ONE more element of some importance yet remains in the complex conception of the human or animal victim, or slain god, which we must briefly examine before we can proceed with advantage to the evolution of Christianity; I mean the doctrine of piacular sacrifice—or, in other words, of the atonement.
“Without shedding of blood,” says the author of one of the earliest Christian tractates, “there is no remission of sin.” This is a common theory in all advanced religions; the sacrifice is regarded, not merely as the self-immolation of a willing divine victim or incarnate god, but also as an expiation for crimes committed. “Behold the Lamb of God,” says the Baptist in the legend, “which taketh away the sins of the world.”
This idea, I take it, is not primitive. Sin must be regarded as a late ethical intruder into the domain of religion. Early man for the most part takes his gods joyously. He is on the best of terms with them. He eats and drinks and carouses in their presence. They join in his phallic and bacchanalian orgies. They are not great moral censors, like the noble creation of the Hebrew prophets, “of purer eyes than to behold iniquity.” They are creatures of like passions and failings with himself,—dear ancestors and friends, ever ready to overlook small human frailties like murder or rapine, but exercising a fatherly care for the most part over the lives and fortunes of their descendants or tribesmen. Angry they may be at times, no doubt; but their anger as a rule can be easily assuaged by a human victim, or by the blood of slaughtered goats and bulls. Under normal circumstances, they are familiar housemates. Their skulls or images adorn the hearth. They assist at the family and domestic feasts; and they lick up the offerings of blood or wine made to them with a smiling countenance. In short, they are average members of the tribe, gone before to the spirit-world; and they continue to share without pride or asceticism in the joys and feasts and merry-makings of their relatives.
Thus the idea of expiation, save as a passing appeasement for a temporary tiff, did not probably occur in the very earliest and most primitive religions. It is only later, as ethical ideas begin to obtrude themselves into the sacred cycle, that the notion of sin, which is primarily that of an offence against the established etiquette of the gods, makes itself slowly visible. In many cases, later glosses seem to put a piacular sense upon what was in its origin by obvious analogy a mere practical god-making and godslaying ceremony. But in more consciously philosophic stages of religion this idea of atonement gains ground so fast that it almost swallows up the earlier conception of communion or feasting together. Sacrifice is then chiefly conceived of as a piacular offering to a justly offended or estranged deity; this is the form of belief which we find almost everywhere meeting us in the hecatombs of the Homeric poems, as in many works of Hellenic and Semitic literature.
In particular, the piacular sacrifice seems to have crystallised and solidified round the sacred person of the artificial deity. “The accumulated misfortunes and sins of the whole people,” says Mr. Frazer, “are sometimes laid upon the dying god, who is supposed to bear them away for ever, leaving the people innocent and happy.” “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” says one of the Hebrew poets, whose verses are conjecturally attributed to Isaiah, about one such divine scapegoat; “yet we did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted. He was wounded for our transgressions; he was bruised for our iniquities. The chastisement of our peace was upon him, and with his stripes are we healed. Jahweh hath laid upon him the iniquity of us all.”
The ideas here expressed in such noble language were common to all the later man-gods of the more advanced and ethical religions.
Mr. Frazer is probably right in connecting the notion of the scapegoat, human or animal, with the popular barbaric idea of the transference of evils. Thus, in popular magic of all nations, diseases of every sort, from serious fevers and plagues, down to headache, toothache, warts, and sores, are transferred by some simple ceremony of witchcraft to animals, rags, or other people. I will quote examples but briefly. Epilepsy is made over to leaves and thrown away in the Malay Archipelago. Toothache is put into a stone in Australia. A Bechuana king gave his illness to an ox, which was drowned in his stead, to secure his recovery. Mr. Gomme quotes a terrible story of a Scotch nobleman who transferred his mortal disease to his brother by a magical ceremony. “Charms” for fever or for warts generally contain some such amiable element of transferring the trouble to a string, a rag, or a piece of paper, which is flung away to carry the evil with it to the person who next touches it. Numerous cases of like implication may be found in the works of Mr. Gomme and Mr. Hartland, to which I would refer enquirers after further evidence.
Closely connected with these notions of transference are also the occasional or periodical ceremonies undertaken for the expulsion of evils from a village or a community. Devils, demons, hostile spirits, diseases, and other misfortunes of every sort are frequently thus expelled with gongs, drums, and other magical instruments. Often the boundaries of the tribe or parish are gone over, a perlustration is performed, and the evil influences are washed out of the territory or forcibly ejected. Our own rite of Beating the Bounds represents on one of its many sides this primitive ceremony. Washings and dippings are frequent accompaniments of the expulsive ritual; in Peru, it was also bound up with that common feature of the corn-god sacrament—a cake kneaded with the blood of living children. The periodical exorcism generally takes place once a year, but is sometimes biennial: it has obvious relations with the sacrifice of the human or animal victim. In Europe, it still survives in many places as the yearly expulsion of witches. The whole subject has been so admirably treated by Mr. Frazer that I have nothing to add to his excellent exposition.
Putting these two cardinal ideas together, we arrive at the compound conception of the scapegoat. A scapegoat is a human or animal victim, chosen to carry off, at first the misfortunes or diseases, later the sin and guilt of the community. The name by which we designate it in English, being taken from the derivative Hebrew usage, has animal implications; but, as in all analogous cases, I do not doubt that the human evil-bearer precedes the animal one.
A good example of this incipient stage in the evolution of the scapegoat occurs at Onitsha, on the Quorra River. Two human beings are there annually sacrificed, “to take away the sins of the land”—though I suspect it would be more true to native ideas to say, “the misfortunes.” The number two, as applied to the victims, crops up frequently in this special connexion. The victims here again are “bought with a price”—purchased by public subscription. All persons who during the previous year have committed gross offences against native ethics are expected to contribute to the cost of the victims. Two sickly people are bought with the money, “one for the land and one for the river.” The victims are dragged along the ground to the place of execution, face downward. The crowd who accompany them cry, “Wickedness! wickedness!” So in Siam it was customary to choose a broken-down woman of evil life, carry her on a litter through the streets (which is usually a symbol of kingship or godhead) and throw her on a dunghill or hedge of thorns outside the wall, forbidding her ever again to enter the city. In this eastern case, there is mere expulsion, not actual killing.
In other instances, however, the divine character attributed to the human scapegoat is quite unmistakable. Among the Gonds of India, at the festival of the god of the crops, the deity descends on the head of one of the worshippers, who is seized with a fit, and rushes off to the jungle. There, it is believed he would die of himself, if he were not brought back and tenderly treated: but the Gonds, more merciful here than in many other cases, take him back and restore him. The idea is that he is thus singled out to bear the sins of the rest of the village. At Halberstadt in Thuringia an exactly similar custom survived till late in the middle ages. A man was chosen, stained with deadly sin, as the public scapegoat. On the first day of Lent he was dressed in mourning, and expelled from church. For forty days, he wandered about, fed only by the priests, and no one would speak to him. He slept in the street. On the day before Good Friday, however, he was absolved of his sins, and being called Adam, was believed to be now in a state of innocence. This is a mitigated and Christianised form of the human sin-offering.
Again, the Albanians of the Eastern Caucasus kept a number of sacred slaves in the temple of the moon, many of whom were inspired and prophesied. When one of these men exhibited unusual symptoms of inspiration, the high priest had him bound with a sacred chain, and maintained for a year in luxury, like the Mexican corn-god. This fact immediately brings the human scapegoat into line with the annual human gods we have already considered. At the end of a year, he was anointed with unguents (or, so to speak, christed), and led forth to be sacrificed. The sacrifice was accomplished as a purificatory ceremony.
Mr. Frazer, to whom I owe all these examples, connects with such rites the curious ceremony of the expulsion of the Old Mars, the Mamurius Veturius, at Rome. Every year on the 14th of March (near the spring equinox), a man, called by the name of a god, was clad in skins—the significance of which rite we now know—and after being beaten with long white rods, was expelled the city. From one point of view, this personage no doubt represented the god of vegetation of the previous year (for the Mars was originally an annual corn-god). But from another point of view, being now of no further use to the community, he was utilised with true old Roman parsimony as a scapegoat, and sent to carry away the offences of the people. Indeed, there seems to be some reason for believing that he was driven into the territory of the hostile Oscans. In this case we perceive that an annual god is made the sin-offering for the crimes of a nation.
In Greece, we get similar traces of the human scapegoat. At Chæronea in Boeotia, the chief magistrate at the town-hall, and every householder in his own house, as we learn from Plutarch (who was himself a magistrate there) had on a certain day to beat a slave with rods of agnus castus, and turn him out of doors, with the formula, “Out, hunger! in, health and wealth!” Elsewhere the custom retained more unpleasant features. At Marseilles, when the colony was ravaged by plague, a man of the poorer classes used voluntarily to offer himself as a sin-offering or scapegoat. Here we have once more the common episode of the willing victim. For a whole year, like other annual gods, he was fed at the public expense, and treated as a gentleman—that is to say, a kingly man-god. At the end of that time, he was dressed in sacred garments —another mark of godship—decked with holy branches, the common insignia of gods of vegetation, and led through the city, while prayers were offered up that the sins of the people might fall on his head. He was then cast out of the colony. The Athenians kept a number of outcasts as public victims at the expense of the town; and when plague, drought, or famine befell, sacrificed two of them (note the number) as human scapegoats. One was said to be a substitute for the men, and one for the women. They were led about the city (like Beating the Bounds again) and then apparently stoned to death without it. Moreover, periodically every year, at the festival of the Thargelia, two victims were stoned to death as scapegoats at Athens, one for the men, and one for the women. I would conjecturally venture to connect this sacred number, not merely with the African practice already noted, but also with the dual kings at Sparta, the two consuls at Rome, and the two suffetes at Carthage and in other Semitic cities. The duality of kings, indeed, is a frequent phenomenon.
I can only add here that the many other ceremonies connected with these human scapegoats have been well expounded and explained by Mannhardt, who shows that they were all of a purificatory character, and that the scourging of the god before putting him to death was a necessary point of divine procedure. Hence the significance of the agnus castus.
Briefly, then, the evidence collected by Mannhardt and Frazer suffices to suggest that the human scapegoat was the last term of a god, condemned to death, upon whose head the transgression or misfortunes of the community were laid as substitute. He was the vicarious offering who died for the people.
It is only here and there, however, that the scapegoat retains to historical times his first early form as a human victim. Much more often, in civilised lands at least, we get the usual successive mitigations of the custom. Sometimes, as we have seen already in these cases, the victim is not actually killed, but merely expelled, or even only playfully and ceremonially driven out of the city. In other instances, we get the familiar substitution of the condemned criminal, or the imbecile, as in the Attic Thargelia.’ The Greeks of Asia Minor used actually to burn their atonement-victim, and cast his ashes into the sea; but the Leucadians merely threw down a condemned prisoner from a cliff, and lightened his fall by fastening live birds to him, while they kept boats below to save him from drowning, and carry him well beyond the frontier. In the vast majority of cases, however, we have the still more common substitution of a sacred animal for a human victim; and this appears to be in large part the origin of that common religious feature, the piacular sacrifice.
Occasionally we get historical or half-historical evidence of the transition from a human victim to a divine or quasidivine animal. Thus, the people of Nias offer either a red horse or a buffalo to purify the land; but formerly, a man was bound to the same stake with the buffalo, and when the buffalo was killed, the man was driven away, no native daring to receive him or feed him. The sacrificial camel of the ancient Arabs, presumably piacular, is expressly stated to be a substitute for a human victim. The favourite victims of the Saracens were young and beautiful captives: but if such were not to be procured, they contented themselves with a white and faultless camel. The step hence to the habitual immolation or driving forth of a divine animal in place of a divine or quasi-divine man is a very small one. In Malabar, the cow is a sacred beast, and to kill or eat a cow is a crime like murder. Nevertheless, the Brahmans transfer the sins of the people to a cow or cows, which are then driven out wherever the Brahmans appoint. The ancient Egyptians used to sacrifice a bull, and lay upon its head all the evils which might otherwise happen to themselves and their country; then they sold the bull’s head to the Greeks, or flung it into the river. (Contrast this effort to get rid of the accursed head with the careful preservation and worship of the sacred one.) The best-known case of all, of course, is the Hebrew scapegoat, which was the sacred animal of a shepherd people, turned out to die of hunger or thirst in the desert, and bearing on its head the sins of the people. (Contrast the scapegoat with the paschal lamb, and compare with the goats and sheep of the last judgment.) When cholera rages among the aboriginal tribes of India, they take a goat or a buffalo—in either case a female, the most sacred sex in Indian sacrifice, and black all over, like Apis and Mnevis; they turn it out of the village, with magical ceremonies, and do not allow it to return within their precincts. In many other similar poojahs, the victim is a goat. Mr. Frazer has collected, here as elsewhere, a vast number of valuable and illustrative instances.
As a rule, the man-god or divine animal selected as a scapegoat is not actually slaughtered, in the fullest form of the rite; he is driven away, or flung into the sea, or left to die of hunger and thirst. Sometimes, however, he is burned as a holocaust: sometimes he is stoned, and sometimes slaughtered. And in later and less perfect forms of piacular animal sacrifice, slaughter was the rule, save where burning had ousted it. Indeed, in many cases, it is difficult to disentangle the various elements of the complex problem. People had got accustomed to certain forms of sacrifice, and mixed them up indiscriminately, so that one and the same rite seems sometimes to be sacramental, sacrificial, and piacular, all at once. Thus Dr. Robertson Smith writes of ancient Egypt: “Bulls were offered on the altar, and part of the flesh eaten in a sacrificial feast; but the sacrifice was only permitted as a piaculum, was preceded by a solemn fast, and was accompanied by public lamentation, as at the death of a kinsman.” Compare the annual mourning for Adonis; and also the similar union of sacrifice, sacrament, and atonement in the Mass, which, at the great resurrection-festival of the Christian year, Easter, is equally preceded by a fast, and by the solemn mourning of Good Friday.
Now, I do not pretend to discriminate accurately in these very mixed cases between one element and another in the compound rite. Often enough, all the various traits of god-slaying, of sacrament, and of public expiation are evidently present. Usually, too, the victim is slain before the altar or sacred stone of some earlier and greater god, and its blood poured forth for him. Thus, in the Hebrew ritual both of the holocaust and the sin-offering, the victim is slain at the altar, “before Jahweh,” and the effusion of blood on the sacred slab has a special significance. In the Semitic held, as Dr. Robertson Smith observes (and I would add, in most others), “the fundamental idea of sacrifice is not that of a sacred tribute, but of joint communion between the god and his worshippers, by joint participation in the living flesh and blood of a sacred victim.” But the identity of god and victim is often quite clear; thus, as we saw before, the sheep-Aphrodite was worshipped in Cyprus with an annual mystic and piacular sacrifice of a sheep; and the worshippers themselves were clad in sheepskins, a rite whose significance is now abundantly evident to us.
On the whole, then, at the stage we have at last reached, I will not attempt to distinguish in every case between the various superposed ideas in the sacrificial ceremony. Most sacrifices seem in the last resort to be substitutes for human-divine victims. Most seem to be sacramental, and most to be more or less distinctly piacular. I do not even know whether, in reconstructing afresh for others a series of rites the ideas of which have grown slowly clear to my own mind by consideration of numerous mixed examples, I have always placed each particular fact in its best and most effective position for illustration. The elements of the problem are so involved and so closely interosculating. For instance, I do not doubt that the great Phoenician and Carthaginian holocausts of human victims, which I was compelled at first to treat most inadequately, were mainly piacular in intention; nor do I doubt that the Greek hecatomb (or holocaust of a hundred oxen) was a mitigation or attenuation of such gigantic human holocausts as these, or as those attributed to the British Druids. Asclepiades states expressly that every victim was originally regarded as a substitute for human sacrifice; and so, in the Elohistic account of the origin of burnt sacrifice, a ram is accepted as a substitute for the life of Isaac, the dearly-beloved son whom the chief or king, Abraham, intends to offer as a royal victim to his tribal god. Abraham says that the god himself will provide a victim; and the ram then, as it were, voluntarily offers itself. So at the great temple of Astarte at Eryx, where the victims were drawn from the sacred or divine herds kept at the sanctuary, the chosen beast was believed of its own accord to present itself at the altar. At the Dupolia in like manner a number of bulls were driven together round the holy table; and the bull was selected which voluntarily approached and eat of the sacred cakes; thereby not only showing himself to be a willing victim, but also doubly divine, first because he took the food intended for the god, and second because he swallowed the sacred corn, itself the duplicate body of the deity. (Compare, of course, the Hebrew shewbread.) I need not pursue this line of thought any further. It must be obvious that many sacrifices at least are sacra-mentally-piacular god-slaying ceremonies, and that in most of them the god is slain, himself to himself, in human or animal form, as an expiation of crimes against his own majesty. Nor need I point out how this complex concept lies at the very root of Pauline theology.
I would like to add, however, that the ideas here formulated must give a new meaning to many points we could not at first understand in ceremonies mentioned in our earlier chapters. I will take only one example—that of the place of Samoyed sacrifice which Baron Nordenskiôld saw on Vaygats Island. We can now divine the meaning of the heap of reindeer skulls piled around the rude open-air shrine; for reindeer are the sacred and the-anthropic animals of the northern races; while the preservation of their heads at the hypothral altar of the elder gods or ghosts has its usual holy and oracular meaning. We can also guess why remains of a fireplace could be seen by the side, at which the sacrificial and sacramental meal was habitually prepared; and why the mouths of the idols were smeared with blood, in order to make the older gods or ghosts participators in the festival. Indeed, any reader who has followed me thus far, and who now turns back to the earlier chapters of this book, will find that many details appear to him in quite a different light, and will see why I have insisted beforehand on some minor points which must have seemed to him at the time wholly irrelevant.
Many other curious ceremonies that seem equally meaningless at first in narratives of travel will also come to have a significant meaning when thus regarded. For instance. Mr. Chalmers tells us that among the New Guinea natives of particular districts, “pigs are never killed but in the one place, and then they are offered to the spirit. The blood is poured out there, and the carcase is then carried back to the village, to be divided, cooked, and eaten. Pigs’ skulls are kept and hung up in the house. Food for a feast, such as at house-building”—a most pregnant hint—“is placed near the post where the skulls hang, and a prayer is said. When the centre-post is set up, the spirits have wallaby, fish, and bananas presented to them, and they are besought to keep that house always full of food, and that it may not fall when the wind is strong.” If we recall other cases elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that the pigs in these instances are killed as sacred victims at the grave of the chief family ancestor; especially when Mr. Chalmers also tells us that “each family has a sacred place where they carry offerings to the spirits of deceased ancestors, whom they greatly fear.” When sickness, famine, or scarcity of fish occur, it is these spirits that have to be appeased. And if we recollect once more that in so many cases the central post of the hut is based on a human or animal victim, both in New Guinea and elsewhere, we can hardly doubt that to this household god or foundation-ghost the offerings at the central post are presented. Finally, the skulls of the pigs which are kept in the house and hung on the post remind us on the one hand of the skulls of ancestor-gods similarly preserved, and on the other hand of the skulls of theanthropic victims kept by the people of India at their festivals, or fastened by early Greeks and Romans on their temples. “They cook the heads of their slain enemies,” says Mr. Chalmers again, “to secure clean skulls to put on sacred places.” Adequately to develop the hints thus suggested, however, would require another book as long as the present one.
Yet here is just one more such hint, from the same author, too pregnant to be omitted.
“When the natives begin planting, they first take a bunch of bananas and sugar-cane, and go to the centre of the plantation, and call over the names of the dead belonging to their family, adding: ‘There is your food, your bananas and sugar-cane; let our food grow well, and let it be plentiful. If it does not grow well and plentiful, you all will be full of shame, and so shall we.’
“When they go on trading expeditions, they present their food to the spirits at the centre-post of the house, and ask the spirits to go before them and prepare the people, so that the trading may be prosperous.
“When sickness is in the family, a pig is brought to the sacred place of the great spirit” (probably the chief ancestral ghost), “and killed. The carcase is then taken to the sacred place of the family, and the spirits are asked to accept it. Sins are confessed, such as bananas that are taken, or cocoanuts, and none have been presented, and leave not given to eat them. ‘There is a pig; accept, and remove the sickness.’ Death follows, and the day of burial arrives. The friends all stand round the open grave, and the chief’s sister or cousin” (the primitive priestess) “calls out in a loud voice, ‘You have been angry with us for the bananas we have taken (or cocoanuts, as the case may be), and you have, in your anger, taken this child. Now let it suffice, and bury your anger.’ The body is then placed in the grave, and covered over with earth.”
Here we have in brief a perfect epitome of savage theology, savage ceremonial, and savage atonement. I could enlarge not a little on its numerous implications.
A single quotation from Mr. Savage Landor’s work on The Hairy Ainu of Japan will also serve as an excellent summary of such encyclopaedic barbaric theology. “If they have any belief at all,” he says, “it is an imperfect kind of Totemism, and the central point of that belief is their own descent from the bear. This does not include the smallest reverence for their ancestor. They capture their Totem and keep it in captivity; they speak to it and feed it; but no prayers are offered to it. When the bear is fat, it is taken out of the cage to be ill-treated and baited by all the men present.” Like the Khond Meriah and the tortures of martyrs. “It is tied to a stake” or stauros or accursed tree, “and a pole is thrust into its mouth; and when the poor beast has been sufficiently tortured, pricked with pointed sticks, shot at with blunted arrows,” like St. Sebastian, “bruised with stones,” like St. Stephen, “maddened with rage and ill-usage, it is killed outright, and, ancestor as it may be, it makes the chief dish and raison d’etre of a festival, where all the members of the tribe partake of its flesh. The owner of the hut in which the feast takes place then sticks the skull on to a forked pole, and sets it outside with the others at the east end of his hut. The skin is made into garments, or is spread on the ground to sleep on.” Here, I need hardly say, we have sacrifice, sacrament, orientation, the sacred head, the use of the skin as a covering of the worshipper, and all the other traits of theanthropic substitution.
It is more to our purpose now, however, to remember these two cardinal points: first, that a dying god, human or animal, is usually selected as a convenient vehicle for the sins of the people; and second, that “without shedding of blood there is no remission of sin.” These two doctrines were commonly current all over the world, but especially in that Eastern Mediterranean world where Christianity was first evolved. Indeed, they were there so generally recognised that the writers of the earliest Christian tractates, the Apostolic Epistles, take them for granted as self-evident—as principles of which every intelligent man would at once admit the truth and cogency.
Christianity grew. It was a natural product. It did not spring, full-fledged, from any one man’s brain, as Athene sprang from the head of Zeus. It was not even invented by any little group or school of men, Petrine or Pauline, the apostles or the disciples, the early church of Jerusalem, Antioch, or Alexandria. Christianity grew—slowly. It developed, bit by bit, for three long centuries, taking shape by gradual stages in all the teeming centres of the Roman world; and even after it had assumed a consistent form as the Holy Catholic Church, it still went on growing in the minds of men, with a growth which never ends, but which reveals itself even now in a thousand modes, from a Vatican Council to the last new departure of the last new group of American sectaries.
Christianity grew—in the crowded cosmopolitanised seaports and cities of the Roman empire—in Antioch, Alexandria, Thessalonica, Cyrene, Byzantium, Rome. Its highway was the sea. Though partly Jewish in origin, it yet appears from its earliest days essentially as a universal and international religion. Therefore we may gain some approximate knowledge of its origin and antecedents by considering the religious condition of these various great towns at the time when Christianity began to spring spontaneous in their midst. We can arrive at some idea of the product itself by observing the environment in which it was evolved.
Once more, Christianity grew—for the most part among the lower orders of the cosmopolitan seaports. It fashioned itself among the slaves, the freedmen, the Jewish, Syrian, and African immigrants, the Druidical Gauls and Britons of Rome, the petty shopkeepers, the pauperised clients, the babes and sucklings of the populous centres. Hence, while based upon Judaism, it gathered hospitably into itself all those elements of religious thought and religious practice that were common to the whole world, and especially to the Eastern Mediterranean basin. Furthermore, it gathered hospitably into itself in particular those elements which belonged to the older and deeper-seated part of the popular religions, rather than those which belonged to the civilised, Hellenised, and recognised modifications of the state religions. It was a democratic rather than an official product. We have to look, therefore, at the elder far more than the younger stratum of religious thought in the great cities, for the influences which went to mould Christianity. I do not deny, indeed, that the new faith was touched and tinged in all its higher parts by beautiful influences from Neo-Platonism, Alexandrian Judaism, and other half-mystical philosophic systems; but for its essential groundwork we have still to go to the root-stratum of religious practice and belief in Antioch and Alexandria, in Phrygia and Galatia, in Jerusalem and Rome. It based itself above all on sacrament, sacrifice, atonement, and resurrection. Yet again, Christianity originated first of all among the Jewish, Syrian, or Semitic population of these great towns of the empire, at the very moment of its full cosmopolitanisation; it spread rapidly from them, no doubt at first with serious modifications, to the mixed mass of sailors, slaves, freedwomen, and townspeople who formed apparently its earliest adherents. Hence, we must look in it for an intimate blend of Judaism with the central ideas of the popular religions, Aryan or Hamitic, of the Mediterranean basin. We must expect in it much that was common in Syria, Asia Minor, Hellas, and Egypt,—something even from Gaul, Hispania, Carthage. Its first o w great apostle, if we may believe our authorities, was one Saul or Paul, a half-Hellenised Jew of Semitic and commercial Tarsus in Cilicia, and a Roman citizen. Its first great churches sprang up in the busy ports and marts of the Levant. Its very name of Christian was given to it first in the crowded and cosmopolitan city of Antioch.
It is here, then, in these huge slave-peopled hives of Hellenised and Romanised commerce, that we must look for the mother-ideas of Christianity.
Antioch was quite undoubtedly in the earliest times the principal cradle of the new religion. I do not mean that Jerusalem was not very probably the place where men first began to form a small sect of esoteric Christ-worshippers, or that Galilee was not the region where the Christ himself most largely lived and taught, if indeed such a person ever really existed. In those matters the traditions handed down to us in the relatively late Gospels may be perfectly correct: and again, they may not. But Christianity as we know it, the Christianity of the Pauline epistles and the later writings, such as the Gospels and the works of the Fathers, must have been essentially a cult of wider Syrian and Gentile growth. It embraces in itself elements which doubtless lingered on in secluded corners more or less among the mass of the people even in Judæa itself, though discountenanced by the adherents of the priestly and official Jahweh-worship; but which were integral parts of the popular and even the recognised religion throughout the whole of northern Syria.
Antioch, where Christianity thus took its first feeble steps, was a handsome and bustling commercial city, the capital of the Greek Seleucid kings, and the acknowledged metropolis of the Syrian area. At the time of Paul (if there was a Paul), it probably contained half a million people; it was certainly the largest town in Asia, and worthy to be compared with Rome itself in the splendour of its buildings. Many things about its position are deserving of notice. It stood upon the banks of the Orontes, a sacred stream, ensconced in a rich agricultural plain, fourteen miles from the river’s mouth. Its Ostia was at Selucia, the harbour whence flowed the entire export trade of Syria and the east towards Hellas and Italy. The Mediterranean in front connected it with Rome, Alexandria, Asia Minor, Greece; the caravan routes across the Syrian desert in the rear put it in communication with the bazars of Mesopotamia and the remoter east. It was thus the main entrepôt of the through trade between two important worlds. The Venice of its time, it lay at the focal point where the highroads of Europe and of Asia converged.
Scholars of repute have pointed out the fact that even earlier than the days of Paul, Buddhist ideas from India seem to have dribbled through and affected the Syrian world, as Zoroastrian ideas a little later dribbled through and affected the thought of Alexandria: and some importance has been attached to this infiltration of motives from the mystical east. Now, I do not care to deny that budding Christianity may have been much influenced on its ritual and still more on its ethical side by floating elements of Buddhist opinion: that the infancy of the Christ may have been nursed by the Magi. But on the whole I think the facts we have just been considering as to the manufacture of artificial human gods and the nature and meaning of piacular sacrifices will suffice to show that Christianity was chiefly a plant of home growth. The native soil contained already every essential element that was needed to feed it—the doctrine of the Incarnation, the death of the Man-God, the atoning power of his Blood, the Resurrection and Ascension. So that, while allowing due weight to this peculiar international position of Antioch, as the double-faced Janus-gate of Europe and Asia, I am not inclined to think that points peculiar to Buddhism need have exercised any predominant influence in the evolution of the new religion. For we must remember that Buddhism itself did but subsume into its own fabric ideas which were common to Peru and Mexico, to Greece and India, to Syria and Egypt, and which came out in fresh forms, surging up from below, in the creed of Christendom. If anything is clear from our previous researches it is this—that the world has never really had more than one religion—“of many names, a single central shape,” as the poet phrases it.
The Syrian people, Semites by race and cult, had fallen, like all the rest of the eastern world, under the Hellenic dominion of the successors of Alexander. A quick and subtle folk, very pliable and plastic, they underwent rapid and facile Hellenisation. It was an easy task for them to accept Greek culture and Greek religion. The worshipper of Adonis had little difficulty in renaming his chief god as Dionysus and continuing to practise his old rites and ceremonies to the newly-named deity after the ancestral pattern. The Astarte whom the east had given to Hellas under the alias of Aphrodite, came back again as Aphrodite to Astarte’s old sanctuaries. Identifications of gods and cults were but simple matters, where so many gods were after all essentially similar in origin and function. Thus the easy-going Syrian had few scruples about practising his primitive ceremonies under foreign titles, or admitting to the hospitality of his Semitic temples the Hellenic deities of the reigning Antiochi.
The Seleucids, however, did not fare so well in their attempt to impose the alien gods on the fierce Jehovistic zealots of the southern mountains. Antiochus IV. endeavoured in vain to force the cults of intrusive Hellenism on his new kingdom of Palestine. He reckoned without his hosts. The populace of Jerusalem would not away with his “idolatrous” rites—would not permit the worship of Zeus and Pallas, of Artemis and Aphrodite, to usurp a place in the holy city of Jahweh. The rebellion of the Maccabees secured at least the religious independence of Judæa from the early Seleucid period down to the days of Vespasian and Titus. Lower Syria remained true in her arid hills to the exclusive and monotheistic cult of the God of Israel. And at the same time the Jew spread everywhere over the surrounding countries, carrying with him not only his straw and his basket, but also his ingrained and ineradicable prejudices.
In Antioch, then, after the Roman absorption of Syria, a most cosmopolitan religion appears to have existed, containing mingled Semitic and Hellenic elements, half assimilated to one another, in a way that was highly characteristic of the early empire. And among the popular cults of the great city we must certainly place high those of Adonis and Dionysus, of Aphrodite-Astarte, and of the local gods or goddesses, the Baalim and Ashtareth, such as the maiden who, as we learnt from Malalas, was sacrificed at the original foundation of the city, and ever after worshipped as its Tyche or Fortune. In other words, the conception of the human god, of the corn and wine god, of the death of the god, and of his glorious resurrection, must have all been perfectly familiar ideas to the people of Antioch and of Syria in general.
Let us note here, too, that the particular group of Jah-weh-worshippers among whom the Christ is said to have found his personal followers, were not people of the priestly type of Jerusalem, but Galilæan peasants of the northern mountains, separated from the most orthodox set of Jews by the intrusive wedge of heretical Samaritans, and closely bordering on the heathen Phoenician seaboard—“the coasts of Tyre and Sidon.” Here Judaism and heathenism marched together; here Jahweh had his worshippers among the fishers of the lake, while Hellenism had fixed itself in the statelier villas of Tiberias and Ptole-mais.
Alexandria was another of the great cosmopolitan seaport towns where Christianity made its earliest converts, and assumed not a few of its distinctive tenets. Now, in Alexandria, Hellenism and the immemorially ancient Egyptian religion found themselves face to face at very close quarters. It is true, the town in its historical aspect was mainly Greek, founded by the great Macedonian himself, and priding itself on its pure Hellenic culture. But the mass of the lower orders who thronged its alleys must surely have consisted of more or less mongrel Egyptians, still clinging with all the old Egyptian conservatism to the ideas and practices and rites of their fathers. Besides these, we get hints of a large cosmopolitan seafaring population, among whom strange faiths and exotic gods found ready acceptance. Beside the stately forms of the Greek pantheon, and the mummified or animal-headed Egyptian deities, the imported Syrian worship of Adonis had acquired a firm footing; the annual festival of the slaughtered god was one of the principal holidays; and other Syrian or remoter faiths had managed to secure their special following. The hybrid Serapis occupied the stateliest fane of the hybrid city. In that huge and busy hive, indeed, every form of cult found a recognised place, and every creed was tolerated which did not inculcate interference with the equal religious freedom of others.
The Ptolemaic family represents in itself this curious adaptability of the Græco-Egyptian Alexandrian mind. At Alexandria and in the Delta, the kings appear before us as good Hellenes, worshipping their ancestral deities in splendid temples; but in the Thebaid, the god Ptolemy or the goddess Cleopatra erected buildings in honor of Ptah or Khem in precisely the old Egyptian style, and appeared on their propyla in the guise of Pharaohs engaged in worshipping Amen-Ra or Osiris. The great Alexander himself had inaugurated this system when he gave himself out as the son of “Zeus Ammon”; and his indirect representatives carried it on throughout with a curious dualism which excused itself under the veil of arbitrary identifications. Thus Serapis himself was the dead Apis bull, invested with the attributes of an Osiris and of the Hellenic Hades; while Amen-Ra was Zeus in an Egyptian avatar.
The large Jewish colony at Alexandria also prepared the way for the ultimate admixture of Neo-Platonism in the Christian faith; while the Egyptian belief in Triads of gods formed the groundwork for the future doctrine of the Trinity, so doggedly battled for by the Alexandrian Athanasius. It is true that Ampère and Preller have strenuously denied any Egyptian admixture in the philosophy of Alexandria; and their reasoning may be conclusive enough as to the upper stratum of thought: but it must at least be admitted that popular belief in the city of the Ptolemies must have been deeply coloured by the ideas and creeds of its Egyptian substratum. Now, in the growth of Christianity, it was the people who counted, not the official classes, the learned, or the philosophic. We must not attribute to the population of the East End of London the theology of Pusey or the evolutionism of Herbert Spencer.
Christianity would seem also to have taken part at least of its form in Rome. And as Roman influence extended likewise over every portion of the vast empire, I must say a very few words here about the origin and growth of the Roman religion.
That religion, as it comes upon us in the few glimpses we get of its early Italic and pre-Hellenised form, was one of the rudest and most primitive type, almost savage in its extreme simplicity. It knew hardly any great gods by name: the few deities it possessed, it expressed only for the most part by adjectival names. Few, I say, as to type, for as to number of individuals, their name indeed was legion; they pervaded the whole, world in that reckless multiplicity which distinguishes the simple ghosts or spirits of early hunting or pastoral peoples. With the Romans, this multiplicity, ubiquity, and vagueness survived into a relatively settled and civilised agricultural condition. A vast number of small departmental gods, with few or no great ones—that is the first state of the Roman pantheon.
The central point of old Roman religion was clearly the household; the family ghosts or lares were the most honoured gods. We may instructively compare Mr. Chalmers’s account of the theology of New Guinea. Beside these ancestral shades, or almost identical with them, came the pénates or practical deities of the store-room, perhaps the representatives of the victims slain as foundation-ghosts at the first erection of the building. Of these two, the Lares were undoubtedly the departed ancestors of the family; they lived near the spot where they were first buried (for the old Romans were buriers), and they still presided over the household as in life, like its fathers and senators. They were worshipped daily with prayers and simple offerings of food and drink; their masks or busts which hung on the wall were perhaps the representatives, or in ancient days the coverings, of the old oracular heads or skulls; for the skulls themselves may have been preserved in wax, as so often elsewhere at an earlier period. * The Penates, which were worshipped with the Lares, seem to have stood for the family spirit in a more generalised way; they represent the continuity and persistence of its Fortune; and therefore, if we may trust the analogy of the Fortune of a town, they are probably the ghosts of the foundation or renewal victims. In judging of all this, we cannot attach too great importance to the analogy of Negritto and Polynesian customs.