I. CHAP. of people, and of country. In no respect is the common nature of human kind so strongly indicated as in the universality of some kind of religion; in no respect is man so various, yet so much the same. All the religions of antiquity, multiform and countless as they appear, may be easily reduced to certain classes, and, independent of the traditions which they may possess in common, throughout the whole, reigns something like a family resemblance. Whether all may be rightly considered as depravations of the same primitive form of worship; whether the human mind is necessarily confined to a certain circle of religious notions; whether the striking phenomena of the visible world, presented to the imagination of various people in a similar state of civilisation, will excite the same train of devotional thoughts and emotions, the philosophical spirit, and extensive range of inquiry, which in modern times have been carried into the study of mythology, approximate in the most remarkable manner the religions of the most remote countries.* *The best, in my opinion, and most comprehensive work on the ancient religions, is the (yet unfinished) translation of Creuzer's Symbolik, by M. De Guignaut, Réligions de l'Antiquité, Paris, 1825. 1835. It is far superior in arrangement, and does not appear to me so obstinately wedded to the symbolic theory as the original of Creuzer. The Aglaophamus of Lobeck, as might be expected from that distinguished scholar, is full of profound and accurate erudition. Yet I cannot but think that the Grecian polytheism will be better under stood, when considered in connection with the other religions of antiquity, than as an entirely independent system; and surely the sarcastic tone in which M. Lobeck speaks of the Oriental studies of his cotemporaries is unworthy of a man of consummate learning. The work of the late M. Constant, Sur la Réligion, extensive in research, ingenious in argument, and eloquent in style, is in my, perhaps partial, judgement, vitiated by an hostility to every kind of priesthood, better suited to the philosophy of the last than of the I. The same primary principles everywhere appear, CHAP. modified by the social state, the local circumstances, the civil customs, the imaginative or practical character of the people. 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 Fetichism. 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 present century. M. Constant has placed the evils of sacerdotal influence in the strongest light, and disguised or dissembled its advantages. The ancient priestly castes, I conceive, attained their power over the rest of their race by their acknowledged superiority; they were the benefactors, and thence the rulers of their people: to retain their power, as the people advanced, they resorted to every means of keeping men in ignorance and subjection, and so degenerated into the tyrants of the human mind. At all events, sacerdotal domi nation (and here M. Constant *The Fetiche of the African 12 CHAP. I. Tsabaism. Natureworship. 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 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, simple in its primary elements, but branching out into mythological fables, rich and diversified in proportion to the poetic genius of the people. This Nature-worship in its simpler, probably its earlier form, appears as a sort of dualism, in which 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 *Hume (History of Nat. Religion) argues that a pure and philosophical 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. a second dualism. And it is remarkable how widely, CHAP. 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 † 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 re-appearance in all their bright and fertilising energy; these, under different forms, were the great annual fast and festival of the early heathen worship. But the poets were the priests of this Poets. 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 * Plutarch, de Iside et Osiride:Φρύγες τὸν θεὸν οἰόμενοι xequivos pèv kalevdeiv, Gépovg ἐγρηγορέναι, τότε μὲν κατευνασμούς τότε δ' ἀνεγέρσεις βακχεύοντες αὐτῷ τελοῦσι. Παφλαγόνες δὲ καταδεῖ σθαι καὶ καθείργνυσθαι 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 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 Compare likewise Dr. Pritch- Nam rudis ante illos, nullo discrimine, vita Et stupefacta novo pendebat lumine mundi. MANIL. i. 67. I. CHAP. 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 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 inextrica 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 spiritual religious notions in the popular belief; while the wise alone preserved within the sanctuary the primeval secret. |
