So real is this society of the dead that Mr. Macdonald says: “The practice of sending messengers to the world beyond the grave is found on the West Coast. A chief summons a slave, delivers to him a message, and then cuts off his head. If the chief forget anything that he wanted to say, he sends another slave as a postscript.”
I have quoted at such length from this recent and extremely able work because 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. Nothing that the mythologists can tell us about the Sun or the Moon, the Dawn or the Stormcloud, Little Red Riding Hood or Cinderella and the Glass Slipper, comes anywhere near the Origin of Religion in these its central and universal elements. Those stories or guesses may be of immense interest and importance as contributions to the history of ideas in our race; but nothing we can learn about the savage survival in the myth of Cupid or Psyche, or about the primitive cosmology in the myth of the children of Kronos, helps us to get one inch nearer the origin of God or of prayer, of worship, of religious ceremonial, of the temple, the church, the sacrifice, the mass, or any other component part of what we really know as Religion in the concrete. These myths may be sometimes philosophic guesses, sometimes primitive folk-tales, but they certainly are not the truths of Religion. On the other hand, the living facts, here so simply detailed by a careful, accurate, and unassuming observer, strengthened by the hundreds of similar facts collected by Tylor, Spencer, and others, do help us at once to understand the origin of the central core and kernel of religion as universally practised all the world over.
For, omitting for the present the mythological and cosmological factor, which so often comes in to obscure the plain religious facts in missionary narrative or highly-coloured European accounts of native beliefs, what do we really find as the underlying truths of all religion? That all the world over practices essentially similar to those of these savage Central Africans prevail among mankind; practices whose affiliation upon the same primitive ideas has been abundantly proved by Mr. Herbert Spencer; practices which have for their essence the propitiation or adulation of a spiritual being or beings, derived from ghosts, and conceived of as similar, in all except the greatness of the connoted attributes, to the souls of men. “Whenever the [Indian] villagers are questioned about their creed,” says Sir William Hunter, “the same answer is invariably given: ‘The common people have no idea of religion, but to do right [ceremonially] and to worship the village god.”
In short, 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. And I am glad to say that, for early Semitic times at least, Professor Robertson Smith is of the same opinion.
If one looks at the vast mass of the world, ancient and modern, it is quite clear that religion consists, and has always consisted, of observances essentially similar to those just described among the Central African tribes. Its core is worship. Its centre is the God—that is to say, the Dead Ancestor or Relative. The religion of China is to this day almost entirely one of pure ancestor-cult. The making of offerings and burning of joss-paper before the Family Dead form its principal ceremonies. In India, while the three great gods of the mystical Brahmanist philosophy are hardly worshipped in actual practice at all, every community and every house has its own particular gods and its own special cult of its little domestic altar.
“The first Englishman,” says Sir William Hunter, “who tried to study the natives as they actually are, and not as the Brahmans described them, was struck by the universal prevalence of a worship quite distinct from that of the Hindu deities. A Bengal village has usually its local god, which it adores either in the form of a rude unhewn stone, or a stump, or a tree marked with red-lead. Sometimes a lump of clay placed under a tree does duty for a deity, and the attendant priest, when there is one, generally belongs to one of the half-Hinduised low-castes. The rude stone represents the non-Aryan fetish; and the tree seems to owe its sanctity to the non-Aryan belief that it forms the abode of the ghosts, or gods, of the village.”
Omitting the mere guesswork about the fetish and the gratuitous supposition, made out of deference to the dying creed of Max-Müllerism, that ancestor-worship must necessarily be a “non-Aryan” feature (though it exists or existed in all so-called Aryan races), this simple description shows us the prevalence over the whole of India of customs essentially similar to those which obtain in Central Africa and in the Chinese provinces.
The Roman religion, in somewhat the same way, separates itself at once into a civic or national and a private or family cult. There were the great gods, native or adopted, whom the State worshipped publicly, as the Central African tribes worship the chiefs ancestors; and there were the Lares and Penates, whom the family worshipped at its own hearth, and whose very name shows them to have been in origin and essence ancestral spirits. And as the real or practical Hindu religion consists mainly of offering up rice, millet, and ghee to the little local and family deities or to the chosen patron god in the Brahmanist pantheon, so, too, the real or practical Roman religion consisted mainly of sacrifice done at the domestic altar to the special Penates, farre pio et saliente mica.
I will not go on to point out in detail at the present stage of our argument how Professor Sayce similarly finds ancestor-worship and Shamanism (a low form of ghost-propitiation) at the root of the religion of the ancient Ac-cadians; how other observers have performed the same task for the Egyptians and Japanese; and how like customs have been traced among Greeks and Amazulu, among Hebrews and Nicaraguans, among early English and Digger Indians, among our Aryan ancestors themselves and Andaman Islanders. Every recent narrative of travel abounds with examples. Of Netherland Island I read, “The skulls of their ancestors were treasured for gods of the New Hebrides, “The people worshipped the spirits of their ancestors. They prayed to them, over the kava-bowl, for health and prosperity.” In New Caledonia, “Their gods were their ancestors, whose relics they kept up and idolised.” At Tana, “The general name for gods seemed to be aremha; that means a dead man, and hints,” says the Rev. George Turner, with pleasing frankness, “alike at the origin and nature of their religious worship.” When the chief prayed, he offered up yam and fruits, saying, “Compassionate father, here is some food for you; eat it. Be kind to us on account of it.” Those who wish to see the whole of the evidence on this matter marshalled in battle array have only to turn to the first volume of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s Principles of Sociology, where they will find abundant examples from all times and places gathered together in a vast and overwhelming phalanx.
What concerns us in this chapter a little more is to call attention by anticipation to the fact that even in Christianity itself the same primitive element survives as the centre of all that is most distinctively religious, as opposed to theological, in the Christian religion. And I make these remarks provisionally here in order that the reader may the better understand to what ultimate goal our investigation will lead him.
It is the universal Catholic custom to place the relics of saints or martyrs under the altars in churches. Thus the body of St. Mark the Evangelist lies under the high altar of St. Mark’s, at Venice; and in every other Italian cathedral, or chapel, a reliquary is deposited within the altar itself. So well understood is this principle in the Latin Church, that it has hardened into the saying, “No relic, no altar.” The sacrifice of the mass takes place at such an altar, and is performed by a priest in sacrificial robes. 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.
Furthermore, the very idea of a church itself is descended