The Evolution of the Idea of God: An Inquiry Into the Origins of Religions. Allen Grant

before burning it. In Africa, while a king of Congo is being embalmed, a figure is set up in the palace to represent him, and is daily furnished with food and drink. Mr. Spencer has collected several similar instances of idols substituted for the bodies of the dead. The Roman imagines wore masks of wax, which preserved in like manner the features of ancestors. Perhaps the most curious modern survival of this custom of double representations is to be found in the effigies of our kings and queens still preserved in Westminster Abbey.

      There are two other sources of idol-worship, however, which, as it seems to me, have hardly received sufficient attention at Mr. Spencer’s hands. Those two are the stake which marks the grave, and the standing stone or tombstone. By far the larger number of idols, I venture to believe, are descended from one or other of these two originals, both of which I shall examine hereafter in far greater detail. There is indeed no greater lacuna, I fancy, in Mr. Spencer’s monumental work than that produced by the insufficient consideration of these two fruitful sources of worshipful objects. I shall therefore devote a considerable space to their consideration in subsequent chapters; for the present it will suffice to remark that the wooden stake seems often to form the origin or point of departure for the carved wooden image, as well as for such ruder objects of reverence as the cones and wooden pillars so widely reverenced among the Semitic tribes; while the rough boulder, standing stone, or tombstone seems to form the origin or point of departure for the stone or marble statue, the commonest type of idol the whole world over in all advanced and cultivated communities. Such stones were at first mere rude blocks or unhewn masses, the descendants of those which were rolled over the grave in primitive times in order to keep down the corpse of the dead man, and prevent him from returning to disturb the living. But in time they grew to be roughly dressed into slabs or squares, and finally to be decorated with a rude representation of a human head and shoulders. From this stage they readily progressed to that of the Greek Hermæ. We now know that this was the early shape of most Hellenic gods and goddesses; and we can trace their evolution onward from this point to the wholly anthropomorphic Aphrodite or Here. The well-known figure of the Ephesian Artemis is an intermediate case which will occur at once to every classical reader. Starting from such shapeless beginnings, we progress at last to the artistic and splendid bronze and marble statues of Hellas, Etruria, and Rome, to the many-handed deities of modern India, and to the sculptured Madonnas and Pietàs of Renaissance Italy.

      Naturally, as the gods grow more beautiful and more artistically finished in workmanship, the popular idea of their power and dignity must increase pari passu. In Egypt, this increase took chiefly the form of colossal size and fine manipulation of hard granitic materials. The so-called Memnon and the Sphinx are familiar instances of the first; the Pashts of Syenite, the black basalt gods, so well known at the Louvre and the British Museum, are examples of the second. In Greece, effect was sought rather by ideal beauty, as in the Aphrodites and Apollos, or by costliness of material, as in the chryselephantine Zeus and the Athene of the Parthenon. But we must always remember that in Hellas itself these glorious gods were developed in a comparatively short space of time from the shapeless blocks or standing stones of the ruder religion; indeed, we have still many curious intermediate forms between the extremely grotesque and hardly human Mycenæan types, and the exquisite imaginings of Myron or Phidias. The earliest Hellenic idols engraved by Messrs. Perrot and Chipiez in their great work on Art in Primitive Greece do not rise in any respect superior to the Polynesian level; while the so-called Apollos of later archaic workmanship, rigidly erect with their arms at their sides, recall in many respects the straight up-and-down outline of the standing stone from which they are developed.