[ p. 226 ]
Myths are stories; they may be true or false. Whether the myth or the ritual illustrating the myth be older, depends on circumstances. The ritual may make a story; the story may lead to the ritual. Some mythical originator is apt to be assumed for the great rituals of a people or, as in Australia and India, they are referred to a group of Fathers regarded as more or less divine. There are myths independent of ritual, living only as storiesj and others of which the whole ritual is a presentation in dramatic form. Myths of the gods may be said to.be religious from the outset, while those concerning men acquire gradually a religious tone as the heroes become more and more the object of devout regard. Myths are also modified by ethical and religious interpretation. The dramatic presentation of an Amerind myth becomes increasingly religious;[1] Japanese cosmogonic myths, in so far as they treat of gods, are religious from the beginning; the story of Paradise again shows how theology and ethics give a myth a new meaning.
Myths are religious in so far as they affect belief in spiritual powers’ and the conduct based upon that belief. The spiritual powers concerned are usually gods or greater demons. Smaller demonia are seldom thus honored, for a demon imagined as the origin of a noise or [ p. 227 ] the tutelary little spirit of a small place, a garden, for example, is not vested with persohality enough to mahe a myth. When a great spirit, on the other hand, becomes the guardian of a people, his image becomes subject to the mythopoetic tendency; he is more and more humanized and around such a character grows up the tale of his deeds. He is described as a hero, is given divine relations. Indra, the storm-god, converses with other gods, treats his mother badly, teUs a lie, etc.; the sun-god tends flocks .or falls in love with a girl; at winter’s coming he grows weak; then he or the vegetation-spirit (not always to he distinguished) dies, is buried, and is resurrected. Or, again, a god brings in new ideas and is a culture-hero, half god, half man, around whom gathers a host of myths. Then there is the creation-myth of how a god created the world and, sometimes united with it, the historical myth, •such as that of the origin of the race, from which direction the fathers came, etc., which easily blends with that of the culture-hero, whose myth explains customs, religious or secular.
Students of religion have insisted for decades that the logical, scientific (explanatory), or. historical myth is not religious. The creation of the world, they say, is explained by primitive logic or science, or the story of an earthly paradise is a reflex of history. What have they to dp with religion? The emphasis with which this thesis has been maintained is not without historical reason. There used to be people who thought that mythology was an essential part of religion, that to question the accuracy of a myth was to undermine religion itself. Either you believed the “Bible story” or you were no Christiam That is what the writer was taught in youth, when he labored under the delusion that he was not a Christian because he could not swallow Jonah’s whale. But today, taking it for granted that no educated person believes in mythology [ p. 228 ] as an essential part of religion, we may ask whether religion can be entirely separated from mythology. As regards onr own belief, indeed, the two have no snch connection as was assmned half a eentnry ago, for we no longer tbink that a man is “irreligious” because he does not believe in this or that absurd myth. But when we treat religion not as it is, or should be, but as it has been, we are obliged to take a di:fferent view. It is no longer a question of that which constitutes or ought to constitute religion today, but of that which constituted it in the past. Now to assert that, for the past generations, mythology, whether scientific or historical, was not an essential part of religion, is unscientific and unhistorical. Without Adam where would have been the doctrine of original sin and without original sin what would have become of religion? “Take away my original sin and my eternal damnation and what religion have I left?” asked the old Scots woman, not without reason. Or let us consider the logical myth of the Hindu hell. It begins with a vague belief in an underground place of darkness and ends with the tortures, fiends, god of hell, and little devils, with the divine Judge and his private secretary taking notes, with the fire of the pit and the gradual purging of sin; in short, it has all the paraphernalia of other more orthodox hells. But it ends also with the deeply embedded national conviction that men are moral solely because they wish to escape the horrors of hell. An oft-repeated Sanskrit verse says, “Through fear of hell-punishment alone are men virtuous,” and shall we say that the conception of an avenging god and the tortures inflicted by his agents have nothing to do with religion? Tet hell began simply as a logical antilhesis to heaven and its rewards for the good, which were firmly established before heU was thought of. The sinner at first merely disappeared in the black gulf of extinction. But then came the [ p. 229 ] thoTiglit of revenge. If tie killed me in tMs life, I ought to be able to torture Mm in the next life. So the first vision of hell in India is that of murderers being punished none too gently by their former victims.[2] Then the punishment Tvas handed over to the divine Judge and his underliags. In Polynesia and South America, powerful spirits devour the souls of the •wicked and weak. Again, a scientific myth of the Amerinds relates how one txibe escaped disaster and fled to a, new country, under what we should call divine guidance, and how this- divine being built up a habitable earth for the chosen people. Is not that religious? Every religion which has a mytholog is more or less bound up with it and affected by it. It makes men ethically better or worse on religious groimds. The Thug who strangles Ms victim does so as a religious act, because he believes in the myth of the goddess who demands the sacrifice. The Greeks knew that their current mythology had an immoral effect and tried to alter their gods accordingly, recognizing the intimate relation between myth and religion^ Conduct is affected by imitation of mytMcal divine conduct. Bacchus, mythically intoxicated, makes a religious drunkard.
Cosmogonic myths usually have little effect on religion but they are the commonest myths and in themselves sometimes adumbrate later religious beliefs. They are of two or three types. An ancestor or a god makes the world or the world is evolved out of primeval matter. It is rather remarkable that the latter idea is by no means uncommon among savages; it does away with creative intelligence. When a god or ancestor makes the world, he forms it out of matter which is not identical "with Mmself, the usual creation-myth of savages, or he dismembers himself and Ms parts become the world (the sun is his [ p. 230 ] eye, the trees his hair), as in Chinese, Hindu, and Teutonic mythology, a primitive pantheism. The god creates man out of dust or clay and blood (life) in African and Babylonian belief, or takes matter and breathes a soul into it to make a human being, as the Polynesians, Amerinds, and Hebrews say, or generates gods and haen as his children, as an old Hindu myth relates; though men, as we have seen, are more often derived from stones, trees, or animals, or crawl up out of the depths of earth. Another common form of world-creation is where chaotic matter splits apart, usually through divine agency, and becomes the primeval pair (male sky and female earth), whose children are the inhabitants of earth. The cosmic .egg is another form of the pair-myth, the two halves splitting up through indwelling divine power (creative or amorous) and making sky and earth, a Greek and Hindu myth, or perhaps only a philosopher’s explanation, as both myths are secondary products. The world or earth once created usually rests on something, an elephant or tortoise or giant. Very early is the conception of order opposed to disorder. Chaos is bad, disorderly; in Babylon it is personified as a seven-headed serpent or shedragon, overcome for the good of the world by divine spirits of order, the halves of her becoming sky and earth. So the Hindus say, “Demons (lovers of disorder) areolder brothers of the gods.” This recognition of chaos as evil implies the recognition of order as right, an impersonal morality (not that of meum and teum) in the universe.
Less widely spread than cosmogonic myths are those of the deluge, of paradise, the happy isles, or other places of past and future felicity, the tree or water of life, and the myths of giants storming heaven. The myth of paradise as the home of the first men is connected with that of creations This home is clearly the older habitation of [ p. 231 ] the tribe in the myth of the Pacific Islanders and it may not be a mere accident that such a traditional paradise is found in the North in the Greek and Hindu myth of Hyperboreans and Northern Kurus. The ancestors living in paradise are represented as larger and more able than men of today, also of greater longevity; they are more like gods. This earliest earthly paradise is then, in the Zoroastrian myth of Yima, transferred to the future and becomes a heaven of joys to be hereafter.[3] That man was at first immortal and then lost his immortality, is a myth of the Pacific Islands, Africa, and India. The Semitic tree of life assumes that men, like gods, could eat thereof and live forever. Races arose from intercourse between gods and men or are quaintly derived from an assumed ancestor who personifies the tribe; but Romulus is really derived from Rdma, not Roma from Romulus. The early inhabitants often become culture-heroes, a role sometimes taken by creators. The Mexican Quetzalcoatl, the Algonkin Michabo, the Babylonian Ea, the Hebraic Tubal Cain, the Greek Kadmos, belong to this class. Arts, laws, and rites are instituted by these beings. The Ten Commandments of the Hebrews, the ten ethical rules of the Hindus, sacrifice and ritual also, are ascribed to divine authority communicated through human, but specially inspired, intermediaries called patriarchs or sages. So the ritual of the Australians and Amerinds is a copy of what was taught by the divine ancestors; religious dances in India are copied from the dances of the gods. Legal procedure is referred to that of the ancestors. Manu, the Adam of the Hindus, “divided his property among his sons”; hence men today must do likewise.
The material source of endless life is the tree of paradise, which in Babylon may be a tree of knowledge. In [ p. 232 ] Zoroastrian tradition, the holy Hom is a tree of life because it quickens vitality, as it also imparts knowledge and gives all kinds of blessings. In Genesis, the two ideas are united, but perhaps they were always so, for knowledge may have been thought to be the means of securing immortal life. According to the late Professor W. Max Müller, Egyptian records have the story of the creation, paradise, the serpent-demon (Babylonian Tiamat, Chaos), and the tree of knowledge and life; but only by implication, not by express relation, are they to be guessed at.[4]
As we have seen that the myth of Yima’s earthly paradise was transferred to the future, so it may have been in the case of descriptions of other future homes of happiness. For example, the Happy Land sects of Buddhism have transferred to the future the bliss imagined to have been enjoyed in an ancient 'Western home. It is the description that makes the myth, because, however certain we be that we shall go to something better in the next life, no man can say just what sort of happiness is to be found there. Imagination idealizes the past or the present and that is heaven. To the Hindu of the Vedic age it was a place under Yama’s tree where the Fathers sat in bliss, or a place where “all desires are granted”; to the Aztec it was an abode in the North (whence they came) or West, approached by a bridge, but a world of “shadow”; to the American Indian if was a place in the Western sky of ease and good hunting; to the author of Gates Ajar it was a place where there will be gingerbread and pianos; to Marie Corelli there will be astral bodies and spheres to be passed through. That some part of man continues to exist after death, is (we may cite Lessing for it) the [ p. 233 ] foundation of religiou today, and a belief in future life instigates inquiry as to the nature of that life, yet it cannot be said that man is naturally curious or even muck concerned about his future. An American Indian once said:[5] “We know that the Milky Way leads to the Happy Hunting Grounds, for so much our fathers have told us, but we do not talk about such things.” The savage is generally not much inclined to talk or think about his hereafter. Catlin and Bishop Colenso give, as regards this point, about the same accout of the Amerind and the African, respectively. The spare time of the savage is devoted to tales of what his ancestors did rather than to what he may expect in the next life.
This deprecatory attitude is not confined to savages. The modern Arab is also disinchned to talk about a life hereafter, apparently because of indifference rather than fear. On the other hand, the imaginative Polynesian enjoys discussing the subject of future life and has an extended system of eschatology; the truly good (brave) “go West,” as they phrase it, and enjoy a future felicity enhanced by watching the discomforts of the damned (cowards) in hell below and by increasing their miseiy’. Ordinarily, however, the paradise-myth of savages is even vaguer than this and consists chiefly in the statement that the best (or bravest) people will live well hereafter. A not uncommon form of the passage to heaven is embodied in the myth which appears in Zoroastrianism as the razor-like Cinvat Bridge (of judgment); in savage belief tins is a log across a bog, over which only the good get safely, the log automatically turning down the craven and other sinner. The Amerinds only after acquaintance with the missionaries interpreted the bog as hell; the Filipinos say merely that the nicked fail to cross the log. The Peruvian bridge was a single hair.
[ p. 234 ]
Immortality is by no means a necessary factor of the belief in a future state, nor do all the good and brave attain future bliss. A diseased Aztec of great bravery might thus fail of his desired heaven (the gods devoured him). A scalped^or hanged Indian does not get to the Happy Hunting Grounds, no matter how worthy he may be; he is like an unburied Greek, suffering for no fault of his own. Death, moreover, is not necessarily the end of life on earth. A man may be reborn again as a man or an animal. Some African tribes believe in repeated deaths of a still human creature, Avho passes a temporary life here and there, but after the third death he comes back no more; others believe in indefinite metempsychosis, which the Egyptians regarded as a magical possibility. The myths of the future life thus fall into three classes, according to which, first, souls exist hereafter in a tomb or a shadow-world;[6] second, there is a place of bliss, a world of the blest; third, there is a 'woi’ld of misery. Ordinarily, too, this is the sequence of belief. Later a limbo is added to hell, a sort of reversion to shadowland for certain souls. What determines entry into heaven may be ethical behavior or accident. In some cases there may be an earlier belief in metempsychosis; this view is not, as used to be taught, too “refined” to be primitive; on the contrary it is found among the Amerinds, and is a commonplace, for example, in Australia and Africa. The African chief selects the creature he will become and makes it, a butterfly, taboo to Ms tribe: “When I die I am going to become a butterfly; do not kin butterflies hereafter,” is one reported deathbed statement. So the Egyptian that prefers to become an animal makes his selection and by use of proper magic, which expresses his wish in a forcible manner (being controlled [ p. 235 ] by the priest be can do nothing without magic), dies happy in the belief that he mil be reborn as the animal he has selected. In the Rig-Veda the sonl, if the mam will (he has an option), goes into plants. Yet even in the belief in metempsychosis there is no implied belief in immortality, though the notion that a soul having lived in previous bodies will keep on transmigrating comes nearer to such a belief than the notion that a man dies and lives as a shadowy being; the latter being often fades out entirely.[7] The savage does not wonder why anyone should live hereafter; he wonders only that one should die. The natural continuance of individuality is taken for granted, but savages, regarding the next life as a sort of replica of this, are also quite ready to believe that the once dead but now” living soul should die . again. Especially in the tropics, where there is continual decay and renewal of life out of that decay, the mind believes most naturally in continued existence; the incessant renewal of life makes death seem like a temporary change. But even without such stimulus to the imagination the notion that the ego has lived before and will keep on living is as natural as to think about it at all. .The Irish lass who said she knew she must have lived forever because she could not remember any time when she tv asn’t alive, is a comic reflection of Wordsworth’s “Ode to Immortality”; the idea that the soul remembers its past is co mm on to philosopher and poet. Even the Buddhists, who repudiated soul, believed that whatever survived might, remember its past.
Between the simple thought of transmigration and the system of metempsycnosis is intruded the idea that the form of rebirth is conditioned by the moral character of [ p. 236 ] the soul. In the fate of Polynesian flies and cocoanuts, their immortal souls are without morality and their destiny is without system; but in the curse on Brynhild, “may she never be born again,” a belief in transmigration is coupled with the idea that she will fail of rebirth because of sin. But to the Norseman metempsychosis was “old women’s talk,” which shows that it was at least ancient if not moral. In Greece and India, the fate of the transmigrating soul implies reward or punishment; but the Hindu has not the Greek notion of a fallen soul (the Hindu “fall of the soul” refers to its entering the evil envelope of matter) or of a completed cycle, which brings the soul to its starting-point; still less is the cessation of the birth-series dependent on divine will.
Semitic belief held the soul first to its home, then to the grave, then to the underground assembly-room of congregated souls outside the control of Ishtar or, at first, of Yahweh; it was a Western land under earth and beyond watery wastes, a seven-fold realm ruled by Death, King of Terrors, Belial, devouring monsters, etc. It was inhabited by ghosts and demons of disease (in the Bible called “pains of hell”), and resurrection was impossible. The nearest approach to resurrection was when a soul was not yet quite dissociated from the body, as it might be stni associated though apparently dead. In that case Marduk could revivify and a spiritual man (priest, prophet) might make the body live again; but this could not happen when the body’s dissolution had taken place.[8] Reward and retribution in early Hebraic ‘thought were ail for this life but might be extended beyond the present generation, the children’s teeth being set on edge or the children killed for the father’s sin; though, in that case, the paternal shade, lacking his meals, would really suffer after all. The only distinction between shades was based [ p. 237 ] on whether they had been properly bnried; neglected bodies made more miserable ghosts. The same idea is found in India and Greece, but the ethical element is united with it.[9] In Egyptian belief, the ethical character of the soul was important, since it was judged hereafter; but magical formulas might apparently offset any delinquency. The dead Egyptian lived much as in life, wealthy and happy or a toiling slave; somewhat similar was the Keltic life hereafter. There are thus all possible myths as to the next life, any one of which is as improbable as any other.[10]
The next myth to be considered is the historical myt^ of the deluge. After man has lived in paradise on earth he deteriorates and sins. Then his sins are washed out by a deluge, according to the Hindu story. But here again religion has utilized an old historic myth. For there are more th’an two himdred deluge-stories on earth and they reflect in a perfectly natural manner some historical occurrence in which the world (of the savage narrator) was. wiped out by an overflowing river or tidal wave and the memory of which is embalmed in tribal tradition, just as the common mjdhs of giants, dwarfs, and monsters reflect tradition, the actual contact of one race with another or the finding of the bones of some antediluvian monster. When a race of different capacity overthrows another, the original inhabitants, if they were builders, become giants, as the makers of the great bricks of prehistoric India are regarded, or they hide in the mountains and if skilled in metal-work become the dwarfs of Germany. The tales told are of course exaggerated. So [ p. 238 ] the flood is exaggerated. Few of the two himdred flood stories, however, have any religious significance; they are merely historical facts rhetorically embellished. But a higher civilization refers the flood to a divine author and finally, as water is lustrative, an ethical significance is given to the myth. In India, the first story of the flood says that a fish announced its coming and when it came (for a cause not mentioned) the fish saved the ship, which it had advised Father Manu to build and into which e had retired, by swimming about with the ship in tow till the waters subsided. Then Manu came out and fathered a new race of men by a union with a divine female born of the sacrifice which he offered. There is no suggestion that the flood was sent by a spiritual power to punish or to wash out sin. The only point in the story is that the ritual of a certain sacrifice was authoritatively established by Manu. But the later version makes the flood a “purification,” sampraksalana, of the world, sent by the Supreme Deity. In the ark with Manu were also (in this version) the Seven Sages and all the seeds ot living things. The fish here is a form of Brahman, “through whose grace Manu recreated the world.
In the Babylonian deluge-myth, the gods themselves are frightened at the world-flood, which was sent by Bel in demoniac fury and cruelty, evidently the olde form of the legend; but in a later version the deluge is represented as a purificatory washing out of a sinful but small population, whom all the gods agreed to punish, though Bel secretly tried to destroy them all so that not one should escape. The wise and kind Ea, however, says to Bel’ “Punish the sinner for hia sins; but be merciful; do not destroy everything.” In the Hebrew version, the ethical and religious side is foremost.[11]
[ p. 239 ]
Presumption is the sin upon the punishment of which another myth is huilded. The Aloidae pile Pelion on Ossa and Olympus to storm heaven and are punished by Apollo for their presumption (Od., 11, 305 1). In India, the god Indra saw the demons building a tower out of a sacrificial mound and, being a god who loves tricks, he assumed the form of a helper, put in a foundation brick and, returning just as “the demons were creeping up and trying to scale the sky,” he withdrew his brick and do^vn fell the tower; so Indra “slew them with the bricks of their own altar.” Here again the only sin was that of presumption, although Indra has a lurking fear lest “if the devils build this ascent-altar they may overcome the gods,” a motive which may have influenced the expulsion from Eden, lest man become even as the gods. The great sin in Greece is presumption, one that the gods always punish and man must guard against. In the story of the tower of Babel, there may have been a new element introduced through a play on the word babel, “confusion,” and babili, “gate of god.”
These rather common myths will serve as illustrations of the link between the tale and religion. Some tales are historical, some are logical; they become religious as they are interwoven with gods on the one hand and with religious experience on the other. The history of a tribe starts with the creation of earth and its own origin; it becomes religious as the god of the tribe is made the creator and originator. The evil of life must be accounted for; it is ascribed to malicious spirits. Sometimes they are spirits whose nature may become malicious; sometimes they are naturally, inevitably, evil. As such they become a group apart and in rare 'cases are logically given a head-spirit to correspond to the head-spirit of the group of good spirits. Such a chief devil is not necessarily a late product of logical imagination. The female [ p. 240 ] Source-of-all-our-woes, as one Hindu Wild Tribe calls the Earth-goddess, is a natural primitive antithesis to the male Source-of -blessings seen in the Sun-god, a double dualism. The Shaman pits Erlik, the chief devil, against the highest god, and says that the evil one is Our Father. Zoroaster imagines all evil spirits as a group pitted against all the good spirits and gives each group its head, Ahriman and Ormuzd. The myth of age-long contest between the two great spirits then begins; plots and counterplots are described as religious history. Generally, however, evil spirits are not so well organized; they lack a ruler.
There is no Satan in India,[12] though there are plenty of great fiends, many of them on a par with the gods or even superior to the gods, as Ahriman was scarcely inferior to Ormuzd. Savages (including the Amerinds) never had such a complete dualism as to organize hosts of good and evil spirits vsdth a head-spirit of each group, until the missionaries gave them the idea. The Semites have a myth of conflict between Tiamat and Bel Marduk, but they are not mclined to make stories about the gods, who have no adventures to speak of (as compared with those of other peoples) and do not combine against an organized army of demons. The theory that (astral) myths arose in Babylonia and propagated myths all over the world has selected a barren soil for such fruit.
Ancient civilization attempted to explain myths as [ p. 241 ] allegories, but to rationalize primitive myths by this procedure is a vain attempt. Myths were first stories, told to be believed literally; they were not intended to inculcate hidden truths. It is evident also that myths cannot be referred to one motif, any more than to one locality. There are vegetation-myths, but not all myths have their origin in the decline and fall of the spirit of vegetation; myths of ghosts, but not ail myths are ghost-stories; real sun-myths, but few of the many myths extant have to do with the sun; astral myths, but their scope and propagation are very limited.[^13]
A common form of myth is the miracle-stbry. Some miracles are true, some are told in majorem gloriam of some great teacher or leader. Myths of cures effected are often exaggerations of real cures.[13] A miracle is a “wonder” occurring through supernatural power; it is wonderful to see a blind man use his eyes, to see a lame man walk freely. But such wonders happen daily and can often be performed when the body is made subject to proper stimulus. Especially are great religious leaders credited with miracles; yet such persons not only cure weakness but control nature; tradition says that nature itself, as in the case of Buddha, is convulsed at their [ p. 242 ] birth and death, in sympathy with the portentous event. As storms and earthquakes may occur when anyone dies or any momentous event happens, such stories (myths and marvels) are not necessarily untrue; but the history of religions, especially Eastern religions, shows that men are apt to invent tales for the pu^ose of glorifying some revered character andr rather believe them than weigh the evidence. Faith itself can perform miracles (“the prayer of faith shall save the siek”)^ irrespective of the object of faith; the same cures are performed at shrines to different objects of worship, saints and gods. Some miracles of one faith are loans from another, but also, arising from the same cause, identical ndracles appear independently in different religions. The Mstorical evidence in each case must be sifted separately. In general, although the witnesses for the miracles performed by Jesus include unlearned and ignorant men, like Peter and John (Acts 4:13), yet their testimony, such as it is, is offered nearer the time of the .event than in the case of other reputedly divine miracle-workers,[14] though the fact that St. Paul does not speak of Jesus as having performed miracles might be regarded as a still earlier argumentum ex silentio.
The gods can of coarse perform any number of miracles. Shiva has sixty-four kinds to his credit. There is a persistent tradition in India that the twin gods (the Greek Dioscuroi) performed many cures, among them [ p. 243 ] that of replacing with an artificial leg the leg of a warrior-queen injured in battle. One wonders why they did not replace whole the original leg. Obviously it was a famous case of surgery actually performed, credit for which was given to the “healer” gods, just as Greek priests acted as physicians and credited Asklepios with the cure. Primitive minds do not seek for evidence when a miracle is proclaimed; the miracle itself is the evidence or sign of divine power. “John did no sign,” σημειον (Jn. 10:41.). One of the earliest miracle-workers is the king who, as a divine person, cures by his “royal touch.” A few years ago Dastur Maher ji Raja went even further and “made a second sun in the sky.” So poets work miracles. The great magician of the Middle Ages was Vergil. Often the “miracle” is actually performed; it merely requires a correct interpretation. An Oriental traveller tells us of a great magician: “And let no man doubt of his miraculous power, for I myself saw that he can control nature.” He goes on to illustrate this by telling how the magician set up a mill in which “a mill-stone moved without water by the nairaculous power with which he endowed it; he called it a wind-mill.”
In India, every superior saint performs such miracles as walking on water, and fiying through air, if he will; but he will not, if he is a real saint. That is the theory, for it is only the common fakir who pretends to perform miracles for the admiration he gains; the true spiritual expert scorns such an exhibition. There is probably some truth in the subjective impression of the higher Yogi that he can do these things, for he is an ascetic who not only fasts and drugs himself till he is subject to hallucinations, but cultivates by scientific approach that narrowing of the field of consciousness (by fixedly gazing at a bright disc and similar means) which results in a mystic trance, wherein he really to himself seems to penetrate matter, [ p. 244 ] fly and float about in upper spheres. The process is psychological. Finally, one must remember that miracles of old were, so to speak, less miraculous, more probable than now. Wesley believed he had performed miracles and in the second century of our era the resurrection of the dead was not considered an uncommon event.
Those who liavo adopted Burkheim theory (above, p, 5) without reservations say, on the other hand, that every festival of any tribe is religious from the beginning ; no savages can feast or dance except as a religious rite; a statement tolerable only when one defines as religious all social activities, which deprives the word of meaning. ↩︎
So in Greece the Erinys, a wronged soul, embodies the first idea of punishment hereafter. ↩︎
When it is said “this day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23: 43) the same word is used as that designating Eden. ↩︎
This stattement was made in a public lecture, December 3, 1903. Professor Muller set the date of these presumed tales as “about 3000 B. C.” The trees appear “as two trees or in one form.” ↩︎
G. E. Foster, Sequoyah, p. 33. ↩︎
The shadow-world is sometimes reserved for inferior and unfortunate ghosts after the bliss-world is invented for the better and luckier. ↩︎
Hell punishment is thought of at first as of indefinite duration, probably fitted to the crime. It is only in later Hindu works that there is talk of eternal punishment in logical antithesis to eternal bliss. ↩︎
Paton, op, cit, p. 24:7, See also above, p, 149. ↩︎
In late Vedic belief, if a man does not have a tumulus for bis bones, his “good deeds” are destroyed. ↩︎
India and Persia both have classic apocalypses revealing the condition of life hereafter. The torments of hell are imitations of judicial punishments in life, somewhat idealized. They are often mentioned in detail in Hindu and Buddhistic works, as are the delights of heaven. ↩︎
For a sufficient criticism of these errors, see Professor Toy’s Introduction to the History of Religions, pp. 384 f . On astral myths, see above p. 54. The debt of Greece to Babylon is slight; that of Zoroastrianism is doubtful except in the case of Anahita. It is possible that India’s deluge-story may be an echo of the Babylonian story, but it comes too early and agrees too little with the latter to make borrowing probable. On the relation between Greek and Babylonian myths, see L. B. Farnell, Greece and Babylon (1911), ↩︎
The Hindu god who punishes sinners and is lord of hell is himself a good (ethical) god and neither he nor his fiends are wiched. This is really more logical than to make the Prince of Evil the personal punisher of evil-minded souls. In the Middle Ages Satan himself enjoyed spitting over eternal flames those who were his most faithful followers. It was not till the beginning of the Christian era that the serpent of Eden was identified with Satan. It may be remarked that in older Hebrew belief punishment for sin was in part automatic, of the taboo sort. If one touched even involuntarily the ark, he sinned and suffered. Primitive Semitic belief also took the tribal view, that the tribe should suffer for the sin of individuals. ↩︎
One of the writer’s colleagues at work in Asia Minor cured a workman of blindness by washing the dirt out of his eyes. The next day his camp was overrun with the halt and blind, who believed that he could “work miracles,” In the East, one who claims divine power usually proves his claim by performing a few miracles and one who works cures is ipso facto more than human. ↩︎
There is no early testimony in support of miracles on the part of either Buddha or Krishna; those attributed to Buddha are recounted long after his death, and Krishna’s birth, if he was a real man, must be set several centuries before he is celebrated as a divine wonder-worker. Some of the modern saints, of India have the best right to claim that their miraculous powers have been proved by eye-witnesses; unfortunately it is suspected that these contemporary witnesses were hypnotized. Hypnosis of others, as well as auto-hypnosis, has been studied as a science in India for more than two thousand years. The Mahabharata describes a case in which the subject was made to say what he did not wish to say, etc. ↩︎