[ p. 47 ]
Long before the four or five[1] elements were recognized as such they were worshipped as natural powers. Water is worshipped in springs and streams by the savages of •Africa and a river-cult is known to the Mongolians. Water washes away evil, disease, and old age; whence arose the idea that there was somewhere a fountaih of youth or of immortality, the antithesis of which later was known as the (Hindu) “river of death.” Magically, water is like fire in that evil spirits will not cross, it. Water cleanses mentally. The Mhnir spring (of wisdom) in G-ermany; Ea, god of water and wisdom in Babylon; Varuna, the “wise” god of water in India, are illustrations. Water cleanses morally. Baptism was practiced in Babylon. Eeligious use of water is prominent in the cult of the Amerindst The Creeks bathed annually, after pui’ging and fasting, to “wash out the sins of the year.” The California sweat-bath removed ill and evil (in India this is merely a physical remedy). Strength returns after the" bath; power is renewed by means of the water, whos6 divine power is absorbed through immersion. Hence, sprinkling mth water kept off evil, thought of as demon, even in the rites of Polynesians, Hindus, etc., of \vhich general behef our Christian baptism is a final expression, derived from Judaism. Compare the baptism of the proselyte and “bathing in Jordan.” As a divine sentient power water, like fire, will not harm the innocent. [ p. 48 ] In early Vedic lore the Beas Eiver cast out (saved) the samt Vasishtha, because he was innocent, but usually the notion is that pure water will regurgitate and, so to speak, spit out the impr '’e man, which leads to the deadly ordeal preserved to our own day in the trial of witches. Survivals of the belief in water-purity may be found in present-day symbolism. In India, the hands are washed before a present is accepted, to show that the recipient is not taking a bribe (“to take with oiled hands” is to accept a bribe). Mourners often avoid washing lest the death-power infecting them infect the stream. One swears by water (stream or well) and at the same time sips it or takes it into the hand. Curse- water is potent to injure; as a divine power it even dries up grain and clouds.[2] Water as the source of life and strength is the birthplace of eager desire (love is born of water) and Kama, Love, as “water-born” reflects in late Hindu mythology the Rig-Vedic declaration that desire, the seed of mind, was the first offspring of the primeval waters.
Now, although advanced savage types, like the Mongolians, imagine, that the stream has a spirit in it, and this interpretation is of course common in the modern fancy of maids in springs, nymphs, mermaids, and the sea-god, yet the more primitive savage, like the Ainu, thinks of the stream itself as being angry and revengeful, just as hail (not a spirit of hail) is averted by a Hindu peasant’s knife, with the idea that hail itself will be afraid.[3] So the Pacific Islander’s “hymn to rain” is clearly not to any rain-demon in the downpour but to the [ p. 49 ] physical drops; ocean is itself a fearful entity before an ocean-spirit exists. Greek Arethousa means merely the “flowing” stream till it becomes a river-goddess. A similar form in India becomes the goddess of fluency. The Kaffirs sacrifice grain and animals to rivers as to potencies. The nymph, like the dryad, is a later phase.
Water and air (wind) go together in the worship of storm- winds. Saussaye, denies that wind per se was ever divine, but this is an error. Homer’s Winds are godlings. Not only as wind-spirit, but as the blowing wind itself, wind has been worshipped by Hindus and Eskimos, to •give only two examples. “Hurricane” was a personified storm-wind and Vata in India was not the spirit in the wind but the wind itself personified, anthropomorpliizftd, as was inevitable. Thunder is always taken as the voice of a god who is the storm (“Who doubteth Indra when he hears him thunder?”). The sweeping storm-winds called Maruts in the Veda are worshipped with Mdra as raging powers, now eagles, now warriors, in poetic metaphor, but always as gods identical with the natural phenomena they really are, and also as protecting tutelary deities to the devout, like cherubim. In this, as in similar cases, man treats jihenomena as he would treat intelligent men, humors or coerces, placates or fears. If a man is drowning, to help him would be to affront the river; wise men let him drown to avoid a si m ilar fate. This attitude is found both in cases where the river is an intelligent being and where there is a river-spirit. The four winds representing space as a whole, as has already been shown, are divine powers.
Fire-worship, which reached its highest poiiit in ancient Persia, is part of sun-worship in Mexico and sun and fire are recognized as one even by savages, while lightning soon becomes, as in ancient India, a third in this early triad. But probably fire-worship precedes sun-worship [ p. 50 ] everywhere, as it does in Eome. Magic has much to do.mth fire, but like water, fire is purificatory and remains in religion as well as in magic. Man must have looked on fire first as a wild animal full of dangers to man. Long before he paid any attention to sun and moon, he feared and cultivated fire, a house-friend as well as a destructive force. All over the world he built special receptacles for it and gave care to its preservation. In at least three ancient communities were instituted vestal virgins whose primary care was to tend the fii’e. Formal vestals were known to Romans, Peruvians, and Kelts; but also among the Damaras, a tribe so low as to be unable to count above three, the chief’s daughters are set to watch the sacred fire, to which, as to rain, they offer sacrifice. The extinction of a public fire is a public calamity and those responsible for it are slain. But if polluted or formally extinguished, as at certain seasons is the case among the Muskhogean Indians, it is solemnly relighted at a feast of first-fruits. In America, the worship of fire and sun go together and it is sometimes impossible to distinguish the two cults. The Potawotamis, “fire-makers,” for example, were devotees of both fire and sun, and kept up an undying fire worshipped as sunfiye. Fire is an excellent example of a phenomenon worshipped per se without implication of a spirit in it. Even the civilized Vedic Aryans regard the actual leaping fire as a living thing swallowing oblations, while acting also as messenger to the heavenly gods. They do not pray to a spirit of fire but to fire itself conceived in priestly fashion but still, phenomenal, a divine creature instinct with life and power. Centuries afterwards, this Fire as divinity is human enough to fight battles as a warrior, dally amorously with kings’ daughters, play tricks, etc., like a Grepk gQd, tiU finally he becomes a goat, a productive, fauniike Creature; for heat and love are then for [ p. 51 ] mally recognized as his forms, the fire of fever and of digestion being also phases of the Fire-god. Like water in that it purifies, fire becomes a moral power and finds out sinners in ordeals (walking through fire, over iiot plates, etc.); it is in India the type of purity. Perhaps as coming from heaven it is especially di-vine, for in most mythologies, such as those of India and Greece and of the Amerinds, it is brought to man from heaven, but it does not need a heavenly origin to make it worshipful. It is not merely as “a symbol of the Supreme God” that fire speaks and is worshipped in the Avesta, but as phenomenon conceived as a divine being.[4]
The worship of atmospheric and heavenly phenomena is more primitive than is often admitted. Among the Kill Tribes of India are found the personification and worship of Rainbow, who to Homer is a di-vine messenger but to classical Hindu mythology is Indra’s bow (it is a god’s bow to the Polynesians also) or a s-wing. Even in the Rig-Veda a poet sings about his having mounted upon the heavenly s-wing. But in modern India and in Africa (Dahomey), the rainbow is a celestial snake, which has led to the suggestion that treasure found at the foot of the rainbow may be a serpent’s hoard. In the Pacific, Morileu Islands, the Rainbow is a powerful god, a fact which makes it unnecessary to imagine Iris as originally a plant. By the same token, the deification of Da-wn by savages makes somewhat strained Herbert Spencer’s explanation of the Vedic Da-wn-goddess as the ghost of a former Miss Dawn. In this category, the weakness of animism and ghostism (if, for clearness, the word may be pardoned) as universal solvents of religion becomes painfully apparent. No one who reads the Rig-Veda impartially [ p. 52 ] can question for a moment that Fire and Dawn and Wind were phenomenal gods from the beginning, and a wider outlook only confirms this fact. Atmospheric phenomena are worshipped all over the world in and for themselves, just as earthly objects are worshipped. Clouds and storm and rainbow and dawn are real beings to savages and as such they have life and power and volition and are deprecated, cajoled, worshipped, just as sun and stars and moon are divine powers to such savages as have anything to do with beings so remote. Not all savages, for though all are buffeted by storm it takes a certain amount of self-interest to call a savage’s attention to the sun or moon as of any practical value to himself, and all religious phenomena are fundamentally practical. Man did not sentimentalize over phenomenal powers, did not worship them as beautiful, did not care much for them one way or another till they forced themselves upon Ms attention by becoming -pertinent to his life and needs; but when this happened he took steps at once to bring himself into satisfactory relationsMp with them.
We have already seen how savages treat rain and hail, wMch have been discussed too logically as forms of water. As a matter of fact their water-nature has nothing to do with their divinity; they are worsHpped as separate powers, fruit-giving, fruit-destroying, worshipped practically. So the Melanesians of New Guinea, who belong to about the lowest stratum of savagery, venerate heavenly bodies, and in 1867 the very savage ’savages of Danger Island were discovered greeting the Pleiades with religious joy and feasting. The Sabaism of astrolatry has its primitive expression in the occasional worship of stars by savages because these stars are connected with their welfare, bring a harvest, or something of that sort. The Hottentots worship Dawn as bringer Of day, and [ p. 53 ] Night, supposed by some scholars to be merely a poetical goddess, is really reyered in Bengal by natives who have not inherited the cult from the Vedas. When a savage begins to imagine his past histo^ he is usually logical enough to derive his tribe from some substance or creature that by evolution or propagation eventually produced the tliinker and speculator. Sometimes he speculates even on the origin of the world and gets far enough to imagine a sky and earth pair, later refined into Sky Father and Earth Mother, but such beings in so far as ‘they do not affect Mm are negligible. TMs is the reason that creator-gods are not worshipped unless they keep on and do something- more important, to the savage of today. So, although Dyaus-Zeus-Jupiter, Father Sky, is about the only certain equation of proto-Aryan mythology, he was of no special moment in Vedic religion and became important to Greek and Eoman only as he hecame much more than an ancestor. The reason why the Polynesian sun-god Tane became important is that from being a mere “lord of the year,” that is, the sun as creator and timepiece of the year, he took a prominent part in regulating crops, so that he is now a god of vegetation and forests. The gods that get a certain preeminence always tend to expand thus. IJnto him who has, shall be given. Tongaloa was the Polynesian god of the ocean; then, because of the affinity between the waters on the earth and those above, in rain and clouds, he became god of the sky; and then again as lord of sea and sky he became gradually not only the greatest but the Mghest god, “having the sun as his eye,” exactly as Varuna, god of water, became god of the sky and also had the sun as his eye.
As the worship of stars may on occasion arise .among savages because they are useful to him (or he thinks so, which religiously amounts to the same thing), so among [ p. 54 ] higher minds a star-cult is established on the basis of utility from two other points of view. The prior is probably" (not demonstrably) the view that stars are the souls of ancestors and as such are still actively interested in family affairs on earth. Groups of stars thus at a very early period represent fathers or seers of old; sometimes constellations are also holy animals. The more erudite view is that which comes when man begins to notice the regular order of the starry host and to connect the site and movement of stars with earth and himself, born in the templum of earth under the influence of such or such a star. This attitude toward stars is not so early as popular histories of civilization represent it. The “ Chaldeans” and their star-cult are not important historically till the eighth century, B. 0., and in Babylon divination by the liver came before that by the stars. Carried to Greece, star-cult received a fresh interpretation wliich swept the older pantheon into a world of strange light-bodies. Mysticism had its way among the later thinkers of the second century, B. 0., till all astrolatry became more or less a system of magic, profitable but probably not exercised wholly for profit, as the influence of the stars was (as it is still) really believed in by both the enquirer and the dispenser of astral lore. In India, the peasants generally believe that stars are the souls of people, though in ancient times they serve also as soul-worlds, that is, each soul receives a star as its home; but the prevailing belief even then was that stars are souls, and groups of stars are beasts. In the West, however, where worship of earthly animals had been given up, their sidereal shapes, lion, bull, fishes, formed a collection of heavenly powers, and were mythologically united with old tales, till out of this museum of natural history twelve became the-'Signs of the zodiac and even the aether in which [ p. 55 ] they moved was worshipped with hymns and sacrifice. Most potent of heavenly bodies were the planets, which revived by their names the cult of Mars, Venus, etc.
These planets, in turn, had each its metal, plant, and stone, potent through them, and they too were worshipped as were, at this time, the elements -gttd elements, which had already been deified in the East. All the lower spheres were, however, controlled by the upper; and over all reigned the power of jfixed order as a detei’mining Pate or Necessity; through whose pqwer cycle succeeds cycle as a duplication of previous events (determined by the stars). Among all these stars and planets Venus was most exalted and formed a triad Avith sun and moon (copied from the Babylonian cult of Ishtar with Shamash and Sin).
Moon-worship is a trait of African religion and is well known in the oldest religious literature of Egypt, Babylon, and India. In some cases it is probably older than sun-worship for it belongs more to the hunting stage than to the agricultural, though the moon’s influence on plantlife is also recognized. In India, the moon is “lord of plants” because it is identified Avith the holy Soma-plant, but the literature of primitive agriculture teems Avith references to the effect of the moon on the groAvth of vegetables. In Deuteronomy, the moon is said to bring forth plants like the sun, but, on the other hand, the moon’s evil influence on men appears to be recognized by the Psalmist (121: 6). It is common AAusdom to our farmers that one should “plant by the moon.” [5]
In magic, the moon is all-important, particularly Avith women, who naturally pay special respect to the moon. [ p. 56 ] Women desiring children prayed to the moon and took vows on the day of the full moon in ancient India and today they worship the moon that their children may escape diseases, offering an oblation, and fast on new moon day. The climate has something to do with, the relative value of the sun and moon. The sun is more needed in the-colder Punjab than in Bengal, where the moon is more worshipped. The Dravidians worship both sun and moon, while the Khonds regard the sun as the supreme god, though the Sonthals, their relations, worship neither sun nor moon. In Central India, the Kurs set up to both gods columns carved with figures of sun and moon and treat these columns as gods. In India also, as in Southern Australia, "moon-phases possess a separate divinity. In Terra del Fuego, the inhabitants desire warmth and so revere the sun, disregarding the moon; in Brazil, both are worshipped. Astrology made the “measurer” (moon) particularly revered. It divides time and in India its twenty-eight days are divided and then sub-divided, making holy moon-days at the “joint-days,” with intervals corresponding to our weekly divisions. Besides other reasons for revering the moon, it is, in Hindu belief, the place where the spirits of the dead go for a time; at the new and full moon they are more active.[6] But worship of the moon in India took place rather on the new moon day than on the full moon day.
The magic connected with the cult of the moon as a deity of the dead may have hindered its popularity as an object of religious regard, but probably the growth in civilization had a more powerful effect. Except in astrolatry, as a product of astrology, moon-cults are of secondary [ p. 57 ] importance[7] and seem to have been left in the hands of women and magicians. Soma-cult gave the moon a purely fictitious religious value in India and in Persia. In civilized communities, worship of the moon walies rapidly and survives as a dummy for witch-practices and the silly superstitions practiced in India (drinking moonbeams, rubbing warts at the time of a waning moon, etc.) and elsewhere. Domestic ceremonies belong to the new paoon (national celebrations at the full moon are more for light than for worship), as many of them have to do with sacrifice to the ancestors and themew moon is fateful; in India to look at the August moon brings danger of false accusations, but its fourth day is especially sacred. Even the Buddhists worshipped the new moon.[8]
In India space (aether) was a fifth element. ↩︎
Later the curse- and ordeal-water becomes (as does fire) a mere instrument in the hands of a higher divinity, as in India, the Old Testament, New England witch-trials, etc. ↩︎
Crooke points out that the blood-sacrifice to hail is made in Kumaou today, as of old in Argolis. A rain-god may not be a god born of rain but a god who sees to it that rain comes as part of his general beneficence. ↩︎
In the Rig-Veda, Fire is father of man, but from beginnmg to end of Hindu mythology he is both element and god. On his role as mediator and member of a triad (trinity), see below, chapter XVII. ↩︎
Compare the directions given in L. Pattee’s House of the Black Ring. One must plant by the moon; everything that strikes down must be planted when the moon is going down; but “beans and peas and such truck must be put in when the moon is in the up.” ↩︎
Our week probably represents a lunar division, though some dispute this; but see Roscher, Die Hebdomadenlehren, pp. 311. On the moon-phases of Osiris, see Fraser, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, pp, 319f. Sinai may have been named from the moon-god Sin. ↩︎
Sin, moon-god of Ur and Harran, became popular as an old Sumerian “lord of knowledge,” but his powers were augmented by astrolatry, apart from which he was, like the Egyptian moon, a sailor, or boat-god, of little importance as compared with the sun; moon-cult is not prominent in the actual worship. Compare Jastrow, Aspects of Beligiom Belief in Babylonia and Assyria, p. 114. So Japan had originally an important sun-goddess and a minor male moon-deity. In China the (new) moon-goddess receives a perfunctory worship in autumn as the western deity (i.e., the new moon), antithetic to the sun-god of the east. ↩︎
The moon is goddess in China, Greece, and Rome; god in Egypt, India, and Babylonia. Grammatical gender often determines the sex of the deity. ↩︎