 54 ; and compare the frontispiece of Burton's Mission to Gelele, where some victims are crucified head downwards, in the St. Andrew mode. The St. Andrew-cross position, again, is found in the tortures of the Eedskins. Lafitau, Mozurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, ii, 261, 292. 8 Lucian, De Dea Syria, xlix. 4 See below, Part IV, § 8. 8 See H. M. Chadwick, The Cult of Othin, 1899, pp. 15-20, 32, 37, 53, 73-74. 8 See above, p. 123. 7 w. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, 2nd ed. ii, 129. 8 Mariner, Tonga Islands, ed. 1827, i, 272. 9 Partridge, Cross Biver Natives, 1905, p. 296. J8 Lafitau, Moiurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, i, 180. ii Chadwick, p. 27. The Tentons also "devoted" whole armies of their enemies to the God. 12 Tal. Jer. Sanhedrin, Schwab's French tr. ch. vi, 7 (9). vol. x, p. 282 ; Tal. Bab. fol. 46, eol. 1, Eng. tr. by Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, p. 436, n. 6. « This has been regarded as an echo of Christian doctrine. But even if it were, the fact of sacrificial hanging would remain certain. 152 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD case, hanging by the wrists was the normal mode of ancient " cruci fixion" so-called.1 But, further, it is clear that the Passover rite, of which the narrative in Exodus is a fictitious account, was originally one of sacrifice of firstlings,2 including the first-born sons ; and the con flicting laws on the subject prove that only with difficulty was the substitution of lambs for children carried out.8 To this day, at least among continental Jews,4 the principle of " redemption " is ritually recognised, in the festival ceremony of Pidyen Haben. A month after the birth of a first son, a friendly Cohen is selected to officiate, who sacerdotally asks certain questions of the mother, one being, "Is this child the first fruit of your womb?" If he be poor, he receives a small fee ;6 if not, the mother throws a small gold chain round his neck ; and he in return, during certain prayers, puts it round the neck of the child, who is thus "redeemed." And that the first-born were at one time set apart as a victim-cZass,6 liable either to be sacrificed or to be employed as hierodouloi, appears from the announcement of Yahweh in the priestly code: "I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the first-born and the Levites shall be mine; for all the first-born ' • »»7 are mine. As regards the private continuance of the practice after the Levites had been set apart as a specific tribe, we can only inferen- tially trace the evolution. Certainly the priesthood did*not of itself set up the movement against child sacrifice : such reforms always begin through rulers or lay reformers, never through the priestly organisation, save when a new cult supersedes an old.8 Circum- 1 See H. Fulda, Das Kreuz und die Kreuzigung, Breslau, 1878, §§ 34-36 and Tab. 1 ; and cp. Ghillany, as cited, pp. 531-2, note. 2 Cp. Eobertson Smith, Belig. of the Semites, p. 445 ; Wellhausen, as there cited ; and Ghillany, pp. 518-552. 8 Compare Ex. xiii, 2 ; xxii, 29 ; xxxiv, 20 ; Lev. xxvii, 28, 29 ; Num. xviii, 15 ; Micah vi, 7. Mr. Lang (Magic and Beligion, p. 53) will not admit that any people ever practised such a yearly massacre of first-born children as Dr. Frazer infers. But Mr. Lang pays no heed to the conflicting laws here specified, some of whioh insist on the "devoting" of all first-born males, human as well as animals, while the others prescribe that the human males shall be " redeemed." Both sets of laws are utterly inexplicable save on the theory of an original practice of child-sacrifice. Cp. the admissions of A. Eeville, ProUgomenes, p. 185 ; and Kuenen, ii, 30, 90-94. As to child-sacrifice in other races, see Dennett, Nigerian Studies, p. 70; Murray, Bise of the Greek Epic, p. 277 ; J. M. B., Christianity and Mytho logy, 2nd ed. pp. 209-10 ; and below, Pt. iv, §§ 3, 4, 5. 4 A number keep up the practice after coming to England. Cp. J. Low, Die Lebensalter in der jildischen Liter atur, 1875, pp. 110-118, cited by Frazer, G. B. ii, 50. 5 Generally 15s., I am privately informed. 8 It is noteworthy that among the Tahitians, when a victim was taken from any family, the rest were held to be " devoted"— a conception partly analogous to that of the Khonds. J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 1837, p. 554. Cp. W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 347. The same principle was noted among the Eedskins (Lafitau, ii, 307). In Mangaia there was a series of tribes " devoted to furnish human sacrifices " (Gill, Myths and Songs of the South Pacific, pp. 24, 36-38, 290, 300, 302). And the story of the Messenian and Achasan sacrifices in Pausanias (iv, 9) and Herodotus (vii, 197) specify a particular family which must supply the victim. 7 Num. iii, 12. There are, however, some grounds for supposing that the first Levites were members of a conquered race. 8 gee above, p. 60, and below, Part IV, § 5. THE JUDAIC EVOLUTION 153 cision, a rite of sacrifice with the same significance,1 seems to have been introduced, or at least stressed, comparatively late, for the same purpose ; and as an official Yahwistic feast the Passover seems also late ;8 though the manner of its enactment in the first redaction of the law indicates that it was in some form already a standing practice.4 It doubtless needed the late myths of Abraham and Isaac6 and of the Exodus to persuade even Yahwists to drop the child sacrifice ; and in the rival cults the practice seems to have been common.6 It is in this connection that there presumptively occurred the usage first of breaking the victims' limbs, and later of drugging them, to prevent the struggles which were usually held to make a sacrifice inauspicious ;7 and the manner in which the caveat against breaking the bones of the paschal lamb is introduced — an apparent interpolation made at the close of the original narrative of the exodus8 — indicates it to be either a late provision against a practice which definitely recalled the rite of human sacrifice, or a specific assertion of the principle that the victim must be without blemish, as against the practice of a human sacrifice in which the victim had to be either maimed or drugged in order to make him seem willing. But, as in the practice of the Khonds, so in that of the Jews, the principle that the victim must be " bought with a price" is visibly a later development, grafted on the other. Originally the victim is voluntary ; this is his special sacrificial virtue. When the voluntary victim can no longer be procured, one " bought with a price," being the property of the saerificers, is the next best thing ; and in his case " willingness " is ostensibly secured by trick, bribe, or brutality. The underlying reasoning is of a piece. We are faced again, however, by the difficult problem of the historic transmission of such usages. On the whole the evidence from anthropology goes far to support the thesis, otherwise well made out, of the Asiatic derivation of the Oceanic peoples. In certain South Sea Islands in modern times, when the practices of 1 The assertion of Kalisch (Comm. on Levit.. i, 409) that circumcision " bore nowhere the remotest relation to human sacrifices " is mere declamation. No other explanation of the rite is valid. 2 Gen. xvii is part of the late priestly code. E. J. Fripp, Composition of the Book of Genesis, 1892, p. 164. 8 2 Kings xxiii, 23. 4 Deut. xvi, 2. 8 Gen. xxii, 1-13. 8 Cp. 2 Kings xvi, 3 ; 2 Chron. xxviii, 3 ; Ps. cvi, 37, 38. . 7 The Greek and Eoman device of putting barley or water in the ear of the sacrificial ox at the altar, to make him bow his head as if signifying willingness to be slain, is found to be closely paraUeled in recent times in the sacrifices of the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu- Kush, who were particularly solicitous on the point. So also the Hindu Thugs. See Sir G. S. Eobertson's Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, p. 423. 8 Ex. xii, 42-51. The clause in v. 46 may even be an addition to the interpolation. 9 Seethe Bev. D. Macdonald's Asiatic Origin of the Oceanic Languages, Luzac and Co. 1894; and Oceania: Linguistic and Anthropological, 1889, pp. 15, 17, 19, etc.; and Keane, Ethnology, 1909, p. 288. Cp. the Nubische Grammatik of Lepsius, 1880, for the thesis that the Egyptian, Libyan, and Kushitic languages are of Asiatic origin. 154 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD human sacrifice and cannibalism had latterly dwindled,1 the first missionaries found in use forms of animal sacrifice which seem to affiliate at many points to the ritual we have seen in operation among Khonds and westerly Semites. Thus the pigs set apart for sacrifice2 at certain temples, "when presented alive, received the sacred mark, and ranged the district at liberty ; when slain, they were exceedingly anxious to avoid breaking a bone, or disfiguring the animal. One method of killing them was by holding the pig upright on its legs, placing a strong stick horizontally under its throat, and another across upon its neck, and then pressing them together until the animal was strangled."3 Here we have (1) the common Asiatic and American usage of leaving the doomed victim for a time at liberty;4 (2) the avoidance of bone-breaking,6 as in the case of the paschal lamb ; (3) the preservation of the cross-figure as seen in the Khond sacrifice; and (4) the evident imitation of human sacrifice in the posture of the victim.6 Seeing, further, that only a portion of the pig thus sacrificed was eaten, and that only by the priests and other sacred persons who were privileged to eat of the sacrifices," the remainder being left on the God's altar till it decomposed, we may fairly surmise that it was a surrogate for a sacrificed human being, formerly eaten as a sacrament in the Aztec fashion. Among the natives of South Nigeria who practised human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism down till the beginning of the twentieth century, we again find the use of the cross-figure. The victims sacrificed for rain were stretched on a rude scaffolding in the form of the St. Andrew's cross ; and goats, as we have seen, were similarly " trussed." " Crucifixion " of a kind, as we have seen, was practised at Benin : and the term is frequently used by eye-witnesses in describing the treatment of victims.7 " The usual form of sacri fice," says Gallwey, "is crucifixion."8 Yet again, some of the women-slaves sacrificed, at the approach of the punitive expedition 1 W. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, 2nd ed. i, 357. 2 Dr. Jevons argues (p. 161) that human sacrifice arose in Polynesia because of lack of domestic animals, there being only pigs and rats. But the pigs could have sufficed in early times as well as late ; and the negroes of Africa have freely offered both kinds._ And why did not Australians, lacking domestic animals, set up or continue human sacrifices? Because men were scarce, probably. 8 W. Ellis, Polynesian Besearches, 2nd ed. i, 345. 4 Above, pp. 111-114; below, § 13 ; and Part IV, §§ 3, 5. 5 In the Tonga Islands, the occasional child-sacrifices were also by strangulation. (Mariner's Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. i, 190, 300). See also Ellis, iv, 151, as to other cases of avoidance of mangling ; and cp. Moerenhaut, Voyage aux lies du Grand Ocean, 1837, i, 508. 8 Long pig, it will be remembered, was a name among Polynesian cannibals for then" human victims. 7 H. Ling Both, Great Benin, 1903, pp. 51, 54, 64, 66, 69, 86, 173 ; and App. p. ix. Cp. Decle, Three Years in Savage Africa, 1900, p. 73, as to cases of crucifixion noted by him. 8 Id. p. 66. THE JUDAIC EVOLUTION 155 to Benin, had the " abdominal wall cut in the form of a cross." There are traces, too, of leg-breaking, one goat being found by the punitive expedition at Benin with its legs broken, as a native explained, "to prevent white man coming";1 and Burton tells of a victim whose legs " had been broken at mid-shin with awful violence." 2 He also records that " a slave bound for the other world is always plied with a bottle of rum before the fatal cord is made fast."8 In Uganda the usage of limb-breaking is found to have been common. The God Kitimba or Kitinda of Damba and elsewhere was represented by a crocodile, his priest," and to appease him men were sacrificed to the crocodiles in the lake. The victim was taken to the brink, " where his knees and elbows were broken, so that he could not crawl away," 4 whereafter the crocodiles came and devoured him.6 Here the primary motive is unusually clear ; and it is noted that in the cise of the victims thrown alive into the pit-grave of the chief among some tribes there is no limb- breaking, they being unable to escape.6 It is not impossible that limb-breaking originated in this simple fashion, and later became a ritual usage with an ethical connotation. But among the Manyema of the same African region, on the other hand, we find that at the burial of a chief ten women victims had their legs and arms broken at the knees and elbows and were thrown into the grave ; the king's dead body, wrapped in bark-cloth, was laid upon theirs ; and then ten men victims were similarly treated, and their bodies laid over the king's.7 Thus the idea of simulated " willingness " cannot be confi dently excluded from even the most primitive phenomena. The main reason for doubt is the fact that in ordinary burial the limbs of the dead are by the same peoples broken at the elbows and knees to admit of their being placed in the sitting posture8 — a practice which, however, is ascribed to certain of the North American Indian tribes9 without any mention of limb-breaking being resorted to. And in the sacrifices of slaves at the death of chiefs, as practised 1 H. Ling Both. Great Benin, 1903, pp. 52. 54, 64, 68, 69. 161 ; and App. x. Cp. citation from Commander Bacon, p. 175, as to the " crucifixion tree." a Id. p. t>5. 8 Again : " The African rarely sacrifices men without stupefying them with .drink or drugs." Both notes that "tbe descriptions of human sacrifices given by Landolpheand Beanvais do not leave the impression that the victims were intoxicated before being killed" (p. 64, note). At Benin, as elsewhere, the drugging was apparently a late device. Latterly it was common. Id. p. 84. „,„ 4 J. F. Cunningham, Uganda and its Peoples. 1905, pp. 88-89. Cp. PP- 188, 217-218. 318. Sometimes 200 or 300 men were sacrificed at a time. On the occasion of the finishing of a king's palace, as many as 700 were at times slaughtered to the leopard-demon. 5 In this connection it is significant that in the time of Herodotus anyone seized and kUled by a crocodile was treated as a divine victim, and buried with special reverence as " something more than human " (ii, 90)— evidently a survival from the ancient rite of human sacrifice. 8 Cunningham, p. 56. 7 Id. p. 318. e Bl. p. 10, • Waitz, Anth ropologie der NaturvSlker, iii, 340. 156 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD in the Sandwich Islands when they were visited by Captain Cook, the victims were clubbed suddenly, having " not the most distant intimation of their fate." 1 Here the exclusion of willingness is so complete that we are led to infer a late and, so to speak, debased form of the rite. Yet again, there is a solitary testimony that in the human sacrifices offered by the Algonkins at the beginning of the hunting season it was a rule that not a bone of the victim must be broken. Seeing that other redskins observed the principle of the Semites, that at the sacrificial feast the victim " must be all eaten, and nothing left,"8 there would thus seem to be not merely an ancient racial affinity between the aborigines of America and some race or races of Asia, but a direct heredity in the matter of special primitive rites. But even if we waive the latter presumption, we can infer the probable line of movement all round in the matter of the usages under notice. As thus : — 1. Originally a "willing" victim is desiderated; and willingness is secured by the bribe of a period of ease and licence. 2. This kind of victim becoming hard to procure, one " bought with a price " was substituted, as representing a voluntary offering by his owner or owners. 3. Still seeking the semblance of a " willing " sacrifice, the sacrificers first broke the limbs of the human victim. 4. Feeling (on some reformer's urging) that such a mangled victim was an unseemly sacrifice, they resorted to narcotics. 5. At a higher stage of social evolution, recoiling from the sacrifice of an innocent victim, men fall back upon condemned criminals, and these in turn are stupefied, from humane or other motives. 6. Being next persuaded that the stupefied victim was either an unseemly or an inefficacious because non- suffering sacrifice, or being on other grounds inclined to abandon huma.n sacrifice, they sub stituted the old sacrifice of an animal, giving it in certain cases human attributes, and in others some of the privileges formerly accorded to the taboo human victim. In the case of the animal it was not as a rule felt necessary either to break bones or to use narcotics, though either plan might be used. But reformers would stress the avoidance of bone-breaking by way of showing the 1 Cook's Voyages to the Pacific, iii (by King), 162. 2 Tanner's Narrative, cited by Lubbock, Origin of Civ. 5th ed. p. 367. 8 Lubbock, last cit. quoting Schoolcraft. Cp. H. Youle Hind, Explorations in the Labrador Peninsula, 1863, ii, 17-18. THE JUDAIC EVOLUTION 157 superiority of the new sacrifice ; hence the need for a veto on imitations of the old practice.1 Such an evolution might conceivably take place independently in different communities. It is true indeed that in the redemptory sacrifices offered by modern Semites for boys, care is taken not to break a bone, "because they fear that if a bone of the sacrifice should be broken, the child's bones would be broken too ";2 but that appears to be a theory framed subsequent to and not antecedent to a reform. It is of the nature of such reforms, however, to be introduced with difficulty and to be rebelled against and reverted from ; and even without the above-cited evidence of a slowly-wrought transfor mation in Hebrew usage, it is certain, from the whole drift of religious history, that the practice of child-slaying, which was systematically legislated against only after the exile, would be revived in times of trouble by Jews, as we know it to have been by Carthaginians. It is through reversions of this kind to old and terrible rites, then, that we must suppose the ancient mode of sacrifice to have been kept in men's knowledge. Such a doctrine rested on the most obvious and therefore the most fully developed side of the conception of sacrifice — the offering to the God of a peculiarly precious gift, representing a maximum of self-deprivation in the sacrificers. Meanwhile, though it is not certain that the mode of " hanging before the Lord " by the wrists ever placed the victim in the form of a cross, as has been done in our own time at Benin, it would appear that the rite of the Passover was closely associated with the cross sign.8 That is the " mark " specified in Ezekiel4 for the saving of the elect from a general massacre ; and the blood mark placed on the doorposts and lintels at the Passover5 is inferentially the same,6 as is the " seal " on the foreheads of the saved in the Apocalypse. To this day, the Arabs make the iaw-mark with sacrificial blood on at least one Moslem shrine.7 In any case, the pre-Christian use of the 1 What looks like a reminiscence of the old sacrificial practice is described by W. Ellis (i, 310) as occurring after battles, when the legs and arms of the dead bodies of defeated warriors were broken and the bodies hung by the neck, and moved up and down for the amusement of the spectators." 2 Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Beligion To-day, 1902, pp. 177-8. 8 There is a passage in Justin Martyr (Dial, with Trypho, xl) which seems to assert that the paschal lamb was " roasted and dressed in the form of the cross "; whence it would follow that the original human victim had been crucified, or bound somewhat in the manner of the Khond sacrifice. It is not known, however, whether roasted lambs in general may not have been dressed in the same fashion. 4 Ezek. ix, 4, 6. Cp. Heb. and Varior. Bible. 8 Exod. xil, 7, 13, 29. 8 Cp. Didron, Christian Iconography, Eng. tr. i, 371, note, where also is noted the tradition that the "two sticks" of the widow of Zareptawere a cross. The prophet's miracle implies the same figure (1 Kings, xvii, 12, 22). • Curtiss, as cited, pp. 192-3. Different forms of the cross are made by Hindus on the 158 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD Cross as a symbol of the Sun-God and as a sign of " immortal life " is undisputed, and we shall see reason to infer that the form of slaying represented in the Christian crucifix — which does not appear in Christian art till about the seventh century1 — was conceived from certain rites in which the initiate extended his arms upon a tree or cross,2 probably in reminiscence of some such mode of treating the sacrificed victim as we have seen described in the case of the Khonds. § 9. Specific Survivals in Judaism. Apart from definite revivals, the memory of human sacrifice is clearly stamped not only on the Passover but on the two other typical sacrificial feasts of the Jews — the indeterminate sacrifice of the Bed Heifer, loosely said to have been performed only eight times since Moses, and the annual sacrifice of a scape-goat on the Day of Atonement. In the case of the former, which was prescribed to take place on the Mount of Olives, the high-priest, his eldest son, and the Messiah Milchama — the deputy High-Priest anointed for war — were all three anointed with holy oil, the mark of a cross being made with it on their foreheads. But further, in one of the two Talmudic accounts, " in anticipation of the performance of the rite, a pregnant woman was brought into one of the chambers of the temple, which was set apart for the purpose, and kept there till her child was born. The child so born was brought up within the sacred precincts, and protected from any chance of incurring ceremonial pollution. When the time for the rite arrived, this child was seated on a wooden litter borne by bullocks, and conducted to the fountain of Siloah. There the child descended, and drew water from the spring in an earthen vessel, bearing which, he was reconducted, as he came, to the Temple."8 But by another account " pregnant women " were brought to Jerusalem, and placed in courts built on the rock, with an excavation underneath, and they and their children were there kept "for the use of the red heifer"4 till the children were seven or eight years old, when they ceased to be held cere monially pure. Here it becomes fairly clear that a regular supply of children-victims had anciently been provided for sacrifice, and that the heifer was the child's representative. Some trace of the knowledge is preserved in the Talmud, in the dubiously significant shrines of Ganesa. See the photograph in Crooke's Popular Beligion and Folklore of Northern India, ed. 1896, i, 105, 110. 1 Bev. St. John Tyrwhitt, Art Teaching of the Primitive Church, S. P. C. K., pp. 232, 234. 2 See below. § 15. 8 Conder, Bible Handbook, 1880, pp. 105-107. 4 Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, 1883, p. 40, citing Tal. Bab. Tract Succah, fol. 21, col. 1, and Parah, ch. iii, 2, 3. As to the authority of Tract Parah, cp. Conder, p. 106. SPECIFIC SUEVIVALS IN JUDAISM 159 saying that " as the red heifer atones for sin so also does the death of the righteous atone for sin."1 Being sacrificed with her face to the south and her head to the west,2 the heifer was presumably dedicated either to the setting or winter sun or to the Moon- Goddess.8 By an equally clear clue in the ritual, we can reach the original character of the sacrifice of the scapegoat, which in its official form is clearly post-exilic.4 In the preparation for that, the high-priest was removed from his own house to the council-chamber seven days in advance, and at the same time a sagan or deputy was appointed who should take his place in case of his being incapacitated. On the night before the day of sacrifice he was not allowed to eat meat, or to sleep, being watched by the younger priests. At that stage, " the elders of the great Sanhedrin handed him over to the seniors of the priestly order, who escorted him to the upper chamber of the house of Abtinas,5 and there they swore him in, and, after bidding him farewell, departed. In administering the oath, they said : " My lord high-priest, we are ambassadors of the Sanhedrin ; thou art ambassador of the Sanhedrin, and our ambassador also. We adjure thee, by Him who causes his name to dwell in this house, that thou deviate not from anything we have rehearsed to thee. Then they parted company, both he and they weeping."6 An absurd Talmudic explanation is given for the weeping : " He wept because they suspected he was a Sadducee ; and they wept because the penalty for false suspicion is scourging."'' Whatever may have been the historical fact concealed by the last phrase, it is sufficiently clear that the rite was originally one of human sacrifice in which either the priest or his deputy, the Sagan or Segan, was put to death as 1 Tal. Bab. Moed Katon, fol. 28, col. 1, cited by Hershon, Treasures, p. 103 ; Genesis, p. 198. 2 Conder, Handbook to the Bible, 1880, p. 107. 8 In Christianity and Mythology, 1st ed. p. 349, I connected the sacrifice of the red heifer with the Egyptian sacrifice of a red ox to Typhon (Plutarch, I. and O. 31— ret wrong in C. and MX But though that also was clearly a substitution for a human sacrifice, the sacrifice of a red heifer was on the whole more likely to belong originally to a Goddess-cult, and in Egypt all she-calves were sacred to Isis (Herod, ii, 41). On the whole problem cp. Spencer, De Legibus Hebreorum, 1. ii, c. 15. 4 The dogmatic assertion of Bleek (Einleit. in das alte Test., ed. Wellhausen, 1878, s 55) as to the clearly Mosaic authorship of Lev. i-vii, xi-xvi, is a sample of the fashion in which criticism of the Pentateuch was so long darkened. All critics now place Leviticus in the Priestly Code ; and ch. xvi is no exception. Cp. Driver, Introd. c. i, § 3 ; Kuenen, The Hexateuch, Eng. tr. pp. 86, 312 ; and the Kautzsch Bible. If Lev. xvi be pre-exilic, why is there no trace of it in Deuteronomy ? 5 A family who prepared the sacred incense. See Yoma, ch. iii, 9. Schwab's Fr. trans. vol. v, pp. 199-200. 8 Tract Yoma, Schwab's Fr. tr. vol. v, pp. 161-2, 163-4, 165, 169, 170, 172; Tal. Bab. fol. 18 A and B, fol. 19 B, Eng. trans, by Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, 1882, p. 90. The last detail is not given by Conder, who probably did not see its significance. 7 Schwab seeks to make the passage more plausible by the rendering (p. 170) that he wept at being supposed capable of unfaithfulness to his instructions, they because of the painful necessity of adjuring him to be faithful. Hershon's translation is the more exact.. 160 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD " ambassador " of the people to the God or Gods, that is, as scape goat for their sins. And in this Sagan we probably have the true interpretation of the Graecised term Zoganes* applied to the mock victim of the Sacaea. He was simply the deputy8 of the originally due victim, the priest, who must thus have solved his personal problem at a very early date. In all likelihood the Hebrews had practised some form of this rite long before the Captivity. And as regards the later practice we have a significant Talmudie clue, in the saying of Eabbi Eleazar that it is lawful to slay an Amhaaretz (one " ignorant of the law," rustic " pagan ") on the Day of Atonement, even (?) when it falls on a Sabbath. There were discussions on the point, and it is explained that the victim must not be slain with a knife, as that would necessitate a formal benediction; but to kill him by tearing his nostrils open no benediction is required." Another Rabbi chimes in that " Rabbi Yochanan has said that it is lawful to split up the Amhaaretz like a fish "; " and that from the neck too," adds yet another.6 The date explains the proposition. Whether as a regular and sanctioned or as a sporadic practice, the sacrifice of a human victim on the Day of Atonement had in all likelihood been practised at or near Jerusalem both before and after the Eeturn from the Captivity.6 The modified sacrifice of the scapegoat, then, was but another variant of the primordial principle of human sacrifice or sin- offering " for the good of the people, and is in many respects the complement of the Passover. The Passover victim was set apart on the tenth day of the civil New Year, which dated from spring ; the Day of Atonement was the tenth day from the ecclesiastical 1 This was clearly the idea in the sacrifice of a man to Zamolxis by the Massagetse. Herod, iv, 94, 95. See above, p. 110, note, as to the Khonds, and below, ch. ii, § 15. 2 Athenseus, xiv. 44. 3 Cp. Selden, De Diis Svris, Syntag, ii, c. 13, and refs. in Schurer, Jewish People in the Time of Christ, Div. II, Eng. tr. i, 257. Schurer, recognising no problem as to the special function of the segan in the sacrifice, decides that he must have been the trrpanrybs toC iepou or " captain of the temple " (p. 258). But this identification would not exclude the origin above argued for. 4 As to the Babylonian God Azazel, see Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 320, 323. Standing for the Goat-God=Capricorn, he probably represented the winter-sun. For tbe Jews of the Maccabean period he was simply a Satan. Book of Enoch, Schodde's trans, cc. viii, 1 ; ix, 6 ; x, 4, 6 ; liv, 5. 5 Tr. Pesachim, fol. 49 B, cited by Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, p. 95; Genesis with a Talmud. Comm. pp. 56, 73. 8 Prof. H. L. Strack, in his learned and valuable work on The Jew and Human Sacrifice (Eng. trans. 1909, p. 160), replying to the anti-Semitic ravings of Prof. Eohling, argues that the passage first above cited " is not to be taken literally, but is merely a proof of the fanatical hatred dividing those learned in the law from those ignorant of it," and offers as proof of his contention a Baying of Babbi Aqiba on the same page of Tr. Pesachim: When I was an Amha-arez, I said, ' Give me a learned man that I may bite him like an ass.' " The great mass of Dr. Straok's argument in hia book is sound, and his refutation of the malignant rubbish of the anti-Semites is complete ; but I can see no force in his reasoning here. He has ignored the comments (above cited) on the saying of Eabbi Eleazar, which exclude his solution. SPECIFIC SUEVIVALS IN JUDAISM 161 New Year, which, as we have seen, began in autumn. It is probable that the latter is the older of the two ; but both hold their ground in reference to the sun's progress, the spring festival standing for his youth and waxing period, the autumn for his maturity and waning. That they had a common principle in the sacrifice of a pure victim appears from the detail that in both cases the victim. before sacrifice is put in an " upper chamber," the idea being to provide that no contamination should arise from a grave beneath.1 And both festivals, it is to be noted, could be celebrated apart from the Temple, the Passover being a domestic as well as a temple-feast, and the Day of Atonement being celebrated in Babylon as well as at Jerusalem.2 It is important to note this circumstance in view of the theoretic universalism of the traditional rite of sacrifice, which even the Khonds declared to be for " mankind," and on which the Gentilising Christians founded their gospel. Jewish sacrifices were strictly national ; but in their later contacts with other races they were constantly being attracted towards more cosmopolitan ideals.8 It sufficed that they had as basis the communal idea, and that it was capable of development on popular lines. In the legend of the slaying of Saul's seven sons they preserved the belief (seen in force among the Moabites, and at the same time in Israel4) that a king's son, offered up by and for his father, was an irresistibly potent sacrifice ; and among some sections of the Semitic race, as we have seen, there was current the myth preserved by Eusebius from Philo of Byblos, that Kronos, " whom the Phoenicians call Israel," adorned his son called Ieoud, " the only," with emblems of royalty, and sacrificed him. The actuality of such a belief among the Phoenicians is proved by the story of Maleus crucifying his only son, crowned and robed in purple, before the walls of Carthage, in order to conquer the city.6 He was fulfilling an august rite. Always it is a typically divine or racial " father " — Kronos, Israel, Abraham J Cp. Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, pp. 40, 41. * Yoma, fol. 66, A and B. Ext. in Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, p. 93. 3 See below, § 15. 4 2 Kings iii, 27. The meaning of the sentence is that the Israelites felt the king's sacrifice of his son must be efficacious, and so gave up the contest in despair. Compare the story (above, p. 126) of Hamilcar's sacrifice of his son. So in the story of the sacrifice of the sons of King Hiel as foundation-Gods for Jericho (Josh, vi, 26 ; 1 Kings xvi, 34) it is implied that a tremendous efficacy had accrued to the practice ; and so again when Maleus has sacrificed his son on a high cross in regal attire he speedily takes Carthage (Justin, xviii, 7). Exactly the same principle is found among the Maoris of New Zealand. A war-chief on the verge of defeat "cut out the heart of his own son as an offering for victory," whereafter, making a desperate onset, he and his tribe triumphed : the war- demon had much praise, and many men were eaten" (Old New Zealand, by a Pakeha Maori, ed. 1900, p. 150). Cp. Bastian. Der Mensch, iii, 104, as to the cases of the Norse Hakon Jarl and the Egyptian Mahdi Mohammed Ben Amar. And see J. C. Lawson, Modern Greek Folklore and Ancient Greek Beligion, 1910, p. 273, as to Pausanias' story m, 20) of the child placed in the battle-front by the Eleans. 6 Last cit. M 162 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD — who figures in the myths of son-sacrifice;1 and when it is remembered that the God-name Tammuz signified in its original Akkadian form " the son of life," and was by the Semites interpreted to mean "the offspring" or "only son,"2 we are led to conclude that this conception, bound up with that of the God's death and resurrection, had a general and strong hold on both non- Semitic and Semitic races ; for a Hebrew cult of the dying and re-arising Tammuz was in the period before the exile carried on in the very temple of Yahweh.8 § 10. The Pre-Christian Jesus-God. We are thus prepared to interpret the crux set up for Christian commentators by the ancient reading " Jesus Barabbas " in Matt. xxvii, 16, 17. That this was long the accepted reading in the ancient church is to be gathered from Origen;4 and the problem has always been reckoned a puzzling one. Had Dr. Frazer noted it, he might have seen cause to look deeper for his solution of the problem of the simple name Barabbas in the Gospel story and in Philo. The natural inference from the Barabbas story is that it was customary to give up to the people about the time of the Passover a prisoner, who was made to play a part in some rite under the name of Barabbas, " Son of the Father "; and the reading " Jesus Barabbas " suggests that the full name of the bearer of the part included that of " Jesus " — a detail very likely to be suppressed by copyists as an error. Is not the proper presumption, then, this : that the preservation of the name "Jesus Barabbas" tells of the common association of those names in some such rite as must be held to underlie the Gospel myth — that, in short, a "Jesus the Son of the Father " was a figure in an old Semitic ritual of sacrifice before the Christian era ? The Syrian form of the name, Yeschu, closely resembles the Hebrew name Yishak, which we read Isaac ; and that Isaac was in earlier myth sacrificed by his father is a fair presumption. We have here the inferrible norm of an ancient God- sacrifice, Abraham s original Godhood being tolerably certain, like that of Israel.6 In Arab legend, Ishmael is sacrificed by his father, though apparently the sacrifice is commuted for a ram in the manner of the story in Genesis.6 1 See cit. from Varro in Lactantius, Div. Inst, i, 21, and Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 1, for the legend of a Greek oracle commanding to " send a man to the Father "—i.e. Kronos. 2 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 232, citing W. A. I. ii, 36, 54. 3 Ezek. viii, 14. 4 See Nicholson, The Gospel According to theHebrews, 1879, pp. 141-2. 5 Befs. above, p. 51. 6 Weil, Biblical Legends of the Mussulmans, Eng. tr. pp. 62-66- Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Beligion To-day, 1902, p. 175. THE PRE-CHRISTIAN JESUS-GOD 163 As a hypothesis the proposed solution must for the present stand ; but the grounds for surmising a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus or Joshua may here be noted. The first is the fact that the Joshua (Jesus) of the book so named is quite certainly unhistorical,1 and that the narrative concerning him is a late fabrication. We can but divine from it that, having several attributes of the Sun-God,2 he is like Samson and Moses an ancient deity, latterly reduced to human status ; and as Jewish tradition has it that he began his work of deliverance on the day fixed for the choosing of the paschal lamb, and concluded it at the Passover,8 it is inferrible that his name was anciently associated with the rite and the symbol, as well as with the similarly significant rite of circumcision, which is con nected with the Passover in the pseudo-history of Joshua.4 That he, who is never mentioned by the psalmists or prophets, should not only be put on a level with Moses as an institutor of the prime ordinances of the passover rite and circumcision, but should be credited with the miracle of staying the course of the sun and moon — a prodigy beyond any ascribed to Moses — is not to be explained save on the view that he held divine status in the previous myth.6 As his name was held in special reverence among the Samaritans, who preserved a late book ascribing to him many feats not given in the Jewish record, the- probability is that he was an Ephraimite deity, analogous to Joseph, whose legend has such close resemblances to the myth of Tammuz- Adonis. No less clear is the inference from the pseudo-prediction inserted in a list of priestly vetoes in the book of Exodus.6 It is there promised that an Angel, in or on whom is the " name " of Yahweh, shall lead Israel to triumph against the Amorites, the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. This is the very list (lacking one) put in Joshua's mouth as that of the conquests effected by the Lord through him,7 so that he is pseudo-historically identified with the promised Angel.8 That personage, again, in virtue of his possession of the magical " name," 9 is in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos.10 Thus the name Joshua = Jesus is _.}, pP- Stade, Gesch. des Volkes Israel, 1881, pp. 64-65: art. Joshua in Encyclopedia Biblica; Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 101-2, 107-9; Eobertson Smith, Old Testament m the Jewish Church, 2nd ed. p. 131. 2 E.g., his crossing of the water dryshod (iii, 13, 17), and his selection of twelve who function with him (iv, 4). 8 Josh, v, 10. 4 Cp. Josh, v, 2-10. „. ,T.ne statement in Josh, ix, 22, 27, suggests a trace of a Joshua cult among the Hebrews. btaae (as cited, p. 65) pronounced the Joshua saga wholly Ephraimitish. 8 Ex. xxm, 20-23. 7 Josh. xxiv, 11. In Josh, v, 13-15, again, "the captain of the host of the Lord," a separate divine personage, reveals himself to Joshua. 9 See hereinafter, Pt. II, ch. ii, § 2. >" Below, Pt. Ill, § 8. 164 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD already in the Pentateuch associated with the conceptions of Logos, Son of God, and Messiah ; and it is in view of such know ledge that the pseudo-prediction is framed. Only the hypothesis that in some Palestinian quarters Joshua had the status of a deity can meet the case. To the nature of that status we have certain clues which have never been considered in correlation, Jews and Christians alike being led by their presuppositions either to ignore or to misconceive them. One clue is, as already noted, the evidently Judaic and pre- Christian character of the Lamb-God Jesus in the Apocalypse. The slain God is there identified not only with the Logos1 before the appearance of the Fourth Gospel, and with the Mithraic or Baby lonian symbols of the Seven Spirits, but with the Alpha and the Omega ; and the accessories are markedly Semitic and Judaistic. Thus the four-and-twenty elders play a foremost part ; the twelve apostles are present only in an interpolation ; 2 and the saved are pre-eminently Jewish.8 Not only, in short, is the Child-God of the dragon-story, in the twelfth chapter, not the Christian Jesus : 4 the Jesus of the whole book is pre-Christian, the book being in fact a Jewish Apocalypse slightly edited for Christian purposes.6 So much is now admitted by many students ; and it is the failure to learn this and other lessons of the documents that still permits of wrong hypotheses to account for the Messianic doctrine in the Book of Enoch, a distinctly pre-Christian work.6 But the same problem arises in connection with that crucial document, " The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles." Not only are the first six chapters of that book wholly Judaic, without mention of any divinity save "God," "the Lord," "the Father," unless "the Spirit " be taken to stand for a second deity ; but even the formula of baptism in the seventh chapter, which belongs to a secondary stratum in the compilation, is not clearly Christian; and the eucharistic formula in the ninth is clearly non-Christian. It runs : " We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us by Jesus thy servant,"7 an expression quite irreconcilable with the accepted Christian narrative and liturgy. Nor is there a single allusion in the entire document, whether in the late or the early portions, to the death of Jesus by i iii. 14, 15 ; xix, 13. 2 xxii, 14. Cp. A Short History of Christianity, p. 17. 3 vii, 5-9. Cp. xxu, 16. 4 Gunkel, SchOpfung und Chaos, p. 173 ; Bberhard Vischer, as there cited. 8 Gunkel p. 19 Cp. Davidson, Introd. to N. T. 2nd ed. i, 253, 263, 267-9; 3rd ed. ii, 214; Martineau, Seas of Authority in Beligion, pp. 224-5. 8 Cp. Schodde's introd. to his translation, 1882, pp. 46-58 7 The reading thy son," given by some clerical translators, is indefensible. The same word, ttoioos, is applied to David and Jesus. THE PRE-CHRISTIAN JESUS-GOD 165 crucifixion or otherwise. Thus it appears that not only was the nucleus of the document a teaching of twelve monotheistic Jewish apostles — the apostles of the High Priest to the Dispersion1 — but even the earlier Jesuist additions were made by Judaic Jesuists who had not the Christian doctrine of a divine sacrifice, whether or not they already had the trinitarian doctrine set forth in the baptismal formula of the seventh chapter. Thus the allusion to the " gospel of the Lord " in the eighth chapter is presumptively an interpolation, occurring as it does in a document in which hitherto "the Lord" had always meant Yahweh ; and even at that, the reference is pre sumptively to the inferred primary form of the first gospel, which had no account of the crucifixion and resurrection2 — a gospel, in short, which had grown up solely by way of sayings and doings ascribed to the mythical Jesus, without the existing birth legend, and without his twelve apostles. Here again the theological critics recognise the Judaic character of the matter,8 but fail to draw the obvious inferences. There remains to be considered in the same connection the fact that in the Jewish liturgy for the ecclesiastical New Year there is or was mention of Joshua {Jeschu = Jesus) as "the Prince of the Presence."4 This is of course interpreted as a title signifying Joshua's relation to Moses ; but in the light of the Apocalypse it seems to have quite another significance. After the deletions effected in the pseudo-history,6 the matter is sufficiently obscure ; but the clues left, when colligated, tell of something very different from the written word. Tentatively, we may surmise that as the Day of Atonement, which comes ten days after the New Year, is the con summation of the annual Day of Judgment,6 Joshua in the liturgy played very much the same part as the Judaic Jesus in the Apocalypse. Finally, we have to note {a) the remarkable Persian tradition which makes Joshua the Son of Miriam,7 whose death day in the 1 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 341 sq., 411, 421 ; A Short History of Christianity, pp. 17-21, 83, and refs. pp. 403-4. * Cp. The Synoptic Problem for English Beaders, by A. J. Jolley, 1893— giving the conclusions of the school of Bernhard Weiss. s Cp. the admissions of Mr. Eendel Harris, in his edition of The Teaching, p. 89; of Dr. C. Taylor in his lectures on it, 1886 ; of the American editors, Hitchcock and Brown, ffi "heir edition ; of Canon Spence in his (1885, pp. 37, 90-91) ; of the Eev. J. Heron in his (Church of the Sub-Apostolic Age, p. 57), and of Dr. Salmon, as there cited (p. 58). 4 Tal. Bab. Tract. Yevamoth, fol. 16, col. 2, Josephoth, cited by Hershon, Genesis with a Lalnx. Coram., p. 24, note j. 8 Cp. Winckler, Geschichte Israels, ii, 102. All things are judged on the New Year's Day," said Eabbi Meir, " and their sentences are sealed on the Day of Atonement." Other Eabbis agreed on the first head, but not on the second. Bosh Hashannah, fol. 16 A, cited by Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud. PP. 98-99. 7 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 99, 166 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD Jewish calendar is that of the beginning of his work, the tenth of Nisan, whereon was chosen the paschal lamb ; and (&) the fact that according to some Jews the " Week of the Son " (circumcision and redemption of the first-born male child) was called the rite of " Jesus the Son." 1 Whether or not we have here the true origination of the myth which makes the Gospel Jesus the Son of Mariam, there is a fair presumption from mythological analogy that the Miriam of the Pentateuch, who dies and is buried at Kadesh,2 " the holy " city, is a Goddess Evemerised,8 and that the day of Joshua's setting out on his fictitious march was in the original myth the day either of his birth or of some act of popular salvation wrought by him. If he were originally a variant of Tammuz, and Miriam a variant of Ishtar, if male infants were circumcised in his honour, and if he died to save men at the Passover, the details to that effect would certainly be excluded by the later Yahwists from any narrative they preserved or framed concerning him. As it is, we may at least argue for a con nection between the Judaic "Jesus the Son" and the traditional " Jesus the Son of the Father." Beyond conjectures we cannot at present go ; but the significance given to the name of Jeshua, the high-priest of the Return, in the book of Zechariah,4 at a time when the book of Joshua did not exist, tells of a Messianic idea so associated when Messianism was but beginning among the Jews. And as the Messianic idea seems to have come to them, as it fittingly might, during their exile, perhaps from the old Babylonian source of the myth of the returning Hammurabi — who in his own code declares himself the Saviour- Shepherd and the King of Righteousness6 — or from the later Mazdean doctrine that the Saviour Saoshyant, the yet unborn Son of Zara- thustra, is at the end of time to raise the dead and destroy Ahriman, it may have had many divine associations such as later orthodox Judaism would sedulously obliterate. What is specially important in this connection is the fact that the doctrine of a suffering Messiah gradually developed among the Jews, for the most part outside the canonical literature. For the doctrine that "the Christ must needs have suffered"7 can be 1 Tal. Bab. Tract. Baba-Bathra, f ol. 60, col. 2, cited by Hershon, Genesis with a Talm. Comm., p. 26. 2 Num. xx, 1. 8 As to the reduction of the ancient Goddesses, Helena, Medea, Harmonia, and others, to human status in late legends, cp. K. O. Mtiller, Introd. to Mythology, Eng. tr. pp. 77-8, 86; Preller, Griech. Mythol. ii, 108 sq.; Pais, Anc. Leg. of Bom. Hist. chs. iv, v, x. 4 Zech. iii, 1-9 ; vi, 10-12. 5 Oettli, Das Gesetz Hammurabis und die Thora Israels, 1903, pp. 82-83. 6 Bundahish, xi, 6 ; Zendavesta, Vendidad, Fargard xix, 18. Cp. Spiegel's note in loc., and his Einleitung, p. 32. 7 Acts xvii, 3 ; xxvi, 23. Cp. Luke xxvi, 26, 46. THE PRE-CHRISTIAN JESUS-GOD 167 scripturally supported only from passages like the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where our A. V. alters the past tense into the present, thus making a description of Israel's past sufferings serve as a mystic type. Cyrus, who is called Messiah in Deutero-Isaiah, was reputed to have been crucified, but not in his Messianic capacity.1 The presumption then is that the doctrine was extra-canonical, and was set up by Gentile example. Even in the Book of Enoch, where the Messianic doctrine is much developed, the Messiah does not "suffer." The first clear trace of that conception in Judaic Uterature appears to be in the doctrine that of the two promised Messiahs,2 Ben Joseph and Ben David, Ben Joseph is to be slain.3 Whence came that theorem it is for the present impossible to say; but it is presumptively foreign,4 and there are clear Gentile parallels. An obvious precedent to begin with lay in the Greek myth of the crucified Prometheus ;6 but on the whole the most likely pagan prototype is to be seen in the slain and resurgent Dionysos, one of whose chief names is Eleuthereos, the Liberator,6 who was specially signalised as the God "born again." As the Jewish Messiah was to be primarily a " deliverer," like the series of legendary national heroes in the book of Judges, a popular God so entitled was most likely to impress the imagination of the dispersed Jews and their proselytes. The same epithet, indeed, may well have attached to ancient deities such as Samson, who is a variant of the deliverer Herakles, and was one of the " deliverers " of the pseudo-history, as well as to the original Jesus whose myth is Evemerised in Joshua. Samson, too, like Dionysos, was "only-begotten."7 But in any case a proximate motive is needed to account for the post-exilic or post-Maccabean revival of such conceptions in a cult form ; and it is to be found in the prevailing religious conceptions of the surround ing Hellenistic civilisation, where, next to Zeus, the Gods most in evidence were Dionysos and Herakles, and the Son- sacrificing Kronos.8 J Diod. Sic. ii, 44. 2 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 303. 8 Eeichardt, Belations of the Jewish Christians to the Jews, p. 37; Bousset, The Anti christ Legend, Eng. tr. p. 107 ; Nutt, Fragments of a Samaritan Targum, 1874, p. 69. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 303, as to Christian opinion on the doctrine. .Bousset, as cited. And see below, Pt. II, ch. ii, § 15. In this connection, however, see the important thesis of Gunkel (Zum. Verstdndnis des N. T., p. 78) that the mystic type in Isaiah stands for a dying and re-arising God. 8 That Prometheus was crucified is not only implied in his traditional posture, but asserted by Lucian, and shown in ancient art. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. P. 371, and Hochart, Etudes d'histoire religieuse, 1890, p. 345. ° He bore also the equivalent name Lysios ; and in Latin he is best known as Liber. iwice-born is one of his common epithets. 7 This title is applied in the Orphic Hymns to Persephone, Athtae\ and Dtaeier as well as to Dionysos (xxix, 2 ; xxxii, 1 ; xl, 16). 8 Schtirer, 2nd Div. i, 22. 168 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD § 11. Private Jewish Eucharists. There arises thus the further presumption that such a cult as we are tracing may have flourished in a Jewish community else where than in Jerusalem. Dr. Frazer, in surmising a celebration of Purim with a real victim at Jerusalem, does not take account of the fact that the bulk of the Jews deported to Babylon had remained and flourished there, many remaining Yahwists ; that there then began the institution of the synagogue, permissible to any group of Jews in any place ; and that wherever in the East there was a Jewish synagogue outside of Judea there was an opening for usages not recognised at Jerusalem. But the existence of many such synagogues is clearly an important condition of the problem ; and precisely because there were no regular sacrificial rites, apart from the Passover, for expatriated Jews, there is a likelihood that among them in particular would revive rites of sacrifice and sacrament which had a great tradition behind them, but were not latterly practised at the temple. This craving for a sacrifice in which they could participate is the special note of the Epistle to the Hebrews ; and indeed the habit and doctrine of sacrifice were far too deeply rooted to permit of a contented submission of all the myriads of scattered Jews to a complete deprivation of the practice. Significantly enough, the most notable sacrificial survival among the race in modern times is one that demonstrably preserves the principle of human sacrifice — that, namely, of the Kapparoth (" atonements "), the slaying of a white cock on the eve of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.2 One Jewish convert to Christianity, Hyam Isaacs, puts it that "the more self-righteous Jews" provide a cock, which is slain by an inferior Eabbi, whereafter the sacrificers swing it nine times over their heads, praying to God that the sins of the year may enter into the fowl. It is not strictly a scapegoat, for it is given to the poor to eat. As to the " self-righteousness " involved, Isaacs admitted that while he remained in the old faith he set great store by the procedure, and " thought he was justified." Theologically he was. It is not disputed that the Hebrew word Gever stands for both "a cock" and "a man."4 Another Jewish convert, Hershon, describing the custom, and noting the eagerness with which white cocks are bought by Jews on the eve of Yom 1 As to the avowed Jewish craving for sacrifices, cp. Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, pp. 167, 285. 2 See Buxtorf , Synagoga Judaica, and other authorities cited by J. M. Wheeler. Foot steps of the Past, 1895, pp. 141-2. 8 Ceremonies, Rites, and Traditions of the Jews, (n.d. circa 1820?), p. 54. 4 Hershon, Treasures of the Talmud, p. 105. PEIVATE JEWISH EUCHAEISTS 169 Kippur, declares that it is " still in vogue amongst those who pride themselves upon their orthodoxy," and decides that it is " one of many relics of Oriental paganism which the Jews brought from the banks of the Euphrates, from the land of their exile, the fatherland of Rabbinic faith and worship."1 It has been strictly preserved in the interim. In an English account of the rite as practised among the Jews of Barbary in the seventeenth century it is noted that the sacrifice came after the reading of the ancient Confession held to be made by the high-priest in sacrificing the scapegoat. The narrator continues : — Since the destruction of their City, the Jews have no place for a proper sacrifice ; and therefore, instead thereof, when they come from the Synagogue, every Father of a Family takes a cock (a white one if possible) upon the ninth day of the Feast, and, calling his Household about him, repeats several sentences of Scripture ; among which the principal are the 17 vers, of Psalm 107 and 23 vers, of Job 13 (33?) After the repetition of these Scriptures, he waves the cock three times2 about his head, at each of which he useth these or the like words : Let this Cock be a commutation for me : Let it be my substitute : Let it be an expiation for me : Let the Bird die, but let life and happiness be to me and all Israel. Amen. Then he again swings the cock thrice about his head, once for himself, once for his sons, and once for the strangers that are with him. Then he kills the cook and saith, I have deserved thus to die. The woman takes a hen, and does the like for those of her sex. In Barbary, where the houses are flat-roofed, they cast the garbage thereon, to be devoured by some ravenous birds, in token that their sins are removed as the entrails they cast out. Now the reason why they chuse a cock for the expiatory is drawn from the ambiguous word in the Talmud, which may signifie either man or cock. So that they repute the death of a cock as much as that of a man ; and to this Domestick Bird the 53 of Esay,3 with many other Passages of Holy Writ, are prophanely and ridiculously applied When they have done with the cock they repair to the sepulchres, where they repeat their prayers and confessions. They bestow the value of their cocks upon the poor, to whom formerly they gave their carkasses, which they now keep to furnish out their own tables.4 This differs from the recent accounts only in respect of the eating of the sacrifice by the sacrificers in person — a closer adherence to the fundamental principle. In no case, however, is there any obscurity as to that. I have seen in recent years an illustrated postcard, made for the use of German Jews, whereon is represented a Jew in hat and long coat, holding a white cock, and 1 m. p. 113. , Hershon's account likewise says " three times," as against Isaacs' "nine times"; and glT36 w t SMne texts- but Job 33 instead of 13. , J;0'6 the support here given to the thesis of Gunkel (above, p. 167, n.). t A™ Present State of the Jews: More particularly relating to those in Barbary, by ij. Addison, one of His Majesty's Chaplains in Ordinary. London, 1675, pp. 185-7. 170 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD standing before a table with a book on it ; while below is the Hebrew text (Job xxxiii, 24), " Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom"; with the addition, "May you be inscribed for a prosperous year," and afterwards, in German, the greeting, "Hearty Good Wishes for the New Year." Two other details complete the identification, (l) The sacrificer, holding with his right hand the tied legs of the bird, " with his left hand on its head coaxes it to keep it quiet"1 — the old effort to secure the willing victim. (2) The procedure includes a " ransom for the Kapparoth " — that is, a ransom for the ransom,2 a principle familiar to the student of ancient sacrifice.8 Here the substitution of a lesser for a human sacrifice is almost undisguised, after two thousand years. A remarkable parallel to the Jewish practice is found at the present day among many of the peoples of the Congo and other regions of Western Africa. Between Isangila and Manyanga [writes Sir H. H. Johnston] there are many eunuchs in the large villages, who seemed to be attached to a vague phallic worship with which is intricately connected a reverence for the moon. When the new moon appears, dances are performed by the eunuchs, who sacrifice a white fowl, which must always be male, in its honour. The bird is thrown up into the air and torn to pieces as it falls to the earth. I was told that in former days a human victim was offered up on these occasions, but that in later times a white fowl had been substituted.4 The question here arises why black races should make white fowls or animals surrogates for men, and an Asiatic origin for the practice suggests itself. That it is, however, also an ancient if not a primary savage practice appears to follow from the frequency of sacrifices of .white fowls among the Nigerians5 and other tribes. The Krus, Intas, Dahomians, Ibus, Eggarahs, and the littoral inhabitants of Cameroons, Bonny, Calabar, Fernando Po, all mark the season of planting their yams and grain by a religious ritual, and a festive meeting of all the tribe. With the exception of the Ashantis, and perhaps the Ibus and Eggarahs, the ceremony is untainted by human blood ; the offerings being goats, sheep, and white fowls, portions of which, after being roasted, are laid together with palm wine as oblations before the idols : this done, they continue the entertainment for several days.6 What is here inferential becomes quite explicit in the religious folk-lore of the Malays, whose wizards invoke the ancestor-spirits to inform them in a dream what sacrifices are required at a given junc- 1 Hershon, p. 106. a Id. p. 112. 8 Frazer, G. B. 2nd ed. 4 The Biver Congo, ed. 1895, p. 279. 6 Above, p. 151, note. 8 Allen and Thomson, Narrative of the British Expedition to the Biver Niger, 1848, ii, 398. Among the Andoni in Nigeria, again, we find the sacrifice of a white ram. Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, p. 381. PRIVATE JEWISH EUCHARISTS 171 ture, whereafter " Whatever sacrifice is asked for must of course be given, with the exception of a hitman sacrifice, which, as it is expressly stated, may be compounded by the sacrifice of a fowl." x And there are several reasons for supposing that the rite is eastern and not African in origin. A special reason is its connection, as noted by Sir H. Johnston, with " a reverence for the moon." As he and other writers also note, worship of the heavenly bodies is very uncommon among the African tribes. " As a rule the West African apparently pays no attention " to the sun, moon, and stars, " though not uncommonly his principal deity is the general controller of the firmament, a Jupiter or Sky-God in fact." 2 "I have never encoun tered," says Sir Harry, " a race of purely Negro blood that took much interest in the stars ";s and again : "I have never yet encoun tered a purely Negro race that attributed divinity to the sun." 4 Now, the Hebrew and other Semitic records go to show that sun- worship and moon-worship evolved together among the Semites ; and the inference from the data before us is that it was from Semitic contacts that some of the negro races in antiquity acquired those cults, and the correlative sacrifice of the white fowl. Other traces of the connection we find among the ancient Greeks. At Methana in Troezen Pausanias saw two men tear a white cock in halves and run round the vines in opposite directions, each carrying a half. When they met they buried the parts together. The purpose was to avert the evil wind called Lips, which dried up the young shoots of the vines.6 The Methanian cock, says Miss Harrison, " is a typical o-fyaytov [thing slaughtered] : it is carried round for purifi cation It is really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies rather than a sacrifice proper. For a o-dyiov we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal Winds were underworld Gods." 7 But they were certainly sacrificed 1 W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, p. 211. Cp. pp. 143-4, where Mr. Skeat infers a progressive substitution of victims— buffalo, goat, fowl, and finally egg, as symbol of the fowl— for the original human victim, sacrificed at the founding of a house. Mr. Skeat does not mention whether the fowl is white ; but on p. 72 he says it must be a cock. He there notes also the offering of dough models of human beings, called " the substitute." * Major Mockler-Ferryman, British West Africa, 2nd ed. 1900, p. 384. 8 The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 697. 4 Liberia, 1906, ii, 1062, note. Cp. Sir A. B. Ellis, Tshi-Speaking Peoples, 1887, pp. 21, 117-8. 5 Note in this connection the Rabbinical saying about splitting the human victim in two. Above, p. 160. 8 Pausanias, ii, 34. Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Beligion, 2nd ed. p. 67, quoting Aristoph. Frogs, 847. As it happens, " when a Haida Indian wishes to obtain a fair wind he fasts, shoots a r<™f™i singes it in the fire, and then, going to the edge of the sea, sweeps it over the surface °' the water four times in the direction in which he wishes the wind to blow " (Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i, 119)— a curious parallelism to the Jewish ritual above described, although the purpose is entirely different. It would appear that a sacrifice to the Wind- Ciods became the type of another. (The dreaded winds, it should be noted, were not merely of the underworld, but demonic, though Boreas at times was pictured with a 172 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD to ; and it has been argued that the sacrifice of Iphigeneia " was, in the words of ./Eschylus, ' a sacrifice to stay the winds.' " J In any case, " the word o- w- Cd- note in Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 364. It is aunosi certain that Josephus would suppress such a detail if he knew it ; but if the detaU crucif rin ed on the soore of his lateness, it would still point to a tradition of king- 2 Above, p. 115. ... J- Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises, 1837, p. 549. The feast in question was one of re-sanctification , after an invasion . 182 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD western as in eastern Asia the number three might naturally have its votaries, in respect of trinitarian concepts as well as of the primary notion of "the heavens, the earth, and the underworld," with their respective Gods.1 There is even a hint of such possible developments in the single sacrifice of the Khonds to the Earth- Goddess, wherein the victim was kept for three days bound to a post which was often placed between two shrubs, before being finally sacrificed at a post around which were usually set up four larger posts.2 But there is an explanation lying in the nature and purpose of the sacrifice, which was probably the determining cause of the detail in the Syrian rite. The tradition, we have seen, called for a king or a king's son ; but a victim of royal blood was normally out of the question ; and whether by consent of latitudinarian kings or high-priests, or by way of simple popular licence, the natural evolution would be that which took place in a similar connection elsewhere — the sacrificing of condemned criminals in the capacity of kings or kings' first-born sons. But, as has been already remarked, though this substitution was quite acceptable to the average mind, there was something repugnant to the higher doctrine of sacrifice in the selection of a criminal, who was morally the analogue of the blemished animal, rejected by nearly all sacrificial rituals. How then could the com pulsion of such a choice be best reconciled with the purpose and spirit of the rite ? By a device framed in the spirit of " sympathetic magic," which was in fact the spirit of all such rites. The sacrificers could by their ritual of mock- crowning and robing distinguish one of the malefactors from his fellows ; and by calling the others what they were, while he was paraded as king, they would attain the semblance of a truly august sacrifice. If in any Jewish community, or in the Jewish quarter of any eastern city, the central figure in this rite were customarily called Jesus Barabbas, " Jesus the Son of the Father" — whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of a God Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz — we should have the basis for the tradition so long preserved in many MSS. of the first gospel, and at the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth of the crucifixion. And when we remember how the common attitude towards criminals permitted the strange survival of human sacrifice in the Thargelia at Athens, we can hardly doubt that 1 Thus the Assyrian temples had sometimes three terraces, for the Gods of the three worlds "; sometimes five, for the five planets ; and sometimes seven, for the planets and sun and moon. Tiele, Outlines, p. 75. 2 Maepherson, Memorials, pp. 118, 127. SPECIAL FEATUEES OF THE CRUCIFIXION MYTH 183 eastern cities could on the same pretext be as conservative of ancient usage. That such a victim should be at times chosen and freed in advance, and permitted a measure of sexual licence as well as a semblance of royal state, is quite conceivable. The usage of a year's dedication or respite seems to have been general in connection with such sacrifices, alike among Asiatics, Greeks, Polynesians, Mexicans, and American aborigines ; we have seen it among Strabo's Albanians ; and there are clear traces of it among the Arabs just before the time of Mohammed.1 At an early stage of civilisation, indulgence to a victim so situated would on many grounds be a matter of course. As we saw, indeed, Japan could secure annual victims who throughout their year of duty seem to have practised rigid abstinence, as the non-sacrificed official does to-day ; but in general such altruism must have been hard to secure. In the triennial sacrifice of a beautiful girl at Bonny to the Sea-God, the victim had her every wish fulfilled, and everything she touched became her property ;2 and among the Eedskins a captive slain to appease the spirit of a slain man of the tribe had given to him the wives or sisters of the dead man, with whom he was allowed to live for a time. Then came a sacrificial banquet, after which he was put in durance and at length ritually slain8 and eaten.4 Perhaps the most suggestive instance of all is that of the Asvamedha6 or horse-sacrifice among the ancient Hindus. Con cerning this the doctrine runs that kings who received from a Brahman a certain special anointing and made the sacrifice of the horse " were thereby enabled to attain boundless conquests.7 With regard to the horse so sacrificed it was stipulated in the ritual that during an entire year beforehand it must be left free to wander at 1 Pococke, Specimen Histor. Arab., 1650, p. 72, citing AI Meidani and Ahmed Ebn Yusef; Sale, Preliminary Discourse to the Koran, 1883, pp. 44-45. Cp. Eobertson Smith, Bel. of the Semites, pp. 343-4, as to the experience of Nilus among the Sinaitic Arabs in the fourth century. A variation in respect of time occurs among the Khonds in the sacrifice of the buffalo to Boora Pennu as a divinely ordained surrogate for the human victim. It is " consecrated at its birth and allowed to range at will over all fields and pastures until five or six years old." When it is to be sacrificed, a crowd of men fasten ropes to its neck and hind legs and rush about with it till it is brought exhausted to the sacrificial tree, "when the priest declares its submission to be a miracle." Maepherson, Memorials, p. 108. Cp. Crooke, Folk-Lore of N. W. India, i, 173, as to drugged animal victims. 2 J. Smith, Trade and Travels in the Gulph of Guinea, 1851, pp. 60, 68. * Lafitau, Mceurs des sauvages ameriquains, 1724, ii, 295 sq. Cp. pp. 308-9, 4 Id. pp. 303-4. 6 Otherwise the Ashummeed Jugg. See an account of a late form of the rite in Halhed's Code of Gentoo Laws, ed. 1777, ch. iii, sect, ix, p. 112. It figures prominently in the Bama- yana, where, however, it is not always efficacious. Cp. i, 10-13 with i, 40-43. It should be noted that the French trans, of the Ramayana by Fauche is excessively abridged; and that his account of the Asvamedha (p. 5) does not accord with that in the Italian trans. by Gorresio. 6 This is said to be "a custom in its origin essentially Turanian or Scythian." (E. W. Frazer, Lit. Hist, of India, 1898, p. 242.) r ' Senart, Essai sur la ligende de Buddha, 2e edit. p. 66. 184 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD its will, carefully protected the while by guards set to the task.1 As this horse is further clearly identified with the sun,2 there can be little doubt that it was a substitute or equivalent for a more ancient human sacrifice to the Sun-God, and was on that account regarded as of overwhelming efficacy.3 Until the present century, among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, a sacrifice of a horse was reckoned to have abnormal virtue, one being " occasionally, not more than once in many years," sacrificed at a certain sacred pit near the temple of Imra at the sacred village of Kstigigrom, in Presungul.4 So deeply fixed was the idea that among the Bataks of Sumatra, who were for a time influenced by the Hindus, the white horse is still a special offering to the higher God or Gods, though it is now as a rule devoted without being slain. In the latter case it remains permanently holy and inviolable ;5 and among the Siberian Yakuts, who latterly are recorded to have consecrated a stallion every year, the animal, though not sacrificed, henceforth does no more work. The horse, we may note in passing, may have been in this case a totem animal. Among the negroes of Nigeria at the present day, however, not only the bullocks specially set apart for sacrifice to the governing God, but cattle in general, including sheep and goats, are treated as if sacred, and the males are eaten only at religious ceremonials.7 The totemistic hypothesis, therefore, is not necessary to the argument, the divinity of the victim as such being clear in any case. And sacredness in animals is not restricted to victims. In Southern India, in some parts of Ganjam, large numbers of Brahmini bulls are treated as sacred ; and castes which do not copy them in giving sacred burial to a bull often set free sacred cows or calves. Among the Adivi or forest Gollas, again, " the people of every house in the village let loose a sheep, to wander whither it will, as a sort of perpetual scapegoat"; and among the Badagas a scape-calf is let loose at every funeral, to bear the sins of the deceased. Henceforth it is free, like the animals otherwise " sacred." 8 We are now prepared to understand that the freedom permitted to the Babylonian mock-king before the Sacaea originated, not, as 1 Id. p. 69. 2 Id. pp. 72-73. 8 In the Mahabharata (ii, 524 sq. cited by Senart, pp. 66-67) there is mention of a tyrant who, like Joshua, sacrifices kings to the Supreme God. 4 Sir G. S. Eobertson, The Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, ed. 1899, p. 393. 5 Warneck, Die Beligion der Batak, 1909, p. 7. Cp. p. 4. e Erman, Travels in Siberia, Eng. tr. 1848, p. 410. This, it should be noted, is an Arab usage. By old Arab law camels which had attained certain degrees of fertility were turned loose and exempted from all service. No less than four usages of this kind— Bahira, Sa'lba, Wasila, and Hami— are specified. Sale, Prelim. Disc, to Koran, ed. 1833, i, 135-7. ' Major Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 199, 200, 402. 8 Thurston, Castes and Tribes, i, 116; ii, 161-2, 287. SPECIAL FEATUEES OF THE CEUCIFIXION MYTH 185 has been suggested,1 by way of making the mock-king commit the act of technical high treason, entering the harem, but as a result of the contingent divinity of the victim in the primitive cult. The formal trial of a victim may be otherwise explained, as a primitive process of degrading a discredited priest-king.2 In the case of the Khonds, who had no harlots and few concubines, intercourse on the part of a destined male victim with either the wives or the daughters of the inhabitants was welcomed as a high boon,4 though he often had allotted to him a victim wife ; and the same idea seems to have underlain the treatment of the doomed God-man in ancient Mexico.5 A study of these cases will suggest that in a primitive tribal state, when annual voluntary victims were other wise hard to get, men may very well have been got to accept the rdle on condition of a year's quasi-regal licence. Savages notoriously set present pleasure far before future pain in their thought. And out of such a reUgious kingship may have separately arisen both the function of the priest-king as seen in Greece and Eome, and the phenomenon of the mock-king of the Sacaea. On this view the improbability of the annual slaying of the acting king, urged by Mr. Lang6 against Dr. Frazer, does, not arise ; while the theory funda mentally stands. What is certain is that no principle of indulgence could have been accepted in the Christian legend, arising as it did in a cultus of asceticism. But in the character of the Messiah as one who associated with publicans and sinners ; in his association with women ; and in the obstinate legend which, apart from the text, made Mary Magdalene — a visibly mythical character7 — figure as a former harlot, we may have another such survival as has been surmised to underlie the tradition of "Jesus Barabbas"; and the common belief of the early Church that the ministry of Jesus lasted for only one year8 may have a similar basis in the old usage. Further, as Dr. Frazer has suggested, the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem may preserve a tradition of a mock-royal procession for the destined victim. Even the legend of the riding on two asses, which, as has been elsewhere shown,9 preserves an ancient zodiacal symbol, and at the same time a myth concerning Dionysos, might have anciently figured in the procession of a God- victim of the Dionysiak type. As the zodiacal symbol stands for 1 By Mr. Lang, Magic and Beligion, p. 198. * Grant Allen, Evol. of Idea of God, pp. 235, 311, 385. • The female victims seem at times to have had promiscuous relations. See Eeclus, Primitive Folk, as above cited. 4 Maepherson, Memorials, p. 116. 5 See below. Part III. ° Magic and Religion, p. 102. 7 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 297-302. " Cp. Baur, Church History, Eng, tr. i, 41, note. " Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 338-41. 186 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD the autumn equinox, and the crucifixion is placed at the spring- equinox, these details would be chronologically separate ; but Tammuz, like Dionysos, seems to have had two feasts ; and in any case the legend was free to include different ritual episodes. Finally, the explanation of the ascription of the title of " Nazarite " to Jesus — a perplexing detail which led the redactors to frame the myth of his birth at Nazareth2 — may be that the Jewish victim, like the Khond, wore his hair unshorn. It would be natural that he should ; the institution of the nazir, a word which means "dedicated," being an inheritance from the ancient times of common human sacrifice, and being associated with the myth of Samson, in which the shorn Sun-God is as it were sacrificed to himself. We have now followed our historic clues far enough to warrant a constructive theory. Indeed, it frames itself when we colligate our main data. As thus : — 1. In the slaying of the Kronian victim at Ehodes we have an ancient Semitic8 human sacrifice maintained into the historic period, by the expedient of taking as annual victim a criminal already con demned to death. 2. In Semitic mythology, Kronos, "whom the Phoenicians call Israel," sacrifices his son Ieoud, " the only," after putting upon him royal robes. 3. The feast of Kronos is the Saturnalia, in which elsewhere a mock-king plays a prominent part ; and as Kronos was among the Semites identified with Moloch = " King,"4 the victim would be ostensibly either a king or a king's son. A trial and degradation were likely accessories. 4. Supposing the victim in the Ehodian Saturnalia to figure as Ieoud, he would be ipso facto Barabbas, " the son of the father ''; and in the terms of the case he was a condemned criminal. At the same time, in terms of the myth, he would figure in royal robes. 5. In any case, the myth being Semitic, it is morally certain that among the many cases of human sacrifice in the Grasco-Semitic world the Rhodian rite was not unique. And as the name " Ieoud," besides signifying " the only," was virtually identical with the Greek and Hebrew names for Judah (son of " Israel") and Jew {Yehuda, 1 Jastrow, Religion of Babylonia and Assyria, p. 484. 2 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 311-18. 8 As to the Phoenician origins of Bhodian religion cp. Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthvms, 2te Aufl. iii, 163, 229, 380, 384; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, §§ 191, 192; Busolt, Griech. Gesch. 1885, i, 172. 4 Selden, De Diis Syris, Syntag. i, c. 6; Duncker, Gesch. des Alterthums, 2te Aufl. hi, 331, note; Smith, Bel. of Semites, p. 355; Tiele, Outlines, p. 209. Cp. J. Spencer, De legibus Hebreorum, 1. ii, c. 10. SPECIAL FEATURES OF THE CRUCIFIXION MYTH 187 Ioudaios), it was extremely likely, among the Jews of the Dispersion, to be regarded as having special application to their race, which in their sacred books actually figured as the Only-Begotten Son of the Father-God, and as having undergone special suffering. 6. That the Rhodian rite, Semitic in origin, was at some points specially coincident with Jewish conceptions of sacrifice, is proved by the detail of leading the prisoner outside the city gates. This is expressly laid down in the Epistle to the Hebrews,1 as a ritual condition of the sacrificial death of Jesus. The case, of course, is not staked on any assumption that the Rhodian rite was the exact historical antecedent of the Jesuist rite as preserved in the gospels. That the Jews had much traffic with Rhodes may be gathered from Josephus's account of Herod's relations with the place ;2 but we are not committed to the view that the Jews had any hand in the Rhodian sacrifice ritual, or that the gospel myth followed that. So far as the records go, the coincidence is incomplete, since (1) the Rhodian Saturnalia was a June or July festival, and thus disparate from the Passover ; and (2) there is no hint of a triple execution. But it suffices, firstly, that we have here a clear case of a variant from a type to which the Christian crucifixion-ritual belongs ; and, secondly, that the Rhodian rite further points to the decisive development which we have yet to trace in the case of the gospel story. For Porphyry incidentally mentions that the Rhodian sacrifice, after having subsisted long, had latterly been modified {jx.erijiXr]6ri) . As to the precise nature of the modification we have no further knowledge ; but we are entitled to conclude that it was either a simple rite of mock- sacrifice or a mystery-drama. Both stages, indeed, would be natural, the step to the latter being dependent on the connection of the rite with a eucharist. But the essential point is that in this case — the memory of which is preserved, like so many items in our knowledge of ancient life, by an incidental sentence in a treatise to which the subject was barely relevant — we have exactly the kind of transition from actual human sacrifice to a conventional rite of mock-sacrifice which our theory implies. And seeing that the actual sacrifice was once normal in the Semitic world, there can be little doubt that the cases and modes of modification were many. Meantime, the bearing of such a development on our total problem is obvious. We have traced on the one hand a Semitic and probably Israelitish tradition of an annually (or periodically) sacrificed 1 Ch. xiii, 12. Cp. Eobertson Smith, as cited, pp. 352-6. 2 Wars, i, 14, § 3 ; 20, § 1 ; 21, § 11. 188 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD victim, "Jesus the Son of the Father," and seen reason to surmise the contact of dispersed Jews with such a rite in Hellenistic eastern towns. On the other hand we have traced a Jewish bread-and-wine eucharist, which we find emerging in documentary knowledge in the pre-Christian eucharist of the " Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," with the name of Jesus attached to a strictly Judaic personage of quasi-divine status, not said to be crucified or otherwise sacrificed. Of these forms of doctrine and rite there took place a fusion, forming the historic Christian cultus. Of such a fusion, the most likely and most intelligible means would be the mystery-drama, whose existence has now to be demonstrated. But first we have to note certain historic possibilities on which the fusion might partly depend. § 14. Possible Historical Elements. One concrete feature in the crucifixion myth remains to be accounted for — the scourging. Mr. Lang presses this feature of the Sacaea as an argument against the view that the victim died as representing a God.1 In reality, the assumption that sacrificed victims were never scourged is no better founded than the assertion that they were never hanged. The human victims in several Asiatic Greek rites were whipped before being sacrificed.2 Scourging, besides, actually took the place of human sacrifice, by tradition, in certain Greek cults ; the scourging (which at times was fatal) being accepted as a sacrificial act.3 The deity specially connected with such acts of scourging was Artemis, concerning the Asiatic savageries of whose cultus we have the disgusted testimony of Plutarch ; and it is noteworthy that the Rhodian victim had been slain near the temple of Aristobula6 — a name of Artemis,6 who is thus in late as in early times connected with human sacrifice.7 It is therefore not unlikely that, when the Rhodian rite was modified, scourging was substituted as a means of obtaining at least the sacrifice of blood ; and when the rite reached the stage of a mystery-drama, that detail would naturally be preserved. 1 Magic and Beligion, p. 131. 2 Frazer, G. B. ii, 126-7. 3 The bloody scourging of young Spartans at the altar of Artemis (Pausanias, iii, 16 ; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius, vi, 20; Cicero, Tusculans, ii, 14; Lucian. De Gymnast. c. 38 ; Plutarch, Lycurgus, c. 17) is one of the best known cases. As to the principle of human sacrifice behind the scourging cp. K. O. Mfiller, Dorians, B. ii, c. ix, § 6. Cicero and Lucian tell of the occasional fatal results. In Mexico, finally, the Tlascalans in one festival fixed a victim to a low cross and killed him by bastinado. Clavigero, Hist, of Mexico, Eng. tr. 1807, vi, § 20 (i, 283). 4 De Swperstiticme, 10. 5 Porphyry, as cited. 6 The title of " good counsel" suggests the better side of the Goddess, yet we find that the temple built by Themistokles to Aristobula at Melite was " at the place where at the present day the public executioner casts out the bodies of executed criminals and the clothes and ropes of men who have hanged themselves." Plutarch, Tliemistokles, 22. 7 Herodotus, iv, 103. POSSIBLE HISTORICAL ELEMENTS 189 It is to be remembered, however, that the original principle of such scourging may be independent of any act of substitution. It is partly indicated in the Khond doctrine in connection with the rite of slow burning — that the more tears the victim shed the more abundant would be the rain. Here indeed there is a plain conflict between two sacrificial principles, that of the symbolism of the victim's acts and that of his willingness. But both principles are known to have existed, some of the Khonds and the Aztecs attaching importance to the tears shed by the victims, while the Carthaginians sought to drown the cries of their children, and the mothers were forbidden to weep. In the case of the original human sacrifice on the Jewish Day of Atonement, as we have seen,2 there was a ritual act of weeping, and perhaps one of scourging ; and we have no ground for doubting that scourging could take place. But there was a ritual need for blood as well as tears. It is noted that in the human sacrifices of Polynesia the victims were rarely much mutilated, but were always made to bleed much ;3 and a perfect obsession of blood pervades the whole Judaic religion, down to the end of the New Testament. In the " hanging unto the Lord " of the sons of Saul, indeed, there was ostensibly no bloodshed ; but Joshua is declared to have " smitten " the five kings before he hanged them. The " sin-offering " too was one of blood ; and a blood sacri fice was the normal one in all nations.4 Scourging would yield the blood without making the victim incapable of enduring the hanging or crucifixion; and in the gospel record that the doomed God sweated as it were drops of blood5 we may have a further concession to the idea. Finally, there is the possibility that, as in the case of the victims in the Asiatic Thargelia and other festivals, who were ceremonially whipped before being put to death, the scourging belonged to the conception of the scapegoat, who thus as well as by banishment bore the people's sins.6 In these various ways, then, we can comprehend the gradual evolution of a ritual with which could be associated on the one hand a belief in a national deliverer, and on the other hand a general doctrine of salvation and immortality. The idea of the resurrection of the slain God is extremely ancient : we have it in the myths of Osiris and of the descent of Ishtar into Hades to rescue Tammuz ; 1 Plutarch, De Superstitione, 13. 2 Above, p. 159. " Moerenhout, Voyage aux Bes du Grand Ocean, i, 508. 4 Cp. Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, i, 341-3. » On this cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 362. ¦ - "P. Dr. Frazer's view (iii, 122-7) that the scourging was supposed to expel evil influences from the victim. Prof. Murray (Bise of the Greek Epic, pp. 13-14, and App. A) argues that there is no evidence for actual slaying in historic times. 190 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD and in the Syro-Greek form of the cult, the resurrection of Adonis was a chief feature of the great annual ritual. So with the other cults already mentioned. From the God, the concept of resurrection was extended to the worshippers, this long before the Christian era. It needed only that the doctrines of divine sacrifice, resurrection, and salvation, temporal or eternal, should be thus blended in a mystery ritual with the institution of a eucharist or holy sacrament, to con stitute the foundation of the religion of Jesus the Christ as we have it in the gospels. That a mystery-drama actually existed, and was the basis of the gospel narrative, will be shown in the next section. But in passing it may be well to note that certain features of the crucifixion myth, though fairly explicable on the lines above sketched, may be due to contemporary analogies from other rites or from actual occurrences. The posture of the victim in the traditional crucifix, which we shall see some reason for ascribing to a ritual in which the worshipper embraces a cross, may on the other hand derive from the Perso- Scythian usage of slaying a "messenger" to the God, flaying him, and stuffing his skin with the arms outstretched.1 This sacrifice, indeed, has obvious analogies to that of the " ambassador " in the old Jewish rite above traced ; 2 and in both cases the idea of the cross-form may derive from the fact that in the gesture-language and picture-writing of savages, which are probably primeval, that is the recognised attitude and symbol of the ambassador or go- between."3 Or the cross-form may connect with some other principle involved in the Semitic representation of the Sun-God with arms outstretched,4 which probably underlies the myth of the outstretching of the arms of Moses.5 On the whole, seeing that the Phoenician symbol of a figure with outstretched arms is found to derive historically from the Egyptian crux ansata,6 which was certainly an emblem of salvation,7 we are entitled to conclude that from time immemorial the posture of the cross had had a religious significance, partly of expiation, partly of beneficence, and that this general significance surrounded the Christian myth. 1 Below, ch. ii, § 14. 2 Above, pp. 159-60. 8 I have before me an extracted magazine article, undated, in which the symbol is reproduced and so explained. 4 See the figures reproduced by Gesenius, Script. Ling. Phoen. Monumenta,1837 , Pt.III. Tabb. 21, 24 (inscriptions translated i, 197, 211), and in the Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society, III, Pt. iii, pi. 23. Cp. Peitschmann, Geschichte der Phonizier, 1889, pp. 205, 214. One is that of Baal Ammon, with arms outstretched, holding in his hand the holy tree. 5 Exod. xvii, 11-12. 6 Meyer, art. Phoenicia, in Encyc. Biblica, iii, 3739 ; Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 242. 7 It had further the hieroglyphic force of " good," and was at the same time a name of Osiris—" Onofri "—which survives in that of the Christian saint Onophrius, constructed out of the God. Cp. Champollion, Pricis du, systeme hiiroglyphique, 1821, Tab. gen. figg. 441-2 : expl. p. 44 ; Sharpe, Egypt. Mythol. pp. 53-4 ; Meyer, Gesch. des Alt. i, 30 ; Tiele, Egypt. Bel. pp. 42, 44, note. POSSIBLE HISTORICAL ELEMENTS 191 Yet again, the repetition of the offer of a drink to the victim, or the mention of gall in that connection, might be motived by the example of the mysteries of Demeter, in which there figured a drink of gall.1 Whatever were the original meaning of that detail, it might be added to that of a narcotic used as above explained. It has been elsewhere shown, too, that such a detail as the crown of thorns might conceivably stand for the nimbus of the Sun-God, or for the crown placed upon the heads of sacrificial victims in general,2 or for the crown which was worn by human victims in such a sacrificial procession as is to be inferred from Herodotus' story of Herakles in Egypt, or for the actual crowns of thorns which were in vogue for religious purposes in the district of Abydos, or for some other ritual practice which is sought to be explained by the myth of the mock- crown of Herakles.3 No limit can well be set to the possibility of such analogies from pagan religious practice. Actual or alleged history, too, may have given rise to some details in a mystery-ritual such as we are considering. In the gospel story as it now stands, though not as an original and dramatic detail in it, we find one remarkable coincidence with a passage in Josephus. The historian tells4 that during the Passover feast, while Jerusalem was being besieged, " the eastern gate of the inner sanctuary, which was of brass and very solid, which in the evening was with difficulty shut by twenty men, and which was supported by iron-bound bars and posts reaching far down, let into the floor of solid stone, was seen about the sixth hour of the night to have 1 Such symbolical explanations may in certain cases be substituted for those offered by Dr. Frazer, whose Virgilian " golden bough," to start with, is shown by Mr. Lang to be very imperfectly identified with the bough of the tree in the Arician grove. Mr. Lang, who is apt to be severe on loose conjectures, for his own part "hazards a guess " that " of old, suppliants approached gods or kings with boughs in their hands," and that the Virgilian bough is such a propitiation to Persephone (Magic and Beligion, pp. 207-8). Though the ' gold " might plausibly be thus explained, it does not follow that the wool- wreathed boughs of suppliant groups, which played the part of our white flags (iBschylus, Supplices, 22-3, 190-2, etc.). were normally used in approaching kings, or all Gods. In Polynesia boughs were indeed presented to certain Gods (Ellis, i, 343), and were carried before chiefs, serving also as peace symbols or "white flags" (Turner, Nineteen Years in Polynesia, 1861, p. 314). But, on the other hand, boughs in the ancient world had a special connection with Gods and Goddesses of vegetation (Cp. Grant Allen, Evol. of Idea of God, P. 384), who were first and last Gods of the Underworld (Cp. Msah. Supplices, 154-161). It was doubtless in this connection that a branch became in Egypt a symbol of time and of eternity (Tiele, Eg. Bel., p. 154). The explanation of the Virgilian bough, then, probably lies in that direction. " It is not known," says Mr. Lang, " whether Virgil invented his bough, or took it from his rich store of antiquarian learning " ( Id. p. 207). It is extremely unlikely that he should have invented it. But he might very well know that in one of the Paintings of Polygnotus at Delphi (Pausanias, x, 30) Orpheus is represented as touching with his hand a branch of the willow-tree, which in Homer (Odyssey, x, 509-510) grows with the poplar in the grove of Persephone. Orpheus had been in Hades and returned. May not the bough then have had this general symbolical significance, and hence figure as a passport to the underworld ? Even the Cimbri, whose priestesses cut the throats of their devoted human victims, crowned them beforehand (Strabo, vii, 2, § 3). Similarly the North American Indians. Lafitau, u, 266. 3 Christianity and Mytholoyy, 2nd ed. pp. 365-6. See also pp. 364, 369 sa., as to the clues tor the cross-motive. 4 Wars, B. vi, c. v, § 3. 192 THE SACRIFICED SAVIOUR-GOD opened of its own accord "; and that this was felt by the wise to be an omen of ruin. In the synoptics it is told that after the robbers taunted Jesus, " from the sixth hour darkness was over the land -till ' the ninth hour," whereupon Jesus uttered his cry of Eli, Eli, and- immediately afterwards, "having again cried with a loud voice, gave up his spirit. And lo, the veil of the temple was rent in two from top to bottom." The three hours of darkness, it would appear, are alleged in order to give time for the passover meal, by way of assimilating the synoptic account to the Johannine. In the second gospel — in an apparently interpolated passage — Jesus is crucified at " the third hour ": in the fourth, " it was Preparation of the Passover : it was about the sixth hour" when Jesus is sent to be crucified; and on that view his death would be consummated when the Passover sacrament was — the gospel, however, giving no further details. The space of silent suffering in the synoptics, from the sixth hour to the ninth, makes the stories finally correspond as to the hours, though not as to the day. In the third gospel, however, the reading is confused by the placing of the sentence : " And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst," after the mention of the three hours' darkness and before the Lord's death. Thus, while the actual time of the veil-rending is left in the vague, the passage can be read as saying that the veil was rent when the darkness began, at the sixth hour. In any case, whether or not the darkness of three hours is a late modification of the synoptic text (on which view the death may be held to have been originally placed at the sixth hour, and the rending of the temple veil at the same moment), the story in Josephus is extremely likely to have been the motive of the veil-rending myth in the gospels. It actually did lead to the insertion of a gloss in an early text — perhaps originally Syriac — of the third gospel, where the stone placed at the mouth of the Lord's tomb is alleged to be such that twenty men could hardly roll it away ; and in the existing old Syriac texts, significantly enough, it is the " front of the gate " of the sanctuary or temple that is rent in the gospel story — not the veil.1 And the parallel does not end here. The story of the rising of the saints, so awkwardly interpolated in the first gospel and in that only, is no less clearly an adaptation of the story of Josephus, in the same passage, to the effect that at the feast of Pentecost the priests when serving by night in the inner temple felt a quaking, 1 Dr. P. H. Chase, The Syro-Latin Text of the Gospels, 1895, pp. 62-67, 95. Jerome, again, tells that in the Gospel according to the Hebrews it is not the veil of the temple that is rent, .but the lintel stone that falls. Comm. in Matt, xxvii, 51 ; Ad Hedyb. viii. POSSIBLE HISTORICAL ELEMENTS 193 and heard a great noise, and then a sound as of a multitude saying : " Let us remove hence." The whole series of portents in Josephus, as it happens, winds up with the story of Jesus the son of Ananus, who had so long " with a loud voice " cried " Woe to Jerusalem," and at last was slain by a stone from an engine, crying " Woe to myself also " as he gave up the ghost. In view of such a remarkable suggestion to the early Jesuists, it seems unnecessary even to ask whether the myth of the veil-rending may be a variant popularly current at the same time with those given by Josephus. In all likelihood the interpolators of the Greek gospel modified both episodes in order either to escape contradiction or to make them more suitable symbolically.1 That they were interpolated after the transcription of the mystery-play we shall see when we consider that as such ; but for the present we have to recognise that if the transcribed narrative could be thus influenced, the play itself might be. The scourging and crucifixion of Antigonus, again, must have made a profound impression on the Jews ;2 and it is a historic fact that the similar slaying of the last of the Incas was kept in memory for the Peruvians by a drama annually acted.3 It may be that the superscription " This is the King of the Jews," and even the detail of scourging,4 came proximately from the story of Antigonus ; though on the other hand it is not unlikely that Antony should have executed Antigonus on the lines of the sacrifice of the mock-king. But it is noteworthy that where the existing mystery-drama, which was doubtless a Gentile development from a much simpler form, intro duces historical characters, it does so on the clear lines of sacrificial principle set forth in the ritual of the Khonds, where already the symbol of the cross is prominent in the fashion of slaying the victim. Though the Gentile hostility to the Jews6 would dictate the special implication of the Jewish priests and people, and of King Herod as in the third gospel, the total effect is to make it clear that the guilt of the sacrifice rests on no one official, but is finally taken by the whole people upon them. Even the quotation put in the mouth of the dying God-Man, " My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" has the effect of implying that he had hitherto suffered volun tarily. Thus does the ritual which was to grow into a world religion preserve in its consummated quasi-historical form the primeval 1 On either view, it remains arguable that the Syriac Gospels here represent an earlier text than the present Greek. 2 Cp. Strabo, in Josephus, Antiq. xv, 1, § 2. 8 Below, Part IV, § 9. See above, p. 117, as to the scourgings mentioned by Josephus. 0 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 354. 6 Psalm xxii, 1. O 194 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD principle that " one man should die for the people " by the people's will ; and, as we have seen, not even in extending the benefit of the sacrifice to " all mankind " does the great historic religion outgo the religious psychology of the ancient Dravidians. When this is realised it will be seen to be unnecessary to suppose that any abnormal personality had arisen to give the cult its form or impetus. In view, however, of the story fortuitously preserved in the Talmud, that one Jesus ben Pandira was stoned and hanged on a tree at Lydda on the eve of the Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannaeus about 100 B.C.,1 we are not entitled to say that a real act of sacerdotal vengeance did not enter into the making of the movement. The evidence is obscure; and the personality of the hanged Jesus, who is said to have been a sorcerer and a false teacher, becomes elusive and quasi-mythical even in the Talmud ; but even such evidence gives better ground for a historical assumption than the supernaturalist narrative of the gospels.3 In any case, there is no reason to ascribe any special doctrinal teaching whatever to Jesus ben Pandira. He remains but a name, with a mention of his death by "hanging on a tree," a quasi-sacrifice, at the time of the sacrificial rite which had anciently been one of man-slaying and child-slaying. Leaving the case on that side undetermined, we turn to a problem which admits of solution. § 15. The Gospel Mystery-Play. It is not disputed that one of the most marked features of the popular religions of antiquity, in Greece, Egypt, and Greek-speaking Asia, was the dramatic representation of the central episodes in the stories of the suffering and dying Gods and Goddesses. Herodotus has been charged with pretending to knowledge that he did not possess ; but there is no reason to doubt his assertion that on the artificial circular lake at Sais the Egyptians were wont to give by night — presumably once a year — representations of the sufferings of a certain one whom he will not name, which representations they called mysteries. The certain one in question we know must have been the God Osiris;4 and that the sufferings and death of Osiris 1 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 363-4. 2 Dr. J. E. Carpenter (First Three Gospels, 3rd ed. p. 312) indignantly cites this pro position with the remark that it erects one passage of the Talmud "into an authority before which the gospels must vanish." Such language bides the issue. Historically, the supernaturalist narrative of the gospels has no authority for critical science. Professor Schmiedel reduces their scientific authority to nine texts, which, however, will not meet the tests he admits to be applicable. See App. to Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. Dr. Carpenter appears to wish to suggest that I take any Talmudic story as a disproof of any analogous story in the gospels — a complete misrepresentation. The gospel stories are historically unacceptable apart from any Talmudic evidence. 8 B. i, c. 171. 4 Cp. Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, cc. 25, 35, 39. THE GOSPEL MYSTEEY-PLAY 195 were dramatically represented, modern Egyptology has freshly estab lished from hieroglyphic documents.1 We, know, too, from the con- eluding rubric of the " Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys " for Osiris that those Goddesses were personated in the ritual by two beautiful women.2 In the worships of Adonis and of Attis there was certainly a dramatic representation of the dead God by effigy, and of his resur rection;3 and in the mysteries of Mithra, as given among the Greeks, there appears to have been included a representation of the burial of a stone effigy of the God, in a rock tomb, and of his resurrection.4 So, in the great cult of Dionysos, with whose worship were connected the beginnings of tragedy among the Greeks, there was a symbolic representation of the dismemberment of the young God by the Titans, this being part of the sacrament of his body and blood ;5 and in the special centres of the worship of Herakles, or at least at one of them, Tarsus, there was annually erected in his worship a funeral pyre, on which his effigy — but sometimes a man — was burned.6 The same motive is worked out in the Trachinice of Sophocles. Among the Greeks, again, a dramatic representation of the myth of the loss of Persephone, the mourning of her mother DemSter, and her restoration, was the central attraction in the Eleusinian mysteries ; and the return of Persephone was separately drama tised.7 Of all those mysteries the mythological explanation is doubtless the same : they mostly originated in primitive sacrificial rituals to represent the annual death of vegetation, and to charm it into returning ; and in the cult of Mithra, who, like Herakles, is speci fically a Sun-God, there may have been an adaptation from the rites of the Vegetation-Gods. In the later stages the magic which had been supposed to revive vegetation is applied to securing the life of the initiate in the next world. We are not here concerned, however, with the origin of the usage. For our purpose it suffices 1 Budge, Papyrus of Ani, Introd., cxv-cxvi, citing Ledrain, Monuments Egyptiens, Pi. xxv. Cp. Brugsch. " Das Osiris-Mysterium von Tentyra," in Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Svraehe, 1881 ; Wiedemann, Bel. of the Anc. Egyptians, Eng. tr. p. 215 ; Prof. Erman, Hdbk. of Eg. Rel. Eng. tr. p. 249 ; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, p. 399 ; and art. by Chabas, in Revue Archiologique, 15 Mai, 1857, p. 76. * Records of the Past, 1st ser. ii, p. 119. Cp. Brugsch, Religion und Mythologie der alten Aegypter, 1885-88, p. 623 sq.; and Chabas, Rivue Archiologique, 15 Juillet, 1857, PP. 207-8. 8 The main authorities are given by Dr. Frazer, G.B. 2nd ed. ii, 116, 131. Cp. Poucart, i 4,ssociaticms religieuses Chez les Grecs, 1873, p. 82. 4 Below, Part III, § 7. Cp. Pirmicus Maternus, De Errore, c. 22 (23); and see Chris tianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 381, note, as to the significance of the passage, which Dr. Frazer, as I think, misapplies to the cult of Attis. » Clemens Alex. Protrept. ii. 6 Bobertson Smith, Beligion of the Semites, p. 353. As to the resurrection of Herakles, see pp. 449-450. See also above, pp. 124, 126. Cp. Newton, Essays ou Art and Archeology. 1880, p. 185. 196 THE SACEIFICED SAVIOUE-GOD us to know that such rites were rites of " salvation," and that they were the most popular in ancient religion. As Christism first became popular by the development or adapta tion of myths and ritual usages like those of the popular pagan systems, notably the Birth-myth, the Holy Supper, and the Eesur- rection, it might be expected that it should imitate paganism in the matter of dramatic mysteries. The mere Supper ritual, indeed, is itself dramatic, the celebrant personating the God as Attis was per sonated by his priest;2 and in the remarkable expression in the Pauline epistle to the Galatians (iii, l) — " before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified " — we have probably a record of an early fashion of imaging the crucifixion.8 In the same document (vi, 17) is the phrase, " I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus "; and various other expressions in the epistles, describing the devotee as mystically crucified and as having become one with the crucified Lord, suggest that in the early stages of the cult it dramatically adopted the apparently dramatic teaching of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, wherein the saved and Osirified soul declares : " I clasp the sycamore tree ; I myself am joined unto the sycamore tree, and its arms are opened unto me graciously "; and again: "I have become a divine being by the side of the birth- chamber of Osiris ; I am brought forth with him, I renew my youth."5 In the fifth century, we know, mystery-plays were per formed either in or in connection with the churches;6 and the identity between the birth-story and several pagan dramatic rituals is too close to be missed.7 But apart from the parallels above indicated the dramatic origination of the story of the Christ's Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion, as it now stands, has yet to be established. The proof, however, I submit, lies, and has always lain, before men's eyes in the actual gospel narrative, 1 Cp. Lactantius, Div. Inst, v, 20 ; Cheetham, The Mysteries, Pagan and Christian, 1897, p. 71. 2 This usage seems to have been normal in Egypt (see Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 107) and common in primitive cults (J. G. Mtiller, Amerikanische Urreligionen, pp. 77, 493,597). 8 Cp. 1 Cor. xi, 26, A.V. and margin. The expression in Galatians suggests either a pictorial setting forth or an effigy. Cp. Canon Cook's Comm. in loc. ; and note the bearing of the doubtful passage in a rubric to ch. cxlviiiof the Book of the Dead (Budge's tr. p. 263), apparently describing a eucharist in presence of painted figures of the Gods. Such a eucharist would approximate to the Boman Lectisternium. Mr. E. K. Chambers (The Medieval Stage, 1903, ii, 3 note), citing the essay in which the above argument was first formulated, takes it as suggesting a dramatic representation in the case of the epistolary references. That was not the intention. His citation of Lightfoot's denial that the word irpoypa was held to come from the divine spirits of deceased nobles ; 7 and it is thus intelligible that the general development of this species of " trance mediumship " should keep in the background the thought of any special Teaching God. With the growth of culture and literature and sacerdotalism, however, the notion of a God who inspires priests or oracles is developed into or superseded by that of a God who especially repre sents the principle of counsel or wisdom or revelation ; and in the polytheistic systems we have accordingly such deities as the Assyrian Nabu or Nebo,8 the wise, the all-knowing, the wisdom of the Gods, patron of writing and literature, and son and interpreter of Merodach, who in turn is the interpreter of the will of his father Ea, the earlier God of wisdom ; the Indian Agni, in his secondary character of messenger or " Mouth of the Gods ";9 and the Egyptian Thoth, who, originally the Moon-God and therefore the Measurer becomes as such the representative of the principle of instruction and the writer of the sacred books.10 In this latter capacity he has an obvious advantage over Maat, the Goddess of Law and Truth, . and at once the daughter and the mother of Ea.11 ^Thus, while every 1 J. G. Mttller, Amerikanische Urreligionen, pp. 304, 319, 330. 2 Id. pp. 394 sq., 587, 594-6-7. 3 Id. p. 587. The God in question was Huemac, national deity of the Toltecs, latterly known as Quetzalcoatl. Below, Part IV, § 7. 4 Mariner's Account of the Tonga Islands, 3rd ed. 1827, i, 104, 190, 290 ; ii, 115, etc. 5 Id. ii, 108. 6 Id, ii, 87. So in Polynesia generally. Cp. Ellis, i, 375, etc. 7 Mariner, ii, 108. 8 Jastrow. Beligions of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 124, 129-30, 229, 344, 348, etc.; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 50, 98, 112-115, 120-1 ; Tiele, Hist, cornp. des anc. relig., trad. fr. 1882, p. 202. 9 Max Mtiller, Physical Beligion, 1891, p. 168 ; below, Part III, § 4. 10 Tiele, Egyptian Beligion, pp. 62-3, 178 ; Le Page Benouf, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 116 ; Book of the Dead, ch. lxviii. n Benouf, pp. 119-122. PRIMARY AND SECONDARY IDEAS 217 Egyptian God proper is neb maat, "lord of law," Thoth is in particular the Logos, Reason, or Word ; and so becomes the sustainer of Osiris against his enemies.1 This latter conception is seen entering Greek mythology at three stages, first in the myth of (l) Hermes, who is Logos in the sense of being either a Moon-God like Thoth2 or simply Wind-God and so the messenger of the Gods ;8 later, in the ennobled worship of (2) Apollo and Athene, of whom the former is the mouth of Zeus and revealer of his counsel, hence the typical God of oracles, and the latter, grouped with her brother and father in a triad, is also her father's wisdom;5 and still later, in the period of developing theosophy, in the myth of (3) Metis, essentially the personified Reason and Intelligence of Zeus.6 In a more sophisticated form, the idea of the God as lawgiver is met with in the myth of Zeus and Minos,7 the Cretan institutor — himself a purely mythical figure, like Moses, and, like him, presum ably a deity of an earlier age ; 8 and again in the legend of King Numa and his Egeria.9 Such myths may conceivably rise either as an inference from the ordinary phenomenon of the seer or sorcerer or priest who claims to have sought and to have been inspired by the God, or as the attempts of a late theosophy to remove anthro pomorphism from the popular lore. On the latter view, they are paralleled by the attempts of the Evemerists to explain the Teach ing God as a myth set up by the fame of a human teacher. Thus Ouranos is figured as a mortal who first gathered men in cities, gave them laws and agriculture, and taught them to observe the stars, the movements of the sun, and the division of months and the year; whence his final deification ;10 and similarly Orpheus becomes sacer interpreterque Deorum," who deterred savage men from slaughters and foulness of life.11 And, either by way of spontaneous evolution or as a result of Semitic or other eastern influence, we find among the Yorubas of Nigeria an Oracle-God and Teaching God, Ifa, who utters moral maxims, and figures alternately as a 1 Book of the Dead, cc. xviii, xx ; Tiele, Egyptian Beligion, p. 63. 2 Cp. Ernst Siecke, Hermes der MonoVGott, 1908. 3 According to Tiele (Outlines of the History of the Ancient Beligions, Eng. tr. p. 211), it waB as Wind-God that Hermes became God of music and (horresco referens) of eloquence. 4 Athene is possibly in origin one with Tanith (Tiele, Outlines, p. 210). and with Anaitis (Id. Egyptian Beligion, pp. 135-6), who was bracketed with Mithra, and bo brought near to Ahura-Mazda. See below, Part III, § 5. But cp. E. Meyer, who decides (Gesch. des Alt. ii, U5) that Athens is simply the place name Athenai=Athens. • IMad, v, 875 sa. viii, 5 sq.; Hesiod, Theog. 896 ; Odyssey, xvi, 260. 8 Cp. Preller, Griechische Mythologie, 2nd ed. i, 150 and refs. 7 Plato, Minos; Strabo, x, 4, § 8; xvi, 2, § 38. Cp. Burrows, The Discoveries in Crete, 1907, pp. 25, 43, 126-7 ; Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic, 1907, pp. 32, 127. 8 Preller, as cited, ii, 118 sq. 9 Plutarch, Numa, cc. 4, 13, 15. 10 Diodorus, iii, 56. u Horace, Ars poet. 391-2. 218 THE TEACHING GOD demigod who mastered and taught medicine, divination, and prophecy, and so was deified, and as the first-born son of the Creator and the Mother Goddess, the Saviour-God being the second-born.1 § 2. The Logos. All such doctrines, it is probable, were represented in the later, if not in the earlier, Babylonian religion ; and the idea of the Logos is probably early in Mazdeism ;2 but in any case it was from the out side that it was pressed upon Judaism, to the extent, as we have seen,3 of making a personality out of that Word of God which originally " came " to the prophets in the sense that his spirit was held to have entered into them. The whole evolution is noticeably parallel to that of the principles of law and government in States, from the stage in which the king or chief is judge and as such " God " to that in which he is surrounded by graded orders of priests and councillors, jurists and administrators. The Logos is in a manner the heavenly Grand Vizier.4 It is impossible, however, to fix a date for the origin of the special dogma of the Logos. To take it as a Greek invention is to ignore the very problem of origins. An eminent Sanskritist assures us in one passage not only that the doctrine of the Logos is exclu sively Aryan," but that " whoever uses such words as Logos, the Word, Monogenis, the Only-begotten, Prototokos, the First-born, Hyios tou theou, the Son of God, has borrowed the very germs of his religious thoughts from Greek philosophy";5 while in another passage he admits that the conceptions of the Word as found in the Psalms6 and of the Angel as found in the Pentateuch " are purely Jewish, uninfluenced as yet by any Greek thought." 7 Other eminent Sanskritists, again, have shown that the River-Goddess Sarasvatl is in the later Brahmanic mythology " identified with Vach " or Vac [ = Speech] "and becomes under different names the spouse of Brahma and the goddess of wisdom and eloquence, and is invoked as a Muse "; while in the Mahabharata she is called the "mother of the Vedas."8 Elsewhere the personified Vach enters into the 1 Dennett, Nigerian Studies, 1910, pp. 58, 63, 86-90. As to Semitic traces see pp. 11. 99. 2 See Below, Part III, §§ 4, 5, 9. The first known use of the term Logos as = orderly causation is by Herakleitos (in Hippolytus, Refut. Heres. ix, 9 [4] . Cp. Bitter and Poller. Hist. Philos. ed. 2a, n. 31, 38, 41, 42). Thus the idea arises in Ionia, in the sphere of the Babylonian culture. Logos is translated " truth " by Fairbanks. .First Philos. of Greece, p. 25. Cp. Zeller, as there cited. But Prof. Julicher (Encyc. Bib. art. Logos) adheres to the usual interpretation. For a full exposition of that see Drummond, Philo Judceus, 1888, i, 32-47, following Heinze. 8 Above, pp. 86, 90, 178. 4 Above, p. 86 5 Max Mtiller, Theosophy, or Psychological religion, 1893, pref . p. x. 6 Ps. xxxiii, 6 ; cvii, 20; cxlvii, 18. 7 Work cited, p. 405. Cp. Nicolas, Des doctrines religieuses des Juifs, p. 190 sq. 8 Muir, Ancient Sanskrit Texts, 3rd ed. v, 342. Cp. Gubernatis, Letture sopra la mitologia vedica, 1874, pp. 132-3 ; Barth, Religions of India, pp. 16, 256. THE LOGOS 219 Rishis or sages as inspiration.1 Again, " When the Brahmarshis were performing austerities prior to the creation of the universe ' a voice derived from Brahma entered into the ears of them all : the celestial Sarasvati was then produced from the heavens ! ' " 2 As among the Greeks and the Jews, so among the Hindus the doctrine of the sacred or creative Word is various. In the Satapatha Brahmana, Prajapati (who is " composed of Seven Males ") first of all things created the Veda, which became the foundation on which he " created the waters from the world in the form of speech. Speech belonged to him. It was created. It pervaded all this." In the same document the cosmic egg is the primordial source : "From it the Veda was first created — the triple essence. Hence men say, 'the Veda is the first-born of this whole creation They say of a learned man that he is like Agni, for the Veda is Agni's mouth.' " The personified Vach, Sarasvati, River-Goddess and Goddess of Speech, is doubtless the later evolution,4 just as is the Grasco-Jewish Sophia ; but there can be no question that the con ception of the Veda as the Word, the first-created thing or first-born Being, is fully present in the Brahmanas. In the Taittariya Brah mana, "Vach (speech) is an imperishable thing the mother of the Vedas, and the centre point of immortality";5 being thus identified with Sarasvati as aforesaid ; but this does not affect the dogma, set forth by Sankara, that " from the eternal Word the world is produced."6 Again, in the Satapatha Brahmana " Speech is the Rig- Veda, mind the Yajur Vedah, breath the Sama Veda."7 In the Taittariya, it is true, the Veda is created after the Soma ;8 but such a variation, we shall see, occurs also in Jewish lore. And among the Vedantists, finally, " the 'word' {sabda) is 'God' {Brahma)."9 As regards, again, the more philosophical side of the Logos doctrine, the conception of an all-pervading and primordial Reason (Tao or Tau), we find it most explicitly and coherently set forth in China by Lao-Tsze, with a doctrine of a unity and trinity of forms of existence,10 in the sixth century before our era.11 Are we then to suppose that such speculation originated with the Ionian Greeks, was passed on by them to the Jews, and by Jews or 1 Muir, iii, 105. 2 Id. first cit. 3 Id. iv, 22-23. 4 Oldenberg, Die Religion des Veda, 1894, p. 63. 5 Muir, iii, 10. As to the various meanings of Vach see i, 325, n. I Id. iii, 104-5. 7 id. iii, l. a id. iii, 8. 9 Ballantyne, Christianity Contrasted with Hindu Philosophy, 1859, p. 193. 10 Compare the Tau Tih King, cc. 1, 14, 42, with Plato's Parmenides and Philebus. 11 Pauthier, Chine Moderne, p. 351 sq. Cp. Chalmers, The Speculations of Lau-Tsze, p. xi. The Chinese translation of the New Testament uses Tau for the Logos in John i, 1. Id. p. xii. Cp. ch. xxv of the Tau Tih King (Chalmers, p. 19). And Lao-Tsze not only lays down (ch. 63) the Golden Eule, but has a set of six maxims closely resembling the Beati tudes (ch. 22). 220 THE TEACHING GOD Greeks or both to the Persians, and thence to the Brahmans and the Chinese ? Such a hypothesis is visibly unmanageable. The Pytha gorean derivation of Plato's doctrine of the Logos is tolerably clear ; and its connection with the planetary lore of the eight heavenly powers, as well as with the lore of numbers and proportion,1 tells of a source such as only the Chaldean or Egyptian schools of astrology and astronomy can be supposed to represent in the early Greek sphere. Babylonian religion contains the principle of the Logos in its most definite primary form, the doctrine of the Divine Name, which is the germ of the Platonic doctrine of ideas no less than of the Philonic and Johannine theology. We even find it in a form approximated-to in the Pentateuch (where the " name " of Yahweh is " in " the promised " Angel" leader),2 and made familiar later by the Jewish Toledoth Jeschu as well as by the modified Christian formula — the teaching, namely, that the mystic name of the Supreme God is known to him alone, and is revealed by him solely to his son, who has thus virtually all power in heaven and on earth.3 " This idea, which prevailed equally in Egypt and in Western Asia, is purely animistic. To pronounce a name is to call up and conjure the being who bears it. The name possesses per sonality To name a thing is to create it : that is why creation is often represented as accomplished by the word." Further, we know from Damascius — whose list of Babylonian God- names is made good by the remains actually discovered in recent times — that Tauthe, Mother of the Gods, first bore a son, Moymis, who was "the intelligible world."5 Here is the very formula of Philo. Of the God Nebo, too, who has so many attributes of the Logos, it is noted that his Akkadian prototype " was once the universe itself"6 — a likely source of such an identification in his case. If then the Jews had the Logos idea before their contact with the Greeks and the Mazdeans,7 the reasonable assumption is that they had it from a source from which the Mazdeans and Ionian Greeks could also have it — the Babylonian lore, in which were accumulated the current fancies of thousands of years of Asiatic speculation, including that of the ancient civilisation from 1 Cp. Cffisar Morgan, Investigation of the Trinity of Plato and of Philo Judeus (1795), ed. 1853, pp. 1, 3, 5. 2 Exod. xxiii, 20-23. In the Talmud, this angel, though he is represented in the pseudo- history by Joshua, is declared to be the Metatron, who in turn is identified with the Logos. Above p. 163. and below, Part III, § 8. 8 Tiele, Hist, comparie des anc. religions, p. 175. 4 13. ib. 6 Id. p. 183 ; Cory's Ancient Fragments, ed. 1876, p. 92 ; Sayce, p. 386. 6 Sayce, p. 405. 7 Cp. Nicolas, as cited above. THE LOGOS 221 which was derived that of the Chinese. And when we find the Brahmanic philosophy, like the Babylonian and Greek, making all things originate from a watery abyss,1 and again from the cosmic egg,2 we have at least cause to surmise that the Babylonian and Indian systems draw from one central source. It is true that the Indian lore seems best to combine the ideas of origination through the Word and through Water ; and that the word Saras means not only Water but Voice, whence Sarasvati = not only "the watery" but also "the vocal" or "the sounding."8 Here, too, we seem to be in touch with primitive thought, for among the (perhaps partly Semitised) Yorubas of Nigeria there seems to have been a primary conception of moving water as the source of sound and of wisdom.4 But while this is visibly more homogeneous than the late Hebrew evolution of a creative Sophia who equates with the creative Logos without any adaptation to the primordial abyss of waters (or " Ocean Stream " as in Homer) on which the " Spirit " had creatively moved, on the other hand the relative lateness5 of the evolution of Vach and Sarasvati leaves open the presumption that a foreign influence has been at work. Agni, also, the Fire-God, is finally identified with the Word ; he too, in the Vedas, is the Son of the Water and messenger of the Gods ; 6 and his worship connects visibly with the fire-worship not only of the Mazdeans but of the Babylonians, for whom also Gibil and Nusku (or Gibil-Nusku) the Fire-Gods are sons of the Creator, Gibil in particular being " the first-born of heaven (Anu) and the image of his father," while Ea, the Water-God, is the lord of life, and also the father of the Fire-God, who in turn is the messenger and counsellor of the Gods, clothed with their attributes.7 The blended characteristics of Sarasvati, finally, are found in the Babylonian Goddess Sarpanitum, who, as finally blended with Erua, the daughter of Ea, was at once "lady of the deep," "voice of the deep," and " the possessor of knowledge concealed from men " — attributes all deriving from the.fact that " wisdom and the life-giving principle were two ideas associated in the Babylonian mind with 1 Muir, i, 24. Cp. Sayce. Hibbert Lectures, p. 371. 2 Muir, iv, 22-23. 8 Gubernatis, Letture sopra la mitologia vedica, pp. 132-3. 4 Dennett, Nigerian Studies, pp. 210, 212. 6 Eelative, that is, to such a God-idea as that of Indra (Oldenberg as cited above). But the Brahmanas are yet " the oldest rituals we have, the oldest linguistic explanations, the oldest traditional narratives, and the oldest philosophical speculations " (Weber, Hist. of Indian Literature, p. 12). 6 Max Mailer, Physical Religion, pp. 151, 168 ; Gubernatis, p. 120. Agni is also born of stone, wood, herbs, and the skies. Miiller, p. 146. Cp. Gubernatis, p. 109, sq. This is simple naturalism. But he is joined with Matarisvan, for whose name there is no Aryan etymology (Mtiller, p. 152). A Central-Asiatic influence must be inferred. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109-110, 115. In the Babylonian system the Fire-God Gibil. protector of the •amuy and the hearth, seems the source of the Indian cult. Cp. Justi, Gesch. der oriental. Volker im Altertum, p. 147 ; Jastrow, Beligion of Babylon and Assyria, 1898, p. 277. 7 Jastrow, Beligion of Babylonia and Assyria, pp. 275-280. 222 THE TEACHING GOD water."1 In these various nations, surely, wehave the true " germs '' alike of the Hindu, the Heraklitean, and the Platonic concepts of the Word or Beason; of the conception of Hermes as Logos and Messenger of the Gods ; of Apollo as his father's wisdom ; of the Hindu, of the Hebrew, and of the Greek formulas of " First-born " and "Only-begotten"; and so alike of the later Judaic and the Christian theosophy. The further research is carried into the affiliation of the cults and creeds of Asia Minor and Syria, the more clearly does it appear that all relate to the great central mass of theosophy accumulated in Babylonia, which was still a culture force in the earlier centuries of the Christian era.2 That system had inferribly given to the Christian Gnostics their astrology and magic ; their doctrine of the immortality of souls (not bodies) ; their Sophia ; their conception of a Saviour, Knowledge- Giver, and Mediator:8 it is sufficiently unlikely, then, that it had failed to evolve as did Brahmanism the concept of the Logos. The rational presumption is that it gave that concept to Greek and Jew alike. But the Jewish evolution was apparently piecemeal. Different ideas and doctrines, such as that of Metis, Thoth, Thoth-Khonsu, the combined Logos (Moon-God) and Sun-God;4 Vohumano, the " Good Mind," combined with Mithra ;5 and the Platonic Logos, probably motived the separate evolution in Judaic literature of the personifications of Sophia or Wisdom,6 the " Good Spirit,"7 and the later Logos. In one book the Logos " leaps down from heaven out of the royal throne,"8 and "as a fierce man of war" wields the divine command as a destructive sword ;9 in another, Sophia is as distinctly personified : she " came out of the Most High," but he created her " from the beginning before the world," and she alone "encompassed the circuit of heaven."10 The writer means to be metaphorical, but for the many the effect must be graphic. And 1 Id. pp. 122-3. Cognate names to Sarasvati are found in the Bactrian Haraq'iti and the Persian Harauvati. Tiele, last cit. p. 115. 2 A collection of Babylonian hymns of the times of the Seleucids and Arsacids, bringing the life of the system down to 86 B.C., has been published by the Berlin Museum. Anz, Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Giiosticismus (in Gebhardt and Harnack's Texte und Untersuchungen, Bd. 15, Leipzig, 1897), p. 60. And three priestly schools are recorded to have survived in Babylonia— at Sippar, Uruk, and Babel-Borsippa — in the times of Strabo (b. xvi, o. i, § 6) and Pliny (Hist. Nat. vi, 30, 6). Cp. Anz, pp. 61-3, as to the later religious developments. 3 Anz, as cited, p. 55 (as to general derivation), 90-3 (as to Ishtar-Sophia), 93-8 (as to Marduk the Saviour and Mediator). 4 Tiele, Egypt. Belig. pp. 154, 178. 5 See below, Pt. Ill, §§ 5, 9. 6 Cp. Prov. iii, etc., Wisd. of Sol. i, 6; vii, 22, etc. ; Ecclesiasticus, passim. 7 Nehemiah, ix, 20. 8 Or " off royal thrones ": cp. Var. Bib. Either way, the logos seems to be already conceived as rrpbs rbv Qeov. 9 Wisdom of Solomon, xviii, 15-16. K> Ecclesiasticus, xxiv, 3, 5, 9. DEEIVATIONS OF THE CHEISTIAN LOGOS 223 this development took place and prepared for yet others, though Judaism was ostensibly bound to resist the multiplication of per sonalities thus set up, and was further predisposed to a male as against a female principle. In this respect, as in so many others, it exhibits its derivations from and affinities with savage thought, for among the Yorubas of Nigeria, in our own time, we find the primary conception, first, of the " natural " trinity of Father, Mother, and Son, with the general concept, behind that, of the Mother of All, who in time tends to be resolved into or superseded by a male ; 1 perhaps as a result of the supersession of the matriarchate. Some such progression seems to have taken place among the Hebrews. The original " Holy Spirit," properly feminine, had in general been kept very much in the background, perhaps in fear of the old developments of goddess-worship, in which the symbol of the dove, taken by the Christists as standing for chastity, had really repre sented sexuality and fecundity. But the mythopoeic faculty, in its new forms of verbalism and pseudo-philosophy, was stronger than dogma, and stronger than fear. Accordingly we have Philo, at the traditional beginning of the Christian era, accumulating round the Logos the various aspects of the earlier Word and Sophia, and fitfully adding to them those of divine Sonship and Messiahship, and even the creative function of Demiourgos, thus at times reducing Yahweh to a somewhat remote abstraction. § 3. Derivations of the Christian Logos. It is significant of the difficulty of winning a hearing for an important new truth in hierology that, a hundred years after the elaborate development of the Logos doctrine in Philo Judaeus was fully demonstrated, the fact is no part of ordinary knowledge even among scholars, if they be not theologians.8 Bryant, who first among English writers made the complete demonstration, held that Philo derived his ideas from association with the Christians. That is obviously a delusion ;4 but there can be no question about the actuality of the parallel between the Philonic and the Johannine and other Christian forms of the doctrine ; and it may be that a 1 Cp. Dennett, Nigerian Studies, pp. 63, 64, 79, 81, 85, 100. As to other Hebrew parallels, see pp. 99, 114. 2 Cp. Gubernatis, Letture sopra la mitologia vedica, pp. 144-5 ; Lang, Myth, Ritual, and Beligion, 2nd ed. ii, 271. 8 See above, p. 147, note. 4 It may be freely granted that the writings of Philo are likely to have suffered like others from the ancient obsession of literary fraud. On this point, antiquity had hardly evolved any moral sense, much less a moral standard. But however Philo's writings may have been tampered with, and with whatever purpose, it was not by Christian hands. The Christian frauds in the way of Sibylline predictions, etc., betray themselves at a glance. No Philonic passages have that hall-mark. 224 THE TEACHING GOD list of Philo's dicta as drawn up by the unsuspecting Bryant1 will be more acceptable than one of those compiled by later scholars. Attributes of the LOGOS in the writings of Philo Judceus? 1. Son of God. De Agricultura, 12 ; De confusione linguarum, 14 ; De Profugis, 20. 2. Second divinity. De Legum Allegoriarum, ii, 21 ; Frag, in Euseb. Prcep. Evang. viii, 13. 3. First-begotten Son of God. De Agric. 12 ; De Somniis, i, 37 ; De Conf. ling. 14, 18 ; Quod Deus immutab. 6. 4. Image of God. De Mundi Opific. 8 ; De Somn. i, 41 ; De Conf. ling. 14, 18, 20, 28 ; De Profug. 19 ; De Monarchia, ii, 5. 5. Superior to angels. Frag, in Euseb. Prcep. Evang. viii, 13 ; De Conf. ling. 28. 6. Superior to all things. De Leg. Alleg. iii, 31, 60, 61. 7. Instrument by whom the world was created. De Mundi Opif. vi ; De Cherubim, 35 ; De Monarchia, ii, 5 ; De Profug. 18 ; De leg. alleg. iii, 31. 8. Vice-gerent of God, on whom all depends. De Agric. xii ; De Somn. i, 41 ; De Profug. 20. 9. Light of the World. De Somn. i, 13, 15, 18. 10. Alone can see God. De Conf. ling. 20. 11. Besides in God. De Profug. 18, 19. 12. Most ancient of God's works. De Profug. 19 ; De leg. alleg. iii, 60, 61. 13. Esteemed the same as God. De Somn. i, 12, 23, 41 ; ii, 36. 14. Eternal. De Plantat. Noe, 5. 15. Beholds all things. De leg. allegor. iii, 59. 16. Maintains the world. De Mose, iii, 14 ; De Profug. 20 ; De Somn. i, 47. 17. Nearest to God, without any separation. De Prof. 19. 18. Free from all taint of Sin. De Profug. 20, 21 ; De Somn. i, 23. 19. Presides over the imperfect and the weak. De leg. allegor. iii, 61, 62. 20. Fountain of Wisdom. De Profug. 18, 25. 21. A messenger sent from God. De Agric. 12 ; Quis rerum divin. haeres, 42 ; De Abrahamo, 36 ; De Prof. 1. 22. Advocate (Paraclete) for Man. Quis rer. div. haeres, 42. De Mose, iii, 14. 23. Orderer and disposer of all things. Quis rer. div. haer. 46, 48. 24. Shepherd of God's flock. De Agric. 12. 25. Governor of the World. De Profug. 20. 1 The Sentiments of Philo Judceus concerning the AOrOS, 1797, p. 106, sa. 2 I have added a number of references to those given by Bryant. DEEIVATIONS OF THE CHEISTIAN LOGOS 225 26. Physician who heals all evil. De leg. alleg. iii, 62. 27. The Seal of God. De Prof. 2 ; De Plant. Noe, 5. 28. Sure refuge of those who seek him. De Somniis, i, 15 ; De Profug. i, 18, 19, 21. 29. Gives heavenly food to all who seek it. De leg. allegor. iii, 56, 58-62 ; De Profug. 25 ; Quis rerum divin. haeres, 39. 30. On men's forsaking their sins gives spiritual freedom. De Somn. i, 15 ; De Congressu qucerendce erud. gratia, 19, 30. 31. Frees men from all corruption. De Congressu, 30 ; De Prof. 18, 21 ; Quis rer. div. haeres, 38. (Is the water of ever lasting life. De Prof. 18.) 32. Not merely Son of God, but well-beloved child. [Eef. to De leg. alleg. iii, 64, where, however, a-yam/rov rtKvov does not refer to the Logos.] 33. Means of man's spiritual happiness. Quis rerum divin. haeres, 42. 34. Admits to the assembly of the perfect. De Sacrificiis, 2, 3 {De Profug. 18). 35. Eaises the just to the presence of the Creator. Ibid. 36. The true high priest. De Somniis, i, 37 ; De leg. allegor. iii, 26 ; De Profug. 20. 37. Word, High Priest, and Mediator. Quis rer. div. haeres, 42 ; De Somn. i, 37 ; De Mose, iii, 14. Much discussion has taken place over the question whether Philo really conceived his Logos as a person1 — a problem of which the futility may be realised after asking whether Christians to-day conceive of the Holy Ghost as a person. That Philo should be inconsistent ; that he should successively make his Logos a deity, a spoken utterance, a creative power, an instrument, an aspect of the deity, a far-seeing spirit, a refuge, the first-born son of the deity, a high-priest and mediator, the covenant,2 the co-ordinating law of the universe, an eternal entity, the first-created thing, an angel,8 the sun, the chief of the angels,6 a body of doctrine, the Scriptures, Moses6, an abstraction of wisdom, the soul of the world7 — all this belonged to his mental habit and that of the students of his age. It was impossible for such minds to be consistent or even momentarily clear : all philosophic thought was for them a shape less cloud of words and verbal images. But where the born verbalisers fluctuated through a hundred forms of phrase, simpler minds inevitably reduced abstractions to personalities sans phrase.6 1 E.g., Principal Drummond's Philo Jitdeus,]£B8, ii, 222-273 ; Caesar Morgan, Investig. of the Trinity of Plato and of Philo, 1795 (ed. 1853, p. 63 sq.). 2 De Somniis, i, 36. 8 Id. i, 41. 4 Id. i, 15 ; De Profug. i. « De conf. ling. 28. 6 De Congressu, 30. 7 De Profug. 20. 8 See below, Pt. Ill, § 5. Q 226 THE TEACHING GOD In the Book of Enoch the Messiah is identified, apparently long before Philo, with a First-Created power who has the characteristics of the Logos.1 For most neologising Jews, in short, the Logos passed into personal status just as did Vohumano, " the Good Mind," for the Mazdeans, because the perpetual naming of an abstraction in religious lore or ritual sets up for the believer an idea of separate personality or nothing. The personalisers were but doing what their simpler ancestors had done before when they gave personality to natural objects, winds, rivers, diseases, thunder, and lightning. They did so because they could not help it ; and Philo, with his superior verbal resources, psychologises helplessly all the while on the primitive plane. It is thus quite misleading to say that in his writings " from first to last the Logos is the thought of God, dwelling subjectively in the infinite mind, planted out and made objective in the universe."2 Supposing such a formula to have real significance for any one to-day — supposing it to be compatible with a theistic proposition of personality — it could have no meaning for Philo, who would not have written as he did if he could so have formulated ; though the triplication of Thought and God and Infinite Mind may be said to be a good deal in his spirit. What we learn from such a verbal construction is that if a modern academic cannot propound a Logos-Idea without self-contradiction, much less could an Alexandrian Jew. And the historical conclusion remains clear, that the Christian doctrine of the Logos is simply a deposition in dogmatic form, round the nucleus of a sacramental cult, of the vaporous haze of thought set up in the Jewish world by Yahwistic speculation on Gentile notions.3 It was the presence of the Jesuist nucleus that wrought the solidification. For Philo there was no bar to a multiplication of Logoi ; and besides making Logoi of both Moses and Aaron4 he has a multitude of lesser Logoi who figure endlessly as thoughts, words, angels, laws, forces, and reasons.5 His Bible withheld him from 1 Enoch, xlviii, 2, 3, 4 ; xlix, 2, 3, 4 ; li, 3 ; Iii, 4. Cp. Beichardt, Belation of the Jewish Christians to the Jews, p. 29, as to the same identification in the paraphrase of Jonathan. 2 Drummond, Philo Judeus, ii, 273. 3 For a thorough discussion of the close connections between Philo, Justin Martyr, and the New Testament books as regards the notion of the Logos, see Supernatural Beligion, Bationalist Press ed. pp. 444, 450, 454 sqq. Cp. Hausrath, History bf the N. T. Times : Times of the Apostles, Eng. tr. 1895, i, 171-180 ; Nicolas, Des Doctrines religieuses des Juifs, 1860, p. 178 sa.; and Schurer, JewishPeople in time of Christ, Eng. tr. Div. II, iii, 374-6. 4 De leg. alleg. iii, 15, 33. 6 De Somniis, i. 12, 13, 19, 23, 31, 34 ; De Sacrificiis, 13 ; De conf. ling., 17 ; De Posterit. Caini, 25-26. Principal Drummond decides that "the Logoi have nothing personal about them" (ii, 225)— another unwarranted specification. There is nothing to show that Philo ever asked himself what he understood by personality. It is essential to an understanding of him to realise that his philosophy derives from a stage of speculation more akin to animism than to science. DEEIVATIONS OF THE CHEISTIAN LOGOS 227 deifying the actual priest or emperor ; Moses was for him definitely reduced to human status ; and to the prophets he pays remarkably little attention, merely citing one occasionally as a " companion of Moses." Finally, he appears in several treatises to be, like the writer of the fifty-first psalm,2 ethically indifferent to sacrifice3 — so much so that it would be difficult to believe that the same hand wholly wrote these and others in which he accepts a modified form of the principle of atonement,4 were it not for the numerous proofs in every treatise that his philosophy is always in a state of flux. In one passage he adumbrates a combination of the ideas of the media torial Logos and the national Messiah;5 but a mind so fixed as his on allegory and symbol and abstraction was unprepared to make a definite Logos out of a sacrificed demigod, even had he lived to see the new Jesuist movement. It is the merest truism, therefore, to say that in his lore the Logos-idea never comes to dogmatic birth. Jesuism precipitated it on the eucharistic sacrifice, thus excluding further vacillations ; but the idea of the Sophia, which, following the book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, he also manipulates,6 and which was no less potentially adaptable, never came to dogmatic birth at all, save in Gnostic teachings which the Church was finally able to suppress. On the other hand, Philo's doctrine of the Holy Spirit7 (which 1 De conf. ling. c. 14. Cp. De Inebrietate, c. 8. Phtto's relation to the Scriptures is certainly not that of the traditional instructed Jew. His reading is in the main limited to the Pentateuch. Cp. Dr. H. E. Byle, Philo and Holy Scripture, 1895, pp. xvii, xxxii. 2 Ps. Ii, 16-17. Vv. 18-19 are obviously from another hand. 8 E.g., De Plant. Noe, c. 39 ; De Mose. iii, 10 ; De Sacrificantibus, 3, 8 ; Quis haeres rer. div. 16 ; De Leg. ad Caium. 39. In the last-cited passage he makes Herod Agrippa wholly ignore the annual sacrifice of atonement, speaking only of the offering of incense ; in the treatise De Humanitate regard is had mainly to the Deuteronomic code, where atonement is not mentioned ; and in the De Sacrificantibus and Quis Haeres all sacrifice is as such made light of. 4 Thus, in the treatise De Victimis, the ordinary view of sacrifice is taken for the most part, the citations on that head being solely from Leviticus. Even there, indeed (c. 14), repentance is expressly set forth as the condition of salvation, and sacrifice as a mere symbol of repentance. So also in De congressu quaer. erud. gratia, c. 14, sacrifices are reduced to ideas ; even supplication is declared unnecessary ; good works and contrition are all. So also in the Deleg. alleg. cc. 30, 57, 61. Cp. De Abrahamo, cc. 1, 3, 4, 5 ; De Migratione Abr. cc. 1, 5. Yet in the De Abrahamo (cc. 33-35) the act of child sacrifice is treated as not unnatural. Again in the De Confusione Linguarum (c. 20) the "ransom and price for the salvation of the soul" is not sacrifice ; and in De Sacrificiis (c. 36) and Quis haeres rer. divin. (c. 24) the function of the Levites as ransomed sacrifices is mystically interpreted. 8 De Execrationibus, c. 9. e E.g., "The mind shall leave both its father, the God of the universe, and the Mother of all things, namely, the Virtue and Wisdom of God" (De leg. alleg. ii, 14). Again the Creator is also the Father of his Creation, and the Mother was the Knowledge of the Creator with whom God uniting became the Father of Creation. And this Know ledge having received the seed of God brought forth her only and well-beloved Son this world " (De Inebrietate, c. 8. There follows a quotation from " some one of the beings of the divine company" which points to Pro v. viii, 32-3, but differs from both the Septuagint and the Hebrew). Yet again "the abrupt rock [pierced by Moses] is the Wisdom of God " (De leg. alleg. ii, 21). And yet again Sophia the daughter of God "is both male and a Father " (De Profug. c. 9. Cp. 20). 7 De Gigantibus, cc. 5, 6, 7. Like the other personifications in the Judffio-Christian creed, this in all its aspects — as Wind, Fire, Dove, Generator, Inspirer, Uniter— is common to older eastern mythologies. Cp. Gubernatis, Mitologia vedica, p. 142 sq. 228 THE TEACHING GOD in his theosophy remains as indeterminate as his notion of the Logos, and is much less stressed than either that or the notion of the Sophia, with both of which it vaguely blends) did find dogmatic acceptance in the formula of the Christian Trinity. The Sophia would have been on many grounds more suitable, supplying as she would the normal demand for a Mother-Goddess ; and the male Spirit, as a matter of fact, has always remained an extremely dim conception, availing very little for the Christian cult. But the formation of a Trinity was forced upon Christism by many of its theosophic precedents ; J and the admission of a Goddess was vetoed by the ascetic principle which was in the ascendant when the doctrine was formulated : so many and various are the forces which determine the growth of a syncretic system in a religiously crowded environment. Such are the chances of social selection. Had not the ascetic principle been thus temporarily active, and had not the craving for a secondary Teaching-God been for the time satisfied by identifying the Sacrificed God with the Logos, an identification of Mary with both Sophia and the Spirit (originally feminine) would have been an equally natural and an equally facile proceeding, the preparation having been sufficiently made on Judaic lines. As it was, the exaltation of Mary, when it came about afterwards as a result of the stressing of the metaphysical aspects of the Son, was undertaken too late for the grafting of a dogmatic Sophia on the new sacred books ; and the still later attempt at a new gospel in the thirteenth century was crushed by the preponderating power of the Papacy. But it is none the less clear that the doctrine of the Logos is a product of the same process of primitive psychology as produces deities of any order. § 4. The Search for a Historical Jesus. Thus far there is no difficulty in tracing a purely speculative process: the doctrine of the Logos is indeed the first stumbling- block of those who seek to reconcile the fourth gospel with the synoptics as a biographical document. And the very abstractness of the conception moves men at the first brush to turn with the more confidence to the concrete teachings put in the God's mouth in the other books. But if they continue critically to reflect, they find one cause after another to regard this concreteness as illusory.2 Many 1 It is partly developed in Philo, De leg. alleg. i, 13 ; De Sacrificiis, 14 ; Quis rer. div. 44, 45; De Congressu, 2; De Abrahamo, 24. Cp. Eeichardt, as cited, pp. 54-57, concerning other Judaic precedents. 2 See Christianity and Mythology, Part III, Div. ii. THE SEAECH FOE A HISTOEICAL JESUS 229 of the utterances of the God, when weighed, are seen to be of the same order as those of the fourth gospel : hence the many vindica tions of that document ; and vigilant attention to the differences of content in the synoptics sets up insoluble doubts as to their authority. Long ago it was pointed out, with no very clear view of the inference to be drawn, that the Sermon on the Mount is a patch work from previous Jewish literature.1 And at length the pressure of criticism has forced the more intelligent professional students of the New Testament to admit the insecurity of the old assumptions, and to attempt a restatement of the case for belief in the historicity of Jesus. The present state of the argument can perhaps be best set forth by way of criticism of the most important of these attempts, the second section of the article " Gospels " in the Encyclopedia Biblica, written by Professor Schmiedel, of Zurich. It is a master piece of critical arrangement and expert knowledge, demanding the attention of every serious student ; so that our time could not be better spent. Passing in review all the main attempts to resolve the gospels into a few mutually interactive primary " sources," Professor Schmiedel comes to the conclusion that no such attempt will hold good. This verdict disposes of an amount of laborious research grievous to think of. For a full hundred years, German theologians by the score have been struggling with this problem, toiling devotedly, trying hypothesis upon hypothesis, refining upon refinements, always hoping to get to, or sure of having reached, a solid textual and his torical foundation, even as they so long sought for one in the quick sands of the Pentateuch. At length, in the name of professional exegesis, Professor Schmiedel sounds the retreat. There are no true " sources," no really primary and trustworthy documents in the gospel amalgam ! There are only nine2 " entirely credible " texts ! One thinks of Meredith's figure of the hosts upon hosts of charging waves, whose achievement is only To throw that faint thin line upon the shore ! And what are the entirely credible texts ? With due care and respect let us enumerate the forlorn handful of unwounded sur vivors : — 1. Mk. x, 17 ff. (" Why callest thou me good? " etc.). 1 Cp. C. C. Hennell, Inquiry Concerning the Origin of Christianity (1838 and later), ch. xvii. 2 At first the Professor specifies five as " the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus," but he afterwards adds four. It is noteworthy that seven of the nine occur in Mark, six of them there only; and only three in Matthew. Those of us who hold that Mark is late, and not early — a redaction of the other gospels and not of an " Ur-Marcus " — can best appreciate the significance of such facts. 230 THE TEACHING GOD 2. Mt. xii, 31 ff. (blasphemy against the Son of Man pardonable). 3. Mk. iii, 21 (" He is beside himself "). 4. Mk. xiii, 32 (" of that day and hour knoweth no man," etc.). 5. Mk. xv, 34 ; Mt. xxvii, 46 (" My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"). 6. Mk. viii, 12 (" No sign shall be given to this generation "). 7. Mk. vi, 5 (" he was able to do no mighty work "). 8. Mk. viii, 14-21 (rebuke to the disciples concerning bread and leaven). 9. Mt. xi, 5 ; Lk. vii, 22. (Passage to be taken in the sense of spiritual healing, since it ends with mention of preaching — not a miracle at all.) It will be seen on what principles Professor Schmiedel proceeds. Where Jesus speaks simply as a man, making no pretence to divinity, to miraculous powers, to prophecy, or to a Messianic mission, and where he is represented as failing to impress his relatives and neighbours with any sense of his superiority — there the record is entirely credible. From this position Dr. Schmiedel makes a leap to the conclusion that the entirely credible — that is, the possible — is the demonstratively historical. Let us take his own words (§ 139) :— These passages might be called the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus. Should the idea suggest itself that they have been sought out with partial intent, as proofs of the human as against the divine character of Jesus, the fact at all events cannot be set aside that they exist in the Bible and demand our attention. In reality, however, they prove not only that in the person of Jesus we have to do with a, completely human being, and that the divine is to be sought in him only in the form in which it is capable of being found in a man ; they also prove that he really did exist, and that the Gospels contain at least some absolutely trustworthy foots concerning him. If passages of this kind were wholly wanting in them, it would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be assigned to the Gospels : he would be in a position to declare the picture of Jesus contained in them to be purely a work of phantasy, and could remove the person of Jesus from the field of history. This will shock the believer without satisfying the scientific naturalist. The proposition in the words I have italicised, I submit, is absolutely untenable. On this point may be staked the whole dispute as to the actuality of the Gospel Jesus. The merely credible is not the trustworthy, the proved : if to be credited with plausible utterances be a proof of the actuality of a personage in literature, then we must believe in the historic actuality of half the characters in fiction. THE CEITICAL PEOBLEM 231 § 5. The Critical Problem. The problem is one that has been before now debated on other issues ; and it may be well here to take up these by way of illumina tion and test. Grote, putting in scientific form a thesis sometimes more summarily phrased by " the plain man," insisted that " The utmost which we accomplish by means of the semi-historical theory is that, after leaving out from the mythical narrative all that is miraculous or high-coloured or extravagant, we arrive at a series of creditable [ = credible] incidents — incidents which may perhaps have really occurred, and against which no intrinsic presumption can be raised. This is exactly the character of a well- written modern novel To raise plausible fiction to the superior dignity of truth, some positive testimony or positive ground of inference must be shown A man who tells us that on the day of the battle of Plataja rain fell on the spot of ground where the city of New York now stands, will neither deserve nor obtain credit, because he can have no means of positive knowledge ; though the statement is not in the slightest degree improbable. On the other hand, statements in themselves very improbable may well deserve belief, provided they be supported by sufficient positive evidence. Thus the canal dug by Xerxes across the promontory of Mount Athos, and the sailing of the Persian fleet through it, is a fact which I believe because it is well-attested — notwithstanding its remarkable improba bility, which so far misled Juvenal as to induce him to single out the narrative as a glaring example of Grecian mendacity.1 To this contention it is objected by Sir A. C. Lyall that " if we may only receive as credible those ancient narratives which could not possibly turn out to be very plausible fiction, we shall be hard pushed for the trustworthy authentication of much early history, religious and secular. Secondly, the example of the supposed assertion as to simultaneous rainfall at Plataea and in Massachusetts is hardly fair. A man's assertion of an isolated fact of which he could not possibly have any positive knowledge, either directly or by hearsay, is a very different thing from affirming credible facts which might reasonably, and according to the known habits of the people who relate the facts, have been handed down by tradition from the persons who witnessed them to those who related them."2 To this very reasonable argument the answer is that it does not meet Grote's case ; and that when we have assented to it the problem remains as before. In regard to many credible facts which might conceivably have been handed down by tradition we are still bound to say that, when related concerning supernatural personages, they are not tolerable evidence of anything done by a real person whose history formed the nucleus of the myth. The proposition as 1 Grote, History of Greece, ch. xvi, ed. 1888, i, 382. 2 Sir A. C. Lyall, Asiatic Studies (1st series), 2nd ed. 1884, p. 31. 232 THE TEACHING GOD to rain on the site of New York on the day of Plataea is an illustra tion, not a universal parallel. The fact remains that there is no common-sense ground for crediting any one credible " assertion made concerning an ostensibly mythical character when we cannot on independent grounds show how the credible story came to be attached to the fable. Sir Alfred Lyall's argument overlooks the demurrer that all particular or specific tradition of a quasi-historical kind is untrust worthy when not corroborated by other evidence, inasmuch as (l) such tradition usually goes hand in hand with obvious super naturalist fable, and (2) many such traditions have been disproved by solid evidence. The question is not whether something tradi tionally asserted to have been said or done by a demigod may not actually have been said or done by a man of the same or another name, but whether, in the absence of other evidence, we are ever entitled ' to believe and assert that it was. To Grote's negative answer there is no valid demurrer. The strength of Sir A. C. Lyall's general claim, that Gods or God-myths have been built up on bases of actual deeds and events, lies in the concrete proof that this has occurred in modern times ; but no such demonstration can enable us to distinguish between the merely possible and the true in ancient tradition. It is conceivable that the Feridun of the Shah Nameh is constructed on a nucleus of reality, to which was added a mass of detail taken from sheer mythology, as myths were heaped upon the story of Cyrus. But in the latter case we have a means of dis crimination ; in the former we have none ; and when we find the very name of Feridun to be a modification of an old God-name,1 we have no right of historical belief left. For the rest, it is beside the case to argue that much accepted history will be cancelled if we accept only narratives which " could not possibly turn out to be plausible fiction." Grote never argued that history proper, the record of a time by those who lived in it, is to be so tried ; and he constantly accepts narratives which might conceivably be plausible fictions — nay, he occasionally accepts tales which appear to some of us to be fictions. It is when we are dealing with myths that he denies our power to discriminate : in history proper he undertakes — 'at times too confidently — to discriminate. Broadly speaking, he is entitled so to proceed insofar as he deals with cases on their merits. Some early historical narratives allege facts which could well be known to the narrator or to the community 1 Cp. Max Muller, Biographical Essays, 1884, pp. 287-8. THE CEITICAL PEOBLEM 233 in general, and may be fairly taken as true; some are obviously fanciful, unplausible, ill- vouched ; and in many cases they are to be doubted even when free from supernaturalism. Historiography consists in a rational selection. It is true that there are some eases wholly or partly on the borderland between the possible and the incredible, where we may fairly surmise a nucleus of fact; but in regard to these Grote's warning should be always kept in mind. Professor Huxley, who invented the word " agnostic " to cover, among other things, the practice of saying that miracles are " not impossible," was notably accommodating in his attitude to narratives of the possible. Con cerning the story of Saul's visit to the witch of Endor, he observes that it does not " matter very much whether the story is historically true," but that it is quite consistent with probability "; and then he adds : "That is to say, I see no reason whatever to doubt that Saul made such a visit."1 The leap here is clearly illicit. There is certainly "reason to doubt " the whole story so long as it cannot be shown to have been reduced to writing near the time of Saul. History" is full of discredited "probabilities" of the same kind: the story of Bruce and the spider is a type. The very fact that kings and commoners in ancient Israel did normally consult witches is as much a reason for admitting that the story could easily be invented as for allowing that it could easily have happened ; and the details of the apparition, to which Professor Huxley oddly extends a measure of his credence, give good ground for suspecting the entire episode to be fiction. All such cases, in fine, must be tried on their documentary as well as their a priori merits ; and, returning to our special problem, we note that the " credible " sayings put in the mouth of the Gospel Jesus are in no way certified by their credibility, but are on the contrary put in complete suspicion by their surroundings. Here is Professor Schmiedel's case, reduced to logical form : There are in the gospels hundreds of unlikely sayings ascribed to Jesus ; there are nine which are likely; then the nine not only establish his historic reality, but give a basis for surmise that many of the less likely, as well as many of the narratives of faith-healing, are also historical ! The answer is (1) that it must be a desperately bad fiction in which not five per cent, of the speeches and episodes are credible." On Dr. Schmiedel's view, if only the ancients had ascribed ten reasonable sayings as well as twelve more or less 1 Essays, iv, pp. 291-2 (essay on " The Evolution of Theology"). 234 THE TEACHING GOD unlikely labours to Herakles he would be entitled to rank as a historic character. On the other hand (2) the very fact that the figure of the Gospel Jesus won belief much more in virtue of the hundreds of improbabilities and falsities in the gospels than in virtue of the " credible " texts, quashes the plea for his actuality based on these texts. The true inference is, not that such texts, being unnecessary, must be genuine and not invented, but that since a substantially false or unlikely biography could win ready credence in the period in question there is no reason to surmise a nucleus of actuality which was never demanded, and that the credible texts stand merely for the proportion of plausibility that might reasonably \be looked for in any conglomerate of sayings and statements round ; a fictitious personage. Paul or the forgers, it is evident, believed in a crucified Jesus as to whom they had no biographical record, whether of sayings or doings. Scores of unlikely utterances, it is admitted, were credited to Jesus after Paul's time. Why were they so credited ? Plainly because certain men or certain sects desired to give their views the sanction of the God-Man's authority. What then does it signify if besides these sayings there are fathered on him a few that are relatively reasonable ? And, knowing as we do that the Ebionites, who attributed to him unlikely sayings, nevertheless regarded him as a mere man, what does it signify if sometimes in the gospel he is so represented? Yet again, what plausibility remains in the cry on the cross, " Why hast thou forsaken me?" when we remember that it is a quotation from the Psalms, and that the whole cult proceeded on the doctrine that " the Christ must needs suffer "?1 It may seem ungracious thus to press the argument against a professed theologian who has already come within sight of " the great surrender " to reason. Schmiedel has indeed gone further in his loyalty to the critical principle than do many professed ration alists. It is only a question of time, however, when his view shall be tested as he has tested other men's, and the process may as well begin here and now. § 6. Collapse of the Constructive Case. First, then, he has not recognised (1) the primary reason for doubting the genuineness of every detail of teaching set forth in the gospels — namely, the total ignorance of those teachings shown in the 1 Professor Schmiedel, in his preface to Dr. Neumann's Jcstts (1907), objects that I have here dealt with only one of his nine " pillar " texts. In response, I have dealt with the whole nine in the Appendix to the second edition of Christianity and Mythology (1910). COLLAPSE OF THE CONSTBUCTIVE CASE 235 Pauline epistles. He takes as genuine the plainly interpolated passage in 1 Cor. xi as to the institution of the Eucharist, then concludes1 that " the details of the life of Jesus had so little interest for Paul that " he fails to quote him when he effectively might. To reason thus is to ignore a far greater difficulty than many which the exegete admits to be insuperable. (2) He makes his arguments at some points2 turn on the assumption of the general certainty of the whole narrative as to Jesus being a teacher with disciples, who established his cult ; whereas the existence of the disciples is no better proved than many of the data already surrendered. (3) He is evidently biassed to his illicit inference (that Jesus really existed) by other inferences which, on his own showing, he was not entitled to draw. For instance, he decides8 that Jesus probably accom plished faith-healing as distinguished from miracles, because this power is so strongly attested throughout the first and second cen turies that, in view of the spiritual greatness of Jesus and the imposing character of his personality ; it would be indeed difficult to deny it to him." What then proved the spiritual greatness and the imposing character of Jesus ? The nine credible texts ? Clearly they amount to no such proof, even if they were genuine : a thousand rabbis might have uttered them. What, again, is the value of the " strong attestation " of the first and second centuries in the face of the silence of Paul, ostensibly the first witness ? The first and second centuries, that is to say the gospels (which certainly did not exist within thirty years of the date alleged for Jesus' death), and the people who believed them, equally attest the prodigies which Professor Schmiedel rejects. Is a witness who solemnly affirms twenty impossibilities to be believed whenever he happens to assert something that might be true, while a more important witness, who in the terms of the case ought to have heard of it if it happened, has evidently never heard of it at all ? Such reasoning, we may say without hesitation, cannot stand : it is negated by the tests on which Schmiedel has proceeded as against the source-finders ; and the latter might very well turn upon him with a confident tu quoque. Take, for instance, the passage4 in which he presses the point of the obvious untrustworthiness of the reports of Jesus' discourses, and yet lets pass the assumption that these reports may be genuine condensations : — Even if the public ministry of Jesus had lasted for a few months only, he must have uttered a thousand-fold more than all that has been recorded in 1 § 147. a §§ 138 a, f; Ui a ; 145/. 3 § 144. 4 § 145 a. 236 THE TEACHING GOD the Gospels. His longest discourse would, if delivered in the form in which it has come down to us, not have taken more than some five minutes in the delivery. However self-evident, this has been constantly overlooked by the critics. They are constantly assuming that we possess the several words of Jesus that have been reported approximately in the same fulness in which they were spoken. In the parables and in one or two other utterances, the Professor admits, the reports are more extended : — In what remains, however, it can hardly be sufficiently emphasised that we possess only an excessively meagre pricis of what Jesus said — namely, only so much as not only made an immediate impression when first heard, but also continued to survive the ordeal of frequent repetition In this process not only was an extraordinary number of utterances completely lost, but a large number of the sayings of Jesus now received for the first time that consecutive and pointed form which made them seem worthy of further repetition. Without doubt Jesus must very often have repeated himself, but what he assuredly often repeated in many variations has been preserved to us only in a single form. Here again the believer will be perturbed, while the scientific critic will not be propitiated. If there are only nine texts that quite credibly indicate the existence of a man Jesus who taught anything, how can we possibly know "without doubt" that (1) he often repeated himself, and that (2) the existing reports are abbreviations of any spoken discourses whatever ? The longest of all, the " Sermon on the Mount," is demonstrably a pen-made compilation from Hebrew literature ; and Professor Schmiedel's previous argument has fully conceded that many of the reports, condensed in appearance as they are, are inventions. That is to say, a brief account of an alleged speech is not to be presumed an epitome of a real speech. The gospel discourses are short, not because they are records of remem bered passages from long speeches, but because the framers had no critical consciousness, and were not accustomed to composing long documents. When we come to the fourth gospel we find longer discourses, in the actuality of which Professor Schmiedel does not believe. But if one gospel-maker could invent long discourses, his less literary predecessors could invent short. Once more, if the synoptic discourses are records of commonly remembered passages from Jesuine discourses, how comes it that Paul never cites a word of them ? To miss that crux is to make as great an oversight as that of the critics who regarded the so-called Sermon on the Mount as the full report of a real sermon. The fact is that the higher criticism of the New Testament has thus far missed the way just as the higher criticism of the Old so long did, by taking for granted PAEALLEL PEOBLEMS 237 the general truth of the tradition.1 It sought to found on the hollow fiction of the Exodus and the Mosaic legislation of the desert, when one intelligent glance at the Book of Judges might have shown that the tabernacle of the desert was a myth. In a similar way it clings to the conception of a preaching and cult- founding Jesus, when an intelligent perusal of the epistles of Paul can suffice to show that the preaching Jesus was created after they were written. It does not indeed follow that Paul's period was what the tradition represents. The reasonable inference from his doctrine is that his Jesus was either a mythic construction or a mere tradition, a remote figure said to have been crucified, but no longer historically traceable. If then Paul's Jesus, as is conceivable, be merely a nominal memory of the slain Jesus ben Pandira of the Talmud (about 100 B.C.), Paul himself may belong to an earlier period than that traditionally assigned to him. Certainly the most genuine-looking epistles in themselves give no decisive chronological clue. But such a shifting of his date would not finally help the case for " Jesus of Nazareth." Escape the argument from the silence of Paul by putting Paul a generation or more earlier, and you are faced by the fresh incredibility of a second crucified Jesus, a second sacrificed Son of God, vouched for by records for the most part visibly false, and containing but a fraction of plausible narrative. The only conclusion open is that the teaching Jesus of the gospels is wholly a construction of the propagandists of the cult, even as is the wonder-working God. § 7. Parallel Problems. The natural impulse to reject this view with violence may be somewhat modified when it is remembered that it does but place the Christ on a historic level with all the other Teaching Gods of antiquity. All the leading Gods, as we have seen, were in some measure regarded as teachers ; and for none of them do we surmise a historic original in the sense of a real teacher and lawgiver. But it is not only the so-called Gods who are thus dislimned by criticism ; the sub-divine or religion-founding and God-proclaiming institutors are found to be no less fabulous, down to the historic period, than 1 An emphatic exception, certainly, must be made as regards the Pauline epistles, which by the late Professor van Manen and others are rejected as entirely spurious. i For the purpose of this argument, it matters not whether any of these epistles be genuine or not, since in any case they are early ; and forgers would have used gospel sayings if they had them to use. The point is that even interpolations upon the originals yield but one gospel datum. 238 THE TEACHING GOD the Gods they were held to have served. Menu, Lycurgus, Numa, Moses — a whole series of revered founders of codes and creeds — are as such dismissed by criticism to the realm of fable ; for even those hierologists who still speak of Moses as a historic person,1 and treat the Exodus as a historic event, concede to Kuenen that the liberator wrote nothing, and can no more be supposed to have invented the Ten Commandments than did Eomulus or Numa the Twelve Tables. Difficulty, indeed, is still made over the alleged personality of Zarathustra ; but few who closely consider the evidence will say that it supports the claim.2 If Zarathustra was a historical character, the proposition is not to be proved by the documents ; and those who hold to the affirmative do so on the strength not of the records but of the tradition, and of the presumption in favour of a personal influence behind a notable development. It is the same with the personalities of Orpheus and Musaeus : wherever the tradition tells of a founder of doctrines or mysteries, criticism on search finds myth ; and if we leave open the bare surmise that there was an Orpheus who taught something, it must be with the avowal that we know nothing of what he specially taught. If we take the whole series of traditional teachers down to the Christian era, we find them to be more or less clearly the products of the same tendency as led to the conception of Teaching Gods — the habit of supposing that every thing held to be good came from a specifically divine or supernormal source. Conservative opinion will naturally rally round the remaining non-Christian cases that are either admitted or still claimed to be historical — -in particular, those of Mohammed and Buddha. What a man has admittedly done, it may be argued, may have been earlier done by other men. If Mohammed founded a new religion, why not Zoroaster ; if Buddha gave a virtually new and potent teaching, why may not a Jesus have done so ? The case may very well be tried over those points. First let us note wherein consists the clear historicity of Mohammed. (1) He is far down within the historic period. (2) His religion rose to far-spread power and notoriety within a generation of his death — a far swifter development than that of Christism, so often described as miraculous. (3) He actually left written documents ; and though these were certainly redacted, most of them have none of the well-known marks of late fabrication. (4) In virtue of the relation of Islam to Christianity, which had a i So the late Professor Tiele, Outlines, p. 85. 2 See below. Part III, § 3. THE PEOBLEM OF BUDDHIST OEIGINS 239 body of sacred books and claimed a monopoly of truth, a fierce critical light played upon the new cult from the first days of its expansion beyond Arabia. (5) The accounts of the life of Mohammed are normally biographical, and, though not quite certainly true in detail, at no point typically mythical, save as regards the tales of marvels at his birth and in his infancy, wherein the record conforms to the normal my thopceic practice of antiquity, seen in the biographies of Plato and Confucius as well as in those of Jesus, Moses, and the Gods and demi-gods in general. Apart from these embellishments, and the tales of his intercourse with angels, he is born and lives and dies normally at known dates ; works no miracles ; makes no claims to divinity ; is traceable long before his period of notoriety ; is, in short, recognisable as a historic type of masterful fanatic. In every one of these respects his record differentiates sharply from those of Buddha and Jesus. Absolute date, of course, is not a decisive consideration : we believe in the historicity of certain Jews B.C., and disbelieve in the legend of William Tell, who is placed thirteen hundred years later. But when we consider the environments in which Jesus and Buddha are supposed to have lived, it becomes clear that the possibilities of fable round such names are boundless. Of neither is it now pre tended that he left a written word ; for neither do critical scholars now claim that his immediate associates have left written accounts of him; in regard to both it is admitted that many sayings are falsely ascribed to them. Instead, then, of letting the supposed historicity of Buddha plead for that of Jesus, we are led to ask whether the one is not as problematic as the other. § 8. The Problem of Buddhist Origins. At the first critical glance into Buddhistic origins, the student becomes aware of a dilemma. The Buddha, we are told, delivered a teaching which, though it did not directly repudiate, yet ignored and treated as valueless the belief in deities ; and the movement he set up was thus practically atheistic ; yet the legends of his own birth, and many of the narratives concerning his life, are in terms of the supernaturalist beliefs of both earlier and later times. As regards the birth legends, they are found to quadrate in large measure with those of the God Krishna, and at the same time to point to many of the myths of the Vedas -,1 so that, whatever may have been l See E. Senart, Essai sur la Ugende de Buddha, 2e 6dit. 1882 ; Prof. Kern, Histoire du Bouddhisme dans I'Inde, Fr. tr. 1901, vol. i, liv. i, ch. ii. 240 THE TEACHING GOD the origin of the Buddhist movement, it must have been heavily overgrown with supernaturalism when the life of the Founder was thus written. The conservative student naturally answers that, though such overlaying and perversion of the Master's teaching did take place, he remains none the less a real person ; and that the proof lies in the many narratives which represent him as speaking like any other mortal teacher. A critical study of the teaching, however, only doubles the dilemma. The accomplished and devoted English scholar who has done so much during the past thirty years to make known the documents of Buddhism to the western world, has no misgivings as to either the historicity of Gotama or his personal establishment of the Buddhist movement in the fashion set forth by the narratives ; but the expositor's own scholarly candour puts before us a dozen grounds for doubt. Every cause for scepticism that exists in the cases of Jesus and Moses exists here, with differences of degree. Firstly, the Buddha wrote nothing. Secondly, none of his disciples or contemporaries wrote of him. Thirdly, some of the documents that seem nearest in time to the alleged period of Gotama, such as the Dialogues, are thoroughly factitious, and strike a student as the reverse of trustworthy ; while others are admittedly literary creations, ascribing to the Buddha extemporaneous verses of a highly finished quality. Fourthly, much of the teaching put in his mouth is of a nature known to be current before his period. As to the nature of his teachings the obscurity is equally great. It is not merely that they contain inconsistencies such as may be fallen into by any teacher : they are so disparate, so discursive, so various in their tone, purpose, and point of view, that a very short critical study reveals difference of source, time, and aim ; and when we contemplate their metaphysic, their minuteness, their demand for leisurely attention and assimilation, we are at a loss to conceive how they could have set up a far-reaching popular movement in any country at any time. As little do we realise why they should have set up any religious society whatever. And the ordinary histories make the assertion without explaining the case. On the other hand, much of the earliest literature exhibits all the marks of doctrinary myth — this by the implicit admission of the scholars who stand critically but confidently for the historicity of the teaching Buddha : " The books [of the Sutta Pitaka] profess to give, not merely the belief itself, but the belief as the Buddha uttered it, with an account of the time when, and the place at which, he uttered it. BUDDHISM AND BUDDHAS 241 The Buddha's new method of salvation, his new doctrine of what salvation was, did not present itself to the consciousness of the early Buddhist community as an idea, a doctrine, standing alone, and merely on its own merits. In their minds it was indissolubly bound up with the memory of the revered and striking personality of him who had proclaimed it."1 Thus it lies on the face of the case that any narrative could find acceptance which was put in circumstantial form ; and that for any doctrine whatever a narrative frame was invented as a matter of course. After the Dhamma, or collection of short scriptures in verse, had come into vogue, " The members of the Order were no longer contented to learn, and to understand the meaning of, the various Eules of the Patimokkha [part of the Vinaya or Eules of the Order] . A desire sprang up to have, for each of them also, a historical basis ; to know the story of how the Buddha himself came to lay down the Eule to his disciples. And it was only the Brother who was properly acquainted with all this, who was accounted a real ' Doctor of the Law.' "2 Now, the Dhamma-pada is believed to be wholly compiled from previous books ; and some of its best doctrines are avowedly ancient, as thus : " Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time : hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule."3 Here, then, we have the cult making its Teaching -God on the ordinary lines, describing him as supernaturally born, calling him the " Blessed One," and visibly creating for the traditional Teacher a flatly fictitious biography. At this early stage, then, Buddhism is seen making its Buddha ; and in the act, instead of yielding support by analogy to the belief in the historic Jesus, it vividly suggests a similar process of con struction in the case of Christism. We are thus far merely left asking what primitive Buddhism really was. § 9. Buddhism and Buddhas. Our English guide, than whom no man knows more of Buddhism, gives us a definition: "There can be little doubt but that the doctrines of the Four Noble Truths and of the Noble Eightfold Path, the ' Foundation of the Kingdom of Eighteousness,' were not only the teaching of Gotama himself, but were the central and most 1 Bhys Davids and Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts, Part I, Introd. p. xvii (" Sacred Books of the East," vol. xiii). 2 Ib. p. xviii, proceeding on the Kullavagga, ix, 5, 1. 8 Dhamma-pada, i, 5. Max Mtiller's trans. S.B.E. x. Professor Bhys Davids indeed translates the last clause "this is always its nature" (Buddhism, p. 128); but he notes (p. 126) other cases of avowed quotation ; and the collection is visibly a far-reaching compilation. See p. 20, note. E 242 THE TEACHING GOD essential part of it."1 The teachings in question are too well known to need quotation here : they are simply a formal and symmetrical statement of the rules of self-repression by which the Buddhist is to attain the inward peace of Nirvana, or deliverance from blind desires- Let us then assume that these teachings are for Buddhism primordial : what is there to prove that they are the utterances of one Gotama, "the Sakya sage "; and that his proclamation of them set up an " Order " of disciples ? The Order, by all accounts, was one of Mendicants. Either there were, or there were not, such Orders in existence before the Buddhist. If not, we are to suppose that one man, by the simple proclamation of a certain set of quietest principles, calling for self- restraint without any painful self -mortification, induced numbers of men and women, many of them instructed, to take up a new way of life in a country not much given to changes or experiments, and through this host of disciples instituted an Order that was to set a great mark on the history of religion. The unlikeliness of such a sudden growth will be generally granted ; and indeed it is fully conceded — though this is rarely mentioned in the more popular accounts of Buddhism — that a Sangha or Society of the kind was no new pheno menon in Buddha's day.2 There seem to have been many ; and the Buddhist Order avowedly copied their practices : — According to Buddhist tradition — and we see no sufficient reason for doubting the correctness of the account — the monks of other, that is, non- Buddhistic sects, used to meet together at the middle and at the close of every half-month, and were accustomed then to proclaim their new teaching in public. At such times the different sects found an opportunity of increasing their numbers and their influence. The Buddhists also adopted the custom of these periodical meetings, but confined themselves to meeting twice in each month. 3 Our authorities argue indeed that the penitential practice of the Buddhist meetings " seems4 to have been an original invention of the Buddhists themselves "; but here we have on the one hand an avowal that the Buddhists ' ' invented ' ' notable usages not prescribed by the traditional Founder, and on the other hand a failure to demonstrate that the Buddhist practice was not pre-Buddhistic.s On the face 1 Bhys Davids, General Introduction to the Buddhist Suttas, vol. xi of " Sacred Books of the East " series, p. xxi. 2 Cp. Kuenen, Hibbert Lectures, p. 248 sg. ; Kern, as cited, ii, 1-3 ; and Prof. Davids' trans, of Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 57, p. 61, note, pp. 64, 66, 77, 78, 102, 105, 220-1. It appears that even the Buddhist yellow robe was common to other Orders (Id. pp. 77, 78). s Rhys Davids and Oldenberg, Introd. to Vinaya Texts, Pt. ii, p. x, proceeding on the Mahavagga, ii, 1, and ii, 4, 2. 4 This modifies Koeppen's " ohne Zweifel" (Die Beligion des Buddha, 1857-9, i, 366). 6 Koeppen (i, 367, note) says that "Die Beichte trat an die Stelle des bramanischen Opfers." But sacrifice had already been superseded in the teaching of some Brahmanists. Below, p. 248. BUDDHISM AND BUDDHAS 243 of the case, the claim is distinctly improbable, in view of the other data. For the rest, the Jainist movement admittedly dates from the same period ; mendicant sages are recognised in the Buddhist books as common phenomena before Buddha ;x and the same kinds of rules of conduct seem to have been general, save that the Buddhist was not so painfully ascetic as some others. The Buddhist movement, then, was one on anciently familiar lines. What is more, the title of " the Buddha," which means " the enlightened," so far from making claim to a new departure, was an implicit acknowledgment of continuance in established ideals. " In the Pali and Sanskrit texts the word Buddha is always used as a title, not as a name. The historical Buddha is represented to have taught that he was only one of a long series of Buddhas who appear at intervals in the world, and who all teach the same system. After the death of each Buddha his religion flourishes for a time and then decays, till it is at last completely forgotten, and wickedness and violence rule over the earth. Gradually then the world improves ; until at last a new Buddha appears who again preaches the lost Dharma or Truth The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who appeared previous to Gotama have been handed down to us. The Buddhavansa or 'History of the Buddhas' gives the lives of all the previous Buddhas before commencing the account of Gotama himself ; and the Pali commentary on the Jatakas gives certain details regarding each of the twenty-four." The number and the names may very well be, as our historian argues, late inventions ; but there can be no question as to the fact of the belief. An early tradition avows that, after " the " Buddha had made sixty converts in three months, sent them in different directions to preach and teach, and again converted the whole population of Bajagriha, the capital of King Bimbisara, he encountered a period of hostility, in which his disciples were ridiculed as preachers of a doctrine of depopulation. Appealed to by them for counsel, he advised them " to say that the Buddha was only trying to preach righteousness, as former Buddhas had done."3 Even in the late Commentary of Buddhaghosa on the Dialogues of Gotama, " the Blessed One " is represented as exhorting his disciples to be earnest, because " hard is it to meet with a Buddha in the world."4 So in 1 Dialogues of the Buddha, pp. 214-221. 2 Davids, Buddhism, pp. 179-180. Cp. Weber, History of Indian Literature, pp. 27, 167, 284-5, as to the Brahmanic connections of the word. A Nepalese list gives eight. Wilson , Essays and Lectures on Belig. of Hindus, 1862, ii, 7. 3 Davids, Buddhism, pp. 55, 61-2, 63-4, and refs. 4 Id. American Lectures, p. Ill ; cp. Dialogues of the Buddha, 1899, p. 87. 244 THE TEACHING GOD the Dhamma-pada we have the text : " A Buddha is not easily found. Wherever such a sage is born, the race prospers." And the name Bhagava, " the Blessed One," is equally impersonal, the Buddhist traditions themselves telling of Gotama's discussions with "Bhagava, Alara, and Udraka."2 Finally, in the fourth century of our era, " there was certainly near to Sravasti a sect of Buddhists who rejected Gotama, reverencing only the three previous Buddhas, and especially Kasyapa, whose body they believed to be buried under one of the dagabas at which they, as well as the orthodox, worshipped, while another was said to be built over the spot where he had died."3 There were probably current, then, at and before the time of Gotama's alleged teaching, any number of teachings credited to "the Buddha " and " the Blessed One "; and these might include many afterwards ascribed to Gotama. Given, then, an absolute absence of evidence for the transcription of any teachings of Gotama in his lifetime, on what grounds are we to believe that they were with knowledge ascribed to a man of that name, whose life answered to the non- supernatural details given in the legends ? Nay, seeing that even the name Gautama or Gotama is on the one hand a common one,4 and on the other hand (as " Gautama of the race of Gotama ") full of mythological associations ;5 and seeing further that there was admittedly another Gotama known to the early Buddhists who also founded an Order,6 what proof is there that sayings and doings of different Gotamas may not have been ascribed to one person ? On the view, again, that the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path are the oldest doctrines of the Buddhist movement, and were formulated by one Gotama, what reason is there to believe that the movement either {a) arose or {b) made any progress on the simple basis of those teachings? Baur, believing in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, yet makes the avowal : How soon would everything true and important that was taught by Christianity have been relegated to the series of long- faded sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity, had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the 1 Dhamma-pada, xiv, 193 (Max Miiller's trans. S. B. E. x). " The awakened " is used in both the singular and the plural throughout the chapter. 2 Davids, Buddhism, p. 34, citing Beal, Bomantic Legend of Buddha, pp. 152-177. 8 Davids, Buddhism, p. 181. Professor Davids avows that the sayings ascribed to Kasyapa Buddha in the Amagandha Sutta are " quite in the manner and spirit of all the teaching ascribed to Gotama himself." 4 Davids, Buddhism, p. 27, note. Cp. Biihler's Introd. to Inst, of Gotama in Sacred Laws oftheAryas (S.B. E. II), Pt. i, 2d ed. pp. 1-li. "Siddartha" is admittedly a dubious name. The Nepalese list gives neither that nor Gotama. Wilson, as cited. s Prof. H. Kern, Histoire du Bouddhisme dans I'Inde, tr. fr. 1901, i, 252-4. 6 Dialogues, p. 222. BUDDHISM AND BUDDHAS 245 mouth of its Founder?"1 Similarly may we not ask, How, in much-believing India, could any large organised movement develop on the simple nucleus of a teaching of self-control, which differed from the common practice of Hindu asceticism only in its renuncia tion of positive self-maceration ? Nay, supposing a sage to have framed an eightfold path of " Eight Belief, Eight Aims, Eight Speech, Eight Actions, Eight means of Livelihood, Eight Endeavour, Eight Mindfulness, Eight Meditation," how should he intelligibly proceed to establish his way by forming an Order of Mendicants ?2 Our guide himself explains that these " classified statements of moral truth " were " addressed to Brahmans skilled in the dialectics of the time "; and they certainly have that aspect. But why should they be offered as a primary code for a new mendicant Order ? It will doubtless be answered that such a priori objection is unwarranted ; that we must take the evidence as we find it and recognise as the primary teaching of the founder of Buddhism the doctrines repeatedly ascribed to him in the oldest documents. But when we inquire historically into the oldest documents and their authenticity we learn from our leading instructors that the received tradition of the First Buddhist Council which " collected the sayings of the Master " is proved to be late and untrustworthy by an early Sutta, which gives all the story of the heresy that is historically stated as the motive for the Council, but says nothing of such a Council taking place. " The author of the Mahaparinibhana-Sutta," says Dr. Oldenberg, " did not know anything of the First Council "; and Professor Ehys Davids agrees.3 And this very Sutta ("The Book of the Great Decease") is open to suspicion of lateness, inas much as it makes the Blessed One figure at the head of a great movement in his lifetime, travelling sometimes with five hundred and sometimes with twelve hundred and fifty disciples. What is more, it represents him as giving forth a kind of teaching hard to reconcile with other doctrine ascribed to him as typical ; for in the very first chapter of the Sutta (§ 4) he is made to lay it down as one of the conditions of the permanent prosperity of a certain tribe of Vaggians that they " honour and esteem and revere and support the Vaggian shrines in town or country, and allow not the proper offerings and rites, as formerly given and performed, to fall into 1 Das Christenthum und die christliche Kirche der drei ersten Jahrhunderte, 1853, PP. 35-36. (Eng. tr. i, 38.) 2 It may be argued that he was giving the preference to mendicancy as a means of livelihood over the wrong means, such as fortune-telling and astrology, said in the Dialogues of the Buddha (Davids' trans. 1899, pp. 16-25) to be practised by some recluses and Brahmans." But on this view the " Tightness " is merely negative. 3 Introd. to the Buddhist Suttas, S.B.E. xi. 246 THE TEACHING GOD desuetude."1 It may well be said of such a teacher that, so far from having opposed Hinduism and " destroyed a system of iniquity and oppression and fraud," he "lived and died a Hindu." l But does such doctrine correlate with the denial of the permanence of the Gods, and of the value of prayers and sacrifices, also ascribed to the Buddha by tradition and documents ? The traditional First Council, then, which figures as the first historical authority for the existence of the Buddha's teachings, is later (if it ever took place at all) than a Sutta which ascribes to him a teaching wholly different in spirit and aim from those commonly held to be typical and essential in his doctrine. But indeed Pali scholars are more and more convinced that the First Council is a mere literary myth, to assign to which a historical date is to put a false problem.3 And if the First Council thus goes by the board, of what value is the late tradition that the Council of Vesali was held a hundred years after the Buddha's death ? Our authorities argue that since the " Ten Points " said to have been there vehemently discussed are not mentioned in the earlier sections of the Mahavagga, these must be prior to the Council ; and that as the Patimokkha is visibly older still, the last-named section of the Vinaya must be very old indeed.4 The answer is (1) that the Council of Vesali5 may have been centuries later than the date traditionally assigned to it, and (2) that the Vinaya texts in general, if relatively old, have nothing of the character of an innovating propaganda, nothing of the nature of an appeal which would create a new Order, but rather correspond to the late code of rules framed for monastic orders in Christendom a thousand years after the foundation of the Christian cult. The fact that they are all ascribed to the Founder is but one more evidence of the total lack of the critical or historical sense among the members. § 10. The Buddhist Gruces. Looking, then, for a foothold among the shifting sands of Buddhist tradition, we note the following clashing records : — 1. The Buddha is represented alike in ostensibly early and in 1 Last cit. pp. 3-4. 2 Davids, Buddhism, p. 83; American Lectures, p. 116. [In the last ed. of his Buddhism Prof. Davids substituted for "Hindu" the phrase "typical Indian," adding: " Hinduism had not, in his time, arisen."] See the Buddhism (pp. 138, 149, 165, etc.) for many instances in which the Buddha is made to speak of "the Gods" as a believer in them ; and cp. Wilson, Essays and Lectures, as cited, ii, 28. 8 Cp. B. Otto Prancke, art. on "The Buddhist Councils" in Journal of the Pali Text Society, 1908, pp. 68-74. 4 Bhys Davids and Oldenberg, Vinaya Texts, i, Introd. p. xvii. Cp. Buddhism, p. 163. 5 As to this cp. Koeppen, Die Beligion des Buddha, i, 155-6. THE BUDDHIST CEUCES 247 late tradition as speaking of "the Gods" with full belief in their existence.1 2. He is represented on the one hand as discouraging sacrifices,2 and on the other hand as prescribing for a whole tribe a strict adherence to ancient rites.3 3. King Asoka, who figured as a good Buddhist in the early vigour of the movement (about 250 B.C.), habitually called himself "the delight of the Gods," as did his contemporary the "pious Buddhist king of Ceylon." 4 4. The Buddha is represented as throwing his Order open to all classes, and at the same time as making the name " Brahman " a term of honour for his Arahats or saints. Brahmans, too, are said to have been among his most distinguished disciples ; and the Dialogues represent his conversations with them. 5. Much teaching that certainly did not come from Buddha is admittedly ascribed to him, the principle being that he delivered the whole canon. 6. Much philosophic matter set forth as his teaching is nearly identical with much of the Sankhya system, of which at least the germs are admittedly pre-Buddhistic.5 The last two circumstances are fully acknowledged by our Buddhist scholars. Oldenberg writes : " I have essentially modified my previous scepticism in regard to the connection of the two systems, and seen reason to place Buddhism considerably closer to the Sankhya than my former researches suggested." 6 And Professor Bhys Davids, enumerating the long list of advantages claimed by the Buddha in one of the Dialogues for the life of a recluse, concedes that " it is perfectly true that of these thirteen consecutive proposi tions, or groups of propositions, it is only the last, No. 13, which is exclusively Buddhist," 7 the exception being " the realisation of the Four Truths, the destruction of the Asavas [lusts, errors, and ignorance] , and attainment of Arahatship." Professor Davids goes 1 Bhys Davids, Buddhism, 18th ed. pp. 35, 55-56, 79, 99, 149, 154 ; American Lectures on Buddhism, 1896, pp. 121, 138, 165 ; Dialogues of the Buddha, tr. 1899, p. 79, etc. 2 Davids, Buddhism, p. 61 ; Dialogues, Sutta v. 8 Vet Oldenberg goes so far as to see (wir diirfen sagen) a true utterance of Buddha in the dialogue on sacrifices, when the other dialogue, giving the contrary view, has equal authority (Der Buddha, 3te Aufl. p. 196). 4 Davids, Buddhism, p. 84. So, among the later princes of the Andhras, who were great patrons of the Buddhists, we have one called Vedisiri, "he whose glory is the Veda," and another Yanasiri, " he whose glory is the sacrifice " (Biihler, Introd. to the Apastamba in "Sacred Laws of the Aryas" (S.B.E. n, Pt. i, 2nd ed. p. xxxix). On the other hand, however, the Andhras are spoken of in the Aitareya-brahmana as degraded and barbarous. As to the laxity of the Buddhism of early kings, cp. Bloch, Zeitschr. d. deutsch. morgen- ISmd. Gesellsch. lxiii (1909), Heft ii, note " Zur Asoka-Inschrift von Bairat," pp. 325-7. * Davids, American Lectures, pp. 24-29. 8 Der Buddha, sein Leben, seine Lehre, seine Gemeinde, 3te Aufl., 1897, Excurs, p. 441. * Dialogues of the Buddha, as cited, p. 59. 248 THE TEACHING GOD on to make the claim : " But the things omitted, the union of the whole of those included into one system, the order in which the ideas are arranged all this is also distinctively Buddhist." This claim, however, does not affect the significance of the admission, and is itself provocative of a new pressure of criticism. For if the exclu sively Buddhist section be the last of all, is not the fair presumption this, that the Buddhist formula here has merely been added to an existing doctrine, appropriated by Buddhists ? Among the specified rules of conduct admitted to be not exclusively Buddhist are many that go far to constitute the content of the " Eightfold Path," which is thus obviously but a separate classification of precepts or ideals common to other schools. The same question arises again over the admission1 that the Eightfold path is not mentioned in our Sutta" (the Sammana- Phala) ; and that, as regards three of the four lines of ethical precept to be traced in the teaching under notice, Buddhism in the first "goes very little beyond the current ethics of the day"; in the second and third proceeds mainly on the practice of pre-Buddhistic recluses and Orders ; and only in the fourth — specifying the Buddhistic program for Arahatship — takes up a special stand.2 But on analysis it is found that this excepted doctrine is at most only verbally special to Buddhism, since the other schools also certainly professed to put down lust of life and physical pleasure, error, and ignorance ; and it is not pretended that the word Arahat " was a Buddhist monopoly. The further we go, the stronger becomes the stress of doubt. Where we are not certainly dealing with pre- Buddhistic doctrine under the form of dialogues held by the Buddha, we are reading, as in so many passages of the Dhamma-pada, sayings of a literary construction, often in verse, which in their present form come from Buddhistic writers long after the alleged period of Gotama, though they too may derive from remote antiquity. Among these, even as happens in the later sections of the Christian gospels, are some of the noblest ethical teachings of Buddhist literature. What doctrines, then, were special to Buddhism ? Not Karma : that was common property, shared-in by Buddhism.3 Wherein did it ethically innovate ? Not in asserting the superiority of a right mind to sacrifice : that was a primary doctrine of the Jainas, and admittedly pre-Buddhistic both within and without the pale of Brahmanism.4 Not in seeking a way of Salvation independently of the Vedas: that had been done by many teachers, in various 1 Id. p. 62. 2 Id. p. 63. s Id. pp. 72, 105 ; Buddhism, pp. 99-100. 4 Dialogues, pp. 164-5. SOCIOLOGICAL CLUES 249 sects.1 Not in the doctrine that defilement comes not from unclean meats, but from evil deeds and words and thoughts : that is given by the Buddhist writers as pre-Buddhistic, "being one of the few passages in which sayings of previous Buddhas are recorded."2 Not in the search for peace through self-control and renunciation : that was the quest of a myriad recluses, the goal of all previous Buddhas. Not in the view that there is a wisdom higher than that attained by mere austerities : that too is pre-Buddhistic.8 Not in the doctrine that non-Brahmans could join an order and attain religious blessed ness : the other Orders were equally open to men of low social status or even slaves ;4 and indeed the rigid ideal of caste separate- ness was not yet established in the days or in the sphere of early Buddhism ;6 for though Brahman claims had long been exorbitantly high, it appears that there were many Brahmans who rationally waived them, and as regards ascetics they were not raised, or at least not pressed.6 In Buddhist practice, too, as in that of the early Christians, runaway slaves were not received into the Order.7 As little was the admission of women to the Order a Buddhist inno vation : that too was practised by the Jainas ; and even the tradition makes the Buddha accept it reluctantly, in the twenty-fifth year of his preaching.8 There seems, in short, to be nothing on the face of the doctrine to account for the special expansion of the Buddhist movement.9 § 11. Sociological Clues. Seeking for sociological explanations, we first turn to the economic conditions. As was to be expected, there are clear traces of an economic pressure that drove men into the Order. In the Milinda Prashnaya ("Questions of Menander"), Nagasena, the founder of the Madhyamika school of northern Buddhism, in answer to a question from Milinda, the Greek King of Sagala in the Punjaub,10 as to whether all members join the Order for the high end of renunciation, is represented as answering : " Certainly not, sire. Some for these reasons ; but some have left the world in 1 Oldenberg, Der Buddha, 3te Aufl. p. 76. 2 Dialogues, p. 104. 8 Id. p. 211. 4 Id. pp. 77, 103. 6 Id. pp. 101, 103, 107, 285-7. Prof. Davids cites Pick, Sociale GUederung im nordSstlichen Indien, pp. 50, 51. 8 Oldenberg, Der Buddha, pp. 71, 175. 7 Davids, Dialogues, p, 103, citing Vinaya Texts, S.B.E. i, 199. 8 Koeppen, Die Beligion des Buddha und ihre Entstehung, 1857, i, 104 ; Bhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 66. 9 Cp. Senart, Essai, pp. 447-451. 10 Professor Davids admits (Introd. to vol. cited, p. xx) that it is told alike of Milinda and of Buddha that many cities sought their ashes, and agreed finally to divide their relics and raise to them monuments — another light on the Buddha legend. As to the identification of Menander, whose coins are extant, with Milinda, see Weber, History of Indian Literature, Eng. tr. p. 306, note. 250 THE TEACHING GOD terror at the tyranny of kings. Some have joined us to be safe from being robbed ; some harassed by debt ; and some perhaps to gain a livelihood."1 Nagasena himself, again, is made to say that he joined as a mere boy, seeking to be taught.2 This account would in all likelihood hold good of the social conditions before the Greek invasion ; and on the face of the case there is no difficulty in under standing that any Order which secured men a measure of peace and security would find adherents, even as did the monasteries and monkish orders of the Middle Ages in Europe. But the same pressure would send applicants to other Orders as well as the Buddhist ; and we have still to ask why it was that the Buddhist was specially sought, and became specially powerful, as well as how it began. To begin with, there are strong reasons for regarding the Jainas and Buddhists alike as having been originally either simple sects, or sections of one sect, of Brahmanism ; and as this view is held by two leading authorities, Weber and Jacobi, and is, as we have seen, now partially yielded to by Oldenberg, we may reasonably try it as a working hypothesis. Weber goes so far as to assert categorically (1) that Brahmanic speculation anciently sundered on two main lines, one finding the First Cause in indiscrete matter, the other finding it in spirit ; (2) that the latter theory gradually became the orthodox one ; and (3) that " from among the adherents of the former view, which came by degrees to be regarded as heterodox, there arose, as thought developed, enemies still more dangerous to orthodoxy, who before long threw themselves into practical questions also, and eventually became the founders of the form of belief known to us as Buddhism."3 On this view (which, it will be seen, implicitly modifies all the ordinary assumptions as to the origin of Buddhism in one man's teaching), the quasi-atheistic element in Buddhism is primordial ; and the popular development is a mere sequel of a movement originally, as it were, academic. In Weber's opinion, the Jainas in turn are only one of the oldest sects4 of Buddhism ; Buddha being for him a real personage who pro pounded to the people without distinction of caste a teaching in which there was " absolutely nothing new," but which had previously "been the possession of a few anchorites " and had " never before been freely and publicly proclaimed to all." Hence " the enormous 1 The Questions of King Milinda (S.B.E. xxxv), ii, 1, § 5. Trans, i, 50. Cp. Kern, as cited by Kuenen, Hibbert Lect. pp. 277-8. 2 There would be others, seeking light ratherthan shelter. Cp. Oldenberg, Buddha, p. 74. 8 History of Indian Literature, Eng. tr. p. 27. Cp. pp. 284-5. 4 Indische Studien, xvi, 210 ; History of Indian Literature, pp. 296-7, note. SOCIOLOGICAL CLUES 251 success that attended his doctrine : the oppressed all turned to him as their redeemer."1 Jacobi on the other hand, pointing to the ancient protest of the Brahmanic writer Vasishtha2 against the neglect of the Veda by ascetics, concludes that " the germ of dissenting sects like those of the Buddhists and the Jainas was contained in the institute of the fourth Asrama (grade), and that the latter was the model of the heretical sects ; therefore Buddhism and Jainism may be regarded as religions developed out of Brahmanism, not by a sudden refor mation, but prepared by a religious movement going on for a long time." s For this view of the two sects as merely cognate there are various grounds — for instance this, that while both Buddhists and Jainas have adopted the five vows of the Brahmanic ascetics, the Buddhists opposed the Brahmanic doctrine of the Atman or personal soul, and the Jainas accepted it with modifications, holding that all parts of the elements as well as animals and plants have souls. This and various other details suggest rather an original independence than a splitting-off. And Jacobi confidently claims4 that " we know for certain that Buddha at least addressed himself chiefly to the members of the aristocracy, and that the Jainas originally preferred the Kshatriyas [the warrior caste] to the Brahmans." Thus far, it will be seen, both forms of the theory accept broadly the tradition as to Buddha's preaching, though that tradition, as apart from the incidental revelations in the documents, says nothing of an acceptance of a Brahmanic basis by Buddha for his Order ; and Weber leaves his conception far from clear, inasmuch as he speaks at one time of a body of heretics as "the founders" of Buddhism, and at another of Buddha as " one of its representatives," and as the first to publish broadcast doctrines previously confined to " a few anchorites." And when we come to compare the legend of Buddha with the Jaina legend of Mahavira [" the great hero "] , our difficulty deepens. The Jaina legends refer the preaching of Mahavira " exclusively to the same district which Buddhism also recognises as its holy land "; and in Weber's opinion they " display so close an affinity to the accounts of Buddha's ministry that we cannot but recognise in the two groups of narratives merely varying forms of common reminiscences."6 But, if reminiscences, why are they to be held as being primarily Buddhistic ? And why, above all, are 1 History, pp. 289-290. 2 [Ch. x, 4, Blihler's trans.] 8 Hermann Jacobi, Introd. to Jaina Sutras (S.B.E. xxii), Pt. i, p. xxxiii. Cp. Senart, Essai, p. 453. 4 Here following Oldenberg, Der Buddha, 3te Aufl. pp. 176-9. .. 5 Jacobi, as cited, p. xiii. 6 Weber, History, p. 296, note. Cp. Wilson, Essays, ii, 10-11. 252 THE TEACHING GOD they to be certificated as reminiscences ? Mahavira is actually described as son of " Siddartha " — a name of Buddha — and husband of " Yasoda," the name of the mythic nurse of Krishna.1 The Jainas, says Jacobi, " have reproduced the whole history of Krishna, with small variations, in relating the life of the twenty-second Tirthakara, Arishtanemi, who was a famous Yadava."2 In the same way the Buddhists have put much of the history of Krishna into their stories of Buddha. Such adaptation is, in fact, a normal religious practice, common to many races and cults.3 A somewhat better reason than any Weber gives for regarding the Jaina legends as the later is that according to them Mahavira did twelve years' penances as against Buddha's six, was convinced of their necessity, and persevered in some of them after becoming a Tirthakara or prophet.4 Such a comparison is avowedly post- Buddhistic. But such a detail might be added to an established Jaina legend just as the Buddhists undoubtedly added to theirs. Granting, however, that the Jainas may represent a secession from the Buddhist movement — their greater asceticism (involving a measure of uncleanliness6) being on the lines of the schism said by the Buddhist tradition to have been set up by Gotama's cousin Dewadatta,6 identified by Jacobi with Mahavira — we have really no sound ground for believing that on either side we are dealing with facts in the life of any sect-founder. The Buddhist legend runs that Ajatasatru, son of the Buddhist rajah Bimbisara, was induced by Dewadatta to kill his father, Dewadatta at the same time causing three attempts to be made on the life of Buddha. Such a tale is on all fours with the efforts of the early Christians to make out that certain rival cults, such as that of " Simon Magus," were set up by way of schism from Christianity, when in reality those cults were the elder.7 Jacobi puts it that Ajatasatru killed his father and warred on his grandfather, who was uncle of Mahavira and patron of the Jainas, thereafter siding with their rivals the Buddhists, whom he had formerly persecuted as friends of his father's.8 Here we have apparently one more attempt to draw a truth of history from a bare tradition ; and on the principles followed in this inquiry 4 Guerinot, Essai de Bibliographic Jaina, 1906, p. v-vi. On this fact no comment is made by M. Guerinot, who insists on the historicity of both Buddha and Mahavira. 2 Jacobi, as cited, p. xxxi, note. Cp. Senart, p. 453. 8 Senart notes (Essai, Introd. pp. xxi-xxii) that the numerous sects of Buddhists follow the same myth types in their legends, despite their other differences, many of which date very far back. 4 Jacobi, as cited, pp. xvii-xviii. « Jacobi, as cited, p. xxvi. 6 Rhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 75-6. 7 Cp. the author's Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 369, 435, and Short History of Christianity, pp. 33-4. 8 As cited, p. xiv. BUDDHISM AND ASOKA 253 there is no scientific warrant for such extraction. But there is on the other hand a clear scientific value in the suggestion that monarchic or other political forces may have determined the success of a particular Order at a particular time.1 § 12. Buddhism and Asoka. When Buddhism first emerges in what may be termed the light of history, it is as an established system highly favoured by the great king Asoka, about 250 B.C. It is made clear by his edicts that only a small number of scriptures, whose titles are only partially identi fiable with known extant writings, were then recognised as pre serving the spoken discourses of the Buddha.2 And among those named is "The Terrors of the Future," which "seems to be a description of the different worlds of purgatory, one of which is described in the Pettavatthu, the 7th Book of the 5th Division of the 2nd Pitaka." So that thus early in the known history of the Order it figures as holding in Buddha's name one of the common superstitions which Buddha is supposed to have repudiated. And Asoka, as we have seen, called himself "the delight of the Gods," as did his friend the contemporary Buddhist king of Ceylon. The first sociological problem is to account for the favour shown by such kings to such an Order. Constantine, we know, raised up Christianity to be the State cultus because of its obvious political uses as a far-reaching organisation, easily attachable to his interest. Had the kings of Magadha a similar motive ? Chandragupta, according to both Greek and Hindu accounts,3 began his career as a robber-chief in the time of Alexander, whose camp he had visited on the banks of the Hyphasis, as a defeated rebel ; and after seizing the throne of Nanda, the murdered rajah of Magadha, about 315 B.C., he defeated Seleukos, the Greek governor of the Indus provinces, driving the Greek power out of India. If then "it is clear that it was just when Chandragupta and his low-caste followers from the Punjab came into power that the Buddhists, the party of reform, the party who made light of caste distinctions, began to rise rapidly in numbers and influence,"4 it is quite intelligible that the upstart 1 Jacobi's view to this effect was accepted by Max Mtiller : " Take away the previous growth of Brahmanism, and Buddha's work would have been impossible. Buddhism might in fact have remained a mere sect of Brahmanism, unless political circumstances had given it an importance and separate existence which other rival sects did not attain " (Natural Beligion, p. 555, citing Jacobi as above). 2 Cp. Bhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 224-6. [In his last ed., 1910, Professor Davids modifies this passage, and protests against the inference that Asoka's list represents ail the canonical writings known in his time.] 3 Cp. Elphinstone, History of India, Cowell's ed. 1889, pp. 152-4; Bhys Davids, Buddhism, pp. 220-1. 4 BhyB Davids, Buddhism, pp. 221. Cp. Jacobi, as cited, p. xiv: "With the extension 254 THE TEACHING GOD dynasty found in the moral and didactic influence of such an Order a useful political support, as Ajatasatru may have done earlier, supposing him to have attained power by killing his father. The record that Ajatasatru, after favouring the Buddhists, captured Sravasti, their headquarters, and totally destroyed Kapilavastu, their sacred place,1 tells further of friction and complications, all presumably of a political character. Usurpers in such cases would be apt to have arrayed against them the influence of the Brahmans ; and the midway position of the Buddhists, who at once paid respect to Brahmanism and departed from its caste principles, would place them in a certain imperfect measure of harmony with the illegitimate monarch.2 But there is a further reason for ascribing to Chandragupta a decisive influence on Buddhism in its relation to Brahmanism. If Weber is right, the peoples of the Punjab " never submitted to the Brahmanical order of things, but always retained their ancient Vedic standpoint, free and independent, without either priestly domination or system of caste. For this reason, too, they were the objects of a cordial hatred on the part of their kinsmen, who had wandered further on ; and on this account also Buddhism gained an easy entrance among them." 3 But if Chandragupta with his Punjabis accepted Buddhism they would be strengthening the tendency existent in Buddhism to ignore caste ; and, again, we have it from the same authority that " Buddha's teaching was mainly fostered in the district of Magadha, which, as an extreme border province, was perhaps never completely Brahmanised;4 so that the native inhabi tants always retained a kind of influence, and now gladly seized the opportunity to rid themselves of the Brahmanical hierarchy and the system of caste." 6 This view, it will be observed, diverges essentially from the other proposition, above cited, that Buddha in person under mined the principle of caste in a fashion " altogether novel and unwonted." If caste had never at all been recognised in the Punjab, and had never triumphed in Magadha, there would be nothing very of the limits of the empire of Magadha a new field was opened to both religions [Jainism and Buddhism], over which they spread with great activity. It was probably this auspicious political conjunction to which Jainism and Buddhism chiefly owed their success, while many similar sects attained only a local and temporary importance." 1 Id. p. 77. 2 Mr. Lillie, while recognising the success of Buddhism before Asoka (Buddhism in Christendom, p. 188), raises a needless difficulty by supposing it to have " struggled on in obscurity and perhaps in secrecy" till his advent (Id. p. 215). The latter view is excluded by the former. 8 History of Indian Literature, p. 4. 4 This view of the matter is not considered by Mr. Lillie, who insists (Buddhism in Christendom, pp. 187-8) that Asoka's stones declare Brahmanism to have been the official creed all over India before his reign. 5 Weber, History, pp. 286-7. Cp. Davids, Early Buddhism (1908), p. 10. BUDDHISM AND ASOKA 255 novel there in the teaching that personal salvation did not depend on it. For such a teaching, Oldenberg avows, there was not only no necessity in that age and environment, but there was no inclination. " Any thought of any reformation of social conditions {Staatsleben), any notion of the founding of an earthly ideal kingdom, a pious Utopia, was wholly alien to these [early Buddhistic] circles. Any thing like a movement of social change was unknown in India." In short, the conception of Buddha as a kind of popular liberator is rejected by one of the leading scholars who still stand for the his toricity of Buddha.1 And though Brahmanists of Sankhya leanings were presumably not great sticklers for caste to begin with, it may well have been the anti-caste bias of the Punjabis that first gave the Buddhist Order a marked leaning of that kind, and supplied the basis for the belief that the Founder had been a Kshatriya. Such a state of things, too, would perfectly account for the fact that the Buddhist scriptures were, and remain, composed not in Sanskrit but in the popular idiom.2 It only needed that a beginning should be made, to stamp a given language as the sacred tongue of Buddhism. What Ajatasatru presumably began and Chandragupta some generations later carried further, the grandson of the latter, Asoka, consummated. He found the Buddhist Order flourishing, and fully established it through his extensive kingdom ; not, however, in direct opposition to Brahmanism, with which the now firmly seated dynasty would naturally make terms of mutual accommodation. For him, it seems clear, Buddhism was an organisation rather than a religion. It was compatible with Brahmanism while capable of being used to keep Brahmanism in check ; and the " delight of the Gods " was not concerned with its atheistic philosophy.3 " Eeverence towards Brahmans and members of the Order " was impartially prescribed in his edicts ; and he repeatedly stipulates for an equal toleration of all sects, and an abstention all round from detraction of others.4 He was thus a Buddhist only in the sense that he made use of all organisations alike, and it is even doubtful whether he assimilated with more than a section of the Buddhists of his time.6 Nor is there any clear warrant for the conclusion that " Buddhism in the time of Asoka was still comparatively pure " because in the edicts we hear nothing of metaphysical beings or hypothetical deities, nothing of ritual, or ceremonies, or charms."6 Edicts were not the natural 1 Oldenberg, Der Buddha, pp. 173-5. Cp. Kuenen, Hibb. Lect. p. 246. 2 Weber, Ind. Lit., p. 179. 3 But cp. Kern, Hist, du Bouddhisme, i, 274. 4 Cp. Max Mtiller, Introd. to Sc. of Beligion, ed. 1882, pp. 5-6, 23 ; Davids, Buddhism, p. 223. 6 Cp. Kern, i, 261. Cp. T. Bloch, " Zur Asoka-Inschrift von Bairat," in Z. D. M. G. Ixiii, 2 (1909), p. 325. 6 Davids, last cit, 256 THE TEACHING GOD place for such allusions ; but the mention of the treatise on The Terrors of the Future" is surely significant enough.1 The Maha- vansa tells that under the sun of royal favour " heretics assumed the yellow robe in order to share in its advantages : whenever they had opinions of their own they gave them forth as doctrines of the Buddha."2 In that case they were doing what other Buddhists had done before them ; and it is certain that most of what Buddhists accept as Buddha's teaching was penned long after Asoka's time. We thus reach a critical conception of Buddhist origins. The Teaching Buddha, considered as the wondrous sage who in his lifetime creates by his own influence a great movement and estab lishes a great Order, shrinks in the light of criticism to the vanishing point. The early suspicion of a keen scholar3 that " after all, Sakya Muni is an unreal being," is justified on the closest scrutiny. The Order, probably originating among ascetic Brahmans, who may have been led to rationalism as a result of their primary renunciation of the Vedas,4 becomes intelligible simply as a monastic or mendicant sect on the ordinary Brahmanical bases, but tolerant on the subject of caste to start with, and tending to diverge from Brahmanism in doctrine and practice in the ratio of its numerical success, especially as regards its rejection of caste distinc tions — a course obviously conducive to its expansion. On these lines, however, it could take many Brahmans with it ; and inasmuch as it was primarily an Order living under rules, rather than a school of doctrine, it could all along include ordinary believers in the Gods as well as rationalists who turned their backs on official and popular Brahmanism because of its systematic exploitation of superstition. But to an energetic rationalism in such an Order there was a fatal obstacle in the central principle or datum of the cult — the obtrusion of the supernatural Buddha as the source of all true wisdom. The very thinkers who framed the dialogues and dis courses in which the Buddha most rationally teaches by argument were there building up the belief in a supernatural being in whom they themselves cannot have believed. To change the familiar phrase, they literally builded worse than they knew. On the popular craving for a Teaching God they relied for securing the popularity of their Order ; and they thus frustrated the higher aims 1 One of the other treatise-titles in Asoka's list appears in Max Miiller's version as " The Supernatural Powers of the Masters," where Prof. Davids reads it " The State of the Just." 2 Cited by Davids, p. 224. 3 H. H. Wilson, Essays and Lectures, ii, 346. Cp. pp. 8-9. 4 Cp. Barth, The Beligions of India, Eng. tr. 1882, p. 81 ; Max Mtiller, Hib. Lect. p. 357 ; Kuenen, Hib. Lect. p. 252 ; Wilson, Essays and Lectures, ii, 347. BUDDHISM AND ASOKA 257 of their doctrine, inasmuch as superstition always drives out judg ment. By the admission of Professor Ehys Davids, the Northern Buddhists took a step " far removed from Gotama's doctrines," " the step from polytheism to monotheism." But, on the other hand, they built up, on Brahmanic lines, a new Buddhistic polytheism, accord ing to which there are five Dhyani Buddhas, mystical and divine beings, living in bliss ; with five Bodhisatvas, or Buddhas Elect, destined to be born ; and five Manushi or human Buddhas, of whom Gotama is the fourth : the fifth, Maitreya, the Buddha of love, being still to come ; and for all such creations we have the sufficient explanation that the dreamers " craved after Buddhist gods to fill the place of the dead gods of the Hindu pantheon." And the northern Buddhism, finally, is as completely given over to poly theistic superstition as the southern.1 It may, indeed, have been the higher intelligence of the rationalising Buddhists that secured the special success of their Order, as compared with that of the Jainas, whose bias to sys tematic self-mortification, as well as their greater superstition, accounts for the unintellectual character of their literature. The less ascetic Buddhists would at once be better able to propitiate kings and better able to attract recruits. Among them would circulate such maxims as that in the Dhamma-pada : — Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires. He who, though dressed in fine apparel, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with all other beings^he indeed is a Brahmana, an ascetic, a friar (bhikshu) ? But behind such sane maxims stood forever the fabulous figure of the Buddha, the giver of all the wisdom in his Order, and the imposer of all its artificial rules. Instead of the mass of myths concerning him being a late accretion to a body of high ethical teaching purporting to come from a normal human being, it is now seen to be probable that, as is contended by M. Senart, the mythical figure was there first,3 and the ethical teaching grew up fortuitously around it, even as the gospel teachings in all likelihood grew up round the name of a sacrificed Jesus who for his earlier worshippers was merely a name. To this, our initial problem, we now finally return, prepared to appreciate aright the issues. 1 Buddhism, pp. 199-211 ; Wilson, Essays and Lectures, ii, 25-39. 2 Dhamma-pada, x, 141, 142, Max Muller's trans. Cp. Bhys Davids, Buddhism, p. 155. 8 Cp. Kern, Histoire du Bouddhisme dans I'Inde, i, passim. S 258 THE TEACHING GOD § 13. The Buddha Myth. In the introduction to M. Senart's Essai sur la Ugende de Buddha, the most comprehensive and scientific attempt of the kind yet made, the central problem is thus posited : — "Either the historical data are the primary nucleus and as it were the central source, the legendary elements representing an ulterior action, in part accessory, without necessary cohesion ; or, inversely, the mythological traits form a whole connected by a higher and anterior unity with the personage on whom they are here grafted, the historical data, if there are really any, being associated with them only in virtue of a secondary adaptation. It is at the first point of view that the inquiry has stood up to the present time. There has been drawn the practical conclusion that it suffices to suppress all the incredible details, what is left being taken for accredited history. I seek to show that for this first point of view we ought decidedly to substitute the second."1 The conclusion to which the present argument points is exactly this, adhered to, however, more strictly than is the case in M. Senart's admirably learned treatise. For while he thus seems to imply that the supernatural element is the beginning of Buddhism as such, he finally assumes that there actually was a "founder." Certainly he sufficiently attenuates his conception : — " A sect has a founder, Buddhism like every other. I do not pretend to demonstrate that Sakyamuni never existed. The question is perfectly distinct from the object of this treatise, It follows, certainly, from the foregoing researches that hitherto the sacred personage has been given too much historical con sistence, that the tissue of fables grouped around his name has been too facilely transformed, by arbitrary piecings, into a species of more or less unplausible history. Scepticism acquires from our analyses, in some regards, a greater precision : still, it does not follow that we should indefinitely extend its limits. In this epic and dogmatic biography, indeed, there remain very few elements which sustain a close examination ; but to say this is not to say that among them there has not entered some authentic reminiscence. The distinction is certainly very diffi cult. Where we are not in a position to show for a tradition its exact counterpart in other cycles, a decision is an extremely delicate process. All that is suspicious ought not necessarily to be eliminated : it is right that whatever is rigorously admis sible ought to be retained. There is no alleged deity — not Vishnu, or Krishna, or Herakles — for whom we might not 1 E. Senart, Essai sur la Ugende de Buddha, 2e <5dit. 1882, pp. xi-xii. THE BUDDHA MYTH 259 construct a sufficiently reasonable biography by proceeding as has hitherto been done in regard to the legend of Buddha. " Under these reserves, I willingly recognise that there remain a certain number of elements which we have no absolute reason for thinking apocryphal : they may represent real historical reminiscences : to that, for my part, I have no objection. It is possible that the founder of Buddhism may have come from a tribe of Sakyas, though the pretended history of that race is certainly quite fictitious. It is possible that he may have come of a royal line, that he may have been born in a city called Kapilavastu, though this name arouses grave suspicions, open ing the door to either mythological or allegorical interpretations, and the existence of such a town is very feebly certified. The name Gotama is certainly historic and well-known, but it is a borrowed name which tells us little. Much trouble has been taken to explain how this strictly Brahmanic patronymic might have passed to a family of Kshatriyas [the warrior caste] . Apart from Buddha, it is above all closely associated with his supposed aunt, the legendary Prajapati I do not speak of his genealogy : it has certainly no value, being borrowed whole from epic heroes, in particular from Eama. On the other hand, it may well be that the teacher of the Buddhists entered on his religious career at the age of thirty-nine " And so on. Let us pause at the last clause to remember how the Jesus of the gospels " began to be about thirty years of age " when he began his teaching career, and to ask on what rational ground we can suppose such a detail to have been biographieally preserved when the surrounding narrative yields no sign of biography what ever ? There is in fact no single detail in the legend that has any claim to critical acceptance ; and the position of the latest con servatives, as Oldenberg, is finally only a general petitio principii. India, admits that candid scholar, always was, as it is, ' a land of types," wherein the lack of freedom stunts the free growth of individuality ; and in the portraits of the Buddha and all his leading disciples we have simply the same type repeated. Yet, he contends, " a figure such as his certainly has not been fundamentally mis conceived {fundamental missverstanden worden ist eine Gestalt wie He seine gewiss nicht)."2 Critical logic will not permit such an a priori reinstatement of a conception in which every element has given way before analysis. It is but an unconscious resort to the old fallacy of meeting the indictment of a spurious document with the formula, " Who else could have written it ?"3 1 Id. pp. 441-3. 2 Der Buddha, 3te Aufl. pp. 159-160, 180. 8 Cp. Baur's answer to Etickert, Paulus, Kap. iv, note 2 (p. 417). And now Baur's own assumptions as to Paul are rejected by the school of van Manen. 260 THE TEACHING GOD We recur to the old issue — the thesis that " every sect must have had a founder." Such was the unhesitating assumption of Minayeff, who did so much to bring historic clearness into early Buddhist history. " It is beyond doubt that at the origin of great historic movements always and everywhere appear important and historic personalities. It was so, certainly, in the history of Buddhism, and its development unquestionably commenced in the work of the founder."1 Here we have something more than the proposition of M. Senart — we have a doctrine which would ascribe to definite founders the cults of Herakles and Dionysos and Aphrodite, the worship of fire, and the institution of human sacrifice. Dismissing such a generalisation as the extravagance of a scholar without sociology,2 we bring the issue to a point in the formula of M. Senart. Plainly that is significant in the sense only that someone must have begun the formation of any given group. It is clearly not true in the sense that every sect originates in the new teaching of a remarkable personage. And we have seen reason to infer that there was a group of heretical or deviating Brahmanists, for whom " a Buddha " was " an enlightened one," one of many, before the quasi-historical Buddha had even so far emerged into personality as the slain Jesus of the Pauline epistles. Brahmanic doctrine, Brahmanic asceticism and vows, and Brahmanic mendicancy — these are the foundations of the Order : the personal giver of that rule and teaching, the Teaching God, comes later, even as the Jesus who institutes the Holy Supper comes after the eucharist is an established rite. Every critical scholar, without exception, admits that a vast amount of doctrine ascribed to Buddha was concocted long after his alleged period. It cannot then be proved that any part of the doctrine is not a fictitious ascription ; and there is not a single tenable test whereby any can be discriminated as genuine. In the words of Kuenen, " we are not free to explain Buddhism from the person of the founder."3 Nor is there any more psychological difficulty in supposing the whole to be doctrinal myth than in con ceiving how the later Brahmanists could put their discourses in the mouth of Krishna. The recent attempts to establish the historicity of Gotama Buddha by excavated tomb-remains4 — a kind of evidence which obviously could prove nothing as to the achievements or teaching 1 I. P. Minayeff, Becherches sur le Bouddhisme, trad. fr. 1894, p. 2. 2 Cp. Oldenberg's strictures on Minayeff, "Buddhistische Studien," in Z.D.M.G., vol. Iii, 1898. 3 Hib. Lect. p. 264. 4 Davids, Early Buddhism, 1908, pp. 29, 49; Buddhist India, p. 17; H. Hackmann, Buddhism as a Beligion, 1909 ; Dr. Fleet, Journ. Boy. Asiat. Soc, 1906. THE BUDDHA MYTH 261 of the person interred — have broken down on their merits. Dr. Fleet's claim to date an inscribed vase before Asoka's time on the strength of its letter-forms is peremptorily rejected;1 and Professor Davids' theory that the remains found under one stupa are those of Buddha has to compete with the theory of Dr. Fleet that they are those of massacred Buddhana Sakiya = " kinsmen of Buddha," which in turn is rejected by M. Barth as an impossible interpre tation. On such lines there can be no establishment of any relevant historic facts ; and we are left to the decision that No extant inscription, either in the north or south, can be referred with con fidence to a date earlier than that of Asoka."2 Professor Kern, coming to conclusions substantially identical with those of M. Senart, posits for us finally an ancient Order of monks, absorbing an ancient popular religion, and developing for people of the middle and lower classes the ideals of a spiritual life current in the schools of the Brahmans and the ascetics. It is very possible," he goes on, "that the Order had been founded — whatever be the precise sense which we attach to that word — by a single man peculiarly gifted, even as, for example, it is possible that Freemasonry may have been so founded. We may even, by an effort of imagination, adorn this founder with all sorts of good qualities ; but we have no right to say that the amiability of the Buddha of the legend has any other origin than the antique belief according to which the Buddha, in his quality of cherishing sun, is manno miltisto " '" — the kindest of men, in the words applied by an old German prayer- chant to the deity. This is the warranted attitude of scientific criticism ; and the mere " may-be " as to the possible Founder is exclusive of any Evemeristic solution. M. Senart's necessary founder, and Professor Kern's possible founder, are wholly remote from the Buddha alike of the Buddhist and of the rationalising scholar, bent on saving a personality out of a myth. On the face of the case, there is a pre sumption that, while there may easily have been, " about 500 B.C., a man who by his wisdom and his devotion to the spiritual interests of his kind made such an impression that contemporaries compared him to a pre-existing ideal of wisdom and goodness, and that posterity completely identified him with this ideal,"4 the Order was not founded by any such person. No Buddha made the Buddhists — the Buddhists made the Buddha.5 1 By M. Barth in the Journ. ales Savants, October, 1906. 2 Vincent Smith, Early History of India, 1908, p. 14. ° Histoire du Bouddhisme dans I'Inde, 1901, i, 263-4 ; cp. p. 241. 4 Kern, i, 264. 5 Cp. I. P. Minayeff, Recherches sur le Bouddhisme, trad. fr. 1894, pp. 157-180. 262 THE TEACHING GOD An obviously sufficient conceptual nucleus for " the " Buddha lay in the admittedly general Brahmanic notion of Buddhas." There is even a tradition that at the time when Sakyamuni came many men ran through the world saying "I am Buddha! I am Buddha!"1 This may be either a Buddhist way of putting aside the claims of other Buddhas or a simple avowal of their common ness. But a real Buddha would be a much less likely " founder" than one found solely in tradition. Any fabulous Buddha as such could figure for any group as its founder to begin with : to him would be ascribed the common ethical code and rules of the group : the clothing of the phantom with the mythic history of Vishnu- Purusha or Krishna, the " Bhagavat " of earlier creeds, followed as a matter of course, on the usual lines. M. Senart holds it for established that the legend as a whole was fixed as early as the time of Asoka."2 Some of the latest surveys of the problem end in an inference that the oldest elements in the legend consist of fragments of an ancient poem or poems embedded in the Pitakas.8 The quasi-biographical colour further given to mythical details is on all fours with that of the legends of Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and Jesus, all late products of secondary mythology, in periods which systematically reduced God-legends to the biographic level. As we have seen, the fabrication of narrative-frames for the teachings ascribed to the Buddha was early an established Buddhist exercise. And this accumulation of quasi-biographical detail, as we have also seen, goes on long after the whole cycle of prior supernaturalist myth has been embodied. It is after Jesus has been deified that he is provided with a mother and a putative father and brothers ; and it is in the latest gospel of all that we have some of the most circumstantial details of his life and deportment. There is even a case for the thesis that some of the characteristics of the Buddha are derived from sculptures which followed Greek models.4 On these grounds, then, it is here submitted that the traditional figure of the Buddha, in its most plausibly rationalised form, is as unhistoric as the figure of the Gospel Jesus has been separately shown to be. Each figure simply stands for the mythoposie action of the religious mind in a period in which Primary-God-making had given way to Secondary-God-making, and in particular to the craving for a Teaching God who should originate religious and moral ideas 1 Senart, Essai, p. 448. 2 Essai, Introd. pp. xxii-xxiii and p. 451. 3 Bishop Copleston, Buddhism Primitive and Present, ed. 1908, p. 53; Geiger, Dipa- vamsa and Mahavamsa, 1905, p. 11. 4 Bloeh, " Einfluss der altbuddhistischen Kunst auf die Buddha-Legende," in Z. D. M. G., 1908, Heft 2, pp. 370-1. THE BUDDHA MYTH 263 as the other Gods had been held to originate agriculture, art, medicine, normal law, and civilisation. And if by many the thought be still found disenchanting, they might do well to reflect that there is a side to the conception that is not devoid of comfort. Buddhism, like Christianity, is from the point of view of its traditional origins a " failure." Buddhism, indeed, notably in the case of Burmah, has done more to mould the life of a whole people towards its ostensibly highest ethic than Christianity ever did ; but Buddhism, being at best a gospel of monasticism, quietism, and mechanical routine, collapsed utterly in India, the land of its rise ; and its normal practice savours little of moral or intellectual superiority to any of the creeds around it.1 Brahmanism, which seems to have ultimately wrought its overthrow, set up in its place a revived and developed popular polytheism, on the plane of the most ignorant demotic life. Christianity, in turn, professedly the religion of peace and love, is as a system utterly without influence in suppressing war, or inter-racial malignity, or even social division. The vital curative forces as against those evils are visibly independent of Christianity. And here emerges the element of comfort. On our Naturalistic view of the rise of the religions of the Secondary or Teaching Gods, it is sheer human aspiration that has shaped all the Christs and all their doctrines ; and one of the very causes of the total miscarriage is just that persistence in crediting the human aspiration to Gods and Demigods, and representing as'' superhuman oracles the words of human reason. Unobtrusive men took that course hoping for the best, seeking a short cut to moral influence ; but they erred grievously. So to disguise and denaturalise wise thoughts and humane principles was to keep undeveloped the very reasoning faculty which could best appreciate them. Men taught to bow ethically to a Divine Teacher are not taught ethically to think : any aspiration so evoked in them is factitious, vestural, verbal, or at best emotionally superinduced, not reached by authentic thought and experience. When, haply, the nameless thinkers who in all ages have realised and distilled the wisdom or unwisdom given out as divine are recognised in their work for what they were, and their successors succeed in persuading the many to realise for them selves the humanness of all doctrine, the nations may perchance become capable of working out for themselves better gospels than the best of those which turned to naught in their hands while they held them as revelations from the skies. 1 Cp. Koeppen, Die Beligion des Buddha, i, 565 ; Davids, Buddhism, pp. 210, 246-250. 264 THE TEACHING GOD § 14. The Problem of Manichmus. On the fringes of the historical problem of Buddhism there lies one which is worth at least a passing scrutiny in this connection — that, namely, of the origins of the heretical quasi-Christian sect of Manichseans. The Christian tradition runs that one Scythianos, a Saracen, husband of an Egyptian woman, "introduced the doctrine of Empedocles and Pythagoras into Christianity"; that he had a disciple, " Buddas, formerly named Terebinthus," who travelled in Persia, where he alleged that he had been born of a virgin, and afterwards wrote four books, one Of Mysteries, a second The Gospel, a third The Treasure, and a fourth Heads. While performing some mystic rites, he was hurled down a precipice by a daimon, and killed. A woman at whose house he lodged buried him, took over his property, and bought a boy of seven, named Cubricus. This boy she freed and educated, leaving him the property and books of Buddas-Terebinthus. Cubricus then travelled into Persia, where he took the name of Manes and gave forth the doctrines of Buddas Terebinthus as his own. The king of Persia [not named] , hearing that he worked miracles, sent for him to heal his sick son, and on the child's dying put Manes in prison. Thence he escaped, flying into Mesopotamia, but was traced, captured, and flayed alive by the Persian king's orders, the skin being then stuffed with chaff and hung up before the gate of the city.1 For this narrative, the historian Socrates, writing in the fifth century, gives as his authority " The Disputation [with Manes] of Archelaus bishop of Caschar," a work either unknown to or dis regarded by Eusebius, who in his History briefly vilifies Manes2 without giving any of the above details. In the Chronicon of Eusebius the origin of the sect is placed in the second year of Probus, C.B. -277; but this passage is probably from the hand of Jerome.8 According to Jerome, Archelaus wrote his account of his Disputation with " Manichseus " in Syriac, whence it was translated into Greek. The Greek is lost, and the work, apart from extracts, subsists only in a Latin translation from the Greek, of doubtful age and fidelity,4 probably made after the fifth century. By Photius it is stated that Heraclean, bishop of Chalcedon, in his book against the Manichseans, said the [Greek] Disputation of Archelaus was 1 Socrates, Hist. Eccles. i, 22. 2 Eusebius, Hist. Eccles. vii. 31. 3 So Tillemont and Lardner (Works, ed. 1835, iii, 256, 261). Beausobre (Hist, de Manichie et du Manichiisme, 1734, i, 122) held it to be by Eusebius. 4 Cp. Neander, Gen. Hist, of Christ. Church, Eng. tr. (Bohn) ii, 166, note, as to the evidence for embellishment in the Greek and Latin versions. THE PEOBLEM OF MANICHSEUS 265 written by one Hegemonius — an author not otherwise traceable, and of unknown date. In the Latin narrative, " Manes " is said to have come, after his flight from court, from Arabion, a frontier fortress, to Caschar or Carchar, a town said to be in Eoman Mesopotamia, in the hope of converting an eminent Christian there, named Marcellus, to whom he had sent a letter beginning : " Manichseus apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the saints and virgins with me, send peace to Marcellus." In his train he brought twenty -two [or twelve] youths and virgins. At the request of Marcellus, he debated on religion with bishop Archelaus, by whom he was vanquished ; whereupon he set out to return to Persia. On his way he proposed to debate with a priest at the town of Diodorides ; but Archelaus came to take the priest's place, and again defeated him ; whereupon, fearing to be given up to the Persians by the Christians, he returned to Arabion. At this stage Archelaus introduces in a discourse to the people his history of this Manes," very much to the effect of the recapitulation in Socrates. Among the further details are these : (1) that Scythianus lived " in the time of the Apostles "; (2) that Terebinthus said the name of Buddas had been imposed on him ; (3) that in the mountains he had been brought up by an angel ; (4) that he had been convicted of imposture by a Persian prophet named Parous, and by Labdacus, son1 of Mithra ; (5) that in the disputation he taught concerning the sphere, the two luminaries, the transmigration of souls, and the war of the " Principia " against God ; (6) that " Corbicius " or Corbicus, about the age of sixty, translated the books of Terebinthus ; (7) that he made three chief disciples, Thomas, Addas, and Hermas, of whom he sent the first to Egypt, and the second to Scythia, keeping the third with him ; (8) that the two former returned when he was in prison, and that he sent them to procure for him the books of the Christians, which he then studied. According to the Latin narrative, finally, Manes on his return to Arabion was seized and taken to the Persian king, by whose orders he was flayed, his body being left to the birds, and his skin, filled with air, hung at the city gate. That this narrative is historically worthless is admitted by all critical students since Beausobre ; and recent historians turn from the Christian to the oriental accounts of the heresiarch for a credible view. There "Mani" is described as a painter,2 who set up a 1 Epiphanius, citing the Greek version, has neokoros, " temple officer." 2 Dr. Marcus Dods, in his preface to Mr. Stothert's translation of the writings ot Augustine against the Manichseans, writes: "Hyde tells us that in Persian mam means painter, and that he was so called from his profession." This is a careless repetition of an old blunder of two good scholars, Fabricius and Wolff, exposed by 266 THE TEACHING GOD sectarian movement in opposition to Zoroastrianism, then in renewed favour in Persia, in the reign of Shapur I. Being proceeded against. he fled to Turkestan, where he made disciples and embellished with paintings a Tchighil [Chinese name for a temple or Picturarum Domus] and another temple called Ghalbita. Provisioning in advance a cave which had a spring, he told his disciples he was going to heaven, and would not return for a year, after which time they were to seek him in the cave in question. They then and there found him, whereupon he showed them an illustrated book, called Ergenk, or Estenk, which he said he had brought from heaven : whereafter he had many followers, with whom he returned to Persia at the death of Shapur. The new king, Hormisdas, joined and protected the sect ; and built Mani a castle. The next king, Bahram or Varanes, at first favoured Mani ; but, after getting him to debate with certain Zoroastrian teachers, caused him to be flayed alive, and the skin to be stuffed and hung up as alleged by the Christians.1 Thereupon most of his followers fled to India, and some even to China, those remaining being reduced to slavery. In yet another Mohammedan account we have the details that Mani's mother was named Meis or Utaehin, or Mar Marjam (Sancta Maria) ; and that he was supernaturally born.2 At the behest of an angel he began his public career, with two companions, at the age of twenty-four, on a Sunday, the first day of Nisan, when the sun was in Aries. He travelled for about forty years ; wrote six books, and was raised to Paradise after being slain under Bahram " son of Shapur." Some say he was crucified " in two halves " and so hung up at two gates, afterwards called High-Mani and Low-Mani ; others that he was imprisoned by Shapur and freed by Bahram ; others that he died in prison. "But he was certainly crucified."3 Thus the sole detail which the Mohammedan and Christian writers have in common is that of the execution with its exemplary sequel. Both accounts, it will be observed, make Mani an innovating heretic ; but the Persian treats him as inventing his doctrine, while the Christian makes it traditive. The Persian story, however, Beausobre (ed. 1734, i, 71), from whose work Dr. Dods quotes a passage (cited by him as on i, 79) which occurs only two pages later. Hyde simply wrote : " Manes Persa, in eorum libris dictus Mani pictor, nam talis fuit professione sua" (o. 21, p. 280). 1 D'Herbelot, Bibliotheque Orientate, s.v. Mani, following the Persian historian Khondemir and others. Hyde (De relig. vet. Persar. c. 21), also following Khondemir, gives the detail as to temple-painting_ ; reads "Ertengh" as the name of Mani's book; has no mention of Hormisdas, making " Behrem " reign when Mani returns to Persia ; and states that Mani was crucified. 2 Gustav Fltigel, Mani, seine Lehre und seine Schriften, 18P.2 (trans, from the Pihrist of Muhammad ben Ishak al Nurrak, with commentary), pp. 83-4. Meis is a name of the lotus or pepper-tree. Id. p. 117. s Id. pp. 84, 97, 99-100, 102-3 ; Beausobre, i, 206. THE MANICH^EAN SOLUTION 267 makes him compose and illustrate his book in Turkestan, with the possible implication that such a book was a novelty in Persia, despite Mani's profession. Baur and Neander, accordingly, com bining the Christian clue of the name Buddas with the Persian clue to Turkestan, infer that in that territory Mani acquired a knowledge of Buddhism.1 To this solution, however, there are several objections. In the first place, there are in Manichseism only shadowy analogies to Buddhism ; and in the second, the name Buddas is plausibly interpreted as being merely a Greek corruption of Butm or Budm, the Chaldaic name of the terebinth tree — a simple translation of Terebinthus.2 On the other hand, Eitter has conjectured that " Terebinthus " may be a corruption of Buddha's title " Tere Hintu," Lord of the Hindus. Finally, it has to be noted that Herodotus repeatedly mentions a people called the Budini," among whom were settled the Neuri, who " seem to be magicians "; so that " Buddas " might be a reminiscence of their repute. We have thus a pleasing variety of choices ! § 15. The Manichcean Solution. Seeking for a solution, we may assume that whatever tradition the Christians had concerning Manes they got from the east ; and it is conceivable that from the datum of Turkestan they evolved the ideas of " Scythianus " and " Buddas," with or without the help of the knowledge that "Budh" might stand for "Terebinthus" in Chaldea.4 But the Persian tradition in itself has little weight, being merely a way of saying that Mani's doctrine had associations with other lands. On the face of the story, he was heretical before he left Persia ; and the medley of theosophic doctrines associated with Manichseism can be traced on the one hand to the general storehouse of Babylonian lore, whence came the lore of Christian Gnosticism, and on the other hand to Mazdeism. Such an amalgamation could very well take place on the frontiers of the Persian and Eoman empires, early in the Christian era. But it has to be asked how and why Manichseism, which at so many points resembles the Gnostic systems so-called, should have held its ground as a cult while they were suppressed. Its Jesus and Christ were as far as theirs from conforming to the doctrines of the Church, and it was furiously 1 Neander, as cited, ii, 170, regards the cave in Turkestan as a "Buddhist grotto." 2 Beausobre, i, 54-55 ; Hyde and Bochart as there cited ; Neander, as cited, p. 166, note. 3 Herod, iv, 105-9. 4 Beausobre decides (i, 191-4) that the Christian story of the debate at Carchar or Caschar in Boman Mesopotamia is an error founded on a real debate at Cascar in Turkestan, where there was a Christian church and bishop, whereas there was no Caschar in Boman Mesopotamia, and the only other Cascar was in the heart of the Persian empire. But the whole story is unhistorical. 268 THE TEACHING GOD persecuted for centuries. The explanation apparently lies in the element of cultus, the exaltation of the Founder. Was this then a case in which an abnormal Teacher really founded a religion by his doctrine and the force of his personality ? In order to form an opinion we have first to note two outstanding features of Manichseism — the doctrine that Manichseus was the Paraclete "; and the fact that his quasi-erucifixion was devoutly commemorated by his devotees in the Bema festival at the season of the Christian Easter.1 Concerning the first datum, the most significant consideration is that the equivalence of the names Mani or Manes and Manichseus is to be explained only on Usher's theory that they are both variants of an eastern name equivalent to the Hebrew name Menahem, which has in part the same meaning as Paraclete.2 Seeing that Manes is declared to have called himself the Paraclete promised in the Christian gospel, the question arises whether he was in Syria called Menahem = Manichaios on this account, or whether Mani was for Persians, as was Manes or Mane for Greeks and Eomans, a passable equivalent for Menahem, in which the third consonant was a guttural. And seeing that the same name is Grsecised as Manaen in the book of Acts, this appears to be the fact. Now, the name Menahem, being framed from the root nahem, often translated in the Septuagint by /ievovoeo) strictly signifies only "the comforter," and has not in Hebrew the various senses of advocate, mediator, messenger, and intercessor, conveyed by parakUtos ; but there are some reasons for holding that in post- Biblical use it may have had a similar significance with the Greek term. In particular, we find it in late Judaic lore practically identi fied with the title of Messiah, the Messiah ben David being called the Menakhem ben Ammiel, while the Messiah ben Joseph is named Nehemia ben Uziel.3 The Talmud brings the identification in close touch with Jesuism. "E. Joshua ben Levi saith, His name is tsemach, 'A Branch'" [Zech. iii, 8. Tsemach, it will be remem bered = Netzer] . " E. Juda Bar Aibu saith, His name is Menahem."4 Jesus, it will be remembered, becomes the parakUtos in the sense of i Augustine declares that while he was a Manichsean he found the Christian paschal feast languidly celebrated, with no fasting or special ceremony, while "great honour was paid to the Bema, which was held during pascha " (De Epist. Fundamenti, c. 8). 2 Annates, T. 1, an. 3032, p.m. 82, cited by Beausobre, i, 71. Usher was led to his conjecture by noticing that Sulpicius Severus gives Mane as equivalent to Menahem (2 Kings, xv, 14, 16). f Bousset, The Antichrist Legend, Eng. tr. p. 108, following Jellinek and Wttnsche; Spiegel, Avesta, i . (1852), Einleit. p. 35, citing Abqat-Bocel and Bertholdt. Spiegel reads Nehemia ben Chosiel. Cp. Eeichardt, Belation of the Jewish Christians to the Jews, 1004, p. Otf. 4 Lightfoot on Matt, i, 2, and ii, l, ed. 1859, i, 10. Lightfoot interprets Menahem here as= parakletos, the comforter." THE MANICH^AN SOLUTION 269 an intercessor, being yet at the same time an atonement.1 And if there is reason to refer the doctrine of the two Messiahs to an extra- Judaic source, a similar surmise is permissible as to the two Menahems.3 In this connection we have next to note, as did Baur long ago, that the story of Mani's concealment in the cave is a strikingly close parallel to the old story in Herodotus concerning the reputed Thracian God Zalmoxis or Zamolxis, of whom " some think that he is the same with Gebelezeis." " Every fifth year they despatch one of themselves, taken by lot, to Zalmoxis, with orders to let him know on each occasion what they want. Their mode of sending him is this. Some of them are appointed to hold three javelins ; while others, having taken up the man by the hands and feet, swing him round, and throw him into the air upon the points. If he should die, being transfixed, they think the God is propitious to them ; if he should not die, they blame the messenger himself, saying that he is a bad man ; and having blamed him they despatch another."5 Gebelezeis may be the Babylonian Fire-God Gibil, identified with Nusku. In that case the sacrifice to him of a messenger is one more instance of sacrificing the God to himself, as Gibil-Nusku was the messenger of all the Gods.6 According to the Greeks of the Hellespont and Pontus, Zalmoxis was a man who had been a slave, at Samos, to Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, then was freed, became rich, and retired to his own country, Thrace, where he taught the doctrine of immortality. While teaching this in a dwelling he caused to be built, "he in the meantime had an under ground dwelling made, and when the building was finished he vanished from among the Thracians ; and having gone down to the underground dwelling he abode there three years." In the fourth year he reappeared to the Thracians, who had deemed him dead, and thus his teaching became credible to them.' The good Herodotus, "neither disbelieving nor entirely believing " the legend, was "of opinion that this Zalmoxis lived many years before Pythagoras "; and we in turn, seeing in the story of the three years' stay under - 1 1 John, ii, 1. 2 Bousset, p. 104. 8 Spiegel (as cited) pronounces that " die Eschatologie der spateren Juden hat nun mit der persischen die auffallendsten Aehnlichkeiten," and cites the lore under notice as a parallel to the Persian " lore of the last things." When we note that in the Judaic writings in question the Messiah ben Joseph (=Nehemia ben Uziel) is slain, that his Boul is carried to heaven by an angel, and that after a time of trial the Messiah ben David appears in triumph with Elias, we have a fairly decisive light on the doctrine that "the Messiah must needs suffer." 4 Das manichdische Beligionssystem, pp. 455-6. 6 Herodotus, iv, 94. 6 Jastrow, Belig. of Bab. and Ass. p. 279. 7 Herod, iv, 95. 270 THE TEACHING GOD ground a remote form of the myth of the God-man's three days in the grave, pronounce that the legends of the freed slave Mani and his concealment in the cave are of similar antiquity.1 He is infer- ribly the Menahem or messenger of the cult of the Thracian Getse ; and in another " Scythian " record we have a clue to the legend of his death, as well as to the myth of " Scythianus." The flaying of slain enemies was a Scythian usage ; and " many, having flayed men whole, and stretched the skin on wood, carry it about on horse back."2 As with the enemy, so with the "messenger,"3 whose function is a recognised one in barbaric sacrifice. At the death of a king, they strangled and buried one of his concubines, a cup bearer, a cook, a groom, a page, a courier, and horses, " and firstlings of everything else." A year later they strangled fifty of his young men-servants and fifty of the finest horses, and, having disembowelled them, stuffed them with chaff and sewed them up. The bodies of the horses were then transfixed lengthwise with beams and placed in the curves of half- wheels to support them ; the bodies of the fifty young men were similarly transfixed and mounted on the horses ; and the whole ghastly cavalcade was placed around the "high-place" made over the king's grave.4 An evolution of such funerary and honorific sacrifices into sacrifices to the Gods is in the normal way of religious history. In modern Dahome, again, it was de rigueur that every occurrence at court should be reported to the spirit of the king's father by a male or female messenger, who was commonly though not always sacrificed.5 The Thracian Getse, who carried on the cult of Zalmoxis and the ritually slain messenger, were subdued by Darius, and embodied in his empire,6 with other Scythian tribes ; and in that vast aggregate their sacrificial rites had the usual chance of being adopted by their conquerors — if indeed they were not already associated with the worship of Gibil-Nusku the Babylonian Fire- God, and so known to the Persian fire-worshippers. And, whether or not by way of such an adoption, we find that after the death of the captive emperor Valerian his skin was dyed red and stuffed with straw, and was so preserved for centuries in the chief temple of 1 In Arab tradition, Salih, the pre-Abrahamic " messenger" of Allah, is born in a cave, and later sleeps in one for twenty years. Weil, The Biblical Legends of the Mussulmans, Eng. tr. 1846, pp. 38-40. 2 Herod, iv, 64. 3 See above, p. 110, note, as to this principle in the human sacrifices of the Khonds. 4 Herod, iv, 71-72. 6 Burton, A Mission to Gelele, 1864, ii, 24. The sparing of some would seem to be an attempt to reduce the rite to a conventional form ; but Burton estimated an annual slaughter of some 500 "messengers." 6 Herod, iv, 96. THE MANICH^EAN SOLUTION 271 Persia1 — a course strongly suggestive of religious symbolism. By certain Arab tribes, who worshipped the star Mars, a warrior in blood-stained garments was annually sacrificed by being thrown into a pit ; and the God was worshipped in a temple of red colour2 — a kindred conception. Such a proceeding as the Persian, in fact, would have been impossible in a temple without religious precedent ; and in the sacrificial practices of the pre-Christian Mexicans, which we find so many reasons for tracing back to an ancient Asiatic centre,3 we find clear duplicates of both details of the quasi-sacrifice of Valerian, together with the messenger-sacrifices of the Khonds and Getse. On the one hand it is recorded that the Mexican "knights of the sun" on a certain day sacrificed to the Sun a human victim whom they " smeared all over with some red sub stance They sent him to the Sun with the message that his Knights remained at his service, and gave him infinite thanks for the great favours bestowed on them in the wars."4 So, again, in the sacrifice to Xiuhteuetli the Fire-God in the tenth month the victims were painted red.5 On the other hand, in a great annual festival held on the last day of the first month, in which a hundred slaves were sacrificed, some were flayed, and their skins were worn in a religious dance by leading devotees, among them being the king. Finally the bodies were sacramentally eaten, and the skins, " filled with cotton-wool, or straw," were " hung in the temple and king's palace for a memorial." The stuffed skin of the victim, then, was sacrosanct,7 and that which had been worn by the king was doubtless specially so, representing as it did at once the deified victim and the monarch. When the king took a captive in war with his own hands, the latter was specially regarded as the representative of the sun, and was clothed with the Sun-God's royal insignia.8 As for the red-painting of the messenger sent to the Sun, 1 Gibbon, ch. 10, Bohn ed. i, 340-1; Pseudo-Lactantius, De mortibus persecutorum, c. 5, 2 Kalisch, Comm. on Leviticus, i, 326, citing Norberg, Lexidion Codicis Nasaraei, p. 107, and Gesenius, Jesaia, ii, 345. Among the Maoris, red paint played a part whereve. possible in religious usages : " their idols, Pataka, sacred stages for the dead, and for offerings or sacrifices, Urupa graves, chiefs' houses, and war canoes, were all thus painted. The way of rendering anything tapu was by making it red." Bev. E. Taylorr Te Ika a Maui, 1870, p. 209. Cp. p. 210. 3 See below, Part IV, § 1. 4 Duran, Historia de las Indias de Nueva Espana, cited in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology, ii, 21, col. 1. s Clavigero, Hist, of Mexico, Eng. tr. 2nd ed. B. vi. c. 34 (i, 306-7). 6 Gomara, La Historia General de las Indias, ed. in Historiadores primitivos de Indias, vol. i (1852), p. 444, col. 2 ; Eng. tr. ed. 1596, pp. 393-4. Cp. Bancroft, Native Baces of the Pacific States, iii, 359 (following Sahagun, Hist. Gen. t. i, 1. 2) for another rite of hanging up a victim's skin in the form of a cross, where stuffing seems to be implied. 7 In Mexico all the skins taken from victims seem to have been so in some degree. The second month was specially named from the " skinning of men," and in the third the skins which had been taken were carried to a smaller temple within the enclosure of the greater, and there solemnly deposited in a cave. Clavigero, as cited, p. 298. 8 J. G. Mtiller, Amerik. Urrelig. p. 635. 272 THE TEACHING GOD that in turn was presumably a special symbolical identification of the victim with the God,1 as in the peculiar Peruvian sacrifice of a shorn sheep "in a red waistcoat " to the Sun-God at Cuzco ; and the final inference is that the dead or slain body of the captive emperor Valerian was made to figure as a sacrificial special Messenger sent by the Persian king to the (messenger) Sun-God, and dedicated to that deity. That the legendary "crucifixion" of "Manichseus" was a myth derived from such a sacrifice is the more probable in view of the evolution of the Christian mystery-drama from an analogous rite. Clemens Alexandrinus, following another authority than Herodotus, tells how " a barbarous nation, not cumbered with philosophy, select, it is said, annually an ambassador to the hero Zamolxis," choosing one held to be of special virtue. The usage would thus seem to have made headway after the time of Herodotus. Clemens, too, identifies with Zoroaster that Er son of Armenius who in Plato figures as "the messenger from the other world,"6 having . gone thither in a death-swoon ; a suggestion that at least the Persians now connected the doctrine of immortality with some conception or usage resembling that of the Getse; and Zoroaster, in turn, was mythically associated with a cave containing flowers and fountains, the whole symbolical of the world, and further associated with resur rection in the mysteries.' Finally, the Manichseans' annual cele bration of the Bema, their name for the rite commemorative of the death of Manichseus, carries with it no explanation ; and must be taken as the title of some Grseco- Oriental mystery -ritual. The word signifies " platform," referring not to the ordinary Bema of the Christian churches, wherein stood the altar, but to the covered platform of five steps prepared by the Manichsean devotees on the anniversary of the Founder's death ;8 but it is not accounted for by any item in the legendary biography, where no such platform is mentioned. Upon the platform described by Augustine something must have been represented or enacted ; and as he appears never to have been one of the electi, but only an auditor or catechumen, he would be, as the Manichseans declared, unacquainted with the special mysteries of the system. The "five steps" point to a symbol of the proto- 1 See above, pp. 112, 114, as to the practice of the Khonds. 2 Purchas his Pilgrimes (following Acosta), ed. 1906, xv, 329. Compare the curious parallel in the recent practice of the Khonds, noted above, p. 117. 8 Above, Part II, ch. i. 4 Stromata, iv, 8. 6 Stromata, v, 14. 6 Republic, x, p. 619. 7 Porphyry, De antro nympharum, c. 6. See below, Part III, § 7. 8 Augustine, as before cited. 9 Beausobre, i, 227-8 ; Neander, ii, 193; Augustine, Contra Fortunatum, lib. i, app. THE MANICHiEAN SOLUTION 273 Chaldean high-place or temple-pyramid and altar of sacrifice, often of five stages ; 1 and the mystery was in all likelihood akin to the early mystery-drama of the Christian crucifixion. The apparent identification of the birthday of Manichseus, in the late Mohammedan account, with the death-day in the known -cultus ;2 and further the symbolism of his public appearance " with two others," suggest a mystic scene analogous to the triple crucifixion. In any case the graded or terraced pyramid, which was at once the norm of a sacri ficial altar3 and the norm of the temples of Babylonia, Mexico, and the South Sea Islands, was also the norm of regal tombs, as instanced by that of Cyrus, still extant.4 The critical presumption, then, is that the flayed and stuffed ManichaBus is one more figure Evemerised out of a rite of annual sacrifice ; and that the Manichsean cult is no more the creation of a man named Manes than is the Buddhist the creation of one Buddha, or the Christian of one Jesus called the Christ. It is a syncretism on the lines of those other cults, borrowing ideas from at least three theosophic sources ; combining a nominal Christism with a modified Mithraism ;5 and assimilating both, in the doctrine that "Jesus hangs on every tree," to the esoteric side of the cult of Dionysos.6 The works ascribed to Mani, so far as known, have every mark of being late concoctions, on Gnostic lines, framed for purposes of proselytism in the Christian sphere, each purporting to be written by "Manichseus, an apostle of Jesus Christ,"' in the manner of the Christian epistles. The " Epistle to the Virgin Menoch," of which fragments are preserved by Augustine in the Opus Imperfectum, suggests anew the special signification of the title Manichseus. As for the Erteng or Erzeng, specially associated in Persia with the name of Mani, the title, it appears, simply means an illustrated book,8 and such a book is no more to be supposed primordial in the cult than the epistles. The success of the cult, in fine, was attained very much as was that of Christism. Its promoters, early recognising the vital importance of organisation, created a system of twelve chief apostles or magistri, with a leader, representing the Founder, and seventy- 1 See above, p. 182, note. Compare the modified "high-place and altar" at Petra, reproduced by Dr. Curtiss, Primitive Semitic Religion To-day, 1902, p. 236 ; and see below, Part III, § 4, and again Part IV, § 1, as to tbe Mexican and other analogues. 2 The same coincidence occurs in the legendary life of Moses, his birthday and death- day falling ahke on the 7th Adar. Hamburger, Beal-Encyc. filr Bibel und Talmud, Suppl. Bd. ii to Abth. i and ii, s.v. Adar. 8 See Dr. Frazer's Lectures on the History of the Early Kingship, 1905, p. 295, as to the place of the "three or four terraces" at which was celebrated the great sacrifice of men at Calicut.4 See woodcut in Smith's Smaller History of Greece. 6 Below, Part III, § 12. 6 Augustine, Contra Faustum, xx, 1, 11. 7 Id. xiii, 4. 8 Beausobre, i, 190, and note. T 274 THE TEACHING GOD two bishops,1 here copying actual Judaism rather than Christian tradition;2 and, despite its discouragement of marriage and pro creation, it survived centuries of murderous persecution in the eastern empire ; finally passing on to the west, through the later sects affected by its tradition, the germs of a new heresy in the Middle Ages. Like the crucified Christ, as we have seen reason to think, its Founder was an imaginary being ; and so it outlasted the tough sects of Marcion and Montanus, of which the latter was " all but victorious " against orthodoxy. Montanus, says one record, claimed to be inspired by the Paraclete ; and his movement, being organised on ecclesiastical lines, went far, beginning in Phrygia, where, as in Persia, the doctrine of a Paraclete was probably pre- Christian.3 That Montanus in turn was an imaginary personage is plausibly argued by Schwegler ; 4 but though some of the adherents of the sect seem to have tended to make of him the Paraclete,5 it appears to have been a fanatical movement founded on no particular personality, being more commonly named Phrygian than Montanist, from its place of origin, and offering no analogies to Manichseism save in respect of a general asceticism. Being rather a special development of tendencies already present in the Christian movement than a new creed, it had less lasting power than the other, though its vogue and duration were sufficient to prove how much of what passes for a new religious development special to Christianity was but the exploitation of elements of ecstatic and ascetic fanaticism abundantly present in the old pagan environment, of which Phrygia was a typical part.6 § 16. The Case of Apollonius of Tyana. As regards the historical argument it may be well, finally, to anticipate an objection which may be grounded on the admission that Apollonius of Tyana, who has been plausibly described as a Pagan Christ,7 was really a historic personage, though his life is clothed upon with myth from birth to death. Here, it may be 1 Augustine, De Haeres. c. 32. 2 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp 347. 3 " The Paraclete was at this time (Mani's) expected by the Persians as well as by the Christians" (Spiegel, Avesta, Einleit. p. 30). u 4 Der Montanismus in die christliche Kirche, 1841 ; Das nachapostolische Zeitalter, 1846. All that can be declared with certainty about Montanus is that he existed," says an orthodox investigator (De Soyres, Montanism and the Primitive Church, 1878, p. 31). 5 Augustine, De Heres. c. 26. 6 As Montanus began to teach about 130, and the movement seems to have been on foot before him, it may even belong to the first century. Cp. De Soyres, pp. 26-27. It certainly existed in the first half of the second. 7 A. Seville, Apollonius of Tyana, the Pagan Christ of the Third Century, Eng. tr. 1866. THE CASE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 275 argued, was a real man, who had lived in the first century of the Christian era, represented in the third as born under supernatural circumstances, working miracles, making disciples and converts by his teaching in Europe and Asia, and finally ascending to heaven. If these prodigies could be told of an actual man, it may be asked, why may not Jesus be actual, of whom similar prodigies are told ? The answer is, as aforesaid, that the ascription of prodigies to any ancient personage is not in itself a disproof of his historicity ; but that the historical evidence in each case is to be taken on its total merits. It is at bottom the same mythopoeic bias that rings with myth the mere name of a phantom God or Demi-God and the slightly known life of a remarkable man ; and the task of criticism is to distinguish cases by impartial tests. We hold Charlemagne and Theodoric and Virgil for historical, despite the myths connected with them in the Middle Ages. The case of Apollonius belongs broadly to the same class, as perhaps does that of Solomon. It is needless here to remark that the abundant attribution of miracles to Apollonius soon after his own day proves the valueless- ness of miracle stories as certificates of divinity : these pages are written for students who have put aside the belief in miracles ; and when Christian Fathers are found, in the case of Apollonius, attri buting to demons the pagan prodigies which they do not deny to have occurred, we have merely to note how absolute was the credulity of the time in regard to any story of strange happenings. They, it is clear, never thought of testing as to whether Apollonius was a real person : they took it for granted that the name of a person said to have existed stood for a real person. Are we, then, entitled to follow their example ? The answer is that in the case of Apollonius we have no reason for suspecting invention, save as regards the details of the biography recast for us by Philostratus in the third century. There even the " credible " data are uncertain. But it is • likely enough that he was, as there represented, a devout Pytha gorean, a vegetarian, an ascetic, a student of medicine and astrology, a universalist in his creed, and a believer in immortality. And he may conceivably have travelled to India, though the details offered us are naught.2 As usual, indeed, there lacks contemporary testimony, apart from that preserved in Philostratus. The Life makes Apollonius die about the reign of Nerva (96-98 C.B.) ; and our first incidental ' Cp. Jean Eeville, La Beligion a Borne sous les Siveres, pp. 212-213. 2 An excellent summary of Philostratus, with extracts from the letters, is given in Mr. Thomas Whittaker's monograph, in Apollonius of Tyana and Other Essays, 1906. 276 THE TEACHING GOD traces of his fame are in Dio Cassius,1 where he is mentioned as a miraculous seer, and in Origen's reply to Celsus, where one Moiragenes (mentioned by Philostratus) is cited as referring to the accounts of magical feats in the memoirs of Apollonius, and observing that some philosophers of note had been convinced by them. These references belong to the very period of the production of the Life by Philostratus, so that there is no trace of any impres sion previously made by the memoirs of Damis and Maximus of JEgse, declared to be used by him. Still, we have no reason for doubting that there was an Apollonius of Tyana, who made an impression in his own day as a wandering teacher, and perhaps as a sorcerer, and whose memory was preserved by statues in several towns, as well as by one or two memoirs, one of them written by his credulous or mendacious disciple, Damis. Of the large number of letters preserved as his, some of them remarkable for their terse force, it is impossible to be sure that they are genuine, though they may very well be so. The reasons for not doubting on the main point are (l) that there was no cause to be served by fabrication ; and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a known name as a nucleus for a mass of marvels and teachings than to build it up, as the phrase goes about the cannon, " round a hole." The difference between such a case and those of Jesuism and Buddhism is obvious. In those cases, there was a cultus and an organisation to be accounted for, and a biography of the Founder had to be forthcoming. In the case of Apollonius, despite the string of marvels attached to his name, there was no cultus. Posterity was interested in him as it was in Pythagoras or Plato ; and Philostratus undertook the recasting of the Life in literary form at the command of the empress Julia Domna, a great eclectic. Even if, as has been so often argued, from Huet and Cudworth to Baur and A. Eeville,3 there was an original intention to set-off Apollonius against Jesus, we should not have ground to doubt that a teaching Apollonius had flourished in the first century : rather the presumption would be that the pagans would seek for some famous wonderworker whose life they could' manipulate. But there is really no reason to suppose that Philostratus, much less Damis, had the gospels before him, though he may well have 1 Hist. Bom. lvii, ad. fin. 2 Contra Celsum, vi, 41. 3 Cudworth, Intellectual System, Harrison's ed. i, 437 ; Huet, Demonstratio Evangelica, Prop, ix, c. 147, § 3 ; Baur, Apollonius von Tyana und Christus, 1832, rep. in Drei Abhand- lungen zur Geschichte der alten Philosophie und ihres Verhtiltnisses zum Christenthum, ' 1876 ; A. Eeville, Apollonius of Tyana, Eng. tr. pp. 57-69. THE CASE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 277 heard of their story. A close comparison of the story of the raising of Jairus' daughter with the story in Philostratus, to which it is so closely parallel, gives rather reason to believe that the gospels copied the pagan narrative, the gospel story being left unmentioned by Arnobius and Lactantius in lists in which they ought to have given it had they known and accepted it.1 The story, however, was probably told of other thaumaturgs before Apollonius ; and in regard to the series of often strained parallels drawn by Baur, as by Huet, it may confidently be said that, instead of their exhibiting any calculated attempt to outdo or cap the gospel narratives, they stand for the general taste of the time in thaumaturgy. Apollonius, like Jesus, casts out devils and heals the sick ; and if the Life were a parody of the gospel we should expect him to give sight to the blind. This, however, is not the case ; and on the other hand the gospel story of the healing of two blind men is certainly a duplicate of a pagan record.2 To say, as does Baur, that the casting-out of devils in the Apollonian legend is necessarily an echo of the gospels, on the score that the Greek and Eoman literatures at that time show no traces of the idea,3 is to make the arbitrary assumption that the supersti tions of Syria could enter the West only by Judaic or Christian channels. The " Metamorphoses " of Apuleius, to say nothing of those of Ovid, might serve to remind us that the empire imbibed the diablerie of the East at every pore ; and the wizardry of Apollonius includes many eastern items of which the gospels show no trace. As for the annunciation of the birth of Apollonius by Proteus, and the manner of its happening, they conform alike to Egyptian myths and to that told concerning the birth of Plato.4 It is, in fact, the Christian myth that draws upon the common store of Greek and Syrian myth, not the Apollonian legend that borrows from the Christian. The descent of Apollonius to Hades, again, seems to have been alleged, after common Graeco-Asiatic precedent, before the same myth became part of the Christian dogmatic code ; and to say that his final disappearance without dying and his apparition afterwards must have been motived by the story of Christ's appear ing to Saul5 is once more to ignore the whole lesson of comparative hierology. Baur goes so far as to argue6 that when Philostratus says the disciples of Apollonius in Greece were called Apollonians, 1 Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 334-5. 2 Id. p. 332. 8 Drei Abhandlungen. p. 139. A. Eeville (work cited, pp. 61-2) implicitly follows Baur. J. Eeville (La Beligion a Borne, pp. 230-4) discusses and dismisses the parody theory. Critics in general now do so likewise. ¦ 4 Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 305-6. , 6 Baur, as cited, p. 148. 6 Id. p. 148, note. 278 THE TEACHING GOD he must be merely framing a parallel to the title of the Christians, because there is now no knowledge of a sect of Apollonians. It was very hard, two generations ago, for even a great scholar to realise the broadest laws of religious evolution. Yet Lardner had shown with reasonable force, in his primitive fashion, nearly a century before, that the model before Philostratus, if there be any, is not Jesus but Pythagoras ; x and his friend De la Eoche had rightly and tersely summed up the whole case in the words : " Philostratus said nothing more in the Life of Apollonius than he would have said if there had been no Christians in the world."2 For once, Baur had not fully grappled with the literature of his subject. His superiority to his Christian predecessors as a critic of Apollonius comes out chiefly in his gravely candid recognition of the high moral purpose set forth in all the discourses ascribed to the hero in the Life. The habit of pitting Apollonius against Jesus really arose about a century after Philostratus, when the pagan intelligence first began to feel itself menaced by the new creed. Hierocles set the fashion in his Philalethes Logos, to which Eusebius and Lactantius3 replied in the normal patristic manner. A hundred years later still, in the time of Augustine, the setting of the miracles of Apollonius and Apuleius against those of Jesus was a common line of pagan argument,6 met in the usual way, neither side convincing the other. If there was any gain, it was on the pagan side ; for while Chrysostom7 triumphs over the failure of the Apollonian movement, such a classically cultured Christian bishop as Sidonius Apollinaris acclaims the personal virtues and philosophic teaching of the pagan sage. The pagans on their part had taken him up all round. In the day of Philostratus, Alexander Severus had eclectically placed a bust of Apollonius, with others of Abraham, Jesus, and Orpheus, in his private chapel or oratory ;9 and later we find Eunapius,10 Ammianus Marcellinus,11 Vopiscus,12 and Apuleius,18 from their different stand- 1 Works, ed. 1835, vi, 489 sa. 2 Cited by Lardner. Cp. also his citation from De la Boche's New Memoirs of Litera ture (1725), i, 99. In an Appendix to his 39th chapter (Works, vii, 508), Lardner cites a passage from Bishop Parker, published in 1681, rejecting Huet's thesis that Philostratus had copied the gospels. 3 Zeller notes in his ed. of the Drei Abhandlungen (p. 201, note) that Baur is wrong in his statement that Porphyry and Jamblichus never mention Apollonius. Lardner had cited their references. Dr. A. Eeville follows Baur (p. 80). 4 Drei Abhandlungen, p. 45, sq. 5 Eusebius, Contra Hieroclem; Lactantius, Div. Inst, v, 2, 3. 6 Marcellinus, in Ep, Augustin. 136 (Migne, Patrol. Cursus Compl. T. 33). 7 Adv. Judeos, Orat. v, 3. 8 Epist. 1. viii, c. 3. The bishop writes of him to a correspondent as noster Tyaneus. 9 Lampridius, Vit. Alex. Sev. xxix. 10 Prooemium in Vit. Sophistarum. n L. xxi, c. 14, ad init. 12 Vit. Aureliani, xxiv. is Apologia, ad fin. THE CASE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA 279 points treating the Tyanean as a demigod, or divinely inspired, or a supreme Mage. It was not, of course, the high ethic and philosophy of the Apollonian discourses that they stressed as against the Christians. Such a saying as " I have found my reward in the amendment of men " was not a word to conjure with in popular debate. It was the miracles, the prodigies, the fables, that were for ancient readers the warrant of the sage's greatness. To-day we cannot tell any more than they to what extent the remarkable discourses which Philostratus professes to copy from Damis stand for any genuine utterances or writings of Apollonius:2 we can be satisfied of the historicity of the man without knowing how far to trust the accounts of his travels and teaching. But we know that if Apollonius had uttered every wise or eloquent teaching put in his mouth by his biographers he could not thereby have founded such a cult as the Christians conducted on the basis of an entirely fictitious biography. Lactantius, in the patristic style, asks Hierocles : " Why there fore, 0 mad head, doth none worship Apollonius for a God, unless perchance thou alone, worthy indeed of that God, with whom the true God will punish thee to all eternity?"8 We to-day can give the answer of hierology. No man was ever perdurably deified for his wisdom, or even for his supposed miracles : religions grow up around rites offered immemorially to unknown powers, or round ways of Hfe set up by generations of nameless teachers, all of which abstractions alike take form as named Gods or Sons of Gods, who in one age are the givers of civilisation, agriculture, knowledge, crafts, arts, rites, and laws, and in another of oracles, of revelations, of doctrines and discourses, of their own lives as redeemers. But the really slain man, the true human sacrifice, though he be counted by millions, is not deified : not he, but an abstraction shaped out of the mystic drama and sacrament which have followed on ages of sacrifices and sacraments of human flesh ; and neither is the true teacher or thinker deified : not he, but a superposed abstraction distilled from many teachings, wise or unwise, put by many generations in the mouth of the mythical one. For it is by such modes alone that men have been able to create the economic bases without which no ' Philostratus, Vit. Apollon. viii, 7, 7. Jnil08tratus (viii, 6), in introducing the Apology before Domitian, remarks that it has been criticised for lack of elegance and sublimity of style ; but this is no security for "8 genuineness. "He [Philostratus] puts into the mouth of Apollonius aesthetic theories which he can scarcely have meant us to believe were not his own " (T. Whittaker, Apol lonius of Tyana, as cited, p. 2). 8 Div. Inst., v, 3. 280 THE TEACHING GOD religion can live. Apollonius, credited with many miracles and wondrous wisdom, like Pythagoras long before him, could become a God only by way of a passing figure of speech, precisely because he had really lived and taught. Given the culture-stage in which many crave the Teaching God, while the multitude still crave the Sacrificed God, a cult which shall combine these in one Deity, still retaining the cosmic Creator God and adding the attractive appeal of the Mother Goddess, has obviously a maximum chance of survival. And such a religion, we have seen reason to conclude, cannot be founded on concrete personages : it must be developed from personalised abstractions. Such a combination is presented in the Christian cultus. But all such success is finally in terms of political and economic adapta tions ; and the final explanation of non-survivals, accordingly, is to be found in the lack or frustration of such adaptations. It remains to note, then, how systems historically developed from abstractions like the Christian have disappeared in the struggle for existence. Part III. MITHRAISM § 1. Introductory. In the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, supervised by so eminent a scholar and hierologist as the late Professor Eobertson Smith, as against some hundreds of pages on the books of the Bible, there was devoted to the subject of the ancient Persian deity Mithra or Mithras, and his cultus, one column. MLthejwhilej^Mjth^ism was well known to have bgenjlj^^iei. rival J9,,0h4§.tianity.in.jhja.. ancient world. Within the past dozen years there has taken place a great improvement in the sense of proportion among the cultivators of hierology ; and the study of Mithraism, in particular, has been conducted with a zeal and a competence which leave little opening for new contributions. The present survey, first undertaken over twenty years ago, is an attempt to elucidate, in the light of compara tive science, what is likely to remain an obscure problem. When all is said,_ we have_but a fragmgntarx-knowledge of Mithraism. But we do know that it was during some centuries the most widespread of the religious systems of the Eoman empire. That is to say, Mithraism was in point of range the most nearly universal religion of the western world in the early centuries of the Christian era. A" fin fV"". "*¦"***¦*¦" lArrr^ 1 To the early 1 Cp. Tiele, Outlines of the History of the Ancient Religions, Eng. tr. p. 170 ; Gaston Boissier, La Religion Romaine d 'Auguste aux Antonins, i, 395, ii, 417 ; H. Seel, Die Mithra- geheimnisse, Aarau, 1823, p. 214 ; Sainte-Croix, Recherches sur les Mystires du Paganisme, 2e. edit, ii, 123 ; Smith and Cheetham's Diet, of Christ. Antiq., art. Paganism; Beugnot, Hist, de la Destruction du Paganisme, 1835, i, 156-8, 336, ii, 225 ; Windischmann, Mithra, ein Beitrag zur Mytbengeschichte des Orients, in Abhandlungen fiir die Kunde des Morgen- lands, Bd. i, p. 62; E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthwms, 1884, i, 541; Ozanam, History of Civilisation in the Fifth Century, Eng. tr. i, 77 ; Creuzer, Das Mithreumvon Neuenheim bei Heidelberg, 1838, pp. 10, 19 ; Lajard, Recherches sur le culte public et les Mystires de Mithra, 1867, p. 672; Preller, Romische Mythologie, ed. KShler, pp. 758-63; Dill, Roman Society from Nero to Marcus AureUus, 1905, Bk. iv, ch. 6 ; Boscher, Ausfilhrliches Lexikon der grie- chischen und romischen Mythologie, col. 3067, 11. 20-30 ; Prof. Cumont, Textes et monuments figuris relatifs aux mystires de Mithra, 1894-6, passim (partly translated by T. J. McCormack, 1903, under title The Mysteries of Mithra, where see pp. 38-84, and in Open Court, May, June, and July, 1902. where see pp. 303, 305, 306, 310, 340, 347, etc.) ; Quinet, Ginie des Religions, 1. iv, sec. 1 ; Benan, Marc. Aurile, ed. 1882, pp. 576-581 ; Jean Eeville, La Religion a Rome sous les Siveres, 1886, pp. 78, 84-5, 102 ; Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands miter der Herrschaft der RSmer, 1866, 3te Th. pp. 120-121 ; Gardner, Exploratio Evangelica, 1899 ; P. 333 ; Hausrath, Hist, of N.T. Times : Time of the Apostles, Eng. tr. 1895, i, 96-7. 281 282 MITHEAISM Fathers, we shall see, Mithraism was a most serious thorn in the flesh ; and the monumental remains of the Eoman period, in almost all parts of the empire, show its extraordinary extension. In our own country, held by the Eomans for three hundred years at a time when Christianity is supposed to have penetrated the whole imperial world, there have been found no signs whatever of any Eoman profession of the Christian faith ; while there are a number of monuments in honour of Mithra.1 There has been found, for instance, a Mithraic cave2 at Housesteads, in Northumberland, con taining sculptures of Mithra-worship, and an inscription: "To the God, best and greatest, invincible Mithra, Lord of Ages";3 and another at Kichester, with an inscription : "To the God the Sun, the invincible Mithra, the Lord of Ages." Other monuments have been found at Chester, on the line of the Eoman wall, at Cambeck- fort in Cumberland, at Oxford, at York,4 and at London and Man chester.5 And " Mithraic bas-reliefs, cut upon the smoothed faces of rocks, or upon tablets of stone, still abound throughout the former western provinces of the Eoman Empire ; many exist in Germany : still more in France." 6 According to Mr. King, again, " the famous ' Arthur's Oon ' (destroyed in the eighteenth century) upon the Carron, a hemispherical vaulted building of immense blocks of stone, was unmistakeably a Specus Mithrceum, the same in design as Chosroes' magnificent fire-temple at Gazaca." But in other lands the remains of Mithraic shrines are far more numerous : they abound in the Alps, in Southern France, in Eastern Italy, in Dalmatia, in Daeia, in many Mediterranean ports ; and though their distribution is unequal, they signify that the cult went wherever went the legions and the Syrian traders who followed them. And yet, with all this testimony to the vogue of Mithraism in the early Christian centuries, there ensues for a whole era an 1 Wright, The Celt, The Roman, and the Saxon, 4th ed. pp. 327, 353. 2 Such a cave, since discovered at Ostia, is described in the Atheneum, Oct. 30 and Nov. 6, 1886 (ext. rep. in Ancient Calendars and Constellations, by the Hon. Emmeline E. Plunkett, 1903, p. 62). 8 There are a shrine and two altars. The second altar has on its frieze the simple word Deo, the whole inscription running: "To the Sun-God, Mithra, unconquered, eternal." The first was erected in the year 252. See the Newcastle Society of Antiquarians' Guide to the Black Gate, etc., pp. 11-12. 4 Wright, as cited, p. 327; Wellbeloved, Eburacum, 1842, pp. 75, 84; Stukeley, Paleo- graphica Britannica, No. 3, London, 1752. See also the inscriptions to Sol and Mithra in Hubner, Inser. Brit. Lat. 6 See the scholarly and temperate essay of Canon (now Bishop) Hicks, Mithras Worship (rep. from " The Boman Fort at Manchester"), Manch. Univ. Press, 1909. » C. W. King, The Gnostics and their Remains, 2nd ed. p. 136. The statement as to France seems inexact. Cp. Prof. Cumont, Textes et Monuments, passim. Prof. Cumont ascribes the largest share of Mithraic monuments to Germany, noting that they are abundant also in Italy, and fairly plentiful in south-eastern Gaul, but rare in central and western France, and very scanty in Greece. BEGINNINGS OF CULT 283 absolute blank in the knowledge of the matter in Christendom — a thousand years in which the ancient cultus seems a forgotten name in Europe. One modern investigator, M. Lajard,1 thinks that since the time of the Fathers the first in European literature to mention Mithra was Pietro Eiccio (Petrus Crinitus),2 born about 1465, a disciple of Politian ; and no other mention occurs till about the middle of the sixteenth century.3 Such was the ignorance of most scholars, that of three now well-known Mithraic monuments dis covered about that period, not one is attributed to Mithra either by the great antiquarian of the time, Bossi, or by his pupil, Flaminius Vacca. Every one knows the sculptured group nf Mithr.a, slaying the bull, so often engraved, of which we haya a, grind fyra.mplpi in the British Museum. Eossi declared one of these monuments to represent Jupiter, as the bull, carrying off Europa; and Vacca tells how a lion-headed image, now known to represent Kronos- Zervan or the Time- Spirit in the mysteries of Mithra, but then held to represent the devil, was (probably) burned in a limekiln.4 A century later, Leibnitz demonstrated that Ormazd and Ahriman, the Good and Evil Powers of the Persian system to which Mithra belonged, were simply deified heroes ; and later still the historian Mosheim, a man not devoid of judgment, elaborately proved that Mithra had simply been at one time, like Nimrod, a famous hunter, before the Lord or otherwise. Other eighteenth-century scholars discussed the problem more intelligently;6 but even in our own day, when all the extant notices and monuments of Mithra have been carefully collected and studied, vigilant scholars confess that we know very little as to the Mithraic religion. It is somewhat remarkable that this should be so ; and though in the terms of the case we cannot look to find much direct knowledge, we may hope at least to find out why the once popular cultus has fallen into such obscurity. To that end we must see what really is known about it. § 2. Beginnings of Cult. To trace completely the history of the cultus, however, we should have to make an examination not merely of Mithraism proper, but of at least three older systems. No historical principle 1 Introduction A I 'itude du culte de Mithra, 1846, pp. 2-3. . 2 De Honesta Disciplina, v, 14, cited by Lajard. 8 By Smet and Pighi. 4 Cp. Cumont, Textes et Monuments, ii, 196 ; King, pp. 129-130. 6 Mosheim's notes on Cudworth, Intellectual System, Harrison's ed. l, 475. 6 See a list in Fabricius, Bibliographia Antiquaria, ed. 3a, 1760, p. 332 ; and cp. M. J. O. Wolf, Manicheismus ante Manicheos, 1707, pp. 62-7. 7 Havet, Le Christianisme et ses Origines, iii, 402; Cumont, Textes et Monuments, as cited, i, 5-7 ; J. Eeville, La Beligion A Borne sous les Sevires, p. 88. 284 MITHEAISM is better established than this, that all historic religions run into and derive from some other religions, the creeds of all mankind being simply phases of a continuous evolution. So, when we say that Mithraism derives from Persia, we are already implying that it affiliates more distantly to the religions of India and Mesopotamia. Here it must suffice, therefore, to give only the briefest sketch of origins. We trace the cult specifically in the earliest Aryan documents — in the Vedas, in which the deity Mitra or Mithra is one of the prominent figures.1 Seeing that there already he duplicates with other deities, it may be that, to begin with, the name was only a special epithet of the sun,2 the central force in later myth as in our planetary system ; and that it lay with the priests and their royal patrons to determine which Name should be the most popular God, since the whole evolution was one of words. In any case, it is in Aryan Persia that the name of Mithra makes its fortune : in India it passes into the background of the verbal host. In the Eig-Veda it is frequently associated with Varuna and Agni ; and in the Atharva-Veda Mitra is so defined as to make his solar character certain. Of a deity who stands in general for the principle of light, it is there said that " In the evening he becomes Varuna Agni; in the morning he becomes Mitra going forth,"4 an expression which plainly points to the Sun-God. That Mithra was not developed into a pre-eminent Vedie deity is to be proximately explained by the fact that Agni, who as fire-God and light-God had similar attributes, was better suited to the purposes of the highly- specialised priesthood which built up the Vedas. The God of the sacrificial fire was eminently adapted to sacerdotal ends ; and it is in that respect that Agni is oftenest presented. It may have been, indeed, that the Aryan invaders of India had thus early assimilated in the case of Agni a popular pre- Aryan (though not Hindu) worship,6 as they did later with the Hindu cult of Krishna ; while in Persia the Aryan Gods may have had a simpler course of development. On the other hand, it seems probable that the Ahura Mazda 1 " Mitra is greater than the earth and the sky : he supports even all the Gods " (Big Veda, iii, 59, 7-8 ; cited by Max Muller, Hibbert Lectures on Beligion in India, 2nd ed. p. 275). Two of his doubles, Pushan and Savitri, are all-seeing, and leaders of souls to the abode of the blest. (Id.). Mitra is further the eldest of the eight sons of Aditi (Muir, Sanskrit Texts, iv, 14). 2 "Obwohl Mitra urspriinglich ein Sonnengott ist, wird die Sonne zu Mitra-Varunas Auge " (A. Hillebrandt, Vedische Mythologie, Kl. Ausg. 1910, p. 40). 8 Muir, as cited, p. 219. 4 Oldenberg, Die Beligion des Veda, 1894, pp. 190-1, citing Atharva-Veda, xiii, 3, 13 ; Max Muller, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 297. 6 Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 109-110 ; Fischer, Heidenthvm und Offenbarung, 1878, p. 59 ; Justi, Gesch. d. oriental. Vblker im Altertum, pp. 397-8, where fire-worship is traced to the natural "fire-wells" of the East. Such fire was termed "Son of Ahuramazda." BEGINNINGS OF CULT 285 (Ormazd) of the Persians is a variant of the Assyrian God-name Assara Mazas, and at bottom identical with the God Assur or Asshur. On that view it is more likely that the Aryans were influenced by the ancient Mesopotamian cults than vice versa.2 However that may be, though we find the sacramental Vedic beverage the Soma preserved in the Persian cult as the Haoma, that principle did not predominate ; and Mithra, in the character of Sun-God and War-God, grew in popular importance. Of Agni, as a special personification of the sacred fire, there is in the Persian system no other trace. The Iranian documents which present to us what remains of the ancient lore of Mithraism are for the most part contained in the collection called the Zendavesta, a somewhat unfortunate title, since Zend signifies, not, as was formerly supposed, a language, but " a commentary or explanation"; and Avesta (from old Persian dbastd, "the law") is the proper name of the original texts, of which the language somewhat resembles the modern Afghan. The collection is divided into two parts, of which the first is the Avesta properly so-called, containing (1) the Vendidad, a compilation of religious laws and mythical tales ; (2) the Visperad, a set of litanies for the sacrifice; and (3) the Yasna, consisting of other litanies and five hymns or Gathas written in what appears to be an older dialect than the rest. The second part is called the Khorda (Small) Avesta, and contains short prayers for general use — namely, five Gdh, thirty formularies of the Sirozah, three Afrigdn, and six Nydyis. It is usual to include in the Khorda, though they do not strictly belong to it, the Yashts, hymns of praise to the several Izads or lesser deities (who, however, here include Mithra) and some fragments. As to the age of the different portions there is considerable dispute. In the opinion of the late M. James Darmesteter, one of the highest authorities, certain quasi-scientific sections {Nasks) of the Avesta were written as late as the middle of the third century of our era, in imitation of Greek and Sanskrit scientific treatises;3 and the same scholar places the important H6m Yasht late in the second century. Much of the Vendidad, however, is reckoned pre- Alexandrian ; and while M. Darmesteter held the Gathas to be post- Alexandrian, and very late in spirit albeit the oldest texts in the 1 Miss Plunkett, Ancient Calendars and Constellations, 1903, pp. 72 sq., 149 sq. 2 Miss Plunkett argues (p. 75) for Assyrian borrowings from the ancestors of the Medes. May there not have been both an early and a late assimilation ? 3 Introduction to the Zendavesta, 2nd ed. p. xlvi. 286 MITHEAISM Avesta, other students count them among the earliest items of all. Broadly speaking, the religion of the Avesta, commonly called the Mazdean, from the God-name Ahura Mazda, is a highly composite one ; but " there are few instances of foreign elements and concepts so freely borrowed by a religion and so harmoniously blended in the original mould."2 § 3. Zoroastrianism. It is thus difficult to formulate precisely the evolution of Mithraism. If the Gathas are really the oldest parts of the Avesta, the cult of Mithra, though older than the Gathas, was for a time or in one region of Iran rejected or eclipsed, since in those rituals it does not appear. Zoroastrianism and Mithraism were certainly) not originally one, neither did one grow out of the other.8 And here arises the question whether Zarathustra (Zoroaster), so closely associated with the Mithra-eult in the later portions of the Avesta, was a mythical figure or a real reformer who put a more spiritual or philosophic teaching in place of the simpler naturalism of the Vedic period. Mr. L. H. Mills, the learned translator and com mentator of the Gathas, affirms in his introduction the historic reality4 and religious originality of Zarathustra, mainly on the ground that whereas in the later Avesta he is lost in myth, in the Gathas he figures quite simply as a real person.5 From the conclusion thus drawn, some of us must respectfully but firmly dissent. The Gathas, critically considered, do not war rant it ; on the contrary, the ostensibly earliest so clearly present Zarathustra as either an ideal or an official figure that Mr. Mills is driven to try to explain them by the question, " Can there have been a school, or family, of Zarathustrians, religious poets, similar to the Vedic seers?"6 Equally vital is his suggestion that "the 1 This is the view of Mr. L. H. Mills, as it was that of Haug. The latter, however (Essays on the Parsis, 3rd ed. pp. 257-260, 287), leaves his position somewhat obscure, arguing as he does on the one hand that the Gathas are the oldest parts of the Zendavesta, and on the other that they ignore Mithra and other Zendavestan Gods, the sacrifice of the Homa, etc., because Zoroaster did not believe in them. M. Darmesteter (Introd. to the Zendavesta, vol. iv of " Sacred Books of the East " series, 2nd ed. p. lxv) supposes the Gathas to have been written (in a dead language) between 100 B.C. and 100 C.B., and the Vendidad still later, pronouncing the latter a return to an older form of doctrine, how ever. Neither view seems satisfactory. M. Darmesteter argues (pp. xlviii-ix), for instance, (a) that one passage in the Horn Yasht can best be understood as referring to Alexander the Great, (6) that the Yasht is a " coherent whole," and (c) that it is therefore as a whole post-Alexandrian. He thus makes no allowance at this point for redactions or interpolations. 2 Darmesteter, p. lxix. 8 Cp. Justi, Gesch. des alten Persiens, 1878, pp. 68-70 ; Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, 4. 11. 4 So also Justi, as last cited, p. 67, and Haug, as above cited. 6 Vol. iii of the Zendavesta trans.," Sacred Books of the East," vol. xxxi, introd. pp. xxii-xxv. 6 Id. p. 21, note on Yasna, xxviii. ZOEOASTEIANISM 287 special eminence of the Governor of Eagha as needing no ' Zara thustra ' over him, that is, no imperial chief (Yasna xix, 19), may be attributed to the successors of Zarathustra."1 The fact is that the Gathas imply rather an established sacerdotal or quasi-regal functionary than a single notable man when they speak of Zara thustra Spitama.2 Still more unconvincing is the claim made for Zoroastrian doctrine as something primarily abnormal. Mr. Mills first claims that nowhere at their period had there been a human voice, so far as we have any evidence, which uttered thoughts like these "; but immediately afterwards, doubtless realising the impossibility of founding a cult all of a sudden with entirely new ideas, he admits that Zarathustra " was probably only the last visible link in a far extended chain. His system, like those of his predecessors and successors, was a growth. His main conceptions had been surmised, although not spoken before."3 The last clause returns to the arbitrary. There is positively no ground for seeing in the Gathas new ideas by a new man : they have all the air of a gradually evolved ritual. The abnormal depth which Mr. Mills ascribes to them, finally, appears to be illusory. He affirms4 that " the mental heaven and hell with which we are now familiar as the only future states recognised by intelligent people, and thoughts which, in spite of their familiarity, can never lose their importance, are not only used and expressed in the Gathas, but expressed there, so far as we are aware, for the first time." But this claim proceeds on such expres sions as, for the wicked the worst life ; for the holy the best mental state "; and to read in such expressions a negation of places of happiness and of torment is to misread alike the psychology and the language of primitive life. The modern who negates a physical heaven and hell, but still affirms a future-state-of-mind, either evades entirely the fatal problem as to the details of that state or verbally affirms its non-locality. There is no reason whatever to suppose that in ancient Asia men either demurred to the doctrine of places of happiness6 and torment, or sought thus intelligibly to modify them. " Worst life " and " best state of mind " could perfectly well connote for early thinkers bodily states and local habitations. 1 Introd. p. xxviii. Compare the laboured arguments on p. 168, with regard to Yasna xlix, and on p. 141, under xlvi, 13. 2 Cp. the Bundahish, xxiv, 1 ; xxix, 2 (S. B. E. v); and the Mihir'.Yasht (Zendavesta, ii, S. B. E. xxiii), xxix, 115. 8 Introd. cit. pp. xxiii-xxiv. 4 Id. p. xx. 5 Yasna, xxx, 4, p. 30. 6 The heavenly mount, whither all redeemed souls go, is spoken of in the Yasna, xxviii, 5— one of the early Gathas. 288 MITHEAISM We must refuse, then, to let the sympathetic illusions even of scholars force upon us an otherwise unsupported belief in the occurrence of a remarkable personality which of its own sheer moral power wrought a sudden and signal innovation in that most con servative of processes; ancient sacerdotal religion. The religious dualism ascribed to Zarathustra is in all likelihood a natural adaptation by priests of a polytheistic process of thought ;x and it seems far more likely that Zarathustra is an ancient title for a kind of priest-king2 — since both functions appear to go with the name in the early Gathas — than that there was a man so named who invented monotheistic dualism,8 even as Abraham is fabled to have discovered monotheism, and somehow succeeded in imposing his doctrine as a system of ritual and worship on his contemporaries. As Mr. Mills and Haug admit, there is not a single biographical detail on Zarathustra to be found. § 4. Evolution of Mithra. Putting aside as otherwise insoluble the problem of Zoro astrianism," and recognising that that system and the special cult of Mithra were originally separate but probably fused by some conquest,4 we proceed to note that the Mithra-cult, both in this connection and later, underwent an evolution in which the God's status slowly fluctuated, or was readjusted, like that of so many other ancient deities. For a time (and this suggests a Zoroastrian influence) he was graded as the subordinate of Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd). "in the Indo-Iranian religion" [M. Darmesteter writes5] "the Asura of Heaven was often invoked in company with Mithra, the God of the heavenly light ; and he let him share with himself the universal sovereignty. In the Veda they are invoked as a pair (Mitra- Varuna) which enjoys the same powers and rights as Varuna alone, as there is nothing more in Mitra- Varuna than in Varuna alone, Mitra being the light of heaven, that is, the light of Varuna. But Ahura-Mazda could no longer bear an equal, and Mithra [in the Avesta] became one of his 1 In Yasna xlvi, 12, Mr. Mills (p. 141) finds proof that the Zarathustrians had early been joined by a Turanian clan. This would introduce Turanian influences. 2 As to the normal approximations of the offices of priest and king in antiquity compare Jewish history and Greek and Boman sacrificial usages with the historic developments in Egypt (Maspero, Hist, ancienne des peuples de I'orient, 4e edit. p. 288) and Phoenicia (Tiele, Hist. comp. des anciennes religions, Fr. tr. 1882, p. 324). See also Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. i, 7 sq. 8 Haug (Essays on the Parsis, 3rd ed. pp. 300-5) credits him with holding at once by Monotheism and Dualism— one God containing two " principles." This conception might as well be credited to the Vedas. See next section ; and cp. Cox, Mythology of the Aryan Nations, p. 562, and Breal and Maury as there cited. 4 Cp. Prof. Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, 11 ; Haug, as cited, pp. 290-2. 5 The Zendavesta, i, Introd. p. lx-lxi. EVOLUTION OF MITHEA 289 creatures : ' This Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, I have created as worthy of sacrifice, as worthy of glorification, as I, Ahura-Mazda, am myself.'1 But old formulae, no longer under stood, in which Mithra and Ahura, or rather Mithra-Ahura, are invoked in an indivisible unity, dimly remind one that the Creator was formerly a brother to his creature." " He preserved, however, a high situation, both in the concrete and in the abstract mythology. As the God of the heavenly light, the lord of vast luminous space, of the wide pastures above, he became later the God of the Sun, Deo invicto Soli Mithra (in Persian Mihr is the Sun). As light and truth were one and the same thing, viewed with the eyes of the body and of the mind, he becomes the God of truth and faith. He punishes the Mithra-Drug, ' him who lies to Mithra ' (or ' who lies to the contract,' since Mithra as a neuter noun means friendship, agreement, contract ' ) ; he is a judge in hell, in company with Eashnu, 'the true one,' the God of truth, a mere offshoot of Mithra in his moral character."3 The ritual of the Avesta is clear on the subject. " We sacrifice unto Mithra and Ahura, the two great, imperishable, holy Gods ; and unto the stars, and the moon, and the sun, with the trees that yield up baresma" [burned on the altar]. "We sacrifice unto Mithra, the lord of all countries, whom Ahura-Mazda made the most glorious of all the Gods in the world unseen." " So may Mithra and Ahura, the two great Gods, come to us for help. We sacrifice unto the bright, undying, shining, swift-horsed sun."4 And in the teaching associated with Zoroaster we find Mithra extolled by Ahura-Mazda as a beneficent and comforting Spirit. " Happy that man, I think" — -said Ahura-Mazda — "0 Spitama Zarathustra ! for whom a holy priest who is the Word Incarnate, offers up a sacrifice unto Mithra Straight to that man, I think, will Mithra come, to visit his dwelling. When Mithra's boons will eome to him, as he follows God's teaching, and thinks according to God's teaching."0 This, though still ancient, was doubtless a relatively late and high form of the cultus in Persia, since in the Avesta we find Mithra repeatedly invoked as a warlike and formidable deity, a God of battles, swift to assail and slay the enemies of truth and justice — which would normally mean, the enemies of his worshippers. „ ' Mihir Yasht, i, in vol. ii of M. Darmesteter's translation of the Zendavesta (vol. 23 of ' Sacred Books " series). Cp. the Khorshed Nyayis in same vol. p. 351. 2 Cp. West, note to trans, of Dinkard, S. B. E., vol. 37, B. viii, c. 44, 8. 8 On the bearing of early Mithraism on conduct see in particular the Mihir Yasht, xxix, pronounced by M. Darmesteter "one of the most important in the Avesta, as a short account of the social constitution and morals of Zoroastrian Iran " (ii, 149, n). 4 Id. ii, 158, 351. 5 Darmesteter's Zendavesta, ii, 155 : Mihir Yasht, xxxii, 137-8. U 290 MITHEAISM But the evolution of a moral cult on such a basis was in the due course of religious adaptation, since in the Mahabharata Agni com bines the same set of characteristics, being at once friendly to warriors and typified by a dove, while as the Mouth of the Gods he fulfils the highest moral functions.1 Thus, then, we have the cultus of Mithra as the Sun-God, the deity of light and truth, created by, and yet co-equal with, the Supreme Deity,2 and fighting ou the side of the good against the evil power Angra-Mainyu (Ahriman)— this at a period long before ! the Christian era. So much is certain, whatever we may decide as to the actual period of the writing of the Avesta, as it has come down to us. Of the literature of Mazdeism, of course, a great deal has perished ; this appearing, says M. Darmesteter, not only from internal evidence, but from history. " The Arab conquest proved fatal to the religious literature of the Sassanian ages, a great part of which was either destroyed by the fanaticism of the conquerors and the new converts, or lost during the long exodus of the Parsis The cause that preserved the Avesta is obvious : taken as a whole, it does not profess to be a religious encyclopsedia, but only a liturgical collection : and it bears more likeness to a prayer-book than to the Bible."8 We can therefore only infer the nature of the rest of the system. But we do know that, as time went on, the cultus of Mithra became more and more considerable. It is hardly accurate to say, as does Canon Eawlinson, that " Mithra was originally not held in very high esteem"; but it is the historic fact that "he ultimately came to occupy a place only a little inferior to that assigned, from the first, to the Ahura-Mazda. Darius, the son of Hystaspes, placed the emblems of Ahura-Mazda and of Mithra in equally conspicuous positions on the sculptured tablet above his tomb [B.C. 485] ; and his example was followed by all the later monarchs of his race whose sepulchres are still in existence. Artaxerxes Mnemon [d. B.C. 358] placed an image of Mithra in the temple attached to the royal palace of Suza. He also in his inscriptions unites Mithra with Ahura-Mazda, and 1 A. Holtzmann, Agni nach den Vorstellungen des Mahdbhdrat.i, 1878, pp. 7, 28, 30, 35. See also above, p. 219. As to the slow rise of Brahmanic ethic from the primary idea of quid pro quo in the relations of Gods and men, cp. M. Baudry's essay De I' interpretation mythologique in the Bevue Germanique. Fev. i, 1868, p. 36 ; and Tiele, Outlines of the Hist. of Religion, Eng. tr. p. 113- Of course the dove may have been, as in other ancient cults, a symbol of sex instinct. On that view, Agni combined the characters of Mars and Venus. 2 A. Hillebrandt confidently asserts (Vedische Mythologie, Kl. Ausg. 1910, p. 121) that the Ahura who is bracketed with Mithra is another than Ahuramazda. For this arbitrary decision he offers no argument beyond a reference to the fact that in India Mithra was bracketed with Varuna. 3 Darmesteter, Zendavesta, i, Introd, pp. xxxi, xxxii (xxxiii in second ed.). EVOLUTION OF MITHEA 291 prays for their conjoint protection. Artaxerxes Ochus [d. B.C. 337] does the same a little later ; and the practice is also observed in portions of the Zendavesta composed about this period."1 Artaxerxes Mnemon, too, swore by " the light of Mithras," as our William the Conqueror swore by " the splendour of God ";2 and in general the importance and range of the Mithraic worship at an early period may be clearly inferred from the mere vogue of the name Mithridates, "the justice of Mithra," which we find in use at least six hundred years before the Christian era.s It is after the Persian conquest of Babylon (538 B.C.) that Mithraism begins to take the shape it wears in the period of the Boman empire. Though historical details are lacking, we are broadly entitled to say that "the Mazdeism of the Persians, in uniting with the astrolatry of the Chaldeans, produced Mithraism." 4 It was presumably before this development that Mazdeism entered Armenia under the earlier Achamenidse,5 who conquered that region about 625 B.C.; for whereas Ahuramazda, the Supreme God, was in some measure superseded by Mithra in the later Mithraic cult,6 in virtue of the same psychological tendency that later gave to the Christian Jesus a nominal equality with and a practical precedence over Yahweh, we find the older Mazdean deity adored as the thundering God in Eastern Iberia as late as the fourth century.7 But Mithraism in turn was prepared in Armenia for its cosmo politan career in the western world ; since it was from Armenian Mazdeism that it borrowed its enigmatic " supreme God," Kronos- Zervan, the Time Spirit, a Babylonian conception, represented in the mysteries by the lion-headed or demon-headed and serpent-encircled 1 Tlie Religions of the Ancient World, p. 105, citing the same author's Ancient Monarchies, iv, 334; Flandin, Voyage en Perse, pis. 164 bis, 166, 173-6; Loftus, Chaldcea and Susiana, p. 572 ; and Sir H. Bawlinson's Cuneiform Inscriptions, i, 342. See also Plutarch, Alexander, 30; Quintus Curtius, De gestis Alex., iv, 48, 12 ; Xenophon, CEconom. iv, 24; Ed. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 506, 542 ; and Windischmann, Mithra, ein Beitrag zur Mythen- geschichte des Orients, in Abhandlungen filr die Kunde des Morgenlands, Bd. i, p. 55. 2 King, The Gnostics and their Bemains, p. 116 ; iElian, Var. Hist, i, 33 ; Xenophon, Cyrop. vii, 5, § 53 ; Plutarch, Artaxerxes, 4. 3 See Cumont, Textes et Monuments, ii, 76-82, for a list of all the names combining that of Mithra, from the earliest times down to the Christian era. They include Mitraphernes, Mitrobates, Mithropaustes, Homamithres, Ithamitres, Siromitres, Mitrogathes, Aspami- tres, Mitraios, Mitrostes, Bheomithres, MithrobouzaneB, Mithrines, Sisymithres, Mithra- cenes, etc., and the name Mithres is very common. 4 Id. i, 8, 231. Justi (Geschichte des alten Persiens, 1879, p. 93) sees Egyptian as well as Chaldean elements in the cult. 5 Cumont, pp. 10-11, 17, 231. Justi says no : "not under Darius or the Achamenidss, but first under the Parthians, who here set up an Arsacide dynasty" (p. 95). 6 Meyer, Gesch. des Alterthums, i, 542. 7 Moses of Chorene, 1. ii, c. 83 (cited by Ioselian, Hist, of Georgian Ch.). Ahuramazda seems to have been widely worshipped in the Georgian district, and often in connection with another deity whose name is preserved by the old historians as Zaden, probably = Satan = Ahriman. Ioselian, Hist, of the Georgian Church, Eng. tr. pp. 20, 39, 67. Cp. Cumont, i, 16-20. 292 MITHRAISM figure which bears the two keys.1 And this deity in turn tells of Babylonian influence, since the conception of the two locked doors of exit and entrance in the firmament is of Babylonian origin. We must not exclude, however, the possibility that certain features of the Mithraic cult derive equally with those of some Babylonian cults from a common source of great antiquity. Mithra partly equates with Bel or Enlil, who seems to have been originally a War-God of "mighty weapons," and was known as ' lord of lands," even as Mithra is " lord of wide pastures " and " all countries " and a bearer of " glorious weapons "; yet these seem to be early and not late attributes of Mithra. Bel, again, gives place to Merodach (Marduk), who assumes his titles and who becomes the Mediator- God;4 but this evolution in Mithra's case may follow older lines; even as his bracketing with Ahura-Mazda, as Bel was bracketed with Anu,5 appears to be early and not late. New Year's day is the festival alike of Bel, Merodach, and Mithra : this is an ancient idea.6 Yet again, when we find the Babylonian Sun-God and War-God Shamas (the prototype of the Hebrew "judge" Samson) figuring especially as the Judge and the Saviour of men, the destroyer of the wicked and of the enemies of his worshippers,7 we need not suppose that Mithra, who has all these attributes, is primarily modelled on Shamas, though he was identified with him :8 the underlying concept is prior to both cults. On the other hand, when Mithra absorbs in himself the idea of the Logos — who for the Baby lonians is a separate God, Nabu, the rival of Merodach9 (as the Logos Hermes for the Greeks is the rival of Apollo), but later bracketed with him as his son10 — we may reasonably suppose that the Mithraic adaptation is late. Of the deity thus shaped through many centuries, by many forces, it seems warrantable to say that his cult was normally in an ethically advanced stage, relatively to contemporary worships. In remote times, doubtless, he was worshipped with human sacrifices, like most other Gods : the Persian practice of sacrificing on a " high place"11 tells of early connection with the Asiatic cult of pyramid- altar-temples, which spread to Polynesia, North America, Syria, 1 Haug, Essays on the Parsis, 3rd ed. pp. 12-13; Cumont, i, 19, 74 sq.: ii, 196, 212, 215, 216,238. 2 Cumont, i, 83, citing Jensen, Die Kosmogonie der Babylonier, 1890, p. 9. Cp. Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de V orient, 4e edit, p. 136. 3 Jastrow, Belig. of Bab. and Assyria, pp. 54, 140, 146. 4 Id. pp. 136, 276. 5 la. p. 147. 6 Jastrow, Belig. of Bab. and Assyria, pp. 127, 631, 678, 681. Cp. the Hon. Emmeline E. Plunkett, Ancient Calendars and Constellations, 1903, pp. 58-59. 7 Jastrow, pp. 71-2. Cp. Code of Hammurabi, Epilogue. 8 Cumont, i, 231. 9 Jastrow, pp. 126-9, 240, 648, 679, io id. pp. 127, 240, 648-9. « Strabo, xv, 3, § 13. EVOLUTION OF MITHEA 293 and Greece, always in connection with sacrifices of men and children. Of such sacrifice there is no trustworthy trace in the historic period, however, and at no time do we find any trace in his legend of sexual complications. Unlike Agni, unlike Krishna and Apollo and Adonis and Herakles and Dionysos and Attis, he has no amours ; and his conjunction with Anaitis or Anahid, as we shall see, seems to have been rather a mystical blending of sexes than a conjugal union. His mate appears to have been primarily Ardivisura, a Goddess of a sacred well, and of the earth -waters generally, later blended with the Semitic Anahid, a Goddess of fruitfulness. At times he may have been licentiously worshipped,2 as Anaitis was;8 but in the Avesta and in the developed cultus so far as we know it he is always shown as making for righteousness.4 Theologically, he exists both in abstract and in symbol. Originally, he is simply the animised sun : later, according to the universal law of religious evolution, he becomes a spirit apart from the sun but symbolised by it, the sun being worshipped in his name, and he being the God who sustains it : nay, an actual subordinate Sun-God takes his place, even in the Eig Veda.5 But since in Persian, as we have seen, his name {Mihr) actually means the sun,6 he can never be dissociated from it ; and as the same word also means 'the friend," the light being the friend of man,7 and seems to connote love or amity,8 a moral distinction inevitably attaches to him in a stage of thought in which words have an incalculable significance. He is not a mere benefactor to be flattered. As the sun in Nature can both succour and slay ; as Apollo, called by Pindar the most friendly to men of all the Gods, is also the Destroyer, so the Persians sang: " Thou, O Mithra, art both bad and good to nations " — and to men.10 At length, the dualist theory holding its ground as a theological system, as it always will while 1 Justi, Gesch. der oriental. Volker im Altertum, pp. 398-9. 2 Athenseus (x, 45), citing Ctesias and Duris, tells that among the Persians the king was permitted to get drunk and dance on one day in the year only, the festival of Mithras (either Christmas-day or one of the days of the New Year festival in spring) ; no one else being allowed to get drunk or dance on that day. 3 Her worship being assimilated to that of Ishtar. Cumont, i, 231, n. Cp. Strabo, B. xi, end. 4 In a Boman inscription he is sanctus dominus, the holy Lord. Cumont, ii, 235. 5 " Sometimes a poet says that Savatri is Mitra, or that he at least performs the same work as Mitra. This Mitra is most frequently invoked in conjunction with Varuna. Both stand together on the same chariot." Max Muller, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 269. 6 Cp. Darmesteter, Introd. to Zendavesta, pp. liv, lxi; Von Bohlen, Das alte Tndien, i, 258 ; Sainte-Croix, Becherches, ii, 122, n. 7 Mitra literally means " a friend "; it is the light as friendly to man. Cp. Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, §§ 59-61 ; Max Muller, Hibbert Lectures, 2nd ed. p. 268, note. 8 Wait, Jewish, Oriental, and Classical Antiquities, 1823, p. 194, citing the Berhan-i Kattea. The name seems to have been the Persian equivalent of Eros. Hyde, De Vet. Persar. Relig. 1700, c. iv, p. 107. 9 Cp. Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, 7th ed. p. 23. 10 Mihir Yasht, viii, 29. 294 MITHRAISM men personify the energies of the universe, Mithra comes to occupy a singular position as between the two great powers of good and evil, Ormazd and Ahriman (the Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu of Mazdeism)— being actually named the MEDIATOR,1 and figuring to the devout eye as a humane and beneficent God, nearer to man2 than the Great .Spirit of Good, a Saviour, a Eedeemer, eternally young, son of the Most High,8 and preserver of mankind from the Evil One. In brief, he is a pagan Christ. Much has been written as to whether Mithra was worshipped as the sun, or as the creator and sustainer of the sun. There can be no reasonable doubt that the two ideas existed, and were often blended.4 We may depend upon it that for the weak and ignorant minds, which could conceive a personal God only under the form of a man or animal, or both combined, the perpetual pageant of the sun was a help and not a hindrance to elevation of thought. We can understand, too, how even to the thinkers, who sought to distinguish between matter and essence, and reckoned the sun only a part of the material universe, the great orb should yet be the very symbol of life and splendour and immortality, as well as the chosen seat of the deity who ruled mankind ; and that it should be the viewless spirit of the sun who, in their thought, proclaimed to man the oracle of the Soul of the Universe : "I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty."5 § 5. The Process of Syncretism. In the great polytheistic era, however, the habit of personifying all the forces of nature led first to a universal recognition of the 1 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, c. 46 ; Julian. In regem solem, cc. 9, 10, 21. Lesser spirits, of course, were also held to exercise mediatorial functions, like the Christian Saints. " The Furuhers of the ancient Persians were intermediate agents between God and man, who presented earthly petitions to the throne of Ormuzd, being connected with the human soul and attendants on it." Wait, Jewish, Oriental, and Classical Antiquities, 1823, p. 88, citing the Berhan-i Kattea. Cp. Spiegel, Avesta, Einleitung, p. 31. For the metaphysical development of the idea of the Sun-God as Mediator see Julian, In regem solem. 2 In the Persian mythology the first man and woman, Mashya and Mashyana, arise on Mithra's day in Mithra's (the seventh) month. (Spiegel, Erdnische Alterthumskunde, i, 503, 511.) In the Persian myth the pair are at first not only sinless but alike sexless (Bundahish, xv). 8 " Like all the Aryan religions, that of the ancient Persians admitted that Ahura Mazda was a husband and father." Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, 137. M. Cumont need not have limited this characteristic to the Aryan systems ; it is equally Semitic. But it is in the later stages of Mithraism that the Ronship of the God is stressed. Id. ii, 4-5. 4 Cp. Tiele, Egyptian Beligion, p. 44, as to Osiris, and Hillebrandt, as cited above, p. 290, note, as to Mitra. One of the many proposed corrections of Gibbon by his commentators which are themselves errors is Guizot's note on ch. viii (Bohn ed. i, 255) to the effect that "Mithra was not the sun." Guizot founded on Anquetll, who, though a great pioneer, had not fully mastered the records. 5 Eevelation, i, 8 ; xxi, 6 ; xxii, 13. A very ancient Pagan formula. See Pausanias, x, 12, as to the chant "Zeus was, Zeus is, Zeus shall be"; and the phrase " God the beginning and the end," in Plato, Daws, iv, 7. Cp., in the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" (eh. lxiv; Budge's trans, pp. 112, 116), the formula, " I am Yesterday, To-day, and To-morrow." THE PEOCESS OF SYNCEETISM 295 actual existence of the deities of foreign peoples, and later on to the idea that all the deities of the nations are but names of phases of one central and omnipotent power. Even among the philosophers and theologians, of course, this conception never really destroyed the habit of thinking of the alleged phases or manifestations of the deity as being really minor deities ; l and much more a matter of course was it that among the multitude the deity or deities should always be conceived in a quite concrete form. But the synthesizing tendency early resulted in this, that different cults were combined; different God-names identified as pointing to the same God ; and different Gods combined into unities of two, three, four, or more members. Egypt is the great theological factory for such combina tions ; but the law necessarily operated elsewhere. The conception of a Divine Trinity is of unknown antiquity: it flourished in Mesopotamia, in Hindostan, in the Platonic philosophy, in Egypt, long before Christianity.2 But the combining process, among other variations, had to take account of the worship of Goddesses as well as of Gods; and in regions where Goddess-worship was deeply rooted it was inevitable that there should occur combinations of sex. This actually took place in the worship of Mithra. From Herodotus, writing in the fifth century B.C., we learn that in some way the God Mithra was identified with a Goddess. The whole passage, though familiar to students, is worth quoting here : — " The Persians, according to my own knowledge, observe the following customs. It is not their practice to erect statues, or temples, or altars, but they charge those with folly who do so ; because, as I conjecture, they do not think the Gods have human forms, as the Greeks do. They are accustomed to ascend the highest parts of the mountains, and offer sacrifice to Zeus, and they call the whole circle of the heavens by the name of Zeus. They sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, fire, water, and the winds. To these alone they have sacrificed from the earliest times ; but they have since learnt from the Arabians and Assyrians to sacrifice to (Aphrodite) Urania, whom the Assyrians call Mylitta, the Arabians Alitta, and the Persians Mitra." This is one of the seemingly improbable statements in Herodotus 1 Compare the Gathas, passim. Mr. Mills (introd. p. xxiv) makes too much of "the wonderful idea that God's attributes are his messengers." The messengers, as he admits, are conceived as Gods or angels. They simply bear the names of attributes, on the analogy of the titles of a king's functionaries. Thus arose the idea of the Logos or Divine Word (Yasna, xxix, 7). 2 See, in the Gathas, Yasna xxx, 7, and Mr. Mills' comments, pp. 14-15, etc., for traces of an early Zoroastrian trinity. 8 B. i, c. 131. 296 MITHRAISM which research has partly confirmed.1 He is accused, indeed, of blundering2 in combining Mithra with Mylitta, it being shown from monuments that the Goddess identified with Mithra was Anaitis or Tanat.8 But that the Armenian Anaitis and Mylitta were regarded as the same deity seems clear,4 and there are other clues. It has not been commonly observed that Strabo twice explicitly brackets Anaitis with a Persian God Omanus as being worshipped at a common altar. He saw the statue of Omanus carried in pro cession.5 There is reason to suppose that Omanus (or the Persian form of the word) was a name of Mithra, and that it is an adaptation of Vohumano (Bahman) = Good Mind, a divine name with a very fluctuating connotation. In one passage of the Zendavesta, Vohu mano figures as the doorkeeper of heaven ; but he was also first of the Ameshaspentas or Amshaspands, of whom Mithra too (making seven) was chief ; and he ranks further in the Avesta with Ahura- Mazda as judge of the dead ; and again as the first-born son of Ahura- Mazda, as was Mithra later. Yet again, he is identified with the creative power ; 7 and it seems impossible that the conception of the Good Mind " should have been prevented from coalescing either with that of Ahura-Mazda, who was not represented by a statue, or with that of Mithra, so making him " the Word." In any case, the fact of the combination of Mithra in a double personality with that of a Goddess is made clear, not only by the statement of the Christian controversialist Julius Firmicus, in the fourth century, and later writers, that the Persians make Mithras both two-sexed and threefold or three-formed,8 but by innumerable Mithraic monu- 1 Lenormant admits as to the alleged blunder : " Perhaps it was not after all an error, and the divine couple may have been sometimes designated as a double Mithra" (Chaldean Magic, p. 236). 2 Bawlinson's Herodotus, i, 257, 416. Cp. Lenormant, Manual of Anc. Hist. Eng. trans. ii, 46 ; and Chaldean Magic, as quoted. 8 Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, 5; ii, 87-88. On the names of this Goddess, see G. Diercks, Entwickelungsgeschichte des Geistes der Menschheit, Berlin, 1881, i, 242. She is held to have been the Goddess of the Oxus. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i, 542. Cp. Tiele, Outlines, pp. 170-1, where she is derived from the Semites, who in turn took her from the Akkadians. See also Tiele's Egyptian Religion, Eng. tr. p. 135 ; and Justi, Gesch. des alten Persiens. pp. 93-5. 4 Creuzer-Guigniaut, Beligions de I'Antiquiti, t. ii, ptie. i, pp. 76-82 (1829); Bahr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, ii, 243. I B. xi, c. 8, §4 ; B. xv, c. 3, § 15. 6 Vendiddd, Farg. 31 (102). 7 See Max Muller, Psychological Beligion, 1893, pp. 184, 186, 203; and the Avesta, Yasna, xxx ; and compare Darmesteter's Introd. 2nd ed. p. lvi, as to Vohumano being the Logos. M. Darmesteter thinks the idea came through the Greeks, but does not face the problem as to whence they derived it. In the Bundahish, Vohumano is the first thing created by God— exactly as is the Logos for Philo— and from him then proceeds "the light of the world" (ii, 23, 25). Cp. the Pahlavi Yasna, xxxi, 8 (a). There is considerable obscurity as to the original character of Vohumano. Cp. Muller, as cited, pp. 54, 56, 57 ; Haug, Essays on the Parsis, 3rd ed. p. 350 ; and Spiegel, Avesta (1852), i, 247-8 (Fargard xix of Vendiddd). Tiele identifies Vohumano with Sraosha, who in turn, however, was joined withMithra. Outlines, pp. 171,172, 176; Haug, pp. 307-8. Below, § 10. Winckler (Altorient. Forschungen, xvi (1901), p. 4) identifies the Omanus of Strabo with Haman ; but the existence of a deity so named is far from certain. 8 De Errore Profanarum Religionum, v. Compare Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, Epist. vii ad Polycarp., cited in Selden, De Diis Syria, Prolog, c. 3 ; and in Cudworth, THE PEOCESS OF SYNCEETISM 297 ments on which appear the symbols of two deities, male and female, the sun and the moon, or, it may be, male and female principles of the sun or of the earth. And this epicene or double-sexed character is singularly preserved to us in that Mithraic monument of the Grssco-Eoman period which we possess in our own British Museum, in which the divine slayer of the bull presents a face of perfect and sexless beauty, feminine in its delicate loveliness of feature, masculine in its association with the male form. In such a combination there is reason to see a direct influence of the old Akkado-Babylonian system on the later Mazdean. From the old Akkadians the Semites received the conception of a trinity, the " divine father and mother by the side of their son the Sun- God."1 But their own ruling tendency was to give every God, up to the highest, a "colourless double or wife";2 and in the final blending of these in a double-sexed deity we have the consummation of the idea. It was not special to Asia ; for the Egyptians gave a double sex alike to moon, earth, air, fire, and water, making the earth male as rock, female as arable soil ; fire masculine as heat, female as light, and so on ; and the Greeks and Eomans accepted the notion;4 but it was probably from Chaldsea that it reached the Mithraists. Bel had been represented as both father and mother of Enlil, and Belti as both father and mother of Ninlil ; and there are yet other instances of the Babylonian vogue of the idea of a God combining the two sexes.5 There is a further presumption that it was either from Babylonia or through Mithraism as modified after the Persian conquest of Babylon that the idea of a double-sexed deity reached the Greeks. In the Orphic hymns, which probably represent the theosophy of several centuries before our era, it is predicated of four deities, of whom two, the Moon and Nature (Selene and Physeos), are normally female, and two (Adonis and Dionysos) normally male.6 Selene is Intellectual System, Harrison's ed. i. 482. In a passage in the Yasna there is mention of " the two divine Mithras " (Lenormant, as quoted, citing Burnouf ). But cp. Mills' rendering of Yasna, i, 11, which appears to be the passage in view. 1 Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, p. 193. 2 Id. p. 215. Cp. Genesis, i, 27 ; Donaldson, Theatre of the Greeks, 7th ed. p. 21 ; and Lenormant, Chaldean Magic, pp. 129-130. In all likelihood, the Hebrew "Holy Spirit" was originally held to be feminine. Cp. Justin Martyr, 1 Apol. c. 64. 3 Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, c. 43 ; Seneca, Quaest. Nat. iii, 14. 4 See Servius on the jEneid, ii, 632. Cp. Donaldson, as last cited. It was in this way that Apollo and Dionysos came to be at times represented in feminine robes ; while Aphrodite was sometimes (as in Sparta) bearded. Cp. Macrobius, Saturnalia, iii, 8, as to the double sex of Venus, which is abundantly illustrated by Preller, Bomische Mythologie, 2nd ed. p. 389, and Griechische Mythologie, 2nd ed. i, 268. On other developments of the principle cp. Selden, De Diis Syris, Syntag. ii, c. 2 ; and Spencer, De legibus Hebreorum, lib. ii, c. xvii, § 12. It has been discussed with much suggestiveness, if with some fantasy of speculation, by Mr. Gerald Massey in his Natural Genesis, 1883, i, 510-518. fi Anz, Zur Frage nach dem Ursprung des Gnosticismus, 1897, p. 105, following Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, pp. 142 sq., 272 sa. 6 Orphica, ix, 2, 3 ; x, 18 ; xliii, 4 ; lvi, 4. 298 MITHEAISM further identified with Men, the Moon-God, who, as being double- sexed like Mithra, was finally identified with him in worship and on coins.1 As Dionysos and Adonis, originally Vegetation Gods, have at this stage become identified with the Sun, there arises a pre sumption that a solar cult has been imitated ; though at the same time the solar cult may have adopted features from the others. The likelihood is that the notion of a double-sexed deity was the outcome on the one hand of the concrete practice of bracketing a male and a female deity together, and on the other hand of speculation on the essence of " divinity." But the concrete process probably came first, and the conjunction of the symbols or heads of a male and female deity in one monument or sculpture would give the lead to a mystical theory of a twy-sexed being. § 6. Symbols of Mithra. To point to these Mithraic monuments, of which there are so many examples, is to point out, further, that the old Persian aversion to images of deity had disappeared with the extension of the Mithraic cultus.2 There is no doubt as to the original forbiddal of images, despite the common delusion that the Jews were the first to lay down such a veto. But it was inevitable that, in the artistic coun tries,8 the adoption of Mithraism should involve the representing Mithra by images, like other deities. Nor was this all. One reason for regarding the Zend-Avesta as substantially ancient is the com parative simplicity of the Mithra cultus it sets forth. Just as happened with Christianity later, the spreading faith assimilated all manner of ancient symbolisms, and new complications of ritual ; and Mithra is associated with the strange symbolic figures of the lion-headed serpentine God, bearing two keys, but above all is pre sented in that of the slayer of the bull. Whence came that concep tion ? There are many explanations. It has been variously decided that-thfi__bull slain by Mithra is the symbol of the earth, the symbol of the mognHihe symbol of the STffiTtne symbol of lust, the symbol of evil, the symbol of the cloud, the bull of the Zodiac, and the cosmogonic bull oftheMagian system!1""" All of these conceptions 1 Cumont, ii, 189-190; i, 235, and notes. As we saw, Mithra was also identified with Shamas, the Babylonian Sun-God. Id. i, 231. 2 Cumont, i, 10, note; i, 236, note. 3 I do not quite follow Canon Eawlinson's meaning in the statement (Seventh Oriental Monarchy, p. 632), that "the Persian system was further tainted with idolatry in respect of the worship of Mithra." For that matter, however, the " idolatry " of antiquity in general is on all fours with the reverence of images under Christianity. 4 Cp. Hammer-Purgstall, Mithriaca, Caen and Paris, 1833, p. 31 ; Eoscher, Ausfilhrliches Lexikon, col. 3051-3; Creuzer, Das Mithreum von Neuenheim, p. 31; Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, pp. 144-153 ; Baur, Das manichdische Beligionssystem, 1831, p. 91 ; Eawlinson, Five Great Monarchies, iii, 361 ; and Hyde, as there cited. Darmesteter holds that the SYMBOLS OF MITHRA 299 may be held to connect with the symbolism of the Veda, where Agni is the bull ; and it is in a similarly early sense, as the Sun-God among the cows, that Mithra is in the Avesta the bull and the cow- stealer1 — which last name he retains in the late Eoman period, when he has the epithet in common with Hermes. On the basis of the primitive nature-myth arose a host of imageries, all interfluent and inseparable, because all fanciful. Any one who has followed the maze of symbolism in Plutarch's Isis and Osiris will be prepared to believe that for the later ancients Mithra as the bull had half-a-dozen significations.8 In that famous treatise, Isis and Osiris and Typhon successively represent a number of different Nature-forces — sun, moon, moisture, the Nile, the Earth, generative warmth, injurious heat, and so on — shifting and exchanging their places, till it becomes plain that the old theosophy was but a ceaseless flux of more or less congruous fancies. We may be sure that Mithraism was as hospit able to mystic meanings as Osirianism. It is intelligible and probable that Mithra slaying the bull should have meantfor many therays oftne sun penetrating the earth, and so creating life for mundane creatures,* as the dog feeds on the blood" of the slain bull. In the Vendidad, the older (Vedic) God Yima, whose "glory" was secured by Mithra when Yima fell through disobedience,6 is represented as sealing the earth with his golden seal," and thrusting into it with his dagger,7 which is perhaps the earliest form of the myth under notice. But those who adopt this as the whole explanation8 overlook a principle perhaps bound up with the origin of Mithraism proper — the significance of the bull as one of those signs of the_zodiae-feough vTnich Ihe sun passed in his annual course. It is nearly certain that the zodiacwas the source of vwrv mil nil of tfie-itirljfei bjimbylisin~~aTid mysticisin of those ancient cults which their priesthoods associated bull, like the Vedic cow. = the cloud ; that its seed is the rain (p. 149) ; and that its true slayer is the serpent (p. 153). In the zodiac, the bull was domus Veneris. But the idea that the bull or ram symbolised lust could well be primary ; and in the Persian myth the ram helps to lead the first man and woman into sin (Spiegel, Erdn. Alterthumsk., i, 511-512 ; Bundahish, xv, 13). For Porphyry, the God (Mithra) who was a stealer of oxen was secretly concerned with generation (De antro, xviii). As to the primeval ox, source of all animals, see the Bundahish, iii, 4-18 ; iv, 1, etc. (West's Pahlavi Texts, i, 17-20. S.B.E. vol. v). 1 Mihir Yasht, xxii, 86. _ 2 Firmicus, De errore, v, calls him abactor bourn. Cp. Commedianus, Instructiones, l, 13 (cited by Windischmann, p. 64, and by Cumont, ii, 9), who speaks of the cows as hidden in a cave ; and Porphyry, as last cited. 3 For Porphyry, Mithra is " the Bull Demiourgos " and " lord of genesis " (De antro, XXIV). , 4 This interpretation is clearly adopted in one monument which makes ears of corn instead of blood come from the bull's wound. Cumont, ii, 228. 6 For another signification of the dog here, see Mr. King's Gnostics and their Remains, 2nd ed. p. 137. Compare the Osirian theory in Plutarch, Isis and Osiris, a. 44. \ Zamyad Yasht, vii, 35. 7 Vendiddd, Fargard, ii, 10, 14, 18 (32-3). 8 King, pp. 135-6. 300 MITHEAISM with the sun, not to speak of those whose priesthoods professedly /Repudiated sun-worship. And one of the most important facts established by the collection and comparison of ancient monuments is, that the Mithraic cultus connects symbolically with an Assyrian or Akkadian cultus far older — the cult which produced those common Assyrian monuments in which a divine or kingly personage slays a lion or a bull, thrusting a sword through him.2 There can be little doubt that these successive religious representations of the slaying f of the lion and the slaying of the bull rest partly on a zodiacal system of sacred symbolism, .in which the slaying of a given animal means either the passing of the sun into or out ol a particular sign of the zodiacTat a particular season of the year, or Erie" slaving of the animal represented as a special sacrifice, or both. TJae— zodiac, Winch is Of immense antiquity, 3 has come to be conventionalised — that is to say, it is fixed, so that the signs have long ceased to coincide with the actual constellations whose names they bear. But originally the students of the stars must needs have had regard to the actual constellations. And this carries us very far back indeed. The view that the slaying of the bull originally pointed to the sun's entering the sign of the Bull at either the vernal equinox or the winter solstice4 is supported by the circumstance that the bull was at once a symbol of the Sun-God and a symbol of agriculture, theeariy_jjlough being drawn by bulls or oxerHwheiiuy possibly the naming of the constellation) ;5 and is 1 See the series in Lajard's Atlas. Professor Cumont, while of course rejecting Lajard's theory that Mithraism originated in the Assyrian system, recognises that the planetary and zodiacal elements in Mithraism were certainly borrowed by it from the ancient Chaldean system ; and that in general Chaldean elements were early superimposed upon the Iranian when the cults met at Babylon (Textes et Monuments, i, 73, 109). 2 Sometimes in the Persian period a griffin or dragon (pronounced by Justi, Gesch. des alten Persiens, p. 109, to be the Arimanian beast) takes the place of the lion or bull. See the figure from Persepolis in Ancient Calendars and Constellations, by the Hon. Emmeline E. Plunkett, 1903, p. 64. Miss Plunkett points out that this figure is a compound of the four zodiacal figures, the Bull, the Lion, the Scorpion, and the Eagle. The bull and the lion, as well as this composite, appear in Persian sculpture of the age of Xerxes, evidently following the Assyrian models. Eeber, History of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, pp. 123-5. Again, there is a presumption that the design of a lion attacking a bull or an ilcorn, seen on a number of ancient coins in A6ia Minor, and even in Macedonia, is a symbol analogous to that of Mithra slaying the bull (see Parker and Ainsworth's Lares and Penates, 1853, p. 187, where the explanation given will not stand). Persia is still the " Land of the Lion and the Sun." Cp. the figures on the palace of Xerxes, reproduced by Justi, p. 106. 3 Cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 397-8; Narrien, Histor. Account of the Orig. and Prog, of Astronomy, 1850, pp. 79-83, 126-137; Tiele, Hist. comp. des anciennes relig. Fr. tr. 1882, p. 248 ; Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, § 6 ; Jensen, Kosmologie der Babylonier, 1890, pp. 57-95; Jastrow, The Beligion of Babylonia and Assyria, 1898, pp. 434. 456. The careful argument of Letronne (Melanges d 'irudition et de critique historique ; Origine des Zodiaques) to show that the zodiac originated with the Greeks is exploded by the dis coveries of Assyriology. The ideas of Macrobius and of Dupuis and Volney which Letronne undertook to overthrow, are thus in large measure rehabilitated. See B. Brown , jun„ Eridanus: Biver and Constellation, 1883; The Phainomena of Aratos, 1885; and Primitive Constellations of the Greeks, Phoenicians, and Babylonians, 1899 The point is newly established in Miss Plunkett's work, above cited, which is an important contribu tion to astronomical mythology, though not very advanced in Biblical matters 4 The latter is the hypothesis argued for by Miss Plunkett, work cited p 18 sq 5 Sayce, p. 48. The title given to Merodach, the Sun-God, when he passed through the twelve zodiacal signs, was Gudi-bir, the bull of light.'" Cp. pp 290 292 SYMBOLS OF MITHEA 301 strongly suggested further by the hostile function assigned in the monuments to the Scorpion, which is the opposing sign, and would represent the autumnal equinox.1 This symbol then dates back, probably, more than 3,000 years before the Christian era — 6,000 years if we assume the original zodiacal year to have begun at the winter solstice ; while the symbol of the slaying of the lion would signify the sun's entrance into Leo at midsummer in the same periods, and may connect with the worship of Tammuz, after whom the midsummer month was named in Syria — unless the God took his name from the month. In point of fact, astronomy tells us that, by the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation of the Bull had ceased to be the sun's place at the vernal equinox for about 2,100 years before the reign of Augustus, the constellation of the Earn taking its place. Still, just as the symbol of the slaying of the lion had, on this theory, held its ground in religion after the bull played a similar part, so did the sign of the Bull play its part in symbol and ceremony long after the sun had begun to enter the constellation Aries at the sacred season. Nevertheless — and this seems a crown ing vindication of the zodiacal theory — while the bull holds its place on the monuments of the Christian era, we find at this very period, in connection with the worship of Mithra as with those of Dionysos2 and (more anciently) of Amun,3 an actual ceremony of slaying a ram in honour of the Sun-God. In Persia, the sign Aries, the Earn, was known as the Lamb ;4 and in some of the Mithraic mysteries at the Christian era, it was a lamb that was slain.5 That fact, as we shall see, has further bearings ; but thus far it surely counts for much as a proof of the zodiacal element in the symbolism of the ancient sophisticated sun worships. The notion of a Fish God is deeply rooted in several of the older eastern religions,6 and though it may be explained as arising from the fancy that the sun was a fish, who plunged into the sea in the evening and emerged in the morning — a natural type of immortality for later mystics — it also strongly suggests an ancient connection with zodiacal astrolatry. 1 Lenormant (Chaldean Magic, p. 56) rejects the idea that there was an astronomical significance in the Assyrian bull-slaying ; but his arguments do not amount to a refutation. He rests his denial on one fragment of a conjuration, which makes demons bulls. 2 The ram "supplied the favourite Dionysiak sacrifice." B.Brown, The Great Dionysiak Myth, ii, 65. In one version of the Dionysiak myth. Zeus changes Dionysos into a ram to save him from Herd. Smith's Diet., art. Dionysus, citing Hyginus and Theon. Cp. Herodotus, ii, 42. 8 Herodotus, as cited. 4 Bundahish, ii, 2. In this list of the zodiacal constellations the Lamb comes first, then the»Bnll. 5 GaruOTi, Les Mystires du Syncritisme Phrygien, p. 34. A ram was the first sacrifice offered by the first man and woman in the Persian myth ; and they, as we saw (p. 294), are specially associated with Mithra. 6 Cp. the illustrations collected in W. Simpson's Jonah, 1899. 302 MITHEAISM In any case, there is no more plausible explanation than the zodiacal one of the early Christian habit of calling Jesus Christ the Fish. The sign of the Fishes comes next the Earn in the zodiac ; and that constellation had actually taken the place of the Earn, at the spring equinox, when this symbol came into use. We may further infer, when we read of Phrixos, the son of Athamas, who was carried to Colchis by a ram with a golden fleece,2 and who in his statue on the Acropolis was represented as having "just sacrificed the ram to some God," 8 that in some eastern cult4 which the Greeks misunderstood, a deity was latterly figured as borne on the zodiacal Earn, in the manner of Mithras "bull-borne,"5 and as sacrificing the ram in its turn. And that there was a constant astronomical significance in the Mithraic cult in particular, we know from the testimony of Origen, to the effect that its mysteries included an elaborate representation of the move ments and relations of the stars and the planets, and the movements of the disembodied human soul among these.6 Every widespread religion, however, is necessarily a complex of many ideas, and in the cult of Mithra this is"abundantly seen. In the course of its western evolution it became closely associated, like that of Attis, with the popular worship of Cybele, the Magna Mater, Mother of the Gods;7 and in virtue of Eoman military tradition it was bracketed with that of many specifically Eoman deities. In the Mithraic cave-temples have been found images and names of Juno, Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Bacchus, Mercury, and Venus, " and especially Silvanus, who had taken on the character of a pantheistic God, doubtless because he was the Latin equivalent of the Greek Pan."8 This, by the way, is not the sole reason for approximating Mithra to Pan. A collocation of the Sun-God with the Goat-God occurs constantly in Greek mythology, and can be clearly traced back to the Babylonian system, on which Mithraism had inde pendently drawn.9 The image of the slaying of the bull, in particular, whatever its original bearing, came to be associated 1 Cp. Gerald Massey, Natural Genesis, i, 454, ii, 389, sg., and the plate in Simpson's Jonah, p. 263, with the fish on the head of the Horus-bearing Isis. Horus had long been " the Fish." 2 Apollodorus, i, 9, § 1. 3 Pausanias, i, 24. 4 One of the children of Athamas in the myth is Melicertes=Melkarth. The story being one of child sacrifice by way of averting a drought, it has analogies to the myth of Abraham and Isaac, which is a late sophistication of an earlier legend. See Frazer, G. B. ii, 35, as to the Greek development of the myth. 5 Such a figure is found in Egypt— Harpocrates (Hor-pi-Khrot, " Horus the child") riding on a ram. See Erman, Handbk. of Eg. Relig. Eng. tr. p. 323. This may or may not be the ground of the Greek myth. 6 Against Celsus, vi, 22. 7 Boscher, 3043-4 ; Cumont, Textes et Monuments, i, 161, 333. 8 Boscher, 3045 ; Cumont, i, 147-8. 9 See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 318-26. THE CULTUS 303 specially with the idea of sacrifice and purification ; and the great vogue of the Phrygian institutions of the Taurobolium and Crio- bolium,1 or purification by the blood of bulls and rams, must have reacted on Mithraism, even if it were not of strictly Mithraic origin. Mithra, like Osiris2 and Dionysos,3 we saw,4 was the bull as well as the God to whom the bull was sacrificed, even as Amun, to whom rams were sacrificed, was " the great ram ";5 and herein lies one of the germs of the dogma of the death and resurrection of the God ; another being the ancient astronomic myth, to which we shall come later, of the Descent of the God to Hades. In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia, which grew very popular in the Eoman world,6 we have the literal and original meaning of the phrase washed in the blood of the lamb "; the doctrine being that resur rection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram, often doubtless a lamb, that being a common sacrifice from time immemorial, on the ground that for certain purposes the victim must be sexually pure. Thus we have such mortuary inscriptions as Taurobolio criobolioque in aeternum renatus, " By the bull-sacrifice and the ram-sacrifice born again for eternity."7 But inasmuch as there was a constant tendency in the mystical systems to substitute symbolism for concrete usages, the Mithraists may be surmised to have ultimately performed their sacrificial rites in a less crude form than that described by Prudentius.8 _ § 7. The Cultus. Eesembling other cults at various points, the Mithraic was latterly peculiar in others. The great specialty of this worship, as we learn from several writers, is that it was carried on in caves — so far at least as its special mysteries were concerned — the cave being considered so all-important that, where natural caves did not exist, 1 Eeferred to by Pirmicus, c. 28. 2 Plutarch. Isis and Osiris, cc. 20, 29, 39. 3 Plutarch, Questiones Greece, 36. 4 Above, p. 299. So in the Babylonian system " the Sun-God eventually became the monster slain by a solar hero." ' Sayce, p. 293. Cp. Hubert et Mauss, Essai sur le sacrifice, in L' Annie Sociologique, ii, 129. 5 Tiele, Egyptian Religion, p. 147. 6 Gibbon, Bohn ed. ii, 145, note. 7 Given in note on Firmicus in ed. Hackiana, 1672, p. 56. See it also in Orelli, No. 2352, and in Cumont, Inscr. 17 (ii, 96). See further in Cumont, Nos. 20-24, and in Orelli, Nos. 1899, 1900, 2130, 2199, 2322, 2326, 2328, 2330, 2331, 2351, 2353, 2361. Compare Boeckh, 6012, b, c. Here the taurobolium and criobolium are directly connected with Mithraism ; and it would appear from Strabo (xv, 3, § 14) that the Mazdeans practised something very like it, slaying victims over pits into which the blood dripped. Concerning tho taurobolium at Athens, see Dittenberger, Inscr. Atticce et. Roman. 172, 173. Cp. King, Gnostics, p. 154. 8 De Coronis, Hymn X", 1009-1050. The initiate was placed in a pit over which there was a grating. On this was placed the animal to be slain — young bull or young ram— and the blood dropped on the votary beneath, See Cumont, i, 187, 334, as to the origins and vogue of the Taurobolium (properly Tauropolinm). 304 MITHRAISM the devotees made artificial ones.1 Porphyry puts it on record2 that the " Persians, mystically signifying the descent of the soul into the sublunary regions, and its regression thence, initiate the mystic in a place which they call a cavern. For, as Euboulos says, Zoroaster was the first who consecrated in the neighbouring mountains of Persia a cave, in which there were flowers and fountains, in honour of Mithra, the Maker and Father of all things — a cave, according to him, being an image of the world, which was made by Mithra. But the things contained in the cavern were symbols of the mundane elements and climates." This explanation of the cave was not improbably suggested by a well-known passage in Plato ;s and it is obvious that the custom must have had some simpler origin. At an early culture-stage among the Eomans, indeed, we find the name mundus given to the sacred cave on the Palatine Hill into which the people threw specimens of all their domestic utensils and a handful of Eoman earth.4 This is remarkably close to the symbolic idea in Porphyry ; but there must have been an earlier form still.5 A cave, in fact, seems to have been one of the earliest forms of temple. It is easy to understand how to half-civilised man caves would have a hundred mysterious significances, as places for dwelling or meeting made by the Deity himself ; and fire- or sun-worshippers would have the special motives supplied by finding in caves the remains of the fires of earlier men, and by the not unnatural theory that the sun himself went into some cave when he went below the horizon at night. Indeed, Porphyry admits that caves in the most remote periods of antiquity were consecrated to the Gods, before temples were. Thus the Curetes in Crete dedicated a cavern to Zeus ; in Arcadia, a cave was sacred to the moon, and to Lycean Pan ; and in Naxos to Dionysos. 1 See Justin Martyr, Dial, with Trypho, cc. 70, 78. Caves were made in honour of Mithra, as temples in honour of other Gods. See Orelli, 2340, 2341. There were no other Mithraic temples. Cumont, ii, 57-8. 2 De antro nympharum, vi. Cp. Firmicus, v. 3 Bepublic, B. vii. 4 Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 16 ; Festus, s. v. Mundus. 5 Here I venture to dissent from the view of M. Cumont (i, 6) that the Persian custom of sacrificing in the open air " gave birth " to that of worshipping Mithra in caverns. I cannot follow the supposed causation. Open-air sacrifice was in early times a Greek and a Semitic as well as a Persian usage. The Boman mundus seems to have passed for the entrance to the lower world. 8 See the article " The Mycenean Tree and Pillar Cult and its Mediterranean Eolations," by A. J. Evans, in the Journal of Hellenic Studies, vol. xxi (1901), p. 99, as to the multitude of caves containing votive and sacrificial deposits found in Crete. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 207, note. . 7 The usage was in fact nearly universal in early times. Cp. Wait, Jewish, Oriental, and Classical Antiquities, p. 47. Hermes and Zeus were cave-born (Homerid. Hymn to Hermes; Hesiod, Theogony, 483); and Typhon in turn was born in the Cilician caves (.ffiischylus. Prom. 359-60; Pindar, Pythia, i, 32). The resting-places of Apollo and Dionysos were alike caves (Pindar, Olymp. vii, 57 ; Diod. Sic, iii, 59). Finally, Apollo, Dionysos, Herakles, Cybele, Demeter, Poseidon, and Zeus were all worshipped in caves (Pomponius Mela, i, 5 ; Pausanias, i, 28 ; ii, 23 ; iii, 25 ; vii, 25 ; viii, 15, 36,' 42 ; Cicero, De THE CULTUS 305 " But," he adds, " wherever Mithra was known, they propitiated the God in a cavern."1 It appears that the greatest sanctity attached to caves in the living rock ; and there are many remains of Mithraic altars cut in rocks ; nay more, the rock came to be specially associated with Mithra,3 who was named "rock-born"; and the phrase, " Geos Ik ir£T/)as) God out of the rock," or " Mithras out of the rock," became one of the commonest formulas of the cultus.4 In these rock-caves, then, or in artificial caves, the priests of Mithra celebrated the habitual rites and special mysteries of their religion. The rising sun would be daily hailed with joy,5 as among the Jewish Essenes, and sun-worshippers everywhere ; and during the night, when the sun was hidden, special prayers would be offered up. The first day of the week, Sunday, was apparently from time immemorial consecrated to Mithra by Mithraists ; and as the Sun-God was pre-eminently "the Lord," Sunday was "the Lord's day" long before the Christian era.6 On that day there must have been special Mithraic worship. But we have some exact information as to the two chief Mithraic ceremonies or festivals, those of Christmas and Easter, the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, the birbhday of the Sun-God and the period of his sacrifice and his triumph.7 That Christmas is a solar festival of unknown antiquity, which the early Christians appropriated to their Christ in total ignorance of the real time of his birth, is no longer denied by competent Christian scholars — when they happen to allude to the natura deorum, i, 42 ; Strabo, xvi, 2, § 38). In Phrygia, Herakles, Hermes, and Apollo were specially called "the cave Gods " (Pausanias, x, 32). But whereas all these deities, starting from the cave, which is the primary temple, acquired loftier fanes, the cult of Mithra in the west reverted and adhered to the cave, natural or artificial. The idea was preserved, apparently, in the worship of the Sun at Hatra in Assyria, where the temple was an entirely dark place (Justi, Geschichte des alten Persiens, 1879, p. 67). 1 De antro, xx. Cp. Statius, Theb. i, 719-20; and Commodianus: "vertebatque boves alienos semper in antris " (Instructiones, i, 13). 2 Cp. the pictures in Jacob Bryant's Analysis of Ancient Mythology, ed. 1774, i, 232, 234, 294 ; and in Cumont's Textes et Monumentes, passim. 3 As with Apollo, born in rocky Delos, to whom the hymnist sings : Thou hast had delight in all rocks, in the steep crags of tall mountains, in rivers hurrying seaward, in shingles sloping to the tide, and harbours of the sea " (Homerid. Hymn to the Delian Apollo). The idea seems to be that the mountains and rivers and harbours were all visible from the place of the God's birth on Mount Cynthus (see 11. 25-44) ; while the rock, which can strike fire, is his earthly symbol, and as it were his source. Johannes LydusJDe mensibus, iii, § 26) gives as the reason for Mithra being held rock-born that rock is the central point of fire." , „ T 4 Firmicus, De Errore, xxi; Justin Martyr, Dialogue with Trypho, c. 70; Jerome, Adversus Jovinianum, i, 7 (Migne, xxiii, col. 219); Windischmann, pp. 61-2, citing Commodianus and Johannes Lydus. . 6 Under the Mazdean system, prayer was offered to Mithra thrice daily ; at dawn, at noon, and at sunset. (Bawlinson, Seventh Oriental Monarchy, p. 628, citing Spiegel, Tradit. Schrift. d. Pars. p. 135). , ^ , . . , , _ 6 Above, p. 180, note. As to this fact, which has been contemptuously denied by Dr. J. E. Carpenter, see Appendix. , , 7 Julian, In regem solem, ea. 19, 20; Preller, BBm. Myth. p. 755; von Bohlen, Das alte Indien. i, 258; Creuzer, Das Mithrium von Neuenheim, p. 29. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 308. X 306 MITHEAISM subject. That Easter is also a solar festival1 is perhaps not so freely recognised. But we know not only that Mithra and Osiris (and Horus), like so many other solar and vegetal deities, were especially adored at the vernal equinox,2 but that in these worships there were special formulas representing, apparently at this date, the symbolical death of the deity, the search for his body, and the finding of it. The Christian Firmicus wrathfully tells how the priests of Osiris, who have a representation of the God in the most 'secret part of their temples, mourn for a certain number of days (presumptively forty,4 = Lent), while professedly searching for the scattered members of his mangled body, till at length they feign to have found it, when they finish their mourning and rejoice, saying, "We have found him: rejoice we."5 And we learn also from Tertullian that Osiris in the mysteries was buried and came to life again.6 Some such idea would seem to be implied in the ritual performed by the people of Patrse at the annual festival of Dionysos, when the God, called Asymnetes ("the Judge" or "the King"), represented by his image in a chest, was carried outside of the temple in the night, to be hailed by the worshippers. Of the image in the chest, it was obscurely told that the sight of it had driven Eurypilus mad — a suggestion that it may have been dismembered. But as to Mithraism the details (if only we can be sure of one identification) are still more precise. The worshippers, Firmicus tells us,8 lay a stone image by night on a bier and liturgically mourn for it, this image representing the dead God. This symbolical corpse is then placed in the tomb, and after a time is withdrawn, whereupon the worshippers rejoice, exhorting one another to be of good hope ; lights are brought in ; and the priest anoints the throats of the devotees, murmuring slowly : " Be of good courage ; ye have been instructed in the mysteries, and ye shall have salvation from your sorrows." As the stone image would be laid in a rock-tomb — the God being pre-eminently " from the rock " and worshipped in a cave — the parallel to a central episode in the Christian legend is suffi- 1 Or rather a luni-solar. It is singular that this movable feast should be celebrated as an anniversary of an event with apparently no orthodox misgivings. 2 Macrobius, Saturnalia, i, 18. Cp. Preller, Bom. Myth., 1865, p. 760. 3 But see Plutarch, On Isis and Osiris, c. 39, which creates a difficulty. There was considerable variance in the dates of the solar festivals in different countries. Cp. Julian, In regem solem, c. 20, and Max Muller, Natural Beligion, pp. 529-30. 4 Compare the forty nights' mourning in the mysteries of Proserpine. De Errore, c. xxviii (xxvii, ed. Halm). 5 De Errore, last cit. 6 Against Marcion, i, 13. 7 Pausanias, vii, 19, 20. Cp. ii, 7, where it is told that the Sicyonians have "statues in a secret place, which one night in every year they bring to the temple of Dionysos." 8 De Errore, xxiii (xxii). I have elsewhere (Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. p. 381, note) discussed Dr. Frazer's view that this passage in Firmicus refers to the cult of Attis. The evidence is clearly against it, the stone image belonging distinctly to the cult of Mithra, though similar rites, with wooden images, belonged to the worships of Attis and Osiris. In the Dionysiak cult, however, the image may have been of stone. THE CULTUS 307 ciently striking ; and in view of the duplication of the motive on all hands, in the cults of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, it is impossible to doubt that we are dealing with a universal myth. To assign the origin of the rite to any known religion would be unwarrantable ; nor is it even certain whether it was originally a part of a solar or of a vegetal cult, though there are grounds for ascribing it to the latter. In any case, it was adaptable to both. It is argued by Dr. Frazer, the chief exponent of the lore of the subject, that the God who dies and rises again does so not as Sun-God but as Vegetation-God ; and it may be granted that the vegetation principle is either primary or present in the cults of Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, and Osiris. But on the other hand the pre-eminently solar Herakles dies on the funeral pyre, descends to Hades, and reascends to Heaven ; the obviously solar Samson of the Semitic myth, who also in its earlier form probably descended to the underworld,1 dies ostensibly in his solar capacity (with shorn hair,2 blinded, and placed between the " pillars " = Herakles' pillars), and must, as God, have risen again ; and even the strictly solar Apollo, as is shown by K. 0. Muller,3 made his Descent to Hades, as did Orpheus, who is inferribly a Day-God. Now, the Descent into Hades was for mortals simply Death ; and since the God as such cannot cease to exist, he may as well be said to die in one way as in another. In all these cases the explanation is more or less clearly astronomical ; and it is so in the case of the Descent of Mithra to Hades, noticed later ; though, as above remarked, the sacrificial principle, identifying the God with the sacrifice, would so complicate the doctrine as to make the solar cult approximate closely to that of the Vegetation-God. This, however, was only one of the Mithraic mysteries, presum ably celebrated once a year. We have further records of another enacted at the initiation of every new devotee, and probably repeated in some form frequently. Justin Martyr,4 after describing the insti tution of the Christian Lord's Supper, as narrated in the gospels, goes on to say : " Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water5 are placed with certain incantations, i 1 Steinthal on The Legend of Samson, § 3. 2 It is true that in some cults this might signify only previous dedication and the preparation for sacrifice. In the practice of the man-sacrificing Khonds, for instance, the victim was kept unshorn till ten or twelve days before the sacrifice, when his hair was cut (Maepherson, Memorials, p. 117). But in the story of Samson the shearing of the hair has clearly also the significance of the weakening of the sun's heat. 8 Introd. to Mythol. pp. 244-6, note. Cp. Preller, Gr. Myth. ii. 317. 4 lApol. c. 66. 5 The Ebionite Christians (the earliest), it will be remembered, celebrated the com munion rite with bread and water (Epiphanius, Her. 30). And water was mixed with wine in later usage ; see Bingham, Christian Antiquities, B. xv, c. ii, § 7 (ed. 1855, v. 242). 308 MITHEAISM in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn." This is borne out by Tertullian, who intimates1 that " the devil, by the mysteries of his idols, imitates even the main parts of the divine mysteries. He also baptises his worshippers in water, and makes them believe that this purifies them of their crimes There Mithra sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers ; he celebrates the oblation of bread ; he offers an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the sword ; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage : he even has his virgins and his ascetics {continentes) ." Again,2 the devil " has gone about to apply to the worship of idols those very things in which consists the administration of Christ's sacraments." Eeference is here made to a certain ceremony of initiation. It strongly suggests the mysteries which are practised in our own time among savage tribes in many parts of the world.8 The complete initiation of a worshipper, we know, was an elaborate and even a painful process, involving many austerities, trial by water, trial by fire, by cold, by hunger, by thirst, by scourging, by branding or bleeding,4 and the mock menace of death.5 Of these austerities different but vague and scanty accounts are given. According to some accounts they lasted fifteen days ; according to others, for forty-eight:6 one old writer7 alleges eighty different kinds of trials. It is more likely that they numbered twelve, seeing that on the Mithraic monuments we find representations of twelve episodes, probably corresponding to the twelve labours in the stories of Herakles, Samson, and other sun-heroes ; but probably also con nected with the trials of the initiated.8 More explicitly we know from Porphyry and from Jerome that the devotees were divided into a number of different degrees, symbolically marked by the 1 Prescr. c. 40 ; Cp. De Bapt. c. 5 ; De Corona, c. 15. 2 Prescr. c. 40. 3 Cp. Cumont, i, 315-316. 4 On this see Mr. King's Gnostics, p. 139, citing Aug. in Johann. i, 7. Mem. Eevelation, xiii, 17 ; also Gregory Nazianzen's First Invective against Julian, c. 70. 3 On this see the details collected by Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. iii, 422-445, of the primitive cults in which "death at initiation" is a ritual feature. This is one of the origins of the idea of being born again." 3 Sainte Croix, Becherches, ii, 126, n. 7 Nonnus, cited by Selden, De Diis Syris, Syntag. i, c. 5; and by Windisehmann, p. 69. See there also the important citation from Elias of Crete, according to whom the trials were twelve, and were " per ignem, per frigus, per famem, per sitim, per flagra, per itineris molestiam, aliaque id genus." Compare Suidas, as cited p. 314. As to the origin of the trials, see Darmesteter on Mihir Yasht, xxx, 122. Darmesteter suggests that the trials may be traceable to that passage, which runs ;— " Ahuramazda answered, Let them wash their bodies three days and three nights : let them undergo thirty strokes for the sacrifice and prayer unto Mithra Let them wash their bodies two days and two nights ; let them undergo twenty strokes for," etc. 8 On the twelve episodes, cp. Sainte-Croix, as cited, with King, Giwstics, p. 128. Com pare the twelve stoles," in the mysteries of Isis, mentioned by Apuleius (Metam, B. xi). There is a remarkable correspondence between the twelve Mithraic trials and twelve forms of Hindoo penance (especially as regards the last), as described by Maurice, Indian Antiquities, 1794, v, 981. These twelve orders of fast include trials lasting fifteen days; and the whole would cover more than eighty days. THE CULTUS 309 names of birds and animals, and apparently by wearing, during some of the rites, the skins or heads of these animals.1 Porphyry2 mentions grades of lions, lionesses, and crows, and higher grades of eagles and hawks ; Jerome3 speaks of crow, gryphon, soldier, lion, Persian (or Perses), sun, Bromios= roarer (or, the bull), and father. Out of the various notices, partly by hypothesis, M. Lajard has constructed a not quite trustworthy scheme,4 representing twelve Mithraic degrees : three terrestrial, the soldier, the lion,5 and the bull ; three aerial, the vulture, the ostrich, and the raven ; three igneous, the gryphon, the horse, and the sun ; and three divine, the grade of fathers, named eagle, sparrow-hawk, and father of fathers.6 It makes a sufficiently grotesque list, in this or any other form ; but it is the old story — all religions are absurd to those who do not believe them;7 and it is not well for those who keep a private conservatory, however small, to throw stones. The " mark on the forehead " of the initiate, finally, was in all likelihood the cross, the universal symbol of life and immortality, and in particular of the Sun-God. Presumably it was not the gammadion or sivastika, the most specific symbol of the Sun, for that appears to have been notably absent from Persian art.8 That it was one of the normal forms of the " Christian " cross may be inferred from the mode of Tertullian's statement, and from the fact 1 On this practice cp. Cumont, as last cited, and W. Simpson, Jonah, 1899, pp. 29-33. 2 De Abstinentia, iv, 16. 3 Epistola, cvii (vii), ad Letam. 4 Recherches sur le Culte Public et Mystires de Mithra, ed. 1867, p. 132, et seq. The main authority for twelve degrees is Porphyry's citation from Pallas as to the signs of the zodiac ; but M. Lajard's list is not zodiacal. The grade of the ostrich is particularly ill made-out (p. 338). 5 Every animal's name used must have had a symbolical meaning. Thus we have it through Tertullian (Against Marcion, i, 13) that " the lions of Mithra are mysteries of arid and scorched nature." 6 Apart from dubieties of detail, it may be taken as certain that the common principle of quadration, or grouping in fours, was distinctly recognised in the Mithraic cult ; and likewise the principle of trinities or sets of three. In an old Mithraic monument at Mycene are figured three rings and four balls. For the Persians, too, as for Greeks and Eomans, the Sun's chariot^ had four horses (Mihir Yasht, xxxi, 125), who stood for the four seasons as well as the "four elements " — earth, air, fire, and water. Heaven, too, was by them represented as quadrate. See Bahr, Symbolik des Mosaischen Cultus, 1837, i, 166 ; also ii, 147, as to the priestly arrangement of the 12 signs in 4 rows of threes ; and Creuzer, as there cited. That four and seven (4+3) were numbers always occupying the Persian mystics we may gather from a quatrain of Omar Khayyam (cited by Bahr, p. 167) exhorting a Sufi to give them up and drink wine. 7 There is a curious correspondence between M. Lajard's four grades and the emblems of the four evangelists given by Augustine : Matthew=lion, Mark=man (this order often reversed), Luke=ox, John=eagle. See "Variorum Teachers' Bible," Aids to Students, p. 10. These, however, were introduced into Judaism from Assyrian sources at the exile. Cp. Ezekiel, i, 10 ; x, 14 ; and Bev. iv, 7. It is interesting to note in this connection that the four Egyptian amenthes or genii of Hades, the mediators for the dead, had respectively the heads of a man, a hawk, an ape, and a dog (Sharpe, Hist, of Egypt, 7th ed. i, 163), while the Assyrian cherubim were compounded of lion, eagle, and man, with a general approxi mation to the ox. The Arabs had tbe same symbols (Wait, as cited, p. 155). The original source of the idea is clearly the zodiac, which figures so largely in the Apocalypse. The four corner" constellations were the Lion, the Bull, the Waterman, and the Scorpion. But the latter, being an evil and destructive sign, could not be given to an Evangel, so there would naturally be substituted that of the Eagle, which rises before that of the Man, and like that is opposite the Lion. 8 Goblet d 'Alviella, The Migration of Symbols, Eng. tr. 1894, pp. 80-82. 310 MITHEAISM that the tau or cross was inferribly a forehead mark in the Judaic cult set forth in the book of Eevelation.1 We know that the symbol entered into the fire-worship of Persia by way of architecture ;2 and it could not have been absent from the imagery of an eastern Sun- God of the time. § 8. The Creed. We have thus far briefly examined what may for the most part be termed the skeleton or dry bones of the Mithraic religion, so far as we can trace them, at the period when it seemed to be success fully competing with Christianity. What of the inner life, the spiritual message and attraction which there must have been to give the cult its hold over the Eoman Empire? Here it is that our ignorance becomes most sharply felt. So far as Christian zeal could suppress all good report of Mithraism, this was done, when Christianity — I will not say overthrew, but — absorbed the Mithraic movement. There were in antiquity, we know from Porphyry, several elaborate treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra ; and every one of these has been destroyed by the care of the Church. They doubtless included much narrative as well as much didactic matter, the knowledge of which would colour the whole religious consciousness of Mithra's worshippers. We shall see later that clues still exist, one of which has been overlooked in studies of Mithraism, to some of the myths of the cult ; and we may safely decide in general that just as the Brahmanas prove the currency of myths concerning the Vedic Gods which are not mentioned in the Vedic hymns, so there must have existed a Mithraic mythology which is not contained in the Zendavesta, that being, though not a simple collection of hymns, a compilation for purposes of worship. The reconstruction of that mythology, however, is now hopeless. Too little attention, perhaps, has been paid to Creuzer's theory that the name Perseus = Perses, "the Persian," and that the Perseus myth is really an early adaptation of the Mithra myth.5 The story of Perseus certainly has an amount of action and colour unusual in Greek myth, and no less suggestive of Oriental origin than is the 1 Cp. Zoeekler, The Cross of Christ, Eng. tr. 1877, pp. 80-81, 105 ; Eev. vii, 3 ; xiv, 1 ; xxii, 4 ; Ezek. ix, 4 ; S. Baring Gould, Curious Myths, 1888, pp. 376-7. 2 Justi. Gesch. der oriental. VSlker im Altertum, p. 397. 8 De Abstinentia, ii, 56 ; iv, 16. 4 It is remarkable that even the treatise of Firmicus is mutilated at a passage (v) where he seems to be accusing Christians of following Mithraic usages, and at the beginning, where he may have made a similar proposition. 5 See Guigniaut's French ed. of Creuzer's Symbolik, i, 368, ii, 158. Cp. Cox, Myth, of Aryan Nations, p. 303, as to the identity of the Perseus and Herakles myths. THE CEEED 311 legend of Herakles. But unless new evidence be forthcoming, such a hypothesis can at most stand for a possibility. And so with the didactic side of Mithraism : we must limit our inferences to our positive data. These include the evidence of the Vendidad ritual that there was associated with the cult a teaching of happy immortality for the righteous, very much on the lines of that of Christianity. An extract1 will make the point clear2: — 27 (89) " (Zarathustra asked) 0 Maker of the material world, thou Holy One ! Where are the rewards given ? Where does the rewarding take place ? Where is the recompense ful filled ? Whereto do men come to take the reward that, during their life in the material world, they have won for their souls ? 28 (90) " Ahura Mazda answered : When the man is dead, when his time is past, then the wicked, evil-doing Dsevas cut off his eyesight. On the _third_ night^when the dawn appears V^J and brightens, when Mithra, the God with beautiful weapons, reaches the all-happy mountains, and the sun is rising : 29 (94) " Then the fiend, named Vizaresha, O Spitama Zarathustra, carries off in bonds the souls of the wicked Dseva-worship- pers who live in sin. The soul enters the way made by Time, and open both to the wicked and to the righteous. At the end of the Kinvad bridge, the holy bridge made by the Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below. 30 (98) " Then comes the beautiful, well-shapen, strong and graceful maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can discern, who has many children, happy and of high under standing. She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above the Haraberezaiti ; above the Kinvad bridge ; she places it in the presence of the heavenly Gods themselves. 31 (102) " Uprises Vohu-mano from his golden seat ; Vohu-mano exclaims : How hast thou come to us, thou Holy One, from that decaying world into this undeeaying one ? 32 (105) " Gladly pass the souls of the righteous to the golden seat of Ahura-Mazda, to the golden seat of the Amesha-Spentas, to the Garoumanem [house of songs] , the abode of Ahura- Mazda, the abode of the Amesha-Spentas, the abode of all the other holy beings. 33 (108) " As to the godly man that has been cleansed, the wicked 1 Vendiddd, Fargard xix. I have put synonyms in the place of one or two reiterated terms, to give the passage some of the literary benefit that is constantly lent in this way by the translators of the Bible. 2 For a recent study on the Mazdean conception of a future state on somewhat pro- Christian lines see the research of M. Nathan, La vie future d'apris le Mazdiisme, d la lumiire des croyances paralliles dans les autres religions. Annales du Musee Guimet. Paris, 1901. 312 MITHEAISM evil-doing Dsevas tremble at the perfume of his soul after death, as doth a sheep on which a wolf is pouncing. 34 (110) "The souls of the righteous are gathered together there: Nairyo-Sangha is with them : a messenger of Ahura-Mazda is Nairyd-Sangha." It is noteworthy, further, that in some codices of the Avesta is found this formula : " He has gained nothing who has not gained the soul : He shall gain nothing who shall not gain the soul." The meaning is "gain a place in Paradise,"1 and the passage looks very like an original form of a well-known Christian text. For the rest, the Zendavesta, like most other Sacred Books, insists on the normal morals strenuously enough. It has strange special teachings as to the sacro-sanctity of the dog ; and its veto alike on the burning and the burying of bodies2 is peculiar to Mazdeism ; but these beliefs do not seem to have affected later Mithraism ; whereas probably its special stress on truthfulness — not paralleled in the Ten Commandments — was maintained. We cannot, indeed, tell how the Mithraic priests dealt with the special problems of the life of the Eoman Empire ; but we are entitled none the less to protest against the loose revival of unfounded and exploded charges against the cult. To this day we find Christian scholars either saying or hinting that Mithraism was signalised in the Eoman period by human sacrifices. For this there is no justification.3 The ecclesiastical historian Sokrates4 does indeed allege that about the year 360 a temple of Mithra at Alexandria, long empty and neglected, was granted by Constantius to the Christians ; that they found in it an adytum of vast depth, containing the skulls of many persons, old and young, who had been sacrificed to Mithra ; and that the Chris tians paraded them through the city, whereupon there was a riot, in which Bishop George and many others were slain. But this narrative is unsupported even in ecclesiastical history, and is full of incredi bilities. The " Pagans " in general are represented as taking arms to avenge an attack on the Mithraic sect, though the Mithraic temple is expressly declared to have been long deserted ; and the emperor Julian, a Mithraist, is represented as writing a letter denouncing the Alexandrians for their conduct. Yet he merely speaks of the killing of George, where Sokrates alleges a wholesale massacre. The whole story savours of mere odium theologicum, and will not consist with any other accounts of Mithraic worship. We do know that during 1 Darmesteter's Zendavesta, i, 370, 2nd ed. (Fragments). 2 Darmesteter, Introd. p. lxxvii. 3 Cp. Cumont, i 69 4 Eccles. Hist. B. iii, c. 2. Cp. B. v, c. 16. THE CEEED 313 the whole of the first three or four centuries it was charged against the Christians, by Jews or Pagans, that they were wont to sacrifice a child at their mysteries.1 That charge was doubtless false, but it was constantly made. On the other hand, the only kind of record founded-on for the charge against Mithraism is one which rebuts it. Sainte-Croix, accepting the plainly worthless testimony of the ecclesiastical historian, referred2 to a passage in the life of Commodus by Lampridius, in the Augustan history, in support of his insinuation that Mithraism involved human sacrifice. But this passage3 explicitly says that Commodus "polluted the rites of Mithras by a real homicide, where it is usual for something to be said or done for the purpose of causing terror " {quum illic aliquid ad speciem timoris vel did vel fingi soleat). The same scholar makes another reference which equally serves to confute him ; 4 yet an English writer later speaks of " the dark and fearful mysteries " of Mithra, repeating the old insinuation.5 Selden6 quotes from Photius7 a statement that men, women, and boys were sacrificed to Mithra ; but that assertion also is plainly valueless, coming as it does from a Christian writer of the tenth century, and being absolutely without ancient corrobora tion. What seems to have happened was a symbolical sacrifice, perhaps followed up by a symbolical eating of the God's image — proceedings which, there is good reason to suppose, occurred in the mysteries of the early Christians.8 But there is far more testimony, such as it is, for the charge of i infamous procedure against the Christians than against the Mithraists. The Mithraic mysteries, save for the fact that they involved real austerities and a scenic representation of death,9 were no more dark and fearful than the Christian mysteries are known to have been, not to speak of what these are said to have been. There lies against them no such imputation of licence as was constantly brought against 1 Cp. Origen, Against Celsus, vi, 27 ; Minucius Felix, Octavius, c. 9 ; Tertullian, Apol. c. 7. 2 Recherches, ii, 135. This false suggestion is implicitly copied by Milman, Hist, of Chr. B. I, c. 1, note. 3 Cap. 9. Sainte-Croix offers an extraordinary mistranslation of the passage. 4 To Porphyry, De Abstin. ii, 56 ; a passage which says only that down till the time of Hadrian it was the custom to sacrifice a virgin to Athene at Laodicea. Sainte-Croix seems to have blundered over the context, in which the detail as to the sacrifice at Laodicea is referred to a historian Pallas, who had written so well on the mysteries of Mithra. This may be the basis also of the assertion by Creuzer (Symbolik, i, 363: 3te Ausg. p. 258) that Hadrian's edict was directed against Mithraism. Preller (Romische Mythologie, ed. Kohler, p. 758, note 3) surprisingly echoes Sainte-Croix. . 5 Wright, The Celt, the Roman, and the Saxon, 4th ed. p. 328. The insinuation is found also in the encyclopsedias. 6 De Diis Svris, Syntag. i, c. 6. 7 in Athanasii vita, cod. 258. 8 Above, pp. 143-4, 206-9. Cp. Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 208-12, 355-61 Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, p. 345. And see below, p. 320. ..... 9 Even this may have been an early Christian usage. Note the force of Gal.m, 1; vi, 17. 314 MITHEAISM the midnight meetings of the Christians, or as is specifically brought by Paul against his own converts at Corinth. Their purpose was unquestionably moral as well as consolatory.1 In the words of Suidas, the worshipper went through his trials in order that he should become holy and passionless. In the course of the initiation, as we know from the unwilling admiration of Tertullian, the devotee, called the soldier of Mithra, was offered a crown, which it was his part to refuse, saying that Mithra was his crown. And everything points to the enunciation of a theory of expiation of and purification from sin, in which Mithra figured as Mediator and Saviour, actually undergoing a symbolic sacrifice, and certainly securing to his worshippers eternal life.3 As to the doctrine of immortality being pre-Christian, it is now quite unnecessary to speak ; and the whole Mithraic symbolism implies such a teaching. On most of the bull monuments, it will be remembered, there stand beside Mithra two figures, one holding a raised and one a lowered torch. These signified primarily sunrise and sunset, or rising spring sun and sinking autumn sun ; but, as Lessing4 long ago showed, they were also the ancient symbols for life and death, and would further signify the fall and return of the soul.5 Nor was this the only point at which Mithraism is known to have competed with Christianity in what pass for its highest attrac tions. The doctrine of the Logos, the Incarnate Word or Eeason, which Christianity absorbed through the Platonising Jews of Alex andria, was present in Mithraism, and of prior derivation. That Mithra was connected with "the Word" appears from the Avesta.6 In the Vendidad, further,7 Zarathustra is made to praise successively Mithra " of the most glorious weapons," Sraosha, " the Holy One," and " the Holy Word, the most glorious," thus joining and in part identifying Mithra with the Word as well as joining him with the Holy Spirit. And Emanuel Deutsch8 was of opinion that the Metatron9 of the Talmud (whom he equates with the Ideas of Plato, 1 See Origen, Against Celsus, iii, 59 ; Julian, Cesares, end ; Homerid. Hymn to Dtmitir, end; K. O. Muller, Introd. to Mythology, ch.xii, § 23. Cp. Preller, Griechische Mythologie. i, 497; and, as to the other Pagan mysteries, the admissions of Mosheim, notes on Cudworth, Harrison's ed. iii. 296-7. 2 De Corona, c. 15. This is corroborated by a scene on one of the monuments (repro duced in Boscher's Lexikon) in which the initiate greets Mithra, and seems to receive from him his solar nimbus. See it in Cumont, ii, 336. 8 See Garucci, Les Mystires du Syncritisme Phrygien, passim. Cp. Windischmann (p. 53) as to the older cultus ; and Boscher, s.v. Mithra, 3055 (20-33), as to the God's being a Saviour-Sacrifice. 4 Wie die Alten den Tod gebildet. See p. 51 in 1869 ed. of Werke. Bd. v, and figures. 5 So Creuzer, Das Mithreumvon Neuenheim, pp. 41-2. 8 Mihir Yasht, xxxii, 137 (quoted above, p. 289). Cp. xxvii. 107. 7 Fargard xix, 14, 15 (48, 54). Cp. Srosh Yasht, exordium, and i, 3 ; Srosh Vaj ; and Frag. of Nasks, ix. 2 ; xxxiv, 70. 8 Literary Remains, p. 50. 3 As to whom see Hershon, Genesis with a Talmudical Commentary, pp. 23-4, MITHEAISM AND CHEISTIANITY 315 the Logos of Philo, the "World of Aziluth " of the Kabbalists, the Sophia or Power of the Gnostics and the Nous of Plotinus) x was " most probably nothing but Mithra."2 As theJMetatron is on the Jewish side identified with the " Angel " promised as~Teader" and commander to the Hebrews in Palestine,8 and that angel is quasi- historically represented by Joshua = Jesus, the chain of allusion from Mithra to the Christ is thus curiously complete. In respect of the concept of a Trinity, as we have already seen, the parallel con tinues. By the admission of a Catholic theologian, the Gods Ahura- Mazda, Sraosha, and Mithra constitute an ostensible trinity closely analogous to that of the later Christists;4 and yet again Mithra, himself approaching to supreme status, rides to battle with Sraosha at his right and Eashnu at his left hand ;5 or else with Eashnu on his right, and Kista, the holy one (female) white-clothed, on his left.6 There seems no good reason for supposing that the doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity reached the Persians through the Greeks :' on the contrary, they probably acquired them from Babylonian sources, on which the Greeks also drew ; and it was not improbably their version of the Logos idea that gave the lead to the Philonic and Christian form, in which the Word is explicitly "the light of the world." § 9. Mithraism and Christianity. Of course, we are told that the Mithraic rites and mysteries were borrowed and imitated from Christianity.8 English scholars of good standing are still found to say that the Mithraic and other mysteries " furnish a strange and hardly accidental parody of the most sacred mysteries of Christianity."9 The refutation of this notion, as has been pointed out by M. Havet,16 lies in the language of those Christian fathers who spoke of Mithraism. Three of them, as we have seen, speak of the Mithraic resemblances to Christian 1 He is further the " Angel of Great Counsel " (Isaiah, ix, 5, Sept.) and heavenly judge, here again equating with Mithra. Cp. Oxlee, Christ. Doct. on the Principles of Judaism, ii, 329. In one of the Jewish forms of excommunication the formula " Mittraton cujus nomen est ut nomen magistri sui " occurs twice. See the translation in Selden, De jure nat. et gent. 1, iv, c. 7. ed. 1679, p. 524. 2 Cp. Darmesteter, Introd. to Zendavesta, 2nd ed. c. 5, as to Jewish and Persian inter actions. M. Darmesteter leant unwarrantably to the view that the Persians were the borrowers, but finally pronounces (p. lxviii) Jew and Persian alike to have borrowed from Platonism. See above, Part II, ch. ii, § 2, for a criticism of this view. 8 Cahen's Bible,, note on Exod. xxiii, 21; Hershon, as cited. 4 E. L. Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, 1878, pp. 121, 130, points to the presence of both Logos and Trinity in the Mithraic system. As to the trinitarian idea, cp. Cumont, i, 298, 331. * Mihir Yasht, xxv, 100. 6 Id. xxxi, 126. 7 Above, p. 218 sq. 8 So Sainte-Croix, Beclierclies, ii, 147 ; and Beugnot, Hist, de la Destr. du Paganisme, i, 157, 158. 9 G. H.Eendall, The Emperor Julian, 1879, Introd. p. 15. Cp. Elton, Origins of English History, 2nd ed. 1890, p. 337. I(> Le Christianisme et ses Origines, iv. 133. 316 MITHEAISM rites as being the work of devils. Now, if the Mithraists had simply imitated the historic Christians, the obvious course for the latter would be simply to say so. But Justin Martyr expressly argues that the demons anticipated the Christian mysteries and prepared parodies of them beforehand. "When I hear," he says,1 "that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this." Nobody now pretends that the Perseus myth, or the Pagan virgin myth in general, is later than Christianity. Justin Martyr, indeed, is perhaps the most foolish of the Christian fathers ; but what he says about the anticipatory action of the demon or demons plainly underlies the argumentation also of Tertullian and Julius Firmicus.2 When, again, Justin asserts8 that the Mithraists in their initiation imitate not only Daniel's utterance that a stone without hands was cut out of a great mountain," but " the whole of [Isaiah's] words " (Isa. xxxiii, 13-19), he merely helps us to realise how much older than Christianity is that particular element of Christian symbolism which connects alike Jesus and Peter with the mystic Eock. That Mazdeism or Mithraism borrowed this symbol from Judaism, where it is either an excrescence or a totemistic survival, is as unlikely as it is likely that the Hebrews borrowed it from Babylonia or Persia.5 In Polynesian mythology, where (as also in the rites of human sacrifice) there are so many close coincidences with Asiatic ideas, it was told that the God Taaroa " embraced a rock, the imagined foundation of all things, which afterwards brought forth the earth and sea." Here again we are in touch with the Grsecised but probably Semitic myth of the rock-born Agdestis, son of Jupiter.7 Even the remarkable parallel between the myth of Moses striking the rock for water and a scene on one of th"e~ Mithraic monuments suggests rather a common source for both myths than a Persian borrowing from the Bible. In the monument, 1 Dial, with Trypho,c. 70. 2 Paul, as M. Havet remarks, would be in the way of knowing the cults of Cilicia. TarBus, indeed, was a Mithraic centre. (Preller, Rom. Mythol. p. 758; Cumont, i, 19,240.) This connects with the vogue of the cult among the Cilician pirates (below, p. 325). In Asia Minor and Syria it seems to have been confined to the seaports they frequented. It is highly probable that it is Mithra who was represented by several of the figures identified with Apollo and other deities in the Lares and Penates of Messrs. Barker and Ainsworth (1853), which deals with antiquities discovered at Tarsus, and with the cults of Cilicia, without once mentioning Mithra or Mithraism. Cp. Creuzer, Symbolik, 3te Ausg. i, 342. We know that on the coins of Kanerki, an Indo-Scythian king of the first century of our era, the same aureoled figure is alternately represented as Helios and Mithra. Windischmann, p. 60, citing Lassen, Indische Alterthumskunde, ii, 837. 8 Last cit. 4 Cp. Jevons, Introd. to Hist, of Religion, ch. 11. 6 Cp. Cumont, i, 165-6 ; Haug, Essays, p. 5. Haug rightly suggests that both Jews and Persians may have drawn from a central source. 6 Ellis, Polynesian Researches, 2nd ed. i, 3-24-5. 7 Arnobius, Adv. Gentes, v, 5. 8 That found at Neuenheim. See Cumont, i, 165. MITHEAISM AND CHEISTIANITY 317 Mithra shoots an arrow at a rock, and water gushes forth where the arrow strikes. As the story of the babe Moses is found long before in that of Sargon,1 so probably does the rock- story come from Central Asia.2 The passage in Isaiah, which strongly suggests the Mithraic initiation, seems to have been tampered with by the Jewish scribes ; and corruption is similarly suspected in the passage Gen. xlix, 24, where " the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel," points to some credence latterly thrust out of Judaism. Above all, the so-called Song of Moses8 (in which both Israel and his enemies figure as putting their faith in a divine " Bock," and the hostile " Eock " is associated with a wine-sacrament) points to the presence of such a God-symbol in Hebrew religion long before our era. There is a clear Mazdean element, finally, in the allusion to the mystic stone in Zechariah,4 the " seven eyes " being certainly connected with the Seven Ame sha-Spentas, of whom Mithra on one view, and Ormazd on another, was chief.6 And when we find in the epistles6 phrases as to Jesus' being a "living stone " and a "spiritual rock," and read in the gospels7 how Jesus said, " Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church," we turn from the latter utterance, so obviously unhistorical, back to the Mithraic rite, and see in the mystic rock of Mithra, the rock from which the God comes — be it the earth or the cloud — the probable source alike of the Eoman legend and the doctrine of the pseudo-Petrine and Pauline epistles. ?- The Mithraic mysteries, then, of the burial and resurrection of the Lord, the Mediator and Saviour ; burial in a rock tomb and resurrection from that tomb ; the sacrament of bread and water, the marking on the forehead with a mystic mark — all these were in 1 Jastrow, Beligionof Babylonia and Assyria, p. 562; Maspero, Hist, ancienne des peuples de Vorient. 4e edit. p. 157 ; Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, pp. 26-8. 2 Prof. Cumont is satisfied that the rock is here, as in Vedic mythology, the symbol of the cloud, which the Sun-God transfixes with his spear or shaft. On this view, the shooting at the rock may be simply a myth-duplicate of the stabbing of the bull. See above, p. 300, note. It is certain that the sky was very commonly conceived in the ancient East as solid. Cp. Yasna, xxx, 5, 6, as trans, by Mills (Zendav. iii, p. 31), and by Haug from the Pahlavi (Essays, 3rd ed. p. 346). So also among the Tongans (Mariner, Tonga Islands, ii, 99). There is something to be said also for Dr. Jevons's theory that rude rock-altars came to be regarded as Gods through being drenched with the blood of sacrifices which the Gods were supposed to enter the stone to consume (though it is not clear that he had the "Bock of Israel" in view). But this theory takes a stronger form in the argument of Mr. Grant Allen (Evolution of tlie Idea of God, ch. v) that the altar-stone was originally a tomb-stone, erected over an ancestor, and that he was the spirit identified with the stone. That all altars, and all temples, are evolved from grave-stones and grave mounds is well proved by Mr. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, §§ 137-9. On this basis, myths of the origination of men and Gods from rocks become newly intelligible. See Mr. Allen again (p. 248, sq., and p. 389) for the suggestion that the divine " corner-stone " may signify a victim slain as foundation-spirit. 3 Deut. xxxii. ; Zech. iii, 9. Cp. Dan. ii, 34. 5 Windischmann, p. 62 ; Seel, p. 215 ; Darmesteter, Ormazd et Ahriman, p. 38. 6 1 Peter ii, 4, 5; 1 Cor. x, 4. In the first case the Greek word is lithos; in th9 second petra. 7 Matt, xvi, 18. 318 MITHEAISM practice, like the Egyptian search for the lost corpse of Osiris, and the representation of his entombment and resurrection, before the publication of the Christian Gospel of a Lord who was buried in a rock tomb, and rose from that tomb on the day of the sun, or of the Christian mystery of Divine communion, with bread and water or bread and wine, which last were before employed also in the mysteries of Dionysos, Sun-God and Wine-God, doubtless as representing his body and blood.1 But even the eucharist of bread-and-wine, as well as a bread-and-meat banquet, was inferribly present in the Mithraic cultus,2 for the Zoroastrian Horn or Haoma, identical with the Vedic Soma,3 was a species of liquor, and figured largely in the old cult as in itself a sacred thing, and ultimately as a deity = the Moon = a king.4 Indeed, this deification of a drink is held to be the true origin of the God Dionysos,5 even as Agni is a deification of the sacrificial fire. And whereas the Mazdean lore associated the Haoma-Tree with the Tree of Life in Paradise,6 so do we find the Catholic theologians making that predication concerning the Christian Eucharist.7 The " cup " of Mithra had in itself a mystical significance : in the monu ments we see drinking from it the sacred serpent, the symbol of wisdom and healing.8 Again, as there is record of an actual eating of a lamb in early Christian mysteries9 — a detail still partly pre served in the Italian usage of blessing both a lamb and the baked figure of a lamb at the Easter season,10 but officially superseded by the wafer of the Mass — so in the old Persian cult the sacrificed flesh was mixed with bread and baked in a round cake called Myazd or Myazda,11 and sacramentally eaten by the worshippers. Nor was this all. Firmicus12 informs us that the devil, in order to leave nothing undone for the destruction of souls, had beforehand resorted to deceptive imitations of the cross of Christ. Not only did they in Phrygia fix the image of a young man to a tree 13 in the 1 Cp. Frazer, GoldenBough, 2nd ed. i, 359 ; ii, 366. 2 Cp. Cumont, i, 146, 197, 320. 3 Spiegel, Avesta, i, 8, citing Windischmann, Ueber den Somakultus der Arier; Max Muller, Physical Beligion, p. 101 ; Psychological Beligion, p. 65. 4 Max Muller, as cited, and in Psych. Bel. pp. 121, 139-140, 147. Cp. in the Zendavesta, Yasna iii, iv, vii, viii, ix. In Yasna ix, Haoma becomes house-lord, clan-lord, tribe-lord, and chieftain of the land. Cp. Mills on Yasna ix (S. B. E. xxxi, 230) as to the antiquity of the idea ; and see Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i, ch. 23, as to its causation. Mr. Spencer makes a striking suggestion in this connection as to the origin of the idea of the tree of knowledge in Genesis. 5 Boscher, Ausfilhrliches Lexikon, 3045; Max Muller, Anthropological Religion, p. 355. As above noted, p. 53, Miss Harrison has newly proved the point, tracing a number of the obscurer epithets of Dionysos to names of grains used to make beer. 6 Cp. Bundahish xviii, 2, 3 ; xxvii, 4 ; xxx, 25 (S. B. E. vol. v) ; Yasna x (S. B. E. xxxi) ; and Mrs. Philpot's monograph, The Sacred Tree, 1897, pp. 13, 123, 130-1. 7 Fischer, Heidenthum und Offenbarung, p. 150. 8 Creuzer, DasMithreum vonNeuenheim, p. 37. 9 Below, p. 320. 1° See refs. on p. 143. 11 Haug, Essays on the Parsis. 3rd ed. pp. 112, 139, 368. 12 De Errors, xxviii. i8 See Julian (In deorum matrem, c. 5) on the tree of Attis, which was " cut down at the moment when the sun arrives at the extreme point of the equinoctial arc." MITHEAISM AND CHEISTIANITY 319 worship of the Mother of the Gods, and in other cults imitate the crucifixion1 in similar ways, but in one mystery in particular the Pagans were wont to consecrate a tree and, towards midnight, to slay a ram at the foot of it. This cult may or may not have been the Mithraic,2 but there is a strong presumption that Mithraism included such a rite. We have seen3 that a ram-lamb was sacrificed in the Mithraic mysteries ; and not only are there sacred trees on all the typical Mithraic monuments, but the God himself is repre sented as either re-born of or placed within a tree — here directly assimilating to Osiris and Dionysos and Adonis,4 and pointing to the origins of the Christian Holy-Cross myth. The Christian assimila tion of Mithraism is, however, still more clearly seen in the familiar Christian symbol in which Christ is represented as a lamb or ram, carrying by one forefoot a cross. We know from Porphyry5 that in the mysteries " a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to Mithra as an appropriate seat ; and on this account he bears the sword of the Earn [Aries] , which is a sign of Mars [Ares] ."6 The sword of the Earn, we may take it, was simply figured as the cross, since a sword is a cross.7 Again, as we have seen, Porphyry 1 JJoros' i' should be remembered, was by the Valentinian Gnostics called " The Cross " and the Eedeemer (Tertullian, Contra Valentin, c. 9). Suggestions of the crucifix appear m the Mazdean monuments. See the development from the winged figure, in Lajard's \ AHas •; and compare the plates in Bryant, i, 294 ; B. K. Porter, Travels in Georgia, etc., \ 1821-2, i, 668 ; ii, 154 ; and Texier, Descrip. de V Arminie, etc., pi. Ill — the two latter repro duced by Justi, Geschichte des alten Persiens, pp. 52, 69. See there also, p. 13, the tomb of Midas, covered with ornamentation of crosses. That the "crown of thorns" is a variation on a mmbus has long been surmised. Mithra, of course, had a nimbus, and this appears irom the monuments (Cumont, ii, 336) to be th e kind of crown given in the mysteries to the initiate. In the older Persian form of the cult, again, the Sun-God rode " with his hands utted up towards immortality " or heaven (Mihir Yasht, xxxi; in Darmesteter, ii, 152). ^°a furtner be associated with some form of the cross which stood for the four- lSS sun-wheel, as in the myth of Ixion.' See Bottger's Sonnencult der Indogermanen, vh a ' .' eiting E. Eapp's essay. Das Labarum und der Sonnencultus ; and compare a ™^nan scuIPture of the Sun-God with the solar-wheel in presence as his symbol. . This tree-cult is assumed by Dr. Frazer (Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 132, note) to have oeen that of Attis, in which the tree figured so prominently ; but that is one of the points at which the cults were likely to converge, both being associated with that of the Magna JMater. Firmicus, in the chapter cited, seems in separate passages to point to two tree cults, mentioning the ram in the second reference only and the simulacrum juvenis in the nrst. See above (p. 306) as to Dr. Frazer's similar ascription to the Attisian cult of the rock-tomb, which presumptively belongs to the Mithraic. 8 Above, p. 301. On the Adonis myth see Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 115 sq. And see in Uuigniaut's edition of Creuzer (figure 139 b, vol. iv) the representation of Osiris as the bun-God emerging from a tree. Dionysos was similarly figured. Cp. Frazer, ii, 160, and f'rm, 5 ^e Antro, xxiv. The later Persians specially celebrated the entrance of the sun into Aries as the new day " (Nuruz). " The public Nuruz [as distinguished from that of the nobles] falls on the first day of the month Ferwardin [March], which happens as the sun enters the tw !i Were all four winds alike rain-bringers "? Quetzalcoatl, as we shall see, was God of one rain-bringing wind, and his mantle was marked with crosses (Mailer, p. 581. Cp. p. 500). Certainly the number four figured in Tlaloc's worship (Bancroft, iii, 348), but so did the image of the snake. Is not the more plausible hypothesis this, that in such a connection the primary significance of the cross was phallic ? 8 Sahagun, pp. 128, 133 (1, ii, ch.29) ; Bancroft, iii, 329-331. 7 See Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed, pp. 205, and above, pp. 207. MEXICAN ETHICS 369 tible presumption is that in all cases alike the symbolical usage grew out of a more ancient practice of ritual cannibalism. Christianity coming among a set of civilised peoples, the symbol became more and more mystical, though the priesthood adhered tenaciously to the doctrine of daily mystical sacrifice. In Mexico, certain cults had similarly substituted symbolism for actual sacrifice; among the modifying practices being the drawing of a little blood from the ears and other parts of the children of the aristocracy.1 But the thin end of the wedge was in, so to speak, in the survival of actual human sacrifices; and the Aztec priesthood drove the wedge deeper and deeper, in virtue of their collective economic interest as well as of what we may term the master tendency of all religions — the fixation of ideas and usages. The more piety the more priests ; the more priests the more sacrifices; and the constant wars of the Aztecs supplied an unfailing stream of captives for immolation.2 Many wars were made for the sole purpose of obtaining captives :8 in fact, the Aztec kings made a treaty with the neighbouring republic of Tlascala and its confederates, a treaty which was faithfully kept, to the effect that their armies should fight on a given ground at stated seasons, in order that both sides should be able to supply themselves with sacrificial victims. At all other times they were quite friendly ; and the Aztec kings avowedly kept up the relation purely in order to have captives for sacrifice.4 An arrangement like that, once set up, would flourish more and more up to the point of national exhaustion, especially as death in battle was reckoned a sure passport to Paradise ; and the priesthood would at the same time grow ever more and more numerous, the only limit being the people's power of endurance. There can be little doubt that the Aztec empire would ultimately have broken down under its monstrous burden if the Spaniards had not destroyed it ; for the taxation necessary to support the military and aristocratic system alongside of the allocation of enormous untaxed domains6 to the ever- multiplying myriads of priests was becoming more insupportable year by year, so that the deep disaffection of the common people was one of the chief supports to the campaign of Cortes.6 It may well be that some of the previous civilisations7 had succumbed in the same way, literally destroyed by religion, to the extent, that is, of inviting conquest by less civilised " tribes. Among some of the Maya peoples, who preceded the Aztecs, 1 Herrera, General History, iii, 216, cited in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology. Cp. Bulletin 28 of Amer. Bureau of Ethnol. as cited, pp. 277, 282. 2 The priests actually went into battle to help in securing captives, and were con spicuous for their fury. Prescott, p. 39. 3 MOller, p. 638. 4 Id. ib.' 5 Prescott, B.i.c. 3. B Id.B. ii, c.6. 7 Cp. Nadaillac, p. 267. 2B 370 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA the office of sacrificer had come to be regarded as degraded ; 1 but even there the sacrifices never ceased ; and the Maya civilisation failed to hold its ground before the others. Strangely enough, there was current among the Aztecs them selves a belief that their State was doomed to be overthrown.2 Here, doubtless, we have a clue to the existence of civilising forces, and of a spirit of hostility to the religion of bloodshed which, how ever, felt driven to express itself in terms of despair. To this spirit of betterment, then, we turn with the doubled interest of sympathy. § 7. The Mexican White Christ. Two sets of phenomena tell of the presence among the Aztecs of that instinct of humanity or spirit of reason which elsewhere gradually delivered men from the demoralisation of human sacrifice. One was the practice, already noted, of substituting a symbol for the sacrificed victim ; the other was the cultus of the relatively benign deity Quetzalcoatl, a God of the Toltecs whom the Aztecs had subdued. There is no more striking figure in American mythology. The name appears to have meant "the feathered [or coloured] serpent," and this was one of his symbols; but he was normally represented by the red-billed sparrow-head, which in Mexican hieroglyphics stands for the air; and his third symbol, the Fire stone, had the same significance.3 As God of the Air, accordingly, he ranks in the pantheon.4 But his mythus has a uniquely ethical stamp, and a certain wistful pathos.6 It tells that he was once high-priest at Tula, in Anahuac, where, ever clothed in white, he founded a cultus, and gave beneficent laws to men, teaching them also the arts of agriculture, metal-work, stone-cutting, and civil government ; the while a king named Huemac held with him the secular rule, and framed the law book of the nation. But the God Tezcatlipoca came to earth in the guise of a young merchant, who deceived the king's daughter, and again in the guise of an old man, who persuaded Quetzalcoatl to drink a mystic drink, whereupon he was seized with an irresistible impulse to wander away. And so he went south-eastwards, setting up his institutions in place after place, but always going further, till at length he disappeared in the east, with a promise to return. For that return his worshippers ever looked longingly, and the Aztec kings with fear, till when 1 Herrera, Hist. Gen. dec. iv,l. x, c. 4, cited by Nadaillac. 2 J. G. Mflller, p. 657. s Id. pp. 583-4. 4 Clavigero, B. vi, § 4 (p. 248). 5 See Dr. Tylor's Besearches into the Early History of Mankind. 1865, pp. 151-4, for the various forms of the myth. THE MEXICAN WHITE CHEIST 371 Cortes came all thought that he was the God, and at Cholula the people sacrificed a man to him, and daubed him with the blood in the regulation way.1 But in the myth of Quetzalcoatl it is told that at Tula he had preached against human sacrifices, telling men to offer to the Gods only fruits and flowers ; and that he could not endure the thought of war, closing his ears when men spoke of it. A similar doctrine is associated with the traditionary worship of the rival God Votan, the legendary founder of the Maya civilisation ;2 and it may be that in both cases there is a reversion to the memory of simpler and kindlier cults. In any case, this humane legend figures for us a late product of Toltec feeling, representing at once the aspiration for a better religion and the memory of the Toltec people, whose polity had been step by step driven to the south-east by the stronger power of the Aztecs.3 It may have been some of the Toltec priests who remained under Aztec rule that framed the gentle mythus,4 and so dreamed for themselves a Messiah, as so many conquered races had done before. On analysis, it appears that Huemac was really the old Toltec name of the God, and that he took that of Quetzal coatl in one of his more southerly resting-places, when he became symbolised as the "serpent.5 Of old he had had human sacrifices like other Gods ; and in the Aztec lands he had them still.6 But some of his white-robed priests, left victimless till they recoiled from the bloody rites of their conquerors, felt that their God must have a different nature from that of the Gods of the black-robed priests of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, and so framed for his cult a new gospel.7 Eecognising this, Dr. Muller and Dr. Brinton and Dr. Beville agree that Quetzalcoatl is properly the God of the beneficent rain- bringing east-wind, identified with the vanquished Toltec people, so that like them he is driven away by the enmity of other deities, but, like the vanishing or slain Sun-God of all mythologies, he is to return again in power and great glory. By such a myth Christians are set vaguely surmising a debt to their own legend ; but there is no such thing in the case. As Mr. Bancroft observes, following 1 Prescott. B. ii, c. 6 ; B. iv, c. 5. 2 Nadaillac, p. 268. 3 Mailer, p. 581. 4 Had they been sacrificers before, they would be partly deprived of victims by the conquest. For another case of a God who refused human sacrifices, see T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, i, 231. He is supposed to have been shrined or incarnated in a man, which for his priests made human flesh taboo. 5 Mailer, p. 587. 6 Id. pp. 589-90. 7 It was one of his priests, bearing his name, who shot the arrow in bo the dough image of Huitzilopochtli — the humanest sacrificial rite in that -God's worship. Bancroft, iii, 299-300. 372 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA Dr. Muller,1 the process is one which has occurred in many mytho logies : — "It is everywhere the case among savages, with their national God, that the latter is a nature-deity, who becomes gradually transformed into a national God, then into a national King, high-priest, founder of a religion, and at last ends in being considered a human being. The older and purer the civilisation of a people is, the easier it is to recognise the original essence of its national God, in spite of all transformations and disguises. So it is here. Behind the human form of the God glimmers the nature- shape, and the national God is known by, perhaps, all his worshippers as also a nature-deity. From his powerful influence upon nature, he might also be held as creator. The pure human form of this God [Quetzalcoatl] as it appears in the fable, as well as in the image, is not the original, but the youngest. His oldest concrete forms are taken from nature, to which he originally belongs, and have maintained themselves in many attributes. All these symbolise him as the God of fertility, chiefly by means of the beneficial influence of the air."2 What is specially interesting is that, despite the inner hostility of the Quetzalcoatl cult to those of the Mexican Gods, his stood in high honour ; 3 and while some of his devotees sacrificed and ate his representative once a year in the usual manner, some of his priests, of whom the chief also bore his name as representing him,4 did as little sacrificing as they could, evidently finding some support in that course.5 We are moved to ask, then, whether there was here a culture-force that could have countervailed the host of the priests of slaughter had the Aztecs been left to work out their own salva tion. The more the problem is pondered, however, the less probable will it seem that the humaner teaching could have so triumphed. Conquest by some other American people might have served to restrain the religion of blood ; but there is no sign that the humaner cult was as such making serious headway. The Aztec priesthood like every other had an economic basis ; its higher offices were the perquisites of certain aristocratic families ; and the habit of perpetual bloodshed had atrophied the feelings of the priestly army on that 1 Id. pp. 329, 337, 583. 2 Native Races, iii, 279. Dr. Tylor once wrote : " I am inclined to consider Quetzalcoatl a real personage, and not a mythical one " (Anahuac, p. 278), and Mr. A. H. Buckland (Anthropological Studies, p. 90) takes the same view; but neither argues the point ; and in his Researches into the Early History of Mankind (1865, pp. 151-4), Dr. Tylor treats the matter as pure myth. It was this deity who was long ago identified with St. Thomas (Clavigero, B. vi, § 4. p. 250). For the myth see Dr. Brinton, American Hero Myths, pp. 73-142. In the ritual of the confessional he is called "the father and mother" of the penitent (Sahagun, p. 341 ; 1. vi, c. 7). He, too, is born of a virgin mother (Brinton, p. 90). 8 His temple at Cholula was the greatest in New Spain. Gomara, as before cited, p. 448, col. 2. 4 Bancroft, iii, 267. « Muller, p. 582. THE FATALITY OF THE PEIESTHOOD 373 side. Beyond a certain point, priesthoods are incapable of intel lectual regeneration from within, even if reformative ideas be present. § 8. The Fatality of the Priesthood. The main hope of the humaner thinkers would probably lie in the substitution of a symbolic for an anthropophagous sacrament : if baked effigies could be eaten, effigies might be sacrificed. But in some even of the symbolic sacraments blood was a constituent. Thus in the cult of Huitzilopochtli, for the baked image made of seeds for the winter festival of the solstice — Christmas — the blood of slain children was the cementing moisture.1 Here again we have the primitive " sympathetic magic ": the image, which was transfixed with an arrow before being eaten, represented the potentialities of new vegetable life at the time of year when vegetation was dead, and the blood of children was the deadly symbol of the moisture that was the life of all things, besides being a means of as it were vitalising the image.2 Such a cult was indeed far from reducing anthropophagy to a mere symbol. So with the cult of Xiuhteuctli, the Fire-God. Alongside, apparently, of the remarkable symbolic sacrament above mentioned there were anthropophagous sacraments to the same God. He was one of the most widely honoured of all, the first drink at every meal in every household being taken in his name — a correlation which again suggests derivation from an Asiatic fire-cult such as is seen blended in that of Agni in the Vedas. In his name, too, every child was passed through the fire at birth — another notable parallel to ancient Asiatic usages;8 and from his six hundred temples burned as many perpetual fires. Every four years a great feast was held in his honour at Quauhtitlan, not far from the city of Mexico ; the first act being to plant six high trees before the temple on the day previous, and to sacrifice two slaves, who were flayed. On the feast day, two priests appeared clad in those victims' skins, hailed with the cry, " See, there come our Gods "; and all day they danced to wild music, the while many thousands of quails were sacrificed to the God. Finally the priests took six prisoners and bound or hanged them to the tops of the six trees, where they were shot through with arrows. When dead they were taken down and their hearts cut out 1 Bancroft, iii, 297-300. 2 MUller, pp. 605-6. See above, p. 144. 8 Dr. MUller remarks (p. 569) in this connection that the entire Aztec religion has many resemblances to the fire-worship of Siva. But the primary fire-worship traced among the Sumer-Akkadians is to be looked to as the possible source of that and the later Semitic as well as of the American forms. 374 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA in the usual way, the priests and nobility finally eating the flesh of both the men and the quails as a sacrament. It is not clear at what place and period the symbolical sacrifice in this cult arose ; but the essential problem is, whether it could have ousted the other. And the answer must be that inasmuch as the human sacrifice was specially associated with the power of the priests, and was obviously to the tastes of the mass of the people of all grades, nothing short of an overthrow of the existing polity by another could have effected the transformation, there being no native culture in the surrounding States that could give the requisite moral lead on a large scale. Such violent subversion, it will be remembered, was a common condition of religious evolution in the Old World in antiquity; and the history of the great priestly systems of Egypt, India, and Babylon points to the conclusion that not otherwise than by the fiat of powerful autocrats, or forcible overthrow at the hands of neighbouring and kindred races, in the absence of peaceful culture-contacts of a higher kind, could such systems be made to loosen their grasp on social and intellectual life. It will be observed that in the cult under notice the priest repre sents the God even as does the victim. The same phenomenon occurs, sometimes, though not always, with the same procedure of donning the victim's skin, in many of the American sacrificial cults, Aztec and other.2 A recent hierologist has argued, in view of the various instances in which priest-kings and sacrificial priests have been themselves annually sacrificed, that " it was as the shedder of divine [victim's] blood that the king-priest's blood was shed," and that he was originally distinguished from his fellow-worshippers " only by his greater readiness to sacrifice himself for their religious needs."3 We need not dwell here on the fallacy of thus imputing a calculated and reasoned self-devotion in the case of an act which, among savage men, would stand just as much for lack of imagination or forethought. Assuming the theory to be true, however, we must recognise that in the case of the historic Mexican priesthood any ancient liability of the kind had long disappeared. According to Herrera, the private chaplains of the nobles were slain at the death of their masters ; but this was as slaves or attendants, not as public priests, and not as true sacrifices.4 In not a single case do we learn 1 MUller, pp. 568-9; Clavigero, B. vi, § 21 (i, 283-4) ; Humboldt, Monuments, 186, 206, 213. 2 Mttller, pp. 77, 493, 570, 677, 581, 591, 599, 600, 604, 606, 635, 640. 3 Jevons, Introd. to the Hist, of Religion, pp. 294, 296. 4 Herrera, General History, Eng. tr. 1725-6, iii, 220, cited in Spencer's Descriptive Sociology, No. II, p. 20, col, 1, THE FATALITY OF THE PEIESTHOOD 375 that the victim was furnished by the priestly class. That class indeed practised in some measure, as we have seen, the asceticisms common to most ancient priesthoods, but it had long made an end of any serious penalties attaching to its profession.2 The priests, in short, were the dominant force in the Mexican society ; and under them it was on the one hand being economically ruined in the manner of most ancient empires, and on the other being anehylosed in its moral and intellectual life. To say this is of course not to select the priests for blame as being the sole or primary causes of the fatal development : their order was but the organised expression of the general religious tendency. But they dramatically exhibit, once for all, the capacity of "religion" in general to darken life and blight civilisation. The mere number of the priests was so great as to constitute a force of fixation such as has never been countervailed in modern European countries, where forces relatively less powerful have only slowly been undermined by culture influences from more advanced neighbouring communities. When we note that the temple of the Mexican Wine-God alone had four hundred priests,3 we realise that we are in presence of social conditions which mere humanism could not avail to transform, even if it found a hearing among the priest hoods. A fortiori, no philosophic developments on the sacerdotal side could have availed. The growth of a pantheistic philosophy among the priesthoods of ancient India and Babylonia and Egypt, and the growth of a monotheistic doctrine among those of Jewry, were equally without effect on the sacerdotal practices as a whole, these remaining in all cases alike primitively sacrificial, though, for extra- sacerdotal reasons already noted, they ceased to include human sacrifice. And in Mexico, of course, the philosophic developments were slight at best. The figuring of Tezcatlipoca as " the soul of the world"4 does not appear to have stood for any methodically 1 Thus Dr. Jevons's remark (p. 283) that "in Mexico the priest was allowed to evade the violent death which attached to his office on condition that he found a substitute (a war captive)," is apt to mislead ; though it may be the true explanation of the origin of the priestly habit of joining in the fighting. 2 We even find that among the redskins boys spared from sacrifice were made priests, being thus safe. Waitz, iii, 207, citing Strachey, Hist, of Travaile into Virginia, ed. 1849, p. 93. 3 MUller, p. 570. 4 Itis remarkable that the doctrine of the Logos is here adumbrated in connection with the_ Winter Sun, who would presumably be born at the winter solstice (when the reign of Huitzilopochtli ended) and pass away at the vernal equinox. As God of Drought, however, he was further God of Death, of the Underworld, and of Judgment (MUller, pp. 614, 618-9, 621)— a combination out of the common line of evolution, the God of Souls and of Wisdom being usually one of the Beloved Gods. The special evolution seems to be due to the fact that he was originally the God of the Tlailotlaks, turned by the Aztecs to special account. Tezcatlipoca was nominally the "greatest God" (Clavigero, B. vi, § 2, p. 244), though Huitzilopochtli got more attention. " Tezcatlipoca was the most sublime figure in the Aztec Pantheon " (Dr. Brinton, American Hero Myths, 1882, p. 69). See his titles (Id. p. 70). He was the Night God (p. 71) ; and Clavigero notes that his statue was of black stone. 376 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEElCA pantheistic thought, being apparently an expression of henotheism common in solar worships. The entire Mexican civilisation, in short, was being arrested at a stage below that attained in the Mesopotamian empires long before the Christian era. § 9. The Beligion of Peru. While in Mexico we see a society being ruined by religion, in Peru we find one suffering economically a similar ruin from the principle of empire. In Peru, the religious tendencies are seen at work in a much modified degree. There the rapid multiplication of the priesthood was hindered by the peculiar standing of the king and his family. In Mexico the king was elected by the nobles : in Peru he reigned by divine right of the strongest description ; the doctrine being that the original Inca was the Sun-God, who married his sister ; and that all succeeding Incas did the same, thus keeping the succes sion strictly divine. As they extended their dominions by conquest, they astutely provided that the religions of the conquered peoples should subsist, but in a state of recognised subjection to the Inca, the divine high-priest, as the priesthood generally ranked below the sacred caste of the Inca nobles ; so that the old cults had not the chance of growing as those of Mexico did, though they remained popular and venerable. The two leading deities were Pachacamac and Viracocha, who in virtue of similarity were often identified. Each figured in myth as a Creator, and they were doubtless originally the Gods of different peoples or tribes, though their cults tended to unity under the politic despotism of the Incas. Pacha camac signifies " life-giver of the earth,"1 and Viracocha — who here assimilates to Aphrodite — " foam of the sea "; and they seem accord ingly to have been respectively associated, to some extent, with the principles of heat and moisture ; but, as so many other ancient systems show, these principles readily lend themselves to combina tion. Both belonged to the pre-Incarial civilisation, but were adopted and blended by the Incas, though their status as creators of all things, including the sun, was inconsistent with the Incarial religion, in which the sun was the Creator.2 The omission to build new temples, however,3 was probably undermining this cult ; and the popular religion was becoming more and more one of worship of the minor deities, with the Inca figuring as the representative of the chief natural God, the Sun. The Thunder and Lightning were worshipped 1 MUller, p. 318. 2 id. pp. 314-319. 3 See Mr. Kirk's note in his ed. of Prescott, p. 44. THE BELIGION OF PEEU 377 as the Sun's ministers ; the Eainbow as his symbol or emanation ; and the Moon and Stars, and in particular the planet Venus, as separate divinities ; and Creator, Thunder, and Sun were sacrificed to as if very much on a level in dignity.1 From such developments we may infer that the Peruvian popular culture was nearly stationary or decaying ; and it becomes easy to understand how, after the Conquest, the Christian deities took the place of the old without any difficulty ; these being so many religious conventions, while the real beliefs of the people remained attached, as they are now, to the genii or sprites of their own lore. For an unprogressing and unlettered people — as many of those in Europe have been at different times — religion is mostly a matter of festivals and hand-to-mouth superstitions ; and the Peruvian common people are, under Christianity, what they were under their Incas. European life gives abundant evidence of how the usages of an ancient creed may survive the creed itself. In Peru, as in Mexico, there was a solemn religious ceremony of renewing at stated periods, by special generation, the fire used in the temples, and even in the households. In Mexico it was done over a human sacrifice, by means of the friction of two sticks, at the end of each cycle of fifty-two years.2 In Peru it was done yearly by means of a concave mirror.8 So did men do in ancient Eome, and similarly have northern European peasants done in Germany, in Scotland, in Ireland, at intervals till our own time, regarding the " need fire " or " forced fire " as a means of averting evil.4 It is one of the oldest rites of the human race, and it has survived under all religions alike down to the other day, when perhaps it received its death-blow from the lucifer match. Equally universal is that ceremony of annually driving out the evil spirits,5 which was undertaken in Peru by the Incas in person, and which is supposed to have survived in Scotland to this day in the burghal ceremony of "riding the marches." Customary usages and minor superstitions outlast faiths and philosophies ; and in Peru they defy the Church. Sun-worship is gone ; but the ideas of the Incarial times remain. And, indeed, there existed in some districts eighty years ago, and probably survives even to-day, a devout celebration of the memory of the ancient theocracy, in the shape of an annual dramatic representation, which the rulers vainly sought 1 Rites and Laws of the Yncas, trans, by C. E. Markham, Hakluyt Society, 1873, p. 27. 2 Prescott, Mexico, c. iv, end ; J. G. MUller, p. 520. 8 Prescott, Conquest of Peru, Kirk's ed. in 1 vol. c. iii, p. 51. "In cloudy weather they had recourse to the means of friction." Eeville, p. 196. 4 Max MUller, Physical Religion, pp. 286-9. 5 On this usage, see Dr. Frazer's Golden Bough, vol. iii, u. iii, §§ 14-15, 378 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA to suppress, of the death of the last Inca at the hands of the Spaniards.1 It was about as ill-founded a devotion as any ever shown to a royal line in our own hemisphere ; for under the Incas the people were heavily oppressed by minutely tyrannous laws and by taxes, they alone bearing all burdens, and the priests and nobles going free.2 But were it not for the mistake of the last Inca before Pizarro in recognising one of his sons by a foreign queen, and dividing the empire between him and the heir apparent, the Inca empire, despite the disaffection of some of its subjects by conquest, might have subsisted long. As its priesthood was necessarily less powerful, so its sacrificial system was less burdensome and less terrible. Human sacrifices also were much less general than in Mexico ; but they existed ;3 and there is reason to reject the claim of Garcilasso, who was biassed by his Incarial descent, that the Incas had wholly abolished them. Peoples at that culture-stage could not readily be forced to give up their ancient rites. It is in fact on record that when an Inca was dangerously ill, one of his sons was sacrificed for him to the Sun-God in the immemorial fashion ;4 and it was in keeping with such a usage that at least one tribe in Quito should regularly sacrifice its first-born.5 If it be a sheer fable that at the accession of a new Inca there were sacrificed some hundreds of children,6 no trust can be put in any of the Spanish testimonies. It is however established by the "Fables and Eites of the Yncas"7that the great festival of Capacocha or Cachalmaca, instituted by one Inca at the beginning of his reign, was celebrated with sacrifices of boys and girls, one from each tribe or lineage, both at Cuzco and at the chief town of each province. Further, after every victory certain captives were sent to the capital to be sacrificed to the sun. It is thus only too likely that among some of the coast peoples children were sacrificed to the Gods every month.8 What seems to be certain is that, save perhaps among some of the more savage tribes, the Peruvians under the later Incas had abolished cannibal sacraments — a proof of the natural move- 1 Stevenson, Twenty Years' Residence in South America, 1825, i, 401 ; ii, 70-3. 2 Prescott, Peru, B. i, c. 2, citing Garcilasso. 3 See Kirk's note to Prescott, p. 51, in reply to the claim of Sir C. Markham on behalf of the Incas. Cp. MUller, pp. 377-8. Sir C. Markham's case is stated by him in Winsor's Narrative History, as above cited, l, 238-9. He does not appear to recognise the bearing of his own assertion that the Incas made a law prohibiting human sacrifice. Such a law is evidence of the practice. The conflict of Spanish authorities is at once solved by allowing that the survivals were local, not general. 4 MUller, p. 378, citing Montesimos. 5 id, p. 377 citing Velasco. 6 Id. p. 378, citing five authorities. 7 Translated from the MS. of Molina by Sir C. Markham, who had denied the occurrence of human sacrifices in Incarial Peru. 8 Mtiller, pp. 378-9, citing Xeres and Eottencamp. THE BELIGION OF PEEU 379 ment of humanity in that direction where the direct interest of a powerful priesthood did not too potently conserve religious savagery. For the rest, they sacrificed their llamas, small birds, rabbits, sheep, and dogs ; and while they alone of the American races had burnt-offerings of animals,1 they ate their unburnt sacrifices raw,2 here again showing the tendency of religion to preserve, wherever possible, the most ancient usages of all. They had, indeed, the custom of Suttee, like the Hindus and the Mexican Chichimecs ; good widows, especially those of the Incas, being at one time expected to bury themselves alive when their husbands died,3 so as to be wives to them in the spirit world ; but this custom was dying out, being replaced by the symbolism of placing statuettes in a man's tomb to represent his wives and servants.4 In the same way, human sacrifice was being replaced by the surrogate of blood-letting.5 Above all, the blood sacrament had become conventionalised in a quasi-Christian form. The Peruvians had the institution of a Holy Communion, in which they ate of a sacred bread, sancu, sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed sheep, the priest pronouncing this formula : " Take heed how ye eat this sancu ; for he who eats it in sin, and with a double will and heart, is seen by our Father, the Sun, who will punish him with grievous troubles. But he who, with a single heart, partakes of it, to him the Sun and the Thunderer will show favour, and will grant children and happy years, and abundance of all that he requires." All then made a solemn vow of piety and loyalty before eating.6 To say, as some do, that there was nothing essentially "moral" in such rites, because they had in view temporal well-being, 7 is merely to set up one more one-sided discrimination between Christianity and Paganism ; for it is certain that the early Chris tians regarded their eucharist as possessing miraculous medicinal virtues. Equally unjudicial is the comment on the rites of infant baptism and confession of sins (which the Peruvians also practised) that " even where the Peruvian religion seems to undertake the 1 Prescott, p. 44, citing McCulloch. 2 Seville, p. 220. Sir C. Markham's assertion, that the Peruvian sacrifices were with one exception thank-offerings and not expiations, omits to define the sacramental species. 8 In this usage we probably have the origin of the practice of burying alive the unfaithful " Virgins of the Sun " in Peru, and Vestals in Eome. Dr. Eeville explains the practice in both cases by the idea of devoting to darkness the unfaithful spouse of the Sun (Lectures cited, p. 207). But the Eoman Vestal was dedicated to the Goddess Vesta. who is identified with the earth, as hearth-fire and as female principle. To the same ancient practice of burying wives alive may be ascribed the long retained practice of putting some female crimiuals to death in that fashion. Michelet (Guerres de religion, 1856, p. 88) gives the absurd explanation that burying alive was resorted to as being more decent than burning alive, because in the latter case the flames soon left the victim naked. 4 Still, it survived the Conquest. Prescott, p. 43, n. citing Ondegardo. 5 MUller, p. 379. 6 Bites and Laws of the Yncas, p. 27. 7 Eeville, pp. 227, 233-5. 380 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA elevation and protection of morals, it does so rather with a utilitarian and selfish view than with any real purpose of sanctifying the heart and will."1 It is hardly necessary to reply that the Mexicans and Peruvians had just the same kind of moral feeling in any given stage of civilisation as Christians have had in a similar culture- stage, and that the desire for future salvation, appealed to in all Christian evangelical teaching, is only utilitarianism and selfishness sub specie mternitatis. The Spaniards themselves recognised that the Mexicans ate the mystical body of the God with every sign of devotion and contrition;2 and they were so far from depreciating the Peruvian communion that they supposed St. Bartholomew had established it.8 The Mexican wise-woman who prayed the Merciful Goddess to cleanse the babe from the sin of its parents will compare fairly well with the practisers of infant baptism among ourselves ; and it cannot be shown that the Mexican and Peruvian confessors stood as a rule any lower morally than those of Christendom at the same culture-stage. The casting of horoscopes for infants was practised in Europe just as in Mexico at the time of the Conquest. The Mexican priests gave indulgences ; but they never went to the lengths of the Eenaissance Papacy in that direction. § 10. Conclusion. On the other hand, the promotion of material well-being is precisely what is oftenest claimed for Christianity ; and the argument is presumably changed in the case of Peru and Mexico only because there it would break down. For the great fact about these heathen civilisations is that they did attain material well-being, as apart from humane feeling, in a considerable degree ; though, as we have seen, they were suffering much from sacerdotalism and autocracy. If we do not say with Dr. Draper that the Spaniards destroyed a higher civilisation than their own, we may at least say that the one they destroyed was in many ways superior to that which they put in its place. What they did was completely to destroy the civilisations they found, without replacing them at all in large measure. In the matters of road-making, agriculture, and the administration of law, the new civilisation was not to be compared with the old, which, indeed, was on these points ahead of anything in Europe since the fall of the Eoman Empire.4 The Aztecs had clean streets, and lighted streets, when Europe had not. Dr. Eeville, 1 16. p. 233. 2 Prescott, Mexico, app. p. 641. 8 Prescott, Peru, p. 62. 4 As to the excellence of the Peruvians' architecture, see Markham, in Winsor, i, 246-7, and Squier, as there cited ; and as to their admirable system of irrigation see pp. 252-3, CONCLUSION 381 indeed, lays undue stress on the lighting of the streets, which was not done by lamps, but by fires j1 but even that was an improvement on the European state of things two hundred years ago. Peru to-day is in large part a desolation compared with what it was under the Incas ; and under the new religion the native races seem to be positively lower than under the old. By the testimony of Catholic priests, the conquerors nearly exterminated the Aztec races, the numbers destroyed by their cruelties being reckoned at twelve millions. And on the side of morality and humanity, who shall say what the gain was in Mexico when the Christian conquerors, after execrating the practice of human sacrifice, set up their own Holy Inquisition to claim its victims for the propitiation of the three new Gods, harrying still further the people they had already decimated by atrocious tyranny and cruelty ? It is little to the purpose to urge, as was done by Joseph de Maistre,2 that " the immense charity of the Catholic priesthood " sought to protect the natives in every way from the cruelty and avarice of the conquerors. It is in the nature of all priesthoods in close connection with the people to seek or wish its good in some way:3 the Mexican priests, as we have seen, enjoined beneficence, and they treated their own vassals well.4 But when the Christian apologist declares that he has "no knowledge of a single act of violence laid to the charge of the priests," save in the one case of Valverde in Peru,5 he goes far indeed beyond his brief. There were certainly humane priests, as Las Casas and Sahagun ; but what but " acts of violence " were the whole efforts of the priesthood to destroy the ancient monuments and records, to say nothing of the operations of the Inquisition? It is not, however, in mere " acts of violence " that the fatality of Christian junction with non-Christian civilisation lies : it belongs to the nature of the case ; and religious principle, which encouraged the original act of conquest, is worse than powerless to avert the consequences. If the more forward races will not leave the more backward alone, and cannot blend with them in a common stock, they must do one of three things : exercise a mere supervision, good or bad, as Englishmen do in India, where they cannot breed ; or crowd the weaker out, as is being done in North America and Australia ; or strangle the lower civilisation 1 Eobertson, History of America,^, vii (Works, ed. 1821, ix, 22). 2 Soiries de Saint Pitersbourg, ed. 1821, i, 109. 8 Cp. MUller, p. 144, on the efforts of missionaries in general to burke the facts as to cannibalism among the aborigines. 4 Prescott, p. 34. 5 Even this he seeks to cast doubt upon. But even Valverde might intelligibly have Bought to protect the Indians, as he is said to have done, after helping to massacre them in conquest. They had become his tithe-payers. 382 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA without developing the higher, as has been done in Mexico and Peru by Christians, and in Egypt by Saracens. Whether a race fusion can take place in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil remains to be seen. If it be attained, those countries will have solved a problem which in the United States, in a worse form, seems far from solution. In that case, a relative success may finally be claimed for the Catholic as against the Protestant evolution. But it will be due to other causes than religion. It may, indeed, be charged against the Catholic Church that its unchangeable hostility to the spread of knowledge has been the means of paralysing progress in countries where, as in Mexico and Peru, it has been able to attain absolute dominion over minds and bodies. " It seems hard," says Dr. Tylor, "to be always attacking the Catholic clergy ; but of one thing we cannot remain in doubt — that their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico." But it is not Catholicism that is the explanation. "The only difference," avows Dr. Brinton,2 "in the results of the two great divisions of the Christian world," in the matter of con quests, " seems to be that on Catholic missions has followed the debasement, on Protestant missions the destruction, of the race." It may be added that in Protestant Natal to-day there is a general determination among the white population to keep the natives uneducated, lest knowledge should give them power. In fine, the claim that there is an inherent civilising virtue in Christianity is here, as elsewhere, turned to confusion. " Christianity," as the same writer declares,3 " has shown itself incapable of controlling its inevitable adjuncts ; and it would have been better, morally and socially, for the American race never to have known Christianity at all than to have received it on the only terms on which it has been possible to offer it." What Christendom could best have done for the American civilisations, after putting down human sacrifice, was to leave them to grow, like those of China and Japan, under the influence of superior example at certain points. Progress might then conceiv ably have come about.4 There is little use in speculating over the 1 Anahuac, p. 126. Since Dr. Tylor wrote, there has been much progress in Mexico, due to the rationalistic ideas which are there as elsewhere confronting the Church. 2 American Hero Myths, p. 206. 8 Id. p. 207. 4 The Mexican language, in particular, shows great capabilities. " Of all the languages spoken on the American continent, the Aztec is the most perfect and finished, approaching in this respect the tongues of Europe and Asia, and actually surpassing many of them by its elegance and expression. Although wanting the six consonants, 6, d, f,r,g, s, it may still be called full and rich. Of its copiousness, the Natural History of Dr. Hermandez gives evidence, in which are described twelve hundred different species of Mexican plants, two hundred or more species of birds, and a large number of quadrupeds, reptiles, insects, and metals, each of which is given its proper name in the Mexican language. Mendieta CONCLUSION 383 might-have-been ; but at least we should not overlook the fact that in Peru there are distinct records of rationalism among the theocratic Incas themselves. Several of these remarkable rulers1 are recorded to have expressed the conviction that the Sun, for ever moving in his allotted course, could not be the Supreme Deity he was said to be — that there must be another Deity who ruled him.2 Netzahualcoyotl, we saw, thought similarly. This reminds us that in all ages and under all religions there have been Freethinkers ; men who knew that the Gods were myths while the Vedic hymns were being made ; Sadducees among the Jews; Mu'tazilites among the Mohammedans. For the history of mental evolution has not been that of a simple process from delusion to rationalism, but of a constant war between the two tendencies in the human mind ; and what has happened hitherto is just that inasmuch as the majority have thought little they have been credulous. To measure the position of any nation in this regard, we have for the most part simply to consider the s1 status and expansive power of its priesthood. And for us to-day i there is one special lesson to be drawn from the case of the unbeliev ing Incas, who never modified their theocratic practice as regarded the multitude, whatever they might deem among themselves. Their principle evidently was that the masses must be deluded. Well, we know that when the royal line fell, those masses were wholly unable to act for themselves, and fell abjectly under the sway of a mere handful of conquerors. Unless the masses also rationalise, they will never attain a worthy humanity. So that the Freethinkers had need be more righteous than the Scribes and Pharisees. It is the more necessary to insist on this, the final lesson of all comparative hierology, because in the face of all the facts some students contrive, with the best intentions, to invert it. Because supernaturalism has always been associated with ethics in religious ' history, it is fallaciously inferred that there can be no ethic without supernaturalism ; and in order to shield from rational criticism the says that it is not excelled in beauty by the Latin, displaying even more art in its con struction, and abounding in tropes and metaphors. Camargo calls it the richest of the vhole land, and the purest, being mixed with no foreign barbaric element ; Gomara says it is the best, most copious, and most extended in all New Spain ; Davila Padilla, that it is very elegant and graceful, although it contains many metaphors which make it difficult ; I Loreozana, that it is very elegant, sweet, and complete ; Clavigero, that it is copious, polite, and expressive ; Brasseur de Bourbourg, that from the most sublime heights it descends to common things with a sonorousness and richness of expression peculiar to itself. The missionaries found it ample for their purpose, as in it, and without the aid of fcreign words, they could express all the shades of their dogmas " (Bancroft, iii, 727-8). | ' According to Prescott, the crania of the Incas show great superiority to those of the people, which may well be believed ; but the data are called in question. See Kirk's ed. i is. 1 2 Eeville, pp. 162-5. Cp. Markham, The Incas of Peru, 1910, pp. 97-103 (prayers to the Supreme Being), and in Winsor's History, i, 233. 384 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA prevailing creed, emphasis is laid on every point at which in its evolution it has chanced to be associated with the principle of betterment. This was the point of view of one of the first scientific investigators on the comparative principle, Benjamin Constant, whose treatise De la Beligion, consider&e dans sa source, ses formes, ses d&veloppements, published in 1824-34, is still worth attention. Developing the principles of Fontenelle and Des Brosses, he set forth, clearly and insistently, two generations before Mr. Lang, the presence of savage survivals in the religions of civilised antiquity ; and while accepting Hume's demonstration of the priority of poly theism2 he anticipated Mr. Lang's theorem about the good Supreme Being who " could not be squared," 8 even as he framed a number of the theses employed by Dr. Jevons for the vindication of religious intuitionism, such as the utility of taboo and the opposition between religion and magic.4 Long before it was fashionable to do so, he adopted and developed Lessing's thesis of the progressive develop ment of all religion ;6 Comte's law of the three stages he anticipated by one of four stages, which is perhaps better grounded;6 and some of his solutions are both ingenious and just, more just than some of those of his successors who follow similar lines. Yet by reason of his desire to glorify " the religious sentiment " in the abstract and in the present time, apart from all the " forms " of religion, he repeatedly lapses into crude sophistry. After insisting that the religious sentiment is " universal " he speaks of " irreligious peoples"; and wherever he has to admit that religion has wrought tyranny and evil he alleges that just there the religious sentiment has left it, that it has become merely interest, egoism, calculation. On this very principle, religion is beneficent only momentarily, when it is taking shape as a reform of old religion by innovators ; each innovation in turn becoming a matter of form, interest, egoism, calculation ; so that " the religious sentiment," so far from being universal, turns out to be the sentiment only of innovators, freethinkers, enemies of traditionalism. After being represented as sweet and consoling " for the mass of men, " the spirit of religion " turns out to be precisely what the mass of men never at any one moment entertain. All the while, it is pretended on a priori grounds that rationalism must always lend itself to 1 Vol. i, pr6f. p. ii. 2 Vol. i. pt. ii, ch. v. 3 Id. pp. 15, 78-79, note. * Compare the citations from Dr. Jevons, above, pp. 6, 20-24, etc., with Constant, vol. i, pt. i, 13 ; pt. ii, 48-50, 71, 83. * Vol. i, pt. i, 104. 8 id. io7_s. 7 cp. i, pt. i, 2-6, 20 ; pt. 2, 45. 8 Cp. v, 157, where it is insisted that the spirit of dogma is directly opposed to the sentiment of religion. Elsewhere (i, pt. i, p. 99) he admits that religion has bad "ten dencies." CONCLUSION 385 fatalistic submission, as if religious reform were not relative ration alism ; and the colossal historical facts of religious fatalism, religious tyranny, religious cruelty, religious licence, are glosed as phenomena of irreligion. From this long-drawn contradiction there is only one way of escape — the recognition that the sole rational test of any religious credence or usage at any moment is its truth, relatively to the intelligence of the moment. Mechanically repeating that religion is a fundamental " sentiment," men lose sight and hold of the truth that veracity is also a sentiment, with inalienable rights. The men who, in terms of religious credences, have reformed religion in the past, have done so in the conviction that the credences they dis carded were not true. To argue that, because their credences were associated for a time with moral or material improvement, we must cherish those credences even when we know them to be untrue, is to be false not only to their ideal but to the very principle of develop ment. ¦ Such an acceptance is in itself corruption, the negation of betterment ; and to turn the historic fact of the relativity of religious beliefs into a general vindication of religion is to read the law of evolution backwards. Bad or mistaken morals are relatively "fit," even as is false belief. It has been argued that cannibalism once saved the human race ; and the proposition may be perfectly true ; but so far from being an argument for reversion to cannibalism, it does not even cancel the fact that cannibalism has again and again gone far to destroy low civilisations. Beligious belief has been historically associated with both the progress and the paralysis of civilisation ; and the just inference is that, so far from its being the principle of betterment, it is simply a form of fallacious mental activity, which may either be counter vailed by truer forms or may countervail them. And the beliefs which have the worst concomitants are precisely those certified by the special pleaders as " truly " religious. The belief in immortality, so often extolled as a great source of consolation, has been the motive for the slaughter of unnumbered millions of human beings, religiously doomed to accompany others to "another world"; the conception of sacrificial salvation, another source of " blessed comfort," has incited to the slaughter of uncounted millions more, with every circumstance of heart-searing atrocity ; the doctrine of sacramental communion with deity, as we have seen, has been the means of conserving and sanctifying systematic cannibalism at the hands of priesthoods, where without priesthoods it must have died out ; and in every age and stage of human growth the religious 2c 386 THE EELIGIONS OF ANCIENT AMEEICA sentiment, of which the most essential and constant characteristic is to cling to " forms," is seen on the intellectual side damning new thought, strangling science, sanctifying injustice, and haloing war, as well as endorsing what measure of moral principle had been evolved in a lower stage of thought. There is never the slightest security that the spirit of justice and reason and sympathy will coincide with "the spirit of religion"; and there is no known religious system which is not habitually turned to the frustration of some of the best of the precepts it professes to inculcate. There is thus no reason to doubt that in savage as in civilised times the forces of organised religion have been arrayed against the forces of betterment, social as well as intellectual, with but a dubious record on the side of moralisation. Certain hierologists on religious grounds make much of the fact that some of the " lowest " races appear to have the highest " notions of a Supreme Being, as if that were not a specially plain proof of the futility of theistic notions as civilising forces. " Fijian religion," we are told, draws " an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods."1 And the apparent effect of that discrimination was to keep the Fijians the most revolting set of cannibals on the face of the earth,2 habitually eating their own species because the Eternal Gods preferred so to feed ; while in the mysteries of their Supreme Being there were scenes of " almost incredible indecency." Precisely where men drew the least clear distinction between ghosts and Eternal Gods, that is to say among the Tongans, cannibalism was abandoned till Fijian influence revived it ; and the position of women was immensely better.3 And all the while, the more brutal the religion, the more complacent were the worshippers. The unconscious testimony of a missionary may help to make the point clearer : — "The religious system of the Samoans differs essentially from that which obtained at the Tahitian, Society, and other islands with which we are acquainted. They have neither maraes nor temples nor offerings ; and, consequently, none of the barbarian and sanguinary rites observed at the other groups. In consequence of this, the Samoans were considered an impious race, and their impiety became proverbial with the people of Earatonga [one of the Hervey Islands] ; for when upbraiding a person who neglected the worship of the gods, 1 Lang, Making of Religion, p. 218, following T. Williams, Fiji, p. 218. Cp. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i, 333-4, as to the distinction throughout Polynesia generally. 2 T. Williams, as cited, pp. 204-214. 8 Cp. Mariner, i, 107-108; ii, 103-4; Seemann, Fiji and its Inhabitants, in Galton's Vacation Tourists, 1862, p. 280. CONCLUSION 387 they would call him 'a godless Samoan.' But this people had 'lords many and gods many';"1 and the belief in these, by the missionary's account, was associated with vice and absurdity. As between the Samoan and the Fijian, our sole test is the critical reason. It is by the same test that we pronounce given religious doctrines incredible or inconsistent, apart from any question of their effects. Let that criticism be honestly met on its own ground, instead of by way of paralogisms concerning the utility of false beliefs in the past, and hierology will be freed from an element of disturbance and distortion, becoming as nearly as possible a department of pure history. It is the tactic of the special pleader for religion that has introduced that element : it lies with him to let it vanish. Doubtless it will reappear in sociology ; but there it will be for the time a quickening force, giving vitality to a science »that is slow to be vivified by actual interests. 1 J. Williams, Narrative of Missionary Enterprises in the South Sea Islands, ed. 1837, pp. 540-1. APPENDIX A The Eating op the Crucified Human Sacrifice. ON page 136 I have suggested that the cannibalism of the Bataks of Sumatra would seem to be a survival of an anthropophagous sacra ment; and on p. 132 I have put the original eating of the "crucified" human sacrifice as an inference supported by other cases of sacra mental cannibalism, by the abundant evidence from Africa, and by the special case of the Dravidian Gonds in India. I had overlooked a decisive testimony, preserved by Pickering,1 which exhibits the Bataks as practising human sacrifice under the aspect of crucifixion, in the way of the Khonds, and as eating the fragments of the victim, as late as 1814. The testimony is that of Major Canning,2 who in his residence among the Bataks at Tappanooly in that year "omitted no opportunity of making the most minute inquiries " on the subject of their cannibalism. It was previously known that they ate criminals, prisoners of war, and aged relatives, " not so much to gratify their appetite as to perform a pious ceremony." Major Canning further elicited a native account of the manner of the ritual sacrifice : — " Three posts are fixed in the ground : to the middle one the body of the prisoner or criminal is made fast, while his arms and legs are extended to the two others. (The narrator and other chiefs present here simultaneously made with their arms and legs the figure of St. Andrew's cross.) On a signal being given everyone entitled to a share in the feast rushes on him with hatchets and knives, and many with no other instruments than their teeth and nails. He is thus in a few minutes entirely cut or torn to pieces, and I have seen the guests so keen as severely to wound each other's hands and fingers. A mixture of lime-juice, salt, and chillies, prepared in the shell of a cocoanut, is always at hand on these occasions, in which many dip the flesh previous to eating it." Questioned further as to the mode of killing, the native witness answers: "The first wounds he receives are from the hatchets, knives, and teeth of his assailants, but these are so numerous and simultaneous as to cause almost immediate death." Major Canning's testimony is open to no doubt, for he here describes a procedure closely similar to that of the Khonds, which when he wrote had not been reduced to published narrative. His witness, a native chief, he tells us, was frequently corroborated 1 The Races of Man, by Charles Pickering, M.D., Bohn ed. 1863, pp. 303-4. 2 Published in the Malacca Observer, 1827, and cited thence in Moore's Papers on the Indian Archipelago, cited in turn by Pickering. 389 390 APPENDIX A by others present. We are left to speculate as to whether the beverage "always at hand on these occasions" had ever had any analogy to the stupefying potion of the Khonds, or was simply a thirst-quencher for the victim before the hour of his slaying. It may be noted, however, that the St. Andrew's cross seems a deviation from the Khond practice, and is an approximation to that of Benin, and to the method observed in the sacrifice of crucified victims of the Mexican God Xipe. (See figure in Encyc. Brit, new ed. art. America, PL ii, p. 809.) APPENDIX B Dramatic and Eitual Survivals. WHILE the first edition of this volume was passing through the press in 1903, there reached me a cutting from an American news paper, describing the survival or revival of a quasi-sacrificial Passion Play among the Christianised descendants of the Aztecs. As an illustration of the psychology of human sacrifice, it is worth reprint ing without note or comment : — "NEW MEXICO'S PASSION PLAY. "The Penitentes and their Self- Inflicted Tortures. ''Santa F&, N.M. {March 27). — Among the Americans who flock once in ten years to see the Passion play at Oberammergau, there are few who know of the more realistic performance given yearly by the Penitentes of New Mexico. This performance was first adequately described by Adolphe Bandelier in a report issued by the Smithsonian Institution about ten years ago. " The full title of the Penitentes is Los Hermanos Penitentes, meaning The Penitent Brothers. The order was established in New Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest under Coronado, about 1540. The purpose of the priests who accompanied the Spaniards was to form a society for religious zeal among the natives. They taught the natives that sin might be expiated by flagellation and other personal suffering. As time passed, the Indian and half- breed zealots sought to improve their enthusiasm by fiercer self- imposed ordeals of suffering. The idea of enacting the travail of the Master on Calvary was evolved. Hence the Passion Play of the Penitentes on each Good Friday. " Mr. Bandelier learned from the Spanish archives that as early as 1594 a crucifixion, in which twenty-seven men were actually nailed to crosses for a half-hour, took place on Good Friday, ' after several weeks of pious mortification of the flesh with knives and cactus thorns.' The Penitentes numbered some 6,000 at the time of the American- Mexican War in 1848. The Catholic Church has long laboured to abolish their practices. So have the civil authori ties. Fifty years ago there were branches of the Penitentes in seventeen localities in the territory, and crucifixions took place in each of the branches. The organisation has since gradually died away. Nowadays the sole remnant of the order is in the valley of San Mateo, seventy-five miles north-east from Santa Fe. There is no railroad nearer than sixty miles. 391 392 APPENDIX B " Some 300 Mexicans still cling to the doctrine that one's mis deeds are to be squared by physical pain during forty days of each year, finally closing with a crucifixion. Most of the Penitentes live at Taos, a very old adobe pueblo. They are sheep and cattle herders. Not one in a dozen of them can read and write in Spanish, and they have as little knowledge of English as if they lived in the heart of Mexico. The Penitentes keep their membership a secret nowadays. They meet in their primitive adobe council chambers {moradas) at night, and they conduct their flagellations and crucifixions as secretly as possible. Charles F. Lummis, of Los Angeles, Cal., was nearly shot to death by an assassin for photographing a Penitente crucifixion a few years ago. The Penitentes have several night meetings during the year, but it is only in Lent that they are active. They have a head, the Hermano Mayor, whose mandates are strictly followed on pain of death. Adolphe Bandelier has written that up to a half century ago there were instances of disobedient and treacherous brother Penitentes having been buried alive. "In Lent the Penitentes have night meetings several times a week at the morada. One day they will whip one another, on another day they go to El Calvario (the Calvary), a little hill away from the town, where they coat their bodies with ashes, and all the time call in lamentations for a witness to their sense of sinfulness. For several days at a time they go without food, and they spend whole nights in tearful prayer. When Holy Week comes the intensity of the fanaticism increases. They have been seen to thrust cactus spines into one another's naked backs until the flesh swelled owing to the torture caused by thousands of nettles under the skin. They have been known to crawl on all fours like lizards over hill and vale for miles at a time to prove their humility. Self- lashing with short whips similar to cats-o'-nine-tails is common, and young men have died from exhaustion and loss of blood during too zealous flagellations. " On Good Friday the Hermano Mayor names the ones who have been chosen to be the Jesus Christ, the Peter, the Pontius Pilate, Mary, the Martha, and so on, for the play. Notwithstanding the torture involved in the impersonation, many Penitentes are annually most desirous of being the Christ. The play is given on El Calvario. While the pipero blows a sharp air on a flute the man who is acting the part of the Saviour comes forth. His only garment is a quantity of cotton sheeting or muslin that hangs flowing from his shoulders and waist. About his forehead is bound a wreath of cactus thorns. The thorns have been pressed deep into the flesh, from which tiny streams of blood trickle down his bronzed face and over his black beard. In a moment a cross of huge timbers that would break the back of many men is laid upon his shoulders. He grapples it tight, and, bending low under the crushing weight, starts on. " On the way a path of broken stones has been made, and the DEAMATIC AND EITUAL SUEVIVALS 393 most devout Penitentes walk over these with bare feet and never flinch. The counterfeit Christ is spit upon by the spectators. Little boys and girls run ahead of the chief actor that they may spit in his face and throw stones upon his bending form. When El Calvario is reached, the great clumsy cross is laid upon the ground. The actor of Christ is seized and thrown upon it. The assemblage joins in a chorus of song, while several Penitentes lash the man's hands, arms, and legs to the timbers with cords of cowhide. The bonds are made as tight as the big muscular vaqueros can draw them. The ligaments sink into the flesh and even cut so that the blood runs out. The arms and legs become blue and then black under the binding, but not so much as a sigh escapes the lips of the actor. He repeats in a mixed dialect of Spanish and Indian the words uttered by Christ at the true Calvary, and bids his brothers spare him not. When all is ready a dozen men erect the cross. The women weep and the children look on dumbfounded. Some of the men mock and jeer the man on the cross ; others throw clods of sunbaked earth at him, and still others, feeling that they must have some part in the physical agony of the afternoon, call upon the multitude to lash and beat them. " In several localities in Colorado and New Mexico it was once the practice literally to nail the hands of the acting Christ to the timbers of the cross, but the Catholic priest of this generation put a stop to that. There is no doubt that people have died from the tortures of the Passion Play. Only two years ago the Government Indian agent in the San Eiga Mountains reported several deaths among the Peni tentes, because of poisoning by the cactus thorns and the lashing the men had endured. The Penitentes believe that no death is so desirable as that caused by participation in the acting of the travail of the Lord. "After the first half hour of noise and flagellation about the cross at El Calvario the excitement dies away. The crucified man, whose arms and legs are now black under the bonds, must be suffering indescribable pain, but he only exclaims occasionally in Spanish, ' Peace, peace, peace,' while the Penitentes who have had no part in the punishment prostrate themselves silently about the cross. As the sun slowly descends behind the mountain peaks the pipero rises to his feet, and, blowing a long, harsh air upon his flute, leads a procession of the people back to the village. Some of the leading Penitentes remain behind and lower the man from the cross. Then, following the narrative of the scenes on Calvary, his body is wrapped about with a mass of white fabric, and is carried to a dug-out cave in the hillside near at hand. In the cave the bleeding and tortured body of the chief actor is nursed to strength. If the man is of great endurance and rugged physical strength he will probably be ready to go home to his family in the evening, conscious of having made ample atonement for long years of sin, and having earned a reputation that many men in Taos have coveted. 394 APPENDIX B " Until a score of years ago women joined in the balancing of the Penitentes' accounts with Heaven by self-imposed bodily suffer ing. No longer ago than when Gen. Wallace was Governor of the territory hundreds of women scourged themselves until their backs and shoulders were raw." The following extract from a New York journal, referring to an incident at Easter, 1903, is noteworthy in the same connection, illustrating as it does, with the Oberammergau play, the persistence of the dramatic appeal of the Passion Play in the gospels : — " THE CBUCIFIXION IN DEAMA. " Lambs Club Actors Perform a Passion Play on Sunday. " The Lambs Club is composed to a considerable extent of actors. Its house backs up against the Garrick Theatre, and its monthly Sunday ' gambols ' have of late been given on that stage. These affairs have consisted of farces and burlesques, and the audiences have been composed of members and their invited guests. But last night merriment gave place to decorum. A ' passion play ' was performed in all seriousness. No tickets were on sale, and so there was no chance of interference by the police, either on the ground that the Sunday law was broken or that the subject of the piece was illegal. " This drama of the Crucifixion was the work of Clay M. Greene, the playwright and formerly ' shepherd ' of the Lambs. He had written it for the Jesuit College at Santa Clara, Cal., of which he is a graduate, and it was acted there last year by priests and students under his direction. In the Lambs cast Judas Iscariot was imper sonated by Joseph Grismer, Pontius Pilate by AI. Lipman, Peter by E. A. Eoberts, John by Ernest Hastings, and Matthew by Henry Woodruff. Other roles were taken by Nathaniel Hartwig, Enos Welles, Fritz Williams, De Wolf Hopper, and Sam Eeed. A stageful of Lambs represented the assemblages. The mounting was the same that had been used in California, and was excellent. The acting was careful, dignified, and, in the main, impressive. " Mr. Greene's play begins on the plains of Bethlehem with the quest of Christ's birthplace by the wise men of the East and Herod's emissaries, and passes quickly to Herod's palace, when the news of the new-born King of the Jews incites him to order the massacre of the infants. Then a lapse of years carries us to the representation of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, His arraignment before the Council, the betrayal of Judas, the trial before Pilate, the delivery by Herod to the Jews, the march to Calvary, and the convulsions of nature following the Crucifixion. " Christ is not a visible character, but his presence is indicated in three scenes. In the trial a bright light is thrown from the side, as DEAMATIC AND EITUAL SUEVIVALS 395 though he were there, and to that point Pilate addresses his exhorta tion to the Master to refute the accusations of his enemies. On the way to Calvary the top of a cross moves across the background, as though carried by Christ, who is hidden by the multitude, and an effulgence marks his movement. Nor is he actually exhibited on the cross, but shadows thrown on a transparent curtain make a picture of the Crucifixion. _ This performance of ' Nazareth ' is preliminary to its possible use in a regular theatrical way. William A. Brady has acquired the rights in it and stands ready to produce it publicly. It is understood that he will request Archbishop Corrigan to sanction the enterprise, and that representatives of his reverence saw the play last evening. In the meanwhile, Oscar Hammerstein has an option on ' The Passion Play,' a version of the Christian tragedy now current in Montreal, with the tacit approval of the Eoman Catholic clergy of that city, and with no obstructive action by the Protestants. Mr. Hammerstein says he will introduce it at the opening of the big theatre which he is going to build in West Thirty-fourth Street, if the acquiescence of church and municipal authorities can be secured. Christ is a visible and audible personage in the Montreal perform ance, which is in French, but here an English translation would be used. It is inevitable that, in case either of these ' passion plays ' becomes a feasible venture, the famous Oberammergau representa tion will be imported. It is said that it would be located in Madison Square Garden, and could be placed there early next autumn if a certainty of non-interference were attainable. It is nearly twenty years since Salmi Morse brought his ' passion play ' to New York from San Francisco. This was a fine production, directed by David Belasco, and costing $40,000. James O'Neill impersonated Christ, and in the cast were Lewis Morrison, James A. Heme, and others since conspicuous. During three weeks large audiences were drawn, but the leading actors were arrested every day and fined $50 each. At last the Governor of California took prohibitive action. Mr. Morse was almost a monomaniac about his play; and Mr. O'Neill, who had been educated for the priesthood, seemed sincerely religious in his personification of Christ. Henry E. Abbey brought the company and the outfit to this city, intending to place them at Booth's ; but the Mayor threatened to cancel the theatre's license. The next move by Mr. Morse was to lease an old church on the site of the present Proctor Theatre in West Twenty-third Street, and put in a stage, on which a single performance was given to an invited audience. Mr. O'Neill had withdrawn, and the late Henry C. De Mille, as the Christ, headed a cast of generally inefficient amateurs. So the venture ended in a fiasco. The present attitude of city and church authorities is not yet ascer tainable." APPENDIX C Eeplies to Criticisms § 1. General Opposition : The Hibbert Journal. As has been remarked in the preface, the most notable aspect of the body of criticism passed upon the first edition of the foregoing work is the almost complete abstention from challenge of the theses upon which challenge was specially invited by the writer — " that the Gospel story of the Last Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, Cruci fixion, and Besurrection, is visibly a transcript of a Mystery- Drama, and not originally a narrative ; and that that drama is demonstrably (as historic demonstration goes) a symbolic modification of an original rite of human sacrifice, of which it preserves certain verifiable details." The only attempt I have seen to counter these positions — an attempt made only incidentally by Dr. J. E. Carpenter — was, as I have elsewhere shown, cancelled by the critic himself. For the rest, critic after critic has impugned this or that analogy between Christian and pagan systems, this or that item of historic assertion ; and many have broadly flouted the general thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus; but no one, so far as I am aware, has attempted to gainsay the central argument upon which attack was specially invited. I am therefore entitled to infer, so far, that that argument has some validity; though, for sheer lack of debate, I cannot yet count it inexpugnable. That there should be found no flaws of statement or obscurities of argument in a treatise covering so many fields, I was never foolish enough to expect ; and to one or two hostile critics I am indebted for corrections of errors of detail. It is to be regretted that critics capable of discovering such errors should put themselves in the wrong by gratuitous misstatements of their own concerning the case they dealt with. Dr. Margoliouth, for instance, pointed out that the legend which makes Joshua the son of Miriam, ascribed by me to the Arabic chronicle of Tabari, occurs only in the Persian version — a correction of some importance. Dr. Margoliouth, how ever, saw fit to allege that my long argument for the existence of a pre-Christian cult of Joshua (Jesus) son of Miriam turned wholly on the reference of the Moslem legend to Tabari, whereas it was only after putting my main case on other grounds that I wrote : " Finally, we have to note {a) the remarkable Arab tradition which makes Joshua the Son of Miriam." This want of critical rectitude marks nearly the whole of the polemic directed against Pagan Christs, and even where some sense of critical principle has been exhibited, theological animus usually deflects the reasoning in an unprofitable fashion. A lady reviewer 396 GENEEAL OPPOSITION : THE HIBBEET JOUENAL 397 in the Hibbert Journal, who certainly showed more concern for argument than most of the other critics of the book, embodied her case in such propositions as these : — 1. Mr. Eobertson, as we have seen, proceeds on the assumption that the historicity of Christ is a myth." 2. His reasons practically reduce themselves to this that Paul shows total ignorance of the teachings and miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels." 3. "He admits what they [the Epistles] imply — the hostility, for instance, to their writer of the Jews throughout the Mediter ranean. But if this is granted, the historicity of Christ must necessarily follow. We can hardly believe that the Jews would have been hostile to a myth : they would have retorted that Jesus never even existed." 4. " Our author, indeed, refuses to admit the historicity of the disciples : he is clearly inconsistent in so doing, for the Epistles imply it, and he admits the Epistles." 5. He explains away the reference to the Eucharist in 1 Cor. xi by assuming that the passage is interpolated. For the rest, he assures us that Paul or the ' forger ' believed in a crucified Jesus as to whom he had no biographical record, and he finds him (!) in the person of a certain Jesus ben Pandira We shall scarcely be guilty of scepticism if we refuse to accept this solution." 6. His [the author's] theological position requires that he should deny the historicity of the Crucifixion." The assumptions " in this debate are wholly on the side of the critic. So far from being led by my theological position" to deny the historicity of Jesus or the Crucifixion, I had come to my present theological conclusions long before doubting the historicity of either ; and only after striving for many years, on the normal assumptions, to construct a tenable historical conception of the rise of Christianity, did I find myself reluctantly driven, by purely historical considera tions, to give them up. I had in the same way taken for granted the historicity of the twelve apostles ; and in abandoning that after an analysis made in the light of the Didache I still held by the historicity of the Founder. Even that I only abandoned after an attempt to construct a theorem of a succession of Jesuses. So far, again, from "finding" Paul's Jesus in the Talmudic Jesus ben Pandira, I have expressly shown that, while bound as historical students to take full account of the apparent possibilities in that direction, we can finally find there no standing-ground. I had in fact anticipated the now common conclusion that the Talmudic Jesus, if not in the main mythical, is little more than a name, historically speaking ; and I finally " found " Paul's Jesus in the abstraction of the human sacrifice, named by the name of the ancient Jesus-God. There, I should have supposed, was the likely point of attack for 398 APPENDIX C negative criticism. But the attacks made at that point, so far as I have seen, take the shape of mere rejection of the thesis. The Hibbert Journal reviewer indeed contended that there is no trace of such a rite" as human sacrifice " among Palestinian Jews of the later period." I leave the reader to decide for himself, after noting the fuller exposition in the present edition, whether that statement can hold. For the rest, my thesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God has received a remarkable and quite independent corroboration in the work of Professor W. Benjamin Smith, Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906) ; and in the recent discussions in Germany over Pro fessor Arthur Drews's Die Christusmythe, that problem has naturally come 'in for much discussion. So far, I have seen no rebuttal of my own position. The other positions taken up by the Hibbert Journal reviewer are only too easily turned. My "reasons" certainly do not "practically reduce themselves" to the silence of Paul." That is indeed a fatal crux, of which the orthodox defence has vainly striven to dispose. But the bulk of the cumulative argument of the examination of " The Gospel Myths " in Christianity and Mythology remains to be dealt with even if the problem of the Pauline Epistles be put aside ; and the further argument in Pagan Christs as to the non-historicity of the whole matter of the mystery-drama is independent of the Pauline problem. Even if we accept ' the four " epistles as genuine, and pass the passages which I challenged as interpolations, my central theses are in no way invalidated. The acceptance of the tradition by "Paul" would not establish the historicity of the tradition. As regards the whole problem of the epistles, the Hibbert Journal reviewer proceeds upon untenable premises. Her assertion that the epistles imply the historicity of the disciples is an error which comes of failure to realise the issue. The epistles never speak of disciples : they speak of apostles, never alleging or suggesting that those apostles were taught by " the Lord." They tell only of a going cultus. And other errors follow. To say that I " accept the epistles," and at the same time to admit that I charge upon them capital interpolations, is to break down at the start. The question of the general genuine ness of " the four " epistles I have left open, while leaning more and more, though always with some reserves, to Van Manen's conclusions. But my case was and is that, whether the epistles to the Corin thians be genuine or spurious, they betray a general ignorance of the purport of the gospel narratives. As thus : (a) the passage 1 Cor. xv, 3-9, cannot well have been current as it stands before the gospels, else they would surely have given the " five hundred " story ; though (&) verse 5 must have been written before the Judas story was added to the gospels, since it speaks of Jesus as appearing to the whole "twelve," where the synoptics say "the eleven"; (c) the non-mention of the women also infers ignorance of the gospel story; {d) the specification of "all the apostles" tells of an GENEEAL OPPOSITION : THE HIBBEET JOUENAL 399 interpolation either of that phrase or of "the twelve "; and (e) the specification of James is again independent of the gospel story. Now, some of these items clearly tell in favour of an early and independent narrative ; but others as clearly tell of interpolation ; and all, taken together, impeach either the gospel narrative or them selves. The two sets are irreconcilable. If the writer of the epistle knew the facts, and if the gospels give the facts, how came he to ignore the central episode of Judas ? If he drew on a current report concerning the " five hundred," how came the gospels to ignore that ? Assume the bulk of the passage to antedate the gospels, what is to be inferred as to their com position ? On the other hand, of what evidential value is a series of assertions of supernatural appearances, which further diverge markedly from the assertions in the gospels ? Be the epistle genuine or spurious, how can it be held to show knowledge of the gospel story ? When, again, we turn to the passage 1 Cor. xi, 23 sq., we find the formula "For I delivered unto you that which also I received" developed into "For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you"; and here, under profession of super natural knowledge, we have an express allusion to the betrayal, of which the other passage shows no knowledge — nay, excludes any inference of knowledge. That this passage is an interpolation is no " assumption," but an irresistible inference from {a) the context and (6) the whole purport of that in ch. xv. It ruptures the context ; and it tells of what the writer of the other chapter knew nothing. So far from being an arbitrary step on my part, the inference of inter polation has been latterly made by a series of German critics who probably had no knowledge of my argument, first penned more than twenty years ago. What then is left of " the apostles " in the Pauline Epistles ? A plainly valueless allusion to the twelve and one to " all the apostles " — allusions which form part of a set of incredible assertions — the mention of "the brethren of the Lord" (1 Cor. ix, 5), and the further allusions to " the apostles " in Galatians, where the exordium has plain reference to the claims of the Judaic apostles of the High- Priest or the Patriarch. If this epistle be " genuine," it tells only of "apostles" of the Jesuist cult, naming "James and Cephas and John," with a separate mention of " Peter," and a description of James as " the brother of the Lord." This, with 1 Cor. ix, 5, is of course one of the holdfasts of the orthodox defence, being in fact the sole quasi-biographical detail as to Jesus in the epistles. But (1) neither this nor any other epistle tells of the parents of Jesus ; and (2) in Acts xii, 2, we have "James, the brother of John," killed by Herod before Paul joins the new sect. So that if James the brother of the Lord " were a brother of the Gospel Jesus and a "pillar," he was so in supersession of the claims of the survivors of " the twelve," since the two Jameses in the gospel list are sons of 400 APPENDIX C Zebedee and Alphaeus ; and there is no gospel mention of any dis- cipleship on the part of James the son of Joseph and Mary, any more than of the other brothers named and sisters mentioned in Matthew xiii and Mark vi. Among these are James and Joses; and in Matt, xxvii, 56, we have mention of " Mary the mother of James and Joses," without specification of her or their relationship to Jesus. Of what historical value, then, is the reference to " James the brother of the Lord" in the epistle to the Galatians, even supposing it to be genuine ? In epistles so often interpolated — by the admission of the revisers who have excised so many later interpolations — such a phrase as " the brother of the Lord " was the easiest of insertions ; and even were the phrase primordial, the inference that " brethren of the Lord " in 1 Cor. ix, 5, was a late group-name is far more tenable than the exorbitant assumption that an actual brother of the Gospel Jesus, who never figures as his supporter in the records, had suddenly become a pillar " of the cult ; and that other brothers had also become propagandists. If these were actual brothers of Jesus, so acting in Paul's day, how comes it that there is no hint of them in the Acts ? The whole apostolic list of names and the list of the " holy family " are alike hopeless imbroglios for any reader concerned about historical truth. And if Galatians be not genuine — as even many theologians are fain to surmise, in view of its pretensions to supernaturally acquired knowledge of the Christian doctrine and its wide divergence from the narrative of the Acts — it may still be interpolated at any point. The separate allusions to " Cephas " and " Petros " are a stumbling- block for any exegesis. Finally, as I have shown in the Preface, the passage in which "brethren of the Lord" are mentioned in 1 Cor. ix is utterly incompatible with the passage on marriage in ch. vii, so that the main mention of the " brethren " in the epistles must go by the board. It is hardly necessary to argue, in conclusion, against the assumption that the Jews could not be " hostile to a myth." Does the reviewer believe that the Gods of the heathen were not myths ? When the Jews denounced such Gods as daimons, did they deny the existence of daimons ? Were not the Christians hostile to Mithra ? If Jesuist Jews could start a circumstantial Jesus myth in an age of universal credulity, the Jews as a matter of course would in the end take the line of denying, not the existence of the alleged Founder, but the genuineness of his mission and his claims. On Van Manen's theory, the epistles belong to the second century. But, on any view of their date, they offered no point of contact to historical criticism. Their Jesus is dateless, speechless, homeless, without a biography. They locate neither his death nor his birth, assign to him no period, quote from him no teaching, specify no miracle. They do but name a crucified Jesus ; and there may have been many crucified Jesuses in Jewish history. The Talmudic Jesus would fit that case, to say nothing of the presumptive sacrificial GENEEAL OPPOSITION : THE HIBBEET JOUENAL 401 victim called " Jesus Barabbas." The very interpolation which tells of the betrayal and the Last Supper names no place and suggests no date. Supposing even the string of assertions concerning the reappearances after the resurrection to have been current in the first century, it names neither place nor time ; and it cites mainly unnamed Christian witnesses. Even if the " five hundred " story were not a late interpolation, it was open to no refutation. A number of Christians could doubtless be got to say they had seen the Lord after his death ; and the " twelve," Cephas, and James were mere partisans, whether dead or alleged to be alive. They too are dateless: the epistles never say whether or not they survive. And while orthodoxy dwells on such valueless " evidence," the Unitarian defenders of the historicity of Jesus do not believe in the event so evidenced. For them, there is nothing in the epistles that admits of either proof or disproof in a debate between Paulinists and Jews. Had the Jews, in terms of the argument of the Hibbert Journal reviewer, said that Paul's Jesus " never existed," there could be no debate, for there was no historical proposition for them to contest. A Jesus without date, home, parents, doctrine, or named disciples, a Jesus merely alleged to have been crucified, without mention of place or time, and to have " risen again " at no specified place or time, was not a subject for historical discussion. And if both Christian and non-Christian scholars, in our own day, in an age of historical criticism, are still in large numbers unable to see that the very absence of historical data from the epistles puts them outside of historical discussion, the Jews of the Pauline period could hardly be capable of so arguing. To this, then, the case for the defence " reduces itself." The sole quasi-historical datum in the epistles which makes for the historicity of Jesus is the hopeless item concerning James and other "brethren of the Lord." The sole "events" historically posited concerning Jesus are that he was crucified and rose again, which last " event " the Unitarians admit to be myth. As to the cruci fixion, their belief turns on the gospel narrative, the dramatic character of which they have not ventured to deny in detail. But the writer or writers of the first epistle to the Corinthians show in , one passage vital ignorance of the gospel story of the betrayal, and give absolutely no historic data for the crucifixion ; while the passage in which the betrayal is mentioned is on the face of the case an interpolation, since it imports knowledge which the other passage negates. Solvuntur tabula. The Unitarian case is in fact only the orthodox case minus the supernatural. But even the orthodox case is a compromise. If the yearly Christians believed anything, they believed in the ascension. No educated Christian now believes in the ascension. Yet educated Christians believe in the resurrection on the testimony of an age which believed in the ascension, and call the legend " evidence." 2d 402 APPENDIX C § 2. The Bev. Alfred Ernest Crawley. The work entitled The Tree of Life, by the Eev. A. E. Crawley,1 author of The Mystic Bose, is an interesting development of modern Christian apologetics. As an anthropologist, Mr. Crawley is suffi ciently familiar with the facts of comparative hierology to know that all the main features of the Christian creed and cultus — Divine Sonship, Virgin-birth, crucifixion, resurrection, salvation, baptism, and eucharist — are common features of pagan religion ; and he takes the somewhat bold course of positing the facts in question. He is indeed somewhat imprudent in putting in the forefront of his exposi tion what he calls "The Eationalist Attack" and "The Anthro pological Attack," admitting that so far as they go they are unanswerable. As to Biblical cosmology, he confesses (p. 141) that " the arguments of Huxley and Laing in this matter can no longer be resisted"; and he in effect says the same thing of the super naturalism of the gospels. It is in the latter part of his book that he proffers his vindication of the faith, in the form of the theorem (1) that religion in general, howsoever mythical be its basis and content, is necessary to " human nature " — that is, to the nature of those who " need " it ; (2) that it is the true bulwark of society against " Eadicals and Socialists "; and (3) that the Church of England is the best Church because she keeps " to a via media which does more than represent the essence of Christian doctrine, for it also preserves the best elements of primitive religion."2 Of this avowed compound of savagery and " progress," the essential value is declared to consist neither in truth or reasonableness nor in any inculcation of altruism, but in the " feeling of life " which it conveys, its substitution of egoism for altruism, its consecration of "indi vidualism." I give his own words (italics mine) : — " Kidd is profoundly mistaken when he speaks of the intense altruism of the early Christians, and of the flood of altruistic emotion which Puritanism and the Eeformation let loose upon the world. Gibbon rightly noted the intense egoism of the Christians ; their altruism was confined to their own family, as it were ; and Wakeman rightly speaks of the stern, uncompromising individualism of the Puritans. This increase of vitality is illustrated by the martyrs, both of the early Christian and Eeformation times" (p. 275). " Even the cruelties of the Inquisition, the tortures and the burnings, were really another expression of the same access of strength. The lesson of religious cruelty, like the lesson of martyrdom, is that if religion, the permanent expression of vitality, can show such invincible strength of cruelty on the one hand, and of endurance on the other, the fact is due to an increase of vitality. We inherit, to our inestimable gain, the spirit and strength of persecutor and 1 The Tree of Life, by Ernest Crawley. Hutchinson and Co., 1905. Mr. Crawley does not put " Bev." on his title-page. 2 Pp. 263, 278. THE EEV. A. E. CEAWLEY 403 martyr alike :• the resource, the endurance, the zeal, and the power of our best men are due to that spirit and the human force which it revealed" (p. 277). Our Anglican sophist, it will be seen, has determined to take the wind out of the sails of Nietzsche, whose doctrine he gravely pro nounces to be a paradox." Before we pass to his specific defence of the Christ myth, it would seem to be necessary to point out to his possible dupes the sociological implications of his thesis, to say nothing of its ethic. (For it is to be presumed that he makes converts, like his congeners, Mr. Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Balfour.) The "invincible strength of cruelty " which he so devoutly admires was after all rather more fully evidenced by the American Eedskins than even by the Puritans who did their best to exterminate them ; and, religion for religion, the Choctaw religion would seem on his own principles to be superior even to the Christian. As for the " vitality" imparted to the Eedskins by their late conversion to Christianity, the concept is one which must entertain the American Bureau of Ethnology. Of course, the Choctaws cannot pretend to have done much in the way of religious persecution — that is indeed a Jewish and Christian specialty ; and it must be admitted that when the Boxers have attempted something in that line the Christians have certainly been able to outdo them in massacre. But then on Mr. Crawley's principles it must surely have been a great " increase of vitality " that enabled the Moslems to overrun all the early centres of Christianity, and the Turks later to conquer Christian Greece. Which makes a difficulty for the Neo-Christian. As regards the services rendered by Christianity to States, again, the would-be believer would do well to note (l) the " vitalising " effect of the spirit of religious cruelty on Spain, which had so many more persecutors and so many more martyrs than England ; (2) the opera tion of the same saving virtue in imperial Borne, where Christians are wont to point to the abolition of the gladiatorial combats as the beneficent work of their creed, but have not yet succeeded in demonstrating any access of vitality to the empire from the first century onwards. It is only fair to admit that the Spaniards con trived to destroy the civilisations of Mexico and Peru. But then the religion of Mexico was marked by an indurated and bloodthirsty cruelty which, on Mr. Crawley's principles, should have meant an adequate amount of "vitality." As for our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, it remains for Mr. Crawley to demonstrate wherein they showed increase of " vitality " between their pagan conquest of Britain and their own conquest by their Norman fellow-Christians. The nature of the thinking faculty which sustains Mr. Crawley in his social philosophy may be gathered from a few samples. 1. " It is one of the most noticeable of the discrepancies in the gospel narratives that Christ consistently refused to give a sign,' while his reporters tell us of so many " (p. 141). 2. ' If ever a con viction seemed to be mortised in adamant, it is perhaps the belief 404 APPENDIX C that religion is essentially altruistic. But the facts unmistakably point to the exact opposite " (p. 273). 3. " Even the most self- sufficient of rationalists prays to something without knowing it" (p. 257). (In which case Mr. Crawley knows the fact without any testimony.) The reader is now substantially prepared to understand and appraise Mr. Crawley's operations in Christian apologetics. He has a certain cynical candour, which is not without its charm ; but with his natural gift for paralogism and his happy freedom from intellectual scruple, he yields some flights of ethic and of logic which will not readily be matched in modern controversy. On p. 125 he speaks of a " reaction against the scientific attack to be seen in an altered Agnosticism, which is really religious, and is practically the old Christianity with all dogma and ritual omitted, and the supernatural element excluded." On p. 131 we learn that " the scientific Agnostic " is " ready to return by some rational path to the main beliefs of Chris tianity. This tendency was seen in Comte and Haeckel ; and the inference is legitimate that, even where the cleavage between religion and science is apparently most marked, yet man cannot do without religion." Then on pp. 290-1 we have the assurance that in " the Ethical and Socialistic societies of to-day " " morality takes the place of religion. The failure of these systems to satisfy human nature is perhaps unexampled for completeness in the history of practical ethics. Positivism, as has been said, is Christianity with the Catholicism left out " [what was " said," as it happens, was the converse : " Catholicism with the Christianity left out "] : " the Ethical move ment leaves out everything." In Mr. Crawley's psychosis, moral, logical, and intellectual incoherence combined yield a rare range of tergiversation. On p. 243 he informs us that " Beligious monism at once removes all false dualism from our metaphysics." On p. 295 he delightedly chimes with Bishop Gore to the effect that " It is common to all the anti- Christian views of sin that at the last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is characteristic of Christ's view of sin — of the scriptural view of it — that it makes it unnatural." [One cannot but linger in this connection over the further joint achievement of Bishop Gore and Mr. Crawley in the way of falsifying doctrinal history. " It is characteristic, again," says the Bishop, " of the non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat and only source in the will." " Now," adds Mr. Crawley, " this account applies exactly to the primitive conception : the savage, like the Essene.regards sin as a transgression of nature. Sin breaks taboo " It must be confessed that on the whole the Bishop contrives to get furthest from the truth. If there is one doctrine that stands out from the whole Christian and " scriptural" tradition, it is that sin entered the entire human race by Adam's fall ; and if there is one moral assumption that dominates that tradition in the early, " dark," THE EEV. A. E. CEAWLEY 405 and middle ages, it is that the body is by nature prone to evil. The simple doctrine, " if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out," might serve to decide the question for any save a Christian sophist. But Mr. Crawley's summary of the savage theory of " nature " runs the Bishop's formula close. The conception " transgression of nature " is simply not possible to a true savage, and was never formulated by one. Taboo is made and unmade by a word or a ceremony. Does the savage call either " nature "?] I have spent some time over the main body of Mr. Crawley's doctrine, thinking it useful to exhibit the moral and mental cast of a writer who lays it down that " irreligion means deterioration," and who, knowing the substantial truth of the results of modern anthropology and hierology, professes to vindicate Christianity as "revelation." "The ordinary believer," he writes, "naively but justly, requires that Christianity shall be literally true, and its Founder both God and Man " (p. 144). So Mr. Crawley goes about to accommodate the ordinary believer. The critical argument of Pagan Christs he introduces to his readers in this summary (p. 148) : — " Dionysus and Apollo also have their religions, and precisely the same stories are told about founders as about the gods they served. Therefore Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Laou-tze, Moses, and Christ must be mythical." Dr. J. E. Carpenter, I admit, could not have done the "therefore " better. My only wonder is that Mr. Crawley did not add Mohammed and Mrs. Eddy : the extras would have made still better reading, and Mr. Crawley's ethic could easily afford them. But there is no lack of completeness in his further pro position that " Dionysus and Apollo are never represented as founders of religions any more than is Jehovah." I leave comment to every adult who has read the Bacchae and the Pentateuch. Wondering why Mr. Crawley did not say " any more than Jesus," I proceed to transcribe his assertion (p. 149) that "Thus the evidence for the historicity of founders like Buddha and Zoroaster" [Quetzalcoatl, for instance?] "is as strong as for any historical fact, and this is admitted by the best students of the respective systems." The pro position and the proof of it I hope to help to preserve by this transcription, to which I add no comment. I may be excused for adding this from the same page : — " Eobertson, indeed, while arguing against the historicity of Jesus, stultifies his case by admitting the historicity of ' another person of the same name,' the Jesus ben Pandera of the Talmud." I ought here, perhaps, to make clear for Mr. Crawley's '" naive " readers the full force and scope of his argument. It means that if I deny the historicity of Moses, but admit that of Moses of Chorene, I have stultified myself; and that if I dispute the historicity of John Barleycorn I stultify my own signature. It is a trifle, but it may be worth adding, that I did not admit the historicity of Jesus ben Pandira, about which I expressed serious doubts. But it is true that I admit the more or less clear historicity of a number of the 406 APPENDIX C Jesuses mentioned by Josephus, even as I admit the historicity of Mr. Crawley while disputing that of his namesakes in Vanity Fair. Further, I have postulated the probable historicity of an annual human sacrifice of a victim ritually named Jesus Barabbas. With that crushing syllogism ready to launch, Mr. Crawley had just before advanced the proposition that the beginning of the Christian era was a " period too late for the free formation either of divine or of historical personalities by the mythopceic imagination " — an inexpensive petitio principii which had often been put forward before. I might leave him to reckon with those Christian hiero- logists who affirm the post-Christian appearance of such deities as Balder and Krishna ; but it may suffice, even for a "naive" believer of moderate intelligence, to ask himself when and how or how freely " were formed the " personalities " of King Arthur and his Knights, Prester John, William Tell, the Wandering Jew, Lohengrin, Tannhauser, the Seven Sleepers, Saint George, Faustus, and Saint Christopher. If Mr. Crawley believed in the worthless argument he has here used, he obviously needed no other. If Jesus cannot be non- historical, the case is at an end. He shows his sense of the futility of his own plea by using a number of others — the argument from the Chrestus of Suetonius, which clearly tells in favour of a Christ myth ; the argument from Tacitus, who, if he wrote tho passage in his History, only repeated what Christians said ; and the argument from the passage in Josephus, given up as spurious by most Christian scholars. Then, in utter disregard of the Pauline epistles, he affirms that the Christian tradition itself " mentions the humanity of Christ first "; and proceeds to found on the hostile Jewish tradition of the " Sepher Toldoth Jeschu," concerning which he expressly argues that it is plainly framed by way of countering the gospel story. Then it has no evidential value whatever, and his case for the historicity of Jesus is at an end. The assertion that the story of the Talmudic Jesus ben Pandira is "of supreme value " as " tending to prove the historicity of Christ " could come only from the writer who asserts that the Gospel Jesus consistently refuses to work wonders while the same gospels tell that he worked many. Mr. Crawley has nothing more to say beyond accusing non- sacramentalist Christians of " stultifying the Incarnation " — the Incarnation in which he himself does not believe, since he insists on the historicity of Jesus and the lateness of the Incarnation story. Against the thesis of Pagan Christs that the gospel tragedy is a mystery-drama he offers no argument whatever. He is content to say in a footnote that Dupuis's derivation of the legend of St. Peter from the Janus myth is worth noting as a type of the extravagant inferences which are so conspicuous in the work of G. W. Cox and J. M. Eobertson." Of the charge of extravagance he does not offer a hint of proof. I do not propose to make a counter charge of " extravagance." The scientific charge against Mr. Crawley, in its most charitable THE EEV. A. E. CEAWLEY 407 form, would be that of intellectual antinomianism. He has simply no intellectual ethic whatever, and he is evidently satisfied that religion needs none, since he declares that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, deals only with " the elemental " (pp. 209, 265). Which means that if you feel you like to believe religion, and you think that it is socially useful, you do well to profess it in dis regard of all argument (p. 296). He proceeds to explain in this connection (p. 265) that " In the elemental view of life, every scientific error of the Bible may be regarded as a truth. It is true, for instance, that the sun rises ; and not even the most pedantic rationalist will employ a more scientific phrase." Observe the logical morality of the phrase "for instance," which is made to cover every myth and every forgery in the Bible. Mr. Crawley, like most latter-day Christian priests, scouts the doctrine of the " French deists " that religion in general has been a matter of priestly imposture ; thoughtfully omitting to tell the naive but just " Christian reader that this was the verdict habitually pronounced by the Christian priesthood upon all non-Christian religions during many centuries. The deists, finding as much priest craft in Christianity as anywhere else, made a fairly reasonable extension of the doctrine. It certainly needs qualification ; though Mr. Crawley, with his usual logical incoherence, offers a hopelessly fallacious argument against it. Among the Australian Aruntas, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have shown, certain myths propounded to the boys and women are perfectly well known by the adult men to be frauds. This, in Mr. Crawley's opinion (pp. 195-6), proves that religious beliefs can never have been set up by fraud. It is really a rather strong argument for the priestcraft theory. For the Aruntas have no priests ; and the old argument was that priests were able to carry off impostures which among laymen without priests would have been treated as such by adults. Whatever may be the final verdict of hierology on that score, no careful student will dispute the actuality of priestcraft among either savages or civilised men. Of its existence among savages the proofs are innumerable. Of its existence among educated Christians the latest proof is Mr. Crawley's book. He helps us to understand the spirit and the procedure of priestcraft in all ages. In the course of one of his professional appeals to pious and other prejudice he writes: — "Theistic and Christian prepossessions are often derided by rationalists ; but there is sound human nature behind the instinct, as we may properly call it, which leads men to distrust an atheist (p. 297). " Human nature," from the point of view of Mr. Crawley's tribe, is notoriously a monopoly of those who hold the beliefs which he inculcates ; but, in spite of that naive claim, rationalists contrive to possess some. And after they read Mr. Crawley it will probably reinforce their instinct, if we may dare so to call it, that there is something profoundly untrustworthy about a temporising priest who champions primitive superstition.' 408 APPENDIX C § 3. The Bev. Dr. St, Clair Tisdall. Dr. Tisdall illustrates at once the difficulty for orthodox theo logians of keeping their tempers when their faith is challenged, and the havoc which passion can work in an argument, not to say in the reasoning faculty itself. His animus disorders his enterprise from the start. In the opening chapter of his work on Mythic Christs and the True1 dealing with the question of Mithraism, he refers to me as "a modern writer on the subject, who tells us that his book ' challenges criticism above all by its thesis.' " Pausing at that word, he goes on to charge me with first asserting that we know very little of Mithraism, and then proceeding, " as do others, to afford a complete account of the legends and the inmost theology of the Mithraists, together with details of its origin." It will be seen that the phrase first quoted by him is from the introduction to this work (preface in first edition), where the phrasing is not " its thesis," but " its theses," the reference being not to any general thesis, but to two immediately specified propositions concerning the Christian mystery-play. Having quoted " its thesis," Dr. Tisdall burkes the rest of the passage, thus either wilfully garbling the whole or failing in his anger to understand what he reads. To the " theses " specified he makes not even an attempt to reply. The attack which he goes on to make on me concerning Mithraism is, as the reader will see from its statement, nugatory. Upon that subject neither I nor any one else can give " a complete account of the legends and the inmost theology." "If we know all this about Mithra," says Dr. Tisdall, quoting some details from another writer and from me, " we know a great deal." And he goes on to propound the crushing counter-thesis, " There are no Mithraic Scriptures extant," as if that settled the question. It is idle to discuss with such a writer what constitutes " a great deal." It may suffice, how ever, to point out that what contemporary documentary evidence we have concerning Mithraism, apart from the Zendavesta, comes from Plutarch, Strabo, Athenaeus, Herodotus, Porphyry, Com modianus, Macrobius, and Julian ; the Fathers Julius Firmicus Maternus, Tertullian, Jerome, Justin Martyr, and Gregory Nazianzen ; and the historian Elisaeus of Armenia. Whether we call their information little or much, there it is. When he proceeds to charge me with eliciting from my " fancy " statements which I quote from the Fathers of his own Church, he merely raises the question whether it is his scholarship or his ethic that is at fault. Accusing me further (p. 7) of dishonestly " reading Christian doctrines into Mithraism," Dr. Tisdall begins by vilifying that creed as " debased." He then sets about proving his charge against me (1) by citing from me a reference to the Khorda Avesta, xxvi, 107, whereafter he declares in italics, " There is no such chapter in 1 Published by the North London Christian Evidence Society, 11 and 12 High Street, Hampstead, N.W. 1909. THE EEV. DE. ST. CLAIE TISDALL 409 existence But possibly this is merely a printer's error, though an unfortunate one." If Dr. Tisdall knows the texts as he professes to do, he must be perfectly well aware that xxvi — with the alter native " (10) " — is Spiegel's chapter-number for the Mihir Yasht in the Khorda Avesta. To say that " there is no such chapter in existence " is again to raise questions not only of scholarship, but of intellectual ethic. True, I have usually cited the Mihir Yasht by that title, and from Darmesteter : the " error " consisted solely in not giving Spiegel's name, with his rendering : " as the heavenly under standing allies itself to the heavenly Mithra." All errors of reference, printers' or writers', doubtless, are unfortunate, though for candid readers they are usually soluble ; but doubly unfortunate is the arrogance of a writer who, making an attack such as the above, thrice prints " Fargand " for " Fargard " in his own text ; twice prints "Principal" for "Principle"; prints "Iride" for "Iside"; prints " Pyramids " as a French word ; and cites Jerome's " Contra Jovinianum" as "Contra Jovianum." A writer who grounds his attacks upon supposed printer's errors should be more careful about his own proofs. On the real issue, Dr. Tisdall is careful not to mention that in the Mihir Yasht { = Khorda Avesta, xxvi, 107 : Spiegel) the "heavenly understanding" is declared to be allied with Mithra. He goes on professedly to cite from Geldner's text of the Zendavesta a passage which is not that referred to by me, laboriously and use lessly proving that it does not speak of the "Word"; and then, turning to Vendidad, Fargard xix, 14, 15 (48, 54), stakes his credit on his own declaration that I " may have been misled " by a trans lation " impossible for a person at all acquainted with the original language." I fancy that most readers will prefer to the smatterings of Dr. Tisdall the expert scholarship of Darmesteter, who reads "the Word Incarnate" in Mihir Yasht xxxii, 137 (where Spiegel has simply "the Manthra"), or even that of Spiegel, who reads "the holy Word" where Dr. Tisdall says no scholar could. Dr. Tisdall's case on this head substantially amounts to denying that " sacred text " has any possible community of meaning with the idea of the Logos. He thereby shows his general ignorance of the evolution of the idea in question. (Both in Islam and in Brah manism the Sacred Book is theologically abstracted to an eternal and uncreated existence ; and the psychic process is fundamentally the same as in the Hindu hypostatising of Speech, which is the type of the Graecised doctrine. " Speech is the Big Veda," and " the word ' is Brahma.") Offering such proofs as that above noticed for his charge^ of dishonesty against me, Dr. Tisdall (2) represents me (p. 12) as giving the Mithraic case in proof of my allegation that the Christian doctrine of the Logos comes from a pagan source. To realise the dishonesty of that assertion, the reader need but peruse §§ 2, 3 of Ch. ii of Part II of the foregoing volume, where the Logos idea is 410 APPENDIX C traced to a probable Babylonian source. I have expressly repre sented the idea of the Logos as late in Mithraism. When, further, my reverend critic in this connection zealously contends that even to prove that Mithra was " associated with " the Word would not be to identify him with it, he raises the question whether he is aware of the history of his own creed. If he knew that in early Christian literature "it is common to find the titles of the Holy Ghost assigned to the Logos," and if he could realise the fact that in ordinary Christian conception the Logos performs the function of the Holy Spirit, even he would hardly have flouted the suggestion that association of that kind can easily lead to assimila tion in a fluid system. For the rest, he makes no attempt to deny that Sraosha, who was latterly bracketed with Mithra, was " the Word "; and he does not even mention my reasons for inferring that in one worship Mithra was practically identified with Vohumano = Sraosha, the latter being worshipped, like Mithra, along with Anaitis. The gist of Dr. Tisdall's claim appears to be that no Eastern creed save the Christian had either a Logos or a Mediator or a Virgin Mother, and that Mithraism could have had no moral value. On all three heads he writes as the merest Christian partisan. He is aware (p. 18) that in Armenia the Christians professed to quote from Persians the statement that "the God Mithra was born of a woman"; and still he professes to see no trace of the idea of a virgin-birth. Yet in his own creed the God-Man is declared to be born of a woman ; and he does not for a moment pretend that the Persians declared Mithra to be the son of a mortal father. Con fusing another text, he makes it assert that Mithra was " incestu- ously born of a mortal mother," when the assertion really was (see above, p. 322, note) that the God was born of the incest of Ahura Mazda with his mother. Any candid scholar would admit that on the face of such references Mithra was reputed supernaturally born of God and a mortal mother. When Dr. Tisdall argues further that the conception of the Petra Genetrix, the Eock from which Mithra was born, excludes the idea of any mother, he merely sets us asking whether he is unaware that in ancient mythology the Earth, con stantly personified, is the mother par excellence. On the general mythological topic of virgin-birth, Dr. Tisdall writes in the childish strain of Canon McCulloch. Where a super naturally impregnated mother is not expressly called a virgin, he protests, there is no analogy to the Christian story. Both reverend gentlemen seem to be unaware that the title of " Virgin " was categorically given in antiquity to Mother-Goddesses and Goddesses of many amours. They cannot see that the essence of the idea under challenge lies in the item of supernatural birth — birth without male congress, which is asserted by Hesiod in the case of Here. In the heat of his partisanship, Dr. Tisdall angrily attacks Dr. Frazer for accepting the overwhelmingly strong testimony of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen as to the belief of certain Australian tribes that all births THE EEV. DE. ST. CLAIE TISDALL 411 are caused by the entrance of ancestral spirits, and that male con gress is not the cause of conception. On this head he advances the futile argument that the tribes in question have strict marriage laws — as if these were not intelligible in terms of mere sex instinct and property; and he has the hardihood to affirm (p. 89) that " there is no proof that savages hold or have ever held" the doctrine of spiritual conception. After this, it matters little that, without an attempt at proof, he declares me (p. 87) to have confounded Saoshyant with Sraosha in the Zoroastrian lore ; and further flatly denies that in that lore Saoshyant is virgin-born. Knowing nothing of the life of Australian blackfellows, he insolently negates the whole profound research of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen ; and on the strength of his private definition he overrules the verdict of Tiele, Cumont, Haug, and Darmesteter concerning Saoshyant. When, however, a Sayce, turned champion of orthodoxy, argues that the human race has not evolved from savagery at all, that ineptitude is for Dr. Tisdall a sufficient ground for refusing to admit that " men were originally savages "; and the youthful folly of Eenan' s deliverance on the same subject — a deliverance never repeated, in a book never completed- — serves equally, with him, to outweigh the whole mass of modern biological science. It does not occur to Dr. Tisdall to ask whether even in 1854 Eenan believed in the Virgin-birth. The reader will be able to realise Dr. Tisdall' s philosophic standpoint and logical faculty from his concluding deliverance (p. 91) that " if we suppose that popular fancy, quite independently and with no apparent reason (!), evolved the idea of supernatural — nay, even of Virgin — birth, then we must conclude one of two things : either (l) that it is an unmeaning delusion, or (2) that it was developed under Divine guidance." Deciding as a matter of course on the latter verdict, Dr. Tisdall proceeds to explain that through all religion " ' one unceasing {sic) purpose runs ' a Divine plan for the education of the human race." On his own view, then, Mithraism was divinely superintended ; and the fatigued reader is moved to ask why the reverend critic took all his previous pains to prove that the Mithraists cannot have had a notion of Virgin-birth, or of a Logos, and must have been a licentious crew ? Given a Divine plan through all, are we not invited to credit Deity with all the religious misconduct of all paganism ? Putting Dr. Tisdall's philosophic puerilities aside, I have to point out, further, the bad faith of a citation by him (p. 21) from me {Pagan Christs, 1st ed. p. 345 : this ed. p. 326) as to the inscription on a picture in a Mithraic catacomb of " phrases of the Eat and drink for to-morrow we die ' order." Dr. Tisdall is careful not to mention {a) my remark that, if original, such phrases might stand for an antinomian tendency such as Paul imputed to his Corinthian converts ; or (b) my further suggestion that they may very well have been inscribed by Christian hands after the fall of Mithraism ; or (c) my further comment that there is no evidence whatever that 412 APPENDIX C Mithraism ever developed such disorders as compelled the suppres sion of the Christian agapa. Needless to add, he does not tell that some declare the picture to represent the Christian ' Banquet of Seven." With his professed faith in the Divine plan running through all religion, he is determined at any cost to prove that the Deity led Mithraists by wholly evil paths. Where Hausrath ascribes to their cult a purity which " won many hearts from sin- stained Olympus" and attracted some of the best emperors, Dr. Tisdall affirms that it won " generally the worst of them " (p. 17), naming "Aurelian, Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius, as well as Julian the Apostate." Hausrath names Antoninus Pius, Constantius Chlorus, and Julian — without thinking it necessary to add "the Apostate." Such are the differences of method and result as between the sectarian and the historian. If one were to comment on the charges brought by Paul the Apostate against his Corinthian converts, or on the characters of the common run of the Christian Emperors from Constantine the Apostate onwards, Dr. Tisdall would presumably fall back either on his candid theorem (p. 70, note) that Christian precept is not responsible for Christian practice — a prin ciple reserved by him for Christian use — or his equally flexible doc trine that all religious history is under divine supervision. At that point we may leave the moral question save in so far as we are forced still to question the moral spirit of the Christian champion. He does not scruple to repel the assertion that Mithra was a Mediator by declaring that it is founded solely on Plutarch's statement that " Mithra was called /ieo-irrjs because he stood midway between the Good Principal [sic] Ormazd, and the Evil Principal [!] Ahriman." The assertion that he was a Mediator between man and God is accordingly declared not to be " scholarly, or even honest." The suggestion here is that /*eo-injs does not really mean Mediator ; whereas that is the normal and standing force of the term. The honest critic would have us believe that the regular Greek word for "intercessor" could have no such connotation for Mithraists when applied to Mithra, because Plutarch said he got the name from being midway between Ormazd and Ahriman ; and that whereas Christians by his own account felt the need of a Mediator, Zoroastrians and Mithraists would not. He does not scruple to write : — " If his worshippers really held him [Mithra] to be a middle-man between Ormazd and Ahriman, we can the better understand Mithra's undoubted association with Cybele, Baal, and such immoral deities." Thus can hierology be written by a Christian priest. If a heretic should ask whether Christ is not practically a mid-way Power between God and Devil, saving his worshippers from both, he would be a good deal nearer the truth ; but we can imagine the epithets with which Dr. Tisdall would greet him. The reader will not be surprised to learn that, perverting to his purpose a passage of Darmesteter, he represents ancient society (albeit under the Divine Plan) in the last years B.C. to have attained merely to THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 413 "the unbridling of the human brute," adding that "so it is in France now." It is on a basis of such sociology and psychology as this that Dr. Tisdall reaches the conclusion that the belief of pagans in super natural births proves the reality of the gospel story. " The false coin," he sums up, in the manner and on the plane of Justin Martyr, " pre- supposes the genuine The very existence of so many varied forms of legends of births of this kind shows that such a thing is not ' unthinkable.' " So that the currency of a multitude of narratives declared to be false (but divinely inspired) proves the inherent credibility of one other narrative of the same order. Such is the logic of official Christian theology in England in 1909. I have not taken the trouble to answer all of Dr. Tisdall's minor criticisms. It may suffice to cite one more, as a sample of their validity. On p. 24 he writes (italics mine) : — " Though Mr. Eobert son says, ' Mithraism was, in point of range, the most nearly universal religion of the Western world, in the early centuries of the Christian era,' yet this statement requires modification. Cumont informs us that, at first at least, ' The influence of this small band of sectaries on the great mass of the Eoman population was virtually as infinitesimal as is to-day the influence of Buddhist societies in modern Europe." That is to say, my statement must be modified because it does not apply to the period before that to which I specifi cally applied it. I spoke of Mithraism " in the early centuries of the Christian era." Professor Cumont's phrase refers expressly to the time of the beginnings, "towards the end of the Eepublic." Dr. Tisdall has penned sheer nullity. An excuse is perhaps needed for dealing at any length with a writer capable of such dialectic. Mine is, that it is necessary at least to let laymen know the nature of the minds which now seek to impose faith upon them. § 4. The Bev. Father Martindale. In the Eoman Catholic periodical The Month, for December, 1908, there appeared an article by the Eev. Father Martindale under the title "The Eeligion of Mithra: Third Article: VI. A Modern Apostle." It was devoted to an attack on Part III of Pagan Christs; and as the title appears to convey the belief that I am a Mithraist, it might seem negligible in a serious discussion. The reverend author, however, has made so many charges of bad faith, with so much revelation of bad faith on his own part, that I have thought it advisable to deal with them in detail, putting succinctly his misrepresentations, errors, and aspersions, and my rebuttals. 1. In his first paragraph, the rev. critic ascribes to me the thesis that " the dwindling intelligence of the earlier Christian generations misinterpreted a kind of mystery-play — such as were those of the ' death and restoring to life ' of Attis and Adonis and Osiris — as the 414 APPENDIX C representation of actual events, and, by a coarse realism, transformed the libretto of this play into the Gospels." Having posited this falsification, he goes on : " We have no intention of touching even lightly on Mr. Eobertson's general theory." Comment. — My thesis was that the mystery-play was closely transcribed, and added to the gospels — an extremely different state ment. The refusal to face the theory was to be expected. It is normal among defenders of the faith. 2. Before dealing even with Mithraism, the rev. critic seeks to inflame his fellow- Catholics by describing me as having made an " attack upon that which is the spiritual life of so many millions, and from which they draw comfort in sorrow and strength in moral stress." Comment. — The critic ought really to have added that my " attack " endangered his own income. In that way, the question of the truth or untruth of the statements under discussion might have been still further obscured. A picture of the happy state of human life under the Inquisition might further have helped his polemic. 3. Dealing with my section on Mithraism, the Eev. Father proclaims that " the list of Mr. Eobertson's authorities astonishes us." He goes on : " After the respectable names of Tiele and Boissier we find cited, without discrimination, H. Seel's Mithrasgeheimnisse (1823), of the first part of which work M. Cumont says that it has but the remotest connection with the cult of Mithra," etc. " Sainte- Croix's Becherches, etc., are next cited," he continues, and Sainte- Croix also is little valued by M. Cumont. " Sainte-Croix makes no use of the monuments, nor does Windischmann, an author of far higher merit, however, whom Mr. Eobertson also quotes. Creuzer and Lajard constantly recur as authorities "; and M. Cumont dismisses these likewise as valueless. Comment. — Any reader of this paragraph, not having seen my essay on Mithraism, would be nearly sure to take it for granted — unless he knew something of the controversial methods of Father Martindale— that the disparaged authors in question were cited by me as authorities for my facts and theories. True, the underlined passage about Lajard and Creuzer might puzzle him ; for why should the critic now say " constantly," after 'asserting generally that I cited the authors as my "authorities "? But he concludes the passage by asserting that " Mr. Eobertson's imposing list of authorities is singularly diminished in impressiveness when we see that it includes names like these." A careful student, of course, might detect in the "includes" a sign of consciousness that the critic had been playing fast and loose with his readers, but the general impression conveyed to most readers of The Month would be that I relied on exploded " authorities." It is my disagreeable duty to point out that Father Martindale knew he was deceiving his readers. The list of "authorities" of THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 415 which he speaks is not truthfully to be described as a list of authorities at all. It is given as a footnote in support of one sentence: As to this, students are agreed" — "this" being the proposition that " Mithraism was in point of range the most nearly universal religion of the Western world in the early centuries of the Christian era." The list of references from which he cites a few names is compiled solely to bear out this assertion. I call Seel and Sainte-Croix and Creuzer and Lajard " students," whatever be their shortcomings; if they are not so describable, what, I wonder, is Father Martindale ? Besides those named I cite Beugnot, Ozanam, E. Meyer, Boscher, Quinet, Eenan, Jean Eeville, Hertzberg, Gardner, Hausrath, and Smith and Chatham's Dictionary — all which " authorities " he is careful not to name ; but I cite them only to show how well founded was my general historic assertion concern ing the vogue of Mithraism. Even after categorically representing me as resting my case upon untrustworthy " authorities," the Eev. Father writes : " Yet, even when he quotes these authorities only to deny their worth, we are often left with the curious impression that, be they right or wrong, the quoting of them should be held to have somehow damaged the Christian tradition." That is to say, the Eev. Father knew that the " imposing list of authorities " was not a list of authorities at all. He knew that I did not rely for my conclusions on the writers he disparaged; he knew that I repeatedly dissented from their views, and that more than once I censured their misstatements. And still he elected to leave standing the original untruth. If the Eev. Father had censured me for putting together such a list of references at all, on the score that the assertion they are offered to prove is one which probably no competent scholar would now dispute, I should have admitted that his blame had some colour, and merely replied that my essay was first written twenty years ago, when, so far as I knew, there was no treatise on the subject in English, and I had to acquire my information from many sources. Had M. Cumont's great work been then in existence, I should probably never have planned my sketch. Even when it was republished in Pagan Christs, so far as I knew, no English study of the subject had appeared. I wrote for an uninformed public. But at least my list has served to elicit a not unmemorable exhibition of what a Christian priest will stoop to in the way of prevarication against one whom he ostensibly supposes to be an " apostle" of a non- Christian cult. 4. After recounting his "curious impression" as above cited, the Eev. Father proceeds as follows : — " Thus, on p. 322 seq., the degrees of Mithraic initiation are discussed. Mr. Eobertson believes them to have numbered twelve. He relies for proof upon a mutilated and incomprehensible text of Porphyry, who is quoting Pallas ; and upon an ' important citation ' from Elias of Crete, who, with Nicetas, asserts the degrees to have 416 APPENDIX C been twelve. But Mr. Eobertson does not notice that Elias and Nicetas {whom, indeed, he does not mention) (!) are both of them using Nonnus, a fantastic mythographer of the sixth or seventh century, whose witness Mr. Eobertson has himself, just above, abandoned." Comment. — The Eev. Father makes " more mistakes than the thing admits of." He puts Nonnus in the sixth or seventh century, when he would have been impossible. The universal voice of history assigns him to the fifth. With his customary good sense, further, the Bev. Father censures me for not noting the inutility of an authority whom, as he admits, I did not even name. Then he represents me as citing Porphyry for a list of twelve degrees of initiation," when I do not cite him for twelve of anything. But these are trifles compared with the dimensions of the mare's nest which is the chief content of the paragraph under notice. The sentences which the Eev. Father attacks in my essay have nothing to do with the Mithraic " degrees." They refer to the trials of initiation — a totally different thing. A glance at the context might have saved him had he been concerned for anything better than aspersing a heretic : I refer twice over to the " austerities," the " elaborate and painful process," which a Mithraic initiate had to undergo. I need not therefore take the trouble to inquire whether his assertions as to Elias of Crete and Nicetas are any more accurate than his dating of Nonnus. The residual fact is that he has made a ridiculous mistake. His very phrase " degrees of initiation " is a triumph of confusion. 5. All the before-mentioned exploits occur within the space of two pages of The Month. And still the exhibition continues. After confusing the trials with the degrees of Mithraism, the rev. critic goes on : — " M. Cumont, however, makes it quite clear that we may trust St. Jerome's formal evidence that the degrees of initiation " [italics mine] " numbered seven. Monuments and inscriptions amply bear this out. Assuming, however, that they were twelve, Mr. Eobertson thus proceeds : ' Out of the various notices [i.e., the contradictory data of Jerome, Porphyry, and irresponsible medieval writers] , partly by hypothesis, M. Lajard has constructed a not quite trust worthy scheme, representing twelve Mithraic degrees.' " Comment. — That is to say, I assumed the degrees were twelve, though I represent as not quite trustworthy the only list which gives that number ! I do not know whether the Eev. Father can yet realise that I never did " assume " that the degrees were twelve, though I thought the trials were probably of that number. The fact remains that Jerome's list of seven lay before him in my essay, and that he suppresses the fact of my having given it, suppressing also the fact that in a footnote I have remarked as to one of Lajard's degrees being " particularly ill made out." Having thus, by suppres sion and confusion, reduced the matter to chaos, the Eev. Father THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 417 proceeds to assert that I make out the " hypothetical and untrust worthy" Mithraic scheme "somehow responsible for Christian emblems." This is a sample of what his state of mind can produce in the way of blundering. My footnote, to which he furiously refers, speaks of a curious correspondence " between Lajard's four grades (which, in his usual way, the critic confuses with his twelve degrees) and the emblems of the four evangelists, adding, " these, however, were introduced into Judaism from Assyrian sources at the exile." These words, expressly inserted to guard against the notion that the emblems in question were taken from Mithraism, the Eev. Father rep resents as setting up one of his " impressions " to the exact contrary. Those " curious impressions " I am content to leave to the psychologists as data ; but I will take the opportunity to explain to other readers that the purport of the note in question is to suggest a widespread use, dating back very far in religious history, of either the four gospel-emblems or four emblems of a similar character. Apparently the Eev. Father is exasperated by the suggestion that those emblems were not originated as such by Christians, though he does not overtly dispute my assertion that they existed in Judaism. The point as to Lajard's grades is that they resolve his list of degrees into four — terrestrial, aerial, igneous (or, rather, solar), and divine; while the Judseo-Christian gospel-emblems of ox, eagle, Hon, and man (and similar uses of emblems among Assyrians and Arabs) seem to imply a similar symbolical division. It is a matter of small importance ; and, if I could have foreseen such readers and critics as Father Martindale, I might have made the note more elaborate. Such prevision, however, was beyond me. He calls the list of degrees in Lajard "preposterous." I had already called it " grotesque." But it is not more grotesque than his blunders, his " curious impressions," and his misrepresentations. 6. And still the Eev. Father contrives to continue blundering. Up to his fourth page he has not once deviated into accuracy, and in the paragraph following on that last quoted he asserts that on pp. 302-3 I "wrongly identify Kronos-Zervan with Mithra." Comment. — Knowing that I never for one moment did any such thing, I re-read in blank astonishment the pages to which he refers. Only on the first is Kronos-Zervan referred to ; and the statement is that from Armenian Mazdeism Mithraism borrowed " its enigmatic ' Supreme God,' Kronos-Zervan, the Time Spirit, a Babylonian con ception, represented in the mysteries by the lion-headed or demon- headed and serpent-encircled figure which bears the two keys. And thisdeity, in turn, tells of Babylonian influence " With a sense of moral relief, I surmise that the critic actually did get his idea from the elliptical beginning of the next paragraph, which runs : " Of the deity thus shaped through many centuries, by many forces, it seems warrantable to say that his cult was normally in an ethically advanced stage " I suppose his intelligence could infer that by this deity was meant the " enigmatic " Kronos- 2e 418 APPENDIX C Zervan ; but I fancy I need not explain to any other reader that, as the whole sequel shows, the reference is just to Mithra. Any reader not primed by malice would realise this in a moment, even if for a moment he had. been misled. 7. In the next paragraph the Eev. Father asserts that in my essay monuments are declared to " prove the identification " of Mithra with Anahita in a twy-sexed personality. Comment. — Once more he has blundered. What I have said is that Herodotus is " accused of blundering in combining Mithra with Mylitta, it being shown " [that is, by M. Cumont] "from monu ments that the goddess identified with Mithra was Anaitis or Tanat." " But," I add, " that the Armenian Anaitis and Mylitta were regarded as the same deity seems clear." As usual, the Bev. Father has misunderstood the argument. And when he goes on to say that " Mr. Eobertson next identifies Mithra with Strabo's Omanos " [ = Vohu Man6 = Good Thought] , he as usual distorts my words. What I have written is that "there is reason to suppose that Omanus (or the Persian form of the word) was a name of Mithra, and that it is an adaptation of Vohumano (Bahman)= Good Mind — a divine name with a very fluctuating connotation." I am not concerned to discuss the problem of the sexual duality of Mithra, as to which the Eev. Father, as usual, is careful to conceal from his readers the relevant data — such as the case of Men, the Moon-god, and the parallels in the Babylonian pantheon. It is a matter on which his opinion counts for nothing ; and he seems never to have reflected upon the phenomena upon which the issue turns. 8. After significantly aspersing the Christian Father Julius Firmicus Maternus because even the anti-pagan testimony of that writer does not suit him, Father Martindale continues : — " The other author quoted as ' making Mithra two-sexed and threefold, or three-formed,' is 'Dionysius.' The pseudo-Areopagite really says : ' This incident [i.e., the miraculous tripling of a certain day] is especially inserted into the Persian sacerdotal traditions, and the Magi still commemorate the "triple Mithra" [ = the tripled length of Day-light] .' There is here no mention of sex nor of form." Comment. — There is here a preliminary falsification, followed by a memorable revelation of credulity. By writing in quotation marks " Dionysius," and proceeding to cite " the pseudo-Areopagite " on his own account, the Eev. Father deliberately suggests to his readers that I cited " Dionysius " without any characterisation. My reference is actually to " Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite " — the usual way of referring to the writer in question. Not content with such a perversion, he adds another. He explicitly asserts that I quoted " Dionysius " as " making Mithra two-sexed and threefold or three-formed." I did no such thing. I expressly speak of the statement of Julius Firmicus {i.e., Maternus) " and later writers, that the Persians make Mithra both two-sexed and threefold or three-formed "; and, giving a reference specifically to Maternus, add THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 419 " Compare Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite," etc. The Eev. Father professes to be correcting me when he had to falsify my words in order to make them seem to need correction. As for the use he makes of Dionysius' testimony, I could not have believed, until I read him, that even in his Church there could be found at the present day such medieval credulity. Not for two hundred years, I should think, has any English scholar been found to attach the slightest credit to the absurd proposition that Mithra's epithet of triplasios referred to the miracle-story of the turning back of the shadow on the dial for Hezekiah, whereby the day was " almost triplicated." Over two hundred years ago, Cudworth could write that " learned men [Vossius and Selden to wit] have already shown the foolery of this conceit." It has been reserved for Father Martindale to reincarnate the credulity of the pseudo-Areopagite and his scholiasts. He evidently takes the Hezekiah legend as a historical fact, recorded by the Persians ; though the very text he accepts tells how Apollophanes the sophist denied all such assertions. Selden, after quoting the comment of Georgius Pachymerius about the triple extension of the day, adds : Ita et Maximus Scholiastes ; and for himself, Nee in Graculorum verba juravi. But such verba seems to be Father Martindale's " authorities." The Bev. Father had set out with a flourish against me as one who might be expected, in an " attack " on the Christian religion, "whether from respect for his adversary or from fears for himself," to be " very careful in his choice of weapons." He is truly a precious authority upon choice of weapons. But his textual esca pades are hardly more amazing than his hierological ideas. I have still a difficulty in conceiving that any man who pretends to write upon Mithraism could seriously assert that triplasios means triple- lengthed, thereby making the Magi identify Mithra with one case of protracted daylight ; or could allege that the word tells nothing of " form." I suppose it is in all seriousness possible to him ; though even among Christian priests and scholars, and in his own Church, there have been many with more insight into the symbolism of alien faiths. Such scholars as Vossius, Selden, Schedius, Huet, and Cudworth could all see that " the triple Mithra " meant something more than three-days-on-end ! Huet, a Catholic bishop, could avow that " The triple Mithras of the Persians, spoken of by Dionysius, seems to be a certain image of the Trinity." Mosheim, balking at such speculation, despite Julian's phrase on " the triple function of the God," prefers reasonably to say with Macrobius that " the three faces of the sun and moon denoted the threefold relation of time, present, past, and future." That simple conception, had Father Martindale considered it, might have withheld him from translating triplasios as triple-lengthed, and from his added nonsense to the effect that the phrase " may indeed have applied to the twin torch- bearers who flank Mithra Tauroktonos." But enough of his inter pretations : it is sufficient to deal with his textual exploits. 420 APPENDIX C 9. Coming at last to some central issues, he says, concerning my thesis that Mithra was virgin-born : — " Mr. Eobertson would prefer to assert, in view of a ' primary tendency,' that such a myth must have developed. He recurs, however, to positive argument. Mithra, he says, is identical with Sabazios ; Strabo says Sabazios is as it were the child of the mother ; Mithra must therefore have had the same relation to a mother. But Anahita (as Goddess of Fertilising Waters) would ' necessarily figure in her cultus as a mother,' and as Mithra (who was ' paired ' with her) never appears (save in worshipful metaphor) as a father, he would perforce rank as her son." Comment. — To the words, "primary tendency," in quotation marks, he appends the reference " P. 96." No such words occur on p. 96 of my book ; they occur on p. 338. [I here refer, of course, to the first edition.] For the closing words in the above-cited passage, again, he refers to p. 337, whereas they occur on p. 339. I should not have dreamt of noting such slips were it not that, finding in one place a wrong figure in one of my references — a 7 turned by the printer into a 9 — the Eev. Father says that " such correction is too often necessary in reading this book." Felicitous and scrupulous to the last, he attempts to fasten discredit upon me for a kind of error that occurs twice upon one of his own pages. Turning to more serious matters, I have to note that his reference to my thesis of a " primary tendency " is one more misrepresentation : the tendency in question is explicitly indicated both on p. 96 and on p. 338 as that to " make the young God the son of the Supreme God." Then I add that "when Mithra became specially identified, like Dionysos, with the Phrygian God Sabazios, who was [for Strabo] the ' child as it were of the [great] mother,' he necessarily came to hold the same relation to the Mother-Goddess." There is nothing " primary " here : the process is specifically secondary. Only there after do I argue that in all likelihood — judging from the legend of the birth of Cyrus — there were ancient Persian forms of the Virgin- birth myth. Having duly obscured the argument here, the Eev. Father proceeds to allege that I " identify " the miraculously born Saoshyant with Mithra, which is one more falsification. My state ment is that as " Sraosha ( = Vohumano) came to be identified with Mithra, so would there be a blending or assimilation of Mithra with Saoshyas or Saoshyant, the Saviour and Eaiser of the Dead." This he calls "identifying." And then where I wrote: "As a result of all these myth motives we find," etc., he drops out the words I have italicised, and quotes me as saying "As a result we find," etc., thus sedulously garbling and perverting still. 10. I shall not occupy myself in discussing with such a critic the question of the Virgin-birth in the legend of Mithra. With M. Cumont I might argue it— with due diffidence: with a cultist who cannot get into a scientific relation with such a problem, it were trifling to reason upon it. I have simply to note that when THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 421 Father Martindale devotes a paragraph to explaining that " some To.pdkvo's divinities were anything but virgin " he is again throwing dust in the eyes of his readers, inasmuch as he implies that my argument does not recognise all this. I have repeatedly pointed to the duality of the Asiatic and other Goddesses, " who were on the one side virgins and on the other mothers." The Eev. Father garbles to no purpose ; he simply does not understand the problem he is discussing. 11. It remains to notice the Eev. Father's characteristic handling of my thesis concerning a " Descent into Hell " in Mithraism : — "With equal pluck Mr. Eobertson determines to show that Mithra died, descended into Hell, and rose again. He has but one piece of evidence. It is a long passage from Firmicus Maternus, which relates a mystic representation of a divine death, followed by an exultant return to life." Comment. — The unfailing inaccuracy of Father Martindale might almost suggest among his fellow-believers a theory of obsession. To the first sentence in this passage he appends a reference, "Pp. 319 sq." That section is a discussion of the ceremonial death and resurrection of Mithra ; and when, on p. 321, I have remarked upon the Descent into Hades of Herakles and Apollo, I go on to allude to the astro nomical explanation in these cases " and in the case of the Descent of Mithra to Hades, noticed later." If he had taken the slightest pains to do anything worthier than raise reckless cavils, he would have found on pp. 340-1 the full account of the Persian legend upon which — without the slightest reference to Firmicus Maternus, who knows nothing of it — I found my thesis. As usual, he has blundered hopelessly. At the close of the paragraph under notice he proclaims that he is " left wondering at the conclusions to which the ' will to dis believe ' can guide an argument." Any reader of these pages, I fancy, will be left wondering more profoundly at the tissue of error, absurdity, and prevarication through which the passion to defend the faith can conduct a Christian priest. In a footnote to the sentence last quoted he contrives to insert yet another falsity. 12. On the question as to Justin's view of the Mithraic Eucharist, the Eev. Father writes, referring first to Justin's passage {Tryph. 70) as to the devils imitating the prophecy of Daniel in the Mithraic doctrine : — " Notice, first, that Justin does not say this diabolic travesty of prophecy was pre-Christian in date; and that he does positively say (Apol. L, 66) that the devils imitate the Eucharist itself in the Mithraic mysteries. Mr. Eobertson should have quoted that passage. ' If the Mithraists had simply imitated the historic Christians,' he argues, ' the obvious course for the latter would be simply to say so.' And that, indeed, is simply what Justin, in this passage, does say." Comment. — Then " devils," in Justin, means for the Eev. Father Martindale just Mithraists! If he could only understand things 422 APPENDIX C occasionally, my task would have been lighter. The passage he says I ought to have quoted I had quoted, textually, on pp. 321-2, giving the reference, and adding similar passages from Tertullian about the devil's doings. The Eev. Father has not even read through the essay he seeks to discredit. Not once can he contrive to pass an accurate censure. But on p. 331, from which he quotes, I explain my contention by quoting from Justin the further passage : " When I hear that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this." And I add : " Nobody now pretends that the Perseus myth, or the Pagan virgin myth in general, is later than Christianity." Does the learned Father suggest that Justin thought it was ? Had he read this passage ? If so, why did he not at least try to meet the argument ? 13. In the next paragraph he avows that in Justin's days " the historical sense was practically dormant "; and in the same breath he affirms that " the divergent pedigrees of the historic Mithraic and Christian meals are so well known as to render quite unnecessary and, in our day, perverse, any theory of borrowing on either side." " So well known "! Known, that is, in an age without the historic sense, as the Eev. Father " knows " the dogmas he has assimilated, with about as much " historical sense," relatively to the problems of his day, as Justin had for his. But though I have called Justin " perhaps the most foolish of the Christian fathers," I never thought him so inane as to say " the devils have counterfeited " when in his own opinion he could truthfully say : " These tales and usages have all come into existence since the propagation of the religion of Christ." Comment. — As usual, Father Martindale entirely misses the point of my estimate of Justin, which is that, foolish as he was, his line of argument is followed by Tertullian. That is to say, it may pass as common and typical. Upon my characterisation of Justin, Father Martindale makes an exquisitely pointless retort ; but he thinks fit to abuse Maternus as " notoriously and constantly unreliable," and guilty of " grotesque " misdescription — this because he does not avail for the Eev. Father's polemic purposes. 14. I have but reached the tenth page of his essay, and still I am occupied with his misstatements. He represents me, in a hope lessly incoherent passage, as saying that "much of the Song of Moses and Zechariah's mystic stone prove the irremediably Mazdean character of ancient Judaism." Another falsity. On p. 382 I argued that the parallel between the arrow scene on the monuments and the story of Moses striking the rock " suggests rather a common source for both myths than a Persian borrowing from the Bible "; and that, " as the story of the babe Moses is found long before in that of Sargon, so, probably, does the rock story come from Central Asia." That is the implication on p. 333, when I speak of " the presence of such a God-symbol in Hebrew religion long before our era." Apparently, the Eev. Father puts the Song of THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 423 Moses and the Book of Zechariah in one category, as belonging alike to " ancient Judaism." I can believe it of him ; but I ascribe a Mazdean element only to the latter, not to the former. 15. The Bev. Father next ascribes to me the thesis of " the identity" — his favourite word — "of St. Peter with Mithra, and also with Janus," when I had spoken of " assimilation with." Comment. — I suppose he knows nothing of the general pheno mena of assimilation of deities in old cults — the addition of solar characteristics to Gods of Vegetation — and of the modes of worship of the latter in Sun-Cults, and so on. I will merely indicate to any of his readers who may see this reply that they must not suppose they gather from him any idea of my case. 16. Nor shall I spend more time over the rest of his garbled quotations — his citing me as saying " entitled to assume " when I wrote " conclude "; his dropping out of an " even " when it qualified the context, and so on. I must say a word, however, on one of his later futilities — his laboriously facetious attempt to demonstrate that my remarks on the probability of the " Chair of St. Peter" being a Mithraic relic amount to a self-contradiction. The Eev. Father writes that my argument amounts to this : " There is strong reason to suppose it is X. It may well be, however, Y. There is at least a possibility that it is Z." Comment.— What the Eev. Father, with his strange gift of fallacy, calls Z, as any other reader will see, is just X ; and the argument runs : " There is strong reason to suppose that it is X. It may well, however, be Y." Any reader but himself, or one of his type, would see that "a relic of a pre-Christian cult" means simply a relic of Mithraism. And he blunders even worse than usual when he argues that my phrase, "it may well be that the whole thing is a fortuitous importation, like so many other ecclesiastical relics," amounts to saying, " I may be quite wrong, but the Church shall have her slap." I need hardly point out to any other reader that, whether the chair be Mithraic or not, the Church stands convicted of a legendary imposture, not only by the verdict of every archaeo logist, but by the simplest application of common-sense. With his customary strategy, he evades making the acknowledgment which every honest inquirer has made — that, whatever it may have been, the chair can never have been constructed as the episcopal chair of St. Peter, or of any early Christian bishop. 17. Upon one point at least the Eev. Father might be expected to be right when he accused me of erring on it — the question of the wording of the litanies of his own Church. I stated that, in listening to the Eoman litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Mithraists who joined the Christian Church knew they were listening to the very epithets of the Sun-God, and I cited six— God of the Skies, Purity of the eternal light, King of glory, Sun of justice, Strong God, Father of the Ages to come, Angel of great counsel. Upon this the Eev. Father asserts first that the litany in question did not exist at 424 APPENDIX C that period. If this were true, it would be a valid rebuttal ; but the Eev. Father offers no evidence whatever, and I will merely say that I believe the epithets cited by me, which are in the opening portion, are as old as the fourth century in Christian worship. Having made his historical assertion, however, the Eev. Father goes on to declare that the epithets cited are "not Mithraic," and that " some of them are not in the litany." That point may be easily settled. I have before me a Catholic Eucologe, in Latin and French, apparently published in the first half of last century. It gives the litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, beginning with Kyrie eleison —a pretty good sign of antiquity in a Eoman litany — and among the earlier epithets are these : — Pater de ccelis, Deus ; Candor lucis aterna ; Bex gloria ; Sol Justitia, Deus fortis, Pater futuri seculi ; Magni consilii Angele. I leave it to Catholic authorities to state whether they repudiate the manual of devotion from which I quote, or whether Father Martindale is here wrong as usual. On the signi ficance of the epithets, my readers can judge for themselves. 18. I am willing now to leave Father Martindale's readers and mine to judge which of us has been guilty of the "mortal sins against history and good-sense " with which he so pretentiously charges me. If any of my errors approximate to some of his, they are grave indeed. He speaks of my work as a compilation of facts tending to the destruction of the hated system." If I thought myself capable of hating any opinion in his fashion, I should indeed reconsider my work with concern. But he is of the tribe who, hating Galileo for presenting an unwelcome truth, accused him of hating Ptolemy and the Holy Ghost. Inspired always by either hate or hysteria, they can imagine no other kind of motive for scientific work. To the last, Father Martindale strives to envenom his readers by quoting me as disparaging the early Christians when I write that " an unwarlike population, for one thing, wants a sympathetic and emotional religion ; and here, though Mithraism had many attractions, Christianity had more, having sedulously copied every one of its rivals, and developed special features of its own." This he calls malevolent disparagement. He simply cannot understand the mental processes of anyone who studies the history of his faith in a scientific spirit : his one thought is to cast aspersions at whatever conflicts with his fanaticism. A dozen ecclesiastical historians have avowed the wholesale adoption of pagan rites, symbols, and conceptions by the early Christian Church : he makes it his task to try to discredit, by bluster and misrepresentation, any rationalist who draws scientific inferences from the fact. 19. In that spirit he pens this passage : — ''For the Dark Ages,' says Mr. Eobertson, pityingly, 'the symbol of the Cross was much more plausibly appealing than that of the god slaying the Zodiacal bull.' Alas, poor Dark Ages 1 No more the ' mystically-figured Persian, beautiful as Apollo, triumphant as Ares, but the gibbeted Jew, in whose legend figured tax- THE EEV. FATHEE MAETINDALE 425 gatherers and lepers, epileptics, and men blind from birth, domestic traitors and cowardly disciples ' — that was all they could appreciate." Then he quotes Isaiah about the despised and rejected of men — a passage which, with his ripe " historic sense," he evidently believes to have been written in anticipation of the coming of the Jesus of the Gospels — and adds : — " With those despisers stand the critics of the Dark Ages ; we with St. Bernard, who said, Tanto mihi carior, quanto pro me vilior ! We are content to share the pessimism and barbarism of that great poet and Crusader." Comment. — Thus, on his last page and his first, the Eev. Father falsifies the book he professes to criticise. He does, I suppose, seriously regard me as taking moral satisfaction in the symbol of a God knifing a bull. But whatever hallucinations he may harbour, he knew, unless he was beside himself, that he had grossly garbled, by an elision, the passage he professed to quote, wholly altering its application so as to suggest that I was expressing my own pre dilections when I sketched those of many pagans of the average pagan type. He knew also that I had expressly spoken of the Mithraists in question as ultimately going over in large numbers to Christianity. It would never do to let the readers of The Month get a glimpse of a scientific view of the process of transition. 20. As if all that were not enough, Father Martindale ends his essay, as he began it, with an explicit untruth. In the last sentence he speaks of " the derivation proposed by Mr. Eobertson for the Mass." Comment. — I have proposed no derivation. The sole derivations for " Mass " that are mentioned in my essay are indicated in the passage : " Their [the Mithraists'] mizd, or sacred cake, was pre served in the mass, which possibly copied the very name "; and in the footnote, after referring to King and Seel as the sources of the suggestion, I add that the word missa " might come, however, from the Greek maza, a name for a barley cake." Thus I did not give my assent to the mizd derivation, and merely suggested a similar i possibility for maza — doing this because, like many other people not , gifted with his credulity, I have never been able to see plausibility in the traditional etymology of missa. 21. My critic speaks of some " eminent professor whose courtesy and erudition enabled us to speak with such conviction on the } derivation proposed by Mr. Eobertson for Mass," and who, he states, wrote of me : 'I think that his books were calculated to strengthen the belief in revealed religion." Comment. — I know not who the " eminent professor " is, nor where my critic discussed the derivation which he misrepresents me as proposing. I cannot find any discussion on the subject in his articles on Mithraism. If he misinformed the eminent professor a,s , successfully upon my books in general as he has done on the point under notice, I doubt not he could elicit from him plenty of 426 APPENDIX C disparagement, especially if he be of Father Martindale's own creed and cast of mind. If, indeed, they both believe what the Eev. Father quotes him as saying, it is not clear why he is so anxious to denounce me. By adding, however, a footnote to the clause last cited, he contrives to suggest to his readers that the eminent professor is M. Cumont. The footnote runs : " We may be allowed to add that since this article was in print Professor Cumont has with great kindness written to us at some length, assuring us that the conclusions we have reached in it are fully justified." As most of the Eev. Father's article consists in perversions of my words and aspersions upon me, he here suggests that Professor Cumont backed him up in these. I therefore take the opportunity to inform any of his readers who may see this that Professor Cumont has not endorsed any of his attacks upon me, and wrote nothing whatever to him concerning the derivation he says I proposed for the word Missa. Thus he ends as he began in mystification. I have no doubt that the Eev. Father will remain well content with his work, which he will justify to himself as a blow struck for his creed and its founder. He avowedly feels himself to be of the tribe of St. Bernard, " that great Crusader"; and of a surety he is. Like St. Bernard, he lashes himself into a passion against all the supposed enemies of a deity whom he represents as having taught him to love his enemies ; like the Saint, he sees in a vast movement of hate, massacre, and destruction a fit expression of his devotion to a saerificially slain God, of whom he says, truly enough, Tanto mihi carior, quanto pro me vilior. "Pro ME vilior": the confession is memorable : the priest's very hysteria of devotion is rooted in egoism, like his antipathy. The spectacle he presents is apt to cure any rationalist of the tendency to suppose that organised religion is a greater force for moralisation, in virtue of its ethical elements, than for demoralisation by reason of its stimulus to fanaticism and its intellectual mis guidance. Those Hellenists and Jews who, long before Christianity took its historic shape, arrived at the doctrine of forgiveness for injuries, and preached love of enemies — those men, one often feels, had undergone a profound spiritual experience ; and it was shared, presumably, by those who inserted the doctrine in the gospels. But how many of those who, in the past eighteen centuries, have^ hysterically professed to draw their " spiritual life " from those,s gospels — how many of them all have ever been turned from their,s primitive passions of resentment by the commandment they call^ divine ? So far from " forgiving " a mere scientific opponent, who no' more hates them or their creed than he hates the Ptolemaic system , or the foes of his ancestors, they set out in a passion of resentment,,; not to get at the truth, but to get at the enemy. In a nobler temper Z DE. J. ESTLIN CAEPENTEE 427 Father Martindale might have compassed something towards critical correction. In my essay, I am practically certain, a priori, there must be errors of theory or fact, or of both. I have never met with any similar treatise in which, after close study, I have not found something in the nature of error ; and I would fain have my errors rectified, as I have already been able to do at some points for myself. But I do not find that my Catholic critic has ever come nearer exposing error in my case than to find a minor inexactitude of phraseology ; and in the pursuit he has himself committed blunders beyond belief, and falsifications that for number and perversity outgo anything I have personally met with in controversy. In the hope of achieving a pious triumph he has selected some score of propo sitions from an essay containing hundreds ; and, withal, what a fiasco he has achieved ! -"} § 5. Dr. J. Estlin Carpenter. In the Unitarian journal The Inquirer, about the end of 1903, there appeared a criticism of Pagan Christs over the initials " J. E. C." Shortly afterwards I criticised it on the assumption that the initials stood for the-signature of Dr. J. E. Carpenter ; and as this inference was not challenged, and the criticism in question was entirely in keeping with signed comments by Dr. Carpenter on this book and on Christianity and Mythology, to which I have replied in the Appendix to the second edition of the latter work, I here embody my rejoinder to the attack first mentioned. It may be well to repeat one or two points from the other reply referred to. I there instanced (1), as an illustration of Dr. Carpenter's historical judgment, his proposition that Krishna is a historical character, arising within the Christian era ; and (2), as illustrating his controversial methods, his dismissal of my thesis concerning the mystery-play added to the gospels with the decision that the " desolate cry," " My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?", could not be put in the dying God's mouth in a mystery- play; after which contention he obliviously decided, in another connection, that the cry was not " desolate " at all, but a reference to the final note of triumph in the Psalm from which it was quoted. It is this critic — the affirmer of the historicity of Krishna — who introduces a polemic against the present treatise with these sentences : — " The author is of course entitled to his opinions. But he is not entitled to claim support for them by constant inaccuracy, or by suppression of evidence, or by treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts." Dr. Carpenter's tone relieves me of any special concern for amenity in dealing with him ; and the present rejoinder may thus be the more concise. 1. At the outset, after charging me with " treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts," my Unitarian critic asserts, by way of opening illustration, that my thesis of the pre-Christian Jesus-cult 428 APPENDIX C and ritual of human sacrifice is " justified " by me in a passage of three sentences {Pagan Christs, 1st ed. pp. 153-4 ; present ed. p. 162), which he quotes. Then he writes: — "Well may the author look on his work and find it very good; for he concludes, ' As a hypothesis the present solution must for the present stand.' " Thus by his own showing the " wild conjecture " is put, not as a proved historic fact, but as a hypothesis. Further on, I remarked (p. 158): "Beyond conjectures we cannot at present go." Dr. Carpenter has not taken the trouble to follow the argument he asperses. The three sentences which he represents as my sole " justification " of it are simply the broad preliminary indications of the nature of the hypothesis ; and after the clause last quoted my text goes on : " But the grounds for surmising a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus or Joshua may here be noted." And here again the critic confusedly confesses that " the next step is to prove that there was a pre-Christian cult," etc. He appears to have written in a state of mind which precluded even the semblance of accuracy or con sistency. 2. Of the eight paragraphs which constitute the alleged " step," the critic refers to two only, which he thus discusses : — " This is done by identifying the successor of Moses with the ' Angel ' of ' Exodus xxiii, 20, who is again identified in the Talmud with the mystic i Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos ; and the triumphant : conclusion follows : ' Thus the name Joshua = Jesus is already in the Penta teuch associated with the conceptions of Logos, Son of God, and Messiah' (p. 155). " No historical student needs to be warned against these preposterous j assertions. But the unwary reader may easily be dazzled by the wide array of references (many of which are useful to the collector of critical curiosities), the legitimate product of extensive reading. The mischief is that Mr. Eobertson does not understand what evidence is, and is the easy prey, therefore, of Talmudic vagaries." The latter paragraph is truly interesting as a sample of logical chaos. In his passion, the critic, with his self-certified sense of " evidence," has lost all hold of the issue. He describes as a " pre posterous assertion " (1) my statement that the Angel-leader is "in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos." For this proposition I give references to Cahen and Hershon. As the critic offers for his angry language no excuse beyond the passage I have cited, it will be seen that, through sheer excitement of temper, he supposes himself to be con- > victing me of absurdity when he merely describes as a "Talmudic, vagary " what I have represented as a Talmudic proposition. Unless' the learned Professor supposes me to have considered the Angel- ] leader and Joshua historical characters, as he considers Krishna, his' outbreak thus far does not even amount to a proposition. It is sheer' verbal incoherence. The other " assertion " specified as preposterous is my contention' that the mythical successor of the mythical Moses is identified hv the Pentateuch with the mythical Angel-leader. In "justification " DE. J. ESTLIN CAEPENTEE 429 of that statement I point to the parallelism of the texts, Exodus xx, 20-23, and Joshua xxiv, 11. In the former text it is promised that an Angel, in or on whom is the " name " of Yahweh, shall lead Israel to triumph against the hostile tribes. As Joshua in the other text claims to do this, he is pseudo -historically identified with the Angel. I should indeed have said " Hexateuch " instead of " Penta teuch "; but I cited the texts. Non-theological minds will probably see some plausibility in an argument so borne out ; but the readers of The Inquirer will not gather from the article of Dr. Carpenter that any such justification was put forward. It is by such instinctive economies that he establishes his epithet " preposterous." 3. After this I may perhaps be pardoned if I meet with a simple rejection the critic's charge that in my estimate of the age of the bulk of Buddha-lore I am " flying in the face of the evidence gathered in recent years from inscriptions in different parts of India." I am content to say that, when he asserts the inscriptions of the third century B.C. to contain " the titles of the collections in which the teaching was grouped" (making no qualification), he shows himself unqualified to speak on the subject. 4. There is somewhat more semblance of scholarly circumspection in the critic's attack on my remark that " the first day of the week, Sunday, was apparently from time immemorial consecrated to Mithra by Mithraists ; and as the Sun-God was pre-eminently ' the Lord,' Sunday was 'the Lord's day' long before the Christian era." He contends that " Mr. Eobertson's statements require him to show ,(1) that Mithra was called Kurios,1 and (2) that his worshippers gave the name KuriaM to the first day of the week before the Christian era." The first statement, he observes, I do not attempt to prove ; and there is, he contends, no record of the application of the epithet Kurios to Mithra. In regard to the second statement, he alleges that I have misunderstood Deissmann's exposition as to the pre-Christian use of the word Kuriakos, since I cite him, though he "cites no instance of its application to designate a day. That [continues j my critic] is the unwarranted inference of our author, who ascribes its use to the Mithra-worshippers ' long before the Christian era,' without a shadow 1 of justification. It is painful to write thus of a student who is undoubtedly in earnest. The general impression which his work produces is that his mythological combinations applied to Christianity are worthless and mis leading, and that no single statement can be trusted without verification." I confess to being astonished that even an angry theologian, making pretension to a competent knowledge of this question, should thus exhibit a complete ignorance of the decisive fact that the expression Kuriaken Euriou, " Lord's-day of the Lord," in the Teaching of the Twehe Apostles, proves the term KuriaM to have had a pre-Christian application to a day. Either the reviewer knew this detail or he did not. I am not concerned to point the alternative inferences. 1 The normal transliteration is Kyrios, but I here follow that of my critic, 430 APPENDIX C It is true that I had not thought it necessary to cite this fact (long ago discussed by me) in my notes in Pagan Christs ; I had in fact taken it for granted that the point was no longer contested— which was clearly a miscalculation on my part. But even Deiss- mann's demonstration of the normal use of the word is quite sufficient to show that it cannot have been spontaneously applied by Christians for the first time to their holy-day. As to the epithets of Mithra, the reader will observe that I did not say that the title Kurios was applied to him on the monuments ; the critic's own quotation shows as much. That the Sun-God" was " the Lord " in the Eoman Empire is admitted even by my critic. Cumont gives only three Greek inscriptions — there are no more to give. The War-God of the Persians was not likely to have shrines and devotees in Greece. But my study on Mithraism showed (1) that Mithra was in Latin inscriptions called Sanctus dominus, besides being separately styled Dominus ; (2) that in the Zendavesta he is "Lord of all countries"; (3) that he was associated with Adonis and with Attis and with Dionysos, all of whom were called Kurios ; (4) that, like them, he was called Father ; (5) that in the Persian period he already had his " day "; (6) that his birthday was Christmas-day, associated with " Lord " Adonis and the Sun-Gods in general. Thus in such a syncretic cult, in such a syncretic age, when the first day of the week was habitually named " the day of the Sun," the popular ascription to Mithra of the title of Lord in the Greek-speaking places where he was worshipped would be a matter of course, even if it did not figure as one of his monumental titles in Greek. The title of Lord for the Sun-God was primarily Semitic in the Eastern world — e.g., Baal, Adon, and Mamas, all meaning " Lord " — and the Mithraic cult in the East might possibly abstain from an official adoption of Semitic usage, though we find Mithra called despotes in Porphyry. But popular usage could not be so restricted. The view of my academic critic appears to be that while Jesus, described as among other things the son of a carpenter, was naturally and normally styled Kurios, the " Unconquered Sun-God " would not be ; and that, while Latin-speaking worshippers called him Dominus, Greek- speaking worshippers never called him Kurios. I leave such " curiosities " of scholarship to " collectors." It may be worth while to inform lay readers, in passing, that Kurios is the normal New Testament word for " master," and is to-day the ordinary Greek equivalent for " Mr." But the essential point is that, as I asserted, " Sun-day was ' the Lord's Day ' long before the Christian era "; and that Sun-day had also been Mithra's day long before the Christian era, Mithra being chief of the seven planetary spirits associated with the days of the week. Where the term KuriaM was current for the chief day of the week, it would be used by the Mithraists as by others. Cumont again and again affirms that " the dies Solis was evidently the most DE. J. ESTLIN CAEPENTEE 431 sacred of the week for the devotees of Mithra." But I iiinot assert that the term KuriaM was used by them long before the Christian era. " That is the unwarranted inference of our " critic, proceeding "without a shadow of justification." The pain which he gave himself in discrediting me was thus quite pathetically gratuitous. And he himself commits another gross blunder " without a shadow of justification." In asserting that " the Sun-God {without Mithra's name) is called Dominus " he either suppresses or proves himself ignorant of the fact that one inscription reads ' Sancto domino \invicto Mithra" (Cumont, ii, No. 60). This from an expert who ' "understands what evidence means." And now I have to ask the reader to note that these blundering I strictures, which come to absolutely nothing on examination, are the sole proofs offered by my Unitarian critic for his account of me as "claiming support " for my opinions " by constant inaccuracy, or by suppression of evidence, or by treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts." The great mass of my argument he has not even attempted to indicate, much less to answer. It would really not pain me particularly to say what I think of such criticism ; but I forego the indulgence. What is worth noting is that Unitarianism should thus once more be exhibited as making a worse show in its criticism of new views of Christian origins than is made by almost any Trinitarian critics. The ill-supported pretension to compre hensive knowledge, the startling deficit of candour, the substitution of mere bluster and invective for argument, would almost seem out- of-date in the Bock. After all, there is something painful in this ; and I regret it. In a book such as Pagan Christs, travelling over many obscure fields and raising many difficult issues, there must needs be oversights, inadequacies, and errors ; and I take it as a matter of course that its central thesis in regard to the Christian cult should be regarded at first sight as extravagant. Any argument to that effect I should cheerfully examine ; and when, as sometimes happens, a fellow-student sends me a note of questionable passages or errors of reference, I am sincerely grateful. It is a pity that the Unitarian Professor, for his part, should proffer hardly anything beyond mere futile aspersion. I must not, however, omit to note one correction by Dr. Carpenter of a statistical statement of mine. At the beginning of my essay on Mithraism I had stated that the late Professor Eobertson Smith wrote in the Encyclopadia Britannica " some hundreds of pages on certain books of the Bible." I did not possess a copy of the Encyclopaedia ; and I had written on the strength of recollection of early reading in libraries. My Unitarian critic has taken the trouble to count the pages of Professor Smith's articles, and finds that they amount only to forty-eight. I shall here take his word without checking him ; and acknowledge that the passage should have run to the effect that the last edition of the Encyclopaedia 432 APPENDIX C contained some hundreds of pages (about 300) on Biblical matters, as against the one half-page given to Mithraism. This statistical correction is almost the only one I have thus far received from any theological critic of my book, which counters the whole historical doctrine of the current religion. My Unitarian critic pronounces the error in question " a characteristic inaccuracy." I fear I must pronounce that a characteristic assertion. If he had done nothing worse, I should not have had to pen two exposures of his critical methods. They have certainly had no corrective influence so far as he is concerned, for in two recent reviews of the translation of the German work of Professor Arthur Drews on " The Christ Myth " Dr. Carpenter exhibits the old temper, the old unscrupulousness, the old incapacity for a broad view of a great problem. He has evidently sat down to the book with the sole object of finding errors of detail which may enable him to seem to discredit the whole, never once seeking to meet the main line of argument, or even to indicate it. No one could gather from his reviews the drift of the reasoning he professes to confute. He can never see the wood for the trees ; and in hacking blindly at particular trees he oftentimes wounds himself. Where there is the faintest opening for a verbal misinterpretation, he ascribes the most irrational meaning the words could suggest. Where, for instance, Drews in the translation (p. 241) remarks that all the details in the Passion are mythologically " given " — from the derision and flagellation to the rock tomb and the women at the place of execution — and the sentence ends, "in just the same form in the worship of Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and Osiris," Professor Carpenter asks, in a review in the Christian Commonwealth : " Who has ever heard of the ' execution ' of Adonis, or of the grave in a rock (in the Egyptian Delta !) of Osiris ?" adding : " Page after page in this book are disfigured by these reckless assertions." Even an ordinary reader might, after one perusal of his criticism, be able to suggest to the infuriated Unitarian Professor that the passage in Drews must have meant, not that all the four cults and myths mentioned were exactly the same — a suggestion impossible to the most ignorant tyro — but that in one or other were to be found all the details in the Christian narrative. The critic himself indicated a suspicion that something had gone wrong in the translation ; but he let his censure stand. In a later review by Dr. Carpenter in the Unitarian Inquirer the same passage is thus handled in a footnote : — " The reader may be directed to the amazing statement, p. 241 : ' The derision, the flagellation, both the thieves, the crying out on the cross, the sponge with vinegar, the soldiers casting dice for the dead man's garments, also the women at the place of execution at the grave, the grave in a rock, are found in just the same form in the worship of Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and Osiris ' (italics mine). Which of these deities was crucified?" In this passage Dr. Carpenter has joined serious garbling of his DE. J. ESTLIN CAEPENTEE 433 own wfth an error on the part of the translator. The passage he cites from Drews is preceded in the text and translation by the words " Everything was given " (which he suppresses) ; and references are given to the Old Testament as regards three of the details. Any candid and competent reader would see at a glance that something was wrong with an interpretation which assigned to the Gentile cults named a series of details well known to be items of Jewish tradition and symbolism, and actually indicated as such by the references. Even without reference to the original, such a reader would divine the misconstruction on the part of the translator. Where he has written, after a comma, ' also the women at the place of execution, are found," the translation should have run, after a semi-colon, "further, the women, who are found." Drews wrote "ferner, die Weiber die." The whole passage means, and can only mean, that in addition to the other " given " items in the crucifixion and burial scenes, most of which are Judaic, the mourning women are found in the pagan cults mentioned. And the case against Dr. Carpenter is clear. He has mentioned in a footnote that he possesses only the first German edition of the Ghristusmythe, not the expanded third, from which the translation is made. But the first, had he examined it, would at once have enlightened him, had he wished to be enlightened. There the context is different : the Judaic items are not mentioned in the same sentence, and we have this : " ferner das ' Felsengrab ' des Heilands, die Weiber am Grabe, die sich ganz ebenso auch im Kultus des Mithra und Adonis finden, usw." Even here he would doubtless exclaim that both rock-tomb and women are not found in both cults : that is his critical way. But between the first edition and the translation he could not fail to see that Drews was not asserting a fourfold cruci fixion-myth, of which each form contained all the details specified. For the rest, he shows his own ignorance of hierology by scouting the execution " of Adonis (concerning whom he might learn from Dr. Frazer that the Adonisian ritual originally centred round an annual human sacrifice to the Vegetation-God) and by denying all connection between the cross-myth and Osiris, who actually figures in a quasi-crucified form. But the essential point is his utterly disingenuous way of covering the real issue by mere Old Bailey cavils and misrepresentations, to the end of keeping it out of sight. In all his columns of splenetic cavilling there is not one argument which really affects the fundamental question. Doubtless a reviewer can protest that he is not responsible for the slips of a translator. But the business of an honest reviewer, and surely of a theological teacher in the position of Dr. Carpenter, is, first and foremost, to bring out the main positions and arguments of a work which he professes to discuss and dismiss as a whole ; and a reviewer who pretends to dispose of an elaborate theorem, supported on many historical lines, by alleging merely error of detail at subsidiary points, is not morally fitted to be a public teacher. 2p 434 APPENDIX C Our Unitarian Professor, however, has done worse than this. In his first review, Dr. Carpenter showed that even in his malice he surmised at least an error of punctuation in the translation : in his second review, instead of clearing up the point, he suppresses not only his own surmise, but an essential part of the text, deliberately reducing it to a different syntactical construction, to make it carry an impossible assertion. If I, in a review of Dr. Carpenter's First Three Gospels, had simply cited his astonishing self-contradiction in regard to the cry on the cross, with some other self-contradictions only less flagrant, and had thereupon pronounced the whole book the work of a man who either did not believe what he said or chronically forgot what he had written, his more careful readers would certainly have pronounced the verdict grossly unfair as a general judgment. But Dr. Carpenter has himself gone further than this. He has taken a plainly involved passage of a translation, where the very references showed him that the meaning could not be that which seemed to lie on the surface, and, confessedly suspecting an error of construction on the translator's part, has in a second article positively aggravated the translator's slip by leaving out, in quotation, an essential clause. Political debate notoriously abounds in misrepresentation and in unfair criticism. But I do not believe that such a process of per version as Dr. Carpenter has indulged in would be successful on a political platform or in the House of Commons. Such trickery, once perceived, would there discredit the performer once for all. And, trickery apart, the spirit in which the theological defence is conducted by Dr. Carpenter and his friends would be felt to be scandalous in a serious debate among truth-seeking laymen. In the Christian Commonwealth, to which he contributed his first review, there appeared an editorial on Drews's book, in which the sole rebutting arguments, as distinguished from blank declamation, were a pair of protests against (1) a passage in the translation in which the disciples of Jesus were spoken of as having known him through " many years of wandering," and (2) a passage which overstated the force of a proposition by Dr. Cheyne concerning Nazareth. Now, the first item in this case also turned on a slip of the translator. Drews had written mehrjahrig," which means "of several years," not many." The critic, of course, was entitled to his cavil ; but here again an honest critic would have dealt with the force of the argument as apart from the mere detail of the number of years. No such attempt was made : the theological journalist never hinted to his readers that Drews was putting a consideration which, with a mere substitution of " several " for " many," told very strongly in support of Drews's case, and against the received tradition. In fine, an indictment of Drews's treatise in a popular yet pretentious Christian journal offered no further confutation of his case than an outcry against a phrase which happened to be a mistranslation, and against one overstatement of another critic's opinion. A short letter PEOFESSOE CAEL CLEMEN 435 by me to the journal in question, pointing out the facts and suggesting the moral, was suppressed, and a bare summary given, from which the moral was carefully excluded. These dialecticians do not want truth, do not want full and fair discussion, do not want elucidation. Their ideal is to discredit those who assail their beliefs, and there an end. Thus the defence of tradition goes on. Neo-Unitarian theologians and journalists handle disturbing theses with as little concern for candour or for patient comprehension, as much reliance on aspersion and vituperation, as was ever shown by Trinitarian critics of Unitarianism. And the Unitarian Inquirer, I observe, indignantly resents any return of censure, apparently claiming for its own chief pundit a monopoly of that. I regret to be unable to comply with the requirement. § 6. Professor Carl Clemen. The Beligionsgeschichtliche Erkldrung des Neuen Testaments of Professor Lie. Dr. Carl Clemen (Giessen, 1909) would probably not be certified as orthodox by theologians claiming to be such, inasmuch as it admits the non-historicity of the Virgin-Birth and the pagan derivation of a certain number of Christian doctrines. It strives, however, to do all that can be done without avowed renunciation of scholarly critical principles to minimise' die Abhangigkeit des altesten Ghristentums von nicht jiidischen Beligionen und philo sophischen Systemen." The reader will note the " altesten." Claiming to examine thoroughly the measure of dependence of the oldest Chris tianity upon non- Jewish religions and philosophic systems, Professor Clemen implicitly admits later pagan influences. His treatment of the data as to the primary influences, however, invites drastic criticism. Undertaking to deal with Gentile influences not only upon the dogmas but upon the narratives of the gospels, Professor Clemen leaves absolutely unmentioned a whole series of explicitly posited precedents for gospel narratives, while dealing, often laboriously, with others, often of less importance. In his opening chapter he thinks fit to dismiss my volume on Christianity and Mythology with an extract from a querulous account of it given by Professor A. Eeville. In the preface to the second edition of that work I have shown that Professor Eeville cannot have given even a cursory attention to the bulk of it, else he would be open to a charge of simple false witness. And now Professor Clemen, not having seen the book himself,1 disposes of it by a citation from another Pro fessor who had not read it. He has thus by a wise economy of research taken no account of a score of the asserted parallelisms which it is the professed object of his book to deal with. At the 1 This course is strangely common among even distinguished German theologians. I am surprised to note it in Dr. A. Schweitzer as well as in the late Professor Pfleiderer. See App. to Christianity and Mythology, 2nd ed. pp. 449, 456. 436 APPENDIX C same time, and on the same principles, he dismisses as exhibitions of Parallelomanie English writings which he admits he has not before him. To the first edition of the present work he has, however, given some little attention. Inaccurately enough, he cites as the Grund- gedanke of the book the two theses as to the mystery-drama on which criticism was specially challenged. They do not constitute the Grundgedanke. The Grundgedanke is the naturalness and inter- connectedness of all religion : the two theses in question represent the central result of the investigation as regards Christian origins. But the real issue, of course, is as to whether they will stand scrutiny. At this point, again, Professor Clemen practises economy of effort. He takes some trouble, indeed (p. 143 sq), to affirm in detail that the Asiatic and other analogies to the crucifixion are non-significant ; but on the central thesis as to the mystery-drama he is satisfied to offer the single proposition : " That the Passion-story was originally composed as a mystery-play does not follow from its dramatic character: it is in essence certainly historical." The reader of the foregoing pages is aware that the contention thus ingenuously evaded is not merely that dramatic origin is to be inferred from a vaguely " dramatic character," but that the main story is historically incredible, and that a variety of details, material and literary, can be explained only on the drama hypothesis, their presence being unin telligible on any other. Upon this argument Professor Clemen has not a word to say : he simply falls back on a petitio principii, not even explaining what it is that he is denying. This is of course in the ordinary way of orthodox and semi- orthodox apologetics ; and I dwell on it here because Professor Clemen, in his Introduction (§ 2), professes to observe scrupulously a critical "method." As he states it, it is simply an adherence to the ordinary principles of historical argument and evidence. But we now see what such a profession of principle is worth. In the first place, Professor Clemen ignores a multitude of the data with which he ought to grapple. That is to say, he disparages a book which he has not read, but of which not only the title suggests but a cited description tells him that it affirms many myth-parallels between Christianity and other systems. After making that citation, in proceeding to describe his method, he remarks (p. 10) that it would be superfluous to disprove propositions which are seen to be "untenable," or to deal with "popular" works which do not once make the attempt to establish their astounding propositions. Either these two rules of exclusion are meant to include Christianity and Mythology or they are not. If not, he makes no excuse for evading its examination. If they are meant to exclude it, he has been unscrupulous enough to asperse and dismiss a book which he has not seen, and whereof he cites only one splenetic hostile descrip tion, which I have elsewhere shown to be written without perusal. Such are the ethic and character of Professor Clemen's real PEOFESSOE GAEL CLEMEN 437 "method." When, finally, he does profess to deal with a capital thesis with which he is avowedly bound to reckon, he burkes the entire argument, assumes without discussion the point in dispute, and passes on to other issues. His profession of method is either a dialectical sham or an exhibition of failure to understand the nature of argument. I have limited my criticism to Professor Clemen's handling of my own books ; but anyone who follows up his handling of the positions (among others) of Gunkel and Jensen will there find a similar tactic of begging the question wherever that course is the most convenient. If this is the best that the professional theologian in Germany can do to meet the anthropological and hierological analysis of Christian origins — and I understand it is thought to be adequate by those who share its positions — there is nothing more to be said. The entire tactic is one of making small concessions (though even these are significantly numerous, compared with the general denials of a few years ago) and evading or suppressing vital issues. What Professor Clemen surrenders are the points already surrendered by many " liberal " theologians : his ostensible defence of other positions is mere asseveration. INDEX AAEON, 175 Abammon, 16 Abipones, the, 49 n. Abraham, 48, 51 n., 175, and Isaac, 64, 65, 124, 153, 162, 302 n. Abraxas, 334 Abtinas, 159 Achan, 149 n. Achilles, 106 n., 107 to. Acolhuan civilisation, 348 n., 366 Acts of Pilate, 202 Addison, L., quoted, 169 Admetus, 324 Adonai, 49 Adonis, Vegetation-God, 307 ; cult of, 99, 181, 195, 319, 433 ; resurrection of, 145, 190, 206, 307 Adulterers, eaten, 136 n. Adversary, doctrine of, 86 -Sisehylus, 172 .feulapius, 206 African religion, 41 ; sacrifices, 106, 117 ». , 122 ; absence of interest in heavenly bodies, 171 Agapce, Christian, 314, 326, 412 Agdestis, 316, 321 Agesilaus, 127 n. Aghii gives Gods immortality, 51 ; origin of, 53, 100, 318 ; as messen ger of the Gods, 216, 221 ; as Logos, 221, 290; in Vedas, 284; as dove, 290 ; as bull, 299 Agnostics and atheists, religious by definition, 19 n.\ the term "agnos tic," 233 Ahriman, 16, 86, 166, 290 Ahura Mazda, origin of, 284-5 ; rela tion of to Mithra, 288 fi., 294, 296, 311, 315, 410 ; a husband and father, 294 n.; in Avesta, 288 ff., 308 n., 311 ; in trinity, 315 ; and Ameshaspentas, 317 Ai, 150 Ainu, the, 30 Ajatasatru, 252, 254 Akatuira, 43 Akhunaton, 60, 75, 82, 84 n. Akkadian civilisation, 78-9, 128, 343 Albanians, human sacrifices by, 125 Alexander Severus, 278 Alexandria, human sacrifice at, 126 Algonkins, human sacrifice by, 156 Allegory in religion, 328-9 Allen, Grant, on Christian origins, xxiii-v ; on human sacrifices, 210 n., 317 n. Alpha and Omega, 142, 164, 294 Altars, 317 n. Ambassador, sacrificial, 159, 190 Amenthes, Egyptian, 309 n. America, religions of ancient, 339 ff.; races of, 339 ff . ; civilisations of, 345 fi., 347, 380 Ameshaspentas, 296, 311, 317, 320 Amhaaretz, sacrifice of, 160 Amosis, 61 Amun, 92, 95, 205 «.; sacrifice of ram to, 131, 301, 303, 320 n. Anahid, 293 Anahuac, 342 Anaitis, 217 »., 293, 296, 322, 326 Anathema, 138 Ancestor-worship, 31-2, 40 fi., 47 ff., 103 Andhras, the, 247 n. Androphagoi, 128 Angels, belief in, 86, 105 ; the angel in the Pentateuch, 163, 218, 220, 315, 428 Animals, sacred, 184 Animism, 9, 24, 33, 220, 226 Anna, 97 Anointing, in sacrifice, 112, 125 ; of priests, 158 ; of Jesus, 201 Anquetil, 294 n. Anthropology, 98 Anthropophagy. See Cannibalism Antigonus, 181, 193 Antiochus Epiphanes, 88, 173 Anu, 221 Aphrodite, 295 ; as masculine, 297 n. Apocalypse, Jesus in, 142, 164 ; Lamb in, 142, 164, 208, 330 ; Judaic char acter of, 164 ; elders in, 179 ; Mith raic details in, 205, 208 ; tau in, 310 ; Mazdean elements in, 142, 164, 330 Apollo, evolution of, 95, 96, 176 n., 322; cult of, 320 n. ; descent to Hades of, 307 ; human sacrifice to, 124 ; and Thargelia, 148 ; titles of, 332 ; as Teaching-God, 214, 217, 222 ; Destroyer and helper, 293 ; as 439 440 INDEX feminine, 297 n.; Cave-God, 304 n.; God of Rocks, 305 n. Apollonius of Tyana, 57, 274-80 ; and Jesus, 277 ; birth-story of, 277 Aquarius, 337 Arabs, life of, 53 n.; use of cross by, 157 ; treatment of camels by, 184 n.; human sacrifices by, 126, 131-2, 134 n., 137 n. Arahatship, in Buddhism, 248 Arbitrary, meaning fcf word, 5 Archelaus, 264-5 Ardivisura, 293 Arianism, 96 Aries, 207, 301, 319 Arishtanemi, 252 Aristobula, 188 Aristodemus, 64, 123, 127 Aristophanes, cited, 127 Aristotle, 198 Armenia, Mazdeism in, 291 Arminius, 57 Arnold, 77 n. Art, Greek, 329 ; Assyrian and Persian, 300 ; Mexican, 344 Artaxerxes Mnemon, 290-1 Artemis, human sacrifices to, 60, 188 ; a saviour, 206 Arthur's Oon, 282 Aruntas, the, 19, 99 n., 407 Aryans, religion of early, 53, 71 n. Ascension, the, 401 Asia, and Oceanic peoples, 153 ; and America, xxiii, 156, 340 ff. Asoka, 247, 253 ff. Asses, the two, 185, 323 Assur, 71 «¦., 75, 285 Assyrian religion, 68, 75, 285 ; empire, 79 ; temples, 182 n. Asuras, 51 Asvamedha sacrifice, 183 Athamas, 123, 302 Atheism in Brahmanism and Buddhism, 250 Athenaeus, cited, 293 n. Ath6n§, evolution of, 95 ; and Par- thenos, 135 ; epithets of, 167 n.; as teacher, 215, 217 ; origin of, 217 n.; a virgin mother, 322 Athenians, human sacrifices by, 127 Atman, doctrine of the, 251 Atonement, Jewish Day of, 158, 160, 165, 168 Attis, evolution of, 95 ; cult of, 99, 181, 195, 196 ; resurrection of, 206, 307 ; Vegetation-God, 307 : tree of, 318 n.; in Orphicism, 322 ; epithets of, 332 n. Augustine, as cult founder, 57 ; cited, 268 n., 272 Augustus, sacrifices to, 129 Aurelian, 325 n. Australians, aboriginal, 41 n., 44 n., 71, 104, 209 n., 410-1 ; Frazer and Lang on, 12; ancestor-worship among, 41, 43, 48; ethics of, 71, 72; names of, 100 n., 103 ; food supply of, 104 and note Avebury, Lord, 102 n. Azazel, 106, 160 n. Aziluth, 315 Aztecs, religion of, 346 ff.; human sacrifices of, 137, 360 ff., 369 ft., 373 ; civilisation of, 342, 369, 380 ff. BABISM, xvi-xviii Babylonian creation myth, 130; taboo of God-names, 49 ; deluge epic, 51 ; civilisation, 78-9 ; religion, 51, 303 n., 364 ; higher aspects, 77 ; influence on Judaism, 74 ff., 80 ff., 86, 167; on Mithraism, 291-2, 300, 315 ; human sacrifices, 128 ; Logos, 218 ff.; hymns and priestly schools, 222 ».; Mes- sianism, 166 Bachichi, the, 134 n. Baentsch, 84 n. Bah, the God, 142 Bahram, 266 Bancroft, H. H., cited, 350, 371 Bandelier, 391 ff . Baptism, Mithraic, 380 ; Mexican, 356, 379 Barabbas, meaning of name, 146 ; annual sacrifice of, 162, 182, 185, 186, 198, 400 Barbary, Jewish sacrifices in, 169 Barth, 261 Bataks, religion of, 2 n., 31-2, 42-3; taboo of names among, 49 ; human sacrifices by, 116, 126 ; animal sacri fices by, 126, 184 ; symbolic sacrifices by, 139; ritual cannibalism of, 135, 389 Batchelor, 30 Baur, cited, 244, 259, 326 n.; on Mani chseus, 267 ; on Apollonius of Tyana, 276 ff. Beatitudes, the, 219 n. ' Beausobre, 264 n., 265, 267 n. Bechuanaland, magic in, 18 ; names in, 103 Behnya, 117 n. Bel, 179 n., 292, 297 Belief, nature of, 25 Belisama, 215 Belloguet, cited, 137 Bellona, 129 Beloved Gods, origin of, 3, 263; as Christs, 4 ; sacramentally eaten, 144 ; INDEX 441 in Judaism, 163, 166-7, 268 ; in Greece, 167 ; in Manichseism, 268 ; their relation to history, 279 ; in Maz deism, 294 ; survival values of, 328-9 ; in America, 370 ff.; attributes of, 375 n. Belti, 297 Bema, the, 268, 272 Bentley, 143 n. Bernard, St., 426 Berosus, 145, 146 Bhagava, 244 Bibliolatry, 66 Bimbisara, 252 Birds, sacred, 92 »., 357 ff. Bishops, Christian, their rites and robes, 331 Black in sacrifice, 171 Blavatsky, Mme., as cult-founder, 58 Bleek, discussed, 159 n. Blood, religious use of, 111, 115, 128, 129, 130, 141, 189, 213 n., 320 and note, 362, 373 Bodhisatvas, 257 Boeckh and Burckhardt, cited, 94 Bonny, sacrifices at, 133, 183 Book of the Great Decease, 245 Boora Pennu, 64 n., 109 ff., 215 Boughs, symbolic meanings of, 191 n. Bowphmia, 130-1 Bousset, xiv Brahma, 218, 219 Brahmanas, the, 219, 221 Brahmanism and magic, 13, 21 ; and pantheism, 76 ; Logos in, 218-9 ; creation doctrine of, 221 ; and Baby lonia, 221; and Buddhism, 250, 254 ff., 260, 263 Brahmans deified, 138 n. Brazil, civilisation of, 348 Bread, sacramental, medicinal virtue of, 144 ; evolution of, 207 n. "Brethren of the Lord," xix, 399 ff. Brinton, cited and discussed, 345 »., 368 ». , 375 n., 382 Brown, Dr. G., 351 n. Brugsch, cited, 77 n. Bryant, 223 Buckland, A. H., cited, 342 n. Buckle, 348 Buddas, 264, 267 Buddha, 4, 57, 238; legend of, 239 ff.; sayings attributed to, 240 ff.; alleged essential teachings of, 241 ; alleged founding of society by, 242 ff .; mean ing of name, 243 ; multiplicity of, 243 ff., 262 ; cruces of record of, 246 fi. ; details concerning, 250-2 ; and Asoka, 253 ff.; unhistorical, 256 ff.; Senart on, 258 ff.; alleged tomb remains of, 260-1 ; inscriptions relating to, 429 Buddhaghosa, 243 Buddhavansa, the, 243 Buddhism, 56; history of, 239 ff.; derivative character of, 247 ff., 256, 260 ; failure of, 263 ; in Thibet and Japan, 344 Buddhist Councils, 245, 246 Budini, the, 267 Buffalo, sacred, sacrifice of, 110, 114, 116, 126, 183 n. Bull, sacred, 184; sacrament of, 140 ; i symbolical meaning of, 298 ff., 320 Burckhardt, cited, 94 Burning and burying of bodies, 312 Burton, cited, 61, 62, 155 Burying alive, 379 n. Byron, Constant on, 58 n. Caiaphas, 122 Calendar, the Jewish, 145-6 ; the Mexi can and Mongolian, 342 Calf, sacrifice of, as God, 130 Callatians, 128 Calvin, as cult-founder, 57 Camel, white, sacrifice of, 131 Campbell, cited, 113, 116 n. Cancer and Capricorn, 323, 337 Cannibalism, 47 »., 65, 104 n., 106; ritual, 106, 132-3, 134, 140 ff., 173, 351, 354, 364 ff., 389; and civilisa tion, 385 Canning, Major, cited, 389 Capacocha, 378 Carabbas, 146, 172 Carpenter, J. E., 194 n., 305 n., 396; criticised, 427-35 ; on Prof. Drews, 432 ff. Carthage, human sacrifices in, 61, 124, 126, 189, 356 n. Caste in India, 249, 254, 255 Catacombs, religion in, 208, 326, 411 Catholicism and the backward races, 381 ff. Catiline, 65, 125 Cave, myths of, 266, 272, 304 fi., 321 fi.; temples, 107 n., 303 ff. Cecrops, 60 Centeotl, 364, 368 Chair of Peter, 334 ff., 423 Chaldean religion. See Babylonia Chambers, E. K., 196 n., 198 n. Chance in nature, 14 n. Chandragupta, 253 ff. Chastity, in pagan cults, 326, 350, 366 Cheetham, 143 n. Cherubim, the, 309 n. Cheyne, 177 »., 434 Child-God, 322 442 INDEX Child-sacrifice, Hebrew, 64, 152, 158; Carthaginian, 65, 124, 126; American, 124, 351, 353 ; Semitic, 124, 161, 344 ; Zulu, 124; Arab, 124; Mexican, 124, 344, 356, 373; Polynesian, 154 n. ; symbolic, among Christians, 207, 368 ; Peruvian, 378 Chinese religion, 51 n., 53 «.; human sacrifices, 61 and note; civilisation, 345 ; Spring Festival, 139-40 Chosroes, fire-temple of, 282 Chrestus, xiv, 406 Christ, the Jewish, 2, 89, 91, 95, 175, 179 Christianity, and magic, 31 ; and mono theism, 93 ; anthropophagy in, 141 ; foundation of, 190 ; causes of success of, 328-9, 330 Christmas, 293 n., 305, 332, 373 Christs, pagan, 4, 206, 212, 263, 328-9, 370 fi. Chrysostom, 278 Chuenaten = Akhunaton, 60, 75, 84 n. Cilician pirates, the, 316 n., 325 Cimbri, human sacrifice among, 123 n., 191 n. Cioacoatl, 322 n., 356 Circumcision, 153, 163 Civilisation, development of, 37 fi. Claudius, 129 Clavigero, cited, 348 n., 355 n. ' Clemen, Prof., criticised, xv, 435-7 Clemens Alexandrinus, cited, 17 in., 272 Coatlicue, 359 Cock, sacrifice of, 118 ».; Jewish sacri fice of, 168 ff.; African sacrifice of, 170-1 ; Greek sacrifice of, 171 ; Ghasiya sacrifice of, 172 ; Chinese sacrifice of, 171 n.; in legend of Peter, 333 Codooloos, the, 114 Colenso, xv Commodus, 313, 326 n. Communion, Christian, 212; theories of, 143. See Eucharist and Sacrament Comte, cited, 15 ; on law of three stages, 384 ; as cult-founder, 58 Confucius, 239 Congo, sacrifices in, 170 Conquest and civilisation, 36, 79 Consciousness, religious, 24, 25, 27, 34, 60,62 Constant, B., cited and discussed, 58 n., 384 Constantine, 325 Convents, pagan, 353 Cortes, 371 Cosmic emotion, 58 Couperie, 61 n. Cow, the sacred, 130 Crawley, Rev. E., criticised, xiv, 402 fi. Creuzer, cited, 310, 313 n. Criminals, sacrificed.125,127, 134 fi., 182 Criobolium, the, 208, 303, 335 Crocodile, sacrifices to, 155 Cross, the, in human sacrifice, 112-13, 118, 151, 154, 157; Judaic symbol, 157, 158 ; meanings of, 190 ; in Osirian cult, 190 n., 196; in other cults, 319, 368; Arab symbol, 157; Hindu symbol, 157 n. ; Mithraic symbol, 309 Crowns, in sacrifice, 112, 114 n., 178, 191 ; in Mithraism, 314, 319 n. Crucifixion, the Christian, 118 ff., 144 ff.; Roman resort to, 120 n., 126 ; mode of, 152 ; of Prometheus, 167 ; of Cyrus, 167 ; of Manichseus, 266 ; mystical, 196; in pagan cults, 319, 389, 433 Crux Ansata, the, 189 Cubricus. See Manichceus Cudworth, cited, 419 Culin, S., cited, 341 n. Culture-history, difficulties of, 349 ; value of American civilisations for, 349 Cumont, services of to hierology, xxii ; on distribution of Mithraic monu ments, 282 «..; on Gods as fathers, 294 w.; on Chaldean elements in Mithraism, 300 n.; on cave-worship, 304 n.; on Apuleius, 321 n.\ on Roman Mithrseums, 324 n.; on women in Mithraism, 326 ».; andFr. Martindale, 426 Cunningham, J. F., 107 Cup, the mystic, 318 Custom, dissolution of, 37 Cybele, 206, 302, 326, 335 Cyprus, human sacrifices in, 61 Cyrus, debt of Judaism to, 67, 83; and Sacsea, 148 n.; crucifixion of, 167 ; and history, 232 ; tomb of, 273; birth of, 321 DABAIBA, 350 Dagon, 208 Dahomey, human sacrifices in, 61, 136 ; cannibalism in, 141 Dall, cited, 346 n. Damascius, 220 Damis, 276 Daniel, 316 Dapper, 109 n. Darius, 290 Darmesteter, on age of Avesta, 285 ; on Ormazd and Mithra, 288-9 ; on Maz dean literature, 290 ; on Logos in Mazdeism, 296 71..; on Mithraic bull, 298 n.; on Mithraic trials, 308 ».; on INDEX 443 Judaism and Persia, 315 to.; on stable- birth, 322-3 w. Daumer, xxv David, 85, 167 Davids, Prof. Rhys, services of to hier ology, xxvi ; on Buddhism, 240 fi. Davies, Prof. T. W., on magic and religion, 12-13 Death, savage views of, 1, 48 ; in ritual, 308 Decle, cited, 2 to., 36 n. Deformed persons sacrificed, 139 Deissmann, 429-30 De la Roche, cited, 278 Delitzsch, 75 n. Demeter, epithets of, 167 n.\ cult of, 142, 176 7i., 191, 195 ; as teacher, 215 Demiourgos, 223, 299 n., 319 Descent to Hades , of Apollonius of Tyana , 277 ; an astronomic myth, 303 ; of Herakles, 307 ; of Mithra, 307, 323, 421 ; of Apollo, 307 De Soyres, 274 n. Despotism and civilisation, 36, 38 Deutsch, cited, 314 Devil, notion of, 86 Dewadatta, 252 Dhammapada, the, 241, 244, 257 Diuga, 109 Dio Cassius, cited, 125 n. Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite, 418 Dionysos, origin of, 53 and note, 100 ; evolution of, 96, 97, 321 ; Omestes, 123; cult of, 97, 99, 130, 132, 144, 167, 176 7i., 181, 195, 330 ; sacrifices to, 123, 130, 140, 301 ; the Liberator, 167 ; two-formed, 180 ; myths of, 64 n., 185, 206, 321 and note, 323 ; Eucharist of, 142, 195, 207, 318 ; as teacher, 214-15 ; as feminine, 297 n. ; epithets of, 167, 206 ; vegeta tion-God, 307 Dioscuri, the, 206 Diphilus, 61 Disease, savage views of, 1 Dissent, scientific aspect of, 96 Dobrizhoffer, 49 n., 213 Dods, Dr. M., cited, 265 Dog, sacramentally sacrificed, 140, 352 ; sanctity of, 312 ; the symbolic, 299 Dove, sacred symbol, 92 n., 223, 290 Drama, conditions of, 197, 198 ; Peru vian, 377-8. See Mystery-Drama Draper, cited, 380 n. Dreams, belief in, 44 Drews, Prof. A., xi, xii, 398, 432 Drugging in sacrifice, 113, 114, 116, 119, 140».,155 Druids, human sacrifices of, 128, 129 Drummond, 226 Drunkenness, religious, 293 m. Dualism, 86, 293 Durkheim, cited, 19 EA, 214, 216, 221 Easter, lamb sacrificedat, 143, 318, 320; image of child eaten at, 207; a solar festival, 306 "Eating the God," 136, 141, 368. See Eucharist and Sacraments Ebionites, 178, 307 n. Ebritum, sacrifices at, 132 Economics of religion, 79, 88, 92, 280, 324, 327, 369, 372 Eddy, Mrs., as cult-founder, 58 Efatese, the, 102, 344 Egeria, 217 Egg, the Easter — a cosmic symbol, 208, 221 ; blessing of, 143 Egyptian religion, 15, 21 n., 23, 44, 60, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 87 n., 92 n., 105 ; human sacrifices,61 ; sacraments, 142 ; hieroglyphics, 190 to., 345 ; deification of kings, 47 ; taboo of God names, 49; influence on Hebrews, 67 ; mono theism, 77 ; ethics, 77 ; cross, 189 ; Teaching-Gods, 214 ; symbols, 309 n. Elagabalus, 125, 129 ti., 326 n. Eleezer, Rabbi, 178 n. El Elyon, 175 Eleusinia, the, 28, 144, 195 Elias of Crete, 308 n. Elijah, as magician, 16, 30 Ellis, A. B., cited, on Gods of fear, 2 ; on thank offerings, 105 n.; on slain messengers, 108 n.; on African sacri fices, 117 n.; on white in sacrifice, 151 n. Ellis, W., cited, 17 n., 215 El Shaddai, 67 n. Enemies, sacrificed, 135 n., 351, 364 Enlil, 292, 297 Enoch, book of, 89, 164, 226 Epimenides, 149 Epiphanius, 204 n. Er, 272 Erua, 221 Eskimo religion, 14 to. Esoteric religion, 330 Esther, 145 Ethical Societies, Crawley on, 404 Ethics, Christian and pagan, 32, 426 and early law, 54-5 ; and religion, 40 55, 56, 58, 72, 76 fi.; Hebrew, 68 fi. sacrificial, 32, 72; Mithraic, 288-9 311, 326; Mazdean, 288-9, 312 Ancient American, 366 fi.; Brah manic, 290 to. ; of Apollonius of Tyana, 279 ; and supernaturalism, 383 ff. 444 INDEX Euboulos, 304 Eucharists, Egyptian, 142 ; heredity of, 31, 90; Jewish, 164, 168 ff.; Diony siak, 142, 195, 207, 318; Mithraic, 142-3, 174, 207, 307 fi., 318, 332 to.; other pagan, 207 to.; Christian, 141, 206-7 ; total evolution of, 209-13 ; ancient American, 144, 351, 352, 364 ff., 368, 373 Euripides, 97 Eurynomos, 94 to. Eurypilus, 60, 306 Eusebius, 129, 264, 278 Evangelists, emblems of, 309 to. Evans, A. J., cited, 304 n., 345 Evemerism, 81, 163, 217 Ewald, 67 Executions, sacrificial, 135 ff. Exorcism, 31 Ezekiel, 157 Ezra, book of, 83 FABBICIUS, V., cited, 15 to. Family and religion, 45, 52, 54 Farrar, A. S., cited, 75 Fasts, pagan, 350 Fate as ruling the Gods, 15 Fawckner, 138 to. Fear, Gods of, 1-3 ; religion of, 11, 27, 40, 41 Feathers as sacred symbols, 359, 360 Feeling and religion, xv, 29, 33 Feridun, 232 Festivals, dates of, 324 Fichte, 56 Fiji, priest-kings in, 36 ; religion in, 343 to., 386 ; cannibalism in, 133, 134 to., 365 Finow, King, 61, 365 to. Fire, symbolic, 206 ; cult of, 373, 377 Fire-God, sacrifices to, 119, 271, 344, 373 ; as Logos, 221; Babylonian, 269 ; American, 119, 271, 368, 373 ; origin of, 285, 318 ; festival of, 368 ; sacra ment of, 368, 373 Firmicus, 296, 306, 310 to., 318 First-born, 296 ; sacrifices of, 123, 128, 152 ; name of Logos, 218, 222, 224, 296 First fruits, 148, 178 Fish, the divine, 207, 301-2, 364 Fison, Mr., cited, 41 Five, sacred number, 181, 343 Flaubert, 82 Flaying, in human sacrifice, 137, 190, 266, 270, 344, 364, 373 Fleet, Dr., 261 Florus, cited, 125 to. Fohsu, 117 to. Folklore, xxii Fomagata, 360 Founder, place of in religion, 57-8 Four, sacred number and symbols, 309 to. Francis Island, cannibalism in, 135 Francis, Saint, 57 Fraud, religious, 63 Frazer, J. G., services of, to hierology, xxiii ; theory of, as to Christian sacra, 118, 144 ff.; on magic and reli gion, 11 ff., 20, 24, 36 ; on the Chris tian crucifixion, 118 ; on Athenian human sacrifices, 127 ; on Barabbas, 162; on Purim, 143, 145, 168; on Firmicus, 306 »., 319 to.; on Vegeta tion-Gods, 307 ; on magic and pro gress, 35 fi.; on magic and art, 35 to.; on Adonis, 433 ; on Godhood of kings, 47 to.; on primitive idea of duration, 47 ; on totemism, 99 to., 102 ».; on Porphyry, 137 to.; on Gods and ani mals, 320 to. ; on entry into Jeru salem, 185 ; on sacrificial scourging, 189 re. Freethinkers, duty of, 383 Funeral sacrifices, 107, 136 Furuhers, 294 to. Fustel de Coulanges, discussed, 54 GAD, 176, 177 to. Gall in the mysteries, 191 Gallwey, quoted, 154 Gammadion, the, 309 Ganesa, 157 n. Garcilasso, 378 Gathas, the, 285, 286 ff. Gauls, human sacrifices by, 137 Gebelezeis, 269 Gelele, King, 61 Gelon, 61 Genius, moral, and religious reform, 60, 72, 78 George, St., 333 Gezo, King, 61 Ghasiyas, sacrifice by, 172 Ghillany, xxiv, xxv, 150 to., 173 Ghosts, savage ideas of, 41 fi., 54 Gibbon, 294 to., 402 Gibil-Nusku, 221, 269 Gill, cited, 43 Girard, discussed and cited, 50 TO., 94 Gladstone, cited, 68 to. Glass, as cult-founder, 57 Gnosticism, and ancestor Gods, 47 ; and Judaism, 95 ; and the early Church, 96; and mystery dramas, 204 re.; and fish symbol, 208 ; and Babylonian theosophy, 222, 267 ; and Mithra, 334 Goat-God, the, 85, 106, 302, 323 ; sacri fice of, 106, 151 INDEX 445 Goddesses evemerised, 166 to. Gods, origins of, 1-2, 3, 41 ff., 47 ff., 53 ; names tabooed, 49 ; as eaters of human flesh, 47 to. ; evolution of, 50 ff.; relation of, to men, 1, 8, 12, 13, 15, 20, 22, 28, 40, 42 ff., 52, 71, 79; supreme, 24, 71, 86, 87, 96, 358; secondary, 89, 95 ff., 99 ff. ; creative, 43, 87, 96, 350, 358, 363, 376; Saviour, 99, 294; sacrificed, 99 ff., 130 ff., 362, 363; teaching, 214 ff. ; as children, 322 Gold Coast, sacrifices on, 117 to. Golden Rule, in Lao Tsze, 219 n. Goldziher, discussed, 70 n. Gonds, cannibal sacrament of, 132 ; symbolism of, 139 Gore, Bishop, 404 Gospels, the, crucifixion details in, 119 ff., 192, 193; theophagy in, 141 ; text of mystery drama in, 197 ff.; their value as history, 228 ff., 234-6; brethren of the Lord in, 399-400 ; the Primitive, 201 Gotama, 240, 244. See Buddha Gracchus, 331 Granger, cited, 2 to. Grannos, 215 Gratian, 331 Gratitude in religion, 3, 8, 29, 40 Graves, evolution of, 317 to. Greek religious thought, 15, 52, 94; in fluence on Judaism, 88, 90; influence on Semitic culture, 218 to.; influence on Islam, 93 ; influence on Rome, 45-6 ; science, 38 ; human sacrifices, 60, 64, 135; animal sacrifices, 171; ethics and Jewish, 68 to.; culture, value of, 76 Gregorie, 176 to. Gregory, St., 331 Grey, SirG., 209 to., 212 Griffin, 300 to. Grote, on human sacrifice, 127 ; on historical evidence, 231 fi. Guatemala, human sacrifice in, 354, 362-3 Gubernatis, xxvi Guerinot, 252 n. Guiana, sorcery in, 23 to. Guizot, 294 to. Gunkel, 437 Hades, 53 Hadrian, 125 Haeckel, cited, 341 Haidas, sacrifices of, 171 to. Haigh, on Dionysus, 97 to. Hair, cutting of, for sacrifice, 111, 307 Haman, 145, 296 to. Hamilear, 126, 161 to. Hammurabi, 78-9, 166, 214 Hanging as mode of sacrifice, 149-50, 151 Haoma, the, 100, 285, 318 Harnack, xii Harrison, Miss, on the religion of fear, 3 to.; on origin of Dionysus, 53 ».; on sacrifice, 106 to., 171 Harvest, sacrifices at, 149 Hathor, 53 Haug, cited and discussed, 286 to., 288 Hausrath, cited, 326, 412 Havet, cited, 315 Hawaii, Teaching-Gods of, 215 Haynes, cited, 340 to. Hebrew religion, 16, 42, 47 to., 48, 49, 51,64, 80 ff., 180; monotheism, 66 fi., 74, 76 fi., 80 fi., 87; ethics, 68 ff., 75 fi., 81, 93 ; polytheism, 67 ff., 86, 91 ; effects on, of Exile, 65 ; aspects of, at Return, 72-3, 82, 83, 85 ff.; over valuation of, 74 ff., 76 ff., 84 ; litera ture, 72, 74 ff., 84, 85 ; culture and commerce, 88 ; temple finance, 88 ; expansion, 89 ; fraudulent history, 80 ff.; festivals, 145 ff.; human sacri fices, 64, 135 re., 149-50, 158 ff., 189 ; taboo of names, 49 ; dualism, 86 ; prophets as cult-founders, 57 ; high- priests, 88 ; cosmology, 75 ; supersti tion, 86-7, 93; eucharists, 168 fi.; obsession of blood, 189 Heifer, sacrifice of, 158 Heinrici, xiii Hell, the Christian, 205 Herakleitos, Logos of, 218 re., 222 Herakles, in Homer, 81 re.; labours of, 308, 336 ; cult of, 99, 131, 167, 195, 337 ; sacrifices to, 130, 195, 337 ; crown of, 191 ; cave God, 304 to.; resurrection of, 195 re. , 307 ; a Saviour, 206 ; and history, 234 Hercules, 337 Heresy, 96 Hermes, as teacher of Apollo, 214 ; rival and son of Apollo, 292 ; Logos, 217, 222 ; epithets of, 299; birth of, 304 «., 321 re.; as lamb bearer, 332 Herod the Great, character of, 90 ; and Antigonus, 181 ; theatres built by, 204 Antipas, in Gospels, 193, 199 Herodotus, cited, on Egyptian sacrifices, 123, 131 ; on Scythians, 127-8 ; on Herakles in Egypt, 191 ; on Osirian mysteries, 194 ; on the Budini, 267 ; on Zalmoxis, 269; on Persian reli gion, 295 Hershon, 168 446 INDEX Hervey Islands, religion in 43, 181 Hesiod, 47, 50 to., 51 Hexateuch, 84, 159 to. Hiawatha, 352 Hibbert Journal, review in criticised, xii, 396 fi. Hiel, 64 re., 161 to. Hierocles, 278 Hieroglyphics, 345, 354 Hierology, purpose and principles of, xxii, 98, 387 High-places, Assyrian, 182 ra.; vogue of sacrifices on, 292-3 ; Asiatic and American compared, 343, 354 ; Poly nesian, 343 ; Mexican sacrifices on, 362 ; in legend of Quetzalcoatl, 366 Hillebrandt, 290 re. Hillel, 179 Hindus, religion of early, 41, 47 re. History, critical method in, 231 ff. Hobbes, 29 Holden, 124 to. Holy Spirit, sex of, 92, 220, 297 to.; in Judaism and Jesuism, 92 ; the Chris tian, 96-7 ; in paganism, 206 ; evolu tion of, 220 ; in Philo, 227-8 Homer, 51, 221 Hommel, discussed, 74 re. Horace, 129 Hormisdas, 266 Horos, 131 re., 206, 306, 319 re.; as fish, 208, 302 to. Horoscopes, 345, 380 Horse, sacrifice of, 183-4 Hubert et Mauss, cited, 134 re. Huemac, 216 re., 370, 371 Huet, 276, 419 Huitzilopochtli, 144 ; as teacher, 214 ; symbols of, 357 ; temples of, 343 ; evolution of, 357 fi.; sacrifices to, 362, 363 ; eucharist of, 373 Human origins, 340 ff. Hume, 384 Huxley, services of, to hierology, xxvi ; on Hebrew development, 65 re.; on Hebrew monotheism, 76, 77 re.; on the Bible, 77 re.; on agnosticism, 233; on witch of Endor, 233 ; Crawley on, 402 Hyde, cited, 265 re. Ibsen, 197 Ibus, the, sacrifice among, 136 to. Idolatry, resistance to, 70, 82, 85, 298 Idols, Mexican, 353 Ieoud, 137, 161, 186 Ifa, 217 Ihering, von, 53-4 Ihne, 45 Immortality, idea of, 47 ff.; acquired by Gods, 51 ; doctrine of, in Mith raism, 311, 314 ; Gnostic, 222; bane ful effect of, 385 Imperialism, ancient, 79, 324-5, 328 ; and human sacrifice, 361 Incas, 366, 376 ff.; rationalism among, 383 Incense, 210, 366 India, sacred animals in, 184 Indian religion, 44, 47 to., 51, 72, 218-9 (see also Buddhism) ; human sacri fices, 122, 212 ; use of cross, 157 n. Indra, evolution of, 95 Indulgences, 380 Infanticide, 53 to., 212 Initiation, rites of, 308 ; grades of, 309 Inquisition, in Mexico, 381, 402 Iphicrates, 61 Iphigeneia, 135, 172, 352 Irrational, meaning of word, 4 ff. Isaac, 51 re., 64, 65, 124, 153, 162 Isaacs, Hyam, 168 Isaiah, and suffering Messiah, 166-7; and the mystic rock, 316-7 Ishmael, 162 Ishtar, 145, 189, 293 re. Isis, 16; as magic- worker, 21 re.; cows sacred to, 159 re. ; and Nephthys, 195 ; in Plutarch, 299 ; mysteries of, 204 re., 308 re., 321 to.; as teacher, 215 Islam, 66, 87, 93, 238-9 Israel (Kronos), 161, 162 re., 186 Issedones, 128 Ixion, 318 re. JACOB, 48, 51 to. Jacobi, cited and discussed, 250, 251 ff. Jainas, the, 250 ff., 257 Jainism, 243 Jairus' daughter, story of, 277 Jakri, the, 110 Jamblichus, cited, 16 James "brother of the Lord," xviii, xix, 399 ff. Jansen, 57 Jansenism, 196 to. Janus, Jevons on, 45 ; evolution of, 46; as teacher, 214 ; and Mithra, 325 ; and Peter, 332-3, 406 Japan, ancestor-worship in, 43 ; human sacrifices in, 61, 138, 183 Jastrow, cited, 76 re. Jenkery, 113 re., 114 Jensen, 437 Jephthah, 64, 124, 352 Jeremiah, 67, 68, 176 Jerome, on Gospel According to Hebrews, 192 re.; on Archelaus, 264 ; on Mith raic initiation, 308-9,416 ; on Beth lehem cave, 321 INDEX 447 Jerusalem, siege of, 191 Jesus (=Joshua), cult of, 57, 90 ff., 95 ; cruoifixion legend of, 118 fi., 144 ff., 192; the Apocalyptic, 142, 164, 205 re., 208 ; a pre-Christian God, 162 ff., 398 ; a demi-god in the " Teaching of the Twelve Apostles," 164, 188 ; unhis- torical, xvii ff., 228 ff., 396 ff.; as Fish, 207, 302 ; in Pauline epistles, 237, 400 ; in Manichseism, 273 ; as Rock, 317 ; litany of name of, 332, 423-4 ; pagan attributes of, 332 high-priest of the Return, 86 re., 91, 166 son of Ananus, 193 the Talmudic, 91, 194, 205, 237, 397, 405 Jevons, F. B., discussed, xxvi, 4 ff., 20 ff., 52, 59, 62, 65 to., 67 re., 70, 74 to., 94, 384; on earliest Gods, 1, 22, 23, 41 ; on taboos, 4-7, 25, 384 ; on rise of idea of duty, 6, 55 ; on super stition, 8 ; on magic and religion, 9-11, 14, 20, 22, 46; definitions of religion by, 20 ff., 24, 34, 60 •«.; on the sacramental meal, 22, 59 ; on Egyptian religion, 23 ; on Supreme Gods, 24 ; on Pantheism, 24 ; on animism, 24 ; on belief, 25 ; on mythology, 26 ; on religious evolu tion, 27, 59-65 re.; on the Eleusinian mysteries, 28 ; on totemism, 27, 44, 99 n., 100 re., 102 re.; on ancestor worship, 41, 44, 52 ; on human sacri fices, 154re., 209 re.; on sacred stones, 317 re. ; on king-priests, 374 ; on Mexican priests, 375 re.; on Roman religion, 45 ; on religious reformers, 62 ; on Monotheism, 65 re., 69 to. Jews, contemporary, rites of, 152. See Hebrews Job, book of, 77, 85, 86 Johnston, Sir H., on negro religion, 40, 170-1 Jolley, A. J., cited, 201 Jonah, book of, 85 Joseph, 163, 167 of Arimathea, 201, 203 Josephus, on siege of Jerusalem, 120 to.; on Jewish human sacrifice, 173 ; on temple miracle, 191 ; on Herod's theatres, 204 Joshua (=Jesus) the high-priest, 86 re., 91, 166; myths of, 64, 72, 163, 396, 428; sacrifices to, 64 to.; the hero, 91 ; sacrificial acts of, 150, 181 ; an Evemerised deity, 163 ff. Josiah, 82 Jovian, 328 Judas, 121-2, 197, 198, 199, 398, 401 Judges as Gods, 42, 47 to. Julian, 312, 326, 327-8 Julius Csesar, sacrifices by and to, 129 ; cited, 137 Juno, 359 Jupiter, human sacrifices to, 128, 129 Justi, cited, 291 to. Justin Martyr, on the paschal lamb, 157 to.; on Mithraic eucharist, 307, 421 ; on Mithraic rock, 316 Juvenal, 129, 231 Ka, the Egyptian, 44 Kaang, 41 re., 43 Kafirs of Hindu-Kush, sacrifices by, 184 Kalisch, 150 re., 153 re. Kalmucks, the, 134 re. Kalthoff, A., xiv Kanerki, 316 re. Kant, 56 Kapparoth, the, 168 ff . Karabbas, 146, 172 Karaboodi, 111 Karhada Brahmans, human sacrifice by, 119 Karma, 248 Kasyapa, 244 Keane, A. H., 346 re. Kepler, 93 re. Kern, 261 Keys, the divine, 206, 292, 298, 330 to., 333 Khonds, ancestral Gods of, 47 to., 108 ; human sacrifices of, 64 re., 72, 108 ff., 118, 130, 183 to.; and images, 71 to., 108, 109 re.; ethics of, 72 ; religion of, 108-9 ; of Maliahs, 109, 110 re., Ill re., 113 ; myths, 111 ; ritual, 111 ff., 182, 193, 307 re.; liberty of victim among, 185 ; Teaching-Gods of, 215 ; mnemo nics of, 345 ; priests of, 366 Khonsu, evolution of, 95 ; and Amun, 131, 320 re.; attributes of, 206 Khorda Avesta, 285 Khosrus, religion of, 319 to. See Chos- roes Kidd, 402 Kin eating, 136 King, C. W., cited, 282, 332 to. Kings as Gods, 47 to. ; sacrifices of, 137, 145, 148 ff., 161, 181, 182, 186; and priests, 288 to., 353; and progress, 35-6, 75, 361 ; abolition of human sacrifice by, 60 ff., 361 Kingsborough, Lord, 349 re. Kingsley, Miss, 41 Kinvad bridge, 311 Kista, 315 Kitimba, 155 Koeppen, 242 re. 448 INDEX Kollmann, P., cited, 30 Koreamoku, 215 Koyis, the, 114 re., 117 Krishna, evolution of, 95 ; and Buddha, . 239, 252, 262 ; cult of, 284 ; and Jainism, 252 Kronos, human sacrifices to, 126, 137, 161, 162 re., 186 ; cult of, as Zervan, in Mithraism, 283, 291, 417 Kuenen, cited, 67 to., 68 re., 260 Kulischer, xxiv Kyriake, 180 re. 429 LACTANTIUS, 278 ; cited and discussed, 121 re., 129, 279 Laing, S., 402 Lajard, services of, to hierology, xxii ; on Riccio, 283 ; on Mithraic origins, 300 to.; on Mithraic degrees, 309, 417 ; on Mithraic monuments, 325 to. Lake of fire, the, 205 Lamb, the divine, 142, 208 ; the God, in the Apocalypse, 142, 164, 205 re., 320 ; substituted for children in sacri fice, 153, 213 re.; sacrificed by Chris tians, 143, 207, 318, 320 ; as cruci fied, 157 re. Lampridius, 313 Lang, A., cited : on taboo, 4 ; on Dr. Frazer's definition of religion, 12 to.; on ancestor- worship and name-taboo, 48, 49; on Zulu religion, 50 to.; on Supreme Gods, 71, 384, 386 ; on Dr. Frazer's theory, 146, 148 to., 149; on the paschal massacre, 152 re.; on scourging of victims, 188 ; on the Golden Bough, 191 re.; on sacrifices, 209 re. ; on savage survivals, 384 ; on Australian religion, 12 ; on primitive idea of immortality , 47 ; on totemism, 100 re., 102 to. Language, evolution of, 346 Lao-Tsze, 219 and note Lardner, cited, 278 Lares Praestites, the, 46 Las Casas, 381 Law, early, and religion, 55 ff. Lectisternia, 178 re., 196 re. Leibnitz, 283 Lenormant, cited, 296 re. Lent, 306 Leonard, Major, 133 to., 134 to. Lessing, xiv, 314, 384 Letourneau, cited, 209 re. Letronne, 300 re. Leucadia, sacrifice at, 139 Levites, 80, 152, 353 Libra, 323 Light-Gods, 284, 326, 331 Lillie, cited and discussed, 254 re. Limb-breaking, in sacrifice, 113, 119, 153, 155, 156 Lion-headed God, 283, 291, 298 Literatures, ancient, 78 Livingstone, 18, 103 Livy, cited, 129 re. Logoi, 226 Logos, doctrine of, in Jewry, 86, 90, 163-4, 178, 218, 222, 226; in the Apocalypse, 205 to.; in Egypt, 217; in Mazdeism, 218, 289 ; in Mithraism, 292, 296, 314 ff., 409; evolution of, 218 ff.; in Brahmanism, 218-9; in China, 219 ; in Plato, 220 ; in Baby lonia, 220 ff.; in Philo, 220, 223-8; in Mexico, 375 to.; in Clem. Alex., 174 re.; in Greece, 217, 218 re. Lord's Day, 175, 180, 305, 429 Lubbock, Sir J., 102 re. Lucian, 73 Lunus, 177 Luther, as cult-founder, 57 Lyall, Sir A. C, on magic and religion, 11 ; on origins of Gods, 231 ff. Lycaon, 123 Lycurgus, 238 Lydus, Johannes, 305 re. MAAT, 177 re., 216 Mabon, 215 Maccabees, the, 89 Macdonald, Rev. D., 43 and note, 102 n. Maepherson, 108 Macrobius, 419 Madagascar, taboo in, 50 re. Magi, the, 322-3 re. Magic, origin of, 10, 15, 23, 28 ; and religion, 7, 9 ff., 28 ff., 99 ; in Brah manism, 13 ; in Egypt, 13 ; in Chaldea, 14; primitive, 13 ff., 21; among Jews, 16, 21 re., 30; "sym pathetic" and "art," 16, 28, 29, 182; and progress, 35 ff.; and art, 35 re.; private and public, 29 Mahaffy, cited and discussed, 127 Mahavira, 251, 252 Maimonides, 179 Maistre, Joseph de, cited, 381 Maitreya, 257 Malabar, human sacrifice in, 138 Malachi, 87 Malagasy, taboo of names by, 50 re. Malayan human sacrifices, 122 ; animal sacrifices, 170-1 Malcolm, cited, 119 Maleus, 161 Mamili, 117 Manah, 177 to. Manco Capac and Mama Ocello, 215, 342 Manes, the, 46 INDEX 449 Mangaia, 152 to. Manichseism, 96, 273 ; and Mithraism, 334 Manichseus, legend and problem of, 264 ff.; flaying and crucifixion of, 266 ; name of, 268 ; story of, and cave, 269 ; mystery-drama of, 272 ; writings of, 273 Manna, 177 to. Manu, Queen, 61 Manyema, the, 155 Maoris, magic and religion among, 13- 14; and images, 71 re.; cannibalism of, 104 re., 365 ; human sacrifices by, 122, 161 re., 209 re.; and colour red, 271 to. March, 359 Marcion, 274 Marduk. See Merodach Margoliouth, Dr., discussed, 396 Maries, the two, 200, 205 Mariner, cited, 116 re., 365 re. Mark, gospel of, 229 re. Markham, C, discussed, 378 to. Mark on the forehead, the mystie, 309 Marquesans, 133, 365 Mars, human sacrifices to, 129 ; symbols of, 319, 357 ; names of, 357 ; and Mithra, 325 ; origin and evolution of, 358-9 ; the star, worship of and sacri fices to, 271 Marti, 84 to. Martindale, Fr., criticised, 413 ff. Marucchi, 335 re. Mary, 21 re., 97, 228, 322 to. Magdalene, 185 Masai, the, 36 re. ; taboo of names among, 50 Mashya and Mashyana, 294 to. Maspero, cited, 13 Mass, the, origin of name, 425 Massagetse, 128, 160 to. Massey, G., cited, 297 to. Massiha, human sacrifice at, 139 to. Matarisvan, 221 to. Mathew, cited, 44 to. , 100 to. Maui, 43 Maury, 136 re. Maya, the, 369-70, 371 Mazdeism, origins of, 288 fi., 291; prayer in, 305 re. ; and Judaism, 83, 85-6, 166, 218 fi., 320, 422-3 Mead, G. R. S., 204 re. Mediatorial Gods, 206, 222, 294 and note, 314, 412 Medicine, from the Gods, 215 Meir, Rabbi, 165 re. Meis, 266 Melchizedek, 175-6 Melkarth, human sacrifice to, 126 ; and Athamas, 302 re. Men = Meni, 176-7, 298 Menahems, 268 Menelaus, 123 Menu, 238 Meredith, G., quoted, 229 Meriah, 110 ff. Merodach, and Ea, 95, 216 ; in creation myth, 130 ; and book of Esther, 145 ; as mediator, 206, 222 re.; as Logos, 216; as Saviour, 222 re.; festival of, 292 ; and Nabu, 292 Mesi, King, 62 re. Mesopotamian culture, 69, 74, 75, 78-80 Messenger, sacrificed, 105 ff . , 190 ; of the Gods, 216, 217, 269, 270, 344 Messiah, rise of doctrine of, 79, 89, 166, 180 ; as priest, 158, 175, 179 ; in Book of Enoch, 89, 167 ; the two Messiahs, 167, 268-9 ; the suffering Messiah, 120, 166-7, 269 re.; Mexican, 370 ff. Metatron, the, 163, 220 re., 314-5 Methana, sacrifices at, 171 Metis, 217, 222 Mexico, religion of ancient, 355 fi.; human sacrifices in, 132, 151, 271, 360 fi.; ethics of ancient, 366 ff.; eucharist in, 144 ; Teaching-Gods of, 216; language of, 382 re.; modern civilisation of, 382 Mexitli, 358 Meyer, E., cited, 51 re., 217 re. Michael, 324, 333 Michelet, cited, 379 re. Mihr, 289, 293, 322 re., 323 Mihrgan, 323 Mihrvard, 322 re. Milinda, King, 249 Mills, L. H., cited and discussed, 286 ff., 295 re. Minayeff, 260 ^^, Minos, 217 C "* Minucius Filix, 129 Miriam, 165-6 Mirror as symbol, 344 Missa, 332 re. Mithra, symbols of, 142, 298 ff., M* sacrament of, *•, MMM, 3W, fB& 318, 332 re.; two-formed, 180, 296 three-formed, 296 ; resurrection of 195, 306, 317 ; cult of, 181, 205, 208 281 ff., 303 ff., 310 fi.; attributes of 206, 288 ff.; sacrifice of, 299, 300 303, 32Q ; festivals of, 293 re.; mys teries of, 195, 302, 305, 306 fi., 314, 317fi.,415ff.; as tree-God, 319 ; and Lunus, 177 ; titles of, 429-30 ; evolu tion of, 95, 288 ff.; human sacrifice 2G 450 INDEX to, 126, 292, 312-3 ; names containing name of, 291 re.; a Pagan Christ, 294 ; name of month, 323 ; descent of, into Hades, 323 Mithradates, 325 Mithraism, 281 fi. ; vogue of, 281, 324, 413 ; monumental remains of, 282 ff.; derivation of, 283 fi.; absorption of, in Christianity, 310 fi., 327 ff., 424 ; organisation of, 330 ; didactic side of, 310ff.; ethics of, 288-9, 311, 326; Tisdall on, 408 ff. ; Martindale on, 413 ff. Mitra, 284, 293 re. Moabites, human sacrifice among, 161 Mockler-Ferryman, 134 re. Mohammed, 64, 65, 238-9. See Islam Mokoiro, 43 Moloch, 70 re., 186 Monarchy and monotheism, 69, 76, 86 Mongols, 341, 344 Monkey sacrificed, 117 Monotheism, evolution of, 66 ff., 76, 82 ff., 84 re., 87 Montanus, xxii, 274 Moon-worship, 159, 170-1, 177. See Min Morals and taboo, 6, 25, 55 Mordecai, 145 Moses, 57 ; and Mithra, 16 ; as God, 17 ; myth of, 67, 80, 175, 190, 217, 238, 239, 273 to., 316-7; in Philo, 226-7 Mosheim, 283, 419 Mother-Goddess, Babylonian, 220 ; in Christianity, 228, 333 ; in Paganism, 321-2, 333 ; Mexican, 364 Mounds, the Mississippi, 343, 354 Mount, the heavenly, 287 to. Mourning, ritual, 306 Moymis, 220 Muggleton, 58 Muir, 218-9 Muller, J. G., cited and discussed, on monotheism and polytheism, 69 ¦».; on theophagy, 144 ; on Asia and America, 347 ; on feather symbol, 359 to. ; on humanity in religion, 366 ra. K. O., on Dionysus, 97 re.; on Apollo, 307 Max, his teaching, 71 re.; on the Logos doctrine, 218 ; on Brahmanism and Buddhism, 253 to.; on Mitra, 293 to. Mundus, 304 Murray, Gilbert, quoted, 97 Musseus, 238 Myazd, 318, 332 Mylitta, 295-6 Mystery-drama, the Eleusinian, 28, 195 ; the Christian, xi, xxi, xxv, 187, 188, 193, 194-204, 212, 396 ff., 436; first Christian production of, 204 ; the Rhodian, 187 ; in the pagan cults, 181, 194, 205, 308-14 ; survivals of, 391 ff.; the Manichsean, 272 Mythology, significance of, xxii ; arbi trary treatment of, 41 ; definitions of, 26 Myths, origin of, 52 ; and history, 231 ff. NABU, 216, 220, 292 Nagasena, 249 Nairy6-sangha, 312 Names, magical virtue of, 21 re., 49, 163, 220 ; origin of, 100 ff. Narcotics in human sacrifice, 113, 114, 116, 119, 138, 140 to., 153, 155, 390 Narrinyeri, taboo of names among, 49 ; ngaitye of, 103 ; Teaching-Gods of, 214 Natchez, religion of, 353 Nature, idea of law in, 16 Nazarite, Jesus as, 186 Ndengei, 365 re. Neander, 267 Nebo. See Nabu Nehemiah, book of, Persian influence on, 83, 86 Nergal, 172 n. Nero, 129 re. Netzahualcoyotl, 366, 383 Neumann, cited, 322 to. New Hebrides, religion in, 43 Newman, J. H., 60, 87 to. F. W., 65 to. New- Year days, 146, 160-1, 292 Nietzsche, 403 Nigeria, human sacrifices in, 132, 135 ; cross in, 154 ; animal sacrifices in, ' 170 ; cattle sacred in, 184 ; Teaching- ; Gods of, 217 ; trinity in, 223 ; crea- ; tion in, 221 Nile, sacrifice to, 135 Nilus, 137 to., 183 to. Nine, sacrifice of, 107 and note Ninlil, 297 Nonnus, 416 Nous, 315 Nubia, cannibalism in, 133 Numa, 217, 238 Numina and Gods, 45 Nurundere, 214 Nuruz, 319 re. ' OANNBS, 208, 214 Obubura sacrifices, 151 Occult, idea of, 15 Oceanic peoples, Asiatic origin of, 153 . INDEX m OdMes, the, 125 to. Odin, cult of, 151 ; as teacher, 215 Odyssey, the, 81 to. Oki, 351 Oldenberg, cited, 13 ; on Buddhism, 245, 247, 255, 259 Olympic Gods, 86 Omanus, 296, 418 Omar Khayyam, cited, 309 re. (Only-begotten, sacrifice of, 137, 162, 187, 351 ; name of the Logos, 218, 222 ; saviours, 167 Onophrius, 190 re. Origen, 21 re., 92, 162, 302, 328 Ornvuzd, 283. See Ahura Mazda Orpheus, descent of, to Hades, 191 to., 307 ; as teacher, 217 ; and the bough, 191 to.; a day God, 307 ; and history, 238 Orphicism, egg in, 208 ; Attis in, 322 Osiris, 16, 53; resurrection of, 92 re., 144, 189, 306, 318 ; cult of, 99, 181, 306; as child, 131 and note; evolu tion of, 53, 95 ; mysteries of, 194-5, 196, 205, 217, 306, 319, 433 ; names of, 190 re.; attributes of, 206, 330 ; as Teaching-God, 214 ; in Plutarch, - 299 Ostiaks, sacrifice by, 115 re. Ouranos, 217 PACHACAMAC, 215, 376 Padseans, 128 Palanque, ruins of, 348 Pallas, 313 re. Pan, 214, 302 Pantheism, 24 ; rise of, 76, 84, 87 Papa=Pope, 335 Papuan religion, 14 to. ; cannibalism, 134 re. Paraclete, 268, 274 Parnapishtim, 51 Parsees, the, 89 Partridge, C, 150-1 Passion plays, 391 fi. Passover, date of, 145-6 ; and cruci fixion, 149; rite of, 152, 157, 163, 213 m. Pater Patrum, 336 ff. Patroclus, 107 re. Paul, as cult-founder, 57 ; and Jesus, xiii, xviii, 121, 234-5, 286, 237, 397 ff.; on the crucifixion, 196 ; and his con verts, 314 Pausanias, 123, 127, 171 Peacock, symbol, 109 Pelopidas, 127 to. Penitentes, 391 ff. PersephonS, 167 to., 191 to., 195, 306 re. Perseus, 64 to., 310, 316, 336 Persian religion, influence of on Jewish, 83, 84, 85-6, 315 to.; human sacri fices, 123 Peru, ancient religion of, 215-6, 272, 376 ff . ; civilisation of, 347, 380 ; drama in, 193, 377 Peter, and cock, 199, 333 ; treason of, 199, 202 ; and rock, 202, 317, 330 ; and Proteus, 332-3 ; and Janus, 332-3 ; chair of, 334 ff. Petra, the God, 330, 333 Petronius, cited, 1 Pfleiderer, xiii, 435 re. Pharmakoi, 148, 171 Philo, Logos doctrine of, 220, 223-8 ; relation of, to Hebrew sacred books, 227 re.; his conception of sacrifice, 177-8, 227 and note Philostratus, 275 ff. Phoenician human sacrifices, 61, 64, 124, 126 Photius, 264, 313 Phrixos, 302 Phrygia, religion in, 274, 318 Pickering, 342, cited, 103 re. Pidyen haben, 152 Pig, sacred, sacrifice of, 154 Pilate, 199, 203 " Acts of," 202 Plato, Logos of, 220, 222 ; birth story of, 239, 277 Pliny, cited, 126, 128 Plunkett, Miss, 285 to., 300 to. Plutarch, cited, 125 to.; his Isis and Osiris, 299 ; on Mithra, 412 Polixena, 106 re., 172 Polynesia, intoxicants in, 116 ; mystic rock in, 316 ; human sacrifice in, 122, 154, 209 re. ; symbolic use of boughs in, 191 re.; pyramid-temples in, 343 n. Polytheism, 66 ff.; ethics of, 69, 70, 71 ff., 77 ff. Pompey, 325 Pomponius Mela, cited, 128 Porphyry, and Abammon, 16 ; on human sacrifices, 129, 137 ; on the Rhodian sacrifice, 137, 187 ; on Mithra, 299 re., 319, 320, 337, 430 ; on sacred caves, 304 ; on Mithraic initia tion, 308-9 Poseidon, 330 Positivism, 57, 404 Prajapati, 219 Prah, 117 re. Pratt, A. E., cited, 14 w., 134 to. Prayer, logic of, 19, 21, 32 ; psychology of, 35 Preller, 180 to. Prescott, cited, 341, 383 «. 452 INDEX Priestcraft, 6, 30, 62, 407 Priests, as taboo-makers, 6 ; and reli gion, 6, 13, 17 ; inspired by the God, 216 ; and Kings, 62, 288 to., 374 ; as promoters of human sacrifice, 361, 364-5, 366, 374 fi.; hostility of to magic, 30 ; reduction of status of Gods by, 51 ; and reform of religion, 60, 62 ; psychology of, 367 Privileges of victims, among Codooloos, 114 ; among Khonds, 111, 116 ; at Bombay, 119 ; among Albanians, 125 ; at Rhodes, 137 ; in Polynesia, 154 ; in America, 354, 363 ; at Bonny, 183 ; among Redskins, 183 ; among Hindus, 183-4 Prometheus, crucifixion of, 167 Prophets, sincerity of, 62-3 Protestantism and the backward races, 382 Proteus, 277, 332 Psychology of religion, 34-5, 39 Punjab, religion in ancient, 253 ff. Purgatory, doctrine of, 333 Purim, 143, 145 ff. Purity of sacrificial victims, 135, 151, 153, 161, 352 Pushan, 284 re. Pyramid-temples, Assyrian, 182 re.; vogue of, 273, 292 ; Asiatic and American, 343, 354 ; Polynesian, 343 ; Mexican, 362, 366 Pythagoreanism, 220, 275, 280 QUEEN of Heaven, 176, 177 Quetzalcoatl, 216 re., 360, 368 re., 370 ff. Quipus, 345 Quma, 342 re. RA, 216 Rain, God of, women sacrificed to, 135, 151 ; Hebrew sacrifices to, 150 ; in Mexico, 356, 368 to. Ram, sacrificed, 117, 131, 319, 320 ; the mystic, 298 to., 301-2, 319, 320 Rama, 259 Rangi, 43 Ransom in sacrifice, 170 Rashnu, 289, 315 Rasmussen, cited, 14 to. Rawlinson, cited and discussed, 290, 298 to. Reason and religion, 39 Reclus, Elie, cited and discussed, 111 to., 114, 115 Red, colour, in human sacrifice, 112, 114, 119, 158, 270-1, 272, 344 Redemption, Jewish rites of, 152 Redskins, religion of, 15, 343 ; canni balism among, 133 ; taboo of names among, 49 to.; crucifixion among, 151 to.; sacrifices of, 106, 122, 124, 133, 151, 152 to., 183 Reinach, S., on religion, 58 to.; on totemism, 99 to., 100 to. Religion, meaning of, 7, 8, 11, 12, 28, 32 ; definition of, 57-8 ; and taboo, 6, 7, 25, 33-4 ; and philosophy, 32 ff., 39, 56 ; and magic, 9 ff., 12 ff., 28 ff.; and totems, 19, 44 ; and law, 54-6 ; scientific view of, 20, 28 ff., 52, 56, 57-8, 385 ; evolution of, 66, 94 ff.; and reform, 60 ff.; fixation in, 66; retrogression in, 41 to., 140; and ethics, 367-8 ; Constant on, 58 re., 384; Reinach on, 58 to.; Reville on, 58 to.; Crawley on, 402 ff. Renaissance, culture of, 39 Renan, 66 ; on the Jews, 94 ; on the Greeks, 94 ; on night in the East, 198 ; on Mithraism, 330 to.; on Babism, xvii Benouf, Le Page, cited, 77 to., 87 re. Resurrection, idea of, 144, 189 ; of the saints, 192, 200. See Immortality, and Osiris, Mithra, Dionysos, Hera kles, etc. Reville, A., on religion, 58 re.; on bury ing alive, 379 to.; on polytheism, 71 re.; on Apollonius of Tyana, 276, 277 re.; on Judaic science, 93 re.; on American civilisations, 342 ; on Jan senism, 196 re.; on cross-symbol, 368 re.; on Christianity and Mytho logy, 435 J., 277 re. Rhodes, human sacrifices at, 65 to. , 137, 186, 187 Riccio, 283 Ritter, 267 Rix, Herbert, xvi Robe, the Buddhist, 242 «., 344 ; the seamless, 330 ; of righteousness, 364 Rock, of Israel, 175, 316, 317; in Jesuism, 202, 316, 330, 331, 335 ; in Mithraism, 305, 316 ff., 410 ; in other cults, 316 Roman symbolism, 139 ; human sacri fice, 128-9, 135 to.; religion, 2 re., 32, 45 ff., 51 to., 53, 68 ; law, 53 ».; imperialism, 80 ; civilisation, 39 ; taboo of God names, 49 Romulus, 238 Rongo, 43 Roscher, xxii Roskoff, cited, 57 TO. Rossi, 283 de, 336 Russia, human sacrifice in, 122 Ruth, book of, 85 INDEX 453 SABAZIOS, 322, 420 Sabbath, institution of, 82, 175 Sacasa, 118, 143, 145 ff., 188 Sacraments, nature of, 28 ; and totem ism, 99 ; cannibal, 22, 65, 124, 128, 141 ff.; Polynesian, 154 ; of redskins, 156; Hebrew, 168 ff.; Dionysiak, 195 ; Mithraic, 142-3, 174, 207 ; Pagan, 207 to.; Christian, 143, 207 ; total genealogy of, 211 ; American, 351, 352 ; Mexican, 364 ff., 373; Peru vian, 378-9 ; Scythian, 128 Sacrifices, ethic of, 32 ; Hebrew, 106, 168 ff. human, disused in prosperity, 64 ; revived in disaster, 65, 140; forms of, 105 ff.; in Greece, 60-1, 123, 129, 135, 139; in Egypt, 61, 123, 129, 135; Phoenician, 61, 64, 124, 126, 129; Polynesian, 61, 122, 150 to., 151, 154, 156, 189; Japanese, 61. 127, 183 ; in Dahomey, 61, 136, 270 ; Chinese, 61, 366; Hebrew, 64, 65, 107 re., 124, 149-50, 158 ff., 168 ff., 186, 189 ; Athenian, 106, 127 ; in Uganda, 107, 125 re., 155 ; at Benin, 107-8, 135, 138 re., 151, 154; in Sumatra, 116, 126 ; in Nigeria, 132, 134, 136 to., 150 ; to the Rain God, 135 ; to the Nile, 135 ; in Malabar, 138 ; in Brazil, 350-1 ; American, 106, 122, 183, 350 ff.; Mexican, 119, 151, 271, 360 ff.; Peruvian, 366, 378; Khond, 108 ff.; universal, 122 ff.; Albanian, 125; to Zeus, 123, 125; to Jupiter, 128, 129 ; ancient Meso potamian, 128 ; Persian, 123 ; Roman, 128-9 ; Arab, 126, 129 ; Rhodian, 137 ; analogous to executions, 135 ; evolu tion of theory and practice of, 138 ff. , 156, 186 ff., 209-13, 361 ; Teutonic, 151 ; to Dionysos, 123 ; to Kronos, 126, 137 ; to Melkarth, 126 ; to Mithra, 126, 312 ; Scythian, 127-8, 269, 270 ; to the sea, 129 re., 183 ; in Bombay, 119; African, 122, 132-3, 151 ; Malay, 122 ; Indian, 122, 127 ; Russian, 122 ; Maori, 122, 365 ; Aryan, 122 ; Slavonic, 123 ; in modern Greece, 125 ; by Cata- linarian conspirators, 125 ; in Gaul, 137 Sagan, the, 159 Sahagun, 381 Sainte-Croix, 313, 414 Salamis, human sacrifices at, 125, 127 Salih, 270 to. Sallust, cited, 125 to. Samaritan religion, 85, 86, 92, 163, 213 «. Samoans, taboo of names by, 50 to.; human sacrifices by, 61, 150 re.; reli gion of, 103, 386 Samson, an Evemerised god, 81, 292 a deliverer, 167 ; only begotten, 167 as Nazarite, 186 ; Sun-God, 186, 307 and Mithra, 292; death of, 307 labours of, 308 Samuel, 17 ; a God, 81 Sancu, 379 Sandeman, 57 Sandwich Islands, human sacrifice in, 156 Saoshyant, and Jewish Messianism, 166 ; characteristics of, 206, 322 ; and Mithra, 322, 420 ; Tisdall on, 411 Saracen culture, 39 Sarasvati, 218-219, 221 Sargon, 317 Sarpanitum, 221 Satapatha Brahmana, 117 Saturn, sacrifices to, 126 ; as Teaching- God, 214. See Kronos Saturnalia, 186 Saul, 233 ; sons of, sacrificed, 149, 161, 181, 189 Saussaye, C. de la, 45 Savages, progress among, 35 fi.; forward races and, 381 ff.; psychology of, 42 Saviour-Gods, 99 ff., 206, 222 Savitri, 284 re., 293 re. Sayce, cited, 14, 220; discussed, 74 re., 411 Scalping, 344 Scapegoat, 184 ; sacrifice of, 105 ff., 138, 158-9, 189 Schmiedel, xi, 229 ff.; his nine trust worthy texts, xix, 230 ff. Schiirer, cited, 92 re., 160 w., 174 Schwab, cited, 159 to. Schwegler, xxii, 45, 274 Schweitzer, Dr. A., xiv, 435 to. Science and magic, 14 ff., 22 Scourging, sacrificial, 188-9 Scythians, cannibalism among, 127 ; human sacrifices by, 127-8, 269, 270 Seel, H., 414 Seeman, B., 343 to. Selden, 313, 419 " Self-made " Gods, 175 Semites, ethics of, 53 •«.; sacrifices of, 64, 65, 124, 135 ; modern, 152, 157 ; sun-and-moon-worship of, 171. See also Hebrew and Phoenician Senart, cited and discussed, 252 to.; 258fi. Sepher Toledoth Jeschu, the, 220, 406 Serapis, 95 Sermon on the Mount, 229, 236 Seven, sacred number, 164, 181, 205 to. 309 to., 317 Sex, ethic of, 77-8 454 INDEX Sexes, union of in deity, 293, 296-8, 418 Sexual liberty of sacrificial victim, among Khonds, 111, 185; among Codooloos, 114 ; among Redskins, 183 ; in Mexico, 363 Shakespeare, 197 Shamai, 179 Shamas, 214, 292 Sheep, sacrifice of, 131, 272, 379 ; sacred, 184 Shekinah, 86 Shema, 49 Shew-bread, 178-9 Shintoism, 344 Siddartha, 244 re., 252 Sidonius Apollinaris, cited, 278 Silenus, 215 Simon of Cyrene, 199 Magus, 252 Sin, theory of, 404 Sin-offerings, 189 Sioux, human sacrifice by, 351 Siiin, 61 re. Skeat, W. W., 171 re. Skins, sacrosanct, in Mexico, 137, 271, 344, 364, 368, 373 ; in Scythia, 190, 270 Smith, Prof. Robertson, cited and dis cussed, on origin of Gods 1 re.; on origins of religion, 52 ; on Mohammed, 65 re.; on Jewish monotheism, 69 ; on animal sacrifice, 131 : on Arab sacrifices, 132 re., 134 re.; on execu tions and sacrifice, 150 re.; on Jewish mystery revivals, 173 ; as editor, 281, 431; on Mexican sacrifices, 363 re.; on sacred skins, 364 ; on decay of cannibalism, 365 n. Adam, cited, 15 Prof. W. B., xi, 398 Sokrates (Ecclesiastical Historian), on Mithraic sacrifices, 126, 313 ; on Manichseus, 264 Solomon, 85 Soma, the, gives Gods immortality, 51 ; feast of, 175 ; origin of, 53 ; in Persia, 285 ; deification of, 100, 318 Son of God, notion of, 95 ff., 322 ; sacrifice of, 161-2 Sophia, doctrine of, in Judaism, 90, 92, 221, 222 ; evolution of, 219, 221, 222 ; in Philo, 223, 227 ; in Christi anity, 228 ; in Gnosticism, 315 Sophocles, 195 Soterism, 72, 92 Spartans, sacrifices of, 135 re. Spencer, H., 71 re.; cited, 40, 50 to.; on origin of Gods, 42 ; services of, xxiii, xxvi ; on origin of totem, 100-1 ; on funeral sacrifices, 209 ; on tree of knowledge, 318 re.; on evolu tion of altars, 317 re. Spiegel, cited, 269, 274 to., 409 " Spirits," 15, 42, 46, 51, 86 Spitta, F., xii, xiii Sraosha, 296 to., 314, 315, 322, 410 Stable, the sacred, 322-3 to. Stade, cited, 87 to., 163 re. Steinthal, cited, 17 to. Stevenson, W. B., cited, 342 re. Strabo, on Leucadian sacrifice, 124; on Albanian sacrifice, 125 ; on Sacsea, 148 re.; on Omanus, 296 Strack, H. L., 160 re. Substitution in sacrifice, among Greeks, 60, 131 ; in Japan, 61 ; by kings, 60, 61 ; among Koyis, 117 ; among Brahmans, 117 ; in India, 118 «.; in Polynesia, 118 n., 154 ; among Arabs, 131 ; in Egypt, 131 ; reason of, 134 ; among Malays, 171 re.; in Fiji, 365 ».; in Mexico, 369 Suetonius, cited, xiv, 129, 406 Suidas, quoted, 314 Sunday, 175, 305, 332, 429 Sun-Gods, 293-4, 299 ff., 305 ; titles of, 175 ; symbols of, 190 ; births of, 321 ; Hebrew sacrifices to, 150 ; sacrifice of horse to, 184 ; and Goat-Gods, 302 Sun-worship, 172, 350, 356, 363, 376-7 Supernatural, meaning of word, 1, 20 ; idea of, 9, 20 Superstition, meaning of , 8-9 ; Hebrew, 86-7, 93 ; in times of crisis, 140 ff. Supper, Holy, 143, 174, 176, 196. See Eucharists Survival, laws of, in religion, 27, 280, 328 Suttee, 61 m.; Peruvian, 379 Swastika, the, 309 Sword = cross, 319 Symbolism, in sacrifice, 139, 144 ; in Mithraism, 298 ff.; in Plutarch, 299 ; in ancient religions, 328 Synagogues of dispersion, 168 Syncretism in religion, 294 to. TAAEOA, 316 Taboo, origin of, 5-6 ; effects of, 7 ; and religion, 6, 7, 49, 55, 57, 404 ; and social obligation, 6, 55 ; of names, 49 ff.; among Hebrews, 49 ; force of, 100 Tacitus, on the Christians, 406 Tahiti, sacrificial usages at, 151, 152 re., 365 ; cannibalism in, 133 Talmud, 78 to., 119 to., 158, 268, 428 Tammuz, resurrection of, 145, 189 ; nameof , 162, 301 ; cultof , 162, 185, 321 Tangaloa, 216 INDEX 455 Tanith, 217 to., 296, 322 Tannese, the, 109 to. Tao or Tau, 219 '. Taplin, Rev. G., 103, 214 Tari Pennu, 72, 109 fi., 215 Tarsus, religions of, 195, 316 to. Tau, the, 157, 310 " Taurobolium, the, 208, 303, 335 Tauthe, 220 | Taylor, Rev. R., on Maori magic, 13- 14 ; on Godhood of chiefs, 41 ; on Maori images, 71 re. Teaching-God, notion of, 56 ; primary, 214-8 ; Mexican, 370 Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, 164, 188 Tears, in Jewish ritual, 159 ; sacrificial value of, 115, 189 Tell, William, 239 Temple, Jewish legends of, 191-2 Temptation-myth, modern criticism of, xii, xiii Ten commandments, 238, 312 Teraphim, 353 Terebinthus, 264 Tertullian, cited, on child sacrifice, 126 ; on sacred blood, 129 ; on willingness of victim, 121 re.; on Mithraism, 308 ; on cult of Herakles, 337 ; on mys teries of Osiris, 306 Tezcatlipoca, as son and lover, 322 re.; symbol of, 344; attributes of, 358, 363, 375 ; festival of, 363 ; and Quet zalcoatl, myth of, 370 Tezcucans, civilisation of, 348 re., 366 Thadda Pennu, 109 Thargelia, 106, 127, 139, 148, 188 Thartaboodi, 111 Theism, 12, 19, 33 ; and kingship, 55 Themistocles, 127 .Theodosius, 95 re. Thieves, sacrificed, 135, 137 Thomas, St., 349 re. Thomson, B., 134 re. Thoth, and magic, 21 re.; and seven, 205 re.; as teacher, 214, 216; moon- god, 217, 221; influence of, on Judaism, 221 Thrace, human sacrifice in, 129 Three, sacrifice of, 115, 181 ff. Thunder-God, sacrifices to, 141 Thurston, 114 re.; cited, 118 Tiberius, 126, 128 Tibet, 136 Tiele, on Hebrew religion, 76 to.; on Hermes, 217 to.; on magic of names, 220; on Anaitis, 296 to. Tisdall, Dr., criticised, 408 ff. Tlaloc, 356, 368 re. Tlascalans, civilisation of, 345, 368 Toleration, ancient, 75 Toltecs, 348, 361 ; religion of, 370 ff. Tonga Islands, human sacrifice in, 61, 151 ; enemies eaten in, 133 ; child sacrifioe in, 154 re. , 365 ; religion in, 216 Torquemada, cited, 355 re. Torture in human sacrifice, 115, 119, 133 Totem, deification of, 44, 100 ; eating of, 99, 104 Totemism, 19, 27, 44, 99 ; and civilisa tion, 37 re. ; origin of, 100 ff. ; sacri fices relating to, 110 re. , 210 Transfiguration, the, 203, 204 Tree, the saored, 118, 318, 319 ; Mithra in, 319. See Cross Trinity, doctrine of, 87, 295 ; in Egypt, 206, 295 ; in China, 219 ; in Judaism, 228; in Mazdeism, 309 to., 315; in Akkad, 297 ; in Babylonia, 206, 297 ; in Hinduism, 295 ; in Nigeria, 220 ; in Christianity, 228 Trumbull, cited, 213 Tu, 215 Tupinambos, human sacrifice by, 350-1 Turner, quoted, 103 Twelve, eucharist of, 175, 179 ; apostles, 164, 180, 399 ; labours, 308, 335, 336 ; tables, 238 ; sacrifice of, 107 re. Twenty-four elders, 164, 179 Two-sexed deities, 297 re., 322 Tylor, cited, 342-3, 372 re., 382 Typhon, 16, 159 re., 299 Tyre, human sacrifice in, 126 UGANDA, limb-breaking in, 155 ; can nibalism in, 136 ; human sacrifice in, 107, 125 re. Ui, 61 Unas, King, 47 re. Unitarianism and Christian origins, 431 Upavasatha, the, 175 Uranus, myth of, 53 re. Usher, 268 Usury among Hebrews, 87 VACCA, 283 Vach, 218-9, 221 Vaggians, tribe of, 245 Valerian, 129 to., 270, 272 Valverde, 381 Van Manen, xviii, 237 re., 259 re., 398, 400 Varro, 134 re. Varuna, 284, 288 Vasishtha, 251 Vatea, 43 Vatican Mount, the, 335 ff. Veda, first created thing, 219 ; second created, 219 ; Agni's mouth, 219 Vedantism, 219 456 INDEX Vegetation-Gods, 191 to., 195, 307, 358, 359 433 Vendidad, 285, 311, 314 Venus, 53; double sex of, 297 to.; the star, 351 Vestals, 379 re. Vinet, xxv Viracocha, 376 Virgil, 191 re. Virgin-birth, myths of, 316, 321-2, 359, 410, 420 Virgins, sacrificed, 135 ; Pagan, 353 Vishnu, 262 Visions, psychology of, 34 Visperad, 285 Vitality in religion, 402 ff. Vizaresha, 311 Vohumano, influence of on Judaism, 222 ; in Mazdeism, 226 ; character and attributes of , 296; in Vendidad, 311; = Sraosha, 322, 410; and Mithra, 332, 410, 418 Voltaire, xv Votan, 371 WAFER, the sacred, 207 re., 208 Wakamba, the, 2 re. Wakeman, 402 Wamyamwezi, the, 2 re. Ward, Lester, 33 to. War-Gods, evolution of, 358-9 Warneck, cited, 2 re., 32 re., 42-3, 136 Water, sacrament of, 143 ; and the Spirit, 221 ; Goddess of, 356 Weber, cited, 221 re.; discussed, 250 ff. Week of the Son, the, 166 Wellhausen, cited, xii, 67 White in sacrifice, 151, 168, 170, 172, 184, 352 Whittaker, T., 275 re. , 279 re. Whydah, sacrifices at, 133 Wiedemann, 47 re. Williams, T., cited, 386 Winckler, cited, 296 re. Windischmann, xxii Winds, sacrifices to, 171 Wine, sacrament of, 142 ff., 175 ff.; given to victims, 119 ft., 137, 354 ; God of, in Mexico, 375. See Diore- ysos, Soma, and Haoma Wisdom, Book of, 227 Wisdom. See Sophia Witchcraft, effects of, 31 Witch of Endor, 233 Women, position of in ancient world, 78; in Mithraism, 325-6; in Poly nesia, 365 ; sacrifices of, 135, 364 ; pregnant, in Jewish ritual, 158 ; Christian Messiah and, 185 ; and Buddhism, 249 Word. See Logos Writing, art of, 81 XEBXES, 231 Xipe, human sacrifices to, 137, 390 Xiuhteuctli, 119, 271, 368, 373 YAHWEH, name of, 220 ; sacraments of, 174, 175, 177 ; name tabooed, 49 priestly theory of, 68 ; as bull, 70 n. frauds upon, 72, 87 ; nature of, 73 worship of, 67, 70 to., 78, 152; rise of, 81 ff., 95; as rain-giver, 73,82, 178 ; as Saviour, 206 Yakuts, the, of Siberia, 184 Yama, 41 Yashts, the, 285 Yasna, 285 Yasoda, 252 Yeschu, 162 Yima, 299 Yoke, the mystic, 206 Yom Kippur. See Atonement, day of Yucatan, religion of, 353 ; civilisation of, 354 Yuluca, 359 ZADEN, 291 to. Zahn, Prof., xii Zakmuk, 143, 145 Zalmoxis, 160 re., 269 Zapotecs, the, religion of, 356 re. Zarathustra, as cult founder, 57 ; and Saoshyant, 166, 322 ; unhistorical, 238, 286 ; and Er, 272 ; and cave, 272, 304 ; Mills on, 286 ff.; cult of, 286 ff.; in Vendidad, 311, 314; his descent to Hades, 324 re.; his birth story, 324 re. Zechariah, cited, 73, 317 ; and Maz deism, 422-3 Zendavesta, 285, 312 Zervan, 283 Zeus, 64 «., 96, 294 re.; Lycseus, 60, 127 ; human sacrifice to, 125, 127 ; rain-giver, 177 ; a Saviour, 206 ; reason of, 217 ; lawgiver, 217 ; cave- born, 321 re. Zipaltonal, 360 Zodiac, and lamb sacrifice, 142 ; in Judaism, 179 re.; in Christism, 185 ; in Mithraism, 299, 337; bull in, 298 re. ; origin and antiquity of, 300 and note ; and evangelist symbols, 309 «.; and cults of antiquity, 299 ff.; and chair of Peter, 336 Zoganes, the, 160 Zoroaster, 57, 272. See Zarathustra Zulus, human sacrifice by, 124 PBINTEDBY WATTS AND CO., JOHNSON'S COURT, FLEET STBEET, LONDON, B.C. 3 9002 00664 1147