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¶ BOOK TWO — HOW RELIGION DEVELOPED IN THE ANCIENT WORLD
I. The Celts
1: The primitive gods — Druids — the mistletoe cult. 2: The festivals — the great holocausts — Beltane — Lugnasad — Samhain — ghost worship.
II. The Babylonians
1: The Semitic goddesses — how the Babylonian gods arose — trinities. 2: Ishtar and the sex rites — holy prostitution — astrology. 3: The priesthood — its vices — and virtues. 4: The defects of the religion — polydemonism — a ritualized morality — Shabatum and mythology — contrast with Hebrew versions of same — fear.
III. The Egyptians
1: Original animal-worship — the growth of the gods — the priests, 2: The idea of monotheism emerges. 3: The reformation under Ikhnaton — reaction 4 : The religion of the masses — Osiris — the future life — why the pyramids were built. 5 : The dead — the Judgment Day — the resort to magic.
IV. The Greeks
1: The Minoan religion — how the Greek gods arose — the Olympian cult. 2: The Olympian cult fails — the learned take to philosophy. 3 : The masses take to magic — and the “mysteries” — the savior-god idea — how men tried to become divine. 4: The desire for a future life — and how the mysteries satisfied it.
V. The Romans
1: Original worship of household spirits — the state religion arises — and is intensified. 2 : Why the state religion failed — the coming of the mysteries — Cybele — Attis — the other foreign cults. 3 : Augustus restores the state religion — the godemperor — the re-action — the Cynics. 4: Why decadent Rome took to the mysteries — Mithras — its significance. 5: Conclusion — Why these ancient cults cannot be called “dead” — the significance of their other-worldly appeal.
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THE story of how religion began has been made unconscionably short and simple in the book just closed. Fundamental elements have been treated in the sketchiest fashion, and many significant elements have hardly been touched on. But in so small a book it was impossible to do otherwise. To have gone into primitive religion with any thoroughness, to have given even in outline the myriad variants among the races of each belief and practice, would have required not a score of pages, but a whole shelf of heavy tomes. All that was possible here was an outline of the central plot, a hurried sketch of the main line of march followed by religion as it advanced through prehistoric centuries.
Unhappily, that outline reads as though given with complete assurance. Despite all the “perhapses” and “probablys” scattered throughout the story, it still reads as though the writer knew for certain just what had happened. Actually he knows nothing of the sort. All he knows is what many learned anthropologists, after much painstaking research, have surmised to be the truth. [ p. 60 ] Of course they may have surmised quite badly. Their underlying theory may be entirely wrong, and religion, instead of having been originally created to elude or conquer fear, may have arisen quite independently of it Religion may be an altogether primal instinct in the human race — something just as old and fundamental and innate as fear itself. Who knows? . . .
To go into that question, however, would serve only to add confusion to what is already too confused a story. Many sets of guesses have been made as to how religion began, but in this little book there was room for only one of them — the one that seems (to the writer) the most reasonable. And that having been given, we must hurry on. . . .
Happily for us the development of religion is not nearly so veiled in mists of doubt as is its beginning. Fairly detailed accounts of many ancient cults exist, and from these we can plot out an almost clear line of progression. Beginning with the animism of the barbaric Celts, and continuing clear through to the Mysteries of the last of the Romans, we can follow almost step by step the slow march of early religion.
¶ I. THE CELTS
THERE is no particular reason for beginning our study of ancient religion with the Celts save that records of their rites and beliefs have come down to us with comparative fullness. Two thousand years ago the Celts were but one of a horde of Aryan peoples just come up out of the night of savagery into that fitful fore-dawn which we call barbarism. Their religion, [ p. 61 ] therefore, was still no more than a pathetic gesture that wavered between the brave but foolish clawing of the savage and the meek but hopeful reaching-out of civilized man. It was not altogether a dependence on magic rites, for the Celts had already discovered that magic alone was not enough. They were already sufficiently advanced to have learnt that the “powers” controlling the universe, the spirits supposed to dwell in trees and stones and other natural objects, could often be moved far more effectively by petition than coercion. Yet they did not stake all their faith on petition, either. Their priests were still covertly shamans, and their sacrifices were at least implicitly half-coercive spells. Perhaps the word “cajolery” best describes the technique wherewith the Celts sought to win over their deities.
They had many deities to win over, for every natural object of any impressiveness seemed to them to contain a spirit to be conjured with. And certain of these spirits had already been sufficiently detached from their physical bodies to be thought of as remote gods and goddesses. Names had been given to them — Ogmius, Maponus, Bridget, and the like — and whole mythologies had been spun around them. A sacrificial ritual had grown up, and a priestly class had been established. There seem to have been no temple edifices, however, but only unroofed circles of stone pillars — Stonehenge in England is the ruins of one of these circles— and groves of sacred trees. Within these circles and groves the priests (who were called Druids, “Wise Ones”) offered up sacrifices and cast spells at regular times, and the priestesses — of whom there seem to have been not a few — performed rites of decidedly dubious respectability.
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Idolatry had not advanced far among the Celts, and their images of the gods were rudely carved logs or simply weapons of one sort or another. Their chief ceremonial object was the mistletoe, that white-berried creeper which has captured the imagination of primitive peoples all over the world. Sir James G. Frazer, in that most fascinating book in all the literature of comparative religions. The Golden Bough, has tried to give the reason for the peculiar veneration attached to this plant. He maintains it is because the mistletoe has no roots in the polluted earth but seems to grow magically between heaven and earth. By that sorry clutching at conclusions which is all that primitive man has of logic, this plant, dangling down from the sky, is therefore thought to be endowed with magic properties. Wherever the [ p. 63 ] Druids discovered it growing on an oak tree, they would approach with great awe and ceremonial pomp and cut it down with a golden sickle. They would be dreadfully careful to catch it before it fell to the earth, and then they would use it to make a potion for the fertilizing of barren women and cattle, and for the cure of epilepsy, ulcers, poisoning, and almost every other human ailment.
¶ 2
REGULAR festivals were held three times in each year, and with especial elaborateness once in every five years. They were largely fire festivals, and were directly intended to make the spirits fertilize the soil. Julius Caesar has bequeathed to us our earliest description of those gruesome quinquennial festivals, when scores of criminals — that is, persons who had transgressed taboos — and prisoners of war and animals would be herded into colossal images of wicker-work, and then ceremoniously burnt to death. It was imagined that the greater the number of victims, the greater would be the fertility of the land, and once all northern Europe reeked with the smell of such holocausts. Originally the ordinary annual festivals were also bloody scenes of human sacrifice; but by historic times they had been rid of that savage factor. But fire still played a large part in the conduct of those festivals, and their obvious purpose was still the magic fructifying of the land. On the eve of the first of May, when the Celts held their festival of Beltane, bonfires of oak-wood were lighted under sacred trees or poles. A “king” and “queen” were chosen to lead the processions into the [ p. 64 ] fields, and then for hours there was a mad flaring of brands plucked from the bonfires, and a wild swirling and dancing in orgiastic revelry. Men and women lay together in the fields, and behaved as did all other primitive peoples at their religious festivals. Simple barbarians they were, and they did what they did in all good faith that it would suggest to the sun and the other gods what they in turn ought to do: make things grow. Not until the Christian idea of morality was brought to them did the Celts grow conscious of any wickedness in their old rites. And even then they did not give them up at once. Indeed, to this day their descendants have not given them up entirely. They have merely pruned and refined and Christianized them into the eminently respectable — but reminiscently very naughty — Maypole dances of modern times. . . .
The two other Celtic festivals of the year were Lugnasad held on the first of August, and Samhain held on the last day of October. Both were marked by rites rather like those of Beltane, and both have persisted to our time, the one as Midsummer Night and St. John’s Day and the other as Hallowe’en and All Saints’ Day. Samhain was the more important of the two, for even as in the Christian calendar it was regarded as the day when the souls of the dead foregathered with the living. Food was laid out in the huts of the Celts and cheery fires were lighted on the hearths, so that the shivering hungry shades of the dead might prepare themselves against the wintry months just coming to the world.
The Celts were inordinately interested in the dead. They knew little about another world save that there was somewhere in the Western Sea a “sweet and blessed [ p. 65 ] isle” reserved for heroes and demigods; hat nevertheless they cherished an abiding faith in an afterlife even for the lowliest tribesman. Nervously they imagined the dead to be shades that hovered in the gloaming, intangible wraiths that yet could do great hurt or kindness. Perhaps their great fire- festivals, those ghastly holocausts of men and beasts, were but desperate efforts to drive away the more malevolent of the shades. For those poor Celts, forever harried by storm and drought and pestilence, had brought themselves to believe that the dead were, in part at least, the doers of all mischief. The dead and the spirits of nature together seemed the ultimate masters of the universe, and all of life for the living seemed to depend on their mysterious favor. That was why religious rites played so large a part in Celtic thought and conduct. They were primitive rites, crude, blundering, almost absurdly naive — but they had to be kept up. Even as a sick man, though he may reject one medicine after another, never can quite bring himself to reject physicians entirely, so the ancient Gaul and Briton often forsook one spell for another, but never dared to forsake the Druids. They were afraid . . . afraid. . . .