702. Roman and Greek. The most fully developed form of this conception is found in the Roman cult.1198 The civic genius of the Romans led them to give prominence to the maintenance of public and private rights; thus among their deities appear public safety or salvation (Salus Publica), public faith or fidelity to engagements (Fides), civic harmony (Concordia), connubial purity (Pudicitia), filial devotion (Pietas), the boundary of property (Terminus), victory (Victoria), liberty (Libertas). There are further the gods Youth (Juventus and Juventas) and Desire1199 (Cupido), perhaps as things fundamental in human life.1200 Fortune (Fortuna) is the mass of evidence determining life by the will of the gods, with which the utterances of the gods (Fata) are identical, and the embodiment of the determining agencies is the Parcæ. Several of these deities have their correspondents in the Greek theistic system:1201 Eros (desire); Tuche (that which is allotted one by the gods or by the course of events); Moira (Aisa), the unification of all the powers that determine man's destiny. The god Kronos was by some improperly identified with "time" (χρόνος).1202
703. Aryan. Among the Aryans of India the god Kama (desire) appears to be identical with Cupido. Some other abstractions, such as Piety and Infinity, are akin to Mazdean conceptions.1203 Brahma, originally 'magical formula,' then 'prayer,' and later 'pious thought,' becomes finally Brahma, the all-embracing god. Ṛta (arta), 'order,' at first, perhaps, the proper order of the sacrificial ritual, becomes finally 'moral order or righteousness' and 'cosmic order.' This conception is still more prominent in the Avesta,1204 in which Asha (Order) is one of the Amesha-spentas, only inferior to the supreme god; the other companions of Ahura Mazda have similar titles and may equally be regarded as the personalization of abstract ideas.1205 In the same category may be included the Mazdean conceptions Endless Time (Zrvan Akarana) and Endless Space (Thwasha), which appear to be treated in the Avesta as personal deities.1206 The organizers of the Mazdean faith, having discarded almost all the old gods, invested the supreme god with certain moral qualities, and these, by a natural process of thought, were concretized (Ahura Mazda is sometimes included in the list of Amesha-spentas). Thus arose a sort of pantheon, an echo of the old polytheism; but the history of the process of formulation is obscure.1207
704. Most, if not all, of the abstract conceptions mentioned above are also placed, in the various theistic systems, under the control of great gods. Thus, for example, Jupiter is the guardian of boundaries and has the epithet "Terminus," and Zeus is the patron of freedom (Eleutherios).1208 It is, however, not necessary to suppose that the abstractions in question are taken from the functions of the great gods. Rather these epithets of the gods are to be explained from the same tendency that produced gods of abstractions. It was the sense of the importance of the boundary in early life that led both to the creation of the god Terminus and to the assignment of the epithet "Terminus" to Jupiter. The desire or love that was so important an element in human life both fashioned itself into a personality and was put under the guardianship of a special deity. Public safety was a cherished idea of the Romans and was doubtless held to be maintained by every local or national god, yet could none the less become an independent deity. The data are not sufficient to enable us to determine in all cases the question of chronological precedence between the deification of the abstraction and the assignment of the epithet to a god. We know that in the later Roman period abstractions were personalized, but this procedure was often poetical or rhetorical.1209
705. A general relation may be recognized between the intellectual character of a people and the extent to which it creates abstract gods. The Semitic peoples, among whom the development of such gods is the feeblest, are characterized by objectiveness of thought, indisposition to philosophical or psychological analysis, and a maintenance of local political and religious organization; it is natural that they should construct concrete deities exclusively or almost exclusively. Egypt also was objective, and carried its demand for visible objects of worship to the point of incarnating its gods in living animals; such living gods tend to banish pale abstractions, and such conceptions played an insignificant part in Egyptian religion. In India, with its genius for philosophical refinement, we might expect to find this latter class of gods; but Indian thought speedily passed into the large pantheistic and other generalizations that absorbed the lesser abstractions. Greece appears to have had the combination of philosophy and practicalness that favors the production of a certain sort of abstract gods, and a considerable number of these it did produce;1210 but here also philosophy, in the form of large theories of the constitution and life of man, got the upper hand and repressed the other development. The Romans had no pretensions to philosophic or æsthetic thought, but they had a keen sense of the value of family and civic life, and great skill in using religion for social purposes. It is they among whom specialized deities, including abstractions, had the greatest significance for the life of the people—family and State.
706. With the growth of general culture all specialized divinities tend to disappear, absorbed by the great gods and displaced by better knowledge of the laws governing the bodily and mental growth of men.1211 The divinities of abstractions, so far as they were really alive, had the effect of making great civic and religious ideas familiar to the people. Later (as in modern life) such ideas were cherished as the outcome of reflection on domestic and national relations—in the earlier period they were invested with sacredness and with personal power to inspire and guide. Exactly what their ethical influence on the masses was it is hardly possible to determine; but it may be regarded as probable that they helped to keep alive certain fundamental conceptions at a time when reflection on life was still immature.
707. The term "nature gods" may be taken as designating those deities that are distinguished on the one hand from natural objects regarded as divine and worshiped, and on the other hand from the great gods, who, whatever their origin, have been quite dissociated from natural objects; in distinction from these classes nature gods are independent deities who yet show traces of their origin in the cult of natural objects.1212
708. These three classes often shade into one another, and it is not always easy to draw the lines between them. It is worth while, however, to keep them separate, because they represent different stadia of religious and general culture; the nature gods are found in societies which have risen above the old crude naturalism, but have not yet reached the higher grade of intellectual and ethical distinctness. But as they are in a real sense dissociated from natural objects, they tend to expand as society grows, and it is unnecessary to attempt to deduce all their functions from the characteristics of the objects with which they were originally connected. In some cases, doubtless, they coalesce with the local clan gods whose functions are universal; and in general, when a god becomes the recognized deity of his community, the tendency is to ascribe to him a great number of functions suggested by the existing social conditions. In some cases the particular function of the god may be derived from the function of the natural object whence he is supposed to spring; but the number and variety of functions that we often find assigned to one deity, and the number of deities that are connected with a single function, indicate the complexity of the processes of early religious thought and make it difficult to trace its history in detail.
709. Among natural objects the heavenly bodies, sun, moon, and stars, and particularly the sun and moon, have very generally attracted men's attention and become objects of worship. The deification of the sun may be traced through all stadia of development, from the crudest objectivism to a highly developed monolatry or a virtual monotheism.1213 Veneration of the physical sun, or a conception of it as a supernatural man, is found in many parts of the world.1214 It has not been observed, apparently, in Australia, Melanesia, Indonesia, and on the North American Pacific Coast;1215 these regions are all backward in the creation of gods—devoting themselves to the elaboration of social organization they have contented themselves largely with an apparatus of spirits and divine animals. In Central and Northern Asia and among the Ainu of Jesso, while there appears to be a recognition of the sun as divine, it is difficult to distinguish real solar divinities.1216 In Japan mention is made of a sun-goddess but she plays an insignificant part in the religious system.1217
710. The cult is more developed in Eastern and Central North America, particularly in the former region. The Navahos (in the center of the continent) have a vague deity of the sun, but the cult is most prominent among the Algonkin (Lenâpé) and Natchez tribes; the last-named especially have an elaborate cult in which the sun as deity seems to be distinct from the physical form.1218
711. The highest development of this cult in America was reached in Mexico and Peru. In both these countries, which had worked out a noteworthy civilization, the solar cult became supreme, and in Peru it attained an ethical and universalistic form which entitles it to rank among the best religious systems of the lower civilized nations.1219
712. The Egyptians, with their more advanced civilization, finally carried sun-worship to a very high point of perfection. The hymns to Ra, the sun-god, reached the verge of monotheism and are ethically high, yet traces of the physical side of the sun appear throughout.1220 The same thing is true of the old Semitic sun-cult. The Babylonian and Assyrian Shamash is in certain respects an independent deity with universal attributes, but retains also some of the physical characteristics of the sun.1221 In Africa, outside of Egypt, the only trace of an independent sun-god appears to be in Dahomi, where, however, he is not prominent; why such a god should not be found in the neighboring countries of Ashanti and Yoruba is not clear; climatic conditions would affect all these countries alike.1222
713. In the Veda the sun-god Savitar has a very distinguished position as ethical deity, but earlier than he the similar figure Surya represents more nearly the physical sun, and this is true perhaps also of Mitra.1223 With the latter it is natural to compare the Avestan Mithra; he is held by some to have been originally a god of light, but he seems also to have characteristics of the sun in the Avesta,1224 and in late Persian the word mihr ('sun') indicates that he was at any rate finally identified with the sun. It is noteworthy that a distinct sun-worship is reported among certain non-Aryan tribes of India, particularly the Khonds;1225 this cult may be compared with that of the Natchez mentioned above,1226 though the Khonds are less socially advanced than these American tribes.
714. The cultic history of the moon is similar to that of the sun, but in general far less important. In addition to its charm as illuminer of the night, it has been prominent as a measurer of time—lunar calendars appear among many tribes and nations, uncivilized (Maoris, Hawaiians, Dahomi, Ashanti and Yorubans, Nandi, Congo tribes, Bantu, Todas, and others) and civilized (the early Babylonians, Assyrians, Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, perhaps the early Egyptians, and now all Mohammedan peoples). Naturally it has been associated with the sun in myths, standing to it in the relation of brother or sister, husband or wife. Among existing noncivilized peoples it sometimes receives worship as a god1227 or as connected with a god.1228 In these cases it retains to a great extent its character as an object of nature. So the Greek Selenē and the Roman Luna, standing alongside of the lunar gods proper, probably indicate an early imperfect deification of the moon.
715. Though the stars were generally regarded, both among savages and in ancient civilized communities, as animated (possessed of souls), and in a sort divine,1229 instances of the deification proper of particular stellar bodies are rare. In Egypt they were reverenced, but apparently not worshiped.1230 The Babylonian astronomers and astrologers began early to connect the planets with the great gods (Jupiter with Marduk, Venus with Ishtar, etc.), and stars, like other heavenly bodies, were held by them to be divine, but a specific divinization of a star or planet does not appear in the known literature.1231 The same thing is true of China, where, it may be supposed, reverence for the stars was included in the general high position assigned to Heaven.1232 In the Aryan Hindu cults stars were revered, and by the non-Aryan Gonds were worshiped, but there is no star-god proper.1233
716. In the Old Testament and the Apocrypha there are passages in which stars and planets are referred to in a way that indicates some sort of a conception of them as divine: they are said to have fought against Israel's enemies, and in the later literature they are (perhaps by a poetical figure of speech) identified with foreign deities or with angels.1234 But there is no sign of Israelite worship offered them till the seventh century B.C., when, on the irruption of Assyrian cults, incense is said to have been burned in the Jerusalem temple to the mazzalot (probably the signs of the zodiac) and to all the host of heaven (the stars);1235 and there is still no creation of a star-god.1236 The early Hebrews may have practiced some sort of star-worship; there are traces of such a cult among their neighbors the Arabs.
717. The Arab personal name Abd ath-thuraiya, 'servant (worshiper) of the Pleiades,' testifies to a real cult,1237 though how far it involves a conception of the constellation as a true individual deity it may be difficult to say. It has been supposed that the pre-Islamic Arabs worshiped the planet Venus under the name Al-Uzza,1238 but this is not certain. It is true that they worshiped the morning star, and that ancient non-Arab writers identified the planet with Al-Uzza because it was with this goddess that the Roman goddess Venus was generally identified by foreigners. But Al-Uzza was an old Arabian local deity who gradually assumed great power and influence, and it is certain that she could not have been originally a star. It must, therefore, be considered doubtful whether the Arabs had a true star-god.
718. A well-defined instance of such a god is the Avestan Tistrya.1239 His origin as an object of nature appears plainly in his functions—he is especially a rain-god, and, as such, a source of all blessings. Alongside of him stand three less well defined stellar Powers. The Greeks and Romans adopted from Chaldean astronomy the nominal identification of the planets with certain gods (their own divine names being substituted for the Babylonian); this did not necessarily carry with it stellar worship,1240 but at a late period there was a cult of the constellations.1241
To some savage and half-civilized peoples the rainbow has appeared to be a living thing, capable of acting on man's life, sometimes friendly, sometimes unfriendly.1242 It figures largely in myths, but is not treated as a god.
719. Along with the deities described above there is a class of higher gods with well-defined personalities, standing quite outside physical nature and man, with definite characters, and humanized in the higher sense. In contrast with the bizarre or barbarous anthropomorphic forms of the earlier deities these have the shape of refined humanity, capable of taking part in the life of the best men; they are the embodiment of a reflective conception of the relations between men and the great world. Inchoate divine forms of this sort may be recognized among certain half-civilized communities, but in their full form they are found only among civilized peoples, being indeed the product of civilization; and among such peoples they exist in varying degrees of approach to completeness.
720. The process of growth from the clan deities and the nature gods up to these higher forms may be traced with some definiteness in the great civilized nations of antiquity. We can see that there has been a scientific movement of separation of gods from phenomena. There is the distinct recognition not only of the difference between man and physical nature, but also of the difference between phenomena and the powers that control them.1243 At the same time there is an increasing belief in the predominance of reason in the government of the world, and along with this a larger conception of the greatness of the world and finally of its unity. Artistic feeling coöperates in the change of the character of divine beings—the necessity of giving symmetry and clearness to their persons, whereby they more and more assume the form of the highest human ideals. Necessarily the ethical element advances hand in hand with the intellectual and artistic; it becomes more and more difficult to conceive of gods as controlled by motives lower than those recognized by the best men.
721. This general progress of thought is in some cases embodied in the conception of a succession of dynasties—one set of gods is overthrown or succeeded by another set; the most extreme form of the overthrow appears in the conception of the death of a whole community of gods, but this occurs not in the form of natural development, but only when one stadium or phase of religion is overmastered and expelled by another.
722. In Babylonia the earliest pair of deities, Lakhmu and Lakhamu, vague forms, were succeeded by a second pair, Anshar and Kishar, somewhat less vague, and these in their turn yielded to the more definite group represented by Ea, Bel, and Marduk—deities who became the embodiments of the highest Babylonian culture; in Assyria Ashur and Ishtar occupied a similar position. In the long religious history of the Hindus many of the gods prominent in the Veda disappear or sink into subordinate positions, and deities at first unimportant become supreme. The Greek succession of dynasties resembles the Babylonian. The ancient Heaven and Earth are followed by Kronos,1244 and he is dethroned by Zeus, who represents governmental order and a higher ethical scheme of society. The Romans appear to have borrowed their chronology of the gods from the Greeks: the combination of Saturnus with Ops (who belongs rather with Consus), the identification of these two respectively with Kronos and Rhea, and the dynastic succession Cælus,1245 Saturnus, Jupiter, seem not to be earlier than the Hellenizing period in Rome.
723. These changes, when original, may have been due partly to the shifting of political power—the gods of a particular dominant region may have come into prominence and reigned for a time, giving place then to deities of some other region which had secured the hegemony; the history of the earliest gods lies far back in a dim region without historical records and therefore is not to be reconstructed definitely now. But such light as we get from literary records of later times rather suggests that the dynastic changes are the product of changes in the conception of the world, and these are as a rule in the direction of sounder and more humane thought.
724. There is a general similarity between the great deities that have been created by the various civilized peoples, since civilization has been practically the same everywhere. But the gods differ among themselves according to the special characters, needs, and endowments of the various peoples, so that no deity can be profitably studied without a knowledge of the physical and mental conditions of the community in which he arose. But everywhere we find that any one god may become practically supreme. Here again the political element sometimes comes in—a dominant city or state will impose its special god on a large district. There is also the natural tendency among men to concentrate on an individual figure. As legendary material has always gathered around particular men, so the great attributes of divinity gather about the person of a particular god who, for whatever reason, is the most prominent divine figure in a given community. Such a god becomes for the moment supreme, to the exclusion of other deities who under different circumstances might have had similar claims to precedence; and under favorable conditions a deity thus raised to the highest position may maintain himself and end by becoming the sole deity of his people and of the world. In any case such a divine figure becomes an ideal, and thus influences more or less the life of his worshipers.
725. In Oriental polytheistic systems the desire to secure completeness in the representation of divine activity shows itself in the combination of two or more forms into a unity of action. On the lower level we have the composite figures of Egypt and Babylonia, congeries of bodies, heads, and limbs, human and nonhuman—the result partly of the survival of ancient (sometimes outgrown) forms or the fusion of local deities, partly of the imaginative collocation of attributes. Many compound names may be explained in this way; in some cases they seem to arise from accidental local relations of cults.
As illustrations of lines of growth in divine figures we may take brief biographies of some of the greater gods. It is in comparatively few cases that the development of a god's character can be satisfactorily traced. There are no records of beginnings—we can only make what may be judged to be probable inferences from names, cults, and functions. The difficulty of the subject is increased by the fact that mythologians and theologians have obscured early conceptions by new combinations and interpretations, often employing familiar divine figures simply as vehicles of late philosophical ideas or some other sort of local dogmas.
726. Egypt.1246 The cult of the sun in Egypt issued in the creation of a group of solar divinities, the most important of whom are Horus (Har or Hor) and Ra (or Rê).
Horus appears to have been the great god of united Egypt in the earliest times about which we have information. The kings of the predynastic and early dynastic periods are called "worshipers of Horus," a title that was adopted by succeeding monarchs, who had each his "Horus name."1247 He was also the special patron of some small communities—a fact that has been variously interpreted as indicating that the god's movement was from local to general patron,1248 or that it was in the opposite direction1249; the former of these hypotheses is favored by what appears elsewhere in such changes in the positions of deities. As Horus is always connected with light he may have been originally a local sun-god; it is possible, however, that he was a clan god with general functions, who was brought into association with the sun by the natural progress of thought. In any case he became a great sun-god, but yielded his position of eminence to Ra. The myth of his conflict with Set, the representative of darkness, is probably a priestly dualistic construction, resting, perhaps, on a political situation (the struggle between the North and the South of the Egyptian territory).1250
727. The general development of Ra is plain, though details are lacking. It may be inferred from his name (which means 'sun') that he was originally the physical sun. Traces of his early crudeness appear in the stories of his destruction of mankind, and of the way in which Isis, by a trick, got from him his true name and, with it, his power.1251 With the growth of his native land (Lower Egypt) he became the great lord of the sun, and finally universal lord;1252 his supremacy was doubtless due in part to the political importance of On (Heliopolis), the seat of his chief shrine. What other circumstances contributed to his victory over Horus are not recorded; in general it may be supposed that political changes occasioned the recedence of the latter.
The primacy of Ra is illustrated by the fact that Amon was identified with him. Amon, originally the local god of Thebes,1253 became great in the South as Ra became great in the North, rising with the growth of the Theban kingdom. His hold on the people, and particularly (as was natural) on the priests, is shown in a noteworthy way by the episode of Amenhotep IV's attempt to supplant him by establishing a substantially monotheistic cult of the sun-god Aton; the attempt was successful only during the king's life—after his death Amon, under the vigorous leadership of the Theban priests, resumed his old position and maintained it until the first break-up of the national Egyptian government. But it was Amon-Ra that became supreme from the fourteenth century onward. The combination of the names was made possible by the social and political union of the two divisions of the land, and it was Ra who gave special glory to Amon.1254
728. A different line of growth appears in the history of Osiris—he owed his eminence mainly to his connection with the dead. Where his cult arose is not known; he was a very old god, possibly prominent in the predynastic period;1255 at a later time the importance of Abydos, the chief seat of his worship, may have added to his reputation. But the ceremonies of his cult and the myths that grew up about his name indicate that he was originally a deity of vegetation, the patron of the underground productive forces of the earth, and so, naturally, he became the lord of the Underworld,1256 and eventually (as ethical conceptions of life became more definite in Egypt) the embodiment of future justice, the determiner of the moral character and the everlasting fate of men. Why he and not some other underground god became Underworld judge the data do not make clear. His association with the death and revivification of plants gave a peculiarly human character to his mythical biography and a dramatic and picturesque tone to his cult.1257 Of all ancient lords of the Otherworld it is Osiris that shows the most continuous progress and reaches the highest ethical plane—a fact that must be referred to the intense interest of the Egyptians in the future.1258
729. The three most prominent female deities of the Egyptian pantheon, Hathor of Dendera, Neith (Nit, Neit) of Sais, and Isis of Buto, exhibit one and the same type of character, and each is occasionally identified with one of the others. Hathor was widely worshiped, but was not otherwise especially noteworthy. The famous inscription said to have stood in the temple of Neith at Sais ("What is and what shall be and what has been am I—my veil no one has lifted"1259) seems not to be immediately connected with any important religious movement, though it is in keeping with the liberal and mystical tendency of the later time. The third goddess, Isis, had a more remarkable history. Her beginnings are obscure, and she appears in the inscriptions later than the other two. She may have been a local deity,1260 brought into association with Osiris (as his sister or his wife) through the collocation of their cults, and thus sharing his popularity; or she may have been a late theological creation.1261 Whatever her origin, as early as the sixteenth century B.C. she appears as a great magician (poisoning and healing Ra by magic arts),1262 then (along with Osiris) as civilizer, and finally as model wife and mother, and as serene and beneficent mistress of the land. It was, apparently, in this last character that she became the gathering-point for the higher religious and ethical ideas of the time, and the central figure in a religious scheme that was widely adopted in and out of Egypt and seemed to be a formidable rival of Christianity.1263
730. India. It is in India that we find the most varied and most sweeping development in the functions and positions of deities—a result due in part to the long-continued movement of philosophic thought, partly to changes in the popular religious point of view occasioned by modifications of the social life.1264
The etymology of the name Varuna is doubtful, but the representation of him in the Rig-Veda points to the sky as his original form—he is a clear example of a sky-god who becomes universal. Of his earliest history we have no information—in the most ancient records he is already fully formed. In the Rig-Veda he embraces the whole of life—he is absolute ruler and moral governor, he punishes sin and forgives the penitent. In conjunction with Mitra he is the lord of order.1265 Mitra, originally the physical sun, is naturally associated with Varuna, but in the Rig-Veda occupies a generally subordinate position, though he appears sometimes to have the attributes of his associate; the two together embody a lofty ethical conception. In accordance with the Hindu fondness for metaphysical abstractions and generalizations the nature god Varuna in the course of time yielded the primacy to Prajapati, 'lord of beings,'1266 who in his turn gave way to the impersonal Brahma. In the popular cults as well as in philosophical systems Varuna sank (or perhaps returned) to the position of patron of phenomena of nature—there was no longer need of him.
731. A god of somewhat uncertain moral character is Indra, who as a nature god is closely connected with the violent phenomena of the air (rain, thunder, and lightning). In this relation he is often terrible, often beneficent, but with low tastes that it is difficult to explain. His fondness for soma, without which he attempts nothing, is perhaps a priestly touch, a glorification of the drink that played so important a part in the ritual; or he may herein be an expression of popular tastes. The sensuous character of the heaven of which he (as air-god) is lord arose doubtless in response to early conceptions of happiness;1267 it is not unlike the paradise of Mohammed, which is to be regarded not as immoral, but only as the embodiment of the existing conception of happy family life. Yet Indra also became a universal god, the controller of all things, and it was perhaps due to his multiform human character as warrior and rain-giver1268 (in his victorious conflict with the cloud-dragon), and as representative of bodily enjoyment, that he became the favorite god of the people. It is not hard to understand why Agni, fire, should be associated with him and share his popularity to some extent; but the importance of fire in the sacrifice gave Agni a peculiar prominence in the ritual.
732. The most curious case of transformation and exaltation is found in the history of Soma, at first a plant whose juice was intoxicating, then a means of ecstatic excitement, a gift to the gods, the drink of the gods, and finally itself a god invested with the greatest attributes. This divinization of a drink was no doubt mainly priestly—it is a striking illustration of the power of the association of ideas, and belongs in the same general category with the deification of abstractions spoken of above.1269
733. An example of a god leaping from an inferior position to the highest place in the pantheon is afforded by Vishnu, a nature god of some sort, described in the early documents as traversing the universe in three strides. Relatively insignificant in the earlier period and in the Upanishads, he appears in the epic, and afterwards, as the greatest of the gods, and, in the form of his avatar Krishna, becomes the head of a religion which has often been compared with Christianity in the purity of its moral conceptions. By his side in this later time stands his rival Çiva, the chief figure in a sect or system which shared with Vishnuism the devotion of the later Hindus. The rise of these two gods is to be referred probably to the dissatisfaction in the later times with the phenomenal character which still clung, in popular feeling, to the older deities. Varuna, once supreme, sank after a while to the position of a god of rain, and Indra, Agni, and Soma were frankly naturalistic, while the impersonal Brahma was too vague to meet popular demands. What the later generation wanted was a god personal and divorced from physical phenomena, supreme, ethically high, but invested with warm humanity. These conditions were fulfilled by Vishnu and Çiva, and particularly by Krishna; that is, the later thought constructed these new deities in accordance with the demand of the higher and the lower religious feeling of the time: the two sides of the human demand, the genial and the terrible, are embodied, the first in Vishnu, the second in Çiva.
734. The primeval pair, Heaven and Earth, though represented as the parents of many gods and worshiped with sacrifices, play no great part in the Hindu religious system. Dyaus, the Sky, never attained the proportions of the formally identical Zeus and Jupiter. His attributes are distinctly those of the physical sky. The higher rôle is assigned to Varuna, who is the sky conceived of as a divine Power divorced from merely physical characteristics;1270 the mass of phenomena connected with the sky (thunder, lightning, and such like) are isolated and referred to various deities. Prithivi, the Earth, in like manner, retains her physical attributes, and does not become the nourishing mother of all things.1271
With a partial exception in the case of Ushas1272 (Dawn) the early Hindu pantheon contains no great female figure; there are female counterparts of male deities, but no such transcendent personages as Isis, Athene, and Demeter. Whether this fact is to be explained from early Hindu views of the social position of women, or from some other idea, is uncertain. In certain modern religious cults, however, the worship of the female principle (Çakti) is popular and influential. It is probable that in early times every tribe or district had its female divine representative of fertility, an embryonic mother-goddess. If the Aryan Hindus had such a figure, she failed to grow into a great divinity. But the worship of such deities came into Aryan India at a relatively recent date, apparently from non-Aryan sources, and has been incorporated in Hindu systems. Various forms of Çakti have been brought into relation with various gods, the most important being those that have become attached to the worship of Çiva.1273 To him is assigned as wife the frightful figure called Durga or Kali (and known by other names), a blood-loving monster with an unspeakably licentious cult. Other Çakti deities are more humane, and there is reason to suppose that the ground of the devotion shown to Kali, especially by women, is in many cases simply reverence for the female principle in life, or more particularly for motherhood.1274
735. The original character of the Hindu lord of the Otherworld, Yama, is obscured by the variety of the descriptions of him in the documents. In the Rig-Veda he appears both as god and (as it seems) as man. He is the son of the solar deity Vivashant (Vivashat); he is named in enumerations of gods, and Agni is his friend and his priest; he receives worship, and is besought to come to the sacrifice.1275 On the other hand, he is never called "god," but only "king";1276 he is spoken of as the "only mortal," and is said to have chosen death; he is associated in heaven with the "fathers."1277 The modern interpretations of his origin have followed these two sets of data. By some writers he has been identified with the sun (particularly the setting sun), and with the moon.1278 But these identifications are set aside for the Veda by the fact that in lists of gods he is distinguished from sun and moon.1279 By others he is regarded as the mythical first man, the first ancestor, with residence in the sky, deified as original ancestors sometimes were, and, as the first to die and enter the world beyond, made the king of that world.
Though Yama is not the sun in the Veda, it is possible that he was so regarded in the period preceding the Vedic theological construction, and in support of this view it may be said that the sun setting, descending into the depths, is a natural symbol of the close of man's life,1280 and rising, represents the man's life in the beyond—thus the sun would be identified with man, and not unnaturally with the first man, the first to die. In support of the other view may be cited the great rôle ascribed by many peoples to the first man: in savage lore he is often the creator or arranger of the world,1281 and he is sometimes, like Yama, the son of the sun.1282 Such an one, entering the other world, might become its lord, and in process of time be divinized and made the son of the creator sun.1283 The Hindu figure is often compared to the Avestan first man, Yima; but Yima, so far as appears, was never divinized, and is not religiously of great importance. Nor do the late Jewish legends and theosophical speculations bear on the point under consideration: in Paradise, it is said, Adam was waited on by angels, the angels were commanded by God to pay him homage (so also in the Koran), and he is described as being the light of the world; and Philo and others conceived of a first or heavenly man (Adam Kadmon), free from ordinary human weakness, and identical with the Logos or the Messiah—therefore a judge in the largest sense of the word.1284 But, while these conceptions testify to the strong appeal made to the imagination by the figure of the mythical first man, they throw little light on the original form of Yama—the early constructions do not include the judge of the other world, and the later ones are too late to explain so early a figure as the Vedic king of that world.
736. In the Rig-Veda Yama is specifically the overlord of the blessed dead—the pious who were thought worthy to dwell in heaven with the gods and to share to some extent their divinity; with the wicked he seems to have nothing to do. The general history of the conception of the future life suggests that in the earliest Indo-Iranian period there was a hades to which all the dead went.1285 If there was a divine head of this hades (originally an underground deity, like Osiris, Allatu, and Ploutos) he would accompany the pious fathers when, in the later Hindu theologic construction, they were transported to heaven; and if the first ancestor occupied a distinguished place among the dead,1286 he might be fused with the divine head into a sort of unity, and the result might be such a complex figure as Yama appears to be. However this may be, the Vedic Yama underwent a development in accordance with the changes in the religious ideas of the people, becoming at last an ethical judge of the dead.1287
737. Persia. The Mazdean theistic system presents special difficulties.1288 The nature of its divine world is remarkable, almost unique, and the literature that has come down to us was edited at a comparatively late period, probably not before the middle of the third century of our era, so that it is not always easy to distinguish the earlier and the later elements of thought. It is generally regarded as certain that the two branches of the Aryan race, the Indian and the Persian, once dwelt together and formed one community, having the same general religious system: the material of spirits is substantially the same in the two and they have certain important names in common—to the Indian Asura, Soma, Mitra, the Persian Ahura, Haoma, Mithra correspond in form exactly. But in the way in which this material was modified and organized the two communities differ widely.
738. The peculiarity of the Persian system is that it practically disregards all the old gods except Mithra and Anahita, substituting for them beings designated by names of qualities, and organizes all extrahuman Powers in two classes—one under the Good Spirit (Spenta Mainyu), the other under the Bad Spirit (Angro Mainyu). The former is attended by six great beings, Immortal Spirits (Amesha-spentas): Good Mind, Best Order or Law, Holy Harmony or Wisdom, Piety, Well-being, Immortality.1289 In the Gathas, which are commonly held to be the most ancient Zoroastrian documents, these attendants of the supreme god are often nothing but qualities, but on the other hand are often personified and worshiped. The rival of the Good Spirit is surrounded similarly by lying spirits (drujas), among whom one, Aeshma, holds a prominent place. The two divine chiefs stand side by side in the earliest literature almost as coequal powers; but it is explained that the wicked one is to be destroyed with all his followers.
739. In some of the early hymns (Yaçnas) Mithra is closely attached to Ahura Mazda—the two are called "the lofty and imperishable ones." The goddess Anahita, first mentioned in an inscription of Artaxerxes II, and described only in the late Fifth Yasht, appears to have been originally a deity of water. It was, doubtless, her popularity that led to her official recognition by Artaxerxes; possibly her formal recognition by the Mazdean leaders was a slow process, since she does not appear in the older Avesta. In the Yasht she receives worship (being in the form of a beautiful young woman) as the dispenser of all blessings that come from pure water; she is said to have been created by Ahura Mazda, and is wholly subordinated to him. Besides these two a great number of lesser gods are mentioned; the latter, apparently the old local gods and spirits here subordinated to the supreme god, are unimportant in the official cult. The souls of the departed also become objects of worship.
740. It thus appears that Zoroastrianism was a reform of the old polytheism. The movement closely resembles the struggle of the Hebrew prophets against the worship of the Canaanite Baals and other foreign gods. In both cases there is evidence going to show that popular cults continued after the leaders of the reform had thrown off the offensive elements of the old system: the Hebrew people continued to worship foreign gods long after the great prophets had pronounced against them; and the official recognition of Ahura Mazda in the Achæmenian inscriptions1290 by no means proves that lower forms of worship were not practiced in Persia by the people.1291
741. If we ask for the grounds of this recoil from the old gods, we must doubtless hold that ethical feeling was a powerful motive in the reform, though economic and other considerations were, doubtless, not without influence.
Since Ahura Mazda is ethically good and his worship ethically pure, there is clearly in its origin hostility to low modes of worship and to materialistic ideas. Possibly also we have here a struggle of a clan for the recognition of its own god, as among the Israelites the Yahweh party represented exclusive devotion to the old national god. If there was such a clan or party in Persia, it is obvious that it produced men of high intelligence and great moral and organizing power, and all that we know of the religious history leads us to suppose that the establishment of the supremacy of Ahura Mazda was the result of a long development.
742. As to the provenance of the Mazdean supreme lord, not a few scholars of the present day hold that he was identical with the Indian Varuna. It is in favor of this identification that the qualities of the two deities are the same, and there is also the noteworthy fact that Ahura Mazda is coupled with Mithra as Varuna is coupled with Mitra; according to this view the Mazdean deity was originally the god of the sky, by whose side naturally stands the sun. In a case like this, involving a general agreement between two systems of thought, there are two possible explanations of the relation between them: it may be supposed that one borrowed from the other (in the present case the borrowing would be on the part of the Persians); or the explanation may be that the two communities developed original material along the same general lines, though with local differences. In the absence of historical data it is perhaps impossible to say which of these explanations is to be preferred. There is, however, no little difficulty in the supposition that one community has actually borrowed its religious system from a neighbor; the general probability is that each followed its own line.
743. Nor is it probable that the rejection of the old divine names by the Persians was the result of hostility toward their Indian neighbors. It is doubtless a curious fact that the Indian name for 'evil spirit,' asura, is in Persian the name of a good spirit, Ahura, while the Indian diva, the general term for a god, is in Persian the designation of a wicked spirit, daeva. The Persian employment of daeva for 'evil spirit' may be explained as a protest not against Indian gods, but against the deities of their own land; so the Hebrew prophets or their editors apply opprobrious names, "no-god" and other terms, to deities regarded by them as inadequate. The abstractions of the Mazdean system have been referred to above. They seem to have been resorted to from a feeling of profound disgust at the worship of some class of people. Unfortunately we have not the historical data that might make the situation clear. In the Gathas the people of Ahura Mazda are suffering from the incursions of predatory tribes, and the greater part of the appeals to the deity are for protection for the herds against their enemies. We thus have a suggestion of a struggle, political and religious, between the more civilized Aryans and the savage Tataric tribes around them.
744. In the later period of Mazdeanism the old titles of supreme deity were succeeded (though not displaced) by the terms "Boundless Time" and "Boundless Space," the latter doubtless suggested by the vault of heaven. These generalizations, however, had little influence on the development of the theological side of the religion, which has continued to regard Ahura Mazda and Angro Mainyu as the two heads of the world and the determiners of human life. The rituals of the Mazdean and Hindu faiths were influenced by the ethical developments of the two, becoming simpler and more humane with the advance toward elevated conceptions of God and man.
745. In view of such facts as are known it may be surmised that the Mazdean system originated with an Aryan agricultural tribe or body of tribes dwelling near the Caspian Sea, in contact with hostile nomads. These Aryans, we may assume, had the ordinary early apparatus of spirits and nature deities (gods of the sun, water, etc.), but, at the same time, a disposition to concentrate worship on a single god (probably a sky-god), who became the chief tribal deity and was naturally regarded as the source of all things good, the Good Spirit; the phenomena of life led them (as it led some other early peoples) to conceive of a rival spirit, the author of things hostile to life. With economic conditions and intellectual characteristics very different from those of their Hindu brethren, they developed no capacity for organizing an elaborate pantheon—they were practically monolatrous, were content with an all-sufficient Good Spirit (the Bad Spirit being tolerated as an intellectual necessity), gradually subordinated to him such gods as the popular feeling retained, and relegated to the sphere of evil the host of inferior hurtful spirits or gods (daevas) whose existence they could not deny.1292 The religious leaders, representing and enforcing the tribal tendency of thought, in the course of time gave more and more definite shape to the cult; perhaps Zoroaster was a preëminent agent in this movement. Ethical purification, as a matter of course, went hand in hand with cultic organization. The old gods or spirits, associates of the supreme god, became embodiments of moral conceptions, and a ritual of physical and moral purity was worked out. Such may have been the general history of the official system; data for a detailed chronological history are lacking.1293
746. China. Chinese religion is characterized by a remarkable restraint in ecclesiastical development: simple religious customs, no native priestly order, few gods, almost no myths. The basis of the popular religion is the usual material, comprising ancestors, spirits (including tutelary spirits), a few departmental gods (of war, of the kitchen, etc.), some of which are said to be deified men. The system is thus nearly the same as that of the central Asiatic Mongolians.1294
747. The reflective movement (which must have begun long before the sixth century B.C., the period of Confucius and Lao-tsze) is marked by the attempt to perfect the social organization, regard being paid mainly to visible, practical relations. Stress is laid on the principle of order in family and state, which is held to reflect the order of the universe;1295 speculation is avoided, there is a minimum of religion. In the more developed religious system the two prominent features are, first, the dominant conception of the unity of the family and of the state led to the emphasizing of the worship of ancestors—a cult which, going back to a very early time, has been interwoven in China with the individual and communal life in a thoroughgoing way, with a constant infusion of moral ideas; and in the next place, the order of society and of the external world is represented by Heaven.1296
748. Originally, doubtless, Heaven was the physical sky (as among the Hindus and Persians and many other peoples), but at an early period came to be practically the supreme god. A sort of monotheistic cult has thus been established as the official religion. The emperor is the Son of Heaven and the High Priest of the nation, and in the great annual sacrifices performed by him the host of minor powers is practically ignored and worship is addressed to the controlling powers of the world. This official worship does not set aside the cult of the various spirits, whose existence is recognized by the minor officials as well as by the people. The cult of local spirits has grown to extraordinary dimensions. They fill the land, controlling the conditions of life and demanding constant regard; and the experts, who are supposed to know the laws governing the action of the spirits (for example, as to proper burial-places), wield enormous power, and make enormous charges of money. These spirits are treated as of subordinate importance in the official religion. The process by which China has reached this religious attitude must have extended over millenniums, and, as is stated above, the intellectual movement in the direction of simplicity and clearness has been attended by an advance in ethical purity.
749. The tendency of Chinese thought is illustrated by the two systems of philosophy which in the sixth century B.C. formulated the conception of a universal dominant order:1297 Confucius represents the extreme logical development of natural order in human life as a product of cosmic order—he is content absolutely to deal with the practical affairs of life and discourages attempts to inquire into the nature of gods or into the condition of men after death. Lao-tsze, on the other hand, similarly taking the Way (tao), or Universal Order, as the informing and controlling power of the world, appears to have laid the stress on the relation between it and the human soul—a conception that has affinities with the Stoic Logos. But it is Confucianism that has remained the creed of educated China. Taoism, beginning, apparently, as a spiritual system, did not appeal to the Chinese feeling, and speedily degenerated into a system of magical jugglery. Thus the Chinese, with the feeblest religious sense to be found in any great nation, have nevertheless reached the grandiose conception of the all-embracing and all-controlling supreme Heaven. In their case the governing consideration has been the moral organization of social life, and Nature has swallowed up all great partial deities.
750. Japan. Japan has produced no great god;1298 out of the mass of nature gods reported in the Kojiki not one becomes preëminent. There is recognition of Heaven and Earth as the beginning of things, and of the sun as a deity, but neither the sky-god nor the sun-goddess becomes a truly high god. Japanese theistic development appears to have been crippled at an early period by the intrusion of Chinese influences; the very name of the national religion, Shinto, 'the Way of the Gods,' is Chinese. The emperor was deified, and ancestor-worship became the principal popular cult;1299 but Confucianism and Buddhism overlaid the native worship at an early period. The later forms of Shinto have moved rather toward the rejection of the old deities than toward the creation of a great national god.
751. Semitic peoples. Among the various Semitic peoples there is so marked a unity of thought that, as Robertson Smith has pointed out,1300 we may speak of the Semitic religion, though there are noteworthy local differences. Generally we find among these communities, as elsewhere, a large number of local deities, scarcely distinguishable in their functions one from another.1301 A noteworthy illustration of the long continuance of these local cults is given in the attempt of the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, to centralize the worship by bringing the statues of the local deities to Babylon; the result was a general popular protest. Similarly an attempt was made by King Josiah in the seventh century B.C. to centralize all Israelite worship in Jerusalem, but the history of the succeeding generations shows that the attempt was not successful. The local gods represent the clannic and tribal organization, to which the Semites appear to have clung with peculiar fondness.
752. Semitic religion shows an orderly advance through the medium of tribal and national feeling in conjunction with the regular moral and intellectual growth of the community. First one god and then another comes to the front as this or that city attains leadership, but these chief gods are substantially identical with one another in functions. The genealogical relations introduced by the priestly theologians throw no light on the original characters of the deities and are often ignored in the inscriptions. A natural division into gods of the sky and gods of the earth may be recognized, but in the high gods this distinction practically disappears.
753. Turning first to the Tigris-Euphrates region, we find certain nature gods that attained more or less definite universal character.1302 The physical sky becomes the god Anu, who, though certainly a great god, was never so prominent as certain other deities, and in Assyria yielded gradually to Ashur. Why the Semites, in marked contrast with the Indo-Europeans and the Chinese, have shown a relatively feeble recognition of the physical heaven we are not able to say; possibly the tribal feeling referred to above may have led to a centering of devotion on those deities that lay nearer to everyday life, or in the case of Babylonia it may be that the city with which Anu was particularly connected lost its early importance, and its deity in consequence yielded to others.1303 The sun is a more definite and more practically important object than the expanse of the sky, and the Semitic sun-god, Shamash, plays a great rôle from the earliest to the latest times. The great king Hammurabi (commonly placed near the year 2000 B.C.), in his noteworthy civil code, takes Shamash as his patron, as the inspirer of wisdom and the controller of human right; and from this time onward this deity is invoked by the kings in their inscriptions. The worship of the sun was established in Canaan at an early time (as the name of the town Bethshemesh, 'house of Shemesh,' shows), and under Assyrian influence was adopted by a large number of Israelites in the seventh century B.C.; the prophet Ezekiel represents prominent Israelites as standing in the court of the temple, turning their backs on the sacred house and worshiping the sun;1304 but as to the nature of the sun-god and his worship in these cases we have no information. Other nature deities that rose to eminence are the moon-god, Sin, and the storm-god, Ramman.
754. The other deities of the Babylonian and Assyrian pantheons seem not to be connected by their names with natural phenomena. They are attached to particular cities or districts, and each district or city, as it becomes a great religious center, raises its favorite god to a position of preëminence. Generally the choice of a special deity by a particular city lies back of historical documents, and the reason for such choice therefore cannot be definitely fixed. The attributes and functions of the resulting great gods, as has already been remarked, are substantially everywhere the same, and where one function becomes prominent, it is often possible to explain its prominence from the political or other conditions.
755. Moreover, as in all theological constructions that follow great political unifications, it was natural to extend the domain of a principal god to whatever department of life or of nature appealed especially to the theologian. When we find certain gods invested with solar functions it does not follow that they were originally sun-gods—such functions may be a necessary result of their preëminence. Out of the great mass of Babylonian and Assyrian deities we may select a few whose cults illustrate the method of development of the religious conceptions. As non-Semitic (Sumerian) religious and other ideas and words appear to have been adopted by the Semitic Babylonians, it is not always easy to distinguish between Semitic and non-Semitic conceptions in the cults as known to us.