Lastly, in the highest religions, a large element of ethics, of sentiment, of broad humanitarianism of adventitious emotion, is allowed to come in, often to the extent of obscuring the original factors of practice and observance.
We are constantly taught that “real religion” means many things which have nothing on earth to do with religion proper, in any sense, but are merely high morality, tinctured by emotional devotion towards a spiritual being or set of beings.
Owing to all these causes, modern investigators, in searching for the origin of religion, are apt to mix up with it, even when dealing with savage tribes, many extraneous questions of cosmology, cosmogony, philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, and mythology. They do not sufficiently see that the true question narrows itself down at last to two prime factors—worship and sacrifice. In all early religions, the practice is at a maximum, and the creed at a minimum. We, nowadays, look back upon these early cults, which were cults and little else, with minds warped by modern theological prejudices—by constant wrangling over dogmas, clauses, definitions, and formularies. We talk glibly of the Hindu faith or the Chinese belief, when we ought rather to talk of the Hindu practice or the Chinese observances. By thus wrongly conceiving the nature of religion, we go astray as to its origin. We shall only get right again when we learn to separate mythology entirely from religion, and when we recognise that the growth and development of the myth have nothing at all to do with the beginnings of worship. The science of comparative mythology and folk-lore is a valuable and light-bearing study in its own way: but it has no more to do with the origin of religion than the science of ethics or the science of geology. There are ethical rules in most advanced cults: there are geological surmises in most sacred books: but neither one nor the other is on that account religion, any more than the history of Jehoshaphat or the legend of Samson.
What I want to suggest in the present chapter sums itself up in a few sentences thus: Religion is practice, mythology is story-telling. 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. And I shall attempt in this book to account for the origin of religion alone, omitting altogether both mythology as a whole, and all mythical persons or beings other than gods in the sense here illustrated.
CHAPTER III.—THE LIFE OF THE DEAD.
The object of this book, we saw at the beginning, is to trace the evolution of the idea of God. But the solution of that problem implies two separate questions—first, how did men begin to frame the idea of a god at all; and second, how did they progress from the conception of many distinct gods to the conception of a single supreme God, like the central deity of Christianity and of Islam. In other words, we have first to enquire into the origin of polytheism, and next into its gradual supersession by monotheism. Those are the main lines of enquiry I propose to follow out in the present volume.
Religion, however, has one element within it still older, more fundamental, and more persistent than any mere belief in a god or gods—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. It is also the latest thing to survive in religion; for many modern spiritualists, who have ceased to be theists, or to accept any other form of the supernatural, nevertheless go on believing in the continued existence of the dead, and in the possibility of intercommunication between them and the living. This, therefore, which is the earliest manifestation of religious thought, and which persists throughout as one of its most salient and irrepressible features, must engage our attention for a little time before we pass on to the genesis of polytheism.
But the belief in continued life itself, like all other human ideas, has naturally undergone various stages of evolution. The stages glide imperceptibly into one another, of course; but I think we can on the whole distinguish with tolerable accuracy between three main layers or strata of opinion with regard to the continued existence of the dead. In the first or lowest stratum, the difference between life and death themselves is but ill or inadequately perceived; the dead are thought of as yet bodily living. In the second stratum, death is recognised as a physical fact, but is regarded as only temporary; at this stage, men look forward to the Resurrection of the Body, and expect the Life of the World to Come. In the third stratum, the soul is regarded as a distinct entity from the body; it survives it in a separate and somewhat shadowy form: so that the opinion as to the future proper to this stage is not a belief in the Resurrection of the Body, but a belief in the Immortality of the Soul. These two concepts have often been confounded together by loose and semi-philosophical Christian thinkers; but in their essence they are wholly distinct and irreconcilable.
I shall examine each of these three strata separately.
And first as to that early savage level of thought where the ideas of life and death are very ill demarcated. To us at the present day it seems a curious notion that people should not possess the conception of death as a necessary event in every individual human history. But that is because we cannot easily unread all our previous thinking, cannot throw ourselves frankly back into the state of the savage. We are accustomed to living in large and populous communities, where deaths are frequent, and where natural death in particular is an every-day occurrence. We have behind us a vast and long history of previous ages; and we know that historical time was occupied by the lives of many successive generations, all of which are now dead, and none of which on the average exceeded a certain fixed limit of seventy or eighty odd years. 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.
We forget, however, that to the savage all this is quite otherwise. He lives in a small and scattered community, where deaths are rare, and where natural death in particular is comparatively infrequent. Most of his people are killed in war, or devoured by wild beasts, or destroyed by accidents in the chase, or by thirst or starvation. Some are drowned in rapid rivers; some crushed by falling trees or stones; some poisoned by deadly fruits, or bitten by venomous snakes; some massacred by chiefs, or murdered in quarrels with their own tribesmen. In a large majority of instances, there is some open and obvious cause of death; and this cause is generally due either to the hand of man or to some other animal; or failing that, to some apparently active effort of external nature, such as flood, or lightning, or forest fires, or landslip and earthquake. Death by disease is comparatively rare; death by natural decay almost unknown or unrecognised.
Nor has the savage a great historic past behind him. He knows few but his tribesmen, and little of their ancestors save those whom his parents can remember before them. His perspective of the past is extremely limited. Nothing enables him to form that wide idea of the necessity and invariability of death which to us is so familiar. That “all men are mortal” is to civilised man a truism; to very early savages it would necessarily have seemed a startling paradox. No man ever dies within his own experience; ever since he can remember, he has continued to exist as a permanent part of all his adventures. Most of the savage’s family have gone on continuously living with him. A death has been a rare and startling occurrence. Thus the notion of death as an inevitable end never arises at all; the notion of death as due to natural causes seems quite untenable. When a savage dies, the first question that arises is “Who has killed him?” If he is slain in war, or devoured by a tiger, or ripped up by an elephant, or drowned by a stream in spate, or murdered by a tribesman,