When religion has entered on the stage of quasi-civilized organization, with fixed legends or documents, temples, and the rudiments of hierarchies, the increased forces of terrorism and conservatism are in nearly all cases seen to be in part countervailed by the simple interaction of the systems of different communities. There is no more ubiquitous force in the whole history of the subject, operating as it does in ancient Assyria, in the life of Vedic India and Confucian China, and in the diverse histories of progressive Greece and relatively stationary Egypt, down through the Christian Middle Ages to our own period of comparative studies.
In ages when any dispassionate comparative study was impossible, religious systems appear to have been considerably modified by the influence of those of conquered peoples on those of their conquerors, and vice versâ. Peoples who while at arm’s length would insult and affect to despise each other’s Gods, and would deride each other’s myths,1 appear frequently to have altered their attitude when one had conquered the other; and this not because of any special growth of sympathy, but by force of the old motive of fear. In the stage of natural polytheism no nation really doubted the existence of the Gods of another; at most, like the Hebrews of the early historic period, it would set its own God above the others, calling him “Lord of Lords.” But, every community having its own God, he remained a local power even when his own worshippers were conquered, and his cult and lore were respected accordingly. This procedure, which has been sometimes attributed to the Romans in particular as a stroke of political sagacity, was the normal and natural course of polytheism. Thus in the Hebrew books the Assyrian conqueror is represented as admitting that it is necessary to leave a priest who knows “the manner of the God of the land” among the new inhabitants he has planted there.
See 2 Kings xvii, 26. Cp. Ruth i, 16, and Judges xvii, 13. The account by Herodotos (ii, 171) of the preservation of the Pelasgic rites of Dêmêtêr by the women of Arcadia points to the same principle. See also hereinafter, ch. vi, § 1; K. O. Müller, Introd. to a Sci. Study of Mythol., Eng. trans., p. 193; Adolf Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, 1860, i, 189; Rhys, Celtic Britain, 2nd ed., p. 69; Max Müller, Anthropological Religion, p. 164; Gibbon, ch. xxxiv—Bohn ed., iii, 554, note; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i, 113–15; and Dr. F. B. Jevons’s Introd. to the Hist. of Relig., 1896, pp. 36–40, where the fear felt by conquering races for the occult powers of the conquered is limited to the sphere of “magic.” But when Dr. Jevons so defines magic as to admit of his proposition (p. 38) that “the hostility from the beginning between religion and magic is universally admitted,” he throws into confusion the whole phenomena of the early official-religious practice of magic, of which sacrifice and prayer are the type-forms that have best survived. And in the end he upsets his definition by noting (p. 40) how magic, “even where its relation to religion is one of avowed hostility,” will imitate religion. Obviously magic is a function or aspect or element of primitive religion (cp. Roskoff, Das Religionswesen der rohesten Naturvölker, 1880, p. 144; Sayce, pp. 315, 319, 327, and passim; and Tiele, Egyptian Rel., pp. 22, 32); and any “hostility,” far from being universal, is either a social or a philosophical differentiation. On the whole question compare the author’s Pagan Christs, 2nd ed., pp. 11–38. In the opinion of Weber (Hist. of Ind. Lit., p. 264) the magic arts “found a more and more fruitful soil as the religious development of the Hindus progressed”; “so that they now, in fact, reign almost supreme.” See again Dr. Jevons’s own later admission, p. 395, where the exception of Christianity is somewhat arbitrary. On this compare Kant, Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft, B. iv, Th. ii, § 3.
Similar cases have been noted in primitive cults still surviving. Fear of the magic powers of “lower” or conquered races is in fact normal wherever belief in wizardry survives; and to the general tendency may be conjecturally ascribed such phenomena as that of the Saturnalia, in which masters and slaves changed places, and the institution of the Levites among the Hebrews, otherwise only mythically explained. But if conquerors and conquered thus tended to amalgamate or associate their cults, equally would allied tribes tend to do so; and, when particular Gods of different groups were seen to correspond in respect of special attributes, a further analysis would be encouraged. Hence, with every extension of every State, every advance in intercourse made in peace or through war, there would be a further comparison of credences, a further challenge to the reasoning powers of thoughtful men.
On the normal tendency to defer to local deities, compare Tylor, Primitive Culture, as last cited; B. Thomson, The Fijians, 1908, p. 112; A. B. Ellis, The Tshi-Speaking Peoples of the Gold Coast, 1887, p. 147, and The Ewe-Speaking Peoples, 1890, p. 55; P. Wurm, Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte, 2te Aufl., p. 43 (as to Madagascar); Sir H. Johnston, The Uganda Protectorate, 1902, ii, 589; Waitz, Anthropologie der Naturvölker, iii, 186; P. Kropotkin, Memoirs of a Revolutionist, ed. 1908, p. 191; W. W. Skeat, Malay Magic, 1900, pp. 56, 84; Thurston, Castes and Tribes of Southern India, 1909, i, 86–87, 94, 100; iii, 188; iv, 170; v, 467–68; W. H. R. Rivers, The Todas, 1906, p. 263; Rae, The White Sea Peninsula, 1881, p. 262; Élie Reclus, Primitive Folk, pp. 254–56; Grant Allen, Evolution of the Idea of God, 1897, pp. 289, 301–302; Castrén, Vorlesungen über die Finnische Mythologie, 1853, p. 281; Gummere, Germanic Origins, 1892, p. 140, citing Weinhold, Deutsche Frauen, i, 105; Gobineau, Les religions et les philosophies dans l’Asie centrale, 2e éd. p. 67; E. Higgins, Hebrew Idolatry and Superstition, 1893, pp. 20, 24; Robertson Smith, Religion of the Semites, 1889, p. 77; Wellhausen, Heidenthum, pp. 129, 183, cited by Smith, p. 79; Lang, Making of Religion, p. 65; Frazer, Golden Bough, 2nd ed. ii, 72. Above all, see the record in Old New Zealand, “by a Pakeha Maori” (2nd ed. Auckland, 1863, p. 154), of the believing resort of some white men to native wizards in New Zealand.
Stevenson, again, is evidently proceeding upon observation when he makes his trader in The Beach of Falesà say: “We laugh at the natives and their superstitions; but see how many traders take them up, splendidly educated white men that have been bookkeepers (some of them) and clerks in the old country” (Island Nights’ Entertainments, 1893, pp. 104–105). In Abyssinia, “Galla sorceresses are frequently called in by the Christians of Shoa to transfer sickness or to rid the house of evil spirits” (Major W. Cornwallis Harris, The Highlands of Aethiopia, 1844, iii, 50). On the other hand, some Sudanese tribes “believe in the virtue both of Christian and Moslem amulets, but have hitherto lent a deaf ear to the preachers of both these religions” (A. H. Keane, Man, Past and Present, 1900, p. 50).
This tendency did not exclude, but would in certain cases conflict with, the strong primitive tendency to associate every God permanently with his supposed original locality. Tiele writes (Hist. of the Egypt. Relig., Eng. trans. introd. p. xvii) that in no case was a place given to the Gods of one nation in another’s pantheon “if they did not wholly alter their form, character, appearance, and not seldom their very name.” This seems an over-statement, and is inconsistent with Tiele’s own statement (Hist. comparée des anc. relig. égyptiennes et sémitiques, French trans., 1882, pp. 174–80) as to the adoption of Sumerian and Akkadian Gods and creeds by the Semites. What is clear is that local cults resisted the removal of their Gods’ images; and the attempt to deport such images to Babylon, thus affecting the monopoly of the God of Babylon himself, was a main cause of the fall of Nabonidos, who was driven out by Cyrus. (E. Meyer, Geschichte des Alterthums, i (1884), 599.) But the Assyrians invoked Bel Merodach of Babylon, after they had conquered Babylon, in terms of his own ritual; even as Israelites often invoked the Gods of Canaan (cp. Sayce, Hibbert Lectures, Relig. of the Anc. Babylonians, p. 123). And King Mardouk-nadinakhe of Babylon, in the twelfth century B.C., carried off statues of the Assyrian Gods from the town of Hekali to Babylon, where they were kept captive for 418 years (Maspero, Hist. anc. des peuples de l’orient, 4e éd. p. 300). A God could migrate with his worshippers from city to city (Meyer, iii, 169; Sayce, p. 124); and the Assyrian scribe class maintained the worship of their special God Nebo wherever they went, though he was a local God to start with (Sayce, pp. 117, 119, 121). And as to the recognition of the Gods of different Egyptian cities by politic kings, see Tiele’s own statement, p. 36. Cp. his Outlines, pp. 73, 84, 207.
A concrete knowledge of the multiplicity of cults, then, was obtruded on the leisured and travelled men of the early empires and of such a civilization as that of Hellas;2 and when to such knowledge there was added a scientific astronomy (the earliest to be constituted of the concrete sciences), a revision of beliefs by such men was inevitable.3 It might take the form either of a guarded skepticism or of a monarchic theology, answering to the organization of the actual earthly empire; and the latter view, in the nature of the case, would much the more easily gain ground. The freethought of early civilization, then, would be practically limited for a long time to movements in the direction of co-ordinating polytheism, to the end of setting up a supreme though not a sole deity; the chief God in any given case being apt to be the God specially affected by the reigning monarch. Allocation of spheres of influence to the principal deities would be the working minimum of plausible adjustment, since only in some such way could the established principle of the regularity of the heavens be formally accommodated to the current worship; and wherever there was monarchy, even if the monarch were polytheistic, there was a lead to gradation among the Gods.4 A pantheistic conception would be the highest stretch of rationalism that could have any vogue even among the educated class. All the while every advance was liable to the ill-fortune of overthrow or arrest at the hands of an invading barbarism, which even in adopting the system of an established priesthood would be more likely to stiffen than to develop it. Early rationalism, in short, would share in the fluctuations of early civilization; and achievements of thought would repeatedly be swept away, even as were the achievements of the constructive arts.