Your Kindle Notes For:
The Evolution of the Idea of God: An
Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions
Grant Allen
Last accessed on Wednesday August
11, 2021
197 Highlight(s) | 20 Note(s)
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“By what successive steps did men
come to frame for themselves the conception of a deity?”—or, if the reader so
prefers it, “How did we arrive at our knowledge of God?”
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It does not concern itself at all
with the validity or invalidity of the ideas in themselves;
Note: What is validity, if truth is
relative?
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first, how did men come to believe
in many gods—the origin of polytheism; second, how, by elimination of most of
these gods, did certain races of men come to believe in one single supreme and
omnipotent God—the origin of monotheism; third how, having arrived at that
concept, did the most advanced races and civilisations come to conceive of that
God as Triune, and to identify one of his Persons with a particular divine and
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human incarnation—the origin of
Christianity.
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have here accepted the theory which
traces the origin of the belief in gods to primeval ancestor-worship, or rather
corpse-worship,
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Why from polytheism have the most
advanced nations proceeded to monotheism?
Note: Why focus on
"nations?"
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To analyse the origin of a concept
is not to attack the validity of the belief it encloses.
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truths. A Deified Man is the central
figure in the faith of Christendom.
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Christianity gave up its strict
monotheism almost at the first start by admitting the existence of three
persons in the godhead, whom it vainly endeavoured to unify by its mystic but
confessedly incomprehensible Athanasian dogma.
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will be obvious at once to every
intelligent reader that Christianity cannot possibly throw for us any direct or
immediate light on the problem of the evolution of the idea of God.
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‘And the goal towards which I shall
move will be the one already foreshadowed in this introductory chapter—the
proof that in its origin the concept of a god is nothing more than that of a
Dead Man, regarded as a still surviving ghost or spirit, and endowed with
increased or supernatural powers, and qualities.
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A god, as I understand the word, and
as the vast mass of mankind has always understood it, is a supernatural being
to be revered and worshipped.
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I contend that religion, as such, is
essentially practical: theology or mythology, as such, is essentially
theoretical.
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into clearer relief this view of
religion as essentially practical—a set of observances, rendered inevitable by
the primitive data of human psychology.
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It is here that we find the great
centre of the native religion. The spirits of the dead are the gods of the
living.
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In the presents brought to the dead
man’s grave to appease the ghost, we have the
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central element of all worship, the
practical key of all cults, past or present.
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I want to bring into strong relief
the fact that we have here going on under our very eyes, from day to day, de
novo, the entire genesis of new gods and goddesses, and of all that is most
central and essential to religion—worship, prayer, the temple, the altar,
priesthood, sacrifice.
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I maintain that religion is not
mainly, as the mistaken analogy of Christian usage makes us erroneously call
it, Faith or Creed, but simply and solely Ceremony, Custom, or Practice.
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Its core is worship. Its centre is
the God—that is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative.
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The entire Roman Catholic ritual is
a ritual derived from the earlier sacerdotal ideas of ministry at an altar, and
its connection with the primitive form is still kept up by the necessary
presence of human remains in its holy places.
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The earliest dome-covered churches
were attempts, as it were, to construct a catacomb above ground for the
reception of the altar-tomb of a saint or martyr.
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none of these gods, so far as we can
judge, could ever have come to exist at all if the ghost-theory and
ancestor-worship had not already made familiar to the human mind the principles
and practice of religion generally. The very idea of a god could not otherwise
have been evolved; though, when once evolved, any number of new beings could
readily be affiliated upon it by the human imagination.
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the true question narrows itself
down at last to two prime factors—worship and sacrifice.
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Religion is practice, mythology is
story-telling.
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Every religion has myths that
accompany it: but the myths do not give rise to the religion: on the contrary,
the religion gives rise to the myths.
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Religion, however, has one element
within it still older, more fundamental, and more persistent than any mere
belief in a god or gods—nay,
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nay, even than the custom or
practice of supplicating and appeasing ghosts or gods by gifts and observances.
That element is the conception of the Life of the Dead. On the primitive belief
in such life, all religion ultimately bases itself. The belief is in fact the
earliest thing to appear in religion, for there are savage tribes who have
nothing worth calling gods, but have still a religion or cult of their dead
relatives.
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form:
Note: But "form" requires
matter
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To us, the conception of human life
as a relatively short period, bounded by a known duration, and naturally
terminating at a relatively fixed end, is a common and familiar one.
Note: It may be known but it isnt
believed, per PEW
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where deaths are rare,
Note: The savage doesnt recognize
the death of other animals?
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death has been a rare and startling
occurrence.
Note: ????
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In point of fact, during these earlier
stages, the idea of Death as we know it did not and does not occur in any form.
There are still savages who do not seem to recognise the universality and
necessity of death—who regard it on the contrary as something strange and
unatural, something due to the machination of enemies or of witchcraft.
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they could not form any other
concept without far more extended knowledge than they have the means of
possessing.
Note: But they certainly knew the
death of animals. No analogy to themselves?
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In other words, from the very
earliest beginning of the neolithic age men buried their dead; and they
continued to bury them, in caves or tumuli, down to the end of neolithic
culture.
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It is only when bronze and other
metals are introduced that races advance to the third stage, the stage of
cremation.
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general conclusion that burial is
the oldest, most universal, and most savage mode of disposing of the remains of
the dead among
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humanity after the general
recognition of death as a positive condition.
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Burial, then, I take it, is simply
by origin a means adopted by the living to protect themselves against the
vagrant tendencies of the actual dead.
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Hence, I believe, with the
introduction of cremation the conception of the ghost merely suffered an airy
change. He grew more shadowy, more immaterial, more light, more spiritual. In
one word, he became, strictly speaking, a ghost as we now understand the word,
not a returning dead man. This conception of the ghost as essentially a shade
or shadow belongs peculiarly, it seems to me, to the cremating peoples.
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when people take to burning their
dead, it is clear they will no longer be able to believe in the Resurrection of
the Body. Indeed, if I am right in the theory here set forth, it is just in
order to prevent the Resurrection of the Body at inconvenient moments that they
take to burning.
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Naturally, therefore, among
cremating peoples, the doctrine of the Resurrection of the Body tended to go
out, and what replaced it was the doctrine of the Immortality of the Soul.
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A god, in fact, is in the beginning
at least an exceptionally powerful and friendly ghost—a ghost able to help, and
from whose help great things may reasonably be expected.
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the supposed power of the gods in
each pantheon has regularly increased in proportion to the increased power of
kings or emperors.
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They grow greater in proportion to
the rise of temples and hierarchies.
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The gods are thought of as more and
more aerial and immaterial, less definitely human in form and nature; they are
clothed with mighty attributes;
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But they are never quite omnipotent
during the polytheistic stage, because in a pantheon they are necessarily
mutually limiting.
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But kingship supplies us with the
missing link.
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terror of the revenant seems to
prevent the usual forms of homage at the tomb of the deceased. Moreover, the
ghost being now conceived as
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more or less freely separable from
the corpse, it will be possible to worship it in some place remote from the
dreaded cemetery.
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Beginning with such natural caves or
such humble huts, the Temple assumes larger proportions and more beautiful
decorations with the increase of art and the growth of kingdoms.
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Thus in Egypt the tomb was often
more carefully built and splendidly decorated than the house; because the house
was inhabited for a short time only, but the tomb for eternity.
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The earliest Idols, if I may be
allowed the contradictory expression, are not idols at all—not images or
representations of the dead person, but actual bodies, preserved and mummified.
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The eyes, again, are often replaced,
as in Peru, by some other imitative object, so as to keep up the lifelike
appearance. Cases like these lead on to others, where the image or idol
gradually supersedes altogether the corpse or mummy.
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“The bodies of those who die in war
or by a violent death are buried,” he says; “and if the head has been captured
[by the enemy], a cocoanut is placed in the grave to represent the missing
member, and to deceive and satisfy his spirit.”
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There is abundant evidence that such
makeshift limbs or bodies amply suffice for the use of the soul, when the
actual corpse has been destroyed or mutilated.
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priests are a class whose direct
interest it is to make the most of the greatness and majesty of the deities
they tend or worship.
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such priesthoods were generally made
hereditary, so as to ensure their continuance throughout all time: and so
successful were they that in many cases worship continued to be performed for
several hundred years at the tomb; so that a person who died under the Early
Empire was still being made the recipient of funeral dues under kings of the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties.
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The temple attendants, endowed for
the purpose of performing sacred rites for the ghost or god, have grown into
priests, who knew the habits of the unseen denizen of the shrine. Bit by bit,
prescriptions have arisen; customs and rituals have developed; and the priests
have become the depositaries of the divine traditions.
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Thus, by convergence of all these
streams, the primitive mummy or ghost or spirit passes gradually into a deity
of unbounded glory and greatness and sanctity. The bodiless soul, released from
necessary limits of space and time, envisaged as a god, is pictured as ever
more and more superhuman, till all memory of its origin is entirely forgotten.
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But to the last, observe this
curious point: all new gods or saints or divine persons are, each as they crop
up first, of demonstrably human origin. Whenever we find a new god added from
known sources to a familiar pantheon, we find without exception that he turns
out to be—a human being.
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Whenever we go back to very
primitive religions, we find all men’s gods are the corpses or ghosts of their
ancestors.
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It will be our task in the
succeeding chapters of this work to do even more than this—to show that the
apparently unresolvable element in later religions, including the Hebrew god
Jahweh himself, can be similarly affiliated by no uncertain evidence upon the
primitive conception of a ghost or ancestor.
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But whenever on earth interment is
practised, there stones of some sort, solitary or in heaps, almost invariably
mark the place of burial.
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just in proportion as the ghost
evolves into the god, so does the tombstone begin to evolve into the fetish or
idol.
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votaries.
Note: Members of a religious
community
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wherever we find the common worship
of “stocks and stones,” all the analogies lead us to believe the stocks and
stones either actually mark the graves of ancestors or else are accepted as
their representatives and embodiments.
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I have already stated that the idol
is probably in many cases derived from the gravestone or other sacred stone. I
believe that in an immense number of cases it is simply the original pillar,
more or less rudely carved into the semblance of a human figure.
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a similar Christianisation of holy
wells, holy stones, and holy places has been managed by connecting them with
legends of saints, or by the still simpler device of marking a cross upon them.
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the altar as a piece of sacrificial
apparatus, and the pillar as a visible symbol or embodiment of the presence of
the deity, which in process of time comes to be fashioned and carved in various
ways, till ultimately it becomes a statue or anthropomorphic idol of stone,
just as the sacred tree or post was ultimately developed into an image of
wood.”
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the sacred stone at Semitic
sanctuaries was from the first an object of worship, a sort of rude idol in
which the divinity was somehow supposed to be present.”
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we can still see clearly in many
places that Jahweh himself was at first personally present in the ark that
covered him. And though the scribes (evidently ashamed of the early worship
they had outlived) protest somewhat vehemently more than once, “There was
nothing in the ark save the two tables of stone which Moses put there at Horeb,
when Jahweh made a covenant with the children of Israel, when they came out of
the land of Egypt,” yet this much at least even they admit—that the object or
objects concealed in the ark consisted of a sculptured stone or stones; and
that to dance or sing before this stone or these stones was equivalent to
dancing or singing before the face of Jahweh.
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this much is fairly certain. The
children of Israel in early times carried about with them a tribal god, Jahweh,
whose presence in their midst was intimately connected with a certain ark or
chest, containing a stone object or objects.
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god of the Hebrews, who later became
sublimated and etherealised into the God of Christianity, was in his origin
nothing more nor less than the ancestral sacred stone of the people of Israel,
however sculptured, and perhaps, in the very last resort of all, the unhewn
monumental pillar of some early Semitic sheikh or chieftain.
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In the first place, a stake or post
most often marks the interment of a person of little social consideration;
chiefs and great men have usually stone monuments erected in their honour;
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In the second place, the stone
monument is far more lasting and permanent than the wooden one.
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For both these reasons, then, the
stake is less critical than the stone in the history of religion.
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From such little images, obviously
substituted for the dead body which used once to be preserved and affectionately
tended, are derived, I believe, most of the household gods of the world—the
Lares and Penates of the Romans, the huacas of the Peruvians, the teraphim of
the Semites.
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all wooden idols or images are
directly or indirectly descended from the wooden headpost or still more
primitive sepulchral pole.
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all the main objects of worship
together leads us back unanimously to the Cult of the Dead as their common
starting-point.
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Whatever grows or stands upon the
grave is sure to share the honours paid to the spirit that dwells within it.
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family gods, as we saw in a previous
chapter, are really family ghosts, promoted to be deities.
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whatever comes up on or out of a
grave is counted as representative of the ghost within it.
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though I believe the temple to have
been developed out of the tomb or its covering, I do not deny that churches are
now built apart from tombs, though always dedicated to the worship of a
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God who is demonstrably a particular
deified personage.
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Thus, in ultimate analysis, we see
that all the sacred objects of the world are either dead men themselves, as
corpse, mummy, ghost, or god; or else the tomb where such men are buried; or
else the temple, shrine, or hut which covers the tomb; or else the tombstone,
altar, image, or statue, standing over it and representing the ghost; or else
the stake, idol, or household god which is fashioned as their deputy; or else
the tree which grows above the barrow; or else the well, or tank, or spring,
natural or artificial, by whose side the dead man has been laid to rest.
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“the Worship of Death,” as the basis
and root of all human religion.
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the mummy is everywhere the central
object of worship—that the entire practical religion of the people was based upon
this all-pervading sense of the continuity of life beyond the grave, and upon
the necessity for paying due reverence and funereal offerings to the manes of
ancestors.
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Egyptian history and religion, we
shall, I think, see that this mystic god, so often explained away by elemental
symbolism into the sun or the home of the dead, was in his first beginnings
nothing more or less than what all his pictures and statues show him to be—a
revered and worshipped Mummy, a very ancient chief or king of the town or
little district of This by Abydos.
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in time, when this worship had
assumed national importance, the local god became the chief figure in the
common pantheon.
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I conclude, therefore, that a large
part of the greater Egyptian gods—the national or local gods, as opposed to
those worshipped by each family in its own necropolis—were early kings, whose
myths were later expanded into legends, rationalised into nature-worship, and
adorned by priestly care with endless symbolical or esoteric fancies.
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to the Egyptian mind the gulf
between humanity and divinity was very narrow,
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THE only people who ever invented or
evolved a pure monotheism at first hand were the Jews.
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It is the peculiar glory of Israel
to have evolved God.
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I propose to do in the present
volume is to reconsider the subject from our broader anthropological
standpoint, and show how in the great Jewish god himself we may still discern,
as in a glass, darkly, the vague but constant lineaments of an ancestral ghost-deity.
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if we put these indications side by
side with those of family cults elsewhere, we may conclude that the Jewish
religion, like all others, was based upon an ultimate foundation of general
ancestor-worship.
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We are fairly entitled to conclude,
then, I believe, that a domestic cult of the manes or lares, the family dead,
formed the general substratum of early Hebrew religion,
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jealous Jahweh
Note: Anthropomorphism
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Jahweh is represented especially as
a god of increase, of generation, of populousness, of fertility.
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In many other passages we get the
self-same trait: Jahweh is regarded above everything as a god of increase and a
giver of offspring.
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The earlier Israelites,
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To them, their god Jahweh was simply
the object—stone pillar
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The character of the Hebrew worship,
however, apparently underwent some slight modification in Egypt; or at any
rate, Egyptian influences led to the preference of certain gods over others at
the period of the Exodus.
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The Sons of Israel, at least from
the date of the Exodus onward, carried this god or his rude image with them in
an ark or box
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through all their wanderings.
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Jahweh was originally but a single
one, a tribal ancestor-god, worshipped in the form of a cylindrical stone,
perhaps at first a grave-stone, and regarded as essentially a god of increase,
a special object of veneration by childless women.
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sacred pillar of a barbarous tribe,
was gradually developed the Lord God of later Judaism and of Christianity—a
power, eternal, omniscient, almighty, holy; the most ethereal, the most
sublime, the most superhuman deity that the brain of man has ever conceived.
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Hebrew monotheism was to some extent
the result of a syncretic treatment of all the gods, in the course of which the
attributes and characters of each became merged in the other, only the names
(if anything) remaining distinct; and to some extent the result of the intense
national patriotism, of which the ethnical god Jahweh was at once the outcome,
the expression, and the fondest hope.
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The syncretism thus brought about in
the Hebrew religion by the superposition of nature-worship on the primitive
cult must have paved the way for the later recognition of monotheism, exactly
as we know it did in the esoteric creed of Egypt, by making all the gods so
much alike that worshippers had only to change the name of their deity, not the
attributes of the essential conception.
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But now that the material Jahweh
itself, which clogged and cramped their ideas, had disappeared for ever, this
spiritual conception
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of a great Unseen God widened and
deepened amazingly.
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the Hebrews in Babylonia gradually
evolved for themselves the notion of a Supreme Ruler wholly freed from material
bonds, to be worshipped without image, representative, or symbol;
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a dweller in the heavens, invisible
to men, too high and pure for human eyes to look upon. The conical stone in the
ark gave place almost at once to an incorporeal, inscrutable, and almighty
Being.
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How did this purely local and
national Hebrew deity advance to the conquest of the civilised world?
Note: Monotheism that is
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At the moment when the empire was
cosmopolitanising the world, Christianity began to cosmopolitanise religion, by
taking into itself whatever was central, common, and universal in the worship
of the peoples among whom it originated.
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strange as it sounds to us, the
human gods were frequently or almost habitually put to death by their votaries.
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apotheosis.
Note: Deification
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Since the god is a man, it would
obviously be quite wrong to let him grow old and weak; since thereby the whole
course of nature might be permanently enfeebled; rain would but dribble; crops
would grow thin; rivers would trickle away; and the race he ruled would dwindle
to nothing. Hence senility must never overcome the sacred man-god; he must be
killed in the fulness of his strength and health (say, about his thirtieth
year), so that the indwelling spirit, yet young and fresh, may migrate
unimpaired into the body of some newer and abler representative.
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Every purpose, therefore, was
answered, and all dangers averted by thus killing the man-god and transferring
his soul, while yet at its prime, to a vigorous successor.”
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In all these cases the divine king
or priest is suffered by his people to retain office, or rather to house the
godhead, till by some outward defect, or some visible warning of age or
illness, he shows them that he is no longer equal to the proper performance of
his divine functions.
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it is now certain that the putting
to death of a public man-god was a common incident of many religions.
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It is likewise clear that many
rites, commonly interpreted as human sacrifices to a god, are really
god-slayings;
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Christianity apparently took its
rise among a group of irregular northern Israelites, the
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Galilæans, separated from the mass
of their coreligionists, the Jews, by the intervention of a heretical and doubtfully
Israelitish wedge, the Samaritans. The earliest believers in Jesus were thus
intermediate between Jews and Syrians.
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Christianity, as we shall see
hereafter, may be regarded historically as a magma of the most fundamental
religious ideas of the Mediterranean basin, and especially of the eastern
Mediterranean, grafted on to the Jewish cult and the Jewish scriptures, and
clustering round the personality of the man-god, Jesus.
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Normally and originally, I believe,
all gods grow spontaneously. They evolve by degrees out of dead and deified
ancestors or chieftains. The household gods are the dead of the family; the
greater gods are the dead chiefs of the state or town or village.
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All these examples combine to show
us two things: first, that the other life is very real and close to the people
who behave so;
Note: To behave is to believe and
vice versa
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sentiment. The further back we go in
time or culture, the stronger does the sentiment in question become; it is only
the civilised and sceptical thinker who hesitates to exchange the solid
comforts of this world for the shadowy and uncertain delights of the next.
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The best known instances of such
deliberate godmaking are those which refer to the foundation of cities, city
walls, and houses. In such cases, a human victim is often sacrificed in order
that his blood may be used as cement, and his soul be built in to the very
stones of the fabric.
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that the offering is really a piece
of deliberate god-making.
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in Welsh legend, Vortigern could not
finish his tower till the foundation-stone was wetted with “the blood of a
child born of a mother without a father”—this episode of the virgin-born infant
being a common element in the generation of man-gods,
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Here once more we have the
sacred-chance victim.
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cultivation and the sowing of seeds
for crops had their beginning as an adjunct of the primitive burial system.
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It is clear from their accounts that
graves do often give rise to crops of foodstuffs, accidentally springing from
the food laid upon them.
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the manufactured or artificial god
of the corn-field or other cultivated plot really dates back to the very origin
of cultivation.
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the flesh and ashes of the victim
were believed to be endowed with a magical or physical power of fertilising the
land.”
Note: A manufactured god
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Cultivation probably began with the
accidental
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sowing of grains upon the tumuli of
the dead.
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Gradually it was found that by
extending the dug or tilled area and sowing it all over, a crop would grow upon
it, provided always a corpse was buried in the centre. In process of time
divine corpses were annually provided for the purpose, and buried with great
ceremony in each field. By-and-bye it was found sufficient to offer up a single
victim for a whole tribe or village, and to divide his body piecemeal among the
fields of the community. But the crops that grew in such fields were still
regarded as the direct gifts of the dead and deified victims, whose soul was
supposed to animate and fertilize them. As cultivation spread, men became
familiarised at last with the conception of the seed and the ploughing as the
really essential elements in the process; but they still continued to attach to
the victim a religious importance, and to believe in the necessity of his
presence for good luck in the harvest.
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I maintain that in his origin the
Dionysus was nothing more than the annual corn-victim, afterwards extended into
the tree and vine victim, from whose grave sprang the pomegranate, that
blood-red fruit, and whose life-juice was expressed as the god-giving wine.
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What is certain is the fact that
among the Aztecs, as among the Phrygians, the priest who sacrificed, the victim
he slew, and the image or great god to whom he slew him, were all identified;
the killer, the killed, and the being in whose honor the killing took place
were all one single indivisible deity.
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It is a common early belief that to
eat of any particular animal gives you the qualities of that animal.
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In short, the dead were eaten
sacramentally or, as one writer even phrases it, “eucharistically.”
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By eating the body of a god, you
absorb his divinity; he and you become one; he is in you and inspires you. This
is the root-idea of sacramental practice; you eat your god by way of complete
union; you subsume him in yourself; you and he are one being.
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victim—the animal which stands for a
man and a god—as
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as a rule, each tribe has its own
sacred beast, which is employed as a regular substitute for a man-god.
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the visitors believed they were
eating the body and blood of the god to their own salvation.
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whoever eat bread and drank wine
from the beginning must have known it was the body and blood of a god he was
eating and drinking.
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“Without shedding of blood,” says
the author of one of the earliest Christian tractates, “there is no remission
of sin.” This is a common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is
regarded, not merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or
incarnate god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed.
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Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived
of as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity;
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“The accumulated misfortunes and
sins of the whole people,” says Mr. Frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the
dying god, who is supposed to bear them away for ever, leaving the people
innocent and happy.”
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Putting these two cardinal ideas
together, we arrive at the compound conception of the scapegoat. A scapegoat is
a human or animal victim, chosen to carry off, at first the misfortunes or
diseases, later the sin and guilt of the community.
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the human scapegoat was the last term
of a god, condemned to death, upon whose head the transgression or misfortunes
of the community were laid as substitute. He was the vicarious offering who
died for the people.
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“the fundamental idea of sacrifice
is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion between the god and his
worshippers, by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred
victim.”
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It must be obvious that many
sacrifices at least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and
that in most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal
form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I point out
how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline theology.
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two cardinal points: first, that a
dying god, human or animal, is usually selected as a convenient vehicle for the
sins of the people; and second, that “without shedding of blood there is no
remission of sin.”
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It based itself above all on
sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection.
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Its very name of Christian was given
to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan city of Antioch.
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Christianity was chiefly a plant of
home growth. The native soil contained already every essential element that was
needed to feed it—the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the Man-God,
the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension.
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Man makes his heaven in the image of
earth; his
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god-slaying ceremonies, more or less
attenuated, have lingered on everywhere in obscure forms among the folk-rites
and folk-customs of the most civilised peoples.
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ever there was really a personal
Christ, and if his followers began by vaguely believing in his resurrection,
the legend, as we get it, is obviously made up of collected fragments from all
the godslaying customs and beliefs we have been considering in detail through
the last six or seven chapters.
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temporary king, slain on a cross as
a piacular atonement, and raised again from the dead after three days, in the
manner common to all corn and wine gods.
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the story on the whole exhibits the
Christ to us entirely in the character of a temporary king, slain with piacular
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rites as a corn and wine god.
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doctrinal Christian theology. Its
cardinal points are four—incarnation, death, resurrection, atonement.
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do not think there is an element in
the Gospel story which does not bear out the parallel here suggested.
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On Easter Sunday, he rises again from
the dead, and every good Catholic is bound to communicate—to eat the body of
his slaughtered god on the annual spring festival of reviving vegetation.
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in our last chapter we shall find
that this universal tendency to worship the dead has ever since persisted as
fully as ever, and is in fact the central element in the entire religious
instinct of humanity.
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The main emotional chord upon which
Christianity played in its early days—and indeed the main chord upon which it
still plays—is just, I believe, the universal feeling in favour of the
deification or beatification of the dead, with the desire for immortality on
the part of the individual believer himself in person.
Note: Eternity is the goal!
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The deities of the time were too
coarse, too childish, too gross for their worshippers. The common philosophic
attitude of cultivated Rome and cultivated Alexandria might be compared to some
extent to that of our own Unitarians, who are not indeed hostile to the
conception of theology in its own nature, but who demur to the most miraculous
and supernatural part of the popular doctrine.
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If Constantine or any other shrewd
military chief had happened to adopt the symbols of Mithra or Abraxas instead
of the name of Christ, it is quite conceivable that all the civilised world
might now be adoring the mystic divinity of the three hundred and sixty-five
emanations, as sedulously as it actually adores
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the final theological outcome of the
old Hebrew Jahweh.
Note: Facticity!!
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We must remember, too, that in all
religious crises, while faith in the actual gods and creeds declines rapidly,
no corresponding weakening occurs in the underlying sentiments on which all
religions ultimately base themselves.
Note: Why?
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The fact is, the average man cares
but little, after all, for his gods and his goddesses, viewed as individuals.
They are but an outlet for his own emotions. He appeals to them for help, as
long as he continues to believe in their effective helpfulness: he is ready to
cajole them with offerings of blood or to flatter them with homage of praise
and prayer, as long as he expects to gain some present or future benefit,
bodily or spiritual, in return for his assiduous adulation. But as soon as his
faith in their existence and power begins to break down, he puts up with the
loss of their godhead, so far as they themselves are concerned, without one
qualm of disappointment or inconvenience. It is something far other than that
that touches him in religion: it is his hopes for his own eternal welfare, and
the welfare after death of those that love him.
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necromancy,
Note: Communication with the dead
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Christianity, while from one point
of view, as a monotheistic or quasi-monotheistic religion, an immense advance
upon the aesthetic paganism of Greece and Italy, was from another point of
view, as a religion of resurrection rather than a religion of immortality, a
step backward for all Western Europe.
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Instead of Israel converting the
world, the world seemed likely to convert Israel.
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all other and elder human gods, was
specifically asserted afresh in a newer case about the man Christ Jesus. The
idea fitted in with the needs of the time, and the doctrine of the Resurrection
of Jesus the Christ became the corner-stone of the new-born Christian religion.
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It was the resurrection that
converted the world of western Europe.
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three great motors of primitive
Christianity: one dogmatic, the resurrection of Jesus: one selfish, the
salvation of the individual soul: one altruistic, the desire for reunion with
the dead among one’s beloved.
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At the period when Christianity
first begins to emerge from the primitive obscurity of its formative nisus,
however, we find it practically compounded of the following elements—which
represent the common union of a younger god offered up to an older one with
whom he is identified.
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Gradually, the conception of a
personal Holy Ghost took form and definiteness: an Alexandrian monk insisted on
the necessity for a Triad of gods who were yet one God: and by the time the
first creeds of the nascent church were
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committed to writing, the Spirit had
come to rank with the Father and the Son as the Third Person in the
ever-blessed Trinity.
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sacerdotalism
Note: Priest as mediary, broker
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I shall strive to show, however, in
my concluding chapters, how even to the very end the worship of the dead is
still the central force in modern Christianity:
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the vast majority of places of
worship all the world over are still erected, as at the very beginning, above
the body of a dead man or woman;
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conclusions at which we previously
arrived as to a belief in immortality or continued life of the dead being in
fact the core and basis of worship and of deity.
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Islam, in practice, is a religion of
pilgrimages to the tombs of the dead.
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hagiology.
Note: Biography of saints
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In short, from first to last,
religion never gets far away from these its earliest and profoundest
associations. “God and immortality,”—those two are its key-notes. And those two
are one; for the god in the last resort is nothing more than the immortal
ghost, etherealised and extended.
Note | Page: 476
Ah cartesion extension...
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Thus the Cult of the Dead, which is
the earliest origin of all religion, in the sense of worship, is also the last
relic of the religious spirit which survives the gradual decay of faith due to
modern scepticism. To this cause I refer on the whole the spiritualistic
utterances of so many among our leaders of modern science. They have rejected
religion, but they cannot reject the inherited and ingrained religious
emotions.
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set forth in as short a form as was
consistent with clearness my conception of the steps by which mankind arrived
at its idea of its God.
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Ancestor-Worship and the Cult of the
Dead God have played a far larger and deeper part than he has hitherto been
willing to admit in the genesis of the religious emotions.
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the vast mass of existing gods or
divine persons, when we come to analyse them, do actually turn out to be dead
and deified human beings. In short, it is my hope that I have rehabilitated
Euhemerism.
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It is abundantly clear that no
distinction of name or rite habitually demarcates these ubiquitous and
uncertain spirits at large from those domestic gods whose origin is perfectly
well remembered in the family circle.
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word, I believe that corpse-worship
is the protoplasm of religion,
