Pagan Christs

by John M. Robertson

First published in 1903

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Contents

Preface To The Second Edition

Introduction

I. The Naturalness Of All Belief

1. Origin of the Gods from Fear

2. All Belief Results of Reasoning

3. Dr. Jevons’ Theories of Religious Evolution

4. Scientific View of the Religious Evolution

5. Dr. Frazer’s Definition

6. The Scientific Induction

7. Dr. Jevons’ Series of Self-Contradictions

8. His Contradictory Doctrine Of The Conditions Of The Survival Of Religion

9. The Continuity Of Religious Phenomena

10. Dr. Frazer’s Sociological Vindication Of The Sorcerer

11. The Beginning Of The End Of Religion

12. Historic View Of Ancestor Worship

13. The Authoritarian Element A Mark Of Religion

14. Definition Of Religion

II. Comparison And Appraisement Of Religions

1. Early Forces Of Reform

2. Reform As A Religious Process

3. Polytheism And Monotheism

4. Hebrews And Babylonians

5. Forces Of Religious Evolution

6. The Hebrew Evolution

7. Post-Exilic Phases

8. Revival And Disintegration

9. Conclusion

III. The Sacrificed Saviour-God

1. Totemism And Sacraments

2. Theory And Ritual Of Human Sacrifice

3. The Christian Crucifixion

4. Vogue of Human Sacrifice

5. The Divinity of the Victim

6. The Cannibal Sacrament

7. The Semitic Antecedents

8. The Judaic Evolution

9. Specific Survivals in Judaism

10. The Pre-Christian Jesus-God

11. Private Jewish Eucharists

12. The Eucharist in Orthodox Judaism

13. Special Features of the Crucifixion Myth

14. Possible Historical Elements

15. The Gospel Mystery-Play

16. The Mystery-Play and the Cultus

17. Further Pagan Adaptations

18. Synopsis And Conclusion: Genealogy Of Human Sacrifice And Sacrament

IV. The Teaching God

1. Primary and Secondary Ideas

2. The Logos

3. Derivations of the Christian Logos

4. The Search for a Historical Jesus

5. The Critical Problem

6. Collapse of the Constructive Case

7. Parallel Problems

8. The Problem of Buddhist Origins

9. Buddhism and Buddhas

10. The Buddhist Cruces

11. Sociological Clues

12. Buddhism and Asoka

13. The Buddha Myth

14. The Problem of Manichæus

15. The Manichean Solution

16. The Case of Apollonius of Tyana

V. Mithraism

1. Introductory

2. Beginnings Of Cult

3. Zoroastrianism

4. Evolution of Mithra

5. The Process of Syncretism

6. Symbols of Mithra

7. The Cultus

8. The Creed

9. Mithraism and Christianity

10. Further Christian Parallels

11. The Vogue of Mithraism

12. Absorption in Christianity

13. The Point of Junction

VI. The Religions Of Ancient America

1. American Racial Origins

2. Aztecs and Peruvians

3. Primitive Religion and Human Sacrifice

4. The Mexican Cultus

5. Mexican Sacrifices and Cannibal Sacraments

6. Mexican Ethics

7. The Mexican White Christ

8. The Fatality of the Priesthood

9. The Religion of Peru

10. Conclusion

Appendix A. The Eating Of The Crucified Human Sacrifice

Appendix B. Dramatic And Ritual Survivals

Appendix C. Replies To Criticisms

Preface To The Second Edition

Since the first issue of this work in 1903, but especially within the past few years, its main positions have been brought into extensive discussion by other writers, notably in Germany, where the Christusmythe of Professor Arthur Drews has been the theme of many platform debates. The hypothesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God, first indicated in Christianity and Mythology, and further propounded in the first edition of this book, has received highly important and independent development at the hands of Professor W. Benjamin Smith in his Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906), and in the later exposition of Professor Drews. For one whose tasks include other busy fields, it is hardly possible to give this the constant attention it deserves; but the present edition has been as fully revised as might be; and some fresh elucidatory material has been embodied, without, however, any pretence of including the results of the other writers named.

Criticism of the book, so far as I have seen, has been to a surprising degree limited to subsidiary details. The first part, a discussion of the general principles and main results of hierology as regards the reigning religion, has been generally ignored, under circumstances which suggest rather avoidance than dissidence. But much more surprising is the general evasion of the two theses upon which criticism was specially challenged in the Introduction—the theses that the gospel story of the Last Supper, the Agony, the Betrayal, the Crucifixion, and the Resurrection is demonstrably not originally a narrative, but a mystery-drama, which has been transcribed with a minimum of modification; and that the mystery-drama was inferribly an evolution from a Palestinian rite of human sacrifice in which the annual victim was “Jesus the Son of the Father.” Against this twofold position I have seen not a single detailed argument. Writers who confidently and angrily undertake to expose error in another section of the book pass this with at most a defiant shot. Like the legendary Scottish preacher, they recognise a “difficult passage, and, having looked it boldly in the face, pass on.” Even Professor Schmiedel, to my surprise, abstains from argument on an issue of which his candour and acumen must reveal to him the gravity. It is but fair to say that even sympathetic readers do not often avow entire acquiescence. Professor Drews leaves this an open question. But I should have expected that such a proposition, put forward as capital, would have been dealt with by critics who showed themselves much concerned to discredit the book in general.

They seem to have been chiefly excited about Mithraism, either finding in the account of that ancient cultus a provocation which the other parts of the volume did not yield, or seeing there openings for hostile criticism which elsewhere were not patent. One Roman Catholic ecclesiastic has represented me as a “modern apostle” of the bull-slaying God. It would seem that a semblance, however illusory, of rivalry in cult propaganda is more evocative of critical conflict than any mere scientific disintegration of the current creed. Of the attacks upon the section “Mithraism,” as well as of other criticisms of the book, I have given some account in Appendix C. It is to be regretted that it should still be necessary to make replies to criticisms in these matters consist largely of exposures of gross misrepresentation, blundering, bad faith, and bad feeling, as well as bad reasoning, on the part of theological critics. In the case of a hostile critique in the Hibbert Journal, which did not incur these characterisations, I made an amicable appeal for space in which to reply and set forth my own case; but my request was refused.

Broadly speaking, the critical situation is one of ferment rather than of decisive conflict. Those devoted Danaïdes, the professional theologians, continue their labours with the serious assiduity which has always marked them, exhibiting their learned results in dialectic vessels which lack the first elements of retention. The theologians are as much occupied with unrealities to-day, relatively to the advance of thought, and as sure of their own insight, as were their predecessors of three hundred years ago, expounding the functions of the devil. In Germany they are not yet done discussing the inner significance of the tale of Satan’s carrying Jesus to the pinnacle of the temple or to a mountain top. Professor Zahn circumspectly puts it that Jesus felt himself so carried. Friedrich Spitta as circumspectly replies that that is not what the gospels say, but does not press that point to finality. Professor Harnack pronounces that the story in Matthew is the older. Spitta cogently proves that it is the later, and that Mark has minimised Luke. Wellhausen’s theory of the priority of Mark he shows to be finally untenable; and his own conclusion he declares to give a decisive result as regards the life of Jesus—namely, that Jesus believed firmly in his Messiah-ship from the moment of his baptism onwards, and that he held by it in terms of his own inner experience of divine and fiendish influences.  And this is history, as written by scholarly theological experts. The fact that the whole Temptation story is rationally traceable to a Babylonian sculpture of the Goat-God beside the Sun-God, interpreted by Greeks and Romans successively as an education of Apollo or Jupiter by Pan on a mountain top, or a musical contest between them, has never entered the experts’ consciousness. They are writing history in the air. Spitta confidently decides that neither the community nor the disciples nor Paul set up the Messianic conception of Jesus; and yet he has not a word to say on the problem of Paul’s entire ignorance of the Temptation story. Seventy years before, our own experts had ascertained with equal industry and certainty that “most probably our Lord was placed [by Satan] not on the sheer descent [from the temple] into the valley (Jos. War, V, v, 2; Ant. XV, xi, 5), but on the side next the court where stood the multitude to whom He might thus announce himself from Dan. vii, 13 (1 Chron. xxi, 16), see Bp. Pearson, VII, f. and g. Solomon’s porch was a cross building to the temple itself, and rose 120 cubits above it. From the term used by both Evangelists, it is certain that the Tempter stood on no part (τοῦ ναοῦ) of the sanctuary.”  Thus does the “expert” elucidation of the impossible go on through the generations. The “experts” of to-day are for the most part as far behind the historic science of their time as were their predecessors; and their results are just as nugatory as the older. But they are just as certain as were their predecessors that they are at the true point of view, and have all the historical facts in hand.

Orthodox and heterodox alike, in the undertaking to set forth the manner of the rise of Christianity, either wholly disregard the principles of historical proof or apply these principles arbitrarily, at their own convenience. Pfleiderer, latterly more and more bitterly repugning the interpretations of other scholars, alternately represented the personality of Jesus as a profoundly obscure problem, and offered fallacious elucidations thereof, with perfect confidence in his own selection of certainties.  Dr. Heinrici, offering a comprehensive view of Das Urchristentum (1902), ignores all historical difficulties on the score that he is discussing not the truth but the influence of Christianity, and so sets forth a copious account of the psychology of the Gospel Jesus which for critical science has no validity whatever. Dr. Schweitzer, in his Von Reimarus zu Wrede (Eng. trans., The Quest of the Historical Jesus, 1910), after ably confuting all the current conceptions of the Founder, sets forth one which incurs fatal criticism as soon as it is propounded.

The old fashion of manipulating the evidences, on the other hand, is still practised from time to time even by distinguished experts like Professor Bousset, a scholar who has done original and important work in outlying provinces of research. But how little critical validity attaches to Bousset’s vindication of the main Christian tradition has been crushingly set forth in the brochure of the late Pastor Kalthoff, Was wissen wir von Jesus? (Lehmann, Berlin: 1904), in reply to Bousset’s discourse under the same title. Professing, for instance, to found on such historical data as the mention of an otherwise unknown “Chrestus” by Suetonius, Bousset deliberately denaturalises the passage to suit his purpose, and then makes it vouch for a “Christian” community at Rome when none such can be shown to have existed. Kalthoff rightly likens such a handling of documents to the methods of the professed rationalisers denounced by Lessing in his day. Many of the “liberal” school of to-day are in fact at the standpoint of the semi-rationalist beginnings of Biblical criticism among the eighteenth-century deists; on behalf of whom we can but say that they were at least sincere pioneers, and that Lessing, in substituting for their undeveloped critical method the idea of a divine “Education of Mankind” through all religious systems alike, retrograded to a standpoint where the rational interpretation of history ceases to be possible, and where the critic stultifies himself by censuring processes of thought which, on his own principles, should be envisaged as part of the divine scheme of “education.” Yet that nugatory formula in turn is pressed into the service of a theology which is consistent only in refusing to submit to scientific and logical tests.

Then we have the significant portent of the pseudo-biological school of the Rev. Mr. Crawley,  according to which nothing in religion is new and nothing true, but all is more or less productive of “vitality,” and therefore precious, so that no critical analysis matters. Here the tribunals of historical and moral truth are brazenly closed; and the critical issue is referred to one commissioned for the instant by the defender of the faith, whose hand-to-mouth interpretations and generalisations of Christian history, worthy of a neophyte’s essay, are complacently put forth as the vindication of beliefs and rites that are admittedly developments from mere savagery. And this repudiation of all intellectual morals, this negation of the very instinct of truth, is profusely flavoured with a profession of zeal for the morals of sex and the “instinct of life.” Incidentally, too, an argument which puts all critical tests out of court is from time to time tinted with a suggestion of decent concern for historical research.

So, too, among the scholars who reconstruct Christian origins at will, some profess to apply a critical “method” or set of methods by which they can put down all challenges of the reality of their subject-matter. In Appendix C, I have shown what such “method” is worth in the hands of Professor Carl Clemen. Their general procedure is simply that of scholastics debating in vacuo, assuming what they please, and rejecting what they please. It is the method by which whole generations of their predecessors elucidated the details of the sacerdotal system of the Hebrews in the wilderness, until Colenso—set doubting about sacred tradition by an intelligent Zulu—established arithmetically the truth of Voltaire’s verdict that the whole thing was impossible. Then the experts, under cover of orthodox outcry, changed the venue, avowing no shame for their long aberration. In due time the modern specialists, or their successors, will realise that their main positions as to Christian origins are equally fabulous; but they or their successors will continue to be conscious of their professional perspicacity, and solemnly or angrily contemptuous of all lay criticism of their “method.” “Wir Gelehrten vom Fach,” they still call themselves in Germany—”we scholars by profession”—thus disposing of all lay criticism.

It is not surprising that alongside of this vain demonstration of the historicity of myth there spreads, among determined believers in the historicity, an uneasy disposition to ground faith on the very “to believe,” called by the name of “spiritual experience.” With a confidence equal to that of the professional documentists, such believers maintain that their own spiritual autobiographies can establish the historical actuality of what rationalist critics describe as ancient myths. “The heart answers, I have felt.” Some of these reasoners, proceeding on the lines of the pseudo-Paul (1 Cor. ii), dispose inexpensively of the historical critic by calling him “impercipient.” They themselves are the percipients “vom Fach.” Other apologists, with a little more modesty, reiterate their conviction that the Christian origins must have been what they have been accustomed to think—that no religious movement can have risen without a revered Founder, and that the spread and duration of the Christian movement prove its Founder to have been a very great personality indeed. Abstractly put, such a theorem logically ends in the bald claim of the theorist to special “percipience,” and a denial of percipience to all who refuse their assent.

It has latterly come to be associated, however, with an appeal to historical analogy in the case of the modern Persian movement of the Bâb, the lessons of which in this connection have been pressed upon orthodox believers by the late Mr. Herbert Rix. Mr. Rix, whose personality gave weight and interest to all his views, seems to have set out as a Unitarian preacher with a fixed belief in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, despite a recognition of the weakness of the historical basis. Noting “with what a childlike mind those ancient Christians came to all questions of external fact—how independent of external fact the truth they lived by really was,”  he yet assumed that any tale passed on by such believers must have had a basis in a great personality. “Those gospel stories,” he wrote, “come down to us by tradition handed on by the lips of ignorant peasants, so that we can never be quite sure that we have the precise truth about any incident.”  Here both the positive and the negative assumptions are invalid. We do not know that all the gospel stories were passed on by peasants; and we never know whether there was any historical basis whatever for any one tale. But on such assumptions Mr. Rix founded an unqualified conviction that the Gospel Jesus “headed a new spiritual era,” “altered the whole face of things,” “gave us a new principle to live by,” and “revolutionised the whole world of human affection”;  and in his posthumous work, Rabbi, Messiah, and Martyr (1907), he presents one more Life of Jesus framed on the principle of excluding the supernatural and taking all the rest of the gospels as substantially true.

Yet towards the close of his life he seems to have realised either that this process was illicit or that it could not claim acceptance on historical grounds. Writing on the Bâb movement, he speaks not only of “those belated theologians who still think the case of a supernatural Christianity can be historically proved by evidence drawn from the latter part of the first century,” but of the “utter insecurity of the historical foundation” of Christianity; and he avows “how hopeless it is to try to base religion upon historical documents.”  Then comes the exposition of how the Bâb movement rose in the devotion evoked by a remarkable personality; and how within thirty years the original account of the Founder was so completely superseded by a legendary account, full of miracles, that only one copy of the original document, by a rare chance, has survived.

The argument now founded on this case is an attempt to salve the historicity of Jesus in surrendering the records. Renan pointed to the Bâb movement as showing how an enthusiastic cult could arise and spread rapidly in our own day by purely natural forces. Accepting that demonstration, the Neo-Unitarians press the corollary that the Bâb movement shows how rapidly myth can overgrow history, and that we have now a new analogical ground for believing that Jesus, like the Bâb, was an actual person, of great persuasive and inspiring power. But while the plea is perfectly reasonable, and deserves every consideration, it is clearly inconclusive. Cult beginnings are not limited to one mode; and the fatal fact remains that the beginnings of the Christist cult are wrapped in all the obscurity which surrounds the alleged Founder, while we have trustworthy contemporary record of the beginnings of the Bâb movement. Place the two cases beside that of the Bacchic cult in Greece, and we have a cult-type in which wild devotion is given to a wholly mythical Founder. The rationalist critic does not affirm the impossibility of an evolution of the Christist movement on the lines of that of the Bâb: he leaves such à priori reasoning to the other side, simply insisting that there is no good historical evidence whatever, while there are strong grounds for inferring a mythical foundation. And those who abstractly insist on the historicity of Jesus must either recede from their position or revert to claims expressive merely of the personal equation—statements of the convincing force of their “religious experience,” or claims to a special faculty of “percipience.” To all such claims the sufficient answer is that, arrogance apart, they are matched and cancelled by similar claims on the part of believers in other creeds; and that they could have been advanced with as much justification by ancient believers in Dionysos and Osiris, who had no more doubt of the historicity of their Founders than either an orthodox or a Unitarian Christian has to-day concerning the historicity of Jesus. In short, the closing of historical problems by insistence on the personal equation is no more permissible among intellectual freemen than the settling of scientific questions thereby. Callous posterity, if not contemporary criticism, ruthlessly puts aside the personal equation in such matters, and reverts to the kind of argument which proceeds upon common grounds of credence and universal canons of evidence.

And this reversion is now in process. Already the argument for the historicity of the main gospel narrative is being largely grounded even by some “experts” on the single datum of the mention of “brethren of the Lord,” and “James the brother of the Lord,” in two of the Pauline epistles. This thesis is embodied in one of the ablest arguments on the historicity question that I have met with. It was put in a letter to me by a lay correspondent, open-mindedly seeking the truth by fair critical tests. He began by arguing that the data of a “Paul party,” a “Cephas party,” and an “Apollos party” in Corinth, if accepted as evidence for the personalities of the three party-leaders named, carry with them the inference of a Christ of whom some logia were current. If then the writer of the epistle—whether Paul or another—ignored such logia, the “silence of Paul” is no argument for ignorance of such logia in general. This ingenious argument, I think, fails in respect of its unsupported premiss. Christists might call themselves “of Christ” simply by way of disavowing all sectarian leadership. On the face of the case, the special converts of Paul were Christists without any logic of Christ to proceed upon. Equally ingenious, but I think equally inconclusive, is the further argument that the challenge, “Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?” (1 Cor. ix, 1), implies that Paul’s status was discredited on the score that he had not seen the Lord, while other apostles had. But the dispute here turns finally on the question of the authenticity of the epistle as a whole, or the chapter or the plea in particular. As coming from Paul, it is a weak plea: multitudes were said to have “seen” Jesus; the apostle would have claimed, if anything, authorisation by Jesus. But as a traditional claim it is intelligible enough. Now, this portion of the epistle is one of those most strongly impugned by the tests of Van Manen as betraying a late authorship and standpoint—that of ecclesiastics standing for their income and their right to marry. The conception of Paul battling against his converts for his salary and “the right to lead about a wife,” within a few pages of his declaration (vii, 8-9) to the unmarried and to widows, “It is good for them if they abide even as I; but if they have not continency, let them marry”—this is staggering even to believers in the authenticity of “the four” or all of the epistles, and gives the very strongest ground for treating the irreconcilable passage in chapter ix, if not the whole chapter, as a subsequent interpolation. That the same hand penned both passages is incredible.

Thus we come to the “brethren of the Lord” with an indestructible presumption against the text. They are mentioned as part of the case for that claim to marry which is utterly excluded by chapter vii. And the claim for salaries and freedom to marry is as obviously likely to be the late interpolation as is the doctrine of asceticism to be the earlier. Given then the clear lateness of the passage, what does the phrase “brethren of the Lord” prove? That at a period presumably long subsequent to that of Paul there was a tradition of a number of Church leaders or teachers so named. Who were they? They are never mentioned in the Acts. They are never indicated in the gospels. Brethren of Jesus are there referred to (Mt. xii, 46, xiii, 55; Mk. iii, 31, 32; Lk. viii, 19, 20; Jn. vii, 3, 5, 10); but, to say nothing of the facts that three of these passages are plainly duplicates, and that only in one are any of the brethren named, there is never the slightest suggestion that any one of them joined the propaganda. On the contrary, it is expressly declared that “even his brethren did not believe on him” (Jn. vii, 5). How then, on that basis, supposing it to have a primary validity, are we to accept the view that the James of Gal. i, 19, was a uterine brother or a half-brother of the Founder, who before Paul’s advent had come to something like primacy in the Church, without leaving even a traditional trace of him as a brother of Jesus in the Acts?

Either the gospel data are historically decisive or they are not. By excluding them from his “pillar texts”  Professor Schmiedel admits that they are bound up with the supernatural view of Jesus. The resort to the argument from the epistles is a partial confession that the whole gospel record is open to doubt; and that the specification of four brothers and several sisters of Jesus in one passage is a perplexity. It has always been so. Several Fathers accounted for them as children of Joseph by a former wife; several others made them children of Clopas and “the other” Mary, and so only cousins of Jesus. If the gospel record is valid evidence, the question is at an end. If it is not, the evidence from the epistles falls. “Brethren of the Lord” is a late allusion, which may stand for a mere tradition or may tell of a group name; and the mention of James as a “brother” (with no hint of any others) in the epistle to the Galatians can perfectly well be an interpolation, even supposing the epistle to be genuine.

I have here examined the whole argument because it is fully the strongest known to me on the side of the historicity of Jesus; and I am concerned to evade nothing. The candid reader, I think, will admit that even if he holds by the historicity it cannot be established on the grounds in question. He will then, I trust, bring an open mind to bear on the whole reasoning of the Second Part of the ensuing treatise.

As in the case of the second edition of Christianity and Mythology I am deeply indebted to Mr. Percy Vaughan for carefully reading the proofs of these pages, and revising the Index.

April, 1911.

Introduction

My purpose in grouping the four ensuing studies is to complement and complete the undertaking of a previous volume, entitled Christianity and Mythology. That was substantially a mythological analysis of the Christian system, introduced by a discussion of mythological principles in that particular connection and in general. The bulk of the present volume is substantially a synthesis of Christian origins, introduced by a discussion of the principles of hierology. Such discussion is still forced on sociology by the special pleaders of the prevailing religion. But the central matter of the book is its attempt to trace and synthesise the real lines of growth of the Christian cultus; and it challenges criticism above all by its theses—(1) that the gospel story of the Last Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, is visibly a transcript of a Mystery Drama, and not originally a narrative; and (2) that that drama is demonstrably (as historic demonstration goes) a symbolic modification of an original rite of human sacrifice, of which it preserves certain verifiable details.

That the exact point of historic connection between the early eucharistic rite and the late drama-story has still to be traced, it is needless to remark. Had direct evidence on this head been forthcoming, the problem could not so long have been ignored. But it is here contended that the lines of evolution are established by the details of the record and the institution, in the light of the data of anthropology; and that we have thus at last a scientific basis for a history of Christianity. As was explained in the introduction to Christianity and Mythology, these studies originated some twenty-five years back in an attempt to realise and explain “The Rise of Christianity Sociologically Considered”; and it is as a beginning of such an exposition that the two books are meant to be taken. In A Short History of Christianity the general historic conception is outlined; and the present volume offers the detailed justification of the views there summarily put as to Christian origins, insofar as they were not fully developed in the earlier volume. On one point, the origins of Manichæism, the present work departs from the ordinary historic view, which was accepted in the Short History; the proposed rectification here being a result of the main investigation. In this connection it may be noted that Schwegler had already denied the historicity of Montanus—a thesis which I have not sought to incorporate, though I somewhat incline to accept it.

Whether or not I am able to carry out the original scheme in full, I am fain to hope that these inquiries will be of some small use towards meeting the need which motived them. Mythology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on hierology; and hierology has permanently interested me only as throwing light on sociology. The third and fourth sections of this book, accordingly, are so placed with a view to the comparative elucidation of the growth of Christianity. If it be objected that they are thus “tendency” writings, the answer is that they were independently done, and are as complete as I could make them in the space. Both are revisions and expansions of lectures formerly published in “The Religious Systems of the World,” that on Mithraism being now nearly thrice its original length. Undertaken and expanded without the aid of Professor Cumont’s great work, Textes et Monuments Figurés relatifs aux Mystéres de Mithra (1896-9), it has been revised in the welcome light of that magistral performance. To M. Cumont I owe much fresh knowledge, and the correction of some errors, as well as the confirmation of several of my conclusions; and if I have ventured here and there to dissent from him, and above all to maintain a thesis not recognised by him—that Mithra in the legend made a “Descent into Hell”—I do so only after due hesitation.

The non-appearance of any other study of Mithraism in English may serve as my excuse for having carried my paper into some detail, especially by way of showing how much the dead cult had in common with the living. Christian origins cannot be understood without making this comparison. It is significant, however, of our British avoidance of comparative hierology wherever it bears on current beliefs, that while Germany has contributed to the study of Mithraism, among many others, the learned treatise of Windischmann and that in Roscher’s Lexikon, France the zealous researches of Lajard, and Belgium the encyclopædic and decisive work of Professor Cumont, England has produced not a single independent book on the subject. In compensation for such neglect, we have developed a signal devotion to Folklore. If some of the favour shown to that expansive study be turned on serious attempts to understand the actual process of growth of world-religions, the present line of research may be extended to advantage.

The lecture on the religions of Ancient America has in turn been carefully revised and much enlarged, not because this subject is equally ignored among us—for there is a sufficiency of information upon it in English, notably in one of the too-little utilised collections of “Descriptive Sociology” compiled for Mr. Spencer—but because again the comparative bearing of the study of the dead cults on that of the living has not been duly considered. In particular I have entered into some detail tending to support the theory—not yet to be put otherwise than as a disputed hypothesis—that certain forms and cults of human sacrifice, first evolved anciently in Central Asia, passed to America on the east, and to the Semitic peoples on the west, resulting in the latter case in the central “mystery” of Christianity, and in the former in the Mexican system of human sacrifices. But the psychological importance of the study does not, I trust, solely stand or fall with that theory. On the general sociological problem, I may say, a closer study of the Mexican civilisation has dissolved an opinion I formerly held—that it might have evolved from within past the stage of human sacrifice had it been left to itself.

Whatever view be taken of the scope of religious heredity, there will remain in the established historic facts sufficient justification for the general title of “Pagan Christs,” which best indicates in one phrase the kinship of all cults of human sacrifice and theophagous sacrament, as well as of all cults of which the founder figures as an inspired teacher. That principle has already been broadly made good on the first side by the incomparable research of Dr. J. G. Frazer, to whose “Golden Bough” I owe both theoretic light and detail knowledge. I ask, therefore, that when I make bold to reject Dr. Frazer’s suggested solution (ed. 1900) of the historic problem raised by the parallel between certain Christian and non-Christian sacra, I shall not be supposed to undervalue his great treasury of ordered knowledge. On the question of the historicity of Founders, I have made answer in the second edition of Christianity and Mythology to certain strictures of his which seem to me very ill-considered. What I claim for my own solution is that it best satisfies the ruling principles of his own hierology.

In this connection, however, I feel it a duty to avow that the right direction had previously been pointed out by the late Grant Allen in his Evolution of the Idea of God (1897), though at the outset of his work he obscured it for many of us by insisting on the absolute historicity of Jesus, a position which later-on he in effect abandons. It is after ostensibly setting out with the actuality of “Jesus the son of the carpenter” as an “unassailable Rock of solid historical fact” (p. 16) that he incidentally (p. 285) pronounces “the Christian legend to have been mainly constructed out of the details of such early god-making sacrifices” as that practised by the Khonds. Finally (p. 391) he writes that “at the outset of our inquiry we had to accept crudely the bare fact” that the cult arose at a certain period, and that “we can now see that it was but one more example of a universal god-making tendency in human nature.” Returning to Allen’s book after having independently worked out in detail precisely such a derivation and such a theory, I was surprised to find that where he had thus thrown out the clue I had not on a first reading been at all impressed by it. The reason probably was that for me the problem had been primarily one of historical derivation, and that Allen offered no historical solution, being satisfied to indicate analogies. And it was probably the still completer disregard of historical difficulties that brought oblivion upon the essay of Herr Kulischer, Das Leben Jesu eine Sage von dem Schicksale and Erlebnissen der Bodenfrucht, insbesondere der sogenannten palästinensischen Erstlingsgarbe, die am Passahfeste im Tempel dargebracht wurde (Leipzig, 1876), in which Dr. Frazer’s thesis of the vegetal character of the typical slain and rearising deity is put forth without evidence, but with entire confidence.

Kulischer had simply posited the analogy of the Vegetation-God and the vegetation-cult as previous students had done that of the Sun-God and the sun-myth, not only without tracing any process of transmutation, but with a far more arbitrary interpretation of symbols than they had ventured on. His essay thus remains only a remarkable piece of pioneering, which went broadly in the right direction, but missed the true path.

It is not indeed to be assumed that if he had made out a clear historical case it would have been listened to by his generation. The generation before him had paid little heed to the massive and learned treatise of Ghillany, Die Menschenopfer der alten Hebräer (1842), wherein the derivation of the Passover from a rite of human sacrifice is well made out, and that of the Christian eucharist from a modified Jewish sacrament of theophagy is at least strikingly argued for. Ghillany had further noted some of the decisive analogies of sacrificial ritual and gospel narrative which are founded on in the following pages; and was substantially on the right historic track, though he missed some of the archæological proofs of the prevalence of human sacrifice in pre-exilic Judaism. Daumer, too, went far towards a right historical solution in his work Der Feuer and Molochdienst der alten Hebräer, which was synchronous with that of his friend Ghillany, and again in his treatise Die Geheimnisse des christlichen Alterthums (1847). His later proclamation of Meine Conversion(1859) would naturally discredit his earlier theses; but the disregard of the whole argument in the hierology of that day is probably to be explained as due to the fact that the conception of a “science of religions”—specified by Vinet in 1856 as beginning to grow up alongside of theology—had not then been constituted for educated men. The works of Ghillany and Daumer have been so far forgotten that not till my own research had been independently made and elaborated did I meet with them.

To-day, the conditions of hierological research are very different. A generation of students is now steeped in the anthropological lore of which Ghillany, failing to profit by the lead of Constant, noted only the details preserved in the classics and European histories; and the scientific significance of his and Daumer’s and Kulischer’s theories is clear in the light of the studies of Tylor, Spencer, and Frazer. Grant Allen, with the ample materials of recent anthropology to draw upon, made a vital advance by connecting the central Christian legend with the whole process of religious evolution, in terms not of à priori theology but of anthropological fact. If, however, the lack of historical demonstration, and the uncorrected premiss of a conventional historical view, made his theory at first lack significance for a reader like myself, it has probably caused it to miss its mark with others. That is no deduction from its scientific merit; but it may be that the historical method will assist to its appreciation. It was by way of concrete recognition of structural parallelism that I reached the theory, having entirely forgotten, if I had ever noted, Allen’s passing mention of one of the vital details in question—that of the breaking of the legs of victims in primitive human sacrifice. In 1842 Ghillany had laid similar stress on the detail of the lance-thrust in the fourth gospel, to which he adduced the classic parallel noted hereinafter. And when independent researches thus yield a variety of particular corroborations of a theory reached otherwise by a broad generalisation, the reciprocal confirmation is, I think, tolerably strong. The recognition of the Gospel Mystery-Play, it is here submitted, is the final historical validation of the whole thesis, which might otherwise fail to escape the fate of disregard which has thus far befallen the most brilliant speculation of the à priori mythologists in regard to the Christian legend, from the once famous works of Dupuis and Volney down to the little noticed Letture sopra la mitologia vedica of Professor de Gubernatis.

However that may be, Grant Allen’s service in the matter is now from my point of view unquestionable. Of less importance, but still noteworthy, is Professor Huxley’s sketch of “The Evolution of Theology,” with which, while demurring to some of what I regard as its uncritical assumptions (accepted, I regret to say, by Allen, in his otherwise scientific ninth chapter), I find myself in considerable agreement on Judaic origins. Professor Huxley’s essay points to the need for a combination of the studies of hierology and anthropology in the name of sociology, and on that side it would be unpardonable to omit acknowledgment of the great work that has actually been done for sociological synthesis. I am specially bound to make it in view of my occasional dissent on anthropological matters from Spencer. Such dissent is apt to suggest difference of principle in a disproportionate degree; and Spencer’s own iconoclasm has latterly evoked a kind of criticism that is little concerned to avow his services. It is the more fitting that such a treatise as the present should be accompanied by a tribute to them. However his anthropology may have to be modified in detail, it remains clear to some of us, whom it has enlightened, that his elucidations are of fundamental importance, all later attempts being related to them, and that his main method is permanently valid.

In regard to matters less habitually contested, it is perhaps needless to add that I am as little lacking in gratitude for the great scholarly services rendered to all students of hierology by Professor Rhys Davids, when I venture to withstand his weighty opinion on Buddhist origins. My contrary view would be ill-accredited indeed if I were not able to support it with much evidence yielded by his scholarship and his candour. And it is perhaps not unfitting that, by way of final word of preface to a treatise which sets out with a systematic opposition to the general doctrine of Dr. F. B. Jevons, I acknowledge that I have profited by his survey of the field, and even by the suggestiveness of some of his arguments that seem to me to go astray.

I. The Naturalness Of All Belief

1. Origin of the Gods from Fear

It seems probable, despite theological cavils, that Petronius was right in his signal saying, Fear first made the Gods. In the words of a recent hierologist, “we may be sure that primitive man took to himself the credit of his successful attempts to work the mechanism of nature for his own advantage, but when the machinery did not work he ascribed the fault to some over-ruling supernatural power.....It was the violation of [previously exploited] sequences, and the frustration of his expectations, by which the belief in supernatural power was, not created, but first called forth.”

The fact that this writer proceeds to repudiate his own doctrine  is no reason why we should, save to the extent of noting the temerity of his use of the term “supernatural.” There are some very strong reasons, apart from the à priori one cited above, for thinking that the earliest human notions of superhuman beings were framed in terms of fear. Perhaps the strongest of all is the fact that savages and barbarians in nearly all parts of the world appear to regard disease and death as invariably due to purposive hostile action, whether normal, magical, or “spiritual.”  Not even old age is for many of these primitive thinkers a probable natural cause of death.  If then the life of early man was not much less troublous than that of contemporary primitives, he is likely to have been moved as much as they to conceive of the unseen powers as malevolent. “On the Gold Coast,” says a close student, “the majority of these spirits are malignant......I believe that originally all were conceived as malignant.”

And how, indeed, could it be otherwise? Those who will not assent have forgotten, as indeed most anthropologists strangely forget when they are discussing the beginnings of religion, that man as we know him is descended from something less human, more brute, something nearer the predatory beast life of fear and foray. When in the period of upward movement which we term civilisation, as distinct from animal savagery, there could arise thrills of yearning or gratitude towards unknown powers, we are æons off from the stage of subterhuman growth in which the germs of conceptual religion must have stirred. If the argument is to be that there is no religion until man loves his Gods, let it be plainly put, and let not a verbal definition become a petitio principii. If, again, no numina are to be termed Gods but those who are loved, let that proposition too be put as a simple definition of term. But if we are to look for the beginnings of the human notion of numina, of unseen spirits who operate in Nature and interfere with man, let it be as plainly put that they presumably occurred when fear of the unknown was normal, and gratitude to an Unknown impossible.

But in saying that fear first made the Gods, or made the first Gods, we imply that other God-making forces came into play later; and no dispute arises when this is affirmed of the process of making the Gods of the higher religions, in their later forms. Even here, at the outset, the play of gratitude is no such ennobling exercise as to involve much lifting of the moral standpoint; and even in the higher religions gratitude to the God is often correlative with fear of the evil spirits whom he wards off. This factor is constantly present in the gospels and in the polemic of the early Fathers;  and has never disappeared from religious life. The pietist who in our own day pours out thanks to “Providence” for saving him in the earthquake in which myriads have perished is no more ethically attractive than philosophically persuasive; and the gratitude of savages and barbarians for favours received and expected can hardly have been more refined. It might even be said that a cruder egoism presides over the making of Good Gods than over the birth of the Gods of Fear;  the former having their probable origin in an individualistic as against a tribal instinct. But it may be granted that the God who ostensibly begins as a private guardian angel or family spirit may become the germ of a more ethical cultus than that of the God generically feared. And the process chronically recurs. There is, indeed, no generic severance between the Gods of fear and the Gods of love, most deities of the more advanced races having both aspects: nevertheless, certain specified deities are so largely shaped by men’s affections that they might recognisably be termed the Beloved Gods.

It will on the whole be helpful to an understanding of the subject if we name such Gods, in terms of current conceptions, the Christs of the world’s pantheon. That title, indeed, no less fitly includes figures which do not strictly rank as Gods; but in thus widely relating it we shall be rather elucidating than obscuring religious history. Only by some such collocation of ideas can the inquirer surmount his presuppositions and take the decisive step towards seeing the religions of mankind as alike man-made. On the other hand, he is not thereby committed to any one view in the field of history proper; he is left free to argue for a historical Christ as for a historical Buddha.

Even on the ground of the concept of evolution, however, scientific agreement is still hindered by persistence in the old classifications. The trouble meets us on one line in arbitrary fundamental separations between mythology and religion, early religion and early ethics, religion and magic, genuine myths and non-genuine myths.  On another line it meets us in the shape of a sudden and local reopening of the problem of theistic intervention in a quasi-philosophical form, or a wilful repudiation of naturalistic method when the inquiry reaches current beliefs. Thus results which were reached by disinterested scholarship a generation ago are sought to be subverted, not by a more thorough scholarship, but by keeping away from the scholarly problem and suggesting a new standard of values, open to no rational tests. It may be well, therefore, to clear the ground so far as may be of such dispute at the outset by stating and vindicating the naturalistic position in regard to it.

2. All Belief Results of Reasoning

In the midst of much dispute, moral science approaches agreement on the proposition that all primitive beliefs and usages, however strange or absurd, are to be understood as primarily products of judgment, representing theories of causation or guesses at the order of things. To such agreement, however, hindrance is set up by the reversion of some inquirers to the old view that certain savage notions are “irrational” in the strict sense. Thus Dr. F. B. Jevons decides that “there is no rational principle of action in taboo: it is mechanical; arbitrary, because its sole basis is the arbitrary association of ideas; irrational, because its principle is [in the words of Mr. Lang] ‘that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact.’”  Again, Dr. Jevons lays it down that “Taboo......is the conviction that there are certain things which must—absolutely must, and not on grounds of experience of ‘unconscious utility’—be avoided.”

It is significant that in both of these passages the proposition runs into verbal insignificance or counter-sense. In the first cited we are told (1) that a certain association of ideas is arbitrary because its basis is an arbitrary association of ideas, and (2) that it is all the while a “causal” (i.e., a non-arbitrary) connection in thought. In the last we are in effect told that the tabooer is conscious that he is not proceeding on an ancestral experience when he is merely not conscious of doing so. When instructed men thus repeatedly lapse into mere nullities of formula, there is presumably something wrong with their theory. Now, the whole subject of taboo is put outside science by the assumption that the practice is in origin ”irrational” and “absolute” and “arbitrary” and independent of all experience of utility. As Dr. Jevons himself declares in another connection, the savage’s thought is subject to mental laws as much as is civilised man’s. How, then, is this dictum to be reconciled with that? What is the “law” of the savage’s “arbitrariness”?

Conceivably part of it lies before us in Dr. Jevons’s page of denial. The very illustration first given by him for the proposition last cited from him is that “the mourner is as dangerous as the corpse he has touched,” “the mourner is as dangerous to those he loves as to those he hates.” Here, one would suppose, was a pretty obvious clue to an intelligible causation. Is it to be “arbitrarily” decided that primitive men never observed the phenomena of contagion from corpse to mourners, and from mourners to their families; or, observing it, never sought to act on the experience? Is it not notorious that among contemporary primitives there is often an intense and vigilant fear of contagious disease?

The only fair objection to accepting such a basis for one species of taboo is that for other species no such explanation is available. But what science looks for in such a matter is not a direct explanation for every instance: it suffices that we find an explanation or explanations for such a principle or conception as taboo, and then recognise that, once set up, it may be turned to really “arbitrary” account by chiefs, priests, and adventurers.

“Arbitrary” has two significations, in two references: it means “illogical” in reference to reason, or “representative of one will as against the general will.” In the first sense, it is here irrelevant, for no one pretends that taboo is right; but it may apply in the other in a way not intended by Dr. Jevons. For nothing can be more obvious than the adaptability of the idea of taboo, once crystallised or conventionalised in a code, to purposes of individual malice, and to all such procedure as men indicate by the term “priestcraft.” Dr. Jevons, in his concern to prove, what no one ever seriously disputed, that priests did not and could not create the religious or superstitious instinct, leaves entirely out of his exposition, and even by implication denies, the vitally relevant truth that they exploit it. And in overlooking this he sadly burdens, if he does not wreck, his own unduly biassed theory of the religious instinct as something relatively “deep,” and as proceeding in terms of an abnormal consciousness of contact with “the divine.” For if those relatively “arbitrary” and “irrational” forms of taboo do not come from the priest—that is, from the religion-maker or -monger, whether official or not—they must, on Dr. Jevons’s own showing, come from “religion.”

It may be that he would not at once reject such a conclusion; for the apparent motive of much of his treatment of taboo is the sanctification of it as an element in the ancestry of the Christian religion. For this purpose he is ready to go to notable lengths, as when  he allows cannibalism to be sometimes “religious in intention.” But while insisting at one point on the absolute unreasonedness and immediate certitude of the notion of taboo, apparently in order to place it on all fours with the “direct consciousness” which for him is the mark of a religious belief, he admits in so many words, as we have seen, that it is “arbitrary” and “irrational,” which is scarcely a way of accrediting it as a religious phenomenon. Rather the purpose of that aspersion seems to be to open the way for another aggrandisement of religion as having suppressed irrational taboo. On the one hand we are told  that the savage’s fallacious belief in the transmissibility of taboo was “the sheath which enclosed and protected a conception that was to blossom and bear a priceless fruit—the conception of Social Obligation.” This is an arguable thesis, not framed by Dr. Jevons for the purposes of his theorem, but spontaneously set forth by several missionaries.  Here we need but note the implication of the old fallacy that when any good is seen to follow upon an evil we must assume the evil to have been a conditio sine quâ non of the good. The missionaries and Dr. Jevons have assumed that but for the device of taboo there could have been no social code—a thesis not to be substantiated either deductively or inductively. But with this problem we need not now concern ourselves, since Dr. Jevons himself turns the tables on it. After the claim has been made for the salvatory action of taboo, we read  that “it was only among the minority of mankind, and there only under exceptional circumstances, that the institution bore its best fruit......Indeed, in many respects the evolution of taboo has been fatal to the progress of humanity.” And again:—

In religion the institution also had a baneful effect: the irrational restrictions, touch not, taste not, handle not, which constitute formalism, are essentially taboos—essential to the education of man at one period of his development, but a bar to his progress later.

But now is introduced  the theorem of the process by which taboo has been converted into an element of civilisation: it is this:—

From the fallacy of magic man was delivered by religion; and there are reasons.....for believing that it was by the same aid he escaped from the irrational restrictions of taboo.

In the higher forms of religion.....the trivial and absurd restrictions are cast off, and those alone retained which are essential to morality and religion.

We shall have to deal later with the direct propositions here put; but for the moment it specially concerns us to note that the dénoûment does not hold scientifically or logically good. The fact remains that irrational taboo as such was, in the terms of the argument, strictly religious; that religion in this aspect had “no sense in it,” inasmuch as taboo had passed from a primitive precaution to a priest-made convention;  and that what religion is alleged to deliver man from is just religion. Thus alternately does religion figure for the apologist as a rational tendency correcting an irrational, and as an irrational tendency doing good which a rational one cannot. And the further we follow his teaching the more frequently does such a contradiction emerge.

3. Dr. Jevons’ Theories of Religious Evolution

At the close of his work, apparently forgetting the propositions of his first chapter as to the priority of the sense of obstacle in the primitive man’s notion of supernatural forces, Dr. Jevons affirms that the “earliest attempt” towards harmonising the facts of the “external and inner consciousness”—by which is meant observation and reflection took the form of ascribing the external prosperity which befell a man to the action of the divine love of which he was conscious within himself; and the misfortunes which befell him to the wrath of the justly offended divine will.

Here we have either a contradiction of the thesis before cited, or a resort to the extremely arbitrary assumption that in taking credit to himself for successful management of things, and imputing his miscarriages to a superior power, the primitive man is not trying to “harmonise the facts of his experience.” Such an argument would be on every ground untenable; but it appears to be all that can stand between Dr. Jevons and self-contradiction. The way to a sound position is by settling impartially the definition of the term “religion.” How Dr. Jevons misses this may be gathered from the continuation of the passage under notice:—

Man, being by nature religious, began by a religious explanation of nature. To assume, as is often done, that man had no religious consciousness 1, begin with, and that the misfortunes which befell him inspired him with fear, and fear led him to propitiate the malignant beings whom he imagined to be the causes of his suffering, fails to account for the very thing it intended to explain—namely, the existence of religion. It might account for superstitious dread of malignant beings: it does not account for the grateful worship of benignant beings, nor for the universal satisfaction which man finds in that worship. As we have seen, Dr. Jevons himself had at the outset plainly posited what he now describes as a fallacious assumption. On his prior showing, man’s experience of apparent hostility in Nature “first called forth” his belief in supernatural power. The interposed phrase, “was not created but,” looks like an after attempt to reconcile the earlier proposition with the later. But there is no real reconciliation, for Dr. Jevons thus sets up only the vain suggestion that the primitive man was from the first conscious of the existence of good supernatural powers but did not think they did him any good—another collapse in countersense—or else the equally unmanageable notion that primitive man recognised helpful supernatural being-, but was not grateful to them for their help.

That the argument has not been scientifically conducted is further clear from the use now of the expression “superstitious dread” as the equivalent of “fear,” while “grateful worship” stands for “satisfaction.” Why “superstitious dread” and not “superstitious gratitude”? A scientific inquiry will treat the phenomena on a moral par, and will at this stage simply put aside the term “superstition.” It is relevant only as imputing a superior degree of gratuitousness of belief (whether by way of fear or of satisfaction) at a comparatively advanced state of culture. To call a savage superstitious when he fears a God, and religious when he thanks one, is not only to warp the “science of religion” at the start, but to block even the purpose in view, for, as we have seen, Dr. Jevons is constrained by his own motive of edification to assume that the benignant God ought by rights to be sometimes feared.

4. Scientific View of the Religious Evolution

Putting aside as unscientific all such prejudgments, and leaving the professed religionist his personal remedy of discriminating finally between “true” and “false” religion, let us begin at the beginning by noting that “religious consciousness” can intelligibly mean only a given direction of consciousness. And if we are to make any consistent specification of the point at which consciousness begins to be religious, we shall put it impartially in simple animism—the spontaneous surmise, seen to be dimly made or makable even by animals, “that not only animals and plants, but inanimate things, may possess life.” Dr. Jevons rightly points out  that this primary notion “neither proceeds from nor implies nor accounts for belief in the supernatural”; and he goes on to show (developing here the doctrine which he ultimately repudiates) how the latter notion would arise through man’s connecting with certain agencies or “spirits” the frustrative or molestive power “which he had already found to exercise an unexpected and irresistible control over his destiny.” “In this way,” continues Dr. Jevons, suddenly granting much more than he need or ought, “the notion of supernatural power, which originally was purely negative and manifested itself merely in suspending or counteracting the uniformity of nature, came to have a positive content.” From this point, as might have been divined, the argument becomes confused to the last degree. We have been brought to the supernatural as a primitive product of (a) the recognition of irregular and frustrative forces in nature, and (b) the identification of them as personalities or spirits like man. But immediately, in the interests of another preconception, the theorist proceeds in effect to cancel this by arguing that, when men resort to magic, the idea of the supernatural has disappeared. His proposition is that “the belief in the supernatural was prior to the belief in magic, and that the latter, whenever it sprang up, was a degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion,”  inasmuch as it assumed man’s power to control the forces of Nature by certain stratagems. And as he argues at the same time that “religion and magic had different origins, and were always essentially distinct from one another,” it is implied that religion began in that belief in a (frustrative) supernatural which is asserted to have preceded magic. That is to say, religion began in the recognition of hostile or dangerous powers.

Now, a logically vigilant investigator would either not have said that belief in a supernatural was constituted by the recognition of hostile personal forces in Nature, or, having said it, would have granted that magic was an effort to circumvent supernatural as well as other forces. Dr. Jevons first credits the early savage with, among other things, a conception of supernatural power which excluded the idea of man’s opposition, and then with the power so to transform his first notion as to see in the so-called supernatural merely forms of Nature. An intellectual process achieved in the civilised world only as a long and arduous upward evolution on scientific lines is thus supposed to have been more or less sudden’’: effected as a mere matter either of ignorant downward drift or of perverse experiment by primeval man, or at least by savage man. It is not easy to be more arbitrary in the way of hypothesis.

Combating the contrary view, which makes magic prior to religion, Dr. Jevons writes:—

To read some writers, who derive the powers of priests (and even of the gods) from those of the magician, and who consider apparently that magic requires no explanation, one would imagine that the savage, surrounded by supernatural powers and a prey to supernatural terrors, one day conceived the happy idea that he too would himself exercise supernatural power—and the thing was done: sorcery was invented, and the rest of the evolution of religion follows without difficulty.

It is difficult to estimate the relevance of this criticism without knowing the precise expressions which provoked it; but as regards any prevailing view of evolution it is somewhat pointless. “One day” is not the formula of evolutionary conceptions. But Dr. Jevons’s own doctrine, which is to the effect that magical rites arose by way of parody of worship-rites after the latter had for ages been in undisputed possession, suggests just such a catastrophic conception as he imputes. Rejecting the obvious evolutionary hypothesis that explicit magic and explicit religion so-called arose confusedly together—that magic employs early religious machinery because it is but a contemporary expression of the state of mind in which religion rises and roots—he insists that magic cannot have been tried save by way of late “parody,” in an intellectual atmosphere which, nevertheless, he declares to be extremely conservative,  and which is therefore extremely unlikely to develop such parodies.

Dr. Jevons’s doctrinal motive, it is pretty clear, is his wish to relieve “religion” of the discredit of “magic,” even as he finally and remorsefully seeks to relieve it of the discredit of originating in “fear.” Having no such axe to grind, the scientific inquirer might here offer to let “religion” mean anything Dr. Jevons likes, if he will only stick to one definition. But science must stipulate for some term to designate a series of psychological processes which originate in the same order of cognitions and conceptions, on the same plane of knowledge, and have strictly correlative results in action. And as such a term would certainly have to be applied sooner or later to much of what Dr. Jevons wants to call “religion,” we may just as well thrash out the issue over that long-established name.

5. Dr. Frazer’s Definition

The need for an understanding becomes pressing when we compare with the conceptions of Dr. Jevons those of Dr. J. G. Frazer, as set forth in the revised edition of his great work, The Golden Bough. Having before the issue of his first edition “failed, perhaps inexcusably,” he modestly avows, “to define even to myself my notion of religion,” he was then “disposed to class magic loosely under it as one of its lower forms.” Now he has “come to agree with Sir A. C. Lyall and Mr. F. B. Jevons in recognising a fundamental distinction and even opposition of principle between magic and religion.”  On this view he defines religion as “a propitiation or conciliation of powers superior to man which are believed to direct and control the course of nature and of human life. In this sense,” he adds, “it will readily be perceived that religion is opposed in principle both to magic and to science.”

The first comment on such a proposition is that it all depends on what you mean by “principle.” If religion means only the act of propitiation and conciliation of certain alleged powers, its principle “may be placed either in the hope that such propitiation will succeed or in the feeling that it ought to be tried. In either case, the accuracy of the proposition is far from clear. But we must widen the issue. It will be seen that Dr. Frazer’s formal definition of religion is as inadequate as that implied in the argument of Dr. Jevons, though his practical handling of the case is finally the more scientific. On the above definition, belief is no part of religion;  and neither is gratitude; though fear may be held to be implied in propitiation. Further, religion has by this definition nothing to do with ethics; and even conduct shaped by way of simple obedience to a God’s alleged commands is barely recognised under the head of “propitiation.” Finally, a theist who has ever so reverently arrived at the idea of an All-wise Omnipotence which needs not to be propitiated or conciliated, has on Dr. Frazer’s definition ceased to be religious. It will really not do.

I am not here pressing for a wider definition, as do some professed rationalists, by way of securing for my own philosophy or ethic the prestige of a highly respectable name; nor do I even endorse their claim as for themselves. I simply urge that as a matter of scientific convenience and consistency the word must be allowed to cover at least the bulk of the phenomena to which it has immemorially been applied. Where Dr. Frazer by his definition makes religion “nearly unknown” to the Australian, because the Australian (mainly for lack of the wherewithal) does not sacrifice,  Mr. Lang ascribes to them a higher or deeper religious feeling on that very account.  Such chaos of definition must be averted by a more comprehensive theory. Whether or not we oppose magic to religion, we cannot exclude from the latter term the whole process of non-propitiatory religious ethic, of thanksgiving ritual, and of cosmological doctrine. Later we shall have to deal with Dr. Jevons’s attempt to withdraw the term from theistic philosophy and from mythology; but we may provisionally insist that emotional resignation to “the divine will” is in terms of all usage whatsoever a religious phenomenon.

It remains to consider the alleged severance between religion and magic. It is interesting to find Dr. Jevons and Dr. Frazer here partially at one, as against the general opinion of anthropologists. That may be cited from a theologian, Professor T. W. Davies, in whose doctoral thesis on Magic, Divination, and Demonology—a performance both learned and judicious—it is argued that “all magic is a sort of religion.”  Dr. Frazer, while agreeing with Dr. Jevons that they are “opposed,” differs from him in holding that magic preceded religion; and by an odd fatality Dr. Frazer contradicts himself as explicitly as does Dr. Jevons. After avowing the belief that in the evolution of thought, magic, as representing a lower intellectual stratum, has probably everywhere preceded religion,”  he also avows that the antagonism between the two

seems to have made its appearance comparatively late in the history of religion. At an earlier stage the functions of priest and sorcerer were often combined, or, to speak perhaps more correctly, were not yet differentiated from each other. To serve his purpose, man wooed the good-will of gods or spirits by prayer and sacrifice, while at the same time he had recourse to ceremonies and forms of words which he hoped would of themselves bring about the desired result without the help of god or devil. In short, he performed religious and magical rites simultaneously; he uttered prayers and incantations almost in the same breath, knowing or reeking little of the theoretical inconsistency of his behaviour, so long as by hook or crook he contrived to get what he wanted.

Proceeding with his ostensible support of the thesis that magic preceded religion, Dr. Frazer, in his admirably learned way, gives us fresh illustrations of the “same confusion of magic and religion” in civilised and uncivilised peoples.  From Dr. Oldenberg he cites the observation that

“the ritual of the very sacrifices for which the metrical prayers were composed is described in the older Vedic texts as saturated from beginning to end with magical practices which were to be carried out by the sacrificial priests”; and that the Brahmanic rites of marriage initiation and king-anointing “are complete models of magic of every kind, and in every case the form of magic employed bears the stamp of the highest antiquity.”

From Sir Gaston Maspero he accepts the weighty reminder that in regard to ancient Egypt we ought not to attach to the word “magic” the degrading idea which it almost inevitably calls up in the mind of a modern. Ancient magic was the very foundation of religion. The faithful who desired to obtain some favour from a god had no chance of succeeding except by laying hands on the deity; and this arrest could only be effected by means of a certain number of rites, sacrifices, prayers, and chants, which the god himself had revealed, and which obliged him to do what was demanded of him.

A closely similar state of things is seen in the practice of the Maoris, who, when using coercive spells “to compel the Gods to yield to their wishes, added sacrifices and offerings at the same time to appease as it were their anger for being thus constrained.” And the missionary who on these data represents the Maoris as rather coercing their Gods than praying to them, puts their usage on all fours with that of many French Catholics.

To all this, obviously, Dr. Jevons may reply that it does not prove the priority of magic to religion.  Neither, however, does it give any basis for Dr. Jevons’s thesis of the secondariness of magic. It simply sets forth that in the earliest available records, as in the practice of contemporary savages, magic so-called and propitiatory religion so-called co-exist and cohere. In Dr. Frazer’s own words, they were not yet differentiated from each other—differentiated, that is, in the moral estimate of priest and worshipper. But in the terms of the proposition, the practice of propitiation was there; and there is nothing to show that it was a late variation on confident magic. On the other hand, the documentary evidence, so far as it goes, is in favour of the priority of magic so-called. “The magical texts formed the earliest sacred literature of Chaldæa. This fact remains unshaken.”

What, then, becomes of the argument that magic and religion so-called are “opposed” because they are logically inconsistent with each other? Like Dr. Jevons, Dr. Frazer makes a good deal of the theoretic analogy of magic with science, both being alleged to rest upon the assumption of the “uniformity of nature” and “the operation of immutable laws acting mechanically.”  Now, while we need not hesitate to see in magic in particular, even as in religion in general, man’s early gropings towards science, we must not let ourselves be by a mere verbalism confused as to what magic is. Obviously it does not assume the uniformity of nature; inasmuch as it assumes to control nature by different devices, framing new procedures where the old fail. It does not even invariably assume strict uniformity in the magical processus itself; but that is the one sort of uniformity of cause and effect that the magician as approaches to conceiving. Now, this conception connects much less with that of what we may term the normal relation of man to nature than with that of his relation to the sets of forces apprehended by late thought as “spiritual,” but by early thought merely as unseen. Early man, presumably, had a normal notion of the process of breaking a stone or killing a foe; and there if anywhere lay the beginnings of his science. As Adam Smith put it, “Fire burns and water refreshes, heavy bodies descend, and lighter substances fly upwards, by the necessity of their own nature; nor was the invisible hand of Jupiter ever apprehended to be employed in those matters.”  As Comte put it, primitive man never made a god of weight.  But even as he thought the invisible or inferrible personalities could do many kinds of “great” things, so he thought that, by taking pains, he could; inasmuch as he never clearly differentiated them from himself in nature and capacity. Thus his magic was part of his way of thinking about what was for him the “occult” or inferred side of things, which way of thinking as a whole was his religion. To speak in terms of Dr. Jevons’s primary position, he was as magician interfering with the sequences of nature as he supposed the occult personalities did.

On yet another ground, we are disallowed from charging inconsistency on primitive or ancient religious thought in respect of divergences from later conceptions. One of the more notable of those divergences is the idea that the Gods themselves are subject to the course of Nature, or the law of Fate: it is reached by modern Native Americans,  as it was by some ancient Egyptians,  and it stands out from the religious speculation of ancient Greece.  In both stages it is compatible with propitiation; and yet it gives a quasi-logical basis for the resort to magic, regarded as a temporary circumvention of the law of things. So with the belief in opposed deities: even if none be regarded as evil, like Ahriman, there is nothing specially inconsistent in a magic that seeks to employ a power of which, in the terms of the case, no deity has a monopoly. On this basis polytheism offers an easy way out of the indictment for inconsistency. When Porphyry asked Abammon, “Does not he who says he will burst the heavens, or reveal the secrets of Isis, or expose the arcanum in the adytum, or scatter the members of Osiris to Typhon—does not he who says this, by thus threatening what he knows not and cannot do, prove himself grossly foolish?”—the sage answers with confidence that such threats are used against not any of the celestial Gods but a lower order of powers, and that the theurgist commands these “as existing superior to them in the order of the Gods,” and possessing power “through a union with the Gods” in virtue of his magic.

That is, of course, a late and sophisticated account of the matter the earlier theologian simply did not realise that any charge of inconsistency could arise. In any case, the Old Testament abounds in cases of sympathetic magic: the sprinkling of the blood of the hallowed sacrifice upon the ears and thumbs and toes of the priests;  the holding up of the arms of Moses,  in the attitude of the Sun-God and War-God Mithra,  to sway the battle; the sending forth of the scape-goat;  the blowing of the trumpets before the walls of Jericho;  the raising of the widow’s son by Elijah, “stretching himself upon the child three times” —all these are acts neither of prayer nor of propitiation, but of sympathetic magic, “which is the germ of all magic”; and the theorist may be defied to show that they stood for a “degradation or relapse in the evolution of religion.”  If, indeed, he could show it, he would be putting a rod in pickle for his theory of the super-excellence of Hebrew monotheism, which evolved itself with these accompaniments.

The early priest, then, is to be called inconsistent in his resort to magic only on the view that he had the definite modern conception of the Omnipotence of a supernatural power; and this he simply had not. It is, then, quite beside the case to argue, as does even Dr. Frazer,  that “the fatal flaw of magic lies in its total misconception of the particular laws which govern” natural sequences. That is not a differentiation between magic and religion; for the “religious” conception that nature is to be affected by propitiating unseen powers is just as fatally wrong; and it arose in the same fashion by “association of ideas,” men assuming that nature was ruled by a personality like themselves. Why, then, is the “flaw” dwelt upon? If it be to prepare for the view that at a certain stage a portion of mankind began to “abandon magic as a principle of faith and practice and to betake themselves to religion instead,”  the answer is that on Dr. Frazer’s own showing men for whole ages practised both concurrently;  and that in the terms of the case they are as likely to have taken to magic because prayer failed as vice versa. Dr. Frazer, indeed, only diffidently suggests that “a tardy recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the more thoughtful part of mankind to cast about for a truer theory of nature and a more fruitful method of turning her resources to account.” But by his own showing he has no right to this hypothesis even on an avowal of diffidence. As well might the contrary theory of Dr. Jevons be supported by the suggestion that the inherent falsehood and barrenness of the theory of prayer and propitiation set the more resourceful part of mankind on a more effectual control of nature by way of magic.  Had not men all along been trying both?

Equally untenable, surely, is the distinction drawn by Dr. Frazer  between “the haughty self-sufficiency of the magician, his arrogant demeanour towards the higher powers, and his unabashed claim to exercise a sway like theirs,” and the attitude of the priest “with his awful sense of the divine majesty and his humble prostration in presence of it.” Dr. Frazer can hardly mean to be ironical; but his words may very well serve to convey such a sense when applied to the attitude of the priesthoods of all ages, Brahmanical  or Papal, Semitic or Aryan. It would be difficult to distinguish in the matter of modesty between Moses  and the magicians of Pharaoh, or Samuel and the Witch of Endor, or Elijah and the priests of Baal, or an excommunicating and flag-blessing bishop and an incantating wizard. All the while we have Dr. Frazer’s own assurance that for long ages the priest was the magician.

If, seeking to form a just judgment, we turn to actual evidence for the attitude of the primitive magician, it lies to our hand in Livingstone’s account of the negro rain-doctors of Bechuanaland. Here we have a typical dialogue between the missionary and the magician. The latter complained in friendly fashion to the missionary, “You see we never get rain, while those tribes who never pray as we do [i.e., Christian fashion] obtain abundance.” “This,” the missionary confesses, “was a fact; and we often saw it raining on the hills ten miles off, while it would not look at us ‘even with one eye.’” When the rain-doctor set to work, on the score that “the whole country needs the rain I am making,” there ensues the argument:—

“M.D. [i.e., Livingstone] . So you really believe that you can command the clouds? I think that can be done by God alone.

“Rain Doctor. We both believe the very same thing. It is God that makes the rain, but I pray to him by means of these medicines, and, the rain coming, of course it is then mine......

“M.D. But we are distinctly told in the parting words of our Saviour that we can pray to God acceptably in his name alone, and not by means of medicines.

“R.D. Truly! but God told us differently. He made black men first, and did not love us as he did the white men......Other tribes place medicines about our country to prevent the rain, so that we may be dispersed by hunger and go to them and augment their power. We must dissolve their charms by our medicines. God has given us one little thing which you know nothing of. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can make rain. We do not despise those things which you possess, though we are ignorant of them. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, though you are ignorant of it.”

“This [adds Livingstone] is a brief specimen of their mode of reasoning, which is often remarkably acute. I never succeeded in convincing a single individual of the fallacy of his belief; and the usual effect of discussion is to produce the impression that you yourself are not anxious for rain.”

Quite so. How could the missionary hope to convince the rain-needy? Delusion for delusion, which was the more “religious”? And which was the plainer “fallacy” of the two fashions of prayer? The true solution of the problem is that set forth in the essay Sur le totemisme of M. Durkheim,  who may be supposed to speak for scientific sociology if any one does. In that essay he deals incidentally with the view of Dr. Frazer that the Australian Aruntas  are at the stage of pure magic, not having yet reached religion. Dr. Jevons, on the contrary, would regard them as truly religious in respect of their totem sacrament. M. Durkheim, applying the inductive method, notes indeed  that the life of the Aruntas is “stamped with religiosity, and that this religiosity is in origin essentially totemic”; but he adds: “The territory is covered with sacred trees, and groves, and mysterious grottos, where are piously preserved the objects of the cult. None of those sacred places is approached without a religious terror.” And he concludes: “What is essential is that the rites of the Aruntas are at all points comparable to those which are found in systems incontestably religious: then they proceed from the same ideas and the same sentiments; and it is arbitrary to refuse them the same title.”

The final condemnation of Dr. Frazer’s definition, however, is, as we shall see cause later to say of that of Dr. Jevons, that in strictness it ignores the bulk of the religious life of mankind. He himself avows that only a part of mankind has ever abandoned magic and taken to “religion instead.” In his own words, magic is a “universal faith,” a “truly Catholic creed”;  and he might, without extending his ample anthropological learning, further establish this fact by reference to current religion. If religion is to mean only the ideas of “the more thoughtful part of mankind,” we shall simply be committed to a new inquiry as to who are the more thoughtful; and the agnostic will have something to say on that head.

Are they the believers in the efficacy of prayer? Insofar as such believers profess belief in an Omnipotent and Unchanging Providence, they stultify their theistic creed as vitally as ever did the magician. Prayer presupposes the changeableness of a Divine will declared to be unchangeable. Then prayer, like magic, is fundamentally opposed to belief in an omnipotent deity! Where shall we stop? Dr. Frazer  supposes the reader to ask, “How was it that intelligent men did not sooner detect the fallacy of magic?”; and he thoughtfully and rightly answers that before the age of science it was really not easy to detect. But he could hardly say as much of prayer, whereof the “fallacy” was detected among Hebrews and heathens thousands of years ago. Yet by his definition the contemporary believer in prayer is religious and the ancient worshipper of Isis was not. On such principles there can be no science of religion whatever, any more than there is a science of orthodoxy. In order to classify the very phenomena with which Dr. Frazer mainly occupies himself, we should have to create a new set of terms for nine-tenths of them, recognising “religion” only as a certain procedure that chronically obtruded itself among them. And then would come Dr. Jevons to explain that this religion was not a religion at all, inasmuch as it resulted from a process of reasoning!

Science, then, is driven to reject both apriorisms alike, and to proceed to find a definition by way of a loyal induction.

6. The Scientific Induction

As thus. In terms of many observations, and of some of Dr. Jevons’s admissions, we are led to realise that the idea of what we term “the supernatural” not only does not mean for primitive man a consistent distinction: it does not mean it for civilised man. Yet the logical burden of Dr. Jevons’s as of Dr. Frazer’s indictment against magic is simply that it is inconsistent  with the admission of the “superiority”—the “super”-ness—of the “divine” to the human. For the purpose of his plea, he necessarily ignores the salient historical fact made clear by Dr. Frazer, that men have abundantly practised magic towards the very Gods to whom they prayed, and whose “supernaturalness” they not only avowed but believed in to the extent of holding them “immortal.” Assyrian, Egyptian, and Indian religious literatures alike are full of cases of such practice. It may be argued that that is still an imperfect conception of “the supernatural”: that the consistent conception requires the ascription of eternity, of omnipotence, of uncreatedness, of never-having-begun. But then men have also humbly prayed, without thought of magic, to Gods to whom they were grateful and whom they believed to be suffering sons of older Gods; and these attitudes of mind Dr. Jevons has fully certificated as “religious.” But, again, men have similarly prayed to mere “saints.” What degree, then, of recognition of superiority is to be regarded as Constituting recognition of “the” supernatural? One is moved to ask. What is the theorist’s own conception of “the supernatural”? and, What does he mean by the term when he speaks of “supernatural terrors”?

When the critic is himself so far from a clear definition, it is very obviously a mere rhetorical device to say that for the magic-monger the conception of the supernatural “by definition” is inconsistent with his practice. He had never given any definition;  neither had the “religious man” who is alleged to have preceded him; and it was simply impossible that they should. The à priori argument against him is thus irrelevant from the start, no less than the à posteriori; and both are further negligible as being inferribly motived by a non-scientific purpose. The right view is to be reached on another line.

Proceeding on the clear lines of human psychology, we can be absolutely certain of this, that a savage may alternately seek to propitiate and seek to coerce or circumvent a human enemy whom he regards as normally stronger than himself. As Dr. Jevons notes, savage hunters on killing a bear will use a ritual to propitiate the bear clan. As he is well aware, Brahmans and other priests have taught that an ascetic or a ritualist can by his practices gain power to coerce or command the highest Gods,  to whom ordinary men can but pray. Such a notion, he argues, is a negation of a supernatural in that it assumes the Gods to be subject to an order of causation which man can control. But, once more, is it not equally a negation of a supernatural to assume, as the highest religions have done and do, that man can persuade the God by prayer, or propitiate him by confession and sacrifices, or keep him friendly by professing esteem and gratitude? Is not every one of these acts an assumption that the God’s moral and mental processes are on a par with those of men, and that he is merely stronger than they? So considered, in what sense is he supernatural? And is not the inconsistency gross when men at once practise prayer and ascribe to their deity fore-ordination of all things? It is not too much to say that the procedure by which Dr. Jevons classifies magic as anti-religious must logically end in so classing every historic religion, and leaving the title to the name vested solely in professed Agnostics and Atheists. Some reasoners have actually so allotted the term; but that conclusion will scarcely suit Dr. Jevons’s book, so to speak.

In view of the whole facts, the terms “belief in the supernatural” must be recognised as signifying for practical purposes merely belief in a personal power that is superhuman, or rather extra-human, yet quasi-human. And such powers are the Gods alike of the earliest savage and the contemporary Christian, the humble offerer of prayer and the practiser of magic. The offerer of prayer, it is true, remains substantially the original type, loyally prostrate before power; civilisation having developed the original docility of the cowed savage through the deadly discipline of great despotisms. On the other hand, the magician of the past has either succumbed to that discipline or developed into the man of science—a function which he finds the worshipper of power often sharing with him. But just as they can so coincide now in practice, they coincided at the start in psychology. This view of the case finally follows from another of Dr. Jevons’s most definite positions; for he repeatedly describes the primitive “sacramental meal” as truly religious, in that it is a “higher” form of sacrifice than the mere gift-sacrifice, being a means of communion with the God, who actually joined in the meal. He does not deny it the title of “religion” even when it involves the conception that in the sacramental meal the God is actually eaten.  In each of these cases the worshipper certainly believed he had acquired a force not previously his own, even as does the practiser of magic; while the eating of the God is the reductio ad absurdum of his “superiority.” Here, then, is even a more complete stultification of the logical idea of the supernatural than is committed by the magician, and it is actually made to validate the “religion” of the sacrificer as against the anti-religion of the magic-monger.

7. Dr. Jevons’ Series of Self-Contradictions

This contradiction naturally reiterates itself in Dr. Jevons’s treatise at a hundred points: being fundamental, it strikes through the entire argument. While premising that religion is “universally human,” and finally contending that man is “by nature religious,” and therefore “began by a religious explanation of nature,”  he pronounces  that “four-fifths of mankind, probably, believe in sympathetic magic,” which, he declares, not only “does not involve in itself the idea of the supernatural,”  but is “hostile from the beginning”  to religion, and is the “negation” thereof.  While affirming that the belief in the supernatural (= religion) was prior to magic, he explains  that it was man’s “intellectual helplessness in grappling with the forces of nature which led him into the way of religion” (i.e., the way in which he began, before he had tried his intellect), and, again, that religion led certain men out of magic, though at the same time they were converted by simply seeing that magic is inefficacious.

Again, reverting for one purpose to his original doctrine of the primacy of fear, Dr. Jevons writes :—

Magic is, in fact, a direct relapse into the state of things in which man found himself when he was surrounded by supernatural beings, none of which was bound to him by any tie of goodwill, with none of which had he any stated relations, but all were uncertain, capricious, and caused in him unreasoning terror. This reign of terror magic tends to re-establish, and does re-establish, wherever the belief in magic prevails.

A few chapters further on, discussing fire-festivals and water rites, without asking wherein they psychologically differ from sacramental meals, he writes :—

If we regard those fire-festivals and water rites as pieces of sympathetic magic, they are clear instances in which man imagines himself able to constrain the gods—in this case the god of vegetation—to subserve his own ends. Now, this vain imagination is not merely non-religious, but anti-religious; and it is difficult to see how religion could have been developed out of it. It is inconsistent with the abject fear which the savage feels of the supernatural, and which is sometimes supposed to be the origin of religion; and it is inconsistent with that sense of man’s dependence on a superior being which is a real element in religion.

The contradiction is absolute. For one purpose, magic is declared to restore the primary reign of terror; for another purpose it is declared to be incompatible with a reign of terror, which is now at once implied and denied to be the primary state. We are in fine told that the savage does and does not fear a “supernatural.”

Another series of contradictions is set up by the theorist’s determination at certain points so to define “religion” as to secure a unique status for Judaism and Christianity—a breach of scientific method on all fours with his dichotomy of religion and magic. Dealing with the Egyptian conception of a future state, and noting how the first chapter of the Book of the Dead promises a future life which simply repeats the earthly, he declares that “no higher or more spiritual ideal entered or could enter into the composition of the Egyptian abode of bliss, because its origin was essentially nonreligious.”  Such being, however, the nature of the conception of the future life entertained by at least nine-tenths of the human race, savage and civilised, we are here again asked to associate the “universally human” influence with only a fraction of ostensible religious doctrine on one of the most specifically religious topics.

In the same fashion every modification of religious doctrine under the influence of political and religious thought is classed as non-religious. Thus, we are told  that “the eschatology of the Egyptian and Indian religions......was not generated by the religious spirit, but was due to the incorporation of early philosophical speculations into those religions.”

Further (in flat defiance of Mr. Lang’s doctrine as to the primary and pious character of savage Supreme Gods), Dr. Jevons lays it down that the idea of a Supreme God, at the head of a pantheon, “is scarcely a religious idea at all; it is not drawn from the spiritual depths of man’s nature; it is a conception borrowed from politics”;  and pantheism in turn “is a metaphysical speculation, not a fact of which the religious consciousness has direct intuition.”  The upshot is that only that idea is religious which “proceeds from an inner consciousness” of connection with or perception of deity: there must be no process of reasoning, no philosophy, no criticism. Dr. Frazer’s view of religion as beginning in criticism of magic is ruled out as Dr. Frazer ruled out magic itself. And if it should be supposed that on this definition primary animism is clearly religious, Dr. Jevons has his veto ready: “In animism man projects his own personality on to external nature; in religion he is increasingly [why only increasingly?] impressed by the divine personality.”

Now, postponing for the moment the scientific answer—the answer of elementary and ultimate psychology—to Dr. Jevons, we have only to turn to the next chapter of his own treatise to find him nullifying this stage of his definition as he has nullified every other. First we are asked  to “note that faith is not something peculiar or confined to religion, but is interwoven with every act of reason,” and that “the period of faith does not terminate when the pupil has come to have immediate consciousness of the facts which he could not see.” Next, we are assured  that “the religious mind believes that all facts of which we have immediate consciousness can be reconciled with one another,” and that “the religious faith which looks forward to the synthesis of all facts in a manner satisfying to the reason......covers a much larger area than either science or moral philosophy.” Either, then, the religious person becomes utterly irreligious when he thus reasons beyond the immediate “facts,” so-called, of his consciousness, or Dr. Jevons’s definition of religion is once more cancelled by himself.

If, again, we return to the chapter on “Taboo, Morality, and Religion,” where it is argued that religion rationalised taboo, we read that “when the taboos which receive the sanction of religion are regarded as reasonable, as being the commands of a being possessing reason, then the other taboos also may be brought to the test of reason.”‘  On the later view, this is an essentially irreligious process. It is true that Dr. Jevons hastens to say,  ”Taboo has indeed been rationalised, but not in all cases by reason,” and to urge  that the prophets and other religious reformers who discriminate between taboos “have usually considered themselves in so doing to be speaking, not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God”—that is, have spoken as do cannibal priests among Polynesians and the impostor priests of the Slave Coast.  This, however, does not save his thesis from the fatal reproach of having explicitly admitted the element of reason for a moment into the religious process. And the lapse recurs, again with a contradiction. In the closing chapter we have from Dr. Jevons successively these three propositions:—

A belief is an inference, and as such is the work of the reason. The reason endeavours to anticipate the movement of facts.

It is an established fact of psychology that every act, mental or physical, requires the concurrence, not only of the reason and the will, but of emotion.

Indeed, the reason of primitive man was ex hypothesi undeveloped; and, in any case, religious belief is not an inference reached by reason, but is the immediate consciousness of certain facts.

These internecine dicta are offered without apology or apparent misgiving as steps in a continuous process of argument. And just such another series occurs in the chapter in which Dr. Jevons undertakes to make out the characteristic thesis that “Mythology is not religion.” In passing, and apart from the scientific rebuttal, it may be well to note that what Dr. Jevons calls “the extraordinary notion that mythology is religion,”  has never been propounded by any writer in the only sense in which it would be either false or extraordinary—that is, that “mythology is the whole of religion.” That it is an element in religion and an aspect or function of “the religious consciousness” is affirmed by Dr. Jevons himself in the very act of denying it. As thus:—

Mythology was primitive man’s romance, as well as his history, his science, his philosophy.

The narratives in which primitive speculations [i.e., myths] were embodied were not merely intellectual exercises, nor the work of the abstract imagination: they reflect or express the mind of the author in its totality, for they are the work of a human being, not of a creature possessing reason and no morality, or imagination and no feeling......In the same way, then, as the moral tone and temper of the author and his age makes itself felt in these primitive speculations, so will the religious spirit of the time......Mythology is one of the spheres of human activity in which religion may manifest itself: one of the departments of human reason which religion may penetrate, suffuse, and inspire.

Mythology is primitive science [etcetera], but it is not primitive religion. It is not necessarily or usually even religious. It is not the proper [!] or even the ordinary vehicle for the religious spirit.

Prayer, meditation, devotional poetry, are the chosen vehicles in thought and word; ritual in outward deed and act. Myths originate in a totally different psychological quarter: they are the work of the human reason, acting in accordance with the laws of primitive logic; or are the outcome of the imagination, playing with the freedom of the poetic fancy. In neither case are they primarily the product of religious feeling: it is not the function of feeling to draw inferences.

It is here categorically asserted, first, that myths are not the work of any one side of the human personality—neither of reason without moral feeling nor of imagination without “feeling.”

Finally, it is asserted that they are the work either of reason without feeling or of imagination without feeling.

After the express denial that any human being can mythologise with one faculty only, and the necessary implication that religious feeling may “penetrate” the other faculties in the act of myth-making or myth-believing, we are told that myths originate in a “totally different psychological quarter” from the “religious spirit.”

As to the other italicised propositions, it may suffice at this point to note (1) that it is plainly wrong to say mythology is primitive science, history, etcetera, in the sense in which it is not (i.e., is not the whole of) primitive religion; (2) that prayer and devotional poetry are normally full of myths; (3) that ritual is in many cases conceived (though clearly not originated) by the worshipper as an imitation of an episode in the history of the God (i.e., a myth); and (4) that by explicitly reducing religion to “feeling” Dr. Jevons, like Dr. Frazer, has eliminated every belief as such from religious consciousness. Tantum relligio!

8. His Contradictory Doctrine Of The Conditions Of The Survival Of Religion

One sample more may suffice to complete the justification of our criticism that Dr. Jevons’s interesting and suggestive treatise is flawed throughout by fatal contradiction. In discussing totemism, he certifies, first, the primitive belief of men in their descent from a totem animal as established or verified for them “in their inner experience—i.e., in the filial reverence and affection which they felt towards him,  thus salving as truly religious the grossest possible “projection of man’s own personality” on Nature, while the spontaneous animism which early man shared with animals is denied the status of “direct consciousness.” Then, taking the totemist’s experience, thus highly classed, he writes:—

Doubtless it was not all or most men who had this experience, or rather it was but few who attended to the feeling; but the best must have paid heed to it and have found satisfaction in dwelling on it, else the conception of the deity would never have followed on the line on which as a matter of fact it was developed.

Turning to the chapter on “The Evolution of Belief,” we have this almost flatly contrary deliverance:—

The perpetuation of any variety [of belief] depends solely on the conditions under which it occurs: whatever varieties of belief are not favoured by the conditions, by their environment, will perish—the rest will survive (the surviving belief will not necessarily be that of the keenest-sighted man, but that which accords with what the average sight can see of the facts).

In another chapter, yet again, we have still a third view of the process of survival, and one which excludes both of the preceding. In order to credit to the “truly” religious principle the rationalisation of taboo, Dr. Jevons, as we said, claimed that the rationalisers considered themselves to be propounding “not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God”; and he thereupon notes that “this belief has been shared by the community they addressed, otherwise the common man would not have gained the courage to break an ancient taboo. Certainly no mere appeal to reason would counterbalance that inveterate terror.”  On this view any dictum of any accredited priest would be decisive, irrespective of the average sight”; and this despite of Dr. Jevons’s refusal to recognise priestcraft as a factor in the creation of taboo in particular or religion in general.

A theory of religion which lands its framer in such a congeries of contradictions as these, I submit, is fully convicted of vital fallacy. And certainly the fallacy is not the result either of imperfect knowledge of the ground or of speculative incompetence: it stands visibly for the misguiding force of a false preconception or prejudice. On much of Dr. Jevons’s book every student, I think, will put a very high estimate: it is studious, well-informed, original, independent in method and in doctrine, and, though deeply prejudiced, nearly always temperate even when most fallacious. In places it reaches a really high level of scholarly and critical efficiency, notably in the chapter on “The Mysteries,” where the tracing of the adoption and adaptation of the primary Eleusinian cult to the purposes of Athens and the cults of Dêmêtêr and Persephonê is as satisfying as it is ingenious. Dr. Jevons is there thus successful, to my thinking, because he is on ground which he has surveyed dispassionately and scientifically, unaffected by his occultist predilections. It is when he has his eye on current religion and its line of descent that, omitting much of the due scholarly research and staking all on the vindication of his sympathies, he yields us a series of logical miscarriages fully as striking as his measure of success in his disinterested inquiry.

Howsoever this may be, his series of contradictions leaps to the eyes; and unless consistency is to be a burden only for the naturalists, unless the supernaturalist is to be let dogmatise in hierology as in religion on the basis of his mere “inner consciousness,” his main argument must simply be removed from the scientific field.

9. The Continuity Of Religious Phenomena

The clear solution, as distinguished from the rebuttal, of all such contradictions is to recognise that, however we may grade religious conceptions and systems, they are all parts of one process, even as are political conceptions and systems. To say that magic is hostile to religion is like saying that either republicanism or monarchism is hostile to politics. For primitive man there are no conceptual divisions between religion and science, worship and art; and the distinction between art-magic and sympathetic-magic—made after the express declaration that mere sympathetic magic was “the germ of all magic”—is an arbitrary stroke of pro-Christian classification, which, nonetheless, logically defeats its purpose. For the primitive sacramental meal was demonstrably on the plane of sympathetic magic inasmuch as, even when it did not kill the victim in a mimetic fashion, it was a making-friends with the God in the way of human fraternisation; and it is to this sacrament that Dr. Jevons, for obvious reasons, accords the special religious rank. It is worse than idle to seek to keep it on a plane apart by framing a formula of “direct consciousness” on the part of the worshippers that they were descended from an animal progenitor on the score that they felt filially towards him. The professed magic-monger’s consciousness was rather more direct than theirs. But the definitions themselves give up the case. “Applied science” is just “art,” and “art-magic” is thus just a form of what Dr. Jevons calls sympathetic-magic. Moreover, the ritual of supplication and gratitude, which he declares to be strictly religious, is visibly framed in the same spirit of expectation of profit as is seen in the magic ritual. A study of the human-sacrifice ritual of the Khonds, cited hereinafter, will make clear both the congruity and the conjunction.

It is certainly true that the one ritual becomes hostile to the other when magic is practised by the sorcerer as an outsider, secretly competing with or undermining the priest.  But in that sense any one religious system is hostile to any other in the same field; and in the same sense heresy is hostile to orthodoxy, and dissent to the official cult, without ceasing to be a form of religion. Such a distinction is on all fours with that between “religion” and “superstition,” disposed of by Hobbes as a mere marking off of the “allowed” belief from that not allowed.” If the alleged “hostility” between religion and magic is reducible to a mere distinction between quasi-communal and individualistic sorcery, the whole dispute passes from the plane of psychological theory to that of simple sociological classification. We pass from a debate over a fallacy to a debate over a mere plea for a particular terminology.  But now there arises a fresh fallacy of ethical discrimination. The communal sorcery, called religion, is falsely certificated as moral and humanitarian. It is no more so than the other. In Africa the private or amateur sorcerer (usually a victim of the professional witch-doctor”) is regarded as the enemy of mankind; but it is precisely by the public magician—witch-doctor, rain-doctor, sorcerer—that the alleged amateur is nefariously “smelt out” and given up to slaughter.  If it be argued that “religious” magic aims at the public good and “mere” magic at private harm, the answer is that the public magician is often notoriously a murdering scoundrel, and the alleged private sorcerer an innocent man done to death. And that is not all. On the separatist theory, the legend of Elijah’s calling down fire from heaven makes him an irreligious magician, in that he was not only acting irregularly and unofficially, but going through the procedure of a sorcerer with absolute confidence in his power to control the will of his God. His machinery of supererogatory watering of his sacrifice—which, as regards the coming rain, was sympathetic magic—was “religiously” gratuitous presumption; and he was staking the whole fortunes of his cult on the chance that his prayer would be miraculously answered. He was, in fact, coercing his God by making the God’s credit with his people depend upon the God’s obedience to his wishes.  It will not avail to acquit Elijah on the score of faith when the faith of the magician in his means of controlling the Gods is made precisely his offence. Among native tribes of the Victoria Nyanza region, “the people, in fact, hold that rulers must have power over Nature and her phenomena.”  Here the “anti-theistic” magic is the main element in the communal religion; and once more the separatist theory breaks down.

That priests in many ages and stages of culture have been hostile to magic is true just in the sense in which it is true that—with deeper cause—they have been hostile to science. In the early and “dark” ages of Christendom the priests of the Christian Church, primed by a magical-medical doctrine of the curing of sickness by the laying on of hands, denounced as atheistic the view of disease passed on by pagan science.  Those priests were all the while practisers of exorcisms,  and were none the less, for Dr. Jevons, highly religious. In the same way the intensely religious Ainu of Saghalien, who practise magic for the cure of disease and resort to professional wizards for the same purpose,  resent as irreligious the attempt to promote the earth’s fertility by manure. When Mr. Batchelor, the missionary, proposed to dig and manure his garden, and explained his wish to his Ainu gardener, that religious personage, strong in his inner consciousness, thus rebuked him: “What, will you, a clergyman and preacher of religion, so dishonour and insult the Gods? Will not the Gods give due increase without your attempting to force their hand or endeavouring to drive Nature?” Here we have the very doctrine of Dr. Jevons and Dr. Frazer: the manuring missionary was an “arrogant” magician, seeking to control the unseen powers in a way which was not the Ainu way. (That, it appears, was usually expectoration.) “Considerably surprised,” says Mr. Batchelor, “I looked at him to see if he were joking. But he was quite serious.” Poor Mr. Batchelor was being treated as his cloth had treated the doctors in the days of unflawed faith. Happily the Ainu did not possess an Inquisition.

True it may be, again, that magic is at some points a lowering of the religious sentiment; though much of the quasi-scientific reflection on this head appears to be a mere echo of ecclesiastical declamation. If we were seriously to inquire which has done the more harm in the way of hindering civilisation, strangling science, obscuring the facts of Nature, and prompting human cruelty, it would soon be found that the organised cults which curse the magician have been by far the more pernicious.  The barbarisation wrought by the attempts of the courageously “superstitious” few to practise witchcraft is trifling beside that compassed by the no less superstitious many in putting supposed witches to death. This holds good of the general life of Africa through whole millenniums, in which countless millions of human beings have been slain as sorcerers and witches on the accusation of professional witch-doctors; and again of the inferrible life of the Hebrews and the recorded witchcraft-manias of Christendom. And if this side of the problem be waived, the fact remains that the Christian religion, which Dr. Jevons and the rest rank as the highest and purest of religious systems, historically took its rise in the “reversion” from theistic faith to a form of sympathetic magic, the eucharist, and was practically rooted as a State cult throughout Europe by the assumption of magical functions on the part of the priest, not only in the administration of the eucharist itself, but in the claim to exercise “supernatural” powers of exorcism and to wield “supernatural” instruments in the form of holy relics. Such practices certainly represent an intellectual and moral declension from the ethic of all the leading Greek schools and of the nobler rabbins.

In other cases a differentiation between magician and priest may have been in origin economic and political, apart from any ethical motive. Among the Bataks of Sumatra, while ancestors are imaged, and the images, as being made potent by soul-stuff, have places in the temples where ancestors are worshipped, the higher Gods are without images or temples, and are prayed to only in conjunction with ancestors or spirits; and here it is noted that the magician “has nothing to do with the worship of the Gods, but operates on the relations with spirits and souls,” while the priest attends to the matters relating to the higher Gods.  The explanation appears to lie in the fact that, as among the Romans, every Batak house-father is priest as regards ancestors, souls, and spirits. The priest-managed cult is either the survival of one imposed on the populace by conquerors and specially provided for (as probably was the case in Rome), or a result of priestly enterprise in imitation of foreign systems.  Its ethical content is a matter of other chances.

Granted, yet again, that dissenting magic, whether beneficent or maleficent in intention, is logically inconsistent with the conceptions of deity normally professed by the magic-monger himself, it is here on all fours with the total structure of the official creed, whichsoever it be. The conception of sacrifice in all its forms is morally irreconcilable with the doctrine of divine justice and goodness, and was on that very ground repudiated by the greater Hebrew and pagan moralists; and with the doctrine of salvation by sacrifice falls the doctrine of salvation by faith. Press that one ethical principle, and the whole apparatus of official Christian ethic collapses, even as the apparatus of prayer and providentialism falls by the test of the principles of divine omniscience, beneficence, and foreordination. Dr. Jevons’s principle of exclusion, in fact, finally makes tabula rasa of the whole field of religious institutions and religious life, and leaves us recognising only a factor which he has expressly excluded from his definition of the religious consciousness—to wit, philosophy.

Here, again, the theoretic separation is spurious. In terms of many parts of Dr. Jevons’s exposition, early religion is just the effort to unify the cosmos through a conception of deity; and early philosophy was nothing else. To stamp as religious only those forms of thought in which the believer has “direct consciousness” of “the divine,” excluding every process of meditation and inference as such, is to include in religion the phenomena of hallucination and even of insanity (to say nothing of the liberal expansion of the formula to include men’s belief in their personal descent from an animal), and to bar out as non-religious the theism which stands on the thesis that “this scheme of things cannot be without a mind.”

On the other hand, ordinary animism, which Dr. Jevons rules out, is certainly a belief in terms of almost though not quite unreflecting consciousness; and to proceed to disqualify it on the ground that it is a projection of man’s personality into Nature is to evoke a fatal challenge; for if this is to be said of animism, it will certainly have to be said much more emphatically of theism. The “impression of the divine personality” of which Dr. Jevons speaks is precisely the projection of the subject’s personality into the unknown, and this by Dr. Jevons’s own showing. To judge from his later argument, while he at times professes to waive the question of the veracity of the religious consciousness, he is much disposed to let it be its own verification.  This, however, he can scarcely venture-on in the case of the primitive man’s belief that he descended from a fox, a bear, or a serpent. It is one thing to pronounce such a belief “truly religious,” by way of securing in advance the “true” heredity of the Christian eucharist; it is another to put such a “fact of consciousness” beside the Christian consciousness of direct divine intercourse and inner answer to prayer. On the latter step must follow the admission that the so-called religious form of “consciousness” is by far the more self-projecting, the less truly receptive, of the two, save indeed where it is merely the mouthpiece of the other. Otherwise Dr. Jevons’s undertaking ends in the edifying decree that the company of the truly religious includes every mahdi, every fakir, every sibyl, every savage seer, every spiritualist, every epileptic Salvationist, every Corybantic worshipper of Cybelê or Kali, and repels not only a Thomas Aquinas, a Pascal, a Hegel, a Spinoza, a Martineau, but every similar thinker who in antiquity prepared the very doctrines which the “feelers” demonstrably took as the theme of their alleged consciousness.

It can hardly be that in thus shaping his definition Dr. Jevons aimed at demonstrating subtly the sub-rationality of religion. He has, indeed, by his theorem of “direct consciousness,” brought religion to precisely the position he assigned to taboo—that of an “irrational” and “arbitrary” association of ideas. He accepted from Mr. Lang, as we saw, the verdict that taboo is thus irrational because its principle is “that causal connection in thought is equivalent to causative connection in fact.” Yet this is exactly the principle which he vindicates on behalf of the religious consciousness. Its notion of causal connection is to be in very truth equivalent to causative connection in fact. It is not to reason; it is not to seek evidence or submit to tests; it is to bring all experience in submission to itself. And it is not only the belief in a Good Male God that is thus assured of its superiority in virtue of its arbitrariness; it is every hallucination of every savage, every vision of the Virgin by a neurasthenic Catholic, every epiphany of Isis or Aphrodite or Cotytto in the past—nay more, every dream of a devil! It seems a sinister service to latter-day religion thus to demonstrate that it is on all fours not with purified philosophy, but with the most unintelligible forms of taboo and the darkest forms of “superstition.”

Once more, however, the scientific course consists not in taking advantage of the logical suicide of those who conduct the other, but in setting forth the fundamental analogy of the psychological processes thus arbitrarily differentiated. The “direct consciousness” of the theist—sheer hallucination apart—is simply a reversion to the earlier man’s confidence in his animistic conceptions, doubled with the conscious resistance to sceptical criticism seen in every dream-interpreter and ghost-seer of the country-side. The persistence is simply a matter of temperament and degree of enlightenment: there are men who can transcend this like other testimonies of their direct consciousness, in learning to see it as a kind of hallucination which may be predicted to arise in some cases in regard to any theistic conception which any thinker may contrive to set up. Where there are images of the Virgin, men and women will have visions of the Virgin; where there are images of animal-Gods, there will be visions of animal-Gods.

Between “impressions” and “projections” there is no such psychological gulf as Dr. Jevons assumes. If there were, the political influence on doctrine which he classes as non-religious would still be in terms of his other theorem truly religious, for the act of thinking of rule in heaven in terms of rule on earth is a sufficiently docile surrender to an impression on consciousness, and would be made by multitudes with the possible minimum of reflection. But, in truth, a minimum of reflection there needs must be in every process of belief; and what Dr. Jevons at times describes as pure processes of direct consciousness are demonstrably not so, or are so only in the sense in which the same thing may be predicated of the thinking of the primitive magician. The man who says he is conscious of an inward answer to prayer is not conscious of it as he is of the sound of a voice; what he experiences is a sense of satisfaction, which (albeit only the result of a release of nervous tension) he infers to come as a direct communication from deity;  and such inference is merely a more casual and less meditated process of reasoning than those which Dr. Jevons dismisses as non-religious. It is thus less rational as being less “reasonable”; but it is not “irrational” save in the loose sense of “fallacious.” It is more arbitrary, but only in the sense that it is less mindful of reason and more egotistic, more self-willed, than the process which appeals fraternally to other men’s judgments. Arbitrary in Dr. Jevons’s implied sense of having no basis it cannot be: so to define the term is to reduce it to insignificance. However vicious religious reasoning may be, it remains reasoning.

10. Dr. Frazer’s Sociological Vindication Of The Sorcerer

To say this, however, is certainly not to endorse the surprising thesis latterly put forth by Dr. Frazer, to the effect that magic-mongering, after all, has been a great factor in human progress.  His first suggestion was, as we have seen, that a recognition of the inherent falsehood and barrenness of magic set the saner men seeking for a truer insight into nature. But after suggesting this “with all due diffidence,” he has latterly come to hold with confidence that it was the clever impostors who, by obtaining monarchic power, were the means of breaking up savage conservatism, and so of making progress possible. It is a singular argument. The public sorcerer “may readily acquire the rank and authority of a chief or king”; and the ablest and most ambitious men of the tribe accordingly follow the profession. The most sagacious are the most likely to see through its fallacies, and, becoming conscious deceivers, will as such “generally come to the top.”  Only the cleverest can survive: all sorcerers run a constant risk of being killed for their failures; and the honest men are likely to be soonest knocked on the head. “The general result is that at this stage of social evolution the supreme power tends to fall into the hands of men of the keenest intelligence and the most unscrupulous character.”  Once supreme, the clever rogue “may, and often does, turn his talents, his experience, his resources, to the service of the public.”  Being a knave, he is not likely to miscarry: witness the contrasted careers of Augustus and George III. Thus magic makes the monarch: “it shifted the balance of power from the many to the one: it substituted a monarchy for a democracy, or rather for an oligarchy of old men.” The custom-ruled savage in the free tribal state is utterly unprogressive, “and the ablest man is dragged down by the weakest and dullest.” But the rise of one man to supreme power breaks the spell; and the tribe “enters on a career of aggrandisement, which at an early stage of history is often highly favourable to social, industrial, and intellectual progress.” “The great conquering races of the world have commonly done most to advance and spread civilisation.....The Assyrians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, are our witnesses in the past......All the first great strides towards civilisation have been made under despotic and theocratic governments.”  Great, therefore, was the service of the sorcerer.

Oddly enough, Dr. Frazer, whose outstanding merit is the fulness of his proofs for his theses, offers us no evidence whatever in support of this thesis beyond the perfunctory allusions to ancient civilisation just cited, which are wholly beside the case. He is severe on à priori theories of kingly origins, but his own argument here is almost wholly à priori. True, some savage kings are magicians = priests; but many are not; and the wide learning of Dr. Frazer evidently does not suggest to him a single case in which the clever knave who has achieved kingship performs the services he is supposed to be able to render.  On the contrary, we have the testimony  that “where the chieftaincy and priesthood meet in the same person, both are of a low order”—among the Fijians. There is really no reason to think that early progress was made as Dr. Frazer suggests: his philosophic antinomianism is gratuitous. And it is not persisted in; for once more we find him reverting  to the view that, as the fallacy of magic becomes more and more apparent, it is “slowly displaced by religion: in other words, the magician gives way to the priest.” The two propositions refuse to quadrate. First, the great merit of the magician king was to break up custom; now he does but pave the way for the priest, who is custom incarnate; who, in point of fact, pursues the very researches which Dr. Frazer credits to the magician; and who, when the chief or king insists upon a humane innovation, makes it his business to poison the innovator.  It is time that the à priori method were abandoned, in this as in other fields of science. It can but yield us a crop of contradictions.

Looking in anthropology and history for the main factors of progress, we find them in very different directions from those indicated by Dr. Frazer. Our first traces of “civilisation,” strictly speaking, are in towns—civitates; and their civilisation consists largely in the development of the useful arts by division of labour. The primary determinants are physical—conditions of regular food-supply, as in the valleys of the Nile, the Tigris, the Euphrates, and the Yang-tsze-Kiang; and the widening of knowledge was a matter of manifold development in which men of all classes must have taken part. To say, as does Dr. Frazer,  that the magicians “were the direct predecessors, not merely of our physicians and surgeons, but of our investigators and discoverers in every branch of natural science,” is to impose a false symmetry on a vast, irregular process, and is an unwarrantable negation of faculty in all but one fraction of the human race. There is positively no ground for supposing that it was professed magicians or magician-chiefs who invented ploughs and bows and arrows, or tamed cattle, or developed agriculture, or began spinning and weaving and metallurgy. Neither is there reason to think that it was the “rain-makers” who developed irrigation, or the “medicine-men” who oftenest discovered the uses of herbs, whether or not they were the first regular observers of the stars. Neither positively nor negatively can they be shown to be the leaders in vital innovation.

The spell of custom, where broken at all, has been dissolved by the compulsions of need or the lure of gain: hunters and shepherds are turned into agriculturists by the bait of food or the goad of hunger. The masterful savage knave who breaks through primitive convention and gives a free run to genius is a creature of Dr. Frazer’s speculative faculty, suddenly permitted to expatiate in an unwonted vacancy. Masterful primitive chiefs and kings we do indeed find at times breaking down evil usages;  but this very service is by way of fighting the priest who (we are told) has supervened on the magician; and in no case, I think, can such a reforming chief or king be shown to have won his power as a sorcerer. As we have seen, the superseding of so-called magic by so-called religion is immeasurably slow; and the idea of taboo subsists in the historic religions to this day.

The things wherein men validly change in the savage state, if we can draw any conclusions from their remains, are the ways and means of living and fighting. Conditions of food-supply determine implements and methods. Weapons are slowly perfected; and if we may reason from the instance of the Romans, the primitive savage was most open to new ideas on that side. There, at least, fas erat ab hoste doceri. But the lift of the race is secular; not a matter of sudden impulsions and emancipations by clever chiefs, rascally or otherwise. Dr. Frazer appears to think concerning the rise of culture as so many theologians still think concerning moral progress. He seeks a “founder” as they seek a Moses, a Buddha, a Zoroaster, a Jesus, for the instauration of morals and of creeds. Whatever magicians might do, only with a vast inertia did the stone ages lapse on, from palæolithic to neolithic, from neolithic to bronze and to iron; and in savage Africa, pullulating with sorcerers, the trivial tribal cultures have exhibited but a futile fluctuation in five thousand years. Non quis sed quid.

The question of the political conditions of the spread of civilisation is another issue; and the conjoining of it with the first is a fresh proof of the fallacy of Dr. Frazer’s new method. These à priori arguments for despotism are products not of induction but of presupposition. If we apply the inductive method which Dr. Frazer professes to follow, we find, for one case in which despotism evokes genius or progress, ten in which it paralyses the first and stifles the second. Under the imperialisms and theocracies of Mesopotamia and Egypt, mayhap, there were laid or retained the foundations of astronomy and mathematics and the beginnings of philosophy; and Greece came into the heritage. The mathematics and the philosophy were developed in democratic Greece as they never had been under the empires; and one of the few cases in which despotism did anything for science was at the later stage when the Ptolemies simply gave astronomy an economic endowment. On the other hand, great literature and great art, great poetry and drama, medicine and biology, were the creations of pre-Alexandrian Greece; and in every one of those fields the human achievement sinks and dwindles after free Greece falls before organised militarism. As to religious literature, Dr. Frazer is not wont to represent the Bible of little Jewry as inferior to those of Assyria and Egypt. The whole Roman empire, finally, stands for one brief florescence of the secondary Roman genius, followed by the ruin of the whole antique civilisation which it absorbed; and the later cultures of the Saracens and the Renaissance were growths from the found seeds of Greek science, and from the assimilation of the remains of Roman culture in a turbulent world of free Italian cities, akin to that of dead Greece.

This digression, forced upon us by Dr. Frazer’s resort to apriorism in sociology, may not be useless if it serves to put us on our guard against the risks of reactionary method within the proper limits of our problem. Away from induction there is no safety; and Dr. Frazer miscarries even as does Dr. Jevons when he neglects observation and gives the rein to presupposition. It is by reason of this swerving from his own principles that he finally fails to solve the problem of Christian origins, and remains stranded in a compromise between tradition and criticism. Vindications of despotism and primitive charlatanism are psychologically and logically on all fours with vindications of incredible creeds, cruel churches, and the sentimentalism of reaction. The business and the duty of the anthropologist as of the sociologist is to note determinants and trace sequences, neither letting his ethic obscure for him the natural processes, nor letting the recognition of that obscure his ethic, which is an act of discrimination and judgment, or nothing.

11. The Beginning Of The End Of Religion

Returning to our immediate problem, the evolution of religious ideas, we note that, all error being but incomplete or illicit induction, “irrational” and relatively “rational” ideas are alike products of the general mental process. The recoil from adventurous magic to precatory ritual is no more a renunciation of reason than the contrary progression; and all changes in religion are but better or worse applications of judgment under varying conditions of psychic suggestion and economic pressure. It is indeed true—and be the truth clearly envisaged—that with the conscious resort to critical reason there begins potentially a process which may end in the negation of all the primary religious conceptions and propositions, even in their most purified philosophical form. When that end is reached, we may well say that philosophy and religion are differentiated, even as science is differentiated at once from magical and from precatory religion, at the point at which it either repudiates or abandons their premisses, and consciously proceeds on tested induction. But even this reaction is never instantaneously complete: witness the sociology of many physicists, and the meteorology of some sociologising historians; and, on the other hand, there is an aspect or function of religion in respect of which it is structurally continuous with systems of doctrine which either abandon or repudiate its premisses.

From the first, it belonged to his nature that man should connect his ethic with his cosmology, since the one like the other grew out of his instincts and perceptions and his effort to harmonise them. Precisely as he animised Nature, so did he moralise it: that is, he conceived of it in terms of what moral ideas he had. Thus it was that he could alternately resort to propitiation and to magic, and alternately feel fear and gratitude. Granting that his religious conceptions first crystallised on the lines of his fears, it was inevitable that they should in time crystallise also in terms of his satisfactions: the one involved the other, and made it not only possible but probable that he should at times thank the very power he feared. Fear would involve propitiation, and propitiation was the door to gratitude. And thus it was that his Gods were in the long run ethically like unto himself, neither wholly beneficent nor wholly maleficent.

Such an evolution would seem inevitable, even if we do not posit as part of the process his direct deification of his own image in that of his ancestors. But that ancestor-worship is a main factor in the growth of religion is proved both à priori and à posteriori. Once the ancestor was recognised as subsisting spirit-wise, he was only in degree, not in kind, distinguishable from the Gods; and there is evidence that in some cases he was conceived as the God par excellence.

See the evidence (of which Dr. Jevons makes no account) collected by Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. i, chaps. xx and xxv; and op. F. W. Christian, The Caroline Islands, 1899, p. 75; Rev. D. Macdonald, Oceania, 1889, p. 161; Basil Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, pp. 5, 57, 111; Glyn Leonard, The Lower Niger and its Tribes, 1906, pp. 67, 89, 98 sq., 104-9, etc.; C. Partridge, Cross River Natives, 1905, pp. 283-4; W. Crooke, Religion and Folklore of Northern India, ed. 1895, vol. i, ch. iv; Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 553, 555, 587, 588, 589, 631, 752. “The essence of true negro-religion,” says the writer last-named, “is ancestor-worship” (Liberia, 1906, ii, 1062). It is true that some observers (cp. Mary Kingsley, West African Studies, 2nd ed. 1901, pp. 111-114; Sir A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast, 1890, p. 24 sq.) deny that certain West Africans “worship their ancestors”; but this, as Miss Kingsley admits, is a matter of culture-stage or variation. African religion is notably impermanent by reason of the peculiar stresses of life-conditions; and no one can trace far the history even of the highest Gods of the indigenes. Cp. Partridge, as cited, pp. 271-3. The higher Gods of a given moment may be ancestors whose ancestorhood has been lost sight of.

Dr. Frazer, Golden Bough, i, 72, note, cites the testimony of Dr. Fison in Australia: “The more I learn about savage tribes, the more I am convinced that among them the ancestors grow into gods.” The same witness, again, tells of a great Fijian chief who “really believed himself to be a god—i.e., a reincarnation of an ancestor who had grown into a god” (Id. i, 141, note). The Godhood of chiefs is a familiar phenomenon. “The Gods being no more than deceased chiefs, the arikis [chiefs] were regarded as living ones” (Taylor, Te Ika a Maui: or, New Zealand and its Inhabitants, p. 173). Cp. Hazlewood’s testimony (Frazer, last cit.); also Mariner, Tonga Islands, ed. 1827, ii, 99-100; W. Ellis, Polynesian Researches, i, 111 sq.; T. Williams, Fiji and the Fijians, ed. 1870, pp. 19, 197; Comm. V. L. Cameron, Across Africa, 1885, p. 336; and Frazer, Lectures on the History of the Early Kingship, 1905, p. 132 sq.

Among the early Aryan Hindus, the first man who died became Yama, the God of the Shades;  and on another view he and his wife were the first human pair,  though sprung from deities of the atmosphere.  But here, still, we are dealing with late developments: it is still an open question how the first Gods originated. And it is impossible to determine exactly the primary psychic processes. The limitary theorem that all God-worship originated in ancestor-worship has evoked the counter-theorem that God-worship must in origin have preceded ancestor-worship; and Dr. Jevons so reasons. But again his predilection recoils on one of his own theses, for the ancestor is obviously likely to have been early regarded as the friendly spirit;  and we are thus led back to Dr. Jevons’s repudiated premiss that the religion of fear had preceded that of gratitude.

His final view of ancestor-worship is that it was assimilated to that of the Gods, but can never have preceded it. It may be true, he grants, that certain ancestors are somehow raised to the ranks of Gods, but it cannot be proved that they were originally ghosts. Then follows this singular theorem:—

What then of these gods?......If they are believed to be the ancestors of their worshippers, then they are not believed to have been human; the worshipper’s pride is that his ancestor was a god andno mere mortal......If, on the other hand, a god is not believed to be the ancestor of any of his worshippers, then to assert that he was really a “deified ancestor” is to make a statement for which there is no evidence; it is an inference from an assumption—namely, that the only spirits which the savage originally knew were ghosts. That assumption, however, is not true; the savage believes the forces and phenomena of nature to be personalities like himself, he does not believe that they are ghosts or worked by ghosts......The fact is that ancestors known to be human were not worshipped as gods, and that ancestors worshipped as gods were not believed to have been human.

We might add, using Dr. Jevons’s own words concerning the theory he rejects, “Which is simplicity itself.” But though in a sense simple, it is unhappily not consistent. For if the savage believed the forces of nature to be “personalities like himself”; if, as Dr. Jevons insists, the magic-monger believed himself on a par with the supernatural in his power to control nature; and if, as Dr. Jevons has previously argued,  it was precisely out of the notion of such personalities or “spirits” that he framed his idea of “supernatural” forces or Gods, then either there is in the terms of the case no contradiction whatever between his counting his ancestors “human” and counting them Gods, or there is no meaning whatever in the phrase “personalities like himself.” Dr. Jevons really cannot have it both ways, even for the purpose of confuting the theory of Spencer. All the while he is but modifying Spencer’s special theory that all God-ideas began in the idea of quasi-human “spirits,” merely refusing to accept “ghosts” as the first form of spirit-idea.

Of course, if Dr. Jevons means that by definition the savage must be held to regard a God-ancestor as “not merely human”—that the savage cannot conceptually mean exactly the same thing by “God” and “man,” else there would be no double significance in the terms—he may claim our assent; for in that case he is asserting a mere truism. But by his own showing the question is whether or not in the opinion of the savage the man could become a God; and so far is this from being doubtful that we have many instances of savages regarding some of their contemporaries, and priests regarding themselves, as Gods;  to say nothing of the fact that for the early Hebrews the title “Gods” was certainly applicable to judges or chiefs.  In Sumatra, the human species, “called the Gods of the middle world, are conceived as a true copy of the God-world. In heaven the same life goes on as on earth. Only gradually are Gods and men distinguished. The Gods stand over men very much as a powerful chief over the crowd. Therefore were such princes named Gods (Debata) and the Gods in turn ‘Grandfather,’ with which title eminent men are greeted.”  For the people of Mangaia in the Hervey Islands the three Gods Rangi, Mokoiro, and Akatuira, grandsons of the great God Rongo,  were the first inhabitants of the islands, and the ancestors of all the tribes.  And the idea is common. In the same island, Vatea, father of Rongo, is the “father of Gods and men.”  The people of Efate in the New Hebrides, down till the time of their conversion, habitually applied to all their Gods the name of “Spirits of the dead”;  and their “first man” is practically identified with Maui, the Creator.  So, among the Bushmen, ‘Kaang or Cagn is at once Supreme God, “the Man” or Master of all things, and the “first being,” with Coti his wife;  and among the Australian Aborigines “the conception of a supreme being oscillated between a hero and a deity.”  Concerning the ancestor spirits in general, a very studious missionary declares that they are “regarded as clothed with all the divine powers in existence.”  Nay, the Japanese at this moment regard themselves as universally descended from Gods; and every dead relation becomes a God relatively to the particular household.  Thus Dr. Jevons is contradicted by the evidence as well as by his own earlier argument.

As before, he has fallen into contradiction by reason of having an illicit doctrinal end to gain—this time, the discrediting of the ghost theory of religion. In order to destroy that, he has in effect committed himself to the proposition that the primitive savage clearly discriminated between ghosts and spirits. Now there is neither à priori nor à posteriori ground for this view; since all the evidence goes to show that the dead ancestor was originally believed to eat and drink, hunt and ride, like the living; and the same things were certainly believed of the Gods. It is one of Dr. Jevons’s own reproaches against the creed of the Egyptians that it regarded the ka or soul in the next world as eating and drinking exactly like the living man. There is really no pretext for believing that the early man ever thought the “spirits” were “not ghosts” orvice versa: it is Dr. Jevons who is here making an unproved assumption. This use of the word “ghost” as representing to early man exactly what it means to us is not only unwarrantable in itself; it is a misrepresentation of the so-called “ghost theory”; for that has regard, among other things, to visions in dreams of the dead as living. If the early savage did see a subjective “apparition” he would doubtless hold it for a “person”; but as regards dreams, peoples comparatively civilised have constantly taken the vision for an objective reality. Of such cases there are several in the Bible.

On the other hand, we have Dr. Jevons’s express assurance first  that the totem animal becomes the totem ancestor, who is universally conceived to have been animal, not human, yet quasi-human, yet is made a God;  next, that “in virtue of the kinship between the god and his worshippers, the killing of a fellow-clansman comes to be regarded in a totem-clan as the same thing as killing the totem-god”;  and, further, that when totemism is no longer a living force, the mere altar-stone comes to be identified with the God, who is “conceived as the ancestor of the race.”  If, then, a whole community can be conceived as descending from one deified animal or from a stone, it surely might be conceived as descending from one man. As to his possible deification, we have Dr. Jevons’s own admission that “eventually......the dead were......on a level with the gods.”  That is to say, he credits men with superiority to such anthropomorphism at a time when they animised everything, and when, later, they could believe in divine animal ancestors or stone ancestors; and he dates ancestor-worship proper as a still later practice arising in a state of comparatively advanced civilisation,  on the ground that “the family is a comparatively late institution in the history of society.”

Now, however, arises a fresh contradiction. The family, surely, was a tolerably old institution among the Romans at the beginning of their written history; but Dr. Jevons had previously committed himself to the proposition that the Romans, down to the time of their assimilation of Greek cults and deities, had not even attained to the stage of polytheism, being at that of simple “animism.”  That is, they had no Gods, though they had long been wont to sacrifice to the manes of their ancestors. The mere statement of that thesis, in turn, involves new contradictions. In denying that the deities of the early Romans were properly describable as Gods until they had adopted Greek Gods or identified their own with some of these, he speaks of the “genuine” and “great” Italian Gods, “Janus, Jupiter, Mars, Diana, Venus, Hercules, etc.” Then he proceeds to show that the great and genuine Janus was indistinguishable in origin and function from the “inferior, animistic powers to whom the title of spirit is the highest that can be assigned.” The general run of those spirits, he contends (following Ihne, Schwegler, and others), “were rather numina or forces than beings”;  and he represents the early Italians as not conceiving them in human form. Yet he admits that Janus was figured as a human head with two faces. The whole theorem is indefensible. To say that an ancient Italian peasant thought of the forces of Nature as abstractions before he had attained to the conception of personal Gods, when all the while he thought of Mars and Diana, Jupiter and Juno, as males and females, is to affirm a countersense. The sole defence offered is the impossible set of definitions by which Chantepie de la Saussaye undertakes to draw a line between Gods proper and Nature powers.  By that definition Gods are not evolved till they have been sculptured—a countersense which at this stage of hierology we might have been spared. The superposition of so many Greek myths upon those of the Romans  gives considerable range for mystification; but no process of that kind can save the theorem that the Gods were not anthropomorphised by imagination before they were objectively imaged.

The thesis, finally, that the Romans before the period of Greek influence were “mere” polydaimonists, and that at the same time they thought even of their daimons as impersonal forces, destroys itself, even apart from Dr. Jevons’s admission that all the while they had “great Gods.” An “inferior” spirit is cognisable as such only by contrast with a superior; and the contention that Janus was evolved from a simple “spirit of doorways,” and remained such, is merely one more rebuttal of Dr. Jevons’s own division of species. If the spirit of doorways was anthropomorphised, it is idle to contend that the other spirits were not. In the very act of maintaining this untenable thesis Dr. Jevons recognises in the attitude of the Romans towards their manes, “the good,” a “worship of deceased ancestors and of spirits which, like Genita Mana, are best explained as spirits of the departed”;  and he decides, further, that the Lares Præstites were conceived under the form of dogs.  In the face of all this his further account of the Italian Gods as “fetishes” reduces the theory to chaos. We are now asked to combine the three conceptions: (1) that ancestor-worship is late; (2) that the Romans had not even reached polytheism long after they had practised ancestor-worship; (3) that they did not anthropomorphise their “spirits,” while they did their ancestors and their “great Gods” (whom, all the while, they had not attained to conceiving as such). And, as if this were not confusion enough, Dr. Jevons pronounces that, at this pre-polytheistic stage, “in Rome, as in China, Assyria, and Babylonia, the cult was nothing but organised magic” —that organised magic which elsewhere he puts as a late degeneration, even as he does here by associating it with the stage of full polytheism in Assyria and Babylonia.

And still we have to note the crowning temerity of the assertion that an imported polytheism was “forced by the State on a people not yet prepared for anything higher than animism and ancestor-worship” —that very ancestor-worship which in his larger treatise he describes as a late evolution, possible only after Gods have been worshipped.

The conception of a State forcing ”polytheism” on a people incapable of it—that is, forcing a belief in Gods on a people who had never thought of Gods, and still less of “God”—is really fatal to the theorist’s differentiation between belief in Gods and belief in spirits. Of this dialectical ruin we can but brush the débris aside.

12. Historic View Of Ancestor Worship

It is necessary to clear up the historic problem of ancestor-worship in order to reach a sound definition of religion. And to begin with, we find the historical evidence is all against Dr. Jevons’s later thesis. Not only have we the many cases in which contemporary savages, like ancient Gnostics, think of a God as an ancestor or of the first man as a God,  and the record in ancient Egypt of the process by which a deceased king became a God;  but we have the relatively late doctrine in Hesiod,  according to which the men of the first age became just and beneficent daimons, passing invisibly over the earth, dispensing rewards and retributions and good fortune.

There is a risk of confusion over this last conception, which, with others of a similar kind, is taken by Mr. Lang as a proof that “early men, contrary to Mr. Frazer’s account, suppose themselves to be naturally immortal.”  Dr. Frazer’s words were that, “lacking the idea of eternal duration, primitive man naturally supposes the gods to be mortal like himself.”  Here the verbal confusion is complete. In the very act of claiming that “far from lacking the idea of eternal duration of life, ‘primitive man’ has no other idea,” Mr. Lang admits: “Not that he formulates his ideas in such a term as ‘eternal.’”  But neither does he formulate it in such a phrase as “naturally immortal”; he has, in fact, no clear idea to formulate;  and Dr. Frazer of all men should have remembered as much. As we have seen,  the savage commonly believes that he would never die save for the acts of hostile spirits, sorcerers, or enemies; yet he knows that all his race die.

What has happened is that men at a certain stage became capable of conceptually noting at once death and the apparent survival (in dreams) of men in some different fashion after death, without framing any theory. But chronic crises in their political or tribal history had the effect of singling out from the vague crowd of ancestral memories those of a particular group or generation who made or led some migration or conquest; and these became for a time “the” ancestors par excellence, early man being unable to construct the human past save by way of some definite beginning. At some point in the long vista he needed a “first man,” or beast, or plant, or stone, or pair; and he had to make such out of some of his ancestral material, with whatever fanciful embellishments. In virtue of the same state of mind, we find tribes and even nations convinced of their special descent from one later man, who at one stage definitely ranks as a God,  though another religious concept may ultimately undeify him, as in the cases of Abraham and Jacob.

As a result of all these tendencies, at a stage in which the primordial belief in the “spiritual” or occult survival of ancestors in general has begun to be definitely contradicted  by the conceptual recognition of death, and by disbelief in the land beyond the grave, there emerges a vague compromise in the notion that either the first pair or the men of the first age were of a different order as regarded their liability to death; and this belief holds the ground until haply a general doctrine of resurrection or ghostly immortality pushes it in turn to the background. But though the notion of the survival of ancestors has thus in a succession of forms subsisted from a very remote period, it clearly does not follow that early men conceived themselves to be immortal in the sense in which they were later held to be so by their descendants. The definite or conceptual belief is retrospective. It is, however, sufficiently general to dispose of Mr. Lang’s argument that among the Australians Gods cannot be developed from ancestors. “No ghost of a man,” he insists, “can grow into a god if his name is tabooed and therefore forgotten.”  And again: “In Australia, where even the recent ghosts are unadored is it likely that some remote ghost is remembered as founder of the ancient mysteries?”  It is after this contention that, apparently without realising the bearing of the statement upon the argument under notice, Mr. Lang triumphantly tells us that there is Australian as well as other evidence of the nearly universal vogue of the belief that the first men—i.e., ancestors—were deathless.

Obviously the very habit of tabooing proper names might conduce to the deifying of ancestors under special epithets, since that resort is always open under tabooism.  The tabooing of ancestors’ names, which is one of the most widespread of savage practices,  can no more destroy the notion that those ancestors have existed than the tabooing of God-names among Egyptians, Babylonians, Hebrews, and Romans put the Gods in question out of recollection.  Was not Yahweh scrupulously specified in many Hebrew rituals as Adonai, the Lord, and by Samaritans as Shema, the Name?  It is well to ask why savages taboo the names of the dead before we deduce views as to the consequences. The reasons doubtless vary, but some instances may illuminate the practice. Among the Battaks, where a man on becoming a father of a boy, N.N., is henceforth known only as “father of N.N.,” children must not utter the names of their parents, and spouses call each other “father of N.N.” and “daughter of the ——,” naming her family. Here the idea is that to know a man’s name is to have some power over his various souls.  Among the Narrinyeri of South Australia “the name of the dead must not be mentioned until his body has decayed, lest a want of sorrow should seem to be indicated by a common and flippant use of his name. A native would have the deceased believe that he cannot hear or speak his name without weeping.”  There is no tendency to oblivion here. In other cases, again, it is clear that when at death a man’s name is “buried” he is simply re-named. Among the Masai, “should there be anything which is called by that [the deceased’s] name, it is given another name which is not like that of the deceased. For instance, if an unimportant person called Ol-onana (he who is soft or weak or gentle) were to die, gentleness would not be called on-nanai in that kraal, as it is the name of a corpse, but it would be called by another name, such as epolpol (it is smooth).”  If then Ol-onana were an important person, is it to be supposed that his personality would be forgotten? Would not he too be re-labelled?  All dead men’s names are tabooed: is it to be supposed that the personalities, or even the old names, of all are forgotten? Re-naming would be a necessity, for men as for things. Among the Narrinyeri, apparently, this would be only temporary, the original name being reverted to after the decay of the body; and even if it were not, the reminiscence would be unbroken, so that a notable man could as well be deified among name-tabooers as among tribes who had not the practice. Nor is there any force in the argument from recent disuse of such deification. Even if we admit the probability that Australian tribes have latterly  ceased to deify ancestors, the fact remains that, as Mr. Lang admits, they think of remote ancestors as undying, even as they do of Gods.

Recognising, however, that the definite conception of ancestors as abnormal in point of deathlessness is retrospective, we must not on the other hand fall into the error of supposing that only in late ages, and by way of poetic retrospect, did men conceive of their deceased predecessors as exercising powers of the kind credited to whatever beings for the time answered to our general notion of “Gods.”  The true solution is that in men’s vague ideas the early “Gods” approximated much more to themselves; and that gradually “the Gods” as such were relatively raised, the change proceeding for ages without involving the absolute negation of ancestral spirits,  and, à fortiori, without necessarily removing from the order of fully-established Gods all who might have been ancestors to start with.

Indeed, there is evidence, as we have seen, that in early stages of religion the Gods were actually conceived as destructible;  ‘ and in the Vedas and Brâhmanas the Gods actually acquire immortality in different ways—by the help of Agni, by drinking the Soma, by continence and austerity, thus gradually raising themselves above the Asuras, with whom they were originally equal.  So in the Babylonian deluge epic Parnapishtim  and his wife, who had been mortal, are raised to immortality.  This conception may be a reflex of the same doctrine as first framed for mortals; but there the fact stands that the Gods were not definitely conceived as “necessarily immortal” to start with.

To see in the Hesiodic or modern-savage theory only a late or “eventual” raising of ancestors to a divine status would be to do violence to all anthropology. Rather it stands for a theological process of discrimination, by which the priesthoods of the Gods carefully reduced deified ancestors as such to a lower level of divinity, while still recognising their immortality and supernatural power. Such a process had demonstrably occurred in the Hebrew system, where the patriarchs and heroes of the Sacred Books have been actually identified as ancient Semitic deities;  and it was just as likely to occur in those other developments of Semitic theology which can be shown to underlie the cosmology of Homer and Hesiod.  Reasoning à priori, again, we have not the faintest ground for supposing that primeval man discriminated between orders of spirits to the extent of conceiving his ancestors as dispensing supernatural favours and yet at the same time ranking far below Gods who did the same thing. How should men conceivably begin to deify confessed mortals as beside “great” Gods, having never ventured to deify them before the Gods had been so magnified? On that line there is no solution. In the words of Professor Robertson Smith, the origins of all religion “go back to a stage of human thought in which the question of the nature of the Gods, as distinguished from other beings, did not even arise in any precise form, because no one series of existences was strictly differentiated from another.”  In the light of all the facts, in fine, we realise that the common process, seen among the historic Greeks,  of demi-deifying a hero, was merely prevented by the presence of fully-established cults from developing just as those cults had done earlier. It of course does not follow that they had all originated in that fashion; but that the ancestor cults as it were played into the solar and vegetal cults from time immemorial is on all grounds probable.

On the other line of reasoning under notice we end in a mere counter-sense as to the definition of “ancestor.” You cannot have ancestor-worship, says Dr. Jevons at one point, till you have the family. Yet he himself has just been describing the totem of the early community as an “ancestor” worshipped as a God before the family was recognised. We seem to be left with the puzzle: “When is an ancestor not an ancestor?” as the sole fruit of a chapter of investigation. If by a sudden petitio principii ancestor-worship is to be defined as strictly a private or family-cult of the kind seen in historic times, then indeed the denial of the priority of ancestor-worship is justified; and it is justified again if it be meant that hostile Gods preceded friendly ones. But in terms of Dr. Jevons’s own theory of the totemistic sacrament, the ancestor-God is the type of the first friendly-God, who on this view is later than the unfriendly Gods; and the friendly-God is ancestral precisely because friendliness was apt to be associated with ancestors,  who were certainly regarded as were “spirits.”

The warranted inference, however, is merely that the ancestor-spirit was one of the types of friendly-God. Just as myths so-called can be seen, on a fair induction, to have originated in a dozen different modes of natural fallacy—inference from phenomena, misinterpretation of names and objects of art, constructions from analogy, misinterpretation of ritual, conjunctions of worships, and so forth —so other religious beliefs so-called are to be inferred as originating in many lines of the animistic and explanatory instinct. The God-idea is simply the most typical myth. Adapting the popular rhyme, we may reasonably say that “there are nine-and-twenty modes of making tribal Gods, and every single one of them is”—natural.

There is really no conceptual limit to the primeval faculty of God-making. The Roman pantheon alone, wherein are Gods of diseases, of drains, of sneezing, of every bodily act, and of a hundred verbal abstractions, might have warned any theorist against denying that early man might deify his ancestors; and the record of the fortunes of many cults might equally warn us against denying that any one deity might attain the highest status. Osiris, on one theory, is like Hades a God made out of the abstraction of the abode of the departed;  Dionysos, like Soma, is plausibly held to be the deified abstraction of mere wine,  sacramentally regarded, as Agni is certainly the deified abstraction of the sacrificial fire; and Hathor, who ran Isis hard in divine honours in Egypt, is in origin simply Hat-Hor, the dwelling of Horus, to wit, the Dawn and the Sunset;  as Venus is possibly a Roman deification of the term Benoth in the Carthaginian phrase Succoth Benoth,  the tents of prostitution. The Gods and Goddesses, in fact, are made out of man’s needs and passions, his fancies and his blunders, his fears and his hopes; and it would be strange if he never made them, even the highest of them, from the nucleus of his reverent and affectionate retrospect on his own kind. Round his elders and his ancestors were formed his first and fundamental notions of right and duty and obedience. How then should he fail to bring at times his religious and his primary ethical ideals into combination?

Von Ihering indeed has argued that the offerings at the graves of the dead—at least among Aryans—are the products not of love, as commonly supposed, but of fear.  It is characteristic of the mode of progression of the sciences that nobody appears to suppose they might be both, some people fearing the dead, some loving them. But even supposing them to have originated in fear of the importunities of the neglected ghost, it would not be unnatural that from the propitiated ghost there should be expected special favour. Doubtless the principle operated differently in different stages. The thesis of Fustel de Coulanges, that “what unites the members of the ancient family is the religion of the hearth and of ancestors,” and that “the ancient family......is a religious rather than a natural association,”  may be perfectly true (under his own reservation that religion of course did not create the family); and it would follow that ancestor-worship took on special features from the time that the family dwelt by or over the family tomb. But this does not dispose of the problem as to the religion of the nomads who have no fixed hearth and tomb,  and of the peoples who either burned or exposed their dead.

Taking the nomadic period in general, and assuming  that the horde preceded the family in order of evolution, we must admit that there were ideas of “ghosts” and other quasi-human “spirits” before the strict family-ancestor was evolved. But there is nothing to show that the idea of a general ancestor or ancestors was not elaborated in the horde-period, out of the normal idea of the ancestor-ghost as well as out of the idea of the non-ancestral spirit, those ideas being easily able to coalesce. A horde was likely to have a horde-ancestor-God; else why should the Greeks be found speaking of their family Gods, Gods of their blood, paternal Gods, gentile Gods?  If the theos were previously conceived solely as a stupendous cosmocrator, how (once more) came men to make theoi of the household? If on the other hand the family and the tribe were roughly coeval, and the notion of a family-ancestor be about as old as the notion of a tribe-ancestor or First Man, we are still left facing ancestor-worship as one of the norms of the cult of a friendly-God. Even in the Aryan horde elders would make themselves respected, and lost fathers and mothers would be missed; and there was no way in which early man could conceive of a providential or punitive deity save in terms of the punitive and providential practices of elders towards juniors, or of chiefs or patriarchs towards groups; or in terms of the action of hostile groups or persons. That the abstraction of divine judges and lawgivers and avengers, thus reached, should be employed to sanction the codes or customs of the seniors or the patriarchs, was psychologically a matter of course; but that does not affect the fact of the à posteriori origination.

13. The Authoritarian Element A Mark Of Religion

Tribal ethic, then, would progressively mould tribal religion and be moulded by it—that is to say, a moral step enforced by political circumstances would be reflected more or less clearly in religion, as in the case of the blood covenant with the God, or in the reduction of the pantheon to monarchic or familial order; while on the other hand the established ethical view of the God would prime the ethical view of the political system. It was not that man was primarily, as it were, incapable of moral ideas as such, or that his notion of mutual duty could arise only, as Dr. Jevons seems to suppose, in the sheath of the idea of taboo. Thus to credit men’s ethic wholly to their religion, while claiming for their religion a separate root in a separate order of consciousness, is merely to beg the question in the interests of occultism. What happened was a habitual interaction of the norms of conduct. Theism would help the king; and monarchy would help theism. The outcome was that the entire ethic of the community had as it were a religious shape,  from which rational criticism could only gradually deliver it. When, then, religious reformers arose whose end and aim was the moral life, they would carry into their ethic the psychology of their religion, were it only because that had been the matrix, so to speak, of the most serious reflection—this even if they did not state their moral doctrine in terms of a recasting of the current religious belief. For Dr. Jevons, such a recasting would be irreligious unless the reformer professed to have direct intercourse with deity;  but we have seen that line of distinction to be untenable, and we cannot consistently deny either religious spirit or religious form to the argument: “God must be good: how then could he have ordained a cruelty or an injustice?”

Inasmuch, however, as all such reforms of morals took effect in modifying the current code for action, the very conception of such a code is historically a religious growth;  and while the concept of public law would quite early differentiate from that of morality as standing for What-is compared with What-ought-to-be, the idea of a code which had a superior moral authority as coming from a God through a Good Teacher remains so nearly homogeneous with that of a code framed by a new Teaching-God or a Good Teacher that they have far more in common than of incompatible. The essential structural continuity rests on the conception of spiritual authority, of “religious” obedience. Where that is present, the religious temper is substantially conserved even if the cosmological premisses of religion are disregarded or dismissed. Thus it is that such a system as that of Buddhism is not merely à posteriori but à priori to be regarded as a religion. To refuse so to regard it is once more to embrace the anomaly of the decision that what serves for religion to half the human race is non-religion.

Where ethics decisively diverges from the religious norm is the point at which it is freed from the concept of external authority. This point, indeed, is slow to become clear; and Kant, who is definitely anti-religious in his repudiation of all forms of ritual of propitiation, but finds his moral authority in a transcendental imperative, is still partly on the religious plane. Fichte, who brushed aside Kant’s identification of religion with ethic, and insisted that religion is knowledge in the sense of philosophy—Fichte will be pronounced by others than Dr. Jevons to be nonreligious as regards his ethic, though he is still religious in respect of his pantheism. It is only when both are divested of apriorism that religion is done with. Then, though some may still claim to apply to their independent philosophy of life the name of religion, on the score that it is at least as seriously framed and held as ever a religion was, the anthropologist may reasonably grant that a real force of differentiation has emerged. When every man consciously shapes his own “religion” out of his conceptions of social utility, the term is of no descriptive value; and when many do so and many more still cleave to religious cosmology and to the ethic of specified authority, the description as applied to the former is misleading. In any case, it is a historical fact that only slowly do ethical schools lose the religious cast. Jurare in verba magistri is their note in all save vigorously progressive periods; and the philosophical schools of the Middle Ages all strike it. That those of to-day have wholly abandoned it, perhaps few would considerately assert; but it is at least obvious that it belongs as essentially to Buddhism as to Christianity, whether or not the individual Buddhist accepts, as most do, a mass of religious beliefs alien to the alleged doctrine of the Master.

14. Definition Of Religion

We may now circumspectly sum up the constructive argument, and in so doing we arrive at an inductive definition of religion.

1. Religion consists primarily in a surmise or conception, reached by way of simple animism, of the causation and control of Nature (including human life) in terms of inferred quasi-human personalities, whether or not defined as extra-Natural. On the belief proceed certain practices. Beginning on the side of fear, it necessarily expands in time, with the rise of culture, to the side of gratitude; and it expresses itself accordingly. But its magical or strategical and its simply precatory or propitiatory forms proceed on the same premisses, and are in origin contemporary and correlative, being respectively the expression of the more and the less self-confident sides of men’s nature  in the state of ignorance.

2. The primary surmise or conception involves itself in a multitude of beliefs, of which one of the most significant is that of kinship between animal and man (making possible a religious development of totemism), and the animal descent of the latter. From animism in general and this belief in particular comes an endless diversity of mythic narratives, all of which must be regarded as part of religion.

3. On the basis of animism, and of primitive inference of causation in all coincidence, arise a multitude of special practices, as taboo, which are first and last religious, being invariably bound up with the religious ideas aforesaid.

4. In virtue of the inevitable correlation of moral with cosmological thought in early man through animism, religion thus becomes secondarily a rule for the human control of human life; and it remains structurally recognisable on this side when the primary aspect has partly faded away.

5. Alike when such a rule for life is ascribed to a mythical founder—whether God or demigod or supernormal man—or to a historical personage credited only with moral genius, the special sanctity or authority ascribed to his code partakes of the nature of religion. Thus the religious element in Positivism consists as much in the reverence given to the founder as in the elements of his teaching. [There is a varying measure of a common religious element in the kind of honour paid to Zoroaster, Buddha, Moses, Jesus, the Hebrew prophets, Apollonius of Tyana, Paul, Saint Augustine, Saint Francis, Luther, Calvin, Arminius, Jansen, Glas, Sandeman, Muggleton, Auguste Comte, Mrs. Eddy, and Madame Blavatsky.]

6. Philosophic, scientific, and ethical thought may be defined as specifically non-religious when, but not before, they have abandoned or repudiated the cosmological premisses of religion, found their guiding principle in tested induction, and, in the case of ethics, ceased to found the rule of life on either alleged supernatural revelation or the authority of an alleged supernormal or specially gifted teacher.

7. Even after conceptual thought has thus repudiated religion, however, what is termed “cosmic emotion” remains in the psychic line of religion.

In fine, religion is the sum (a) of men’s ideas of their relation to the imagined forces of the cosmos; (b) of their relation to each other as determined by their views of that, or by teachers who authoritatively recast those views; and (c) of the practices set up by those ideas.

Under this definition there is room for every religion ever historically so-called,  from fetishism to pantheism, and from Buddhism to Comtism, without implicit negation of any claim made for any one religion to any moral attribute, save of course that of objective truth or credibility.

II. Comparison And Appraisement Of Religions

1. Early Forces Of Reform

The main obstacle to a “science of religion,” naturally, is the survival either of simple belief in a given religion or of sociological predilections set up by such a belief; and we have seen how a scholarly treatise may still be affected by one or the other. That a learned and thoughtful “Introduction to the History of Religion” should treat the whole vast drama of religious development up till the period of the Roman Empire as “the propaideutic of the world to Christ”  is perhaps not to be wondered at in view of English culture-conditions in general; but it is none the less unfortunate. A view of the history of religion which merely ignores or discredits on the one hand the entire religious life of the non-Christian world, and on the other the entire monotheistic or unitarian evolution in the Christian world, cannot meet the needs of scientific thought. The perorational statement that “of all the great religions of the world it is the Christian Church alone which is so far heir of all the ages as to fulfil the dumb, dim expectation of mankind,” is but a sectarian shibboleth; and the claim, “In it alone the sacramental meal commemorates by ordinance of its founder the divine sacrifice which is a propitiation for the sins of all mankind,” is an all-too-simple solution of the historic problem. We are being treated merely to a new adjustment of “Christian Evidence.”

On the side of science, again, there is certainly a danger that the necessary effort to eliminate partisanship and predilection may somewhat sway the balances. Dr. Jevons justly argues  that religion is no more to be conceived or classified in terms of primeval superstition than science is to be classified in terms of primeval animism and magic. But the very tactic of his own treatise, aiming as it does at certificating one set of developments on behalf of the special apparatus of the Christian Church, is a hindrance to the recognition of religion as an aspect of the process of civilisation. In terms of the analogy with science, religion ought to be to-day at a far higher level than it was in ancient Syria, or in the Græco-Roman decadence. But here the special-pleader reverts to the Newmanian thesis of “special genius,” arbitrarily placing the highest genius for religion in antiquity, and implying (apparently) that whatever genius there has been since is joyfully subservient to that.

Now, genius is certainly a factor in every line of mental evolution, in the sense that all marked mental capacity is a “variation”; and insofar as religions have been moralised or rationalised, genius for righteousness or for reason has clearly been at work. But just as certain as the fact of genius is the fact that it is in large part wasted; and we shall utterly misread the history of mankind if we conceive the “religious consciousness” as readily susceptible of impulses from the moral or rational genius of the gifted few.  On the contrary, nothing is harder than even the partial imposition of the higher view on the religious multitude; and this precisely because the crowd supposes (with the countenance of Dr. Jevons) that it has “inner consciousness” of the veracity of its congenital beliefs. King Akhunaton of Egypt, presumably, had such consciousness of the truth of his monotheism; but even his autocratic power failed to annul the inner consciousness of the polytheists around him, or, for that matter, the “direct consciousness” of the priests that their bread was buttered on the polytheistic side.

There is, I think, no known case in history of a “going” priesthood reforming its own cult, in the sense of willingly making an important change on moral lines. There is indeed abundant reason to credit priesthoods with the alteration of the rule under which the priest himself was the primary subject for sacrifice;  but the change consisted solely in laying the burden upon others. Apart from the presumptive changes of view set up in Israel during the exile, it seems to have been always by kings (or queens or heroes ) that human sacrifices were suppressed in antiquity, never by the choice of priesthoods.  Thus King Eurypylus is associated with the abolition of the human sacrifice to Artemis Triclaria;  Cecrops with the substitution of cakes for living victims to Zeus Lycæus; Iphicrates  and Gelon  with the attempted stoppage of human sacrifices at Carthage; King Diphilus with its cessation at Cyprus; Amosis with its abrogation at Heliopolis in Egypt.  In the ancient history of Japan, it is an Emperor who, about the beginning of the Christian era, recoils from the practice of burying servitors alive at the funeral of a prince; and it is on his appeal that one of his ministers hits on the device of substituting clay images.  Among the Samoans one legend ran that the human sacrifices to the Sun, which were destroying the race, were put an end to by the lady Ui giving herself up and being accepted by the pacified Sun as his bride; while another version makes Ui the daughter of the King of Manu’a, who gave up his daughter as a final sacrifice, and then abolished the practice.  In another case a Tongan queen, named Manu, saved alive a number of those destined for her husband’s cannibal feasts; and in yet another a cannibal God—presumably the priest or incarnation of a higher deity—is destroyed by the action of a daring youth.  The powerful King Finow of Tonga, again, showed a disposition to check some forms of human sacrifice;  and King Gezo of Dahome is credited with “materially reducing the number of human sacrifices throughout his kingdom”  during his lifetime. King Gelele, again, promising that “by and by, little by little, much may be done” in the way of curtailing the sacrifices, declared: “If I were to give up this custom at once, my head would be taken off to-morrow.”  Such was the power of the priests. Similarly the abolition of human sacrifices in ancient China was effected only by the action of humane princes; and the attempt in earlier times seems to have involved insurrection and desperate war.

Elsewhere such attempts are known to have failed, and the work of King Gezo of Dahome was undone after him. “The fetisheer is all-powerful in Dahome. The last monarch was notably desirous of modifying the horrors and the expenses of the national worship: his son has been compelled to walk in the old path of blood.”  The strongest characteristic of priesthoods is their conservatism; and though moral and religious innovators have arisen among them, practical moral reforms have always to be forced on them from the outside.  Where a powerful king resists them from humane motives, even if he put them down by force for the time, he is not unlikely to be the victim in the end.  Where substitutes have been made for human sacrifices among “nature-folk” without governmental pressure, as apparently among the Malays and some tribes in India, there is no priesthood to speak of; and these simple people have silently attained what passes for a great “reform” where “religious history” is concerned.

For every man of moral genius, probably, who has been able to modify for the better the form or course of an organised religion, there have been ten who were slain or silenced by its organisation. Indeed, if we reckon solely the ostensible historical cases of fortunate innovation on the direct appeal of genius, the balance is immeasurably the other way. What is more, the economic and social conditions in antiquity were such that the man who succeeded even indirectly in modifying a cult or creed for the better did so by some measure of fraud. Dr. Jevons, as we have seen, lightly decides that such reformers “have usually considered themselves......to be speaking, not their own words or thoughts, but those of their God.” If they did, be it said once more, they would only be feeling as did the common run of early priests in their normal procedure. The full significance of the case will come out much better if we say that reformers found they stood the best chance of a hearing when they professed to be speaking the words of the God. What this meant in the way of demoralisation it is depressing to surmise.

It is indeed customary of late to substitute for the exaggerated notion of “pagan” priestcraft that used to be held by most Christians and by some freethinkers the much more arbitrary notion of an absolute rectitude in the pristine “religious consciousness”; but critical science can accept no such fantasy. There are evidences of conscious fraud on the surface of the most primitive-looking cults known to us;  the majority of travellers unhesitatingly impute fraud to the magicians and priests of savage tribes; and while there is reason to believe that early man and savage man have a less clear sense than we of the difference between truth and falsehood (in this respect partly approximating to the child-mind), there is really no reason for supposing them less capable of resort to wilful deception. On the contrary, they seem in religious matters to have been more prompt at fabrication, in the ratio of the greater credulity they met with. Unless, then, we proceed with Dr. Jevons to make gratuitous exceptions in favour of all cases on the line of evolution of our own creed, we must conclude that the ancient conditions often, if not always, drove reformers to make-believe.

2. Reform As A Religious Process

The case may become clearer if we look for illustration to the phenomena of fictitious literature. It will hardly be suggested that the Semites and Greeks who wrote religious treatises or hymns and ascribed them to famous men of centuries before, were under a hallucination as to the source of their thoughts. They did but seek for them the passport of a name that challenged respect. Precisely, then, as the “prophetic” writer put his words in the mouth of a dead prophet (a common way of aiming at reforms), making him say, “Thus saith the Lord,” so in many cases at least the living prophet must have been perfectly conscious that his spoken words were “not the Lord’s, but his own.” In fact, the saner the prophet, and the saner his counsel, the more likely was he to know how he came by it; though his feeling that he was on the side of the God would greatly relieve his scruples about professing to be the God’s mouthpiece. The man who, on the other hand, was so far beside himself as to suppose that Omnipotence was speaking through him, was much less likely to have wise counsels to give. In any case, crazed or prudent, right or wrong, all alike ran the risk of being denounced by the others as “false prophets,”  and stoned accordingly. Thus reform was a matter either of persuading kings or of managing fellow-priests and fellow-worshippers; and genius for management would be fully as important as genius for righteousness.

In the case, for instance, of a substitution of animal for human sacrifices, or of dough-dolls for sacrificial animals or men or children, the reformer of a priest-ruled cult had to play at once upon the credulity and the self-interest of the worshippers. It is clear from the Hebrew books that for the early Hebrews as for the Phœnicians the first-born of man as well as of animals was at one time a customary sacrifice;  and the myth of Abraham and Isaac confesses the fact in the act of supplying a pretext for a change. In the story of the sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter, again, it is evident that human sacrifice must once have been normal to permit of the idea of the application of the vow to a human being; and the declaration that a special annual mourning was set up for the alleged tragedy of mischance is an ethical fiction. In all likelihood the ground of it was an annual sacrifice of a maiden, which was transmuted into an act of lamentation for one traditionally sacrificed. So with the obvious fiction of Joshua’s imprecating on the rebuilder of Jericho the curse of slaying his sons for the foundations:  the practice had clearly been normal, and the representing of it as a foredoomed horror is a late invention. And no less clear is it, from the story of the sacrifice of a virgin imposed by the Delphic Oracle on the Messenians in their war with the Spartans,  that the practice, wherever it originated, was religiously established among the early Greeks.

Such story-telling as that of the Isaac myth, and that of the suicide of the despairing Aristodemus, convinced that he had slain his daughter in vain,  was the natural device  of the humane reformer, who was much more likely to be relatively a rationalist than to be abnormally subject to religious ecstasies or trances. Mohammed is indeed a case to the contrary, he being credited with opposing the practice of female infanticide; but the very fact that in the Koran no tale is framed to carry the point is a confirmation of our view. In an old cult, a bald command to forego or reverse an established rite would be bewildering to the worshippers, whereas a myth describing a process of commutation would find easy acceptance where such a commutation was already agreeable to normal feeling.

Normal feeling, on the other hand, was often the matrix of the reformative idea. There was a natural tendency to relax human sacrifices in times of prosperity unless a zealous priesthood insisted on them;  and a long period of prosperity would make men loth to shed the blood of their own children. Thus either the political accident of a prolonged peace or the opening of a new era of government was the probable condition of the effectual arrest of child-sacrifice among the Hebrews; and the myth of Abraham and Isaac and the ram was in all likelihood framed at such a time. Its inclusion in a sacred book was some security against such a reversion to child-sacrifice as we know to have occurred among the Carthaginians in times of great distress or danger, after periods in which it was disused.  The same tendency is implied in the story—whether true or false—of a cannibal sacrament among the members of the conspiracy of Catiline.  Nations, like men, are apt to be driven to worse courses by terror and disaster;  and it is not only conceivable but probable that the Hebrews made their main steps towards religious betterment when they were temporarily razed from the list of the nations and set to cultivate their religious consciousness in a captivity which withheld them from political vicissitude without reducing them to slavery.

For the explanation of religious evolution, then, we must look not so much to genius for right thought as to genius for hitting the common taste or for outmanœuvring rival cults. By far the clearest case of cult- or creed-shaping by a single genius is that of Mohammed; and here, to the historical eye, it is the political expansion of Islam at a critical moment that makes the fortunes of the faith, not the rise of the faith that makes the fortune of the Moslems. Had not the Saracens at the moment of the successful emergence of Mohammed’s movement found their chance to overrun great territories of the enfeebled Christian empire, that movement might never have been aught but an obscure tribal worship, or might indeed have been speedily overlaid by the surrounding polytheism. It was the sense of triumphant opposition to Christian tritheism and Mary-worship and to Persian fire-worship that sharply defined the Moslem dogma; and once a religion has its sacred book, its tradition of triumph, and its established worship, the conservatism of the religious instinct counts for much more in preserving it than the measure of genius that went to the making of its doctrine. Every religion, in fact, sees supreme genius, both literary and religious, in its own Bible simply because it is such. No Christian can have a devouter conviction of the splendour of his sacred books than the Moslem enjoys concerning the Koran, the Brahman over the Vedas, or the Buddhist in respect of the large literature of his system.

3. Polytheism And Monotheism

Broadly speaking, religious evolution is far from being a steady progress, and, such as it is, is determined in great measure by political and social change. It was certainly a political process, for instance, that established a nominal monotheism among the Hebrews in Palestine; even as it was a political process that established a systematic polytheism in other States.  Primarily, all tribes and cities probably tended to worship specially a God, ancestral or otherwise, who was the “Luck” of the community and was at first nameless, or only generically named. Later comparison and competition evolved names; and any association of tribes meant as a matter of course a pantheon, the women of each taking their deities with them when they married into another clan. Ferocious myths and theological historiography in the Hebrew books tell amply of the anxiety of the priests of Yahweh at a comparatively late stage to resist this natural drift of things; and the history, down to the Captivity, avows their utter failure.

Neither in the attempt nor in its failure is there anything out of the ordinary way of religious evolution. While some theorists (with Renan) credit Israel with a unique bias to monotheism, others, unable to see how Israel could be thus unique, infer either an early debt to the higher monotheistic thought of Egypt or (with Ewald) an original reaction on the part of Moses against Egyptian polytheism. All three inferences are gratuitous. Renan’s thesis that a special bias to monotheism was set up in the early Semites by their environment is contradicted by all their ancient history, and is now abandoned by theologians.  The story of Moses in Egypt is a flagrant fiction; and “Moab, Ammon, and Edom, Israel’s nearest kinsfolk and neighbours, were monotheists in precisely the same sense in which Israel itself was” —that is to say, they too had special tribal Gods whom their priests sought to aggrandise. There is no reason to doubt that such priests fought for their Baals as Yahwists did for Yahweh. The point of differentiation in Israel is not any specialty of consciousness, but the specialty of evolution ultimately set up in their case through the conquest of Babylon by Cyrus.

All the earlier Palestinian groups tended to be monotheistic and polytheistic in the same way. When tribes formally coalesced in a city or made a chief, a chief God was likely to be provided by the “paramount” tribe or cult,  unless he were framed out of the local fact of the city, or the mere principle of alliance.  In the case of the Hebrews, the cult of Yah, or Yahu, or Yahweh, was simply a local worship sometimes aggrandised by the King, and documentally imposed on the fictitious history of the nation long afterwards.  In the miscellaneous so-called prophecies ascribed to Jeremiah there is overwhelming testimony to the boundless polytheism of the people even in Jerusalem, the special seat of Yahweh, just before the Captivity. Either these documents preserve the historic facts or they were composed by Yahwists to terrorise yet a later generation of Hebrew polytheists. Not till a long series of political pressures and convulsions had eliminated the variant stocks and forces, and built up a special fanaticism for one cult, did an ostensible monotheism really hold the ground in the sacred city.

That this monotheism was “religious” in the arbitrary and unscientific sense of being neither ethical nor philosophical it might seem needless to deny; but the truth is that it represents the ethic of a priesthood seeking its own ends. The main thesis of the prophetic and historical books is simply the barbaric doctrine that Yahweh is the God of Israel, whom he sought to make “a people unto him”; that Israel’s sufferings are a punishment for worshipping the Gods of other peoples; and that Yahweh effects the punishment by employing as his instruments those other peoples, who, if Yahweh be the one true God, are just as guilty as Israel. There is here, obviously, no monotheism properly so-called, even when the rival Gods are called non-Gods.  Such an expression does not occur in the reputedly early writings; and when first employed it is but a form of bluster natural to warring communities at a certain stage of zealotry; it is known to have been employed by the Assyrians and Egyptians as spontaneously as by the Hebrews;  and it stands merely for the stress of cultivated fanaticism in priest-taught communities. The idea that Yahweh used other nations as the “rod of his anger” against Israel and Judah, without desiring to be worshipped by those other nations, is a mere verbal semblance of holding him for the only God; and arises by simple extension of the habit of seeing a chastisement from the tribe’s God in any trouble that came upon it.

Here we are listening to a lesson given by priests. On the other hand, the politic course of conciliating the Gods of the foe, practised by the senate-ruled Romans, tells of the grafting of the principle of sheer worldly or military prudence on that of general religious credulity in a community where priesthood as such was but slightly developed. Morally and rationally speaking, however, there is no difference of plane between the Roman and the Hebrew conceptions.  Jeremiah, proclaiming that “the showers have been withheld” by “the Lord that giveth rain,”  is on that side, indeed, at the intellectual level of any tribal medicine-man; and if the writers of such doctrine could really have believed what their words at times implied, that the alleged one sole God desired the devotion of Israel alone, leaving all other peoples to the worship of chimæras, they would have been not above but below the intellectual and moral level of the professed polytheists around them.

On any view, indeed, they were morally lower in that they were potentially less sympathetic. So far as can be historically gathered, the early monotheistic idea, so-called, arose by way of an angry refusal to say, what the earlier Yahwists had constantly said and believed, that other nations had their Gods like Israel. There is thus only a quibbling truth in the thesis that monotheism does not grow out of polytheism, but out of an “inchoate monotheism” which is the germ of polytheism and monotheism alike.  The “inchoate monotheism” in question being simply the worship of one special tribal God, is itself actually evolved from a prior polytheism, for the conception of a single national God is relatively late, and even that of a tribal God emerges while men believe in many ungraded Gods. It is quite true that later polytheism arises by the collocation of tribal Gods; but there is absolutely no known case of a monotheism which did not emerge in a people who normally admitted the existence of a multitude of Gods. Even, then, if the first assertors of a Sole God were so in virtue of a special intuition, that intuition was certainly developed in a polytheistic life. And there is absolutely no reason to doubt, on the other hand, that in Israel as elsewhere there were men who reached monotheism by philosophic progression from polytheism.

The historic evolution of Jewish monotheism, however, was certainly not of this order. It was not even, as Robertson Smith with much candour of intention implied, “nothing more than a consequence of the alliance of religion with monarchy.”  Monarchy in Mesopotamia and Egypt never induced monotheism; and most of the Jewish kings were on the face of the record polytheists. The development, as we shall see, was post-monarchic and hierocratic; and the immediate question is whether the spirit which promoted it was either morally or intellectually superior. The judicial answer must be that it was not. Insofar as it was a sincere fanaticism, a fixed idea that one God alone was to be recognised, though he devoted himself to one small group of men, it partook of the nature of mono- mania, since it utterly excluded any deep or scrupulous reflection on human problems; and insofar as it was not fanatical it was simply the sinister self-assertion of priests bent on establishing their monopoly.

The contrary view, that a belief in the existence of the Gods of other tribes than one’s own is “obviously” a “lower form of faith than that of the man who worships only one god and believes that as for the gods of the heathen, they are but idols,”  must just be left to the strengthening moral sense of men. Such an assumption necessarily leads, in consistency, to the thesis that the man who believes his tribe has the One God all to itself does so in virtue of a unique “revelation”; and this is implied in the further description of true monotheism as proceeding on an “inner consciousness that the object of man’s worship is one and indivisible, one and the same God always.” On this basis, sheer stress of egoism is the measure of religiosity; and as the mere scientific reason cannot suppose such egoism to have been a monopoly of the Hebrews, it would follow, for ordinary minds, that revelation occurred in every separate cult in the world. It is indeed certain that even among polytheists a special absorption in the thought of one God is a common phenomenon.  Thus there are as many revelations as there are Gods and Goddesses, all alike being vouched for by the “spiritual depths of man’s nature.”

Unless rational thought is once more to be bridled by absolutism, such a line of reasoning must be classed with the pretensions of the medieval papacy. Men not already committed to dogma cannot conceive that a religion is to be appraised in utter disregard of its relation to universal morals, on a mere à priori principle as to the nobility of monotheism—especially when the principle is set up for one monotheism alone. It is merely a conventional result of the actual course of the evolution of the Christian system that quasi-monotheism as such should be assumed to be an advance on other forms of creed, with or without exception of the case of Islam. A certain intellectual gain may indeed arise where a cult dispenses with and denounces images; this, even if the variation arose, as is likely, not by way of positive reasoning on the subject, but by the simple chance of conservatism in a local cult which had subsisted long without images for sheer lack of handicraftsmen to make them.  But the gain is slight indeed when the anthropomorphic idea of the God’s local residence is stressed exactly as his imaged presence is stressed elsewhere, and when in every other respect his worship and ethic are on the common anthropomorphic level.  In any case it is clear that such monotheism could not be made by mere asseveration, with or without “genius,” to prevail against the polytheism of a population not politically selected on a monotheistic basis.

Even if it were, however, it would depend on further and special causes or circumstances whether the worshippers underwent any new moral development.  The conventional view unfortunately excludes the recognition of this; hence we have the spectacle of a prolonged dispute  as to whether savage races can ever have the notion of a “Supreme Being” or “Creator” or “High God,” or “All Father,” with the assumption on both sides that if the affirmative can be formally made out the savages in question are at once invested with a higher intellectual and spiritual character—as if a man who chanced to call his God “High” and “Good” thereby became good and high-thinking.  All the while Mr. Lang, the chief champion of the affirmative, avows that his Supreme-Being-worshipping savages in Australia would kill their wives if the latter overheard the “high” theistic and ethical doctrine of the mysteries.  Even apart from such an avowal, it ought to be unnecessary to point out that terms of moral description translated from the language of savages to that of civilised men have a merely classifying force, and in themselves can justify no moral conclusion in terms of our own doctrines, any more than their use of terms like “Creator” can be held to imply a philosophical argument as to a “First Cause.”

Two moral and intellectual tests at least must be applied to any doctrine or cult of “monotheism” before it can be graded above any form of polytheism: we must know whether it involves a common ethic for the community of the worshipper and other communities; and whether it sets up a common ethic of humanity within the community. Either test may in a given case be partially satisfied while the other is wholly unsatisfied. Thus we have the pre-exilic Hebrews and (perhaps) some modern Australian aborigines  affirming a “One God” who is “Creator” of all, and yet treating all strangers as outside of the God’s providence or law; while on the other hand we had till recently the Khonds, with their human sacrifices to the Goddess Tari and their doctrine of a Supreme God, proclaiming that the victim whom they liturgically tortured or tore to pieces was sacrificed for “the whole world,” the responsibility for its welfare having been laid on their sect.  To set such “monotheism” or such Soterism above late Greek or Roman polytheism or Hindoo pantheism is possible only under an uncritical convention.  We must try Hebrew religion by moral tests if we are to grade it in a moral scale with others; and by such tests it is found to be anti-moral in its very monotheism. As for its records, we find its most impressive myths (to say nothing of the others) duplicated among some of the primitive tribes in India in our own day. One such tribe ascribes to a sacred bull the miracle of Joshua, the turning back of the sun in its course; another has a legend that is a close counterpart of that of the Exodus—the dividing of the waters by the God to enable the tribe to escape a pursuing king.

Genius, no doubt, did arise in the shape of an occasional monotheist with both literary gift and higher ethical and cosmical ideals than those of the majority; and though there is reason to surmise lateness as regards the “prophetic” teachings of that order,  it is not to be disputed that such thinkers (whom Dr. Jevons would deny to be thinkers) may have existed early. But the broad historic fact remains that by the ostensibly latest prophet in the canon Yahweh is represented as complaining bitterly of the frauds committed on him in the matter of tithes and sacrifices. “Offer it now unto thy governor: will he be pleased with thee?” he is made to say concerning the damaged victims brought to his altar.  And the very prophet of the Restoration lays down, or is made to lay down, the old doctrine of the tribal medicine-man very much in the language of a modern company-promoter:—

And it shall come to pass that every one that is left of all the nations which came against Jerusalem shall go up from year to year, to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, and to keep the feast of tabernacles [more correctly booths].

And it shall be that whoso of all the families of the earth goeth not up unto Jerusalem to worship the King, the Lord of hosts, even upon them there shall be no rain.

And if the family of Egypt go not up, and come not, neither shall it be upon them; there shall be the plague [or upon them shall be the plague] wherewith the Lord will smite the nations that go not up to keep the feast of tabernacles.

If this were the whole or the principal historical clue to the motives of the Return, we should be moved to decide that that movement was simply a sacro-commercial venture, undertaken by men who had seen how much treasure was to be made by any shrine of fair repute for antiquity and sanctity. The other records, of course, enable us to realise that there entered into it the zeal of a zealous remnant, devoted to the nominal cult of their fathers’ city and the memories of their race. But with such a document before us we are forced to recognise, what we might know from other details in sacerdotal history to be likely, that with the zealots there went the exploiters of zealotry. It is certain that the men of the Return were for the most part poor: a Talmudic saying preserves the fact that those who had done well in Babylon remained there;  and, on the other hand, it holds to reason that among the less prosperous there would be some adventurers, certainly not unbelievers, but believers in Mammon as well as in another God.

Such men had abundant reason to believe in Yahweh as a source of revenue. The prophetic and historic references to him as a rain-giver are so numerous as to give a broad support to Goldziher’s theory that the God of the Hebrews had been a Rain- God first and a Sun-God only latterly; and in sun-scorched Syria a God of Rain was as sure an attraction as the Syrian Goddess herself, who in Lucian’s day had such treasure-yielding prestige. But even if we ignore the economic motive, obvious as it is, the teaching of Zechariah remains undeniably tribalist and crassly unedifying. To such doctrine as this can be attributed neither the intellectual nor the moral advantages theoretically associated with monotheism in culture-history. It is historically certain that science never made in Jewry any such progress as the monotheistic conception has been supposed to promote; and whatever general elevation of moral thought may have taken place among the teachers of later Jewry is clearly to be ascribed not to a fortuitous upcrop of genius—though that was not absent—but to the chastening effect of disaster and frustration, forcing men to deep reverie and the gathering of the wisdom of sadness. And to this they may have been in a measure helped by the higher ethical teachings current among their polytheistic conquerors and neighbours. There emerges the not discomforting thought that it is from suffering and the endurance of wrong, not from triumph and prosperity, that men have reached an ideal in religion which renounces all the egoisms of race and cult. Such an experience could have come to other victims of Babylon, brought within the Babylonian world before the Jews. But the trouble was that only there could a wisdom of self-renunciation subsist in any communal shape: in the Hebrew books, however introduced, it was forever doubled with the lore of savagery and tribalism, the worst religious ethic always jostling the best.

4. Hebrews And Babylonians

We must indeed guard against throwing on the side of Assyria and Babylon the balance of prejudice which has so long been cast on the side of Jewry. There can have been no more of general ethical or rational elevation in the great polytheistic States than in the small. But it lies on the face of the history of religion alike in India, Mesopotamia, and Egypt, that in great and rich polytheistic priesthoods there arose naturally a habit of pantheistic speculation  which at least laid the basis for a higher philosophy, science, and ethic; and it would be precisely the men of such enlarged views in the great Mesopotamian capitals who would most readily hold intercourse with the conquered or travelling Israelites. Certain it is that the cosmogony of Genesis is adapted directly from that preserved and partly developed in Mesopotamia from pre-Semitic times. Thus the so-called genius of the Hebrews for religion founded itself on the common Asiatic tradition of many thousands of years.

That the Hebrews should have learned anything worth learning from the Babylonians is a notion for which most people are still unprepared by education.  As it was put in the last generation by one apologist: “The moral chasm which separates us from heathens is so great that we can hardly realise their feelings.”  But when it is realised that the Hebrews adopted the mythic cosmology of their neighbours  it should be easier to conceive that they got from them ideas of a more advanced order.  And if the ethical tone of the “inchoate monotheism” of the Hebrew books be thoughtfully noted, it will be realised that only in the larger community was there any appreciable chance for the development of a relatively enlightened creed.

There had there arisen perforce a measure of tolerance in virtue of the very compulsion to polytheism. Early Assyria was as primitively tribal as early Israel: Assur was at least as loudly vaunted and as devotedly trusted as Yahweh; and his worshippers were presumptively not more but less ready to accept other Gods, precisely because they were so much more successful in their wars. Yet when by conquest city was added to city, and kingdom to kingdom, a systematic polytheism was as inevitable in Mesopotamia as in Egypt. There we see kings specially devoted to one God;  but when one king’s zeal leads him to impose his cult on all, the outcome is the razing of his own name, as well as his God’s, from the monuments  after his death. Whole populations could not be driven out of one worship into another; and as the sense of national unity arose, the priesthoods of the capitals would more and more readily accept the Gods of the outlying communities. The mere vicissitudes of warfare were always a reason, in military eyes, for desiring to widen the field of divine assistance; and no mere soldier or soldier-king could conceivably doubt the existence of the Gods of his enemies, however he might in battle affect to deride them. It was among the priests, or other thoughtful men of leisure, that there would arise the inference that all the God-names were but varying labels for one great non-tribal Spirit,  who might be conceived either (as among the Brahmans and Egyptians) pantheistically, or on the lines of the relation of the earthly autocrat to the states he ruled. And it was only through some such theorizing as this that any moral or intellectual progress could be made; for only on this line could monotheism become international.

It is part of the convention aforesaid to treat the preservation of the Hebrew creed as a gain to civilisation equal with that of the Greek victory over the invading Persians: the heritage of Jewish monotheism, it is assumed, is as precious as the heritage of Hellene literature, philosophy, and art.  If, however, there is to be any rational comparative appraisement of cults, it must be in terms of their service either to ethics or to science, including philosophy; and the service to ethics must finally be gauged in terms of human happiness and freedom. Now, we have seen that in the last pages of the Old Testament canon the religion of the Jews is tribal, trivial, narrow;  and it is the historic fact that to the day of the final fall of Jerusalem it remained tribalist and localist; a gospel of racial privilege and a practice of barbaric sacrifice; a law of taboo and punctilio, proclaiming a God of ritual and ceremonial, dwelling unseen in a chosen house, with much concern about its furniture and its commissariat. There is no ethical principle in its whole literature that is not to be found in the sacerdotal literatures of Egypt, Persia, India, or in the non-sacerdotal literature of China and Greece. And with the Hebrew ethic there is almost constantly bound up the ethic-destroying concept of the One God as the patron of one people, who only through them consents to recognise the rest of the human race.

It matters little whether, on the other hand, we think of the pantheistic or monotheistic element in the Egyptian and other systems as effective:  the question is whether either polytheism or monotheism lifted morals and promoted science and civilisation. Now, the polytheistic empires and the Hebrew State alike failed to reach any principle of international reciprocity, so that on that score they availed nothing against the fatal egoism of race; and as regards moral reciprocity within the State, any discoverable difference of code is rather in favour of the polytheists.  The every-day code of the Egyptian funerary ritual  supplies the main practical ethic of the Gospels, and is closely echoed in the probably non-Hebraic book of Job;  but while a similar social spirit is incidentally met with in the psalms and the prophets, the outstanding and emphasised ethic of the Hebrew historical and prophetic books is really that national and regal righteousness consist in worshipping the Hebrew God and renouncing the others, while to worship them is to commit the sin of sins. The abstractly pietistic sentiment of the Hebrew books, of which the most important element is the sense of contrition, belongs to the psalmodic literature of the Babylonians and the Egyptians alike;  and all that is called by pietists “cold” and “hard” and “materialistic” in other religious lore is abundantly paralleled within the covers of the Bible.

In one respect, indeed, the Hebrew ethic is distinctly more refined than that of the other creeds, that is to say, in its relation to the principle of sex; but here, it is quite clear, the general elevation is post-exilic, seeing that every form of sexual vice is constantly asserted to have prevailed in and around the cult of Yahweh before the Captivity. It thus appears that the Israelites either acquired their purer ethic among the Babylonians, where an ideal of purity certainly co-existed with a practice of sanctified licence,  or developed such an ethic as the result of the post-exilic struggle against the seductions and competition of the neighbouring cults. And from this doctrinal evolution, finally, there resulted, apart from the abolition of licentious worship as such, no betterment of the position of women  or the practice of men in Jewry as compared with Greece and Rome. Not only did normal sexual vice subsist as elsewhere,  but the Hebrew code of divorce was iniquitous, and the law for the special punishment of women offenders remained at least formally barbarous down to the Christian era.

5. Forces Of Religious Evolution

The true judgment on the comparative merits of religions is to be reached by noting the manner of their evolution; and when this is impartially done the student is led, not to any racial palm-giving on the score of “religious genius,” but to a new sense of the significance of social and political factors, and a compassionate realisation of the ill-fortune of all high aspirations among men. Genius for moral and philosophical thought as distinguished from literary expression is to be recognised here and there in all the old religious literatures; and even as regards literary genius there is little weight in estimates which appreciate the Hebrew books on the one hand in an enthusiastically eloquent rendering and on the other dimly divine the Gentile literatures through the cerecloths of dead scripts, whereof the scrupulous interpreters convey the very deadness as assiduously as the Elizabethans sought for transfigurement in translation. What is common to all the ancient literatures is the fatality by which the “general deed of man” determines the general thought.

In ancient Babylonia, the scholars are now agreed, there was a highly evolved yet not highly imperialised State, ruled by an enlightened Akkado-Babylonian king named Hammurabi,  two thousand three hundred years before our era, and long ages before historic Hellas was so named. This polity failed and fell, and on its ruins there rose successively the terrible and tyrannous empires of Assyria and later Babylon, wherein no doctrine of civil freedom could survive, though the code of Hammurabi remained the code of his people. Under such rule, whatever flower of moral genius might bloom in high or cloistered places, men in the mass could not be aught but fixedly superstitious, morally shortsighted, good only in virtue of their temperaments and the varying pressure of crude law and cruder custom. Whether they worshipped one God or many, a Most High or a Mediator, a Mother Goddess or a Trinity, their ethic was unalterably narrow and their usage stamped with primeval grossness; for wherever the life of fortuitous peace bred a gentler humanity and a higher civilisation, the Nemesis of empire and conquest hurled a new barbarism on its prey, only to adopt anew the old cults, the old lore, the old delusions. So, on the bases of civilisation laid by the old Sumer-Akkadians, the Babylonian and the Assyrian wrestled and overthrew each other time and again till the Persian overthrew the Babylonian; and all the while the nameless mass from generation to generation dreamed the old dreams, with some changes of God-names and usages, but no transformation of life, and no transfiguration of its sinister battlefield.

In no ancient State, certainly not in pre-exilic Jewry, did men think and brood more over religion, in theory and practice, than they did in Babylon;  and in such a hotbed “religious genius” must be presumed to have arisen. But while it could leave its traces in higher doctrine, and join hands fruitfully with nascent science, it could never restore the freer polity of Sumer-Akkadia, though it could humbly cherish the Akkadian dream that Hammurabi would come again,  as Messiah, to begin a new age. On the broad fields of sword-ruled ignorance there could thrive only such vain hopes and the rank growths of superstition. Better Gods were not to be set up, save in unseen shrines, on a worsening earth. As in Egypt and in Hindostan, religion was of necessity determined in the main by the life-conditions of the mass; and to the mass, or to powerful classes, priesthoods must always minister.

What Mesopotamian civilisation finally yielded to the common stream of human betterment was the impulse of its cosmogony and its esoteric pantheism to science and philosophy in the new life of unlit perialised Greece, and the concrete store of its astronomical knowledge, alloyed with its astrology. Its current ethic was doubtless abreast of the Ten Commandments and the Egyptian ritual of the judgment day; and its commerce seems to have evolved an adequate working system of law, besides a notable system of banking; but a civilisation which itself failed to reach popular well-being and international equity could pass on no important moral ideal to posterity. On the contrary, it bequeathed the fatal lust of empire, so that on the new imperial growth of Persia there followed, by way of emulation, that of Macedonia, to be followed by that of Rome, which ended in the paralysis and prostration of the whole civilisation of the Mediterranean world. And in the last stages of that decadence we find arising a nominally new religion which is but a fresh adaptation of practices and principles as old as Akkadia, and which is beset by heresies of the same derivation.

6. The Hebrew Evolution

At this point the Mesopotamian succession is seen to mingle with that of Judæa, which in turn falls to be conceived and appraised, as a total evolution, in terms of the conditions. As has been briefly noted above, Judaic monotheism was equally with Mesopotamian polytheism a result of political circumstances. The Jewish national history as contained in the sacred books is demonstrably a vast fiction to one half of its extent, as tested by the admissions of the other; and the fiction was a gradual construction of its priests and prophets in the interest of the cult which finally triumphed.

From the more ancient memories or documents which are preserved among the priestly fictions—records such as are included in the closing chapters of the book of Judges—we realise that after the alleged deliverance from Egypt and the fabulous Mosaic legislation in the wilderness the religion of Israel in Canaan was one of local cults, with no priesthood apart from the local functioning of single “Levites,” presumably members of a previous race of inhabitants who knew “the manner of the God of the land.”  These functionaries can best be realised as belonging to the lower types of Indian fakirs and Moslem dervishes.  And even in this primitive stage, when the only general political organisation was an occasional confederation of tribes for a given purpose,  some had already developed the abnormal vices associated with corrupt civilisations.  It is not unlikely that the beginnings of a centralised system occurred at a shrine answering to the description of that of Shiloh in the book of Samuel; but the legend of that “prophet” is more likely to be an Evemerised version of the fact that the God of the shrine was Samu-El, a form of the Sem or Samos of the Samaritans and other Semites, who is further Evemerised as Samson in the book of Judges.  At this stage we find the priests of the shrine notoriously licentious, and their methods primitively barbaric;  and the only semblance of a national or even tribal religion is the institution of the movable ark, a kind of palladium, containing amulets or a sacred stone, which might be kept by any chief or group strong enough to retain it  and able to keep a Levite for its service.

Even on the face of the official and myth-loaded history, it was by a band of ferocious filibusters at this level of religion that an Israelite kingdom or principality was first set up, and a shrine of Yah or Yahweh instituted in the captured Jebusite stronghold of Zion, where a going worship must already have existed. From such a point forward the kingdom, waxing and shrinking by fortune of war, would tend to develop commercially and otherwise on the general lines of Semitic culture, assimilating the higher Syrian civilisation wherever it met with it. The art of writing by means of the alphabet, received either from the kindred Phœnicians or direct from Babylon,  would be early acquired in the course of the traffic between the coast cities and the inland States; and with such culture would come the religious ideas of the neighbouring peoples.

It is impossible to construct any save a speculative narrative of the religious evolution out of the mass of late pseudo-history, in which names known to have been those of Gods are assigned to patriarchs,  heroes, kings, and miracle-working prophets, all in turn made subservient to Yahweh of Israel. But from the long series of invectives against other cults in the pseudo-historical and prophetic books, the contradictory fiats as to local worships in the Pentateuch,  and the bare fact of the existence of Yahweh’s temple at Jerusalem, we can gather clearly enough that that particular worship at that place was aggrandised by a few kings of Israel or of Judah, and relatively slighted by many others; that its priests did their utmost, but in vain, by vaticination, literary fraud, and malediction, to terrorise kings and people into suppressing the rival shrines and cults; that all the while their own had the degraded features of the rest;  and that their “monotheism” was merely of the kind ascribed by Flaubert to the sun-priests at Carthage, who derided their own brethren of the cult of the moon—though rage rather than derision is the normal note of the priests of Yahweh. The main motives of their separatism are visibly their perquisites and their monopoly.

There is a certain presumption that the story of the reforms of King Josiah—a movement which compares with that of Akhunaton in Egypt—is founded on fact, seeing that the record confesses Josiah to have died miserably, where the general burden of the history required him to prosper signally, as a reward for his Yahwism. It may well have been that the hostility he evoked among his subjects wrought his ruin. In any case it may be taken as certain that even had ho prospered, his effort to abolish the multitude of cults would have failed as Akhunaton’s did; and there is finally no disguise of the fact of its failure. Neither in Israel nor in Judah had even the merely monopolist monotheism of the Yahwist priests made popular headway; and if at this stage there did exist monotheists of a higher type, prophets whose aim was just government, wise policy, and decent living, they stood not a better but a worse chance of converting kings or commoners, rich or poor. The popular religion was determined by the popular culture-stage and life-conditions.

In Babylon, however, while many doubtless went over bodily to the native cults, the stauncher Yahwists would tend to be made more zealous by their very contact with the image-using systems; and the state of critical consciousness thus set up  would tend to give a certain new definiteness to the former less-reasoned hostility to the rival worships. The conception of Yahweh as incapable of being imaged would promote a kind of speculation such as had already occurred among the “idolatrous” priesthoods themselves; and that intercourse took place between the Yahwists and some Babylonian teachers is proved by their now giving a new significance to the Assyro-Babylonian institution of the Sabbath,  and developing their whole ceremonial and temple law on Mesopotamian lines.  Indeed, the simple fact that from this time forward the spoken language of Judæa became Aramaic or “Chaldee” is evidence that their Babylonian sojourn affected their whole culture.

With the anti-idolatrous Persian conquerors of Babylon, again, a Jewish sympathy would naturally subsist; and the favourable conditions provided for the captives by Cyrus may explain the apparent feebleness of the first Return movement. However that may be, it is probable that to the intervention of Cyrus is due the very existence of the later historic Judaism, and of the bulk of the Hebrew Bible. Had he not conquered Babylon, Hebrew “monotheism” would in all likelihood have disappeared like the other monotheisms of Palestine, absorbed by the mass of Semitic polytheism in the Semitic empire; for even when the Return began, the monotheistic ideal had no great force. It is true that the commercial success which began to accrue to many of the Jews in Babylon would dispose them afresh to magnify the name of Yahweh as the God of their salvation;  but a merely Babylonian Judaism, despite its Talmud, could have had no historic fruit. It is clear that, despite the preliminary refusal to join hands with the Samaritans and other populations around,  the immigrants gradually mixed more and more with the surrounding Semitic tribes, whose cults were singly of the same order as the Yahwist; and the old polytheism would thus have re-arisen but for the coming, a century later, of new zealots, whose sense of racial and religious separateness may have been sharpened at Babylon by competition, as well as by concourse, with the Mazdean cult. The alternation of the Persian phrase “God of heaven” with “God of Jerusalem”  in the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, with the final predominance of the former title in the latter book, suggests a new process of challenge and definition, which, however, would concern the majority of Yahwists much less than it did their theologians. What all could appreciate was the consideration that if the cult were not kept separate it would lose its revenue-drawing power.

When once the laxer elements had been eliminated, or at least sacerdotally discountenanced, the social conditions were vitally different from the pre-exilic. Gathered together on the traditional site for the very purpose of instituting the cult of Yahweh and no other, the recruited and purged remnant gave their priests such an opportunity for building up a hierocracy as had never before been in that region; and the need and the opportunity together wrought the evolution. To speak of the doctrine thus instituted as the product of a unique order of religious consciousness is to substitute occult forces for natural laws. Insofar as it had any philosophic content, any breadth of cosmic conception, it borrowed from the inductive monotheism or pantheism (the conceptions constantly and inevitably shade into each other) of the deeper thinkers of Babylon  or its Persian conquerors; and such a content was precisely that element in the creed which counted for least in its institution. What drew or held the votaries together was the concept of a God dwelling in the temple of Jerusalem, and there only; and conferring special favours in the matters of rainfall and healing on those who brought gifts to his shrine. The worshippers were no more transcendentalist than their priests. They were but hypnotised by the unexampled series of literary fabrications on which the creed was refounded—a body of written sacrosanct lore such as had never before been brought within the reach of any save priestly students.

We are in danger, perhaps, of unduly stigmatising the Hebrew forgers when we consider their work by itself, keeping in mind the enormous burden of delusion and deceit that it has so long laid upon mankind. In their mode of procedure there was really nothing abnormal; they did but exploit the art of writing—first acquired by the race for commercial purposes—on the lines of immemorial priestly invention; and we must not pass upon them a censure that is not laid on the mythologists and scribes of Egypt or the theologers and poets of India and Greece. Our business is to understand, not to blame, save insofar as a sophistic praise still compels demur. And the historical processus may be sufficiently realised in noting, without binding ourselves to, the conclusions broadly reached by scholars a generation ago, to the effect that the first collected edition of the pretended Mosaic law, comprised in the Pentateuch and the book of Joshua, contained some eighty chapters; and the second, over a century later, a hundred and twenty; ninety more being added afterwards.

Such a literary usage, indeed, gave a unique opportunity to literary and religious genius, and it was variously availed of. Lyrics of religious emotion, commonly ascribed to the semi-mythic David, to whose legend apparently accrued the lyric attributes of the God of that name;  sententious and proverbial wisdom, similarly fathered on Solomon; dramatic discussion of the ethical dilemma of all theism, in the singularly isolated and foreign-seeming book of Job; and express argumentation against the fanatical racial separatism of the post-exilic theocracy, in the hardly less isolated romances of Ruth and Jonah—all this goes with the mass of pseudo-history, cosmology, and prophecy, to make up the library which we call the Hebrew Bible. It may be taken as certain that a body of students familiar with the whole range of such a literature had from it an amount of intellectual stimulation not theretofore paralleled in the Semitic world; and from the rabbinical life of centuries we might reasonably expect some fine fruit of ethical and philosophic thought. But again, on close inquiry, we become sadly aware of the fatality of the evolutionary process, in little Jewry as in the great States that decayed around.

7. Post-Exilic Phases

If we look first to the vogue of Biblical Judaism in Palestine, we have to note that from the consummation of the Return the cult was jealously closed not only to the people of Samaria, who presumed to worship a Yahweh on their own sacred hill, but to the country people around who had been left behind by the Assyrian conqueror.  The sociological conditions were thus such that, when the first force of the new conditions was spent, intellectual anchylosis was bound to set in. The learned class, devotedly absorbed in a literature regarded as divinely inspired, must rapidly become in general incapable of new thought; and their religious philosophy could of itself make no further progress. This is what is seen to take place. But for their traditional rejection of images—a principle in which they had been encouraged by the Mazdeans whom they had met at Babylon—they would even have reverted by that path to normal polytheism. As it was, remaining peculiar in this respect, they did but think of their God as an imageless yet anthropomorphite being who made his home in their temple and either ignored or detested the neighbour nations which had idols. Save for higher speculations which could not appeal to the majority even of the student class, they made no progress towards a consistent and comprehensive monotheism.

What extension of speculative thought occurred was rather in the direction of dualism. The doctrine of the Adversary, developed either from the Persian Ahriman or the Babylonian figure of the Goat-God,  or else from both, begins to figure in the later writings; and, once dramatically installed in the brilliant book of Job, was sure to figure more and more in the general consciousness. All the while, the normal eastern ideas of multitudinous angels and evil spirits had never been absent, though they were denounced when associated with other cults; and in point of general superstition there can have been little to choose between Jew and Gentile.  On the side of the belief in angels, again, the very desire to spiritualise and elevate the deity of the older traditions led to the imagining of new divine beings. Among the Samaritans, who, setting out with a Pentateuch, developed quite as much zeal as had the Judeans for the God of Israel, the expression “angel of God” or “angels of God” was frequently substituted for “God” or “Gods” in Genesis; and the Chaldee paraphrasts did as much, at times adding further “the word of the Lord” or “the Shekinah” as a compromise where “angel” seemed inadequate.  Similarly the later Jews read “angels of God” where their sacred books inconveniently spoke of “Gods.”  In the book of Nehemiah, yet again, we have the mention of the “Good Spirit” of God,  an idea apparently derived from Mazdeism,  and sure to set up a special divine concept. Such conceptions in all likelihood grew up by way of analogy from the phenomena of monarchical government  in which the “word” or “hands” or “eye” of the autocrat became names for his chief functionaries or representatives.

It would be hard to show that a “monotheism” which really accepted, as absolutely as any polytheism, a vast plurality of divine beings, had any moral or spiritual efficacy in virtue of merely setting forth a tyranny of a Supreme God over hosts of angels, with a rebel party included, rather than a kind of feudal family oligarchy like that of Olympus, in which the Chief God is partially thwarted by the others. The difference is much more one of political habit and outlook than of either ethic or philosophy. The Jews derived from Babylon the idea of a Creator-God;  and if that be the valuable principle in monotheism their polytheistic kindred are entitled to the credit. So with the idea of a Supreme-God:  the Hebrew specialty lay solely in putting a greater distance between God and Angels than did the Mesopotamian, and in rejecting (for the time being) the notions of triads and of a divine family. So little difference was there between the two states of mind that the Christian Fathers freely applied the term “Gods” to the Angels of the Judæo-Christian system.  For the rest, it is significant that the beginnings alike of rational science and of rational ethics were made, not among the Hebrew monotheists, but among Babylonian and Greek polytheists, who went far in cosmic and moral philosophy while the post-exilic Jews were devotees of a God whose passionate and capricious will took the place of both natural and moral law.

A “consistent, remorseless, naked monotheism,” in short, never prevailed among the Jews any more than in any other people. Such a concept, save in the case of scattered thinkers, as often Gentiles as Jews, has never doctrinally or conceptually flourished till the rise of modern Deism, Islam having in turn capitulated to the notion of inferior good and evil spirits. Some small and isolated communities in antiquity probably approached nearer than the Jews ever did to the bare notion of a single (tribal) God, without “sons,” or angels, or a Chosen One, and without an Adversary; and the ancient pantheists, tending as pantheism usually does to repass into theism, at times reached in that way a far purer form of monotheism  than that of the Hebrew books.

While the creed, despite its rooted traditionalism, was thus of its own nature lapsing into new indirect forms of polytheism, the secular problem of political life was no more being solved in Jewry than elsewhere. In the day of the Restoration we already find the rich taking usury from the poor;  and in the last of the canonical prophets we find crudely indicated the pressure of that deep doubt as to the God’s good government which makes the theme of the book of Job. That the faithful deceive the deity and each other, and that many despair of Yahweh’s rule —such are the testimonies of the closing pages of the Old Testament. Only the cohesive power of ceremonialism, the unchanging pressure of popular superstition, and—last, but certainly not least—the economic success of the shrine, maintained the priestly State. There had presumably now begun among the dispersed Jews the rule of sending gifts to the temple, a practice which in a later age made an economic basis for a whole order of rabbins and scribes; and on the same basis there would be partly maintained a considerable population of pauper devotees. Under such circumstances the high-priest, another Babylonian adaptation, was practically what the king had been in the past; and the post was intrigued for, and at a pinch murdered for,  like any other eastern throne.

One indirect result of the priestly policy was the development of the faculty of the Jews for prospering in other lands. Placed as they were, a small community among great States, it behoved them, like the Dutch of to-day, to be linguists for the sake of their commerce; and when the post-exilic priesthood, like that of post-Reformation Scotland, found their account in teaching their people to read the sacred books, they were at once preparing them to succeed among the less-schooled populations around and creating an abnormal tie between the dispersed ones and the sacred city.

But, on the other hand, the surrounding cultures could not but affect the Jewish. On the Persian overlordship followed the Macedonian; and where the similar Persian creed had failed to do more than modify the Jewish, the manifold Greek culture which spread under the Seleucids and the Ptolemies penetrated Syrian life in all directions. In that world of chronic strife and deteriorating character, where already all men had attained the fatal temper, seen later at large in decadent Rome, of acquiescence in the rule of the most successful commander as such, the tranquil cynicism of Greek cosmopolitan culture was as appropriate in Jewry as elsewhere. So far did the assimilation go that the hierarchy at length was definitely faced by a Hellenising party, convinced of the futility of the tribal religion, even as the pre-exilic Yahwists had been; and high-priests were found to take the bribes and do the work of heathenism. There was, as we have seen, no moral or philosophic elevation in the Judaic cult to countervail intellectually such a movement; and had not Antiochus Epiphanes, in a spirit of fanaticism wholly alien to the general policy of the Diadochi, proceeded to coerce and outrage the zealots of Jerusalem, their worship would have dwindled very much as it did in the old time. But that act elicited the singular genius of the Maccabean family, under whom the desperate tenacity of the most devoted part of the race at length triumphed over its foes to the point of re-establishing a State in which the king was priest, as previously the priest had been king. In the face of such a consummation, all the promises and pretensions of the old cult seemed newly justified; and a newly exultant faith emerged.

8. Revival And Disintegration

Thus for a second time was a Yahwist remnant selected, the bulk of the educated class passing over to the neighbouring polities, and their place being taken by new popular material of a more zealous order. Judaism was in fact the product not of a racial bias but of a socio-political selection, such as might have taken place under similar conditions in any race whatever; and ever since the Dispersion the same selective process has continued, the unzealous Jews always tending to be absorbed in the populations among whom they live. Something similar has actually occurred among the Parsees. Even, however, if the Jewish evolution were as unique as it is conventionally represented to have been, the special case would no more be an exception to universal sociological law than is the phenomenon of marsupials to biological law. There has simply been survival in the Judaic case, chiefly in virtue of the fact of Sacred Books, where similar creed-tendencies were usually annihilated under the ancient regimen of tyrannous violence. One result of the desperate frequency of bloodshed and massacre in the Jewish sphere was a passion for fecundity, as against the need for restraint of numbers that was felt in the City States of Greece in their progressive period; and the Jews thus abounded, and carried their religion with them, where other creeds died out.

Irresistible, however, is the law of strife among unenlightened men, and no less so the law of change among all. In the stress of the Maccabean struggle we find the doctrine of the Messiah already so far developed that a secondary God is the due result. The Christ of the Book of Enoch is substantially a deity: “before the sun and the signs were created, before the stars of heaven were made, his name was called before the Lord of the Spirits”;  he is at once Chosen One, Son of God and Son of Man; he is judge at the Day of Judgment;  and as “Son of the Woman”  he clearly relates to the Babylonian myth in the Book of Revelation. And seeing that “in him dwells the Spirit of Wisdom” he is in effect at once the Sophia and the Logos of the Apocrypha and of the Platonising Philo Judæus.

But the evolution did not end there. Under the new Asmonean dynasty there broke out in due course all the violences native to the hereditary monarchy of the ancient world; and once again the play of outside influences, which the feuds of competitors for the throne brought to bear, affected the hereditary creed within its central sphere. The Greek translation of the sacred books became the normal version; and to that version were added books not admitted into the Hebrew canon, some of them elaborating new theological conceptions. As the Jewish State came more and more into the whirl of the battling empires of Seleucids and Ptolemies, soon to be crushed by Rome, the dynasty of king-priests passed away before the energy of new competitors; and once more kings, not even Jewish by descent, subsisted beside high-priests of their own choosing. At length, under the Idumean Herod the Great, a man born to rule amid plots and feuds, to drown rebellions in blood and to outwit enemies by outgoing them in audacity, Eastern craft exploited at once Greek culture and Roman power with such address that Hellenism gained ground against the utmost stress of organised conservatism; while among the common people, conscious of an evil fate, movements of quietism and asceticism and Mahdism undermined the ancient prestige of the temple-cult. Once again the tribal faith was being disintegrated.

One of the movements emerging though not originating at this time is the cult associated with the quasi-historic name of Jesus. As organised Yahwism had been retrospectively fathered on the fictitious legislation of Moses, so the Jesuine cult is in turn fathered on Jesus in a set of narratives stamped with myth, and incapable of historical corroboration even when stripped of their supernaturalism. To the eye of comparative science the central feature in the cult as it appears in the oldest documents is the eucharist, an institution common to many surrounding religions, and known to have been in ancient and secret usage among sections of the Jews.  Descending perhaps from totemistic times, it invariably involved some rite or symbolism of theophagy, or eating of a divine victim; and a sacrificed God-man was the natural mythic complement of the ritual.

In the case of the Jesuine cult, an actual historic person may or may not have been connected with the doctrine; and for such a connection there is a quasi-historic basis in an elusive figure of a Jesus who appears to have been put to death by stoning and hanging about a century before the death of Herod.  On the other hand the name in its Hebrew and Aramaic forms had probably an ancient divine status, being borne by the mythic Deliverer Joshua, and again by the quasi-Messianic high-priest of the Restoration. It was thus in every aspect fitted to be the name of a new Demigod who should combine in himself the qualities of the Akkadian Deliverer-Messiah and the Sacrificed God of the most popular cults of the Græco-Roman, Egyptian, and west-Asiatic world. In this aspect only is it to be historically understood. But before considering it in its type, we have to consider it in its genetic relation to Judaism, and so complete our estimate of the evolution of that cult to the moment of its definite arrest.

That the cult of Jesus the Christ was being pushed in rivalry with that of pure Judaism among the Jews of the Dispersion before the destruction of the Temple appears from the nature of the oldest documents as well as from the tradition. Such competition was the more easy because the life of the synagogue was largely independent of that of the central temple, and craved both rites and teaching which should make up for the sacrificial usages which were the chief institutions at Jerusalem. But that Jesuism could have successfully dispensed with the main cult among either Jews or Gentiles while the Temple remained standing is inconceivable. When it did begin to make substantial progress late in the second century of its own era, its main prestige undoubtedly came from the Jewish sacred books; and had the Temple been allowed to remain in active existence, that prestige would have accrued to it as of old. Conceivably, however, there might have happened a development of Jesuism under Judaism, the new cult exploiting the old and being tolerated or adopted by it. In that case there would have occurred yet once more a disintegration of a quasi-monotheism in terms of a virtual polytheism. And towards such disintegration marked progress had been made under the ægis of Judaism.

Note has already been taken of the entrance of new and practically polytheistic ideas into the cult at the very moment of its ostensible purgation of polytheistic tendencies; and in the course of four centuries these ideas had been much developed. To the “Good Spirit” of Nehemiah and the Logos or “Word” of intermediate writers had been added the personified Sophia or “Wisdom” of the books of Proverbs and Ecclesiasticus and Enoch; and while the Samaritans seem to have conceived, on old Semitic lines, of a female Holy Spirit, symbolised like several Gods and Goddesses by a dove,  the Jews proper who came into contact with Greek thought developed with the help of the Platonists the originally eastern notion of the Logos into a new Jewish deity.  In their anxiety to avoid Goddess-worship, they even represented the Deity as generating the Son out of himself (ἐκ γαστρὸς);  and those who later made Jesus speak of “My Mother the Holy Spirit” were unable to prevail against the old prejudice. It was thus on Judaically laid lines that Jesuism ultimately completed its theology. But had not the Temple been overthrown, either the Judaic evolution would have kept the Jewish Logos in organic relation to the Yahwist worship and sacred books, or the movement would have been overshadowed.

All would have depended on its economic sustenance. Had it promised a useful reinforcement to the Jewish high-priest’s powers of attracting proselytes and revenue,  it would doubtless have been exploited in the name of Judaism, very much as it was by the early Christists; and in view of the historic facts it is reasonable to say that had their system survived, the temple-priests would so have exploited it. Inasmuch, finally, as the element of Messianism, reduced to a form of purely theological Soterism, was actually exploited by the Christists without specially calling forth the wrath of Rome, the temple priesthood might have done as much. It was in fact the catastrophe of the destruction of Jerusalem, provoked by the desperate courage of the zealots of the old faith, that alone made possible the separate rise of Christism and its ultimate erection into the State religion of the declining Roman empire.

To say this, however, is to say that Jewish monotheism so-called—in reality a tribal system using a monotheistic terminology—was from first to last an unstable doctrine, always running risk of dissolution into polytheism, avowed or sophisticated; that it was so

dissolving at the time of the destruction of its temple; and that its offshoot, Christism, is a resultant of the process. If then monotheism is as such intrinsically superior to other forms of religion, Christianity is one of the inferior faiths, representing as it does the dissolvent process in question. To the eye of science, of course, it is neither inferior nor superior save in respect of its ethical and intellectual reactions; and towards an estimate of these we proceed by a comparative study of the religious principles on which Christism is built up.

Meantime, while the Hebrew literature obviously plays a large part in the intellectual colouring of the new Christist world, it would be difficult to show that Judaism made for higher life in the post-Roman world. So far as it made proselytes, it was by appealing to normal superstition, to belief in the mysterious potency of a particular God-name, and of the rites of his cult.  To scientific and philosophical thought it passed on no moralising and unifying conception of life, for it had none such to give. Moslem monotheism, in furnishing a temporary habitat for scientific thought,  did more for civilisation both directly and indirectly; but Moslem thought had to be fertilised by the re-discovered philosophy of Greece before it could attain to anything. And insofar as a philosophical and scientific monotheism arose in the medieval period, it inherits far more from Greek thought—which indeed had early undergone Semitic influences—than from Hebrew dogma.

As for the direct influence of Judaism on life, the most favourable view is to be reached by noting that the most applauded moral teaching of the Gospels is either Judaic or a Judaic adaptation of other codes. The first Gospel-makers did but put in the mouth of the demigod sayings and ideals long current in Jewry. But this again amounts to saying that men with ideals in Jewry were glad to turn to a new movement in which their ideals might have a place, finding the established cult sunk in ceremonialism. And when we contemplate the mass of its ceremonial law, the endless complex of taboo and sacrifice and traditionary custom and superstition, we can but say that if men were good under such a regimen it was in spite of and not in virtue of it. Moral reason is there outraged at every turn; and the anti-sacrificial doctrines of the prophets were stedfastly disregarded to the end. If it be suggested that in such a system religion has got rid of the irrational element in taboo, and left only what is “essential to religion and morals,” we can but recall the classic case of the Briton’s verdict on the folly of the French nation in making the uniforms of its army “white, which is absurd, and blue, which is only fit for the artillery and the blue-horse.”

We come within sight of the truth when we listen to Renan’s dictum that of the Jewish race we may say the very best and the very worst without fear of error, since it presents both extremes. Therein the Jewish race is simply on all fours with all others, as Renan might easily have realised if he could once have got rid of the racial presupposition in his moral estimates. Judaism, in short, wrought no abnormal development in thought or life; and its very failure was on the lines of the failures of the systems and civilisations around it. The champion of the current creed, though an expert in Greek lore, resorts to the conventional judgment  that “the Greek with his joyous nature had no abiding sense of sin.” It is the dictum also of Renan: “A profound sentiment of human destiny was always lacking to the Greeks”: they had “no arrière pensée of social disquietude or melancholy”: their childlike serenity was “always satisfied with itself”: “gaiety has always characterised the true Hellene.”  A closer student of Greek religion than Renan, and one perhaps more sympathetic than Dr. Jevons, declares of this doctrine: “It is the absolute contrary of the facts I seek to set forth.”  And two of the Germans who have studied Greece most closely and most independently have agreed in the verdict that “The Greeks were less happy than most men think.”  Their verdict is likely to cancel the conventional formula for those who will weigh both in critical balances. It was the Greeks, when all is said, who passed on to Christianity its type of torturing fiend:  it was the Greek adoption of Christianity, “the religion of sorrow,” that preserved to the world that growth from a pagan germ on Judaic soil; and it was “the Greek,” finally, who constructed the Christian creed.

9. Conclusion

There has thus emerged from a survey of the comparative evolution of religions the conclusion that not only do all undergo change in spite of the special religious aversion to change, but all evolve by the same laws, their differences being invariably reducible to effects of environment. Of this the decisive proof is the fact that, under the very roof of a professed monotheism, there arose as aforesaid a secondary God-idea on the lines of a normal process of polytheism. The law of the process is everywhere an interposition of a new God, evolved by later psychosis, between the worshippers and the earlier God, so long as the God-idea remains a psychic need. Only the violent rupture with Christism, and the ensuing feud, prevented Judaism from obeying the law in the normal manner: what happened was that on the severance of the new cult from the old, the older deity was himself modified, with, for a time, somewhat grotesque results.  But for Christists the new God stands to the old in the convenient relation that was normal in the original environment—that of son. Even as Apollo, and Athenê, and Attis, and Herakles, and Dionysos, had to become children of Zeus, and Merodach the son of Ea, and Khonsu the son of Amun at Thebes,  and Mithra the son of Ahura-Mazda, the Judæo-Greek Logos had to be the son of Yahweh, the anti-Judaic animus of the Gnostics failing to oust the already formed myth.

Such an evolution stands in all cases alike for the simple need of the worshipper who has ceased to relate fully to the old environment, and is appealed to by a cult coming from an environment like his own, or adapts his old God to a new moral climate. In the oldest systems known to us such modifications are seen taking place. Already in the Vedas, Indra, originally a God of thunder and storm, has been “touched with emotion” till he becomes of the order of the Beloved Gods, giving and receiving the love of men;  and still his cult was in its own sphere largely superseded by that of Krishna,  who could better be made to play the part. In Egypt, again, Osiris is visibly made to meet the need for a “nearer God” by assuming new characteristics from age to age;  and yet, after millenniums of possession, he seems to have waned before Serapis, who in turn ceded, not without force, to Jesus.  All the while, indeed, inferior deities were popular by reason of the same general need for a God “near at hand.”

In the so-called “Aryan” religions the process is essentially the same. Apollo had to supervene on Zeus, as Zeus had done on Kronos; and “that father lost, lost his,” in a sufficiently primitive myth. Where new culture-contacts follow each other rapidly, and the rites of one accredited Son-God fail to meet the newest psychic needs, another is given him as a brother; and so Dionysos, grouped in another triad, stands alongside of Apollo. This is accomplished in spite of the most furious resistance of kings and men who see in the new cult only evil and madness; till in time the priests of Apollo, who can have been no less resentful, give it a place in their chief temple.  In all such developments, the new God partially supersedes the older,  whatever formalities be maintained; and no further explanation is needed for the fact, so fallaciously stressed in some modern propaganda, that many savages recognise a Supreme God or Creator to whom they do not sacrifice or pray.  The Supreme God, so to speak, has retired from business, in virtue not of any superiority of character but of the law of divine superannuation.

Nor is there any limit to the process of substitution save in the cessation of the need. All heresy, all dissent, is but a subsidiary phase of the process which in old time evolved new Gods. The early Church could live down the manifold imaginations of Gnosticism, because they were framed for the speculative minds, and such minds tended to disappear as the intellectual decadence continued; but only after long convulsions, desperate persecution, and much exhaustion, could it live down its more intimate heresies; and when Arianism and Manichæism seemed at length destroyed, it was only to rise again in new forms, philosophic on the one side, popular on the other.

And the Gods survive in the ratio of their capacity to meet either order or need—that is to say, in the ratio of the adaptive skill and economic address of their prophets and priests. Without such adaptation they are insalvable. In the orthodox Christian trinity, framed under Judaic restrictions, the Holy Spirit has been from first to last, technically speaking, a failure, being for all practical purposes superseded by the Virgin Mother, and for all philosophic purposes merged in the Logos on the one hand and in the Father-God on the other. But just as Jesus tended to supersede Yahweh, so Mary in large measure tended to supersede Jesus, who is seen to have become more inaccessible and supernal as his Mother was made in her turn to play the part of Mediator. There are even traces in later medieval art of a tendency to make Mary’s mother, Saint Anna, take the place of the Father in a new trinity; and the similar tendency to create a secondary trinity out of the human father and mother and son, Joseph and Mary and Jesus, is not yet exhausted.  It depends upon the total fortunes of civilisation whether that tendency shall be realised, or be arrested by the culture-forces which are at present disintegrating all theistic thought.

In fine, Christ-making is but a form or stage of God-making, the Christs or Son-Gods being but secondary Gods. Of necessity they are evolved out of prior material—the material, it may be, of primitive cults to which men reverted in times of distress and despair of help from the Gods in nominal power; but when the reversion persists the old material is transformed, and the result is a new God who, Antæus-like, has fresh vitality through contact with the primary sources of religious emotion, but is turned to the account of new phases of emotion, moral and other. Thus in the Hellenised cult of the Thrakian Bacchus, out of the very riot of savagery, the reek of blood and of living flesh torn by the hands and teeth of wine-maddened Mœnads, there arises the dream of absorption in the God, and of utter devotion to his will, even as we meet it in the suicide-seeking transports of the early Christians.  And thus, on the æsthetic side of the evolution, from the rude block of the rustic Beer-God  there is ultimately fashioned, under the hands even of the unbelieving Euripides, the gracious form of the calm God of Joy:—

No grudge hath he of the great;

No scorn of the mean estate;

But to all that liveth His wine he giveth,

Griefless, immaculate.

And even such a mystery as Hellenic hands wrought out of the hypostasis of the Beer-God, Hellenistic hands could shape from that of a man of sorrows, moulding from the sombre figure of the human sacrifice, slain a million times through æons of ignorance, a God of another and a more enduring cast. In the understanding of this secondary process lies the comprehension of the history of what may be conveniently termed “culture-religion” as distinguished from the “Nature religion” studied under the head of anthropology. In terms of this distinction we may say that hierology proper begins with the typically secondary Gods, where anthropology in the ordinary sense ends.  But it is essential to a scientific view that we remember there has been no break in the evolution, no supernatural or enigmatic interposition; and this will be sufficiently clear when we study the evolution of the secondary Gods in detail.

III. The Sacrificed Saviour-God

1. Totemism And Sacraments

There is an arguable case for the theory that the belief in a dying and re-arising Saviour-God, seen anciently in the cults of Adonis, Attis, Herakles, Osiris, and Dionysos, originated obscurely in the totem-sacraments of savages who ate a sacred animal in order to preserve their identity of species with it.  There is, however, a much stronger case for the simpler theory that the belief in question originated on another line in the practice of sacrificing by way of sympathetic magic a victim who, as such, became a God, but was not supposed to rise again in his own person.  The first of these theories is in the nature of the case incapable of proof;  and it is not necessary, for a rational comparison and appreciation of the historic cults, to establish it, any more than to assume that either derivation excludes the other. We should profit little by our knowledge of the manifold God-making powers of early man if we supposed that any given Saviour-cult could originate only in such a line or lines of descent; and in point of fact the proposal to hark back to totemism seems to overlook the fact that a sacramental meal ostensibly can originate apart from totemism.

It is not plausible to suppose, for instance, that the eating of bread in a primitive eucharist implied that the partakers originally had the corn for their special totem;  or (supposing the God Dionysos to have been a simple deification of the sacramental Soma or Haoma, as Agni was of the sacrificial fire)  to conclude that the first Soma-drinkers made their ritual beverage on the score that they were of the grape or any analogous totem. Both inductively and deductively we seem rather led to conclude that totems might or might not be sacramentally eaten; and that animals like men might be sacramentally eaten without any reference to totemism. It is apt to be forgotten that at bottom the word “sacred” (hieros) equates with “taboo”; and that an animal might be made taboo for a variety of reasons—as being too valuable to kill, or as being unwholesome, or as being for occasional killing only.

On the difficult subject of totemism, the suggestion may here be incidentally offered that the totem was in origin merely the group’s way of naming itself.  Such group-names were as necessary as individual names; and while a person could readily be labelled from the place of his birth or any family incident at that period, or by a physical or moral peculiarity, clans of the same stock could with difficulty be distinguished in the nomadic state save by arbitrary names, which could best be drawn from the list of natural objects. Indeed, it is hard to conceive how otherwise nomadic clans could first name themselves. What other vocables were available?  Spencer’s suggestion that totemism originated in misinterpretation of nicknames  raises the difficulty that nicknames presuppose names. Spencer fully realises this in the case of individuals, but overlooks it in the case of thegroup, since he apparently supposes the tribal totem-name to come through the nickname of an already-named individual. When we realise that for sheer lack of other words the early group could hardly have any name whatever save from a natural object, and when we so recast the explanation, the objection which meets the first form of the nickname theory—that it ascribes too much latitude to verbal misunderstanding —falls to the ground. In the primitive state, we must presume, objects and actions were first named by onomatopœia, or else, sensations and actions being first so named, objects were metaphorically named from sensations and actions;  and so with attributes. A definite doctrine as to beginnings is hard to justify, and is not here essential: it suffices to realise that objects would be somehow named before individuals and groups were, whether or not individuals were named before groups. And while persons might readily be named or nicknamed Tall or Short, Straight or Crooked, Quick or Slow, tribes could only in rare instances be so distinguished; while nothing would be more easy than for one family or clan to say to another, You are the Wolves, we the Bears; you the Trees, we the Birds, and so on.

Some such agreement would be necessary; for the mere bestowal of names of whim or derision by groups or clans on each other—sometimes suggested as an explanation of the phenomenon—would yield a multitude of names for each group.  The same difficulty meets Spencer’s theory that the belief in animal descent came through a nickname, and the totem symbol from that. Spencer, I repeat, had not fully considered the special conditions of the naming of groups. His correction of common assumptions as to the naming of individuals  is important, though it is perhaps precarious in respect of the assumption that contemporary savage ways of naming children were primordial; but there is a clear hiatus between his doctrine of individual names and nicknames, and his suggestion as to tribal totem-names. He merely rejects other explanations without justifying his own. “Why,” he asks,”  did there occur so purely gratuitous an act as that of fixing on a symbol for the tribe? That by one tribe out of multitudes so strange a whim might be displayed is credible. But that by tribes unallied in type and scattered throughout the world, there should have been independently adopted so odd a practice, is incredible.” Now, the naming of groups is no more gratuitous or strange than the naming of individuals: groups needed to name themselves and each other as such, just as individuals did; and as Spencer admits animal-nicknames to be natural,  he cannot well deny animal names to be natural in the case of clans or tribes. If there is anything certain about early man it is that he regarded animals as on a level with him, and all objects as possibly animate. For tribal purposes, then, these were the natural names; and a formal agreement would be required for their adoption. In no other way could groups speak with each other about each other, at least when they became numerous. And until fixed dwellings or hamlets did away with the need, the expedient would subsist for the reason for which it began.

This period, however, would be immensely long, and the memory of the genesis would infallibly be lost. Given the original circumstances, “verbal misunderstanding” was thus inevitable.  When, that is to say, the comparatively early savage learned that he was “a Bear,” and that his father and grandfather and forefathers were so before him, it was really impossible that, after ages in which totem names thus passed current, he should fail to assume that his folk were descended from a bear, which as a matter of course became at a later stage an Ancestor-God.  The belief was inevitable precisely because the totem was not a nickname, but a name antecedent to nicknames; and because descent from an animal was the easiest way of explaining or conceiving a “beginning” of men. And while some totem names might conceivably have been chosen by way of striking up a helpful alliance with an animal family,  the fact that the list of totems includes sand, sparrows, pigeons, bats, and so on, is hardly open to that interpretation; while the principle of simply naming from an already-named object seems to meet all cases alike.

Such a procedure has actually been noted among the contemporary natives of the island of Efati in the New Hebrides, where “the people are all divided into families or clans, each of which has a distinctive name, such as manui, the cocoa-nut, namkatu......a species of yam, naui, the yam,” etc.  Similarly the exogamous “classes” of the Australian tribes are always named from animals, plants, objects, etc.;  and in most of the tribes of West Africa there are some men with a totem surname who with men of the same surname in other tribes claim a common descent from the original totem.  Livingstone noted the same usage among the Bechuanas, whole tribes being known as “they of the monkey,”  and so on—a state of things in which the cognomen could be carried from any one tribe into others. So among the Narrinyeri of South Australia, “every tribe has its ngaitye, that is, some animal which they regard as a sort of good genius, which takes an interest in their welfare—something like the North-American Indian totem No man or woman will kill her ngaitye, except it happens to be an animal which is good for food, when they have no objection to eating them.  Nevertheless, they will be very careful to destroy the remains,” from the usual fear of sorcery.  Here we have the rationale of the totem. “It appears to me,” writes the last witness, “that the ngaitye of the Narrinyeri is the same as the aitu of the Samoans, but it is not regarded with so much veneration by the former as by the latter. The names are evidently derived from one original, ngaitye being the same word as aitu, only with the addition of consonants.”

Now, the aitu of Samoa is simply the primary form of the Gods. “At his birth a Samoan was supposed to be taken under the care of some God, or aitu, as it was called. The help of several of these Gods was probably (sic) invoked in succession on the occasion, and the one who happened to be addressed just as the child was born was fixed on as the child’s God for life.”  Each God was supposed to appear in “some visible incarnation”—beast, fish, bird, animal, shell-fish, or creeping thing. “A man would eat freely of what was regarded as the incarnation of the God of another man, but the incarnation of his own particular God he would consider it death to injure or eat.” “This class of genii, or tutelary deities, they call aitu fale, or Gods of the house.”

In fine, the family-name or tribe-name, plant or animal or what not, first becomes an ancestor, who re-incarnates himself, and as such is not normally to be eaten. This is the rule in the vast majority of cases.  But among the ill-supplied Australians  he may be eaten when he is eatable, being regarded all the while as a God-ancestor,  whose remains must be safeguarded from sorcery; while among the well-supplied Samoans he is strictly taboo, though any man may eat another man’s ancestor-God. In neither case is there any sign of the idea of a totem-sacrament; and Livingstone’s Bechuana tribes, like the Samoans, never ate their totem, “using the termila, hate or dread, in reference to killing it.” And it is difficult to conceive that a sacramental eating of the totem was originally a matter of course. To say nothing of the normal veto on the eating of one’s own kin, the people whose totem was the sand, or the thunder, or the evening star, or the moon, or the hot wind, for instance, must have been hard put to it to conform to the principle; and while those of the centipede might contrive to accept it, the folk of the lion-totem must have found their sacrament precarious. While, again, in virtue of the primeval logic which regarded interfusion of blood as a creation of kinship, and the eating of lion as a way of becoming brave, the belief in the totemic descent, once set up, might at times lead to the practice of eating the totem, the eating of a lamb sacrament, on the other hand, is not plausibly to be so accounted for. There is, however, no difficulty in understanding how the totem animal might come to be at once revered and shunned, or regarded as “unlucky” when met. For instance, a Basuto of the crocodile totem, who did not often see crocodiles, might naturally feel when he met one as “civilised” people have been known to feel when they see an ancestor in a dream—he might take the meeting, that is, as a warning that trouble or death was about to overtake him. On the totem name had followed inevitably the belief in the totem ancestry, and occasionally the prohibition of the totem animal as food; and to both concepts attached all the hallucinations that early clustered around names.

When, however, we come to deal with religions as distinguished from religion, we are at a stage far removed from simple totemism, though many of the early hallucinations still remain in possession, as in the animal-Gods of Egypt and the animal-angels of Judaism.

For our purpose of comparison and comprehension, then, we may fitly take up the conception of the slain Saviour-God as it existed, on the one hand, in the ancient cults amid which Christianity arose, and as it has been found, on the other hand, elsewhere and in later times in cults of primitive cast.

2. Theory And Ritual Of Human Sacrifice

The sacrifice of a Saviour-God is a specialisation of the general practice of human sacrifice, which takes many forms.  The most readily intelligible are those in which (a), after a tribal war, captives are ritually slain to appease or compensate the spirits of those killed in fighting; (b) those in which, in time of pestilence or 1 danger, or by way of precaution, victims are slain to propitiate the deities supposed to be concerned; (c) those by way of thank-offerings to the Gods after a victory;  and (d) those in which, on the death of a savage chief, slaves and wives—and, it may be, animals—are slain to accompany him in the “other” life, whatever it may be. The victims in the last case are the analogues of the weapons and the food placed in or on or near the grave in ordinary savage burial.

The fourth form of ritual slaying is sometimes differentiated from human sacrifice “in the true sense” as being simply a provision, dictated by filial piety, for the comfort and dignity of a savage aristocrat in the other world.  It is well to note the distinction; but it is no less important to realise how completely the conception in this case fuses psychologically with that behind the express sacrifice of a victim to appease a deity, and, further, how the funeral sacrifice leads up to the “messenger” and “scapegoat” sacrifices, which blend in that of the Saviour-God-Man. All three of the forms specified are common in savage and barbaric life, and it is in the psychic atmosphere of such conventional blood-shedding that there grows up the whole body of the religious doctrine of sacrifice. Human sacrifice, indeed, may be defined as one specialisation of ritual slaughter and sacrament.

Strictly speaking, the “messenger” and “scapegoat” victims are also outside the primary conception of sacrifice inasmuch as they are not, or not necessarily, offered up to any God by way of propitiation. The pharmakos or “magic-man” (literally “medicine-man,” but not in the received sense of that term) who was ritually beaten and put to death in the festival called Thargelia at Athens was strictly a scapegoat, upon whom were put all evils, the people’s sins included: he took them away, and was killed to complete the process of riddance, but was not “offered up” to any God.  But in point of fact the Hebrew scapegoat was specifically a “sin offering”; and of the two goats concerned one was “for the Lord” and the other “for Azazel,” the Goat-God.  And even in the Greek case the act of ritual slaying is akin to the others inasmuch as all alike are supposed to work either the salvation or benefit of the community or the good of an eminent individual. As we shall see, the slaying which it most concerns us to trace, that of the Saviour-God, may in some cases be only in this general sense a sacrifice, being conceivably rather an act of ritual magic, like the slaying of the pharmakos, than a propitiation of a God, since the victim (even in the case of the scapegoat) is a God. But, as we shall see, the forms of the slaying assimilated, all being alike “religious,” and the psychic connotations were very much the same.

Of the first of the four common forms above specified the typical examples are those furnished by the practice of the North-American Indians,  who commonly added cannibalism  to their torture-sacrifices, apparently combining the motives which led some savages to eat their dead by way of symbolic “communion,” and those which suggested the eating of brave enemies, or animals, in the hope of acquiring their courage. This last is still common in Africa; where, again, we have instances of individual appeasement of the slain. “In cases of murder or manslaughter a sacrifice is made to lay the spirit of the victim”;  and among the Nilotic negroes, when a warrior has killed a man, he must in propitiation shave his head, catch a fowl, hang it round his neck by the beak, and cut away the body, leaving the head hanging.  Here the fowl is a surrogate for the man. In the case of funeral sacrifices also, we shall see, the element of cannibalism enters; and here too the primary principle appears to have been that which underlay “kin-eating,” though a new sacramental element begins to be involved. In any case the procedure is clearly religious. A contemporary anthropologist tells that among the Unyoro and other tribes of Uganda, before British rule, on the death of a king, “a circular pit was dug, not more than five feet in diameter, and about twelve feet deep. The king’s bodyguard seized the first nine Unyoro men they met and threw them alive into the pit. Then the dead body of the king was rolled in bark-cloth, and the skin of a cow, newly killed, wrapped round it and sewn. This bundle was then lowered in the midst of the nine men in the pit, no clay was filled in, but another cowskin was stretched tightly across the opening and pegged down all round. A covering of grass was then neatly laid over the skin, and the multitude who were present at the funeral set to work at once to build a temple over the grave.  A headman was appointed as watcher, and very many of the personal servants of the deceased were appointed to live in the temple, and their descendants after them. It was the duty of the surrounding country to see that they were supplied with food.” “How any beings could hit on this method of honouring a dead king,” he concludes, “passes the range of the most morbid imagination.”  The really surprising thing is that a professed anthropologist in the twentieth century should have been so perplexed. The cruelly simple usage in question is one of the most familiar types of human sacrifice;  and even the further development of “messenger” sacrifices, which we shall have to consider later, proceeds on the same primitive and transparent reasoning. In the still later development of the Man-God sacrifice, which partly involves the last-mentioned, the psychic causation is more complicated, and, as we shall see, the variations of practice set up a variety of problems. In some forms it is simple enough. At Benin, for instance, hundreds of criminals were sacrificed annually at one festival, at the rate of twenty-three a day. On these occasions the king, regally attired, “addressed the victims in a kind voice, telling them he was sending them with a message  to his father. They were to salute his father, and tell him that his son was not ready to join him yet, but he sent them, the victims, to be with his father and salute him.”  In less primitive societies we shall find the office of messenger doubled with that of the sacrificed God-Man. He in turn appears at times to be doubled with the Scapegoat, or remover of sins and evil spirits; and there are yet other variants—e.g., the simple sacrifices of victims slain in treaty-making as “blood of reconciliation.”  But if each phase be handled in a scientific spirit, it will be found to reveal in turn much if not all of its anthropological significance.

The most remarkable of the Man-God-slaying cults which have come under what maybe termed scientific observation, while actually in force, is that which prevailed till fifty or sixty years ago among the mountaineer Khonds,  or Kui, of Orissa. The first observer, Major Macpherson, was a man abnormally qualified in his day both for the study of the sacrificial rite and for its peaceful abolition; and science owes him on the former head nearly as much as civilisation does on the latter. It would be hard to find an anthropological research before his day more marked by the scientific spirit.

On the face of his report, there are various reasons for regarding the Khonds as a Dravidian race  driven to the hills (where they subjugated other aborigines) by invading Oriyas; and one of several grounds for surmising that their religion derives from ancient Central-Asiatic sources is the fact that, like the Chinese, they show great respect for parents and ancestors. One of their boasts is, or was, “that they reverence their fathers and mothers, while the Hindus treat theirs with contempt.”  Another reason is their rejection alike of temples and images. “They regard the making, setting-up, and worshipping of images of the Gods as the most signal proof of conscious removal to a hopeless distance from communion with them; a confession of utter despair of being permitted to make any direct approach to the deity: a sense of debarment which they themselves have never felt.”  Yet another reason is the fact that they had no official priesthood, the function being open to anyone who felt called to assume it, and went through the normal preliminary symptoms of a state of trance.

Politically the hill Khonds of Orissa were governed in general by patriarchs, patriarchal councils, and popular assemblies; and there was no trace of Christian influences—the very existence of the tribes having been unknown to the Government before 1835. Their religious system was a normal polytheism, with a Supreme Creator God, known as Boora Pennu or Light God, at the head. Under him were Tari (or Bera) Pennu,  the Earth-Goddess, and certain second-class deities of natural or social forces, as rain, vegetation, increase, hunting, war, and boundaries. Next came the deified sinless men of the first age, who were the tutelary Gods of tribes and septs; and under these ranked a multitude of local spirits, all named Gods, who presided over villages, houses, hills, fountains, streams, forests, and so forth. With the second order of Gods was ranked Dinga, the judge of the dead and allotter of retribution, who has some appearance of being taken over from another cult.

It was to Tari, the Earth-Goddess, that human sacrifices were offered; and from the fact that they occurred only among certain tribes, who theoretically admitted the inferiority of Tari to Boora, but gave her their chief devotion and credited her as the Boora-worshippers did Boora with raising fallen man from misery and introducing civilisation, it may be inferred that the cults were originally independent. In the Māliahs (hill districts) of Goomsur, the sacrifice was to “Thadha Pennu,” the Earth-Goddess, symbolised as a peacock.  To the last, the sect of Boora regarded human sacrifice “with the utmost abhorrence as the consummation of human guilt, and believed it to have been adopted under monstrous delusions devised by Tari as the mother of falsehood, with a view solely to the final destruction of her followers.”  It is told of Boora, too, that he interfered, through a minor God, according to one myth, to substitute a buffalo for a man as an oblation to Tari; and this miracle is commemorated at an annual great festival of Boora, called the “jakri” or “dragging,” on account of the way in which the buffalo—previously treated as ameriah—is finally handled. According to another account, Boora sent four divine agents to prevent a human sacrifice for which Tari had called. Afterwards, however, her worshippers relapsed.

The common relationship of exogamous tribes, who are constantly at war yet habitually intermarry,  is the apparent explanation of such a permanent schism. But it seems not impossible that the sacrificial cult was originally that of a conquered race, and that a section of the Khonds adopted it from them, as so often happens where a primitive rite or mystery practised by aborigines is able to appeal to later comers.  It was from an apparently subject race who participated in the cult that the Tari-worshipping Khonds purchased their human victims.

As normally practised, the rite was not totemistic,  but of the nature of “sympathetic magic,” and the purpose was to promote agricultural fertility; but it was also resorted to as a special means of propitiation in the case of a pestilence or other sign of divine displeasure, such as a calamity in the family of a chief; and individual families similarly made propitiation for individual disaster.  The victim, called the meriah, or tokki, or keddi,  was in all cases either purchased from the procuring caste (who at times kidnapped children from the plains for the purpose) or bred as a hereditary victim, a number of families being set apart and cherished for the purpose, so that he—or she, for it was often a woman—was either personally willing to be slain on religious grounds or was the property of the sacrificers. As it was the universal conviction that the meriah became a God by the act of sacrifice, there was no difficulty in keeping up the supply; and in times of famine Khonds would sell their own children as victims, considering the sacrificial death a highly honourable one. And the Meriah, being consecrated from the beginning, had unlimited sexual liberty, his intercourse with the wife or daughter of any tribesman being welcomed as a boon from the deity. Generally, however, he had assigned to him a wife, herself a destined victim, and mother of victims to come.

The special religio-ethical feature of the rite was the universally accepted doctrine that the victim, if not a volunteer, must be “bought with a price,”  and died “for all mankind,” not merely for the Khonds;  and this view was set forth in the ritual, though it also expressed distinctly the local demand for greater wealth. An odd feature of it was that, although the flesh of the slain victim was cut up into shreds so that a piece might be buried in every field, the recited myth told that Tari demanded blood because when the earth was soft mud she made it firm by the blood she dropped when she cut her finger.  And there was put in her mouth the injunction: “Behold the good change! cut up my body to complete it.”  It thus appears that originally the victim had represented the Earth-Goddess herself; and in a variant of the Khond legend in which two women, Karaboodi and Thartaboodi, figure as the “only two females on the earth,” each with a male son, the former, finding that a drop of her blood hardens the wet earth, tells her son to cut her up, which he does. Thereafter the God “Boora Panoo” comes upon the scene, and the cult of human sacrifice is methodically established, the spirit of Karaboodi insisting on its continuance when her descendants offer a monkey as a substitute for a man.  Obviously it is an agricultural rite; and it may be that the pretence of drying up the soft mud was a magical device to put the evil spirits of drought on a false scent.

The sacrificial rite lasted three or five days. On the first, the meriah’s hair, previously kept long, was shaved off—save in cases where it had been shorn ten or twelve days before—and the people passed the night in a licentious revel.  On the second, he was carefully bathed and newly clothed, taken in procession to the sacred (or taboo) Meriah grove, where he was fastened to a stake,  seated, and anointed with ghee, oil, and turmeric  (red dye), garlanded with flowers, and worshipped during the day by the assembly, who again spent the night in debauchery. On the third day he was given milk to drink, and the final act of ritual and sacrifice began. At this stage we are struck by the importance of the priest: “a great and fitly instructed priest alone can officiate”; and it is to be gathered from the accounts of the Janni, as well as from the ritual (1) that he was traditionally a celibate and recluse, parading his austerities and securing sanctity by personal uncleanness; (2) that it was primarily his function to brave the curse of the sacrificed and deified victim; and (3) that it was thus the priestly influence that maintained the sacrifice. Four days after the sacrifice of the meriah there was sacrificed a buffalo, of which the remains were left for the meriah’s spirit —a safeguard against blood-guiltiness.  The ritual, however, was so framed to begin with as to distribute the responsibility over the village headman or patriarch and the body of the people. On the one hand, the victim reproached his slayers while avowing the belief that he was made a God by the act; on the other hand, the priest and the headman, pleading this, defended themselves by reciting the circumstances under which he was purchased and dedicated, he consenting as a child. The idea seems to have been to set forth thoroughly both points of view, so that there should be no misunderstanding about the religious nature of the act, and the responsibility of the entire community for it; but whether by way of sympathetic imagination on the part of some ritual-making priest, or by simple adoption of the actual language of some past sufferer, the victim in one form of the ritual was made to invoke a curse upon the priest, while the latter declared that it was he, as minister of the Creator God, who gave the death its virtue, and threatened to deprive the resisting one of a place among the Gods.  Finally he was either fastened to a cross of which the horizontal bar, pierced by the upright, could be raised or lowered at will,  or placed in the cleft or split made in a long branch of a green tree, which was made to grasp his neck or chest, the open ends being closed and tightly tied so as to imprison him in the wood, and make as it were a cross, of which he was the upright; and it appears to have been at this stage that there occurred one of the most significant acts in the entire ritual. It being essential that the victim should finally not resist, his arms and legs, or, where the arms were sufficiently secured, the legs only, were broken, save in cases where the end was attained by drugging him with opium or datura.  This accomplished, the priest slightly wounded the victim with an axe, and the crowd instantly cut him to pieces, leaving untouched the head and intestines. These, after being carefully watched in the interim, were next day, in some cases, burned to ashes with a whole sheep; and the ashes were spread over the fields, or laid as a paste over the houses and granaries. In the same spirit, the portions of flesh were solemnly carried to the participating villages, religiously divided among the people, and buried in the fields, each man placing his piece in the earth “behind his back without looking.”

Upon this ritual there were many local variations. Major-General Campbell, who had followed Macpherson in the Khond agency, tells of a form of the rite in which the victim was first drugged, then taken to the place of execution, where his head and neck were placed in the cleft of a strong split-bamboo, the ends of which were secured and held; whereafter the priest with his axe broke the joints of the legs and arms, and the sacrifice was consummated by the people in the usual frightful way.  Among the Khonds of the Māliahs of Goomsur there was much feasting and intoxication for a month prior to the sacrifice; on the day before the rite the victim was intoxicated with toddy, garlanded, bound to a post bearing the peacock effigy of the Earth-Goddess,  and ritually addressed as a God. On the next day he was again intoxicated and anointed with oil, of which each one present sought to obtain a touch for his own head. Finally a hog was sacrificed; and the victim was stifled in the mud made with its blood, then cut in pieces. A buffalo calf was afterwards maimed in front of the post, and on the third day was killed and eaten,  visibly as a surrogate. Among the hill tribe called Codooloo, as among the Khonds, there were two sects, of which one offered human sacrifices to the God “Jenkery.” In this case the purchased victim had absolute sexual liberty and the right to eat and drink whatever he would. From the moment of seizure till the sacrifice he was kept intoxicated. The signal for slaughter was a wound in the stomach, with the blood from which the image of the God was besmeared. Then he was cut to pieces, everyone trying to secure a morsel, to be presented to the God of his own village.

In yet other cases, according to M. Elie Reclus, the two methods of preventing the victim’s struggles were combined. “She must not die in her bonds, since she dies voluntarily, of her own freewill, as they say. He [the priest] loosens her from the stake, stupefies her by making her gulp down a portion of opium and datura, then breaks her elbows and knees with the back of the hatchet.  Other variations are noted in the use of the drug;  and in different districts the entire sacrifice varied. Thus among the Kotaya hill tribes the victim was taken before the image of the Earth-Goddess, and rice, coloured (red) with turmeric, was thrown on his hair,  while he was kept under the influence of opium. In this case the victim had enjoyed special privileges for an unspecified period, all his wishes being granted, and every woman in the village being at his command as a concubine.  No quasi-crucifixion is specified, the victim being simply stabbed “in the stomach,” and the blood used to bathe the idol, whereafter he was cut to pieces by the crowd.  In yet another case (at Ramgherry and Lutchampore) the victim was placed in irons, new clothed, made drunk with arrack, and forced into the “temple” of the Goddess, a hole three feet deep. There his throat was cut and his head cut off; the remains being covered with earth and with a pile of stones. When the next victim was to be sacrificed, the hole was cleared out afresh for the purpose.

In this district occurred yet another variation. Every third year two victims were sacrificed in honour of the Goddess; and, whether thus triennially or annually, at Bundair in Jeypore there were sacrificed to the Sun-God at one festival three victims, “one at the east, one at the west, and the third in the centre of the village.”  In this case each victim was tied by the hair to a post near his grave, over which he was suspended horizontally with the face downwards, his legs and arms being held outstretched by the assistants.  He was then beheaded, and the head, stuck on the stake, was there left to decay. A further variation was in the direction of the principle that the infliction of pain made the sacrifice specially efficacious.  In some districts the victim, after being exposed on a couch, and led in procession round the place of sacrifice, was put to death by slow burning, or by applying hot brands to the body on a sloping pyre, and tortured as long as possible, “it being believed that the favour of the Earth-Goddess, especially in respect of the supply of rain, will be in proportion to the quantity of tears which may be extracted.”  It is needless to recapitulate the further variants at any length. “Victims were stoned, beaten to death with tomahawks or heavy iron rings......; they were strangled; they were crushed between two planks;  they were drowned in a pool in the jungle, or in a trough filled with pig’s blood......Sometimes the victim was slowly roasted......; sometimes he was despatched by a blow to the heart, and the priest plunged a wooden image into the gaping wound, that the mannikin might be gorged with blood.”

All that is constant is the principle of a redemptory bloody sacrifice. But by way of synopsis it may be noted that there prevail certain principles of procedure and symbolism, especially (1) that of (2) stupefying or laming the victim to secure apparent acquiescence; the counter-principle of the need either for suffering as such or for such suffering as shall cause the victim to weep much—a conception belonging to sympathetic magic; (3) the anointing, and the consequent sanctification of the oil; (4) the deification of the victim; (5) the according to him of remarkable privileges, sexual and social; and (6) a certain propensity to the symbol of the cross.

Seeing that the drinking of the soma was primordially a religious act in the East, and that intoxicants play a similar part among modern Polynesians,  it seems not impossible that the drugging or intoxicating of the victim was a development from a form of the rite in which he took part in a common banquet; but of this no clear trace had been left, save among the Native Americans of the past.  It is to be noted, too, that while the destined child victim among the Khonds went about freely, in some cases at least the adult victim was kept fettered, though well fed, in the house of the village patriarch.

Very significant, further, is the horrible stratagem employed by the Bataks of the Malay Peninsula to secure acquiescence from the boy victim in their Pangulabalang, a sacrifice of one “to be sent out for the overthrow of enemies.” “A boy is taken from a stranger tribe, and for a time well-fed with titbits, till he has grown quite trustful. Then one day he is taken and blindfolded; a hole is dug, and he is put in it; and the sorcerer comes and asks him: ‘Wilt thou go where we send thee?’ ‘Wilt thou do only good to us, and evil to our enemies?’ ‘Wilt thou aid us in war and overthrow our enemies?’—and so on. To all the questions the trusting boy answers ‘Yes.’ Meanwhile lead has been melted on the fire; it is thrown suddenly on his neck, whereof he dies. The corpse is burned; but the ashes and fat are carefully preserved. These remains are now precious magic-medicine, for through them the spirit of the dead may be forced to do all he promised in life.”  Here too the victim is evidently deified, and his ritual “willingness” is an essential element in the efficacy of the sacrifice.

It is to be noted, finally, that when, by the persuasions of Macpherson or the menaces of his successors, open human sacrifices were put an end to among the Khonds, they treated the henceforth substituted buffalo very much as they had treated the meriah. The ritual accosts him as a human being, and commiserates him, as it did the meriah, for being sold; he is frequently anointed; he is implored to be a willing sacrifice; cakes are offered to him; he is promised a happy immortality in the paradise of the Earth-Goddess; and he is instantly cut to pieces, and the fragments buried in the fields, as was done with the flesh of the human victim. A song preserves (inaccurately) the memory of the work done by Macpherson and Campbell.  Among the Koyis “a langur monkey is frequently substituted” for the human victim, “and called for occasion Ekuroma Potu—i.e., a male with small breasts. This name is given in the hope of persuading the Goddess [Māmili or Pele] that she is receiving a human sacrifice.”  The sheep or goats offered by the same tribe to the smallpox-Goddess are given toddy to drink; their acceptance is regarded as of good omen; and when they are eaten the women are excluded from the repast,  as happens in so many cannibal banquets.  And, again, there is record that it is or was recently “the practice, a few years ago, at every Dassara festival in Jeypore, Vizagapatam, to select a specially fine ram, wash it, shave its head, affix thereto red and white bottu and nāman (sect marks) between the eyes and down the nose, and gird it with a new white cloth after the manner of a human being. The animal being then fastened in a sitting posture, certain pūja (worship) was performed by a Brahman priest, and it was decapitated.”

Here we have the plainest substitution of the animal for the man; and the process entitles us to credit the old record in the Satapatha Brāhmana that “in the beginning the sacrifice most acceptable to the Gods was man,” and that “for the man a horse was substituted, then an ox, then a sheep, then a goat, until at length it was found that the Gods were most pleased with offerings of rice and barley.”  What has happened under our own eyes is very likely to have happened in progressive periods of ancient civilisation. The progression from man to animals has repeatedly occurred,  and it is impossible to explain such cases as either survivals or revivals of totem sacrifices. The victims are the ordinary domestic animals;  and they are ceremonially invested with the attributes and the divinity of the human being. It is reasonable to assume that the same evolution as is here traced took place in at least some of the ostensible surrogate sacrifices in Greece  and elsewhere, seeing that there are so many records or traditions of the suppression of human sacrifices in the countries in question. And all this is in keeping with the theory of the present inquiry.

3. The Christian Crucifixion

To those who have not realised how all religion has been evolved from savage beginnings, it will seem extravagant to suggest that the story of the Christian crucifixion has been built up from a practice such as those above described. And yet the grounds for inferring such a derivation are extremely strong. Some doubt has been cast, not quite unjustly, upon such inferences in general, as a result of criticism of Dr. Frazer’s ingenious guess that the gospel crucifixion incidentally reproduced the features of the sacrifice of a mock-king in the Perso-Babylonian feast of the Sacæa. The vital difficulty of such a theory is that it takes the gospel episode as historical on the strength of detailed narratives which—save in the episode of Barabbas, whereby the main history is undermined—give no hint of such a coincidence as is surmised, and which, if true narratives, could not conceivably omit to record it had it occurred.

But scientific hierology is not held down to that theory, which, in any case, seeks to account only for certain features of the crucifixion story, notably the mock-crowning and the scourging. These features are indeed probably to be explained through the analogies to which Dr. Frazer points, though not on his assumption of a historical episode; but there are other features, such as the cross itself, and the resurrection, to which the clues lie, unemphasised, in other sections of Dr. Frazer’s survey; and there are yet others which he has not ostensibly studied. Some of these are illuminated by the rite of human sacrifice among the Khonds. Their placing of the victim, for instance, either on a cross or in a cleft bough in such a way as to make a living cross,  wherein the God is as it were part of the living tree, is a singularly suggestive parallel. But no less so is the detail as to the breaking of the victim’s arms and legs, to make him seem unresisting, and the substitution of opium as being less cruel.

This last principle is found to have been acted on by the Karhâda Brahmans of Bombay. In their secret human sacrifice, described by Sir John Malcolm, the unsuspecting victim—often a stranger long hospitably entertained for the purpose—was drugged; and in his drugged state was led three times round the idol of the Goddess, whereafter his throat was cut.  Yet again, the same principle is found so far away as Mexico, where, in one annual sacrifice to the Fire-God, the victims were painted red like the Khond meriah, and a narcotic powder was thrown in their faces. They too were subjected to special suffering, being thrown into the fire before being sacrificed with the knife in the usual way.  And in the Mexican sacrifice, also, the God was expressly represented by a tree, stripped of bark and branches, but covered with painted paper.

Let us now take the Christian parallels.

In the fourth gospel it is told that after the death of Jesus on the cross, in order “that the bodies might not stay on the cross on the Sabbath,” the Jews “asked of Pilate that their legs might be broken and they might be taken away.” But the soldiers broke only the legs of the “two others,” these not being yet dead: Jesus they spared, piercing his heart with a lance, “that the scripture might be fulfilled: A bone of him shall not be broken.” The other gospels say nothing on this point; but all four tell of the offering of a drink, and the first two synoptics mention it both before and after the act of crucifying. In Matthew, “vinegar mixed with gall” is offered beforehand, and refused after tasting; and a sponge of vinegar is offered, apparently in sympathy, after the cry of Eli, Eli. In the first passage the text has evidently been tampered with; for the Vulgate and Ethiopic versions, the Sinaitic, Vatican, and Bezan codices, and many old MSS., read wine for vinegar, while the Arabic version reads myrrh for gall.  In Mark, more significantly, the first drink becomes “wine spiced with myrrh,” and is refused without tasting; and here the commentators recognise that the purpose was presumably to cause stupefaction, and so lighten the suffering.  In Luke, this detail entirely disappears, and the vinegar offered on the cross is given in mockery. In John also, only the drink offered on the cross is mentioned; and of this it is said that “When Jesus had received the vinegar he said, It is finished.” Then follows the detail as to the breaking of the legs.

It is needless here to challenge afresh the historical value of the conflicting records, wherein a slight detail, of no historical importance, enters only to take varying forms for symbolical reasons. What we are concerned with is the source of the symbolism. One compiler clearly knows of a drink offered before the crucifixion, and implies that it was intended to cause euthanasia, for he notes that it was refused. The divine victim must be a conscious sufferer. A later compiler ignores altogether this detail, and notes only that the slayers tormented the victim with a drink of vinegar. Both details alike are un-Roman,  for the torment was trivial, while the narcotic would be inconsistent with what was meant to be an exemplary punishment. The theologising fourth gospel, in turn, makes the victim accept the drink of vinegar as the last symbolic act of sufferance;  but then suddenly alludes to a detail not specified by the others—a concluding act of limb-breaking, from which the divine victim escapes for dogmatic reasons, the fact of his death being made certain by a lance-thrust in the side. We must infer that the limb-breaking was known to occur in certain circumstances, and that the writer or an interpolator of the fourth gospel saw need to make it clear that the bones of the Messiah remained unbroken. He being, according to the fourth gospel, the true paschal sacrifice, it was important that the law as to the Passover should in him be fulfilled.

On what data, then, did the different evangelists proceed? What had they under notice? Not an original narrative: their dissidence is almost complete. Not a known official practice in Roman crucifixions; for the third gospel treats as an act of mockery what the first and second do not so regard; and the fourth describes the act of limb-breaking as done to meet a Jewish demand, which in the synoptic narrative could not arise. Mere breaking of the legs, besides, would be at once a laborious and an inadequate way of making sure that the victims were dead;  the spear-thrust would be the natural and the sufficient act; yet only one victim is speared. Only one hypothesis will meet the whole case. The different narratives testify to the existence of a ritual or rituals of crucifixion or quasi-crucifixion, in variants of which there had figured the two procedures of breaking the legs of the victim and giving him a narcotic. Of these procedures neither is understood by the evangelists, though by some of them the latter is partly comprehended; and they accordingly proceed to turn both, in different fashions, to dogmatic account. Their conflict is thus insoluble, and their testimony alike unhistorical. But we find the psychological clue in the hypothesis of a known ritual of a crucified Saviour-God, who had for universally-recognised reasons to appear to suffer as a willing victim.  Being crucified—that is, hung by the hands or wrists to a tree or post, and supported not by his feet but by a bar between his thighs—he would tend to struggle (unlike the Khond victim, whose arms were free) chiefly with his legs; and if he were to be prevented from struggling, it would have to be either by breaking the legs or by stupefying him with a drug. The Khonds, we have seen, used anciently the former horrible method, but learned to use the latter also. Finally, the detail of the spear-thrust in the side, bestowed only on the ostensibly divine victim, suggests that in some similar ritual that may have been the mode of ceremonial slaying. We have but to recognise that among some of the more civilised peoples of the Mediterranean similar processes had been sometimes gone through about two thousand years ago, and we have the conditions which may account for the varying gospel narratives.

And if there had occurred in the Mediterranean world such an evolution as we see among the Khonds and elsewhere, we have in the story of the betrayal by Judas, incredible and unintelligible as the narratives stand, one more item of sacrificial practice. The Pauline phrase “bought with a price” (1 Cor. vi, 20) ostensibly conveys the meaning of “ransomed,” and is not applied to Jesus. But the paying of a price to Judas by the high-priests would become quite intelligible as one more detail in a mystery-drama growing out of a ritual of human sacrifice. “Judas” in any case is presumably only a development from Joudaios, a Jew;  and the basis of the episode, thus understood, would be the Gentile imputation on the Jews of having sold the Lord as a human sacrifice. And the doctrine put in the mouth of Caiaphas in the fourth gospel (xi, 50-51) is a doctrine of human sacrifice.

4. Vogue of Human Sacrifice

Given the prima facie fitness of the hypothesis, however, there at once arises the question, What positive evidence have we for the existence in the Mediterranean world of any such man-sacrificing ritual about the beginning of the Christian era?

As to the commonness of the practice among “savage” or primitive peoples, there is no question. It is frequent to this day in parts of Africa,  and in the Malay Archipelago;  it is probably not wholly obsolete in India;  and it occurs from time to time in primitive Russia, among ignorant and fanatical peasants.  In Polynesia and Maori New Zealand it was normal in the past century; and among Native Americans it occurred, as a religious usage in war time, as late as 1837.  And the ancient testimonies show the practice at no distant time to have subsisted among nearly all the races then known, especially among the Semites and the “barbarians.” Despite some allegations to the contrary, human sacrifices were normal among all branches of the Aryan race.  Lusitanians,  Gauls,  and Teutons  alike, at the period of their contact with the Romans, normally sacrificed to their Gods captives and prisoners, sometimes by burning,  sometimes by hanging,  sometimes by crucifying,  sometimes by throat-cutting or other letting of blood.  Of the ancient Slays we have equivalent records.  Among some tribes of the more easterly Galatæ  and the Massagetæ  and other Scythians  similar usages were reported; and while human sacrifices had in the time of Herodotus, by his account, long ceased to be offered in Egypt,  the memory of them was, to say the least, sufficiently fresh among the Greeks and Romans.

The records of the substitution of a goat for a boy in sacrifice to Dionysos at Potniæ,  and of a hart in substitution for a virgin at Laodicea;  the stories of King Athamas, called upon by the Delphic oracle to sacrifice his firstborn son Phryxos,  of King Lycaon who sacrificed a child to Zeus,  of Aristodemos offering up his child on the call of the oracle when the method of the lot failed,  and of Menelaos sacrificing two children in Egypt when stayed by contrary winds,  tell of a once recognised conception and practice; and those of the sacrificing of three Persian boys to Dionysos Omêstês at the battle of Salamis,  and of seven children by the Persians to the God of the Underworld when they were entering Greece,  are equally significant. Among the Eretrians and Magnesians, again, sacrifices of human firstlings were said to have been anciently offered;  in Sparta, in Chios, and in Tenedos,  there were similar memories; and the custom was notoriously well established in Thrace.  There is reason, too, to infer an act of child sacrifice behind Pausanias’s tale of the infant placed in the forefront of an Elean army.

Anciently, it would seem, human sacrifice of all kinds was common to the Hellene stock;  and the attempts of Mr. Gladstone and others to elevate that race by ascribing their unquestioned acts to the influence of their neighbours, merely substitute a confession of weak imitativeness for one of savage proclivity.

The sacrificing of children in particular may or may not have spread from the Semites, among whom it was at one time normal,  as it was among the pre-Christian Mexicans and Peruvians,  and seems to have been till quite recently among the northern Zulus.  Female infants were frequently put to death among the Arabs before Mohammed,  whether or not by way of sacrifice; as they have been in China and elsewhere in Asia in recent times;  and they were sacrificed on special grounds in the South Sea Islands  before the arrival of the missionaries. Among the North American Indians propitiatory sacrifices of children are known to have occurred in the nineteenth century.  It was among the Semites, in any case, that they were most common in the Mediterranean world. The standing provision in the Hebrew code, and the stories of Abraham and Isaac and Jephthah’s daughter tell of a once regular practice; and the Greek and Latin testimonies as to Carthaginian usage are overwhelming.  The association of Carians with Greeks in the sacrifice of the sons of Phanes in the Perso-Egyptian war—a rite consummated by the drinking of their blood, mixed with wine and water—suggests the preponderance of eastern influence, especially as regards the sacramental conception.

Such practices gradually became more and more rare among the civilised peoples, and are held to have subsisted latterly in only one or two places in the civilised parts of the Roman Empire;  and there are various traces of the gradual process of mitigation. In the Leucadian sacrifice of a man to Apollo by throwing him from a rock into the sea—of which Strabo preserves the memory. —the last stage seems to have been one in which not only was the victim a condemned criminal, but attempts were made to ease his fall by attaching to him wings and even birds, while many men waited below, in boats, to rescue him and carry him beyond the boundaries, Such mitigations were likely to be common;  but it is on record that only in the time of Hadrian was the annual human sacrifice to Zeus abolished at Salamis in Cyprus;  and the possibility of either secret or open survivals in Asia Minor in the first century would thus seem to be considerable. There are, indeed, indications which cannot be put aside, of occasional resort to human sacrifice in the Greek-speaking world in modern times.  The stories of its practice by Elagabalus seem not impossible;  and the various accounts of the manner of the sacrifice of a slave by the Catalinarian conspirators may point to various forms of survival.

To begin with, we have Strabo’s account of human sacrifice as being practised in his time by the primitive Albanians, who lived south of the Caucasian mountains and west of the Caspian sea, in the land watered by the Cyrus and the Araxes. Under the high-priest of the Moon-Goddess were a number of “sacred” slaves (hierodouloi); and when one of these became divinely possessed and wandered alone in the woods he was seized, bound with sacred fetters, and maintained sumptuously for a year. When the festival day came he was anointed with a fragrant ointment, and slain by being pierced to the heart with a sacred lance through the side. Auguries were then drawn from the manner of his fall, and the body was carried away to a certain spot and ceremonially trampled upon by all as a means of purification.  Here we have a sacrifice corresponding in one notable detail to one of the gospel narratives, and having other marked features in common with other well-known rites of human sacrifice.  In the annual spring sacrifice at Salamis, again, the victim was led thrice round the altar (as in the rite of the Karhâda Brahmans), then pierced by the priest with a lance, and the corpse was finally burned on a pyre.  And that this mode of sacrifice in turn had a far-eastern origin or precedent may be inferred from the manner of the buffalo-sacrifice of the Bataks of Sumatra  to the “Sombaon”—a term expressive of sacro-sanctity. In certain cases the buffalo is tied to a stake which has been decked and dedicated; the slayer is robed, and crowned with leaves; and he spears the victim in the side after asking the onlookers, “Shall I spear?” In all likelihood the buffalo is a surrogate for an ancient human sacrifice.

Later testimony brings us closer to civilisation in the same period. Tertullian is not the best of witnesses; and when he asserts that children are secretly sacrificed by non-Christians in Carthage in his own day,  he is but doing what he denounces the pagans for doing as against his own sect—publishing a rumour which had never been investigated. But when he tells that children were publicly sacrificed to Saturn as late as the proconsulship of Tiberius, who therefore “crucified” a number of priests on the sacred trees beside their temple, he is saying something that squares with a good deal of testimony as to Semitic practices. Thus we have the explicit record  that Hamilcar sacrificed his own son at the siege of Agrigentum, 407 B.C., and the many testimonies as to wholesale sacrifices of children among the Carthaginians. There is good evidence that an annual sacrifice of a boy to Kronos had anciently taken place at Tyre, but that it was given up, the citizens refusing to renew it when the city was besieged by Alexander; and the writer who records this also asserts that the Carthaginians maintained the practice of one annual sacrifice till the destruction of their city.  To the same effect, Pliny alleges  that the victim was annually sacrificed before the image of Hercules—that is, Melkarth. Even the lack of agreement as to dates of cessation is a proof that such usages could subsist without exciting much concern in the more civilised sections of the Roman empire. The story of the ecclesiastical historian Sokrates,  to the effect that the Mithraists in Alexandria had habitually offered human sacrifices to Mithra down till somewhere before or after the year 300, is on the face of it worthless;  but that there had been such sacrifices at Alexandria at some period is not incredible. Among the Arabs, it seems certain, human sacrifices subsisted in the generation before Mohammed; among the Japanese, they flourished later still;  among the Hindus, as we have seen, they have lasted down to our own time among the primitives.

In view of the importance of this point to our inquiry, it has to be remarked, first, that there is no clear record of the date of cessation of the human sacrifices in the Thargelia at Athens. The historians pass over these matters with no apparent sense of the social and moral significance of such a problem. Grote does not so much as mention the Thargelia in connection with the practice of human sacrifice; and even Dr. Frazer  remarks that “the Athenians regularly maintained” a number of possible victims, without suggesting any period for the usage. Professor Mahaffy, on whom as a culture-historian the problem pressed, makes a notable admission. “I think,” he writes, “that Aristophanes alludes to this custom as bygone, though the scholiasts do not think so; but its very familiarity to his audience shows a disregard of human life strange enough in so advanced a legal system as that of Athens.”  The fact seems to have been that where criminals were concerned no notion of humanity or illegality came into play; though in the story of the sacrifice of the daughter of Aristodemus there is an evident prevalence of horror at the act.  The horror of Themistocles at the demand that he should sacrifice captives of princely blood at Salamis  is really no ground for thinking, as does Professor Mahaffy, that he or any other Athenian would wince at putting a criminal to death by religious rites; and such usages, ceasing to be called human sacrifices, may have subsisted long after the Periclean period.

Secondly, there is reason to infer from the uneasy language of Pausanias  that human sacrifice to Lycaean Zeus was still performed in his time during periods of prolonged drought; and, as we shall see, there are more explicit albeit doubtful assertions as to its continuance at Rome at a still later period.

Among the barbarians, too, there were cannibal sacraments. Herodotus tells that his “Androphagoi” were the only people among the Scythians who ate human flesh;  but he also asserts that “when a Scythian overthrows his first enemy he drinks his blood”; that when the Scythians make solemn covenants they mix their blood with wine and drink thereof;  that the Massagetæ sacrifice their aged kinsmen and eat their flesh;  and that the Issedones eat the flesh of their dead fathers, mingled with animal flesh, at a grand banquet.  Of the “Indian” Callatians and Padæans he gives similar accounts.  From such testimony it appears that an anthropophagous sacrament could subsist among a people not generally given to cannibalism; nor does it appear from Herodotus that even the Androphagoi were at all shunned by other tribes. Substantially following Herodotus, Pomponius Mela, in the chapter in which he mentions the Androphagoi and Sacco, tells of some in their region who hold it best to slay nothing, and of some who, when a near relative is growing weak through age or sickness, slay him as a sacrifice and hold it fas et maxime pium to eat of their bodies.  Pomponius’s geography is certainly of the wildest; but it is sufficient to note that he locates these sacramentalists in the region of Nysia, of mount Meros, sacred to Jove, and of the cave in which was nourished Father Liber. As there is little doubt that the ancient Akkadians and later Babylonians sacrificed their first-born children,  there need be none as to similar practices among later Asiatic barbarians.

Returning to the civilised pale, we have the terse testimony of Pliny that among the Druidical rites suppressed by Tiberius had been one in which hominem occidere religiosissimum erat, mandi vero etiam saluberrimum.  On this Pliny declaims, in the imperialistic manner, that nec satis æstimari potest, quantum Romanis debeatur for ending such horrors. Yet we have not only the record of the early burying alive of four alien men and women in the Forum Boarium of Rome, 216 B.C.;  we have also Pliny’s own avowals that only in the year 657 of Rome (97 B.C.) was there passed a senatus-consultus forbidding human sacrifices;  and that despite this there had been seen in his own time (etiam nostra aetas vidit) such a sacrifice,  in the form of the burying alive of two aliens of a nation with which Rome was at war. The law, it appears, referred only to private sacrifices, not to public.  It had been even an established rule that before a battle a dictator or consul or praetor was entitled to sacrifice any Roman soldier—quem velit ex legione  Romana scripta civem devovere.  We have also the innuendoes of Horace  and Juvenal  to the effect that even in their own day ancient savageries, such as the sacrifice of boys by slow starvation, could be performed in private, as well as the records of the sacrifice of two soldiers of Julius Cæsar to Mars,  and of the slaying of three hundred of the enemies of Augustus as a sacrifice to the deified Julius.  Lastly, Suetonius explicitly asserts that the dreadful rites of the Druids, which Pliny declares to have been abolished by Tiberius, were not put down till the time of Claudius, and in this connection he adds that only under Augustus were those rites forbidden to the citizens of Rome.  Here, again, the divergence of the testimony tells of indefinite possibilities of survival for bloody rites, even near the centre of government.

On the general question, for the rest, we have from Porphyry, without dates, a list of cases of human sacrifices formerly practised by the Greeks, as in Rhodes, Chios, Tenedos, Salamis, Crete, Athens, and Sparta, no less than by Egyptians, Arabs, and Phœnicians.  And not only Porphyry, but Eusebius,  Minucius Felix,  and Lactantius  speak of the sacrifice of a man to Latiarian Jove as being still practised in their time; while Plutarch  tells of a secret rite, by implication one of human sacrifice, which he declares to be practised in the month of November in the Rome of his day. Of the eating of sacrificed human victims Porphyry mentions no cases among civilised peoples; and he gives but a loose account of the practice among the Bassaroi of Thrace, who had imitated it from the Taurians;  but Tertullian is again more explicit and, at the same time, very circumstantial. “At this day,” he writes, “among ourselves (isthic) blood consecrated to Bellona, taken in the palm from a punctured thigh, is given to her sealed ones”—i.e., her initiates.  In another passage, he speaks of a surviving usage of drinking human blood in the worship of the Latiarian Jove.  His further allusion to the practice of drinking the blood of slain gladiators as a remedy for epilepsy suggests many further possibilities of the same kind; and he expressly asserts that the men of his day have seen a man burnt alive as Hercules.

5. The Divinity of the Victim

On the classic side there is thus abundant evidence as to the practice of human sacrifice, and some as to sacramental cannibalism, in the historic period; but what the theory finally requires is either the sacrifice of a victim who, as being specifically divine, is the subject of a eucharist, or the proof that such a eucharist could be combined with the sacrifice of a divine victim. Now, in the Khond cult, as we have seen, not only is the victim deified, but the propitiated Goddess figures in the myth as the original sacrifice. An ostensibly similar myth is found in ancient Babylon, in a creation story, where Marduk is actually decapitated in order that the first man may be made from his blood and “bone.”  After such precedents, the deification of sacrificed victims could readily follow; though the probability is, of course, that the myth was framed to explain an already established usage of deification. Of this conception we have already seen a clear trace in the old Mediterranean world in the sacrifices of the Albanians to the Moon-Goddess; and for fuller light we turn first to the cult of Dionysos. Not only is there the story of the substitution of a goat for a boy in the sacrifice to Dionysos at Potniæ,  but there is the combined significance of (a) the myth of the rending of the divine boy Dionysos, in the form of a bull, by the Titans;  (b) the fact that in the ritual mystery the worshippers tore a live bull to pieces with their teeth;  (c) the peculiar Dionysiak ritual at Tenedos, where a gravid cow was treated as a woman in labour, and her calf, devoted to the God, was made to wear the tragic cothurni, while the slayer was formally pursued with stones and had to fly into the sea;  (d) the actual rending of men as Dionysiak sacrifices at Chios and Tenedos;  and (e) the peculiar procedure in the Athenian Bouphonia or religious “murder of the ox,”  where the ceremonial flight of the slayers, their repudiation of guilt, and the solemn trial and condemnation of the weapons used as being the guilty things, all go to show that the ox represented either a divinity or a human victim, or the former by development from the latter.  The theory of Robertson Smith, that the animal sacrifice is the earlier, need not be here considered. It rests on the assumption that the primordial communion-sacrifice was totemistic; and this has not been and cannot be proved. On the other hand we have many traces of the substitution of an animal for a human sacrifice in historic times; and this is all that is required to solve the historic problem.

From another side we see the same principle at work in the old Theban sacrifice to Amun,  wherein the ram, the symbolic and sacred animal of the God, never otherwise sacrificed, was on the annual festival-day of the God offered up to him, the skin being placed on the God’s statue. As Herodotus tells the story, there was then brought beside the image of Amun an image of “Herakles,” presumably Khonsu, the Son of the God in the Theban Trinity;  whereafter “all who are in the temple beat themselves in mourning for the ram, and then bury him in a holy sepulchre.” Whatever may have been the parts played by father and son respectively in this rite, it is clear that the slaying of the ram—presumptively a lamb—represented the death of the God, whose resurrection would necessarily follow, like that of Osiris. In the ritual worship of Herakles, the man burned alive represented the God,  who in the myth dies on the funeral pyre. Another rite practised in the worship of the Syrian Goddess indicates in a different way the original connection of an animal sacrifice with a human sacrifice and a sacrament. In the Syrian ritual, the stranger who came to sacrifice had to offer up a sheep, of which he partook, on whose skin he knelt, and whose head he placed on his in the act of supplication.  The symbolism is here fairly complete. And in yet another rite, that of the sacrifice and sacramental eating of a camel among the Sinaitic Arabs of the fourth century,  it was clearly avowed that the young white camel was a substitute for a human sacrifice, young and beautiful captives being the preferred victims. In this case the blood of the wounded camel was drunk by the tribesmen, and the animal was cut to pieces and instantly devoured raw. That at a remote period the human victim was so eaten, it is difficult to doubt.

Proceeding on the maxim that the myth is always long posterior to the rite which it pretends to explain, we must suppose that before the composition of the legends concerning the Titans and the birth, death, and rebirth of Dionysos, such a primitive rite as the legend describes had actually been performed. Between a ritual in which the victim is torn to pieces for burial in the fields, and one in which the victim is eaten by the worshippers, there is a process of development to be accounted for. Two hypotheses are open. The Khond rite may be a modification of an original ritual of cannibalism; or the ancient Dionysiak rite may stand for a transformation of the typical rite, in which, an animal having been substituted for a human victim, the eating of it became a means to communion with the God whom the animal mystically represented. Broadly speaking, one process is as likely as the other; and both have evidently taken place. While the Khonds did not eat their human sacrifice, the Gonds, a kindred Dravidian race, by one account actually did;  and many medieval and modern instances of kin-eating and other ritual cannibalism are on record.  In one of the most recently noted instances of human sacrifice among contemporary savages, which is also the most primitive that has been observed—the cult of the Snake-God at Ebritum in Southern Nigeria—the annual victims seem to have been eaten regularly; and of the four hundred slain on the occasion of the death of a great chief, “all were killed at Ebritum as offerings to the God, and then eaten by the Aro people, the flesh being distributed through the late chief’s country. These victims were looked upon as sacred, and those who ate their flesh ate Gods, and thus assimilated within themselves something of the divine attributes and power. The victims were not fattened before being killed.”  In another tribe, the Ibo, the sacrifice and eating of a male or female slave is still a regular part of the “Okuku” or post-funeral ceremony for a chief; and in this case the victim is “bought with a price” after the chief’s death, fattened, and treated with particular kindness, in the Asiatic fashion.  Instances of ritual cannibalism may easily be multiplied. In the annual human holocaust at Whydah, a century ago, the sacrifice of one man thrown from a height with his hands tied, a muzzled crocodile, and a pair of pigeons with clipped wings, terminated the celebration; and the man in this case was devoured by the multitude.  And to this day, in the words of one observer, “no great human sacrifice offered for the purpose of appeasing the Gods and averting sickness or misfortune is considered to be complete unless either the priests or the people eat the bodies of the victims.”  The same sacramental element is seen in the eating of parts of the sacrificed captives of war at Bonny.

In the Tonga Islands, again, the bodies of enemies slain in war were dedicated to the Gods, and a few sacramentally eaten: this at a stage of civilisation at which many of the community, and particularly the women, regarded the proceeding with disgust;  and similar survivals were noted in the Marquesas.  In Fiji  and Tahiti  dedication to the Gods was a preliminary to every act of public cannibalism. Among the Niam-Niams of Nubia, too, it appears to have been chiefly in times of war that cannibalism was resorted to; and though a white onlooker ascribed the act in such a case to sheer “blood-thirstiness and hatred,”  it was doubtless a religious proceeding. The same inference arises in the cases in which Native Americans in modern times have been known to eat human flesh in time of war; since they did it “with repugnance,” though they believed it to produce courage.  Even the infliction of torture may have a religious as distinct from a merely revengeful motive,  as in a sacrifice among the Native Americans in which the victim, a slave, was burned by a slow fire, with progressive mutilation and partial eating, followed by killing and the eating of the remains. Finally the partakers beat on their huts “to compel the soul of the defunct to abandon the village.”  Here we have a systematic ritual.

We may therefore conclude that primordially the human sacrifice was normally eaten, as it was by the semi-civilised Mexicans at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is in fact certain that anthropophagy has been practised in all parts of the world in the savage and semi-civilised stages;  and it is no less certain that cannibalism had persisted long in its religious form after it had ceased to be a normal practice: the rationale of the act being, not that men to the last offered the Gods that which they commonly liked for themselves, but that they held it a sacred experience to continue to eat what they believed the God to eat.  On the other hand, the recoil from cannibalism which everywhere marks the rise of humanity would, in the more civilised Asiatic states, lead on one hand to the setting apart of criminals for the human sacrifices, and on the other to the substitution of an animal, which, partly in virtue of survivals of totemism and partly in virtue of the current conception of all sacrifice,  could pass as the representative and incarnation of the God, and would at the same time serve for the typical sacramental meal, but no longer in a totemistic sense.

A certain difficulty arises as to the use of criminals for sacrificial purposes. As we have seen, the Khonds vetoed it, and rejected even prisoners of war. In view of the nearly universal principle  among the higher races of antiquity that the sacrifice must be pure and without blemish, a criminal would seem to be the last man to suit the part; and among the Mesopotamian Semites a genuine and precious sacrament was anciently insisted on.  This appears to have been the idea underlying the common rule that the victim should be a male, which prevailed among the peoples of Nigeria in recent times as regards both men and animals.  Yet these tribes, as we have seen, sacrifice indifferently a female or a male slave to-day;  and of the practice at Benin it is told that “the people who were kept for sacrifice were bad men or men with bad sickness—they were all slaves”; and that a slave who committed a murder was put apart as a fit victim for the common good.  A woman again, was the usual sacrifice to the Rain-God;  and women slaves were among those sacrificed to save the city.  So among the Egyptians, even in our era, there was a usage of sacrificing a virgin annually to the Nile.  The idea of fitness, in short, could easily and spontaneously vary.  So, among the Greeks, virgins are typical victims for human sacrifice; and the Goddess known simply as Parthenos, sometimes associated with Athênê, and by Herodotus identified with Iphigeneia,  is probably but an abstraction from a once annual virgin-sacrifice. But it is found that in primitive communities the act of execution “constantly assumes sacrificial forms”;  and it is told of the Bataks of Sumatra that they ate their executed criminals, without any other resort to cannibalism, the relatives of the executed man being entitled to the best pieces,  The same is told of the people of Francis Island in the South Pacific: “Thieves were killed and their bodies eaten: only in such cases was there cannibalism.”  In the case of the Bataks at least there would seem to be a clear survival of an anthropophagous sacrament, as it can hardly he supposed that people not otherwise cannibalistic would desire to devour an executed relative for the sheer pleasure of eating human flesh. And the accepted explanation of Batak practice is one which chimes with all we know of the motives to theophagy. “The cannibalism so common in Sumatra derives in any case originally from the desire to obtain, through the means of the eaten flesh of a newly-slain man, the enrichment of one’s own life-stock by his tondi” —that is, the many specific spirits which animate his limbs and organs. The Bataks of to-day hardly realise the motive, though their licit cannibalism is now limited to the eating of brave warriors wounded and taken captive, and of certain criminals, as aforesaid.  But with other primitives there is no discrimination. An old Chinese description of Tibet preserves record of a Tibetan practice of sending criminals of certain kinds to be eaten by a tribe of savages north of Burma.  The latter may have proceeded on the Batak principle; but of this there is no trace, they being ostensibly ready to eat anybody’s exiles. Among the Manyema of Uganda, till the other day or even now, it has been the rule that the dead are always eaten by their kindred in the nearest village —a limitation which suggests modification of an original kin-eating by the example of cannibalism after warfare.

The view that the criminal was a proper sacrifice, in fact, might readily grow out of the circumstance that the earlier victims had been normally captives;  and this collocation of ideas we actually find in the custom of Dahome, where human sacrifice was so recently and so systematically practised. The annual victims, as distinguished from the holocaust at the death of a king, were commonly captives and criminals, these being normally the king’s perquisite.  As the death holocaust proceeded on the assumption that the king must enter the Death-land well attended, so the annual sacrifices, which might number about thirty, were contributions of filial piety to that retinue. The time of sacrifice was accordingly the only time of capital punishment in the year.  Here the process of reasoning is sufficiently transparent. If an enemy of the tribe from without could suffice, so, it might be argued, would an enemy of the tribal law from within, he being, besides, one of the king’s or God’s own people. And among the Aztecs, accordingly, we find the law decreeing that thieves who had stolen gold and silver—thieves par excellence, so to speak—were annually sacrificed with the regular victims to the God Xipe, patron of the goldsmiths. Like many other victims, they were flayed, and the priest wore their skins, thus figuring as the God in their persons.

We have, again, the record of Caesar that in the wholesale human sacrifices of the Gauls the offering up of those who had committed thefts or other crimes was considered “more grateful to the immortal Gods”; but that “when the supply of that species fell short, they descended to sacrifices of the innocent.”  And there is reason to think, with M. de Belloguet,  that the peculiar sacrifices in question (in which numbers of men were burned alive in large simulacra) were derived from some early Carthaginian or other Phœnician cult. Needless to say, the simple recoil in more civilised periods from the idea of a wilful sacrifice of the innocent—a recoil clearly seen in Greek and Semitic legends—would encourage the resort for victims to the unfortunates under sentence of death.

Finally, we have the express statement of Porphyry that in the annual sacrifice of a man to the ancient Semitic deity Kronos at Rhodes, a prisoner condemned to death was selected and kept till the Kronian festival, when he was led outside the city gates and, having been given wine to drink, put to death.  Here we have at length a close parallel in the Mediterranean world to what we have seen reason to regard as a typical detail in the gospel mystery-play.  The Kronian victim at Rhodes we know cannot have been originally a criminal; and it is much more likely than not that he originally personated either the God Kronos,  or, as seems most probable, the “only-begotten son” Ieoud, whom in a Phœnician myth  Kronos is said to have sacrificed after dressing him in royal robes. To this clue we shall return after a further survey. In the meantime, we may take it as established (1) that the giving of a narcotic to the victim—which we have seen practised among the Khonds, and which we find transferred in India and elsewhere to animal victims  who are presumably surrogates—derives from ancient usage; and (2) that the original purpose of the rite was not held to be defeated by the selection for sacrifice of a prisoner sentenced to death.

In a community where social duty was deeply impressed on all, as in medieval Japan, it was possible to secure every year a victim who practised ascetic abstinence, and was finally put to death on behalf of the community,  and this may well have been the early ideal.  As the Japanese human scapegoat, though of course no longer sacrificed, is even now called the “one-year god-master,” and was anciently called “the abstainer,” it is not difficult to conceive that this may have been one of the ways in which kingship grew up.  But in more sophisticated societies, as we know, the extremer obligations of the kingship were overridden, and victims must in most States have been hard to procure.  It is true that in primitive communities the fear of death seems surprisingly slight among doomed victims;  and the known readiness of Chinamen to sell themselves as substitutes for condemned criminals points the same moral. But none the less there has been an evolution of the faculty of apprehension. An intermediate stage is seen in the medieval State of Malabar, where condemned men volunteered to immolate themselves in honour of a God, giving themselves twelve wounds with as many knives, and thereby winning funeral honours.  The tendency in less rigorously drilled communities than Japan would be, first, towards a general unwillingness which had to be met by the bribe of a year’s licence, and, later, to a state of things in which nobody would volunteer, and the victim must be either bred and bought, as among the Khonds, or taken from among the condemned criminals. These, however, would include persons condemned for impiety, who even for the Christians were explicitly anathemata, that is, objects “devoted” to the Gods.  The same title of anathema  was given to the sacred objects hung up or deposited in the temples and to the man denounced for impiety.  So that, even if the widespread usage of granting abnormal privileges to the victim, whether human or animal,  were originally a way of asserting his divinity, a criminal was not ineligible.

Thus, though it does not seem to be clearly proved that the victims put to death in the Thargelia festival at Athens were latterly criminals,  it is highly probable that they were. Early religion looked to the physical side of sacrifice; and if the criminal were whole, no question of his fitness would arise for more primitive worshippers, save where, as among the Khonds, the practice of purchase set up a special credence.  In one Greek sacrifice, indeed, that performed at Leucadia, an “ugly or deformed person” seems to have been chosen as the victim.  When, again, the developing religious consciousness became capable of shrinking from the anomaly of calling a criminal “sacred,” there was, as we shall see later, a symbolical way out of the difficulty.

Symbolism, too, would further the modification of the sacrificial meal. Long before the more civilised peoples revolted from the act of human sacrifice, they would recoil, we must suppose, from the act of anthropophagy; and in regard to many rites of human sacrifice we find stories of substitution of animals and of waxen and other images and cakes by order of humane kings.  The Roman devices of the kind are well known, and their resort to images of straw is paralleled among the Gonds of India in our own time;  while the modern Malays offer dough models of human beings, called “the substitute,”  and the Bataks of Sumatra employ a number of symbolic sacrifices of images of human beings, some made of bananas, some of wood—all plainly suggestive of a process of substitution for former human sacrifices.  The same process of substitution may be confidently inferred in the case of the rite practised in the Chinese Spring Festival, held annually on the fourth of February. The chief magistrate of each department, crowned with flowers, is carried in a chair in procession, surrounded by figures representing mythological personages; and before him is carried a huge decorated figure of a buffalo, in terra-cotta, with gilded horns, behind which goes a child, with one foot shod and the other naked, who constantly beats the buffalo. Behind him march labourers carrying their agricultural implements; and the procession goes out (and returns) by the eastern gate of the town, “to meet the spring.” When it is over, the buffalo is broken up, and the pieces, with a vast number of small buffalo figures carried in the interior of the figure, are distributed to all the people; whereafter the governor delivers a discourse in praise of agriculture.  What has historically taken place, doubtless, is first a substitution of a buffalo, as among the Khonds, for the original human victim, of whom the flower-crowned governor is a surviving trace. Later, Chinese thrift and mandarin policy substituted an image for the buffalo, adding a multitude of small figures of it for distribution with the pieces of the image, as was once done in the case of the living victim.

For the rest, the turn of mind which made myths out of the misunderstood survivals of totemism would have no difficulty in finding reasons for eating any given animal in the worship of any given God, whether or not the primordial sacrifice had been that of an animal. Thus the worshippers of Dionysos could feel they were commemorating the dismemberment of the God when they ate the raw flesh of a bull or a kid; other devotees ate a young dog;  and further symbolic modification easily followed, on lines common to many pagan cults.

6. The Cannibal Sacrament

Given such a modification, however, we have to reckon with a tendency that is seen to have been chronic in religious history—the tendency, namely, to revert to a foreign or archaic form of sacrifice or mystery in times of national disaster and uncertainty.  It is expressed alike in the Roman resort to eastern and Egyptian Gods in times of desperate war, in the revival or preservation of the cults of subdued races,  in the multiplication of magical rites for decaying civilisations, and in the chronic reversion during times of excitement to palmistry and other modes of fortune-telling.  And that the idea of religious anthropophagy prevailed in the early Christian world is obvious from the central ritual of the cult, where the formulas: “Take eat, this is my body”; “Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood,” cannot conceivably be other than adaptations from a mystery ritual in which a sacrificed God so spoke by the mouth of his priest.  In the fourth gospel we have an amplification in the same sense, the act of symbolical anthropophagy or theophagy being made the means to immortality:—

I am the bread of life......I am the living bread, which came down out of heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: yea, and the bread which I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world......Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, ye have not life in yourselves. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day. For my flesh is true meat, and my blood is true drink. He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood abideth in me, and I in him.

The very repetitions are ritualistic; we have them in the ritual of the Khonds, and in the ritual of the pre-Christian Mexicans.  And there is another curious parallel in a certain ritual of Dahome, where, with all the stress of human sacrifice, cannibalism occurred in one set of cases only—those killed by lightning, a death “which renders sepulture, as among the Romans, unlawful.” In these cases the official “wives” of the Thunder-God place the body upon a platform, cut from it lumps which they chew without eating, crying to passers-by: ‘We sell you meat, fine meat, come and buy.’”

Now, the eucharist stands both in the myth and in the nature of the cult in the closest relation to the act of human sacrifice; and to explain the latter without reference to the former is to miss part of the problem. For the compilers of the fourth gospel, as we have noted, the Crucified One is the final and universal paschal sacrifice, being slain at the time of the paschal lamb-eating, whereas in the synoptics he had previously partaken thereof. And that this conception existed among the Judæo-Christists before the gospels were written is clear from the book of Revelation, where we have a Judaic writer of the early days of the Gentile schism  identifying Jesus with the Alpha and the Omega = the Almighty, and at the same time with “the Lamb that was slain,” and that has seven horns and eyes, like the symbol of Mithra, the slain God actually appearing as a Lamb in the vision. Thus in the Jesuine eucharist, as in so many others, there is embodied the primitive countersense of the God eating himself, in that the sacred or sacrificial animal which he eats is his own manifestation. There could not well occur in respect of the lamb the further myth-evolution seen in some other cults, as in that of the goat-eating Dionysos, where “we have the strange spectacle of a God sacrificed to himself on the ground that he is his own enemy.” But the primary principle is the same: whether through totemism or through an early application of the zodiacal principle, making the spring sacrifice consist in a lamb because the Sun is then in the constellation of the Ram-Lamb, the lamb stands for the God; and “as the God is supposed to partake of the victim offered to him, it follows that, when the victim is the God’s own self, the God eats of his own flesh.”  In the gospel legend this happens by a double necessity, inasmuch as the God must found his own eucharist before his death.

It was doubtless by way of refining upon the earlier practice of flesh-eating that in the synoptics the God is made to call the bread his flesh; though in the course of the supper he presumptively ate of the prescribed flesh of his special symbol and representative, the lamb. In the same way the Mithraists, whose God was symbolised by both the bull and the lamb, had a sacred meal of bread and wine and one of bread and water, though the God is normally figured as slaying the bull, and a lamb was at certain times eaten in the mysteries.  So in the mystical eucharist of the Egyptians, wherein the divine beings “eat the God Bah [God of the water-flood] and drink the drink offerings,”  the “cakes and ale” so constantly mentioned in the funeral ritual clearly stand for bread and wine as symbolising flesh and blood, the cakes being made of white grain, and the ale from red grain.  The worshippers of Dionysos inferribly did the same when his worship was linked to that of Dêmêtêr or Ceres, the Corn-Goddess, and in his cult in turn the wine was mixed with water.  But it is on record that though some Christian worshippers in the second century and later, whether imitating the Mithraists or proceeding on general ascetic principles, substituted water for wine in the normal sacrament (a mixture of wine and water being the common usage),  an actual lamb was in many churches anciently sacrificed and eaten at Easter, and that when that usage ceased a baked image of a lamb was substituted.  And vestiges of both customs survive to this day in the practice of the Catholics of Italy, wherein an actual body of a lamb as well as a confectionery image is blessed by the priest, with the Easter eggs, and sometimes bread.

There were in reality two ideals in the early Church: that set forth by a number of the Fathers down to Augustine, according to which the ritual of the Holy Supper is purely mystical;  and another, resting on the natural feeling that the ritual language was gratuitously fantastic if taken as wholly mystical. This, the realistic view, founds on the whole historical analogy of sacrifice, which always meant a communion with the God in partaking of a common meal,  and often, further, a partaking of the God  under the form of his animal or human representative—this after the principle of totemism, if ever present in the particular cult, had been long overlaid by a later mysticism.

In short, if men ate the paschal sacrament of the Lamb by way of eating the God, they were doing what was pleasing to the God; and if they further regarded the God as incarnate in human shape, they were equally entitled or committed to eating him in that form. But are we then to suppose that in any Mediterranean population about the beginning of the Christian era a religious sect could sacrifice a human being and afterwards sacramentally eat of the flesh? In the records of the man-sacrifice of the Babylonian Sacæa or Zakmuk, to which Dr. Frazer looks for the original of a rite copied by the Jews in their Purim feast and incidentally applied to the execution of a historic Jesus, there is no trace of a subsequent anthropophagous or other sacrament; any more than a rite of resurrection. Yet such a sacrament would seem to be primordial; and the idea of resurrection, developed as a doctrine of individual immortality from the primary conception of the annual revival of vegetation, had become part of the mystery rituals of Osiris and Dionysos, and of the Eleusinia, long before the Christian era.

It is the same doctrine that we find in pro-Christian Mexico, particularly in the worship of Huitzilopochtli, concerning which a discerning mythologist of the last generation noted that the practice of making from dough and seeds and children’s blood small images of the God, which were treated like human victims and eaten, signified his death and the eating of his body:—

Whereas the God dies, it must be religiously and as a sacrifice; and whereas the anthropomorphic God dies, he dies as a human sacrifice according to the established usages......his heart is cut out and his body eaten as was done in every human sacrifice. Was the thought thereby signified that the God, when his body was eaten, became part thereof, and so communicated himself? Doubtless, but not abstractly, metaphysically, or at all Christianly or morally, but simply on his Nature side, which is the essence of the Feast-God. In seeds he gives his body to nourish his worshippers......Broadly, the God entertains the sacrificer at the sacrifice through the sacrificial meal; and when the slave, as so often happens, represents the God to whom he is sacrificed, the eating of his flesh is an eating of the God’s.

With the comparative “morality” of the heathen and Christian sacraments we need not here concern ourselves. But it is to be noted that among the early Christians the sacramental bread was treated as having medicinal virtue; and that in the Middle Ages it became practically a fetish.

7. The Semitic Antecedents

In view of such an evolution, which may or may not have a historical connection with the old Asiatic rite seen surviving among the Khonds and Gonds, we may perhaps infer where we cannot trace the development that preceded the reduction of the Jesus myth to its present form. An important light is also thrown on the problem by the speculation of Dr. Frazer, inasmuch as it indicates clues which are not affected by the miscarriage of his actual theorem; and to these we may profitably turn.

Dr. Frazer’s hypothesis is that the “mockeries” of the crucifixion represent the application to the case of Jesus of the usages of the Perso-Babylonian festival of the Sacæa,  which he is disposed to identify with the very ancient New Year festival known as the Zakmuk or Zagmuku.  From this he holds the Jews to have derived their (certainly post-exilic) feast of Purim, of the origin of which such a fictitious account is given in the book of Esther, whereof the Esther and Mordecai strongly suggest the God-names Ishtar and Merodach. Purim, in its main features, resembles alike the accounts given of the Sacæa and those given of Zakmuk; and the suggestion is that the Jews, in borrowing the festival, may have copied from the Babylonians the Sacæa practice of putting to death at that date “a malefactor, who, after masquerading as Mordecai, in a crown and royal robe, was hanged or crucified in the character of Haman.” This in itself is not incredible; nor is it unlikely that the fast which precedes the feasting of Purim was, in Babylon, a ceremonial mourning for a God or demigod who died like Tammuz or Adonis, and like him rose again on the third day. Then comes the suggestion that Jesus was crucified in the character of Haman.

Now arises, however, the problem as to dates. Purim occurred in the middle of the lunar month of Adar, the last of the Jewish sacred year, which, says Dr. Frazer, “corresponds roughly to March.” In Condor’s Handbook, as it happens, it is made to run from January 28th to February 25th, leaving (for us) an interval of eleven days unaccounted for between the end of the year and the beginning of the next, which sets out with 1st Nisan = 8th March. What the Jews did to round the cycle was to insert a thirteenth lunar month seven times in nineteen years. This intercalary month was presumptively placed at the end of the year, with the effect of retarding the New Year and making Nisan (also called Abib = ripe ears) run into our April. The practical point for us, then, is that there were several weeks between Purim and the Babylonian Zakmuk, which fell “early” in Nisan. Doubtless the Jews put Purim earlier to prevent its clashing with their Passover, which was originally a spring festival of the same order. But then the Sacæa, according to Berosus, fell in the Babylonian month of Lous, which answers to July;  and Jesus, again, is crucified at the Passover, which occurs in the middle of Nisan, the lamb being set apart on the 10th, while “unleavened bread” began on the 15th. Thus none of the dates fit, Jesus being crucified, according to the story, a month after the Jewish festival in which Haman figures, and months before that of the Sacæa in which a mock king was hanged or crucified.

Of these difficulties, which Dr. Frazer avows, Mr. Lang makes the most.  Dr. Frazer’s suggested solutions are—(1) that Berosus may be wrong about the date of the Sacæa; (2) that Jesus may really have been crucified in Adar, at the feast of Purim, and not in Nisan, at the feast of the Passover—Christian sentiment preferring the latter date, and making the change in tradition; (3) that the Jews may sometimes (cp. Esther iii, 7) have put Purim alongside of the Passover. For the rest, he suggests that Barabbas was the Mordecai of the year; and cites from Philo the story of Carabbas, who was made to play the part of a mock king at Alexandria, by way of burlesquing King Agrippa.  The name Carabbas, it is suggested, may be a copyist’s error for Barabbas, which, Dr. Frazer thinks, may have been the standing name for a figure in a mock sacrifice, since it means “Son of the Father,” and points to the old Semitic cults in which king’s sons were sacrificed by or for their fathers.

Now, the mere difficulty about dates would not be fatal to Dr. Frazer’s very interesting and ingenious theory if that were otherwise on a sound footing. That there were two calendar usages in regard to the Sacæa becomes probable when we note (1) that the Jews, under Babylonian influence, had separated their ecclesiastical from their civil year—their ecclesiastical new year (the older) being in autumn, while the civil year began in spring,  and (2) that they had a second or little Passover, a month after the first, for those who could not keep that.  Under the changing dynasties of Mesopotamia there might easily be such a duplicating of the Sacæa; and as a matter of fact Zakmuk was a festival day in many Babylonian cults.  On the other hand, the Jews would readily antedate their Purim to separate it from the Passover; and Christian tradition might very well falsify a date of which it had no documentary record. But this last consideration calls up a far more serious objection to the form of Dr. Frazer’s proposition—the above-noted objection, namely, that he is accepting the historic actuality of the crucifixion, the inscriptions on the cross, the “of Nazareth,” the mockery by the soldiers, the utterances of Pilate, the episode of Barabbas, and all the rest of it. To a critic who accepts all this the critical answer obviously is: If you thus take for granted the genuineness of such a highly detailed narrative, how can you possibly account for its absolute omission of any shadow of allusion to the Haman-and-Mordecai show of which you suppose the crucifixion to have accidentally become part? This objection Dr. Frazer does not try to meet; and it is hard to see how he could meet it.

A thorough inquiry, surely, must take account of all aspects of the gospel problem, not merely of ostensible parallels in pagan usage to one aspect of the crucifixion story. The whole documentary problem, surely, must be taken into account; and the historical criticism of the entire legend reckoned with. We are not dealing with a generally credible and corroborated narrative in which a single episode raises surmise of extraneous factors not recognised in the text, but with one which begins and ends in absolute and immemorial myth and is stamped with supernaturalism in every sentence. By Dr. Frazer’s own repeated avowal, we ought not to look to the current narrative of the origin of a rite for the historical fact, but to the rite for the origin of the narrative. If this law does not hold of the Christian eucharist it holds of nothing; and the eucharist is the keystone of the arch built over the death of the God in the gospels.

Dr. Frazer obviously proceeds on the common assumption that the teachings of the Gospel Jesus testify to an indubitable personality. But that view, so natural at first sight, has reached its lowest degree of credit among special students precisely at the moment of Dr. Frazer’s unquestioning acceptance of it.  Anthropology and hierology cannot afford thus to ignore the special historical problems of the very creed on which confessedly their results must finally come to bear. Several of Dr. Frazer’s remarks, however, suggest that in the very act of bringing his invaluable research into relation with the creeds of his contemporaries he had regarded as outside his field of study some of the most significant and best-established facts as to the doctrinal evolution of Christism among the Jews.

8. The Judaic Evolution

Rejecting, then, as not merely unwarranted but excluded by the evidence, Dr. Frazer’s assumption of the historicity of the crucifixion, we have to note carefully the inferences which his research really warrants. When these are drawn it will be found that his notable hypothesis does not fall to the ground in its essentials. He has really added signally to his former great services by bringing together the evidences for the existence of a mock-kingly sacrifice among the Semites before the Christian era, and by skilfully elucidating the whole primitive psychology of such rituals. It needs only that his procedure be freed, on the principles of scientific mythology, from the difficulty set up by accepting one set of palpable myths as history. When criticism has done its worst against his manipulation of the Sacæa, Zakmuk, and Purim, it will be found that there remains clearly open the inference that certain details of the crucifixion myth are drawn from some old Semitic rite resembling the Sacæa, not by way of Purim in its Evemerised Jewish form, but in a simpler form, in which there was no Ishtar or Merodach.

Precisely because the practice of human sacrifice to the Vegetation-God was so nearly universal as Dr. Frazer has shown it to be, it is unnecessary to assume that the Jews owed their variant of it solely to a late contact with another nation. The Athenians had in their Thargelia, which like the Passover was a feast of first fruits,  a usage of human sacrifice which as we have seen corresponded at points with the Babylonian, inasmuch as the victims were maintained in potentially riotous ease, and were latterly chosen from the criminal class, though they cannot originally have been so. The sacrifice, indeed, does not seem to have belonged to the earlier worship of Apollo at all,  and the calling of the victims pharmakoi, “medicine-men,” suggests an adaptation of a West-Asiatic usage, the more so as quasi-Semitic sacrifices were in use among the Eretrians and Magnesians.  In all likelihood this was the very sacrifice of purification said to have been prescribed to the plague-stricken Athenians by the Cretan Epimenides,  when two youths voluntarily gave themselves as victims.  But if the Athenians could take such a rite from Crete or Asia Minor, there is reason to conclude that it was known in Palestine, in a simpler form than the Babylonian, before the exile. That there were such forms is to be inferred from both early and late evidence.

Firstly, we have the whole tradition of the Passover, with which, and not with Purim, the crucifixion myth comes chronologically in touch on the face of the case. Among the aspects of the gospel myth which the analogy of the Sacæa leaves untouched are (1) the mourning for the victim; (2) his alleged divinity and his titles of Son of God and Son of Man; (3) his participation in a sacramental meal in which his flesh is mystically eaten; (4) his execution along with two criminals; (5) his resurrection; (6) his subsequent status as Messiah or Christos. Now, the first three of those characteristics are as cognate with the paschal rite as they are alien to Purim; the fourth can be shown historically to connect with paschal usage; and the others develop naturally from the preceding. That there is no need to go to Purim for an actual killing or sacrificing of quasi-royal victims or malefactors in connection with a sacrificial festival appears from the legend of the hanging of seven king’s sons “before the Lord,” an event which happens according to the narrative at the barley harvest, that is, at the time of the Passover.

In the face of this familiar record it is obliviously asserted by Mr. Lang that “sacrificed victims are not hanged.”  He has given thirteen cases of human sacrifice in which victims were not hanged, but has apparently not consulted his Bible. Now, the expressions “before the Lord” and “unto the Lord” mean sacrifice or nothing;  and that the hanging of Saul’s sons was by way of propitiation is clear from the remark in the context that “after that, God was intreated for the land.”  Further, hanging is the mode not only in the sacrificing of Saul’s sons but in the offering up “unto the Lord” of the heads of the people as described in Numbers xxv, 4. Equally sacrificial, in spirit and in occasion, though the usual formula is not applied to it, is the hanging of the five kings by Joshua in the pseudo-history; and in the case of his hanging of the king of Ai, where the procedure is exactly the same, it is explicitly told, in the Hebrew, that he “devoted” all the people of Ai, as he had done those of Jericho.  As Ai is an imaginary city,  we must conclude that the legend points to a customary rite. Finally, a comparison of a passage in Deuteronomy in which every hanged man is declared to be “the curse of God,”  with the passages cited from the book of Joshua, proves that “the curse of God” meant “devoted to God,”  since in the former the course prescribed is precisely that followed in the pseudo-history, namely, the taking down and burying of the victim within the day. Thus all hanged men were in ancient Jewry sacrifices to the Sun-God or the Rain-God,  and the Pauline epistle unconsciously clinches the point in citing the misunderstood text.  It may in fact be taken as historically certain that human sacrifice in this aspect was a recognised part of Hebrew religion down till the Exile.

And here, as at so many other points, we find a specific parallel between Hebrew usage and that of the natives of Africa. At the death of a Nigerian chief or notable, the slaves slain to “raise him up by the head and feet” are buried with him; and others are “hung in the different compartments of the house” and in the street or roadway; the heads of these being afterwards cut off and regarded as conveying luck. Again, near a certain Long Juju shrine in Southern Nigeria, where human sacrifice was regularly practised until its capture by the British troops, it was noted that beside a minor temple at Ibum were “trees on which murderers and thieves used to be hanged.”  That the hanging had a religious significance is proved by the fact that when the capture took place there was found “the last sacrifice, a white goat, trussed up in the branches of a palm-tree and starving to death.”  And it is expressly explained concerning the sacrifice of a woman to the Rain-God at Benin that “a woman was taken, a prayer made over her, and a message saluting the Rain-God put in her mouth; then she was clubbed to death and put up in the execution-tree” [St. Andrew’s-cross-wise] “so that the rain might see.”

Semitic usage is all that need be proved in the present connection; but it may be further noted (1) that animal victims were hanged to a tree in the cult of the Syrian Goddess in the second century of our era;  (2) that human victims were bound or hanged to trees in the sacrificial rites of the pre-Christian Mexicans;  (3) that human victims were frequently if not habitually hanged in sacrifice to Odin,  as well as to other Teutonic deities;  (4) that in certain cases of human sacrifice in Tahiti the slain victim was “suspended from the sacred tree”;  (5) that the devoted bodies of slain enemies were hanged on a tree by the Tongans;  (6) that among Obubura natives a lamb in a propitiatory sacrifice was “fastened into the topmost prong of a pole” and set up, with a palm branch on which was impaled a yam, at the entrance of the compound;  (7) that some of the northern Native Americans hanged dogs to poles with running knots “in honour of their divinities”; that the nomads similarly attached skins of wild beasts to trees; and that the Floridans elevated other offerings.  It is significant that among the early Odin-worshippers, as among Greeks and Semites, king’s sons were sacrificed in substitution for their fathers; and that latterly slaves and criminals were substituted in such rites.  From the nature of the case, too, it is probable that the victim was hanged not by the neck but by the hands.  In some of the Scandinavian cases the victim was wounded with a javelin as well as hanged; and one myth specifies a hanging which lasted nine nights.  In any case, hanging by the wrists was the normal mode of ancient “crucifixion” so-called.

But, further, it is clear that the Passover rite, of which the narrative in Exodus is a fictitious account, was originally one of sacrifice of firstlings,  including the first-born sons; and the conflicting laws on the subject prove that only with difficulty was the substitution of lambs for children carried out.  To this day, at least among continental Jews,  the principle of “redemption” is ritually recognised, in the festival ceremony of Pidyen Haben. A month after the birth of a first son, a friendly Cohen is selected to officiate, who sacerdotally asks certain questions of the mother, one being, “Is this child the first fruit of your womb?” If he be poor, he receives a small fee;  if not, the mother throws a small gold chain round his neck; and he in return, during certain prayers, puts it round the neck of the child, who is thus “redeemed.” And that the first-born were at one time set apart as a victim-class,  liable either to be sacrificed or to be employed as hierodouloi, appears from the announcement of Yahweh in the priestly code: “I have taken the Levites from among the children of Israel instead of all the first-born......and the Levites shall be mine; for all the first-born are mine.”

As regards the private continuance of the practice after the Levites had been set apart as a specific tribe, we can only inferentially trace the evolution. Certainly the priesthood did not of itself set up the movement against child sacrifice: such reforms always begin through rulers or lay reformers, never through the priestly organisation, save when a new cult supersedes an old.  Circumcision, a rite of sacrifice with the same significance,  seems to have been introduced, or at least stressed, comparatively late,  for the same purpose; and as an official Yahwistic feast the Passover seems also late;  though the manner of its enactment in the first redaction of the law indicates that it was in some form already a standing practice.  It doubtless needed the late myths of Abraham and Isaac  and of the Exodus to persuade even Yahwists to drop the child sacrifice; and in the rival cults the practice seems to have been common.  It is in this connection that there presumptively occurred the usage first of breaking the victims’ limbs, and later of drugging them, to prevent the struggles which were usually held to make a sacrifice inauspicious;  and the manner in which the caveat against breaking the bones of the paschal lamb is introduced—an apparent interpolation made at the close of the original narrative of the exodus —indicates it to be either a late provision against a practice which definitely recalled the rite of human sacrifice, or a specific assertion of the principle that the victim must be without blemish, as against the practice of a human sacrifice in which the victim had to be either maimed or drugged in order to make him seem willing. But, as in the practice of the Khonds, so in that of the Jews, the principle that the victim must be “bought with a price” is visibly a later development, grafted on the other. Originally the victim is voluntary; this is his special sacrificial virtue. When the voluntary victim can no longer be procured, one “bought with a price,” being the property of the sacrificers, is the next best thing; and in his case “willingness” is ostensibly secured by trick, bribe, or brutality. The underlying reasoning is of a piece.

We are faced again, however, by the difficult problem of the historic transmission of such usages. On the whole the evidence from anthropology goes far to support the thesis, otherwise well made out, of the Asiatic derivation of the Oceanic peoples.  In certain South Sea Islands in modern times, when the practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism had latterly dwindled,  the first missionaries found in use forms of animal sacrifice which seem to affiliate at many points to the ritual we have seen in operation among Khonds and westerly Semites. Thus the pigs set apart for sacrifice  at certain temples, “when presented alive, received the sacred mark, and ranged the district at liberty; when slain, they were exceedingly anxious to avoid breaking a bone, or disfiguring the animal. One method of killing them was by holding the pig upright on its legs, placing a strong stick horizontally under its throat, and another across upon its neck, and then pressing them together until the animal was strangled.”  Here we have (1) the common Asiatic and American usage of leaving the doomed victim for a time at liberty;  (2) the avoidance of bone-breaking,  as in the case of the paschal lamb; (3) the preservation of the cross-figure as seen in the Khond sacrifice; and (4) the evident imitation of human sacrifice in the posture of the victim.  Seeing, further, that only a portion of the pig thus sacrificed was eaten, and that only by “the priests and other sacred persons who were privileged to eat of the sacrifices,” the remainder being left on the God’s altar till it decomposed, we may fairly surmise that it was a surrogate for a sacrificed human being, formerly eaten as a sacrament in the Aztec fashion.

Among the natives of South Nigeria who practised human sacrifice and ritual cannibalism down till the beginning of the twentieth century, we again find the use of the cross-figure. The victims sacrificed for rain were stretched on a rude scaffolding in the form of the St. Andrew’s cross; and goats, as we have seen, were similarly “trussed.” “Crucifixion” of a kind, as we have seen, was practised at Benin: and the term is frequently used by eye-witnesses in describing the treatment of victims.”  The usual form of sacrifice,” says Gallwey, “is crucifixion.”  Yet again, some of the women-slaves sacrificed, at the approach of the punitive expedition to Benin, had the “abdominal wall cut in the form of a cross.” There are traces, too, of leg-breaking, one goat being found by the punitive expedition at Benin with its legs broken, as a native explained, “to prevent white man coming”;  and Burton tells of a victim whose legs “had been broken at mid-shin with awful violence.”  He also records that “a slave bound for the other world is always plied with a bottle of rum before the fatal cord is made fast.”  In Uganda the usage of limb-breaking is found to have been common. The God Kitimba or Kitinda of Damba and elsewhere was represented by a crocodile, his “priest,” and to appease him men were sacrificed to the crocodiles in the lake. The victim was taken to the brink, “where his knees and elbows were broken, so that he could not crawl away,”  whereafter the crocodiles came and devoured him.  Here the primary motive is unusually clear; and it is noted that in the case of the victims thrown alive into the pit-grave of the chief among some tribes there is no limb-breaking, they being unable to escape.  It is not impossible that limb-breaking originated in this simple fashion, and later became a ritual usage with an ethical connotation. But among the Manyema of the same African region, on the other hand, we find that at the burial of a chief ten women victims had their legs and arms broken at the knees and elbows and were thrown into the grave; the king’s dead body, wrapped in bark-cloth, was laid upon theirs; and then ten men victims were similarly treated, and their bodies laid over the king’s.  Thus the idea of simulated “willingness” cannot be confidently excluded from even the most primitive phenomena. The main reason for doubt is the fact that in ordinary burial the limbs of the dead are by the same peoples broken at the elbows and knees to admit of their being placed in the sitting posture —a practice which, however, is ascribed to certain of the North American Indian tribes  without any mention of limb-breaking being resorted to. And in the sacrifices of slaves at the death of chiefs, as practised in the Sandwich Islands when they were visited by Captain Cook, the victims were clubbed suddenly, having “not the most distant intimation of their fate.”  Here the exclusion of willingness is so complete that we are led to infer a late and, so to speak, debased form of the rite.

Yet again, there is a solitary testimony that in the human sacrifices offered by the Algonkins at the beginning of the hunting season it was a rule that not a bone of the victim must be broken.  Seeing that other Native Americans observed the principle of the Semites, that at the sacrificial feast the victim “must be all eaten, and nothing left,”  there would thus seem to be not merely an ancient racial affinity between the aborigines of America and some race or races of Asia, but a direct heredity in the matter of special primitive rites. But even if we waive the latter presumption, we can infer the probable line of movement all round in the matter of the usages under notice. As thus:—

1. Originally a “willing” victim is desiderated; and willingness is secured by the bribe of a period of ease and licence.

2. This kind of victim becoming hard to procure, one “bought with a price” was substituted, as representing a voluntary offering by his owner or owners.

3. Still seeking the semblance of a “willing” sacrifice, the sacrificers first broke the limbs of the human victim.

4. Feeling (on some reformer’s urging) that such a mangled victim was an unseemly sacrifice, they resorted to narcotics.

5. At a higher stage of social evolution, recoiling from the sacrifice of an innocent victim, men fall back upon condemned criminals, and these in turn are stupefied, from humane or other motives.

6. Being next persuaded that the stupefied victim was either an unseemly or an inefficacious because non-suffering sacrifice, or being on other grounds inclined to abandon human sacrifice, they substituted the old sacrifice of an animal, giving it in certain cases human attributes, and in others some of the privileges formerly accorded to the taboo human victim. In the case of the animal it was not as a rule felt necessary either to break bones or to use narcotics, though either plan might be used. But reformers would stress the avoidance of bone-breaking by way of showing the superiority of the new sacrifice; hence the need for a veto on imitations of the old practice.

Such an evolution might conceivably take place independently in different communities. It is true indeed that in the redemptory sacrifices offered by modern Semites for boys, care is taken not to break a bone, “because they fear that if a bone of the sacrifice should be broken, the child’s bones would be broken too”;  but that appears to be a theory framed subsequent to and not antecedent to a reform.

It is of the nature of such reforms, however, to be introduced with difficulty and to be rebelled against and reverted from; and even without the above-cited evidence of a slowly-wrought transformation in Hebrew usage, it is certain, from the whole drift of religious history, that the practice of child-slaying, which was systematically legislated against only after the exile, would be revived in times of trouble by Jews, as we know it to have been by Carthaginians. It is through reversions of this kind to old and terrible rites, then, that we must suppose the ancient mode of sacrifice to have been kept in men’s knowledge. Such a doctrine rested on the most obvious and therefore the most fully developed side of the conception of sacrifice—the offering to the God of a peculiarly precious gift, representing a maximum of self-deprivation in the sacrificers.

Meanwhile, though it is not certain that the mode of “hanging before the Lord” by the wrists ever placed the victim in the form of a cross, as has been done in our own time at Benin, it would appear that the rite of the Passover was closely associated with the cross sign.  That is the “mark” specified in Ezekiel  for the saving of the elect from a general massacre; and the blood mark placed on the doorposts and lintels at the Passover  is inferentially the same,  as is the “seal” on the foreheads of the saved in the Apocalypse. To this day, the Arabs make the tau-mark with sacrificial blood on at least one Moslem shrine.  In any case, the pre-Christian use of the Cross as a symbol of the Sun-God and as a sign of “immortal life” is undisputed, and we shall see reason to infer that the form of slaying represented in the Christian crucifix—which does not appear in Christian art till about the seventh century —was conceived from certain rites in which the initiate extended his arms upon a tree or cross,  probably in reminiscence of some such mode of treating the sacrificed victim as we have seen described in the case of the Khonds.

9. Specific Survivals in Judaism

Apart from definite revivals, the memory of human sacrifice is clearly stamped not only on the Passover but on the two other typical sacrificial feasts of the Jews—the indeterminate sacrifice of the Red Heifer, loosely said to have been performed only eight times since Moses, and the annual sacrifice of a scape-goat on the Day of Atonement. In the case of the former, which was prescribed to take place on the Mount of Olives, the high-priest, his eldest son, and the Messiah Milchama—the deputy High-Priest anointed for war—were all three anointed with holy oil, the mark of a cross being made with it on their foreheads. But further, in one of the two Talmudic accounts, “in anticipation of the performance of the rite, a pregnant woman was brought into one of the chambers of the temple, which was set apart for the purpose, and kept there till her child was born. The child so born was brought up within the sacred precincts, and protected from any chance of incurring ceremonial pollution. When the time for the rite arrived, this child was seated on a wooden litter borne by bullocks, and conducted to the fountain of Siloah. There the child descended, and drew water from the spring in an earthen vessel, bearing which, he was reconducted, as he came, to the Temple.”  But by another account “pregnant women” were brought to Jerusalem, and placed in courts built on the rock, with an excavation underneath, and they and their children were there kept “for the use of the red heifer”  till the children were seven or eight years old, when they ceased to be held ceremonially pure. Here it becomes fairly clear that a regular supply of children-victims had anciently been provided for sacrifice, and that the heifer was the child’s representative. Some trace of the knowledge is preserved in the Talmud, in the dubiously significant saying that “as the red heifer atones for sin so also does the death of the righteous atone for sin.”  Being sacrificed with her face to, the south and her head to the west,  the heifer was presumably dedicated either to the setting or winter sun or to the Moon-Goddess.

By an equally clear clue in the ritual, we can reach the original character of the sacrifice of the scapegoat, which in its official form is clearly post-exilic.  In the preparation for that, the high-priest was removed from his own house to the council-chamber seven days in advance, and at the same time a sagan or deputy was appointed who should take his place in case of his being incapacitated. On the night before the day of sacrifice he was not allowed to eat meat, or to sleep, being watched by the younger priests. At that stage, “the elders of the great Sanhedrin handed him over to the seniors of the priestly order, who escorted him to the upper chamber of the house of Abtinas,  and there they swore him in, and, after bidding him farewell, departed. In administering the oath, they said: “My lord high-priest, we are ambassadors of the Sanhedrin; thou art ambassador of the Sanhedrin, and our ambassador also. We adjure thee, by Him who causes his name to dwell in this house, that thou deviate not from anything we have rehearsed to thee. Then they parted company, both he and they weeping.”  An absurd Talmudic explanation is given for the weeping: “He wept because they suspected he was a Sadducee; and they wept because the penalty or false suspicion is scourging.”  Whatever may have been the historical fact concealed by the last phrase, it is sufficiently clear that the rite was originally one of human sacrifice in which either the priest or his deputy, the Sagan or Segan, was put to death as “ambassador” of the people to the God or Gods,  that is, as scapegoat for their sins. And in this Sagan we probably have the true interpretation of the Græcised term Zoganes  applied to the mock victim of the Sacæa. He was simply the deputy  of the originally due victim, the priest, who must thus have solved his personal problem at a very early date.

In all likelihood the Hebrews had practised some form of this rite long before the Captivity. And as regards the later practice we have a significant Talmudic clue, in the saying of Rabbi Eleazar that it is lawful to slay an Amhaaretz (one “ignorant of the law,” rustic “pagan”) on the Day of Atonement, even (?) when it falls on a Sabbath. There were discussions on the point, and it is explained that the victim must not be slain with a knife, as “that would necessitate a formal benediction; but to kill him by tearing his nostrils open no benediction is required.” Another Rabbi chimes in that “Rabbi Yochanan has said that it is lawful to split up the Amhaaretz like a fish”; “and that from the neck too,” adds yet another.  The date explains the proposition. Whether as a regular and sanctioned or as a sporadic practice, the sacrifice of a human victim on the Day of Atonement had in all likelihood been practised at or near Jerusalem both before and after the Return from the Captivity.

The modified sacrifice of the scapegoat, then, was but another variant of the primordial principle of human sacrifice or “sin-offering” for the good of the people, and is in many respects the complement of the Passover. The Passover victim was set apart on the tenth day of the civil New Year, which dated from spring; the Day of Atonement was the tenth day from the ecclesiastical New Year, which, as we have seen, began in autumn. It is probable that the latter is the older of the two; but both hold their ground in reference to the sun’s progress, the spring festival standing for his youth and waxing period, the autumn for his maturity and waning. That they had a common principle in the sacrifice of a pure victim appears from the detail that in both cases the victim before sacrifice is put in an “upper chamber,” the idea being to provide that no contamination should arise from a grave beneath.  And both festivals, it is to be noted, could be celebrated apart from the Temple, the Passover being a domestic as well as a temple-feast, and the Day of Atonement being celebrated in Babylon as well as at Jerusalem.

It is important to note this circumstance in view of the theoretic universalism of the traditional rite of sacrifice, which even the Khonds declared to be for “mankind,” and on which the Gentilising Christians founded their gospel. Jewish sacrifices were strictly national; but in their later contacts with other races they were constantly being attracted towards more cosmopolitan ideals.  It sufficed that they had as basis the communal idea, and that it was capable of development on popular lines. In the legend of the slaying of Saul’s seven sons they preserved the belief (seen in force among the Moabites, and at the same time in Israel ) that a king’s son, offered up by and for his father, was an irresistibly potent sacrifice; and among some sections of the Semitic race, as we have seen, there was current the myth preserved by Eusebius from Philo of Byblos, that Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” adorned his son called Ieoud, “the only,” with emblems of royalty, and sacrificed him. The actuality of such a belief among the Phœnicians is proved by the story of Maleus crucifying his only son, crowned and robed in purple, before the walls of Carthage, in order to conquer the city.  He was fulfilling an august rite. Always it is a typically divine or racial “father”—Kronos, Israel, Abraham—who figures in the myths of son-sacrifice;  and when it is remembered that the God-name Tammuz signified in its original Akkadian form “the son of life,” and was by the Semites interpreted to mean “the offspring” or “only son,”  we are led to conclude that this conception, bound up with that of the God’s death and resurrection, had a general and strong hold on both non-Semitic and Semitic races; for a Hebrew cult of the dying and re-arising Tammuz was in the period before the exile carried on in the very temple of Yahweh.

10. The Pre-Christian Jesus-God

We are thus prepared to interpret the crux set up for Christian commentators by the ancient reading “Jesus Barabbas” in Matt. xxvii, 16, 17. That this was long the accepted reading in the ancient church is to be gathered from Origen;  and the problem has always been reckoned a puzzling one. Had Dr. Frazer noted it, he might have seen cause to look deeper for his solution of the problem of the simple name Barabbas in the Gospel story and in Philo. The natural inference from the Barabbas story is that it was customary to give up to the people about the time of the Passover a prisoner, who was made to play a part in some rite under the name of Barabbas, “Son of the Father”; and the reading “Jesus Barabbas” suggests that the full name of the bearer of the part included that of “Jesus”—a detail very likely to be suppressed by copyists as an error. Is not the proper presumption, then, this: that the preservation of the name “Jesus Barabbas” tells of the common association of those names in some such rite as must be held to underlie the Gospel myth—that, in short, a “Jesus the Son of the Father” was a figure in an old Semitic ritual of sacrifice before the Christian era? The Syrian form of the name, Yeschu, closely resembles the Hebrew name Yishak, which we read Isaac; and that Isaac was in earlier myth sacrificed by his father is a fair presumption. We have here the inferrible norm of an ancient God-sacrifice, Abraham s original Godhood being tolerably certain, like that of Israel.  In Arab legend, Ishmael is sacrificed by his father, though apparently the sacrifice is commuted for a ram in the manner of the story in Genesis.

As a hypothesis the proposed solution must for the present stand; but the grounds for surmising a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus or Joshua may here be noted. The first is the fact that the Joshua (Jesus) of the book so named is quite certainly unhistorical,  and that the narrative concerning him is a late fabrication. We can but divine from it that, having several attributes of the Sun-God,  he is like Samson and Moses an ancient deity, latterly reduced to human status; and as Jewish tradition has it that he began his work of deliverance on the day fixed for the choosing of the paschal lamb, and concluded it at the Passover,  it is inferrible that his name was anciently associated with the rite and the symbol, as well as with the similarly significant rite of circumcision, which is connected with the Passover in the pseudo-history of Joshua.  That he, who is never mentioned by the psalmists or prophets, should not only be put on a level with Moses as an institutor of the prime ordinances of the Passover rite and circumcision, but should be credited with the miracle of staying the course of the sun and moon—a prodigy beyond any ascribed to Moses—is not to be explained save on the view that he held divine status in the previous myth.  As his name was held in special reverence among the Samaritans, who preserved a late book ascribing to him many feats not given in the Jewish record, the probability is that he was an Ephraimite deity, analogous to Joseph, whose legend has such close resemblances to the myth of Tammuz-Adonis.

No less clear is the inference from the pseudo-prediction inserted in a list of priestly vetoes in the book of Exodus.  It is there promised that an Angel, in or on whom is the “name” of Yahweh, shall lead Israel to triumph against the Amorites, the Hittites, and the Perizzites, and the Canaanites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites. This is the very list (lacking one) put in Joshua’s mouth as that of the conquests effected by the Lord through him,  so that he is Pseudo-historically identified with the promised Angel.  That personage, again, in virtue of his possession of the magical “name,”  is in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos.  Thus the name Joshua = Jesus is already in the Pentateuch associated with the conceptions of Logos, Son of God, and Messiah; and it is in view of such knowledge that the pseudo-prediction is framed. Only the hypothesis that in some Palestinian quarters Joshua had the status of a deity can meet the case.

To the nature of that status we have certain clues which have never been considered in correlation, Jews and Christians alike being led by their presuppositions either to ignore or to misconceive them. One clue is, as already noted, the evidently Judaic and pre-Christian character of the Lamb-God Jesus in the Apocalypse. The slain God is there identified not only with the Logos,  before the appearance of the Fourth Gospel, and with the Mithraic or Babylonian symbols of the Seven Spirits, but with the Alpha and the Omega; and the accessories are markedly Semitic and Judaistic. Thus the four-and-twenty elders play a foremost part; the twelve apostles are present only in an interpolation;  and the saved are pre-eminently Jewish.  Not only, in short, is the Child-God of the dragon-story, in the twelfth chapter, not the Christian Jesus:  the Jesus of the whole book is pre-Christian, the book being in fact a Jewish Apocalypse slightly edited for Christian purposes.  So much is now admitted by many students; and it is the failure to learn this and other lessons of the documents that still permits of wrong hypotheses to account for the Messianic doctrine in the Book of Enoch, a distinctly pre-Christian work.

But the same problem arises in connection with that crucial document, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles.” Not only are the first six chapters of that book wholly Judaic, without mention of any divinity save “God,” “the Lord,” “the Father,” unless “the Spirit” be taken to stand for a second deity; but even the formula of baptism in the seventh chapter, which belongs to a secondary stratum in the compilation, is not clearly Christian; and the eucharistic formula in the ninth is clearly non-Christian. It runs: “We thank thee, our Father, for the holy vine of David thy servant, which thou hast made known to us by Jesus thy servant,”  an expression quite irreconcilable with the accepted Christian narrative and liturgy. Nor is there a single allusion in the entire document, whether in the late or the early portions, to the death of Jesus by crucifixion or otherwise. Thus it appears that not only was the nucleus of the document a teaching of twelve monotheistic Jewish apostles—the apostles of the High Priest to the Dispersion —but even the earlier Jesuist additions were made by Judaic Jesuists who had not the Christian doctrine of a divine sacrifice, whether or not they already had the trinitarian doctrine set forth in the baptismal formula of the seventh chapter. Thus the allusion to the “gospel of the Lord” in the eighth chapter is presumptively an interpolation, occurring as it does in a document in which hitherto “the Lord” had always meant Yahweh; and even at that, the reference is presumptively to the inferred primary form of the first gospel, which had no account of the crucifixion and resurrection —a gospel, in short, which had grown up solely by way of sayings and doings ascribed to the mythical Jesus, without the existing birth legend, and without his twelve apostles. Here again the theological critics recognise the Judaic character of the matter,  but fail to draw the obvious inferences.

There remains to be considered in the same connection the fact that in the Jewish liturgy for the ecclesiastical New Year there is or was mention of Joshua (Jeschu = Jesus) as “the Prince of the Presence.”  This is of course interpreted as a title signifying Joshua’s relation to Moses; but in the light of the Apocalypse it seems to have quite another significance. After the deletions effected in the pseudo-history,  the matter is sufficiently obscure; but the clues left, when colligated, tell of something very different from the written word. Tentatively, we may surmise that as the Day of Atonement, which comes ten days after the New Year, is the consummation of the annual Day of Judgment,  Joshua in the liturgy played very much the same part as the Judaic Jesus in the Apocalypse.

Finally, we have to note (a) the remarkable Persian tradition which makes Joshua the Son of Miriam,  whose death day in the Jewish calendar is that of the beginning of his work, the tenth of Nisan, whereon was chosen the paschal lamb; and (b) the fact that according to some Jews the “Week of the Son” (circumcision and redemption of the first-born male child) was called the rite of “Jesus the Son.”  Whether or not we have here the true origination of the myth which makes the Gospel Jesus the Son of Mariam, there is a fair presumption from mythological analogy that the Miriam of the Pentateuch, who dies and is buried at Kadesh,  ”the holy” city, is a Goddess Evemerised,  and that the day of Joshua’s setting out on his fictitious march was in the original myth the day either of his birth or of some act of popular salvation wrought by him. If he were originally a variant of Tammuz, and Miriam a variant of Ishtar, if male infants were circumcised in his honour, and if he died to save men at the Passover, the details to that effect would certainly be excluded by the later Yahwists from any narrative they preserved or framed concerning him. As it is, we may at least argue for a connection between the Judaic “Jesus the Son” and the traditional “Jesus the Son of the Father.”

Beyond conjectures we cannot at present go; but the significance given to the name of Jeshua, the high-priest of the Return, in the book of Zechariah,  at a time when the book of Joshua did not exist, tells of a Messianic idea so associated when Messianism was but beginning among the Jews. And as the Messianic idea seems to have come to them, as it fittingly might, during their exile, perhaps from the old Babylonian source of the myth of the returning Hammurabi—who in his own code declares himself the Saviour-Shepherd and the King of Righteousness —or from the later Mazdean doctrine that the Saviour Saoshyant, the yet unborn Son of Zarathustra, is at the end of time to raise the dead and destroy Ahriman,  it may have had many divine associations such as later orthodox Judaism would sedulously obliterate.

What is specially important in this connection is the fact that the doctrine of a suffering Messiah gradually developed among the Jews, for the most part outside the canonical literature. For the doctrine that “the Christ must needs have suffered”  can be scripturally supported only from passages like the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, where our A. V. alters the past tense into the present, thus making a description of Israel’s past sufferings serve as a mystic type. Cyrus, who is called Messiah in Deutero-Isaiah, was reputed to have been crucified, but not in his Messianic capacity.  The presumption then is that the doctrine was extra-canonical, and was set up by Gentile example. Even in the Book of Enoch, where the Messianic doctrine is much developed, the Messiah does not “suffer.” The first clear trace of that conception in Judaic literature appears to be in the doctrine that of the two promised Messiahs,  Ben Joseph and Ben David, Ben Joseph is to be slain.  Whence came that theorem it is for the present impossible to say; but it is presumptively foreign,  and there are clear Gentile parallels.

An obvious precedent to begin with lay in the Greek myth of the crucified Prometheus;  but on the whole the most likely pagan prototype is to be seen in the slain and resurgent Dionysos, one of whose chief names is Eleuthereos, the Liberator,  who was specially signalised as the God “born again.” As the Jewish Messiah was to be primarily a “deliverer,” like the series of legendary national heroes in the book of Judges, a popular God so entitled was most likely to impress the imagination of the dispersed Jews and their proselytes. The same epithet, indeed, may well have attached to ancient deities such as Samson, who is a variant of the deliverer Herakles, and was one of the “deliverers” of the pseudo-history, as well as to the original Jesus whose myth is Evemerised in Joshua. Samson, too, like Dionysos, was “only-begotten.”  But in any case a proximate motive is needed to account for the post-exilic or post-Maccabean revival of such conceptions in a cult form; and it is to be found in the prevailing religious conceptions of the surrounding Hellenistic civilisation, where, next to Zeus, the Gods most in evidence were Dionysos and Herakles, and the Son-sacrificing Kronos.

11. Private Jewish Eucharists

There arises thus the further presumption that such a cult as we are tracing may have flourished in a Jewish community elsewhere than in Jerusalem. Dr. Frazer, in surmising a celebration of Purim with a real victim at Jerusalem, does not take account of the fact that the bulk of the Jews deported to Babylon had remained and flourished there, many remaining Yahwists; that there then began the institution of the synagogue, permissible to any group of Jews in any place; and that wherever in the East there was a Jewish synagogue outside of Judea there was an opening for usages not recognised at Jerusalem. But the existence of many such synagogues is clearly an important condition of the problem; and precisely because there were no regular sacrificial rites, apart from the Passover, for expatriated Jews, there is a likelihood that among them in particular would revive rites of sacrifice and sacrament which had a great tradition behind them, but were not latterly practised at the temple. This craving for a sacrifice in which they could participate is the special note of the Epistle to the Hebrews; and indeed the habit and doctrine of sacrifice were far too deeply rooted to permit of a contented submission of all the myriads of scattered Jews to a complete deprivation of the practice.

Significantly enough, the most notable sacrificial survival among the race in modern times is one that demonstrably preserves the principle of human sacrifice—that, namely, of the Kapparoth (“atonements”), the slaying of a white cock on the eve of Yom Kippùr, the Day of Atonement. One Jewish convert to Christianity, Hyam Isaacs, puts it that “the more self-righteous Jews” provide a cock, which is slain by an inferior Rabbi, whereafter the sacrificers swing it nine times over their heads, praying to God that the sins of the year may enter into the fowl. It is not strictly a scapegoat, for it is given to the poor to eat. As to the “self-righteousness” involved, Isaacs admitted that while he remained in the old faith he set great store by the procedure, and “thought he was justified.”  Theologically he was. It is not disputed that the Hebrew word Gever stands for both “a cock” and “a man.”  Another Jewish convert, Hershon, describing the custom, and noting the eagerness with which white cocks are bought by Jews on the eve of Yom  Kippùr, declares that it is “still in vogue amongst those who pride themselves upon their orthodoxy,” and decides that it is “one of many relics of Oriental paganism which the Jews brought from the banks of the Euphrates, from the land of their exile, the fatherland of Rabbinic faith and worship.”  It has been strictly preserved in the interim. In an English account of the rite as practised among the Jews of Barbary in the seventeenth century it is noted that the sacrifice came after the reading of the ancient Confession held to be made by the high-priest in sacrificing the scapegoat. The narrator continues:—

Since the destruction of their City, the Jews have no place for a proper sacrifice; and therefore, instead thereof, when they come from the Synagogue, every Father of a Family takes a cock (a white one if possible) upon the ninth day of the Feast, and, calling his Household about him, repeats several sentences of Scripture; among which the principal are the 17 vers. of Psalm 107......and 23 vers. of Job 13 (33?)......After the repetition of these Scriptures, he waves the cock three times  about his head, at each of which he useth these or the like words: Let this Cock be a commutation for me: Let it be my substitute: Let it be an expiation for me: Let the Bird die, but let life and happiness be to me and all Israel. Amen. Then he again swings the cock thrice about his head, once for himself, once for his sons, and once for the strangers that are with him. Then he kills the cock and saith, I have deserved thus to die. The woman takes a hen, and does the like for those of her sex. In Barbary, where the houses are flat-roofed, they cast the garbage thereon, to be devoured by some ravenous birds, in token that their sins are removed as the entrails they cast out. Now the reason why they chuse a cock for the expiatory is drawn from the ambiguous word in the Talmud, which may signifie either man or cock. So that they repute the death of a cock as much as that of a man; and to this Domestick Bird the 53 of Esay,  with many other Passages of Holy Writ, are prophanely and ridiculously applied......When they have done with the cock they repair to the sepulchres, where they repeat......their prayers and confessions. They bestow the value of their cocks upon the poor, to whom formerly they gave their carkasses, which they now keep to furnish out their own tables.

This differs from the recent accounts only in respect of the eating of the sacrifice by the sacrificers in person—a closer adherence to the fundamental principle. In no case, however, is there any obscurity as to that. I have seen in recent years an illustrated postcard, made for the use of German Jews, whereon is represented a Jew in hat and long coat, holding a white cock, and standing before a table with a book on it; while below is the Hebrew text (Job xxxiii, 24), “Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom”; with the addition, “May you be inscribed for a prosperous year,” and afterwards, in German, the greeting, “Hearty Good Wishes for the New Year.” Two other details complete the identification. (1) The sacrificer, holding with his right hand the tied legs of the bird, “with his left hand on its head coaxes it to keep it quiet” —the old effort to secure the willing victim. (2) The procedure includes a “ransom for the Kapparoth”—that is, a ransom for the ransom,  a principle familiar to the student of ancient sacrifice.  Here the substitution of a lesser for a human sacrifice is almost undisguised, after two thousand years.

A remarkable parallel to the Jewish practice is found at the present day among many of the peoples of the Congo and other regions of Western Africa.

Between Isangila and Manyanga [writes Sir H. H. Johnston] there are many eunuchs in the large villages, who seemed to be attached to a vague phallic worship with which is intricately connected a reverence for the moon. When the new moon appears, dances are performed by the eunuchs, who sacrifice a white fowl, which must always be male, in its honour. The bird is thrown up into the air and torn to pieces as it falls to the earth. I was told that in former days a human victim was offered up on these occasions, but that in later times a white fowl had been substituted.

The question here arises why black races should make white fowls or animals surrogates for men, and an Asiatic origin for the practice suggests itself. That it is, however, also an ancient if not a primary savage practice appears to follow from the frequency of sacrifices of white fowls among the Nigerians and other tribes.

The Krus, Intas, Dahomians, Ibus, Eggarahs, and the littoral inhabitants of Cameroons, Bonny, Calabar, Fernando Po, all mark the season of planting their yams and grain by a religious ritual, and a festive meeting of all the tribe. With the exception of the Ashantis, and perhaps the Ibus and Eggarahs, the ceremony is untainted by human blood; the offerings being goats, sheep, and white fowls, portions of which, after being roasted, are laid together with palm wine as oblations before the idols: this done, they continue the entertainment for several days.

What is here inferential becomes quite explicit in the religious folk-lore of the Malays, whose wizards invoke the ancestor-spirits to inform them in a dream what sacrifices are required at a given juncture, whereafter “Whatever sacrifice is asked for must of course be given, with the exception of a human sacrifice, which, as it is expressly stated, may be compounded by the sacrifice of a fowl.”  And there are several reasons for supposing that the rite is eastern and not African in origin. A special reason is its connection, as noted by Sir H. Johnston, with “a reverence for the moon.” As he and other writers also note, worship of the heavenly bodies is very uncommon among the African tribes. “As a rule the West African apparently pays no attention” to the sun, moon, and stars, “though not uncommonly his principal deity is the general controller of the firmament, a Jupiter or Sky-God in fact.”  ”I have never encountered,” says Sir Harry, “a race of purely Negro blood that took much interest in the stars”;  and again: “I have never yet encountered a purely Negro race that attributed divinity to the sun.”  Now, the Hebrew and other Semitic records go to show that sun-worship and moon-worship evolved together among the Semites; and the inference from the data before us is that it was from Semitic contacts that some of the negro races in antiquity acquired those cults, and the correlative sacrifice of the white fowl.

Other traces of the connection we find among the ancient Greeks. At Methana in Troezen Pausanias saw two men tear a white cock in halves  and run round the vines in opposite directions, each carrying a half. When they met they buried the parts together. The purpose was to avert the evil wind called Lips, which dried up the young shoots of the vines.  The Methanian cock, says Miss Harrison, “is a typical σφάγιον [thing slaughtered]: it is carried round for purification......It is really of the order of pharmakos ceremonies rather than a sacrifice proper. For a σφάγιον we should expect the cock to be black, but on the principle of sympathetic magic it is in this case white. The normal sacrifice to a wind was a black animal.....Winds were underworld Gods.”  But they were certainly sacrificed to; and it has been argued that the sacrifice of Iphigeneia “was, in the words of Æschylus, ‘a sacrifice to stay the winds.’”  In any case, “the word σφάγιον is always used of human victims and of such animals as were in use as surrogates. The term is applied to all the famous maiden sacrifices of mythology As a σφάγιον Polyxena is slain on the tomb of Achilles.”  So that we come back once more to the white cock as a substitute for a human victim; and as the winds were either Gods or Genii, it was strictly a sacrifice.

Again, among the Dravidian Ghasiyas of Mirzapur, “the most degraded of the Dravidian tribes,” after a man’s death his son sacrifices a white fowl as the recipient of his father’s spirit, or otherwise as placating him,  and a white cock is a common sacrifice to the Sun-God among other tribes of the same race.  On that view, the surrogate cock sacrifice is probably ancient among the Semites;  and the late continuance of human sacrifice was with the Hebrews as with other races a result of the pressures of perturbing calamity on the one hand, and a ritual survival on the other. On any view, it is not to be supposed that in the age of sacrificial worship the dispersed Jews, craving for its usages, would abstain from other private rituals of a sacrificial and eucharistic kind. It is a Rabbinical doctrine that “so long as the Temple existed the altar made atonement for Israel; but now it is a man’s table that makes atonement for him.”  ”Table” is interpreted to mean “hospitality,” an unplausible gloss. It would certainly be understood by most Jews of the sacrificial age to mean individual rites of a quasi-sacrificial kind; and the principle would hold for exiled Jews before the fall of the Temple.

By reviving such mysteries, those of the Dispersion could in a measure compensate themselves for their exclusion from the orthodox sacrifices, which were a monopoly of the holy city. And when we find the later Christists practising rites closely analogous to those of pagan deities such as Mithra and Dionysos, we cannot well doubt that Jews in the large eastern cities would be at times inclined to resort to mysteries of sacrament sacrifice for which they had a precedent in their own traditions. The story of the “Karabbas” episode at Alexandria, in fact, is an item of positive evidence not yet matched by any in regard to Jerusalem; unless it be the story to the effect that Antiochus Epiphanes found in the temple at Jerusalem a Greek captive who was to be sacrificed and sacramentally eaten.  In view of all the clues, notably that of the Rabbinical saying as to the lawfulness of slaying a pagan rustic on the Day of Atonement,  we cannot pronounce that story incredible; and the retort of Josephus, that one victim could not supply a meal to the multitude of worshippers, is at once disposed of by the principle that “sin-offerings were too holy to be eaten except by the priests.”  Nor can we quite confidently reject the theorem of Ghillany, that there was an element of actual ritual cannibalism in the paschal meal of the Jews in the pre-exilic period, though the proof is incomplete.  It suffices, however, to note that when revived rites of sacrament were seen to flourish among the Dispersion, there would be a tendency at Jerusalem to recognise them for economic reasons. The more we study the history of Judaism, the more clearly we realise that it was never immune from change, never long a triumphant fixed cult realising the ideal of its sacred books. Even in the immediate sphere of the temple itself, then, revived or innovating rites could make their way.

Such an acceptance would require only one condition—that the innovating rites were professedly Yahwistic. In the exilic period there had been many resorts to “unclean” sacraments, such as the mystical eating of dogs, mice, and swine,  men desperately seeking help from alien rites when their own God had wholly failed to help them; and our ablest Hebraist, while noting that “the causes which produced a resuscitation of obsolete mysteries among the Jews were at work at the same period among all the northern Semites,” decides that the rites in question “mark the first appearance in Semitic history of the tendency to found religious societies on voluntary association and mystic initiation, instead of natural kinship and nationality.”  Whatever may have been the origins, it suffices that the alleged “first appearance” was not the last. However the tendency may have been held in check at Jerusalem, it cannot have been equally repressed among the dispersed Jews, who saw all around them attractive mystical cults emanating from their own Semitic kindred; and who had in their own sacred books pretexts enough for “clean” sacraments in honour of Yahweh. For in all the orthodox sacrifices, it is to be remembered, an eating and drinking with the Deity, a sitting at his table as his guest, even as one would sit at a great banquet, was the essential notion, the ideal for the laity as well as the priesthood.  It would be strange indeed if the dispersed myriads wholly renounced such an experience.

The law permitted at the temple of Jerusalem private as well as public sacrifices of all kinds; and in the case of the peace- or thank-offerings “only the fat was burned on the altar, while the flesh was used by the owner of the sacrifice himself as material for a jocund sacrificial feast.”  And “as was only natural, it was the numerous private offerings of so many different kinds that constituted the bulk of the sacrifices.” Their number was in fact “so vast as to be well-nigh inconceivable.”  That is to say, the private proclivity to sacrifice was the predominant religious factor. At a time, then, when movements of dissent and innovation and even of “anticlericalism”  were being set up by a variety of forces, new and old, it is not to be supposed that the multitudes of Jews distributed through the Hellenistic world submitted passively to a monopoly which deprived them of most of the normal sensations of religion.

The obscurest side of the problem, perhaps, is that of the weekly eucharist, the “Holy Supper” of bread and wine, which in the later Jesuist cult we find in such close connection with the sacrifice of the God, but in the earlier form of the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” does not appear to be so connected. Yet the very phenomenon of the Teaching points to what we have other reasons for surmising—a weekly rite of old standing among the Jews of the Dispersion. The Passover came but once a year; and any act of real or simulated human sacrifice would be no more frequent. Would the dispersed Jews then forego all such weekly rites as occurred among the Gentiles? If normally they abstained from “drink offerings of blood” presented to other Gods,  had they no permissible libation? That there was a weekly eucharist among the Mithraists is practically certain: the Fathers who mention the Mithraic bread-and-wine or bread-and-water sacrament never speak of it as less frequent than the Christian;  and the Pauline allusion to the “table of daimons,” with its “cup,” implies that that was as habitual as the Christian rite,  which was certainly solemnised weekly in the early Church. And that this weekly rite, again, is not originally Mithraic, but one of the ancient Asiatic usages which could reach the Jews either by way of Babylon or before the Captivity, is to be inferred from the fact that the Brahmanic Upavasatha, the fast-day previous to the sacrament of the Soma, occurred four times in each lunar month;  and was thus closely analogous to the Sabbath, which was originally a lunar feast.  As the Soma feast was connected with the worship of the moon, it would be a “supper” on the night of the day before moon-day—that is, on the night of the Sunday, which was clearly “Lord’s Day” long before the Christian era. That the Sumerians or Akkadians, who had the seven-day week, were the source of the weekly bread- and-wine supper for both the Hindus and the Persians, seems the natural hypothesis.

12. The Eucharist in Orthodox Judaism

That there were both orthodox and heterodox forms of a quasi-Mithraic bread-and-wine ritual among the Jews is to be gathered even from the sacred books. In the legend of the Exodus, Aaron and the elders of Israel “eat bread with Moses’ father-in-law before God” —that is, twelve elders and the Anointed One or Christos eat a bread sacrament with a presumptive ancient deity, Moses himself being such. And wine would not be wanting. In the so-called Song of Moses, which repudiates a hostile God, “their Rock in which they trusted, which did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine of their drink-offering,” Yahweh also is called “our Rock”; and in an obscure passage his wine seems to be extolled.  Even if the Rock in such allusions were originally the actual tombstone or altar on which sacrifices were laid and libations poured, there would be no difficulty about making it into a God with whom the worshipper ate and drank;  and such an adaptation was as natural for Semites as for Aryans.

But there are clearer clues. Of the legend of Melchizedek, who gave to Abraham a sacramental meal of bread and wine, and who was “King of Peace” and “priest of El Elyon,”  we know that it was a subject of both canonical  and extra-canonical tradition. He was fabled to have been “without father, without mother, without genealogy, having neither beginning of days nor end of life, but made like unto the Son of God.”  As the name meant King of Righteousness, and El Elyon was a Phœnician deity, the legend that Abraham paid him tithes tells simply of one more extra-Yahwistic cult among the Israelites; and the description cited must originally have applied to the Most High God himself. “Self-made” was a title of the Sun-Gods,  and King of Righteousness a title of many Gods (not to mention Hammurabi and Buddha) as well as of Yahweh and Jesus.  It is vain to ask whether the bread-and-wine ritual was connected directly with the solar worship,  or with that of a King of Peace who stood for the moon, or both moon and sun; but it suffices that an extra-Israelitish myth connected with such a ritual was cherished among the dispersed Jews of the Hellenistic period. And the use made of the story of Melchizedek by Justin Martyr  and Tertullian,  as proving that a man could be a priest of the true God without being circumcised or observing the Jewish law, would certainly be made of it by earlier Jews of the more cosmopolitan sort.

Further, the denunciations of the prophets against the drink-offerings to other Gods did not veto a eucharist eaten and drunk in the name of Yahweh. Those denunciations to start with are a proof of the commonness of eucharists among the Jews about the exilic period. Jeremiah tells of a usage, especially popular with women, of incense-burnings and drink-offerings to the Queen of Heaven.  This, as a nocturnal rite, would be a “Holy Supper.” And in the last chapters of the Deutero-Isaiah  we have first a combined charge of child-sacrifice and of unlawful drink-offerings against the polytheistic Israelites, and again a denunciation of those who “prepared a table for Gad (Fortune), and that fill up mingled wine unto Meni.”  Now, Meni, translated “Destiny,” is in all likelihood simply Mên the Asiatic Moon-God, who is virtually identified with Selênê-Mênê the Moon-Goddess in the Orphic hymns, and like her was held to be twy-sexed.  In that case Meni is only another aspect of the Queen of Heaven,  the wine-eucharist being, as before remarked, a lunar rite. Whether or not this Deus Lunus was then, as later, identified with Mithra, we cannot divine. It suffices that the sacrament in question was extremely widespread.

The allusion to the “mingled wine” apparently implies an objection such as we know existed in Greece to any dilution of the wine devoted to the Wine-God. There the practice was to keep unmixed the cup to the “Good Deity” (agathos daimon) Dionysos,  but to mix with water that which was drunk to Zeus the Saviour, he being the rain-giver.  In the worship of Yahweh, whether or not he were originally a variant of Dionysos,  the priests would naturally stipulate for a drink-offering of unmixed wine, since in all likelihood they themselves consumed it,  though there is a suggestion in the code that it sweetened the burnt-offering.  In Philo Judæus there is a passage which notably combines the idea of the virtue of unmixed wine with that of its mystical connection with human sacrifice:—”Who then is the chief butler of God? The priest who offers libations to him, the truly great high-priest who, having received a draught of everlasting graces, offers himself in return, pouring in an entire libation of unmixed-wine.”  Here, as so often elsewhere in Philo, the conception of sacrifice has become mystical; but his identification of the sacrifice with the Logos, which “pours a portion of blood” for the purposes of the bodily life;  and his comparison of the celestial food of the soul to manna, which the Logos “divides in equal portions among all who are to use it, caring greatly for equality,”  tells of a more concrete interpretation of texts among the more normally religious.

On the other hand, as Yahweh like Zeus was the rain-giver, and good sense vetoed much drinking of the strong unmixed wine, there was no solid reason why in the Hebrew cult also the wine should not be diluted; and in the Talmud we find the act in a measure prescribed,  the practice of the Ebionites and the early Christians  being thus anticipated. In any case, we find the drink-offering of wine expressly connected in one—apparently interpolated—section of the priestly code  with the passover feast of first-fruits and the firstling lamb; and here it is stipulated that no bread shall be eaten till the oblation has been made. Thus both as an orthodoxy and as a heresy a Holy Supper of bread and wine in connection with a symbolic sacrifice of a firstling lamb was known among the pre-Christian Israelites.

What bearing, finally, the practice may have had on the use of the sacred shew-bread of the temple remains problematic; but that the shew-bread stood for some quasi-sacramental meal is the only explanation we have of it.  Concerning the twelve cakes or loaves of fine flour which were placed every sabbath day “upon the holy table before the Lord,” the code prescribed that “it shall be for Aaron and his sons; and they shall eat it in a holy place; for it is most holy unto him of the offerings of the Lord.”  A sacrament is implied in the description. And when we remember that the oxen sacrificed at the temple of Yahweh wore crowns and had their horns gilt  exactly like those sacrificed by the pagans,  we are entitled to doubt whether the temple-priests did not in most other respects conform to common pagan practice.  Priestly sacramental banquets of flesh and cakes we know to have been usual in Rome.  Even on Judaic principles, however, the priests were likely to make of their sacred loaves—or a few of them, for they were large—a Banquet for Twelve.  According to Maimonides, the daily sacrifice required thirteen priests for its performance;  and on the principle that the bread and wine constituted a sacrifice, the presiding priest and twelve others would be the fit consumers. We know further that there was a dispute between the school of Shamai and that of Hillel as to the meal on the Sabbath-eve, wherein wine was drunk, the Shamaites holding that a blessing should first be asked on the day, the Hillelites putting first the wine, which consecrated the day.  If, then, the loaves and the wine were eaten on the evening following the Sabbath, it would represent a pre-Christian bread-and-wine eucharist or Holy Supper of thirteen priestly persons on the Day of the Sun. In this, as in all sacraments, the God mystically joined; and if the High Priest presided there was in his person a Christos or Anointed One.

Now, we know (1) that the High-Priest officiated on the sabbaths;  (2) that the retiring course of priests received six of the loaves and the incoming one the other six;  and (3) that they were eaten stale, each sabbath’s supply being consumed on the next sabbath.  Here then was an apparent necessity for an eating of the sacred bread by the priests in the company of the High-Priest, as representing Aaron; and inasmuch as wine was forbidden to all during their period of service  there is an implication that they were free to drink it when the service was over —that is, on the sabbath day, after the high-priest had officiated.

Of course the number may not have been twelve; it may have been twenty-four, the number of the courses of the priests  and of the heavenly band of “elders” in the Judæo-Christian Apocalypse; and the bread may have been eaten not with wine but with water. Either way, at least, there was a sacrament very much on the later Christian lines; and this suffices for our theory, which does not require that we should find in the very temple a close Judaic precedent for the Christian weekly supper of bread and wine. Indeed, there is a presumption that it originated, as before suggested, outside of the immediate sphere of the temple priesthood. But the fact that there was a certain precedent in the priestly practice would be a point in favour of an outside rite, which might conceivably be specialised among the Twelve Apostles of the High-Priest, whose official function is the real basis of the myth of the Twelve Apostles of Jesus.  Even this hypothesis, in turn, is not essential to our theory of sacramental evolution. It suffices that beyond all question there were many Gentile precedents for the eucharist, and that its connection with the Lord’s Day  was quite independent of the myth of the Lord’s resurrection on the first day of the week; the rite being so fixed in both its solar and its lunar connection, which was implicit in the cults of Dionysos and Mithra, both of them two-formed, and both combining the attributes of sun and moon.  And as the myth of the sacrifice of the God-Man as king, and the kindred sacrament of the Lamb-God, were derived through Judaic channels, there is a presumption that the habitual rites of the first Christists came in the same way. On that view it remains to trace further the Judaic evolution.

13. Special Features of the Crucifixion Myth

Of the evolution of the Jewish religion between the closing of the Hebrew canon and the rise of Jesuism we know, broadly, that it consisted in (1) the establishment of the doctrine of a future life, in despite of its complete absence from the Mosaic law; (2) the development of the belief in a Messiah who should either restore the temporal power of Jewry or bring in a new religious world; (3) the growth of the idea of an only-begotten Son of God, otherwise the Word, who is alternately the nation of Israel and a God who represents it;  and (4) the growth of independent sects or movements, such as that of the Essenes. Of the historical circumstances we know more. They included, as we have seen, a recurrent paganisation of portions of the priesthood; an interlude of absolute pagan domination; and finally, after a period of triumph for the traditional faith, the advent of an Idumean dynasty, far from zealous for orthodox Judaism.

During centuries of this evolution, the Jewish people tasted many times the bitterness of despair, the profound doubt denounced by the last of the prophets; and in periods in which many went openly over to Hellenism it could not be but that ancient rites of the Semitic race were revived, as some are declared to have been in earlier times of trouble. Among the rites of expiation and propitiation, as we have seen, none stood traditionally higher than the sacrifice of a king or a king’s son; and such an act the Jews saw as it were performed for them when the Romans under Antony, at Herod’s wish, scourged, crucified [lit. “bound to a stake”], and beheaded Antigonus, the last of the Asmonean priest-kings, in the year 37 B.C.  In a reign in which two king’s sons were slain by their own father, the idea would not disappear; but in so far as it held its ground as a religious doctrine it would in all likelihood do so by being reduced to ritual form, like the leading worships of the surrounding Gentile world. In the case of nearly every God who mythically died and rose again—as Osiris, Dionysos, Attis, Adonis, and Mithra—the creed of the God’s power to give immortal life was maintained by a ritual sacrament, generally developed into a mystery-drama. Such a mystery-drama, however, would be at bottom a perpetuation of the latest form of the primitive rite as it had been publicly performed; and as we have seen in the gospel myth the clear trace of the ancient usage of disabling or drugging the victim to make him seem a willing sufferer, so we may infer from it that the latest public form of the human sacrifice in some Syrian communities was the sacrificing of three criminals together.

Of a sacrifice of this special number the explanation may very well be the great and then growing vogue of the number three in eastern mysticism. Among the Dravidians of India we have seen three victims sacrificed to the Sun-God. In the legendary sacrifice of Saul’s sons there figured the sacred and planetary number seven, which appears also in the special “restoration feast” of the Hervey and other South Sea Islanders;  in the legendary sacrifice of the kings by Joshua we have the older planetary number, five; and in western as in eastern Asia the number three might naturally have its votaries, in respect of trinitarian concepts as well as of the primary notion of “the heavens, the earth, and the underworld,” with their respective Gods.  There is even a hint of such possible developments in the single sacrifice of the Khonds to the Earth-Goddess, wherein the victim was kept for three days bound to a post which was often placed between two shrubs, before being finally sacrificed at a post around which were usually set up four larger posts.  But there is an explanation lying in the nature and purpose of the sacrifice, which was probably the determining cause of the detail in the Syrian rite.

The tradition, we have seen, called for a king or a king’s son; but a victim of royal blood was normally out of the question; and whether by consent of latitudinarian kings or high-priests, or by way of simple popular licence, the natural evolution would be that which took place in a similar connection elsewhere—the sacrificing of condemned criminals in the capacity of kings or kings’ first-born sons. But, as has been already remarked, though this substitution was quite acceptable to the average mind, there was something repugnant to the higher doctrine of sacrifice in the selection of a criminal, who was morally the analogue of the blemished animal, rejected by nearly all sacrificial rituals. How then could the compulsion of such a choice be best reconciled with the purpose and spirit of the rite? By a device framed in the spirit of “sympathetic magic,” which was in fact the spirit of all such rites. The sacrificers could by their ritual of mock-crowning and robing distinguish one of the malefactors from his fellows; and by calling the others what they were, while he was paraded as king, they would attain the semblance of a truly august sacrifice. If in any Jewish community, or in the Jewish quarter of any eastern city, the central figure in this rite were customarily called Jesus Barabbas, “Jesus the Son of the Father”—whether or not in virtue of an old cultus of a God Jesus who had died annually like Attis and Tammuz—we should have the basis for the tradition so long preserved in many MSS. of the first gospel, and at the same time a basis for the whole gospel myth of the crucifixion. And when we remember how the common attitude towards criminals permitted the strange survival of human sacrifice in the Thargelia at Athens, we can hardly doubt that eastern cities could on the same pretext be as conservative of ancient usage.

That such a victim should be at times chosen and freed in advance, and permitted a measure of sexual licence as well as a semblance of royal state, is quite conceivable. The usage of a year’s dedication or respite seems to have been general in connection with such sacrifices, alike among Asiatics, Greeks, Polynesians, Mexicans, and American aborigines; we have seen it among Strabo’s Albanians; and there are clear traces of it among the Arabs just before the time of Mohammed.  At an early stage of civilisation, indulgence to a victim so situated would on many grounds be a matter of course. As we saw, indeed, Japan could secure annual victims who throughout their year of duty seem to have practised rigid abstinence, as the non-sacrificed official does to-day; but in general such altruism must have been hard to secure. In the triennial sacrifice of a beautiful girl at Bonny to the Sea-God, the victim had her every wish fulfilled, and everything she touched became her property;  and among the Native Americans a captive slain to appease the spirit of a slain man of the tribe had given to him the wives or sisters of the dead man, with whom he was allowed to live for a time. Then came a sacrificial banquet, after which he was put in durance and at length ritually slain  and eaten.

Perhaps the most suggestive instance of all is that of the Asvamedha  or horse-sacrifice among the ancient Hindus.  Concerning this the doctrine runs that kings who received from a Brahman a certain special anointing and “made the sacrifice of the horse” were thereby enabled to attain boundless conquests.  With regard to the horse so sacrificed it was stipulated in the ritual that during an entire year beforehand it must be left free to wander at its will, carefully protected the while by guards set to the task.  As this horse is further clearly identified with the sun,  there can be little doubt that it was a substitute or equivalent for a more ancient human sacrifice to the Sun-God, and was on that account regarded as of overwhelming efficacy.  Until the present century, among the Aryan Kafirs of the Hindu-Kush, a sacrifice of a horse was reckoned to have abnormal virtue, one being “occasionally, not more than once in many years,” sacrificed at a certain sacred pit near the temple of Imra at the sacred village of Kstigigrom, in Presungul.  So deeply fixed was the idea that among the Bataks of Sumatra, who were for a time influenced by the Hindus, the white horse is still a special offering to the higher God or Gods, though it is now as a rule devoted without being slain. In the latter case it remains permanently holy and inviolable;  and among the Siberian Yakuts, who latterly are recorded to have consecrated a stallion every year, the animal, though not sacrificed, henceforth does no more work.  The horse, we may note in passing, may have been in this case a totem animal. Among the negroes of Nigeria at the present day, however, not only the bullocks specially set apart for sacrifice to the governing God, but cattle in general, including sheep and goats, are treated as if sacred, and the males are eaten only at religious ceremonials.  The totemistic hypothesis, therefore, is not necessary to the argument, the divinity of the victim as such being clear in any case. And sacredness in animals is not restricted to victims. In Southern India, in some parts of Ganjam, large numbers of Brāhmini bulls are treated as sacred; and castes which do not copy them in giving sacred burial to a bull often set free sacred cows or calves. Among the Adivi or forest Gollas, again, “the people of every house in the village let loose a sheep, to wander whither it will, as a sort of perpetual scapegoat”; and among the Badagas a scape-calf is let loose at every funeral, to bear the sins of the deceased. Henceforth it is free, like the animals otherwise “sacred.”

We are now prepared to understand that the freedom permitted to the Babylonian mock-king before the Sacæa originated, not, as has been suggested,  by way of making the mock-king commit the act of technical high treason, entering the harem, but as a result of the contingent divinity of the victim in the primitive cult. The formal trial of a victim may be otherwise explained, as a primitive process of degrading a discredited priest-king.  In the case of the Khonds, who had no harlots  and few concubines, intercourse on the part of a destined male victim with either the wives or the daughters of the inhabitants was welcomed as a high boon,  though he often had allotted to him a victim wife; and the same idea seems to have underlain the treatment of the doomed God-man in ancient Mexico.  A study of these cases will suggest that in a primitive tribal state, when annual voluntary victims were otherwise hard to get, men may very well have been got to accept the rôle on condition of a year’s quasi-regal licence. Savages notoriously set present pleasure far before future pain in their thought. And out of such a religious kingship may have separately arisen both the function of the priest-king as seen in Greece and Rome, and the phenomenon of the mock-king of the Sacæa. On this view the improbability of the annual slaying of the acting king, urged by Mr. Lang  against Dr. Frazer, does not arise; while the theory fundamentally stands. What is certain is that no principle of indulgence could have been accepted in the Christian legend, arising as it did in a cultus of asceticism. But in the character of the Messiah as one who associated with publicans and sinners; in his association with women; and in the obstinate legend which, apart from the text, made Mary Magdalene—a visibly mythical character —figure as a former harlot, we may have another such survival as has been surmised to underlie the tradition of “Jesus Barabbas”; and the common belief of the early Church that the ministry of Jesus lasted for only one year  may have a similar basis in the old usage. Further, as Dr. Frazer has suggested, the story of the triumphal entry into Jerusalem may preserve a tradition of a mock-royal procession for the destined victim. Even the legend of the riding on two asses, which, as has been elsewhere shown,  preserves an ancient zodiacal symbol, and at the same time a myth concerning Dionysos, might have anciently figured in the procession of a God-victim of the Dionysiak type. As the zodiacal symbol stands for the autumn equinox, and the crucifixion is placed at the spring-equinox, these details would be chronologically separate; but Tammuz, like Dionysos, seems to have had two feasts;  and in any case the legend was free to include different ritual episodes. Finally, the explanation of the ascription of the title of “Nazarite” to Jesus—a perplexing detail which led the redactors to frame the myth of his birth at Nazareth —may be that the Jewish victim, like the Khond, wore his hair unshorn. It would be natural that he should; the institution of the nazir, a word which means “dedicated,” being an inheritance from the ancient times of common human sacrifice, and being associated with the myth of Samson, in which the shorn Sun-God is as it were sacrificed to himself.

We have now followed our historic clues far enough to warrant a constructive theory. Indeed, it frames itself when we colligate our main data. As thus:—

1. In the slaying of the Kronian victim at Rhodes we have an ancient Semitic  human sacrifice maintained into the historic period, by the expedient of taking as annual victim a criminal already condemned to death.

2. In Semitic mythology, Kronos, “whom the Phœnicians call Israel,” sacrifices his son Ieoud, “the only,” after putting upon him royal robes.

3. The feast of Kronos is the Saturnalia, in which elsewhere a mock-king plays a prominent part; and as Kronos was among the Semites identified with Moloch = “King,”  the victim would be ostensibly either a king or a king’s son. A trial and degradation were likely accessories.

4. Supposing the victim in the Rhodian Saturnalia to figure as Ieoud, he would be ipso facto Barabbas, “the son of the father”; and in the terms of the case he was a condemned criminal. At the same time, in terms of the myth, he would figure in royal robes.

5. In any case, the myth being Semitic, it is morally certain that among the many cases of human sacrifice in the Græco-Semitic world the Rhodian rite was not unique. And as the name “Ieoud,” besides signifying “the only,” was virtually identical with the Greek and Hebrew names for Judah (son of “Israel”) and Jew (Yehuda, Ioudaios), it was extremely likely, among the Jews of the Dispersion, to be regarded as having special application to their race, which in their sacred books actually figured as the Only-Begotten Son of the Father-God, and as having undergone special suffering.

6. That the Rhodian rite, Semitic in origin, was at some points specially coincident with Jewish conceptions of sacrifice, is proved by the detail of leading the prisoner outside the city gates. This is expressly laid down in the Epistle to the Hebrews,  as a ritual condition of the sacrificial death of Jesus.

The case, of course, is not staked on any assumption that the Rhodian rite was the exact historical antecedent of the Jesuist rite as preserved in the gospels. That the Jews had much traffic with Rhodes maybe gathered from Josephus’s account of Herod’s relations with the place;  but we are not committed to the view that the Jews had any hand in the Rhodian sacrifice ritual, or that the gospel myth followed that. So far as the records go, the coincidence is incomplete, since (1) the Rhodian Saturnalia was a June or July festival, and thus disparate from the Passover; and (2) there is no hint of a triple execution. But it suffices, firstly, that we have here a clear case of a variant from a type to which the Christian crucifixion-ritual belongs; and, secondly, that the Rhodian rite further points to the decisive development which we have yet to trace in the case of the gospel story. For Porphyry incidentally mentions that the Rhodian sacrifice, after having subsisted long, had latterly been modified (μετέβληθη). As to the precise nature of the modification we have no further knowledge; but we are entitled to conclude that it was either a simple rite of mock-sacrifice or a mystery-drama. Both stages, indeed, would be natural, the step to the latter being dependent on the connection of the rite with a eucharist. But the essential point is that in this case—the memory of which is preserved, like so many items in our knowledge of ancient life, by an incidental sentence in a treatise to which the subject was barely relevant—we have exactly the kind of transition from actual human sacrifice to a conventional rite of mock-sacrifice which our theory implies. And seeing that the actual sacrifice was once normal in the Semitic world, there can be little doubt that the cases and modes of modification were many.

Meantime, the bearing of such a development on our total problem is obvious. We have traced on the one hand a Semitic and probably Israelitish tradition of an annually (or periodically) sacrificed victim, “Jesus the Son of the Father,” and seen reason to surmise the contact of dispersed Jews with such a rite in Hellenistic eastern towns. On the other hand we have traced a Jewish bread-and-wine eucharist, which we find emerging in documentary knowledge in the pre-Christian eucharist of the “Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” with the name of Jesus attached to a strictly Judaic personage of quasi-divine status, not said to be crucified or otherwise sacrificed. Of these forms of doctrine and rite there took place a fusion, forming the historic Christian cultus. Of such a fusion, the most likely and most intelligible means would be the mystery-drama, whose existence has now to be demonstrated. But first we have to note certain historic possibilities on which the fusion might partly depend.

14. Possible Historical Elements

One concrete feature in the crucifixion myth remains to be accounted for—the scourging. Mr. Lang presses this feature of the Sacæa as an argument against the view that the victim died as representing a God.  In reality, the assumption that sacrificed victims were never scourged is no better founded than the assertion that they were never hanged. The human victims in several Asiatic Greek rites were whipped before being sacrificed.  Scourging, besides, actually took the place of human sacrifice, by tradition, in certain Greek cults; the scourging (which at times was fatal) being accepted as a sacrificial act.  The deity specially connected with such acts of scourging was Artemis, concerning the Asiatic savageries of whose cultus we have the disgusted testimony of Plutarch;  and it is noteworthy that the Rhodian victim had been slain near the temple of Aristobula —a name of Artemis,  who is thus in late as in early times connected with human sacrifice.  It is therefore not unlikely that, when the Rhodian rite was modified, scourging was substituted as a means of obtaining at least the sacrifice of blood; and when the rite reached the stage of a mystery-drama, that detail would naturally be preserved.

It is to be remembered, however, that the original principle of such scourging may be independent of any act of substitution. It is partly indicated in the Khond doctrine in connection with the rite of slow burning—that the more tears the victim shed the more abundant would be the rain. Here indeed there is a plain conflict between two sacrificial principles, that of the symbolism of the victim’s acts and that of his willingness. But both principles are known to have existed, some of the Khonds and the Aztecs attaching importance to the tears shed by the victims, while the Carthaginians sought to drown the cries of their children, and the mothers were forbidden to weep.  In the case of the original human sacrifice on the Jewish Day of Atonement, as we have seen,’ there was a ritual act of weeping, and perhaps one of scourging; and we have no ground for doubting that scourging could take place.

But there was a ritual need for blood as well as tears. It is noted that in the human sacrifices of Polynesia the victims were rarely much mutilated, but were always made to bleed much;  and a perfect obsession of blood pervades the whole Judaic religion, down to the end of the New Testament. In the “hanging unto the Lord” of the sons of Saul, indeed, there was ostensibly no bloodshed; but Joshua is declared to have “smitten” the five kings before he hanged them. The “sin-offering” too was one of blood; and a blood sacrifice was the normal one in all nations.  Scourging would yield the blood without making the victim incapable of enduring the hanging or crucifixion; and in the gospel record that the doomed God sweated as it were drops of blood  we may have a further concession to the idea. Finally, there is the possibility that, as in the case of the victims in the Asiatic Thargelia and other festivals, who were ceremonially whipped before being put to death, the scourging belonged to the conception of the scapegoat, who thus as well as by banishment bore the people’s sins.

In these various ways, then, we can comprehend the gradual evolution of a ritual with which could be associated on the one hand a belief in a national deliverer, and on the other hand a general doctrine of salvation and immortality. The idea of the resurrection of the slain God is extremely ancient: we have it in the myths of Osiris and of the descent of Ishtar into Hades to rescue Tammuz; and in the Syro-Greek form of the cult, the resurrection of Adonis was a chief feature of the great annual ritual. So with the other cults already mentioned. From the God, the concept of resurrection was extended to the worshippers, this long before the Christian era. It needed only that the doctrines of divine sacrifice, resurrection, and salvation, temporal or eternal, should be thus blended in a mystery ritual with the institution of a eucharist or holy sacrament, to constitute the foundation of the religion of Jesus the Christ as we have it in the gospels.

That a mystery-drama actually existed, and was the basis of the gospel narrative, will be shown in the next section. But in passing it may be well to note that certain features of the crucifixion myth, though fairly explicable on the lines above sketched, may be due to contemporary analogies from other rites or from actual occurrences. The posture of the victim in the traditional crucifix, which we shall see some reason for ascribing to a ritual in which the worshipper embraces a cross, may on the other hand derive from the Perso-Scythian usage of slaying a “messenger” to the God, flaying him, and stuffing his skin with the arms outstretched.  This sacrifice, indeed, has obvious analogies to that of the “ambassador” in the old Jewish rite above traced;  and in both cases the idea of the cross-form may derive from the fact that in the gesture-language and picture-writing of savages, which are probably primeval, that is the recognised attitude and symbol of the ambassador or “go-between.”  Or the cross-form may connect with some other principle involved in the Semitic representation of the Sun-God with arms outstretched,  which probably underlies the myth of the outstretching of the arms of Moses.  On the whole, seeing that the Phœnician symbol of a figure with outstretched arms is found to derive historically from the Egyptian crux ansata,  which was certainly an emblem of salvation,  we are entitled to conclude that from time immemorial the posture of the cross had had a religious significance, partly of expiation, partly of beneficence, and that this general significance surrounded the Christian myth.

Yet again, the repetition of the offer of a drink to the victim, or the mention of gall in that connection, might be motived by the example of the mysteries of Dêmêtêr, in which there figured a drink of gall.  Whatever were the original meaning of that detail, it might be added to that of a narcotic used as above explained. It has been elsewhere shown, too, that such a detail as the crown of thorns might conceivably stand for the nimbus of the Sun-God, or for the crown placed upon the heads of sacrificial victims in general,  or for the crown which was worn by human victims in such a sacrificial procession as is to be inferred from Herodotus’ story of Herakles in Egypt, or for the actual crowns of thorns which were in vogue for religious purposes in the district of Abydos, or for some other ritual practice which is sought to be explained by the myth of the mock-crown of Herakles  No limit can well be set to the possibility of such analogies from pagan religious practice.

Actual or alleged history, too, may have given rise to some details in a mystery-ritual such as we are considering. In the gospel story as it now stands, though not as an original and dramatic detail in it, we find one remarkable coincidence with a passage in Josephus. The historian tells  that during the Passover feast, while Jerusalem was being besieged, “the eastern gate of the inner sanctuary, which was of brass and very solid, which in the evening was with difficulty shut by twenty men, and which was supported by iron-bound bars and posts reaching far down, let into the floor of solid stone, was seen about the sixth hour of the night to have opened of its own accord”; and that this was felt by the wise to be an omen of ruin. In the synoptics it is told that after the robbers taunted Jesus, “from the sixth hour darkness was over the land till the ninth hour,” whereupon Jesus uttered his cry of Eli, Eli, and immediately afterwards, “having again cried with a loud voice, gave up his spirit. And lo, the veil of the temple was rent in two from top to bottom.” The three hours of darkness, it would appear, are alleged in order to give time for the passover meal, by way of assimilating the synoptic account to the Johannine. In the second gospel—in an apparently interpolated passage—Jesus is crucified at “the third hour”: in the fourth, “it was Preparation of the Passover: it was about the sixth hour” when Jesus is sent to be crucified; and on that view his death would be consummated when the Passover sacrament was—the gospel, however, giving no further details. The space of silent suffering in the synoptics, from the sixth hour to the ninth, makes the stories finally correspond as to the hours, though not as to the day. In the third gospel, however, the reading is confused by the placing of the sentence: “And the sun was darkened, and the veil of the temple was rent in the midst,” after the mention of the three hours’ darkness and before the Lord’s death. Thus, while the actual time of the veil-rending is loft in the vague, the passage can be read as saying that the veil was rent when the darkness began, at the sixth hour.

In any case, whether or not the darkness of three hours is a late modification of the synoptic text (on which view the death may be held to have been originally placed at the sixth hour, and the rending of the temple veil at the same moment), the story in Josephus is extremely likely to have been the motive of the veil-rending myth in the gospels. It actually did lead to the insertion of a gloss in an early text—perhaps originally Syriac—of the third gospel, where the stone placed at the mouth of the Lord’s tomb is alleged to be such that twenty men could hardly roll it away; and in the existing old Syriac texts, significantly enough, it is the “front of the gate” of the sanctuary or temple that is rent in the gospel story—not the veil.  And the parallel does not end here. The story of the rising of the saints, so awkwardly interpolated in the first gospel and in that only, is no less clearly an adaptation of the story of Josephus, in the same passage, to the effect that at the feast of Pentecost the priests when serving by night in the inner temple felt a quaking, and heard a great noise, and then a sound as of a multitude saying: “Let us remove hence.” The whole series of portents in Josephus, as it happens, winds up with the story of Jesus the son of Ananus, who had so long “with a loud voice” cried “Woe to Jerusalem,” and at last was slain by a stone from an engine, crying “Woe to myself also” as he gave up the ghost.

In view of such a remarkable suggestion to the early Jesuists, it seems unnecessary even to ask whether the myth of the veil-rending may be a variant popularly current at the same time with those given by Josephus. In all likelihood the interpolators of the Greek gospel modified both episodes in order either to escape contradiction or to make them more suitable symbolically.  That they were interpolated after the transcription of the mystery-play we shall see when we consider that as such; but for the present we have to recognise that if the transcribed narrative could be thus influenced, the play itself might be.

The scourging and crucifixion of Antigonus, again, must have made a profound impression on the Jews;  and it is a historic fact that the similar slaying of the last of the Incas was kept in memory for the Peruvians by a drama annually acted.  It may be that the superscription “This is the King of the Jews,” and even the detail of scourging,  came proximately from the story of Antigonus; though on the other hand it is not unlikely that Antony should have executed Antigonus on the lines of the sacrifice of the mock-king. But it is noteworthy that where the existing mystery-drama, which was doubtless a Gentile development from a much simpler form, introduces historical characters, it does so on the clear lines of sacrificial principle set forth in the ritual of the Khonds, where already the symbol of the cross is prominent in the fashion of slaying the victim. Though the Gentile hostility to the Jews  would dictate the special implication of the Jewish priests and people, and of King Herod as in the third gospel, the total effect is to make it clear that the guilt of the sacrifice rests on no one official, but is finally taken by the whole people upon them. Even the quotation put in the mouth of the dying God-Man, “My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?”  has the effect of implying that he had hitherto suffered voluntarily. Thus does the ritual which was to grow into a world religion preserve in its consummated quasi-historical form the primeval principle that “one man should die for the people” by the people’s will; and, as we have seen, not even in extending the benefit of the sacrifice to “all mankind” does the great historic religion outgo the religious psychology of the ancient Dravidians.

When this is realised it will be seen to be unnecessary to suppose that any abnormal personality had arisen to give the cult its form or impetus. In view, however, of the story fortuitously preserved in the Talmud, that one Jesus ben Pandira was stoned and hanged on a tree at Lydda on the eve of the Passover in the reign of Alexander Jannæus about 100 B.C.,  we are not entitled to say that a real act of sacerdotal vengeance did not enter into the making of the movement. The evidence is obscure; and the personality of the hanged Jesus, who is said to have been a sorcerer and a false teacher, becomes elusive and quasi-mythical even in the Talmud; but even such evidence gives better ground for a historical assumption than the supernaturalist narrative of the gospels.  In any case, there is no reason to ascribe any special doctrinal teaching whatever to Jesus ben Pandira. He remains but a name, with a mention of his death by “hanging on a tree,” a quasi-sacrifice, at the time of the sacrificial rite which had anciently been one of man-slaying and child-slaying. Leaving the case on that side undetermined, we turn to a problem which admits of solution.

15. The Gospel Mystery-Play

It is not disputed that one of the most marked features of the popular religions of antiquity, in Greece, Egypt, and Greek-speaking Asia, was the dramatic representation of the central episodes in the stories of the suffering and dying Gods and Goddesses. Herodotus has been charged with pretending to knowledge that he did not possess; but there is no reason to doubt his assertion  that on the artificial circular lake at Sais the Egyptians were wont to give by night—presumably once a year—representations of the sufferings of a certain one whom he will not name, which representations they called mysteries. The certain one in question we know must have been the God Osiris;  and that the sufferings and death of Osiris were dramatically represented, modern Egyptology has freshly established from hieroglyphic documents.  We, know, too, from the concluding rubric of the “Lamentations of Isis and Nephthys for Osiris that those Goddesses were personated in the ritual by two beautiful women.

In the worships of Adonis and of Attis there was certainly a dramatic representation of the dead God by effigy, and of his resurrection;  and in the mysteries of Mithra, as given among the Greeks, there appears to have been included a representation of the burial of a stone effigy of the God, in a rock tomb, and of his resurrection.  So, in the great cult of Dionysos, with whose worship were connected the beginnings of tragedy among the Greeks, there was a symbolic representation of the dismemberment of the young God by the Titans, this being part of the sacrament of his body and blood;  and in the special centres of the worship of Herakles, or at least at one of them, Tarsus, there was annually erected in his worship a funeral pyre, on which his effigy—but sometimes a man—was burned.  The same motive is worked out in the Trachiniæ of Sophocles. Among the Greeks, again, a dramatic representation of the myth of the loss of Persephonê, the mourning of her mother Dêmêtêr, and her restoration, was the central attraction in the Eleusinian mysteries; and the return of Persephonê was separately dramatised.

Of all those mysteries the mythological explanation is doubtless the same: they mostly originated in primitive sacrificial rituals to represent the annual death of vegetation, and to charm it into returning; and in the cult of Mithra, who, like Herakles, is specifically a Sun-God, there may have been an adaptation from the rites of the Vegetation-Gods. In the later stages the magic which had been supposed to revive vegetation is applied to securing the life of the initiate in the next world. We are not here concerned, however, with the origin of the usage. For our purpose it suffices us to know that such rites were rites of “salvation,” and that they were the most popular in ancient religion.

As Christism first became popular by the development or adaptation of myths and ritual usages like those of the popular pagan systems, notably the Birth-myth, the Holy Supper, and the Resurrection, it might be expected that it should imitate paganism in the matter of dramatic mysteries. The mere Supper ritual, indeed, is itself dramatic, the celebrant personating the God as Attis was personated by his priest;  and in the remarkable expression in the Pauline epistle to the Galatians (iii, 1)—”before whose eyes Jesus Christ was openly set forth crucified”—we have probably a record of an early fashion of imaging the crucifixion.  In the same document (vi, 17) is the phrase, “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus”; and various other expressions in the epistles, describing the devotee as mystically crucified and as having become one with the crucified Lord, suggest that in the early stages of the cult it dramatically adopted the apparently dramatic teaching of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, wherein the saved and Osirified soul declares: “I clasp the sycamore tree; I myself am joined unto the sycamore tree, and its arms are opened unto me graciously”;  and again: “I have become a divine being by the side of the birth-chamber of Osiris; I am brought forth with him, I renew my youth.”  In the fifth century, we know, mystery-plays were performed either in or in connection with the churches;  and the identity between the birth-story and several pagan dramatic rituals is too close to be missed.  But apart from the parallels above indicated the dramatic origination of the story of the Christ’s Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, and Crucifixion, as it now stands, has yet to be established. The proof, however, I submit, lies, and has always lain, before men’s eyes in the actual gospel narrative. It is the prepossessions set up by age-long belief that have prevented alike believers and unbelievers from seeing as much.

Let the reader carefully peruse the story of the series of episodes as they are given in their least sophisticated form, in the gospels of Matthew and Mark. From Matthew xxvi, 17, or 20, it will be noted, the narrative is simply a presentment of a dramatic action and dialogue; and the events are huddled one upon another exactly as happens in all drama that is not framed with a special concern for plausibility. In many plays of Shakespeare, notably in Measure for Measure,  there occurs such a compression of incidents in time, the reason being precisely the nature of drama, which, whether or not it holds theoretically by the unities, must for practical reasons minimise change of scene and develop action rapidly. Even in the Hedda Gabler of Ibsen, the chief master of modern drama, this exigency of the conditions leads the dramatist in the last act to the startling step of making the friends of the suicide sit down to prepare his manuscripts for the press within a few minutes of his death. To realise fully the theatrical character of the gospel story, it is necessary to keep in view this characteristic compression of the action in time, as well as the purely dramatic content. The point is not merely that the compression of events proves the narrative to be pure fiction, but that they are compressed for a reason—the reason being that they are presented in a drama.

As the story stands, Jesus partakes with his disciples of the Passover, an evening meal; and after a very brief dialogue they sing a hymn, and proceed in the darkness to the mount of Olives. Not a word is said of what happened or was said on the way: the scene is simply changed to the mount; and there begin a new dialogue and action. A slight change of scene—again effected with no hint of any talk on the way—is made to Gethsemane; and here the scanty details as to the separation from “his disciples,” and the going apart with the three, indicate with a brevity obviously dramatic the arrangement by which Judas—who was thus far with the party—would on the stage be enabled to withdraw. Had the story been first composed for writing, such an episode would necessarily have been described; and something would naturally have been said of the talk on the way from the supper-chamber to the mount. What we are reading is the bare transcript of a primitive play, in which the writer has not here attempted to insert more than has been shown on the scene.

In the Passion scene, this dramatic origination of the action is again twice emphasised. Thrice over Jesus prays while his disciples sleep. There is thus no one present or awake to record his words—an incongruity which could not well have entered into a narrative originally composed for reading, where it would have been a gratuitous invention, but whichon the stage would not be a difficulty at all, since there the prayer would be heard and accepted by the audience, like a soliloquy in an inartistic modern play. No less striking is the revelation made in verses 45 and 46, where in two successive sentences, with no pause between, Jesus tells the sleeping three to sleep on and to arise. What has happened is either a slight disarrangement of the dialogue or the omission of an exit and an entrance. Verse 44 runs: “And he left them again, and went away, and prayed a third time, saying again the same words.” If verse 45, from the second clause onwards, were inserted before verse 44—where, as the text stands, Jesus says nothing—and verse 46 introduced with “and saith unto them” immediately after the first clause of verse 45, the incongruity would be removed. Only in transcription from a dramatic text could it have arisen.

Then, without the slightest account of what he had been doing in the interim, Judas enters the scene exactly as he would on the stage, with his multitude, “while he [Jesus] yet spake.” With an impossible continuity, the action goes on through the night, a thing quite unnecessary in any save a dramatic fiction, where unity of time—that is, the limitation of the action within twenty-four hours, or little more, as prescribed by Aristotle —was for the ancients a ruling principle. Jesus is taken in the darkness to the house of the high-priest, “where the scribes and the elders were gathered together.” The disciples meanwhile had “left him and fled,” and not a word is said as to what they did in the interim; though any account of the episode, in the terms of the tradition concerning them, must have come through them.

But it is needless to insist on the absolutely unhistorical character of a narrative which makes the whole judicial process take place in the middle of the night, a time when, as Renan notes, an Eastern city is as if dead. The point is that the invention is of a kind obviously conditioned by a dramatic purpose. In the dead of night the authorities proceed to hunt up “false witnesses” throughout Jerusalem, because the witnesses must be produced in the trial scene as closely as possible on that of the capture; and the process goes on till two give the requisite testimony. Then Jesus is questioned, condemned, buffeted, and (presumably) led away; and Peter, remaining on the scene, denies his lord and is convicted of treason by the crowing of the cock. Of what happens to the doomed God-Man in this interval there is not a hint; though it is just here that a non-dramatic narrative would naturally follow him most closely.

Morning has thus come, and “when morning was come” the priests and elders, who thus have had no rest, “take counsel” afresh to put Jesus to death, and lead him away, bound, to Pilate. But this evidently happens off the scene, since we have the interlude in which Judas brings back his thirty pieces of silver, is repudiated by the priests, and goes away to hang himself. The story of the potter’s field is obviously a later writer’s interpolation in the narrative. An original narrator, telling a story in a natural way, would have given details about Judas: the interpolator characteristically wants to explain that “Then was fulfilled that which was spoken by Jeremiah the prophet.”

As usual, not a word is said of the details of the transit from place to place: the scene simply changes all at once to the presence of the Governor; and here, with not a single touch of description such as an original narrator might naturally give, we plunge straight into dialogue. Always we are witnessing drama, of which the spectators needed no description, and of which the subsequent transcriber reproduces simply the action and the words, save in so far as he is absolutely forced to insert a brief explanation of the Barabbas episode. The rest of the trial scene, and the scene of the mock crowning and robing, are strictly dramatic, giving nothing but words and action. In the account of the trial before Herod, which is found only in Luke, the method of narration is significantly different, being descriptive and non-dramatic, as the work of an amplifying later narrator would naturally be. The words of Herod are not given; and the interpolation was doubtless the work of a late Gentile, bent on making Jewish and not Roman soldiers guilty of mocking the Lord.  In the first two gospels, even the episode of the laying hold of Simon of Cyrene, to make him bear the cross, might have been introduced at this point on the stage, without involving the attempt—impossible in drama—to present the procession to the place of crucifixion. Of that procession Matthew and Mark offer no description: they simply adhere to the drama, leaving to the later narrative of Luke the embellishment of the mourning crowd of daughters of Jerusalem, and the speech of Jesus to them on the way. Even Luke, however, offers no description of the march; and even his added episode might have been brought into a dramatic action, either at the close of the crowning-scene or at the beginning of that of the crucifixion.

Here, as before, the action is strictly dramatic, save for the episode of the Scriptural explanation of the casting of lots, which may or may not have been a late addition to the action. No word is said of the aspect of Jesus, a point on which an original narrator, if writing to be read, or telling of what he had seen, would almost certainly have said something. In a drama, of course, no such details were needed: the suffering God-Man was there on the stage, seen by all the spectators. The same account holds good of all the remaining scenes in the gospel story, with a few exceptions. The three hours of darkness and silence could not be enacted, though there might be a shorter interval; and the rending of the temple veil, which could not take place on the scene, is to be presumed a late addition to the transcribed narrative; but a machinery of commotion may very well have been employed, and the wild story of the opening of the graves of the saints may actually derive from such a performance, though the absurdity of the 53rd verse is wholly documentary. Such a story would naturally be dropped from later gospels because of its sheer extravagance; but such a scruple would not affect the early dramatists. Even the episode of the appeal of the priests and Pharisees to Pilate to keep a guard on the tomb, though it might be a later interpolation, could quite well have been a dramatic scene, as it presents the Jews “gathered together unto Pilate, saying.....”

The resurrection scene, like that of the crucifixion, is wholly “staged.” The two Maries, who sat before the sepulchre when Joseph closed it, appear again late on the Sabbath day, having presumably been driven away by the guard before. Nothing is said of what has gone on among the disciples; nothing of the communion of the mourning women: the whole narrative is rigidly limited to the strictly consecutive dramatic action, as it would be represented on the stage. Even the final appearance in Galilee is set forth in the same fashion, and the gospel even as it stands ends abruptly with the words of the risen Lord. When the mystery-play was first transcribed, it may have ended at Matt. xxviii, 10, verses 11-15 having strong marks of late addition. But it may quite well have included verses 16-20, with the obvious exception of the clause about the Trinity, which is certainly late. In any case, it ended on a speech.

Why should such a document so end, if it were the work of a narrator setting down what he knew or had heard? Why should he not round off his narrative in the normal manner? The “higher criticism” has recognised that the story of the betrayal and the rest do not belong to the earlier matter of the gospels. The analysis of the school of Bernhard Weiss, as presented by Mr. A. J. Jolley,  makes the “Primitive Gospel” end with the scene of the anointing. I hold that scene to have been also dramatic, and to have been first framed as a prologue to the Mystery-Play;  but the essential point is that all that portion which I have above treated as the Mystery-Play is an addition to a previously existing document. Not that the play (in some form) was not older than the document, but that its transcription is later. And this theory gives the explanation as to the abruptness of the conclusion. Where the play ended the narrative ends. Only in the later third gospel do we find the close, and some other episodes, such as the Herod trial and the account of Joseph of Arimathea, treated in the narrative spirit—in the manner, that is, of a narrative framed for reading. In Luke’s conclusion there is still a certain scenic suggestion; but it is a distant imitation of the concrete theatricality of the earlier version; description is freely interspersed; speeches are freely lengthened; and the story is rounded off as an adaptive writer would naturally treat it.

In the earlier gospels such a treatment has not been ventured on. There are but a few doctrinary and explanatory interpolations; the descriptive element is kept nearly at the possible minimum; the scenic action is adhered to even where interpolated description would clearly be appropriate for narrative purposes; the transcriber even stumbles over his text to the extent of joining two speeches which should have an entrance and an exit between them; and when the last scene ends the gospel ends. The transcriber has been able to add to the previous gospel the matter of the mystery-play; and there he loyally stops. His work has been done in good faith, up to his lights; and he does not presume to speak of matters of which he knows nothing. Later doctrinaires, with a dogma to support, might tamper with the document: he sticks to his copy. Doubtless the addition was made by Gentile hands. In the play the apostles are unfavourably presented, and the episode of the treason of Peter is probably a Gentile invention made to discredit the Judaising party, who held by a Petrine tradition, though on the other hand the gospel text about the rock is presumably a late invention in the interest of the Roman See.

In this connection there arises the question whether the specifically dramatic “Acts of Pilate,” as contained in the non-canonical “Gospel of Nicodemus,” may not likewise represent an original drama. Broadly speaking, it seems to do so, and it may conceivably proceed upon a dramatic text independently of the synoptics. On the ground, not of its dramatic form but of the occasional relative brevity and the general consistency of its narrative, it has even been argued  that its matter is earlier than the version of the story in any of the gospels. With that problem we are not here concerned; but it is relevant to note that the dramatic action of the non-canonical gospel is not earlier but later than that preserved in the canonical. In the “Acts of Pilate” the trial scene is composed by reducing to drama a whole series of episodes from the previous gospel history, the various persons miraculously cured by Jesus coming forward to give evidence on his behalf. Even the story of the water-wine miracle is embodied from the fourth gospel. This expansion is manifestly a late device, and has the effect of making the already impossible trial scene newly extravagant. And while the trial in the “Acts” is in passages more strictly dramatic than in the gospel, those very passages tell of redaction, not of priority. Thus Pilate is made to utter in his address the explanation concerning the usage of releasing a prisoner, and volunteers allusion to Barabbas, where the gospel gives those details by way of narrative. It is clear that in the natural and original form of such a drama Pilate would not so speak: the speech is a sophistication.

Whether or not, then, the “Acts” proceeded on a separate dramatic text, it does not preserve an earlier version. That it does not give the absurd detail about the risen saints visiting the holy city after the resurrection is merely a fresh proof that the first gospel is at that point interpolated. The mere fact that the “Acts” gives names to personages who are without names in the canonical gospels—as, the two thieves and the soldier who pierced the Lord’s side—tells of lateness. What the document does signify is the apparent extension of the mystery-play beyond the limits of that embodied in the first gospel, and under the same pressure of Gentile motive, the whole effect of the extension being to throw a greater guilt of perversity on the Jews and to put Pilate in a favourable light. That the play in the “Acts” came from a source to which the Syrian sacrificial tradition was alien is further suggested by the fact that it places the act of mock-crowning at Golgotha, not in the Praetorium, and that for the scarlet robe it substitutes a linen cloth; while a formal sentence of scourging is passed by Pilate. Finally, the resurrection does not happen upon the scene, but is related by the mouths of the Roman soldiers, as if the dramatist or compiler were bent on producing new and stronger evidence in proof of the event.

On any view, however, the dramatic form of the “Acts” serves to strengthen the presumption that dramatic representations of the death of Jesus were early current, and thus to support the foregoing interpretation of the gospel story. That interpretation, it is submitted, fits the whole case, and at once explains what otherwise is inexplicable, the peculiar character of what is clearly an unhistorical narrative. Assume the story to be either a tradition reduced to writing long after the event, or the work of a deliberate inventor desirous of giving some detail to a story of which he had received the barest mention. Either way, why should that impossible huddling of the action, that crowding of the betrayal and the trial into one night, have been resorted to? It does not help the story as a narrative for reading: it makes it, on the contrary, so improbable that only the hebetude of reverence can prevent anyone from seeing its untruth. The solution is instant and decisive when we realise that what we are reading is the bare transcription of a mystery-play, framed on the principle of “unity of time.”

As has been remarked, it is not to be supposed that the play as it stands in the gospel is primordial; rather it is a piece of technical though unliterary elaboration, albeit older than the play in the “Acts of Pilate,” for if we divide it by its scenes or places we have the classic five acts:—first, the Supper; second, the Agony and Betrayal, both occurring on the mount; third, the trial at the high-priest’s house; fourth, the trial before Pilate; fifth, the Crucifixion. If we suppose this to have been one continuous play, the resurrection may have been a separate action, with five scenes—the removal of the body by Joseph; the burial; the placing of the guard of soldiers; the coming of the women and the address of the angel; and the appearance of the risen Lord. But similarly the early action may have been divided: the anointing scene, the visit of Judas to the priests, the visit of the disciples to the “certain man” in whose house the Supper was to be eaten—all these may have been dramatically presented in the first instance. The scene of the Transfiguration, too, has every appearance of having been a dramatic representation in the manner of the pagan mysteries. But the theory of the dramatic origin of the coherent yet impossible story of the Supper, Agony, Betrayal, the two Trials, and the Crucifixion, does not depend on any decisive apportionment of the scenes. It is borne out at every point by every detail of the structure of the story as we have it in transcription; and when this is once recognised, our conception of the manner of the origin of the gospels is at this point at least placed on a new, we might say a scientific, basis.

16. The Mystery-Play and the Cultus

In all probability the performance of the mystery-play was suspended in the churches  when it was reduced to narrative form as part of the gospel. The suspension may have occurred either during a time of local persecution or by the deliberate decision of the churches, in the second century. But such a deliberate decision is likely to have been taken when the cult, having broken away from Judaism, was also concerned to break away from the paganism in contact with which the play would first arise. How far away from Jerusalem that may have been we can hardly divine. Greek drama certainly came much closer to Jewish life than has been recognised in the histories. Not only were theatres built by Herod, as Josephus testifies, at Damascus and Jericho,  but ruins of two theatres exist at Gadara,  described by Josephus as a Greek town,  and known to have produced a number of notable Hellenistic writers.  But the presumption from what we know of Christian origins is that the cult developed rather in the larger than in the smaller Hellenistic cities; and it would need a fairly strong group to produce such a mystery-play. It may indeed never have been performed in full save at important centres, such as Antioch or Alexandria; and when once the cult was at all widely established such a state of things would be inexpedient on many grounds. The reduction of the play to narrative form put all the churches on a level, and would remove a stumbling-block from the way of the ascetic Christists who objected to all dramatic shows as such.

But the manner of the transcription happily preserves for us the knowledge of the fact that it was such a show to begin with. And if we suppose it to have grown up in a Gentile environment, say in Alexandria, on the nucleus of the eucharist, after the model of an actual sacrifice in which a “Jesus Barabbas” was annually offered up, we shall be so far within the warrant of the evidence. Whether the official stoning and hanging of an actual Jesus on a charge of sorcery and blasphemy in the days of Alexander Jannæus had served as a fresh point of departure, is a question that cannot at present be decided. All that is clear is that the gospel story is unhistorical. The placing of the action of the mystery-play in Jerusalem would be the natural course for Gentiles who were seeking to counteract the Judaising party in a cult which founded on a slain Jewish Jesus; since the more clearly Jerusalem and Jewry were saddled with what had come to be regarded as an act of historic guilt, the clearer would be the grounds for a breach with Judaism.

To locate the first performance of the play in its present shape is beyond the possibilities of the case as the evidence stands. The detail of the two Maries suggests Egypt, where the cult of Osiris had just such a scene of quasi-maternal mourning; and the Egyptian ideas in the Apocalypse, such as those of the “lake of fire” and “the second death,”  further point to Alexandrian sources for early Jesuism; but the eucharist and burial and resurrection are apparently Mithraistic, as are various details in the Apocalypse;  and the Osirian ritual, like the Mithraic, would be known in many lands. We can but say that the death-ritual of the Christian creed is framed in a pagan environment, and that, like the myth of the Virgin-birth,  it embodies some of the most widespread ideas of pagan religion. In strict truth, the two aspects in which the historic Christ is typically presented to his worshippers, those of his infancy and his death, are typically pagan.

But indeed there is not a conception associated with the Christ that is not common to some or all of the Saviour cults of antiquity. The title of Saviour, latterly confined to him, was in Judaism given to Yahweh,  and among the Greeks to Zeus,  to Helios;  to Artemis,  to Dionysos,  to Herakles,  to the Dioscuri,  to Cybelê,  to Æsculapius;  and it is the essential conception of the God Osiris. So, too, Osiris taketh away sin, and is judge of the dead, and of the last judgment; and Dionysos, also Lord of the Underworld, and primarily a God of feasting (“the Son of Man cometh eating and drinking”), comes to be conceived as the Soul of the World, and as the inspirer of chastity and self-purification. From the Mysteries of Dionysos and Isis comes the proclamation of the easy “yoke”; and the Christ not only works the Dionysiak miracle,  but calls himself “the true vine.”  Like the Christ, and like Adonis and Attis, Osiris and Dionysos suffer and die to rise again; and to become one with them is the mystical passion of their worshippers. All alike in their mysteries give immortality; and from Mithraism the Christ takes the symbolic keys of heaven and hell,  even as he assumes the function of the Virgin-born Mithra-Saoshyant, the destroyer of the Evil One.  Like Mithra, Merodach,  and the Egyptian Khonsu,  he is the Mediator; like Khonsu, Horus, and Merodach, he is one of a trinity;  like Horus, he is grouped with a divine Mother; like Khonsu, he is joined with the Logos;  and like Merodach, he is associated with a Holy Spirit, one of whose symbols is fire.  In fundamentals, in short, Christism is but paganism re-shaped: it is only the economic and the doctrinal evolution of the system—the first determined by Jewish practice and Roman environment,  and the second by Greek thought —that constitute new phenomena in religious history.

17. Further Pagan Adaptations

One likely result of the non-performance of the mystery-play as such would be a modification of the sacramental meal. When the crucifixion was represented in sequel to the supreme annual eucharist, the bread and wine of the weekly Supper were somewhat definitely presented as symbols, whereas the merely priestly representation of the God by the ministrant in the simple eucharist would emphasise the declaration “this is my body.” As to what may have ritually occurred in this connection either shortly before or after the period of the mystery-play we can but speculate, as aforesaid; but we have seen that the ritual eating of a lamb did take place in the post-Pauline period, as in the mysteries of Mithra and Dionysos; and there is reason to infer that for similar reasons there was long and commonly practised among Christists the usage of eating a baked image of a child at the Easter communion.  That is the only satisfactory explanation of the constant pagan charge against the Christians of eating an actual child—a charge met by the Fathers in terms which convey that there was something to conceal.  As it was made and repelled long after the gospels were current with the mystery-play added, there would be no reason for the attitude of mystery unless the ritual included some symbolism not described in the books. Given that this symbol was bread shaped in a human form, Christism was exactly duplicating one of the practices of the man-sacrificing Mexicans, who at the time of the Spanish conquest employed such a symbol in some of their sacraments alongside of still surviving rites of man-eating, and constant human sacrifice.

When, however, the Christian cult was officially established, there needed no such primary symbolism to secure for the habitual sacrament the reverence of the faithful. The general belief that the sacred bread became the flesh of the God, and as such had miraculous virtue, could be maintained on the strength of the bare priestly blessing; and though the consecrated wafer is itself copied from pagan practice,  it is finally a symbol of a symbol. For the same reason the church was able to put down a tendency which can be traced in the second and third centuries, and even later, to set up a new sacramental symbol for the Christ—to wit, the Fish.  This peculiar symbolism was superficially traced to the fact that the Greek word Ἰχθύς, Fish, is got from the initial letters of the phrase, Ἰησοῦς Χριστὸς Θεοῦ Ὑιὸς Σωτὴρ—Jesus Christ, God’s Son, Saviour. But such a solution is incredible: the anagram is framed after the symbol, not before it; and the true explanation must be that whereas the divine lamb had long been identified with the zodiacal sign Aries, into which the Sun enters at the vernal equinox, the time of the crucifixion, the precession of the equinoxes had for some time made the sun’s zodiacal place at that season not the constellation Aries, but the constellation Pisces.

Either for the same reason, or in virtue of the simpler myth according to which the Sun was a fish who every evening plunged in the sea, Horus had long been “the Fish” in Egypt; and in some planispheres he was represented as fish-tailed, and holding a cross in his hand. It was he, and not Jesus, who figured for the Gnostics as the Divine Fish;  and it was probably through the Gnostics that the symbol entered the Christian system. And though the Egyptian precedent was inconvenient, and the symbol recalled both the Philistine Fish-God Dagon and the Babylonian Oannes, many Christists would be the more led to such a change of symbol because the lamb symbol was awkwardly common to both Judaism and Mithraism; and because in particular the phrase of the Judaistic Apocalypse, “washed in the blood of the Lamb,” pointed very inconveniently to the Mithraic rite of the criobolium, which with the taurobolium was a highly popular pagan rite of “purification.”

The catacomb banquet scenes in which fishes figure as the food  are probably due to this motive; and the story of the sacred meal of fish in the fourth gospel was probably shaped in part under the same pressure, though the idea of a banquet of seven was also Mithraic.

A State Church was able to dispense with such tactics, though it saw fit to discourage the use of the lamb symbol. That, nevertheless, survived with the equally pagan symbol of the Easter egg, which has no place in the sacred books, but was taken by the Gnostics from the lore of the Orphicists.

The bread symbol, finally attenuated to the wafer, served as the supreme or official sanctity. Yet in this remotely symbolical fashion the historical Church has sedulously preserved the immemorial principle, common to paganism and Judaism, of a constantly repeated sacrifice; and by that doctrine the Church of Rome stands to this day, the Church of England leaning strongly towards it.

Hierologically speaking, they are quite justified; the eucharist is a sacrificial meal or nothing; and those who recoil from the sacrificial principle, if they would be equally consistent, have by rights but one course before them, that of relegating the Christian cultus to the status of those of paganism.

But in the way of such a course there stands the agelong prepossession in favour of the Gospel Jesus as a personality and as a teacher. In these his moral aspects, men think, he stands apart from the Christs, mythic or otherwise, of the Gentile world, and is worthy of a perpetual attention.

In these aspects, then, finally, must the Christian God-Man be comparatively studied.

18. Synopsis And Conclusion: Genealogy Of Human Sacrifice And Sacrament

Meantime it may be helpful to draw up a tentative genealogical scheme of the history of the sacrificial idea as we have sketched it up to Christianity, and further to reduce this to diagram form. We set out with the dim primeval life in which

A. All ”victims,” whether animal or human, are not strictly sacrificed but commonly eaten, the “Gods” and the “dead” being held to share in the feast, as a feast. Dead relatives are similarly eaten, and parents filially slain and eaten, to preserve their qualities in the family or tribe. On such habits would follow the sacrifices of human beings at funerals,  held by Mr. Spencer to be primordial forms of sacrifice proper.

Thence would differentiate—

B. Offerings to the Gods. These would include burnt-offerings, fruits and libations, especially first fruits, and latterly incense,  corn, and wine; and with them might correlate

B´. Totem-Sacrifices, in which the victim might be eaten either as (a) the God or as (b) a mode of union with the God-ancestor or totem species; and

B″. Human Sacrifices as such, normally of captives, which would be eaten (a) along with the God as thank-offering or as food for the slain dead, or (b) as propitiatory or “sin” offerings, or (c) as vegetation-charms and life-charms, or else (d) buried in morsels as vegetation-charms, or (e) as sanctifying foundations of houses or villages.

In virtue of the general functioning of the priest there would thus arise the general conception of

C. Priest-blessed ritual sacrifices, eaten as sacraments, including

C´. The quasi-totem-sacrifice, in which the God eats himself, as animal or as symbol, in a sacramental communion with his worshippers; and

C″. Human sacrifices, in which the victim (a) represented the God, or (b) had a special efficacy as being a king or a king’s son, or (c) a first-born or only son. In the case of Goddesses, the sacrifice might be a virgin; and this concept would react on the conception of the God in an ascetic movement, making him either double-sexed or virtually sexless. For the sacrifice, nevertheless, the victim must latterly be as a rule a criminal. These various victims might or might not be eaten.

There is thus evolved (1) the general conception of a peculiarly efficacious Eucharist or sacramental meal in which is eaten, symbolically or otherwise, a sacrificed animal or human being, normally regarded as representing the God, though the God eats thereof. Latterly men often assume that the animal so sacrificed is thus treated as being an enemy of the God, where the nature of the animal admits of such an interpretation. Finally, after public human sacrifices are abolished or made difficult, there is found (2) the practice of a Mystery-Drama, symbolical of the act of human sacrifice, in which the victim is sympathetically regarded as an unjustly slain God.

Such practices competing successfully with the official or public rites and sacrifices, they in turn elicit a priesthood which raises them to official ritual form. Thus there arises

D. The priest-administered eucharist, of which the mean or norm is Bread and Wine = Body and Blood, but which may retain the form of

D´. The symbolical animal, or a dough image thereof, or

D″. A baked image of the God-Man or Child.

In virtue, however, of the symbolical principle, and of the priestly function, the thing eaten, though still called the host (= hostia, victim), may be reduced to a single symbol, which stands for the living body, including its blood. Such is the “communion in one kind” or consecrated wafer of the Catholic Church, repudiated by Protestants, who revert to the “communion in two kinds” or bread and wine of the sacred books. The Catholic practice is practically on a par with some of the usages of the pre-Christian Mexicans; while the Protestant reverts to the Mithraic and Dionysiak usages which were imitated by the early Church.

Thus is an appallingly long-drawn evolution summed up for the modern world in a symbol which to the uninstructed eye tells nothing of the dreadful truth, and presents a fable in its place. If to die as a human sacrifice for human beings be to deserve the highest human reverence, the true Christs of the world are to be numbered not by units, but by millions. Almost every land on this globe has during whole ages drunk their annually shed blood. According to one calculation, made in the last century, the annual death-roll from human sacrifice and female infanticide in one section of British India alone was fifteen hundred.  Taking the sacrifices at only a fifteenth of the total; noting further the calculation of Sir George Grey, which gives four millions of victims for New Zealand alone in 2,000 years; taking into account the known holocausts of modern Africa and Polynesia,  and pre-Christian Mexico,  and the universal practice of pre-Christian Europe, we are led to an estimate beside which every Christian reckoning of the “army of martyrs” becomes insignificant. We are forced to reckon by thousands of millions: the truth is too vast for realisation. Tantum relligio. Thus has the human race paid in death for its faith in immortality. “Laugh as much as you please,” wrote Dobrizhoffer a century ago, “at the sepulchral rites of the Abipones; you cannot deny them to be proof of their believing in the immortality of the soul.”  Even so. And for rites at which madness itself could not laugh, we have the same explanation. Of these miserable victims of insane religion, the majority were “innocent” even by the code that sacrificed them; and of the rest, in comparison with those who slew them, who shall now predicate “guilt”? Thus have nameless men and women done, many millions of times, what is credited to the fabulous Jesus of the Christian gospels; they have verily laid down their lives for the sin of many; and while the imaginary sacrifice has been made the pretext of a historic religion during two thousand years, the real sacrifices are uncommemorated save as infinitesimals in the records of anthropology. Twenty literatures vociferously proclaim the myth, and rivers of tears have been shed at the recital of it, while the monstrous and inexpugnable truth draws at most a shudder from the student, when his conceptual knowledge becomes for him at moments a lightning-flash of concrete vision through the awful vista of the human past. In a world which thus still distributes its sympathies, a rational judgment on the historic evolution is not to be looked for save among the few. Delusion as to the course of religious history must long follow in the wake of the delusion which made the history possible.

IV. The Teaching God

1. Primary and Secondary Ideas

Though the secondary Gods are not always sacrificed, they are nearly always in some measure teachers; and here, of course, they are developed from earlier forms. A general conception of the God as teacher belongs to early religion, inasmuch as he is held to have given the moral laws which are associated with his cult; and where his worship is specially bound up with rites of agriculture he is conceived as having taught men that and other arts. Among the Narrinyeri of South Australia, the Supreme God Nurundere “instituted all the rites and ceremonies which are practised by the aborigines, whether connected with life or death. On enquiring why they adhere to any custom, the reply is, because Nurundere commanded it.”  Among the ancient civilisations the same doctrine is common. Thus Oannes the Fish-God (identified with Ea)  taught the Babylonians agriculture and the building of cities, writing, laws, cosmology, religion, the sciences, and the arts, including the measurement of lands—in a word, everything appertaining to civilisation;  and Shamas dictates the laws of Hammurabi.  On a less comprehensive scale, in Egyptian myth, Thoth gave men language and names, the art of writing, and the rules of worship and sacrifice;  Osiris taught the Egyptians the art of agriculture, and gave them laws, and guidance as to worship;  Janus and Saturn did as much for the Italians;  Huitzilopochtli no less for the Aztecs;  and Apollo, though in one myth he has to learn divination from Pan  as he learns music from Hermes, in another gives laws to the Hyperboreans  and thereafter speaks oracles at Delphi for the Greeks, teaching them a more civilised way of life.  Dionysos similarly had a teacher in Silenus, but himself taught men in particular the culture of the vine; and Dêmêtêr, who must needs introduce some of the arts of agriculture,  is also a lawgiver for both Greeks and Romans.  Isis in turn divides with Osiris the honours of agriculture, she having shown men how to make use of wheat and barley; and she too gives men laws, and even leechcraft.  The Goddesses, indeed, are as commonly as the Gods credited with introducing culture. Athênê teaches all crafts;  Cybelê like Isis is a teacher of healing;  and the Gallic Minerva (Belisama) was reputed the giver of arts and crafts.  Similarly the Gallic Apollo (Grannos or Mahon) was held to drive away disease;  as also the Teutonic Odin.  This idea of the Gods as the givers of healing is indeed common to the whole Aryan race; and in the religion of India medicine was held to come immediately from them like the Veda itself.  So in Hawaii there is found a tradition that “many generations back a man called Koreamoku obtained all their medicinal herbs from the gods, who also taught him the use of them; that after his death he was deified, and a wooden image of him placed in the large temple at Kairna, to which offerings of hogs, fish, and cocoa nuts were frequently presented......Two friends and disciples of Koreamoku continued to practise the art after the death of their master, and were also deified after death.”  Elsewhere, again, “From the gods the priests pretended to have received the knowledge of the healing art”;  while in Tahiti there was a God of physic and two of surgery, as well as the usual guild-Gods of the different avocations.  In Samoa, yet again, the War-God Tu was in time of peace a doctor.

The universality of the idea is best realised when we turn to the Gods of the more primitive peoples. We have seen how the Dravidian Khonds ascribe to Boora and Tari the raising of men from savagery and ignorance to comfort by means of instruction, and to Boora a moralising purpose as against the sacrificial cult. So, in the higher mythology of Peru, the Sun sent Manco Capac and Mama Ocello to teach savage men true religion, morality, agriculture, arts, and sciences; while on another view Pachacamac, finding the first breed hopeless, turned them into tiger cats or apes, and made a new set, whom he taught arts and handicrafts. This idea of teaching or reformation pervades the whole cosmogony of the Incarial period.  So with the Gods of pre-Christian Mexico: the national deity of each tribe or nation is nearly always specified as the giver of its laws, and at times as the inventor of fire and clothing,  and in at least one case he is the writer of the sacred books.

Where this conception is not prominent in a primitive religion, the explanation appears to be that the enlightening power of the Gods operates by way of inspiring the priests. Thus in the Tonga Islands, where there seems to have been little trace of a general culture-myth, inspiration of the priest by his God was held to be common;  and even the God Tangaloa, “God of artificers and the arts,” appropriately had for his priests only carpenters.  When inspired, the priest as a matter of course spoke in the first person, as being the God for the time being.  Similar inspiration, however, was held to come from the divine spirits of deceased nobles;  and it is thus intelligible that the general development of this species of “trance mediumship” should keep in the background the thought of any special Teaching God.

With the growth of culture and literature and sacerdotalism, however, the notion of a God who inspires priests or oracles is developed into or superseded by that of a God who especially represents the principle of counsel or wisdom or revelation; and in the polytheistic systems we have accordingly such deities as the Assyrian Nabu or Nebo,  the wise, the all-knowing, the wisdom of the Gods, patron of writing and literature, and son and interpreter of Merodach, who in turn is the interpreter of the will of his father Ea, the earlier God of wisdom; the Indian Agni, in his secondary character of messenger or “Mouth of the Gods”;  and the Egyptian Thoth, who, originally the Moon-God and therefore the Measurer becomes as such the representative of the principle of instruction and the writer of the sacred books.  In this latter capacity he has an obvious advantage over Maat, the Goddess of Law and Truth, and at once the daughter and the mother of Ra.  Thus, while every Egyptian God proper is neb maat, “lord of law,” Thoth is in particular the Logos, Reason, or Word; and so becomes the sustainer of Osiris against his enemies.

This latter conception is seen entering Greek mythology at three stages, first in the myth of (1) Hermes, who is Logos in the sense of being either a Moon-God like Thoth  or simply Wind-God and so the messenger of the Gods;  later, in the ennobled worship of (2) Apollo and Athênê, of whom the former is the mouth of Zeus and revealer of his counsel, hence the typical God of oracles, and the latter, grouped with her brother and father in a triad,  is also her father’s wisdom;  and still later, in the period of developing theosophy, in the myth of (3) Metis, essentially the personified Reason and Intelligence of Zeus.

In a more sophisticated form, the idea of the God as lawgiver is met with in the myth of Zeus and Minos,  the Cretan institutor—himself a purely mythical figure, like Moses, and, like him, presumably a deity of an earlier age;  and again in the legend of King Numa and his Egeria.  Such myths may conceivably rise either as an inference from the ordinary phenomenon of the seer or sorcerer or priest who claims to have sought and to have been inspired by the God, or as the attempts of a late theosophy to remove anthropomorphism from the popular lore. On the latter view, they are paralleled by the attempts of the Evemerists to explain the Teaching God as a myth set up by the fame of a human teacher. Thus Ouranos is figured as a mortal who first gathered men in cities, gave them laws and agriculture, and taught them to observe the stars, the movements of the sun, and the division of months and the year; whence his final deification;  and similarly Orpheus becomes “sacer interpreterque Deorum,” who deterred savage men from slaughters and foulness of life.  And, either by way of spontaneous evolution or as a result of Semitic or other eastern influence, we find among the Yorubas of Nigeria an Oracle-God and Teaching God, If a, who utters moral maxims, and figures alternately as a demigod who mastered and taught medicine, divination, and prophecy, and so was deified, and as the first-born son of the Creator and the Mother Goddess, the Saviour-God being the second-born.

2. The Logos

All such doctrines, it is probable, were represented in the later, if not in the earlier, Babylonian religion; and the idea of the Logos is probably early in Mazdeism;  but in any case it was from the outside that it was pressed upon Judaism, to the extent, as we have seen, of making a personality out of that Word of God which originally “came” to the prophets in the sense that his spirit was held to have entered into them. The whole evolution is noticeably parallel to that of the principles of law and government in States, from the stage in which the king or chief is judge and as such “God” to that in which he is surrounded by graded orders of priests and councillors, jurists and administrators. The Logos is in a manner the heavenly Grand Vizier.

It is impossible, however, to fix a date for the origin of the special dogma of the Logos. To take it as a Greek invention is to ignore the very problem of origins. An eminent Sanskritist assures us in one passage not only that the doctrine of the Logos is “exclusively Aryan,” but that “whoever uses such words as Logos, the Word, Monogenês, the Only-begotten, Prototokos, the First-born, Hyios tou theou, the Son of God, has borrowed the very germs of his religious thoughts from Greek philosophy”;  while in another passage he admits that the conceptions of the Word as found in the Psalms  and of the Angel as found in the Pentateuch “are purely Jewish, uninfluenced as yet by any Greek thought.”  Other eminent Sanskritists, again, have shown that the River-Goddess Sarasvatî is in the later Brahmanic mythology “identified with Vâch” or Vâc [= Speech] “and becomes under different names the spouse of Brahma and the goddess of wisdom and eloquence, and is invoked as a Muse”; while in the Mahâbhârata she is called the “mother of the Vedas.”  Elsewhere the personified Vâch enters into the Rishis or sages as inspiration.  Again, “When the Brahmarshis were performing austerities prior to the creation of the universe ‘a voice derived from Brahma entered into the ears of them all: the celestial Sarasvatî was then produced from the heavens!’”

As among the Greeks and the Jews, so among the Hindus the doctrine of the sacred or creative Word is various. In the Satapatha Brâhmana, Prajapati (who is “composed of Seven Males”) first of all things created the Veda, which became the foundation on which he “created the waters from the world in the form of speech. Speech belonged to him. It was created. It pervaded all this.” In the same document the cosmic egg is the primordial source: “From it the Veda was first created—the triple essence. Hence men say, ‘the Veda is the first-born of this whole creation.....They say of a learned man that he is like Agni, for the Veda is Agni’s mouth.’”  The personified Vâch, Sarasvatî, River-Goddess and Goddess of Speech, is doubtless the later evolution,  just as is the Græco-Jewish Sophia; but there can be no question that the conception of the Veda as the Word, the first-created thing or first-born Being, is fully present in the Brâhmanas. In the Taittariya Brâhmana, “Vâch (speech) is an imperishable thing......the mother of the Vedas, and the centre point of immortality”;  being thus identified with Sarasvatî as aforesaid; but this does not affect the dogma, set forth by Sankara, that “from the eternal Word the world is produced.”  Again, in the Satapatha Brâhmana “Speech is the Rig-Veda, mind the Yajur Vedah, breath the Sâma Veda.”  In the Taittariya, it is true, the Veda is created after the Soma;  but such a variation, we shall see, occurs also in Jewish lore. And among the Vedantists, finally, “the ‘word’ (sabda) is ‘God’ (Brahma).”  As regards, again, the more philosophical side of the Logos doctrine, the conception of an all-pervading and primordial Reason (Tao or Tau), we find it most explicitly and coherently set forth in China by Lao-Tsze, with a doctrine of a unity and trinity of forms of existence,  in the sixth century before our era.

Are we then to suppose that such speculation originated with the Ionian Greeks, was passed on by them to the Jews, and by Jews or Greeks or both to the Persians, and thence to the Brahmans and the Chinese? Such a hypothesis is visibly unmanageable. The Pythagorean derivation of Plato’s doctrine of the Logos is tolerably clear; and its connection with the planetary lore of the eight heavenly powers, as well as with the lore of numbers and proportion,  tells of a source such as only the Chaldean or Egyptian schools of astrology and astronomy can be supposed to represent in the early Greek sphere. Babylonian religion contains the principle of the Logos in its most definite primary form, the doctrine of the Divine Name, which is the germ of the Platonic doctrine of ideas no less than of the Philonic and Johannine theology. We even find it in a form approximated-to in the Pentateuch (where the “name” of Yahweh is “in” the promised “Angel” leader),  and made familiar later by the Jewish Toledoth Jeschu as well as by the modified Christian formula—the teaching, namely, that the mystic name of the Supreme God is known to him alone, and is revealed by him solely to his son, who has thus virtually all power in heaven and on earth.

“This idea, which prevailed equally in Egypt and in Western Asia, is purely animistic. To pronounce a name is to call up and conjure the being who bears it. The name possesses personality...... To name a thing is to create it: that is why creation is often represented as accomplished by the word.” Further, we know from Damascius—whose list of Babylonian God-names is made good by the remains actually discovered in recent times—that Tauthê, Mother of the Gods, first bore a son, Moymis, who was “the intelligible world.”  Here is the very formula of Philo. Of the God Nebo, too, who has so many attributes of the Logos, it is noted that his Akkadian prototype “was once the universe itself” —a likely source of such an identification in his case. If then the Jews had the Logos idea before their contact with the Greeks and the Mazdeans,  the reasonable assumption is that they had it from a source from which the Mazdeans and Ionian Greeks could also have it—the Babylonian lore, in which were accumulated the current fancies of thousands of years of Asiatic speculation, including that of the ancient civilisation from which was derived that of the Chinese. And when we find the Brahmanic philosophy, like the Babylonian and Greek, making all things originate from a watery abyss,  and again from the cosmic egg,  we have at least cause to surmise that the Babylonian and Indian systems draw from one central source. It is true that the Indian lore seems best to combine the ideas of origination through the Word and through Water; and that the word Saras means not only Water but Voice, whence Sarasvatî = not only “the watery” but also “the vocal” or “the sounding.”  Here, too, we seem to be in touch with primitive thought, for among the (perhaps partly Semitised) Yorubas of Nigeria there seems to have been a primary conception of moving water as the source of sound and of wisdom.  But while this is visibly more homogeneous than the late Hebrew evolution of a creative Sophia who equates with the creative Logos without any adaptation to the primordial abyss of waters (or “Ocean Stream” as in Homer) on which the “Spirit” had creatively moved, on the other hand the relative lateness  of the evolution of Vâch and Sarasvatî leaves open the presumption that a foreign influence has been at work. Agni, also, the Fire-God, is finally identified with the Word; he too, in the Vedas, is the Son of the Water and messenger of the Gods;  and his worship connects visibly with the fire-worship not only of the Mazdeans but of the Babylonians, for whom also Gibil and Nusku (or Gibil-Nusku) the Fire-Gods are sons of the Creator, Gibil in particular being “the first-born of heaven (Anu) and the image of his father,” while Ea, the Water-God, is the lord of life, and also the father of the Fire-God, who in turn is the messenger and counsellor of the Gods, clothed with their attributes.  The blended characteristics of Sarasvatî, finally, are found in the Babylonian Goddess Sarpanitum, who, as finally blended with Erua, the daughter of Ea, was at once “lady of the deep,” “voice of the deep,” and “the possessor of knowledge concealed from men “attributes all deriving from the fact that “wisdom and the life-giving principle were two ideas associated in the Babylonian mind with water.”  In these various nations, surely, we have the true “germs” alike of the Hindu, the Heraklitean, and the Platonic concepts of the Word or Reason; of the conception of Hermes as Logos and Messenger of the Gods; of Apollo as his father’s wisdom; of the Hindu, of the Hebrew, and of the Greek formulas of “First-born” and “Only-begotten”; and so alike of the later Judaic and the Christian theosophy.

The further research is carried into the affiliation of the cults and creeds of Asia Minor and Syria, the more clearly does it appear that all relate to the great central mass of theosophy accumulated in Babylonia, which was still a culture force in the earlier centuries of the Christian era.  That system had inferribly given to the Christian Gnostics their astrology and magic; their doctrine of the immortality of souls (not bodies); their Sophia; their conception of a Saviour, Knowledge-Giver, and Mediator:  it is sufficiently unlikely, then, that it had failed to evolve as did Brahmanism the concept of the Logos. The rational presumption is that it gave that concept to Greek and Jew alike.

But the Jewish evolution was apparently piecemeal. Different ideas and doctrines, such as that of Metis, Thoth, Thoth-Khonsu, the combined Logos (Moon-God) and Sun-God;  Vohumano, the “Good Mind,” combined with Mithra;  and the Platonic Logos, probably motived the separate evolution in Judaic literature of the personifications of Sophia or Wisdom,  the “Good Spirit,”  and the later Logos. In one book the Logos ”leaps down from heaven out of the royal throne,”  and “as a fierce man of war” wields the divine command as a destructive sword;  in another, Sophia is as distinctly personified: she “came out of the Most High,” but he created her “from the beginning before the world,” and she alone “encompassed the circuit of heaven.”  The writer means to be metaphorical, but for the many the effect must be graphic. And this development took place and prepared for yet others, though Judaism was ostensibly bound to resist the multiplication of personalities thus set up, and was further predisposed to a male as against a female principle. In this respect, as in so many others, it exhibits its derivations from and affinities with savage thought, for among the Yorubas of Nigeria, in our own time, we find the primary conception, first, of the “natural” trinity of Father, Mother, and Son, with the general concept, behind that, of the Mother of All, who in time tends to be resolved into or superseded by a male;  perhaps as a result of the supersession of the matriarchate. Some such progression seems to have taken place among the Hebrews. The original “Holy Spirit,” properly feminine, had in general been kept very much in the background, perhaps in fear of the old developments of goddess-worship, in which the symbol of the dove, taken by the Christists as standing for chastity, had really represented sexuality and fecundity.  But the mythopœic faculty, in its new forms of verbalism and pseudo-philosophy, was stronger than dogma, and stronger than fear. Accordingly we have Philo, at the traditional beginning of the Christian era, accumulating round the Logos the various aspects of the earlier Word and Sophia, and fitfully adding to them those of divine Sonship and Messiahship, and even the creative function of Demiourgos, thus at times reducing Yahweh to a somewhat remote abstraction.

3. Derivations of the Christian Logos

It is significant of the difficulty of winning a hearing for an important new truth in hierology that, a hundred years after the elaborate development of the Logos doctrine in Philo Judæus was fully demonstrated, the fact is no part of ordinary knowledge even among scholars, if they be not theologians.  Bryant, who first among English writers made the complete demonstration, held that Philo derived his ideas from association with the Christians. That is obviously a delusion;  but there can be no question about the actuality of the parallel between the Philonic and the Johannine and other Christian forms of the doctrine; and it may be that a list of Philo’s dicta as drawn up by the unsuspecting Bryant  will be more acceptable than one of those compiled by later scholars.

Attributes of the Logos in the writings of Philo Judæus.

1. Son of God. De Agricultura, 12; De confusione linguarum, 14; De Profugis, 20.

2. Second divinity. De Legum Allegoriarum, ii, 21; Frag. in Euseb. Præp. Evang. viii, 13.

3. First-begotten Son of God. De Agric. 12; De Somniis, i, 37; De Conf. ling. 14, 18; Quod Deus immutab. 6.

4. Image of God. De Mundi Opific. 8; De Somn. i, 41; De Conf. ling. 14, 18, 20, 28; De Profug. 19; De Monarchia, ii, 5.

5. Superior to angels. Frag. in Euseb. Præp. Evang. viii, 13; De Conf. ling. 28.

6. Superior to all things. De Leg. Alleg. iii, 31, 60, 61.

7. Instrument by whom the world was created. De Mundi Opif. vi; De Cherubim, 35; De Monarchia, ii, 5; De Profug. 18; De leg. alleg. iii, 31.

8. Vice-gerent of God, on whom all depends. De Agric. xii; De Somn. i, 41; De Profug. 20.

9. Light of the World. De Somn. i, 13, 15, 18.

10. Alone can see God. De Conf. ling. 20.

11. Resides in God. De Profug. 18, 19.

12. Most ancient of God’s works. De Profug. 19; De leg. alleg. iii, 60, 61.

13. Esteemed the same as God. De Somn. i, 12, 23, 41; ii, 36.

14. Eternal. De Plantat. Noe, 5.

15. Beholds all things. De leg. allegor. iii, 59.

16. Maintains the world. De Mose, iii, 14; De Profug. 20; De Somn. i, 47.

17. Nearest to God, without any separation. De Prof. 19.

18. Free from all taint of Sin. De Profug. 20, 21; De Somn. i, 23.

19. Presides over the imperfect and the weak. De leg. allegor. iii, 61, 62.

20. Fountain of Wisdom. De Profug. 18, 25.

21. A messenger sent from God. De Agric. 12; Quis rerum divin. haeres, 42; De Abrahamo, 36; De Prof. 1.

22. Advocate (Paraclete) for Man. Quis rer. div. haeres, 42. De Mose, iii, 14.

23. Orderer and disposer of all things. Quis rer. div. haer. 46, 48.

24. Shepherd of God’s flock. De Agric. 12.

25. Governor of the World. De Profug. 20.

26. Physician who heals all evil. De leg. alleg. iii, 62.

27. The Seal of God. De Prof. 2; De Plant. Noe, 5.

28. Sure refuge of those who seek him. De Somniis, i, 15; De Profug. i, 18, 19, 21.

29. Gives heavenly food to all who seek it. De leg. allegor. iii, 56, 58-62; De Profug. 25; Quis rerum divin. haeres, 39.

30. On men’s forsaking their sins gives spiritual freedom. De Somn. i, 15; De Congressu quærendæ erud. gratia, 19, 30.

31. Frees men from all corruption. De Congressu, 30; De Prof. 18, 21; Quis rer. div. haeres, 38. (Is the water of everlasting life. De Prof. 18.)

32. Not merely Son of God, but well-beloved child. [Ref. to De leg. alleg. iii, 64, where, however, αγαπητου τεκνου does not refer to the Logos.]

33. Means of man’s spiritual happiness. Quis rerum divin. haeres, 42.

34. Admits to the assembly of the perfect. De Sacrificiis, 2, 3 (De Profug. 18).

35. Raises the just to the presence of the Creator. Ibid.

36. The true high priest. De Somniis, i, 37; De leg. allegor. iii, 26; De Profug. 20.

37. Word, High Priest, and Mediator. Quis rer. div. haeres, 42; De Somn. i, 37; De Mose, iii, 14.

Much discussion has taken place over the question whether Philo really conceived his Logos as a person —a problem of which the futility may be realised after asking whether Christians to-day conceive of the Holy Ghost as a person. That Philo should be inconsistent; that he should successively make his Logos a deity, a spoken utterance, a creative power, an instrument, an aspect of the deity, a far-seeing spirit, a refuge, the first-born son of the deity, a high-priest and mediator, the covenant,  the co-ordinating law of the universe, an eternal entity, the first-created thing, an angel,  the sun,  the chief of the angels,  a body of doctrine, the Scriptures, Moses , an abstraction of wisdom, the soul of the world —all this belonged to his mental habit and that of the students of his age. It was impossible for such minds to be consistent or even momentarily clear: all philosophic thought was for them a shapeless cloud of words and verbal images. But where the born verbalisers fluctuated through a hundred forms of phrase, simpler minds inevitably reduced abstractions to personalities sans phrase. In the Book of Enoch the Messiah is identified, apparently long before Philo, with a First-Created power who has the characteristics of the Logos.  For most neologising Jews, in short, the Logos passed into personal status just as did Vohumano, “the Good Mind,” for the Mazdeans, because the perpetual naming of an abstraction in religious lore or ritual sets up for the believer an idea of separate personality or nothing. The personalisers were but doing what their simpler ancestors had done before when they gave personality to natural objects, winds, rivers, diseases, thunder, and lightning. They did so because they could not help it; and Philo, with his superior verbal resources, psychologises helplessly all the while on the primitive plane.

It is thus quite misleading to say that in his writings “from first to last the Logos is the thought of God, dwelling subjectively in the infinite mind, planted out and made objective in the universe.”  Supposing such a formula to have real significance for any one to-day—supposing it to be compatible with a theistic proposition of personality—it could have no meaning for Philo, who would not have written as he did if he could so have formulated; though the triplication of Thought and God and Infinite Mind may be said to be a good deal in his spirit. What we learn from such a verbal construction is that if a modern academic cannot propound a Logos-Idea without self-contradiction, much less could an Alexandrian Jew. And the historical conclusion remains clear, that the Christian doctrine of the Logos is simply a deposition in dogmatic form, round the nucleus of a sacramental cult, of the vaporous haze of thought set up in the Jewish world by Yahwistic speculation on Gentile notions.

It was the presence of the Jesuist nucleus that wrought the solidification. For Philo there was no bar to a multiplication of Logoi; and besides making Logoi of both Moses and Aaron  he has a multitude of lesser Logoi who figure endlessly as thoughts, words, angels, laws, forces, and reasons.  His Bible withheld him from deifying the actual priest or emperor; Moses was for him definitely reduced to human status; and to the prophets he pays remarkably little attention, merely citing one occasionally as a “companion of Moses.”  Finally, he appears in several treatises to be, like the writer of the fifty-first psalm,  ethically indifferent to sacrifice —so much so that it would be difficult to believe that the same hand wholly wrote these and others in which he accepts a modified form of the principle of atonement,  were it not for the numerous proofs in every treatise that his philosophy is always in a state of flux. In one passage he adumbrates a combination of the ideas of the mediatorial Logos and the national Messiah;  but a mind so fixed as his on allegory and symbol and abstraction was unprepared to make a definite Logos out of a sacrificed demigod, even had he lived to see the new Jesuist movement. It is the merest truism, therefore, to say that in his lore the Logos-idea never comes to dogmatic birth. Jesuism precipitated it on the eucharistic sacrifice, thus excluding further vacillations; but the idea of the Sophia, which, following the book of the Wisdom of Jesus ben Sirach, he also manipulates,  and which was no less potentially adaptable, never came to dogmatic birth at all, save in Gnostic teachings which the Church was finally able to suppress.

On the other hand, Philo’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit  (which in his theosophy remains as indeterminate as his notion of the Logos, and is much less stressed than either that or the notion of the Sophia, with both of which it vaguely blends) did find dogmatic acceptance in the formula of the Christian Trinity. The Sophia would have been on many grounds more suitable, supplying as she would the normal demand for a Mother-Goddess; and the male Spirit, as a matter of fact, has always remained an extremely dim conception, availing very little for the Christian cult. But the formation of a Trinity was forced upon Christism by many of its theosophic precedents;  and the admission of a Goddess was vetoed by the ascetic principle which was in the ascendant when the doctrine was formulated: so many and various are the forces which determine the growth of a syncretic system in a religiously crowded environment.

Such are the chances of social selection. Had not the ascetic principle been thus temporarily active, and had not the craving for a secondary Teaching-God been for the time satisfied by identifying the Sacrificed God with the Logos, an identification of Mary with both Sophia and the Spirit (originally feminine) would have been an equally natural and an equally facile proceeding, the preparation having been sufficiently made on Judaic lines. As it was, the exaltation of Mary, when it came about afterwards as a result of the stressing of the metaphysical aspects of the Son, was undertaken too late for the grafting of a dogmatic Sophia on the new sacred books; and the still later attempt at a new gospel in the thirteenth century was crushed by the preponderating power of the Papacy. But it is none the less clear that the doctrine of the Logos is a product of the same process of primitive psychology as produces deities of any order.

4. The Search for a Historical Jesus

Thus far there is no difficulty in tracing a purely speculative process: the doctrine of the Logos is indeed the first stumbling-block of those who seek to reconcile the fourth gospel with the synoptics as a biographical document. And the very abstractness of the conception moves men at the first brush to turn with the more confidence to the concrete teachings put in the God’s mouth in the other books. But if they continue critically to reflect, they find one cause after another to regard this concreteness as illusory.  Many of the utterances of the God, when weighed, are seen to be of the same order as those of the fourth gospel: hence the many vindications of that document; and vigilant attention to the differences of content in the synoptics sets up insoluble doubts as to their authority. Long ago it was pointed out, with no very clear view of the inference to be drawn, that the Sermon on the Mount is a patchwork from previous Jewish literature.  And at length the pressure of criticism has forced the more intelligent professional students of the New Testament to admit the insecurity of the old assumptions, and to attempt a restatement of the case for belief in the historicity of Jesus. The present state of the argument can perhaps be best set forth by way of criticism of the most important of these attempts, the second section of the article “Gospels” in the Encyclopædia Biblica, written by Professor Schmiedel, of Zurich. It is a masterpiece of critical arrangement and expert knowledge, demanding the attention of every serious student; so that our time could not be better spent.

Passing in review all the main attempts to resolve the gospels into a few mutually interactive primary “sources,” Professor Schmiedel comes to the conclusion that no such attempt will hold good. This verdict disposes of an amount of laborious research grievous to think of. For a full hundred years, German theologians by the score have been struggling with this problem, toiling devotedly, trying hypothesis upon hypothesis, refining upon refinements, always hoping to get to, or sure of having reached, a solid textual and historical foundation, even as they so long sought for one in the quicksands of the Pentateuch. At length, in the name of professional exegesis, Professor Schmiedel sounds the retreat. There are no true “sources,” no really primary and trustworthy documents in the gospel amalgam! There are only nine  ”entirely credible” texts! One thinks of Meredith’s figure of the hosts upon hosts of charging waves, whose achievement is only

To throw that faint thin line upon the shore!

And what are the entirely credible texts? With due care and respect let us enumerate the forlorn handful of unwounded survivors:—

1. Mk. x, 17 ff. (“Why callest thou me good?” etc.).

2. Mt. xii, 31 ff. (blasphemy against the Son of Man pardonable).

3. Mk. iii, 21 (“He is beside himself”).

4. Mk. xiii, 32 (“of that day and hour knoweth no man,” etc.).

5. Mk. xv, 34; Mt. xxvii, 46 (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”).

6. Mk. viii, 12 (“No sign shall be given to this generation”).

7. Mk. vi, 5 (“he was able to do no mighty work”).

8. Mk. viii, 14-21 (rebuke to the disciples concerning bread and leaven).

9. Mt. xi, 5; Lk. vii, 22. (Passage to be taken in the sense of spiritual healing, since it ends with mention of preaching—not a miracle at all.)

It will be seen on what principles Professor Schmiedel proceeds. Where Jesus speaks simply as a man, making no pretence to divinity, to miraculous powers, to prophecy, or to a Messianic mission, and where he is represented as failing to impress his relatives and neighbours with any sense of his superiority—there the record is entirely credible. From this position Dr. Schmiedel makes a leap to the conclusion that the entirely credible—that is, the possible—is the demonstratively historical. Let us take his own words (§ 139)

These......passages......might be called the foundation-pillars for a truly scientific life of Jesus. Should the idea suggest itself that they have been sought out with partial intent, as proofs of the human as against the divine character of Jesus, the fact at all events cannot be set aside that they exist in the Bible and demand our attention. In reality, however, they prove not only that in the person of Jesus we have to do with a completely human being, and that the divine is to be sought in him only in the form in which it is capable of being found in a man; they also prove that he really did exist, and that the Gospels contain at least some absolutely trustworthy facts concerning him. If passages of this kind were wholly wanting in them, it would be impossible to prove to a sceptic that any historical value whatever was to be assigned to the Gospels: he would be in a position to declare the picture of Jesus contained in them to be purely a work of phantasy, and could remove the person of Jesus from the field of history.

This will shock the believer without satisfying the scientific naturalist. The proposition in the words I have italicised, I submit, is absolutely untenable. On this point may be staked the whole dispute as to the actuality of the Gospel Jesus. The merely credible is not the trustworthy, the proved: if to be credited with plausible utterances be a proof of the actuality of a personage in literature, then we must believe in the historic actuality of half the characters in fiction.

5. The Critical Problem

The problem is one that has been before now debated on other issues; and it may be well here to take up these by way of illumination and test. Grote, putting in scientific form a thesis sometimes more summarily phrased by “the plain man,” insisted that

“The utmost which we accomplish by means of the semi-historical theory is that, after leaving out from the mythical narrative all that is miraculous or high-coloured or extravagant, we arrive at a series of creditable [= credible] incidents—incidents which may perhaps have really occurred, and against which no intrinsic presumption can be raised. This is exactly the character of a well-written modern novel......To raise plausible fiction to the superior dignity of truth, some positive testimony or positive ground of inference must be shown......A man who tells us that on the day of the battle of Platæa rain fell on the spot of ground where the city of New York now stands, will neither deserve nor obtain credit, because he can have no means of positive knowledge; though the statement is not in the slightest degree improbable. On the other hand, statements in themselves very improbable may well deserve belief, provided they be supported by sufficient positive evidence. Thus the canal dug by Xerxes across the promontory of Mount Athos, and the sailing of the Persian fleet through it, is a fact which I believe because it is well-attested—notwithstanding its remarkable improbability, which so far misled Juvenal as to induce him to single out the narrative as a glaring example of Grecian mendacity.

To this contention it is objected by Sir A. C. Lyall that “if we may only receive as credible those ancient narratives which could not possibly turn out to be very plausible fiction, we shall be hard pushed for the trustworthy authentication of much early history, religious and secular. Secondly, the example of the supposed assertion as to simultaneous rainfall at Platæa and in Massachusetts is hardly fair. A man’s assertion of an isolated fact of which he could not possibly have any positive knowledge, either directly or by hearsay, is a very different thing from affirming credible facts which might reasonably, and according to the known habits of the people who relate the facts, have been handed down by tradition from the persons who witnessed them to those who related them.”  To this very reasonable argument the answer is that it does not meet Grote’s case; and that when we have assented to it the problem remains as before. In regard to many credible facts which might conceivably have been handed down by tradition we are still bound to say that, when related concerning supernatural personages, they are not tolerable evidence of anything done by a real person whose history formed the nucleus of the myth. The proposition as to rain on the site of New York on the day of Platæa is an illustration, not a universal parallel. The fact remains that there is no common-sense ground for crediting any one “credible” assertion made concerning an ostensibly mythical character when we cannot on independent grounds show how the credible story came to be attached to the fable.

Sir Alfred Lyall’s argument overlooks the demurrer that all particular or specific tradition of a quasi-historical kind is untrustworthy when not corroborated by other evidence, inasmuch as (1) such tradition usually goes hand in hand with obvious supernaturalist fable, and (2) many such traditions have been disproved by solid evidence. The question is not whether something traditionally asserted to have been said or done by a demigod may not actually have been said or done by a man of the same or another name, but whether, in the absence of other evidence, we are ever entitled to believe and assert that it was. To Grote’s negative answer there is no valid demurrer. The strength of Sir A. C. Lyall’s general claim, that Gods or God-myths have been built up on bases of actual deeds and events, lies in the concrete proof that this has occurred in modern times; but no such demonstration can enable us to distinguish between the merely possible and the true in ancient tradition. It is conceivable that the Feridun of the Shah Nameh is constructed on a nucleus of reality, to which was added a mass of detail taken from sheer mythology, as myths were heaped upon the story of Cyrus. But in the latter case we have a means of discrimination; in the former we have none; and when we find the very name of Feridun to be a modification of an old God-name,  we have no right of historical belief left.

For the rest, it is beside the case to argue that much accepted history will be cancelled if we accept only narratives which “could not possibly turn out to be plausible fiction.” Grote never argued that history proper, the record of a time by those who lived in it, is to be so tried; and he constantly accepts narratives which might conceivably be plausible fictions—nay, he occasionally accepts tales which appear to some of us to be fictions. It is when we are dealing with myths that he denies our power to discriminate: in history proper he undertakes—at times too confidently—to discriminate. Broadly speaking, he is entitled so to proceed insofar as he deals with cases on their merits. Some early historical narratives allege facts which could well be known to the narrator or to the community in general, and may be fairly taken as true; some are obviously fanciful, unplausible, ill-vouched; and in many cases they are to be doubted even when free from supernaturalism. Historiography consists in a rational selection.

It is true that there are some cases wholly or partly on the borderland between the possible and the incredible, where we may fairly surmise a nucleus of fact; but in regard to these Grote’s warning should be always kept in mind. Professor Huxley, who invented the word “agnostic” to cover, among other things, the practice of saying that miracles are “not impossible,” was notably accommodating in his attitude to narratives of the possible. Concerning the story of Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor, he observes that it does not “matter very much whether the story is historically true,” but that “it is quite consistent with probability”; and then he adds: “That is to say, I see no reason whatever to doubt......that Saul made such a visit.”  The leap here is clearly illicit. There is certainly “reason to doubt” the whole story so long as it cannot be shown to have been reduced to writing near the time of Saul. “History” is full of discredited “probabilities” of the same kind: the story of Bruce and the spider is a type. The very fact that kings and commoners in ancient Israel did normally consult witches is as much a reason for admitting that the story could easily be invented as for allowing that it could easily have happened; and the details of the apparition, to which Professor Huxley oddly extends a measure of his credence, give good ground for suspecting the entire episode to be fiction.

All such cases, in fine, must be tried on their documentary as well as their h priori merits; and, returning to our special problem, we note that the “credible” sayings put in the mouth of the Gospel Jesus are in no way certified by their credibility, but are on the contrary put in complete suspicion by their surroundings. Here is Professor Schmiedel’s case, reduced to logical form: There are in the gospels hundreds of unlikely sayings ascribed to Jesus; there are nine which are likely; then the nine not only establish his historic reality, but give a basis for surmise that many of the less likely, as well as many of the narratives of faith-healing, are also historical! The answer is (1) that it must be a desperately bad fiction in which not five per cent. of the speeches and episodes are “credible.”

On Dr. Schmiedel’s view, if only the ancients had ascribed ten reasonable sayings as well as twelve more or less unlikely labours to Herakles he would be entitled to rank as a historic character. On the other hand (2) the very fact that the figure of the Gospel Jesus won belief much more in virtue of the hundreds of improbabilities and falsities in the gospels than in virtue of the “credible” texts, quashes the plea for his actuality based on these texts. The true inference is, not that such texts, being unnecessary, must be genuine and not invented, but that since a substantially false or unlikely biography could win ready credence in the period in question there is no reason to surmise a nucleus of actuality which was never demanded, and that the credible texts stand merely for the proportion of plausibility that might reasonably be looked for in any conglomerate of sayings and statements round a fictitious personage. Paul or the forgers, it is evident, believed in a crucified Jesus as to whom they had no biographical record, whether of sayings or doings.

Scores of unlikely utterances, it is admitted, were credited to Jesus after Paul’s time. Why were they so credited? Plainly because certain men or certain sects desired to give their views the sanction of the God-Man’s authority. What then does it signify if besides these sayings there are fathered on him a few that are relatively reasonable? And, knowing as we do that the Ebionites, who attributed to him unlikely sayings, nevertheless regarded him as a mere man, what does it signify if sometimes in the gospel he is so represented? Yet again, what plausibility remains in the cry on the cross, “Why hast thou forsaken me?” when we remember that it is a quotation from the Psalms, and that the whole cult proceeded on the doctrine that “the Christ must needs suffer”?

It may seem ungracious thus to press the argument against a professed theologian who has already come within sight of “the great surrender” to reason. Schmiedel has indeed gone further in his loyalty to the critical principle than do many professed rationalists. It is only a question of time, however, when his view shall be tested as he has tested other men’s, and the process may as well begin here and now.

6. Collapse of the Constructive Case

First, then, he has not recognised (1) the primary reason for doubting the genuineness of every detail of teaching set forth in the gospels—namely, the total ignorance of those teachings shown in the Pauline epistles. He takes as genuine the plainly interpolated passage in 1 Cor. xi as to the institution of the Eucharist, then concludes  that “the details of the life of Jesus had so little interest for Paul that” he fails to quote him when he effectively might. To reason thus is to ignore a far greater difficulty than many which the exegete admits to be insuperable. (2) He makes his arguments at some points  turn on the assumption of the general certainty of the whole narrative as to Jesus being a teacher with disciples, who established his cult; whereas the existence of the disciples is no better proved than many of the data already surrendered. (3) He is evidently biassed to his illicit inference (that Jesus really existed) by other inferences which, on his own showing, he was not entitled to draw. For instance, he decides  that Jesus probably accomplished faith-healing as distinguished from miracles, because “this power is so strongly attested throughout the first and second centuries that, in view of the spiritual greatness of Jesus and the imposing character of his personality, it would be indeed difficult to deny it to him.” What then proved the spiritual greatness and the imposing character of Jesus? The nine credible texts? Clearly they amount to no such proof, even if they were genuine: a thousand rabbis might have uttered them. What, again, is the value of the “strong attestation” of the first and second centuries in the face of the silence of Paul, ostensibly the first witness? The first and second centuries, that is to say the gospels (which certainly did not exist within thirty years of the date alleged for Jesus’ death), and the people who believed them, equally attest the prodigies which Professor Schmiedel rejects. Is a witness who solemnly affirms twenty impossibilities to be believed whenever he happens to assert something that might be true, while a more important witness, who in the terms of the case ought to have heard of it if it happened, has evidently never heard of it at all?

Such reasoning, we may say without hesitation, cannot stand: it is negated by the tests on which Schmiedel has proceeded as against the source-finders; and the latter might very well turn upon him with a confident tu quoque. Take, for instance, the passage  in which he presses the point of the obvious untrustworthiness of the reports of Jesus’ discourses, and yet lets pass the assumption that these reports may be genuine condensations:—

Even if the public ministry of Jesus had lasted for a few months only, he must have uttered a thousand-fold more than all that has been recorded in the Gospels. His longest discourse would, if delivered in the form in which it has come down to us, not have taken more than some five minutes in the delivery. However self-evident, this has been constantly overlooked by the critics. They are constantly assuming that we possess the several words of Jesus that have been reported approximately in the same fulness in which they were spoken. In the parables and in one or two other utterances, the Professor admits, the reports are more extended:—

In what remains, however, it can hardly be sufficiently emphasised that we possess only an excessively meagre précis of what Jesus said—namely, only so much as not only made an immediate impression when first heard, but also continued to survive the ordeal of frequent repetition In this process not only was an extraordinary number of utterances completely lost, but a large number of the sayings of Jesus now received for the first time that consecutive and pointed form which made them seem worthy of further repetition. Without doubt Jesus must very often have repeated himself, but what he assuredly often repeated in many variations has been preserved to us only in a single form.

Here again the believer will be perturbed, while the scientific critic will not be propitiated. If there are only nine texts that quite credibly indicate the existence of a man Jesus who taught anything, how can we possibly know “without doubt” that (1) he often repeated himself, and that (2) the existing reports are abbreviations of any spoken discourses whatever? The longest of all, the “Sermon on the Mount,” is demonstrably a pen-made compilation from Hebrew literature; and Professor Schmiedel’s previous argument has fully conceded that many of the reports, condensed in appearance as they are, are inventions. That is to say, a brief account of an alleged speech is not to be presumed an epitome of a real speech. The gospel discourses are short, not because they are records of remembered passages from long speeches, but because the framers had no critical consciousness, and were not accustomed to composing long documents. When we come to the fourth gospel we find longer discourses, in the actuality of which Professor Schmiedel does not believe. But if one gospel-maker could invent long discourses, his less literary predecessors could invent short. Once more, if the synoptic discourses are records of commonly remembered passages from Jesuine discourses, how comes it that Paul never cites a word of them? To miss that crux is to make as great an oversight as that of the critics who regarded the so-called Sermon on the Mount as the full report of a real sermon. The fact is that the higher criticism of the New Testament has thus far missed the way just as the higher criticism of the Old so long did, by taking for granted the general truth of the tradition.  It sought to found on the hollow fiction of the Exodus and the Mosaic legislation of the desert, when one intelligent glance at the Book of Judges might have shown that the tabernacle of the desert was a myth. In a similar way it clings to the conception of a preaching and cult-founding Jesus, when an intelligent perusal of the epistles of Paul  can suffice to show that the preaching Jesus was created after they wore written.

It does not indeed follow that Paul’s period was what the tradition represents. The reasonable inference from his doctrine is that his Jesus was either a mythic construction or a mere tradition, a remote figure said to have been crucified, but no longer historically traceable. If then Paul’s Jesus, as is conceivable, be merely a nominal memory of the slain Jesus ben Pandira of the Talmud (about 100 B.C.), Paul himself may belong to an earlier period than that traditionally assigned to him. Certainly the most genuine-looking epistles in themselves give no decisive chronological clue. But such a shifting of his date would not finally help the case for “Jesus of Nazareth.” Escape the argument from the silence of Paul by putting Paul a generation or more earlier, and you are faced by the fresh incredibility of a second crucified Jesus, a second sacrificed Son of God, vouched for by records for the most part visibly false, and containing but a fraction of plausible narrative. The only conclusion open is that the teaching Jesus of the gospels is wholly a construction of the propagandists of the cult, even as is the wonder-working God.

7. Parallel Problems

The natural impulse to reject this view with violence may be somewhat modified when it is remembered that it does but place the Christ on a historic level with all the other Teaching Gods of antiquity. All the leading Gods, as we have seen, were in some measure regarded as teachers; and for none of them do we surmise a historic original in the sense of a real teacher and lawgiver. But it is not only the so-called Gods who are thus dislimned by criticism; the sub-divine or religion-founding and God-proclaiming institutors are found to be no less fabulous, down to the historic period, than the Gods they were held to have served. Menu, Lycurgus, Numa, Moses—a whole series of revered founders of codes and creeds—are as such dismissed by criticism to the realm of fable; for even those hierologists who still speak of Moses as a historic person,  and treat the Exodus as a historic event, concede to Kuenen that the liberator wrote nothing, and can no more be supposed to have invented the Ten Commandments than did Romulus or Numa the Twelve Tables.

Difficulty, indeed, is still made over the alleged personality of Zarathustra; but few who closely consider the evidence will say that it supports the claim.  If Zarathustra was a historical character, the proposition is not to be proved by the documents; and those who hold to the affirmative do so on the strength not of the records but of the tradition, and of the presumption in favour of a personal influence behind a notable development. It is the same with the personalities of Orpheus and Musæus: wherever the tradition tells of a founder of doctrines or mysteries, criticism on search finds myth; and if we leave open the bare surmise that there was an Orpheus who taught something, it must be with the avowal that we know nothing of what he specially taught. If we take the whole series of traditional teachers down to the Christian era, we find them to be more or less clearly the products of the same tendency as led to the conception of Teaching Gods—the habit of supposing that every thing held to be good came from a specifically divine or supernormal source.

Conservative opinion will naturally rally round the remaining non-Christian cases that are either admitted or still claimed to be historical—in particular, those of Mohammed and Buddha. What a man has admittedly done, it may be argued, may have been earlier done by other men. If Mohammed founded a new religion, why not Zoroaster; if Buddha gave a virtually new and potent teaching, why may not a Jesus have done so? The case may very well be tried over those points.

First let us note wherein consists the clear historicity of Mohammed. (1) He is far down within the historic period. (2) His religion rose to far-spread power and notoriety within a generation of his death—a far swifter development than that of Christism, so often described as miraculous. (3) He actually left written documents; and though these were certainly redacted, most of them have none of the well-known marks of late fabrication. (4) In virtue of the relation of Islam to Christianity, which had a body of sacred books and claimed a monopoly of truth, a fierce critical light played upon the new cult from the first days of its expansion beyond Arabia. (5) The accounts of the life of Mohammed are normally biographical, and, though not quite certainly true in detail, at no point typically mythical, save as regards the tales of marvels at his birth and in his infancy, wherein the record conforms to the normal mythopœic practice of antiquity, seen in the biographies of Plato and Confucius as well as in those of Jesus, Moses, and the Gods and demi-gods in general. Apart from these embellishments, and the tales of his intercourse with angels, he is born and lives and dies normally at known dates; works no miracles; makes no claims to divinity; is traceable long before his period of notoriety; is, in short, recognisable as a historic type of masterful fanatic. In every one of these respects his record differentiates sharply from those of Buddha and Jesus.

Absolute date, of course, is not a decisive consideration: we believe in the historicity of certain Jews B.C., and disbelieve in the legend of William Tell, who is placed thirteen hundred years later. But when we consider the environments in which Jesus and Buddha are supposed to have lived, it becomes clear that the possibilities of fable round such names are boundless. Of neither is it now pretended that he left a written word; for neither do critical scholars now claim that his immediate associates have left written accounts of him; in regard to both it is admitted that many sayings are falsely ascribed to them. Instead, then, of letting the supposed historicity of Buddha plead for that of Jesus, we are led to ask whether the one is not as problematic as the other.

8. The Problem of Buddhist Origins

At the first critical glance into Buddhistic origins, the student becomes aware of a dilemma. The Buddha, we are told, delivered a teaching which, though it did not directly repudiate, yet ignored and treated as valueless the belief in deities; and the movement he set up was thus practically atheistic; yet the legends of his own birth, and many of the narratives concerning his life, are in terms of the supernaturalist beliefs of both earlier and later times. As regards the birth legends, they are found to quadrate in large measure with those of the God Krishna, and at the same time to point to many of the myths of the Vedas;  so that, whatever may have been the origin of the Buddhist movement, it must have been heavily overgrown with supernaturalism when the life of the Founder was thus written.

The conservative student naturally answers that, though such overlaying and perversion of the Master’s teaching did take place, he remains none the less a real person; and that the proof lies in the many narratives which represent him as speaking like any other mortal teacher. A critical study of the teaching, however, only doubles the dilemma. The accomplished and devoted English scholar who has done so much during the past thirty years to make known the documents of Buddhism to the western world, has no misgivings as to either the historicity of Gotama or his personal establishment of the Buddhist movement in the fashion set forth by the narratives; but the expositor’s own scholarly candour puts before us a dozen grounds for doubt. Every cause for scepticism that exists in the cases of Jesus and Moses exists here, with differences of degree. Firstly, the Buddha wrote nothing. Secondly, none of his disciples or contemporaries wrote of him. Thirdly, some of the documents that seem nearest in time to the alleged period of Gotama, such as the Dialogues, are thoroughly factitious, and strike a student as the reverse of trustworthy; while others are admittedly literary creations, ascribing to the Buddha extemporaneous verses of a highly finished quality. Fourthly, much of the teaching put in his mouth is of a nature known to be current before his period.

As to the nature of his teachings the obscurity is equally great. It is not merely that they contain inconsistencies such as may be fallen into by any teacher: they are so disparate, so discursive, so various in their tone, purpose, and point of view, that a very short critical study reveals difference of source, time, and aim; and when we contemplate their metaphysic, their minuteness, their demand for leisurely attention and assimilation, we are at a loss to conceive how they could have set up a far-reaching popular movement in any country at any time. As little do we realise why they should have set up any religious society whatever. And the ordinary histories make the assertion without explaining the case.

On the other hand, much of the earliest literature exhibits all the marks of doctrinary myth—this by the implicit admission of the scholars who stand critically but confidently for the historicity of the teaching Buddha:

“The books [of the Sutta Pitaka] profess to give, not merely the belief itself, but the belief as the Buddha uttered it, with an account of the time when, and the place at which, he uttered it. The Buddha’s new method of salvation, his new doctrine of what salvation was, did not present itself to the consciousness of the early Buddhist community as an idea, a doctrine, standing alone, and merely on its own merits. In their minds it was indissolubly bound up with the memory of the revered and striking personality of him who had proclaimed it.”

Thus it lies on the face of the case that any narrative could find acceptance which was put in circumstantial form; and that for any doctrine whatever a narrative frame was invented as a matter of course. After the Dhamma, or collection of short scriptures in verse, had come into vogue,

“The members of the Order were no longer contented to learn, and to understand the meaning of, the various Rules of the Pâtimokkha [part of the Vinaya or Rules of the Order]. A desire sprang up to have, for each of them also, a historical basis; to know the story of how the Buddha himself came to lay down the Rule to his disciples. And it was only the Brother who was properly acquainted with all this, who was accounted a real ‘Doctor of the Law.’”

Now, the Dhamma-pada is believed to be wholly compiled from previous books; and some of its best doctrines are avowedly ancient, as thus: “Hatred does not cease by hatred at any time: hatred ceases by love: this is an old rule.”  Here, then, we have the cult making its Teaching-God on the ordinary lines, describing him as supernaturally born, calling him the “Blessed One,” and visibly creating for the traditional Teacher a flatly fictitious biography. At this early stage, then, Buddhism is seen making its Buddha; and in the act, instead of yielding support by analogy to the belief in the historic Jesus, it vividly suggests a similar process of construction in the case of Christism. We are thus far merely left asking what primitive Buddhism really was.

9. Buddhism and Buddhas

Our English guide, than whom no man knows more of Buddhism, gives us a definition: “There can be little doubt but that the doctrines of the Four Noble Truths and of the Noble Eightfold Path, the ‘Foundation of the Kingdom of Righteousness,’ were not only the teaching of Gotama himself, but were the central and most essential part of it.”  The teachings in question are too well known to need quotation here: they are simply a formal and symmetrical statement of the rules of self-repression by which the Buddhist is to attain the inward peace of Nirvana, or deliverance from blind desires. Let us then assume that these teachings are for Buddhism primordial: what is there to prove that they are the utterances of one Gotama, “the Sakya sage”; and that his proclamation of them set up an “Order” of disciples?

The Order, by all accounts, was one of Mendicants. Either there were, or there were not, such Orders in existence before the Buddhist. If not, we are to suppose that one man, by the simple proclamation of a certain set of quietest principles, calling for self-restraint without any painful self-mortification, induced numbers of men and women, many of them instructed, to take up a new way of life in a country not much given to changes or experiments, and through this host of disciples instituted an Order that was to set a great mark on the history of religion. The unlikeliness of such a sudden growth will be generally granted; and indeed it is fully conceded—though this is rarely mentioned in the more popular accounts of Buddhism—that a Sangha or Society of the kind was no new phenomenon in Buddha’s day.  There seem to have been many; and the Buddhist Order avowedly copied their practices:—

According to Buddhist tradition—and we see no sufficient reason for doubting the correctness of the account—the monks of other, that is, non-Buddhistic sects, used to meet together at the middle and at the close of every half-month, and were accustomed then to proclaim their new teaching in public. At such times......the different sects found an opportunity of increasing their numbers and their influence. The Buddhists also adopted the custom of these periodical meetings, but confined themselves to meeting twice in each month.

Our authorities argue indeed that the penitential practice of the Buddhist meetings “seems  to have been an original invention of the Buddhists themselves”; but here we have on the one hand an avowal that the Buddhists “invented” notable usages not prescribed by the traditional Founder, and on the other hand a failure to demonstrate that the Buddhist practice was not pre-Buddhistic.  On the face of the case, the claim is distinctly improbable, in view of the other data. For the rest, the Jainist movement admittedly dates from the same period; mendicant sages are recognised in the Buddhist books as common phenomena before Buddha;  and the same kinds of rules of conduct seem to have been general, save that the Buddhist was not so painfully ascetic as some others.

The Buddhist movement, then, was one on anciently familiar lines. What is more, the title of “the Buddha,” which means “the enlightened,” so far from making claim to a new departure, was an implicit acknowledgment of continuance in established ideals.

“In the Pâli and Sanskrit texts the word Buddha is always used as a title, not as a name. The historical Buddha is represented to have taught that he was only one of a long series of Buddhas who appear at intervals in the world, and who all teach the same system. After the death of each Buddha his religion flourishes for a time and then decays, till it is at last completely forgotten, and wickedness and violence rule over the earth. Gradually then the world improves; until at last a new Buddha appears who again preaches the lost Dharma or Truth.....The names of twenty-four of these Buddhas who appeared previous to Gotama have been handed down to us.....The Buddhavansa or ‘History of the Buddhas’.....gives the lives of all the previous Buddhas before commencing the account of Gotama himself; and the Pâli commentary on the Jâtakas gives certain details regarding each of the twenty-four.”

The number and the names may very well be, as our historian argues, late inventions; but there can be no question as to the fact of the belief. An early tradition avows that, after “the” Buddha had made sixty converts in three months, sent them in different directions to preach and teach, and again converted the whole population of Rajagriha, the capital of King Bimbisâra, he encountered a period of hostility, in which his disciples were ridiculed as preachers of a doctrine of depopulation. Appealed to by them for counsel, he advised them “to say that the Buddha was only trying to preach righteousness, as former Buddhas had done.”  Even in the late Commentary of Buddhaghosa on the Dialogues of Gotama, “the Blessed One” is represented as exhorting his disciples to be earnest, because “hard is it to meet with a Buddha in the world.”  So in the Dhamma-pada we have the text: “A Buddha is not easily found. Wherever such a sage is born, the race prospers.”  And the name Bhagavâ, “the Blessed One,” is equally impersonal, the Buddhist traditions themselves telling of Gotama’s discussions with “Bhagavâ, Alâra, and Udraka.”  Finally, in the fourth century of our era, “there was certainly near to Srâvasti a sect of Buddhists who rejected Gotama, reverencing only the three previous Buddhas, and especially Kâsyapa, whose body they believed to be buried under one of the dâgabas at which they, as well as the orthodox, worshipped, while another was said to be built over the spot where he had died.”

There were probably current, then, at and before the time of Gotama’s alleged teaching, any number of teachings credited to “the Buddha” and “the Blessed One”; and these might include many afterwards ascribed to Gotama. Given, then, an absolute absence of evidence for the transcription of any teachings of Gotama in his lifetime, on what grounds are we to believe that they were with knowledge ascribed to a man of that name, whose life answered to the non-supernatural details given in the legends? Nay, seeing that even the name Gautama or Gotama is on the one hand a common one,  and on the other hand (as “Gautama of the race of Gotama”) full of mythological associations;  and seeing further that there was admittedly another Gotama known to the early Buddhists who also founded an Order,  what proof is there that sayings and doings of different Gotamas may not have been ascribed to one person? On the view, again, that the Four Noble Truths and the Noble Eightfold Path are the oldest doctrines of the Buddhist movement, and were formulated by one Gotama, what reason is there to believe that the movement either (a) arose or (b) made any progress on the simple basis of those teachings? Baur, believing in the historicity of the Gospel Jesus, yet makes the avowal: “How soon would everything true and important that was taught by Christianity have been relegated to the series of long-faded sayings of the noble humanitarians and thinking sages of antiquity, had not its teachings become words of eternal life in the mouth of its Founder?”  Similarly may we not ask, How, in much-believing India, could any large organised movement develop on the simple nucleus of a teaching of self-control, which differed from the common practice of Hindu asceticism only in its renunciation of positive self-maceration? Nay, supposing a sage to have framed an eightfold path of “Right Belief, Right Aims, Right Speech, Right Actions, Right means of Livelihood, Right Endeavour, Right Mindfulness, Right Meditation,” how should he intelligibly proceed to establish his way by forming an Order of Mendicants?  Our guide himself explains that these “classified statements of moral truth” were “addressed to Brahmans skilled in the dialectics of the time”; and they certainly have that aspect. But why should they be offered as a primary code for a new mendicant Order?

It will doubtless be answered that such à priori objection is unwarranted; that we must take the evidence as we find it and recognise as the primary teaching of the founder of Buddhism the doctrines repeatedly ascribed to him in the oldest documents. But when we inquire historically into the oldest documents and their authenticity we learn from our leading instructors that the received tradition of the First Buddhist Council which “collected the sayings of the Master” is proved to be late and untrustworthy by an early Sutta, which gives all the story of the heresy that is historically stated as the motive for the Council, but says nothing of such a Council taking place. “The author of the Mahâparinibhâna-Sutta,” says Dr. Oldenberg, “did not know anything of the First Council”; and Professor Rhys Davids agrees.  And this very Sutta (“The Book of the Great Decease”) is open to suspicion of lateness, inasmuch as it makes the Blessed One figure at the head of a great movement in his lifetime, travelling sometimes with five hundred and sometimes with twelve hundred and fifty disciples. What is more, it represents him as giving forth a kind of teaching hard to reconcile with other doctrine ascribed to him as typical; for in the very first chapter of the Sutta (§ 4) he is made to lay it down as one of the conditions of the permanent prosperity of a certain tribe of Vaggians that they “honour and esteem and revere and support the Vaggian shrines in town or country, and allow not the proper offerings and rites, as formerly given and performed, to fall into desuetude.”  It may well be said of such a teacher that, so far from having opposed Hinduism and “destroyed a system of iniquity and oppression and fraud,” he “lived and died a Hindu.”  But does such doctrine correlate with the denial of the permanence of the Gods, and of the value of prayers and sacrifices, also ascribed to the Buddha by tradition and documents?

The traditional First Council, then, which figures as the first historical authority for the existence of the Buddha’s teachings, is later (if it ever took place at all) than a Sutta which ascribes to him a teaching wholly different in spirit and aim from those commonly held to be typical and essential in his doctrine. But indeed Pali scholars are more and more convinced that the First Council is a mere literary myth, to assign to which a historical date is to put a false problem.  And if the First Council thus goes by the board, of what value is the late tradition that the Council of Vesâli was held a hundred years after the Buddha’s death? Our authorities argue that since the “Ten Points” said to have been there vehemently discussed are not mentioned in the earlier sections of the Mahâvagga, these must be prior to the Council; and that as the Pâtimokkha is visibly older still, the last-named section of the Vinaya must be very old indeed.  The answer is (1) that the Council of Vesâli  may have been centuries later than the date traditionally assigned to it, and (2) that the Vinaya texts in general, if relatively old, have nothing of the character of an innovating propaganda, nothing of the nature of an appeal which would create a new Order, but rather correspond to the late code of rules framed for monastic orders in Christendom a thousand years after the foundation of the Christian cult. The fact that they are all ascribed to the Founder is but one more evidence of the total lack of the critical or historical sense among the members.

10. The Buddhist Cruces

Looking, then, for a foothold among the shifting sands of Buddhist tradition, we note the following clashing records:—

1. The Buddha is represented alike in ostensibly early and in late tradition as speaking of “the Gods” with full belief in their existence.

2. He is represented on the one hand as discouraging sacrifices,  and on the other hand as prescribing for a whole tribe a strict adherence to ancient rites.

3. King Asoka, who figured as a good Buddhist in the early vigour of the movement (about 250 B.C.), habitually called himself “the delight of the Gods,” as did his contemporary the “pious Buddhist king of Ceylon.”

4. The Buddha is represented as throwing his Order open to all classes, and at the same time as making the name “Brahman” a term of honour for his Arahats or saints. Brahmans, too, are said to have been among his most distinguished disciples; and the Dialogues represent his conversations with them.

5. Much teaching that certainly did not come from Buddha is admittedly ascribed to him, the principle being that he delivered the whole canon.

6. Much philosophic matter set forth as his teaching is nearly identical with much of the Sankhya system, of which at least the germs are admittedly pre-Buddhistic.

The last two circumstances are fully acknowledged by our Buddhist scholars. Oldenberg writes: “I have essentially modified my previous scepticism in regard to the connection of the two systems, and seen reason to place Buddhism considerably closer to the Sankhya than my former researches suggested.”  And Professor Rhys Davids, enumerating the long list of advantages claimed by the Buddha in one of the Dialogues for the life of a recluse, concedes that “it is perfectly true that of these thirteen consecutive propositions, or groups of propositions, it is only the last, No. 13, which is exclusively Buddhist,”  the exception being “the realisation of the Four Truths, the destruction of the Asavas [lusts, errors, and ignorance], and attainment of Arahatship.” Professor Davids goes on to make the claim: “But the things omitted, the union of the whole of those included into one system, the order in which the ideas are arranged ......all this is also distinctively Buddhist.” This claim, however, does not affect the significance of the admission, and is itself provocative of a new pressure of criticism. For if the exclusively Buddhist section be the last of all, is not the fair presumption this, that the Buddhist formula here has merely been added to an existing doctrine, appropriated by Buddhists? Among the specified rules of conduct admitted to be not exclusively Buddhist are many that go far to constitute the content of the “Eightfold Path,” which is thus obviously but a separate classification of precepts or ideals common to other schools.

The same question arises again over the admission  that “the Eightfold path is not mentioned in our Sutta” (the Sâmmana-Phala); and that, as regards three of the four lines of ethical precept to be traced in the teaching under notice, Buddhism in the first “goes very little beyond the current ethics of the day”; in the second and third proceeds mainly on the practice of pre-Buddhistic recluses and Orders; and only in the fourth—specifying the Buddhistic program for Arahatship—takes up a special stand.  But on analysis it is found that this excepted doctrine is at most only verbally special to Buddhism, since the other schools also certainly professed to put down lust of life and physical pleasure, error, and ignorance; and it is not pretended that the word “Arahat” was a Buddhist monopoly. The further we go, the stronger becomes the stress of doubt. Where we are not certainly dealing with pre-Buddhistic doctrine under the form of dialogues held by the Buddha, we are reading, as in so many passages of the Dhamma-pada, sayings of a literary construction, often in verse, which in their present form come from Buddhistic writers long after the alleged period of Gotama, though they too may derive from remote antiquity. Among these, even as happens in the later sections of the Christian gospels, are some of the noblest ethical teachings of Buddhist literature.

What doctrines, then, were special to Buddhism? Not Karma: that was common property, shared-in by Buddhism.  Wherein did it ethically innovate? Not in asserting the superiority of a right mind to sacrifice: that was a primary doctrine of the Jainas, and admittedly pre-Buddhistic both within and without the pale of Brahmanism.  Not in seeking a way of Salvation independently of the Vedas: that had been done by many teachers, in various sects.  Not in the doctrine that defilement comes not from unclean meats, but from evil deeds and words and thoughts: that is given by the Buddhist writers as pre-Buddhistic, “being one of the few passages in which sayings of previous Buddhas are recorded.”  Not in the search for peace through self-control and renunciation: that was the quest of a myriad recluses, the goal of all previous Buddhas. Not in the view that there is a wisdom higher than that attained by mere austerities: that too is pre-Buddhistic.  Not in the doctrine that non-Brahmans could join an order and attain religious blessedness: the other Orders were equally open to men of low social status or even slaves;  and indeed the rigid ideal of caste separateness was not yet established in the days or in the sphere of early Buddhism;  for though Brahman claims had long been exorbitantly high, it appears that there were many Brahmans who rationally waived them, and as regards ascetics they were not raised, or at least not pressed.  In Buddhist practice, too, as in that of the early Christians, runaway slaves were not received into the Order.  As little was the admission of women to the Order a Buddhist innovation: that too was practised by the Jainas; and even the tradition makes the Buddha accept it reluctantly, in the twenty-fifth year of his preaching.  There seems, in short, to be nothing on the face of the doctrine to account for the special expansion of the Buddhist movement.

11. Sociological Clues

Seeking for sociological explanations, we first turn to the economic conditions. As was to be expected, there are clear traces of an economic pressure that drove men into the Order. In the Milinda Prashnaya (“Questions of Menander”), Nagasena, the founder of the Madhyamika school of northern Buddhism, in answer to a question from Milinda, the Greek King of Sagala in the Punjaub,  as to whether all members join the Order for the high end of renunciation, is represented as answering: “Certainly not, sire. Some for these reasons; but some have left the world in terror at the tyranny of kings. Some have joined us to be safe from being robbed; some harassed by debt; and some perhaps to gain a livelihood.”  Nagasena himself, again, is made to say that he joined as a mere boy, seeking to be taught.  This account would in all likelihood hold good of the social conditions before the Greek invasion; and on the face of the case there is no difficulty in understanding that any Order which secured men a measure of peace and security would find adherents, even as did the monasteries and monkish orders of the Middle Ages in Europe. But the same pressure would send applicants to other Orders as well as the Buddhist; and we have still to ask why it was that the Buddhist was specially sought, and became specially powerful, as well as how it began.

To begin with, there are strong reasons for regarding the Jainas and Buddhists alike as having been originally either simple sects, or sections of one sect, of Brahmanism; and as this view is held by two leading authorities, Weber and Jacobi, and is, as we have seen, now partially yielded to by Oldenberg, we may reasonably try it as a working hypothesis. Weber goes so far as to assert categorically (1) that Brahmanic speculation anciently sundered on two main lines, one finding the First Cause in indiscrete matter, the other finding it in spirit; (2) that the latter theory gradually became the orthodox one; and (3) that “from among the adherents of the former view, which came by degrees to be regarded as heterodox, there arose, as thought developed, enemies still more dangerous to orthodoxy, who......before long threw themselves into practical questions also, and eventually became the founders of the form of belief known to us as Buddhism.”  On this view (which, it will be seen, implicitly modifies all the ordinary assumptions as to the origin of Buddhism in one man’s teaching), the quasi-atheistic element in Buddhism is primordial; and the popular development is a mere sequel of a movement originally, as it were, academic. In Weber’s opinion, the Jainas in turn are only one of the oldest sects  of Buddhism; Buddha being for him a real personage who propounded to the people without distinction of caste a teaching in which there was “absolutely nothing new,” but which had previously “been the possession of a few anchorites” and had “never before been freely and publicly proclaimed to all.” Hence “the enormous success that attended his doctrine: the oppressed all turned to him as their redeemer.”

Jacobi on the other hand, pointing to the ancient protest of the Brahmanic writer Vasishtha  against the neglect of the Veda by ascetics, concludes that “the germ of dissenting sects like those of the Buddhists and the Jainas was contained in the institute of the fourth Asrama (grade), and that the latter was the model of the heretical sects; therefore Buddhism and Jainism may be regarded as religions developed out of Brahmanism, not by a sudden reformation, but prepared by a religious movement going on for a long time.”  For this view of the two sects as merely cognate there are various grounds—for instance this, that while both Buddhists and Jainas have adopted the five vows of the Brahmanic ascetics, the Buddhists opposed the Brahmanic doctrine of the Atman or personal soul, and the Jainas accepted it with modifications, holding that all parts of the elements as well as animals and plants have souls. This and various other details suggest rather an original independence than a splitting-off. And Jacobi confidently claims  that “we know for certain that Buddha at least addressed himself chiefly to the members of the aristocracy, and that the Jainas originally preferred the Kshatriyas [the warrior caste] to the Brahmans.”

Thus far, it will be seen, both forms of the theory accept broadly the tradition as to Buddha’s preaching, though that tradition, as apart from the incidental revelations in the documents, says nothing of an acceptance of a Brahmanic basis by Buddha for his Order; and Weber leaves his conception far from clear, inasmuch as he speaks at one time of a body of heretics as “the founders” of Buddhism, and at another of Buddha as “one of its representatives,” and as the first to publish broadcast doctrines previously confined to “a few anchorites.” And when we come to compare the legend of Buddha with the Jaina legend of Mahâvîra [“the great hero”], our difficulty deepens. The Jaina legends refer the preaching of Mahâvîra “exclusively to the same district which Buddhism also recognises as its holy land”; and in Weber’s opinion they “display so close an affinity to the accounts of Buddha’s ministry that we cannot but recognise in the two groups of narratives merely varying forms of common reminiscences.”  But, if reminiscences, why are they to be held as being primarily Buddhistic? And why, above all, are they to be certificated as reminiscences? Mahâvîra is actually described as son of “Siddartha”—a name of Buddha—and husband of “Yasoda,” the name of the mythic nurse of Krishna.  The Jainas, says Jacobi, “have reproduced the whole history of Krishna, with small variations, in relating the life of the twenty-second Tirthakara, Arishtanemi, who was a famous Yadava.”  In the same way the Buddhists have put much of the history of Krishna into their stories of Buddha. Such adaptation is, in fact, a normal religious practice, common to many races and cults.

A somewhat better reason than any Weber gives for regarding the Jaina legends as the later is that according to them Mahâvîra did twelve years’ penances as against Buddha’s six, was convinced of their necessity, and persevered in some of them after becoming a Tīrthakara or prophet.  Such a comparison is avowedly post-Buddhistic. But such a detail might be added to an established Jaina legend just as the Buddhists undoubtedly added to theirs. Granting, however, that the Jainas may represent a secession from the Buddhist movement—their greater asceticism (involving a measure of uncleanliness ) being on the lines of the schism said by the Buddhist tradition to have been set up by Gotama’s cousin Dewadatta,  identified by Jacobi with Mahâvîra—we have really no sound ground for believing that on either side we are dealing with facts in the life of any sect-founder. The Buddhist legend runs that Ajâtasatru, son of the Buddhist rajah Bimbisâra, was induced by Dewadatta to kill his father, Dewadatta at the same time causing three attempts to be made on the life of Buddha. Such a tale is on all fours with the efforts of the early Christians to make out that certain rival cults, such as that of “Simon Magus,” were set up by way of schism from Christianity, when in reality those cults were the elder  Jacobi puts it that Ajâtasatru killed his father and warred on his grandfather, who was uncle of Mahâvîra and patron of the Jainas, thereafter siding with their rivals the Buddhists, whom he had formerly persecuted as friends of his father’s.  Here we have apparently one more attempt to draw a truth of history from a bare tradition; and on the principles followed in this inquiry there is no scientific warrant for such extraction. But there is on the other hand a clear scientific value in the suggestion that monarchic or other political forces may have determined the success of a particular Order at a particular time.

12. Buddhism and Asoka

When Buddhism first emerges in what may be termed the light of history, it is as an established system highly favoured by the great king Asoka, about 250 B.C. It is made clear by his edicts that only a small number of scriptures, whose titles are only partially identifiable with known extant writings, were then recognised as preserving the spoken discourses of the Buddha.  And among those named is “The Terrors of the Future,” which “seems to be a description of the different worlds of purgatory, one of which is described in the Pettavatthu, the 7th Book of the 5th Division of the 2nd Pitaka.” So that thus early in the known history of the Order it figures as holding in Buddha’s name one of the common superstitions which Buddha is supposed to have repudiated. And Asoka, as we have seen, called himself “the delight of the Gods,” as did his friend the contemporary Buddhist king of Ceylon.

The first sociological problem is to account for the favour shown by such kings to such an Order. Constantine, we know, raised up Christianity to be the State cultus because of its obvious political uses as a far-reaching organisation, easily attachable to his interest. Had the kings of Magadha a similar motive? Chandragupta, according to both Greek and Hindu accounts,  began his career as a robber-chief in the time of Alexander, whose camp he had visited on the banks of the Hyphasis, as a defeated rebel; and after seizing the throne of Nanda, the murdered rajah of Magadha, about 315 B.C., he defeated Seleukos, the Greek governor of the Indus provinces, driving the Greek power out of India. If then “it is clear that it was just when Chandragupta and his low-caste followers from the Punjab came into power that the Buddhists, the party of reform, the party who made light of caste distinctions, began to rise rapidly in numbers and influence,”  it is quite intelligible that the upstart dynasty found in the moral and didactic influence of such an Order a useful political support, as Ajâtasatru may have done earlier, supposing him to have attained power by killing his father. The record that Ajâtasatru, after favouring the Buddhists, captured Srâvasti, their headquarters, and totally destroyed Kapilavastu, their sacred place,  tells further of friction and complications, all presumably of a political character. Usurpers in such cases would be apt to have arrayed against them the influence of the Brahmans; and the midway position of the Buddhists, who at once paid respect to Brahmanism and departed from its caste principles, would place them in a certain imperfect measure of harmony with the illegitimate monarch.

But there is a further reason for ascribing to Chandragupta a decisive influence on Buddhism in its relation to Brahmanism. If Weber is right, the peoples of the Punjab “never submitted to the Brahmanical order of things, but always retained their ancient Vedic standpoint, free and independent, without either priestly domination or system of caste. For this reason, too, they were the objects of a cordial hatred on the part of their kinsmen, who had wandered further on; and on this account also Buddhism gained an easy entrance among them.”  But if Chandragupta with his Punjabis accepted Buddhism they would be strengthening the tendency existent in Buddhism to ignore caste; and, again, we have it from the same authority that “Buddha’s teaching was mainly fostered in the district of Magadha, which, as an extreme border province, was perhaps never completely Brahmanised;  so that the native inhabitants always retained a kind of influence, and now gladly seized the opportunity to rid themselves of the Brahmanical hierarchy and the system of caste.”  This view, it will be observed, diverges essentially from the other proposition, above cited, that Buddha in person undermined the principle of caste in a fashion “altogether novel and unwonted.” If caste had never at all been recognised in the Punjab, and had never triumphed in Magadha, there would be nothing very novel there in the teaching that personal salvation did not depend on it. For such a teaching, Oldenberg avows, there was not only no necessity in that age and environment, but there was no inclination. “Any thought of any reformation of social conditions (Staatsleben), any notion of the founding of an earthly ideal kingdom, a pious Utopia, was wholly alien to these [early Buddhistic] circles. Anything like a movement of social change was unknown in India.” In short, the conception of Buddha as a kind of popular liberator is rejected by one of the leading scholars who still stand for the historicity of Buddha.  And though Brahmanists of Sankhya leanings were presumably not great sticklers for caste to begin with, it may well have been the anti-caste bias of the Punjabis that first gave the Buddhist Order a marked leaning of that kind, and supplied the basis for the belief that the Founder had been a Kshatriya. Such a state of things, too, would perfectly account for the fact that the Buddhist scriptures were, and remain, composed not in Sanskrit but in the popular idiom.  It only needed that a beginning should be made, to stamp a given language as the sacred tongue of Buddhism.

What Ajâtasatru presumably began and Chandragupta some generations later carried further, the grandson of the latter, Asoka, consummated. He found the Buddhist Order flourishing, and fully established it through his extensive kingdom; not, however, in direct opposition to Brahmanism, with which the now firmly seated dynasty would naturally make terms of mutual accommodation. For him, it seems clear, Buddhism was an organisation rather than a religion. It was compatible with Brahmanism while capable of being used to keep Brahmanism in check; and the “delight of the Gods” was not concerned with its atheistic philosophy.  ”Reverence towards Brahmans and members of the Order” was impartially prescribed in his edicts; and he repeatedly stipulates for an equal toleration of all sects, and an abstention all round from detraction of others.  He was thus a Buddhist only in the sense that he made use of all organisations alike, and it is even doubtful whether he assimilated with more than a section of the Buddhists of his time.  Nor is there any clear warrant for the conclusion that “Buddhism in the time of Asoka was still comparatively pure” because in the edicts “we hear nothing of metaphysical beings or hypothetical deities, nothing of ritual, or ceremonies, or charms.”  Edicts were not the natural place for such allusions; but the mention of the treatise on “The Terrors of the Future” is surely significant enough.  The Mahâvansa tells that under the sun of royal favour “heretics assumed the yellow robe in order to share in its advantages: whenever they had opinions of their own they gave them forth as doctrines of the Buddha.”  In that case they were doing what other Buddhists had done before them; and it is certain that most of what Buddhists accept as Buddha’s teaching was penned long after Asoka’s time.

We thus reach a critical conception of Buddhist origins. The Teaching Buddha, considered as the wondrous sage who in his lifetime creates by his own influence a great movement and establishes a great Order, shrinks in the light of criticism to the vanishing point. The early suspicion of a keen scholar  that “after all, Sakya Muni is an unreal being,” is justified on the closest scrutiny. The Order, probably originating among ascetic Brahmans, who may have been led to rationalism as a result of their primary renunciation of the Vedas,  becomes intelligible simply as a monastic or mendicant sect on the ordinary Brahmanical bases, but tolerant on the subject of caste to start with, and tending to diverge from Brahmanism in doctrine and practice in the ratio of its numerical success, especially as regards its rejection of caste distinctions—a course obviously conducive to its expansion. On these lines, however, it could take many Brahmans with it; and inasmuch as it was primarily an Order living under rules, rather than a school of doctrine, it could all along include ordinary believers in the Gods as well as rationalists who turned their backs on official and popular Brahmanism because of its systematic exploitation of superstition.

But to an energetic rationalism in such an Order there was a fatal obstacle in the central principle or datum of the cult—the obtrusion of the supernatural Buddha as the source of all true wisdom. The very thinkers who framed the dialogues and discourses in which the Buddha most rationally teaches by argument were there building up the belief in a supernatural being in whom they themselves cannot have believed. To change the familiar phrase, they literally builded worse than they knew. On the popular craving for a Teaching God they relied for securing the popularity of their Order; and they thus frustrated the higher aims of their doctrine, inasmuch as superstition always drives out judgment. By the admission of Professor Rhys Davids, the Northern Buddhists took a step “far removed from Gotama’s doctrines,” “the step from polytheism to monotheism.” But, on the other hand, they built up, on Brahmanic lines, a new Buddhistic polytheism, according to which there are five Dhyâni Buddhas, mystical and divine beings, living in bliss; with five Bodhisatvas, or Buddhas Elect, destined to be born; and five Mânushi or human Buddhas, of whom Gotama is the fourth: the fifth, Maitreya, the Buddha of love, being still to come; and for all such creations we have the sufficient explanation that the dreamers “craved after Buddhist gods to fill the place of the dead gods of the Hindu pantheon.” And the northern Buddhism, finally, is as completely given over to polytheistic superstition as the southern.

It may, indeed, have been the higher intelligence of the rationalising Buddhists that secured the special success of their Order, as compared with that of the Jainas, whose bias to systematic self-mortification, as well as their greater superstition, accounts for the unintellectual character of their literature. The less ascetic Buddhists would at once be better able to propitiate kings and better able to attract recruits. Among them would circulate such maxims as that in the Dhamma-pada:—

Not nakedness, not platted hair, not dirt, not fasting, or lying on the earth, not rubbing with dust, not sitting motionless, can purify a mortal who has not overcome desires. He who, though dressed in fine apparel, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with all other beings, he indeed is a Brahmana, an ascetic, a friar (bhikshu).

But behind such sane maxims stood forever the fabulous figure of the Buddha, the giver of all the wisdom in his Order, and the imposer of all its artificial rules. Instead of the mass of myths concerning him being a late accretion to a body of high ethical teaching purporting to come from a normal human being, it is now seen to be probable that, as is contended by M. Senart, the mythical figure was there first,  and the ethical teaching grew up fortuitously around it, even as the gospel teachings in all likelihood grew up round the name of a sacrificed Jesus who for his earlier worshippers was merely a name. To this, our initial problem, we now finally return, prepared to appreciate aright the issues.

13. The Buddha Myth

In the introduction to M. Senart’s Essai sur la légende de Buddha, the most comprehensive and scientific attempt of the kind yet made, the central problem is thus posited:—

“Either the historical data are the primary nucleus and as it were the central source, the legendary elements representing an ulterior action, in part accessory, without necessary cohesion; or, inversely, the mythological traits form a whole connected by a higher and anterior unity with the personage on whom they are here grafted, the historical data, if there are really any, being associated with them only in virtue of a secondary adaptation. It is at the first point of view that the inquiry has stood up to the present time. There has been drawn the practical conclusion that it suffices to suppress all the incredible details, what is left being taken for accredited history. I seek to show that for this first point of view we ought decidedly to substitute the second.”

The conclusion to which the present argument points is exactly this, adhered to, however, more strictly than is the case in M. Senart’s admirably learned treatise. For while he thus seems to imply that the supernatural element is the beginning of Buddhism as such, he finally assumes that there actually was a “founder.” Certainly he sufficiently attenuates his conception:—

“A sect has a founder, Buddhism like every other. I do not pretend to demonstrate that Sakyamuni never existed. The question is perfectly distinct from the object of this treatise, It follows, certainly, from the foregoing researches that hitherto the sacred personage has been given too much historical consistence, that the tissue of fables grouped around his name has been too facilely transformed, by arbitrary piecings, into a species of more or less unplausible history. Scepticism acquires from our analyses, in some regards, a greater precision: still, it does not follow that we should indefinitely extend its limits. In this epic and dogmatic biography, indeed, there remain very few elements which sustain a close examination; but to say this is not to say that among them there has not entered some authentic reminiscence. The distinction is certainly very difficult. Where we are not in a position to show for a tradition its exact counterpart in other cycles, a decision is an extremely delicate process. All that is suspicious ought not necessarily to be eliminated: it is right that whatever is rigorously admissible ought to be retained. There is no alleged deity—not Vishnu, or Krishna, or Herakles—for whom we might not construct a sufficiently reasonable biography by proceeding as has hitherto been done in regard to the legend of Buddha.

“Under these reserves, I willingly recognise that there remain a certain number of elements which we have no absolute reason for thinking apocryphal: they may represent real historical reminiscences: to that, for my part, I have no objection. It is possible that the founder of Buddhism may have come from a tribe of Sakyas, though the pretended history of that race is certainly quite fictitious. It is possible that he may have come of a royal line, that he may have been born in a city called Kapilavastu, though this name arouses grave suspicions, opening the door to either mythological or allegorical interpretations, and the existence of such a town is very feebly certified. The name Gotama is certainly historic and well-known, but it is a borrowed name which tells us little. Much trouble has been taken to explain how this strictly Brahmanic patronymic might have passed to a family of Kshatriyas [the warrior caste] . Apart from Buddha, it is above all closely associated with his supposed aunt, the legendary Prajápati......I do not speak of his genealogy: it has certainly no value, being borrowed whole from epic heroes, in particular from Rama. On the other hand, it may well be that the teacher of the Buddhists entered on his religious career at the age of thirty-nine ......” And so on. Let us pause at the last clause to remember how the Jesus of the gospels “began to be about thirty years of age” when he began his teaching career, and to ask on what rational ground we can suppose such a detail to have been biographically preserved when the surrounding narrative yields no sign of biography whatever? There is in fact no single detail in the legend that has any claim to critical acceptance; and the position of the latest conservatives, as Oldenberg, is finally only a general petitio principii. India, admits that candid scholar, always was, as it is, “a land of types,” wherein the lack of freedom stunts the free growth of individuality; and in the portraits of the Buddha and all his leading disciples we have simply the same type repeated. Yet, he contends, “a figure such as his certainly has not been fundamentally misconceived (fundamental missverstanden worden ist eine Gestalt wie die seine gewiss nicht).”  Critical logic will not permit such an A, priori reinstatement of a conception in which every element has given way before analysis. It is but an unconscious resort to the old fallacy of meeting the indictment of a spurious document with the formula, “Who else could have written it?”

We recur to the old issue—the thesis that “every sect must have had a founder.” Such was the unhesitating assumption of Minayeff, who did so much to bring historic clearness into early Buddhist history. “It is beyond doubt that at the origin of great historic movements always and everywhere appear important and historic personalities. It was so, certainly, in the history of Buddhism, and its development unquestionably commenced in the work of the founder.”  Here we have something more than the proposition of M. Senart—we have a doctrine which would ascribe to definite founders the cults of Herakles and Dionysos and Aphroditê, the worship of fire, and the institution of human sacrifice. Dismissing such a generalisation as the extravagance of a scholar without sociology,  we bring the issue to a point in the formula of M. Senart. Plainly that is significant in the sense only that someone must have begun the formation of any given group. It is clearly not true in the sense that every sect originates in the new teaching of a remarkable personage. And we have seen reason to infer that there was a group of heretical or deviating Brahmanists, for whom “a Buddha” was “an enlightened one,” one of many, before the quasi-historical Buddha had even so far emerged into personality as the slain Jesus of the Pauline epistles. Brahmanic doctrine, Brahmanic asceticism and vows, and Brahmanic mendicancy—these are the foundations of the Order: the personal giver of that rule and teaching, the Teaching God, comes later, even as the Jesus who institutes the Holy Supper comes after the eucharist is an established rite. Every critical scholar, without exception, admits that a vast amount of doctrine ascribed to Buddha was concocted long after his alleged period. It cannot then be proved that any part of the doctrine is not a fictitious ascription; and there is not a single tenable test whereby any can be discriminated as genuine. In the words of Kuenen, “we are not free to explain Buddhism from the person of the founder.”  Nor is there any more psychological difficulty in supposing the whole to be doctrinal myth than in conceiving how the later Brahmanists could put their discourses in the mouth of Krishna.

The recent attempts to establish the historicity of Gotama Buddha by excavated tomb-remains —a kind of evidence which obviously could prove nothing as to the achievements or teaching of the person interred—have broken down on their merits. Dr. Fleet’s claim to date an inscribed vase before Asoka’s time on the strength of its letter-forms is peremptorily rejected;  and Professor Davids’ theory that the remains found under one stupa are those of Buddha has to compete with the theory of Dr. Fleet that they are those of massacred Buddhana Sakiya = “kinsmen of Buddha,” which in turn is rejected by M. Barth as an impossible interpretation. On such lines there can be no establishment of any relevant historic facts; and we are left to the decision that “No extant inscription, either in the north or south, can be referred with confidence to a date earlier than that of Asoka.

Professor Kern, coming to conclusions substantially identical with those of M. Senart, posits for us finally an ancient Order of monks, absorbing an ancient popular religion, and developing for people of the middle and lower classes the ideals of a spiritual life current in the schools of the Brahmans and the ascetics. “It is very possible,” he goes on, “that the Order had been founded—whatever be the precise sense which we attach to that word—by a single man peculiarly gifted, even as, for example, it is possible that Freemasonry may have been so founded. We may even, by an effort of imagination, adorn this founder with all sorts of good qualities; but we have no right to say that the amiability of the Buddha of the legend has any other origin than the antique belief according to which the Buddha, in his quality of cherishing sun, is manno miltisto” —the kindest of men, in the words applied by an old German prayer-chant to the deity.

This is the warranted attitude of scientific criticism; and the mere “may-be” as to the possible Founder is exclusive of any Evemeristic solution. M. Senart’s necessary founder, and Professor Kern’s possible founder, are wholly remote from the Buddha alike of the Buddhist and of the rationalising scholar, bent on saving a personality out of a myth. On the face of the case, there is a presumption that, while there may easily have been, “about 500 B.C., a man who by his wisdom and his devotion to the spiritual interests of his kind made such an impression that contemporaries compared him to a pre-existing ideal of wisdom and goodness, and that posterity completely identified him with this ideal,”  the Order was not founded by any such person. No Buddha made the Buddhists—the Buddhists made the Buddha.

An obviously sufficient conceptual nucleus for “the” Buddha lay in the admittedly general Brahmanic notion of “Buddhas.” There is even a tradition that at the time when Sakyamuni came many men ran through the world saying “I am Buddha! I am Buddha!”  This may be either a Buddhist way of putting aside the claims of other Buddhas or a simple avowal of their commonness. But a real Buddha would be a much less likely “founder” than one found solely in tradition. Any fabulous Buddha as such could figure for any group as its founder to begin with: to him would be ascribed the common ethical code and rules of the group: the clothing of the phantom with the mythic history of Vishnu-Purusha or Krishna, the “Bhagavat” of earlier creeds, followed as a matter of course, on the usual lines. M. Senart “holds it for established that the legend as a whole was fixed as early as the time of Asoka.”  Some of the latest surveys of the problem end in an inference that the oldest elements in the legend consist of fragments of an ancient poem or poems embedded in the Pitakas.  The quasi-biographical colour further given to mythical details is on all fours with that of the legends of Joseph, Moses, Joshua, and Jesus, all late products of secondary mythology, in periods which systematically reduced God-legends to the biographic level. As we have seen, the fabrication of narrative-frames for the teachings ascribed to the Buddha was early an established Buddhist exercise. And this accumulation of quasi-biographical detail, as we have also seen, goes on long after the whole cycle of prior supernaturalist myth has been embodied. It is after Jesus has been deified that he is provided with a mother and a putative father and brothers; and it is in the latest gospel of all that we have some of the most circumstantial details of his life and deportment. There is even a case for the thesis that some of the characteristics of the Buddha are derived from sculptures which followed Greek models.

On these grounds, then, it is here submitted that the traditional figure of the Buddha, in its most plausibly rationalised form, is as unhistoric as the figure of the Gospel Jesus has been separately shown to be. Each figure simply stands for the mythopœic action of the religious mind in a period in which Primary-God-making had given way to Secondary-God-making, and in particular to the craving for a Teaching God who should originate religious and moral ideas as the other Gods had been held to originate agriculture, art, medicine, normal law, and civilisation. And if by many the thought be still found disenchanting, they might do well to reflect that there is a side to the conception that is not devoid of comfort.

Buddhism, like Christianity, is from the point of view of its traditional origins a “failure.” Buddhism, indeed, notably in the case of Burmah, has done more to mould the life of a whole people towards its ostensibly highest ethic than Christianity ever did; but Buddhism, being at best a gospel of monasticism, quietism, and mechanical routine, collapsed utterly in India, the land of its rise; and its normal practice savours little of moral or intellectual superiority to any of the creeds around it.  Brahmanism, which seems to have ultimately wrought its overthrow, set up in its place a revived and developed popular polytheism, on the plane of the most ignorant demotic life. Christianity, in turn, professedly the religion of peace and love, is as a system utterly without influence in suppressing war, or inter-racial malignity, or even social division. The vital curative forces as against those evils are visibly independent of Christianity. And here emerges the element of comfort.

On our Naturalistic view of the rise of the religions of the Secondary or Teaching Gods, it is sheer human aspiration that has shaped all the Christs and all their doctrines; and one of the very causes of the total miscarriage is just that persistence in crediting the human aspiration to Gods and Demigods, and representing as superhuman oracles the words of human reason. Unobtrusive men took that course hoping for the best, seeking a short cut to moral influence; but they erred grievously. So to disguise and denaturalise wise thoughts and humane principles was to keep undeveloped the very reasoning faculty which could best appreciate them. Men taught to bow ethically to a Divine Teacher are not taught ethically to think: any aspiration so evoked in them is factitious, vestural, verbal, or at best emotionally superinduced, not reached by authentic thought and experience. When, haply, the nameless thinkers who in all ages have realised and distilled the wisdom or unwisdom given out as divine are recognised in their work for what they were, and their successors succeed in persuading the many to realise for them- selves the humanness of all doctrine, the nations may perchance become capable of working out for themselves better gospels than the best of those which turned to naught in their hands while they held them as revelations from the skies.

14. The Problem of Manichæus

On the fringes of the historical problem of Buddhism there lies one which is worth at least a passing scrutiny in this connection—that, namely, of the origins of the heretical quasi-Christian sect of Manichæans. The Christian tradition runs that one Scythianos, a Saracen, husband of an Egyptian woman, “introduced the doctrine of Empedocles and Pythagoras into Christianity”; that he had a disciple, “Buddas, formerly named Terebinthus,” who travelled in Persia, where he alleged that he had been born of a virgin, and afterwards wrote four books, one Of Mysteries, a second The Gospel, a third The Treasure, and a fourth Heads. While performing some mystic rites, he was hurled down a precipice by a daimon, and killed. A woman at whose house he lodged buried him, took over his property, and bought a boy of seven, named Cubricus. This boy she freed and educated, leaving him the property and books of Buddas-Terebinthus. Cubricus then travelled into Persia, where he took the name of Manes and gave forth the doctrines of Buddas Terebinthus as his own. The king of Persia [not named], hearing that he worked miracles, sent for him to heal his sick son, and on the child’s dying put Manes in prison. Thence he escaped, flying into Mesopotamia, but was traced, captured, and flayed alive by the Persian king’s orders, the skin being then stuffed with chaff and hung up before the gate of the city.

For this narrative, the historian Socrates, writing in the fifth century, gives as his authority “The Disputation [with Manes] of Archelaus bishop of Caschar,” a work either unknown to or disregarded by Eusebius, who in his History briefly vilifies Manes  without giving any of the above details. In the Chronicon of Eusebius the origin of the sect is placed in the second year of Probus, C.E. 277; but this passage is probably from the hand of Jerome.  According to Jerome, Archelaus wrote his account of his Disputation with “Manichæus” in Syriac, whence it was translated into Greek. The Greek is lost, and the work, apart from extracts, subsists only in a Latin translation from the Greek, of doubtful age and fidelity,  probably made after the fifth century. By Photius it is stated that Heraclean, bishop of Chalcedon, in his book against the Manichæans, said the [Greek] Disputation of Archelaus was written by one Hegemonius—an author not otherwise traceable, and of unknown date.

In the Latin narrative, “Manes” is said to have come, after his flight from court, from Arabion, a frontier fortress, to Caschar or Carchar, a town said to be in Roman Mesopotamia, in the hope of converting an eminent Christian there, named Marcellus, to whom he had sent a letter beginning: “Manichæus apostle of Jesus Christ, and all the saints and virgins with me, send peace to Marcellus.” In his train he brought twenty-two [or twelve] youths and virgins. At the request of Marcellus, he debated on religion with bishop Archelaus, by whom he was vanquished; whereupon he set out to return to Persia. On his way he proposed to debate with a priest at the town of Diodorides; but Archelaus came to take the priest’s place, and again defeated him; whereupon, fearing to be given up to the Persians by the Christians, he returned to Arabion. At this stage Archelaus introduces in a discourse to the people his history of “this Manes,” very much to the effect of the recapitulation in Socrates. Among the further details are these: (1) that Scythianus lived “in the time of the Apostles”; (2) that Terebinthus said the name of Buddas had been imposed on him; (3) that in the mountains he had been brought up by an angel; (4) that he had been convicted of imposture by a Persian prophet named Parcus, and by Labdacus, son  of Mithra; (5) that in the disputation he taught concerning the sphere, the two luminaries, the transmigration of souls, and the war of the “Principia” against God; (6) that “Corbicius” or Corbicus, about the age of sixty, translated the books of Terebinthus; (7) that he made three chief disciples, Thomas, Addas, and Hermas, of whom he sent the first to Egypt, and the second to Scythia, keeping the third with him; (8) that the two former returned when he was in prison, and that he sent them to procure for him the books of the Christians, which he then studied. According to the Latin narrative, finally, Manes on his return to Arabion was seized and taken to the Persian king, by whose orders he was flayed, his body being left to the birds, and his skin, filled with air, hung at the city gate.

That this narrative is historically worthless is admitted by all critical students since Beausobre; and recent historians turn from the Christian to the oriental accounts of the heresiarch for a credible view. There “Mani” is described as a painter,  who set up a sectarian movement in opposition to Zoroastrianism, then in renewed favour in Persia, in the reign of Shapur I. Being proceeded against, he fled to Turkestan, where he made disciples and embellished with paintings a Tchighil [Chinese name for a temple or Picturarum Domus] and another temple called Ghalbita. Provisioning in advance a cave which had a spring, he told his disciples he was going to heaven, and would not return for a year, after which time they were to seek him in the cave in question. They then and there found him, whereupon he showed them an illustrated book, called Ergenk, or Estenk, which he said he had brought from heaven: whereafter he had many followers, with whom he returned to Persia at the death of Shapur. The new king, Hormisdas, joined and protected the sect; and built Mani a castle. The next king, Bahram or Varanes, at first favoured Mani; but, after getting him to debate with certain Zoroastrian teachers, caused him to be flayed alive, and the skin to be stuffed and hung up as alleged by the Christians.  Thereupon most of his followers fled to India, and some even to China, those remaining being reduced to slavery.

In yet another Mohammedan account we have the details that Mani’s mother was named Meis or Utachin, or Mar Marjam (Sancta Maria); and that he was supernaturally born.  At the behest of an angel he began his public career, with two companions, at the age of twenty-four, on a Sunday, the first day of Nisan, when the sun was in Aries. He travelled for about forty years; wrote six books, and was raised to Paradise after being slain under Bahram “son of Shapur.” Some say he was crucified “in two halves” and so hung up at two gates, afterwards called High-Mani and Low-Mani; others that he was imprisoned by Shapur and freed by Bahram; others that he died in prison. “But he was certainly crucified.”

Thus the sole detail which the Mohammedan and Christian writers have in common is that of the execution with its exemplary sequel.

Both accounts, it will be observed, make Mani an innovating heretic; but the Persian treats him as inventing his doctrine, while the Christian makes it traditive. The Persian story, however, makes him compose and illustrate his book in Turkestan, with the possible implication that such a book was a novelty in Persia, despite Mani’s profession. Baur and Neander, accordingly, combining the Christian clue of the name Buddas with the Persian clue to Turkestan, infer that in that territory Mani acquired a knowledge of Buddhism.  To this solution, however, there are several objections. In the first place, there are in Manichæism only shadowy analogies to Buddhism; and in the second, the name Buddas is plausibly interpreted as being merely a Greek corruption of Butm or Budm, the Chaldaic name of the terebinth tree—a simple translation of Terebinthus.  On the other hand, Ritter has conjectured that “Terebinthus” may be a corruption of Buddha’s title “Tere Hintu,” Lord of the Hindus. Finally, it has to be noted that Herodotus repeatedly mentions a people called the Budini,  among whom were settled the Neuri, who “seem to be magicians”; so that “Buddas” might be a reminiscence of their repute. We have thus a pleasing variety of choices!

15. The Manichean Solution

Seeking for a solution, we may assume that whatever tradition the Christians had concerning Manes they got from the east; and it is conceivable that from the datum of Turkestan they evolved the ideas of “Scythianus” and “Buddas,” with or without the help of the knowledge that “Budh” might stand for “Terebinthus” in Chaldea.  But the Persian tradition in itself has little weight, being merely a way of saying that Mani’s doctrine had associations with other lands. On the face of the story, he was heretical before he left Persia; and the medley of theosophic doctrines associated with Manichæism can be traced on the one hand to the general storehouse of Babylonian lore, whence came the lore of Christian Gnosticism, and on the other hand to Mazdeism. Such an amalgamation could very well take place on the frontiers of the Persian and Roman empires, early in the Christian era. But it has to be asked how and why Manichæism, which at so many points resembles the Gnostic systems so-called, should have held its ground as a cult while they were suppressed. Its Jesus and Christ were as far as theirs from conforming to the doctrines of the Church, and it was furiously persecuted for centuries. The explanation apparently lies in the element of cultus, the exaltation of the Founder. Was this then a case in which an abnormal Teacher really founded a religion by his doctrine and the force of his personality?

In order to form an opinion we have first to note two outstanding features of Manichæism—the doctrine that Manichæus was “the Paraclete”; and the fact that his quasi-crucifixion was devoutly commemorated by his devotees in the Bema festival at the season of the Christian Easter.  Concerning the first datum, the most significant consideration is that the equivalence of the names Mani or Manes and Manichæus is to be explained only on Usher’s theory that they are both variants of an eastern name equivalent to the Hebrew name Menahem, which has in part the same meaning as Paraclete.  Seeing that Manes is declared to have called himself the Paraclete promised in the Christian gospel, the question arises whether he was in Syria called Menahem = Manichaios on this account, or whether Mani was for Persians, as was Manes or Mane for Greeks and Romans, a passable equivalent for Menahem, in which the third consonant was a guttural. And seeing that the same name is Græcised as Manaen in the book of Acts, this appears to be the fact. Now, the name Menahem, being framed from the root nahem, often translated in the Septuagint by μενονοέω, strictly signifies only “the comforter,” and has not in Hebrew the various senses of advocate, mediator, messenger, and intercessor, conveyed by paraklêtos; but there are some reasons for holding that in post-Biblical use it may have had a similar significance with the Greek term. In particular, we find it in late Judaic lore practically identified with the title of Messiah, the Messiah ben David being called the Menakhem ben Ammiel, while the Messiah ben Joseph is named Nehemia ben Uziel.  The Talmud brings the identification in close touch with Jesuism. “R. Joshua ben Levi saith, His name is tsemach, ‘A Branch’” [Zech. iii, 8. Tsemach, it will be remembered = Netzer]. “R. Juda Bar Aibu saith, His name is Menahem.”  Jesus, it will be remembered, becomes the paraklêtos in the sense of an intercessor, being yet at the same time an atonement.  And if there is reason to refer the doctrine of the two Messiahs to an extra-Judaic source,  a similar surmise is permissible as to the two Menahems.

In this connection we have next to note, as did Baur long ago, that the story of Mani’s concealment in the cave is a strikingly close parallel to the old story in Herodotus concerning the reputed Thracian God Zalmoxis or Zamolxis, of whom “some think that he is the same with Gebelezeis.”

“Every fifth year they despatch one of themselves, taken by lot, to Zalmoxis, with orders to let him know on each occasion what they want. Their mode of sending him is this. Some of them are appointed to hold three javelins; while others, having taken up the man......by the hands and feet, swing him round, and throw him into the air upon the points. If he should die, being transfixed, they think the God is propitious to them; if he should not die, they blame the messenger himself, saying that he is a bad man; and having blamed him they despatch another.”

Gebelezeis may be the Babylonian Fire-God Gibil, identified with Nusku. In that case the sacrifice to him of a messenger is one more instance of sacrificing the God to himself, as Gibil-Nusku was the messenger of all the Gods.  According to the Greeks of the Hellespont and Pontus, Zalmoxis was a man who had been a slave, at Samos, to Pythagoras, son of Mnesarchus, then was freed, became rich, and retired to his own country, Thrace, where he taught the doctrine of immortality. While teaching this in a dwelling he caused to be built, “he in the meantime had an underground dwelling made, and when the building was finished he vanished from among the Thracians; and having gone down to the underground dwelling he abode there three years.” In the fourth year he reappeared to the Thracians, who had deemed him dead, and thus his teaching became credible to them.  The good Herodotus, “neither disbelieving nor entirely believing” the legend, was “of opinion that this Zalmoxis lived many years before Pythagoras”; and we in turn, seeing in the story of the three years’ stay underground a remote form of the myth of the God-man’s three days in the grave, pronounce that the legends of the freed slave Mani and his concealment in the cave are of similar antiquity.  He is inferribly the Menahem or messenger of the cult of the Thracian Getæ; and in another “Scythian” record we have a clue to the legend of his death, as well as to the myth of “Scythianus.” The flaying of slain enemies was a Scythian usage; and “many, having flayed men whole, and stretched the skin on wood, carry it about on horseback.”  As with the enemy, so with the “messenger,”  whose function is a recognised one in barbaric sacrifice. At the death of a king, they strangled and buried one of his concubines, a cup-bearer, a cook, a groom, a page, a courier, and horses, “and firstlings of everything else.” A year later they strangled fifty of his young men-servants and fifty of the finest horses, and, having disembowelled them, stuffed them with chaff and sewed them up. The bodies of the horses were then transfixed lengthwise with beams and placed in the curves of half-wheels to support them; the bodies of the fifty young men were similarly transfixed and mounted on the horses; and the whole ghastly cavalcade was placed around the “high-place” made over the king’s grave.  An evolution of such funerary and honorific sacrifices into sacrifices to the Gods is in the normal way of religious history. In modern Dahome, again, it was de rigueur that every occurrence at court should be reported to the spirit of the king’s father by a male or female messenger, who was commonly though not always sacrificed.

The Thracian Getæ, who carried on the cult of Zalmoxis and the ritually slain messenger, were subdued by Darius, and embodied in his empire,  with other Scythian tribes; and in that vast aggregate their sacrificial rites had the usual chance of being adopted by their conquerors—if indeed they were not already associated with the worship of Gibil-Nusku the Babylonian Fire-God, and so known to the Persian fire-worshippers. And, whether or not by way of such an adoption, we find that after the death of the captive emperor Valerian his skin was dyed red and stuffed with straw, and was so preserved for centuries in the chief temple of Persia —a course strongly suggestive of religious symbolism. By certain Arab tribes, who worshipped the star Mars, a warrior in blood-stained garments was annually sacrificed by being thrown into a pit; and the God was worshipped in a temple of red colour —a kindred conception. Such a proceeding as the Persian, in fact, would have been impossible in a temple without religious precedent; and in the sacrificial practices of the pre-Christian Mexicans, which we find so many reasons for tracing back to an ancient Asiatic centre,  we find clear duplicates of both details of the quasi-sacrifice of Valerian, together with the messenger-sacrifices of the Khonds and Getæ. On the one hand it is recorded that the Mexican “knights of the sun” on a certain day sacrificed to the Sun a human victim whom they “smeared all over with some red substance......They sent him to the Sun with the message......that his Knights remained at his service, and gave him infinite thanks for the great.....favours bestowed on them in the wars.”  So, again, in the sacrifice to Xiuhteuctli the Fire-God in the tenth month the victims were painted red.  On the other hand, in a great annual festival held on the last day of the first month, in which a hundred slaves were sacrificed, some were flayed, and their skins were worn in a religious dance by leading devotees, among them being the king. Finally the bodies were sacramentally eaten, and the skins, “filled with cotton-wool, or straw,” were “hung in the temple and king’s palace for a memorial.”  The stuffed skin of the victim, then, was sacrosanct,  and that which had been worn by the king was doubtless specially so, representing as it did at once the deified victim and the monarch. When the king took a captive in war with his own hands, the latter was specially regarded as the representative of the sun, and was clothed with the Sun-God’s royal insignia.  As for the red-painting of the messenger sent to the Sun, that in turn was presumably a special symbolical identification of the victim with the God,  as in the peculiar Peruvian sacrifice of a shorn sheep “in a red waistcoat” to the Sun-God at Cuzco;  and the final inference is that the dead or slain body of the captive emperor Valerian was made to figure as a sacrificial special Messenger sent by the Persian king to the (messenger) Sun-God, and dedicated to that deity.

That the legendary “crucifixion” of “Manichæus” was a myth derived from such a sacrifice is the more probable in view of the evolution of the Christian mystery-drama from an analogous rite.  Clemens Alexandrinus, following another authority than Herodotus, tells how “a barbarous nation, not cumbered with philosophy, select, it is said, annually an ambassador to the hero Zamolxis,”  choosing one held to be of special virtue. The usage would thus seem to have made headway after the time of Herodotus. Clemens,  too, identifies with Zoroaster that Er son of Armenius who in Plato figures as “the messenger from the other world,”  having gone thither in a death-swoon; a suggestion that at least the Persians now connected the doctrine of immortality with some conception or usage resembling that of the Getæ; and Zoroaster, in turn, was mythically associated with a cave containing flowers and fountains, the whole symbolical of the world, and further associated with resurrection in the mysteries.  Finally, the Manichæans’ annual celebration of the Bema, their name for the rite commemorative of the death of Manichæus, carries with it no explanation; and must be taken as the title of some Græco-Oriental mystery-ritual. The word signifies “platform,” referring not to the ordinary Bema of the Christian churches, wherein stood the altar, but to the covered platform of five steps prepared by the Manichæan devotees on the anniversary of the Founder’s death;  but it is not accounted for by any item in the legendary biography, where no such platform is mentioned.

Upon the platform described by Augustine something must have been represented or enacted; and as he appears never to have been one of the electi, but only an auditor or catechumen, he would be, as the Manichæans declared, unacquainted with the special mysteries of the system.  The “five steps” point to a symbol of the proto-Chaldean high-place or temple-pyramid and altar of sacrifice, often of five stages;  and the mystery was in all likelihood akin to the early mystery-drama of the Christian crucifixion. The apparent identification of the birthday of Manichæus, in the late Mohammedan account, with the death-day in the known cultus;  and further the symbolism of his public appearance “with two others,” suggest a mystic scene analogous to the triple crucifixion. In any case the graded or terraced pyramid, which was at once the norm of a sacrificial altar  and the norm of the temples of Babylonia, Mexico, and the South Sea Islands, was also the norm of regal tombs, as instanced by that of Cyrus, still extant.

The critical presumption, then, is that the flayed and stuffed Manichæus is one more figure Evemerised out of a rite of annual sacrifice; and that the Manichæan cult is no more the creation of a man named Manes than is the Buddhist the creation of one Buddha, or the Christian of one Jesus called the Christ. It is a syncretism on the lines of those other cults, borrowing ideas from at least three theosophic sources; combining a nominal Christism with a modified Mithraism;  and assimilating both, in the doctrine that “Jesus hangs on every tree,” to the esoteric side of the cult of Dionysos.  The works ascribed to Mani, so far as known, have every mark of being late concoctions, on Gnostic lines, framed for purposes of proselytism in the Christian sphere, each purporting to be written by “Manichæus, an apostle of Jesus Christ,”  in the manner of the Christian epistles. The “Epistle to the Virgin Menoch,” of which fragments are preserved by Augustine in the Opus Imperfectum, suggests anew the special signification of the title Manichæus. As for the Erteng or Erzeng, specially associated in Persia with the name of Mani, the title, it appears, simply means an illustrated book,  and such a book is no more to be supposed primordial in the cult than the epistles.

The success of the cult, in fine, was attained very much as was that of Christism. Its promoters, early recognising the vital importance of organisation, created a system of twelve chief apostles or magistri, with a leader, representing the Founder, and seventy-two bishops,  here copying actual Judaism rather than Christian tradition;  and, despite its discouragement of marriage and procreation, it survived centuries of murderous persecution in the eastern empire; finally passing on to the west, through the later sects affected by its tradition, the germs of a new heresy in the Middle Ages. Like the crucified Christ, as we have seen reason to think, its Founder was an imaginary being; and so it outlasted the tough sects of Marcion and Montanus, of which the latter was “all but victorious” against orthodoxy. Montanus, says one record, claimed to be inspired by the Paraclete; and his movement, being organised on ecclesiastical lines, went far, beginning in Phrygia, where, as in Persia, the doctrine of a Paraclete was probably pre-Christian.

That Montanus in turn was an imaginary personage is plausibly argued by Schwegler;  but though some of the adherents of the sect seem to have tended to make of him the Paraclete,  it appears to have been a fanatical movement founded on no particular personality, being more commonly named Phrygian than Montanist, from its place of origin, and offering no analogies to Manichæism save in respect of a general asceticism. Being rather a special development of tendencies already present in the Christian movement than a new creed, it had less lasting power than the other, though its vogue and duration were sufficient to prove how much of what passes for a new religious development special to Christianity was but the exploitation of elements of ecstatic and ascetic fanaticism abundantly present in the old pagan environment, of which Phrygia was a typical part.

16. The Case of Apollonius of Tyana

As regards the historical argument it may be well, finally, to anticipate an objection which may be grounded on the admission that Apollonius of Tyana, who has been plausibly described as a Pagan Christ,  was really a historic personage, though his life is clothed upon with myth from birth to death. Here, it may be argued, was a real man, who had lived in the first century of the Christian era, represented in the third as born under supernatural circumstances, working miracles, making disciples and converts by his teaching in Europe and Asia, and finally ascending to heaven. If these prodigies could be told of an actual man, it may be asked, why may not Jesus be actual, of whom similar prodigies are told?

The answer is, as aforesaid, that the ascription of prodigies to any ancient personage is not in itself a disproof of his historicity; but that the historical evidence in each case is to be taken on its total merits. It is at bottom the same mythopœic bias that rings with myth the mere name of a phantom God or Demi-God and the slightly known life of a remarkable man; and the task of criticism is to distinguish cases by impartial tests. We hold Charlemagne and Theodoric and Virgil for historical, despite the myths connected with them in the Middle Ages. The case of Apollonius belongs broadly to the same class, as perhaps does that of Solomon.

It is needless here to remark that the abundant attribution of miracles to Apollonius soon after his own day proves the valuelessness of miracle stories as certificates of divinity: these pages are written for students who have put aside the belief in miracles; and when Christian Fathers are found, in the case of Apollonius, attributing to demons the pagan prodigies which they do not deny to have occurred, we have merely to note how absolute was the credulity of the time in regard to any story of strange happenings. They, it is clear, never thought of testing as to whether Apollonius was a real person: they took it for granted that the name of a person said to have existed stood for a real person. Are we, then, entitled to follow their example? The answer is that in the case of Apollonius we have no reason for suspecting invention,  save as regards the details of the biography recast for us by Philostratus in the third century. There even the “credible” data are uncertain. But it is likely enough that he was, as there represented, a devout Pythagorean, a vegetarian, an ascetic, a student of medicine and astrology, universalist in his creed, and a believer in immortality. And he may conceivably have travelled to India, though the details offered us are naught.

As usual, indeed, there lacks contemporary testimony, apart from that preserved in Philostratus. The Life makes Apollonius die about the reign of Nerva (96-98 C.E.); and our first incidental traces of his fame are in Dio Cassius,  where he is mentioned as a miraculous seer, and in Origen’s reply to Celsus,  where one Moiragenes (mentioned by Philostratus) is cited as referring to the accounts of magical feats in the memoirs of Apollonius, and observing that some philosophers of note had been convinced by them. These references belong to the very period of the production of the Life by Philostratus, so that there is no trace of any impression previously made by the memoirs of Damis and Maximus of Ægæ, declared to be used by him. Still, we have no reason for doubting that there was an Apollonius of Tyana, who made an impression in his own day as a wandering teacher, and perhaps as a sorcerer, and whose memory was preserved by statues in several towns, as well as by one or two memoirs, one of them written by his credulous or mendacious disciple, Damis. Of the large number of letters preserved as his, some of them remarkable for their terse force, it is impossible to be sure that they are genuine, though they may very well be so.

The reasons for not doubting on the main point are (1) that there was no cause to be served by fabrication; and (2) that it was a much easier matter to take a known name as a nucleus for a mass of marvels and teachings than to build it up, as the phrase goes about the cannon, “round a hole.” The difference between such a case and those of Jesuism and Buddhism is obvious. In those cases, there was a cultus and an organisation to be accounted for, and a biography of the Founder had to be forthcoming. In the case of Apollonius, despite the string of marvels attached to his name, there was no cultus. Posterity was interested in him as it was in Pythagoras or Plato; and Philostratus undertook the recasting of the Life in literary form at the command of the empress Julia Domna, a great eclectic. Even if, as has been so often argued, from Huet and Cudworth to Baur and A. Réville,  there was an original intention to set-off Apollonius against Jesus, we should not have ground to doubt that a teaching Apollonius had flourished in the first century: rather the presumption would be that the pagans would seek for some famous wonderworker whose life they could manipulate.

But there is really no reason to suppose that Philostratus, much less Damis, had the gospels before him, though he may well have heard of their story. A close comparison of the story of the raising of Jairus’ daughter with the story in Philostratus, to which it is so closely parallel, gives rather reason to believe that the gospels copied the pagan narrative, the gospel story being left unmentioned by Arnobius and Lactantius in lists in which they ought to have given it had they known and accepted it.  The story, however, was probably told of other thaumaturgs before Apollonius; and in regard to the series of often strained parallels drawn by Baur, as by Huet, it may confidently be said that, instead of their exhibiting any calculated attempt to outdo or cap the gospel narratives, they stand for the general taste of the time in thaumaturgy. Apollonius, like Jesus, casts out devils and heals the sick; and if the Life were a parody of the gospel we should expect him to give sight to the blind. This, however, is not the case; and on the other hand the gospel story of the healing of two blind men is certainly a duplicate of a pagan record.

To say, as does Baur, that the casting-out of devils in the Apollonian legend is necessarily an echo of the gospels, on the score that the Greek and Roman literatures at that time show no traces of the idea,  is to make the arbitrary assumption that the superstitions of Syria could enter the West only by Judaic or Christian channels. The “Metamorphoses” of Apuleius, to say nothing of those of Ovid, might serve to remind us that the empire imbibed the diablerie of the East at every pore; and the wizardry of Apollonius includes many eastern items of which the gospels show no trace. As for the annunciation of the birth of Apollonius by Proteus, and the manner of its happening, they conform alike to Egyptian myths and to that told concerning the birth of Plato.  It is, in fact, the Christian myth that draws upon the common store of Greek and Syrian myth, not the Apollonian legend that borrows from the Christian. The descent of Apollonius to Hades, again, seems to have been alleged, after common Græco-Asiatic precedent, before the same myth became part of the Christian dogmatic code; and to say that his final disappearance without dying and his apparition afterwards must have been motived by the story of Christ’s appearing to Saul  is once more to ignore the whole lesson of comparative hierology. Baur goes so far as to argue  that when Philostratus says the disciples of Apollonius in Greece were called Apollonians, he must be merely framing a parallel to the title of the Christians, because there is now no knowledge of a sect of Apollonians. It was very hard, two generations ago, for even a great scholar to realise the broadest laws of religious evolution. Yet Lardner had shown with reasonable force, in his primitive fashion, nearly a century before, that the model before Philostratus, if there be any, is not Jesus but Pythagoras;  and his friend De la Roche had rightly and tersely summed up the whole case in the words: “Philostratus said nothing more in the Life of Apollonius than he would have said if there had been no Christians in the world.”  For once, Baur had not fully grappled with the literature of his subject.  His superiority to his Christian predecessors as a critic of Apollonius comes out chiefly in his gravely candid recognition  of the high moral purpose set forth in all the discourses ascribed to the hero in the Life.

The habit of pitting Apollonius against Jesus really arose about a century after Philostratus, when the pagan intelligence first began to feel itself menaced by the new creed. Hierocles set the fashion in his Philalethes Logos, to which Eusebius and Lactantius  replied in the normal patristic manner. A hundred years later still, in the time of Augustine, the setting of the miracles of Apollonius and Apuleius against those of Jesus was a common line of pagan argument,  met in the usual way, neither side convincing the other. If there was any gain, it was on the pagan side; for while Chrysostom  triumphs over the failure of the Apollonian movement, such a classically cultured Christian bishop as Sidonius Apollinaris  acclaims the personal virtues and philosophic teaching of the pagan sage. The pagans on their part had taken him up all round. In the day of Philostratus, Alexander Severus had eclectically placed a bust of Apollonius, with others of Abraham, Jesus, and Orpheus, in his private chapel or oratory;  and later we find Eunapius,  Ammianus Marcellinus,  Vopiscus,  and Apuleius,  from their different standpoints treating the Tyanean as a demigod, or divinely inspired, or a supreme Mage.

It was not, of course, the high ethic and philosophy of the Apollonian discourses that they stressed as against the Christians. Such a saying as “I have found my reward in the amendment of men”  was not a word to conjure with in popular debate. It was the miracles, the prodigies, the fables, that were for ancient readers the warrant of the sage’s greatness. To-day we cannot tell any more than they to what extent the remarkable discourses which Philostratus professes to copy from Damis stand for any genuine utterances or writings of Apollonius:  we can be satisfied of the historicity of the man without knowing how far to trust the accounts of his travels and teaching. But we know that if Apollonius had uttered every wise or eloquent teaching put in his mouth by his biographers he could not thereby have founded such a cult as the Christians conducted on the basis of an entirely fictitious biography.

Lactantius, in the patristic style, asks Hierocles: “Why therefore, O mad head, doth none worship Apollonius for a God, unless perchance thou alone, worthy indeed of that God, with whom the true God will punish thee to all eternity?”  We to-day can give the answer of hierology. No man was ever perdurably deified for his wisdom, or even for his supposed miracles: religions grow up around rites offered immemorially to unknown powers, or round ways of life set up by generations of nameless teachers, all of which abstractions alike take form as named Gods or Sons of Gods, who in one age are the givers of civilisation, agriculture, knowledge, crafts, arts, rites, and laws, and in another of oracles, of revelations, of doctrines and discourses, of their own lives as redeemers. But the really slain man, the true human sacrifice, though he be counted by millions, is not deified: not he, but an abstraction shaped out of the mystic drama and sacrament which have followed on ages of sacrifices and sacraments of human flesh; and neither is the true teacher or thinker deified: not he, but a superposed abstraction distilled from many teachings, wise or unwise, put by many generations in the mouth of the mythical one. For it is by such modes alone that men have been able to create the economic bases without which no religion can live. Apollonius, credited with many miracles and wondrous wisdom, like Pythagoras long before him, could become a God only by way of a passing figure of speech, precisely because he had really lived and taught.

Given the culture-stage in which many crave the Teaching God, while the multitude still crave the Sacrificed God, a cult which shall combine these in one Deity, still retaining the cosmic Creator God and adding the attractive appeal of the Mother Goddess, has obviously a maximum chance of survival. And such a religion, we have seen reason to conclude, cannot be founded on concrete personages: it must be developed from personalised abstractions. Such a combination is presented in the Christian cultus. But all such success is finally in terms of political and economic adaptations; and the final explanation of non-survivals, accordingly, is to be found in the lack or frustration of such adaptations. It remains to note, then, how systems historically developed from abstractions like the Christian have disappeared in the struggle for existence.

V. Mithraism

1. Introductory

In the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, supervised by so eminent a scholar and hierologist as the late Professor Robertson Smith, as against some hundreds of pages on the books of the Bible, there was devoted to the subject of the ancient Persian deity Mithra or Mithras, and his cultus, one column. All the while, Mithraism was well known to have been the chief rival to Christianity in the ancient world. Within the past dozen years there has taken place a great improvement in the sense of proportion among the cultivators of hierology; and the study of Mithraism, in particular, has been conducted with a zeal and a competence which leave little opening for new contributions. The present survey, first undertaken over twenty years ago, is an attempt to elucidate, in the light of comparative science, what is likely to remain an obscure problem.

When all is said, we have but a fragmentary knowledge of Mithraism. But we do know that it was during some centuries the most widespread of the religious systems of the Roman empire. That is to say, Mithraism was in point of range the most nearly universal religion of the western world in the early centuries of the Christian era. As to this, students are agreed.  To the early Fathers, we shall see, Mithraism was a most serious thorn in the flesh; and the monumental remains of the Roman period, in almost all parts of the empire, show its extraordinary extension. In our own country, held by the Romans for three hundred years at a time when Christianity is supposed to have penetrated the whole imperial world, there have been found no signs whatever of any Roman profession of the Christian faith; while there are a number of monuments in honour of Mithra.  There has been found, for instance, a Mithraic cave  at Housesteads, in Northumberland, containing sculptures of Mithra-worship, and an inscription: “To the God, best and greatest, invincible Mithra, Lord of Ages”;  and another at Kichester, with an inscription: “To the God the Sun, the invincible Mithra, the Lord of Ages.” Other monuments have been found at Chester, on the line of the Roman wall, at Cambeckfort in Cumberland, at Oxford, at York,  and at London and Manchester.  And “Mithraic bas-reliefs, cut upon the smoothed faces of rocks, or upon tablets of stone, still abound throughout the former western provinces of the Roman Empire; many exist in Germany: still more in France.”  According to Mr. King, again, “the famous ‘Arthur’s Oon’ (destroyed in the eighteenth century) upon the Carron, a hemispherical vaulted building of immense blocks of stone, was unmistakeably a Specus Mithræum, the same in design as Chosroes’ magnificent fire-temple at Gazaca.” But in other lands the remains of Mithraic shrines are far more numerous: they abound in the Alps, in Southern France, in Eastern Italy, in Dalmatia, in Dacia, in many Mediterranean ports; and though their distribution is unequal, they signify that the cult went wherever went the legions and the Syrian traders who followed them.

And yet, with all this testimony to the vogue of Mithraism in the early Christian centuries, there ensues for a whole era an absolute blank in the knowledge of the matter in Christendom—a  thousand years in which the ancient cultus seems a forgotten name in Europe. One modern investigator, M. Lajard,  thinks that since the time of the Fathers the first in European literature to mention Mithra was Pietro Riccio (Petrus Crinitus),  born about 1465, a disciple of Politian; and no other mention occurs till about the middle of the sixteenth century.  Such was the ignorance of most scholars, that of three now well-known Mithraic monuments discovered about that period, not one is attributed to Mithra either by the great antiquarian of the time, Rossi, or by his pupil, Flaminius Vacca. Every one knows the sculptured group of Mithra slaying the bull, so often engraved, of which we have a good example in the British Museum. Rossi declared one of these monuments to represent Jupiter, as the bull, carrying off Europa; and Vacca tells how a lion-headed image, now known to represent Kronos-Zervan or the Time-Spirit in the mysteries of Mithra, but then held to represent the devil, was (probably) burned in a limekiln.  A century later, Leibnitz demonstrated that Ormazd and Ahriman, the Good and Evil Powers of the Persian system to which Mithra belonged, were simply deified heroes; and later still the historian Mosheim, a man not devoid of judgment, elaborately proved that Mithra had simply been at one time, like Nimrod, a famous hunter,  before the Lord or otherwise. Other eighteenth-century scholars discussed the problem more intelligently;  but even in our own day, when all the extant notices and monuments of Mithra have been carefully collected and studied, vigilant scholars  confess that we know very little as to the Mithraic religion. It is somewhat remarkable that this should be so; and though in the terms of the case we cannot look to find much direct knowledge, we may hope at least to find out why the once popular cultus has fallen into such obscurity. To that end we must see what really is known about it.

2. Beginnings Of Cult

To trace completely the history of the cultus, however, we should have to make an examination note merely of Mithraism proper, but of at least three older systems. No historical principle is better established than this, that all historic religions run into and derive from some other religions, the creeds of all mankind being simply phases of a continuous evolution. So, when we say that Mithraism derives from Persia, we are already implying that it affiliates more distantly to the religions of India and Mesopotamia. Here it must suffice, therefore, to give only the briefest sketch of origins.

We trace the cult specifically in the earliest Aryan documents—in the Vedas, in which the deity Mitra or Mithra is one of the prominent figures.  Seeing that there already he duplicates with other deities, it may be that, to begin with, the name was only a special epithet of the sun,  the central force in later myth as in our planetary system; and that it lay with the priests and their royal patrons to determine which Name should be the most popular God, since the whole evolution was one of words. In any case, it is in Aryan Persia that the name of Mithra makes its fortune: in India it passes into the background of the verbal host.

In the Rig-Veda it is frequently associated with Varuna  and Agni; and in the Atharva-Veda Mitra is so defined as to make his solar character certain. Of a deity who stands in general for the principle of light, it is there said that “In the evening he becomes Varuna Agni; in the morning he becomes Mitra going forth,”  an expression which plainly points to the Sun-God. That Mithra was not developed into a pre-eminent Vedic deity is to be proximately explained by the fact that Agni, who as fire-God and light-God had similar attributes, was better suited to the purposes of the highly-specialised priesthood which built up the Vedas. The God of the sacrificial fire was eminently adapted to sacerdotal ends; and it is in that respect that Agni is oftenest presented. It may have been, indeed, that the Aryan invaders of India had thus early assimilated in the case of Agni a popular pre-Aryan (though not Hindu) worship,  as they did later with the Hindu cult of Krishna; while in Persia the Aryan Gods may have had a simpler course of development. On the other hand, it seems probable that the Ahura Mazda (Ormazd) of the Persians is a variant of the Assyrian God-name Assara Mazas, and at bottom identical with the God Assur or Asshur.  On that view it is more likely that the Aryans were influenced by the ancient Mesopotamian cults than vice versa.

However that may be, though we find the sacramental Vedic beverage the Soma preserved in the Persian cult as the Haoma, that principle did not predominate; and Mithra, in the character of Sun-God and War-God, grew in popular importance. Of Agni, as a special personification of the sacred fire, there is in the Persian system no other trace.

The Iranian documents which present to us what remains of the ancient lore of Mithraism are for the most part contained in the collection called the Zendavesta, a somewhat unfortunate title, since Zend signifies, not, as was formerly supposed, a language, but “a commentary or explanation”; and Avesta (from old Persian âbastâ, “the law”) is the proper name of the original texts, of which the language somewhat resembles the modern Afghan. The collection is divided into two parts, of which the first is the Avesta properly so-called, containing (1) the Vendidâd, a compilation of religious laws and mythical tales; (2) the Vispêrad, a set of litanies for the sacrifice; and (3) the Yasna, consisting of other litanies and five hymns or Gâthas written in what appears to be an older dialect than the rest. The second part is called the Khorda (Small) Avesta, and contains short prayers for general use—namely, five Gâh, thirty formularies of the Sîrôzah, three Âfrigân, and six Nyâyis. It is usual to include in the Khorda, though they do not strictly belong to it, the Yashts, hymns of praise to the several Izads or lesser deities (who, however, here include Mithra) and some fragments.

As to the age of the different portions there is considerable dispute. In the opinion of the late M. James Darmesteter, one of the highest authorities, certain quasi-scientific sections (Nasks) of the Avesta were written as late as the middle of the third century of our era, in imitation of Greek and Sanskrit scientific treatises;  and the same scholar places the important Hôm Yasht late in the second century. Much of the Vendidâd, however, is reckoned pre-Alexandrian; and while M. Darmesteter held the Gâthas to be post-Alexandrian, and very late in spirit albeit the oldest texts in the Avesta, other students count them among the earliest items of all.

Broadly speaking, the religion of the Avesta, commonly called the Mazdean, from the God-name Ahura Mazda, is a highly composite one; but “there are few instances of foreign elements and concepts so freely borrowed by a religion and so harmoniously blended in the original mould.”

3. Zoroastrianism

It is thus difficult to formulate precisely the evolution of Mithraism. If the Gâthas are really the oldest parts of the Avesta, the cult of Mithra, though older than the Gâthas, was for a time or in one region of Irân rejected or eclipsed, since in those rituals it does not appear. Zoroastrianism and Mithraism were certainly not originally one, neither did one grow out of the other.  And here arises the question whether Zarathustra (Zoroaster), so closely associated with the Mithra-cult in the later portions of the Avesta, was a mythical figure or a real reformer who put a more spiritual or philosophic teaching in place of the simpler naturalism of the Vedic period. Mr. L. H. Mills, the learned translator and commentator of the Gâthas, affirms in his introduction the historic reality  and religious originality of Zarathustra, mainly on the ground that whereas in the later Avesta he is lost in myth, in the Gâthas he figures quite simply as a real person.

From the conclusion thus drawn, some of us must respectfully but firmly dissent. The Gâthas, critically considered, do not warrant it; on the contrary, the ostensibly earliest so clearly present Zarathustra as either an ideal or an official figure that Mr. Mills is driven to try to explain them by the question, “Can there have been a school, or family, of Zarathustrians, religious poets, similar to the Vedic seers?”  Equally vital is his suggestion that “the special eminence of the Governor of Ragha as needing no ‘Zarathustra’ over him, that is, no imperial chief (Yasna xix, 19), may be attributed to the successors of Zarathustra.”  The fact is that the Gâthas imply rather an established sacerdotal or quasi-regal functionary than a single notable man when they speak of Zarathustra Spitama.

Still more unconvincing is the claim made for Zoroastrian doctrine as something primarily abnormal. Mr. Mills first claims that “nowhere at their period had there been a human voice, so far as we have any evidence, which uttered thoughts like these”; but immediately afterwards, doubtless realising the impossibility of founding a cult all of a sudden with entirely new ideas, he admits that Zarathustra “was probably only the last visible link in a far extended chain. His system, like those of his predecessors and successors, was a growth. His main conceptions had been surmised, although not spoken before.”  The last clause returns to the arbitrary. There is positively no ground for seeing in the Gâthas new ideas by a new man: they have all the air of a gradually evolved ritual.

The abnormal depth which Mr. Mills ascribes to them, finally, appears to be illusory. He affirms  that “the mental heaven and hell with which we are now familiar as the only future states recognised by intelligent people, and thoughts which, in spite of their familiarity, can never lose their importance, are not only used and expressed in the Gâthas, but expressed there, so far as we are aware, for the first time.” But this claim proceeds on such expressions as, “for the wicked the worst life; for the holy the best mental state”;  and to read in such expressions a negation of places of happiness and of torment is to misread alike the psychology and the language of primitive life. The modern who negates a physical heaven and hell, but still affirms a future-state-of-mind, either evades entirely the fatal problem as to the details of that state or verbally affirms its non-locality. There is no reason whatever to suppose that in ancient Asia men either demurred to the doctrine of places of happiness  and torment, or sought thus intelligibly to modify them. “Worst life” and “best state of mind” could perfectly well connote for early thinkers bodily states and local habitations.

We must refuse, then, to let the sympathetic illusions even of scholars force upon us an otherwise unsupported belief in the occurrence of a remarkable personality which of its own sheer moral power wrought a sudden and signal innovation in that most conservative of processes; ancient sacerdotal religion. The religious dualism ascribed to Zarathustra is in all likelihood a natural adaptation by priests of a polytheistic process of thought;  and it seems far more likely that Zarathustra is an ancient title for a kind of priest-king —since both functions appear to go with the name in the early Gâthas—than that there was a man so named who invented monotheistic dualism,  even as Abraham is fabled to have discovered monotheism, and somehow succeeded in imposing his doctrine as a system of ritual and worship on his contemporaries. As Mr. Mills and Haug admit, there is not a single biographical detail on Zarathustra to be found.

4. Evolution of Mithra

Putting aside as otherwise insoluble the problem of “Zoroastrianism,” and recognising that that system and the special cult of Mithra were originally separate but probably fused by some conquest,  we proceed to note that the Mithra-cult, both in this connection and later, underwent an evolution in which the God’s status slowly fluctuated, or was readjusted, like that of so many other ancient deities. For a time (and this suggests a Zoroastrian influence) he was graded as the subordinate of Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd).

“In the Indo-Iranian religion” [M. Darmesteter writes ] “the Asura of Heaven was often invoked in company with Mithra, the God of the heavenly light; and he let him share with himself the universal sovereignty. In the Veda they are invoked as a pair (Mitrâ-Varunâ) which enjoys the same powers and rights as Varunâ alone, as there is nothing more in Mari), Varunâ than in Varunâ alone, Mitra being the light of heaven, that is, the light of Varunâ. But Ahura-Mazda could no longer bear an equal, and Mithra [in the Avesta] became one of his creatures: ‘This Mithra, the lord of wide pastures, I have created as worthy of sacrifice, as worthy of glorification, as I, Ahura-Mazda, am myself.’  But old formulæ, no longer understood, in which Mithra and Ahura, or rather Mithra-Ahura, are invoked in an indivisible unity, dimly remind one that the Creator was formerly a brother to his creature.”

“He preserved, however, a high situation, both in the concrete and in the abstract mythology. As the God of the heavenly light, the lord of vast luminous space, of the wide pastures above, he became later the God of the Sun, Deo invicto Soli Mithræ (in Persian Mihr is the Sun). As light and truth were one and the same thing, viewed with the eyes of the body and of the mind, he becomes the God of truth and faith. He punishes the Mithra-Drug, ‘him who lies to Mithra’ (or ‘who lies to the contract,’ since Mithra as a neuter noun means ‘friendship, agreement, contract’ ); he is a judge in hell, in company with Rashnu, ‘the true one,’ the God of truth, a mere offshoot of Mithra in his moral character.”

The ritual of the Avesta is clear on the subject. “We sacrifice unto Mithra and Ahura, the two great, imperishable, holy Gods; and unto the stars, and the moon, and the sun, with the trees that yield up baresma” [burned on the altar]. “We sacrifice unto Mithra, the lord of all countries, whom Ahura-Mazda made the most glorious of all the Gods in the world unseen.” “So may Mithra and Ahura, the two great Gods, come to us for help. We sacrifice unto the bright, undying, shining, swift-horsed sun.”  And in the teaching associated with Zoroaster we find Mithra extolled by Ahura-Mazda as a beneficent and comforting Spirit. “Happy that man, I think”—said Ahura-Mazda—”O Spitama Zarathustra! for whom a holy priest......who is the Word Incarnate, offers up a sacrifice unto Mithra......Straight to that man, I think, will Mithra come, to visit his dwelling. When Mithra’s boons will come to him, as he follows God’s teaching, and thinks according to God’s teaching.”  This, though still ancient, was doubtless a relatively late and high form of the cultus in Persia, since in the Avesta we find Mithra repeatedly invoked as a warlike and formidable deity, a God of battles, swift to assail and slay the enemies of truth and justice—which would normally mean, the enemies of his worshippers. But the evolution of a moral cult on such a basis was in the due course of religious adaptation, since in the Mahâbhârata Agni combines the same set of characteristics, being at once friendly to warriors and typified by a dove, while as the Mouth of the Gods he fulfils the highest moral functions.

Thus, then, we have the cultus of Mithra as the Sun-God, the deity of light and truth, created by, and yet co-equal with, the Supreme Deity,  and fighting on the side of the good against the evil power Angra-Mainyu (Ahriman)—this at a period long before the Christian era. So much is certain, whatever we may decide as to the actual period of the writing of the Avesta, as it has come down to us. Of the literature of Mazdeism, of course, a great deal has perished; this appearing, says M. Darmesteter, not only from internal evidence, but from history.

“The Arab conquest proved fatal to the religious literature of the Sassanian ages, a great part of which was either destroyed by the fanaticism of the conquerors and the new converts, or lost during the long exodus of the Parsis The cause that preserved the Avesta is obvious: taken as a whole, it does not profess to be a religious encyclopædia, but only a liturgical collection: and it bears more likeness to a prayer-book than to the Bible.”

We can therefore only infer the nature of the rest of the system. But we do know that, as time went on, the cultus of Mithra became more and more considerable. It is hardly accurate to say, as does Canon Rawlinson, that “Mithra was originally not held in very high esteem”; but it is the historic fact that

“he ultimately came to occupy a place only a little inferior to that assigned, from the first, to the Ahura-Mazda. Darius, the son of Hystaspes, placed the emblems of Ahura-Mazda and of Mithra in equally conspicuous positions on the sculptured tablet above his tomb [B.C. 485]; and his example was followed by all the later monarchs of his race whose sepulchres are still in existence. Artaxerxes Mnemon [d. B.C. 358] placed an image of Mithra in the temple attached to the royal palace of Suza. He also in his inscriptions unites Mithra with Ahura-Mazda, and prays for their conjoint protection. Artaxerxes Ochus [d. B.C. 337] does the same a little later; and the practice is also observed in portions of the Zendavesta composed about this period.” Artaxerxes Mnemon, too, swore by “the light of Mithras,” as our William the Conqueror swore by “the splendour of God”;  and in general the importance and range of the Mithraic worship at an early period may be clearly inferred from the mere vogue of the name Mithridates, “the justice of Mithra,” which we find in use at least six hundred years before the Christian era.

It is after the Persian conquest of Babylon (538 B.C.) that Mithraism begins to take the shape it wears in the period of the Roman empire. Though historical details are lacking, we are broadly entitled to say that “the Mazdeism of the Persians, in uniting with the astrolatry of the Chaldeans, produced Mithraism.”  It was presumably before this development that Mazdeism entered Armenia under the earlier Achamenidæ,  who conquered that region about 625 B.C.; for whereas Ahuramazda, the Supreme God, was in some measure superseded by Mithra in the later Mithraic cult,  in virtue of the same psychological tendency that later gave to the Christian Jesus a nominal equality with and a practical precedence over Yahweh, we find the older Mazdean deity adored as the thundering God in Eastern Iberia as late as the fourth century.  But Mithraism in turn was prepared in Armenia for its cosmopolitan career in the western world; since it was from Armenian Mazdeism that it borrowed its enigmatic “supreme God,” Kronos-Zervan, the Time Spirit, a Babylonian conception, represented in the mysteries by the lion-headed or demon-headed and serpent-encircled figure which bears the two keys.  And this deity in turn tells of Babylonian influence, since the conception of the two locked doors of exit and entrance in the firmament is of Babylonian origin.

We must not exclude, however, the possibility that certain features of the Mithraic cult derive equally with those of some Babylonian cults from a common source of great antiquity. Mithra partly equates with Bel or Enlil, who seems to have been originally a War-God of “mighty weapons,” and was known as “lord of lands,”  even as Mithra is “lord of wide pastures” and “all countries” and a bearer of “glorious weapons”; yet these seem to be early and not late attributes of Mithra. Bel, again, gives place to Merodach (Marduk), who assumes his titles and who becomes the Mediator-God;  but this evolution in Mithra’s case may follow older lines; even as his bracketing with Ahura-Mazda, as Bel was bracketed with Anu,  appears to be early and not late. New Year’s day is the festival alike of Bel, Merodach, and Mithra: this is an ancient idea.  Yet again, when we find the Babylonian Sun-God and War-God Shamas (the prototype of the Hebrew “judge” Samson) figuring especially as the Judge and the Saviour of men, the destroyer of the wicked and of the enemies of his worshippers,  we need not suppose that Mithra, who has all these attributes, is primarily modelled on Shamas, though he was identified with him:  the underlying concept is prior to both cults. On the other hand, when Mithra absorbs in himself the idea of the Logos—who for the Babylonians is a separate God, Nabu, the rival of Merodach  (as the Logos Hermes for the Greeks is the rival of Apollo), but later bracketed with him as his son —we may reasonably suppose that the Mithraic adaptation is late.

Of the deity thus shaped through many centuries, by many forces, it seems warrantable to say that his cult was normally in an ethically advanced stage, relatively to contemporary worships. In remote times, doubtless, he was worshipped with human sacrifices, like most other Gods: the Persian practice of sacrificing on a “high place”  tells of early connection with the Asiatic cult of pyramid-altar-temples, which spread to Polynesia, North America, Syria, and Greece, always in connection with sacrifices of men and children. Of such sacrifice there is no trustworthy trace in the historic period, however, and at no time do we find any trace in his legend of sexual complications. Unlike Agni, unlike Krishna and Apollo and Adonis and Herakles and Dionysos and Attis, he has no amours; and his conjunction with Anaitis or Anahid, as we shall see, seems to have been rather a mystical blending of sexes than a conjugal union. His mate appears to have been primarily Ardivisura, a Goddess of a sacred well, and of the earth-waters generally, later blended with the Semitic Anahid, a Goddess of fruitfulness.  At times he may have been licentiously worshipped,  as Anaitis was;  but in the Avesta and in the developed cultus so far as we know it he is always shown as making for righteousness.

Theologically, he exists both in abstract and in symbol. Originally, he is simply the animised sun: later, according to the universal law of religious evolution, he becomes a spirit apart from the sun but symbolised by it, the sun being worshipped in his name, and he being the God who sustains it: nay, an actual subordinate Sun-God takes his place, even in the Rig Veda.  But since in Persian, as we have seen, his name (Mihr) actually means the sun,  he can never be dissociated from it; and as the same word also means “the friend,” the light being the friend of man,  and seems to connote love or amity,  a moral distinction inevitably attaches to him in a stage of thought in which words have an incalculable significance. He is not a mere benefactor to be flattered. As the sun in Nature can both succour and slay; as Apollo, called by Pindar  the most friendly to men of all the Gods, is also the Destroyer, so the Persians sang: “Thou, O Mithra, art both bad and good to nations”—and to men,  At length, the dualist theory holding its ground as a theological system, as it always will while men personify the energies of the universe, Mithra comes to occupy a singular position as between the two great powers of good and evil, Ormazd and Ahriman (the Ahura-Mazda and Angra-Mainyu of Mazdeism)—being actually named the Mediator,  and figuring to the devout eye as a humane and beneficent God, nearer to man  than the Great Spirit of Good, a Saviour, a Redeemer, eternally young, son of the Most High,  and preserver of mankind from the Evil One. In brief, he is a pagan Christ.

Much has been written as to whether Mithra was worshipped as the sun, or as the creator and sustainer of the sun. There can be no reasonable doubt that the two ideas existed, and were often blended.  We may depend upon it that for the weak and ignorant minds, which could conceive a personal God only under the form of a man or animal, or both combined, the perpetual pageant of the sun was a help and not a hindrance to elevation of thought. We can understand, too, how even to the thinkers, who sought to distinguish between matter and essence, and reckoned the sun only a part of the material universe, the great orb should yet be the very symbol of life and splendour and immortality, as well as the chosen seat of the deity who ruled mankind; and that it should be the viewless spirit of the sun who, in their thought, proclaimed to man the oracle of the Soul of the Universe: “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the first and the last, which is, and which was, and which is to come, the Almighty.”

5. The Process of Syncretism

In the great polytheistic era, however, the habit of personifying all the forces of nature led first to a universal recognition of the actual existence of the deities of foreign peoples, and later on to the idea that all the deities of the nations are but names of phases of one central and omnipotent power. Even among the philosophers and theologians, of course, this conception never really destroyed the habit of thinking of the alleged phases or manifestations of the deity as being really minor deities;  and much more a matter of course was it that among the multitude the deity or deities should, always be conceived in a quite concrete form. But the synthesizing tendency early resulted in this, that different cults were combined; different God-names identified as pointing to the same God; and different Gods combined into unities of two, three, four, or more members. Egypt is the great theological factory for such combinations; but the law necessarily operated elsewhere. The conception of a Divine Trinity is of unknown antiquity: it flourished in Mesopotamia, in Hindostan, in the Platonic philosophy, in Egypt, long before Christianity.  But the combining process, among other variations, had to take account of the worship of Goddesses as well as of Gods; and in regions where Goddess-worship was deeply rooted it was inevitable that there should occur combinations of sex. This actually took place in the worship of Mithra. From Herodotus,  writing in the fifth century B.C., we learn that in some way the God Mithra was identified with a Goddess. The whole passage, though familiar to students, is worth quoting here:—

“The Persians, according to my own knowledge, observe the following customs. It is not their practice to erect statues, or temples, or altars, but they charge those with folly who do so; because, as I conjecture, they do not think the Gods have human forms, as the Greeks do. They are accustomed to ascend the highest parts of the mountains, and offer sacrifice to Zeus, and they call the whole circle of the heavens by the name of Zeus. They sacrifice to the sun and moon, to the earth, fire, water, and the winds. To these alone they have sacrificed from the earliest times; but they have since learnt from the Arabians and Assyrians to sacrifice to (Aphroditê) Urania, whom the Assyrians call Mylitta, the Arabians Alitta, and the Persians Mitra.”

This is one of the seemingly improbable statements in Herodotus which research has partly confirmed.  He is accused, indeed, of blundering  in combining Mithra with Mylitta, it being shown from monuments that the Goddess identified with Mithra was Anaitis or Tanat.  But that the Armenian Anaitis and Mylitta were regarded as the same deity seems clear,  and there are other clues.

It has not been commonly observed that Strabo twice explicitly brackets Anaitis with a Persian God Omanus as being worshipped at a common altar. He saw the statue of Omanus carried in procession.  There is reason to suppose that Omanus (or the Persian form of the word) was a name of Mithra, and that it is an adaptation of Vohumano (Bahman)=Good Mind, a divine name with a very fluctuating connotation. In one passage of the Zendavesta,  Vohumano figures as the doorkeeper of heaven; but he was also first of the Ameshaspentas or Amshaspands, of whom Mithra too (making seven) was chief; and he ranks further in the Avesta with Ahura-Mazda as judge of the dead; and again as the first-born son of Ahura-Mazda, as was Mithra later. Yet again, he is identified with the creative power;  and it seems impossible that the conception of the “Good Mind” should have been prevented from coalescing either with that of Ahura-Mazda, who was not represented by a statue, or with that of Mithra, so making him “the Word.” In any case, the fact of the combination of Mithra in a double personality with that of a Goddess is made clear, not only by the statement of the Christian controversialist Julius Firmicus, in the fourth century, and later writers, that the Persians make Mithras both two-sexed and threefold or three-formed,  but by innumerable Mithraic monuments on which appear the symbols of two deities, male and female, the sun and the moon, or, it may be, male and female principles of the sun or of the earth. And this epicene or double-sexed character is singularly preserved to us in that Mithraic monument of the Græco-Roman period which we possess in our own British Museum, in which the divine slayer of the bull presents a face of perfect and sexless beauty, feminine in its delicate loveliness of feature, masculine in its association with the male form.

In such a combination there is reason to see a direct influence of the old Akkado-Babylonian system on the later Mazdean. From the old Akkadians the Semites received the conception of a trinity, the “divine father and mother by the side of their son the Sun-God.”  But their own ruling tendency was to give every God, up to the highest, a “colourless double or wife”;  and in the final blending of these in a double-sexed deity we have the consummation of the idea. It was not special to Asia; for the Egyptians gave a double sex alike to moon, earth, air, fire, and water, making the earth male as rock, female as arable soil; fire masculine as heat, female as light, and so on;  and the Greeks and Romans accepted the notion;  but it was probably from Chaldæa that it reached the Mithraists. Bel had been represented as both father and mother of Enlil, and Belti as both father and mother of Ninlil; and there are yet other instances of the Babylonian vogue of the idea of a God combining the two sexes.

There is a further presumption that it was either from Babylonia or through Mithraism as modified after the Persian conquest of Babylon that the idea of a double-sexed deity reached the Greeks. In the Orphic hymns, which probably represent the theosophy of several centuries before our era, it is predicated of four deities, of whom two, the Moon and Nature (Selenê and Physeos), are normally female, and two (Adonis and Dionysos) normally male.  Selenê is further identified with Mên, the Moon-God, who, as being double-sexed like Mithra, was finally identified with him in worship and on coins.  As Dionysos and Adonis, originally Vegetation Gods, have at this stage become identified with the Sun, there arises a presumption that a solar cult has been imitated; though at the same time the solar cult may have adopted features from the others. The likelihood is that the notion of a double-sexed deity was the outcome on the one hand of the concrete practice of bracketing a male and a female deity together, and on the other hand of speculation on the essence of “divinity.” But the concrete process probably came first, and the conjunction of the symbols or heads of a male and female deity in one monument or sculpture would give the lead to a mystical theory of a twy-sexed being.

6. Symbols of Mithra

To point to these Mithraic monuments, of which there are so many examples, is to point out, further, that the old Persian aversion to images of deity had disappeared with the extension of the Mithraic cultus.  There is no doubt as to the original forbiddal of images, despite the common delusion that the Jews were the first to lay down such a veto. But it was inevitable that, in the artistic countries,  the adoption of Mithraism should involve the representing Mithra by images, like other deities. Nor was this all. One reason for regarding the Zend-Avesta as substantially ancient is the comparative simplicity of the Mithra cultus it sets forth. Just as happened with Christianity later, the spreading faith assimilated all manner of ancient symbolisms, and new complications of ritual; and Mithra is associated with the strange symbolic figures of the lion-headed serpentine God, bearing two keys, but above all is presented in that of the slayer of the bull. Whence came that conception? There are many explanations. It has been variously decided that the bull slain by Mithra is the symbol of the earth, the symbol of the moon, the symbol of the sun, the symbol of lust, the symbol of evil, the symbol of the cloud, the bull of the Zodiac, and the cosmogonic bull of the Magian system.  All of these conceptions may be held to connect with the symbolism of the Veda, where Agni is the bull; and it is in a similarly early sense, as the Sun-God among the cows, that Mithra is in the Avesta the bull and the cow-stealer —which last name he retains in the late Roman period,  when he has the epithet in common with Hermes. On the basis of the primitive nature-myth arose a host of imageries, all interfluent and inseparable, because all fanciful. Any one who has followed the maze of symbolism in Plutarch’s Isis and Osiris will be prepared to believe that for the later ancients Mithra as the bull had half-a-dozen significations.  In that famous treatise, Isis and Osiris and Typhon successively represent a number of different Nature-forces—sun, moon, moisture, the Nile, the Earth, generative warmth, injurious heat, and so on—shifting and exchanging their places, till it becomes plain that the old theosophy was but a ceaseless flux of more or less congruous fancies. We may be sure that Mithraism was as hospitable to mystic meanings as Osirianism. It is intelligible and probable that Mithra slaying the bull should have meant for many the rays of the sun penetrating the earth, and so creating life for mundane creatures,  as the dog feeds on the blood  of the slain bull. In the Vendidâd, the older (Vedic) God Yima, whose “glory” was secured by Mithra when Yima fell through disobedience,  is represented as “sealing the earth with his golden seal,” and thrusting into it with his dagger,  which is perhaps the earliest form of the myth under notice.

But those who adopt this as the whole explanation  overlook a principle perhaps bound up with the origin of Mithraism proper—the significance of the bull as one of those signs of the zodiac through which the sun passed in his annual course. It is nearly certain that the zodiac was the source of very much of the later symbolism and mysticism of those ancient cults which their priesthoods associated with the sun, not to speak of those whose priesthoods professedly repudiated sun-worship. And one of the most important facts established by the collection and comparison of ancient monuments  is, that the Mithraic cultus connects symbolically with an Assyrian or Akkadian cultus far older—the cult which produced those common Assyrian monuments in which a divine or kingly personage slays a lion or a bull, thrusting a sword through him.  There can be little doubt that these successive religious representations of the slaying of the lion and the slaying of the bull rest partly on a zodiacal system of sacred symbolism, in which the slaying of a given animal means either the passing of the sun into or out of a particular sign of the zodiac at a particular season of the year, or the slaying of the animal represented as a special sacrifice, or both.

The zodiac, which is of immense antiquity,  has come to be conventionalised—that is to say, it is fixed, so that the signs have long ceased to coincide with the actual constellations whose names they bear. But originally the students of the stars must needs have had regard to the actual constellations. And this carries us very far back indeed. The view that the slaying of the bull originally pointed to the sun’s entering the sign of the Bull at either the vernal equinox or the winter solstice  is supported by the circumstance that the bull was at once a symbol of the Sun-God and a symbol of agriculture, the early plough being drawn by bulls or oxen (whence possibly the naming of the constellation);  and is strongly suggested further by the hostile function assigned in the monuments to the Scorpion, which is the opposing sign, and would represent the autumnal equinox.  This symbol then dates back, probably, more than 3,000 years before the Christian era—6,000 years if we assume the original zodiacal year to have begun at the winter solstice; while the symbol of the slaying of the lion would signify the sun’s entrance into Leo at midsummer in the same periods, and may connect with the worship of Tammuz, after whom the midsummer month was named in Syria—unless the God took his name from the month. In point of fact, astronomy tells us that, by the precession of the equinoxes, the constellation of the Bull had ceased to be the sun’s place at the vernal equinox for about 2,100 years before the reign of Augustus, the constellation of the Ram taking its place. Still, just as the symbol of the slaying of the lion had, on this theory, held its ground in religion after the bull played a similar part, so did the sign of the Bull play its part in symbol and ceremony long after the sun had begun to enter the constellation Aries at the sacred season. Nevertheless—and this seems a crowning vindication of the zodiacal theory—while the bull holds its place on the monuments of the Christian era, we find at this very period, in connection with the worship of Mithra as with those of Dionysos  and (more anciently) of Amun,  an actual ceremony of slaying a ram in honour of the Sun-God. In Persia, the sign Aries, the Ram, was known as the Lamb;  and in some of the Mithraic mysteries at the Christian era, it was a lamb that was slain.  That fact, as we shall see, has further bearings; but thus far it surely counts for much as a proof of the zodiacal element in the symbolism of the ancient sophisticated sun worships. The notion of a Fish God is deeply rooted in several of the older eastern religions,  and though it may be explained as arising from the fancy that the sun was a fish, who plunged into the sea in the evening and emerged in the morning—a natural type of immortality for later mystics—it also strongly suggests an ancient connection with zodiacal astrolatry. In any case, there is no more plausible explanation than the zodiacal one of the early Christian habit of calling Jesus Christ the Fish. The sign of the Fishes comes next the Ram in the zodiac; and that constellation had actually taken the place of the Ram, at the spring equinox, when this symbol came into use.

We may further infer, when we read of Phrixos, the son of Athamas, who was carried to Colchis by a ram with a golden fleece,  and who in his statue on the Acropolis was represented as having “just sacrificed the ram to some God,”  that in some eastern cult  which the Greeks misunderstood, a deity was latterly figured as borne on the zodiacal Ram, in the manner of Mithras “bull-borne,”  and as sacrificing the ram in its turn. And that there was a constant astronomical significance in the Mithraic cult in particular, we know from the testimony of Origen, to the effect that its mysteries included an elaborate representation of the movements and relations of the stars and the planets, and the movements of the disembodied human soul among these.

Every widespread religion, however, is necessarily a complex of many ideas, and in the cult of Mithra this is abundantly seen. In the course of its western evolution it became closely associated, like that of Attis, with the popular worship of Cybelê, the Magna Mater, Mother of the Gods;  and in virtue of Roman military tradition it was bracketed with that of many specifically Roman deities. In the Mithraic cave-temples have been found images and names of Juno, Minerva, Apollo, Mars, Bacchus, Mercury, and Venus, “and especially Silvanus, who had taken on the character of a pantheistic God, doubtless because he was the Latin equivalent of the Greek Pan.”‘ This, by the way, is not the sole reason for approximating Mithra to Pan.”  A collocation of the Sun-God with the Goat-God occurs constantly in Greek mythology, and can be clearly traced back to the Babylonian system, on which Mithraism had independently drawn.  The image of the slaying of the bull, in particular, whatever its original bearing, came to be associated specially with the idea of sacrifice and purification; and the great vogue of the Phrygian institutions of the Taurobolium and Criobolium,  or purification by the blood of bulls and rams, must have reacted on Mithraism, even if it were not of strictly Mithraic origin. Mithra, like Osiris  and Dionysos,  we saw,  was the bull as well as the God to whom the bull was sacrificed, even as Amun, to whom rams were sacrificed, was “the great ram”;  and herein lies one of the germs of the dogma of the death and resurrection of the God; another being the ancient astronomic myth, to which we shall come later, of the Descent of the God to Hades. In the procedure of the Taurobolia and Criobolia, which grew very popular in the Roman world,  we have the literal and original meaning of the phrase “washed in the blood of the lamb”; the doctrine being that resurrection and eternal life were secured by drenching or sprinkling with the actual blood of a sacrificial bull or ram, often doubtless a lamb, that being a common sacrifice from time immemorial, on the ground that for certain purposes the victim must be sexually pure. Thus we have such mortuary inscriptions as Taurobolio criobolioque in aeternum renatus, “By the bull-sacrifice and the ram-sacrifice born again for eternity.”  But inasmuch as there was a constant tendency in the mystical systems to substitute symbolism for concrete usages, the Mithraists may be surmised to have ultimately performed their sacrificial rites in a less crude form than that described by Prudentius.

7. The Cultus

Resembling other cults at various points, the Mithraic was latterly peculiar in others. The great specialty of this worship, as we learn from several writers, is that it was carried on in caves—so far at least as its special mysteries were concerned—the cave being considered so all-important that, where natural caves did not exist, the devotees made artificial ones.  Porphyry puts it on record  that the “Persians, mystically signifying the descent of the soul into the sublunary regions, and its regression thence, initiate the mystic in a place which they call a cavern. For, as Euboulos says, Zoroaster was the first who consecrated in the neighbouring mountains of Persia a cave, in which there were flowers and fountains, in honour of Mithra, the Maker and Father of all things—a cave, according to him, being an image of the world, which was made by Mithra. But the things contained in the cavern......were symbols of the mundane elements and climates.”

This explanation of the cave was not improbably suggested by a well-known passage in Plato;  and it is obvious that the custom must have had some simpler origin. At an early culture-stage among the Romans, indeed, we find the name mundus given to the sacred cave on the Palatine Hill into which the people threw specimens of all their domestic utensils and a handful of Roman earth.  This is remarkably close to the symbolic idea in Porphyry; but there must have been an earlier form still.  A cave, in fact, seems to have been one of the earliest forms of temple.  It is easy to understand how to half-civilised man caves would have a hundred mysterious significances, as places for dwelling or meeting made by the Deity himself; and fire- or sun-worshippers would have the special motives supplied by finding in caves the remains of the fires of earlier men, and by the not unnatural theory that the sun himself went into some cave when he went below the horizon at night. Indeed, Porphyry admits that caves in the most remote periods of antiquity were consecrated to the Gods, before temples were. Thus the Curetes in Crete dedicated a cavern to Zeus; in Arcadia, a cave was sacred to the moon, and to Lycean Pan; and in Naxos to Dionysos. “But,” he adds, “wherever Mithra was known, they propitiated the God in a cavern.”

It appears that the greatest sanctity attached to caves in the living rock; and there are many remains of Mithraic altars cut in rocks;  nay more, the rock came to be specially associated with Mithra,  who was named “rock-born”; and the phrase, ‘‘Θεὸς ἐκ πέτρας, God out of the rock,” or “Mithras out of the rock,” became one of the commonest formulas of the cultus.

In these rock-caves, then, or in artificial caves, the priests of Mithra celebrated the habitual rites and special mysteries of their religion. The rising sun would be daily hailed with joy,  as among the Jewish Essenes, and sun-worshippers everywhere; and during the night, when the sun was hidden, special prayers would be offered up. The first day of the week, Sunday, was apparently from time immemorial consecrated to Mithra by Mithraists; and as the Sun-God was pre-eminently “the Lord,” Sunday was “the Lord’s day” long before the Christian era.  On that day there must have been special Mithraic worship. But we have some exact information as to the two chief Mithraic ceremonies or festivals, those of Christmas and Easter, the winter solstice and the vernal equinox, the birthday of the Sun-God and the period of his sacrifice and his triumph.  That Christmas is a solar festival of unknown antiquity, which the early Christians appropriated to their Christ in total ignorance of the real time of his birth, is no longer denied by competent Christian scholars—when they happen to allude to the subject. That Easter is also a solar festival  is perhaps not so freely recognised. But we know not only that Mithra and Osiris (and Horus), like so many other solar and vegetal deities, were especially adored at the vernal equinox,  but that in these worships there were special formulas representing, apparently at this date,  the symbolical death of the deity, the search for his body, and the finding of it. The Christian Firmicus wrathfully tells how the priests of Osiris, who have a representation of the God in the most secret part of their temples, mourn for a certain number of days (presumptively forty,  = Lent), while professedly searching for the scattered members of his mangled body, till at length they feign to have found it, when they finish their mourning and rejoice, saying, “We have found him: rejoice we.”  And we learn also from Tertullian that Osiris in the mysteries was buried and came to life again.  Some such idea would seem to be implied in the ritual performed by the people of Patræ at the annual festival of Dionysos, when the God, called Asymnetes (“the Judge” or “the King”), represented by his image in a chest, was carried outside of the temple in the night, to be hailed by the worshippers. Of the image in the chest, it was obscurely told that the sight of it had driven Eurypilus mad—a suggestion that it may have been dismembered.

But as to Mithraism the details (if only we can be sure of one identification) are still more precise. The worshippers, Firmicus tells us,  lay a stone image by night on a bier and liturgically mourn for it, this image representing the dead God. This symbolical corpse is then placed in the tomb, and after a time is withdrawn, whereupon the worshippers rejoice, exhorting one another to be of good hope; lights are brought in; and the priest anoints the throats of the devotees, murmuring slowly: “Be of good courage; ye have been instructed in the mysteries, and ye shall have salvation from your sorrows.” As the stone image would be laid in a rock-tomb—the God being pre-eminently “from the rock” and worshipped in a cave—the parallel to a central episode in the Christian legend is sufficiently striking; and in view of the duplication of the motive on all hands, in the cults of Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, it is impossible to doubt that we are dealing with a universal myth.

To assign the origin of the rite to any known religion would be unwarrantable; nor is it even certain whether it was originally a part of a solar or of a vegetal cult, though there are grounds for ascribing it to the latter. In any case, it was adaptable to both. It is argued by Dr. Frazer, the chief exponent of the lore of the subject, that the God who dies and rises again does so not as Sun-God but as Vegetation-God; and it may be granted that the vegetation principle is either primary or present in the cults of Attis, Adonis, Dionysos, and Osiris. But on the other hand the pre-eminently solar Herakles dies on the funeral pyre, descends to Hades, and reascends to Heaven; the obviously solar Samson of the Semitic myth, who also in its earlier form probably descended to the underworld,  dies ostensibly in his solar capacity (with shorn hair,  blinded, and placed between the “pillars” = Herakles’ pillars), and must, as God, have risen again; and even the strictly solar Apollo, as is shown by K. O. Müller,  made his Descent to Hades, as did Orpheus, who is inferribly a Day-God. Now, the Descent into Hades was for mortals simply Death; and since the God as such cannot cease to exist, he may as well be said to die in one way as in another. In all these cases the explanation is more or less clearly astronomical; and it is so in the case of the Descent of Mithra to Hades, noticed later; though, as above remarked, the sacrificial principle, identifying the God with the sacrifice, would so complicate the doctrine as to make the solar cult approximate closely to that of the Vegetation-God.

This, however, was only one of the Mithraic mysteries, presumably celebrated once a year. We have further records of another enacted at the initiation of every new devotee, and probably repeated in some form frequently. Justin Martyr,  after describing the institution of the Christian Lord’s Supper, as narrated in the gospels, goes on to say: “Which the wicked devils have imitated in the mysteries of Mithra, commanding the same thing to be done. For, that bread and a cup of water  are placed with certain incantations in the mystic rites of one who is being initiated, you either know or can learn.” This is borne out by Tertullian, who intimates  that “the devil, by the mysteries of his idols, imitates even the main parts of the divine mysteries. He also baptises his worshippers in water, and makes them believe that this purifies them of their crimes......There Mithra sets his mark on the forehead of his soldiers; he celebrates the oblation of bread; he offers an image of the resurrection, and presents at once the crown and the sword; he limits his chief priest to a single marriage: he even has his virgins and his ascetics (continentes).” Again,  the devil “has gone about to apply to the worship of idols those very things in which consists the administration of Christ’s sacraments.”

Reference is here made to a certain ceremony of initiation. It strongly suggests the mysteries which are practised in our own time among savage tribes in many parts of the world.  The complete initiation of a worshipper, we know, was an elaborate and even a painful process, involving many austerities, trial by water, trial by fire, by cold, by hunger, by thirst, by scourging, by branding or bleeding,  and the mock menace of death.  Of these austerities different but vague and scanty accounts are given. According to some accounts they lasted fifteen days; according to others, for forty-eight:  one old writer  alleges eighty different kinds of trials. It is more likely that they numbered twelve, seeing that on the Mithraic monuments we find representations of twelve episodes, probably corresponding to the twelve labours in the stories of Herakles, Samson, and other sun-heroes; but probably also connected with the trials of the initiated.  More explicitly we know from Porphyry and from Jerome that the devotees were divided into a number of different degrees, symbolically marked by the names of birds and animals, and apparently by wearing, during some of the rites, the skins or heads of these animals.  Porphyry  mentions grades of lions, lionesses, and crows, and higher grades of eagles and hawks; Jerome  speaks of crow, gryphon, soldier, lion, Persian (or Perses), sun, Bromios = roarer (or, the bull), and father. Out of the various notices, partly by hypothesis, M. Lajard has constructed a not quite trustworthy scheme,  representing twelve Mithraic degrees: three terrestrial, the soldier, the lion,  and the bull; three aërial, the vulture, the ostrich, and the raven; three igneous, the gryphon, the horse, and the sun; and three divine, the grade of fathers, named eagle, sparrow-hawk, and father of fathers.  It makes a sufficiently grotesque list, in this or any other form; but it is the old story—all religions are absurd to those who do not believe them;  and it is not well for those who keep a private conservatory, however small, to throw stones.

The “mark on the forehead” of the initiate, finally, was in all likelihood the cross, the universal symbol of life and immortality, and in particular of the Sun-God. Presumably it was not the gammadion or swastika, the most specific symbol of the Sun, for that appears to have been notably absent from Persian art.  That it was one of the normal forms of the “Christian” cross may be inferred from the mode of Tertullian’s statement, and from the fact that the tau or cross was inferribly a forehead mark in the Judaic cult set forth in the book of Revelation.  We know that the symbol entered into the fire-worship of Persia by way of architecture;  and it could not have been absent from the imagery of an eastern Sun-God of the time.

8. The Creed

We have thus far briefly examined what may for the most part be termed the skeleton or dry bones of the Mithraic religion, so far as we can trace them, at the period when it seemed to be successfully competing with Christianity. What of the inner life, the spiritual message and attraction which there must have been to give the cult its hold over the Roman Empire? Here it is that our ignorance becomes most sharply felt. So far as Christian zeal could suppress all good report of Mithraism, this was done, when Christianity—I will not say overthrew, but—absorbed the Mithraic movement. There were in antiquity, we know from Porphyry,  several elaborate treatises setting forth the religion of Mithra; and every one of these has been destroyed by the care of the Church.  They doubtless included much narrative as well as much didactic matter, the knowledge of which would colour the whole religious consciousness of Mithra’s worshippers. We shall see later that clues still exist, one of which has been overlooked in studies of Mithraism, to some of the myths of the cult; and we may safely decide in general that just as the Brahmanas prove the currency of myths concerning the Vedic Gods which are not mentioned in the Vedic hymns, so there must have existed a Mithraic mythology which is not contained in the Zendavesta, that being, though not a simple collection of hymns, a compilation for purposes of worship. The reconstruction of that mythology, however, is now hopeless. Too little attention, perhaps, has been paid to Creuzer’s theory that the name Perseus = Perses, “the Persian,” and that the Perseus myth is really an early adaptation of the Mithra myth.  The story of Perseus certainly has an amount of action and colour unusual in Greek myth, and no less suggestive of Oriental origin than is the legend of Herakles. But unless new evidence be forthcoming, such a hypothesis can at most stand for a possibility.

And so with the didactic side of Mithraism: we must limit our inferences to our positive data. These include the evidence of the Vendidâd ritual that there was associated with the cult a teaching of happy immortality for the righteous, very much on the lines of that of Christianity. An extract  will make the point clear :—

27      (89)      “(Zarathustra asked) O Maker of the material world, thou Holy One! Where are the rewards given? Where does the rewarding take place? Where is the recompense fulfilled? Whereto do men come to take the reward that, during their life in the material world, they have won for their souls?

28      (90)      “Ahura Mazda answered: When the man is dead, when his time is past, then the wicked, evil-doing Dævas cut off his eyesight. On the third night, when the dawn appears and brightens, when Mithra, the God with beautiful weapons, reaches the all-happy mountains, and the sun is rising:

29      (94)      “Then the fiend, named Vizaresha, O Spitama Zarathustra, carries off in bonds the souls of the wicked Dæva-worshippers who live in sin. The soul enters the way made by Time, and open both to the wicked and to the righteous. At the end of the Kinvad bridge, the holy bridge made by the Mazda, they ask for their spirits and souls the reward for the worldly goods which they gave away here below.

30      (98)      “Then comes the beautiful, well-shapen, strong and graceful maid, with the dogs at her sides, one who can discern, who has many children, happy and of high understanding. She makes the soul of the righteous one go up above the Haraberezaiti; above the Kinvad bridge; she places it in the presence of the heavenly Gods themselves.

31      (102)      “Uprises Vohu-manô from his golden seat; Vohu-manô exclaims: How hast thou come to us, thou Holy One, from that decaying world into this undecaying one?

32      (105)      “Gladly pass the souls of the righteous to the golden seat of Ahura-Mazda, to the golden seat of the Amesha-Spentas, to the Garôumânem [house of songs], the abode of Ahura-Mazda, the abode of the Amesha-Spentas, the abode of all the other holy beings.

33      (108)      “As to the godly man that has been cleansed, the wicked evil-doing Dævas tremble at the perfume of his soul after death, as doth a sheep on which a wolf is pouncing.

34      (110)      “The souls of the righteous are gathered together there: Nairyô-Sangha is with them: a messenger of Ahura-Mazda is Nairyô-Sangha.”

It is noteworthy, further, that in some codices of the Avesta is found this formula: “He has gained nothing who has not gained the soul: He shall gain nothing who shall not gain the soul.” The meaning is “gain a place in Paradise,”  and the passage looks very like an original form of a well-known Christian text.

For the rest, the Zendavesta, like most other Sacred Books, insists on the normal morals strenuously enough. It has strange special teachings as to the sacro-sanctity of the dog; and its veto alike on the burning and the burying of bodies  is peculiar to Mazdeism; but these beliefs do not seem to have affected later Mithraism; whereas probably its special stress on truthfulness—not paralleled in the Ten Commandments—was maintained. We cannot, indeed, tell how the Mithraic priests dealt with the special problems of the life of the Roman Empire; but we are entitled none the less to protest against the loose revival of unfounded and exploded charges against the cult. To this day we find Christian scholars either saying or hinting that Mithraism was signalised in the Roman period by human sacrifices. For this there is no justification.  The ecclesiastical historian Sokrates  does indeed allege that about the year 360 a temple of Mithra at Alexandria, long empty and neglected, was granted by Constantius to the Christians; that they found in it an adytum of vast depth, containing the skulls of many persons, old and young, who had been sacrificed to Mithra; and that the Christians paraded them through the city, whereupon there was a riot, in which Bishop George and many others were slain. But this narrative is unsupported even in ecclesiastical history, and is full of incredibilities. The “Pagans” in general are represented as taking arms to avenge an attack on the Mithraic sect, though the Mithraic temple is expressly declared to have been long deserted; and the emperor Julian, a Mithraist, is represented as writing a letter denouncing the Alexandrians for their conduct. Yet he merely speaks of the killing of George, where Sokrates alleges a wholesale massacre. The whole story savours of mere odium theologicum, and will not consist with any other accounts of Mithraic worship. We do know that during the whole of the first three or four centuries it was charged against the Christians, by Jews or Pagans, that they were wont to sacrifice a child at their mysteries.  That charge was doubtless false, but it was constantly made.

On the other hand, the only kind of record founded-on for the charge against Mithraism is one which rebuts it. Sainte-Croix, accepting the plainly worthless testimony of the ecclesiastical historian, referred  to a passage in the life of Commodus by Lampridius, in the Augustan history, in support of his insinuation that Mithraism involved human sacrifice. But this passage  explicitly says that Commodus “polluted the rites of Mithras by a real homicide, where it is usual for something to be said or done for the purpose of causing terror” (quum illic aliquid ad speciem timoris vel dici vel fingi soleat). The same scholar makes another reference which equally serves to confute him;  yet an English writer later speaks of “the dark and fearful mysteries” of Mithra, repeating the old insinuation.  Selden  quotes from Photius  a statement that men, women, and boys were sacrificed to Mithra; but that assertion also is plainly valueless, coming as it does from a Christian writer of the tenth century, and being absolutely without ancient corroboration. What seems to have happened was a symbolical sacrifice, perhaps followed up by a symbolical eating of the God’s image—proceedings which, there is good reason to suppose, occurred in the mysteries of the early Christians.

But there is far more testimony, such as it is, for the charge of infamous procedure against the Christians than against the Mithraists. The Mithraic mysteries, save for the fact that they involved real austerities and a scenic representation of death,  were no more dark and fearful than the Christian mysteries are known to have been, not to speak of what these are said to have been. There lies against them no such imputation of licence as was constantly brought against the midnight meetings of the Christians, or as is specifically brought by Paul against his own converts at Corinth. Their purpose was unquestionably moral as well as consolatory.  In the words of Suidas, the worshipper went through his trials in order that he should become holy and passionless. In the course of the initiation, as we know from the unwilling admiration of Tertullian,  the devotee, called the soldier of Mithra, was offered a crown, which it was his part to refuse, saying that Mithra was his crown. And everything points to the enunciation of a theory of expiation of and purification from sin, in which Mithra figured as Mediator and Saviour, actually undergoing a symbolic sacrifice, and certainly securing to his worshippers eternal life.  As to the doctrine of immortality being pre-Christian, it is now quite unnecessary to speak; and the whole Mithraic symbolism implies such a teaching. On most of the bull monuments, it will be remembered, there stand beside Mithra two figures, one holding a raised and one a lowered torch. These signified primarily sunrise and sunset, or rising spring sun and sinking autumn sun; but, as Lessing  long ago showed, they were also the ancient symbols for life and death, and would further signify the fall and return of the soul.

Nor was this the only point at which Mithraism is known to have competed with Christianity in what pass for its highest attractions. The doctrine of the Logos, the Incarnate Word or Reason, which Christianity absorbed through the Platonising Jews of Alexandria, was present in Mithraism, and of prior derivation. That Mithra was connected with “the Word” appears from the Avesta.  In the Vendîdâd, further,  Zarathustra is made to praise successively Mithra “of the most glorious weapons,” Sraosha, “the Holy One,” and “the Holy Word, the most glorious,” thus joining and in part identifying Mithra with the Word as well as joining him with the Holy Spirit. And Emanuel Deutsch  was of opinion that the Metatron  of the Talmud (whom he equates with the Ideas of Plato, the Logos of Philo, the “World of Aziluth” of the Kabbalists, the Sophia or Power of the Gnostics and the Nous of Plotinus)  was “most probably nothing but Mithra.”  As the Metatron is on the Jewish side identified with the “Angel” promised as leader and commander to the Hebrews in Palestine,  and that angel is quasi-historically represented by Joshua =Jesus, the chain of allusion from Mithra to the Christ is thus curiously complete. In respect of the concept of a Trinity, as we have already seen, the parallel continues. By the admission of a Catholic theologian, the Gods Ahura-Mazda, Sraosha, and Mithra constitute an ostensible trinity closely analogous to that of the later Christists;  and yet again Mithra, himself approaching to supreme status, rides to battle with Sraosha at his right and Rashnu at his left hand;  or else with Rashnu on his right, and Kista, the holy one (female) white-clothed, on his left.

There seems no good reason for supposing that the doctrines of the Logos and the Trinity reached the Persians through the Greeks: on the contrary, they probably acquired them from Babylonian sources, on which the Greeks also drew; and it was not improbably their version of the Logos idea that gave the lead to the Philonic and Christian form, in which the Word is explicitly “the light of the world.”

9. Mithraism and Christianity

Of course, we are told that the Mithraic rites and mysteries were borrowed and imitated from Christianity.  English scholars of good standing are still found to say that the Mithraic and other mysteries “furnish a strange and hardly accidental parody of the most sacred mysteries of Christianity.”  The refutation of this notion, as has been pointed out by M. Havet,  lies in the language of those Christian fathers who spoke of Mithraism. Three of them, as we have seen, speak of the Mithraic resemblances to Christian rites as being the work of devils. Now, if the Mithraists had simply imitated the historic Christians, the obvious course for the latter would be simply to say so. But Justin Martyr expressly argues that the demons anticipated the Christian mysteries and prepared parodies of them beforehand. “When I hear,” he says,  ”that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this.” Nobody now pretends that the Perseus myth, or the Pagan virgin myth in general, is later than Christianity. Justin Martyr, indeed, is perhaps the most foolish of the Christian fathers; but what he says about the anticipatory action of the demon or demons plainly underlies the argumentation also of Tertullian and Julius Firmicus.

When, again, Justin asserts  that the Mithraists in their initiation imitate not only Daniel’s utterance “that a stone without hands was cut out of a great mountain,” but “the whole of [Isaiah’s] words” (Isa. xxxiii, 13-19), he merely helps us to realise how much older than Christianity is that particular element of Christian symbolism which connects alike Jesus and Peter with the mystic Rock. That Mazdeism or Mithraism borrowed this symbol from Judaism, where it is either an excrescence or a totemistic survival,  is as unlikely as it is likely that the Hebrews borrowed it from Babylonia or Persia.  In Polynesian mythology, where (as also in the rites of human sacrifice) there are so many close coincidences with Asiatic ideas, it was told that the God Taaroa “embraced a rock, the imagined foundation of all things, which afterwards brought forth the earth and sea.”  Here again we are in touch with the Græcised but probably Semitic myth of the rock-born Agdestis, son of Jupiter.  Even the remarkable parallel between the myth of Moses striking the rock for water and a scene on one of the Mithraic monuments suggests rather a common source for both myths than a Persian borrowing from the Bible. In the monument, Mithra shoots an arrow at a rock, and water gushes forth where the arrow strikes. As the story of the babe Moses is found long before in that of Sargon,  so probably does the rock-story come from Central Asia.

The passage in Isaiah, which strongly suggests the Mithraic initiation, seems to have been tampered with by the Jewish scribes; and corruption is similarly suspected in the passage Gen. xlix, 24, where “the Shepherd, the Stone of Israel,” points to some credence latterly thrust out of Judaism. Above all, the so-called Song of Moses  (in which both Israel and his enemies figure as putting their faith in a divine “Rock,” and the hostile “Rock” is associated with a wine-sacrament) points to the presence of such a God-symbol in Hebrew religion long before our era. There is a clear Mazdean element, finally, in the allusion to the mystic stone in Zechariah,  the “seven eyes” being certainly connected with the Seven Amesha-Spentas, of whom Mithra on one view, and Ormazd on another, was chief.  And when we find in the epistles  phrases as to Jesus being a “living stone” and a “spiritual rock,” and read in the gospels  how Jesus said, “Thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,” we turn from the latter utterance, so obviously unhistorical, back to the Mithraic rite, and see in the mystic rock of Mithra, the rock from which the God comes—be it the earth or the cloud—the probable source alike of the Roman legend and the doctrine of the pseudo-Petrine and Pauline epistles.

The Mithraic mysteries, then, of the burial and resurrection of the Lord, the Mediator and Saviour; burial in a rock tomb and resurrection from that tomb; the sacrament of bread and water, the marking on the forehead with a mystic mark—all these were in practice, like the Egyptian search for the lost corpse of Osiris, and the representation of his entombment and resurrection, before the publication of the Christian Gospel of a Lord who was buried in a rock tomb, and rose from that tomb on the day of the sun, or of the Christian mystery of Divine communion, with bread and water or bread and wine, which last were before employed also in the mysteries of Dionysos, Sun-God and Wine-God, doubtless as representing his body and blood.  But even the eucharist of bread-and-wine, as well as a bread-and-meat banquet, was inferribly present in the Mithraic cultus,  for the Zoroastrian Hom or Haoma, identical with the Vedic Soma,  was a species of liquor, and figured largely in the old cult as in itself a sacred thing, and ultimately as a deity = the Moon = a king.  Indeed, this deification of a drink is held to be the true origin of the God Dionysos,  even as Agni is a deification of the sacrificial fire. And whereas the Mazdean lore associated the Haoma-Tree with the Tree of Life in Paradise,  so do we find the Catholic theologians making that predication concerning the Christian Eucharist.  The “cup” of Mithra had in itself a mystical significance: in the monuments we see drinking from it the sacred serpent, the symbol of wisdom and healing.  Again, as there is record of an actual eating of a lamb in early Christian mysteries—a detail still partly preserved in the Italian usage of blessing both a lamb and the baked figure of a lamb at the Easter season, but officially superseded by the wafer of the Mass—so in the old Persian cult the sacrificed flesh was mixed with bread and baked in a round cake called Myazd or Myazda,  and sacramentally eaten by the worshippers.

Nor was this all. Firmicus  informs us that the devil, in order to leave nothing undone for the destruction of souls, had beforehand resorted to deceptive imitations of the cross of Christ. Not only did they in Phrygia fix the image of a young man to a tree  in the worship of the Mother of the Gods, and in other cults imitate the crucifixion  in similar ways, but in one mystery in particular the Pagans were wont to consecrate a tree and, towards midnight, to slay a ram at the foot of it. This cult may or may not have been the Mithraic,  but there is a strong presumption that Mithraism included such a rite. We have seen that a ram-lamb was sacrificed in the Mithraic mysteries; and not only are there sacred trees on all the typical Mithraic monuments, but the God himself is represented as either re-born of or placed within a tree—here directly assimilating to Osiris and Dionysos and Adonis,  and pointing to the origins of the Christian Holy-Cross myth. The Christian assimilation of Mithraism is, however, still more clearly seen in the familiar Christian symbol in which Christ is represented as a lamb or ram, carrying by one forefoot a cross. We know from Porphyry  that in the mysteries “a place near the equinoctial circle was assigned to Mithra as an appropriate seat; and on this account he bears the sword of the Ram [Aries], which is a sign of Mars [Ares].”  The sword of the Ram, we may take it, was simply figured as the cross, since a sword is a cross.  Again, as we have seen, Porphyry explains  that “Mithra is the Bull Demiurgos and lord of generation.” Here then would be, as we have already seen, a symbolical slaying, in which the deity is sacrificed by the deity;  and we may fairly infer that the symbolic ram in turn would be sacrificed by the Mithraists on the same principle. Now, it appears to be, as we have said, the historic fact that among the early Christians a ram or lamb was sacrificed in the Paschal mystery. It is disputed between Greeks and Latins whether at one time the slain lamb was offered on the altar, together with the mystical body of Christ; but it is admitted by Catholic writers—and this, by the way, is the origin of a certain dispute about singing the Agnus Dei in church—that in the old Ordo Romanus a lamb was consecrated, slain, and eaten, on Easter Day, by way of a religious rite.  Of this lamb, too, the blood was received in a cup.  Everything thus goes to show not only that the Lamb in the early Christian cultus was a God-symbol from remote antiquity, but that it was regarded in exactly the same way as the symbolical lamb in the Mithraic cult.  In the Apocalypse, one of the earliest quasi-Christian documents, and one that exhibits to us the stage in which Jesuism and the Lamb-God-symbol were still held parts of Judaism, the Gentile differentiation being repudiated, we have the Slain Lamb-God described as having seven horns and seven eyes, “which are the seven spirits of God, sent forth unto all the earth,” and as holding in his right hand seven stars —that is to say, the seven planetary Mazdean “Amshaspands” or Amesha-Spentas, before mentioned, of which Mithra was the chief and as it were the embodiment.

10. Further Christian Parallels

Still further does the parallel hold. It is well known that whereas in the gospels Jesus is said to have been born in an inn stable, early Christian writers, as Justin Martyr  and Origen,  explicitly say he was born in a cave. Now, in the Mithra myth, Mithra is both rock-born and born in a cave; and the monuments show the new-born babe adored by shepherds who offer first-fruits.  And it is remarkable that whereas a cave long was (and I believe is) shown as the birthplace of Jesus at Bethlehem, Saint Jerome actually complained  that in his day the Pagans celebrated the worship of Tammuz (= Adonis), and presumably, therefore, the festival of the birth of the sun, Christmas Day, at that very cave.

Given these identities, it was inevitable that, whether or not Mithra was originally, or in the older Mazdean creed, regarded as born of a Virgin, he should in his western cultus come to be so regarded. As we saw, there was a primary tendency, Aryan as well as Semitic, to make the young God the son of the Supreme God, like Dionysos, like Apollo, like Herakles; and when Mithra became specially identified, like Dionysos, with the Phrygian God Sabazios,  who was the “child as it were of the [great] Mother,”  he necessarily came to hold the same relation to the Mother-Goddess.  But in all likelihood there were ancient Persian forms of the conception to start from. It seems highly probable that the birth-legend of the Persian Cyrus  was akin to or connected with the myth of Mithra,  Cyrus (Koresh) being a name of the sun,  and the legend being obviously solar. Thus it would tend to be told of Mithra that he was born under difficulties, like the other Sun-Gods;  and his being cave-born would make it the more easy.

It was further practically a matter of course that his mother should be styled Virgin, the precedents being uniform.  In Phrygia the God Acdestis or Agdistis, a variant of Attis, associated with Attis and Mithra in the worship of the Great Mother, is rock-born;  like Mithra he is twy-sexed, figuring in some versions as a female; and the coarse Greek story of the manner of his birth is evidently a myth framed to account for an epithet. Further, the Goddess Anahita or Anaitis, with whom Mithra was anciently paired, was preeminently a Goddess of fruitfulness and nutriency,  and as such would necessarily figure in her cultus as a Mother; and as Mithra never appears (save in worshipful metaphor) as a father, he would perforce rank as her son. Precisely so does Attis in the Orphic theosophy figure as the son of Athênê, the Virgin Goddess,  who in turn is possibly a variant of Anaitis and Tanith  Finally, as the preeminent spirit Sraosha (= Vohumano) was connected with Mithra,  so would there be a blending or assimilation of Mithra with Saoshyas or Saoshyant, the Saviour and Raiser of the Dead, who in the Parsee mythology is to be virgin-born, his mother miraculously conceiving him from the seed of Zarathustra.

As a result of all these myth-motives, we find Mithra figuring in the Christian empire in the fourth and fifth centuries, alongside of the Christ, as supernaturally born of a Virgin-Mother—a mortal maiden or a, Mother-Goddess—and of the Most High God;  and if the Christians made much of some occult thesis that Mithra was his own father, or otherwise the spouse of his mother, they were but keeping record of the fact that in this as in so many ancient cults, and more obscurely in their own, the God had been variously conceived as the Son and as the lover of the Mother-Goddess.  In all probability they took from, or adopted in emulation of, Mithraism the immemorial ritual of the birth of the Child-God; for in the Mithraic monuments we have the figure of the tree overshadowing the new-born child  even as it does in the early Christian sculptures.

So long as Mithraism was allowed to subsist, the competition continued. Even as Jesus in the historic creed makes the Descent to Hades, like so many elder Gods, so in the ancient Persian system Mithra was slain and passed to the under-world, this at the time of the autumnal equinox, when the sun enters Libra, the current month bearing Mithra’s name (Mihr). The evidence for the myth is peculiarly interesting, inasmuch as it is embodied in a tradition and a custom which have locally survived even the knowledge that there ever was such a deity. It is a Christian archæologist who writes that “Mihrgàn (or Mihrjàn) is the name of the sixteenth day of any month, and is the name of the seventh month of the solar year; and during its continuance the sun which enlightens the world is in the sign of Libra, which is the beginning of the autumnal season, and with the Persians ranks next in honour to the feast and holiday of the Nùrùz.”  Here, too, the public day is at the beginning and the courtiers’ day at the end of a festival week. In the late legend, Mithra being lost sight of, the autumnal festival was explained by a story that “the Persians had a king of the name of Mihr, who was a very great tyrant, and that in the middle of the month he arrived at the regions of torment, for which reason they gave the name of Mihrgàn, which signifies the death of a tyrannical king; for Mihr has been allowed to mean to die, and Gàn, a tyrannical king.”  The etymology is of course nonsense, Mihr being simply, as we have seen, the true Persian form of the God-name Mithra, after whom was named the seventh month of the solar year. And the clear inference is that in the old myth the God went to the underworld at the proper solar date, the autumnal equinox, perhaps to “rise again,” fittingly, at the vernal equinox.

Here we should have the proper pair of solar dates, which in the Christian cult are combined by making the God die and rise again at the spring equinox in the manner of Attis and Adonis and the other Gods of Vegetation; though on the other hand Jesus is tempted as the Sun-God by the Goat-God at the beginning of his career (Sun in Capricorn), and rides on two asses like Dionysos at the beginning of his decline (Sun in Cancer).  In the Roman Calendar we find still further traces of the old doubling in the setting of the Festival of the Transfiguration and the Festum Nominis Jesu on August 6th and 7th, and of the Assumption of Mary on August 15th; while the day of the Exaltatio Sacræ Crucis is September 14th, and that of St. Michael, the conqueror of the dragon of Hades, is September 29th. When we remember that the myth of the descent of Apollo to Hades was in time completely lost sight of by the Greeks, to the extent even of their forgetting that Admetus had been a name of Hades,  we can readily understand the similar process in the case of Mithra.

11. The Vogue of Mithraism

In view of this long series of signal parallels between the Mithraic and the Christian cults, it is difficult to doubt that one has imitated the other; and it may now be left to the candid reader to pass his own judgment on the theory that it was Mithraism which copied Christism. The Christian imitation took place, be it observed, because the features imitated were found by experience to be religiously attractive; Mithraism itself having, as we have seen, developed some of them on the lines of other Oriental cults. Its history, as far as we can trace it, is a series of adaptations to its environment. Mithraism in fact had spread in the west with just such rapidity as Christians have been wont to count miraculous in the case of their own creed. And we, looking back on Christian and other religious history with sociological eyes, can perfectly understand how such a cultus, with an elaborate ceremonial and an impressive initiation, with the attraction of august and solemn mysteries and the promise of immortal life, and with official encouragement as regarded the army, could spread throughout the Roman Empire in the age in which the primitive Roman religion crumbled away before the advance of far more highly specialised and complicated systems and a more philosophic thought.  So special was the favour accorded to it in Rome that a Mithræum was permitted to be dug in the Capitoline Hill under the Capitol, the most venerated spot in the city.  Above all was it popular in the army, which, though the type of the social disease, really seems to have been to some extent a school, albeit a savage one, of moral strength and order at a time when an appalling abjection was overtaking the Roman world, men reverencing rank as dogs reverence men. One of the first stages in the initiation, for men, consisted in the devotee’s receiving a sword, and being called a soldier of Mithra.  Hence the association of Mithra with Mars, and his virtual absorption of Janus, whose attributes he duplicated. Thus Mithraism was specially the faith of the soldiery;  and in doing honour to the Invincible Sun-God Mithra—Deo Soli Invicto Mithræ, as the monuments have it—the Emperor Constantine vied with the most loyal Mithraists long after his so-called conversion to Christianity.

The explanation of this phase seems to be that it was through oriental militarism that the cult reached the west. We have it from Plutarch  that Mithraism was first introduced to Rome through the Cilician pirates, whom Pompey put down; and it is known that those pirates were a confederation of soldiers and others formerly employed by Asian rulers (in particular by Mithradates, in whose army Mithraism would be the natural cult) and thrown on their own resources by the Roman conquest.  As such piracy was not reckoned discreditable, and Pompey took many of the defeated pirates under his patronage,  their religion had a good start with the Roman army, in which so many of them entered, and which was for centuries afterwards so largely recruited from the East. It is very likely that the Roman authorities from the first encouraged the cult  as specially fitted for the soldiery. But the cult was not confined to them.

Among the non-military congregations, we learn from the inscriptions, there were both slaves and freedmen,  so that the cult was on that side as receptive as the Christian. But in one other respect it seems to have been less so. Among all the hundreds of recovered inscriptions there is no mention of a priestess or woman initiate, or even of a donatress; though there are dedications pro salute of women, and one inscription telling of a Mithræum erected by the priest and his family.  It would seem then that, despite the allusion of Tertullian to the “virgins”  of Mithra, women held no recognised place in the main body of the membership.  It would seem, indeed, that inasmuch as the cult was conjoined in the West with that of the Great Mother, Cybelê, as in the East with that of Anaitis, women must have been thus associated with it;  but if they were apart from the Mithraists proper the latter would be to that extent socially disadvantaged in their competition with Christianity, however appropriate their worship may have been to the life of the army.

Such an attitude of exclusiveness is probably to be set down in part to the spirit of asceticism which, on Tertullian’s testimony, marked the Mithraic cultus as it did the Manichæans  and several of the Christian sects. Of none of the ancients can sexual asceticism be predicated more certainly than of Julian, the most distinguished Mithraist of all; and such facts dispose of the Christian attempt to charge upon the rival religion a cultus of sensuality. On a picture of the “banquet of the seven priests” in the Mithraic catacomb  there are found phrases of the “Eat and drink, for to-morrow we die” order;  and these may stand for an antinomian tendency such as was early associated with Christism;  though it is not at all unlikely that they were inscribed in a hostile spirit by the hands of Christian invaders of the Mithraic retreat. However that may be, there is absolutely no evidence that Mithraism ever developed such disorders as ultimately compelled the abolition of the love-feast among the Christians. The Mithraic standards, in fact, seem to have been the higher; though both cults alike were sustained mainly by the common people, apart from the special military vogue of the older system. A Christian historian has even held it likely that “what won sympathy for the worship of Mithra in Rome was the fundamental ethical thought that the deity is set in constant strife with evil......The pure and chaste God of light, of whom no myth related anything but virtue and strife against evil, won many hearts from sin-stained Olympus Above.....all, the most ideal characters in the history of imperial Rome gave their protection to the Mithra-worship.”

In all probability it was the poorer cult of the two, lacking as it did the benefactions of rich women. It has been inferred, from the special developments of Mithraism among the soldiers and the Syrian traders who followed the camp, that it was primarily, in the West, a religion of the humble,  like Christianity, and that like Christianity it only slowly attained wealth. But inasmuch as it never imitated the propagandist and financial methods which the Church took over from the later Judaism of the Dispersion, and always maintained a highly esoteric character, it escaped certain of the lowering forces of the Christist movement. One of these was the practice of systematic almsgiving, which attracted a motley mass of both sexes to the Christian churches. Mutual aid there probably was among the Mithraists, who in their capacity of organised groups or sodalitia were able to own their congregational property;  but their different religious outlook and tradition excluded large financial developments.

12. Absorption in Christianity

Now, however, arises the great question, How came such a cultus to die out of the Roman and Byzantine empire after making its way so far and holding its ground so long? The answer to that question has never, I think, been fully given, and is for the most part utterly evaded, though part of it has been suggested often enough. The truth is, as aforesaid, that Mithraism was not overthrown; it was merely transformed.

It had gone too far to be overthrown: the question was whether it should continue to rival Christianity or be absorbed by it. While Julian lived, Mithraism had every prospect of increased vogue and prestige; for the Emperor expressly adopted it as his own cultus. “To thee,” he makes Hermes say to him, “I have given to know Mithras, thy Father. Be it thine to follow his precepts, so that he may be unto thee, all thy life long, an assured harbour and refuge; and, when thou must needs go hence, full of good hope, thou mayest take this God as a propitious guide.”  It is the very tone and spirit of the cult of the Christ; and as we have seen, the Christian Fathers with almost one consent saw in Mithraism the great rival of their own worship. The spirit of exclusiveness which Christianity had inherited from Judaism—a spirit alien to the older paganism but essential to the building up of an organised and revenue-raising hierarchy in the later Roman empire—made a struggle between the cults inevitable.

The critical moment in the career alike of Mithraism and of Christianity was the death of Julian, who, though biassed in favour of all the older Gods, gave a special adherence to the War-God Mithra. Had Julian triumphed in the East and reigned thirty years, matters might have gone a good deal differently with Christianity. His death, however, was peculiarly disastrous to Mithra-ism; for he fell at the hands of the Persian foe, the most formidable enemy of the later empire; and Mithra was “the Persian” par excellence, and the very God of the Persian host. There can be little doubt that Jovian’s instant choice of Christianity as his State creed was in large measure due to this circumstance; and that at such a juncture the soldiery would be disposed to acquiesce, seeking a better omen. Yet, even apart from this, we are not entitled to suppose that Mithraism could ever have become the general faith, save by very systematic and prolonged action on the part of the State, to the end of assimilating its organisation with that of the Church.

Religions, we say, like organisms and opinions, struggle for survival, and the fittest survive. That is to say, those survive which are fittest for the environment—not fittest from the point of view of another and higher environment. What then was the religion best adapted to the populations of the decaying Roman Empire, in which ignorance and mean subjection were slowly corroding alike intelligence and character, leaving the civilised provinces unable to hold their ground against the barbarians? An unwarlike population, for one . thing, wants a sympathetic and emotional religion; and here, though Mithraism had many attractions, Christianity had more, having sedulously copied every one of its rivals, and developed special features of its own. The beautiful and immortal youth of the older sun-worships, Apollo, Mithras, Dionysos, was always soluble into a mysterious abstraction a in the Christian legend the God was humanised in the most literal way; and for the multitude the concrete deity must needs replace the abstract. The gospels gave a literal story: the Divine Man was a carpenter, and ate and drank with the poorest of the poor. So with the miracles. The priesthoods of the older religions often, if not always, explained to the initiated in the mysteries the mystical purport which was symbolised by the concrete myths; and in some early Christian writers, as notably Origen, we find a constant attempt so to explain away concrete miracle and other stories as allegories. But gradually the very idea of allegory died out of the Christian intelligence; and priests as well as people came to take everything literally and concretely, till miracles became everyday occurrences. This was the religion for the Dark Ages, for the new northern peoples which had not gone through the Pagan evolution of cults and symbolisms and mysticisms, but whose own traditional faith was too vague and primitive to hold its ground against the elaborate Christian theology and ritual.

We may say indeed that the preference for such a God as Jesus over such a one as Mithra was in full keeping with the evolution of æsthetic taste in the Christian period. Some may to-day even find it hard to conceive how the Invincible God of the Sun could ever call forth the love and devotion given to the suffering Christ. As we have seen, Mithra too was a suffering God, slain and rising again, victorious over death; so that to him went out in due season all the passion of the weeping worship of Adonis; but it is in his supernal and glorious aspect that the monuments persistently present him; and for the decaying ancient world it was still possible to take some joy in the vision of beauty and strength. Many there must still have been who wondered, not at the adoration given to the mystically figured Persian, beautiful as Apollo, triumphant as Arês, but at the giving of any similar devotion to the gibbeted Jew, in whose legend figured tax-gatherers and lepers, epileptics and men blind from birth, domestic traitors and cowardly disciples. Ethical teaching there was in Mithraism; and for the Mithraists it would be none the less moving as coming from an eternal conqueror, the type of dominion. But even as the best Mithraic monuments themselves tell of the decline of the great art of Greece, so the art of Christism tells of a hastening dissolution in which æsthetic sense and craftsmanship alike sink to the levels of barbarism. In the spheres alike of Byzantium and of papal Rome, the sculptured Mithra would yearly meet fewer eyes that looked lovingly on grace and delightedly on beauty; more and more eyes that recoiled pessimistically from comeliness and turned vacantly from allegorical or esoteric symbols.

The more we study the survival of Christianity, the more clearly do we see that, in spite of the stress of ecclesiastical strife over metaphysical dogmas, the hold of the creed over the people was a matter of concrete and narrative appeal to every-day intelligence. Byzantines and barbarians alike were held by literalism, not by the unintelligible: for both alike the symbol had to become a fetish; and for the Dark Ages the symbol of the cross was much more plausibly appealing than that of the God slaying the zodiacal bull. Other substitutions followed the same law of psychological economy. Thus it was that Christianity turned the mystic rock, Petra, first into the Christ,  but later into the chief disciple Petros; made an actual tunic of the mystic seamless robe of the Osirian and Mazdean mysteries, the symbol of light and sky; caused to be performed at a wedding-feast, for the convenience of the harder drinkers among the guests, the Dionysiak miracle of turning water into wine; made Jesus walk on the water not merely in poetry and symbol, as did Poseidon, but for the utilitarian purpose of trying Peter’s faith and saving him; and put the scourge of Osiris in the Lord’s hand for the castigation of those who defiled the temple by unspiritual traffic.  There can be little question as to which plane of doctrine was the more popular. The Christian tales, in a different moral climate, represent exactly the commonplace impulse which built up the bulk of Greek mythology by way of narratives that reduced to an anecdotal basis mystic sculptures and mysterious rites.

But that was not all. The fatal weakness of Mithraism, as pitted against Christianity, was that its very organisation was esoteric. For, though an esoteric grade is a useful attraction, and was so employed by the Church, a wholly esoteric institution can never take hold of the ignorant masses. Mithraism was always a sort of freemasonry,  never a public organisation.  What the Christians did was to start, like Rome herself, from a republican basis, combining the life-elements of the self-supporting religious associations of the Greeks with the connecting organisation of the Jewish synagogues,  and then to proceed to build up a great organisation on the model of that of republican and imperial Rome—an organisation so august for an era of twilight that the very tradition of it could serve the later world to live by for a thousand years. The Christian Church renewed the spell of imperial Rome, and brought actual force to make good intellectual weakness. And so we read that the Mithraic worship was by Christian physical force suppressed in Rome and Alexandria, in the year 376 or 377,  at a time when, as the inscriptions show, it was making much headway. At Rome, the deed was done by the order of the Christian prefect Gracchus; but the proceeding was specifically one of ecclesiastical malice, since even so pious an emperor as Gratian dared not yet decree a direct assault upon an esteemed pagan cult. But, once begun, the movement of destruction spread, and the Church which still makes capital of the persecution it suffered at pagan hands, outwardly annihilated the rival it could not spiritually defeat. In an old Armenian history of the reign of Tiridates,  it is told how St. Gregory destroyed in the town of Pakaiaridj the temple of Mihr “called the son of Aramazd,” took its treasure “for the poor,” and consecrated the ground to the Church.

But such acts of piratical violence, which had been made easy by the earlier check to Mithraism in its special field, the army, only obscured the actual capitulation made by the Church to the Mithraic as to the other cults which it absorbed. Even the usages which it could not conveniently absorb, and therefore repudiated, prevailed within its own fold for centuries, so that in the eighth century we find Church Councils commanding proselytes no more to pay worship to fanes and rocks.  And there were other survivals.  But all that was a trifle as compared with the actual survival of Mithraic symbols and rites in the very worship of Christ. As to the sacrifice of the lamb we have seen; and though at the end of the seventh century a general Council ventured to resist the general usage of picturing Christ as a lamb,  the veto was useless; the symbol survived. Some Mithraic items went, but more remained. The Christian bishop went through a ceremony of espousing the Church, following the old mystery in which occurred the formula, “Hail to thee, new spouse; hail, new light.”  His mitre was called a crown, or tiara, which answered to the headdress of Mithra and the Mithraic priests, as to those of the priests of Egypt; he wore red military boots, now said to be “emblematical of that spiritual warfare on which he had entered,” in reality borrowed from the military worship of Mithra, perhaps as early as Jovian. And the higher mysteries of communion, divine sacrifice, and resurrection, as we have seen, were as much Mithraic as Christist, so that a Mithraist could turn to the Christian worship and find his main rites unimpaired, lightened only of the burden of initiative austerities, stripped of the old obscure mysticism, and with all things turned to the literal and the concrete, in sympathy with the waning of knowledge and philosophy throughout the world. The Mithraic Christians actually continued to celebrate Christmas Day as the birthday of the sun, despite the censures of the Pope;  and their Sunday had been adopted by the supplanting faith. When they listened to the Roman litany of the holy name of Jesus, they knew they were listening to the very epithets of the Sun-God—God of the skies, purity of the eternal light, king of glory, sun of justice, strong God, father of the ages to come, angel of great counsel. In the epistles of Paul they found Christian didactics tuned to the very key of their mystical militarism. Their priests had been wont to say that “he of the cap” was “himself a Christian.”  They knew that “the Good Shepherd” was a name of Apollo;  that Mithra, like Hermes and Jesus, carried the lamb  on his shoulders; that both were mediators, both creators, both judges of the dead. Like some of their sacred caves, and so many pagan temples, the Christian churches looked toward the east. Their soli-lunar midnight worship was preserved in midnight services, which carried on the purpose of the midnight meetings of the early Christians, who had simply followed Essenian, Egyptian, Asiatic, and Mithraic usage; there being no basis for the orthodox notion that these secret meetings were due to fear of persecution.  Their myazdor mizd, or sacred cake, was preserved in the mass, which possibly copied the very name.

Above all, their mystic Rock, Petra, was presented to them in the concrete as the rock Peter, the foundation of the Church. It has been elsewhere shown  that the myth of the traitorous Peter connects with those of Proteus and Janus as well as with that of Mithra, inasmuch as Janus also had “two faces,” led the twelve months as Mithra presided over the zodiacal signs and Peter over the twelve apostles, and, like Proteus and Peter and the Time-God in the Mithraic cult, bore the heavenly keys. Here again the mythic development of Peter probably follows on that of Jesus; at all events Jesus too has constructively several of the attributes of Proteus-Janus: as “I am the door”;  ”I stand at the door and knock”; “I am in the Father and the Father in me” (=Janus with the two faces, old and young, seated in the midst of the twelve altars); “I have the keys of death and of Hades.” The function of Janus as God of War is also associable with the dictum, “I came not to bring peace, but a sword.” Finally, the epiphany is in January. But there is to be noted the further remarkable coincidence that in the Egyptian Book of the Dead Petra is the name of the divine doorkeeper of heaven—a circumstance which suggests an ancient connection between the Egyptian and Asiatic cults. On the other hand, the early Christian sculptures which represent the story of Jesus and Peter and the cock-crowing suggest that it originated as an interpretation of some such sculpture; and the frequent presence of the cock, as a symbolic bird of the Sun-God,  in Mithraic monuments, raises again a presumption of a Mithraic source. There is even some ground for the view that the legend of St. George is but an adaptation of that of Mithra;  and it is not unlikely that St. Michael, who in the Christian east is the bearer of the heavenly keys, is in this aspect an adaptation from the Persian War-God.  The dragon-slayer clearly derives from Babylon.

From the Mithraists too, apparently, came the doctrine of purgatory,  nowhere set forth in the New Testament save in the spurious epistle of Peter.  And though their supreme symbol of Mithra slaying the bull was perforce set aside, being incapable of assimilation, they knew that the Virgin Mother was but a variant of the Goddess-Mothers whose cults had at various times been combined with those of Mithra, and some of whose very statues served as Madonnas;  even as the doctrines of the Logos and the Holy Spirit and the Trinity were borrowed from their own and older Asiatic cults and those of Egypt alike.

It has chanced, indeed, that those Christian sects which most fully adopted the theosophies of Paganism have disappeared under the controlling power of the main organisation, which, as we have said, held by a necessity of its existence to a concrete and literal system, and for the same reason to a rigidly fixed set of dogmas. We know that the Gnostics adopted Mithra, making his name into a mystic charm, from which (spelling it Μειθρας) they got the number 365, as from the mystic name Abraxas.  Manichæism, too, the greatest and most tenacious of all the Christian schisms, carried on its ascetic front the stamp of the Persian environment in which it arose, and visibly stands for a blending of the ascetic and mystic elements of Mithraism and Christianity. For the celebration of the slain Christ it practically substituted that of the slain Manes, at the paschal season; reducing the crucifixion to a mere allegory of the cult of vegetation, and identifying the power and wisdom of the Saviour-God with the Sun and Moon.  Neither its adherents nor its opponents avowed that it was thus a fresh variant of Mithraism; but the Mithraists cannot have failed to see and signalise alike the heretical and the orthodox adaptation, and it is clear that Mithraism not only entered into Manichæism but prepared the way for it in the West.  The more reason why Mithras should be tabooed by the organised Church. Thus, then, we can understand why the very name seemed at length to be blotted out. And yet, despite all forcible suppression, not only do the monuments of the faith endure to tell how for centuries it distanced its rival; not only do its rites and ceremonies survive as part of the very kernel of the Christian worship; but its record remains unknowingly graven in the legend on the dome of the great Christian temple of Rome, destined to teach to later times a lesson of human history, and of the unity of human religion, more enduring than the sectarian faith that is proclaimed within.

13. The Point of Junction

And still we have to note what appears to be the strangest concrete survival of all, cherished where we should least count on finding it. At Rome there is religiously preserved a chair which is alleged to be that of St. Peter. It is significant of the measure of knowledge and judgment with which the Church has been governed that this belief should subsist concerning a chair which ostensibly bears representations of the signs of the zodiac, and the twelve labours of the Sun-God.  Peter, we are to suppose, having found his way to Rome, and established a Latin Church with the facility which belonged to inspiration and the gift of tongues, proceeded to commission a sculptor, Pagan or Christian, to carve him an episcopal chair, ornamented with the best-known symbols of the heathenism which Christians were supposed to be bent on overthrowing. Such a legend need not be discussed.

We have already seen how at a variety of points the myth of Peter is a development of that of Jesus, and how, alike as leader of the twelve, fisherman, “rock,” and bearer of the keys of heaven and hell, the first disciple assimilates with Mithra and Janus, who severally or jointly had those attributes, and whose joint cult acquired a special status in the Roman empire as being at once that of the army and (on the side of Janus) that of the immemorial city. And whereas the legendary Peter thus closely conformed in symbol to the “God out of the Rock,” the chief priest of the Mithraic cult at Rome compared no less closely with the Christian bishop, ultimately distinguished as Papa = Father. Among the grades of the Mithraists were that of the Patres Sacrorum, or Fathers of the Mysteries, and that of the Pater Patrum, Father of the Fathers, whose seat was at Rome; and while there was a sacred Mithraic cave under the Capitol, we know from monumental remains that Mithraic worship was conducted on the Vatican Mount, where also was a temple of the Mother-Goddess Cybelê, and where also dwelt the Archi-Gallus, or arch eunuch, the head of the cult of Cybelê and Attis.  As the ruling tendency of the later paganism was to combine or “syndicate” all the leading cults, and as Roman patricians were then wont to hold at once the priesthoods of various Gods, it is not surprising to find that in the year 376, under the emperors Valens and Valentinian, one Sextilius Agesilaus Ædesius was Pater Patrum Dei Solis Invicti Mithræ, “born again for eternity through the tauroboliumand the criobolium,” and at the same time priest of Hecate and of Bacchus, as well as an adorer of the Mother of the Gods and Attis.  On the Vatican Mount, then, if anywhere, would be the seat of the pagan Pope who looked to the Sun-God as his Saviour, and worshipped the Mother of the Gods.

It has been unsuspectingly asserted on the Christian side that the pagans raised their later shrines on the Vatican Mount by way of profaning the site of the grave of St. Peter. We are now entitled to conclude that, on the contrary, the grave of St. Peter was located by tradition on the Vatican Mount because that was the Roman site of the pagan cult to which the myth of Peter was specially assimilated. His grave was assigned where his legend was adumbrated, and, it may be, where his chair was found. For there is some reason to suppose that the “chair of St. Peter” is simply the chair of the Pater Patrum, the supreme pontiff of Mithra at Rome.

In reality, the “Chair of St. Peter” is a somewhat nondescript object, of which the ornamentation does not fully exhibit either the twelve signs of the zodiac or the twelve labours of Herakles. It was exhibited to the public in 1867, photographed, and at that time examined by the eminent archæologist de Rossi, who pronounced it to be in part of old oak much worn, containing a number of inlaid panels of carved ivory in the classic style, representing the labours of Hercules; the whole structure, however, having been renewed by supports and cross-pieces of acacia-wood, of which the ornamentation is medieval.  In Rossi’s opinion the older portions probably formed originally the curial chair of a senator; and it may be that the whole thing is thus a fortuitous importation, like so many other ecclesiastical relics. But there is an obvious possibility that it is a relic of a pre-Christian cult; and this is rather more likely than would be the sanctification of a mere senator’s chair.

The ivory panels, eighteen in number, and not easy to decipher in a photograph, answer in part to the labours of Herakles; a few have simply the zodiacal signs from which the legend of the twelve labours was originally framed; some suggest rather the labours of Perseus; and some closely resemble episodes in the Mithraic monuments. It is not impossible, then, that the whole is an ancient artist’s combination, for a syncretic cult, of a number of the symbols of oriental sun-worship, to which all three legends belong. The myth of Perseus (perhaps = the Persian) is at bottom identical with that of Herakles; and in Rome the Mithraists would be very ready to bracket the later conquering Sun-God with the older, the more so because their monuments presented scenes of the same order, and conjunction of cults was the fashion of the day. The old Roman Hercules, it will be remembered, was a quite different deity from the Grecian Herakles, who was a variant of the Semitic Melkarth and Samson; and though that Herakles was worshipped under the later pagan emperors by his Latin name, it does not appear that at Rome his cult was latterly flourishing. Tertullian indeed asserts that in his day there has been seen (vidimus) a man burnt alive as Hercules (= Herakles);  but though this was a ritual sacrifice its solitary celebration tells rather of a Roman show than of a cult. There were two shrines of Hercules Victor on the Capitoline Hill, and some three other aedes in other districts;  but the inscriptions of the period show no such interest in his cult as in those of Mithra and other eastern deities. There was in fact no ritualistic worship of Hercules or Herakles at Rome; nothing to account for the use of such a chair; whereas the mysteries of Mithra were among the most elaborate then in existence, and the Mithraic priesthood one of the most august. Finally, we know from Porphyry, and from the monuments,  that Mithra was habitually represented in the midst of the zodiacal circle, so that the pretended Petrine chair is in every way congruous with his worship. The fact that, in the Mithraic monuments, the zodiac begins with Aquarius, who in ancient art is represented somewhat as a fisherman, would of course appeal to the champions of Peter, whose ancient festival at Rome (Jan. 18) coincided with the sun’s entering Aquarius in the calendar: and it is the historic fact that the Mithraic order of the zodiac, beginning on the right with Aquarius and ending on the left with Capricorn, was imitated in Christian art.

If, as we have surmised, an official substitution of Christism for Mithraism began under Jovian when the latter cult was discredited for Roman purposes by the defeat and death of Julian at the hands of the Persians, it is likely enough that an official change of the kind was effected at Rome, the Mithraic Pater being either superseded or simply Christianised. In taking over the status of the Mithraic pontiff, the Christian Papa of Rome would acquire whatever remained of his influence in the army and in the civil service, besides completing the process of uniting in his own person the symbolisms in virtue of which he was head of the visible Church. It was thus in many ways fitting that he should take to himself the actual chair of the Pater Patrum. However that may be, the historical and documentary facts enable us to infer broadly the line of adaptation of Mithraism to the Christian cult. It was presumably thus:—

1. Before the gospels were written, Jesus as “Lamb” was assimilated to Mithra in respect (a) of his attributes of “Seven Spirits” and “seven stars”; (b) of his symbol of the Rock; and (e) of the mystic keys borne by the Time-God in his mysteries. In all three cases there seem to have been ancient Judaic myths to proceed upon.

2. The resurrection ritual, with its rock tomb, and the eucharist of bread and wine, may have been equally ancient even in Jewry; but there is reason to suppose that both were consciously assimilated to the Mithraic mysteries.

3. As the Mithraic Pater Patrum assumed the symbols of the God, and the Christian bishop of Rome imitated the Pater Patrum, the tradition came to transfer from Jesus to Peter, the reputed founder of the Roman see, the attributes of the Persian God, and of those with whom he was identified in Rome. Thus whereas Jesus had been key-bearer and Rock before the gospels were current, Peter finally was foisted on the gospel in both capacities, while the more exclusively divine attribute of headship of the Seven Spirits was practically dropped from Christian doctrine; and even the symbol of the lamb was discountenanced. They had done their work, and were finally both incongruous and inconvenient.

VI. The Religions Of Ancient America

1. American Racial Origins

In the study of the native religions of North and South America, there is a special attraction bound up with the special perplexity of the subject. These religions, like the peoples which have held them, seem to stand historically apart from the rest of humanity, unrelated, underived, independent. The first question that occurs to the ethnologist when he looks at the native American races is, How and when did they get there? With which of the other human families are they most nearly connected? In the present state of knowledge, we still infer a “unity” in the human race, and decline to believe that different human species were independently evolved from lower forms in different continents, acquiring the same physical structure under widely varying conditions.  The suggestion to this effect by Waitz  represents the state of speculation before the bearings of the Darwinian theory had been realised.

It is therefore fitting that ethnologists should try to trace a connection between the native races of America and the races of Asia, which are the nearest to them in geographical position. Until that hypothesis is either established or overthrown, our anthropology and our moral science must remain in large part unsettled. It has been argued that “we may safely leave to ethnologists the task of deciding whether the whole human race descends from one original couple or from many; for, spiritually speaking, humanity in any case is one. It is one same spirit that animates it and is developed in it; and this, the incontestable unity of our race, is likewise the only unity we need care to insist on.”  But this defines rather the theological than the scientific attitude: for the very question whether an alleged spiritual unity is independent of a biological or genealogical unity is one of the preliminary problems of true “spiritual” science.

As we go into detail, we shall see some remarkable coincidences between American and Asiatic and European and Polynesian religious systems; and our conception of human nature must alter a good deal according as we decide that certain peculiar superstitions and ritual practices were reached alike by various races who grew separately out of pre-human species, and these out of still lower species, in different parts of the world, without intermixture; or decide that the whole of the man-like family developed interconnectedly over one area, and that the different races now existing did not branch off from the central stem till they had already acquired what we call human characteristics—that is, until they had reached the stage of speech, weapons, and fire, at which they probably had “religion.”

Suppose, for instance, that the American races came many thousands of years ago from Asia, and that they are kindred to the earlier Asiatic races: they would already have the germs of myths and a certain religious bias in common with peoples whose descendants subsist in Asia; and the coincidences in their religion would have to be pronounced historical, that is, they would represent a sequence of phenomena substantially determined by one original set of conditions within a given area and territory. If, on the other hand, we suppose that evolution proceeded in different parts of the planet and in widely different environments on identical lines from the lowest forms of life through many others, up to the anthropoid and the human, our whole conception of evolutionary law is affected, and that in turn must affect our philosophy. Looking inductively for evidence, we find what appear to be clear traces of the existence of man in the Mississippi valley between fifty and sixty thousand years ago, or perhaps even in the “inter-glacial” period. Without deciding as to times, it would seem certain that palæolithic man, whether by way of Behring Strait or of Greenland and Labrador, peopled America from Asia or Western Europe;  and there are some grounds for inferring two distinct racial movements.  But to whatever conclusions the palæologist may come on that head,  the original scientific and logical veto on the hypothesis of two or more independent evolutions of the human species must for the present hold good.

However remote be the time of the first migration, then, we are shut up to the assumption that the American races derive from Asia, either directly or by way of Polynesia,  since the alternative is a hypothesis of a human evolution from pre-human forms in the New World, with the result of yielding an identical human species, while the fauna and flora in general are markedly different. As to the possibility of such an evolution in America, Haeckel gives an emphatic negative. Putting the two hypotheses of immigration from north-east Asia and from Polynesia, he adds: “In any case the original inhabitants of America came from the Old World, and are certainly not, as some suppose, evolved from American apes. Catarrhine or small-nosed apes have at no period existed in America.”  The fact that men are so much alike in the two hemispheres, while the animals are so widely different, is a proof that the former are not autochthonous in America.

Nor is there any physical difficulty over the hypothesis that the American races proceeded, by successive waves of emigration, from Asia.  At Behring Strait Asia and America are almost within sight of each other; and at one time they were united. And if we suppose a migration of tribes like the Kamtskadals, who easily bear extreme cold, being but slightly civilised, we dispose of all such difficulties as the suggestion that pastoral Mongols would never have crossed without some of their animals. Prescott, however, remarks that “it would be easy for the inhabitant of Eastern Tartary or Japan to steer his course from islet to islet, quite across to the American shore, without being on the ocean more than two days at a time”;  and this hypothesis is open.  The question is one for the exact solution of which we have not sufficient materials; and it must be admitted that some ethnologists in the past came to their conclusions lightly. It has been said of Pickering, for instance, that he set up a connection between the Malay and the Californian because each had an open countenance, one wife, and no tomahawk.  Happily we need not resort to such inductions as these. Nor need we be deterred from the scientific search by the fact that some of the guesses made have been wildly absurd. There is said to be widely current in Peru a legend, fully believed by the natives, that the name of the first Inca, Manco Capac, arose in the actual advent of a shipwrecked Englishman, who got to be known as Ingasman, and who married the daughter of one Cocapac, his son being accordingly called Ingasman Cocapac, whence the name and title Inca Manco Capac.  That is droll enough; but we need not therefore proceed with Dr. Réville dogmatically to decide that “everything shows that the civilisations of Mexico and Peru are autochthonous, springing from the soil itself.”  If it be meant merely that the higher forms of those civilisations (for there were many separate processes) may have subsisted for many centuries without foreign influence, there is no dispute; but the statement as it stands is an unwarranted assertion of a separate human evolution from pre-human forms.

In the nature of the case, the primary separation of the American from the Asiatic races being admittedly very remote, there are not many close parallels to be expected. A number of extraordinary correspondences, however, have been traced, which point to migrations posterior to the Stone Ages. Take that, for instance, between the Aztec calendar signs and the Mongolian zodiac. “The symbols in the Mongolian calendar are borrowed from animals. Four of the twelve are the same as the Aztec. Three others are as nearly the same as the different species of animals in the two hemispheres would allow. The remaining five refer to no creature then found in Anahuac. The resemblance went as far as it could.”  And no less remarkable is the “analogy between the Mexican system of reckoning years by cycles and that still in use over a great part of Asia,” seeing that “this complex arrangement answers no useful purpose, inasmuch as mere counting by numbers, or by signs numbered in regular succession, would have been a far better arrangement.”  Such a correspondence must be allowed to count for much; and there is also a remarkable, though perhaps not a conclusive, resemblance between the Aztec, pre-Aztec, and Peruvian temple-pyramids and those of Mesopotamia,  which derived from the earlier Akkadians or Sumerians. Ruins of these still subsist in Central America and Peru which can be compared with the records of those of Babylonia and the one example at Saqqara in Egypt.  Those temples or “mountain houses” doubtless began as graves, and grew into great mounds of earth, like those found in the Mississippi valley;  and the Asiatic like the Mexican pyramid was latterly one of several stages or terraces.  Five seems to have been long a common number in Asia, the Babylonian number seven being reached only at a late period;  and five was the number of stages or stories in the great temple of Huitzilopochtli, the Mexican national God.  In the fact that such pyramid temples, or tombs of the same type—the former often carefully covered with masonry, and having likewise in some cases five stages—are found in many of the South Sea Islands,  we have a fresh reason for supposing an ancient distribution of races eastwards from Asia, in repeated waves of migration.  So, too, we are entitled to surmise kinship, when we find that the Mexicans and some Native American tribes  had a fixed usage of throwing the first morsels of their meals into the fire;  that something like this is the practice of the islanders of Lamotrek in the Carolines  and those of Efate in the New Hebrides;  and that many Tungusian, Mongolian, and Turkish tribes persistently do the same thing to this day;  and it is difficult to believe that the peculiar usages of sacrificing a “messenger” or “ambassador” to the Sun, painting him red, and hanging up his and other victims’ skins, stuffed, as possessing a sacred efficacy,  were independently evolved in the two hemispheres. Even the practice of scalping seems to be peculiar to the Native Americans and the kindred Polynesians, and, in a modified form,  to the Mongols;  and, as we shall see, the Mexicans, like the ancient Semites and their Sumer-Akkadian teachers, passed their children “through the fire” to the Fire-God. What is more significant, they had the Semitic usage of making certain of their special sacrificial observances last for five days.

There are remarkable concrete parallels, also, in the religious practices and symbolisms of Asia and Mexico, apart from those which may be taken as universal. Thus a stone or metal mirror was the symbol, and the source of the name, of the Mexican God Tezcatlipoca; and it is also the outstanding symbol in Japanese Shintoism,  recognisably a very primitive Asiatic cult. It is told, again, of the national God and War-God Huitzilopochtli that, when the people came to Mexico from their home, his wooden image with certain war-emblems was carried by four priests in an ark or chest, called the Seat of God. Here we have a widespread usage;  but it is significant that it is found in some closely similar form among Mongols, Chinese, and Japanese. So with the casting of children’s horoscopes.  More specific is the parallel between certain Mexican usages and those of the Buddhist priests of Thibet and Japan—such as red and yellow headdresses and black robes,  which were in all likelihood pre-Buddhistic. Singularly suggestive of Buddhist contacts, however, are a number of Mexican sculptures: many figures of Quetzalcoatl are practically identical with the established type of Buddha; and other carvings show hardly less close parallels.  But no less significant of a general Asiatic connection, perhaps, is a circumstance which has not been much considered by the ethnologists, though it has been noted by the anthropologists—the fact, namely, that both in ancient Asia and in ancient America men kept records by means of knots in strings.  The Chinese in old times are known to have done so;  and it is told of he Dravidian Khonds of Orissa that when brought to European knowledge sixty years ago they “kept all accounts by knots on strings,” and conceived of their Gods as recording men’s faults in the same fashion.  This would seem to be exactly the method of mnemonics used by the Peruvians when they were discovered by the Spaniards, their quipus being described in the same terms; and there is evidence that the same device was used in Central America, and perhaps among the Tlascalans, though it had gone into disuse among the Mexicans, who had attained to the use of “hieroglyphics.”

There remains the question of the source and nature of those hieroglyphics. To examine it in detail is beyond the scope of this survey; and it must suffice to say that as the Mexican hieroglyphic system proper represents an early stage in the evolution of writing from pictures to phonetic symbols, with a phonetic system developed alongside of it,  the phenomena are quite consistent with the hypothesis of culture influences from Asia at a remote period. It is not necessary to identify glyphs in order to infer that the Chinese, Egyptian, and Aztec systems are akin. The Egyptian symbols remained substantially undeveloped for at least two thousand years;  and recent specialists are satisfied that “many of the elements of hieroglyphic writing had been growing upon the banks of the Nile long before the time of the first historic dynasty.”  Given such a slow rate of growth, and noting the fact that Mexican and Egyptian hieroglyphics, and Chinese script, are all written in columns, we are provisionally entitled to see in all three the stages of a continuous evolution.

It is true that the American languages, while demonstrably akin to each other, like the Indo-European group, show little or no relation to any of the languages of Asia. But though the difficulty of fully proving affinities of language between American and Asiatic races is great, and we seem thus bound to suppose a very remote separation indeed; on the other hand the extraordinary difference between the tongues of American Indians of the same race  and the observed facts as to the rapid changes of language among South Sea islanders, when isolated from each other, go to suggest that very wide deviation may occur in a few thousands of years among people of one stock who have separated at a stage in which they have no literature, and only the material beginnings of a ritual. Beyond this we need not go. It suffices that there is no conceptual obstacle to the assumption that the civilisation of pre-Christian America grew from the central Asiatic roots which fed the beginnings of civilisation as we know it in Mediterranean Asia and Europe; and that from the practical certainty of an original migration of Asiatics to America there follows the probability that there occurred several, at different stages of Asiatic evolution.  The hypothesis which seems best to meet all the facts is that America was first peopled from Asia at an extremely remote period; that there slowly grew up American races with a certain definite type of language; and that later immigrants from Asia or Polynesia, perhaps coming as conquerors in virtue of importing a higher civilisation, were linguistically absorbed in the earlier mass, as conquering invaders have repeatedly been in the known history of Europe.

2. Aztecs and Peruvians

All this was recognised by the industrious Swiss historian of the American religions fifty years ago,  when the real unity of the human race was still obscure, in that it was affirmed on such fantastic bases as the myth of an originally created pair and the counter-hypothesis of creation “in nations”—either of monkeys or men;  and when congenital theories of a peopling of America by the “ten lost tribes” were much in vogue. There need then be no serious dispute over the thesis  that “the origin of the ancient American religions is to be sought for in the nature of their human spirit”—a different thing from saying that they are autochthonous. The true proposition is neither that, as Müller says, the American peoples did not receive their religions from the peoples of the Old World, nor that they did: both formulas are misleading. Inasmuch as their ancestors were distinctly human when they first passed from Asia to America, the germs of religion and of many rites were derivative; but like all other peoples they evolved in terms of universal law. And as their migrations are likely to have occurred in different epochs, and from different stocks, we may look to find in them, scattered as they are over an entire hemisphere, hardly less variations in language, aspects, and civilisation than were to be traced in the races of the old world a few thousand years ago.

Such variation is actually seen when we seek to ascertain the connection of the different peoples of Ancient America with each other. For among these there is fully as much variation as is found among the peoples of Europe. To go no farther, the Aztecs or Mexicans differ noticeably in certain physical characteristics from the Native Americans; and these again show considerable variations of type. A decisive theory of the culture-histories of these peoples cannot yet be constructed, inasmuch as we are still very much in the dark as to the civilisations which existed in Central and South America before those of Mexico and Peru. For the title of this section, “The Religions of Ancient America,” is designed only to mark off the religions flourishing so lately as four hundred years ago, and the aboriginal religions still existing, from that Christian religion which was introduced into Mexico and Peru by the Spaniards, and into North America by the English and French. The two religious systems we have chiefly to consider, the Mexican and Peruvian as they existed before the Spanish Conquest, are not very ancient in their developed form; because even the two civilisations were comparatively modern. The Aztecs and the Peruvians, as regards their then situation, professed to date back only a few centuries from the Conquest; and in both Peru and Mexico there were and still are the architectural remains of civilisations, some of which were themselves so ancient  as to be unintelligible to the nations found by the Spaniards. Thus, near Lake Titicaca in Peru  there are wonderful remains of structures which by their size suggested giant builders, the work of a race whom (or whose successors) the Incas overthrew; and yet further there are remains of rude circles of standing stones which belonged to a primitive civilisation far more ancient still. So, in Mexico, there are ancient ruins, such as those at Palanque, which suggest a civilisation higher, on the side of art and architecture, and at the same time much older, than that of the Aztecs.

All we can say with any safety is that, as it was put by Buckle, the earlier civilisations grew up in those regions where there were combined the conditions of a regular, easy, and abundant food supply—namely, heat and moisture, without an overwhelming proportion of the latter, such as occurs in Brazil.  Now, from the point of view of the needs of an early civilisation, the golden mean occurs, in South America, only in the territories which were covered by the empire of the Incas, and farther north, from the Isthmus of Panama to Mexico. We surmise then a long-continued movement of population southwards, one wave pushing on another before it, till some reached Patagonia. After a time, however, there might be refluxes. It is admitted that Mexican tradition points to early developments of civilisation about the Isthmus and Central America, and then waves of migration and conquest northwards. And it may have been that the people called the Toltecs, who flourished in Mexico before the Aztecs, and were in several respects more highly civilised than they,  represented yet again a backflow of one of these peoples from the north, according to the tradition.  Their alleged silent disappearance, after four centuries of national life, is the standing puzzle of Mexican history.  All that we know is, that Mexico remained the seat of the most flourishing empires, mainly because it could best yield an abundant and regular supply of vegetable food, as maize; and that when Cortès invaded it, the civilisation of the Aztecs, who constituted the most powerful of the several Mexican States then existing, was among the most remarkable.

And herein lies the instructiveness of these civilisations, with their religions, that they supply us with a set of results practically independent of all the known history of Europe and Asia. It has been remarked that the great drawback of most of the moral or human sciences is that they do not admit of experiments as do the physical sciences. You must take the phenomena you get and try to account for them, with no aid from planned repetitions of cases. But, on the other hand, the human sciences as latterly organised have an enormous wealth of data lying ready to hand, and some collocations of data have for us the effect of new revelations in human affairs. After men became absorbed in the conception of European civilisation, with its beginnings, on the one hand in Aryan barbarism, on the other in the Eastern and Egypto-Semitic culture, they seemed to be shut up to a certain body of conclusions about human nature and its tendencies of thought and action. What was worse, the conclusions were presented ready made in terms of the reigning religion. But when we go to the records of the cultures and creeds of Mexico and Peru, records wonderfully preserved in the teeth of the fanaticism which would have destroyed them all if it could, we stand clear of the prejudices alike of Jew and Christian; we are in a measure spared the old contrast between pretended monotheism and polytheism, the eternal suggestion of the possible diffusion of revealed truth,  the perpetual comparison between Christendom and Paganism. We are faced by a civilisation and a religion that reached wealth and complexity by normal evolution from the stages of early savagery and barbarism without ever coming in contact with those of Europe till the moment of collision and destruction. And to study these American civilisations aright is to learn with clearness lessons in sociology, or human science in general, which otherwise could have been acquired only imperfectly and with hesitation. The culture-histories of the two hemispheres, put side by side, illuminate each other as do the facts of comparative anatomy.

3. Primitive Religion and Human Sacrifice

Whatever may have been the variety of the stocks that immigrated from Asia, it holds good that we may look in the less advanced American races for traces of the steps in the religious and social evolution of Mexico and Peru. The non-Aztec peoples of Central America, to begin with, had developed religious systems which in their main features recall the Goddess-worships of Semitic and Hellenistic antiquity; the most marked difference, as regards the historic period of the latter, being the American proclivity to human sacrifice. The summary given of some of them by Mr. H. H. Bancroft will serve to illustrate the old process by which the human mind reached the same essential results out of a superficial variety of materials:—

“The most prominent personage in the Isthmian Pantheon was Dabaiba, a goddess who controlled the thunder and lightning, and with their aid devastated the lands of those who displeased her. In South America, thunder and lightning were held to be the instruments used by the sun to inflict punishment upon its enemies, which makes it probable that Dabaiba was a transformed sun-goddess. Pilgrims resorted from afar to her temple at Urabâ, bringing costly presents and human victims, who were first killed and then burned,  that the savoury odours of roasting flesh might be grateful in the nostrils of the goddess. Some describe her as a native princess, whose reign was marked by great wisdom and many miracles, and who was apotheosized after death. She was also honoured as the mother of the Creator, the maker of the sun, the moon, and all invisible things, and the sender of blessings, who seems to have acted as mediator between the people and his mother, for their prayers for rain were addressed to him, although she is described as controlling the showers; and once, when her worship was neglected, she inflicted a severe drought upon the country. When the needs of the people were very urgent, the chiefs and priests remained in the temple, fasting and praying with uplifted hands; the people meanwhile observed a four-days’ fast, lacerating their bodies and washing their faces, which were at other times covered with paint. So strict was this fast, that no meat or drink was to be touched until the fourth day, and then only a soup made from maize-flour. The priests themselves were sworn to perpetual chastity and abstinence, and those who went astray in these matters were burned or stoned to death. Their temples were encompassed with walls, and kept scrupulously clean; golden trumpets, and bells with stone clappers, summoned the people to worship.”

At a lower stage of civilisation we find human sacrifice already well established, on historic lines, where temples and priesthoods are still insignificant. Thus among the Tupinambos of north-eastern Brazil there was practised a form of sacrifice which recalls at once the rite among the Indian Khonds and the better known one in Mexico, so often described. Among the lower tribes the human sacrifice here figures as primarily an act either of propitiation of their own dead slain in war or of providing them with food in the other world, they having become Gods in virtue of falling in battle;  and, secondarily, as an act of sacrament.  The Tupinambos and their congeners sought in battle not to slay but to capture enemies; and when they had a captive he was taken to their village in triumph and received with fife-music, supplied by the bones of previous prisoners. For a whole year he was carefully treated, well fed, and supplied with a well-favoured maiden as wife and servant. At length, on the day of the feast, he was adorned with feathers, and festally led to sacrifice, his body being immediately cut in pieces and distributed among the heads of houses or minor chiefs; or, otherwise, eaten in a general feast.  If he had a child by his wife, it was brought up, as among the Khonds, for the same fate.

Of the more general usage of sacrificing children, which we have seen to be primordial in Central Asia, there are many traces among the North-American Indians. Thus those of Florida at the time of the Spanish conquest are recorded to have sacrificed first-born children to the sun;  and in Virginia there was at times offered up the sacrifice of the “only begotten son.” More general seems to have been the simple usage of sacrificing boys to the God Oki and other deities.  Oki was held to “suck the blood from the left breast”; and the theory of the sacrifice seems to have been that it secured good fortune in war. But there was practised in addition an annual spring sacrifice—an instance of which is known to have occurred as late as 1837 or 1838—on the Khond principle of ensuring a good harvest, the propitiated deity in this case being the “great star” Venus. Prisoners were the usual victims; and the last and best-known case is that of the sacrifice of a Sioux maiden, who was bound to a stake and slain with arrows. Before she died, pieces of her flesh were cut off in the horrible fashion of the Khonds, and the blood made to fall on the young seed-corn.

Next to a human sacrifice seems to have ranked, among some tribes, that of a white dog, the dog being for the Native American a valuable possession,  and whiteness being held by them, as among the Greeks and Romans, a mark of purity and distinction in animals. Always it was something important or typically desirable that must be offered to the God. And in all cases the act of sacrifice seems to have lain near the act of sacrament, in which we know the identification of the God with the victim, whether as totem or otherwise, to have been a normal conception. The white dog, like the victim in the ancient Dionysiak sacrifice among the Greeks, seems at times to have been torn to pieces and so eaten.  But there is an overwhelming amount of testimony to prove that among the Native Americans at the time of the Spanish conquest religious cannibalism was common.  It was as a rule, perhaps, prisoners of war who were eaten; and it is recorded that when in the Florida war of 1528 famishing Spaniards were driven to eat the corpses of their own comrades, the Floridan natives, who were wont to eat their captives, were horrorstruck —this though they had no agriculture, and fared precariously at all times.  But though certain tribes were anthropophagous only on a war footing, there is only too much evidence in others that cannibalism occurred on other religious pretexts;  and as all primitive feasts were more or less sacramental, and the sacramental eating of human flesh is seen to have subsisted among the Aztecs long after simple cannibalism had disappeared, there can be little doubt that originally the human sacrifice was eaten among the American peoples.

Even in the “savage” stage, however, there can be traced the beginnings of the recoil not only from the sacrifice but from the cannibal sacrament. The letting of blood seems to have been in certain rites substituted for slaying;  and in the story of Hiawatha the Heaven-God, who lived as a man among the Onondagas and had a mortal daughter, we find a parallel to the modified legends of Iphigeneia and Jephthah’s daughter. Heaven ordered that the maiden should be sacrificed, and her father sadly brought her forth; but there came a mighty sound as of a wind, and the people, looking on high, saw a dark object approaching with terrific speed, whereupon they all fled. The father and daughter stayed resignedly, and lo! the coming thing was an enormous bird, which hurled itself with such force on the maiden that she disappeared, and the bird was buried up to the neck in the earth.  Late or early, the legend was framed with a purpose.

In the tribal stage, necessarily, there was little development of the priesthood. Its beginnings were represented by the “medicine-men” or sorcerers, who set up secret religious societies or orders, to at least one of which, in the historic period, sorcerers of various types and tongues could belong.  Of the temple, too, the beginning is seen in the sacred hut, to which in certain tribes only the king or the medicine-man has entrance, and in which begin to be stored idols and sacred objects.  As we go southward, towards the region of the higher civilisation, we find an increasing development of the priestly function, sometimes in combination with the kingly, as among the Natchez of Florida, among whom in the seventeenth century was found the worship of the sun, symbolised in the hut-temple by an ever-burning fire.  There the king-priest was “brother of the Sun,” and the royal family constituted an aristocracy with special privileges, though bound to marry outside their caste.

In the midway civilisations of Central America, this development has gone far towards the state of things seen in the kingdom of the Aztecs. In Yucatan, for instance, there was a hierarchy of priests, with a head; and the order seems to have had extensive judicial powers.  The temples, too, had become considerable buildings, to which the leading men made roads from their houses.  Alongside of the priests, all the while, remained the sorcerers or “medicine-men,” also an official class with different types or orders, members of which, however, were privately employed by the nobles,  after the manner of “Levites” among the early Hebrews; and these private priests competed with the hierarchy in the matter of receiving formal confessions from penitents and patients.  Convents existed for virgins, and of those who spent their whole lives in them the statues were after death worshipped as Goddesses, while the king’s daughter ranked as the “Fire Virgin,” and to her others were sacrificed.  Idols of all kinds abounded; and wooden ones, like the Hebrew teraphim, were accounted precious family heirlooms.  Human sacrifices, of course, were frequent, children being made victims in great numbers when captives were lacking, and legitimate sons when the sons of slave women ran short,  ”not even the only son being spared.”  Surrogate sacrifices in the form of blood-letting were normal; but the cannibal sacrament does not seem to have been so; though it took place in Guatemala, where the king and priests and nobles partook of the victims slain to “the highest God” at the time of Lent, the high-priest and the king getting the hands and feet.

In the case of this particular sacrifice, the chosen victims, who were slaves, were each allowed for a week the peculiar privileges accorded to similar victims in the Old World, down to the detail of dining with the king; and for this sacrifice, it is recorded, the victims were “brought together in a particular house near the temple, and there got to eat and drink until they were drunk,” apparently on the principles of the Khonds and Rhodians. It seems now difficult to doubt that the religion of ancient America is of Asiatic derivation; and that the pyramidal altar-temples of Mexico and Babylon are alike developments from simpler mounds or “high places” shaped by the prehistoric peoples of Asia, who first carried the practice with them to the New World. It is now reasonably established that the “Mound-Builders” of the Mississippi valley were simply North-American Indians, living very much at the culture-stage of those found by the first whites, though there as elsewhere there may have been partial retrogression in certain tribes and territories under stress of war.

From the tribal state, civilisation had risen to a stage at which, in Central America, even outside the Aztec State, as in Yucatan, there were schools in the temples where the children of the priests and nobles were taught such science as the priests possessed, from books  in which had been evolved a hieratic script on the basis of hieroglyphics,  as in ancient Egypt. They had advanced far in agriculture, cultivating many plants and fruits; had numerous stone buildings, and excellent stone-paved roads; and had made some little progress in sculpture. But there had been no transcending of the primeval concepts of religion; and human blood flowed for the Gods far more freely than in the state of savagery. The savage’s “happy hunting ground” had been specialised into a heaven and a hell;  the medicine-man into a great priestly order; from his primitive symbolism had been evolved the sacrament of baptism; his simple sun-worship had become a vast ceremonial; and in many territories the “heathen” had so far anticipated Christian civilisation as to have established the practice of confession. But the stamp of primeval savagery, conserved by the spirit of religion, is clear through it all: there is no gainsaying the fundamental relationship of the lower and the higher cults. Around the civilisations of Peru and Mexico, at the time of the Spanish conquest, there stretched north and south a barbarism in which we know to have existed the germs of universal historic religion—human sacrifices constituting sacraments; beliefs in deities and spirits beneficent and maleficent; practices of prayer and witchcraft, ritual and worship, festival and ordinance, the whole in part conducted by the community as a whole, but guided by the soothsayers and sorcerers who are the beginnings of priesthoods. From such antecedents everywhere has all “higher” religion been evolved.

4. The Mexican Cultus

When we turn from this stage of religious history to that of Aztec Mexico, the first and most memorable difference that faces us is the immense expansion of the power of the priests. If we can trust the Spanish writers,  five thousand priests were connected with the principal temple in the city of Mexico alone, where there were in all some 600 temples, and where the total population was perhaps about 300,000;  and all the cities were divided into districts placed under the charge of parochial clergy, who regulated all acts of religion. In this enormous strength of the priestly class we have the secret of that frightful development of religious delusion and its attendant atrocity which marks off Mexico from the rest of the world. The system was, of course, polytheistic, and, equally of course, it exhibits the usual tendency towards pantheism or monotheism; but the overwhelming priesthood necessarily perpetuated the separate cults. There were at least thirteen principal deities, and more than two hundred inferior.  Indeed, some reckon as high as three thousand the number of the minor spirits,  who would answer to the genii and patron saints of Europe; and it is obvious that in Mexico as in Christendom there must have been many varieties of religious temper and attitude.  In many of the forms of prayer and admonition which have been preserved,  we see a habit of alluding reverently to “God” (Teotl) or “our Lord,” without any specification of any one deity, and with a general assumption that the Lord loves right conduct. This universal God was in origin apparently the Sun, who was worshipped in the temples of all the Gods alike, being prayed to four times each day and four times each night.

At the first glance it is plain that the Mexican pantheon represented the myths of many tribes, myths which overlapped each other, as in the case of the ancient and widely worshipped God of Rain and his wife the Goddess of Water, and which survived separately by being adapted to the different usages of life. In connection with the rite of infant baptism, which the Mexicans practised most scrupulously, the officiating women prayed to “Our Merciful Lady,” Chalchiuhtlicue or Cioacoatl, the Goddess of Water.  At the season when rain was wanted for the harvest, again, prayer was made to the God or Gods named Tlaloc —for both the singular and plural forms are used—who controlled the rain; and whereas the Goddess of Water invoked at baptism was held merciful, the Tlaloc had to be propitiated by the regular sacrifice of a number of sucking infants, bought from poor parents or extorted from superstitious ones.  There is no more awful illustration of the capacity of the human mind for religious delusion than the record of how the merciful people, believing in the efficacy of the sacrifice, would yet keep out of the way of the sacred procession which carried the doomed babes, because they could not bear to see them weep and think of their fate; while others, weeping themselves, would take comfort if the children wept freely, because that prognosticated plenteous rains. But even under the spell of religion men could not sacrifice infants to the very deity invoked at baptism: so the benign Water-Goddess was sundered from the child-devouring Water-God. And by the same law of adaptation to social function it came about that the most prominent of the worships of Mexico, a state periodically at war, was that of the War-God Huitzilopochtli, who figured as the patron God of the nation.

In Huitzilopochtli we have a very interesting case of mythological evolution.  It has been argued that he was originally a simple bird-God, the humming-bird, his early name being the diminutive Huitziton, “the little humming-bird.”  An old legend tells that while the Aztecs still dwelt in Aztlan, a man among them named Huitziton chirped like a bird, “Tihui” = “Let us go,” and that he thus persuaded them to migrate and conquer for themselves a new country. As the later God actually bears the symbol of a hummingbird on his left foot, and his name Huitzilopochtli means “hummingbird on the left,” there has evidently occurred some process of assimilation; but it is not quite certain that it was in this wise. If the humming-bird were originally a totem-God, the hypothesis would seem sound; but this, I think, has not been shown; and there remains open the possibility that the symbol was not primary but secondary.

The singular fact that, even as the Mexican War-God has a humming-bird for his symbol, so Mars, the Roman War-God, has a wood-pecker for his, is in this regard worth a moment’s attention. We can draw no certain conclusion in the matter; but it seems likely that the evolution in the two cases may have been similar. Now, there is no clear evidence that the wood-pecker was a totem-God; and the whole question of Mars’s name Picumnus, which he was held to have from Picus, the wood-pecker, is obscure.  Oddly enough, the Sabines had a legend that the wood-pecker led them to their settling-place, which they consequently called Picenum. When we note that a number of ancient communities similarly had legends of birds or animals who guided them to their settling-place,  and that the name of the place sometimes accords with the name of the guide and sometimes does not, we seem obliged to recognise three possibilities.

1. The animal or bird was in some cases very likely a totem-God, the legend of guidance being a late way of explaining its association with the community.

2. A place, however, might easily be named by newcomers because of the number of birds or animals of a given kind seen there; and the explanatory legend on that view is naught.

3. A symbolic animal, connected with the worship or image of a God, would also give rise to explanatory legends. One would prompt another.

If then the Sabines put the wood-pecker on their standard, the question arises whether it may not have been because it was the symbol of the War-God. It is noted concerning the humming-bird that he is extraordinarily brave and pugnacious;  and the same might readily be said of the wood-pecker, who is as it were always attacking. Supposing the symbol to be secondary, there is no difficulty in the matter: all the legends would be intelligible on the usual lines of myth-making. In regard to Huitzilopochtli, again, there is a symbolic source for his curious epithet “on the left.” In one legend he sits after death at the left hand of his brother Tezcatlipoca,  the Creator and Supreme God; and whether or not this is the earliest form of the idea, it suggests that the placing of the symbol on the left foot of the War-God may have arisen from the previous currency of the phrase “Huitzlin on the left” in another signification, though on this view the God had been already named after his symbol.

Leaving open the problem of origins on this side, we come upon another in the fact that neither Huitzilopochtli nor Mars was primarily a War-God. The former, who was practically the national God of Mexico, was also called Mexitli;  and it seems likelier that this should have been his original name, and Huitzilopochtli a sobriquet, than vice versa. And so with the function. A War-God, specially known as such, is not a primary conception: what happens is that a particular God comes to be the God of War. Among the Native Americans, the “Great God” or Creator and Ruler, or else the Heaven-or Sun-God, was the War-God;  and we know that Mars was originally a sylvan deity,  concerned with vegetation and flocks and herds. How came he to preside over war? Simply because, we may take it, he was the God of the season at which war was usually  made. Campaigns were begun in spring; and so the God of the Spring season, who was specially invoked, became War-God. Mars was just Martius, March; and he lent himself the better to the conception, because March is a stormy and blusterous month. Mars strictly retains these characteristics, being a blusterous rather than a great or dignified God in both the Greek and Roman mythologies. But here suggests itself another possible source for the symbol of the War-God. Picus means speckled,  coloured; and the speckled wood-pecker might figure the coming of speckled spring, as the humming-bird would do the colour-time in Mexico. Perhaps there may be a similar natural explanation for the further striking coincidence that Huitzilopochtli is born of a virgin mother, Coatlicue, who is abnormally impregnated by being touched by a ball of bright-coloured feathers,  while Juno bears Mars also virginally, being impregnated by the touch of a flower.

In both cases, certainly, we have a sufficiently marked primary type for the myth of the Virgin-Birth, the idea in each being simply the birth of vegetation in spring. Though the mythical Coatlicue, like Mary, is a God-fearing woman, who frequents the temple and lives in a specified village, Coatepec, near Tula, the Virgin Mother is simply the ancient Mother of all, the Earth; and the concept of virginity is a verbally made one, in virtue of the mere fact that the whole is a metaphor. But if Huitzilopochtli be thus admittedly in origin a God of Vegetation,  there arises a stronger presumption that he too was originally symbolised by his bird because of its seasonal relation to his worship. It is denied that in his case the seasonal explanation of the choice of Mars as War-God can hold good,  because the spring in Mexico is a time of heavy rains, when campaigns are impossible. In his case then the selection of the War-God is presumably a result on the one hand of his symbol, which further seems to have been spontaneously made a symbol of the sun,  and on the other hand of his special popularity—a constant feature in the cult of the Vegetation-Gods. And when we note further that the chief God of the Caribs, Yuluca, was represented with a headdress of humming-bird feathers, and that the Toltec God Quetzalcoatl, also a God of fruitfulness, was figured with the head of a sparrow, which was the hieroglyph of the air,  we are led to surmise, not that all of these Gods were originally Bird-Gods, but that they were all originally Spring-Gods or other Nature-Gods to whom the birds were given as symbols, though the sparrow may have been originally a totem-God. Throughout the whole of Polynesia, the red feather of one small bird, and the tail feathers of the man-of-war bird, are “the ordinary medium of extending or communicating supernatural power,” and are regarded as specially pleasing to the Gods.

5. Mexican Sacrifices and Cannibal Sacraments

Of deeper interest is the moral aspect of the worship of Mexican Gods, especially the most memorable feature of all, human sacrifice. Though this, as we have seen, is primordial in religion, there can be no question that its enormous development was the work of the organised priesthood, and of the cultivated religious sentiment. The Roman War-God remained subordinate, warlike though the Romans were; the Mexican became one of the two leading deities, and received the more assiduous worship. Whence the divergence? Mainly, we must conclude, from the multiplication of the Mexican priesthood, which was primarily due to the absorption of the priest-hoods of the conquered races; and from the prior development of the rite of human sacrifice in the cult of the Gods or Goddesses of Vegetation. Among the Aztecs the tradition went that human sacrifices were of late introduction;  and this view would no doubt be favoured by the priests, who would represent that the latter-day power of the State was due to the sacrifices. But we have seen that they were practised on a smaller scale by the American peoples at much earlier stages of social evolution; and in the midway stages they were also common. In northern South America, the chief God of the Muyscas, Fomagata, was worshipped with many human sacrifices, as he was also under the name Fomagazdad, with his wife Zipaltonal, in Nicaragua, where he and she were held the progenitors of the human race;  and similar usages, often in connection with the Sun-God, sometimes with the God of Rain, were common in Yucatan, Chiapa, Tobasco, Honduras, and elsewhere.  The Mexican Otimias, also, who were not conquered by the Aztecs, sacrificed children and ate their flesh, carrying it with them, roasted, on their campaigns. Such sacrifices then were well-established in Mexico before the Aztecs came, being found in some degree even among the relatively peaceful Toltecs.  What the Aztec priesthood did was to multiply them to a frightful extent.

The causes of expansion and restriction in such cases are no doubt complex; but when we compare those of the Aztecs and the Greeks, Egyptians, and Romans, we can trace certain decisive conditions. Firstly, human sacrifices tend to multiply among peoples much given to war, by way of offerings to the Gods; but where there is only a limited priesthood the natural force of compassion leads men in time, as they grow more civilised, to abandon such sacrifices; while a priesthood tends to maintain them. Thus among the civilised peoples of the old world they lasted longest with the priest-ridden Carthaginians; and the reason that they did not continue late among the Jews was probably that these did not possess a numerous priesthood till after the Captivity, when their religion was recast in terms of the more civilised Oriental systems. On the other hand, an expanding or expanded empire, powerfully ruled by a warrior autocrat, like those of Babylon and Egypt, is led in various ways to abandon human sacrifice even if the priesthoods be numerous. Alien cults are absorbed for political reasons, and it is no part of the ruler’s policy to be habitually at war with small neighbours, he having absorbed most of them: hence an irregular supply of captives. The priesthoods, too, can be conveniently provided for through other forms of sacrifice; and on those other lines they are less powerful relatively to the king. Thus in the empire of the Incas the practice of human sacrifice was well restrained. But where a warlike and priest-ridden State is established among well-armed neighbours, with cults of human sacrifice already well-established all round, the sacrificing of captives is apt to serve as a motive to war, and the priests tend to enforce it. The process is perfectly intelligible. The stronghold of all priesthoods is the principle of intercession; whether it be in the form of simple prayer and propitiatory worship, or a mixture of that with a doctrine of mystic sacrifice, as among Protestants; or in the constant repetition of a ceremony of mystic sacrifice, as among Catholics; or in actual animal sacrifice, as among ancient Jews and Pagans. In these cases we see that, the more stress is laid on the act of sacrifice, the stronger is the priesthood—or we may put it conversely. Strongest of all then must be the hold of the priesthood whose sacrifices are most terrible. And terrible was the prestige of the priesthood of Mexico. The greater the State grew, the larger were the hecatombs of human victims. Almost every God had to be propitiated in the same way; but above all must the War-God be for ever glutted with the smoking hearts of slain captives. Scarcely any historian, says Prescott,  estimates the number of human beings sacrificed yearly throughout the empire at less than 20,000, and some make it 50,000.  Of this doomed host, Huitzilopochtli had the lion’s share; and it is recorded that at the dedication of his great new temple in 1486 there were slain in his honour 70,000 prisoners of war, who had been reserved for the purpose for years throughout the empire. They formed a train two miles long, and the work of priestly butchery went on for several days.

At every festival of the God there was a new hecatomb of victims; and we may conceive how the chronic spectacle burnt itself in on the imagination of the people. The Mexican temples, as we have seen, were great pointless pyramids, sometimes of four or five stories, and the sacrifices were offered on the top. The stair was so made that it mounted successively all four sides of the pyramid, and when the train of torch-bearing priests wound their way up in the darkness, as was the rule for certain sacrifices,  to the topmost platform, with its ever-burning fires and its stone of sacrifice, the whole city looked on. And then the horror of the sacrificial act! In the great majority of the sacrifices the victim was laid living on the convex stone and held by the limbs, while the slayer cut open his breast with the sacred flint  knife—the ancient knife, used before men had the use of metals, and therefore most truly religious—and tore out the palpitating heart, which was held on high to the absent but all-seeing sun, before being set to burn in incense in front of the idol, whose lips, and the walls of whose shrines, were devoutly daubed with blood.

Apart from the resort to holocausts, the religious principle underlying many, if not all, of the American human sacrifices was that the victim represented the God; and on this score slaves or children were as readily sacrificed as captives. Among the Guatemalans, we are told, captives or devoted slaves were regarded as becoming divine beings in the home of the Sun;  and the general principle that the victim represented the God involved such a conception.  And while this principle probably originates in early rites, such as those so long preserved by the Khonds, which aimed at the annual renewal of vegetation by propitiation and “sympathetic magic,” the practice became fixed in the general rituals as a sacred thing in itself.

In connection with one annual festival of Tezcatlipoca, the Creator and “soul of the world,” who combined the attributes of perpetual youthful beauty with the function of the God of justice and retribution, as Winter Sun, there was selected for immolation a young male captive of especial beauty, who was treated with great reverence for a whole year before being sacrificed—almost exactly like the doomed captive among the South American Tupinambos above described. He was gorgeously attired; flowers were strewn before him; he went about followed by a retinue of the king’s pages; and the people prostrated themselves before him and worshipped him as a God. He was in fact, according to rule, the God’s representative, and was described as his image.  A month before the fatal day new indulgences were heaped upon him. Four beautiful maidens, bearing the names of the principal Goddesses, were given him as concubines. At length came his death day. His honours and his joys were ended, and his fine raiment taken away. Carried on a royal barge across the lake to a particular temple, about a league from the city, whither all the people thronged, he was led up the pyramid in procession, he taking part in the ritual by throwing away his chaplets of flowers and breaking his guitar. Then, at the top, the six black-robed slayers, the sacrificial stone, and the horror of the end. And when all was over the priests piously improved the occasion, preaching that all this had been typical of human destiny,  while the aristocracy sacramentally ate the victim’s roasted limbs.

Along with the victim for Tezcatlipoca there was one for Huitzilopochtli; and they roamed together all the year. The latter victim was not adored: but he had the privilege of choosing the hour for his sacrifice, though not the day. He was called the “Wise Lord of Heaven,” and he was slain, not on the altar, but in the arms of the priests.

The Goddesses, too, had their victims—women victims; and a maiden was regularly prepared for one sacrifice to the Maize-Goddess Centeotl, the Mexican Ceres, somewhat as was the representative of Tezcatlipoca. Centeotl was the Mother-Goddess par excellence, being named Toucoyohua, “the nourisher of men,” and represented, like Dêmêtêr and so many Goddesses of the same type, with a child in her arms.  A tradition prevailed, too, that in her cult there were anciently no human sacrifices. But this is doubtful; and the explanation is as before, that anciently single victims were sacrificed, while among the Aztecs there were many. The woman who personated the Goddess was sacrificed with other victims,  and the slaying was followed by a ceremonial of an indescribably revolting character, the slayers flaying the victims and donning their skins.  This hideous act is in all likelihood one of the oldest devices of religious symbolism; and it is a distinguished theologian who suggests to us that it is lineally connected, through the totemistic or other wearing of animal-skins, with the Biblical conception of “the robe of righteousness.”  It is certainly akin to the practice of the Babylonian priests, who wore imitation fish-skins as identifying them with the Fish-God,  and to that of the Egyptian and other priests who wore the dappled skins of leopards or fawns as symbolising the starry heavens, or robes without seam as symbolising the cosmos.  At bottom all ritualism is the same thing, a reduction of righteousness, in all sincerity, to make-believe.

But the special and habitual atrocity of the Mexican cultus was the act of ritual cannibalism. This was strictly a matter of religion. After a captive had been sacrificially slain in ordinary course, his body was delivered to the warrior who captured him, and was by him made the special dish at a formal and decorous public banquet to his friends. It was part of the prescribed worship of the Gods. That the Mexicans were not in the least cannibals by taste is shown by the fact that in the great siege by Cortès they died of starvation by thousands. They never ate fellow-citizens;  only the sacrificially slain captive. But only a great priesthood could have maintained even that usage. We have seen that such ritual cannibalism has existed at one time in all races; and obviously it must have originated in simple cannibalism, for men would never have begun to offer to the Gods food that was primordially abominable to themselves.  On the other hand, however, we know that cannibalism everywhere dies out naturally even among savages, apart from religion, as soon as they reach some degree of peaceful life, and even sooner. Among the native tribes of Lower California, though they are among the most degraded savages in the world, and given to various disgusting practices, the eating not only of human flesh but of that of monkeys, as resembling men, is held abominable.  The Tahitians, who in warfare were murderous to the last degree, and practised hideous barbarities, had yet evolved beyond the stage of public cannibal banquets, even the sacrifice of a man to the God being followed only by the pretended eating of his eye by the chief;  and it was the priests who instigated what human sacrifices there were. So among the similarly cruel Tongans, cannibal feasts were rare, occurring only after battles, and being execrated by the women; child sacrifices were also rare and special, and were being superseded by surrogates of amputated fingers.  In each of these cases the priesthoods were little organised:  hence the upward evolution. Among the Fijians, the Marquesans, and the Maoris, on the contrary, we find highly organised and cannibalistic priesthoods;  and there we likewise find cannibalism and human sacrifices alike common. So, among the Khonds, a specially “instructed” priest was essential to the meriah sacrifice; and in China, where human scapegoat sacrifices were discredited and abolished between the third and second centuries B.C., we hear of them as being prescribed by priests and put down by wise rulers.  And as in Peru we shall see reason to regard the Incas as putting some check on human sacrifice, so in the whole of Central America the only case of any attempt at such reform, apart from the Toltec priesthood of Quetzalcoatl, occurs in the history of the great Acolhuan king of Tezcuco, Netzahualcoyotl, who died in 1472. Of him it is told that he was the best poet of his country, which was the most highly civilised of the New World;  and that he worshipped, on a great altar-pyramid of nine stages, an “unknown God” who had no image, and to whom he offered only perfume and incense,  resisting the priests who pressed for human sacrifice. But his example seems never to have affected his Aztec allies, who gradually won supremacy over the Tezcucans; and even in his own realm he could never suppress the human sacrifices which had there been revived before his time under Aztec influence, and multiplied under it later.

The Aztec religion, in fine, was working the ruin of the civilisation of Central America, as similar religions may have done for the far older civilisations that have left only ruins behind them. Sacerdotalism, it is clear, tended as an institution to check the progress of humanity, which even among slaughterous savages elsewhere brought anthropophagy into discredit. No amount of passion for war could have kept the civilised Aztecs complacently practising ritual cannibalism if an austere and all-powerful priesthood had not fanatically enforced it.  The great sanction for human sacrifice, with the Mexicans as with the Semites, was the doctrine which identified the God with the victim, and as it were sacrificed him to himself. The principle was thus in a peculiar degree priest-made and priest-preserved.

6. Mexican Ethics

The recital of these facts may load some to conclude that the Mexican priesthood must have been the most atrocious multitude of miscreants the world ever saw. But that would be a complete misconception: they were as conscientious a priesthood as history bears record of. The strangest thing of all is that their frightful system of sacrifice was bound up not only with a strict and ascetic sexual morality, but with an emphatic humanitarian doctrine. If asceticism be virtue, they cultivated virtue zealously. There was a Mexican Goddess of Love, and there was of course plenty of vice; but nowhere could men win a higher reputation for sanctity by living in celibacy. Their saints were numerous. They had nearly all the formulas of Christian morality, so-called. The priests themselves mostly lived in strict celibacy;  and they educated children with the greatest vigilance in their temple schools and higher colleges.  They taught the people to be peaceful; to bear injuries with meekness; to rely on God’s mercy and not on their own merits: they taught, like Jesus and the Pagans, that adultery could be committed by the eyes and the heart; and above all they exhorted men to feed the poor. The public hospitals were carefully attended to, at a time when some Christian countries had none. They had the practice of confession and absolution; and in the regular exhortation of the confessor there was this formula: “Clothe the naked and feed the hungry, whatever privations it may cost thee; for remember, their flesh is like thine, and they are men like thee; cherish the sick, for they are the image of God.” And in that very same exhortation there was further urged on the penitent the special duty of instantly procuring a slave for sacrifice to the deity.

Such phenomena carry far the challenge to conventional sociology. These men, judged by religious standards, compare closely with our European typical priesthood. They doubtless had the same temperamental qualities: a strong irrational sense of duty; a hysterical habit of mind; a certain spirit of self-sacrifice; at times a passion for asceticism; and a feeling that sensuous indulgence was revolting. Devoid of moral science, they had plenty of the blind instinct to do right. They devoutly did what their religion told them; even as Catholic priests have devoutly served the Inquisition. That is one of the central sociological lessons of our subject. The religious element in man, being predominantly emotional and traditional, may ally itself with either good or evil; and no thanks are due to religion, properly speaking, if it is ever in any degree identified with good. How comes it that Christianity is not associated with human sacrifice while the Mexican cultus was? Simply by reason of the different civilisations that went before. It is civilisation that determines the tone of religion, and not the other way. Christianity starts with a doctrine of one act of human sacrifice; and Christians are specially invited each year at the sacred season to fasten their minds on the details of that act. Their ritual keeps up the mystic pretence of the act of ritual cannibalism which of old went with the human sacrifice: they harp on the very words, “body and blood.” They mystically eat the body of the slain God. Now this very act was performed by the Mexicans not only literally, as we have seen, but in the symbolic way also; and they connected their sacraments with the symbol of the cross.

Of the Tlascalans it is told that at one festival they fixed a prisoner to a high cross and shot arrows at him; and that at another time they fastened one to a low cross and killed him by bastinado.  In the sacrifice of a maiden to the Maize-Goddess Centeotl above mentioned, the priest who wore the slain victim’s skin stood with his arms stretched out, cross-wise, before the image of Huitzilopochtli, so representing the Goddess; and the skin (presumably stuffed)  was hung up with the arms spread in the same attitude, and facing the street.  The Mexicans, finally, had a festival in honour of Xiuhteuctli, the God of Fire,  the crowning act of which was the making a dough image of the God (as was also done in the worship of Huitzilopochtli at the festival called “Eating the God”) and raising it on a cross,  the image being then climbed for and thrown down, and the fragments eagerly eaten by the crowd as possessing a sacred efficacy.  They felt they were brought into union with the God in that fashion. As has been above noted, there is some evidence that among the first Christians the Eucharist was sometimes a baked dough image of a child:  and on any view the irresistible presumption is that in all cases alike the symbolical usage grew out of a more ancient practice of ritual cannibalism. Christianity coming among a set of civilised peoples, the symbol became more and more mystical, though the priesthood adhered tenaciously to the doctrine of daily mystical sacrifice. In Mexico, certain cults had similarly substituted symbolism for actual sacrifice; among the modifying practices being the drawing of a little blood from the ears and other parts of the children of the aristocracy.  But the thin end of the wedge was in, so to speak, in the survival of actual human sacrifices; and the Aztec priesthood drove the wedge deeper and deeper, in virtue of their collective economic interest as well as of what we may term the master tendency of all religions—the fixation of ideas and usages. The more piety the more priests; the more priests the more sacrifices; and the constant wars of the Aztecs supplied an unfailing stream of captives for immolation.  Many wars were made for the sole purpose of obtaining captives:  in fact, the Aztec kings made a treaty with the neighbouring republic of Tlascala and its confederates, a treaty which was faithfully kept, to the effect that their armies should fight on a given ground at stated seasons, in order that both sides should be able to supply themselves with sacrificial victims. At all other times they were quite friendly; and the Aztec kings avowedly kept up the relation purely in order to have captives for sacrifice.  An arrangement like that, once set up, would flourish more and more up to the point of national exhaustion, especially as death in battle was reckoned a sure passport to Paradise; and the priesthood would at the same time grow ever more and more numerous, the only limit being the people’s power of endurance. There can be little doubt that the Aztec empire would ultimately have broken down under its monstrous burden if the Spaniards had not destroyed it; for the taxation necessary to support the military and aristocratic system alongside of the allocation of enormous untaxed domains  to the ever-multiplying myriads of priests was becoming more insupportable year by year, so that the deep disaffection of the common people was one of the chief supports to the campaign of Cortès.  It may well be that some of the previous civilisations  had succumbed in the same way, literally destroyed by religion, to the extent, that is, of inviting conquest by less “civilised” tribes. Among some of the Maya peoples, who preceded the Aztecs, the office of sacrificer had come to be regarded as degraded;  but even there the sacrifices never ceased; and the Maya civilisation failed to hold its ground before the others.

Strangely enough, there was current among the Aztecs themselves a belief that their State was doomed to be overthrown.  Here, doubtless, we have a clue to the existence of civilising forces, and of a spirit of hostility to the religion of bloodshed which, however, felt driven to express itself in terms of despair. To this spirit of betterment, then, we turn with the doubled interest of sympathy.

7. The Mexican White Christ

Two sets of phenomena tell of the presence among the Aztecs of that instinct of humanity or spirit of reason which elsewhere gradually delivered men from the demoralisation of human sacrifice. One was the practice, already noted, of substituting a symbol for the sacrificed victim; the other was the cultus of the relatively benign deity Quetzalcoatl, a God of the Toltecs whom the Aztecs had subdued. There is no more striking figure in American mythology.

The name appears to have meant “the feathered [or coloured] serpent,” and this was one of his symbols; but he was normally represented by the red-billed sparrow-head, which in Mexican hieroglyphics stands for the air; and his third symbol, the Firestone, had the same significance.  As God of the Air, accordingly, he ranks in the pantheon.  But his mythus has a uniquely ethical stamp, and a certain wistful pathos.  It tells that he was once high-priest at Tula, in Anahuac, where, ever clothed in white, he founded a cultus, and gave beneficent laws to men, teaching them also the arts of agriculture, metal-work, stone-cutting, and civil government; the while a king named Huemac held with him the secular rule, and framed the law book of the nation. But the God Tezcatlipoca came to earth in the guise of a young merchant, who deceived the king’s daughter, and again in the guise of an old man, who persuaded Quetzalcoatl to drink a mystic drink, whereupon he was seized with an irresistible impulse to wander away. And so he went south-eastwards, setting up his institutions in place after place, but always going further, till at length he disappeared in the east, with a promise to return. For that return his worshippers ever looked longingly, and the Aztec kings with fear, till when Cortès came all thought that he was the God, and at Cholula the people sacrificed a man to him, and daubed him with the blood in the regulation way.

But in the myth of Quetzalcoatl it is told that at Tula he had preached against human sacrifices, telling men to offer to the Gods only fruits and flowers; and that he could not endure the thought of war, closing his ears when men spoke of it. A similar doctrine is associated with the traditionary worship of the rival God Votan, the legendary founder of the Maya civilisation;  and it may be that in both cases there is a reversion to the memory of simpler and kindlier cults. In any case, this humane legend figures for us a late product of Toltec feeling, representing at once the aspiration for a better religion and the memory of the Toltec people, whose polity had been step by step driven to the south-east by the stronger power of the Aztecs.  It may have been some of the Toltec priests who remained under Aztec rule that framed the gentle mythus,  and so dreamed for themselves a Messiah, as so many conquered races had done before. On analysis, it appears that Huemac was really the old Toltec name of the God, and that he took that of Quetzalcoatl in one of his more southerly resting-places, when he became symbolised as the serpent.  Of old he had had human sacrifices like other Gods; and in the Aztec lands he had them still.  But some of his white-robed priests, left victimless till they recoiled from the bloody rites of their conquerors, felt that their God must have a different nature from that of the Gods of the black-robed priests of Tezcatlipoca and Huitzilopochtli, and so framed for his cult a new gospel.

Recognising this, Dr. Müller and Dr. Brinton and Dr. Réville agree that Quetzalcoatl is properly the God of the beneficent rain-bringing east-wind, identified with the vanquished Toltec people, so that like them he is driven away by the enmity of other deities, but, like the vanishing or slain Sun-God of all mythologies, he is to return again in power and great glory. By such a myth Christians are set vaguely surmising a debt to their own legend; but there is no such thing in the case. As Mr. Bancroft observes, following Dr. Müller,  the process is one which has occurred in many mythologies:—”It is everywhere the case among savages, with their national God, that the latter is a nature-deity, who becomes gradually transformed into a national God, then into a national King, high-priest, founder of a religion, and at last ends in being considered a human being. The older and purer the civilisation of a people is, the easier it is to recognise the original essence of its national God, in spite of all transformations and disguises. So it is here. Behind the human form of the God glimmers the nature-shape, and the national God is known by, perhaps, all his worshippers as also a nature-deity. From his powerful influence upon nature, he might also be held as creator. The pure human form of this God [Quetzalcoatl] as it appears in the fable, as well as in the image, is not the original, but the youngest. His oldest concrete forms are taken from nature, to which he originally belongs, and have maintained themselves in many attributes. All these symbolise him as the God of fertility, chiefly......by means of the beneficial influence of the air.”

What is specially interesting is that, despite the inner hostility of the Quetzalcoatl cult to those of the Mexican Gods, his stood in high honour;  and while some of his devotees sacrificed and ate his representative once a year in the usual manner, some of his priests, of whom the chief also bore his name as representing him,  did as little sacrificing as they could, evidently finding some support in that course.  We are moved to ask, then, whether there was here a culture-force that could have countervailed the host of the priests of slaughter had the Aztecs been left to work out their own salvation. The more the problem is pondered, however, the less probable will it seem that the humaner teaching could have so triumphed. Conquest by some other American people might have served to restrain the religion of blood; but there is no sign that the humaner cult was as such making serious headway. The Aztec priesthood like every other had an economic basis; its higher offices were the perquisites of certain aristocratic families; and the habit of perpetual bloodshed had atrophied the feelings of the priestly army on that side. Beyond a certain point, priesthoods are incapable of intellectual regeneration from within, even if reformative ideas be present.

8. The Fatality of the Priesthood

The main hope of the humaner thinkers would probably lie in the substitution of a symbolic for an anthropophagous sacrament: if baked effigies could be eaten, effigies might be sacrificed. But in some even of the symbolic sacraments blood was a constituent. Thus in the cult of Huitzilopochtli, for the baked image made of seeds for the winter festival of the solstice—Christmas—the blood of slain children was the cementing moisture.  Here again we have the primitive “sympathetic magic”: the image, which was transfixed with an arrow before being eaten, represented the potentialities of new vegetable life at the time of year when vegetation was dead, and the blood of children was the deadly symbol of the moisture that was the life of all things, besides being a means of as it were vitalising the image.  Such a cult was indeed far from reducing anthropophagy to a mere symbol.

So with the cult of Xiuhteuctli, the Fire-God. Alongside, apparently, of the remarkable symbolic sacrament above mentioned there were anthropophagous sacraments to the same God. He was one of the most widely honoured of all, the first drink at every meal in every household being taken in his name—a correlation which again suggests derivation from an Asiatic fire-cult such as is seen blended in that of Agni in the Vedas. In his name, too, every child was passed through the fire at birth—another notable parallel to ancient Asiatic usages;  and from his six hundred temples burned as many perpetual fires. Every four years a great feast was held in his honour at Quauhtitlan, not far from the city of Mexico; the first act being to plant six high trees before the temple on the day previous, and to sacrifice two slaves, who were flayed. On the feast day, two priests appeared clad in those victims’ skins, hailed with the cry, “See, there come our Gods”; and all day they danced to wild music, the while many thousands of quails were sacrificed to the God. Finally the priests took six prisoners and bound or hanged them to the tops of the six trees, where they were shot through with arrows. When dead they were taken down and their hearts cut out in the usual way, the priests and nobility finally eating the flesh of both the men and the quails as a sacrament.

It is not clear at what place and period the symbolical sacrifice in this cult arose; but the essential problem is, whether it could have ousted the other. And the answer must be that inasmuch as the human sacrifice was specially associated with the power of the priests, and was obviously to the tastes of the mass of the people of all grades, nothing short of an overthrow of the existing polity by another could have effected the transformation, there being no native culture in the surrounding States that could give the requisite moral lead on a large scale. Such violent subversion, it will be remembered, was a common condition of religious evolution in the Old World in antiquity; and the history of the great) priestly systems of Egypt, India, and Babylon points to the conclusion that not otherwise than by the fiat of powerful autocrats, or forcible overthrow at the hands of neighbouring and kindred races, in the absence of peaceful culture-contacts of a higher kind, could such systems be made to loosen their grasp on social and intellectual life.

It will be observed that in the cult under notice the priest represents the God even as does the victim. The same phenomenon occurs, sometimes, though not always, with the same procedure of donning the victim’s skin, in many of the American sacrificial cults, Aztec and other.  A recent hierologist has argued, in view of the various instances in which priest-kings and sacrificial priests have been themselves annually sacrificed, that “it was as the shedder of divine [victim’s] blood that the king-priest’s blood was shed,” and that he was originally distinguished from his fellow-worshippers” only by his greater readiness to sacrifice himself for their religious needs.”  We need not dwell here on the fallacy of thus imputing a calculated and reasoned self-devotion in the case of an act which, among savage men, would stand just as much for lack of imagination or forethought. Assuming the theory to be true, however, we must recognise that in the case of the historic Mexican priesthood any ancient liability of the kind had long disappeared. According to Herrera, the private chaplains of the nobles were slain at the death of their masters; but this was as slaves or attendants, not as public priests, and not as true sacrifices.  In not a single case do we learn that the victim was furnished by the priestly class.  That class indeed practised in some measure, as we have seen, the asceticisms common to most ancient priesthoods, but it had long made an end of any serious penalties attaching to its profession.  The priests, in short, were the dominant force in the Mexican society; and under them it was on the one hand being economically ruined in the manner of most ancient empires, and on the other being anchylosed in its moral and intellectual life. To say this is of course not to select the priests for blame as being the sole or primary causes of the fatal development: their order was but the organised expression of the general religious tendency. But they dramatically exhibit, once for all, the capacity of “religion” in general to darken life and blight civilisation.

The mere number of the priests was so great as to constitute a force of fixation such as has never been countervailed in modern European countries, where forces relatively less powerful have only slowly been undermined by culture influences from more advanced neighbouring communities. When we note that the temple of the Mexican Wine-God alone had four hundred priests,  we realise that we are in presence of social conditions which mere humanism could not avail to transform, even if it found a hearing among the priest-hoods. À fortiori, no philosophic developments on the sacerdotal side could have availed. The growth of a pantheistic philosophy among the priesthoods of ancient India and Babylonia and Egypt, and the growth of a monotheistic doctrine among those of Jewry, were equally without effect on the sacerdotal practices as a whole, these remaining in all cases alike primitively sacrificial, though, for extra-sacerdotal reasons already noted, they ceased to include human sacrifice. And in Mexico, of course, the philosophic developments were slight at best. The figuring of Tezcatlipoca as “the soul of the world”  does not appear to have stood for any methodically pantheistic thought, being apparently an expression of henotheism common in solar worships. The entire Mexican civilisation, in short, was being arrested at a stage below that attained in the Mesopotamian empires long before the Christian era.

9. The Religion of Peru

While in Mexico we see a society being ruined by religion, in Peru we find one suffering economically a similar ruin from the principle of empire. In Peru, the religious tendencies are seen at work in a much modified degree. There the rapid multiplication of the priesthood was hindered by the peculiar standing of the king and his family. In Mexico the king was elected by the nobles: in Peru he reigned by divine right of the strongest description; the doctrine being that the original Inca was the Sun-God, who married his sister; and that all succeeding Incas did the same, thus keeping the succession strictly divine. As they extended their dominions by conquest, they astutely provided that the religions of the conquered peoples should subsist, but in a state of recognised subjection to the Inca, the divine high-priest, as the priesthood generally ranked below the sacred caste of the Inca nobles; so that the old cults had not the chance of growing as those of Mexico did, though they remained popular and venerable. The two leading deities were Pachacamac and Viracocha, who in virtue of similarity were often identified. Each figured in myth as a Creator, and they were doubtless originally the Gods of different peoples or tribes, though their cults tended to unity under the politic despotism of the Incas. Pachacamac signifies “life-giver of the earth,”  and Viracocha—who here assimilates to Aphroditê—”foam of the sea”; and they seem accordingly to have been respectively associated, to some extent, with the principles of heat and moisture; but, as so many other ancient systems show, these principles readily lend themselves to combination. Both belonged to the pre-Incarial civilisation, but were adopted and blended by the Incas, though their status as creators of all things, including the sun, was inconsistent with the Incarial religion, in which the sun was the Creator.  The omission to build new temples, however,  was probably undermining this cult; and the popular religion was becoming more and more one of worship of the minor deities, with the Inca figuring as the representative of the chief natural God, the Sun. The Thunder and Lightning were worshipped as the Sun’s ministers; the Rainbow as his symbol or emanation; and the Moon and Stars, and in particular the planet Venus, as separate divinities; and Creator, Thunder, and Sun were sacrificed to as if very much on a level in dignity.

From such developments we may infer that the Peruvian popular culture was nearly stationary or decaying; and it becomes easy to understand how, after the Conquest, the Christian deities took the place of the old without any difficulty; these being so many religious conventions, while the real beliefs of the people remained attached, as they are now, to the genii or sprites of their own lore. For an unprogressing and unlettered people—as many of those in Europe have been at different times—religion is mostly a matter of festivals and hand-to-mouth superstitions; and the Peruvian common people are, under Christianity, what they were under their Incas. European life gives abundant evidence of how the usages of an ancient creed may survive the creed itself. In Peru, as in Mexico, there was a solemn religious ceremony of renewing at stated periods, by special generation, the fire used in the temples, and even in the households. In Mexico it was done over a human sacrifice, by means of the friction of two sticks, at the end of each cycle of fifty-two years.  In Peru it was done yearly by means of a concave mirror.  So did men do in ancient Rome, and similarly have northern European peasants done in Germany, in Scotland, in Ireland, at intervals till our own time, regarding the “need fire” or “forced fire” as a means of averting evil.  It is one of the oldest rites of the human race, and it has survived under all religions alike down to the other day, when perhaps it received its death-blow from the lucifer match. Equally universal is that ceremony of annually driving out the evil spirits,  which was undertaken in Peru by the Incas in person, and which is supposed to have survived in Scotland to this day in the burghal ceremony of “riding the marches.” Customary usages and minor superstitions outlast faiths and philosophies; and in Peru they defy the Church. Sun-worship is gone; but the ideas of the Incarial times remain. And, indeed, there existed in some districts eighty years ago, and probably survives even to-day, a devout celebration of the memory of the ancient theocracy, in the shape of an annual dramatic representation, which the rulers vainly sought to suppress, of the death of the last Inca at the hands of the Spaniards.

It was about as ill-founded a devotion as any ever shown to a royal line in our own hemisphere; for under the Incas the people were heavily oppressed by minutely tyrannous laws and by taxes, they alone bearing all burdens, and the priests and nobles going free.  But were it not for the mistake of the last Inca before Pizarro in recognising one of his sons by a foreign queen, and dividing the empire between him and the heir apparent, the Inca empire, despite the disaffection of some of its subjects by conquest, might have subsisted long. As its priesthood was necessarily less powerful, so its sacrificial system was less burdensome and less terrible. Human sacrifices also were much less general than in Mexico; but they existed;  and there is reason to reject the claim of Garcilasso, who was biassed by his Incarial descent, that the Incas had wholly abolished them. Peoples at that culture-stage could not readily be forced to give up their ancient rites. It is in fact on record that when an Inca was dangerously ill, one of his sons was sacrificed for him to the Sun-God in the immemorial fashion;  and it was in keeping with such a usage that at least one tribe in Quito should regularly sacrifice its first-born.  If it be a sheer fable that at the accession of a new Inca there were sacrificed some hundreds of children,  no trust can be put in any of the Spanish testimonies. It is however established by the “Fables and Rites of the Yncas”  that the great festival of Capacocha or Cachalmaca, instituted by one Inca at the beginning of his reign, was celebrated with sacrifices of boys and girls, one from each tribe or lineage, both at Cuzco and at the chief town of each province. Further, after every victory certain captives were sent to the capital to be sacrificed to the sun. It is thus only too likely that among some of the coast peoples children were sacrificed to the Gods every month.  What seems to be certain is that, save perhaps among some of the more savage tribes, the Peruvians under the later Incas had abolished cannibal sacraments—a proof of the natural movement of humanity in that direction where the direct interest of a powerful priesthood did not too potently conserve religious savagery.

For the rest, they sacrificed their llamas, small birds, rabbits, sheep, and dogs; and while they alone of the American races had burnt-offerings of animals,  they ate their unburnt sacrifices raw,  here again showing the tendency of religion to preserve, wherever possible, the most ancient usages of all. They had, indeed, the custom of Suttee, like the Hindus and the Mexican Chichimecs; good widows, especially those of the Incas, being at one time expected to bury themselves alive when their husbands died,  so as to be wives to them in the spirit world; but this custom was dying out, being replaced by the symbolism of placing statuettes in a man’s tomb to represent his wives and servants.  In the same way, human sacrifice was being replaced by the surrogate of blood-letting.  Above all, the blood sacrament had become conventionalised in a quasi-Christian form. The Peruvians had the institution of a Holy Communion, in which they ate of a sacred bread, sancu, sprinkled with the blood of a sacrificed sheep, the priest pronouncing this formula: “Take heed how ye eat this sancu; for he who eats it in sin, and with a double will and heart, is seen by our Father, the Sun, who will punish him with grievous troubles. But he who, with a single heart, partakes of it, to him the Sun and the Thunderer will show favour, and will grant children and happy years, and abundance of all that he requires.” All then made a solemn vow of piety and loyalty before eating.

To say, as some do, that there was nothing essentially “moral” in such rites, because they had in view temporal well-being,  is merely to set up one more one-sided discrimination between Christianity and Paganism; for it is certain that the early Christians regarded their eucharist as possessing miraculous medicinal virtues. Equally unjudicial is the comment on the rites of infant baptism and confession of sins (which the Peruvians also practised) that “even where the Peruvian religion seems to undertake the elevation and protection of morals, it does so rather with a utilitarian and selfish view than with any real purpose of sanctifying the heart and will.”  It is hardly necessary to reply that the Mexicans and Peruvians had just the same kind of moral feeling in any given stage of civilisation as Christians have had in a similar culture-stage, and that the desire for future salvation, appealed to in all Christian evangelical teaching, is only utilitarianism and selfishness sub specie æternitatis. The Spaniards themselves recognised that the Mexicans ate the mystical body of the God with every sign of devotion and contrition;  and they were so far from depreciating the Peruvian communion that they supposed St. Bartholomew had established it.  The Mexican wise-woman who prayed the Merciful Goddess to cleanse the babe from the sin of its parents will compare fairly well with the practisers of infant baptism among ourselves; and it cannot be shown that the Mexican and Peruvian confessors stood as a rule any lower morally than those of Christendom at the same culture-stage. The casting of horoscopes for infants was practised in Europe just as in Mexico at the time of the Conquest. The Mexican priests gave indulgences; but they never went to the lengths of the Renaissance Papacy in that direction.

10. Conclusion

On the other hand, the promotion of material well-being is precisely what is oftenest claimed for Christianity; and the argument is presumably changed in the case of Peru and Mexico only because there it would break down. For the great fact about these heathen civilisations is that they did attain material well-being, as apart from humane feeling, in a considerable degree; though, as we have seen, they were suffering much from sacerdotalism and autocracy. If we do not say with Dr. Draper that the Spaniards destroyed a higher civilisation than their own, we may at least say that the one they destroyed was in many ways superior to that which they put in its place. What they did was completely to destroy the civilisations they found, without replacing them at all in large measure. In the matters of road-making, agriculture, and the administration of law, the new civilisation was not to be compared with the old, which, indeed, was on these points ahead of anything in Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.  The Aztecs had clean streets, and lighted streets, when Europe had not. Dr. Réville, indeed, lays undue stress on the lighting of the streets, which was not done by lamps, but by fires;  but even that was an improvement on the European state of things two hundred years ago. Peru to-day is in large part a desolation compared with what it was under the Incas; and under the new religion the native races seem to be positively lower than under the old. By the testimony of Catholic priests, the conquerors nearly exterminated the Aztec races, the numbers destroyed by their cruelties being reckoned at twelve millions. And on the side of morality and humanity, who shall say what the gain was in Mexico when the Christian conquerors, after execrating the practice of human sacrifice, set up their own Holy Inquisition to claim its victims for the propitiation of the three new Gods, harrying still further the people they had already decimated by atrocious tyranny and cruelty?

It is little to the purpose to urge, as was done by Joseph de Maistre,  that “the immense charity of the Catholic priesthood” sought to protect the natives in every way from the cruelty and avarice of the conquerors. It is in the nature of all priesthoods in close connection with the people to seek or wish its good in some way:  the Mexican priests, as we have seen, enjoined beneficence, and they treated their own vassals well.  But when the Christian apologist declares that he has “no knowledge of a single act of violence laid to the charge of the priests,” save in the one case of Valverde in Peru,  he goes far indeed beyond his brief. There were certainly humane priests, as Las Casas and Sahagun; but what but “acts of violence” were the whole efforts of the priesthood to destroy the ancient monuments and records, to say nothing of the operations of the Inquisition? It is not, however, in mere “acts of violence” that the fatality of Christian junction with non-Christian civilisation lies: it belongs to the nature of the case; and religious principle, which encouraged the original act of conquest, is worse than powerless to avert the consequences. If the more forward races will not leave the more backward alone, and cannot blend with them in a common stock, they must do one of three things: exercise a mere supervision, good or bad, as Englishmen do in India, where they cannot breed; or crowd the weaker out, as is being done in North America and Australia; or strangle the lower civilisation without developing the higher, as has been done in Mexico and Peru by Christians, and in Egypt by Saracens. Whether a race fusion can take place in Mexico, Peru, and Brazil remains to be seen. If it be attained, those countries will have solved a problem which in the United States, in a worse form, seems far from solution.

In that case, a relative success may finally be claimed for the Catholic as against the Protestant evolution. But it will be due to other causes than religion. It may, indeed, be charged against the Catholic Church that its unchangeable hostility to the spread of knowledge has been the means of paralysing progress in countries where, as in Mexico and Peru, it has been able to attain absolute dominion over minds and bodies. “It seems hard,” says Dr. Tylor,  ”to be always attacking the Catholic clergy; but of one thing we cannot remain in doubt—that their influence has had more to do than anything else with the doleful ignorance which reigns supreme in Mexico.” But it is not Catholicism that is the explanation. “The only difference,” avows Dr. Brinton,  ”in the results of the two great divisions of the Christian world,” in the matter of conquests, “seems to be that on Catholic missions has followed the debasement, on Protestant missions the destruction, of the race.” It may be added that in Protestant Natal to-day there is a general determination among the white population to keep the natives uneducated, lest knowledge should give them power. In fine, the claim that there is an inherent civilising virtue in Christianity is here, as elsewhere, turned to confusion. “Christianity,” as the same writer declares,  ”has shown itself incapable of controlling its inevitable adjuncts; and it would have been better, morally and socially, for the American race never to have known Christianity at all than to have received it on the only terms on which it has been possible to offer it.”

What Christendom could best have done for the American civilisations, after putting down human sacrifice, was to leave them to grow, like those of China and Japan, under the influence of superior example at certain points. Progress might then conceivably have come about.  There is little use in speculating over the it might-have-been; but at least we should not overlook the fact that in Peru there are distinct records of rationalism among the theocratic Incas themselves. Several of these remarkable rulers  are recorded to have expressed the conviction that the Sun, for ever moving in his allotted course, could not be the Supreme Deity he was said to be—that there must be another Deity who ruled him.  Netzahualcoyotl, we saw, thought similarly. This reminds us that in all ages and under all religions there have been Freethinkers; men who knew that the Gods were myths while the Vedic hymns were being made; Sadducees among the Jews; Mu’tazilites among the Mohammedans. For the history of mental evolution has not been that of a simple process from delusion to rationalism, but of a constant war between the two tendencies in the human mind; and what has happened s hitherto is just that inasmuch as the majority have thought little they have been credulous. To measure the position of any nation in this regard, we have for the most part simply to consider the status and expansive power of its priesthood. And for us to-day there is one special lesson to be drawn from the case of the unbelieving Incas, who never modified their theocratic practice as regarded the multitude, whatever they might deem among themselves. Their principle evidently was that the masses must be deluded. Well, we know that when the royal line fell, those masses were wholly unable to act for themselves, and fell abjectly under the sway of a mere handful of conquerors. Unless the masses also rationalise, they will never attain a worthy humanity. So that the Freethinkers had need be more righteous than the Scribes and Pharisees.

It is the more necessary to insist on this, the final lesson of all comparative hierology, because in the face of all the facts some students contrive, with the best intentions, to invert it. Because supernaturalism has always been associated with ethics in religious history, it is fallaciously inferred that there can be no ethic without supernaturalism; and in order to shield from rational criticism the prevailing creed, emphasis is laid on every point at which in its evolution it has chanced to be associated with the principle of betterment. This was the point of view of one of the first scientific investigators on the comparative principle, Benjamin Constant, whose treatise De la Religion, considerée dans sa source, ses formes, ses développements, published in 1824-34, is still worth attention. Developing the principles of Fontenelle and Des Brosses, he set forth, clearly and insistently, two generations before Mr. Lang, the presence of savage survivals in the religions of civilised antiquity;  and while accepting Hume’s demonstration of the priority of polytheism  he anticipated Mr. Lang’s theorem about the good Supreme Being who “could not be squared,”  even as he framed a number of the theses employed by Dr. Jevons for the vindication of religious intuitionism, such as the utility of taboo and the opposition between religion and magic.  Long before it was fashionable to do so, he adopted and developed Lessing’s thesis of the progressive development of all religion;  Comte’s law of the three stages he anticipated by one of four stages, which is perhaps better grounded;  and some of his solutions are both ingenious and just, more just than some of those of his successors who follow similar lines. Yet by reason of his desire to glorify “the religious sentiment” in the abstract and in the present time, apart from all the “forms” of religion, he repeatedly lapses into crude sophistry. After insisting that the religious sentiment is “universal” he speaks of “irreligious peoples”;  and wherever he has to admit that religion has wrought tyranny and evil he alleges that just there the religious sentiment has left it, that it has become merely interest, egoism, calculation.  On this very principle, religion is beneficent only momentarily, when it is taking shape as a reform of old religion by innovators; each innovation in turn becoming a matter of form, interest, egoism, calculation; so that “the religious sentiment,” so far from being universal, turns out to be the sentiment only of innovators, freethinkers, enemies of traditionalism. After being represented as “sweet and consoling” for the mass of men, “the spirit of religion” turns out to be precisely what the mass of men never at any one moment entertain. All the while, it is pretended on à priori grounds that rationalism must always lend itself to fatalistic submission, as if religious reform were not relative rationalism; and the colossal historical facts of religious fatalism, religious tyranny, religious cruelty, religious licence, are glosed as phenomena of irreligion.

From this long-drawn contradiction there is only one way of escape—the recognition that the sole rational test of any religious credence or usage at any moment is its truth, relatively to the intelligence of the moment. Mechanically repeating that religion is a fundamental “sentiment,” men lose sight and hold of the truth that veracity is also a sentiment, with inalienable rights. The men who, in terms of religious credences, have reformed religion in the past, have done so in the conviction that the credences they discarded were not true. To argue that, because their credences were associated for a time with moral or material improvement, we must cherish those credences even when we know them to be untrue, is to be false not only to their ideal but to the very principle of development. Such an acceptance is in itself corruption, the negation of betterment; and to turn the historic fact of the relativity of religious beliefs into a general vindication of religion is to read the law of evolution backwards. Bad or mistaken morals are relatively “fit,” even as is false belief. It has been argued that cannibalism once saved the human race; and the proposition may be perfectly true; but so far from being an argument for reversion to cannibalism, it does not even cancel the fact that cannibalism has again and again gone far to destroy low civilisations.

Religious belief has been historically associated with both the progress and the paralysis of civilisation; and the just inference is that, so far from its being the principle of betterment, it is simply a form of fallacious mental activity, which may either be countervailed by truer forms or may countervail them. And the beliefs which have the worst concomitants are precisely those certified by the special pleaders as “truly” religious. The belief in immortality, so often extolled as a great source of consolation, has been the motive for the slaughter of unnumbered millions of human beings, religiously doomed to accompany others to “another world”; the conception of sacrificial salvation, another source of “blessed comfort,” has incited to the slaughter of uncounted millions more, with every circumstance of heart-searing atrocity; the doctrine of sacramental communion with deity, as we have seen, has been the means of conserving and sanctifying systematic cannibalism at the hands of priesthoods, where without priesthoods it must have died out; and in every age and stage of human growth the religious sentiment, of which the most essential and constant characteristic is to cling to “forms,” is seen on the intellectual side damning new thought, strangling science, sanctifying injustice, and haloing war, as well as endorsing what measure of moral principle had been evolved in a lower stage of thought. There is never the slightest security that the spirit of justice and reason and sympathy will coincide with “the spirit of religion”; and there is no known religious system which is not habitually turned to the frustration of some of the best of the precepts it professes to inculcate. There is thus no reason to doubt that in savage as in civilised times the forces of organised religion have been arrayed against the forces of betterment, social as well as intellectual, with but a dubious record on the side of moralisation.

Certain hierologists on religious grounds make much of the fact that some of the “lowest” races appear to have the “highest” notions of a Supreme Being, as if that were not a specially plain proof of the futility of theistic notions as civilising forces. “Fijian religion,” we are told, draws “an impassable line between ghosts and eternal gods.”  And the apparent effect of that discrimination was to keep the Fijians the most revolting set of cannibals on the face of the earth,  habitually eating their own species because the Eternal Gods preferred so to feed; while in the mysteries of their Supreme Being there were scenes of “almost incredible indecency.” Precisely where men drew the least clear distinction between ghosts and Eternal Gods, that is to say among the Tongans, cannibalism was abandoned till Fijian influence revived it; and the position of women was immensely better.  And all the while, the more brutal the religion, the more complacent were the worshippers. The unconscious testimony of a missionary may help to make the point clearer

The religious system of the Samoans differs essentially from that which obtained at the Tahitian, Society, and other islands with which we are acquainted. They have neither maraes nor temples nor offerings; and, consequently, none of the barbarian and sanguinary rites observed at the other groups. In consequence of this, the Samoans were considered an impious race, and their impiety became proverbial with the people of Raratonga [one of the Hervey Islands]; for when upbraiding a person who neglected the worship of the gods, they would call him ‘a godless Samoan.’ But......this people had ‘lords many and gods many’;” and the belief in these, by the missionary’s account, was associated with vice and absurdity.

As between the Samoan and the Fijian, our sole test is the critical reason. It is by the same test that we pronounce given religious doctrines incredible or inconsistent, apart from any question of their effects. Let that criticism be honestly met on its own ground, instead of by way of paralogisms concerning the utility of false beliefs in the past, and hierology will be freed from an element of disturbance and distortion, becoming as nearly as possible a department of pure history. It is the tactic of the special pleader for religion that has introduced that element: it lies with him to let it vanish. Doubtless it will reappear in sociology; but there it will be for the time a quickening force, giving vitality to a science that is slow to be vivified by actual interests.

Appendix A. The Eating Of The Crucified Human Sacrifice

On page 136 I have suggested that the cannibalism of the Bataks of Sumatra would seem to be a survival of an anthropophagous sacrament; and on p. 132 I have put the original eating of the “crucified” human sacrifice as an inference supported by other cases of sacramental cannibalism, by the abundant evidence from Africa, and by the special case of the Dravidian Gonds in India. I had overlooked a decisive testimony, preserved by Pickering,  which exhibits the Bataks as practising human sacrifice under the aspect of crucifixion, in the way of the Khonds, and as eating the fragments of the victim, as late as 1814. The testimony is that of Major Canning,  who in his residence among the Bataks at Tappanooly in that year “omitted no opportunity of making the most minute inquiries” on the subject of their cannibalism. It was previously known that they ate criminals, prisoners of war, and aged relatives, “not so much to gratify their appetite as to perform a pious ceremony.” Major Canning further elicited a native account of the manner of the ritual sacrifice:—

“Three posts are fixed in the ground: to the middle one the body of the prisoner or criminal is made fast, while his arms and legs are extended to the two others. (The narrator and other chiefs present here simultaneously made with their arms and legs the figure of St. Andrew’s cross.) On a signal being given everyone entitled to a share in the feast rushes on him with hatchets and knives, and many with no other instruments than their teeth and nails. He is thus in a few minutes entirely cut or torn to pieces, and I have seen the guests so keen.....as severely to wound each other’s hands and fingers. A mixture of lime-juice, salt, and chillies, prepared in the shell of a cocoanut, is always at hand on these occasions, in which many dip the flesh previous to eating it.” Questioned further as to the mode of killing, the native witness answers: “The first wounds he receives are from the hatchets, knives, and teeth of his assailants, but these are so numerous and simultaneous as to cause almost immediate death.”

Major Canning’s testimony is open to no doubt, for he here describes a procedure closely similar to that of the Khonds, which when he wrote had not been reduced to published narrative. His witness, a native chief, he tells us, was frequently corroborated by others present.

We are left to speculate as to whether the beverage “always at hand on these occasions” had ever had any analogy to the stupefying potion of the Khonds, or was simply a thirst-quencher for the victim before the hour of his slaying. It may be noted, however, that the St. Andrew’s cross seems a deviation from the Khond practice, and is an approximation to that of Benin, and to the method observed in the sacrifice of crucified victims of the Mexican God Xipe. (See figure in Encyc. Brit. new ed. art. America, Pl. ii, p. 809.)

Appendix B. Dramatic And Ritual Survivals

While the first edition of this volume was passing through the press in 1903, there reached me a cutting from an American newspaper, describing the survival or revival of a quasi-sacrificial Passion Play among the Christianised descendants of the Aztecs. As an illustration of the psychology of human sacrifice, it is worth reprinting without note or comment:—

“NEW MEXICO’S PASSION PLAY.

“THE PENITENTES AND THEIR SELF-INFLICTED TORTURES.

“Santa Fé, N.M. (March 27).—Among the Americans who flock once in ten years to see the Passion play at Oberammergau, there are few who know of the more realistic performance given yearly by the Penitentes of New Mexico. This performance was first adequately described by Adolphe Bandelier in a report issued by the Smithsonian Institution about ten years ago.

“The full title of the Penitentes is Los Hermanos Penitentes, meaning The Penitent Brothers. The order was established in New Mexico at the time of the Spanish conquest under Coronado, about 1540. The purpose of the priests who accompanied the Spaniards was to form a society for religious zeal among the natives. They taught the natives that sin might be expiated by flagellation and other personal suffering. As time passed, the Indian and half-breed zealots sought to improve their enthusiasm by fiercer self-imposed ordeals of suffering. The idea of enacting the travail of the Master on Calvary was evolved. Hence the Passion Play of the Penitentes on each Good Friday.

“Mr. Bandelier learned from the Spanish archives that as early as 1594 a crucifixion, in which twenty-seven men were actually nailed to crosses for a half-hour, took place on Good Friday, ‘after several weeks of pious mortification of the flesh with knives and cactus thorns.’ The Penitentes numbered some 6,000 at the time of the American-Mexican War in 1848. The Catholic Church has long laboured to abolish their practices. So have the civil authorities. Fifty years ago there were branches of the Penitentes in seventeen localities in the territory, and crucifixions took place in each of the branches. The organisation has since gradually died away. Nowadays the sole remnant of the order is in the valley of San Mateo, seventy-five miles north-east from Santa Fé. There is no railroad nearer than sixty miles.

“Some 300 Mexicans still cling to the doctrine that one’s misdeeds are to be squared by physical pain during forty days of each year, finally closing with a crucifixion. Most of the Penitentes live at Taos, a very old adobe pueblo. They are sheep and cattle herders. Not one in a dozen of them can read and write in Spanish, and they have as little knowledge of English as if they lived in the heart of Mexico. The Penitentes keep their membership a secret nowadays. They meet in their primitive adobe council chambers (moradas) at night, and they conduct their flagellations and crucifixions as secretly as possible. Charles F. Lummis, of Los Angeles, Cal., was nearly shot to death by an assassin for photographing a Penitente crucifixion a few years ago. The Penitentes have several night meetings during the year, but it is only in Lent that they are active. They have a head, the Hermano Mayor, whose mandates are strictly followed on pain of death. Adolphe Bandelier has written that up to a half century ago there were instances of disobedient and treacherous brother Penitentes having been buried alive.

“In Lent the Penitentes have night meetings several times a week at the morada. One day they will whip one another, on another day they go to El Calvario (the Calvary), a little hill away from the town, where they coat their bodies with ashes, and all the time call in lamentations for a witness to their sense of sinfulness. For several days at a time they go without food, and they spend whole nights in tearful prayer. When Holy Week comes the intensity of the fanaticism increases. They have been seen to thrust cactus spines into one another’s naked backs until the flesh swelled owing to the torture caused by thousands of nettles under the skin. They have been known to crawl on all fours like lizards over hill and vale for miles at a time to prove their humility. Self-lashing with short whips similar to cats-o’-nine-tails is common, and young men have died from exhaustion and loss of blood during too zealous flagellations.

“On Good Friday the Hermann Mayor names the ones who have been chosen to be the Jesus Christ, the Peter, the Pontius Pilate, Mary, the Martha, and so on, for the play. Notwithstanding the torture involved in the impersonation, many Penitentes are annually most desirous of being the Christ. The play is given on El Calvario. While the piperoblows a sharp air on a flute the man who is acting the part of the Saviour comes forth. His only garment is a quantity of cotton sheeting or muslin that hangs flowing from his shoulders and waist. About his forehead is bound a wreath of cactus thorns. The thorns have been pressed deep into the flesh, from which tiny streams of blood trickle down his bronzed face and over his black beard. In a moment a cross of huge timbers that would break the back of many men is laid upon his shoulders. He grapples it tight, and, bending low under the crushing weight, starts on.

“On the way a path of broken stones has been made, and the most devout Penitentes walk over these with bare feet and never flinch. The counterfeit Christ is spit upon by the spectators. Little boys and girls run ahead of the chief actor that they may spit in his face and throw stones upon his bending form. When El Calvario is reached, the great clumsy cross is laid upon the ground. The actor of Christ is seized and thrown upon it. The assemblage joins in a chorus of song, while several Penitentes lash the man’s hands, arms, and legs to the timbers with cords of cowhide. The bonds are made as tight as the big muscular vaqueros can draw them. The ligaments sink into the flesh and even cut so that the blood runs out. The arms and legs become blue and then black under the binding, but not so much as a sigh escapes the lips of the actor. He repeats in a mixed dialect of Spanish and Indian the words uttered by Christ at the true Calvary, and bids his brothers spare him not. When all is ready a dozen men erect the cross. The women weep and the children look on dumbfounded. Some of the men mock and jeer the man on the cross; others throw clods of sunbaked earth at him, and still others, feeling that they must have some part in the physical agony of the afternoon, call upon the multitude to lash and beat them.

“In several localities in Colorado and New Mexico it was once the practice literally to nail the hands of the acting Christ to the timbers of the cross, but the Catholic priest of this generation put a stop to that. There is no doubt that people have died from the tortures of the Passion Play. Only two years ago the Government Indian agent in the San Riga Mountains reported several deaths among the Penitentes, because of poisoning by the cactus thorns and the lashing the men had endured. The Penitentes believe that no death is so desirable as that caused by participation in the acting of the travail of the Lord.

“After the first half hour of noise and flagellation about the cross at El Calvario the excitement dies away. The crucified man, whose arms and legs are now black under the bonds, must be suffering indescribable pain, but he only exclaims occasionally in Spanish, ‘Peace, peace, peace,’ while the Penitentes who have had no part in the punishment prostrate themselves silently about the cross. As the sun slowly descends behind the mountain peaks the pipero rises to his feet, and, blowing a long, harsh air upon his flute, leads a procession of the people back to the village. Some of the leading Penitentes remain behind and lower the man from the cross. Then, following the narrative of the scenes on Calvary, his body is wrapped about with a mass of white fabric, and is carried to a dug-out cave in the hillside near at hand. In the cave the bleeding and tortured body of the chief actor is nursed to strength. If the man is of great endurance and rugged physical strength he will probably be ready to go home to his family in the evening, conscious of having made ample atonement for long years of sin, and having earned a reputation that many men in Taos have coveted.

“Until a score of years ago women joined in the balancing of the Penitentes’ accounts with Heaven by self-imposed bodily suffering. No longer ago than when Gen. Wallace was Governor of the territory hundreds of women scourged themselves until their backs and shoulders were raw.”

The following extract from a New York journal, referring to an incident at Easter, 1903, is noteworthy in the same connection, illustrating as it does, with the Oberammergau play, the persistence of the dramatic appeal of the Passion Play in the gospels:—

“THE CRUCIFIXION IN DRAMA.

“LAMBS CLUB ACTORS PERFORM A PASSION PLAY ON SUNDAY.

“The Lambs Club is composed to a considerable extent of actors. Its house backs up against the Garrick Theatre, and its monthly Sunday gambols’ have of late been given on that stage. These affairs have consisted of farces and burlesques, and the audiences have been composed of members and their invited guests. But last night merriment gave place to decorum. A ‘passion play’ was performed in all seriousness. No tickets were on sale, and so there was no chance of interference by the police, either on the ground that the Sunday law was broken or that the subject of the piece was illegal.

“This drama of the Crucifixion was the work of Clay M. Greene, the playwright and formerly ‘shepherd’ of the Lambs. He had written it for the Jesuit College at Santa Clara, Cal., of which he is a graduate, and it was acted there last year by priests and students under his direction. In the Lambs cast Judas Iscariot was impersonated by Joseph Grismer, Pontius Pilate by Al. Lipman, Peter by R. A. Roberts, John by Ernest Hastings, and Matthew by Henry Woodruff. Other rôles were taken by Nathaniel Hartwig, Enos Welles, Fritz Williams, De Wolf Hopper, and Sam Reed. A stageful of Lambs represented the assemblages. The mounting was the same that had been used in California, and was excellent. The acting was careful, dignified, and, in the main, impressive.

“Mr. Greene’s play begins on the plains of Bethlehem with the quest of Christ’s birthplace by the wise men of the East and Herod’s emissaries, and passes quickly to Herod’s palace, when the news of the new-born King of the Jews incites him to order the massacre of the infants. Then a lapse of years carries us to the representation of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem, His arraignment before the Council, the betrayal of Judas, the trial before Pilate, the delivery by Herod to the Jews, the march to Calvary, and the convulsions of nature following the Crucifixion.

“Christ is not a visible character, but his presence is indicated in three scenes. In the trial a bright light is thrown from the side, as though he were there, and to that point Pilate addresses his exhortation to the Master to refute the accusations of his enemies. On the way to Calvary the top of a cross moves across the background, as though carried by Christ, who is hidden by the multitude, and an effulgence marks his movement. Nor is he actually exhibited on the cross, but shadows thrown on a transparent curtain make a picture of the Crucifixion.

“This performance of ‘Nazareth’ is preliminary to its possible, use in a regular theatrical way. William A. Brady has acquired the rights in it and stands ready to produce it publicly. It is understood that he will request Archbishop Corrigan to sanction the enterprise, and that representatives of his reverence saw the play last evening. In the meanwhile, Oscar Hammerstein has an option on ‘The Passion Play,’ a version of the Christian tragedy now current in Montreal, with the tacit approval of the Roman Catholic clergy of that city, and with no obstructive action by the Protestants. Mr. Hammerstein says he will introduce it at the opening of the big theatre which he is going to build in West Thirty-fourth Street, if the acquiescence of church and municipal authorities can be secured. Christ is a visible and audible personage in the Montreal performance, which is in French, but here an English translation would be used.

“It is inevitable that, in case either of these ‘passion plays’ becomes a feasible venture, the famous Oberammergau representation will be imported. It is said that it would be located in Madison Square Garden, and could be placed there early next autumn if a certainty of non-interference were attainable. It is nearly twenty years since Salmi Morse brought his ‘passion play’ to New York from San Francisco. This was a fine production, directed by David Belasco, and costing $40,000. James O’Neill impersonated Christ, and in the cast were Lewis Morrison, James Herne, and others since conspicuous. During three weeks large audiences were drawn, but the leading actors were arrested every day and fined $50 each. At last the Governor of California took prohibitive action.

“Mr. Morse was almost a monomaniac about his play; and Mr. O’Neill, who had been educated for the priesthood, seemed sincerely religious in his personification of Christ. Henry E. Abbey brought the company and the outfit to this city, intending to place them at Booth’s; but the Mayor threatened to cancel the theatre’s license. The next move by Mr. Morse was to lease an old church on the site of the present Proctor Theatre in West Twenty-third Street, and put in a stage, on which a single performance was given to an invited audience. Mr. O’Neill had withdrawn, and the late Henry C. De Mille, as the Christ, headed a cast of generally inefficient amateurs. So the venture ended in a fiasco. The present attitude of city and church authorities is not yet ascertainable.”

Appendix C. Replies To Criticisms

§ 1. General Opposition: The Hibbert Journal.

As has been remarked in the preface, the most notable aspect of the body of criticism passed upon the first edition of the foregoing work is the almost complete abstention from challenge of the theses upon which challenge was specially invited by the writer—”that the Gospel story of the Last Supper, Passion, Betrayal, Trial, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, is visibly a transcript of a Mystery-Drama, and not originally a narrative; and that that drama is demonstrably (as historic demonstration goes) a symbolic modification of an original rite of human sacrifice, of which it preserves certain verifiable details.” The only attempt I have seen to counter these positions—an attempt made only incidentally by Dr. J. E. Carpenter—was, as I have elsewhere shown, cancelled by the critic himself. For the rest, critic after critic has impugned this or that analogy between Christian and pagan systems, this or that item of historic assertion; and many have broadly flouted the general thesis of the non-historicity of Jesus; but no one, so far as I am aware, has attempted to gainsay the central argument upon which attack was specially invited. I am therefore entitled to infer, so far, that that argument has some validity; though, for sheer lack of debate, I cannot yet count it inexpugnable.

That there should be found no flaws of statement or obscurities of argument in a treatise covering so many fields, I was never foolish enough to expect; and to one or two hostile critics I am indebted for corrections of errors of detail. It is to be regretted that critics capable of discovering such errors should put themselves in the wrong by gratuitous misstatements of their own concerning the case they dealt with. Dr. Margoliouth, for instance, pointed out that the legend which makes Joshua the son of Miriam, ascribed by me to the Arabic chronicle of Tabari, occurs only in the Persian version—a correction of some importance. Dr. Margoliouth, however, saw fit to allege that my long argument for the existence of a pre-Christian cult of Joshua (Jesus) son of Miriam turned wholly on the reference of the Moslem legend to Tabari, whereas it was only after putting my main case on other grounds that I wrote: “Finally, we have to note (a) the remarkable Arab tradition which makes Joshua the Son of Miriam.”

This want of critical rectitude marks nearly the whole of the polemic directed against Pagan Christs, and even where some sense of critical principle has been exhibited, theological animus usually deflects the reasoning in an unprofitable fashion. A lady reviewer in the Hibbert Journal, who certainly showed more concern for argument than most of the other critics of the book, embodied her case in such propositions as these:—

1. “Mr. Robertson, as we have seen, proceeds on the assumption that the historicity of Christ is a myth.”

2. “His reasons......practically reduce themselves to this......that Paul......shows total ignorance of the teachings and miracles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels.”

3. “He admits what they [the Epistles] imply—the hostility, for instance, to their writer of the Jews throughout the Mediterranean. But if this is granted, the historicity of Christmust necessarily follow. We can hardly believe that the Jews would have been hostile to a myth: they would have retorted that Jesus never even existed.”

4. “Our author, indeed, refuses to admit the historicity of the disciples: he is clearly inconsistent in so doing, for the Epistles imply it, and he admits the Epistles.”

5. “He explains away the reference to the Eucharist in 1 Cor. xi by assuming that the passage is interpolated. For the rest, he assures us that Paul or the ‘forger’ believed in a crucified Jesus as to whom he had no biographical record, and he finds him (!) in the person of a certain Jesus ben Pandira......We shall scarcely be guilty of scepticism if we refuse to accept this solution.”

6. “His [the author’s] theological position requires that he should deny the historicity of the Crucifixion.”

The “assumptions” in this debate are wholly on the side of the critic. So far from being led by my “theological position” to deny the historicity of Jesus or the Crucifixion, I had come to my present theological conclusions long before doubting the historicity of either; and only after striving for many years, on the normal assumptions, to construct a tenable historical conception of the rise of Christianity, did I find myself reluctantly driven, by purely historical considerations, to give them up.

I had in the same way taken for granted the historicity of the twelve apostles; and in abandoning that after an analysis made in the light of the Didachê I still held by the historicity of the Founder. Even that I only abandoned after an attempt to construct a theorem of a succession of Jesuses.

So far, again, from “finding” Paul’s Jesus in the Talmudic Jesus ben Pandira, I have expressly shown that, while bound as historical students to take full account of the apparent possibilities in that direction, we can finally find there no standing-ground. I had in fact anticipated the now common conclusion that the Talmudic Jesus, if not in the main mythical, is little more than a name, historically speaking; and I finally “found” Paul’s Jesus in the abstraction of the human sacrifice, named by the name of the ancient Jesus-God.

There, I should have supposed, was the likely point of attack for negative criticism. But the attacks made at that point, so far as I have seen, take the shape of mere rejection of the thesis. The Hibbert Journal reviewer indeed contended that there is “no trace of such a rite” as human sacrifice “among Palestinian Jews of the later period.” I leave the reader to decide for himself, after noting the fuller exposition in the present edition, whether that statement can hold. For the rest, my thesis of the Pre-Christian Jesus-God has received a remarkable and quite independent corroboration in the work of Professor W. Benjamin Smith, Der Vorchristliche Jesus (1906); and in the recent discussions in Germany over Professor Arthur Drews’s Die Christusmythe, that problem has naturally come in for much discussion. So far, I have seen no rebuttal of my own position.

The other positions taken up by the Hibbert Journal reviewer are only too easily turned. My “reasons” certainly do not “practically reduce themselves” to the silence of “Paul.” That is indeed a fatal crux, of which the orthodox defence has vainly striven to dispose. But the bulk of the cumulative argument of the examination of “The Gospel Myths” inChristianity and Mythology remains to be dealt with even if the problem of the Pauline Epistles be put aside; and the further argument in Pagan Christs as to the non-historicity of the whole matter of the mystery-drama is independent of the Pauline problem. Even if we accept “the four” epistles as genuine, and pass the passages which I challenged as interpolations, my central theses are in no way invalidated. The acceptance of the tradition by “Paul” would not establish the historicity of the tradition.

As regards the whole problem of the epistles, the Hibbert Journal reviewer proceeds upon untenable premises. Her assertion that the epistles imply the historicity of the disciplesis an error which comes of failure to realise the issue. The epistles never speak of disciples: they speak of apostles, never alleging or suggesting that those apostles were taught by “the Lord.” They tell only of a going cultus. And other errors follow. To say that I “accept the epistles,” and at the same time to admit that I charge upon them capital interpolations, is to break down at the start. The question of the general genuineness of “the four” epistles I have left open, while leaning more and more, though always with some reserves, to Van Manen’s conclusions. But my case was and is that, whether the epistles to the Corinthians be genuine or spurious, they betray a general ignorance of the purport of the gospel narratives. As thus: (a) the passage 1 Cor. xv, 3-9, cannot well have been current as it stands before the gospels, else they would surely have given the “five hundred” story; though (b) verse 5 must have been written before the Judas story was added to the gospels, since it speaks of Jesus as appearing to the whole “twelve,” where the synoptics say “the eleven”; (c) the non-mention of the women also infers ignorance of the gospel story; (d) the specification of “all the apostles” tells of an interpolation either of that phrase or of “the twelve”; and (e) the specification of James is again independent of the gospel story. Now, some of these items clearly tell in favour of an early and independent narrative; but others as clearly tell of interpolation; and all, taken together, impeach either the gospel narrative or themselves. The two sets are irreconcilable.

If the writer of the epistle knew the facts, and if the gospels give the facts, how came he to ignore the central episode of Judas? If he drew on a current report concerning the “five hundred,” how came the gospels to ignore that? Assume the bulk of the passage to antedate the gospels, what is to be inferred as to their composition? On the other hand, of what evidential value is a series of assertions of supernatural appearances, which further diverge markedly from the assertions in the gospels? Be the epistle genuine or spurious, how can it be held to show knowledge of the gospel story?

When, again, we turn to the passage 1 Cor. xi, 23 sq., we find the formula “For I delivered unto you......that which also I received” developed into “For I received of the Lord that which also I delivered unto you”; and here, under profession of supernatural knowledge, we have an express allusion to the betrayal, of which the other passage shows no knowledge—nay, excludes any inference of knowledge. That this passage is an interpolation is no “assumption,” but an irresistible inference from (a) the context and (b) the whole purport of that in ch. xv. It ruptures the context; and it tells of what the writer of the other chapter knew nothing. So far from being an arbitrary step on my part, the inference of interpolation has been latterly made by a series of German critics who probably had no knowledge of my argument, first penned more than twenty years ago.

What then is left of “the apostles” in the Pauline Epistles? A plainly valueless allusion to the twelve and one to “all the apostles”—allusions which form part of a set of incredible assertions—the mention of “the brethren of the Lord” (1 Cor. ix, 5), and the further allusions to “the apostles” in Galatians, where the exordium has plain reference to the claims of the Judaic apostles of the High-Priest or the Patriarch. If this epistle be “genuine,” it tells only of “apostles” of the Jesuist cult, naming “James and Cephas and John,” with a separate mention of “Peter,” and a description of James as “the brother of the Lord.” This, with 1 Cor. ix, 5, is of course one of the holdfasts of the orthodox defence, being in fact the sole quasi-biographical detail as to Jesus in the epistles. But (1) neither this nor any other epistle tells of the parents of Jesus; and (2) in Acts xii, 2, we have “James, the brother of John,” killed by Herod before Paul joins the new sect. So that if “James the brother of the Lord” were a brother of the Gospel Jesus and a “pillar,” he was so in supersession of the claims of the survivors of “the twelve,” since the two Jameses in the gospel list are sons of Zebedee and Alphæus; and there is no gospel mention of any discipleship on the part of James the son of Joseph and Mary, any more than of the other brothers named and sisters mentioned in Matthew xiii and Mark vi. Among these are James and Joses; and in Matt. xxvii, 56, we have mention of “Mary the mother of James and Joses,” withoutspecification of her or their relationship to Jesus. Of what historical value, then, is the reference to “James the brother of the Lord” in the epistle to the Galatians, even supposing it to be genuine? In epistles so often interpolated—by the admission of the revisers who have excised so many later interpolations—such a phrase as “the brother of the Lord” was the easiest of insertions; and even were the phrase primordial, the inference that “brethren of the Lord” in 1 Cor. ix, 5, was a late group-name is far more tenable than the exorbitant assumption that an actual brother of the Gospel Jesus, who never figures as his supporter in the records, had suddenly become a “pillar” of the cult; and that other brothers had also become propagandists. If these were actual brothers of Jesus, so acting in Paul’s day, how comes it that there is no hint of them in the Acts? The whole apostolic list of names and the list of the “holy family” are alike hopeless imbroglios for any reader concerned about historical truth. And if Galatians be not genuine—as even many theologians are fain to surmise, in view of its pretensions to supernaturally acquired knowledge of the Christian doctrine and its wide divergence from the narrative of the Acts—it may still be interpolated at any point. The separate allusions to “Cephas” and “Petros” are a stumbling-block for any exegesis. Finally, as I have shown in the Preface, the passage in which “brethren of the Lord” are mentioned in 1 Cor. ix is utterly incompatible with the passage on marriage in ch. vii, so that the main mention of the “brethren” in the epistles must go by the board.

It is hardly necessary to argue, in conclusion, against the assumption that the Jews could not be “hostile to a myth.” Does the reviewer believe that the Gods of the heathen werenot myths? When the Jews denounced such Gods as daimons, did they deny the existence of daimons? Were not the Christians hostile to Mithra? If Jesuist Jews could start a circumstantial Jesus myth in an age of universal credulity, the Jews as a matter of course would in the end take the line of denying, not the existence of the alleged Founder, but the genuineness of his mission and his claims. On Van Manen’s theory, the epistles belong to the second century. But, on any view of their date, they offered no point of contact to historical criticism. Their Jesus is dateless, speechless, homeless, without a biography. They locate neither his death nor his birth, assign to him no period, quote from him no teaching, specify no miracle. They do but name a crucified Jesus; and there may have been many crucified Jesuses in Jewish history. The Talmudic Jesus would fit that case, to say nothing of the presumptive sacrificial victim called “Jesus Barabbas.” The very interpolation which tells of the betrayal and the Last Supper names no place and suggests no date. Supposing even the string of assertions concerning the reappearances after the resurrection to have been current in the first century, it names neither place nor time; and it cites mainly unnamed Christian witnesses. Even if the “five hundred” story were not a late interpolation, it was open to no refutation. A number of Christians could doubtless be got to say they had seen the Lord after his death; and the “twelve,” Cephas, and James were mere partisans, whether dead or alleged to be alive. They too are dateless: the epistles never say whether or not they survive.

And while orthodoxy dwells on such valueless “evidence,” the Unitarian defenders of the historicity of Jesus do not believe in the event so evidenced. For them, there is nothing in the epistles that admits of either proof or disproof in a debate between Paulinists and Jews. Had the Jews, in terms of the argument of the Hibbert Journal reviewer, said that Paul’s Jesus “never existed,” there could be no debate, for there was no historical proposition for them to contest. A Jesus without date, home, parents, doctrine, or named disciples, a Jesus merely alleged to have been crucified, without mention of place or time, and to have “risen again” at no specified place or time, was not a subject for historical discussion. And if both Christian and non-Christian scholars, in our own day, in an age of historical criticism, are still in large numbers unable to see that the very absence of historical data from the epistles puts them outside of historical discussion, the Jews of the Pauline period could hardly be capable of so arguing.

To this, then, the case for the defence “reduces itself.” The sole quasi-historical datum in the epistles which makes for the historicity of Jesus is the hopeless item concerning James and other “brethren of the Lord.” The sole “events” historically posited concerning Jesus are that he was crucified and rose again, which last “event” the Unitarians admit to be myth. As to the crucifixion, their belief turns on the gospel narrative, the dramatic character of which they have not ventured to deny in detail. But the writer or writers of the first epistle to the Corinthians show in one passage vital ignorance of the gospel story of the betrayal, and give absolutely no historic data for the crucifixion; while the passage in which the betrayal is mentioned is on the face of the case an interpolation, since it imports knowledge which the other passage negates. Solvuntur tabulæ.

The Unitarian case is in fact only the orthodox case minus the supernatural. But even the orthodox case is a compromise. If the early Christians believed anything, they believed in the ascension. No educated Christian now believes in the ascension. Yet educated Christians believe in the resurrection on the testimony of an age which believed in the ascension, and call the legend “evidence.”

§ 2. The Rev. Alfred Ernest Crawley.

The work entitled The Tree of Life, by the Rev. A. E. Crawley,  author of The Mystic Rose, is an interesting development of modern Christian apologetics. As an anthropologist, Mr. Crawley is sufficiently familiar with the facts of comparative hierology to know that all the main features of the Christian creed and cultus—Divine Sonship, Virgin-birth, crucifixion, resurrection, salvation, baptism, and eucharist—are common features of pagan religion; and he takes the somewhat bold course of positing the facts in question. He is indeed somewhat imprudent in putting in the forefront of his exposition what he calls “The Rationalist Attack” and “The Anthropological Attack,” admitting that so far as they go they are unanswerable. As to Biblical cosmology, he confesses (p. 141) that “the arguments of Huxley and Laing in this matter can no longer be resisted”; and he in effect says the same thing of the supernaturalism of the gospels. It is in the latter part of his book that he proffers his vindication of the faith, in the form of the theorem (1) that religion in general, howsoever mythical be its basis and content, is necessary to “human nature”—that is, to the nature of those who “need” it; (2) that it is the true bulwark of society against “Radicals and Socialists”; and (3) that the Church of England is the best Church because she keeps “to a via media which does more than represent the essence of Christian doctrine, for it also preserves the best elements of primitive religion.”  Of this avowed compound of savagery and “progress,” the essential value is declared to consist neither in truth or reasonableness nor in any inculcation of altruism, but in the “feeling of life” which it conveys, its substitution of egoism for altruism, its consecration of “individualism.” I give his own words (italics mine):—

“Kidd is profoundly mistaken when he speaks of the intense altruism of the early Christians, and of the flood of altruistic emotion which Puritanism and the Reformation let loose upon the world. Gibbon rightly noted the intense egoism of the Christians; their altruism was confined to their own family, as it were; and Wakeman rightly speaks of the stern, uncompromising individualism of the Puritans. This increase of vitality is illustrated by the martyrs, both of the early Christian and Reformation times” (p. 275).

‘Even the cruelties of the Inquisition, the tortures and the burnings, were really another expression of the same access of strength. The lesson of religious cruelty, like the lesson of martyrdom, is that if religion, the permanent expression of vitality, can show such invincible strength of cruelty on the one hand, and of endurance on the other, the fact is due to an increase of vitality. We inherit, to our inestimable gain, the spirit and strength of persecutor and martyr alike: the resource, the endurance, the zeal, and the power of our best men are due to that spirit and the human force which it revealed” (p. 277).

Our Anglican sophist, it will be seen, has determined to take the wind out of the sails of Nietzsche, whose doctrine he gravely pronounces to be a “paradox.” Before we pass to his specific defence of the Christ myth, it would seem to be necessary to point out to his possible dupes the sociological implications of his thesis, to say nothing of its ethic. (For it is to be presumed that he makes converts, like his congeners, Mr. Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Balfour.) The “invincible strength of cruelty” which he so devoutly admires was after all rather more fully evidenced by the American Native Americans than even by the Puritans who did their best to exterminate them; and, religion for religion, the Choctaw religion would seem on his own principles to be superior even to the Christian. As for the “vitality” imparted to the Native Americans by their late conversion to Christianity, the concept is one which must entertain the American Bureau of Ethnology. Of course, the Choctaws cannot pretend to have done much in the way of religious persecution—that is indeed a Jewish and Christian specialty; and it must be admitted that when the Boxers have attempted something in that line the Christians have certainly been able to outdo them in massacre. But then on Mr. Crawley’s principles it must surely have been a great “increase of vitality” that enabled the Moslems to overrun all the early centres of Christianity, and the Turks later to conquer Christian Greece. Which makes a difficulty for the Neo-Christian.

As regards the services rendered by Christianity to States, again, the would-be believer would do well to note (1) the “vitalising” effect of the spirit of religious cruelty on Spain, which had so many more persecutors and so many more martyrs than England; (2) the operation of the same saving virtue in imperial Rome, where Christians are wont to point to the abolition of the gladiatorial combats as the beneficent work of their creed, but have not yet succeeded in demonstrating any access of vitality to the empire from the first century onwards. It is only fair to admit that the Spaniards contrived to destroy the civilisations of Mexico and Peru. But then the religion of Mexico was marked by an indurated and bloodthirsty cruelty which, on Mr. Crawley’s principles, should have meant an adequate amount of “vitality.” As for our own Anglo-Saxon ancestors, it remains for Mr. Crawley to demonstrate wherein they showed increase of “vitality” between their pagan conquest of Britain and their own conquest by their Norman fellow-Christians.

The nature of the thinking faculty which sustains Mr. Crawley in his social philosophy may be gathered from a few samples. 1. “It is one of the most noticeable of thediscrepancies in the gospel narratives that Christ consistently refused to give a ‘sign,’ while his reporters tell us of so many” (p. 141). 2. “If ever a conviction seemed to be mortised in adamant, it is perhaps the belief that religion is essentially altruistic. But the facts unmistakably point to the exact opposite” (p. 273). 3. “Even the most self-sufficient of rationalists prays to something without knowing it” (p. 257). (In which case Mr. Crawley knows the fact without any testimony.)

The reader is now substantially prepared to understand and appraise Mr. Crawley’s operations in Christian apologetics. He has a certain cynical candour, which is not without its charm; but with his natural gift for paralogism and his happy freedom from intellectual scruple, he yields some flights of ethic and of logic which will not readily be matched in modern controversy. On p. 125 he speaks of a “reaction against the scientific attack......to be seen in an altered Agnosticism, which is really religious, and is practically the old Christianity with all dogma and ritual omitted, and the supernatural element excluded.” On p. 131 we learn that “the scientific Agnostic” is “ready to return by some rational path to the main beliefs of Christianity. This tendency was seen in Comte and Haeckel; and the inference is legitimate that, even where the cleavage between religion and science is apparently most marked, yet man cannot do without religion.” Then on pp. 290-1 we have the assurance that in “the Ethical and Socialistic societies of to-day” “morality takes the place of religion. The failure of these systems to satisfy human nature is perhaps unexampled for completeness in the history of practical ethics. Positivism, as has been said, is Christianity with the Catholicism left out” [what was ”said,” as it happens, was the converse: “Catholicism with the Christianity left out”]: “the Ethical movement leaves out everything.”

In Mr. Crawley’s psychosis, moral, logical, and intellectual incoherence combined yield a rare range of tergiversation. On p. 243 he informs us that “Religious monism at once removes all false dualism from our metaphysics.” On p. 295 he delightedly chimes with Bishop Gore to the effect that “It is common to all the anti-Christian views of sin that at the last resort they make sin natural, a part of nature. It is characteristic of Christ’s view of sin—of the scriptural view of it—that it makes it unnatural.”

[One cannot but linger in this connection over the further joint achievement of Bishop Gore and Mr. Crawley in the way of falsifying doctrinal history. “It is characteristic, again,” says the Bishop, “of the non-Christian view that it makes the body, the material, the seat of sin. It is essential to the Christian view to find its seat and only source in the will.” “Now,” adds Mr. Crawley, “this account applies exactly to the primitive conception: the savage, like the Essene, regards sin as a transgression of nature. Sin breaks taboo......”It must be confessed that on the whole the Bishop contrives to get furthest from the truth. If there is one doctrine that stands out from the whole Christian and “scriptural” tradition, it is that sin entered the entire human race by Adam’s fall; and if there is one moral assumption that dominates that tradition in the early, “dark,” and middle ages, it is that the body is by nature prone to evil. The simple doctrine, “if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out,” might serve to decide the question for any save a Christian sophist. But Mr. Crawley’s summary of the savage theory of “nature” runs the Bishop’s formula close. The conception “transgression of nature” is simply not possible to a true savage, and was never formulated by one. Taboo is made and unmade by a word or a ceremony. Does the savage call either “nature”?]

I have spent some time over the main body of Mr. Crawley’s doctrine, thinking it useful to exhibit the moral and mental cast of a writer who lays it down that “irreligion means deterioration,” and who, knowing the substantial truth of the results of modern anthropology and hierology, professes to vindicate Christianity as “revelation.” “The ordinary believer,” he writes, “naïvely but justly, requires that Christianity shall be literally true, and its Founder both God and Man” (p. 144). So Mr. Crawley goes about to accommodate the ordinary believer. The critical argument of Pagan Christs he introduces to his readers in this summary (p. 148): “Dionysus and Apollo also have their religions, and precisely the same stories are told about founders as about the gods they served. Therefore Buddha, Zoroaster, Confucius, Laou-tze, Moses, and Christ must be mythical.” Dr. J. E. Carpenter, I admit, could not have done the “therefore” better. My only wonder is that Mr. Crawley did not add Mohammed and Mrs. Eddy: the extras would have made still better reading, and Mr. Crawley’s ethic could easily afford them. But there is no lack of completeness in his further proposition that “Dionysus and Apollo are never represented as founders of religions any more than is Jehovah.” I leave comment to every adult who has read the Bacchae and the Pentateuch. Wondering why Mr. Crawley did not say “any more than Jesus,” I proceed to transcribe his assertion (p. 149) that “Thus the evidence for the historicity of founders like Buddha and Zoroaster” [Quetzalcoatl, for instance?] “is as strong as for any historical fact, and this is admitted by the best students of the respective systems.” The proposition and the proof of it I hope to help to preserve by this transcription, to which I add no comment.

I may be excused for adding this from the same page:—”Robertson, indeed, while arguing against the historicity of Jesus, stultifies his case by admitting the historicity of ‘another person of the same name,’ the Jesus ben Pandora of the Talmud.” I ought here, perhaps, to make clear for Mr. Crawley’s “naïve” readers the full force and scope of his argument. It means that if I deny the historicity of Moses, but admit that of Moses of Chorene, I have stultified myself; and that if I dispute the historicity of John Barleycorn I stultify my own signature. It is a trifle, but it may be worth adding, that I did not admit the historicity of Jesus ben Pandira, about which I expressed serious doubts. But it is true that I admit the more or less clear historicity of a number of the Jesuses mentioned by Josephus, even as I admit the historicity of Mr. Crawley while disputing that of his namesakes in Vanity Fair. Further, I have postulated the probable historicity of an annual human sacrifice of a victim ritually named Jesus Barabbas.

With that crushing syllogism ready to launch, Mr. Crawley had just before advanced the proposition that the beginning of the Christian era was a “period too late for the free formation either of divine or of historical personalities by the mythopœic imagination”—an inexpensive petitio principii which had often been put forward before. I might leave him to reckon with those Christian hierologists who affirm the post-Christian appearance of such deities as Balder and Krishna; but it may suffice, even for a “naïve” believer of moderate intelligence, to ask himself when and how or how “freely” were formed the “personalities” of King Arthur and his Knights, Prester John, William Tell, the Wandering Jew, Lohengrin, Tannhäuser, the Seven Sleepers, Saint George, Faustus, and Saint Christopher.

If Mr. Crawley believed in the worthless argument he has hero used, he obviously needed no other. If Jesus cannot be non-historical, the case is at an end. He shows his sense of the futility of his own plea by using a number of others—the argument from the Chrestus of Suetonius, which clearly tells in favour of a Christ myth; the argument from Tacitus, who, if he wrote the passage in his History, only repeated what Christians said; and the argument from the passage in Josephus, given up as spurious by most Christian scholars. Then, in utter disregard of the Pauline epistles, he affirms that the Christian tradition itself “mentions the humanity of Christ first”; and proceeds to found on the hostile Jewish tradition of the “Sepher Toldoth Jeschu,” concerning which he expressly argues that it is plainly framed by way of countering the gospel story. Then it has no evidential value whatever, and his case for the historicity of Jesus is at an end. The assertion that the story of the Talmudic Jesus ben Pandira is “of supreme value” as “tending to prove the historicity of Christ” could come only from the writer who asserts that the Gospel Jesus consistently refuses to work wonders while the same gospels tell that he worked many.

Mr. Crawley has nothing more to say beyond accusing non-sacramentalist Christians of “stultifying the Incarnation”—the Incarnation in which he himself does not believe, since he insists on the historicity of Jesus and the lateness of the Incarnation story. Against the thesis of Pagan Christs that the gospel tragedy is a mystery-drama he offers no argument whatever. He is content to say in a footnote that Dupuis’s derivation of the legend of St. Peter from the Janus myth “is worth noting as a type of the extravagant inferences which are so conspicuous in the work of G. W. Cox and J. M. Robertson.” Of the charge of extravagance he does not offer a hint of proof.

I do not propose to make a counter charge of “extravagance.” The scientific charge against Mr. Crawley, in its most charitable form, would be that of intellectual antinomianism. He has simply no intellectual ethic whatever, and he is evidently satisfied that religion needs none, since he declares that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, deals only with “the elemental” (pp. 209, 265). Which means that if you feel you like to believe religion, and you think that it is socially useful, you do well to profess it in disregard of all argument (p. 296). He proceeds to explain in this connection (p. 265) that “In the elemental view of life, every scientific error of the Bible may be regarded as a truth. It is true, for instance, that the sun rises; and not even the most pedantic rationalist will employ a more scientific phrase.” Observe the logical morality of the phrase “for instance,” which is made to cover every myth and every forgery in the Bible.

Mr. Crawley, like most latter-day Christian priests, scouts the doctrine of the “French deists” that religion in general has been a matter of priestly imposture; thoughtfully omitting to tell the “naïve but just” Christian reader that this was the verdict habitually pronounced by the Christian priesthood upon all non-Christian religions during many centuries. The deists, finding as much priest-craft in Christianity as anywhere else, made a fairly reasonable extension of the doctrine. It certainly needs qualification; though Mr. Crawley, with his usual logical incoherence, offers a hopelessly fallacious argument against it. Among the Australian Aruntas, as Messrs. Spencer and Gillen have shown, certain myths propounded to the boys and women are perfectly well known by the adult men to be frauds. This, in Mr. Crawley’s opinion (pp. 195-6), proves that religious beliefs can never have been set up by fraud. It is really a rather strong argument for the priestcraft theory. For the Aruntas have no priests; and the old argument was that priests were able to carry off impostures which among laymen without priests would have been treated as such by adults.

Whatever may be the final verdict of hierology on that score, no careful student will dispute the actuality of priestcraft among either savages or civilised men. Of its existence among savages the proofs are innumerable. Of its existence among educated Christians the latest proof is Mr. Crawley’s book. He helps us to understand the spirit and the procedure of priestcraft in all ages. In the course of one of his professional appeals to pious and other prejudice he writes:—”Theistic and Christian prepossessions are often derided by rationalists; but there is sound human nature behind the instinct, as we may properly call it, which leads men to distrust an ‘atheist’” (p. 297). “Human nature,” from the point of view of Mr. Crawley’s tribe, is notoriously a monopoly of those who hold the beliefs which he inculcates; but, in spite of that naïve claim, rationalists contrive to possess some. And after they read Mr. Crawley it will probably reinforce their instinct, if we may dare so to call it, that there is something profoundly untrustworthy about a temporising priest who champions primitive superstition.’

§ 3. The Rev. Dr. St. Clair Tisdall.

Dr. Tisdall illustrates at once the difficulty for orthodox theologians of keeping their tempers when their faith is challenged, and the havoc which passion can work in an argument, not to say in the reasoning faculty itself. His animus disorders his enterprise from the start. In the opening chapter of his work on Mythic Christs and the True,  dealing with the question of Mithraism, he refers to me as “a modern writer on the subject, who tells us that his book ‘challenges criticism above all by its thesis.’” Pausing at that word, he goes on to charge me with first asserting that we know very little of Mithraism, and then proceeding, “as do others, to afford a complete account of the legends and the inmost theology of the Mithraists, together with details of its origin.”

It will be seen that the phrase first quoted by him is from the introduction to this work (preface in first edition), where the phrasing is not “its thesis,” but “its theses,” the reference being not to any general thesis, but to two immediately specified propositions concerning the Christian mystery-play. Having quoted “its thesis,” Dr. Tisdall burkes the rest of the passage, thus either wilfully garbling the whole or failing in his anger to understand what he reads. To the “theses” specified he makes not even an attempt to reply. The attack which he goes on to make on me concerning Mithraism is, as the reader will see from its statement, nugatory. Upon that subject neither I nor any one else can give “a complete account of the legends and the inmost theology.” “If we know all this about Mithra,” says Dr. Tisdall, quoting some details from another writer and from me, “we know a great deal.” And he goes on to propound the crushing counter-thesis, “There are no Mithraic Scriptures extant,” as if that settled the question. It is idle to discuss with such a writer what constitutes “a great deal.” It may suffice, however, to point out that what contemporary documentary evidence we have concerning Mithraism, apart from the Zendavesta, comes from Plutarch, Strabo, Athenæus, Herodotus, Porphyry, Commodianus, Macrobius, and Julian; the Fathers Julius Firmicus Maternus, Tertullian, Jerome, Justin Martyr, and Gregory Nazianzen; and the historian Elisæus of Armenia. Whether we call their information little or much, there it is. When he proceeds to charge me with eliciting from my “fancy” statements which I quote from the Fathers of his own Church, he merely raises the question whether it is his scholarship or his ethic that is at fault.

Accusing me further (p. 7) of dishonestly “reading Christian doctrines into Mithraism,” Dr. Tisdall begins by vilifying that creed as “debased.” He then sets about proving his charge against me (1) by citing from me a reference to the Khorda Avesta, xxvi, 107, whereafter he declares in italics, “There is no such chapter in  existence......But possibly this is merely a printer’s error, though an unfortunate one.” If Dr. Tisdall knows the texts as he professes to do, he must be perfectly well aware that xxvi—with the alternative “(10)”—is Spiegel’s chapter-number for the Mihir Yasht in the Khorda Avesta. To say that “there is no such chapter in existence” is again to raise questions not only of scholarship, but of intellectual ethic. True, I have usually cited the Mihir Yasht by that title, and from Darmesteter: the “error” consisted solely in not giving Spiegel’s name, with his rendering: “as the heavenly understanding allies itself to the heavenly Mithra.” All errors of reference, printers’ or writers’, doubtless, are unfortunate, though for candid readers they are usually soluble; but doubly unfortunate is the arrogance of a writer who, making an attack such as the above, thrice prints “Fargand” for “Fargard” in his own text; twice prints “Principal” for “Principle”; prints “Iride” for “Iside”; prints “Pyramids” as a French word; and cites Jerome’s “Contra Jovinianum” as “Contra Jovianum.” A writer who grounds his attacks upon supposed printer’s errors should be more careful about his own proofs.

On the real issue, Dr. Tisdall is careful not to mention that in the Mihir Yasht (= Khorda Avesta, xxvi, 107: Spiegel) the “heavenly understanding” is declared to be allied with Mithra. He goes on professedly to cite from Geldner’s text of the Zendavesta a passage which is not that referred to by me, laboriously and uselessly proving that it does not speak of the “Word”; and then, turning to Vendidâd, Fargard xix, 14, 15 (48, 54), stakes his credit on his own declaration that I “may have been misled” by a translation “impossible for a person at all acquainted with the original language.” I fancy that most readers will prefer to the smatterings of Dr. Tisdall the expert scholarship of Darmesteter, who reads “the Word Incarnate” in Mihir Yasht xxxii, 137 (where Spiegel has simply “the Manthra”), or even that of Spiegel, who reads “the holy Word” where Dr. Tisdall says no scholar could.

F’. Dr. Tisdall’s case on this head substantially amounts to denying that “sacred text” has any possible community of meaning with the idea of the Logos. He thereby shows his general ignorance of the evolution of the idea in question. (Both in Islam and in Brahmanism the Sacred Book is theologically abstracted to an eternal and untreated existence; and the psychic process is fundamentally the same as in the Hindu hypostatising of Speech, which is the type of the Græcised doctrine. “Speech is the Rig Veda,” and “the ‘word’is Brahma.”)

Offering such proofs as that above noticed for his charge of dishonesty against me, Dr. Tisdall (2) represents me (p. 12) as giving the Mithraic case in proof of my allegation that the Christian doctrine of the Logos comes from a pagan source. To realise the dishonesty of that assertion, the reader need but peruse §§ 2, 3 of Ch. ii of Part II of the foregoing volume, where the Logos idea is traced to a probable Babylonian source. I have expressly represented the idea of the Logos as late in Mithraism.

When, further, my reverend critic in this connection zealously contends that even to prove that Mithra was “associated with” the Word would not be to identify him with it, he raises the question whether he is aware of the history of his own creed. If he knew that in early Christian literature “it is common to find the titles of the Holy Ghost assigned to the Logos,” and if he could realise the fact that in ordinary Christian conception the Logos performs the function of the Holy Spirit, even he would hardly have flouted the suggestion that association of that kind can easily lead to assimilation in a fluid system. For the rest, he makes no attempt to deny that Sraosha, who was latterly bracketed with Mithra, was ”the Word”; and he does not even mention my reasons for inferring that in one worship Mithra was practically identified with Vohumano—Sraosha, the latter being worshipped, like Mithra, along with Anaitis.

The gist of Dr. Tisdall’s claim appears to be that no Eastern creed save the Christian had either a Logos or a Mediator or a Virgin Mother, and that Mithraism could have had no moral value. On all three heads he writes as the merest Christian partisan. He is aware (p. 18) that in Armenia the Christians professed to quote from Persians the statement that “the God Mithra was born of a woman”; and still he professes to see no trace of the idea of a virgin-birth. Yet in his own creed the God-Man is declared to be born of a woman; and he does not for a moment pretend that the Persians declared Mithra to be the son of a mortal father. Confusing another text, he makes it assert that Mithra was “incestuously born of a mortal mother,” when the assertion really was (see above, p. 322, note) that the God was born of the incest of Ahura Mazda with his mother. Any candid scholar would admit that on the face of such references Mithra was reputed supernaturally born of God and a mortal mother. When Dr. Tisdall argues further that the conception of the Petra Genetrix, the Rock from which Mithra was born, excludes the idea of any mother, he merely sets us asking whether he is unaware that in ancient mythology the Earth, constantly personified, is the mother par excellence.

On the general mythological topic of virgin-birth, Dr. Tisdall writes in the childish strain of Canon McCulloch. Where a supernaturally impregnated mother is not expresslycalled a virgin, he protests, there is no analogy to the Christian story. Both reverend gentlemen seem to be unaware that the title of “Virgin” was categorically given in antiquity to Mother-Goddesses and Goddesses of many amours. They cannot see that the essence of the idea under challenge lies in the item of supernatural birth—birth without male congress, which is asserted by Hesiod in the case of Hêrê. In the heat of his partisanship, Dr. Tisdall angrily attacks Dr. Frazer for accepting the overwhelmingly strong testimony of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen as to the belief of certain Australian tribes that all births are caused by the entrance of ancestral spirits, and that male congress is not the cause of conception. On this head he advances the futile argument that the tribes in question have strict marriage laws—as if these were not intelligible in terms of mere sex instinct and property; and he has the hardihood to affirm (p. 89) that “there is no proof that savages hold or have ever held” the doctrine of spiritual conception. After this, it matters little that, without an attempt at proof, he declares me (p. 87) to have confounded

f Saoshyant with Sraosha in the Zoroastrian lore; and further flatly denies that in that lore Saoshyant is virgin-born. Knowing nothing of the life of Australian Aborigines, he insolently negates the whole profound research of Messrs. Spencer and Gillen; and on the strength of his private definition he overrules the verdict of Tiele, Cumont, Haug, and Darmesteter concerning Saoshyant. When, however, a Sayce, turned champion of orthodoxy, argues that the human race has not evolved from savagery at all, that ineptitude is for Dr. Tisdall a sufficient ground for refusing to admit that “men were originally savages”; and the youthful folly of Renan’s deliverance on the same subject—a deliverance never repeated, in a book never completed—serves equally, with him, to outweigh the whole mass of modern biological science. It does not occur to Dr. Tisdall to ask whether even in 1854 Renan believed in the Virgin-birth.

The reader will be able to realise Dr. Tisdall’s philosophic standpoint and logical faculty from his concluding deliverance (p. 91) that “if we suppose that popular fancy, quite independently and with no apparent reason (!), evolved the idea of supernatural—nay, even, of Virgin—birth, then we must conclude one of two things: either (1) that it is an unmeaning delusion, or (2) that it was developed under Divine guidance.” Deciding as a matter of course on the latter verdict, Dr. Tisdall proceeds to explain that through all religion “‘one unceasing (sic) purpose runs’ a Divine plan for the education of the human race.” On his own view, then, Mithraism was divinely superintended; and the fatigued reader is moved to ask why the reverend critic took all his previous pains to prove that the Mithraists cannot have had a notion of Virgin-birth, or of a Logos, and must have been a licentious crew? Given a Divine plan through all, are we not invited to credit Deity with all the religious misconduct of all paganism?

Putting Dr. Tisdall’s philosophic puerilities aside, I have to point out, further, the bad faith of a citation by him (p. 21) from me (Pagan Christs, 1st ed. p. 345: this ed. p. 326) as to the inscription on a picture in a Mithraic catacomb of “phrases of the ‘Eat and drink for to-morrow we die’ order.” Dr. Tisdall is careful not to mention (a) my remark that, if original, such phrases might stand for an antinomian tendency such as Paul imputed to his Corinthian converts; or (b) my further suggestion that they may very well have been inscribed by Christian hands after the fall of Mithraism; or (c) my further comment that there is no evidence whatever that Mithraism ever developed such disorders as compelled the suppression of the Christian agapæ. Needless to add, he does not tell that some declare the picture to represent the Christian ”Banquet of Seven.” With his professed faith in the Divine plan running through all religion, he is determined at any cost to prove that the Deity led Mithraists by wholly evil paths. Where Hausrath ascribes to their cult a purity which “won many hearts from sin-stained Olympus” and attracted some of the best emperors, Dr. Tisdall affirms that it won “generally the worst of them” (p. 17), naming “Aurelian, Diocletian, Galerius, and Licinius, as well as Julian the Apostate.” Hausrath names Antoninus Pius, Constantius Chlorus, and Julian—without thinking it necessary to add “the Apostate.” Such are the differences of method and result as between the sectarian and the historian. If one were to comment on the charges brought by Paul the Apostate against his Corinthian converts, or on the characters of the common run of the Christian Emperors from Constantine the Apostate onwards, Dr. Tisdall would presumably fall back either on his candid theorem (p. 70, note) that Christian precept is not responsible for Christian practice—a principle reserved by him for Christian use—or his equally flexible doctrine that all religious history is under divine supervision.

At that point we may leave the moral question save in so far as we are forced still to question the moral spirit of the Christian champion. He does not scruple to repel the assertion that Mithra was a Mediator by declaring that it is founded solely on Plutarch’s statement that “Mithra was called μεσίτησ because he stood midway between the Good Principal [sic] Ormazd, and the Evil Principal [!] Ahriman.” The assertion that he was a Mediator between man and God is accordingly declared not to be “scholarly, or even honest.” The suggestion here is that μεσίτησ does not really mean Mediator; whereas that is the normal and standing force of the term. The honest critic would have us believe that the regular Greek word for “intercessor” could have no such connotation for Mithraists when applied to Mithra, because Plutarch said he got the name from being midway between Ormazd and Ahriman; and that whereas Christians by his own account felt the need of a Mediator, Zoroastrians and Mithraists would not. He does not scruple to write:—”If his worshippers really held him [Mithra] to be a middle-man between Ormazd and Ahriman, we can the better understand Mithra’s undoubted association with Cybele, Baal, and such immoral deities.” Thus can hierology be written by a Christian priest. If a heretic should ask whether Christ is not practically a mid-way Power between God and Devil, saving his worshippers from both, he would be a good deal nearer the truth; but we can imagine the epithets with which Dr. Tisdall would greet him. The reader will not be surprised to learn that, perverting to his purpose a passage of Darmesteter, he represents ancient society (albeit under the Divine Plan) in the last years B.C. to have attained merely to “the unbridling of the human brute,” adding that “so it is in France now.”

It is on a basis of such sociology and psychology as this that Dr. Tisdall reaches the conclusion that the belief of pagans in supernatural births proves the reality of the gospel story. “The false coin,” he sums up, in the manner and on the plane of Justin Martyr, “pre-supposes the genuine......The very existence of so many varied forms of legends of births of this kind shows that such a thing is not ‘unthinkable.’” So that the currency of a multitude of narratives declared to be false (but divinely inspired) proves the inherent credibility of one other narrative of the same order. Such is the logic of official Christian theology in England in 1909.

I have not taken the trouble to answer all of Dr. Tisdall’s minor criticisms. It may suffice to cite one more, as a sample of their validity. On p. 24 he writes (italics mine):—”Though Mr. Robertson says, ‘Mithraism was, in point of range, the most nearly universal religion of the Western world, in the early centuries of the Christian era,’ yet this statement requires modification. Cumont informs us that, at first at least, ‘The influence of this small band of sectaries on the great mass of the Roman population was virtually as infinitesimal as is to-day the influence of Buddhist societies in modern Europe.” That is to say, my statement must be modified because it does not apply to the period before that to which I specifically applied it. I spoke of Mithraism “in the early centuries of the Christian era.” Professor Cumont’s phrase refers expressly to the time of the beginnings, “towards the end of the Republic.” Dr. Tisdall has penned sheer nullity.

An excuse is perhaps needed for dealing at any length with a writer capable of such dialectic. Mine is, that it is necessary at least to let laymen know the nature of the minds which now seek to impose faith upon them.

§ 4. The Rev. Father Martindale.

In the Roman Catholic periodical The Month, for December, 1908, there appeared an article by the Rev. Father Martindale under the title “The Religion of Mithra: Third Article: VI. A Modern Apostle.” It was devoted to an attack on Part III of Pagan Christs; and as the title appears to convey the belief that I am a Mithraist, it might seem negligible in a serious discussion. The reverend author, however, has made so many charges of bad faith, with so much revelation of bad faith on his own part, that I have thought it advisable to deal with them in detail, putting succinctly his misrepresentations, errors, and aspersions, and my rebuttals.

1. In his first paragraph, the rev. critic ascribes to me the thesis that “the dwindling intelligence of the earlier Christian generations misinterpreted a kind of mystery-play—such as were those of the ‘death and restoring to life’ of Attis and Adonis and Osiris—as the representation of actual events, and, by a coarse realism, transformed the libretto of this play into the Gospels.” Having posited this falsification, he goes on: “We have no intention of touching even lightly on Mr. Robertson’s general theory.”

Comment.—My thesis was that the mystery-play was closely transcribed, and added to the gospels—an extremely different statement. The refusal to face the theory was to be expected. It is normal among defenders of the faith.

2. Before dealing even with Mithraism, the rev. critic seeks to inflame his fellow-Catholics by describing me as having made an “attack upon that which is the spiritual life of so many millions, and from which they draw comfort in sorrow and strength in moral stress.”

Comment.—The critic ought really to have added that my “attack” endangered his own income. In that way, the question of the truth or untruth of the statements under discussion might have been still further obscured. A picture of the happy state of human life under the Inquisition might further have helped his polemic.

3. Dealing with my section on Mithraism, the Rev. Father proclaims that “the list of Mr. Robertson’s authorities astonishes us.” He goes on: “After the respectable names of Tiele and Boissier we find cited, without discrimination, H. Seel’s Mithrasgeheimnisse (1823), of the first part of which work M. Cumont says that it has but the remotest connection with the cult of Mithra,” etc. “Sainte-Croix’s Recherches, etc., are next cited,” he continues, and Sainte-Croix also is little valued by M. Cumont. “Sainte-Croix makes no use of the monuments, nor does Windischmann, an author of far higher merit, however, whom Mr. Robertson also quotes. Creuzer and Lajard constantly recur as authorities”; and M. Cumont dismisses these likewise as valueless.

Comment.—Any reader of this paragraph, not having seen my essay on Mithraism, would be nearly sure to take it for granted—unless he knew something of the controversial methods of Father Martindale—that the disparaged authors in question were cited by me as authorities for my facts and theories. True, the underlined passage about Lajard and Creuzer might puzzle him; for why should the critic now say “constantly,” after asserting generally that I cited the authors as my “authorities”? But he concludes the passage by asserting that “Mr. Robertson’s imposing list of authorities is singularly diminished in impressiveness when we see that it includes names like these.” A careful student, of course, might detect in the “includes” a sign of consciousness that the critic had been playing fast and loose with his readers, but the general impression conveyed to most readers of The Month would be that I relied on exploded “authorities.”

It is my disagreeable duty to point out that Father Martindale knew he was deceiving his readers. The list of “authorities” of which he speaks is not truthfully to be described as a list of authorities at all. It is given as a footnote in support of one sentence: “As to this, students are agreed”—’’this” being the proposition that “Mithraism was in point of range the most nearly universal religion of the Western world in the early centuries of the Christian era.” The list of references from which he cites a few names is compiled solely to bear out this assertion. I call Seel and Sainte-Croix and Creuzer and Lajard “students,” whatever be their shortcomings; if they are not so describable, what, I wonder, is Father Martindale? Besides those named I cite Beugnot, Ozanam, E. Meyer, Roscher, Quinet, Renan, Jean Réville, Hertzberg, Gardner, Hausrath, and Smith and Chatham’s Dictionary—all which “authorities” he is careful not to name; but I cite them only to show how well founded was my general historic assertion concerning the vogue of Mithraism.

Even after categorically representing me as resting my case upon untrustworthy “authorities,” the Rev. Father writes: “Yet, even when he quotes these authorities only to deny their worth, we are often left with the curious impression that, be they right or wrong, the quoting of them should be held to have somehow damaged the Christian tradition.” That is to say, the Rev. Father knew that the “imposing list of authorities” was not a list of authorities at all. He knew that I did not rely for my conclusions on the writers he disparaged; he knew that I repeatedly dissented from their views, and that more than once I censured their misstatements. And still he elected to leave standing the original untruth.

If the Rev. Father had censured me for putting together such a list of references at all, on the score that the assertion they are offered to prove is one which probably no competent scholar would now dispute, I should have admitted that his blame had some colour, and merely replied that my essay was first written twenty years ago, when, so far as I knew, there was no treatise on the subject in English, and I had to acquire my information from many sources. Had M. Cumont’s great work been then in existence, I should probably never have planned my sketch. Even when it was republished in Pagan Christs, so far as I knew, no English study of the subject had appeared. I wrote for an uninformed public. But at least my list has served to elicit a not unmemorable exhibition of what a Christian priest will stoop to in the way of prevarication against one whom he ostensibly supposes to be an “apostle” of a non-Christian cult.

4. After recounting his “curious impression” as above cited, the Rev. Father proceeds as follows:—

“Thus, on p. 322 seq., the degrees of Mithraic initiation are discussed. Mr. Robertson believes them to have numbered twelve. He relies for proof upon a mutilated and incomprehensible text of Porphyry, who is quoting Pallas; and upon an ‘important citation’ from Elias of Crete, who, with Nicetas, asserts the degrees to have been twelve. But Mr. Robertson does not notice that Elias and Nicetas (whom, indeed, he does not mention) (!) are both of them using Nonnus, a fantastic mythographer of the sixth or seventh century, whose witness Mr. Robertson has himself, just above, abandoned.”

Comment.—The Rev. Father makes “more mistakes than the thing admits of.” He puts Nonnus in the sixth or seventh century, when he would have been impossible. The universal voice of history assigns him to the fifth. With his customary good sense, further, the Rev. Father censures me for not noting the inutility of an authority whom, as he admits, I did not even name. Then he represents me as citing Porphyry for a list of twelve “degrees of initiation,” when I do not cite him for twelve of anything. But these are trifles compared with the dimensions of the mare’s nest which is the chief content of the paragraph under notice. The sentences which the Rev. Father attacks in my essay have nothing to do with the Mithraic “degrees.” They refer to the trials of initiation—a totally different thing. A glance at the context might have saved him had he been concerned for anything better than aspersing a heretic: I refer twice over to the “austerities,” the “elaborate and painful process,” which a Mithraic initiate had to undergo. I need not therefore take the trouble to inquire whether his assertions as to Elias of Crete and Nicetas are any more accurate than his dating of Nonnus. The residual fact is that he has made a ridiculous mistake. His very phrase “degrees of initiation” is a triumph of confusion.

5. All the before-mentioned exploits occur within the space of two pages of The Month. And still the exhibition continues. After confusing the trials with the degrees of Mithraism, the rev. critic goes on:—

“M. Cumont, however, makes it quite clear that we may trust St. Jerome’s formal evidence that the degrees of initiation” [italics mine] “numbered seven. Monuments and inscriptions amply bear this out. Assuming, however, that they were twelve, Mr. Robertson thus proceeds: ‘Out of the various notices [i.e., the contradictory data of Jerome, Porphyry, and irresponsible medieval writers], partly by hypothesis, M. Lajard has constructed a not quite trustworthy scheme, representing twelve Mithraic degrees.’”

Comment.—That is to say, I assumed the degrees were twelve, though I represent as not quite trustworthy the only list which gives that number! I do not know whether the Rev. Father can yet realise that I never did “assume” that the degrees were twelve, though I thought the trials were probably of that number. The fact remains that Jerome’s list of seven lay before him in my essay, and that he suppresses the fact of my having given it, suppressing also the fact that in a footnote I have remarked as to one of Lajard’s degrees being “particularly ill made out.” Having thus, by suppression and confusion, reduced the matter to chaos, the Rev. Father proceeds to assert that I make out the “hypothetical and untrustworthy” Mithraic scheme “somehow responsible for Christian emblems.” This is a sample of what his state of mind can produce in the way of blundering. My footnote, to which he furiously refers, speaks of a “curious correspondence” between Lajard’s four grades (which, in his usual way, the critic confuses with his twelve degrees) and the emblems of the four evangelists, adding, “these, however, were introduced into Judaism from Assyrian sources at the exile.” These words, expressly inserted to guard against the notion that the emblems in question were taken from Mithraism, the Rev. Father represents as setting up one of his “impressions” to the exact contrary.

Those “curious impressions” I am content to leave to the psychologists as data; but I will take the opportunity to explain to other readers that the purport of the note in question is to suggest a widespread use, dating back very far in religious history, of either the four gospel-emblems or four emblems of a similar character. Apparently the Rev. Father is exasperated by the suggestion that those emblems were not originated as such by Christians, though he does not overtly dispute my assertion that they existed in Judaism. The point as to Lajard’s grades is that they resolve his list of degrees into four—terrestrial, aërial, igneous (or, rather, solar), and divine; while the Judæo-Christian gospel-emblems of ox, eagle, lion, and man (and similar uses of emblems among Assyrians and Arabs) seem to imply a similar symbolical division. It is a matter of small importance; and, if I could have foreseen such readers and critics as Father Martindale, I might have made the note more elaborate. Such prevision, however, was beyond me. He calls the list of degrees in Lajard “preposterous.” I had already called it “grotesque.” But it is not more grotesque than his blunders, his “curious impressions,” and his misrepresentations.

6. And still the Rev. Father contrives to continue blundering. Up to his fourth page he has not once deviated into accuracy, and in the paragraph following on that last quoted he asserts that on pp. 302-3 I “wrongly identify Kronos-Zervan with Mithra.”

Comment.—Knowing that I never for one moment did any such thing, I re-read in blank astonishment the pages to which he refers. Only on the first is Kronos-Zervan referred to; and the statement is that from Armenian Mazdeism Mithraism borrowed ”its enigmatic ‘Supreme God,’ Kronos-Zervan, the Time Spirit, a Babylonian conception, represented in the mysteries by the lion-headed or demon-headed and serpent-encircled figure which bears the two keys. And this deity, in turn, tells of Babylonian influence......”

With a sense of moral relief, I surmise that the critic actually did get his idea from the elliptical beginning of the next paragraph, which runs: “Of the deity thus shaped through many centuries, by many forces, it seems warrantable to say that his cult was normally in an ethically advanced stage “I suppose his intelligence could infer that by this deity was meant the “enigmatic” Kronos-Zervan; but I fancy I need not explain to any other reader that, as the whole sequel shows, the reference is just to Mithra. Any reader not primed by malice would realise this in a moment, even if for a moment he had been misled.

7. In the next paragraph the Rev. Father asserts that in my essay monuments are declared to “prove the identification” of Mithra with Anahita in a twy-sexed personality.

Comment.—Once more he has blundered. What I have said is that Herodotus is “accused of blundering in combining Mithra with Mylitta, it being shown” [that is, by M. Cumont] “from monuments that the goddess identified with Mithra was Anaitis or Tanat.” “But,” I add, “that the Armenian Anaitis and Mylitta were regarded as the same deity seems clear.” As usual, the Rev. Father has misunderstood the argument. And when he goes on to say that “Mr. Robertson next identifies Mithra with Strabo’s Omanos” [ = Vohu Manô, = Good Thought], he as usual distorts my words. What I have written is that “there is reason to suppose that Omanus (or the Persian form of the word) was a name of Mithra, and that it is an adaptation of Vohumano (Bahman) = Good Mind—a divine name with a very fluctuating connotation.” I am not concerned to discuss the problem of the sexual duality of Mithra, as to which the Rev. Father, as usual, is careful to conceal from his readers the relevant data—such as the case of Men, the Moon-god, and the parallels in the Babylonian pantheon. It is a matter on which his opinion counts for nothing; and he seems never to have reflected upon the phenomena upon which the issue turns.

8. After significantly aspersing the Christian Father Julius Firmicus Maternus because even the anti-pagan testimony of that writer does not suit him, Father Martindale continues:—

“The other author quoted as ‘making Mithra two-sexed and threefold, or three formed,’ is Dionysius.’ The pseudo-Areopagite really says: ‘This incident [i.e., the miraculous tripling of a certain day] is especially inserted into the Persian sacerdotal traditions, and the Magi still commemorate the “triple Mithra” [ = the tripled length of Day-light].’ There is here no mention of sex nor of form.”

Comment.—There is here a preliminary falsification, followed by a memorable revelation of credulity. By writing in quotation marks “Dionysius,” and proceeding to cite “the pseudo-Areopagite” on his own account, the Rev. Father deliberately suggests to his readers that I cited “Dionysius” without any characterisation. My reference is actually to “Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite”—the usual way of referring to the writer in question. Not content with such a perversion, he adds another. He explicitly asserts that I quoted “Dionysius” as “making Mithra two-sexed and threefold or three-formed.” I did no such thing. I expressly speak of the statement of Julius Firmicus (i.e., Maternus) “and later writers, that the Persians make Mithra both two-sexed and threefold or three-formed”; and, giving a reference specifically to Maternus, add “Compare Dionysius the pseudo-Areopagite,” etc. The Rev. Father professes to be correcting me when he had to falsify my words in order to make them seem to need correction.

As for the use he makes of Dionysius’ testimony, I could not have believed, until I read him, that even in his Church there could be found at the present day such medieval credulity. Not for two hundred years, I should think, has any English scholar been found to attach the slightest credit to the absurd proposition that Mithra’s epithet of triplasiosreferred to the miracle-story of the turning back of the shadow on the dial for Hezekiah, whereby the day was “almost triplicated.” Over two hundred years ago, Cudworth could write that “learned men [Vossius and Selden to wit] have already shown the foolery of this conceit.” It has been reserved for Father Martindale to reincarnate the credulity of the pseudo-Areopagite and his scholiasts. He evidently takes the Hezekiah legend as a historical fact, recorded by the Persians; though the very text he accepts tells how Apollophanes the sophist denied all such assertions. Selden, after quoting the comment of Georgius Pachymerius about the triple extension of the day, adds: Ita et Maximus Scholiastes; and for himself, Nec in Græculorum verba juravi. But such verba seems to be Father Martindale’s “authorities.”

The Rev. Father had set out with a flourish against me as one who might be expected, in an “attack” on the Christian religion, “whether from respect for his adversary or from fears for himself,” to be “very careful in his choice of weapons.” He is truly a precious authority upon choice of weapons. But his textual escapades are hardly more amazing than his hierological ideas. I have still a difficulty in conceiving that any man who pretends to write upon Mithraism could seriously assert that triplasios means triple-lengthed, thereby making the Magi identify Mithra with one case of protracted daylight; or could allege that the word tells nothing of “form.” I suppose it is in all seriousness possible to him; though even among Christian priests and scholars, and in his own Church, there have been many with more insight into the symbolism of alien faiths. Such scholars as Vossius, Selden, Schedius, Huet, and Cudworth could all see that “the triple Mithra” meant something more than three-days-on-end! Huet, a Catholic bishop, could avow that “The triple Mithras of the Persians, spoken of by Dionysius, seems to be a certain image of the Trinity.” Mosheim, balking at such speculation, despite Julian’s phrase on “the triple function of the God,” prefers reasonably to say with Macrobius that “the three faces of the sun and moon denoted the threefold relation of time, present, past, and future.” That simple conception, had Father Martindale considered it, might have withheld him from translating triplasios as triple-lengthed, and from his added nonsense to the effect that the phrase “may indeed have applied to the twin torchbearers who flank Mithra Tauroktonos.” But enough of his interpretations: it is sufficient to deal with his textual exploits.

9. Coming at last to some central issues, he says, concerning my thesis that Mithra was virgin-born:—

“Mr. Robertson would prefer to assert, in view of a ‘primary tendency,’ that such a myth must have developed. He recurs, however, to positive argument. Mithra, he says, is identical with Sabazios; Strabo says Sabazios is as it were the child of the mother; Mithra must therefore have had the same relation to a mother. But Anâhita (as Goddess of Fertilising Waters) would ‘necessarily figure in her cultus as a mother,’ and as Mithra (who was ‘paired’ with her) never appears (save in worshipful metaphor) as a father, hewould perforce rank as her son.”

Comment.—To the words, “primary tendency,” in quotation marks, he appends the reference “P. 96.” No such words occur on p. 96 of my book; they occur on p. 338. [I here refer, of course, to the first edition.] For the closing words in the above-cited passage, again, he refers to p. 337, whereas they occur on p. 339. I should not have dreamt of noting such slips were it not that, finding in one place a wrong figure in one of my references—a 7 turned by the printer into a 9—the Rev. Father says that “such correction is too often necessary in reading this book.” Felicitous and scrupulous to the last, he attempts to fasten discredit upon me for a kind of error that occurs twice upon one of his own pages.

Turning to more serious matters, I have to note that his reference to my thesis of a “primary tendency” is one more misrepresentation: the tendency in question is explicitly indicated both on p. 96 and on p. 338 as that to “make the young God the son of the Supreme God.” Then I add that “when Mithra became specially identified, like Dionysos, with the Phrygian God Sabazios, who was [for Strabo] the ‘child as it were of the [great] mother,’ he necessarily came to hold the same relation to the Mother-Goddess.” There is nothing “primary” here: the process is specifically secondary. Only thereafter do I argue that in all likelihood—judging from the legend of the birth of Cyrus—there were ancient Persian forms of the Virgin-birth myth. Having duly obscured the argument here, the Rev. Father proceeds to allege that I “identify” the miraculously born Saoshyant with Mithra, which is one more falsification. My statement is that as “Sraosha (= Vohumano) came to be identified with Mithra, so would there be a blending or assimilation of Mithra with Saoshyas or Saoshyant, the Saviour and Raiser of the Dead.” This he calls “identifying.” And then where I wrote: “As a result of all these myth motives we find,” etc., he drops out the words I have italicised, and quotes me as saying “As a result.....we find,” etc., thus sedulously garbling and perverting still.

10. I shall not occupy myself in discussing with such a critic the question of the Virgin-birth in the legend of Mithra. With M. Cumont I might argue it—with due diffidence: with a cultist who cannot get into a scientific relation with such a problem, it were trifling to reason upon it. I have simply to note that when Father Martindale devotes a paragraph to explaining that “some παρθένος divinities were anything but virgin” he is again throwing dust in the eyes of his readers, inasmuch as he implies that my argument does not recognise all this. I have repeatedly pointed to the duality of the Asiatic and other Goddesses, “who were on the one side virgins and on the other mothers.” The Rev. Father garbles to no purpose; he simply does not understand the problem he is discussing.

11. It remains to notice the Rev. Father’s characteristic handling of my thesis concerning a “Descent into Hell” in Mithraism:—

“With equal pluck Mr. Robertson determines to show that Mithra died, descended into Hell, and rose again. He has but one piece of evidence. It is a long passage from Firmicus Maternus, which relates a mystic representation of a divine death, followed by an exultant return to life.”

Comment.—The unfailing inaccuracy of Father Martindale might almost suggest among his fellow-believers a theory of obsession. To the first sentence in this passage he appends a reference, “Pp. 319 sq.” That section is a discussion of the ceremonial death and resurrection of Mithra; and when, on p. 321, I have remarked upon the Descent into Hades of Herakles and Apollo, I go on to allude to the astronomical explanation in these cases “and in the case of the Descent of Mithra to Hades, noticed later.” If he had taken the slightest pains to do anything worthier than raise reckless cavils, he would have found on pp. 340-1 the full account of the Persian legend upon which—without the slightest reference to Firmicus Maternus, who knows nothing of it—I found my thesis. As usual, he has blundered hopelessly.

At the close of the paragraph under notice he proclaims that he is “left wondering at the conclusions to which the ‘will to disbelieve’ can guide an argument.” Any reader of these pages, I fancy, will be left wondering more profoundly at the tissue of error, absurdity, and prevarication through which the passion to defend the faith can conduct a Christian priest. In a footnote to the sentence last quoted he contrives to insert yet another falsity.

12. On the question as to Justin’s view of the Mithraic Eucharist, the Rev. Father writes, referring first to Justin’s passage (Tryph. 70) as to the devils imitating the prophecy of Daniel in the Mithraic doctrine:—

“Notice, first, that Justin does not say this diabolic travesty of prophecy was pre-Christian in date; and that he does positively say (Apol. i., 66) that the devils imitate the Eucharist itself in the Mithraic mysteries. Mr. Robertson should have quoted that passage. ‘If the Mithraists had simply imitated the historic Christians,’ he argues, ‘the obvious course for the latter would be simply to say so.’ And that, indeed, is simply what Justin, in this passage, does say.”

Comment.—Then “devils,” in Justin, means for the Rev. Father Martindale just Mithraists! If he could only understand things occasionally, my task would have been lighter. The passage he says I ought to have quoted I had quoted, textually, on pp. 321-2, giving the reference, and adding similar passages from Tertullian about the devil’s doings. The Rev. Father has not even read through the essay he seeks to discredit. Not once can he contrive to pass an accurate censure. But on p. 331, from which he quotes, I explain my contention by quoting from Justin the further passage: “When I hear that Perseus was begotten of a virgin, I understand that the deceiving serpent counterfeited also this.” And I add: “Nobody now pretends that the Perseus myth, or the Pagan virgin myth in general, is later than Christianity.” Does the learned Father suggest that Justin thought it was? Had he read this passage? If so, why did he not at least try to meet the argument?

13. In the next paragraph he avows that in Justin’s days “the historical sense was practically dormant”; and in the same breath he affirms that “the divergent pedigrees of the historic Mithraic and Christian meals are so well known as to render quite unnecessary and, in our day, perverse, any theory of borrowing on either side.” “So well known”! Known, that is, in an age without the historic sense, as the Rev. Father “knows” the dogmas he has assimilated, with about as much “historical sense,” relatively to the problems of his day, as Justin had for his. But though I have called Justin perhaps the most foolish of the Christian fathers,” I never thought him so inane as to say “the devils have counterfeited” when in his own opinion he could truthfully say: “These tales and usages have all come into existence since the propagation of the religion of Christ.”

Comment.—As usual, Father Martindale entirely misses the point of my estimate of Justin, which is that, foolish as he was, his line of argument is followed by Tertullian. That is to say, it may pass as common and typical. Upon my characterisation of Justin, Father Martindale makes an exquisitely pointless retort; but he thinks fit to abuse Maternus as “notoriously and constantly unreliable,” and guilty of “grotesque” misdescription—this because he does not avail for the Rev. Father’s polemic purposes.

14. I have but reached the tenth page of his essay, and still I am occupied with his misstatements. He represents me, in a hopelessly incoherent passage, as saying that “much of the Song of Moses and Zechariah’s mystic stone prove the irremediably Mazdean character of ancient Judaism.” Another falsity. On p. 382 I argued that the parallel between the arrow scene on the monuments and the story of Moses striking the rock “suggests rather a common source for both myths than a Persian borrowing from the Bible”; and that, “as the story of the babe Moses is found long before in that of Sargon, so, probably, does the rock story come from Central Asia.” That is the implication on p. 333, when I speak of “the presence of such a God-symbol in Hebrew religion long before our era.” Apparently, the Rev. Father puts the Song of Moses and the Book of Zechariah in one category, as belonging alike to “ancient Judaism.” I can believe it of him; but I ascribe a Mazdean element only to the latter, not to the former.

15. The Rev. Father next ascribes to me the thesis of “the identity”—his favourite word—”of St. Peter with Mithra, and also with Janus,” when I had spoken of “assimilation with.”

Comment.—I suppose he knows nothing of the general phenomena of assimilation of deities in old cults—the addition of solar characteristics to Gods of Vegetation—and of the modes of worship of the latter in Sun-Cults, and so on. I will merely indicate to any of his readers who may see this reply that they must not suppose they gather from him any idea of my case.

16. Nor shall I spend more time over the rest of his garbled quotations—his citing me as saying “entitled to assume” when I wrote “conclude”; his dropping out of an “even” when it qualified the context, and so on. I must say a word, however, on one of his later futilities—his laboriously facetious attempt to demonstrate that my remarks on the probability of the “Chair of St. Peter” being a Mithraic relic amount to a self-contradiction. The Rev. Father writes that my argument amounts to this: “There is strong reason to suppose it is X. It may well be, however, Y. There is at least a possibility that it is Z.”

Comment.—What the Rev. Father, with his strange gift of fallacy, calls Z, as any other reader will see, is just X; and the argument runs: “There is strong reason to suppose that it is X. It may well, however, be Y.” Any reader but himself, or one of his type, would see that “a relic of a pre-Christian cult” means simply a relic of Mithraism. And he blunders even worse than usual when he argues that my phrase, “it may well be that the whole thing is a fortuitous importation, like so many other ecclesiastical relics,” amounts to saying, “I may be quite wrong, but the Church shall have her slap.” I need hardly point out to any other reader that, whether the chair be Mithraic or not, the Church stands convicted of a legendary imposture, not only by the verdict of every archæologist, but by the simplest application of common-sense. With his customary strategy, he evades making the acknowledgment which every honest inquirer has made—that, whatever it may have been, the chair can never have been constructed as the episcopal chair of St. Pester, or of any early Christian bishop.

17. Upon one point at least the Rev. Father might be expected to be right when he accused me of erring on it—the question of the wording of the litanies of his own Church. I stated that, in listening to the Roman litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, Mithraists who joined the Christian Church knew they were listening to the very epithets of the Sun-God, and I cited six—God of the Skies, Purity of the eternal light, King of glory, Sun of justice, Strong God, Father of the Ages to come, Angel of great counsel. Upon this the Rev. Father asserts first that the litany in question did not exist at that period. If this were true, it would be a valid rebuttal; but the Rev. Father offers no evidence whatever, and I will merely say that I believe the epithets cited by me, which are in the opening portion, are as old as the fourth century in Christian worship. Having made his historical assertion, however, the Rev. Father goes on to declare that the epithets cited are “not Mithraic,” and that “some of them are not in the litany.” That point may be easily settled. I have before me a Catholic Eucologe, in Latin and French, apparently published in the first half of last century. It gives the litany of the Holy Name of Jesus, beginning with Kyrie eleison—a pretty good sign of antiquity in a Roman litany—and among the earlier epithets are these:—Pater de cœlis, Deus; Candor lucis æternæ; Rex gloriæ; Sol Justitiæ, Deus fortis, Pater futuri seculi; Magni consilii Angele. I leave it to Catholic authorities to state whether they repudiate the manual of devotion from which I quote, or whether Father Martindale is here wrong as usual. On the significance of the epithets, my readers can judge for themselves.

18. I am willing now to leave Father Martindale’s readers and mine to judge which of us has been guilty of the “mortal sins against history and good-sense “with which he so pretentiously charges me. If any of my errors approximate to some of his, they are grave indeed. He speaks of my work as a compilation of facts “tending to the destruction of the hated system.” If I thought myself capable of hating any opinion in his fashion, I should indeed reconsider my work with concern. But he is of the tribe who, hating Galileo for presenting an unwelcome truth, accused him of hating Ptolemy and the Holy Ghost. Inspired always by either hate or hysteria, they can imagine no other kind of motive for scientific work. To the last, Father Martindale strives to envenom his readers by quoting me as disparaging the early Christians when I write that “an unwarlike population, for one thing, wants a sympathetic and emotional religion; and here, though Mithraism had many attractions, Christianity had more, having sedulously copied every one of its rivals,and developed special features of its own.” This he calls malevolent disparagement. He simply cannot understand the mental processes of anyone who studies the history of his faith in a scientific spirit: his one thought is to cast aspersions at whatever conflicts with his fanaticism. A dozen ecclesiastical historians have avowed the wholesale adoption of pagan rites, symbols, and conceptions by the early Christian Church: he makes it his task to try to discredit, by bluster and misrepresentation, any rationalist who draws scientific inferences from the fact.

19. In that spirit he pens this passage:—

“‘For the Dark Ages,’ says Mr. Robertson, pityingly, ‘the symbol of the Cross was much more plausibly appealing than that of the god slaying the Zodiacal bull.’ Alas, poor Dark Ages! No more the ‘mystically-figured Persian, beautiful as Apollo, triumphant as Ares, but.....the gibbeted Jew, in whose legend figured tax-gatherers and lepers, epileptics, and men blind from birth, domestic traitors and cowardly disciples’—that was all they could appreciate.”

Then he quotes Isaiah about the despised and rejected of men—a passage which, with his ripe “historic sense,” he evidently believes to have been written in anticipation of the coming of the Jesus of the Gospels—and adds:—

“With those despisers stand the critics of the Dark Ages; we with St. Bernard, who said, Tanto mihi carior, quanto pro me vilior! We are content to share the pessimism and barbarism of that great poet and Crusader.”

Comment.—Thus, on his last page and his first, the Rev. Father falsifies the book he professes to criticise. He does, I suppose, seriously regard me as taking moral satisfaction in the symbol of a God knifing a bull. But whatever hallucinations he may harbour, he knew, unless he was beside himself, that he had grossly garbled, by an elision, the passage he professed to quote, wholly altering its application so as to suggest that I was expressing my own predilections when I sketched those of many pagans of the average pagan type. He knew also that I had expressly spoken of the Mithraists in question as ultimately going over in large numbers to Christianity. It would never do to let the readers of The Monthget a glimpse of a scientific view of the process of transition.

20. As if all that were not enough, Father Martindale ends his essay, as he began it, with an explicit untruth. In the last sentence he speaks of “the derivation proposed by Mr. Robertson for the Mass.”

Comment.—I have proposed no derivation. The sole derivations for “Mass” that are mentioned in my essay are indicated in the passage: “Their [the Mithraists’] mizd, or sacred cake, was preserved in the mass, which possibly copied the very name”; and in the footnote, after referring to King and Seel as the sources of the suggestion, I add that the wordmissa ”might come, however, from the Greek maza, a name for barley cake.” Thus I did not give my assent to the mizd derivation, and merely suggested a similar possibility formaza—doing this because, like many other people not gifted with his credulity, I have never been able to see plausibility in the traditional etymology of missa.

21. My critic speaks of some “eminent professor whose courtesy and erudition enabled us to speak with such conviction on the derivation proposed by Mr. Robertson for Mass,” and who, he states, wrote of me: “I think that his books were calculated to strengthen the belief in revealed religion.”

Comment.—I know not who the “eminent professor” is, nor where my critic discussed the derivation which he misrepresents me as proposing. I cannot find any discussion on the subject in his articles on Mithraism. If he misinformed the eminent professor as successfully upon my books in general as he has done on the point under notice, I doubt not he could elicit from him plenty of disparagement, especially if he be of Father Martindale’s own creed and cast of mind. If, indeed, they both believe what the Rev. Father quotes him as saying, it is not clear why he is so anxious to denounce me. By adding, however, a footnote to the clause last cited, he contrives to suggest to his readers that the eminent professor is M. Cumont. The footnote runs: “We may be allowed to add that since this article was in print Professor Cumont has with great kindness written to us at some length, assuring us that the conclusions we have reached in it are fully justified.” As most of the Rev. Father’s article consists in perversions of my words and aspersions upon me, he here suggests that Professor Cumont backed him up in these. I therefore take the opportunity to inform any of his readers who may see this that Professor Cumont has not endorsed any of his attacks upon me, and wrote nothing whatever to him concerning the derivation he says I proposed for the word Missa. Thus he ends as he began in mystification.

**************

I have no doubt that the Rev. Father will remain well content with his work, which he will justify to himself as a blow struck for his creed and its founder. He avowedly feels himself to be of the tribe of St. Bernard, “that great Crusader”; and of a surety he is. Like St. Bernard, he lashes himself into a passion against all the supposed enemies of a deity whom he represents as having taught him to love his enemies; like the Saint, he sees in a vast movement of hate, massacre, and destruction a fit expression of his devotion to a sacrificially slain God, of whom he says, truly enough, Tanto mihi carior, quanto pro me vilior. “Pro me vilior”: the confession is memorable: the priest’s very hysteria of devotion is rooted in egoism, like his antipathy.

The spectacle he presents is apt to cure any rationalist of the tendency to suppose that organised religion is a greater force for moralisation, in virtue of its ethical elements, than for demoralisation by reason of its stimulus to fanaticism and its intellectual misguidance. Those Hellenists and Jews who, long before Christianity took its historic shape, arrived at the doctrine of forgiveness for injuries, and preached love of enemies—those men, one often feels, had undergone a profound spiritual experience; and it was shared, presumably, by those who inserted the doctrine in the gospels. But how many of those who, in the past eighteen centuries, have hysterically professed to draw their “spiritual life” from those gospels—how many of them all have ever been turned from their primitive passions of resentment by the commandment they call divine?

So far from “forgiving” a mere scientific opponent, who no more hates them or their creed than he hates the Ptolemaic system or the foes of his ancestors, they set out in a passion of resentment, not to get at the truth, but to get at the enemy. In a nobler temper, Father Martindale might have compassed something towards critical correction. In my essay, I am practically certain, à priori, there must be errors of theory or fact, or of both. I have never met with any similar treatise in which, after close study, I have not found something in the nature of error; and I would fain have my errors rectified, as I have already been able to do at some points for myself. But I do not find that my Catholic critic has ever come nearer exposing error in my case than to find a minor inexactitude of phraseology; and in the pursuit he has himself committed blunders beyond belief, and falsifications that for number and perversity outgo anything I have personally met with in controversy. In the hope of achieving a pious triumph he has selected some score of propositions from an essay containing hundreds; and, withal, what a fiasco he has achieved!

§ 5. Dr. J. Estlin, Carpenter.

In the Unitarian journal The Inquirer, about the end of 1903, there appeared a criticism of Pagan Christs over the initials “J. E. C.” Shortly afterwards I criticised it on the assumption that the initials stood for the signature of Dr. J. E. Carpenter; and as this inference was not challenged, and the criticism in question was entirely in keeping with signed comments by Dr. Carpenter on this book and on Christianity and Mythology, to which I have replied in the Appendix to the second edition of the latter work, I here embody my rejoinder to the attack first mentioned.

It may be well to repeat one or two points from the other reply referred to. I there instanced (1), as an illustration of Dr. Carpenter’s historical judgment, his proposition that Krishna is a historical character, arising within the Christian era; and (2), as illustrating his controversial methods, his dismissal of my thesis concerning the mystery-play added to the gospels with the decision that the “desolate cry,” “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”, could not be put in the dying God’s mouth in a mystery-play; after which contention he obliviously decided, in another connection, that the cry was not “desolate” at all, but a reference to the final note of triumph in the Psalm from which it was quoted.

It is this critic—the affirmer of the historicity of Krishna—who introduces a polemic against the present treatise with these sentences:—”The author is of course entitled to his opinions. But he is not entitled to claim support for them by constant inaccuracy, or by suppression of evidence, or by treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts.” Dr. Carpenter’s tone relieves me of any special concern for amenity in dealing with him; and the present rejoinder may thus be the more concise.

1. At the outset, after charging me with “treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts,” my Unitarian critic asserts, by way of opening illustration, that my thesis of the pre-Christian Jesus-cult and ritual of human sacrifice is “justified” by me in a passage of three sentences (Pagan Christs, 1st ed. pp. 153-4; present ed. p. 162), which he quotes. Then he writes:—”Well may the author look on his work and find it very good; for he concludes, ‘As a hypothesis the present solution must for the present stand.”“

Thus by his own showing the “wild conjecture” is put, not as a proved historic fact, but as a hypothesis. Further on, I remarked (p. 158): “Beyond conjectures we cannot at present go.” Dr. Carpenter has not taken the trouble to follow the argument he asperses. The three sentences which he represents as my sole “justification” of it are simply the broad preliminary indications of the nature of the hypothesis; and after the clause last quoted my text goes on: “But the grounds for surmising a pre-Christian cult of a Jesus or Joshua may here be noted.” And here again the critic confusedly confesses that “the next step is to prove that there was a pre-Christian cult,” etc. He appears to have written in a state of mind which precluded even the semblance of accuracy or consistency.

2. Of the eight paragraphs which constitute the alleged “step,” the critic refers to two only, which he thus discusses:—

“This is done by identifying the successor of Moses with the ‘Angel’ of Exodus xxiii, 20, who is again identified in the Talmud with the mystic Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos; and the triumphant conclusion follows: ‘Thus the name Joshua =Jesus is already in the Pentateuch associated with the conceptions of Logos, Son of God, and Messiah’ (p. 155).

“No historical student needs to be warned against these preposterous assertions. But the unwary reader may easily be dazzled by the wide array of references (many of which are useful to the collector of critical curiosities), the legitimate product of extensive reading. The mischief is that Mr. Robertson does not understand what evidence is, and is the easy prey, therefore, of Talmudic vagaries.”

The latter paragraph is truly interesting as a sample of logical chaos. In his passion, the critic, with his self-certified sense of “evidence,” has lost all hold of the issue. He describes as a “preposterous assertion” (1) my statement that the Angel-leader is “in the Talmud identified with the mystic Metatron, who is in turn identifiable with the Logos.” For this proposition I give references to Cahen and Hershon. As the critic offers for his angry language no excuse beyond the passage I have cited, it will be seen that, through sheer excitement of temper, he supposes himself to be convicting me of absurdity when he merely describes as a “Talmudic vagary” what I have represented as a Talmudic proposition. Unless the learned Professor supposes me to have considered the Angel-leader and Joshua historical characters, as he considers Krishna, his outbreak thus far does not even amount to a proposition. It is sheer verbal incoherence.

The other “assertion” specified as preposterous is my contention that the mythical successor of the mythical Moses is identified in the Pentateuch with the mythical Angel-leader. In “justification” of that statement I point to the parallelism of the texts, Exodus xx, 20-23, and Joshua xxiv, 11. In the former text it is promised that an Angel, in or on whom is the “name” of Yahweh, shall lead Israel to triumph against the hostile tribes. As Joshua in the other text claims to do this, he is pseudo-historically identified with the Angel. I should indeed have said “Hexateuch” instead of “Pentateuch”; but I cited the texts. Non-theological minds will probably see some plausibility in an argument so borne out; but the readers ofThe Inquirer will not gather from the article of Dr. Carpenter that any such justification was put forward. It is by such instinctive economies that he establishes his epithet “preposterous.”

3. After this I may perhaps be pardoned if I meet with a simple rejection the critic’s charge that in my estimate of the age of the bulk of Buddha-lore I am “flying in the face of the evidence gathered in recent years from inscriptions in different parts of India.” I am content to say that, when he asserts the inscriptions of the third century B.C. to contain “the titles of the collections in which the teaching was grouped” (making no qualification), he shows himself unqualified to speak on the subject.

4. There is somewhat more semblance of scholarly circumspection in the critic’s attack on my remark that “the first day of the week, Sunday, was apparently from time immemorial consecrated to Mithra by Mithraists; and as the Sun-God was pre-eminently ‘the Lord,’ Sunday was ‘the Lord’s day ‘long before the Christian era.” He contends that “Mr. Robertson’s statements require him to show (1) that Mithra was called Kurios,  and (2) that his worshippers gave the name Kuriakê to the first day of the week before the Christian era.” The first statement, he observes, I do not attempt to prove; and there is, he contends, no record of the application of the epithet Kurios to Mithra. In regard to the second statement, he alleges that I have misunderstood Deissmann’s exposition as to the pre-Christian use of the word Kuriakos, since I cite him, though he “cites no instance of its application to designate a day. That [continues my critic] is the unwarranted inference of our author, who ascribes its use to the Mithra-worshippers ‘long before the Christian era,’ without a shadow of justification. It is painful to write thus of a student who is undoubtedly in earnest. The general impression which his work produces is that his mythological combinations applied to Christianity are worthless and misleading, and that no single statement can be trusted without verification.” I confess to being astonished that even an angry theologian, making pretension to a competent knowledge of this question, should thus exhibit a complete ignorance of the decisive fact that the expression Kuriakên Kuriou, “Lord’s-day of the Lord,” in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, proves the term Kuriakê to have had a pre-Christian application to a day. Either the reviewer knew this detail or he did not. I am not concerned to point the alternative inferences.

It is true that I had not thought it necessary to cite this fact (long ago discussed by me) in my notes in Pagan Christs; I had in fact taken it for granted that the point was no longer contested—which was clearly a miscalculation on my part. But even Deissmann’s demonstration of the normal use of the word is quite sufficient to show that it cannot have been spontaneously applied by Christians for the first time to their holy-day.

As to the epithets of Mithra, the reader will observe that I did not say that the title Kurios was applied to him on the monuments; the critic’s own quotation shows as much. That “the Sun-God” was “the Lord” in the Roman Empire is admitted even by my critic. Cumont gives only three Greek inscriptions—there are no more to give. The War-God of the Persians was not likely to have shrines and devotees in Greece. But my study on Mithraism showed (1) that Mithra was in Latin inscriptions called Sanctus dominus, besides being separately styled Dominus; (2) that in the Zendavesta he is “Lord of all countries”; (3) that he was associated with Adonis and with Attis and with Dionysos, all of whom were called Kurios; (4) that, like them, he was called Father; (5) that in the Persian period he already had his “day”; (6) that his birthday was Christmas-day, associated with “Lord” Adonis and the Sun-Gods in general. Thus in such a syncretic cult, in such a syncretic age, when the first day of the week was habitually named “the day of the Sun,” the popular ascription to Mithra of the title of Lord in the Greek-speaking places where he was worshipped would be a matter of course, even if it did not figure as one of his monumental titles in Greek. The title of Lord for the Sun-God was primarily Semitic in the Eastern world—e.g., Baal, Adon, and Marnas, all meaning “Lord”—and the Mithraic cult in the East might possibly abstain from an official adoption of Semitic usage, though we find Mithra called despotês in Porphyry. But popular usage could not be so restricted.

The view of my academic critic appears to be that while Jesus, described as among other things the son of a carpenter, was naturally and normally styled Kurios, the “Unconquered Sun-God” would not be; and that, while Latin-speaking worshippers called him Dominus, Greek-speaking worshippers never called him Kurios. I leave such “curiosities” of scholarship to “collectors.” It may be worth while to inform lay readers, in passing, that Kurios is the normal New Testament word for “master,” and is to-day the ordinary Greek equivalent for “Mr.”

But the essential point is that, as I asserted, “Sun-day was ‘the Lord’s Day’ long before the Christian era”; and that Sun-day had also been Mithra’s day long before the Christian era, Mithra being chief of the seven planetary spirits associated with the days of the week. Where the term Kuriakê was current for the chief day of the week, it would be used by the Mithraists as by others. Cumont again and again affirms that “the dies Solis was evidently the most sacred of the week for the devotees of Mithra.” But I did not assert that the term Kuriakê was used by them long before the Christian era. “That is the unwarranted inference of our” critic, proceeding “without a shadow of justification.” The pain which he gave himself in discrediting me was thus quite pathetically gratuitous. And he himself commits another gross blunder “without a shadow of justification.” In asserting that “the Sun-God (without Mithra’s name) is called Dominus” he either suppresses or proves himself ignorant of the fact that one inscription reads “Sancto domino invicto Mithræ” (Cumont, ii, No. 60). This from an expert who “understands what evidence means.”

And now I have to ask the reader to note that these blundering strictures, which come to absolutely nothing on examination, are the sole proofs offered by my Unitarian critic for his account of me as “claiming support” for my opinions “by constant inaccuracy, or by suppression of evidence, or by treating the wildest conjectures as historical facts.” The great mass of my argument he has not even attempted to indicate, much less to answer. It would really not pain me particularly to say what I think of such criticism; but I forego the indulgence. What is worth noting is that Unitarianism should thus once more be exhibited as making a worse show in its criticism of new views of Christian origins than is made by almost any Trinitarian critics. The ill-supported pretension to comprehensive knowledge, the startling deficit of candour, the substitution of mere bluster and invective for argument, would almost seem out-of-date in the Rock. After all, there is something painful in this; and I regret it. In a book such as Pagan Christs, travelling over many obscure fields and raising many difficult issues, there must needs be oversights, inadequacies, and errors; and I take it as a matter of course that its central thesis in regard to the Christian cult should be regarded at first sight as extravagant. Any argument to that effect I should cheerfully examine; and when, as sometimes happens, a fellow-student sends me a note of questionable passages or errors of reference, I am sincerely grateful. It is a pity that the Unitarian Professor, for his part, should proffer hardly anything beyond mere futile aspersion.

I must not, however, omit to note one correction by Dr. Carpenter of a statistical statement of mine. At the beginning of my essay on Mithraism I had stated that the late Professor Robertson Smith wrote in the Encyclopædia Britannica ”some hundreds of pages on certain books of the Bible.” I did not possess a copy of the Encyclopædia; and I had written on the strength of recollection of early reading in libraries. My Unitarian critic has taken the trouble to count the pages of Professor Smith’s articles, and finds that they amount only to forty-eight. I shall here take his word without checking him; and acknowledge that the passage should have run to the effect that the last edition of the Encyclopædia contained some hundreds of pages (about 300) on Biblical matters, as against the one half-page given to Mithraism. This statistical correction is almost the only one I have thus far received from any theological critic of my book, which counters the whole historical doctrine of the current religion. My Unitarian critic pronounces the error in question “a characteristic inaccuracy.” I fear I must pronounce that a characteristic assertion. If he had done nothing worse, I should not have had to pen two exposures of his critical methods.

They have certainly had no corrective influence so far as he is concerned, for in two recent reviews of the translation of the German work of Professor Arthur Drews on “The Christ Myth” Dr. Carpenter exhibits the old temper, the old unscrupulousness, the old incapacity for a broad view of a great problem. He has evidently sat down to the book with the sole object of finding errors of detail which may enable him to seem to discredit the whole, never once seeking to meet the main line of argument, or even to indicate it. No one could gather from his reviews the drift of the reasoning he professes to confute. He can never see the wood for the trees; and in hacking blindly at particular trees he oftentimes wounds himself. Where there is the faintest opening for a verbal misinterpretation, he ascribes the most irrational meaning the words could suggest. Where, for instance, Drews in the translation (p. 241) remarks that all the details in the Passion are mythologically “given”—from the derision and flagellation to the rock tomb and the women at the place of execution—and the sentence ends, “in just the same form in the worship of Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and Osiris,” Professor Carpenter asks, in a review in theChristian Commonwealth: ”Who has ever heard of the ‘execution’ of Adonis, or of the grave in a rock (in the Egyptian Delta!) of Osiris?” adding: “Page after page in this book are disfigured by these reckless assertions.” Even an ordinary reader might, after one perusal of his criticism, be able to suggest to the infuriated Unitarian Professor that the passage in Drews must have meant, not that all the four cults and myths mentioned were exactly the same—a suggestion impossible to the most ignorant tyro—but that in one or other were to be found all the details in the Christian narrative. The critic himself indicated a suspicion that something had gone wrong in the translation; but he let his censure stand.

In a later review by Dr. Carpenter in the Unitarian Inquirer the same passage is thus handled in a footnote:—

“The reader may be directed to the amazing statement, p. 241: ‘The derision, the flagellation, both the thieves, the crying out on the cross, the sponge with vinegar, the soldiers casting dice for the dead man’s garments, also the women at the place of execution at the grave, the grave in a rock, are found in just the same form in the worship of Adonis, Attis, Mithras, and Osiris’ (italics mine). Which of these deities was crucified?”

In this passage Dr. Carpenter has joined serious garbling of his own with an error on the part of the translator. The passage he cites from Drews is preceded in the text and translation by the words “Everything was given” (which he suppresses); and references are given to the Old Testament as regards three of the details. Any candid and competent reader would see at a glance that something was wrong with an interpretation which assigned to the Gentile cults named a series of details well known to be items of Jewish tradition and symbolism, and actually indicated as such by the references. Even without reference to the original, such a reader would divine the misconstruction on the part of the translator. Where he has written, after a comma, “also the women at the place of execution,......are found,” the translation should have run, after a semi-colon, “further, the women,......who are found.” Drews wrote “ferner, die Weiber,......die.” The whole passage means, and can only mean, that in addition to the other “given” items in the crucifixion and burial scenes, most of which are Judaic, the mourning women are found in the pagan cults mentioned.

And the case against Dr. Carpenter is clear. He has mentioned in a footnote that he possesses only the first German edition of the Christusmythe, not the expanded third, from which the translation is made. But the first, had he examined it, would at once have enlightened him, had he wished to be enlightened. There the context is different: the Judaic items are not mentioned in the same sentence, and we have this: “ferner das ‘Felsengrab’ des Heilands, die Weiber am Grabe, die sich ganz ebenso auch im Kultus des Mithra and Adonis finden, usw.” Even here he would doubtless exclaim that both rock-tomb and women are not found in both cults: that is his critical way. But between the first edition and the translation he could not fail to see that Drews was not asserting a fourfold crucifixion-myth, of which each form contained all the details specified. For the rest, he shows his own ignorance of hierology by scouting the “execution” of Adonis (concerning whom he might learn from Dr. Frazer that the Adonisian ritual originally centred round an annual human sacrifice to the Vegetation-God) and by denying all connection between the cross-myth and Osiris, who actually figures in a quasi-crucified form. But the essential point is his utterly disingenuous way of covering the real issue by mere Old Bailey cavils and misrepresentations, to the end of keeping it out of sight. In all his columns of splenetic cavilling there is not one argument which really affects the fundamental question.

Doubtless a reviewer can protest that he is not responsible for the slips of a translator. But the business of an honest reviewer, and surely of a theological teacher in the position of Dr. Carpenter, is, first and foremost, to bring out the main positions and arguments of a work which he professes to discuss and dismiss as a whole; and a reviewer who pretends to dispose of an elaborate theorem, supported on many historical lines, by alleging merely error of detail at subsidiary points, is not morally fitted to be a public teacher. Our Unitarian Professor, however, has done worse than this. In his first review, Dr. Carpenter showed that even in his malice he surmised at least an error of punctuation in the translation: in his second review, instead of clearing up the point, he suppresses not only his own surmise, but an essential part of the text, deliberately reducing it to a different syntactical construction, to make it carry an impossible assertion. If I, in a review of Dr. Carpenter’s First Three Gospels, had simply cited his astonishing self-contradiction in regard to the cry on the cross, with some other self-contradictions only less flagrant, and had thereupon pronounced the whole book the work of a man who either did not believe what he said or chronically forgot what he had written, his more careful readers would certainly have pronounced the verdict grossly unfair as a general judgment. But Dr. Carpenter has himself gone further than this. He has taken a plainly involved passage of a translation, where the very references showed him that the meaning could not be that which seemed to lie on the surface, and, confessedly suspecting an error of construction on the translator’s part, has in a second article positively aggravated the translator’s slip by leaving out, in quotation, an essential clause.

Political debate notoriously abounds in misrepresentation and in unfair criticism. But I do not believe that such a process of perversion as Dr. Carpenter has indulged in would be successful on a political platform or in the House of Commons. Such trickery, once perceived, would there discredit the performer once for all. And, trickery apart, the spirit in which the theological defence is conducted by Dr. Carpenter and his friends would be felt to be scandalous in a serious debate among truth-seeking laymen. In the Christian Commonwealth, to which he contributed his first review, there appeared an editorial on Drews’s book, in which the sole rebutting arguments, as distinguished from blank declamation, were a pair of protests against (1) a passage in the translation in which the disciples of Jesus were spoken of as having known him through “many years of wandering,” and (2) a passage which overstated the force of a proposition by Dr. Cheyne concerning Nazareth. Now, the first item in this case also turned on a slip of the translator. Drews had written “mehrjährig,” which means “of several years,” not “many.” The critic, of course, was entitled to his cavil; but here again an honest critic would have dealt with the force of the argument as apart from the mere detail of the number of years. No such attempt was made: the theological journalist never hinted to his readers that Drews was putting a consideration which, with a mere substitution of “several” for “many,” told very strongly in support of Drews’s case, and against the received tradition. In fine, an indictment of Drews’s treatise in a popular yet pretentious Christian journal offered no further confutation of his case than an outcry against a phrase which happened to be a mistranslation, and against one overstatement of another critic’s opinion. A short letter by me to the journal in question, pointing out the facts and suggesting the moral, was suppressed, and a bare summary given, from which the moral was carefully excluded. These dialecticians do not want truth, do not want full and fair discussion, do not want elucidation. Their ideal is to discredit those who assail their beliefs, and there an end.

Thus the defence of tradition goes on. Neo-Unitarian theologians and journalists handle disturbing theses with as little concern for candour or for patient comprehension, as much reliance on aspersion and vituperation, as was ever shown by Trinitarian critics of Unitarianism. And the Unitarian Inquirer, I observe, indignantly resents any return of censure, apparently claiming for its own chief pundit a monopoly of that. I regret to be unable to comply with the requirement.

§ 6. Professor Carl Clemen.

The Religionsgeschichtliche Erklärung des Neuen Testaments of Professor Lic. Dr. Carl Clemen (Giessen, 1909) would probably not be certified as orthodox by theologians claiming to be such, inasmuch as it admits the non-historicity of the Virgin-Birth and the pagan derivation of a certain number of Christian doctrines. It strives, however, to do all that can be done without avowed renunciation of scholarly critical principles to minimise “die Abhängigkeit des ältesten Christentums von nicht jüdischen Religionen and philosophischen Systemen.” The reader will note the “ältesten.” Claiming to examine thoroughly the measure of dependence of the oldest Christianity upon non-Jewish religions and philosophic systems, Professor Clemen implicitly admits later pagan influences. His treatment of the data as to the primary influences, however, invites drastic criticism.

Undertaking to deal with Gentile influences not only upon the dogmas but upon the narratives of the gospels, Professor Clemen leaves absolutely unmentioned a whole series of explicitly posited precedents for gospel narratives, while dealing, often laboriously, with others, often of less importance. In his opening chapter he thinks fit to dismiss my volume on Christianity and Mythology with an extract from a querulous account of it given by Professor A. Réville. In the preface to the second edition of that work I have shown that Professor Réville cannot have given even a cursory attention to the bulk of it, else he would be open to a charge of simple false witness. And now Professor Clemen, not having seen the book himself,  disposes of it by a citation from another Professor who had not read it. He has thus by a wise economy of research taken no account of a score of the asserted parallelisms which it is the professed object of his book to deal with. At the same time, and on the same principles, he dismisses as exhibitions of Parallelomanie English writings which he admits he has not before him.

To the first edition of the present work he has, however, given some little attention. Inaccurately enough, he cites as the Grundgedanke of the book the two theses as to the mystery-drama on which criticism was specially challenged. They do not constitute the Grundgedanke. The Grundgedanke is the naturalness and interconnectedness of all religion: the two theses in question represent the central result of the investigation as regards Christian origins. But the real issue, of course, is as to whether they will stand scrutiny. At this point, again, Professor Clemen practises economy of effort. He takes some trouble, indeed (p. 143 sq.), to affirm in detail that the Asiatic and other analogies to the crucifixion are non-significant; but on the central thesis as to the mystery-drama he is satisfied to offer the single proposition: “That the Passion-story was originally composed as a mystery-play does not follow from its dramatic character: it is in essence certainly historical.” The reader of the foregoing pages is aware that the contention thus ingenuously evaded is not merely that dramatic origin is to be inferred from a vaguely “dramatic character,” but that the main story is historically incredible, and that a variety of details, material and literary, can be explained only on the drama hypothesis, their presence being unintelligible on any other. Upon this argument Professor Clemen has not a word to say: he simply falls back on a petitio principii, not even explaining what it is that he is denying.

This is of course in the ordinary way of orthodox and semi-orthodox apologetics; and I dwell on it here because Professor Clemen, in his Introduction (§ 2), professes to observe scrupulously a critical “method.” As he states it, it is simply an adherence to the ordinary principles of historical argument and evidence. But we now see what such a profession of principle is worth. In the first place, Professor Clemen ignores a multitude of the data with which he ought to grapple. That is to say, he disparages a book which he has not read, but of which not only the title suggests but a cited description tells him that it affirms many myth-parallels between Christianity and other systems. After making that citation, in proceeding to describe his method, he remarks (p. 10) that it would be superfluous to disprove propositions which are seen to be “untenable,” or to deal with “popular” works which do not once make the attempt to establish their astounding propositions. Either these two rules of exclusion are meant to include Christianity and Mythology or they are not. If not, he makes no excuse for evading its examination. If they are meant to exclude it, he has been unscrupulous enough to asperse and dismiss a book which he has not seen, and whereof he cites only one splenetic hostile description, which I have elsewhere shown to be written without perusal. Such are the ethic and character of Professor Clemen’s real “method.” When, finally, he does profess to deal with a capital thesis with which he is avowedly bound to reckon, he burkes the entire argument, assumes without discussion the point in dispute, and passes on to other issues. His profession of method is either a dialectical sham or an exhibition of failure to understand the nature of argument.

I have limited my criticism to Professor Clemen’s handling of my own books; but anyone who follows up his handling of the positions (among others) of Gunkel and Jensen will there find a similar tactic of begging the question wherever that course is the most convenient. If this is the best that the professional theologian in Germany can do to meet the anthropological and hierological analysis of Christian origins—and I understand it is thought to be adequate by those who share its positions—there is nothing more to be said. The entire tactic is one of making small concessions (though even these are significantly numerous, compared with the general denials of a few years ago) and evading or suppressing vital issues. What Professor Clemen surrenders are the points already surrendered by many “liberal” theologians: his ostensible defence of other positions is mere asseveration.

THE END

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Table of Contents

Preface To The Second Edition

Introduction

I. The Naturalness Of All Belief

1. Origin of the Gods from Fear

2. All Belief Results of Reasoning

3. Dr. Jevons’ Theories of Religious Evolution

4. Scientific View of the Religious Evolution

5. Dr. Frazer’s Definition

6. The Scientific Induction

7. Dr. Jevons’ Series of Self-Contradictions

8. His Contradictory Doctrine Of The Conditions Of The Survival Of Religion

9. The Continuity Of Religious Phenomena

10. Dr. Frazer’s Sociological Vindication Of The Sorcerer

11. The Beginning Of The End Of Religion

12. Historic View Of Ancestor Worship

13. The Authoritarian Element A Mark Of Religion

14. Definition Of Religion

II. Comparison And Appraisement Of Religions

1. Early Forces Of Reform

2. Reform As A Religious Process

3. Polytheism And Monotheism

4. Hebrews And Babylonians

5. Forces Of Religious Evolution

6. The Hebrew Evolution

7. Post-Exilic Phases

8. Revival And Disintegration

9. Conclusion

III. The Sacrificed Saviour-God

1. Totemism And Sacraments

2. Theory And Ritual Of Human Sacrifice

3. The Christian Crucifixion

4. Vogue of Human Sacrifice

5. The Divinity of the Victim

6. The Cannibal Sacrament

7. The Semitic Antecedents

8. The Judaic Evolution

9. Specific Survivals in Judaism

10. The Pre-Christian Jesus-God

11. Private Jewish Eucharists

12. The Eucharist in Orthodox Judaism

13. Special Features of the Crucifixion Myth

14. Possible Historical Elements

15. The Gospel Mystery-Play

16. The Mystery-Play and the Cultus

17. Further Pagan Adaptations

18. Synopsis And Conclusion: Genealogy Of Human Sacrifice And Sacrament

IV. The Teaching God

1. Primary and Secondary Ideas

2. The Logos

3. Derivations of the Christian Logos

4. The Search for a Historical Jesus

5. The Critical Problem

6. Collapse of the Constructive Case

7. Parallel Problems

8. The Problem of Buddhist Origins

9. Buddhism and Buddhas

10. The Buddhist Cruces

11. Sociological Clues

12. Buddhism and Asoka

13. The Buddha Myth

14. The Problem of Manichæus

15. The Manichean Solution

16. The Case of Apollonius of Tyana

V. Mithraism

1. Introductory

2. Beginnings Of Cult

3. Zoroastrianism

4. Evolution of Mithra

5. The Process of Syncretism

6. Symbols of Mithra

7. The Cultus

8. The Creed

9. Mithraism and Christianity

10. Further Christian Parallels

11. The Vogue of Mithraism

12. Absorption in Christianity

13. The Point of Junction

VI. The Religions Of Ancient America

1. American Racial Origins

2. Aztecs and Peruvians

3. Primitive Religion and Human Sacrifice

4. The Mexican Cultus

5. Mexican Sacrifices and Cannibal Sacraments

6. Mexican Ethics

7. The Mexican White Christ

8. The Fatality of the Priesthood

9. The Religion of Peru

10. Conclusion

Appendix A. The Eating Of The Crucified Human Sacrifice

Appendix B. Dramatic And Ritual Survivals

Appendix C. Replies To Criticisms