History of Religion

des religions, edi

swissenschaft, edit

Histoire Générale

of Religion and Ethic

of Religious Knowledge has excellen

1905. An account of the progress of o

gious Development, a psychologic

Presidents of the Sections give a record of the most recent progress in every part of our study. Of these see, fo

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who lived by hunting, with stone weapons, animals which are now extinct. How from his earliest and most helpless state man came in various ways to help himself; how he discovered fire, how he improved his weapons and invented tools, how he learned to tame certain of the animals on which he had formerly made war, and instead of wandering about the world came to settle in one place and t

in the primitive condition. Not all savage tribes are thought to be in that condition. The bushmen of Australia, the Andaman Islanders, and others,1 are found to be in such a state in point of habits and acquirements that they must be considered as races which have fallen from a higher position, and present instances of degeneration. But a multitude of savage tribes remain in all quarters of the globe who do not appear to have been thus enfeebled, and who are held to be still in that state in which the dwellers in all parts of the earth were before what we now call civilisation began. They are races among whom civilisation did not spring up, as it did in China or in Peru. From these races we may learn in a general way, though in this great caution is required, what the ancestors of all the civilised nations were. It confirms this conclusion that we find in every civilised nation a number of phenomena, practices, beliefs, stories, which the mental condition of the

lture, chap. ii., where the theory

y.) A new faith has always to begin by adjusting itself to that which it found in possession of the soil, and it always adopts what it can of the old system. We should expect then that the great religions of the world should exhibit features which do not belong to their own structure, but which they inherited, with or against their will, from their uncivilised predecessors. And that is the case, as we shall see afterwards, with all the great religions. They are all full of survivals of the savage state. The old religious associations cling to the face of a land and refuse to be uprooted, whatever changes t

but of the religion of early races. In the next chapter an attempt will be made to describe that religion; but we may say here that there are some features which are generally, though by no means always found in it, and that these features may be regarded for practical purposes as the religion of the primitive world, which everywhere was the forerunner of the great systems. This is the jungle, as it were, overspreading all the early world, out of which like giant trees the great religions arose, and from which they derived and still derive a nourishment they cannot disown. Indeed, we may go much farther. In some of their

red in the morning, why some stones are like men. And he wants to know all these things, and is for ever asking questions. But almost any answer will do for him, the first explanation that turns up is accepted; and while a child finds out pretty soon if he has been told wrong, the savage is so ignorant that he cannot see the absurdest explanation to be false, but sticks to it seriously and goes on using it. There is no consistency in the contents of his mind, and inconsistency does not distress him. He has no classes and orders of things, but considers each thing by itself as it occurs, without putting it in its place with reference to other things. He has no idea of what is possible and what is impossible; these words in fact would have no meaning for him, since he is not aware of any laws by which events are governed. His imagination, accordingly, is not under any restraint; he hits upon all kinds of grotesque theories, and, having no critical faculty to test them, he repeats them

tones. He is living himself; he regards all these as living too. He imagines them like himself, and supposes them to have feelings and passions like his own, to reason as he does, and even if he is told they speak as he does, that is not incredible to him. Thus he lives in a world of infinite confusion, in which there are no laws, no classes of beings, no means of knowing what may happen, or of verifying any statement, where every

be the case. Mr. Lang accounts as follows for the diffusion of the same stories all over the world: "An ancient identity of mental status, and the working of similar mental forces at the attempt to explain the same phenomena, will account without any theory of borrowing, or of transmission of myth, or of original unity of race, for the world-wide

of gods, is universal at the savage stage; and the accounts which some travellers have given of tribes without religion are either set do

state, so devoid of all that has been since acquired, should yet be

impossible, however, to conceive how this could be done. If the religion given at first was a lofty and pure one,-and no other need be thought of in such a connection,-then it implies a condition of human life far above the struggles and uncertainties of savage existence; and both the civilisation and the religion must have been lost afterwards. But how could all mankind forget a pure reli

all stages of his existence the world of which man is aware outside him, and the world of feelings and desires within him are in conflict. But the conviction lives within him that in some way they can be brought into harmony, and that a power exists which rules in both of these discordant realms and in which, if he can identify himself with it, he also will escape from their discord. If this be so, then this necessity to seek after a higher power must have begun to operate as soon as human consciousness appeared. The savage certainly was never unac

rd Lectures, The Evolution of Religion, 1893. Ga

f reverence, and though his treatment of his god be far from what to us seems worthy, or even though he strove to appease a multitude of spirits which he conceived as flitting about him, before he came to form a settled relation of confidence with one being whom he took for his own god. Where the sense of need has sent a human being to hold intercourse with a higher power, there we hold religion is making its appearance. And if this

RECO

the three fol

thropology, Thi

itive Culture, Fo

rd Edition, 1900. A new editi

ual, and Religion,

s, in De l

Anthropologie der N

ons of Primitiv

rs and missionaries are

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ve been omitted. No one set of savages has anything that can be called a system, and different sets of savages are not alike. For the present purpose we are obliged to include under the name, tribes who occupy various positions in the scale of human advancement, and tribes in all sorts of geographical positions, in hot climates and in cold, both rude savage

gher faiths. Remembering what has been said as to the uniformity of savage thought amid its great variety of forms, and looking for those parts of it which have proved to have life in them, rather than for what is merely curious and grotesque, we may venture on our task not without hope. In the present chapter we shall inquire what be

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ancestors and

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similar to his own, he could not fail to wish to open up communication with them. That simple view, that they were living beings with feelings like his own, was enough to go upon. In his anxieties for food or warmth he could not fail to think of the beings who, he had observed, had power to supply him with these comforts, of the rain which he had noticed was able to make food grow, of the sun whose warmth he knew. The thunderstorm was a being who had power to put an end to a long drought; t

the moon. In China heaven itself is worshipped to this day. The Babylonians worshipped the stars. The Vedic gods are primarily the elements. From savage life examples of this earliest state of matters can also be quoted, though mythology has nearly everywhere greatly confused it. The Mincopies adore the sun as a beneficent deity, the moon as an inferior god. To the Natchez the sun is the supreme god; with some tribes of North America the chief god is heaven blowing, the sky with a wind in it, what Longfellow calls the "Great Spirit" or blowing. The Incas invoked together the Creator and the Sun and Thunder.

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Nile and the Ganges did not become sacred by having a mythical being added to them as their spirit; they were themselves sacred beings. Every country is studded with names which reveal to the scholar the primeval sanctity of the spots they belong to; the mountain, the grove, and the individual tree, the rocky gorge, the rock, the grassy knoll, each was once an object of reverence. Britain is full of sacred wells, which once received prayers and offerings. There is no animal that has not once been worshipped. A marked feat

spirit of his friend which visited him. Thus there arises in his mind the conception of a human spirit which is able to leave the body and dwell at a distance from it. It is called by various names,-the shade, the image, the heart, as perhaps when Elisha says his heart went with Gehazi when he went to meet Naaman the Syrian (2 Kings v. 26), the breath, the soul. When the breath or spirit goes away and stays away (in spite of efforts made to bring it back) the man dies. But the spirit is not dead. It has gone away and is staying somewhere else. The spirit resembles the body in shape, but it is of a thin and light consistence, and is able to move about and to pass through the smallest openings, to make unpleasant noises, and to cause its presence to be felt in a variety of ways. In the very earliest times, the savage regards th

ged to fall short of religion, which is the cultivation, not the avoidance, of intercourse with higher powers. The savage has no hope from the spirit, and does not seek his intercourse. But in most forms of the belief in the continued life of the departed, other sentiments than fear prevail; natural affection is felt for the lost relative; th

a spirit which is supposed to be connected with them. Stones, trees, twigs, pieces of bark, roots, corn, claws of birds, teeth, skin, feathers, articles of human manufacture, any conceivable object, will be held in reverence by the savage and regarded as embodying a spirit. Anything that strikes his fancy as being out of the common he will take up and add to his museum of objects, each of which has in it a hidden power. That power, be it repeated, is not connected with the natural quality of the object, but is due to a spirit which has come

e sailors of the eighteenth century to the deities they saw worshipped by the negroes of the West Coast of Africa. De Brosses, a French savant of last century, brought the word fetishism into use as a term for the type of religion of the lowest races. The word has given rise to some confusion, having been appl

e casual object, but the spirit connected with it that the savage worships; but even then we shall be obli

e are instances in which the supreme god appears to be a different being from the nature-god. The Samoyedes worship the sun and moon and the spirits of other parts of nature; but they also believe in a good spirit who is above all. The Supreme Being of the islands of the Pacific bears in New Zealand the name of Tangaroa, and is spoken of in quite metaphysical terms as the uncreated and eternal Creator. Here we may suspect Christian influence. With the Zulus Unkulunkulu the Old-old one might be supposed to be a kind of first cause. But on looking nearer we find he is distinctly a man, the first man, the common ancestor; beyond which idea speculation does not seem to go. Among many North American tribes it is usual to find an animal the chief deity, the hare or the musk-rat or the coyote. It is very common to find in savage beliefs a vague far-off god who is at the back of all the others, takes little part in the management of things, and receives little w

(1898); Galloway, Studies in the Philo

should the more backward races now existing represent a stage of human life belonging to the early world, from spirits residing in outward objects, w

some casual object, as we have described, then he chose higher objects, trees and mountains, rivers and lakes, and even the sun and stars. The heavens at la

is it, surely, that he got the notion of God from some other quarter and applied it in his own grotesque and degraded way; than that the notion of God was taken first from such poor forms and applied afterwards to objects better suited to it. Religion and civilisation go hand in hand, and if civilisation can decay (and leading anthropologists declare that the debased tribes of Australia and West Africa show signs of a higher civilisation they have lost) then religion also may decay. A lower race may borrow religious ideas from a higher and adapt them to their own position, i.e. degrade them. And the progress of religion may still have been upwards on the whole, although ret

he life they witnessed in plants and animals, in sun and moon and other parts of nature, was due to their being inhabited by the spirits of departed men. With all respect for the splendid exposition given by Mr. Spencer2 of the early beliefs of mankind regarding spirits, it is impossible to think that he has made out his case when he treats the gods of early India and

al Institutions, p. 675; "ghost-propit

ther beings, man would judge that they had souls like his own; and so every part of nature came to have its soul, and everything that went on in the universe was to be explained as the activity of souls. It was in this way, according to Mr. Tylor, that the view of the universal animation of nature, characteristic of early thought, was reached. "As the human body was held to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the operatio

eir place in the general animistic system of mankind." He acknowledges that, with few exceptions, great gods have a place as well as smaller gods in every non-civilised system of religion. But in origin and essence he holds they are the same. "The difference is rather of rank than of nature." As chiefs and kings are among men so are the great gods among the lesser spiri

e belief that they had souls or spirits. But how did early man regard these great powers before this? Did they not appear to him adorable by the very impressions they made u

y served by those who need to communicate with him; in having therefore a regular worship, while the spirit is only worshipped when the occasion arises; and in being served from feelings of attachment and trust, and not like the spirits from fear. When gods appear, some writers hold, then and not till then does religion begin; before that point is reached magic and exorcism are the forms used for addressing the unseen beings, but when it is reached we have worship; intercourse is delib

Germans, as a rule, hold the view that the great nature-worship came first, and that the sanctity of the tree and the river came to them from above, these objects being regarded as lesser living beings deserving to be worshipped as well as the greater ones. The English school let the sanctity of these objects come to them as it were from below; when man has come to believe in spirits, he concludes that they have spirits too, and worships the spirits

religions des peuples

of M. André Lefèvre's L

he powers of nature. By several great writers it is held that the worship of these is the original form of all reli

(p. 179, sqq.). First, there are tangible objects, which, however, Mr. Max Müller denies that mankind as a whole ever did worship; such things as stones, shells, and bones. Then second, semi-tangible objects; such as trees, mountains, rivers, the sea, the earth, which supply the material for what may be called semi-deities. And third, intangible objects, such as the sky, the stars, the sun, the dawn, the moon; in these are to be seen the germs of deities. At each of these stages man is seeking not for something finite but for the infinite; from the first he has a presentiment of something far beyond; he grasps successive objects of worship not for themselves but for what they seem to tell of, though it is not there, and this sense of the infinite, even in poor and inadequate beliefs, is the germ of religion in him. When he rises after his long journey to fix his regards on the great powers of nature, he apprehends in them something great and transcendent. He appl

the Origin of

religions presumably began in the same way, e.g. those of China and of Egypt-by the impression made on man from without by great natural objects co-operating with his inner presentiment of the infinite, which they met to a greater degree than any objects he had tried before. Religion was due accordingly to ?sthetic impressions from without, answering an ?sthetic and intellectual inner need. Those needs, then, which led men to make gods of the great powers of earth and heaven were not of an animal or material nature, but belonged to the intellectual part of his constitution. Those who framed such a religion for themselves must have been raised above the pressing necessities and cares of savage life; they were not absorbed in the task of making their living, but had leisure to stand and admire the

r he regards religion, as he considers consciousness itself, not as an original and inseparable element of human nature, but as a thing acquired by man on his way upwards; and he finds the original motive of religion to have lain in egoistic eud?monism, in the selfish desire of happiness, which at tha

et without religion and without morality. The need for food is the motive that brings about the change, for that pure egoist early man has seen that the powers of nature are able to help or hinder him in his search for a living; the sun can set his plants growing or can burn them up, and the thunderstorm can revive them. His happiness depends on these powers, and he seeks to set up relations with them. He seeks to gain as an ally the heavenly power who is so able to further or to thwart his aims; he makes known to it his wishes by calling upon it, and he offers presents to it. He worships the heavenly powers, and religion h

eligion by itself without being combined with higher beliefs. He denies also that fetishism could ever be an original religious product, or that men could ever pass from having no religion to the religion of fetishism. Wherever it appears,

t for food alone. The intellectual craving, the desire to know the nature of the world he lived in, and to refer himself to the highest principle of it, as far as that could be attained; the ?sthetic need, the desire to have to do with objects which filled his imagination; the moral need, the desire not to occupy a purely isolated position, but to place himself under some authority, and to feel some obligation, these also, though in the dimmest way, as matters of presentiment rather than clear consciousnes

f Religion, vo

rived from nature-worship, but grew out of the belief awakened in early man, by the familiar experiences mentioned above. That the greater nature-worship, on the other hand, can be derived from the belief in spirits is an assertion which can never be proved, or even made probable; that it arose from the impressions produced on early man by the great objects and forces of nature, is a thing we can understand and believe. The minor nature-worship is also a very intell

ent natures, who formed in his mind quite a happy family. When he found a new god, that did not oblige him to part with any old one; it was one god he was seeking, but he could not settle on one god as yet, when there were so many beings with a good claim to the position. He made his gods not out of nothing, but out of a great variety of experiences and impressions, and they acted and reacted on each other in an endless variety of ways. One god came to

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s of Oxford Congress of the H

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he Myths of the

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, West African

gious System of th

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tions of Discovery in North-Wes

Native Tribes of Cen

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ligion, and the minor nature-gods to another, the thought of the departed members of the household to a third. But these various religions could not develop side by side without influencing each other. These different

ther, rain, storm, and thunder and lightning, are the objects. It cannot be too clearly borne in mind that what was worshipped was originally the natural object itself, regarded, after the earliest habit of thought, as l

o the object indicated by the name, a new character and new powers. They proceed to argue about the name and draw conclusions from it as to the nature of the being they worship, and so come to think of their deity in quite a different manner. Even to classify objects together and give them a common title, "the bright ones," or "the living ones," as the early Aryans did, gives them an independent position of their own, and tempts the imagination to go further in describing them. Striving to find names for those beings he worships and thinks about so much, early man gives them the names of living creatures with whom he is

sun is a bull chasing her round the sky. This is an instance of a principle which obtains in many at least of the early religions and which it is important to remember, viz. that the powers o

sman. Thus the god acquires a personal character and an independent movement; what is told about him has reference, of course, to the natural object he sprang from, or the season with which he is connected; but the deity is becoming more and more separate from the natural object, and acquiring a character and history of his own. The stories connected with the god vary according to the habits and the imaginations of different peoples; in some cases the gods remain pure and exalted beings, in

him, and there cannot be two highests, but only one. But man's position in the early world does not allow him to be true to this religious instinct. As he sees one aspect of the world to-day, and another to-morrow, he cannot, when his god is a power of nature, always see the same god before him. But can he not worship another god when the first one is out of sight and out of mind? Though he worshipped heaven yesterday, can he not worship the sun to-day, or the storm, or the great sea? And though the former generation worshipped one of these beings in the foremost place, may not the existing generation devote itself principally to another? That power does not cease to be a deity which is not immediately before his mind. It is still a deity, and in a while he will turn to it again, and make it first. Thus it come

to be sought, or in some other way adjusting their various claims; or, on the other hand, while believing in the existence of many gods, they may confine their worship to one. A man knows that there are many gods, but says that he has only to do with one of them. This is a religious position very frequently met with in antiquity. A circle of gods is believed in, but o

great, and thou sun that seest all things, and ye rivers and thou earth, and ye that

ppressed at Jerusalem by that monarch, 2 Kings xxiii. The gods of each of the surrounding tribes appear to have b

are immediately addressing as supreme, and heap upon him all the highes

nto Thee among the gods, O Lord!... Thou art great, and doest wondrous things: Thou art God alone" (Ps. lxxxvi. 8, 10). Here the other gods are recogni

oples are idols: but Jehovah made the heavens" (Ps. x

e manifestation of a living power, but of an evil one. Thanks to the good god alternate, in this case, with efforts to counteract or to appease the bad one; if the two appear to be nearly balanced, then neither is supreme, and both overawe the mind and receive worship. But in general we may remark that the greater nature-worship is of an elevating tendency. It brings man into relations with po

: an animal is only worshipped in the country where it occurs, and the worship of the tree, the well, the stone, is altogether local. With this local nature-worship the world was, in early times, thickly overspread; and manifold survivals of it are still to be found even in lands where

have their small local worships-each clan, almost each kraal, has its shrine, its god, and limits itself to its own sacred things. Religion is a bond connecting t

ythical first parent of the species, and possessing its qualities in a supreme degree. It happened apparently over the whole world, with the exception of most branches of the Aryan family, that men at a very early stage regarded themselves as related by the tie of descent, some to one species of animals or of plants and some to another. From this belief tribes took their names, each member tattooing the figure of his animal ancestor on his perso

ns. The first is animal-worship, a phenomenon of frequent occurrence and of perplexing import. Mr. McLennan has shown that much at least of the widespread worship of animals is to be traced to an early totem-stage of society,2 when animals were held sacred as the ancestors of men. In the second place, totemism explains the view taken in the early world of the nature of religious fellowship. In modern times people regard each other as brothers in religion when they believe the same doctrines. It is belief, an intellectual or spiritual agreement, that binds them together. The ancient religi

g never passed through the totemistic stage. Mr. Robertson Smith, in his Religion of the Semites, maintains that, though they are past that stage when we first know them

See also Mr. Lang's Myth, Ritua

he local customs of the peasantry of Europe. Early man appears to have worshipped trees as wonderful living beings; but his thought soon advanced to the conception of a tree-spirit, of which the tree itself was either the body or the dwelling, and which possessed various powers, such as that of com

is of stones not treated by art, but regarded as sacred in the form in which they were found, was widely diffused among early races; but this is a subject on which light is still called for. The Caaba of Mecca and the stone of the temple of Diana at Ephesus are famous isolated instances of it; but it has been suggested that the standing stones or menhir

ch are still, or were lately, frequented in England. St. Wallach's well and bath

vol. xvii. p. 33, "Rude S

his own people. In passing from his own home to a distant spot, a man will leave the territory of his own god and enter on that of another, and as the god can only be worshipped at his own shrine, the man will leave his religion when he leaves his home, and either be compelled to serve the gods of strangers, or to perform no religious duties at all.5 Thus the ideas connected with totemism meet and harmonise in many old countries with those connected with local shrines.6 Those dwelling around the shrine form a kindred of one blood, of which the local god is both the progenitor and the living head. Religion is thus both strictly tribal and strictly local. It is for his brethren of the tribe, for those in whose veins the blood of the same divine ancestor runs, that a man's enthusiasm is kindled in acts of worship; it is his duty to his clan that he then realises, the prosperity of his clan that he de

g passages in the Bible: Genesis xxviii.; Ruth i. 16; 1 Sam.

ect Mr. Robertson Smith'

re conceived as carrying on the same kind of existence as they had led here, though an existence unsubstantial and of little power; "strengthless heads" Homer calls them. Food and drink were of use to them; for the finer part of it was supposed to reach them. The taste of blood revived them; and various pleasures were possible to them.7 This belief, it will be seen, differs from all the modern doctrines of a continued existence. It is not the resurrection of the body that the savage believes in. He knows well enough that the body does not rise; but he also knows that the spirit can exist and move and do a number of things that were done in life, without the body

Tylor's Primitive Culture, t

hey dwell is modelled on a land that is known, with the addition of ideal features; they do very much what they did on earth, hunt or feast, make music or carry on discussions. In some cases there is a judgment-seat before which the soul appears for its trial, and here of course the spirit-world must be divided into two parts or more, for the reception of t

y indicated cross and recross each other, in endless combinations; none of them is to be found entirely by itself. There is no fetish worship which is not accompanied by traces of an early belief in great gods; there is no belief in great gods which is not accompanied

ginate the belief in a life after death, nor was it left to them to appoint sacred seasons in the year, or to consecrate the spots to which worship has always clung. All these beliefs are prehistoric, and what remained for the great religions was not to bring them forward for the first time, but to surround them with a new

and wander about the earth by themselves, leaving their bodies untenanted. But these illusions were after all only the outward and inadequate expression in which the spirit of religion then clothed itself. Religion must always express itself in terms of the knowledge which exists in the world at a particular time; and if the knowledge is defective to which the world has attained, religious beliefs must share in its defects. But, on the ot

ight and not wrong. What he worshipped was not the bare object which met the eye and ear, but the thing as he conceived it. He conceived that there was without him that of which his inner consciousness bore witness, an ideal, a being not grasped

oks cited in this cha