[ p. 180 ]
Ritual is a stereotyped expression of emotion or belief or of both combined. A stated time as well as a set manner marks the ritual of seasonal sacrifices, but there are rituals, such as that of war, not determined by the season. Ritual is the frame which preserves religion as weU as exhibits it, but it often lasts longer than that which it is intended to keep. Its great primitive importance is more than religious, for it established an intimate relation between religion and non-religious acts; it sanctified custom and to a large extent gave man the first clear conception of ordered times in the observance of fixed dates, which it tended to make exact in the form of calendars, as well as in impressing upon his mind chronological data in the ritual of historical exhibitions.
But it is an error to assume, with Wundt, that all temporal observance has its origin in religion. Particularly in commemorative rites, the ritual preserves a mass of observances, the origin of which is popular and to be sought in non-religiqus custom. Economic ceremonies based on seedtime and harvest are not at first religious. It is not correct to say with Durkheim that every feast is religious. His argument is that any feast excites the masses, so that they are carried outside of themselves and feel themselves in another world, exactly as they are deliriously excited by religion, and the consciousness of being “in another world” makes the feast religious. Proof of this assertion would be gratefully received, failing which it may be safely regarded as pure assumption. Popular feasts survive, however, often without religious [ p. 181 ] bearing even when they have been taken up as religious. Gratification at harvest expresses itself in free jollity, is then interpreted religiously (compare the Feast of Tabernacles), and finally remains as -a gay celebration, modified into seemliness, as compared with its original form, through advancing ethical feeling and prior association with religion, though scarcely a trace of religion remains in the popular estimate of the day (compare the Saturnalia and the modern Thanksgiving Day). Seedtime and joy of life express themselves in non-religious forms and then the non-religious celebration of spring becomes Easter or Passover, with a host of extraneous religious associations, and finally Easter becomes merely a display of bonnets. .Dress itself has thus become religious; headdresses, paint, oil, decorative marks, assumed by savages for economic and social purposes, are taken up as marks of medicine-men and priests or are employed for ritualistic ends, oil for anointing religiously, decorative tattoo as apotropaic remedy, and paint and scars becoming part of the ritual of totemism.[1]
The agricultural stage shows more religious incorporation of savage ideas in ritualistic form than does the usually precedent nomadic stage, partly because the deities become more anthropomorphized. A grain field is fertilized, with blood rather magically than religiously, because blood, representing life, makes the field live, so to speak, as it also drives away demons. But in the agricultural stage man finds himself more dependent on weather and sun than in the hunting stage and the recurrent season becomes vitally important, so that he is apt to pay tribute to the spirit (as to a chief) whose aid he needs on stated occasions, render blood as tribute, dedicate first-fruits and first-born to gods conceived as of human sort, though he may at the same time (as shown [ p. 182 ] above, p. 172 ) produce rain by pouriag out water or blood, as saints’ images were whipped for wind long after the sailor bad learned to pray to thena. For magic dies bard and its ritual remains closely interwoven with that of religion. Closer attention to seasons bas come out of the agricultural stage; but in empbasizing this reiterated truism it must not be exaggerated, for the moons of the hunter also divided time. Most savages have lunar time and feasts and it is perhaps safest to’ confine oneself to the obvious fact that the solar calendar and its religiousritual is a product of the agricultural stage. We are still under the influence of the religious importance of the New Year’s day, which in the form of day or week gives the prognostication or oracle of the coming year. Sundances and celebrations of solstice and equinox are not quite in the same category, however, as in one case it is the sun and in the other the season which occasions the celebration. The winter mourning is because of the dying of the season rather than of the sun and the summer rejoicing (compare the harvest feast, Pentecost) was nob so much a recognition of the sun as a spiritual power as it was a celebration of the changing year.
What marks the shift from custom to religion is the attribution of custom as religious to a semi-divine or ancestral authority. Eitual makes a myth. “Because the gods gave themselves as food to the Sun, so do we.”[2] A rule which says “because Father Manu did so and so, therefore we do it as a religious duty,” marks the shift to religion. So, because Abraham circumcised, “therefore we circumcise”; because the Japanese goddess held a mirror, a mirror is employed in her ritual, etc. A ritual, too, may fathered by a myth. The means of fighting the seven devils that cause an eclipse becomes a ritual.
[ p. 183 ]
Ritual generally expresses quite closely the conditions of life. The African cow-herders have developed a strict milking-ritual; the Todas have a religious buffalo-ceremony; the Australian ritual has to do with the propagation of grubs and other local food-supplies; the ritual of Mstoiy renders dramatically the tribal events of the past; the war-dances (of Greeks and Amerinds alike) prepare for battle by stimulating courage and simulating what is to tsome; in general the ritual is not markedly re‘ligious but rather social and economic. Religion is rather an alien here; but, by dint of dragging in the Fathers of old as admiring helpers and turning rather perfunctorily to the spirits for aid, the ceremony acquires a religious tinge and in time may become almost wholly religious. For example, the Amerind dances are often rather historical and simulative than religious, but at the end of the sun-dance, for example, there is a pretense of prayer to the spirits.[3] Sometimes, however, a dance is said to have been practiced (not invented) merely to please a certain manitou, as certain songs are simg to honor him.
All these rituals are of the mob and it is here that Burkheim gets Ms strongest support for the theory that all religion is mob-illusion. But it must not be overlooked that private rituals exist. The antithesis between private and public is not very real, though often formulated when applied to magic and religion. Eeligion, too, is private and ritual is both private and public. There is no mob in the ritual of Shamanism nor in that of the candidate for priesthood among Africans. A ritual of refined Shamanism is that of Ohin^e ancestor-worship, in which no mobspirit creates iHimion or makes the ceremony.
The distinction between rites of joy and rites of sorrow [ p. 184 ] brings out this matter of private ritual very clearly. Feasts of thanksgiving or of public rejoicing or victory or. harvest are common outlets for general feeling. Bites of joy are thus for the most part rites of the group. But woe is not only public, it is suffered and expressed in private by individuals, animal and human. We have already discussed public mourning and its ritual, but not directly Durkheim’s theory that mourning is not individual at all. No primitive individual, according to this view, mourns for his dead; only the group as a whole gets excited because it feels its group-unity afflicted or impaired and hence hacks itself and howls, making for itself a mourning ritual which precedes the wish to mourn: “It is the rite which establishes the wish to mourn, not the wish to mourn which establishes the mourning ritual.”[4] As opposed to this whole argument, let us consider that the ghost leaves a family or an individual often destitute, often loved; in any case, the death affects first of all the individual, and the wish to mourn or rather the expression of mourning is even with animals an individual matter. As remarked in the first chapter, the submergence of the individual in the group has been exaggerated. It is true that the group determines ethics and ritual to a great extent, yet it is an absurd distortion of this truth to maintain that in primitive groups there is no individuality. But this is the consequence of the general theory that “evil powers are the product of rites and symbolize them” (as spirits and ghosts), that is, there would be no ghosts or evil spirits were not mob-excitement productive of such illusions.[5]
[ p. 185 ]
The customary distinction between private and public ritual is that private ritual is for the individual, public for the public. Such festival-rituals as we have been considering are for the public good, or pleasure, and are carried out by the public to a marked extent, though certain warriors and priests are apt to be the actors to the exclusion of the general public. Yet all share in the feast or general sacrifice. But a private ritual is for the benefit of a few or for one, such as a birth-rite, circumcision, same-giving, wedding. Nevertheless, the participants really make the rite in large measure, and in the case of a wedding or funeral the rite is private only in the sense that one or two individuals or families are especially concerned; the whole clan take a hand in the celebration, as they do in a mourning-rite. The intervening rite between public and private is where, as in a commensal meal, a sub-division of a clan or caste or body of workers (as inBorne) celebrates a commemoration or has a reunion. In other words, there is no genetic distinction between celebrations of public and private rites. But what is important is that savages have these private rites, such, for example, as a rite among Africans wdien a woman has conceived, to insure the protection of the tutelary spirit, just as they have private religious impulses. The main difference between private and public performances is that in a family matter a priest is often unnecessary; every father acts as his own priest here as he does, in India, for example, in wish-rites and other matters of private concern. But this means merely that the father is the priest sufficient for the need, and this family ritual, with the head of the family as its natural priest, is probably just as primitive as is the clan-congress for religious purposes. So the familiar family taboos concerning women are not originally clan affairs. No priest was required [ p. 186 ] of old in a Hindu wedding or in many domestic rites insuring life and health.
Prominent in public rituals of increase of grain are dancing and masked actors. If we go back to a period before grain-gods are known, we find the grain itself or the a-nimnl regarded as an intelligent power which is exhorted to grow and increase. At this stage dancing is distinctly a reproductive stimulus, as it is in the animal krngdom, and the object of dancing would be perfectly dear even if it were not accompanied, as is the ease in Australian and other savage rituals, by sexual pantomime and orgies. At the same stage masked actors representing the powers are a common feature of the ritual, and music stimulates growth as dancing stimulates power. There is no symbolism, but the spirit of the mask is affected by the erotic growth-producing act, of which dancing and music are the expression. That is to say, dancing as a part of religious ritual is at first neither apotropaie, to frighten off demons, nor to please the gods. As an autointoxicant it empowers and helps growth. The next stage is when spiritual powers are imagined as affecting crops unfavorably. Evil demons retard and injure the crop and the ceremony which helps the crop according to tradition is employed to help it in the present view, so that dancing is interpreted as a means of dispelling evil spirits. This belongs to a stage represented by Amerinds and Negroes and still survivestin the notion, now generalized, that dancing drives away devils. It is only a few years ago that our Southern -Negroes at camp meeting took dancing to be a general prophylactic against .evil and sang as they danced (religiously) :
“Here we dance around the stump
And kick the devil at every jump.”
The circle of the dance, by the way, is also primitive; it [ p. 187 ] is still preserved in the ring-ronnd-the-rosy dance, a harmless survival of a terrible old religious rite. The third stage in religious dancing is the one represented by David dancing before the Lord[6] and the dancing of the recessional in the Spanish church today. The war-dance is a clan-application of the private dance to excite valor, beginning with the animal male dance at the mating season, in which the peacock or grouse dances as part of his autointoxication preparator to fighting any other claimant of his mate, perhaps also to charm her with the exhibition of his valor. The Australians, who show us the ’ probable beginnings of so many ritual features, have also a masked drama and historical plays, as well as a comedyplay, as part of their magical-religious ritual, elements of religion leading to the drama of today and found also aiaong Pacific Islanders and Amerinds.
The beginning of a parallel to Mexican and Greek vegetation-mysteries with an ethical bearing had already begun among the Oherokees. The Syrian and Greek cult of Tammuz and Adonis is approached by the Dravidian wild tribes. There is an interesting parallel between the Dravidian and Amerind sun-rites illustrative of how a ritual of this sort may lose its primitive meaning. The Amerinds did not know why their rite was performed. The rite began with a fast of four days, in which the victims were deprived not only of food and drink but also of sleep. In this weakened condition skewers of wood were inserted under the muscles of the back and the victims were then hauled up by ropes, fastened to the hooks of wood, and swung round and roimd tiU they could no longer endure the agony. The Dravidian Bhumka rite also consists in stringing a man up by a hook inserted in his back and [ p. 188 ] swinging him around in exactly the same way as was done, in America; but in India the rite is explained as one producing a good effect on the crops.[7] To the Amerinds the torture was only a test of valor. In both eases, however, we have to do with the primitive rite of swinging with the sun as a means of helping the sun to aid the crops, just as in the same district of India rain is produced by having a naked woman plough at night, and (or) burying a frog at night (allied in thought to water and dark powers).[8] This kind of ritual, which, to ensure a good harvest, causes torture or death of animals or man, lasted (as has been explained) through the Middle Ages, and still survives in a generally unrecognized form in the Maypole cult.
j Though ritual is based on usage it is subject to change. Several individuals are mentioned in the ancient Brah; man literature as objecting to such and such a ritual and either modifying or rejecting it. The clash of clan on clan, the welding of different traditions, may account for sijch cases, but also the advancing ethical sense or a more intelligent mind. One of these old ritualists is reported to have said that part of the ritual was nonsense. The different schools are constantly citing diverse “family traditions” as to ritual. Social expansion then amalgamates rituals or brings in new ritual, as in Borne. Change of climate, life under new conditions, all these elements oppose the stereotyped ritual with more or less success. The United States left out the prayer for the king in the [ p. 189 ] Church service. The famine of 1897 caused the priests of Ahmedahad to circnmamhulate the city chanting old Vedic hymns, a new ritual in its entirety. The Hindu ritual anent eclipse has been radically changed, being converted into a great -bathing ceremony. So the inner force of a ritual changes. The Amerind snake-dance began as a magical ceremony to get rain, but has become religious and precative. Just as the ritual begins as an expression of social usage, so it is maintained by conforming thereto, in thought as in act, in so far as it can. But it is apt, as a conservative force, to lag far behind. Hence it embodies outworn thought; the cult as compared with the creed is often anachronistic.
Any ritual may thus, instead of becoming Vague, be diverted into the expression of a new idea. Thus in Japan, besides the ritual of gifts to the gods there was a general rite of purification, to rid the land ef all evil, “foulness,” by depositing it on a horse and having it washed off in the sea. The ritual remains but is now “propitiatory.” So another Japanese ritual, to ask for favors, is now a “laudation.” In these cases, a later ethos has interpreted the old rite in modern terms.
That a rite begins with a specific object is rather m line with similar phenomena in the ritual. Thus there is a large class of words which originally are ejaculatory and have the definite purpose of emphasizing statements made in the ritual with an added so-be-it or so-it-is, like Amen, Selah, Om (yes, truly). Then the connotation becomes vague; they are no longer felt as part of a Shamanistic ejaculatory service but as mysterious and rather awful words which may be applied ans^where on solemn occasions, just as definite swearrwords become vague expressions of wonder or wrath, like jove, hell, damn. In the Brahman liturgy one of these exclam.ntions became a veritable word of magical power used in benediction [ p. 190 ] and as a divine weapon.’ So, again, sacrificial wateY is for a certain purpose; bnt in the Hindu drama a frightened priest, who wants to cure a case of sunstroke, suggests fetching the “sacrificial water, which ds curative,” that is, it is good for any trouble. Again, the use of Biblical texts and words of the Koran on Scraps of paper are treated as general amulets. The tendency in all these cases is to convert a religious act or object of definite character into a vague general magical act or talisman. The sacred word becomes in itself a divine power. This is actually reduced to a system in Tantric Buddhism, where spells and words have magical effect and act as a compelling power (like the old Vedic ritual).
It is somewhat in this wa.y that we must explain the extraordinary fact .already alluded to, that the same ritual is used for the most Averse purposes, a mass. for a wedding or a funeral, for example, and fasting for expiation and for communion. In the Hindu ritual, expiation, communion, a vow, and a contract are all alike indifferently introduced by the same sacrificial machinery slightly modified. The thought has become vague and only a general sense of religious purification attaches to the ceremony, so that it can be applied to almost any specific pm-pose. This seems to the writer a more probable explanation than that urged by Durkbeim, who thinks that the rite is in its inception not a particular function, having any specific aim, but a general vague means of establishing a group-force and confidence, whereby the group reas’fii ms itself peiiodicaHy, the various effects of the rite arising from a secondary determination of a special object.[9]
A late form of rite is the pilgrimage to a certain shrine, where miracles always ocenr, Mecca, Benares, Lourdes, etc. Such a pilgrimage multiplies the god, thus having a [ p. 191 ] distinct religions value. The Jupiter of such and such a place is a different Jupiter in each and so Our Lady of this’ or that shrine is not the same power. Otherwise there would be no object in going to a special shrine. Of course it is said that it is the same Jupiter, the same saint, the same Lady, but the weary pilgrim knows well that his special helper is to be found only in one shrine. Inddentally, pilgrimages create new buildings of gods and enlarge temple services, making places where relics are ^stored, but these are not new features. In erecting preservative shrines and temples, naturally the architectural sense is developed, as in painting and sculpture, and religion gives back more than it has received. In the view of many scholars, art in all its forms originates in religious activities. Far be it from an Indologist to minimize the actual benefit derived from religion by art and science; for in India, geometry, music as a science, astrology, medicine, sculpture, and painting, not to speak of law and philosophy, are all outgrowths of religion. Eeligion, such as it is, even in Australia led to drarnatic beginnings, lyric and epic poetry of a rudimentary sort, and to the shrine idea. Nevertheless, it is an exaggeration to attribute to religion the primary use of dress, decoration, oil, etc. Even animals love adornment and the more savage a man is the more he likes to make a display. Fishbone necklaces are found in European caves as old as European elephants and probably for adornment only; as savages use oil for gpeasing themselves before they use it for religious purposes. Umbrellas were first carried not, as Dr. Jevons says, to protect the sun from the mana of a man, but man from the sun.
In our own Church, the ritual of which preserves in some measure that of ancient Borne (compare the processions, use of incense, statues, etc.), changes tending to modify the older cult are clearly marked. Augustine [ p. 192 ] tells us that the liturgy for the dead was like that of unbelievers and discusses the advisability of having a service sung or recited. Curative shrines to heathen gods were not radically altered by being ascribed to Christian saints. Songs to Venus were kept but addressed to Saint Venus. Demeter was still invoked under the name of Holy Mother; Artemis, as the Holy Virgin. The cave of Askiepios is even today decorated with the same votive offerings as of yore, but Asklepios has the name of a Christian. Even Buddha became canonized as a Christian, saint. In these regards our religion did not so much displace another as absorb it, giving a new interpretation to the old cult and ritual, just as in India the gods of the wild tribes have been absorbed with their cults into Brahmanism. All great religions have thus absorbed the less in spirit and cult, and such a ritual as that of Lamaism or Mithraism or Christianity is always more or less a compotmd of original and foreign elements. Thus arises the question of borrowing. The cult of Aphrodite borrowed part of its ritual from the East as that of Dionysos from the North. Christianity probably borrowed from Mithraism and from other sources. Lamaism perhaps borrowed some elements from Christianity. But the question of borrowing is one not always to be answered with certainty. The Lamaistic church, mth its tintinnabulations, prostrations, holy pictures and banners, its pope, its vicars, its priests with their gorgeous vestments, its abbots, monasteries, monks and nuns, struck the first Christian missionaries as a devilish caricature of their own church. But item for item, what proof is there of borrowing? Banners and pictures of saints were known in both churches before they came in contact; genuflections, bells, processions, and incense were common to every religion of the East and West. The Buddhists had monks and nuns from the beginning. It needed only that all these [ p. 193 ] elements should combine; and they did so, withal the more easily because the climate rendered the enclosed chnreh bnilding necessary., This put together more strikingly these diverse items; for esample, the hanging of pictures, the circumscribed procession. Incense, too, was inherited by the Christian Church from Mediterranean usage (all the Semites except the Arabs used it) and the Buddhistic Church inherited it from the Brahmans. The ritualistic halo was borrowed from Greece and this apparently was carried to India, as the rosary was carried from India to the Christian Church.[10]
More important is the matter of our own ritual as expressing primitive ideas. Baptism, as already explained, purifies by washing off evil power. The ritual of atonement is expressed by savages in the ritual of sacrifice preceded by purification, from ill rather than from moral evil,“” but the two, as we have seen, are combined in savage thought. Incantation, bathing, purging, steam baths, fasting, all these were practiced by the original Americans as purificatory. With these means they removed e’vdl influences, ill, and sin. They washed themselves free of evil, as baptism drives off the devil. In his curative sulphur bath the savage believed that his ensuing better health was the result of a triumph over evil, hence sinful, powers. The fast made him avoid defiled food, was hygienic, and at the same time gave him visions, obviously (to him) bringing him into closer touch with spiritual forces. Purification by fire is not rare, though less common [ p. 194 ] than by water and fast; it is usually an ordeal, to test one’s purity of word or act (involving perjury or adultery). But it is a common means of making atonement by proxy sacrifice; the victim being burned as a substitute for the sinner or as a placatory offering, and in many religions fire is purificatory; it burns away evil, the stain of mortality (Greek), cleanses the field (needfire). Florence still retains the cult of the Easter fire.
The ritual of purification is thus in great measure an outgrowth from the apotropaic ceremony, riddance from ni leading to, a ritual whereby evil spirits are driven away. From this general idea arises the thought that, when one has sinned, the evil infecting a man through his sin may be driven out of him by a similar ceremony; he can by fasting and bathing and sacrifice bring himself again into a normal relation with the good power. The purificatory act makes him clean and in that condition he can attempt reconciliation by a sacrifice, which pays his debt to the power he inoagines he has offended. Sometimes atonement was made in advance by self-inflicted torture. In all religions there is usually a preparatory cleanliness before the atoning sacrifice is made or can be accepted. This was the keynote of Buddha’s remonstrance against the sacrifice as a mere ritual. Sacrifice without the clean heart, he said, leads only to vain belief in relief; the foundation of religion is moral cleanliness. In savage religion, however, the ethical and religious sides are generally separate. Sins, that is, are not necessarily ethical and may be accidental as well as voluntary.[11]
Apotropaic remedies have now become with us merely rustic superstitions. In classical time there lingered still [ p. 195 ] a formal ritual for driving off ghosts and -winter and famine and other evils conceived spiritually. For ordinary evil spirits, noise and iron ard smells and fire and water were regarded as apotropaic^ above all, Wood. In the Passover the Wood may have been used to keep oif evil spirits and the shedding of the L^b’s blood is historically connected with this ceremony; bnt it has been interpreted as a sacrifice, not as an apotropaic means, as the whole theory of atonement has become sacrificial in the Christian Church.[12] Bnt in general this has been accepted only with the reservation that the individual must have made the preliminary step and purified himself, in token of which repentance is accepted by the priest. A. further step is taken when it is recognized that by confession of faith one implicitly repents; and the last step is taken when a mere dying utterance of the Savior’s name is taken as implying the confession of faith. This leads to the practice, if not the doctrine, that a sinner who utters the name of Jesus on his death-bed is secure of salvation. It is the same -with the devotees of Rama and Buddha and in this regard all three religions have made it possible for a murderer to die in peaceful certainty of salvation, however sinful his disposition really remains to the end. Fortunately for ethics, this religious fanaticism is not prevalent and only in certain sects is the “repetition of the Holy Name” regarded as a passport to Heaven.
As baptism and atonement-rites belong to savage usage, so the rite of confirmation is a modern form of primitive [ p. 196 ] imtiation. The Church represents the secret society which is found in many savage tribes of Africa, Polynesia, and America. When a boy becomes an adult he is admitted into the tribe with a ritual which, as we have seen, fortifies him and endows him with spiritual power. WTien successfully tested he is robed in the equivalent of the later toga virilis and is accepted as a member of the body politic. In India, so enduring is this rite that a boy who has not been initiated is to this day no member of society; he is, as it were, un-caste, has no place, is regarded as a Pariah. In savage hfe, when the clan becomes less important as an entity, the secret society takes its place, as the caste takes the place of the clan. Into the secret society, as into the clan, the youth is admitted only after a certain ritual, usually interpreted as tests of manhood,[13] and is then entrusted with the secrets of his new order, entrance into which purifies him from various evils and causes him to become a new being, so that, as already explained, he is even said to have been “born again.” In all these societies the novice becomes a member of a mystic congregation.
There are in these secret societies the same elements, of a spiritual brotherhood, as those that led to the secret ( Orphic) society and eventually found expression in the form of the Church as a mystic spiritual body, into which one is admitted as a regenerate being. The vigil of the savage who is to be initiated is kept with fasting and prayer and rewarded with visions. Such a religious society tends to do away with the clan as authority, substituting what we should call church authority. But probably in all cases [ p. 197 ] (as notably in Greece) the mystic society anyway follows a decadence of clan-spirit. It is composed of members who belong to various clans and thus introduce a new principle of unity. So in India members of various clans called families made one caste and in Africa a mystic society ignores tribal relations and creates a spiritual brotherhood, as one may imagine that totemism united men by spiritual affinity, so that if a Bear-brother of one tribe came to a tribe not his own but also brothers of the bear he would have been received as a brother though from a different political organization. It is on record that members of the savage secret society sometimes expect a special sort of future happiness, as the Greek mystic brotherhoods expected a peculiar reward hereafter. In this life, too, the members, once recognized, enjoy special respect and are often feared. Such souls in oiir religion, as saints, have power; they are prayed to as intercessors. On the other hand, prayers are said for the dead, one is “baptized for the dead,” as if man could still help the ordinary spirit.
Historically these savage ideas, which, for example, invented baptism, absolution after confession, and communion among the Aztecs (who also revered the cross as a religious symbol); a special paradise for the chosen or elect in Polynesia; and peculiar bliss hereafter for members of the African societies; as weU as the common savage rituals of fasting, prayer, and hymns; and established mystic brotherhoods, whereby men were drawn closer together by a spiritual bond which also united them mth the spirit itself — ^these savage ideas are not the direct antecedents of similar Christian expressions, which have been modified and clarified by intefruediate expression of a more advanced type, as the Christian mystic brotherhood had -behind it the spirituality of the Orphic mystics, who first gave voice to the hope of a [ p. 198 ] blissful resurrection for their converts. The different elements which make up the whole church ritual are indeed eventually of a savage type, but each has gone through similar intermediate modifications and been more and more spiritualized.[14] Also, of course, all these different rites have here coalesced into one body distinct from any other body of rites. The Church has in this shown itself not abnormal or unhuman, but it expresses in its united ritual common hopes and common needs such as men have expressed in many times and places but hitherto with less completeness and far less spirituality. Some try to ignore the- origin of these rites; some mock at them as a body of antiquated savage superstitions; but it is wiser to recognize their origin and at the same time to realize that they have become finer and nobler than the savage originals; just as the G-reeks and Hebrews refined their inherited myths and made inspired poetry out of commonplace tales.
The advantages derived from ritual have already been animadverted upon. It linked the social to the religious side of life; it was iustrumental in conserving religious forms; it held the social body together in the service of spiritual powers. Its disadvantages are that it tends to replace spontaneity with form as it becomes more or less meaningless owing to repetition and it is apt to turn into a machine of power operated by a few men to their own advantage (see the next chapter). At present, the question of church ritual service, of what sort it should be, is more an aesthetic than a religious matter, fbr a stately dignified procedure is to some more pleasing than [ p. 199 ] spontaneous utterances. Eitualized prayer is thus to many more satisfying than individual expression. Others find in the ritual a poor substitute for emotion and prefer plain talk and plain exercises to elaborate if more beautiful expression and activities. Incense and candles and genuflections soothe some and irritate others. But such things are not essential, or even important.
The need of something more vital than the stereotyped ritual is admirably illustrated in the procedure in I n dia at the death of a loved member of the family. The lawhooks inform us that “minor rites” for the dead may be performed “according as old men and women” recommend. Such people are, together with priests, the natural conservators of old local Custom. So, after the formal priestly rites have been performed, the mourners are advised to listen to comforting old tales. Some old person, it is suggested (but not required), should gather the mourners together and recite verses of a consolatoiy character. Then a specimen is given by the law-maker (Yaj., Dh.) of what it would be advisable to say :
“Naught in life is fixed or sure; water-bubbles ne’er endure;
Element to element back returns when life is spent.
Earth itself will pass away, ocean too; e’en gods decay;
And shall mortals, foam and bubble on the sea of life and trouble.
Outlive earth and sea and sky? Weep not if a mortal die.
Weep not, ye who mourn, but think, ‘He ye love must loathing drink
All the tears the mourners shed, when they vainly weep their dead.’
Therefore tales of noble worth, what good men have done on earth,
[ p. 200 ]
What the great have dying left, tell each other. Though bereft,
Think that he who dies still lives watchful of the heart that grieves !
Will your tears his joy increase, where he lives the life of peace?
His he bliss without alloy; let no mourning mar his joy.”
Ritualized religious songs are both laudatory and penitential. In India, these songs are chiefly laudatory; in Babylon, chiefly penitential; but the two sorts are often united even in the same hymn. In both environments the hymns lost their original freshness and by dint of repetition tended to become formulaic and magical. The formality of worship and sacrifice is also strengthened by ritualistic processions and pilgrimages at set times of the year, usually under the guise of commemoration services, such as that of some episode or exploit of the god, his birthday or triumph over enemies. Often an old processional ritual is utilized for this purpose.[15] New shrines and new forms of worship are thus introduced. The ordinary ritual had to do in the East generally, with attendance on the idol-body of the god, who in India was at home and received on certain days, prior to which he had to be waked, washed, and waited on, like a raja at court. But idols and temples are not part of India’s early service. In later times, each temple has a multitude of priests, who, like the Greek priests of only one shrine, serve one divinity and receive money from private and public contributions. In Egypt and elsewhere, the temples [ p. 201 ] acquired immense wealth in this way and the Egyptian priests, partly by virtue of this wealth, attained great political influence.
The temple-idea, when not that of a grove (above, p. 29), is a developed ghost-house or god-hut, beth-el, and in any form is, or contains, taboo-stufl, either religious implements or divine bodies (fetishes, etc.). Sometimes skeletons of ancestors, carried by Amerinds in bundles in war, serve as contents of such a prirnitive ai’k, like the one in which the Hebrews carried their sacra. The developed temple combines the idea of a sacred place for a spirit’s home and a sacred place for sacrifice to the spirit, who is either still tangible in idol or altar (originally divine) or intangible, as when the altar becomes a mere stone of sacrifice. The temple of the Jews did away with the free open sacrifices, which previously might be nfade anywhere, as they were made at first in India, where no temples were built tiU the modern gods had overshadowed the open-air deities of the Vedic religion. It may be questioned whether the early Aryans had temples at all. The Homeric Greeks appear to have sacrificed without regard to place and a simple altar built for the occasion was all that was necessary. Both Vedic and Homeric deities were unconfined powers and the Aryan Greeks may have borrowed the temple-idea from their neighbors, as did the Jews.[16] Neither Greek nor He [ p. 202 ] brew temple was intended as a meeting-bonse is the modern sense; the Jewish synagogne filled this need. Altars are not at all necessary in primitive or even modern sacrifices. The usual sacrifice to the elephant-god in India (Ganesha) is an offering of flowers, fruits, fish, milk, cakes, and intosicants, which are placed in a basket and left at a crossing in a place marked only by strewn grass (like the Vedio barhis). The stone god of a Hindu village is. both god and altar. In the Patiala district of the Punjab there is still worshipped on occasion (when smallpox is feared) the Bibrian stone, which is at once altar, temple, and god.
As the principles of religion have little concern with the later development of art and architecture and the elaboration of ritual, it will be unnecessary here to trace the growth of national temples and the details of service. But attention may be called to the less known forms of temples, such as the roofed and domed Toltec temple of the serpent-god, with a simulated serpent’s mouth as its door and to the ziggurats, called teocalli, of the Aztecs, pyramidal edifices five to nine stories in height, “high places” which make doubtful the inference that Babylonian ziggurats reflect a previous mountain-altar.[17] The real pyranaids of Egypt were tombs rather than temples, [ p. 203 ] and temples in China are often evolved from ghosthouses. The Creek temple became a Christian church and on occasion a Mohammedan mosque without much difficulty. Remarkable is the resemblance of the Buddhist shrine with altar-place, aisles marked by columns, etc., to the Gothic cathedral, which has been imagined to be copied from the grove-idea, reproduced in stone. All elaborate ritual tends to introduce the same elements, such as choirs, incense, rich robes, intoned service, bells, lights, etc. They serve to stimulate the religious sensibilities, making a difference between profhne and sacred, elevating and awing the spirit, while leading it to “worship the Lord in the beauty of holiness,” objectively presented. Images and pictures of ancestors, as in Rome and China, serve at first as veritable abodes (resting-places) for the departed members of the family; but images are •also tised to distract ghosts from human bodies. They enter the image as a residence.
See below on the use of oil, decoration, etc. ↩︎
The Aztecs explained thus the human victims offered as food to the Sun-god, ignoring the involuntary sacrifice of the human victim. ↩︎
In the historical dance itself there may, however, be a religious element, since the ancestors are honored as spiritual powers. So in China and Australia the dance imitates the deeds of the dead as a religions rite. ↩︎
Durkheim, op. cit., p, 398. ↩︎
Ibid., p. 411. The thesis that evil powers are the product of rites seems peculiarly inept in the face of the fact that whole groups, like the Babylonians, regard ghosts as maliciously active, while other groups, like the Veddas and Amerinds, regard them as friendly, and neither group has any mob-rite to further such beliefs. ↩︎
The indecency of David’s dance was objected to by his wife, but chiefly becanse it offended her conservative instincts, which were shocked by his making a spectacle of himself. ↩︎
Betul District Gazetteer, vol I. A, pp, 57, 61 (1907). ↩︎
The nakedness of the female performer represents bare Mother Earth to the native mind; but probably nakedness in such cases is, as Durkheim suggests, merely a removal of clothing (like removing one’s hat in church) as an act of respect or as being in a religious (not profane) condition, in which circumstances ordinary (profane) acts and clothes are taboo. Deference is expressed by difference. So mourning and other religious acts lead to nakedness. ↩︎
Durkheim, op. cit., p, 387, ↩︎
The rosary was originally a mnemonic device of the Buddhists, borrowed by them from Shivaism (the god’s own original necklace was of skulls); it was a direct transfer from Buddhism to Christianity. The halo appears late on Buddhist saints and may have come direct from the Greeks, like the Gandhara Buddhas of Greek provenance. ↩︎
In Babylon, atonement was effected by magical means, fire, the use of water, the “curse of Eridu”, etc., which removed the sinful cause of disease or disability. ↩︎
Compare Heb. 9: 11-28. It has been interpreted as a covenant-sacrifice and as a ransom-sacrifice, either as redemption from punishment or from corruption and death. Some think the original use of the blood of the Paschal lamb was not apotropaic but for communion with the tribal spirit. In Hindu religions, salvation is release from individual bonds, for the attainment of the fullest life, but this implies also release from sinful propensities. ↩︎
Circumcision in some cases fonns part of the ritual on entering; one of these savage secret societies; in some cases it is part of the clan-initiation. Circumcision is found among African and Australian savages as well as among Egyptians and Hebrews. It had no religious significance originally and is rarely associated with the cult of the phallus. ↩︎
An excellent illustration may be found in the legend of the Holy Grail. The eucharisthic nature of the Grail ritual, eating and drinking of natural products ae containing qualities of the god, points to the origin of the legend in the Syrian Adonis-myth or the Eleusinian mysteries. See J. L. Weston, The Grail, 1907; and W. A. Nitze in Modern Language Ass. Publications for 1909, pp. 365 f. ↩︎
^16 ↩︎
Protests against assigning ethnical value to the word Aryan, have exaggerated the case. It is true that Aryan speech covers many races, but there must have been some Aryan type not wholly linguistic to have left such a distinctive mark on civilization. The Vedic Aryans were markedly different from the Indic aborigines, as were the Achaeans from the aborigines whom they conquered and who in turn conquered them; that is, by absorption, as the Aryans of India were absorbed and their religion was affiliated to that of the natives. The difference was the same. A freer, ruder spirit ruled the Aryans, who fraternized with gods and cared little for ghosts and other mysterious things of the earth, which they exploited instead of being subjugated by it. Only the Kelts, whose Aryan blood was perhaps thinned out through more combative distance as well as time, show but faint traces of the Aryan attitude and for the most part reflect the earth-religion of the primitive inhabitants. ↩︎
^18 ↩︎