[ p. 67 ]
Our line between man and beast is drawn with, a view to certain suppositions, such as that man has language, reason, or soul, and the beast lacks these human attributes; but a savage is not troubled with such modem ideas and to him a beast has language, reason, and soul just as a man has. Again, we make a distinction between men and gods; gods have immortality and more than human powers and attributes. But a savage thinks that a man who has more than human powers is a sort of god and he judges human powers by his own norm, while attributes such as immortality do not appear to him to be especially divine. In short, he makes no very clear categories of beast, man, and god and in consequence his worship of one is that of the others; it is not worship in the sense of implied recognition of unhuman divinity, but rather the profound respect suitable in the presence of a spiritual power vastly superior to that of the worshipper, yet equally appropriate to beast, man, and god. Hence even today in India the word worship, puja, is applied to all three, sometimes to the horror of the missionary, who thinks puja is worship in his own hnaited sense. All extraordinary creatures are mysterious, and what is mysterious is to be fearedj and what is feared is either shunned or honored, worshipped.
This rule applied to man works out very simply among savages and semi-civilized peoples. In some savage tribes, twins, extraordinary and mysterious, are regarded as unlucky, in some as lucky, and they are either exposed [ p. 68 ] to die or receive unusual honor in consequence, an observance approaching worship, but not identical. But albinos and poets and crazy people, being still more remarkable, are apt to be revered as quite unhuman, quasi divine beings, spiritually as physically superhuman. Especially priests, being in touch, with the spiritual world, and kings, having superhuman power, are objects of a respectful regard that is not differentiated from that paid to gods; they are really worshipped. The Eoman emperor, called divine, was-only-the successor of a seribs, of kings and priests who were gods to their Eastern subjects, as after his day lived the king-gods of Mexico and Peru and even today the masses of India recognize the emperor of India as a divinity. The peasants of Polynesia, of Eussia, of the Orient generally and the emperors of Europe have still believed till.lately that there’s a divinity doth hedge a king, perhaps because it is a divinity of a more striking sort, so to speak, than is usually found on earth. According to all Hindu scriptures a king is “compounded of gods” and a priest is “a god on earth.” In Egypt the king was identified with the sun-god or was the son of the sun., In Babylonia the king was divine per se till in later times, with the increase in Semitic power, he lost divinity but became representative of the divine, the Semites als a race never haying admitted the divinity of man except as. totemism may have implied a divine brotherhood between man and a superhuman animal god. In rare cases a priest becomes a king, as when the Mgh-priest of Tibet becomes the temporal ruler, but the theory that kings were originally priests, in Babylonia and elsewhere, is as a general statement a perversion of history and of .existing facts. The chief of a tribe in most combative communities becomes its head hot as priest but as warrior, and the medicine man or priest has his separate part, as with our Indians, the [ p. 69 ] Hindus, the Greeks, Romans, etc. Power over the lives of his people gives the king his divine superhumanity; power over spiritual powers gives the priest his influence and exalts him into a superior being. The living chiefs of African tribes, like American sachems, are not worshipped as priests, but they maintain their power by strength and violence, and in Africa, as in Polynesia, they are invested with a sacred character, which in the latter case leads to taboos similar to but stricter than those sur’ rounding the priests of Greece and Rome.
Probably the earliest superhuman humans were those who were “possessed”[1] by a spirit; they through communion with the spirit themselves possessed extraordinary spirituality, which, as in the case of the Micronesian Ululia (“entered” and so “possessed”), makes one feared as having supernatural power. But creatures of this sort, whose more familiar form is that of the religious lunatic, the howling dervish, the mantic madman, the dancing ecstatic prophet, are only the first phase of development. The priest who is god on earth must have more than this temporary conjunction with divinity; he must become the permanent representative of the divine and not only his wild utterances but his sober and considered speech and action must be those of the divinity with which he is imbued. Such is the Guru or religious chief of the Hindu sects; such service is given to bim as to the gods; he is in reahty to his own sect what the Brahman priesthood claimed to be as a whole, divinity on earth.
Then come those kings whose acts of beneficence or power made them, in story, more than human. We may doubt whether they were men receiving divine honors, [ p. 70 ] but the after age regarded them as men who were gods while still alive, Rama and Krishna and gods of this ilk. The divinity of the Chinese emperor is not of this sort, but rather he is divine because he is chosen as the highest incorporation of the Way, the representative of the Supreme Lord of Heaven.
But in a god-fearing and god-seeking country any accident may make a man a god or godling, as it may make him one of the semi-divine heroes of the lland. Only lately an American was thus canonized in Japan. In India, Nicholas, the hero of Delhi, was a god to his followers, who would have worshipped him had he not forbidden them to do so. Not a century ago a tramp came to a Hindu village and fell asleep at a deserted shrine. When the villagers awoke they found him there asleep. Nothing could persuade them that he was not the god returned. He in turn awoke to find himself the object of worship; food, drink, attendance, reverence, all were his. Alarmed at fiirst he protested that he was only a poor villager like themselves. But they would not believe him; rather they believed in him and he, finding the post an easy one, remained there ever afterwards and lived and died a god.
Moreover every true Hindu wife is hlce Eve and “she for God in him” represents her attitude toward her husband, to whom she makes offerings, and. whom she worships as her divinity. This is no phrase, and though this attitude is enjoined upon her by divine (inspired) law it is not as a merely legal injunction thai; she regards it. It is her delight thus to deify her husbafiid. When she rises in the morning she worships first of all the sun and afterwards the tulsi plant and a pipal tree; then she does obeisance to her husband and in particular worships his big toe, bathing and anointing it and oflfering to her husband incense, as she would to any other god.
In circumstances where gods are produced so easily [ p. 71 ] and the gods of the sky are also intimate with men, there spring np the demi-gods, half divine, half human. Such demi-gods are not all mythological; they are at times the offspring of human mothers or fathers and their clev^rr ness or power leads their contemporaries or descendants to ascribe to them one parent who is more than human. Sons of gods by human mothers are of course more common than sons of goddesses by human fathers. The fatherhood of a child was uncertain. But the divine man does not even now require a divine parent. Extraordinary powers, especially spiritual, prove divinity to the credulous East. Chunder Sen, only a few decades ago, was merely a popular excitable Hindu preacher; but his congregation adored him literally and he ended by believing himself adorable, not only inspired but divine. In Persia also, in the last century, the Bab was taken as incarnate God; though Zoroaster and Mohammed through their own teachings repressed this tendency and became not divine but merely more than human, men filled with divine inspiration and power. Apotheosis depends largely on the definition of the word god; sometimes it connotes only a superman. A “sacrifice to gods having human nature” is formally recognized by orthodox Hindus, and the Puranas tell the history of men who became gods, though such cases always refer to the past and today it is doubtful whe&er the gods mentioned were ever nten at all.
The phase of temporary divinity must also be noticed. In savage cults, the wolf-man as wolf -worshipper not only represents the god, he is the god, the very wolf-god he portrays with his mask; but when he removes the mask he becomes mere man again. So in the Tantric rites, the divine essence converts for a night an ordinary woman into a goddess, as in less degree a common man becomes a temporary prophet, filled with divine power, a sort of god. A fetish is a temporary divinity and ihe plant substituted [ p. 72 ] for Soma (when this is impossible to get) is, for the occasion, mystically converted by the priest into the divinity (Soma), so that the worshippers believe that in parjtaking thereof they have become partakers of the real substance of divinity.
But it makes a difference whether a man is alive or dead. When the poor African said, “My chieftain is my god, for I fear him more than all,” he worshipped a living man-god. But the worship of Buddha is not quite worship of man, but of a figure originally not a god but only superhuman, a figure imagined of fictitious value, not representing divinity tiU long after Buddha the man had ceased to live. Again, as the Absolute, Buddha is a philosophical abstraction, not a ease of man-worship. So the worship of ancestors is not precisely the same as the worship of living men. The dead ancestor is no longer a man.
Possession is where a spirit rules a mind, as distinct from obsession, where, as in the case of an incubus or succubus, a malicious spirit rules or enslaves a human body. ↩︎