[ p. 13 ]
Man has worshipped everything on earth, including himself, stones. Mils, flowers, trees, streams, weUs, ocean, ^afid animals. He has worshipped everything he could tMnk of beneath the earth, metals, eaves, serpents, and under-world ghosts. Finally, he has worshipped everytMng between earth and heaven and everything in the heavens above, mist, wind, cloud, rainbow, stars, moon, sun, the sky itself, though only in part has he worshipped the spirits of all these objects. Yet with all tMs bewildering jumble to Ms discredit, man to Ms credit has never really worshipped anything save what he imagined behind these phenomena, the tMng he sought and feared; power.
Categories, such as those of Saussaye, who divides religious objects of worship into heavenly and earthly, or those of Max Müller, whose divisions are objects “seizable, half-seizable, and non-seizable,” as illustrated by a stone, a hill, and a star, are not useful and may be worse than useless in suggesting a false chronological series, for some of the lowest savages worship stars and half-civilized men today worship stones. There is no ascending scale followed by all men. But for convenience we shall have to examine these objects in order and we may as well begin with the worship of stones and hills, things apparently most lifeless. Erudite titles for the divisions here following would be litholatry, orolatry, dendrolatry, astrolatry, theriolatry, pyrolatry, nephelolatry, [ p. 14 ] ophilolatry, etc., but -latry is not always synonymous with worship; there may be an observance, a service, without actual worship.
The worship of stones and hills: Stone- worship may be addressed to a mere stone, a fetish, a totem, an idol, or a symbol The stone may be a pebble, a rock, lonely or otherwise remarkable, or a flint weapon or aerolite. In all these forms, as far as known to each community, stones have been worshipped by Finns, Lapps, South Sea Islanders, Africans, EedsMns, Peruvians, Greeks, Romans and other Aryans, Syrians, Dravidians, Egyptians, and Chinese. At the present day the inhabitants of Kateri in South India worship a stone, which if neglected will turn into a wild ox, and in Northern India not only the wild tribes but recognized castes of civilized society worship stones which they believe to be alive and possessed of volition.[1] Pood and drink are presented to stones today in Nigeria to effect cures. There is in these cases no idea of a spirit in the stone; it is the stone itself as being powerful and wilful which is propitiated.
If one ask a Yankee farmer why his fields every year have a fresh crop of stones (they do indeed annually come to the surface), he will say that they climb up from below and he almost believes that they work up of their own volition. In the Middle Ages the peasants believed this and more, for they thought the stones had power to move about as living beings. Vows were made to them by our own ancestors. The Lapps, some African tribes, and the Peruvians shared with the Amerinds and the Greeks the belief that stones could propagate themselves, and even that the human race had sprung from stones. Among the [ p. 15 ] Semites, the Canaanites especially, and, among the Aryans, the Kelts worshipped and anointed stones. Similarly, Jacob after using a stone as a pillow anointed if and Eachel concealed stones in the tent, probably “vidt ness stones” (Gen. 28: 11-22; 31:34).
The notion that stones are the children of earth interchanges with the belief that they are the hones of earth, both \iews presupposing the assumption that earth is an organic whole and stones are part of the earth-mother. But a lone rock or curious stone is revered for itself and becomes one of the earliest forms of gods. A suggestive stone often from its very shape serves as a phallus, not at first of a god but in itself worshipful. So a rock remotely suggesting a human shape becomes a god per se before it is recognized as an image or idol of a higher divinity. Thus, in. Greece, the stone image of Cybele jor Athena (a square stone at Mantinea) or the Argive Hera was an object of worship afterwards called by one of these names.
Different in qrigin are the betyls or heavenly stones, whose divinity derived from their origin. A blazing stone striking the earth would always inspire fear and subsequent religious regard or worship, as in the case of many known betyls (probably the Kaaba stone at Mecca is of this sort). Transferred from Syria to Greece by the way of Crete the name Baityloi or Betels (perhaps bethels?) was generally applied to these heavenly visitors, worshipped under various names by the Eomans, Finns, and other Europeans, and probably several of the more revered objects of this class came West with the name, like the Black Mother and the Cretan betyl, afterwards the stone at Delphi that was regarded as the god given to Kronos by Ehea. Along with these, however, other stones called cerauniae or lapides fulminis, which were in reality not aerolites but relics of the stone age, were Tyom as [ p. 16 ] amulets, etc., though, supposed to have fallen from the sky. In Central America, the sacred stones of the Mayas were certainly betyls; but they were recognized as identical with the earth-goddess and deified as such. The Zeus Kasios of the Greeks was an aerolite, as the name, of Semitic origin, indicates. One of the forms of Shiva in India is a rock, but this is probably, like his hill-form, from an adaptation of an earlier cult of these objects not (in the case of the rock) as of heavenly origin but as in itself worshipful. Red paint, representing blood, is smeared on such stones in India and America as a sign of worship. In India, as in Syria and Greece, the aerolite is apt to become the phallic emblem.[2]
Stone-worship is not racial nor is it merely primitive in time. At this hour is worshipped in Bengal a stone which fell in 1880; it is at present “the miraculous god.”[^3] About the same time an aerolite fell in Greenland; it has been an object of religious regard ever since. The attitude toward non-aerolite stones may today be illustrated in the ease of Hindu peasants. They do not tbink a spirit is in the stone but they regard the stone itself as having personality, life, activity, volition. A group of five stones in India (thirty in Greece) is sometimes found as a religions unit similar to the stone circles of Europe and to the groups of stones set by the Amerinds, though not always numbered or placed precisely in a circle. The secret of these stones is not always the same. In some cases they may represent astronomical wisdom, but we must guard ourselves against accepting this as a general explanation. In Burma, for example, the stones appear like a miniature Stonehenge, yet the circle is not fixed but grows, for each stone is a monument to a great man [ p. 17 ] added to the circle at his death, a sort of Westminster, eombining pious and religious feeling. The dead are httle divinities and this rude circle, of Burma is, in reality, essentially like a Jain temple, where the divinities are images of saints. The spot is holy ground; the peasant bows to the stone. European trilith erections may often be tombs, and menhirs may be memorials of this sort. Such a stone may even be a totem and the first altar was probably itself a divinity before it served as a sacrificial table.
The ceremony of throwing a stone among the Eomans involved the invocation of Jupiter audit has thence been Supposed that Jupiter himself was originally a stone, as for other reasons scholars have interpreted Jupiter as an oak. But nothing is more fallacious than to identify a deity with an object of ceremony. Nevertheless, although Jupiter was not a stone, there was a stone identified with Jupiter in Eome, as with Zeus in Greece, and on this stone as a god the Eomans took the oath.
Here may be mentioned the common practice in India of taking up a stone as a witness. If one wishes to hale an, offender to court one seizes a stone and calls it an officer. The stone mounted in the Hindu marriage ceremony was originally a millstone and seems to be merely a symbol of constancy, or endurance, though modem practice identifies the stone with the wife of Shiva or with the di\T.ne protector of the field and family.
A stone may be half human and yet divine enough to excite religious aw’e and veneration. Of this sort are first the stones like those of the Profile Kock in the White Mountains. No Indian could see this apparent face of rock without imagining it the face of a more than human yet manlike being. A face so grave, so stern, so lifelike Was necessarily revered. A similar face juts out near Castine; this also was worshipped by the Amerinds, but [ p. 18 ] it never became a god. It was something uncannily dangerous and thought of as a sachem’s head, revered to the point of worship but still as something only half divine. In other localities a similar superstition clings to “Lot’s wife” and to the rock that in India was once the wife of a saint, who was cursed to live as a rock because she deceived her husband. In Peru there are stones which were formerly human beings, but “they became impious and were petrified.” These are still human. But there is also a rock in India, which is the remains of the nymph Eambha, who tried to seduce a saint and was turned into a rock, although she was the fairest nymph born of Ocean. In Greece we have the parallel figure, and Nioba fingitur lapidea.
When we hear of a stone being put into water to produce rain it is not always because the stone has magical power; sometimes the stone represents a divine power. On the other hand, it must not be concluded that a stone is a holy power because it works wonders. A millstone is magically efficacious not because of the stone but because of the hole in it. In the Rig-Veda we read that a god cured a girl by drawing her through the hole in the middle of his chariot-wheel. Any perforated jewel is thus doubly valuable. Noses and ears were not perforated at first to carry rings, but the rings were carried to keep open the hole. Coins with a hole in them are prophylactic like jewels. The Shalagrama stone now represents Vishnu; it was originally a stone holy in itself and twice as holy when perforated.
The holy stones revered by the inhaoitants of the Pyrenees are half fetish and half divinity and the same is tee of the similar stones of the Hebrides and those generally revered by the Dravidians. The African fetish-stone also in its original form is not a material thing containing a spirit but an animate being and is treated as such, being [ p. 19 ] cajoled or beaten to be helpful, just as the stone fetish called Hermes was treated in Greece. Whether we term such objects gods or not is a matter of indifference. They are supernatural powers, potent and yohtive. In conclusion it may be noticed that the aerolite, destined to become’ a god or fetish when it alights, is in transit regarded as a falling soul, as. in India, or, as in South America, it is the still flaming butt of a god’s cigar.
The lone stone to the villager is a guardian god. And what the rock is to the villager the hill is to the larger commimity. It is a being, alive and capable of aiding or injuring. It was not at first to the spirits of the hills that the Chinese offered sacrifice but to the hills themselves as powers. There is, so to speak, only a quantitative difference between stone and hill. Only the higher intelMgence regards the holy hiU as holy because a spirit lives in it or gives oracles there. To the less developed mind the hiU itself is divine. The rude peasants xmder the IFral Mountains regard them thus even now; the hiU is a living divinity, not the abode of divinity. The oath-mountain to them is itself the witness and punisher of perjury. In India, only two thousand years ago, it was believed that mountains lived and married and had children by rivers. Anthropomorphism by no means necessarily precedes anthropopathism. The hill has no human form but it has human passion and divine, that is, more than human power. Hills as abodes of heavenly gods are of course doubly holy and when, . as in the case of the Himalayas, they merge with the sky, .they are regarded not as parts of earth but of heaven. When a pilgrim comes down the mountain he is said in the great Hindu epic to “return to earth.” Hills, like chasms, dre often revered as spirithomes.
Earth itself receives a nomipal homage as molher paired with father sky in many savage cosmogonies, but [ p. 20 ] earth to a savage is only what he knows of it; he is not apt to pay devotion to earth as a divine power. He reveres rather the hills and chasms (leading to the underworld) as homes of ghosts and spirits. Sundry savages (Australian and early German) believe that children come out of earth by way of streams,[3] and early German religion had a cult of a mother goddess presumed to be Earth.
The advent of agriculture increases the observance and regard for both earth and sun. A sort of rude hoe-agri- ’ culture is as old as cattle-raising, but till a people has fixed habitations and gardens it does not develop much religious interest in earth. Then arise the boundary-gods and field-protectors found in India and elsewhere. A general primitive Mother-goddess is often a personification of earth. But, although the cult of such a Mothergoddess is found in the earliest Asiatic and European civilizations it is not certain that the female deity represents Mother Earth. In India, however, as late as 1901 the census enrolls “worshippers of earth, of sun, of divine female rivers, of snakes, and of disease goddesses” in one district of Bengal.
When the cult of spirits has superseded that of spiritual objects, matter as alive and volitive, the stone becomes the home of a spirit, as in Iceland and in later fetish-forms. A third stage is represented by the change from a divine thing to an accessory of a more divine spirit, stone pillars, originally divine, standing by a shrine, massebas, for ghosts or gods, and altars, as well as stones used to bring rain. Many stone monuments, however, have become sacred simply through association with the dead or with divinity. Not every obelisk was itself [ p. 21 ] divine; so dolmens and tombstones become sacred through association -with the dead, though tombs were really worshipped, as in the case of Norwegian cairns. Carved images, idols, are later than natural idols but are worshipped as readily; in fact, in some cases artificial images are so primitive that they appear as the first monuments. The only religious symbols of some very primitive South American tribes are figures made to frighten away demons and the Neolithic age already had carved figures of presumably religious or magical import. In Africa a rude pillar portrays a spirit and sometimes is anointed in order to attract spirits. The worship of images is almost universal but is finally tabooed by the highest religions, Mohammedan, Eoman Catholic, etc., or is permitted only as an indulgence to a weak mind. Thus, Du Bois,- one of the early Eoman Catholic missionaries in India, reports that the common people indubitably worship the image itself, but that the better educated repudiate such worship. The same holds for this missionary’s own religion. The uneducated peasant who bows to the image in Southern Europe, especially when that image moves its eyes or otherwise seems to be ahve, is certainly worshipping the thing he sees. The matter was put succinctly to the writer by a Hindu gentleman who was kind enough to answer a blunt question as to whether he really worshipped the image to which he bowed. “This,” he replied, “is mere matter of intelligence. I being completely devil-upped (developed) worship only myself[4] but conform out of liberality to popular [ p. 22 ] superstition. My wife, lacking intelligence and not being devil-upped, worships bare image.”[5]
The Worship of Trees and Plants: The cult of trees is one of the oldest, as it is one of the most widely extended fonns of worship. It is also one of the latest to yield to a higher type of religion. It appeals to the savage who fears the forest; to the barbarian who sees in the tree the spirit of productivity; and to civilized man, to whom the tree is emblematic of divinity. The deification of plants and grains is later than that of trees. Probably the tree-, world as a whole was an earlier object of cult than any individual tree, as the savage dreads the power of the jungle and placates it rather than that of any one tree known to him. The forest as a whole is dangerous also to the more advanced animist who fears the spirits of the wild, though they may be offset by the gentle fairies and elves likewise living in the wood. These are the first arboreal spirits in distinction from the trees themselves. But the tree per se. is also beneficent or maleficent and is. treated as such. It gives a welcome shade or fruit or it is poisonous or lacerates. On the whole, however, it is probably the forest rather than the single tree which received first religious regard as a terrifying object. As soon as man began to think in terms of spirit he imagined demons misleading him and making noises in the jungle, spirits comparable to the Jinns of desert or mountain. There is an Amazon tribe which i^eeognizes no spiritual power save Oaypor, a demon who “leads people aroxmd in a circle when they are lost in the wood,” not a ghost, be it observed, but a spirit of nature comparable to a mermaid as a product of the sea. Man easily personifies or humanizes natural causes when he observes an effect. A Vedie [ p. 23 ] hymn of some three thousand years ago (Rig-Veda, 10, 146) expxesses this artlessly by saying that if one hears a noise in the forest like a wagon creaktng or a tree crashing down it is because the Girl of the Wood is playing there; she will not hurt one unless one tries to traclr her, but if is well to set out an offering for her, who is the Mother of the wild animals. In the main this Indian goddess is a kindly being, slaying only when aggrieved. She is really made of the noises in the wood, a prototype of all sylvan deities, farms, sylvani, and other mates of hamadryads, who die with the wood, like the Tyrolese Wildfanger. Some, like the Hindu Eakshasas, are fierce. Many of the beliefs of this early stage linger late into modern times. The shrieking plant and bleeding tree are analogous creations, showing that the idea of a spirit inhabiting the plant is more modem than the idea of the plant as a spiritized whole. The bush-soul is another matter. In this conception a human being unites his soul with something in the ‘bush’ (forest), a shrub or branch, believing himself secure so long as the sacred repository is preserved intact. This is a very common notion and has no connection with totemism, though the soul may be united with either animal or plant.
In India, tree-marriages are common. The wife who otherwise would get the evil result of a third marriage on the part of her hhsband thus easts the evil on the tree substitute, she herself becoming the fourth wife. This is a modem survival of a more general custom, according to which a tree[6] was actually wedded to a human being, as being a similar anthropopathic creature. Thus, in the Hindu epic, a woman who wants children embraces a tree. The same epic treats the trees as sentient beings having [ p. 24 ] volition, though elsewhere they are regarded not as themselves holy beings but as abodes of spirits. This latter was " the rationalized Buddhistic belief, namely, that trees were not, as the Brahmans taught, living beings, but homes of spirits called dryads, described as “goddesses born in trees and to be worshipped by those wishing to have children.” Here, as in Northern Europe, the tree inverted (its roots above in heaven) is the divine Tree of Life and whoso worships it worships God. A tree alone in a village is an object of veneration everywhere, but some are especially to be worshipped either because of their usefulness or because the rustling of their leaves is believed to be a divine, oracular voice, or the sound shows that spirits whisper there. Every leaf of the pipal (which is worshipped as the abode of Visshnu) houses a god, though it is possible that a belief in it as a totem may have strengthened its divinity, as is the case with the nim tree. Probably the veneration of many trees and plants arises from their medicinal (magical) power, as is the ease with the tulsi plant sacred to Vishnu. Shiva is incorporate in the sandal-\yood tree as well as identified with the world-tree of life.[7]
The most important element in all the Indian data is the belief in the vital power of the tree itself (not the [ p. 25 ] tree-spirit) as revealed in the tree-marriage, which shows that the woman marrying a tree draws to herself its very life. The tree is thus in itself the productive power and fertilizing strength emanates from it. It is for this reason that the spiritual or vital power of rebirth and reproduction is connected with the May-tree and for the same reason women and goddesses in childbirth cling to trees, as depicted in Greece and India.[8] Incidentally, the persistent belief in metempsychosis of a sort in such folklore as “Put of her breast there grew a rose,” etc., implies that the victim grows up again as a plant; the rose is the girl herself.
Whether wood-spirits are kind or not depends on circumstances. The Finns regard them as gentle; they call the forest-spirit “gentle god of the wood” and give Mm the “honey goddess” as wife. The Amerinds’ spirit was ferocious, like themselves, a cruel demon, and the Eussian forest deity was brutal and misleading, though tMs type appears also in Sweden and Japan, while in Switzerland the wood-spirits are tricky rather than cruel, stealing milk and children, yet recovering for man the cow he has lost.
So far as is possible we may attempt a progressive series by following the social advance as conditioned by economic facts. We have seen that as Brahmanism precedes Buddhism, so the older Brahman cult of the tree as a spirit-entity precedes the Buddhist belief in hamadryad and dryad. Later than tree-cult in general is plant-cult, as the fear of the jungle-power precedes the worship of plants and grains. The Patagonian, who has no notion of a spirit of vegetation, worships the tree alone. The more [ p. 26 ] advanced Mexican recognizes the same spirit which was worshipped by the Egyptians and Semites, the vegetation-spirit, as a great power of nature, probably the Mother. In India so marked was the cult of trees that the Greeks said: “These Indians worship especially trees”; withal long after the deities of garden and grain had a rival cult. Probably the peeled rods before Japanese temples revert to a similar cult of trees, as in Europe a similar use of stalks and peeled rods symbolized just this, a fact we are apt to forget, as we forget how recent is the observance. Our forefathers in Europe only a few centuries ago were worshipping stones, tombs, plants, trees, springs, rivers, and mountains, not to speak of cows and birds, as objects of their reverence. Traces of this still remain in popular rites. In particular, it was not till long after the advent of Christianity that the reverence paid to trees diminished. The Norsemen derived the first men from trees,[9] and, later, worshipped tree-born gods. In India, the Creator was born of a lotus and the tulsi is only one of a host of plants originally divine and then associated with higher divinity, as an ashera stands beside a shrine, the old god becoming a symbol of the new, “He who dwelt in the bush” may have been, like Zeus in the oak, a later god inhabiting an older, as the sycamoregods of Egypt preserved the still more ancient divinity of the tree. The “talking (oracular) tree” of Grecian and Persian myth is reflected in the tree of soothsayers (Judges 9 : 37; see the revised version); we may compare the divining rod, virgula divina.
The cult of trees, however, is not universal. China is without it even in the attenuated form of cultivating deities living beside trees. It has only the borrowed myth of the tree of life. Nor is tree-cult, even in tree-worshipping [ p. 27 ] countries, as widespread and fundamental as some scholars would have us believe. Not all the great gods of antiquity originate from plants and trees, neither Mars nor Apollo, for example, though the first has been called a vegetal god and the second has been explained as a deified apple. Even among the Semites, who worshipped trees very generally, a god’s tree was the tree where the god chanced to live, so that the cypress, for example, was holy to different gods. The great gods of Babylon, of Greece, of Germany, of India, are not of vegetal origin, nor were Osiris and Adonis trees but spirits of vegetation, which is another matter. Half a dozen references occur in the Old Testament showing a belief in prophetic and sacred trees;[10] but data indicatiag that the origin of the Hebrew Yahweh is to be found in a female date-palm, even with the analogies drawn from other Semitic sources, are not sufficient to corroborate this striking suggestion. In Siam there is a pretty superstition connected with the tree-spirit. The house-spirit is an independent entity living in the peak of the house and protecting its inmates. But also the spirit of the tree is kindly and when the tree is cut down to make a house, this spirit still lives in the planks shaped from the tree and thence watches over the family. Many plants shaped like parts of a body or looking like a body are used as drugs simply because they oppose disease-demons, being themselves spiritual powers (suggested by the shape), one devil thus offsetting another.
Plants or grains yielding an intoxicant have generally been deified, as in India, Persia, and Mexico. The Soma, or Horn, plant, which produces intoxication, is thus regarded as a divine power. Both in India and Persia the worship of this plant was enhanced by accepting it as [ p. 28 ] identical with the moon, to which it bore a resemblance in color, in swelling, and as an exhilarant. It thus really jpassed into another sphere and became a god of light, power, and truth, a w^arrior spirit of the sky, with accredi’ced battles and amours. A religious drinking-bout honored the Hindu god, much as the Amazon Indians had a religious beer-festival celebrated with music and less pleasing effects similar to those of the Hindus. A degraded form of the same tendency leads today in India to the solemn cult of a bottle of whiskey.[11] In the later cult of Zoroaster, the Horn became the plant of life, which bestows immortality and gives all highest earthly goods, such as wealth, strength, and wisdom to men, and husbands to girls. In India eventually only the priests may partake of this mystical divine juice, which is at the same time a plant-product and a god, and only those who partake may be reckoned “gods on earth.” To drink the deified liquor is to become divine; one absorbs divinity much in the same way as a totem-worshipper renews power. But other plants, such as millet or maize, in that they give sustenance, are also revered and as among the Semites receive due w’orship. Plant-totems were thus originally quasi parents in that they gave life. But it does not follow that corn-mothers and rites of reproduction prove totemism. In the Eiresione festival of the Greeks there is the same propitiation of the spirit of vegetation and ensuing benediction as is found in the harvest-festivals of Northern Europe.
Survivals of the religious importance of trees are mainly confined in Europe to petty or pretty superstitions in regard to the use of amulets, the May-tree, etc. Eapping on wood three times implies taking protection in the Cross with invocation of the Trinity, The Christmas [ p. 29 ] tree first symbolized the second blossoming of trees in mild winters between the days of St. Martin (our Indian summer) and St. Andrew, November 11 to 30. The celebration, first current in Germany in the seventeen^;h century, marked a saint’s miracle in making a summer day in winter; the tree then had no lights. Later the celebration was connected with St. Nicholas’s day as Christ’s day. An earlier tree-celebration belonged to the Attis-cult (March 25); this tree was decorated.[12] In mediaeval jplays, the Christmas tree was associated rather with the tree of Paradise, of which it was regarded as a part. The use of incense came from the Orient to Greece and so to Europe a thousand years before Christ. In India, every god has his own preferred and detested incense, so that perfume to one god is stench to another and the many woods from which- incense comes are therefore carefully enumerated in Hindu ritualistic works. The primary use of incense may have been apotropaic, to keep off evil spirits; this use becoming ritualized would j;hen have been maintained with altered interpretation, as a service, like the dance; the gods being pleased with the odor, like the savor of sacrifice, a kind of sublimated food, as is the ease with tobacco-offerings. In the Chinese wedding-ceremony incense is still used to drive away evil spirits.
The temple-idea comes to the fore first in the sacred grove, as a home of spirits, and this in turn reverts to the jungle as habitat of mysterious powers. Such formal groves set apart for deities were known, for example, to the Assyrians, Eomans, Greeks, and ffindus, whose “divine woods” and “groves of the gods” are celebrated [ p. 30 ] in the epic. But the grove as temple is even more primitive than is illustrated by Druidic and classical instances. In Fais, one of the Caroline Islands, the Polynesian god Eongola had no temple, but at certain times he occupied a Special grove, where during his visit there was taboo of taUdng. Tintir, the original name of Babylon, where many tree-spirits were worshipped, is said to mean the “grove of the gods.” Even the Australians kept their religious implements in a sacred (taboo) place hidden among rocks or trees, and this form of temple may have preceded god-houses (bethels) and the genuine (Eoman) templum idea of an earthly place “cut off” to correspond to a heavenly region selected by diviners, as it would also have been older than the tomb-temple or edifice raised over a grave.
To our religious sense the idea of resurrection is associated with St. Paul’s appeal to the analogous resurrection of grain. All around the Mediterranean and far north in Central Europe this resurrection of plant life had been made the centre of religious ritual long before Paul’s day. The analogy too had been emphasized in the Greek ritual mystery of the resurrection and its divine participants, the Mother-goddess and her daughter, grain, as early as the eighth century B. C., and man had been taught by Orphic wisdom that by participating in these rites he himself might “rise again.” The dying god who should rise again was well known to the South, and in the North there were ritual observances to ensure the future life of the corn-mother. Sometimes this is spoken of as the death and resurrection of the year or yeardemon; but it was at bottom not so much the year as the grain and vegetation whose death and resurrection interested the people. All this is too well known on the European side to treat here in detail; but it is worth mentioning that we find the same idea of this grain-mother [ p. 31 ] and her daughter (both divine) in South America. Wherever agriculture obtains and winter is a deadly influence, these ideas become prominent and have more than once been incorporated in myth, as in the tales of Adojis, Demeter, etc.
The divinity of Bhuvaneshvar is a shaped block of granite about eight feet long gunk in the ground. At Ramakhya on the Brahmaputra a rude eleft rock represents the goddess. Most of the gtones worshipped are unshaped rocks. ↩︎
Crooke, The Popular Religion and Folk-lore of Northern India, p. S2. ↩︎
For the primitive cult of earth, see Albrecht Dietrich, Mutter Erde ( 1905 ). ↩︎
The then “Saint of Benares” also explained that he “worshipped only himself” as divine soul. Worship of images is a later trait of Buddhism, which inevitably followed from the early regard for relics comhined with images of Buddha. These relics and images paved the way to the shrine, which, adopted by the Brahmans, became a temple, unknown to early India. ↩︎
The image of stone is sometimes the earlier idol, but often this is not the case, the trunk or root of a tree serving as an image before stone is hewed into shape. ↩︎
The wedding of the tulsi plant to the stone shalagrama is a religions mystery, in which the plant represents a human bride and the stone a divine bridegroom. ↩︎
The Yggdrasil, or tree of Odin and of life, had one root in the sky, one in giant-land, and one in the under-world. The Hindu tree of life roots in heaven and its head is this life below. When the Vedic poet asks from what tree (wood) the world was fashioned, he may mean material, νλη. In Japan, the world tree, the tree of heaven, and the tree of immortality are united into one. In the Genesis story, the tree of life is identical with the tree of knowledge, in that the divine fruit imparts divine attributes of either kind. It may he remarked that the so-called “tree of knowledge” of the Buddhists, the Bo-tree, is not a tree imparting knowledge but merely the tree under which Gotama (Buddha) chanced to sit when he acquired perfect knowledge or wisdom. Also the famous akshayavata of Gaya was not primarily an “indestructible banyan”, as understood nowadays, but a tree which makes indestructible the offerings to the Manes. ↩︎
For the same reason a pregnant woman worships a Shami tree, in which lives the Shakti or essential power of the Fire-god, a common rite today, the worship consisting in offerings and a light, with quadruple circumambulation, which ensures to the embryo protection and heat. ↩︎
This myth is found among the Sioux Indians as well as among the Greeks and Persians. ↩︎
Compare 1 Sam, 14; 2, and 22: 6; 2 Sam. 5; 24; Ex. 3:4. ↩︎
Oman, The Brahmam, Theists and Muslims, p. 173. ↩︎
The decorated pine-tree of the Attis-cult, however, represented the god himself as lord of vernal vegetation. Although Christmas Day was transferred from March 25 to December 25, the Christmas tree itself does not appear to have been borrowed from this cult. A decorated “tree of victory” formed part also of a popular Hindu celebration. ↩︎