Introduction to the History of Religions Part 2

+64+. 3. It may be considered an advance in the organization of the future life when the soul is supposed to go to some distant place on the earth or in the sea or in the sky.[128] This is an attempt to separate the spheres of the living and the dead, and thus at once to define the functions of the dead and relieve the living from the fear of them. The land of the dead is sometimes vaguely spoken of as lying on earth, far off in some direction not precisely defined--east, west, north, or south--in accordance with traditions whose origin is lost in the obscurity of the past.

+65+. Possibly in some cases it is the traditional original home of the tribe;[129] more often, it would seem, some local or astronomical fact has given the suggestion of the place; one Egyptian view was that the western desert (a wide mysterious region) was the abode of the departed; it was a widespread belief that the dead went to where the sun disappeared beneath the horizon.[130] Tribes living near the sea or a river often place the other world beyond the sea or the river,[131] and a ferryman is sometimes imagined who sets souls over the water.[132]

Mountains also are regarded as abodes of the dead.[133] It is not unnatural that the abodes of departed souls should be placed in the sky, whose height and brightness, with its crowd of luminous bodies, made it an object of wonder and awe, and caused it to be regarded as the dwelling place of the happy G.o.ds, with whom deserving men would naturally be. Sometimes the expanse of the upper air was regarded as the home of souls (as in Samoa), sometimes a heavenly body--the sun (in India), or the moon (in the Bowditch Islands), or the stars.[134] The schemes being vague, several of these conceptions may exist side by side at the same place and time.

+66+. The occupations of the dead in these regions are held usually to be the same as those of the living; no other view is possible in early stages of social life. Generally all the apparatus of earthly life (food, utensils, weapons) is placed on the grave or with the body, and wives and slaves are slain to be the companions of the deceased.

+67+. 4. A more decided separation between the living and the dead is made in the conception of the underground world as the abode of the latter. It was, however, only at a late period that this conception was carried far enough to make the separation effective. Among the Central Australians there were folk-stories of early men who traveled under the ground, but this is represented as merely an extraordinary way of getting from one place to another on the surface of the earth. Some North American tribes tell of an underground world inhabited by the ants and by beings similar to man, but those who live up on the earth are seen there only by accident, as when some hero dares the descent.[135]

The conception of a real subterranean or submarine hades is found, however, among many savage and barbarous peoples, as the Samoans, the inhabitants of New Guinea, the Zulus, the Navahos, the Eskimo, the Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, and others.[136]

+68+. These pictures of the future world are crude, and usually stand side by side with others; they are experiments in eschatology. But the constructive imagination moved more and more toward an organized underground hades as the sole abode of the dead--the place to which all the dead go. Such a hades is found among the civilized peoples of antiquity, Egyptians, Semites, Hindus, Greeks, and Romans, and, in more recent times, among the Teutons (Scandinavians). The suggestion for this position may have come from the grave (though it does not appear that the grave was regarded as the permanent abode of the dead), and from caverns that seemed to lead down into the bowels of the earth. The descent of souls into a subterranean world offered no difficulties to early imagination: ghosts, like the Australian ancestors, could move freely where living men could not go; where there was no cavern like that by which aeneas pa.s.sed below,[137] they could pa.s.s through the ground.

+69+. A lower region offered a wide land for the departed, with the possibility of organization of its denizens. Ghosts gradually lost their importance as a factor in everyday life; sights and sounds that had been referred to wandering souls came to be explained by natural laws. Wider geographical knowledge made it difficult to a.s.sign the ghosts a mundane home, and led to their relegation to the sub-mundane region. Further, the establishment of great nations familiarized men with the idea that every large community should have its own domain. The G.o.ds were gradually ma.s.sed, first in the sky, the ocean, and hades, and then in heaven. For the dead the first organization (if that term may be allowed) was in hades; the separation into heaven and h.e.l.l came later. A specific divine head of the Underworld is found in Egypt, Babylonia and a.s.syria, India, Greece, Rome, but not in Israel. Such a definite system of government could exist only when something approaching a pantheon had been established; the Babylonians, for example, whose pantheon was vague, had also a vague G.o.d of hades.

+70+. Theories of the occupations of the dead varied in the early civilized stage, before the rise of the idea of ethical retribution in the other life. In the absence of earthly relations, imagination could conceive of nothing for them to do, and hence an ardent desire for the continuance of earthly life.[138] For the Hebrews the Underworld was without pursuits; the shades sat motionless, in the dress and according to the rank of the upper world, without emotions or aims (except a sparkle of malicious satisfaction when some great man came down from earth), and without religious worship.[139] A similar view was held by the Greeks and the Romans. Certain Egyptian doc.u.ments speak of mundane occupations for the dead, but these doc.u.ments belong to a comparatively late stage of culture, and what the earlier view was we do not know.[140] Of Hindu ideas, also, on this point we have only relatively late notices.

+71+. 5. A radical transformation in the conception of the state of the dead was effected by the introduction of the idea of moral retribution into the life of the Underworld.[141] The basis of the movement was the natural conception of life as determined by ethical considerations, but the process of transformation has extended over thousands of years and has hardly yet reached its completion. In the lowest eschatological systems known to us there is no marked difference in the status of departed souls; so among the Central Australians, the tribes of New Guinea and the Torres Straits islands, the Zulus, the Malagasy, the West African peoples, and some North American tribes.[142]

+72+. The earliest grounds of distinction are ritualistic and social; these occur among the higher savages and survive in some civilized peoples. The Fijians a.s.sign punishment in the other world to bachelors, men unaccompanied by their wives and children, cowards, and untattooed women.[143] Where circ.u.mcision was a tribal mark, the uncirc.u.mcised, as having no social status, were consigned to inferior places in hades: so among the Hebrews.[144] The omission of proper funeral ceremonies was held in like manner to entail deprivation of privilege in hades: the shade had an undesirable place below, as among the Babylonians and the Hebrews,[145] or was unable to enter the abode of the dead, and wandered forlorn on the earth or on the border of the Underworld, as was the Greek belief.[146] Exposure of the corpse to beasts and birds, making funeral ceremonies impossible, was regarded as a terrible misfortune for the dead.[147]

+73+. Such of these beliefs as relate to violations of ritual appear to spring from the view that the tribal customs are sacred, and from the consequent distinction between tribesmen and foreigners. All persons without the tribal mark were shut out from the privileges of the tribe, were outlaws in this world and the next; and those whose bodies were not properly disposed of lost the support of the tribal deities or of the subterranean Powers.[148] It was also held that the body retained the form in which it went down to hades;[149] hence the widespread dread of mutilation, as among the Chinese still. On the other hand the brave were rewarded.[150]

+74+. Sometimes earthly rank determines future conditions--a natural corollary to what is stated above (--72 f.). A distinction is made between n.o.bles and common people in the Bowditch Islands.[151] The members of the Fijian Areoi Society are held to enjoy special privileges in the other world.[152] The belief in the Marquesas Islands is that the sky is for high G.o.ds and n.o.bles.[153] According to John Smith, in savage Virginia only n.o.bles and priests were supposed to survive after death.[154] The North American Mandans (of Dakota), according to one view, a.s.sign to the brave in the hereafter the delightful villages of the G.o.ds.[155] When souls are supposed to enter into animals different animals are a.s.signed to n.o.bles and common men.[156] Kings and n.o.bles retain their superiority of position and are sometimes attended by their slaves and officers.[157]

+75+. The manner of death is sometimes significant. The Karens hold that persons killed by elephants, famine, or sword, do not enter the abode of the dead, but wander on the earth and take possession of the souls of men.[158] In Borneo it is supposed that those who are killed in war become specters.[159] The belief in the Marquesas Islands is that warriors dying in battle, women dying in childbirth, and suicides go up to the sky.[160] In regard to certain modes of death opposite opinions are held in the Ladrone (Marianne) Islands and the Hervey group: in the former those who die by violence are supposed to be tortured by demons, those who die a natural death are believed to be happy; according to the view in the latter group these last are devoured by the G.o.ddess of death, and the others are happy. In the one case violent death, it would seem, is supposed to be due to the anger of the G.o.ds, and to be a sign of something bad in the man; in the other case happiness is compensation for the misfortune of a violent death, and natural death, being the fate of ordinary people, leaves one at the mercy of the mistress of the other world.

+76+. The advance to the conception of moral retribution hereafter could take place only in communities in which earthly life was organized on a moral basis. The beginning of the movement is seen in certain savage tribes. Savages have their codes, which generally recognize some ethical virtues among the tribal obligations. Stealing, lying, failure in hospitality, cowardice, violation of marital rights--in general, all the acts that affect injuriously the communal life--are, as a rule, condemned by the common sense of the lowest peoples, and the moral character of the G.o.ds reflects that of their worshipers. By reason of the sense of solidarity the faults of individuals affect not only themselves but also their communities, and the G.o.ds care for communities as well as for individuals. Whenever, then, there is an inquest in the other world, these faults, it is likely, will be punished. On account of the paucity of our information, it is not possible to make a general statement on this point, but examples of future moral control occur in many savage creeds.[161] In such systems the nature of the life beyond the grave is variously conceived: sometimes as cheerless and gloomy (as in Finland), sometimes as pleasant (as in Samoa, New Guinea, New Caledonia, Bowditch Islands, some North American tribes, Brazil).[162]

+77+. In tracing the growth of the conception of distinctions in the other world,[163] we find first a vague opinion that those who do badly in this life are left to shift for themselves hereafter;[164] that is, there is no authority controlling the lives of men below. In the majority of cases, however, distinctions are made, but these, as is remarked above, are based on various nonmoral considerations, and have small cultural value.[165]

+78+. In the published reports of savage beliefs there is not always mention of a formal examination of the character of the dead, and probably nothing of the sort was imagined by the lowest tribes. It appears, however, in such relatively advanced peoples as the Fijians[166] and the Khonds.[167]

+79+. Moral retribution proper is found only in great civilized nations and not in all of them; the early Semites appear to have retained the old conception of punishment for ritual faults or failures, and for offenses against the national welfare. For the Hebrews the proof is found in the Old Testament pa.s.sim; in the Babylonian and a.s.syrian literature, as far as published, there is one sign of departure from the scheme sketched in the _Descent of Ishtar_: Hammurabi (ca. 2000 B.C.) invokes the curses of the G.o.ds on any one who shall destroy the tablet of his penal code, and wishes that such a one may be deprived of pure water after death. In regard to the South Arabians, the pre-Mohammedan North Arabians, and the Aramaeans, we have no information; and for the Phoenicians there is only the suggestion involved in the curse invoked on those who violate a tomb, and in the funeral ceremonies.[168] But the same general religious ideas prevailed throughout the ancient Semitic area, and we may probably a.s.sume that the Hebrew conception was the universal one.

+80+. In Egypt, India, China, Persia, Greece, Rome, however, and among the Jews in the Greek period,[169] higher ethical conceptions were carried over to the Underworld; judgment, it was held, was p.r.o.nounced on the dead, and rewards and punishments dealt out to them according to their moral character. The Jews and the Persians went a step further, and conceived of a final general judgment, a final winding-up of human history, and a permanent reconstruction of the world on a basis largely moral, though tinged with local religious elements--a grandiose idea that has maintained itself up to the present time, embodying the conviction that the outcome of life depends on character, and that ethical retribution is the essence of the world.

+81+. This ethical const.i.tution of the life hereafter led to the local separation of the good from the bad. Such a separation was imagined by comparatively undeveloped peoples whose ethical principle was chiefly ritualistic, as, for example, the Fijians, the American Indians, and by civilized peoples in their early stages, the Vedic Hindus[170] (Yama's abode in the sky, and a pit) and the Greeks (the Homeric Elysian Fields, and Tartarus).[171]

+82+. In fact, a recognition of a place of happiness and a place of punishment in the other life accompanies sooner or later a certain stage of ethical culture in all communities. In India it appears in the late Vedic and post-Vedic periods, together with the ethical doctrine of metempsychosis, and though, as is natural in such a stage of development, various ideas are held respecting the destinies of the good and the bad, the ethical distinction between these cla.s.ses of persons, with a systematic awarding of rewards and punishments, becomes firmly established: Yama becomes an ethical judge. In the Brahmanas, Manu, and the Mahabharata, we find a sort of heaven for the virtuous and a h.e.l.l for the vicious. While the academic thought of Brahmanism and the altruistic systems of Jainism and Buddhism looked to the absorption of the departed into the All, the popular Hindu faith held fast to the scheme of happiness and wretchedness in the future.[172] As in Dante's _Divina Commedia_, the heaven was somewhat colorless, the h.e.l.l more distinct and picturesque; pain is acute and varied, happiness is calm and uniform.

+83+. The later Egyptian eschatological development was not unlike the later Hindu. The good were rewarded with delightful habitations in the West or with the Sun; the bad were tortured in a gloomy place.[173]

+84+. As regards the early Greek eschatological scheme, it is suggested by S. Reinach[174] that the descriptions of punishments in Tartarus (as in the cases of Tantalus and others) arose from misunderstood representations of the condition of the dead in the other world, they being represented either as engaged in the occupations of this life, or as they were at the moment of death. The great punishments, in fact, are a.s.signed only to heroic mythical offenders, but there seems to be no reason why the idea of retribution should not be supposed to enter into such descriptions. Separation of the good from the bad on ethical grounds appears in Greece in the time of Plato. In various pa.s.sages he describes the savage places (Tartarus and others) to which criminals go after death, and the happy abodes of the virtuous.[175] These abodes were not with the G.o.ds; the occasional translations to heaven (Heracles, Ganymede) are exceptional honors paid to heroes and favorites.

+85+. The Jewish conception of a punitive future belongs to the Greek period of Jewish history, and was probably developed on Hebrew lines under Greek and Egyptian influence. A combination of the Old Testament view of future retribution on earth with the conception of torture in the other world is given in Enoch.[176] In some circles Sheol was placed in the West and divided into two regions, one of happiness, the other of punishment,[177] or the good dwell with the angels in heaven, the bad in h.e.l.l.[178] By others the abodes of the dead were placed in the heavenly regions: of the seven heavens, the second was a.s.signed to the bad and the third to the good.[179] With all the variation of locality, the separation of the bad from the good is made permanent, and this distinction is maintained in the New Testament, which throughout a.s.signs the wicked to h.e.l.l (Gehenna or Tartarus), while the righteous dwell sometimes on the renovated earth, sometimes in the heavenly regions.[180]

+86+. The Jewish and Christian books mentioned above content themselves with the general statement that the punishment of the wicked will be torture by fire and cold. Succeeding Christian books elaborated the picture of torture with great ingenuity; the _Apocalypse of Peter_, following and expanding the description of Plato and Enoch, has an elaborate barbarous apparatus of punishment, and this scheme, continued through a series of works,[181] has its culmination in Dante's Inferno, where, however, the ethical element is p.r.o.nounced, though colored by the poet's likes and dislikes.

+87+. _Purgatory._ The wicked dead were not always left hopeless in their place of punishment. Kindly human feeling (shown in early stages by pious care for the well-being of the dead) and the a.n.a.logy of earthly procedures, civil and religious, led to the view that, after the expiation of faults by suffering, the evildoer might be freed from his prison and gain a place of happiness. Pardon and purification were effected on earth by punishments (scourging, imprisonment, etc.) or by ritual processes (ablution, fastings, etc.)--why not in the other life?

In some systems of transmigration the man, forced after death to a.s.sume a lower form, may rise by good conduct to a higher form. In Plato's imaginative construction of the Underworld[182] those who have lived neither well nor ill are purified in the Acherusian lake and then receive rewards according to their deserts; and those who have committed great but not unpardonable crimes may come to the lake (after having suffered the pains of Tartarus) and be freed from trouble if they obtain pardon from those they have wronged. But as here, so hereafter, certain offenses were regarded as unpardonable. The purgatorial conception pa.s.sed into patristic and Roman and Eastern Christianity and Talmudic and Medieval Judaism.[183]

+88+. _Resurrection._ The doctrine of the resurrection of the dead, which has been fully developed only by the Persians and the Jews (and from them taken by Christianity and Islam), appears to have grown from simple beginnings. It is the expression of the conviction that the perfect man is made up of soul and body, and its full form is found only in periods of high ethical culture. But in very early times the belief in the intimate connection between body and soul appears in the care taken among certain peoples to preserve the bones or the whole body of the deceased as a possible future abode for the soul;[184] and, on the other hand, as the soul, it was held, might return to the body and be dangerous to the living, means were sometimes employed to frighten it off. It seems to have been believed in some cases that the destruction of the body involved the destruction of the soul (New Zealand). An actual entrance of a departed soul into a human body is involved in some early forms of the doctrine of reincarnation,[185] but this is not the restoration of the dead man's own body. It was held in Egypt (and not improbably elsewhere) that the soul after death might desire to take possession of its own body, and provision was made for such an emergency; but this belief seems not to have had serious results for religious life. A temporary reunion of soul and body appears in the figure of the vampire, which, however, is a part of a popular belief and religiously not important. But these pa.s.sing beliefs indicate a general tendency, and may have paved the way for the more definite conception of bodily restoration.

+89+. The more developed Hindu doctrine (Brahmanic, Jainistic, Buddhistic) recognized a great variety of possible forms of reincarnation (human and nonhuman), and made a step forward by including the continuity or reestablishment of moral life and responsibility (the doctrine of karma).[186] It, however, never reached the form of a universal or partial resurrection.

+90+. The birthplace of this latter doctrine appears to have been the region in which Mazdaism arose, the country south of the Caspian Sea.

Windischmann infers from Herodotus, iii, 62, that it appears as a Mazdean belief as early as the sixth century B.C.[187] This is doubtful, but it is reported as a current belief by Theopompus.[188] Its starting-point was doubtless the theory of reincarnation, which, we may suppose, the Iranian Aryans shared with their Indian brethren. Precisely what determined the Iranian movement toward this specific form of reincarnation we have no means of knowing. It may be due to the same genius for simple organization that led the Zoroastrians to discard the ma.s.s of the old G.o.ds and elevate Ahura Mazda to the chief place in the pantheon; their genius for practical social religious organization may have induced them to select human reincarnation as the most natural and the most effective morally, and to discard other forms as unworthy.[189]

The dead man's own body would then be the natural dwelling place of his soul; but a refined body (as in 1 Cor. xv) might be regarded as better suited to the finer life of the future. Whatever the cause, they adopted this conception, and probably through their influence it pa.s.sed to, or was formulated by, the Jews, among whom it appears in the second century B.C. (in the Book of Daniel).[190] In Daniel and 2 Maccabees resurrection is confined to the Jews; in Enoch it is sometimes similarly confined, sometimes apparently universal.[191] In the New Testament also the same diversity of statement appears; resurrection seems to be confined to believers in some pa.s.sages[192] and to be universal in others.[193] In the former case it is regarded as a reward of piety and as a consequence of the intimate relation between the man and G.o.d or Christ; unbelievers then remain in hades, where they are punished. But universal resurrection was probably thought of as involved in the grandiose conceptions of a final judgment and a final moral restoration.[194]

5. POWERS OF THE SOUL

+91+. Savage lore takes account of the powers of the separated soul only; the qualities and functions of the earthly incorporate soul are accepted as a part of the existing familiar order, and are not a.n.a.lyzed or discussed. It was different with the departed soul, which, because of its strangeness and mystery, was credited with extraordinary powers, and this part of savage science was gradually developed, through observation and inference, into an important system. In the search for causes, the Shade, its independent existence once established, came to be regarded as the agent in many procedures of which no probable account could otherwise be given.

+92+. The greatest activity of the departed soul is found in the earliest known period of culture, when it was not yet relegated to hades or to the sky, but dwelt on earth, either near its former habitation or in a distant region from which it might return. Its powers of movement and action are then held to be all that imagination can suggest. Such souls move through the air or under the ground, enter houses through obstacles impenetrable to the earthly man, pa.s.s into the human body, a.s.sume such shapes as pleases them. Divested of gross earthly bodies, they are regarded as raised above all ordinary limitations of humanity.

Of these conceptions, that of the ghost's superhuman power of movement remains in the popular faith to the present day.

+93+. The practical question for the early man is the determination of the relation of departed souls to earthly life. Among savage tribes their att.i.tude is sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly, more often the latter.[195] To fear the unknown is a human instinct. Shades are looked on as aliens, and aliens are generally enemies. In particular, ghosts are conceived of as sometimes wandering about in search of food or warmth, or as cherishing enmity toward persons who had wronged them in their earthly life. They are supposed to be capable of inflicting disease or pain, and precautions are taken against them. Cases are reported of persons who killed themselves in order that, as ghosts, they might wreak vengeance on enemies.[196] On the other hand, to the members of its own family the departed soul is sometimes held to be friendly, or not unfriendly, but among savages it is not thought of as a potent and valuable friend.

+94+. In the more advanced cults the functions of the departed souls become larger and more important. They are regarded as having the power of foretelling the future, and are consulted.[197] They become guardian spirits, and a cult of souls arises.[198] In some higher forms of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) they are regarded as mediators between man and the deity, or as advocates for man in the heavenly court.

+95+. _Prayer for the dead._ Before the ethical stage of religion the moral condition and needs of the dead did not come into consideration; their physical wants were met by performance of funeral rites and by supplying them with food and other necessities of life,[199] and they later came to be looked on as helpers rather than as needing help; but when this old view pa.s.sed away, and the conceptions of judgment and ethical retribution after death were reached, the moral status of the dead became a source of anxiety to the living. It was held that the divine judge might be reached--by intercession or by pet.i.tions, or by the performance of certain ceremonies--and his att.i.tude toward the dead modified.

+96+. A trace of such care for the deceased may be found in the Brahmanic ceremonies intended to secure complete immortality to fathers.[200] In Egypt, in the later times, there was an arrangement for securing for the deceased immunity from punishment for moral offenses: a sacred beetle of stone, inscribed with a charm beginning "O my heart, rise not up against me as a witness," laid on the breast of the mummy, silences the heart in the presence of Osiris, and the man, even though guilty, goes free. Forms of charms were prepared by the priests, and the name of any one who could pay was inserted in blanks left for this purpose.[201] This sort of corrupting procedure was reproduced in some periods of Christianity. In the early Church a custom existed of receiving baptism on behalf of such as died unbaptized;[202] here, apparently, a magical efficacy was ascribed to the act. The first mention of prayer for the dead occurs in a history of the Maccabean wars, where a sin-offering, accompanied by prayer, effects reconciliation for certain soldiers who died in a state of sin (idol symbols were found on their persons).[203] Prayer for the dead has been largely developed in Christianity and Islam.[204]

6. GENESIS OF SPIRITS

+97+. As early science identified life with the soul, it logically attributed a soul to everything that was regarded as living. This category seems to have embraced all the objects of the world--human beings, beasts, plants, weapons, rocks, waters, heavenly bodies. Savages rarely formulate their ideas on such a subject, but the belief in the future existence of nonhuman as well as human things is fairly established by the widespread practice of slaying animals at the tomb and burying with the dead the objects they are supposed to need in the other world. This custom exists among many tribes at the present day, and the contents of ancient tombs prove its existence in former times.

The dead are provided with clothing, implements of labor, weapons, ornaments, food, and as these objects remain in their mundane form by or in the grave, it is held that their souls pa.s.s with the souls of their possessors into the world beyond. Further, the belief in transformation from human to nonhuman forms and vice versa involves the supposition of life in all such things. That the heavenly bodies, similarly, are supposed to be animated by souls appears from the fact that they are regarded as manlike in form, thought, and manner of life: the sun is frequently represented as a venerable man who traverses the sky--the moon being his wife, and the stars their children; and sun and moon sometimes figure as totems. This general conception has been expanded and modified in a great variety of ways among different peoples, but the belief in the anthropomorphic nature of the astral bodies has been an element of all religions except the highest.

+98+. The apparent incongruities in the savage theory--that all things are endowed with life--need occasion us no difficulty. Complete consistency and tenability in such theories is not to be expected. Early men, like the lower animals, were doubtless capable of distinguishing between things living and things dead: a dog quickly discovers whether a moving object is alive. Man and beasts have in such questions canons of criticism derived from long experience.[205]

+99+. But man differs from the beast in that he feels the necessity of accounting for life by the hypothesis of a soul, and as he seems to himself to find evidence of life in plants and minerals (movement, growth, decay), he is justified in attributing souls to all things. He is interested, however, only in movements that affect his welfare.

Whatever his general theory about rocks, a particular rock, as long as it does not affect his life, is for him an inert and worthless ma.s.s, practically dead; but if he discovers that it has power to harm him, it becomes instinct with life, and is treated as a rational being. Man has shown himself practical in all stages of religion; he is always the center of his world, and treats objects and theories with sole regard to his own well-being.

+100+. The world of the savage was thus peopled with souls, and these came to have an independent existence. That this was the case with human souls is pointed out above,[206] and by a.n.a.logy the separateness was extended to all souls. Thus there arose tree-spirits, river-spirits, and other similar extrahuman beings. It is convenient to employ the term 'spirit' as the designation of the soul in a nonhuman object, isolated and independent, and regarded as a Power to be treated with respect. The term is sometimes used of a disembodied human soul, and sometimes of a deity resident in an object of nature. It is better to distinguish, as far as possible, between these different senses of the word. The functions of a spirit are sometimes practically identical with those of a G.o.d. The difference between these two cla.s.ses of extrahuman agents is one of general culture; it is especially determined in any community by the extent of the organization of such agents that has been effected by the community. The cult of spirits is considered below in connection with the description of divine beings.[207]

CHAPTER III

EARLY RELIGIOUS CEREMONIES

+101+. The earliest known forms of social life are characterized by the performance of public ceremonies, which are almost always religious.

Religion in some form enters into all the details of early life--there is no event that is not supposed to be caused or affected by a supernatural Power or influence. A vaguely conceived force (_mana_), an attribute of life, is believed to reside in all things, and under certain circ.u.mstances has to be reckoned with. Mysterious potencies in the shape of souls, spirits, G.o.ds, or mana are held to preside over and control all affairs--birth, sickness, death, hate and love, hunting and war, sowing and reaping. There is no dogma except belief in this extrahuman influence--no conception of moral effort as based on and sanctioned by a definite moral ideal, no struggle of the sort that we call spiritual. Religion consists of a body of practices whose authority rests on precedent; as it is supposed they have existed from time immemorial, they are held to be necessary to secure the well-being of the tribe (a sufficient supply of food, or victory over enemies); to the question why such and such things are done, the common reply of the savage is that without them the thing desired could not be got.