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CHAPTER VII.

THE ORIGIN OF POLYTHEISM.

Difficulty of realizing the state of mind of a savage.-The first stage in primeval religion one of autotheism; then a perception and veneration of resistances.Classification of resisting forces.-Nature worship.-Brute worship.-Personification of phenomena.-The Greek the typical polytheist.-The names of the sun become distinct solar deities.-Moral deities.-Astrolatry.-Theogonies.

T is no easy matter for a man of ordinary education to

a

own day; it is far more difficult for him to divest his mind of all its acquisitions through study and observation, and reduce his ideas to the level of those of the progenitor of his race, whom we will call Areios.

This, however, must be our task if we are to arrive at a true conception of the dawn and development of religious ideas. With our clear sense of the oneness of God, of His moral perfections, and of His relation to Nature, we can with difficulty picture to ourselves the rude theological attempts of our early forefathers. The path leading to theism is to our eyes a way of light, and we forget that it is like the path traced by the sun upon the waters, over restless waves and unfathomed deeps. Man had to fray his road through a wilderness of fable before he could reach the truth, and traverse a multitude of intermediary deities before he could conceive a King of gods, which, though it is an idea divided from pure monotheism by a gulf, is yet within view of it.

Let us attempt to cast ourselves back in imagination to prehistoric ages, and observe the acts and measure the

thoughts of Areios, new upon the earth. All his faculties are in abeyance, and he knows not what capacities and powers are his. The world outside is nothing to him yet; he first explores his own being. He has a vigorous intelligence, without being aware of it, for he has not used it. Slowly he acquires facts, assimilates them, and draws conclusions from them. In his attempts to advance he stumbles and falls. Yet every fault gives him an impetus forward. The pain produced by error is the whip that urges him into civilization. Before man can learn to do things right, he must do things wrong. Before he can discover the right path in science, religion, and political economy, he has to flounder through a bog of blunders.

The girl strums discords before she strikes harmonies ; the boy scratches pothooks before he draws straight lines. The early religious beliefs of the human family are its discords and pothooks, the stages of error by which it has travelled before correct ideas can be attained.

At first, then, man is conscious of no existence save his own; he is like the brute, self-centred and self-sufficient; he is his own God. He is Autotheist.

But presently he feels resistances. Effects surround him of which he is not the cause, The outlines of the exterior world loom out of the fog and assume precision. He acknowledges that there are other objects, that there exist other forces besides himself. The convulsions of Nature, the storm, the thunder, the exploding volcano, the raging sea, fill him with a sense of there being a power superior to his own, before which he must bow. His religious thought, vague and undetermined, is roused by the opposition of Nature to his will.

His next stage is the classification of the physical forces. His intellectual ideas are like metal in fusion: the material

world is the mould into which they flow and from which they receive their shape. Nature is mighty, beautiful, wise. He bows to it in its various manifestations, and adores the sun, the sky, the dawn, the tempest, without for a moment forgetting their physical character. It is not inert Nature that he worships, but one animated, and invested by him with his own sentiments; for he has not yet learned to distinguish himself from other creatures, as the sole rational being. Therefore he attributes to all objects a life and a reason analogous to his own. Children in play act in the same manner; addressing their dolls and pets as though they were endowed with understanding.

Caspar Hauser, that mysterious boy brought up in isolation and ignorance, was a striking example of the degree of intelligence which primitive peoples must have possessed. He exhibited almost throughout his whole life an incredible difficulty in distinguishing those things which were animate from those which were inanimate. Every movement he supposed to be spontaneous. If he touched his little wooden horses and they moved, he attributed the motion to their shrinking from his touch. If any one struck a stock or stone, he exhibited distress, thinking that these objects must be sensible to pain. Mademoiselle Leblanc, the savage woman, of whom Louis Racine has given such a valuable biography, exhibited a precisely similar want of capacity.

The intelligence apparent in the beast bears such a close resemblance to that in man, that it is not to be wondered at if Areios failed to detect the line of demarcation between instinct and reason. It was not a merely fancied external resemblance between the beast and man, but it was a perception of the similarity of the skill, pursuits, desires, sufferings, and griefs of the brute to those of himself which led him to seek within the beast something analogous to the

soul within himself; and this, notwithstanding the points of contrast existing between them, elicited in his mind so strong a sympathy that, without a great stretch of imagination, he invested the animal with his own attributes, and with the full powers of his own understanding. He regarded it as actuated by the same motives, as subject to the same laws of honor, as moved by the same prejudices; and the higher the beast was in the scale, the more he regarded it as his equal, and even as his superior.' In the struggle with the savage races of beasts in the hunter's life, how many members of the tribe were tracked down and devoured? Man was forced to protect himself against the lion, the tiger, the wolf, and above all the serpent, which, gliding through the herbage, struck, when least expected, its poison-fangs into his flesh, and slew him. In order to preserve himself from their attacks, he adored those which he could not master, and thus arose zoolatria.

If the worship of the lion and the tiger died out, it was because man discovered the use of iron, and could stab or shoot his god. If ophic worship perpetuated itself long after other forms of zoolatry had disappeared, it was because the serpent was that creature against which weapons and precautions were of least avail. In southern lands the dread of the serpent is most intense, for there the danger arising from it is most felt, and it is because this danger can be so imperfectly guarded against that, among the religions of hot countries,

"The trail of the serpent is over them all." In the North, the bear was the quently the object of worship.

object of dread, and conseThe Finn believed it came

from the land of sun and moon, and was born miraculously,' and he venerated it as an inferior deity.

1

1 Baring-Gould: Book of Werewolves, p. 155; London, 1865.

2 Kalewala, Run., xlvi., 355-458.

Sun, moon, and stars, were also invested by man with a life and knowledge like his own. "He begins to lift up his eyes," says Professor Max Müller; "he stares at the tent of heaven, and asks who supports it? He opens his ears to the winds, and asks them whence and whither ? He is awakened from darkness and slumber by the light of the sun, and him whom his eyes cannot behold, and who seems to grant him the daily pittance of his existence, he calls 'his life, his breath, his brilliant Lord and Protector.' He gives names to all the powers of Nature." He could not name the objects of Nature without giving them sex, nor speak of abstract qualities without determining them by articles. Every subject in a phrase was presented as an acting being, every idea became an action, and every action, whether transitory or continuous, was limited in duration by the tense of the verb. We are in the habit of compensating in our own minds for the deficiencies of language; but this habit was as yet unformed by Areios. With him every object was personified and endowed with life by the exigencies of speech. Every substantive was an animated being, every verb a physical act.' Areios personified his very words. The hymn addressed to some deified natural object, as it escaped his lips invested itself with human attributes. The speech of the Hindoo Areios became incarnate as Sarasvatî; his prayer was deified as Vâgdevatâ. It was the same with the Greek Areios; in Homer, we see prayers (Airaí) regarded as the divine daughters of Zeus; and by Philochorus, the first-fruits of sacrifice are spoken of as Ovλaí, godlike daughters of earth. But this impersonation was carried to greater exaggeration by the Indian than by the Greek. Every incident and circumstance connected with

1 Chips, &c., i., 69.

2 Bréal: Hercule et Cacus, p. 9; Paris, 1863.

* Iliad, i., 502.

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