THE EVOLUTION OF
RELIGION

AN ANTHROPOLOGICAL STUDY

BY
L. R. FARNELL, M.A., D.Litt.

AUTHOR OF “CULTS OF THE GREEK STATES”
FELLOW AND TUTOR OF EXETER COLLEGE, OXFORD; UNIVERSITY LECTURER
IN CLASSICAL ARCHÆOLOGY; CORRESPONDING MEMBER OF THE
GERMAN IMPERIAL ARCHÆOLOGICAL INSTITUTE; FELLOW
OF THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL SOCIETY

NEW YORK: G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS
LONDON: WILLIAMS AND NORGATE
1905

Preface

A small book on a great and difficult subject must explain and apologise for itself, especially if it cannot claim a raison d’être as a handbook for beginners. Having accepted the stimulating invitation to give in the spring of this year a short series of lectures for the Hibbert Trust on some subject belonging to the department of comparative religion, I felt that it was desirable to avoid those topics that had been appropriated by former lecturers; and also that the Trustees, as well as the audience, deserved that what the lecturer put forth should embody the results of some personal and original study. I finally selected for special discussion the ritual of purification, and the influence of the ideas associated with it upon law, morality, and religion; and secondly, the development of prayer from lower to higher forms. These subjects do not appear to have been as yet exhaustively treated by modern anthropology or scientific and comparative theology, and I had already worked upon them to some extent as “parerga” of the treatise that I am completing for the Clarendon Press on the history of Greek cults. I am aware that these special questions would well repay longer and more minute research, and could each furnish material for a large volume. But having been advised to publish the lectures more or less as they were delivered, I put them forth as tentative and incomplete work. I specially regret to have been unable to have gone further at present into the Egyptian evidence, with the kindly proffered assistance of Mr Griffiths, the Reader in Egyptology at Oxford.

The first two lectures, dealing with the methods and the value of the study of comparative religion and its relations to anthropology, are of a more general character. If they seem to occupy somewhat too large a part of a work of this small compass, the urgency of the questions they raise may serve as an apology. It was suggested to me that some such pronouncement might be timely at the point we have reached. For the subject is winning greater consideration, and even receiving endowment, in the organisation of the newer Universities. From the scientific point of view it is one of the most fascinating of studies; and its practical importance for our colonial administrators and our missionaries is obvious to those who reflect. It is also a legitimate hope that its wider and more intelligent recognition in England may tend to cool and temper the heated atmosphere of dogmatic controversy, by presenting religious facts in their true proportion and proper setting.

I must take this opportunity of expressing my gratitude to many friends for valuable assistance, and especially to my friend and colleague, Mr R. Marett, to whose comprehensive knowledge of the religious thought and ritual of savage races I owe many important clues.

L. R. FARNELL.

August, 1905.

Contents

LECTURES I. AND II.

THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS

LECTURE III.

THE RITUAL OF PURIFICATION AND THE CONCEPTION OF PURITY: THEIR INFLUENCE ON RELIGION, MORALITY, AND SOCIAL CUSTOM

LECTURE IV.

THE EVOLUTION OF PRAYER FROM LOWER TO HIGHER FORMS

INDEX

ENDNOTES

The Evolution of Religion

LECTURES I. AND II.
THE COMPARATIVE STUDY OF RELIGIONS: ITS METHOD AND PROBLEMS

The reasonable and sympathetic study of the various religions of mankind, which are perhaps the clearest mirror we possess of human feeling, aspiration, and thought in its highest and lowest forms, is only possible for the individual or for the age that feels no constraining call to suppress and obliterate all save one cherished creed. Such study began, as we should expect, in the earlier Hellenic period, the Hellenic religion throwing few or no obstacles in the way of undogmatic investigation; and the first anthropologist of religion is Herodotus. Then among Hellenistic scholars and those of pre-Christian Rome there were some who devoted themselves to the collection and exposition of the religious institutions of foreign races. But save a few short treatises, such as Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride, Sallustius’ De Diis et Mundo, Lucian’s De Dea Syria, nothing has survived beyond the titles and the fragments of their works; and by an irony of fortune we owe much of our knowledge of Hellenic and other religions of the Mediterranean area to the Christian controversialists, who reveal many of the essential features of the various pagan creeds in order to expose them to obloquy: they could not anticipate that we should gather as the fruit of their labours a better appreciation than we could otherwise have gained of the religions which they strove to destroy, and possibly of Christianity itself. If I were attempting, as I do not propose to attempt, to give a complete survey of the growth and development of the study which we are considering, I should probably be able to cull but little material for the narrative from Byzantine and mediæval sources. We may note that the spirit of these ages was, on the whole, alien to our present interest; and that it is not till after the Renaissance and the discovery of America that systematic work in this field begins again. To two Spaniards of Peruvian and Mexican descent,^3.1 we owe our knowledge of the religions of the Incas and the Aztecs, that of the latter at least being of prime importance for the student of the higher religions of mankind. A Polish nobleman of the 16th century has left us a fairly detailed account of the religious practices and beliefs of the then semi-pagan Lithuania.^3.2 But it may be regarded as one of the greatest achievements of the latter part of the 19th century to have raised the comparative study of religion to a high position in the whole domain of inductive speculation and inquiry. And its development has been mainly due to two independent lines of investigation. The first stimulus came with the discovery and the interpretation of the sacred books of the East, a momentous epoch in the history of European thought, and certain important theories concerning religious origins were put forth by Vedic scholars, and based on the evidence of Vedic literature: at the same time the decipherment of the Assyrian-Babylonian and Egyptian texts has contributed a wealth of new material, and has started new problems of religious inquiry, which specially concern the students of Hellenic as well as those of Semitic antiquity. But an equally or, as some may think, more powerful factor in the recent advance towards the organised knowledge of religions has been the growth, in the last half-century, of the study that has appropriated the name of anthropology, which is generally understood to mean the study of primitive or savage man, both in the past and the present, in respect of his physical and mental conditions. It is quite unnecessary for me to dilate on the high and manifold utility, both practical and speculative, of this new branch of human inquiry; the theme has become almost a popular commonplace in the leading journalism of the day. And anthropology, defined as above, has a definite value and object apart from its contributions to our knowledge of the religions of the world. It is nevertheless true that the religious interest in England is so strong and penetrating, that many of our leading anthropologists, in their investigations of savage society, have directed their attention mainly to religious or quasi-religious phenomena. Even if their labours were confined to the discovery and the exposition of savage ritual and belief, we should still be greatly indebted to them; for to many of us at least the savage man is interesting in his own right, whether it is true or not that the study of his mental phenomena helps to explain the mental phenomena of our higher selves or of the higher races in the past. But these writers claim, and I think with right, to have done more than this, and by comparison, induction, and hypothesis to have thrown some light on the evolution of religion from lower to higher forms, and therefore to have laid the foundation for the science with which we are concerned. Also attempts have been recently made by an accomplished scholar of the new doctrine, Dr Frazer, to trace what may be called the anthropological genesis of the central idea of Christianity itself.^6.1 It is not then surprising that in England at least such claims and such ambitions should excite mistrust, even hostility, and the prestige of anthropology may have also suffered at times from the indiscretion of its friends. Still, its work is of wide vogue, its energy exuberant, and its influence in the future assured. In considering, therefore, the aims and methods of the comparative science of religion, it has appeared to me that its relations to anthropology are now one of the main points in the inquiry. And we may seem to have reached a stage where it is desirable to test our position, to take stock as it were, to examine our methods, and to consider whether they are capable of improvement. The task is difficult, and in facing it one must face the imputation of presumption, especially as in a short course of lectures one must be brief, and may therefore appear over-dogmatic.

If the comparative study of religion is to examine, as on the ground of its title it must, the various recorded or discoverable religions of every branch of the human family, then a part of anthropology, limited, as it has usually chosen to limit itself, to the study of the savage races, is obviously a sub-department of the whole. And its work, conducted often under great difficulties, has been solid, well-organised, and of high importance. Even those who deny its claim to be called a science, whatever that word may mean, must admit that it is at least an indispensable branch of historic inquiry, and that it has deepened the self-knowledge of mankind.

Some of its pioneers may have been overeager in their theorising, premature in their attempts to reveal the origin of all religion in some savage ritual or in the background of savage thought, for instance in ancestor-worship or totemism. Such rash generalisations are inevitable in the opening periods of a new study, and may be discredited or abandoned without discrediting the investigations that gave rise to them. We may have come to be aware of the excesses of the students of totemism: we may have come to the conviction that neither theirs nor any other special and single hypothesis has as yet supplied us with the master-clue by which we can penetrate to the aboriginal source of human religion: we may have found scientific reasons for rejecting the belief that all gods arose as ghosts of departed ancestors. But if we discard such theories of origin, we owe this negative result to the maturer study of anthropology itself; and we may owe to it the positive induction that the religious product at the different stages and in the different branches of mankind was a complex growth from many different germs.

It has taught us also much more than this. It has shown us that all through the present societies of savage men there prevails an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its environment.

We have learnt to discover a certain savage style, as we may call it, in myth and ritual; and anthropology has performed a twofold work of comparison; for it has not only compared the various savage races of mankind, but it has compared the results of this colligation with the religious phenomena of the higher races, and has revealed the savage style in much of their mythology and ritual. It was first discovered by the earlier investigators of the antiquity of Northern Europe, such as the brothers Grimm and Mannhardt, that underlying the religion of Christendom lay a stratum of peasant-ritual and belief, not yet extinct nor likely soon to be, that reveals the same mental condition in early Europe that exists among our savage contemporaries in various parts of the world. Then the sacred edifice of Hellenism was attacked; and the complacency of Hellenic scholars was sometimes disturbed by the revelation, through a strict comparative method, of the same savage style in much of Hellenic ritual and Hellenic myth. Thus for the first time we came to understand the true significance of many of the crude and repulsive facts in Hellenic religion—the human sacrifices, the reverence paid to animals, stones, and trees, the demonology and magic rites. Many of these practices had lost their meaning for the more advanced generations, who nevertheless retained them under the strong constraint of religious conservatism; but if we find the same practices among existing races who perform them with a living and plenary faith as part of a quasi-logical structure of belief, we can place them back into their proper setting when we discover them still surviving in the higher and alien society. Greek religion especially, having never violently broken with its own past, is a bed of rich deposit still inviting exploration. And now Hellenic scholars are ransacking the same treasure for further anthropological material; while Assyriologists and Egyptologists are treating a part of the phenomena of their special departments in the same spirit.

We realise the gain of this: we are slowly and surely arriving at inductive conclusions concerning the similarity of development through which the higher and lower races have passed and are passing; the solidarity of the human family appears stronger than we might have supposed. At the same time we have now to be on our guard against certain common anthropological fallacies. Some of these are less inevitable than others: for instance, that which we may call the fallacy of simple enumeration. On the ground of the general inductive belief that the higher races have at one time passed through a savage phase, it is often too rashly assumed that each and all of them must at one time have possessed a particular institution, such as totemism or ancestor-worship, which, as a matter of fact, is found among the majority of the savage races of to-day. This is to exaggerate the principle of solidarity, to ignore the fact of the great diversity actually observable among existing primitive societies, and the possibility that it was just by avoiding some particular detrimental institution that some of the higher peoples were able to proceed on their path of progress. Again, the anthropological explanation is often obliged to be hypothetical, for the evidence presented is often very fragmentary: by means of a reasonable and expert imagination, an attempt is made to reconstruct a whole fabric out of a few fragments. A single bone may enable the expert biologist to reshape unerringly the once living animal; but in anthropology the fragment in question may have descended from either one of two differing organisms or organic institutions that may have left very much the same imprint upon mythology and religion. For instance, a full-fledged totemistic system, having fallen into decay, might leave its trace in certain stories about animals or in occasional reverence paid to a particular animal: but direct animal-worship, a religious view that may be quite independent of totemism, or certain forms of ancestor-worship may equally well have deposited the same fossil-thought or fossil-rite.^13.1 And we know how recklessly the theory of the ubiquitous practice of human sacrifice has been used to explain certain peculiar phenomena in later ritual, such as the scourging of the Spartan boys, for example.

But a stricter anthropology can correct the over-narrow hypotheses of its immaturity, and can render masterly aid to the evolutionary study of the higher religions; for each of these, in spite of revelation or transforming enthusiasm that would obliterate the past, contains a mass of mysterious dead matter; and it is for the anthropologist to show the prior functional organic significance of this. But if, in obedience to the currently accepted limitation of his subject, he confines himself mainly to the study of savage life and to the dead matter of the higher religions, and yet is tempted to deal with the more vital and essential elements in these, he will be liable to the special bias of his own study. We may note such bias in recent attempts to explain the essential features of the Eleusinian Mysteries in the light of merely savage anthropology. And of course we are all apt to lose the sense of proportion and to exaggerate the importance of the special phenomena to which we confine our regard. The folk-lorist will be liable to over-emphasise the part played by mythology in religion, and may ignore the higher importance of prayer and ritual; for the most conscientious cobbler is never really able to stick to his last. In fact, though the whole exposition of the higher religions is impossible without anthropology, there is some danger at present lest the part be at times mistaken for the whole. For instance, we may feel with some uneasiness that recent expositions of Hellenic religion tend, unintentionally no doubt, to distort the view of the reader and to produce a false impression by exaggerating the savage and primitive facts, missing the true perspective and misjudging the whole. Our appreciation of Greek mythology may suffer in the same way, unless we can keep the keen edge of our appreciative faculty: the Greek myth has often its striking affinities with the Arunta or the Pawnee, and it is necessary for comparative folk-lore and anthropology to point this out, and often to insist on the beauty of the legend and the dignity of the religious thought among savages: but it is unfortunate if these studies should result in our loss of the perception that Greek mythology, after all, is the most beautiful of any of which we have record.

The fallacy which I have so far tried to indicate arises from the temper of mind that a special study is liable to engender. On the other hand, there is a particular fallacy of method to which the modern study of anthropology, as it has chosen to limit itself, specially exposes us. It is liable to withdraw us from the immediate entourage of a particular fact—a particular legend or a religious service—to the distant circumference. It was inevitable for the earliest pioneers of the study to travel far, for the circumference was unexplored, and there were facts lying at the distant points that concerned us. But, after all, our first object of study should be the more immediate environment of the thing which we wish to understand. The student of Hellenic religion and myth may have ultimately to roam, in a literary sense, into Central Australia and the byways of America; but he ought first to explore the Mediterranean regions and the lands of anterior Asia. It is interesting, and may be necessary, to know “the Pawnee version of the Eleusinia”; but, for the true understanding of the great Greek mystery, certain elements in the Egyptian religion, in Mithraism, and in Christianity itself will probably afford a more illuminative comparison. The mind of our student is sometimes tempted, in fact, to travel too easily and too cheaply to the other side of the globe, and to leave undone work that should first have been done nearer home.

To reduce these ideas to something like a working formula of method, may we say that the anthropology which the comparative study of any one of the more complex and advanced religions immediately demands is “an adjacent anthropology”? For religious ideas, legends, and ritual are most contagious, and tend to propagate themselves over large contiguous areas: for, to reverse a stereotyped question, “what is less its own than a people’s gods?” We greatly desiderate an anthropology of the Mediterranean basin, including anterior Asia; for there are strong reasons for the belief that from very early times the frequent intercourse of the leading peoples in this region endowed them with a common stock of religious ideas, ritual, and legend which have probably left their impress on the higher religions of the world. It is these that specially interest most of us, and we feel we cannot solve their problems by means of savage anthropology alone. Why, after all, should the latter term be restricted, as it usually is, to the study of savage life? Doubtless we cannot so extend the use of the word as to cover its full etymological signification: else it would come to include the whole of human history from the beginning down to the present, and would lose its value as a mark of any special science. But we might somewhat enlarge its present connotation with advantage to the comparative method, and without a too wide departure from current usage. We might define the anthropological study of any one of the higher religions as an evolutionary study of its embryology: the evolutionary law might appear in the first instance as a proximate law of growth. For probably every one of the world-creeds has inherited, apart from its own achievement, a double tradition, a tradition from the more remote and one from the more immediate past. The first may descend from immemorial antiquity, and from really primitive or savage mental and social life; and it has been the task of primitive anthropology to expound and explain the facts that this tradition has deposited. But many if not most of these facts may be regarded as functionally dead matter surviving in the more advanced system of belief, and as not belonging to its essential life. On the other hand, from the immediate tradition much will be found to have been taken over by an inevitable law of assimilation, certain potent ideas which, though transformed, will enter into the very life-blood of the new creed. And these are to be discovered and analysed by what I have ventured to call an “adjacent” anthropology, which will include a comprehensive study of the literature and monuments belonging to the more proximate past of the race which develops the new faith as well as of the races that are its nearer neighbours.

Such a method, though not hitherto styled anthropological, has already been applied by various scholars in the different parts of our field; the exposition of the Babylonian elements in Judaic religion, of the Judaic and pagan elements in Moslemism, are examples of it. On the present occasion I would prefer to illustrate it by noting its application to the scientific study of Christianity itself, of which the remarkable complexity, the variety of forms that it has assumed in different parts of Christendom at different periods, seems specially to invite the higher anthropological treatment. Moreover it probably contains a richer deposit than any other of the world-religions from the various streams of thought and belief that nourished the life of early civilised or semi-civilised man. The illustration drawn from our own religion will be also more personally interesting to ourselves; and though the limits of time and my own knowledge may prevent me from putting forth any original statement, yet something may be gained and a more extended interest awakened by a brief notice of what has been and what remains to be done.

There is now no need for apology if one wishes frankly to consider the genesis of the fundamental ideas and prevailing institutions of earlier and later Christianity, although hitherto a certain religious shyness, which belongs to the national character, may have made English scholars reluctant to attempt the anthropology of our national faith; and the progress of the subject owes more to foreign workers. Our own theological students of distinction have not evaded the question as to the early influences that may have moulded the religious thought of Christ and St Paul; but these were naturally sought mainly in the later Judaism; and though the debt of the developed Christianity to Hellenic philosophy has never been ignored, yet that neither our sacred books nor Judaic literature nor Greek philosophy explain the whole complex of historic Christianity, is a conviction of recent growth, and the investigations to which it has prompted are recent. For instance, it was a new departure of great promise for the future of our science when, in a course of Hibbert lectures delivered some years ago, Dr Hatch publicly expounded the deep indebtedness of Christianity in respect of ritual, organisation, and even religious concept to the Eleusinian Mysteries and other mystic societies of Greek lands. And the few students of Hellenic religion in England have often noted its many ties of affinity with our own, though of these there has been as yet no complete and authoritative account. We may admit that the triumph of a new and great creed may imply a potent revelation, perhaps a sudden mental transformation in the catechumens difficult to equate with any formulated law of evolution. Still we cannot gainsay the experience that as the religion establishes and organises itself, it draws nourishment from the old soil which is full of the living germs of past organisms. Therefore it was inevitable that Hellenic religion should leave a deep impress upon earlier and later Christianity; partly because the religious temper in the Greek world throughout the centuries immediately preceding the adoption of Christianity was more powerful and fervid than it had been in the days of Homer or Pericles, and mainly because Hellenic converts became the pillars of the Church. But the comparative student must pursue the problem further afield and beyond the track of Hellas. The old Phrygian religion, which Professor Ramsay’s travels and investigations have assisted us to know, must be seriously taken into account; for Phrygia was one of the earliest homes of Christianity, its aboriginal religion had germinated in ideas strikingly akin to some that are primary in all or many of the creeds of Christendom; and the morbid and ecstatic temperament of the native Phrygian, which gave so distinct a colour to the Cybele-Attis cult, seems to have appeared again in certain schismatic forms of Christian doctrine in Phrygia, especially in the heresy of Montanism. Finally, we may learn much, even adopt much, from our enemies. The most dangerous antagonists of Christianity were, after all, the worship of Isis and Mithraism. It may be possible to trace the influence of these on their conqueror: the great work of M. Cumont on Mithras cult suggests at least many interesting religious parallels; and even the older Zoroastrian literature must be considered within the range of necessary and legitimate comparison.

As I am here concerned with illustration of method rather than with positive proof, I can only offer a very brief summary of the results which the anthropological study of Christianity has hitherto achieved, and may yet achieve.

The religious affinities discoverable between the earlier and later “Mediterranean” systems may be classified according as they appear in the legends, in nomenclature and terminology, in external symbols and liturgical objects, in hieratic institutions, and finally in the ideas, aspirations, and concepts of faith. As regards legend and mythology, a great historic religion may of course claim to be free from all mythology; nevertheless it is a matter of experience that popular legends are sure at some period earlier or later to creep in, for the people insist on telling the old stories under changed names. I myself have heard the immemorial story of Odysseus walking inland with his oar, which the rustic mistakes for a winnowing-fan, told about St Peter, St Paul, and St John on the coast of the Peloponnese; just as an old Norse legend about Odin and Baldur is retold of Christ and St Peter.^26.1 And students of mediæval hagiology will discover more and more clearly various fragments of pre-Christian mythology embedded in the legends of the saints. Such facts are the material of comparative folk-lore, which plays a useful but quite subordinate part in the work of comparative religion. Legends have indeed their own independent interest, poetical, ethical, and other; but the importance of mere mythology in the study of religion has been often much overrated; St Augustine, mistaking Greek legends for Greek religion, could discover no morality in it at all,^26.2 and modern scholars have inherited the fallacy. Myths are often irresponsible, capricious, volatile, and flit like a vapour round the solid structure of real belief and ritual. A high religion may attract low myths: some of our own are not spotless, but Christianity can ignore them. The myth that is an essential fact for the student of religion is that which enshrines some living religious idea or institution, or one which proves the survival of some ritual or faith that belonged to an older system. I may note a few of this kind which illustrate the affinities of Judaic, Christian, and pagan legend. The cessation of human-sacrifice in the Mediterranean area, the awakening of the conviction that the practice was abhorrent to a merciful God, implied so momentous a change in religious and moral thought and practice that it would be strange if it left no legendary record of itself. We may discern one in the story of Abraham’s sacrifice; to which we find a very striking and close parallel in the Laconian legend of Helen, whose father intended to sacrifice her to God in order to stay a plague:^27.1 the eagle, the messenger of God, swooped down and snatched the knife from the sacrificer’s hand, and let it fall on a kid that was pasturing near. Again, we are all familiar with the story of Jephtha’s vow: the fact is not so well known that a story identical in nearly every detail was told of Idomeneus, the Cretan hero,^28.1 who vowed that if he returned home from the Trojan war he would sacrifice to God the first thing that he met on landing: his daughter was the first that met him—and Idomeneus “did with her according to his vow,” or intended to do so, and the people exiled him for it. Different from these, but belonging to the inner circle, so to speak, of sacred narrative, are one or two Gospel stories which are not peculiar to Palestine or to our sacred books. The miraculous star that guides sacred personages on a divine errand must be an Anatolian star-legend, for it is told of Æneas and his voyage to Italy.^28.2 And a critical appreciation of the style of Hellenic folk-lore detects at once a marked Hellenic colour in the legends that gather around the birth and rearing of the Virgin in the apocryphal Gospel of St James. More important and suggestive of much more is the parallelism that we discover between the story of our Lord’s temptation and the temptation of Zarathustra in the Zend-Avesta: here also the evil god offers the holy prophet the kingdoms of the world if he will fall down and worship him.^29.1

Finally, it is not improbable that the strange legend preserved in various late Greek MSS., of the Virgin Mary’s descent into hell,^29.2 where she is shown the torments of the damned, is derived ultimately from the Babylonian myth of the descent of Ischtar, which in the Greek world transformed itself into the story of the descent of Aphrodite. This suggestion is in harmony with the evidence which will be noticed below for the belief that the development of the worship and the divine character of the Virgin owed much, directly or indirectly, to the great Anatolian cult of the mother-goddess.

As regards the legend just mentioned, we may suppose direct borrowing, or at least direct mental suggestion from an older mythology and faith. To the other examples which I have adduced—probably only a few among many that might be quoted—the theory of borrowing may be inappropriate.

It may be more scientific, and certainly it is at present more expedient, to be content with the assumption that for thousands of years over contiguous human areas a similarity of religious temperament, religious institutions, religious crises may tend to produce a common stock of legend; whether the legend is true or false is not our present concern.

I turn now to the second group of affinities, those in nomenclature and terminology. This may at first sight appear a matter unimportant for the evolution of religion, and of merely linguistic concern. A people changing its religion cannot suddenly change its speech, but must adapt the old terminology to the new thought. It may be of interest for the student of language to know that when St Paul promises to “show you a mystery” he is borrowing the language of paganism; that when Bishop Clemens^31.1 ecstatically exclaims, “The Lord is our hierophant; bearing the sacred torch He has marked the initiate with His own seal… once join our mystery and you will dance in the choir of angels,” he is using the phraseology of the Eleusinian and Attis Mysteries. But the interest of such a style, upon which Dr Hatch has sufficiently commented, is more than linguistic; for it foreshadows a real though fortunately a temporary change which came over Christianity in the first few centuries of its life, transforming it from an open doctrine into a mystery organised after the old Greek type. Moreover the modern logical view of names as merely indifferent speech-symbols, which can be changed without affecting the essence of the things, was by no means the old-world view. The formula nomina sunt numina was valid in all the old religions of the Mediterranean area, including earlier and even later Christianity: the divine name was felt to be part of the divine essence and itself of supernatural potency; and this will be seen to be of paramount importance when we consider the forms of ancient prayer. Therefore the propagation of a new religion was greatly assisted if it could allow itself to employ some at least of the names potent and familiar in the older creed. Now the personal names of the various deities of paganism, owing to the mental illusion noted above, were necessarily hateful to the new faith and were ruthlessly suppressed, surviving merely as names of demons or for purposes of magic: only in remote corners of the old world one or two may still be lingering, purified as it were and at peace, as in the modern chapel of “Panagia Aphroditissa,” near the old Paphos in Cyprus. But some of the sacred names of Greek paganism were mere appellatives, possessing less individual personality, and were therefore innocent in the ears of the Christian propagandists. And two of these were destined to become names of primary virtue in the terminology of the new faith. When the apostles and their successors preached the Gospel of “the Saviour,” this title could awaken at least a responsive religious thrill in the hearts of the Hellenes who had been nursed in their ancestral religion. For it had long been attached to their supreme god, and in its feminine form to their beloved goddess Kore, and as applied to her the appellative already connoted “salvation” after death;^33.1 and already it had been used by the Alexandrian Greeks to sanctify the divine man, God’s representative on earth, “the living image of God,” as one of the later Ptolemies is styled in the ecstatic language of the Rosetta inscription.^34.1 But in the history of divine names none have been of greater import for paganism and Christianity alike than “Kore-Parthenos” and that of the Greek and Phrygian “Divine Mother,” the θεῶν Μήτηρ. It is at least probable that the prevalence of the cult and the name of “Kore,” the goddess who proffered salvation in the pre-Christian Hellenic world, afforded strong stimulus to the later growth and diffusion of Mariolatry, which is one of those phenomena in the history of the Church which cannot be adequately explained without looking beyond the limits of Christianity proper. A passage in the Panarium of Epiphanios^34.2 is of singular interest for those who wish to study the period of transition between old things and new. This writer tells us that on the night of the 5th or 6th of January, in Alexandria, the worshippers met in the sacred enclosure or temple of “Kore,” and having sung hymns to the music of the flute till dawn, they descended by the light of torches into an underground shrine and brought up thence a wooden idol on a bier representing Kore, seated and naked, with the sign of the cross on her brow, her hands, and her knees. And with the accompaniment of flutes, hymns, and dances the image was carried round the central shrine seven times, before it was restored again to its nether dwelling-place: “and the votaries say that to-day at this hour Kore—that is, the Virgin—gave birth to the Eternal.”

It is strange that Epiphanios should quote this rite as an example of pure paganism. This cannot be true: the image has been carefully signed with the cross in such a way as to suggest, not casual violence, but the deliberate intention of the worshippers; nor could the formula, “the Virgin has born the Eternal,” have been part of a purely pagan liturgy consecrated to the Hellenic Kore. Still less could the service be purely Christian: at least I imagine that a naked Virgin, kept in a cavern shrine and carried round with timbrels, would be a unique fact in Christian archæology. The belief is forced upon us that we have here a blending of at least two rival creeds in a period of transition. An old ritual of Kore at Alexandria, the goddess of the underworld whose statue was kept in a subterraneous cavern, may have included a kind of passion play in which a holy child was born: as this occurred near the beginning of January, it could all the more easily be adapted to the requirements of a gradually prevailing Christianity. The idol is sanctified with the sign of the cross, and the child is called “the Aion.” This name betrays the influence at work. The doctrine which laboured most zealously to combine the various elements of the pagan and Christian creeds was Gnosticism, and “Aion” was a figure which the Gnostics borrowed from Mithraism.^37.1 It seems that the religious rays from Hellas, Persia, and Bethlehem converged at the “Korion” of Alexandria. But the name Κόρη does not seem to have usually formed part of the sacred title accepted by the early Church for the Mother of our Lord. Probably the name had acquired a personal association with the pagan goddess too strong to allow it to be used for the new faith;^37.2 nor was the idea of virginity so directly connoted by it as by the term παρθένος: hence ἡ ἁγνὴ παρθένος or ἡ ἁγία παρθένος is chosen for the Christian appellation of Mary. But these words themselves belong to the ancient hieratic vocabulary of Hellas, for the maiden-goddess known by no other name than Parthenos had long been adored in various states of Asia Minor and Thrace;^38.1 “Hagne,” the “Holy One,” was a divinity dear to the Arcadians;^38.2 and at Assos, the chief port of Mysia, visited by St Paul on one of his journeys, an inscription attests that “the Holy Virgin of our fatherland”—such is her style—had been pre-eminent in the pagan worship.^38.3 Moreover the sacred title, “the Mother of God,” was sympathetic with a very ancient and dominant Mediterranean faith: in prehistoric times from Crete, and at a later period from Phrygia, had gone forth the worship of the divine mother, known generally as “the Gods’ Mother” or “the Mother,” which had left a deep impress upon the religious imagination of the various races of the Greek and Roman world. It is no paradox to affirm that one of the streams that fostered the later growth of Mariolatry may have descended from the Minoan palace of Knossos.^39.1

As regards the third group in my classification, external symbols and liturgical objects, we might suppose that these mainly belong to the minutiæ of archæological study. A philosopher may ignore them as trivial facts; but they have been the cause of too much bloodshed and strife to be ignored by the history of religions, and the feelings they excite are still powerful enough to divide the churches and the sects of Christendom. Besides, if one religion borrows its symbols and sacred objects from another, it probably borrows much more besides. The use of candles and incense in churches, the fashion of certain ecclesiastic vestments, can be shown to have descended to us from a pre-Christian world. And it was quite natural that the new faith should take over the religious property of paganism, whatever at least it could receive without violation of its own essential principles. It is only the anthropological study of these particulars, apparently insignificant in themselves, that enables us to understand certain modern controversies, as for instance concerning incense, and also to appreciate the extraordinary tenacity with which the successive generations cleave to the smaller things of cult. These latter are felt to be part of the spell which is exercised upon us by an immemorial tradition, a spell that is all the stronger because it works upon the “subconscious” self; and those who maintain them are rarely aware of the aboriginal reason which prompts them. And often the question about the symbols or the sacred objects of worship, as distinct from the ideas and personalities, becomes obviously of prime importance for the comparison and classification of religions. Thus the distinction between iconic or idolatrous and aniconic or non-idolatrous cults is of deep significance, for it may correspond to the distinction between a more and a less anthropomorphic conception of the divinity, or to a belief that the embodiment of him in material objects is right and seemly or wrong and unseemly. The more spiritual a religion becomes, the greater is its inclination to dispense with the idol and even to reprobate it; the worshipper of Jahvé was thus set in antagonism to the surrounding tribes, and in the Iranian region the Zarathustrian votary to the worshipper of the Daevas. The history of Christianity in regard to this matter is familiar to us all: in spite of the vehement protests of its apostles and earlier propagandists who inherited the spiritual Judaic view, we know that all the efforts of the iconoclastic emperors could not suppress the veneration of images in the later period. Even in the Teutonic north, Christianity came, in the days before the Reformation, to assume an iconic character which is not accounted for by the ancestral tradition of our pagan forefathers: who certainly carved images, in spite of what Tacitus tells us, but do not appear to have been markedly idolatrous. We infallibly detect here the abiding influence of Greco-Roman paganism, in which idolatry had taken so deep a root, satisfying as it did the artistic-religious cravings of the people. We have records of the transformation of the old statues into Christian images; in an epigram we find Heracles pathetically complaining that he is forced to become St Luke:^42.1 a beautiful head of Aphrodite in Athens is rudely stamped with the cross, perhaps to convert her into the Virgin:^42.2 at the present day there exists in South Italy an image of a Madonna del Granato, holding a pomegranate, which by a curious chain of evidence can be traced with some probability back to the Hera of Argos, carved by Polycleitos.

Now the image may be regarded in two aspects: as a symbol merely bringing close to the sense the spiritual idea of divinity, and serving to stimulate the prayerful thought of the worshipper: or it may be venerated as the indwelling abode of the divinity, in which he habitually resides, or into which, by spells and blood-offerings, he may be compelled to enter. The first is the more spiritual and advanced point of view, the orthodox aspect of the image in the iconic churches of Christendom at most periods; and this is put forward as an apology for what may seem idolatry: we may note in passing that the same apology was put forward by the advanced champions of paganism. The second is the more primitive view, accepted at most periods by the people, and sometimes tolerated or even encouraged by certain of the churches: the idol is regarded as miraculous, as infused with divine power, perhaps itself the very divinity; and the uncultured Greeks who whipped the idol of Pan with squills if food was scarce,^43.1 or bound the image of Aphrodite with cords to prevent it running away,^43.2 the Breton smith mentioned by Renan, who threatened the saint’s image with red-hot pincers to compel him to heal his son, the modern savage who smears his idols with blood,^44.1 are to be classed together in the morphology of religion.

Idolatry in this sense is a higher form of fetichism, which, strictly defined, is the veneration of material objects, often shaped by art and handled in such a way as to endow them with divine potency, which bring good fortune to the owner. It is supposed to connote savagery, but survivals of it are found in most civilised communities, and we probably all inherit some faint impress of the fetichistic spirit, nor need we be startled if we find it in the higher religions.

In ancient Greece the fetich was common enough: sacred axes, sacred sceptres, pyramidical or cone-shaped stones, rudely hewn tree-stumps, are examples which we find in the literature and art of the historic or prehistoric periods; the most common kind of private fetich was the gem, carried as an amulet. This superstitious view of gems belonging to primitive faith has continued through many ages. Moreover, both in the public and private religion of Christendom in many periods, and even at the present time, we can easily recognise the fetichistic value of the sacred objects, relics, crucifixes; and the Bible itself might sometimes be carried as an amulet about the person to secure one from danger, and its modern use in the English legal oath, the witness “kissing the book,” conforms to a fetichistic type of oath which was common in the primitive Teutonic communities.^45.1 When Tertullian exclaims, “How great is the difference between the wood of the cross and the shapeless wooden emblems of Pallas or Ceres,”^45.2 he is thinking generally of the wide difference between Christianity and Hellenic polytheism. As regards the attitude of the Christian and pagan worshippers towards these emblems of their cult which Tertullian mentions, we are not sure that any such general distinction could be drawn. The “adoration of the true wood of the cross,” of which we have heard in recent times, if we merely consider the nature of the religious object and the value of the material thing for faith, must be called fetichistic: at least I know of no other word equally appropriate in the terminology of the science of religions. Doubtless the modern mind, in the performance of such ritual practices, can distinguish between the inanimate or material thing and the divine spirit which sanctifies it. But so also can the intelligent savage, who cares nothing for his piece of wood when he thinks the power-giving spirit has departed from it. The fetichism then of the higher religions and of the savage faith is morphologically the same; the vital difference lies in the conception of the divinity that is supposed to animate or sanctify the material thing.

It would be wrong to attribute the fetichistic proclivities discovered in the Christian communities wholly to the Hellenic or Mediterranean strain in our religion; for we must reckon with the survival among the later ritual-observances of the superstitions of the Northern peoples, and fetichism was certainly characteristic of the early Teutonic, Celtic, and Slavonic races. In this matter, as in others, we have to note that the puritanism of the early Church could not prevail against the strength of habit and immemorial tradition.

The illustration of this group of affinities may conclude with the observation that the most cherished emblem of our creed, the type of the cross itself, had already been in vogue as a religious symbol of certain of the earlier pagan peoples; it played a part in the ancient Egyptian^47.1 and Assyrian ritual, and recently Dr Evans has revealed to us in the Palace of Minos in Crete a chapel of the cross dedicated to the worship of the divine mother.^48.1 We can go no further than the surmise that the propagation of Christianity may have been assisted by the fact that the emblem of the new faith would not appear wholly unfamiliar to some of the converted races.

As regards the affinities discernible in respect of hieratic institutions, the organisation of churches, the relations of Church and State, I have only space to cite a few salient illustrations. The earliest Christian Church, a private religious society united by the bond of faith, the members contributing to each other’s wants, with a simple democratic organisation of ecclesia and sacred officials, would not strike the contemporary Greco-Roman world as an unfamiliar phenomenon; for its family likeness to the Hellenic “thiasoi” or brotherhoods of cult was sufficiently obvious, and has often been commented on. They, like it, were often proselytisers, and, ignoring the barriers of caste, gens, and city, accepted in principle the religious fellowship of man. “It is well to consider all men friends and brothers, as being the family of God,” says Apollonius,^49.1 echoing the doctrine of the Stoics. The soil was ready prepared for the new cosmopolitan religion.

In considering the history of the hierarchy in Christendom, we are often obliged to turn our eyes back upon the pre-Christian period. For instance, the insistence on the apostolic succession in the various churches, a primary article of faith with many at the present time, is entirely in keeping with a very old Mediterranean tradition: for we find it not infrequently maintained in Hellenic paganism that the priest should descend directly from the god whom he serves, or from the first apostle who instituted the particular cult or mystery;^50.1 we hear of the priest being qualified “by descent and by divine appointment.”^50.2 But in the earlier religious period the succession or descent was regarded in the linear and physical sense: this has become refined into the idea of a spiritual succession, maintained however by a continuity of physical though mystic contact. Here, as so often in the comparative study of religion, we have to note the physical and material ideas of the more primitive period maintaining themselves in the later but translated into a spiritual significance.

The relation between the priesthood and the State has been one of the burning questions of the secular and religious history of Europe. To understand fully all the features in the State organisation of the Church and the many points of controversy, we need often to go far back into the records of early Aryan and Mediterranean society. We may mark here and there in the pagan Anatolian region the emergence of the idea that the priest should be temporal lord,^51.1 while in most early Aryan societies the subordination of the spiritual to the secular power appears to have been maintained. A study of the sagas of the North suggests the reflection that the struggle fought out to a definite decision at the Reformation had already been decided in the Teutonic North in the far-off days before Christianity;^52.1 also that the secular character of the married English priesthood in our pre-Conquest period is only the reflex of old Teutonic custom.

The celibacy of the priesthood is, again, a question that has agitated and divided the churches, nor does it appear that we ourselves have finished with it. To trace its origin and inner significance, a wide anthropological study is necessary, and I may be able to return to it in another association in a later lecture. Within the history of the Church, we may trace back the religious ideas underlying the dogma of celibacy to the ascetic enthusiasm of the third and fourth centuries, and we may be right in connecting it with the growth of Mariolatry. But the original source of the phenomenon lies far in the background of our religion; the impulse to religious celibacy had long been congenial to the temperament of some of the Anatolian races. We find it powerful in the Judaic sect of the Essenians; and in the anthropology of primitive societies we are often confronted with the idea that the virgin body is the only fit organ for the full divine afflatus.

In another question of administration, in the position of women in regard to the ministry, we can trace the opposing forces of differing pre-Christian traditions.^53.1 Their present total exclusion from sacred functions in all but a few sects shows the triumph of the Judaic rule sanctioned and insisted upon by St Paul; it is not at all in accordance with Teutonic or Greco-Roman religious custom; and in fact we find in the early centuries of the Church, when Greek influence was strongest, that certain offices of the ministry could be fulfilled by women; we even hear of a heretic sect in the fifth century that signalised itself by the orgiastic processions of the “priestesses of the Virgin Mary.”^54.1 It is still possible that the old Teutonic view in this matter may reassert itself.

If we try to give a complete account of any of the important institutions of the churches, infant baptism or the Roman confession for instance, we ought at least, before we can pronounce that any particular one is a spontaneous or a unique growth, to survey the religions contiguous to or immediately preceding Christianity. As regards the practice of confession, a usage which, as I hope to show, may be explained as connected with a ritual of purification, its institution cannot at least be regarded as a unique phenomenon in the early Church. A very simple form of it appears to have been known to the Judaic system, and it appears as a formal element in the Babylonian liturgy:^54.2 as a spiritual relief to which a man might voluntarily resort, it was encouraged by the Delphic oracle;^55.1 as part of the cathartic ritual which was preliminary to initiation it was required by the ordinances of the Samothracian Mysteries; and it is in an anecdote concerning these that we meet with the first example of the free Protestant spirit reprobating the practice.^55.2 We may infer that it was uncongenial to the character and alien to the tradition of our Teutonic forefathers, in the record of whose pagan institutions there is no hint of it, and Alcuin complains of his Goths “that no one of the laity was willing to confess to the priests.”^55.3 It may well have been a spontaneous growth of southern Christianity; but it appears to have arisen first within the early monastic orders,^55.4 and as these in their origin had certain affinities with the non-Christian mystic brotherhoods, where the practice was not unknown, it is possible that in this matter also a pre-Christian tradition was still of some effect. Or, if this is unlikely, we must maintain that like conditions evolve similar products over the whole area with which comparative religion deals; and the most striking resemblance to a Christian confessional is to be observed in the old Mexican ritual, if we can trust Sahagun.^56.1 As regards the other suggested example, we should probably find, if we followed out the history and origin of infant baptism, that the pre-Christian tradition was a strong efficient force in the settlement of the question; there were urgent reasons at least why the rite should soon have come to be maintained by the early Church, for analogous rites whereby the new-born child was consecrated to the divinity were probably part of the hereditary tradition of most of the converted races. We know that many of the Hellenes had been in the habit of passing the infant solemnly round the fire, a purificatory and also consecrating process;^57.1 the northern Teutons sprinkled the infant with water:^57.2 and when Aristotle tells us that many of the barbarian tribes were in the habit of plunging the new-born into river-water, to harden the little ones, he is mistaking a religious for a secular practice.^57.3 Looking at the baptism of the adult neophyte, we find interesting resemblances to the ceremonies of the pre-Christian mystic initiations; the idea commonly expressed in these latter, that the catechumen died to his old life and was born again, was eagerly adopted and developed by the later religion, and here as there left its imprint on the ritual: death and rebirth were actually simulated in the mystic service.^57.4

The affinities between Christian and pagan ritual, in many cases no doubt the result of direct inheritance, demand a more detailed investigation than they have yet received, especially in respect of the festival calendar: even the early writers of the Church were of opinion that the feast of the Purification of the Virgin Mary in February, was a development of the old Roman Februalia instituted by Numa;^58.1 and such names of Christian saints and bishops as Hilarion, Hilarius, attest the popularity of the Hilaria, the festival of Adonis in the last days of paganism. Much might be still discovered by a minute knowledge of the Greco-Roman records, combined with travel in Mediterranean lands and with personal observation of the ritual of feast- and fast-days in the remoter villages.^58.2

Finally, there remains the question, of greater moment and perplexity than all the preceding, concerning the affinities of the Christian and pre-Christian religions in primary ideas and essential belief. To point out resemblances is not necessarily to ignore contrasts; only it is of more avail for present science to emphasise the former, as the latter are obvious enough and have always been emphasised. But we must guard against accepting too rashly the fact of resemblance for proof of actual origin; nor must we ignore the truth that two religions may be vitally different in effect, while they use the same materials of thought and belief. The subject demands great knowledge and critical insight, and I can only indicate here clues that have already been followed and might be followed further. There is probably no need to call to your notice the fact that the incarnation of the Godhead in human form was a familiar conception to the civilised and half-civilised races of the old world, and was attached equally to mythic personages as well as to actual men. That such a personality could serve as a mediator between man and the Supreme God was conceivable to the Hellenic, Egyptian, even the Latin imagination; and though the idea does not seem to have been woven into any fabric of faith by these races, it appears as a natural product in the higher stages of polytheism, and in many primitive and advanced societies it has dominated men’s views concerning the person and position of the King.

More important still for the purposes of the religious comparison is the wide prevalence in the Mediterranean communities of the belief in the death and resurrection of the divinity: and this has been the theme of much recent anthropological investigation.^60.1 This is not the time to examine into its origin and significance or to track out the various phenomena that illustrate and group themselves around it in the Mediterranean cults. I would merely call attention in passing to the fact that the belief existed, and was probably expressed in the pre-Christian ritual of St Paul’s own city of Tarsos,^61.1 and that it was especially strong in the Attis Mysteries of the Great Mother of Phrygia and Crete; we know that these were celebrated at a season which corresponded to the end of our Lenten period and the beginning of Easter, that they were preceded by fasting and began with lamentations, the votaries gathering in sorrow around the bier of the dead divinity; then followed the resurrection, and the risen god gave hope of salvation to the mystic brotherhood, and the whole service closed with the feast of rejoicing, the Hilaria.^62.1 The Christian fathers themselves were struck with the deep resemblance between this and their own mystery, and they were tempted to attribute it to the diabolic spirit of parody. We may take the words of Firmicus Maternus,^62.2 with which he concludes his description of such an Attis Mystery as I have outlined—“truly the devil has Christians of his own”—as the text of a very important chapter in comparative religion. We hear of a Christian convert in Crete being seduced by the fascinations of the Hilaria; and Phrygia, its ancestral home, was one of the earliest strongholds of Christianity. Here at least we may assume that the ancient dogma and ritual of the people was one of the predisposing causes operating in favour of the new.

The comparative student must also give careful consideration to what are called the eschatologic doctrines, the beliefs concerning posthumous happiness, salvation, and damnation, not only of the Judaic, but also of the Hellenic, Anatolian, and Egyptian religions: and especially to those of the Hellenic, for it was they that were most widely known in the area of the Greco-Roman world, and modern theory has at times endeavoured to trace back the apocalyptic literature of Christianity to Hellenic sources.^63.1 The investigation would demand a careful study of the Eleusinian and the Orphic Mysteries, in both of which we find the pregnant idea that salvation after death depended on a religious act of faith or on a mystic communion with a divinity that might be attained on earth by a sacrament or other liturgical means: and the inquiry will include the question how far in these earlier systems the doctrine of salvation by faith was actually blended with any admixture of the ethical doctrine of salvation by works. And the problem, like many others in the scientific study of religion, will be found to concern philosophic as well as religious history.

The ideas attaching to sacrifice in the Mediterranean world have long been recognised as a vital subject of inquiry for the comparative science; and both the lower and the higher anthropology can contribute much that is essential to the full understanding of the evolution of the Christian doctrine concerning the divine sacrifice and the Holy Communion. I need not here enlarge on this subject, even by way of mere illustration, for I have already dealt with it, however inadequately, in a former paper:^65.1 it is an intricate and fascinating theme and invites further research.

But for proving the revival on the new Christian soil of the older pre-Christian religious thought and aspiration, there is no special subject so fruitful as the study of Mariolatry. I have already suggested by way of illustration the possibility of such pagan titles as “Kore-Parthenos,” the “Gods’ mother,” having exercised an abiding influence in exciting and shaping the nascent thought of earlier Christendom; and I affirmed that their prevalence corresponded to a prevailing religious bias which turned the minds of many of the peoples in the old world to cleave affectionately to the mother-goddess or to the divine maid. Apart from mere titles, the student of the latter days of paganism is forced to note at almost every point the deep impress of such ideas and the enthusiasm they evoked. In all the leading Greek mysteries, the Mother and the Maid held a dominant position, and the Orphic brotherhoods had ranged the Mother by the side of the Son-God and the Father-God; and even in the state-cults of the ancient centres of Hellenic civilisation, the maternal character of the divine power had long been cherished. Finally, the Phrygian religion of the Mother, to which even Mithraism, a pre-eminently masculine or paternal religion, was obliged to accommodate itself, had captured the greater part of the Greco-Roman world; and was certainly very influential in the districts of Asia Minor visited by St Paul and in every one of the cities of the Seven Churches. The sentiment it evoked is expressed by the words of a poet of the Middle Attic comedy: “For those who have true knowledge of things divine, there is nothing greater than the Mother; hence the first man who became civilised founded the shrine of the Mother.”^66.1 This then is a leading factor in the religious psychology of the converted nations with which we must reckon.