Introduction to the History of Religions Part 1

Introduction to the History of Religions.

by Crawford Howell Toy.

PREFACE

The object of this volume is to describe the princ.i.p.al customs and ideas that underlie all public religion; the details are selected from a large ma.s.s of material, which is increasing in bulk year by year. References to the higher religions are introduced for the purpose of ill.u.s.trating lines of progress.

The a.n.a.lytic table of contents and the index are meant to supplement each other, the one giving the outline of the discussion, the other giving the more important particulars; the two together will facilitate the consultation of the book. In the selected list of works of reference the t.i.tles are arranged, as far as possible, in chronological order, so as to indicate in a general way the progress of investigation in the subjects mentioned.

My thanks are due to the publishers for the care they have taken in the printing of the volume, and to their proofreaders, particularly to the chief proofreader, for not a few helpful suggestions.

C. H. T.

CAMBRIDGE, Ma.s.sACHUSETTS

CHAPTER I

NATURE OF RELIGION

+1+. It appears probable that primitive men endowed with their own qualities every seemingly active object in the world. Experience forced them to take note of the relations of all objects to themselves and to one another. The knowledge of the sequences of phenomena, so far as the latter are not regarded as acting intentionally on him, const.i.tutes man's science and philosophy; so far as they are held to act on him intentionally, the knowledge of them const.i.tutes his theory of religion, and his sense of relation with them is his religious sentiment. Science and religion are coeval in man's history, and both are independently continuous and progressive. At first science is in the background because most objects, since they are believed to be alive and active, are naturally supposed by man to affect him purposely; it grows slowly, keeping pace with observation, and constantly abstracting phenomena from the domain of religion.[1] Religion is man's att.i.tude toward the universe regarded as a social and ethical force; it is the sense of social solidarity with objects regarded as Powers, and the inst.i.tution of social relations with them.

+2+. These Powers are thought of in general as mysterious, and as mightier than ordinary living men.[2] Ordinarily the feeling toward them on man's part is one of dependence--he is conscious of his inferiority.

In some forms of philosophic thought the man regards himself as part of the one universal personal Power, or as part of the impersonal Whole, and his att.i.tude toward the Power or the Whole is like that of a member of a composite political body toward the whole body; such a position is possible, however, only in a period of very advanced culture.

+3+. There being no records of initial humanity, it is hardly possible for us to know certainly what the earliest men's feeling was toward the animate and inanimate forces around them. Not improbably it was simply fear, the result of ignorance of their nature and absence of social relations with them. But in the human communities known to us, even the lowest, the relations with extrahuman beings appear to be in general of a mixed nature, sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly, but neither pure love nor pure hatred. So refined a feeling as love for a deity is not found among savages. As religion springs from the human demand for safety and happiness as the gift of the extrahuman Powers, hostility to them has been generally felt to be opposed to common sense.[3] Coercion there has been, as in magical procedures, or to bring a stubborn deity to terms; and occasional antagonism (for example, toward foreign G.o.ds); but not hatred proper as a dogma, except in the great ethical religions toward evil spirits, and in certain elaborate philosophic systems--as, for example, in the Gnostic conception of an imperfect Demiurge, or in the a.s.sumption of an original blind Chance or blind Will whose products and laws are regarded as not ent.i.tled to respect and obedience.

+4+. Instead of complete friendliness and unfriendliness in early tribes we find more commonly between the two a middle ground of self-regarding equipoise. The savage, the half-civilized man, and the peasant often deal with superhuman Powers in a purely selfish commercial spirit, courting or neglecting them as they seem likely to be useful or not.

The Central Australian (who may be credited with a dim sense of the superhuman) conducts his ceremonies, intended to insure a supply of food, apparently without the slightest emotion of any sort except the desire for gain.[4] The Italian peasant, who has vowed a wax candle to a saint in return for a favor to be shown, does not scruple to cheat the saint, after the latter has performed his part of the agreement, by offering tallow instead of wax, if he thinks he can do so with impunity.

A recusant deity is sometimes neglected or even kicked by way of punishment or to force him to give the desired aid, and a G.o.d or a saint is valued and sought after in proportion to his supposed ability to be useful.

+5+. And this navely utilitarian point of view is by no means confined to the lowest forms of religion; in the Old Testament, for example, the appeal to Yahveh is generally based on his a.s.sumed power to bestow temporal blessings,[5] and this is a widespread att.i.tude at the present day in religious communities, where salvation is commonly the end had in view by the worshiper. Love toward the deity simply on account of his personal moral character, without regard to the benefit (namely happiness) to be got from him, is found, if found at all, only in highly cultivated natures, and is rare in these. And, in truth, it is difficult if not impossible to justify religion except on the ground that it brings satisfaction (that is, happiness through and in perfection of nature) in the broadest and highest sense of that term, for otherwise it could not be regarded as a good thing.

+6+. On the other hand, fear of the superhuman Power is a common feeling, recognizable everywhere, at all times, and in all stages of social and intellectual development. By many it is regarded as the original and essential att.i.tude of the religious mind.[6] To this view it is sometimes objected that religion could never have arisen from fear--that religion, as a cult, of necessity involves amicable relations between man and the deity. The objection, however, is based on an arbitrary and incorrect definition of religion; it is quite conceivable that man might cultivate the deity through fear of the latter's displeasure, and that an elaborate system of ceremonies and beliefs might arise from the desire to avert his anger. Such a conception--which is certainly not a lofty one--is not unnatural in the presence of a great Power whose dispositions and purposes are not well understood; numerous examples of such an att.i.tude might be cited from various religions, savage and civilized.

+7+. But, on historical grounds, as in the examples given above, it seems better to say that the earliest known att.i.tude of man toward the superhuman Power is one of interested observation and fluid emotion--the feeling is determined by experience of phenomena. The man is pleased, displeased and afraid, suspicious or careless, according as he sees things to be helpful, harmful, doubtful, or resultless. In process of time, by observation and reflection, he succeeds in tabulating phenomena, and more or less definitely fixing his emotional att.i.tude toward their a.s.sumed cause. A tradition is gradually established, and men are trained from infancy to welcome certain things, to fear others, and to accept certain others as meaningless; from time to time strange things will appear, and these will be treated according to established principles or will remain mysterious. A germinal conception of natural law will arise from the observation of periodically occurring phenomena (such as the rising and setting of the sun, periodic rains, tides) and familiar facts of everyday life, as, for example, the habits of men and other animals. Everything outside this sphere will be ascribed to extrahuman agency--so sickness, death, and sometimes birth.[7]

+8+. The history of religion, which is a part of the history of thought, necessarily shows, as is observed above, a constant enlargement of the domain of natural law, and a consequent contraction of the direct action of the supernatural, though this does not always or generally lessen the conviction that the Supernatural Power, acting through natural law, controls all things. In this process, also, the conception of the att.i.tude of the Supernatural Power is more or less definitely fixed; a formulation of signs is accomplished, whereby it is known whether the deity, at particular moments, is pleased or displeased, and whether a given deity is generally friendly or hostile. This method of determining the att.i.tude of the deity continued into late stages of social life, and still exists even in professedly Christian communities.[8]

+9+. As the basis of the religious feeling we must suppose a sense and conception of an extrahuman Something, the cause of things not otherwise understood. All things were supposed to have life, and therefore to be loci of force; man's sense of social relation with this force const.i.tuted his religion. This sense was at first doubtless vague, ill-defined, or undefined, and in this form it is now found in certain tribes.[9] Gradually, as the processes of human life and of the external world become better known, and the vastness of the extrahuman control becomes evident, the Something is conceived of as great, then as indefinitely great, and finally, under the guidance of philosophic thought, as infinite. Thus the sense of the infinite may be said to be present in man's mind in germinal form at the beginning of truly human life, though it does not attain full shape, is not formulated, and is not effective, till the period of philosophic culture is reached.[10]

+10+. As far as our present knowledge goes, religion appears to be universal among men. There is no community of which we can say with certainty that it is without religion. There are some doubtful cases--for example, certain Australian tribes reported on by Spencer and Gillen, among whom it is difficult to discover any definite religious feeling: they offer no sacrifices or pet.i.tions, and appear to recognize no personal relations with any supernatural Power, beyond the belief that the spirits of the dead are active in their midst, causing sickness, death, and birth; nor is there any sign that they have lost earlier more definite beliefs.[11] Yet they have solemn ceremonies in which human blood plays a great part, and these may have reference to the intervention of supernatural beings, the term "supernatural" being taken as expressing any mysterious fact lying outside of the common course of things. A mysterious being called Twan is spoken of in initiation ceremonies, chiefly, it seems, to frighten or train the boys.

Is there an indication that the tribal leaders have risen above the popular belief in such a being? Experience shows that it is difficult for civilized men to get at the religious ideas of savages; and it is possible, in spite of the careful investigations thus far made, that the last word on Central Australian beliefs has not yet been spoken. A similar reserve must be exercised in regard to reports of certain other tribes, whose ceremonies and inst.i.tutions have appeared to some European and American observers to be without a religious element.[12]

+11+. There is at present no satisfactory historical evidence (whatever psychological ground there may be, or whatever deduction from the theory of evolution may seem necessary) of the existence of a subreligious stage of human life--a stage in which there is only a vague sense of some extrahuman power affecting man's interests, without definition of the power, and without attempt to enter into social relations with it.[13]

+12+. True, in the great ma.s.s of existing savage humanity we find social and religious customs so definite that we are forced to suppose a long preceding period of development. It has even been held that traces of religious conceptions are discernible in the first surviving records of "prehistoric" man, the contemporary of the cave bear--a period separated from the earliest clear historical records by many millenniums;[14] but, though the existence of such conceptions is by no means improbable, the alleged traces are too dim to build a theory on. The supposition of a continuous religious development from the earliest times is in accord with all that we know of human history, but, until more facts come to light, it will be prudent to reserve opinion as to the character of prehistoric religion.[15]

+13+. In general, religious development goes hand in hand with social organization. Those groups which, like the Rock Veddas of Ceylon (described by Sarasin) and the Yahgans of Tierra del Fuego (described by Hyades and Deniker), have scarcely any clan organization, have also scarcely any religion. In most of the lowest communities known to us we find well-const.i.tuted clans and tribes, with strict (and usually complicated) laws of relationship and marriage, and a somewhat developed form of religion.[16] Here again it is evident that we see in the world only the later stages of a long social process; the antecedent history of this process belongs to sociological science, and does not concern us here;[17] its later history is inseparably connected with the development of religion.

+14+. It is in this social process that science, philosophy, art, and ethics are constructed, and these, though distinct from the religious sentiment, always blend with it into a unity of life. Religion proper is simply an att.i.tude toward a Power; the nature and activity of the Power and the mode of approaching it are constructed by man's observation and reflection. The a.n.a.lysis of the external world and of man's body and mind, the discovery of natural laws, the history of the internal and external careers of the human race--this is the affair of science and philosophy; rules of conduct, individual and communal, grow up through men's a.s.sociation with one another in society, their basis being certain primary instincts of self-a.s.sertion and sympathy; art is the product of the universal sense of beauty. All these lines of growth stand side by side and coalesce in unitary human life.

+15+. The external history of religion is the history of the process by which the religious sentiment has attached itself to the various conceptions formed by man's experience: ritual is the religious application of the code of social manners; the G.o.ds reflect human character; churches follow the methods of social organization; monotheism springs from the sense of the physical and moral unity of the world. Ideas concerning the nature and functions of the deity, the nature of the soul and of conscience, and future life are all products of scientific thought and might exist if religion did not exist, that is, if men did not recognize any practical relations between themselves and the deity. But, as a matter of fact, the religious sentiment, coexisting with these ideas, has always entered into alliance with them, creating nothing, but appropriating everything. Supernatural sanctions and emotional coloring are products of general experience and feeling.

The intellectual and ethical content of religion varies with the intellectual and ethical culture of its adherents; we may speak properly of the philosophy and morals, not of a religion, but of the people who profess it.

+16+. The internal history of religion is the history of individual religious emotional experience (a phenomenon that hardly appears at all in the records of early life), and becomes especially interesting only in periods of advanced culture. It is true that this experience is based on the whole reflective life of man, whose beginnings go back to the earliest times. Aspirations and ideals, connected especially with man's religious life, spring from the long line of experiences with which men have always been struggling. The central fact of the higher religious experience is communion and union with the deity, and the roots of this conception are found in all the religious ideas and usages that have been formulated and practiced in human history. The study of such ideas and practices is thus important for the understanding of the later more refined spiritual life, as in turn this latter throws light on its crude predecessors. It is no disparagement to the higher forms of thought that they have grown from feeble beginnings, and it does not detract from the historical value of primitive life that we must decline to credit it with depth and refinement. Every phase and every stadium of human experience has its value, and the higher stages must be estimated by what they are in themselves. In the history of religion the outward and the inward elements have stood side by side in a unitary experience.

But, though the deeper feeling is necessarily more or less closely connected with the external history, it is an independent fact requiring a separate treatment, and will be only occasionally referred to in the present volume.

CHAPTER II

THE SOUL

+17+. The doctrine of the soul is so interwoven with the history of religious beliefs that a brief statement of its early forms will be appropriate before we enter on the consideration of religious inst.i.tutions and ideas.[18]

1. NATURE OF THE SOUL

+18+. The belief in an interior something in man, different from the body, appears to be practically universal in early human history; the ideas concerning the nature of the soul have changed from time to time, but no tribe of men has yet been found in which it is certain that there is no belief in its existence. The Central Australians, religiously one of the least-developed communities known, believe in ghosts, and a ghost presupposes some sort of substance different from the ordinary body. Of some tribes, as the Pygmies of Central Africa and the Fuegians, we have no exact information on this point. But in all cases in which there is information traces of a belief in a soul are found. We are not concerned here with philosophic views, like that of Buddhism and many modern psychologists, that do not admit the existence of the soul as a separate ent.i.ty. The proofs of the universality of the belief in a soul are scattered through all books that deal with man's religious const.i.tution and history.[19]

+19+. For the basis of a universal fact of human experience we naturally seek a universal or essential element of human thought. In this case we must a.s.sume a natural or instinctive conviction of the existence of an internal life or being--a consciousness (at first doubtless dim and vague) of something diverse and separate from the visible physical being, a sense of mental activity in thought, feeling, and will.

+20+. It is not surprising that we do not meet with the expression of such a consciousness among savages: partly, as is well known, they are like children, intellectually incapable of formulating their instinctive beliefs (and they have, consequently, no word to express such a formulation); partly, they are not disposed to speak frankly on subjects that they regard as sacred or mysterious. Attempts at formulation follow the lines of culture, and it is not till a comparatively late stage that they reach definite shape.

+21+. The interior being, whose existence was vaguely felt, was recognized by early man in many common experiences. Certain phenomena were observed that seemed to be universal accompaniments of life, and these, by a strictly scientific method of procedure, were referred to an inward living thing. It was hardly possible for early observers not to notice that when the breath ceased the life ceased; hence many peoples have regarded the breath as the life, and as the form of the interior being, and in many languages the words for 'soul' and 'spirit' are derived from the word for 'breath'.[20] The breath and therefore the soul of a dying man might be received (inhaled) by any person present; it was sometimes obligatory on a son to receive his father's last breath--he thereby acquired the father's qualities.[21]

+22+. Another accompaniment of the body that attracted the attention of early men was the shadow, for which the science of that day, unacquainted with optical laws, could account only on the supposition that it was a double of the man, another self, a something belonging in the same general category with the breath-soul, though usually distinguished from it.[22] The shadow was regarded as a sort of independent objective being, which might be seized and destroyed, for example, by a crocodile, as the man pa.s.sed along a river bank; yet, as it was the man, its destruction involved the man's death.[23] The soul, regarded as a shadow, could not cast a shadow. Similarly one's reflection in water was regarded as a double of him.[24]

+23+. Blood was known by observation in very early times to be intimately connected with life, acquired the mystery and sacredness that attached to life, and has played a great part in religious ceremonies.[25] As soul is life, a close relation between blood and soul appears in the thought of lower and higher peoples, though the relation is not always the same as that described above. The blood is sometimes said to be the soul,[26] sometimes the soul is supposed to be in the blood as it is in the hair or any other part of the body. Blood could not be regarded as the soul in the same sense in which the breath, for example, was the soul--if the breath departed the man's life departed, but one could lose much blood without injury to vital power. It is not to be expected that the relation between the two should be precisely defined in the early stages of society. If Homer at one time speaks of the soul pa.s.sing away through a wound and at another time of the blood so pa.s.sing (death being the result),[27] this variation must not be pressed into a statement of the exact ident.i.ty of blood and soul. By the Californian Maidu the soul is spoken of as a 'heart', apparently by reason of the connection of the heart with the blood and the life.[28]

There is to be recognized, then, a vague identification of 'soul' and 'blood'; but in common usage the two terms are somewhat differently employed--'soul' is the vital ent.i.ty, the man's personality, 'blood' is the representative of life, especially on its social side (kinsmen are of "one blood," but not of "one soul")[29] and in offerings to the deity. Early man seems, in fact, to have distinguished between life and soul.[30]

+24+. As the soul was conceived of as an independent being, it was natural that it should be held to have a form like that of the external body--it could not be thought of otherwise.[31] This opinion was doubtless confirmed in the savage mind by such experiences as dreams, visions, hallucinations, and illusions, and by such phenomena as shadows and reflections. The dreamer believed that he had been far away during the night, hunting or fighting, and yet the testimony of his comrades convinced him that his body had not left its place; the logical conclusion was that his inner self had been wandering, and this self, as it seemed to him, had walked, eaten, hurled the spear, done all that the ordinary corporeal man would do. In dreams he saw and conversed with his friends or his enemies, all in corporeal form, yet all of them asleep in their several places; their souls also, he concluded, were wandering.

Even in his waking hours, in the gloom of evening or on some wide gleaming plain, he saw, as he thought, shadowy shapes of persons who were dead or far away, and heard mysterious voices and other sounds, which he would naturally refer to the inner self of the absent living or the dead. Reproductions of himself and others appeared on land and in water. All such experiences would go to convince him that there were doubles of himself and of others, and that these were corporeal--only dim, ethereal, with powers greater than those of the ordinary external body.

+25+. While the soul of the living man was most commonly conceived of as a sublimated replica of the ordinary body, it was also supposed in some cases to take the form of some animal--an opinion that may have arisen as regards any particular animal from its appearance at a time when the soul was supposed to be absent from the body,[32] and is to be referred ultimately to the belief in the ident.i.ty of nature of animals and man.

The souls of the dead also were sometimes supposed to take the shape of animals, or to take up their abode in animals[33] or in trees (as in Egypt): such animals (tigers, for example) were commonly dangerous, and this theory of incarnation is an expression of the widely diffused belief in the dangerous character of the souls of the dead. In later, cultivated times the bird became a favorite symbol of the soul--perhaps from its swift and easy flight through the air.[34]

+26+. Savage science, though it generally identified the soul with the breath, and regarded it as a separate interior form, seems not to have attempted to define its precise locus, posture, and extension within the body--the early man was content to regard it as a vague homunculus. The whole body was looked on as the seat of life, and was sometimes eaten in order to acquire its qualities, especially the quality of courage.[35]

Life was supposed to reside in the bones as the solid part of the body, and these were preserved as the basis of a future life.[36] But even in early stages of culture we find a tendency to specialize--courage, for example, was a.s.signed particularly to the head and the heart, which were accounted the most desirable parts of a dead enemy.[37] These organs were selected probably on account of their prominence--the heart also because it was the receptacle of the blood. The soul was located by the Indians of Guiana in the pupil of the eye.[38]

+27+. Gradually a more precise localization of qualities was made by the Semites, Greeks, Romans, and other peoples. These, for reasons not clearly known to us, a.s.signed the princ.i.p.al emotional faculties to the most prominent organs of the trunk of the body. The Semites placed thought and courage in the heart and the liver, anger in the liver (the bile), love and grief in the bowels, voluntary power in the kidneys.[39]