CHAP. I. FETICHISM - TSABAISM. Fetichism. 11 Each state of social culture has its characteristic theology, self-adapted to the intellectual and moral condition of the people, and coloured in some degree by the habits of life. In the rudest and most savage races we find a gross superstition, called by modern foreign writers Fetichism, in which the shapeless stone, the meanest reptile, any object however worthless or insignificant, is consecrated by a vague and mysterious reverence, as the representative of an unseen Being. The beneficence of this deity is usually limited to supplying the wants of the day, or to influencing the hourly occurrences of a life, in which violent and exhausting labour alternates either with periods of sluggish and torpid indolence, as among some of the North American tribes; or, as among the Africans, with wild bursts of thoughtless merriment. This Fetichism apparently survived in more polished nations, in the household gods, perhaps in the Teraphim, and in the sacred stones (the Botylia), which were thought either to have fallen from heaven, or were sanctified by immemorial reverence. In the Oriental pastoral tribes, Tsabaism," the simpler worship of the heavenly bodies, in general prevailed; which among the agricultural races The Fetiche of the African is the Manitou of the American Indian. The word Fetiche was first, I believe, brought into general use in the curious volume of the President De Brosses, Du Culte des Dieux Fétiches. The word was formed by the traders to Africa, from the Portuguese, Fetisso, chose fée, enchantée, divine, ou rendant des oracles. De Brosses, p. 18. Hume (History of Nat. Religion) argues that a pure and philosophical Tsabaism. theism could never be the creed of a barbarous nation struggling with want. "The astral worship of the East is ably and clearly developed in an Excursus at the end of Gesenius's Isaiah. I use Tsabaism in its popular sense. The proper signification and !nitation of the word must be sought in the profoundly learned work of Chwol. sohn, die SSabier und der SSabaismus, St. Petersburg, 1856. 12 Nature NATURE-WORSHIP. BOOK I. grew up into a more complicated system, connecting the periodical revolutions of the sun and moon with the pursuits of husbandry. It was Nature-worship, worship. simple in its primary elements, but branching out into mythological fables, rich and diversified in proportion to the poetic genius of the people. This Natureworship in its simpler, probably its earlier form, appears as a sort of dualism, in which the two great antagonist powers, the creative and destructive, Light and Darkness, seem contending for the sovereignty of the world, and, emblematical of moral good and evil, are occupied in pouring the full horn of fertility and blessing, or the vial of wrath and misery, upon the human race. Subordinate to, or as a modification of, these two conflicting powers, most of the Eastern races concurred in deifying the active and passive powers of generation. The sun and the earth, Osiris and Isis, formed a second dualism. And it is remarkable how widely, almost universally extended throughout the earlier world, appears the institution of a solemn period of mourning about the autumnal, and of rejoicing about the vernal, equinox.* The suspension, or apparent extinction of the great Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride :— Φρύγες τὸν θεὸν οἰόμενοι χειμῶνος μὲν καθεύδειν, θέρους δ' ἐγρηγορέναι, τότε μὲν κατευνασμούς τότε δ' άνεγέρσεις βακχεύοντες αὐτῷ τελοῦσι. Παφλαγόνες δὲ καταδεῖσθαι καὶ και θείργνυσθαι χειμῶνος, ἦρος δὲ ἀναλύεσθαι φάσκουσι, ▾ Bohlen (das Alte Indien, p. 139 et seq.) gives a long list of these festivals of the sun. Lobeck (i. 690) would altogether deny their symbolical character. It is difficult, however, to account for the remarkable similarity y between the usages of so many distinct nations in the New World as well as the Old, in Peru and Florida, in Gaul and Britain, as in India and Syria, without some such common origin, or a common sentiment springing from a certain kindred and identity in human nature. See Picart's large work, Cérémonies et Coutumes Religieuses, passim. Compare likewise Dr. Pritchard's valuable work on Egyptian Mythology; on the Deification of the Active and Passive Powers of Generation; CHAP. I. POETS. 13 vivifying power of nature, Osiris or Iacchus; the destitution of Ceres, Isis, or the Earth, of her husband or her beautiful daughter, torn in pieces or carried away into their realms by the malignant powers of darkness; their reappearance in all their bright and fertilising energy; these, under different forms, were the great annual fast and festival of the early heathen worship." Poete. But the poets were the priests of this Nature-worship; and from their creative imagination arose the popular mythology, which gave its separate deity to every part of animate or inanimate being; and, departing still farther from the primitive allegory, and the symbolic forms under which the phenomena of the visible world were embodied, wandered into pure fiction; till Nature-worship was almost supplanted by religious fable and hence, by a natural transition, those who discerned God in every thing, multiplied every separate part of creation into a distinct divinity. The mind fluctuated between a kind of vague and unformed pantheism, the deification of the whole of nature, or its animation by one pervading power or soul, and the deification of every object which impressed the mind with awe or admiration. While every nation, every а the Marriage of the Sun and the Earth, p. 40, and pp. 62-75, and Grimm, Deutsche Mythologie, p. 144, &c. z Nam rudis ante illos, nullo discrimine, vita In speciem conversa, operum ratione carebat, Et stupefacta novo pendebat lumine mundi. Tum velut amissis mærens, tum læta renatis Sideribus, &c.-MANIL. 1. 67. • Some able writers are of opinion that the reverse of this was the case that the variety was the primary belief; the simplification the work of a later and more intellectual age. On this point A. W. Schlegel observes, "The more I investigate the ancient history of the world, the more I am convinced that the civilised nations set out from a purer worship of the Supreme Being; that the magic power of Nature over the imagination of the successive human races, first, at a later period, produced polytheism, and, finally, altogether obscured the more 14 GROWTH OF MYTHOLOGY. BOOK L tribe, every province, every town, every village, every family, had its peculiar, local, or tutelar deity, there was a kind of common neutral ground on which they all met, a notion that the gods in their collective capacity exercised a general controlling providence over the affairs of men, interfered, especially on great occasions, and, though this belief was still more vague and more inextricably involved in fable, administered retribution in another state of being. And thus even the common language of the most polytheistic nations approached to monotheism.b Wherever, indeed, there has been a great priestly no spiritual religious notions in the po- This is strikingly expressed by a Christian writer: "Audio vulgus cum ad cœlum manus tendunt, nihil aliud quam Deum dicunt, et Deus magnus est, et Deus verus est, et si Deus dederit. Vulgi iste naturalis sermo est, an Christiani confitentis oratio?" Min. Fel. Octavius. The same thought may be found in Cyprian, de Van. Idol., and Tertullian, Apolog. There is nothing in this brief statement irreconcileable with the view of the common development of language and mythology, or rather the growth of mythology out of expanding language-expanded with such wonderful ingenuity and surpassing erudition by M. Max Müller, Oxford Essays, 1856. That theory accounts for the common origin and descent of the myths of the whole Arian race, the kindred and similitude of which have been generally admitted; whilst the passing of these myths in their second stage through the minds of poets explains their endless diversity, their departure from their original meaning, and the perpetual loss of the key to their interpretation. caste. с 15 In caste, less occupied with the daily toils of life, and advanced beyond the mass of the people, the pri- Priestly mitive Nature-worship has been perpetually brought back, as it were, to its original elements; and, without disturbing the popular mythological religion, furnished a creed to the higher and more thinking part of the community, less wild and extravagant. Persia the Magian order retained or acquired something like a pure theism, in which the Supreme Deity was represented under the symbol of the primal uncreated fire; and there Nature-worship, under the form of the two conflicting principles, preserved much more of its original simplicity than in most other countries. To the influence of a distinct sacerdotal order may be traced, in India, the singular union of the sublimest • This is nowhere more openly professed than in China. The early Jesuit missionaries assert that the higher class (the literatorum secta) despised the idolatry of the vulgar. One of the charges against the Christians was their teaching the worship of one God, which they had full liberty to worship themselves, to the common people :—" Non æque placere, rudem plebeculam rerum novarum cupiditate, cœli Dominum venerari." Trigault, Exped. in Sinas, pp. 438575. d "The learned Brahmins adore one God, without form or quality, eternal, unchangeable, and occupying all space but they carefully confine these doctrines to their own schools, as dangerous; and teach in public a religion, in which, in supposed compliance with the infirmities and passions of human nature, the deity is brought more to a level with our pre The incompre judices and wants. |